This may be perhaps the first time I’ve embraced an article from the Yale Environment 360 forum, the opener reads:
Environmentalists have long sought to use the threat of catastrophic global warming to persuade the public to embrace a low-carbon economy. But recent events, including the tainting of some climate research, have shown the risks of trying to link energy policy to climate science.
Al Gore’s latest book where he had to photoshop in some hurricanes comes to mind.
The NCDC sponsored climate change report where they photoshopped in a flooded house also comes to mind.
And, yes even the snowstorms reportedly caused by global warming this winter are also reminders of how common this bogus linkage to weather is.
From:
Green think tank tells environmentalists: Leave climate change science behind
By Ben Geman
Leaders of a contrarian environmental think tank, The Breakthrough Institute, have a way to get beyond the climate science wars: Break the link between global warming research and the push for low-carbon energy.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, in a new essay in Yale Environment 360, [Titled: Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate] argue that environmentalists are too eager to link natural disasters and dangerous weather to man-made climate change.
…
They write:
Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.
The essay also suggests that climate advocacy and research have become too intertwined, with environmentalists seeking to represent the science as “apocalyptic, imminent, and certain.” The science has been harmed as a result, they argue, stating:
Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.
…
The Yale Environment 360 website has a comments section below the articles. Look for a lively response to their new piece.
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“openunatedgirl (19:05:59) :
You really want to challenge that we are ruining our environment? Really? Talk to any one from New Orleans. True, global warming was not the culprit there, but the rather the destroying of wetlands for profit.”
Katrina was a category 3 storm. Most of the damage to property (Flooding, not wind) was largely due to poorly built and maintained levees, mostly it appears, in some of the poorest neighbourhoods there. The rest of the damage being attributed to climate change/environmental damage which was pure popaganda.
When you build a city below sea level, in a basin, on a flood plain and don’t maintain your defenses, nature will strike and win out in the end.
@Ian (17:57:31) notes that all of humanity could fit into our smallest state.
Yeah, but only in Manhattan-sized apartments. You could, however, put all of humanity into typical suburbia — dad, mom, 2.3 kids on a sixth of an acre — in an area roughly the size of Texas. It would never work, though; it’d be a couple of hundred miles to the nearest strip mall.
===
This whole “renewable energy” nonsense drives me up the wall. For nearly all of its history, humanity has depended on “renewable energy”; as a result, for example, the entire US east of the Mississippi was basically denuded of forest by the turn of the 20th century. The total remaining whitetail deer herd was estimated at the time at a quarter-million. Then the US went to a fossil-fuel economy and now the East is reforested (just look down while flying over it some time) and the states of Alabama, Wisconsin, and Michigan (the only ones I know off the top of my head) have deer herds of around three million EACH.
But now, of course, we have to fix that by devastating vast swaths of countryside and wildlife habitat with utterly useless turbine monstrosities, which generate nothing actually useful except subsidies and tax breaks for fat cats on Wall Street. Criminal lunacy.
Friends, we next have to save the environment from the environmentalists. Go figure.
I found the cogeneration plant in Braunschweig in the german wikipedia:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heizkraftwerk_Braunschweig-Mitte
Link to various map services:
http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?language=en&pagename=Heizkraftwerk_Braunschweig-Mitte¶ms=52.278611111111_N_10.514722222222_E_dim:1000_region:DE-NI_type:landmark_&title=Heizkraftwerk Braunschweig-Mitte
Link on google maps:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=52.278611,10.514722&spn=0.01,0.01&t=m&q=52.278611,10.514722
So you see, it’s not far from the city center.
The lefties will never pursue the energy angle, it is too obvious. Sure, for a short time they can claim an energy shortage, but most people will wonder why they don’t create more energy. The energy crisis didn’t work for Carter, it won’t work now. For their scheme to work, they must label the user of the energy as the problem. It’s politics.
For kicks and giggles I went to a “Green” precinct meeting once in the Minneapolis area (and believe me, this is a socialist state). There were about eight shaggy, unshaven individuals there – and they were the women. The Green’s don’t have the same political steam in America that they seem to have in Europe. I can’t see them having any substantial leverage with our Congress or with our culture for that matter. I’ll tell you what does though. The UN and the EU. The UN and the EU have strategically used global warming as the principle attack engine in its endless and relentless campaign for global socialism. It’s the same old bunch, Baby. The usual suspects and their intellectual surrogates in government, media and finance. AGW = social control.
“West Houston (20:19:12) :
[…]
There are some people (are you one?) that would stand in the way of this huge clean cheap energy that we have in the US (and you Lymies have in your little islands, too, it seems) in abundance.
