Features

…When I see a headline like this: “Americans Are Outliers in Views on Climate Change.”

The article comes from the New York Times. Here’s the chart that makes the reporter’s point:

According to a recent Gallup poll, the figure for the U.S. is closer to 30%

On the one hand, this chart may represent Americans’ famed frankness relative to the rest of the world. After all, national populations that purportedly care much more about the supposed threat of catastrophic climate change, like Germany and Japan, are turning to “dirty” coal in increasing volumes as they turn away from nuclear power. When it comes to choosing between carbon intensive electricity and no electricity at all, the Germans and Japanese are going with reliable power, global warming be damned.

On the other hand, perhaps the chart is evidence that the U.S.A. really is a City Upon a Hill. In a world rife with clear and present dangers to the immediate welfare of living human beings, among which climate change (“a rich man’s issue“) is decidedly not included, God bless Americans for keeping their priorities in perspective. For my view on the matter, see this interview with SNL. [click to continue…]

In an article today about the White House’s doom and gloom National Climate Assessment, Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears goes out of his way to tar those opposed to economically disastrous and ineffective global warming policies as being under the thumb of libertarian businessmen Charles and David Koch:

Other contrarians include libertarians at the Cato Institute, founded by Charles and David Koch, brothers whose multi-billion dollar fortune is partly derived from fossil fuels, and are well-known to deny the impacts of climate change.

Cato researchers Paul C. Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels said the assessment was “biased toward pessimism, the opposite of how Wolfe described it. As a resource, it is meant to justify “federal regulation aimed towards mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.”

However, in an effort to deploy the tired progressive guilt by association argumentum ad Kochum, Fears falls flat: the Cato Institute was not “founded by Charles and David Koch.” As the first line of the Cato Institute Wikipedia article correctly states, Cato was founded “by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch.” If you don’t trust Wikipedia, here’s Will Wilkinson mentioning the three Cato founders in The Economist: “Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute in 1977 with Ed Crane and Murray Rothbard.” To be clear, that is but one brother Koch, not two, as a Cato Institute founder. To be even clearer, Charles was one of the Cato founders, not David. Good? Great.

This isn’t the first time a Washington Post reporter has thrown truth out the window in a sad attempt to smear the Kochs and the organizations they support. Recently, Post reporters Steve Mufson and Juliet Eilperin were caught publishing massive falsehoods regarding Koch Industries’ Canadian oil sands lease holdings. John Hinderacker produced an excellent smack-down of Mufson and Eilperin’s incredibly lazy reporting and their subsequent mealymouthed walk-back.

I know the newspaper business is struggling, but maybe the Post should consider hiring a fact checker for all things Koch. This is just getting embarrassing.

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Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute sued the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) for flouting the Freedom of Information Act. CEI’s Chris Horner asked OSTP to produce work-related emails that OSTP’s Director, John Holdren, stored in an email account at his former employer, the environmental-pressure group Woods Hole Research Center. OSTP has resisted producing them.

What is ironic about this is that OSTP’s Director, soon after taking office, lectured OSTP employees about not conducting official business using private email accounts, and about the need to forward all work-related communications to their agency email account in order to comply with federal record-keeping laws. (See May 10, 2010 Memo from OSTP Director John Holdren to all OSTP staff, Subject: Reminder: Compliance with the Federal Records Act and the President’s Ethics Pledge, at 1, available as Exhibit B to the letter at this link.)

Apparently, the longer an official is in power, and the less he fears losing power, the less he cares about government transparency and the rule of law. The complaint is reposted immediately below. [click to continue…]

During his first presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that his plan for a cap-and-trade program would “bankrupt” anyone who builds a coal-fired power plant. Cap-and-trade died when it was exposed as cap-n-tax — a stealth energy tax that would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” Following the November 2010 defeat of 29 House Democrats who supported the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, President Obama vowed to find “other ways of skinning the cat.”

If you trust the Obama administration, the “cat” to be skinned is global warming. If you distrust the administration, the “cat” on the cutting board is the coal industry.

