Cap &Trade, Climate, Chinese, German nuclear - WJS Blog

I read but try not to blatantly plagiarize Keith Johnson's blog posts... yet he almost always read well between the lines and concisely posts it.

Here he goes again pulling the Climate Standoff, Chinese Wind issue, German Nukes and Cap-and-Trade Disaster all together this week.

Here is quick blurb, but subscribe to his feed to get the good stuff - Short and Sweet!

Cap-and-Trade: "If you liked what Enron, AIG, and the Federal Reserve did to the economy, you'll love cap and trade."

That's the thrust of a new paper from Louisiana State University economist Joseph Mason. Cap-and-trade programs, like the one passed by the House and simmering in the Senate, pose a couple of big problems, he says: They don't work, and they can gum up the rest of the economy. Like many economists, Dr. Mason pines for the elegance of a carbon tax to tackle climate change.

France offers a lesson in how to please no one with its new carbon tax: which upsets both consumers and environmentalists, in the WSJ. Not to mention free-traders, since it includes a carbon tariff, in the FT.

Whatever you do, don't count on carbon offsets to save the day: A new report from Friends of the Earth lambasts offsets as a tool to tackle climate change, at Solve Climate.

Geothermal power can't catch a break: A German geothermal project is put on hold after fresh fears of earthquakes from deep drilling, in the NYT.

There's lots of sturm und drang over the fate of Germany's nuclear reactors. It's the wrong debate, says The Economist: "To keep the lights burning, Germany may ultimately have to choose between missing its targets to reduce greenhouse gasses or becoming more beholden to Russia for natural gas. That debate could turn radioactive."

Read more of Keith Johnson's blog posts here

Climate Change - An Atheist and a religion tool

According to a report in the Telegraph, One of Britain's most eminent scientists, who is an atheist, has said that the world may have to turn to religion to save itself from catastrophic climate change... religion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past and it may be needed again.

"Maybe religion is needed," said Lord May. "A supernatural punisher maybe part of the solution," he added.

He said that in the past, a belief in a god, or gods, that punish the unrighteous may have been part of the mechanism of evolution that maintains co-operation in a dog-eat-dog world.

Having a God as the ultimate punisher was possibly a logical step for a society to take, he added.

Such a system would be "immensely stabilizing in individual human cultures" and societies, he pointed out.

Read more of this from the economic times

PLEASE someone take away this guys library card

Nostradamus climate talks in Copenhagen will fail?

NextBigfuture discusses ideas around predictions...
Nextbigfuture previously looked at Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's predictions on Iran and his method of prediction. Bruce is a famous math professor who uses a computerized game theory model to make accurate political predictions.

Read his end of the world to your next new car predictions here

Your eco-behavior may have "No Impact, Man".

... main charge (on No Impact Man) is that personal lifestyle changes like his, no matter how committed or extreme, tend to obscure the fact that the big changes needed are collective—social and political. One person changing doesn’t amount to much.

You could argue, I guess, that whatever Beavan’s intentions, and whatever he may have said in his book or blog, it was inevitable that the stunt—going without toilet paper, etc.— became the focus.

... if people are going to do these kind of personal-behavior performance pieces, it’s important that they convey accurate information about the impact of personal behaviors. That is information the public desperate needs. McKinsey found, in a 2008 survey of consumers:

Our study shows that more than one-third of the consumers who want to help mitigate climate change don’t really know how. The top three ways for them to reduce their own emissions are to drive more fuel-efficient cars, improve the insulation of their homes, and eat less beef. Yet when we asked the consumers in our study to name the top three, they fingered recycling, energy-efficient appliances, and driving less. Few consumers knew how eco-friendly it is to shun beef.

As you can see, the American people are deeply confused about how to reduce their impact, even if they wanted to. I cringe every time I see someone on TV going on about unplugging power strips—the most time-consuming, irksome, low-impact change a person can make. If you want to reduce your impact, replace your car with a Prius or take public transit, insulate your home, and eliminate beef from your diet.

