Category Archives: Environment

We need climate change—in the House of Representatives

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I didn’t have the energy to post on this Friday night, and it’s taken a while to get back to it, but I can’t help thinking that we’ve seen the definitive moment of the Democratic leadership of this Congress: they were in such a hurry to ram through their energy tax, they passed a bill that didn’t even exist. Seriously. As David Freddoso put it,

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers’ amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk’s desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.

But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: “Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)…” How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?

Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can’t even wait until members of Congress know what they’re voting on.

There’s supposed to be a section of the bill establishing and regulating a financial derivatives market (that’s the “trade” part of “cap-and-trade”); as of the time the bill was passed, that hadn’t been written yet—there was only a “placeholder.” Barney Frank said it was OK because he was sure they’d put a good system in place, and that was apparently good enough. Somehow, the thought of Barney Frank presiding over a sub-prime carbon market, when herefused to see the collapse of the sub-prime housing market coming, isn’t encouraging.

More than that, the purpose of this haste is to keep people from thinking about the economic effects of this bill, which aren’t going to be good. Bloomberg, the Heritage Foundation, andInvestor’s Business Daily have all laid it out:

As we’ve said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million (see charts below).

Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500.

Hit hardest by all this would be the “95% of working families” Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they’ll be hit by this draconian energy tax.

Of course, the Democratic majority has been clever enough to make sure that the bill won’t actually take effect until 2012, so that it won’t mess up their chances for re-election in 2010; but once it does, as the Heritage Foundation notes, people will notice:

For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.

But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012-2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.

That’s not the only cost, though; Bloomberg notes that this bill will drive a lot of jobs overseas and give foreign energy producers a competitive advantage over American companies. At a time when we’re trying to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, this bill will onlyincrease it.

America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. . . .

“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. . . .

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.

“They’ll be searching the globe for refined products that don’t carry the same level of carbon costs,” said Mahaffey, a former Exxon Corp. refinery manager.

In short, this is going to blow a large hole in our economy. And to what purpose? Well, that’s still very much up for debate, as I’ve pointed out a few times. As the IBD editorial continues,

According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050—the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill—would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.

Doesn’t sound all that impressive, does it? It’s partly because the countries to which we’ll be shipping all those jobs have significantly poorer environmental records than the US, as Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) notes:

If one truly cares about the planet, why do we want to make steel in China rather than in the United States where our carbon emissions are one-third that of the Chinese per ton of steel produced? One Arkansas refinery recently testified that under a cap-and-tax regime, they would be forced to close their 1,200-employee plant while India builds the largest in the world to ship fuel to the United States with nowhere near the environmental protections we have. We’re not helping the environment by sending industries that operate cleanly and efficiently in the United States to a regulation-free China or India.

That’s probably partly why even within the EPA, there are those who question the value of this bill—but the EPA is unwilling to listen, even to the point of trying to suppress the study challenging global-warming dogma, because “the administration has decided to move forward”and nothing is to be allowed to get in the way (not even the facts). This is a classic example of that “triumph of ideology over science” that the Obama Administration was supposed to be against. Apparently they don’t mind it when it’s leftist ideology. (Or when it gives them the opportunity to pump money to special interests.)

Now, it seems to me there’s hope that the Senate defeats this bill—Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) certainly expects that to happen, and he has a reasonable case—but there was never much for the House, since the House Republicans are functionally irrelevant. That said, I have to give House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) credit for making the most of irrelevance; he didn’t have the votes to back him up, but he did a grand old job of carving up this turkey anyway, in what some dubbed a “mini-filibuster.” The reason for his speech? Informing the House as to what was in that 300-page “managers’ amendment,” so that no one who voted for the bill could claim they didn’t know. Bravo, Mr. Minority Leader. Bravo.

