Category: Climate & Energy

By Steven Milloy
Human Events, October 8, 2010

It’s hard to sufficiently mock President Obama’s decision to install solar panels on the White House. But I’ll try.

The cost of the panels at this point is unknown. But the White House has assured the public that the installation job will be offered through a competitive bidding process. Given that Jimmy Carter spent about $30,000 in the 1970s installing solar panels on the White House (removed in 1986 by President Reagan), you can bank on President Obama’s folly blowing that price tag away, especially when you consider all the federal employee staff time, and security and public relations efforts that will go into the project.

Since the annual savings of the system is estimated to be only $2,300, you could also safely bet that the system will never actually pay for itself—no matter how many decades (centuries?) the system is used.

The system won’t make the White House energy independent since nighttime, clouds and rain will all force the building to remain hooked up to its existing power sources and back-ups.

Finally, the system will offer no environmental benefits. Whether or not you believe that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are changing global climate for the worse, whatever few tons of carbon dioxide emissions that might possibly be avoided through White House (or anyone else’s) use of solar panels will scarcely offset the new coal-fired power plant that China erects every other week.

The panel installation can be, then, little more than a too-little-too-late exercise in public relations to salvage something legislatively for President Obama’s green base.

While even President Obama has given up on a cap-and-trade bill coming out of this Congress, he no doubt would like to prod Congress into passing a so-called national renewable electricity standard (RES) in the upcoming lame duck session of Congress. An RES would require that a certain percentage of electricity generation come from solar, wind biomass and other supposedly renewable sources. Conveniently, Senators Jeff Bingaman (D.-N.M.) and the retiring Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.) have just introduced such a bill (S. 3813).

Although the Bingaman-Brownback bill is little more than cap-and-trade in renewable drag, it has attracted some Republican support in the Senate from Susan Collins (Maine), Jon Ensign (Nev.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa). But Democratic skeptics like Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) have offset these Republican votes. Sen. Dick Durbin has also rained on the Bingaman-Brownback RES parade, telling Congressional Quarterly, “It’s not an easy and quick bill. There are many choices, and most of them are controversial. To think we can do them quickly in a lame duck is a long shot.”

The President’s desperate green supporters insist the White House project is not completely symbolic. The CEO of solar panel maker Sungevity told Climatewire that, “This is not about Carter and another President doing solar; it’s about the fact that solar is able to save customers money.” Just who those customers are and how much money they’re actually saving, wasn’t disclosed, however.

The Center for American Progress’ Richard Caperton told Climatewire that if the President used the solar panel announcement “appropriately,” he could “show that the [solar] industry leads to jobs.” But of course the vast majority of solar manufacturing jobs are in China, where renewable energy workers earn about 1/10 of American workers.

DuPont is expanding its facility in Circleville, Ohio, to manufacture solar energy materials, accepting $56 million in federal stimulus and state aid for the $175 million project. What does the taxpayer get for all that money? Seventy new jobs created, 444 existing jobs retained and 230 construction jobs. Add all the jobs up and divide and you get a per job cost of $235,000, $76,000 of which comes from taxpayers.

Taxpayers are on the hook for about $114,000 for each stimulus-funded solar panel job at projects in Longmont, Colo., and Tipton, Ind. Then there is the $592,000-per-solar-job cost at the Emmet J. Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis, Ind.

Pardon me, but since the purpose of all this is to force consumers to spend more money buying high-priced energy (but only when the sun shines), as a taxpayer, I vote for unemployment.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.”

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.”

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.