Green Education: Global Warming

Yesterday on NPR’s radio program To the Point, I said it was dishonorable for ExxonMobil to support a carbon tax. I compared ExxonMobil’s reported embrace of carbon taxes to Enron’s lobbying for the Kyoto Protocol. Enron was a a major natural gas distributor and saw in Kyoto a means to suppress demand for coal, natural gas’s [...]

In a fiery speech yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) ”calls out” “climate deniers.” In the first half of the speech he goes ad hominem, attacking opponents as “front groups” who take payola from “polluters” to “confuse” the public by selling “doubt” as their product. First a bit of free advice for the good Senator: Your team has been playing nasty from day one. [...]

A new study conducted by Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) for the National Council of Chain Restaurants (NCCR) estimates the impact of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) on the chain restaurant industry. PwC used the following research strategy. First, PwC examined 11 public and private sector studies estimating the extent to which the RFS increases ethanol utilization beyond what [...]

On a visit to DC’s Cosmos Club last week, I checked out its impressive wall of photographs of club members who had won Nobel Prizes.  I was looking for one of Michael Mann, who, in his defamation complaint against CEI, refers to himself three times as a “Nobel prize recipient”.  (See, for example, page 3 [...]

The American Lung Association (ALA) is hawking the results of an opinion poll that supposedly shows “American voters support the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) setting stronger fine particle (soot) standards to protect public health.” ALA spokesperson Peter Iwanowicz says the poll ”affirms that the public is sick of soot and wants EPA to set more protective standards.” Missy [...]

With Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) citing Hurricane Sandy as a reason to have another go at climate legislation, to say nothing of the media spin depicting Sandy as punishment for our fuelish ways, it’s useful to look at some actual science. In a study published in the journal Climatic Change, scientists Michael Chenoweth and Dmitry Divine analyze the history of [...]

House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy have signed a No Climate Tax Pledge. Bad news for those pushing carbon taxes as part of a budget deal.  Friends of affordable energy can ill-afford complacency, however. The Dumb Party has been known to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and carbon [...]

Last week on National Journal’s Energy Experts Blog, 16 wonks addressed the question: ”Is Washington Ready for a Carbon Tax?” Your humble servant argued that Washington is not ready — unless Republicans are willing to commit political suicide. That’s no reason for complacency, because spendaholics have on occasion gulled the Dumb Party into providing bi-partisan cover for unpopular tax hikes. President G.H.W. [...]

Note: A nearly identical version of this column appeared last week in Forbes Online. I am reposting it here with many additional hyperlinks so that readers may more easily access the evidence supporting my conclusions. The November 2012 elections ensure that President Obama’s war on coal will continue for at least two more years. The administration’s preferred M.O. has been [...]

Both the blogosphere and the mainstream media have been abuzz with commentary blaming global warming for Hurricane Sandy and the associated deaths and devastation. Bloomberg BusinessWeek epitomizes this brand of journalism. Its magazine cover proclaims the culpability of global warming as an obvious fact: Part of the thinking here is simply that certain aspects of the storm (lowest barometric [...]

“Remove Big Wind’s training wheels” and let the production tax credit (PTC) expire, argues University of Lousiana State University Professor David Dismukes in a report published by the American Energy Alliance (AEA), a grassroots free-market research and advocacy group. Wind energy lobbyists and their congressional allies are pushing for a one-year extension of the PTC, [...]

In Wind Intermittency and the Production Tax Credit: A High Cost Subsidy for Low Value Power, economist Jonathan Lesser finds that “the vast majority of the Nation’s wind resources fail to produce any electricity when our customers need it most.” He also cautions that the wind energy production tax credit (PTC), which would add $12.2 billion to [...]