Category: Climate & Energy

Don’t cap, subsidize: Wind industry needs to become cost competitive

By Steve Milloy
The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA), October 3, 2010

It’s terrific that Sen. Chuck Grassley wants to help out Iowa’s wind industry, but does he have to sell out the rest of the state in the process?

Last week, Sen. Grassley co-sponsored a bill (S.3813) to establish a national renewable electricity standard (RES), legislation that Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has indicated he would try to make the consolation prize in this Congress’ final lame duck-clash over global warming regulation.

Despite his co-sponsorship, Sen. Grassley is rightly wary of Sen. Reid’s gambit and told the media that unless more than a handful of Republicans also sign on to the bill, “I’m not going to be a part of one or two Republicans, get 60 votes, so they can have a partisan victory.”

What is RES and why should Sen. Grassley not go down the RES road at all?

An RES would require that electric utilities generate a set percentage of their power from so-called “renewable” power sources, like solar and wind, by a certain date. The disastrous-for-House-Democrats Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed in June 2009, for example, would require that utilities generate 20 percent of their power from renewables by the year 2020. S. 3813 would reduce the Waxman-Markey standard to 15 percent.

But even a 15 percent RES would be quite the monumental challenge given that solar and wind power provide less than 2 percent of current electricity generation and require massive subsidies to do so. According to the Department of Energy, solar and wind are each subsidized at a rate 55 times that of coal, 97 times that of natural gas and 15 times that of nuclear power.

Solar panels and windmills aside, it’s only the taxpayer wallet that makes these forms of energy “renewable.”

But even cost is not the main reason for rejecting the arbitrary targets and deadlines of a national RES.

Imagine a utility that generates 100 percent of the electricity it sells by burning coal or natural gas. Impose the S. 3813 RES standard on that utility and, all of a sudden, only a maximum of 85 percent of its electricity can be generated by fossil fuels. In other words, the utility’s use of fossil fuels has been capped — the result would be skyrocketing energy prices.

Since the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Americans have been up in arms against cap-and-trade. As Sen. Grassley recently observed “If we pass cap and trade we’d export all of our jobs, manufacturing jobs to China.”

But the same reasons for opposing cap-and-trade can and ought to be applied to RES, which ought to be labeled as calling cap-and-subsidize.

Under cap-and-trade, electric utilities would be compensated for higher generation costs by charging consumers more for electricity and by selling billions of dollars of carbon credits, which they received for free courtesy of taxpayers. Under RES, electric utilities would be similarly compensated for higher generation costs, courtesy of over-charged consumers and untold billions in taxpayer subsidies.

So the difference between RES and cap-and-trade is merely a change in form, not a change in substance of an economy-killing consumer/taxpayer rip-off.

None of this is to dissuade Sen. Grassley from trying to help Iowa’s wind industry, which is the second largest in the U.S. – but that path forward is much different than a job- and economy-killing cap on fossil fuel use.

The first step forward for wind entrepreneurs is to push for tax and regulatory policies that will restart economic growth. A growing economy requires more energy, thus enlarging the opportunities for renewable technologies. Next consumers who value renewable electricity should be allowed — not forced — to purchase it at whatever price the market will bear.

The renewables industry should also be encouraged to look for niches where its technologies are competitive with conventional energy technologies. Finally, like all other business enterprises, the renewable energy businesses should look for efficiencies that make its products more cost competitive.

Many in the renewable energy sector have gotten lazy and have decided that hiring lobbyists is easier than innovating and competing. Sen. Grassley should work to help the latter and to discourage the former.

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).

Why does Brownback push RES?

By Steve Milloy
Kiowa County Signal, September 22, 2010

Will Sam Brownback’s last act as a senator be to sellout Kansas and the rest of America on capping greenhouse gas emissions?

Sen. Brownback joined Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and several other senators earlier this week in introducing a bill to establish a national renewable electricity standard (RES), which Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has indicated he would try to make the consolation prize in this Congress’ final lame duck-clash over global warming regulation.

Sen. Brownback called RES a common-sense energy policy and said, “the beauty of this is it is not cap and trade.”

What is RES and why should Sen. Brownback not let an RES bill stain his senatorial legacy?

An RES would require that electric utilities generate a set percentage of their power from so-called “renewable” power sources, like solar and wind, by a certain date. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which was disastrous-for-House-Democrats, passed in June 2009 and would, for example, require that utilities generate 20 percent of their power from renewables by the year 2020. Sen. Bingaman’s bill would reduce the Waxman-Markey standard to 15 percent as per Sen. Brownback’s request.

