Climate change and the UN

Nice words

Leaders offer little of substance at the latest climate change gathering in New York

JUST over 70 days to go and there is miserably little progress yet. The outlook for the global summit on climate change to be held in Copenhagen in December is uncertain. The current version of the draft outcome document for the meeting is hundreds of pages long, with thousands of passages in brackets representing points of disagreement. Climate-watchers are steadily lowering their expectations. They had hoped that activities this week in New York, scheduled around the UN General Assembly, might move things forward. So far there is little to cheer.

A speech by Barack Obama on Tuesday September 22nd was eagerly awaited. He acknowledged that America—which failed to ratify the Kyoto protocol, encouraging industrialised countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases—has some catching up to do. He made clear the dangers of rapid climate change, urging the world to act “boldly, swiftly and together” to avert an “irreversible catastrophe”. But he offered little that was practical or specific, beyond noting that America would start measuring its greenhouse-gas emissions more exactly, to better assess what progress is being made. He struck an urgent tone but there was little punch to the speech. A spokesman for Oxfam, an aid agency, responded ruefully that someone had “switched the coffee to decaf at today’s UN climate summit”.

To some extent Mr Obama was upstaged by China’s president, Hu Jintao, who at least offered some specific details of steps that his country is taking. He described how, in China’s five-year economic plan from 2006-2010, the country has set itself targets of energy intensity—the energy required to produce a unit of GDP. Mr Hu says that China will go further in the coming years, by trying to cut the carbon emissions per dollar of GDP produced, for example by developing renewable and nuclear energy. “We will endeavour to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 15% by 2020”, he said. He also touted plans to extend an existing reforestation programme: 18%, or 175m hectares, of Chinese land is forested today; the government wants to see another 40m hectares added by 2020. China is now the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, and its emissions are rising rapidly as its economy grows. Mr Hu wants to show the world that he is taking concerns about the climate seriously.

However the Chinese president did not offer hard targets on the main issue, carbon intensity, only promising a reduction by a “notable amount”. As long as China continues to add coal-fired power at an alarming rate, Mr Hu’s promises will not satisfy those who worry that global carbon emissions are growing too quickly. Nor is his speech likely to be enough to convince sceptics in America’s Congress who want China to commit to hard targets before—or at least at the same time as—America does.

The cap-and-trade bill in Congress offers a target that many Europeans consider to be weak—a 17% reduction in emissions on 2005 levels by 2020. But even that is imperilled by almost total Republican opposition, and the nervousness of moderate Democrats in vulnerable electoral districts.

Whatever Mr Obama’s personal commitment to doing something about climate change, he has a limited ability to enforce new policies. He has the power to do some things by executive decision, and has done so with efficiency standards on light bulbs and cars. And a 2007 court decision has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency can directly regulate greenhouse-gas emissions which are considered an “endangerment”, a power that Mr Obama has threatened to use. But all sides in America agree that legislation would be more comprehensive than an executive order.

But the slow progress of the bill through Congress has foreign partners running out of patience with the excuse that the health-care bill must come first, or that Congress really is complex. America must move at the same time as other economies, rich and poor alike, a dilemma Scott Barrett, an economist at Columbia University, calls the “biggest collective-action problem in human history”. The lack of pace of cap-and-trade in the Senate is an ominous sign.

Climate Change and the Nanny State

Do we need the government to save us from ourselves?

David Harsanyi

If Jesus raised the dead tomorrow, our science czar probably would be too busy calculating the carbon footprint to find salvation.

But who needs Christ when the flock is blessed with sound moral guidance from men and women whose lifework has been cajoling 50 percent plus one to push a button?

From our extravagant health care choices to our risky financial behavior to our ill-conceived love of profit to, most tragically, our immoral penchant for air-conditioning our homes, we need help. I need help.

This week, prepping for the upcoming Copenhagen climate change talks, Dr. Steven Chu, our erstwhile energy secretary, crystallized the administration's underlining thinking by claiming that the "American public ... just like your teenage kids, aren't acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is."

Did you know that Cabinet positions come equipped with a handbook detailing how Americans "should act"? If teenagers—irresponsible bunch of weasels that they usually are—are in need of moral supervision, an environmental train wreck like me needs an intervention.

