By Paul Chesser
The Wite-Out was barely dry on the Climategate investigations of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit and Penn State hockey stick creator Michael Mann last week when environoiacs (including Mann himself) trumpeted “exoneration” and demanded apologies to those who were scrutinized. But not everyone who is sympathetic to the alarmist cause believes the investigations were legitimate, including The Atlantic’s Clive Crook (Hat tip to Morano):
I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even willfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.
The Penn State inquiry exonerating Michael Mann—the paleoclimatologist who came up with “the hockey stick”—would be difficult to parody. Three of four allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry announces that, for “lack of credible evidence”, it will not even investigate them. (At this, MIT’s Richard Lindzen tells the committee, “It’s thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues are explicitly stated in the emails. I’m wondering what’s going on?” The report continues: “The Investigatory Committee did not respond to Dr Lindzen’s statement. Instead, [his] attention was directed to the fourth allegation.") Moving on, the report then says, in effect, that Mann is a distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man admired by his peers—so any allegation of academic impropriety must be false....
In short, the case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no. His record is swooned over. Verdict: case dismissed, with apologies that Mann has been put to such trouble.
Warren Meyer, who is not inclined to take Mann to the woodshed, called the investigations ridiculous as well:
In a large sense, Penn State’s only test of Mann’s ability is that he is currently a member in good standing of the small in-crowd that dominates climate science. His science is good because it comes to the right conclusions.
Unlike many skeptics, I have no desire to “get” Professor Mann. I don’t need him fired or even investigated by Penn State. The way to refute him is to refute him, not haul him in front of tribunals.
That being said, Penn State did start and investigation and as such has some responsibility to do the thing right. And boy was this a joke. The most charitable thing I can say is that his work is fraught with more questionable decisions and practices and approaches than anything I have ever seen that was taken this seriously.
The formerly mainstream media has seized the opportunity of these two sham reports to also exonerate their own laziness and apathy in reporting about Climategate. As Pat Michaels wrote for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the investigations were not independent, but protective of their own institutions. The universities and the environmentalists can pretend, but not a soul was exonerated, cleared, or acquitted. The scandal lives, and now has grown
By Paul Driessen
The Soviet Union’s demise helped usher in manmade catastrophic global warming as the new “central organizing principle of civilization.” Now, global warming is giving way to a growing recognition that: climate change is primarily natural, cyclical and moderate; China, India and other countries will not sacrifice CO2-generating economic growth to prevent speculative climate crises; and carbon taxes strangle competitiveness, destroy jobs and send families into fuel poverty.
Thus, while not recanting predictions of disastrous climate change, environmental activists and the United Nations are already launching a new campaign. The real threat to the planet, they now assert, is the impact of modern energy technologies and civilization on biodiversity. The case for saving species, they insist, is even “more powerful” than the need to address climate change.
They seek to preserve biodiversity by controlling people’s energy use, economic activities and population - through new regulations and taxes under the auspices of the United Nations and global treaties. These efforts, they claim, will generate benefits “worth $4-5 trillion per year” (based on questionable studies and computer models that underscore the intrinsic value of species and biodiversity).
To accept these claims, one would have to ignore the sordid history of Climategate and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - and believe a larger, more powerful United Nations will somehow ensure honesty, transparency, accountability and actual consequences for misfeasance, misrepresentation, intimidation, and adverse impacts on people and economic growth. One would also have to ignore a growing body of evidence that:
The greatest threats to the world’s species are misguided environmental and anti-technology policies.
Among the policies adversely impacting biodiversity are these.
* Intense opposition to coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric plants for generating the electricity that two billion people worldwide so desperately need. Not only does this force people to rely on open fires for heating and cooking - perpetuating poverty, lung disease and premature death. It also destroys mountain gorilla and other wildlife habitats, as people cut trees for fires and charcoal.
China and India are self-financing hundreds of power projects, to avoid conditions placed by wealthy countries on World Bank and other international loans. But poor countries must still rely on such loans - and thus must run gauntlets laid down by regulators and environmental activists who oppose critically needed power plants and the economic growth and middle class living standards the plants generate.
