Author: Steve Milloy

If Al Gore’s Chicago Climate Exchange Suffers Total Failure, Does the MSM Make a Sound?

By Steve Milloy
November 6, 2010, PajamasMedia.com

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.

Although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law, like the Waxman-Markey scheme passed by the House in June 2009.

At its founding in November 2000, it was estimated that the size of CCX’s carbon trading market could reach $500 billion. That estimate ballooned over the years to $10 trillion.

Al Capone tried to use Prohibition to muscle in on a piece of all the action in Chicago. The CCX’s backers wanted to use a new prohibition on carbon emissions to muscle in on a piece of, quite literally, all the action in the world.

The CCX was the brainchild of Northwestern University business professor Richard Sandor, who used $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation to launch the CCX. For his efforts, Time named Sandor as one of its Heroes of the Planet in 2002 and one of its Heroes of the Environment in 2007.

The CCX seemed to have a lock on success. Not only was a young Barack Obama a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX, but over the years it attracted such big name climate investors as Goldman Sachs and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the CCX’s highly anticipated looting of taxpayers and consumers — cap-and-trade imploded following its high water mark of the House passage of the Waxman-Markey bill. With ongoing economic recession, Climategate, and the tea party movement, what once seemed like a certainty became anything but.

CCX’s panicked original investors bailed out this spring, unloading the dog and its across-the-pond cousin, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), for $600 million to the New York Stock Exchange-traded Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) — an electronic futures and derivatives platform based in Atlanta and London. (Luckier than the CCX, the ECX continues to exist thanks to the mandatory carbon caps of the Kyoto Protocol.)

The ECX may soon follow the CCX into oblivion, however — the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. No new international treaty is anywhere in sight.

While we don’t know how well Al Gore and Goldman Sachs fared on their investments in the CCX, we do know that there’s no reason to cry for Sandor. He received $98.5 million for his 16.5% stake in CCX when it was sold. Not bad for a failure that somebody else financed.

Incredibly (but not surprisingly), although thousands of news articles have been published about CCX by the lamestream media over the years, a Nexis search conducted a week after CCX’s announcement revealed no news articles published about its demise.

Outside of a report in Crain’s Chicago Business and a soft-pedaled article in a small trade publication, the media has entirely ignored the demise of the only U.S. effort at carbon trading. Even Glenn Beck, who has dedicated quite a bit of Fox News airtime to exposing the CCX, has yet to mention the news.

Despite ending carbon trading, the CCX isn’t vanishing altogether. It intends to transition into the murky world of dealing in carbon offsets. Once again, however, with the tide leaving on carbon regulation and increased concerns about fraudulent carbon offsets, the future of that market is quite uncertain.

With the demise of CCX carbon trading, only the still-pending Waxman-Markey bill is keeping cap and trade alive — technically, at least — in the U.S. According to JunkScience.com’s Cap-and-Trade Death Clock, however, Waxman-Markey only has about 60 days of life left before it, too, turns into a pumpkin.

Despite this good news, opponents of carbon regulation will need to remain vigilant. While radical greens and the rent-seeking “clean energy” industry are down, they are not out.

Though they will never again dare utter the term “cap and trade,” they will reformulate and rebrand carbon regulation in the form of a national “renewable electricity standard” (RES), a “carbon tax,” or perhaps something even more innocent and cuddly — like “free cotton candy for everyone (FCCE).”

The global warming mob will be back, with their old agenda and new deceit, in 2011. Given that Republican politicians have a long history of squishiness on environmental issues, the rest of us will need to be prepared to continue the battle against Marxist/socialist and economy-killing energy rationing and taxes.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.

Junk science machine attacks BPA

By Steve Milloy
November 4, 2010, GreenHellBlog.com

Radical environmentalists and unscrupulous profiteers have put together a perpetual junk science machine in hopes of driving the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) to extinction. That machine includes a gullible/sympathetic media that hopes to get away with telling the public only part of the story. Consider a Nov. 2 report by Science News’ Janet Raloff, “Skin is no barrier to BPA study shows; Finding suggests store receipts could be significant source of exposures.”

Raloff starts her story by quoting the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Frederick vom Saal (more on him later), who says that

“The new study [by Daniel Zalko et al. and published in Chemosphere] is now unequivocal in showing that yes, BPA can go through human skin.”

While no one disputes that some BPA can be absorbed through the skin, the question is how much and is this harmful?

As Zalko admits in his study, BPA is metabolized to highly water soluble metabolites that are known to be estrogen inactive. This downplayed fact is, of course, devastating to the underlying scare, which relies on the hypothesis that absorbed BPA acts like an estrogen.

To get around this problem, Raloff obliquely acknowledges it by stating,

“Though such transformations are often assumed to render a chemical nontoxic…”

She then offers a naked claim by Zalko in contradiction:

“’that would be a false assumption,’ Zalko says, ‘because any compound that has been conjugated can be deconjugated’.”

But while Zalko claims that these metabolites can be converted back into BPA in the body, this is pure speculation (wishful thinking?) on his part as there is no data to support the claim.

Raloff then tells us that,

The role of metabolites in BPA’s potential toxicity is complicated, vom Saal says, because the body can — and regularly does — conjugate and deconjugate compounds. “It’s well known,” for instance, “that the body is full of desulfating enzymes, which play a role regulating estrogen levels during pregnancy.”

There is no doubt that the body is full of many chemicals that have a variety of roles — but there remains no evidence that the body converts any non-estrogenic BPA metabolites back into BPA.

Raloff’s article then goes on to discuss another earlier Zalko study involving application of BPA to the ears of dead pigs. Zalko reports that after three days, more than half of the applied BPA diffused through the skins of the pig ears.

