Category — Climate debate issues

[Editor note: Mr. Lewis's musical parody, "How I Was Not Al Gored Into Submission," released three weeks ago, has exceeded 20,000 views on YouTube.]

“Polluter-funded” is the global warming movement’s favorite pejorative to discredit anyone who questions the reality of a climate crisis or opposes their policy nostrums. Google the term and you’ll find about 18,300 sites where it appears.

“Polluter-crafted” brings up about 7,500 sites. The warming lobby uses this buzzword to trash legislation they oppose, most recently Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution of disapproval, pursuant to the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to stop EPA from dealing itself into a position to make climate policy – a power Congress never approved when it enacted the Clean Air Act.

Who are these “polluters” who craft and fund? Any big company that emits carbon dioxide (CO2) because it supplies, refines, or combusts carbon-based (fossil) fuels.

CO2 ‘Pollution’: A Rhetorical Trick

This is all a rhetorical trick. Yes, CO2 is a “greenhouse” (heat-absorbing) gas. However, water vapor (H2O) is also a greenhouse gas, yet nobody calls it “air pollution.” Since 1975, EPA has required automakers to install catalytic converters to clean up automobile exhaust. The core function of these devices is to turn other substances into the aforementioned greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2. It would be nutty to say that catalytic converters pollute the air.

Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless trace gas that is non-toxic to humans and animals at more than 30 times ambient levels. An essential plant nutrient, CO2 is the basic building block of the planetary food chain. Plants raised in CO2-enriched environments grow larger and faster, use water more efficiently, and are more resilient to environmental stresses such as drought and air pollution. Since animals directly or indirectly depend on plants for food, CO2 emissions nourish the entire planetary biosphere. Name another “pollutant” that does that!

But okay, for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that CO2 emissions are “air pollution.”  Some of the nation’s biggest CO2-emitters support the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Waxman-Markey supporter American Electric Power (AEP) is the nation’s top CO2-emitter, according to Benchmarking US Air Emissions (2006), a joint report by Ceres, NRDC, and PSEG. Duke Energy, which merged with Cinergy, is the nation’s third-largest CO2-emitter. CEO Jim Rogers crowed about Duke’s role in crafting Waxman-Markey shortly after the House passed it last June.

U.S. CAP–’Polluters’ Too

Waxman-Markey arguably takes the cake in the industry-scripted bill category. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership (U.S. CAP), a coalition including some of the world’s biggest corporations, outlined the bill’s main provisions months before it was introduced in A Blueprint for Legislative Action: Consensus Recommendations for U.S. Climate Legislation (January 2009).

So is Waxman-Markey a “polluter-crafted” bill? And are recipients of campaign contributions from AEP, Duke, and other U.S. CAP member companies “polluter-funded” politicians? Yes, if you apply green “logic” without fear or favor. [Read more →]

What a difference 12 months makes. Almost exactly one year ago, the popular, newly minted president, Barack Obama, was telling Congress that he wanted “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.”

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. [Read more →]

On Wednesday evening January 27th a discussion of the latest developments in climate change science will be held on the campus of Rice University (directions below for those nearby). This discussion/debate is cosponsored by the Shell Center for Sustainability and the Center for the Study of Environment and Society at Rice. Here is the flyer:

Defending the IPCC consensus regarding natural-versus-anthropogenic climate change is Gerald R. North, Distinguished Professor of the Physical Section, Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University.

Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts of Technology, will challenge the IPCC consensus, arguing that real-world climate sensitivity lies below the iconic range of 2c–4.5C. Questions about ‘Climategate’ and the newly emerged  ‘Himalayangate’ (the latter exposed by Dr. North’s Texas A&M colleague, John Nielsen-Gammon) are expected to be covered in the question/answer period after the scientists’ formal 30-minute presentations.

[DIRECTIONS McMurtry Auditorium is located in Duncan Hall. Visitor parking is available to anyone with a credit card.  Visitor Parking “L” and Founder’s Court Visitor are the closest to Duncan Hall, in particular using the Rice main entrance on South Main Street at Sunset Blvd. Another parking lot is the North Lot, 5-8 min walk to Duncan Hall, on Rice blvd using entrance # 21 or 20.

