Cooler Heads Digest 19 November 2010

Announcements

The Cooler Heads Digest will not be published next week, but will return Friday, December 3.

In the News

The Ecological Monster Who Said…Peep
Ben Lieberman, Washington Times, 19 November 2010

America’s First Carbon Market Closes Shop
Christopher Horner & William Yeatman, Sacramento Bee, 19 November 2010

G20 Adviser Says U.S. Will Face Trade Boycott over Climate
Ben Webster, The Times, 19 November 2010

Global Warming: How To Approach the Science, part 1
Richard Lindzen, Testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology, 17 November 2010

Global Warming: How To Approach the Science. part 2
Patrick Michaels, Testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology, 17 November 2010

Cap-and-Trade Is Dead, But Kyotoism Is Alive and Well at the EPA
Marlo Lewis, Washington Examiner, 15 November 2010

Colorado Plan Tied to Phantom Carbon Tax
William Yeatman & Amy Oliver Cooke, Pueblo Chieftain, 14 November 2010

The Climate Change Scare Is Dying
Christopher Booker, Telegraph, 14 November 2010

Big Green Leader Wants GOP To Forget Popular Will…Or Else
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner, 9 November 2010

News You Can Use
Climategate’s First Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of the Climategate scandal. Here’s a round-up of analyses and commentary:

One Year Ago Today, Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat
Climategate: One Year and 60 House Seats Later, Marc Sheppard, American Thinker
How the Climategate Weasels Wiggle Away, James Delingpole, Telegraph
What Does Climategate Say about Science?, Terence Kealey, The Global Warming Policy Foundation

Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell

Lame Duck Session a Big Success So Far

The first week of Congress’s lame duck session has been a big success.  They haven’t done anything.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pulled a scheduled vote to invoke cloture and proceed to S. 3815, the “Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010,” because he did not have the 60 votes required. 

S. 3815 is known around town as the Boone Pickens Payoff Bill.  Pickens told Bloomberg News this week that he thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the bill would be enacted, so we can’t celebrate yet. 

The bill would provide $4.5 billion in subsidies for natural gas vehicles and $3.5 billion in subsidies for electric vehicles plus $2 billion in loans to manufacturers of natural gas vehicles.  The subsidies to purchasers would range from $8,000 to $64,000.  The larger payments would be for purchasers of heavy trucks that run on natural gas.

But the Lame Ducks Will Be Back after Thanksgiving

Congress will be in recess next week for Thanksgiving and will return on November 29th.  There are enough big must-do items that it still seems unlikely to me that the Senate will be able to take up Pickens’s bill or the Renewable Electricity Standard (or RES) bill, S. 3813.  The RES bill is sponsored by Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and retiring Senator Sam Brownback (R-Ks.), who has just been elected Governor of Kansas.  It now has 31 co-sponsors, including three other Republicans. 

The RES bill would raise electric rates in those States that haven’t yet followed the failed California model of raising rates to impoverish consumers and drive out energy-intensive industries.  My guess is that it will be blocked in the Senate by Republican and Democratic Senators from those States in the Mideast and Southeast that still depend on low-cost coal and therefore still have manufacturing.  On the other hand, there is an incentive for Senators from States that have already enacted their own renewable requirements to support a national standard in order to lower the competitiveness of the States that have not adopted renewable requirements.

Who Will Be Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee?

There are now four active candidates running to be the next Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee: former Chairman and current Ranking Republican Joe Barton (R-Tex.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), and Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.).  The House Republican Steering Committee will vote—probably in early December—and then their recommendation will be voted on by the entire Republican Conference.

It’s hard to predict these insider contests because personal relationships play a big role.  Here are a few comments.  Barton has served two years as Chairman and the last four as Ranking Republican.  House Republican rules are ambiguous, but it seems that Barton requires a waiver of the six-year rule in order to be eligible.  Another obstacle is the new Speaker, current Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).  Barton made the mistake of running against Boehner for Minority Leader after the House Republicans lost their majority in the 2006 elections.

