Investor’s Business Daily, 22 September 2009
President Obama warns of planetary doom at the U.N. if we fail to pass cap-and-trade legislation. Meanwhile, a former warm-monger predicts decades of cooling as the sun stays nearly “spotless.”
The president had hoped to address Tuesday’s United Nations climate change summit in New York with a finished cap-and-trade bill. Failing that, he hoped he’d at least have a version of the Waxman-Markey bill that has passed the House on his desk before the Copenhagen talks in December to cobble together a follow-up to the failed Kyoto Protocol.
Not only did that not happen in the cool summer of 2009, but both science and circumstance have turned against the administration. The American people are in no mood in a recession with near double-digit unemployment to have their electricity rates “necessarily skyrocket” while our economic hole is dug deeper for microscopic, if detectable at all, reductions in global temperature.
The president paraphrased Al Gore’s sentiment that the science is settled and the debate is over, saying that “after too many years of inaction and denial, there is finally widespread recognition of the urgency of the challenge before us. We know what needs to be done.”
Actually, the science is not settled. Nor is it clear what, if anything, needs to be done to prevent what he called “irreversible catastrophe.”
In a speech last week at the U.N.’s World Climate Conference in Geneva, Professor Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, one of the world’s foremost climate modelers and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged that the Earth has been cooling and is likely to continue that trend for the next couple of decades. Al Gore, call your office.
Latif has been looking into the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as the North American Oscillation. When he factored these natural fluctuations into his global climate model, Professor Latif found the results brought the allegedly endless rise in global temperatures to a screeching halt. Latif conceded the planet has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.” Latif still believes in a warming trend and thinks it will resume. But he at least acknowledges the empirical evidence of cooling, that there are factors at work here other than your SUV, and that doom will not occur the day after tomorrow.
None of the alarmists and their supercomputer climate models ever predicted even a 30-year respite in their apocalyptic scenarios. Neither did they predict the sun, that thermonuclear furnace in the sky that has more influence on earth’s climate than any number of Ford Explorers, would suddenly go quiet for an indefinite period. Charles Perry, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Lawrence, Kan., says there’s a growing sense in the scientific community that the earth may be entering into a “grand minimum” - an extended period with low numbers of sunspots that results in cooler planetary
temperatures. In July through August of this year, 51 consecutive days passed without a sunspot, one day short of the record. As of Sept. 15, the current
solar minimum - with 717 spotless days since 2004 - ranks as the third longest on record. Perry cites data indicating that global temperature fluctuations
correspond to a statistically significant degree with the length of the sunspot cycle and variations in solar activity. 1816, the “year without a summer,” was during an 1800 to 1830 grand minimum when Europe became significantly cooler.
Latif and others conclude that, at the very least, we have time to think about it and analyze and learn. We don’t have to fight global warming by inflicting global poverty. More things on Earth affect climate than are dreamed up in computer models. Read more here.
World Climate Report
President Obama’s risky perseveration on health care is running over another of his pet governmental expansions - cap-and-trade legislation sent by the House on June 26 for Senate consideration.
How soon we forget. By a squeaky 219-212 vote, the House rushed Congressman Waxman’s 1300-page opus out the door so the members could get back to the hustings for the Fourth of July. When many freshman democrats got home, those who voted for it experienced the first angry “town hall” of their careers. The blowback caused by Obamunism began over energy, not healthcare.
Obama is taking great risks with healthcare because he can’t cobble enough votes from his own party. About 50 congressmen won’t vote for anything with Public Option in it, while another 50 won’t vote for anything without it. There’s no doubt that this impasse is going to continue for some time.
Given that health care is bottled up in the house, why isn’t Obama pushing Cap and Trade in the Senate? Simple: the votes aren’t there. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), the new head of the Agriculture Committee calls cap-and-trade a “complete non starter” and said that it is not her “preference to move on cap and trade this year.”
Now the White House is providing cover for the Senate in order to keep Obama from another legislative embarrassment (assuming health care will be his first). When asked last week about cap-and-trade, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs completely ignored the question and segued into the need for major legislation to prevent some future financial crisis.
For cap-and-trade, “next year” translates as “never.” Senators know what touched off the town halls, and they know what fate awaits many of their democrat counterparts come November 2010. Voting for an unpopular Public Option healthcare program along with cap-and-trade will easily realign the Senate into its old filibustering self.
Right now (and there’s a lot of time between now and the 2010 election) it’s a pretty good bet that a substantial number of democratic congressmen who voted for cap-and-trade are not going to come back - especially those from republican-leaning districts. That kills cap-and-trade in the next Congress.
