William Yeatman

When it Comes to Climate Change, Errors Abound

by William Yeatman on February 24, 2009 · 5 comments

in Environment, Global Warming

“A Matter of Fact,” a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, challenges the Washington Post to correct George F. Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers” column, published February 15th. The report, by CAP’s Brad Johnson, asserts that George Will made three factual errors:

  • Current “global sea ice levels” equals those of 1979
  • There hasn’t been warming in “more than a decade”
  • “Global cooling” joins a list of well publicized “planetary calamities that did not happen.”

Will’s column is not perfect, and Johnson raises some valid questions. For the sake of intellectual honesty, however, Johnson should broaden his fact-checking scope to incorporate misstatements on both sides of the global warming debate—including his own fudging of the truth.

But first, let’s address CAP’s critique of Will’s column.

Error 1. It seems that Will is guilty of delay. On the one hand, the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, the source of his assertion that global sea ice levels haven’t changed in 30 years, publically disavowed Will’s claims. On the other, ACRC reported on January 1, 2009 that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979.” Will’s column appeared 45 days later, during which the discrepancy between current levels and 1979 levels grew by 8%.  If anything, this demonstrates the perils of reporting on an ever-changing global climate.

Error 2. CAP and George Will have it wrong. Will wrote that it hasn’t warmed in “more than a decade,” while Brad Johnson claims that “global warming is continuing.” According to data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, compiled by NASA’s Dr. Roy Spenser, there has been no statistical warming of lower atmosphere temperatures over the past seven years, despite the fact that global greenhouse gas emissions have increased.

Error 3. Will is right and CAP is wrong. Johnson notes that there was never a “scientific consensus” on global cooling, but that’s not what Will claimed. He only wrote that some scientists and media outlets warned of global cooling, which is true.

I am an unabashed global warming “denier,” but I nonetheless applaud Brad Johnson’s efforts. On the topic of global warming, misrepresentations of the science abound, and we in the energy/global warming policy community should root them out and expose them with vigilance.

With that in mind, I have a “Matter of Fact” list of my own:

Fiction: Al Gore claims in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, that “there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer ….”

Fact: It hasn’t warmed in 7 years, despite a steady increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. Where’s the Warming, Al?

Fiction: Dr. James Hansen, ultra-alarmist, has suggested that a 2-3 degree warming would cause sea levels to rise by 80 feet. Hansen then lowered his estimation to 20 feet. His most recent estimate is “at least” 3.2 to 6.4 feet.

Fact: The preeminent body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that a 2-3 degree warming would cause sea levels to rise 7 to 23 inches.

Fiction: In 1986, Dr. John P Holdren, President Barack Obama’s choice to become White House Science Adviser, is quoted as having said that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion human beings by 2020. During his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Holdren was questioned about this claim, and said that “it is still possible.”

Fact: To fulfill Holdren’s alarmist warning, climate change would have to kill twice as many people as died in World War Two, each year, for the next ten years.

Fiction: The Center for American Progress’s Brad Johnson last summer reported that the death of two Boy Scouts in Iowa was “evidence” of “the consequences” of global warming.

Fact: As recently noted on Roger Pielke Jr’s Prometheus, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters cautions that “justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading.”

End Run to a Regulatory Morass

by William Yeatman on February 23, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Features, Zeitgeist

The ultra powerful enviro-lobby has a big problem: So far, it hasn’t been able to convince the Congress to enact energy-rationing policies to fight “global warming” (I am using quotation marks because it hasn’t warmed in 7 years, despite a steady increase in global greenhouse gas emissions).

Last year, a bi-partisan group of Senators spurned a cap-and-trade scheme written by California Senator Barbara Boxer’s staff because they couldn’t countenance imposing higher energy costs on their constituents at a time when gas cost $4/gallon. Given current economic woes, a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme is even more unlikely to make it through the Congress.

Faced with this political and economic reality, the eviros have adopted a new strategy. They want to pull an end run around Congress by having the executive branch regulate green house gases without a legislative mandate.

It’s a complicated process, but here’s the gist: They are trying to get the Environmental Protection Agency to find that greenhouse gas emissions are “pollutants” that “endanger” public welfare, a ruling that automatically results in regulation under the Clean Air Act. This is not a good thing. As noted by my colleague Marlo Lewis, if the EPA were to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, it would result in a regulatory nightmare.

