For northern Ohio, the price was a surreal $357 per megawatt – because northern Ohio has been heavily reliant on coal plants that will all be shut down by 2015.

These increases can only be passed on to the consumer – or taxpayer.  Again, this is what bidders actually committed to pay for power generating capacity.  As Doug Ross reminds us, this isn’t information from a model; it’s a real-world, market-driven data point.  It’s going to cost that much to generate power without the coal plants.  If you want electric power, you’re going to have to pay the rate that makes it possible to generate power at that cost.

And, of course, almost no one can afford to do that.  Suppose the eight-fold increase in the auction price produced a commensurate eight-fold increase in the unit price of a kilowatt-hour for the consumer.  (It may not, but it will produce a significant increase, probably on the order of 500-700%.)

Imagine the average $120 or so monthly electric bill of Northeasterners exploding to $960 a month.  The 500-700% increase would produce average bills running from $600-720 a month.

Even just doubling the amount of people’s electric bills would entail a huge economic shock.  The eight-fold-increase numbers are hard to get our minds around, but supposing that the increase no more than doubled or tripled the amount of the average electric bill – with the residue being absorbed by taxpayer-debt-funded government programs – it would still have a very disruptive effect on social cohesion.  Only a small percentage of Americans would riot in the streets, but millions of Americans would begin fleeing the areas where they could no longer afford to live.

Those who already live in rural parts of northern Ohio would no doubt turn exclusively to diesel generators, propane heaters, and wood fires.  (Which we can expect would then be outlawed.)  They and their rural confreres in the neighboring states would be joined by more and more refugees from the cities.  Suburbanites would go off-grid to the extent they could, but would remain captive to urban regulation.  Many in the Northeast and Midwest would make the long delayed decision to move elsewhere – south and west – even if that meant losing the investment in their homes.  Still others would begin considering the move for the first time.

What Americans will not do is blithely revert to living in 19th-century conditions in the cities.  More than household electric bills will skyrocket:  the cost of everything in life that relies on electricity – in other words, everything – will skyrocket as well.  Retailers, no matter what they sell, will have to charge much, much more for their products, not only because making them costs the producers more, but because keeping the lights on or the machines operating in the retail facility will cost so much more.

This electricity increase will force thousands of businesses to shut down.  Even many big businesses can’t handle this cost increase.  It will kill more jobs than anything has to date, making the Great Depression look like a roaring recovery.  It will make things we take for granted, like fresh produce, impossible to obtain unless you live right next to a farm (and live outside of the Northeast, where commercial farming will die out entirely) – but it will also distort and suppress all kinds of sophisticated and packaged production, including those related to the most basic necessities.  The price of gasoline may remain comparatively stable, but if there are far fewer retailers to ship products to, many truckers will still go out of business.

Doug Ross cites the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) predicting that the massive shutdown of coal plants will compromise the reliability of the power grid in the Northeast.  But we must also consider the likelihood that power companies will lose so many customers, and lose so much revenue, that they will go under.  “Saving” them with big bailouts would only make the areas they serve more beholden to their “patrons” in the federal government.

These are mostly first-order effects.  As distortions mushroomed in the Northeast, we can assume that the federal government would not stand idle.  If its priority remained limiting the people’s access to electric power, it would do whatever was necessary to ensure that there would be no benefit from fleeing to the other parts of the country.

The bottom line on this prospective skyrocketing is that it cannot happen without tremendous social disruption.  That doesn’t mean the American people will turn violent or undisciplined – a small minority would, and they are already displaying their character as we speak – but it does mean that we cannot continue life as we know it, with almost everyone in the northeastern part of the country artificially priced out of the convenience of central-grid electric power.

Keep in mind, this is entirely artificial.  This is government policy, made independently of any sort of outside crisis.  Nothing imposes this on us except the Obama administration’s acceleration of hallucinatory ideological extremism.

Ross notes that after NERC published its estimates on the reliability problems of the future power grid, it was promptly investigated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

Gee, we’d have never guessed.

Lovelock goes into some further detail:

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

So in essence, what Lovelock is saying is a) he was wrong about his predictions and b) in actuality they really don’t know what is happening although they have this theory which isn’t panning out the way they thought it would.

Great.

So much for the value of consensus huh?

To his credit, at least, Lovelock admits to the mistake.

Would that the rest of the alarmists had that sort of integrity. Instead, many choose to double down and make themselves even less credible.

Oh, and Lovelock makes an important point:

Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”

Yeah, neither am I. I’m a skeptic. Climate changes. It has throughout the history of the planet. And we’ve had periods of higher CO2 and higher temperatures in our history, neither of which could be linked to man. Additionally:

He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role.

“It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said.

I am skeptical of his first statement and much more likely to find credence in the second, i.e. it is the oceans of this world that drive climate change, not man. Additionally, it seems to me that, at least to this point, the skeptic’s theory of low sensitivity of the climate to CO2 seems to be more valid than the alarmists theory of high sensitivity. Had the alarmists been right, as Lovelock points out, we should be frying right now.

Most importantly is his admission that “twelve years is a reasonable time”. It has provided enough time for a trend to develop that debunks the alarmist’s predictions.

Finally Lovelock admits that which has been painfully evident to most skeptics, given the trend of those 12 years – “we don’t know what the climate is doing.”

That is correct. And until we do we need to quit trying to make economy killing policy based on what the evidence is currently telling us is a faulty theory.

Or said another way, we need to use actual science to drive policy, not pseudo-science that supports a political agenda.

I should be able to get consensus on that, no?

~McQ

Twitter: @McQandO

Listed under the story are a number of documents which Desmog Blog claims to be from an email package sent to contributing members of the Heartland Institute.

I sent the link to Jim Lakely, an old friend and communications director at Heartland. I’ve known Jim for years and wondered if he’d seen the story at the link.

He wrote back quickly saying “yes” he’d seen it and it appears that one of the documents is a fake.

That’s about the time I decided to sit back and watch while taking the time to read the documents for myself. For most of them, nothing was particularly surprising and certainly there was certainly nothing particularly damning. If you’re familiar with the Institute, everything mentioned in the documents was pretty well known except perhaps some of the donor information Desmog chose to expose. Obviously it was more important to release the information quickly (apparently they released it within hours of getting it) than to worry about privacy concerns. These are the “bad guys” for heaven sake. They don’t deserve the same rights or respect Desmog would most likely demand for themselves. After all, they take money from the Koch brothers.

But to the fake document. You can see it here.

What was missing from this collection of documents was something really damning. Something Desmog and their ilk could point too and condemn the Heartland Institute.

Well, conveniently, there was this “confidential memo” which fit the bill perfectly. It made statements like this:

Development of our “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms” project [emphasis original].
Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. [emphasis mine]

After reading that, you’re supposed to believe that the dastardly Heartland Institute is against teaching science and, of course the further implication is that AGW is “science” while the skeptical side is anti-science. Of course that belies the fact that the Heartland sponsored climate conference this year, open to everyone, was billed as “returning the scientific method” to climate science, not abandoning it.

And can you imagine pitching “dissuading teachers from teaching science” to donors who have previously sponsored your effort to get the complete science out there?

Warren Meyer comments at Forbes:

For those of us at least somewhat inside the tent of the skeptic community, particularly the science-based ones Heartland has supported in the past, the goal of “dissuading teachers from teaching science” is a total disconnect. I have never had any skeptic in even the most private of conversations even hint at such a goal. The skeptic view is that science education vis a vis climate and other environmental matters tends to be shallow, or one-sided, or politicized — in other words broken in some way and needing repair. In this way, most every prominent skeptic that works even a bit in the science/data end of things believes him or herself to be supporting, helping, and fixing science. In fact, many skeptics believe that the continued positive reception of catastrophic global warming theory is a function of the general scientific illiteracy of Americans and points to a need for more and better science education.

Is the Heartland Institute developing such a curriculum? Yes. Is it designed to point out that the topic is “controversial and uncertain” and therefor be used to dissuade teachers from teaching “science”. Hardly … what’s the point in developing the curriculum then?

In fact the curriculum is designed to present those parts of the science of climate change that don’t fit or contradict the faith based nonsense being taught and pushed by the alarmist side. You know, the “inconvenient truths”. Controversy and uncertainty have and always will be a part of science, but certainly nothing which would stop it from being taught. This Rather-gateish attempt is the left trying to discredit an institution which has mounted a threat and is actually taking action against its alarmist creed.

Why do I compare it to Rather-gate? Two reasons. One, the fake doc. Heartland acknowledged the authenticity of all the documents but one. That document, it unequivocally stated, was a fake:

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact. [emphasis original]

Check out Anthony Watt’s analysis here. You’ll see some Rather-gate like problems with the document. Then read Megan McArdle’s (who, btw, is not a skeptic) total destruction of the memo.

Finally, again to compare it to Rather-gate, at least one journalist has decided to cool it for the moment, given the document that is the most damning is said to be fake. Heartland is pleased with that, however Warren Meyer made a little bet at the end of his Forbes piece:

If the strategy memo turns out to be fake as I believe it to be, I am starting the countdown now for the Dan-Rather-esque “fake but accurate” defense of the memo — ie, “Well, sure, the actual document was faked but we all know it represents what these deniers are really thinking.” This has become a mainstay of post-modern debate, where facts matter less than having the politically correct position.

Andrew Revkin, the journalist in question, has indeed backed off for the moment, but:

Is Revkin himself seeking to win my fake-but-accurate race? When presented with the fact that he may have published a fake memo, Revkin wrote:

looking back, it could well be something that was created as a way to assemble the core points in the batch of related docs.

It sounds like he is saying that while the memo is faked, it may have been someones attempt to summarize real Heartland documents. Fake but accurate! By the way, I don’t think he has any basis for this supposition, as no other documents have come to light with stuff like “we need to stop teachers from teaching science.”

Expect to see the argument that the document does indeed expose “the core points” when, in fact, it does nothing of the sort, but instead implies things not in evidence in order to discredit the Heartland Institute and characterize it as an activist organization instead of a think tank. What this attack essentially says to me is that Heartland has finally achieved the level of “threat” to the AGW crowd.

Some things never change.

Well, except the climate.

~McQ

Twitter: @McQandO

First, let me be clear, the debate among scientists isn’t whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or whether, even, it can cause warming, but instead on what real (if any) total effect it has overall on the climate. In other words, is there a saturation point where additional CO2 has little marginal effect, or does it build to a tipping point where the change is radical? Robust climate or delicate climate?

Evidence is building toward the robust climate theory, which would mean that while there may be more CO2 being emitted, it has little to no effect on the overall climate. That, of course, is contrary to the AGW crowd’s theory.

So, on to the latest high profile defections:

One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”

Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Persuaded by Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.

Vahrenholt concluded, through his research, that the science of the IPCC (if you can call it that) was mostly political and had been “hyped.”

Germany’s flagship weekly news magazine Der Spiegel today also featured a 4-page exclusive interview with Vahrenholt, where he repeated that the IPCC has ignored a large part of climate science and that IPCC scientists exaggerated the impact of CO2 on climate. Vahrenholt said that by extending the known natural cycles of the past into the future, and taking CO2′s real impact into effect, we should expect a few tenths of a degree of cooling.

That, as I said, points to the “robust” climate model.

Once more to make the point before I leave the subject:

Skeptic readers should not think that the book will fortify their existing skepticism of CO2 causing warming. The authors agree it does. but have major qualms about the assumed positive CO2-related feed-backs and believe the sun plays a far greater role in the whole scheme of things.

As Dr. Roy Spencer says, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Adding CO2 should cause warming. The argument is “how much” and that’s based on competing theories about the climate’s sensitivity. Skeptics think the sensitivity is very low while alarmists think it is very high. The building evidence is that rising CO2 has little warming effect in real terms regardless of the amount of the gas emitted. That there is a “saturation level”. If that’s true, and indications are it is, then there’s a) no justification for limiting emissions and b) certainly no justification to tax them.

That, of course, is where politics enter the picture. Governments like the idea of literally creating a tax out of thin air, especially given the current financial condition of most states. Consequently, governments are more likely to fund science that supports their desired conclusion – and it seems that in this case there were plenty who were willing to comply (especially, as Patrick J. Michael has noted, when that gravy train amounts to $103 billion in grants).

What Vahrenholt is objecting too is the IPCC’s key definition in which it clearly states that “climate change” is a result of and because of “human contributions”. As noted above, he thinks that the sun is a much greater factor (something mostly ignored in the models) and he finds past CO2 trends to forecast nothing like the IPCC’s forecast.

What we’re finding as this argument goes forward is that Patrick Michaels was right – “AGW theory functions best in a data free environment”.

~McQ

Twitter: @McQandO

You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy.  Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.

The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of course.  The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package.

Solazyme’s partner in the biofuel sale is Dynamic Fuels, a Louisiana company owned jointly by Tyson Foods and Tulsa-based Syntroleum.  Tyson and Syntroleum are distinguished by having profitable lines of business that do not rely on government grants to unprofitable “green” projects.  This does not make their biofuel product price-competitive with fossil fuels, however.  (They were induced to develop biofuel manufacturing processes by a combination of subsidies and tax breaks.)

The Dynamic Fuels plant was opened for business in Geismar, LA in 2010, becoming by far the largest biofuels plant in North America – and reportedly, in combination with a plant in Finland, a producer of 94% of the world’s biofuels.  This is great boosterism stuff, but the biofuels produced by Dynamic Fuels are still considerably more expensive than the fossil-fuel alternative.  Dynamic Fuels has begun supplying aviation biofuel to KLM, the Dutch flag carrier, but of course, the use of more-expensive biofuels by commercial carriers has to be subsidized by governments.

If governments stopped subsidizing biofuels, their artificial “profitability” would disappear overnight.  Price-wise, they can’t compete with fossil fuels.  The day may come when they can, but subsidizing them while they don’t is not a method with any record of success for encouraging price efficiency.  What it does instead is create languishing public dependencies and tremendous opportunities for cronyism, as demonstrated in the Solyndra scandal.

As the Institute for Energy Research article (top link) indicates, the US has enormous reserves of both conventional and unconventional oil and natural gas resources.  Opening them up for exploitation would, among other things, ensure that the US armed forces could buy cheaper fuel – cheaper than today’s prices – produced in the USA.  At a time when federal debt is spiraling and the Defense Department is facing budget cuts that are guaranteed to gut the fighting forces and render them ineffective, it seems to border on insane to eschew a ready, significantly cheaper alternative and require the armed services to quadruple what they pay for fuel as a proof of concept – apparently with the idea that the forces should buy more of the 4-times-as-expensive fuel.  This is, after all, our national security we’re talking about.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

First, without a viable alternative for fossil fuel to this point, the intent of the administration is to increase prices on those fuels that will ensure they’re “priced the way they ought to be”. Stern:

You need to use less energy through efficiency and to develop renewable energy sources more and more to the point that they get to what’s called grid parity, so that standing on their own they actually become sources of energy that can compete with sources like coal and so forth, fossil fuels.

And it is a very good thing to have those fossil fuel sources priced the way they ought to be, to have a price on carbon. That’s what we were trying to do with our legislation, it didn’t pass, but that kind of legislation obviously is in place in Europe, and hopefully it will come into place more and more.’

Now remember, this is from the administration that has claimed the mantle of champion of the middle class. Yet its plan is to price much of the middle class into energy poverty if it can ever get its legislation passed. And for those that will try to argue that it’s a plan for the future when there are, arguendo, viable alternatives, that’s nonsense. “It didn’t pass” tells you all you need to know about that claim.