Do that and you can relax about, say, toilet paper.

Please read full by David Roberts at GRIST

Funny? Shift from health care to climate care….

Climate Change, Carbon Trading, and Thievery - Crooks

Apparently, the carbon trading market – which has grown to more than $100 billion, the Washington Post reports – is attracting more than just businesses seeking viable ways to manage their CO2 emissions.

Crooks, too, are drawn to carbon permit trading, as evidenced by last Wednesday's arrest by British customs agents of nine people in the London area suspected of a £38 million ($63 million) "carousel" carbon permit fraud...one important implication of carbon permit fraud for sustainable businesses could be its potential impact on the passage of

Obama's climate and energy policies, which feature a cap-and-trade bill. I can already see opponents to the bill (*cough* oil industry supporters) staking their claim: if passing climate legislation could encourage crime, it shouldn't be passed. (Carbon fraud could have a similar impact on the passage of an international climate change agreement – the topic of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.)

In fact, the problem gives rise to a whole host of additional issues. For example, are cap-and-trade systems even effective if (a) companies can still over-produce CO2 (can trading carbon permits really trim a country's overall CO2 production?) and (b) crooks can chip away at the money a country makes through its clean tech investments and policies?

Please read full from Sarah Harper of TriplePundit

Global Warming To Be Put On Trial?

Slashdot- The United States' largest business lobby is pushing for a public trial to examine the evidence of global warming and have a judge make a ruling on whether human beings are warming the planet to dangerous effect. "The goal of the chamber, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, is to fend off potential emissions regulations by undercutting the scientific consensus over climate change. If the EPA denies the request, as expected, the chamber plans to take the fight to federal court. The EPA is having none of it, calling a hearing a 'waste of time' and saying that a threatened lawsuit by the chamber would be 'frivolous.'

"The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable," said a recent letter to world leaders by the heads of the top science agencies in 13 of the world's largest countries, including the head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

The EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, as proposed in April, warned that warmer temperatures would lead to "the increased likelihood of more frequent and intense heat waves, more wildfires, degraded air quality, more heavy downpours and flooding, increased drought, greater sea level rise, more intense storms, harm to water resources, harm to agriculture, and harm to wildlife and ecosystems."

Critics of the finding say it's far from certain that warming will cause any harm at all...

Read full at LA Times.

Clinton-era climate negotiator says cap-and-trade bill “gotten out of control.”

Tim Wirth— Democratic senator from Colorado, former Clinton-era climate negotiator, and current U.N. Foundation president—raised quite a hubbub this week when he told Bloomberg news that the cap-and-trade bill in Congress had "gotten out of control."

"The Republicans are right—it's a cap-and-tax bill," Wirth said. "That's what it is because they are raising revenue to do all sorts of things, especially to take care of the coal industry, and it makes no sense." He maintained that he supported passage of the Waxman-Markey bill in the House and remains a "cap and trade advocate."

Here's the key portion of Wirth's statement:
....As one of the original 1990 authors of the highly successful cap-and-trade legislation to address acid rain, I believe in the cap-and-trade approach and believe it should be targeted only at utilities. I also don't think an auction is necessary—in fact, none of the five successful cap-and-trade programs has included an auction, and one isn't necessary in the Senate energy/climate bill for it to be successful in reducing emissions.

Unfortunately, the existence of an auction can be used by opponents to caricature any and all cap-and-trade programs as "cap-and-tax." As a cap and trade advocate, I think we should avoid anything that gives climate legislation opponents a chance to label it as "cap and tax."

Read more from Grist

global warming started 7,000 years ago

In Europe, slash-and-burn techniques for clearing forested land allowed the farming of crops that had spread from the Fertile Crescent. This practice loosed the forests’ stored carbon into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. In eastern Asia a couple of millennia later there was a tenfold increase in the growth of rice as the region’s principal foodstuff. That meant the destruction of vast grasslands, which released equally vast amounts of methane—a gas far more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is.

The ice-core record shows that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made an anomalous upturn about 7,000 years ago, and that methane levels, which were also falling, began to increase about 5,000 years ago (see chart).

