By Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times
Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.
A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.
And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery - not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.
“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful ‘ “ said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”
Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.
And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them.
Politicians and activists say such attitudes will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.”
The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.
Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.
Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data. Then there was the unusually cold winter in Northern Europe and the United States, which may have reinforced a perception that the Earth was not warming. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history. (ICECAP NOTE: only in their corrupted data base)
Asked about his views on global warming on a recent evening, Brian George, a 30-year-old builder from southeast London, mused, “It was extremely cold in January, wasn’t it?
In a telephone interview, Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert, said that the shift in opinion “hadn’t helped” efforts to come up with strong policy in a number of countries. But he predicted that it would be overcome, not least because the science was so clear on the warming trend.
“I don’t think it will be problematic in the long run,” he said, adding that in Britain, at least, politicians “are ahead of the public anyway.” Indeed, once Mr. Cameron became prime minister, he vowed to run “the greenest government in our history” and proposed projects like a more efficient national electricity grid.
Scientists have meanwhile awakened to the public’s misgivings and are increasingly fighting back. An editorial in the prestigious (ICECAP NOTE: at one time - no longer) journal Nature said climate deniers were using “every means at their disposal to undermine science and scientists” and urged scientists to counterattack. Scientists in France, the Netherlands and the United States have signed open letters affirming their trust in climate change evidence, including one published on May 7 in the journal Science.
In March, Simon L. Lewis, an expert on rain forests at the University of Leeds in Britain, filed a 30-page complaint with the nation’s Press Complaints Commission against The Times of London, accusing it of publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” about climate change, his own research and remarks he had made to a reporter.
“I was most annoyed that there seemed to be a pattern of pushing the idea that there were a number of serious mistakes in the I.P.C.C. report, when most were fairly innocuous, or not mistakes at all,” said Dr. Lewis, referring to the report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Meanwhile, groups like the wildlife organization WWF have posted articles like “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” providing stock answers to doubting friends and relatives, on their Web sites.
It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world.
In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007.
Then came articles contending that the 2007 report was inaccurate on a host of other issues, including African drought, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level, and the economic impact of severe storms. Officials from the climate panel said the articles’ claims either were false or reflected minor errors like faulty citations that in no way diluted the evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, successfully demanded in February that some German newspapers remove misleading articles from their Web sites. But such reports have become so common that he “wouldn’t bother” to pursue most cases now, he added.
The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides. “I’m still concerned about climate change, but it’s become very confusing,” said Sandra Lawson, 32, as she ran errands near Hyde Park.
by Christopher Horner
Following the embarrassment of having recommended Spain’s failed “green” programs, Obama switched to using Denmark as a model. Best out of five?
May 24, 2010
President Obama was caught flatfooted by the embarrassing truth about Spain’s “green economy” after he instructed us - on eight separate occasions - to “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain” as a model for a U.S. future. Spain, of course, is suffering an economic meltdown from enormous public debt incurred through programs like a mandated “green economy.”
But Obama also just implored Spain to drastically scale back or risk becoming Greece. A flip he immediately flopped, by pushing hard to enact the Kerry-Lieberman “path to insolvency” bill based on… Spain. (Cue Benny Hill theme.)
So, embarrassed - or perhaps shameless - Obama changed his pitch: “Think about what’s happening in countries like Denmark.”
Of course, the experience of Denmark - a country with a population half that of Manhattan’s, not exactly a useful energy model for our rather different economy and society - is no great shakes, either.
But it gets better.
In my new book - Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America - I describe the absurdity of the “free ice cream” theories of the “green economy” our statist friends now embrace as their latest raison d’etre for a controlled society. My mother-in-law - visiting from Denmark - is reading my book with a particular interest in its expose of what her heavily taxed labor pays for in that country.
The book also prompted her to relay an amazing new anecdote to the case study referred to by the Danes as “the fairy tale of the windmills.”
In the northern region of Jutland called Thy, Denmark is forcing people off of their land ("Kelo" is apparently Danish for “Kelo") and - wait for it - preparing to clear-cut fifteen square kilometers of forest, and eventually thirty, in order to put up more of the bird- and job-killing monstrosities.
These giant windmills are not even intended to fill an energy gap for the Danish economy. No, they are to be onshore experimental versions of massive new off-shore turbines - with the facility to be rented out to wind mavens like Siemens.
The argument they are forwarding for doing this is not just the typically risible claim that this is necessary for the environment. After all, “[the] deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of the CO2 emissions of 100,000 people per year.”
They are also forwarding the argument that this must occur in order to create Danish jobs.
