By Collin Levy, Wall Street Journal Online
Former Vice President Al Gore recently took his climate-change show on the road for the benefit of liberal bloggers, Sunday morning TV aficionados and other innocent bystanders. This week he laid out his demand for a miraculous transformation in U.S. energy use over a mere 10 years. As for drilling for more oil? “Absurd,” the Nobel Laureate scoffed. “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” The same might be said for Mr. Gore. For while his message hasn’t changed, the political realities of the energy debate have. Suddenly, Mr. Gore’s inconvenient speechifying only tightens the vice Democrats find themselves in over drilling.
Voters’ pocketbooks are now involved, making them more skeptical about climate change—and about the utility of any policies aimed at influencing climate change. The environmental movement is facing a critical moment. Democrats who support the greenies in their most ambitious goals, and scariest pseudo-scientific rhetoric, suddenly seem woefully out of touch with American voters.
Back in June, Barack Obama made hay of John McCain’s comment that while opening lands to drilling might not have a short term direct impact on oil supply and prices, it would have a “psychological impact” by sending a signal to consumers and the market that the country was expanding its own resources. “In case you’re wondering,” Mr. Obama said, “that’s Washington-speak for ‘it polls well.’”
Ho, ho. But oil prices have fallen since President Bush announced his support for more drilling. And polls these days are shifting overwhelmingly in favor of it. More than two-thirds of Americans support expanding drilling along the coasts, and 59% approve of drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, according to a Reuters-Zogby poll. The worst news for Democrats is that support for drilling is now a majority opinion even in their own constituency. The quandary for Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi et al. is how to keep irate environmentalists inside the tent while still meeting voter demand for lower prices. Raging against oil companies and Wall Street may get you through a news cycle or two, but it’s not a solution. Read more here.
EPW Blog
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, gave a floor speech on America’s energy policy today. Selected Excerpts of Inhofe’s Energy Speech:
“I believe that America is not running out of oil and gas or running out of places to look for oil and gas. America is running out of places where the Democrats in Congress are allowing us to look for oil and gas. Again I ask, why should producing America’s own resources be a partisan issue? It shouldn’t be, but it is. The Democrats in Congress refuse to increase our supply of energy, and gas prices keep rising. I call on the Democrats to act to expand refinery capacity and to open the nation’s access to the Outer Continental Shelf, ANWR, and the Rocky Mountain oil shale, and preserve access to Canadian oil sands. Today’s American oil producer operates with the most sophisticated environmental technologies and policies on the planet. 67 percent of the American people recognize the need for development and support action. It’s time to end the Democratic Party’s obstruction. The American public must demand that the Democrats in Congress allow us to produce our own resources.
Americans are clearly embracing the need for expanded domestic production. Recent polling data from Rasmussen shows that 67 percent of American voters support offshore drilling - only 18 percent oppose. The same poll also found that 64 percent believe that if offshore drilling is allowed, gas prices will go down. Another poll from The Polling Company Inc. found that 81 percent of Americans support greater use of domestic energy resources
But even though the American public strongly supports expanded use of American resources, oil and gas exploration and production is currently prohibited on 85 percent of America’s offshore waters. The Pacific and Atlantic regions of the Outer Continental Shelf which hold an estimated 14 billion barrels of oil and 55 trillion cubic feet of gas are off-limits. 14 billion barrels of oil are equivalent to more than 25 years’ worth of our imports from Saudi Arabia. Looking to Alaska, ANWR is estimated to contain 10 billion barrels of oil - about 15 years’ worth of imports from Saudi Arabia. If President Clinton hadn’t vetoed legislation allowing environmentally sensitive exploration on the Coastal Plain of ANWR ten years ago, today we would have 1 million additional barrels of oil a day coming from ANWR. Turning to oil shale, the potential energy development from these resources is truly massive. But, once again, Democrats are blocking development. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 established a one-year moratorium on the necessary funding to complete the final regulations for commercial leasing of oil shale.
In an effort to hide their true record of blocking access to America’s own resources, the Democrats are engaged in a campaign of shifting blame claiming that there are 68 million acres in America where oil and gas companies have bought the right to drill and they are sitting on them. Very simply, not all leases contain oil. Sometimes at the end of the day there is no oil or gas found on a lease. For example, between 2002 and 2007, 52 percent of all the exploration wells and 8 percent of all development wells were dry.
By opening the nation’s access to the reserves of the Outer Continental Shelf, ANWR, and Oil Shale, we could cut our nation’s trade deficit nearly in half. According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. spent more than $327 billion to import oil in 2007. These oil imports accounted for 46 percent of the nation’s $711 billion trade deficit last year.”
Read the full testimony here.
Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama, Huntsville
I would like to thank Senator Boxer and members of the Committee for allowing me to discuss my experiences as a NASA employee engaged in global warming research, as well as to provide my current views on the state of the science of global warming and climate change. I have a PhD in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and have been involved in global warming research for close to twenty years. I have numerous peer reviewed scientific articles dealing with the measurement and interpretation of climate variability and climate change. I am also the U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
On the subject of the Administration’s involvement in policy-relevant scientific work performed by government employees in the EPA, NASA, and other agencies, I can provide some perspective based upon my previous experiences as a NASA employee. For example, during the Clinton-Gore Administration I was told what I could and could not say during congressional testimony. Since it was well known that I am skeptical of the view that mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions are mostly responsible for global warming, I assumed that this advice was to help protect Vice President Gore’s agenda on the subject.
This did not particularly bother me, though, since I knew that as an employee of an Executive Branch agency my ultimate boss resided in the White House. To the extent that my work had policy relevance, it seemed entirely appropriate to me that the privilege of working for NASA included a responsibility to abide by direction given by my superiors. But I eventually tired of the restrictions I had to abide by as a government employee, and in the fall of 2001 I resigned from NASA and accepted my current position as a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks’—instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC.
If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, as we will see, it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end—if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now. Read more here. Listen to Roy’s testimony here. Read also Senator Inhofe’s opening statement here.