By Michael J. Economides
It is billed as a “panel of the world’s leading economists… to fight climate change.” I am not sure what kind of economists they are but the ones that have been meeting in Bonn, Germany seem to ignore what any undergraduate student in business or engineering can readily conclude: the net present value of carbon dioxide fossil fuels is positive and huge; the net present value of any “green” alternatives is negative to hugely negative.
Unless of course they start with the presumption of anthropogenic global warming, which they do, but even more to the point, they accept lock stock and barrel the most alarmist, the direst predictions of the consequences of global warming. If one accepts those, no economic calculation is necessary because the presumed damages have an incalculable impact. There is no real need for “leading economists” to congregate other than provide fake but authoritative sounding pronouncements for what it is a thinly disguised giant worldwide tax.
The panel was assembled by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last March and is supposed to report to him in October. “Potential revenue sources include auctioning the right to pollute, taxes on carbon production, an international travel tax, and a tax on international financial transactions, as well as government grants and loans.” The speaker in Bonn: none other than Nicholas Stern, the author of one of the most alarmists reports on the subject in the UK.
Almost certainly because of the failure of US Congress to enact carbon legislation and the debacle in Copenhagen last December, the proposal in Bonn, unabashedly uttered by Stern is for the UN to be the revenue raiser. In a far from subtle manner, the UN has been mentioned for the first time as the vehicle to raise $100 billion per year to fight climate change. This departure from past plans is so outlandish, so far out of any authority that the UN has ever claimed on member states that it would lend credibility of the pronouncements of not just right-wing radio talk show hosts but the most radical phobias of world governance expressed by fringe groups.
Stern is certainly not immune to cherry pick information to prove a point. One would wonder about the scholarliness of this leading economist. One of the most striking examples, one that has been quoted by many, is the Stern Report’s citing of the work of Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, a US consulting firm. The Report said: “New analysis based on insurance industry data has shown that weather-related catastrophe losses have increased by 2% each year since the 1970s over and above changes in wealth, inflation and population growth/movement… If this trend continued or intensified with rising global temperatures, losses from extreme weather could reach 0.5%-1% of world GDP by the middle of the century.”
Muir-Wood said his research showed no such thing and accused Stern of “going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence”.
But Stern in Bonn was unfazed. He talked of a “new industrial revolution to move the world away from fossil fuels to low carbon growth...It will be extremely exciting, dynamic and productive.”
But there was nothing specific. Which technologies will shape this new industrial revolution, what is their viability, what is their own economic attractiveness? What it is certain is that the existing highly attractive, tried and true technologies and energy sources are to be taxed at the tune of $1 trillion per decade. There will be a process, not specified, on how this massive revenue will be “distributed.” And finally the clincher, “private capital also will be crucial, and governments must adopt policies reducing the risk to investors”, i.e. subsidies, i.e., more taxes.
These ideologues seem unrepentant and unmoved by the giant signals from many countries, all in just this year, which led to the Copenhagen fiasco, the wholesale abandonment of subsidized, unrealistic green technologies throughout Europe and the huge disconnect between public pronouncements and actions by practically every country. Now they will try the UN route which is the surest way to further reduce the effort to laughable levels. How is the US going to compel countries to comply with such massive tax increases?
But never underestimate the environmentalists’ fervor once they find themselves in the government. In the United States we have a new tactic. The EPA, citing the Congressional refusal to enact the holy carbon legislation, which I would have thought would be a yet another giant signal of what the public wants (a bothersome nuisance I am sure) will now attempt to impose regulations on the power and energy industry.
Blinded by ideology and an almost religious anti-carbon devotion have they, from Bonn to Washington, lost all their senses?
Economides is a professor at the University of Houston and the editor-in-chief of the Energy Tribune
ICECAP Note: Every real economist I know thinks this is a ridiculous idea, but these rent-seeking phonies led by the pompous, ignorant Stern, proclaim themselves “leading economists” and give the UN what it thinks it needs to turn the tide. Here’s hope they and the equally clueless and pompous EPA fail miserably. See here where the UN is failing and Stern, the UK discredited economist is taken to the woodshed here for overstating the science.
Climate Science Weblog Guest Post By Bill DiPuccio
Many of the comments made on your Three Hypotheses reinforce my belief that the word “significant”, when applied to human influence on climate, may require further qualification in order to remove any confusion.
Anthropogenic forcing is a continuum: It can dominate climate change, modulate natural variability, or have little to no impact at all. I believe what you mean is that human influence is “significant (but not necessarily dominant)”.