Of course, “creating jobs,” to the extent such mandates can do this (as they are typically net job killers), appears much more necessary after the state first made it difficult for the private sector to do such things. Denmark enforced what methods, and what quantity of those methods, are acceptable for producing electricity. It always turns out that the acceptable ways are inefficient, intermittent, and expensive. Which sort of explains the need for mandates.
Employers, who pass taxes and other costs along until they can’t, leave for less inane political and economic environments. Like Kentucky, for example, as I detail in Power Grab.
So, yes, President Obama, let’s think of what’s happening in these European countries.
For the moment, put aside the spectacular irony of what the “green” agenda necessitates well before reaching its logical conclusion. There is a more important lesson here, as our policy sages in Washington seek to cram through a replica of Europe’s social democracy here before November, when voters get to weigh in on this form of “change.”
The key lesson to be learned from Spain: these glorified make-work schemes, which saddle the economy with boondoggles of massive physical redundancies, inherently create “bubbles.” The bubbles exist solely because of wealth transfers from taxpayers - meaning from productive uses to intrinsically uneconomic ones (again, they have to be mandated and subsidized to exist).
The bubbles only avoid bursting with constant infusions of redistributed taxpayer wealth. But simply existing is not politically tolerable to the constituencies that politicians create with the subsidy and mandate schemes. There is a reason that GE’s Washington lobbying budget tops that of all of Big Oil … combined. Once a “market” is created by government fiat, recipients of the largess pour tremendous resources into keeping the gravy train rolling, and gaining steam.
This is just what happened in Spain, where the public deficit threatened an economic default.
And in Denmark, where the politicians look to clear every inch of land they can find - even if it happens to be occupied or forested - to put up more windmills in the name of “creating jobs.”
We have learned from Obama’s models in Spain and Denmark (and also Germany) that no net jobs are - or can be - created by these financial rat holes. Opportunity costs and direct jobs lost due to the economic pain caused by higher energy prices and other restrictions on individual liberty harm the economy as a whole. And what the economy gets in return are temporary jobs requiring more debt - which means taxes.
The schemes drain the public treasury, passing off your hard-earned money to entrenched interests. And, now, they lead to clear-cutting forests and “takings.”
In a way - a particular way known mostly to Washington, but apparently also everywhere else the “market socialists” rule - it just makes sense.
Christopher Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and author of the recently-published Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.
uncoverage.net
Former television weather meteorologist and KSFO morning man Brian Sussman led a delegation of about 100 to Monterey last week to give a “Climate-gate hello” to the “warming guru” Al Gore. (Sussman’s book, “Climate-gate” is a New York Times best-seller and “the” expose of the 20-year fraud of global warming.)
It is a curious and wondrous sight to behold who exactly would pay $85 pp to listen to Gore exhalations, especially when the crowd is from the Monterey peninsula, Mother Earth’s food chain, from the Pebble Beacher cashmere crowd to the meth-heads.
Sussman’s video, “Gore’s “Useful Idiots” Exposed...is the “inconvenient truth” about the “warm nuts” crowd.
May 18, 2010 Gore Blows into Monterey, CA
The idea that Al Gore can still go places, charge money to speak and maintain a shred of credibility is beyond me. There he was bloviating about climate change....again....in Monterey California....filling college students’ skull with mush and polar bears and acid oceans...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Monterey Herald:
Gore called climate change the “most important challenge facing any of us,” that if left unaddressed could result in the “end of human civilization as we know it.” Rising temperatures and increased ocean acidification, he warned, would result in melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels and an estimated 100 million “climate refugees” from poor coastal nations for every one meter lost to the ocean. There would be larger fires and floods, and longer droughts, he said, as well as an “extinction crisis” threatening life on the planet that could rival the demise of the dinosaurs, which many scientists believe was caused by a meteor striking Earth.
But we don’t have to let the meteor hit us this time,” Gore said. “We can stop this.”
Gore said the best estimates indicate that real action to start “bending the curve” of climate change must begin within “a decade or so,” citing NASA scientist Tim Hanson as a key source. But he warned that the longer pollution continues, the longer it will take and the more difficult it will be to reverse the current trend.”
Gore has just bought a $8.8 million beachfront mansion in Montecito so he can’t be THAT worried about rising sea-levels.... Some members of the tea party protested outside...will post their pictures when I get them.
May 15, 2010: Al Gore, Meet the Tea Party
Now that the snows have melted and one the dang-coldest, blusteriest winters in recent history is over, Al Gore is coming out like mildew on the shower floor.
Gore is EMBOLDENED, no doubt, by the introduction this week of the job-killing, tax-and-tax, economy-squeezing “cap-and-trade” bill, sponsored by John “Big Hair” Kerrey.
