By Kimberley A. Strassel, Potomac Watch
It isn’t often an energy company (of all things) gets to present itself as an environmental crusader, cozy up to Washington rulemakers, buy political protection, and pad its bottom line - all in one neat little announcement. So give Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM and Exelon credit for going for the gold.
The three utility giants have made news recently by quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Their finer sensibilities, they explained, would no longer allow them to associate with an organization lacking in environmental fervor. How dare the Chamber demand the Environmental Protection Agency be transparent about the science it is relying on to regulate all carbon energy use. Heresy! “As a company with a clear and strong position on the importance of addressing climate change,” we must go our own way, lamented PG&E’s CEO Peter Darbee.
Fortunately for Mr. Darbee, that way leads to the bank. As much as supporters of cap and tax would like to spin this as a new corporate ethic, the reality is less edifying. The lesson here is that big business political rent-seeking is alive and thriving.
“The carbon-based free lunch is over,” declared Exelon CEO John Rowe, neglecting to mention that his company’s free lunch is only beginning. Under the House’s climate-change bill, a few utilities -primarily those that have made big bets in renewable and nuclear energy - are poised to clean up once Congress hands them carbon emission credits. The bill sets aside 35% of the free credits for utilities. Exelon and other “renewable” utilities will get a huge piece of that pie.
Exelon CEO John Rowe
An internal memo produced by Bernstein Research in June described how Mr. Rowe met with investors to rejoice that the House legislation will allow Exelon to rake in additional revenue - by some estimates, up to $1.5 billion a year. Others will pay for this Exelon privilege, of course - notably, Midwestern customers of traditional coal utilities who will see their energy prices double. But hey, all’s fair in love and lobbying.
“Seeking greater competitive advantage through regulatory means is, lamentably, an entrenched fact of life in some corporate boardrooms . . . But breaking with an organization and creating a public stage on which to tout a company’s green credentials is overwrought. This is about profit, not Gaia,” says Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe.
Speaking of senators, the utility exodus conveniently came only days before Sen. Barbara Boxer released her own draft climate bill. And Mrs. Boxer, also conveniently, left blank the portion allocating credits - all the better to bribe support out of key industry players by dangling precious goods in front of them. Emancipated from the Chamber, Exelon and others are free to play ball. The EPA’s new emissions rules were also announced this week in tune with the Boxer bill, reminding companies that if they don’t work with Congress, the EPA will make them pay without any compensating emissions credits.
Let’s also not forget that Chicago-based Exelon and employees, including Mr. Rowe, contributed tens of thousands of dollars for their home-city presidential aspirant. And that Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, was once a consultant to Exelon. In an energy world in which winners and losers are picked on the Potomac, there is no harm in reminding the president who his friends are.
The move also keeps the mob at bay. Caught flat-footed by public outrage over health care, liberal interest groups are now attacking opponents of the Democratic agenda in personal terms. For the crime of talking straight about ObamaCare, former House leader Dick Armey and former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey have been targeted and lost jobs in the private sector. The Natural Resources Defense Council is attempting a similar takedown of Chamber President Tom Donahue, in retribution on climate. The utility execs hope to avoid that bull’s-eye. As extra insurance, Mr. Rowe this spring taped an ad with the Environmental Defense Fund, the smoothest of the green lobbies, to plump for climate legislation.
The Chamber’s sin was giving the utilities the excuse to bolt by suggesting there be a “trial” on the science. The organization is doing its job, representing all its other members that will foot the climate bill. More astonishing than the exits from the Chamber is the news that the administration won’t grant the business community’s simple request to be transparent on its science. This obfuscation is becoming habit.
The stonewalling of the Chamber follows the muzzling of a career EPA scientist - Alan Carlin - who had questioned the scientific basis of the agency’s moves. The agency is now considering shuttering Mr. Carlin’s entire department - whose job it is to examine the economic consequences of agency rules. Treasury only reluctantly released climate documents demanded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and only after redacting a section about cost. Under pressure, it recently released the complete documents. So only now are we discovering that Team Obama believes a climate bill could cost the economy up to $300 billion annually.
