In an executive order issued last week, Governor Deal stripped Dr. Stooksbury of his title and conferred it to a current employee of the state’s Environmental Protection Division—a position under direct government control, unlike Stooksbury’s rather independent office at the University of Georgia.

Certainly, the Governor can do as he chooses. And the newly tapped Georgia State Climatologist, Bill Murphey is seemingly qualified for the job. But, the move has all the signs of haste, and none of an orderly, well-thought out and coordinated transition. Which hints of something fishy going on.

It is worth bearing in mind that politics should consider scientific opinion, not shape it.

Stooksbury’s ouster is just the latest in a string of State Climatologists have been “replaced” in recent years for what seem like political reasons.

Patrick Michaels in Virginia. David Legates in Delaware. George Taylor in Oregon. Those three now-former state climatologists were on the rather cautious (and outspoken) side when it came to the possibility for alarming climate changes to occur as a result of human changes to the large-scale composition of the atmosphere. All three were ushered out by governors who had a different take on the issue. Michaels, Legates, and Taylor were victims of their title of “state” climatologist, even though, in this case, “state” referred primarily to geographical location more so than “government.” I guess the governors wanted to alleviate any confusion associated with the name and put someone in that position whose view better reflected that of the “State” (with a capital ‘S’).

What Is a “State Climatoligist”

According to the American Association of State Climatologists (AASC), “State Climatologists are individuals who have been identified by a state entity as the state’s climatologist and who are also recognized by the Director of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the state climatologist of a particular state.” Primarily, the State Climatologist does things like:

• Coordinate and collect weather observations for the purpose of climate monitoring

• Summarize and disseminate weather and climate information to the user community

• Demonstrate to the user community the value of climate information in the decision making process

• Perform climate impact assessments and weather event evaluations

• Conduct climate research, diagnosis, and projections

Usually, such activities don’t really attract the attention of the Governor, and so there never really is much conflict between “state” as a geographical location and “state” as the government. A change in Administration did not result in a change of the State Climatologist.

Until recently—when climate has been pushed to forefront of politics. Now having a State Climatologist whose views on climate change are not harmonious with that of the State Governor can sometimes be attention grabbing—and usually not in a good way for one of the two entities involved. Governors who previously were probably unaware that there was such a thing as a State Climatologist, now want to make sure they are on the same page.  I would think that would involve the Governor setting up a meeting with the scientist and getting briefed on the issue. However, with increasing frequency, it seems to be the other way around.

Certainly this was the case with Stooksbury.

The Governor’s Executive Order transferring the position of State Climatologist came as a complete surprise to seemingly everyone involved. In fact, Stooksbury learned of his ouster through a media inquiry. “There was word in June they were considering having the state climatologist report to [Environmental Protection Division], but as far as what happened this week, I was totally blindsided” Stooksbury said. Not only did Stooksbury lose his post, but so too did Pam Knox, the Assistant State Climatologist (Pam was the one-time State Climatologist of Wisconsin).  Both Stooksbury and Knox were eminently qualified for their position.

As to the forwarded reason for the switch, the governor’s spokesman said that it made sense to “centralize the [state climatology] office in state government.”

Stooksbury explains the implications of this move in an interview with Tom Crawford of the Georgia Report (in an article well worth reading,)

“You’ve kind of lost that independent voice for informing the public and informing decision-makers,” Stooksbury said. “I’m not sure that is good for the state in the long term. In a university setting, there is more independence, more access to the latest scientific information.”

Where’s the Beef?

Could the Governor have some beef with Stooksbury? Well, in this politically charged climate of climate change, Gov. Deal is on the conservative side of the issue. Stooksbury is somewhere in the middle—not particularly alarmed, but neither in denial that human greenhouse gas emissions et al. are having an impact on the climate. Stooksbury was not overly outspoken about the issue, instead spending the vast majority of his time doing the more mundane climate services tasks that State Climatologists do. However, Stooksbury would discuss his views on the topic of climate change if asked (See here, for example).

But, Stooksbury was hardly outspoken on the issue of climate change, saying that “I’ve tried not to make any comments on policy. I am a scientist. In public, I’ve been very quiet.”

Where’s the Outcry?

Admittedly, it is just speculation at this point that politics were involved in Stooksbury’s ouster but such speculation has not previously stopped outcry from various channels of the web when other State Climatologists were booted for seemingly political reasons.  So I am at a loss to understand why Stooksbury’s situation has not grabbed wider attention outside north-central Georgia. So far, the response has been little more than a trickle . I certainly don’t want to think that folks’ concern over political pressure only flows in one direction!