But even a 15 percent RES would be quite the monumental challenge given that solar and wind power provide less than 2 percent of current electricity generation and require massive subsidies to do even that much. According to the Department of Energy, solar and wind are each subsidized at a rate 55 times that of coal, 97 times that of natural gas and 15 times that of nuclear power. Solar panels and windmills aside, it’s only the taxpayer wallet that makes these forms of energy “renewable.”

But cost is not the main reason for rejecting the arbitrary targets and deadlines of a national RES.

Imagine a utility that generates 100 percent of the electricity it sells by burning coal or natural gas . Impose the Bingaman-Brownback RES standard on that utility and, all of a sudden, only a maximum of 85 percent of its electricity can be generated by fossil fuels. In other words, the utility’s use of fossil fuels has been capped.

Since the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Americans have been up in arms against cap-and-trade. But the same reasons for opposing cap-and-trade can, and ought, to be applied to RES, which should be labeled “cap-and-subsidize.”

Under cap-and-trade, electric utilities would be compensated for higher generation costs by charging consumers more for electricity and by selling billions of dollars of carbon credits, received for free courtesy of taxpayers. Under RES, electric utilities would be similarly compensated for higher generation costs, courtesy of over-charged consumers and untold billions in taxpayer subsidies. So the difference between RES and cap-and-trade is merely a change in form, not a change in substance of an economy-killing consumer/taxpayer rip-off.

Sen. Brownback hasn’t yet figured out that the effort to regulate greenhouse gases is not spurred by good faith intentions to protect the environment as much as it is spurred by the left-wing political agenda to increase government control over the U.S. economy through energy rationing.

It is ironic that just as Kansas succeeds in beating back the radical green agenda — witness the likely permitting this year of the controversial Sunflower coal-fired power plant in southwest Kansas — Sen. Brownback would surrender the state and nation to the agenda of the Obama administration’s admitted socialists, energy czar Carol Browner and former green jobs czar Van Jones.

America has rightly rejected cap-and-trade and its associated political agenda. Sen. Brownback should too; and if he returns to Kansas as governor, he needs to leave such bad green ideas in Washington, D.C.

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).

Tell Sen. Brownback that an RES is a bad idea and he’s being played for a sucker by Harry Reid.

Senate takes another bite at the EPA’s greenhouse apple

UPDATE: Senate Democrats have cancelled the mark-up of the EPA budget reportedly because they were concerned that Republicans would offer an appropriations rider to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases (described in the article below).

By Steve Milloy
GreenHellBlog, September 14, 2010

The Senate has a chance to at least partially redeem the 111th Congress when the Appropriations Committee meets to vote on the budget of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, September 16.

Two Committee Democrats, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), have indicated they may vote favorably on an appropriations rider that would block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions starting in January 2011.

Given the 18-12 Democrat-Republican split on the Committee, only two more Democrats would be needed (along with a unanimous Republican bloc) to stop the EPA from implementing the most sweeping, expensive and controversial environmental/energy/economic regulation in history.

Those two Democrats might not be hard to find given that Committee members Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) voted earlier in the year for the Murkowski resolution to block EPA regulation. And Committee member Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) is a co-sponsor of the Rockefeller proposal to delay EPA regulation for two years.

Why should the Appropriations Committee take the extraordinary step of reining in the EPA?

First, greenhouse gas regulation would necessarily impact the entire U.S. economy, as it would affect 70 percent of electricity generation and nearly 100 percent of transportation energy use. The totality of this impact demands that Congress, as opposed to a single and often controversial federal agency, address the issue.

Next, there is no serious dispute over the fact that greenhouse gas regulation will raise energy costs without providing any offsetting and near-term economic benefits. Given current economic conditions, making energy cost more will do nothing but further set back, if not reverse economic recovery. EPA has shown precious little concern for the real-world impacts of its impending regulations, so it’s time for the adults in Congress to step forward and assert authority over the EPA.

Third, there is a misconception among many on the Hill and in the public that that Supreme Court ordered to the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Nothing could be further from the truth. In its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the Court merely ruled that the EPA could, not that it must, regulate greenhouse gases. Evidence of the debatable nature of EPA regulation is that the Bush EPA opted not to regulate greenhouse gases while the Obama administration reversed that decision.

