Global warming?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

True, but that's a bit like saying it's better to be shot with a .22 than a .38.

Shot placement is much more important than caliber.

[ZenGum]

lol, okay, so most metaphors don't stand up to rigorous examination.

Originally Posted by Beestie

While true, its quite a bit better than petroleum-based fuels.

Natural gas versus gasoline as a vehicle fuel:

• Reduces carbon monoxide emissions 90%-97%
• Reduces carbon dioxide emissions 25%
• Reduces nitrogen oxide emissions 35%-60%
• Potentially reduces non-methane hydrocarbon emissions 50%-75%
• Emits fewer toxic and carcinogenic pollutants
• Emits little or no particulate matter
• Eliminates evaporative emissions

From here.

The major problem lies with availability and depletion of supplies in Gulf of Mexico and Texas - even the Canadian supplies are dubious. Exploration of National Gas sources is still tricky and supplies harder to find.
More importantly historically the National Gas industry could never find a way stabilize prices, or control them... with very little reserves and difficulty in maintaining reserves I can't see how an energy policy reliant on National Gas would be stabilize economically.

It could though act as part of a short term energy policy, though.

[classicman]

WASHINGTON – One contributor to global warming — bigger than coal mines, landfills and sewage treatment plants — is being left out of efforts by the Obama administration and House Democrats to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Belching from the nation's 170 million cattle, sheep and pigs produces about one-quarter of the methane released in the U.S. each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That makes the hoofed critters the largest source of the heat-trapping gas.

In part because of an adept farm lobby campaign that equates government regulation with a cow tax, the gas that farm animals pass is exempt from legislation being considered by Congress to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA under President Barack Obama has said it has no plans to regulate the gas, even though the agency recently included methane among six greenhouse gases it believes are endangering human health and welfare.

~snip~

House aides and EPA officials say that controlling such emissions is unworkable. Cow burps make up about 2 percent of all the climate-altering pollution in the U.S.
But allies of farmers in Congress say the reluctance to step in the cow tax debate has a lot to do with the outcry from the agriculture industry and moderate Democrats from rural states whose votes are needed to pass the bill.

"I think they realized that if you are a Democrat in an agricultural state, a red state, that this is radioactive and I think that is why they have tried scrupulously to reaffirm that they don't have any intention of doing this," said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. He is sponsoring a bill that would bar the EPA from requiring farmers to get permits for cattle burps.

The Farm Bureau quickly did the math and figured farms would have to pay about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and $20 for each hog to purchase permits for emissions.

The cow tax was born.

[xoxoxoBruce]

They'll take my bacon from my cold dead hands.

[classicman]

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Joanne Simpson Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled.

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence."

linkhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html

[Aliantha]

Fielding is a fucking idiot. I wouldn't be taking his word on ANYTHING! He was just about crying while giving a speech on a new fucking tax FFS. He's a tosser of the highest order.

eta: The bill might have trouble going through not because 'A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming', but because it's going to cost a lot to go forward with. The cost of just about everything will rise, and due to the current financial situation, that scares most people.

Debate will resume in the parliament at a later date, but it will undoubtedly go through although with some modifications.

[ZenGum]

A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Well, going from zero to one counts as growing, I guess, but the impression created is

[TheMercenary]

Well looks like the EPA is in a bit of internal turmoil over what they are putting out as facts concerning CO2.

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-9...warming-Part-1

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/2...pa-management/

And now the House of Representatives has just voted on billions in new tax for Cap and Trade. Hmmmmmmmmm....

Someone is making money off this one somewhere.

[TheMercenary]

Looks like others are picking up on the story as well, not just the SF Examiner:

EPA plays hide and seek; suppressed report revealed

By Michelle Malkin • June 26, 2009 12:30 AM My syndicated column below slams the EPA for suppressing inconvenient truths about Obama’s politicized global warming agenda. As I blogged early Wednesday afternoon, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released e-mails detailing how eco-bureaucrats stifled a senior researcher who challenged the agency’s reliance on outdated data to support its greenhouse gas “public endangerment” finding.

Breaking late tonight, CEI has released the draft version of the censored study that the EPA doesn’t want you to see. You can read the entire 98-page document here.

Here is the preface, which begins, “We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming. EPA and others have tended to accept the findings reached by outside groups…as being correct without a careful and critical examination of their conclusions and documentation.” No wonder they tried to shut up senior researcher Alan Carlin (click on image for full-size):



***

EPA’s game of global warming hide-and-seek
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

The Obama administration doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don’t want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion-dollar, thousand-page “cap and trade” bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda.