But who cares about how much BPA can be absorbed by the ears of dead pigs? We have data from real human beings. As pointed out on this blog earlier:

A June 2010 study published in the journal Annals of Bioanalysis and Chemistry by Swiss food regulators reported that a person repeatedly touching thermal printer paper for 10 hours/day, such as at a cash register, would absorb 42 times less BPA than permitted by current safety regulations, which already have a very significant margin of safety. No workers or consumers would normally be exposed to even such infinitesimal amounts.

A February 2010 study from the University of Zurich’s Centre for Xenobiotic Risk Research reported that, “Dermal absorption (that is, absorption through the skin), is therefore at most a secondary absorption route for bisphenol A. The primary absorption route is still dietary intake. For this route, daily total amounts of bisphenol A around 10,000 times higher are considered harmless for adults.”

Raloff relies heavily on vom Saal to validate Zalko’s claims and insinuations. But she omits mention of two salient facts about vom Saal:

  1. He is a long-time and reality-free advocate against BPA; and
  2. His scientific claims against BPA have not been replicated by independent scientists.

Raloff concludes her article by pointing out that Appleton Papers is poised to rush to market BPA-free receipt paper for the upcoming holiday season. No doubt Raloff’s Science News hatchet-job will accompany Appleton’s marketing pitches — a perfect accompaniment as it contains not a single skeptical or dissenting voice.

BPA may be targeted for extinction but here’s why the rest of us ought not let that happen.

BPA is the test case for the bogus theory of endocrine disrupters. If the radical greens get away with destroying BPA’s reputation based on that never-validated hypothesis, they will proceed to use that scam against a host of other chemicals. The battle for BPA is not really about BPA. It’s about whether we will use science or circuses to determine chemical safety.

For more on BPA, check out Debunkosaurus.com.

Re-educating Mitch McConnell on clean coal

While we shouldn’t expect our left-wing elitist of a President to understand last Tuesday’s electoral rejection of his “progressive” prescriptions for America, we should expect Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to get it.

But Sen. McConnell seems to have missed the message, at least when it comes to cap-and-trade — odd for a coal state politician. The day after the election, Sen. McConnell said:

“The president says he’s for nuclear power. Most of my members are for nuclear power. The president says he’s for clean coal technology. Most of my members are for clean coal technology. There are areas that we can make progress on for the country.”

Aside from the canard of President Obama sincerely supporting nuclear power and the fact that Republicans ought to avoid the loaded and already co-opted-by-the-left
word “progress,” so-called “clean coal” is a form of Obama-think — a discredited cap-and-trade concept that was more trap than sincere policy.

Some in the coal industry and some coal-burning electric utilities had been talked into supporting cap-and-trade, provided that taxpayers and ratepayers forked over billions (if not trillions) of dollars for so-called “carbon capture and sequestration” (CCS) — that is burying utility carbon dioxide emissions deep underground and hoping they stay there safely.

But to the extent that any so-called environmentalists paid any lip service to clean coal and CCS, it was only to lure coal and utility suckers into cap-and-trade. Does anyone really believe, after all, that the greens would allow utilities to inject underground billions of tons of highly pressurized carbon dioxide all over the nation? They fought tooth-and-nail, after all, to prevent the storage of a comparatively small number of sealed casks of spent nuclear fuel one mile underground in the Nevada desert.

But discussion of clean coal and CCS are academic since, as of January 3, 2011, cap-and-trade will be as dead as dead gets. This is because there is no cap-and-trade without CCS and you can bet that the 112th Congress — at least on the House side — will not appropriate the billions (trillions) of dollars necessary of for large-scale CCS. So clean coal is dead too — except in the minds of establishment zombies who slept through the election.

If all anyone is worried about with coal is carbon dioxide, then coal is already clean — and that’s what all Republican Senate candidates believed, except perhaps for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator-elect Mark Kirk (R-IL).

Radical environmentalists are trying to put out the post-election message that support for cap-and-trade wasn’t a big negative for House Democrats.

But as a former senior Senate staffer pointed out to me…

…one need look no further than the ten House Democrats who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill but who voted against the healthcare bill — i.e., Reps. John Adler (NJ), Rick Boucher (VA), Frank Kratovil (MD), Ike Skelton (MO), Zack Space (OH), Harry Teague (NM), Ben Chandler (KY), Dan Lipinski (IL), Stephen Lynch (MA), Collin Peterson (MN).

Of the ten, three were in noncompetitive seats (Peterson, Lynch, and Lipinski). Lynch and Lipinski, in fact, voted against healthcare because it didn’t go far enough. That leaves seven House members who voted against healthcare but supported Waxman-Markey, six of whom were defeated last night and the seventh, Chandler led by only 600 votes (out of 239,000 cast), but the race hasn’t been called yet (as of Nov. 4).

So Waxman-Markey seems to have figured prominently in all seven of these races, especially in Boucher’s, considering his role in helping to craft the bill. In the Teague race, returning Congressman Pearce cited the cap-and-trade vote as one of the primary reasons he decided to challenge Teague.

Sen. McConnell should wake up to the new reality in Washington, DC — a reality that does not include the discredited and lamebrain ideas of President Obama and the Pelosi-Reid 111th Congress. Many of yesterday’s Republican victors would probably just as soon have the tea party-esque and already-hip-to-the-new-reality Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) as their leader.

If Sen. McConnell keeps prattling about ”clean coal,” he may just one day find himself in the same scrap heap as all the Democrats who were smoked yesterday for their Waxman-Markey votes.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

The Junkman goes to vote…

… behind the green curtain in the Peoples Republic of Maryland.

As I pulled into the garage at my polling place, the University of Maryland at Shady Grove, I was prevented from parking my Ford Expedition in the first convenient space because the best spaces were for:

Note that these spaces weren’t even for the handicapped or pregnant women. They for politically correct greenie-weenies who drive cars like this:

I hope the driver of that car never has the misfortune of running into anything larger than a Kleenex box.