Regardless, EPA’s Carbon Pollution Rule, which would establish first-ever new source performance standards (NSPS) for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new fossil-fuel power plants, appears at first glance to be one of those “other ways.” However, in a recent commentary, Nathan Richardson of Resources for the Future argues that, with a little editing, EPA can turn the “carbon pollution” rule into the legal framework for cap-and-trade. [click to continue…]

On this morning’s Platts Energy Week with Bill Loveless, FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller gave a bombshell interview regarding the clear and present danger to electric reliability posed by the EPA.

By way of background, “FERC” stands for Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and included among its responsibilities is helping to ensure that the lights stay on. While regional transmission organizations bear the primary burden for maintaining the reliability of the grid, the 2005 Energy Policy Act authorizes FERC to establish mandatory reliability standards for interstate power transmission. As such, Commissioner Moeller is well-positioned to assess threats to the grid. And according to him, EPA’s ridiculous Utility MACT has created the possibility of rolling blackouts. Excerpted transcript and video are posted below:

FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller: “We’re closing an enormous amount of coal generation, through a variety of rules, and a good number of those plants are set to retire next April. (Editor’s note: here, Moeller is referring to EPA’s absurd Utility MACT, which threatens to retire up to 25% of the nation’s coal fleet, starting next spring). But most people would say about 90% of that capacity was running and used and necessary during the polar vortex events. So the question is: Are we going to have mild weather for the next 2-3 years? If so, we can probably get through it. But if we have more extreme weather events, like we had this winter, and that power is no longer available, we could be in a real situation that’s not good for consumers.

Platts Energy Week: Are regional blackouts a possibility?

FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller: They are a possibility.

A new study by the Fraser Institute in Canada finds that economic freedom is an important cause of air quality improvement.

The study compares average airborne concentrations of particulate matter and economic freedom in 105 countries around the world. The authors, Joel Wood and Ian Herzog, find that in 2010, the 20 countries that were most economically free had average concentrations of particulate matter that were nearly 40% lower than the 20 least-free countries.

Of course, correlation does not prove causation, and other variables often associated with economic liberty, namely wealth and democracy, also foster air quality improvement. Nonetheless, the authors find a “robust” relationship between economic freedom and air quality after controlling for other factors:

After controlling for the effects of income, political freedom, and other confounding variables, we find that a permanent one-point increase in the Economic Freedom of the World index results in a 7.15% decrease in concentrations of fine particulate matter in the long-run, holding all else equal. This effect is robust to many different model specifications and is statistically significant. This effect is in addition to a general 36% decrease over time due to unidentified factors.

The study is based on urban concentrations of airborne particulate matter smaller than 10 microns in diameter (PM10) from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and on the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World (EFW), which in turn is largely based on data from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Economic Forum. The EFW index “reflects the size of government; the quality of the legal system and strength of property rights; soundness of money; freedom to trade; and burden of regulation.”

So why does economic freedom promote air quality improvement?

• Property rights defined and secured through a strong justice system enable people to protect themselves and their property from pollution.
• In contrast, government regulations that preempt private, court-enforced “negotiations between those benefiting from and those being hurt by a polluting activity” prevent “an efficient distribution of the right to the environmental resource” and “cause inefficient levels of pollution.”
• Freedom to trade “is key to ensuring that new, cleaner technologies can be adopted across borders.”
• “Bureaucratic inefficiency, the influence of special-interest groups, and the prevalence of state-owned enterprises can all hinder the ability of a government to improve the environment effectively.”
• State-run firms shielded from market discipline are wasteful resource consumers.

The last point is more important than generally realized. In this connection, I’m pleased to post Hoover Institution scholar Mikhail S. Bernstam’s splendid out-of-print book, The Wealth of Nations and the Environment. Published in 1990, the book is something a post mortem on the Soviet Union. The Soviet empire collapsed largely because it went bankrupt. Economic decline however did not mean less pollution but more. Our worst ecological nightmares were daily realities of people living in the USSR and other eastern bloc countries. Why is that? [click to continue…]

Does a recent science paper say it’s okay to lie about climate change if that’s what it takes to ratify climate treaties? No. But the study is quite silly, going to heroic mathematical lengths to prove what most of us learned on the playground: liars can win friends and influence people — until they get caught.

Today’s Climatewire ($) reviews the study, “Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements,” which some skeptical blogs had denounced for advocating dishonesty in a good cause.

