Environment Update

Lots of great news surrounding the environment to pass along.  First, let's start with the High Priest in the Green Church of Environmentalism, Al Gore himself.  Bret Stephens writes a great column at the Wall Street Journal about Gore's latest speech, in which he proposed eliminating 100% of fossil fuel use in the next ten years.  Excerpts (emphasis mine):

Al Gore gave a speech last week "challenging" America to run "on 100% zero-carbon electricity in 10 years" -- though that's just the first step on his road to "ending our reliance on carbon-based fuels." Serious people understand this is absurd. Maybe other people will start drawing the same conclusion about the man proposing it.

In Mr. Gore's prophecy, a transition to carbon-free electricity generation in a decade is "achievable, affordable and transformative." He believes that the goal can be achieved almost entirely through the use of "renewables" alone, meaning solar, geothermal, wind power and biofuels.

And he doesn't think we really have any other good options: "The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," he says, with his usual gift for understatement. "And even more -- if more should be required -- the future of human civilization is at stake."

Here, however, is an inconvenient fact. In 1995, the U.S. got about 2.2% of its net electricity generation from "renewable" sources, according to the Energy Information Administration. By 2000, the last full year of the Clinton administration [of which he was the Vice-President...!], that percentage had dropped to 2.1%. By contrast, the combined share of coal, petroleum and natural gas rose to 70% from 68% during the same time frame.

Now the share of renewables is up slightly, to about 2.3% as of 2006 (the latest year for which the EIA provides figures). The EIA thinks the use of renewables (minus hydropower) could rise to 201 billion kilowatt hours per year in 2018 from the current 65 billion. But the EIA also projects total net generation in 2018 to be 4.4 trillion kilowatt hours per year. That would put the total share of renewables at just over four percent of our electricity needs.

Mr. Gore makes no mention of nuclear power in his speech, nor of the equally carbon-free hydroelectric power. These are proven technologies -- and useful reminders of what happens when environmentalists get what they wished for.

Mr. Gore's case would also be helped if our experience of renewable sources were a positive one. It isn't. In his useful book "Gusher of Lies," Robert Bryce notes that "in July 2006, wind turbines in California produced power at only about 10% of their capacity; in Texas, one of the most promising states for wind energy, the windmills produced electricity at about 17% of their rated capacity." Like wind power, solar power also suffers from the problem of intermittency, which means that it has to be backed up by conventional sources in order to avoid disruptions.

And then there are biofuels, whose recent vogue, the World Bank believes, may have been responsible for up to 75% of the recent rise in world food prices. Save the planet; starve the poor.

A more interesting question is why Mr. Gore remains believable.

[Ma]ybe he is believed simply because people want something in which to believe. "The readiness for self-sacrifice," wrote Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer," "is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life. . . . All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. . . . To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible."

Stephens' conclusion makes an excellent point.  Gore has made a phenomenal amount of money by embracing the unreality that is man-made catastrophic climate change.  For him and his followers, they cannot live in evidence-based reality that relies on reason without letting go of their belief system of climate change.  They are mutually exclusive concepts.  This, then, is what proves that environmentalism is a religion - it takes an incredible amount of unbelief in reality to make belief in environmentalism possible.

But, this is also a perfect example of how damaging this mentality is to America.  Radical environmentalists seem to be perfectly content to take whatever steps they deem necessary in the name of saving the planet, even if it means crippling the economy, raising food prices, and killing American jobs.  They are martyrs in a battle between real humanity and a mythical dying planet.  Vincent Carroll calls Gore's latest idea 'nutty', but I think that's being mild.  The one thing about environmentalism that is truly catastrophic is what environmentalists want to do in the name of saving the planet!

The thing that really galls me is that Gore is openly hypocritical (see history here and here).  His own energy consumption is orders of magnitude higher than normal people, and it has been for a long time.  Even after taking on the mantle of Green High Priest, though, Gore's hypocrisy is stunning (emphasis mine):

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former vice president's home energy use surged more than 10 percent, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

"A man's commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home," said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. "Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption."

In the past year, Gore's home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

 
He takes his hypocrisy on the road with him, too.  Michelle Malkin quotes Ed Frank from Americans for Prosperity:

"We're back from Al Gore's big global warming speech, and boy did we have a great time! We had a dedicated band of taxpayer advocates out in force, pointing out the high economic cost of global warming alarmism - starting with $8 a gallon gasoline. Of course, we saw plenty of hypocrisy — especially the fact that Gore didn't ride his bike or take public transporation to the event. He didn't even take his Prius! Instead, he brought a fleet of two Lincoln Town Cars and a Chevy Suburban SUV! Even worse, the driver of the Town Car that eventually whisked away Gore's wife and daughter left the engine idling and the AC cranking for 20 minutes before they finally left!"

Visit the link for video of the episode.

We continue to see more reports of what global warming -- despite the fact that it's been proven by evidence and reason to NOT be happening anymore -- is causing.  A Democrat Congressman told a group of students that global warming caused the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia.  One can't really blame him, I suppose, because his affiliation with the Democrat party means he simply can't say anything bad about the radical Islamic Muslims who were the ones actually torturing, killing, and mutilating American soldiers.  That would be uncouth.  Global warming is a much more comfortable shoe to slip on here.

What's good to see is that more and more people are coming around (hat tip: Heavy-Handed Politics) to the facts of reality.  Dr. David Evans is one of those people.  He is "the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol".  As a former climate change believer, he studied and researched carbon emissions and ice cores for years in the name of saving the planet.  He's singing a different tune now:

[S]ince 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

He lists the following uncontested points that most people don't know:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming.
3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).
4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion.

His conclusion is very, very reasonable:

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

All he's saying is that if this is such a catastrophic phenomenon, it needs to be debated honestly.  For those who believe it is true, it should be their responsibility to prove it is true.  The rest of us should require that proof before implementing policy changes that would most certainly be disastrous to our way of life.

That makes perfect sense, doesn't it?  So why do environmentalists stamp their foot, accuse anyone who disagrees with them (which now includes just about everyone who's bothered to stop and think about the issue) of being 'flat-earth' idiots and seeks to silence all dissent?  It's because they fear truth and they simply cannot allow fact and reason to enter into the debate.  They'll lose, utterly and completely.

Finally, we have a revelation of epic proportions that needs to be passed along to you.  With all of this topic of global warming, we really should trace things back to the source.  When you really boil it down, what is it that causes the warming of the planet?  Someone has finally identified the source, and it's really an amazing discovery.  If only we had realized this years ago, we may not have had this entire debate, and we could possibly have avoided all this expensive and ridiculous regulation.  Regardless, we now know precisely what it is that warms this planet we call Earth, our home.  Once you are made aware of this explosive bit of information, you will be forever changed (dare I say illuminated?) by the solution to this vexing question.  Are you ready?  Here we go...

The ultimate cause of the warming of the Earth is...  [drum roll please...]

The Sun.

There's my two cents.