Category Archives: climate

Obama’s War on Energy

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The Obama administration plans to block the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless they are built with novel and expensive technology to capture greenhouse-gas emissions[.]

There’s a surprise.  The EPA’s latest rule version on this subject looks to control CO2 emissions as an urgency exists in the minds of climate deniers (i.e., those who deny that the existing climate change is an ongoing natural phenomenon) to reduce humanity’s output of this “greenhouse” gas.

[T]he revised rule said it would propose an emissions limit of 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour for coal plants and 1,000 pounds per megawatt hour for large gas-fired plants.

…such stringent limits would ban new coal plants….

And

The rule is also a crucial stepping-stone for the Obama administration’s next big environmental project, emissions standards for the fleet of existing power plants.  Mr Obama has told the EPA to produce those standards by June 2014.

Never mind that CO2 is a trailing indicator, confirming the health of the planet.

The climate deniers’ minds—and those of their pet policy makers in the EPA—are made up, and they resent being confused by facts.

Federal Climate Plan and Crony Capitalism

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George Russell, writing for Fox News, had this on the efficacy of President Barack Obama’s national plan to fight “climate change:”

a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases .

The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they  have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project’s research horizon.

And

[T]he study declared that “their combined impact is less than 1% of total US emissions” over the next 25 years, and they are a lousy bargain to boot:  “Very little if any GHG reductions are achieved at substantial cost with these provisions.”

[T]he study concluded “current tax expenditures and subsidies are a poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”   They “achieve small reductions in GHG emissions and are costly per unit of emissions reduction.”

The full cost was something the study was unable to make entirely clear.  It estimated that the federal government had spent some $48 billion in just the past two years on “tax expenditures”—meaning subsidies, credits, and other incentives—related to the energy sector, and also noted that few were specifically enacted to reduce greenhouse gases.

Obama’s plan also ignores the erroneous nature of its assumptions about what is a significant GHG.  It includes all of their assumed GHGs, for instance including atmospheric CO2….

Worse, for the short term,

[T]he probe underlined how little is yet known about the relationship between government tax-and-spend activity and actual climate change results, especially as government spending gets embedded in a growing thicket of regulations and initiatives created to solve different parts of the greenhouse gas puzzle, but all touted to achieve the same ends.

And

[T]he plan also calls for $7.9 billion in additional funding for advanced clean energy technology, a hike of about 30%.  This includes investment in a range of energy technologies, from advanced biofuels to nuclear mini-reactors.

Never mind that this is a waste of money.  If the technology can’t compete in the free market without subsidies, it’s not commercially viable.  And so does not warrant subsidization—assuming government subsidies are ever appropriate.

The ludicrosity goes on, but you get the idea.

It’s hard to believe that Obama and his colleagues in the Executive Branch and allies in the Legislative Branch didn’t know this stuff a priori; earlier studies, for instance, have debunked the very concept of serious human impact on evolving climate.  But he, and they, do know full well the pecuniary benefit of this plan for the plan’s recipients.

The study itself can be found here.

A Bit More on “Climate”

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Recall that Candidate Barack Obama said in 2008 that if

someone wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.  It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

In President Obama’s speech last week, he announced the next phase of his assault on our economycontributions to climate dysfunction, and in it he’s going after existing coal-fired power plants.  Indeed, Obama’s attack on coal—on cheap energy for the American economy—and on coal-related jobs is now explicit: his climate advisor, Daniel Schrag (formally, Schrag is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology), also said last week that

a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.

Some of the broader economic damage to be done through Obama’s new policy phase has been estimated by The Heritage Foundation.

First, some highlights from the Heritage Foundation‘s report:

In March 2012, the EPA proposed a rule that would prohibit new power plants from emitting more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity generated.  Without the addition of carbon capture and sequestration…the regulation would effectively ban the construction of new coal-fired plants.*

The President’s recent announcement also threatens existing plants and would adversely affect the more than 1,100 coal-fired generators at nearly 600 plant locations that generate 40 percent of America’s affordable, reliable energy.**

Last year, the EPA finalized new mercury and air toxics standards that will force utilities to use maximum achievable control technology standards to reduce mercury emissions and other hazardous air pollutants.  By the agency’s own admission, the rule will cost $10 billion by 2015 but have only $6 million in purported benefits from mercury reductions.

