An Environmentalist Agenda for Earth Day 2010

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Back in 1970 when we celebrated the first Earth Day, what would we have thought if we had known what environmentalism would become by 2010? Back then I was in 7th grade, and an avid member of my Junior High School’s “ecology club.” We planted trees, collected litter, and painted all the garbage cans on campus green, among other things. And back then, as now, the teachers were enthusiastically encouraging the students to care about the planet.

The results ensuing in the 40-50 years since “Silent Spring” was written and the first Earth Day was celebrated are impressive. When I grew up in California’s Santa Clara Valley in the 1960’s, on a bad air day you couldn’t see the Santa Cruz Mountains five miles away. Then we got rid of unleaded gas and mandated catalytic converters and today, with ten times as many people living in what we now call the Silicon Valley, there is never more than a faint wisp of smoggy haze, even on the worst days. We cleaned up our rivers, got rid of acid rain, saved the Condor and countless other magnificent wildlife species, and on and on and on. And then we went too far.

Today environmentalism is run amok. It is the creator of artificial scarcity, the enabler of the very corporate greed its denizens naively decry, it is a faith and a religion, an ideological smokescreen for statism and socialism, and it has lost most of its connection to the original values we believed in. And the reason for this is clear – once the environmentalists accomplished important goals, their cause began to lose visibility and had to struggle for relevance among the American public. So instead of continuing to emphasize environmentalist goals that still mattered, environmentalists sold out, and embraced the absurdity of anthropogenic climate change.

In honor of Earth Day and everything it still represents that is good and still urgently valid, this post isn’t to debate, yet again, whether or not the earth’s climate is catastrophically tipping, whether or not humans have caused this, or whether or not humans can do anything about this. Read “The Climate Money Trail,” and the reports linked to in that post, and make up your own mind. It is beyond comprehension to me that anyone can follow the logic and facts in those posts with an open mind and fail to conclude what I have, that concerns about anthropogenic climate change are unfounded.

Instead of dwelling on that debate, in honor of Earth Day, here is a list of genuine environmental challenges that remain with us. Challenges we might be making more progress in addressing, were the trajectory of our responses not diverted by the great boogyman of climate change:

1 – Enforce sustainable fishing on the world’s oceans. Stop incinerating the world’s forests to grow subsidized biofuel. Revisit plans to carpet the world’s open spaces with wind generators and solar farms.

2 – Eliminate toxic metal and microscopic particulate emissions from coal powered generating plants. Complete the transition to clean fossil fuels (clean, not CO2-free). Develop clean coal, shale gas, and offshore oil.

3 – Clean up tainted aquifers in places like the Los Angeles basin and begin harvesting and storing storm runoff.

4 – Build nuclear-powered desalination plants to augment natural sources of fresh water. In general, accelerate construction of nuclear power stations.

5 – Eliminate particulate and other genuine pollutants from heavy diesel trucks and machinery.

6 – In order to stimulate economic growth, which will empower society to fund genuine environmental mitigation, repeal “decoupling” policies so public utilities will nurture competitive, cheap energy and water from all sources, instead of enabling utilities to make more money when they produce less.

7 – In addition to encouraging wealth creation, support female literacy around the world, so the combination of wealth and literacy leads to voluntary reductions in family sizes, accelerating humanity’s inevitable path towards population stabilization.

8 – Continue reasonable and realistic attempts to protect endangered species, including educational campaigns to reduce consumer demand for endangered animal parts.

9 – Restore balance to protection of open space and wilderness areas, recognizing that excessive curbs on private land development hinder economic growth which in-turn reduces the financial wherewithal to mitigate genuine environmental challenges.

10 – Reinvent environmentalism to embrace property rights, limited government, and reasonable environmental goals, in order to achieve a clean, sustainable civilization on an accelerated path to universal abundance and prosperity.

This set of objectives may seem like heresy today, now that the global environmental movement has been hijacked by the climate issue. But 40 years ago these objectives probably would probably have seemed reasonable. The message that should be carrying the day right now is that rational environmentalism prevailed. It is institutionalized and its accomplishments are dramatic. Fulfilling these objectives here would return environmentalism not only to a viable common ground that would benefit everyone, but would arguably return environmentalism to its roots.

Earth Day should be a celebration of the accomplishments the environmentalist movement has logged over the past 40 years. It should also be a celebration of the future – where technology will yield abundant energy and water, and voluntary urbanization combined with voluntary population stabilization will yield abundant open space. But to realize this promising destiny, environmentalists must embrace capitalism, the engine of prosperity, the enabler of progress, and abandon the climate-inspired litany of doom.

Implementing California’s Global Warming Act

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In 2006 California’s legislature passed AB32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act,” a measure that was touted as a trailblazing breakthrough in the dire challenge to avoid catastrophic climate change. Enthusiastically signed by Republican Governor Schwarzenegger, with “early action” measures diligently enforced by Attorney General Jerry Brown, praised by climate crusader Al Gore, this legislation became the model for the world to follow. But the devil is in the details.

In the Spring of 2007 California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) got to work on an implementation plan, in order to fulfill the legislative mandate to have AB32 fully enforced by 2012. Three years later, after countless public hearings, meetings with industry leaders, and endless legal, economic, and scientific analysis, CARB has a lot to show for their effort. CARB has produced so much material, in fact, that it is impossible to briefly summarize the myriad regulations that AB32 has already spawned. Implementation of AB32 will dramatically impact pretty much every aspect of human activity.

