The Climate-bummed

Ronald Bailey of Reason notes that the partiers – er, convention attendees – from the Copenhagen Hoedown in December are not doing very much at all about the plans they owe the UN for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Plans are due 31 January, but reportedly fewer than two dozen nations have even sent their letters of agreement to the December accord.  Something about the whole Copenhagen thing reminds me of a cross between Animal House and Old School (you’d be an unwilling expert on these idiotic movies too, if you’d done even one deployment on a Navy ship), and the lack of any accountable outcome from it just seems to be of a piece with the Summit’s air of being a backdrop for Will Ferrell-type antics.

Bailey reports, however, that Yvo de Boer, a Dutch official charged by the UN with issuing climate-related ultimatums, “declared that the United Nations would hold the U.S. to Obama’s pledge to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below its 2005 level.”  Bailey quotes the New York Times:

The United Nations will hold President Obama to his promise that the United States will reduce carbon emissions even if the Senate cannot pass climate legislation, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said this morning.

“Whatever route is taken [in US domestic politics], the president of the United States committed to a 17 percent emissions reduction in Copenhagen,” de Boer said. “The president of the United States committed to more ambitious emissions reductions for 2030 and 2050. And it is those statements to which the international community will hold the government of the United States accountable.”

Well, yeah, De Boer.  Bring it, son.  Knock yourself out.  While you’re getting ready for it, figure out how to fill your bank account without the 25% of it that comes from the evil, flatulent Yankee economy every year.

Meanwhile, John Hood at NRO’s Planet Gore picks up on this piece from the Jacksonville [NC] Daily News.  The backlash is beginning, in Congress and apparently the courts, against the recent EPA finding on greenhouse gases.  The Chamber of Commerce and the National Cattlemen’s Association seem to be leading the charge in court, and lawmakers like Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Dana Rohrbacher of California are proposing measures to rein in the EPA.

Scott Brown won convincingly a race his opponent held all the traditional cards for, and one of his key appeals to Massachusetts voters was his opposition to cap-and-trade.  He had to make a particular point of it, in fact, because it was a reversal based on his earlier voting record.  So it’s not like there’s any way to spin his campaign position as non-categorical.  He unquestionably had to avow his distaste for cap-and-trade, explicitly and without caveat, to succeed as he did in winning his Senate seat.  Voters are certainly not going to be more in favor of C&T elsewhere; except for California, Massachusetts probably represents the pinnacle of sentiment for C&T, and Brown’s successful method was to repudiate it.

The battle against an arbitrary dictatorship of the EPA isn’t by any means won, but voters may be waking up to the fact that when the EPA declares what we breathe out to be a pollutant, this isn’t about “pollution” any more.  It’s about theoretical abstractions and cosmology: unsound bases for regulating and levying onerous taxes on people’s livelihoods.

Perhaps, as Churchill said of another prolonged conflict, we are not seeing the beginning of the end – but we are at least seeing the end of the beginning.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/warren-buffetts-big-bet.html

As it happens my son sent me a long DOE report the other day that made me think things aren’t as bad as I had thought even if global warming fears are wholly reasonable. Or perhaps I’m just in an optimistic frame of mind.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analyses/pubs/Bituminous%20Baseline_Final%20Report.pdf

If the assumptions of the study and the analysis leading to the executive summary aren’t too far wrong electricity from coal will cost about 50% more with very high CO2 capture and storage. That means fossil fuels alone can support recently normal rates of economic growth for a hundred years or more. If the transition can take place over twenty years it’s not an insurmountable economic problem, if only because many existing uses of electricity are pretty inefficient and the economy will enforce a lot of energy conservation as electicity costs rise. So the actual economic effect of the energy cost change in terms of living standards will be less than a 50% rise.

And that leaves out the possibility that the public will eventually get comfortable with nuclear fission, which is operating now at cost levels that must be at least comparable to coal plants without carbon capture (or else it wouldn’t be operating). It also leaves out the possibility that fusion will eventually become possible at some cost that’s reasonable in the context of rising fossil energy costs due to carbon capture and depletion. It also leaves out wind and solar and biomass and such; but they strike me as nearly trivial in the 20 year term next to the bigger sources of energy despite all of the hype.

The economy commonly reacts to such cost changes, and even worse cost changes, over time without too much disruption if the politicians don’t meddle too much, as they did in the 1970′s for a time. For instance oil and thus gasoline prices can rise and have risen in the past by more than 50% in a year or two without causing more than moderate pain, at least to anyone who has access to the technology to read this, despite all of the whining that always attends such price changes.

Perhaps that’s why Warren Buffett made his big bet on coal.

As Mark Steyn points out, Friedman likes Waxman-Markey because it “contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs.”

