Climate Politics

Legal Fight to Stop EPA Rule Closing Power Plants

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Update on ominous overreach by Biden/Harris regime comes from Just the News  While the SCOTUS denies request to block EPA power plant rule, challengers vow to continue fight.  As explained below, EPA intends to require expensive and impractical CO2 Capture and Storage on all power plants using carbon fuels, thereby forcing shutdowns. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images,

Analysts say that if the rule is implemented, more than 5 million
people could experience blackouts, some lasting for 41 hours.

The Supreme Court ruled against a bid to block the EPA’s power plant rule while legal challenges make their way through the courts, but West Virginia, which is leading the coalition of states challenging the rule, vows the fight isn’t over. 

In a brief order, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch said that the applicants “have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of the challenges to the” EPA’s rule.

However, the justices explained, the stay wasn’t needed because compliance requirements wouldn’t begin until June 2025, which means the applicants wouldn’t “suffer irreparable harm” before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decides the merits of the case. Injunctive relief, such as sought here, requires clear and convincing proof that the harm be immediate and irreparable.

The lower court is expediting the case, the justices noted, meaning it would be resolved in the court’s current term. Afterward, the case would still have time to return to the Supreme Court, if it’s warranted. 

The EPA rule, which was finalized in April, requires that coal-fired power plants be fitted with carbon capture technology controlling 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2039, and new gas-fired power plants will need to do the same starting in 2035, depending on the amount of runtime they have.

Energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling revealed that the EPA failed to do a proper analysis of the impacts of the rule, and if implemented, over 5 million people will experience blackouts, some lasting for 41 hours. While the EPA has defended the rule and argues that carbon capture is “well proven,” its own modeling showed it expected only one coal plant and no gas plants to be fitted with the technology as far out as 2055.

Two dozen states led by West Virginia filed a lawsuit against the EPA in May, arguing that the agency exceeded its authority with the rule. Utilities and industry groups also filed legal challenges to the rule. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the parties’ requests to block the rules while the courts considered the challenges, and the court ruled the applicants wouldn’t succeed on the merits of their case.

In court filings, the EPA noted that the lower court ruled the applicants are unlikely to succeed in arguing the agency exceeded its authority, and it stood by the rule and its carbon capture requirements, arguing that the technology has been “adequately demonstrated.”

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a
statement on the high court’s ruling that the fight isn’t over.

“This is not the end of this case: we will continue to fight through the merits phase and prove this rule strips the states of important discretion while forcing plants to use technologies that don’t work in the real world,” Morrisey said.

In 2022, the Supreme Court had sided with West Virginia and other states in a challenge to the Obama-era “Clean Power Plan.” Morrisey said that the high court had made clear limits to what the EPA can do, and the Biden administration’s “green new deal agenda” is ignoring those limits.

“This rule is yet another attempt of unelected bureaucrats to push something the law doesn’t allow,” Morrisey said.

Indiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming joined the application to the Supreme Court.

Bureaucrats Against Democracy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

David Blackmon provides the background in his Daily Caller article Bureaucrats Worry Democracy Will Get In The Way Of Their Climate Agenda.  As the above image suggests some of those in power have not shied away from acting in defiance of democratic norms. By imposing climate policies and regulations they have diminished the livelihoods and freedoms of the public they supposedly serve. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I have frequently written over the last several years that the agenda of the climate-alarm lobby in the western world is not consistent with the maintenance of democratic forms of government.

Governments maintained by free elections, the free flow of communications and other democratic institutions are not able to engage in the kinds of long-term central planning exercises required to force a transition from one form of energy and transportation systems to completely different ones.

Why? Because once the negative impacts of vastly higher prices for all forms of energy begin to impact the masses, the masses in such democratic societies are going to rebel, first at the ballot box and if that is not allowed by the elites to work, then by more aggressive means.

This is not a problem for authoritarian or totalitarian forms of government, like those in Saudi Arabia, China and Russia, where long-term central planning projects invoking government control of the means of production is a long-ingrained way of life. If the people revolt, then the crackdowns are bound to come.

This societal dynamic is a simple reality of life that the pushers of the climate alarm narrative and forced energy transition in western societies have been loath to admit. But, in recent days, two key figures who have pushed the climate alarm narrative in both the United States and Canada have agreed with my thesis in public remarks.

In so doing, they are uttering the quiet part about
the real agenda of climate alarmism out loud.

Last week, former Obama Secretary of State and Biden climate czar John Kerry made remarks about the “problem” posed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that should make every American’s skin crawl. Speaking about the inability of the federal government to stamp out what it believes to be misinformation on big social media platforms, Kerry said: “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” adding, “I think democracies are, are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing.”

Never mind that the U.S. government has long been the most focused purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in our society, Kerry wants to stop the free flow of information on the Internet.

The most obvious targets are Elon Musk and X, which is essentially the only big social media platform that does not willingly submit to the government’s demands for censoring speech.

Kerry’s desired solution is for Democrats to “win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know, winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to, to, implement change.” The change desired by Kerry and Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats is to obtain enough power in Congress and the presidency to revoke the Senate filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, enact the economically ruinous Green New Deal, and do it all before the public has any opportunity to rebel.

Not to be outdone by Kerry, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland of Canada, who is a longtime member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum, was quoted Monday as saying: “Our shrinking glaciers, and our warming oceans, are asking us wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change.”

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the central governments of both Canada and the United States have moved in increasingly authoritarian directions under their current leadership, both of which have used the climate-alarm narrative as justification. This move was widely predicted once the utility of the COVID-19 pandemic to rationalize government censorship and restrictions of individual liberties began to fade in 2021.

Two sides of the same coin.

Frustrated by their perceived need to move even faster to restrict freedoms and destroy democratic levers of public response to their actions, these zealots are now discarding their soft talking points in favor of more aggressive messaging.

This new willingness to say the quiet part out loud
should truly alarm anyone who values their freedoms.