The favored utilities don’t mind this lack of transparency, since the more consumers realize how much they will pay for climate legislation, the less they support it. And save a few lucky utilities, pay America will. Read more here.
A story in Ski Magazine this month entitled ”Meet the woman who’s saving our snow”. Her name is Alison Gannett, a NH native who currently resides in Crested Butte, Colo. Among her quotes “The forecast is bleak - we’re headed toward a perilous situation. The concern is not that our grandkids won’t be able to ski. It’s that WE won’t be able to ski. In Europe, which is warming much faster, about half the ski areas are going to be out of business in the next few years.”
Allison walks the walk and talks the talk. But the talk is all misguided.
The scary climate models that Al Gore, her mentor relies on for his dire projections are all failing miserably. The earth has been cooling for 8 years now. Sea levels have stopped rising. The arctic ice has increased 26% since 2007 and the Antarctic ice has reached record high extent. Also snow has fallen first time ever or in many decades in many locations, and all-time record snows have occurred in North America and Europe and in the Southern Hemisphere.
See how last few years have seen even record snows in Europe here and they are getting off to an early start.
We set records for snow here in the United States and much of North America the last few winters and given the cooling of the Pacific and more La Ninas and the quiet sun (unlike CO2, the real climate drivers), look for lots more cold and snowy years to come in decades ahead. This winter given the weak El Nino, expect the snow to be focused further south in the central and southern Rockies. In years ahead though with La Ninas dominating expect banner snow years in the central and northern Rockies and northwest.
Here is that story mentioned on the early start to the snow season in Europe here:
Winter Arrives Early In The Alps
Sep 28, 2009 Alicia Taylor, Executive Editor, Europe
Fresh snow on the Kitzsteinhorn glacier, Kaprun, Austria
The first snow of the winter season 2009/10 has fallen across the Alps. Many big-name resorts were reporting fresh snow on the slopes as early as Sept. 14, including Saas-Fee, Breuil-Cervinia, Kaprun, and Hintertux. The Allalin glacier (3500 metres) above the Swiss resort of Saas-Fee now has 84cm of snow after a further 20cm fell on the week of Sept. 16, offering excellent conditions for some late summer skiing; the snowpark is reporting its halfpipe, rails, and kickers all open for business.
Italy’s high alpine resort of Breuil-Cervinia (2050 metres), which shares a ski area with Zermatt in Switzerland, reported 80cm of fresh snow on its slopes during the first week of Sept. This resort is one of the highest in the country and offers skiing up to 3883 metres. The Monterosa ski areas have also reported 10cm of new snow in the last week.
Kaprun, Austria reported 42cm of snow at the Alpincenter (2450 metres) on the Kitzsteinhorn glacier Sept. 21, which was enough to reopen some of the upper slopes. Austria’s Hintertuxer glacier (3000 metres) boasts 15 kilometres of open pistes after fresh snowfall gave a new snow height of 55cm boosting its year-round skiing.
Autumn skiing In France will kick off in Les Deux Alps Oct. 24 to Nov. 1 and the lifts will open for the main winter season Nov. 28. Val d’Isere opens Nov. 28 and the Grande Motte ski area in Tignes will reopen for skiing Sept. 26.
See this story and links here.
Here by the way is an October 1, 2009 photo from FamousInternetSkiers in northern New England (Stowe).
By Greg Pollowitz
In the piece Chris Horner flagged here, Paul Krugman wrote yesterday:
But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.
The real inconvenient truth is that columnists like Krugman never attack their own industry for its role in the so called climate crisis. Do we need print editions of newspapers and their carbon-spewing delivery methods in Krugman’s green-world order? Maybe Krugman will accept compensation based on online clicks only? Then again, our computers use coal-fired electricity. Instead of checking NYTimes.com ten times a day, I’ll only check once. Krugman also appears on MSNBC regularly - maybe he’ll advocate the simple electricty-saving solution of no longer watching television live. If everyone were to DVR the programs and skip the ads, that would shrink MSNBC’s carbon footprint commendably.
