Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
It’s a bad week for poor people around the planet. First, and with great fanfare, our President unleashed his patented climate plan, affectionately known as Obama’s War on Coal™. He hasn’t said yet how much Obama’s War on Coal™ will cost, but we can be sure that it will not be cheap. And as in any war, it is guaranteed that the poor will suffer the most.
Sadly, this was followed by even worse news. The World Bank has decided it wants to keep the developing world from having inexpensive electricity. They will not make any more loans for coal-fired power plants.
You remember “inexpensive electricity”? When I was a kid, the US Government used to be in favor of inexpensive electricity, because it was rightly seen as the savior of the poor farmer and the poor housewife. That’s why the Tennessee Valley Authority came to be. I wash the clothes around our house, and I don’t do it by hand. I have inexpensive energy to do that. Now, however, the government and the environmental NGOs and the climate alarmists are doing every single thing that they can to make energy more expensive. And the World Bank has just officially joined the baying chorus.
The World Bank thinks that inexpensive energy will harm the poor … not now, of course, but in fifty years. And on that basis, the World Bank thinks it is justified to harm the poor now.
This is the madness at the base of the climate alarmists policy—it actively harms the poor now, with the justification that it might help their grandkids avoid harm in 50 years.
The wealthy fat-cats running the World Bank are unwilling for school kids in India to have cheap electricity to study by, on the grounds that it might, not will but might, make those students’ grandkids a bit warmer in a century. I doubt that the poor in India would vote for that plan, but I guess the World Bank is our economic paterfamilias who knows what the poor need, much better than the poor know themselves, and it’s not cheap electricity …
The same thing is going on in the US. Where I live, California, the resident burglars are called the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, known as PGE. They are a monopoly utility, and supposedly they are run for the benefit of the ratepayers.
Now, if you had a monopoly public utility for say water, and your water supplier said they were going to charge twenty times the going price for a glass of water if you were really, really thirsty, would you think that was in the public interest?
That’s exactly what’s happening to Anthony, PGE is gouging him on the price because that’s when he really needs the electricity … what kind of a screwed up world has this become? A public utility is supposed to provide cheap energy, not gouge the customers at the time they really need the electricity.
Now, the East Coast and the Powder River country is going to feel the pain, as coal-fired plants close and their electricity costs start to creep up. So, since war has been declared, let’s see if Obama’s War on Coal™ is worth the billions and billions of dollars it will cost … what are we buying for our money?
Well, fortunately I don’t have to go through all the math to figure it out. There is a strong supporter of the Obama climate plan named Chris Hope, who has done the math for us. His blog says:
Chris is a climate change policy researcher, PAGE model developer, and faculty member at Cambridge Judge Business School, interested in environment and energy.
He has used his whiz-bang model to do the calculations. His assumption is that the US will do the following
1) Lower the CO2 emissions to 83% of the 2008 level over the next seven years, and
2) Maintain that low level of emissions for the succeeding 80 years.
Now, absent a huge technological breakthrough or another depression, there’s little chance of us getting to 83% of 2008 emissions in the next seven years.
But that pales before the improbable idea of the US maintaining that low a level of emissions for the next 80 years.
So to start with, we see that Mr. Hope has made the most hopeful assumptions about the climate plan—first that it will meet its initial goal, and second that it will maintain that goal for over three-quarters of a century.
And with those likely unattainable assumptions, what does Mr. Hope calculate as the effect of Obama’s War on Coal™?
Well … um … well, he says that by the year 2100, nearly a century from now, that the temperatures will be much cooler.
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How much cooler, you ask?
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Well … two …
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Two degrees C?
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Er … no …
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Oh … so, it’s two tenths of a degree C, then, not two degrees C?
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Um … no.
…
I have to confess, in writing this I find that I am very reluctant to reveal the expected outcome of Obama’s War on Coal™ for a simple reason—it is at times like this that I’m embarrassed to be an American.
