Kimberly Strassel comments in the WSJ on the EPA dust-up we discussed the other day, first quoting the global warming skeptic’s boss at the agency telling him to sit down and shut up in his dissent on cap and trade:
“The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision…I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office…With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”…
the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both “the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded.” In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin’s study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.
Perhaps we should just take the advice of Paul Krugman and stop being “deniers” and “traitors” — or perhaps implement this from Tom Friedman: “A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic…It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.” What impels these men to such righteous fervor, and to such apparent hysteria at dissent?
Paul Krugman comments on cap and trade and finds “treason” among the global warming “deniers”:
the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course…
researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today…
Gosh! Other government reports, suppressed by the government, draw very different conclusions. And it certainly seems that global cooling has been going on for some time, likely as a result of solar activity. For the record, we’re skeptical of AGM because an increase of 100ppm in CO2 causing such catastrophic problems just doesn’t pass the test of common sense, in our opinion. Indeed, it has been argued that increases in CO2 are an effect of rising temperatures, not the cause. We could be wrong of course, but Krugman’s rather hysterical tone doesn’t help the hypothesis he’s trying to sell.
Cap and trade: a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist?
Environmentalism is a religion of sorts, and an unreformed religion at that. (Those sorts of believers are capable of endless trouble, as we all know.) Chief among its sins is man-made global warming — allegedly caused by CO2’s teeny-tiny increase — for which America must be punished. No matter that China and India are the major contributors to increases at this point. In the Obama administration, Gaia must be served and dissent is clearly not welcome. HT: Powerline
We understand that all administrations want to speak with a coherent voice, and controlling the bureaucracies is one element of that, but any bill that is (a) a “huge tax” according to Warren Buffett; (b) paradoxically also a “jobs bill” according to Obama; and (c) something that is needed to “save our planet” in Obama’s words deserves full and open debate — not evidence of the crass suppression of opposing views.
You can’t look at the chart above without thinking that America has lost its mind. The intergenerational theft from our children and grandchildren is evidence of insanity or idiocy. James Lewis in The American Thinker makes some points that have appeared here as well:
As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean?…
Or look at the global warming farce, still hotly pursued by the political classes in Europe and this country, although the Australians seem to be coming to their senses. China now has more millionaires than the UK, because they use all their resources, like coal, to fire their industrial plants. They will never sacrifice a single luxury car to the cap and trade fraud. Neither will India. China and India have been under the thumb of egomaniacal socialists (in the case of India) and communists (in the case of China). They’ve been there, done that, seen the suffering…
No wonder those Chinese college students fell all over themselves with laughter when Timothy Geithner assured them that Obama would never spend the United States into debt. What an idiot! They laughed because Geithner’s stupidity or mendacity was too obvious for words…
On the last point, health care, it is very hard to believe that Americans are that stupid or gullible. There are fewer than 800,000 doctors in the US. The Obama plan intends to provide insurance to 47 million additional people. So there is a 15% increase in potential demand from physicians, and a 0% increase in supply. Whether you support Obama or not, increasing demand while supply remains constant raises prices, the opposite of what Obama claims. It’s just not possible to do what he says he wants — price control regimes always result in rationing, lower quality, and black markets — but no one seems to care (at least so far).
Here’s the thing, perhaps: The young are disconnected from the past, and live in a world of digital utopian images. They don’t remember a hard past. So they are in the process of creating a hard future. This seems to us one of the greatest avoidable tragedies in history. Sigh.
More on the folly that is called cap and trade from Bloomberg:
America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. Under the Waxman-Markey climate bill that may be voted on today by the U.S. House, refiners would have to buy allowances for carbon dioxide spewed from their plants and from vehicles when motorists burn their fuel. Imports would need permits only for the latter, which ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said would create a competitive imbalance.
“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. Houston-based ConocoPhillips has the second-largest U.S. refining capacity.
The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported…One in six U.S. refineries probably would close by 2020 as the cost of carbon allowances erases profits, according to the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group known as API. Carbon permits would add 77 cents a gallon to the price of gasoline
So what? Who cares anymore in the ridiculous TV show that is called America? Who cares if cap and trade won’t even address any real problems, and creates incentives that are precisely the opposite of its stated goals? Don’t bother us. We’re America and we’re sleeping.