So, I’ll say it loud and clear—Georgia governor Nathan Deal made a poor decision in replacing David Stooksbury as Georgia State Climatologist. If politics were involved—then the decision was egregious. There is no better individual to serve the climate needs of the people of the state of Georgia. I am confident that everyone who has directly interacted with David Stooksbury (or with Pam Knox) would be in agreement. Clearly, Governor Deal never did.

Both the “state” and the “State” of Georgia have lost a valuable resource.

[disclaimer: I attended graduate school with David Stooksbury at the University of Virginia back in the late 1980s when we were both students of Dr. Patrick Michaels studying climatology in the Department of Environmental Sciences. David and I both worked for several years in the Virginia State Climatology. Even back then, he always had his sights set on becoming the Georgia State Climatologist—a goal that he ultimately achieved and at which he excelled.]

They would do well to study how in the 105th and 106th Congresses, a GOP House committee chairman from Missouri single handedly debunked the Clinton-Gore administration’s economic analysis of the Kyoto Protocol. 

Kyotoism: Down but Not Yet Out

Politically, the last eighteen months have been remarkable. In June 2009, the House passed H.R. 2454, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act,” popularly known as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Waxman-Markey’s passage was the culmination of a 20-year PR/lobbying campaign waged by U.N. officials, regulatory bureaucrats, environmental activists, lefty politicians, and corporate rent seekers.

Many of them crowed that ultimate victory was inevitable. With Barack “Blueprint for Change“ Obama in the White House, Speaker Pelosi and Chairmen Waxman and Markey running the climate show in the House, and Majority Leader Reid and Chairman Boxer setting the agenda in the Senate, expectations ran high in green circles.

Their optimistic scenario went as follows: Congress would finally enact cap-and-trade, which would shame China into accepting binding emission limits at the Copenhagen conference, which would then remove the chief obstacle to U.S. ratification of a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

Things did not turn out that way. Waxman-Markey quickly became a political liability for many of its supporters, Copenhagen fizzled, and by the summer of 2010 the greenhouse bubble burst. Among the chief factors derailing the Kyoto agenda were the Climategate scandal, Waxman-Markey’s outing as a stealth energy tax, 15 years of no net warming, the worst recession since the 1930s, China’s unwavering rejection of binding emission limits, and growing realism about the economic and technical downsides of wind and solar power.

Energy realists, however, can ill-afford to become complacent. EPA is moving rapidly to “enact” Kyoto-like restrictions on the U.S. economy. The Supreme Court could also launch an era of CO2 tort litigation if it decides Connecticut v. American Electric Power in favor of plaintiffs.

Moreover, few defeats in politics are permanent. The greenhouse gang is nothing if not inventive in recycling their policy nostrums under new guises and rationales. What was cap-and-trade, after all, but an obfuscatory repackaging of Al Gore’s Btu energy tax? And when proponents could no longer sell cap-and-trade as climate policy, they blathered about air pollution and asthma, oil dependence and national security, stimulus and green jobs.

Bear in mind, too, that cap-and-trade is a wealth-transfer scheme, and there is never any shortage of politicians and interest groups eager to bilk the public. They count on the fact that most voters are so busy with work and family matters that they are rationally ignorant of the harm lofty-sounding regulatory initiatives can do to them. 

No, we dare not rest on our laurels. Frédéric Bastiat debunked the broken window fallacy more than 150 years ago, yet Obama officials say with a straight face that putting a price on carbon (smashing that very big “window” consisting of all companies that make or use energy from fossil fuels) will stimulate the economy and create jobs.

Man from Missouri

Missouri is the “Show Me State,” which also makes it the Skeptic State, a place where plain folks proudly insist on seeing the evidence before assenting to the “frothy eloquence” of experts. How fitting, then, that James Talent, Republican of Missouri, adroitly used the hearing process to challenge climate-related flim-flam when he was Chairman of the House Committee on Small Business. In the 112th Congress, House GOP chairmen will need something of Jim’s talent to consolidate the gains energy realists made in the November elections and to roll back EPA’s greenhouse power grab.

On June 4, 1998 during the 105th Congress, and then again on April 29, 1999 during the 106th Congress, Chairman Talent grilled Janet Yellen, head of the Council of Economic Advisors, about the Clinton-Gore administration’s Kyoto economic impact analysis. Despite repeated Web searches, I am unable to locate the committee print for the June 4, 1998 hearing. Fortunately, I wrote a column about that hearing and excerpted much of the pertinent exchange.  