Al-Goro came to Knoxville to emit carbons and collect a fake college diploma from the University of Tennessee, which awarded the same honor last year to country/western singer Dolly Parton. Here’s Gore’s speech zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
100 Tea Party and various intrepid Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) engaged in damn-fine dutiful doggedry:
“Al Gore is setting a new standard for underserved honors,” said Dillon MacDonald who is a CFACT-TN leader. “First he got a Nobel prize although he didn’t bring peace, now he’s getting an honorary degree for scaring Americans with flawed science. He flies in private jets, just bought another mansion, yet tells working people their houses are too large, their showers too warm, their cars too fast and our economy too free. We should give him a doctors in hypocrisy.”
First, on Thursday, May 13th at 7 PM CFACT will host “Climate: The Counter Consensus” at the Tennessee Amphitheater in the World’s Fair Park. The event will feature Lord Christopher Monckton who last weeked testified before Congress on global warming, Ann and Phelim McElhinney, producers of the documentary ‘Not Evil, Just Wrong’ which debunks Gore’s film “An Incovenient Truth” and others.
Then, on Friday, May 14th at 8am, students and community members will gather across the street from the Thompson-Boling arena in Knoxville, TN to voice opposition to Al Gore’s honorary degree and call attention to his alarmism and support for public policies that are likely to make him the world’s first ‘carbon billionaire’.
“Al Gore’s developed an enviable quick rich scheme,” Evan, CFACT National Field Director, said. “Sadly the rest of us will have to pay for it by tripling your gas prices, doubling your home utility bills, a couple million jobs, and trillions lost in economic progress. Al must be stopped.”
Protesters will urge political leaders to strongly oppose policies like cap and trade and other domestic or international mandates that would recklessly slash carbon emissions, based on unproven fears of man-made global warming. They will encourage them to support policies that keep energy reliable and affordable, protect American jobs, fully develop all of our domestic energy resources, and promote genuine environmental progress.
Al Gore has used global warming to stoke fears, win an Oscar, a Nobel Peace Prize and bolster his net worth into the hundreds of millions. Yet hard results from the earth sciences are replacing the consensus of Al’s political science. Scientists at NASA and MIT are making observations with new satellites and ground based technologies that not only adjust - but directly contradict the assumptions in every computer model Al Gore uses to show we are doomed. Join CFACT and tell Al Gore we’ve had enough. There has to be a better therapy for losing a presidential election that won’t cost the rest of us quite so much.
Here’s local coverage:
Irish Climate-gate producer McAleer protested for a time in his famous polar bear costume.
You might recall, McAleer was “in bear” in December and attacked by global-warming protestors at the Copenhagen Climate summit. Al Gore will be emitting in Monterey, California Monday evening. KSFO’s Brian Sussman and goodness-knows-how many Tea party/Climate-gaters will gather outside for a loud welcoming!
For your reading pleasure, blogger Dave Hatter has a great resource page of 100 + articles explaining the fraud of Climate-gate.
By Clifford Krauss and Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times
Beneath the subarctic forests of western Canada, deep under the peat bogs and herds of wild caribou, lies the tarry rock that is one of America’s top sources of imported oil.
There is no chance of a rig blowout here, or a deepwater oil spill like the one from the BP well that is now fouling the Gulf of Mexico. But the oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses other environmental challenges, like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.
In addition, critics warn that American regulators have waived a longstanding safety standard for the pipelines that deliver the synthetic crude oil from Canada to refineries in the United States and have not required any specific emergency plans to deal with a spill, which even regulators acknowledge is a possibility.
Oil sands are now getting more scrutiny as the Obama administration reviews a Canadian company’s request to build a new 2,000-mile underground pipeline that would run from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast and would significantly increase America’s access to the oil. In making the decision, due this fall, federal officials are weighing the environmental concerns against the need to secure a reliable supply of oil to help satisfy the nation’s insatiable thirst.
The gulf accident adds yet another layer of complexity. Regulators and Congress are weighing new limits on drilling off the coastline after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, increasing the pressure to rely more heavily on Canada’s oil sands. At the same time, political consciousness of the risks has grown.
Canadian oil sands are expected to become America’s top source of imported oil this year, surpassing conventional Canadian oil imports and roughly equaling the combined imports from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm.
In a new report, it projects that oil sands production could make up as much as 36 percent of United States oil imports by 2030. “The uncertainty and the slowdown in drilling permits in the gulf really underscores the growing importance of Canadian oil sands, which over the last decade have gone from being a fringe energy source to being one of strategic importance,” said Daniel Yergin, an oil historian and chairman of IHS CERA. “Looking ahead, its importance is only going to get bigger.”
