A little eco-nomics never hurt

Technological advancements have elevated mankind to its healthiest and wealthiest level in history. Our lives are longer, our health is greater, our food is more plentiful, and modern conveniences are now so affordable that even the poor among us own what only the rich could afford 50 years ago. It is against this backdrop that we now find ourselves debating the merits of many of these conveniences and advancements. From the chemical scares of the 1960's and 1970's (e.g., DDT, dioxin, food preservatives), to the fear of runaway population growth and rapidly dwindling petroleum supplies, the very people that have been blessed with the prosperity that unbridled human ingenuity brings are increasingly anxious about the world we have created for ourselves.

Fear of the ultimate environmental threat, global warming, is now striking at the very heart of modern life, casting doubt upon the future availability of inexpensive energy that is necessary to keep society running. Al Gore's movie 'An Inconvenient Truth', Discovery's recent special 'Global Warming: What You Need to Know with Tom Brokaw', and a deluge of media stories and editorials are all dedicated to convincing you that we need to be saved from ourselves.

And while it is true that there are potential negative side effects of our use of fossil fuels (as well as most other natural resources), little attention is ever paid to the practical question: what should be done about it? It is much easier to point out a problem than it is to actually fix it....and 'fixing problems' too often leads to unintended negative consequences.

A century ago people would be too busy working -- trying to stay fed, clothed, and sheltered -- to worry about any ill effects from the industrial revolution. Today, though, we have enough wealth to not only support ourselves and clean up most of our messes in the process, but to donate to causes that claim to be 'making things better' by lobbying for ever-increasing levels of cleanliness and safety in our environment.

What reasonable person could be against 'clean water', 'clean air', and 'clean renewable sources of energy'? Who dares argue with politicians, scientists, and other pundits who lead the fight against global warming? The dangerous illusion underpinning many environmental efforts is that it is both possible and preferable to keep pushing toward a 100 percent clean and safe existence. Those of us who try to point out that there are practical limits to cleanliness and safety are immediately branded as shills for big business. Meanwhile, environmentalists and politicians get to hold the high ground of altruism and concern for the public's interest.

P.J. O'Rourke once said, "Some people will do anything to save the Earth...except take a science course." To that I would add, "...or a basic economics course". If for a reasonable cost we can remove 98 percent of the contaminants in our drinking water and make it quite safe, is it then a good idea to spend ten times as much to push that purity from 98 percent to 99 percent?

In the real world, there are only limited resources to accomplish everything we want to do, and resources diverted to wasteful ends are no longer available to tackle more pressing problems. Only in the imaginary world of the environmental lobbyist, pandering politician, or concerned journalist is it a public service to keep pushing toward 100 percent purity. Occasionally, the light bulb will go on, and someone realizes the practical limits that (thankfully) keep "Earth saving" goals from rarely being achieved. This happened to '20/20' consumer advocate John Stossel in 1994, with his special "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?". For me, it was about 1985, when I started reading about -- and understanding -- basic economics.

While most people are out making the system work, others are devising ever more alarmist ways to make it look like the latest drought, flood, or hurricane is mankind's fault. The implication is that, if only enough of us can agree that something bad is happening, we will then be motivated into action. And we indeed should do those things that make the most economic and scientific sense -- for instance national investments in energy research.

But when the pundits push for solutions that will not work (the Kyoto Protocol, or the rapidly failing EU carbon trading scheme), one begins to wonder about either their intelligence or their motives. In the end, these efforts do little more than redistribute wealth and let their proponents feel good about themselves. Could redistributing wealth be the true motive? Disdain for 'wealth' and 'big business' arises when people neglect the fact that these conditions only occur when someone figures out a better way to provide more desirable goods and services, at a lower cost, that people want. Economic transactions benefit the seller and the buyer, otherwise they would not occur.

But instead, our language belies persistent beliefs in economic myths: 'workers' versus 'management' (as if managers have no economic value), or 'price gouging' (when gasoline supply is disrupted, or has a threatened disruption, and prices rise, we somehow expect the laws of supply and demand to be repealed). We may be envious of those that have more than us, but it is misguided to believe that if they had less, that we would have more.

Everyone benefits from the promise of profits that motivates investors to risk their money on better ways to provide what people want. You say you don't like the disparities in wealth that a free market generates? I would be glad to have my wealth increase by only 40 percent as the rich see a 200 percent increase in their wealth. The alternative is for all of us to be equally poor and miserable. If you must, think of profits as a necessary evil...but for the good of all of us, profits (as well as the risk of losses) are a necessary part of our high standard of living.

As long as the media continues to portray the global warming issue (as well as other environmental threats) as an ideological battle between politicians and scientists who are trying to save humanity on the one hand, and evil petroleum-pushers bent on maintaining our 'addiction to oil' on the other, we will be no closer to solutions to our energy problems. Journalists have the power to frame the debate, and so far that power has been, at best, misused. At worst, it has been abused.

