Events- upcoming!

Climate Alarmists are Looking Very Foolish! Check this out!

/ 1957chev / 2 Comments

Australia Shoots Down Climate Lobby’s Scare Mongering

July 28, 2014 by  

dirty harry2

Australia shoots down climate lobby’s scare mongering
Marita Noon
cfact.org
21 July 2014

Thursday, July 17 was a big news day. The world was shocked to learn that a Russian-made missile shot down a Malaysian Airlines jet with 298 on board as it flew over Ukraine en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. Though flight 17 eclipsed the news cycle, there was another thing shot down on July 17.

Almost a year ago, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott won a landslide election with a nearly single-issue campaign: repeal the carbon tax. On July 17, he made good on that promise, as the Australian Senate voted, 39 to 32, to abolish the “world’s biggest carbon tax” – a tax that was reportedto “do nothing to address global warming, apart from imposing high costs on the local economy.”

Australia was one of the first major countries, outside of the European Union, to adopt a carbon price—first suggested in 2007 and passed under Labour Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2011. Gillard’s campaign promised: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” While she attempted to brand it a carbon price, not a “tax,” Sinclair Davidson, a professor in the school of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University, said: “The electorate had a very specific understanding of her words” and perceived it as a broken promise.

Australia’s carbon tax, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), was “recognized by the International Energy Agency as model legislation for developed countries.” The WSJ reports that when Australia’s carbon tax was passed, the Brookings Institution “described Australia as an ‘important laboratory and learning opportunity.’”

So, what do we learn from the “laboratory” the now-failed “model legislation” offered?

First, the WSJ states: “The public hates it.” The (UK) Telegraph calls the tax: “one of the most unsuccessful in history” and points out that it is “unique in that it generated virtually no revenue for the Australian Treasury due to its negative impact on productivity; contributed to the rising costs that have taken the gloss off the country’s resources boom; and essentially helped to bring down Ms. Gillard’s former Government.” The Telegraph, in an article titled: “Australia abandons disastrous green tax on emissions,” adds that the tax failed in “winning over voters who faced higher costs passed on by the companies that had to pay for it.” In Slate, Ariel Bogelclaims the 2011 bill required “about 350 companies to pay a penalty for their greenhouse gas emissions.”

While Australia is, as the WSJ put it: “the world’s first developed nation to repeal carbon laws that put a price on greenhouse-gas emissions,” it is not the only one to back away from such policies. New Zealand has weakened its emissions trading scheme; Japan has retreated from its pledges to cut greenhouse emissions and instead committed to a rise in emissions; Canada withdrew from the Kyoto protocol in 2011; England, where “the bill for green policies is rising,” has “so far resisted calls to expand tax on carbon emissions”; the European Union carbon emissions trading scheme­ – the biggest in the world and the heart of Europe’s climate-change program – is in dire straits; and, just the day after Australia’s news was announced, South Korea – whose planned 2015 emissions trading market launch would make it the world’s second largest – hinted at an additional delay due to projected costs to businesses.

The Telegraph offers this summary: “Carbon trading mechanisms and green taxes have largely been a failure elsewhere and especially so in Europe where they have dragged on investment and threatened long-term energy security.”

These are important lessons in light of the renewed push for a carbon tax in the U.S. Consider the partnership of President George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, who are, together, who are calling for a climate tax.

According to the WSJ, the World Bank called Australia’s repeal “one of the biggest international threats to the rollout of similar programs elsewhere.” The climate lobby is concerned as “Australia’s vote shows that the real obstacle to their dreams of controlling more of the world’s economy is democratic consent.”

In the U.S., similar efforts to reduce CO2 emissions by increasing costs to emitters, and therefore consumers – in our case, cap and trade – failed to achieve “democratic consent” even when Democrats had control. The people didn’t want it. So, the Obama Administration now is trying to go around Congress with onerous rules and regulations on emissions.

As in the U.S., a carbon tax – or cap and trade – is not the only policy increasing energy costs to Australian consumers. In the U.S., we have the Renewable Portfolio Standard; Australia has its Renewable Energy Target (RET). Both require the addition of expensive wind-and-solar energy.

Jennifer Marohasy, Ph.D., who worked for 12 years as a scientist for the Queensland government, told me: “Of course while the carbon tax needed to be repealed, its abolition will go only some way to reducing pressures on Australian businesses and households. The so-called Clean Energy Act 2011 is part of a tsunami of regulation and legislation introduced over recent years that has seen the average electricity price in Australia increase by 70% in real terms. Next in line must be the mandatory RET, a government-legislated requirement on electricity retailers to source a specific proportion of total electricity sales from renewable energy sources including wind and solar, with the extraordinary costs serving as a hidden tax – paid by all electricity users.”

In the Australian Financial Review, Alan Moran, an economist specializing in regulatory matters, in particular covering energy, global warming, housing, transport, and competition issues, and Director of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Deregulation Unit, agrees that the carbon tax is just one of the burdens holding down the Australian economy. He sees a cascade of programs for support of high-cost renewables and penalties for fossil-fuel use and “a bewildering array of subsidies and programs.”

Both see the RET as the bigger issue. Marohasy says: “In short, repeal of the carbon tax is a big symbolic win. But it’s mostly just window-dressing: to appease the masses. In the background, proponents of anthropogenic global warming who dominate our political class still very much control the levers of government and intend to continue to terrorize the population with claims of catastrophic global warming, while consolidating their rent-seeking through the RET.” She explained: “Money collected from the carbon tax went to government, money collected through the RET largely goes to the global warming industry.” Which is why some in the Australian Senate agreed to vote for the repeal – as long as the RET isn’t touched.

However, Abbott has stated: “All of us should want to see lower prices and plainly at the moment the renewable energy target is a very significant impact on higher power prices.” Time will tell how Abbott fares in the RET battle. But for now, he’s given the world a “learning opportunity” on climate change and energy policy.

Meanwhile, the climate lobby resorts to hyperbole to push its scare-mongering tactics. In closing her piece in Slate, Bogle whines: “As someone who has to live in the quickly cooking world Abbott leaves behind…” Perhaps she’s missed the data that the planet’s predicted warming hasn’t happened – despite ever-increasing CO2 emissions. According to satellite records, there has been no warming in almost 18 years.

May America learn from, as the Brookings Institution observed, the “important laboratory” of Australia’s foray into climate schemes.
cfact.org

Marita Noon is the author of the book Energy Freedom and serves as the executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the companion educational organization, the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE).

Marita Noon

Wind and Solar….Novelty Energy Forms, That We Can’t Afford!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

The Economist: Wind and solar power are even more expensive than is commonly thought

What global warming polar bear 3

No kidding.

Via the Economist

Quote

…Charles Frank of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, uses a cost-benefit analysis to rank various forms of energy.

…To determine the overall cost or benefit, though, the cost of the fossil-fuel plants that have to be kept hanging around for the times when solar and wind plants stand idle must also be factored in. Mr Frank calls these “avoided capacity costs”—costs that would not have been incurred had the green-energy plants not been built. Thus a 1MW wind farm running at about 25% of capacity can replace only about 0.23MW of a coal plant running at 90% of capacity. Solar farms run at only about 15% of capacity, so they can replace even less. Seven solar plants or four wind farms would thus be needed to produce the same amount of electricity over time as a similar-sized coal-fired plant. And all that extra solar and wind capacity is expensive.

