The next few years will be a very dramatic, hair-raising race to determine which will happen first: will the government be able to impose disastrous energy regulations, before genuine scientists can debunk the global warming hysteria?
Tony Blair once described the War on Terrorism, not as a clash of civilizations, but as "a clash about civilization." This political battle over global warming will be a clash about the continued survival of industrial civilization.
Robert Tracinski on the Radio Friday
Robert Tracinski is scheduled to appear Friday, May 1, from 4:15 to 4:30 pm Eastern Time (1:15 to 1:30 pm Pacific Time), on "The Politics of Money" on San Diego's AM 1000 KCEO. Listen online at http://www.politicsofmoney.com/.
Jack Wakeland has been providing me with a lot of updates on this issue, so here is a round-up of the current state of the race. (Jack has been too busy to write an article of his own on this topic. In his "day job" as an engineer, he is involved in another crucial race: the race to build enough nuclear power plants to replace all of the coal-fired plants killed by the environmentalists.)
Jack directs my attention to two calls to action from Joseph D'Aleo at the global warming "skeptic" website ICECAP. Unfortunately, the ICECAP site doesn't provide permalinks to these articles, but they are currently up on the main page as I am writing this.
D'Aleo writes that "Two trains are racing down the tracks, and if they get to where the government wants, the results to all Americans will be nothing short of catastrophic."
One track is congressional "cap-and-trade" legislation, which is fortunately widely considered to be dead on arrival in Congress. But considering the Republicans' loss of the filibuster, D'Aleo is right to warn that we should "not assume anything."
The second, more ominous track is one that makes a congressional vote into a quaint anachronism: the EPA's plan to begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions on its own unlimited authority. D'Aleo points to the progress of a bureaucratic finding that carbon dioxide qualifies as a "pollutant" under the Clean Air Act.
Although EPA did not propose any associated regulations at this time, the endangerment finding is EPA's first step towards triggering a cascade of [Clean Air Act] programs that will effectively impose strict regulations on a large segment of the American economy. This may include regulations that will affect most all buildings including churches, schools, large and small businesses, the kind of fuels used, the car you drive and, taken to the extreme, how many times you can mow your lawn or blow away your snow or whether you can burn wood in your home stove. The regulations will be just as onerous as cap and trade legislation. The public is unaware that though not a direct tax, the costs of increased regulation and or "cap-and-trade" scheme (really ration-and-tax) will likely run at least $2000 for Americans according to [a] conservative Heritage Foundation study up to $3100 per family per year according to an MIT study, with increased government control over your entire life, increased job losses and energy shortages.
D'Aleo's conclusion is justifiably bleak: "If left unchallenged, there is no tomorrow." Or as Jack puts it, the "EPA is writing rules for anti-industrial dictatorship."
If you don't believe that cap-and-trade will be a disaster, take a look at a few sobering numbers offered by economist Robert Samuelson in his latest column for Newsweek. This is what Samuelson does best: citing the economic statistics that expose the lies and evasions offered by politicians. Thus, he shows us what the reductions in carbon dioxide emissions required under cap-and-trade would actually mean for America's energy consumption.
[C]onsider America's energy needs in 2030, as estimated by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Compared with 2007, the United States is projected to have almost 25 percent more people (375 million), an economy about 70 percent larger ($20 trillion) and 27 percent more light-duty vehicles (294 million). Energy demand will be strong.
But the EIA also assumes greater conservation and use of renewables. From 2007 to 2030, solar power grows 18 times, wind six times. New cars and light trucks get 50 percent better gas mileage. Light bulbs and washing machines become more efficient. Higher energy prices discourage use; by 2030, oil is $130 a barrel in today's dollars. For all that, US CO2 emissions in 2030 are projected to be 6.2 billion metric tons, 4 percent higher than in 2007….
To comply with the House bill, CO2 emissions would have to be about 3.5 billion tons.
So even assuming an enormous expansion of so-called "renewable energy," Americans will not be able to replace fossil fuels with some other source of power. We will simply be forced to reduce our energy use by half.
Samuelson also makes a very interesting point about how the use of invalid models based on arbitrary assumptions has crept from climatology into economics. "The claims of the Environmental Defense Fund and other environmentalists that this reduction can occur cheaply rely on economic simulations by 'general equilibrium' models." But these models, he argues, "embody wildly unrealistic assumptions."
The selling of the green economy involves much economic make-believe. Environmentalists not only maximize the dangers of global warming—from rising sea levels to advancing tropical diseases—they also minimize the costs of dealing with it. Actually, no one involved in this debate really knows what the consequences or costs might be. All are inferred from models of uncertain reliability. Great schemes of economic and social engineering are proposed on shaky foundations of knowledge. Candor and common sense are in scarce supply.
While the projected cost of global warming regulations is mitigated by the assumption of a rapid expansion in "renewable energy," environmentalists long ago began crusading against these same sources of energy. Jack Wakeland documented this trend years ago: that environmentalists will turn against any form of "renewable energy" the moment it shows signs of generating power on an industrial scale. He just sent me the latest update, informing me that "bogus health claims against wind power are on the rise because it now generates up to 2% of our electricity."
The Canadian news report he sent me describes these blatantly unscientific claims.
More people are coming forward saying they're experiencing sleep problems, headaches, and heart palpitations caused by living near windmills….
Carmen Krogh, a retired Alberta pharmacist,…and a group of volunteers distributed questionnaires in areas near wind farms, asking residents to describe whether they have experienced any effects from the turbines.
Of 76 people who responded to their informal survey, 53 reported at least one health complaint….
The turbines don't appear to affect everyone equally and it is not clear what causes the health problems in some people. Some suspect that the constant, low frequency noise and vibration from the rotating blades may be what cause the problems….
McMurtry told the committee that until there are rigorous epidemiological studies of the health effects of wind turbines, Ontario should not go ahead with any further construction of wind turbines.
The Obama administration is also working to choke off the supply of a genuine industrial-scale "alternative" to fossil fuels: nuclear power. It is doing this by killing a project to provide for the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel.
He cites a report from the Republican minority on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public works. Here is Jack's summary:
"Every operating nuclear power plant has paid and continues to pay the Department of Energy a surcharge on all of the nuclear fuel they purchase. (All purchase of nuclear fuel in the United States go through the Department of Energy, which produces or contracts for the production of all of the nuclear fuel used in America.) $11 billion in surcharge payments have been collected from the nuclear power industry to date.
"What is the purpose of this fuel surcharge? Its purpose is to fund a government-operated (or controlled) permanent high-level waste repository for spent nuclear fuel.
"Last month, the geological surveys and scientific assessments and the combating of legal and political delays on the Yucca Montain project were finally—on paper—at an end. After spending $7.7 billion in taxpayer money on developing the hundreds of thousands of pages of back-up documentation, the final gold-plated, bullet-proof safety analysis for the project was done, and the final intra-agency submittal of the DOE's application for a nuclear operating license was ready.
"Then anti-energy Energy Secretary Chu declared that storing spent fuel at the Yucca Mountain waste repository was 'not an option.' Secretary Chu's dismissal has not only wasted the $7.7 billion license application, it requires that the government return the $11 billion in fuel surcharges to nuclear power generating companies from whom it was collected."
So that is the status of one side of the race. Now that the American people have foolishly allowed Democrats to control the presidency and a large majority in Congress, the left is proceeding with massive new controls designed to choke off our ability to generate power on the scale required to maintain an industrial civilization.
What about the other side of the race—the race to debunk the global warming hysteria before it destroys our prosperity? That is what I will examine in part two of this article.
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