The premise behind AB32 is that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, and that virtually eliminating CO2 emissions is necessary to prevent the planet’s climate from overheating, with all the apocalyptic consequences; rising oceans inundating coastal regions, epic droughts cascading through the world’s fragile forests and killing them, extreme storms, acidic oceans, collapsing agriculture – the end of life as we know it.

If you accept this premise, than the goals AB32 sets forth are perfectly reasonable – they call for a reduction of California’s total CO2 emissions caused by human activity, currently estimated at about 500 million metric tons per year, to be brought down by 2020 to the level they were in 1990, which was about 425 million metric tons per year.

To get an idea of what regulations CARB intends to enact, one may review online copies of their most recent “Climate Change Scoping Plan,” their “Updated Economic Analysis of California’s Climate Change Scoping Plan,” and their “ENERGY 2020 Model Inputs and Assumptions.” From these documents it is possible to put together the broad assumptions that underlie CARB’s ambitious plans for California. The key variables include current and projected figures for CO2 emissions, population, GDP, and total energy consumption in BTUs. If you compare the ratios between these variables, you will grasp the audacious impracticality of AB32, and by extension, of the entire agenda of the global climate alarm community.

As of 2010 California has a population of 39.3 million people, with a GDP of $1.6 trillion per year, and total energy consumption of 7.2 quadrillion BTUs per year. By comparing GDP with total energy consumption, California’s “energy intensity” can be calculated, that is, the amount of BTU units of energy required to produce $1.00 of GDP. In California’s case today, 4,644 BTUs equate to $1.00 of GDP, which is among the best in the world. The United States, for example, has energy intensity of 6,998. India’s energy intensity is 14,221, China’s is 15,512, and Russia’s is a staggering 24,212. This means the Chinese, for example, uses more than triple the energy used by Californians to produce the same unit of wealth. At the other extreme, only four major nations have energy intensities that narrowly edge California’s; Germany with 4,522, Japan with 4,513, the United Kingdom with 4,460, and nuclear-powered France the leader at 4,343. California is already a world leader in energy efficiency, which means it is going to be very expensive to realize additional energy efficiencies. We have already picked the low hanging fruit. We are already an example to the world.

With all this in mind, where does CARB envision California to be in 2020 with respect to these variables? In the mildest case, CARB estimates California’s total energy consumption between now and 2020 to drop by 6.4%, to 7.0 quadrillion BTUs per year. At the same time, California’s population is projected to grow to 44.1 million, and GDP to grow to $2.0 trillion per year. Under this scenario, California’s energy intensity will improve dramatically, dropping to a mere 3,450 BTUs per $1.00 of GDP. Is this practical? Can California produce a unit of wealth while consuming half as much energy as the rest of the United States?

There is only one way, ultimately, to accomplish this goal, and that is through policies that will make energy cost more. Here is where the other shoe drops – because not only is CARB designing policies to reduce California’s total energy consumption, but they are doing this to finance their core mission, which is to reduce the “carbon intensity” of California’s energy mix.

The definition of carbon intensity is how many kilograms of CO2 emissions correspond to $1.00 of GDP, and by this measure, California also scores quite well, requiring only .34 kg per $1.00 of GDP. The United States has a carbon intensity of .40, and only France is significantly ahead of California, with a carbon intensity of .15. CARB intends to reduce California’s carbon intensity by nearly 40% by 2020, from .34 to .21 kg/$1.00 GDP. Put another way, they intend to engineer a reduction to California’s projected 2020 “business as usual” CO2 emissions of 600 million metric tons per year by 30%, to the 1990 level of 425 million metric tons. They intend to do this is by empowering the state to auction “emission allowances” to every business whose operations in California are estimated to emit more than 25,000 tons of CO2 per year. This will affect nearly every major utility, refinery, agricultural operation, and manufacturer in the state.

By forcing industrial entities to purchase permits to emit progressively smaller quantities of CO2, these entities are inevitably forced to pass these costs on to consumers. CARB analysts are on record stating this should not be harmful to the economy because they intend to redistribute the proceeds of these auctions to anyone harmed by these price increases. There are several problems with this. First of all, there are going to be too many people at the table. Utilities, along with all the other major CO2 “polluters,” are going to be at the front of the line, along with the high-tech community, petitioning for subsidies to deploy low-carbon energy sources, or otherwise lower their carbon “footprint.” These would include wind generators and solar farms, along with the attendant extensions of transmission lines to reach these disbursed sources of energy. And because these sources of energy are intermittent, energy storage and backup generation infrastructure will also require new construction. It is important to emphasize that because of all this additional required investment – transmission, storage, and backup generators – no matter how inexpensive solar or wind energy becomes, it will never be as inexpensive as conventional energy today.

In order to sell the cost increases to consumers, who are already seeing utility rate increases of 30% or more as the utilities begin investing in the transition to low-carbon electricity, “smart meters” are going to be deployed at every residential, commercial or industrial account. These high-tech devices will comprehensively monitor energy consumption, eventually communicating with appliances that have embedded, IP addressable communication suites. They will enable the utility to “assist” the customer to micro-manage their energy consumption, providing “incentives” for the customers to upgrade their appliances and modify their lifestyle to consume less energy. In reality, this means people will have to use less overall energy, and consume energy at the approved times, or they will pay punitive rates – even higher than they will already be. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where this is going: Install expensive and toxic compact fluorescent lighting, back-straining front-loading washers, double or triple paned, smaller windows, paint your roof white, down-size your television, add lighting systems that automatically turn off the lights if you left them on, enroll in programs to let experts from the utility into your home to help you with all this and more – or else.

