SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY PROJECT

The Week That Was August 7, 2010

Quote of the Week

“The report emphasizes that human society has developed for thousands of years under one climatic state, and now a new set of climatic conditions are taking shape.” NOAA’s State of the Climate in 2009, July 28, 2010 –

This Week

By Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

The quote of the week came from the NOAA report (see http://tiny.cc/nbj5c) released on July 28, the day before EPA’s declaration that it will not reconsider its finding that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to human health and welfare. Virtually weekly, physical evidence mounts that over the past 10,000 years the earth has experienced periods warmer than today – the last one was the Medieval Warm Period and cold periods such as the Little Ice Age. (Please see the first two references under NIPCC reviews.) Yet, NOAA maintains that the earth’s climate has been virtually stable for thousands of years.

This goes to the crux of the political issue – the systematic disregard by publically funded scientists of contradictory physical evidence. Be it by hockey sticks, use of carefully selected time frames, calculation of past temperatures by computer models with highly speculative assumptions, or any other means, a code of silence infects publicly funded climate science.

The public has a right to know all the science not just selected parts of it, as in the NOAA report. A right ignored by publically funded scientists. (Please see the excerpt of Bob Carter’s article “Closing out dissent” under Articles. Next week’s TWTW Science Editorial will be a short review of the NOAA report by Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso.

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The Number of the Week is +0.49°C. This is the temperature anomaly for July, 2010 from UAH Globally Averaged Satellite-Based Temperature of the Lower Atmosphere as reported by Roy Spencer.

The temperature for July is 0.49°C above the mean for the past 32.5 years. Temperatures continue to be slightly below, but not statistically significantly so, than the record for the satellite measurements set in 1998, which was a strong El Niño year. The 2009 – 2010 El Niño appears to be over. Sea surface temperatures are falling. It remains to be seen if atmospheric temperatures will fall later this year.

(http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-globaltemperatures/) We can all be thankful that Roy Spencer and John Christy adamantly believe that the public should be informed of the results of science – not selected parts of it.

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It appears that cap and trade in the US is dead – for now. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid withdrew a very weak energy bill before the Senate left for summer recess. No doubt something will return with the Senate in September, but one can only speculate what. The environmental industry is now reducing its sights from the grand scheme to smaller more focused issues.

Early reports indicate the Environmental Defense Fund spent $20 Million lobbying on cap and trade. Other environmental promoters are not opening their books as of yet. Their IRS Form 990, which is required from all non-profit organizations, should make interesting reading. The financial reports of the big corporations pushing cap and trade will also make for interesting reading.

An indication of what the nation is missing by not having cap and trade can be found in the article below describing an existing scheme that includes 10 states in the Northeast. (Please see “Greed and secrecy mark ...” under Cap and Tax.)

Many cap and trade supporters are now pinning their hopes on the EPA. However, EPAwill be tied up in litigation for some time over its proposed limitation of carbon dioxide emissions. Texas has let EPA know that it does not appreciate EPA’s interference with its state sovereignty. Other states may follow. (Please see the first article under EPA.) Then, there are the independent law suits of which SEPP is a part of one.

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The BP well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped and cemented from the top. The operation will not be complete until a relief well intercepts the existing well far below the floor of the Gulf and seals the well “from below.” The technological advances in directional drilling over the past decade are remarkable.

Government reports state the total amount of oil that gushed out of the well is about 4.9 million barrels. Fortunately, it was light oil and much of it evaporated. NOAA estimates that over 70% of the oil is gone. The size of the spill compares that the estimates of the amount of oil released into the Persian Gulf by retreating Iraqi troops during the first Gulf War (about 4 to 6 million barrels). According to Wikipedia, the Persian Gulf is 251,000 square kilometers while the Gulf of Mexico is 6.4 times as large at 1,600,000 square kilometers. Also the Persian Gulf is more enclosed. Thus, the expected long term intensity of the BP spill should be significantly less than that of the Persian Gulf. Some, but few remnants of the Persian Gulf release remain.

It continues to appear that the administration will use the BP spill to punish the entire oil industry, and consequently the American public.

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The great advances in directional drilling, combined with the stubbornness of one man, are creating a major revision of the hydrocarbon, geophysical map. With little or no government support, George Mitchell spent almost 20 years and his own money to develop a means of “fracking” shale to extract natural gas. If the method can be successfully applied elsewhere, then many areas of the world with no “recoverable” hydrocarbon reserves will have abundant reserves. The method is proving successful around Fort Worth, Texas and in the Eastern US.

