Carl Sagan
Common sense teaches that the world would be a better place if people were more informed about it. Scientists with the fervor of corner preachers exhort anyone who will listen to take an interest in scientific matters. Astrophysicist Carl Sagan writes, for example, that:
the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential growth….How can we affect national policy… if we don’t understand the underlying issues?
Certainly everyone wants to overcome ignorance in the world, but notice that Sagan does not just complain about ignorance. Rather, he says that it is “dangerous,” “perilous,” and “foolhardy” to be ignorant of environmental issues. Passages like these rarely create “average citizens” who become experts on environmental policy, particularly when these issues barely warrant a mention in the rest of the book. Instead they create average citizens who become experts on caring about environmental policy. They tell the reader that it’s “perilous and foolhardy” to ignore these issues. After all, they’re scientific.
The Experts on Caring then go out and flood politicians and bureaucrats with questions about the environment. What will you do about this or that new catastrophe? Those who ignore such calls are labeled as “anti-science.” Anyone who disagrees just doesn’t understand science.
This weekend, one such Caring Expert told me that “all our wealth has a downside. Think about global warming. We are responsible for that. Hurricanes and floods kill people.” Statements like these encapsulate the major problem with Experts on Caring: Even if they’re right about a problem, their sense of proportion has been totally distorted by the Carl Sagans of the world who tell them it’s “dangerous” not to care.
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Anthony Watts’s indispensable Web site, Watts Up with That?, has a trove of hard-hitting commentaries on climate scientist Peter Gleick’s theft and publication of the Heartland Institute’s fund-raising documents and apparent forgery of a “confidential” climate strategy memo. Gleick earlier this week confessed to stealing the documents, but not to fabricating the strategy memo, although textual and other evidence point to him as the culprit.
Gleick, who described his conduct as a “serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics,” has resigned from his post as Chair of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task Force on Scientific Integrity. He nonetheless tried to blame the victim, claiming “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”
Yep, it’s the small underfunded band of free market think tanks who are stifling the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Academy of Sciences and their numerous brethren overseas, the European Environment Agency, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the EPA, NRDC, Greenpeace, etc. etc. Heartland invited Gleick to attend a public event and debate climate change just days before he stole the documents. Gleick turned down the invitation. Yet Gleick has the chutzpah to plead “frustration” at those trying to “prevent this debate.”
Among the key posts on Anthony’s site to check out: Joe Bast’s Skype interview with the Wall Street Journal; Dr. Willis Eschenbach’s Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gunderson, who succeeds Gleick as Chair of the AGU Scientific Integrity Task Force; and Megan McCardle’s column in The Atlantic reviewing among other things evidence fingering Gleick as the author of the fake strategy memo. [click to continue…]
House Ratchets Up Probe of White House Involvement in Solyndra Scandal
Fourteen Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) sent a strongly-worded, five-page letter to the White House on 9th February setting a 21st February deadline for turning over documents related to the White House’s involvement in the Solyndra scandal. The letter also demands that five officials be made available for interviews by 17th February.
The letter notes that the Committee requested the relevant documents five months ago and has made every effort to accommodate the White House’s concerns. As to the reasons why the White House has refused to comply with the committee’s subpoena last fall, the letter notes that the White House has not claimed executive privilege for the withheld documents and demands that if executive privilege is going to be claimed the White House must let the committee know by 21st February.
The Department of Energy made the first renewable energy loan under the 2009 stimulus bill to solar panel maker Solyndra, which is based in Fremont, California. The entire $527 million of taxpayer money was lost in August when Solyndra declared bankruptcy. The largest private investor in Solyndra, George Kaiser, is a major Obama and Democratic Party donor and fundraiser and has been a frequent visitor to the White House during the Obama presidency.
So much for consensus.
For years, climate change cultists have attempted to shut down public discourse over global warming by assuring us that “the debate is over,” that scientists are in lockstep agreement that Man is steam-frying his own planet.
That was always bunk, of course. For one, if the scientific debate was really over, no one would have to say it. There just wouldn’t be any debate. No one these days goes around saying “the debate is over” about heliocentrism. That’s because no one questions the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun – there is literally no debate.