It is no secret that President Obama ordered the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as a prod to get Congress and industry moving on greenhouse gas regulation. The Senate now has another chance (after the 51-47 defeat of the Murkowski resolution) to reassert Congress as the driver of this major domestic policy.

Moreover, the EPA may have acted illegally and usurped congressional authority by issuing its so-called “tailoring rule,” part of the suite of greenhouse gas regulations. Under the Clean Air Act, if the EPA decides to regulate a “pollutant,” then all sources that emit 250 tons annually of that pollutant must be regulated.

But the EPA has unilaterally decided to change the law for greenhouse gases. Over the course of the past year, the EPA has arbitrarily and without congressional authorization raised the threshold from 250 tons to 50,000 tons and then to 75,000-100,000 tons — otherwise the agency would find itself with the Herculean and unpopular task of regulating thousands of small businesses and apartment buildings.

If Senate Democrats want to take steps to stem the bleeding that seems likely to occur in November and perhaps beyond, they should remember that America has pretty much rejected the policy known as “cap-and-trade” and that EPA regulation of greenhouse gases amounts simply to “cap” — that is, all pain with no gain. Any politician that takes no action to stop that will be in deep trouble this fall and in 2012.

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 Last Green Puppy: Still a Dog Named ‘Cap’

By Steve Milloy
GreenHellBlog, September 13, 2010

Should Senate Republicans stomp all over the “last living puppy”?

Yes, because in this case the “last living puppy,” according to Grist.org writer David Roberts, is the so-called renewable electricity standard (RES), which Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) says he will try to make the consolation prize in this Congress’ final clash over global warming regulation.

What is RES and why should Senate Republicans —pay attention Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) — make sure it gets put to sleep (permanently)?

An RES would require that electric utilities generate a set percentage of their power from so-called “renewable” power sources, like solar and wind, by a certain date. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed in June 2009 would require that utilities generate 20 percent of their power from renewables by the year 2020.

This would be quite the monumental challenge given that solar and wind power provide less than 2 percent of current electricity generation and require massive subsidies to do so. According to the Department of Energy, solar and wind are each subsidized at a rate 55 times that of coal, 97 times that of natural gas and 15 times that of nuclear power.

Solar panels and windmills aside, it’s the taxpayer wallet that makes these forms of energy renewable.

But even cost is not the main reason for rejecting the arbitrary targets and deadlines of a national RES.

Imagine a utility that generates 100 percent of the electricity it sells by burning coal. Impose the Waxman-Markey RES standard on that utility and, all of a sudden, only a maximum of 80 of its electricity can be generated by coal. In other words, the utility’s use of coal has been capped.

Since the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Americans have been up in arms against cap-and-trade. But the same reasons for opposing cap-and-trade can and ought to be applied to RES, which ought to be labeled as calling cap-and-subsidize.

Under cap-and-trade, electric utilities would be compensated for higher generation costs by charging consumers more for electricity and by selling billions of dollars of carbon credits, which they received for free courtesy of taxpayers. Under RES, electric utilities would be similarly compensated for higher generation costs, courtesy of over-charged consumers and untold billions in taxpayer subsidies.

So the difference between RES and cap-and-trade is merely form of the consumer/taxpayer rip-off.

But not every Republican in Congress yet understands this.

Sen. Brownback recently stated that he could support a “modest” RES where energy efficiency gains count toward the RES standard. Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) previously indicated he could consider an RES that included so-called “clean coal” as a form of renewable energy.

Whatever RES deal Sens. Brownback and Voinovich might try to cut with Harry Reid, rest assured that the only part of it that would be kept and enforced would be the “cap.” Energy efficiency gains are uncertain and difficult to ascertain. Clean coal, insofar as it implies so-called “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), is far closer to fantasy than reality given its multi-trillion dollar costs, and physical and political challenges.

America has rejected cap-and-trade. As adorable and palatable as advocates will try to make it sound, RES is just a different flavor of an idea that has already been euthanized.

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).

Beware of Greens Bearing Gifts

By Steve Milloy
September 3, 2010, Charleston Daily Mail

Energy Secretary Steven Chu visits the University of Charleston on Sept. 8 to resurrect cap-and-trade via the Trojan Horse of carbon capture and sequestration.

President Obama’s radical agenda to destroy the coal industry is on the ropes in Congress.

Since the House passed the Waxman-Markey bill in June 2009, it’s been all downhill for cap-and-trade – done in by the Climategate exposure of global warming’s fraudulent science, and the anticipated job losses and higher energy costs associated with cap-and-trade, all amid the worst economic downturn in 70 years.