So I was forced to park on the 4th level — I mean the “Recycling” level:

The sickness of it all became clear when I got off the elevator on the first level — I mean the “Earth” level:

Fully primed to vote, I completed my mission of voting against every sitting comrade in the PRM.

BTW, in the spirit of Alaskans-who-think-they-are-entitled-to-be-Senators, I wrote in Lisa Murkowski for Maryland Attorney General. The sitting comrade-AG had no other competition.

BPA, semen quality study is Chinese junk

By Steve Milloy
October 28, 2010, GreenHellBlog.com

A Kaiser Permanente-sponsored study of 514 Chinese workers reports that urinary levels of chemical bisphenol A (BPA) were associated with decreased sperm concentration, total sperm count, sperm vitality and sperm motility. The study was published in the journal of Fertility and Sterility. It may as well have been published in the journal of Futility and Stupidity.

First, the statistical associations are quite dubious. None of the reported associations between urinary BPA levels and semen quality are statistically significant. None of the p-values were reported, so it can be presumed that they all exceed the standard significance requirement of P =< 0.05. The confidence intervals (i.e., margins of error) are all quite wide — i.e., 160-200+% greater than the size of the reported association.

Next, the statistical associations were supposedly adjusted for age, education, history of chronic disease, previous history of exposure to other chemicals and metals, employment history, marital status, age at first intercourse, smoking, drinking and study site. But all these “data” were self-reported by the workers and the researchers made no effort to verify or validate any of it. Assuming for the sake of argument, for example, that smoking, drinking, and “exposure to other chemicals and metals” are true confounding factors for semen quality, no information was collected on the levels of such exposures. No doubt there are many other risk factors for reduced semen quality, but they weren’t considered. The researchers claim that study subjects complied with a 7-day sexual abstinence requirement but how certain can they be?

Also, the study population was not randomly selected. Of the 888 workers eligible to participate, only 514 did. Were these 514 the less healthy ones who opted for a free medical exam?

This effort was not designed or conducted so as to study the relationship of BPA exposure to semen quality. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t.

BPA has been used for more than 50 years with no real-world indication that it has ever harmed anyone. That’s why the anti-chemcial activists are forced to stoop to the depths of such junk science.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

For more on BPA, check out JunkScience.com’s Debunkosaurus.

Science 101: No scales, balances in science

Thanks go out today to Reason.com science correspondent Ron Bailey for inspiring today’s Science 101 lesson. (Disclaimer: Ron is an acquaintance, fellow libertarian and nice guy. That said, he doesn’t always get his science corresponding correct, at least when it comes to climate.)

In Bailey’s recent column, “Will a Republican Congress Knock Science Back Into the Stone Age?” (Reason.com, Oct. 26), he writes:

The balance of the evidence is that the man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are increasing the average temperature of the globe.

Brimming with excitement upon reading this, I immediately went to Edmund Scientific’s to see if I could purchase such a scale or balance to weigh evidence. Unfortunately, I learned that I could only purchase equipment to weigh things like solids, liquids, powders and animals. The science equipment supply house had nothing for sale that could weigh evidence. No other purveyor of scientific equipment had any new or magical technology for weighing evidence either.

As it turns out, the notion of weighing evidence isn’t a scientific one at all. While courts of law have finders of fact (i.e., judges and juries) who weigh evidence and regulatory agencies employ a weight-of-evidence concept in risk assessment to help make often-politicized regulatory decisions, science is about determining objective facts and proofs, not about making hasty and subjective judgments. From Copernicus and Galileo to Brahe and Keppler to Newton and Einstein and all the other great scientists in between and since, science has always been about the search for truth about the natural world, not the search for a politically correct or viable consensus about the same.

And the way scientists determine truth is by formulating hypotheses, designing and conducting experiments to test the hypotheses, and then publicly reporting their methodologies and results so that others may verify any claimed results and conclusions. This process is then repeated as necessary to arrive at the point of objective knowledge.

That’s the theory anyway, so what about Bailey’s assertion?

We know objectively that human activity has increased the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases, perhaps by as much as 65 percent since the mid 19th century. We’re pretty sure that average global temperature has also increased since that time — but no one can be sure by precisely how much since we do not have a sufficient number of temperature readings from enough places covering a long enough period of time. Moreover, we also know that the available temperature data have either been significantly and artificially increased by the urban heat island effect, and/or have been extensively manipulated by collectors.

We also know that while atmospheric greenhouse gas levels have steadily risen, global temperatures have done everything but. Since 1995, for example, GHG gas levels have increased by around 10 percent, but average global temperatures have gone nowhere, perhaps even slightly down. Between 1940 and 1975, global temperatures markedly declined leading to alarm about a pending global cooling.

The question to be answered then is whether the known human GHG emissions are in any way causally related to the sort-of-observed temperature changes.

One valid way to answer the question might be to make some prediction about global temperature based on manmade greenhouse gas emissions and to see if it comes true. A similar process was used by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington to confirm Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity in 1919. Despite the billions and billions of dollars spent worldwide on climate science over the past 20 years, this has yet to be accomplished.

Invalid ways to answer the question include mere observations of changes in Arctic melting, frequency or severity of weather events, ocean pH, coral reefs or polar bear populations. Even if such events were tied to warming global temperatures, it would still need to be proven that human GHG emissions caused the warming in the first place. Also invalid are purported historical temperature reconstructions, like Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick. Past any fraudulent aspects to them, they offer no information about the potential relationship between greenhouse gas levels and temperature.

It is noteworthy that global warming alarmist groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists have latched onto the weight-of-evidence notion in a national advertising campaign “to educate the public about the overwhelming weight of the scientific evidence for human-caused global warming.” But an illustrative case of how UCS employs weight-of-the evidence is provided by the web site ActivistCash.com:

In 1986 UCS asked 549 of the American Physical Society’s 37,000 members if Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was “a step in the wrong direction for America’s national security policy.” Despite the biased wording of the push-poll question, only 54 percent disapproved of SDI. Even so, UCS declared that the poll proved “profound and pervasive skepticism toward SDI in the scientific community.”