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Clinton unveils global warming initiative



On a stage of political all-stars Tuesday afternoon at UCLA, former President Clinton announced a new initiative to help cities combat global warming. Joined by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and London Mayor Ken Livingstone, Clinton laid out the challenges ahead. "We have to reduce about 80% of our greenhouse gases over the next 10 years," said Clinton What a moron! Does he realize that doing so would take us back to the caves?] , whose foundation sponsored the initiative. "It sounds like a daunting task. I don't believe it is." The burning of fossil fuels is blamed for creating most greenhouse gases, which in turn are blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere and warming the Earth, leading to an array of problems.

Clinton offered a three-prong plan: Use a consortium of large cities to leverage their purchasing power for energy-saving products; offer expert technical assistance to cities trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions; and create better measurement tools to ensure that progress is being made.

As of last month, 164 nations had signed the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990 levels. The United States has not signed the treaty, leading a number of cities and states - including Los Angeles and led by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels - to declare they were forging ahead on their own. At the same time, a group of cities from around the globe, led by Livingstone, is also tackling the problem. He detailed some of the drastic and politically unpopular steps that he took to pry motorists from their cars in London - most prominently a huge increase in downtown parking fees.

Villaraigosa promised the invited crowd at UCLA's Anderson School of Management that Los Angeles would not shy from making reductions. "We can't think about global warming as some faraway problem of melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and distant hurricanes," he said. "It's our problem here in the city of Los Angeles." Villaraigosa noted programs already in place, including getting ships to use electric power while docked at the Port of Los Angeles, planting 1 million trees to absorb carbon dioxide and pushing the Department of Water and Power to secure 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. About 5% of Los Angeles' power now comes from renewable sources. The DWP relies heavily on coal-burning power plants, considered to be a significant source of greenhouse gases.

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New York Times Op-Ed Heat Wave Hype Melts Under Scrutiny

The August 3 New York Times op-ed by Bob Herbert titled "Hot Enough Yet," makes several dubious global warming claims. See: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03herbert.html?hp Herbert promotes the idea that the recent heat wave that has swept across the United States is another example of human caused catastrophic global warming. But the facts do not support this latest example of climate hysteria.

Claim: Herbert implies that the recent heat wave hitting the eastern United States is somehow evidence of global warming.
Fact: The recent heat wave hitting Mid-Atlantic States is nowhere close to breaking record temperatures set in 1930 - 50 years before fears of human cased catastrophic global warming began. "That summer has never been approached, and it's not going to be approached this year," said the state of Virginia's climatologist Patrick Michaels. See: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200608/NAT20060804c.html

In addition, even climate alarmist, NASA scientist James Hansen, rebuffs any attempts to tie any single weather event to global warming. "I am a little concerned about this, in the sense that we are still at a point where the natural fluctuations of climate are still large -- at least, the natural fluctuations of weather compared to long-term climate change," Hansen, director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters in April 2006.

Claim: Herbert wrote: "We should keep in mind, as Al Gore has pointed out, that of the 21 hottest years ever measured, 20 have occurred within the last 25 years. And the hottest year of this recent hottest wave was last year."
Fact: According to official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the global average temperature did not increase between 1998-2005. ".this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," noted paleoclimate researcher and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia in an April 2006 article titled, "There is a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998." See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html

Claim: Herbert wrote: "But with polar bears drowning because they can't swim far enough to make it from one ice floe to another."
Fact: Polar Bears are not going extinct because of the supposedly melting ice, according to a biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the arctic government of Nunavut. "Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present," Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006. See here: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1146433819696&call_pageid=970599119419

Claim: Herbert wrote: ".with the once-glorious snows of Kilimanjaro about to bring down the final curtain on their long, long run."
Fact: A New York Times recent article debunked Herbert's claims, noting that there is `dubious evidence' that Kilimanjaro is melting due to global warming. "The ice on Kilimanjaro has been in retreat since at least the 1880's, with the greatest decline occurring at the beginning of that period, when greenhouse gas concentrations were much lower," says the New York Times article of July4, 2006 by Philip M. Boffey. "The National Academies panel judged that Kilimanjaro's glaciers "may be shrinking primarily as a continuing response to precipitation changes earlier in the century," Boffey noted.

Claim: Herbert wrote: ".with the virtual disappearance of Lake Chad in Africa, which was once the size of Lake Erie, it may be time to get serious about trying to slow this catastrophic trend."
Fact: The disappearance of Lake Chad primarily has been caused by human overuse of water, not global warming. "The lake's decline probably has nothing to do with global warming, report the two scientists, who based their findings on computer models and satellite imagery made available by NASA. They attribute the situation instead to human actions related to climate variation, compounded by the ever increasing demands of an expanding population," according to the April 26, 2001 National Geographic titled "Shrinking African Lake Offers Lesson on Finite Resources." See: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/04/0426_lakechadshrinks.html ).

