Special to Financial Post

Climate alarmists suffer a setback, but retain their goal

On Friday evening I attended a music festival in Prague and during the break I mentioned to a group of people that I was going to Chicago, among other things to speak at a global warming conference. Their reaction was: “Global warming? Isn’t it already over? Does anybody care about it?” That is how they see it. Maybe it is a European perspective.

The last time I was asked to speak about global warming was in July 2011 in Australia. Of course, one possible explanation is that the audiences are no longer interested in my views on this topic; the other explanation is that this experience of mine is not unique. The topics have undoubtedly changed. I am more often asked to speak about the eurozone sovereign debt crisis than our global warming.

The undeniable fact is that almost from one day to the next the global-warming debate ceased to be fashionable. It disappeared from the headlines. It may weaken the position of the global-warming fundamentalists, but it makes it more difficult for us, the “deniers” or “skeptics,” as they call us, to motivate people to think about this issue and to openly and politically express their views about the irrational, human-freedom-curtailing, human-prosperity-undermining measures and policies introduced by the political establishments in most of the countries of the world in the last two decades, not to speak about the measures prepared for the future. We have to keep repeating that our planet is determined not only by anthropogenic influences but dominantly by long-term exogenous and endogenous natural processes and that most of them are beyond any human control.

The alarmism has subsided, they want to make it “low profile.” Declarations such as the one from 1989 that “global warming is the greatest crisis ever faced collectively by humankind” are no longer popular. The former radical alarmists, even the scientists connected with the IPCC, changed their tactic. More and more often we hear carefully worded statements that “some environmentalists, supported by the media, exaggerated the conclusions that had been carefully formulated by scientists.” We know that they were not “carefully formulated.”

There is no doubt that most of the true-believers in the global warming debate remain undisturbed in their views. Some individuals leave the bandwagon (the most recent well-known case is James Lovelock) but those people who have vested interests (and there are many of them now) together with the men and women who innocently and naively sympathize with any idea that is against freedom, capitalism and markets are still “marching on.”

Discussing technicalities is not sufficient, because the supporters of the global-warming debate are not interested in them. We are not dealing with people who are authentically interested in science and in incremental changes in temperature and their causes. For them, the temperature data are just an instrument in their plans to change the world, to suppress human freedom, to bring people back to underdevelopment. Their ideas are the ideas of ideologues, not of scientists or climatologists. Data and sophisticated theories will never change their views.

There are probably more and more people around us now who do not buy the alarmism of the global-warming debate, but we have to accept that they are not sufficiently motivated to do anything against it. And they don’t know how. Politicians and political activists, bureaucrats in the national and international organizations, and representatives of the subsidized businesses are organized and able to push this doctrine further ahead because to do so is in their narrowly defined interests. Ordinary people are not organized and do not have politically formulated interests. They are also not helped by the existing political parties because these parties are not raising this issue either. They are already - almost all of them - more or less captured by the greens.

To sum up my simple message: Empirical data are important; scientific discoveries are important; the disclosure of malpractices in the IPCC and other “bastions” of the global-warming debate are important; but we have to take part in the undergoing ideological battle. The subtitle of my five-year-old book is What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? There is no doubt that it is all about freedom.

Vaclav Klaus is the President of the Czech Republic. These remarks were extracted from his presentation to the Heartland Institute’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago last week.

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Senate Will Vote in Next Two Weeks on Effort to Stop Obama War on Coal

Washington, D.C. - This evening, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, gave a speech on the Senate floor highlighting a new video of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 1 Administrator Curt Spalding admitting that due to EPA’s barrage of rules, “if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem.” Administrator Spalding goes on to explain that the decision to kill coal was painful “because you got to remember that if you go to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and all those places, you have coal communities who depend on coal. And to say that we just think those communities should just go away, we can’t do that. But [Administrator Jackson] had to do what the law and policy suggested. And it’s painful. It’s painful every step of the way.”

This new video is the second in a series revealing the truth about the Obama-EPA’s extreme agenda to kill fossil fuels. It follows a video Senator Inhofe highlighted in April, which showed former EPA Region 6 Administrator admitting that EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies. 

Tonight on the Senate floor, Senator Inhofe urged his colleagues to join him in the effort to stop President Obama’s war on fossil fuels and affordable energy.  In the next two weeks, the Senate will vote on a resolution by Senator Inhofe that requires a simple majority of those voting and present; this resolution would overturn the Obama EPA’s Utility MACT rule, which is specifically designed to shut down coal plants across the country.  It would send EPA back to the drawing board to craft a rule that balances environmental protection and economic growth, instead of killing coal in American electricity generation.

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Utility MACT Resolution: Stopping President Obama’s War on Coal

Mr. President, this month, the United States Senate will have the opportunity to put a stop to the second most expensive EPA regulation in history - a rule known as Utility MACT.  Let me tell you what Utility MACT is. That’s what the Obama-EPA calls it so people won’t know what it is and how much it costs. It is the first step to kill coal in the United States. Right now 50% of our electricity comes from coal, so you can imagine what will happen to your energy costs as well as millions of lost jobs. I have introduced a resolution to kill it. By voting for my resolution, SJR 37, members of the Senate can prevent the Obama EPA from causing so much economic pain for American families.  It requires only a majority vote in the Senate and House and then would have to be signed by the President. I don’t believe President Obama would veto it right before an election. 