But, thanks to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), the Environmental Protection Agency now has authority to issue its own regulations on carbon dioxide. Given its obvious failure in the legislature, it is a sure bet that Obama will direct (or has directed) Administrator Lisa Jackson to issue her own cap-and-trade schedule (along with a 37mpg average fuel economy mandate). Look for something concrete out of EPA before the United Nations’ climate change confab in Copenhagen in early December. For sure, the world’s largest emitter of CO2 - China - isn’t going to agree to any mandatory emissions reductions there unless the U.S. has something very serious in hand. And, if China does nothing, there’s simply not going to be a major slowdown in the growth of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
Not that it really matters. The rather large elephant crowding cap-and-trade out of the Senate is the earth’s reluctance to warm in the last decade, along with new projections saying that we could go another ten years without much heating.
The current hiatus in warming portends a reduction in potential heating for the entire century. Most computer models produce significant warming as a result of an increase in atmospheric water vapor (a “greenhouse” gas), which comes from an ocean initially warmed by carbon dioxide. When the ocean doesn’t warm much, this “feedback” effect is delayed. Or so goes the myth.
The lack of warming is an embarrassment to any elected official who has been hiding behind “the science is settled” fig leaf in order to promote cap-and-trade. While every scientist will tell you that indeed the surface temperature of the planet is warmer than it was a century ago (that’s the “settled” part of global warming science), very few scientists anticipated such as long a period without warming as we are now in. In other words, the real science of future warming is completely unsettled.
The bottom line is that the Senate is perfectly happy to kick cap-and-trade under the train. It’s going to have a hard enough time recovering from the upcoming healthcare wreck. Voting for that, along with cap-and-trade, could unleash a torrent of new republicans in both houses of congress.
Fobbing carbon dioxide regulation off to the EPA gets Congress off the hook and will lay the blame on the President. No wonder the Senate has abandoned cap-and-trade. It’s payback for being forced to vote on healthcare. See post here.
By Ben Webster, Environment Editor
People who emit more than their fair share of carbon emissions are having their pay docked in a trial that could lead to rationing being reintroduced via the workplace after an absence of half a century.
Britain’s first employee carbon rationing scheme is about to be extended, after the trial demonstrated the effectiveness of fining people for exceeding their personal emissions target. Unlike the energy-saving schemes adopted by thousands of companies, the rationing scheme monitors employees’ personal emissions, including home energy bills, petrol purchases and holiday flights.
Workers who take a long-haul flight are likely to be fined for exceeding their annual ration unless they take drastic action in other areas, such as switching off the central heating or cutting out almost all car journeys. Employees are required to submit quarterly reports detailing their consumption. They are also set a target, which reduces each year, for the amount of carbon they can emit.
Those who exceed their ration pay a fine for every kilogram they emit over the limit. The money is deducted from their pay and the level of the fine is printed on payslips. Those who consume less than their ration are rewarded at the same rate per kilogram.
The maximum that an employee can earn or be fined has been capped at 100 pounds, but is likely to rise once staff have grown accustomed to the idea. WSP, the global engineering consultancy, has been conducting the rationing scheme among 80 of its British employees for almost two years. In the first year the overall carbon footprint of participants fell by 10 per cent. The company is discussing its scheme with several FTSE 100 companies.
Three quarters of the employees were rewarded and a quarter, including Stuart McLachlan, the managing director, were fined. Mr McLachlan tried to cut his carbon footprint by buying a bike and cycling 12 miles to work from Richmond, Surrey, to Chancery Lane, in Central London. He also installed energy-saving lightbulbs, but he still exceeded his ration - and was fined 100 pounds - because he flew to his holiday home in South Africa.
The idea of personal quotas for carbon emissions is being advocated by the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research. Everyone would be given a number of free “credits”, to buy gas and electricity for their homes, fuel for cars and plane tickets for holidays. Those who did not use all their credits could sell the excess to people who used more fossil fuels.
WSP is planning to expand its rationing scheme next year to cover 3,000 employees in offices around the world. However, it will set different targets for each country to reflect national average emissions. In Britain the target this year is 5.5 tonnes, which is one tonne above the national average for home energy and personal transport. The US target is likely to be double the British target, to reflect much greater emissions per person.
David Symons, co-ordinator of the scheme, said that US employees would be unlikely to join a scheme with the same ration as British staff. “The teams in the States would think they would be in debit straightaway.”
Mr Symons stayed within his ration last year by giving up his Mazda RX8 sports car and buying a diesel Peugeot 207. He met this year’s target largely because his partner had a baby and he rarely left home except to go to work.
One employee, Dan Dowling, 29, switched the mode of transport for his honeymoon in Rome from plane to train. His colleague, Emma Bollan, stopped blow-drying her hair and cut down on roast dinners. She said: “The big incentive is not the prospect of earning 100 pounds but in trying to ensure that you don’t have to pay out.”
Several WSP staff added that peer pressure played a part in persuading them to stay within their ration.
Mr McLachlan said: “There have been some interesting competitive dynamics in the company as a result of having this transparency.”
Read more here.