Guy Adams, the Independent
Hollywood A-listers love to trumpet their green credentials. Guy Adams reports on a film-maker who’s out to expose them.
For years, they’ve preached green living while travelling the world in SUVs, limousines and private jets. But now Hollywood’s foremost tree-huggers face the prospect of being exposed as eco-hypocrites - in the very medium that finances their extravagant carbon footprints in the first place.
Robert Redford became the latest movie star to have his environmental credentials publicly ridiculed on film this week, when a hostile documentary was released in which he stood accused of failing to practise the environmentalism that he so vehemently preaches.
The short film, Robert Redford: Hypocrite, was released on Friday, via YouTube, to coincide with the closing days of his Sundance Film Festival. Depending on your point of view, it represented either a cheap hatchet-job or a stunning evisceration of a pioneering green activist who was once lauded on Time Magazine’s list of environmental “superheroes”.
According to the film, Redford recently sold a dozen plots of land near to the Sundance ski resort in Utah, which he owns, to developers seeking to build luxury homes there. The revelation is especially contentious because each of the sites sits on an undeveloped ridge, in what was previously wilderness. Ironically, Redford recently stuck his head above the parapet to lobby against a similar project in California’s Napa Valley, where he keeps a home. Mind you, the film points out, the nimby-ish actor did not stand to profit from the Napa development. The plots of land near Sundance, by contrast, fetched him around $2m each.
“It’s the hypocrisy that gets me,” said the film’s Irish director, Phelim McAleer. “He’s taking a lovely virgin ridge and building McMansions on it. Granted, they’re nice, lefty, eco-McMansions. But they’re McMansions all the same. At the same time, he’s trying to stop other people from building houses in a nice spot.” The film also points out that Redford, 74, has often called for the world to reduce its carbon footprint, while simultaneously accepting the shilling of United Airlines, for which he performed voiceovers in aTV advert proclaiming that “it’s time to fly”.
Yet the Sundance Kid won’t be the last Hollywood liberal to face the howitzers of McAleer, who became a known figure among climate change deniers in 2009, when he released the controversial feature-length documentary Not Evil Just Wrong, which disputed global warming science.
In a previous short film finished two months ago, McAleer, ridiculed the environmental credentials of James Cameron. The Avatar director preaches “living with less”, it noted, while owning a helicopter, a fleet of submarines, three Harley Davidsons, four sports cars and a private yacht.
Aerial footage of Cameron’s Malibu estate in the film revealed several large houses, at least three heated swimming pools, a fire engine, but not one solar panel or wind turbine.
McAleer now has a “hit list” of other celebrities he regards as hypocritical. He intends to make and release a new film laying into one of them every two to three months. He also plans take aim at some US politicians.
“As a film-maker, this is the gift that keeps on giving,” he says. “We have a hit list, and as well as the usual Hollywood suspects it has people like John McCain on it a man who has backed climate-change legislation, while being unable to remember how many homes he owns.”
Unlike many independent film-makers, who can find themselves in dire financial straits, McAleer says his short pictures are self-financing. On YouTube, they drive traffic to his website, where fans purchase DVDs of Not Evil Just Wrong. The Cameron film clocked up 175,000 “views”.
“There seems to be something about the environmental movement that attracts hypocritical people,” he added. “Most are rich, and while they don’t want to give up what’s made their life happy, they’re happy to tell other people not to.
Dr. Udaysankar Nair, UAH
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (March 1, 2011)—The impacts that local deforestation might have on the snowcap and glaciers atop Mount Kilimanjaro are being
calculated at The University of Alabama in Huntsville using regional climate models and data from NASA satellites.
The first piece of that research, which looked only at the month of July, found that deforestation is changing weather patterns around the mountain but not (at least in July) at the peak, according to Dr. Udaysankar Nair, a research scientist in UAHuntsville’s Earth System Science Center.