He and his colleagues have turned to archaeological and anthropological data to show that early farmers used ten times as much land per person as modern farmers. Burning off large areas of forest or grassland, they would farm the enriched soil until its yield began to drop, and then move off to do the same elsewhere—as practitioners of slash-and-burn agriculture do to this day.

Such profligacy would make the contributions of early farmers large enough to have an effect on worldwide levels of greenhouse gases. So although the size of the effect has increased markedly since the industrial revolution, it looks as if humanity has been interfering with the climate since the dawn of civilisation.
 
Read full at Economist

Climate "bill is a disaster"... A Missed Opportunity

From Donald Marron:
On Friday, the House of Representatives passed its climate change bill by a slim margin. The bill's key feature is a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. That system would set national emission limits and would require affected emitters to own permits (called allowances) to cover their emissions.

The number one thing you should know about this bill is that the allowances are worth big money: almost $1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and more in subsequent decades.

There are many good things the government could do with that kind of money. Perhaps reduce out-of-control deficits? Or pay for expanding health coverage? Or maybe, as many economists have suggested, reduce payroll taxes and corporate income taxes to offset the macroeconomic costs of limiting greenhouse gases?

Choosing among those options would be a worthy policy debate. Except for one thing: the House bill would give away most of the allowances for free. And it spends virtually all the revenue that comes from allowance auctions.

As a result, the budget hawks, health expanders, and pro-growth forces have only crumbs to bargain over. From a budgeteer's perspective, the House bill is a disaster....

Economists have spent decades demonstrating the potential benefits of using environmental taxes to help finance the government (and make no mistake, a cap-and-trade system is a tax; the Congressional Budget Office, much to its credit, even scores it that way). But that economic logic works only when a substantial fraction of the revenues are used to improve fiscal policy — e.g., reducing deficits or reducing distortions from the tax system. The House bill does neither.

Read full from By Greg Mankiw

Worlds first carbon capture plan fails biblically

The Guardian reports: It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground. But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.

From Climate Progress
As I explained a year ago, “CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role“:

* Cost: This is the biggest problem, and it hasn’t gotten better (see Harvard stunner: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 — 20 cents per kWh!).
* Scale: We need to put in place a dozen or so clean energy “stabilization wedges” by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes — see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)” For CCS to be even one of those would require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure, no mean feat.
* Permanence and transparency: If Putin’s Russia said it was sequestering 100 million tons of CO2 in the ground permanently, and wanted other countries to pay it billions of dollars to do so, would anyone trust them? No. The potential for fraud and bribery are simply too enormous. But would anyone trust China? Would anyone trust a U.S. utility, for that matter? We need to set up some sort of international regime for certifying, monitoring, verifying, and inspecting geologic repositories of carbon — like the U.N. weapons inspections systems. The problem is, this country hasn’t been able to certify a single storage facility for a high-level radioactive waste after two decades of trying and nobody knows how to monitor and verify underground CO2 storage. It could take a decade just to set up this system.
* Timing: As Howard Herzog of MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said last year, “How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we’re having so much trouble building the first one?“

Stuart Haszeldine, a CCS expert at the University of Edinburgh, warned of the danger of opposition towards CCS snowballing into a “bandwagon of negativity” if too many early projects were rejected. “Once you’ve screwed up one or two of them, people are going to think ‘if they rejected this in Barendrecht, there must be a reason’,” he said.

People should think of CCS as a post-2025 solution (at best), worthy of R&D and demonstration funding, especially for projects that include biomass cofiring.

But we need massive deployment of low-carbon technology now, however, and that means efficiency, conservation, recycled energy, natural gas, wind, solar PV, concentrated solar thermal with storage, geothermal, biomass... read full at Climate Progress


Update
And China calls CCS just too expensive...