Dearth of Green Jobs in UK

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Chris Morrison provides the analysis in his Daily Sceptic article ONS Reveals the Pitiful Number of New Green Jobs Being Created in the U.K. Economy.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The problem with the green U.K. economy, and its associated destruction of the hydrocarbon environment, is that there are very few jobs being created. The few remaining ‘workers’ in the ruling Labour party are starting to rumble all the luxury boondoggles that are set to further decimate well-paid jobs in their communities. The figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), trying to estimate the actual number of green jobs, are always a highly creative hoot, and the latest batch are no exception. Many jobs identified are simply displacement activity, with one repair or maintenance occupation taking over from another. Around 6% of the total are to be found in ‘environmental charities’, an interesting way to describe elite billionaire political funding to push the Net Zero fantasy. Such is the seeming desperation to rustle up a green job, the ONS even includes repairing home appliances, controlling forest fires and separating hydrogen by carbon dioxide-producing electrolysis.

The latest ‘estimates’ from the ONS cover 2021 and 2022, and they are said to show an increase in both years. But as the graph below reveals, the rises are pitiful over a decade, and the 2022 estimate of 639,000 is less than 2% of jobs in the economy as a whole.

As can be seen, environmental charities employ 40,000 people, almost as many as the 47,000 that work in renewable energy. But the charities figure does not include all those make-work jobs in environmental consultancy and education or what is described as in-house environmental activities. If all the displacement, invented or re-badged jobs in repair, electric vehicles, waste disposal, water treatment, energy efficiency, Net Zero promotion, teaching and the ubiquitous bureaucracy are rightly ignored, it is unlikely that more than 150,000 new jobs have been created.

Fairly small pickings, it might be thought, from all the cash sprayed at subsidy-hunting chancers over at least two decades. Even worse, any new jobs are easily offset by the occupations being destroyed in steel making, refining hydrocarbons, coal mining and oil and gas exploration. Fracking for gas would transform a number of deprived areas in the U.K. at little environmental cost, as it has done in the U.S. Energy security would likely be achieved, and the tax take would be considerable. But fracking is anathema to the major political parties in the U.K., except the emerging Reform party.Last week saw some real push back on the madness of Net Zero and the so-called green economy. The boss of GMB, the third largest trade union in the country, told the annual Labour party conference that its plans to decarbonise the energy network by 2030 will cost up to one million jobs, decimate working communities and push up bills for the poorest. According to Smith, Government’s plans for Net Zero were “bonkers” and “fundamentally dishonest”. In a week when it was revealed that British consumers, both industrial and private, had some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world, he charged that current energy policy amounted to virtue signalling by politicians. He accused them of exporting jobs and importing virtue because the jobs were being created abroad rather than in the U.K.

Meanwhile, a recent paper published in Science came to a damning conclusion that will not surprise sceptics, namely that 96% of climate policies over the last 25 years, ultimately designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, have been a waste of money. “That’s where green spin has got us,” writes George Monbiot, although these days the Guardian’s extremist-in-chief seems to have given up on all life enhancing processes that run the risk of disturbing anything on the planet. “Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what sceptics have been saying all along,” observes the sceptical journalist Jo Nova. “Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something,” she says.

As we can see, the ONS survey is full of these make-work schemes providing jobs that can only exist by rigging free markets and providing eye-watering subsidies from consumers and taxpayers. As the more concerned trade unionists can see, much of the cost of these fantasy ventures falls on the poorest members of society forced to pay higher prices for many of the basic essentials of life. In addition, as we have observed, most green schemes make mugs of the wider investing public, with the RENIXX, a stock capitalisation global index of the 30 largest renewable industrial companies, showing near zero growth since it was started in 2006. None of this matters, of course, to the Mad Miliband and his weird wonks at the U.K. Department of Energy, who are ramping up ideological plans to hose cash at daft ideas like carbon capture, battery energy storage and hydrogen production.

Not only is CO2 Capture and Storage wildly impractical, its aim is to deprive the biosphere of plant food.

But all is not lost on the jobs front – opportunities must be taken when they occur. Earlier this year, Gary Smith was able to point to some new employment clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.

Footnote Q & A:

Q:  What is the difference between Golf and Government?

A:  In Government you can always improve your lie.

–Anonymous Source

Resources

Climate Policies Fail in Fact and in Theory

Investors Beware Green Equipment Companies

Green Deal Cuts EU Emissions, Doubles Them Elsewhere

Investors Beware Green Equipment Companies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Steve Goreham explains in his Heartland article Why Are Renewable Equipment Companies Such Poor Investments? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Headlines promote renewable energy equipment companies as part of efforts to transition to Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Wind and solar system providers, electric vehicle manufacturers, green hydrogen producers, and other green equipment firms form a growing share of world industry. But renewable equipment firms suffer poor market returns, so investors should beware.

The Renewable Energy Industrial Index (RENIXX) is a global stock index of the 30 largest renewable energy industrial companies in the world by stock market capitalization. Current RENIXX companies include Enphase Energy, First Solar, Orsted, Plug Power, Tesla, and Vestas.

IWR of Germany established the RENIXX on May 1, 2006, with an initial value of 1,000 points. This month, the RENIXX stood at 1,013 points, essentially zero value growth over the last 18 years. In comparison, the S&P 500 Index more than quadrupled over the same period. The RENIXX is down three years in a row from 2021, losing about half its value.

Wind turbine manufacturers faced serious financial challenges over the last three years, even with rising sales. Rising costs, high interest rates, and project delays continue to impact the profitability of wind projects and equipment suppliers. The stock of Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest supplier, rose only 7% over the last 16 years, and its stock price has fallen 58% from a high in 2021. Vestas struggled to make a profit in 2022 and 2023 and suspended dividends to shareholders.

Other major wind suppliers have also been poor investments for shareholders. The stock of Siemens Gamesa, the number two turbine maker, is down 65% since a peak in 2021. Gamesa reported a loss of €4.4 billion in 2023 and received a €7.5 billion bailout from the German government that same year. Other top wind suppliers suffered major stock price declines since 2021, including Goldwind of China (down 77%) and Nordex of Germany (-36%).

