Between jobs prospects and debt realities. Some depressing thoughts from Veronique de Rugy.
Category Archives: Economics
Climaquiddick Doesn’t Matter
Because there are so many better reasons to scuttle the nonsense in Copenhagen:
While it’s great fun — and entirely worthwhile — to make a big stink about Climategate, it would be a shame if people believed that Copenhagen’s inevitable failure hinged on this one scandal. Even if the CRU researchers were the model of scientific dispassion, these schemes are pointless. Indeed, even if global warming is the threat the alarmists claim it is, it makes no sense to waste trillions of dollars on “fixes” that will do little to fix the alleged problem.
I like the reference to Canada as the Richie Cunningham of the UN.
Who Needs Coal?
It’s a gas, man:
Just a few years ago, the industry didn’t have the technology to unlock these reserves. But thanks to advances in horizontal drilling and methods of fracturing rock with high-pressure blasts of water, sand and chemicals, vast gas reserves in the United States are suddenly within reach.
As a result, said BP chief executive Tony Hayward, “the picture has changed dramatically.”
“The United States is sitting on over 100 years of gas supply at the current rates of consumption,” he said. Because natural gas emits half the greenhouse gases of coal, he added, that “provides the United States with a unique opportunity to address concerns about energy security and climate change.”
Recoverable U.S. gas reserves could now be bigger than the immense gas reserves of Russia, some experts say.
But it doesn’t require us to tighten our hair shirts, so it’s off the table.
No Fools, They
India won’t sign any binding carbon reductions. They’d be crazy to, just when they’ve finally thrown off much of the socialism that has held them back for decades, and are finally bringing their people out of poverty, particularly when it’s based on flimsy science, and economic ignorance. The Warm-monger religion demands that they remain in poverty for the good of Gaia, but they’ll stick with their traditional beliefs, and fully bellies.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More from Shikha Dalmia:
The resulting emission cuts won’t even make a dent in global temperatures. India’s per capita energy consumption is 15 times less than America’s and half of China’s—the two biggest polluters. To be sure, President Obama is poised to pledge to cut U.S. carbon emissions 80% below 2005 by 2050 at Copenhagen. But it’s an empty promise because there is little to zero chance that he will be able to get Congress to go along. China too announced plans—modest by all accounts—to curb its emissions. So India will certainly face pressure at the conference to act, despite the fact that bigger polluters won’t.
But as a developing country, India can least afford to give up its right to consume as much energy as is necessary to deliver all Indians a living standard comparable to the one that rich countries take for granted. There is every reason to believe that the new License Raj will damage India’s economy every bit as much as the old one in the preliberalization days, when India’s growth rate remained stuck at around 2%. This would be unfortunate at any time, but especially now, when the West itself is in the middle of a huge rethinking on this issue.
Yup.
Climaquiddick And The EPA
It’s about to hit:
I cannot think of any instance where the EPA depended so heavily on non-EPA synthesis reports to justify proposed regulatory action in their almost 39 years of existence.
As a result of this EPA decision, the EPA’s fortunes in regard to regulating GHGs are directly tied to the fate of the IPCC reports.
Let the lawsuits begin.
[Late afternoon update]
Here we go. CEI has petitioned the EPA to suspend its CO2 regulations.
[Bumped]
Panic At The HuffPo
The Huffington Post is desperately trying to fend off Climaquiddick, but Newbusters isn’t having any of it.
Sharia Financing
Some thoughts on petrodollar Jihad.
What Is Science?
APS has an explanation for the warm-mongers:
Science is the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the universe and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories.
The success and credibility of science are anchored in the willingness of scientists to:
1. Expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others. This requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials.
2. Abandon or modify previously accepted conclusions when confronted with more complete or reliable experimental or observational evidence.Adherence to these principles provides a mechanism for self-correction that is the foundation of the credibility of science.
But, but…it’s settled! We have to save the planet!
Just As An Aside
If you want to follow the Climaquiddick events, in addition to Pajamas Media, the folks over at Planet Gore are all over the case on a pretty continual basis.
And via the latter, here is a list of hundreds of peer-reviewed (because we all know how important that is) papers outside the “consensus” of AGW.
A Working Scientist’s View
Thoughts on Climaquiddick from Derek Lowe:
I have deep sympathy for the fellow who tried to reconcile the various poorly documented and conflicting data sets and buggy, unannotated code that the CRU has apparently depended on. And I can easily see how this happens. I’ve been on long-running projects, especially some years ago, where people start to lose track of which numbers came from where (and when), where the underlying raw data are stored, and the history of various assumptions and corrections that were made along the way. That much is normal human behavior. But this goes beyond that.
Those of us who work in the drug industry know that we have to keep track of such things, because we’re making decisions that could eventually run into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money. And eventually we’re going to be reviewed by regulatory agencies that are not staffed with our friends, and who are perfectly capable of telling us that they don’t like our numbers and want us to go spend another couple of years (and another fifty or hundred million dollars) generating better ones for them. The regulatory-level lab and manufacturing protocols (GLP and GMP) generate a blizzard of paperwork for just these reasons.
But the stakes for climate research are even higher. The economic decisions involved make drug research programs look like roundoff errors. The data involved have to be very damned good and convincing, given the potential impact on the world economy, through both the possible effects of global warming itself and the effects of trying to ameliorate it. Looking inside the CRU does not make me confident that their data come anywhere close to that standard…
But why should we pay any attention to him? He is, after all, one of those Evil Scientists™ in the pay of Big Business, not a noble one trying to save the planet (with millions of dollars in government and left-wing grants).
As a commenter notes, the biggest casualty of this episode is the credibility of science itself. But if it saves us from those trying to save the planet from us, perhaps it’s worth the cost, if it can be regained.