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.

On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study. “There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls, etc.” On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency’s climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors:

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. 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.”

Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the “process” of ramming the EPA’s endangerment finding through. Truth-in-science took a backseat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from “a very negative impact.”

In another follow-up e-mail, McGartland warned Carlin to drop the subject altogether: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”

But, of course, the e-mails show that EPA had already predetermined what it was going to do – “move forward on endangerment.” Which underscores the fact that the open public comment period was all for show. In her message to the public about the radical greenhouse gas rules, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson requested “comment on the data on which the proposed findings are based, the methodology used in obtaining and analyzing the data, and the major legal interpretations and policy considerations underlying the proposed findings.” Ms. Jackson, meet Mr. Carlin.

The EPA now justifies the suppression of the study because economist Carlin (a 35-year veteran of the agency who also holds a B.S. in physics) “is an individual who is not a scientist.” Neither is Al Gore. Nor is environmental czar Carol Browner. Nor is cap-and-trade shepherd Nancy Pelosi. Carlin’s analysis incorporated peer-reviewed studies and, as he informed his colleagues, “significant new research” related to the proposed endangerment finding. According to those who have seen his study, it spotlights EPA’s reliance on out-of-date research, uncritical recycling of United Nations data, and omission of new developments, including a continued decline in global temperatures and a new consensus that future hurricane behavior won’t be different than in the past.

But the message from his superiors was clear: La-la-la, we can’t hear you.

In April, President Obama declared that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” Another day, another broken promise. Will Carlin meet the same fate as inspectors general who have been fired or “retired” by the Obama administration for blowing the whistle and defying political orthodoxy? Or will he, too, be yet another casualty of the Hope and Change steamroller? The bodies are piling up.

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/06/26...port-revealed/

[TheMercenary]

by Richard Morrison
June 25, 2009

Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.
The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature.

New data also indicate that ocean cycles are probably the most important single factor in explaining temperature fluctuations, though solar cycles may play a role as well, and that reliable satellite data undercut the likelihood of endangerment from greenhouse gases. All of this demonstrates EPA should independently analyze the science, rather than just adopt the conclusions of outside organizations.

The released report is a draft version, prepared under EPA’s unusually short internal review schedule, and thus may contain inaccuracies which were corrected in the final report.

“While we hoped that EPA would release the final report, we’re tired of waiting for this agency to become transparent, even though its Administrator has been talking transparency since she took office. So we are releasing a draft version of the report ourselves, today,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman.

http://cei.org/news-release/2009/06/...y-censored-epa

[TheMercenary]

Alan Carlin is the economist and 38 year veteran at the Environmental Protection Agency whose report was stonewalled internally and so was not considered (or so he was told) in their decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. I spoke with him for an hour this evening. (A background interview with an anonymous source in the EPA that corroborates what Carlin says below can be found here.)

At the end of the hour, the last question I asked him was what had motivated him to come forward with an almost 100-page report written in 4 days detailing the problems with the scientific claims for global warming as given by the IPCC (an early draft can be found at http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/DOC062509-004.pdf). The report was not transmitted internally, and the emails released by CEI on Tuesday suggest to me that this may have been because the report did not support the previously determined conclusions desired by the new Administration.

In Carlin's personal view "The bottom line is whether or not the IPCC is wrong or right about the significance of increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in increasing global temperatures--it is amazing how few people have asked that question. What's happening in Australia (where a Senator Fielding is holding a 'mini-debate' with skeptical scientists and administration advocates of an Australian cap and trade policy) is fantastic--why can't we do that here? Models, good or bad, don't prove or disprove a scientific hypothesis about the real world. I'm dreadfully concerned that we may be taking an ineffective and extremely costly action, and after six years of working on climate change I might be able to help--but I'm not allowed to."

Carlin got his first degree in physics, before he turned to economics and remembers lunching occasionally with the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman while at Caltech, who told him that if you attempt to compare observations with a hypothesis and the observations don't fit, you can either change the hypothesis or ascertain if the observations are wrong. Carlin is convinced that observations of climate do not match the hypothesis that human-generated greenhouse gases are producing significant global warming in the real world. He adds ruefully that if the NIPCC report recently released by the Heartland Institute had been available in March, when he wrote his report, it might have saved him a lot of time assuming that it covers many of the same points.

