THE HOCKEY STICK CONTINUES (THE REAL ONE)

Letter from Christopher C. Horner (CHorner@cei.org) regarding the recent rise in CO2 emissions by the EU



The EEA has now updated its priceless 21 June 2005 chart which causes equally priceless expressions among Kyotophiles when I present it across the continent. See here

One year does of course not make a trend, though had emissions fallen it doubtless would have been reported as such. The actual trend remains obvious: EU emissions continue to rise. [Paging Dr. McCain, Dr. McCain, you are needed in the reality-check room].

At least the press account wasn't as misleading as last December's, pushed out to divert attention from the decision in Montreal to NOT amend Kyoto per Article 18 to make it binding, which said "on track to meet commitment to reduce emissions"; which is of course absurd but ritually accepted by outlets such as Reuters which took that a step further as cheerleader, and wrote a headline "Europe well ahead of track". Seriously. Find that trend in this data and there is a job in government waiting for you in Brussels.

Of note: I have previously written about those curiously changing (typically upward) 1990 EU baselines -- 15 years later (See here PDF) -- via which to date individual member states have fudged a cumulative total of 3.4% upward, or almost half of the EU-15 bubble obligation.

Given this, see the Note following the second chart on the EEA release:

"The base year emissions in this table are preliminary and the final emissions will be agreed in 2006 within Council Decision (2002/358/EC)....."

This, doubtless, will be worth the price of admission. "OK, gentlemen, how far out of compliance shall we agree we are, and how shall we allocate the violations? Who can afford what amount of credits?" Hold on to those old copies of prior baselines linked to in my paper, they'll be something to compare. Regardless, see the various baselines to date and await their "final answer" later in the year.






A REALLY drastic climate change -- just before written history began

The Sahara suddenly got a lot wetter about 8500 BC and then dried out again about 5300 BC -- all due to NATURAL climate fluctuations (unless those prehistoric Saharans had SUVs) and all very RECENTLY in geological terms. See the latest journal abstract on the subject below

Radiocarbon data from 150 archaeological excavations in the now hyper-arid Eastern Sahara of Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and Chad reveal close links between climatic variations and prehistoric occupation during the past 12,000 years. Synoptic multiple-indicator views for major time slices demonstrate the transition from initial settlement after the sudden onset of humid conditions at 8500 B.C.E. to the exodus resulting from gradual desiccation since 5300 B.C.E. Southward shifting of the desert margin helped trigger the emergence of pharaonic civilization along the Nile, influenced the spread of pastoralism throughout the continent, and affects sub-Saharan Africa to the present day.

Abstract from "Climate-Controlled Holocene Occupation in the Sahara: Motor of Africa's Evolution" by Rudolph Kuper and Stefan Kropelin





A Cartel Worse Than OPEC

At this moment, America faces one of the greatest threats to its economy and perhaps its very survival as a world power. A war is under way in the Middle East, source of 50% of the world's petroleum energy, which, if distribution were disrupted, could cause a world recession or worse. Terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, are waging war against Israel from bases in Lebanon and Palestine. Cross-border support is coming from Iran and Syria. Add to this the threat of Iran's development of nuclear weapons. To expect Hezbollah and Hamas to negotiate is hope in the extreme. The governments of both Lebanon and Palestine are powerless to reign in these two terrorist groups.

The entire region is at a flash point. A single spark could ignite this tinder box, wreaking havoc upon the U.S. economy, perhaps even its ability to wage war. An all-out war in the Middle East could seriously disrupt the 25% of total U.S. oil imports which comes from the Persian Gulf region. At best $100 per barrel oil is predicted by year's end. No one really knows.

There is one thing we do know. Congress has done absolutely nothing to develop domestic resources, to make America energy independent. The President presents energy plans which Congress rejects, summarily. And there is no executive follow-through. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day. Of this, 12 million barrels are imported.

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve stands at 727 million barrels, providing enough oil, at 12 million imported barrels per day, for 60 days. According to an agreement with the International Energy Agency, all 26 members must have a strategic petroleum reserve equal to 90 days of oil imports. The United States falls 30 days short. Canada, America's largest supplier of crude oil, has no reserve and in time of crisis would withhold exports. U.S. petroleum reserves accounted for as much as 3% of all known world reserves in 2004. That percentage places U.S. reserves at about 340 billion barrels of oil. To be totally self-sufficient, the United States, at the present rate of consumption, would have to use some 12 million barrels a day from the reserve. At that rate the reserves would last 75 years. In 75 years alternative resources for oil certainly will be found. As little as 2% of world oil reserves would replace imported oil for 45 years at today's rate of consumption.

New discoveries of oil reserves are reported regularly. On a trip in September 2005, this writer visited the oil rich country of Azerbaijan, along the Caspian Sea. News articles of the day reported enormous reserves found under the shallow Caspian Sea, reported to equal some of the oil rich areas of Saudi Arabia. This year a very large reserve was located in the Gulf of Mexico, some distance from the shore line of Texas. There is no shortage of oil or gas around the coast of the United States. Some 20 years ago, Phillips Petroleum sought permission to drill wells in the Bridger-Teton National Forest (gasp!) in Wyoming. The wells were to be capped and used only in case of a national emergency. Wyoming is one of America's richest states in energy resources. The request was denied.

Those who remember the 1973 Arab-Israeli War will recall the energy crisis that developed and the long lines at the gas pumps. The United States had joined in support of Israel. Nearly all Middle East oil imports were cut off. When the oil started flowing again, the price of crude oil was no longer $4.50 a barrel. It rose to $40 per barrel, causing a world recession.

Today the United States faces a cartel far more destructive of America's energy independence than OPEC's nine nations. This new cartel is composed of an assortment of envirocrat groups posing as environmentalists, endangered species advocates, animal rights promoters, property rights destroyers and assorted ice-age fanciers turned global warmers. Leaders among these envirocrats are Greenpeace, the Green Party, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, Earth First, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Wilderness Society and Defenders of Wildlife, to name a few. Individuals such as former Presidential candidates Ralph Nader and former Vice President Albert A. Gore, Jr. are prominent spokesmen for the envirocrat causes.

What has become the obvious intent of this cartel is the destruction of America's access to its own resources. Examples are: "protection" of a spotted owl despite near destruction of the timber industry in Oregon and Washington; desperately needed petroleum reserves set aside in Alaska to protect the sex habits of the caribou; the set-aside of vitally needed sulfur-free coal reserves in Utah; and denial of offshore drilling for a number of reasons, including the spoiling of the view of a few people by rigs 15 miles away. This list could continue for a full column.

This cartel of envirocrat groups is permitted by both political parties in Congress to disrupt America's access to its own natural resources. Kneeling at the feet of the envirocrat intimidators, Congress accepts the barrage of false and phony claims that, if examined closely, would reveal the fraud.

When the lines get blocks long at the gas pumps Americans will give thanks to the OPEC cartel for providing the only gasoline available, even at prices over $5 per gallon. Appeals to the envirocrat cartel will get them nothing.

Source






"MANY ACADEMICS AND SCIENTISTS ARE UNPREDICTABLE, UNBALANCED AND PRONE TO OVER-REACT"

The adage "like a kid at heart" may be truer than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever. Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry. Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny.

The theory's creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue. Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality. In the mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. A "child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge" is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, "unfinished."

"The psychological neoteny effect of formal education is an accidental by-product - the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity," he explained. "But formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity to new learning, and cognitive flexibility." "When formal education continues into the early twenties," he continued, "it probably, to an extent, counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise occur at about this age."

Charlton pointed out that past cultures often marked the advent of adulthood with initiation ceremonies. While the human mind responds to new information over the course of any individual's lifetime, Charlton argues that past physical environments were more stable and allowed for a state of psychological maturity. In hunter-gatherer societies, that maturity was probably achieved during a person's late teens or early twenties, he said. "By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people," he said. "People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact."

Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, "immature" people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift. The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues, he believes. These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness. At least "youthfulness is no longer restricted to youth," he said, due to overall improvements in food and healthcare, along with cosmetic technologies.

David Brooks, a social commentator and an op-ed columnist at The New York Times, has documented a somewhat related phenomenon concerning the current blurring of "the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture," which Charlton believes is a version of psychological neoteny. Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

A true inconvenience

President Bush has announced that our nation is addicted to oil, but that isn't true at all. I am addicted to cigarettes, I am not addicted to water. Yet if I had to choose between the two, I'll pick water every time -- I need it to survive. We need energy to survive, and for now that means we need dirty fuels like oil and coal. We fear that our use of fossil fuels changes the climate, and the result is a debate between societal survival and, well, societal survival.