Some 80% of the world’s solar panels are manufactured in China and the top six suppliers reside in China. The solar panel industry is beset by overcapacity and severe competition. Stock prices of the top seven suppliers have all declined by more than 50% since 2021. The stock of U.S. firm First Solar has risen since 2021 but remains below its all-time high price reached in 2008.

Tesla, which was founded in 2003, remained the only pure-play, publicly traded EV stock until 2018. By the end of 2021, Tesla’s value had soared to over $1 Trillion, boasting a market value more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Ford, BMW, and Honda combined. But Tesla is the exception.

But in most cases, electric vehicle (EV) companies have been very poor investments. Between 2020 and 2024, 31 EV companies went public on U.S. stock exchanges. Only one of these 31 companies, the Chinese firm Li Auto, saw its price rise since the initial public offering (IPO). Thirty EV firms saw their stock prices fall, most precipitously.

EV company price declines from the IPO price include Fisker (-99%), Nikola (-94%), NIO (-50%), Lucid Group (-75%), and Rivian (-88%). Six others of the 31 companies went bankrupt. Tesla and Chinese firms BYD and Li Auto are the only EV firms profitable today.

ChargePoint is the world’s largest dedicated EV charger company (behind EV manufacturer Tesla), with over 25,000 charging stations in the U.S. and Canada. ChargePoint went public in 2021 by merging with Switchback Energy Acquisition Corporation, valued at $2.4 billion. The firm’s value today is about $585 million, down 76% since 2021.  For fiscal year 2024, ChargePoint lost $458 million on revenue of $507 million.

It’s not clear that any charging company can make money. High-speed, 50-kilowatt EV chargers cost about five times as much as traditional gasoline pumps. Around 80% of EV charging is done at home, reducing the demand for public charging. ChargePoint, EVgo, Wallbox, Allego, and Blink Charging are all valued today at small fractions of their original IPO price. No EV charger firm is profitable, even after continuing to receive large government subsidies.

Plug Power is a leading supplier of hydrogen energy systems, including battery-cells for hydrogen vehicles and electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen fuel. Founded in 1997, the company went public in October 1999 at a split-adjusted price of about $160 per share.

But during its 27-year history, Plug Power has never turned a profit. According to financial reports, the firm lost $1.45 billion in 2024, up from a loss of $43.8 million in 2018. Its current stock price is under two dollars per share.

Traditional established firms are finding that renewable equipment can be poor business. In 2023, Ford lost $4.7 billion on sales of 116,000 electric vehicles, or over $40,000 per vehicle. General Electric’s wind turbine business lost $1.1 billion in 2023.

The U.S. federal government provided subsidies to renewable equipment companies of between $7 billion and $16 billion per year between 2010 and 2022. But the Cato Institute estimates that because of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, subsidies will skyrocket to about $80 billion in fiscal year 2025.

EIA

Without the fear of human-caused climate change and
a rising level of government subsidies and mandates,
many of these green companies would not exist.

It’s doubtful that carbon dioxide pipelines, heavy electric trucks, offshore wind systems, green hydrogen fuel equipment, and EV charging stations would be viable businesses in unsubsidized capital markets.

During this last year, leading financial firms pulled back on their climate change pledges. Bank of America, JP Morgan, State Street, and Pimco withdrew from Climate Action 100+, which seeks to force companies and investment funds to address climate issues and adopt environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies.

But it’s difficult to invest in renewable equipment companies
when they are losing money.

 

Wind Power Pollution and Hypocrisy in New England

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Emmett Hare reports in City Journal Wind Power Debacle in New England.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A fractured turbine’s blade in Nantucket is causing
ongoing problems and frustrating local residents.

In mid-July, a blade from an offshore wind turbine operating 15 miles southwest of Nantucket fractured. A large amount of fiberglass, foam, and plastic debris fell into the ocean and began washing up on the island’s shores. The incident led to the closure of several beaches and a suspension of operations and construction for the massive Vineyard Wind project, a joint venture of Avangrid and foreign-owned Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners that has installed and operated ten of 62 planned turbines in the country’s largest wind farm.

At local meetings, Nantucket residents expressed concerns about officials’ handling of the turbine breakage and the environmental hazards of enormous fiberglass blades tumbling into the sea. In the past, they have also cited the project’s impact on marine wildlife and its visual impact on the town’s scenic beaches. A CNN report describing this “unusual and rare” event noted that the Coast Guard had retrieved a 300-foot piece of the shattered blade from local waters. The outlet reported that a spokesperson for GE Vernova, the wind-blade manufacturer, “couldn’t provide officials with the precise number of times something similar has happened at other wind farms around the world.”

Environmental groups, realizing the potential political implications of the fractured blade, downplayed the episode. The National Wildlife Federation (NWF), which avidly supports offshore wind farms, insisted that the damage was minor. “Compared to other energy disasters in the ocean like oil spills, this incident is fairly contained and easily cleaned up to prioritize the safety of marine life,” said Amber Hewett, senior director of offshore wind energy for the NWF. The Sierra Club emphasized that “the failure of a single turbine blade does not adversely impact the emergence of offshore wind as a critical solution for reducing dependence on fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis.”

Whether the incident is “contained” remains in question. Debris from the broken turbine has been reported beyond Nantucket—in Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, Rhode Island, and off the coast of Montauk, Long Island. The debris is breaking up into smaller pieces resembling shattered glass, with yet-unknown effects on Nantucket’s marine habitat. Vineyard Wind cautioned that “[m]embers of the public should avoid handling debris” and promised to “bag, track, and transport all debris to proper storage as soon as possible.” It remains to be seen whether simple avoidance will suffice, especially given the possibility of debris entering the human food chain through area fish.

The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) Wind Technology Testing Center in Boston has taken delivery of a 107-meter wind turbine blade designed for GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X offshore wind turbine.

