A free-market energy blog

An odd thing happened during Sunday night’s Superbowl game: Joe Romm at Climate Progress and I came to the same conclusion regarding  an environmentally controversial Superbowl commercial. We both thought the advertisement portraying Audi’s ability to thrive in an environmental police state with its ‘clean diesel’ technology missed its mark here in the U.S.

Sure, Romm wanted the Saints and I the Colts in the big game … and Joe would probably like the environmentalist police portrayed in the commercial, while I’d hate it. But still, there were areas of agreement between us, the big one being greenwashing.

As Romm puts it, casting a scurrilous aspersion on the appropriateness of Germanic humor:

I’m not sure the German car company understands that the idea of “Green Police” they are spoofing is, in fact, precisely what many conservatives in this country actually think is the primary reason people who care about the environment—the apparent target audience of this ad—are trying to get the nation to take action on global warming.

And by pointing out Audi’s incongruous focus on powerful cars, Romm sees a bit of greenwashing at work: “Audi isn’t perceived as a green car company, so they aren’t poking fun at themselves, a typically much safer strategy.”

Romm is right on this point. On their website, Audi’s vehicle descriptions focus on driving performance far more than environmental performance. Audi, we’re told, features “legendary,” “nimble,” and “supreme” performance (all euphemisms for high horsepower). The focus is clearly on “Legendary Audi Power,” rather than “Legendary Audi Environmentalism,” as the ad would suggest.

But I wouldn’t call that modest greenwashing, I’d call it blatant and shameless greenwashing–in a league with that of Al Gore, the head of the IPCC, most Hollywood green-advocates, the Obama Administration, and the Democrats in Congress, all of whom encourage others to live green lifestyles while consuming more energy per capita than some of the small countries they claim will be drowned by global-warming-induced sea level rise. And did I mention Nancy Pelosi’s entourage going to climate negotiations in Copenhagen? They put out enough carbon dioxide to fill 10,000 Olympic sized swimming pools! Now that’s a bodyprint, not a footprint, by green standards!

But Romm’s big concern probably isn’t about the state of Germanic humor, nor is it really about greenwashing (he’s all for that when various companies flog his favorite carbon-rationing schemes). It is that humor might inadvertently lead people to actually think about what a future of bag police, lightbulb police, foam-cup police, recycling police, plastic bottle police, and hot-tub-temperature police might be like, and view such a development with less than a humorous attitude.

Romm seems to be worried that Superbowl viewers might even connect the dots with the opinions of (shudder) right-leaning columnists such as Charles Krauthammer who had the ill grace to foreshadow a green police state, in 2008, when he opined:

Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect…. And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment — carbon chastity — they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Of course, we won’t have really have the  eco-police portrayed in the Audi spot. No, that’s much too blatant for the deep-green environmentalist types. They’re more fond of just banning things outright, like incandescent lightbulbs, two-ply toilet tissue and flush-toilets, or slapping taxes (directly or indirectly) on things like carbon emissions, plastic and paper bags, houses with large lot-sizes, air travel, etc.

What I found most amusing was the eerie resonance between the Audi commercial, and some spoof-PSA spots such as this one, poking fun at water conservation, produced by a pro-tobacco Canadian public relations firm. Sadly, the PR firm has pulled their anti-environmentalist PSA spoofs from their websites. I suppose that opposing recycling is too much even for a pro-tobacco group.

All of which goes to show, when it comes to environmentalism, there’s only one answer to jokes such as “how many environmentalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

Answer? “That is NOT funny!”

P.S.: Apparently, Dave Roberts of Grist also disliked the Audi commercial, saying “Is it me or were the Super Bowl commercials this year unusually ugly, misogynistic, and, worst of all, unfunny? Of course, Roberts seems absolutely fascinated by the idea of declaring people who disagree with him “teabaggers,” which is either a heterophobic slander or a homophobic one, depending on your sexual orientation, I suppose. But of course, as we all know, the left-wing is exempt from accusations of phobism, if they do say so themselves.

Editor note: Julian Simon is a primary inspiration for this free-market energy blog, the name of which comes from his characterization of energy as the master resource.

Twelve years ago today came the shocking news: Julian Simon, age 65, had died of heart failure after his regular morning workout in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He had undiagnosed heart disease.

Just two months before, I had visited extensively with Simon when he came Houston to give what would be his last major address, titled: “More People, Greater Wealth, Expanded Resources, Cleaner Environment.” A full house of 200 heard Simon that day, and one in attendance, free-market entrepreneur Gordon Cain, was so impressed that he mailed Simon an unsolicited $25,000 check for research.