* Steadfast promotion of expensive, unreliable wind and solar power. Wind turbines slice up birds and collapse bat lungs. Turbines and solar arrays would have to cover millions of acres to provide power for cities. They require ultra-long transmission lines and backup gas generators, and consume millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass, polymers and rare earth (lanthanide) minerals - all of which have to extracted from the Earth and processed into finished products, burning fossil fuels and generating mining wastes and air and water pollution.
Con Ed had to generate some 13,500 megawatts to meet New York City’s air conditioning and other electricity needs during the recent July heat wave. The 600-turbine Roscoe wind farm blankets 100,000 Texas acres to generate 780 MW at full capacity. That means NYC would need a wind farm 1.6 times the size of Connecticut (5 million acres or 2 million hectares), if the turbines are running at an average 30% of capacity. But during the heat wave, there’s barely a breeze.
Now multiply that habitat demand times the world’s biggest cities, and calculate the biodiversity impact. No wonder the wind industry wants exemptions from endangered species rules and environmental impact studies that hyper-regulate fossil fuel and nuclear companies. No wonder Senator Diane Feinstein has introduced legislation to prohibit solar installations in the super-sunny Mojave Desert, where developers want to install millions of acres of photovoltaic panels.
* Equally passionate advocacy for biofuels, especially ethanol. Every 7 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol requires crops grown on an area the size of Indiana (23 million acres) - and Congress now wants the USA to produce 20 billion gallons of EtOH annually by 2020. In addition to expropriating vast crop land and wildlife habitat, ethanol production requires billions of gallons of water, millions of tons of fertilizer and insecticides, and enormous quantities of natural gas and diesel fuel to power tractors, tanker trucks and conversion plants - to distill a fuel that gets 20% fewer mpg than gasoline.
And yet, President Obama told a Ghanaian audience in July 2009 that malnourished Africa should forego even gas-fired electricity generators in favor of wind, solar and biofuel power. The continent and its arid, nutrient-depleted soils already cannot feed their populations adequately, and the President wants them to divert cropland and wildlife habitats to biofuels. Meanwhile, environmental activists continue to…
* Oppose biotechnology, genetically engineered crops and even hybrid seeds. These specialized crops survive better during droughts, increase farm family incomes, improve nutrition, and reduce the need for insecticides. They offer the best hope for growing more biofuel crops on less acreage.
The New York Times says we can ill afford “not to make the best use of genetic engineering.” If we “allow propaganda to trump science, then the potential for global agriculture to be productive, diverse and sustainable will go unfulfilled.” The late Dr. Norman Borlaug warned that forcing the world to rely on organic and traditional farming to feed even current populations would require plowing under nearly every remaining acre of forest and grassland habitat. That’s without factoring in biofuels.
And yet, environmentalists and EU bureaucrats threaten African nations with punitive boycotts if they plant biotech crops. Radical greens want Third World farmers to rely on “traditional” seeds and agricultural methods, and oppose the use of seeds that have been “touched by corporations.”
* Environmentalists also oppose timber cutting and even tree thinning and mechanized fire suppression on vast acreage of US national forests. Too often the result is fiery conflagrations that incinerate trees, wildlife, soil and streams, causing extensive erosion and long-term habitat loss.
* Topping it off, the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent endangerment decision, low-carbon fuel standards, and power plant emission rules will force even greater expansion of wind, solar and biofuel use, further impacting habitats and biodiversity.
It is bad enough that “biodiversity stabilization” is a reprise of past government-environmentalist eco-scares. Like its predecessors, the new program offers horrifying predictions of a dying planet - backed by little more than dubious theories, assumptions, assertions and statistics, fed into fancy computer models that generate ominous scenarios and graphics. It also proposes the same tired “solutions” - more taxes, regulations, and government control over lives, energy development and economic growth.
The far greater problem is that the UN, EPA, “mainstream media” and political establishment are ignoring the real threats to habitats, species and biodiversity: the anti-energy, anti-technology, anti-people agenda of radical green ideology.
We now have an opportunity to make Earth a better place for people and the natural world. We need to reject this agenda, demand sound science and solid evidence that a treat exists, and recognize that modern technology actually offers the best hope for protecting the diversity of species.