Upton is one of the more liberal Republican House Members, but is nonetheless the front runner for the job.   His voting record has been compiled here.  A number of his environmental and energy votes are at odds with the vast majority of his Republican colleagues.  For example, he was the main sponsor of the ban on incandescent light bulbs, voted for the 2007 anti-energy bill, voted against offshore drilling, voted against a major reform of the Endangered Species Act, and voted for the California Desert bill, which locked up millions of acres.  But Upton is running a hard and highly visible public campaign and is promising to be a good conservative.

Stearns has a very conservative voting record.  He is also saying some of the right things, as for example in this column by Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal.  On the other hand, the rap on Stearns is that he has not done much heavy lifting on the committee.

My guess is that Shimkus is the most likely to have a shot at defeating Upton.  Shimkus, like Barton and Stearns, opposes global warming alarmism and supports more domestic production of coal, oil, and natural gas.  He has said publicly that he is a candidate, but is running a behind-the-scenes campaign.

Another possible candidate for Energy and Commerce Chairman is Rep. Greg Walden (R-Oreg.).  He took a leave of absence from the committee, so that a party-switcher could keep his seat on the committee as a Republican.  Walden is currently serving as Chairman of the Republican transition team that is preparing for transfer of majority control of the House in January to the Republicans.  That suggests that the House Republican leadership holds him in high regard.     

On the Democratic side, outgoing Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) faces no opposition to become Ranking Democrat on the committee in the 112th Congress.  Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the other chief sponsor of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, has apparently cleared the field and will be elected Ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee.

The Natural Resources Committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), who is unopposed to be Chairman when the Republicans take control of the House in January, proposed this week to take the Energy and Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction over energy issues and combine it with his committee into a new Energy and Natural Resources Committee.  I have publicly supported Hastings’s proposal in my role as director of Freedom Action. It’s a long shot that the House Republican leadership or Conference will go along, but at the least Hastings is sending a shot across the bows of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which regularly encroaches on the jurisdiction of his committee.      

Across the States
Texas Fights Back

The Washington Examiner this week ran an excellent three part series by Kathleen Hartnett White and Mario Loyola, of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, on a burgeoning conflict between the EPA and the State of Texas.

Part 1: EPA Is Offended by Texas’s Successful Permitting Rules
Part 2: Putting a Lid on Texas’s Economic Growth
Part 3: Doing the Environmentalists’ Dirty Work

Around the World
IPCC Official: Climate Policy Is about Wealth Redistribution, Not Environment

German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer gave an eye-opening interview to Neue Zürcher Zeitung (translated here), in which he said that “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy….This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” Mr. Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary, check out the Coalition’s website, www.GlobalWarming.org



Cooler Heads Digest 3 September 2010

In the News

The Real Cost of Being Green
William Yeatman & Amy Oliver Cooke, Denver Post, 3 September 2010

Godzilla in the Mirror
George Will, Indianapolis Star, 3 September 2010

A True Green Believer
Richard Morrison, American Spectator, 2 September 2010

Drill, Baby, Drill Is Back
Ben Lieberman, MasterResource.org, 2 September 2010

Green Cheese
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 1 September 2010

“Cool It,” Rival to “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gets a U.S. Distributer
Dave Itzkoff, New York Times, 1 September 2010

“Clunkers” Classic Government Folly
Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 1 September 2010

Obama Urges Court To Vacate AGW Decision
Marlo Lewis, Pajamas Media, 30 August 2010

The Greening of Godzilla
Walter Russell Mead, American Interest, 28 August 2010

USGS Perpetrates a Climate Science Fraud
William Yeatman, Big Journalism, 28 August 2010

Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell

Reid Outlines Lame Duck Strategy

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) this week said that he would still try to pass an anti-energy bill after the November 2 election in a lame duck session. He has given up on cap-and-trade, but is working to gain support for a 15% renewable electricity standard (or RES) for utilities.  Ben Geman of The Hill reports that in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday Reid said that two Republican Senators have expressed interest in an RES.  One is thought to be Sam Brownback (R-Ks.), who is retiring. 