Utility MACT is the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to kill coal: Utility MACT is specifically designed to close down existing plants, while the Obama-EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations are specifically designed to prevent any new coal plants from being built. 

The goal behind these policies is not surprising. But what is surprising is that while President Obama goes around pretending to be for an “all-of-the-above” approach on energy, members of his green team administration just can’t help but tell us the truth about what’s really going on at EPA. 

Mr. President, you may remember that several weeks ago I came to the Senate floor to bring attention to a video of EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz admitting that EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies.  Today, I would like to highlight another video.  It’s a video of EPA Region 1 Administrator Curt Spalding admitting that the Obama EPA consciously and deliberately made the choice to wage a war on coal.  Now, I’m going to quote exactly what he said so everyone can have the full effect. He said,

“But know right now, we are, we are struggling. We are struggling because we are trying to do our jobs. Lisa Jackson has put forth a very powerful message to the country. Just two days ago, the decision on greenhouse gas performance standard and saying basically gas plants are the performance standard which means if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem. That was a huge decision. You can’t imagine how tough that was. Because you got to remember that if you go to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and all those places, you have coal communities who depend on coal. And to say that we just think those communities should just go away, we can’t do that. But she had to do what the law and policy suggested. And it’s painful. It’s painful every step of the way.”

Let me repeat the key part of Administrator Spalding’s quote just for emphasis - he said: “if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem.” Even more stunning, he’s admitting that the Obama EPA’s decision to kill coal was “painful every step of the way” because West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and all the coal states depend on coal development for their jobs and livelihoods - but that they’re just going to kill coal anyway.  Trust me, Administrator Spalding and President Obama, it’s far more painful for those who will lose their jobs and have to pay skyrocketing electricity prices, than for you. 

Spalding’s statement that “if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem” reminds us a lot of President Obama’s own statement about coal in 2008 when he wasn’t so afraid to explain his real intentions.  Remember he said, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

Of course, this war on coal comes from the same administration that put the “crucify them” Administrator Al Armendariz in charge of the biggest oil and gas producing region of the country.  In fact, EPA’s crucifixion philosophy is so obvious now that even the left leaning Washington Post said that the Obama EPA is “earning a reputation for abuse.” But I think Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal put it best when she said that Armendariz was “a perfect general for Mr. Obama’s war against natural gas” and “on the front lines” of President Obama’s battle to end fossil fuels and affordable energy.

As this most recent video of Region 1 Administrator Spalding confirms, there are plenty of green generals like Armendariz going into battle for the Obama EPA. We have several more videos of EPA officials making similar statements, but I will talk about those at a later date, because today I would like to focus my remarks specifically on President Obama’s war on coal and what members of this body will choose to do about it. 

The fundamental question before the United States Senate will be whether my colleagues will have the courage to stand up to President Obama and put the brakes on his abusive, out of control EPA that has openly admitted that “if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem” - or if they are going to stand with President Obama and his administration’s “crucify” agenda. 

War on Coal

One of the most interesting and telling aspects of President Obama’s disingenuous attempt to rebrand himself as a supporter of fossil fuels is that he never mentions coal.  He doesn’t even pretend.

In fact, up until very recently President Obama’s campaign website had a section devoted to the President’s goals for every energy resource except coal.  Only after facing intense criticism, and disappointing primary results in coal states, the Obama campaign attempted quietly to add a “clean coal” section to its site. 

Well, apparently President Obama’s definition of “clean coal” is no coal.  In his 2013 budget request, the President cut funding for coal research and development at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) by nearly 30 percent.  This is at the same time EPA has proposed greenhouse gas standards for coal-fired power plants that require Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) - a technology that is not ready to operate on a commercial scale.  So on the one hand we have Obama issuing standards in which utilities can’t comply without using CCS.  On the other, we have him handicapping that very technology.

After cap-and-trade was thoroughly rejected by the American people and defeated in a Democrat controlled congress, President Obama promised that he wouldn’t give up in his efforts to stop coal development.  He also said “Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat. It was a means, not an end. I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.”

And he has found other ways to skin the cat - by imposing regulations that have exactly the same effect of killing coal.  I don’t have time to go into every action EPA is taking but I would like to highlight a few of their key coal-killing regulations. 

Front and center, of course, is the Utility MACT rule, a rule with such strict standards, they cannot be met, which means that, along with EPA’s other air rules, up to 20% of America’s coal fired capacity will be shuttered and around 1.6 million jobs will be lost. Utility MACT’s price tag is second only to the Obama EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations which are designed to prevent any new coal plants from being built in this country. Like the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, these regulations will cost $300 to $400 billion dollars a year and destroy over two million jobs.  It may even cost more if the courts throw out EPA’s “tailoring rule” - a rule that EPA is attempting to create to subvert the law in order to avoid the “absurd results” that would ensue if the agency regulates greenhouse gases under the thresholds required by the Clean Air Act.  That means every church, every school, every restaurant and coffee shop, will have to be regulated or put out of business by the EPA. 

EPA is also waging this war on the permitting front, and this is a problem that we’ve been tracking for a long time.  As my EPW Minority Report from January 2010 showed, EPA at that time was obstructing 190 coal mining permits, putting nearly 18,000 jobs at risk. And not much has improved since then. 

Last November a report by the Office of Inspector General that I requested confirmed that EPA, through its own actions, has been deliberately and systematically slowing the pace of permit evaluations for new plants in Appalachia.  These findings were concerning enough that Inspector General did a follow up review - and again, in February of this year, OIG found that EPA did not have a consistent, official recordkeeping system, which was exacerbating permit delays. 