The EPA simply could declare that greenhouse gases endanger public welfare, but there are also a number of circuitous pathways by which the green lobby could force the EPA’s hand. In today’s DC Examiner, former CEI Warren Brooks Fellow Jeremy Lott and I have an opinion piece that explains one such round-about route to a regulatory nightmare-the California tailpipe emissions waiver.

A sample:

If the EPA allows California to regulate greenhouse gases from automobiles, it will tacitly acknowledge that greenhouse gases are “pollutants” — and under the Clean Air Act anything considered a pollutant is automatically subject to regulation. Environmental groups will be sure to have their lawyers sue the EPA to make this explicit.

Once greenhouse gases are classified as a “pollutant,” big construction projects (power plants, high schools, apartment buildings, hospitals) will be delayed and perhaps halted while federal regulators try to decide whether they comply with the Clean Air Act. New construction jobs? Forget about it.

Before the EPA takes this drastic step, shouldn’t our nation’s representatives in Congress debate and vote on whether to substitute this California regulation for federal law? Environmentalists don’t think so.

Rather than have Congress deliberate, the environmental groups want the courts to decide. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and other well-funded, litigation-happy green groups think the California waiver is a dream come true.

Click here to read the rest.

The Greens Can Take Away My Steak the Moment They Pry It from My Cold, Dead Hands

by William Yeatman on February 19, 2009 · 2 comments

in Global Warming

I have been a steak snob ever since I apprenticed under a master butcher in Ojai Valley, California a few years back. Indeed, I’m the kind of guy who orders his steak so rare that the people dining at the table next to me get uncomfortable.

So it is with rising dread that I witness the greenies’ assault on the beef industry. Enviro-types have long hated cattlemen for treating cows like animals, but recently, they’ve found a new motive to attack providers of delicious red meat: climate change.

According to the latest in the “It’s easy being green” series run by the Center for American Progress, “it’s worth taking a closer look” at beef production, for “the planet’s sake,” because industrial scale livestock farming has a big carbon footprint. The piece references a 2006 study that compares “a Toyota Prius, which uses about one fourth as much as fuel as a Chevrolet Suburban SUV, to a plant-based diet, which uses roughly one-fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat.”

How about a steak tax, America? After all, the greens put gas-guzzling SUV’s (God bless ‘em) in their cross-hairs, and came out on top-they forced through new fuel efficiency regulations that have saddled an ailing Detroit with a $100 billion burden. Can the cattleman be far behind?

Why Is HuffPo Pimping Ethanol?

by William Yeatman on February 18, 2009 · 11 comments

in Global Warming

Yesterday’s edition of the Internet news juggernaut, The Huffington Post, ran an ethanol love song written by Bob Dinneen, who is identified in his HuffPo biography as “the ethanol industry’s lead lobbyist before the Congress and Administration.”

Given that Mr. Dinneen is a professional shill, there’s no need to repeat his self-serving argument. Whatever is his case for ethanol, the bottom line is his bottom line.  But it is worth saying a few things about the reality of ethanol.

Ethanol is touted as a solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil.  It is true that ethanol—an alcohol distilled from corn—can be used to run cars.  “Can,” however, does not mean “should.”  Indeed, ethanol is a bad idea both economically and environmentally.

For starters, ethanol is twice as expensive as gasoline, so filling your car with ethanol raises your fuel bill. Also, by turning corn, which is usually used food, into fuel, demand for food increases.  So, increased ethanol use raises your food bill too. Finally, ethanol is awful for the environment—it results in increased corn cultivation, which leads to greater nitrogen runoff, which causes massive, oxygen-depleted “dead zones” in our streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Yet Americans are forced to buy ethanol thanks to laws written by the ultra-powerful corn and agribusiness lobbies.  Ethanol makes corn growers and ethanol producers rich, so they have spent millions lobbying legislators to pass (1) generous taxpayer subsidies for ethanol production, and (2) a Soviet-style production quota that forces Americans to use a certain percentage of ethanol in the nation’s fuel supply (last year, Americans were forced to buy 9 billion gallons of corn fuel).

So why is the Huffington Post pimping the ethanol boondoggle when so many others have stopped supporting these corrupt programs?

King corn and its agribusiness allies could never convince Americans to buy ethanol; instead, they convinced Congress to force ethanol on consumers. The industry’s existence is a powerful testament to lobbyists’ ability to rig the rules of the game to enrich their clients at the expense of everyday Americans—a tacit endorsement from the Huffington Post can only help the ethanol lobby continue to do so.