But the bill says nothing about preventing new buildings from becoming Bigfoot.  I’m reminded of a scene in Dr. Zhivago, in which Zhivago is informed by a People’s Commissar that the Moscow mansion his family lived in before the Revolution could (and should) have housed a lot more of the People — who are now milling about the mansion in numbers more suited to peace and justice.

“Yes, indeed,” says Zhivago, or words to that effect.  “This is more just.”

We can wonder what will be the “just” dispensation of Friedman’s carbon footprint, come the Revolution.

Rasmussen’s likely voter robocalls have been registering severe slippage for weeks, with all the passion heavily on the disapproving side, though it’s only in the last days that they’ve shown overall presidential approval reaching statistical dead center.  Most startling was a separate Rasmussen poll assessing hypothetical 2012 match-ups showing Obama tied with Mitt Romney, and a mere 6 points ahead of  Sarah Palin – even with the latter just having been declared politically D.O.A. by most of the political establishment.

Meanwhile, at the Contentions blog, O-watchers Jennifer Rubin and Peter Wehner had a Monday field day, with three separate posts on “Obama’s Summer of Discontent.”   On Fox, Dick Morris spoke of Waterloo and Stalingrad.  In the Wall Street Journal, Fred Barnes cast his analytical net a bit closer to shore, focusing on Obama’s legislative agenda.  Barnes offered a detailed analysis, but his summary statements will suffice for us here:

Mr. Obama’s top initiatives — health-care reform and “cap and trade” energy legislation — are in serious jeopardy and he has himself and his congressional allies to blame.

Their high-pressure tactics in promoting and passing legislation, most notably the economic “stimulus” enacted in February, have backfired.

and

For Mr. Obama, this is all a potentially disastrous turn of events.

and

Mr. Obama’s health-care and energy initiatives, the core of his far-reaching agenda, were bound to face serious opposition in Congress in any case. Hardball tactics and false promises have only made the hill he has to climb steeper. Now he may lose on both. The president and his congressional allies should have known better.

Though an opponent of the President, Barnes has not in the past been averse to delivering bad news to Republicans.  If he now has ill tidings for the other side, he delivers them with little evident glee, perhaps because he has seen a failed presidency or two, and knows how much damage they can do even to those who eventually benefit politically.

Can Obama stop the slide or even turn it around, or is he destined (as he already appeared to be at the 100-day mark) to emulate those princes whom Machiavelli criticized for indulging in “liberality” early on, at risk of inevitably becoming either “poor and despised” or “rapacious and hated” during the straitened financial circumstances that inevitably follow?

Repeatedly telling anyone who’s still listening that “we’re out of money, ” as again last week during All-Star Game chit-chat, seems like a better start on the “poor and despised” alternative, especially when you’ve also been all over the place taking credit for spending as much as you could as fast as you could.  On the other hand, talking up taxes night and day in the context of health care and energy overhauls and budget shortfalls is a good way to work on “rapacious and hated.”

Or maybe Obama will defy Machiavelli – by managing to become both despised and hated.  On many days, his and his Administration’s contradictory messages – “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” and jaw dropping debt, “misread the situation” and “wouldn’t change a thing,” and so on – seem intended to bring about just such a political catastrophe.  If he appeared to some as a “sort of God” only a few weeks ago, increasingly he and he alone will appear responsible for every leaf that falls and every babe that cries from sea to shining sea, and a lot of leaves are falling and a lot of babes are crying.

Of course, it’s never over til it’s over in politics.  A cynic might, for instance, advise Obama’s people to go find a lunatic:  Martin and Annelise Anderson, in their recent, highly sympathetic book Reagan’s Secret War, attribute Reagan’s early success in no small part to his handling of the attempt on his life and the subsequent outpouring of public respect and sympathy.  Of course, no one in this universe can tell us what happened in the one where John Hinckley found some other way to impress Jodie Foster:  For all we know, Reagan would have had to have gone slower and fought even harder, and managed to do a few important things better.

The point remains that unexpected opportunities will come, perhaps in disguise.  In a way, that was the story of Reagan’s presidency, from before it even began.  He came into office already greeted by opinion leaders as, in Clark Clifford’s phrase, an “amiable dunce.”  He was forced by legislative arithmetic to negotiate with the opposite party, which controlled the House under a speaker who originally question Reagan’s ability to play “in the big leagues.”  There was even some question at the time, after a succession of failed administrations stretching back 20 years, whether the presidency itself was an outmoded institution.

In short, Reagan had ‘em right where he wanted ‘em.  By late July, after passing the capstone on his domestic program with strong support in the House and an overwhelming vote in the Senate, he recorded the following note to himself in his private diary:

This on top of the budget victory is the greatest pol. win in half a century.

On present evidence, if President Obama is keeping a diary, and is in touch with reality at all, he won’t likely be writing notes like that to himself anytime soon.  Politically, he may have to look for something more on the Clintonian “comeback kid” model – which begins with deeply diminished expectations of the sort Reagan never had to generate, having started out with them.

