LEAKED UN REPORT SHOWS STERN IS WRONG ON CLIMATE ECONOMICS

The British government has vastly underestimated the costs of its green agenda, which could turn out to be up to five times more expensive than ministers are predicting, according to a leaked United Nations (UN) report obtained by The Business. The action recommended by the British Stern Review - keeping greenhouse gas levels at 550 parts per million - would cost up to 5% of global gross domestic product (GDP), according to the UN. This is in stark contrast with the Stern review, which says it will probably cost only 1%. This much lower number is used by Stern to make the case for immediate action and steep taxes to cut back on the emission of greenhouse gases. But the UN estimate undermine Stern's economic rationale.

Stern also said the cost of not acting could be 5% to 20% of global GDP. If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figures are right, they open up the possibility that the British proposals would cost as much as they save, making them redundant. The new UN figures, exclusive to The Business, come from a draft copy of the 2007 review of the IPCC, which is the acknowledged global authority on climate change science. The Stern review itself was explicitly based on the IPCC's last report, which didn't calculate the cost of stabilising emissions.

Embarrassingly for the British government, the IPCC has done its own sums on restricting greenhouse gas emission to various levels and has found each of the targets far more expensive than the Stern review claimed.

The debate on what to do about global warming has focused on what target to set for greenhouse gas concentrations, now at 430 parts per million (ppm). On current economic trajectory, it is feared they could reach 700ppm by the end of the century.The Stern review directly links global warming scenarios to greenhouse gas concentration levels. At 550ppm, the studies quoted in the review claim the planet is likely to warm by 3øC. Stern considers this to be dangerous, but not catastrophic. The European Union has set a target of 450ppm but the Stern review said this is unlikely to be achieved because developing economies are growing so quickly. However, the 650ppm limit was shown by Stern as inviting catastrophic climate change.

So the review looks closely at the case for keeping emissions to 550ppm, which it underplays. Stern's executive summary states: "An upper bound for the expected annual cost of emissions consistent with a trajectory leading to stabilisation at 550ppm is likely to be 1% of GDP by 2050."

But the draft copy of the IPCC's Fourth Annual Review, due for publication next year, finds the cost of achieving the same goal to be between "1% and 5% loss of global GDP". The less-ambitious target of stabilising emissions at 650ppm would cost less than 2% of GDP.

The Stern review team would not comment on the draft report as it has not been published. But The Business understands that the leaks were made available to its scientists at the time of compilation.

Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank economist now working for the British Treasury, has admitted from the offset that his report could only work if it was agreed on a global basis. Ministers are to travel to India and America to promote his findings.But being contradicted by IPCC research hardly helps Britain's case, since the IPCC figures are the only ones used to frame the global debate. The leaked UN draft is circulating on the internet and will serve to undermine Stern's authority.

Though the Stern review was received to universal acclaim in London, it has been attacked in other parts of the world for being alarmist and, in some cases, incompetent. His nightmare scenario - global warming costing between 5% to 20% of GDP - was achieved by using an unusually low discount rate in his calculations. This is a standard device to justify investments with a long-term payoff.

The 11-member Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has already given the Stern Review a cold reception. Mohammed Barkindo, Secretary-General of Opec, attacked the report at an energy conference in Moscow."We find some of the so-called initiatives of the rich industrialised countries, who are supposed to take the lead in combating climate change, rather alarming," he said. Adaptation to climate change, he added, cannot be conducted by "scenarios that have no foundations in either science or economics (referring to the Stern report's publication)".

In Washington, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) said the Stern review would have no traction internationally as its economic mistakes would be instantly recognised by experts in the field. "Stern's costs are actually more expensive than doing nothing about climate change itself," said Iain Murray, senior fellow at CEI specialising in climate change. "This is 'Chicken Little' stuff," said Murray, "except Chicken Little wasn't trying to scare the public in order to create Enron-style con games and line the pockets of Wall Street bankers at the expense of consumers."

This opprobrium sharply contrasts with the Stern review's reception in London, where his conclusions were welcomed by business and accepted by all mainstream British political parties.