Both hearings examined the Clinton-Gore administration’s estimate that implementing Kyoto the “smart way” would cost the United States only $14-23 per ton of carbon, or about 0.1% of GDP.

In the 1998 hearing, Yellen was the sole witness on the first panel. This allowed Talent to pursue a single line of inquiry. He asked her: $14-23 per ton — why so cheap? Yellen said it was because of the flexibility mechanisms (emission trading, banking, CDM credits, and the like) that the Clinton-Gore team negotiated in Kyoto.

So Talent asked, how much would complying with Kyoto cost absent the flexibility mechanisms, or “sweeteners,” as he called them? Yellen could not or would not say, raising the suspicion that Kyoto would be very costly if we had to meet the targets mainly via domestic policies and measures. 

Talent then asked the obvious follow up – if you don’t know how much Kyoto would cost without the sweeteners, how can you estimate what it costs with the sweeteners? Suppose the sweeteners do reduce the overall cost of compliance by some percentage. Still, if we don’t know the base case or “raw” cost of Kyoto, how can you calculate the discounted cost? Time and again Talent pressed Yellen on this, but  never got an answer. He put her on the horns of a dilemma. She could either acknowledge that Kyoto was potentially very costly or come across as incompetent or disingenuous.

In the 1999 hearing, there were only two witnesses — Yellen and Rob Reinstein, an environmental negotiator in the first Bush administration. Reinstein had estimated for each Kyoto Annex I (developed) country how many tons of emission allowances it would have to sell and how many it would need to buy. He added up the numbers and found that even with the inclusion of former Soviet bloc countries, whose economies and emission levels had collapsed, demand would exceed supply by anywhere from 1.3:1 to 12:1 (p. 33). Implication: The price of emission allowances would be higher than $14-23 per ton, potentially much higher.

Talent asked Yellen for her supply and demand estimates. She did not have the numbers but said they were ”implicit” in the administration’s model.  However, she offered no evidence that those “implicit”  numbers were based on the kind of country-by-country assessment that Mr. Reinstein performed. Talent commented:

We asked you, the Committee asked you, in a written question for estimates of the U.S. demand for emission credits by year for the period, 2008 through 2012. And we asked for the potential supply from Russia and the Ukraine. And here was your answer: “The Administration has no estimates of the demand for emission credits by year for the period, 2008 through 2012. Demand will be sensitive to a variety of factors that are quite different [sic] to forecast ten to fourteen years in advance, especially the rate of technological innovation and the diffusion and adoption of current innovations and those placed on the market over the next ten years. For the same reason, we have no estimates of the supply of emission credits.”

In short, Talent said “show me,” and Yellen gave him “frothy eloquence.”

Implications for current committee chairs

In two hearings, using simple logic and refusing to let the witness change the subject, Jim Talent, a lawyer, stumped the White House’s top economist, discrediting the Clinton-Gore Kyoto economic analysis. What lessons should today’s chairmen draw from this slice of climate policy history?

First, when conducting an oversight hearing, have a simple but carefully prepared prosecutorial plan of action. An oversight hearing is an adversarial proceeding. It is much like a trial, albeit conducted before the court of public opinion rather than a court of law. The chairman should have a clear idea what fact or facts he wants to bring to light, what headline he wants the media to report, what conclusion he wants fellow policymakers to draw. In the 1998 hearing, I believe, Talent wanted to reveal that the administration essentially pulled its Kyoto cost numbers out of thin air and could not or would not explain how it arrived at the $14-23 per ton estimate. In the 1999 hearing, I believe, Talent wanted to reveal that the administration estimated emission allowance prices without first doing the empirical (country-by-country) research needed estimate supply and demand. 

In addition to having clear objectives about what the hearing is to reveal, the chairman must be dogged in questioning the witness. He must accept only two results as satisfactory: (1) the witness finally comes clean and gives a straight answer, or (2) the witness finally exposes himself as evasive and non-responsive.

Second, limit the number of witnesses per panel to one or at  most two persons. Limiting the panel to one witness ensures that the witness is on the hot seat the whole time and gives the chairman more control over the back-and-forth, facilitating a prosecutorial mode of interrogation. Adding a second, friendly witness (Reinstein, for example, in the 1999 hearing) enables the chairman to grill the other team’s witness on the basis of competing expert testimony. 

