Archives for the 'Environment' Category
Is it Still Global Warming if the Planet isn’t Warming?
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Not only has the planet not warmed over the last decade, but new peer-reviewed research suggests that it might not warm over the coming decade. Reports the Daily Telegraph:
Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.
This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.
Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: “The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that.”
This creates an exquisite philosophical dilemma: can the planet be warming if it isn’t warming? I’m sure the Goracle will be able to enlighten us.
Of course, the computer models tell us that warming will eventually restart. But didn’t those same models tells us that we would be warming now? Hmm …
Greenhouse Sinners Repent!
Airplanes emit CO2. Ergo people shouldn’t fly. To do otherwise is, well, sinful in the view of some people Reports ABC News:
Moral authorities of varied stripes have weighed in. In 2006, London’s Anglican Bishop John Chartres said flying abroad to vacation is a “symptom of sin” because it ignores “an overriding imperative to walk more lightly upon the earth.” Environmentalists have also framed flying as a moral issue since it allegedly causes harm in pursuit of unnecessary ends. “You can be an environmental saint – drive a hybrid car, recycle, conserve your water – and if you take one air flight, it actually blows your carbon budget right out of the water,” says Elle Morrell, director of a green-lifestyle program at the Australian Conservation Foundation. One round-trip flight from Sydney to New York City, she says, generates as much in carbon-dioxide emissions per passenger as an average Australian would generate in an entire flightless year.
Of course, this ignores the value of travel. Even some environmentalists recognize that tourism sustains the environment in some countries.
Airlines aren’t alone in making an ethics-based case for flying. Another defender is Martha Honey, executive director of The Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. She notes that nature preserves in many developing countries can sustain their missions only with support from foreign visitors who fly there.
“Of everything involved in tourism, airplane travel is doing the most damage in terms of climate change. That’s absolutely true,” Honey says. “But the movement in Europe saying, ‘Stay home; don’t get on a plane’ is disastrous for poor countries … whose most important source of income is from nature-based tourism. It’s also disastrous for us as a human race to not travel and see the world. The question is, ‘How do you do it, and do it smartly?’ “
It might be worth serious effort to reduce CO2 emissions. But to stop doing what makes life worth living would rather miss the most basic point of life.
Eat a Kangaroo to Save the Environment?
A story in the Wall Street Journal suggests it is time to once again eat kangaroos, to protect the environment, and cope with Kangaroo overpopulation problems. “Greenpeace has recommended that Australians substitute kangaroo meat for consumption of other red meats to reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas from flatulent cattle and sheep. Kangaroo meat is a sought-after meal in Australian restaurants and charcuteries. Recipes like kangaroo escalopes with spinach and anchovy butter, kangaroo tail soup, or kangaroo strip loin pan roasted on balsamic mash are not unusual on the menus of fine restaurants.”
Of course, as Doug Bandow noted earlier today, eating animals can also save endangered species by giving people an incentive to harvest them rather than destroying their habitat or exterminating them. People owning animals helps ensure their survival, too: that’s part of why there are a heck of a lot more chickens than passenger pigeons (a now extinct species which were once as numerous in America as chickens are today), and far more cattle than buffalo.
Eating locally, touted as good for the environment, often isn’t: one study found it was better for the environment for English people to eat lamb that was imported from New Zealand rather than raised in England. And culinary prejudices often keep people from eating local foods that truly do tax the environment less, like cicadas, which are very tasty when microwaved for just a short time, but which few people eat despite the fact that they can easily be collected in large quantities when they periodically emerge from the earth. (In the Washington, D.C. suburbs, they come out in huge numbers once every 17 years).
Congested Pockets
Almost five years ago, I argued that London’s Congestion Charge was merely a wealth transfer from London commuters to the administrators of the charge. You know what? I was right:
Capita, the company that set up the system and operated it for the Mayor, was said to have been given a £250 million contract over five years, but the Mayor refused to reveal the details. Then it emerged an extra £31 million was paid to Capita in the first year, raising concerns that costs would reduce revenues promised by the Mayor. Last year Capita was paid £130 million, more than 60 per cent of the money taken in by the charge over the year.