Also in line for wealth redistribution will be the low income communities. If paying to deploy low-carbon electricity generation and transmission infrastructure, and attaching “smart meters” to everyone’s homes isn’t costly enough, consumers able to afford this will also see built into their inflated utility rates an assessment to help the less fortunate. Remember the incentives to the utilities, who in a competitive market would be trying to deliver cheaper services, are completely reversed in California – utilities are regulated businesses that have fixed, negotiated profit percentages. The only way they can make significantly more profit is by collecting more revenue. Without AB32, even in their wildest dreams, California’s regulated utilities would not have seen the possibility of doubling or even tripling their revenues within a decade. Similarly, without AB32, California’s high-tech “green” entrepreneurs and investors would have had to deliver green solutions the old fashioned way – by actually offering something better, faster, cheaper and cleaner – instead of short-cutting the process with legislated mandates and subsidies.

To reduce California’s carbon emissions by 18% in eight years will take more than just selling emissions allowances to industry and imposing smart meters in homes and businesses. AB32 enables new restrictions on land development in California, which already has the most draconian limitations on private property in the nation. In order to develop land, to allegedly reduce vehicle miles traveled, AB32 inspired regulations and legislation will require land development to occur in concentric circles around existing cities. It will place greenbelts around urban areas and require infill instead of expansion. There are a lot of good intentions here, but terrible unintended consequences. The artificial scarcity created by these restrictions, in a sparsely populated state with massive reserves of open space, has already created a housing market that was prohibitively expensive even before the real-estate bubble. Moreover, mandated infill often destroys the atmosphere of semi-rural suburbs, and greenbelts designed to prevent suburban sprawl generally only serve to create exurban sprawl, as developers simply relocate to beyond the greenbelt’s outer boundary.

Along with unprecedented encroachments on our property rights, and insidious intrusions into our privacy, the biggest problem with AB32 is the negative economic impact that it will have, in a state already crippled economically by existing environmental regulations. When one considers the financial costs required to lower CO2 emissions, it is specious to suggest that these costs are somehow offset because they create “green jobs.” When designing regulations for utilities, the job of government is to mandate reasonable environmental safeguards, but to balance that with an equally important mandate to deliver abundant, cheap energy and water.

According to this reasoning, instead of investing in a low carbon electricity infrastructure and surveillance systems to micro-manage energy consumption, California should be investing in nuclear power, nuclear powered desalination plants along the coast, liquid natural gas terminals, efficiency upgrades to existing high-voltage transmission lines, run-off harvesting and aquifer storage systems, upgraded aqueducts, comprehensive waste-water treatment and aquifer recharge, offshore drilling for oil and gas, widened roads and freeways, more airport runways, and buses for mass transit. These steps will result in energy, water and transportation costing everyone in California less. This will benefit businesses and consumers, and make California a magnet for investors and entrepreneurs all over the world. A recent study in Spain entitled “Lessons from the Spanish Renewables Bubble” calculated that for every green job created in Spain, because of higher costs of energy to industry, 2.2 jobs were lost. More specifically, with respect to electricity, they showed that every “green” megawatt of capacity cost 5.3 jobs elsewhere in the economy. The study concluded that these consequences were not unique to Spain’s approach but instead “are largely inherent in schemes to promote renewable energy sources.”

The trump card, of course, to negate all voices of reason, is the alleged threat of global warming. If you are an informed skeptic – something the alarmists contend is an oxymoron – it becomes tiresome to recite the litany of legitimate reasons we should stop, look and listen before going down this well-intentioned path to green hell. The primacy of solar cycles, the multi-decadal oscillations of ocean currents, the dubious role of water vapor as a positive feedback mechanism, the improbability of positive climate feedback in general, the uncertain role (and diversity) of aerosols, the poorly understood impact of land use changes, the failure of the ice caps to melt on schedule, the failure of climate models to account for an actual cooling of the troposphere, the fact that just the annual fluctuations in natural sources of CO2 emissions eclipse estimated human CO2 emissions by an order of magnitude. And let’s not forget – California only is responsible for 1.7% of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Does any of this matter to CARB?

Apparently not. If you read CARB’s scoping plan, it is instructive to read the final section “Vision for the Future.” The tentative targets they are setting for California’s CO2 emissions decline precipitously after 2020, to 284 mmt in 2030, to 185 mmt in 2040, and to 85 mmt in 2050. Returning to the notion of carbon intensity, these are mind-numbing objectives. Basically CARB is proposing to completely eliminate fossil fuel from California’s energy mix (barring “sequestration,” another major boondoggle) within the next forty years, and analysts at the agency openly admit they have no idea how they will accomplish this. But according to the climate alarmists, this is the only way to go if we hope to survive. Will California travel this road all alone?

Will California’s Voters Reject their Global Warming Act?

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A citizen’s initiative that looks likely to make it onto the November ballot this year is the aptly named “California Jobs Act,” which would suspend implementation of AB32, California’s Global Warming Act, until unemployment in the Golden State drops down to 4.8%. Passed in 2006, AB32 calls for California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) to write new regulations designed to lower, by 2020, California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. According to CARB’s report “California 1990 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Level and 2020 Emissions Limit,” in 1990, Californian’s emitted 433 million metric tons of “CO2 equivalents” in 1990, and by 2004 these greenhouse gasses had increased to an estimated 484 million metric tons.