Simon invited me to coauthor an energy paper with him for a conference he was planning. This excited me, as did his warm inscription to my first edition copy of The Ultimate Resource. After all, he was the latest major influence on me in a line of thinkers that began with Ayn Rand and had continued with Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Not unlike other libertarians, I had gone from individualism-is-cool (Rand’s The Fountainhead) to free-markets-work (Mises’s Human Action) to the-perils-of-government-planning (Hayek, various).

I am not the only one to list Simon alongside other top classical liberal/libertarian scholars. Don Boudreaux, chair of the department of economics at George Mason University, wrote:

The three scholars who have had the the greatest impact on my own thinking are F. A. Hayek, James Buchanan, and Julian Simon….  [Simon's] vital idea of “the ultimate resource”  … is one of the most profound—and least understood—in all of the social sciences.

 Dear Professor Simon,

I have never before written a fan letter to a professional colleague, but to discover that you have in your Economics of Population Growth provided the empirical evidence for what with me is the result of a life-time of theoretical speculation, is too exciting an experience not to share it with you. The upshot of my theoretical work has been the conclusion that those traditional rules of conduct (esp. of several property) which led to the greatest increases of the numbers of the groups practicing them leads to their displacing the others — not on “Darwinian” principles but because based on the transmission of learned rules — a concept of evolution which is much older than Darwin.

I doubt whether welfare economics has really much helped you to the right conclusions. I claim as little as you do that population growth as such is good — only that it is the cause of the selection of the morals which guide our individual action. It follows, of course, that our fear of a population explosion is unjustified so long as the local increases are the result of groups being able to feed larger numbers, but may become a severe embarrassment if we start subsidizing the growth of groups unable to feed themselves.

Sincerely, F. A.Hayek

Hayek wrote a second letter upon reading The Ultimate Resource: [Read more →]

Suppose you began this morning by learning that some investors and developers had stepped forward with a reportedly new type of commercial grade electrical power called “Zephyr Integrated Power” (ZIP). Being clever, they are spending a LOT of time and money marketing ZIP, knowing that this is their chance to break into the grid in a BIG way.

Their message– ZIP is “FREE, CLEAN, AND GREEN”–sounds great! Oh yes, and for good measure, ZIP will create oodles of jobs.

So the basic question is this: exactly what do we do before we allow these people and their new product on the electric grid?

We wouldn’t be so gullible to just take their word for it, would we? Yet this is exactly what we are doing today!

And there is more: our politicians are so enamored with ZIP that they tell these promoters that we will not only allow them on the grid, we will FORCE utilities to use ZIP. (Hmmm. Wouldn’t utilities WANT to use ZIP if it was so great?) How are utilities going to be forced to use ZIP? Lobbyists have sold our politicians a clever tool called the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to do just that.

Yet there is more. Despite the supposed benefits (which a free market would obviously jump on without government involvement), our wise government is going to offer the ZIP promoters billions of dollars of taxpayer money and ratepayer guarantees to support their product.

Remember, all this is without independent proof that ZIP has any real benefits…

Sadly, this astounding state of affairs is how our currently lobbyist-driven system operates.

Policy Proposal for the Environmental Left

The Left looks to government to do good things for the environment. My Pollyanna vision is that complex technical matters should be solved by science. So here is my (government-involved) proposal (with apologies to the libertarian bloggers and readers of MasterResource). It would go something like this… [Read more →]

In the face of a changing fiscal and political environment, Congress and various states are belatedly rethinking their far-flung  efforts to restructure and regulate the nation’s energy markets. The opportunity is to change course and base their actions on facts, not emotion–and slow down and even reverse governmental largesse. The global warming scare has been cut down to size, after all, and the problems of politically dependent energies are more evident than ever.

Too many legislators and interventionists cling to basic energy myths, however. Here are five major ones.

Myth: Foreign Oil Provides Most of Our Energy

According to the U.S. Department of Energy and the Energy Information Administration, oil represents less than 40% of our energy use. A full two-thirds of that oil comes from North America, primarily Canada, not the Middle East.

A related myth is that alternative energy sources will reduce the use of petroleum. Such sources may first reduce domestic production, but they will not appreciably affect production in unstable regions.

Renewable technologies are subject to import and price security concerns as well. And the equipment for 65% of the wind installations in the U.S. in the past five years have come from foreign sources, including China. Moreoever, rare earth metal ores such as lanthanum and neodymium are vital to electric car batteries and some renewable energy are concentrated in China, for example, and Beijing favors export restrictions.

Myth: Renewables Will Replace Conventional Energy Sources

A correlated and persistent myth is that increasing wind- and solar-generated electricity will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and thus boost our energy security. Less than 1% of our electricity is generated using petroleum, so any renewable generation will have no appreciable effect on petroleum demand. [Read more →]

The typical pulverized coal power plant in the U.S. is about 35 years old, yet the fleet will continue to operate for many years to come. New coal-fired plants, meanwhile, will continue to enter service but at a slow rate. There may not be a future price for carbon dioxide (CO2) given the dramatic scientific and political developments that we are going through, but cheap natural gas makes it difficult to justify the higher up-front costs of a new coal plant.

