May 2012

Does Al Gore believe energy conservation is for the little people, the hoi polloi?

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, as reported by the Drudge Report today, says that Al Gore’s home electricity use is 20x that of the average US household.

Gore’s mansion, [20-room, eight-bathroom] located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

Seems that the average household consumers 10,656 kilowatt hours, compared to Gore’s 221,000 kWh use.

Reminds me of the time Barbara Streisand urged all the little people to forego clothes dryers and line dry their wash, instead. And then her spokesperson was aghast at the suggestion that Babs might do the same.

How cute, Environmental Defense is declaring that “news just broke”—wink, they just now heard of it too!—that Texas Utilities (TXU) has agreed to a buyout by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. joined by a group chock-full of greens called the Texas Pacific Group. Why is this cause for environmentalist joy (or at least joy among those who have a stake in the deal — whatever it is, they are not yet saying — a universe which does not yet include the unsated Public Citizen and Rainforest Action Network)? Well, it seems that, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC):

“As part of the sale agreement, Environmental Defense helped negotiate an aggressive environmental platform that will, among other things:

• Terminate plans for the construction of 8 of 11 coal-fired power plants TXU had hoped to build;
• Stop TXU’s plans to expand coal operations in other states;
• Endorse the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) platform, including the call for a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions; and
• Reduce the company’s carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.”

Of course, Duke Energy endorses the CAP’s objectives, and is meanwhile building an enormous coal-fired power plant. And we won’t hold our breath for the other, less publicized terms of the deal to emerge, but it is fair to say that not even our green friends engage in acts that are not in their enlightened self-interest. Which brings to mind past precedent with such canoodling.

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I recently testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. One of the other witnesses was Peter Darbee, CEO and President of PG&E Corporation. In his testimony, he argued that his company had no special interest in the energy rationing fight because California had adopted the “decoupling” policy which ensured that his firm was able to make as much revenue by “not selling” electricity as by selling it.

This idea—supported by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Amory Lovins, and many within the utility industry—is strange. Imagine if grocery stores were regulated utilities, each enjoying a regional monopoly over the selling of food and other basic needs, and were guaranteed revenue regardless of whether they sold anything or not. One can imagine stores promoting diet classes, raising food prices (California’s electricity is among the highest priced in the nation), becoming ever less sensitive to the quality and variety of foods displayed, downsizing portions of food, and so forth. And, of course, they would then be far less concerned about the challenges of organic food, the trans-fat battles, sugar subsidy programs, and the like. What twisted webs we humans weave, when first we elect to regulate!

On C-SPAN last night, I was watching “Prime Minister’s Questions”—the wonderful British institution in which the Prime Minister answers questions, both from his sometimes supporters and from the opposition. One question dealt with the adequacy of housing in Britain—the questioner arguing that far more money must be spent to provide housing for the poor. Prime Minister Blair responded by arguing that a balance was needed between private housing and “social housing.”

Frederick Hayek once noted that the growing use of “social” as an adjective had lowered the quality of communication. “Social,” he argued, was a weasel word—it connoted some element of morality while conveying no substantive meaning at all. Ah, but in the political world connotations may well be more meaningful than substance. Consider “social justice,” “social security,” “social costs,” “welfare state,” and the host of other terms that are now so domiant in today’s world. Hayek listed many terms of this sort. Our challenge is to show that the underlying value that is implied by this term—the egalitarian value of justice, of fairness—is rarely advanced by such “social” programs, that only the institutions of freedom can advance fairness.

Americans eat more junk than many other peoples, although the gap is diminishing, and many other Western countries are beginning to catch up to the United States in their obesity rates.

The greater American tendency to eat junk food may ironically be partly the result of our obsession with the health risks and imperfections of perfectly ordinary foods, which leads us to see no difference between such foods and truly unhealthy food. People often erroneously believe that baked potatoes, hamburgers, pizza, and cheese are intrinsically unhealthy, when they are not. As a result, they avoid them, while satisfying their food cravings instead with corn chips, potato chips, doughnuts, buttered popcorn, and cake, which typically contain few nutrients.

(By contrast, people in my wife’s native France, who are somewhat skinnier on average than Americans, do not view cheese, hamburgers, or baked potatoes as unhealthy — indeed, they eat far more cheese, and somewhat more baked potatoes, than Americans do).

It also reflects many Americans’ inability to understand math. The fact that a hamburger has a fair amount of fat doesn’t make it unhealthy if it contains even more protein than fat. If you haven’t had protein for a while, it’s better to eat a quarter-pounder with 28 grams of protein and 26 grams of fat than a salad with iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing, that has just a few grams of protein and more than 25 grams of fat from the dressing. It’s the ratio that matters. But many people can’t do math, and focus just on the amount of fat, ignoring the amount of protein in a food item, or the ratio of fat to protein.

