“Since economic models are trained to match climate models, if climate models overstate the effect of CO2 emissions, economic models will overstate the social damages associated with them. “
The fact that CO2 emissions lead to changes in the atmospheric carbon concentration is not controversial. Nor is the fact that CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) absorb infrared energy in the atmosphere and contribute to the overall greenhouse effect.
Increases in CO2 levels are therefore expected to lead to atmospheric warming, and this is the basis for the current push to enact policies to reduce GHG emissions. For more than 25 years, climate models have reported a wide span of estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 emissions, ranging from relatively benign to potentially catastrophic, reflecting a wide range of assumptions about how the climate system may or may not amplify the effects of GHG emissions.…
Continue ReadingTwo weeks ago, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) hosted a state-of-the-art climate and energy conference in the nation’s energy capital of Houston. The global warming establishment may have stayed away, but a large crowd was treated to a sound, multi-disciplinary review of the physical science, political economy, and resource economics.
The evening keynote for At The Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit was an address by Texas Governor Rick Perry. While Perry’s general public policy positions are free-market–and thus pro-consumer and pro-taxpayer–his energy security, don’t-import-but-export argument smacks of Mercantilism and U.S.-side protectionism. Furthermore, Perry pulled his punches regarding the conference’s major themes on climate and energy policy. It was a timid, uninspired keynote just when the momentum dictated going the other way.
Soft on Climate Propoganda
Perry could have, should have, reiterated the conference’s major themes: the 15–20 year ‘pause’ in global warming; lowered climate sensitivity estimates (and explanation for the same in the peer-reviewed literature); the desperate, speculative tie-in’s between anthropogenic climate change and extreme weather events (if there has been no warming, how can ‘climate change’ be involved?);…
Continue Reading“This proposal delivers its ‘green’ energy at roughly twice the cost of a LA-basin gas-generated power, estimates energy expert Tom Tanton, since transmission losses from Wyoming to LA would be between 10 and 11 percent. This is surely a project that should be taken with a grain, or a chunk, of salt.”
California, trying to desalinize their drinking and irrigation water, is floating the idea of buying and storing renewable energy in a salt mine near Salt Lake City as part of a plan to get ‘green’ electrons to Los Angeles. This technology-over-economics, cost-be-damned project would use an existing Utah-to-California transmission line previously dedicated to coal-by-wire from the Intermountain Coal Power Plant.
This scheme, a joint venture by Pathfinder Energy, Magnum Energy, Dresser-Rand and Duke-American Transmission, is based on the purported success of a preexisting energy storage project in Alabama that uses compressed air stored in natural caverns to power electricity producing generators.…
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