SPPI CO2 Report
The enquiries very, very carefully avoided looking at the actual science being discussed in the thousand emails released by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia last November. Instead, they reached for the whitewash-bucket. All of them did this. Not one did its job properly or independently.
Why this failure to investigate even the most blatant incitement to destroy scientific material in emails from “Professor” Jones to fellow-"scientists"? Why the failure to investigate the “trick” by which Jones had sought to conceal the growing discrepancy between rising real-world temperatures as measured by thermometers and the falling temperatures shown by the tree-ring records that he was trying to pretend were reliable enough to tell us there was no medieval warm period?
Why the failure to investigate why various of the Climategate emailers - a poisonous, malevolent crew from the beastly tone of so many of the emails - had spent a year bullying and cajoling editors of learned journals to delay publication of a result they found uncongenial, so that they could cobble together an attempted refutation to be published at the same time as the paper they disagreed with?
Scientific dishonesty on this scale is not routine, even in the corrupted academe of today. But it was not investigated. The people who ran the enquiries knew what was expected of them. Their job was to look the other way. And why? Because almost the entire governing class of the world has foolishly signed up to the climate-extremist results of the UN’s climate panel, and governments never, ever admit they are wrong.
The classe politique has all the advantages of position, status, wealth (ours), and access to an increasingly spineless and fawning mainstream news media. And it knows how to grandstand. Every year, there is a major climate conference - last December at Copenhagen (where the stage-management went horribly wrong), and this December at Cancun, where the theater directors will be taking very good care that nothing shall go wrong at all.
The kow-towing media will be there in all their feeble strength. But the people will no longer be fooled.
The draft Treaty of Cancun - world government lite, in the words of one commentator - is already in draft, and has been studied by officials and world leaders at a still-incomplete series of meetings in Bonn, Germany. The Chinese, who rightly have no intention whatsoever of putting their economic growth at risk by making any serious cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, have offered to hold an additional meeting in Tientsin before December’s Cancun session, just to make sure that “the process”, as the UN’s bureaucrats call it, will not be derailed by the lackadaisical lifestyle of Mexico’s manana republic.
What will Cancun mean? Higher taxes. More regulation. Less freedom. No democracy. The New World Order is upon us, in the name of solving the non-problem of man-made “global warming”. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were fun, while they lasted. Commentary by Monckton of Brenchley here.
By Alan Caruba
I attended the first two International Climate Change Conferences when they were held in New York City, but a change of venue to the hometown of The Heartland Institute, Chicago, was enough to discourage someone like myself who no longer enjoys travel of any kind for any reason.
The most recent Heartland conference was held May 16-18 and drew over 800 people from nearly thirty nations. I “attended” electronically, watching the proceedings that were broadcast by Pajamas Media via the Internet.
My friend, Joseph Bast, is the founder The Heartland Institute and, in a recent issue of The Heartlander, he wrote a revealing and insightful article, “There’s Nothing Mainstream About Old Media”, that says much about the state of journalism in America today.
“Heartland’s first international conference on Climate Change generated 124 print articles with a total circulation of nine million readers. It was covered by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, three of the four television networks, and dozens of publications outside the U.S.”
Though Bast did not say so, I can tell you that the bulk of the coverage was an effort to disparage the conference’s proceedings, devoted to debunking the global warming hoax.
The Fourth conference in May featured world-famous physicists from Russia and Israel, and the U.S..; two astronauts including one who walked on the moon...” Also addressing the attendees were the two men who exposed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “hockey stick” fraud in which a deliberately fraudulent graph conveyed the notion of a rapidly warming planet.
The blogger who broke the Climategate story in November 2009 that revealed how IPCC “scientists” had deliberately distorted their “research” to further the global warming hoax was there along with eighty elected officials, and many others who have steadfastly questioned global warming claims, some for decades, until it finally began to die of its own dead weight.
Guess how many from the “mainstream media” covered the Fourth Conference? None!
This was and is literally a conspiracy of silence and, as Bast points out, “It is unethical for a reporter to refuse to report that so many prominent scientists and policy experts believe the fear of global warming is overblown. It is unethical to boycott an important event with major public policy importance.”
Keep in mind that the Obama administration’s desperate effort to push through Cap-and-Trade legislation, a huge tax on all energy use, is entirely based on global warming and the lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are “causing” it.
