Detroit — In rolling out its plan for the future of Chrysler on Wednesday, Fiat executives dutifully stressed that the “New Chrysler” would be more fuel efficient — hailing the tiny, 40 mpg, Euro-transplant Fiat 500 as a marquee car. After all, a precondition for Fiat’s no-money-down takeover of the ailing automaker was that it conform to President Obama’s prophecy for the auto industry.
“Fiat has demonstrated that it can build the clean, fuel-efficient cars that are the future of the industry,” announced the soothsayer-in-chief last April, upon handing Chrysler’s keys to the Italians.
Coincidentally, October sales figures came out the same day this week that Fiat laid out its Chrysler plan, and greens were cheered by the fact that hybrid sales climbed to 2.9 percent of market share — nearly where they were two summers ago when gas prices hit $4 a gallon.
But a closer look at the numbers raises more questions about whether more expensive hybrids and diesels will ever be more than a niche U.S. market — rather than the norm predicted by the president (a prediction mandated by his 35.5 mpg requirements by 2015).
Dozens of new hybrid entries have flooded the market in the last two years, but as the Toyota Prius goes — so goes the hybrid market. The Prius (sales up 14 percent last month) still dominates the sector with a 55 percent market share.
Both Honda (the Insight) and Ford (Fusion Hybrid) have brought impressive entries to market this year, wallpapering the airwaves with green marketing. Both products have been a disappointment. The Prius outsells the Insight by an 8:1 margin. “Honda’s Insight is a sales dud,” writes Paul Niedermeyer of Green Car Congress, “only modestly improving on last year’s Civic hybrid numbers. The Civic Hybrid (down 85 percent) is becoming irrelevant.”
For its part, the Fusion Hybrid — targeted at Toyota’s mid-size Camry Hybrid — only seems to be stealing Camry sales rather than expanding the market. Camry Hybrid sales were down a staggering 50 percent in October. Furthermore, the Fusion seems to be stealing from its own nest as its SUV cousin — the Ford Escape Hybrid — saw sales drop 53 percent.
All of this continues to raise “the question as to whether Ford’s hybrid program is anything other than a PR/EPA/Govt. fleet sales gambit, with volumes limited purposely because Ford’s hybrid costs likely exceed incremental revenue,” concludes Niedermeyere.
It also raises the question as to whether President Obama has any idea what he’s talking about.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who has qualms about a plan to pay $1.5 billion for Chinese wind turbines to go up in West Texas. Sen. Chuck Schumer isn't a happy camper.
Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, writes in today's Washington Post:
Lower-carbon future? Try natural gas.
The public debate on climate change can seem beguilingly simple: alternative fuels good; fossil fuels bad. If we burn less of the latter and use more of the former, the argument goes, we will be well on our way to a lower-carbon future.
But shaping our energy future will be more complex than simply using less fossil fuel and more alternatives. Getting to a lower-carbon world while also providing the increasing energy needed to power a growing economy requires a more nuanced approach.
Renewable energy sources — wind, solar, biofuels — have an important role, and BP, the energy company I head, is investing significantly in all. Still, the shift to alternatives can't happen overnight. Global energy needs and the sheer scale of our business make this impossible.
The issue, then, is not a choice between fossil fuels and alternatives but, rather, what combination can achieve the fastest carbon reduction at the lowest possible cost using available technology?
Answering that question requires recognizing that not all fossil fuels are created environmentally equal. We can reduce carbon emissions significantly if we burn cleaner, less-carbon-intensive fossil fuels while also moving in a deliberate and affordable way toward alternatives and increased efficiency. Fortunately, there is a feasible path toward this goal.
Seriously tackling carbon dioxide levels over the next two decades will require addressing the use of electricity — and coal in particular. Electricity generation produces 41 percent of the CO2 the United States emits, the largest single source. Coal generates half of all U.S. electricity, but 80 percent of the resulting carbon. Coal has to be cleaned up or replaced.
Is there a path to cleaner coal? In theory, yes: It's called carbon capture and storage (CCS), which essentially involves reverse-engineering a gas field, putting the carbon back in the ground rather than taking it out. (BP is a major investor in demonstration projects to test CCS at scale.) With government support, large-scale implementation of CCS could be achievable by roughly 2020. But even then, substantial costs will be associated with its use.
What about nuclear power? All-out nuclearization, a la France, would be costly and difficult to achieve in the United States, and the environmental payoff would be slow.
I don't think we can afford to wait. Until renewables gain a sizable share of the power sector, CCS becomes available, and nuclear energy ramps up, the only realistic option is increasing use of natural gas.
Gas is far and away the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, generating at least 50 percent less carbon per kilowatt hour than coal, and almost zero sulfur oxides, mercury and particulate ash. And because gas-fired power stations can be easily switched on and off (unlike those fired by coal), it is the ideal complement to intermittent power sources such as wind and solar.
A world treaty on climate change will be delayed by up to a year and is likely to be watered down because countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are refusing to commit to legally binding reductions.
British officials preparing for next month’s UN summit in Copenhagen said the best that could be hoped for was that national leaders would make “political agreements” on emission cuts and payments to help poor countries to adapt to climate change. These agreements would be non-binding, however, and could later be revised or rescinded by national parliaments.
At pre-summit talks in Barcelona, the officials said the final agreement would not emerge until at least six months after the Copenhagen summit, which ends on December 17. They said they hoped another meeting would be convened by next December to allow leaders to sign the treaty.
The admission that no treaty will be signed at Copenhagen marks the failure of the process agreed at a UN meeting in Bali in December 2007, when industrialised countries agreed to deliver a binding climate-change agreement within two years. The delay has angered developing countries, which say they are already suffering from man-made climate change.
People say that the election of Barack Obama and his pursuit of radical measures — from state-run health care to unilateral nuclear disarmament — marks the end of American conservatism. One Jeremiah, Sam Tanenhaus, has produced a predictable book, The Death of Conservatism. I do not sympathize with such defeatism. To begin with, conservatism is protean. One kind was neatly summed up by that bluff old Victorian the Duke of Cambridge: "It is said I am against change. I am not against change. I am in favor of change in the right circumstances. And those circumstances are when it can no longer be resisted."
Then there are reactionaries. Margaret Thatcher is a good example. She did not agree with Winston Churchill's principle that Labour's nationalization program, introduced in the postwar period of 1945-51, could not be reversed. She simply reversed the program, privatizing British Airways, steel, water, electricity, gas and other industries.
There are also romantic conservatives. These are the intellectual descendants of Edmund Burke, who see their views as creative and imaginative. They are quite happy to embark on change if it has the positive purpose of underpinning the security and stability of society. The outstanding recent American example of this is William F. Buckley, who left behind a school of his own, as well as his magazine, National Review.
A fourth category is made up of economists, ranging from Milton Friedman to Friedrich Hayek, who identify conservatism with capitalism. They cannot be opposed to change as such, for the chief source of change is capitalism itself — and never more so than today. The birth of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century was the biggest single upheaval in history. Moreover, it was merely the first in a series of technological transformations that continue at an accelerating pace.
One has only to list these first four varieties of conservatism to realize that there is no possibility of its death. The instinct to resist change, to recover the past or to romanticize it are part of human nature and will always find political expression. Capitalism is merely a term for the investment of money in wealth creation.
Conservatism, indeed, is so protean that one of its most powerful expressions is now found with the radical left. The noisiest single lobby in the world today is the Climate Change/Global Warming/Green alliance, of which the supposedly liberal President Obama is an enthusiastic member and which has the support of left-wing ideologues all over the world.
This is essentially a reactionary movement, for its aim is to confine and even reverse capitalism, returning to a precapitalist arcadia in which woods and forests expand, the sea is no longer harvested, energy is strictly rationed and controls on human activity, especially wealth and job creation, are universal.