Anything is possible in a lame duck session, but my guess is that the atmosphere after the election is going to be so ugly that it will be hard to do anything in the Senate or the House.  That’s because a lot of Democrats in Democratic States and districts are in danger of being swept out of office.  They will be bitter and perhaps eager to exact some further damage on their way out the door, but on the other hand Republicans are almost certain to be united in wanting to block anything until the 112th Congress, which may have a lot more Republicans than the 111th does.

The Congress returns on 12th September.  They are scheduled to be in session for four weeks before recessing for the campaign.

Across the States

Fiorina, Whitman Disappoint on AB 32

Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for Senator in California, participated in a debate with incumbent Barbara Boxer (D) this week. Politico reported that Fiorina’s “major stumble” came on her waffling response to a question about Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative to suspend A.B. 32, the State’s global warming law, until unemployment decreases to 5.5 %. Fiorina said that she had not yet taken a position on the proposition. What is it with California’s high-profile GOP candidates this election cycle? Like Fiorina, Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman refuses to declare whether she supports Proposition 23. With unemployment in the state above 12 %, polls indicate that the economy is the priority for California voters. AB 32 is designed to raise the price of energy, which would harm the economy. Supporting Proposition 23 should be a political winner.

Climategate Update

A Conflict of Interest in the Cuccinelli Case
Chris Horner, from Planet Gore

On Monday, Judge Paul Peatross ruled that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli cannot access the University of Virginia’s records in his inquiry into Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann’s claims made to obtain research funding.

I attended the hearing a week ago Friday. Beforehand, Peatross cited his wife’s 1982 degree in environmental science from UVA and asked counsel whether they believed it disqualified him from hearing the University’s motion. That fact, apparently, was relevant. But the fact that the judge’s wife previously worked in the Department of Environmental Sciences — the very department that stood to suffer had he ruled in favor of the attorney general – was somehow not worth disclosing to counsel. I learned of this only after the hearing from Ms. Peatross’s former coworkers, who were astonished that her husband would decide such a matter given his seeming lack of objectivity.

This series of events gives the appearance of the judge’s failure to disclose. Indeed, it seems to rise to the level of a basis for the judge to recuse himself.

IPCC Rapped

The Inter-Academy Council (IAC) this week released its report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IAC study was prompted by conspicuous errors contained in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. According to the Telegraph, the report is “extremely damaging.” In particular, the IAC report concludes that IPCC’s mistakes—including the unfounded claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035—were caused by shoddy standards and weak leadership.

Here’s a roundup of commentary:

• Wall Street Journal editorial, Climate of Uncertainty, 2 September 2010

• Dr. Roy Spencer, Dump the IPCC, 1 September 2010

• Telegraph editorial, Flawed Science, 30 august 2010

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary, check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

CEI Weekly: CEI Stars in "The Green Swindle"

Friday, September 3, 2010

VIDEO: CEI Expert RJ Smith appears on Fox News to speak on the origins of the environmental movement.

FEATURED STORY: CEI stars in new Fox News special, "The Green Swindle" Environmentalists have convinced a large percentage of the population that human beings will soon destroy the earth. How have they been so successful in spreading their message, and how much of what they say is true? Click here to watch the first part of “The Green Swindle,” a special edition of Hannity featuring interviews with CEI’s R.J. Smith, Chris Horner, Iain Murray, and Myron Ebell. SHAPING THE DEBATE [Video] Chris Horner on Fox News discussing new car stickers [Video] Vincent Vernuccio sets out to prove unions hire non-union labor No More Ethanol for America, Please Brian McGraw's op-ed in The Hill's Congress Blog Lobsters Should Fear Mother Nature More than Plastics Angela Logomasini's op-ed in The Providence Journal

CEI PODCAST September 2, 2010: How Zoning Laws Affected Hurricane Katrina’s Victims CEI Policy Analyst Marc Scribner talks about his recent Forbes article, explaining how urban central planning made it harder to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina — and how well Houston, which has no zoning laws, coped with 260,000 Katrina evacuees. BEST OF THE BLOGS Antibiotics and Meat DO Mix by Greg Conko Obama's EPA: School Marms R Us by Marlo Lewis Expensive Jobs by Ryan Young

Cooler Heads Digest 20 August 2010

Announcements

The American Legislative Exchange Council’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force have posted the presentations from their 2010 annual meeting. Click here to see the slides for “The Politics of EPA Regulation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” by CEI’s Myron Ebell.