While this event may be “unusual and rare” in an absolute sense, many wind farms have seen broken turbines, fires, and sea-floor damage. And Nantucket’s situation is particularly dire, given that Vineyard Wind’s turbines are by far the largest ever constructed in the United States: the blade that fragmented on July 13 was over 350 feet long and weighed 57 tons.

Even when functioning as intended, wind farms can negatively affect the surrounding environment. Wildlife advocates have claimed that sonic and subsonic vibrations from the construction and operation of turbines disrupt the navigational senses of marine mammals like whales and dolphins and can cause beachings. Turbines are also responsible for the deaths of countless birds. Clammers and fishermen are wary of working in areas close to wind farms, out of concern for equipment snags on buried power lines and risks to their vessels of navigating between the turbines in bad weather.

French Fishermen Join U.S. Fishermen in Fighting Offshore Wind – IER

The Nantucket residents questioning the safety of wind turbines generally support alternative energy. Indeed, in an FAQ post on the town government’s webpage, officials made the point that allowing wind projects to avoid scrutiny might allow traditional fossil fuel producers to evade similar oversight: “If [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] guts the provisions of these longstanding federal laws protecting culturally and environmentally significant places to facilitate expedient green energy projects, fossil fuel developers will exploit the bad precedent to undercut regulation of harmful projects for decades to come.”

Nonetheless, the Nantucket residents have seen themselves branded as tools of the fossil-fuel industry by well-financed lobbyists and promoters of richly subsidized wind power. They have also been subject to physical attacks. At a city council meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, a field director for Climate Jobs Rhode Island, David Booth, was charged with simple assault and disorderly conduct after accosting a speaker and seizing a bag of turbine fragments that she had brought for her testimony. Booth allegedly appeared prominently in a photo on the campaign website of Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which was subsequently removed without comment.

Debris in the water from Vineyard turbine blade

The wind-power industry has seen some of its planned projects cancelled in recent years due to swelling production costs and local opposition to the environmental and aesthetic impact of the colossal windmills. A report published by Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab in early 2024 suggested that much of the opposition to offshore wind was rooted in “misinformation,” “[c]onspiracy theories,” and cherry-picked information supplied by “right-wing think tanks.” It might prove beyond the powers of an academic paper to convince the residents of New England and coastal states that the fiberglass and foam washing up on their beaches is nothing more than a conservative talking point.

See Also:

The Short Lives of Wind Turbines

Green Deal Cuts EU Emissions, Doubles Them Elsewhere

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The news and analysis from University of Groningen is reported at Science Daily European Green Deal: A double-edged sword for global emissions.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Greenhouse gas emissions will fall in the EU, but rise even more elsewhere

Summary:  The European Green Deal will bring down the emission of greenhouse gases in the European Union, but at the same time causes a more than a twofold increase in emissions outside its borders.

The European Union aims to be carbon-neutral by 2050 as part of the comprehensive Green Deal that was agreed upon four years ago. However, an analysis of the policy documents outlining the practical measures of the Green Deal shows that it will decrease carbon emissions in Europe, but also increase carbon emissions outside of the EU. This increase is more than double the amount of carbon emissions saved by the Green Deal. This analysis was published in Nature Sustainability on by an international team of scientists led by Klaus Hubacek, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Groningen.

The European Green Deal is a set of policies intended to fully decarbonize Europe by 2050, but it also includes measures for clean energy production and ecological restoration. Hubacek and colleagues from the United States and China carried out full supply chain analyses of the policy documents underlying the Green Deal. Their conclusion is that the Green Deal in its current form will lead to an increase in emissions in countries outside the EU by 244.8 percent compared to the Green Deal’s carbon reduction goal in the land, land use change, and forestry sector within EU borders.

Reasons to be Skeptical of Policies

One example is the measure to increase biodiversity in Europe by planting three billion trees. ‘However, trees require a lot of land that cannot be used to produce food. That means that food must be produced elsewhere, and to do this, land must be converted into cropland. This increases the carbon dioxide emission and reduces biodiversity,‘ says Hubacek. In this way, the EU would reduce carbon emissions within its borders, but ‘export‘ them to the countries that would produce our food, for example Africa or South America.

Of course, the Green Deal does contain a paragraph forbidding the import of products (such as meat or animal feed) for which woodland is converted to farmland. Hubacek is sceptical: ‘Nothing stops these other countries from growing products for Europe on existing farmland and felling forests to produce for the local market. There are simply too many uncertainties in these types of regulations.’ The Green Deal also calls for an increase in organic farming, but this requires more farmland in Europe. Hubacek: ‘Again, there is very little information available on the impact on land use.’

No free lunch

However, the scientists did not just reveal the negative impacts of the Green Deal on the rest of the world. They also looked at different scenarios to see if overall carbon reductions could be enhanced. ‘We found one very effective way to do this.’ says Hubacek, ‘By adopting the more plant-based “planetary health diet,” it is possible to save an enormous amount of carbon emissions.’ Another measure is to phase out food-based biofuels within the EU, which would reduce the amount of farmland needed and thus save carbon emissions and prevent biodiversity loss. Also, the EU could assist developing regions to increase their agricultural efficiency, which would also reduce land use.

Although the Nature Sustainability article shows that the European Green Deal in its present form could result in a net loss for the global environment, the scientists conclude that it can be remedied. ‘By adopting the planetary health diet, which is relatively simple’, says Hubacek. However, there is one more thing that needs to change, he stresses: ‘The programme is driven by techno-optimism, but our analysis underlines that there is no free lunch. I very much doubt that “Green Growth” is possible, as everything you produce requires an input of resources. So we really need to consume less.’ There is a strong sense of urgency now that global warming seems set to surpass the 1.5 degrees from the 1995 Paris Agreement, and many other planetary boundaries are also being overstepped. Hubacek: ‘It is time to implement measures that work.’

Comment:

The authors share the IPCC notion of climate emergency caused by GHGs, but are practical enough to realize the proposed policies are counter productive.  I am among those who agree with Dr. Happer that the only climate crisis is coming from the torrent of ill-advised governmental policies that are not likely to reduce GHG emissions or temperatures, but will achieve great economic and social destruction.

