The individual (or individuals) who, in November 2009, released 1,000 emails to and from IPCC-affiliated climate scientists, igniting the Climategate scandal, struck again earlier this week. The leaker(s) released an additional 5,000 emails involving the same cast of characters, notably Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and Michael Mann, creator of the discredited Hockey Stick reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature history. The blogosphere quickly branded the new trove of emails “Climategate 2.0.”
The timing in each case was not accidental. The Climategate emails made painfully clear that the scientists shaping the huge — and hugely influential — IPCC climate change assessment reports are not impartial experts but agenda-driven activists. Climategate exposed leading U.N.-affiliated scientists as schemers colluding to manipulate public opinion, downplay inconvenient data, bias the peer review process, marginalize skeptical scientists, and flout freedom of information laws. Climategate thus contributed to the failure of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Similarly, Climategate 2.0 arrives shortly before the December 2011 climate conference in Durban — although nobody expects the delegates to agree on a post-Kyoto climate treaty anyway.
Excerpts from Climategate 2.0 emails appear to confirm in spades earlier criticisms of the IPCC climate science establishment arising out of Climategate. My colleague, Myron Ebell, enables us to see this at a glance by sorting the excerpts into categories. [click to continue…]
A week has passed since President Obama made his shocking announcement delaying the Keystone XL pipeline decision until after the presidential election. The news has been met with cries of victory and sighs of disappointment, but the tactic shouldn’t have surprised anyone as it totally fits with his ideology.
Additionally, TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, handed the environmentalists a win.
First, we all know that the President is fundamentally opposed to all carbon-based fuels (think Solyndra, et al)—so the pipeline’s approval was a longshot. But it would have created thousands of true shovel-ready jobs without a dollar of taxpayer money—many of which would have been union (not to mention the spin-off jobs).
The pipeline’s approval would have made the unions happy, while angering the environmentalists. Two of Obama’s solid funders were in conflict—one shouting in one ear, the other in the other ear (drowning out the voice of the American public). Waiting for the decision, watchers wondered which base held more sway.
The delay announcement, however, is a possible fundraising coup.
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Yesterday’s excerpt from Mark Pennington’s Robust Political Economy showed why it might not be a good idea to trust government with environmental protection. Pennington argued that government has no strong incentive to actually protect the environment, and even if they did, they wouldn’t know the best ways to balance environmental protection with other priorities. Canadian think-tank Environment Probe’s Elizabeth Brubaker’s Property Rights in the Defence of Nature gives many examples of how property rights rather than legislation were used to prevent pollution.
On April 31, 1950, An Act respecting The KVP Company Limitedreceived royal assent. With one stroke of the pen, the Ontario government wiped out an entire community’s property rights, and with them, citizens’ power to protect their river from an upstream polluter. The story of the KVP Act dramatically illustrates the significance of common law rights to clean water and governments’ willingness to override these rights in the name of the “public good.” It is a story about a community’s struggle for a clean river – a struggle against the pulp mill that dumped its wastes into it. The courts tried to protect the river; the government protected the pollution.
…By the 1940s, the abundance of game fish had made the river and its surroundings a popular tourist resort area. The opening of the KVP plant in 1946 changed all that. Repulsive odours, often likened to the stench of rotten cabbage, permeated the river’s 35-mile course to Lake Huron’s north channel; they were even detectable ten miles out into the channel. Farm animals found the water repelling. People living beside the river could no longer draw their drinking water from it. Even boiled water tasted and smelled so bad that it couldn’t be used for cooking or washing.
Sadly, much of KVP’s pollution was unnecessary. Kraft mills elsewhere used alternative methods – settling basins, for example – for effluent disposal. Before the mill had started up, a downstream landowner had urged its manager to pipe the effluent to sand flats nearby. But the manager had refused. “It is,” he had said, “a matter of economics.
