Freedom Line Blog

On yesterday’s “Hardball”, Democratic strategist (and promiscuous presidential campaign kamikaze) Bob Shrum got into an almost unwatchable scrimmage over global warming and the Copenhagen Conference with Pat Buchanan.  In a tag-team effort with host Chris Matthews, Shrum tried to side-step the epistemological questions surrounding climate change by invoking the analogy of carrying fire insurance.

This meme, which has started showing up in Democratic talking points lately, tries to get around climate uncertainty by invoking the “precautionary principle”: that it’s prudent to take decisive action proportional to a catastrophic threat even if the potential of that threat being realized is miniscule. This irrational doctrine has been part of the environmental left’s catechism for decades, but its appearance in the political sphere shows that liberals are becoming sensitive to the fallout over Climategate and trying to reframe their position as a common sense hedge against catastrophe.  Wrong.

The Precautionary Principle sounds good in a vacuum (who caucuses for increased risk, after all?), but is (ironically) non-empirical in its application. All of life is a matter of weighing probable rewards versus probable risks. Jettisoning this cost-benefit principle on a serious policy issue is dangerous — and the insurance analogy shows why.

Think about how fire insurance actually works. You pay a miniscule fee to hedge against the minute possibility of a catastrophic outcome. But that’s not how carbon abatement schemes work. First of all, there’s no pool to socialize risk within. As an inherently global “crisis”, everyone is supposedly effected — so it’s impossible to cross-subsidize in the way that insurance plans do. But more importantly, you wouldn’t buy fire insurance that costs exponentially more than the likely damage from a fire — and that’s what the economic disaster represented by cap and trade and other such schemes would mean.

Liberals can’t get their head around the fact that there’s only so much value swimming around in an economy (regardless of the money supply).  If you use some of it in one place, you can’t use it in another. And when government mandates its use, it’s almost always less efficient than the private sector. This is called an opportunity cost. It’s usually covered in the first few days of an elementary economics course. This is what happens when we elect people who cut that class for a Sierra Club meeting.

A hat tip to James Delingpole of The Daily Telegraph (UK) is in order for his continuing coverage of the metastasizing Climategate controversy. The Russians are now weighing in with charges that global warming alarmists used only 25% of data reported by Russian scientists; intentionally leaving out information showing no signs of warming. Much of this doctored research was in turn folded into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report, the definitive statement supporting the calls for international regulation of energy consumption. (For a counter-argument using all the available climate data, see this report published by the Heartland Institute.) With the Copenhagen climate conference degenerating into anarchy and finger-pointing soon there may be another appellation added to “discredited” and “fraudulent”: convicted.

As Lord Christopher Monkton explains in this interview, he and another climate skeptic are requesting prosecution of the researchers responsible for destroying information sought through Britain’s version of the Freedom of Information Act. Others are calling for investigations into whether there is a case for criminal fraud against scientists using government grants to produce misleading reports. Many of the people who’ve profited from this scurrilous research are present or arriving in Copenhagen. When looking back on the group photos a few years from now, one wonders how many of them will be behind bars, owing millions in damages, or drummed out of office. Most likely, not enough.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasts that current climate change legislation in the Senate will increase spending by $833 billion.

According to the budget office, not only would Cap-and-Trade legislation effectively tax and regulate all carbon emissions in the country, but it would also add $854 billion to federal coffers.

The cost estimate concluded, “CBO estimates that the annual cost of [cap-and-trade] would amount to tens of billions of dollars for private-sector entities and hundreds of millions of dollars for public entities… Public and private entities would also be required to report information on greenhouse gases to a federal registry.”

In short, the bill is an unmitigated disaster and must be defeated.

Click here for the CBO study.  More of CFIF on climate change here and here.

barbaric:   (1) Of, relating to, or characteristic of barbarians.   (2) Crude or unrestrained in taste, style, or behavior.

Perhaps California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is simply desperate to retain some element of his fading spotlight as he drifts toward political retirement?  After all, we live in the age of reality TV, in which even self-embarrassment such as White House party-crashing is an acceptable price for publicity.

Sadly, that possibility would be preferable to the possibility that he’s simply lost what remained of his intellectual bearing.