Back in 2006, when AB32 was passed by California’s State legislature, and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, California’s economy was at the crest of the debt-fueled housing-bubble boom. Now that California’s unemployment rate is nearly 13%, the highest in the nation, it is dawning on California’s voters that schemes to go it alone and adopt the bleeding edge of climate mitigation policies may not be the best prescription for economic recovery. Notwithstanding promises of abundant “green jobs,” and visions of a prospering “green economy,” what is most likely to be the economic outcome if California fully implements AB32 by 2012 as planned?

There are several examples surfacing that suggest CARB’s original economic assessment was overly optimistic. An analysis on the net impact of AB32 on jobs in California prepared in March 2010 by California’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office refuted CARB’s conclusions, and claimed implementation of AB32 would cause net job losses, not net gains. One of the first of studies of the actual economic impact of publicly subsidized renewables, entitled “Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources” was released by economists at the University of Rey Juan Carlos in March 2009.  It documented how the Spanish “green jobs” policies in fact destroyed jobs, detailing this in terms of jobs destroyed per job created and the net destruction per installed mega-watt.

Proponents of AB32 will continue to argue that implementing AB32 will accelerate transition to a prosperous “green” economy, but ultimately their economic argument has to rest on the premise that green policies and green products are cost-competitive with conventional technologies and existing policies. And in most cases, this position is dramatically false. It is one thing to subsidize strategic research into energy technologies that will eventually yield breakthroughs in price and performance, but quite another to require substantially more expensive current renewable energy technology to be deployed at scale today. Solar energy and wind energy are still 2-3x more expensive than conventional energy solutions, and with recent developments in shale gas extraction as well as ongoing progress in safe nuclear technologies, that cost gap is not shrinking. Proponents of solar and wind energy also frequently fail to account not only for the installation cost of these intermittent energy generators, but also the cost of maintaining back-up conventional generators that have to be activated when the sun sets or the wind dies down. They also often fail to assess the costs of constructing additional high-voltage transmission lines to transport electricity from decentralized wind and solar farms to urban areas, as well as the costs to buffer the power grid to accommodate massive fluctuations in generating output from these intermittent sources of energy. Ironically, proponents also fail to assess the costs of lawsuits and permit processes which add, especially in California, massive additional cost to any new energy project, conventional or alternative.

Evidence that renewable energy costs significantly more than conventional energy is not hard to find. An article in the Los Angeles Times, dated March 15th, 2010, entitled “DWP plans 37% rate hike over four years to cover cost increases,” states the primary reason for this is to pay for renewable energy. Other utilities across the state are planning similar increases – not just power utilities, but all utilities who consume power, such as the water, sewage and sanitation districts. All of these utility rate increases cascade into the cost of doing business as a private sector company. And it doesn’t end there – to implement AB32 and realize the ambitious goals for greenhouse gas reduction, CARB intends to rewrite regulations on land-use and land management, vehicle efficiency, building energy efficiency, transportation policies – in general, they intend to regulate virtually every industrial process that results in greenhouse gas emissions. There is a cost for all of this.

California may have a liberal electorate, but Californian’s also have a very well documented aversion to higher taxes. And “mitigation” in the name of global warming is an indirect tax. By raising prices for energy and other resources required by California’s industries, many will leave California. Those who remain will have to defer investment in job creating activity, such as plant expansion or research and development, in order to absorb higher utility expenses and invest in new equipment for mitigation. The “green” jobs created by construction of subsidized, non-competitive energy and utility infrastructure are vastly outnumbered by the jobs lost because the business community has to allocate more of their financial resources to paying energy and utility bills, and consequently have less financial resources to create new products and new jobs.

On the demand side of the economy the same consequences apply. Consumers will have to pay more for energy and other utilities, as well as for products produced in California – including transportation and housing. This will reduce their discretionary consumption, further shrinking the economy. These mandated increases to the cost of doing business and the cost of living in California thanks to AB32 are not explicitly called taxes, but that is what they are.

California has a well-earned reputation as a political trend-setter. Californians were the first electorate to enact term limits. Their property tax revolt in 1978 stunned the nation. California’s voters have the potential – if they vote to suspend AB32 this November – to begin to reestablish their State as a leader of responsible political action. The impact of Californians suspending AB32 will not only be to save themselves from punitive new hidden taxes, but to reignite a constructive discussion regarding what green technologies are really ready for prime-time, and what a realistic balance should be between environmental stewardship and economic growth.

The Climate Money Trail

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One of the most lucid recent commentaries that addresses the question of climate politics and money is by Australia’s Joanne Nova, who posted “The Money Trail” on March 4th. As we wonder again whether the consensus of scientists regarding climate change – if there ever was such a thing – is now unraveling in the wake of climategate, glaciergate, amazongate, methanegate, etc., it is important to also take another look at the money trail.

My own position on climate change has been consistent for many years. Back in 1995, when I launched www.ecoworld.com, I was determined, among other things, to present both sides of the climate change debate. A post from 2008 entitled “Environmentalist Priorities and the Global Warming Scare” offers links to dozens of reports EcoWorld published on the issue of climate change. These reports provide ample references to primary sources of data, and document a growing conviction that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have little to do with any recent climate change, that predictions of impending catastrophic climate events are improbable, and that the cure is worse than the disease. But what about following the money?