It is perhaps trite to say that the young today don’t know what it was like in the old days, and how far we’ve come. But what they don’t know can cost us money, since they tend to favor trendy and expensive environmental policy foolishness. This group apparently includes the current President. Here are some excerpts from a wonderfully entertaining piece by Jack Dini in the American Thinker — it notes, for example, that pollution levels in China’s major cities are up to 50 times higher than in LA:
No American city is among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution according to the World Bank…seven of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in China. Of the ten cities in the world with the highest levels of air pollution, three are in India…
China has some of the worst pollution problems in the world. Nearly two-thirds of China’s 343 major cities currently fail to meet the nation’s air quality standards. Pollution levels in China’s major cities are 10 to 50 times higher than the worst smoggy day in Los Angeles. The twenty fastest growing cities in the world are all in China…
The combined carbon dioxide emissions from the 850 new coal-fired power plants that China and India are building between now and 2012 are five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords. So you can put in all those curly light bulbs and drive all the Priuses you want: India just ate that for breakfast and China will eat the next round of conservation for lunch…
India is also growing rapidly, and its major cities experience particulate levels often eight to ten times higher than the worst American cities. India is the fourth-most coal dependent country in the world and has enough reserves to last for the next 100 years. Carbon emissions in India are rising faster than nearly every other country on the planet. Between 1980 and 2006, India’s carbon output increased by 341%, compared to 321% for China, 103% for Brazil 238% for Indonesia and 272% for Pakistan…
rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions-because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still…
You recall then-Senator Obama’s clueless statements about China last summer: “Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure…vastly the superior to us now.” (Apparently their infrastructure spending excluded pollution control equipment.) This is the genius behind the absurdity of cap and trade. Yikes!
The Dinocrat’s grandparents were born into the hardscrabble America of the late 19th century. Half the people were farmers and almost no one was rich. It was a world of short lives, a world without cars, telephones, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, access to books, and often without running water and indoor plumbing. News came sporadically and late if it came at all. The Dinocrat’s grandchildren experience a generally much richer America of far greater longevity, a world of instant communications among everyone on the planet, and instant access to a global encyclopedia of immeasurable size. Every kid with his cell phone has far greater resources at his fingertips to broadcast and receive the news of the world than were ever available to Edward R. Morrow.
It is a world of great promise, but also of considerable peril, as we have discussed on many occasions. More has changed in the last 130 years in terms of population, long life, prosperity, communications, available knowledge, technology, and global reach than in any comparable period of human history. It is perhaps trivial to say, but it is also true: we do not understand the vast complexity that has grown up about us. The complexity of the modern world has overtaken our ability to understand it, and this creates instability — how much instability is a little hard to say at the moment.
Meanwhile, instability comes from another angle as well. Any ideology that insists on the literal truth of books that are millennia out of date is ipso factoat war with the modern world. It is an inevitable conflict. It is unknown at this time whether George Bush’s ambitious but ahistorical approach to solving the problem will have any lasting impact on the matter. What seems clear to us is that an unambiguous understanding and defense of the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment values that underpin our freedom and prosperity is necessary for America and the West to make it through the 21st century in a form recognizable to our forbears. At the moment it looks somewhat unlikely that the Western world will pass this test.
The modernness of the modern world is a thing that we do not understand. It has all happened so fast. The proper reaction to so much change in so short a time is modesty. Instead we have just the opposite. In Europe there are substantial elements of the population who would like to see the modern world destroyed. In the US, many people want “change” at an even more accelerated pace, but many of the changes they are getting are a fantasy — the numbers just don’t add up. Maybe we’ll muddle through, but a train wreck of some sort seems likelier to us at the moment. Are we unduly pessimistic?
“I face this challenge with profound humility…I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this…was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”
As Bill Buckley said: “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” Too late for that now.
As a liberal columnist friend of ours observed, Obama is in many ways the “generic Democrat” you see in opinion polls. Certainly his views seem to be typical of the left of the Democratic Party. What distinguishes Obama is his audacity — his remarkable and openly expressed grandiose sense of destiny. Any man who produces an autobiography at the age of 33 should never be underestimated.
We previously noted the ridiculous EPA ruling that CO2, a gas that is necessary for human life, is now to be considered dangerous. Here’s what the Obama administration is really up to. Ed Markey: “Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them.”WSJ:
carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. This so-called “endangerment finding” sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate.
This is a momentous decision that has the potential to affect the daily life of every American, yet most of the media barely noticed, and those that did largely applauded. When America’s Founders revolted against “taxation without representation,” this is precisely the kind of kingly diktat they had in mind.
Michigan Democrat John Dingell helped to write the Clean Air Act, as well as its 1990 revision, and he says neither was meant to apply to carbon. But in 2007 five members of the Supreme Court followed the environmental polls and ordered the EPA to determine if CO2 qualified as a “pollutant.” The Bush Administration prudently slow-walked the decision. As Peter Glaser, an environmental lawyer at Troutman Sanders, told Congress in 2008, “The country will experience years, if not decades, of regulatory agony, as EPA will be required to undertake numerous, controversial, time-consuming, expensive and difficult regulatory proceedings, all of which ultimately will be litigated.”