See the series of four posts World of Hurt from Climate Policies

World of Hurt from Climate Policies-Part 1

See Also

Climate Policies Fail in Fact and in Theory

 

Beware “Fact Checking” by Innuendo

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Kip Hansen gives the game away in his Climate Realism article Illogically Facts —’Fact-Checking’ by Innuendo.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The latest fad in all kinds of activism to attack one’s ideological opponents via “fact checking”.    We see this in politics and all the modern controversies, including, of course, Climate Science.

Almost none of the “fact checking sites” and “fact checking organizations” actually check facts.  And, if they accidentally find themselves checking what we would all agree is a fact, and not just an opinion or point of view, invariably it is checked against an contrary opinion, a different point of view or an alternative fact.

The resulting fact check report depends on the purposes of the fact check.  Some are done to confirm that “our guy” or “our team” is proved to be correct, or that the opposition is proved to be wrong, lying or misinformation.  When a fact is found to be different in any way from the desired fact, even the tiniest way, the original being checked is labelled a falsehood, or worse, an intentional lie. (or conversely, other people are lying about our fact!).   Nobody likes a liar, so this sort of fake fact checking accomplishes two goals – it casts doubt on the not-favored fact supposedly being checked and smears an ideological opponent as a liar.  One stone – two birds.

While not entirely new on the fact-checking scene, an AI-enhanced effort has popped to the surface of the roiling seas of controversy: Logically Facts.  “Logically Facts is part of Meta’s Third Party Fact-Checking Program (3PFC) and works with TikTok in Europe. We have been a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) since 2020 and are a member of the Misinformation Combat Alliance (MCA) in India and the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) in Europe.” [ source ]   Meta? “Meta Platforms…is the undisputed leader in social media. The technology company owns three of the four biggest platforms by monthly active users (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram).” “Meta’s social networks are known as its Family of Apps (FoA). As of the fourth quarter of 2023, they attracted almost four billion users per month.”   And TikTok?  It has over a billion users.

I’m doubting that one can add up the 4 billion and the 1 billion to make 5 billion users of META and TikTok combined, but in any case, that’s a huge percentage of humanity any way one looks at it.

And who is providing fact-checking to those billion of people?  Logically Facts [LF].

And what kind of fact-checking does LF do?  Let’s look at an example that will deal with something very familiar with readers here:  Climate Science Denial.

The definition put forward by the Wiki is:

“Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change.”

Other popular definitions of climate change denial include: attacks on solutions, questioning official climate change science and/or the climate movement itself.

If I had all the time left to me in this world, I could do a deep, deep dive into the Fact-Checking Industry.  But, being limited, let’s look, together, at one single “analysis” article from Logically Facts:

‘Pseudoscience, no crisis’: How fake experts are fueling climate change denial

This article is a fascinating study in “fake-fact-checking by innuendo”. 

As we go through the article, sampling its claims, I’ll alert you to any check of an actual fact – don’t hold your breath.   If you wish to be pro-active, read the LF piece first, and you’ll have a better handle on what they are doing.

The lede in their piece is this:

“Would you seek dental advice from an ophthalmologist? The answer is obvious. Yet, on social media, self-proclaimed ‘experts’ with little to no relevant knowledge of climate science are influencing public opinion.” 

The two editors of this “analysis” are listed as Shreyashi Roy [MA in Mass Communications and a BA in English Literature] and Nitish Rampal [ … based out of New Delhi and has …. a keen interest in sports, politics, and tech.]  The author is said to be [more on “said to be” in a minute…] Anurag Baruah [MA in English Language and a certificate in Environmental Journalism: Storytelling earned online from the Thompson Founation.]

Why do you say “said to be”, Mr. Hansen?  If you had read the LF piece, as I suggested, you would see that it reads as if it was “written” by an AI Large Language Model, followed by editing for sense and sensibility by a human, probably, Mr. Baruah, followed by further editing by Roy and Rampal.

The lede is itself an illogic.  First it speaks of medical/dental advice, pointing out, quite rightly, that they are different specializations.  But then complains that unnamed so-called self-proclaimed experts who LF claims “have little to no relevant knowledge of climate science” are influencing public opinion.   Since these persons are so-far unnamed, LF’s AI, author and subsequent editors could not possibly know what their level of knowledge about climate science might be.

Who exactly are they smearing here?

The first is:

“One such ‘expert,’ Steve Milloy, a prominent voice on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), described a NASA Climate post (archive) about the impact of climate change on our seas as a “lie” on June 26, 2024.”

It is absolutely true that Milloy, who is well-known to be an “in-your-face” and “slightly over the-top” critic of all things science that he considers poorly done, being over-hyped, or otherwise falling into his category of “Junk Science”, posted on X the item claimed. 

LF , its AI, author and editors make no effort to check what fact/facts
Milloy was calling a lie, or to check NASA’s facts in any way whatever.

You see, Milloy calling any claim from NASA “a lie” would be an a priori case of Climate Denial: he is refuting or refusing to accept some point of official climate science.

Who is Steve Milloy? 

Steve Milloy is a Board Member & Senior Policy Fellow of the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, author of seven books and over 600 articles/columns published in major newspapers, magazines and internet outlets.  He has testified by request before the U.S. Congress many times, including on risk assessment and Superfund issues.  He is an Adjunct Fellow of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

“He holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences, Johns Hopkins University; Master of Health Sciences (Biostatistics), Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health; Juris Doctorate, University of Baltimore; and Master of Laws (Securities regulation) from the Georgetown University Law Center.”

It seems that many consider Mr. Milloy to be an expert in many things.

And the evidence for LF’s dismissal of Milloy as a “self-proclaimed expert”  having “little to no relevant knowledge of climate science”?  The Guardian, co-founder of the climate crisis propaganda outfit Covering Climate Now, said “JunkScience.com, has been called “the main entrepôt for almost every kind of climate-change denial”” and after a link listing Milloy’s degrees, pooh-poohed him for “lacking formal training in climate science.”  Well, a BA in Natural Sciences might count for something. And a law degree is not nothing. The last link which gives clear evidence that Milloy is a well-recognized expert and it is obvious that the LF AI, author, and editors either did not read the contents of the link or simply chose to ignore it.

