Guest essay by David Archibald
In President Obama’s war on coal, and thus the US economy, what would be the cheapest way to start the counter-attack? The most effective allocation of funds would be to achieve what Nebraska set out to do. At the urging of State Senator Beau McCoy in late 2013, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture was tasked with commissioning a report on cyclical climate change. The budget for the exercise was $44,000. That right, for a mere $44,000 Nebraskans would be told what was going to happen to their climate. If the Sun was going to sleep with the consequence that cold air from the Canadians would come south faster and longer, Nebraskans would be forewarned and fore-armed. Alas, the effort was abandoned when promoters of global warming in the state offered to do it for free.
The danger to the promoters of global warming was that the stillborn Nebraskan climate report would have been the first government-sanctioned report on the planet to say that carbon dioxide and the burning of coal are nothing to worry about. A report on cyclical climate change would say that there is something far more serious coming that is going to smack our civilisation like a freight train. That serious thing is one of the cycles that the Nebraskans were going to be told about. One day the science of climate cycles might get out to Nebraska but in the meantime they will be wondering why their winters are getting colder and Spring seems to be delayed and how can they begin planting while their fields are still covered in snow.
It is one thing for books to be published which warn of the severe, solar-driven cooling coming (I’m on my third) and for retired academics to voice concerns over the low standards of US Government-funded climate science, but much more moral authority comes from the imprimatur of government. And any government can do it. Any government with coal mines, or coal-burning power plants, and tens of thousands of jobs at stake could wonder if the EPA view of climate science was all that there was to be known on the subject. Pennsylvania could do it, North Carolina could do it and Texas could do it to name a few. Half the states of the Union could do it and should do it.
As the climate reports come in, the vague, almost-impossible-to-believe notion that the Obama Administration’s war on coal through the EPA is a peculiar form of malicious self-loathing will be seen with crystal clarity. That there is no scientific basis for what the EPA is attempting to do whatsoever. That the degradation and disruption that the EPA is intent upon is a loathing for America as it is, pure and simple. Instead of the loftiest ideals of “thinking of the children” and so on, President Obama and the EPA are driven by the basest of motives – that their fellow Americans be poorer with reduced opportunities.
Now it is up to the states to defend themselves in the war on coal. Nobody else has the power or the interest at the moment. If they wish to defend themselves and their way of life, the first step is to acquire the armament appropriate to the battle. That would be a report on climate that they have commissioned and have ownership of. One government’s report on something like climate is as good as another’s. Thickness doesn’t matter so much. A 40 page report from the State of Pennsylvania that said that carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas and that we had better prepare for solar-driven cooling would send the EPA into apoplexy. So where is Pennsylvania’s report on climate, and those of all the other states that have so much to lose? Hasten now, so much time has been lost already.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of The Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Regnery, 2014).
“The biggest war on coal is the competition from fracked natural gas.”
Bingo! Although every action the Feds take to shut down coal production is just icing on the cake.
I work in the nat gas industry, and every action the Fed’s take to shut down coal just makes my future that much more secure and makes my employers that much wealthier. While jobs like mine are growing because of this, whose jobs are getting wiped out? Union members, that’s who. One of the left’s longtime, hard core supporters. Knock yourself out, Obama!!!
Jimbo says:
April 5, 2014 at 2:48 am
I was wondering about coal yesterday and their attempts to destroy the industry. Then I realised that coal in the ground is coal in the ground for our grand children. The coal reserves can always be dug up in the future, ‘it’s all for the grand children.’ 🙂
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Protect your grandchildren’s future , go cold and dark today so they can stay warm in the future.
