On Thursday, the R Street Institute and the Heartland Institute held a debate in a Washington, D.C. auditorium on the proposition: “Resolved: Under no circumstances should conservatives support a tax on carbon emissions.” About 150 people attended.

Arguing for the proposition were James Taylor of Heartland and David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation. Arguing against were Andrew Moylan of R Street and former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) of the Energy and Enterprise Institute.

After the debate, moderator and Reason Foundation science correspondent Ron Bailey called for a division of the house. A majority of the audience opposed the proposition. The next day Bailey reported on Reason’s blog that “About 60% of Conservatives Support a Carbon Tax.” When this headline provoked the ire of some conservatives, Bailey said it was meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek.

Whether offered in jest or not, Bailey’s headline is false. Had he put the question to the 150 or so movement conservatives who attend Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Meeting, the head count might have been 148-2 — with only Moylan and Eli Lehrer of R Street standing in favor of a carbon tax.

Most people who attend carbon tax events in D.C. are ‘progressives.’ I suspect many who came to the debate were staunch carbon taxers and would not have stood for the proposition even if Taylor and Kreutzer dazzled with the oratory of Abe Lincoln and Dan’l Webster.

An unfortunate word choice may also have tilted the straw poll against the proposition. Prudence counsels us never to say never. In some circumtances, bad choices are the only way to avoid even greater evils. The categorical formulation (“under no circumstances”) made the proposition literally unreasonable.

Here’s what the debate was really about: “Resolved, a carbon tax is a conservative idea whose time has come.” That proposition is almost farsical on its face. Even some greenies in the room might have had to swallow hard before standing up for it.

Let’s review some of the back and forth.

Do carbon taxes pick winners and losers?

Inglis led off by arguing that a conservative energy policy does not “pick winners and losers.” What conservatives want is an “impartial cop on the beat.” That’s a carbon tax, which applies equally to all forms of energy and then lets the “free market” decide. Not so — not even close.

A carbon tax discriminates against carbon-based (fossil) fuels. That’s its core function! Inglis might as well say that a nuclear tax applies equally to all forms of energy and lets the free market decide. Just because the market sorts out the effects of a discriminatory tax does not make the tax non-discriminatory.

When Inglis says he opposes picking winners and losers, he presumably refers to narrowly-targeted market-rigging schemes such as renewable energy production tax credits, stimulus loans to Solyndra, or biofuel set-asides. A carbon tax rigs energy markets too — but throughout the economy. Retail intervention bad, wholesale intervention good — that’s Inglis’s “free market” philosophy.

Inglis mentioned that he voted against the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. However, the economic function of a carbon tax is identical to that of cap-and-trade. Both policies put an explicit price on carbon. In so doing, they aim to handicap fossil fuels and thereby “finally make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy in America,” as President Obama put it. The purpose of pricing carbon, former Energy Secy. Steven Chu wrote in congressional testimony, is to “drive investment decisions towards clean energy.” A carbon tax is all about picking winners and losers.

Maybe what Inglis means by an “impartial cop” is a tax on all forms of environmental damage. Later in the debate he acknowledged that wind farms kill lots of birds including endangered species. But to date, the only environmental externalities he and other carbon-tax proponents express any desire to tax are those attributed to fossil fuels.

Do R Street and Inglis believe in “pixie dust”?

Moylan argued that conservatives complain a lot about income taxes and the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations but have no plan to reduce tax and regulatory burdens. Actually, we do. It’s to keep making the moral, economic, and constitutional case for market-driven energy, win legislative seats in the 2014 elections, and win a clean sweep in 2016. Andrew confuses not having a plan with not seeking a deal that assumes conservative victory is impossible. More on this topic below.

A revenue-neutral carbon tax, Moylan continued, could simultaneously reduce income taxes and replace EPA’s command-and-control regulations with a market-based climate change policy.

Kreutzer and Taylor responded that Inglis and Moylan believe in “pixie dust” if they think Congress would enact a revenue-neutral, regulation-repealing carbon tax. I concur.

