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Newsletter (July 2, 2009)
In this issue
Featured- The American Left Takes Up Christian Environmentalism
- CBO's Smoke and Mirrors with Cap-and-Trade Cost Numbers
- Scientists Duel with Letters on Global Warming
- Climate Change Cure Hurts Least Among Us
Debate- Did EPA Muzzle Analyst's Report?
- U.S. Government's Climate Con-Job
- Green Justice: Sotomayor's Enviro-Activism
Science- Ice Shelves Stable Over Six Years
Economics- Bound to Burn
- For Those Unemployed from Cap and Trade, Help Is on the Way...For 1.5 % of You
Meet the Critics: Craig D. Idso & Jay H. Lehr
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Patrick J. Reilly
Founder, Cardinal Newman Society; Senior Fellow, Capital Research Center
Capital Research Center, June, 2009
Summary: Religious green groups are distorting the tenets of Christianity in order to pressure church congregations to go along with the Big Government environmentalist agenda. It’s the height of cynicism and an opportunistic attack on capitalism that plays on the emotions of the nation’s churchgoers while cashing in on the popularity of some green initiatives.
What would Jesus drive?
It’s a silly question. The Bible recounts Jesus astride a donkey and in a fishing boat, but he never really “drove” anything, unless the popular country song “Jesus, Take the Wheel” has any historical relevance.
What Jesus did was walk—and one can only assume that’s what the “greener than thou” environmentalists at the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) would like the rest of us to be doing. Want proof? Try carting a group of elderly faithful to one of EEN’s prayer events in a Chevy Blazer.
“What would Jesus drive?” is the slogan of the Christian environmentalists’ national campaign against sport utility vehicles (SUVs). EEN claims a “growing religious consensus that fuel economy and pollution from cars, trucks and SUVs are serious moral issues.”
EEN is not a church-sponsored entity in itself, but an independent organization that urges churches to integrate the environmentalist agenda within their religious activities. The activist group “seeks to educate, inspire, and mobilize Christians in their effort to care for God’s creation, to be faithful stewards of God’s provision, and to advocate for actions and policies that honor God and protect the environment.” EEN publishes suggested sermons for church leaders and interprets the Bible in a manner that supports environmentalist political goals.
It is just one example of how environmentalists are getting religion, and some Christians are going green. Not only SUVs—but also climate change, animal welfare, protection of rare plant species, and other “green” concerns—are increasingly the subject of a curious mix of leftist politics and religion, especially Christianity.
After decades of unsuccessful efforts to root out the “religious right” from American politics, the religious left is striving to compete. Today’s environmentalists are not content to argue science and public policy. Instead they are trying to use religion to advance their cause. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, June 23, 2009
The Heritage Foundation estimated a month ago that cap-and-trade legislation making its way through the House of Representatives would cost the average American household about $1,500 a year in higher energy bills and the American economy about $9.6 trillion in lost gross domestic product between now and 2035.
But last week the Congressional Budget Office released a report claiming the bill would cost the average household only about $175 per year.
The difference is stark. What's up? A small part of the difference might be explained by changes in the bill over the past month. But only a small part.
The Heritage Foundation released a critique of the CBO report on June 22 that points out some basic errors that result in gross underestimate of costs.
- Most importantly, the CBO report completely omits the economic damage from restricting energy use and requiring substitution of more expensive for less expensive energy sources. That means CBO essentially ignores the $393 billion per average year in lost GDP. But that GDP loss is money that otherwise would have been in people's pockets--"$6,790 per family of four," Heritage points out, "and that is before they pay their $4,600 share of the carbon taxes."
- The CBO also uses 2020 as its exemplary year--resulting in unrepresentatively low cost estimates across the board, since 2020 is projected to have the second lowest GDP loss of the 24-year period.
- The CBO report underestimates the cost of "allowances"--emissions permits bought by energy producers and users. The report takes the year 2020 as illustrative and claims that the cost then will be only about $28 per ton, which, with a cap of 5.056 billion tons, implies gross allowance cost of $142 billion, but the report lists only $91.4 billion--an amount inexplicably lower than CBO's own June 5 estimates of $119.7 billion, $129.7 billion, $136 billion, $145.6 billion, and $152.9 billion for the years 2015 to 2019. "It’s hard to believe that the next number in that series would be $91.4 billion," says the Heritage critique.
- The CBO report also assumes that the government's spending of the revenues received from permit sales will be of direct, dollar-for-dollar benefit to consumers. That simply isn't realistic. "When have Americans ever seen all of a tax returned to them?" asks Heritage. "It’s like suggesting your tax rebate will be as large as the amount taken from your paycheck every year."
