Maley's Energy Blog

This headline/subhead in The Guardian (UK) reminds me of the plot of a really bad 1950s monster movie:

Global warming monitoring needs to find ‘missing heat’, say scientists

Further study on oceans needed before hidden heat ‘comes back to haunt us’, say researchers in Colorado

So, Global Warming Is Going to Kill Us All!!!

And what makes it really scary: we don’t even know where all that Global Warming is!!!!

Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh! We’re all going to die!!!!!!

Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, climate scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, say that only about half of the heat believed to have built up in the Earth in recent years can be accounted for. New instruments are needed to locate and monitor this missing heat, they say, which could be storing up trouble for the future.

“The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later,” Trenberth said. “The reprieve we’ve had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate.”

What they’re telling us is that all the heat that their whiz-bang thermodynamic climate models say must be getting trapped has gone AWOL.

The scientists say: “How can we understand whether the strong cold outbreaks of December 2009 are simply a natural weather phenomenon, as they seem to be, or are part of some change in clouds or pollution, if we do not have adequate measurements?”

Fellas, um, I’m not a climate scientist, but have you considered the possibility that your climate models are wrong? That maybe, just maybe, there are significant earth/atmospheric/oceanic processes that aren’t understood well enough to make a half-decent computer model of them?

Nah, that couldn’t be, because those climate models are what hold the whole field of Climate Science together. And if those models are suspect… nah, we’re not even going there, my friend!

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

I don’t know who disgusts me more — Sen. Graham, or the oil companies.

Senators consider gasoline tax as part of climate bill

Estimates put it in the range of 15 cents a gallon. Some oil companies are on board with the plan because it would cost them far less than other proposals to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Leading voices in the Senate are considering a new tax on gasoline as part of an effort to win Republican and oil industry support for the energy and climate bill now idling in Congress.

The tax, which according to early estimates would be in the range of 15 cents a gallon, was conceived with the input of several oil companies, including Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips, and is being championed by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

[Emphasis added.]

Disgusted, but not surprised. Last June, you may recall, Shell and BP were tied for #6 on my list of The Top 10 Green Energy Whores.

Continue reading →

In the 1980s, Congress, searching for domestic energy supplies, created incentives in the form of production tax credits for ethanol and for unconventional natural gas.

The history of those two programs, and the current state of affairs in the energy world, speaks volumes about the relative merits of these two fuels.

The ethanol tax credit has been in place continuously since 1984. Despite a 2007 Congressional mandate to ramp up ethanol consumption dramatically, the product is floundering in the marketplace, falling well short of Congress’s wishes. 

Facing the scheduled year-end 2010 expiration of their vital tax credit, ethanol processors have opened up their wallets. They’ve hired a former Democratic Presidential candidate, Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.) as co-chairman of a new trade group, Growth Energy. They’ve kicked off a $2.5 million TV ad campaign to help change the public perception of their “green” but underperforming fuel. The ultimate strategy is to lobby the EPA to mandate an increase in the percentage of ethanol in gasoline, from 10% to 15%, the marketplace be damned.

Likewise, the unconventional natural gas tax credit also began in the early 1980s. To combat planners’ fears that conventional gas supplies were limited, the “Section 29” credit hoped to spur research and development of new technologies to enable production from “unconventional” sources: gas from low-permeability, or “tight” sands, gas from shale, and gas from coal seams. The credits applied to wells drilled before 1992. Those wells earned the tax credits on production through the year 2002. Thousands of wells were drilled, and new technologies were developed, spurred on by the additional economic incentive the credit offered. Today, eight years after the last tax credit dollar, some 40% of natural gas supplies come from the unconventional sources made possible by the tax credit’s R&D.

The “Section 29” natural gas credit was an unqualified success. By any objective (i.e., non-political) measure, the ethanol program has been a bust. The difference is a reflection of the properties of the respective fuels. Natural gas production is a net energy gain process that has benefited from the application of new technologies (seismic exploration, horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing), thereby enabling large scale leaps in efficiency. Corn ethanol, on the other hand, is inherently inefficient, possibly even a net energy loss. Incremental gains may be made in processing or in crop yields, but it is impossible to make the same kind of gains as have been seen in natural gas in recent years.

Conservatives, liberals and environmentalists alike are skeptical about ethanol’s economic and environmental benefit, particularly in the case of the corn-based product: to conservatives, it’s another Climate Change boondoggle, to liberals it’s corporate welfare and “food for fuel”. Environmentalists decry the soil depletion and the watershed damage of large scale corn agriculture. It is foolish and wasteful for our government to mandate the use of an inferior fuel in spite of its well-known engineering, economic and environmental shortcomings.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

In a single Huffington Post column, NASA’s famous warmist-alarmist Dr. James Hansen invokes Godwin’s Law on climate change, criticizes President Obama for his lack of stalwart leadership in that area, and offers a climate change solution that would also discourage illegal immigration.