If all the costs and benefits are totted up using Mr Frank’s calculation, solar power is by far the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions. It costs $189,000to replace 1MW per year of power from coal. Wind is the next most expensive. Hydropower provides a modest net benefit. But the most cost-effective zero-emission technology is nuclear power. The pattern is similar if 1MW of gas-fired capacity is displaced instead of coal. And all this assumes a carbon price of $50 a tonne. Using actual carbon prices (below $10 in Europe) makes solar and wind look even worse. The carbon price would have to rise to $185 a tonne before solar power shows a net benefit.

There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to choose one form of energy over another, including emissions of pollutants other than CO2 and fear of nuclear accidents. Mr Frank does not look at these. Still, his findings have profound policy implications. At the moment, most rich countries and China subsidise solar and wind power to help stem climate change. Yet this is the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile Germany and Japan, among others, are mothballing nuclear plants, which (in terms of carbon abatement) are cheaper. The implication of Mr Frank’s research is clear: governments should target emissions reductions from any source rather than focus on boosting certain kinds of renewable energy.

 

How Governments are Trying to Push Agenda 21….A New World Disorder!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

SCIENTIFIC PRETENSE VS. DEMOCRACY

Arrogance and intolerance in the name of superior expertise are antithetical to popular governance and the requirements of honest argument. But that hasn’t stopped them from becoming a central feature of our political life.

By  

“We will restore science to its rightful place…”

—Barack Obama

Unpacked, this sentence means: “Under my administration, Americans will have fewer choices about how they live, and fewer choices as voters because, rightfully, those choices should be made by officials who rule by the authority of science.”

Thus our new president intends to accelerate a trend a half-century old in America but older and further advanced in the rest of the world. There is nothing new or scientific about rulers pretending to execute the will of a god or of an oracle. It’s a tool to preempt opposition. The ruler need not make a case for what he is doing. He need only reaffirm his status as the priest of a knowledge to which the people cannot accede. The argument “Do what we say because we are certified to know better” is a slight variant of “Do what we say because we are us.”

An Old Story

THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUALS and merchants who founded the modern state spoke of political equality. But they knew that if the masses governed, they might well have guillotined them rather than nobles and priests. And so they set up, and Napoleon perfected, a system of government that consisted of bureaucracies. In practice and in theory, the bureaucracies defined the modern state in terms of efficient administration, which they called scientific. In 19th-century France, Prussia, and their imitators, the state set standards for schools, professions, and localities. While elected assemblies might debate abstractions, they did not deal with the rules by which people lived. Political equality and self-rule were purely theoretical, while personal latitude was at the discretion of the bureaucracies. This is the continental model of the state, best explained by G. W. F. Hegel in The Philosophy of History and by Max Weber in his description of the Rechtsstaat, the “rational-legal state.” Access to this ruling class is theoretically equal, typically through competitive exams, and its rules should apply equally. Just as in the ancient Chinese imperial bureaucracy, decisions should be made by those who know and care best: the examination-qualified bureaucrats. In modern governance, in addition to embodying the state, the bureaucrats are supposed to be the carriers of the developing human spirit, of progress. Only in Switzerland and America did the theory and practice of popular government survive into the modern world. But note: they survived because they were planted on older, hybrid pre-Enlightenment roots.

Because the pretense of rare knowledge is the source of the modern administrative state’s intellectual and moral authority, its political essence is rule of the few, by their own authority, over the many. Ancient political theory was familiar with this category, distinguishing within it the rule of the moneymakers for the purpose of wealth, of the soldiers for glory, or of the virtuous for goodness. But modern thought has reduced government by the few to the rule of the experts. Expert in what? In bringing all good things, it seems. This was so when Mexico’s dictator Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911) justified his rule by claiming that he was just following the impartial advice of “los cientificos,” the scientists, about economics and public administration. Never forget that the one and only intellectual basis for Communist rule over billions of people since 1917 is the claim that Karl Marx had learned the secret formula for overcoming mankind’s “contradictions,” especially about economics. How many millions genuflected before the priests of “dialectical materialism”! To a lesser degree, the “brain trust” and “the best and the brightest” were important sources for the authority of the Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy administrations, respectively.

The scientific subject matter to which the rulers claim privileged access matters little. Three generations ago it was economics, in our time it includes everything from environmentalism to child rearing. But whether the objective be rainmaking, the avoidance of plague or falling skies, the fulfillment of fond wishes, or the affirmation of identity, the ruler’s incantations establish the presumption that he and his class know things that others do not or cannot know; that hence he and his class have the right to rule, while the rest must accept whatever explanations come from on high. In our time, such knowledge is called science, and claiming ownership of it practically negates political equality, if not human equality altogether. Claiming it is a political, not a scientific, act.

Knowledge and Equality

THE CLAIM THAT PUBLIC AFFAIRS (and as well many matters heretofore deemed private) are beyond the capacity of citizens to understand and too complex for them to administer, and hence that only certified experts may deal with them, must be cynical, at least to the extent to which those who make it realize that only theoretically does it transfer power to “the experts.” In practice, the power passes to those who certify the experts as experts. Surely, however, the polity’s ordinary members cease to be citizens.

Aristotle teaches that political relationships— that is, relationships among equals—depend on persuasion. Conversely, persuasion is the currency of politics only insofar as persons are equal. Whereas equals must persuade their fellows about the substance of the business at hand, despots, kings, or aristocrats exercise power over lesser beings by pointing to their status. But do those who rule on behalf of superior knowledge really know things that endow them with the right to rule? What might such things be? What subjects, what judgments, qualify as “science,” meaning matters so far beyond the horizon of ordinary human beings as to disqualify commonsense judgment about them? What can any humans know that the knowledge of it rightly places them in the saddle and others under it? What are the matters on which the public may have legitimate opinions, and on what matters are their opinions illegitimate, except when expressed by leave of certified experts? Moreover, how does one accede to the rank of expert? Must one possess a degree? But neither Galileo nor Isaac Newton had any, never mind Thomas Edison. Moreover, possessors of degrees do differ among themselves. Must one be accepted by other experts? By which ones? Note also that scientists are not immune to groupthink, to interest, to dishonesty, to mutual deference or antagonism, never mind to error.

The problem is patent: Because it is as plain in our America as in all places and at all times that some men do know the public business far better than others, it follows that the people in charge should be the ones who best know what they are doing. Hence, inequality of capacity argues for political inequality. To the extent that the matters to be decided rest on expertise, any nonexperts who claim a civil or natural right to refuse to follow the experts in fact abuse those rights. At most, nonexperts may choose among competing teams of experts.