Last week, a phalanx of Canadian diplomats took advantage of a previously planned trip to Washington to promote oil sands as a safer alternative to deepwater drilling because leaks would be easier to detect and control.
In an interview afterward, Alberta’s premier, Ed Stelmach, said he was not trying to capitalize on the gulf disaster, but merely promoting” what we have to offer, which is security of supply” and “a safe stable government.”
From a supply standpoint, there is much to recommend oil sands, also known as tar sands. Canada has 178 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, virtually all in oil sands. Only Saudi Arabia has more proven oil reserves.
The United States produces about five million barrels of oil a day and imports 10 million more. Canada accounts for about 1.9 million barrels of the daily imports, roughly half of it from oil sands.
“If you need crude to fuel your economy, you’d really better be thinking about Canada,” said Chris Seasons, president of the Canadian unit of Devon ‘Energy, an oil company based in Oklahoma City. Devon is already producing 35,000 barrels a day from oil sands around Conklin. It expects to expand its production to 200,000 barrels a day by 2020, in part through a second project, with BP. That would be roughly equivalent to current imports from Kuwait.
To increase delivery of oil sands crude, TransCanada is building the Keystone pipeline system. Two Keystone pipelines have been approved, with the first one delivering oil to Illinois in June. A much longer pipeline to Texas, called Keystone XL, is still under federal review. If fully developed as proposed, the system would allow Canada to export an additional 1.1 million barrels of oil a day.
In a world in which so many oil-producing nations are far away, unstable or hostile to the United States, Canadian oil sands hold great political appeal.
“It is undeniable that having a large supply of crude oil available by pipeline from a friendly neighbor is extremely valuable to the energy security of the United States,” said David L. Goldwyn, coordinator for international energy affairs at the State Department. The department is scheduled to decide this year whether to approve Keystone XL.
Complicating the calculation is the fact that Canada’s backup market for its oil is probably China. Plans are already under way for pipelines from Alberta to Canada’s western coast for shipments to Asia. Although those could take up to a decade to build because of land considerations, Mr. Stelmach, Alberta’s premier, flew to China on Friday on a trade mission to Shanghai, Beijing and Harbin. He said one of his messages was, “We’ve got energy.”
Whatever the advantages, serious environmental problems and risks come with producing oil from oil sands. Most of the biggest production sites are huge mine pits, accompanied by ponds of waste that are so toxic that the companies try to frighten birds away with scarecrows and propane cannons. Extracting oil from the sands produces far more greenhouse gases than drilling, environmental groups say, and the process requires three barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced because the dirt must be washed out. Already, tailing pools cover 50 square miles of land abutting the Athabasca River.
The mines are also carving gashes in the world’s largest intact forest, which serves as a vital absorber of carbon dioxide and a stopover point for millions of migrating birds. Proponents of oil sands acknowledge the dirtiness of the extraction process. But they say that newer projects are using more efficient technologies. For example, instead of surface mining, the Devon project injects high-pressure steam into the reservoir to enable the heated oil sands to be pumped out of the ground as a fluid, which is less invasive of the forest. Shell is also experimenting with ways to capture some of the carbon emissions, and other companies are trying to use solvents to heat the steam more efficiently.
Some analysts argue that imports from oil sands will replace conventional oil from places like Venezuela and Mexico, where heavy oil requires so much refining that it produces a comparable amount of greenhouse gas emissions. For the United States, “in the grand scheme of things, the actual emissions impact is very small,” said Michael A. Levi, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
But environmental groups are unmoved. “Having tar sands in our energy mix is simply inconsistent with the kind of climate and environment promises we’ve heard the Obama administration make,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, who works on the issue at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The high-pressure pipelines that transport the oil give rise to separate safety and environmental concerns, which have been spotlighted by local ranchers and other opponents during the current comment period on the State Department’s environmental impact statement for the proposed pipeline expansion.
One big question is whether TransCanada should get waivers to use thinner pipes on Keystone XL than is normally required in the United States. The Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which oversees oil pipelines, gave such waivers to TransCanada for the first two Keystone pipelines. TransCanada says the thinner pipes have been allowed in Canada for decades and pose no extra risk.
But Cesar de Leon, a former deputy administrator of the pipeline and safety administration who is now an independent pipeline safety engineer, said the thinner standard is appropriate only if pipelines are being aggressively monitored for deterioration. Although the safety administration required such monitoring in the Keystone permits, it “didn’t have the people to monitor compliance,” he said.
In a report in March on the agency’s broader permitting practices, the Transportation Department’s inspector general found that, in many cases, the agency had failed to check the safety records of permit applicants and had not checked to verify that permit terms were being followed.