Fortunately for the rest of us, Reagan’s SDI helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite UCS’s dubious scientific consensus.

To date, Copernicus and Galileo are perhaps the most prominent victims of Bailey’s subjective method for determining objective reality. But watch out, the rest of us could be next.

Activists are dangerous, not BPA

By Steve Milloy
October 27, 2010 GreenHellBlog

A new study from Sweden reports that “cash receipts could be a major source of exposure to the long-used but newly controversial chemical bisphenol A (BPA).”

Study author Tomas Östberg of the Swedish Jegrelius Institute reported in early October that receipts he analyzed contained an average of around 1.4 percent BPA. Östberg then leapt to the conclusion that, “Because there is a risk that this may be a health hazard, the use of thermal paper that contains bisphenol A should be minimized.” News of the study was picked up by European media, including the Stuttgarter Zeitung (Oct. 16), which advised readers in a headline to “Steer clear of receipts.”

Östberg’s study, however, is a long way from constituting evidence that cash receipts present any sort of risk to workers or consumers.

First, as Östberg obliquely admits, it is not at all certain that BPA presents any sort of health risk at all, even if it is present in receipts, albeit to a very small degree. It is important to keep in mind that BPA has been used commercially for more than 50 years, and despite all that use and exposure, there are no published scientific studies or reports of workers or consumers being actually harmed by BPA.

Though BPA has become the subject of much controversy recently, that has mainly been due to unsubstantiated claims of BPA being a so-called “endocrine disrupter” at low doses. None of these claims have been verified, validated or vindicated and only continue to resound because of constant repetition by anti-chemical activist groups and a sympathetic-to-ignorant news media. Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority deem BPA to be perfectly safe at existing exposure levels.

Östberg’s study merely exploits the ongoing BPA controversy by reporting the presence of BPA in receipts — as if the existence of controversy makes BPA’s presence in receipts dangerous.

Östberg fails to mention two recent studies that essentially debunk his own. It’s not important that receipts contain BPA so much as how much of the BPA is typically absorbed from handling them.

A June 2010 study published in the journal Annals of Bioanalysis and Chemistry by Swiss food regulators reported that a person repeatedly touching thermal printer paper for 10 hours/day, such as at a cash register, would absorb 42 times less BPA than permitted by current safety regulations, which already have a very significant margin of safety. No workers or consumers would normally be exposed to even such infinitesimal amounts.

A February 2010 study from the University of Zurich’s Centre for Xenobiotic Risk Research reported that, “Dermal absorption (that is, absorption through the skin), is therefore at most a secondary absorption route for bisphenol A. The primary absorption route is still dietary intake. For this route, daily total amounts of bisphenol A around 10,000 times higher are considered harmless for adults.”

What can we conclude from these scientific studies? It is quite clear that the BPA-in-receipts controversy is just another scare contrived by anti-chemical activists.

But why not simply short-circuit the controversy and replace BPA with another chemical as some have tried with so-called “BPA-free” receipts?

Aside from the fact that BPA-free receipts are more expensive, while providing no discernible health or safety benefits, there is the issue of allowing anti-chemical activists to get away with using junk science and fear to smear a perfectly safe technology. Few chemicals have been as heavily scrutinized as BPA, after all, and still there is no direct evidence indicating it poses any risk to health whatsoever.

BPA is a test case for the activists. If they get away with establishing vanishingly small exposures to BPA as a health hazard, they will use the precedent to systematically eliminate other beneficial chemicals from society on an arbitrary basis. In the US, class action lawsuits involving BPA asking for billions of dollars in compensatory damages have already been filed.

Chemicals have helped give western society the highest and healthiest standard of living it has ever enjoyed. We have regulatory systems that ensure these chemicals are used safely. Those proven safeguards should not be abandoned in favor of wild allegations from irresponsible activists whose agenda is not to educate the public, but to cause maximal alarm and fear, to undermine public confidence in the regulatory process — and to make money for themselves.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

For more debunking of BPA scares, please visit JunkScience.com’s Debunkosaurus.

RIP: Carbon trading

In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) is ending carbon trading this year — the very purpose for which it was founded. CCX will remain open for business, however, as it transitions into the murky world of dealing in carbon offsets.

Outside of a report in Crain’s Chicago Business and a soft-pedalled article in the certain-that-climate-control-regulation-is-coming trade publication Carbon Control News, the media has ignored the demise of the only voluntary U.S. effort at carbon trading.

CCX was sold earlier this year for $600 million to the New York Stock Exchange-listed IntercontinentalExchange (Symbol: ICE), an electronic futures and derivatives platform based in Atlanta and London. ICE also acquired the European Climate Exchange as part of the transaction. The ECX remains open to accomodate the Kyoto Protocol-required carbon trading among EU nations. The sale of CCX to ICE allowed climateers like Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Goldman Sachs to cash out of investments in CCX.

At its founding in November 2000, some estimated that the size of CCX’s carbon trading market could reach $500 billion. The CCX was the brainchild of Richard Sandor who used $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation to launch the CCX. Sandor received $98.5 million for his 16.5% stake in CCX when it was sold. Not bad for an idea that didn’t pan out.

Incredibly (but not surprisingly), although thousands of news articles have been published about CCX by the lamestream media over the years, a Nexis search revealed no news articles published about the demise of CCX in the five days since the CCX’s announcement.

With the demise of CCX carbon trading, only the still-pending Waxman-Markey bill is keeping cap-and-trade alive (technically, at least) in the U.S. According to JunkScience.com’s Cap-and-Trade Death Clock, however, Waxman-Markey only has about 68 days of life left before it, too, turns into a pumpkin.