When it comes to global warming, it is both useless and unnecessary to quibble about disputed facts, such as whether human activity is a significant factor. For the purposes of this column, I will simply accept all of the assumptions of the Green Movement. Global warming is real, and we are a significant cause of the problem. (Hell, if Pat Robertson can buy into it, why can't I?). So what does man-made global warming mean for us? We will face warmer weather, more droughts, higher sea levels, more precipitation, et cetera. Under the more extreme scenarios, some parts of the planet would become uninhabitable -- although it is probably safe to imagine that some uninhabitable areas would become more livable, especially up North. Generally, though, we can assume that human life will be affected negatively by the warming trend. Our way of living will dramatically change.

Forget New England

The Green Movement wants to do something about that. The argument basically goes like this: if we suffer now by dramatically changing the way we live, then maybe we can avoid suffering later by dramatically changing the way we live. Put that way, it doesn't sound like a winning proposition. But will we really suffer now because we act in a fashion dramatic enough to avoid climate change? The beginning of the answer lies with the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty that would require the U.S. and several other industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gases -- especially the ubiquitous carbon dioxide -- by meeting emissions targets.

What exactly would it mean to meet the Kyoto targets? Let's look at the numbers. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the United States generated 5,802 million metric tons (MMT) of CO2 in 2003. Naturally, this number has grown over the years as our economy has expanded. In 1990 we emitted just 4,969 MMT of carbon dioxide. If we had ratified the Kyoto treaty, we would have committed to cut emissions to levels 7% below that 1990 level -- or to about 4,620 MMT.

Can we cut emissions by that much? Sure we can. I'm looking at the Energy Information Administration's table of all 50 states' levels of carbon dioxide emissions. If we shut down all industry and electric generation in the 14 "Blue" States (the ones that went for John Kerry in 2004) east of the Mississippi River, then seize all automobiles, airplanes, and private land there, we would slightly overshoot the Kyoto goals.

Of course, I'm being somewhat ridiculous here (besides, that solution didn't work when they tried it in Cambodia). So let's try to spread the burden of Kyoto compliance around. In 2003, gasoline use in the U.S. accounted for 1,141 MMT or 20 percent of our total carbon dioxide emissions. If Congress acts today to outlaw the use of gasoline for all uses -- automobiles, lawn-mowers, generators, et cetera -- we'd be within just 40 million metric tons of reaching our Kyoto goals. And that's great, unless you like being able to drive, or having food brought to your grocery store, or having ambulances and fire trucks that can respond to emergencies.

It is true that we don't have to meet the Kyoto goals tomorrow -- but we would have to meet them by 2008, which is not much better if you think about it. Even 2018 would not be much better. We are a growing population that needs more energy every year to sustain life and comfort.

This is not a simple case of adjusting your thermostat by a few degrees, driving fewer miles this summer, or even buying a hybrid. Even gradual Kyoto compliance would require much more drastic action than that. You would have to stop heating and cooling your office -- perhaps your home as well. You would have to take the bicycles on your family vacation this summer -- not on top of your car, but instead of your car. Forget about using that microwave -- and probably best to turn off that power-sucking computer of yours as soon as you're done reading this.

Given what it would take to comply, it's no wonder that the signatories of the Kyoto treaty are mostly failing to meet the targets, many of them (notably Canada, but especially Spain) doing far worse than the non-signatory United States. Even the countries that have kept emissions in check since 1990 (such as Germany) have largely done so because of a one-time event -- the collapse of Eastern Bloc industry at the end of the Cold War -- and not through significant, sustained reductions in energy use.

`Kyoto Is Not Enough'

But the picture is actually much bleaker than all that, because an important Green Movement tenet is that compliance with the Kyoto treaty is only the first baby step toward changing the warming trend. In November 2005, Professor Guy Brasseur, a Belgian scientist who runs the National Center for Atmospheric Research, addressed members of the European Parliament to inform them that "Kyoto is not enough." "If we stopped all CO2 emissions today, the temperature would continue to rise for between 200 and 300 years," said Brasseur, who also noted that in order to stop human activity from raising the temperature, "we must reduce emissions not by five to ten percent, but by eighty to ninety percent."

Someday, that may become possible: it will happen as soon as we develop a new, cost-efficient technology that satisfies our needs for energy with minimal pollution. But it's very safe to say that such dramatic reductions are impossible any other way. Right now, even a 20 percent reduction in emissions would probably be more traumatic and destructive to our civilization than twenty more years of high emissions and global warming -- especially considering that such a relatively large emissions reduction still would not put a dent in the problem. And that is to say nothing of the effect a 60 percent or a 90 percent reduction in CO2 emissions would have on how we live.

The sages of The New York Times editorial board deride the technological development approach as a "Hail Mary" solution, and of course blame the idea on President Bush (who is responsible for every other evil in the world, so why not?). But this is simple blindness to reality. For normal people who drive cars and refrigerate their food, the "Hail Mary" approach is infinitely more effective and preferable to the approach that represents a slow death for the world economy.

The Green Movement, unfortunately, opposes the cost-effective, emission-free technologies we have already developed -- namely, hydroelectric and nuclear power.

The main point is that, accepting the premises of the Green Movement at face value, there is no reason to make society suffer, just to bring about minor reductions of emissions that won't make a difference. If the climate keeps getting hotter, as the Greens predict, I'm certainly not going to be the one to sacrifice my air conditioning now so that maybe it cools off in a few centuries. My thermostat stays on 68.

Source






Environmental Bounty-Hunting

How Earthjustice and other green groups abuse the legal system.

Private prosecution of crimes has a long and sordid history, and that history isn't over. Bounty hunters no longer hound innocent people to death as some did in England in the mid-18th century, but environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have modified the tactic. They use "citizen suits" to reap rich rewards for themselves with little positive impact on the environment.

Most federal environmental statutes allow citizens to sue individuals or companies for violating the laws. Indeed, from 1993 to 2002, more than 75% of all environmental federal court decisions started as citizen suits, reports James May. Writing the Widener Law Review, he concludes that citizen suits are "the engine that propels the field of environmental law."

But most of these suits are brought by environmental organizations, not individuals, and most of the filings don't end in a court decision; they end in settlements. From 1995-2002, there were 4,438 notices of intent to sue under four environmental statutes--6.6 times more than actual federal court decisions in citizen suits. Presumably most of the others were settled. Why the settlements?

My research indicates a clear and compelling reason: settlements bring in money environmental groups can use to pursue other goals. Although statistics are hard to come by, most citizen suits appear to be filed under the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA). Provisions in these laws enable citizen prosecutors to craft settlements that compensate them generously for legal costs (amounts well above actual costs) and that channel funds into pet environmental projects (called "supplemental environmental projects.")

These laws make prosecutions easy because they require companies to keep detailed records of their activities; in other words, evidence of technical violations is provided by the companies themselves! Furthermore, the laws saddle "violators" with very heavy penalties (up to $25,000 per day), but these penalties can be waived if the case is settled. And RCRA even allows citizens to prosecute past violations, not just ongoing ones.

Many of the violations are trivial and technical. Defendants who have not even minimally harmed the environment are roped in. One commentator points out that the Atlantic States Legal Foundation has frequently sued over paperwork violations under the Clean Water Act, but "not over violations of substantive environmental standards." Companies settle simply to avoid expensive litigation.

An indication that self-interest, not environmental stewardship, propels these suits comes from comparing citizen suits filed under two different laws. Between 1995 and 2002, 1,371 citizen suits were filed under the under the Clean Water Act but only 143 under the Clean Air Act. Do environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund think that water violations are more serious than air pollution? Probably not. They do know, however, that the Clean Water Act mandates record-keeping that makes suing under it easy and allows large fines that make settlements lucrative; the Clean Air Act does not.

Another sign that the goals are financial, not environmental, is that the Clean Water Act suits are disproportionately targeted at private firms, not municipal governments. Yet municipal governments generate much more water pollution. Current statutes thus create a moral hazard, distorting the incentives of environmental groups. As Michael Greve wrote some years ago, "In purpose and effect, citizen suit provisions are an off-budget entitlement program for the environmental movement." Repealing these provisions, particularly those in laws that authorize large monetary fines, would help some environmental groups refocus on activities that actually enhance environmental quality.

Source






GOOEY GORE

Al Gore establishes his environmental credentials straight away in his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth. When he stands by a river, sees the leaves, feels the river bank give a little beneath his feet, hears a cow in the distance, he feels all gooey inside. This profound revelation sets the scene for his deeply manipulative movie.

We first see the man who was almost the US president stride onstage to give a PowerPoint presentation claiming the global warming apocalypse is nigh. That presentation - boring graphs, pie charts, diagrams and all - is the movie, interspersed with footage of Gore strolling around his family farm in Tennessee, chatting about himself, and dragging his suitcase from airport to airport. Next month, Gore will bring his Apple Mac to Sydney to launch the movie and, judging by a preview audience this week, he is in for a rapturous reception.