The Obama administration’s gambit for getting West Virginians on the cap-and-trade bandwagon is to buy the state off with carbon capture and storage.

Why shouldn’t West Virginia just make the cap-and-trade deal and take the CCS money and run?

Because the exchange means the end of the West Virginia’s golden goose – the coal industry.

The administration is holding out the promise of perhaps billions of dollars for utilities to develop practical technologies for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants, injecting the emissions underground, and hoping they stay there safely.

It’s a win-win, according to the Obama administration. The coal industry remains alive as the state gets extra money and jobs to bury coal-related emissions.

This may sound like a good, if not great, deal, but it’s really the classic sucker’s bet.

The reality is that carbon capture and storage is physically, financially and politically impractical, not to mention futile in terms of avoiding global warming.

University of Houston petroleum engineer Michael Economides estimates that it would take a land mass the size of the state of Maryland to store the CO2 emissions from a single 500-megawatt power plant – and there are more than 200 plants of that size in the U.S.

The costs of carbon capture and storage are budget-busting, especially for a cash-strapped federal government.

It would cost billions of dollars per power plant to install the equipment to capture CO2 emissions, and billions more to drill the numerous injection wells needed to get it underground.

Untold billions of dollars will be needed to purchase rights of way for pipelines.

Still billions more would be required to build and maintain the pipelines from power plants to geographically suitable areas for storing CO2.

Carbon capture and storage requires about 30 percent more energy to capture CO2. Even more energy will be required to pump the CO2 hundreds of miles through pipelines.

Beyond the physical and financial hurdles, there are the local politics, including the debate surrounding the risks of underground CO2 storage. Stored CO2 may leak and acidify groundwater.

Underground CO2 exploded in Cameroon in 1986, asphyxiating people and cattle.

Keep in mind, too, that environmental activists have blocked the storage of spent nuclear fuel one mile underground in an isolated section of the Nevada desert at Yucca Mountain.

Does anyone really believe people will allow pressurized CO2 to be stored under wide swaths of populated areas?

Carbon capture and storage has already given rise to its own slang – NUMBY-ism or “not-under my backyard.”

The futility of carbon capture and storage is best considered in light of the fact that capturing all the CO2 emissions emitted by every coal-burning power plant in the U.S. would make precious little difference to atmospheric CO2 levels.

Over the course of 100 years, it would reduce atmospheric CO2 levels by less than 3 percent. Compare that with the fact that mankind has added about 10 percent to CO2 levels just in the past 15 years with no discernible impact on global climate.

Cap-and-trade’s anti-coal carbon caps will be a certainty, while capture and storage is anything but.

In the end, West Virginia will likely be stuck with coal-killing policies even as carbon capture and storage goes the way of the Jimmy Carter-era synfuels boondoggle.

Coal provides West Virginia with 90,000 direct and indirect jobs and $6 billion in annual economic value. Carbon capture and storage will never come close to approaching the value of coal to West Virginia.

A word to the West Virginia-wise: Beware of Greens bearing gifts.

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.”

Speak of the devil: Alarmist scientists issue call for scary scenarios at AGU conference

Global warming alarmist scientists Steve Sherwood (University of New South Wales) and Matthew Huber (Purdue University) have asked colleagues to develop scary scenarios for their session at the December 13-14, 2010 meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Here’s the e-mail that Huber sent out to his list earlier today:

X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2
X-AuditID: 12074f13-b7baaae000000a09-0c-4c7e6a09c911
To: undisclosed-recipients:;@XXXXX.EDU
From: Matthew Huber
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 10:56:29 -0400
Subject: agu
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1081)
X-PMX-Version: 5.5.9.388399
X-PerlMx-Virus-Scanned: Yes
X-Brightmail-Tracker: AAAAARXch2M=

hi,
I wanted to bring to your attention an AGU session that Steve Sherwood and I are co-convening. I wanted to encourage you to submit results to this session if have something relevant. we’re looking simulations or theory or data that push the envelope what we think of as Earth’s climate. [Emphasis added]

-matthew huber

GC44: Undiscovered Climates of Earth

Past and future climates changes could conceivably be large enough to engender unforeseen qualitative alterations in the functioning of the climate system . Exploring the largest climate changes can verge into speculation, but can also help discover general, novel insights into climate dynamics with major biospheric implications. This session aims to explore or document qualitative or unexpected climate change mechanisms and impacts in significantly warmer or cooler climates. We welcome model or observational studies on changes in climate feedback strength or the emergence of new feedbacks; changes in modes of variability; new climate nonlinearities; fundamental climate zone shifts; and qualitatively new impacts on to life emerging in hot or cold climates.