But on what basis may they choose? If the questions that the experts debate among themselves are fundamentally comprehensible by attentive laymen, “science” would be about mere detail and citizens would be able to decide the big questions on the basis of equality. But if the “science” by which the polity is ruled disposes of essential questions, then citizenship in the sense of Aristotle and of the American Founders is impossible, and the masses should be mere faithful subjects. And if some voters dig in their heels or place their faith in scientists who are out of step with “what science says”—quacks, by definition— then they undermine the very basis of government that rests on expertise. Such inequalityis compatible with some conceptions of citizenship, but not with the American or democratic versions thereof.Because Americans believe that “all men are created equal,” they tend to identify the concept of citizenship with that of self-government; the American commitment to equality means equality in the making of laws. Even more, it presumes laws under which persons may live as they wish, that the people have the final say on any restriction of that freedom, and that even popular assent—never mind scientific decision-making—cannot alienate the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Unlike Hegel and Napoleon, who saw nations as organisms to be organized scientifically, Americans view public life as an arena of clashing interests that must be adjusted to their general satisfaction. Hence from the American perspective, removing the polity’s business from the arena of politics to the cloisters of science just restricts the competition among the polity’s factions and changes its rules. Whereas previously the parties had to address the citizenry with substantive cases for their positions and interests, now translating those positions into scientific terms expressed by certified persons means that the factions must fight one another by marshaling contrasting scientific retinues, by validating their own and discrediting their opponents’ experts. It follows then that the modern struggle is over control of the process of accreditation, and that the arguments the masses hear must be mostly ad hominem, seldom ad valorem— not least because the experts deem the masses incapable and unworthy of hearing anything else.

Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” revolutionized the relationship between ordinary Americans and their government by introducing a new kind of legislation: thenceforth, the people’s elected representatives would delegate to “independent” executive agencies the “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” power to invent and administer the rules in their field by which people would live. The citizen’s recourses against these powers are mostly theoretical. The notion that they are “independent” and rule by impartial expertise is on the level of stories about tooth fairies.

Scientific Pretense Comes to America

AMERICA GOT ITS FIRST straight dose of scientific governance in the 1950s. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Brown v. Board of Education—whether schools segregated by race fulfilled the 14th Amendment’s requirement for “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens—not by reference to any legal or political principle on which the general population might pronounce themselves (one such principle was available in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that Brown overturned), but rather by reference to a “study” by sociologist Kenneth Clark concluding that “separate is inherently unequal.” This was a finding supposedly of fact, not of law. Whereas ordinary citizens were supposedly competent to agree or disagree with the legal and moral principles on either side of these cases, the Court decided Brown on a basis that could be contested only by sociologists as well credentialed and funded as Mr. Clark. Debates within the Court and in society at large subsequently have been focused not so much on what is lawful as on contending studies about the effects of competing policies.

The scientization of American political life was just beginning. Between the 1950s and 2000 social policy slipped away from voter control because the courts and the “independent agencies” took them over. Beginning in the 1970s, courts and agencies began to take control of economic life through the pretense of scientific environmental management.

In Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), the Court agreed with what it called predominant scientific opinion that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause “global warming” and hence ordered it to regulate those emissions—essentially America’s economy. The American people’s elected representatives had not passed and were not about to pass any law concerning “global warming.” No matter.

It should be superfluous to point out that “scientific” briefs submitted to courts, as well as the innumerable contacts between expert “independent” agencies and the interest groups in the fields they regulate, are anything but impartial, bloodless, disinterested, apolitical. But in fact the power of scientific pretense rests largely on the thin veil it casts over clashes of interest and political identity. Let us look further.

In his 1960 Godkin lectures at Harvard, C. P. Snow, who had been Britain’s civil service commissioner, told Americans that “In any advanced industrial society…the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men: in secret and, at least in legal form, by men who cannot have firsthand knowledge of what these choices depend upon or what their results may be.” In short, public figures must be figureheads for scientists who are formally responsible to them but whose minds are beyond common understanding and scrutiny. Snow concluded that society’s greatest need was for change, and that scientists were “socially imaginative minds.” While scientists should not administer, he said, they should be part of the Establishment, along with administrators. He illustrated this point by contrasting the clash in Britain between two scientists, Sir Henry Tizard, innovative, progressive, and very much a member of the administrative- scientific Establishment, and F. A. Lindemann, a scientist close to Winston Churchill but outside the Establishment. According to Snow, Lindemann polluted science and administration with politics, while Tizard’s contrary scientific and administrative opinions were supra-political. Tizard’s membership in the Establishment made them that. But in the same year, President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell to the American people after eight years in the White House and a lifetime in the U.S. Army argued that government’s embrace of science would corrupt itself and science. Whereas Snow had taken pains to identify science with public policy and to call true scientists only those who got along with colleagues and especially with administrators, Eisenhower pointed to these things as subversive. His oft-cited warning about the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” was part of the address’s larger point: the danger that big government poses to citizenship:

…a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

The prospect against which Eisenhower warned has become our time’s reality. One accedes to the rank of expert by achieving success in getting grants, primarily from the government. Anyone who has worked in a university knows that getting government grants is the surefire way to prestige and power. And on what basis do the government’s grantors make the grants that constitute the scientific credentials? Science itself? But the grantors are not scientists, and they would not be immune to human temptations even if they were. Personal friendship, which C. P. Snow touted, is not nearly as problematic as intellectual kinship, professional and political partisanship. In sum, as Eisenhower warned, politicians are tempted to cast issues of public policy in terms of science in order to foreclose debate, to bring to the side of their interests expert witnesses whose expertise they manufactured and placed beyond challenge.

Power by Pretense

TESTIFYING TO A JOINT CONGRESSIONAL committee on March 21, 2007, former vice president Al Gore argued for taxing the use of energy based on the combustion of carbon, and for otherwise forcing Americans to emit much less carbon dioxide. Gore wanted to spend a substantial amount of the money thus raised to fund certain business ventures. (Incidentally or not, he himself had a large stake in those ventures.)

But, he argued, his proposal was not political, and debating it was somehow illegitimate, because he was just following “ science,” according to which, if these things were not done, Planet Earth would overheat and suffocate. He said: “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem.’” But Gore’s advocacy of “solutions” for “global warming” was anything but politically neutral acceptance of expertise. As vice president until 2001, and afterward, he had done much to build a veritable industry of scientists and publicists who had spent some $50 billion, mostly in government money, during the previous decade to turn out and publicize “studies” bolstering his party’s efforts to regulate and tax in specific ways. Moreover, he claimed enough scientific knowledge to belittle his opposition for following “science fiction.” But Gore’s work was political, not scientific. Not surprisingly, some of his opponents in Congress and among scientists thought that Gore and his favorite scientists were doing well-paid science fiction.

Who was right? Gore’s opponents, led by Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, argued that the substance of the two main questions, whether the Earth was being warmed by human activities, and what if anything could and should be done about it, should be debated before the grand jury of American citizens. Gore et al. countered that “the debate is over!” and indeed that nonscientific citizens had no legitimate place in the debate. Yet he and like-minded citizens claimed to know enough to declare that it had ended. They also claimed that scientists who disagreed with them, or who merely questioned the validity of the conclusions produced by countless government science commissions to which Gore and his followers had funneled government money, and which they called “mainstream science,” were “deniers”—illegitimate. Equally out of place, they argued, were calls that they submit to tests of their scientific IQ. Whatever else one may call this line of argument, one may not call it scientific. It belongs to the genus “politics.” But, peculiarly, it is politics that aims to take matters out of the realm of politics, where citizens may decide by persuading one another, and places them in a realm where power is exercised by capturing the commanding heights of the Establishment.