The "inconvenient truth" that Gore has selflessly dedicated his life to warn us about is that "humanity is sitting on a time bomb". We have "just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heatwaves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making". Humans have polluted the atmosphere so much in the past 50 years that diseases and parasites are spreading, from lice and ebola to malaria. He provides no evidence, and doesn't mention that the rise of malaria coincided with the banning of the pesticide DDT, the most effective weapon against mosquitoes.

Gore's movie lingers on images of destruction and human misery from Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans last year. Global warming is the culprit, he says, with hurricanes at record levels last year. Like everything else in his movie, he presents it as incontrovertible fact, without mentioning that hurricane experts from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the evidence linking hurricane activity and global warming is inconclusive.

He makes curious claims such as "Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand" because the sea level has risen so much. Really? [Sure will be news in both the Pacific island nations and New Zealand!]

He shows scientists examining ice cores from the Antarctic, which he claims show changes in the atmosphere over two years resulting from a political act in the United States, much like a ring in a tree trunk: "Right here is where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act. It's very distinguishable."

At one point Gore, the one-time US vice-president, stands on a moveable platform next to a screen showing a graph of carbon dioxide and temperature over time. The two lines mirror each other until, suddenly, the temperature line stops and the carbon dioxide line takes a drastic turn upwards, climbing off the chart and a couple of metres up the wall, with Gore in hot pursuit. This carbon dioxide line shows the effect of human activity over the past 50 years and projected into the future, he says. The frightening implication is that temperature will mirror this increase, incinerating us in a flash, but where is the rest of the temperature line? Just as the audience is pondering this mystery, the scene ends. Forget the evidence, just trust Al Gore.

The next scene gives us a reason for this leap of faith as the camera pans over old newspaper headlines from 1989, when Gore's six-year-old son was badly injured in a car accident. "It turned my world upside down," he says, making him ask: "How shall I spend my time on this earth." Of course, he will save it.

After all the panic, the final credits present an odd logical leap with a long list of simple domestic tasks we can perform to prevent the global catastrophe: buy energy-efficient light bulbs, drive a hybrid car, get our parents to come to the movie, and pray.

Gore presents as a missionary, the font of sacred scientific information known to only a privileged few which he is now sharing person by person with his audiences. For all its ostentatious stodginess and earnest-university-lecture style, the movie is sophisticated propaganda, full of hyperbole, misleading and incomplete information, and vicious about non-believers. It is aimed at children, and its distributors will provide an interactive online study guide for 39,000 teachers around Australia. But as the geologist Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, has said: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic." We have more to fear from another ice age, he claims.

The problem with Gore's approach is that he makes the threat of man-made global warming seem so certain, so enormous and so insoluble that most people turn off. Visiting Sydney last year, Johan Norberg, the author of In Defence of Global Capitalism, pointed to one effect: a recent survey in the once deep-green Sweden showed that people thought the environment was in crisis at the same time as their interest in environmental issues had fallen from 30 per cent to 5 per cent. "Everyone thinks the environment is falling apart but they're not going to do anything about it," Norberg said.

The apocalyptic way in which climate change is so often presented by green groups, the media and on government websites is a kind of "climate porn", according to a report, Warm Words, released this month by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank. "Sensationalism . serves to create a sense of distance from the issue." It argues: "Alarmism might even become secretly thrilling - effectively a form of 'climate porn' rather than a constructive message. All of this serves to undermine the ability of this discourse to bring about action." It is human nature when faced with a problem too large to solve to simply ignore it in the hope it will go away. Funnily enough, the other eco catastrophes so confidently predicted 30 years ago - acid rain, nuclear winter, species extinction, the population bomb - never did eventuate.

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

THE MARKET SOLUTION TO TRAFFIC CONGESTION

An Australian economist points out some unpopular truths:

One thing I hate about politicians is the way they pretend to indulge us rather than level with us. They rarely tell us the unvarnished truth about what problems they can fix and what they can't, preferring to string us along. They act as though they can fix everything, which encourages a culture of complaint and a focus on the alleviation of symptoms rather than a search for fundamental solutions.

Take all the whingeing about the price of petrol [gasoline]. No pollie's prepared to tell us that since the problem is a global shortage of oil, the rise in price is a healthy development because, by encouraging both producers and consumers to adjust their behaviour accordingly, it offers the best solution to the problem. Fortunately, neither side of politics is silly enough to embrace the populist cry for the temporary relief of symptoms that would come from cutting the tax on petrol - which would increase local demand without adding to supply.

A related issue on which the pollies have always lacked frankness is traffic congestion. They won't admit there are no painless answers to peak-hour delays. It's not practically possible to eliminate congestion. The best we could hope for is to slow down the rate at which it's getting worse. In his book Still Stuck in Traffic, Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution in Washington reveals just how ignorant of the nature of the problem politicians have allowed us to be. He argues that traffic congestion isn't the problem. Actually, it's the solution to the problem - the only solution the public finds acceptable.

The real problem is that we all want to live together in big cities and travel to and from work or school at pretty much the same time of day. Now, it makes economic sense for us to live in cities and it makes social as well as economic sense for us to want to work when others are working. But the problem is greatly compounded by our desire to live in low-density suburbs and to travel in our own cars - by ourselves. So the demand for road space at peak times of the day greatly exceeds the supply of space available. The result is traffic congestion, which is merely a way of rationing the space on a first come, first served basis. It's a queue, in other words.

We all think of ourselves as having a democratic right to drive to work if we want to, but what the pollies never have the courage to point out is that, by exercising our private right to drive, we impose "social costs" on other people. There are costs for other motorists - in the form of slower journey times and increased fuel consumption - and costs on the rest of the community, in the form of air and noise pollution.

The standard economists' solution to this is to make private individuals bear the social costs of their actions by charging them to use main arteries at peak times. You'd keep increasing the charge until you'd eliminated the congestion. But no government in the world has done this. That's partly because technology hasn't yet advanced to the point where a fool-proof charging system is practical. Mainly, however, it's because the public would vigorously object to such a charge. We hate the idea because it would disadvantage people who couldn't afford the charge (which is true), because we believe we're already paying enough tax and because we much prefer to leave the cost of congestion hidden from view.

See the point? When demand exceeds supply we have to ration. And when you won't ration by price (which is what economists advocate) you have to ration by queue. So congestion isn't the problem, it's the solution to the problem - the only solution we're prepared to accept, our unending complaints notwithstanding. By hiding the cost of congestion - by paying it in time rather than money - we understate the cost of our preference for living in low-density patterns and we end up overinvesting in highways. Both things lead to urban sprawl, which increases energy costs, infrastructure costs, vehicle kilometres travelled and air pollution.

In theory, the problem of excess demand for peak-hour road space can be tackled either by reducing demand or by increasing supply. As we've seen, the public shies away from demand-side solutions because they impose costs directly on the individual. We prefer supply-side solutions because they impose costs on the community (and we can kid ourselves that others will pay, not us). Hence the perennially popular solution of trying to reduce congestion by building more tunnels and expressways. The problem with it is that any success you have in reducing congestion and travel time is soon lost because it induces more demand from people who'd prefer to drive to work. There must be some ultimate limit to this additional demand, but to reach it would require a huge expansion of expressways, involving the disfiguring of many landscapes and the destruction of thousands of homes. It would also be impossibly expensive and wasteful (because of all the hours of the week when the extra expressways were underutilised).

So building better roads offers no realistic solution to congestion - a conclusion both public and pollies seem to be coming to in reaction to the modern practice of allowing private operators to build the new expressways and then charge directly for their use.

What about reducing road congestion by increasing the supply and quality of public transport? Not a bad idea, particularly since it's been so long neglected and in view of our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the dearth of public transport in outer suburbs suggests it would be an expensive business to make more than a modest impact on road congestion. And to some extent you'd be shifting the congestion from road to rail and bus.

So what hope is there? Well, it turns out that a lasting rise in the price of petrol might have a significant effect in reducing the demand for peak-hour road space by shifting people to public transport and encouraging ride-sharing. Downs says in his book that cutting the number of lone drivers would reduce congestion more than any other single change

Source






HOW NOT TO POLL CLIMATE EXPERTS ON GLOBAL WARMING MOVIE

Cheap journalism at the Associated Press reveals little about accuracy. "The nation's top climate scientists are giving "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy," announces the Associated Press. But what does that really mean? Well, for starters, it's the polling equivalent of grade inflation as five stars doesn't mean 100 percent accuracy.

"The former vice president's movie - replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets - mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press."

But that's small potatoes when forced, by implication, to accept that there are only 19 "top climate scientists" in the entire United States. The AP, apparently, "contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book."

So why doesn't the headline say - "nation's top climate scientists have not seen Gore warming movie" - which is the salient lede in this bit of amateur polling? Or even "some climate scientists ok Gore movie's accuracy." The answer is that neither of these headlines makes for a compelling story.

But even if you accept the newsworthiness of 19 climate scientists, it is important to ask what is the probability that this very low response rate has resulted in selection bias? In other words, were those scientists who read the book or saw the movie more likely to agree with it from the outset - especially as Gore's position is no secret?

