Tomorrow night, Politico will name EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson as the most influential energy policymaker of the year, presumably for implementing a regulatory train wreck that will certainly make energy more expensive, and perhaps even turn out the lights.
What? Was the president of the Sierra Club unavailable?
Congressional Republicans Move on Keystone Pipeline
President Barack Obama’s announcement last month that he would delay making a decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election is provoking strong opposition in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and 36 Republican co-sponsors introduced a bill on Wednesday, 30th November, that would require the President to approve the project within sixty days unless he decides that it would not be in the national interest.
Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.) introduced a bill on Friday, 2nd December, that would transfer the decision from the State Department to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and give FERC a thirty-day deadline to issue the permit after final agreement has been reached between the State of Nebraska and Trans Canada Corporation, the company that would build the pipeline, on a new route that goes around Nebraska’s Sand Hills.
Terry introduced his bill at a press conference just before the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on it. He said that House Speaker John Boehner was considering including the bill in a larger package supported by President Obama and Senate Democrats that would extend unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut. Including the Keystone bill in the larger bill would make it much harder for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to block in the Senate and for President Obama to veto.
Rep. Terry has been a strong backer of the 1,700 mile pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to U. S. refineries in the Gulf, even while most of his state’s political establishment has objected to the route. That dispute has now apparently been resolved. The pipeline would carry over 500,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the oil sands in northeast Alberta and from the Bakken field in North Dakota. Bakken production is going up rapidly, and much of the oil is currently being transported by rail to refineries in the lower Midwest.
It’s no secret that actors have superhero-sized egos – especially when they actually play a superhero. Case in point: Mark Ruffalo, who picked up an Academy Award nomination for his role in last year’s Oscar-bait The Kids Are All Right, and who has now thrown himself into the role of his career – The Incredible Hulk.
Ruffalo will be the latest actor to portray Marvel Comics’ Jolly Green Giant in next year’s big budget spectacular, The Avengers, which will bring the cinematic versions of Marvel’s characters, including Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man, together to save Earth from an intergalactic menace.
But Ruffalo the actor has an enemy in his crosshairs more insidious than any supervillain: Hydraulic fracturing. Yep, the process by which natural gas is extracted from rock via pressurized fluid, commonly known as “fracking,” has aroused the especial ire of the environmentalists, Ruffalo included. On November 30th The Capitol reported:
In the wake of EPA’s announcement that it intends to regulate how drillers dispose of the millions of gallons of wastewater (or flowback water) created by shale gas production, the Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee’s recent hearing on the issue focused on how such added regulation will negatively impact the American economy: “Ensuring Regulatory Approaches That Will Help Protect Jobs and Domestic Energy Production.” This added federal regulation can only be seen in the wasteful light of a phantom problem.
According to E&E News, there are currently no national standards set for the disposal of shale gas drilling wastewater; dumping it into rivers and streams is prohibited. States currently have the jurisdiction of choosing what drilling regulations to adopt. To Representative Tim Bishop’s (D-NY) question of why a national minimum standard would not succeed, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Michael Krancer shot back: “Because of our long history of oil and gas development and comprehensive regulatory structure, Pennsylvania does not need intervention to ensure an appropriate balance between resources development and environmental protection is struck.”
Yesterday’s and Monday’s excerpts argued that we shouldn’t fear climate change. Steven Pinker argued that even if climate change causes resource scarcity, it won’t lead to violent conflicts over those resources. Matt Ridley argued that a warmer world might actually be good for people. Today’s excerpt from former President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus’s Blue Planet in Green Shackles argues similarly that we shouldn’t fear global warming because people 100 years from now will be far richer and therefore, capable of adapting to new changes.
Blue Planet in Green Shackles was published by CEI in 2008
If we look to the future and any problems that may possibly arise (including environmental ones) through the eyes of an economist, we have to mention the income, or wealth effect, on the one hand, and the effect of technological progress, on the other. We also have to consider the incredible human ability to adapt to new, unexpected events and circumstances.
It is perhaps needless to talk extensively about the fact that people’s income and wealth will radically increase and that—as a result—their behavior and structure of their demand for material and nonmaterial goods will change as well, not to speak about the immense technological progress that will occur. We all intuitively feel this is the case, but not all of us draw the right conclusions from it.
In “Costs and Benefits of Greenhouse Gas Reduction,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas C. Schelling (1996) ponders how the world will look in 75 years. To get an idea of what the future might bring, he thought of looking back 75 years, to 1920. Interestingly enough, he says that in 1920—when paved roads were uncommon in the United States—mud was the biggest climate-related problem. Pure mud. Schelling adds, “It might not have occurred to us in 1920 that by 1995 most of the nation’s roads would have been paved solid.” This conclusion is not in any way trivial. I am convinced that as a conceptual construct it can be applied to the whole environmental problem.
What will the world be like in 100 years, assuming the expected economic growth? We do not know, but surely we will be miles away from where we are today. Many “roads will be paved solid.” It is thus a fatal mistake to base our thinking about the situation 100 years from now on the knowledge of today’s technologies and wealth.