Thus on July 28, 2008, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi explained to journalist David Rogers why she was right in forbidding Congress to vote on proposals by Republicans to open U.S. coastlines to oil drilling. Using fossil fuels, she explained, causes global warming. Forbidding votes that could result in more oil being used was her duty because, she said, “I’m trying to save the planet. I’m trying to save the planet.” No one would vouch for her scientific expertise. But she was surely saving an item in the agenda of her party’s constituencies, which rightly feared defeat in open debates and votes.

In the same way, in September 2008 Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Ben Bernanke told Congress and the country, backed by many in the banking business, that unless Congress authorized spending $700 billion to purchase the financial assets that the banks and investment houses considered least valuable, the entire financial system would collapse and the American people would lose their savings, jobs, homes, and so on, and that authorizing that money would avert the crisis. But none of those who proposed the expenditure explained why the failure of some large private enterprises and their subsequent sale at public auction would cause any of the abovementioned catastrophes. There was no explanation of how the money would be spent, how the assets to be bought would be valued, or why. The arguments were simply statements by experts in government as well as finance—whose repeated mistakes had brought about the failures that were at the center of contention, and whose personal interests were involved in the plan they proposed. The strength of their arguments lay solely in the position of those making them. They were the ones who were supposed to know. And when, a month later, the same Paulson, backed by the same unanimous experts, told the country that the $700 billion would be spent otherwise, and as they committed some $8 trillion somehow to shore up the rest of the economy, the arguments continued to lie in the position of those making them, combined with the clamor of those who would benefit directly from the government’s outlays. In practice, expertise—or science—has come to be defined by a government job or commission. Truth and error are incidental.

The confluence of political agendas with the attempt to describe political choices as scientific rather than political, and the attempt to delegitimize opponents as out of step with science, is clear in the 2005 book by journalist Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science. Typically, Mooney disclaims substantive scientific judgment and claims only the capacity and right to discern the “credibility” of rival scientists and their claims. Note well, however, that propositions or persons are credible—that is, worth believing—only to the extent that they are correct substantively. Arguments such as Mooney’s, Paulson’s, Pelosi’s, and Gore’s most certainly aim to convince citizens about certain substantive propositions, but—and this is key—they do so indirectly, by pretending that they find certain propositions credible and others not. Credible are the ones of which they approve, coming from persons the places of which they approve: the government bureaucracies or universities. Judgments of authoritative provenance, they argue, need not refute the opposition’s arguments, or even refer to their substance because science— meaning the Establishment—supposedly has settled the arguments intellectually to its own satisfaction, the only satisfaction that matters. Mooney writes that because “American democracy… relies heavily on scientific technical expertise to function [public officials] need to rely on the best scientific knowledge available and proceed on the basis of that knowledge to find solutions.”

Modern Republicans, he argues, have put themselves “in stark contrast with both scientific information and dispassionate, expert analysis in general.” Caught in the confluence of corporate interests and conservative ideology, primarily religion, Republicans have “skewed science” on every important question of the day, from stem cell research to “global warming, mercury pollution, condom effectiveness, the alleged health risks of abortion, and much else.” They have “cherry picked” facts and, most ominously, even cited scientists to back them up. Mooney worries: “If the American people come to believe they can find a scientist willing to say anything, they will grow increasingly disillusioned with science itself.”

Against the Grain

THAT WORRY IS SERIOUS. Convincing people that what you may teach your children, what taxes you should pay, must be decided by the “scientific” pronouncements of members of a certain class challenges the American concept of popular government all too directly. To succeed, any attempt to impose things so contrary to American life must overcome political hurdles as well as human nature itself.

Government by scientific pretense runs against the grain of politics in two ways: First, since those who would rule by scientific management eschew arguments on the substance of the things, instead relying on the cachet of the scientists whose mere servants they pretend to be, their success depends on maintaining a pretense of substantive neutrality on the issues—the pretense that if “science” were to pronounce itself in the other direction, they would follow with the same alacrity. But this position is impossible to maintain against the massive evidence that those who hawk certain kinds of social or environmental policies in the name of science are first of all partisans of those policies, indeed that these policies are part of the identity of their sociopolitical class.

Second, it is inherently difficult for anyone who fancies himself a citizen to hear from another that he is not qualified to disagree with a judgment said to be scientific. Naturally, he will ask: If I as a layman don’t know enough to disagree, what does that other layman know that qualifies him to agree? Could it be that his appeal to science is just another way of telling me to shut up because he is better than I, and that he is justifying his presumption by pointing to his friends in high places?

The most important claims made on behalf of science often run against human nature, none more so than its central claim about the nature of humanity. On December 20, 2005, deciding the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, federal district court judge James Jones prohibited the Dover, Pennsylvania, schools from teaching the possibility that human beings are the result not of chance but of “intelligent design.” To partisan applause, he ruled that science had shown, proved, that all life, including human life, is the result of chance, that it is meaningless, that entertaining the possibility of the opposite is religion, and that doing so in a public school amounts to the “establishment of religion,” and hence is prohibited by the First Amendment.

Leave aside the absurdity of maintaining that the authors of the U.S. Constitution entertained any part of this reasoning. Consider: since everyone knows that nobody reallyknows how life, particularly human life, came about (cf. the legal meaning of the word “knowledge”), any attempt to impose as official truth the counterintuitive proposition that human life is meaningless discredits itself. It is impossible to suppress the natural reaction: “How the hell do they know?”

Human nature rebels especially violently against those who pretend to special knowledge but who then prove inept, whose prescriptions bring misery. When politicians lay out their reasons why something should or should not be done, when the public accepts those reasons, and then the ensuing measures bring grief, the public’s anger is tempered by its own participation in the decision, and is poured out on the ideas themselves as well as on the politicians who espoused them. But when the politicians make big changes in economic and social life on the basis of “science” beyond the people’s capacity to understand, when events show them to have been wrong, when those changes impoverish and degrade life, then popular anger must crash its full force only on those who made themselves solely responsible. The failed sorcerers’ apprentices’ excuse “science made me do it” will only add scorn to retribution.  

Climate Alarmists Can’t Handle the Truth. It goes Against Their Agenda!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Just Who is Waging the ‘War on Science’?

Paul Driessen | Jul 26, 2014

 

Left-leaning environmentalists, media and academics have long railed against the alleged conservative “war on science.” They augment this vitriol with substantial money, books, documentaries and conference sessions devoted to “protecting” global warming alarmists from supposed “harassment” by climate chaos skeptics, whom they accuse of wanting to conduct “fishing expeditions” of alarmist emails and “rifle” their file cabinets in search of juicy material (which might expose collusion or manipulated science).

A primary target of this “unjustified harassment” has been Penn State University professor Dr. Michael Mann, creator of the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph that purported to show a sudden spike in average planetary temperatures in recent decades, following centuries of supposedly stable climate. But at a recent AGU meeting a number of other “persecuted” scientists were trotted out to tell their story of how they have been “attacked” or had their research, policy demands or integrity questioned.

