Costly Energy, Climate Policies in Democrats’ Spending Bill Lack Transparency
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., are driving Congress to pass a $3.5 trillion spending package to go along with the more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in August.
Transparency and debate are all but nonexistent.
As far as energy and environment issues are concerned, the long and short of it is, these bills are the Green New Deal by another name and Congress’ bid to implement President Joe Biden’s Paris climate commitments to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Looking at the committee proposals in the House of Representatives, there are five main buckets of policy:
A Clean Electricity Performance Plan, which would pay power companies $150 per megawatt-hour to increase renewable electricity generation by at least 4% each year, and penalize companies that don’t at $40 per megawatt-hour.
Energy tax credits, extended and expanded for green energy technologies, fuels, and vehicles.
Federally funded grants, loans, research and development, and demonstration of green energy.
A new Climate Conservation Corps.
New penalties on oil, gas, and coal companies, such as a ban on production off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and a punitive fee on methane emissions.
Combined with the infrastructure bill, this includes a $6 billion bailout of existing nuclear power plants, a carbon dioxide reduction mandate on states implemented through the Department of Transportation, and tens of billions of dollars on green energy research and development, commercialization, and federal procurement.
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in August that “the Green New Deal is in the DNA of this green budget resolution.”
Additionally, the Biden administration has moved expeditiously to propose new climate regulations in nearly every agency—but particularly from the Environmental Protection Agency, the departments of Energy and Interior, and the Securities and Exchange Commission—to prop up green energy and target nearly every aspect of the oil, gas, and coal industries.
As others have noted, some of these pieces don’t fit logically together into coherent policy and don’t take into account what states and the private sector are already doing.
Complexity is not the friend of transparency, and taxpayers are likely to bear the brunt of it.
For example, it’s possible that a power company with a lot of nuclear power generation could really bring in the bucks with the nuclear energy bailout in Congress’ infrastructure bill, state subsidies for nuclear and renewables (for example, Illinois’ recently passed bailout), and the Clean Electricity Performance Plan payments to meet the net-zero goals many utilities have already voluntarily committed to.
What does this add up to? Assuming Washington can successfully dictate the behavior and choices of Americans as it’s proposing to do, Americans can expect a moderation of global temperatures of 0.04 of a degree Celsius by the end of the century using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assumptions (problematic as they may be) about the nature and pace of global warming.
Setting aside whether you think 0.04 of a degree Celsius is a worthy goal, the cost effectiveness of how Congress is proposing to achieve it through these bills is an issue that even some moderate Democrats are rightly flagging.
That is, just as cost is not an irrelevant strategic factor in acquiring defense assets and new capabilities, cost is not irrelevant when it comes to climate response.
One can look at cost in at least two ways.
First is the dollar amount, which—according to fact sheets from the House Natural Resources Committee and Energy and Commerce Committee—tallies up to roughly $270 billion. Further, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the House’s green energy tax policies will lose $235 billion in tax revenues over the next decade.
However, many of the programs that liberals are pushing forward are “temporary,” hiding their true long-term cost.
Just as important are costs in the loss of decision-making power of American families, businesses, and states as the size and scope of the federal government grows.
Along with the administration, Congress is trying to frame and narrow the choices Americans are allowed to make.
For example, there’s nothing wrong with electric vehicles as a choice Americans can make, but federal policies are trying to make it hard to choose anything else.
Instead, robust competition in the marketplace has served Americans well for centuries and driven innovation to newer and better technology.
Right along with free enterprise being a foundational piece of what has made the U.S. a great country to live in is the idea of federalism; namely, that California can run its experiment, Texas can try something else, as can Rhode Island and every other state while they learn from these laboratories of democracy.
But the proposed expansions of the federal government in these bills further destroy that system of diversity within unity.
The left has oversimplified the problems of—and solutions to—climate policies, and is trying to persuade Americans that commitment to living within our fiscal means and holding fast to founding principles must be abandoned. That’s a costly endeavor.
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Energy crisis puts world’s most ambitious climate plan to test
The record spike in energy prices could hardly have come at a worse time for Europe’s ambitious new climate plan, with politicians just beginning to talk about how they’re going to implement the world’s most sweeping emissions-cutting strategy.
The energy crisis is threatening double-digit increases in consumer electricity bills months before the winter freeze and it’s also squeezing industrial giants. As European governments scrambled to blunt the impact on consumers — Greece promised subsidies on power bills, for example — threats of blackouts in the U.K. this past week were a vivid reminder of the fragility of energy supplies.