Is China getting cold feet about clean coal? It certainly sounds that way. Bloomberg reports:

"Carbon capture and storage, particularly for China is not one of the priorities–the cost is an issue," [said Su Wei, director-general of the climate-change unit at China's National Development and Reform Commission] in an Aug. 4 telephone interview from Beijing. "If we spent the same money for CCS on energy efficiency and the development of renewables, it would generate larger climate-change benefits."

Wow. Even though so-called clean coal is still embryonic, there's increasing consensus in the U.S. that making it viable is crucial to meeting emissions goals and keeping the lights on.

That's doubly true for China, where coal is a bigger-and much faster-growing-part of the energy mix. In fact, MIT recently argued that China must not only build new clean-coal plants, but retrofit existing coal plants at great expense if the world is to have any hope of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions.

And the idea that China must embrace clean coal has become a staple of U.S. policy as well, from vice president Joe Biden's famous rope-line comments during the campaign to Energy Secretary Steven Chu's more recent pronouncements. In fact, China and the U.S. just agreed to cooperate on clean-coal research.

Even with China's big push on low-carbon electricity sources-especially renewables and nuclear power-coal will still account for at least 60% of its electricity in 2020.

If carbon capture and storage is simply too expensive to handle the challenge, will "cleaner" coal have to do the trick? And what will that mean for global efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions?

Global Warming ate my data - Inconvenient data

The world's source for global temperature record admits it's lost or destroyed all the original data that would allow a third party to construct a global temperature record. The destruction (or loss) of the data comes at a convenient time for the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia - permitting it to snub FoIA requests to see the data.

The CRU has refused to release the raw weather station data and its processing methods for inspection - except to hand-picked academics - for several years. Instead, it releases a processed version, in gridded form. NASA maintains its own (GISSTEMP), but the CRU Global Climate Dataset, is the most cited surface temperature record by the UN IPCC. So any errors in CRU cascade around the world, and become part of "the science".

Professor Phil Jones, the activist-scientist who maintains the data set, has cited various reasons for refusing to release the raw data. Most famously, Jones told an Australian climate scientist in 2004:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

Read full from The Register


‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data.... One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy’. ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’

Scientific American this month also goes over this 'massive problem:
“We were too naive,” admits Walt Meier, a researcher at the center. “We weren’t prepared for how closely people were watching.” The science community knows that such adjustments happen all the time, he says, but “the undermining of public confidence in our data comes from ignorance of use.”

Read full "Stumbling Over Data: Mistakes Fuel Climate-Warming Skeptics" at Scientific American

Political - Scientist: Steven Chu (Chinese Rockstar?)

Drawing the line from TIME:
"What the U.S. and China do over the next decade," declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize – winning physicist who is leading President Obama's push for a clean-energy economy, "will determine the fate of the world." - Chu

Chu had gone to Beijing's Tsinghua University, the "MIT of China," to make his half-apocalyptic, half-optimistic pitch about climate change... Chu methodically explained that the science is clear, that we're boiling the planet — but also that science can save us, that we can innovate our way to sustainability. He acknowledged that the developed nations that made the mess can't tell the developing world not to develop, but he also warned that China is on track to emit more carbon in the next three decades than the U.S. has emitted in its history; that business as usual would intensify floods, droughts and heat waves in both countries; that greenhouse gases respect no borders.

This earth, he concluded, is the only one we've got; it would be illogical and immoral to fry it. "Science has unambiguously shown that we're altering the destiny of our planet," he said. "Is this the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren?"

It was a tough message to deliver to the Chinese — basically, "Do as we say, not as we did" — but it's hard to imagine a more credible messenger.

It's not just that Chu is a Chinese American whose parents both graduated from Tsinghua before attending the real MIT or that he's the most qualified leader ever at the Department of Energy (DOE) — which is a bit like being the most likable character ever on NYC Prep. It's also that Chu is the kind of scientific savant the Chinese revere, a techno-geek who scored a Nobel for developing methods of cooling atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, who shelved his quantum-physics career to try to save the planet but on weekends still tries to cure cancer with lasers. "In the U.S., rock stars and sports stars are the glamour people. In China, it's scholars," Chu told me during his trip to Beijing. "Here, Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Britney Spears."