Secondly, this administration has bought into the 100 billion (a year) dollar fund that the “rich countries” are supposed to fund to help the “poor countries” (like China and India). Stern:

We will also be working hard to ramp up the funding that is supposed to reach a 100 billion dollars a year by 2020. There’s a ton of work to be done in the years. We have been doing a lot of work on this, this year, and we will be continuing to do that as are many other countries. And all at the same time, if we get the kind of roadmap that countries have called for — the EU has called for, that the U.S. supports — for preparing for and negotiating a future regime, whether it ends up being legally binding or not, we don’t know yet, but we are strongly committed to a promptly starting process to move forward on that.

Tell your grandkids to start saving up, because the Obama administration is getting ready to shackle them and their future earnings to a global redistribution scheme based in fraudulent science (regardless of what Sen. Barbara “Ma’am” Boxer claims).

As with health care reform, there is no popular support in the US for this sort of nonsense, yet your enlightened rulers certainly believe they know better – just ask them. And they intend to push their ideological agenda instead of doing the will of the people. As for you little people, just suck it up and learn to appreciate (and pay for) their enlightened rule, OK?

A Soviet prospecting mission began here in the fifties. In 1971, a drilling operation exposed an underground cavity that discharged enormous quantities of gas. Thinking the supply of gas would last but a few weeks, Soviet engineers decided to torch the hole. And it’s been burning ever since. The intense heat coming from the crater allows visitors to approach Hell’s Door only for a few minutes at a time because of the unbearable temperature.

At night, the hole looks like Dante’s Inferno: the fire burns in all its magnificence, giving the well the look of a volcanic burning crater.

But you and I have to give up our incandescent light-bulbs.

For the children. Oh, and the global warming scam, too. But mostly the children. And Ewoks.

For instance:

A new round of United Nations climate talks is getting under way in Durban, South Africa, Monday. And domestic struggles here in the United States are hampering the global talks.

The United States is second only to China in emitting gases that cause global warming. Despite a presidential pledge to reduce emissions two years ago, we’re spewing more carbon dioxide than ever into the atmosphere.

That’s putting a crimp on the 20-year-long struggle to develop a meaningful climate treaty.

Really? That’s what’s putting a crimp on it? Or is the unquestioned acceptance of the premise “emitting gases” causes “global warming” perhaps the problem when it appears the “science” is falling apart?

What is interesting to me is to watch those who unquestionably accept this premise ignore the profound problems the “science” that supports this nonsense has shown.

Christopher Booker does a good job of distilling the problem, here speaking of the UK government:

To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture – each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.

On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.

Like driving up energy costs to a point that energy poverty will be a common problem. Booker has another nice body slam to the “premise” later on in his article:

While our Government remains trapped in its green dreamworld, similar horror stories pile up on every side, from that UBS report on the astronomically costly fiasco of the EU’s carbon-trading scheme, to our own Government’s “carbon floor price”, in effect a tax on CO2 emissions rising yearly from 2013. This alone will eventually be enough to double the cost of our electricity, and drive a further swathe of what remains of UK industry abroad, because we are the only country in the world to have devised something so idiotic.

All this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.

It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors, such as Michael Mann, are no ordinary scientists: they are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.

That’s entirely true if you actually read through the released emails. What you read isn’t science, it is “scientists” tailoring their “science” to fit a political agenda in order to keep the grant gravy train rolling. The deniers, in this particular horror show, are the true believers who have, on faith, accepted the “premise” and refuse to question it or examine the evidence which argues strongly against it.

To be clear, the whole debate revolves around “climate sensitivity” to CO2. Those on the side of man-made global warming claim the environment is highly sensitive to CO2. The so-called “deniers” claim it isn’t at all. And for those who’ve followed the debate, the real science seems to support the so-called “deniers”.

The climate may be less sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought – and temperature rises this century could be smaller than expected. That’s the surprise result of a new analysis of the last ice age. However, the finding comes from considering just one climate model, and unless it can be replicated using other models, researchers are dubious that it is genuine.

As more greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, more heat is trapped and temperatures go up – but by how much? The best estimates say that if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, temperatures will rise by 3 °C. This is the “climate sensitivity”.

But the 3 °C figure is only an estimate. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the climate sensitivity could be anywhere between 2 and 4.5 °C. That means the temperature rise from a given release of carbon dioxide is still uncertain.

But you wouldn’t know that by listening to the alarmists (and much of the press) who continue to claim the science is settled. And that’s in the face of this:

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S.Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

Yet:

… Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

[…]

… [S]he added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

But the true believers gathering in Durbin SA? Still reject the fact that the so-called “science” of global warming is under fierce and sustained attack and is being found to be increasingly wanting in both substance and fact.

And I don’t know about you but it seems incredible to me that, as Prof. Curry notes, scientists are “finally addressing” the influence of “clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation”.

Finally!? How in the world could “science” not have included those originally? How could they have somehow been factored out?

That’s actually an easy question to answer.

Because including them wouldn’t have given the “scientists” in question the results necessary to support the “premise” cooked up by those pushing the man-made global warming agenda. And that, of course, meant an end to the grant money of multi billions of dollars.

Meanwhile in Durbin this week, the real deniers are going to be busily trying to trade away your ability to purchase cheap and plentiful energy through various schemes which will advance their agenda and put the rest of humanity in an unrecoverable energy deficit.

Delegates at the conference will also be hammering out the details of a plan to administer the Green Climate Fund, money that is to help poor countries deal with climate change.

The fund is expected to grow over the next eight years to eventually distribute about $100 billion a year. However, it is still unclear where all of that money will come from and how it will be distributed.

In addition to the usual international development funds from the West, proposals include a carbon surcharge on international shipping and on air tickets, as well as a levy on international financial transactions.

This is what junk science tied to a political agenda brings. And, as usual, you’ll be levied to pay the bill they agree on with your money and your way of life.

It seems esteemed NASA astronomer turned climatologist turned paid activist Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has not been reporting some income that he is required by law to do. How long will NASA continue to look the other way? Chris Horner explains.

A Summary of James E. Hansen’s NASA Ethics File

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

…Hansen [also] failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties … to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.

Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.

Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee. This is despite NASA ordering him to return at least some of the money, with the rest apparently unnoticed by NASA. This raises troubling issues about Hansen’s, and NASA’s, compliance with ethics rules, the general prohibition on not privately benefitting from public service, and even the criminal code prohibition on not having one’s public employment income supplemented. All of this lucrative activity followed Hansen ratcheting up his global warming alarmism and activism to be more political… [but] he cannot receive outside income for doing his job, he has placed himself in peril, assuming the Department of Justice can find a way to be interested in these revelations.

…Hansen suddenly became the recipient of many, often lucrative offers of outside employment and awards after he escalated his political activism — using his NASA position as a platform, and springboard. This began with a strident “60 Minutes” interview in early 2006, alleging political interference by the Bush administration in climate science…

…consider these failures to report often elegant air and hotel/resort accommodations received on his SF278 as required by law (the amount of direct cash income received from the party providing him travel, as well, is in parentheses):

• Blue Planet Prize ($500,000), travel for Hansen and his wife to Tokyo, Japan, 2010
• Dan David Prize ($500,000), travel to Paris, 2007
• Sophie Prize ($100,000), Oslo Norway, travel for Hansen and his wife, 2010
• WWF Duke of Edinburgh Award, Travel for Hansen and his wife, London, 2006
• Alpbach, Austria (alpine resort)(“business class”, with wife), 2007
• Shell Oil UK ($10,000), London, 2009
• FORO Cluster de Energia, travel for Hansen and wife (“business class”), Bilbao, Spain, 2008
• ACT Coalition, travel for Hansen and wife to London, 2007
• Progressive Forum ($10,000)(“first class”), to Houston, 2006
• Progressive Forum ($10,000), to Houston, 2009
• UCSB ($10,000), to Santa Barbara, CA
• Nierenberg Prize ($25,000), to San Diego, 2008
• Nevada Medal ($20,000), to Las Vegas, Reno, 2008
• EarthWorks Expos, to Denver, 2006
• California Academy of Science ($1,500), to San Francisco, 2009
• CalTech ($2,000), travel to Pasadena, CA for Hansen and his wife, 2007

The following is an incomplete list of other travel apparently accepted to make paid speeches and/or receive cash awards but not reported on SF278 financial disclosures:

Boston, Washington, DC (twice); Columbus, OH; Omaha, NE; Wilmington, DE; Ithaca, NY (business class); Chapel Hill, NC; Deerfield, IL (Sierra Club “No Coal” campaign); Dartmouth, NH; Alberta, Canada (as consultant to a law firm helping run an anti-oil sands campaign), Stanford; Minneapolis; Missoula, MT

…World Wildlife Fund [also] gave Hansen an engraved Montres Rolex watch, which typically run $8,000 and up (2006), but which was not reported by Hansen on his SF 278 under “gifts”, which must be reported if valued at more than $260…

These activities appear to violate the criminal code, 18 U.S.C. 209.

And Hansen’s not the only one enriching himself. Members of the United Nations Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have profited greatly from their various reports advocating man-made global warming, carbon offsets and other money-making schemes.

For a slightly different tale of demosclerosis, see the Wall Street Journal today on “Flies and their lawyers,” which are keeping the Paiute Cutthroat Trout from “going home.”  The drama unfolds in the Sierra Nevada wilderness of California, southeast of Tahoe near the Nevada border.  In brief, the Paiute cutthroat trout (not to be confused with other varieties of cutthroat trout, like the Lahontan, for which there are also restoration projects underway) has been absent for decades from the 9-mile-long lower-creek area from which it is believed to have sprung some 10,000 years ago.  State fish and game officials introduced different varieties of trout into the lower-creek area some time back, and those trout did away with the Paiute cutthroat.

Happily, however, in 1912 a guy toted some Paiute cutthroats to the upper-creek area, above the waterfall, and the Paiute cutthroat trout survives to this day.  California Fish and Game and the federal authorities want to reintroduce the Paiute cutthroat to the lower creek.  They’ve been working on it since 1990.  The process itself isn’t expected to take long – get rid of the “non-native” fish by killing them off, put the Paiute cutthroat back in – but the regulatory requirements and the lawsuits have kept the restoration waiting on the shelf for 21 years.

Lawsuits?  Who could object to restoration of the Paiute cutthroat trout in its ancestral home?  That would be the legal defenders of invertebrates, of course.  Defenders of “flies,” to put it in WSJ’s generic terms.  Well, and people who just don’t like the use of chemicals.  To eliminate the unwanted fish, the state authorities want to use rotenone, a chemical whose naturally occurring base, found in the roots of common plants, was once used by indigenous tribes to kill fish for easier harvesting.  Rotenone would be tough on the flies (although they would be back in force pretty quickly).

Now, it turns out that the EPA has already been pleased (literally, that’s their word) to note that the project managers plan to use forms of rotenone that do not contain the synergist piperonyl butoxide (PBO).  They would prefer that the project use a rotenone compound with less naphthalene wherever possible, of course, and they recommend that Tamarack Lake receive physical treatment only (that is, have the unwanted fish removed physically rather than by chemical extermination).  They note that the lake is already deemed to be fishless, but the project managers reserve the authority to treat it chemically if the need arises.  The EPA wants them to commit to physical removal as their method of prior choice.

EPA also shoehorns the following into the agency’s May 2010 comment on the Final Environmental Impact Statement regarding the restoration project:

Finally, we wish to comment on the statement in “Master Response I” regarding climate change (p. F-16, last paragraph). The response states that the evaluation of cumulative impacts of the project and climate change are not required under NEPA since NEPA only requires consideration of project impacts in combination with other past, present, and reasonably foreseeable projects, and that climate change is not a project under this definition. We strongly disagree with this interpretation. In fact, the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) cumulative effects handbook1 identifies global climate change as an example of cumulative effects (CEQ, p. 9) and identifies indirect effects, such as climate change, as important in improving the analysis of cumulative effects (CEQ, p. 7).

In case you were wondering.

We could focus on the sensation of swimming in tar that one gets from tracing one of these bureaucracy-lawsuit-regulation-fests.  But there are two other important perspectives on this, one of which is that this is what your tax dollars are doing for you.  Some questions to consider:

1.  Do you care if the Paiute cutthroat trout, which is already surviving elsewhere, is reintroduced to the 9 miles of lower creek where, over the millennia, it developed its unique markings?

2.  Do you care enough to pay for the restoration?

3.  Do you care enough to spend all the money spent by the US federal government and the states of California and Nevada to overcome years’ worth of regulatory bureaucracy and lawsuits?

4.  Do you think this is a high-priority topic for the US federal courts?

5.  Would you care even if the Paiute cutthroat trout had not survived?

6.  Since this whole issue has arisen because of fish management activities undertaken by government officials in the past, should we not think twice about continuing to bustle around relocating fish, for abstract, sometimes fanciful reasons that end up competing with each other down the road?

The other important perspective on this is that a burdensome, demosclerotic process of this kind can only be sustained by government.  Government doesn’t have to worry about a bottom line – at least not in the short run.  You’ve got government’s back.

You certainly can’t institute processes like this in the administration of your own life.  (Imagine telling your mortgage-holder that your payment is being held up by the environmental impact statement.)  Businesses can’t tolerate them.  These processes are extremely inefficient and dysfunctional: they actively prevent the objective from being reached, in favor of endless deliberations from which more and more people come to derive their livelihoods.

Virtually all of the money that has changed hands so far has gone to lawyers, advocacy “experts,” and government employees, none of whom gets anything done that generates food, shelter, commerce, production jobs, and revenue.  Every single speck of this whole tale is self-imposed overhead.  It’s as if the clerical and janitorial staff, Human Resources and the legal department and the electric power company, all combined forces to prevent the sales staff from selling anything, or the logistics staff from getting the product delivered, or the production line from rolling anything off of it, finished and ready for the customer.

A business could never run this way.  It would be bankrupt by the third day of operation.  But there’s one more perspective worth taking a look at here, and that is the modernist perspective:  that we know enough, and government agencies are smart and well-appointed enough, to cruise the landscape with perfect foresight, resettling the fish for what are basically sentimental purposes.  It’s an odd marriage of irredentism and technological self-satisfaction, as if we can now use technology and the majestic powers of government to enforce mythical beliefs.

The most important question of all – whether this project is something worth having the taxpayer-funded government do – doesn’t get a serious debate.  The important question never gets posed to the people footing the bill.  Instead, with a government now run largely through its bureaucracies, and a court system attuned to arcane environmentalism, the process is extended for years, costing more and more money, over ancillary questions like how much naphthalene ought to be present in the rotenone compound, and whether fish are sexier than flies, environmental-advocacy-wise.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

In keeping with this policy, his administration yesterday refused to hand over documents subpoenaed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee regarding the bankrupt solar firm Solyndra.

A letter from White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler explained that the request would place an “unreasonable burden on the president’s ability to meet his constitutional duties.” That makes sense, I suppose. The president—who, by the way, is a constitutional scholar—has already made it abundantly clear that he believes he has a duty to circumvent the Constitution when he deems such action to be in the national interest. Translation: He could be a much more effective leader if everyone would just get off his back and let him run the country by himself. (Translation of the translation: He don’t need no stinking Constitution.)

The letter further allowed as how the committee’s “extremely broad request for documents—now a subpoena—is a significant intrusion on Executive Branch interests,” whatever that means. Plus, the letter whined, the Obama administration had already turned over 85,000 pages of documents in the course of their investigation. How much more do they want, for cripesake?

How about the truth, counselor?

The Blaze quotes Committee Chairman Fred Upton as saying:

We have been reasonable every step of the way in this investigation, and it is a shame that the Obama administration and House Democrats continue to put up partisan roadblocks to hide the truth from taxpayers. Now, we need to know the White House’s role in the Solyndra debacle in order to learn the full truth about why taxpayers now find themselves a half billion dollars in the hole. The White House could have avoided the need for subpoena authorizations if they had simply chosen to cooperate.

Speaking of “interests,” it would appear to be in the Obama administration/campaign’s best interests to make the Solyndra mess go away sooner than later. The White House and the Obama Justice Department are from out of the woods on Fast and Furious. It would seem to behoove them make at least one scandal disappear before the electoral stakes get any higher. Unless the reason they are stonewalling is because they know they can’t make Solyndra vanish.

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If the 2012 election is about anything, it will be about how many voters have figured out that that isn’t the case.  The world has, metaphorically speaking, turned upside down – and not by accident but by agency.  The voters, and the ideologues making decisions in the US government, have two different sets of assumptions about truth and value.

A good illustration of this is the differing concepts of each party about “jobs.”  When the voters say they want jobs, they mean they want a resurgence of opportunity in the various fields in which they have worked: manufacturing, accounting, engineering, sales, construction. By “jobs,” the voters mean vocations, lines of work and expertise to build on, paths to fulfillment, accomplishment, greater responsibility: the means to a better life for themselves and their families.

Of course jobs should come with a paycheck, but what’s important about a “job,” as opposed to a welfare hand-out, is that it’s something that leverages your importance – your skills, your character – to merit that paycheck.  A person with a job has a lot of influence over how much he earns and what he can do with it.  A job is always a two-way street, in which the employee can shape his own destiny through how much he’s willing to put into it.  The market is quite marvelous about rewarding greater effort, when it comes to the goods and services customers prize.

That is not how the ideologues who now govern the United States see “jobs.”  For them, “jobs” are a systemic/economic given, to be treated most profitably as units of political influence and taxpaying value.  Jobs are a mechanical abstraction; what’s real is constituencies and dependencies.  Their view of jobs is not that America is stronger when she’s producing more of them, which she does with breathtaking power on her own.  It’s that jobs represent an opportunity to cultivate that most prized of political assets:  dependent constituencies.  If there are to be more jobs, what’s important to the Obama ideologues is that the jobs be something their government can tighten or loosen the valve on.

For many of them, this is because they see jobs in the abstract as something on which a hazy power structure already tightens or loosens the valve.  Many of them literally think a capitalist cabal – “big business,” “Wall Street” – decides to distribute jobs freely or dole them out parsimoniously.  That is not the experience of the average person who has ever held a private-sector job, but Obama’s team is not composed of such people. The fry-dropper at Burger King, who can see that her job is probably about to be cut because there’s hardly any customer traffic on her shift, knows more about the economics of employment than quite a few of Obama’s federal-agency managers.

This disconnect between each party’s understanding of truth and value is a major factor in the almost unparsable noise of the current political debate.  A week ago, on Fox News Sunday, center-left panelist Liz Marlantes declared that Rick Perry’s energy plan would fail to resonate with voters because what people care about is jobs, and Perry had said nothing about a plan for job creation.

But millions of voters understand that Perry’s energy plan is a jobs plan.  It would not only create jobs in the energy industry, it would make energy cheaper for everyone, households and businesses alike, and thus improve everything about our economic picture, including investment, business start-ups, and hiring.

What it would not do is leave job-creation in the hands of federal-government planners.

We have reached the point at which we can no longer pretend we are talking about the same things.  The Obama administration and its apologists in the media are not talking about economic improvement, opportunity, or even relief as the average voter understands them.  Another case illustrates that beautifully:  the case of the Mexican trucking industry.

I should state up front that I’m a friend of free trade in general, and not an advocate of special protections for US businesses.  The latter simply cost the American consumer more – and all attempts to prevent the market from rendering its judgments end by needing perpetual shoring up, mainly in the form of incessant public bail-outs and favoritism.

But what’s going on with the trucking industry has nothing to do with the market.  It has to do with a weird concatenation of ideological stances.  All things are no longer equal.  There is nothing in this situation that is happening because the market would demand it.  No “capitalist cabal” is making the relevant decisions.  The Obama ideologues are fully in charge.  They have produced the situation, lock, stock, and barrel.  Here it is.

NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – is a good idea and always has been.  I’m in favor of it.  I don’t think NAFTA and Interstate 35 are tools of the devil to undermine American integrity.  But it’s possible to cynically invoke NAFTA for the wrong reasons, and that’s precisely what the Obama administration has done.

The first Mexican-registered long-haul truck crossed the border into Texas, with full access to the US road network, on Friday, 21 October, under the aegis of NAFTA.  (A US law, you may remember, passed in 1994.  Yes, it took this long.)  If I had my druthers, Mexican trucks would have had full access to US highways by 2000, which is what was supposed to happen under the original provisions of NAFTA.  Canadian trucks already have such access.  Law enforcement and security precautions would have had to be somewhat different with Mexican trucks, given their origin and the crime problems from that particular US border, but it’s not the access to the US hauling market I object to.

The problem is what has led up to the triumphant ceremony on the 21st, and the comparatively disfavored position of the US trucking industry.  The first Mexican truck admitted with full access to US highways arrived 10 weeks after Obama imposed new fuel-efficiency regulations on big-rigs and other heavy transport trucks, along with new emission targets.  Officials of the trucking industry lined up shoulder to shoulder with Obama for a photo op in August, when the new regulations were issued, but a few journalists who still retain critical thinking capabilities reported that the industry officials’ complaisance was not replicated among independent owner-operators.

Large firms that retain fleets of trucks may be able to amortize the cost of buying new, compliant rigs relatively quickly, as promised by federal regulators.  (That promise in itself will, of course, depend on the future price of fuel.  Saving on higher-priced fuel may be current saving, but it doesn’t amortize a sunk cost in the manner predicted by the regulators.)

But independent truckers will be hit hard.  A number of them won’t be able to afford to buy compliant rigs, and will have to cease operation.  Others may be able to afford it, but will never realize the savings potentially available to large firms, because the life-cycle for a truck – how long it’s kept and operated – is typically shorter for independent owner-operators.  The increased cost, without off-setting savings, will eat into profits, expansion plans, and hiring.  Smaller operators handle less overall volume and have less discretion over loading as well, and loading is everything when it comes to fuel efficiency (and the need for harder-working, higher-emitting engines).  Since the purpose of trucking is to bear heavy loads over long distances, simple physics will price many independents out of the business.

But wait – there’s more.  Besides fuel-efficiency regulations, the US trucking industry has also been hit with a new set of safety regulations.  These regulations, however well-intentioned, are not only costing the industry more, they are in some ways actively defeating their own purpose.  But costing the industry more is bad enough.  Who feels the costs the most?  That would be independent owner-operators, of course.  One of the cost impositions an owner-operator is ill-positioned to overcome is the need to hire additional drivers in order to haul the same freight in the same time while complying with safety rules.

Here are a couple of examples of the level of debate producing the decisions on these regulations.  This one comes from the Jim Motavalli piece on fuel-efficiency regulations (at BNet):

In the absence of regulations, companies that led with new aerodynamics and engine technology often lost out because their prices were higher, the [American Trucking Associations] said. Regulations create a level playing field.

Well, no.  Regulations tilt the playing field on behalf of favored constituencies.  The market is a level playing field.  Regulations inherently create artificial advantages and disadvantages.

This priceless soundbite is from a Washington Times piece on the new safety regulations:

“Since fatigue is a national epidemic, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that 10 hours per day is safer than 11 hours a day,” said Edward C. Bassett Jr., an attorney with the APITLA, in a Wednesday letter to Mr. Obama.

So, the US trucking industry – already affected by California’s new emission regulations – is facing regulations that will force many smaller operators out of business, cost jobs, and make transportation costs more expensive for all commercial enterprises.  Under these conditions, new competition from Mexican truckers seems like it might not be the best idea.

But the Obama administration isn’t just admitting Mexican trucks to US highways.  As reported back in April by the Green Room’s Director Blue (Doug Ross), it’s using US taxpayer dollars to enable Mexican trucks to operate on our highways.  Mexican trucks will have to comply with EPA fuel-efficiency and emission standards too.  But what American truckers have to pay for themselves, Uncle Sam is funding with your tax dollars for their Mexican counterparts.

When it comes to safety regulations, meanwhile, the sheer logistics of enforcement will mean that Mexican truckers will be able to avoid much of the cost as well.  Just as US industry officials speak for large trucking operators, agreements with the Mexican government will act as an agent for Mexican haulers in terms of compliance bona fides.  Mexican truckers and large US firms will develop a modus vivendi with regulators; it’s the independent owner-operators who can neither absorb new costs nor make favorable arrangements with government agencies.

Just as Obama’s “jobs” plan is not a jobs plan as most voters would understand one, so his approach to Mexican trucking and NAFTA is not “free trade.”  It’s regulatory favoritism.  We are so heavily regulated now that it is no longer possible to speak in terms of level playing fields and markets.  There is little left in life in which we cannot be punished or incentivized by regulatory decisions.

Control over how ever-increasing regulation is wielded is the apparent objective of the Obama administration; we can speculate as to why Mexican trucking is to be favored, but the point is that it is being favored by conscious policy, just as large trucking firms are being relatively favored by conscious policy, and small truckers are being absolutely disfavored in every way by conscious policy.  There’s no “market” to it – except the iron reality that small businesses can’t compete when the playing field is artificially tilted against them.

More and more Americans are living that reality.  Do we understand that Barack Obama doesn’t see it the way we do?  Do we “get” that he and his advisers, for their ideological reasons, want the playing field tilted?  Have we internalized the truth that all things are not equal, we’re not singing off the same sheet of music, and we aren’t in Kansas anymore?  We’ll find out in 2012.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

*Catch the next episode at 8pm EST on radio stations across America or by way of podcast:
20111017KMC – Radio Podcast
20111017KMCVid – Video Podcast

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month: WGCF-FM – Paducah, KY
(including the ciities of: Paducah, KY., Cape Girardeau, MO., Paris, TN., Carbondale, IL.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
The “Occupy” movement steps forward the next level. “Occupy Citibank” kiddos go to a Citibank branch and make their demands known. “We want everything for free.” PLUS the Nazis and the largest group of Communists in the western world endorse Occupy, as does the largest force of Communists in the east. kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
In a border state, in a town a mere ten miles from the border, a pro-Mexico teacher requires the students in her class to memorize the Mexican National Anthem, and the Mexican Pledge of Allegiance. The school seems to say, no big deal, but wait till you hear it with your own ears. Is it a big deal? Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“Life is like this for all of us (a struggle between the spiritual and physical.) No matter where we live, trouble is just a phone call away.” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

In 2010, Bloomberg decreed that the city’s 24,000 restaurants would all have “scarlet letter”grades emblazoned on their windows in a brazen show of their Health Department-certified cleanliness (or lack thereof). This past August, he declared theprogram a success—this despite an independent inspection revealing that New York branches of Starbucks that had received “A” grades were crawling with infestation ranging from vaginal yeast to fecal strep.

But at least the letter grading system has been good for business in a troubled economy, right? Er, maybe it’s best not to ask.

Another Bloombergian brainstorm that the mayor recently deemed an unqualified success was the installation of biker-friendly bicycle lanes on all of New York’s major thoroughfares. The cost of the project was a mere $25 million (at a time when the city was closing hospitals). The plan also eliminated an entire lane of motor-vehicular traffic, creating congestion nightmares on the city’s already traffic-choked avenues. Then again, this consequence was likely intended: Bloomie is a card-carrying environmentalist.

In the press conference where Bloomberg announced the success of the bike lanes, he noted that the number of bicyclists injured since the dedicated lanes were installed has declined. What he neglected to mention is that the number of pedestrians injured by reckless cyclists has not.

A study recently done by Hunter College professorsfound that 55% of all emergency-room visits in the state resulting from bikes hitting pedestrians occur in New York City. One of the study’s authors, Bill Milczarski, told the New York Post that the number of injured pedestrians could be even higher, adding, “We don’t know how many people are injured and just go home or see their family doctor.”

That the accidents were waiting to happen should have been evident to city planners from the get-go. Then again, Bloomberg travels everywhere in a bullet-proof limo. It is not likely, he has ventured out from behind a parked car (cars are now parked a lane’s width out from the curb to accommodate the bike lanes) only to be greeted by a speeding cyclist bearing down on him, shouting “Watch it!”

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The EPA will shut down an estimated 20% of the nation’s coal plants through the ground-level ozone rule (the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) ) through cap and trade that is about to be implemented in January 2012. Opponents of the Obama administration’s “over-reaching” EPA say these are costly regulations. Financial analysts estimate that the cost of this rule will be $130 billion by 2015. But if that figure is correct, that’s good news for the US economy.

…Because there is another way of looking at that $130 billion “expense”. One industry’s expense is another industry’s sales bonanza. For the coal industry’s balance sheet, it is an expense, but think about who is going to perform this $130 billion cleanup – fairies? Hardly. This is a job for real American industries…

Consider the raw idiocy behind this line of “reasoning”:

• America’s coal industry employs 126,000 workers directly and another 455,000 workers whose jobs are indirectly dependent upon the coal industry.

• Closing 20% of America’s coal factories will result in the immediate layoffs of about 116,000 workers, many of them union members in the mining, electrical, transportation and service industries.

• Blackouts and brownouts will become commonplace: there is no way to shutter roughly 10% of America’s electric generation capacity without causing shortages and rationing.

• And simple supply-and-demand will cause skyrocketing prices for electricity, which will be paid for directly by retail customers (you and I) as well as businesses, which will also pass those costs on to consumers like — yes — you and I.

The executive summary for you hard-working, dues-paying members of the AFL-CIO, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Teamsters and the United Mine Workers: the Democrat Party is now aligned with the hard-left Eco-Marxist movement and it is using your money to destroy your jobs.

Remember in 2012.

 
Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.

A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.

The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns.

The Journal further notes that other companies that produce cars for the masses have had their bids for loans rejected, while manufacturers of vehicles whose target market is wealthy fat cats receive the subsidies. The paper quotes Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, as saying:

This is not for average Americans. This is for people to put something in their driveway that is a conversation piece. It’s status symbol thing.

One supposes a corporate jet won’t fit in the driveway.

Meanwhile, Fisker stock, which had been in decline prior to the White House cash injection, continued its slide following a high of $35.40 a share on September 21, 2009. Currently, the stock is selling for around $3 a share. Tesla has performed somehwat better, achieving a high of $36 a share in November of 2010 before descending to its current price of $25.

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Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

I remember, again going back to my early years in the South, when the Civil Rights revolution was unfolding, there were two things that really made an impression on me. My generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators and we went, ‘Whoa! How gross and evil is that?’ My generation asked old people, ‘Explain to me again why it is okay to discriminate against people because their skin color is different?’ And when they couldn’t really answer that question with integrity, the change really started.

Gore goes on to expound on how skeptics have mounted “an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, to attack their integrity, and to slander them with the lie that they are making up the science in order to make money.”

The operative terms in this quote are attack, slander, lie, and science. Gore knows all about the first three terms, which he traffics in incessantly, and almost nothing about the last. As for making money, Gore can protest all he likes that his intentions are noble, but he can’t deny his current net worth, which is estimated to be north of $100 million, all of it accumulated by running around and shrieking that the sky is falling.

As for the science, one has to wonder when its most visible protector will get around to reporting the latest findings from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a group comprised of 8,000 scientists from more than 600 universities and national laboratories in 60 countries. CERN built a pristine stainless steel chamber that precisely replicates the Earth’s atmosphere and tested the hotly debated claim that the chief culprits in global warming are cosmic rays and the sun. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, reveals that this theory accounts “for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century.”

But don’t look for Al Gore to be quoting CERN any time soon. The group claims to have invented the Internet, which as everything knows was invented by someone else.

