See preview here.

Contacts:

Richard Morrison, 202-331-2273

Christine Hall, 202-331-2258

by Richard Morrison, CEI

Will BP and Goldman Sachs Be at Kerry’s Press Conference?

Washington, D.C., May 11, 2010 - As Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) prepare to introduce their long-delayed energy-rationing legislation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute calls on Americans to remember what is really at stake: government control over energy use and massive kickbacks to favored corporations.

“The bill crafted by Kerry and Lieberman - and sometimes Lindsey Graham (R-SC) - manages to have something to harm everyone except big business special interests,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Energy Policy Myron Ebell. “Environmentalists know it will have no discernible impact on the climate, but it will reward favored companies with massive windfall profits.”

Senator Kerry has admitted that the bill was written in close consultation with the companies and industries to be regulated, including the Edison Electric Institute and major oil companies. Kerry recently remarked “Ironically, we’ve been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months,” referring to BP, Conoco Phillips, and Shell. This process could only be considered “ironic” by someone unacquainted with the history of special interest lobbying in Washington, D.C.

“Cap and trade regulation, far from disciplining the energy sector, is poised to become one of the greatest wealth transfers from consumers to private corporations in the nation’s history,” said Ebell. “General Electric, Exelon, BP, Goldman Sachs, and Duke Energy will make out like bandits because of provisions they have written. That’s not democracy or capitalism.  It’s political corruption and crony capitalism.”

As public awareness of what cap and trade would cost American consumers has grown, the bill’s sponsors have responded not by amending their proposals, but by trying to fool the public with shifting terminology. Senator Kerry at one point renamed gasoline taxes “linked fees.” Sen. Lieberman remarked in April he was dropping the phrase “cap and trade” in favor of “emissions reduction targets,” going so far as to joke about the in-name-only difference by asking a reporter “Remember the Artist Previously Known as Prince?”

“Lieberman is not the only one playing word games,” said CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. On-again, off-again co-sponsor Lindsey Graham recently said in an interview that he no longer considers the Kerry-Lieberman legislation either a cap-and-trade bill or a global warming bill because “There is no bipartisan support for a cap-and-trade bill based on global warming.”

“So, because climate alarm and cap-and-tax are no longer polling well, Graham now pretends he can change the bill’s nature simply by rebranding it. I’ve got news for these guys,” said Lewis. “Everybody knew it was Prince even before the Artist Formerly Known As changed his name back to plain old Prince. An energy tax by any other name is just as foul.” See release here.

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest group that studies the intersection of regulation, risk, and markets.

Time to holler long and loud at the senators in your state here.

----------------

On Sunday, May 23, 2010, The U Thant Institute will host its sixth annual Ambassadors’ Luncheon at the Shore and Country Club in Norwalk, Connecticut. The keynote speaker, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, will give his thoughts on The Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia.

By Jim Tankersley

WASHINGTON—After months of negotiations and weeks of delay, Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., will finally unveil their plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions and spur clean energy growth on Wednesday - and the biggest challenge will be selling the notion that the bill has any chance of passage.

Kerry and Lieberman’s efforts took a major hit when their Republican co-architect, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, walked away from the bill shortly before its scheduled rollout three weeks ago.

Since then, partisan polarization has intensified and the politics of energy were muddled further by the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Though Kerry and Lieberman added new curbs on drilling - including allowing states to block their neighbors’ plans to drill offshore - the legislation does not ban new drilling altogether

Still, Kerry and Lieberman say they’ve lined up wide support from utilities, oil companies and other business leaders they’ve courted for months, which they hope will leverage support from moderate Democrats and crossover Republicans.

And the senators, along with many environmental groups, insist that the Gulf spill has focused public attention on America’s thirst for oil, giving new momentum to a bill that could represent the last, best chance for several years for the Senate to act forcefully to curb global warming.

“The oil spill creates urgency,” Kerry said in an interview Tuesday. “In my judgment, the oil spill says, get this done folks. You’ve got to get to it and to change America’s energy posture.”

The proposed legislation mandates reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels via a “cap and trade” system for power plants and, eventually, factories - with strict curbs on the types of trading that would be allowed.

It would require oil companies to obtain emissions permits at a set price not set by the trading market. That essentially mimics the so-called “linked fee” - which itself approximated a gasoline tax - that drafters scrapped after the White House raised concerns it would damage the bill in the eyes of voters. Still, as written, the bill would likely raise fuel costs.