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Because the reality is that Chris Hope, an ardent supporter of the War on Coal™, using the most optimistic (and unattainable) assumptions, says that IF we win the War on Coal and we put hundreds of people out of work and increase the cost of electricity for poor and wealthy alike (although obviously, Obama and his rich pals don’t care about the cost increase), here’s our prize. Here’s what Chris Hope says we’ve bought for the all the pain and suffering:
In the year 2100 the world might be 0.02°C cooler.
Two hundredths of a degree in a century. Maybe. That’s the prize. That’s what Chris Hope has proudly announced will be the reward for the job loss and the pain and suffering of the poor.
Two hundredths of a degree of cooling. An amount that is far below our ability to even measure …
Me, I think that that one fact alone should be our emblem and our rallying cry in opposition to this gob-smacking lunacy. So the next time someone says they think the War on Coal™ is a brilliant plan, gently point out to them that they are advocating spending billions and billions of dollars to cool the planet by two hundredths of a degree in the year 2100, and in the process harming the poor … and ask if that strikes them as the most rational of plans …
Or you could just shake them until their teeth rattle and say “You think we should spend billions of dollars to cool the planet two hundredths of a degree a century from now, while hurting the poor today? Have you gone barking mad? Billions for a reward that’s too small to be even measured, while pensioners shiver in fuel poverty? Unhand my wallet, you thieving varlet, and slink back to your hole!”
I swear, this unremitting attempt by Obama and the activists and the environmental NGOs to crush the poor back into their hovels, while they proudly declaim the noblest of motives, turns my stomach and threatens to fair unhinge my reason … how can they do that?
Billions and billions of dollars for two hundredths of a degree … bad news, folks, the Emperor not only has no clothes. He’s lost his mind entirely.
Grrrrr, bad for my blood pressure … in any case, here’s what coal did while Obama was declaring war on it …
w.
The World Bank will soon be redundant for financing of third world projects in any case. Obama can say what he wants but the BRICS countries are in discussion on forming their own bank for financing projects. What Obama and the World Bank says will become completely meaningless except as a footnote in history.
Chris Hope is hardly the first warmist to publish such numbers for the possible value we could expect for all the pain, misery, and death we are told we must embrace for the sake of the “planet” and the “children”. Although the purveyors of climate catastrophism have always been seriously reluctant to give up these kind of figures, whenever someone has succeeded in holding their feet to the fire for a length of time sufficient to actually make them cough them up, the values are always the same i.e. totally unmeasurable differences.
And of course they all so economically illiterate that they have no idea what “opportunity costs” are, and how they compound almost infinitely into the future. When significant portions of the world’s wealth are diverted into less productive or totally unproductive uses now, we lose not only the current value of that wealth, but all the extra wealth that could have been created if a more efficient choice had prevailed. One place where the much ballyhooed 97% statistic may actually apply is that since this assault on the Demon Carbon began, 97% of the world’s wealth that has been diverted because of it has been completely ratholed.
It’s hard to come up with what that total value of wealth is to this point, but it has to be in the hundreds of $Billions by now. Even if market forces had been allowed to completely control where that wealth was allocated there would still have been significant inefficiencies but the difference compounded out to the end of this century will probably grow to hundreds of Trillions or perhaps Quadrillions. A totally laissez- faire market comparison is admittedly unrealistic, but China, India, Brasil, and other developing economies have demonstrated over the last couple decades that allowing elements of market forces and entrepreneurship to act in what had been complete top down command economies can have amazingly profound effects.
Sadly, if the currently discussed plans are allowed to proceed, we may end up by the finish of the Emperor Barry era with Mao’s China as more of free market economy than the US of A.
“If a foreign nation had launched an attack on America to destroy its coal-fired plants, to shut down its coal mines, and to thwart its ability to drill for oil and natural gas, we would be at war with it.” – Alan Caruba
As I recall, the EPA came up with similar minuscule benefits for requiring ethanol in the gasoline pool and not anytime in the near future, yet the fools are now pushing even more ethanol while the runoff creates a huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
There is no scientific logic to the agenda supported by the parrots in the MSM.
