Why isn’t Lord Lawson dead yet?
By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: January 25th, 2012
Lord Lawson: not dead, despite the fond wishes of internet trolls
This isn’t me asking, you understand. I’m merely repeating a question someone posted on the internet after Lord Lawson had the temerity to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme speaking out in defence of shale gas in a debate with Friends of the Earth’s Tony Juniper. (H/T Bishop Hill)
Did anyone on Lawson’s side of the debate post similar messages earnestly hoping that Juniper choked on his organic tofu? Or demanding that Friends Of The Earth have its charity status withdrawn because it’s quite clearly a viciously misanthropic, anti-capitalist political organisation funded by deep-green ecoloons who given half the chance would have us all living in Maoist peasant collectives while they busily bombed our economy back to the dark ages? I doubt it somehow. Climate realists tend to be far too busy being nice and reasonable and balanced - as Lord Lawson always takes pains to do - to adopt the Alinsky-ite smear tactics adopted by their opponents.
I’m sure Lord Lawson can take consolation from the words of his old boss Margaret Thatcher: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”
Never were these words truer than in the case of the climate change debate. The alarmists simply haven’t got a leg to stand on, so the best they can do to shore up the ruins of their collapsing cause is to engage in ad homs, appeals to authority and utterly dishonest campaigns like the current Guardian-encouraged witch-hunt to try to force the Global Warming Policy Foundation to reveal its sources of funding.
Why is the campaign so utterly dishonest? First, it succumbs to what Jamie Whyte calls the Motive Fallacy: the demonstrably false notion that if you have an interest (financial or otherwise) in holding an opinion it must perforce be untrue. Whyte gives one example: “A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he may really love her nonetheless.”
But even better answer comes from this brilliant analysis by Ben Pile at Spiked Online!, who notes the outrageous hypocrisy of the greenies’ harassing of the GWPF when its funding - relative to the amount spent on green propaganda - is so minuscule.
Even the £500,000 that the GWPF received from donors in its first year of operations fades into insignificance when put in perspective.
For example, it would take the combined resources of 25 GWPFs to produce an equivalent of the UK government’s extraordinarily patronising Act on CO2 campaign. The Committee on Climate Change spends more than eight times that much each year on its own operations. In 2010, the quasi-independent Carbon Trust and Energy Saving Trust received government grants worth 156 million and 70 million respectively. That’s a total of 452 times as much public money as the GWPF took from donors. The billionaire Jeremy Grantham = who has around $1.5 billion worth of stock in oil companies - is the benefactor of the influential Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change, headed by Lord Nicholas Stern, who wrote The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and WWF enjoy gifts of millions of pounds from the UK and EU governments. And the EU funds associations of renewable energy companies to lobby politicians to the tune of millions of euros per year.
It would be an astronomical understatement to say that the environmental activists banging on about the GWPF lack a sense of proportion and have incredible double standards. The GWPF’s resources are far less than even a thousandth of what is available to the government for research and PR - through its departments, the quangos and NGOs that are recruited into its green agenda, and firms and other associations that will profit by it. And yet this tiny operation has seemingly achieved such reach, to punch far above its weight, against the collective force of all the above.
But perhaps the best reason of all why the GWPF should never have to name its donors is this one, as advanced by Bishop Hill on Twitter:
Greenpeace spokesman: { We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.”. Why would GWPF donors want their names public?
Why indeed.
David Middleton on WUWT
Obama clean energy ad airing in Va. See how leftist US charities funded the big lie here. See Inhofe’s op ed in the Hill on holding Obama to his word on energy here.
A new ad from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that touts his energy and ethics record began airing in Virginia this week even as Republican blasted him over a decision to reject a permit for a proposed oil pipeline from Canada.
The 30-second spot (see below) makes a case that Obama’s policies have promoted clean energy jobs and reduced the nation’s dependence on foreign oil while enduring unfounded attacks funded by wealthy energy industry officials.
This campaign ad is nothing but a collection of falsehoods.
