Climate Progress

Joint Hearing Between House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and House Intelligence Community Management (ICM) Subcommittee

This hearing will be WEBCAST Live -please CLICK HERE to watch.

On Wednesday, June 25, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and the Intelligence Community Management (ICM) Subcommittee, will hold a joint hearing on “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.” Members will hear and discuss the results of the first-ever U.S. Government analysis of the security threats posed by global warming.

WHAT: Joint Hearing on the National Security Implications of Global Warming

WHERE: 210 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC

WHEN: Wednesday, June 25, 2008, 9:30 AM

WITNESSES:

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Part 1 discussed the pointless and hopelessly impractical $300 million battery prize proposed by the presumptive the GOP nominee. McCain also offered another hot gimmick this week:

My administration will issue a Clean Car Challenge to the automakers of America, in the form of a single and substantial tax credit based on the reduction of carbon emissions. For every automaker who can sell a zero-emissions car, we will commit a 5,000 dollar tax credit for each and every customer who buys that car. For other vehicles, whatever type they may be, the lower the carbon emissions, the higher the tax credit. And these large tax credits will be available to everyone — not just to those who have an accountant to explain it to them.

Now that is both silly and unmanageable. First off, a zero-emissions car would either be a pure electric vehicle or a hydrogen fuel cell car. Neither of those are the kind of near-term or even medium-term solution that we need, that we should encourage, or that we are likely to get (and whether they were actually zero-emissions would depend on how the hydrogen or electricity is made, as discussed below). The serious players are all pursuing plug-in hybrids, as they should be (see “This just in: Hydrogen fuel cell cars are still dead“). Those are not zero-emissions.

Second, “the lower the carbon emissions, the higher the tax credit” is absurd. Once again, Senator McCain and his energy advisers betray how little they understand the issues involved. Let’s look at the two most plausible reduced-emissions fuels: biofuels and electricity. Each of them would be both a bureaucrat’s and an accountant’s nightmare.

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We are standing at the threshold of a revolution in the world energy economy. Or, so we might hope after reading this week’s Economist.

The tell-tale signs of that revolution are documented in a 14-page special section on “The Future of Energy.”

The Economist, a magazine that calls itself a newspaper, began publishing in 1843 to “take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

Its special energy section (June 21-27 edition) delivers a bit of both. But it contains plenty of information that ought to be circulated far beyond the periodical’s regular readership.

The feature’s bottom line (liberally paraphrased) is this:

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Wired magazine used to be the place to go for the latest in technology. But now it covers any sexy techy idea, no matter how impractical.

Given that we all have limited time, Wired should be off every technophile’s must-read list and replaced by Technology Review, which has revamped its stodgy old self and become what once Wired aspired to be.

For me, this started with the absurd cover story by Peter Schwartz 5 years ago, “How Hydrogen Can Save America,” which claimed “What we need is a massive, Apollo-scale effort [$100 billion over ten years] to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power.” Uhh, no. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a source — except for the sun, of course, and if we really want to harness its power we should be placing big bets on solar energy. Try instead my Technology Review piece “The Last Car You Would Ever Buy — Literally.”

Recently Wired published their most misinformed piece, “Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green.” RealClimate beat me to the punch debunking Wired’s bizarre analyses in favor of using air-conditioning and against protecting old-growth forests or buying a Prius (see “Wired Magazine’s Incoherent Truths“). They didn’t debunk Wired’s claim, “Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy,” perhaps because it is so obviously absurd (see The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power).

Now Wired has fallen into the tank containing sharks with lasers by publishing Chris Mooney’s bizarre paeon to geo-engineering and the late Edward Teller and his protégé Lowell Wood — famed uber-hawkish promoters of all things dubious.

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When even the nation’s premier business newspaper is confused about your conflicting economic positions, your campaign has jumped the shark. I’d like to think the WSJ read my post on the presumptive GOP nominee’s doubletalk strategy: “Memo to media: McCain doubletalks to woo conservatives and independents at the same time.”

The WSJ really nails McCain. They trot out a variety of euphemisms for “inconsistent” or “baffling” or “incomprehensible” — the favorite journalistic phrase in this regard being “defies easy categorization”:

Senator’s Broad Range Of Energy Policies Defies Categories

Sen. John McCain is putting energy policy at the center of his presidential campaign, embracing a diverse array of positions that defies easy categorization.

He is for more oil drilling and also for alternatives to oil. He wants to drill off the coasts but not in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He supports subsidies for nuclear power and clean-coal technology, but has opposed them for ethanol, solar and wind power.

He wants to lower gasoline prices by temporarily suspending the federal gas tax. But he wants to raise the price of gas with a cap-and-trade system that punishes polluting industries.

In environmentally conscious Portland, Ore., he praised wind power. In Texas oil country he supported more drilling. In rural Missouri he urged more nuclear power. In California he praised fuel-efficiency standards.