Source





Celebs Mislead Californians on Air Pollution Threat

What do Bill Clinton and Julia Roberts know about air pollution and health in California? The answer can only be "not much," based on their statements in support of the California ballot measure known as Proposition 87 which would tax oil to fund alternative energy research. "We're all victims of this state's tragically poor air quality. California has the worst air pollution in the nation," claims Roberts. Clinton says that air pollution prevents Californians from "living out the full lives they deserve to have."

It's true that much of California doesn't meet federal air quality standards. Nine of the top ten "smoggiest" counties in the nation and seven of the top ten "sootiest" counties in the nation are in California. But failure to meet federal air quality standards (called nonattainment in EPA-speak) or having the "smoggiest" and "sootiest" counties doesn't mean that California air significantly threatens state public health.

First, the federal air quality standards are not really health-based standards - no scientific studies show that the standards (or any range around them) serve as actual demarcation points for healthy versus unhealthy air quality. The existing standards were scientifically controversial when the Clinton-era EPA first proposed them in 1996 -- time and science have yet to validate them as improving public health. In fact, California seems to be doing quite well health-wise despite its nonattainment issues.

"What does [nonattainment] mean in the real lives of people?" Clinton asked at a speech at UCLA on Oct. 14. "It means more asthma, more bronchitis, [and] more lung cancer. It means heart disease, lung disease and premature death," he said. But are any of Clinton's claims true? The prevalence of asthma in California was below the U.S. national average (7.7 percent vs. 8.1 percent), according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. California has a lower asthma rate than most states that fully meet (attain) federal air quality standards. California's death rate from chronic lower respiratory disease (CLRD) -- including emphysema, chronic bronchitis and asthma -- was 20 percent below the U.S. average (34.4 vs. 42.2 per 100,000 people).

Even within the state there appears to be little correlation between air pollution and respiratory problems. Los Angeles County has by the far the most Californians exposed to nonattainment air, yet it has a relatively low death rate from CLRD. In contrast, Humboldt County is in attainment yet has one of the state's highest CLRD death rates.

How about lung cancer risk? For men, California ranks in the lowest quartile among states ranked by the CDC. For women, California ranks in the next-to-lowest quartile. Attainment states like Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin all have much similar or much higher lung cancer rates.

By the way, a new study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology (Oct. 24) could find no support for the proposition that gasoline exhaust increases lung cancer risk.

California's heart disease rate is also below the national average (504 vs. 536 annual deaths per 100,000 people). The rate for Los Angeles County, which supposedly has the "riskiest" air in the state, is on par with the national average. Attainment states like Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma all have substantially higher heart disease rates than California. With respect to premature death, California has the fourth lowest death rate among the states -- a death rate roughly one-third lower than that of attainment states.

Clinton also warned that, "At the age of two months, babies in Los Angeles have already breathed enough toxins to reach the EPA's lifetime limit for cancer risk from dirty air." Putting aside the question of whether these toxins actually increase cancer risk, Clinton basically implies that California air virtually guarantees that Californians will get cancer. But according to the CDC, the cancer rates for California men and women are about 9 percent and 6 percent below the national average, respectively. California's cancer rates are below those of attainment states such as North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin.

So what is to be made of the fact that while most of California doesn't meet federal air quality standards, the state's population doesn't appear to be adversely impacted? Moreover, Californians seem healthier than the populations of states in full attainment with federal standards. Could it be that California's current air pollution levels, in reality, have little, if anything, to do with its public health? If so - and the evidence certainly points to that conclusion - then it seems that Proposition 87 would have a similarly negligible impact on public health. Yes, California should work to improve its air quality -- but success is more likely to follow from a firm grasp on the actual relationship between air pollution and health, rather than political rhetoric from know-nothing celebrities.

Source




Playing politics with the weather: Radical prescriptions will cause, not avert, disaster

An editorial from "The Australian":

It's easy being green, at least for politicians who would rather play politics than balance community fear that the present drought is the shape of climate change to come against the need to keep the export economy, and everybody's electric powered appliances, ticking over. This week, the Government was caught flat-footed by the media response to Nicholas Stern's report on climate change. Despite counselling caution in the way we consider the nature and effects of climate change, the Prime Minister did what he always does when he finds himself flat-footed: he spent money, this time on new alternative energy programs. Labor leader Kim Beazley, seeing a chance to make the issue his own went further, hammering Mr Howard for not signing the Kyoto Protocol and promising to focus research on alternative energy so that Australia could cut its greenhouse emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.