In the News

“Think about What’s Happening in Countries Like Germany….”
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 20 August 2010

Cancer of Tropic
Jay D. Homnick, American Spectator, 19 August 2010

Is GOP Opposition to Cap-and-Trade Self-Contradictory?
Marlo Lewis, OpenMarket.org, 18 August 2010

The Economic Costs of the Off-Shore Oil Moratorium
Eric Lowe, MasterResource.org, 16 August 2010

Primer on Extreme Weather Mortality
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 16 August 2010

More Gore in the Climate Debate?
Myron Ebell, Politico Energy Arena, 12 August 2010

News You Can Use

Sea Level Rise: Insignificant

According to a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Oceans, “The global mean sea level for the period January 1900 to December 2006 is estimated to rise at a rate of 1.56 ± 0.25 mm/yr which is reasonably consistent with earlier estimates, but we do not find significant acceleration.”  As noted by The Hockey Shtick, the 1.56 mm/yr non-accelerating rate of sea level rise would result in sea levels 6 inches higher than the present in 100 years.

The Real Motive for the “Scientific Consensus”

“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract … a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.”

From Jane Lubchenco, NOAA Administrator, 1997 American Association for the Advancement of Science presidential address. [The quote above was posted this week at ICECAP by Joe D’Aleo]

Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell

2010 Candidates Running against Alarmism

 

Politico ran a revealing story by Darren Samuelsohn this week on Republican candidates for the Senate and House who are openly dismissive of global warming alarmism.  Politico’s Energy Arena then asked its participants to comment on the possible ramifications of this development in the 112th Congress.  Specifically, what does it say for the chances of enacting energy-rationing next year?  This is a slightly-edited version of what I wrote for the Energy Arena.  It will be posted here.

Not only are there more Republican candidates this year who don’t believe in global warming, I have yet to find a Republican nominee for the House or the Senate who is running in favor of cap-and-trade.  Nearly all Republican nominees are running against cap-and-trade, and most are trying to make an issue of it against their Democratic opponents.                            

This is true even in some liberal congressional districts.  For example, Star Parker is running against Rep. Laura Richardson in California’s 37th congressional district, which includes Compton and most of Long Beach.  Parker has made opposition to cap-and-trade the top issue in her campaign.  Parker may be a long shot in a strongly Democratic district, but she has found that opposing the higher energy prices that will result from enacting cap-and-trade resonates with poor voters.

Even the seven Republicans who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill on 26th June 2009 aren’t publicizing this fact. (Rep. John McHugh of New York was the eighth, but he is now the Secretary of the Army in the Obama Administration). I checked out their campaign web sites, and not a single one mentions cap-and-trade or global warming as an issue.  The web site of Michael Castle, who is favored to win Delaware’s open Senate seat, only mentions that he’s in favor of energy independence.

Rep. Mark Kirk backed away from his vote within a week of making it when he discovered that he couldn’t possibly win the Illinois Republican nomination for the Senate if he supported cap-and-trade.  And according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun, Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California, in a debate on 19th August with her Democratic opponent, Steve Pougnet, did not make clear whether she would vote for cap-and-trade again.

A fair number of Democrats are also running against cap-and-trade, including most of those who voted against Waxman-Markey and a fair number of challengers.  Very few who voted for Waxman-Markey are mentioning that fact in their campaigns.

My conclusion is that cap-and-trade is an election loser and is already completely dead in the 112th Congress.  The Obama Administration apparently agrees.  It was recently reported that all mention of cap-and-trade was removed earlier this summer from the White House Energy and Environment web site.  