Officials of the safety administration did not respond to interview requests. But in written testimony to a House committee in April, the agency’s new administrator, Cynthia L. Quarterman, acknowledged problems and promised to improve. “As you know,” she said, “we inherited a program that suffered from almost a decade of neglect and was seriously adrift.”
Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, said the whole situation was alarmingly reminiscent of the permit waivers that were routinely granted to offshore oil wells, including the BP well leaking in the gulf. “I think it is incumbent on myself as a policy maker to say ‘hold it,’” Mr. Tester said.
In another sign of concern among policy makers, on April 29 South Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission rejected TransCanada’s request for an exemption from a state requirement to notify affected landowners about spills of less than five barrels. The gulf spill haunted local public hearings on the Keystone project last week in Murdo, S.D., and York, Neb.
Some people along the path of the proposed and existing pipelines complained that no one had required TransCanada to produce an emergency plan for a spill, even though the new pipes would traverse pristine territory, including the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies water to a wide swath of the nation’s breadbasket and where even a small spill could have grave consequences.
Others demanded that thicker steel be used. And some asked how the pipeline would be monitored for wear and tear. At the York hearing on May 10, Jim Condon, an engineer from Lincoln, Neb., said the amount of oil spewing from the leaking BP well was just a small fraction of what would be passing through the Keystone XL pipeline. “A rupture of the pipeline would be a huge problem,” he said.
Investor’s Business Daily
Regulations: Call it cap-and-trade or bait-and-switch, but John Kerry and Joe Lieberman continue to tilt at windmills with a bill to restrain energy growth in the name of saving the planet. The bill introduced Wednesday and sponsored by the two senators is called the American Power Act, an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. Like President Obama’s offshore drilling program, for every “incentive” there is a restriction. It’s as if Hamlet were to be appointed Secretary of Energy.
The legislation has little to do with developing America’s vast domestic energy supply. It’s cap-and-trade meets pork-barrel spending. It’s about regulations, restrictions and research. It does not deal with exploiting America’s vast energy reserves but with finding ways to mitigate their alleged harmful effect. To that end, the bill creates some 60 new agencies and projects to eat up our tax dollars and buy support. See list of some programs here.
According to a leaked draft summary, there is “$7 billion annually to improve our transportation infrastructure and efficiency” to be paid for by a gas tax that is not called a tax but a “linked fee.” There is “$2 billion per year for researching and developing effective carbon capture and sequestration methods
and devices.” There is even “a new multibillion-dollar revenue stream for agriculture through a domestic offset program.” Tilling the soil releases carbon dioxide, don’t you know?
Ironically, the draft summary acknowledges the bill will cause energy prices to necessarily skyrocket by promising to “provide assistance to those Americans who may be disproportionately affected by potential increases in energy prices.” How about lowering prices and creating jobs by increasing domestic supply?
Somewhere Sen. Lindsey Graham fell off the wagon, disillusioned perhaps by the politics of shifting priorities, and possibly not impressed, as we are not, by the bill’s promise to expedite licensing for nuclear reactors “in a way that is guided by sound science and engineering while remaining fully mindful of safety and environmental concerns.” That’s liberal-speak for study forever, build never.
After coal-mine disasters and oil rig explosions, one would think nuclear power would be celebrated as a non-polluting power source whose casualty rate is zero. According to the Energy Information Administration, electricity from nukes eliminated 26 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2009. Split atoms, baby, split atoms. Enough already with the research.
The proposed legislation mandates reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels via a capand-trade system for power plants and, eventually, factories - with strict curbs on the types of trading that could be done. It would require oil companies, for example, to obtain emission permits at a set price
not determined by the trading market. While allegedly providing some incentives to domestic energy development, it would also allow California to implement its draconian energy efficiency standards and other provisions of its signature global warming law, AB 32. “We will not undermine California,” Kerry said. Oh, good.
“This bill is a compilation of just about every bad idea that has emerged in the energy debate,” said Patrick Creighton, spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research, a free-market think tank. “Two things are certain if this bill becomes law: Energy prices will skyrocket, and jobs will be shipped overseas.”
It is a scam built upon a scam, introduced just as the mercury in Chicopee, Mass., dropped to 26 degrees at about 5 a.m., beating the previous record for the chilliest May 11 set back in 1962.
In testimony before Congress on May 6, Britain’s Lord Christopher Monckton, a global warming expert, noted that “neither global mean surface temperature nor its rates of change in recent decades have been exceptional, unusual, inexplicable or unprecedented.”