It's no accident that this movement began as "conservation," an old form of resistance to change, and got its first impetus from the publication of Rachel Carson's romantic book The Sea Around Us. This form of conservatism has a new order of priorities, in which "preserving the planet" comes before the interests of mankind.
Indeed, many of its supporters would prefer a pristine world in which Homo sapiens remained primitive or did not exist at all. Their faith, like most forms of political absolutism, is a substitute for genuine religion. In fact it is, in one sense, a crude form of religion — pantheism, the worship of the Earth and all its manifestations.
Yesterday, at the Washington Times' day-long confab on climate policy — featuring Sen. Inhofe, Rep. Markey and Czech Pres. Vaclav Klaus — I was part of a panel which was asked by moderator Jeff Birnbaum to share our thoughts about Sens. Kerry and Graham's claim to be developing a way to "yes" on a climate bill, in apparent hopes of snatching defeat from the jaws of our looming victory.
I responded in part by noting that Sen. Graham doesn't even seem to know what this loosey-goosey "framework" is, gushing as he does in the New York Times with Sen., Kerry about a critical component of it being something that sounds like cap-and-trade — then having his Washington and South Carolina staffs, as well as outside consultants tell voters and the media that he doesn't support cap-and-trade, and never will. The latter comes from people who have called the office, and from locals — as you'll read in the link below.
Given such confusion, this sounds like something to stay away from until Sen. Graham either knows, or is willing to admit, what it is he's talking about. "Pulling a Chamber," and latching onto the vague notion (under immense pressure from large member companies and/or in desperate DC-style hope) that members of Congress won't snub you, even while on bended knee at fundraisers, for daring to be obstructionist — others would call it having a survival instinct — is of extremely curious appeal.
Worse, however, the more the locals dig into and tell us about Graham's undertaking, the less there is to like.
When it comes to climate change legislation, it's hard to figure what the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer could possibly be thinking.
Less than 48 hours after citizens in New Jersey and Virginia turned around the last year's support of President Obama and his policies by a whopping 25 percent, Boxer rammed a cap-and-tax bill through her committee that is even worse than the one passed by the House last June. That House bill provoked the first angry "town hall" meetings — everyone remembers them as being about health care, but they really started in response to climate legislation — that culminated in Tuesday's landslides.
How can Boxer not realize that forcing this bill out of committee is an even bigger slap against taxpayers and energy consumers?
If anything, she has guaranteed the measure's failure on the Senate floor, where any chance that there will be 60 votes required to close debate has just evaporated. By doing this, she has taken the regulation of carbon dioxide away from the people's representatives and placed it in the hands of the unelected Environmental Protection Agency, which will be given its marching orders by climate czar Carol Browner.
This will only incite more anger that government by the people is rapidly becoming government by czars.
Only if the world leaders in Copenhagen are complete morons will they believe that today's committee vote means anything:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A controversial climate change bill cleared its first hurdle in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, allowing President Barack Obama to tout progress in the run-up to next month's global warming talks in Copenhagen.
Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ignored a Republican boycott and used their majority to approve the legislation that would require U.S. industry to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 20 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.
"I think this is a great signal for Copenhagen that there's a will to do what it takes to advance this issue," committee Chairman Barbara Boxer told reporters after her panel voted.
The committee vote also came as international negotiators held a contentious climate change meeting in Barcelona, their final session before the Copenhagen summit starts December 7.
But Democrats are likely to fall far short of their goal of passing legislation in the full Senate before Copenhagen as Boxer's bill lacks enough support for full approval.
ECUADOR's unprecedented offer to accept payment for not extracting oil from beneath the Amazon rainforest is beginning to draw interest. The move could usher in a new way to both combat climate change and prevent damage to ecologically diverse and sensitive regions.
More than two years ago, Ecuador said it would abandon plans for drilling in Yasuni National Park, one of the few pristine regions of Amazon rainforest remaining, if it was paid half of the $7 billion that it expected to earn from tapping the oilfield. "This was a major turning point in the 'drill, drill, drill' mentality," says Matt Finer, an ecologist with Save America's Forests, an environmental group based in Washington DC, which released its analysis of the initiative this week (Biotropica, DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2009.00587.x).
Ecuador said it would not drill if it was paid half of what it expected to earn from the oilfield
No country has taken up Ecuador's offer so far, but Finer says there has been "increasing chatter" that Germany will pay about 20 per cent of the total.
To get an idea of the tomfoolery that lies ahead with Waxman-Markey/Kerry Boxer climate-change legislation, take a look at the “agricultural title” now being crafted by Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow.
“Stabenow has been working for about 18 months on a farms and forests bill,” reports CQ Today. “It will probably be merged with broader climate change legislation that would cap greenhouse gas emissions and establish a market for trading government-issued pollution allowances.”
Cap-and-trade in Europe has foundered since the trading of dubious “emissions credits” has eclipsed any serious effort in reducing carbon emissions. Western European countries have earned “credits” from closing antiquated industries in Eastern European or planting trees in Rwanda. There are even stories about factories built in China solely for the purpose of closing them down and selling the “emissions credits” to European nations.
We may be about to see worse.
Stabenow’s idea is to marry the interests of two of her constituents — limping Rust Belt industries and ailing farmers — into one big subsidy package. The farmers will earn emissions credits by not cutting down trees, not planting crops and maybe diapering cows. There is even talk of urban farming:“We have a lot of excess land in Detroit and Flint,” Stabenow told CQ Today. “We could develop farms and forestation that would be positive for the city.”
“Stabenow envisions Michigan cashing in on an offset program,” says the report — and who wouldn’t? “Depending upon how the program is structured, it could be cheaper for industrial polluters to purchase offsets than the government-issued emissions allowances.” With various government programs encouraging farmers both to grow and not grow crops and with climate legislation rewarding them for putting more land under cultivation and then taking it out again, the whole thing could turn into one vast pipeline of federal subsidies to Michigan and every other agricultural state. No wonder even skeptics such as Montana Democrat Max Baucus are starting to come around:
Baucus said that developing a farm title with generous offset provisions for farmers may not, on its own, be enough to win his support for the bill. “But it’s important,” he said. “Everything helps.”
So here’s a better idea. Why don’t we reward farmers not to produce the ethanol that now consumes 30 percent of the nation’s corn crop? Ethanol is doing absolutely nothing to reduce oil imports, probably losesenergy as far as anyone can tell, drives up food prices, and actually increases carbon emissions by throwing millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere that otherwise would have remained in the soil or the food chain for years or decades.
So now we’d have a program that would pay farmers to stop causing environmental damage by allowing industries to escape carbon caps by encouraging farmers to put more land under cultivation where they would be paid not grow crops . . . well, we’ll let Senator Stabenow figure it all out.
The Scoundrel’s False Refuge of ‘Certainty’ [Chris Horner]
I have a piece in Energy Tribune that I decided to post after encountering a particular energy lobbyist who, like many, has spent too much time in Washington while at the same time seeming to have just ambled out of the Greyhound station on First Street.
It is subtly titled, "The Four Horsemen of Cap-and-Trade defeatism: There's only one 'Certainty.'"
Some who have followed business-group intrigue in recent days may find the thought exercise worthwhile.
WASHINGTON — The most common deals under the government's $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program, aimed at putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road, replaced old Ford or Chevrolet pickups with new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by The Associated Press.
The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F150s. They were 17 times more likely to buy a new F150 than, say, a Toyota Prius. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.
Owners of thousands more large old Chevrolet and Dodge pickups bought new Silverado and Ram trucks, also with only barely improved mileage in the middle teens, according to AP's analysis of sales of $15.2 billion worth of vehicles at nearly 19,000 car dealerships in every state. Those deals helped the Ford F150 and Chevy Silverado — along with Ford's Escape midsize SUV — climb into the Top 10 most-popular vehicles purchased with the government rebates. The most common truck-for-truck and truck-for-SUV deals totaled at least $911 million.