It's hard to imagine those who disagreed with the movie's widely-publicised claims lining up to pay for a lecture on science from an ex-politician. And the impression that the AP succeeded in polling only those who agreed with Gore's arguments is underlined by the quote from one scientist who, after watching a special presentation of the movie said, "Al, I'm absolutely blown away."

STATS is not in a position to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of what Gore claims, or what those scientists who gave it two thumbs almost vertical said in response. But we know a meaningless poll when we see one.

And the AP's story follows on an op-ed in the June 26 Wall Street Journal by Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, which was both critical of Gore's movie and the idea of a consensus among scientists about the causes and nature of global warming.

Given that Lindzen has long criticized the consensus view of global warming, one wonders whether he was among the AP's list of the 100-top climate scientists. If so, one would have expected him to have had something to say about the movie. And if he was not on the list, then why not?

Statistical Assessment Service






BILL GRAY IS TAKING THE HEAT

Galileo got crosswise with Pope Urban VIII. Robert Oppenheimer didn't see eye-to-eye with Edward Teller. Every original thinker has a bete noire who torments and goads him. For William Gray, a lean, six-foot-five emeritus professor at Colorado State University and one of the world's leading experts on tropical storms, the bugaboo on the horizon is another tall, charismatic fellow named Albert Arnold Gore Jr. You can call him Al.

Sitting in his office on the northwest edge of Fort Collins, Gray thumbs through Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, the coffee-table companion book to the documentary of the same name. Gore has been making the rounds of talk shows and bookseller conventions promoting both efforts. Turn on cable news and there he is, reciting the we're-in-deep-shit message he's been delivering by slide show for years, now bolstered by a website (www.climatecrisis.net) and startling computer graphics that depict the earth being ravaged by a gauntlet of man-made catastrophes over the next few decades.

Gray doesn't believe in the planetary emergency. Never has. Still, he picks his words carefully. A few weeks ago, a Washington Post article quoted him comparing Gore's convictions about global warming to Hitler's beliefs about the Jews, a burst of rhetorical overkill he says he sincerely regrets. So he's going to try to sound a diplomatic note here, even though the book, which some colleagues have asked him to review, strikes him as a piece of outright hysteria. "I admire Al Gore," he says. "There's no doubt, with over six billion people, we have a lot of environmental problems in this world. He's pointing them out. That's fine. But that doesn't mean it's all due to global warming, or that you're going to solve these problems by cutting back on fossil fuels."

The tone seems conciliatory enough. But soon Gray is out of his seat, pointing out features on a map of the world pinned to the wall, reading passages from Gore's book aloud, scribbling lines of convection on a yellow legal pad. "This is a slick propaganda book," he declares. "The pictures are very good. But there are factual errors."

He's off and running. The people who are spreading the global-warming alarm, including the scientists, just don't understand the way the atmosphere works, he says. The ones who see a link between increasing ocean temperatures and more intense hurricanes in recent decades don't understand the ocean or hurricanes. The global computer models projecting that heat-trapping greenhouse gases will warm the earth between three and seven degrees Fahrenheit in the next hundred years -- melting polar ice, flooding shorelines and disrupting weather patterns everywhere -- are fatally flawed.

Now 76 years old, Gray is an old-school meterologist who prefers observational data to computer modeling. "I could assemble fifty of my colleagues who are very skeptical about global warming," he says. "The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] never talks to us, but I have a bit of an obligation, at my age -- I was trained to tell the truth. There's a lot of hogwash in this. If I don't speak up, I'm not doing my job."

FULL STORY here

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

CALIFORNIA: HYBRID BUSES NO GOOD

When Elk Grove established its own transit system 19 months ago, it was hailed as another first for a city that prides itself on maverick moves. A hybrid-powered commuter bus fleet -- the cleanest in the nation -- would be the heart of what's called the e-tran. But now, Elk Grove's path to clean-air mass transit has taken a detour. Diesel buses, both chartered and purchased, currently make up nearly half of e-tran's 42-vehicle fleet and most of the daily commute buses to downtown Sacramento.

Instead of cruising into the nation's history books, the hybrid fleet has had trouble accelerating into the fast lanes of the freeways. Instead of comfortable rides, hybrid bus air conditioners have quit in triple-digit temperatures, leaving passengers sweating in ovenlike heat. Now, only five of the city's 21 hybrids are used on freeways. "In the quest to be leading edge, you have to take chances at times on new technology," Mayor Rick Soares said. "We took that chance."

No one is saying that the hybrid purchases, at a cost of $434,300 each, were a waste. The city, once served by Sacramento Regional Transit, has seen a huge growth in demand for rides within Elk Grove, and that's where most e-tran hybrids now operate. But there is disappointment. "Hybrid may not be the way to go for commuter service," said e-tran Transit Manager Carlos Tobar, who was hired to run e-tran more than a month after the start of the new service. "Live and learn."

So, what's the problem with the hybrids? They perform best during stop-and-go traffic, Tobar said. The hybrid's electric energy booster, an ultra capacitor, works in tandem with a 145-kilowatt generator. That booster is recharged every time a driver applies the brakes. That's great for intercity transit, but is troublesome on freeways where brakes are less often applied. "At highway speeds, many of the systems are stressed," Tobar said.

Among the stresses are air conditioners that switch off on ultra-hot days during freeway travel. To relieve passengers, Tobar either pulls buses from service or delivers bottled water in ice buckets to buses on afternoons hotter than 105 degrees. Still, passengers have been howling. With sunlight beating into bus windows, the hybrids have been compared to rolling hot houses. "Last night, you were sweating in there," Fred Burriell said of his commute home to Elk Grove during the latest heat wave. "You didn't need a sauna."

This isn't the first year the fledgling bus service has had these problems. Last year customers had similar complaints about air-conditioning breakdowns.... The sources of maintenance problems also aren't easy to detect, Tobar has said. Last month, he called in experts from both ISE Corp. of San Diego and Complete Coach Works of Riverside to solve the air-conditioning problems. ISE provided the hybrid system to Complete Coach, which remanufactured the buses for sale to Elk Grove. "I still believe that Elk Grove made a visionary decision" in purchasing the hybrids, Complete Coach's Macy Neshati said Friday, noting the company believes the fleet will improve.

And Elk Grove is still committed to its goal for lower-emission buses. "We really care about our riders," Tobar said. "We have had our challenges. But, like any champ that is knocked down, we get up and continue to fight."

Source






GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES HEAVY RAIN, etc., etc.

Reuters report below from June, which blames GW for both heavy rain AND record cold. On the other side of the Atlantic, global warming has been causing causing drought and now from Britain to California it's causing record heat! Sure is pesky stuff!

Images of swamped homes in the U.S. Northeast deepened suspicions over global warming, giving ammunition to scientists and others who say greenhouse gas-spewing cars and factories are fueling extreme weather. Meteorologists cautioned that no one should read too much into one storm. But the Atlantic Ocean is unusually warm for this time of year, they said, creating excess moisture in the atmosphere that can swiftly build a powerful rainstorm.

Paul Epstein, associate director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, said the Atlantic is warming faster than scientists projected even a decade ago, and he expects such storms as the one seen this week from Virginia to New York to become common. "Scientists and climatologists are looking at one another and we're just stunned because no one, even in the 1990s, projected the magnitude of the storms and degree of warming in the Arctic that we are seeing," he said.

Epstein sees a clear pattern: rain has increased in the United States by 7 percent in three decades; heavy rain events of more than 2 inches a day are up 14 percent and storms dumping more than 4 inches a day rose 20 percent. The floods that forced up to 200,000 evacuees from a historic Pennsylvania coal town on Wednesday followed a year of erratic weather in other parts of the region, including record rainfall in May and June in Massachusetts, a spring-like January in Maine and Vermont's worst autumn foliage in memory.

On February 12, Boston dug itself out of its largest snowfall for a single day when 17.5 inches fell -- an abrupt change from the second-warmest January on record in much of New England. Rhode Island's January was the warmest in 56 years. In Maine, lakes froze later, then thawed, faster than many could remember.

Most scientists say greenhouse gases could cause huge climate changes like floods, heat waves, droughts and a rise in sea levels that could swamp low-lying Pacific islands by 2100. But not everyone blames human pollution for drenching the U.S. Northeast. "The climate is warming," said Bernie Rayno, senior meteorologist at Accuweather.com. "The real question is: 'Are humans causing it or is it occurring because of natural cycles?' We believe that we are in a natural cycle like we were back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. And that was a time of big climate swings."

Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists sees a gradual shift over the past 50 years toward heavier rain and more violent weather, including the record-shattering hurricane season that produced 28 storms last year. "We do expect to see an increase in the intensity of rainstorms particularly in the Northeast," she said.

