By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
Electric bills have skyrocketed in the last five years, a sharp reversal from a quarter-century when Americans enjoyed stable power bills even as they used more electricity.
AS OBAMA PROMISED
Households paid a record $1,419 on average for electricity in 2010, the fifth consecutive yearly increase above the inflation rate, a USA TODAY analysis of government data found. The jump has added about $300 a year to what households pay for electricity. That’s the largest sustained increase since a run-up in electricity prices during the 1970s.
Electricty is consuming a greater share of Americans’ after-tax income than at any time since 1996 - about $1.50 of every $100 in income at a time when income growth has stagnated, a USA TODAY analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data found.
Greater electricity use at home and higher prices per kilowatt hour are both driving the higher costs, in roughly equal measure:
•Residential demand for power dropped briefly in 2009 but rebounded strongly last year to a record high. Air-conditioners and household appliances use less power than ever. A new refrigerator consumes half the electricity as a similar one bought in 1990. But consumers have bigger houses, more air-conditioning and more electronics than before, outpacing gains in efficiency and conservation.
“People have made a lot of money selling weight loss programs. It’s the same for energy. Behavior is hard to change,” says Penni Conner, vice president of customer care at NSTAR, a Boston-based utility.
•Prices are climbing, too, hitting a record 11.8 cents per residential kilowatt hour so far this year, reports theEnergy Information Administration. The increase reflects higher fuel prices and the expense of replacing old power plants, including heavily polluting — but cheap to operate — coal plants that don’t meet federal clean air requirements.
“Higher bills are a huge problem for low income families,” says Chris Estes, executive director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition, which opposes a proposed rate hike in its state by Duke Energy. “Utilities are what people’s budgets start with.”
Duke Energy says the rate increase is needed to pay for replacing old power plants and making the transmission system more reliable. The Charlotte-based utility has reached a tentative agreement with North Carolina to raise rates 7.2% in February, lower than its original 17% request.
“The industry as a whole is facing higher costs because we’re retiring our aging fleet” of power plants, says Duke Energy spokeswoman Betsy Conway. Electricity cost varies widely depending on where you live. Cheapest: Northwest communities near hydropower dams - as low as 2 cents per kilowatt hour. Most expensive major utility: Consolidated Edison, supplier of New York City - 26 cents per kilowatt hour, according to EIA.
High taxes, limits on air-polluting fuels and the expense of maintaining an underground transmission system keep consumer costs high, says ConEd spokesman Chris Olert.
A potential bright spot: Electric bills appear roughly the same so far this year as last when adjusted for inflation, based on preliminary reports.
However, the future of energy prices and the upcoming closure of more polluting coal plants makes the long-term outlook cloudy for consumers. Duke Energy plans to ask for another rate hike next year to cover the costs of new natural gas-fired plants.
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 12th, 2011
The Durban climate conference has been an abject failure. But that hasn’t stopped those who were there desperately trying - with all the plausibility of Monty Python’s Black Knight - to spin their disaster as though it represents some kind of massive triumph. Among them is a man named Michael Jacobs, formerly climate adviser to Gordon Brown.
In his Guardian column today, Jacobs argues that “the conference that has ended in Durban, South Africa, amid considerable drama, should be regarded as very much a success.”
I disagree. And today we met on Sky News to discuss it.
By the time Jacobs left he was not a happy bunny. He left the set very quickly, apparently not a little discombobulated that I had just accused him (off camera, unfortunately) of talking “weapons-grade b***ocks”. But then, he had started it by turning to me immediately after we’d done our recording and saying: “You are entitled to your opinion. What you are not entitled to are your own facts.”
In other words, Jacobs was accusing me of having lied on TV. This was more revealing about the mindset of committed warmists than it was about the veracity of what I had actually said. If you can find a link to our encounter you can judge for yourself: I said Durban had been a flop (TRUE); I said if the 15,000 delegates really cared about Climate Change they would have done it by teleconferencing rather than hopping onto planes and creating an enormous carbon footprint (TRUE); I said global warming had stopped in 1998 (TRUE); I said that “green jobs” were a nonsense – quoting the Verso Economics statistic that for every “green job” created by government subsidy in the UK economy another 3.7 jobs are lost in the real economy (TRUE); and I said that if the former Climate Adviser to Gordon Brown was uncomfortable with any of this, well that was surely a sign that things must be going well (TRUE).
So what was the best response Michael Jacobs could muster? To call me a liar.
That opinion/facts phrase he used sounded familiar. And sure enough, up it crops in that rather embarrassing report that Steve Jones did for the BBC Trust – the one arguing that the BBC really ought to be more biased in its coverage of global warming because, er, well, it should.
“All of us involved in this debate need to remember that we are entitled to our own opinions but none of us are entitled to our own facts.”
