Boycott Chiquita Bananas!

Sounds crazy, but this is serious business.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Follow @BloodBananas and @Boycott Chiquita on Twitter for all your Boycott Chiquita Banana News."

And at Instapundit, "BOYCOTTING CHIQUITA BANANAS over Conflict Oil."

Chinese Double-Standards and the U.N. Conference on Climate Change, Durban 2011

This was a New York Times the other day, "Outrage Grows Over Air Pollution and China’s Response."

BEIJING — The statement posted online along with a photograph of central Beijing muffled in a miasma of brown haze did not mince words: “The end of the world is imminent.”

The ceaseless churning of factories and automobile engines in and around Beijing has led to this: hundreds of flights canceled since Sunday because of smog, stores sold out of face masks, and many Chinese complaining on the Internet that officials are failing to level with them about air quality or make any improvements to the environment.

Chronic pollution in Beijing, temporarily scrubbed clean for the 2008 Summer Olympics, has made people angry for a long time, but the disruptions it causes to daily life are now raising questions about the economic cost, and the government’s ability to ensure the safety of the population.

“As a Chinese citizen, we have been kept in the dark on this issue for too long,” said Yu Ping, the father of a 7-year-old boy, who has started a public campaign to demand that officials report more accurately about Beijing’s air quality. “The government is just so bureaucratic that they don’t seem to care whether we common people live or die. And it’s up to us, the common people, to prod them and to put pressure on them so that they can reflect on their actions and realize that they really just have to do something.”

When the frustration of parents boils over, Communist Party leaders start worrying about their legitimacy in the eyes of the people. That was the case in 2008 when parents vented anger over deadly school collapses in the Sichuan earthquake and over adulterated milk.

The motionless cloud of pollution that has smothered the capital and its surroundings in recent days has frayed tempers. Long stretches of highway have been shut down because of low visibility, hobbling transportation of people and goods. Workers at Capital International Airport have faced crowds of irate travelers whose flights have been grounded. From Sunday to 11 a.m. Tuesday, more than 700 outbound and inbound flights were canceled, one airport official said. A tour guide, Wang Lanhuizi, 23, clutched dozens of passports from a stranded group. “I’m really worried, but there’s nothing we can do,” she said.

An announcement at the airport made no mention of pollution, attributing the cancellations and delays to “the weather condition.” That has long been the government line: the haze is fog, not fumes. But increasingly, Chinese know better. People like Mr. Yu, a newspaper editor, are lobbying officials to stop whitewashing their air quality reports.

And here's this from yesterday's Times, "At Climate Talks, a Familiar Standoff Between U.S. and China":

DURBAN, South Africa — China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, has once again emerged as the biggest puzzle at international climate change talks, sending ambiguous signals about the role it intends to play in future negotiations. This week, the nation’s top climate envoy said that China would be open to signing a formal treaty limiting emissions after 2020 — but laid down conditions for doing so that are unlikely ever to be met.

China’s lead negotiator at the United Nations climate change talks here, Xie Zhenhua, said that China was prepared to enter into a legally binding agreement after current voluntary programs expire at the end of the decade, seemingly a major step. China has always contended that because of its rapid economic growth and the persistent poverty of millions of its citizens, it cannot be bound by the same emissions standards as advanced industrialized nations.

Mr. Xie outlined five conditions under which China would consider joining such a treaty as a full partner, the major one being that China and other rapidly growing economies must be treated differently from the so-called rich countries. But that has been a deal-breaker for the United States for years and is the central reason that the Senate refused to even consider ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 agreement whose goal, still unmet, is to limit global greenhouse gas emissions...

But no word about China's epic pollution-fueled hypocrisy from communist Amy Goodman, at The Guardian, "Derailing Durban's climate change conference."

Big Oil Companies Are Shifting Their Focus Back to the West

A great piece.

At Wall Street Journal, "Big Oil Heads Back Home":

Big Oil is redrawing the energy map.