Or would you rather have those windmills that by all accounts are (besides being inefficient and unreliable) noisy to the point of lunacy for those forced to live near them? Perhaps solar panels would be of more interest in the London fog?”
I’m a Kraut, mein bester. I’m coming from Lower Saxony, i hear that we have a lot of shale here and i actually enjoy the prospect of some home-grown fossil fuel production.
When i said that industry by itself wouldn’t make energy production clean i had in mind the fact that flue gas desulfurization or filtering out black carbon simply adds cost. If you don’t force industry to install filters they won’t do it. That’s where environmental regulation makes sense, and that’s where lawmakers fulfill a useful role.
And i wish the US all the best with their own projects in this regard.
Robert of Ottawa (19:28:57) :
That type of move (lawsuit your recovery efforts into the dirt) is exactly the m.o. that has ruined much of California’s forests after fires. They go cherry-pick a judge and get an injunction to stop all salvage.
Lawsuiting energy and manufacturing in the US is their next planned move.
The have 3 test cases already in motion.
Pressed Rat: I’ve always wanted to ask, how does Minnesota believe in global warming? How is it possible for people in the coldest state believe that 1. the earth is warming and 2. it is better to be cold?
I am in Washington state and our experienced fraud team made a special trip to Minnesota to ensure that Al Franken is your senator, so I have much to apologize over.
Here’s the story on the ‘nuisance’ angle the Greens are going tort over:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/29/global-warming-advocates-threaten-blizzard-lawsuits/
Still don’t understand what they mean by “low carbon economy”. It’s as vague as “carbon emissions” or “carbon footprint”. I get the impression that in the popular imagination carbon is associated with blackness and dirt, a superficial take on the problem that has been encouraged by a plethora of clumsily Photoshopped images of water vapour belching from cooling towers and chimneys. Surely the aim of any development in prime movers (because that is essentially what we are talking about) from James Watt onwards has always been to obtain maximum efficiency. What has changed here? – Well the fact that over the last forty years or so this has been coupled to an increasing demand for the minimum of environmental contamination in the extraction and exploitation of energy sources and the treatment of waste. In all these fields it seems to me that there is still room for improvement and still the need to exercise constant vigilance. But judging by the changes I have seen in my lifetime we’re we’re well on the way towards achieving that goal.
“DirkH (20:47:22) :
[…]
And i wish the US all the best with their own projects in this regard.”
Not to be misunderstood: The best of luck for the shale projects, not for Cap&Trade “projects” which i find rather detrimental.
I object to the use of environmentalists when the correct term is AGWer or the neutral climate concerned. Many environmentalists, especially those old enough to have sought an energy transformation since before climate became an issue, hold contrarian views on climate. Many of us believe the focus on CO2 is actually hindering that transformation.
Re green energy (carbon-less) and carbon-based energy, this might be of interest.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/more-musings-on-grand-game.html
The short version is that OPEC is not going to let oil become sufficiently expensive for alternatives to oil to become economic.
pft:
Further to your oil cartel comment, look what happens to people who were off the grid for their natural gas. The Ontario government shut down a small natural gas well dug in 1931, and being privately operated by an elderly Ontario couple to heat their house (and formerly 3 neighbours’ houses too) ostensibly for health and safety reasons. The couple was forced to pay to have the well capped (to the tune of at least $15,000) out of their private savings.
See http://news.therecord.com/article/649750
Governments are definitely part of the energy cartel. Anyone who thinks, in this day of global conglomerates, that either privatization OR nationalization of energy will solve the problem of the little people being squeezed for all we’ve got has got bats in his or her belfry. N.B. the last observation is just a general comment, not a response to anybody here. Nor are any of these organizations truly interested in developing more efficient means to utilize energy, so long as there is money to be made the old fashioned way.
What I’ve found most infuriating about the green eco-fascists is their eagerness to help the governments and energy cartels drive up the cost of energy, with no regard to the suffering this will cause many ordinary people, and especially the poor. If only they would be hoist by their own petard on this! But even more infuriating is how many people in urban centres seem to think that raising the price of gas and oil will be just fine – they’ll just continue to ride their bikes and take the subway thank you very much. For the rest of us wood stoves will be the answer to home heating (that’ll put paid to the greenhouse gas problem, eh?), if the ‘green’ scenario comes to pass, but won’t solve the problem of high food and commodity prices. Yikes!
Nordhaus and Shellenberger: “In recent years, bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy supply through the expansion of renewables, nuclear power, and natural gas. . .”