A June 2009 CIV FI post entitled “The Climate Alarm Industry” lists several reasons why it is ludicrous to accuse climate skeptics of being motivated by financial incentives, when the financial incentives to be a climate alarmist are several orders of magnitude greater:

Financial incentives to promote anthropogenic CO2 as a dangerous pollutant:

– Insurance companies charge higher premiums
– Fossil fuel companies keep prices (and profits) high
– Politicians enact new taxes
– Public sector entities get new taxes to fund their pensions
– Environmental organizations get more funds
– Left wing activists get a new basis to attack private ownership
– More public sector funded jobs are created
– Lawyers have a new basis to file lawsuits
– CPA firms begin to audit carbon accounting
– Wall street gets to trade emissions credits
– Climate researchers get more grant requests funded
– United Nations bureaucrats get a guaranteed revenue stream

Before quoting some of Joanne Nova’s astute observations on this same topic, here are three articles by Dr. Richard Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT who is one of the most credible climate skeptics in the world. These articles are interesting both because they summarize and debunk many of the scientific arguments in favor of climate alarm, but also because they document in great detail the politicization of the academic community in favor of alarm. Read “Is There a Basis for Global Warming Alarm,” “Climate Science – Is it Currently Designed to Answer Questions,” and “Why Global Warming is Unlikely to be a Safe Area for Investment.”

In “The Money Trail,” Nova quantifies some of the financial incentives motivating climate alarm. Consider these points:

“The US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989 – to be sure, this funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it’s 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics. It buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation.”

“What the US Government has paid to one side of the scientific process pales in comparison with carbon trading. According to the World Bank, turnover of carbon trading reached $126 billion in 2008. PointCarbon estimates trading in 2009 was about $130 billion. This is turnover, not specifically profits, but each year the money market turnover eclipses the science funding over 20 years.”

“Commissioner Bart Chilton, head of the energy and environmental markets advisory committee of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has predicted that within five years a carbon market would dwarf any of the markets his agency currently regulates: “I can see carbon trading being a $2 trillion market.” “The largest commodity market in the world.” He ought to know.”

“Unpaid skeptics are not just taking on scientists who conveniently secure grants and junkets for pursuing one theory, they also conflict with potential profits of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and every other financial institution or corporation that stands to profit like the Chicago Climate Exchange, European Climate Exchange, PointCarbon, IdeaCarbon (and the list goes on… ) as well as against government bureaucracies like the IPCC and multiple departments of Climate Change.”

Joanne Nova, like any responsible skeptic, has done her homework. Here is her take on the actual science of climate change:

“And as far as evidence goes, surprisingly, I agree with the IPCC that carbon dioxide warms the planet. But few realize that the IPCC relies on feedback factors like humidity and clouds causing a major amplification of the minor CO2 effect and that this amplification simply isn’t there. Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements failed to find the pattern of upper trophospheric heating the models predicted, (and neither Santer 2008 with his expanding “uncertainties” nor Sherwood 2008 with his wind gauges change that). Two other independent empirical observations indicate that the warming due to CO2 is halved by changes in the atmosphere, not amplified. [Spencer 2007, Lindzen 2009, see also Spencer 2008]. Without this amplification from water vapor or clouds the infamous “3.5 degrees of warming” collapses to just a half a degree — most of which has happened.”

With a citizen’s initiative entitled the “California Jobs Act” currently working its way onto the November 2010 ballot that will suspend implementation of California’s “Global Warming Act,” it will be interesting to see what arguments the opponents of suspension will muster. Will they accuse skeptics of being “flat-earthers,” or call them even worse names? They would be better advised to rejoin the scientific debate, if they value their credibility. Will they accuse the skeptics of “following the money?” Because in that regard they will be making a terrible mistake. The bigger money trail is not hard to see – and is yet another example of Wall Street collusion with big government. To wrap up, here is Joanne Nova’s take on the attacks made on climate skeptics:

“The starkly lop-sided nature of the funding means we’d be fools not to pay very close attention to the evidence. It also shows how vapid the claims are from those who try to smear skeptics and who mistakenly think ad hominem arguments are worth making.”

Contrasting Environmentalism & Unions

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a man who always stood up for the worker, once made this very contrarian statement “I would continue where others have stopped, and I would rise when others sleep.” This is an inspiring explanation of the moral worth of polemics, or being contrarian for its own sake. Because not only are polemics a potentially pointless, occasionally perilous game, tolerating the polemicist is the only reason we have political freedom. One might also add that indulging contrarian thought is the only way we preserve a glimmer of truth, during every time our world is seized with misplaced monolithic zeal, and consequently, nurturing the contrarian is a way civilization can better adapt and embrace disruptive and productive innovations and more quickly evolve. So how would workers or contrarians view our latest global panic, the war on CO2 emissions? In considering this question, the differences between unions, who care about workers, and environmentalists, who care about nature, become quite interesting.

Global warming policies and environmentalist policies in general are only in part about global warming or environmentalism, they are more generally about to what extent we redesign our government to give more rights to government and fewer rights to individual property owners. Environmentalists claim their policies benefit the economy, but one might just as easily argue that is not only false, but dangerously false. In the name of environmentalism we are not simply slowing our economy down, we are failing to develop and maintain infrastructure necessary to avoid natural disasters. A certain amount of environmentalist wisdom informing government laws and regulations is healthy, indeed essential. But restricting development of water infrastructure, power plants and freeways, forcing developers to only be permitted to approach heavily restricted lists of eligible property owners based on “urban service boundaries,” and litigating literally everything in the name of some environmentalist statute or presumed statute – is environmental extremism, not common sense environmentalism. Now we have the war on CO2. This imperils the global economy, it undermines attempts to improve human safety and security, and threatens the freedom of individuals and nations.