Monckton also advised: “There are many urgent priorities that need the attention of Congress, and it is not for me as an invited guest in your country to say what they are. Yet I can say this much: on any view, ‘global warming’ is not one of them.”
We agree. Jobs, energy development and economic growth come first. See post here. See more at SEPP website here.
By John O’Sullivan, guest post on Climate Realists
While analyzing the federal government’s latest long-winded publication, ‘Climate Action Report, the Fifth National Communication of the United States of America Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’ I stumbled across something buried deep inside that will dismay (or perhaps amuse) many taxpayers.
In the section entitled, ‘Proposed Regulation Facilitating Geologic Sequestration of CO2’ the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has pulled out all the stops to make an even bigger ass of itself. It is introducing a new requirement under the Safe Drinking Water Act to protect U.S. citizens from being ‘poisoned’ from carbon dioxide in drinking water.
The latest cock-eyed federal policy concerns “a new class of injection well - Class VI” (page 44) that at great expense will inject carbon dioxide (CO2) underground by a process that will inhibit drinking water from becoming as carbonated as fizzy Perrier water. The greenies call this process ‘carbon sequestration,’ in case you didn’t know.
A somnolent U.S. administration has completely swallowed the Mickey Finn plied to it by politicized environmentalists so that taxpayers pockets are legally being picked to the tune of tens of billions. All this is due to the encroaching acceptance by certain world political leaders of the unproven hypothesis that human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, are ‘bad’ for our planet.
Doped up on their great green Mickey, President Obama’s government has opened the financial floodgates and money is fast pouring into various sequestration projects. The “Class VI” system is intended to pump industrially produced carbon emissions deep into the Earth. Here, they believe, it will be ‘less harmful.’ Nonetheless, due to natural forces, it will still eventually seep into the water supply with the passage of time. Nationally, taxpayer funded investment into such ‘green’ schemes is currently overflowing at about $18.6 billion.
The difference here from any offshore oil disaster is when (not if) the underground water supply does eventually become ‘contaminated’ by the sequestered CO2, then the government will have inadvertently created a benefit not a catastrophe: America’s home grown version of France’s famous tipple.
But by their failure to apply any joined up thinking on the issue, the typically profligate EPA will not see the economic benefits from the inadvertent spiking of our tap water. To do so would effectively pull the plug on the whole ‘CO2 is poison’ scam.
The weird and amoral world of eco-politics would rather taxpayers stay blissfully ignorant about how benign CO2 really is. Marketed for generations in its iconic pear-shaped little green bottle, Perrier has been regarded as a ‘chic’ and aspirational non-alcoholic beverage among Europe’s middle classes. In fact this ‘Champagne’ of mineral water costs more per barrel than the finest grade gasoline oil.
In Perrier’s manufacturing process the water and CO2 are sourced independently before being mixed in the bottling process. This ensures the gas added in bottled Perrier gives the same fizz as the water from the original source, the Vergeze spring in the Languedoc region of southern France.
Disavowing itself of saner opinion on the matter, the EPA has determined that the ingredient that makes the water’s fizz-that nasty carbon dioxide-is nothing short of an environmental ‘poison.’ But have you ever heard of anyone being poisoned by Perrier?
But if the U.S. government was serious about generating ‘green’ jobs then they have missed a trick by not turning these new ‘Class VI super injectors’ into money-making machines. Any forward-looking government mindful of green economic opportunities should be planning to export America’s very own ‘champagne’ to nations that won’t view it as poison.
Footnote: from 1981 to 2005, the French Perrier company sponsored an annual comedy award in Britain known as “The Perriers.” The EPA would surely scoop their own “Perrier” with this latest joke perpetrated on the American people. Will the EPA yet dig itself an even deeper hole in this climate change fiasco? Read post here.
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Carbon Capture & Burial
By Viv Forbes, Carbon Sense Coalition
The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for an end to the waste of community resources and energy on research and development costs for “Carbon Capture and Burial”. The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that billions of dollars are being wasted on sacrifices to the global warming god - endless bureaucracy, politicised research, piddling wind and solar schemes, roof insulation disasters, ethanol subsidies, carbon credit forests, carbon trading frauds and huge compliance costs.
“But perhaps the biggest waste of all is the futile quest to capture carbon dioxide from power stations, separate it, compress it, pump it long distances and force it down specially drilled bore holes, hoping it will never escape. The effect of CO2 on global temperature, if it exists, is so small that no one has been able to demonstrate or measure it. The touted effect exists solely in computer models whose forecasts to date have all failed. Therefore there is ZERO proven benefit for mankind in trying to capture harmless CO2 in order to bury it in carbon cemeteries. Worse, it is removing valuable plant food from the biosphere - a step towards global food suicide.
