Category — Climate policy

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is going to cost a lot (both in terms of dollars and effort), and it is going to produce few if any demonstrable climate results for decades to come (if ever).” 

The scientific community—or especially that part of it which holds the opinion that not enough is being done to mitigate potential climate change—is struggling with why the general public (and hence policymakers) are not heeding their call to action on global warming.

In a recent post, I pointed to one reason: the fast diminishing role that any U.S.-side mitigation would have in curbing greenhouse gas emissions enough to measurably affect global climate. This is a classic bang-for-the-buck evaluation. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is going to cost a lot (both in terms of dollars and effort), and it is going to produce few if any demonstrable climate results for decades to come (if ever).

In short, a mitigation (versus a wealth-is-health adaptation strategy) is a tough sell given even the most alarming climate change projections, and becomes nearly impossible under more modest climate change scenarios.

The role of climate change science has been, and continues to be, in arbitrating between the potential climate outcomes. And although there are some who argue that the science no longer matters as far the politics go, a lot of other scientists who make at least a partial living studying climate and climate change (including myself) would like to think otherwise.

And many of us have taken the additional step of not only producing science, but also translating our results (and that of others) into more layman’s terms, describing what implications the results have on the bigger picture of climate change, and then suggesting what, if anything, should be done about it. With mixed success (depending on who you ask). [Read more →]

“[T]he impact that emissions reduction efforts in the U.S. will have on global emissions totals–and by extension, global climate–is quickly diminishing.”

The just-released numbers for last year’s carbon dioxide emissions (not including land-use changes) show why forcing large cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is not very high on the priority list of the U.S. powers-that-be (including voters).

In 2010, the total global CO2 emissions were the highest on record, ~9.1 PgC (33,400 million metric tons). The U.S. contribution was ~1.50PgC, about 16% of the global total—percentage-wise the lowest on record (since 1959) and falling rapidly.

Unilateral U.S. CO2 mitigation strategies, in other words, are doomed to increasing irrelevance–and even unintended consequences should carbon rationing at home result in industrial transfers to less regulated areas. [Read more →]

Last Wednesday, November 17, 2010, the Subcommittee on Energy & Environment of the Committee on Science and Technology of the U. S. House of Representatives held a hearing on climate change titled “A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response.” In a clear deference to the incoming make-up of the House, there were a relatively high number of panelists that were invited by the sitting minority, which made this hearing more “rational” and fascinating that than most subcommittee hearings in some time.

The Republican invitees were Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, and Judith Curry.

The first two are stalwarts of the let’s-just-hold-on-a-minute view of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. And, true to form, at the hearing each presented compelling evidence as to why anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions might not rapidly push up global temperature—not now, nor in the future. The testimony of Lindzen and Michaels can be found here and here respectively. And while their arguments are met with considerable opposition from the global-warming-is-a-dire-problem types, the ideas espoused by Lindzen and Michaels are scientifically compelling.

The third Republican invitee, Georgia Institute of Technology’s Dr. Judith Curry, is a new addition to this group (her testimony can be accessed here). In fact, not too long ago, she was starring for the Democrats at Congressional hearings. She also endorsed Joe Romm’s book, Come Hell and High Water, upon its release in 2006.

But all this changed about a year ago, when Dr. Curry started delving into the contents of the Climategate emails (which just celebrated the one-year anniversary of their release). She did not like what she found and spoke up.

At the time, when expressing her initial concern about the behavior on display (and its implications) in the Climategate emails, hers was one voice among several that came from folks who were typically apart from the usual (critical) suspects.

However, as time went on, the other voices have grown dimmer, while Judith’s has grown louder—primarily because of her continued investigations and her conviction borne upon what she has found.

Her primary interest, as of late, concerns the recognition and representation of uncertainty in our scientific knowledge. She holds the opinion that the level of true uncertainty is suppressed in the IPCC documents, and that its full revelation is essential in presenting a fair description of the state of scientific knowledge.

Her frank discussion on this topic has made her rather unpopular among her past supporters (she was at one time deemed the “high priestess of global warming” but now labeled a “heretic”) and is what has landed her in the anchor seat of the Hearing last week.

Here is a snippet of how she describes her personal journey: [Read more →]

On the day following the elections, President Obama urged policymakers not to forget about climate change. While he ideally would like to get help from the Congress in enacting legislation aimed at curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, he seems willing to let EPA do the heavy lifting in the absence of Congressional action. He is also looking to the states that the United States citizenry does not want to have done collectively.

In his post-election press conference last Wednesday, November 3, 2010, the president gave some clues about what his future aspirations are for a climate/energy policy. It was most obvious in his response to a question put to him by the Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler, and indicates that his Dream Green Team playbook is still alive and well.

Question:

Thank you, Mr. President. You said earlier that it was clear that Congress was rejecting the idea of a cap-and-trade program, and that you wouldn’t be able to move forward with that. Looking ahead, do you feel the same way about EPA regulating carbon emissions? Would you be open to them doing essentially the same thing through an administrative action, or is that off the table, as well?