Do biofuel mandates and subsidies inflate food prices? Do they increase world hunger ? There was a rip-roaring debate on the food security impacts of biofuel policies in 2007-2008, when sharp spikes in wheat, corn, and rice prices imperiled an estimated 100 million people in developing countries. Food price riots broke out in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia, and Yemen.
Experts attributed the rapid rise in food prices to several factors including high petroleum prices, drought in Australia, a weak U.S. dollar, commodity speculation, and rising demand for grain-fed meat by China’s rapidly expanding middle class. But some also laid part of the blame on biofuel policies, which artificially increase global demand for corn and soy while diverting those crops and farmland from food to fuel production. A July 2008 World Bank report argued that biofuel policies accounted for as much as two-thirds of the 2007-2008 price spike. A July 2010 World Bank report, on the other hand, concluded that rising petroleum prices were the dominant factor. “Biofuels played some role too, but much less than previously thought,” the report stated.
Where does the debate stand today? Recent reports by the National Research Council (NRC), the New England Complex Systems Institute (CSI), the UN Committee on World Food Security (CWFS), and Iowa State University (ISU) all acknowledge that biofuel policies put upward pressure on food and feed prices. The NRC and ISU studies argue that U.S. biofuel policies have only modest impacts on grain prices whereas the CSI and CWFS studies indicate that biofuel policies contributed significantly to the 2008 global food crisis and/or pose significant risks to global food security today.
Links to these reports and key excerpts follow. [click to continue…]
Monday’s excerpt from Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature argued that we shouldn’t fear global warming because even if it causes resource scarcity, people will not resort to violence over scarce resources. Today’s excerpt from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist gives another reason why we shouldn’t fear global warming—extra warmth will be good for us.
The Rational Optimist was released in 2010
If only hypothetically, it is worth asking whether civilisation could survive climate change at the rate assumed by the consensus of scientists who comprise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)–that is, that the earth will warm during this century by around 3° C…
Sea level is by far the most worrisome issue, because the current sea level is indeed the best of all possible sea levels: any change–up or down–will leave ports unusable. The IPCC forecasts that average sea level will rise by about 2-6 millimetres a year (or about a foot per century). At such rates, although coastal flooding will increase slightly in places (local rising of the land causes sea level to fall in many areas), some countries will continue to gain more land from siltation than they lose to erosion. The Greenland land-based ice cap will melt a bit around the edge–many Greenland glaciers retreated in the last few decades of the twentieth century–but even the highest estimates of Greenland’s melting are that it is currently losing mass at the rate of less than 1 per cent per century. It will be gone by AD 12,000….
As for fresh water, the evidence suggests, remarkably, that, other things being equal, warming will itself reduce the total population at risk from water shortage… On average rainfall will increase in a warmer world because of greater evaporation from the oceans, as it did in many previous warm episodes such as the Holocene (when the Arctic ocean may have been almost ice-free in summer), the Egyptian, Roman and medieval warm periods. The great droughts that changed history in western Asia happened, as theory predicts, in times of cooling: 8,200 years ago and 4,200 years ago especially. If you take the IPCC’s assumptions and count the people living in zones that will have more water versus zones that will have less water, it is clear that the net population at risk of water shortage by 2100 falls under all their scenarios….
Yesterday afternoon, my colleague Myron Ebell spoke at a panel hosted by the Heritage Foundation, on President Barack Obama’s recent decision to postpone until the first quarter 2013 a determination on whether or not to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline—the $7 billion, shovel-ready project to deliver up to 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil from Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. He made the case that the President subordinated significant job creation to political pandering.
Myron was joined by Heritage’s Nicolas Loris and also Daniel Simmons, of the Institute for Energy Research. Video of his presentation is available below.
Electricity rates now depend more on public policy and regulatory decisions than on actual costs.
Based on a newly released report from Oliver Wyman, a leading global management consulting firm, “There is a growing need to increase electricity prices. These rate increases are largely being driven by environmental, regulatory, and security requirements.” And they are adding to “financial strain at the worst possible moment.”
The report, designed to help utility companies deal with customer wrath, states that “the increases have been the most significant in the residential segment”—where they grew more quickly than other sectors. Despite declining pricing on some fuels, such as natural gas, electricity rates have risen 2.7% per year with some regions experiencing average price increases of 5.1% annually. In contrast, the consumer price index—excluding food and energy—rose by 1.7%.
In Steven Pinker’s brilliant new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he demonstrates that peace has actually increased over the course of human history, even over the past few centuries, and particularly the last few decades. In this excerpt, Pinker discusses the myth that resource scarcity increases violent conflict, and that climate change could contribute to more war, terrorism, and violence.
A 2007 New York Times op-ed warned, “Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous–and more intractable–than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.” That same year Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their call to action against global warming because, according to the citation, climate change is a threat to international security. A rising fear lifts all the boats. Calling global warming “a force multiplier for instability,” a group of military officers wrote that “climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror.”
Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery… it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources. Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling.
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