Last I heard, natural gas was made of carbon and hydrogen, and when burned produces CO2 and H2O. So you won’t ‘decarbonize’ our economy by using it.
But so what? If not for putative ‘climate change’, why do the greens want to ‘decarbonize’ the economy at all? It is nice to see these two authors admitting that the alarmist warnings of dire catastrophes from imminent ‘global warming’ caused by CO2 are so much poppycock. Clearly they are admitting that most of this vaunted ‘climate science’ was not science at all, but scientism in the service of a political agenda.
Is that agenda the ‘decarbonization’ of the economy? Or is that aim really an excuse for something else, something having to do with control, with an end to the values that have driven our civilization to ever-new heights of prosperity, abundance, and freedom?
Having them retreat from the alarmist tactic is a battle worth winning, and certainly worth posting here. But it’s not winning the war, not yet.
We’ll win when they throw in the towel and admit, ‘carbon’ is good and vital for the continued progress of mankind.
/Mr Lynn
“Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates,,, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself”
“the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates”?
Let’s get to it.
We have been witnessing crimes.
Publicly funded elected officials, bureaucrats and academia, (independently and in many cases in chorus) have been deliberately distorting and fabricating science to advance their causes and self interests.
Their agendas, their careers, their positions and salaries, their departments and institutions all stood to gain and did benefit from their deceit.
It wasn’t non-criminal cheerleading or innocent worry and confusion.
It is calculated and the fraud is still underway.
I have no doubt their are millions of people around the globe who are angered by the deceit and will demand consequences for the perpetrators.
AND,,, CO2 emissions are not pollution and we need the abundant supplies of coal, oil and natural gas for decades to come.
@DirkH (17:26:25) :
“Poptech (17:13:02) :
The irony of all this is if you understand economics there is nothing to focus on, free markets will take care of our energy needs. All government does is increase costs and delay technological innovation. If they want to see a transition to clean energy, then they need to get out of the way.”
Actually, no. Energy companies would go for the cheapest energy, and that is hydrocarbons for at least the next 500 years or so (oil, coal, gas, and now huge amounts of shale gas becoming economical).
– – – – – – –
Dirk, you’re only half right. Your figure of 500 years is easily off by more than factor of 10 (I initially thought that “500 years” was a typo, but you repeated that figure again in a later post, so I guess not). In less than 50 years, other alternative sources of energy, including solar panels, solar sterling engines, wind turbines, and solid hydrogen will be cheaper than hydrocarbons. If you doubt that, take a look at the price of gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel, and natural gas vs. the CPI over the past 50 years, the divergence is striking, and it will only continue to worsen. At some point, certainly during the first half of the 21st century, alternative sources of energy will begin to compete with hydrocarbons. (As for shale gas becoming economical, it is only due to the increased price of natural gas as it continues to diverge from the CPI.)
One example of an alternative energy scheme which is already less expensive than hydrocarbon fuels is passive solar. I was involved with passive solar energy research almost 30 years ago. People have been utilizing passive solar heating ( I use it myself as an auxiliary), at less than 1/10th the cost of heating with natural gas, heating oil or electricity. Granted passive solar is not a panacea, but it is also acutely under-utilized.
The efficiency of solar panels continues to increase, and the price will continue to decrease as economies of scale begin to affect the price, but that’s a few decades off into the future. If wind turbine manufacturers would get their act together and shift their model to microgeneration, the wind energy industry will thrive. There are numerous alternative energy souces being researched. One is here:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html
Another is a solid hydrogen fuel:
“The US Air Force finances a project using ammonia borane (H3NBH3) to pack hydrogen gas for using it in fuel cells
. Jadoo Power Systems was given a contract this week to develop ammonia borane pellets for hydrogen generation.”
http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2009/02/04/ammonia-borane-hydrogen-storage/
What every person on the planet should know!
Access to cheap and safe energy should be a human right!
1. Anthropogenic Global Warming or Climate Change is a political induced scam!
CO2 is not a climate driver, temperatures show no significant up or down trend.
Much warmer periods have happened before and each of them saw the rise of great civilizations.
The past ten thousand years we saw the Minoan, the Roman and the Medieval warmth period when it was much warmer than today and the Little Ice Age with much lower temperatures that happened without our current CO2 emissions.
Warming never has been a problem, what we must fear is cold!
See: http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
The science behind AGW/Climate Change presented by the United Nations IPCC AR-4 report is corrupted! and everything that has been told about melting ice caps and rising sea levels is a lie.
http://wattsupwiththat.com http://www.icecap.us and http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
2. The potential and the benefits of the so called “Green Renewable Energy”, wind, solar and bio fuels is hyped!
It is relative expensive, it can’t deliver the promised output we need to maintain a healthy economy and it certainly can’t replace coal oil and gas.