Incredibly, LF’s next target is “… John Clauser, a 2022 Nobel Prize winner in physics, claimed that no climate crisis exists and that climate science is “pseudoscience.” Clauser’s Nobel Prize lent weight to his statements, but he has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change.“

LF’s evidence against Clauser is The Washington Post in an article attacking not just Clauser, but a long list of major physicists who do not support the IPCC consensus on climate change:  Willie Soon (including the lie that Soon’s work was financed by fossil fuel companies) , Steve Koonin, Dick Lindzen and Will Happer.   The Post article fails to discuss any of the reasons these esteemed, world-class physicists are not consensus-supporting club members. 

Their non-conforming is their crime.  No facts are checked.

LF reinforces the attack on world-renown physicists with a quote from Professor Bill McGuire:  “Such fake experts are dangerous and, in my opinion, incredibly irresponsible—Nobel Prize or not. A physicist denying anthropogenic climate change is actually denying the well-established physical properties of carbon dioxide, which is simply absurd.”

McGuire, is not a physicist and is not a climate scientist, but has a PhD in Geology and is a volcanologist and an IPCC contributor.   He also could be seen as “lacking formal training in climate science.”

But, McGuire has a point, which LF, its AI and its human editors seem to miss, the very basis of the CO2 Global Warming hypothesis is based on physics, not based on what is today called “climate science”. Thus, the physicists are the true experts . (and not the volcanologists….)

LF then launches into the gratuitous comparison of “fake experts” in the anti-tobacco fight, alludes to oil industry ties, and then snaps right to John Cook.

John Cook, a world leader in attacking Climate Change Denial, is not a climate scientist.  He is not a geologist, not an atmospheric scientist, not an oceanic scientist, not a physicist, not even a volcanologist.   He  “earned his PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Western Australia in 2016”.

The rest of the Logically Facts fake-analysis is basically a re-writing of some of Cook’s anti-Climate Denialists screeds.  Maybe/probably resulting from an AI large language model trained on pro-consensus climate materials.  Logically Facts is specifically and openly an AI-based effort.

LF proceeds to attack a series of persons, not their ideas, one after another:  Tony Heller, Dr. Judith Curry, Patrick Moore and Bjørn Lomborg.

The expertise of these individuals in their respective fields
are either ignored or brushed over.

Curry is a world renowned climate scientist, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Curry is the author the book on Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, another book on Thermodynamics, Kinetics, and Microphysics of Clouds, and the marvelous groundbreaking Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response.  Google scholar returns over 10,000 references to a search of “Dr. Judith Curry climate”.

Lomborg is a socio-economist with an impressive record, a best selling author and a leading expert on issues of energy dependence, value for money spent on international anti-poverty and public health efforts, etc.   Richard Tol, is mention negatively for daring to doubt the “97% consensus”, with no mention of his qualifications as a Professor of Economics and a Professor of the Economics of Climate Change.

Bottom Line:

Logically Facts is a Large Language Model-type AI, supplemented by writers and editors meant to clean-up the mess returned by this chat-bot type AI.    Thus, it is entirely incapable to making any value judgements between repeated slander, enforced consensus views, the prevailing biases of scientific fields and actual facts.  Further, any LLM-based AI is incapable of Critical Thinking and drawing logical conclusions.

In short, Logically Facts is Illogical.

Defence offered by Facebook in Stossel defamation lawsuit.

California Browning from Electricity Policies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ronald Stein explains the devastation in his Heartland article The Golden State of California Is Turning Brown Without Continuous Electricity.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

As a resident of California for more than six decades, I am aware that the availability of continuously generated electricity in California is deteriorating and will get worse!

The “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies in California that are supported by Governor Newsom and the Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris have led to the state’s most expensive electricity and fuel prices in America and increasingly high cost of living, housing, and transportation, coupled with an increase in crime, smash-and-grab robberies, homelessness, pollution, and congestion that has caused many tax-paying residents and companies to exodus California to more affordable cities and states.

California’s net move-out number of residents in 2022 alone was more than 343,000 people that left California — the highest exodus of any state in the U.S.

The California Policy Institute counted more than 237 businesses that have left the state since 2005. Among these businesses were eleven Fortune 1000 companies, including AT&T, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently made a startling admission: U.S. electricity demand will double by 2050, and meeting that soaring demand will require the equivalent of building 300 Hoover Dams.

The last California Nuclear Power Plant at Diablo Canyon, a 2.2 GW plant generating continuous uninterruptable electricity, is projected to close soon. In nameplate only, it would take 1,000 2.2MW wind turbines to generate 2.2 GW, but then, it’s only intermittent electricity vs. the continuous uninterruptable electricity from Diablo demanded by the California economy!

As a result of the “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies and renewables of wind and solar stations built at the expense of taxpayer dollars, California now imports more electric power than any other US state, more than twice the amount in Virginia, the USA’s second-largest importer of electric power. California typically receives between one-fifth and one-third of its electricity supply from outside of the state.

Power prices are rocketing into the stratosphere and, even before winter drives up demand, are being deprived of continuous electricity in a way that was unthinkable barely a decade ago. But such is life when you attempt to run the economy on sunshine and breezes.

Projected electricity costs for California Businesses

Further, these so-called “green” electricity sources of wind and solar are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. They also endanger wildlife.

California’s economy depends on affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner electricity and fuels. Unfortunately, policymakers are driving up California’s electric and gas prices, and California now has the highest electricity and fuel prices in the nation. Those high energy prices are contributing to the pessimistic business sentiment. California’s emission mandates have done an excellent job of increasing the cost of electricity, products, and fuels to its citizens.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that these supposed “green” alternative methods of generating electricity won’t work — especially as electricity demand is projected to double by 2050 due to AI, charging of EVs and data centers, government-mandated electric heating and cooking, and charging grid-backup batteries. Intermittent electricity from wind and solar cannot power modern nations.