The Heritage critique points out other serious errors in the CBO report. The low-down: CBO grossly understates costs of cap-and-trade legislation.Back to top by E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, July 1, 2009
On June 19, the Woods Hole Research Center released an open letter from scientists to the President and members of Congress calling for "strong leadership" to avert "a rapidly developing global climatic catastrophe." The letter called for passage of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill then pending in the House, now passed and moving to the Senate.
But on July 1 another group of scientists released a letter in direct response, questioning the independence of the Woods Hole group because of ties with presidential science advisor John Holdren, "the same science advisor who has given us predictions of 'almost certain' thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time."
Signed by physics professors Robert Austin and William Happer of Princeton, Laurence Gould of Harvard, and Harold Levins of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and meteorology professor Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and environmental sciences professor and atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, the letter adds:
- Earth has been cooling for ten years;
- the present cooling was not predicted by the alarmists' computer models;
- legislation supported by the Woods Hole Letter "would cripple the US economy, putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors."
"For such drastic action," it continued, "it is only prudent to demand genuine proof that it is needed, not guesswork, and not false claims" that the evidence is clear and the debate is over.
The new letter concluded by warning, "Finally, climate alarmism pays well. Many alarmists are profiting from their activism. There are billions of dollars floating around for the taking, and being taken."Back to top by Kenneth W. Chilton
Emeritus Director, Institute for the Study of Economics and the Environment, Lindenwood University
The Detroit News, June 30, 2009
For the past two years, Congress has been considering legislation to address global warming. The latest version, the Waxman-Markey climate bill, has been approved by the House and seems dangerously close to being enacted into law. For American families struggling to keep their heads above water, the cure will be worse than the disease. . . .
. . . The question to ask about reducing any environmental "pollutant" is, How clean is clean enough?
The answer is: When the cost of reducing pollution just a bit more is the same as the value of the benefit derived from doing so. The answer is simple. But doing the math is complicated.
Fortunately, a back-of-the-envelope" estimate for the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas reductions provides a pretty clear picture. On the cost side, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that any cap-and-trade bill that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent could cost the average household roughly $1,600 (in 2006 dollars). Further, "The rise in prices would impose a larger burden, relative to income, on low-income households ...." (Households in the lowest income quintile spend 21 percent of their income on energy-intensive items compared with 4 percent for the highest one-fifth of American households.)
A Heritage Foundation analysis finds that Waxman-Markey would, by 2035, raise electricity rates 90 percent, gasoline prices 74 percent, residential natural gas prices 55 percent and an average family's monthly energy bill by more than $100.
How about the corresponding value of reducing greenhouse emissions? Congress has made no attempt to answer this obvious question.
One estimate by Paul Knappenberger, an environmental scientist with 20 years experience as a climate researcher, concludes "by the year 2050, the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would result in a global temperature 'savings' of about 0.05 degrees Centigrade ... about two years' worth of warming." In short, this legislation creates very high costs for American households and produces NO discernible benefit! . . .
. . . efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions necessarily result in higher energy costs that impact "the least among us" most harshly. The Biblical command to care for the poor and deal with them justly should give us pause as we consider policies with almost no benefit and great cost to the least of these.
Read the rest.Back to top Debateby E. Calvin Beisner
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Special to the Cornwall Alliance, June 30, 2009
Last March Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analyst Alan Carlin submitted a report that challenged the EPA's intent to regulate carbon dioxide to reduce global warming. The 98-page report called the science underlying the EPA's intents outdated and cited multiple refereed scientific and economic studies in recent years that show that human influence on climate change is minimal and efforts to fight it will cost far more than their effects will be worth.
But Fox News reports that Carlin's "boss told him in March that his material would not be incorporated into a broader EPA finding and ordered Carlin to stop working on the climate change issue." That effectively covered up existence of the report until the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) obtained it and released it last week.
Now Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a leading Congressional critic of manmade global warming fears, has demanded an investigation. "He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA," Inhofe told FOX News. "We're going to expose it."