Not only is EPA continuing to stall the permitting process, they are trying to stop permits that have already been granted.  In January 2011 EPA took the drastic and unprecedented step of revoking a lawfully issued mining permit that the Bush Army Corps of Engineers had granted to the Spruce Mine project in Appalachia. Fortunately, the courts recognized EPA overreach in this case.  March 23, 2012 the U.S. District Court ruled that EPA exceed its authority - and as the Judge said, EPA’s claim that it can veto a permit already issued by the Army Corps of Engineers is a “stunning power for an agency to arrogate to itself.”

States Are Weighing In

After four years of this aggressive barrage of rules designed to kill coal, many in the heartland, states that rely most heavily on coal, are not amused. 

Just last month, 24 state attorneys general, including one quarter of all Democratic state attorneys general, filed suit to overturn Utility MACT because of the devastating effects it will have on jobs and their states’ economies; these are Democrats from Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, West Virginia, and Wyoming. In other words, it appears that Democrat AG’s from several states are trying to save coal, while the Democratic Senators from these same states are carrying out President Obama’s war on coal.

Let’s take a look at what’s happening in West Virginia.  The state government just sponsored a three-day forum last week on “EPA’s War on Coal.” Larry Puccio, the Democrat Party Chairman in West Virginia said, “A lot of folks here have real frustration with this administration’s stance on coal and energy.” Also recently, on a West Virginia radio show, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America famously said that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson “shot [the coal industry] in Washington” just as the Navy SEALs shot bin Laden.  As Roberts expanded, “We’ve been placed in a horrendous position here. How do you take coal miners’ money and say let’s use it politically to support someone whose EPA has pretty much said, ‘You’re done’?"And let’s not forget that West Virginia is the state where President Obama lost several counties to a convicted felon in the primaries. 

Workers in Kentucky are also weighing in.  As Politico Pro reported, President Obama lost to an “uncommitted” vote in 38 counties representing the Kentucky Coal Coalition and won just 44 percent of over 49,000 votes; he only carried 14 of the 38 coal counties; and overall carried the state as a whole with just 58 percent of the vote.  In Arkansas, President Obama won the primary with less than 60 percent of the vote.  In Ohio it’s the same story.  When Vice President Biden visited that state recently he was faced with over 100 workers who will lose their jobs because of this administration’s aggressive regulatory regime. Their message to the Obama administration: “stop the war on coal.”

These states have good reason to be concerned.  Let’s take a look at how Utility MACT will impact some of the most coal dependent states. 

- ARKANSAS - 40% of electricity; $70 million in annual payroll

- LOUISIANA - 9th cheapest electricity; $100 million in payroll

- MICHIGAN - 60% of electricity; 10th in coal use

- MISSOURI -80% of electricity; 6th in coal use

- MONTANA -60% of its electricity; 5th in coal production

- NORTH DAKOTA - 85% of electricity; 9th in coal production

- OHIO -85% of its electricity; more than 19,000 jobs

- PENNSYLVANIA - 52% of electricity; 5th in coal use

- TENNESSEE - 62% of electricity; $220 million in annual payroll

- VIRGINIA - more than 31,000 jobs; 13th in coal production

- WEST VIRGINIA - 2nd in coal production; more than 80,000 jobs

These are real jobs that will be lost state by state.

Utility MACT: Electricity Prices will “Necessarily Skyrocket”; Jobs will be lost

Now I would like to take a moment to go into detail about why Utility MACT would be so devastating. Just to put this rule in perspective, even Democrat Representative John Dingell, author of the Clean Air Act amendments, said Utility MACT is “unparalleled in its size and scope” and it “presents a set of new regulations with possible wide-reaching impacts on the way our country generates and consumes electricity.”

Utility MACT has an unprecedented price tag - EPA puts the cost of their rule at nearly $10 billion a year, while other sources project it will cost even more, making it the second most expensive rule in the Agency’s history. This is second only to global warming cap and trade, which would be $300-400 billion tax increase. Can you believe it? This tax increase would cost the average family that pays federal income taxes over $3,000 each year. Now Utility MACT would tax each family over and the above cap-and-trade tax. Further, the rule will shutter 20 percent of America’s coal-fired power capacity; this will inevitably result in higher electricity prices for every American.

It’s not just me saying this. As the Chicago Tribune reported on May 18, in 2015 “electric bills are set to be about $130 more than they are now.” It went on to say that prices have already significantly risen in the heartland.  To quote this article again, “Prices were higher in northern Ohio and the Mid-Atlantic region, at $357 per megawatt and $167 per megawatt respectively.”

Now let’s look at jobs: Utility MACT and other EPA regulations on the electric power sector have resulted in over 24,000 megawatts of announced power plant retirements located in 20 states.  According to the National Economic Research Associates, Utility MACT will destroy 180,000 to 215,000 jobs in 2015.  And with other, new EPA regulations on the electric power sector, the economy stands to lose approximately 1.65 million jobs by 2020.

Manufacturers will be particularly hard hit due to their reliance on low cost electricity and because of their dependence on natural gas as a raw material, as both electricity rates and natural gas prices increase.  According to Nucor steel, a 1 cent increase in electricity rates costs the firm $120 million. These extra costs could endanger a million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industries. Utility MACT will also have a negative ripple effect.  Just to bring up one example, in Avon Lake, Ohio, the closure of the local GenOn power plant will cost the school system 11% of its budget annually.  Besides the 80 high-quality jobs lost at the plant and many indirect jobs lost in the community, the city will have fewer resources for its paramedic and firefighting services.  This story will be replicated at communities across the country. 