Rice campus map: http://www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html]

Having this climate debate is very good news. The last climate science debate at Rice University was in the summer of 2000 at the James A. Baker Institute. Therein lies a story…. [Read more →]

Editor Note: In our ‘best of MasterResource’ weekend series, we are pleased to reprint the September 30th post by Ken Green in light of the stalemate of U.S. climate legislation for 2009. Obviously, the onset of Climategate will only reinforce a worst-case scenario for climate alarmism politics.

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

James Hansen, for instance, said three years ago in the New York Review of Books: “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.” That was also Al Gore’s estimate in “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the time has been ticking away, and it’s increasingly obvious that the Gore/Hansen “wrenching transformation” of the U.S. energy system is simply not going to happen.

Perhaps Copenhagen will make it official.

U.S. cap-and-trade has become a big political liability, in particular, as polls show voters are relatively unconcerned about climate change, and are deeply averse to higher energy prices. That has led Senator John Kerry, for example, to try to hide the ball by changing the name of scheme to “pollution reduction” in order to obscure the reality that it’s basically a massive energy tax. Other Left-leaning politicians (the latest being Houston Mayor Bill White, who is running for the U.S. Senate) are announcing their opposition to cap-and-trade. (1)

Renewable energy is also getting more scrutiny than ever before, awakening not only cost-conscious middle America but grass-roots environmentalists concerned about negative local impacts and big-business intrusion.

Anti-Alarmist Momentum

Here is the death spiral that I believe the the Climate Crisis Industry fears (and is probably right to fear) consciously or subconsciously:

1. U.S. rejects cap-and-trade in 2009, leaving a climate bill in serious trouble for election-year 2010 and beyond.

2. Copenhagen flounders without any U.S. commitment and from developing country opposition, among other things. The failed Kyoto Protocol creeps toward its 2012 expiration date with an all pain, no gain tag.

3. EPA action is delayed by court action and public/political opposition, negating implementation for years and effective implementation for longer. Congressional action to de-authorize EPA becomes more and more likely as businesses, and electric utilities in particular, demand certainty to meet growing U.S. electricity demand coming out of a recession. [Read more →]

My ‘Left’ friends are mad at me now that the climate debate/ discussion has shifted, at least temporarily, from Save the World to Why Did We Fail? Here is what a former Enron executive (his name will remain confidential) emailed me a few days ago:

Rob- shame on you. The [Breakthrough Institute] article [Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change] names only 3 reasons why the U.S. will not address climate mitigation: far off threat, greed, and telling them what they don’t want to hear. It ignores the real reason: the constant effort from people like yourself to undermine the case for action with its ancillary affect of dividing the country and paralyzing the system.

Then the sarcasm comes in:

I am not being facetious: you should pat yourself on that back for helping create an atmosphere that will prevent any meaningful action on the false threat of climate change from happening in this country. It is a proud moment and credit to your hard work. I tip my hat.

Now, there are a lot of people who would love to take credit for helping to derail any piece of all pain-no gain legislation. But Waxman-Markey probably would not pass the House today if a re-vote were taken, and even some Democratic Senators know that being Democrat includes not needlessly increasing energy prices for their constituents.

Still, I took some offense at this email and wrote back in all seriousness:

I am surprised …. I thought you were having second doubts about the increasingly false alarm of high-sensitivity warming. And to me the lessons of Enron include the fake green stuff we were doing–and the fake stuff that [our old colleague Jim] Rogers [of Duke Energy] is doing at the expense of his customers and broader society.

[Texas A&M Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Oceanography] Jerry North told me just last week that he is more convinced than ever that the warming is at the very bottom of the IPCC range, which some top climate economists say makes CO2 a positive externality, not a negative one. We have peer-reviewed articles on how feedback effects are not the big amplifiers that the models (must) assume. [Read more →]

“The [Houston Chronicle's] editorial positions have moved in a decidedly liberal and environmentalist direction since its parent, the Hearst Corporation, installed new management in 2002.”