Second, the fact that it was so often politicians and/or celebrities (or a bizarre hybrid of the two like Al Gore) intoning the “debate is over” canard, instead of actual scientists, was a major clue that something was amiss with the “consensus” claim.
(The Washington Post famously reported on Gore’s scientific acumen: “For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6…and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”)
Sadly for Gore et al, a growing number of scientists are publically expressing skepticism about anthropogenic global warming, emboldened by a flood of new data that casts doubt on the whole “climate change” paradigm (I address some of this new data in my latest piece for the Washington Examiner).
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Dear Mitt,
Congratulations on winning the Iowa Caucus! I know you have worked long and hard for the Republican Presidential Nomination.
On the night of the caucuses, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS), was heard saying: “Republicans, in general, aren’t enthusiastic about any of their choices.” This is clear as evidenced by the search for the “not Romney” candidate.
While DWS was correct, one thing all Republicans are enthusiastic about is beating President Obama. They will unite behind that cause. If you are to be the candidate who unites the Republican Party, you are going to have to differentiate yourself from President Obama to win support beyond Iowa. You’ve got several problems there.
One problem is your view on manmade climate change. The American public doesn’t view global warming as an important issue—this is especially true for Republicans. Yet President Obama continues to tout green jobs. In the name of saving the planet, his administration’s policies are making it difficult for people to feed their families and heat their homes.
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Last week, Judge Lawrence O’Neill of the U.S. District Court in Fresno issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), a regulation requiring a 10% reduction in the carbon content of motor fuels sold in the state by 2020. O’Neill concluded that the LCFS violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution because it discriminates against out-of-state economic interests and attempts to control conduct outside the state’s jurisdiction. [click to continue…]
On the first day of 2012, the New York Times published an editorial, “Where the Real Jobs Are,” that is uniformly backwards. If the federal government did the exact opposite of every recommendation made by the New York Times editorial board, Americans would benefit the most.
According to the Times, President Barack Obama should reject the shovel-ready Keystone XL Pipeline, because it would carry “conventional” oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. The editorial board then suggests that “real” jobs are those in the sector of the economy responsible for the production of “alternative” energy, like wind and solar power. Instead of allowing the private sector to create 6,000 (presumably fake) jobs by permitting the Keystone XL, the Times argues that the President should “lay out the case that industry, with government help, can create hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs.” In the Times’s mind, Europe has shown the way:
“Europe has encouraged the commercial development of carbon-reducing technologies with a robust mix of direct government investment and tax breaks, loans and laws that cap or tax greenhouse gas emissions. This country needs a comparably broad strategy that will create a pathway from the fossil fuels of today to the greener fuels of tomorrow.”
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In The Bottomless Well: The twilight of fuel, the virtue of waste, and why we will never run out of energy, Peter Huber and Mark Mills argue that the massive energy “losses” during energy production aren’t bad, as outside critics of the U.S. energy economy want to assert. They are actually the most necessary and beneficial part of America’s energy use—they refine energy sources into usable energy.
The Bottomless Well was published in 2005
To put it as bluntly as it can be put, the “waste” of energy is virtue, not a vice. It is only by throwing most of the energy away that we can put what’s left to productive use. The cold side of the engine—where we discard most of the energy—is as essential as the hot, where we suck it in. More essential, in fact. It is by throwing energy overboard that we maintain and increase the order of our existence.
The electricity at the plug arrives from the enormous generator in some utility’s central power plant. What spins the generator’s shaft is a steam turbine. The steam comes from a boiler, which is heated by furnace, which most probably burns coal. In the very best power plants, half of the raw heat available in the coal is consumed inside the plant itself in converting the other half of the heat into electricity. Less efficient power plants—smaller ones used as stand-by generators, for example—consume two-thirds of their heat to refine the other one-third into electricity. The whole business, in short, reeks of a Ponzi scheme, with each successive tier of the pyramid feeding voraciously off the one beneath—and with new tiers constantly being added at the top. Small wonder that so much of our energy economy is often characterized as wasteful. Casual observers are easily convinced that there must be a better way.