Early results from this work, which is funded through NASA’s Earth Science Directorate, were published Feb. 15 in the “Journal of Geophysical Research.” The current glaciers of Kilimanjaro, made famous by an Ernest Hemingway short story in 1936 and a movie released in 1952, are almost 12,000 years old. About 16,000 years ago, during the most recent ice age, Kilimanjaro’s glaciers covered up to 150 square kilometers and reached from the summit (19,298 feet above sea level) to the surrounding plain more than 9,000 feet below.
A tiny fraction of that ice cap still exists. Surveys in the 1880s estimated that glaciers covered about 20 square kilometers on the mountain. From 1912 to now, the glacier area on Kilimanjaro has decreased from about 12 square kilometers to less than two.
Nair and doctoral student Jonathan Fairman, a NASA Earth system science fellow, are studying the effects of deforestation on weather patterns in a 2,000-square-mile area around the mountain.
In collaboration with UAHuntsville’s Dr. Sundar Christopher and Dr. Thomas Molg at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, they use data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments aboard two NASA satellites to determine the surface characteristics of both forested and deforested land in the area around the mountain.
That data is used to digitally add or remove tracts of indigenous land cover within computer models of the regional weather. That lets them compare
existing weather patterns to patterns that might exist if no trees had been cut down or if all of the surrounding forests were razed. The UAHuntsville team also uses MODIS data to evaluate how well the model simulates cloud formation and weather patterns over Kilimanjaro under current conditions.
They decided to start by looking at July, during the summer “dry” season. That is when weather around the mountain is influenced least by large-scale
regional weather systems from the Indian Ocean.
“We figured that the impact of local systems—such as deforestation—would be greater when large scale weather events aren’t there,” Nair explained.
In July the prevailing wind across the high plains of northern Tanzania is from the south. The models show that during that month deforestation around
the mountain is shifting cloud cover and precipitation up the south side of the mountain. Modeling of weather patterns on the windward side of Kilimanjaro shows a decrease in rain and cloudiness at levels up to 6,500 feet above sea level, but an increase in rainfall and cloud cover from 6,500 to about 13,000 high.
July rainfall on the lee or north side of the mountain has decreased at higher elevations (5,850 to 13,000 feet) in response to deforestation. There is little precipitation at the peak during July and the models indicate that hasn’t changed in response to deforestation.
“Kilimanjaro is an isolated mountain, so under normal circumstances most of the local air flow goes around the mountain,” Nair said. “When you cut down forests you reduce surface roughness, which increases wind speed at higher elevations on the windward slopes. That faster wind over steep upper slopes causes more intense cloud formation and precipitation up the side of the mountain.”
Nair and Fairman are extending their model runs to include the fall and spring rainy seasons, when the dominant weather rolls in from the Indian Ocean.
“We need to look at the complete annual cycle before we understand the impacts that deforestation is having on the mountain peak,” Fairman said.
Early results suggest that deforestation around Kilimanjaro might be having a noticeable impact on how quickly glaciers and ice are melting on the
mountain, although it isn’t clear from preliminary data modeling whether that impact is positive or negative.
“When we look beyond the summer dry season, our results suggest that regional deforestation has the potential to either mitigate or enhance large scale climate change,” said Nair. “In some places, like Costa Rica, deforestation clearly adds to the effects of climate change. For Kilimanjaro, we expect our extended model simulations to reveal whether deforestation will worsen or mitigate large scale changes.”
Earlier research by Nair and other scientists at UAHuntsville found that deforestation in Costa Rica is increasing some impacts of large-scale climate change in the mountain range that is home to that country’s cloud forests. Unlike Kilimanjaro, however, the Costa Rican mountains are a range that the prevailing wind cannot blow around.
For more information: Dr. Udaysankar Nair, (256) 961-7841 nair@nsstc.uah.edu mailto:nair@nsstc.uah.edu
By Carol Hopkins, the Daily Tribune
Snow today in Burbank and Universal City, CA, first time since 1949 according to local officials.
It has been an amazing winter in many places in the Northern Hemisphere, fourth in a row.
