OPINION/COMMENTARY

Can We Afford the Energy Bill?

It's bad enough that the energy bill now working its way through Congress may cost taxpayers close to $36 billion over the next five years. Worse, it actually contains provisions that would increase the cost of energy in the years ahead. Take the ethanol mandate. This costly gasoline additive, made from Midwestern corn, already gets special tax breaks worth more than 50 cents per gallon. Now, its producers, including agri-business giant Archer Daniels Midland, have convinced their friends in Congress to require that 7.5 billion gallons of it be added to the nation's fuel supply. Acording to a study by the Energy Department, this mandate could cost drivers more than 3 cents per gallon -- in an energy bill that was supposed to help lower the price at the pump. Granted, there are many other energy bill provisions that won't increase energy costs. But most are unlikely to decrease them either. And many, including all sorts of giveaways to the energy industry, will cost taxpayers a fortune. In the hands of Congress, the energy bill has morphed into a farm bill, an environmental bill, and above all else, a massive pork-barrel bill. But what we really need is a true energy bill, one that frees energy markets from unnecessary regulatory constraints and opens up new sources of supply. There are a few such provisions in the bill -- like facilitating approvals for hydroelectric power plants and encouraging investments in electric transmission lines -- but only a few....

The Trial Lawyers' Additive

Congress is wrangling over a federal energy bill filled with pork. But budget waste has garnered less attention than one of the bill's most sensible provisions, limiting legal liability for producers of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). Government normally shouldn't protect companies from lawsuits, but Washington is largely responsible for the problem -- the focus of a number of lawsuits, including scores of consolidated cases being heard in New York. MTBE began as a gasoline additive in 1979 to make gasoline burn more cleanly. Congress mandated use of oxygenates to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, intending to subsidize already heavily subsidized ethanol. However, MTBE proved to be the superior product. It could be shipped via pipelines and emitted less pollution than ethanol. The Sierra Club called MTBE one of the ten most environmentally useful products. Unfortunately, the additive can contaminate the water supply if it leaks from a pipeline or storage tank. The result is unpleasant, not dangerous....

RUNNING AGAINST THE WIND

The energy bill which recently passed the Senate would force large utilities to generate 10 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2020 and provides $3.7 billion in tax credits to wind-power producers. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R - Tenn.) says this is a bad idea because the presence of huge wind turbines will ruin the aesthetics of the countryside.

According to Alexander:

* A modern wind generator stands on a tower between 300 and 400 feet high with flashing red lights that can be seen for more than 20 miles.
* Its blades are 95 feet long and when the wind is blowing at a sufficient speed, enough electricity can be generated to power 500 homes - but that is only 35 percent of the time.

There are other reasons for opposing wind generators:

* After three decades and over $14 billion in taxpayer subsidies, renewable energy sources supply just 3 percent of U.S. electricity; wind provides less than 0.2 percent.
* A single 555-megawatt gas-fired power plant on 15 acres generates more electricity each year than all 13,000 of California's wind turbines on 106,000 acres.
* An estimated 44,000 birds, including an average of 50 golden eagles annually, have been killed over the past 20 years.

Furthermore, wind farms in agriculturally dominated areas would significantly increase local surface drying and soil heating, harming agriculture and making it harder to grow corn for ethanol.

Source: Editorial, "Running Against The Wind," Investor's Business Daily, July 15, 2005.

For text: http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/050714/issues01.html?.v=1

Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media

In a world where many adults receive their science education from newspapers and television, a great deal of misinformation about global warming exists. The media is quite skilled at making highly untenable predictions of greenhouse doom and gloom appear credible-foretelling drastically rising sea levels, the increased fury of hurricanes, and even plagues of locusts. The inaccuracies about how humans inadvertently warm earth's tenuous atmosphere so pervade popular culture that the actual science behind this notion is hardly given a second thought. So how do we separate the global warming wheat from the greenhouse chaff? As a meteorologist practicing my trade for nearly 20 years, I recommend a read of the latest work by Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia and senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. The book, Meltdown, is the latest in Michaels' sequence of books on the topic of global warming. Meltdown presents the flip side of what most people have heard about global warming, a cogent counterpoint to the view that the introduction of anthropogenic carbon dioxide is pushing the fluid systems of this planet into hyper-overdrive. The book presents a vast body of highly credible and growing knowledge that has been largely ignored. It includes scientific information that does not get reported in the papers or in government reports, because this information threatens to undermine the great doom and gloom establishment. The basic thesis of Meltdown is that, yes, there has been a recent upward trend in the temperature of the atmosphere. But the increase is small and unlikely to mushroom into something truly catastrophic; the public, policy, and scientific distortions that have emerged are way off the mark. The book is steeped in scientific fact, with no fewer than 100 references to journal literature, but Michaels distills, synthesizes, and cuts through the morass like a beacon. His coverage is broad, and the distortions he uncovers are organized into topics dealing with ecosystems, drought and flood, severe storms, diseases, and the cryosphere....