Appearing today on ABC’s Good Morning, America, Schwarzenegger attempted to outdo even the Obama White House on the topic of climate change absurdity.  Even though he has presided over California as it has hemorrhaged jobs and descended to economic basket-case status, partly due to costly state environmental policies, he denied any contradiction between the global warming agenda and economic prosperity, saying, “we in California have proven it over and over that you can protect the economy, and you can protect the environment.  I don’t think you have to choose.  I think it is nonsense talk to say ‘let’s talk first about the economy.'”

Apparently oblivious to the Climategate scandal surrounding the global warming activists at Britain’s University of East Anglia, he went so far as to say that on the issue of global warming, we should “pay more attention to the universities.”  And ignoring California’s catastrophic loss of jobs to surrounding business-friendly states, Schwarzenegger continued, “in California, the biggest job creation is in green technology, we have seen an increase there of over 36%, we have been increasing the amount of jobs in all those different areas.”

Perhaps most preposterously, the man who played Conan the Barbarian had the audacity to label anyone who rightfully questions man-made global warming hysteria as “still living in the Stone Age.”

No, Governor Schwarzenegger, you’re the one who has continuously regressed back to the Stone Age with such profoundly mindless comments as these during your tenure.  What a sad, sad spectacle for a once-promising political newcomer and purported reformer.

Was Chicago-style political thuggery the type of “hope and change” for which Americans voted in 2008?

Either way, that’s the White House’s emerging modus operandi.

Intially, the Obama Administration at least paid lip service to bipartisanship, even if the reality behind closed doors was quite different.  But with the EPA’s recent determination that everyday carbon dioxide constitutes a “dangerous pollutant,” Obama has abandoned even that pretense.  According to an anonymous White House source quoted by Fox News, the EPA’s absurd ruling is a bald political tactic to bludgeon the Senate and the business community into accepting carbon cap-and-tax legislation:

If you don’t pass this legislation, then … the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area.  And it’s not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

The House of Representatives passed a cap-and-tax bill by razor-thin margins, but its prospects in the Senate appeared slim.  Meanwhile, many business coalitions have refused to play ball in the White House’s game of global warming hysteria.  Enter the team of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, with their ugly form of Chicago politics.

As Obama’s popularity falls to record lows for a President at this stage, and with his extremist agenda in increasing jeopardy, we should prepare for more.

Bjorn Lomborg is probably the coolest head when it comes to global warming and climate change.  Rather than dispute the science – a task ably engaged in by Lord Christopher Monckton, among others – Lomborg takes aim at the Environmental Left’s specious claim that regulating energy consumption enables human flourishing.  If the goal is to help people, then why not get the biggest bang for a nation’s tax dollars?  As Lomborg points out:

The choice is stark: for a few hundred million dollars, we could help almost half of humanity now. Compare this to the investments to tackle climate change – $40 trillion annually by the end of the century – which would save a hundred times fewer starving people. For every person saved from malnutrition through climate policies, the same money could have saved half a million people from micronutrient malnutrition through direct policies.

Some argue that the choice between spending money on carbon cuts and on direct policies is unfair. But it is a basic fact that no dollar can be spent twice. Rich countries and donors have limited budgets and attention spans. If we spend vast amounts of money on carbon cuts in the belief that we are stopping malaria and reducing malnutrition, we are less likely to put aside money for the direct policies that would help today. Indeed, for every dollar spent on strong climate policies, we will likely do about $0.02 of good for the future. If we spent the same dollar on simple policies to help malnutrition or malaria now, we could do $20 or more good – 1,000 times better, when all impacts are taken into account.

If you haven’t encountered Lomborg before, here’s a link to his website.  If you want to read a sensible viewpoint on using scarce resources to improve life for the most people possible, there’s no better place to start.  Now, if Bjorn could just get Al Gore to debate him…

What do Obamanomics and global warming hysteria have in common?

A numbers hoax.

As anyone outside the deepest redoubts of the Daily Kos and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann knows, the foundation underlying the global warming agenda is crumbling.  This is the result of revelations of politically-correct climate scientists explicitly attempting to distort data, blacklist opposing viewpoints and redefine what constitutes scholarly publication on the subject.  Even the shameless Al Gore has been embarrassed enough to avoid the climate change summit taking place in Copenhagen this month.