Reuters, 29 June 2006






PESKY ICE-CORE DATA

Big natural fluctuations in recent times? There are clearly both "good" ice-cores and "bad" ice-cores



For the first time, glaciologists have combined and compared sets of ancient climate records trapped in ice cores from the South American Andes and the Asian Himalayas to paint a picture of how climate has changed - and is still changing - in the tropics. Their conclusions mark a massive climate shift to a cooler regime that occurred just over 5,000 years ago, and a more recent reversal to a much warmer world within the last 50 years.

The evidence also suggests that most of the high-altitude glaciers in the planet's tropical regions will disappear in the near future. The paper is included in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Lastly, the research shows that in most of the world, glaciers and ice caps are rapidly retreating, even in areas where precipitation increases are documented. This implicates increasing temperatures and not decreasing precipitation as the most likely culprit.

The researchers from Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center and three other universities combined the chronological climate records retrieved from seven remote locations north and south of the equator. Cores drilled through ice caps and glaciers there have captured a climate history of each region, in some cases, providing annual records and in others decadal averages. "Approximately 70 percent of the world's population now lives in the tropics so when climate changes there, the impacts are likely to be enormous," explains Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State.

For the last three decades, Thompson has led nearly 50 expeditions to remote ice caps and glaciers to drill cores through them and retrieve climate records. This study includes cores taken from the Huascaran and Quelccaya ice caps in Peru; the Sajama ice cap in Bolivia; the Dunde, Guliya, Puruogangri and Dasuopu ice caps in China.

For each of these cores, the team - including research partner Ellen Mosley-Thompson, professor of geography at Ohio State - extracted chronological measurements of the ratio of two oxygen isotopes - O18 and O16 - whose ratio serves as an indicator of air temperature at the time the ice was formed. All seven cores provided clear annual records of the isotope ratios for the last 400 years and decadally averaged records dating back 2000 years.

"We have a record going back 2,000 years and when you plot it out, you can see the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA)," Thompson said. During the MWP, 700 to 1000 years ago, the climate warmed in some parts of the world. The MWP was followed by the LIA, a sudden onset of colder temperatures marked by advancing glaciers in Europe and North America . "And in that same record, you can clearly see the 20th Century and the thing that stands out - whether you look at individual cores or the composite of all seven - is how unusually warm the last 50 years have been. "There hasn't been anything in the record like it - not even the MWP," Thompson said. "The fact that the isotope values in the last 50 years have been so unusual means that things are dramatically changing. That's the real story here."

While the isotope evidence is clear throughout all of the cores, Thompson says that the more dramatic evidence is the emergence of unfossilized wetland plants around the margin of the Quelccaya ice cap, uncovered as the ice retreated in recent years. First discovered in 2002, the researchers have since identified 28 separate sites near the margin of the ice cap where these ancient plants have been exposed. Carbon-dating revealed that the plants range in age from 5,000 to 6,500 years old. "This means that the climate at the ice cap hasn't been warmer than it is today in the last 5,000 years or more," Thompson said. "If it had been, then the plants would have decayed."

FULL STORY here

(Benny Peiser cautions: "It should be pointed out that there are serious questions about whether oxygen isotopes O18 and O16 are reliable proxies for air temperature (let alone growing doubts about statitical accuracy of alleged proxy-disasters). Anyone unfamiliar with the scientific debate on these and other proxy claims may wish to consult Steve McIntyre's "Climate Audit")

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

CLIMATE STRATEGY: BETWEEN AMBITION AND REALISM

From the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR)

Summary:

(Translation: Julian Ross)

There are strong indications that the climate is undergoing change, partly under the influence of human activity. A substantial reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases is needed in order to slow down the rate of climate change sufficiently. However, while the total global volume of CO2 emissions needs to fall sharply, in reality it is more realistic to expect them to increase steeply as a result of rising prosperity and population growth.

There are considerable uncertainties and all manner of complicating factors which make it difficult to formulate an effective climate policy. The magnitude of the climate effects (and sometimes the direction in which they operate) is difficult to predict. There are large gaps in our knowledge about the climate system, partly due to the extreme slowness of that system. This raises the danger of setting in motion irreversible changes. The problem of policy formulation is also exacerbated by the global setting in which it has to be achieved. Different countries have widely diverging interests and consistently place the emphasis on economic growth, leading to an increase rather than a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the international coordination of the emission reduction efforts is problematic, raising the danger of inadequate policy. These uncertainties and complicating factors could lead to high costs. Given these uncertainties, climate policy ought to focus not only on optimisation, but also on robustness. A robust strategy is aimed at achieving success in a wide variety of potential scenarios.

1.1.1.1 Difficult judgments

There are wide differences in the way individual countries view the climate issue. The global divergence in perceptions, interests and preferences can make it difficult or even impossible to formulate an effective climate strategy. The effectiveness of that strategy depends on the goals that countries strive to achieve, and reaching agreement on this (in the sense of hard commitment) will not be easy. Differences in perceptions and preferences can lead to unbridgeable differences in the degree of willingness to bear the costs. One of the problems when deciding on the cost distribution is that both the costs of adaptation and of reducing the rate of climate change are unclear. Moreover, policymakers have to weigh those costs against completely different objectives which also require government intervention (economic growth, education, health care, infrastructure, pensions, military spending, and so on); the emphasis given to these objectives also varies considerably from one country to another.

Applying the prudence principle does not offer an immediate solution, because high costs have to be weighed against risks which are to some extent still unknown. This raises the paradox of trying to estimate the unknown. The prudence principle can therefore not provide an answer to the question of what constitutes a sensible mix of emission reductions and adaptation. The lack of an optimum policy mix also implies that the principle of intergenerational burden-sharing does not offer a firm basis for a solution.

1.1.1.2 No effective policy to date

The European Union (EU) determined in 1996 that the increase in global temperatures as a consequence of climate change had to be limited in the present century to 2 øC relative to pre-industrial levels. This standpoint was reaffirmed in 2005, when it was also stipulated that the attainability of the reduction targets needed to be reviewed in the light of costs/benefits aspects. The EU has a well-developed emissions trading system, putting it at the head of the field. At the same time, the EU pursues a specific climate policy on various fronts. The Netherlands has played a pioneering role in this climate policy. At global level, under the Kyoto protocol the signatory countries agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the period 2008-2012 to at least 5% below the level in 1990.

The policy pursued thus far has not proved effective, either in the EU or globally. On the contrary, policy activism in the EU has led to fragmentation, and in the Netherlands to a plethora of changes of direction. The potential for cost-effective domestic climate policy appears to be limited, and much of the effort will therefore have to be directed towards achieving objectives outside the Netherlands (and even outside Europe). Globally, the targets set by the Kyoto protocol are too limited, cover a very short period and apply only for a select group of developed countries which already have relatively CO2-efficient economies. The policy to date - both globally and at the level of the EU and the Netherlands - lacks a global, long-term perspective.

1.1.1.3 A new climate strategy

This WRR report sets out a climate strategy which gives both a rationale and direction to the Dutch policy within the EU and to the EU policy in a global context.

The Council took the following question as its starting point:

How can the Netherlands, as a member of the European Union, pursue an effective climate policy from a global and strategic perspective?

Key notions which characterise this strategy are: a global and long-term approach as inalienable principles; effectiveness of emission reduction by 2050; cost minimisation in the choice between options available now and the choice between options over a period of decades; damage limitation through timely adaptation to a climate which is undeniably changing; unflagging and energetic promotion of low-emission technology and innovation; a strategic approach to global coordination; and finally robustness, in view of the major uncertainties. The proposed climate strategy is based on three solution pathways: (1) adaptation to climate change; (2) reduction of greenhouse gas emissions; and (3) effective global coordination.

1.1.1.4 (1) High priority for adaptation

Adapting to a changing climate can reduce or prevent later damage. While adaptation policy cannot and must not replace internationally coordinated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, for many countries - and in any event for the Netherlands - it is considerably easier to achieve. It is not an acceptance of defeat, but is in fact an attractive option because the fruits of local efforts are also enjoyed locally, something which applies to only a very limited extent for emission reductions. Adaptation is not always possible globally, or can be so costly and disruptive that ultimately total emigration becomes unavoidable in certain localities. Adaptation can therefore not be viewed at the purely local level in all cases. The world community can reinforce or supplement the adaptive capacity of poor countries, and will sooner or later have to address vulnerabilities that can threaten the existence or cohesion of entire regions or peoples.

For the Netherlands, the most relevant climate changes from a policy perspective are the prospect of a wetter climate and higher sea levels (+20 cm to +110 cm by 2100). In the first place, therefore, adaptation will be focused on water policy in relation to flood protection; this is of great importance for four reasons:

* Climate change will still occur if emission reductions are successful, albeit in milder form.
* The credibility of coordinated global emission reductions is (so far) low.
* Successful adaptation will improve the Netherlands' international negotiating position.
* There is ground to be made up in the area of cost-effective flood protection.