For every tonne of coal burnt, about 11 tonnes of gases are exhausted - 7.5 tonnes of nitrogen, 2.5 tonnes of CO2 and one tonne of water vapour. These are all harmless and valuable natural recycled atmospheric gases. Life on earth would be impossible without them.
Normally these harmless gases are vented to the atmosphere after filters take out nasties like soot and noxious fumes. To capture the CO2 would require additional energy to collect the 11 tonnes of gases and separate the 2.5 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of coal burnt. Then even more energy would be required to compress this 2.5 tonnes of CO2 and pump it to the burial site.
All of this is possible, but the capital and operating costs will be horrendous. It is estimated that 30% - 40% of the power currently generated will be used just on carbon capture, compression and pumping. More energy still is required to produce and erect the steel for all those pumps and pipes and to drill the disposal wells. All this will chew up more coal resources and produce yet more carbon dioxide, for no benefit.
But the real problem starts at the burial site. There is no vacuum occurring naturally anywhere on earth - every bit of space is occupied by solids, liquids or gases. Thus to dispose of CO2 underground requires it to be pumped AGAINST the pressure of whatever is in the pore space of the rock formation now - either natural gases or liquids. These pressures can be substantial, especially after more gas is pumped in.
The natural gases in rock formations are commonly air, CO2, methane or rotten egg gas. The liquids are commonly fresh or salty water or, very rarely, liquid hydrocarbons.
To find a place where you could drive out oil or natural gas in order to make space to bury CO2 would be like winning the Lottery - a profitable but very unlikely event. Pumping air out is costly, pumping CO2 out to make room for CO2 is pointless and releasing large quantities of salty water or rotten egg gas would create a real surface problem, unlike the imaginary threat from CO2.
In normal times, pumping fresh water out would be seen as a boon for most locals, but these days it is probably prohibited. Naturally, some carbon dioxide will dissolve in groundwater and pressurise it, so that the next water driller in the area could get a real bonus - bubbling Perrier Water on tap, worth more than oil.
Regulating carbon dioxide is best left to the oceans - they have been doing it for millions of years. It’s time for tax payers and shareholders to protest this gigantic waste of money, energy and coal resources on fantasies like carbon capture and burial. Because, no matter where we look for space for carbon dioxide burial, we will find signs saying:
“All carbon cemeteries are already full”. Read more here. See futility of this scheme here and the huge cost here.
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Deserts may absorb up to 1/2 of CO2 emissions
By Lubos Motl, The Reference Frame
I need to get rid of a bookmark on my toolbar. So let me make a small posting about these two papers.
A few months ago, someone (a Czech climate skeptic) sent me an interesting link to Mr Jiri Grygar’s “Discovery Harvest 2008” (Zen objevju 2008, in Czech, EN).
Every year, this astronomer and the most famous Czech science communicator presents the discoveries related to astronomy and celestial bodies from the previous year.
There are many interesting things over there but my source was impressed by an interesting comment about deserts.
According to two papers published in 2008,
Wohlfahrt, Fenstermaker, Arnone: Large annual net ecosystem CO2 uptake of a Mojave Desert ecosystem
and a similar paper by Li Yan about Gubantonggutt, a desert in Western China, described in Science, June 2008, indicated that the (alkaline) deserts absorb up to 100 grams of carbon per squared meter and year. When multiplied by the total arid and deserty area, which is about 35% of the land mass, you would conclude that the deserts absorb up to 1/2 of the fossil fuel CO2 emissions.
Enlarged here.
Of course, I think that the absorption could be even larger if the CO2 concentrations themselves would be higher. If we assume that our CO2 production per year won’t change much, it seems sensible to expect that the CO2 concentration won’t ever be allowed to exceed the doubled values because all the added CO2 would be absorbed by similar (enhanced) sinks. See post here.
By Gordon J. Fulks
Albert Einstein spoke for all who view science as a noble profession when he said he was “trying to understand the mind of God.”
But I am concerned that many who promote the idea of catastrophic global warming reduce science to a political and economic game. Scare tactics and junk science are used to secure lucrative government contracts.
Consider first an example of what makes science so fascinating. The well-documented observation that the global temperature peaks every summer in July seems unremarkable to those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere.
But it is remarkable when you realize that the Earth’s closest approach to the sun, when sunlight is strongest, occurs during the Southern Hemisphere summer in January. It is even more remarkable when you realize that the Earth was significantly warmer 10,000 years ago when its closest approach coincided with the Northern Hemisphere summer.
