Posts from — March 2009

MasterResource is nearing its three-month anniversary. Our total views have exceeded 50,000–not bad for a start-up, energy-focused blog. We have had as many as 3,200 views on a day and now have a base daily viewership of around 500.

We have had 111 posts (at least one per day!) from 21 different authors. Our post categories exceed 50. Nearly 500 comments from more than 150 individuals have been received, and more comments are being added to different posts. We welcome critical comments so long as they are made in good faith and in good taste.

Our most popular posts (and comments on posts) to date have been: [Read more →]

President Obama had a realism moment last week when he responded, off-script, to a question posed to him at a meeting with the Business Roundtable in Washington.  In response to a challenge to costly carbon-dioxide (CO₂) regulation by Weyerhaeuser President Daniel Fulton, Obama opined:

I’m not somebody who — I’ve never bought into these Malthusian, woe, Chicken Little, the earth is falling — I tend to be pretty optimistic. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t pretty optimistic. But I think this is–the science is overwhelming. This is a real problem. It will have severe economic consequences, as well as political and national security and environmental consequences.

Well, here is a little secret that should be brought out in the open. [Read more →]

Call it an economic train wreck, a constitutional crisis, or legslative thuggery. Litigation-driven regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) under the Clean Air Act (CAA) is all of the above.

The Supreme Court case of Massachusetts v. EPA  (April 2, 2007) has set the stage for a policy disaster. Mass v. EPA’s second anniversary rapidly approaches, and in a Power Point presentation leaked to Greenwire last week, EPA reveals how it plans to respond to the Court. But first, some background on the case and the Pandora’s Box it has created. [Read more →]

In the realm of climate science, as in most topics, there exists a range of ideas as to what is going on, and what it means for the future. At the risk of generalizing, the gamut looks something like this: Ultra-alarmists think that human greenhouse-gas-producing activities will vastly change the face of the planet and make the earth inhospitable for humans; they therefore demand large and immediate action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. Alarmists understand that human activities are changing the earth’s climate and think that the potential changes are sufficient to warrant some pre-emptive action to try to mitigate them. Skeptics think that humans activities are changing the earth’s climate but, by and large, they think that the changes are not likely to be terribly disruptive (and even could be, in net, positive) and that drastic action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions is unnecessary, difficult, and ineffective. Ultra-skeptics think that human greenhouse gas-producing activities are impacting the earth’s climate in no way whatsoever.

Most of my energy tends to be directed at countering alarmist claims about impending climate catastrophe, but the scientist in me gets just as bent out of shape about some of the contentions made by the ultra-skeptics, which are simply unsupported by virtually any scientific evidence. Primary among these claims is that human activities are not responsible for the observed build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is just plain wrong. [Read more →]

Environmental protection and economic progress can and should be complementary. Innovation and deployment of naturally better technologies can enable us to be greener, wealthier, and happier.

But the politics of climate change can ruin the synergy. It becomes “environment” versus the economy. A case study is Ireland.

Ireland is a home to green politics, and, as in many other countries, the focus is on greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation policies. While green activism has grown both through formal green political parties,and through sympathetic factions working within formal institutional structures, more important still is the ability of greens to exert pressure through coalition politics, especially in parliaments. This can imbue green parties or green-party sympathizers with considerable power to “gate keep” and control agendas. [Read more →]

Cambridge University economist Dr. Terry Barker told delegates at the recent Copenhagen climate conference that if the current economic downturn persists for several years, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions worldwide could drop by 40% to 50%, the Irish Times reports. 

Dr. Barker, who is director of the Cambridge Center for Climate Research, said the Great Depression of the 1930s reduced global emissions by 35% because so many factories shut down, especially in the United States. He adds: [Read more →]

[Note: Sunday posts at MasterResource will include best-of reposts from this blog, best-of posts or op-ed's from other writers, and other general material.]

Robert Bryce is a straight shooter and exactly the type intellectual that is needed as a rethink slowly emerges from the current politicized energy fare.  He himself has changed his mind on vital issues, just as Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg did before him. Indeed, as Bryce mentions in the op-ed to follow: [Read more →]

AP writer Samantha Young describes the results of a new report commissioned by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Climate Action Team that puts a price tag on all sorts of climate change-related damage set to befall California in the decades ahead.

But as you may have guessed from a report commissioned by the leader of state who presided over the enactment of the world’s first “comprehensive program of regulatory and market mechanisms to achieve real, quantifiable, cost-effective reductions of greenhouse gases,” the price is high (it better be, or what was the point?). And, as with all things global warming, folks are quick to point out that it is probably going to be even worse than it is made out to be.

But what is not pointed out is that California’s emissions reduction program will do nothing to mitigate the impact of the coming climate. [Read more →]

Earlier this week, President Obama signed an administrative directive to ensure that scientific fact – not ideological fancy – informs federal policy. Well, good for him. Now that he’s overturned the Bush administration’s prohibitions against using federal money to undertake some forms of research associated with embryonic stem cells, up next should be an administrative about-face on corn ethanol as a means of addressing climate change. Alas, the possibility that Obama will admit error on this matter is only slightly better than the possibility that Jessica Simpson will someday win the Nobel Prize for physics. Ideology trumping science? Bad. Politics trumping science? Business as usual.

Regardless, let’s quickly review the literature on ethanol and climate change. [Read more →]

I have previously posted on NASA scientist and leading climate alarmist James Hansen as a “scientist behaving strangely.” His mixing of politics and science–controversial science at that–has raised eyebrows among friend and foe.

But then there is the old, more moderate Jim Hansen. Below, I offer some quotations for the historical record. There are undoubtedly other quotations that can be added–and should be in the “comments” section, whether by Hansen or by colleagues of Hansen.

Perhaps Dr. Hansen can say that his thinking has evolved toward greater alarm. But if so, with temperatures little or no higher today than when he wrote a decade or more ago, the question must be asked: why has his alarm gone up rather than down? [Read more →]