Of course, the root Obama problem is just plain stupidity combined with the desire to “be somebody” , tough when you dont have a brain and then hire like minded folk like (junk)
science advisor Holdren. And his goal could have been so easily reached – take one of those trillions that he flushed down the toilet and use it instead to buy nuclear plants – that would buy 200 such plants, and their capacity (roughly 260 GW), would, in addition to the current 20% nuclear component, provide for over 70% emission free nuclear power. Since the cost of one of those plants (roughly $5 billlion, less due to bulk buying) can be repaid by sending the Treasury 1 less than a penny for each kWhr they produce, in 60 years they would have more than repaid the trillion dollars. They are guaranteeed a 60 year lifepan, which means they will still be around 70 years from now, which means paying back considerably more than they cost.
My calculations, based on very dependable cost data, shows the Gen 3+ nuclear plants in the U.S. producing at a cost of roughly 4 cents per kWhr, total, which includes everything : nuclear waste disposal, decommissioning, fuel, ops and maintenance, cost of original construction of the plant. For comparison, that is close to the cost of natural gas and since nuclear fuel costs are
such a small protion of nuclear power costs (less than 3/4th of a penny per kWhr) and are in oversupply for the foreseeable future, nuclear power generation costs will be just as steady in the future as in the past. A report of the actual costs of wind power estimates their production costs as 15 cents or 19 cents per kWhr, depending upon whether coal or gas power is used for backup.
The total govt subsidy for wind power is roughly 2 cents per kWhr, which is more than twice the cost of building a nuclear plant (which anti-nukes claim is too expensive).
By or before the end of the buildout, SMRs (small modular reactors) would be commercially available that would have load following capability, which means they could replace most of the
remaining peak load natural gas generators and thus provide most of the remaining 30% demand, as well as incrementally adding more nuclear capacity as demand increases via additional installations.
Clumsy thinking always leads to clumsy ideas, and Obama is , without doubt, the clumsiest thinker in Washington. Evah!! His programs are overly complicated, a sure indication that little intelligent thought was behind them.
Patrick and Ken, perhaps the “people” are confused with human breath at about 40,000 ppm per exhaled concentration, or 4%
If States want to win the war on coal and get rid of the AGW fearmongering then all they have to do is adopt the work of the NIPCC as their guide for future climate. Science at it’s best and it suits the purpose.
There, wasn’t that easy?
In light of your political leanings, which I am sympathetic with, it is amusing that your choice of title, “What is to be done?”, is the same that Lenin used for a pamphlet he published in 1902. The phrase is somewhat famous, at least to someone with an interest in early communist arcana.
There is now unequivocal observational evidence that planet cooling has started. It appears there will be billions of dollars made available for ‘skeptic’ climate research.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
If significant planetary cooling continues the public, media, and political response are predictable: Panic, outrage over climategate, and a demand for a scientific explanation as to why the planet is cooling, why the AGW mechanism saturates, and how much cooling will occur. There will likely be initial warmists attempts to explain away the cooling, however, that will be futile if there is significant cooling.
The public and media are not aware there is unequivocal evidence of cyclic abrupt cooling in the paleo climatic record. There is a physical reason why Canada, the Northern US Border States, UK, and Northern Europe were covered 22 times with a 2 mile thick ice sheet and why interglacial periods ended abruptly rather than gradually.
Both the scientific and the political debates have been overwhelmingly incompetent, with individuals unsurprisingly spread all over the place in their views, and dogmatically resistant to changing those views when confronted with new, and increasingly definitive, evidence against them.
The mere fact that the climate change/global warming debate is now widely understood to be political rather than scientific (I summarize the scientific side of the situation as: there is no valid climate science and no competent climate scientists, ever since my Venus/Earth atmospheric temperatures comparison) should tell everyone, in no uncertain terms, that the situation is beyond anything any of us have ever personally experienced before: false science being mandated (that means forced upon us all, tyrannically) by the highest political authorities, not to mention by all of our most trusted and authoritative, but incompetent and even fraudulent, institutions.
