By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
Have you had a lot of fun watching the price of gasoline shoot out of sight this year at the pump? That will be just the appetizer. Thanks to new regulations from the Obama administration, power companies will shut down a significant number of coal-fired plants by 2014, and without any other reliable sources of mass-produced electricity, consumers will see their bills go up as much as 60% (via Instapundit and Newsalert): Consumers could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40 to 60 percent in the next few years.
The reason: Pending environmental regulations will make coal-fired generating plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, more expensive to operate. Many are expected to be shuttered.
The increases are expected to begin to appear in 2014, and policymakers already are scrambling to find cheap and reliable alternative power sources. If they are unsuccessful, consumers can expect further increases as more expensive forms of generation take on a greater share of the electricity load.
You won’t just pay more to the utility company, either. The Chicago Tribune runs the math on public-sector cost increases in just their city:
What analysts know is that a portion of ComEd bills that pays electricity generators to reserve a portion of their power three years into the future will increase more than fourfold. That would translate into increases of $107 to $178 a year for an average residential customer in ComEd’s territory, starting in 2014, according to calculations by Chris Thomas, policy director for consumer advocacy group Citizens Utility Board.
In 2014 those so-called capacity costs are expected to add approximately $2.7 million over the previous year to electricity bills in Chicago Public Schools, $3.3 million for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and $5.4 million to the city of Chicago, according to an analysis by Tenaska, aNebraska-based power development company that wants to develop a coal-fed power plant in central Illinois that would meet stringent regulations because it would capture and sequester emissions.
It’s the EPA gift that keeps on...taking.
On the other hand, we can consider this a rarity - an Obama promise kept:
Obama told the Chronicle:
The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.
You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know - Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it - whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.
They - you - you can already see what the arguments will be during the general election. People will say, “Ah, Obama and Al Gore, these folks, they’re going to destroy the economy, this is going to cost us eight trillion dollars,” or whatever their number is. Um, if you can’t persuade the American people that yes, there is going to be some increase in electricity rates on the front end, but that over the long term, because of combinations of more efficient energy usage, changing lightbulbs and more efficient appliance, but also technology improving how we can produce clean energy, the economy would benefit.
If we can’t make that argument persuasively enough, you - you, uh, can be Lyndon Johnson, you can be the master of Washington. You’re not going to get that done.
Even without cap-and-trade - or perhaps more accurately, even with a backdoor carbon tax through regulatory adventurism - Obama kept his promise to have electricity rates skyrocketing, and putting the burden on consumers, business, and taxpayers. Who said that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date?
Hockey Schtick
A paper published online yesterday in the journal Paleoceanography shows Nordic sea surface temperatures were as much as 6C higher than the present during the Holocene Climate Optimum (~ 9500 to 6000 years ago) and a “general cooling trend” over the past 7000 years. The paper finds changes in solar energy impacting the Earth (solar insolation) explain the natural cycles of cooling and warming seen in the proxy reconstruction. The study results clearly show no correlation with CO2 levels and once again demonstrate how the Sun controls climate, not CO2.
August Sea Surface Temperatures shown in the top graph show the Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO) was much hotter than the present and a general cooling trend over the past 7000 years. Note the present is at the left side of the graph & x axis legend is “Calendar years before the present” The last major ice age ended about 11,000 years ago.
PALEOCEANOGRAPHY, VOL. 26, PA2220, 15 PP., 2011 doi:10.1029/2010PA002002
Holocene climate variability of the Norwegian Atlantic Current during high and low solar insolation forcing
K. S. Berner, et al
A high-resolution sediment core from the Vøring Plateau has been studied to document the centennial to millennial variability of the surface water conditions during the Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO) and the late Holocene period (LHP) in order to evaluate the effects of solar insolation on surface ocean climatology. Quantitative August summer sea surface temperatures (SSSTs) with a time resolution of 2–40 years are reconstructed by using three different diatom transfer function methods. Spectral- and scale-space methods are applied to the records to explore the variability present in the time series at different time scales. The SSST development in core MD95-2011 shows a delayed response to Northern Hemisphere maximum summer insolation at ∼11,000 years B.P. The record shows the maximum SSST of the HCO to be from 7.3 to 8.9 kyr B.P., which implies that the site was located in the regional warm water pool removed from the oceanic fronts and Arctic waters. Superimposed on the general cooling trend are higher-frequency variabilities at time scales of 80-120, 210-320, 320-640, and 640-1280 years.