The decision not to include Carlin's report in EPA findings related to greenhouse gas regulation apparently was made by the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics Director Al McGartland, who according to the CEI e-mailed Carlin saying,
The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office. That the comments didn't help the legal or policy case for EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's decision to regulate carbon dioxide, however, is just the point. The decision appears to have been made despite contrary evidence known to the EPA but not revealed publicly.Back to top by Paul K. Driessen
Columnist, Townhall.com; Senior Fellow, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise; Author, Eco-Imperialism.com
Townhall.com, June 20, 2009
. . . Climate Armageddonites are trying to counter these inconvenient truths, scare people into clamoring for climate legislation, and enact the job-killing Waxman-Markey bill before more citizens realize they’ll be forced to pay $$$$ trillions for a hypothetical 0.1 degree Fahrenheit reduction in global temperatures. What to do?
Issue another report by government scientists carefully selected to present alarmist views on climate disasters. Ignore contrary data and analyses. Rely almost entirely on computer-generated worst-case scenarios. Hire an activist media firm that specializes in environmental scare campaigns. And spend tens of millions hyping disasters that will befall us if we don’t act immediately:
Rising sea levels, floods in lower Manhattan, California beaches permanently submerged. Ferocious hurricanes, floods and droughts. Food shortages, epidemic diseases, a quadrupling of heat-wave deaths in Chicago. Aged sewer systems convulsing from massive storm runoff. Wildflowers disappearing from Rocky Mountain slopes and polar bears from the Arctic. Leisure time gone as people struggle to survive.
“Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” is the “most up-to-date, authoritative, comprehensive” analysis ever done on how human-caused warming affects the United States, deadpans Obama “science advisor” John Holdren.
Actually, it’s the most flagrant attempted con-job and propaganda campaign in US history.
If it helps Congress enact cap-and-tax legislation, it will give activists, courts and bureaucrats control over virtually every aspect of our lives. It will enable them to confiscate hard-earned dollars, convert them to payoffs for activists and companies that get on the climate-crisis bandwagon, consign uncooperative companies and scientists to the ash heap of history, and conceal the exorbitant costs of restrictive energy policies – on families, industries, jobs and transportation – until long after the bill becomes law.
The bogus “report” conflates and confuses human activities and emissions with the powerful natural forces that have caused major and minor climate changes and weather anomalies since the dawn of time – from the Carboniferous Period to the Age of Dinosaurs, from the Big Ice Ages and interglacial periods to the Little Ice Age, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, Dust Bowl and countless others. It relies on conjecture, conformist thinking and conspicuous elimination of contrary, skeptical, realist scientists and studies that do not support climate cataclysm conjecture and ideology.
The authors “largely ignored” critical comments to earlier drafts and made the final version “even more alarmist” than infamous UN “summaries” of global warming “crises,” says Joseph D’Aleo, first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Weather Analysis and Forecasting Committee. The report is simply “wrong on many of its claims” and marks “an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA,” D’Aleo concludes. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Meghan Clyne
Journalist; Speechwriter for George W. Bush and Laura Bush
New York Post, June 1, 2009
Greens have a lot to be happy about now that Sonia Sotomayor is poised to be come the next Supreme Court justice -- she's shown she's willing to impose their agenda from the bench.
In 2006, then-Second Circuit Judge Sotomayor heard arguments in Riverkeeper v. EPA . . . Riverkeeper sued the Bush Environmental Protection Agency, insisting that the EPA wasn't doing enough to enforce a provision of the Clean Water Act designed to keep river creatures from being sucked into power plants' cooling-water intake valves. At issue was language in the act requiring such plants to use the "best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact."
The groups contended that power companies had to do everything possible to save river life, sky-high costs notwithstanding. The EPA, for its part, asserted that the statute allowed weighing the cost of each environmental-technology advance against the number of organisms it would save -- and then deciding if the added expense was worth it.
Sotomayor ruled in favor of Riverkeeper. In the process, she muscled aside longstanding Supreme Court precedent which says that as long as a federal agency embraces a "reasonable" interpretation of its governing statute, courts should stay out of the way and let the experts do their job. . . .
. . . American Enterprise Institute environment expert Steven Hayward says Sotomayor's "judicial activism extends in this area to always being on the side of state power, used on behalf of environmental groups." If Sotomayor ascends to the high court, as appears likely, she'll have plenty of opportunity to help green activists write environmental regulations through judicial fiat. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby Christian Kerr
Journalist, The Australian
The Australian, June 17, 2009
Scientists from Western Australia's Curtin University of Technology are using acoustic sensors developed to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to listen for the sound of icebergs breaking away from the giant ice sheets of the south pole.
"More than six years of observation has not revealed any significant climatic trends," CUT associate professor Alexander Gavrilov said yesterday. . . .