To fight back against this “harassment,” the American Geophysical Union actually created a “Climate Science Legal Defense Fund,” to pay mounting legal bills that these scientists have incurred. The AGU does not want any “prying eyes” to gain access to their emails or other information. These scientists and the AGU see themselves as “Freedom Fighters” in this “war on science.” It’s a bizarre war.

While proclaiming victimhood, they detest and vilify any experts who express doubts that we face an imminent climate Armageddon. They refuse to debate any such skeptics, or permit “nonbelievers” to participate in conferences where endless panels insist that every imaginable and imagined ecological problem is due to fossil fuels. They use hysteria and hyperbole to advance claims that slashing fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions will enable us to control Earth’s climate – and that references to computer model predictions and “extreme weather events” justify skyrocketing energy costs, millions of lost jobs, and severe damage to people’s livelihoods, living standards, health and welfare.

Reality is vastly different from what these alarmist, environmentalist, academic, media and political elites attempt to convey.

In 2009, before Mann’s problems began, Greenpeace started attacking scientists it calls “climate deniers,” focusing its venom on seven scientists at four institutions, including the University of Virginia and University of Delaware. This anti-humanity group claimed its effort would “bring greater transparency to the climate science discussion” through “educational and other charitable public interest activities.” (If you believe that, send your bank account number to those Nigerians with millions in unclaimed cash.)

UVA administrators quickly agreed to turn over all archived records belonging to Dr. Patrick Michaels, a prominent climate chaos skeptic who had recently retired from the university. They did not seem to mind that no press coverage ensued, and certainly none that was critical of these Spanish Inquisition tactics.

However, when the American Tradition Institute later filed a similar FOIA request for Dr. Mann’s records, UVA marshaled the troops and launched a media circus, saying conservatives were harassing a leading climate scientist. The AGU, American Meteorological Society and American Association of University Professors (the nation’s college faculty union) rushed forward to lend their support. All the while, in a remarkable display of hypocrisy and double standards, UVA and these organizations continued to insist it was proper and ethical to turn all of Dr. Michaels’ material over to Greenpeace.

Meanwhile, although it had started out similarly, the scenario played out quite differently at the University of Delaware. Greenpeace targeted Dr. David Legates, demanding access to records related to his role as the Delaware State Climatologist. The University not only agreed to this. It went further, and demanded that Legates produce all his records – regardless of whether they pertained to his role as State Climatologist, his position on the university faculty, or his outside speaking and writing activities, even though he had received no state money for any of this work. Everything was fair game.

But when the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a FOIA request for documents belonging to several U of Delaware faculty members who had contributed to the IPCC, the university told CEI the state’s FOIA Law did not apply. (The hypocrisy and double standards disease is contagious.) Although one faculty contributor clearly had received state money for his climate change work, University Vice-President and General Counsel Lawrence White falsely claimed none of the individuals had received state funds.

When Legates approached White to inquire about the disparate treatment, White said Legates did not understand the law. State law did not require that White produce anything, White insisted, but also did not preclude him from doing so. Under threat of termination for failure to respond to the demands of a senior university official, Legates was required to allow White to inspect his emails and hardcopy files.

Legates subsequently sought outside legal advice. At this, his academic dean told him he had now gone too far. “This puts you at odds with the University,” she told him, “and the College will no longer support anything you do.” This remarkable threat was promptly implemented. Legates was terminated as the State Climatologist, removed from a state weather network he had been instrumental in organizing and operating, and banished from serving on any faculty committees.

Legates appealed to the AAUP – the same union that had staunchly supported Mann at UVA. Although the local AAUP president had written extensively on the need to protect academic freedom, she told Legates that FOIA issues and actions taken by the University of Delaware’s vice-president and dean “would not fall within the scope of the AAUP.”

What about the precedent of the AAUP and other professional organizations supporting Dr. Mann so quickly and vigorously? Where was the legal defense fund to pay Legates’ legal bills? Fuggedaboutit.

In the end, it was shown that nothing White examined in Legates’ files originated from state funds. The State Climate Office had received no money while Legates was there, and the university funded none of Legates’ climate change research though state funds. This is important because, unlike in Virginia, Delaware’s FOIA law says that regarding university faculty, only state-funded work is subject to FOIA.

That means White used his position to bully and attack Legates for his scientific views – pure and simple. Moreover, a 1991 federal arbitration case had ruled that the University of Delaware had violated another faculty member’s academic freedom when it examined the content of her research. But now, more than twenty years later, U Del was at it again.

Obviously, academic freedom means nothing when one’s views differ from the liberal faculty majority – or when they contrast with views and “science” that garners the university millions of dollars a year from government, foundation, corporate and other sources, to advance the alarmist climate change agenda. All these institutions are intolerant of research by scientists like Legates, because they fear losing grant money if they permit contrarian views, discussions, debates or anything that questions the climate chaos “consensus.” At this point, academic freedom and free speech obviously apply only to advance selected political agendas, and campus “diversity” exists in everything but opinions.

Climate alarmists have been implicated in the ClimateGate scandal, for conspiring to prevent their adversaries from receiving grants, publishing scientific papers, and advancing their careers. Yet they are staunchly supported by their universities, professional organizations, union – and groups like Greenpeace.

Meanwhile, climate disaster skeptics are vilified and harassed by these same groups, who pretend they are fighting to “let scientists conduct research without the threat of politically motivated attacks.” Far worse, we taxpayers are paying the tab for the junk science – and then getting stuck with regulations, soaring energy bills, lost jobs and reduced living standards…based on that bogus science.

Right now, the climate alarmists appear to be winning their war on honest science. But storm clouds are gathering, and a powerful counteroffensive is heading their way.

Uncommonly Good News….I would Love to Hear Much More Like It!

/ 1957chev / 7 Comments

Contract scrapped

By Leith Dunick, tbnewswatch.com

View larger pictures
Streak of Green – Hair SalonHey Stylists! It’s time to go green! Looking for a F/T stylist to join our team in a very busy organic, eco friendly full service salonwww.streakofgreen.com

A spokeswoman for the Nor’Wester Mountain Escarpment Protection Committee says she’s ecstatic that Horizon Wind Inc.’s planned turbine farm in Thunder Bay might be dead in the water.

Irene Bond said she learned on Friday that the Ontario Power Authority had cancelled the Toronto-based company’s feed-in tariff contract, essentially ending the agreement to sell energy to the provincial grid. 

Bond said the news caught her off guard.

“If this is the news that will end this project, that the FIT contract is indeed cancelled for the whole project, yeah it is a surprise and a very welcome one,” she said.

“I’m just thrilled that this will finally be over. We’ve been at it for five years as a community grass-roots group to educate people about the destruction and the history of the land and that it deserves better than to be industrialized.”

The OPA confirmed the contract cancellation via email on Friday, citing project delays as the main reason for the decision.

“The Big Thunder Wind Park project was significantly delayed due to force majeure events,” OPA spokeswoman Mary Bernard said. “Under a FIT contract, either party to the contract has the right to terminate the contract if force majeure events delay a project past 24 months. The OPA terminated the Big Thunder Park project for this reason.”