The green movement has zero interest in swapping a carbon tax for the litigation-driven EPA regulatory system they have worked decades to build and practically own. They want carbon taxes plus carbon regulation.

Note that neither the carbon tax bill sponsored by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) nor that sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) would remove one iota of the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Boxer-Sanders would impose new EPA regulations on hydraulic fracturing. Waxman-Whitehouse preemptively safeguards the EPA’s regulatory turf, stating: “Nothing in this Act shall affect the application of any other provision of law to a covered entity, or the responsibility for a covered entity to comply with any such provision of law.”

As for revenue-neutrality, it’s a pipedream. The main attraction of carbon taxes for most politicians is the prospect of raking in $100-200 billion in new revenues annually. Congress’s big spenders and deficit hawks (often the same people) have no interest in “tax reform” that does not “enhance” revenues. Kreutzer aptly described as delusional the belief that $200 billion in new revenues could “walk across town in DC without being molested.”

Even if, per impossibile, Congress did use every dollar of carbon tax revenue to cut income taxes, the scheme would still be economically damaging, Taylor and Kreutzer argued. A carbon tax is like the mythical creature that eats its own tail. To the extent it works as intended, it taxes away the base on which it is levied. Over time, it would generate less and less revenue to offset other taxes while making America increasingly dependent on wind turbines, solar panels, and biofuels, which are not up to the task of powering a modern economy.

When asked by Bailey for a response to the “pixie dust” criticism, Inglis said it amounted to denying the capacity for self-government — as if it were impossible to replace inefficient taxes and regulations with a better policy unless we have a king. Kreutzer countered that Inglis has lost confidence in self-government if he thinks it’s impossible to reduce taxes by cutting spending. Kreutzer cited a report Moylan had authored outlining more than a trillion dollars in spending cuts over ten years. Why not make that the basis for a plan to cut income taxes rather than an economically-damaging energy tax?

What is the conservative energy agenda?

Moylan argued that conservatives complain alot about the EPA but propose no market-based alternative to command-and-control; just saying no won’t work. Here I will offer my own response.

Granted, negativity gets you only so far. However, conservatives have an inspiring, positive energy agenda to offer the American people based on what’s happening in dozens of states around the country. In just a few short years, advances in unconventional oil and gas production have upended the gloomy green paradigm of inevitable depletion, dependency, and decline. “Unleashing” what Manhattan Institute scholar Mark Mills calls the “North American energy colossus” could revive the economy, create millions of new jobs, and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in new federal and state revenues without raising taxes. That’s the winning energy agenda conservatives should talk up and rally around.

Inglis and Moylan noted their support for the Keystone XL pipeline and hydraulic fracturing, but they can’t sell the positive vision required for conservative victory while stumping for a carbon tax. Politicians want to be all things to all people, so it’s not suprising Inglis sees nothing problematic about trying to slam on the brakes and put pedal to the metal at the same time. But my friend Andrew Moylan, a talented and sober analyst, should know better. The carbon mitigation agenda, whether implemented via taxes, regulations, or export restrictions, imperils domestic energy development and would move public policy in exactly the wrong direction.

Over the next four years conservatives should be uncompromising champions of the freedom of Americans to develop and export domestic energy resources. To advance our agenda, we cannot entirely avoid nay-saying. We must, for example, continually rebut alarmist narratives about climate change, coal power plants, and hydraulic fracturing. If we deliver a consistent message of growth, opportunity, and renewal to the American people, we have a real shot at reining in the EPA and enacting a 21st century energy program in 2016. This path is a much more robust affirmation of the capacity for self-government than the pursuit of a compromising and defeatist inside-the-beltway deal.

Is a carbon tax an efficient climate policy?

Thursday night’s debate put arguments about climate science off limits. That is odd, since the leading rationale for a carbon tax is the alleged need to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. The ostensible reason for not debating climate science was to focus on R Street and Inglis’s areas of expertise — the politics and economics of tax reform. A tactical calculation may also have been at work. A debate on climate science would have exposed how much Inglis agrees with Al Gore – an instant turnoff for conservatives.