What about congestion? TFL’s own spin figures suggests that congestion is down by a paltry 16 percent overall. However, as The Bow Group has shown, most of this relates to a drop-off in people entering London after 11am. There has been precious little effect on congestion in the rush hour. And journey times - where the real economic benefit of reduced congestion should appear - have not been affected.
Once again, an environmental tax, disguised as a market mechanism, has failed to achieve its own objectives, while making some people rich at the expense of commuters. Diffuse costs, concentrated benefits, indeed.
Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.
The Children’s Crusade
Steven Dubner asks whether children are responsible for the recent explosion of environmental concern.
He’s got a point. As well as the decidedly non-secular holiday of Earth Day, which appears to be celebrated at every public school in the US, my daughter’s Brownie troop was assigned a project recently to learn about a foreign country. As well as learning about famous people, landmarks and so on, they had to tell the other Brownies “how they are green.” Hmmmm.
Yet this example of pester power at work would also help explain one phenomenon that is infuriating to the environmental movement. Consistently, Americans have said they are concerned about global warming, but when asked to rank it among urgent issues that action must be taken on, they rank it next to or right at the bottom. For instance, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll in January found it ranked right at the bottom, tied with “making the Bush tax cuts permanent.” Even a minority of Democrat supporters called it a “top priority.” I suspect this is compatible with an agenda in the household set by people who don’t have to make the hard decisions.
What will be interesting is how this translates as these children leave school and start having to square living a “sustainable” life with working for a living and having to satisfy other needs. Perhaps they will put a higher value on the environment than their parents (and if prosperity continues to increase, I think this is going to happen in any event), but if times get hard as a direct result of environmental policy, then the choices made will be very interesting.
Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.
Drill for Oil to Save the Environment
In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson’s column “Start Drilling“ points out that ethanol production is far worse for the environment than drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic tundra, yet Congress promotes ethanol subsidies to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, even as it blocks drilling in the Arctic and ”the Atlantic and Pacific coasts” that would do far more to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. “What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity,” he writes.
A news story today in the Post describes how ethanol production is devouring our food supply, even though a study shows that “greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol ‘exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.’ By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.”
In the American Spectator, Iain Murray notes that ethanol production has caused “food shortages and massive increases in food prices around the world. There have been food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and most recently, Haiti — where the poor have been reduced to eating cakes made with bleach and are on the verge of bringing the government down. Even in America, some grocery stores have begun to institute a form of rationing. Meanwhile, massive tracts of rainforest are being cleared in Indonesia to produce biodiesel, threatening the orangutan and other magnificent animals with extinction. In Brazil, the growth of sugar cultivation for ethanol is forcing food producers into the Amazon.”
By contrast, one of the Audubon Society’s chief bird sanctuaries (the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana), has 37 oil wells on site, and has produced natural gas for 50 years without harming the environment. Drilling for oil hasn’t harmed the birds a bit. But ethanol production causes environmental destruction, mass hunger, starvation, and rioting worldwide.
Disclosure: like many Americans, I have a retirement plan (both a 401(K) and an IRA). Like most retirement plans, it contains mutual funds. And most of those mutual funds own some stock in oil companies. So when politicians demand that the government impose a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies, what they are really trying to do is take money from my retirement plan — and your retirement plan, too, if you have one. That’s not going to encourage exploration for new sources of oil, or reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Heritage Speech
I’ve just got back from delivering a speech at the Heritage Foundation on the subject of my book. I think it went well and the audience certainly seemed enthusiastic about it. You’ll be able to watch it here when the webcast gets properly archived within a day or so. Thanks to ever-excellent John Hilboldt and his team for putting it on and to Ben Lieberman for hosting it.
All You Ever Wanted to Know About Ethanol…
But were afraid to ask can be found in Chapter Two of The Really Inconvenient Truths, which you can now get for free via this site. I’ll be on the Jim Bohannon Show tonight at 10pm talking about this and many other things the left doesn’t want you to know about the environment.