In addition to attention for flood protection, consideration also needs to be given to natural assets and ecology. Climate change not only brings threats to the natural landscape, but also opportunities, and to some extent these opportunities can be created in the wake of the measures taken. Synergy can often be found between flood protection and housing construction or natural recovery. This synergy can be exploited to broaden the support for adaptive measures.

The main concern in Dutch adaptation policy is to keep options open. Flood protection measures demand major investments and are long-term in nature. A phased approach could be chosen for these investments; however, the same cannot be said for the creation of space for storing any surplus river water, when it is not certain whether these reserves will ever be used. There are three further problems: first, developed areas cannot be de-urbanised, or at least only at extremely high cost; second, there is insufficient administrative impetus to push through the reservation of space; and thirdly, public support for measures to protect against the flood risk is low. Flood protection is a national interest which needs to be fitted into the local context by seeking optimum solutions, not by watering down the national objectives. In some localities water will need to be given priority over construction, and vice versa. A higher priority for water management demands the adoption of a stronger position by national government at the expense of the position of lower administrative echelons. The importance of the flood protection offered by the primary flood barriers will benefit from a greater awareness of the flood risk.

1.1.1.5 (2) Reduction of emissions: routes and timeframes

In order to achieve the EU's 2øC target, a considerable reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions will have to be achieved in the coming decades, of the order of 10-11 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) per year in 2050 compared with a 'business as usual' scenario. The fuels to be used to play a decisive role here. There is no time to wait for a transition in the energy system; for the moment existing, mature technologies must be used. Modern renewable energy sources (sun, wind, hydropower and modern biomass) offer too little potential to achieve a globally adequate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the period up to 2030, quite apart from the question of the relative costs. Fossil fuels will therefore continue to dominate the world energy supply until at least 2050. Coal in particular will continue to play an important role. A dozen coal-based economies, which together account for roughly two-thirds of the world population, will undoubtedly exploit the existing cheap and well-distributed coal reserves. A global climate strategy will therefore inevitably have to focus its emission reduction efforts on coal ('clean fossil energy').

In the period to 2050, the required global emission reductions (10-11 GtC per year by 2050) could be achieved via four main routes:

* Energy efficiency (3.4 GtC per year). This option saves fuel (often referred to as a 'no regret' option) and is therefore attractive, but this does not mean it comes without cost. The emphasis will have to be placed on electricity consumption, electricity generation and heating. The greatest savings are to be made in the emerging economies.

* Energy mix (4 GtC per year). This route entails CO2 sequestration and storage in combination with gasification technology and the use of biomass. The transport sector could make a significant contribution to this in the longer term, among other things by using biofuels.

* Photosynthesis (2 GtC per year). This route entails the curbing of deforestation, an acceleration in afforestation and reforestation, better utilisation of timber in products and buildings, and more sustainable agriculture. The potential of this option is of limited duration.

* Reduction of other greenhouse gases (1 GtC per year), primarily methane and (industrial) N2O.

In addition to these main routes, there are additional options for reducing emissions, such as nuclear energy and wind energy.

The emission reduction routes use mature technology, but are not enough to achieve the further emission reductions that will still be needed after 2050. By that time, the energy supply will have to undergo a transition to emission-free energy. This can only be achieved if the wealthy nations invest in a large-scale and long-term research and development effort. The Council recommends the founding of a Top Technology Institute for emission-free energy for the development of this knowledge. Precisely because of the wide distance between the existing and desired situations, a clear distinction needs to be made between technology development and technology diffusion. In the present policy of the EU and the Netherlands this distinction is not made adequately, and this in turn pushes up costs.

1.1.1.6 (3) Effective global coordination

The greatest task in the coming decades is to ensure that industrialising and poor countries realise their economic growth in an emission-efficient way. The marginal costs of emission reduction will remain low in these developing countries for several decades to come, but the reduction in CO2 emissions will only be achieved if the wealthy OECD countries meet all or part of the costs. The Council therefore believes that the Netherlands needs to focus its emission reduction efforts as a priority on the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), if necessary in combination with development work.

The emissions trading system set out under the Kyoto protocol is a valuable instrument for the leading countries, but suffers from the effectiveness paradox: what is achievable is not effective, what is effective is not achievable. The small group of participating countries cannot develop an effective global policy without the countries which do not or are not willing to participate in Kyoto in the foreseeable future. Often, the reluctance of non-participating countries is based on fears of low economic growth and a desire to secure energy supplies. This means that, in addition to the Kyoto approach, a 'multicoloured flexibility' is needed in the array of initiatives designed to meet the interests of these countries. This will make it easier to create support for the development of technologies which facilitate the climate-friendly exploitation of coal than for the creation of emission ceilings which could put a brake on the economic growth of emerging economies. When it comes to energy efficiency, the interests of the climate and of a secure energy supply are parallel, making energy efficiency a promising policy focus.

The common interests form the starting point for the establishment of coalitions which will tackle whole or partial problems jointly. These coalitions could focus on different domains, and could for example consist of coalitions of nations (e.g. heavy polluters which together can have a decisive influence on emissions), as well as corporate coalitions (e.g. companies which agree a joint sectoral standard for energy efficiency in the market, which can be tightened up further as time progresses).

The required 'multicoloured flexibility' can take on divergent various forms, varying from a 'no-regret' policy (with enormous potential in developing countries), a 'no-lose' policy (which provides incentives to reduce emissions but imposes no sanctions if they are exceeded), technology development and diffusion and intensity targets, to self-imposed climate policy involving accountability and an emissions trading system or carbon price. As with the trade policy, it is both possible and attractive in some areas to stimulate emission reductions bilaterally and regionally, for example as part of existing special relations or development policy. In addition industry, knowledge institutions and NGOs need to be actively involved in climate policy. Interesting developments are going on at this more horizontal transnational level which should be encouraged where possible.

The UNFCCC does not offer a suitable framework for multilateral coordination; in order to make the coordination more effective, a World Climate Organisation (WCO) needs to be set up, as a permanent organisation backed by fixed diplomatic missions. This is necessary in order to create a degree of problem-ownership, so that decisions are taken and implemented. The WCO would need to act as an executive body (Special Climate Council) for permanent and rotating national members, with a gradual increase in its powers. The WCO could then in time take over the leadership from the de EU, which also implies that the EU and Japan would then no longer be setting (or be able to set) the agenda. Until then, leadership by the EU is both desirable and necessary in order for it to play a catalytic role.

FULL DOCUMENT (in Dutch): here







GENE THAT WITHSTANDS SALINITY DISCOVERED

Even greater food surpluses on the way?

Israeli researchers from the Institute of Evolution of the University of Haifa, have succeeded in isolating a gene that withstands salinity. "The research will contribute to a significant increase in the amount of arable land available for agriculture," said the institute's director Professor Eviatar Nevo, who initiated and spearheaded the pioneering research.

Of the earth's 57 million square miles of land, approximately 12 million square miles are arable - meaning land that can be used for growing crops. However, arable land is being lost at the rate of over ten million hectares per year. Nevo's research will make it possible to grow plants, including crops, in saline earth, a development that will contribute in the future to a true revolution in saline agriculture throughout the world.

Saline agriculture is the production of crops on land that is affected by salt. Too much salt in soil or in irrigation water will inhibit the growth of most crops, or may even kill them. Saline soils are found in arid lands, in coastal deserts, and where arable land has been ruined by poor farming practices.

Modern methods of irrigation and fertilization of crops has caused much of the arable lands around the world to become saline. This is especially true in drylands because of the high rate of evaporation, which leaves the salt behind. More and more farmers are forced to plant crops on marginal lands and to use soil that was once arable but now has a high saline content.

To prove their research, Nevo's team went to the mother of saline content - the Dead Sea - one of the most hypersaline bodies of water in the world with a saline concentration ten times that of the oceans. "Back in 1998, we discovered 77 different types of filamentous fungi in the Dead Sea, some were rare and sporadic, and others were much more common and even reached the bottom of the sea 300 meters down," Nevo told ISRAEL21c. "We became interested in the fungi's genetic resources - what made them thrive in the salty Dead Sea."

In the current study, Eurotium herbariorum, a common fungal species, was isolated from the lake. One of Nevo's doctoral students, Yan Jin, from China, then isolated and sequenced the HOG gene that is responsible, in concert with other genes, for the fungus' ability to defend itself from the salinity of the Dead Sea.

The gene was introduced into 'saccharomyces cerevisiae' - better known as baker's yeast - and the team observed that resultant transgenic yeast was able to tolerate more salt than normal, especially in resisting large temperature changes. The researchers found that in comparison to yeast that was not genetically engineered, the yeast that had been genetically transformed by the insertion of the HOG gene was more durable in saline or highly oxidative environments and also able to better withstand extreme heat and cold. "The gene helps the fungus to balance the internal salt content of the cell through the production of the alcohol glycerol and thus prevents the fungus from drying out and helps it defend itself against salinity," said Nevo. "I expected the gene transformation to increase the salt tolerance of the yeast. But the tolerance to high and low temperatures proved to be a surprise," he added.

