Latest Pajamas Media Post (’Will Obama ‘Betray’ Environmentalists?’) Is Up (With Updates and Elaboration)
It will go up at BizzyBlog on Friday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.
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Update and Elaboration:
One of the points of the column is that “the rest of the world” is renouncing the economy-crippling initiatives the promoters of globaloney so desire (”globaloney” is shorthand for the idea that the earth is catastrophically warming because of human activity; the truth is that it hasn’t been warming since 1998, that any warming that might have occurred isn’t catastrophic, and that it isn’t significantly caused by us anyway).
There’s a further development supporting that contention, courtesy of the indispensable daily e-mail from Benny Peiser at CCNet:
(Peiser’s Cut-to-the Chase Take) EU CLIMATE POLICY IN DISARRAY: ITALY HARDENS VETO THREAT
AFP Article: Italy threatens to veto costly EU climate change package
Italy will veto ambitious European Union plans to tackle climate change unless changes are made to make the package less costly to industry and consumers, a minister warned Monday.
“If the climate package passes as it stands it will lead to a 17 percent hike in electricity bills for every Italian,” Andrea Ronchi, Italy’s european policy minister, told reporters in Brussels.
….. “Britain’s (Prime Minister Gordon) Brown goes one way, (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel another, (French President Nicolas) Sarkozy goes his way and (Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis) Zapatero his,” he said.
“It’s a problem at a time when the European Union is going to be called upon more and more to speak with a single voice,” he added.
Here’s the fun part, as my column notes near the end: If there is to be “a single voice” coming from the EU in 2009, it will be that of Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who will occupy the EU’s rotating presidency this coming year. Klaus, who has seen and lived through tyranny, calls out globaloney for what it is (bolds are mine, and differ from those in original):
The explicitly stated intentions of global warming activists are frightening. They want to change us, to change the whole mankind, to change human behavior, to change the structure and functioning of society, to change the whole system of values which has been gradually established during centuries. These intentions are dangerous and their consequences far-reaching. These people want to restrict our freedom. It is our duty to say NO.
….. It represents, on the contrary, an abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity endangering ideology of environmentalism.
….. I consider environmentalism to be the most effective and, therefore, the most dangerous vehicle for advocating large scale government intervention and unprecedented suppression of human freedom at this very moment.
….. I used to live in a world where prices and property rights were made meaningless. It gave me the opportunity to see how irrationally the economy was organized and how damaged the environment was as a result. This experience tells me that we should not let anyone play the market again and dictate what to produce, how to produce it, what inputs to use, what technologies to implement.
….. the existing evidence does not justify the currently proposed expensive, economy and society disrupting and probably useless and ineffective measures.
As I said many times before: the current world-wide dispute is not about environment, it is about freedom. And I would add “about prosperity and living conditions of billions of people.”
Read the whole speech at the link.
I love this guy.
The New York Times hates Klaus so much that it dug into files of the former KGB to find negative comments about him. Note the irony, given Klaus’s positions and his history as an anti-Communist freedom fighter and his role in liberating Czechoslovokia.
So if a President Obama wants us to go whole-hog into freedom-suppressing emissions caps and the like, even in the teeth of a struggling economy, it seems he’ll have us doing so unilaterally, i.e., “go it alone” (Whatever happened to that liberal mantra, “We should be just like Europe”?).
As my column notes, I don’t think he will, at least at first.
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Further Update: If Obama wants to see what happens to go-it-aloners, he need only look across the pond to see the consequences when elitists give in to delusion (again, courtesy of Peiser) –
Tough new targets on tackling climate change will cost Britain £500 a year per household, push up utility bills and force 1.7million Britons into fuel poverty by 2020.
The grim predictions came from independent Government advisers yesterday as they set targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions.
The influential panel led by millionaire business guru Adair Turner wants the UK to cut levels by up to 42 per cent within 12 years.
….. But the committee insisted the target was essential to prevent dangerous global warming.
Everyday Britons disagree, which explains why Gordon Brown is the perhaps most despised British Prime Minister in memory. His Labour Party is suffering not only IN the polls, but AT the polls, having been thrashed in at least the past three electoral contests (May elections, London Mayor’s race, July special election). But Brown’s government seems grimly determined to lead his party over the cliff. I doubt that Obama, who above all is a preservationist — of his own political viability — will do the same.