More on Deadly Ethanol Subsidies
Nate Beeler has an an excellent editorial cartoon, “Food for Thought,” that captures the deadly and costly consequences of ethanol subsidies, in today’s Washington Examiner. Many go hungry because of the greed of a few. We wrote earlier about how ethanol subsidies are causing hunger and starvation worldwide. Rioting and violent protests have occurred in many countries, including Mexico, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Haiti, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Senegal, Ethiopia, Mauritania, Madagascar, and the Philippines. Ethanol subsidies are also contributing to environmental destruction.
The Bottom Line on ‘Earth Week’
Our good friend Tim Carney’s Examiner column this week connects a few very interesting dots - what, for example, does Alicia Silverstone talking about energy efficiency on NBC have to do with corporate welfare for one the nation’s largest companies? Tim puts it all together.
Earth Day was Tuesday, and NBC Universal has extended the celebration into “Earth Week.” Reprising its “Green Week” from last fall, NBC and its affiliates worked some sort of environmental message into all of its programming this week.
Amid its calls for individual sacrifices in the name of the environment and paeans to “green” legislation, the network once again failed to disclose prominently that its parent company stands to get rich off of “environmentalist” laws.
NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.
In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.
This is all also part of of GE’s must discussed “ecomagination” campaign, which so far seems mostly to have produced ever more imaginative ways of getting U.S. taxpayers to pay GE to manufacture technologies consumers don’t want.
Big Surprise: Political Agencies are Political
It’s a funny thing about the greens. They support government controls over everything in society in the name of Mother Earth, but after turning over our freedom to regulators they get angry that political decisions at political agencies are affected by politics! As if that was a big surprise! The Union for Concerned Scientists is upset because regulators at EPA have to listen to the concerns raised by lobbyists from industry and elsewhere.
Well, we at CEI are concerned about such politically driven decisions too! We don’t want agencies’ “science” to serve industry or the greens! That’s because, unlike the greens, we don’t trust government to command and control away our freedoms—be they economic or personal. We prefer market-driven decisions, which are based on what consumers want, what turns enough profit (and generates wealth for everyone), and what works! And if a product does a concrete and measurable harm, the institutions of liberty—such as a legal system upholding individual rights and private property—are there to demand a remedy. Everyone is held responsible for their actions in the marketplace.
Government decisions are based on what group is the most organized and can pull the most stings and levers in Washington. Parties are held selectively responsible for their actions, and often bad actions are supported via regulation or subsidies. The greens don’t mind this system as long as their friends are in charge of the levers, they can pull the strings, and they can gain the subsidies. But the minute any other voice is heard, they suddenly become the protectors of sound of science!
Frankly, science is better served when the greens are ignored, but that rarely happens. Political pressures to serve a “green cause” are very strong and that inclination is harming science more than industry voices. Indeed. During the arsenic in drinking water debate, scientists who served on the key National Academy of Science study on the topic reported such pressures to an EPA interagency liaison, complaining that they did not support the spin placed on the report and that they felt political pressure to support the green’s cause. Why didn’t the Union for Concerned Sciences complain then? Well, that wouldn’t serve their political agenda.
The Windy Denmark Question
Yesterday, a listener on the Michael Medved show challenged me that (I paraphrase), “Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost.” I said that I was no expert on Denmark but that there were significant subsidies involved. As this Economist article makes clear, it is certainly not correct to say that Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost:
Researchers in Denmark have gone a step further and put a value on this effect. They believe that wind power shaved 1 billion kroner ($167m) off Danish electricity bills in 2005. On the other hand, Danish consumers also paid 1.4 billion kroner in subsidies for wind power.
The Danish government cut wind power subsidies that year. The result:
The building of wind turbines has virtually ground to a halt since subsidies were cut back. Meanwhile, compared with others in the European Union, Danes remain above-average emitters of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. For all its wind turbines, a large proportion of the rest of Denmark’s power is generated by plants that burn imported coal.