The results of the study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS] of the United States. It was another feather in the cap of the institute, which Nevo founded in the mid-1970s. Consisting of 25 research laboratories, the University of Haifa facility covers all aspects of evolutionary biology, from ecological modeling and ecological-genetics, to molecular evolution and cytogenetics, associated with the twin evolutionary processes of speciation and adaptation? and everything about evolution from bacteria to humans. "We cut across the life spectrum," Nevo said with a laugh.

A foreign associate of the National Academy of Scientists in the US, Nevo began his career as a geologist, but switched to the field of dynamic evolutionary biology in 1964. "Even as a child, I was interested in this. I'm a born naturalist."

Today the Institute of Evolution also hosts an international graduate center of evolution, which currently houses 70 PhD students from 10 countries, including Yan Jin from China. "We also have another unit with 80 masters students and 1,300 undergraduates. We have collaborations with 500 labs in over 50 countries. Essentially we investigate all the problems connected to evolutionary biology, both theoretical and applicative," said Nevo, with no small amount of pride.

Having devoted 30 years of his life to building the institute into a world-class center of learning, Nevo has no intentions of slowing down, and he's as enthusiastic as a 20-year-old about the salinity gene research. "I've got no plans to retire ? on the contrary, I plan to continue onward," he said.

Since the study was published, Nevo said that the team has gone a step further by also transferred the gene into the model plants Arabi-dopsis and have succeeded in making it salt-resistant. "The genetic salt resistant resources of the Dead Sea could be very important for revolutionizing saline agriculture around the world. If we can transform this gene and other genes we've cloned, we'll be able to improve crop production by making them salt tolerant and enable the growth of crops like wheat in a tepid desert area. Our goal is to develop a battery of salt resistant genes to be used for crop improvement."

Source






CAPITALISM SOLVES ROAD CONGESTION IN SWEDEN

User-pays works, as Milton Friedman said it would

Here in this country of nature-lovers, berry-pickers, and climate-change activist weathermen, you would think that the introduction of a modest toll imposed on cars driving into the capitol city -- enacted with the intention of reducing rush-hour traffic, improving air quality and health, increasing use of public transportation and multiple other benefits -- would experience political smooth sailing. Especially after a similar initiative in London has worked beautifully, while charging more than twice the proposed toll at rush hour. Not so. Or at least, not at first.

Last year, the politics around the planned "congestion tax/environmental fee" got so heated that Stockholm's normally calm radio channels began to sound more like America's whiniest call-in shows. Friendships strained under the divide between the "Ja" and "Nej" side of the equation, and many commentators predicted that Stockholm's currently left-leaning city government would experience a crushing defeat on the strength of its support for this issue. There were even open calls for civil disobedience from car-owner support groups, who made it possible for members to purchase special license-plate "protectors," plastic covers that would foil the cameras designed to snap a picture of your car's license plate and ding you for the toll. All that is behind us now. Because the toll works. And the people like it. he plan all along. The backstory of why that was (as I understand it) goes like this: the original idea was promoted by the Swedish Green Party, which meant that it was automatically opposed (or at least, less than enthusiastically supported) by nearly everyone else. Unfortunately, Green support is often the political kiss of death here, even for ideas that everyone agrees are quite good. The political compromise that got the idea through (it was actually forced on the city by the national parliament, not the city council) involved framing it as an experiment, the "Stockholm Trial" in official talk. Stockholm would try it for seven months, and look at the data, and then the people of Stockholm would vote about whether to turn the system back on, or dismantle it.

And that's where we are now. The toll system, which worked nearly flawlessly since being inaugurated on 1 January, was turned off on 31 July. The very next day, traffic jams reappeared on the major arteries that had, magically, been free of such jams for the previous half-year. Here are some of the early results from the Stockholm Trial, which involved a tax of between US $1.50 and 2.75 or so per car, depending on time of day and prevailing exchange rate:

1. The Trial reduced traffic even more than expected. Planners expected 10-15% reduction, and they got about 22% -- nearly a quarter, on average.

2. Mobility improved significantly. The data showed this, and everyone talked about it: it was a lot easier to get around, and you could more reliably predict that you would arrive at your destination on time.

3. Carbon dioxide emissions were reduced 2-3% overall in Stockholm County, just as a result of this one policy. Reductions were around 14% in the inner city, compared to pre-toll levels.

4. Particulates, NOx, and other noxious pollutants were also (rather obviously) reduced, and science-based cost-benefit calculations show the policy would save a number of people from early death with this policy -- in fact, it would save about 300 cumulative life-years. Probably about 25 people were spared the agony of a traffic injury, as well, just during the short period of the trial.

5. Public transport use increased by about 6% (but about 1.5% of that is credited to higher fuel prices during this period). And we got new buses.

6. At the start of the trial, 55% of Stockholmers thought the trial was a "bad decision." That number fell to 41% after just a few months, as people experienced the effects directly, and the number calling it a "good decision" of course rose. Even those whose travel habits forced them to pay the toll showed an increase in approval for it.

With all this positive news about a working strategy, one might assume that the political battle is over, and that the referendum will be a kind of formality. Au contraire. Already the local scribes are beginning to write fascinating things, such as (according to my wife's paraphrase translation of a recent lead news editorial), "Yes, it's all very well that the thing worked as planned and made life significantly better ... but since the political process that originally introduced it was flawed, we should reject it now." Such arcane reasoning is being countered by comely columnists in the free daily papers who say (in a typical example) that they will vote yes "for the environment, for myself, for my daughter."

The vote is 17 September. I will be watching it like a hawk, because if even highly educated Swedes -- living in green-city Stockholm, in a country with a whole Ministry for Sustainable Development and a national policy of becoming fossil-fuel free by 2020 -- won't vote "Ja" for a demonstrably effective policy that has obviously improved their quality of life ... well, we will all have go back to the sustainability strategy whiteboard.

I should add that the Stockholm Trial was not just a new toll, but included also an increase in the region's already-excellent public transportation options, including even a significant reduction in price for single trips. You can get the whole story, in the form of a detailed evaluation report, in English.

Oh, and did I confess yet that I never once paid the new toll? I avoided it completely ... by driving an ethanol-fueled car (and commuting by bus). Environmentally-certified cars are exempt. We get our license tags photographed like everyone else when we pass the payment stations around the city -- big brother is watching your driving habits -- but the computers just ignore us. Partly as a result of this intentional loophole, sales of cars like mine have increased dramatically in Stockholm.

Congestion pricing is, by the way, one of the first dozen "Policies to Change the World" selected for promotion by the newly formed World Future Council. Maybe it's time your city tried this policy, too. Just don't bother with the turning-it-off part.

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************

"Water, water everywhere, but ..."

As Summer temperatures are set to be some of the hottest on record, and much hyperbole is written about whether this is influenced by man's activities, Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomberg, is about to set off to Australia to promote his new book, How to Spend $50 billion - a book on how to get the best bang for the buck on interventions in the developing world. One of his simple conclusions is that trying to correct human-induced climate change is not a cost-effective intervention, whereas improving water supply is a far better initiative. And in the heat, ready access to water, whether in California or the Sahel, or the most arid continent on earth (Australasia), is vital. Unfortunately Lomborg's analysis doesn't address the world's largest water problem -- gross misallocation of agricultural water. This is a pity because his destination, Australia, has a well-honed solution -- the market.

The Problem

Alarmists have been crying wolf about water wars for years, but like many green exaggerations they have a kernel of truth. Freshwater is being overused and polluted in many parts of the world. Aquifers from as far afield as Beijing and Dallas will last only another two or three decades; perennial rivers in many places are now often running dry at least during some parts of the year. In short, we have a problem: there is enough water but it is being used inefficiently almost everywhere and at current rates it will run out soon.

In India over one million children die due to diarrhea and other easily preventable water-borne diseases every year. Few Indians (perhaps 30 percent) have close access to decent sanitation and high quality drinking water. Not only does this expose the majority to dangerous dysenteries and other water-borne disease, but it provides requires back-breaking toil for those (usually women and children) who have to make long journeys to collect it every day. The indirect costs are even more staggering with salinity levels rising in so much irrigation water that crops fail, farmers commit suicide and thousands of the poorest starve.

The main water allocation problem is the result of Soviet-style management over agricultural water. In most places around the globe, governments decide who gets how much water, when they can use it and often what for, and if they don't use their allocation (regardless of how they use it) they will lose it. Once governmental allocations are made, officials rarely reallocate, even when massive changes in agriculture, industry, mining, domestic and rural demand occur. The result is politically favored allocation and grotesque situations where farmers often pay 100 times less than other types of users, and the poorest in slums often pay 10 times what rich domestic consumers pay, and for unsafe water.