Reader A.F. sends a follow up to this post on out of control alternative-energy spending in Oregogn. The Oregonian:
Oregon energy officials released new rules Tuesday aimed at curbing a controversial state program that grants lucrative tax subsidies for wind, solar and other renewable power plants.
The changes are intended to rein in some of the runaway costs of the program by making it harder for one project to qualify for multiple tax credits and by giving the Oregon Department of Energy greater leeway to deny an application.
The new rules also allow the state to withdraw the subsidy to a company that doesn't produce the amount of energy, conservation or jobs it promised in its application. The rules become effective immediately but don't apply to businesses that have already qualified for the tax credits.
"We took this action because we wanted to preserve the program but also to make sure we were reducing the fast growth in the program and reducing its impact on the general fund," said Energy Department Director Mark Long.
The announcement of the new rules comes on the heels of an investigation by The Oregonian that showed state officials lowballed the cost of the Business Energy Tax Credit program before asking the Legislature to boost the size of the subsidies. The investigation also showed little oversight or accountability in the way the credits have been handed out.
Republicans Boycott Climate Bill Debate — Absent Senators Argue Costs of Bill to Address Global Warming; Democrats Say Move is a Delaying Tactic
I'm sure there are more than a view red-state Dems who woke up this morning and, after reading the election results, are quietly thanking their lucky stars for said "delaying tactic."
To appreciate the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama is a regulator reborn, consider this: EPA officials have begun to cut air pollution by invoking the Clean Water Act.
Long quiescent under President George W. Bush, the agency is churning out initiatives and regulations at a pace that pleases its friends in the environmental movement and frightens many in the business community.
In the past eight months, the EPA has proposed eight major new regulations for air pollutants that would strengthen the nation's clean air laws almost overnight. In contrast, in the first eight months of the Bush administration, the agency proposed one small regulation that affected a limited number of polluters.
"The Obama EPA is issuing more significant rule-makings at a much quicker rate than the EPA did in eight years of the Bush administration," said Roger Martella, who served as the agency's general counsel under Mr. Bush.
Since February, the EPA has placed 175 surface coal mining projects under review and halted 79 of them because of their effects on surface water. For 30 years, the agency did not object to the air pollution caused when miners blast dirt into the air to expose coal deposits. Now, invoking the Clean Water Act, the agency is moving to block, at least for now, the projects when they sully nearby streams with the same pollutant.
The agency also has, for the first time, revoked a permit for a surface mine because the project in West Virginia could violate the Clean Water Act.
More broadly, the agency has announced there could be a link between greenhouse gas emissions and public health and welfare - a prelude to new mandates for corporations to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. The agency also agreed to allow California to regulate tailpipe emissions, increased fuel efficiency standards for cars for the first time in more than 25 years and won White House approval to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from the nation's largest polluters.
Couric Celebrates the ‘King of Conservation’ [Henry Payne]
CBS news anchor Katie Couric interviewed Al Gore on her web program, “@katiecouric,” this week as the Goracle makes the media rounds flogging his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. Would she go after his blatant conflict of interest in using nonprofit dollars to promote and lobby for energy policies the adoption of which would benefit him financially? Would Katie put the ex-veep through the shredder, exposing his shallowness on the global warming issue — giving him the same treatment she gave Sarah Palin last fall? Couric’s introduction: “I'm honored to be joined today by the Godfather of Green, the King of Conservation: Former vice president Al Gore.”
Nope. No bias there.
(See more clips from the interview here, courtesy the Media Research Center.)
How about ‘Blow Up This Global Test’? [Chris Horner]
As candidate, Barack Obama wanted to deliver his soaring apologia for our nation at the Brandenburg Gate — the site of President Reagan’s famous plea to “tear down this wall” — but was rebuffed for reasons obvious to all . . . except, well, him. Now, he waves off an invitation to return to the former site of the Berlin Wall to commemorate the 20th anniversary ofcommunism’s defeat on November 9 (no one thinks he would actually celebrate it, as Rich Lowry’s analysis of our dear leader details).
Today we see another twist on the tear-down-this-wall moment. Obama faces the “global test” that Sen. John Kerry warned us was coming during his time as candidate.
Caught up in the moment, in a rare joint meeting of Congress using the hook of the fall of the Berlin Wall, “German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on the U.S. Congress today to tear down the metaphorical ‘wall’ that makes it possible for some to ignore the effects global warming will have on future generations. A failure to address the problem, she added, would be ‘shortsighted.’” That comes via the reportage of E&E News today, under the blustery headline “Merkel warns Congress against inaction.”
“Inaction” means both the U.S. refusing to a Kyoto II treaty later this year in December, and Congress not passing domestic cap-and-trade legislation — harming our economy and, incongruously, turning our ship of state further in the direction of the regime whose defeat Merkel was supposedly celebrating. Yet again we see how easy it is for central planners to convince themselves that the failure of central planning simply means that we need more and better planners.
It was bad enough that Western Europe went so recklessly soft under the defense umbrella that brave Americans — and American taxpayers — provided them for decades. This also led to social democracy flirting more openly with socialism — and, worse, festering radical environmentalism that has now metastasized into a full-blown anti-capitalist agenda, in the name of saving the planet.
Green is the new red, as I argued in detail in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism). Chancellor Merkel was stranded on the wrong side of that Wall when President Reagan called on another state to change its policies. Reagan’s call was liberating and led to statues in European squares. Coming here to set forth a “global test” and demand our lawmakers do what a democratic voter base rejects is simply offensive.
KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Nepal’s cabinet will hold a meeting on Mount Everest to highlight the threat from global warming, which is causing glaciers to melt in the Himalayas, an official said Monday.
The cabinet will meet at the Everest base camp this month, just before an international climate change conference in December in Copenhagen, said Deepak Bohara, the forest and soil conservation minister.
Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and other cabinet members will fly by plane to the 17,400-foot camp, the starting point for mountaineers trying to climb the world’s highest mountain.
Last month, the cabinet of Maldives donned scuba gear and held an underwater meeting to highlight the threat of global warming to that nation, the world’s lowest.
White Man Speak with Forked Tongue [William Tucker]
At the committee hearings on the Kerry-Boxer Bill last week, Democrats dutifully trotted out Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Indian Nation of Alaska, who assured us that climate change would affect Native Americans more than most others. “Tribes in Alaska are seeing their villages literally disappear from under them,” President Sharp told the committee.“The melting permafrost threatens to undermine their buildings and all they have ever built and owned.We think it is imperative that Congress take action to prevent this looming catastrophe.” If things are that serious, apparently the news hasn’t reached the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts, which recently asked the Department of the Interior to block the 170-megawatt CapeWind project off Nantucket, claiming the Atlantic Ocean is their “traditional cultural property.”(This is the project Teddy Kennedy spent his last years trying to prevent.)The New York Times could barely restrain its anger as it editorialized against the tribal claim on Monday:
Tribal officials say their culture requires them to greet the sunrise each day and that this ritual requires unobstructed views. Their claim should be rejected by the responsible federal and state officials. Another round of bureaucratic reviews would drag out an approval process that has gone on much too long and give opponents time to find some other way to derail the effort. The tribes’ claim seems unsupportable. “Traditional cultural properties” tend to be defined areas — a ceremonial burial ground, for instance — not a huge, unenclosed portion of the ocean. Awarding NantucketBay such status could cast a legal shadow over a host of other activities, including shipping and commercial fishing. There is also evidence that the tribes have been working hand-in-glove with the project’s main opposition group, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. The alliance includes many local people but has been largely underwritten by wealthy homeowners from Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod who hate the idea of having 440-foot windmills on the horizon.
Then there’s the case of the Goshute Native American Tribe in Utah, which for a decade has been offering to store the nation’s nuclear waste on its reservation.Environmental opponents have practically sworn to restart the Indian Wars if that one goes through.