Response:

With respect to the EPA, I think the smartest thing for us to do is to see if we can get Democrats and Republicans in a room who are serious about energy independence and are serious about keeping our air clean and our water clean and dealing with the issue of greenhouse gases—and seeing are there ways that we can make progress in the short term and invest in technologies in the long term that start giving us the tools to reduce greenhouse gases and solve this problem.

The EPA is under a court order that says greenhouse gases are a pollutant that fall under their jurisdiction. And I think one of the things that’s very important for me is not to have us ignore the science, but rather to find ways that we can solve these problems that don’t hurt the economy, that encourage the development of clean energy in this country, that, in fact, may give us opportunities to create entire new industries and create jobs that—and that put us in a competitive posture around the world.

So I think it’s too early to say whether or not we can make some progress on that front. I think we can. Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way. It was a means, not an end. And I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.

And I think EPA wants help from the legislature on this. I don’t think that the desire is to somehow be protective of their powers here. I think what they want to do is make sure that the issue is being dealt with.

Clearly Obama seems hopeful that Congress will step in and do the dirty work, but the threat of using the EPA to carrying the entire load is only thinly veiled.

However, going the EPA route is not going to be any easier than going the Congressional route. [Read more →]

Barring the trickery of a lame duck conference committee, cap-and-trade is dead in the 111th Congress. Some blame President Obama for not taking a more hands-on role. Others blame environmental groups for waging a $100 million lobbying campaign without winning a single GOP convert to the Kerry-Lieberman bill. Others blame the allegedly “well-funded denial machine,” even though proponents, who include major corporations like BP as well as Big Green, must have outspent free-market and conservative advocacy groups by more than 100 to 1.

The August 11 edition of Climatewire (subscription required) featured interviews with Exelon Corp. VP Betsy Moler and Resources for the Future President Phil Sharp, who lament that Republican lawmakers, the “inventors” of “market-based” environmental policy, turned against their own “invention.” Moler and Sharp are trying to spin GOP opposition to cap-and-trade as self-contradictory, hence as unstable, hence as reversible. As Climatewire reports, Moler is not ready to “throw in the towel” and Sharp entertains the hope that a “new kind of coalition” will emerge in the next Congress.

Now, let’s look at this notion, peddled by Moler and Sharp, that Republicans flip-flopped and trashed their own legacy by nixing cap-and-trade. [Read more →]

The innocent layperson may have gotten the idea that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represented the “consensus” view that urgent government action is needed to avert catastrophic impacts on humanity.

And yet, as Jim Manzi’s recent exchange with uber-alarmist Joe Romm makes perfectly clear, even the latest IPCC report punctures holes in the alarmist claims. Perhaps without realizing it, Romm implicitly admits that the IPCC AR4 report never supported the alarmist view.

Manzi Uses the IPCC to Take Down Al Gore

In his relatively new position as “in-house critic” at The New Republic, Manzi criticized a characteristically alarmist piece that Al Gore had published in the same venue. Manzi wanted to show that Gore was misleading the public on what the “scientific consensus” actually had to say about the risks of climate change. [Read more →]

On June 10, the U.S. Senate will debate and vote on a resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26), sponsored by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from ‘enacting’ controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door.

S.J.Res.26 would overturn the EPA’s endangerment finding, a December 2009 rulemaking in which the agency concluded that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. America could end up with a bundle of greenhouse gas regulations more costly and intrusive than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.

At a minimum, as former Virginia Gov. George Allen and I explain elsewhere, unless stopped, the EPA will be in a position to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to the agency by Congress.

S.J.Res.26 puts a simple question squarely before the Senate: Who shall make climate policy — lawmakers who must answer to the people at the ballot box or politically unaccountable bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges appointed for life?

Precisely because S.J.Res.26 would restore constitutional discipline to climate policymaking, regulatory zealots are mounting smear campaigns against it. Climate Progress calls it “polluter crafted” (impossible, because the language and form of the resolution are fixed by the Congressional Review Act). MoveOn.Org claims the resolution will condemn many Americans to “smoke the equivalent of a pack a day just from breathing the air” (utter nonsense – just one cigarette delivers 12-27 times the daily dose of fine particulate matter that non-smokers get in cities with the most polluted air). Environmental Defense Action Fund says the resolution will give corporate polluters a “bailout” (also impossible, because S.J.Res.26 is not a tax or spending bill). 

Train Weighs In, Ignores Obvious, Knocks Down Straw Man 

A more sophisticated attack comes from Russell Train, who served as EPA Administrator under the Nixon and Ford Administrations (1973-1977). In a May 24 letter to Senate leaders, Train warns that S.J.Res.26 would “rollback Clean Air Act protections.”