These “green” wind and solar projects primarily exist because they are financed with taxpayer money, i.e., disguised by taxpayers as “Government Subsidies.”

“GREEN” policymakers are oblivious to humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels from fossil fuels, as they are to these two basic facts:

(1)  No one uses crude oil in its raw form. “Big Oil” only exists because of humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels made from oil!

(2)  “Renewables” like wind and solar only exist to generate intermittent electricity; they CANNOT make products or fuels!

To rid the world of crude oil usage, there is no need to over-regulate or over-tax the oil industry; just STOP using the products and fuels made from crude oil!

Simplistically:

STOP making cars, trucks, aircraft, boats, ships, farming equipment, medical equipment and supplies, communications equipment, military equipment, etc., that demand crude oil for their supply chain of products.

STOPPING the demands of society for the products and fuels made from oil will eliminate the need for crude oil.

The primary growth in electric power usage is coming from new data centers housing AI technologies. It is expected that over the next few decades, 50% of additional electric power will be needed just for AI, but data centers CANNOT run on occasional electricity from wind and solar.

Cal matters raises concerns about state policy to phase out ICE vehicles in favor of EVs.

How will the occasionally generated electricity from wind and solar support the following:

  • America’s military fleet of vehicles, ships, and aircraft?
  • America’s commercial and private aircraft?
  • America’s hospitals?
  • America’s space exploration?

Despite Governor Newsom’s and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s support for the “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies in California, it’s time to stimulate conversations about the generation of continuously generated electricity to meet the demands of America’s end users.

 

Good News: SEC’s ESG Plans Thwarted with Biden Term Ending

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The news comes from Bloomberg Law article SEC’s Gensler Sees ESG Plans Thwarted as Biden’s Term Nears End. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler started out with big plans on ESG.

  • Gensler seeks board diversity, workforce, ESG fund disclosures
  • Agency unlikely to finalize ESG regulations before January

The Democrat arrived at the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021, after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and President Joe Biden’s election that year fueled interest in environmental, social and governance investing. Gensler wanted public companies to report details about their climate change risks, workforce management and board members’ diversity.

He also sought new rules to fight greenwashing and other misleading ESG claims by investment funds.

Almost four years later, most of those major ESG regulations are unfinished, and they’ll likely remain so in the less than five months Gensler may have left as chair. A conservative-led backlash against ESG and federal agency authority has fueled challenges in and out of court to corporate greenhouse gas emissions reporting rules and other SEC actions, helping blunt the commission’s power.

The climate rules—Gensler’s marquee ESG initiative—were watered down following intense industry pushback, then paused altogether after business groups, Republican attorneys general and others sued.

“It’s clear the commission leadership is exhausted and feeling buffeted by the courts, Congress and industry complaints,” said Tyler Gellasch, who was a counsel to former Democratic SEC Commissioner Kara Stein and is president and CEO of investor advocacy group Healthy Markets Association.

The SEC has finalized more than 40 rules since 2021, “making our capital markets more efficient, transparent, and resilient,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg Law.

The spokesperson declined to comment on the status of the agency’s pending ESG rules, beyond pointing to the commission’s most recent regulatory agenda.

Long-standing plans to require human capital and board diversity disclosures from companies have yet to yield formal proposals. Final rules concerning ESG-focused funds still are pending, and even if the SEC adopts them before January as the agenda suggests, a Republican-controlled Congress and White House may have the power to quickly scrap them under the Congressional Review Act.

Unlike the workforce and board diversity rules that have yet to be proposed, investment fund regulations concerning ESG have already been drafted and are targeted for completion in October, according to the SEC’s latest agenda. ESG funds would have to disclose their portfolio companies’ emissions and report on their ESG strategies.

The SEC proposed the regulations in May 2022, along with rules intended to ensure ESG funds’ names align with their investments. The commission issued final fund name rules in September 2023.

The SEC’s investment fund proposal has raised objections from both funds and environmental and investor advocates.

The proposal would require environmentally-focused funds to disclose their carbon footprints, if emissions are part of their investment strategies. But it wouldn’t require funds that look at emissions to disclose other metrics that play a significant role in how they invest and the methodology they use to calculate those measures. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, and other environmental and investor groups pushed for those requirements in an April letter to the SEC.

The Investment Company Institute, which represents funds, has raised concerns its members would have to report on their carbon footprints before public companies must disclose their emissions under SEC rules. The group in April called on the SEC to keep fund emissions reporting requirements on ice until the litigation challenging the agency’s public company climate rules is resolved. That litigation is at the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which is unlikely to rule this year.

The fund rules have received no Republican support at the SEC, with only Gensler and his fellow Democratic commissioners voting in favor of proposing them.

“If it’s a Republican Congress and Trump administration, you could imagine they would be willing to disapprove those,” said Susan Dudley, a George Washington University professor who oversaw the White House regulatory policy office under President George W. Bush.

 

Climate Policies Fail in Fact and in Theory

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A recent international analysis of 1500 climate policies around the world concluded that 63 or 4% of them were successful in reducing emissions.  The paper is Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades published at Science.org.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Abstract

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate targets necessitates better knowledge about which climate policies work in reducing emissions at the necessary scale. We provide a global, systematic ex post evaluation to identify policy combinations that have led to large emission reductions out of 1500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents. Our approachintegrates a comprehensive climate policy database with a machine learning–based extension ofthe common difference-in-differences approach. We identified 63 successful policy interventions with total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2 . Our insights on effective but rarely studied policy combinations highlight the important role of price-based instruments in well-designed policy mixes and the policy efforts necessary for closing the emissions gap.

Context

(1). Although the [Paris] agreement seeks to limit global average temperature increase to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C,” its success critically hinges on the implementation of effective climate policies at the national level.  However, scenarios from global integrated assessment models suggest that the aggregated mitigation efforts communicated through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) fall short of the required emission reductions.