Bio fuels in terms of land use and prize compete with food production and topical forests (palm oil) promoting famine in the Third World and destruction of our remaining tropical forest.
Bio fuels also consume large amounts of water.
Production requires considerable amounts of fossil fuel.
That’s why renewable fuels and energy at the current level of development are at best niche market solution.
Most Green Renewable Energy is not “Green” at all!
3. The demonizing of carbon fuels is a foolish!
Fossil fuels can be burned safe without harmful emissions.
CO2 is the gas of life, it makes plants and algae grow and it is certainly not a dangerous pollutant.
Without fossil fuels we can not maintain high yield harvests to feed the world
(1 unit of food takes 4 units of oil to produce!), no medicine, no fertilizers, no pesticides, no plastics, no transport and distribution, no steel, no aluminum, no glass, no clothing, paints, resins and no wind mills or solar panels.
To demonize fossil fuels is not only dangerous, it is also plain stupid!
Without fossil fuels our current civilization, standard of living and life expectancy would not be possible.
4. Peak Oil is an illusion!
Oil Companies and the big banks manipulate oil prices based on the popular notion that we are at the end of the oil age and stocks are running low!
This is not the case and current stocks will serve generations to come.
Socialist Governments and the United Nations (IPCC AR-4) use the Peak Oil argument in support of their “Green Agenda” http://green-agenda.com
Their policy is to tax the CO2 emissions released by burning fossil fuels and deny the Third World the opportunity of development.
This is pure fraud.
5. Cheap energy is now available for all of humanity as energy dependence and peak oil NO LONGER EXIST!
THIS CHEAP ENERGY SOURCE IS SHALE GAS AND IT IS FOUND IN ABUNDANCE ALL OVER THE WORLD IN 75% OF THE WORLDS SEDIMENTS!!!!!!!!!!
Shale gas is a clean burning fuel suitable for high efficiency gas power plants to generate cheap electricity, to heat our homes, offices and factories and power trucks, trains and busses.
Some US producers have declared they can make a profit at $1 MMBTU or below, especially considering how close new supplies are to population centers.
This is not only important for the USA where shale gas extraction was invented and immense deposits will serve several generations but it is also important for Europe and especially for the Third World because they now have the opportunity to develop efficient and affordable electrical grids, key for any economic development.
Is Shale gas a peace maker?
On a geopolitical level shale gas is a major game changer as it eliminates potential conflict between Nations over energy resources and makes countries and populations free and independent.
All people have to fear is Government Control and propaganda based rule that limits or even denies access to cheap energy in pursuit of Global Power and Domination.
Governments currently pose the biggest threat to our freedom, prosperity and future as they no longer support the vital interests of their populations.
This goes for all current Governments in power, especially the EU Government and her Member States, the US Obama Administration, the Government of Canada, Australia, New Sealand and Japan and all other Nations that signed the United Nations Copenhagen Accord and the United Nations Chapter 21. See: http//green-agenda.com
This in short is the message that has to go out now.
Energy independence for generations to come and the technology to secure it is the real revolution of our time threatened only by “LACK OF INFORMATION”.
Only elect those politicians who support this vision and reject deny any power or support to any politician, Government or policy that intends you to think otherwise or takes advantage of the fact that we live on a carbon planet, with a carbon based life cycle and a carbon fueled society.
I have to disagree Mr. Watts.
Their goal is still to remake the “entire global energy economy.” They only claim that they can’t do it with the soft climate science any longer. They still want to send us back to the caves.
I wish I was as smart as they are. I wonder if they are as smart as Mao and Stalin, their heros. Get ready to slaughter another hundred million souls, in your name, if they are.
I wish I could dictate the perfect solution, legislate that the Earth will be at the perfect temperature, like they can. Are we to believe that if we cut our carbon emissions there will be no more bad weather? Obama oversaw the worst winter in decades on the east coast. I thought he could control the weather, or have we not done enough to limit our carbon footprint?
Their stated mission remains to decarbonize the blah, blah blah to save us from ourselves.
If we decarbonize like they want us to, we trash all of our fridges, microwaves, stoves, cars, computers, cell phones and light bulbs.
These environmentalists have realized they can’t waste any more time trying to justify their goals with climate science because it is viewed as fraudulent.
What will be the new threat? Meat diets? Dairy products? Ocean acidification? Tundra thaw? Future famine due to droughts and floods? The next doomsday scenario will rear its ugly head very soon, I am sure.