A two-person panel can also be structured as an actual debate. Acting as referee, the chairman can ensure that the other team’s witness addresses the friendly witness’s arguments. He can repeatedly ask each witness to respond to the other’s arguments. Both formats — single witness or two witnesses – enhance the chairman’s ability to pursue a question until he gets a real answer or an obvious non-answer.

A debate format would be ideal for examining the claims of climate alarmists. For example, when University of Alabama in Huntsville Prof. John Christy challenged Columbia University Prof. James Hansen’s high-end climate sensitivity estimates at a Ways and Means Committee hearing in February 2009, Hansen declined to address Christy’s argument on the merits. Instead, Hansen advised the committee to ask the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to produce a report and then accept its verdict as “authoritative.” Very convenient considering that Hansen is an NAS member and Christy is not, and that NAS is something of an old boys network. 

Unsurprisingly, Chairman Rangel let Hansen off the hook. I’ll bet Jim Talent would not have done so. He’d  have said something like: “You can’t refute Prof. Christy by ignoring him. And I am not going to be persuaded by a report that the NAS hasn’t written. I’m from Missouri. Show me!”

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

- James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ‘saving the planet’.”

- Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

On the political front:

The IPCC’s reputation as a serious scientific institution continues to hemorrhage as a nearly endless string of errors and/or bad practices relating to the Fourth Assessment Report come to light.

As Newsweek put it recently,

Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports—including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been refuted by academic studies.

Further, Newsweek opines, the case for policy-development based on climate alarmism is also off the rails,

There are excellent reasons to limit emissions and switch to cleaner fuels—including an estimated 750,000 annual pollution deaths in China, the potential to create jobs at home instead of enriching nasty regimes sitting on oil wells, the need to provide cheap sources of power to the world’s poorest regions, and the still-probable threat that global warming is underway. At the moment, however, certainty about how fast—and how much—global warming changes the earth’s climate does not appear to be one of those reasons.

Internationally, things are not much better for the alarmists. The negotiations in Copenhagen were a complete shambles, resulting only in a non-binding, let’s-meet-again memorandum that the various participating countries “recognized” having seen.

Greenpeace activist, and Independent Commentator Joss Garman characterized the “Copenhagen Accord” thus:

This “deal” is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they will come about. There is not even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 C. Instead, leaders merely recognise the science behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it.

The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.

In the EU, the vaunted European Trading System continues to come apart at the seams. According to James Kanter at the NYT:

Carbon traders, for example, have been arrested for tax fraud; evidence has emerged of lucrative projects that may do nothing to curb climate change; and steel and cement companies have booked huge profits selling surplus permits they received for free.

And the EU is backing away from previous plans to tighten its carbon reduction targets. According to Greenwire,

For months, Europe has mulled whether to increase to 30 percent its current commitment to reduce CO2 emissions 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. E.U. leaders in Brussels, including the bloc’s climate chief, Connie Hedegaard, have seemed to favor such a commitment, while influential member states like Germany and France have expressed skepticism of such a pledge without binding support from other major industrial powers like the United States.

A study, released today by the European Commission, expresses concern that Europe’s trading system for limiting emissions will remain less effective than planned without reductions in carbon allowances over the next decade. But addressing that problem may have to take a back seat for now, Hedegaard said.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., climate alarmism has sunk so low that Senator John Kerry risks choking himself to death as he ties his tongue into knots to pretend that his climate bill, the misleadingly named “American Power Act,” is not a climate bill. Depending on the date, Senator Kerry disingenuously characterizes as a job creation bill, or a bill to end dependency on foreign oil, or as a bill to rejuvenate the moribund US nuclear energy sector…or anything but what it is, which is a bill full of direct and indirect taxes on carbon: that is, on coal, natural gas, oil, and gasoline.

Pundits give the bill little chance of passage in this Congress, and if Democrats take anything like the whuppin’ they’re expected to get in November, I wouldn’t look for a reprise of the “American Power Act” any time soon. [Personal note to Senator Kerry: Dear Senator, will you please stop perpetuating the fiction that you can create jobs by forcing up the cost of power (and making it less reliable) in the United States. All you’re going to do with your fraudulently titled climate bill is kill jobs, reduce economic growth, export more of America’s industrial base to other countries, and perpetuate the misery of this lackluster economy. Even worse, you’ll hurt the people you claim as your primary constituency – the poor – more than the wealthy, as the poor spend more of their budget on energy than those with greater wealth.]