The Natural Gas Myth

It’s not surprising that instead of taking credit for the dire results of this coal-killing agenda in an election year, the Obama administration is claiming that lower natural gas prices are the reason utilities are switching from coal to natural gas.

But there’s one major problem: while President Obama poses in front of pipelines in Oklahoma, pretending to be a friend of oil and natural gas, he has given marching orders to his administration to do everything possible to end hydraulic fracturing.  Remember, as I mentioned earlier, Armendariz was the one who was caught on tape admitting the EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies, specifically targeting hydraulic fracturing. 

If the crucifixion scandal isn’t enough of a revelation of this war on natural gas, remember that the Sierra Club - which recently gave the President its most enthusiastic endorsement - has just rolled out its newest campaign: “Beyond Gas,” a spin-off of its decade-old “Beyond Coal” campaign to phase out coal-fired power plants.  As Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune explained “As we push to retire coal plants, we’re going to work to make sure we’re not simultaneously switching to natural-gas infrastructure. And we’re going to be preventing new gas plants from being built wherever we can.”

So natural gas supplies may be plentiful now, but the Obama Administration’s “crucify them” agenda on oil and gas development is designed to change that.  Its whole purpose is to decrease access to these resources through increased regulations from the federal government. 

Public Health

Now I’d like to address one more myth that’s being perpetrated by Utility MACT proponents, which has to do with their public health argument.  The truth is that the health benefits EPA claims are exaggerated and misleading.  That’s because EPA’s analysis shows that over 99 percent of the benefits from the rule come from reducing fine particulate matter, not air toxics.  Of course, fine particulate matter is regulated under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards program, and in fact 90% of Utility MACT’s purported particulate matter benefits occur in air already deemed safe in the NAAQS program. 

Not only is EPA double miscounting benefits, it is also dismally failing the cost/benefit test.  The agency itself admits that Utility MACT will cost an unprecedented $10 billion to implement - and it also admits that the $10 billion in costs will yield a mere $6 million in direct benefits. That means that EPA’s best case scenario yields a ludicrous cost/benefit ratio of 1600 to one. 

In reality, Utility MACT will harm the public by increasing unemployment, a well-established risk factor for elevated illness and mortality rates.  In addition to influences on mental disorder, suicide and alcoholism, unemployment is also a risk factor in cardiovascular disease and overall decreases in life expectancy.  Further, higher electricity bills act like a regressive tax, hurting the poor and elderly the most by diverting funds from living expenses such as food, rent and medical care to pay for more expensive electricity.  To be sure, those who won’t feel any of this economic pain are President Obama’s Hollywood elites.

Republicans the First to Introduce Mercury Reduction Legislation

I know what my environmentalist friends are saying: they’re already accusing me of allowing mercury going into the air - so today I would like to remind them that it was Republicans who first put forth a real plan to reduce mercury emissions from power plants. 

In 2003 and 2005, I was working to pass the Clear Skies bill, which was the most aggressive initiative in history to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury - in fact, this bill would have reduced mercury emissions by 70% by 2018. So in just 6 years from now, we would already have had a 70% reduction. It was a plan that would have improved our air by reducing utility emissions faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than the Clean Air Act as it still stands today.  And it would have done all this without harming jobs.

So why did Clear Skies fail? In 2005, then Senator Obama served with me on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and it was his vote that killed the bill.  As Senator Obama himself admitted, “I voted against the Clear Skies bill.  In fact I was the deciding vote despite the fact that I’m a coal state and that half of my state thought I’d thoroughly betrayed them because I thought clean air was critical and global warming was critical.”

Clear Skies apparently didn’t cause enough economic pain.  It reduced real pollutants; it didn’t address President Obama’s pet cause of climate change.  It did not achieve the goal they really want to impose: ending coal. So now instead of having a reasonable and effective mercury reduction plan already in place and working for the American people, President Obama wants to implement EPA’s Utility MACT rule in order to kill coal.

We Still Need Coal

The bottom line is that we still need coal, and all those who dream of doing away with it will not be able to escape the reality that coal will continue to provide much of our electricity for the foreseeable future.  So we need to be implementing policies that improve air quality without destroying coal and millions of good American jobs, and imposing skyrocketing electricity costs on every American. 

That’s why my Resolution to stop Utility MACT is so crucial.  Contrary to what my critics are saying, this resolution does not prevent EPA from regulating mercury under the Clean Air Act - it simply requires EPA to go back to the drawing board to craft a rule in which utilities can actually comply; a rule that does not threaten to end the coal in American electricity generation but helps utilities reduce emissions without having to shut their doors. 

Before I end, I’d like to add that in the fight to hold EPA accountable and stop the regulatory onslaught, no one has been a stronger legislative partner than Congressman Fred Upton. As the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he’s on the front lines each and every day scrutinizing the EPA’s actions and advancing legislation to keep the agency in check. Fred and I partnered up in the opening weeks of the 112th Congress to introduce the Energy Tax Prevention Act, a bill that would stop EPA in its tracks in the misguided effort to transform the Clean Air Act into a greenhouse gas regulatory tool. We’ve continued to work closely together, and I believe our work has not only put EPA on notice that Congress won’t stand for its overreach, I also believe we’ve made a real difference in forcing them to stand down on issues like the ozone reconsideration. The House recently passed bipartisan legislation to rein in Utility MACT with 19 Democrats supporting the measure, so now it’s time for the Senate to act. 