Mr Beazley's position appears politically astute. By making the Prime Minister look like he has been asleep on the climate change watch, the Labor leader appeals to journalists, and every other self-appointed opinion-maker, who believes Australian coalminers are climate-change public enemy number one, with number two being everybody who drives a 4WD or owns an airconditioner. And he has delivered the Labor Left the sort of symbolic issue it loves to campaign on, because it asserts their moral superiority over people who it believes are obsessed with economics.

Or at least some of the Labor Left, because the faction does not sing one song on how to balance the environment and economics. While environment spokesman Anthony Albanese praises alternative energy and preaches the evils of nuclear power as a replacement for coal, other Labor voices quietly chorus other ideas. The mining unions are keen on coal and some of them see nuclear energy as a way of providing clean power that generates jobs for Australians, and more members for them. And while the Labor line is now set for the next election, it is a fair bet that MPs and candidates looking for ways to win back the electorates lost to Mr Howard's mantra of economic growth will wonder whether the Opposition Leader is on the right track.

And they may wonder whether the Mr Howard has already lured Mr Beazley into a trap that will not be sprung until the next election. There is also no doubting the Prime Minister looked like he was making policy on the run this week. But there is no doubting that the distinction between the two men is now clear. On the one hand, Mr Howard is making not entirely convincing claims that the Government takes global warming seriously and is investing in technology to make coal cleaner and reduce Australia's output of greenhouse gas. But he is not walking away from the importance of energy - especially coal - exports to economic growth. And it would be hard to find a middle-income Australian couple with kids who does not know that their tax cuts and family payments depend to a great extent on the government revenue generated by the minerals boom.

There is no doubting that the world is warming. The question is how to address the issue. Mr Howard is keeping with the oft-misrepresented spirit of the Stern report, which does not call for radical solutions such as an immediate (and impossible) switch to solar energy but rather market-based solutions and the development of clean technologies such as the geosequestration of waste gasses from coal-fired power plants. Here Australia already has a leg up, with $500 million earmarked for the development of low-emissions technology. The signing of the Kyoto Protocol would do nothing to help the global environment while doing great harm to the Australian economy.

Although this newspaper remains healthily sceptical about the possible causes of and solutions to global warming, the Stern report landed at a time when concerns with global warming are very much on the community agenda, thanks to such events as Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. But while Mr Gore's film was alarmist and, critics say, based on dubious science, the Stern review is a good deal more sober. Yet much of the coverage of Sir Nicholas's work has come from the Chicken Little school of journalism, fundamentally twisting the report to support the arguments of hairshirt environmentalists who see middle-class Australian voters as lazy, greedy sheep whose addiction to consumer appliances and automobiles is killing the planet. Any carbon-trading regime or price-signalling mechanism Australia does eventually sign on to will have to be designed in such a way that we are not disproportionately punished for our vast stores of coal or the extra carbon-consuming distances it takes our products to reach export markets around the world.

It is easy to indulge in juvenile jeremiads about the need to do away with killer coal as a power source, as long as you ignore two simple facts. Without coal exports Australia goes broke. And without greenhouse gas emitting coal fired power stations, now and for the foreseeable future, we would enjoy a clean green lifestyle, with all the mod cons of the middle ages. It is doubtful that the Prime Minister's greenhouse initiatives will be enough to assuage his opponents who will be well pleased with Mr Beazley's position.

But the risk for Labor is that appealing to the bishops and broadcasters, the academics and activists who denounce Australians for emitting greenhouse gases Mr Beazley may frighten ordinary Australians into worrying what their children will do for a living if our energy exporting economy is cut back. The Labor leader may be right. Perhaps the picture that will win the next election is a power station belching greenhouse gases. But if he is wrong an entirely different image will define the election, one we saw in the 2004 campaign when Tasmanian timber workers cheered Mr Howard for promising to protect them from then Labor leader Mark Latham's sell-out to the Greens on another environmental issue.