It has been a helleva winter in Oklahoma, with all time record snowfall and the coldest ever temperature (-31F) for the state. In this story, Carol hears from two scientists who see the signature of natural variability.
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Nobody can do anything about it, but everybody has an opinion on it - this winter’s weather.
Bill Deedler, weather historian at the National Weather Service’s White Lake Township office, said the weather has been impacted by two factors. One is La Nina, an ocean effect that causes colder than normal temperatures in the Pacific, he said, and it’s acting in conjunction with an Arctic low dropping from Canada’s eastern half.
“Between the two, we have a formula for a strong storm track with more snow and ice from the Southwest into the Great Lakes,” said Deedler. “Earlier this winter, it was in the South and up the East Coast. It has nothing to do with global warming.”
Chris Kobus, an Oakland University associate professor of engineering who has made a study of weather, also dismisses the winter as having anything to do with global warming. He noted that we experienced similar severe weather in the late 1970s. “This is just climate variability,” said Kobus. “We haven’t experienced it in decades.”
Kobus recalled how some scientists said warm winters in recent years were caused by global warming. “Now the same people are blaming global warming (for the more severe weather),” he said. “I don’t buy it. (Global warming) is a hoax.”
He said studies indicated the planet has only warmed half a degree in centuries.
He recommends people research both sides of the climate question by visiting climateprogress.org and climateaudit.org for opposing viewpoints. “You have to look at both sides,” Kobus said.
He believes the debate boils down to funding. “(Advocates of global warming) are well-funded and have deep connections with the media,” he said. “So-called skeptics (of global warming) are neither well-funded nor organized via advocacy organizations. It is a one-way debate.”
...
Al Gore, who has been warning people of global warming for years ($$$$$), recently answered the question about why winters have become snowier by saying the scientific community says that increased heavy snowfalls are consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming.” A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species,” Gore said.
The alarmists should be ranked among the endangered species.
Herald Sun
JULIA Gillard’s planned carbon tax is deliberately intended to hurt every Australian. Update: see this story in the Australian ”Carbon tax a pledge of suicide” that supports this statement.
Indeed that is its precise point. To force us to pay much higher prices for electricity—so that otherwise unviable forms of generation such as wind and solar and gas can “compete” with and then replace our longstanding cheap coal-fired power.
That’s much higher prices, it is worth noting, that will come on top of the big increases in electricity prices that consumers around Australia have already been hit with in recent years.
In short, it is the “extra GST we have to have, but without any offsetting personal tax cuts”.
What has not been recognised, far less understood, is that the “Julia tax”—the tax you have after an election that you promised before the election not to have—will also be devastating for small and medium businesses.
So those hundreds of thousands of Australians will be screwed over twice by their Government. First as ordinary consumers having to pay more for their electricity. And then when their businesses are hit by higher costs.
That in turn will mean that the rest of us will also be screwed over twice. Again as everyday consumers. And then as “collateral damage” when the SME sector that provides most of the jobs in the economy, is made less profitable and less viable.
It is extremely doubtful that Gillard—far less her twittering Climate Minister Greg Combet—have the slightest idea of any of this. And to the extent they are getting any advice from Treasury, that once great institution of rational analysis is now discredited by its embrace of a bizarre mix of ivory-tower economic modelling and primitive pre-Enlightenment theological belief.
LAST week the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry tried to sound the warning on this very real and immediate danger for SMEs. Its warning bears broadcasting for two big reasons.
First its substance. The Gillard carbon tax will devastate business.
Indeed it will send many of them to the wall. Never mind, Gillard would presumably respond, they can switch to building (useless) wind towers and (even more useless) solar panels.
See full post.
The statement is being made in response to statements submitted to the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, Committee on Energy and Commerce, United States House of Representatives, February 9, 2011 by EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson and American Public Health Association representative Lynn Goldman, M.D.