Huff Po is generally a well-done publication, so why run a pitch by a guy who is trying to get rich by screwing the consumer? Since when are greedy lobbyists palatable to the left?

Drill, Baby, Drill! (To Save the Environment)

by William Yeatman on February 17, 2009 · 3 comments

in Odds & Ends

When is it OK for an oil slick to coat a pristine beach?

When it’s a “natural occurrence,” of course!

My boss stayed at a hotel in Santa Barbara, and on the bed stand of his room, a pamphlet read:

“Tar found along local beaches is the result of natural seeps in the ocean that leak oil and natural gas into the Santa Barbara Channel. Like the La Brea tar pits on land, natural cracks and faults caused by ancient earthquakes allow oil and gas to escape from the ocean floor. The seepage then floats to the surface where some evaporates, some degrades and the rest thickens into floating balls of sticky tar. Tides, currents and winds can wash the tar onshore.”

Believe it or not, it gets better.

To hammer home the naturalness of the oil slick that coats the hotel’s beachfront, the pamphlet further noted that, “The Chumash Native Americans put tar seepage to work 5,000 years ago. Besides waterproofing baskets and bowls, they used a mixture of tar and pine to seal their canoes.”

So Captain Hazelwood did the Eskimos a service by providing them with plenty of sealant, right?

That was a cheap joke, but there is an actual policy point here.

If you can’t distinguish between a “natural” oil slick and an anthropogenic oil slick, and you think that all oil slicks are bad, then you’d want to do something about it. Well, it so happens that there is an easy fix for these “natural” oil slicks: drilling. By removing the oil, it can’t seep out and coat beautiful beaches.

So let’s drill, baby, drill! (for nature, that is)

Expensive Energy Does Not Stimulate the Economy

by William Yeatman on February 3, 2009

in Economy, Energy, Stimulus to Nowhere

Last week the House of Representatives passed HR 1, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocates $816 billion to stimulate the economy. Environmental policy figures prominently in the House’s stimulus package, including $72 in direct spending for green energy and $20 billion in clean energy tax incentives. According to the liberal Center for American Progress, this $92 billion will create 459,000 green jobs by 2010, at a cost of $196,000 per job. What a deal!

The Senate will soon begin to debate over its own version of the stimulus package, S. 336, The American Investment and Recovery Plan, which would spend $887 billion to get the economy going. The bill includes $78 billion in clean energy spending, and $31 billion in tax incentives for renewables and energy efficiency.

Of course, the only reason that the clean energy industry needs generous taxpayer support is because it cannot otherwise compete with conventional energy sources. Which begs the question: How is it possible to stimulate the economy by forcing Americans pay more for energy?

An example will help clarify my point. President Barack Obama wants the stimulus package to spend $32 billion to provide 6 million homes with green energy by 2012. By comparison, the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region plans to build enough coal-fired power by 2012 to supply 4 million homes in the rapidly growing southwest. Both plans would power a similar number of households by 2012. The difference between the two plans is that Obama’s renewables need $32 billion in taxpayer money to compete with conventional energy sources, whereas the Navajo Nation’s coal projects can make a profit without lavish government handouts.

For a detailed account of the green pork in both bills, click here. The numbers are appalling. Virtually every energy boondoggle is well positioned at the taxpayer trough, from synfuels to ethanol. It is farm-bill politics at its worst (N.B. “farm bill politics” is a style of legislating by which every possible stakeholder is bought off, so that there are no objections to a spending bill’s passage. As its name suggests, negotiations leading to a renewal of the God-awful farm bill every 5 years are the paragon of this governing technique).

Although both plans stink, they are not the same.  E&E Daily today reported that there are 3 major differences between the energy provisions of the House and Senate stimulus packages:

1. The Senate increases Loan Guarantee Program (authorized in Title 17 of 2005 Epact) by $50 billion in 2009. The program covers “commercial projects,” including nuclear and coal to liquid, which frightens environmentalists. The House keeps 2009 funding for “commercial projects” steady (at $38 billion), and amends Title 17 to include $8 billion in temporary funds for renewables and green transmission.