In a similar manner, the data trumpeted by the Obama White House to justify its “stimulus” efforts has been exposed.  Last week, the chief of the board tracking stimulus spending announced that inspectors will review the data underlying Obama’s claim that he “saved or created” approximately 650,000 jobs.  This number was announced in October of this year, only to be quickly refuted.  Among other things, the estimate included non-existent Congressional districts, and dozens of jobs purportedly created by grants of less than $1,000.

Although these two news items have received well-deserved attention, few people have connected them.  The simple fact is that two of the greatest icons of liberal thought – global warming and government spending – have been exposed as reliant upon fraudulent data.  When the White House wonders why its poll numbers continue to plummet to unprecedented lows and voters begin to smell the coffee, perhaps they merely need to read the news.

The Obama Administration increasingly resembles an oceanliner captain who stubbornly responds to iceberg alarms by shifting to full speed ahead.

Ignoring recent news of declining global temperatures and the Climategate scandal that has shaken global warming activism to its core, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) yesterday declared carbon dioxide a “dangerous pollutant.”

That’s right – the gas that we all exhale and that plants inhale is suddenly a toxin.

The political cynicism behind this maneuver is obvious.  Barack Obama and climate change alarmists (notice, by the way, how they dropped the term “global warming” when the temperature data became too inconvenient) know that passing draconian carbon cap-and-tax legislation in the foreseeable future is nearly impossible.  Consequently, they have used the EPA to arrogantly shove their agenda through, or at least as a threat to Senators and big business lobbyists that the alternative to Congressional cap-and-tax is even worse.

Fortunately, the EPA’s reckless, mindless and arrogant maneuver will be challeneged in court.  But in the meantime, we’re left to wonder whether there’s any limit to the destructive efforts the Obama White House will shove down Americans’ throats in order to placate the extremist left wing.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses “Climategate” and the costly agenda of global warming alarmists.

Whither evidence-based public policy? In the wake of the metastasizing scandal over falsified global warming data, the Obama Administration is acting as though the only debate over climate change is when to stop it. As Richard Wolffe reports, President Obama’s recent Asia trip was a crucial part of brokering a deal to set new restrictions on carbon emissions at next month’s Copenhagen conference.

Beyond the photo ops and press statements, Obama was pushing President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the kind of climate deals that eluded him at the G8 summit in Italy in the summer – and have eluded international negotiators for the last decade. China and India have played central roles in blocking past agreements, alongside the US, in a seemingly intractable dispute between fast-developing economies and the older, wealthier polluters.

Now Obama is at the point where he feels on the verge of a breakthrough, based on the kind of talks that don’t get covered by reporters obsessing about state dinners. “He had extensive conversations with President Hu specifically on climate and conversations with the prime minister of India,” said one senior White House aide. “So he has been building momentum for a political agreement to be brokered at Copenhagen.”

This is another example of what Obama meant during the campaign when he said as president he would “turn the page” on the old debates dividing America. Then, as now, the only page turning to be done is when it dismisses the opposition as unserious and uninformed. How tragic if the president succeeds in realizing Al Gore’s dream of a voluntary global energy contraction just as news is surfacing that the very data supporting it is corrupt.

In spite of the dubious value of his recent trip to Asia, now comes an announcement that President Obama will be traveling to the glorified photo op that is the denuded climate change meeting in Copenhagen on his way to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize. In both cases Obama’s presence was assured only after any meaningful criteria were removed.
The only meaningful accomplishment possible at Copenhagen is scheduling another meeting next year. And of course, no single person on the planet can claim to live in a greater state of peace after 10 months of Hope and Change. Such is the Obama approach to international relations, which is looking and sounding resolute when there is nothing able to be resolved.

Apologies for the misleading headline.  According to recent reports by climatologists, it’s actually been several years since the globe we call Earth ceased warming.  Although many global warming alarmists are at a loss to explain how a supposedly constant increase in global temperature could stop without warning (and just before a conference to fund its decrease), that doesn’t mean the cause for the sudden cessation is unknown.  In fact, the real head scratcher here is how the mainstream media missed the obvious reason for winning the war on climate change.

Since at least 1970, Ed Begley, Jr. has waged a one man war for the environment.  That year he bought his first electric car and celebrated the first Earth Day.  As detailed in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Begley is SERIOUS about his eco-responsibilities.  He cooks food in a solar oven that “sits in the yard and gets up to about 375 degrees on a sunny day.”  When he dies he wants to put his 205 pounds of organic matter to good use.  “I want to be buried with a cardboard box and a sheet and put in the earth.”  After all, we come from the earth, and return to the earth, right?