Administrator Jackson begins by stating that all Americans rely on the Clean Air Act to protect them from harmful air pollution. I agree. Next, Administrator Jackson says she is relying on the 2007 Supreme Court decision that EPA could consider greenhouse gases an air pollutant. Administrator Jackson neglected to include that the Supreme Court also said the Administrator could exclude a greenhouse gas if she could present evidence that the gas was not a pollutant or endangerment to mankind. This gets to the heart of the issue since Administrator Jackson has singled out carbon dioxide as the key substance to regulate on the grounds that, as Administrator Jackson so frequently comments, “CO2 is a pollutant and an endangerment to mankind.” That anyone would say that CO2 is a pollutant is incredible, but particularly when said by Administrator Jackson who is a degreed chemical engineer. There is not a single case, short of multi-thousands of parts per million (ppm) of this trace gas, that indicates CO2 to be a pollutant.
CO2 is the staff of life. Earth’s food chain begins with plants and as we all learned in elementary school, CO2 is what plants eat. In fact, as thousands of peer reviewed laboratory and field studies show, the more CO2 plants “eat”, the more robustly they grow. This is not speculation based upon man-made models; this is from real, empirical observations. I present three examples demonstrating that CO2 is not a pollutant; first, many commercial greenhouse operators grow the fruits and vegetables we buy in the grocery and where they and their staffs work, in an atmosphere of 1,000 ppm CO2. The workers suffer no ill effects and the plants grow profusely. Earth’s current atmosphere contains only 390 ppm. Secondly, as testified to the Unites States Senate, Princeton distinguished Professor William Happer has pointed that our very own government allows CO2 levels to build up to 8,000 ppm in our nuclear submarines where our sailors reside for week s at a time. Thirdly, we breathe in the current 390 ppm of CO2 and breathe out 40,000 ppm (!) with our lungs incurring no toxic or detrimental effects. For this Administration and especially Administrator Jackson to continue to refer to CO2 as a pollutant is far worse that a slip of the tongue or exaggeration; it is grossly misleading to our country’s citizens.
...What about the public position papers of the leading scientific societies that declares a belief in man-made global warming? None, to my knowledge, have agreed to take a vote of their membership. Most societies are run by a small group of leaders, mostly academics, whose universities depend, in part, on government grants. Why didn’t Administrator Jackson mention the recent poll by “Scientific American”, a very popular publication with scientists, which found that 77% of the thousands of respondents said they believed that climate was driven by natural causes, 83% said the IPCC was a corrupt organization, and 91% said the doubts about what is causing climate change should be publicly discussed.
...
Dr. Goldman says “Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human health. Scientists have stated in the strongest possible terms that human activities are to blame. The IPCC has unequivocally concluded that greenhouse gas (singular) is causing global warming.” Unequivocal means certain and even the IPCC have not come to such a conclusion. Dr. Goldman continues: “This increase in Earth’s temperature is causing more regional extreme weather events, increases and decreases in temperature and rainfall, may create (more) floods, heat waves, drought, poor air quality that lead to poor health outcomes such as heat strokes, injury, malnutrition, respiratory illnesses, asthma and infectious diseases.” Dr. Goldman, there are 66 peer reviewed studies that show that longevity increases and/or diseases diminish in a warmer world. There are fewer deaths from heart attacks, strokes and respiratory diseases (CCR, 2009, pages 664 to 676).
Also, 106 peer reviewed studies worldwide indicate 20th century droughts are no more frequent or severe than in the previous millennia and 47 more peer reviewed studies from North America, Europe and Asia indicate no increased frequency or severity of floods last century (CCR, 2009, pages 281 to 309). The statistical histogram put together by the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University shows that global cyclone (hurricane) energy has trended down for 17 years and is currently at a 30 year low despite the 24/7 ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2. Another histogram of the number of strong to violent tornados in the USA shows a clear downward trend for the past 35 years.