The emphasized option of the e-mail is obviously a clarion call for more ammunition for alarmist fearmongering.

As I coincidentally pointed out in my Human Events column today, “Desperate Greens Make Desperate Claims”:

As the chances of a cap-and-trade bill recede in the 111th Congress, expect the increasingly desperate greens to amp up their gloom-and-doom rhetoric—as they already have… reality will matter less and less to climate alarmists as their visions of cap-and-trade in this Congress, once a sure bet, fade away. Keep that in mind as you read the climate-related news this fall.

Given the house-of-cards-like collapse of global warming alarmism over the past year — as well as the sort of ongoing self-inflicted harm described above— I’m hoping that Tom Wolfe will recount the spectacle in a new book, perhaps called “The Bonfire of the Credibilities.”

Desperate Greens Make Desperate Claims

by Steven Milloy
September 1, 2010, Human Events

As the chances of a cap-and-trade bill recede in the 111th Congress, expect the increasingly desperate greens to amp up their gloom-and-doom rhetoric—as they already have.

Amid Al Gore’s recent concession speech to his zombie followers, for example, he apparently couldn’t help himself from linking every recent bad weather event he could think of with global warming—from floods in Nashville and Pakistan to the recent heat wave and forest fires in Russia.

Before that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) took the opportunity of an ongoing East Coast heat wave to proclaim the current decade to be the hottest on record and to proclaim that global warming is “undeniable.”

Then there was the recent Environmental Defense Fund claim that global warming is going to wreck Mexican agriculture and increase illegal immigration by almost 7 million by 2070.
No doubt before this Congress is over, we will be subjected to even more extreme claims, although I can’t imagine what scary scenario the greens could conjure up that they haven’t tried before.

One would have thought that Al Gore had learned his lesson about blaming bad weather on climate change when a British judge ruled in 2007 that his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, couldn’t be shown to British school children without a disclaimer about its many egregious errors (amounting to about 99% of the science presented in the film). One of the judicially noticed errors that Gore made was attributing individual weather events and natural disasters (like Hurricane Katrina) to climate change.

Regardless of how climate changes—and it will continue change even if humans magically vanished from the planet and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels return to the alarmist ideal of 350 parts per million—there will always be bad weather and natural disasters in whatever unpredictable proportion and frequency nature dictates.

As to the NOAA claim that now is the hottest era since recordkeeping began, let’s first keep in mind that both nature and humans began recordkeeping long before NOAA and we know that the period known as the Medieval Optimum (about 1,000 years ago when the Vikings tilled Greenland without the help of John Deere) was as warm if not warmer than today.

Moreover, even NOAA should know that the Northern Hemisphere has been warming (thankfully) for about 200 years since the end of a very cold 400-year period in history known as the Little Ice Age. Yes, so it’s been almost continually warming since the early 1800s—and the early 2000’s are the warmest decade? NOAA has a tremendous grasp on the obvious.

The agency, of course, would have us believe that this warming trend is due to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. The problem with that notion is that it’s not clear in any record anywhere that manmade CO2 emissions correlate with global temperature change. Since 1995, in fact, there has been no significant warming of average global temperature while atmospheric CO2 levels have increased by more than 10%.

Not only has there been no warming since 1995, but it’s likely the alarmist-made temperature record is actually showing more warming than is actually occurring. Between temperature measurement stations being located on heat-retaining airport runways and other urban heat islands, and the Climate-gate mafia gradually removing cooler, rural weather stations from their data gathering, it must be really embarrassing for the alarmists to have to lie and cheat to keep the data from showing the real-life slight cooling that in all likelihood is actually occurring.

What about the supposed global warming-induced wave of Mexican illegals? Let’s just say that warming temperatures have tended to increase agricultural productivity by lengthening growing seasons. Moreover, any potential warming caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations would likely happen in drier, northern latitudes rather than wetter, more temperate zones where the greater presence of water vapor tends to rob CO2 of the opportunity to cause any warming.

Finally, the greens typically assume that any change in climate is necessarily bad. So far, we only know that cooling is potentially problematic for agricultural production. Climatic warming has yet to be anything but a boon to mankind.

But reality will matter less and less to climate alarmists as their visions of cap-and-trade in this Congress, once a sure bet, fade away. Keep that in mind as you read the climate-related news this fall.