Two of the biggest drains on the United States economy over the past 30-50 years are environmentalists and labor unions. Both have reduced the efficiency of the economy in critical areas. Environmental laws and litigation have raised the costs for all resources, dramatically slowing economic development while only yielding marginal additional environmental benefits – if any. The power of big labor, in both the public and private sector, has reduced the ability of unionized workforces to right-size their entitlements in the face of lower revenues. This inflexibility in-turn causes larger than necessary shocks when large corporations or government entities postpone restructuring because of legacy obligations.

Unlike environmentalist policies, however, the impact of unions – in both the public and private sector – are at least economically progressive in a relatively egalitarian and competitive system that values project-merit, and therefore release money into a broader and more productive sector of the economy. Environmentalism, on the other hand, funds jobs for government bureaucrats along with astronomical fees for private service professionals – people who produce nothing and are motivated by their compensation to perpetually demand additional takings. Such environmentalism is regressive and slows economic growth, it raises costs of living for working people and transfers the wealth to far fewer, far more highly compensated, far less productive individuals. Environmentalism, at its idealist core, too often worships nature and marginalizes the aspirations of individuals, and consequently restricts building activity. Union organizing, at its idealist core, is to care above all for the common man who works to build things that create wealth.

Another crucial distinction between unionism and environmentalism is there is an inevitable end to the need to have unions, because the need for unions will wither away as per capita wealth increases. Since ever-advancing technology and slowing human birthrates guarantee that per capita wealth will always increase, eventually there will be enough overall wealth in the world to provide everyone with basic needs and more. Environmentalism, on the other hand, has no inevitable limit, it must be self regulating. And the more extreme environmentalist policies become, the less wealth we will have. Environmentalist doomsday predictions of resource shortages will likely occur, if they occur, precisely because we stopped developing resources in the name of protecting the environment. Balance has been lost in the discussion – the trump card is the alleged need to stop CO2 emissions – and the zealotry and propaganda mustered today to silence climate skeptics would make Francisco Franco proud, and others, in hopefully not all of their unfortunate worst iterations.

Of course we should prepare for climate change. The climate changes catastrophically all the time, these are called “storms,” and they are perfectly natural. Sometimes, since the beginning of time, we have had “extreme storms,” and this is also perfectly natural. As our ability to mitigate risk to humans increases through technology, our values and our priorities to upgrade publically available human protections increases apace. Of course we need to better prepare for droughts and extreme weather. But we need to do this regardless of whether or not CO2 is causing overall temperatures to increase – and excuse me if, Marquez-like, I would continue with my global warming skepticism where others have stopped. Along with underground HVDC electrical grid upgrades, we should be building freeways and aqueducts and offshore LNG terminals. We should be burying fiberoptic cable and moving electricity conduits underground, and eliminate the visual scourge and dangerous tangle of overhead telephone wires and telecom cables across the old suburbia. There are plenty of union jobs out there waiting to be done, and they create real value, but approving any of these developments requires prohibitive environmental compliance costs – billions and billions and by God, nowadays, trillions of dollars. The fact that unions and environmentalists are in the same political party in America is curious, to say the least.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez also said this, “I have learned that a man has the right to look down on somebody only when he is helping him to get up.” Environmentalists may claim to have this impulse, but unlike the unionists who clearly are empathic with ordinary people, environmentalist policies are now ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of elites. The environmentalist mantra ala stopping global warming at any costs will benefit the established oligarchal elites, not the working man, not unionists, not minority activists, nor free thinking liberals. Why then do those who claim to speak for working people continue to embrace extreme environmentalism, when its practice yields results that are opposed to their own core values and goals?  The way the workers will rise economically to the point where unions can willingly wither away will be when we implement infrastructure proposals and public policies designed to make energy, water, transportation and shelter less expensive, not more expensive. This will require reforming environmentalism.

Trillions and Trillions

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If the old saying were coined today, it would be “a few trillion here, and a few trillion there, and pretty soon we are talking about serious money.” Who knows what trillions mean anymore – is the U.S. a $15 trillion economy, or are dollars fluid, and benchmarks meaningless?

Deficits are now counted in trillions of dollars, joining quantities previously ascribed only to global reserves of major commodities, or the annual output of large nations. One trillion. A thousand billion. A million million. Debts and deficits are now routinely counted in trillions with a T. Will requiring counting and auditing CO2 emissions, then taxing and assessing fees on CO2 emissions – and auctioning permits to emit CO2 – become the mechanism for governments to address their exploding debts and deficits, now denominated in trillians, and will such policies best advance the interests of humanity and the earth?

Commodities, along with the value of economic output, or economic capacity, wax and wane in the flux of the global market. If you try to completely regulate all this capitalism, if you try to eliminate all the waxing and waning, you are very likely to create a political economy resembling either fascism or communism. Enforcing a regulatory scheme so comprehensive as to encompass literally all combustion, concerned not merely about clean burning but burning itself, cannot help but require such tyranny.