Further Update II, 8:30 a.m.: Even more, courtesy of a Peiser e-mail received moments ago (his title is “Rising Anger”) –
BRUSSELS, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) — About 11,000 workers from the steel industry in European countries gathered on Tuesday in Brussels to protest the European Union’s climate change policy which they fear might make them lose their jobs.
The European Parliament and the French Presidency of the European Union agreed Monday on details of future targets on emissions from cars, setting the target for 2020 at 95 g CO2 per kilometer.
“We don’t want to lose our job,” one protester said, adding that the new regulations will possibly kill the steel industry in Europe. Several protesters held a coffin to indicate that the European steel industry will die when EU’s climate change plan is implemented.
Typical: The AP says it’s only 5,000. Yes, I trust Xinhua more than globaloney-crazed AP (see Jennifer Loven) on an environmenta-related story such as this.
I know you are full of it when you start your post by repeating a long refuted claim that it has stopped warming since 1998.
It is well known that this is a false claim that uses the anomaly of 1998 as a starting point. 1998 was the strongest El Nino of the century, which typically raises global atmospheric temperatures by abou .5 Centigrade.
1998 was also the peak of a well know 11 year solar cycle.
We are now at the bottom of that solar cycle. And the La Nina of the past year is well known to lower global atmospheric temps by .5C
Nevertheless, this is what NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies climatologists have to say.
“Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth’s second warmest year in a century.
The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990″
Environmentalism is COMMON SENSE. It’s hard to have common sense when you are blinded by political ideology.
Anyone interested in learning how much scientific consensus there really is should go to
http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/
There are truly only a handful of skeptical climate scientists, while tens of thousands of climate scientists agree with the IPCC. All the lists of supposed scientist skeptics are padded phony lists of mostly non climate scientists. These lists are pure propaganda. They have been thoroughly debunked by science as have all of the skeptic arguments. Those are the facts. Senator Inhofes list of 400 skeptics, The Oregon Petition are both phony lists. The Oregon Peitition was a hoax, using phony NAS stationary to fool some scientist into signing what looked like an official document from the National Academy of Science. The group that started the Oregon petition hang out on a farm in Oregon. NOT ONE of them is a climate scientist.
Perhaps this anectodal story will illustrate the point.
from http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/8/1227/22627 posted by Andrew Dessler
“A journalist friend recently sent me this:”
“I just got my “Journalist’s Guide to Global Warming Experts” from The Heartland Institute in the mail. They list four “experts” in Texas. It’s an awesome list. …
Robert Bradley, energy expert.
H.Sterling Burnett, policy analyst
Dr. John Dale Dunn, emergency physician
Michael Economides, petroleum engineer
As you probably know, the Heartland Institute is one of the world’s premier climate denialist organizations, so you can be pretty sure these guys reject the mainstream scientific view.
Notice anything odd about the list? Despite the fact that there are dozens if not hundreds of reputable climate scientists working in Texas, the Heartland Institute is unable to get a single one of them onto their list. Apparently expertise is not required to be an expert for Heartland. In fact, I’m pretty sure if you can repeat the following phrase — “the climate stopped warming in 1998!” — you qualify.
This reinforces a point I’ve been making for a while: there are a few credible scientists who dispute the basic message of the IPCC. But not many. You can probably count them on your fingers and toes: Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Spencer, Christy …”
This is just like all the other lists of supposed experts who are skeptics.
You can believe the skeptics or you can trust science, period. On the one hand is pure belief, clouded by political ideology, on the other hand is over 30 years of climate study by 30 or 40 thousand scientists from all over the world. The scientific evidence is getting stronger, not weaker. The number of skeptical scientists is decreasing, not increasing. The actual observations of things like artic sea ice are more extreme than what was predicted by the IPCC only a few years ago. As one scientist said, the arctic sea ice is melting one hundred years ahead of schedule.
We are endangering every ecosystem on earth, even without global warming. Species are already going extinct at an unprecented rate, going all the way back to the big die offs millions of years ago. How can any intelligent person think we can continue that without endangering our own survival.
Oil is killing our economy, damaging the environment, causing international strife, while we are now fighting our second war in Iraq. Renewable energy and clean tech will envigorate the economy and stop the bleeding of $$$s.
It will create jobs, end the huge trade deficit created by oil. Oil and gas company subsidies and tax credits are many times larger than those for renewable energy.
“Estimating U.S. oil and gas subsidies is very challenging. Subsidies rarely involve cash payments. Instead scores of U.S. government agencies and departments create hundreds of programmes to support the U.S. energy sector. And there is no requirement for the federal government to keep track of all this.”
