Yesterday, CEI’s Chris Horner testified before the Ohio House of Representatives Committee on Public Utilities, on legislation to modify the state’s existing green energy production quota by expanding the number of electricity generators that qualify as clean energy.
Below is his presentation and written testimony.
It’s now all but certain that the ethanol tax credit will expire at the end of the year, and the ethanol producers continue to claim credit for “giving it up” despite that it was obviously lost due to larger political considerations, and the fact that they lobbied initially for its extension and then eventually for a substitute which would have still funneled money into their industry. The tariff on ethanol imports also expires at the end of the year, and is likely to expire, though a bill was just introduced to extend it. It has no chance of passing through normal legislative means but its not impossible for it to be attached to larger omnibus bills in order to appease ethanol interests.
There are a few problems here. First, restrictions on trade are not normally good, but the fact that much of ethanol consumption is due to the renewable fuel standard mandate (and not market forces) complicates things. If imports of sugarcane ethanol are merely going to cut down on corn ethanol consumption/production, then it seems that the removal of the trade barrier would be a neutral/good thing. However, if imports of sugarcane ethanol require that Americans purchase additional ethanol relative to a baseline with the tariff, then an argument could be made for keeping the tariff. There are also other longer term political considerations: if sugarcane ethanol is kept out, the corn ethanol folks might lobby to lift the cap on corn ethanol and allow it to qualify as an advanced biofuel. Or, Congress might scrap the advanced biofuel RFS altogether as cellulosic ethanol is yet to exist.
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:
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….
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…]
The first three excerpts this week argued that the quantity of natural resources are 1) not as limited as experts have believed (Daniel Yergin), 2) not as important as our technological and political ability to access them (Peter Huber/Mark Mills), and 3) not “natural,” in that their usefulness is not an inherent feature, but rather an artificial human innovation (Robert Bradley). This excerpt from Matt Ridley’s brilliant 2010 book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves explains how non-renewable, finite energy sources paradoxically made economic growth sustainable. With inanimate objects doing the work instead of slaves, we can, as he says, all “live the life of a Sun King.”
In 1807, as Parliament in London was preparing to pass at last William Wilberforce’s bill to abolish the slave trade, the largest factory complex in the world had just opened at Ancoats in Manchester. Powered by steam and lit by gas, both generated by coal, Murrays’ Mills drew curious visitors from all over the country and beyond to marvel at their modern machinery. There is a connection between these two events. The Lancashire cotton industry was rapidly converting from water power to coal. The world would follow suit and by the late twentieth century, 85 percent of all energy used by humankind would come from fossil fuels. It was fossil fuels that eventually made slavery–along with animal power, and wood, wind and water–uneconomic. Wilberforce’s ambition would have been harder to obtain without fossil fuels. ‘History supports this truth,” writes the economist Don Boudreaux. ‘Capitalism exterminated slavery.’
The story of energy is simple. Once upon a time all work was done by people for themselves using their own muscles. Then there came a time when some people got other people to do the work for them, and the result was pyramids and leisure for a few, drudgery and exhaustion for the many. Then there was a gradual progression from one source of energy to another: human to animal to wind to fossil fuel. In each case, the amount of work one man could do for another was amplified by the animal or the machine. The Roman empire was built largely on human muscle power, in the shape of slaves. It was Spartacus and his friends who built the roads and houses, who tilled the ground and trampled the grapes. There were horses, forges and sailing ships as well, but the chief source of watts in Rome was people.
Though he was prepared to go quite a bit deeper when he turned on his steam-powered drill in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, in 1859, Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil at 69 feet. The first “deep water” oil wells stood in 100 feet of water in 1954. Today, they reach through 10,000 feet of water, 20,000 feet of vertical rock, and another 30,000 feet of horizontal rock.
Yet over the long term, the price of oil has held remarkably steady. Ten-mile oil costs less than 69-feet oil did, and about the same as one-mile oil did two decades ago. Production costs in the hostile waters of the Statfjord oil fields of the North Sea are not very dfiferent from the costs at the historic Spindletop fields of southeast Texas a century ago. There have been price spikes and sags, but they have been tied to political and regulatory instabilities, not discovery and extraction costs. This record is all the more remarkable when one considers that the amount of oil extracted has risen year after year. Cumulative production from U.S. wells. alone has surpassed a hundred billion barrels.
The historical trends defy all intuition. It is easy enough to thank human ingenuity for the relatively steady price of a finite and dwindling resource and leave it at that. But there is a second part to this story: it is energy itself that begets more energy. Electrically powered robots pursue new supplies of oil at the bottom of the ocean. Electricity purifies and dopes the silicon that becomes the photovoltaic cell that generates more electricity. Lasers enrich uranium that generates more electricity that powers more lasers. Power pursues the energy that produces the power.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute gets a disapproving nod from Naomi Klein in her latest essay for The Nation:
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”
(Before we go any further, Horner addressed this FOIA complaint earlier this week, after Lisa Jackson suggested that those engaged in asking for taxpayer funded communications that they are entitled to under the law were “criminal.” )
She’s going to call us on this — right? She doesn’t want to end capitalism as we know it, she just wants a large carbon tax so we can dot our landscape with windmills in the next few decades and ride off into the sunset on our new carbon-free ponies. Well, no, she’s going to largely confirm that she believes unfettered capitalism is going to destroy the world, and we need to reorganize society around localized organic farming or community co-ops or something: [click to continue…]
Paul Krugman’s recent article in the NY Times is a weak attempt to convince those who have been led astray by our “fossilized political system” that solar power is somehow becoming a rising star of reliability since, as he claims, it is now “cost-effective.” This pipedream is of course followed by a casual alarmist condemnation of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). It seems Krugman has gotten a little too solar-happy based on his overt distortion of both solar and fracking facts.
First, let’s get the sun out of our eyes and the buzzing Krugman out of our ears so the reality of solar energy can come into focus. Holman W. Jenkins’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal shatters Krugman’s application of solar energy under “Moore’s Law,” explaining the real reasons behind the decrease in solar energy price, which Krugman claims was actually the “technological success” of Solyndra’s failure. In Jenkins’s piece, he uses a fictitious acceptance letter from Herbert M. Allison, a former chief financial officer of Merrill Lynch, recruited by the White House to counsel on the Department of Energy’s “green” loan program, who was recruited after the collapse of Solyndra. He states:
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