I’d like to remind my colleagues that this resolution will likely be the vote on coal for the year so this is our one chance.  Many of my Democrat colleagues have gone on record saying they want to rein in the Obama-EPA.  The senior Senator from Missouri is one of them: she said back home that she is determined to “hold the line on the EPA.” Does that mean she, and other Senate Democrats who have made similar statements, will vote to stop the centerpiece of Obama’s war on coal?

Today I have talked a lot about Utility MACT. Let’s be sure we understand what it means one more time. Utility MACT is a rule by the EPA to end coal in America and cause electricity rates to skyrocket. My resolution, SJR 37, will allow the elected members of the Senate to stop the Obama-EPA. It is as simple as that.

The vote on my resolution will clearly demonstrate to the American people which Senators will “hold the line” and stand with their constituents for jobs and affordable energy, and which Senators want to kill coal in favor of President Obama’s radical global warming agenda that will be devastating to people in their states.

To borrow a phrase from Administrator Spalding, to choose latter will be painful, “painful every step of the way” for their constituents.  I hope they make the right choice.  With that Mr. President, I yield the floor. 

Over the last 18 months, policymakers in Canada, the U.S. and Japan have quietly abandoned the illusory goal of preventing global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, an alternative view has emerged regarding the most cost-effective way in which to deal with the undoubted hazards of climate change.

ICECAP note: But note the protesters in Chicago for the NATO conference protested outside the ICCC 7.

This view points toward setting a policy of preparation for, and adaptation to, climatic events and change as they occur, which is distinctly different from the former emphasis given by most Western parliaments to the mitigation of global warming by curbing carbon dioxide emissions.

Ultimately, the rationale for choosing between policies of mitigation or adaptation must lie with an analysis of the underlying scientific evidence about climate change. Yet the vigorous public debate over possibly dangerous human-caused global warming is bedevilled by two things.

First, an inadequacy of the historical temperature measurements that are used to reconstruct the average global temperature statistic.

And, second, fuelled by lobbyists and media interests, an unfortunate tribal emotionalism that has arisen between groups of persons who are depicted as either climate “alarmists"or climate “eniers.”

In reality, the great majority of working scientists fit into neither category. All competent scientists accept, first, that global climate has always changed, and always will; second, that human activities (not just carbon dioxide emissions) definitely affect local climate, and have the potential, summed, to measurably affect global climate; and, third, that carbon dioxide is a mild greenhouse gas.

The true scientific debate, then, is about none of these issues, but rather about the sign and magnitude of any global human effect and its likely significance when considered in the context of natural climate change.

For many different reasons, which include various types of bias, error and unaccounted-for artifacts, the thermometer record provides only an indicative history of average global temperature over the last 150 years.

The 1979-2011 satellite MSU (Microwave Sounding Units) record is our only acceptably accurate estimate of average global temperature, yet being but 32 years in length it represents just one climate data point. The second most reliable estimate of global temperature, collected by radiosondes on weather balloons, extends back to 1958, and the portion that overlaps with the MSU record matches it well.

Taken together, these two temperature records indicate that no significant warming trend has occurred since 1958, though both exhibit a 0.2C step increase in average global temperature across the strong 1998 El Nino.

In addition, the recently quiet Sun, and the lack of warming over at least the last 15 years - and that despite a 10% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide level, which represents 34% of all post-industrial emissions - indicates that the alarmist global warming hypothesis is wrong and that cooling may be the greatest climate hazard over coming decades.

Climate change takes place over geological time scales of thousands through millions of years, but unfortunately the relevant geological data sets do not provide direct measurements, least of all of average global temperature.

Instead, they comprise local or regional proxy records of climate change of varying quality. Nonetheless, numerous high-quality paleoclimate records, and especially those from ice cores and deep-sea mud cores, demonstrate that no unusual or untoward changes in climate occurred in the 20th and early 21st century.

Despite an estimated spend of well over $100-billion since 1990 looking for a human global temperature signal, assessed against geological reality no compelling empirical evidence yet exists for a measurable, let alone worrisome, human impact on global temperature.

Nonetheless, a key issue on which all scientists agree is that natural climate-related events and change are real, and exact very real human and environmental costs. These hazards include storms, floods, blizzards, droughts and bushfires, as well as both local and global temperature steps and longer term cooling or warming trends.

It is certain that these natural climate-related events and change will continue, and that from time to time human and environmental damage will be wrought.

Extreme weather events (and their consequences) are natural disasters of similar character to earthquakes, tsunami and volcanic eruptions, in that in our present state of knowledge they can neither be predicted far ahead nor prevented once underway. The matter of dealing with future climate change, therefore, is primarily one of risk appraisal and minimization, and that for natural risks that vary from place to place around the globe.

Dealing with climate reality as it unfolds clearly represents the most prudent, practical and cost-effective solution to the climate change issue. Importantly, a policy of adaptation is also strongly precautionary against any (possibly dangerous) human-caused climate trends that might emerge in the future.

Financial Post
Bob Carter, a paleoclimatologist at James Cook University, Australia, and a chief science advisor for the International Climate Science Coalition, is in Canada on a 10-day tour. He speaks at Carleton University in Ottawa on Friday.

Here is a five minute long special report on a power source for the 21st Century; one that the “greens”, climate change alarmists and global warming skeptics might all agree on.

And here is my blog about that power source.

JOHN COLEMAN’S BLOG
May 21, 2012

THORIUM will power the world.  That is the bumper sticker of the future.

The ugly debate about energy has gone on and on.  It is costing us billions of dollars.  It is beginning to cripple our nation.  I have been looking for a source of abundant, cheap electric power that short cuts the raging, highly destructive debate; a source all sides can support.  I think I have found it. It is thorium. 

Thorium is nothing new.  It was successfully demonstrated in the 1960s.  I am not the only one to find it; there are now 100s, maybe even thousands of scientists, promoting it. But it has largely been forgotten and overlooked ever since the military/industrial complex and their political and bureaucratic servants dumped it 50 years ago.

I am asking for all sides in the climate change, global warming, carbon dioxide, carbon footprint debate to consider supporting thorium.  It is green; it produces no “greenhouse gasses”, no particulate pollution, leaves little waste and produces no risk of explosion, radiation or pollution in the atmosphere or ocean.  It is cheap; an abundant resource found in the desert salts and rocks in virtually every country on Earth.  It is relatively cheap and simple to use.

I see every reason why, despite their huge, continuing differences on other issues, that thorium power can be accepted and promoted by all sides.  I think Richard Lindzen and Michael Mann, Joe Bast and Peter Glieck, Fred Singer and James Hansen, Lord Monckton and Al Gore, Roger Pielke and Joe Romm should all set aside their debate long enough to help get the move to thorium electric power generation rolling.

I have just finished my first television report on thorium.  It is about five minutes long; a true monster of a long “package” by television news standards.  Yet Steve Cohen, the News Director of KUSI-TV, gave his full support and approval and cleared it for telecast on Monday, May 21st.  It has now been posted on the KUSI website.

After you have watched, please, do a little internet digging of your own. The Thorium Alliance.com website is a good place to look.

It will take a mountain of enthusiasm from a broad range of well positioned people to move the politicians and bureaucrats to back thorium.  It would also be great if a major supplier of generating stations would climb aboard.  I fear it is going to take a lot of political donations to move our Congress.  And, I don’t think this can move forward without Congress.

If you interested enough to learn about thorium power here and now, read on:

Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly
By William Pentland, Contributor

For the past several months, a friend of mine has been telling me about the potentially game-changing implications of an obscure (at least to me) metal named Thorium after the Norse god of thunder, Thor.

It seems like he is not the only person who believes thorium, a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, could provide the world with an ultra-safe, ultra-cheap source of nuclear power.

Last week, scores of thorium boosters gathered in the United Kingdom to launch a new advocacy organization, the Weinberg Foundation, which plans to push the promise of thorium nuclear energy into the mainstream political discussion of clean energy and climate change. The message they’re sending is that thorium is the anti-dote to the world’s most pressing energy and environmental challenges.

So what is the big deal about thorium? In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:

What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.

A clutch of companies and countries are aggressively pursuing Dean’s dream of a thorium-powered world.

Lightbridge Corporation, a pioneering nuclear-energy start-up company based in McLean, VA, is developing the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor in collaboration with Russian researchers. In 2009, Areva, the French nuclear engineering conglomerate, recruited Lightbridge for a project assessing the use of thorium fuel in Areva’s next-generation EPR reactor, advanced class of 1,600+ MW nuclear reactors being built in Olkiluoto, Finland and Flamanville, France.

In China, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and a clutch of Chinese outfits began an effort in mid-2009 to use thorium as fuel in nuclear reactors in Qinshan, China.

Thorium is more abundant than uranium in the Earth’s crust. The world has an estimated 4.4 million tons of total known and estimated Thorium resources, according to the International Atomic Energy Association’s 2007 Red Book.

The most common source of thorium is the rare earth phosphate mineral, monazite. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 12 million tons, two-thirds of which are in India.  Idaho also boasts a large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals.

Thorium can be used as a nuclear fuel through breeding to fissile uranium-233.  For those technically-inclined readers, here is a link to a geek-friendly explanation of what that means.

I have no idea whether thorium is the panacea many people claims it is likely to be, but I believe we’ll be hearing more about it in the years to come.

The entire article is on the Forbes website.

There is more to come.  Let’s get focused on this concept and try to see it through. It could save our modern, high technology way of life.

John Coleman
jcoleman@kusi.com

As this time of the years reminds us, flowers never go out of style. Whether it is to celebrate a holiday or make up for some bad behavior, flowers just get it done every time. This has been the case for generations and will be the case from now until eternity. There is a good reason why we have flower shops on every other street corner.

According to AboutFlowers.com, “the U.S. floral industry includes fresh cut flowers, cut cultivated greens, potted flowering plants, foliage plants and bedding/garden plants, making floriculture the third largest U.S. agricultural crop. The U.S. floral industry consists of more than 60,000 small businesses, such as growers, wholesalers, retailers, distributors and importers.” Total revenue for these businesses is over $35 billion annually with 67% of fresh flowers being imported largely from Colombia and Ecuador. Can you name the state leading fresh flower production? California dominates the market with 77% of the US production; Washington produces 6%, Hawaii is at 4%, and Florida, Oregon, and New Jersey each produce 3% of our fresh flowers.

Commercial flower growers are fully aware that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 produce great results in indoor greenhouses, and the industry has dreamed up many creative ways to cheaply produce the magic gas. There is no doubt the CO2 creates better flowers, but maintaining higher levels of CO2 can be expensive and in some cases, not cost effective. Flowers in the real world don’t have to worry about the financial cost of higher levels of atmospheric CO2 - it is coming to them absolutely free given emissions from fossil fuel consumption throughout the world. Flowers today are growing in a world of ever-increasing CO2 levels, and research continues to show us that the flowers are thrilled with the situation.

A recent article on orchids is a case in point. The article appeared in Plant Cell Reports and was written by four scientists from several universities in Japan. While we typically think of orchids as tropical and subtropical flowers for our enjoyment, there are many varieties that grow in temperate and even cold climates. Did you know that vanilla plants are orchids? The underground tubers of some terrestrial orchids can be ground into powder and used in cooking (ground orchid powder shows up in hot beverages and ice cream). Make a trip to Reunion Island and enjoy a rum that is made from the dried leaves of orchids, or if you cannot make the trip, you can purchase any number of perfumes that are derived from the scent of orchids. All of these uses makes us wonder about the future of this highly diverse member of the biosphere.

Norikane et al. grew orchids in glass bottles with atmospheric CO2 concentrations maintained at ambient levels of CO2 (around 380 ppm), 3,000 ppm, and 10,000 ppm to explore what would happen with “super-elevated” levels of CO2; they used cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL’s) to light the plants throughout the experiment. There is a lot of information in the article, but the plantlets absolutely loved the high levels of CO2. When comparing ambient to 10,000 ppm CO2, the young plantlets increased the number of leaves by 29%, they more than tripled the number of roots, they nearly doubled plant height, root length increased by a factor of six, stem diameter increased by 50%, fresh and dry weight of the shoots nearly tripled, and fresh and dry weight of the roots increased by a factor of 20! They transferred the plantlets and after another 30 days, the goodness kept right on going with benefits to every part of the plants (including the chlorophyll content). In their abstract, Norikane et al. note “growth of plantlets, in particular the roots, was remarkably enhanced” (it is very rare to see scientists referring to their results as remarkable). They state at the very end of the article “we will expect that super-elevated CO2 enrichment under CCFL make possible more efficient and higher quality commercial production of clonal orchid plantlets.”

We all know some guys who have gone down the roses road from time to time and left the orchids for the prom crowd. So, in their interests, we searched around and found this oldie-but-goodie article in The New Phytologist from back in 1985 in which roses were grown with elevated concentrations of CO2. The piece was produced by a scientist with the Agricultural University of Norway and the research was funded by the National Agricultural Research Council and the Royal Ministry of Petroleum and Energy of Norway (very interesting).

Mortensen grew roses (Rosa ‘Mercedes’ in growth chambers with atmospheric CO2 maintained at 330 ppm and 1,000 ppm. The plants increased their dry weight by 21% thanks to the extra CO2. Mortensen also grew two varieties of African violets in these chambers, and their dry weights increased by 40.8 and 58.3% given elevated CO2. The violets increased the number of plants producing flowers, the elevated CO2 decreased the number of days to flowering by a full week, and the number of flowers and flowerbuds more than doubled in the chambers with elevated CO2. Maybe you prefer mums instead of orchids, roses, or violets? You guessed it - Mortensen grew two variety of mums as well, and the elevated CO2 caused them to increase their dry weight by 27.8% and 67.1%.

We could go on and on - Mortensen grew lettuce, cucumbers, tomato, moss, ivy, and other flowers, and the CO2 effect on dry weight ranged from 21.4% for the roses to 74.0% for the lettuce. More reasons for happiness, more reasons to give flowers, and more reasons to welcome higher levels of CO2.

References:

Mortensen, L.M. 1985. Nitrogen oxides produced during CO2 enrichment. I. Effects on different greenhouse plants. The New Phytologist, 101, 103-108.

Norikane, A., T. Takamura, M. Morokuma, and M. Tanaka. 2010. In vitro growth and single-leaf photosynthetic response of Cymbidium plantlets to super-elevated CO2 under cold cathode fluorescent lamps. Plant Cell Reports, 29, 273–283.

Recently, in conjunction with publication of my new book, Merchants of Despair, which exposes the crimes of the global Malthusian movement, I was interviewed on the radio by a liberal talk show host. When I brought up the issue of race- or caste-targeted forced sterilization programs instituted in Peru, India, and many other Third World countries with USAID and World Bank funds, the host chose to deal with the matter by pooh-poohing the existence of these atrocities.

I was shocked. These programs are not secret, and their horrors have received some, if less-than-deserved, coverage in the mainstream media. Indeed, the members of the Fujimori government were brought to trial and convicted of genocide for their enforcement of such policies. Yet here was this liberal gentleman, supposedly an anti-racist and feminist, a self-proclaimed defender of the poor and the helpless, shrugging off massive violations of human rights and extraordinary crimes directed against women, infants, and people of color. In amazement I blurted out, “This is a holocaust, and you should not be denying it!”

Then it hit me. I was dealing with a holocaust denier.

Indeed, the entire environmentalist movement consists of holocaust deniers, who continue to refuse to look at or admit the existence of the carnage they have created and continue to perpetuate worldwide.

So let’s look at the record.

