Cooler Heads Digest

“China’s addition of 90GW of coal-fired power plants installed in 2006 alone is expected to emit over 500 million tons of CO2 per year for their 40 year lifetimes. This is (sic) compared to the entire European Union’s Kyoto reduction commitment of 300 million tons of CO2.”—From Dr. Steven Chu’s congressional testimony March 2007. President-elect Barack Obama has nominated Dr. Chu to become Secretary of Energy.

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The minority staff of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this week released a compilation of the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the alarmist establishment view of global warming. To view the report, click here.

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Even global warming alarmists know that cap-and-trade schemes are a boondoggle. According to The Times, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the most extreme global warming alarmists, believes cap-and-trade is a “terrible” approach. “Carbon trading does not solve the emission problem at all,” he says. “In fact it gives industries a way to avoid reducing their emissions. The rules are too complex and it creates an entirely new class of lobbyists and fat cats.”

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This week the National Climatic Data Center is reporting that through its first 10 months, 2008 is shaping up to be the coolest year in the United States since 1997. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other major state-run institutes have concluded that China will double it’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2020.

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Ten years ago this week, the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol. On this symbolic occasion, it seems worthwhile to note that the planet has cooled since the U.S.  signed the Kyoto Protocol. It must be working! (Can we go home and relax now?)

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The price of carbon allowances in the European Union’s European Trading Scheme has fallen more than 40% since July, thereby destroying the argument that a cap-and-trade program provides “a measure of certainty to the energy industry in estimating the future price of carbon for the purpose of planning investments in new power generators.”

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On October 29, the U. S. broke 168 cold-temperature records and 63 snowfall records. The first snowfall in October in London since 1934 started at about ten PM on October 28, just as the British House of Commons passed a new climate bill that mandates 80% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

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Unseasonably cold weather chilled Al Gore’s keynote speech at Harvard’s Sustainability Celebration this week. While Al blathered on about the immediate dangers posed by catastrophic global warming, temperatures in Cambridge, Massachusetts neared record lows. 

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The most sophisticated computer models in the world predict a temperature increase in this decade of about 0.2C due to increased concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. But this is not at all what we have seen, according to statistician Bjorn Lomoborg. Temperatures in this decade have not been increasing. They have actually decreased by between 0.01 and 0.1C.

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The U. S. faces the prospect of demand-driven blackouts as soon as 2009, according to a report issued last week by the NextGen Energy Council. The study, “Lights Out in 2009?,” says that U.S. base-load generation capacity reserve margins "have declined precipitously to 17 percent in 2007, from 30-40 percent in the early 1990s."  A 12-15 percent capacity reserve margin is the minimum required to ensure reliability and stability of the nation’s electricity system.  Compounding this capacity deficiency, the projected U.S. demand in the next ten years is forecast to grow by 18 percent, far exceeding the projected eight percent growth in baseload generation capacity between now and 2016.

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According to Leila Abboud of the Wall Street Journal, greenhouse gas emissions have increased 15 % in Norway since the country enacted the world’s first carbon tax twenty years ago. That’s slightly less than the increase in the United States over the same period.

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The Democratic and Republican nominees also spoke at the annual pow-wow of the Clinton Global Initiative this week. Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Az.) presented almost indistinguishable plans to ration energy with a cap-and-trade program and save us from global warming.  They also both vowed to reduce global poverty and revive the U. S. economy. The little difficulty that no one asked them about is that cap-and-trade will create chronic economic stagnation and increase poverty around the world.

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The Institute for Energy Research (IER) last week posted a devastating exposé of the Pelosi plan. As announced last week, the plan would:

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In the News The Lawnmower Police Are ComingChris Horner, Human Events, 9 September 2008 The Pickens Plan: Questions UnansweredReece A. Epstein and David A. Ridenour, National Center for Public Policy Research, September 2008 Drilling for Dollars

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