The Obama EPA has now opened this Pandora’s box. The centerpiece of the Clean Air Act is something called the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS, under which the EPA decides the appropriate atmospheric concentration of a given air pollutant. Under this law the states must adopt measures to meet a NAAQS goal, and the costs cannot be considered. For global warming, this is going to be a hugely expensive futility parade.
Greenhouse gases mix in the atmosphere, and it doesn’t matter where they come from. A ton of emissions from Ohio has the same effect on global CO2 as a ton emitted in China; and even if Ohio figured out a way to reduce its emissions to zero, it would still have no control over the carbon content in its ambient air. But under the law, EPA would be required to severely punish Ohio — and every state — for not complying with NAAQS…
Hundreds of thousands of currently unregulated sources will suddenly be subject to the EPA’s preconstruction permitting and review, including schools, hospitals, malls, restaurants, farms and colleges. According to EPA, the average permit today takes 866 hours for a source to prepare, and 301 hours for EPA to process…For now, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claims her agency will only target cars and trucks.
If industries object to all this, they could become particular targets of punitive regulation. It is noteworthy that Congressman Ed Markey was so open about how government coercion would work: “Industries across the country will just have to gauge for themselves how lucky they feel if they kill legislation in terms of how the EPA process will include them.” Swell country.
The Obama administration is nothing if not fashionably in tune with the campus orthodoxy of the moment. Here are some thoughts from the US Energy Secretary, of all people:
“I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent — I remember this number — one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will — some of them will disappear…
(sea levels) could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that…Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is — this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous”
Britain still might be a little ahead of us in the inanity department, however. Their fashionable scientists say things like this: “We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend toward fatness, and recognize it as a key factor in the battle to reduce (carbon) emissions and slow climate change”…
The WSJ says that carbon dioxide has been declared dangerous by the US government. Carbon dioxide is present in a minuscule amount (380 parts per million) in the atmosphere and is absolutely essential to human life:
The Obama administration declared Friday that carbon dioxide and five other industrial emissions threaten the planet…The Environmental Protection Agency finding that the emissions endanger “the health and welfare of current and future generations” is “the first formal recognition by the U.S. government of the threats posed by climate change”…The finding could touch every corner of Americans’ lives, from the types of cars they drive to the homes they build. Along with carbon dioxide, the EPA named methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride as deleterious to the environment.
You may not recall that carbon dioxide is essential to human life, because it is essential to plant life. In the process of photosynthesis, six molecules of water plus six molecules of carbon dioxide produce one molecule of sugar plus six molecules of oxygen. Thus plants grow, and so man can live. But the US government considers it dangerous. So it goes.
As for methane, one of the other now-dangerous gases, we have commented on occasion here and there about livestock flatulence. One might draw a comparison with what’s now coming out of the EPA now, but that would be unbecoming.
China is aggressively stimulating its economy through the banking sector, a source of previous problems and concerns. It appears to be working. Bloomberg:
The People’s Bank of China “will implement moderately loose monetary policy and maintain the continuity and stability of policy,” the central bank said on its Web site today. It pledged “ample liquidity” to “ensure money supply and loan growth meet economic development needs.”…
New loans rose to 1.89 trillion yuan ($277 billion) in March, the central bank said yesterday. M2, the broadest measure of money supply, grew 25.5 percent, the most since Bloomberg began compiling data in 1998 and more than the 21.5 percent median estimate in a survey of 12 economists. China’s industrial production climbed 8.3 percent from a year earlier in March and consumer demand grew “relatively rapidly” in the first quarter, adding to signs that the government’s 4 trillion yuan stimulus plan is taking effect…
China’s banks, which are mostly state-owned, have already met the bulk of the government’s target of at least 5 trillion yuan of new loans this year. Lending may top that level by as much as 3 trillion yuan…Commercial banks’ bad-loan ratio was 2.45 percent at the end of 2008, according to the regulator. The ratio was more than 20 percent in 2003, before the government completed a cleanup of the banking system that cost more $500 billion.
The stimulus has had an effect on the market, which has been recovering recently from its dramatic plunge from the stratospheric Roaring Twenties level of 2007.
Reversing its role as the world’s fastest-growing buyer of United States Treasuries and other foreign bonds, the Chinese government actually sold bonds heavily in January and February before resuming purchases in March, according to data released during the weekend by China’s central bank. China’s foreign reserves grew in the first quarter of this year at the slowest pace in nearly eight years, edging up $7.7 billion, compared with a record increase of $153.9 billion in the same quarter last year.
China has lent vast sums to the United States — roughly two-thirds of the central bank’s $1.95 trillion in foreign reserves are believed to be in American securities. But the Chinese government now finances a dwindling percentage of new American mortgages and government borrowing. In the last two months, Premier Wen Jiabao and other Chinese officials have expressed growing nervousness about their country’s huge exposure to America’s financial well-being.