I informed you all a year ago that the system is broken, in both science and politics. Obama is not merely the latest Democratic President; the evidence, before your very eyes for the last 6 years (beginning in my estimation with his disavowal of knowledge about his pastor of 20 years, the “Rev.” Jeremiah Wright–demonstrating a complete lack of character and a religious cult leader’s ability to lie blatantly, before the whole world) is that he is a pathological liar, and is in fact personally devoted to lying, at every point and on any topic big or small, to the people he is supposed to serve. And he is devoted to the ideology of the radical, activist Left, whose purposes and actions led me to begin calling them the Insane Left, with the passage of Obamacare 4 years ago. And I remind everyone, I voted Democratic through 8 straight presidential elections, from 1976 through 2004–I do not approach these matters with prejudice of any kind. Obama is of a different fundamental kind, more closely resembling a dissembling and self-serving religious cult leader than anything else.
But you all think you are knowledgeable adults, who know the situation and Obama well enough to be “reasonable” about him and those who raised him up. The Weimar Republic also thought it knew Hitler–who suspended their constitution the same year he was raised to power by them (what’s that? I can’t evoke Hitler, according to your fashionable “Godwin’s Law” dogma? Well, “who knows only his own generation remains always a child”, and Godwin was a child).
This unprecedented time calls for more than unending, vain lukewarm (!) debate. It calls for getting to the very heart of matters both scientific and political, and for dealing with criminal authorities.
The real problem is that markets should decide what direction our power generation should take, not Government subsidies and politics.
The real struggle human kind is engaged in is the struggle with nature.
Some more soot anybody, have a ball: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-26899525
You cant spend billions and then implement into the trillions and be wrong.. The peasants have no clothes with the lib-left decked out in such finery..
Its like finding out WW2 was based on a lovers quarrel..
I would like to see coal miners and the mine owners perform a pre-emptive strike. A shut down of coal production for thirty days will have an alarming effect on those trying to shut down the industry. A shutdown until prices improve would be justifiable and a real sharp eye opener. GK
Obama is an idiot.
I have heard this sort of claim before and it does not make sense to me.
What makes sense is that there are competing interests involved and the Administration is behaving in a manner that they believe suits their interests not those of the coal states.
Greater and more efficient use of energy will improve the human condition. Coal is our major source of energy. There are two main types of coal. If CO2 is not considered a pollutant, anthrocite burns “clean” and bituminous coal burns “dirty”. Clean air standards require plants to scrub out the dirty ash and store it in lagoons (that are now failing and polluting our water). Here in North Carolina, Duke progress is in the process of replacing those old failing plants that burn bituminous coal with natural gas burning power plants that are cheaper to build and operate. They are working for a pipe line from Pennsylvania’s fracking sites and the state legislature is fast tracking the exploration of shale gas in North Carolina. I think the future use of “dirty” coal is through insitu conversion to natural gas and shipping by pipelines rather than rail. Even if CO2 is considered a pollutant, It makes no sense to sequester CO2 at the source when the cold water sink of the Arctic ocean is doing a much better job for free.
Cramer says:
April 5, 2014 at 2:32 am
This is nothing more than political fear mongering.
Wrong. Try opening your eyes. But first, get your head out of the sand. That helps.
The biggest war on coal is the competition from fracked natural gas.
Wrong again. Competition from NG is healthy, just as any real competition is. It is good for the market, and good for customers. What is unhealthy is government interference in the market.
Make no mistake. This is not just a war on coal, and by extension, a war on “carbon”; it is a war on democracy itself.
As one of the early posters to this site, I think this post is not one of the better posts. The post is vague and accusatory, providing little if any evidence of what is claimed. The most obvious problem coal faces is that natural gas is now abundant and cheap and mostly confined to a domestic American market. And gas does, in fact burn cleaner than coal. But too many of the reactions and responses on this thread ado not speak well of the current state of WUWT community. Disagreement and discussion is not trolling. It is tolerance and civility. Asking for evidence is not trolling. It is being skeptical.
cedarhill says:
April 5, 2014 at 4:59 am
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Sadly, you are 100% correct.