“Energy subsidies are often simply hidden from public scrutiny. It’s only recently been revealed that 40 companies granted leases between 1996 and 2000 for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico do not have to pay royalties for the publicly-owned resource. This is worth nearly a billion dollars a year in lost revenue to the federal government, according to a 2008 study by Friends of the Earth (FOE), a U.S. environmental NGO, and may ultimately total 50 billion dollars.”
“Subsidy programmes from 1918 are still in place. “I’m not aware of any oil and gas subsidy that has ever been phased out,” said Koplow, the leading expert on U.S. energy subsidies”
“In a time of skyrocketing oil prices and profits, why did the George W. Bush administration in 2005 authorise an additional 32.9 billion dollars in new subsidies over a five-year period?”
“This massive government intervention distorts energy markets, making it very difficult for alternative energy sources to compete without similarly massive subsidies. “And it promotes America’s addiction to oil,” Larsen added.”
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=7124&Method=Full
Estimates of oil and gas govt giveaways are from $40 to $80 billion dollars anually. The hidden costs of oil like health care, environmental damage etc. are in the hundreds of billions anually.
Comment by Richard Mercer — December 3, 2008 @ 11:14 am
Boy, that’s a long way to go to refute a claim that hasn’t been refuted. And it hasn’t been.
Goddard’s data-cookers constantly, constantly, make fools of themselves — as, apparently, do you.
Klaus is right, especially about the whole thing being about command and control. You are wrong.
Comment by TBlumer — December 3, 2008 @ 11:29 am
#1, concerning your “subsidies,” Exxon Mobil paid almost $30 billion in income taxes alone on $70 billion in profit. That’s a rate of about 42%. Subsidy, schmubsidy. Any subsidy that falls to the bottom line such as you described gets largely taxed back anyway or ends up being reflected at the pump in the form of lower prices.
In your royalties example, the subsidies occurred between 1996 and 2000. Who was president then? Better yet, who was VICE President then?
The solution to the money going overseas is to explore and extract here with no holds barred.
Comment by TBlumer — December 3, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
Only one minor problem with the long winded argument: 1998 was not the hottest year, 1934 was. GISS was forced to acknowledge it this year. Oophs, was that inconvenient?
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html
Top 10 GISS U.S. Temperature deviation (deg C) in New Order 8/7/2007
Year Old New
1934 1.23 1.25
1998 1.24 1.23
1921 1.12 1.15
2006 1.23 1.13
1931 1.08 1.08
1999 0.94 0.93
1953 0.91 0.90
1990 0.88 0.87
1938 0.85 0.86
1939 0.84 0.85
Now let’s put on the critical thinking cap, you know that thought process that ignores dogma. If 1921 was the 3rd hottest year and 1934 was thee hottest year, then something is wrong with the idea of CO2 pushing up temperatures since clearly CO2 was way lower in 1921 and 1934 than 1998 or 2006. The theory of CO2 as the driver of climate fails in the face of logic. Please don’t insult people’s intelligence by saying this was only in the US and the US only occupies 5% of the world’s landmass. Why? because in the southern hemisphere there has been ZERO warming and the only reason why is it called GLOBAL is because of disingenuous math by averaging the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. If there is no warming in the US and the Southern Hemisphere, QED, it can not be Global, just European and Asian warming. BTW, most of the temperature stations are in the US not visa versa, how does 5% of the landmass have more temperature stations than the remaining 95% of the landmass? Does it not follow that the land area with the most temperature stations is likely to be more accurate than an area with less????
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/aug/15/the-hottest-year-1934/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/29/al-gore-does-oprah-was-anybody-watching/
Please, 30 or 40K scientists? Wild assertions get you no where here, especially when thousands of scientists have signed petitions stating their objection to AGW.
Comment by dscott — December 3, 2008 @ 12:29 pm
Bahahahaha, bahahaha, thus evaporates the $500 per voter bribe. http://michellemalkin.com/2008/12/03/neeeever-mind-again-obama-abandons-windfall-profits-tax/
Remember Obama wanted to fund the so called refundable tax rebate for high energy prices by taxing the oil companies. Bahhahahaha, what a bunch of suckers, SUCKERS, SUCKERS!!!! They thought they were getting a $500 gift for their vote. SUCKERS!!!!!!
Ho, ho, ho, the man has audacity, as much if not more than Bill Clinton. “That was then and this is now”
Comment by dscott — December 3, 2008 @ 3:02 pm