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In the latest installment of what has become an increasingly sorry drama, the European Union’s Ambassador to the United States, former Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, has written to Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). His goal in the February 22 letter is “to put the facts before you,” claiming that “incorrect or incomplete information has been presented about the European Union (EU) climate policy. In particular, this concerns the EU’s achievements to date by comparison to achievements in the US, and whether the EU will meet its obligation under the Kyoto Protocol, which is to reduce its emissions by 8% by 2012.”

[Note: This promise is from 1990 levels, whatever Europe chooses to claim that they were. That is, EU greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 1990 have oddly been serially revised upward, even 15 years after the fact and recently more than once in one year, such that they have inexplicably discovered emissions equivalent to those of Ireland's in 1990, thereby lowering the EU's performance gap; that is, they've found a country under the sofa cushions. Call it recovered emissions syndrome.]

Ambassdor Bruton’s complaint, in short, is that not everyone is behaving and bending to EU insistence that all discussion about greenhouse gas emissions be in the context of a 1990 emissions baseline, which affords Europe credit for two political decisions preceding and unrelated to the Kyoto Protocol or any effort to reduce GHGs. As more modern performance comes to light, Europe is facing a serious embarrassment of being outperformed by the U.S. in terms of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly the key target carbon dioxide, the target of all proposals floating around Washington. [click to continue…]

Today’s Globe and Mail reports that Canadian environmental groups may soon succeed in getting the Province of Ontario to ban the use of lawn pesticides used for “cosmetic purposes.” They’ve managed to get such bans in the Province of Quebec as well as in dozens of cities, including Toronto and Halifax. Their success is part of a larger campaign to rid the world of man-made chemicals—without regard to the impacts—no matter how bad. For further insights on their efforts see this CEI study.

Such bans are not only foolish, they can prove dangerous. After all, do the greens really expect people to manually pull all the weeds from their lawns? Sounds like a good recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome to me. Moreover, “cosmetic uses” likely include products that do such valuable things as control lyme disease-carrying ticks and other vermin.

There is no good evidence to suggest that these products properly applied pose a serious public health risk or environmental problem, nor is there evidence that the allegedly “natural” alternatives won’t pose greater risks.

There is an easier solution for greens that don’t want exposure to these substances in their own yards—don’t buy them. As for the rest of us, let us decide for ourselves—unless you can demonstrate that we have done you harm in a court of law.

Freeborn John (good name for a good blog) has a post up remembering the excesses of British labor unions before Thatcher. As he notes, these excesses have been airbrushed out of internet accounts as those unions have been romanticized. Lest we forget…

A story in the Washington Post sports section points out that General Motors VP Brent Dewar is pushing NASCAR to switch from gasoline to ethanol. Well, if he was lobbying for the change because of safety reasons, or economics, or for mileage or for performance reasons, one might not carp. But it seems he has a messianic desire to change the world. Dewar was based in Brazil in the 90s and witnessed its transformation from a petroleum-based economy to an ethanol economy. And he wants that to happen in America.

But apparently Dewar hasn’t considered such issues as Brazil’s lack of petroleum reserves, the relative ease of converting sugar cane to ethanol, and the government’s massive subsidies. It is simply a trendy thing to do and will change the world. He believes NASCAR should help lead that change and said “it would send a signal to the public. A lot of people don’t understand the benefits of ethanol.” Of course a lot of people understand both the benefits and the costs–and that is partially why ethanol is still so little used in the U.S.

Even some NASCAR drivers appear to be falling for the scam. Jeff Burton was reported to say: “Although our impact on environmental issues is probably very, very small, from a marketing standpoint, we could have a major impact.” And Kyle Petty seems to support the idea of forcing alternative fuels into widespread acceptance by saying: “I think once you start seeing alternative fuels used in places like racing and places where you least expect them, then you don’t think about that guy with the Volkswagen van that runs off of whatever.”

It seems these few people hope that if NASCAR, as all-American as possible, and some of the world’s fastest cars can run with ethanol, it will convince Joe Six-Pack and NASCAR’s 75 million fans that this is the wave of the future.

This trend represents a continuation of what NASCAR’s original fans feared from the ever-growing shift from the sport’s roots of tobacco and beer into the Madison Avenue world of politically correct corporate responsibility and an abandonment of the good ol’ boys driving fast cars on short tracks in the Southeast.