 

Clearing out the links drawer

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Here are a few things I’ve been meaning to get around to posting on (for quite a while—I think I ran across all of these back in March) that just aren’t likely to get their own posts at this point; so I’ll toss them out for your interest, and if I ever do get around to putting up a longer post on any of them, well, the duplication won’t hurt anything.

Beryllium 10 and climate
The science in this is not immediately transparent to the non-specialist, but it’s interesting evidence that climate change is far more about what the sun does than about CO2.

A Dozen Sayings of Jesus That Will Change the World—If Christians Ever Believe Them
Dan Edelen’s always challenging—sometimes problematically so; this is a post that ought to make Christians in this country uncomfortable.

Generational Disconnect
Chaille Brindley has put his finger on a real need in the American church.

Anatomy of an Internet Joke
I think this post by James Wallace Harris fits very well with Brindley’s comments.

Channeling Dubya, yet again

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This from VO at C4P:

In the closing days of his Administration, President Bush removed gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains from the endangered species list.Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, has decided to support President Bush’s position on the issue and leave the wolves off the list, prompting outrage from the eco-nuts in Obama’s base.How long before we see Ashley Judd attacking Obama in web ads?UPDATE: Steve Altman in the comments points out an interesting development: Only two days after his much-publicized lifting of a federal funding ban on research involving human embryos (therefore causing Christopher Reeve to walk again), he has signed into law essentially the exact same ban as part of the Omnibus Spending Bill. So he’s basically wasted everybody’s time with a bunch of posturing while accomplishing precisely nothing for his base.

Speaking as a former Coloradan who remembers when Secretary Salazar was Colorado Attorney General Salazar, I’m not at all surprised by his action; he represents a Western sensibility on the environment, one that seeks to balance environmental concerns with the needs of people, not the views of the East Coast elite.  I don’t always agree with his positions, to be sure, but I expected him to chart a balanced, thoughtful course at Interior, and so far, I’ve seen nothing to make me think otherwise.As for the Obama administration’s sleight of hand on ESCR, that’s no vast surprise either; I wasn’t aware that that language was a standard part of the national budget, but since the whole thing combines passing the buck to Congress with a symbolic action that produces no practical effect, two things which we’ve seen over and over again during the first two months of this administration, there’s nothing startling here.

Another global-warming skeptic

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is the distinguished cosmologist and mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, of Tulane University.  His letter of a few weeks ago (which I missed at the time) to blogger William Katz, detailing the agenda-driven work behind this issue and its relationship to government funding of research, and the developing efforts to suppress scientific challenges to global-warming theory (since its supporters can’t disprove them, they must resort to force to silence them), should concern anyone who cares about the state of scientific research in the West.HT:  John Hinderaker

Behold the pelican . . .

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People all over the West Coast are, and not in a good way:

Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say.Weak, disoriented birds are huddling in people’s yards or being struck by cars. More than 100 have been rescued along the California coast, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in San Pedro.Hundreds of birds, disoriented or dead, have been observed across the West Coast.”One pelican actually hit a car in Los Angeles,” said Rebecca Dmytryk of Wildrescue, a bird-rescue operation. “One pelican hit a boat in Monterey.”

The worrisome thing is, we don’t know why; no one has yet come up with an explanation that fits the facts.  Here’s hoping someone does soon, and that it’s something we can address.

The global-warming hoax and the better environmental path

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courtesy of Harold Ambler in HuffPo (which is nowhere I would have expected to see global warming called “the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind,” but there you go).  He does a nice job of exposing the baloney “science” underlying global-warming claims (including a point about the limited ability CO2 has to absorb heat); perhaps more importantly, he also points out that bowing to global-warming hysteria would misdirect our environmental efforts and do considerable damage to the world economy—which would not only increase human suffering, it would also further damage the global environment by moving the world collectively back toward more primitive, and dirtier, technologies for energy generation.One of my fellow debaters in high school used to say, “I’m pro-environment, but anti-environmentalist.”  Issues like this make me think he was right.HT:  Bill Roberts