According to Bernard, a force majeure is a stipulation in a contract that provides relief to a party when events beyond their control prevent them from fulfilling certain contractual obligations. But it also specifies a time limit to get things back on track.

“The OPA cannot provide details of the force majeure events due to confidentiality obligations under the contract,” Bernard said.

It’s unclear if there is an appeal process available to Horizon at this time.

Horizon Wind released a brief statement saying they have provided notice of dispute to the OPA on their decision to end the contract.

“Pending resolution of the disputed issues, Horizon Wind is evaluating its options,” the statement reads. 

The project was first approved by Thunder Bay city council in 2007.

A dispute with the city led to Horizon in 2010 filing a $126-million lawsuit against the municipality when council refused to approve certain turbine locations.

The city later backed down and the lawsuit was tossed.

More recently Fort William First Nation filed a judicial review against the Ministry of the Environment asking for all work on the project to stop until the community had been properly consulted.

The FWFN claim alleged the province failed to consult them about the project itself and the company’s 2013 renewable energy approval.

Fort William First Nation Chief Georjann Morriseau called it a great day, but said the band won’t drop any of its legal challenges until they’re 100 per cent certain the project won’t be completed. 

“It’s still slightly early for that,” Morriseau said. “Right now, today we’ve been working on trying to receive more confirmation on what this actually means for the project itself, for the REA application and process moving forward.

“Once we do receive that confirmation we’ll be sure to update both communities on the developments.” 

It’s not necessarily the end of the project, she cautioned. 

“It wouldn’t come as a surprise if there is an appeal,” she said, adding she thinks treaty rights must come first and be protected and will ultimately prevail.

City of Thunder Bay officials said they too are looking into the legal implications of the decision, after learning of it that morning.

“At this point we’re trying to understand what it means. We have a lease with Horizon, so I’ve asked our staff to look at it,” Commisso said, wary of speaking to specifics of the lease or whether or not he thinks it’s a good decision. 

Mayor Keith Hobbs had little to say.

“I have no comment at this time,” he said.

Minister of Natural Resources Bill Mauro said he was advised two or three days ago through the Ministry of Energy the contract was being terminated.

Mauro, a longtime opponent of the project, was coy in his reaction when asked Friday morning.

“My position on it has been well known,” Mauro said. “This is an OPA decision. The Ontario Power Authority has informed me … they’re not going through with the project and I think that we’re all going to move forward from there.”

Parker Gallant Exposes Energy Poverty, in Ontario

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Parker Gallant: Wind Turbines and solar panels bring Ontario Energy Poverty: Chapter 2

(July 23, 2014) The first Chapter on “energy poverty” introduced the reader to LIEN (Low-Income Energy Network) who held their 10th anniversary (formed one year after the Liberals were elected in 2003) and to APCH (A Place Called Home) of the City of Kawartha Lakes & Haliburton County.

 

The City has a population of 90,000 with Lindsay hosting slightly over 20,000 of that population.

In the research I found LIEN members included the CAW; who erected a wind turbine in Chatham Kent and the Windfall Centre, where Brent Kopperson sits as the founder and Executive Director. For those who have followed my articles, Kopperson was one of the original founders of the GEAA (Green Energy Act Alliance). Some of the attendees at the LIEN Conference also caught my attention as they included Environmental Defence (a GEAA founder), Toronto Hydro (the sole distribution company that attended and whose distribution rates have increased 176% in the past 11 years), the OEB (Ontario Energy Board) and the OPA (Ontario Power Authority). Union Gas & Enbridge were also represented.

Responsibility for creating “energy poverty” is not something that one would anticipate claiming responsibility for; but, as pointed out in the previous chapter, the letter Energy Minister, Bob Chiarelli sent to the OEB certainly inferred it was the ruling Liberal Party that created it. The letter, from Minister Chiarelli to the OEB was dated April 23, 2014, just over 10 years after the Liberals passed: Bill 100,Electricity Restructuring Act, 2004 creating the OPA which brought us four (4) long term energy plans in a 10 year time frame and whose responsibility has been to contract for intermittent, unreliable, expensive renewable energy.

When I originally spoke with the LIEN Coordinator, Zee Bhanji, I questioned her as to who was the local distribution company (LDC) with the worst reputation in respect to cutting off clients for not paying their electricity bills. The answer was Hydro One, the Provincially owned LDC with about 25% of the residential clients in Ontario. Co-incidentally when I touched base with Jennifer Lopinski of APCH it turned out Hydro One were the LDC for the City of Kawartha Lakes & Haliburton County. The data that APCH had gathered and sent to me disclosed some interesting statistics that if applied to Hydro One’s full client base of 1.1 million residential customers and the 4.4 million total customers; paints a dismal picture for those living at the “low-income” levels detailed in Minister Chiarelli’s letter to the OEB. Minister Chiarelli certainly wasn’t concerned about the 11,800 plus personnel of OPG and Hydro One on the 2014 “Sunshine List”!

The statistics that Jennifer supplied (years 2008 through to Dec. 31, 2013) covered five (5) fuel types including; oil, wood, natural gas, propane and hydro. Out of $251,474 of fuel utility requests (2013), 86.5% ($217,490) were for electricity supplied by Hydro One. The number of requests for 2013 were 276 meaning Hydro One represented approximately 239 on the list and the average negotiated amount appears to be about $875 per household and represents .644% of all households (37,100) in the City.

Extrapolating the APCH numbers to Hydro One’s 1.1 million residential clients would mean that 7,100 of their customers would be affected by “energy poverty” and taking that further would mean that they would be called on to provide $6.2 million in support. When I examined theLEAP (Low-Income Energy Assistance Program) for 2012 in the report prepared by the OEB it indicated that Hydro One had provided grants of $1,503,062 to 2,628 customers and that amount was $1.3 million less than the salaries of their top 5 executives.

If one extrapolates the foregoing to all LDC supplied residential ratepayer households the number of customers living in “energy poverty”; at a minimum, is 28,300 households or 20,000 more than the LEAP program supported and translates into a requirement for $25 million versus the $3.9 million actually disbursed in 2012.

It is worth noting that the numbers kindly supplied by Jennifer Lopinski of APCH only encompasses those who approached the charity for help. There are probably many households that were unaware of APCH and never contacted them for assistance. Perhaps Hydro One has the answer to that question?
Another reference made in Chapter One was to a letter to the editor of the London Free Press written by Kris Stevens, Executive Director of the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association just prior to the June 12, 2014 Provincial election. One of the quotes from Stevens letter was this nonsensical iteration:

“We’re making real progress and we can do so much more. On election day don’t vote for those that want to kill thousands of new jobs in the clean green energy sector. Vote for an Ontario that is heated, cooled and moved by a modern distributed clean sustainable energy system. A modern green energy system will power our prosperity for generations to come.”

“Real progress” to those who pushed renewable energy has proven to be a fallacy that has done nothing more than create prosperity for foreign companies that rushed to Ontario for the money extracted from Ontario’s ratepayers. At the same time the push for wind and solar power has played a major role at creating “energy poverty” that now rivals Germany with over 1% of all households (44,000) in Ontario suffering from that malady!