In the frantic round of talks ahead of Copenhagen, meanwhile, China’s negotiators can take comfort from the fact that the real pressure is being felt in other capitals. In truth, China has played its climate cards beautifully.
Beijing has been helped by events elsewhere. In its early days, the Obama administration hoped to forge a close partnership on climate change with China that would allow it to nudge Beijing into important new commitments. But with its climate-change bill still languishing in Congress, Washington has little leverage. Todd Stern, US special envoy for climate change, has admitted the two countries will not sign any substantial agreement when President Barack Obama visits Beijing later this month.
China has also been quite happy for India to strike a more belligerent tone in climate talks – a role often played by Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister. Both governments feel strongly that the onus of dealing with global warming lies with the rich world. Last week they even signed an agreement to co-ordinate climate-change efforts, which will help them to take a united stance in Copenhagen. But it suits China for India to take a harder line in public.
Beijing has also done an excellent job at convincing the rest of the world it is serious about climate change. China is one of the biggest manufacturers of solar panels, and this year, announcements have been made almost every week about another big new wind farm – even if a large number of the existing ones are not yet connected to the national grid.
The government has set itself a target of improving energy efficiency by 20 per cent in the 2006-10 period and, with a little help from the downturn at the end of last year, the country is on track to get near to this goal. So, by the time President Hu Jintao told a United Nations climate- change conference in September that China would also adopt a “carbon intensity” target, environmental groups were only too happy to herald it as a big breakthrough.
Beijing’s policies have been so successful that US advocates of green technology have given warning that China will become the dominant player. “China is spending about $9bn (€6.1bn, £5.5bn) a month on clean energy,” Steven Chu, the US energy secretary, told a Senate committee last week. “The US, meanwhile, has fallen behind.”
K — E —Y — Why? Because it's good PR (even if it is a pointless environmental gesture):
The Walt Disney Company announced Tuesday that it has made a $4 million investment in forest conservation projects to decrease carbon dioxide emissions.
The $4 million is one of the largest corporate donations ever made to an international effort known as Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation — or REDD.
The REDD program rewards countries that preserve forests with carbon credits that can then be sold for cash on the global carbon market.
“It’s a real milestone,” said Toby Janson-Smith, the senior director of forest carbon markets at Conservation International. “It really shows how far we’ve come in understanding the role that tropical forest loss plays in climate change.”
Mr. Janson-Smith hopes that Disney’s donation will help draw attention to REDD as climate legislation is debated in the United States Congress, and as December’s United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen approaches.
UN climate change talks in Barcelona have stalled as African countries say the world's rich nations must do more to cut emissions.
Talks over how to cut back global carbon emissions to ease the effects of climate change have broken down, with African nations arguing that rich nations are not doing their fair share.
The latest round of talks, scheduled for Nov. 2-6 in Barcelona, are aimed at looking into a number of natural remedies that might help manage the rise in global emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the main by products from the burning of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels in electrical power plants and heavy industries.
Richer nations (except the United States) agreed at a 1997 United Nations-sponsored forum in Kyoto, Japan, to reduce their industrial emissions by 11 percent to 15 percent from their 1990 levels by the year 2020. But a growing number of developing nations, many of them in Africa, argue that richer nations such as Japan, Britain, Germany, and the US (which did not sign the Kyoto Protocol) should cut emissions by as much as 40 percent in order to slow down climate change.
“They’re saying let’s focus on the real issues, which is targets for developed countries,” South African delegation head Alf Wills told Reuters news agency in Barcelona. Richer nations are using “delaying tactics” rather than talking about how Europe and the industrial nations can share the burden more fairly in cutting back on carbon emissions, he said.
Daniel Yergin and Robert Ineson write in today's WSJ:
America's Natural Gas Revolution — A 'shale gale' of unconventional and abundant U.S. gas is transforming the energy market.
The biggest energy innovation of the decade is natural gas — more specifically what is called "unconventional" natural gas. Some call it a revolution.
Yet the natural gas revolution has unfolded with no great fanfare, no grand opening ceremony, no ribbon cutting. It just crept up. In 1990, unconventional gas — from shales, coal-bed methane and so-called "tight" formations — was about 10% of total U.S. production. Today it is around 40%, and growing fast, with shale gas by far the biggest part.
The potential of this "shale gale" only really became clear around 2007. In Washington, D.C., the discovery has come later — only in the last few months. Yet it is already changing the national energy dialogue and overall energy outlook in the U.S. — and could change the global natural gas balance.
From the time of the California energy crisis at the beginning of this decade, it appeared that the U.S. was headed for an extended period of tight supplies, even shortages, of natural gas.
While gas has many favorable attributes — as a clean, relatively low-carbon fuel — abundance did not appear to be one of them. Prices had gone up, but increased drilling failed to bring forth additional supplies. The U.S., it seemed, was destined to become much more integrated into the global gas market, with increasing imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
But a few companies were trying to solve a perennial problem: how to liberate shale gas — the plentiful natural gas supplies locked away in the impermeable shale. The experimental lab was a sprawling area called the Barnett Shale in the environs of Fort Worth, Texas.
The companies were experimenting with two technologies. One was horizontal drilling. Instead of merely drilling straight down into the resource, horizontal wells go sideways after a certain depth, opening up a much larger area of the resource-bearing formation.
The other technology is known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fraccing." Here, the producer injects a mixture of water and sand at high pressure to create multiple fractures throughout the rock, liberating the trapped gas to flow into the well.
The critical but little-recognized breakthrough was early in this decade — finding a way to meld together these two increasingly complex technologies to finally crack the shale rock, and thus crack the code for a major new resource. It was not a single eureka moment, but rather the result of incremental experimentation and technical skill. The success freed the gas to flow in greater volumes and at a much lower unit cost than previously thought possible.
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore thought he had spotted a winner last year when a small California firm sought financing for an energy-saving technology from the venture capital firm where Mr. Gore is a partner.
The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr. Gore’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital providers, looking for $75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.
Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr, another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate advisers.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.
Silver Spring Networks is a foot soldier in the global green energy revolution Mr. Gore hopes to lead. Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.
Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.
Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.
Mr. Gore says that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.
“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” Mr. Gore said. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”
In an e-mail message this week, he said his investment activities were consistent with his public advocacy over decades.
“I have advocated policies to promote renewable energy and accelerate reductions in global warming pollution for decades, including all of the time I was in public service,” Mr. Gore wrote. “As a private citizen, I have continued to advocate the same policies. Even though the vast majority of my business career has been in areas that do not involve renewable energy or global warming pollution reductions, I absolutely believe in investing in ways that are consistent with my values and beliefs. I encourage others to invest in the same way.”
Mr. Gore has invested a significant portion of the tens of millions of dollars he has earned since leaving government in 2001 in a broad array of environmentally friendly energy and technology business ventures, like carbon trading markets, solar cells and waterless urinals.
Al's Gore's much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward.
In his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, the man who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his touring slideshow on disappearing polar ice and other consequences of climate change, concludes: "Simply laying out the facts won't work."
Instead, Gore tells Newsweek magazine in a pre-publication interview, that he has been adapting his fact-based message - now put out by hundreds of volunteers - to appeal to those who believe there is a moral or religious duty to protect the planet.
"I've done a Christian [-based] training program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references. It's probably my favourite version, but I don't use it very often because it can come off as proselytising," Gore tells Newsweek.
Gore's book arrives at a time of intense international scrutiny of America's moves on the environment ahead of an international meeting on global warming at Copenhagen, now just more than a month away.
Last week, I noted how eliminating meat from your diet can help fight global warming. This week brings another installment of "Simple, Stupid Steps to Save the Planet:" Get rid of Toto!