The legislation would immediately send two-thirds of the revenues from emissions permit sales directly back to consumers as refunds on their utility bills, Kerry said, and eventually refund nearly all the proceeds to consumers, in an effort to blunt energy cost increases. Small sums would be dedicated to reducing the federal budget deficit, investing in energy research and financing international climate change efforts.

Also included are several efforts to win support from Republicans and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, including massive incentives for new nuclear power plants and a variety of protections and sweeteners for Rust Belt manufacturers.

As written, the bill would stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and restrict state environmental powers.

But it would allow California to implement energy efficiency standards and other provisions of its signature global warming law, AB 32. “We will not undermine California,” Kerry said.

Groups such as the Sierra Club have threatened to fight any bill that strips EPA and state regulatory authority.

No issue figures to pose as much political difficulty as offshore drilling. In the wake of the BP spill, several coastal Democrats have threatened to block any bill that expands drilling. Some Republicans and centrist Democrats, such as Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, have insisted on a continued offshore drilling expansion.

Critics of climate legislation have long argued that emissions limits would raise energy costs and cripple the economy.

“This bill is a compilation of just about every bad idea that has emerged in the energy debate,” said Patrick Creighton, spokesman for the free-market Institute for Energy Research think tank. “Two things are certain if this bill becomes law: energy prices will skyrocket, and jobs will be shipped overseas.” See story here. Read more here.

Time to holler long and loud at the senators in your state here. See Inhofe’s blog on Kerry-Lieberman here.

Update:  Wall Street Journal Europe reports “The “green economy” is supposed to be a win-win situation, as massive subsidies for renewable energy sources and other “clean” technologies would help both the environment and the economic recovery. The facts on the ground tell a different story, though. One green job costs on average as much 4.8 jobs in the entire economy, or 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector. Our figures only seem to confirm what is intuitive: That the green economy may be very profitable for those who receive the subsidies, but that they are detrimental to the overall economy.

By David Deming

There are two problems with Al Gore.  First, he’s a demagogue who lacks an appreciation for the ethics and methods of science.  Second, he’s a not a scientist, but a celebrity and politician who does not understand the technical aspects of science.  Put succinctly, the man simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  But Gore is now advising the world on complex technical issues related to energy and climate.  That’s a problem for the human race.

As described in my book, Science and Technology in World History, Vol. 1, what we know as modern science began in ancient Greece in the 6th century BC. The Greek philosophers embraced intellectual freedom, open discussion, and critical analysis.  Pupils were not only allowed to question and criticize their teachers, but were encouraged to do so.  Debate was elevated by Plato and his students to the science of dialectic.  In the Platonic Dialogue, Timaeus, it is noted that anyone who can present a better plan “shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend.”

But Al Gore refuses to debate his critics.  He has repeatedly dodged a debate with Christopher Monckton.  Instead of engaging skeptics in reasoned discussions, Gore has relentlessly demonized those who disagree with him.  In a series of infamous character assassinations, he has stated that people who are skeptical of the hysterical global warming scenario he has been promoting (and profiting from) are comparable to the lunatic fringe that believes the Apollo Moon landings were filmed on a movie stage.  He has also compared global warming skeptics to people who believe the Earth is flat.

Scientific issues like climate change are not morality plays.  Scientists are objective and tentative.  To be a scientist is to be skeptical.  Science is never “settled,” because there can be no finality in any empirical system of knowledge.  Only God has all the data.  Scientists employ multiple working hypotheses. They work together cooperatively, eager to have their mistakes pointed out to them, so as to advance a disinterested search for truth.

One of the finest examples of this ethic is found in a letter written by Robert Hooke to Isaac Newton on January 20, 1676.  Hooke told Newton, “I have a mind very desirous of and very ready to embrace any truth that shall be discovered though it may much thwart and contradict any opinions or notions I have formerly embraced.” Why was Hooke eager to have his errors pointed out?  Because, he explained, “my aim is the discovery of truth,” therefore “I can endure to hear objections.”

But Al Gore can endure no objections. His aim is not to find truth, but to tendentiously assemble and present information so as to mislead.  An example of Gore’s dissembling is found in the film, An Inconvenient Truth.  One of the most memorable scenes in An Inconvenient Truth is the unveiling of a startling graph that shows a strong correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature over the last several hundred thousand years.  Gore then states “when there’s more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer.” Because the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now relatively high, the audience is led to believe that a drastic rise in global temperature is imminent.

But carbon dioxide does not determine temperature the way that Gore suggests.  On the contrary, temperature controls carbon dioxide by modulating its release and absorption from the oceans.  The temperature changes found in the ice core data cannot be caused by carbon dioxide changes, because the increases in atmospheric temperature precede increases in carbon dioxide by several hundred years.