For decades, its main stomping grounds were in the developing world—exotic locales like the Persian Gulf and the desert sands of North Africa, the Niger Delta and the Caspian Sea. But in recent years, that geographical focus has undergone a radical change. Western energy giants are increasingly hunting for supplies in rich, developed countries—a shift that could have profound implications for the industry, global politics and consumers.

Driving the change is the boom in unconventionals—the tough kinds of hydrocarbons like shale gas and oil sands that were once considered too difficult and expensive to extract and are now being exploited on an unprecedented scale from Australia to Canada.

The U.S. is at the forefront of the unconventionals revolution. By 2020, shale sources will make up about a third of total U.S. oil and gas production, according to PFC Energy, a Washington-based consultancy. By that time, the U.S. will be the top global oil and gas producer, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia, PFC predicts.

That could have far-reaching ramifications for the politics of oil, potentially shifting power away from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries toward the Western hemisphere. With more crude being produced in North America, there's less likelihood of Middle Eastern politics causing supply shocks that drive up gasoline prices. Consumers could also benefit from lower electricity prices, as power plants switch from coal to cheap and plentiful natural gas.

RTWT.

The Climategate Sequel

From Steven Hayward, at Weekly Standard, "Climategate (Part II): A Sequel as Ugly as the Original":

The conventional wisdom about blockbuster movie sequels is that the second acts are seldom as good as the originals. The exceptions, like The Godfather: Part II or The Empire Strikes Back, succeed because they build a bigger backstory and add dimensions to the original characters. The sudden release last week of another 5,000 emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University​—​ground zero of “Climategate I” in 2009​—​immediately raised the question of whether this would be one of those rare exceptions or Revenge of the Nerds II.

Before anyone had time to get very far into this vast archive, the climate campaigners were ready with their critical review: Nothing worth seeing here. Out of context! Cherry picking! “This is just trivia, it’s a diversion,” climate researcher Joel Smith told Politico. On the other side, Anthony Watts, proprietor of the invaluable WattsUpWithThat.com skeptic website, had the kind of memorable line fit for a movie poster. With a hat tip to the famous Seinfeld episode, Watts wrote: “They’re real, and they’re spectacular!” An extended review of this massive new cache will take months and could easily require a book-length treatment. But reading even a few dozen of the newly leaked emails makes clear that Watts and other longtime critics of the climate cabal are going to be vindicated.

Continue reading.

And see Hayward's piece from 2009, "Scientists Behaving Badly."

German Police Clash With Protesters as Nuclear Waste Shipment Heads North

A report at Washington Post.

New Trove of Stolen E-Mails From Climate Scientists Is Released

At New York Times:

The anonymous hacker who shook the world of climate science two years ago by posting a trove of stolen e-mails delivered a new batch on Tuesday, stirring up climate-change contrarians a little more than a week before global negotiations on greenhouse gases are to begin in Durban, South Africa.

The new e-mails appeared remarkably similar to the ones released two years ago just ahead of a similar conference in Copenhagen. They involved the same scientists and many of the same issues, and some of them carried a similar tone: catty remarks by the scientists, often about papers written by others in the field.

Climate scientists said the release was likely intended to torpedo any potential progress in the Durban negotiations, though not much progress had been expected anyway given that countries have been reluctant to commit to binding emissions limits.

The University of East Anglia, the British institution at the middle of the previous hacking episode, confirmed that at least some of the newly released e-mails were authentic. The cache released in 2009 appeared to have come from a file someone obtained by hacking into the university’s computers, a crime for which no charges have been filed or suspects named. The new batch of more than 5,000 e-mails is evidently a fresh selection from the same set of records.

Continue reading.