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.

Penn State's Integrity Crisis

By Steve Milloy
July 14, 2010, The Daily Caller

Penn State University just exonerated Professor Michael Mann for wrongdoing related to Climategate. While that good news for Mann is no surprise, it came at a dear cost to Penn State – its integrity.

Soon after Climategate broke last November, Penn State convened an internal committee to investigate Mann, the primary author of the now-infamous and discredited “hockey stick” global warming graph.

Hopes for a bona fide investigation were dashed when the preliminary results were released in February. To the joy of climate alarmists, Penn State announced via press release that Mann was cleared of three of the four allegations against him (regarding falsification/suppression of data, deletion of e-mails/data and misuse of confidential information). But if one looks past the release and reads the committee’s report, it becomes obvious the fix was in.

The preliminary review included the Climategate e-mails themselves, an interview with Mann, and documents submitted by Mann. While one committee member did informally endeavor to get external views on Mann, they only came from Texas A&M’s Gerald North and Stanford University’s Donald Kennedy.

North had earlier dismissed Climategate in a Washington Post interview only a few days after the scandal broke. He also assisted with a futile 2006 effort to rehabilitate Mann’s debunked hockey stick. As editor of Science magazine, Kennedy was an outspoken advocate of climate alarmism.

The committee went to great lengths to defuse the money line from the Climategate e-mails – i.e., “Mike’s Nature trick… to hide the decline.” While explaining how “trick” could merely refer to a “clever device,” the committee failed to even mention “hide the decline,” a phrase referring to Mann’s still-unexplained deletion of temperature data contradicting the climate alarmism hypothesis.

Based on Mann’s denial, the preliminary report concluded that there was no evidence to indicate that Mann intended to delete e-mails – even though that conclusion is contradicted by the plain language and circumstances of the relevant e-mail exchange. No inquiry beyond Mann’s denial was made.

Finally, the preliminary report dismissed the accusation that Mann conspired to silence skeptics by stating, “one finds enormous confusion has been caused by interpretations of the e-mails and their content” – but shouldn’t the committee have attempted to eliminate that confusion?

It’s unclear why the committee didn’t immediately exonerate Mann of the fourth allegation — seriously deviating from accepted practices within the academic community — except that by leaving it open, the committee apparently hoped to rebuild “public trust in science in general and climate science specifically.”

Four months later, the committee’s investigation charade has concluded. Most shocking, however, is that Penn State remains openly unabashed by the investigation’s shoddiness.

As before, a media release clearing Mann of “any wrongdoing” is making alarmists giddy. But once again, the investigation’s disturbing reality is revealed in the report.

The committee again excluded from consideration any document or point of view that might incriminate Mann’s conduct.

Other than the Climategate e-mails, the committee only examined:

(1) undescribed “documents collected by the [committee];” (2) “documents provided by Dr. Mann…”; (3) the committee’s preliminary report; (4) a May British House of Commons whitewash of Climategate; (5) a recent letter published in Science magazine deploring climate skepticism from 255 climate alarmists; (6) a document about the National Science Foundation peer review process; (7) the Department of Energy Guide to Financial Assistance; (8) information on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s peer review process; (9) information regarding the percentage of NSF proposals funded; and (10) Mann’s curriculum vitae.

The committee apparently made no effort to obtain, much less consider, the volumes of available news reports, analyses (including from Congress) and commentary about Mann, the hockey stick and/or Climategate.

More than see no evil, the committee maintained its policy of hear no evil. Of the five additional interviews conducted, four were of Mann’s fellow alarmists. The lone climate skeptic interviewed was MIT professor Richard Lindzen. But the report makes clear that the committee conducted Lindzen’s interview in the finest traditions of a kangaroo court.

Here’s how the report describes the interview:

… When told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed at the inquiry stage… Dr. Lindzen’s response was: ‘It’s thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues that he explicitly stated in the e-mails. I’m wondering what’s going on?’ The Investigatory Committee members did not respond to Dr. Lindzen’s statement. Instead, Dr. Lindzen’s attention was directed to the fourth allegation, and it was explained to him that this is the allegation which the Investigatory Committee is charged to address…

Amazed that the committee would treat a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and an IPCC lead author with such disrespect and disregard, I contacted Dr. Lindzen. He told me, “They also basically ignored what I said. I suppose they interviewed me in order to say that they had interviewed someone who was skeptical of warming alarm.”