There have been many studies by journalism research centers that have long since established the liberal allegiance of the vast bulk of journalists working in the so-called mainstream media today, newspapers and news magazines, radio and television news outlets.
“This isn’t journalism,” wrote Bast. “It’s advocacy.” And it is advocacy of a global fraud called global warming. It is the deliberate deception of millions of Americans and others around the world to further the global warming fraud.
Noted climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball, writing in CanadaFreePress.com, asked “How long before politicians realize the public are simply not on board the climate change alarmism? It can’t be much longer as economies fail, jobs disappear, markets weaken, and deficits and debts soar?”
The politicians in Congress and the mainstream journalists who report on the torrent of global warming lies from the Oval Office and the Environmental Protection Agency are likely to be the last to give up on their attempts to fleece the American public in the name of global warming, climate change, or “green jobs.”
The new media is, of course, the rise and growth of the Internet and its many websites and blogs that provide the truth about the global warming hoax and many other issues that are causing Americans and others around the world so much grief.
“Best of all, wrote Bast, “most of the new media is free of the suffocating conceit and arrogance of the liberal old media that makes most news stories unreliable and every editorial predictable.”
“If the price of the rise of new media is the death of the old,” wrote Bast, “then I say it is a bargain.” See more here.
By Faye Flam
In a report that may help dispel the so-called Climategate scandal, a Pennsylvania State University panel Thursday fully cleared climatologist Michael Mann of professional-misconduct allegations.
The university launched an inquiry in November after hackers exposed more than 1,000 private e-mail messages sent between Mann and colleagues in England.
Critics of climate scientists said that statements in the e-mail messages exposed climate change as a hoax and revealed a deliberate cover-up. The stolen messages were touted in blogs and op-eds as reason to doubt the widely held view that the global climate has warmed substantially over the last century and that human-generated greenhouses gases play a role.
“I knew ultimately I’d be vindicated by a fair review of the facts,” Mann said. “Now we can all hopefully get back to doing research.”
This case is unusual in that the investigation was prompted by calls and e-mail from university alumni, state and local politicians, and others, according to a draft of the report. Usually, universities launch scientific fraud investigations only when specific charges are brought by a colleague.
A draft of the report released Thursday concluded that “the Investigatory Committee after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegations against Dr. Michael E. Mann, professor, Department of Meteorology, Pennsylvania State University.”
Mann is best known for advancing the use of tree rings, ice cores, corals, and other indirect measures to reconstruct the global climate over the last millennium. His graphs tracing global temperature history have been dubbed the “hockey stick” because the temperatures appear to rise sharply during the last century.
According to the report, the panelists decided that without any formal charges against Mann, they would have to use the various complaints to “synthesize” allegations against him. They came up with four categories:
Falsifying or suppressing data.
Deleting, concealing, or otherwise destroying e-mail associated with a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the main international scientific group charged with informing policy.
Misusing privileged or confidential information.
Deviating from accepted practices within the academic community.
The e-mail message that has surfaced most often in public criticism of Mann was written by colleague Phil Jones at East Anglia University. Jones referred to a “trick” Mann had used in a published paper to display some of his data. The panel concluded that this referred not to any attempted deception but to a technique for displaying data graphically.
Jones also wrote of an attempt to “hide the decline” which critics say refers to a decline in global temperatures. But read in context, Jones was clearly referring to a particular type of tree-ring datum used not by Mann but another researcher.
The initial Penn State inquiry relied on an interview with Mann as well as several prominent scientists, including Texas A&M climatologist Gerald North, who headed a 2006 panel investigating Mann’s work for the National Academy of Sciences
In February, a report of the university’s initial inquiry cleared Mann on the charges of falsification, concealing data, and misusing privileged information. But the panelists felt they didn’t have enough evidence to determine whether Mann deviated from accepted practices. Another panel was assembled to investigate this last charge.
As reported Thursday, that investigation focused on stolen e-mail messages suggesting that Mann refused to share some of his partially processed data, and that he forwarded an unpublished paper without the author’s specific permission.
The panelists interviewed a number of scientists inside and outside Penn State, including MIT’s Richard Lindzen, an outspoken critic of Mann and his work.