A New Zealand study claims a medium-size dog leaves a larger ecological footprint than an SUV. The Seattle Times (hat tip to longtime friend, Planet Gore reader, and Seattle resident, Landon Howell) covered the study thus:
In "Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living," authors Robert and Brenda Vale argue that resources required to feed a dog — including the amount of land needed to feed the animals that go into its food — give it about twice the eco-footprint of, say, building and fueling a Toyota Land Cruiser. Noting that a cat's pawprint was roughly equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf's, "New Scientist" asked an environmentalist at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, U.K., to independently calculate animals' environmental impact, and reported that "his figures tallied almost exactly." The study apparently didn't take into account the emissions of either the SUV or the dogs.
There are 40,906 licensed dogs in Seattle, and about 125,000 total, according to Don Jordan, director of the Seattle Animal Shelter and President of the Washington State Federation of Animal Care and Control Agencies.
"If you look at a large-size dog, they can live 10-14 years, and it certainly wouldn't surprise me," Jordan said of the study. "There's a lot that goes into manufacturing and producing food to care for dogs during the course of a life."
Short of eating the dogs, what should be done about these four-legged eco-Hummers before they kill us all?
"If, in fact, this is true, I think that given the focus particularly with the mayor's office of being the greenest city possible, I would think that pet owners would look at the manufacturing process for the items they're buying for their dogs. I've seen every year the boutique shops for dogs start to sprout up, whether it be bakers or clothing stores or treats or stuff," Jordan said.
Mayor Greg Nickels' spokesman Alex Fryer somehow appeared not to find the matter urgent. "We never answer a hypothetical," he said.
Candidate Mike McGinn didn't respond to a Seattle Times query.
Joe Mallahan's spokeswoman, Charla Neuman — who owns two St. Bernards — refused to relay questions on the topic to Mallahan.
"Thank god this wasn't paid for by taxpayer dollars," Neuman said of the New Zealand study, while spinning the matter thusly: "Take the combination of Joe having a small dog and driving a Prius, and he'll be a very green mayor."
As the vice president knows, I have always advocated an all-of-the-above approach to American energy independence. Among other things, my alternative energy goal for Alaska sits at 50 percent because Alaska reached more than 20 percent during my term in office. The Obama-Biden administration, on the other hand, recently announced a renewable goal of only 25 percent. However, domestic drilling should remain a top priority in order to meet America’s consumption and security needs.
The vice president’s extreme opposition to domestic energy development goes all the way back to 1973 when he opposed the Alaska pipeline bill. As Ann Coulter pointed out, “Biden cast one of only five votes against the pipeline that has produced more than 15 billion barrels of oil, supplied nearly 20 percent of this nation’s oil, created tens of thousands of jobs, added hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and reduced money transfers to the nation’s enemies by about the same amount.”
This nonsensical opposition to American domestic energy development continues to this day. Apparently the Obama-Biden administration only approves of offshore drilling in Brazil, where it will provide security and jobs for Brazilians. This election is about American security and American jobs.
There’s one way to tell Vice President Biden that we’re tired of folks in Washington distorting our message and hampering our nation’s progress: Hoffman, Baby, Hoffman!
And how is this news greeted by the Left? But of course, an e-mail blast from Democrats.com pressuring Ford on global warming:
Subject:
Ford Must Quit the Chamber of Commerce
Text:
Dear , What group is doing the most to make global warming worse? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That's why top companies including Apple, Exelon Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Nike, and Public Service Company of New Mexico have all quit the Chamber. If Ford wants to reduce global warming, it must break with U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Thanks for all you do! Bob Fertik
To: William Ford Jr., Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Company Subject: Ford must break with U.S. Chamber of Commerce Dear Mr. Ford, I am happy to see that your company is supporting new national clean car standards. These standards will reduce U.S. oil consumption, cut global warming emissions, and save people like me money at the gas pump. Unfortunately, Ford's environmental commitments are undermined by its continued participation in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has sued the Environmental Protection Agency to prevent implementation of the new standards and is actively lobbying against other efforts to curb U.S. global warming pollution. I therefore ask that you lead the board of directors to make a public break between Ford and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Sincerely,
No doubt the next step will be for Dems to impose an excess profits tax on Ford until it becomes a loyal Party member and breaks its associations with various undesirables. Then, once it complies with the aforementioned global-warming mandates, Ford will finally be competitive with GM and Chrysler.
State officials deliberately underestimated the cost of Gov. Ted Kulongoski's plan to lure green energy companies to Oregon with big taxpayer subsidies, resulting in a program that cost 40 times more than unsuspecting lawmakers were told, an investigation by The Oregonian shows.
Records also show that the program, a favorite of Kulongoski's known as the Business Energy Tax Credit, has given millions of dollars to failed companies while voters are being asked to raise income taxes because the state budget doesn't have enough to pay for schools and other programs.
The incentives are now under intense scrutiny at the Oregon Department of Energy, which is scrambling to curb their skyrocketing costs.
Energy officials were worried about the impact on the state budget in 2006, when Kulongoski and his staff proposed a dramatic boost in tax breaks to woo wind and solar companies to Oregon — upping the subsidies from a high of $3.5 million per project to as much as $20 million.
According to documents obtained under Oregon's public records law, agency officials estimated in a Nov. 16, 2006, spreadsheet that expanding the tax credits would cost taxpayers an additional $13 million in 2007-09. But after a series of scratch-outs and scribbled notes, a new spreadsheet pared the cost to $1.8 million. And when energy officials handed their final estimate to the Legislature in February 2007, they pegged the added cost at just $1.2 million for the first two years and $4.1 million for 2009-11.
The higher estimates were never shown to lawmakers. Current and former energy staffers acknowledged a clear attempt to minimize the cost of the subsidies.
"I remember that discussion. Everyone was saying, yes, this is going to be a huge (budget) hit," recalled Charles Stephens, a former analyst for the Energy Department who left in 2006. "The governor's office was saying, 'No, we need a smaller number.'"
‘If I Die from Malaria Tomorrow, Why Should I Care about Global Warming?’ [Greg Pollowitz]
Bjørn Lomborg writes in today's WSJ:
Climate Change and Malaria in Africa: Limiting carbon emissions won't do much to stop disease in Zambia
When he first got sick, Samson Banda didn't realize he had malaria. Only after he came down with a serious fever did he end up at a clinic in the Bauleni slum compound in Lusaka, Zambia. The clinic has just a few nurses and staff with basic medical skills. Locals can wait for an entire day to be seen.
Unchecked malaria is serious. Nine out of 10 of the world's annual one million malaria-caused deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease — transmitted via mosquitoes — can cause low blood sugar, an enlarged spleen and liver, severe headaches, a shortage of oxygen to the brain, and renal failure. It can lead to coma and death. Twenty-seven year-old Samson was ill for six months before he started to recover.
Bauleni is an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes during the rainy season between November and April. The slum lacks any sanitation or sewer supply, so locals dig pit latrines. The waste overflows. Most adults have some long-term infection that tends to recur.
"Our conditions are pathetic — both the health clinics and the sanitation in this area," Mr. Samson told a Copenhagen Consensus Center researcher.
Ask what he wants to see foreign donors' money spent on, and he is quick to answer: better health care. When he is asked about global warming, Mr. Samson responds: "I have heard about it, but I don't even know how it would affect me. If I die from malaria tomorrow, why should I care about global warming?"
Detroit — When Washington bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, the Obama administration promised that government’s role would be to make loans to ensure that the companies became viable, profitable entities again. That promise was as believable as the idea that Washington can provide universal health care and cut federal spending — and sure enough, Washington pols have been eager to play auto mechanic.
A few examples:
Greenback mandates. While D.C. pols insist on the one hand that Detroit build the green cars politicians want, federal pay caps are making it difficult for the automakers to keep key green-friendly executives. Case in point: the ultra-green, electric Chevy Volt program has lost two top execs in the last two months. Last week, Frank Weber, the German-born engineer in charge of the Volt, moved back to his mother country to work for Opel. Just a month before, Bob Kruse, executive director of engineering for all GM plug-ins, left for the consulting industry.
"You can’t blame the guy," industry analyst Joe Phillippi of Auto Trends said of Kruse. "What is the prospect of ever making serious money . . . working for a ward of the government, where your pay is capped?"
NIMBY contracts. Numerous pols are insisting that automakers provide pork for their districts. For example, the Wall Street Journalreports that Montana’s delegation is pressuring GM to reinstate a contract with a Montana palladium mine (palladium is used in catalytic converters) that had been nullified in bankruptcy court. "The simple fact is, when GM took federal dollars, they lost some of their autonomy," says GOP Rep. Denny Rehberg.
The Dealer Untouchables. One of GM’s key moves has been to streamline its bloated dealer network to bring it in line with sales (despite a market share similar to Toyota’s, GM has five times as many dealers). But GM’s plan to eliminate 1,300 dealerships has run into a buzzsaw of Congressional opposition. Strong-arming from senators like West Virginia’s Jay Rockefeller and New York’s Chuck Schumer have already reversed the closing of 70 dealers . . . and counting.
Union favoritism. Chrysler and GM have moved aggressively to cut their transportation costs, effecting Teamster jobs and riling the union’s political friends. Chrysler, for example, will save 25 percent of its $111 million annual hauling budget by transferring to lower-cost carriers. But Michigan reps from both sides of the aisle are unimpressed, reports the Detroit News. "Relatively minor short-term cost savings generated by shifting this work to non-unionized companies is greatly outweighed by the elimination of good-paying, union middle-class jobs,” complains Michigan Republican Thaddeus McCotter.
In response to such interference, GM head of global purchasing Robert Socia responds, "The best way to repay taxpayers is to run the business as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible."
But as the auto bailouts are proving, politics — not taxpayers — are Washington’s top priority.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This item has been amended since its initial posting.
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — October 29, 2009 — Today the Department of Transportation and White House chose to respond to an analysis Edmunds.com released Wednesday that looked at auto sales this year and what sales volumes would have been had the popular Cash for Clunkers program never existed.
At issue is one point of the analysis showing the taxpayer cost for every incremental vehicle sold was $24,000. To be clear, Edmunds.com is not disputing the government's statements regarding total voucher applications, vehicles sold or voucher values. The key question is how many of these sales would have occurred anyway.
Apparently, the $24,000 figure caught many by surprise. It shouldn't have. The truth is that consumer incentive programs are always hugely expensive when calculated by incremental sales — always in the tens of thousands of dollars. Cash for Clunkers was no exception.
The White House claims that our analysis was based on car sales on Mars and that on Earth, the marketplace is connected. We agree the marketplace is connected. In fact, that is exactly the basis of our analysis.
It is also claimed we missed the possibility that Cash for Clunkers generated excitement and consumers bought vehicles even if they didn't qualify for the program — a claim that has been widely supported by anecdote but by little analysis. It does, after all, seem a bit odd that masses of consumers would elect to buy a vehicle because of a program for which they don't qualify — doubly so when you add in the fact that prices shot up during Cash for Clunkers, creating a disincentive to buy.
Finally, the White House claims that the increase in fourth-quarter production reported by the car manufacturers can be attributed to Cash for Clunkers. But here is a better reason: the economy is recovering accompanied by improved car sales. No manufacturer increases production — a decision with long-term consequences — based on the 30-day sales blip triggered by an event like Cash for Clunkers.
With all respect to the White House, Edmunds.com thinks that instead of shooting the messenger, government officials should take heart from the core message of the analysis: the fundamentals of the auto marketplace are improving faster than the current sales numbers suggest.
Isn't this a piece of good news we can all cheer?
About Edmunds.com, Inc. (http://www.edmunds.com/help/about/index.html) Edmunds.com, Inc. publishes four Web sites that empower, engage and educate automotive consumers and enthusiasts. Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive consumer information, launched in 1995 as the first automotive information Web site. Its most popular feature, the Edmunds.com True Market Value® , is relied upon by millions of people seeking current transaction prices for new and used vehicles. Edmunds.com was named "Best Car Research Site" by Forbes ASAP, has been selected by consumers as the "Most Useful Web Site" according to every J.D. Power and Associates New Autoshopper.com Study(SM), was ranked first in the Survey of Car-Shopping Web Sites by The Wall Street Journal and was rated "#1" in Keynote's study of third-party automotive Web sites. Inside Line launched in January 2005 and is the most-read automotive enthusiast Web site. CarSpace launched in February 2006 and is an automotive social networking Web site and home to the oldest and most established automotive community. AutoObserver.com launched in 2007 and provides insightful automotive industry commentary and analysis. Edmunds Inc. is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and maintains a satellite office in suburban Detroit.
"Cap-and-trade Mirage" by Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, lawyers for the EPA, in today's Washington Post. An excerpt:
We are speaking out as parents, citizens and attorneys, but our analysis is informed by more than 20 years each at the Environmental Protection Agency's San Francisco Regional Office, including Allan's extensive experience overseeing California's cap-and-trade and offsets programs for the EPA.
Cap-and-trade means a declining "cap" on total emissions, while allowing trading of pollution permits. Confidence in the certainty of declining caps is based on the mistaken assumption that cap-and trade was proven in the EPA's acid rain program. In fact, addressing acid rain required relatively minor modifications to coal-fired power plants. Reductions were accomplished primarily by a fuel switch to readily available, affordable, low-sulfur coal, along with some additional scrubbing. In contrast, the issues presented by climate change cannot be solved by tweaks to facilities; it requires an energy revolution through investments in building clean-energy facilities.
The biggest obstacle to this revolution is that uncontrolled fossil fuel energy remains much cheaper than clean energy. Cap-and-trade alone will not create confidence that clean energy will become profitable within a known time frame and so will not ignite the huge shift in investment needed to begin the clean-energy revolution. In recent interviews, even the economists who thought up cap-and-trade have said they don't believe it's an appropriate tool for climate change.
What guarantees failure of the proposed climate bills, however, are their provisions for carbon offsets, a concept not used in the acid rain program. Both bills allow all required greenhouse-gas reductions for almost 20 years to be met with carbon offsets rather than actual reductions in use of the capped sources. Offsets — considered indispensable to keeping cap-and-trade affordable — are supposed to be "additional" reductions beyond what is legally required. But experience with offsets in Europe and California has shown that ensuring real "additionality" is not an achievable goal.
Today's New York Times has an op-ed in defense of this Times of London piece on how we'll have to become a world of vegetarians to "save" the planet: An excerpt:
Methane is agriculture’s second-largest greenhouse gas. Wetland rice fields alone account for as much 29 percent of the world’s human-generated methane. In animal farming, much of the methane comes from lagoons of liquefied manure at industrial facilities, which are as nauseating as they sound.
This isn’t a problem at traditional farms. “Before the 1970s, methane emissions from manure were minimal because the majority of livestock farms in the U.S. were small operations where animals deposited manure in pastures and corrals,” the Environmental Protection Agency says. The E.P.A. found that with the rapid rise of factory farms, liquefied manure systems became the norm and methane emissions skyrocketed. You can reduce your methane emissions by seeking out meat from animals raised outdoors on traditional farms.
CRITICS of meat-eating often point out that cattle are prime culprits in methane production. Fortunately, the cause of these methane emissions is understood, and their production can be reduced.
Much of the problem arises when livestock eat poor quality forages, throwing their digestive systems out of balance. Livestock nutrition experts have demonstrated that by making minor improvements in animal diets (like providing nutrient-laden salt licks) they can cut enteric methane by half. Other practices, like adding certain proteins to ruminant diets, can reduce methane production per unit of milk or meat by a factor of six, according to research at Australia’s University of New England. Enteric methane emissions can also be substantially reduced when cattle are regularly rotated onto fresh pastures, researchers at University of Louisiana have confirmed.
However. . .methane might be a bigger issue than originally thought, meaning if we are in a crisis, politicians will have to force Americans to give up meat. Again, from the Times of London:
The effects of a critical greenhouse gas on global warming have been significantly underestimated, according to research suggesting that emissions controls and climate models may need to be revised
Methane’s impact on global temperatures is about a third higher than generally thought because previous estimates have not accounted for its interaction with airborne particles called aerosols, Nasa scientists found.
When this indirect effect of the potent greenhouse gas is included one tonne of methane has about 33 times as much effect on the climate over 100 years as a tonne of carbon dioxide, rather than 25 times as in standard estimates.
Drew Shindell, of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who led the study, said that the findings added to the importance of measures to contain methane emissions, as well as those of carbon dioxide, which will be discussed at the Copenhagen climate summit in December.
How much will polling on "saving the planet" drop once America learns there's no more meat in our diet?
For a group of 20th-century leaders called the Elders — whose members include Archbishop Tutu of South Africa, former President Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson, a former Irish president — it also was a conversation with their families that they felt would be most usefully conducted before the cameras.
On Thursday, seeking to highlight the responsibility that older generations bear for climate change, members of the group traveled to Istanbul for a symbolic photo shoot accompanied by young relatives.
“This is a rather late wake-up call for all humanity to behave in a more responsible manner,” said Lakhdar Brahimi, 75, a veteran United Nations envoy who helped broker an agreement ending civil war in Lebanon, and who was accompanied by his grandchildren, Balthazar, 5, and Basile, 3. “It is the responsibility of today’s generations to act,” he said.
The Elders group was founded in 2007 with the help of Nelson Mandela. Its chairman, Archbishop Tutu, acknowledged that his generation bore the blame for not making tough choices sooner.
“We should have long ago used recyclable energy,” said Archbishop Tutu, who danced on a lawn as he entertained his grandchildren before the cameras.
“If we had used solar energy or wind power, we wouldn’t have been in this predicament.”
Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who found fame as the author of the provocative book “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” said that by campaigning for swift agreement at a global climate conference in December in Copenhagen, the Elders risked backing expensive and ineffective solutions that might divert money from more effective measures to save lives and protect the planet.
“I have no doubt the Elders care deeply about their grandchildren,” Mr. Lomborg said, “but we should be concerned about all the other grandchildren who were not at the event and who run the risk of dying tomorrow from lack of sanitation, starvation and disease.”
Ms. Robinson, 65, said she sympathized with that view, but she added that coming generations would not have a planet to enjoy unless action was taken now to resolve the problem.
To paraphrase Mr. Buckley, I'd rather be governed by the first few hundred seniors in the Boston phone book than this group of "Elders."
European Union leaders on Friday offered to contribute money to a global fund to help developing countries tackle global warming hoping kick-start stalled talks on a new agreement on climate change.
But E.U. leaders disappointed climate campaigners by making the offer conditional on donations from other parts of the world and by failing to decide how much Europe would contribute to a global pot of up to 50 billion euros by 2020.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt insisted the E.U. now had "a very strong negotiating position" to press for a global deal at United Nations talks in Copenhagen in December that are aimed at agreeing a successor accord to the Kyoto Protocol.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, also stressed that Europe was leading the way.
"There is no-one else among the industrialized nations" to have made as concrete an offer of climate finance, Ms. Merkel told a press conference in Brussels.
But environmental groups took a mostly negative view of the results of the two-day summit, saying E.U. leaders had chosen vague, global figures and thereby diminished chances of unblocking climate negotiations ahead of the meeting in Copenhagen.
"Europe has failed once again to say how much it is prepared to contribute for climate finance," said Sonja Meister, a climate campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth Europe. "In every way the EU is shirking its historical responsibilities and blocking progress towards the just and fair agreement the world needs in Copenhagen," she said.
Life was so much simpler for Europe when George W. Bush could be blamed for everything.
Some choice quotes of Sir David King, former chief scientific advisor to prime ministers Blair and Brown, from Benny Peiser at CCNet.
Today, alarmism is out:
When people overstate happenings that aren’t necessarily climate change-related, or set up as almost certainties things that are difficult to establish scientifically, it distracts from the science we do understand. The danger is they can be accused of scaremongering. Also, we can all become described as kind of left-wing greens. —Sir David King, The Times, 30 October 2009
But back when alarmism was all the rage:
If all the ice on Greenland were to melt, sea level would rise by seven metres. Is that likely to happen? Well I was saying six years ago unlikely [but] I'm afraid that that's having to be revised... 80 percent of our human population lives within less than a one metre rise of sea level so imagine the destabilisation of our geopolitical system with a sea level rise of the order of one or two metres. And that is on the cards I'm afraid. —Sir David King, London, 19 June 2008
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — A total of 690,000 new vehicles were sold under the Cash for Clunkers program last summer, but only 125,000 of those were vehicles that would not have been sold anyway, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the automotive Web site Edmunds.com.
Still, auto sales contributed heavily to the economy's expansion in the third quarter, adding 1.7 percentage points to the nation's gross domestic product growth.
The Cash for Clunkers program gave car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 if they traded in less fuel-efficient vehicles for new vehicles that met certain fuel economy requirements. A total of $3 billion was allotted for those rebates.
The average rebate was $4,000. But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales.
Busy Covering Car Sales on Mars, Edmunds.com Gets It Wrong (Again) on Cash for Clunkers
Posted by Macon Phillips on October 29, 2009 at 12:20 PM EDT
On the same day that we found out that motor vehicle output added 1.7% to economic growth in the third quarter – the largest contribution to quarterly growth in over a decade – Edmunds.com has released a faulty analysis suggesting that the Cash for Clunkers program had no meaningful impact on our economy or on overall auto sales. This is the latest of several critical “analyses” of the Cash for Clunkers program from Edmunds.com, which appear designed to grab headlines and get coverage on cable TV. Like many of their previous attempts, this latest claim doesn’t withstand even basic scrutiny.
The Edmunds analysis is based on two implausible assumptions:
1. The Edmunds’ analysis rests on the assumption that the market for cars that didn’t qualify for Cash for Clunkers was completely unaffected by this program.
In other words, all the other cars were being sold on Mars, while the rest of the country was caught up in the excitement of the Cash for Clunkers program. This analysis ignores not only the price impacts that a program like Cash for Clunkers has on the rest of the vehicle market, but the reports from across the country that people were drawn into dealerships by the Cash for Clunkers program and ended up buying cars even though their old car was not eligible for the program.
This faulty assumption leads Edmunds to a conclusion that is at odds with many independent analyses: Edmunds assumption that more than 80% of the payback from Cash for Clunkers would occur in 2009 isn't how many mainstream analyses, including Moody's and IHS Global Insight approach the problem (see pages 5 and 15 of this CEA report [PDF]). In fact, Deutsche Bank recently concluded that “The important takeaway from recent sales trends is that it suggests that there has been minimal 'payback' for the U.S. government’s 'cash for clunkers' program.”
2. Edmunds also ignores the beneficial impact that the program will have on 4th Quarter GDP because automakers have ramped up their production to rebuild their depleted inventories.
Major automakers including GM, Ford, Honda and Chrysler all increased their production through the end of the year as a result of this program, which will help boost growth beyond the third quarter. The actions of private market participants, who would not increase production if they didn’t think demand for their product would be there through the end of the year, is a far better indicator of market dynamics – and one that Edmunds.com conveniently ignores.
Most importantly, this program is helping boost our economy and create jobs now when we need it most. In a comprehensive report, the Council of Economic Advisers estimated that the Cash for Clunkers will create 70,000 jobs in the second half of 2009. The strength of recent auto sales data suggest that, if anything, this projection underestimates the actual impact of the program. CEA’s analysis is transparent and comprehensive, laying out all of its assumptions for the public to understand. Edmunds.com, on the other hand, is promoting a bombastic press release without any public access to their underlying analysis.
So put on your space suit and compare the two approaches yourself:
OK. I'll go to page 5 of the White House's CEA report. Here's what it says:
We are not aware of any explicit analysis by the automakers of the proportion of sales that will not be swiftly paid back. But, according to an August 28 interview with the Associated Press, Ford Motor Company President of the Americas Mark Fields "estimated about 30 percent to 40 percent of its clunkers sales were ‘truly incremental,’ meaning that they came from consumers who had no plans previously to buy a car. The rest, he said, came from people who were going to buy a car later on."8 Moody’s Investors Service is even more optimistic, estimating "that about 60 percent of the vehicles sold with clunker rebates were purchased by consumers who were not otherwise intending to buy," according to the Wall Street Journal.9 General Motors appears to have a similar view: a September 1, 2009 story in BusinessWeek quoted Michael DiGiovanni, GM’s executive director of global market and industry analysis, as estimating that only "about 200,000 of the 700,000 cars sold under the clunkers program were pulled ahead from future months."10
So, Edmunds says 125,000 cars were incremental. Ford says about 245,000. And GM says the number is 500,000. Since GM has no credibility in my opinion, why don't we just go with Ford's estimate? This would basically halve the Edmunds number, resulting in a cost per clunker of $12,000. Still bad.
And either way, why not jut say "we don't agree," point readers to your studies, and let it go? What's with the juvenile spaceman nonsense?
The world's largest user and fastest-growing user of energy are teaming up to build a "massive" wind farm in West Texas:
A consortium of Chinese and American companies announced a joint venture today to construct a massive 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas, utilizing wind turbines manufactured in China.
Construction of the $1.5 billion wind farm would be funded largely by Chinese financiers, with an assist from the United States government in the form of loan guarantees and grants from the federal stimulus package.
“This wind farm project came about thanks to the openness of the United States for investments in the field of renewable energy,” said John Lin, the chief operating officer of Shenyang Power Group, an industrial group in China focused on renewable energy projects.
The wind farm, to be built on 36,000 acres in West Texas, will use 240 2.5 megawatt turbines manufactured in China. Construction is expected to begin in March 2010. The project is expected to create 300 temporary construction jobs, and roughly 30 permanent jobs.
So, to recap: $1.5 billion of Chinese-built windmills are going to go up in West Texas, thanks in no small part to "an assist from the United States government in the form of loan guarantees and grants from the federal stimulus package. . . . 'This wind farm project came about thanks to the openness of the United States for investments in the field of renewable energy.'" Translation: Were it not for your hefty government handouts, we wouldn't be doing this. For all you baseball fans out there, translation: If you subsidize it, they will come.
Granted, simply building more and more and more windmills (and solar panels) won't make them cost efficient — because you still have to deal with wind's intermittency and volatility, a current lack of commercial-scale electricity storage, and an electric grid not built for the large-scale addition of remote renewable energies — but at least the $1.5 billion dollars will create "roughlythirty" jobs.
That's right: 30 . . . -ish. If that isn't a bang for your taxpayer buck, I don't know what is.
Detroit — Fisker Automotive? Call it Obama Automotive.
As part of Washington’s effort to remake the U.S. auto industry to fit President Obama’s green vision of 1 million electric cars sold by 2015, Vice President Joe Biden announced Tuesday that luxury electric carmaker Fisker would invest $193 million in taxpayer money to buy an ex-Pontiac plant in Wilmington, Delaware. “I refuse to believe that we will not once again lead the entire world in the manufacturing of automobiles,” Biden told a friendly UAW crowd. “This factory in Delaware, and the industry, are going to get back up off the mat.” With its pork barrel politics, union favoritism, and massive taxpayer subsidy, the Delaware plant is a case study in Washington industrial-policy boondoggles.
Toys for the rich: Democrats love to huff and puff about expensive weapons systems — but at least those are built for the common defense. Fisker makes cars for well-to-do American greens. The luxury sedan slated to be built at the Delaware facility will sticker for $47,400 (Fisker’s press release spun the price as “around $39,900 after federal tax credits.” That credit represents a $7,500 taxpayer subsidy per car) — meaning that it will compete against the BMW 3-series and Mercedes C-Class luxury cars.
Political connections: Notably, Fisker has never manufactured an automobile before. Its first car, the $87,000 Fisker Karma, is not due to roll off its Finnish assembly line until next year. So how does an automaker that hasn’t made an auto land a half-billion government investment? Check its rolodex. Fisker is the darling of California green politicians. Located in Silicon Valley along with its electric cousin, Tesla, Fisker has been touted by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Diane Feinstein as a California pioneer that will help the Bay area steal Detroit’s mantle as America’s car capitol. And Fisker also benefits from ties to the Goracle — his venture firm, Kleiner Perkins, is a lead Fisker investor.
Union payoff: Fisker will maintain the Delaware plant’s UAW representation — an odd decision for a startup seeking to keep costs low. But of course, this is a government startup, and the union comes with the package.
Political pork: Biden’s lead role in Fisker’s announcement is surely no accident. This is valuable pork for the Veep’s home state in the coming election year. The Delaware plant maintains union jobs — and voters — and provides Biden’s Senate replacement (his son, Beau?) with a handy campaign promise of green jobs.
Washington in charge: As the majority stakeholder in General Motors, Washington (via its GM CEO puppet) had allegedly targeted the Delaware pant for closure. In fact, it is merely transferring it to another government-financed entity, Fisker, who will operate the plant with a portion of its $529 million in taxpayer loans.
The Obama administration’s 21st century vision of a government-led American auto industry is a striking contrast to the private companies that vaulted Detroit to U.S. dominance in the early 20th century.
“This is proof positive that our efforts to create new jobs, invest in a clean energy economy and reduce carbon pollution are working,” commented Energy Secretary Steven Chu about the Delaware plant. “We are putting Americans back to work and reigniting a new Industrial Revolution that is paramount for the economic success of this country.” Welcome to the Era of Big Government Motors.
This stood out from yesterday's New York Times live blog of the Senate's climate hearings:
10:00 a.m.: Carol Browner mentions elements of legislation that would allow farmers to get income by selling credits for carbon banked in their fields through changes in agricultural practices. Some specialists in carbon sequestration through forests and farm fields, including Kevin Gurney at Purdue, have told me the policy here is out ahead of the science, given that it remains difficult to measure precisely how much, or even whether, a particular change — for example from plowing fields to no-till agriculture using pesticides to kill weeds — improves the rate of carbon sequestration. That leaves significant potential for “greenwash,” or at least for actions cast as having a climate benefit that the climate system may never notice.
How about the "Obama/Enron Energy Tax?" Because, really, what's so different between what President Obama wants to implement and what Enron wanted to do? From a CEI op-ed back in 2002:
It’s not surprising to most people that Enron delivered truckloads of money to politicians in an attempt to influence the political process. What may surprise many, however, is that Enron believed that one of its main opportunities to make money by gaming the political system was global warming.
Enron became one of the biggest corporate boosters of the Kyoto global warming treaty, which would require huge reductions in energy use by consumers and industry. According to an internal Enron memo, quoted by The Washington Post, the Kyoto treaty would “do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States.”
In addition to all its political lobbying and contributions, Enron became a founding member of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s Business Environmental Leadership Council, a leading industry front group pushing the Kyoto agenda. Enron chairman Ken Lay also served on the board of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment, along with Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense, and former Alcoa CEO and current Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.
Even after President Bush decided to withdraw the U.S. from the Kyoto treaty, Enron continued to push for a domestic regulatory scheme known as cap-and-trade, whereby the government would set a cap on the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions allowed in the U.S.
It would then distribute permits or allowances to companies affected by the cap giving them the right to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. Those allowances could then be traded in the open market.
Enron executives believed that a cap-and-trade program would put them in a position to dominate the U.S. energy market. Electric utilities, required to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, would be forced to switch from coal to natural gas as the only practical alternative to electricity production. As a leading trader of natural gas, Enron would be the recipient of a huge financial windfall.
