Posts from — August 2009

Roger Pielke Jr. Challenges Joe Romm: Looking for Intellectual Improvement

by rbradley

There is that old saying–when you dig yourself into a hole, stop digging! Joe Romm at the influential climate blog Climate Progress continues to dig deeper in his spat with Roger Pielke, Jr., who is seen by Left and Right as a straight-shooter in the polarized climate debate.

This is an instance where bad behavior by Romm is backfiring on him and his sponsor, the Center for American Progress (CAP).

Pielke’s post, “Please Read Climate Progress” (July 31) begins:

It’d sure be nice if people who disagree could debate policy questions based on the merits of the issue. Of course, this is not reality. I have been amused to see Joe Romm … find himself unable to respond to the policy arguments that I make, and thus find himself having to instead engage in ever more shrill and personal attacks on me. Most recently he has falsely accused my university of violating my academic freedom by shutting down our blog, Prometheus. They of course did no such thing, and when a reader of both of our blogs called him on it he could not provide the goods (because there aren’t any).

And the Romm problem for Pielke Jr. goes deeper: [Read more →]

August 7, 2009 5 Comments

Politics vs. Science at EPA: The Carlin Matter Revisited

by rpeltier

[Editor note: For more background and the likely consequences of EPA's endangerment finding, see Marlo Lewis, "CO₂ Regulation under the Clean Air Act: Economic Train Wreck, Constitutional Crisis, Legislative Thuggery"]

In their recent draft of an endangerment-finding technical support document (TSD), scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conclude that carbon dioxide emissions are a public health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Federal law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is “accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased”; the most recent available; and collected by the “best available methods.” The EPA’s TSD on carbon emissions violates all of these requirements.

Staff researcher Dr. Alan Carlin, given just a few days to review the draft TSD, took EPA to the woodshed because the report offered little more than a bibliography of out-of-date reports and research rather than a rigorous scientific inquiry into the subject. The Carlin report’s preface clearly shows that the EPA abdicated its position of scientific authority on the subject: “Our conclusions do represent the best science in the sense of most closely corresponding to available observations that we currently know of [and] are sufficiently at variance with those of the IPCC, CCSP, and the Draft TSD that we believe they support our increasing concern that EPA has not critically reviewed the finding by these other groups.”

Both of EPA’s recent attempts to regulate additional pollutants under the Clean Air Act have had poor results. [Read more →]

August 6, 2009 8 Comments

Rent Seeking, Crony Capitalism, and U.S. Energy Politics: Who Wins from the Racket?

by Donald Hertzmark

A calm has descended over the federal government’s initiatives in energy amid the furor over health insurance legislation. The respite is welcome, but the sturm und drang of clashing interests will resume in earnest after Congress’s summer recess. There is too much money on the table–our money–for the favor-seekers to ignore.

A Banana Republic?

Increasingly, it is clear that the initial cap-and-trade legislation was insufficiently opaque. Numerous analyses of Waxman-Markey (HR 2454) on this site and others have shown that the proposed cap-and-trade legislation will cost consumers dearly by raising the prices of electricity and gasoline, while ignoring viable sources of clean energy that have not yet found the key to the federal treasury.

With so much money at stake, each of the contestants (call them rent-seekers, some of them reluctant players in the political capitalism game) will attempt to gather up as much of the pot as possible. The only people not at the table, those of us who will pay for this orgy of confiscation, wonder just what it is that we will receive in return for our cash.

Rent-seeking is defined as follows in Wikipedia: [Read more →]

August 5, 2009 1 Comment

UK Report: Taxpayer Funding for Climate Alarmism ($11 million of $60 million total)

by msinclair

TaxPayers’ Alliance has just released a new report on the scale that British taxpayers’ money is being used to fund lobbying and political campaigning. We found that £38 million – $60 million – was being spent on taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning in just a year, a portion of which aims to secure greater government intervention to try to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It is about climate alarmism and related policy activism, not sober science and free-market reliance.

Examples

The Sustainable Development Commission, a public sector body with a budget of over £4 million, writes reports arguing that economic growth is a bad thing and that “natural justice tells us that individual emissions of CO₂ must, in the long run, converge around the same per capita entitlement.”

The New Economics Foundation are responsible for the Happy Planet Index, which places Saudi Arabia and Burma above the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States in terms of “achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources.” The foundation gets more than £600,000 in funding from public sector organizations.

The Campaign for Better Transport attacks road building [Read more →]

August 4, 2009 3 Comments

McCain Echoes Hansen: Waxman-Markey is a 'Farce' (The Civil War widens among climate alarmists)

by rbradley

“[The Waxman-Markey] 1,400-page bill is a farce. They bought every industry off—steel mills, agriculture, utilities…. I would not only not vote for it. I am opposed to it entirely, because it does damage to those of us who believe that we need to act in a rational fashion about climate change.”

- Senator John McCain to Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, August 1-2, 2009, p. A9.

“The truth is, the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. It is an exceedingly inefficient way to get a small reduction of emissions. It is less than worthless….”

-James Hansen, “Strategies to Address Global Warming,” July 13, 2009.

The death of federal climate legislation in 2009 will not only be because traditional Republicans and conservative Democrats said “no”. It will also be because true believers like Senator John McCain realize that politicized cap-and-trade is all pain and no gain. A scorched earth economic policy that does not meaningfully address a feared “scorched earth” to come is worse than no policy at all.

Consider the conversation between Stephen Moore and Senator McCain in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal:

Since Mr. McCain was the co-sponsor of the McCain-Lieberman bill last year to limit CO emissions through a cap-and-trade system, I ask him about the climate change bill that passed the House last month and he surprised me with his opposition. “I believe climate change is real . . . but this 1,400-page bill is a farce. They bought every industry off—steel mills, agriculture, utilities,” he says.

So you wouldn’t vote for the House bill? “I would not only not vote for it,” he laughs, “I am opposed to it entirely, because it does damage to those of us who believe that we need to act in a rational fashion about climate change.”

And compare this to what NASA scientist, climate alarmist, and Al Gore confidant James Hansen has said about the original version of Waxman-Markey: [Read more →]

August 3, 2009 14 Comments