United Liberty

In his inaugural address on Monday, President Barack Obama touched on “climate change,” an issue that he unsuccessfully pushed during his first term.

“We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity,” Obama said, adding, “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” Obama, who even invoked God when addressing the topic, then criticized those of us “still deny the overwhelming judgment of science.”

Ironically, these comments came at the beginning of the coldest week in Washington, DC in nearly a decade. The low at Reagan National on Wednesday morning was a bone-chilling 15 degrees, according to The Weather Channel. My iPhone showed 14 degrees at Nationals Park — nevertheless, it has been pretty cold in the nation’s capitol this week.

But is climate change really a threat? A plurality of Americans agree with President Obama, according to a new CNN poll, though that number is down from recent years. Moreover, a Gallup poll from last summer showed that the issue ranked dead last on Americans’ list of concerns.

Written by Chip Knappenberger, Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. Posted with permission from Cato @ Liberty.

There seems to be a noticeable murmur around town about a carbon tax—a tax on the amount of carbon dioxide that is released upon generating a unit of energy. Since fossil fuels—coal, oil, natural gas—are both the source of over 75% of our energy production and emitters of carbon dioxide when producing that energy, a carbon tax insures that the price of everything goes up.

There is one and only one justification for a carbon tax—an attempt to influence the future course of the earth’s climate (or, as some people prefer, to mitigate anthropogenic climate change) by trying to force down the emissions of the most abundant human-generated greenhouse gas.

But of all the things that a carbon tax will do (raise prices, increase bureaucracy, elect Tea Partiers, etc), mitigating anthropogenic climate change in any meaningful manner is not one of them.

The annual carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S., currently about 5,500 million metric tons per year, only contributes roughly 0.003°C/per year of warming pressure on global temperatures (see here for a handy way of making that calculation). So the best that a carbon tax could ever hope to achieve, climatically, would be to prevent this amount of warming each year by completely eliminating all carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S.

Written by Chip Knappenberger, Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. Posted with permission from Cato @ Liberty.

Scientists have known for decades that, as global carbon dioxide levels increase, so too does the standing biomass of the world’s plants. Carbon dioxide is a strong plant fertilizer.

As plants grow better, they also increasingly act as carbon sinks as they convert atmospheric carbon dioxide, with a little help from water and sunshine, into carbohydrates stored as biomass. Some of that carbon is returned to the air annually through decomposition, but other portions are are stored for longer periods in the soil, downed logs, houses, etc.  This plant-based carbon sink helps to offset the growth of global carbon dioxide emissions from human activities (primarily from the burning of fossil fuels). Together, the terrestrial carbon sink, along with the oceanic carbon sink, annually takes up more than half of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions—and remarkably, as global CO2 emissions have increased, so too has the global CO2 sink.

But now comes new evidence that plants may be helping to combat global warming through another mechanism as well, slowing the build-up of the atmospheric concentration of methane (a greenhouse gas some 25 times more effective than CO2 on a molecule-for-molecule bases at adding pressure for the world to warm).

That Al Gore is a hilarious guy. He’s pushed the global warming alarmism for years only to see the economically devasting Kyoto Protocal be rejected and cap-and-trade proposals fail in the Congress, despite overwhelming Democrat-majorities in both chambers. Sure, Gore managed to win a Nobel Prize in the process, though his theories on the impact of climate change are much more extreme than those of the IPCC.

Gore most recent flash of crazy came yesterday when he suggested that President Barack Obama’s poor debate performance in Denver on Wednesday was due to the high-altitude of the city:

Former vice president and environmental activist Al Gore suggested the altitude in Denver might be to blame for President Obama’s performance in Wednesday night’s debate.

“I’m going to say something controversial here,” Gore said on Current TV following the debate. “Obama arrived in Denver at 2 p.m. today, just a few hours before the debate started. [Mitt] Romney did his debate prep in Denver. When you go to 5,000 feet and you only have a few hours to adjust — I don’t know, maybe.”

Frankly, this is an astoundingly poor excuse for a bad debate performance. What’s more, no one is buying it — in fact, they’re laughing at Gore. WaPo’s Alexandra Petri probably said it best:

I just read a post over at ThinkProgress’ Climate Progress section called “Must-Read: A Guide for Engaging and Winning on Climate and Green Energy.” It looks to me, though, that what it really is is a proposal for liberals to just lie, mislead, obfuscate, or otherwise not know what the hell they are going on about.

Here’s point one of three:

Key Finding 1: Extreme Weather

Voters have taken note of the nation’s unusual and severe weather—the tornadoes, heat waves, wildfires, and drought. The public clearly gets that something is going on with the climate because they see it in their own lives and on the news. Some are still uncertain about the causes of climate disruption, but three out of four now recognize it is real

Newsflash: extreme weather is not new. Tornadoes, heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes have been with human beings for centuries. (And over that time, deaths attributable to extreme weather have dropped by 98%, so there.) There isn’t even a recent upturn in this weather either. And weather does not directly correlate to climate, which is the bigger thing. Just because there’s a storm outside doesn’t mean the world is dramatically changing; it’s mean there’s a damn storm outside. So ThinkProgress wants people to basically lie and mislead folks about this topic, which I suppose is par for the course.