On the regulatory front,

EPA continues to face opposition to regulation of the greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. On June 10, a resolution authored by Senator Lisa Murkowski (and co-sponsored by 38 others including 3 Democrats) will be voted on. The resolution concludes that it is:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to the endangerment finding and the cause or contribute findings for greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (published at 74 Fed. Reg. 66496 (December 15, 2009)), and such rule shall have no force or effect.

Finally, on the public opinion front,

Poll numbers continue to decline when it comes to people expressing serious concern about climate change, or willingness to pay anything to remedy it.

The New York Times points out that public belief levels are plummeting even in Jolly Old Britain, (and not-so-jolly old Germany) both of which have been, until recently, seething hotbeds of climate alarmism:

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

Our “paper of record,” also observes that

The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.

Conclusion

My colleague, Steve Hayward, thinks that future historians will peg 2008 as the year that climate alarmism jumped the shark. If so, it’s clear that in 2010, the Fonz is on the sharp declining phase of the jump, headed back down to the water. On every front, climate alarmists are losing, from international negotiations, to domestic legislation, to public opinion. Even the UK’s Royal Society is being forced to reconsider their position on climate change.

We can hope that climate alarmism will be replaced by a new era of climate realism, where the focus is on fostering resilience: building institutions, and helping other countries build institutions that would give them resilience in the face of any sort of climate change, manmade or natural, modest or major. Instead, however, my guess is this won’t happen. The alarmists are unable to give up the sense of panic they need to preserve to promote radical policies. And, to be fair, there is such polarization on the part of climate skeptics that even we climate moderates come in for some slapping around when we admit a vague possibility that humans could cause even modest harm via our influence on the climate. There is little appetite on either side for moderation or realism.

Instead, what I suspect will happen is that the entire issue of climate change will go sub rosa, and be embedded in discussions of energy, sustainability, energy security, renewable energy, protecting biodiversity, or anything that lacks the words “climate change” in the title.

The Democrats, fully confident of their new president and their grip on both houses of Congress, were certain that they could pass yet another big energy bill that would finally push hydrocarbons off their pedestal and replace them with wind turbines, solar panels, and every other type of alternative energy.

An Unstimulated Economy

But a lot has happened since Obama delivered his first State of the Union address. The global economy has continued to show lackluster growth. And perhaps most important: unemployment rates in the U.S. remain stubbornly high and are expected to stay high for at least the next two years. The massive stimulus, in short, has been expensive and unstimulating.

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that “roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments.” The same story, written by Peter S. Goodman, also contained this astonishing fact: Some 6.3 million Americans have “been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.”

Real estate foreclosures in the U.S. are soaring, with up to 3.5 million homeowners facing the threat of foreclosure this year. And of course, there’s the changing balance of power in Congress. The Democrats’ brief stint with a super majority has ended in the Senate, where a Republican, Scott Brown, now sits in the chair held by the late Ted Kennedy.

Other Problems for Climate Alarmism

Meanwhile, sloppy work has tarnished the reputation of the UN-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), perhaps irretrievably so. The most dramatic error was that 80% of Himalayan glacier area would very likely melt by 2035. But it is hardly the only one as Chip Knappenberger explained yesterday at MasterResource. And still more errors are coming to light.

Over the past two months, much of Europe and the U.S. has been hit with record-cold temperatures and record amounts of snow. (Supporters of the theory of global warming insist that the record snows are “consistent” with their theory.) And there has been Climategate. Last year, someone hacked into the computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and released a spate of embarrassing emails that were exchanged among various climate scientists. The emails set off a firestorm of criticism of the scientists and their research methods. The tone and substance of the emails revealed an agenda at work where desired “science” trumped careful, open, respectful scholarship.

Earlier this month, the global-warming alarmists took yet another hit when the BBC published an interview with Phil Jones, the embattled scientist who heads the Climate Research Unit. The BBC’s environmental reporter, Roger Harrabin, asked Jones if he agreed that “from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming.”

Jones responded by saying “Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level.”

While that statement is enormously important, another Harrabin question was just as significant. Harrabin asked Jones to comment on the claim that “the debate over climate change is over.” Jones responded:

I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the paleoclimatic) past as well.

All this has the establishment climate industry rethinking a number of things–even the United Nations’s role in framing the science and negotiating international policy. Stated the New York Times yesterday:

[The Yvo de Boer] resignation does remind us that the U.N. process is tiring, cumbersome and slow. It reinforces the notion that some parallel negotiating track will be necessary if the world is to have any hope of achieving the reductions scientists believe are necessary to avert the worst consequences of climate change.