In any event, one can stipulate for purposes of discussion that “consensus” climatology is correct and still conclude that a carbon tax is an inefficient climate mitigation policy. Bailey as moderator did not raise the issue, but I will address it here.

Whatever carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions a carbon tax might induce in the U.S. would be swamped by emission increases in China, India, and other industrializing nations. Although the tax might be an expensive drag on the economy, it would have no discernible impact on climate-related risks.

Using IPCC assumptions, Cato Institute climatologist Chip Knappenberger calculates that even if the U.S. stops emitting CO2 immediately, “the ultimate impact on projected global temperature rise would be a reduction, or a ‘savings,’ of approximately 0.08°C by the year 2050 and 0.17°C by the year 2100—amounts that are, for all intents and purposes, negligible.” A carbon tax would achieve even less. It is an exercise in futility.

Bjorn Lomborg makes a related criticism. A carbon tax tries to ‘solve’ the ‘climate problem’ by making hydrocarbon energy more costly than renewable energy. In this crucial respect, a carbon tax is identical to cap-and-trade, which Inglis and Moylan oppose. Handicapping hydrocarbons doesn’t work because renewable energies still have severe deficiencies in terms of cost and performance, and what is not commercially viable is not politically sustainable. Thus, argues Lomborg, if you worry about climate change, your top priority should be to make non-carbon energies cheaper than fossil fuels. Only then would nations deploy low- and non-emitting energies on the scale required to meet the IPCC’s CO2 stabilization targets.

Lomborg is more confident than I that government-directed R&D can midwife major breakthroughs enabling green energy to out-compete fossil fuels. But he is spot on in arguing that climate change is not an emergency requiring immediate action to reduce emissions, and that the Kyoto-carbon tax path is a dead end.

Is a carbon tax an efficient air pollution policy?

Responding to the “pixie dust” criticism, Inglis said Taylor and Kreutzer believe in the “tooth fairy” because they believe there is such a thing as a free lunch. Coal power plants kill 23,000 people annually, Inglis asserted, and just because we don’t pay for those deaths at the meter doesn’t mean we don’t pay. Regardless of our views on climate change, we should support a carbon tax because it will help clean the air, he said.

So despite the ‘no science allowed’ rule of the house, Inglis appealed to a scientific rationale of sorts. It is not credible. Claims that fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution from coal power plants kills tens of thousands of Americans annually are based on weak statistical associations in cherry-picked epidemiological studies. Such research is particularly susceptible to measurement error, publication bias, and spurious correlation due to unknown confounding variables. More reliable toxicological studies of volunteers, elderly asthmatics, and laboratory animals find that current PM2.5 concentrations in the U.S. are too small to cause significant disease or death.

PM2.5 pollution is already controlled directly or coincidentally by more than two dozen EPA rules, and the Clean Air Act requires states to reduce PM2.5 to levels requisite to “protect public health” with an “adequate margin of safety.” As a strategy for reducing PM2.5 emissions, these policies are much more efficient than a carbon tax, which does not target the pollutant of concern.

Raising the cost of power generation via a carbon tax creates no incentive whatsoever to control PM2.5 emissions. The only way a carbon tax would reduce PM2.5 emissions is as a byproduct of making coal uneconomical as an electricity fuel and forcing coal power plants to shut down. Is that what Inglis wants? Does he think the Obama administration’s war on coal is a conservative policy?

Two things should be evident: (1) Decades of experience show that the U.S. does not need a carbon tax to control and reduce air-pollutant emissions; and (2) air pollution has long since ceased to be a plausible excuse to suppress the production, delivery, and consumption of fossil fuels.

Source: EPA

What about the social costs of carbon mitigation?