And to say the industries of the future don’t have vast armies of lobbyists in place just isn’t true. Just ask Al Gore:
WASHINGTON - A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.
The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns.
Chief Executive Henrik Fisker and his company’s Karma
I’m no Nobel economist, so please tell me how Fisker and Tesla - industries of the future - are going to pay back this billion dollars. See post here.
By Harold Ambler
What started as a brouhaha in the blogosophere has turned into a minor embarrassment for the United Nations in the climate debates. As first reported on ClimateAudit.org, the origin of a graph used in last week’s UN climate report, published to coincide with the summit in New York attended by President Obama and other world leaders, was not an august team of scientists working around the clock, but rather Wikipedia.
Perhaps equally surprising was the revelation that the graph’s author was not a climatologist, but rather an obscure Norwegian ecologist, Hanno Sandvik, who claimed no expertise regarding the data used in his graph. Misidentified in
the UN report as “Hanno,” Sandvik politely distanced himself from the graph as the story unfolded. The UN report authors, meanwhile, had given a scientist they had never met or heard of the appearance of scientific legitimacy.
Was copying and pasting a Wikipedia graph drawn by a non-climatologist the best that the United Nations, with all the resources at its disposal, could do? Evidently, it was. Sandvik himself appeared surprised.
“‘My’ graph has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal since I am not a climatologist,” he wrote in an e-mail to TalkingAboutTheWeather.com. “The graph has been drawn using data that have undergone peer-review. That means that the graph is ‘mine’ only in a very restricted sense, viz. that I have drawn it - the underlying data [are] not mine, as the source provided clearly indicates. I have no qualification to judge whether the underlying data are correct or erroneous, and have never pretended to be able to do so.”
This is not the first graph with a hockey-stick shape to gain notoriety. The most famous example is that of Penn State climatologist Michael Mann’s own hockey stick graph, prominently featured at the 2001 UN IPCC meeting and in its Third Assessment Report
That hockey stick has since been debunked by the United States Congress by the world-renowned statistics expert Edward Wegman.
The Wegman Report was sufficiently damning that, until now, the United Nations has distanced itself from Mann’s graph, which did not appear in the Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007. From the Congressional report led by Wegman came the following conclusion: “The [Mann] methodology puts undue emphasis on those proxies that do exhibit the hockey stick shape and this is the fundamental flaw.”
Mann has argued that it was never his intention for the flat part of the stick that he derived from proxies to be grafted onto the modern temperature record, providing the upturned blade, as though the two sets of data had the same origin. Writing on the website that he cofounded, realclimate.org, Mann wrote the following in response to earlier critiques of his methodology in 2004: “No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.”
Such a graft is precisely what Sandvik’s graph does, however, leading to the inevitable question: Is the United Nations an “industry-funded climate disinformation website”? Unlike Mann’s graph, which, with the use of color and error bars, at least suggests both the level of uncertainty associated with temperature proxies and shows that the sources for the temperature data is not the same during the past 1,000 years, the “Hanno” graph used by the United Nations has neither error bars nor different colors for the differently derived data. By intent or no, it is inherently misleading.
The storm over “Hanno 2009” is very likely just beginning. See post here.
By Alan Caruba
You begin with bad science, the kind that has no basis in fact. You get corporations to promote that bad science in order to increase their profits. Then you get the courts involved to rule on what those corporations are doing and when they incorporate the bad science in their judgment, you complete the circle of ignorance.