Falsehood #1: “Secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama"… The Koch brothers (and the oil & gas industry in general) have been anything but secretive in their attacks on President Obama.
Falsehood #2: The ad implies that President Obama has created 2.7 million “clean energy industry” jobs.
The 2.7 million figure is purportedly cited from a Brookings report. The report said that there currently are 2.7 million jobs in America that “produce goods and services with an environmental benefit.”
The clean economy, which employs some 2.7 million workers, encompasses a significant number of jobs in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries. (Page 4)
The report says that the “clean economy establishments added half a million jobs between 2003 and 2010.” So… Obama didn’t even “create” half a million “clean energy jobs.” He didn’t even create half a million clean economy jobs. The Brookings report refers to “clean economy” not “clean energy” jobs. The vast majority of the “clean economy” jobs are not in energy… And almost all of those jobs were created before Obama took office.
More than 82% of the “clean economy” jobs listed in the report have nothing to do with energy production…
Waste Management & Treatment ... 386,116 ...14%
Public Mass Transit… 350,547… 13%
Conservation ... 314,983… 12%
Energy Saving Building Materials ... 161,896… 6%
Regulation & Compliance ... 141,890 ...5%
Professional Environmental Services ... 141,046 ... 5%
Organic Food & Farming ... 129,956 ...5%
Recycling & Reuse ... 129,252 ... 5%
Green Consumer Product ... 77,264 ...3%
Green Building Materials ... 76,577… 3%
HVAC ... 73,600 ... 3%
Sustainable Forestry Products … 61,054 ... 2%
Recycled Content Products ... 59,712 ... 2%
Green Architecture ... 56,190 ... 2%
Air & Water Purification ... 24,930 ... 1%
Green Chemical Products ... 22,622 ... 1%
Total ... 2,207,635 ... 82%
Falsehood #3: The ad implies that President Obama somehow played a role in the increase in US domestic oil production over the last few years… That is beyond ridiculous! The plays and prospects from which the production growth was derived were worked up, leased, drilled and plumbed-up for production over the last decade or more. The effects of Obama’s disastrous anti-drilling policies won’t show up in production data for quite some time.
Obama’s anti-drilling policies began in 2009 and were ramped up in 2010. This is either the most amazingly arrogant lie to ever come out of this President’s mouth or an example of his incredible ignorance of the oil & gas industry and energy in general.
The increase in US oil production has come from two main sources:
1) Shale plays like the Bakken (below, enlarged)
The Bakken shale play has mostly been developed on private property. Very little of the shale plays have been developed on Federal lands – And the Obama administration has actively sought to further restrict development on Federal lands. Apart from the EPA, regulation and obstruction of these sorts of plays are mostly in the hands of State gov’ts.
2) Deepwater Gulf of Mexico discoveries.
The deepwater discoveries that have been brought on line over the last three years were discovered long before Obama took office...Many were discovered while Clinton was still in office. Construction and installation of the production facilities began long before Obama took office. On top of that, much of the increase in production was the result of the ongoing recovery from hurricanes Rita (2005), Katrina (2005) and Ike (2008).
Over the last two years, the Obama administration has almost paralyzed operations in the Gulf of Mexico with an unlawful permitorium and has aggressively tried to hamper the shale plays with fraudulent EPA attacks on fracking and unlawful efforts to make BLM lands unavailable…
So far, during the presidency of Barack Obama, the price of a gallon of gasoline has jumped 83 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The administration has the smallest number of people with real business experience - less than 10% of any president the last century. All the others had 3 to over 6 times as much experience. Obama’s hope and change was to come from the brilliance of academics and textbooks and unproven or false assumptions. Can America afford four more years of no hope and more unwanted change???
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Nothing sound about EPA science
by Sen. James Inhofe and Sen. David Vitter
Three years after President Obama’s inaugural promise to “restore science to its rightful place,” independent government agencies have uncovered numerous instances of scientific abuse at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As the EPA grapples with this criticism as well as a recent embarrassing court decision, President Obama must have felt compelled last week to appear at headquarters to give his EPA a “pep talk.”