Those, at least, seem to be well within Obama’s reach.

It is to the earthlings in this scenario that Ms. Palin is speaking. And when she writes lines like this intentional jaw-dropper in the Washington Post — “We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil” — she is quite intentionally signalling that she is ready for war.

That only implies an immediate run for the presidency to people who cannot understand her. Instead, she intends to use her celebrity to champion the views of the many earth-based Americans who have been overlooked — and whom the Republican establishment will continue to patronize, and overlook, at the cost of their own annihilation.

We are going to have a war, next door in the U.S.A. — a war between two world views that have become very nearly mutually incomprehensible. One might almost say that it was quietly declared on the op-ed of the Washington Post Tuesday.

Instead of adding to the thought here – something I expect we’ll be doing more of over time, whether we want to or not – I’ll just note that, along with J.E. and also Noemie Emery, Warren remains one of the most thoughtful and sympathetic observers of things Palinistical.  For those interested in understanding what Palin herself as well as “Palin” the construct represent culturally and politically, both in the U.S. and, forgive the grandiosity, in a world-historical context, it’s worth bookmarking Warren’s site, and paging through the archives all the way back to late August of last year.  You’ll no doubt encounter much else of interest, written with unusual grace.

h/t:  HotAir headlines

…all afternoon. But at least she didn’t tell him to call her Senator. And her remark about being married to a veteran was really terribly funny, when you think about it. Which she didn’t.

Her piece is refreshing because it doesn’t make formulaic references to either “conservation” or “investing in alternative energy sources.” The jury hasn’t even started deliberation on the proximate meaning of a finite supply of fossil fuel resources; rather, the world’s proven reserves continue to expand exponentially every 30 years, as technological improvements lead to better surveying techniques, and to increased capacity to access reserves.  Meanwhile, government investment in alternative energy has yet to achieve anything other than creating new taxpayer-funded dependencies – along with distorting world food prices, among other unintended consequences of boresighted policy.

What Palin does focus on is the economic damage that would be done by making American production cost significantly more than it does abroad, by driving jobs out of the US, and by sticking the poor and middle class with “skyrocketing” (Obama’s word) utility bills, and fuel bills performing the same gyrations.  These are the economic “biggies,” in a nutshell.

She straightforwardly advocates drilling into our proven reserves, expanding our use of coal, and going after the vast sources of fuel under our Western states, which include shale oil and tar sands.  The significant feature of these approaches is that private industry is fully prepared to fund every penny of the infrastructure and R&D – because these fuel processes can be expected to be profitable, unlike wind, solar, and biofuels.  She also points out the always-available option of nuclear power generation.

I would add something she doesn’t address, which is the intrusive, anti-libertarian nature of the elements of the Smart Grid envisioned by Waxman-Markey for private homes and businesses.  I’m all for an updated power grid, but utility customers need to retain their economic power – and liberty – to exert demand against it at their discretion, with the price of the service being their decision criterion.  A grid that effectively doesn’t offer that feature is, in fact, a Stupid Grid, one that would stifle the incentives of economic liberty and create whole new galaxies of opportunity for political graft, corruption, and favoritism.

And I do quibble with the endlessly-repeated mantra of “energy independence,” which Palin invokes here, as literally everyone else does.  It’s already the case that Saudi Arabia and OPEC can’t hold us over a barrel, energy-wise.  They’re not our major fuel suppliers, nor does OPEC have the power today to jack up prices beyond what non-OPEC producers are willing to agree to, or hurt the US as it did in the 1970s by refusing to sell to us.  If Canada and Mexico get smart with us – well, I’m betting they won’t.

The reason we should want to drill for and refine our own fuel is that we can bring energy costs and prices down by doing that.  We also create much less pollution and environmental havoc with our drilling and refining methods than do Russia, China, India, or Mexico.

The “energy independence” mantra is usually invoked with an air of anti-trade populism, and that is not a posture beneficial to the American consumer or the economy as a whole.  Our international fiscal problem is debt, not trade.

Nor are we engaged in the Middle East “because we need their oil.”  There are a number of interlocking reasons why we are engaged there, and although oil is one of them, the national security issue is not whether we can buy oil from Middle Eastern nations, but whether oil can be bought freely by everyone, from Middle Eastern nations.  That issue matters directly and significantly to the world trade in oil, and to our network of alliances.  Our allies want diversity in their fuel sources, and the seller competition it brings; and it is greatly to our advantage to see that they have it, lest they be turned against us by extortion from the aspiring oil/gas monopolists in Moscow and Beijing.

But tapping our own resources more effectively would bring down global energy prices, and benefit Americans tremendously.  In that, Palin is absolutely right.  Good on her for making the point, minus the reflexive bromides we get from even guys like Romney and Huckabee.