For the European Union, which is proposing to ban new fossil-fueled cars by 2035 and impose new costs on dirty home heating, the steep costs of such an ambitious plan will be an even tougher sell to voters already reeling from hikes in utility bills.
“Of course the current level of energy prices has the potential to make discussions on the climate package more complex,” said Peter Vis, a senior adviser at the Rud Pedersen Public Affairs consultancy and a former political aide to the EU’s first climate commissioner. “But to weaken the package due to the energy crunch today would detract from the longer-term solution of reducing Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels without addressing the cause of the gas supply squeeze.”
Natural gas and power prices are surging to all-time highs in the 27-nation region, as the bloc’s economies rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. The surge in demand comes amid limited gas imports from Norway and Russia, with some countries accusing Moscow of manipulating supplies. At the same time, the EU strategy to accelerate emissions cuts in every sector from transport to manufacturing and agriculture boosted demand for carbon permits, with prices more than doubling over the past two years to new records.
The EU wants to lead the global fight against climate change, setting an example for other major emitters such as the U.S. and China. Its overarching goal in the Green Deal strategy is to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
The green package unveiled in July aims to align the economy with stricter binding goal of reducing emissions by at least 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels. The laws need to be approved by the European Parliament and member states in the Council of the EU, with each institution entitled to amending the plan, in a process likely to take around two years.
But for Europe’s lower-income countries — as well for the continent’s energy-intensive industries — the pain of any transition will be significant, and the EU will be under pressure to help cushion the blow from the current price jump.
As the political talks get underway, governments from Madrid to Amsterdam are taking steps to alleviate the immediate impact of the energy crisis and prevent backlash against carbon-cutting policies. Measures to reduce emissions “may not stand a sustained period of abusive electricity prices,” Spain told the EU in a letter on Sept. 20, recalling the yellow vests protests that shook France two years ago.
The gas crisis already hijacked this week’s meeting of energy ministers, called to discuss draft laws to increase the share of renewables and boost energy savings. While the EU has limited powers in the area of energy policy, which largely remains in the hands of member states, the European Commission pledged to publish in the coming weeks guidelines on what short-term tools nations can use in line with the bloc’s law. Options include reducing value added tax and excise on energy.
In Greece, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis earlier pledged to grant a power subsidy in the fourth quarter for all households aimed at covering most of the expected price spike in power bills. He also announced a reduction of sales tax until June 2022 for coffee, transport, nonalcoholic drinks, cinemas, gyms, dance schools and tourism packages.
The Netherlands amended the country’s budget to include €500 million ($586 million) to lower energy costs for companies and households. Spain will slap a windfall tax on power utilities and cap consumers’ energy bills, a move that critics said could limit investment in renewables.
“That is not sustainable,” Ignacio Galan, the chief executive officer of Spanish power company Iberdrola SA, said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “That puts at risk the whole energy transition.”
But European governments are limited in what they can do to tackle the power crunch — without making their climate goals even harder to reach.
“It feels unlikely that politicians will reverse track and go back to coal generation or make changes to the approach to carbon,” said John Musk, an analyst at RBC Europe Ltd. “It is hard to see what measures can be adopted to alleviate near term supply-demand constraints on gas and power. There are likely to be a couple of difficult years to navigate in terms of consumer prices and there may have to be some measures to help consumers here and there.”
The biggest industrial energy users are particularly exposed to the immediate impact of the price spike. Zinc producer Nyrstar NV said on Thursday it is cutting output at a major Dutch plant during peak times of day. For regional aluminum producers, electricity costs could equate to about 80% of the commodity’s overall price, the metals industry association Eurometaux said in a letter to the EU energy chief Kadri Simson, urging further support for the sector.
“These rising electricity prices have already led to curtailments and could lead to further relocation of our sector outside Europe if not addressed,” the lobby said. “More broadly, we’re also concerned that if electricity remains too expensive, it will disincentivize industrial electrification as a decarbonization route, undermining the EU’s Green Deal objectives.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/09/25/business/eu-energy-climate/
******************************************Can We Really Model Climate Change?
Hardly a day goes by when we are not assailed by claims of doom and gloom over “climate change,” with some well-known politicians warning us that our world will cease to exist as we know it by 2035 (a short 14 years from now!).
