climate change — VOICES for REASON

A number of developments on the climate front suggest that the tide has turned somewhat for promoters of green climate policy:

• Although Congress has been working for months on a climate change bill that would impose a carbon rationing scheme (cap and trade) on the U.S. economy, and although the House version passed by a narrow margin in June—the Senate version is struggling badly.

• The world is gearing up for a major climate conference in Copenhagen (Dec. 7-18)—which has long been anticipated by climate activists as the chance to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol before it expires in 2012. But it’s looking less and less likely that the conference will produce any sort of strong, binding agreement.

• A recent Pew poll suggests that fewer Americans see global warming as a “very serious” problem, and the more people hear about cap and trade, the less they support it. (Those who describe themselves as having “heard a lot” about cap and trade tend to oppose it by two-to-one.)

Does this mean that those of us who oppose green climate policies are winning? Is the battle over this issue almost over? Far from it.

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I’ve just had an article on climate policy published in the journal Energy and Environment. It will appear in a special issue of the journal focusing on “Climate Policy and Energy Poverty.”

The article takes what I think is a pretty unique approach to the topic. I don’t focus on the science of climate change–i.e., I don’t specifically address the question of whether or not man-made greenhouse gases are the dominant agents driving the earth’s climate (though I don’t accept the ubiquitous assertion that they are). Instead, I address an entirely different question; one that I think the proponents of climate change alarm ignore completely.

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One of the “clean energy” sources promoted by environmentalists is geothermal–energy derived from the natural heat deep below the earth’s surface. Unlike solar or wind power, which are intermittent and therefore unreliable sources of energy, geothermal heat is always present. It doesn’t require vast installations of unsightly, noisy wind turbines or immense arrays of mirrors or solar cells, and it produces no emissions whatsoever (except perhaps some water vapor from cooling units).

But before you cue the chorus of green hallelujahs in praise of geothermal, you might want to take a look at a recent New York Times article that points out one little problem with the primary method of extracting geothermal energy: it causes earthquakes.

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I my last post I mentioned Richard Lindzen’s keynote address at the Heartland Institute’s climate change conference. Another talk that I found especially interesting was the one by Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor from King Juan Carlos University in Spain. (Videos of this talk and most of the others are available at the conference website.)

Calzada is the lead author of a study that attacks the myth of economy-boosting “green jobs.” President Obama has cited Spain’s green energy initiatives as a model for the United States to follow. But Calzada and his colleagues argue that the Spanish programs have been an economy-killing disaster, with more than two jobs lost for every “green job” siphoned from the market economy through taxation.

It is completely bizarre for the Obama administration to hold up this job-destroying program as a curative for an economy that’s already on the ropes due to massive government intervention in finance, health care, and energy. If Obama finds any more ways like these to “boost” the economy, it won’t be long before we have no economy left.

I promised I would report back from the Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC.

The highlight of the conference, for me, was the keynote address by Dr. Richard Lindzen, a leading M.I.T. climate scientist who has long been the most prominent scientific critic of global warming alarmism. (The full text of his talk is available here, along with the rest of the conference proceedings.)

At one point, Lindzen dissected the central argument that the proponents of climate alarm use in attributing the global temperature changes over the past few decades to human activities:

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In my last post, I mentioned I was heading to the Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC. (I’ll report on the conference soon.)

I had noted the timeliness of the event, given that Congress was working on a bill imposing a cap-and-trade system in the United States (along with a host of other disastrous government interventions), and I expressed hope that the event might “inject a measure of reason into the Congressional debate before the bill comes up for a vote.”

Well, even a measure of reason is probably too much to expect of today’s political bodies. The bill passed in the House last Friday. The bill’s Congressional opponents (some of whom spoke at the Heartland conference) put up a determined fight, and it passed by an extremely narrow margin, 219 to 212, but it passed nevertheless.  

This moves us one step closer to total government control over our production and use of energy, which fuels every aspect of our economy and makes possible the unprecedented quality of life we enjoy today. Even if it were provably true that human activity was causing large-scale changes to the earth’s climate (which it’s not), how is that a justification for undermining industrial civilization by an assault on economic freedom and on the continued development of industrial-scale energy?

With “solutions” like this, who needs problems?

Next week, the Heartland Institute will host its Third International Conference on Climate Change; June 2nd in Washington, DC. The Ayn Rand Institute is a co-sponsor.

The event follows closely on the heels of a previous conference, which took place in New York City in March (see here and here)–but the new conference couldn’t be more timely. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce just approved a comprehensive climate and energy bill, the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act,” which would impose energy impoverishment in a variety of ways: forced energy conservation programs, a cap-and-trade system rationing U.S. carbon emissions, a renewable energy mandate forcing us to use expensive, impractical forms of energy, and more.

The event is intended to acquaint Congressional staff with the views of scientists and economists who oppose green climate and energy policies. Hopefully, it will help inject a measure of reason into the Congressional debate before the bill comes up for a vote.

In any event, I will be there and will have lots to report after the conference. Stay tuned.

We’re constantly told that one of the “catastrophic” impacts of global warming will be a rising sea level. But geology can be rather complex. Here is a story about sea levels actually falling around Juneau, Alaska. Apparently, the loss of “billions of tons” of ice that have melted away from retreating glaciers is causing the land to rise faster than the sea.

So is this good news? At least this region will be spared the supposedly catastrophic impacts we hear so much about–flooding, increased coastal erosion, salt water infiltration, and so on–right?

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For years, scientists critical of the claims of catastrophic, man-made climate change have pointed out that even if the earth were warming–whether from human causes or not–there would be many positive benefits. For instance, warmer climate conditions combined with higher atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide–a.k.a. plant food–would dramatically promote plant growth. (See here for evidence this has already occurred, due to today’s CO2 levels and the slight temperature increase since the ’80s.)

The response from climate change alarmists has been either to completely ignore or dismiss such evidence–or, more recently, to trot out all manner of studies asserting that higher CO2 levels would primarily benefit harmful, pollen-spewing villains such as ragweed. And the media, of course, dutifully chimes in with gloomy headlines such as “Allergies Getting Worse Due to Global Warming” or “Climate Change: Something to Sneeze At.”

Well, here are some other “inconvenient truths” you won’t hear from Al Gore.

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What is the biggest danger to Americans’ health and welfare? No, it’s not global warming — but it may well be global warming policy. In the name of fighting off hypothetical rises in average global temperature, our government has given itself draconian power to throttle energy sources that emits CO2 — which means, well over 80% of American production.

The first step was the Supreme Court’s decision last year that carbon dioxide, which every human breath produces and every green plant eats for breakfast, is a “pollutant” — and therefore subject to potentially unlimited control by the EPA. Now, the Obama EPA has announced that it plans to use its newfound power to the fullest.

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