Supported by the downstream community and by local wildlife organizations, six men, all of whom owned land along the Spanish River, launched five lawsuits against KVP…High Court Chief Justice McRuer found that the KVP Company had both violated the plaintiffs’ riparian rights and committed a nuisance. He awarded damages totaling $5,600 and issued an injunction prohibiting KVP from altering the character or quality of the water…
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Environmentalists, green energy lobbyists, and their political benefactors rely on a number of bogus talking points in order to justify generous taxpayer subsidies to the renewable energy industry, without which it wouldn’t exist. At a Congressional hearing last week, for example, Energy Secretary Steven Chu testified that green energy subsidies are necessary so that the U.S. can win a renewable energy trade war with China. (I dispute this contention in a previous post). Yesterday, the Institute for Energy Research’s Robert Bradley debunked another such rationalization—recently, renewable energy enthusiasts have taken to arguing that “that government subsidies over many decades allowed the oil and gas industry to cement its perch atop the energy chain. The implication is that wind and solar may need the same long-lived subsidization to achieve commercial viability too.” This is the thesis of a much-hyped analysis published last month by DBL Investors, titled “What Would Jefferson Do? The Historical Role of Federal Subsidies in Shaping America’s Energy Future.” The paper received gobs of attention from the media, despite the fact that it was written by a venture capital firm that invests in green energy, and which, therefore, directly benefits from taxpayer handouts to the industry.
In any case, Bradley exposes the poor historical analysis that buttresses this latest justification for throwing ever-more taxpayer money at green energy boondoggles. From his post,
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Federal agencies are not supposed to be overtly partisan. They are also not supposed to legislate. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood apparently didn’t get the memo. Or maybe they just don’t give a darn.
In a press release announcing their plan to raise fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, the agency heads boast: “Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of executive actions the Obama Administration is taking to strengthen the economy and move the country forward because we can’t wait for Congressional Republicans to act” [emphasis added]. Jackson and LaHood even title their press release, “We Can’t Wait.”
‘What do we want? Energy independence! When do we want it? Now!’ Even if that means trashing the separation of powers, the essential constitutional foundation for accountable government.
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In Saturday’s New York Post, I give a brief history of natural global warming and its inevitable benefits to humanity. From the column:
“You can be forgiven if you didn’t know that we’re in the middle of an ice age right now, what with all the talk about global warming. But it’s true. We’re in what geologists call “the Quaternary glaciation,” an ice age that’s lasted for the past 2.5 million years.
Ice ages last a very long time, with periods of extreme cold punctuated by warmer periods, or interglacials. We’re in such an interglacial right now: The Holocene epoch began about 12,000 years ago. It’s best thought of as a brief respite from the most severe ravages of Quaternary ice.
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Continuing with excerpts from great books on environmental and energy issues (see last week’s posts here), below is an excerpt from Mark Pennington’s brilliant new book Robust Political Economy. “Robust” political institutions are, according to Pennington, those “institutions that perform best given that people 1) have limited knowledge and 2) are prone to self-interested behavior.” He argues the case that market institutions are better suited to deal with these realities than governments. In this passage, he applies these two criteria to environmental protection.
Robust Political Economy was released in 2011
Classical liberalism does not question the view that environmental problems arise when private actors are unaccountable for their actions. What it does question is the supposition that political intervention, whether of the ‘command and control’ or ‘price-based’ variety, is the best way of ‘internalising’ the relevant externalities. There are two dimensions to this account which reflect the focus on the conditions required for a robust political economy of institutions and decisions.
The first line of analysis draws on the Hayekian understanding of the knowledge problem. Seen from this perspective, neo-classical approaches to environmental policy repeat the socialist calculation error by assuming that the knowledge necessary to correct for ‘market failures’ is somehow ‘given’ to policy-makers. In an environmental context the assumption is that trade-offs between environmental and other objectives are known and fixed.
Viewed through the Hayekian lens both command and control and price-based policy mechanisms are variations of central planning and may be inappropriate because the primary environmental problem is typically not one of giving people the right incentives to act on the basis of known environmental values, but of discovering what the relevant values are. Knowledge of these values is fundamentally dispersed throughout society and evolves in light of the changing ideas of individuals and organisations as they interact with each other and the natural world.