(2)The United Nations (UN) estimates quantify a median emission gap of 23 billion metric tonnes(Gt) carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) by 2030

(3). The persistence of this emissions gap is not only caused by an ambition gap but also a gap in the outcomes that adopted policies achieve in terms of emission reductions.

(4). This raises the fundamental question as to which types of policy measures are successfully causing meaningful emission reductions. Despite more than two decades of experience with thousands of diverse climate policy measures gained around the world, there is consensus in neither science nor policy on this question.

The exhibit above shows the scope and complexity of the analysis.  But the bottom line is that 96% of the effort and trillions of $$$ were spent to no avail. It is estimated that on the order of 1.2 Billion tonnes of CO2 were prevented over the last 20 years, with an additional 23 Billion tonnes to be erased by 2030. 

Any enterprise with that performance would be liquidated. 
That is an epic failure in fact. 

And recommending mixing of policies including subsidies and regulations along with pricing goes against economic theory and fails in practice. Ross McKitrick explains the dangers of making climate policies willy-nilly in his Financial Post article Economists’ letter misses the point about the carbon tax revolt.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Yes, the carbon tax works great in a ‘first-best’ world where it’s the
only carbon policy. In the real world, carbon policies are piled high.

An open letter is circulating online among my economist colleagues aiming to promote sound thinking on carbon taxes. It makes some valid points and will probably get waved around in the House of Commons before long. But it’s conspicuously selective in its focus, to the point of ignoring the main problems with Canadian climate policy as a whole.

EV charging sign Electric-vehicle mandates and subsidies are among the mountain of climate policies that have been piled on top of Canada’s carbon tax. PHOTO BY JOSHUA A. BICKEL/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

There’s a massive pile of boulders blocking the road to efficient policy, including:

    • clean fuel regulations,
    • the oil-and-gas-sector emissions cap,
    • the electricity sector coal phase-out,
    • strict energy efficiency rules for new and existing buildings,
    • new performance mandates for natural gas-fired generation plants,
    • the regulatory blockade against liquified natural gas export facilities,
    • new motor vehicle fuel economy standards,
    • caps on fertilizer use on farms,
    • provincial ethanol production subsidies,
    • electric vehicle mandates and subsidies,
    • provincial renewable electricity mandates,
    • grid-scale battery storage experiments,
    • the Green Infrastructure Fund,
    • carbon capture and underground storage mandates, 
    • subsidies for electric buses and emergency vehicles in Canadian cities,
    • new aviation and rail sector emission limits,
      and many more.

Not one of these occasioned a letter of protest from Canadian economists.

Beside that mountain of boulders there’s a twig labelled “overstated objections to carbon pricing.” At the sight of it, hundreds of economists have rushed forward to sweep it off the road. What a help!

To my well-meaning colleagues I say: the pile of regulatory boulders
long ago made the economic case for carbon pricing irrelevant.

Layering a carbon tax on top of current and planned command-and-control regulations does not yield an efficient outcome, it just raises the overall cost to consumers. Which is why I can’t get excited about and certainly won’t sign the carbon-pricing letter. That’s not where the heavy lifting is needed.

My colleagues object to exaggerated claims about the cost of carbon taxes. Fair enough. But far worse are exaggerated claims about both the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the economic opportunities associated with the so-called “energy transition.” Exaggeration about the benefits of emission reduction is traceable to poor-quality academic research, such as continued use of climate models known to have large, persistent warming biases and of the RCP8.5 emissions scenario, long since shown in the academic literature to be grossly exaggerated.

But a lot of it is simply groundless rhetoric. Climate activists, politicians and journalists have spent years blaming Canadians’ fossil fuel use for every bad weather event that comes along and shutting down rational debate with polemical cudgels such as “climate emergency” declarations. Again, none of this occasioned a cautionary letter from economists.

There’s another big issue on which the letter was silent. Suppose we did clear all the regulatory boulders along with the carbon-pricing-costs-too-much twig. How high should the carbon tax be? A few of the letter’s signatories are former students of mine so I expect they remember the formula for an optimal emissions tax in the presence of an existing tax system. If not, they can take their copy of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy by Prof. McKitrick off the shelf, blow off the thick layer of dust and look it up. Or they can consult any of the half-dozen or so journal articles published since the 1970s that derive it. But I suspect most of the other signatories have never seen the formula and don’t even know it exists.

To be technical for a moment, the optimal carbon tax rate varies inversely with the marginal cost of the overall tax system. The higher the tax burden — and with our heavy reliance on income taxes our burden is high — the costlier it is at the margin to provide any public good, including emissions reductions. Economists call this a “second-best problem”: inefficiencies in one place, like the tax system, cause inefficiencies in other policy areas, yielding in this case a higher optimal level of emissions and a lower optimal carbon tax rate.

Based on reasonable estimates of the social cost of carbon and the marginal costs of our tax system, our carbon price is already high enough. In fact, it may well be too high. I say this as one of the only Canadian economists who has published on all aspects of the question. Believing in mainstream climate science and economics, as I do, does not oblige you to dismiss public complaints that the carbon tax is too costly.

Which raises my final point: the age of mass academic letter-writing has long since passed. Academia has become too politically one-sided. Universities don’t get to spend years filling their ranks with staff drawn from one side of the political spectrum and then expect to be viewed as neutral arbiters of public policy issues. The more signatories there are on a letter like this, the less impact it will have. People nowadays will make up their own minds, thank you very much, and a well-argued essay by an individual willing to stand alone may even carry more weight.

Online conversations today are about rising living costs, stagnant real wages and deindustrialization. Even if carbon pricing isn’t the main cause of all this, climate policy is playing a growing role and people can be excused for lumping it all together. The public would welcome insight from economists about how to deal with these challenges. A mass letter enthusing about carbon taxes doesn’t provide it.

Postscript:  All the Pain for No Gain is Unnecessary

 

There is no charge for content on this site, nor for subscribers to receive email notifications of postings.