Just a few weeks ago, representatives of the government blamed the catastrophic flooding in New York and New Jersey in the aftermath of Ida on “climate change,” as did another member who earlier blamed another natural weather phenomenon on “climate change.” Apparently, neither understands the difference between “weather” (the cause of fires in California, hurricanes like Ida, tornadoes, etc.) and “climate” (longer-term swings in temperature, precipitation, etc.).
The fact is that, statistically, such “weather” events (e.g., tornadoes) are no more frequent or intense than they have been in the past. Accordingly, you should be excused for asking about the bases of these extravagant claims.
Do the claimants have a magical crystal ball with which they can see the future more clearly than the rest of us, or is it simply the blind leading the blind with some of the blind being more vocal than others? After all, paleontologists and earth scientists will tell you that Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial and it has changed drastically and cyclically during the approximately 2.5-million-year history of the human species.
However, at issue is a more subtle phenomenon related to changes induced by the human species themselves. Humankind has had that capacity for less than 300 years (since the start of the Industrial Revolution, from the mid-1700s).
But, you may say, 300 years is just a “blink of an eye” within typically climatic (not weather) cycles that occur over thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years. For example, 300 years of CO2-producing industrialization represents just 0.3 percent of a 100,000-year ice-age cycle.
My point is that the climate is an exceedingly complex physico-chemical system, and we must ask the question: Do climate models faithfully include each of these phenomena, in a deterministic manner with sufficient detail that they can be described by the relevant constitutive equations and natural law constraints in a form that renders the predictions reliable (see below)? Or are we again being led by the blind?
To be clear, my goal is not to pass judgment on any specific climate model, for that would entail a much deeper analysis than that which I present here. I simply wish to make the reader aware of the stringent conditions that must be met when modeling complex physico-chemical systems, such as our climate, the results of which may impact how future multi-trillion-dollar investments are made.
Hopefully, this discourse will prompt people to ask the right questions before approving such expenditures.
Two great philosophies exist with respect to prediction: empiricism, which is the philosophy that everything that we can ever know we must have experienced; and determinism, which posits that we can predict the future from the past upon the basis of the known physical laws (“Laws of Nature”). Thus, all scientists collect data that are converted into knowledge, and that knowledge is eventually used to formulate the Laws of Nature that, unlike the Laws of Man, are inviolate and are true under all circumstances everywhere in the universe.
Indeed, I like to define “science” as the process of transitioning from empiricism (what we observe) to determinism (what we know and can predict) upon the formulation of the Natural Laws. Thus, the Natural Laws represent the condensation of all scientific experience so that when we invoke such a law it contains knowledge extending back thousands of years, to before Aristotle and Archimedes.
Impeding the transition from empiricism to determinism is “complexity.” Volumes have been written on complexity, and space does not allow even a cursory review of the subject here.
“Complexity” is like driving on a highway on a foggy night. The fog obscures your vision and allows you to see just a short distance along your path. Now you switch on your high beams, and lo and behold, you can see much farther. Thus, you have used an instrument (the high beams of your automobile) to allow you to see farther and with greater clarity.
So it is in science; in fact, it is fair to say that the digital computer (our “high beams”) has allowed us to advance science more over the past four decades than science had advanced throughout previous history. In other words, the computer has greatly extended our intellects, which is the role of models!
The development of models in human intellectual pursuits is a very complex subject that extends well beyond this op-ed, but an excellent, somewhat technical review is given by Frigg and Hartmann [1]. I will focus on deterministic models, as their predictive powers are so much greater than those of empirical models since “prediction” is the single most important attribute that climate models claim to possess.
All deterministic models have a common structure, either explicitly or implicitly. All deterministic models must have a theoretical basis that is, itself, based upon observation. These observations may be presented as postulates or assumptions, with postulates being based directly on observation.
Thus, it is important to note that a theory can be no more valid than the postulates and assumptions upon which it is based. Also, the postulates must not presuppose the output of the model; that is, the postulates must not accept as an empirical fact that human-induced global warming is occurring.
Thus, if one starts with a postulate that states that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible for that change, the chances are that the model will predict exactly that, but the prediction will be invalid because of the input of even unrecognized bias.
The prediction environment is also problematic, because what is sought is a reliable difference between two large, fluctuating numbers: the climate as we now know it (including human impact) and the unknown climate that might have existed were there no human impact. We can measure how the climate is changing in current time using a variety of techniques, but how do we measure the climate as it might have existed over the same period sans human impact? The short answer is that we cannot!