Mann said the raw data he used were all publicly available. He said there was only one group that requested more data than he was unwilling to send - led by Toronto businessman and minerals consultant Stephen McIntyre.
Mann said he initially tried to accommodate their requests though he felt McIntyre was harassing him without making a good-faith effort to check or reproduce his work.
In response to another charge, Mann admitted to forwarding an unpublished paper by a close colleague because he assumed the author of the paper wouldn’t mind.
After studying the e-mail messages and conducting a number of interviews, the Penn State panelists came to the unanimous conclusion that none of this “deviated from standard practice” in climatology.
Penn State’s clearing of Mann was “absolutely no surprise,” said Caspar Ammann, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado. Ammann said in 2002 he set out to reproduce Mann’s “hockey stick” graph and found the data he needed were all publicly available.
Not only was Ammann able to reproduce the graph showing unusual warming in the 20th century, but he also said Mann’s was not the first such graph to show this.
Ammann said that Mann and McIntyre disagreed over the methods used to center the data, but the end result was a hockey stick either way.
MIT’s Lindzen said he still believed Mann committed misconduct. “The fact that he didn’t reveal data unless forced to - that’s not exactly normal,” he said. Of the panel’s concessions, he said: “I find it peculiar but not altogether surprising. Institutions tend to try and defend people.”
Nearly all climate scientists have been sympathetic to Mann and the other English researchers whose private e-mail messages were exposed. Some have wondered why the “scandal” isn’t centered on the illegal hacking of private e-mail.
Authorities have not revealed who was responsible for the stolen e-mail.
Several climate researchers have also expressed surprise at the way Climategate inflated the importance of Mann’s work as evidence for climate change. Mann himself says it’s just one of many lines of evidence.
In an interview earlier this year, Texas A&M’s Gerald North said he would remain concerned about global climate change even if all the researchers deriving “hockey stick” graphs turned out to be wrong. Climate models, he said, are becoming increasingly convincing. And it’s becoming harder to ignore the retreat of glaciers and shrinkage of sea ice.
The large-scale pattern of warming is what makes human-generated greenhouse gases a more likely cause than changes in the sun, said NCAR’s Ammann. Solar changes tend to heat the upper atmosphere, while greenhouse warming tends to heat the oceans and lower atmosphere, leaving the upper atmosphere colder. And that, he said, is exactly the pattern that scientists are observing. See post here.
Icecap Note: The outcome was not surprisining nor the comments by Caspar Ammann, who used the same flim flam statistical data and approaches to ‘replicate Mann’s results. We will not give up until Mann and Ammann and all the other scientists in on this obfuscation are exposed. As for Professor North’s comments, maybe he should take a look at the long term cyclical history of the ice and snowpack (enlarged here).
Or here the Greenland ice core indication of temperature. You see the cyclical warming but a new COOLING for 5000 years (enlarged here).
Meanwhile note Antarctica ice extent reached third highest level since 1979 even as the UN promised a much more alarmist 5th report with a lrge increase in sea level as antarctic and greenland increases melt. Data doesn’t count in the alarmist world. Models count and if data disagrees, change it or lie.
Enlarged here.
By Jim Hollingsworth posted on SPPI
INTRODUCTION
While scientists the world over continue to study and debate what part man has played (if any) in the gentle warming that took place mainly in the latter half of the last century, Dr. James Hansen is absolutely certain. The purpose of his book is to scare us into taking immediate and drastic action to control greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide. Although Dr. Hansen is a scientist, his work is more political than scientific. He makes an emotional appeal and he does it by attempting to build fear that there will be no world left for our grandchildren to live in.
Few people are really concerned about global warming. Most know that change is the one constant you can expect with any climate. When doing surveys of what is important to people global warming is generally listed dead last. Those who believe that our world is headed for disaster will welcome Dr. Hansen’s book: He may also catch a few gullible. But, most of the rest of the world are more concerned about raising their standard of living, and even having things like clean water, and safe sanitary facilities, than they are about global warming. Having cheap and universally available energy, especially electricity, has saved many lives the world over.