Cat cracking: yeah, and my new cummins diesel has a huge warning sticker warning to avoid using biofuels. I buy bulk “un polluted” diesel fuel for the farm and I avoid fuelling from locations promoting biofuels to prevent damage to my Diesel engines. Let the greenies buy it and pay the repair bills.
No sooner have the people of Egypt successfully protested en masse to remove one set of toxic rulers, than they have to do it all over again to try to remove another toxic lot. Sorry, USA, but it’s now mass protest time for you too. You can’t afford to leave your current toxic rulers in charge for another 2 1/2 years and I think you have no other way of disempowering them. Good luck.
Sometimes I just wonder. Isn’t it better for someone in a developing country to burn coal for cooking that chop down a tree?
These nutters are going to accelerate the global rate of deforestation. India, China and other nations will probably wipe out that “0.02°C cooler” by burning more coal, oil, gas, biomass etc.
Time to stock up with tar and feathers methinks.
What if the crazy bastid in the Whitehouse decided the fastest way to carbon neutrality would be to nuke the crap out of China and India? Given the other crazy things he’s doing this would not surprise me.
I bet the members of the Work Bank don’t hold their meetings in a mud-hut heated by burning animal dung……
“The World Bank thinks that inexpensive energy will harm the poor … not now, of course, but in fifty years. And on that basis, the World Bank thinks it is justified to harm the poor now.”
So, a new version of an old saying has emerged: In order to save the people, we have to sacrifice them. What a cynical way to sell depopulation.
It makes me sick that this is what the world has come to. When will people realize that an era of total failure is about to begin? Still, people don’t care and when they finally get it, it might be too late.
The endgame for preservation of freedom has begun.
Thank you, Anthony, Willis and all pubicly explicit skeptics, for fighting the good fight!
You DO make a difference and people WILL appreciate it.
I pray for your health, strength and persistance.
And may the good Lord be your guide in these troublesome times.
Every molecule of CO2 is surrounded by 2500 other non-CO2 molecules. Nobody seems to care what these are doing, besides not being affected by that lonely CO2 molecule.
What greenies fail to understand is that CO2 contains 2/3rds oxygen. CCS will not only remove useful carbon from the atmosphere that would have been used by plants for food, but a vast amount of useful oxygen will be buried with it.
It’s time to implement Greenie Capture and Storage™.
Sorry Willis. In your eagerness to write this article you misread The phrase ‘Obama’s war on coal’
It actually should read ‘Obamas war on civilisation.’
Hope you don’t mind me fixing that for you
Tonyb
I have the feathers. Someone get the tar.
Our governors have also done the calculations, and did them before they announced the coming measures. Unless they are using sliderules and slipped two decimals, they, too, understand the immaterial benefit they will achieve. So why are they doing it?
What else is going on? What other consequence should we be looking at?
The non-loans: exactly who was going to get the money who now won’t? The economic crisis may mean that the World Bank doesn’t HAVE the money to lend, so there must be cuts somewhere with a surficial acceptability. Perhaps this is the real reason. But perhaps it is the specific non-recipient we should be thinking about. After the general keep-the-others-powerless thing, I mean.
When something doesn’t make sense, you’re missing part of the story.
Doug Proctor says:
July 1, 2013 at 1:22 am
I disagree entirely, Doug. These are not bad people setting out to screw the poor. It would be much easier if they were. Instead, they truly believe that they, and they alone, are preventing untold pain and suffering by helping avert Thermageddon.
The proper name of that disease is “Noble Cause Corruption”, wherein the luminance and the refulgence of the coruscating beauty of your noble cause justifies the ugly collateral damage your actions are causing in the real world.
The old adage applies here, “There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.” Or as the song has it,
“Still, a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest …”
Regards, and thanks for the comment,
w.