Not so! Yes, the resolution would “prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.” But from its inception in 1970 through the present day, EPA has not regulated greenhouse gas emissions, and its recently finalized motor vehicle emission standards do not take effect until 2011. Train confuses “rollback” with containment. The only thing S.J.Res.26 would roll back is EPA’s regulatory overreach. [Read more →]

If your goal is keeping the earth’s temperature rise below 2°C, the only thing you have left is hope. Hope that the climate sensitivity—how much the global temperature rises from an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations—is far beneath what the climate models calculate it to be. When it comes to trying to use emissions cuts to achieve the 2°C goal, the cat is already out of the bag—maybe not in terms of emissions-to-date, but almost certainly so for emissions-to-come.

Such is the conclusion implicit in the recent analysis by Joeri Rogelj and colleagues published in a recent issue of Nature magazine.

Rogelj et al. did yeoman’s work in collecting all the varied (non-binding) efforts pledged by all of the various countries of the world to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions under the Copenhagen Accord that came out of last December’s big United Nations Climate Conference. From these pledges (which only extend to the year 2020 and of which Rogelj et al. commented “It is amazing how unambitious these pledges are”), Rogelj and colleagues kludged together a set of emissions pathways into the future.

Since some countries had a range of pledges emissions reductions, Rogelj et al. developed both an “optimistic” and a “pessimistic” emissions scenario to the year 2020.

What is supposed to happen after 2020 is anybody’s guess. [Read more →]

Word on the political street is that a 15 cent increase in the federal gasoline tax may well be included in the final draft of a bill being prepared by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and John Kerry (D-MA) to address global warming.   Shell, British Petroleum, and ConocoPhillips – are said to support the tax because it’s a less costly intervention in the transportation fuel market (for them anyway) than alternative interventions that might otherwise find their way into this prospective legislation.  Shell et al. may be right about that, but be that as it may, this would still constitute lousy public policy.  A gasoline tax hike ought to be resisted.

Higher Taxes Will Not Alter Climate Under Anyone’s Math

The proposed gasoline tax increase will have no significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions.  That’s because the demand curve for gasoline is rather inelastic.  Hence, a 15 cent increase in gasoline prices – presuming that the entirety of the tax is passed on to consumers, which may not prove to be the case – would not discourage very much fuel consumption at all. 

While I don’t have any calculations at hand to translate the likely amount of reduced oil consumption into a percentage reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions (although that would be a fine project to undertake if this idea ever finds its way into the bill), the figure is certainly below 1 percent.  How much cooler would the planet be given that emissions decline over the next 50, 100, and 150 years?  That figure would certainly be too small to even measure.

Regardless, the uninternalized “negative externality” associated with the impact of gasoline consumption on the climate is likely to be rather small in monetary terms.  After a review of the pertinent economic literature by economist Ian Parrry, Mr. Parry concluded that a gallon of gasoline likely does about 5 cents worth of damage to the environment via its impact on the global climate, assuming that the conventional narrative about anthropogenic climate change is correct.  Accordingly, a 15 cent increase in the gasoline tax to address climate impacts would likely do more economic harm than good even if you believe the scientific arguments forwarded by the IPCC. [Read more →]

Yesterday (Mar. 9), the Houston Chronicle published an op-ed by Shell Oil CEO Marvin Odum titled, Why Shell Oil Co. and I are staying in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. It’s pretty thin on substance. Kinda reminds me of that ’80s film, ”The Unbearable Lightness of Rent-Seeking.”

Maybe Mr. Odum got his marching orders from The Hague (Netherlands), or maybe he really believes cap-and-trade is good for the oil (and natural gas) business. These are strange times. Confusion abounds in high places.

In this post, I provide a running commentary on Odum’s column.  Odum’s verbiage is indented; my comments follow in bold type. 

Today, Washington is having the wrong energy and climate debate, and the future of the U.S. economy may be the biggest casualty.

A rather amazing statement, considering that the party of cap-and-trade controls the White House and the leadership of both the House and Senate. Saint Barack, Czarina Browner, Lisa Endangerment-Finding Jackson, General Boxer, and Inquisitor Waxman occupy the commanding heights of energy and climate policy in the nation’s capital, yet ”Washington is having the wrong energy and climate debate.” How did they let that happen? Odum offers no explanation.

Rather than developing sensible legislation that creates a viable market for low-emission energy while developing more of our own oil and gas resources, Washington is engaged in a snowball fight over the science of global warming.

Yep, move along, nothing to see here. ”Snowball fight” indeed. Top IPCC-affiliated scientists conspired to bias the peer-reviewed literature they would assess, ignored research that did not fit into the “nice tidy story” they wanted to tell, and violated the UK freedom of information act to prevent independent researchers from checking their data and methods. These IPCC insiders repeatedly flouted U.S. Government standards of openness and transparency, rendering the IPCC reports  unsuitable as basis for policymaking, as Peabody Energy documents in its 240-page examination of the Climategate files. [Read more →]