It is still more remarkable when you realize that we are now close to an orbital configuration for another ice age. The present warm Holocene interglacial period, during which human civilization has flourished, may give way by the end of this millennium to 90,000 years of cold. Climate changes from orbital variations are called Milankovitch Cycles and are confirmed by Antarctic ice core data. Typically, good science is not particularly controversial because it has been tested by the scientific method involving theories validated by observations made by many scientists working independently.
The ClimateGate scandal revealed that this method can be easily scammed. In that case, prominent scientists with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were caught conspiring to circumvent normal checks and balances in their research. They were compensating for their lack of honest evidence linking man-made carbon dioxide to global warming by doctoring data, refusing to disclose analysis techniques, bullying any who questioned them and working to silence critics.
Early hints of the developing scandal surfaced when British researcher Keith Briffa was forced by the Royal Society to release his Siberian tree ring data purporting to show a dramatic temperature rise in the 20th century. Astonishingly, he substantially relied on a single tree, far different from all others. It was a clear case of selecting data to support his viewpoint. This may be acceptable politics, but to me, it is scientific fraud.
Subsequent disclosures confirmed widespread participation in data manipulation. Others are involved in touting climate models as substitutes for honest data and as predictors of catastrophe. These far-from-rigorous computer simulations are said to “prove” that carbon dioxide is the only explanation for recent short-term warming, despite substantial evidence that ocean and solar cycles are largely responsible.
The connection to an $80 billion government gravy train should have alerted our media to conflicts of interest. But they were too dazzled by the so-called “experts” and too sold on the politics to realize that these scientists had been corrupted by the age-old problems of money and power.
A recent editorial in the journal Nature admits that implicated scientists are scared. They know that honest mistakes are typically forgiven but fraud is not. The editorial urges them to fight back with a war of words: “The core science supporting anthropogenic global warming has not changed.” Such a bluff can succeed only if the public remains ignorant that the core is rotten.
The political and economic empire is already striking back. We are beginning to see blue ribbon commissions of carefully chosen “experts” whose job is to exonerate the guilty and get global warming hysteria back on track. A better approach is to embrace what the Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, called “utter honesty.” Implicated scientists are aware of what honest data show. Increased carbon dioxide has, at most, a minor effect on global temperature and is highly beneficial to our green natural world.
All plants and animals owe their very existence to carbon dioxide. Scientific scandals inevitably require significant corrective measures to restore objectivity, including in this case, major revisions to the way we support scientific research. Read more here.
Gordon J. Fulks of Corbett holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research. Reach him at gordonfulks@hotmail.com.
CO2Science
Reference
Vinther, B.M., Jones, P.D., Briffa, K.R., Clausen, H.B., Andersen, K.K., Dahl-Jensen, D. and Johnsen, S.J. 2010. Climatic signals in multiple highly resolved stable isotope records from Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 29: 522-538.
Background
The authors introduce the report of their new study by writing that “during the past 10 years studies of seasonal ice core δ18O records from the Greenland ice sheet have indicated, that in order to gain a firm understanding of the relationships between Greenland δ18O and climatic conditions in the North Atlantic region, it is important to have not only annually resolved, but seasonally resolved ice core δ18O data.”
What was done
Working with 20 ice core records from 14 different sites, all of which stretched at least 200 years back in time, as well as near-surface air temperature data from 13 locations along the southern and western coasts of Greenland that covered approximately the same time interval (1784-2005), plus a similar temperature data set from northwest Iceland (said by the authors to be employed “in order to have some data indicative of climate east of the Greenland ice sheet"), Vinther et al. proceeded to demonstrate that winter δ18O was “the best proxy for Greenland temperatures.” Then, based on that determination and working with three longer ice core δ18O records (DYE-3, Crete and GRIP), they developed a temperature history that extended more than 1400 years back in time.
What was learned
In the words of the seven scientists, “temperatures during the warmest intervals of the Medieval Warm Period,” which they defined as occurring “some 900 to 1300 years ago, “were as warm as or slightly warmer than present day Greenland temperatures [italics added].”
What it means
As for what this result implies, the researchers conditionally—and rather amusingly—state that further warming of present day Greenland climate “will result in temperature conditions that are warmer than anything seen in the past 1400 years.” But, of course, their work more directly and unconditionally implies that late 20th-century and early 21st-century weather has not yet been warm enough to confer “unprecedented” status upon Greenland air temperatures. What is more, Vinther et al. readily admit that the independent “GRIP borehole temperature inversion suggests that central Greenland temperatures are still somewhat below the high temperatures that existed during the Medieval Warm Period.” H/T Marc Morano and C3Headlines.
ICECAP NOTE In fact it was warmer in the 1930s/40s than today. Here below (enlarged here) is the NASA GISS plot of Godthab Nuuk.