BC
Regarding Obama, the EPA and the impoverishing of America, I don’t think it is necessarily their deliberate intent to impoverish the country. It’s just that they are so obsessed with environmental issues that they don’t a rat’s a** about the impact that excessive and unnecessary environmental rules and regulations will have on the economy, especially those involving coal and CO2. They are either apathetic about the impact or simply ignorant of it because they don’t understand how the economy works and know nothing about running a small business or corporation and what impacts their success. We in the U.S. can only hope that the next president will be someone who does understand these things and actually cares.
IMHO, it is not necessarily the ends of the green left that we need to be concerned about, but the manner in which they believe they can get us there. Rather then an ongoing regulatory eco-war on the economy, we need someone in the White House who places the emphasis on technological improvements and advancements as the key to environmental protection and policy. Fossil fuel power plants should be replaced (especially the older ones) only when we have the will, the money and the technology to replace them with something better, namely nuclear. The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor has been bandied about for some time now as the best answer for the next generation of nuclear power. LFTR (with its safely and proliferation-resistant features) and other environmentally friendly technologies such as the Brayton Cycle (http://energyfromthorium.com/2014/04/04/closed-loop-brayton-cycle-sandia-national-laboratory/) need to be the environmental counterargument to Obama, the EPA and the green left and their obsession with furthering a regulatory eco-war on the economy. The Brayton Cycle developers at the Sandia National Labs hope that the Brayton Cycle will improve gas turbine efficiency by as much as 50%…quite an achievement.
The American people need to be made to understand that regulatory eco-wars on the economy, CO2 taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and a scientifically bogus CAGW scare campaign only serve to further burden an economy that is still struggling to create enough good-paying jobs for everyone who wants one. They do not provide the technology and other means with which we can take steps toward a post-fossil fuels era, if that is indeed our near-term goal. The worst part of this is that the hardliners in the green leftist movement will probably never understand any of this no matter how hard you try to get them to do so. So sad and tragic.
The other big sink is the biosphere that converts that CO2 into useful products like food and wood. Power plant plumes of CO2 have a short half-life above global background levels. Clouds, rain, moist soil, and the biosphere are sucking up those extra CO2 molecules. Also, the biosphere is emitting a lot more CO2 (rotting organic matter) than all the coal fired power plants in existance. Trying to control the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 by controlling anthropogenic emissions is like spitting into the wind.
harrydhuffman (@harrydhuffman) says:
April 5, 2014 at 7:16 am
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WOW, …. great commentary, … Harry D Huffman.
May I have your permission to post (quote) it on another Forum?
Sam C
@Hunter,
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see. Competition from NG is completely healthy. If you view market forces as a “problem” for coal then you either have no understanding of economics, or are simply biased against coal, and thus have an agenda. The truth is that both coal and NG have slightly different, and equally important roles. The price of coal is stable in comparison to NG, which can vary enormously. Yes, these are good times for NG. Hurray. But, demand is high. That puts upward pressure on price. Fortunately for consumers, pesky coal is there, with its irritatingly stable price helping to keep NG competitive price-wise. Hurray again. Now, throw in Obama’s war on coal, and everything goes out the window, hurting consumers, skewing the market, and ultimately threatening democracy.
Or, we could all just watch the thermometers and as the temperatures fall, watch CAGW people shriek louder trying to convince every one that colder is hotter, and bend their adjustments to the breaking point, becoming less believed. Facts obvious to most are not on their side. Here in the upper central states this AM I look out the window and see a fresh blanket of snow. Now snow in April here is not completely unusual, but the last time I remember this was back in the early 80’s, just at the end of the 70’s ice age “crisis”.
James Strom says:
April 5, 2014 at 6:32 am
Bingo, you win the prize James! Send me your postal address and I will send you a copy of my book. If you send me your postal address via the contact button on my website, http://www.davidarchibald.info, I will mail you a copy of my book.
I can’t believe Cramer above suggested that rising oil prices don’t have a strong effect on the economy. This is the pie-in-the-sky liberalism that destroys this whole climate change issue among the middle. When liberals completely ignore reality to justify their actions.