The left loves to label free market types as enemies of Mother Earth.  However, I’ve said for a while that the left should probably start looking at how the free market can actually help them attain their goals with regard to the environment.  For example, many companies have adopted so-called “green” practices, not so much because of a social conscious, but because it allows them to position themselves as if they have a social conscious.

According to some data that isn’t exactly burning up the mainstream media, it looks like the free market is having a more direct impact on the environment, particularly with regard to CO2:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) June energy report says that energy-related carbon dioxide fell to 5,473 million metric tons (MMT) in 2011.

That’s down from a high of 6,020 MMT in 2007, and only a little above 1995’s level of 5,314 MMT.

Better yet, emissions in the first quarter of 2012 fell at an even faster rate — down 7.5% from the first quarter of 2011 and 8.5% from the same time in 2010. If the rest of 2012 follows its first-quarter trend, we may see total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions drop to early-1990s levels.

Awesome for the left, right?  I mean, surely that means some of their efforts are starting to show results. Well, I wouldn’t be so sure.  You see, Investors.com has another bit of data that should be considered:

While Barack Obama says that his administration is concerned about rising energy costs and has an “all of the above” energy plan, the Environmental Protection Agency has imposed new carbon emissions regulations new coal plants:

The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Industry officials and environmentalists said in interviews that the rule, which comes on the heels of tough new requirements that the Obama administration imposed on mercury emissions and cross-state pollution from utilities within the past year, dooms any proposal to build a coal-fired plant that does not have costly carbon controls.

While there may be an excuse for his perceived gaffe last week in Ohio, Mitt Romney has made another notable shift on an issue. This time Romney is reversing course on global warming, in hopes to appeal to conservatives:

Speaking at a closed-door fundraiser on Thursday in Pittsburgh, Romney’s position on the causes of global warming continued the rightward shift that has been underway for several months “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,” he told donors at Pittsburgh’s Consol Energy Center.

As recently as his 2010 book, No Apology, Romney wrote, “I believe that climate change is occurring.… I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor. I am uncertain how much of the warming, however, is attributable to man and how much is attributable to factors out of our control.”

In June of this year, Reuters reported that Romney said that the United States should “reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.”

To be sure, I actually agree with Romney’s more recent comments on the issue, but as the AP notes, Romney isn’t really helping himself with these reversals. And if/when he gets into the general election, Democrats aren’t going to give him a pass.

Rep. Hank Johnson, who’s probably most famous for his concern about the island of Guam tipping over due to large numbers of military personnel on the island, has made a statement that’s not as glaringly dumb…but it’s not far behind when you look at the numbers.  You see, Johnson was talking about Republican efforts to take a long, hard look at environmental regulations that they claim has caused increases in energy costs as well as the corollary impact on business.

“Since 1970, the Clean Air Act has reduced toxic and health-threatening air pollution by 60 percent while our economy has grown more than 200 percent,” Johnson said, and he’s essentially right.  PolitiFact took a look and found that his numbers are essentially dead on. So what’s the problem?  Well, only that it looks like growth was better before the Clean Air Act.

Johnson’s statement seems to imply that the Clean Air Act did not hurt the economy or even helped it. Wallace wasn’t sure a direct correlation can be made.

She researched GDP 10 years before the Clean Air Act passed and the 40 years since and concluded that the average annual growth was greater before 1970. “It’s kind of difficult to say it’s directly related,” Wallace told us.

Apparently, President Obama knew that solar company Solyndra was in trouble prior to his now infamous visit to the site.  For those with really short memories, that visit was to brag about how well government intervention into the private sector was working.  Unfortunately, Solyndra is now filing for bankruptcy and the president is feeling the heat.

From the National Journal:

New e-mails released Monday show the White House was warned about Solyndra’s potential problems even before President Obama visited the company’s Fremont, Calif., headquarters and used it as a backdrop for his push for renewable energy investment and green jobs.

“A number of us are concerned that the president is visiting Solyndra,” Steve Westly, managing partner of Westly Group, wrote in an e-mail to Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett on May 24, 2010, a day before the president’s well publicized trip to Solyndra. “[T]here is an increasing concern about the company because their auditors, Coopers and Lybrand, have issued a ‘going concern’ letter … Many of us believe the company’s cost structure will make it difficult for them to survive long term.”

Westly went on to ask Jarrett if he could check with the Energy Department to make sure its officials were comfortable with Solyndra’s finances.

“I just want to help protect the president from anything that could result in negative or unfair press,” Westly wrote. “If it’s too late to change/postpone the meeting, the president should be careful about unrealistic/optimistic forecasts that could haunt him in the next 18 months if Solyndra hits the wall, files for bankruptcy, etc.”

Well, I guess that part didn’t work out to well for them.