Seriously.

Obama’s Second Chance on the Predominant Moral Issue of This Century

The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century. Our fossil fuel addiction, if unabated, threatens our children and grandchildren, and most species on the planet.

So the Cadillac Escalade enjoys the same moral standing as West African slave ships and Bergen-Belsen’s crematoria. Got it.

Yet the president, addressing climate in the State of the Union, was at his good-guy worst, leading with “I know that there are those who disagree…” with the scientific evidence. This weak entrée, almost legitimizing denialists, was predictably greeted by cheers and hoots from well-oiled coal-fired Congressmen. The president was embarrassed and his supporters cringed….

Why face the difficult truth presented by the climate science? Why not use the president’s tack: just talk about the need for clean energy and energy independence? Because that approach leads to wrong policies, ineffectual legislation larded with giveaways to special interests, such as the Waxman-Markey bill in the House and the bills being considered now in the Senate.

What prescription is offered our President? Hansen has only one: We must tax the bejeezus out of carbon-based energy consumption.

An essential corollary to the rising carbon price is 100 percent redistribution of collected fees to the public — otherwise the public will never allow the fee to be high enough to affect lifestyles and energy choices. The fee must be collected from fossil fuel companies across-the-board at the mine, wellhead, or port of entry. Revenues should be divided equally among all legal adult residents, with half-shares for children up to two per family, distributed monthly as a “green check”. …

The fee-and-green-check approach is transparent, fair and effective. … Economic modeling shows that carbon emissions would decline 30 percent by 2020. The annual dividend would be $2000-3000 per legal adult resident, $6000-9000 per family with two or more children.

About sixty percent of the public would receive more in the green check than they pay in added energy costs. …

[Emphasis added.]

Oh, and the cost to administer such a program? Dr. Hansen doesn’t say, so I guess it’s fair to assume it will be negligible…

Let’s look at the numbers of this proposal. Something like 4% of the population is, um, suboptimally documented. About 28% of women have more than two children. Allowing for some overlap, that leaves 10-15% of us energy hogs (you, me, and Al Gore) to pay the freight so that 60% can get their “green check”.

But notice that Hansen mentions twice that you have to be “legal” to be a green check recipient. So an family of illegals will have a heavy monetary incentive to go home. Was this Hansen’s intended result? It’s certainly not liberal dogma; surely we’ll have to grant blanket amnesty before imposing this solution.

Perhaps most grating of all is Dr. Hansen’s invoking of the name of Galileo:

This is not the 17th century, when “beliefs” trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system. The president should unequivocally support the climate science community, which is under politically orchestrated assault on the legitimacy of its scientific assessments.

On the contrary, the Climategate memos paint a picture of a community of scientists who were more driven by “beliefs” than by a quest for the truth. The skeptics have confronted the putative “consensus” of the climate change political/scientific establishment just as Galileo was at odds with the political/scientific establishment of his day. It is Hansen and other representatives of the establishment who would have the skeptic community recant.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

Iron Eyes Cody, the faux-Indian of the Keep America Beautiful ad campaign, had a point.

In the 1960s, our environment was a mess.

I can remember streams full of suds from non-biodegradable detergents. Litter was a big problem everywhere. The air in major cities ranged from blue to grey to brown. There were two high-profile oil spills, one in California and one in Louisiana. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire.

As the hippie-driven Whole Earth movement crested, the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970. The Environmental Protection Agency was formed in July, 1970.

Over the last 40 years, things have improved. The air and the water are cleaner. And the EPA deserves some of the credit. But even more credit must also go to the thousands of companies and millions of individuals whose environmental attitudes have changed.

EPA’s attitude has changed, too. No longer content to live within the confines of the legislation which defines its mission, EPA has embarked on an unprecedented bureaucratic power grab by reinterpreting the rules, redefining its mission and its authority.

In forty short years, EPA has morphed from an agency with a well-defined, popular and worthy mission to one whose bureaucratic ambitions are not limited to controlling and cleaning up the environment. The goal of this regulatory octopus is the control of the entire industrialized economy of our country.

As Iain Murray writes in a Washington Times opinion piece titled EPA’s Ginormous Power Grab, EPA has built upon its greenhouse gas ‘finding’ (that GHGs contribute to global warming and thus constitute a hazard to public health) using an interlocked, four-pronged strategy:

• Encourage California and other states to adopt nonstandard fuel-economy requirements.
• Expropriate the authority of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in setting fuel-economy standards for the auto industry.
• Take the lead on setting U.S. climate and energy policy.
• Administratively amending the Clean Air Act (“tailoring” is the term of art) to make the Act workable for CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases it was never meant to regulate.

