Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 9 May 2017

Bring Back Free Market Environmentalism

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

“Property rights make the environment an asset rather than a liability by giving owners an incentive for stewardship…markets and the exchange process allow people with different priorities regarding the use of natural resources to cooperate rather than fight.”

With rallying cries to continue funding scientific research and pursue eco-friendly policies, environmentalists are leading the charge against President Donald Trump and his perceived anti-science agenda. Mottos like “Science not Silence” and “#NoSidesInScience” are echoed on the March for Science website, and the activists are advocating for increased public funding and urging lawmakers to adhere to scientific evidence.

While the March for Science movement does claim to be non-partisan, it’s hard not to connect its emergence with the advent of the Trump administration and its plans to cut the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and other science and environmental programs.

There has been plenty of apocalyptic talk regarding the future of the environment over the past thirty years or so, particularly with regard to climate change. But the doom and gloom has reached a fever pitch now that Trump is president and the Republicans control both the House and the Senate.

For instance, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Denis Hayes, president and chief executive of the Bullitt Foundation and coordinator for the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, warned that, “Defunding science is the intellectual equivalent of eating our seed corn.” And Gina McCarthy, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, voiced her concerns in Cosmopolitan. She argued that the EPA has been vital in protecting the environment and warned that, “thanks to the Trump administration’s dangerous scorched-earth strategy, essential programs that keep us safe are at risk of being shut down.”

Many liberals believe the government is crucial for protecting the environment. But is government really the best means for achieving this goal? After all, it was the EPA that accidentally poisoned the Animas River in Colorado back in 2015, and the Tennessee Valley Authority has repeatedly gotten into hot water for their coal-fired plants, which have allegedly leaked toxic pollutants into nearby groundwater. Then there was the excruciatingly slow response to the Flint, Michigan water crisis, where thousands of local residents drank contaminated water despite assurances from the local government that it was safe.

Government solutions rarely bear fruit; the free market and the innovation of individuals offer better solutions. Consider the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), which embodies the philosophy of free market environmentalism. PERC aims to protect the environment by focusing on property rights and the rule of law. As the website puts it:

“Property rights make the environment an asset rather than a liability by giving owners an incentive for stewardship…markets and the exchange process allow people with different priorities regarding the use of natural resources to cooperate rather than fight.”

Donald Leal, a Senior Fellow Emeritus with PERC and Terry Anderson, the former President and Executive Director of PERC, championed the partnership between the free market and environmentalism in their 1991 book Free Market Environmentalism. The authors pushed for free market solutions to environmental problems, such as supporting private water trusts and leasing fishing rights to fishermen. Writing for the Hoover Institution in 2015, Anderson sums up free market environmentalism this way: “The problem is that the environment, like the economy, is constantly in flux, and we humans have to adapt our actions to those changes. Tackling environmental problems requires agility, which is what entrepreneurship is all about.”

The government is not known for being agile. As Anderson points out, those with entrepreneurial spirit can react faster and with greater precision to a myriad of issues than government bureaucrats. A prime example is the advent of pop-up wetlands that help migratory birds struggling to make their lengthy journeys due to droughts find sanctuary. The Nature Conservancy has devised a plan to temporarily create wetlands for these migratory birds. By using a pilot program called BirdReturns, the Nature Conservancy creates pop-up wetlands by paying rice farmers to flood their fields. The program relies on satellite imagery, paired with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s crowdsourced bird watching program eBird, to determine which rice fields should be flooded. By offering payment to willing farmers, the Nature Conservancy manages to help migratory birds while also respecting private property rights.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

May 9, 2017 at 01:33AM

Uncategorized 9 May 2017

Renewable Energy Agency Wonders Why Russia Is Not Wasting $300bn On Renewable Energy!

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

By Paul Homewood

PEI report:

Renewable energy could account for as much as 11.3 per cent of Russian’s power generation mix by 2030, but has so far remained badly underdeveloped, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
Green energy accounts for a paltry 3.6 per cent of the total mix at the present time, and the politics and over-reliance on its large reserves of fossil fuels are largely responsible for the failure to meet potential.

IRENA, in a recent report entitled Renewable Energy Prospects for the Russian Federation, called for cumulative investments of $300bn in renewable energy up to 2030, or on average $15bn per year between 2010 and 2030.
Although the Russian government is aware of the possibilities for renewable energy in the country, its energy model is in need of transformation if promise is to be fulfilled, according to the FT.
Under its current energy strategy, Russia aims to increase its renewable energy share to only 4.9 per cent by the 2030 timeline which is well below par of the 11.3 per cent aforementioned figure estimated by IRENA.
The Russian oil and gas industry generates about 15 per cent of GDP, 35 per cent of federal budget revenue and 60 per cent of exports.
Rosneft and Gazprom, state-owned oil and gas groups both benefit from government assistance and preferential treatment. In addition, an underdeveloped grid hampers investments in large-scale renewable projects such as wind farms or new hydroelectric stations, which are cost-effective only if enough consumers are close enough.

http://ift.tt/2q22ikQ

I think we can file this in the No S**t Sherlock file!

Does anybody with a modicum of common sense honestly expect Russia, with huge reserves of fossil fuels (on which its whole economy is heavily dependent), to simply abandon these, and waste hundreds of billions (which it has not got) on building wind and solar plants (that don’t work most of the time).

Anybody who still thinks Russia are in any way serious about cutting CO2 might care to check out the actual data.