Climatewire reports that the researchers — Fuhai Hong of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Xiaojian Zhao of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology — issued a statement online saying their objective was only to explain why certain parties have incentives to exaggerate climate change damages, not to justify lying about climate change.

Critics may have read only the study’s abstract, most of which does seem to take a permissive or even approving view of deliberate exaggeration (i.e. lying):

It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency by using a modified International Environmental Agreement (IEA) model with asymmetric information. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA, which will eventually enhance global welfare.

But the concluding sentence of the abstract hints that honesty may be the best policy after all:

From the ex ante perspective, however, the impact that manipulating information has on the level of participation in an IEA and on welfare is ambiguous.

What are we to make of this kerfuffle?

The study is heavily mathematical, one might say gratuitously so, because the overall conclusion is so obvious: “Information manipulation” — that is, lying — can sometimes fool people into giving you what you want, but it can also backfire and discredit you. The story of the boy who cried wolf leaps to mind (although Hong and Zhao don’t mention it).

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Breathlessly reports today’s E&E PM ($):

Political spending by the fossil fuel industry has soared in recent years, and companies have been rewarded with billions of dollars in federal subsidies for oil, gas and coal projects, according to a report released today by environmental groups.

Contributions from the oil and gas industry increased by a staggering 11,761 percent from 2008 to 2012, according to a report released today by the Sierra Club and Oil Change International.

Conspicuously absent from E&E PM’s article is mention of the fact that Sierra Club took millions from the natural gas industry to attack the coal industry, DURING THE SAME TIME PERIOD THAT IS COVERED BY THE REPORT!!!

As I noted in February 2012,

Bryan Walsh in Time Magazine this week broke the big story that the Sierra Club received over $25 million from the natural gas industry to serve as a corporate shill and attack the coal industry.  Walsh wrote: “TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past.”

For shame!

In January, EPA proposed the Carbon Pollution Standard, a regulation that requires new coal-fired power plants to install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. Because CCS is not yet commercially viable, it is prohibitively expensive. As a result, EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standard effectively bans the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

Without further ado, here are the top six reasons that EPA’s proposed Carbon Pollution Standard is illegal:

#6. EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standard increases conventional pollution.

Capturing, transporting, and sequestering greenhouse gases from a power plant is an energy-intensive process that leads to a general energy penalty varying on the order of 15-25%. This energy penalty requires the additional consumption of fuel, which increases conventional pollution. While there are technologies to mitigate increases in nitrogen oxides and particulate matter pollution, nothing can mitigate a precipitous increase in emissions of ammonia pollution (see chart below) caused by use of carbon capture and sequestration. Also, because CCS-outfitted power plants use more fuel, they generate greater volumes of combustion wastes, primarily coal ash and boiler slag. Increases in conventional pollution, per se, don’t sink the Carbon Pollution Standard, but the Agency must address these adverse environmental impacts, at the very least. See Sierra Club v. Costle, 657 F. 2d 298, at 331. The proposed Carbon Pollution Standard fails to do so.

#5. EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standard is not based on “adequately demonstrated” technology.

The Clean Air Act requires that the Carbon Pollution Standard be based on an “adequately demonstrated” technology, which the courts have interpreted as being “commercially demonstrated.” In a recent post for Master Resource, I compared the state of CCS technology today to past pollution control technologies whose commercial viability was adjudicated by the courts. The results of this analysis are summarized in the chart below and demonstrate that CCS is not “adequately demonstrated.”

#4. EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standard is not “achievable.”

In addition to requiring that the Carbon Pollution Standard be based on an “adequately demonstrated” (i.e., commercially viable) technology, the Clean Air Act requires that the regulation must be “achievable.” The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in turn, has interpreted “achievability” to mean that the regulation is capable of being met in all parts of the country. See National Lime Association V. EPA, 627 F. 2d 416 at 443. This is a problem for the EPA, because the types of geological formations that are capable of storing vast volumes of greenhouse gases for sequestration are distributed unevenly throughout the country. Indeed, the agency identified only 12 States that practice the type of sequestration (enhanced oil recovery) that EPA believes will meet the requirements of the Carbon Pollution Standard.

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