. . . More than 100 signals from Antarctica are detected weekly by the Cape Leeuwin station. They are then transmitted to Geoscience Australia in Canberra.
"Six years of results is not long in the scheme of things, so we will keep watching," Dr Gavrilov said. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economicsby Peter W. Huber
Regular Contributor, Forbes.com; Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
City Journal, Spring, 2009
. . . We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still. . . .
. . . If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks—the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it—that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide. Beyond that, weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total fossil-fuel emissions. We should also investigate large-scale options for accelerating the process of ocean sequestration. . . .
. . . If we do need to do something serious about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it’s burned is the one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it’s the one approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now, because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Nicolas Loris
Research Assistant, Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, The Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation, June 16, 2009
It’s no secret the Waxman-Markey cap and trade legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is a jobs killer. Heritage Foundation economists found that over a 2012-2030 timeline, job losses average over 1.1 million. By 2035, a projected 2.5 million jobs are lost below the baseline (without a cap and trade bill). But don’t take our word for it. The Black Chamber of Commerce and The Brookings Institution are projecting catastrophic job losses as well.
It’s all right, though, because the government has you covered. Sort of. It’s called Climate Change Worker Adjustment Assistance (CCWAA). Translation: It’s unemployment insurance for those who are going to lose their jobs because of Waxman-Markey. It provides “156 weeks of income supplement, 80 percent of their monthly health care premium, up to $1,500 for job search assistance, up to $1,500 for moving assistance, and additional employment services for skills assessment, job counseling, training, and other services.”
The problem is, the numbers don’t add up. A recently released CBO report calculates the outlays for the CCWAA to be $4.3 billion over 9 years (2011 through 2019). Using $35,507 as the average income per person and $9,968 as the average health care cost, the annual compensation cost to a worker displaced by Waxman-Markey would be $32,829. Combining those two estimates, CBO suggests that the program would cover, on average, 14,553 displaced workers each year.
The Heritage Foundation estimates that between 2011 and 2019, an average of 987,440 Americans will be out of work because of Waxman-Markey. Using CBO’s guidelines, only one out of every 68 displaced workers would receive benefits. That’s 1.47 percent of displaced workers. . . .
. . . With so many people affected by cap and trade and so few receiving assistance, calls to fully fund the program would commence (think No Child Left Behind). If the government covered every displaced worker, the total cost from 2011 to 2019 (CBO’s time window) would be $291 billion – more than $32.4 billion per year. From 2011 to 2035, Heritage estimates average annual unemployment to increase by 1.14 million people, which would cost an average of $37.7 billion per year. The 25-year cost would be $942.1 billion. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Meet the CriticsHave you ever been at a loss for words when challenged by the alarmist's claim of scientific "consensus," or that dissenting scientists are unqualified? Not only does consensus prove nothing, but the very idea of "consensus" among scientists on catastrophic manmade climate change is simply unfounded. A 2008 Senate Environment and Public Works Minority Report documents dissension around the world:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent
Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Two notable critics are:
Craig D. Idso, Ph.D.
Former Director of Environmental Science at Peabody Energy in St. Louis and a member of numerous scientific societies, Craig Idso is the founder and chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Idso and his father explain that "today’s temperatures are not in any way unusual, unnatural or unprecedented," but "are just what should be expected, as a result of the natural (non-CO2-induced) recovery of the planet from the global chill of the several-hundred-year-long Little Ice Age." Having recently published his book, CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs, Idso has authored or co-authored numerous pieces on climate change, such as Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming, Will Global Warming Decimate Earth's Biosphere?, and Your 'Carbon Legacy'.
Jay H. Lehr, Ph.D.
Jay Lehr, Senior Fellow and Science Director of the Heartland Institute, graduated from Princeton at the age of 20, earned a Ph.D. in environmental science, and, becoming a renowned lecturer, has dedicated much of his life to educating people on environmental science, even testifying before congress 36 times. Lehr observes, "In the 13th century we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind. If we go back to the revolutionary war, 300 years ago, it was very very cold--we've been warming out of that cold spell from the revolutionary war period and now we're back into a cooling cycle." Lehr has written many books on the environment along with over 900 journal articles. A sample of his work is his 2009 International Conference on Climate Change presentation, Green Energy Job Losses.Back to top Briefly NotedMany Pastors Say Global Warming Not Man-Made
Cosmic Rays too Wimpy to Influence Climate
'It's Not About the Money'
EPW Policy Beat: The Acid Rain Myth
Cost Works Against Alternative and Renewable Energy Sources in Time of Recession
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders.
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