Let’s look at the modern age and the effect oil prices have had on the economy.
After World War II the American economy grew rapidly and steady for more than 25 years. The US by then had mostly industrialized and good jobs were plentiful and companies grew. Throughout this period we had abundant and cheap energy.
Then this period of expansion came to a crashing halt in 1973. This was the year of the first Arab oil embargo which created the first energy crisis. The country had already been hit by bad fiscal policies which created a major strain on our budget, such as LBJ’s war on poverty and the war in Vietnam.
The economy eventually recovered, but growth remain anemic and inflation became the norm for the rest of the 1970s. Then came the second energy crisis which followed the Iranian revolution and subsequent war with Iraq. This created yet another recession which doomed Carter’s Presidency. Reagan came in, ripped the band aid off the inflation problem by hiking up interest rates to 20+%, creating a third major recession in 8 years. But he also convinced the Saudi King to ramp up production of oil to collapse prices.
With inflation under control and the oil glut on, the economy surged. This created the longest period of economic expansion in American history, and it coincided with, again, having an abundance of cheap energy available.
This period of prosperity was interrupted only briefly in 1990-1991 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and America went to war against him. This sent prices rising to 60 dollars a barrel and caused a small recession. The war went well, and ended quickly. Prices fell, the economy recovered.
This lasted until 2000, when another spike in oil prices (from 1999-2000) caused yet another small recession.
Yes, oil prices continued to rise and despite this, the economy recovered. But as we know now this recovery existed because of a real estate bubble which, when it finally popped, brought the entire economy down with it in 2008.
Since then the economy, like in the 1970s, has enjoyed only an anemic recovery. The reason is mostly due to the existing high price of energy, which is now being held up arbitrarily by various environmental taxes and regulations.
Reasons cheap energy is so important to economy:
1. Energy doesn’t have the same supply and demand relationship as most other commodities. People need energy regardless of what the price is. They need to heat their homes and they need electricity to run their household goods. They need to drive to work and their children to school, etc. They can’t do without energy. Thus, if the price increases it will cost regular consumers hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of dollars more a year. That money then won’t be spent on other items these people might want or need and, therefore, they do without those other items to pay their higher energy bills. Two-thirds of our economy is based on consumer spending. Thus, this has a strong negative impact on both consumer confidence and purchasing power.
2. We still live in an industrial economy. Factories need energy, and lots of it, to produce its goods. Increasing energy costs substantially adds to the overhead of a company, thus hurting its prospects of profitability. This, in turn, means that these companies may be less inclined to hire more workers in order to reduce costs.
3. There is a direct relationship between oil prices and the auto industry. If people drive less, they buy fewer cars. This means car companies suffer. This means car part companies suffer. This means companies which produces steal and metal suffer, etc.
Arguing that high energy costs don’t have a negative impact on the economy is stupid.
The assumptions in the post by David A. ought to be questioned. One would be that anyone would care what a report by a US State would say. The government and people of Portland and Seattle likely could not find Harrisburg and would not listen or care about reports from there. Many new reports would say what the UN IPPC SPM says so there is no sense in going there. Further, every State already has a climate report; find them here:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/state_climate_profiles.html
Like most such reports done by States, they are accumulating dust on the shelves of bureaucrats or taking up space on ageing hard drives. Why waste more money on such efforts?
A second major assumption of the post is that solar-driven cooling is about to hit “like a freight train.” Many people believe this but it actually seems the science is not settled in this regard.
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Eric Worrall says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:39 am
“Why would the American – government . . .”
“. . . the 11 year climate cycle . . . ”
I know of zero evidence for the first of these.
The second is stated incorrectly. Makes no sense?
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Konrad says:
April 5, 2014 at 12:51 am
“. . . in the hands of readers of blogs like this.”
Wrong! Recall:
In the 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person.” Stevenson called back “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority.”
And HOPE is not a plan:
http://thekaoseffect.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/obama_rally1.jpg