By granting California the power to ignore federal fuel-economy standards, the EPA created a regulatory patchwork that imposes significant burdens on the auto industry.

This led to the White House brokering a deal whereby the EPA muscles in on the NHTSA’s statutory authority to regulate fuel-economy standards, something for which the EPA has no statutory authority.

The EPA claims this then compels it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources, thereby making it the effective arbiter of national climate policy – even as Congress debates what to do about the issue.

Even the EPA seems to recognize the absurdity of the resulting regulations under the language of the Clean Air Act – which would lead to the EPA having to issue permits for fast-food franchises and large apartment buildings to emit greenhouse gases – so the agency took upon itself the power to tailor statutory language, thereby playing lawmaker, to avoid the regulatory debacle which it itself had put in motion.

And that, dear reader, is why conservatives don’t trust bureaucracies.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

This is not a post about Sesame Street or the Childrens Television Workshop.

No, this is about a literal big bird, a griffon vulture, and its unfortunate failure to maintain separation from a large power-generating windmill in Crete.

Let’s got to the videotape. (Not for the squeamish or PETA activists.)

Renewable energy proponents want to portray an image of their technology being “free” and “green” and “non-impacting”. The realists among us point out that any technology of sufficient scope and power to meet our country’s energy demands has some downside, too.

It’s been my experience in the U.S. that the Fish and Wildlife Service levies heavy fines for migratory waterfowl accidentally killed because of industrial mishaps. For endangered and protected species (condors, pelicans, all raptors), the fine per bird can also run to many thousands of dollars.

So why did the vulture repeatedly circle among the whirling generator blades? Was he attracted to the vortices created by the windmill’s blades, or was he eying a previously-downed windmill victim while planning his brunch? We’ll never know.

H/T wattsupwiththat.com

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

Remember the State of the Union, way back in January? President Obama shared a vision of our nation’s energy future:

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. …

Two months later, if you replace “making tough decisions” with “continuing to do nothing” in that sentence, you’ve got a clear picture of what’s happening.

Not only did the President make a disingenuous suggestion of a push to open new offshore areas (read: Virginia and the Eastern Gulf, off Florida) during the SOTU, over a year of foot-dragging by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar may jeopardize the regular annual leasing program in the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico – that 15% of the Outer Continental Shelf that is currently open for leasing.

Last Thursday, 88 Republican House members sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, calling for an end to the “Obama Moratorium” on offshore drilling.

Washington, D.C.– Today, House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Doc Hastings (WA-04), House Republican Leader John Boehner, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and 85 other Republicans sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar demanding that the Administration begin to implement the 2010-2015 five-year lease plan for the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). This plan would open, for the first time in a generation, areas that were made available when Congress lifted the moratorium in 2008. After repeatedly delaying the original 2010-2015 OCS lease plan, Secretary Salazar recently said that the Administration would wait until 2012 to implement a new plan. The establishment of this new two-year “Obama Moratorium” is unacceptable to Republicans in Congress and defies the will of the American people.

Nick Snow, in an Oil and Gas Journal article points out that the Bush Administration attempted to accelerate the leasing program in response to the high energy prices of 2008.

As for preparing the next 5-year OCS program, which increasingly looks as if will cover its original 2012-17 time frame instead of the 2010-15 period which Salazar’s predecessor, Dirk A. Kempthorne, proposed when he “jump-started” its development in late July 2008, Birnbaum said: “We submitted a schedule which indicated we would begin scoping a programmatic [environmental impact statement] in April. That’s still on track.”

… House GOP members sent a letter to Salazar on Mar. 25 asking him to immediately implement the 2010-15 OCS schedule which was in its final comment period when Salazar took office and began a series of delays to broaden and redesign it.

Separately, in the O&GJ’s Washington Pulse blog, Snow adds:

After The Hill’s energy and environment Blog posted a story on Mar. 3 … quoting Salazar saying that the next five-year program would cover the 2012-17 instead of 2010-15 period, however, critics erupted. “Secretary Salazar has finally confirmed what had long been feared – that the Obama administration has no intention of opening up new areas for offshore drilling during his four years in office,” House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Minority Member Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said on Mar. 8.

When I contacted Salazar’s office for a statement, a spokeswoman responded: “Secretary Salazar will have a new five-year plan before the current plan expires.” That would be on June 30, 2012. If he expects to meet that deadline, he’ll need to start beginning to develop a programmatic environmental impact statement in the next few weeks if he expects to continue holding lease sales in the central and western GOM, let alone considering any in other parts of the OCS which were off-limits until Sept. 30, 2008.

