Blog

Earth Hour wastes energy and harms the planet.  Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish academic and environmental writer, recently lambasted Earth Hour, the annual tradition of turning off the lights, which falls on March 23:

In fact, Earth Hour will cause emissions to increase. As the United Kingdom’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterwards.

And the cozy candles that many participants will light, which seem so natural and environmentally friendly, are still fossil fuels – and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs. Using one candle for each switched-off bulb cancels out even the theoretical CO2 reduction; using two candles means that you emit more CO2.

To some self-styled environmentalists and bureaucrats, symbolism is more important than reality.  The Environmental Protection Agency clings to ethanol mandates, imposing them despite growing evidence that they increase world hunger and mortality, and harm the environment.  As the Wall Street Journal noted, in October 2011,

the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Action Aid petitioned the EPA to review the so-called renewable fuel standard that mandates that 13.8 billion gallons of corn ethanol be blended into the gasoline supply next year. The free-market think tank and global hunger charity argued that the EPA’s technical regulations implementing the mandate did not meet “basic standards of quality” [since] EPA failed to consider multiple peer-reviewed studies documenting the link between ethanol and world hunger in its public health literature review, as required by law. That includes one paper that concludes that biofuel mandates are responsible for at least 192,000 premature deaths every year. Overall more people die from chronic hunger world-wide than malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined.

EPA disregarded this evidence, and denied the petition after a fourteenth-month delay.  (A request for reconsideration has been filed).

In 2008, a Washington Post editorial by two prominent environmentalists described how ethanol mandates have harmed the environment and spawned hunger across the world.   In “Ethanol’s Failed Promise,” Lester Pearson and Jonathan Lewis observed that “Turning one-fourth of our corn into fuel is affecting global food prices. U.S. food prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation, hitting the pocketbooks of lower-income Americans and people living on fixed incomes.  .  .Deadly food riots have broken out in dozens of nations in the past few months, most recently in Haiti and Egypt. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warns of a global food emergency.” [click to continue…]

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. military is exploring how to bundle renewable energy contracts into securities (à la subprime mortgages), in order to better leverage taxpayer dollars to pay for more green energy.

Is anyone else discomfited by this second order mission creep? The military is supposed to be fighting wars. Now, it’s getting into complex, risky investment banking. So that it can generate more green energy.

Surely General Patton is rolling in his grave.

The Associated Press last week reported that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was set to partially lift a statewide moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, a gas drilling technology also known as fracking, but he was persuaded to hold off on doing so by his former brother-in-law Robert Kennedy, Jr., a famous environmentalist. According to the AP, Kennedy impressed on Gov. Cuomo the “health problems” associated with fracking. Contrary to what Kennedy told the Governor, there are no such “health problems.” The truth is that environmentalist agitators like Kennedy and documentarian Josh Fox don’t have any evidence to back up their claims. If I was an upstate New Yorker whose property lay above the Marcellus Shale, a gas rich geological formation underneath much of the State, I’d question why my Governor is listening to his former brother-in-law, instead of the New York state geologist, Dr. Taury Smith, a fracking supporter who dismisses environmentalist alarmism about the drilling technique as being the “worst kind of spin.”

Representatives Steve Scalise (R-La.), Joe Barton (R-Tex.), and 103 other original co-sponsors introduced a resolution expressing the sense of Congress that a tax on carbon dioxide emissions would harm the U. S. economy.    Scalise is chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee and Barton is former chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.  H. Con. Res. 24 would not forbid the House from passing a carbon tax bill in the future simply because Congress cannot bind itself in that way.

The purpose of the resolution rather is to build congressional and public opposition to a carbon tax.  Some observers have said this is unnecessary because neither the House nor the Senate would vote for a big new tax on energy use.  That is true.  Moreover, the White House has said repeatedly that they have not and will not propose a carbon tax.  That is also true.  However, the White House’s denials are carefully worded not to rule out supporting a carbon tax proposal that was part of a comprehensive and bipartisan budget or tax reform deal.  The White House really wants Republicans to propose a carbon tax.

The attraction for including a carbon tax in any big budget or tax deal is considerable for the big spenders in Congress because it’s the only thing on the table that would raise a lot of new revenue.  A tax of twenty dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emitted would raise over $100 billion in its first year.  By burying it in a package, no Member of Congress would have to take an up or down vote on a stand-alone carbon tax and could still protest in public that he was against the carbon tax but had to accept it in order to pass the whole package.  A further problem is that these big budget and tax deals are negotiated in secret by House and Senate leaders, chairmen and senior members of the relevant committees, and the White House.

As it happens, the day before Scalise and Barton introduced their resolution, Representative Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) released a discussion draft of “carbon-pricing” legislation. “Putting a price on carbon could help solve two of the nation’s biggest challenges at once:  preventing climate change and reducing the budget deficit,” Waxman said in a press release.

Back in 2007, EPA issued a regulation known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), requiring billions of gallons of corn ethanol to be blended into the U.S. gasoline supply. This mandate is a continuation of the U.S. biofuel policy, and has been celebrated by environmentalists and GW alarmists as a way of reducing greenhouse gases and lowering our dependence on supposedly dangerous foreign oil.

In October of 2011, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ActionAid USA petitioned EPA to review its position on the impact of its RFS mandates on world hunger. Since a large portion of available farmland is being used to grow corn for ethanol instead of for food, this lowers the food supplies drastically and in turn drives up prices. Our petition was based on the Data Quality Act, which enables anyone to seek correction of data that has been disseminated by a federal agency. The request argued that the information in EPA’s regulatory analysis and on the agency’s website incorrectly downplayed the impacts of the U.S. mandates on world hunger. To support this claim, CEI and ActionAid cited several studies showing that higher food prices from biofuel mandates have caused malnutrition in developing countries, resulting in nearly 192,000 excess deaths annually.

Not being in much of a hurry to examine if whether it might be partly responsible for such carnage, EPA exceeded its 90-day response deadline-three times. Fourteen months would pass before they finally, in December of 2012, denied the petition.

This delay is particularly ironic since the Obama administration and EPA frequently have complained about the slow pace of Congress, issuing executive orders and fuel economy regulations with the slogan “We Can’t Wait.” Apparently, when it comes to assessing whether their policies are killing people, they can.

EPA claimed that assessing deaths due to biofuel programs was beyond the scope of its analysis, which apparently only focused on the incremental effects of the U.S. biofuel mandate. CEI and ActionAid USA filed a request for reconsideration on March 11, providing new evidence of the policy’s devastating effects on food prices and global hunger. A copy of the request is appended to the end of this post. Given EPA’s alleged “global leadership” role and the fact that people in developing countries spend up to 80 percent of their income on food, the new request shows that the U.S. mandate alone has far-reaching negative implications that EPA should address.

The request was fittingly filed during the Government in the Sunshine Week, a national initiative to promote the importance of open government. However, given EPA’s notorious lack of transparency on other matters, we wonder what effect our request will have on the agency whose motto is “protecting people and the environment.” We have an in-house joke that EPA ought to take that slogan and insert the phrase “but not in that order” to the end of it.