U.S. investors not sweating global warming

From Bloomberg:

…almost two-thirds of U.S. investors say climate change is a minor danger or “no real threat,” according to the first Quarterly Bloomberg Global Poll.

But European and Asian investors hold the opposite view:

In Europe and Asia, Bloomberg users are “more concerned about their governments taking too little action,” [pollster Ann Selzer] said. “In the U.S., the common response is fear government will take too much action.”

It just goes to show that Europeans and Asians learned nothing from the 20th century.

All hail Belchatow…

Below is a photo of Poland’s Belchatow power plant, the largest single carbon dioxide emitter in Europe — about 31 million metric tons annually.

Belchatow is driving European greens nuts as it plans to increase its generating capacity by 20% next year — even though this means buying more emission allowances. Belchatow also signals the failure of the European emissions trading scheme, the British green group Sandbag told ClimateWire.

So for being the largest emitter of life-giving CO2 in Europe and simultaneously helping to sabotage the Kyoto Protocol, let’s take a moment to venerate the aptly named Belchatow.

Poland's Belchatow power plant: Drives greens nuts
Poland's Belchatow power plant: Drives greens nuts

Tar sands emissions on par with U.S. crude oil

“Two independent studies have found direct emissions from producing, transporting and refining oil sands crude are in the same range as those of the other crudes refined in the United States,” reports the Alberta Energy Research Institute.

These are important studies as the greens are moving to block the import of oil produced from Canadian tar sands. The 2007 energy bill, for example, prohibited the U.S. government from purchasing oil from sources (read “Canadian tar sands”) where the greenhouse gas emissions are greater on a lifecycle basis.

California’s expensive carbon tax delayed

California regulators postponed a final vote on implementing a statewide carbon fee because of litigation fears from taxing imported electricity, according to ClimateWire. The measure would tax electricity imported from the coal-fired power plants located just over California’s eastern border.

Regardless of the imported electricity issue, ClimateWire reports that the new fee would cost a California cement plant about $200,000 per year and an oil refinery about $1.3 million per year.

Why GE wants to raise the cost of electricity

If you want to know why General Electric is lobbying for the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill — and the higher electricity prices that would result from it — the company provided yet another reason today.

GE announced that it would develop and manufacture appliances that will supposedly interact with the coming “smart Grid” to reduce energy use. GE-provided examples of this interaction include:

  • A refrigerator will delay its defrost cycle – a cycle that takes more energy than normal operating mode – until the energy load is lower;
  • A dryer will reduce the wattage used by the heating coils;
  • A dishwasher will delay its start until a time of day when energy usage is lower.

Supposedly consumers would be able to override appliance actions, but who knows how easy that would be or whether that capability might be controlled or even phased out over time.

GE has been running a pilot “demand-response” program with Louisville Gas & Electric (LG&E) utilizing GE employees as pilot participants — folks who now seem unduly concerned with saving energy. According to the GE media release,

Dana and Mark Bryan of Louisville, KY stated the appliances also have led to changes in their energy using habits. “It’s helped me get more organized,” says Dana. “I now unload the dishwasher first thing in the morning and then fill it throughout the day. After dinner, I set it to run and the smart programming delays it until after 10 p.m.” Mark reports a 20% reduction of total electrical consumption in the months he has participated in the program. “As part of the pilot, I have an in-home energy monitor. It lets me know the rate I am paying and the instantaneous electrical consumption. Watching that meter has driven behavior changes in my house that have resulted in reduced energy consumption. That explains a portion of the 20% reduction.”

So how much of your time at home do you really want to spend monitoring your family’s electricity usage?

The average monthly electric bill in the U.S. is about $100. If obsessing over the in-home energy monitor saves the Bryans less than $20/month, then I’d suggest that meter-watching is not really a productive use of anyone’s time — unless, of course, you enjoy that sort of thing.

But, if global warming regulation is enacted and electricity prices skyrocket and/or energy is eventually rationed, then meter-watching could, for many, become more of a necessity as opposed to an optional fetish, particularly for those in lower income brackets.

GE will profit, of course, from selling the home monitors and the more-expensive “smart” appliances. But it’s not at all clear that consumers will get any benefits at all since they’ll be paying more for the appliances and more for electricity.

The common sense public policy move would be to increase our electricity supplies and reduce its cost by building needed power plants and transmissions lines and forgoing government mandates on fuels and emissions — so that we don’t have to sweat electricity use.

I’d bet that GE would make more money from making electricity cheaper than it would from making it more expensive.

California retirees lose big but invest in cap-and-trade?

CalPERS, California’s giant state retirement system, has invested $200 million with Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist who focuses on so-called “cleantech.”