[Never mind that i]n the absence of these new regulations, US air quality [already] has improved significantly over the past several decades.  Emission of toxic pollutants [already] has dropped as much as 96% since 1980.

Now, some of the economic losses that will occur by 2030 according to the Heritage Foundation:

  • Employment falls by more than 500,000 jobs;
  • Manufacturing loses over 280,000 jobs;
  • A family of four’s annual income drops more than $1,000 per year, and its total income drops by $16,500 over the period of analysis;
  • Aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreases by $1.47 trillion;
  • Electricity prices rise by 20%;
  • Coal-mining jobs drop 43%; and
  • Natural gas prices rise 42%.

In sum, Obama’s war on coal will cut GDP by $1.47 trillion by 2030.  All for no impact at all on our climate, since atmospheric CO2 (the biggest target of this war) is well-established as a trailing indicator confirming warming that’s already occurring and increasing health of the planet.

 

*It’s important to note that carbon capture has never been successfully demonstrated in a production-sized mechanism and that no one—including Obama’s administration—has been able to figure out what to do with the “15–20 super tankers’ worth of liquid carbon dioxide that…carbon capture would create” annually.

**This also ignores the impact on an already marginally stable American electric power grid that cannot handle such a catastrophic drop in power production while demand continues to rise—or would with an actual economic recovery.

 

h/t Power Line

Arrogance

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Fox News‘ headline says it all:

Obama planning to sidestep Congress for next phase in climate change agenda

He came through on that in his Tuesday speech: he intends to implement his climate change claptrap by diktat through his EPA, wholly ignoring the will of the people and our representatives.  In the realization of his speech, his

national plan to combat climate change…include[s] the first-ever federal regulations on carbon dioxide emitted by existing power plants….

In a speech at Georgetown University Tuesday Obama…announce[d] he’s issuing a presidential memorandum to implement the regulations….

And

…he is directing his administration to allow enough renewables on public lands to power 6 million homes by 2020, effectively doubling the capacity from solar, wind and geothermal projects on federal property.

But he won’t allow oil and gas drilling—or the associated jobs and cheap energy.  Expensive energy that the unemployed can’t get is better, you see.  Additionally, there’ll be

…$8 billion in federal loan guarantees to spur investment in technologies that can keep carbon dioxide produced by power plants from being released into the atmosphere.

Never minding that actual science, rather than the pseudo-science of his followers, has shown that CO2 is a trailing indicator of increasing health of the planet.

Congress?  I don’ need no stinkin’ Congress.

A Bit of Climate

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What’s up with this?  Is it getting warmer?  Well, yes, maybe, depending on the time scale and the baseline of comparison.  It’s warmer today than during the last Ice Age.  It’s warmer today than during the Little Ice Age of some 3-4 hundred years ago and that ended around 1 hundred years ago.  It’s hard to say, though, how today’s temperature compares with the Medieval Warm Period of some 1,000 years ago, since data sets like NASA’s have been falsified to plus up the claimed warming of today.  We aren’t warmer than we were a decade and a half ago.

The claims of warming and of disastrous continued warming get their force in large part from climate models—more than 70 of them—all of which have been predicting warming rates ranging from worrisome to disastrous.  There’s nothing like actual observation, empirical data, to see what’s up, though.  Anthony Watts, of Watts Up With That, has reprinted a graph from Dr Roy Spencer [“doctor” from his PhD in Meteorology, and currently Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama] that compares the year-by-year predictions of those models with satellite and balloon observational data.  The graph has been adjusted by Spencer to produce an artificial agreement between the models and reality in 1979, and then lets the predictions and the empirical data flow from there.

The squares and circles represent the satellite and balloon, respectively, actual observations; the various lines the predictions of the models; and the heavy black line the simple average of the models.  For the climate-worriers’ concerns of the dangerous effects of a 1.5ºC increase in temperature, the overstatement of the models compared to reality of nearly 1ºC lends incredulity to their claims.

Hmm….