The committee asked Mann about e-mails that mention Dr. Stephen McIntyre, one of the scientists credited with debunking Mann’s hockey stick. While Mann told the committee that there was “no merit whatsoever to Mr. [sic] McIntyre’s claims here…,” the committee didn’t interview McIntyre.

The committee also pointed to several awards given to Mann for his research including Scientific American’s naming Mann as one of the “50 leading visionaries in science and technology” and its selection of a web site co-founded by Mann as one of the top 25 “science and technology” web sites in 2005. The committee then wrote, “had Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research been outside the respected practices, it would have been impossible for him to receive so many awards and recognitions…”

The Committee also credited Mann with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. “This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside accepted practices in his field,” the committee observed. MIT’s Lindzen was also a co-Nobelist, but apparently the award didn’t help his credibility.

Global warming and Mann have been worth millions of grant dollars and lots of publicity for Penn State. But one would think the institution’s integrity is worth more.

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).

Kerry-Lieberman’s Great American Rip-off

By Steve Milloy
The Daily Caller, May 13, 2010

There are only three things you need to know about the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill that was released Wednesday—it will accomplish nothing for the environment; it will cost a lot of money and it will financially enrich and politically empower a host of scoundrels.

Regardless of what you think about manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, it is undeniable that the emissions reductions contemplated by Kerry-Lieberman don’t amount to a hill of beans. The goal of Kerry-Lieberman, like the goal of the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill, is to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2050.

But rather than such paltry emissions cuts, let’s say that starting next year, we just shut down America—zero emissions—and kept it shut down for the next 100 years. What difference would that make atmosphere-wise?

Roughly speaking, U.S. energy use (at 2005 levels) adds to atmospheric CO2 at a rate of about 1 part per million every three years. So after 100 years, U.S. energy use would add about 33 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere. Is that a lot?

Well, atmospheric CO2 has increased by over 35 ppm since 1995 without producing any global warming at all—that’s according to IPCC contributor and Captain Climategate himself, the University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones. Moreover, physicists agree that every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere has less global warming potential than the molecule that preceded it. So the next 35 ppm of atmospheric CO2 will have less impact than the preceding 35ppm, which had no discernible effect.

None of this is a secret, the EPA did this analysis for itself in 2007.

Back to Kerry-Lieberman, it carbon emissions reduction provisions would obviously be nowhere near as severe as the shuting-down-America-for-100-years-scenario.

So what will Kerry-Lieberman cost us to accomplish nothing?

Based on the Waxman-Markey bill, which Kerry-Lieberman is modeled after, the Brookings Institution (hardly a hotbed of climate skeptics or Chicago-school economic thought) estimated that between 2012 and 2050, mandatory CO2 emission reductions would make energy cost $9 trillion more—this works out to a cost of about $3,100 per year for a family of four.

This of course doesn’t take into account the inflationary aspects of making energy cost more—after all, all goods and services are produced with energy and energy that costs more will necessary inflate the cost of everything. Americans will have a hard time paying these costs given all the jobs that will flee overseas to places like China, India and Mexico where carbon caps won’t exist, and energy and labor prices will be lower.

But surely someone will benefit from Kerry-Lieberman, right? That $9 trillion, after all, must go somewhere.

Sales of permits to emit CO2 will fill federal coffers with more money for politicians to hand out to special interest groups. Many CO2 emission permits will be handed out for free to special interests who will be able to turn around and sell them in the market for guaranteed profits. Wall Street will get to profit from the trading—just assume that every time you switch on a light a bell will ring at Goldman Sachs notifying it of yet more profits from nonproductive financial shenanigans. Al Gore’s venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins has invested more than a billion dollars in dozens of companies that are Kerry-Lieberman dependent. Talk about Gore-porate greed.

Kerry Lieberman contains a host of mandates and programs for energy efficiency, so-called green technologies and other corporate welfare programs. Companies like GE would profit from electric utilities being forced to buy expensive “renewable” technologies and from consumers being forced to buy more expensive appliances.

Worse than the transfer of wealth from the hard-working to the hardly-working, is the transfer of power from Americans over their own lives and businesses to governmental goons and busy-bodies. The Environmental Protection Agency—the most rogue federal agency of all —would be responsible for administering Kerry-Lieberman. While EPA control over the economy and the power to enforce that control would be immensely expanded, American business and individuals would have essentially the same ability as now to defend themselves against the EPA—pretty much none.