Pop Went the Climate Bubble

by Steve Milloy
October 21, 2010, Human Events

The New York Times’ editorial writers have apparently spent the last 11 months in a Rip Van Winkle-like state of unconsciousness when it comes to climate change.

Monday‘s lead editorial, “In Climate Denial Again,” railed about the 19 of 20 or so Republican Senate candidates who do not “accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.” The Times contrasted those deniers with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 report, the group’s “most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change,” and a 2000 promise by George W. Bush to cap carbon dioxide emissions

But nowhere in the editorial did the Times recall Climategate or the other related global warming-related “gates” that the November 2009 scandal touched off—all of which, no doubt, helped make skeptics of 95% of Republican Senate candidates. So here’s a quick recap of what happened over the past year to the legendary scientific “consensus” on global warming.

Last November, a host of private and candid e-mails between climate alarmist-scientists stored at the University of East Anglia (UK) somehow made its way into the public domain and history. Like a shot heard around the world, the e-mails instantaneously validated what the climate skeptics had been saying for more than a decade about the alarmists — that they had cooked the books on global warming science and then conspired to silence and belittle their critics.

Most famously, the e-mails revealed that the alarmist community was aware and, indeed, even proud of the scientific fraud known as the “hockey stick” — a graph purporting to show that global temperatures had been stable over the last millennium and then had spiked upwards during the 20th Century, impliedly due to human activities. All this was expressed in an e-mail that featured the infamous Climategate phrase “Mike’s trick… to hide the decline.”

As it turns out, the reason a “trick” was needed to “hide the decline” was that, in reality, the hockey stick data used to show global temperatures spiking during the 20th Century actually showed a decline in the later part of the 20th Century — the precise opposite phenomena that the alarmists claimed to have occurred. But the inconvenient data was intentionally deleted and replaced with other, more cooperative data.

This fraud is what prompted Virginia Atty. Gen. Ken Cuccinelli to launch an investigation into whether Virginia taxpayers were defrauded by hockey stick inventor and former University of Virginia researcher Michael Mann.

Perhaps the real significance of Climategate is that it opened the floodgates of pent-up global skepticism. Climategate was followed in rapid succession by glacier-gate, rainforest-gate, Pachauri-gate and NASA-gate.

Glacier-gate exposed the much-repeated and IPCC-official falsehood that global warming was going to cause the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. This myth was used by Sen. John Kerry to whip up frenzy about Himalayan melting leading to regional water shortages and, ultimately, war between India and Pakistan.

As it turns out though, there never was any scientific study or evidence that the glaciers were going anywhere soon. The IPCC claim about the glaciers was based on a mere 1998 telephone interview with an obscure Indian scientist that was reported in the New Scientist magazine, which by the way, is not anywhere close to a peer-reviewed science journal.

Amazon-gate involved another IPCC claim that global warming was going to destroy 40% of the Amazon rainforest. Once again the sourcing of the factoid was dubious. It came from a report put together by the World Wildlife Fund, a radical green activist group. The report had not been independently peer-reviewed or validated.

Glacier-gate and Amazon-gate opened up the IPCC and its chief Rajendra Pachauri to a great deal of criticism and made Pachauri vulnerable to inquiries about his various conflicts of interest.

Though he positioned himself as the impartial head of the Nobel Peace prize winning IPCC, in reality Pachauri has had ties to many energy companies, including companies that planned on profiting from carbon trading. Reminiscent of another major UN scandal — oil-for-food — Pachauri-gate helps explain how glacier-gate and Amazon-gate happened.

The still ongoing NASA-gate involves the systematic distortion of global temperature readings by the U.S. government. As revealed by a team of skeptics riding the Climategate wave, NASA researchers were exposed as improperly manipulating temperature data to produce claims such as “2005 was the warmest year on record.”

The researchers showed how NASA had been gradually trimming the number of temperature stations (from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now) and then averaging temperature data in such a way as to produce synthetically warmer temperatures. The 2005-warmest-temperature-claim was, in fact, based on a temperature “data base” that had no original temperature data.

A fascinating aspect the past year’s meltdown in climate alarmism is that most of the facts underlying the developments weren’t newly discovered — at least to climate skeptics.

Glacier-gate, for example, was flagged at my web site JunkScience.com in 1998 when the claim was first made. The hockey stick had been publicly exposed and debunked in 2006, including in congressional hearings and by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council. NASA’s skewing of temperature data was also a familiar topic of concern among skeptics.

Climategate was the straw that broke the alarmists’ back. The rapid-fire succession of glacier-gate, Amazon-gate and Pachauri-gate left global warming alarmism reeling. It now seems that the deniers are those who insist that Climategate and its progeny have not smashed the public confidence in the 50-year-old climate alarmism hypothesis.

But there is one lesson in physical science that the New York Times and its fellow alarmists will learn when they wake up from their stupor of denial — it takes a lot less time to pop a bubble that it does to create one.

Mr. Milloy is the founder and publisher of JunkScience.com. His columns and op-ed pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of “Green Hell,” a new book from Regnery Publishing.

Gangster Government: California officials retaliate against Prop. 23 supporters

California Treasure Bill Lockyer is retaliating against two Texas-based refiners that are supporting Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative to rollback the state’s global warming law until unemployment (now at 12.4 percent) recedes to 5.5 percent.

According to Climatewire:

… state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a former attorney general, urged the state’s largest public employee investment funds to divest themselves of Valero and Tesoro stock.

Lockyer sent a letter to the public pension funds, known as CalPERS and CalSTRS, asking them to rid themselves of any stock connected to the refiners Valero and Tesoro. Lockyer charged the companies with attempting to constrain gasoline supplies in California to ensure profits for years to come — and opposing the state’s climate change law as a means to ensure that constraint.