Moreover, because you cannot store any wind power that is generated when no-one wants to use it, Denmark has to sell excess wind-power to Sweden at a price of 0c per KWh. This has caused some trouble:
Much has been written about Denmark’s success as the world’s wind power pioneer. But the regularly repeated claim – that Denmark generates 20 percent of its electricity demand from wind sources – is highly misleading. That 20 percent of electricity is not supplied continuously from wind power. Denmark’s wind supply is so variable that it relies heavily on neighbors Norway and Sweden, taking their excess production. In 2003 its export figure for wind power electricity production was as high as 84 percent, as Denmark found it could not absorb its own highly variable wind output capacity into its domestic system. The scale of Denmark’s subsidies was such that in 2006-07 the government increasingly came under scrutiny from the Danish media, which claimed the subsidies were out of control.
Overall, Denmark, a small, flat, windy country of about 5.5 million souls cannot be a model for the US to follow, even if they had succeeded in making wind power work efficiently.
Is Sweden Really Green or Just Rich?
Brian Williams and his team at NBC announced Sweden to be the greenest country on the planet, and I sure hope their correspondent enjoyed her Sweden junket. However, according to the environmental performance index, Switzerland is the greenest country in the world. But that probably doesn’t work for people who want to portray overly regulated and taxed countries like Scandinavia as the best places in the world to live.
Ok, so granted, Sweden has done a great job at meeting their Kyoto goals, because they do not have oil and have relied on nuclear power for so many years. Sweden is also a rich country, and this is where NBC’s reporting fall way short. If you look at the environmental performance index, it is easy to see that the countries that are ranked high on environmental performance with few exceptions are countries with a high GDP per capita.
The conclusion is the one that you will hear the amazing policy fellows at CEI repeat over and over again, wealthier is healthier and richer is cleaner. The greenest thing you could have done to celebrate Lenin’s birthday today, eh…, I mean to celebrate earth day today is to help increase free trade, help do something to get another poor farmer or factory worker in a developing country get out of poverty. If they get rich, they can afford to clean up their environment, just like the countries on top of the environmental performance index have been able to do.
“Cap and trade is a tax”
Thus spoke CEI’s Myron Ebell at yesterday’s launch of the Hot Air Tour, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, in time for Earth Day. For more, please see the video below.
Ethanol Subsidies Kill Forests and People and Scar the Planet
In the Washington Post, two prominent environmentalists have an editorial, “Ethanol’s Failed Promise,” which explains how ethanol subsidies and mandates are destroying the environment and fueling hunger and violence worldwide. “Turning one-fourth of our corn into fuel is affecting global food prices. U.S. food prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation, hitting the pocketbooks of lower-income Americans and people living on fixed incomes. . .Deadly food riots have broken out in dozens of nations in the past few months, most recently in Haiti and Egypt. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warns of a global food emergency.”
Moreover, note Lester Pearson and Jonathan Lewis, ”food-to-fuel mandates are leading to increased environmental damage. First, producing ethanol requires huge amounts of energy — most of which comes from coal. Second, the production process creates a number of hazardous byproducts, and some production facilities are reportedly dumping these in local water sources. Third, food-to-fuel mandates are helping drive up the price of agricultural staples, leading to significant changes in land use with major environmental harm. Here in the United States, farmers are pulling land out of the federal conservation program, threatening fragile habitats. . .Most troubling, though, is that the higher food prices caused in large part by food-to-fuel mandates create incentives for global deforestation, including in the Amazon basin. As Time Magazine reported this month, huge swaths of forest are being cleared for agricultural development. The result is devastating: We lose an ecological treasure and critical habitat for endangered species, as well as the world’s largest ‘carbon sink.’ And when the forests are cleared and the land plowed for farming, the carbon that had been sequestered in the plants and soil is released. Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger has modeled this impact and reports in Science magazine that the net impact of the food-to-fuel push will be an increase in global carbon emissions — and thus a catalyst for climate change.”
In Human Events, Deroy Murdock explains how rising food prices resulting from ethanol have forced Haitians to literally eat dirt (dirt cookies made of vegetable oil, salt, and dirt), caused tortilla riots in Mexico, and fueled violent protests in unstable “powder kegs” like Pakistan and Egypt.
We previously wrote about the unsavory politics that led to this crisis, the rioting it has caused, and the starvation that countless people across the globe face as a result. Finance ministers and central bankers are now calling for an end to ethanol and other biofuel subsidies and mandates in an effort to prevent enormous loss of life.
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