The President’s EPA morale boost came just months after an Office of the Inspector General report found that the EPA cut corners and short-circuited the required peer review process for its December 2009 endangerment finding, which is the foundation for EPA’s plan to regulate greenhouse gases. EPA was dealt another blow to its scientific integrity when President Obama forced the agency to withdraw its plan to tighten the ozone standards because the economic and scientific analyses were so blatantly unsound.
More recently, an extraordinary D.C. Circuit Court ruling in December blocked EPA from moving forward with its signature air rule, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, because EPA failed to follow an adequate, open and transparent process.
And just last week, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report confirmed that EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program-which EPA acknowledges is the “scientific foundation for decisions"-is flawed. The report highlights “both long-standing and new challenges” EPA faces in implementing the IRIS program, echoing previous concerns from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that the agency is basing its decisions on shoddy scientific work.
Scientific concerns also extend to EPA’s recent activities regarding hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Last month, the agency released a highly criticized draft report on an investigation attempting to link fracking to ground water contamination near Pavillion, Wyo. This draft report-which has yet to undergo peer review and has substantial data gaps as well as methodological concerns-supplements a broader agency study on the potential impacts of fracking on drinking water resources, which has likewise been criticized for not adhering to established scientific procedures.
It’s unfortunate that the EPA under President Obama has degenerated into an agency that won’t review, assess, share or critically analyze its scientific work. We voiced our concerns with the quality of work coming out of EPA regarding the ozone standard in a nine-page letter last June, in which we asked EPA to address numerous questions related to significant matters of scientific integrity, weight of evidence, data selection, conclusions and impacts based on the best available scientific and economic analysis. We have not yet received a response. In fact, EPA was so reluctant to have any review of their work that it was necessary to block a key nominee in order to get EPA to contract with the NAS for a single review. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson later admitted on the record that the NAS review would not have happened without the hold.
It was White House Science Advisor John Holdren, who promised to ensure “Executive Branch policies are informed by sound science.” In October 2011, along with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, we sent Holdren a nine-page letter asking more than 30 specific questions relating to scientific matters and concerns of scientific integrity at multiple agencies. In December, Holdren refused to answer even a single question.
When EPA fails to act after multiple concerns are raised by the GAO, the NAS, and even the agency’s own inspector general, the only conclusion is that EPA is fraught with a dangerous willingness to disregard scientific evidence when it contradicts the agency’s political goals.
EPA’s science-the foundation of the Obama Administration’s damaging regulatory agenda-is not sound. And because the administration refuses to be transparent, we don’t have any clue whether anyone at the White House or EPA is even trying to fix the problem.
By Alan Caruba
It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.
It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.
While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.
This isn’t an “energy policy.” It’s a “no-energy policy” and it is a guarantee of economic disaster.
Obama’s decision to reject a permit for Canada’s XL Keystone pipeline is just one example. It is a job-killer and a revenue-killer. There are thousands of pipelines serving America’s energy needs and the XL Keystone pipeline would ensure that Canada’s own vast energy reserves would flow to America. It is one of our key trade partners and Obama has slapped it in the face.
In early January, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, announced a new 20-year, million-acre ban on uranium mining for federal lands in Arizona, despite the fact that these lands hold the highest-grade of known uranium deposits in the United States. It is an outrage that a new GOP-Congress will have to overturn if the nation is to be assured of sufficient uranium to power its nuclear plants and for weapons development. If the ban remains, these uranium resources would be inaccessible until 2023!
Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that Salazar’s announcement “further compounds a man-made energy crisis that has been planned and executed in Washington, D.C.”
At the same time we are learning of enormous natural gas discoveries that can reduce our energy bills and turn sleeping little towns into boomtowns, environmental organizations have launched a vast propaganda campaign against “fracking”, a technology that has been safely used for more than fifty years. Their claims about dangers to the nation’s supply of fresh water are baseless. Their claims that fracking has caused earthquakes in Ohio are absurd.