Because of the fact that climate change is recognized as just a normal part of the history of the earth most people are simply not convinced by the kinds of arguments put forth by Dr. Hansen and other global warming alarmists. The alarmists are like Chicken Little who ran around saying: “The sky is falling; I must go and tell the king”. But there is no more substance in their predictions than there was in Chicken Little’s.
Dr. Hansen’s view depends on two things. First, that man, through burning fossil fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas), is producing huge quantities of carbon dioxide, and this increase in carbon dioxide, through the “greenhouse effect”, is causing the earth to warm.
There is, however, considerable evidence that gentle warming and increased carbon dioxide are beneficial to plants. Also, more people die in winter than in summer. The present level of carbon dioxide is about 390 ppm (parts per million). All plants need carbon dioxide; that is what plants use to grow: The more carbon dioxide the faster they grow.
But, there is a remarkable similarity between the historical temperatures and the level of carbon dioxide. What we think we know about temperature in the distant past (before thermometers) comes from proxy data like tree rings, sedimentary deposits, and more recently ice core samples, especially from Antarctica and Greenland. In Antarctica the Russians have drilled down to a depth representing about 800,000 years. (The ice over Antarctica averages about 7,000 feet, and in some places is over 15,000 ft thick.)
Detailed analysis of these ice cores has revealed that temperature rises first followed about 800 years later by an increase in carbon dioxide. Do keep in mind that Antarctica is mostly a desert, with very little snowfall (less than one inch a year at the pole), so it is very difficult to separate one year from another.
The second thing that Dr. Hansen has put forth to support his case is what he calls “tipping points”. Sure, he says, the earth is just warming mildly at the present, but through a mechanism he calls “positive feedbacks” and “forcings” a little warming is going to be multiplied until a tipping point is reached and there is a dramatic rise in temperature, causing the destruction of all life on the earth. The only problem with tipping points is that there is little historical evidence to support it. It is all based on computer models which are actually no better than the data that is put into them.
His idea about tipping points is no doubt based on the hockey stick graph developed by Michael E. Mann. This graph was popularized by Al Gore in his movie An Inconvenient Truth in which he mounts a man lift to reach the top of the graph. The only problem with the graph, of course, is that you have to exclude the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and then project a short term tail of the graph out into the future to make it work. The graph has been discredited by Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre and even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has stopped using it. So, all things considered Dr. Hansen has no case: The science simply will not support any program requiring immediate and radical action to, not only control, but also reduce, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He knows that only by appealing to our emotions and not to science will he gain any adherents to his program: Thus, the thrust of his book.
by Marlo Lewis
Today, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Environment will hold a hearing on the Blowout Prevention Act of 2010. A draft of the legislation and other pertinent documents are available on the Subcommittee’ Web site.
Although the draft legislation and hearing documents address serious problems brought to light by the Committee’s ongoing investigations, the Blowout Prevention Act would throw the baby out with the bath water.
To restate the obvious, although oil spills are bad, oil is good. Without oil, there would be no modern commerce and no mechanized agriculture. Life for most people would be “nasty, brutish, and short,” and many of us would not even be alive. Another obvious point - British Petroleum (BP) is to blame for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, not the oil industry as a collective entity.
Yet the draft legislation that Chairmen Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) will promote at today’s hearing could shut down all offshore drilling in the United States.
The draft text says the federal government “shall not issue a permit to drill for a high-risk well unless the applicant for such permit demonstrates . . . and the appropriate federal official determines that . . . the applicant has an oil spill response plan that ensures that the applicant has the capacity to promptly stop a blowout in the event the blowout preventer and other well control measures fail.”