Across the States

Kentucky

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear (D) is taking heat from the Legislature for buying into climate alarmism. In December 2009, Gov. Beshear created the Kentucky Climate Action Plan Council, and charged it with developing “an action plan to address the causes of climate change, prepare for the likely consequences and impacts of climate change to Kentucky, and establish firm benchmarks and timetables for implementing the KCAPC recommendations,” according to its website. KCAPC then hired the Center for Climate Strategies for $200,000 to manage its meetings, set its agenda, provide all its ideas, and write all its reports. As has been reported by the Heartland Institute’s Paul Chesser, the Center for Climate Strategies is a global warming alarmist advocacy group that has devised energy rationing schemes in States across the country. Unfortunately for the Governor, the people of Kentucky—a major coal-producing state—do not share his enthusiasm for energy rationing, which is why the State Senate Government Contract Review Committee last week voted 6-0 to disapprove of KCAPC’s contract with the Center for Climate Strategies. The Governor this week defended the contract.

New Jersey

Despite the fact that the people of New Jersey already pay the seventh highest electricity rates in the country, Governor Chris Christie (R) this week signed a “green energy” bill that will raise utility bills even higher. According to Energy & Environment News (subscription required), the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act requires the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to set up a program requiring utilities to buy offshore renewable energy credits for approved wind farms. Ultimately, the credits would finance 1,100 MW of offshore wind energy, costing rate-payers $6 to $8 billion (before transmission costs are accounted for). Taxpayers are also on the hook: The bill creates $100 million in tax incentives for wind power manufacturers.

Around the World

China

This week China surpassed Japan to become the second largest economy in the world. A month ago, China surpassed the United States to become the largest energy user in the world. These two facts are directly related. According to the International Energy Agency, “Coal has underpinned China's massive and unprecedented growth in output, fueling an economic miracle….” Coal-fired power plants provide approximately 80 % of China’s electricity.

Climategate Update

Hockey Stick Debunked, Again

The Annals of Applied Statistics, a highly respected statistical journal, has accepted for publication a searing critique of Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” global temperature reconstruction by statisticians Blakeley McShane and Abraham Wyner. It’s titled, “A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?” You can read a draft at Climate Audit. It states in the abstract:

“We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.”

For more on the Hockey Stick, check out this excellent book review of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, by John Dawson in this month’s Quadrant.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary, check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.



CEI Weekly: The Nation's Worst Attorneys General

>>The Nation's Worst Attorneys General
Some of the nation’s state attorneys general have been very bad indeed, reports Senior Attorney Hans Bader. In the new study, "The Nation’s Worst Attorneys General," Bader documents cases of AGs engaging in unethical behavior, usurping legislative powers, fabricating the law, and following predatory practices in regards to private (and out-of-state) businesses. He goes on to rank the worst of the worst, a list headed up by California’s Jerry Brown and Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal.
Read the study here.

>>Shaping the Debate 

[Video] Vincent Vernuccio on Non-Union Pickets

Vincent Vernuccio's media appearance on Fox Business

U.S. Tech Firms' China Presence Furthers Internet Freedom

Ryan Radia and Greg Conko's op-ed in The Seattle Times

Obama's New Financial Regulation Bill Strangles America's Economy with Red Tape

John Berlau's op-ed on Fox Forum

More Muscle for Big Merchants

John Berlau's op-ed on The New York Times' Room for Debate

Climategate Inquiry Glosses Over the Facts

Iain Murray's op-ed in The Washington Examiner

Economists vs. Economics

Ryan Young's op-ed in The American Spectator

'Climategate' Fallout may Impact Legislation

Myron Ebell's citation in The San Francisco Chronicle

Lift Government Barriers to Encourage Competition and Innovation

Wayne Crews' news release

>>Best of the Blogs

President Obama Signs Dodd-Frank Financial "Reform" Bill: 2315 Pages of Special-Interest Payoffs

By Hans Bader

Blowout Prevention Act - Will Rs Get Buyer’s Remorse?

By Marlo Lewis

>>LibertyWeek Podcast

Episode 102: Collective Insanity

Richard Morrison and Marc Scribner welcome guest co-host Alex Nowrasteh to episode 102. We take on the health care tax, obscenity and the First Amendment, the prognosis for the Gulf of Mexico, and the collective insanity coming out of Venezuela.

 >>Support CEI

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