Parker Gallant is a retired bank executive and a former director of Energy Probe Research Foundation. As with all independent bloggers on this site, Parker’s views do not necessarily reflect those of Energy Probe.

Aussies Dump the Regressive Carbon Tax!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Carbon Tax Gone – RET to Follow

July 19, 2014 by  

Australia has started to dismantle the ‘green’ policies that have sabotaged its economy and fuelled the wind turbine industry – all with no perceivable environmental benefit – yet generating widespread annoyance across rural Australia. The first to go was the Carbon Tax – which Tory Aardvark has described so well in his post below – next will be the RET.

oz_no_carbon_tax

Australia Dumps Carbon Tax
Tory Aardvark
18 July 2014

One thing you can be absolutely sure of, globally, there will be a huge number of outraged Greens and warming alarmists because Australia has dumped it’s carbon tax.

This as the saying goes really is a double whammy, Australian PM Tony Abbott is a politician who has actually kept his word and dumped the hugely unsuccessful and deeply unpopular Carbon Tax, that Labor PM Julia Gillard promised voters she would never introduce, and then promptly broke her word.

The Carbon Tax was ill conceived, it generated virtually no revenue because of its negative impact on productivity and led directly to the downfall of the Gillard Labor/Green coalition, so it wasn’t all bad really.

Alarm bells will be sounding across the Green world as those that believe that crippling Green taxation will allow the human race to select a climate of its own choosing, can see their belief system about to come crashing down. In the immortal words of EU Climate Commissar Connie Hedegaard ‘A world you like. With a climate you like’, delusional thinking even by 15th Century standards, frankly bizarre in the 21st Century.

The response from the Green rent seekers, crony capitalists, left wing politicians and others complicit in the AGW scam has been, well what you would expect really:

EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said the European Union regretted the repeal of the tax just as new pricing initiatives are emerging around the world.

“The EU is convinced that pricing carbon is not only the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions, but also THE tool to make the economic paradigm shift the world needs. This is why the EU will continue to work towards global carbon pricing with all international partners,” she said.

“With today’s repeal of the Carbon Pricing Mechanism, the discussions to link the Australian system and Europe’s carbon market will evidently be discontinued.”

Assorted Green NGOs are muttering darkly about irresponsibility, catastrophic climate change, rising sea levels and Green Armageddon because a country that emits just 1.19% of global CO2 emissions has repealed a job and wealth killing tax. To obfuscate the tiny global percentage of CO2 that Australia emits the warming alarmist cabal have invented CO2 emissions per capita to overstate their case and make Australia appear to be a bigger “polluter” than it actually is.

Climate scientists say the country is also likely to expect more extreme weather events as the plant warms, including prolonged periods of drought and more wildfires.

This Green tax definitely had mythical properties being able to control the weather, prevent wildfires and drought.  Where will the Unicorns be able to drink now?

WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O’Gorman said the move ensured polluting would now be “free”.

“This will see carbon pollution go up, not down,” he said.

“Without an effective mechanism to cut carbon pollution, Australia is unlikely to meet its international commitments to cut pollution by 5-25% by 2020 and tackle global warming.”

There is more bad news looming if you are possessed of an irrational fear of CO2, it appears that the world’s oldest Carbon Market is about to join Australia’s Carbon Tax in the dumpster:

Another looming setback to connecting markets and eventually setting a global price on polluting carbon is the possibility that New Zealand’s ETS, small but one of the first to be established, will be scrapped after a September election.

In remains to be seen how many other countries will further remove themselves from the UN backed AGW scare, Canada is a  likely candidate, in a devastating blow to the UNFCCC process Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol stating “Kyoto was not the way forward for Canada or the world” just one day after COP18 finished.

Japan is also wavering on committing Green economic suicide now, then of course there is Putin’s Russia which will play along with the AGW scam for as long as it suits Gazprom and not 1 second longer.
Tory Aardvark

The mandated biannual RET review is due to present its findings in a few weeks –  but STT hears that the current version of the RET will disappear and the planned adjustments will promote renewable energy but also spell the end of the wind industry in Australia. For we all know – wind turbines don’t run on wind – they run on subsidies. Take away the subsidies  – and the problem will disappear.

Unicorn Drinking from a River

Faux-Greenies Long for a New World Disorder!

/ 1957chev / 1 Comment

A Future without Electricity 
That’s what radical Greens want — and President Obama’s policies are moving us toward. 

Back to the Future?: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
 
 

 

 
 

Stephen Moore 

Could the radical-Green movement in America make mankind’s future resemble a science-fiction Earth ruled by apes?

This weekend I went to the see the blockbuster movieDawn of the Planet of the Apes, and an Investor’s Business Daily editorial this week got me thinking about a bleak scenario. Our future won’t have ape rulers, but, IBD points out, a world without energy might well look similar.

In the movie, bands of humans are resisting a global government of super-intelligent monkeys, gorillas and the like. The humans lack access to electricity, making their struggle — let along the normal life we know today — nearly impossible.

They are rendered powerless — literally. The simian despots understand that depriving the humans of access to electricity will keep them underfoot. (The climax of the movie, as IBDexplains, has humans in San Francisco — of all places — heroically reopening a power plant and bringing electricity back to the whole city.)

 I wonder how many Americans got the subtle message here: Energy is the master resource. Without it, we return to a Stone Age existence. Life in its absence is nasty, brutish and short.

Is that where the radical Greens, one of the most influential political forces in America today, would take us? If we continue to follow their advice, electric power and fuel will become more expensive (as President Obama has admitted). TheInvestor’s Business Daily editorial noted, “as the Sierra Club, billionaire Tom Steyer and the Obama administration rage war against coal and other fossil fuel,” we could end up seeing “rolling brownouts and even blackouts in the years ahead.”

In other words, the apocalypse confronting America may not be the havoc of “climate change,” but a slow-motion return to a medieval lifestyle.

Consider the Obama administration’s ongoing war on coal, marked most recently by new Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring dramatic reductions in carbon emissions from power plants. America gets about 40 percent of its electricity from coal-fired plants, as IBD notes.

The greens say, no problem, we will shift to renewable energy. But it’s not so simple, as IBD points out: States with onerous renewable-energy standards such as Colorado and California are still relying heavily on coal to fill in the gaps during bad weather or periods of high demand.

There is a reliable, green, economical alternative: natural gas. It’s become cheap and abundant due to new smart drilling technologies. But the environmentalists are busy devising strategies to shut down natural gas as an energy source as well, raising unsupported objections to fracking, one of the methods used to extract it. The Sierra Club says we have to move “beyond natural gas,” even though natural gas is reducing carbon emissions.

And as IBD notes, the Left has little love for other sources of electricity, either, such as nuclear and hydro. In fact, the editorial notes, we get about 90 percent of our power from sources that the Left is trying to shut down.

Sorry, for the foreseeable future, we aren’t going to get our power for our $18 trillion economy from wind turbines and solar panels. And if we begin to try, prices are going to skyrocket.

As for our major transportation fuel, the Greens think oil is a “dirty” fuel that causes global warming. They’re trying to stop domestic drilling anywhere they can. They say we should move to electric cars. Fine. But where are we going to get the electricity to power the batteries?