[Emphasis added.]

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

One of the many features of the Health Care Bill that Nancy Pelosi was oh-so-anxious that we boobs find out about is a new 10% tax on tanning services. That one somehow slipped past most Americans as they watched the President’s promised coverage of the health care deliberations on CSPAN.

(*Clears throat*)

Most “progressive” initiatives have a “Women and Minorities Hardest Hit” angle. This victim-du-jour is less appealing: “Middle- and Upper-Middle Class White Women Hardest Hit”.

If the TanningTax is such a good idea, why not extend it to nail salons? Forget going in; have you ever walked past a nail salon with the door open? Don’t light a match — between the polishes and removers, they use every volatile chemical that has an MSDS sheet, and probably some that don’t.

Based only on strictly empirical observation, it’s illegal for anyone other than an Asian woman to own a nail salon, or work in one, so you’ve got the “Minorities Hardest Hit” angle covered. (Seriously, an organization called the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum says that “…42% of all nail technicians nationwide are Asian, with Vietnamese women comprising 39% of the entire industry…”.) As for the customers, I’ve seen plenty of fast food & convenience store clerks who look like they take the lion’s share of their weekly paychecks to support an outlandish set of 2” lunch-hooks. 

This, from the MSDS Sheet for acetone, a component of polish remover:

Emergency Overview
—————————————
DANGER! EXTREMELY FLAMMABLE LIQUID AND VAPOR. VAPOR MAY CAUSE FLASH FIRE. HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED OR INHALED. CAUSES IRRITATION TO SKIN, EYES AND RESPIRATORY TRACT. AFFECTS CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM.

In my industry, oil and gas extraction, there have been concerns (as in, lawsuits claiming damages in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars) about worker exposure to benzene, “naturally occurring radioactive materials” (“NORMs”), and other compounds in low concentrations, with workers subject to infrequent exposure. Right now the EPA is looking at regulating trace additives in fracturing fluids that, in 1,000,000 applications, have never been proven to contaminate ground water.

In nail salons, the exposure is constant and impossible to avoid. Many of the workers in this industry work long hours, seven days a week.

When it comes to chemical exposure, I’d much rather take my chances in an oil field environment than in a nail salon. For that matter, I’d rather a tanning.

Why has this gone on so long? It’s because of a well-funded lobby and an EPA exemption. The cosmetics industry, or “Big Polish”, has historically (since the 1930s) been regulated by the FDA, and has so far avoided EPA oversight.

Here’s the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum’s position paper on the issue.

Despite the snark, all the facts in the foregoing are true. What do I really think?

• There’s a whole lot of crap just like this TanningTax buried in the health care bill; we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
• All new punitive lifestyle taxes are repugnant, especially ones with an identifiable “racialist” or “classist” angle.
• EPA’s regulatory attention does not always reflect the hazard, but rather the perceived deep pockets of the regulatee.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

Calling #EarthHour 2010 a “blip” does a grave injustice to real, honest-to-goodness blips.

Our pals at wattsupwiththat.com have completed their multivariate statistical analysis of the impact of last night’s Earth Hour on energy consumption in California:

2010 Earth Hour in California – just as ineffective as last year

The line you should be paying attention to is the red one, “Actual Demand”. Although demand was headed south during Earth Hour, that’s because of the time of day, not any consumption decisions by hordes of concerned green activists. (Note that Saturday night’s actual consumption during that time frame is higher than tonight’s consumption is forecast to be at the same time.)
As evidence of that assertion, here’s the corresponding graph from 2009:

And, the following day, Sunday, 3/29/09:

As an index of significance, consider the dip around “07” of each graph. That’s the decrease in load as streetlights across the state wink off due to sunrise.

Note also that there’s no “zero” on the vertical scale of this graph, which tends to accentuate fluctuations, making them relative to the baseload level of around 19,000 MW instead of zero.

If there was a big effect from Earth Hour, you’d see a step event like the street lights at 7AM as everybody turned off their home lights in California at 8:30PM (2030). Plus, the greens don’t seem to realize that no power plants get switched off, so there’s really no CO2 savings.  The power plants are run based on demand forecast. Short term spikes from well intentioned stunts really don’t make a blip of difference to CO2 emissions.

Furthermore:

WWF [the cranks formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund – ed.]  would be better off preaching year round energy conservation than publicity stunts, but unfortunately publicity stunts are what wow the gullible and fill the till.

But in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about, filling the till?

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

North Korea celebrates Earth Hour!

(Ooops! That photo is from 2006…)