Denier Talk Backfires

Remember how the pro-global warming theorists have repeatedly trumpeted the claims from the IPCC and others that the scientific proof of global warming was overwhelming and therefore, there was no reason for any further discussion? Given that the science was “settled”, politicians had to act immediately to curb carbon dioxide emissions, in order to avert catastrophic climate change. The fervor around the science, and the belief that the issue was settled, became so common that anyone who doubted the supposed consensus view was branded as a “denier.”

The fervor against the “deniers” was so strong that in 2006, one journalist, David Roberts of Grist, even advocated “war crimes trials for these bastards – some sort of climate Nuremberg.” (Shortly after his piece was published, Roberts retracted his statement.) The denunciations of the “deniers” continued after Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and they continue to this day.

Last month, Rolling Stone magazine published a list of “the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming.” The article, called, “The Climate Killers” lambasted a range of people — Warren Buffett, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Oklahoma US Senator James Inhofe, and columnist George Will, among them.

Yet less than six weeks after Rolling Stone published its list of “climate killers” Jones, one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, told the BBC that

a) there’s been no statistically significant warming of the earth over the past 15 years, and

b) that the science of global warming is not, in fact, settled and that, in his words, “there is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties.”

Defections from U.S. CAP

It’s not clear what effect Jones’ interview has had on U.S. businesses, but it’s interesting to note that just two days after the BBC published its Q&A with Jones, two multinational oil companies – BP and ConocoPhillips –announced that they were dropping out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (US CAP). Last week, industrial giant Caterpillar also announced that it was quitting US CAP.

About a year ago, US CAP, a coalition of major corporations and environmental groups, looked to be the odds-on favorite to set the agenda for global warming legislation in Congress. Led largely by Jim Rogers, the loquacious CEO of Duke Energy, US CAP was viewed as a new business model for big industries trying to grapple with the potential consequences of carbon legislation. On February 13, 2009, Rogers, speaking at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, declared “The signposts are clear: we’ll have legislation” on carbon emissions. Four months later, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a 1,428-page monstrosity filled with loopholes and giveaways for favored industries. Perhaps this is what Enron-ex Rogers expected and/or wanted. But could anyone, even the most amoral rent-seeker, have really wanted it? When printed out on standard paper, the 2009 bill (also known as Waxman-Markey or the cap-and-trade bill) stacks nearly 7 inches tall.

But since last June, and particularly since December, when leaders from 192 countries met in Copenhagen for what the Associated Press called “the largest and most important UN climate change conference in history,” the urgency for any type of substantive action on carbon emissions has vanished. Indeed, after two weeks of wrangling in Copenhagen, the result was laughably predictable: no legally binding agreement on any reductions in carbon emissions, only a promise to set targets and an agreement to meet again a year later in Mexico City to discuss all of the same issues one more time.

In announcing their decision to drop out of US CAP, BP and ConocoPhillips made it clear that they were concerned about how pending US climate legislation would affect their refining businesses. Conoco’s CEO, James J. Mulva, said that the pending legislation “left domestic refineries unfairly penalized versus international competition.” Caterpillar said it was dropping out so that it could focus on carbon capture and storage projects. (And more, as Ken Green at MasterResource wrote last week, have quietly bolted the cap-and-trade lobby group.)

Whatever their reasons, the exit of these companies reflects the waning enthusiasm for any type of federal carbon legislation. Senate leaders say they will attempt to pass a different energy bill from that passed by the House last year, one that will tax refineries and put emission limits on heavy industry.

That might happen. But that kind of tax scheme is going to meet huge resistance from industry. And the departure of BP and ConocoPhillips from US CAP appears to indicate that the refining industry – which has been hammered by the recession and slack motor fuel demand – has decided to actively fight such legislation.

The “Inevitable” Was Not and Is Not

In summary, given the ragged state of the economy, persistently high unemployment – indeed, the highest number of unemployed people in modern U.S. history – along with huge numbers of foreclosures, the suddenly much-weaker scientific case for cutting carbon dioxide emissions, and the changing balance of power in Washington, don’t count on any significant carbon emissions legislation out of Congress anytime soon. Democrats and Republicans alike are sensing political peril in any effort that will impose higher energy prices on taxpayers during tough economic times.

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Robert Bryce’s fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, will be published in April by PublicAffairs. An earlier version of this article was published at the Energy Tribune, where Bryce serves as managing editor.