- Bill Dawson, Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, December 3, 2007.

“One factor [in the industry retrenchment] could be the fate of climate change legislation in Congress, which could add costs to oil and gas producers, refiners, chemical makers and other parts of the energy sector, forcing them to cut jobs. Susan Combs, Texas comptroller of public accounts said: “I think there’s a big bull’s-eye painted on Houston.”

- Brett Clanton, “Big Oil’s Lean Look Fuels Area Jobs Fear,” Houston Chronicle, November 8, 2009.

Cap-and-trade, even in a watered down beginning, isn’t good for Houston. But the Houston Chronicle has been at the forefront of advocating for such open-ended regulation–even rejecting a sober cost-benefit analysis of the issue. And even not having second thoughts about alarmist science that its own science writer Eric Berger (see below) has grown to have.

Why such a crusade at the nation’s 7th leading paper?

Looking for an answer, I stumbled upon a piece on the web by former Houston Chronicle environmental writer Bill Dawson.  Dawson now teaches at Rice University on media issues and the environment.

His post fills in some gaps about why Houston’s paper (the Houston Post folded and merged into the Chronicle in 1995) became such an organ for climate alarmism–even tramping to the Left of the New York Times at times. It also explains the large circulation declines, given that the Houston audience is more free market, conservative, libertarian, and non-alarmist than the Chronicle’s editorial writers and reporters. And the Houston energy industry, as Brett Clanton reported in a front page article in Sunday’s Chronicle, will be a big loser under cap-and-trade. 

The latest circulation news for the Houston Chronicle is rather grim–a year-to-year decline of 13%. One comment on the circulation report said much about the alienated audience:

If you would give any indication you were fair, we would start buying your paper again. I know this isn’t going to happen but I wish it would because I truly believe you folks in the media are the common man’s eye’s and ears, our checks and balances.

As of late, your profession has failed terribly.

Bill Dawson Documents the Bias

Mr. Dawson’s blog brings some very interesting things to light. [Read more →]

Two years ago, in Scenes from the Climate Inquisition, my colleague Steve Hayward and I observed that climate alarmists were growing ever more incendiary in their criticism of people who disagree with them. And these disagreements were not simply about the science, but about the favored policy choices of leftist environmentalists, many of whom had no training in public policy or economics.  As we wrote:

Anyone who does not sign up 100 percent behind the catastrophic scenario is deemed a “climate change denier.” Distinguished climatologist Ellen Goodman spelled out the implication in her widely syndicated newspaper column last week: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” One environmental writer suggested last fall that there should someday be Nuremberg Trials–or at the very least a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission–for climate skeptics who have blocked the planet’s salvation.

Former Vice President Al Gore has proposed that the media stop covering climate skeptics, and Britain’s environment minister said that, just as the media should give no platform to terrorists, so they should exclude climate change skeptics from the airwaves and the news pages. Heidi Cullen, star of the Weather Channel, made headlines with a recent call for weather-broadcasters with impure climate opinions to be “decertified” by the American Meteorological Society. Just this week politicians in Oregon and Delaware stepped up calls for the dismissal of their state’s official climatologists, George Taylor and David Legates, solely on the grounds of their public dissent from climate orthodoxy. And as we were completing this article, a letter arrived from senators Bernard Sanders, Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry expressing “very serious concerns” about our alleged “attempt to undermine science.” Show-trial hearing to follow? Stay tuned.

Desperation is the chief cause for this campaign of intimidation. The Kyoto accords are failing to curtail greenhouse gas emissions in a serious way, and although it is convenient to blame Bush, anyone who follows the Kyoto evasions of the Europeans knows better. The Chinese will soon eclipse the United States as world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, depriving the gas-rationers of one of their favorite sticks for beating up Americans.”

At the time, we naively hoped that there would be a moderation of such language, as some saner voices were beginning to push back against the whole slander-denier complex.