Following a sharp drop in the early 1990s, due to the collapse of the old Soviet heavy industry, emissions have not fallen at all in twenty years.

http://ift.tt/1RSrHnr

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

May 9, 2017 at 12:39AM

Uncategorized 9 May 2017

Arctic Methane Seeps Slow Global Warming, Reverse Ocean Acidification and Cure Hypoxia

via Watts Up With That?
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Arctic Methane Seeps Slow Global Warming, Reverse Ocean Acidification and Cure Hypoxia

Guest post by David Middleton

From the “Truth is Stranger than Fiction” files:

Are methane seeps in the Arctic slowing global warming?

By Randall HymanMay. 8, 2017 , 3:00 PM

Good news about climate change is especially rare in the Arctic. But now comes news that increases in one greenhouse gas—methane—lead to the dramatic decline of another. Research off the coast of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago suggests that where methane gas bubbles up from seafloor seeps, surface waters directly above absorb twice as much carbon dioxide (CO₂) as surrounding waters. The findings suggest that—in isolated spots in the Arctic—methane seeps in isolated spots in the Arctic could lessen the impact of climate change.

“This is … totally unexpected,” says Brett Thornton, a geochemist at Stockholm University who was not involved in the research. These new findings challenge the popular assumption that methane seeps inevitably increase the global greenhouse gas burden.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Molecule for molecule, it traps nearly 30 times as much heat in the atmosphere as CO₂. But scientists know relatively little about its role in the global carbon cycle. Most atmospheric methane comes from biological sources—belching bovines and bacteria feasting on decomposing litter—or from the burning of fossil fuels. In the ocean, methane bubbles up from deep seeps, where it is often stored in icelike crystal lattices of water called hydrates. When those hydrates “melt,” because of changing temperatures and pressures, the methane is released, and it can percolate into the atmosphere above.

To find out just how much methane the Arctic Ocean was contributing to the global balance, biogeochemist John Pohlman of the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, set out to measure the gas close to the ocean surface above known methane seeps near Svalbard during the Arctic summer. He and his team were constantly surprised by how little methane they found. But the bigger surprise was that surface water CO₂ levels dropped whenever their ship crossed a seep. “[The CO₂ data] became the most important part of the story,” Pohlman says.

When combined with other data—sudden drops in water temperature, along with increases in dissolved oxygen and pH at the surface—the lower CO₂levels were telltale signs of bottom water upwelling and photosynthesis, Pohlman says. Pohlman and his team conclude that the same physical forces that are pushing the methane bubbles up are also pumping nutrient-rich cold waters from the sea bed to the surface, fertilizing phytoplankton blooms that soak up CO₂, they write today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Such a “fertilization effect” would be “really surprising,” says Thornton…

[…]

In fact, the study finds that in such zones, nearly 1900 times more CO₂ is being absorbed than methane emitted. That’s a small but real consolation for those concerned about global warming, Pohlman says: In these limited zones, the atmospheric benefit from CO₂sequestration is about 230 times greater than the warming effect from methane emissions.

[…]

Science

This article raises several questions:

Why are climate “scientists” always surprised when it turns out to not be worse than previously expected?

Was this discovery so inconvenient that it justified doubling up on “in isolated spots in the Arctic” in the same sentence?

If CH₄ is so much worse than CO₂… Why do “scientists know relatively little about its role in the global carbon cycle,” while seeming to know everything there is to know about CO₂and ts role in the global carbon cycle?

Does this mean that a controlled program of methane hydrate dislocation would help alleviate Gorebal Warming, Chicken Little of the Sea and hypoxia?

When combined with other data—sudden drops in water temperature, along with increases in dissolved oxygen and pH at the surface—the lower CO₂levels were telltale signs of bottom water upwelling and photosynthesis, Pohlman says.

via Watts Up With That? http://ift.tt/1Viafi3

May 9, 2017 at 12:14AM

Uncategorized 9 May 2017

May’s Energy Price Controls Savaged By Experts And Her Own Cabinet

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

Theresa May’s interventionist energy price cap has whacked share prices this morning: Centrica is trading at the lowest level for 15 months. The wonk world is savaging the policy:

Adam Smith Institute: “Freezing energy prices was a very bad idea when Ed Miliband proposed it. Yet two years after the electorate rejected it Theresa May is putting forward the same idea and rebranding it a ‘cap’. The facts on the ground haven’t changed, yet just like workers on boards and the living wage, Red Ed’s Zombie Policies are on the march.”

Institute of Economic Affairs: “Introducing a cap on household energy prices would be a clumsy and counterproductive government intervention that could have an adverse effect on the energy market. A cap would likely backfire with companies finding some way around them: either by pushing prices higher now in anticipation of the cap or by increasing their lower prices to offset the cap at the top”

Centre for Policy Studies: “The claim that an energy price cap will save households £100 a year is by no means a guarantee. In fact, an intervention of this kind could be detrimental to competition in the market, meaning that this reform could end up doing more harm than good.”

Taxpayers’ Alliance: “Crude diktats such as this suggest that the government simply doesn’t understand the consequences of these ill-thought-out policies.”

Social Market Foundation: “Energy companies will inevitably recoup the costs of this cap elsewhere, which may mean higher prices for people who have shopped around and switched tariff to get themselves a better deal.”

CBI: “A major market intervention, such as a price cap, could lead to unintended consequences, for example dampening consumers’ desire to find the best deal on the market and hitting investor confidence.”

Market analysts RBC Europe: “This decision by May is clearly as much a political as it is an economic one. This intervention could create a worse deal for customers on average.”

Here were members of Theresa May’s Cabinet attacking Ed Miliband’s price cap in 2015:

Michael Fallon: “We have not seen intervention in industry on a scale like this since the 1970s when they tried to control the price of bread.”

Boris Johnson: “Miliband says he will imitate the catastrophic policies of the emperor Diocletian, by imposing a price freeze on energy bills for the 20 months succeeding the election.”