I hope to debate a young Yale environmental evangelist someday.
EJ
Refreshing news.
Now maybe we can get some greens back to doing REAL green things (instead of FAKE climate-catastrophe nonsense)?
Recently a major commercial development was permitted in a public park locally. Years ago there would have been a massive protest, but it seems none of the greens give a sh*t about parks & trees anymore – they just want to run around freaking out about FAKE climate “problems”.
Shame on you fake greens. Protect the parks & natural forests and oppose toxic pollution. Stop wasting your time misrepresenting nature — natural climate variations are a part of nature – show some respect for nature.
Paul Vaughan,
Ecologist, Parks & Natural Forests Advocate
I have to agree with what a lot of other commenters already said. The article is very clear that the climate propoganda has discredited itself, and thus “new” reasons for a “low carbon” economy must be found:
————-
understood in its proper role, as one of many reasons why we should decarbonize the global economy, climate science can even help contribute to the case for taking such action.
————-
They don’t say what those “many reasons” are, and the wording suggests that they simply assume that “high carbon” is bad and should be obvious to everyone that it is. Here lies the ultimate fallacy that somehow a return to “simpler times” and a less industrialized economy is “obviously” better than what we have now. Having read a thing or two about history, this doesn’t seem that obvious to me.
Yes, shale assures that the world will never, ever run out of (or even remotely short of) fossil fuels. It’s purely a matter of cost of extraction, a cost which dramatically declines in the face of hands-on experience and technological progress.
The AGW advocates may be wrong, but we would have to plunge into the heart of the next glacial period in the next five years for them to be as wrong as the Club of Rome (and the various other resource panicmongers). It’s very, very difficult to be as sublimely wrong as the Club of Rome.
Global warming is mere exaggeration and irresponsible, uninformed, damaging speculation. But the Resource Scarcity premise is the third biggest lie in history.
(Number two is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and number one is that wars never solve anything.) But, then, any honest liberal knows that. (Well, half a brain also required.)
Thatcher, while not the mother of AGW, was certainly the wet nurse. I admire the Iron Lady but she did a lot of damage in her madcap scheme to disembowel the coal mining unions and promote nuclear power. The rest of Europe climbed on board because, jealous of America’s strength based on free enterprise and cheap carbon energy, they saw their chance to take her down. Canada and the US should be standing shoulder to shoulder to push back on AGW nonsense. Instead, Obama starting drinking the kool-aid and appears set to help Europe push America down the same dead-end path of socialism. I had such high hopes for him but now I’m somewhere between alarmed and disillusioned.
“Not Completely Off Topic” – from UNIVERSITY of EAST ANGLIA
Breakthrough Producing Hydrogen from Water + Sunlight
Sunday, March 07, 2010
solar hydrogen breakthrough image Image: Angewandte Chemie, Wiley Sunlight + Water = Hydrogen Gas Scientists at the UNIVERSITY of EAST ANGLIA, led by Dr. Thomas Nann, report a breakthrough in the production of hydrogen from water using the energy of sunlight. Amidst all the hype about a potential hydrogen economy, which would rely upon the highly energetic and clean burning hydrogen atom, one of the big questions has been whether sufficient hydrogen…Read the full story on TreeHugger
EJ: EJ (21:33:32) : “What will be the new threat? Meat diets? Dairy products? Ocean acidification? Tundra thaw? Future famine due to droughts and floods? The next doomsday scenario will rear its ugly head very soon, I am sure.
It already has: Ocean Acidification.
As a close half-sister to the CO2 scare, this one follows the same farudulent premise: Reduce manmade CO2 or the world will end.
Unfortunately, sham policies based upon scientific scams [ the spuedo-religion of CAGW] does nothing whatsoever to advance cleaning up the Earth from man-made pollution, habitat destruction, and overfishing.
Rather…it throws all of of those legitimate concerns, under the bus.
Where was Al Gore when he could have spoken up for the wholesale elimination of large sharks in the world’s oceans who have ruled the deep for hundreds of millions of years?
Where was Al Gore when he could have championed finding a solution to the disastrous gigantic Pacific trash gyre?
Where is Al Gore speaking up for 1/4 of the world’s population who does not have electricity, and their chances are even more dire now given that hydrocarbons have been demonized by he and Hansen and others?
The world’s first poised carbon billionaire was conveniently silent…because he KNEW he could not make any money on any of the foregoing.
It is for THAT reason, and for the millions of third world women and children who will die due to some “green” experiment gone bad, that Al Gore’s name will always be a well-deserved curse word on my lips!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA