Sensible, responsible energy policies must replace today’s subsidies and crony corporatism
By Paul Driessen
America needs more economic growth, domestic manufacturing, jobs and secure, affordable energy to make those things happen.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney understands that achieving this goal requires unleashing American ingenuity, reducing excessive regulatory strangleholds on businesses and working capital, and allowing safe, proven technologies to tap and utilize our vast onshore and offshore deposits of oil, natural gas and other energy riches. He knows we can do all this without sacrificing important environmental values.
President Obama fervently believes the solution is to unleash more taxes, regulations and regulators, keep our subsurface resources off limits, and impose a painful transition from hydrocarbons to wind, solar and biofuel energy. He aligns with and listens to environmentalist agitators who detest hydrocarbons, frighten people into thinking fossil fuel production and use will destroy the planet, and conceal the
adverse health, economic and environmental effects of “green” energy “alternatives.”
The Obama vision has been an unmitigated disaster. Countless failures, bankruptcies and layoffs are matched by a need for perpetual subsidies taken from hard-working, productive people and businesses, and given by unaccountable bureaucrats to failed technologies and companies, run by crony corporatists who return the favor by contributing substantial portions of our compulsory taxpayer largesse to the reelection campaigns of cooperative politicians.
The Romney vision, by contrast, actually works. Bain Capital investments brought us Staples, The Sports Authority, Steel Dynamics and many other success stories. More recently, on the energy front, America’s private sector ingenuity, sweat and perseverance launched new technologies and discoveries that abruptly ended the myths of “peak oil” and “imminent depletion” of US and global petroleum.
Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, for example, was developed by private industry, funded by private investors and tested on private lands. It did not have to depend on taxpayer subsidies, approval by federal bureaucrats, or access to shale deposits on federal lands.
Had it been otherwise, “fracking” would never have gotten off the ground. The incredible North Dakota, Texas and Pennsylvania oil, gas, jobs and revenue boom would never have occurred. Vast deposits of oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids would have remained trapped in shale rock formations, thousands of feet below Earth’s surface.
Natural gas prices would still be above $8 per thousand cubic feet (million Btu), instead of in the $2.50 to $3.00 range. America would still be looking overseas for fuels to replace the coal that the Obama EPA is effectively eliminating from our energy, electricity, employment and economic picture.
But thanks to drilling and fracking on private lands, under commonsense state regulations, US oil and gas production is increasing, for the first time in 15 years, despite continued leasing and drilling moratoria on federal onshore and offshore lands. America is on the threshold of a manufacturing renaissance fueled largely by access to abundant, reliable, affordable fuels and petrochemical feed stocks, to power and supply raw materials for factories, refineries and chemical plants.
Plentiful gas from the Marcellus shale formation has persuaded Shell to plan a $2biillion ethane “cracking” plant near Pittsburgh creating 10,000 construction jobs and 10,000 permanent jobs. Steel plants, electric utilities and countless other industries will also benefit from shale gas.
Citigroup’s “Energy 2020” report says the US petroleum industry could add “as many as 3.6 million jobs by 2020 and increase the US gross domestic product by as much as 3 percent,” while also generating billions of dollars in lease bonuses, rents, royalties and taxes for local, state and federal governments.
Fracking could bring new jobs and revenues to depressed areas of Maryland, New York, Ohio and other states. Expanded access to our newfound century’s worth of hydrocarbon energy will keep prices low and reverse the flow of manufacturing jobs out of our country, providing jobs for millions of American graduates and unemployed workers, and creating a new prosperity for current and future generations.
Moreover, the energy, manufacturing, employment and economic benefits will be unencumbered by worrisome environmental impacts. Hydraulic fracturing has been utilized since 1949, and has been carried out more than 2.5 million times, safely and without causing any serious harm.
Fracking fluids are 99.5% water and sand, combined with chemicals that keep sand particles suspended in the liquid, fight bacterial growth, and improve gas flow and production. Most additives used today are vegetable oils and common, biodegradable chemicals found in cheese, beer, canned fish, dairy desserts, shampoo, and other food and cosmetic products. Steadily improving technologies, techniques and regulations will further reduce environmental risks.
For those still worried about catastrophic manmade global warming, natural gas emits far less carbon dioxide than coal. It doesn’t create waste disposal or radiation disinformation that has stymied nuclear power expansion. Unlike wind turbines, it doesn’t slaughter birds and bats. Unlike solar power, it doesn’t require blanketing millions of acres of wildlife habitat with photovoltaic panels.
Unfortunately, facts like these have not stopped peak oil diehards and anti-hydrocarbon activists in and out of the Obama administration. They have become master fear mongers and propagandists, advancing their “just say no” opposition to North American fossil fuel energy and using lawsuits, lobbying, fabrications and demonstrations to block drilling, fracking, the Keystone XL pipeline, coal mining and burning, and countless other projects, while promoting subsidies, favoritism, and exemptions from environmental laws for wind, solar and biofuel programs.
During his first inaugural address, in the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt told the American people, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Environmental extremists take the opposite tack, arguing that the only thing we have to fear is… just about everything.
We need jobs and renewed economic vitality. We all want a clean environment. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, industries of all kinds have made tremendous progress in reducing emissions and improving safety, efficiency and sustainability. They will doubtless continue to make further progress.
But giving in to fear and hysteria, and throwing more roadblocks in front of responsible energy and economic development, creates far more harm than benefit for our nation and its people.
Team Obama is the government arm of the environmental extremist lobby. It’s time to replace it with a Romney team that understands, encourages and enables sensible, responsible North American energy and economic development.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death.
In his Aug. 6 op-ed, “A New Climate-Change Consensus,” Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp speaks of “the trend- a decades -long march toward hotter and wilder weather.” We have seen quite a few such claims this summer season, and Mr. Krupp insists that we accept them as “true.” Only with Lewis Carroll’s famous definition of truth, “What I tell you three times is true,” is this the case.
But repetition of a fib does not make it true. As one of many pieces of evidence that our climate is doing what it always does, consider the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s year-by-year data for wet and dry years in the continental U.S.
From 1900 to the present, there are only irregular, chaotic variations from year to year, but no change in the trend or in the frequency of dry years or wet years. Sometimes there are clusters of dry years, the most significant being the dry Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. These tend to be followed by clusters of wet years.
Despite shrill claims of new record highs, when we look at record highs for temperature measurement stations that have existed long enough to have a meaningful history, there is no trend in the number of extreme high temperatures, neither regionally nor continentally. We do see the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s setting the largest number of record highs, at a time when it is acknowledged that humans had negligible effect on climate.
What about strong tornadoes? Again there is no trend. Last year was an unusually active season, and unfortunately some of those storms ravaged population centers. We were told that these disasters were the result of human CO2 emissions. Yet 2011 was only the sixth worst for strong tornadoes since 1950 and far from a record. And have any of us heard about this tornado year? Why not? Because 2012 has been unusually quiet. Most of the tornado season is behind us, and so far the tornado count is mired in the lowest quintile of historical activity. As for hurricanes, again there is no discernible trend.
Regarding wildfires, past western fires burned far more acreage than today. Any climate effect on wildfires is complicated by the controversial fire suppression practices of the past hundred years.
Lurid media reporting and advocates’ claims aside, even the last comprehensive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report noted that"archived data sets are not yet sufficient for determining long-term trends in [weather] extremes.” Yet this has not stopped global warming advocates from using hot summer weather as a tool to dramatize a supposedly impending climate Armageddon.
In a telling 2007 PBS interview, former Sen. Tim Wirth gloated about how he had rigged the 1988 Senate testimony chamber to dramatize the impact of NASA scientist James Hansen’s histrionic testimony on imminent danger from global warming: “We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer...So we scheduled the
hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington or close to it.”
Not content to gamble on the vagaries of weather statistics, Mr. Wirth also boasted, “What we did is that we went in the night beforehand and opened all the windows . . . so the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room . . . when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.” Tricks like those described by Sen. Wirth have been refined to an art to promote the cause of economically costly action to prevent supposedly catastrophic consequences of increasing CO2.
Contrast these manipulations with the measured and informative Senate testimony of climatologist John Christy earlier this month.
In an effort to move the science debate completely into the political arena, Mr. Krupp implies that with the exception of a few enlightened Republican governors and captains of industry, most “conservatives” are climate skeptics - and vice versa. But some of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include the politically liberal physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever; famously independent physicist and author, Freeman Dyson; environmentalist futurist, and father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock; left-center chemist, Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the
German environmental movement, and many others who would bristle at being lumped into the conservative camp.
Whether increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is bad or good is a question of science. And in science, truth and facts are not the playthings of causes, nor a touchstone of political correctness, nor true religion, nor “what I tell you three times is true.”
Humanity has always dealt with changing climate. In addition to the years of drought and excessive moisture described above, the geological record makes it clear that there have been longer-term periods of drought, lasting for many years as during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to many decades or centuries. None of these past climate changes, which had a profound effect on humanity, had anything to do with CO2, and there are good reasons for skepticism that doubling CO2 will make much difference compared to natural climate changes.
It is increasingly clear that doubling CO2 is unlikely to increase global temperature more than about one degree Celsius, not the much larger values touted by the global warming establishment. In fact, CO2 levels are below the optimum levels for most plants, and there are persuasive arguments that the mild warming and increased agricultural yields from doubling CO2 will be an overall benefit for humanity. Let us debate and deal with serious, real problems facing our society, not elaborately orchestrated, phony ones, like the trumped-up need to drastically curtail CO2 emissions.
Roger W. Cohen
Fellow, American Physical Society
La Jolla, Calif.
William Happer
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.
Richard S. Lindzen
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Mass.
Written by JoNova | August 08 2012
You’d expect a professor to have done the basic research.
Naomi Oreskes is famous (of sorts) for the book: Merchants of Doubt - it seeds doubts about skeptics by saying that skeptic’s “seed doubts” about climate change.
The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Orsekes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.
The hypocrisy of saying that skeptics attack the messenger is lost on Orsekes who specializes in… attacking the messengers.
Oreskes’ work is based on a logical fallacy, inept research, and incompetent reasoning.
What is remarkable is that so many “intellectuals” or journalists can’t or won’t see through her thin rhetoric.
1.Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes.
2.The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has a budget that is one hundredth of Greenpeace and WWF’s combined. Funding for alarmist research since 1990 is at least $79 billion, and probably a lot higher. Funding for skeptical research is so small, no one can add it up. The oil giants like Shell and BP mostly support alarmism and carbon markets. The global carbon market was worth $176 bn in 2011, about the same as the global wheat trade, and the renewables investments added up to $243 bn in 2010. These are very large amounts of vested interest. Since Oreskes is blind to the real money in the debate we can only assume she is an activist rather than a historian.
3.She resorts to twenty year old documents about tobacco funding to smear by association because she has so little real evidence of actual funding or misbehavior of skeptics. As it happens, Fred Singer was never directly paid by a tobacco company, has never doubted that smoking causes cancer, but corrected a scientific error in a paper on passive smoking. He deserves thanks. Oreskes owes him an apology.
4.Skeptics far outrank believers in both numbers and in scientific kudos. They have won real Nobel Prizes in physics, the climate scientists Oreskes quotes have won “Peace Prizes”. Skeptics can name 31,500 scientists including 9,000 PhD’s and hundreds of professors. The IPCC can name 62 people who reviewed the critical chapter nine of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, some of them reviewing their own work. Alarmists don’t try to counter the Petition Project with a petition of their own because, even with all their supporters on the scientific gravy train, they don’t stand a chance of coming up with a number large enough to prop up their claims that 97% of scientists agree.
5.Oreskes claims “deniers” attack the messenger, which on it’s face is true, except that she is the one who denies the evidence and attacks the messenger. She is the Queen of Smear and The Merchant of Doubt herself. Virtually no one has done more to smear opponents in this debate than she has. She refers to them continuously as “Deniers” - though she cannot name any evidence they deny, she has dug mindlessly into the paltry funding, biographies, or association and connections with topics that are totally unrelated to our atmosphere. Skeptics keep asking for evidence. It’s been 30 months since I asked, and no one can provide THAT mystery paper that supports the catastrophic claims.
6.Oreskes keeps stating that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and increases the temperature of the planet, but almost all the leading skeptics agree with it. Why does she keep stating it, as if it is a point of contention? She wants the audience to believe that this is what the debate is about, while the skeptics agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes warming - but dispute the feedbacks asserted by models (which account for two thirds of the forecast increase in temperatures), but which is completely absent in the observations. Is Oreskes ignorant and incompetent in assessing the real scientific debate or is she deliberately deceiving her audience? Only she knows.
When she says those in denial reject “the scientific evidence”, she mistakenly believes that “evidence” about climate change is an internet poll of government funded researchers. It’s an anti-science position akin to witchcraft. Tens of thousands of real scientists, including men who walked on the moon, and Nobel Prize winners of physics, know that evidence for climate change comes from thermometers, ice cores, satellites and fossils. Real scientists can quote 1,100 peer reviewed papers that support their skepticism. Naomi Oreskes can quote no real evidence that supports her catastrophic pet hypothesis. Instead she thinks computer simulations produce “observations” and scientist’s opinions are worth measuring and quoting.
Oreskes’ event at Curtin in Perth on Thursday is advertised with the following:
Professor Naomi Oreskes will host a discussion where she will outline the political and ideological roots of climate change denial, showing the linkages between neo-liberalism - the revival of classical commitments to laissez-faire economics - and the rejection of the scientific evidence of man-made climate change. Professor Oreskes will show how those who are committed to laissez faire reject the scientific evidence, and attack the scientific messenger. And she will suggest that the way forward is to focus on solutions, particularly solutions that minimize government interventions in the market-place.
Since skeptics don’t deny any scientific evidence, her theories about neoliberalism collapse in a hole, doomed by an error cascade that starts with her first phrase. Here’s an alternate hypothesis: Scientists reject man-made global warming because it’s wrong (it lacks empirical support), not because of their political beliefs. The models she claims are working fail on global, regional, and local scales, they fail on short term forecasts, get core assumptions wrong and can’t explain long term historic climate movements either.
The question she ought be researching is why those of a collectivist, big-government nature are so blind to the mountain of evidence staring them in the face. Could it be that a scientific theory that suggests we need a larger, more regulatory and powerful government involvement appeals to exactly the same people who dislike individual responsibility and real free markets? Those who call for “free market” solutions to climate change are the ones who don’t understand what a free market is. In a real free market, governments don’t set the price, create an artificial demand, determine the supply and tweak the rules to get the outcome they want, picking the “winners” in the energy game.
She is in denial about what science is, what evidence is, about the mass movement of whistleblowing scientists storming across the web, and about the vested interests.
The hypocrisy is blatant. Why is UWA supporting her as a 2012 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Professor-at-Large? Who is paying for her to come, and why are UWA standards so low that they continue to support her smear campaign?
The first and only thing you need to know about Oreskes is that she does not understand what science is. Although she’s called a science historian, whenever she refers to “The Science” or “The Evidence” she is not referring to science as understood by Faraday, Einstein, Bohr or Fleming. Where they hold empirical evidence and the data to be the ultimate decider, Oreskes thinks science is done by voting, and only an annointed subclass of scientists is allowed to cast their opinion.
Naomi Oreskes is speaking at UWA today. UWA needs to justify how much taxpayers money they contribute to propagating something that is so clearly not science, but not even competent research. In years to come, UWA and Scripps will be embarrassed that their science faculties should promote something so unscientific.
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Icecap Note: In August 2012, a climate extremist addressed to various skeptical climate researchers what he offensively called “an appeal to you to be reasonable”. Christopher Monckton of Brenchley replied, whereupon the extremist - unable or unwilling to produce a single scientific argument - said he did not wish to pursue the debate further. This paper is an extended version of the reply to the climate extremist.