“A trillion here, and a trillion there, and pretty soon we are talking about serious money.” Is the output of the entire global economy still estimated at approximately $50 trillion dollars per year, even in this slow-down, and if the dollar devalues, what does that mean in any case? And who is to say what the equilibrium price of commodities is or should be, when each of them is subject to the disruptions of entrepreunership and innovation at any time?

Transcending any quantity of currency is the innate endowment of national wealth. And wealth, in the case of nations, is valued in the extent and quality of their institutions and their assets. The wealth of nations, for example, is their ability to educate their population and provide them ample incentives to excel. The wealth of nations is also in their endowment of natural resources as well as the net worth of their already-built infrastructure.

For these reasons, despite the volatility of dollars and derivatives and related intangibles, despite its infinite diversity and that it can only be described theoretically, nonetheless wealth and wealth creation is real and absolute. Genuine wealth cannot therefore be contained or consigned or configured, much less created, via new fiat currencies and asset inventions pegged to transfers of carbon or climate models. And this is why, despite the desparate pleas of precautionary principle zealots wearing CO2 blinders, all strategies to adapt to climate change must be subjected to honest cost-benefit analysis. It is clear we are experiencing climate change, because to be experincing anything else on this water planet, blessed with a greenhouse atmosphere and teeming life, would be terribly alarming. Mars, for example, experiences minimal climate change.

Trying to mitigate the allegedly negative effects of CO2 emissions through heavily regulating and taxing all CO2 emissions is simply not effective compared to many alternative wealth-creating uses of public funds. And please note, the costs to trade the rights to emit CO2 emissions is equivalent to taxes, fees and regulations, in terms of costs to innovators, entrepreneurs, and emerging nations. Expanding the government regulatory sector, and using it to pay subsidies to fossil fuel companies to sequester CO2, or put another way, using CO2 emissions as the primary criteria for any and all environmental project merit, can completely displace basic cost-benefit analysis.

When these macroeconomic cost-benefit analyses are done, many policies that rely on CO2 emissions as a key criteria become questionable. In order to hopefully reduce CO2 emissions, should we really imprison our small property owners behind “urban service boundaries”? To allegedly lower our “carbon footprint,” should we continue to contemplate digging new scars in the earth that rival the Great Wall of China ala bullet train corridors, when instead the future may likely find bigger freeways and auto-piloting busses that navigate far more versatile upgraded roads?

If you abandon the notion that CO2, an enabler of teeming life, is actually a deadly pollutant that poses an existential threat to the planet and especially to human civilization, or that every square inch of undeveloped land is sacred and any land development must be subjected to trillions in analysis and fees and settlements and taxes, than you might support useful scars in the earth: Aqueducts, massive runoff collection basins, large scale aquifer injection and storage infrastructure, desalination plants, nuclear power plants, and an offshore liquid natural gas terminal, to name a few. Projects that create lasting regional wealth, along with jobs, which increases options.

There are many wonderful ways to adapt to fluctuations of climate while investing in genuine economic advancement that encourages individualism and pluralistic property ownership, rather than yielding to the hubristic notion that regulating and taxing CO2 emissions is our best chance to survive and thrive as a species. Specifically, developing aqueducts, aquifers, desalination plants, and diverse energy production capacity – and encouraging new private land developments connected with smart, safe, sustainable upgraded public roads and 21st century roadworthy vehicles – is the way we create genuine wealth at the same time as we best manage climate change, natural or anthropogenic, hot or cold.

Prosecuting “Future Crimes”

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The “World Future Council” has recently issued a press release stating “Crimes against Future Generations need to become taboo” (pdf), with a lead sentence that states the following: “How can we prevent and prosecute activites today that severely threaten the living conditions and health of those living in the future?”

Does this sound sinister to you? If you don’t buy into some of the dominant concepts of mainstream environmentalism today, if you appreciate the potential for unintended consequences, and if you are paying attention to the ongoing momentum of mainstream environmentalism, you will find this pronouncement sinister indeed. Here’s more:

“The fundamental rights of future generations need to be recognized in international justice. Investigating the concept of Crimes against Future Generations is a very important initiative to support this,” according to Prof. Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger, a World Future Council “Councillor.”

Like most utopian concepts, this all sounds great except for one glaring, fatal flaw: We can’t predict the future, or the judgement of history. For example, in their press release, WFC notes the problem of rainforest destruction due to oil drilling – ignoring the fact that most rainforest destruction in the past decade or more has been financed by proceeds from European emissions allowance auctions, because “carbon neutral” biofuel plantations were considered until fairly recently to be eligible carbon offset projects. Deforestation on the scale of hundreds of thousands of square miles was enabled by social engineers of WFC’s ilk, their misguided utopian idealism only matched by their political savvy. In this case, the judgement of the future is already here – and the guilty parties are the same people who are proposing we create a new area of international law to prosecute who, themselves? Clearly, in the case of rainforests, futurists didn’t see the future very well at all, nor are they being honest today about what really happened.

Another obvious example of the simplistic arrogance of the WFC’s press release is their distaste for nuclear power, despite the potential of nuclear power to make significant contributions to global energy supply. Nuclear power is cleaner and safer than ever, but to read this press report you would think Chernobyl was yesterday. The irony is fascinating – these people presume to be so certain of the judgement of history some time in the future that they wish to prosecute those of us today whose projects may not fit their world view, yet these futurists have no faith in the potential for technology to ever deliver safe nuclear power! What technologies do they like, and why, and will their assessments be any more accurate than the ones that lead to the incineration of Indonesian rainforests to plant oil palms?

