The poor carbon footprint of wind and solar

Paul Joskow pointed out that these costs do not take account of the costs of intermittency: wind power is not generated on a calm day, nor solar power at night. Conventional power plants must be kept on standby. Electricity demand also varies during the day in ways that the supply from wind and solar generation may not match.

HT: The Economist via Sinclair Davidson

The best discussions on green interest group coalitions

Bootleggers, Baptists, and the Global Warming Battle By Bruce Yandle and Stuart Buck:

The theory’s name is meant to evoke 19th century laws banning alcohol sales.

  • Baptists supported Sunday closing laws for moral and religious reasons, while bootleggers were eager to stifle their legal competition.
  • Politicians were able to pose as acting in the interests of public morality, even while taking contributions from bootleggers.

Yandle and Buck argue that during the battle over the Kyoto Protocol, he “Baptist” environmental groups provided moral support while “bootlegger” corporations and nations worked in the background to seek economic advantages over their rivals.

BAPTISTS? THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL INTEREST GROUPS By Todd J. Zywicki who specifies three testable implications of a public interest model of the activities of environmental interest groups:

(1) a desire to base policy on the best-available science;

(2) a willingness to engage in deliberation and compromise to balance environmental protection against other compelling social and economic interests; and,

(3) a willingness to consider alternative regulatory strategies that can deliver environmental protection at lower-cost than traditional command-and-control regulation.

Zywicki concludes that It has been argued that environmental regulation can be best understood as the product of an unlikely alliance of “Baptists and Bootleggers” – public-interested environmental activist groups and private-interested firms and industries seeking to use regulation for competitive advantage.

Australia’s carbon debate mirrors global follies

via lowyinterpreter.org

Green Tariffs: the only rational reason for having a carbon tax

duties-taxes-import-spain-spainbox

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The Australian carbon tax repeal

carbon tax good riddance

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What the carbon tax repeal means to you

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In a democracy we resolve our differences by trying to persuade each other and elections

The-virtue-of-a

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An inconvenient chart

co2

HT: aei-ideas.org

United States and European Emission Patterns | The Energy Collective

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United States and European Emission Patterns | The Energy Collective.

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Trusting Al Gore

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The battle of the graphs

The second IPCC report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today.

The 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. The technique they overweighed was one which the UN’s 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines.

Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now.

HT: Climate-chaos-Dont-believe-it

There are major differences between a carbon tax and emissions trading.

  1. The history of cap-and-trade systems suggests that the carbon emission allowances are given away to carbon emitters, which they can use or sell at market prices. The prices of energy products would rise, but governments would collect no revenue to reduce other taxes and compensate consumers.
  2. Agreement on a global cap-and-trade system is hard to imagine. A global carbon tax is easier to negotiate. All nations use a carbon tax to raise revenue and use the proceeds to compensate consumers with tax relief. No money needs to change hands across national borders.
  3. A carbon tax is now being championed by groups and political parties that previously would deny to their graves that taxes have significant incentive effects, and that taxes do not affect the supply of labour or the rate and direction of investment to any important degree. It is suspicious that groups and parties that deny tax cuts increase economic growth take time out from these foundational beliefs to support a tax because of the incentives it gives to reduce carbon consumption. They want it both ways.

The disappearance of IPCC 1990 report figure 7c, the Medieval warm period, and River Thames frost fairs

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This painting, dated 1684, by Abraham Hondius depicts one of many frost fairs on the River Thames during the Little Ice Age. River Thames frost fairs were held on its tideway in some winters between the 17th century and early 19th century.

HT: Wattsupwiththat.com

The global warming hiatus? Climate models all wrongly predicted warming, so let’s call it a discrepancy

FE0617_climate_C_MF

Ross McKitrick noted this week that the IPCC still uses the word unequivocal to describe the evidence, but has let a new word slip into its lexicon : hiatus – the global warming hiatus since 1998.

How times have changed. Up until now, to mention this hiatus was to be a climate denier – pure wickedness: to be anti-science and a paid lackey or wannabe paid lackey of Big Oil.

Has the IPCC become a climate denier? Trends change.  Differentiating a break in trend from fluctuations around a trend is never easy. 

"Down the Up Escalator": a graphic explaining why global warming is *not* slowing down.

I have not seen a statement of when this hiatus becomes a break in trend. Nor have I seen an estimate of when a return of warming, in what year in the 2020s or 2030s or whenever, will a return in warming make recent trends in global temperatures statistically significant evidence of global warming.

via Junk Science Week: The global warming hiatus? Climate models all wrongly predicted warming, so let’s call it a discrepancy | Financial Post.

National emissions regulations can have perverse global effects.

If relatively clean countries switch to clean energy (via command-and-control regulations, cap-and-trade, pollution taxes, or green norms), fossil fuels don’t vanish. Instead, their world price falls – encouraging further consumption in relatively dirty countries.  The net effect?

Bryan Caplan

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