That's one reason Chu's message doesn't resonate all that well with Americans. They ranked global warming last in a national survey of 20 top priorities; in a global poll, only 44% of them wanted action to be taken on the issue, vs. 94% of Chinese. Most Republican leaders flatly reject prevailing climate science, while many Democrats from coal, oil and farm states are equally protective of the fossil-fuel status quo. This is why the American Clean Energy and Security Act — a far-reaching Democratic bill that would cap carbon emissions — has been marketed to a confused public on the basis of issues that poll far better: gas prices, foreign oil and green jobs. It narrowly passed the House, but it's in trouble in the Senate, and the President, while supportive, is now preoccupied with health care. (Read "Getting Your Slice of the Cap-and-Trade Pie.")

Chu will be America's first Clean-Energy Secretary — a job that's part green evangelism, part venture capitalism and part politics.

He's perfect for parts one and two. The fate of the world, in Chu's calculation, hinges on part three.

Read - The full TIME article here

He is right - Cap-and-Trade's Creator a strong Critic

You would think they would listen to the guy who started it?

JS online 'Cap-and-Trade's Unlikely Critics: Its Creators'

Economists Behind Original Concept Question the System's Large-Scale Usefulness, and Recommend Emissions Taxes Instead

In the 1960s, a University of Wisconsin graduate student named Thomas Crocker came up with a novel solution for environmental problems: cap emissions of pollutants and then let firms trade permits that allow them to pollute within those limits.

Now legislation using cap-and-trade to limit greenhouse gases is working its way through Congress and could become the law of the land. But Mr. Crocker and other pioneers of the concept are doubtful about its chances of success. They aren't abandoning efforts to curb emissions. But they are tiptoeing away from an idea they devised decades ago, doubting it can work on the grand scale now envisioned.

"I'm skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon," says Mr. Crocker, 73 years old, a retired economist in Centennial, Wyo. He says he prefers an outright tax on emissions because it would be easier to enforce and provide needed flexibility to deal with the problem.

Mr. Crocker, who went on to become a professor at the University of Wyoming, is one of two economists who dreamed up cap-and-trade in the 1960s. The other, John Dales, who died in 2007, was also a skeptic of using the idea to tame global warning.

"It isn't a cure-all for everything," Mr. Dales said in an interview in 2001. "There are lots of situations that don't apply."

Mr. Crocker sees two modern-day problems in using a cap-and-trade system to address the global greenhouse-gas issue. The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. "It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally," he says. "There are no institutions right now that have that power."

Europe has embraced cap-and-trade rules. Emissions initially rose there because industries were given more permits than they needed, and regulators have since tightened the caps. Meanwhile China, India and other developing markets are reluctant to go along, fearing limits would curb their growth. If they don't participate, there is little assurance that global carbon emissions will slow much even if the U.S. goes forward with its own plan. And even if everyone signs up, Mr. Crocker says, it isn't clear the limits will be properly enforced across nations and industries.

The other problem, Mr. Crocker says, is that quantifying the economic damage of climate change -- from floods to failing crops -- is fraught with uncertainty. One estimate puts it at anywhere between 5% and 20% of global gross domestic product. Without knowing how costly climate change is, nobody knows how tight a grip to put on emissions.

"Once a cap is in place," he warns, "it is very difficult to adjust." For example, buyers of emissions permits would see their value reduced if the government decided in the future to loosen the caps.

"This allows your local polluter to merely buy credits elsewhere and continue polluting while passing his costs on to you."

Please read full from JSonline


Also The OilDrum has some helpful and current hints on subject:
The Case for a Carbon Tax to Control Climate Change (Part I)

Cap-and-trade is very complicated and little understood by the public, creating an ideal environment for horse-trading by special interests.

The Case for a Carbon Tax to Control Climate Change (Part II)

In contrast to cap-and-trade, carbon usage fees are relatively transparent, making it harder for greenhouse gas-producing interests to finagle sweetheart deals at the climate’s expense.