Dr. Goldman, where are your peer reviewed studies, based on actual data and not simply on someone’s opinion, that refute these peer reviewed studies? Were you swayed by the claims in the Lancet and echoed by Secretary Sebelius of Health and Human Services immediately before the Copenhagen Conference that millions of deaths could be saved by lowering CO2 emissions? Those statements are in direct contradiction to 25 peer reviewed studies from the United States, Russia, Japan, Norway, Korea, England, Australia, Brazil, Greece and Asia that showed a much higher death rate from heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory diseases following a drop in temperature versus following a heat event. (CCR, 2009, pages 664 to 667) Do you have evidence, as many people claim, that shows that people who move from New York City to Miami actually die earlier than their actuarial peers left behind?
The average January temperature in New York City is 33 Fahrenheit and 77F in July. The January temperature in Miami is 68F or 45 Fahrenheit warmer and the July average in Miami is 83F or 6F warmer than New York City. Why has the United States population voluntarily migrated to the southern states if, as you suggest, warmer temperatures are so bad for the health of our citizens? The length of the growing seasons also lengthens dramatically as you move south or in years when the temperatures rise in the north. Are people stupid, healths wise, that voluntarily choose climates that average many degrees warmer?
Dr. Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute for Infectious Diseases has testified that there is no evidence that mosquito borne malaria has increased as Earth has warmed. Dr. Goldman, if they exist, please furnish our lawmakers with peer reviewed studies that refute the above studies…
...In summary, the peer reviewed science plus empirical observations and common sense speak for themselves. To ignore this is the true endangerment to mankind.
Read more here.
By Mike Nichols
The Wisconsin scientists who just put together the big report on “Wisconsin’s Changing Climate” don’t like to talk about “predictions.”
They like to talk about “projections.”
The word “prediction,” I guess, has some negative connotations associated with soothsayers, palm readers, Steelers’ fans and Romanian witches - who, it was reported the other day, are now being threatened with fines and imprisonment if their tarot cards fail and their predictions don’t come true. The witches, in response, are said to be dumping poisonous mandrake into the Danube and putting curses on the government.
A projection, on the other hand, has a basis. It is, according to my Webster’s, “the carrying forward of a trend into the future.”
The projection of our scientists is that statewide annual average temperatures in Wisconsin are likely to increase by 6 to 7 degrees by sometime around 2055. That is both an alarming and astounding projection - alarming because that sort of permanent heat wave would dramatically alter everything from our lakes to our forests to our farms to our health, astounding because temperature trends in the recent past do not appear to foretell that sort of dramatic, upward surge.
I say “recent past” because there is a ton we don’t and can’t know prior to 1950. What we do know, according to the report by the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, is that between 1950 and 2006 our annual average temperature here in the Badger State rose by a single degree - 1.1 to be exact.
There are, just for the record, some differences between various places in our state. The average increase in far western or northern Wisconsin, around the Twin Cities or Superior, has been closer to two degrees since 1950, for instance. Parts of Forest or Florence counties, in the meantime, have actually gotten slightly colder. While there’s been an average annual increase statewide of 2.5 degrees since 1950 in the winter, moreover, fall has actually seen “a slight cooling trend” across the state.
But just wait. All hell - or something nearly as warm - is about to break loose. Even Wisconsin’s autumns are projected to be 4 to 10 degrees warmer by the middle of the current century.
Bottom line: In the 56 recent years preceding 2006, the average annual temperature went up 1 degree. In the next 44 years , according to projections, the average annual temperature will likely increase 6 or 7 degrees.
Past, in other words, is not prologue. It’s actually downright deceiving, a small gradual incline in temperature that is apparently about to turn upward at about the same slope as the Eiger.
I asked Dan Vimont, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor involved in the study, why they think warming trends are going to accelerate so much quicker than they have in the past. He mentioned expectations regarding accumulated levels of greenhouse gases and what scientists believe the impact will be. In addition to data collected since 1950 at 176 Wisconsin weather stations, future projections are also based on the “downscaling” of global climate models typically constructed by supercomputers that simulate interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, land and ice, according to the report.