W. ,
You have to realize that greens have this religious level belief about what is natural. Supposedly burning coal is not natural and so is evil. You see, man must have zero impact on the planet otherwise armaghedon will occur.
Nukes which emit no pollution are likewise not natural. And so on. Of course I never saw what was all natural about destroying land in china for rare earths could possibly be natural in relation to solar and wind but I digress. Their beliefs are rather funny and I call them beliefs because they make no sense logically.
Deep down these people think their religious beliefs about the planet trumps all and so their cause of ripping the poor off is justified. The problem is that these nuts are taken advantage of by politicians who use them to further causes of getting rich(al gore) or to gain control of the people (Obama) and so these weird greens who have irrational beliefs are just useful idiots for the politicians to further their own agendas.
Don’t get mad at them, laugh at how stupid they all are. Laugh at how clean nuclear energy is bad but dirty and obsolete wind is good. Laugh at how backwards their beliefs are and how they are nothing but another group of Amish who want to force everyone to be like them( unlike the real Amish for that last part)
You can not allow them to get to you because there is little point into getting upset. They don’t Care about anyone but themselves so knowing that you can respond to them directly and counter their claimant by not calling them crazy but just another religion which is just as nutty as Scientology. Face it, if we laugh at them and get the rest of the world to laugh at them we win. No one is going to side with the village idiots, so treat them as such. When. They grow up they can rejoin the conversation and be treated as adults but why give them dignity when they have none? Just my two cents really because after being told once by a green that I was being selfish when I pointed out how their policies were going to make the poor poorer I kind of just lost any respect for greens in general. That was awhile ago and I haven’t looked back. So: when Obama declares war on coal, just laugh at the immature child who is plainly waging war in coal because ‘it is evil’ and move on. Laugh at the idiots advising him and telling him coal is bad. Laugh at the morons who believe an all ti recor high is proof of the end of days. In any event I hope some of those spark an idea or two.
The Tyndall Centre are holdinf a conference in December, where they will discuss how we all reduce energy consumption by 60% in a decade.
They say this is necessary as current low carbon technologies are ineffective. It appears that Obama’s and the EU’s plan to make energy much more expensive is a means to this end.
Details on the conference below.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/the-taxpayer-funded-tyndall-centre-want-us-to-reduce-energy-consumption-by-60-in-next-10-years/
I really do hate to appear to don a tinfoil hat, but the more I see of the global elitist’s policies being enacted in agriculture, farming, crops, fuel, industry etc, I cannot help but connect the dots and see Agenda 21 being enacted everywhere with the aim being of those elitists in control of the EnvironMENTALists agenda being the death by starvation, hypothermia/dehydration and genetic mutilation, of BILLIONS of humans over the next 100 years.
They have written openly of their aims. When Hitler killed millions, he was rightly labelled a monster.
These ecoMENTAList savages want to kill BILLIONS!
Obama is the worst and now most stupid President the US has ever had. He does not exhibit the intelligence he is credited with to listen to advisers so obviously full of BS.
I heard the head of the World Bank in Australian ABC radio (where else?) recently and IMO there was coolaid by the gallon
dp says:
Thanks dp, you actually made me laugh 🙂
That thought has crossed my mind as well. However, I can sleep at night because I know many people in the US military. I doubt they would ever, ever find anyone who would carry out such an order. I suspect the first salvo would “accidentally” hit the White House. Hey, it’s been rebuilt before.
So – I sleep, knowing that the most inept president ever to hold the office can’t do as much harm as I suspect he has contemplated…
They’ve been killing birds, abusing the scientific process, infuriating people who can use excel, and making our first world lives a little more expensive for decades — but now this crap is going to start killing people.
No, sorry, Niff. It’s the maximum (im)possible US contribution towards the global goal of 2K. Not in addition to it.
Sorry, but tar and feathers are no longer politically correct. However, on the other hand, bio-tar and free-range feathers…