Alas, the venom-spitting of the the climatistas is increasing in direct proportion to the probability of failure in enacting their world-girdling eco-theocracy. And the leader of the pack, Joseph Romm of Climate Progress (Center for American Progress), turns out to be one of the least civil human beings to tread the planet. [Read more →]

One of the ugliest battles in the blogosphere climate wars has involved the newly released Superfreakonomics, sequel to the best-selling Freakonomics. In the new book’s final chapter (available here in pdf), economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner set out to challenge the view that massively restricting carbon emissions is the only hope for averting planetwide catastrophe.

In this post I will link to some of the major commentary on the book so far, and then focus on U.C. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong’s specific claims that Levitt and Dubner’s arguments in support of geoengineering are somehow “bad economics.” As we’ll see, Levitt and Dubner might be wrong, but if so they are wrong because of the numbers. DeLong is painting their views as self-evidently absurd, but that’s only because he himself is overlooking a basic economic point.

The Background

Not surprisingly, the climate scientists and economists who are most vocal about the need for drastic emissions cutbacks were furious when the book’s contents began circulating. Joe Romm got the ball rolling with this fiery post; his ally in such matters, Paul Krugman, soon followed suit. Dubner defended himself and co-author Levitt against Romm’s accusations of intentional distortion in this post, and one of the primary sources for the chapter, physicist (and all-around guru) Nathan Myhrvold, defended himself from Romm’s accusations of ignorance here.

In the present post, [Read more →]

Paul Krugman has been on the warpath lately regarding climate change economics. He has devoted his last two NYT columns (here and here) to the subject, as well as back-to-back blog posts (here and here). True to form, Krugman accuses those who disagree with him of abject stupidity and evil intent; for Krugman it is impossible that any decent economist who cares about human beings could actually think the costs of cap-and-trade legislation will be high. But as we’ll see, Krugman’s own figures don’t jibe with the narrative he’s pushing.

In his September 27 blog post, Krugman takes up his familiar theme of denouncing those who dare to say that Waxman-Markey carries a large price tag. After using a diagram to explain the textbook distinction between the compliance costs of a new tax (or mandate), versus the “deadweight loss,” Krugman excoriates economist Martin Feldstein for allegedly spreading lies:

[Feldstein] took the CBO’s estimate of “compliance costs”, which was $1600 per household in an early report (it’s now down to $900, but who’s counting?), and implied that this was the economic cost of the legislation. But “compliance costs” are basically the sum of the blue rectangle and the red triangle; the true economic costs are just the triangle, and are much smaller.

OK now, this is quite simply hilarious, if you can follow me through the argument. I really don’t think Krugman realizes just how much his pants are down on this one.

First off, Krugman is correct that there really is a distinction between the impact of a new tax in terms of paying extra revenues, versus the overall loss to the economy because of distorted incentives. But when the public wants to know “how much will cap-and-trade cost?”, it is quite reasonable for them to wonder, “How much will my electricity bill, or gasoline prices, go up because of this?” Most people do not realize that Krugman & Co. are netting out the gains to the recipients of free allowances and government expenditures when computing the “net burden on U.S. households.”

For an analogy, consider the debate over health care reform. [Read more →]

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

James Hansen, for instance, said three years ago in the New York Review of Books: “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.” That was also Al Gore’s estimate in “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the time has been ticking away, and it’s increasingly obvious that the Gore/Hansen “wrenching transformation” of the U.S. energy system is simply not going to happen.

Perhaps Copenhagen will make it official.

U.S. cap-and-trade has become a big political liability, in particular, as polls show voters are relatively unconcerned about climate change, and are deeply averse to higher energy prices. That has led Senator John Kerry, for example, to try to hide the ball by changing the name of scheme to “pollution reduction” in order to obscure the reality that it’s basically a massive energy tax. Other Left-leaning politicians (the latest being Houston Mayor Bill White, who is running for the U.S. Senate) are announcing their opposition to cap-and-trade. (1)

Renewable energy is also getting more scrutiny than ever before, awakening not only cost-conscious middle America but grass-roots environmentalists concerned about negative local impacts and big-business intrusion. [Read more →]