Since the financial success of “cleantech” seems to be heavily dependent on the dubious cap-and-trade bill now in the U.S. Senate, it seems that CalPERS is risking a lot of retiree money on a piece of legislation that may never pass and, if it does, may very well be an economic disaster — even for the rentseekers it is designed to enrich.

Calpers lost $56.2 billion during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009. So what’s another $200 million?

For more on state pension funds and global warming check out our report, Pensions in Peril: Are State Officials Risking Public Employee Retirement Benefits by Playing Global Warming Politics?

Obama’s National Caulking Program: 20+ years to break even?

President Obama’s stimulus plan to weatherize America may take more than a generation to break even — if it ever does.

States will spend an average of $6,500 to weatherize homes under the plan, according to a report in Greenwire. Eligible homes house families earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, about $44,000 per year for a family of four.

In Indiana, which just received the first tranche of the $132 million in caulking industry welfare coming its way, the average annual home heating cost is about $1,000.

As Obama’s caulking program hopes to reduce average home heating bills by 32 percent — or about $320 per year in Indiana — it could take more than 20 years for the program to break even.

[This space reserved for the photo-op of the Caulker-in-Chief in action!]

New White House Coffee Mug
New White House Coffee Mug

Biaswire: Dem pols don’t get money for climate?

In its article “Fossil-energy interests contribute heavily to GOP in climate fight” (July 22), Greenwire reports that,

Oil companies, electric utilities and the coal industry have poured more than $250,000 this year into the coffers of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House fundraising arm that has played a lead role in attacking Democrats who supported climate legislation.

Gee… I wonder how much Al Gore, his partners at Kleiner-Perkins and Generation Investment Management, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, General Electric and all the USCAP companies, the wind, solar and biofuels industries, and all the other climate/energy rentseekers have “poured” into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — or is that not worth reporting, Greenwire?

Greens behind German technophobia

From Newsweek:

In the 1960s and 1970s, German companies and laboratories churned out futuristic technologies, from novel types of nuclear reactors to the world’s first magnetic-levitation train. In the early 1980s, Germany was one of the first countries to develop a national plan for genetics research, setting up labs in Munich, Cologne, and Heidelberg. Per capita, German scientists applied for more biotech patents than Americans did.

Yet only a few years later, German pharmaceutical companies like BASF and Bayer postponed production plans and moved much of their research abroad. Germany lost its spot at the cutting edge of biotech. One reason was the pull of a powerful new startup culture that had developed around American universities in the 1980s. But there was a more sinister reason as well: a powerful coalition of environmental activists, church leaders, politicians, and journalists mobilized fears against medical biotechnology as a dangerous meddling with nature, an attack on human dignity reminiscent of Nazi eugenics. With much of the public behind them, lawmakers tightened regulations, bureaucrats refused to grant permits, and even academic research facilities became targets of righteous protest. Today, most Germans once again accept medical biotech, but most of the industry’s leading companies are found in the U.S.

Welfare for mad scientists? AMS endorses federal funding of geoengineering

The American Meteorological Society this week endorsed federal funding of geoengineering — that is, the Society believes that taxpayers should support surplus, unemployable, over-educated madmen willing to research how best to blot out the sun and implement other bizarre schemes in hopes of  slowing climate change. Our only question is where the giant rubber-room research facility will be constructed.

California Screaming: Wind, solar lobbies to squeeze taxpayers amid budget crisis

Amid the worst budget crisis in its history, the state of California is set to make things worse at the behest of the wind and solar industries.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is set to increase the state’s so-called renewable portfolio standard (RPS) to 33% by 2020, up from 20% — meaning that one-third of the electricity produced in the state must come from so-called renewable sources like wind and solar, according to a report in Restructuring Today.

To meet that standard, the utility industry will need to spend an estimated $115 billion over the next 10-plus years. Given that only about $23.5 billion in financing was available annually for renewable projects nationwide before the financial crisis, the new standard would require that California utilities obtain about 50% of available funding each year.

CARB chairman Mary Nichols, a Democrat appointed by Gov. Schwarzenegger and a former Clinton administration EPA appointee, admitted to Restructuring Today that,

It’s going to be a challenge to reach that goal without negatively impacting reliability or leading to huge cost boosts for consumers.

A California Senate consultant told Restructuring Today that since the state’s budget crisis has been “temporarily” resolved, the bill containing the new standard is likely to pass and be signed into law this September.

The new standard will essentially require that each man, woman and child in California borrow about $3,108 in principal alone to pay for it — that is, the privilege of paying higher electricity prices for no environmental gain.