“CalPERS and CalSTRS should not be investing in Texas oil companies that hurt the California economy, no more than they should invest in companies that spend millions of shareholder dollars to undermine California’s environmental laws and the state’s green energy industries and green tech jobs,” Lockyer wrote.

Lockyer, a board member at CalPERS, is expected to ask the board tomorrow to divest Valero and Tesoro holdings during a meeting.”

It was also reported to this blog that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who views the global warming law as his signature accomplishment, kept Chevron out of the Proposition 23 battle by threatening the company with adverse tax measures.

Energy efficiency is not a jobs policy

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) just released its state energy efficiency scorecard.

Spurred by ACEEE’s ranking of California as the most energy efficient state and the fact that California is only exceeded by Michigan and Nevada in unemployment, we ran a simple regression of ACEEE energy efficiency rankings versus state unemployment rankings according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for August 2010.

Unemployment ranking was positively correlated (slope=.15) with energy efficiency ranking — i.e., states with higher unemployment rankings tended to have higher energy efficiency rankings.

ACEEE claims that energy efficiency creates jobs — and maybe it does. But do the jobs created through energy efficiency efforts wind up destroying other jobs — and more of them?

Energy efficiency is a policy of contraction, not one of growth — and job gains only occur during periods of growth. While energy efficiency may make sense on a case-by-case basis, blindly implemented on a societal scale, it is a suicidal policy.

There is plenty of energy out there. We need to put as much of it to good use as soon as possible to get our economy and standard of living back on the positive track.

Beware of ‘post-partisan’ energy policy

Just as tea party activism is about to snatch American energy policy from the jaws of cap-and-trade, some on the right are already moving into “bipartisan” mode. The (often) conservative American Enterprise Institute has teamed up with the (liberal) Brookings Institution and the (self-described, “founded in 2003 to modernize liberal-progressive-green politics”) Breakthrough Institute to offer a “post-partisan” energy policy.

Below is the introduction and summary of recommendations of the group’s report “Post-Partisan Power: How a Limited and Direct Approach to Energy Innovation Can Deliver Clean, Cheap Energy, Economic Productivity and National Prosperity.” Our comments are in bracketed bold.

INTRODUCTION

If ever there were a time to hit the reset button on energy policy, it is today. [Agreed, if this means getting rid of centrally-planned and dictated energy policy and politics. Somehow, though…] Congress is set to adjourn without taking substantive, long-term action on either climate or energy. [Great. The defeat of cap-and-tarde is a victory for America.] While conservatives may be celebrating the death of cap and trade, the truth is that the right’s longstanding hopes for the expansion of nuclear power and oil production have also run aground, foundering on the high cost of constructing new nuclear plants and the impacts of the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. [C’mon, if the greens had passed cap-and-trade, there would still not be any nuclear power or new oil/gas drilling. To argue to the contrary is either naive or disingenuous.] As a result, energy policy is at a standstill, despite overwhelming public support for accelerating the move to clean, affordable energy sources and tapping fast-growing clean energy industries to create jobs and wealth in the United States. [American-produced energy already is clean — it’s the Chinese that could use the Clean Air Act.]

Today, few issues in American political life are as polarized as energy policy, with both left and right entrenched in old worldviews that no longer make sense. [Global warming skepticism is based on sound science. If that’s an “old worldview,” then call us dinosaurs.] For the better part of two decades, much of the right has speculated darkly about global warming as a United Nations-inspired conspiracy to destroy American sovereignty, all while passing off chants of “drill, baby, drill” as real energy policy. [Speculated? Did you miss Climategate? Glacier-gate? Pachauri-gate? Al Gore’s admission that climate regulation is about global governance?] During the same period much of the left has oscillated incoherently between exhortations that avoiding the end of the world demands shared sacrifice, and contradictory assertions that today’s renewable energy and efficiency technologies can eliminate fossil fuels at no significant cost. [The left isn’ oscillating at all. They are focused on establishing a one-world socialist paradise. Whatever path gets the comrades there, they’ll follow. Global warming has just been their most successful gambit to date.] All the while, America’s dependence on fossil fuels continues unabated and political gridlock deepens, preventing real progress towards a safer, cleaner, more secure energy system. [We have plenty of fossil fuels, and they are cheap and safe. We’d be even more energy independent, if we relied more on our own resources including coal, natural gas and nuclear power. Three cheers for gridlock — it’s better than the Obama alternative.]

The extremes have so dominated mainstream thinking on energy that it is easy to forget how much reasonable liberals and conservatives can actually agree on. [Watch out conservatives, here’s where the post-partisans get us to walk into the chopper blades.] Fossil fuels have undeniably been critical to American prosperity and development, but we can gradually move toward cleaner, healthier, and safer energy sources. [There is no objective or empirical evidence indicating that alternative forms of energy are cleaner, healthier and safer than fossil fuels.] Indeed, throughout history, as we have become a more prosperous nation, we have steadily moved to cleaner energy sources, from wood and dung to coal to oil to natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear energy. [Nonsense. There is no such transition going on. We use more coal than natural gas. The greens have essentially killed off more nuclear development. Hydropower is only used where possible. The greens want to go back to burning wood and weeds (biomass).] Our goal today should be to make new clean energy sources much cheaper so they can steadily displace fossil fuels, continuing this ongoing process. [Fossil fuels are not “dirty” as used in America.] If we structure this transition correctly, new energy industries could be an important driver of long-term economic growth. [How does more expensive energy without any accompanying benefits lead to long-term economic growth?]

Arriving at a new post-partisan consensus will require liberals and conservatives, alike, to take a renewed look at key facts, which challenge some long-standing assumptions about energy. [Translation: Now that conservatives have triumphed over cap-and-trade, it’s time to surrender.]