Some of the worst atrocities can be laid at the feet of the population control ideologues such as Paul Ehrlich and his co-thinkers who argued - in direct contradiction to historical fact - that human well-being is inversely proportional to human numbers. As a result of their agitation, since 1966 U.S. foreign aid and World Bank loans to Third World countries have been made contingent upon those nations implementing population control programs. In consequence, over the past four decades, in scores of countries spanning the globe from India to Peru, tens of millions of women have been rounded up and subjected to involuntary sterilizations or abortions, often under very unsafe conditions, with innumerable victims suffering severe health effects or dying afterwards.

Ehrlich also called for the United States to create a Bureau of Population and Environment which would have the power to issue or deny permits to Americans to have children. While rejected here, this idea was adopted by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, who were convinced of the necessity of such measures by the writings of the Club of Rome after these were plagiarized and republished in China under the name of one of its top officials. Thus was born China’s infamous “one-child policy,” which has involved not only hundreds of millions of involuntary abortions and forced sterilizations, but infanticide and the killing of “llegal children” on a mass scale.

The anti-technology wing of the antihuman movement also has its share of human extermination to account for. The pesticide DDT was first employed by the U.S. Army to stop a typhus epidemic in Naples which had been created by the retreating Germans through their destruction of that city’s sanitation system. Subsequently, Allied forces used it in all theaters to save millions of diseased-ravaged victims of Axis tyranny, and after the war employed it to wipe out malaria in the American south, southern Europe, and much of south Asia and Latin America. The benefits of these campaigns were unprecedented. As the National Academy of Sciences put it in a 1970 report:

To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase of agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.

But the role of DDT in saving half a billion lives did not positively impress everyone. On the contrary, as Alexander King, the co-founder of the Club of Rome put it in his 1990 biography, “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Of course, such reasoning would carry little appeal to the American public. Much better ammunition was provided by Rachel Carson, who in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, had made an eloquent case that DDT was endangering bird populations. This was false. In fact, by eliminating their insect parasites and infection agents, DDT was helping bird numbers to grow significantly.  No matter. Using Carson’s book and even more wild writing by Ehrlich (who in a 1969 Ramparts article predicted that pesticides would cause all life in the Earth’s oceans to die by 1979), a massive propaganda campaign was launched to ban DDT.

In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency responded by holding seven months of investigative hearings on the subject, gathering testimony from 125 witnesses. At the end of this process, Judge Edmund Sweeney issued his verdict: “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. … DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.” No matter. EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (who would later go on to be a board member of the Draper Fund, a leading population control group), chose to overrule Sweeney and ban the use of DDT in the United States. Subsequently, the U.S. Agency for International Development adopted regulations preventing it from funding international projects that used DDT. Together with similar decisions enacted in Europe, this effectively banned the use of DDT in many Third World countries. By some estimates, the malaria death toll in Africa alone resulting from these restrictions has exceeded 100 million people, with 3 million additional deaths added to the toll every year.

The harm done by the EPA, itself a creation of the environmental movement, has not been limited to stopping DDT. It is no coincidence that U.S. oil production, which had been growing at a rate of 3 percent per year through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, peaked in 1971, immediately after the EPA’s creation, and has been declining ever since. In 1971, the U.S. produced 9.6 million barrels of oil per day (mpd).  Today we are down to 5.6 mpd. Had we continued without environmentalist interference with our previous 3 percent per year growth in the period since - as the rest of the non-OPEC world actually did - we would today be producing 35 mpd, and the world economy would not be groaning under the extremely regressive tax represented by $100 per barrel oil prices. The environmentalist campaign against nuclear power has made its promise for plentiful, cheap electricity impossible as well.

The genocidal effect of such support for energy price-rigging should not be underestimated. Increasing the price of energy increases the price of all other products. It is one thing to pay $100 per barrel for oil in a nation like the USA which has an average income of $45,000 per year. It is quite another to pay it in a Third World country with an average income of $1500 per year. An oil price stiff enough to cause recession in the advanced sector can cause mass starvation among the world’s poor.

European greens also have much horror to account for, notably through their campaign against genetically modified crops. Hundreds of millions of people in the Third World today suffer from nutritional deficiencies resulting from their cereal-dominated diets. This can now readily be rectified by employing genetically enhanced plants, such as golden rice, which is rich in vitamin A.  Other genetically modified crops offer protection against iron or other vitamin deficiency diseases, dramatically increased yields, self-fertilization, and drought or insect resistance. But as a result of political pressure from the green parties, the European Union has banned the import of crops from countries that employ such strains, thereby blackmailing many governments into forbidding their use. In consequence, millions of people are being unnecessarily blinded, crippled, starved, or killed every year.

Taken together, these campaigns to deny billions of people the means to a decent existence have racked up a death toll exceeding that achieved by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or any of the other tyrants whose crimes fill the sordid pages of human history.  It is ironic that the perpetrators of this holocaust have chosen to affix the term “deniers” to those who refuse to endorse their proposal to radically expand it via a global program of mass human sacrifice for the purpose of weather control. In fact it is they, who call upon us to harden our hearts to “the inconvenient truth” that allegedly requires such suffering, who are the real new deniers; deniers not just of a past holocaust that rightfully commands our grief, but a present one, whose desperate victims still plead for our action.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of “Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil”. His newest book, “Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism” has just been published by Encounter Books.

See how PSU Ethics Professor Donald Brown and Michael Mann is guilty as charged here. Also Bill Nye the science guy.