Carlin's main concern seems to be that the Endangerment Finding (an official declaration by the EPA that CO2 is a danger to public health and welfare) may actually turn out to be a time bomb that may explode in the EPA, echoing the reasoning of our anonymous source as reported earlier today. As I wrote then, the EPA does not want to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air act without legislation limiting their regulation to the largest emitters. If the proposed new cap and trade legislation (which removes EPA's ability to use the Clean Air Act to regulate global warming gases) is not forthcoming, Carlin worries that it may well be very difficult for the EPA to carry out its mandate. His report was an attempt to have the EPA reconsider the science (which Carlin considers bad science), as despite the respectable trappings that cloak the IPCC and their reports, their hypotheses fail many observational tests in his view.

Carlin has been transferred off all climate-related work, but is not at all bitter. He says that from a civil service point of view, his boss 'absolutely has the right' to give him new work assignments. "I still have a phone, I can still talk to people in my office," he says.

Carlin hastens to add that he did not turn over to the Competitive Enterprise Institute the emails that were published. "But when a reporter called Tuesday and asked me to verify them it became evident that CEI had them."

Carlin also assisted in the organization of a series of seminars with notable scientists in the field of climate science, including some notable skeptics as well as ardent "warmists." They were attended by an average of maybe 30 or 40 employees--but those employees only rarely included members of the workgroup that eventually would be charged with writing the proposed endangerment document.

Later we will discuss the science that Carlin wanted to present to the EPA. For now, he's another whistleblower who actually wanted to help the organisation that shut him out and moved him off the case.

Is this really how we want to run things?

http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-En...ng-and-trouble

[TheMercenary]

Now this guy has some pretty damm good ideas. Read a bit of a short interview which connects to some other interviews here:

If global climate change was a more normal political issue, Lomborg would be classed as a centrist, a moderate who is trying to bring political consensus on positive action to address climate change. But global climate change is not normal, and his views, instead of bringing praise from both sides, have brought criticism. But more about that later.

Make Fossil Fuels More Expensive, or Green Fuels Irresistible?

“I love this thought—it comes from the Breakthrough Institute. Basically, the idea is that everyone seems to be trying to make fossil fuels so expensive that we won’t use them. But that’s never going to happen. So why don’t we try to make green energy so cheap that everyone will want to use it?”

After three books and the creation of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (which looks at prioritizing the problems the world faces and organising an intelligent response to them) Lomborg's goals for the next five years are fairly simple, and familiar, which is slightly depressing as it means there hasn't been much progress since they were expounded in his 2007 book, Cool It. “My main point is to make sure that we don’t just do something that makes us feel good, but that we do something that actually does good."

"There is a lot of conversation right now about what we should do about global warming, and promises of cutting CO2 by 20%, 40%, 80% abound. The problem in many ways is, it’s not going to happen. We have tried this many times and we have not done so, and just promising to do so is not going to fix the problem. So I hope to get people to realize sooner rather than later that if you’re actually going to make this happen, we need to make sure that we do much more of the smart things to deal with climate change, instead of promising things that won’t happen. We should try to make sure that we invest in research and development, so that we actually get new opportunities, so that we get even cheaper solar panels, that will actually make it possible to cut carbon emissions dramatically by the end of this century.”

Should We Rush to Judgment or Invest in the Future?

"The risk is that instead of making better solar panels, better windmills, better ocean generating systems, so that everybody can afford to buy them, including the Chinese, and will want to buy them, there’s huge pressure to buy existing technology and put it up today. Using existing solar panels makes us feel good, it makes for great photo ops, but actually does very little to make sure we will cut our future emissions. My favourite example is Germany, which has put up the most solar panels in the world and, there’s nothing wrong with Germany doing that, but it’s a very expensive way of generating very little energy and essentially Germany is going to be paying about $150 billion to postpone global warming by the end of the century by one hour. I don’t see the logic of that argument. Instead of paying that amount of money to make Germans feel good about themselves, we should be paying to get better solar panels so that everyone, including India, will want to put up cheap, available solar panels by, say, 2030.”

"We should spend vastly more on research and development. The depressing thing is that everybody talks about green energy, but everybody thinks that means putting up windmills. Putting up very specific windmills. My point is if you actually want to do good, it’s not about putting up windmills that are, even now, inefficient, it’s about putting up windmills in the future that are so efficient that everybody will want one. That is actually a lot cheaper than what many people are arguing that we should be doing right now, and that kind of research and development is much cheaper and much more efficient in the long run. What the Copenhagen Consensus showed was that with every dollar you invest in very quick CO2 cuts, you probably do less than a dollar’s worth of good and if you take into account what kind of policy measures come up, it might be as low as 4 cents for every dollar, whereas if you invest in research and development that is bringing better technology for the future, you can end up doing as much as $16 worth of good for every dollar invested. My basic point is that I’d much rather do $16 worth of good rather than 4 cents.”