For liberals this means acknowledging that today’s renewable energy technologies are, by and large, too expensive and difficult to scale to meet the energy needs of the nation, much less a rapidly growing global population. [Does this mean that: (1) liberals should wake up and smell reality; (2) Al Gore and his fellow green profiteers/rentseekers should try to make money the old-fashioned way, i.e., by earning it; and that (3) green Marxist/socialists and other reds should cease and desist?] New mandates, carbon pricing systems such as cap and trade, and today’s mess of subsidies are not going to deliver the kind of clean energy innovation required. And nuclear power, long reviled by many on the left, is far cleaner and safer than most liberals imagine, and holds enormous potential to displace low-cost but high-polluting coal power. [The left doesn’t care about how safe nuclear power is. Nuclear power is energy non grata as far as the left is concerned.]

For conservatives this means acknowledging that fossil fuels have serious health, safety, and security consequences aside from any risks global warming might pose. [Sorry, not buying the junk science. This sentence is footnoted to materials from groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Clean Air Task Force.] The biggest obstacle facing nuclear
power is not environmental policy but rather public opposition, high construction costs, and associated financial risks. [All green activist inspired problems.] And while many faults can be found with ethanol and synfuels investments, the bulk of historic federal investments in energy technology — from hydro and nuclear to solar, wind, and electric vehicles — have been an overwhelming success. [Hydro has worked. Nukes can work. but solar, wind and EVs are taxpayer rip-offs.]

This white paper is the product of a more than yearlong dialogue between scholars at three think tanks situated at divergent points on the political compass. Drawing on America’s bipartisan history of successful federal investment to catalyze technology innovation by the U.S. military, universities, private corporations, and entrepreneurs, the heart of this proposal is a $25 billion per year investment channeled through a reformed energy innovation system. [Because central planning (as the 20th century proved) works so well…]

This new system is built on a four-part energy framework:

1. Invest in Energy Science and Education
2. Overhaul the Energy Innovation System
3. Reform Energy Subsidies and Use Military Procurement and Competitive Deployment to Drive Innovation and Price Declines
4. Internalize the Cost of Energy Modernization and Ensure Investments Do Not Add to the National Debt

To accelerate energy innovation and modernization, we propose a role for government that is both limited and direct. It is limited because it is focused, not on reorganizing our entire highly complex energy economy, but rather on specific strategies to drive down the real cost of clean energy technologies. Instead of subsidizing existing technologies hoping that as they scale up, costs will decline, or providing tax credits to indirectly incentivize research at private firms, this framework is direct because the federal government would directly drive innovation and adoption through basic research, development, and procurement in the same way it did with computers, pharmaceutical drugs, radios, microchips, and many other technologies.

Time and again, when confronted with compelling national innovation priorities, the United States has summoned the resources necessary to secure American technological leadership by investing in breakthrough science and world-class education. The United States responded vigorously to the Soviet launch of Sputnik by investing the resources necessary to ensure American innovators, entrepreneurs, and firms would lead the world in aerospace, IT, and computing technologies, igniting prosperous new industries in the process. [The successes of the Manhattan Project and race to the moon should not swell the heads of would-be central planners. Both were exceedingly limited-in-scope projects. Not easy, but limited.] Today, we invest $30 billion annually in pursuit of new cures to deadly diseases and new biomedical innovations that can extend the lives and welfare of Americans. [Investment? We have accomplished precious little with that annual $30 billion. That expenditure has become more akin to workfare for the overeducated.] We similarly devote more than $80 billion annually to military innovations that can help secure our borders. [Another rousing government success!] We propose a similar national commitment to energy sciences and education, which have languished without the funding deserving of a national innovation priority. [We already spend a fortune on education — more than any other nation. What do we get for it? 25th in worldwide math and science?] At the same, this proposal is based on what we know about successful public-private partnerships to build and strengthen regional hubs of innovation, such as the one that evolved into Silicon Valley. Therefore, we propose investment in a national network of regional clusters of universities, entrepreneurs, private investors, and technology companies. [Apparently, we can’t make progress until we have the proper bureaucracy set up. Taxpayers need to hold on to their wallets any time the term “public private partnership is used.]

While the left wants to cut fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies and the right wants to cut renewable energy subsidies, we propose across-the-board energy subsidy reform, disciplining all incentives for technology deployment and adoption to a new framework that rewards innovation — as measured through real declines in the cost of generating energy — not simply producing more of the same. [Why not get rid of all subsidies and reform the tax code? Make technologies compete on their own economic merits. Technology is its own incentive; if it needs to be subsidized then it has no real value.] Today’s federal investments — whether for solar and wind or ethanol and nuclear — are structured around scale and quantity, not innovation. The innovation system we propose builds on the successes of military procurement to purchase and prove advanced energy systems while providing competitive markets for emerging energy technologies, which can facilitate mass manufacture, demand progressive innovation, and bring down the real, unsubsidized cost of clean and secure energy alternatives. [Military procurement as a model? Which cost-overrun should we point to? What is this fascination with command-and-control style government?]

These productive investments have the potential to raise America’s economic growth over the long term and thus help reduce the budget deficit. America’s $1.3 trillion budget deficit is largely a consequence of low growth and the increasing cost of structural entitlement programs, but it can be overcome by a combination of higher growth, responsible entitlement reform, and targeted spending cuts. Achieving higher growth will require continued federal investments in productive enterprises, including health, information technology, and energy. [Believe it or not, fire, electric current, the automobile, airplane, telegraph, telephone and many other technologies were all developed and commcialized without government involvement. AEI and Brookings have been in Washington, DC too long.] Furthermore, fear of technology failure should not paralyze strategic investments in innovation, since some amount of failure is inevitable and essential to such a disruptive and non-linear process. [We have nothing to fear, but the government itself.]