After all, President Barack Obama warned me this week that a failure to address the problem of "carbon pollution" could create an "irreversible catastrophe." (Yeah, Oxygen, you're next.) Chu recently referred to Earth as "the great ship Titanic."

Chu will deploy bureaucrats to more than 6,000 public schools to, um, teach children about "climate change" and efficiency. They probably won't mention that the Energy Department was found to have wasted millions on inefficient use of energy by an independent auditor this year. (Listen, even our parents aren't perfect.)

Chu the adult likes to say that coal—which as we speak is likely powering your computer, your office, and your house and allows your kids to sit in their schoolhouse without freezing their little toes off in early fall—is his "worst nightmare."

Coal. Not an energy that is running its course or one that the market will replace. This energy source accounts for more than half of electricity production in the entire nation.

Chu, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner—and, unlike me, a deadly serious person—believes that "all the world's roofs should be painted white as part of efforts to slow global warming." Guess what? Not one white roof in my community. What's the holdup? Do we have to pass a law?

We do. Because you are hopeless, petulant, immoral, and clueless. Your nightmare starts with banning a plastic bag at the grocery and ends with a job-killing cap-and-trade scheme. It starts with a public service announcement from a third-tier celebrity and ends with you scouring the earth to find a light bulb that lights something.

For you, the immoral-inclined, there is hope. According to a new Gallup Poll, Americans believe that government is too intrusive. Gallup data show that 57 percent of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals. Forty-five percent say there is too much government regulation, and only 27 percent say the amount of regulation is about right.

There is one question we all have to answer: What's more important, negligibly reducing "carbon pollution" through coercive policies or protecting personal freedom and allowing real markets to work? That's the trade-off. Parenting won't change the question.

Remember when George W. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, claimed that the president saw the American people "as we think about a 10-year-old child"? His comment, understandably, caused much mockery and disdain.

The problem, apparently, wasn't the paternalist sentiment; it was the parent offering it. What we needed was a brainy, grown-up administration to harangue and regulate us into submission.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his Web site at www.DavidHarsanyi.com.

The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic

The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.

• By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Wherever Jim Hansen is right now -- whatever speech the "censored" NASA scientist is giving -- perhaps he'll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don't count on it.

Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he'd given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.

Ken Fallin

Alan Carlin, 35-year Environmental Protection Agency veteran

So much so that one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over."

Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.

Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have 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." (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "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." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.

The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Republican officials are calling for an investigation; House Energy Committee ranking member Joe Barton sent a letter with pointed questions to Mrs. Jackson, which she's yet to answer. The EPA has issued defensive statements, claiming Mr. Carlin wasn't ignored. But there is no getting around that the Obama administration has flouted its own promises of transparency.

The Bush administration's great sin, for the record, was daring to issue reports that laid out the administration's official position on global warming. That the reports did not contain the most doomsday predictions led to howls that the Bush politicals were suppressing and ignoring career scientists.

The Carlin dustup falls into a murkier category. Unlike annual reports, the Obama EPA's endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both "the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded." In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin's study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.

Unable to defend the EPA's actions, the climate-change crew -- , led by anonymous EPA officials -- is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a "denier." He is, we are told, "only" an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn't his "job" to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with "informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.") His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.) Where's Mr. Hansen and his defense of scientific freedom when you really need him?

Mr. Carlin is instead an explanation for why the science debate is little reported in this country. The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign. The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition.

Climate Change Vote Narrowly Passes

Correcting Krugman

Correcting Krugman on Climate

Mises Daily by Robert P. Murphy

In a previous article, I argued that Paul Krugman's recent articles in support of government efforts to mitigate climate change — and in particular the Waxman-Markey legislation pending in Congress — were typically misleading. Specifically, Krugman's estimate that "serious" efforts to fight climate change would cost only 2 percent of GDP by the year 2050 was much lower than what the IPCC "consensus" itself said about aggressive measures like Waxman-Markey, and in any event these estimates all assumed that politicians worldwide implement the policies in textbook fashion.