Part 2 of this interview covers Lomborg's opinions on American politics regarding climate change and his feelings towards those who are on the other side of the fence. It can be found here.

http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-En...warming-Part-1

[TheMercenary]

So the government finally figured it out. To run and charge electric cars you need electricity. That comes from Coal and nuclear power.

Electric Cars Will Not Decrease Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Says Federal Study
Thursday, June 25, 2009

The stimulus law enacted in February promoted the purchase of plug-in electric cars by the federal government and the broader market, but a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released this month says that the use of plug-in electric vehicles will not by itself decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

To do that, the report argues, the United States would have to switch from coal-burning plants to lower-emission sources to generate electricity such as nuclear power.

“If you are using coal fired power plants and half the country’s electricity comes from coal powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?”
Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report and a specialist in energy issues told CNSNews.com.

The report found that the adoption of plug-in cars could result in benefits, including reduced petroleum consumption and dependency.

But it concedes that in regions of the country heavily reliant on coal for power generation, electric plug-in vehicles will not result in a decrease in green house gas emissions.

“Reduction in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy,” GAO reported.

“For plug-ins to reach their full potential, electricity would need to be generated from lower-emission fuels such as nuclear and renewable energy rather than the fossil fuels--coal and natural gas--used most often to generate electricity today.”

In an attempt to encourage the development and manufacturing of “plug-in” electric vehicles, the government has allocated $300 million from the economic stimulus funding to the General Services Administration (GSA) to acquire fuel-efficient vehicles. These funds must be spent by 2011.

The GAO report pointed out that the stimulus law also establishes a tax credit for consumers for the purchase of plug-in cars--up to $2,500 for two-wheeled, three-wheeled, and low-speed plug-in cars.

But the report cites results from a study showing that “if plug-in hybrids reached 56 percent of the cars on the road by 2030, they would require an increased electricity production, much of which would likely come from additional coal plants.”

The government watchdog said that adjustments would need to be made, such as building new nuclear plants and developing technology so that fossil fuel plants will be equipped to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2).

“However, new nuclear plants and renewable energy sources can be controversial and expensive,” the report noted.

While not a mandate, goals within President Obama’s executive order (No. 13423) encourage the integration of plug-in hybrid cars into federal vehicle fleets. The GAO report, while remaining supportive of the goal, pointed out the difficulties in achieving plug-in integration.

“Developing policy or incentives to encourage consumers to buy plug-ins only in regions with low-carbon energy sources could be difficult and may not correspond with manufacturers’ business plans,” reported the GAO.

Another impediment to the success of plug-in cars, is the high cost of lithium-ion batteries. The GAO report noted that in order for plug-in cars to be cost effective they must be relatively inexpensive compared to gas.

“Research suggests that for plug-ins to be cost-effective relative to gasoline vehicles the price of batteries must come down significantly and gasoline prices must be high relative to electricity,” the report said.

Gaffigan told CNSNews.com that $2 billion of the Recovery Act funds are being expended for grants to manufacture plug-in batteries, and the money is not limited to lithium-ion batteries.

But Gaffigan also explained that this particular impediment would not go away just because the government threw a lot of money at it.

“At the end of the day, if gasoline is still relatively cheap compared to the other alternatives, there is just not going to be that kind of motivation for the market place to develop something else,” Gaffigan told CNSNews.com.

Furthermore, foreign dependency on lithium could take the place of dependency on petroleum.

“The United States has supplies of lithium, but if demand for lithium exceeded domestic supplies, or if lithium from overseas is less expensive, the United States could substitute reliance on one foreign resource (oil) for another (lithium),” warned the GAO.

“Yes, it is a very real possibility,” Gaffigan confirmed when CNSNews.com asked about the possibility of lithium dependency.

To make matters worse, while lithium-ion batteries are attractive because they produce insignificant levels of toxic waste, the extraction of lithium could have harmful environmental consequences.

“Extracting lithium from locations where it is abundant, such as South America, could pose environmental challenges that would damage the ecosystems in this area,” the GAO report pointed out.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/conten...x?RsrcID=50070

[xoxoxoBruce]

Fuck green energy, we need alternative energy.
Both to reduce our dependence on oil from unfriendlies and avoid the eventual price gouging.
If that means running cars on coal power, so be it. Keep your eye on the ball folks.