2. The House and the Senate disagree over tax incentives for renewable energy. HR 1 would fund up to 30% of construction costs for renewable projects that break ground in 2009 and 2010. I have not seen a cost estimate for this provision. S 336 does not have this provision. Senator Bingaman argued that grants are inappropriate because the taxpayer would not receive any compensation for its investment.

3. The Senate bill also provides about $5 billion less in direct energy efficiency investment than the House package. The greatest difference lies in the low-income assistance weatherization program, which would receive $2.9 billion in the Senate bill as compared to $6.2 billion in the House version.

Update on Green Stimulus: It Still Stinks

by William Yeatman on January 29, 2009 · 2 comments

in Economy, Environment, Features, Stimulus to Nowhere, Zeitgeist

The Obama/Pelosi green stimulus is taking shape as it winds two paths through the House and the Senate. Both chambers agree with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff that the government should shower winners in the renewable energy industry with about $30 billion in taxpayer money.

The well paid lobbyists for wind and solar energy producers deserve a round of applause—they did a great job.

There is, however, one small kink: The House and Senate disagree on how to give this money away.

According to E&E News, legislators on the House side want to fund up to 30 % of the construction of renewable energy projects using grants, or direct give-aways. On the Senate side, leading members of the party in power are indicating that grants are an inappropriate mechanism to pick winners and losers in the energy business. They would prefer some other pork delivery format, probably a refundable tax credit, which is but a grant by another name.

The only good news is that the House and Senate have a history of jurisdictional disputes over give-aways to the renewable energy industry. Maybe they’ll get so worked up with territoriality that they’ll prove resistant to compromise, and this crummy green stimulus package will die.

Why State Funded Energy R&D Doesn’t Work

by William Yeatman on January 14, 2009 · 4 comments

in Features, Global Warming, Odds & Ends, Zeitgeist

Dr. Stephen Chu, President-elect Barack Obama’s selection to head the Department of Energy, is a vocal proponent of wasting taxpayer money on research & development for alternative energy.  Dr. Chu prefers to think of state r&d as an “investment,” but “waste” is the appropriate terminology.

The fundamental shortcoming of government funded R&D is government’s inability to successfully perform the development part. That’s the process by which an innovation (itself a product of the research component) is brought to the market and made economically viable. It culminates when consumers find value in the aforementioned innovation, and start to buy it in sufficient quantities to make the enterprise of that innovation profitable.

It is a complex process that is dependent on myriad intangibles, such as trial-and-error tinkering and circumstance. Successful development is diffuse and unpredictable…..

…..To read the rest, click on this link, which will take you to our energy and global warming blog at globalwarming.org. Then subscribe to globalwarming.org, so that you can read all our cheeky posts.

Celebrate Coal (or, How I Just Tripled My Carbon Footprint)

by William Yeatman on November 20, 2008 · 6 comments

in Odds & Ends

Our individual carbon footprints are a function of consumption, which, in turn, is a derivative of individual wealth. Accordingly, my carbon footprint should be small, because I am poor. As an adult, I’ve never lived in a space larger than a room, and I don’t drive.

Despite my inconspicuous consumption, I have an enormous carbon footprint. Indeed my carbon footprint is so big that it rivals that of a mega-consumer like Leonardo de Caprio, or even a super-mega consumer like Al Gore.

How is that possible? My ex-wife and I buy ten thousand pounds of coal every fall for the Kyrgyz family with whom we lived while we served in the Peace Corps. Burning a ton of coal emits about 3 tons of carbon into the atmosphere, so we are responsible for 30 tons of green greenhouse gases! For environmentalists in rich countries, that’s a cause for alarm. For the Kamchibekova clan in Talas, Kyrgyzstan, it’s a reason to cheer.

[click to continue…]

Obey GE

by William Yeatman on November 18, 2008 · 7 comments

in Economy, Energy, Environment

This is “Green Week,” NBC’s annual effort to show you how to “green your routine.” It sounds innocuous enough, but “Green Week” is actually part of a manipulative business strategy employed by General Electric (GE), the owner of NBC.

GE is a world leader in the production of clean energy goods and services that people don’t want to buy, like compact fluorescent light bulbs. That’s why it spends millions every year to convince the Congress to pass laws like last year’s energy bill, which forces consumers to buy compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Generally speaking, Americans don’t like being told what to do, so GE uses “Green Week” to propagate global warming alarmism and frighten Americans into accepting rules and regulations that force them to buy GE products.

[click to continue…]

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