But life for an eco-warrior and global warming stopper isn’t just about capping your cooking temperatures and trading in your coffin.  There are hassles too.  According to Begley, the worst thing about being green is “when you don’t have a recycling bin nearby and you have to carry garbage around in your car to get it home.”  That would be the two bedroom, one and a half bath home he shares with his wife and daughter.  It’s also the one he’s plowed steady sums of money into adding a bevy of cutting-edge technologies to reduce his carbon footprint.

So while the climatologists scramble to fix their computer models and the diplomats try to convince each other that spending for a warmer day is still needed (if not necessary), remember the man who through eco-mortification and carbon penance became the green hued saint that saved the planet.  (Until it starts warming again…)

Since he was inaugurated last January, Barack Obama has broken almost all of the promises he earnestly made as a candidate, from pledges of bipartisanship to not raising taxes on anyone earning under $250,000.  Indeed, he even gave a preview to his future behavior when he jettisoned his pledge to abide by public campaign finance limits as soon as he secured the Democrats’ nomination.

But not all of Obama’s broken promises are bad.

Last November, he promised immediate action to impose climate change hysteria as official federal policy, saying, “now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all.  Delay is no longer an option.”

Well, maybe not.  This past weekend, Obama announced that there would be no international carbon cap-and-tax accord when world leaders meet in Copenhagen, Denmark next month.  That’s good news for strapped American taxpayers and businesses, but unwelcome news for sniveling Europeans, who are doing their left-wing Joe Wilson imitation by branding Obama a liar.

We would’ve preferred that Obama join Europeans in celebrating the Berlin Wall’s demise last week, but we can at least be thankful for the small blessing that he’s also offending the Euro global-warming alarmists.

One of the more frustrating aspects of debunking worldwide climate change hysteria is the false notion that a consensus exists that global warming is man-made.

On that front, there’s good news to report for those of us who prefer sobriety to fashionability.  According to a new Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll, a 47% to 37% plurality believes that climate change results more from long-term planetary causes than human activity.  Considering the fact that temperatures have declined since eleven years ago, and that global cooling was the trendy hysteria just thirty years ago, it’s refreshing to know that Americans are on to the scam.

And dangerously for Barack Obama, Americans by 50% to 20% believe that he still considers global warming man-made.  Thus, like ObamaCare, this means that more Americans view his agenda as one opposing theirs, creating a precarious phenomenon for him.  As he prepares to travel to Copenhagen to once again bow before the false international gods of global warming at the expense of America’s economy and taxpayers, it’s something of which his bumbling staff had better become aware.

In a sign that trying to scare or shame people into supporting “climate change” regulation isn’t working, some Environmental groups are emphasizing the positive aspects of legislating in the Earth’s name. A sample:

Now, some groups have muted their alarms about wildfires, shrinking glaciers and rising seas. Not because they’ve stopped caring about them — but because they’re trying to win over people who might care more about a climate bill’s non-environmental side benefits, such as ‘green’ jobs and reduced oil imports.”

Perhaps the best evidence that the Environmental Left is learning the popularity of arguing for American held jobs and reducing our dependence on foreign oil is the opening statement by an activist to a group of college students in Kansas:

Take climate change off the table, okay?” Jackson said, after reciting evidence that the climate really is changing. “You don’t have to buy it for everything I’m about to say, because everything we do [to combat climate change] is a good idea for at least three other reasons.”

Not all Environmental groups agree with this new wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing approach.  Their intent to keep focusing on alarming the public about impending doom makes it difficult to know who to root for.  On the one hand, it’s nice to know at least some people on the Left want to maintain truth in advertising.  On the other, it’s a compliment of sorts to have the opposition parroting conservative arguments because they’re persuasive to neutral audiences.  Either way, the discord won’t  help pass climate change legislation.  Thank goodness.

With all the focus this week on off-year elections and the impending House healthcare vote this Saturday, it would be easy to miss the steady progress of two “climate change” proposals. The first is a bill approved today by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. If signed into law it would require industry to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. As usual, the committee’s Chairwoman, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), thinks “this is a great signal for Copenhagen that there’s a will to do what it takes to advance this issue.”