An expert from the center-right think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies is even more blunt:

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I am glad that so many in the energy debate have picked up on one of the two messages from my previous post (see EIA bombshell: Offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030″).

But in listening to the radio and TV debates, I realize that some people have the impression that U.S. Energy Information Administration said offshore drilling might eventually lower oil prices. It did not. It found that allowing offshore drilling would have no significant effect on prices as far out into the future as the analysis projected.

Why should it lower prices? Offshore drilling is projected by EIA to deliver less extra annual oil production in 2030 than Saudi Arabia announced it would add this year, an announcement that had no significant impact whatsoever on oil prices. [In fact, oil prices actually went up — see yesterday’s AP story, “Oil prices rise despite Saudi vow to pump more.”]

It is worth nothing that the EIA report “Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is quite analytically substantive and made relatively optimistic assumptions:

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The U.S. Climate Change Science Program (aka the Bush Administration) has issued a must-read report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. It wouldn’t be must read or even big news if it weren’t for the fact that

• Many environmentalists stopped talking about the extreme weather/global warming link a decade ago.
• The deniers, the delayers, and of course the Roger Pielkes of the world have pushed back against any claims that climate change is driving the extreme weather we see today [as Chico Marx (dressed as Groucho) said “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?“]
• The media has been brow-beaten by the deniers into downplaying the connection. The journalist Ross Gelbspan has a long discussion of this in his great 2004 book, Boiling Point — I will blog on this later.
• The Midwest is experiencing the second “500-year flood” in 13 years. [Don’t worry, big media, it’s all just a big coincidence like the deniers keep saying.]

This report is really an “I told you so” from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and Tom Karl in particular, who has been a real leader in this area, helping to create the still rarely-discussed Climate Extremes Index (see “Global warming causes deluges and flooding, just like the Midwest is seeing (again).”

If you don’t read the whole report, at least read the synopsis:

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Twenty years ago today, before he became America’s top climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen was among the first to warn Congress and the nation about the dangers of human-caused global warming. For a new analysis of that testimony, see Grist here.

Hansen just spoke at the National Press Club, which I attended. He is also giving a briefing to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming. Looks like C-SPAN will skip both. Sad.

You can see look at his presentation and recent postings on his website. Here are some words of wisdom I took from his speech today:

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Conservative presidential hopeful John McCain has offered yet more proof he doesn’t understand energy — and more opportunity for the media to salivate over his faux “maverick-ness”:

John McCain hopes to solve the country’s energy crisis with cold hard cash.

The Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting is proposing a $300 million government prize to whomever can develop an automobile battery that far surpasses existing technology….

McCain said such a device should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs and have “the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

This idea is almost as bad and almost as cynical as the gas tax holiday (see “Gas tax holiday is cynical and indefensible“).

POINTLESS: First off, every energy and car company on the planet knows they’ll get rich by improving batteries. The world is probably spending $1 billion a year in this quest. This $300 million prize is a pointless gimmick, just a cynical move to get some good PR.

NOT HOW TECHNOLOGY WORKS: You don’t just invent a battery that has the “cost … to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.” That requires mass production, hundreds of thousands if not millions of batteries produced a year, to get the economies of scale and the benefits of the manufacturing learning curve. When you “invent” the batttery, you do a spreadsheet on what mass production costs would be. It would be a bureaucratic nightmare to try to figure out who would win this. Does the money go to the most plausible spreadsheet?

HASN’T EXXONMOBIL ALREADY SOLVED THIS PROBLEM?

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Since when do we deal with our addiction by going to summits hosted by drug suppliers? Yet here is the Washington Post:

Saudi Arabian Oil Summit Hopes to Isolate Cause of Price Rise

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia, June 21 — Leaders from oil-producing and oil-consuming nations will meet here Sunday to try to pinpoint the reasons behind the rise in oil prices, which have doubled over the past year, and to find ways to bring them down.

You cannot make this stuff up. I can “pinpoint” the reason prices are high. We are addicted to your product, just like the president said. We will pay any price you charge and do nothing whatsoever to break the addiction. Heck, we will even go to a summit you host to talk about anything but our addiction.

U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman, representing the world’s top oil consumer, said Saturday that insufficient oil production is driving the soaring crude prices. Oil production has not kept up with increasing demand from developing countries including China and India, Bodman said.

Has your head exploded yet? Is Big Media that gullible? Don’t answer that second question. Is the energy secretary unaware that we still use twice as much oil as China and India combined? Is he unaware supply is limited but that his boss has blocked most efforts to reduce demand? (See “Peak Oil? Bring it on!“)

Question for the Energy Secretary: What country’s insatiable thirst for oil imports is most responsible for the tightening world market from 1995 to 2004?

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