The problem, in part, is one of parameter, scale and location. Though spatially small, the UHI effect in the center of a large city may produce a 5F-10F difference in max summer temps when compared to outlying rural locations. In this case, the anthropogenic effect is the dominant factor in meso-scale climate change as regards the increase in average summer temp. Deposition of black carbon aerosols may have a large measurable impact on regional climates in polar and glacial areas by accelerating melting, but little or no measurable influence in the tropics. In both of these examples, locations downstream will naturally experience some effect along the impact continuum.
When parameter, scale and location are taken into consideration, Hypothesis 2A becomes a composite that more accurately reflects the breadth and complexity of climate change as well as the current state of climate science which is becoming increasingly nuanced. It takes into consideration the potential dominance of natural causes or CO2 on specific parameters, scales and locations, without exaggerating (as do Hypothesis 1 and 2B) their influence.
Enlarged here.
Read more and follow back to original post and comments here. I would agree with Bill and Roger as I believe do most scientists. It’s all a matter of degrees (no pun intended).
Published by American Thinker, August 5, 2010
The US Senate/s proposed Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) would force electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of their power from wind and solar - rising to 15% by 2021. These goals resemble those of the Waxman-Markey bill that barely passed the House in June 2009. It’s disturbing that some Republicans on the House Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted for ACELA (American Clean Energy Leadership Act). If the Senate were to take up an energy bill, it is likely that Sen. Brownback (R-KS) will introduce an amendment for RES.
Now, it is quite clear that wind and solar are not economic—and probably never will be competitive, even when fuel prices rise significantly. So the RES mandate would mean that all of us taxpayers would support even more the RE rent-seekers and lobbyists, who are already milking the government for subsidies and tax-breaks for the construction of wind farms and solar energy projects.
In addition, electricity users (rate payers) would pay more for electric power to cover the higher cost. The so-called “feed in tariff” would force utilities to buy expensive wind and solar electricity and average the cost into the rest of the power produced. The consumer, meaning all of us, would pay for this boondoggle. It’s just a huge transfer of money, yet another regressive tax on consumers, with the electric utilities forced to become tax collectors.
The hoax part of the RES is that “clean electricity” is being advertised as a way to save the earth from the ‘dreadful fate’ of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). To accept this outlandish proposition, one would have to believe that the carbon dioxide generated in the burning of fossil fuels has a noticeable influence on climate. The data argue against it. The constantly advertised “scientific consensus” is phony; it does not exist. The evidence that the UN climate panel, the IPCC, puts forward in support of AGW is pitifully inadequate and wrong. It is easy to show that no credible evidence exists; just look at the summary of the NIPCC report “Nature, not human activity, rules the climate.” It is available for free on the Internet. (http://tiny.cc/0cawy)
The fraud relates to the idea that energy produced without CO2 emission is “clean.” This word ‘clean’ is being misused, and that’s a huge part of the problem. Of course, removing genuine pollutants like sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides and mercury from smokestacks is a real clean up. It is already mandated by the Clean Air Act and being pursued adequately. But CO2 is not a pollutant - in spite of the claims of the EPA in its ‘Endangerment Finding’ - which has yet to be tested in court. CO2 is neither toxic nor irritating nor visible - nor a climate forcer of any significance, so the idea that we have to stop emitting CO2, or capture and sequester it, is a pure fraud.
And finally, the whole scheme is a financial rip-off. We all know that wind and solar energy are intermittent. If their use should rise beyond the present few percent, we would require either on-site storage of electricity or large standby capacity, probably fueled by expensive natural gas, to kick in when the wind kicks out. Either scheme would impose huge additional costs.
The biggest part of the swindle is that the RES is being sold on the basis of creating “green jobs.” But since when does wasting money create productive jobs? Why not leave it with consumers who can save and invest it to create real jobs. A study conducted in Spain, which has gone overboard on renewable energy, shows that each so-called green job displaces between two and three real jobs. In any case, the manufacture of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells is now in the hands of lower-cost Chinese industry. So the green jobs in the US would consist of sweeping the mirrors clean from dust and dirt and fixing the blades and gearboxes of the turbines when they fail.
In all of this, the proposed legislation ignores nuclear power, which is not only “clean"in the sense of not emitting carbon dioxide, but is also competitive in price with most fossil fuels. Nuclear is most likely to become the major source of electric power once low-cost fossil fuels are depleted. Yet ACELA explicitly says that new nuclear power and updates to existing nuclear facilities and generation from municipal solid waste incineration are not included in the base quantity.
The hypocrisy of the RES advocates is appalling. It’s OK for the taxpayer to subsidize low-carbon energy that doesn’t work (wind, solar) but not low-carbon energy that does work (nuclear). Read more here.