The climate variations at the time scale of 320-640 years are documented both for periods of high and low solar orbital insolation. We found evidence that the submillennial-scale mode of variability (640-900 years) in SSST evident during the LHP is directly associated with varying solar forcing. At the shorter scale of 260–450 years, the SSST during the LHP displays a lagged response to solar forcing with a phase-locked behavior indicating the existence of a feedback mechanism in the climate system triggered by variations in the solar constant as well as the role of the thermal inertia of the ocean. The abruptness of the cooling events in the LHP, especially pronounced during the onsets of the Holocene Cold Period I (approximately 2300 years B.P.) and the Little Ice Age (approximately 550 years B.P.), can be explained by a shutdown of deep convection in the Nordic Seas in response to negative solar insolation anomalies. These cooling events are on the order of 1.5C.
See the lack of warming in the tropical oceans to a depth of 700 meters in the Pacific based on buoys from 130E to 80W.
Enlarged. H/T Marc Morano
James Delingpole, UK Telegraph
Sometimes it takes a trip abroad properly to ram home just how screwed your country is. And so it proved when, on the deck of a Baltic cruise ship, I first read reports of Scottish Power’s dramatic gas and electricity price rises. Instead of experiencing a wave of fury, as no doubt I would have done at home, what I felt instead was the sort of detached, sardonic amusement an alien might feel on viewing from outer space a once-great civilisation destroying itself over an issue of immeasurable triviality.
That issue, of course, is “Climate Change”. Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exacerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”
Let’s concentrate on the British example since, thanks to Cameron’s determination to lead the “greenest government ever”, we’re further down the road to Eco Hell than most, and let’s look at the reasons behind those electricity and gas price rises.
These are outlined here in this must-read piece by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser, which lists the various mechanisms (Renewables Obligations, European Emissions Trading Scheme, Feed-In Tariffs, etc) which, this year alone, will drive up our domestic energy bills by around 15 per cent and business energy costs by 20 to 25 per cent. Every one of these mechanisms is based on the so-far-very-much-unproven hypothesis that Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide emissions are contributing dangerously to “Global Warming” and that this “Global Warming” is an undesirable thing. In other words, our political classes are imposing on both our domestic expenses and on the broader economy swingeing costs whose sole justification is the threadbare theorising of a small number of heavily compromised scientists brandishing dodgy computer models.
“How did those charlatans get away with it?” That is the question historians will be asking in generations to come. And: “Why, given his hearty endorsement from the start of all this green lunacy, was there ever a period when David Cameron was treated by significant segments of the media as an homme serieux?” And: “How can it possibly have been that, during the worst global recession since the 1930s, the world’s political leaders were able to impose such enormous, unjustified extra costs on their ailing economies without serious criticism from the commentariat or rebellion from their electorates?”
ICECAP NOTE: The story goes on to show how the media and politicans want to put the entire blame for the skyrocketing energy costs which are devastating the economy and hurting the poor and elderly with no mention of unwise green policy, the real reason for the problems. He concludes:
How much longer are they going to get away with this? Well, I said at the beginning that this country was doomed, but I’m encouraged to see signs that just a hint of a fightback is beginning.
It’s nice, for example, to see my previously fairly agnostic colleague Charles Moore take up the baton for climate realism in this excellent Telegraph column. The Daily Mail, too, has been going MENTAL (but in a good way) on the subject all week, the latest entrant into the fray being the goose-downishly light-of-touch Richard Littlejohn.
Charles Moore is bang on the nail:
High energy costs kill economic growth. That is another way of saying that they make people poorer. Higher energy bills are implacable, direct, and impossible to avoid without personal discomfort. They are coming in now, whereas the counter benefits of any “Green Deal” are much more speculative and long-term. If people think that politicians are making them poorer for no good reason, they will not vote for them.
Say what you like about David Cameron - and you’ll have noticed I do, quite a bit - but if there’s one thing he’s good at it’s being more slippery than a jellied eel in a tub of KY Jelly. And he’ll need this skill in spades if he’s not to go down in history as the Prime Minister who, in the name of a non-existent problem, presided over the devastation of the British countryside with bat-chomping eco-crucifixes for rent-seeking toffs (aka wind farms) and the destruction of the British economy thanks to the imposition of wholly unnecessary costs and regulations. The best of luck to you Dave. And I don’t wish it you for your sake but the sake of our country. It deserves better than this, really it does. See this excellent post here.