In the present article I wish to continue my criticism of Krugman's writings in support of Waxman-Markey. We will see that even on mainstream, neoclassical economic terms, Waxman-Markey fails a cost/benefit test by a huge margin. It's not even close.

Krugman Trick to Downplay Costs Would Also Minimize Benefits

In a passage intended to show just how cheap even aggressive climate action can be, Krugman writes,

Consumers would end up poorer than they would have been without a climate-change policy.

But how much poorer? Not much, say careful researchers, like those at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even with stringent limits, says the M.I.T. group, Americans would consume only 2 percent less in 2050 than they would have in the absence of emission limits. That would still leave room for a large rise in the standard of living, shaving only one-twentieth of a percentage point off the average annual growth rate.

Elsewhere I have written about this neat little trick of translating a fairly large impact into an apparently negligible amount, by switching from the level of the impact into a reduced rate of annual growth. After all, two percent of global output in 2050 is a fantastic amount of income. To give a ballpark, in 2007, using the "purchasing power parity" approach, global GDP was about $66 trillion.

So if we conservatively assume that real global GDP (and yes we're ignoring all of the Austrian critiques about such a concept) grows at 3.5 percent annually, then MIT's estimate of the cost of fighting climate change works out to $5.8 trillion in the year 2050 alone. In other words, we're not talking about a one-shot cost here; we're saying the annual cost in the year 2050 will be $5.8 trillion (in 2007 US dollars). Somehow I think that if Dick Cheney suggested that fighting the global war on terror would "only" cost 2 percent of world output by 2050, Paul Krugman might raise more of a fuss.

In any event, Krugman's column seems rather one-sided, doesn't it? After all, when trying to decide if a particular policy makes economic sense, the standard mainstream thing to do is check whether the costs are lower than the benefits. And yet, the modeled benefits of fighting climate change aren't mentioned anywhere in Krugman's column. It is simply taken for granted that the US government must do something — and quick! As Krugman says in another column (again without pointing to any specific evidence), "It's time to save the planet."

Yet this is rather noneconomist talk, isn't it? It sounds a bit like saying, "Teachers should get a huge pay raise, because education is very important."

Yes, if the planet itself were in jeopardy, then just about any forfeited economic output would be worth it, if it could avert that catastrophe.

But of course "the planet" isn't in danger. What people really mean by such language is that "the desirability of living on earth as judged by our descendants" is at risk. Well then, exactly what are the risks? And let's be scientific and objective about this, folks! No consulting fringe "deniers." I want to draw from the consensus of world experts, as codified in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Now things get really interesting, and we see why Krugman and other proponents of Waxman-Markey haven't been talking about the quantitative, net benefits of their plans. As Jim Manzi points out, according to middle-of-the-pack estimates of various dials (such as the level of global emissions without strict government controls, the sensitivity of the climate to these emissions, the vulnerability of future generations to warmer temperatures, etc.), the IPCC reports that the hit to global GDP would be between 1 and 5 percent, for 4 degrees Celsius of (additional) warming that would probably not occur until the 22nd century.

Yikes, up to a 5 percent loss in total global output — an inconvenient truth indeed! Oh wait, Krugman has shown us how to deal with such alarming numbers. If we just shave 0.05 percentage points off of global GDP growth — for example, if the world economy grows at 2.95 percent per year, rather than 3 percent — then, as Krugman has already demonstrated, global GDP in the year 2050 will be 2 percent lower than it otherwise would have been.

Now if we just let the simulation run until the year 2114, the gap between 3 percent growth and 2.95 percent growth will have grown exponentially into a 5-percentage-point difference.

What does all this mean? Quite simple: the differential in growth rates that Krugman considers quite negligible when weighing the costs of fighting climate change works just as well for the differential in growth rates that the IPCC middle-of-the-pack forecasts say the world would suffer under unrestricted emissions.

In other words, by Krugman's own criteria, the best-guess IPCC estimate of the benefits of fighting climate change are just as negligible as Krugman considers the MIT estimate of the costs of fighting climate change.

Mainstream Economic Models Would Never Justify Waxman-Markey

The more I have investigated these matters, the more shocked I become. One doesn't even need to rely on Austrian or public-choice arguments to show that Waxman-Markey is crazy.