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Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Canadian actors Margot Kidder and Tantoo Cardinal have been arrested while protesting in Washington to stop construction of an oil pipeline from Alberta’s oilsands to Texas.

Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the first four Superman movies, and her friend Cardinal, who starred in North of 60 and the film Dances with Wolves, were taken into custody near the White House.

They were among dozens arrested Tuesday morning on the fourth day of daily demonstrations against TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline project.

There was a time when unsuccessful actors would complain that they, “couldn’t even get arrested in this town.” It was a take-off on the old adage which proclaimed that any headline was a good headline, providing they spelled your name correctly. Kidder may be the best example of putting the lie to that rule, since the last time I recall seeing her name in print was when she was found cowering naked in some bushes after chopping her own hair off with a razor. (This is not to make light of the woman’s problems. She’s clearly had a lot of challenges to deal with in life.)

So what were they all doing at the White House in the first place? As the article notes, they are protesting the construction of the Keystone pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands fields down to Texas. The reason for the pipeline’s construction is obvious, and was noted in the article as part of comments by her partner in crime. (emphasis mine.)

“It’s progressively broken my heart over time to see destruction that has gone on,” she said. “Fort McMurray, the tarsands … it’s a place that we can see really how sick the Earth is and how sick we are as a people. I am here to be part of a voice to say, ‘Wake up.’” The $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline has approval from Canada but needs a final nod from the United States before it can go ahead. It would nearly double the amount of crude the U.S. imports from Alberta’s oilsands, and travel through environmentally sensitive areas of the American heartland to Gulf Coast refineries.

Well we certainly wouldn’t want to double the amount of energy we can purchase from Canada as opposed to suppliers in the Middle East or Venezuela, now would we?

The protesters are continuing with a long discredited meme, calling the oil sands petroleum products a “carbon bomb.” Unfortunately for them, the science argues otherwise. Under the worst possible conditions, oil sands production can result in a whopping 6% more emissions than retrieving light, sweet crude. But this is because the oil sands are harder to get to, so there is a corresponding increase in vehicle usage in the process. There’s nothing magical about bitumen which makes the extraction of it more carbon intensive.

Further, as has been repeatedly shown, on a “wells to wheel” basis, total emissions from the production process of any type of fossil fuel are miniscule compared to what eventually comes out at the tailpipe end of the chain. 75% of all emissions take place at consumption, not creation.

Further, Kidder and her allies seem to remain under the misguided impression that if we don’t pump these resources down to the lower 48 for processing it’s just going to stay in the ground. As we discussed earlier this month, (and even the Washington Post editorial board agreed) Canada has a ready and waiting customer for all the energy they can produce in China.

Not only will the product head to Asia, but the associated economic opportunity. Perhaps Margot Kidder and her friends don’t need jobs. (As evidenced by the fact that they seem to have a month free to hang out on the sidewalks of DC.) But plenty of people in the energy industry around the Gulf Coast do. Let’s hope that, for once, the Obama administration can turn a deaf ear to the demands of misguided activists who are seeking to hinder job creation, not increase it.

Consider the recent actions of the EPA and its related bureaucracies, who ostensibly act with the consent of the American people to protect the environment:

• Southern Co., parent of Alabama Power, critical of EPA emission rule: “Southern Co. would have to spend billions retrofitting, upgrading or closing its coal-fired power plants under tough new emissions standards proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, and Alabama’s utility regulator is backing the industry’s complaints that the changes would increase power bills and threaten reliability… The Atlanta-based utility giant, in a strongly worded, 200-page submission to the EPA, says the long-term price tag of several new environmental proposals is at least $13 billion.”

• Coal Regs Would Kill Jobs, Boost Energy Bills: “Two new EPA pollution regulations will slam the coal industry so hard that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and electric rates will skyrocket 11 percent to over 23 percent, according to a new study based on government data… Overall, the rules aimed at making the air cleaner could cost the coal-fired power plant industry $180 billion…”

• To EPA, milk is ‘ toxic sludge’: “Imagine treating milk the same as the toxic sludge now washing up on Gulf Coast beaches… It may sound absurd, but some dairy producers are worried that it could happen under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to prevent oil spills from polluting waterways.”

• CEI Releases Global Warming Study Censored by EPA: “The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.”

• Energy in America: EPA Rules Force Shell to Abandon Oil Drilling Plans: “Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits… Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion.”

• White House, EPA ignore Small Business Admin’s report that new coal regulations will kill jobs, economy: “President Barack Obama is ignoring heated concerns from within his own administration that new Environmental Protection Agency coal industry regulations will be economically devastating… The EPA is plowing forward with new Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) mandates. The regulations would force coal energy plants to install giant scrubber-like materials inside smokestacks to capture and cleanse carbon particles before their atmospheric release.”

• Administration blocks more Bush-era oil shale development leases: “The Interior Department on Wednesday blocked a Bush administration plan to open parts of the Mountain West for oil shale development, announcing that it would first study the water, power and land-use issues that complicate one of the nation’s most abundant but controversial untapped sources of energy.”

• Obama administration reverses Bush wilderness policy: “U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on Thursday that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will again have the authority to set aside large areas of federally owned territory in the West that it deems deserving of wilderness protection.”

• Plans for massive oil pipeline opposed by environmentalists: “More than 1,000 activists — including NASA climatologist James Hansen, who has urged the scientific community to “get involved in this fray” — are expected to descend on the White House starting Sunday for three weeks of civil disobedience and mass arrests. Six California activists are driving from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., as part of a “No Tar Sands Caravan” that leaves Sunday… The American Petroleum Institute and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, both of which are urging the State Department to approve the project, held a conference call with journalists Thursday in which they claimed the pipeline could generate 20,000 new jobs.”

• Energy Secretary Chu Embraces High Gas Prices, Again: “This weekend, Energy Secretary Steven Chu appeared on Fox News Sunday and host Chris Wallace asked him about his desire in 2008 for Americans to punitively pay more at the pump in order to wean them off of gasoline. Shockingly, Chu did not walk back his comments as he has attempted to do in the past. In fact, he embraced the strategy noting that his focus is to ease the pain felt by his energy policies by forcing automakers to make more fuel-efficient automobiles.”

• Obama’s New Fuel Economy Standards Will Increase Cost of a Car More Than $11,000: “The Obama Administration’s new fuel economy standards will cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase over $11,000, according to a study conducted by the Center for Automotive Research.”

Everything this administration does is intended to make Americans suffer. Every single thing.

If we don’t crush the Democrats at the voting booth in 2012, I fear that the great American experiment will be finished.

Q.  When does destroying a creature’s natural habitat with human power-generation activities not matter?

A.  When Jerry Brown is governor of California, the creature is the desert tortoise, and the power-generation activity in question is the installation of a huge solar-power facility in the Mojave Desert.

It’s the, um, selective prioritization that warrants calling out here.  The issue of whether the desert tortoise will be fatally inconvenienced by the solar facility is no more clear-cut than it ever is in such cases.  Some environmentalists can always be found who will make an impassioned and perhaps (or perhaps not) exaggerated case that Critter X is facing extinction because of Proposed Human Activity Y.  In the matter of the desert tortoise, the federal government originally halted the solar facility’s construction because of a study that suggested hundreds of baby tortoises would be killed, and the tortoise population would lose thousands of acres of habitat, if the project went forward.  Later, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided the tortoises wouldn’t be harmed – as long as the tortoises were transplanted elsewhere – and the project was allowed to continue.

But the environmentalists have filed suit in federal court, asking for an injunction against continuing construction.  So last week, Brown filed a brief requesting that the injunction petition be dismissed. According to the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, KABC:

At a conference in Los Angeles, Governor Jerry Brown vowed to crush efforts to block renewable energy projects in California, helping them overcome permitting and environmental challenges.

He signed a law earlier this year mandating the state get 33 percent of its energy from alternative sources by 2020, including solar energy.

“The sun in California is like the oil in Texas: It’s fabulous wealth waiting to be developed,” said Brown. “And those who would resist that have to offer a pretty darn good argument for me to give up on solar energy.”

I swear, the things these Democrats get away with saying in public.  The sun is wealth, so who cares what happens to the desert tortoise?  Or, to put it precisely: when the proposed activity is something Jerry Brown isn’t in favor of, it’s fine for lawsuits to hold it up for years, regardless of the merits of the environmentalist argument.  When the proposed activity is something Jerry Brown is in favor of, environmentalist lawsuits will be swept aside quickly, regardless of the merits of the environmentalist argument.

It’s good to have that clarified – and worth making another point.  Wherever solar power is making a desert bloom, the umbilical cord to the federal government is not hard to find.  The company building the solar facility in the Mojave is BrightSource, an international corporation headquartered in Oakland.  Here’s the deal with BrightSource:

Founded in 2004, the company has attracted more than $500 million in private funding and has become a renewables darling, with agreements to supply electricity to California utilities PG&E and Southern California Edison.

That’s the good news. But the company’s SEC filing in April [2011] for a $250 million IPO tells a more, er, interesting story.

The company has posted a string of net losses, totaling $177 million. Much of its $32 million in revenue over the past three years has come not from power generation, but from a contract with Chevron to use its technology to recover . . . not-so-renewable heavy oil. The filing advises investors that BrightSource has “generated substantial net losses and negative operating cash flows since our inception and expect[s] to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

There’s also trouble at its flagship venture, a 3,600-acre solar project in the Mojave desert… Fortunately for BrightSource, its efforts are sustained by an impressive array of federal, state and local subsidies, including a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, one of the largest solar guarantees on record. The company notes federal provisions providing solar projects with a 30% investment tax credit through 2016, as well as accelerated depreciations of capital costs for solar entities, among other goodies.

In this enterprise, the source of wealth isn’t the sun, it’s (a) the American taxpayer and (b) fossil fuels.

By contrast, since 2004, the oil and gas industry has paid more than $217 billion to the federal government, just in corporate income tax and production fees.  That doesn’t include the revenues generated by the income taxes of those employed in the industry (or the sales they generate), or the taxes paid by the industries that exist because of the oil and gas industry.  In the same period, the federal government has also collected more than $200 billion in federal fuel taxes.

A reminder of a few things endangered species are more important than:

- US Border Patrol operations

- Developing oil shale in Utah

- Agriculture in the Central Valley of California

- Oil and gas development in more than 180,000 square miles of Alaska

The principle seems to be that if it turns a profit, attracts voluntary investment, make a net contribution to the public treasury, or protects our national borders, then the convenience of an endangered species takes precedence over it.  But the Jerry Brown codicil is that if it can’t operate without subsidies from the taxpayer, then it takes precedence over endangered species – and those who sue in court on behalf of the endangered species are to be “crushed.”  Good to know.

The California state reptile (National Park Service image)

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN’s proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.

“I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them,” reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

Oh … “only one of many parameters”, eh? Nice to see someone finally admit that.  For instance that big yellow thing that hangs in the sky each day?

Imagine that – cosmic rays have a role in cloud formation and the sun is extraordinarily active in how many cosmic rays are able reach the atmosphere and carry out that function. Apparently few if any models use it.   However the the effect is profound:

The CLOUD experiment builds on earlier experiments by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who demonstrated that cosmic rays provide a seed for clouds. Tiny changes in the earth’s cloud cover could account for variations in temperature of several degrees. The amount of Ultra Fine Condensation Nuclei (UFCN) material depends on the quantity of the background drizzle of rays, which varies depending on the strength of the sun’s magnetic field and the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Emphasis mine. Back to that big yellow thing – what role does it have:

Since clouds often cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface, a moderate change in cloud cover clearly could explain the warming/cooling cycle.

Svensmark noted the gigantic “solar wind” that expands when the sun is active—and thus blocks many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise hit the earth’s atmosphere. When the sun weakens, the solar wind shrinks. Recently, the U.S. Solar Observatory reported a very long period of “quiet sun” and predicted 30 years of cooling.

Got it? We’re in a solar minimum and the temp hasn’t risen in the 10 years since it has begun. Go figure.

So where does this leave us given the CERN gag order? What can you infer from that?

Nigel Calder does a good job of rounding the inferences up for us:

Four quick inferences:

1) The results must be favourable for Svensmark or there would be no such anxiety about them.

2) CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It’s OK to enter “the highly political arena of the climate change debate” provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark’s heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation.

3) The once illustrious CERN laboratory ceases to be a truly scientific institute when its Director General forbids its physicists and visiting experimenters to draw the obvious scientific conclusions from their results.

4) The resulting publication may be rather boring.

Indeed … boring only in the sense of reading dense scientific material. Not boring in its impact.

The CERN experiment is supposed to be the big test of the Svensmark theory. It’s a tipoff, then, that CERN’s boss, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, has just told the German magazine Die Welt that he has forbidden his researchers to “interpret” the forthcoming test results. In other words, the CERN report will be a stark “just the facts” listing of the findings. Those findings must support Svensmark, or Heuer would never have issued such a stifling order on a major experiment.

Can’t wait to watch this one unfold. But the gag order is very suspicious and certainly infers that the results don’t support the warmist theory … or should I say “assertion” now?

–

Bruce McQuain blogs at Questions and Observations (QandO), Blackfive, theWashington Examiner and the Green Room.  Follow him on Twitter: @McQandO

I mention this because on The Weather Channel this morning, a TWC reporter interviewed an Oklahoma City official who said the area has now seen the most days ever in which excessive heat advisories have been issued.  I have no doubt that the heat wave is miserable and seems never-ending to those in Oklahoma this summer (like the members of my family), but the city official’s statement doesn’t mean 2011 is the most persistently hot summer ever.  It means they weren’t issuing excessive heat advisories in 1980.

Here is a summary of the 1980 heat wave from the NewsOK Oklahoma Weather Blog:

Record-high temperatures for Oklahoma’s capital were tied or broken 18 times during 1980, and the third-highest temperature ever recorded for Oklahoma City was set on August 2 with a reading of 110 degrees (113 remains Oklahoma City’s highest recorded temperature, from July 11, 1936). High temperatures of greater than 90 degrees occurred on 71 consecutive days, from June 23 until September 1 (it should be noted that after this one day respite, temperatures elevated above 90 degrees once again for 14 consecutive days).

As the weather blogger says, “The defining characteristic of the summer of 1980 was the relentlessness of the heat.”  Seventy-one straight days over 90 – nearly half of them 100 or more – took a tremendous toll on livestock, crops, and human lives.

July 1980 was also the driest July of the century for Oklahoma – less rainfall even than during the Dust Bowl – with a statewide average precipitation of less than half an inch.  I can personally attest that not one single drop of it fell in Oklahoma City.  The period of most intense heat coincided with 41 straight days in which most of the state saw no rainfall at all.  The level of Lake Hefner, in northwest Oklahoma City, was the lowest most people had ever seen it; news crews visited it almost every day to mourn the shrinkage.

And, of course, if you didn’t have air conditioning in car or home – and a lot of people didn’t; my car had no A/C – you spent much of the summer soaked in sweat.  The nighttime lows hovered between 85 and 90.  One of the main things I remember is working all day in a skirt and pantyhose, which was standard attire in 1980.  There was nothing like leaving the state office building between 4:30 and 5:00 PM each afternoon and getting into a big metal car that had been baking in the sun and 100+-degree heat since 7:30 that morning.  I carried a washcloth in my purse to grip the door handle with, and laid two beach towels on the seat and seat-back as a buffer against the burning heat.

The heat wave of 1980 was felt across North America.  As many as 1700 lives are estimated to have been lost due to the excessive heat, along with over $50 billion in economic losses (in 2007 dollars).   But the worst heat wave in North America in the past century actually occurred in 1936.  Another intense, prolonged heat wave hit the central continent in the summer of 1954.  According to the American Meteorological Society, in an article about the 1980 heat wave published in 1981:

Much more hostile conditions have existed in the past, particularly during the 1930′s and the 1950′s.

It’s worth remembering that 1980 was worse than 2011 (although that may change), and the 1950s and 1930s were worse than 1980.

It’s also worth remembering that the heat waves occurred in conjunction with some of the coldest winters the continent has seen, along with a high incidence of tornadoes and intense hurricanes.  Many of the 20th century’s North American records were set in 1935 and 1936; rain and snowfall records that still stand were set in the northwest, temperatures in Fargo were below zero for 37 straight days, 107 people died across the country in river flooding in the spring.  1953-54 saw only slightly less precipitation and cold, although some areas of the northwest set rainfall records that still stand.  The two-year period spawned tornadoes even more intense than the record-shattering years of the 1930s.

And many Americans in middle age or older today remember the hard winters of 1978 and 1979, still the coldest on record for much of North America.  It was in the wake of these winters – which also hit Europe and parts of Asia hard – that ice-age prophets (if not certified climatologists) roamed the globe forecasting a catastrophic cooling of the earth.  (Notably, Europe was hard hit by wild weather in 1953 and 1954 as well, with unusual events including a disastrous flood of England, Scotland, and the Low Countries by the North Sea in 1953, and a tornado strike on London in 1954.)

None of these facts mean that the people suffering tornadoes and intense heat this year, or those being driven from their homes by floods and wildfires in the northern plains and the southwest, are enduring less than their predecessors in wild-weather-dom.  What they mean is that weather has been wild before.  Many of us who are no more than middle aged can remember it being worse in our lifetimes.  Our parents, and theirs, have similar memories; written records from decades or centuries ago confirm the same thing. 

Collated data and human anecdotal experience deliver the same message about weather:  it comes in cycles.  What you’re seeing on any given day is virtually guaranteed not to be the “worst” or “most” it’s ever been – “ever” includes at a minimum some 80,000 to 100,000 years’ worth of climate conditions suitable for human life, of which we have directly measured no more than about 150.  In fact, whatever you’re seeing today is probably not even the worst or most in the last 40 years.  Anecdote, transient impressions, and ignorance of the recent past should not be invoked to convince us that a given theory (like anthropogenic global warming/climate change) is invalid – but neither should they to convince us that it is valid.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

– the holiday tends to bring with it tons of trash, hazardous fireworks, and polluting cars. While some traditions should be embraced, others may need to be tweaked so that future generations can enjoy both this holiday and this earth, as well. Here are a few tips to make your Independence Day more pleasant for you and the world in which you live.

Follow these HuffPo tips for a less planet-killing 4th:

- Don’t buy fireworks (that is if they’re even legal in your state — they are here in Virginia and our neighborhood will be having a blast shooting them off in the street as soon as it gets dark).

- Carpool. (Or have yourself a few kids. Then you’ll be carpooling every time you get in the car.)

-  Whatever you do, don’t eat meat! “Sure, hot dogs and hamburgers might be an American tradition, but sometimes traditions need to change a bit, especially when the safety of our world is a stake.” Good one!

- “Rethink” grilling. Coal is bad, but so is propane. (See previous tip and eat lettuce instead.)

- Compost your 4th of July garbage: “Don’t have a compost? What better day to start one than on your holiday!” Enjoy!

Et cetera.

It’s not strictly green — it does contain some world-safety-threatening animal products (cream, eggs, butter) — but we’ll make our annual flag cake as usual. (This version involves actual baking. Ours is whipped cream and fruit on top of sliced-up pound cake. Lazy but good.)

(Not our actual cake but virtually the same.)

You’re probably not surprised that a Harvard Study Shows Republicans Enjoy 4th of July More Than Dems. Parades, like county fairs, are unsophisticated, free of edge or irony.

But in Wisconsin, they aren’t free of politics: Firefighters union puts politics over honoring 9/11 firefighters. The Troglopundit reports:

In Racine, Wisconsin (my original home town), the local firefighters’ union is turning its back on a July 4th float honoring 9/11 firefighters because the firefighter behind the float doesn’t support the union’s politics. [. . .]

This is an Independence Day parade float, honoring firefighters (and police) who died on 9/11. But, sorry Lt. Gorniak: you don’t support the union’s politics? We won’t support your float.

You may think I’m going to berate the union for that. Nope. I’m all for them showing Wisconsin exactly what they stand for, and this is a perfect example.

And what they stand for in this case is themselves. That’s it. It appears that union membership can be hazardous to your mind. Someone needs to find a way to deprogram these guys.

Don’t get all carried away with that new compost pile and forget to read Mark Steyn’s weekend column: Dependency and Demagoguery: A not so Glorious Fourth:

Oh, c’mon, do you want to compromise your kids’ safety in order to give grope breaks to dying nonagenarians? A spokesgroper for the Transport Stupidity Administration explained that security procedures have to be “the same for everyone” – because it would be totally unreasonable to expect timeserving government bureaucrats to exercise individual human judgment. Oddly enough, it’s not “the same for everyone” if you’re Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi from Nigeria, who on June 24 got on a flight at JFK with a college ID and an expired boarding pass in somebody else’s name. Why, that slippery devil! If only he’d been three-quarters of a century older, in a wheelchair and dying of leukemia, we’d have got him! He was arrested upon landing at LAX, and we’re now going to spend millions of dollars prosecuting him. Why? We should thank him for his invaluable expose of America’s revolting security theater, and make him head of the TSA.

Read the whole thing.

What a long way we’ve come since that first 4th of July. If you’re within striking distance of Mount Vernon, it might be the perfect place to be on our country’s birthday:

Historic Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, salutes our first commander-in-chief with a dazzling display of made-for-daytime fireworks during its annual Independence Day event! Visitors will be treated to spectacular smoke fireworks in patriotic colors fired over the Potomac River. The event also includes an inspirational naturalization ceremony for 100 new citizens, military reenactments, a special wreathlaying ceremony, and a visit from the “first” first couple, “General and Mrs. Washington.”

New this year – Mount Vernon will have 500 bottles of the George Washington Rye Whiskey available for sale! Head to The Shops located in the Mount Vernon Inn Complex or the Distillery & Gristmill to purchase one of the 500 bottles of whiskey distilled on site. Each 375 ml bottle retails for $95. Whiskey sales begin at each location at 10 a.m. on July 4 and continue while supplies last. (To purchase, you must be 21 years or older and have a valid photo ID).

9:30 a.m: General Washington’s Inspection of the Troops:

Reading of the Declaration of Independence and a demonstration by the First Virginia Regiment on the Bowling Green.

10:00 a.m: 50th-Annual Independence Day Wreathlaying: A ceremonial wreathlaying at Washington’s Tomb by the George Washington Chapter, Sons of the American Revolution.

11:00 a.m: United States Citizenship & Immigration Services Naturalization Ceremony: A special Independence Day naturalization ceremony for America’s 100 newest citizens in front of George Washington’s home.

12:00 p.m: “Red, White, and Blue” Concert: Patriotic performance by the National Concert Band of America.

12:45 p.m: Pyrotechnic Salute to America: Unique daytime fireworks display over the Potomac River!

1:00 p.m: “Happy Birthday, America!” Cake: Birthday cake (while supplies last) on the Bowling Green.

1:30 p.m: Revolutionary War Military Music: Demonstration by the First Virginia Regiment on the Bowling Green.

2:30 p.m: Revolutionary War Military Drill: Demonstration by the First Virginia Regiment on the Bowling Green.

More on Washington’s whiskey here. Wishing you a fun, non-catastrophic weekend.

Cross-posted at P&P.

This would be one thing if Texas were an outlier among the 50 states in terms of dirty air or an otherwise demonstrably imperiled environment.  But the truth is closer to the opposite:  the air in Texas has been getting cleaner; in the urban areas, much cleaner.  And in spite of being by far the largest electric power producer of the 50 states, and heavily reliant on coal, Texas has been steadily reducing its emissions of the EPA’s least-favored compounds from coal combustion (e.g., sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide). Its emissions of NOx and SO2 are substantially lower than the national average; Texas is ranked the 11th lowest in NOx emissions (.098 lb/mmBtu in 2009, versus a national average of .159 lb/mmBtu), and 24th in SO2 (.309 lb/mmBtu in 2009, versus a national average of .458 lb/mmBtu).

But the EPA isn’t really making the argument that Texas is an environmental pigsty.  It’s not putting any data or findings behind that premise, at any rate.  Instead, it is simply acting high-handedly, assuming an authority that nothing in written law confers on it, to pronounce Texas’s procedures in violation of EPA rules – even when there is no basis for making that claim.  To put it bluntly, the EPA is making a power grab.

Overriding the state air-permit system

There are three principal facets to the power grab.  One began with an EPA decision in January 2010 that the Texas air-permit program was invalid, and that every facility operating under such a permit in the state would have to be re-permitted.  The argument was not that Texas plants were emitting too much.  Rather, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, the Texas “air-permit program … caps emissions of air pollutants from an entire facility, but the EPA wants to scrutinize and restrict emissions from every polluting unit of a plant.”  Texas, along with a number of other states, is concerned that regulating on the EPA’s basis will cost considerably more, without improving air quality.

Neither of the two approaches can claim to be the obvious intent of the Clean Air Act.  In default of a clear intent in written law, the point at issue is whose judgment ought to prevail in this matter.  Texas argues that federalism was a key component of the Clean Air Act, and properly so; that’s how things work in the United States.  The EPA is supposed to set air quality standards, and then the states choose their methods to meet them.  Other states agree.

The EPA has made no philosophical arguments to justify its regulatory ukase – but, of course, it doesn’t have to.  It is currently operating under a chief executive who endorses its approach and doesn’t require it to justify what it wants to do.  Reining it in would require concerted action from Congress, and/or a favorable ruling for the states in a lawsuit.

Keep in mind that throughout the 16 years in which Texas issued its industrial air permits, air quality in Texas improved – a lot.  The Texas system wasn’t failing to produce a compliant outcome.  And it took the EPA 16 years to decide, in spite of that record of success, to invalidate all the existing state-issued permits.  The motivation was clearly political.

The war on coal; New draconian air-quality standards

The permit invalidation was just the beginning, however.  The second facet of the power grab, the Obama EPA’s war on coal, will have at least as damaging an effect on Texas as on other states, and in some ways perhaps more.  The war on coal is part of a larger regulatory assault on emissions and industrial byproducts of all kinds, which will, if implemented as intended, ensure life as we know it cannot continue in the United States.  The impact on Texas is discussed in the testimony submitted to Congress by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in March.

The findings include the likelihood that the new regulations adopted by the Obama EPA will shut down more than 5700 MW of electrical generating capacity in Texas, or about one-twelfth  of the peak demand levied by state users in the last couple of years.  Meanwhile, based on economic trends, Texas expects to need as much as 25% more capacity by 2020.  TPPF cites industry and independent think-tank estimates that the cost of compliance with the new EPA standards will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and will thus drive utility costs – and therefore the cost of living – up significantly, while at the same time eliminating thousands of jobs in many industries.

From regulating the naturally-occurring fine dust in the countryside, to treating the byproducts of coal combustion as hazardous waste, and preventing them from being sold for use in cement, the EPA’s proposals would shut down one aspect of human economic life after another.

TPPF gets in a number of good points about both the politics and the data; for example, it observes on p. 6 of the document that the EPA got around the rules governing its implementation of the new regulations by deeming its proposed action (dramatically tightening air quality standards) to be deregulatory.  How did it do that?  By positing that a comprehensive scheme of regulation would involve issuing permits for 6 million sources of emissions, and deciding instead to “tailor” its program to cover only large sources (e.g., the 12,000 emitters that currently require permits to operate).

Just imagine how we could fleece our fellow men if we all had the power to declare it “deregulation” – mercy, relief, a benefit to the regulated – when we don’t do as much as we could have done.  There is a distinctly mafia-like ring to that thought process.

The TPPF testimony also alludes to the EPA’s extremely shaky case that fuel-burning plants need to have their mercury emissions reduced by 91% (mercury emissions from US industry have already been reduced considerably in the past 30 years).  A number of studies suggest that many coal-fired electrical plants will simply find this impossible.

And there doesn’t appear to be a pressing need for it anyway.  Besides the facts that the entire United States power sector emits only 1% of the globe’s anthropogenic mercury output, and that 50% of the mercury in the Atlantic is emitted from Asia, not the US (virtually all the human-emitted mercury in the Pacific comes from Asia), everything in the alarmist case about mercury is either undemonstrated (e.g., that mercury levels in fish have been rising), or wildly overestimated (e.g., the incidence of mercury in child-bearing women in the US, and how that compares to the level of mercury considered dangerous to humans).  See here and here for evidence and counterarguments.

But wait – there’s more.  If you’re wondering how Texas is going to make up that 5700+ MW of power-generating capacity, so is Texas.  Nuclear power would do the trick, of course, but as TPPF observes, new nuclear power plants are an iffy proposition in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.  Wind, solar, and biomass are laughably uneconomic sources, and wind and solar are unreliable as well.

Shutting down natural gas

But what about natural gas?  The EPA is way ahead of us, with the third facet of its power grab.  Ben Voth wrote a piece for American Thinker in January calling out the new EPA assault on the production of natural gas in Texas.  And if you think the EPA’s particular beef is with fracking (hydraulic fracturing) chemicals, think again.  The basis for the EPA’s abrupt move against a Texas natural gas driller in December 2010 was methane and benzene found in local water.

It all fit nicely with the emotional appeal of the “documentary” Gasland, which did for the natural gas industry what Michael Moore did for 9/11.  The problem is that not only was Gasland full of errors and misrepresentations, the EPA case against Range Resources in Texas was full of holes as well.  Based on analysis of their nitrogen content, the methane and benzene in the afflicted water came not from the natural-gas drilling by Range Resources, but through natural seepage from a shallower nearby gas formation – one that is not being drilled.  In other words, there’s nothing humans could have done to prevent the seepage.

(The Energy in Depth write-ups point out also that methane is a naturally occurring gas and the hazards of its presence in drinking water depend, as with so many things, on concentration.  They also cite a study by the Texas health authorities which demonstrated that benzene exposure in the gas-drilling areas of Texas is no higher than it is in the rest of the US, and that the only residents who have elevated levels of benzene are smokers.)

But subsequent testimony from EPA staffers, part of a reconstruction of the December 2010 decision to shut down the Range Resources drilling operation, showed that the EPA did not even consider the possibility that the methane and benzene appeared naturally in the water in question.  This failure fit well with other patterns in the EPA action; the reconstruction (see the second EID link) indicates that it was an instance of activists and the EPA working together to jump the gun.

Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) is pursuing this issue.  The Republicans in Texas’s congressional delegation have sent a letter to Cass Sunstein expressing strong disapproval of the EPA’s failure to abide by its own rules in implementing the new air quality and emissions regulations.  As Pajamas notes, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has sent a letter of its own decrying the new regulations – although the Texas Democrats have remained silent.

The fight continues among the states.  At least 15 (including Texas) filed suit against the EPA over its “climate-change” regulations in 2010, even before the full slate of new air quality/emissions regulations were published.  On the other side are 16 states

fighting back on behalf of the EPA, saying without regulations, climate change will adversely affect them.

Those states are: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Remarkably, the states “fighting on behalf of the EPA” include the ones with the biggest state deficits, the ones with the highest taxes, the ones with the highest unemployment, and the ones hemorrhaging businesses and revenues and losing seats in Congress after the 2010 census.  One principles-of-governance note:  as long as there is an EPA, any president can put people in it who will abuse the agency’s portfolio.  The courts are incompetent to decide how much the EPA “should” be doing.  That’s a political decision that belongs in Congress – and we need to be telling Congress to do things differently.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Well, it’s certainly hard to argue with that, isn’t it? The economy is in dire need of a boost of that magnitude and, just as obviously, we definitely need all the new jobs we can get, right? There’s just one little problem with this masterful plan. A recent independent study of the EPA’s cost benefit predictions shows that they are almost entirely vaporware.

In “Assessment of Obama Administration’s Cost-Benefit Analysis of Clean Air Act Regulation,” economist David Montgomery reveals the very large net regulatory benefits touted by EPA rely on apples to orange comparisons, where the vast majority of the benefits have none of the financial reality that the costs do.

“In its Clean Air Act appraisal, EPA substitutes calculated misdirection for solid analysis” explained NTU Executive Vice President Pete Sepp. “Nearly all of EPA’s promised $2 trillion in benefits from existing regulations stem from feelings rather than fiscal improvements.

“Federal regulators arrived at their staggering figures by polling individuals on how much they’d be willing to pay to reduce risks in general, mostly using estimates from studies of occupational risks unrelated to air pollution.”

But the EPA did get one thing right. It’s going to be expensive.

Dr. Montgomery added “while less than 3 percent of the EPA’s purported benefits will show up as additional jobs or real output in the economy, 100 percent of the costs will do so. Even EPA’s own macroeconomic analysis shows that existing air pollution regulations are a net drag on the economy. And EPA’s tally doesn’t even take into account the costs of its pending new ozone standards and regulations on electric utilities over the next decade.”

This type of pie in the sky enthusiasm for creative accounting shouldn’t come as any surprise, as it’s been a hallmark of this administration since day one. Whether it’s the coming explosion of green jobs that simply never happened or sure-fire ways to eliminate coal production which will bankrupt consumers, the laudable goals never seem to match up to the grim realities.

As I’ve stated repeatedly, I’m no fan of coal as a primary energy source, but you simply can’t regulate it out of existence without first coming up with a way to replace all that energy. And the first time a person comes along who can manage that feat in a clean, safe, economically viable way, I’ll be at the front of the line waiting to shake their hand. But we’re nowhere near that point yet. I understand that Congress is often – as my grandfather used to say – about as useful as teats on a boar hog, but in matters such as this we have to keep the legislative branch in the loop. These types of actions can not simply be left to an executive branch entity such as the EPA without oversight. The nation’s teetering economy just isn’t going to survive this type of “help” from Washington.

The judge, Ernest Goldsmith, allowed the other elements of the 2006 law (AB 32) to proceed as planned, so small businesses and truck drivers and others who will be drastically affected by its emission-curbing requirements have no prospect of relief.  The important business of driving business out of California will proceed apace.

Of equal interest, however, is the basis for the judge’s decision to suspend the C&T plan.  The Association of Irritated Residents brought the suit originally because the C&T plan is likely to do exactly what any sensible person would predict:  place the greatest burdens on poor people.  Besides causing their bills to necessarily skyrocket and eliminating their jobs, C&T would allow high carbon emitters – which are located disproportionately in lower-income areas – to essentially buy “permits” (unused carbon allowances from others) to continue emitting.  Even if you don’t think it’s a burden to have lots of carbon dioxide emitted in your neighborhood, the argument that the impact will be unequal between income groups is sound.

But that argument was not the one adduced most directly by Judge Goldsmith.  His decision made reference instead to the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) of 1970, and determined that the California Air Resources Board (CARB), established in 1967, had failed to comply with them in its preparation of the Scoping Plan for implementing the C&T scheme under AB 32.  In particular, CARB had failed to adequately study alternatives to instituting C&T, as required by CEQA.

Goldsmith actually issued his original ruling in that regard in January.  In the months since, CARB has failed to address his concerns: in multiple efforts at turning in better homework, it has yet to prove to his satisfaction that it has given adequate consideration to alternatives to C&T.

Having the judiciary play the role of referee in this regard works – at least partly – to the advantage of sanity in this case.  So that part is good.  What’s ridiculous is having a body of law and a bureaucratic apparatus so convoluted that it swings tentacles around and grasps itself by the neck and squeezes.

It is equally absurd to tolerate judges deciding whether boards or commissions have “adequately” complied with a regulatory requirement like “studying alternatives.”  I’m not complaining about the decision in this case, mind you, but from the reasonable man standpoint, how would the judge know what’s “adequate”?  In the case of a public policy issue with extensive technical aspects and major impact for dozens of constituencies, there is no such thing as a single standard of adequacy for the studying of alternatives.  The judge is merely expressing the opinion of one citizen about what constitutes an “adequate” effort to study alternatives.

If Americans genuinely think that we should turn such decisions over to the judiciary, we have completely lost touch with the meaning of limited, constitutional, consensual government.  The truth is that decisions about whether policy alternatives have been studied adequately belong, in joint trust, to the legislature and the executive.  Judges should not be refereeing such disputes.  There is no such thing as absolute truth or even constitutionality when it comes to “adequate studying”; there is only preference and opinion.  A judge doesn’t know any better whether the alternatives for environmental policy have been studied adequately than my state senator and representative do – or than I do, or my neighbors do, for that matter.

“Adequacy” in the studying of policy alternatives is precisely the kind of thing that should be voted on – not decided by a judge as if the law has some enduring standard to measure it by.  We have a very wrong idea of law if we think it is a judicially-refereed mechanism for edging toward the “right” answers about everything in life.  There are many, many things in life that are a matter of preference and opinion – and since we don’t all agree on them, government and law should obtrude on our arrangements in those areas as little as possible.

When the law is in proper relationship to the people, the scope of the judiciary is very limited, but actually more meaningful to the enterprise of “good government.”  Today, we have a body of law so huge and burdensome that it has started going 15 rounds with itself on a regular basis, and the judiciary acts as a referee on intricate and inherently political questions of policy.

It is possible to think in different terms, and to conceive of a regimen of law and jurisprudence much more like that envisioned by the Founders.  Americans need to wake up and recognize that accepting the way things are done now makes us importunate, dependent, and increasingly unfit to govern ourselves.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Interestingly, although I’m sure their credentials can be checked, the video does the opposite of reassure me about them.

Meanwhile, USA Today caused a burble in the blogosphere this week by comparing climate-change skeptics to Birthers.

Over at Slate, Brian Merchant last week revived blogosphere interest in a piece that appeared at FrumForum back in April, in which D.R. Tucker – who apparently had had no clear idea of why he was skeptical about anthropogenic global warming/climate change (AGW/CC) – announced that he had changed his mind, on reading the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.

If you read through his piece, you realize that he genuinely seems to have had no idea whatsoever why he was once an AGW/CC skeptic.  He appears unfamiliar with any of the main features of the debate, and unaware of the persuasive counter-evidence about literally everything he refers to in his discussion, ticking off point after point as if there has been no challenge to the IPCC data or the conclusions of AGW/CC believers.

Fortunately, AGW/CC believer James Hansen of NASA, along with three colleagues, published a new study this month concluding that climate models have consistently overestimated net man-made effects on climate.  Sarcasm has ensued.  The IPCC, meanwhile, in the wake of the revelations about erroneous or undocumented claims in its Fourth Assessment Report, has decided to implement reforms designed to prevent such problems in the future.

So it’s all good.  The AGW/CC debate continues.  And now, we know who the climate scientists are.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic.

And with that he begins a demolition of the theories, premises and methods by which the AGW scare has been foisted on the public.

The politics:

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

He makes clear he understands that CO2 is indeed a “greenhouse gas”, and makes the point that if all else was equal then yes, more CO2 in the air should and would mean a warmer planet. But that’s where the current “science” goes off the tracks.It is built on an assumption that is false.

The science:

But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas. [emphasis mine]

But it didn’t increase the height of the moist air around the planet as subsequent studies have shown since that time. However, that theory or premise became the heart of the modeling that was done by the alarmist crowd.

The modeling:

This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.

What did they find when they tried to prove this theory?

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

Evans is not the first to come to these conclusions. Earlier this year, in a post I highlighted, Richard Lindzen said the very same thing.

For warming since 1979, there is a further problem. The dominant role of cumulus convection in the tropics requires that temperature approximately follow what is called a moist adiabatic profile. This requires that warming in the tropical upper troposphere be 2-3 times greater than at the surface. Indeed, all models do show this, but the data doesn’t and this means that something is wrong with the data. It is well known that above about 2 km altitude, the tropical temperatures are pretty homogeneous in the horizontal so that sampling is not a problem. Below two km (roughly the height of what is referred to as the trade wind inversion), there is much more horizontal variability, and, therefore, there is a profound sampling problem. Under the circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that the problem resides in the surface data, and that the actual trend at the surface is about 60% too large. Even the claimed trend is larger than what models would have projected but for the inclusion of an arbitrary fudge factor due to aerosol cooling. The discrepancy was reported by Lindzen (2007) and by Douglass et al (2007). Inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data.

Evans reaches the natural conclusion – the same conclusion Lindzen reached:

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

And why will it continue? Again, follow the money:

We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!

Indeed. How extraordinarily unexciting for the proletariat who will be the ones stuck with the bill if these governments ever succeed in finding a way to pass the taxes they hope to impose and extend even more government’s control over energy.

While you’re listening to the CEOs of American oil companies being grilled by Congress today, remember all of this. They’re going to try to punish an industry that is vital to our economy and national security, and much of the desire to do that is based on this false “science” that has been ginned up by government itself as an excuse to control more of our energy sector, raise untold revenues for its use and to pick winners and losers. All based on something which is, according to Evans and other scientists, now demonstrably false.

–

Bruce McQuain blogs at Questions and Observations (QandO), Blackfive, the Washington Examiner and the Green Room.  Follow him on Twitter: @McQandO

One thing that’s odd about this is that the issue for the EPA is the icebreaking ship.  The Beaufort Sea off Alaska’s north coast is covered with sea ice more than 10 months out of the year.  For 6-8 weeks in August and September each year, the ice recedes, leaving an un-iced area up to 70 miles from the coast.

But the icepack makes navigation impossible without an icebreaker for all of the other 10 months – and in all areas where sea ice is prevalent and subject to break-up, commercial navigation is normally assisted with icebreaking at any time of year.  (The Russians have tales to tell about ships that tried to transit their northern coast without icebreaking support, in the late summer, and had to be abandoned in early fall after they had gotten stuck in the ice and couldn’t be dislodged.)

So all significant seafaring activity off the Alaskan coast in this area requires icebreaking services virtually all year.  Shell isn’t the only economic actor contracting for icebreaking services.  Most commercial maritime traffic operates within 70 miles of the coast – meaning that’s where the icebreakers will be cutting swaths through the ice and emitting their emissions – because that’s where the ice tends to be youngest and thinnest.

Even if Shell were the only entity contracting for icebreaking services, the company has been doing it for some time now, as indicated by this industry press release from the Norwegian agency that supplied an icebreaker to support Shell’s drilling in the Beaufort Sea in 2007.  Besides the fact that the icebreaking has been going on, Shell has been doing oil industry work in the area at least that long – which means the EPA isn’t shutting this operation down in an early stage.

It’s not clear at this point what has changed (emission standards tightened?  A particular icebreaker emitting too much?), but plenty of icebreaking has been allowed in the Beaufort Sea before.  Even global warming believers venture into the Beaufort Sea on icebreakers.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions” and as The Optimistic Conservative.  She writes a weekly column for Patheos.

The white paper making this recommendation is full of bureaucrat-eze like this:

In the intermediate distances, new technologies are less mature and modal choices are fewer than in the city. However, this is where EU action can have the most immediate impact (fewer constraints from subsidiarity or international agreements). More resource-efficient vehicles and cleaner fuels are unlikely to achieve on their own the necessary cuts in emissions and they would not solve the problem of congestion. They need to be accompanied by the consolidation of large volumes for transfers over long distances. This implies greater use of buses and coaches, rail and air transport for passengers and, for freight, multimodal solutions relying on waterborne and rail modes for long-hauls.

Translated into English this says smaller cars aren’t enough to reach the goal, people will have to ride the bus or train. That’s supposed to happen by 2050, but the paper also calls for cutting the number of cars on the road in half by 2030. Of course the paper takes pains to assure us that this will be a gentle transition:

New mobility concepts cannot be imposed. To promote more sustainable behaviour, better mobility planning has to be actively encouraged.

On page 15 they finally get around to telling us how they plan to encourage the right choices:

Price signals play a crucial role in many decisions that have long-lasting effects on the transport system. Transport charges and taxes must be restructured in the direction of wider application of the ‘polluter-pays’ and ‘user-pays’ principle…

For passenger cars, road charges are increasingly considered as an alternative way to generate revenue and influence traffic and travel behaviour…The long-term goal is to apply user charges to all vehicles and on the whole network to reflect at least the maintenance cost of infrastructure, congestion, air and noise pollution.

Sounds like the entire city will become a toll road. Coincidentally, our own CBO looked at the idea of a pay-by-the-mile tax just last week, so this idea isn’t just being floated in Europe. Apparently the gas taxes we’re already paying (.36 cents a gallon in CA) aren’t sufficient. Finally in the recommendations section we get the kicker:

Phase II (2016 to 2020)
• Building on Phase I, proceed to the full and mandatory internalisation of external costs (including noise, local pollution and congestion on top of the mandatory recovery of wear and tear costs) for road and rail transport.

Funny, but I think “mandatory internalization of external costs” sounds a lot like an “imposed” mobility concept. I thought they said they wouldn’t do that to us just a few pages ago.

C&T has suffered other setbacks recently, one from predictable human baseness and the other from a competing strain of high-victim-card politics.

First the baseness.  Sensible Europeans realized back in 2009 that their C&T scheme, the EU Emission Trading System (ETS), wasn’t working.  From its 2005 inauguration to 2008, Eurocarbon emissions rose 1.9%.  But that’s not why the EU nations closed their carbon-trading registries in January, or why, as of last week, only six of the 30 national registries had reopened for business.

The reason for the dramatic mass closures was plain old theft.  The ETS had been plagued by fraudulent trading for some time; analysis following a big Europol bust in late 2009 indicated that as much as 90% of the trading volume in the previous 18 months had been generated by fraudulent traders, many of whom used the most basic of fraud methods, closed up shop, and skedaddled.  (H/t: CarbonTax.org)

There have been several IT attacks on the national registries as well, but a fake bomb threat in Prague in January, which cleared out the offices of the Czech national registry long enough for cyber thieves to steal thousands of carbon allowances, was the straw that put the camel in traction.  National registries shut down left and right.  By mid-February only one-fifth of them had resumed operation.  The ETS spot market is in a state of suspended animation, trading having ground to a halt through the attrition of fraud-leery traders.  Futures trading continues, with the price per tonne (metric ton) constant, as befits a wholly artificial commodity whose “value” depends entirely – most notably in a global recession – on the continuation of a government mandate.

Meanwhile, in North America, a state judge in January issued a tentative ruling to stay the implementation of California’s C&T scheme (one of the chief elements of Assembly Bill 32), scheduled for launch on 1 January 2012.  The proximate justification for this ruling – seemingly extraordinary for a Bay area judge – is that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) failed to properly evaluate the impact of the scheme as required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  Ironic as it might seem that the archest of arch environmentalists could be hoist on their own petard, the reason parses immediately.  The plaintiff bringing suit had a higher victim card to play.

There is a sense in which actual justice might be in view here.  It is quite true that the various schemes of the left for reordering mankind fall hardest on the poor – and environmental crusades are notorious for doing so.  The plaintiff in the case against CARB argues that a likely impact of implementing AB32 will be the siting of the state’s worst carbon “polluters” in poorer areas.  The plaintiff’s concerns are, of course, well founded; multiple factors drive emission-prone installations to poorer areas, and a C&T scheme will serve to reinforce them.

Naturally, if you don’t view carbon dioxide as a pollutant, you aren’t worried that the poor will be in danger if they live where emissions of it are higher by a tiny margin.  (Many carbon emitters do, it must be noted, emit other things too; part of the lawsuit’s argument is that CEQA requires looking at the totality of the environmental impact, which would include other types of emissions, some of which are less salubrious for human life.)

But the politics of this are both predictable and justifiable.  If ending up in the vicinity of carbon emissions is a “price,” why should our law ensure that the poor will have to pay it?

Given that C&T has all along been a rent-seeking scheme, it isn’t surprising that it has been so easy to exploit and attack.  The abstractness of its core “commodity” makes fraud virtually inevitable: unlike pork bellies or barrels of oil, it is never audited by the eventual delivery of tangible goods.  The trader is never held accountable to an end result that is meaningful to individuals, who can reject the scheme and the trader’s role in it – withhold their patronage from the trading system – if the outcome turns out to be unappealably lousy.  “Society,” the theoretical beneficiary, is stuck with the scheme, by government fiat, but has no meaningful way to count its profit or cost.

Sounds like a big pile of fraud, crony shenanigans, cynical diversion of funds, and unfair impact on the poor, just waiting to happen.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions” and as The Optimistic Conservative.  She writes a weekly column for Patheos.

WASHINGTON — Oscar nominee Josh Fox wants President Barack Obama to order a national moratorium on the natural gas drilling procedure call hydraulic fracturing.

Fox, nominated for his documentary “Gasland” about environmental problems associated with hydraulic fracturing, made his plea Thursday at a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol.

“The point is, that he has to wake up to this now,” Fox said. “We would like to educate him. We would like to bring this to him.”

Oh, yes. If there’s one thing the president needs it’s to have some encouragement to further shut down any development of domestic energy resources. And it looks like he’ll get an earful.

Gasland was nine parts fantasy with a few sprinkles of propaganda on top. Fox’s efforts to depict rural homes as ticking time bombs awaiting only the right spark to set off natural gas explosions was opportunistic and sensationalized. Are there homes in rural Pennsylvania (among others) where natural gas leaks out of the water faucets in homeowners’ sinks? Yes, indeed there are. I’ve seen it myself.

In an area scores of miles away from the site of any drilling in known history.

The lands above the Marcellus play are rich with natural gas. When you drill a water well for your home – going down a couple hundred feet to reach the aquifer – you will frequently disturb pockets of gas which then makes its way up to the surface. That’s just what happens when you drill in the ground out here for any reason.

I’ve toured the modern natural gas rigs in use today. They drill down not hundreds, but thousands of feet to reach the really rich deposits in the shale beds, and then turn to drill out horizontally from there. The drill holes use two and three nested layers of pipes, each of which is permanently sealed with cement and drilling mud to prevent gases from coming back up through the wells. The rigs themselves are built on vast insulated pads to catch any spills which may happen at the surface due to catastrophic cascading equipment failures. (An event which happens less frequently than blue moons.) And when the rig is finally done and the resources played out, they don’t even pull the pipes out of the ground. They seal them off forever to protect the environment.

And here’s the real kicker: to protect themselves from environmental lawsuits, energy companies have taken to inserting probes into the ground for miles around all proposed drill sites before the first drill bit digs into the ground. Guess what? In these areas, they found natural gas seeping out in almost all of the test sites and ground water before they even began work.

The ground is full of gas. That’s why we’re there looking for it. Trying to pretend that the entire area was free of it until some nasty energy company came along to drill may be a convenient way to pocket a big payday from a lawsuit, but it’s not a reflection of reality.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wears many hats. A number of them are ill-fitting and beyond the purview of big city mayor. Two years ago, wearing the hat of global warmist, Bloomberg proclaimed that climate change was a bigger threat than terrorism. Last year, he swapped that hat for one reading amateur cardiologist, as he embarked on a crusade to take salt shakers out of the hands of Americans who like their food with flavor.

His latest, and possibly silliest, headwear is that of undercover documentary maker. To demonstrate an indemonstrable connection between gun control and the shootings that occurred in Tucson several Saturdays back, Bloomberg sent a clandestine film crew to a gun show in Phoenix. One of his self-professed goals was to show

just how easy it is for anyone with a driver’s license to walk into a gun show and buy weapons used in the Tucson shooting.

One might rightly ask who footed the bill for Bloomberg’s “sting” operation, but a more trenchant question is why hizzoner thinks limiting legal access to weapons is the solution to ending crimes involving handguns. Maybe Bloomberg needs to scope out his hat collection again. If he does he will find one that reads co-founder of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. [Emphasis added]

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) reports that the majority of handguns used in crimes are obtained illegally. Most of these guns are not stolen—that’s a popular misconception—but they are acquired by illicit means. The methods used include “straw purchases,” when someone who may not legally acquire a firearm or wants to do so anonymously has a companion buy the gun on his behalf.

Oftentimes these illegal transactions are entered into willingly by unscrupulous gun store owners. If the nation is going to crack down on the sale of handguns to those prone to use them in crimes, this is where the investigation needs to begin. The ATF estimates that of the nation’s 124,000 retail licensed gun sellers, about 8% engage in these criminal practices.

As for Bloomberg, maybe he should focus more on the job he was elected to do than on solving the nation’s ills. Several weeks ago, about a dozen New Yorkers in need of emergency medical treatment died because of Bloomberg’s failure to make sure his sanitation department removed the snow from impassable streets. It would be reassuring to know the next time disaster strikes that the mayor is at home rather than out on some mission to save the planet.

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• Starbucks, Heinz, and Subway sign on to Bloomberg’s dubious salt reduction initiative
• New York restaurants will be required to make the grade AND reveal their GPA

California’s utilities are spending $548 million over seven years to subsidize consumer purchases of compact fluorescent lamps. But the benefits are turning out to be less than expected.

One reason is that bulbs have gotten so cheap that Californians buy more than they need and sock them away for future use. Another reason is that the bulbs are burning out faster than expected.

Here’s what the compact fluorescents are supposed to do in theory,

Here’s what happened at casa de Fausta: I went to Lowe’s, purchased a box of three CFs, replaced a burned-out incandescent that had been working well for four years with one of the CFs, and turned on the light.

The CF turned on, flickered, and died.

Until some good LEDs are readily available, I’ll keep using incandescents, thank you.

Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog.

Or is there perhaps just a bit more to the story?

The case in question involves the former energy giant Texaco, who entered into an agreement to drill for oil in Ecuador beginning in the 1970′s in partnership with the country’s state-run oil company Petroecuador. (Texaco was purchased by Chevron in 2001, inheriting the situation detailed here.) Having only a minority share in the resources, this arrangement continued until the early 90′s when the government of Ecuador “nationalized” the energy industry. Texaco was forced to pull out of the area, leaving the state-run company to continue drilling. At that time, Texaco further agreed to clean up any residual effects at their drill sites, which they did.

While that should have been the end of the story, an environmental activist group called the Amazon Defense Coalition (ADC) sprung up, seemingly created from whole cloth with the intent of reaching into Texaco’s deep pockets and seeing what they might find there. They even use a URL name of “texacotoxico” rather than anything to do with the Amazon or environmental concerns. Long story short, the group took Texaco to court in a small town in Ecuador and began proceedings to demand a $27B settlement for the alleged environmental harm. (Yes, that was “billion” with a “B.”)

The case has run into numerous delays and restarts. Since the American company had no holdings in country, ADC initially sought to extract the funds in the United States, but their first attempts met with defeat on a variety of legal issues. The challenges continued, with more damages being claimed by ADC until the current sum being demanded is in excess of $110B. These increased demands and claims of damage expanded through the last decade, even though Texaco / Chevron hadn’t been on site to collect a single barrel of oil for nearly twenty years and only the Ecuadorian government was extracting resources. The case will be coming up for a decision again early this year.

I couldn’t find a real estate agent to confirm this, but I believe $110B is roughly what you would need to buy Ecuador.

As each chapter of the story unfolded over the years a multitude of new wrinkles came to light.

In a related case, lawyer Cristobál Bonifaz – one original architect of the Texaco/Chevron lawsuit – brought claims of cancer and other maladies resulting from drilling contamination which were later dismissed in a San Francisco court as being “manufactured” and the court also observed that the lawyers’ lawsuit was “likely a smaller piece of some large scheme against [Chevron].”

The claim was allegedly supported by the results of a scientific study by expert biologist Charles Calmbacher, stating that the area was widely contaminated. Signed documents to that effect were submitted in court. However, when presented with the report as submitted, Mr. Calmbacher was perplexed, noting that the sheets with his signature on them seemed to have been attached to a totally different set of results.

The reports with his signature, [Calmbacher] said in the deposition, must have been written by someone else.

“I concluded that I did not see significant contamination that posed immediate threat to the environment or to humans or wildlife around it,”

In addition, there has been proof captured on film of the Ecuadorian judge in the case being intimidated by operatives for the plaintiffs to ensure that a favorable judgment was obtained. But this was only one of many incidents of fraud brought to light when the case was challenged in various courts in the United States.

A Federal Magistrate Judge in North Carolina wrote, “While this court is unfamiliar with the practices of the Ecuadorian judicial system, the court must believe that the concept of fraud is universal, and that what has blatantly occurred in this matter would in fact be considered fraud by any court. If such conduct does not amount to fraud in a particular country, then that country has larger problems than an oil spill.”

Responding to a request by Hot Air for comment on the upcoming case, Chevron Media Adviser Justin Higgs said,

“The lawsuit in Ecuador, intended to defraud Chevron, is concocted by American contingency-fee lawyers who seek to enrich themselves through dishonest means. Over the last year, events in U.S. Courts have exposed a pattern of fraud and misconduct on the part of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Chevron will fight this meritless case and we intend to hold accountable all of those who have knowingly participated in this unlawful scheme.”

At the bottom of it all, this suit smells to high heaven, plain and simple. We should know in the next few weeks or months what the latest decision holds, so stay tuned. We’ll be watching how this is handled and which groups in the United States are affiliating themselves with this Amazon Defense Coalition. We will continue to update you on the next set of results.

Now you can yell at Jazz for being a stupid, wrong-headed RINO even faster than by leaving a comment. Follow him on Twitter! (@JazzShaw)

First, Gerard recapped some of the highlights from the previous year.

In 2010, oil and natural gas companies created 57,000 new jobs in Pennsylvania and West Virginia alone as part of the Marcellus Shale natural gas development.

The number-one ranking in Gallup’s “Job Creation Index” belongs to North Dakota, thanks to its record-breaking oil production numbers.

Last year, oil and natural gas companies’ investments in U.S. capital projects for this decade hit the two trillion dollar mark.

Finally, this industry provides the U.S. Treasury, on average, with well over $95 million each day in taxes, rent, royalties and bonus payments.

As to the future, there are two major areas of concern which may be directly affected by the government: expansion of areas of access for energy exploration and taxation of the energy industry as a whole. The Obama administration is faced with an opportunity to move forward in expanding the economy, creating jobs and stimulating government revenue, or to give in to populist impulse and pursue regressive policies.

Regarding expanded energy access, a recent study by Wood-Mackenzie examined the potential for allowing expanded oil and gas exploration, as well as the effect higher taxation on the energy industry would have. The results will come as no surprise to students of history.

Wood Mackenzie’s analysis found that increasing access leads to a direct increase in domestic production, jobs, and government revenue. Whereas increasing taxes reduces production and jobs. It is also detrimental to government revenues five years into the future.

Exploring the details of this study are well worth the time, but they follow a solid historical pattern. Some of the numbers should still prove eye-opening.

If access is expanded:
Direct Employment Potential: 130,000 direct jobs are estimated to be created by 2020 and 150,000 by 2025
Indirect* Employment Potential: 330,000 indirect jobs are estimated to be created by 2020, growing to 380,000 by 2025

If access is restricted and taxation of the industry expanded:
Direct Employment Potential: An estimated 50,000 jobs lost in 2014, dropping to 15,000 in 2020 and 8,000 in 2025
Indirect Employment Potential: An estimated decrease in employment of 120,000 in 2014, 35,000 in 2020 and 20,000 in 2025

When government attempts to recoup losses by taxing productivity, they kill the goose which has produced vast quantities of golden eggs. For the energy industry in particular, if we restrict opportunities for productivity, those opportunities do not disappear… they migrate elsewhere, taking much needed jobs across various market sectors with them. But by allowing one of the most successful industry avenues in the nation to expand – while ensuring maximum safeguards against environmental impact – the result is a net plus for both the government and the private sector.

Recent restrictions on the issuance of new drilling permits by the current administration have already proven disastrous. As this report from Investor’s Business Daily demonstrates, government policy has a real time effect on productivity if handled unwisely.

Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the price of oil has rocketed 117% to $90.41 a barrel and gasoline has jumped 67% to $3.07 a gallon. In the 34 industrialized nations, oil imports have surged 34% in the last year to $790 billion. The U.S. alone has seen a $72 billion jump.

All this imperils a fragile recovery from the financial crisis. “Oil prices are entering a dangerous zone for the global economy,” says Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency.

Given the clear threat, it’s economically irrational to sit on our hands and fail to develop our own energy resources. At least 130 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas lie offshore, and hundreds of billions of barrels more are locked in shale deposits in the Northeast and West. Yet our policy remains leaving this wealth alone.

It’s a lot of material to cover, but two messages become clear. First, taxing our way out of poor government policy by attempting to target the more productive sectors of our economy will result in a net loss of both government revenue and jobs. Second, we have the resources available which will allow the private sector to produce the needed boost to our economy which the federal government can not. But the government itself can thwart this recovery if it submits to what passes for good political headlines.

DISCLOSURE: The author was invited to attend this conference with transportation and accommodation costs supplied by API. No other financial considerations were offered or accepted. There was no agreement to publish anything regarding the conference and API was not offered any preview of published material nor the opportunity to comment on it prior to publication.

Now you can yell at Jazz for being a stupid, wrong-headed RINO even faster than just by leaving a comment. Follow him on Twitter! @JazzShaw

There is a problem with this perfect scheme, however. Cash-strapped Northeasterners, reverting to their infamous thrift (and with businesses closing to boot), are using a lot less electricity than they were a couple of years ago.  A whole lot less.  In fact, the results from the latest sale of RGGI carbon dioxide permits were abysmal: only 57% of those on offer in the RGGI exchange sold, and the selling price was the minimum allowable bid of $1.86 per unit. The reason is simple:  electricity use is way, way down in the Northeast.  The power industry doesn’t need all the CO2 units being offered.

Environmentalists, who ought to be ecstatic, can still kvetch. The diversion of the RGGI funds already deposited with the states is problematic: instead of being used for energy-salvation measures, they are being used to pay for schools and other state expenses. One environmental activist is quoted as follows:

Some environmentalists who support the multistate pact agree that without the investment in programs that cut energy use and create green jobs, the initiative’s potential economic benefit becomes an expense.

“There’s a direct consequence for taking this money,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club. “Families are going to pay higher energy bills this winter if they didn’t weatherize their homes.”

It’s worth briefly unpacking this logic. Mr. Tittel’s statement – “Families are going to pay higher energy bills this winter if they didn’t weatherize their homes” – is a truism independent of whether there is a RGGI or not.  If you weatherize your home, you will pay lower energy bills than if you don’t weatherize your home.  There could be no RGGI at all, and that would still be true.

The differences with RGGI are the following:

1. Energy bills are higher, regardless of whether you weatherize or not.

2.  Additional money goes to the state treasuries, with RGGI in effect.  The additional amount doesn’t deliver more electricity to you, or deliver it better.  You just pay more per unit than you did before, and the state gets a new income stream.