Sounds innocent enough. However, the bill defines as “high-risk” any “offshore oil or gas exploration or production well,” not just ultra-deepwater rigs. In addition, at both the June 17 Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing and the June 15 Energy and Environment Subcommittee hearing, Chairmen Waxman, Markey, and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) emphasized that none of major oil companies, individually or in combination, could have stopped the spill after the blowout preventer failed:
“BP failed miserably when confronted with a real leak, and ExxonMobil and the other companies would do no better.” - Chairman Waxman, June 15
“It could be said that BP is the one bad apple in the bunch. But unfortunately, they appear to have plenty of company. Exxon and the other oil companies are just as unprepared to respond to a major oil spill in the Gulf as BP.” - Chairman Stupak, June 15
“Yet when you’re asked can you stop the massive quantities of oil that are now ruining the beaches and marshland, killing the wildlife, and devasting the economy, you [BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips] say no. You say you’re not well equipped to deal with it, and these catastrophic impacts are simply unavoidable.” - Chairman Markey (hearing transcript, pp. 220-221), June 15
The implication is obvious: The federal government “shall not” issue any more permits for offshore drilling, because nobody knows how to “promptly stop a blowout in the event that the blowout preventer and other well control measures fail.” Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) put it this way: “BP ignored a very simple rule. If you can’t plug the hole, don’t drill the well.” But, as the BP disaster shows, some holes cannot be plugged, at least not in time to prevent gigantic spills. Logically, the bill implies that no permits to drill should be granted and that existing permits should be revoked.
How might Chairmen Waxman, Markey, and Stupak reply to this criticism?
Maybe they would claim that they just want Big Oil to invest more in spill response. For example, Markey asserted that the industry has “invested zero time and money into developing safety and response efforts.” He continued: “The oil companies before us today amassed nearly $289 billion in profits over the last 3 years. They spent $39 billion to explore for new oil and gas. Yet the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention, and spill response was a paltry $20 million per year, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of their profits” (June 15 hearing transcript, p. 4). These numbers seem to speak volumes. In fact, they are highly misleading.
Oil companies are not like pharmaceutical companies, which test and develop their products in laboratories. Most of the information relevant to the safety of offshore wells is acquired in the field, in the process of drilling for gas and oil. Safety information obtained via discrete investments in R&D is supplemental to information generated in the course of producing hydrocarbons. The most important safety ‘R&D program’ is the multi-billion dollar annual investment the industry makes to find and produce new fields of oil and gas. It has been very successful. It is the reason that, until the BP disaster, there had not been a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico since the 1979 Ixtoc 1 oil spill, more than 30 years ago. It is the reason, notes ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, that nothing like the BP disaster occurred “at the 14,000 other deepwater wells that have been successfully drilled around the world.”
As the Committee’s investigations make clear, disaster struck not because the oil industry is stingy with R&D, but because BP repeatedly cut corners in the design and testing of the Macando well. BP flouted industry best practices and acted with reckless disregard for employee safety, environmental protection, and the region’s economy. That is hardly surprising given BP’s atrocious record of “willful and egregious"safety violations in the refining end of its business.
The irony here is that BP’ dreadful safety and environmental record may well be related to its lobbying for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill and multi-million dollar re-branding as “beyond Petroleum.” Cynicism and the pursuit of excellence don’t mix. There is hardly anything more cynical than lobbying for market-rigging rules in the name of saving the planet. Also, an oil company that starts to believe its own PR about being “beyond petroleum” is bound to become sloppy about its core competence.
One thing is clear - no amount of additional R&D spending would have enabled BP, or any of its rivals individually or working in concert, to stop the spill after the blowout preventer failed. At the June 15 hearing, Chairman Stupak engaged Mr. Tillerson in colloquy on this very point. Consider these excerpts:
Stupak: “So when these things happen, these worst-case scenarios, we can’t handle them, correct?”
Tillerson: “We are not well equipped to handle them. There will be impacts as we are seeing. . . .That’s why the emphasis is always on preventing these things from occurring, because when they happen, we’re not very well equipped to deal with them.”
Stupak: “. . . so no matter which one of the oil companies here before us had the blowout, the resources are not enough to prevent what we’re seeing day after day in the gulf, not only the loss of 11 people, but we’re on, what, day 56 or 57 of oil washing up on shores. There is no other plan. There is no way to stop what’s happening until we finally cap this well, correct?”
Tillerson: “That is correct. . . . There is no response capability that will guarantee you will never have an impact. It does not exist and it will probably never exist.”
In short, the Blowout Prevention Act sets a standard no oil company can meet. No applicant for a permit to drill can “demonstrate” that it has “the capacity to promptly stop a blowout after the blowout preventer and other well control methods fail.” Chairman Stupak surely knows this, having belabored the point at the June 15 hearing.