In other words, unless you’re a supercomputer, or somebody who programs one, it’s impossible to definitively refute what the scientists are projecting. It’s also impossible to wholly embrace it.
They are basically asking us to trust them and the supercomputers and the projections that, we’re told, are much more than mere predictions. That would be a lot easier if there were some obvious evidence in recent temperature trends that we really are at the base of the Eiger instead of just peering into tarot cards. See post.
ICECAP NOTE: With the house eliminating funding the IPCC and looking at cut backs or elimination of funding for NOAA and NASA climate efforts, they should hold hearings into the NSf and its funding process. Although the funding dollars for climate change have dramatically increased, I am told by many scientists with an excellent publishing background, they are unable to get NSF funding anymore as all of it is going to fund alarmist research and climate modeling. Even as the sun and oceans are clearly showing their importance as climate drivers, scientists who are studying these natural factors are being ignored. The house should mandate a significant portion (40%+?) of the climate change dollars be used to study natural factors before approving NSF funding.
Piers Corbyn astrophysicist of WeatherAction long range forecasters reports
I have just completed a 10 year research programme into the causes of the UK floods in Autumn 2000 and conclusively demonstrate (Ref 1) their risk was very likely (a 2 in 3 chance) exacerbated by the millennium bug. The correlation between the floods and the exponential growth of the bug which started in January 2000, a full 9 months previously is widely accepted and fully piers reviewed. The other reason why we can be so confident is that we know of no other reason, or to be more precise there are allegedly plenty of other reasons but we don’t want to know them because our bug research grant needs renewal and it was hard enough to spin this one out for ten years.
SERIOUSLY this level of drivel is only surpassed by the recent ‘Nature’ - Met Office - BBC publication - one-sided propagation by the familiar anti-science spin axis of ‘studies’ to the effect that Man-made CO2 contributed to the floods in 2000 and more intense precipitation in general (here, here, here).
1. If there were any truth in their claims we would have seen a continuous increase in floods (and other extremes according to their catechism) during the last century and also in the last ten years because CO2 has been rising continuously. BUT THERE HAS BEEN NO INCREASE WHATSOEVER IN GENERAL FLOOD INCIDENCE OR STORMINESS IN THE UK, USA or THE WORLD.
This fact - for UK rainfall - was reported on Sat 13 Feb 2010 by leading hydrologists to a joint meeting of British Hydrological Society and the Royal Meteorological Society held in Physics Lecture Theatre 1 Imperial College London. The corresponding lack of increase in severe storms, Hurricanes, any extreme events and a decline in US tornadoes is also well documented p See references with graphs in WeatherActionNews 2010no27 pdf link
All the extremes that have happened in the last decade - including very severe extremes in the last 9 months have happened before (indeed that is largely how they are scientifically predicted using solar magnetic studies) - have happened before in the last few hundred years when there was less CO2. So they weren’t caused by CO2 but something else - the Sun - which is still around!
2. These ‘findings’ come from the same para-science cult which told the world in 2000 that Britain and many other places would see the end of snow and the USA much milder winters by 2010. Could they have been more wrong? Now they say warming (judged by fiddled data) causes cooling and snow!!
3. Their many parametered ‘finger-printing’ methods are open to adjustment - ‘fudging’ - to get the desired result and in the end are opaque discredited hocus pocus. Previous such ‘tricks’ of supposedly ‘fingerprinting’ temperature data for a spread of ‘emissions’ to detect some sort of signal in fact did nothing of the sort. The many adjustable parameters of the amounts of different emissions + volcanoes etc were adjusted to give the appearance of ‘fitting’ 1990 to 2000 but that same ‘proven’ model then failed TOTALLY to predict any of the decade 2000 to 2010 which cooled (even by already fudged (’undeclined’
temperature data) rather than the large warming they predicted.