Good phrase, that. (Though personally I’d prefer the more grammatical “none of us is"). Presumably it has been doing the rounds quite a bit in Warmist circles. As it would, I suppose: after all, when you’ve got so very few scientific facts on your side, you need all the handy slogans you can muster.
What really impresses me, though, is the bravura hypocrisy of such accusations. I mean if there’s one thing we’ve established with absolute, 100 per cent, cast iron certainty in the climate debate which has been raging these last few years it’s this: that climate scientists are a bunch of epic liars.
In the Climategate and Climategate 2.0 emails they’re shown time and again fudging data, breaching FOI requests, lying to outsiders who’ve requested to see the raw data on which they’ve based their dubious prognostications, grossly exaggerating their degree of certainty about the threat of AGW, tweaking their Assessment Reports to make them look more scary, pretending those Assessment Reports are the work of divers hands when really the people doing all the legwork and rewriting comprise a relatively small core of committed activists.
Yet for all this, Michael Jacobs has apparently never stopped to ask himself whether this might not suggest something ever so slightly dubious about the quality of the science underpinning his cherished theories. So certain is he of the unimpeachable virtuousness of his cause, it seems, that he has no need to respond to sceptics with facts or arguments. All he has to do is call them liars and the problem will go away.
Except it won’t.
No “Climate Debt” is owed to developing countries
Ottawa, Canada, December 11, 2011:
“Developed nations are not guilty of causing the climate change that developing nations claim they are suffering,” said Tom Harris, executive director of ICSC which is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. “Climate changes all the time - both warming and cooling - due to natural causes and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. However, to the degree possible, and considering our economic circumstances, developed nations still have a moral obligation to devote a proportion of their foreign aid to helping the world’s most vulnerable people adapt to natural climate events.”
ICSC chief science advisor, Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, and author of the best selling book, “Climate: the Counter Consensus” says, “Science has yet to provide unambiguous evidence that problematic, or even measurable, human-caused global warming is occurring. Consequently, any agreements - Durban, Cancun, Copenhagen or Kyoto - to reduce humanity’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are utterly futile. Governments need to recognize that the really dangerous climate hazards are natural events and change, and to prepare more fully to adapt to them when they occur.”
New Zealand-based Terry Dunleavy, ICSC founding chairman and strategic advisor, expands on this point, “The UN’s nonsensical attempts to ‘stop climate change’ have diverted world attention, and hundreds of billions of dollars, away from helping those already being hurt by natural climate variation and weather-related events. The health and wellbeing of people suffering today is infinitely more important than the remote possibility that our GHG emissions might threaten those yet to be born.”
“We urge citizens from across the political spectrum to take a more mature perspective, one that is based on real science, engineering and economics, not political correctness,” asserts ICSC energy issues advisor, Bryan Leyland of Auckland, New Zealand. “Whether you are socialist or capitalist, industrialist or environmentalist, no one wants to pour money down the drain. Yet, that is exactly what is happening as a result of the global warming scare. Expensive and ineffective alternative energy projects such as wind turbines and solar cells are receiving massive government support, in the belief that they will reduce GHG emissions which are wrongly blamed as a cause of dangerous global warming. Meanwhile, the conventional power sources that we rely on for our very survival, let alone the economic progress we need to create a better world, are deliberately starved of support. This is a very dangerous situation.”
ICSC science advisor Professor Ole Humlum, of the Institute of Geosciences, University of Oslo, explains, “Today’s climate debate is essentially about the relative influence of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) versus natural climate variations. In my mind, there is no doubt that the data available clearly show that the natural variations are the dominant of these two factors, including during the last few years. The net temperature effect of our CO2 emissions appears to be insignificant.”
Mr. Harris concluded: “As is well demonstrated by the Nongovernmental International Climate Panel on Climate Change (www.nipccreport.org), warming alarmism is a not based on a correct interpretation of the science. The climate scare has largely been fuelled by computer-generated misrepresentations that bear little relationship to modern climate or to its observed history.”
As nearly all independent observers have now concluded, a new approach is needed to address climate change. The best (indeed, self-evident) Plan B is that nations should prepare for and adapt to the onset of damaging climate-related events and change as and when they occur.
----------
The ICSC is a non-partisan group of scientists, economists and energy and policy experts who are working to promote better understanding of climate science and related policy worldwide. We aim to help create an environment in which a more rational, open discussion about climate issues emerges, thereby moving the debate away from implementation of costly and ineffectual “climate control” measures. Instead, ICSC encourages effective planning for, and adaptation to, inevitable natural climate variability, and continuing scientific research into the causes and impacts of climate change.
ICSC also focuses on publicizing the repercussions of misguided plans to “solve the climate crisis”. This includes, but is not limited to, “carbon” sequestration as well as the dangerous impacts of attempts to replace conventional energy supplies with wind turbines, solar power, most biofuels and other ineffective and expensive energy sources.