Maybe the Blowout Prevention Act is simply a product of sloppy drafting. But maybe not. As written, the bill would revive and expand the federal ban on offshore drilling. Indeed, it would cripple U.S. domestic petroleum production. Do the sponsors not know that banning offshore drilling would increase consumers’ pain at the pump, destroy high-paying American jobs, and make the United States more dependent on OPEC oil? Or do they just not care?
Climate Depot
Once again, the world is being warned of a climate “tipping point.” The latest bout of stern warnings comes from a survey of 14 climate “experts.”
Get ready, we only have 190 years! Scientists ‘expect climate tipping point’ by 2200 - UK Independent - June 28, 2010 - Excerpt: “13 of the 14 experts said that the probability of reaching a tipping point (by 2200) was greater than 50 per cent, and 10 said that the chances were 75 per cent or more.”
Such silliness. It’s difficult to keep up whether it is hours, days, months or 1000 years. Here are few recent examples of others predicting climate “tipping points” of various durations.
HOURS: Flashback March 2009: ‘We have hours’ to prevent climate disaster - Declares Elizabeth May of Canadian Green Party
Days: Flashback Oct. 2009: UK’s Gordon Brown warns of global warming ‘catastrophe’; Only ‘50 days to save world’
Months: Prince Charles claimed a 96-month tipping point in July 2009
Years: Flashback Oct 2009: WWF: ‘Five years to save world’
Millennium: Flashback June 2010: 1000 years delay: Green Guru James Lovelock: ‘Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out’
It is becoming obvious that the only authentic climate “tipping point” we can rely is this one:
Flashback 2007: New Zealand Scientist on Global Warming: ‘It’s All Going to be a Joke in 5 Years’ (He wasn’t Optimistic enough - it only took 3 years!)
Inconvenient History of Climate ‘Tipping Point’ Warnings
As early as 1989, the UN was already trying to sell their “tipping point” rhetoric on the public. See: U.N. Warning of 10-Year ‘Climate Tipping Point’ Began in 1989 - Excerpt: According to July 5, 1989, article in the Miami Herald, the then-director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the 1989 article, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” (LINK) & (LINK)
NASA scientist James Hansen has been warning of a “tipping point” for years now. See: Earth’s Climate Approaches Dangerous Tipping Point - June 1, 2007 - Excerpt: A stern warning that global warming is nearing an irreversible tipping point was issued today” by James Hansen.
Former Vice President Al Gore invented his own “tipping point” clock a few years ago. Excerpt: Former Vice-President Al Gore came to Washington on July 17, 2008, to deliver yet another speech warning of the “climate crisis.” “The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis,” Gore stated.
Prince Charles claimed a 96-month tipping point in July 2009. Excerpt: The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the “age of convenience” was over.
‘World has only ten years to control global warming’, warns Met Office - UK Telegraph - November 15, 2009
Excerpt: Pollution needs to be brought under control within ten years to stop runaway climate change, according to the latest Met Office predictions. [...] “To limit global mean temperature [increases] to below 2C, implied emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere at the end of the century fall close to zero in most cases.”
The UN chief Ban Ki-moon further shortened the “tipping point” in August 2009, when he warned of ‘incalculable’ suffering without climate deal in December 2009!
Newsweek magazine waded into the tipping point claims as well. Newsweek wrote: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” But, Newsweek’s “tipping point” quote appeared in a April 28, 1975 article about global cooling! Same rhetoric, different eco-scare.
[Climate Depot Editor’s Note: The public understands that “we must act now” claims are being manufactured for political purposes. See: Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About ‘Global Governance’ - July 10, 2009 - It is no wonder that more and more Americans are rejecting climate fears. See: Polling: ‘More Americans believe in haunted houses than man-made global warming’ - 37% vs. 36% - October 30, 2009 - For another explanation of why climate fear promoters are failing to convince the public, see: MIT Climate Scientist: ‘Ordinary people see through man-made climate fears—but educated people are very vulnerable’ - July 6, 2009]
UK Scientist Philip Stott ridiculed “tipping point” claims in 2007. Excerpt: In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed. [...] Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter. Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million [the 2007 population estimate is 302,824,000]. [...] In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988), issuing its first assessment report in 1990, which served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).
See even more links in the full story here.