Equally important: A carbon-based tax addresses people’s resistance to bearing additional costs directly.

Ouch... G8 climate scorecards rigged by WWF & Allianz

Next Big Future is Reporting through Thorium Forum that  G8 climate scorecards from WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature and Allianz have rigged numbers

WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option. The indicators “emissions per capita”, “emissions per GDP” and “CO2 per kWh electricity” for all countries have therefore been adjusted as if the generation of electricity from nuclear power had produced 350 gCO2/kWh (emission factor for natural gas). Without the adjustment, the original indicators for France would have been much lower, e.g. 86 gCO2/kWh.

WWF - World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), Gland, Switzerland and Allianz SE, Munich, Germany. Any reproduction in full or in part of this publication must mention the title and credit the above-mentioned publisher as the copyright owner.







More accurate numbers for CO2 by energy source.
world Resources Institute has an online searchable interface to the IEA numbers on CO2 by country and region and does not appear to have been manipulated.



Countries do the best on CO2 for energy that have a high percentages of energy from hydroelectric, geothermal and nuclear power.

The IEA report on world energy for 2008 in pdf form


Read full with detailed charts at Next Big Future

The Next Great American Bubble Cap-and-trade

The Great American Bubble Machine - Rolling Stone
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's cohead of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.

The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game.

It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion. Goldman wants this bill.

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energyfutures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Please read full by - Rolling Stone

Current climate models are fundamentally wrong

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University.

"There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

"You go along a core and everything's the same, the same, the same, and then suddenly you pass this time line and the carbon chemistry is completely different," Dickens said. "This has been documented time and again at sites all over the world."

Read full from sciencedaily

Also on same article - Global Warming Predictions Are Overestimated, Suggests Study On Black Carbon A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming ... read more sciencedaily

EPA Chief: "U.S. action alone will not impact CO2 levels"

An EPA chart was presented during the Senate's debate of the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade legislation that showed the carbon reductions under that bill would not materially effect global carbon concentrations in the atmosphere.

SENATOR INHOFE: ...This is what we determined during the Warner-Lieberman bill last year, 13 months ago, and that was the EPA that said this is the difference it would make. And let's keep in mind, the IPCC said they wanted to keep it down below 550 parts per million. And this shows by the EPA chart that with or without the developing nations it makes virtually no change.

Do you still agree with this chart? Dr. Chu,

SECRETARY CHU: Uh, no, I don't agree with that chart.

INHOFE: Do you, Secretary Jackson?

ADMINISTRATOR JACKSON: I believe that essential parts of the chart are that the U.S. action alone will not impact CO2 levels ..

Watt's Up With That concludes with Inhofe's analysis on the effects of the bill if the USA acts unilaterally without China and India:

"I am encouraged that Administrator Jackson agrees that unilateral action by the U.S. will be all cost for no climate gain," Sen. Inhofe said. "With China and India recently issuing statements of defiant opposition to mandatory emissions controls, acting alone through the job-killing Waxman-Markey bill would impose severe economic burdens on American consumers, businesses, and families, all without any impact on climate."

"...I was somewhat surprised that Secretary Chu disagreed with EPA's analysis of what would happen if the U.S. acts alone to address climate change, which cap-and-trade supporters claim is a global problem," Sen. Inhofe said. "EPA's analysis that global greenhouse gas emission levels can only be stabilized with meaningful, mandatory action by China and India is widely accepted. I extend an invitation to the Secretary to see whether he wants to clarify his remarks."

So without the participation of China and India, the climate bill will have virtually no impact on global CO2 emissions.

Please read full from source and You can see the transcript of a video of both these Obama administration officials responding at complete odds with each other under questioning from Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe at the Senate hearing on climate bill.

"Peak Oil May Solve the Climate Change Problem without Regulation."

CO2 not as big a enemy as methane.... While articles like this put CO2 effects and into future perspective, they do not focus on the fact that we still have to reduce toxic emissions and curb the methane cycle. CO2 may not be a 'real future threat' industrial emissions, toxic releases and peak oil are.