It’s sad to say, but America appears to be on the decline, with its screwy budget priorities and wild, unsupportable entitlement programs. China appears to be headed in a very different direction — this story about the CEO of BYD, Wang Chuan-Fu, makes China’s development seem a little like that of the US a century or more ago.
The AP reports that the Obama administration’s science adviser, who has incorrectly predicted various disasters for three decades now, is seriously behind the times:
The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air. John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays…
“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.” Holdren outlined several “tipping points” involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said. Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”
Holdren ought to get with the new program before it is too late: blame technology, industry, coal miners, bankers in stovepipe hats, indoor plumbing, prosperity and progress for man-made global cooling. As we’ve discussed in the past, he had better start getting with the program before a Maunder Minimum catches up with him.
The other day we saw Miss and Mrs outlawed in Europe. Now they’re using spy planes and thermal imaging to spy inside people’s homes. It’s supposed to save maybe £380 a year. Daily Mail:
snooping on the public has reached new heights with local authorities putting spy planes in the air to snoop on homeowners who are wasting too much energy. Thermal imaging cameras are being used to create colour-coded maps which will enable council officers to identify offenders and pay them a visit to educate them about the harm to the environment and measures they can take…
More than half the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the domestic sector, which includes property and transport. Almost 60 per cent of a household’s heat is lost through uninsulated walls, lofts and windows, costing the average home £380 a year.
(If they really want to solve the problem, why aren’t they spying on the cows in the UK’s barns?) What else will government be using such means to snoop about and then show up at your house to give you uninvited lectures for your own good?
On the more conservative side, the Labour Party is being chided for a “pathological inability to accept fiscal responsibility,” Obama administration spending is described as the “road to hell,” and Obama’s ratings are down 14%. But the side of ever more intrusive government still seems to be winning by quite a lot, does it not?
This site is a fan of Stephen Pinker. Here he discusses the decline in violence the developed world, particularly in the West:
The greatest current conflicts in the world are the result of the clash between traditional societies and modernity. (We’re not doing so well in maintaining the Enlightenment values that make possible the modern world, by the way.) In any event, modernity is likely to triumph over incompatible tribalism one way or another. It’s a pity that the urgently needed religious Reformation seems to continue to lie far in the future, since not only would violence decrease, as Pinker says, but the quality of life for over a billion people would vastly improve. (HT: CJ)
My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.
There are many lessons to be drawn from the sub-prime debacle and all the awful things that have flowed from it. One of them is not to believe computer models over common sense. In the land of sub-prime, the computer models the rating agencies used to rate garbage AAA were just nuts. But they had a superficially plausible narrative line, and people had a vested interest in believing they were true. This is also true of the global warming issue, as well as most bubbles throughout history.
In science it is known that data sometimes get bent and scientists get corrupted in pursuit of a dream. We should apply the same kind of skepticism to the global warming bubble as should have applied to the housing bubble or the oil bubble. There’s plenty of mitigating evidence after all. It would be a pity not to learn from our mistakes.
The severity of damaging human-induced climate change depends not only on the magnitude of the change but also on the potential for irreversibility. This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.
So we now know what the next graph will look like. Whew! Time to sell the mukluks on eBay. (HT: Ace)
as long as we continue to depend on dirty fossil fuels like coal and oil to meet our energy needs, and dump 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, we move closer and closer to several dangerous tipping points which scientists have repeatedly warned -– again just yesterday –- will threaten to make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable destruction of the conditions that make human civilization possible on this planet.
No doubt the majority in Congress will find Mr. Gore’s logic compelling. However, this is the same Congress that boldly ventures into self-parody with its plans for economic stimulus.
When it comes to global warming or cooling, there’s the view above and the view below. Take your pick.
As of this moment, the politico-scientific consensus seems still apparently tipped just a bit towards warming, though frosty 2008 has seen a serious questioning of that view. We might do well to remember what the National Academy of Sciences said just thirty years ago, when the consensus was very different: “In geological prospective, the case for cooling is strong…If this interglacial age lasts no longer than a dozen earlier ones in the past million years, as recorded in deep sea sediments, we may reasonably suppose the world is about due to slide into the next ice age.” (HT: Powerline)
Final question: how much do you care about global warming when you are worried about the possibility of losing your job? Answer: global what?
James Hansen has had a lot of odd and extreme ideas. He has wanted to try CEO’s of energy companies for “high crimes against humanity and nature” — who should be the judges of crimes against “nature”, by the way? Now he says we only have four years to save the earth. UK Guardian
Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added. Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. “We cannot afford to put off change any longer”…