Claim: Herbert wrote: "I think the single most effective thing most ordinary Americans could do to become more informed about global warming - and the steps we need to take to fight it - is to go see Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," and read his book of the same title."
Fact: Gore has been criticized by many scientists for his incorrect and misleading presentation of science in his movie. "A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse." - wrote Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal. For more scientific critique of Gore see here: http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=257909

In April, 60 scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister questioning the basis for climate alarmism. The letter noted, "'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural "noise." See web link:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605

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Windmills versus birds -- the right decision for the wrong reason

The Australian government banned a windfarm because it might kill a rare parrot. But Greenies want their windmills back and who cares about the parrot? The parrot was probably not endangered but so are many of the things that Greenies want to protect. Maximum disruption is all that the Greenies really want

So, the Orange-bellied Parrot might yet be forced to fly the gauntlet of the deadly wind turbines of Bald Hills. Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell yesterday set a course for abandoning the quixotic avian rescue mission he launched in April by blocking the $220 million Bald Hills wind farm. But, with his legal defence looking ever more wobbly, the minister yesterday invited the Bald Hills developers to resubmit their application to build 52 wind turbines in South Gippsland.

Campbell's dilemma illuminates both the dangers of belief politics and the end of certainty within the environmental lobby.
The minister's problem is that he really seems to believe at least one or two of the rare parrots will be sliced and diced by the twirling blades of Bald Hills.

Had Campbell merely been wedging species-green against climate-change-green against renewable-committed state government, then John Howard might well be preparing to strike a medal in his honour. Instead the PM could soon be looking for a replacement. Because, whatever the outcome of his ministerial review, Campbell looks as endangered as his pretty parrot.

If, in the name of the parrot, Campbell sticks to his ban, then he will cop it from state governments committed to ambitious renewable energy targets and the developers riding on that policy. Less predictably, Campbell will also get it in the neck from elements of the environmental lobby who now reckon solutions to climate change take precedence over limited species protection.

For example, Greenpeace has called for the parrot-saving minister to be sacked. And not because he has opened the way for the extinction of the parrot. No, Greenpeace says Campbell must go for the flimsy evidence supporting his stand against wind power taking its proper place on the national energy horizon. The irony of Greenpeace's position will be naked to all those who, over the past 25 years, have spent millions defending projects from environmental challenges based on similarly gossamer evidence.

But a Campbell backflip, for all its intellectual necessity, will make him look even sillier than he did in April. Not only will he look weak but the Howard Government will become politically liable for every chopped-up parrot found at the foot of a Bald Hills turbine.

The sad twist in the debate is that the minister made the right decision but for all the wrong reasons. The Government should stop Bald Hills but only because it, like any other wind farm, fails any test of economic viability. Australia's commitment to wind power is little more than an expensive expression of feel-good politics. And power consumers will directly pay the price of the renewables policy.

There is no particular government subsidy available to the wind power industry. Rather, there are federal and state government targets that force power distributors to take whatever wind power is produced. This means the wind generators sell their power into the grid at the going price paid to all other generators. The renewables producers then receive a credit for each megawatt hour they produce. That credit is then sold for about $43 a megawatt hour to the distributors. That is then added to our power bills.

That is the untold story of wind power. In June, Access Economics estimated Victoria's then policy of producing 10 per cent of the state's power from renewables by 2010 would add about 10 per cent to the wholesale price of power. And yet, even in those states with the most ambitious renewables targets, South Australia and Victoria, the net effect of wind power on carbon dioxide emissions will be negligible, if not illusory. According to another recent study, if Victoria reaches its target of 1000 megawatts of renewable generation capacity by 2016 (the state currently boasts about 120MW of wind capacity), its share of national greenhouse gas emissions will fall from 32 per cent to 28 per cent by 2020. But in raw numbers, Victoria's power plants will be pumping out 24 per cent more carbon dioxide by 2020 than they do in 2006 because, quite simply, Victorians will be using much more power.

Interestingly, that same report, prepared for Sustainability Victoria, found flaws in the Government's greenhouse gas abatement model because the Government was assuming wind power would replace, predominantly, brown coal fuelled electricity. But the flukey nature of wind power, combined with the low-cost base of brown coal, means wind is far more likely to replace gas and black coal fired power. Both, but gas in particular, produce lower emissions than Victoria's brown coal. "Thus, a more sophisticated approach is required to estimate the level of abatement from wind generation," the report suggests. I would argue that a greater level of sophistication is needed at all levels of this debate.

Because the answers to our national greenhouse challenge do not lie in the wind. There is no way either wind or solar power can produce the levels of base load electricity capacity we need. The big solutions lie elsewhere and can only emerge from a broad and cohesive national energy policy directed at finding cleaner ways of producing base load power from known technologies. That means embracing the work being done on clean coal and low-emission power plants. And probably investigating nuclear options.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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