While human access to drinking water and sanitation is obviously vital, far more water is used -- about 70 percent of globally withdrawn freshwater -- and vastly more water wasted in agriculture than in any other allocation. Improving agricultural water allocation use and assigning flexible rights to it can result in more efficient outcomes and ultimately fairer allocations to the world's poor in the aridest parts of the world.

Water reallocation is also becoming vital in the fastest growing areas of South East Asia. Due to burgeoning agriculture, China's surface water is rapidly depleting, and according to the respected think tank the Rand Corporation, water shortages could indefinitely lower annual growth by as much as 2 percent. India's quasi-illegal water rights trading system was valued at over US $1 billion a year in 1999 by the World Bank. While this questionable system is improving agricultural output, it is also leading to even faster aquifer depletion and pollution than in China. China needs to adopt individual and communal water rights, and India should legalize its own system, in order to prevent an ecological and health-related disaster in the coming decades; both nations can learn a lot from Australia's rights trading system as well as from successes elsewhere.

A partial solution

Countries and regions that have redefined and traded water rights have seen water access for the rural poor increase in volume and fall in price. All users -- agricultural, industrial and domestic -- have seen their supplies increase in reliability and quality with infrastructural improvements. Aside from making economic sense, there is a moral imperative for pushing for such a reform of water rights -- access to better quality water reduces disease and death.

Chile, South Africa and Australia provide the best examples of how trading can take place, improving farm output while benefiting the poor. Chile's trading has increased access to water for the vast majority of poor rural users. Meanwhile, the US has lost its way: Its western states initially led the pack with legal structures to encourage trade but overburdening federal environmental regulations and perverse litigation against market trades by environmental groups have limited flexible allocation.

Australia's trading system along the hundreds of miles of the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) is now the most sophisticated and effective in the world and should be analyzed closely by all countries where agriculture dominates water usage. Progress is perhaps best exemplified by the 'Watermove' website now operating in the MDB. This sophisticated system allows users to trade water on the internet. Moreover, it breaks down the right to water into its constituent parts, including access and distribution.

Trading has promoted a reduction in low-value cropping activity like cereal production; it has encouraged non-farming enterprise owners (including municipalities for domestic water use) to buy traded water in the very arid state of South Australia. Trading has lowered water use and increased farmer productivity; as some farmers leave the business others flourish and choose crops more suitable to the climate (including grapes to make great Australian wines). But regardless of which specific sector buys the water, the clear pattern has been a shift to higher value production and more efficient water use.

Only time will tell whether China and India, and western US states, which within 20 years will also have chronic and acute water problems, will adopt the sophisticated trading techniques of Australia, but it will be a great deal better than decision by government fiat. Water trading allows time for individuals to adapt to changing conditions -- man-made or natural -- and the conditions are changing. Sticking one's head in Gobi or Mojave sand won't help future Chinese or Californians.

Source






OK coral

Weeks after the National Science Foundation released a report about the connection between increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the acidity of the oceans, doomsayers continue to prophesy that global warming will kill the coral reefs off our picturesque Florida coast.

The NSF study, released with two other federal research entities and entitled "Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Coral Reefs," landed with a thud, and it is remarkable how the press has received it. Writers have editorialized about it, literally with one voice, without any critical fact-checking. In a July 11 editorial, the editors of the Cincinnati Post wrote, "This report is a fraction of the available evidence indicating anthropogenic climate change....The evidence is clear and convincing. The global-warming critics are neither." On July 12, the Albuquerque Tribune, in its own in-house editorial, printed the same words (without attribution).

It could have done something more original and scrutinized the NSF report. There's a major problem with it, right at the beginning. Its first paragraph states correctly that, as a result of the burning of fossil fuel and other activities, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is rising. From there, however, the report loses its way. "Rates of increase," it says, "have risen from 0.25% [per year] in the 1960s to 0.75% [per year] in the last five years."

Really? The standard reference for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is that registered at Mauna Loa Observatory, beginning in 1958. The average rate of change in the 1960s was 0.30% per year, and in the last five years, it was 0.55%. This last value is not statistically distinguishable from the average rate for the past 25 years. The real change from the 1960s to the last five years is 0.25% per year, while the NSF-sponsored report gives it as twice that.

The precise figure is important, because the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide is directly related to the amount of warming it creates and to changes in the acidity of the oceans; computer models using a carbon dioxide increase rate twice that which is observed show twice as much warming. And that is precisely what has occurred: there are now four separate, taxpayer-supported reports "intercomparing" the dozens of climate models for global warming that have evolved in recent years. Each one uses a carbon dioxide increase of 1% per year, or twice the real rate. Ever wonder why they predict so much warming?

It gets better (worse). The coral report then states that "The current atmospheric CO2 concentration...is expected to continue to rise by about 1% [per year] over the next few decades." "Continue"? The average increase for the last decade was 0.49 per year, for the decade before that was 0.42%, and for the decade before that was 0.43%. Again, about half of what the report expects to "continue." The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 380 parts per million. Before we industrialized -- back when life expectancy was in the 40s -- the concentration was about 280.

Fewer than 100 million years ago, or 400 million years after corals first arose, the carbon dioxide concentration was a bit less than 3,000 ppm. Around 175 million years ago it was pushing 6,000. If there was that much more carbon dioxide around, the oceans would have been that much more acidic, which would have killed the corals. And yet they lived.

How does the report take this problem into account? It balances the increase in acidification that these concentrations of carbon dioxide would bring about with some countervailing change in its opposite, alkalinity. So the report speculates that "ocean alkalinities could have been higher during periods with high CO2 levels." (Emphasis added.)

Then there's the problem of identifying a definite decline in corals. The report says that it is "difficult" to find this effect, and that "on average" it does not exist, because the rates of coral growth are controlled by many other factors that are apparently obscuring their decline.

How on earth did all of this make it through peer review? Or do we no longer care enough to get the facts right before expressing opinions under the mantle of scientific authority? To many editorialists, when it comes to global warming, facts don't matter. But here are a few: corals have been around for half a billion years, on a planet that was much, much warmer, had much more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, got hit by an asteroid or two, experienced ice ages and is now in the midst of a slight warming trend. You can bet that they'll be around a long time after humans have come to the end of the evolutionary road.

Source







GERMANS CHEATING OVER COAL

Plans to exempt new power stations from the next phase of the EU's CO2 trading scheme could lock Germany into highly polluting coal-fired power plants for many years, warn researchers and NGOs.

The German government on 28 June 2006 submitted its national allocation plan to the European Commission for the second phase of the EU's CO2 emissions trading scheme (EU-ETS) covering the period 2008-2012 (see EurActiv 30 June 2006). The ETS is the EU's flagship instrument to fight climate change and meet Europe's Kyoto pledge to reduce its emissions of global warming gases by 8% by year 2012. Germany's national CO2 reduction pledge amounts to a 21% cut because of the sheer size of its economy. Its emissions are currently about 17% lower than in 1990, the reference year of the Kyoto Protocol.

Planned exemptions under the second phase of the EU emissions trading scheme mean a new breed of cleaner coal-fired power stations are on their way in Germany, according to Christian Egenhofer, a senior researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels. But it could also lock the country into high carbon fuels for many years to come, he warns.

Under Germany's draft National Allocation Plan, which was submitted to the Commission on 28 June, every new power station built between 2008 and 2012 would be allowed to opt out from carbon emission restrictions for a period of 14 years (EurActiv 30 June 2006). Egenhofer says the opt-out would allow investments into cleaner yet more expensive coal-fired power stations to become economically viable, thus helping the country meet rising demand for electricity. "There is a rational reason for the Germans doing this, it is the security of supply," says Egenhofer. "The German fuel mix is perfectly balanced at the moment, one third gas, one third coal, one third nuclear. So it seems to be a deliberate choice".

The EU carbon trading scheme tends to favour electricity produced from natural gas because it emits lower levels of carbon dioxide. Coal, on the other hand, has higher carbon intensity, which means coal-fired power stations need to buy pollution credits on the market to be able to operate. This in turn pushes their costs up, eventually forcing electricity produced from coal out of the market in the long run. "If you let the market unfettered, then you go towards gas," Egenhofer says. "And all of it will have to come from Russia so you might run in over-dependence. Again, [Germany's] fuel mix may not end up as balanced as it is at the moment".

So is Germany taking the right option in asking to let new coal-fired power stations out of the ETS? "It is a double-edged sword," says Egenhofer. "In the sort term, it helps to move to a cleaner technology within the fuel in question. If you give this 14 year opt-out, you may get this investment because it is a good economic deal. But [the Germans] may at the same time put themselves off-track if you look beyond the Kyoto Protocol," he warns. "From an economic incentive perspective it is a non-sense," Egenhofer says. "If you really want to bring down emissions you want to move to low-carbon fuels. If you get all new installations based on coal, they may be very efficient but they are still very high in carbon intensity so you lock yourself on a certain track. That is a risk."

Source

***************************************

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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************