Regardless of your social cause - we need to have a future powered by sustainable energy.

EV World - Problem with Biokinetic Sequestration

He contends that there is no need to regulate carbon dioxide emissions using cap and trade schemes like those found in the Waxman-Markey Bill (HR 2454) because two natural force are at work: rapidly approaching limitations on fossil fuel availability and natural (biokinetic) sequestration. He writes...

Intuitively, anyone who recognizes the practical limitations on fossil energy supply knows emissions will not rise exponentially for another century, as portrayed by the IPCC and the US Global Climate Change Research Program (ref-1). The forecast growth rate in energy consumption—1.4% per year—is not very large, but compounded over a century it would suggest that by 2100 we would be consuming three times more energy than we consume today. In the meantime, we will have consumed about 15 trillion barrels-of-oil-equivalent.

That is an astounding number considering we only have about 13 trillion barrels-equivalent in oil, gas, coal, oil sands, heavy oil and oil shale combined. And only a portion of this total, perhaps no more than one-third, can ultimately be recovered under reasonable economic conditions.

He believes that "oil is peaking about now," while gas and coal will follow "within a couple of decades." He argues that "unrealistic" expectations of future fossil fuel energy supply are "but one glaring error in the climate change science."

"A second is the systematic underreporting of the beneficial impact higher CO2 concentrations have on photosynthesis," he writes, noting that plants and the oceans can absorb much of the CO2 released by the last two hundred years of industrialization.

"In 2008 we emitted about 34.2 billion tonne [of CO2], of which 18.8 billion went missing. A prime suspect for this missing mass is the fertilization effect that CO2 has on photosynthesis rates."

Dr. Bunger developed a biokinetic model that takes into the account the rate of natural plant and ocean sequestration and projections on oil, gas and coal depletion (Colin Campbell, Energy Watch Group 2007 Coal Report ). The result of that model, shown below, indicates that CO2 emissions will level off well below the 450 ppm tipping point suggested by James Hansen and others around 2030 and begin a gradual decline.

He concludes, "Rather than making the problem worse through regulation, political effort should be better spent on improving efficiency of energy use, and helping to ensure we have adequate domestic supply of fuels when the world-wide competition for dwindling supply begins in earnest. That time is not long from now."

Read more from EV World 

EPA Sees Limited Renewable Energy Growth under Waxman-Markey

Bad for renewables, bad for climate, bad for sustainability....
Are EPA and I wrong about the Climate Bill?

President Obama says the greenhouse-gas emissions cutting Waxman-Markey bill before Congress will "spark a clean energy transformation."

But according to a page 27 of the new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency casts doubt on that claim.

...published Tuesday, the legislation, sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, would actually result in slightly less new renewable energy generation capacity by the year 2020 than if the U.S. continued on a business-as-usual path with no emissions caps.

The bill also won't encourage a big switch to renewables, the analysis says...would reduce demand for new generation, including power from the wind, sun and biomass.  (Here's how that sounds in untranslated EPA-speak: "Allowances prices are not high enough to drive a significant amount of additional low or zero-carbon energy . . . in the shorter term.")

This isn't quite consistent with White House talking points. On Tuesday, President Obama told reporters that the legislation before the House of Representatives "will create a set of incentives that will spur the development of new sources of energy, including wind, solar, and geothermal power," incentives that "will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy."

The EPA analysis indicates that the reductions will occur to a large degree because the legislation allows companies to meet their obligations by investing in offsets - activities that are supposed to avoid or reduce emissions but which occur in areas not directly regulated - including paying farmers to switch to no-till agriculture, or paying Brazilians to protect rainforests.

The analysis adds that the share nuclear and coal plants outfitted carbon-capture system - would rise "substantially" under the legislation.
But it indicates that total volume of new renewable generation capacity - meaning new solar, wind and geothermal power - would essentially remain flat or decline slightly compared with a business-as-usual scenario...

Read full from From Wall Street Journal