If their rain ‘model’ was worth a dime it would have predicted the last ten years of rain in the UK but the Met Office promised the UK barbecue summers for 2007, 2008, & 2009 and instead we got floods floods and more floods - all as predicted by WeatherAction using solar activity. I challenge the authors of these papers to predict UK rainfall over the next 5 years using their ‘model’.
The lesson of their methods is that fudge can fill a spoon of any shape but doesn’t stretch very far in the real world. That needs candy floss - which is where Myles Allen, a leading participant in the study, of Oxford University came in a few years ago with his climate change by participatory computers. In this by essentially holding computer buttons children and some grown-ups were led to ‘feel’ they were advancing knowledge when in fact all they were doing was helping put rubbish into a climate model so they could associate with and believe the rubbish which came out. This is brainwashing - made in Oxford University and a disgrace. And what happened to his participatory results? Remember? ‘Maybe runaway warming in a few years?! - End of Snow?! Etc etc. Where are we now? 100 year record snow and cold levels in Britain, much of Europe, USA, South Korea etc and world average temperatures are going down and down. Their answer? Do something like it again but for rain with another grant at public expense.
See post and more. Spot on Piers!!!!
By Paul Chesser
Progress Energy CEO Bill Johnson, whose company will (pending approval) be swallowed by larger electric utility Duke Energy, has been making the media rounds. He has discussed the planned merger, which he says is necessary because of looming capital projects that will be needed to meet electricity demand, but he also warned regulators in Washington of the dangers posed by the heightened government regulatory environment:
“Call this regulatory picture what you will - “a train wreck” ... “a tsunami” ... or an overdue change that’s ultimately do-able,” Johnson said. “It’s not hard to imagine the customer pushback that will occur because of the resulting increase in the price of electricity. This pushback will come from industrial customers struggling to be competitive, and from residential customers and small businesses struggling to make ends meet. As indicated, I’m especially sensitive to the households of modest means, where energy represents a disproportionately large share of disposable income.”
This is what many groups who represent low-income, minority, small businesses and senior citizens have been saying for years. What is ironic is that Progress would form its partnership with Duke, which as a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership has lobbied for policies (especially cap-and-trade) that dramatically increase those regulations that Johnson criticizes. Duke’s Jim Rogers is known as one of the top rent-seeking CEOs in the country (perhaps second only to Government Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt).
Specifically Johnson spoke of his concern over a “daunting convergence of new federal rules and aggressive deadlines coming at us on multiple fronts” - pending changes on air, water and land rules under the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), changing rules on nuclear safety from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the new grid reliability rules from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Also from his remarks:
What’s worrisome is the insufficient attention to the cumulative effects on utilities and our customers. I’m not suggesting we face a doomsday scenario, but I do believe the current fragmented approach, coupled with rapid-compliance deadlines, is a recipe for inefficiency, system reliability challenges and unnecessarily high cost.
Johnson pointed out a study by the Edison Electrical Institute which reported, among other things, that utilities will be forced to retire up to one-fourth of coal-fired power plants earlier than planned; that those plants are heavily concentrated in the Southeast, Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states, where the cost impacts will be felt more strongly; and the incremental capital expenditures due to the requirements could reach $247 billion by 2020.
“These costs are real,” Johnson told the regulators, “and whether through rate cases or energy markets, they ultimately will be borne by utility customers - homes, churches, schools, small businesses and large industries.”
Answering the charge that utilities have always been able to meet past environmental regulations, Johnson added:
According to this argument, the industry is overstating the challenge - “crying wolf.” But the last significant wave of new environmental rules was driven by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. And, in that case, the industry had a decade to identify and implement the most cost-effective solutions.
This new wave of EPA rules is on a much broader front - SO2, NOx, mercury, coal ash, water, greenhouse gases - and a much faster track. We’re being required to execute much more change in a much smaller window of time.
The bottom line is the coming effect on our electric bills will be painful, all in pursuit of a dubious-at-best global warming problem. And now Johnson is marrying one of the practitioners of alarmism, as he complains about his new spouse’s habits.
Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center and is executive director for the American Tradition Institute.