If crimes against the future are going to be prosecuted, perhaps we should prosecute those who in the name of environmentalism, fought, often successfully, to eliminate nuclear power, eliminate coal power, banned DDT and genetically modified crops, and in general restricted resource development of all kinds. Because when the history of the 21st century is written, it may be this version of environmentalism will be to blame for condemning humanity to a dark age of scarcity that was completely, utterly avoidable. So where are the legal briefs for this case? In what international court shall we file this lawsuit against environmentalists for “crimes against the future?”

Environmentalism today has been hijacked by powerful vested interests, including public sector unions, corporate cartels, and the “international community,” whose shared concern is preserving their elite status and squelching competition. They are abetted by irresponsible journalists who have not taken it upon themselves to verify all of the doomsday predictions coming out of the PR mills such as that of the WFC, nor are willing to consider alternative world views that might embrace entrepreneurial activity and resource development. They are also abetted by ambitious consultants, service professionals and entrepreneurs of all stripes who see in the green mania a good way to grow their businesses – and if they don’t think too hard, they may even consciously think they are saving the planet. But when the judgement of history is upon us, one hundred years hence, maybe it will be those who wanted to reform environmentalism, right-size government, and roll back the power of big labor who will be seen to have fought the good fight. Green is a complex color – it reflects a great deal of genuine beauty and promise, but shades of darkness as well.

Prosecuting “crimes against the future” is a snake pit, writhing with opportunists and their useful zealots, and nothing more. It is dangerous, it discredits the genuine values and challenges of environmentalism that should be addressed, and threatens our freedom.

The Climate Alarm Industry

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On May 22nd, 2009, in the Wall Street Journal there is a commentary by Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg entitled “The Climate-Industrial Complex,” and that description says it all. One would think Lomborg is pointing out the obvious – that climate alarm is the pretext to orchestrate a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich – but sadly, this observation is still obscured by overwhelming and terrifying visions of planetary meltdown.

Lomborg has never said global warming isn’t a reality. Like most skeptics, he acknowledges there has been about a 1.0 degree (centigrade) increase in the average temperature of the planet in the past 150 years. Lomborg doesn’t even question the latest and greatest climate models, which, despite the disastrous worst case scenarios that are constantly emphasized, only predict minor sea level rise and moderate temperature increases over the next century. Lomborg’s primary mission has been to simply perform basic cost-benefit analysis on the measures being proposed to allegedly reverse global warming, such as it is. When you do these cost-benefit exercises (read “How Much for a Degree“), the rhetoric of those who think we can actually control climate quickly is seen for what it is – misguided and often misanthropic.

In his May 22nd commentary, however, for the first time, Lomborg went a step further, and exposed the agenda of the “climate-industrial complex.” He quoted U.S. President Eisenhower, who coined the phrase “military-industrial complex,” and said of it ”the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” and, ”there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”

In his commentary Lomborg cites several examples of the power of the rising climate-industrial complex – in short, the collusion of big business and politicians, with the enthusiastic support of journalists, to undertake the most “spectacular and costly action” in history. Rather than rewrite Lomborg’s article – I highly recommend you read the original – here are bullet points from an EcoWorld post of December 2007, “Global Warming Questions,” where I have listed the powerful special interests who benefit from global warming alarm:

– Insurance companies charge higher premiums
– Fossil fuel companies keep prices (and profits) high
– Politicians enact new taxes
– Public sector entities get new taxes to fund their pensions
– Environmental organizations get more funds
– Left wing activists get a new basis to attack private ownership
– More public sector funded jobs are created
– Lawyers have a new basis to file lawsuits
– CPA firms begin to audit carbon accounting
– Wall street gets to trade emissions credits
– Climate researchers get more grant requests funded
– United Nations bureaucrats get a guaranteed revenue stream

One can add to that list the incentive of massive subsidies that will flow into the coffers of major polluters to “sequester” their CO2 emissions. And the saddest example of a special interest who will benefit are the high tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and elsewhere, who used to altruistically identify unmet needs, create products to fill those needs, and experience massive success in the competitive free market. These entrepreneurs created the information technology industry from scratch – and they could have done it without a dime of government subsidies or one shred of government regulation. Now this inspiring tradition is being tragically undermined, as “green” entrepreneurs turn to the government to coerce people into buying their products, to the taxpayers to fund their innovations, and to complicit journalists to foment diluvian panic that dovetails with their marketing strategy.

Every time I reveal to someone my belief there is not evidence of imminent and catastrophic climate change, nor that anthropogenic CO2 is the primary culprit, I am again struck by how incredulous they are. This point of view has successfully been cast as a grotesquely self-interested if not evil or psychotic perspective. And what happened to journalistic and scientific skepticism? It is amazing that for the first time in history, the people running around with signs saying “the world is coming to an end” are considered the sane ones, and those of us who are saying it is not are considered the lunatics.

As Lomborg pointed out, however, the reason for this inversion of logic is clear. Climate alarm is an industry, impelled by a critical mass of special interests that together quite accurately may be called the climate-industrial complex. Environmental challenges are real and require ongoing efforts to mitigate them. But to mingle special interests with environmental imperatives is to invite a public backlash. Environmentalists and entrepreneurs alike would do well to reflect on this possibility, particularly now that the global economic temperature has cooled considerably more than 1.0 degree centigrade.