The energy Ponzi scheme is invariably framed—and lamented—as a symptom of grotesque waste. In the standard graphical presentation, the noble pyramid is portrayed, instead, as a squid-like creature, expelling waste through every tentacle. Updated versions of the energy squid are now routinely wheeled out to demonstrate how most of the energy we use goes to “waste” or (more colorfully) disappears down a “rat hole.”
But something far bigger than a wasteful rat hole is at work when you are looking at the 95 percent or more of total demand. That much demand can’t all be blamed on bad engineering. If the main use of energy is to condition energy itself, then “energy” isn’t the right metric at all, and the “energy economy” must in fact center on something quite different. Engines and generators are obviously doing something for us that isn’t captured by any of the conventional metrics of energy and power.
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In his book, Contract with the Earth, former-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich writes, “The universality of the recycling phenomenon should be regarded as a turning point in our struggle to revitalize the earth, and one of the most successful mass environmental actions in human history.” Natural resource economist Julian Simon disagrees. In this excerpt from The Ultimate Resource II, Simon argues that recycling and conservation only make sense if they also make economic sense.
Ultimate Resource II was released in 1996
Should you conserve energy by turning off lights that are burning needlessly in your house? Of course you should – just as long as the money that you save by doing so is worth the effort of shutting off the light. That is, you should turn out a light if the money cost of the electrical energy is greater than the felt cost to you of taking a few steps to the light switch and flicking your wrist. But if you are ten miles away from home and you remember that you left a 100-watt light bulb on, should you rush back to turn it off? Obviously not; the cost of the gasoline spent would be far greater than the electricity saved, even if the light is on for many days. Even if you are on foot and not far away, the value to you of your time is surely greater than the cost of the electricity saved.
The appropriate rule in such cases is that you should conserve and not waste just so far as the benefits of conserving are greater than the costs if you do not conserve. That is, it is rational for us to avoid waste if the value to us of the resource saved is more than the cost to us of achieving the saving – a matter of pocketbook economics. And the community does not benefit if you do otherwise.
Ought you save old newspapers rather than throw them away? Sure you ought to – as long as the price that the recycling center pays you is greater than the value to you of your time and energy in saving and hauling them. But if you – or your community – must pay someone more to have paper taken away for recycling than as trash, there is no sound reason to recycle paper.
Recycling does not “save trees”. It may keep some particular trees from being cut down. But those trees never would have lived if there were no demand for new paper – no one would have bothered to plant them. And more new trees will be planted and grown in their place after they are cut. So unless the very act of a saw being applied to a tree makes you unhappy, there is no reason to recycle paper nowadays.
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In the News
Climategate Bombshell
Maxim Lott, Fox News, 16 December 2011
Scientific Communication: Preach or Engage?
Chip Knappenberger, Master Resource, 16 December 2011
Keystone Blue Collar Blues
Lawrence Kudlow, Real Clear Politics, 16 December 2011
Obama’s Justice Department Joins Britain’s Climategate Leaker Manhunt
Chris Horner, Washington Examiner, 15 December 2011
Nipping Jobs in the Bud
Brian McGraw, American Spectator, 15 December 2011
Time to Tell the Green Energy Industry to Grow Up
Jackie Moreau, GlobalWarming.org, 15 December 2011
Obama’s Transparency War Targets Climate Skeptics
David Bier, Open Market, 15 December 2011
Obama’s Regulatory Burden
Rep. Fred Upton, National Review, 15 December 2011
EPA’s Bogus Wyoming Fracking Report
Robert Bryce, New York Post, 14 December 2011
Big Picture Items
World Climate Report, 14 December 2011
New You Can Use
Another Alarmist Myth Debunked
According to an IPS interview with Richard Armstrong, a geographer at Colorado University’s National Snow and Ice Centre and the lead author of the first comprehensive study of the glaciers of High Asia, 96 percent of the water that flows down the mountains of Nepal into nine local river basins comes from snow and rain, and only 4 percent from summer glacier melt. Of that 4 percent, says Armstrong, only a minuscule proportion comes from the melting away of the end points of the glaciers due to global warming. The study debunks a long-held talking point of global warming alarmists, that climate change could incite a resource war between India and Pakistan by melting away Himalayan glaciers.
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