For example, William Nordhaus is one of the pioneers in the field of climate-change economics, and he is no laissez-faire ideologue; Austrian readers may recognize Nordhaus as Samuelon's coauthor of a textbook that is sympathetic to "market failure," to say the least.

Yet according to Nordhaus's "DICE" model of the global climate and economy, if the whole world were to implement the stringent emissions caps (83% below 2005 levels by the year 2050) contained in Waxman-Markey, the net loss of the policy would be enormous.[1] It's true, such stringent limits would reduce the amount of climate damage future generations would suffer, but the harms imposed on the economy (because of the emission caps) would more than outweigh these benefits. Indeed, Nordhaus's model says that the present discounted value of these different impacts (i.e., slowing climate change but also slowing economic growth) is somewhere in the range of negative $14 trillion to negative $21 trillion, measured in 2005 US dollars. (I give more details of this derivation here.)

Conclusion

Paul Krugman is a very sharp guy, conversant in many different fields. Yet his analysis of the economics of climate change is as wrongheaded as his analysis of depressions. Relying just on the IPCC "consensus" estimates as well as a leading model such as Nordhaus's, it is impossible to justify the draconian emission cuts in Waxman-Markey.

Partisans on both sides of the debate concede that if the United States imposes unilateral emission cuts, there will be a negligible effect on global temperatures. But, ironically, if the whole world were to foolishly follow us down this path, one of the leading mainstream models projects that the globe would be many trillions of dollars poorer for it — and that figure includes the alleged benefits of mitigating harmful climate change.

Pelosi's Chinese Climate Change

Carbon reduction trumps human rights.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi took her climate crusade to China last week, urging that "we must work together" to address what she called this urgent challenge. Her junket won't change many Chinese minds but it does speak volumes about her party's changing priorities.

Back when Mrs. Pelosi was a rising liberal star her signature issue was human rights in China. In 1991, she famously unfurled a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square. During the Clinton Administration, she argued against normalizing trade relations with China unless linked to human-rights progress. Yet throughout last week's China tour Mrs. Pelosi said nothing of note about human rights -- despite the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre this week.

Mrs. Pelosi told us in a brief interview in Hong Kong that she had raised human rights "privately" with Chinese leaders. She explained that her previous human rights lobbying had been in a "personal capacity" as a mere Congresswoman, but now that she is Speaker she "speaks for Congress" and has to take a softer approach. That argument would be more credible had Mrs. Pelosi not regularly excoriated Republican Presidents for not doing more about Tibet and the other billion or so Chinese who lack basic political freedoms.

The reality is that her former convictions have fallen to the new liberal imperative of saving the world from carbon: "Workers rights, human rights, people's rights are part of environmental justice," she declared, in language that the leaders of a "People's Republic" can appreciate. With China now the world's No. 1 CO2 emitter, Democrats are desperate to sign up China for the follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol lest the exercise again be pointless.

A student at a Beijing university returned fire, asking Mrs. Pelosi what could be done that might convince American voters and Congress to cut back on emissions. "We have so much room for improvement," Mrs. Pelosi replied, according to the Associated Press. "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory . . . of how we are taking responsibility."

At least she's honest about what her climate project would really mean state-side. Most Democrats have a kind of global-warming split personality: On the one hand, New York will be underwater unless we create millions of new green jobs by imposing a cap-and-trade tax. Yet they also ridicule anyone who points out that their carbon limits will result in huge new taxes and costs for people who use electricity, drive cars, buy groceries -- which is say, everyone.

Speaking earlier in Shanghai, the Speaker elaborated: "I think that from what I've heard so far from the Chinese side of this -- and I think we're all in this together -- that the economic aspects of it are very, very important to the Chinese as well." The Speaker was talking about "green investment," though what Beijing actually wants is for developed nations to hobble their own economies with a cap-and-tax regime that would send jobs and billions of dollars a year in transfer payments to China the way Kyoto has. So the Chinese economy would be more efficient, while the West would be less competitive.

Whatever Chinese leaders do collectively on climate change, they must be relieved that Mrs. Pelosi no longer wants to press very hard for individual rights.

Climate of Extremes