I honestly don't pay heed to the global warming scaremongers these days, not that I ever much did in any case. The science is not settled, and it's just not even what academics call "normal science" anymore. That is, the scientific community long ago abandoned the rigorous methods of inquiry and morphed into a quasi-religious cult ready to burn heretics at the stake. Go back and read this post from October: "Dr. Martin Hertzberg Letter at the Vail Daily Skewering the Gore-Hansen-IPCC Climate Change Clique." And then check the instant classic from 2009, Steven Hayward's, "Scientists Behaving Badly," at the Weekly Standard.

And then back to the current controversy, check Watt's Up With That?, "Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!" And James Delingpole, "Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!" (At Memeorandum.)

Davis, Peters, and Caldeira on "The supply chain of CO2 emissions"

A compelling, open-access article in the new issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Here is the abstract:

CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are conventionally attributed to the country where the emissions are produced (i.e., where the fuels are burned). However, these production-based accounts represent a single point in the value chain of fossil fuels, which may have been extracted elsewhere and may be used to provide goods or services to consumers elsewhere. We present a consistent set of carbon inventories that spans the full supply chain of global CO2 emissions, finding that 10.2 billion tons of CO2 or 37% of global emissions are from fossil fuels traded internationally and an additional 6.4 billion tons CO2 or 23% of global emissions are embodied in traded goods. Our results reveal vulnerabilities and benefits related to current patterns of energy use that are relevant to climate and energy policy. In particular, if a consistent and unavoidable price were imposed on CO2 emissions somewhere along the supply chain, then all of the parties along the supply chain would seek to impose that price to generate revenue from taxes collected or permits sold. The geographical concentration of carbon-based fuels and relatively small number of parties involved in extracting and refining those fuels suggest that regulation at the wellhead, mine mouth, or refinery might minimize transaction costs as well as opportunities for leakage.

Worth Reading

Daniel Kahnemann, the psychologist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002 for his contributions to behavioral economics (challenging mainstream conceptions of rationality), has an interesting column in today's New York Times (here) on the "hazards of confidence." Here is an excerpt:

The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

I coined the term “illusion of validity” because the confidence we had in judgments about individual soldiers was not affected by a statistical fact we knew to be true — that our predictions were unrelated to the truth. This is not an isolated observation. When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails. And this goes for you, too. The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.

Meanwhile, future Nobel laureate (for contributions to environmental and energy economics), William Nordhaus has an interesting essay (masquerading as a book review) on energy in the New York Review of Books (here). Here's an excerpt:

If we look at actual taxes in the energy sector, they are far below the calculated external costs. In 2007, for which we have complete data, after discounting the net of energy subsidies, the money paid in total federal energy taxes was $21 billion, or less than one tenth of the level necessary to price energy at its social costs. Virtually all of these taxes were gasoline taxes—devoted to building roads so that cars could drive faster and farther! So Graetz is correct in his assertion quoted above that the US has failed to charge the full cost of its energy consumption; it is not even close.

A second point is that environmental taxes can play a central role in reducing the fiscal gap in the years to come. These are efficient taxes because they tax “bads” rather than “goods.” Environmental taxes have the unique feature of raising revenues, increasing economic efficiency, and improving the public health.

Final Report of the Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

The Commission, appointed by President Obama and co-chaired by former Democratic Senator Bob Graham and former EPA chief (under Bush I) William Reilly, makes numerous recommendations for improving offshor drilling safety and environmental protection, including the following:

•  Congress should create an independent safety agency within the Department of the Interior to oversee all aspects of offshore drilling safety.
• When drafting offshore oil leases, under existing statutory authorities, Interior should ensure that the industry pays the costs of regulatory oversight, as do other regulated industries, such as telecommunications. Those regulatory oversight costs should include the budget of the new independent safety agency (see above) and oil-spill response planning, which should be borne by the agency, rather than American taxpayers.
• With respect to the increased risks associated with deepwater drilling in areas with less well understood geologies, Interior should toughen its baseline prescriptive safety regulations and require oil companies to demonstrate that they have undertaken thorough risk assessments and are prepared to manage all risks pertaining to planned operations.
• Congress should enact a statute that would create within the Interior Department a distinct environmental science office headed by a chief scientist with well-specified responsibilities regarding environmental review and protection.
• The oil and gas industry should adopt, as some other high-risk industries already have, a "Safety Institute," as an industry-created, self-policing entity responsible for developing, adopting, and enforcing standards of excellence to ensure continuous improvement in safety. 
• Each house of Congress should assign a committee with responsibility for conducting annual oversight hearings to consider the state of technology, application of safety processes, and environmental protection in offshore oil exploration and drilling.
• The President should seek increased funding for agencies with oil-spill response responsibilities, including Interior and the Coast Guard.
• The President should create an inter-agency review process for oil-spill response planning. Final response plans should be made publicly available.
• Interior, the Coast Guard, and the Department of Energy should develop in-house expertise to effectively oversee containment operations in the immediate aftermath of a well blowout.
• As a permit condition for deepwater drilling, Interior should require oil and gas companies to (a) design wells in ways that anticipate the potential need for containment should a blowout occur and to (b) have immediate access to containment technologies.
• Congress should significantly increase the Oil Polllution Act's liability cap and financial responsibility requirements for offshore facilities.

Many of the Commission's recommendations are based on its analysis of what other countries, such as Norway and the UK, already require. The full report, supporting documents, and a press kit that contains "Highlights of Key Recommendations" can be viewed here.

On This Date

On January 2, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon signed a bill lowering the maximum US speed limit to 55 mph. The primary purpose of the move was to conserve gasoline during the OAPEC oil embargo by an estimated 2.2 percent. However, because many motorists ignored the law, and many states did not strictly enforce the speed limit, the real gasoline savings were closer to 1 percent. Nevertheless, the limit had side-benefits as well, including reduced traffic fatalities and pollution emissions. The federal maximum speed limit was lifted in 1995, during the Clinton Administration, in response to pressure from states and the transportation industry, after the price of gasoline had fallen (in real terms).

Changing the Norms of Energy Consumption in the US

An interesting article in Scientific American (here) tells about ongoing research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to assess how social norms relating to energy consumption might successfully be altered to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Starting with past success stories of positive norm changes, the researchers hope to identify how hurdles might be avoided and incentives created by policies to alter energy use by individuals. Those past success stories include massive reductions in tobacco use (in 1965, 44% percent of Californians smoked; today only 9.3% smoke) and increased use of seat belts by drivers (see here).

What lessons might those success stories provide for changing norms with regard to energy use? We probably should not be too optimistic. Smoking norms were altered by a massive government information campaign, but that campaigned was facilitated by the large, internal costs of smoking. The increased use of seat belts was spurred, in significant part, by laws prohibiting driving without wearing them. Compliance with those laws was surely facilitated, however, by the internal costs of driving without them. In other words, individual smokers and drivers had substantial personal incentive to stop smoking and to wear seat belts. The same cannot really be said with respect to individual energy consumption. While energy prices obviously create some incentive to conserve, individuals typically do not get sick or die from leaving the lights on. This  is not to say the research efforts are necessarily a waste of time or money. It just means that altering social norms of energy consumption is likely to be more difficult and complicated than getting people to stop smoking or to buckle up in their cars.

How important is increasing energy efficiency to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and stabilizing the global climate? The answer to that question is somewhat complicated. Simon Dietz of Michigan State University is quoted in the Scientific American story as claiming that, on conservative estimates, decreased energy consumption by American households could result in a 7 percent reduction in total US greenhouse gas emissions, which translates to 1.5 percent of total global emissions. However, Bjorn Lomborg, citing studies of the so-called "rebound effect," notes (here) that energy efficiency improvements do not necessarily lead to nominal reductions in energy use. The economic logic is simple: as energy efficiency increases, the price of energy drops, leading (all else being equal) to increased energy demand. Thus, the key for climate policy is not just to increase the efficiency of energy production or supply, but to actually reduce total energy consumption.