Last summer our suburban home in northern Virginia lost power for two days during a storm. No lights, no computers, no air conditioning, no TV, no iPods or iPhones. To my three sons, this was like hell on earth. How did people live without electricity? They wondered. Very poorly, I told them.

I wonder how many young people will be so excited about “green energy” when such outages are commonplace and they come to the realization that life without those “dirty” sources of power won’t be so wonderful.

We don’t need apes to destroy our planet. The green humans seems to be doing a fine job of it all on their own.

— Stephen Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.

 

No Cost/Benefit Analysis? NO Wind Turbines!

/ 1957chev / 2 Comments

Blowing Our Dollars in the Wind

Wind energy produces costly, intermittent, unpredictable electricity. But Government subsidies and mandates have encouraged a massive gamble on wind investments in Australia – over $7 billion has already been spent and another $30 billion is proposed. This expenditure is justified by the claim that by using wind energy there will be less carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere which will help to prevent dangerous global warming.

Incredibly, this claim is not supported by any credible cost-benefit analysis – a searching enquiry is well overdue. Here is a summary of things that should be included in the analysis.

Firstly, no one knows how much global warming is related to carbon dioxide and how much is due to natural variability. However, the historical record shows that carbon dioxide it is not the most important factor, and no one knows whether climate feedbacks are positive or negative. Also, in many ways, the biosphere and humanity would benefit from more warmth, carbon dioxide and moisture in the atmosphere.

However, let’s assume that reducing man’s production of carbon dioxide is a sensible goal and consider whether wind power is likely to achieve it. To do this we need to look at the whole life cycle of a wind tower.

Wind turbines are not just big simple windmills – they are massive complex machines whose manufacture and construction consume much energy and many expensive materials.  These include steel for the tower, concrete for the footings, fibre glass for the nacelle, rare metals for the electro-magnets, steel and copper for the machinery, high quality lubricating oils for the gears, fibre glass or aluminium for the blades, titanium and other materials for weather-proof paints, copper, aluminium and steel for the transmission lines and support towers, and gravel for the access roads.

There is a long production chain for each of these materials. Mining and mineral extraction rely on diesel power for mobile equipment and electrical power for haulage, hoisting, crushing, grinding, milling, smelting, refining. These processes need 24/7 reliable electric power which, in Australia, is most likely to come from coal.

These raw materials then have to be transported to many specialised manufacturing plants, again using large quantities of energy, generating more carbon dioxide.

Then comes the construction phase, starting with building a network of access roads, clearance of transmission routes, and excavation of the massive footings for the towers. Almost all of this energy will come from diesel fuel, with increased production of carbon dioxide. Moreover, every bit of land cleared results in the production of carbon dioxide as the plant material dozed out of the way rots or is burnt, and the exposed soil loses its humus to oxidation.

Once the turbine starts operating, the many towers, transmission lines and access roads need more maintenance and repair than a traditional power plant that produces concentrated energy from one small plot of land using a small number of huge, well-tested, well protected machines. Turbines usually operate in windy, exposed, isolated locations. Blades need to be cleaned using large specialised cranes; towers and machinery need regular inspection and maintenance; and mobile equipment and manpower needs to be on standby for lightning strikes, fires or accidents. All of these activities require diesel powered equipment which produces more carbon dioxide.

Even when they do produce energy, wind towers often produce it at time when demand is low – at night for example. There is no benefit in this unwanted production, but it is usually counted as saving carbon fuels.

Every wind farm also needs backup power to cover the +65% of wind generating capacity that is lost because the wind is not blowing, or blowing such a gale that the turbines have to shut down.

In Australia, most backup is provided by coal or gas plants which are forced to operate intermittently to offset the erratic winds. Coal plants and many gas plants cannot switch on and off quickly but must maintain steam pressure and “spinning reserve” in order to swing in quickly when the fickle wind drops. This causes grid instability and increases the carbon dioxide produced per unit of electricity. This waste should be debited to the wind farm that caused it.

Wind turbines also consume energy from the grid when they are idle – for lubrication, heating, cooling, lights, metering, hydraulic brakes, energising the electro-magnets, even to keep the blades turning lazily (to prevent warping) and to maintain line voltage when there is no wind. A one-month study of the Wonthaggi wind farm in Australia found that the facility consumed more electricity than it produced for 16% of the period studied. A detailed study in USA showed that 8.3% of total wind energy produced was consumed by the towers themselves. This is not usually counted in the carbon equation.

The service life of wind towers is far shorter than traditional power plants. Already many European wind farms have reached the end of their life and contractors are now gearing up for a new boom in the wind farm demolition and scrap removal business. This phase is likely to pose dangers for the environment and require much diesel powered equipment producing yet more carbon dioxide.

Most estimates of carbon dioxide “saved” by using wind power look solely at the carbon dioxide that would be produced by a coal-fired station producing the rated capacity of the wind turbine. They generally ignore all the other ways in which wind power increases carbon energy usage, and they ignore the fact that wind farms seldom produce name-plate capacity.

When all the above factors are taken into account over the life of the wind turbine, only a very few turbines in good wind locations are likely to save any carbon dioxide. Most will be either break-even or carbon-negative – the massive investment in wind may achieve zero climate “benefits” at great cost.

Entrepreneurs or consumers who choose wind power should be free to do so but taxpayers and electricity consumers should not be forced to subsidise their choices for questionable reasons. People who claim climate sainthood for wind energy should be required to prove this by detailed life-of-project analysis before getting legislative support and subsidies.

Otherwise we are just blowing our dollars in the wind.
 

 

Hey Ho, the Carbon Tax Witch is Dead…. Yaaayyy!!!!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Finally! Carbon Tax Gone – Australia gets rid of a price on carbon

As of today, Australia no longer has the most expensive “carbon” price in the world. The voters didn’t ask for a tax in 2010,  but it was forced on them in 2011. They rejected it wholeheartedly in 2013 but it still has taken months to start unwinding this completely pointless piece of symbolism which aimed to change the weather. The machinery of democracy may be slow, but this is a win for voters.

11:15am EST today: The Australian Senate passes the carbon tax repeal bill.

“Australia has become the first country in the world to abolish a price on carbon, with the Senate passing the Abbott government’s repeal bills 39 votes to 32.“ SMH

Now we need to turn off the tap to all the other green gravy rent-seekers who ignore the evidence.

h/t Matthew

Other news services are starting to cover this.  All the cross-benchers except Nick Xenophon (who was absent) voted for the repeal. Labor and the Greens opposed it. News.com

Soon big companies will stop paying a penalty on carbon emissions, currently just over $25 a tonne, ending Australia’s most controversial policy implementation since the 2003 decision to join the Iraq invasion.

Labor dragged out the final debate stages with questions about the Palmer United Party’s amendment to ensure price cuts from the carbon tax repeal are passed fully onto consumers and businesses. The Greens took a similar line of questioning and quizzed the finance minister about the government’s promised $550 saving for households from the repeal of the carbon tax.

On the question of $550 per household per year — just as it was impossible to know exactly how much more everything cost with a carbon tax, it will be impossible to know exactly how much less we will have to pay, and it will take months for savings to be passed through the supply lines. And billions of dollars wasted will never be recovered.