To ensure that these limited, targeted new investments do not add to the federal deficit, we propose a suite of options that Congress and the President can use to finance energy innovation. [Because the government can/should be picking winners and losers? President Obama was a community organizer, not Thomas Edison, in his past life (and even Edison was wrong when it came to electricity for the masses).] These include cutting existing energy subsidies, charging new royalties for oil drilling, small surcharges on oil imports or electricity sales, and a very low carbon price. While each of these mechanisms may bother some on both the left and right, all should agree that exacerbating the national debt is unwise. Revenues must be found in order to make these productive investments, which have long-term potential to revitalize the economy. [A growing economy will float all boats — including our bloated government. Growing government will do just the opposite.]

Increasing investment in energy technology and innovation, as we advocate, remains exceedingly popular with Americans of all political stripes. Of all energy policy proposals, from carbon pricing and cap and trade to new oil and gas drilling, expanding production and lowering the price of clean, innovative energy technologies is the most popular approach, regularly receiving support from 65 to 90 percent of Americans in independent news polls, Gallup surveys, and other opinion research. [Unicorns for everyone and free cotton candy would also be popular.]This public support is consistent over time, and reflects the historical willingness of publics to pay slightly more for cleaner and safer energy sources. [Let’s poll the public and whether it likes being lied to and ripped off by the government.]

In the pages that follow, we aim to present a practical and bipartisan [Bipartisan = supposed conservatives who want to be invited to tony Washington DC cocktail parties.] approach to American energy policy. The time has come for a fresh start that can bring our nation into the future through a pragmatic drive to make clean energy cheap and abundant. [Fresh start = July 4, 1776]

POST-PARTISAN POWER
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE!BROOKINGS INSTITUTION!BREAKTHROUGH INSTITUTE
SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS”

Invest in Energy Science and Education

Secure funding necessary to complete the doubling of Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science budgets. Direct a significant portion of new funds to programs related to energy sciences, including roughly $300 million in annual funding to scale up the Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) program over the coming years. [The Department of Energy is a failure and should be abolished.]

Invest roughly $500 million annually to support K-12 curriculum and teacher training, energy education scholarships, post-doctoral fellowships, and graduate research grants. [We need to get the federal government out of education. Has anyone noticed that kids have gotten stupider as the government gets more involved?] Just as the United States rose to the Cold War challenge by enacting the National Defense Education Act and leveling critical investments in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, a new national commitment is needed today to train, educate, and inspire a generation of energy innovators, engineers, and entrepreneurs. [Cold War defense challenges were solved by men and women who were educated in the days before taxpayer largesse flowed freely to a corrupted university system.]

Overhaul the Energy Innovation System

Help reform the U.S. energy innovation system by investing up to $5 billion annually to establish a robust national network of regional energy innovation institutes bringing together private sector, university, and government researchers alongside investors and private sector customers. Funded at $50-300 million annually, each institute will foster competitive centers of clean energy innovation and entrepreneurship while accelerating the translation of research insights into commercial products. [Because in Washington DC: Bureaucracy=Success]

Bring the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) to scale by providing $1.5 billion annually, while dedicating a significant portion of new funding to dual-use energy technology innovations with the potential to enhance energy security and strengthen the U.S. military. The Department of Defense (DOD) should work actively with ARPA-E to determine and select dual-use breakthrough energy innovations for funding through the ARPA-E program and potential adoption and procurement by the DOD. [Hopefully, DOD’s success with pioneering the Internet will translate into a perpetual motion machine.]

Reform Energy Subsidies and Use Military Procurement and Competitive Deployment Incentives to Drive Price Declines

Reform the nation’s morass of energy subsidies. Instead of open-ended subsidies that reward firms for producing more of the same product, employ a new strategy of competitive deployment incentives, disciplined by cost reductions and optimized to drive steady improvements in the price and performance of a suite of emerging energy technologies. Create incentives for various classes of energy technologies to ensure that each has a chance to mature. Decrease incentive levels until emerging technologies become competitive with mature, entrenched competitors to avoid creating permanently subsidized industries or picking winners and losers, a priori. Meet the new morass; same as the old morass.]

Expand DOD efforts to procure, demonstrate, test, validate, and improve a suite of cutting-edge energy technologies. New, innovative energy alternatives are necessary to secure the national defense, enhance energy security, and improve the operational capabilities of the U.S. military. Provide up to $5 billion annually in new appropriations to ensure the Pentagon has the resources to pursue this critical effort without infringing on funds required for current military operations. [We should just surrender to the Chinese now. In return, maybe they’ll let us keep using knives and forks.]

Recognize the potential for nuclear power — particularly innovative, smaller reactor designs — to enhance American energy security, reduce pollution, and supply affordable power. [We can “recognize” anything we want, but as long as the greens have the ability to choke of nuclear power through regulation and litigation, they will.] America cannot afford to bank on one technology alone, however, and must pursue all paths to clean, affordable energy, supporting all innovative, emerging clean energy sources, from advanced wind, geothermal, and solar to electric vehicles and advanced batteries, allowing winners to emerge over time. [At what point does the taxpayer get to pull the plug on failed technologies?]

Internalize the Cost of Energy Modernization and Ensure Investments Do Not Add to the Deficit

Secure revenues to ensure these productive new investments do not exacerbate the national debt, through one or a combination of the following means: phase out unproductive energy subsidies, which have not sufficiently driven innovation; direct revenues from oil and gas leasing to energy innovation; implement a small fee on imported oil to drive energy innovation and enhance American energy security; establish a small surcharge on electricity sales to fund energy modernization, similar to the Highway Trust Fund; and/or dedicate revenues from a very small carbon price to finance necessary investments in clean energy technology. [Translation: Make consumers pay more for energy.]

So there you have it —  “post-partisan energy policy.” It’ll build on what’s failed and then charge people more for it.

Sorry, but we’re for gridlock until the American left packs up and moves to Totalitarian Fantasy Island.