Green Coal?

The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held its first hearing on what its chairman Pete Domenici, R-NM, promises will be several reviewing all aspects of the debate over climate change. With luck, subsequent hearings will provide more light than the first, otherwise this nation could face electricity brownouts and economic blackouts in the near decades ahead. The witnesses consisted of four scientists who deem global warming to be a serious problem caused by human use of fossil fuels and their carbon emissions, particularly carbon dioxide. As a result, news reports following the event focused on senators "acknowledging" the climate problem and "struggling" with what to do about it. Unfortunately, the scientists -- including Ralph J. Cicerone, the new president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Sir John Houghton of Great Britain, a former head of the United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change - had little to offer in practical answers....

Don't Throw Money at Overheated Issue

The suggestion that U.S. senators are considering inflicting severe damage on the U.S. economy to mitigate some of the supposed effects of global warming is worrying. It suggests that "the world's greatest deliberative body" hasn't deliberated anywhere near enough. First we should remember that, even though it now seems that mankind probably is contributing to a warming trend, considerable uncertainties remain in our knowledge of what is likely to happen in the future. This is apparent when we consider that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that global temperatures could rise over the next hundred years by between 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit and 10 degrees Fahrenheit, a 400 percent margin of error. Moreover, those projections are based not so much on science as on economic projections. Inquiries into those projections by expert economists suggest they are both methodologically unsound and also far from realistic. They predict, for example, that countries such as Zimbabwe, Vanuatu and North Korea will overtake the United States in per capita income by 2100. If this is the case, global warming may be the least of our worries. Next, not enough effort has been put into assessing the likely costs of any damage caused by global warming compared with the costs of measures to control warming. This is an important issue, because it gets to the heart of the political involvement with global warming. Why should we take action to prevent it if those actions will damage us more?....

The Parachuting Pussycats

Fifty years ago, a malaria outbreak occurred among Borneo’s Dayak people. The World Health Organization came to the rescue. They sprayed the people’s thatch-roofed huts with DDT—and set in motion a life-and-death illustration of the importance of respecting the natural order. The pesticide killed the mosquitoes, but it also killed a parasitic wasp that kept thatch-eating caterpillars under control. The result? People’s roofs began caving in. And then things really got bad. The local geckos feasted on the toxic mosquitoes—and got sick. Cats gorged on sick geckos—and dropped dead. And then, with no cats, the rats began running wild, threatening the people with deadly bubonic plague. The World Health Organization was in a quandary. What unexpected disasters might occur if it now poisoned the rats? Then someone determined that they needed to reintroduce part of the natural order that had collapsed: specifically, cats to eat rats. So one morning, the Dayak people heard the droning of a slow-flying aircraft. Soon the sky was littered with parachutes bearing pussycats to earth. Operation Cat Drop delivered 14,000 felines to Borneo. They hit the ground—feet first, I suppose—and began taking care of the rats....

The Human Cost Of Animal Rights Violence

We have long known that the lunatic fringe of the animal rights movement will stop at nothing -- including the law -- to achieve their goal of "total animal liberation." Trying to prevent Americans from ever enjoying a hamburger again, groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) happily attack restaurants, research labs, and even farms. If anyone can attest to the despicable actions of the ALF, it's Dr. Mark Blumberg, a researcher from the University of Iowa, whose lab was destroyed by the ALF in November 2004. Writing an article in The Washington Post, Blumberg describes the "human cost" of the ALF attack: Imagine the horror of walking into your office at work, as one of my young colleagues did, to find computers, books and personal effects (such as ultrasound images of your unborn child) soaked in acid. Then, imagine having to don a chemical protection suit for several days and sift through multiple 55-gallon drums filled with acid-soaked papers, photocopying those that are still readable as they crumble in your hand. Unfortunately, the attack on the building is where our story begins, not ends. For what followed was a series of well-orchestrated harassments....

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