Local firm does good

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in more ways than one. Rabb/Kinetico Water Systems is a company based here in Warsaw that makes non-electrical home water systems (that, as I understand it, is where “Kinetico” comes in) that use far less salt than your typical electrical water softener; that also means, as I understand it, a lot less water wastage with their systems. They do good work with a good product; they also do good work in other ways, as Don Clemens, the company’s president, is one of the founders and leaders of Men Following Christ, a local Christian ministry. They’re admirable folks, and it’s good to see them getting a little attention beyond our community here: the Times-Union, our local paper, reported last week that PBS and Hugh Downs had filmed a segment on Rabb/Kinetico for the network’s “National Environmental Report.” I don’t know when that will be airing, but I hope to catch it (maybe it will be on the PBS website).

Offshore drilling, pro and con

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Pauline at Perennial Student has a post up about offshore drilling (which is just as much about the different ways the story can be spun by the media, depending on whom you read and what their agenda is); she has some good links and even better commentary. I particularly appreciated the introduction to SOS California, a group working to find ways to capture/recover oil that naturally seeps into the ocean—thereby both providing energy and reducing pollution. I’d never heard of them before, but may their tribe increase.

Inconvenient truth?

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The conventional wisdom is that the earth is warming, that it’s the fault of human activity, and that we need to make major changes to reduce CO2 emissions or we’re heading for disaster. Certainly, that’s the line pushed by the scientific and media establishments, and by much of the political establishment as well; as for the cultural elite, they showed their view of the matter when they gave Al Gore an Oscar for his film expounding that point of view, and then topped it off with the Nobel Peace Prize (in one of the stranger awards in the already strange history of the Nobel Prizes).

Which is a very good thing, if this is a real problem. But is it? Is the science really there? Maybe not. For all the worry about shrinking ice caps, for instance, the ice has come back under the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest winter in decades, which has given it its greatest snow cover in over 40 years. For all the concern about polar bears, their population is up. And for all the insistence that global warming is caused by human CO2 emissions, the temperature data and the CO2 data don’t correlate; that’s why 30 years ago, the alarmists were proclaiming that human CO2 emissions were driving a cooling trend that would send us into another ice age.

The fact of the matter is, we know beyond a doubt that the climate has been heating and cooling all through human history; around the turn of the 17th century, we had a “little ice age” that saw the Thames and the Hudson freeze, while earlier, during the Viking period, Greenland was pleasant enough to warrant the name they gave it. We know that the sun’s behavior varies, and it seems likely that fluctuations in solar activity is one of the major drivers in global temperature change; the fact that other planets of our solar system have also been experiencing “global warming” certainly suggests that this is the case. The driving force behind the global-warming argument appears to be not science, but the wisdom of Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”

That said, does it necessarily follow that we can ignore the question of CO2 emissions, or other forms of pollution? While I think it’s inappropriate of the establishment to smear dissenters as “in the pay of the oil companies,” there are certainly those who oppose the global-warming argument not because it’s bad science, but because they have their own agendas. As Christians, we should be very careful about that. Regardless of the scientific case one way or the other, we have powerful theological reasons to fight pollution; we know from Genesis that God has not given us this planet, but has rather entrusted it to our care as stewards under his authority, and we will most assuredly be called to account for how we have taken care of it. I believe the earth God has made is much more resilient than we often believe, and that our capacity to damage it permanently is quite a bit less impressive than we, in our twisted pride, tend to think—but that in no way frees us from our responsibility to enhance the earth by our labors rather than diminishing it. Will continuing to pump our pollutants into the air cause catastrophic warming that will kill billions of people? I rather doubt it; but if we continue to do so without doing everything we can to clean up our act (bearing in mind that today’s solutions often produce tomorrow’s problems), we’ll still pay for it in the end.

(Update: here’s an excellent column by Thomas Sowell on the subject of global warming.)