Need it be said that the Environmental Protection Agency has turned its eyes on fracking and is working on a report due later this year that will likely call for harsh crackdowns on its use and more regulations to throttle the expansion of natural gas extraction?
The EPA has just released a report of those power plants that top the list of its regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There is no basis in science to justify the reduction of CO2. Indeed, since it is a gas on which all vegetation depends, much as oxygen is vital to all animal life, reducing it would impair great crop yields and healthier forests.
These regulations are based on the global warming hoax that blamed CO2 for warming the earth. That is utterly false. The Earth is currently in a perfectly natural cooling cycle and the climate of the Earth is almost entirely based on the Sun - solar radiation - along with the actions of oceans, clouds, and even volcanic activity that spews tons of particulates into the atmosphere.
Coal-fired power plants account for fifty percent of all the electricity generated in the United States. Fifty percent! And yet the EPA is determined to shut down dozens of them providing that vital factor in the lives of all Americans and the economy, nor does this take into account the billions that energy producers have spent to upgrade their technology to reduce emissions.
The Obama administration fuel economy agenda, a call for 54.5 miles per gallon ignores simple physics. There is a finite amount of energy a gallon of gas can generate. If you dilute it with ethanol as is currently required, you get even less mileage. The administration is trying to circumvent Congress by issuing standards based on regulating “greenhouse gas emissions”, but there is no need for this. It is a false argument. The Center for Automotive Research says that the proposed new standards would cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase by more than $11,000.
Americans and the nation’s future are being victimized by Obama administration policies. The 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, was released on January 12th by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, measures the many factors that contribute to the economic health of a nation - things like property rights, regulatory efficiency, open markets, free trade and labor policies.
Economic freedom is declining worldwide as governments try to spend their way out of the global recession. The United States fell to 10th place. In 2009 it ranked 6th, in 2010 it was 8th, and in 2011, it was 9th.
We are witnessing the deliberate murder of a superpower.
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Germany’s 100 Billion Euro Solar Fiasco
Solar Stocks Plunge Worldwide As Germany Vows To Phase Out Subsidies
Solar stocks plunged around the world after Germany, the largest market for panels, said it will make quicker cuts to subsidized rates and phase out support for the industry by 2017. --Bloomberg, 20 January 2012
The costs of subsidizing solar electricity have exceeded the 100-billion-euro mark in Germany, but poor results are jeopardizing the country’s transition to renewable energy. The government is struggling to come up with a new concept to promote the inefficient technology in the future. --Alexander Neubacher, Spiegel Online, 18 January 2012
Germany’s exit from nuclear power could cost the country as much as 1.7 trillion euros ($2.15 trillion) by 2030, or two thirds of the country’s GDP in 2011, according to Siemens, which built all of Germany’s 17 nuclear plants. The estimate of 1.7 trillion euros assumes strong expansion of renewables, with feed-in tariffs as the biggest chunk of costs. -–Christoph Steitz, Reuters, 17 January 2012
One fifth of every German industrial company has moved activities to foreign countries, or plans to do so, because of the uncertain energy and raw material supply. This is the result of a survey conducted by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), in which 1520 companies participated. DIHK-President Hans Heinrich Driftmann finds this alarming: He fears that Germany is losing its appeal for foreign investors in the wake of it’s energy supply transformation.--Dieter Keller, Südwest Presse, 18 January 2012
Germany’s green politicians here were too dim-witted to foresee the obvious consequences. The German electricity market is on the verge of collapse. The scale of the EEG Renewable Energy Feed-in Act is of unprecedented stupidity, a folly that will certainly go down in German history textbooks. The backpedaling away from solar subsidies in Germany is now happening so fast that it’s making people’s heads spin. Call it the reverse energy supply transition - one from fantasy back to reality. --P. Gosslin, NoTricksZone, 19 January 2012