Somebody always ends up with the bill for this and it is always either the consumer and/or the taxpayer. The process is called “rent seeking” when corporations attempt to manipulate public opinion and policy for their personal gain. Recently, Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, wrote gleefully about a decision of the Second U.S. Court of Appeals, State of Connecticut et al v. American Power et all, that concluded that states and other plaintiffs have the right to sue five electric utilities for creating a “public nuisance” by emitting carbon dioxide (CO2), thus contributing to global warming.
As I am wont to point out almost every day, there is NO global warming and CO2 plays no role whatever in the process by which the Earth warms. It is, however, the most hyped “greenhouse” gas, alleged to be responsible for the planet’s warming. No, the Sun is the most responsible for that and right now it is in hibernation, producing far fewer sunspots (magnetic storms) than in previous years. The result is that the Earth has been cooling for the past decade.
Apparently the judges, Joseph McClaughlin and Peter Hall, were unaware of this or, for whatever reason, thought that it was permissible to open the utilities to law suits anyway. They may have been relying on one the most stupefying decisions handed down by the Supreme Court that likewise declared that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and a “pollutant.”
How the Supremes came to the conclusion that a gas responsible for all the vegetation on Earth and thus vital to all life on Earth was a pollutant, defies understanding. We humans emit CO2 every time we exhale. The Court is not immune to stupidity, however, because prior to the Civil War, it ruled that Dred Scott, a freedman was, in fact, a slave on the theory, one presumes, that once a slave, always a slave.
Lewis noted that “These utilities for years have lobbied for carbon cap-and-trade schemes. Instead of opposing climate alarmism, they have helped to promote it.” The lies about global warming have come back to bite them! In sum, cap-and-trade would allow the utilities and other producers or users of energy to makes heaps of money selling so-called “carbon credits” among each other. Think of it as a high stakes game of Texas Hold’m poker or the sale of indulgences by the Church that wiped the purchaser’s sins clean.
Now, instead of trading carbon credits, the utilities will be subject to endless consumer lawsuits for the high crime of producing electricity while emitting CO2. One day after the Appeals Court decision, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had finalized new requirements for the nation’s biggest sources of “greenhouse gases” to publicly disclose their annual emissions “providing the necessary foundation for effective federal policy to reduce global warming pollution.”
Only there is NO global warming and thus no need to “reduce” it. And CO2 is not a pollutant. Just because the EPA says global warming is real does not mean it is. Just because the courts say that CO2 is a pollutant does not mean it is.
If Congress passes the Cap-and-Trade bill that just barely passed the House and is now in the Senate for a vote, it will cost families approximately $1,800 more each year to heat, cool, and power their homes so that a handful of the very rich can get richer trading carbon credits while everyone else gets poorer.
If this sounds a lot like those mortgage loan “derivatives” that were “bundled” as assets and sold to banks and investments house, thus generating the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, you’re right. It’s all very creative, but the court’s decision, the EPA’s regulation, and the claim that global warming exists are all utterly false. They are all lies piled upon lies.
And you as a taxpayer and consumer will be forced to pay for them out of your pocket. Read more here.
By Greg Roberts, The Australian
ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.
See larger image here.
The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast.
Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.
However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.
See larger image here.
East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.
Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.
“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said.
The melting of sea ice - fast ice and pack ice - does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland. See full story here. H/T Dr. Benny Peiser.
See rapid rise of antartic ice this year above enlarged here.
See BBC story on the akkeged laser determined disappearance of Antarctic and Greenland ice.
By Norm Kalmanovitch, on Climate Realists
I have been having some discussions (technical disagreement) regarding the fact that there were emissions reductions from 1979 to 1982 that had no effect on the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration, and stating that this was proof that fossil fuel emissions are not the primary source for the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Having this in my head, in reading one of your inclusions I found an interesting table from the IPCC 2001 TAR which listed the contribution from nature as well as the contribution from humans and the total annual increase in contribution from both sources. What is missing is the annual increase in human contribution. When you put in the approximate figure of 500 million metric tonnes per year for the human contribution, the table refutes the IPCC claim that humans are the prime source for increases in CO2 emissions.