The Earth’s oceans contain more than fifty times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide is more soluble in cold water.  As the oceans warm, they release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  When the oceans cool, they absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  The science is no more complex than noting that a warm coke has more fizz than a cold one.  Temperature controls carbon dioxide, not the other way around.

A film like An Inconvenient Truth is carefully scripted and checked for errors. Al Gore can be made to appear as if he knows the science. But a recent television interview [Video] was more revealing.  Promoting geothermal energy, Gore said that the temperature in the interior of the Earth is “several million degrees.” But it isn’t. It’s not even close.

Since people first started lowering thermometers into boreholes in the nineteenth century, we have known that the temperature of the Earth’s core is no more than several thousand degrees Celsius.  The temperature at the inner-outer core boundary is constrained by a phase transition to be in the neighborhood of 6000C.  More to the point, the temperature of near-surface rocks in geothermal areas is typically hundreds of C.  At temperatures exceeding 1000 C in the Earth’s crust, rock begins to melt.  So Gore was wrong by at least a factor of a thousand, or by one-hundred-thousand percent.

Gore’s blithe and erroneous characterization of the Earth’s internal temperature was not an insignificant slip of the tongue.  Widespread development of geothermal energy is not feasible precisely because Earth’s internal temperatures are not as high as Gore believes.  That is why the practical exploitation of geothermal energy is limited to areas like Iceland, a country that virtually sits on top of a volcano.

After declaring that temperatures inside the Earth are “several million degrees,” Gore claimed that we have “new drill bits that don’t melt in that heat.” How can anyone be so remarkably ignorant as to think we have metallurgical techniques capable of producing drill bits that don’t melt in temperatures of “several million degrees?”

Gore then made the stunning assertion that geothermal resources in the US alone are so enormous that they could meet our entire energy needs for 35,000 years.  Is it not remarkable that we ignore such a vast, unexploited source of energy?  Is it not astonishing that generations of scientists and engineers have failed to recognize the potential for withdrawing virtually limitless amounts of free energy from the Earth?

If the promise of geothermal energy sounds too good to be true, the reason is that it’s not true.  The United States gets less than one percent of its energy from geothermal sources.  Extracting geothermal energy is inherently an inefficient process because you have to work against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  It’s easy to turn mechanical energy into heat, but difficult to efficiently reverse the process.  Geothermal energy production is limited to exceptional areas like Iceland precisely because the high temperatures necessary are found only in a very few locations.

Al Gore may not know what he’s talking about, but he’s not alone.  The world is full of ignorant people. As a college professor, I interact constantly with students, many of whom are very concerned with global warming.  But in my interactions I have invariably found that the more science a student knows, the more skeptical they are of the standard global warming alarmist scenario.  Students majoring in engineering or physics have some appreciation for the scientific method and the uncertainties involved in understanding and predicting climate change.  Unlike Gore, they also understand that the ability to develop alternative energy sources is limited by the laws of physics and chemistry, not political willpower.

Students who buy into global warming alarmism are almost always from non-technical majors such as journalism.  They can’t think quantitatively, critically, or analytically.  They have beliefs, but no interest in or appreciation for facts.  Accordingly, they are almost completely ignorant of any relevant facts. Their minds are immature and their thought processes undisciplined.  They don’t understand the difference between fact and opinion.  One student recently told me that we have to stop using oil because global warming was caused by the heat given off by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Human beings must acquire some education and knowledge before they can begin to develop an appreciation for the extent of their own ignorance.  But these global warming alarmists know nothing, and therefore believe they understand everything.

If I have been too hard on Mr. Gore, I ought to close by noting that ignorance is the normal human condition, intelligence the exception.  Al Gore is not the only person who doesn’t understand science.  US President Barack Obama takes advice from Gore. And a group of Norwegian politicians recently distinguished themselves by awarding Nobel Prizes to both Gore and Obama.  As Nobel Prize recipients, Gore and Obama have joined an elite group that includes Portuguese physician Egas Moniz.  In 1949, Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for devising an innovative procedure known as the frontal lobotomy.  It seems fitting that Gore and Obama are grouped with Moniz, since their apparent goal is to lobotomize human civilization. Read more here.

Note the Goracle opines about the oil spill here. Meanwhile University of Tennessee faculty push for honorary degree for Gore here.

David Deming is a geophysicist and associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma.  He is the author of Science and Technology in World History, Volume 1.