You may get a home weatherization out of the deal, but you could have gotten that anyway, without RGGI.  Either way, you’re paying for it; the difference lies in who extracts income from the process, and how.

It’s in the nature of politics that money sitting around in a fund becomes the target of public spenders.  It’s in the nature of economics that when people have less income, but things cost them more, they buy less of those things.  Nevertheless, it’s funny how quickly politics and economics have kicked in to torpedo RGGI, our nation’s grandest (so far) carbon rent-seeking scheme.

Make no mistake:  carbon-credit schemes are about generating income.  They are not about reducing emissions until we can declare victory; their purpose is to institute a method for government and interest groups to perpetually manipulate and make money off of humanity’s most basic interactions with the environment.

Think of it this way.  Option One: you could weatherize your home, and pay lower utility bills.  But why do that, when with Option Two, you could arrange for the government to make the power industry pay it a new surcharge for the authorization to generate power; a move that raises your energy bills (and all your other bills, since everyone you buy anything from uses energy) to cover the surcharge, but also puts more money in the state kitty, some of which might be used to weatherize your home?  Is there any question that Option Two is preferable?  Higher costs overall, money going to the government, special interests rather than the market  dictating the system’s premises – and still you have the possibility, although not the guarantee, of course, of a home weatherization.  What’s not to love?

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions” and as The Optimistic Conservative.  She writes a weekly column for Patheos.

But I do impute such a desire to the makers of the “No Pressure” video. In their unapologetic apology for the video, they display neither contrition for the theme of pulverizing those who disagree with them, nor understanding that it’s their inverted “moral” justification for doing so that’s the problem.  It’s not the contrived images, per se, that ought to disturb us, it’s the ideology behind them.

As several commenters pointed out at Ed’s post, the proposition of the video is Nazism.  It’s not “like” Nazism – it is Nazism.  This is partly because a tortured idea of environmental-ecological hygiene was a strong element in Nazism.  But that’s not the most important reason.  The “No Pressure” video’s proposition is Nazism because it implies a moral justification for “problematic” humans being exterminated.  It shows the global-warming skeptics dying because they “deserve it” – because they interfere with realization of the urgent collective idea.

This is Nazism.  It is the very heart of Nazism.  It is why Nazism produced euthanasia of the old and disabled, why it justified ghastly eugenic experiments on “problematic” humans, and why it led to the Holocaust of the Jews.

Note this well: Nazism did not do this by preaching in favor of euthanasia, of homicidal eugenic experimentation, or of slaughtering Jews.  Nazism was always publicly coy about the implications of its vicious themes.  It achieved its real outcomes, rather, by first positing a “utopian” condition (one with a substantial element of eco-harmony alongside the “racial hygiene”); by then supposing a systemic racial and political menace to it; and by demonizing and dehumanizing those who were held to be interfering with the realization of the utopia. Nazism further assumed a mystical urgency to the problem, which justified limiting the people’s freedoms, requiring certain involuntary actions and heroic sacrifices from them, and subjecting some of the people to unequal treatment.

It does not matter that environmental activists who achieve public prominence and political influence today aren’t preaching a Final Solution.  The Nazis didn’t preach one either, nor did Germans vote for them in the hope of one.  What the Nazis’ public rhetoric did was justify the Final Solution, along with the other hideous undertakings of the Nazi state.  Their public rhetorical campaign laid the foundation for their moral decisions behind closed doors.

The horrific decisions themselves were not featured in public communications.  They were not advocated explicitly or introduced for national debate.  Yet they were still adopted and executed by the national government.  And this is important: in Nazi propaganda – in what we would today call the Nazis’ “information campaign” – there could be found no countervailing affirmation of the irreducible moral standing of the “problematic” humans.  In word and picture, the “problematic” humans were portrayed solely in terms of their “vile” nature, as if they were a virus infecting society, and as if they should be treated as such.

I’m sure that most environmental radicals are not personally in favor of blowing away their critics.  Most of them would repudiate such an idea with repugnance.  I understand that.  But their intellectual idea is an absolutist one; it does not admit of the possibility that their fellow humans are owed the right to live by their own moral lights in this matter, just because they are human.  We are all human, in fact.  Being human makes each of us prone to error, something the long parade of errors and unraveling assertions in the history of AGW advocacy has amply demonstrated.  A moral society does not assume error and punish preemptively; it waits to establish error, by process of law and investigative iteration; and it seeks accommodation and compromise when neither absolute truth nor incontrovertible error can be objectively established.

We are assuredly living under the latter conditions today, when it comes to the AGW/Climate Change/Climate Disruption proposition.  There may well be some amount of anthropogenic global warming, although theoretical certainty has persistently been greater than unassailable evidence in that regard.  But skepticism that human carbon emissions are having a cataclysmic effect on “the planet” is as fully justified as was skepticism that Jews and other substandard humans constituted a mongrelizing infestation of a pristine, ecologically harmonious Aryan super-race.

The central moral vulnerability of radical environmentalism is that it does exactly what the Nazis did:  it advances arguments that would justify a wildly hubristic, fabulist attitude about our fellow humans; and it never mitigates the force of that rhetorical theme with an uncompromising commitment to the moral right of those fellow humans to their lives and liberty.

This latter form of mitigation is not a given in any time or place.  It cannot be left to operate on its own, because it doesn’t.  The moral right to life and liberty has been defined out of effective existence by every collectivist ideology and most forms of autocracy.  The most epic, tragic fool is the one who suggests, in sophomoric fashion, that people ought to “lighten up” about fanatical ideologues and their cavalier dismissal of the moral rights of others.

On this topic, there is under no circumstances an obligation to “lighten up.”  We either acknowledge instead the obligation to be weighed down with the burden of vigilance, or we end up being ruled by people who think it’s funny and satisfying to imagine us being pulverized.  The step from that to actually killing people, in the name of an ideological morality, has already been taken, and more than once in the last century.  No one who prescribes disregarding that history can be taken seriously.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

Of course, only if you’re a Washington Post writer does it seem ironic to you that manufacturers move their plants to where taxes are lower and all employer costs cheaper.  But the article has other unintended ironies – or, at least, fatuous and utterly unexamined statements.  The most important one occurs in paragraph 6, near the beginning, and it comes in for critical scrutiny not at all.  In fact, it’s expressed in vague, impressionistic terms that ought to get a journalist horsewhipped by a serious editor.  Here’s what WaPo tells us about the US decision to force the phase-out of the incandescent bulb:

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense.

Savor that for a moment.  These 14 words are the sum total of the justification offered in the WaPo narrative for all the economic perturbation the story then proceeds to describe.  The climax of the tale is a bunch of Americans losing their manufacturing jobs, as a whole industry is reorganized and transformed.  But WaPo’s writers examine everything about this story except the original reasoning for the political decision.

We are left to wonder what exactly “immense” means, savings-wise.  One almost begins to suspect, given the fleeting nature of the allusion to it, that we’re not supposed to wonder.  But wonder we must, if our minds are unruly:  when it comes to immensity, there’s no hint of a definition or supporting documentation.

Fortunately, there is always the online web search.  Here’s what I unearthed:

1. The common figure used to predict carbon-emission savings, if every household in America switches from incandescent bulbs to CFLs, is 90 billion pounds per year.  This is a narrow, first-order assessment: it doesn’t take into account the life-cycle differences there may be in the carbon footprints of incandescent bulbs versus CFLs, in terms of what it takes to manufacture or dispose of them.  It considers the reduction in carbon emissions incident to household lighting use.  This estimate does not consider savings from businesses and public installations converting to CFLs, which would presumably increase the number by as much as 100%.  We’ll look only at the household number, however.  For ease of comparison, we can convert it to 45 million tons of carbon per year.

2.  The total amount of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere is, on average, about 720 billion tons.

3.  Humans now contribute 6-7 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere per year.

4.  As the spirited reader discussion at the link above highlights, numbers for “carbon” are smaller than numbers for the compound “carbon dioxide.”  It must also be pointed out that there is a difference between the American (short) ton of 2000 pounds and the metric ton (or tonne) of 2204 pounds, or 1000 kilos.  I have taken “ton” at face value and assumed it to mean the American short ton wherever I found it, while assuming tonne means metric ton.  But if you want to convert everything to metric tons, please do.  Meanwhile, those who prefer to deal in tons of the compound (CO2) can multiply the carbon numbers by a factor of 3.66.  Doing that does produce figures that are even more immense.

6.  Given the immensity of the numbers involved, it’s unlikely that picking one standard over another will seriously misrepresent the climax that readers know we’re building toward here.  The mathematically-inclined have already noted that 45 million is, frankly, way smaller than either 720 billion or 6 billion.  We could convert these figures to metric tons or multiply them by 3.66, and the relationship would remain the same.

It turns out that reducing America’s carbon emissions by 45 million tons per year amounts to a reduction of 0.75% from the lower global emissions figure of 6 billion tons.  It’s a reduction of 0.64% from 7 billion tons.  And it represents 0.006% of the total carbon routinely present in the atmosphere.

7.  “Immense” is a relative characterization.  45 million is a big number, and is especially impressive when it’s written out with a lot of zeros:  45,000,000.  90 billon – or 90,000,000,000 – is even more impressive; but of course, it describes the same weight as 45 million if you change the unit of measurement.  Immense, however, in this case means “fart in a thunderstorm.”  Double the 45 million to 90 million, to include emission savings for industry and public installations, and you have a slightly bigger fart in a thunderstorm.

So, for the sake of a fart in a thunderstorm, the bulb-makers of Winchester, Virginia are this month joining the other Americans who have lost their bulb-making jobs.  The free market never produces this kind of result.  It takes politics to do this to people.  The lesson in politics is beautifully simple:  take a questionable premise; steep it in demagoguery and make unthinking adherence to it a litmus test; assert it repeatedly – preferably using impressive but unparsable adjectives – as established fact; and then, when you’ve killed people’s jobs by acting urgently on your unexamined premise, send Washington Post reporters to write a solicitous puff piece on how sad and ironic it is for them.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

That is, in fact, what she said: 1 degree Celsius.  Somebody’s bound to have it recorded somewhere.  I don’t remember how many times she said it, but it was more than once.  I’m sure it was simply a burble, an inadvertent misstatement, because as I confirmed later on the web, the claimed temperature increase is 1 degree Fahrenheit, not 1 degree Celsius.  This is a significant difference in the scope of the claim, of course, degrees Fahrenheit representing smaller increments than degrees Celsius (1 degree F being about 0.55 degrees C).  The increase in global average temperatures thus sounds a whole lot like the 0.6C advertised to us over the last decade, until discrepancies in NOAA’s data processing and the revelation of ClimateGate-o-List gave us the parody-ready expression “hide the decline.”

But like all the unequivocal assertions periodically made about “global warming,” this newest one reverts automatically, on the slightest examination, to either banal meaninglessness or probable falsehood.  The verbal slip of “Celsius” versus “Fahrenheit” just seems emblematic of the eager, relentless carelessness with which the case is regularly made to the public.

For one thing, the statement “the earth is warming up” is not the same thing as saying “human activity is causing the earth to warm,” nor does it have any meaning at all outside of some climatologically relevant context.  (The earth warms up – and then cools down – virtually every day of the year over most of its surface.)

I suspect a good 7 out of 10 skeptics of anthropogenic global warming would stipulate that there does seem to be fairly good evidence of a slight increase in average recorded global temperatures over the last 50 years.  But we could say that about multiple 50-year periods in the last several thousand years – and indeed, we need only extend our data set back another 50 to discover that the last 50 years have not seen “warming” more extensive than the previous 50 years, when measured by recorded temperature data.

Trumpeting the findings of the 300 scientists as incontrovertible evidence of “global warming” amounts to chopping logic and burying premises for rhetorical effect.  Unfortunately for the narrow substance of the claim, there are also good reasons to doubt its particulars.  For one thing, as this post outlines, much of the evidence it offers is either cherry-picked or anecdotal.  Its principal observations don’t show a linear trend (e.g., temperatures don’t show a linear upward trend), begging the indispensable question of what temperatures were doing before the last 50 years.  The memory of the “hockey stick graph” is fresh enough in our minds that we won’t blindly accept a 50-year cut-off without skepticism about the longer-term trend being ignored.

But the methodology behind the NOAA data used for the new study also remains questionable.  This more critical piece provides an outline of concerns, citing (among several) one analysis that came to this conclusion:

NOAA “systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” explained climate researchers Joseph D’Aleo and Michael Smith in a study published by the Science and Public Policy Institute. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs.”

Newman also links to this eye-opening post by Anthony Watts – at whose blog it was famously demonstrated that the CRU climatologists were, in fact, using data-norming to “hide the decline” – which shows the instances of literal data interpolation that ought to make us take to the streets with torches and pitchforks.  Where there aren’t local sensors to receive data from – e.g., in parts of Africa, Canada, and Greenland – NOAA has been basically making up temperature data as if there were sensors in place.  Surprise, surprise:  where the data points are interpolated, the trend of “observations” is toward higher temperatures.  As Watts drily notes:

There seems to be an inverse correlation between the number of [actual] stations and warming – more stations in a 5×5 degree grid and less warming is observed.

Interpolation is not, per se, a criminal practice in scientific procedures.  But it should certainly be clarified and highlighted when advocates propose to make public policy based on the conclusions drawn from it.  The fact is that we don’t know what the temperatures were in a number of locations where NOAA has arbitrarily assigned values.  To call a data set that includes this form of input “incontrovertible evidence” is to turn empiricism and even sanity itself on their heads.

No part of the argument seems to remain intact under scrutiny.  The loss of Antarctic ice, for example, is not by any means established as a seminal trend.  The Antarctic seems, in fact, to be adding ice, even as some of its edges, in some areas, recede.  But that isn’t the whole story either:  apparently, the introduction of space-based magnetic sensors is confusing the picture, and may be exaggerating the amount of icepack recession in these edge areas.

Meanwhile, as pointed out here, the margin of error in the Antarctic temperature data used by NASA – 2-3 degrees Celsius – is too great for a temperature increase of less than that margin to be validated.  With a margin of error that big, any depiction of a temperature trend that’s based on the reported observations is an arbitrary product of scientist bias.  Visit the reader comments at this post for a good discussion of why icepack recession is not directly correlated with temperature in this part of the world anyway.  Where temperatures never rise above freezing, ice loss is not due to the melting we traditionally think of – just as, in the Himalayas, icepack loss correlates much more strongly to solar radiation than to ambient air temperature.

Whenever you do even the smallest amount of research, you discover that the most repetitive claims being touted as AGW/CC “science” are worse than junk science:  they are like fairy tales for toddlers.  The Bugs Bunny-Roadrunner Hour I used to watch as a kid offered more empiricism and integrity.  Given the numerous holes and guesses infesting our current temperature databases, I assess that the best we can truthfully say is that it looks like there’s been a slight rise in the globally-averaged temperature in the past half-century, if we consider solely the numbers offered from those databases – but ultimately, we can’t be absolutely sure.

There are too many places on earth that still haven’t been measured comprehensively over time – and there’s been too little strictness in ensuring identical measuring conditions over time, even where we do have comprehensive observations.  Meanwhile, this slight rise in temperature, if it is one, is neither unique nor obviously a unidirectional trend, because we’ve seen temperatures go up and down in a cyclical manner before.  Insisting that our average temperatures are being influenced by anthropogenic carbon emissions further ignores the fact that we don’t even have a means of accurately detecting and recording the “greenhouse gas feedback process” on which the whole AGW/CC theory depends, much less identifying the precise impact on this posited process of the slight amount of terrestrial carbon emissions for which humans are responsible.

We really don’t know enough for certain to start ordering each other around, as with Cap-and-Trade legislation, EPA regulations, and judicial rulings.  That’s the bottom line.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.