Unfortunately, only the former is commonly reported in newspapers, giving the impression to non-experts that it is all due to human impact. It is not, and the human impact component is normally only minor, but nevertheless, it is an important component. The headlines would not be as dramatic or fear-inducing if the readers were reminded that the human component is the difference between what we observe and what we model in the absence of human impact, and that is normally small.
Thus, we are concerned with changes in temperature due to human impact of a few tenths of a degree Celsius on a background that fluctuates several tens of degrees Celsius daily to monthly (due to the weather) and even more (typically 30 to 45oC) over the seasons of the year.
That is not to dismiss the possible seriousness of human-induced climate change if, in fact, it is actually occurring at the rate claimed by the doomsayers. That is the still unanswered challenge.
There is no question that climate change modeling exists at the very edge of feasible modeling, and it is for this reason that the nature of the models employed must be critically examined. You see, part of the problem is that the art and science of modeling is seldom taught in universities; somehow, students are expected to know how to model complex physico-chemical systems as though it was part of the human genome.
The author became so concerned with the lack of modeling skills among graduate students that he, while a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, taught a course titled “Theories and Models in Science and Engineering.” I don’t recall anyone involved in climate change taking the course.
I began this op-ed with the question “Can We Really Model Climate Change?” and I will end with a considered opinion. The answer is a qualified “yes,” but only, in my humble opinion, if the modelers adhere to certain rules. The modelers must:
Carefully describe the theoretical bases of the model, clearly state all postulates and assumptions, and demonstrate that they do not reflect any preconceived bias toward a certain result.
List and describe the constitutive equations and constraints, demonstrate that all equations are independent, and demonstrate that there are a sufficient number of equations to cover all unknowns.
Refrain from introducing “ad hoc” factors (“crook’s constant” in my student days) to make the model “work.”
Ensure that any calibrating data are known from independent experiment and are known to be true within well-established bounds.
Carefully define “success,” and ensure that the scientific method of prediction and assessment is strictly adhered to, including the rejection of the model if only one incorrect prediction is made that cannot be corrected by valid reassessment of model parameters and input data.
I emphasize that the “rules” of modeling outlined above have been established by numerous scientific philosophers over thousands of years of collective work and have been instilled into the transition from empiricism to determinism that I call “science.”
As the saying goes, “The devil is in the details.” The emphasis on the natural laws renders these rules in compliance with previous scientific experience and must be recognized in any attempt to model complex physico-chemical systems in a deterministic manner, including (and especially) Earth’s climate. To ignore them is to do so at your (and our) peril.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/can-we-really-model-climate-change_4016309.html
*********************************************Australian PM refuses to commit to phasing out fossil fuels
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to commit to phasing out fossil fuels as a major climate conference approaches, while his deputy doubled down on opposing targets for net zero emissions of greenhouse gases.
Australia, the world's top coal and a major gas exporter, is under growing pressure to come up with emissions reduction targets ahead of November's COP26 United Nations climate conference in Scotland.
The International Monetary Fund called on Australia to set a "time bound" target to reach net zero emissions on Friday, when the country's treasurer warned that Australia must brace for much higher borrowing costs if it fails to commit to a net zero target by 2050, as many peers have done.
In interviews with Australian media after a summit in Washington, Morrison said his government was still working on its emissions plans, declining to commit to curbing fossil fuels that account for a major part of Australia's export revenue.
He told broadcaster SBS in an interview that aired on Saturday night that he was not prepared to pull back any fossil fuel industries immediately.
"We don't have to, because that change will take place over time," he said. "We are working on the transition technologies and fuels and the ultimate technologies that will be there over the next 20, 30 years that can get us to net zero... This doesn't happen overnight."
Morrison, who has a largely undefined slogan of "technology not taxes", was part of a government that torpedoed a carbon pricing scheme after winning the 2013 election while opposing the mechanism as a tax.
His deputy prime minister, climate change sceptic Barnaby Joyce, dug in on Sunday against a net zero target.
"We look at it through the eyes of making sure there is not an unreasonable, or any loss of... regional jobs," Joyce, whose National party represents largely rural voters, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Joyce said proceeds from mining and agriculture industries were vital for people in regional towns, from hairdressers to auto service providers.
"You've got to remember, fossil fuels are your nation's largest export and if you take away your nation's largest export, you've got to accept a lower standard of living," he said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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