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Yesterday morning, television magazine energyNOW! ran a surprisingly* good segment on the oil boom in North Dakota. Long story short: technological advances in drilling have made possible the recovery of vast reserves of oil, which has caused tremendous job creation. According to the segment, the average oil and gas worker makes $75,000, and there is a huge demand for labor. The whole northwestern part of the state is like a wild-west mining town. At one point, a supervisor at one rig offered a job to the energyNOW! cameraman. As a result of this oil rush, North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country–a paltry 3.5 percent.
Compare this to California. Despite possessing mineral wealth, the Golden State wants nothing to do with the production of “dirty” hydrocarbons. Instead, it is the self-proclaimed leader in expensive “clean” energy technologies, like wind turbines and electric cars. To that end, the State next month is expected to finalize a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme. The idea is to make conventional, hydrocarbon energy more expensive, and thereby boost demand for green energy. The cap-and-trade scheme was originally planned to have been a regional policy, but last week, Arizona became the sixth State (after New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Utah) to withdraw. In a statement, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality said it acted to “[avoid] the economic costs to industries that are subject to cap and trade.” Now, California will absorb these “economic costs” alone. This energy tax will only worsen the state’s unemployment rate: 11.9 percent, second worst in the nation.
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This week’s excerpts have shown that 1) natural resources are not as limited as experts have believed (Daniel Yergin). 2) Natural resource consumption leads to more, not less resources (Mark Mills/Peter Huber). 3) Natural resources aren’t “natural”–they are the result of human ingenuity (Robert Bradley). 4) Non-renewable, finite, depletable energy sources made economic growth sustainable (Matt Ridley). Today’s excerpt from brilliant resource economist Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2 adds to these points, particular to Robert Bradley’s point. Simon argues that the ultimate resource isn’t energy–it’s mankind.
When I began to work on population studies, I aimed to help the world contain its “exploding” population, which I believed to be one of the two main threats to humankind (war being the other)….
One spring day about 1969 I visited the U.S. AID office on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., to discuss a project intended to lower fertility in less-developed countries. I arrived early for my appointment, so I strolled outside in the warm sunshine. Below the building’s plaza I noticed a road sign that said “Iwo Jima Memorial.” There came to me the memory of reading a eulogy delivered by a Jewish chaplain over the dead on the battlefield at Iwo Jima, saying something like, “How many who would have been a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein have we buried here?”
And then I thought, Have I gone crazy? What business do I have trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein – or simply a joy to his or her family and community, and a person who will enjoy life?
I still believe that helping people fulfill their desires for the number of children they want is a wonderful human service. But to persuade them or coerce them to have fewer children than they would like to have—that is something entirely different….
Enabling a potential human being to come into life and to enjoy life is a good thing, just as protecting a living person’s life from being ended is a good thing. Of course a death is not the same as an averted life, in large part because others feel differently about the two. Yet I find no logic implicit in the thinking of those who are horrified at the starvation of a comparatively few people in a faraway country… but who are positively gleeful with the thought that 1 million or 10 million times that many lives will never be lived that might be lived.
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The New York Times today ran its second editorial scolding the Obama Administration for its decision to delay a tightening of ozone standards in response to a lengthy article by John Broder who exhaustively detailed the big players in this decision and their thought processes. Though there are critiques of the science behind the evidence of harm from ozone concentrations of ~75 parts per billion, I’d like to focus on an outcome of the ozone tightening that the NYT implies is nothing but an industry talking point:
This page was not impressed by those arguments then and is no less skeptical of them now in light of John M. Broder’s exhaustive account in The Times on Thursday of the steps that led up to the decision. The article paints a picture of an aggressive campaign by industry lobbyists and heavyweight trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute that began soon after it became clear that Ms. Jackson was determined to tighten the rules governing allowable ozone levels across the country.
The standards governing ozone — the main component of harmful smog — are supposed to be set every five years. But because the standards proposed by the Bush administration in 2008 were seen as inadequate by the scientific community and had been challenged in court, Ms. Jackson decided to set her own standards, tough but achievable. Their health benefits would approximate their costs, and they would not begin to bite for several years, giving industry time to prepare. [click to continue…]
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