Still, there is significant new electricity generation capacity is possible from these older plants, perhaps as much as 30,000 MW–twice EIA’s projected growth of coal power over the next two decades. In addition, new technology upgrades have the potential of improving the operating efficiency by 3% to 5%. But the impediment for such win-wins is the risk of a New Source Review violation, years of litigation, and possibly fines.

Given the Obama Administration’s stance against coal, many attendees of the National Coal Council’s December meeting were caught flat-footed when DOE Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy James Markowsky suggested an exception be made under Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR) program. Mr. Markowsky proposed easing the NSR requirements for power plants that make modifications to improve their operating efficiency–assuming those plants would be good candidates for a later retrofit of a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) system.

Markowsky’s trial balloon also suggested that candidate plants would already have installed flue gas desulfurization (FGD) systems. The concept is intriguing but doesn’t go near far enough in solving the nation’s energy woes.

NSR Definitions Remain Murky

NSR is the process established by the Clean Air Act (CAA) that requires utilities to add a host of new and expensive emission controls should they make any “major modifications” to the plant that increase emissions. The definition of a major modification has been the subject of numerous court battles since the Clinton Administration yet stills remains murky. Even when upgrades were discussed with the EPA in advance of their installation, Justice has routinely lowered the legal boom on utilities that made common maintenance changes to their plants The usual result has been a decade of legal maneuvering followed by a consent decree agreement where the utility agrees to install new emission controls and pay a fine. [Read more →]

Posts at MasterResource have highlighted the Left’s growing Civil War on climate policy. James Hansen, in particular, has called for the rejection of (Enronesque) cap-and-trade, as well as for the failure of the Copenhagen approach to climate policy.

More recently, the Hard Left (Bill McKibben, John Passacantando, etc.) has heated-up over Joseph Romm’s dismissal of cap-and-dividend as “cap-and-divide.” Here’s the comment of longtime Greenpeace head Passacantando on Romm’s post:

Joe, as a longtime reader of your blog I find your hostility towards an innovative approach perplexing …. I don’t think a legislative alternative to what appears to be a dead approach … is in any way divisive. Cap and dividend (the CLEAR Act) is a smart policy alternative, a real Plan B, filling in the current vacuum.

Romm would have none of it (remember, he works for the ObamaTank, a.k.a Center for American Progress).

I don’t find the approach “innovative” except in a sense they have found a way of siphoning off support from an effort that might actually lead to a bill that might preserve a global deal. Cap and Divide is a political dead end which is also environmentally inadequate. What more can one say? In that regard, it is much “worse” than Waxman-Markey, which, after all, passed the House. The only reason you and [Bill] McKibben [and James Hansen?] don’t know Cap-and-Divide is a political dead end is because it never even had enough political support to have been alive in the first place….

Obviously we need something other than W-M. But cap and divide ain’t it. The main thing that its ardent supporters in the environmental movement are doing is shrinking the political space available for an actual climate bill that Graham, Lieberman, Kerry and the White House are trying to put together.

The growing Civil War on the Left–with Romm to the Right Left–is a sight to behold for many longtime participants in the great climate debate.

Now to Bob Herbert at the New York Times. [Read more →]

“Unrestricted mobility is every bit as important to American freedom and economic health than health care reform. I hope that the people who have fought socialized health care will work just as hard to fight the congestion coalition.”  – R. O’Toole

The United States is the most mobile nation on earth, with the average American traveling nearly twice as many miles per year as the average resident of any other country. That mobility, the vast majority of which is provided by automobiles, has produced enormous benefits, including higher incomes, lower cost consumer goods, better housing, and access to a wide variety of social and recreational opportunities.

Transportation touches everyone’s lives every single day, and most American have to deal with traffic congestion several times a week. So when Congress takes up the subject of federal transportation funding, which it does every six years, people ought to be as concerned as they have been in the ongoing health-care debate.

This is especially true because there is a congestion coalition of powerful interests that wants to reduce our mobility. This coalition includes: 

1. Big city officials who view the suburbs as rivals;
2. Downtown property owners who similarly would like to limit the growth of edge cities;
3. Rail contractors who make far larger profits building;
4. Subsidized rail lines than from roads paid for out of highway user fees;
5. Urban planners who think Americans should be happy to live in cramped, European-like cities;
6. Natural area advocates who think no one should be allowed to live in rural areas except for an elite few who know how to appreciate nature; and
7. Environmentalists who argue getting people out of their cars is critical to stopping global warming.