The method uses water and sand mixed with small amounts of chemicals. Already the antienergy groups are attacking the method because it uses millions of gallons of water per well and some questionable chemicals. Even though the process takes place thousands of feet below the water table and below aquifers for drinking water, these groups are playing on fear of contamination of drinking water. Clearly, proper treatment of surface waste water from the process is needed. But this should be determined by science, not by fear.

Also of concern is the role that the Federal Government, particularly the EPA, may decide to play. Continued success in this privately funded enterprise will render many alternative energy schemes of Federal and state governments even more financially impractical. Will governments allow it?

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The RES is a hoax, a fraud, and a rip-off

The US Senate’s proposed Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) would force electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of their power from wind and solar – rising to 15% by 2021. These goals resemble those of the Waxman-Markey bill that barely passed the House in June 2009. It’s disturbing that some Republicans on the House Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted for ACELA (American Clean Energy Leadership Act). If the Senate were to take up an energy bill, it is likely that Sen. Brownback (R-KS) will introduce an amendment for RES.

Now, it is quite clear that wind and solar are not economic -- and probably never will be competitive, even when fuel prices rise significantly. So the RES mandate would mean that all of us taxpayers wouldsupport even more the RE rent-seekers and lobbyists, who are already milking the government for subsidies and tax-breaks for the construction of wind farms and solar energy projects.

In addition, electricity users (rate payers) would pay more for electric power to cover the higher cost. The so-called “feed in tariff” would force utilities to buy expensive wind and solar electricity and average the cost into the rest of the power produced. The consumer, meaning all of us, would pay for this boondoggle. It’s just a huge transfer of money, yet another regressive tax on consumers, with the electric utilities forced to become tax collectors.

The hoax part of the RES is that “clean electricity” is being advertised as a way to save the earth from the ‘dreadful fate’ of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). To accept this outlandish proposition, one would have to believe that the carbon dioxide generated in the burning of fossil fuels has a noticeable influence on climate. The data argue against it. The constantly advertised “scientific consensus” is phony; it does not exist. The evidence that the UN climate panel, the IPCC, puts forward in support of AGW is pitifully inadequate—and wrong. It is easy to show that no credible evidence exists; just look at the summary of the NIPCC report “Nature, not human activity, rules the climate.” It is available for free on the Internet. (http://tiny.cc/0cawy)

The fraud relates to the idea that energy produced without CO2 emission is “clean.” This word ‘clean’ is being misused, and that’s a huge part of the problem. Of course, removing genuine pollutants like sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides and mercury from smokestacks is a real clean up. It is already mandated by the Clean Air Act and being pursued adequately. But CO2 is not a pollutant – in spite of the claims of the EPAin its ‘Endangerment Finding’ – which has yet to be tested in court. CO2 is neither toxic nor irritating nor visible—nor a climate forcer of any significance, so the idea that we have to stop emitting CO2, or capture and sequester it, is a pure fraud.

And finally, the whole scheme is a financial ripoff. We all know that wind and solar energy are intermittent. If their use should rise beyond the present few percent, we would require either onsite storage of electricity or large standby capacity, probably fueled by expensive natural gas, to kick in when the wind kicks out. Either scheme would impose huge additional costs.

The biggest part of the swindle is that the RES is being sold on the basis of creating “green jobs.” But since when does wasting money create productive jobs? Why not leave it with consumers who can save and invest it to create real jobs. A study conducted in Spain, which has gone overboard on renewable energy, shows that each so-called green job displaces between two and three real jobs. In any case, the manufacture of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells is now in the hands of lower-cost Chinese industry.

So the green jobs in the US would consist of sweeping the mirrors clean from dust and dirt and fixing the blades and gearboxes of the turbines when they fail. In all of this, the proposed legislation ignores nuclear power, which is not only “clean” in the sense of not emitting carbon dioxide, but is also competitive in price with most fossil fuels. Nuclear is most likely to become the major source of electric power once low-cost fossil fuels are depleted. Yet ACELA explicitly says that new nuclear power and updates to existing nuclear facilities and generation from municipal solid waste incineration are not included in the base quantity.

The hypocrisy of the RES advocates is appalling. It’s OK for the taxpayer to subsidize low-carbon energy that doesn’t work (wind, solar) but not low-carbon energy that does work (nuclear).