Although Kerry-Lieberman is a loser of a bill for the vast majority of America, we will have our hands full fighting its financial and political beneficiaries. Even if the bill fails to pass before the election, there is talk on Capitol Hill of procedural shenanigans by which a lameduck Congress could pass it regardless of what Americans have to say in November.

Rise up America, while you still can.

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).

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/05/13/kerry-liebermans-great-american-rip-off/#ixzz0np4oHpUh

Tree Ring Circus

By Steve Milloy
May 12, 2010, Washington Times

Are academic scientists some special sub-species of humans who are beyond suspicion and above the law? That is the question now being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney General Ken Cucinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming’s poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.

Cucinelli is under assault by global warming alarmist brigades and the American Civil Liberties Union for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mann’s hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Cuccinelli recently sent UVA a civil investigative demand (CID) requesting e-mails and other documents pertaining to Mann.

Cuccinelli’s rationale is simple to understand: Mann’s claim-to-fame — the infamous “hockey stick” graph — is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether it is intentional fraud.

Developed in the late-1990s while Mann was at the University of Massachusetts, his hockey stick graph purports to show that average global temperature was fairly stable over the past millennium and up until the 20 the century, when it spiked up impliedly because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”) as proof that humans were destroying the planet.

But by the mid-2000s the hockey stick graph began to be revealed for what it was — pure bunk.

Critics of the hockey stick graph first became suspicious because it failed to show two well-known periods of dramatic swings in global temperature — the so-called Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Mann’s indignant refusal to share his data and methods with critics only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, it was discovered that the computer model that produced the hockey stick would produce a hockey stick graph regardless of what data was input. But it gets worse.

Mann apparently created the hockey stick by cherry-picking data he liked and deleting data he didn’t like. While the vast majority of the hockey stick is based on temperature data extrapolated from tree rings going back hundreds of years, the tip of the blade (representing the late 20th century) was temperature data taken from thermometers. Past the obvious apples-and-oranges problem, as it turns out, Mann appended the thermometer data to the hockey stick at a point at which the tree ring data actually shows cooling. This cooling trend data was then deleted. This is what is referred to by the now-famous Climate-gate phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to … hide the decline.”

Mann’s defenders characterize this deletion of data as an elegant statistical technique. There is, however, nothing sophisticated, much less innocent about it. Contrary to Mann’s defenders, the hockey stick has never been vindicated by anyone. If nothing else, proof of its discredit lies in the fact that no one, not even the ethically challenged United Nations, relies on it anymore as evidence of manmade global warming.

Mann’s name-making hockey stick work occurred while he was at the University of Massachusetts, after which he was hired by the taxpayer-funded UVA. Did UVA hire Mann under the illusion that his hockey stick was a legitimate scientific achievement? Did Mann receive taxpayer-funded grants based on what amounts to scientific misconduct? These are legitimate inquiries — but not to everyone.

Left-wing academics, global warming alarmists, and the ACLU object to Cucinelli’s probe. They cast aspersions such as “witch hunt,” McCarthyism,” and “abuse of office.” In their less hysteric moments, they claim Cuccinelli threatens academic freedom. This is all so much rot.

Some scientists have actually been known to commit scientific misconduct tantamount to fraud. A Tulane researcher was found guilty of misconduct by the federal Office of Scientific Integrity in the late 1990s for fabricating data about pesticides being dangerous hormonal system disrupters. Don’t forget the South Korean researcher that was indicted for claiming false advances in stem cell research. Only political correctness saved a University of Pittsburgh researcher from conviction during the 1990s of manipulating data allegedly linking lead-based paint with lower IQs.

Believe it or not, scientists are just like the rest of the population — a mixture of good and bad. Mann’s hockey stick is such bad science that it compels the question, “Why?” Would UVA have hired Mann and would government grants have been awarded to him had the truth about the hockey stick been known by university and state decision-makers at the time? Were they intentionally deceived?

As the Climategate scandal has revealed, the climate alarmist mob is, at the very least, devious and unethical. It has conspired to silence its critics and to dispense with the normal give-and-take of the scientific process — all the while trumpeting the junkiest of science in trying to frighten the public and politicians into keeping the grant money flowing.

Have some of the climate mob’s members acted criminally as well? No one knows at this point. But through his hockey stick shenanigans, Mann has certainly provided Cuccinelli with “probable cause” to consider the possibility. A thorough investigation by someone not in cahoots with the climate mob is the only way to answer legitimate questions related to the expenditure of taxpayer money.

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).