Australian nuclear power coming

A public debate on nuclear energy will follow the publication of a taskforce report on the viability of the industry, Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane has said. Prime Minister John Howard's hand-picked nuclear energy taskforce will find that a nuclear industry could be commercially viable within 15 years, giving the green light to the Prime Minister to radically shake up Australia's energy market. Former Telstra boss Ziggy Switkowski's review will also find the cost of nuclear power should come down dramatically as more global powers invest in the technology and the cost of fossil fuels go up.

Last night, Mr Macfarlane said a 15-year timeframe was "very realistic", offering an optimistic assessment from the Howard Government on the way forward for nuclear power. Mr Macfarlane also said a high-level report, to be released next week by the International Energy Agency, will give added weight to those backing nuclear power. Today, Mr Macfarlane has said a full public debate will follow the release of the report, expected in the next fortnight. "What we are seeing in the community is a willingness now to consider nuclear energy," Mr Macfarlane has said. "We are seeing reports like the Switkowski report which will indicate that nuclear energy will be competitive with low emission coal within 15 years. "We want to see debate that is based in understanding and knowledge not a debate based on scare tactics," he has said. He has said a nuclear power option will not be pursued in the face of widespread public opposition.

The release of Dr Switkowski's draft in two weeks will bolster Mr Howard's push to make nuclear power a central element of his election campaign. The Government this week sharpened its policy differences with Labor on energy following the release in London on Tuesday of a report by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern calling for more urgent co-ordinated action to tackle climate change. The Opposition wants to ratify the existing Kyoto agreement, sign up to a global emissions trading system and give a stronger focus on renewable energy.

The Europe-based IEA, in its world energy outlook, will urge governments to speed up construction of new nuclear power plants, as part of the response to the climate change issue. "No doubt it will give impetus (to the nuclear debate)," Mr Macfarlane said.

Mr Howard yesterday ruled out any approach to fighting climate change that strips Australia of its competitive advantage as a heavy user of carbon-based fossil fuels with rich deposits of coal and gas. But nuclear power may be a partial solution, with the Switkowski review expected to find that the relative cost of nuclear power will come down amid a renewed focus worldwide on the technology driven by soaring energy needs and the fight against atmospheric pollution caused by fossil fuels. While it will find nuclear power is not competitive on a cost basis with coal-based power generation today, it anticipates the costs of using carbon fuels will rise over the next decade as some sort of carbon price signal is implemented to slow global warming. It will say the Government could make a decision to move ahead with nuclear power now, even given the cost differentials, and "by the time the first reactor was (reliably) delivering electricity the cost differential would have almost disappeared", according to a source.

Earlier this week, Mr Howard gave a strong signal he expected nuclear to play a role in Australia's energy future, when nuclear power on the one hand became competitive with clean coal on the other. "The point at which those two cross each other is, at this stage, impossible to precisely determine," he said. "When we have Ziggy Switkowski's report, we may have a better idea of where the two relate to each other." The report is expected to give hope to nuclear proponents, who are already taking steps to bridge the skills gap Australia has in key nuclear fields with new university courses.

Mr Howard yesterday vowed to do all he could to fight climate change, short of anything that cost Australia its comparative economic advantages. "In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions you have to adjust the use of all of those things where we have a comparative advantage, that is fossil fuels, because they're the basis of a lot of our wealth," he said. "We've got to be very careful that the adjustment process doesn't unfairly disadvantage Australia. The cost to this country of losing our comparative advantage in things like gas and coal would be enormous, it would be jobs and investment lost."

Opposition resources spokesman Martin Ferguson said "nuclear power is an important part of the energy security and climate change debate for Europe, Asia and North America". "That is why Australia's uranium is now so sought after ... Australia is energy rich. We are the envy of the world," he said. "The only energy security issue Australia has is in transport fuels and that's why this Government has got to get serious about converting our vast reserves of gas and coal into clean diesel."

Source

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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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