The Obama administration has gladly joined this coalition, saying it wants to emphasize livability, not mobility. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood recently threw out rules designed to insure that federal transportation funds are cost-effectively spent. Instead, LaHood prefers projects that do not encourage “urban sprawl.” Since the low-densities that planners derisively call sprawl are a direct result of mobility, LaHood is saying he wants to fund wasteful transportation projects that don’t truly enhance personal mobility. [Read more →]

Joseph Romm heavily edits the comments at his top-rated energy/environmental blog, Climate Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress. (The more academic, one-post-per-day MasterResource is #14 of 2,800 “green blogs” as of 1/31/10 per Technorati, not too bad for being 13 months old.)

Dr. Romm will not publicly debate his distinguished opponents either, just as Paul Ehrlich refused to debate the late Julian Simon. Though thin-skinned and trigger happy, Romm has not attempted to rebut a four-part post at the Breakthrough Institute by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, et al., Joe Romm and Climate McCarthyism, a widely disseminated and discussed event on the Left. (Updates on the Romm series are available at the Breakthrough Institute blog.)

Nor will Romm show the courage of his convictions by betting on his predicted global warming trend, which has led some to speculate that Romm deep down is really a global lukewarmer. In a similar vein, a reasonable oil production bet offered by Michael Lynch to put Romm’s peak-oil belief to the test has also been ignored by the uber-confident senior fellow at CAP.

Critics may ask: Is the MIT doctorate who commands a top bully pulpit for the Party in Power an intellectual scarecrow?

Yet sometimes loyal readers at Climate Progress reveal much in their (permitted) comments. And they are fighting the blues as the key issue to which they are emotionally chained continues to fray, politically and intellectually.

Retreating Romm

Romm himself has waxed and waned in the great climate tumult of the last year, often retreating to an I’ll-take-anything position in the service of the Obama agenda. Once a flaming radical, Romm as a Democratic Party operative is now an incrementalist. And his  incrementalism has shrunk with new developments. It must be sad for climate Left veterans to read such Romm statements as the outcome of Copenhagen being a glass two-thirds full. [Read more →]

The New York Times dutifully featured this week two media events primed to gin up public—and Congressional—support for industrial wind technology.

The first was a “study“ by the Department of Energy and authored primarily by David Corbus of the National Renewable Energy Lab. It claims that, for a startup cost of around $100 billion public dollars, “wind could displace coal and natural gas for 20 to 30 percent of the electricity used in the eastern two-thirds of the United States by 2024.” Corbus acknowledged that such an enterprise would require substantial grid modification but said the $100 billion was “really, really small compared to other costs,” which the Times failed to identify.

A few days later, the paper of record ballyhooed the annual report of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), which touted the growth of wind last year and projected that the country would soon get 2 percent of its electricity from wind energy. The report fretted about the American wind gap with Europe, which AWEA alleged gets 5 percent of its electricity from wind, compared to only about 1 percent in the USA, while stating “Denmark has essentially achieved that goal already, and sometimes produces more wind power than it can use.”

AWEA’s stalking horse for this PR event, energy consultant Tim Stephure, said, “By 2020 wind’s installed capacity could be five times higher than it is today, reaching about 180,000 megawatts.”

To achieve this goal, from its present base of 35,000 wind turbines and an installed capacity of about 35,000 MW, the industry must build, in each of the next ten years, an installed capacity of 14,500 MW.  This is pure speculation and, more accurately, nonsense. [Read more →]

The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often held up as representing “the consensus of scientists”—a pretty grandiose and presumptuous claim. And one that in recent days, weeks, and months, has been unraveling. So too, therefore, must all of the secondary assessments that are based on the IPCC findings—the most notable of which is the EPA’s Endangerment Finding—that “greenhouse gases taken in combination endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”

Recent events have shown, rather embarrassingly, that the IPCC is not “the” consensus of scientists, but rather the opinions of a few scientists (in some cases as few as one) in various subject areas whose consensus among themselves is then kludged together by the designers of the IPCC final product who a priori know what they want the ultimate outcome to be (that greenhouse gases are leading to dangerous climate change and need to be restricted). So clearly you can see why the EPA (who has a similar objective) would decide to rely on the IPCC findings rather than have to conduct an independent assessment of the science with the same predetermined outcome. Why go through the extra effort to arrive at the same conclusion?

The EPA’s official justification for its reliance on the IPCC’s findings is that it has reviewed the IPCC’s “procedures” and found them to be exemplary.

Below is a look at some things, recently revealed, that the IPCC “procedures” have produced. These recent revelations indicate that the “procedures” are not infallible and that highly publicized IPCC results are either wrong or unjustified—which has the knock-on effect of rendering the IPCC an unreliable source of information. Unreliable doesn’t mean wrong in all cases, mind you, just that it is hard to know where and when errors are present, and as such, the justification that “the IPCC says so” is no longer sufficient (or acceptable). [Read more →]