I put together the attachment in a rather pedantic style (for which I apologize) just to make the point that the IPCC is so messed up that even their own publications refute their conjecture.
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Throughout the 1990’s global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were increasing on average by about 500 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year. This table from the IPCC 2001 Third Assessment Report shows the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 over this time period to be 11,700 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year. This clearly demonstrates that only 500 of the 11,700 million metric tonnes of annual increase in atmospheric CO2 was from fossil fuels.
500/11,700 = 0.0427 or 4.27%. This means that 95.73% of the increase was naturally sourced. The response to this increase is a measured increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 2.0ppmv/year.
See larger image here.
Since 95.73% of this is due to naturally sourced CO2 nature isresponsible for 95.73% of 2.0ppmv/year or 1.9ppmv/year. Basic arithmetic shows that:
2.0ppmv/year - 1.9ppmv/year = 0.1ppmv/year If we reduce our fossil fuel consumption to a steady level with no further increases we will eliminate this 0.1ppmv/year increase and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will only increase by 1.9ppmv/year. If we reduce our fossil fuel consumption to a level that causes a 500 metric tonne decrease in emissions from year to year the atmospheric concentration will only increase by 1.8ppmv/year.
If we reduce our fossil fuel consumption to a level that causes a 1000 metric tonne decrease in emissions from year to year the atmospheric concentration will only increase by 1.7ppmv/year. If we reduce our fossil fuel consumption to a level that causes a 2000 metric tonne decrease in emissions from year to year, the atmospheric concentration will only increase by 1.5ppmv/year. No matter what we do the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will keep increasing because natural increases in CO2 emissions are over 20 times greater than increases in emissions from fossil fuels.
If the IPCC models are correct and increases in CO2 concentration cause increases in global temperatures, the Earth will continue to warm at catastrophic rates regardless of what we do to reduce emissions.
REALITY CHECK!!!!
First of all this table demonstrates that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are not the primary source for the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and in fact fossil fuel CO2 emissions account for less than 5% of the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Second and most importantly, the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, regardless of source, is not causing an increase in global temperature as demonstrated by the past eight years of cooling with steadily increasing CO2 concentration and the ever increasing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
This flies in the face of IPCC statements that the Earth is warming and this warming is caused by humans.
See enlarged graph here.
See more here.
By Marc Morano, Climate Depot
Renowned agricultural scientist Dr. Norman Borlaug has died at the age of 95. Borlaug, known as the father of the “Green Revolution” for saving over a billion people from starvation by utilizing pioneering high yield farming techniques, is one of only five people in history who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom ,and the Congressional Gold Medal.
For more details on Borlaug’s life and accomplishments see CNN’s report here. Also here is a Gregg Easterbrook article on Borlaug’s life and career.
Borlaug was also a man-made global warming skeptic who was featured in the U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists. Borlaug is featured on page 116 of March 2009 U.S. Senate Report of More Than 700 Dissenting Scientists on Man-Made Global Warming.
Dr. Borlaug’s entry in the U.S. Senate report is reproduced below:
Renowned agricultural scientist Dr. Norman Borlaug, known as the father of the “Green Revolution” for saving over a billion people from starvation by utilizing pioneering high yield farming techniques, is one of only five people in history who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom ,and the Congressional Gold Medal. Borlaug also declared himself skeptical of man-made climate fears in 2007. “I do believe we are in a period where, no question, the temperatures are going up. But is this a part of another one of those (natural) cycles that have brought on glaciers and caused melting of glaciers?” Borlaug asked, according to a September 21, 2007 article in Saint Paul Pioneer Press. The article reported that Borlaug is “not sure, and he doesn’t think the science is, either.” Borlaug added, “How much would we have to cut back to take the increasing carbon dioxide and methane production to a level so that it’s not a driving force?” We don’t even know how much.”
This was back in the days when the Nobel Peace Prize meant something and you had to accomplish something meaningful to earn it.