Why does Senator Boxer care about Copenhagen? Because that’s the next destination on the U.N.’s perpetual climate change treaty writing circuit. For months, supporters of creating an internationally binding treaty to enforce hard caps on emissions and “carbon reparations” payments from rich to poor countries have seen the December meeting in Copenhagen as the moment when the Al Gore-negotiated Kyoto Protocol could become global. Boxer, with the help of the Obama Administration, is ready to put taxpayer money where the Environmental Left’s mouth is.

One snag though. Apparently, the global economic recession is putting the brakes on countries’ ability to raise taxes without creating jobs or improving infrastructure. How odd. Now the treaty’s negotiators are talking as if it may take another year to get an agreement signed. Thankfully, such a timetable puts any ratification decision by the U.S. Senate after next year’s mid-term elections. As the 2010 campaign issues continue to pile up, people looking to rebuke Obama & Co. for healthcare reform can also send a message that higher taxes, greater wealth redistribution, and lower productivity are as unpopular when imposed by foreign powers as they are when mandated domestically.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, penned a great op-ed in Roll Call this week about the climate change legislation (aka Cap-and-Trade) being pushed by the Obama White House and the majority leadership in Congress.

No matter how many times Congress debates it, and no matter how environmentalists couch it, cap-and-trade will do virtually nothing to stop global warming, and cap-and-trade, as Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said, ‘is a tax, and a great big one.’ These are the fundamentals in the cap-and-trade debate…

We need to remind the American public, for example, that the 1,400-page Waxman-Markey monstrosity is a monument to big government that will make food, gasoline and electricity more expensive, increase mandates on small businesses, and increase the size and reach of the federal bureaucracy — all while doing nothing to affect climate change.

The Kerry-Boxer legislation introduced Sept. 30 is, in many ways, worse than the Waxman-Markey bill. This reflects the attitude of one of the bill’s sponsors, who said recently that, because of the recession, businesses should be expected to make even more expensive emissions reductions. While it’s never a good time to pass a national energy tax, one would have thought that imposing such a tax during a recession is especially bad.”

Read the full column here.

Psssst…  Want to see Al Gore undressed?

Then watch this video.  After foolishly agreeing to participate in a Q&A during a gathering of “environmental journalists,” Gore didn’t expect to find himself exposed by questions pointing out the myth that is man-made global warming alarmism.  But exposed he was, by Irish film producer and director Phelim McAleer.  Predictably, Mr. McAleer’s microphone was quickly silenced, but not before he made Al Gore sweat and puff.  Coming at the end of a week in which even the BBC openly wondered “What Happened to Global Warming?,” it just wasn’t a very good week for poor Al Gore.

In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that we must “invest” $10 trillion over the upcoming 20 years to stop global warming.  That’s $500 billion per year, and we’ll give you one guess as to which nation will be asked to shoulder that crippling new burden…

Shamelessly, this amount is 37% higher than the IEA said was necessary just one year ago.  The IEA also demands that developed nations such as the United States reduce carbon emissions even further than the economically destructive levels already being pushed by left-wing special interests and liberal politicians through such abominations as the Waxman-Markey bill, which will cost American families thousands of dollars each year and punish American business.  This IEA report also comes just as global temperatures continue their cooling plateau over the past ten years, meaning that the global warming hysteria may be today’s equivalent of the discredited global cooling craze of the 1970s.  But what’s a trifling $10 trillion, right?

The University of East Anglia is a taxpayer-supported university whose Climate Research Unit (CRU) has produced data serving as the basis for international studies alleging a global warming crisis.  That includes our own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has proposed draconian, unnecessary and costly regulation of carbon dioxide. But in August of this year, the CRU admitted that it destroyed the original raw data for its global surface temperature set, claiming a lack of storage space.

In other words, the dog ate its homework?

Unfortunately, but conveniently for global warming alarmists, the EPA stopped accepting public comments on its proposed carbon dioxide regulation back in June.  But fortunately, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed a petition with the EPA yesterday to re-open debate.  As stated by CEI’s General Counsel Sam Kazman, “the EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data.  But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable.  If the EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”

Dennis the Menace couldn’t get away with this excuse, and neither should the CRU or EPA bureaucrats.