Inglis stated at the outset that a key issue for carbon tax proponents is the “negative externalities” of CO2 emissions. If I may translate, carbon has a “social cost” — adverse effects not directly paid for by fossil-energy producers and consumers. Therefore, the argument goes, policymakers should correct this “market failure” with a tax that makes polluters pay for damages they impose on others. In other words, the tax should match the “social cost of carbon” (SCC). But that is very far from being a known quantity. Modelers can get practically any SCC estimate they want by fiddling with discount rates and by tweaking assumptions about climate sensitivity, meteorology, ice sheet dynamics, technological change, etc.

More importantly, even if SCC estimates were not assumption-driven hocus-pocus, their use by activists, policymakers, and agencies would still be biased and misleading, because proponents of “climate action” always ignore the social costs of carbon mitigation.

As Cato Institute scholar Indur Goklany explains in a recent study, fossil fuels are the chief energy source of a “cycle of progress” responsible for the amazing improvements of the past 250 years in life expectancy, health, nutrition, safety, comfort, human capital formation, and per capita income. The cycle of progress is to no small extent a “positive externality” of fossil fuels. Thus, policies that suppress the extraction, delivery, and consumption of fossil fuels, or that make fossil energy less affordable, have social costs in addition to whatever compliance burdens and economic losses the policies entail.

For example, the more stringent the carbon mitigation scheme, the more severe the impacts on household income and job creation. Numerous studies find that poverty and unemployment increase the risk of sickness and death. Carbon tax advocates never acknowledge this side of the ledger.

Given the continuing importance of fossil fuels to human flourishing and the undeniable connection between livelihoods, living standards, and life expectancy, carbon taxes can easily do more harm than good to public health — even if one accepts the IPCC’s version of the science.

Conservative policy or dumb politics?

Finally, let’s get down to what the major parties care about most: elections. The political choice facing the American people is in no small part that between a Republican Party that is anti-tax and pro-energy and a Democratic Party that is anti-energy and pro-tax. This clear product differentiation is an asset for the GOP. Republicans are truly the Dumb Party if they squander their energy advantage instead of pressing it to the hilt. Conservative advocacy of a carbon tax can only blur the battle lines, divide GOP leaders, and demoralize the movement’s activist base.

In 2010, Rep. Inglis lost a primary battle by 70%-29% to Tea Party challenger, Trey Gowdy. Inglis himself blames his defeat principally on his advocacy of a carbon tax. Inglis is an ideal spokesman for the proposition that a carbon tax is a conservative idea whose time has come. The messenger is a living refutation of the message.

NASA scientist Roy Spencer recently posted on his Web site some startling graphs produced by John Christy, his colleague at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The graph immediately below compares the linear-trend temperature projections of 73 climate models with the linear trend of observed temperatures for the bulk tropical atmosphere during 1979-2012.

The 73 models are part of the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP-5), a collaborative effort of 20+ modeling groups to inform the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). The Project’s three main objectives are to “evaluate how realistic the models are in simulating the recent past,” “provide projections of future climate change” out to 2035 and 2100, and “understand some of the factors responsible for differences in model outputs” such as different estimates of feedback effects.

Christy’s graph reveals what Spencer calls an “epic failure” of the models to match the actual behavior of the tropical atmosphere. Models that overestimate recent warming are likely to overestimate future warming as well.

Of course, observational systems may have biases and errors, but that is an implausible explanation for the mismatch. The observations come from two satellite and four radiosonde (weather balloon) datasets, which all independently give “virtually identical trends.”

What about the subset of U.S.-designed models — do they get the trend right? Nope. Take a gander at the next graph.

Spencer comments:

I continue to suspect that the main source of disagreement is that the models’ positive feedbacks are too strong . . . and possibly of even the wrong sign.

The lack of a tropical upper tropospheric hotspot in the observations is the main reason for the disconnect in the above plots, and as I have been pointing out this is probably rooted in differences in water vapor feedback. The models exhibit strongly positive water vapor feedback, which ends up causing a strong upper tropospheric warming response (the “hot spot”), while the observation’s lack of a hot spot would be consistent with little water vapor feedback.

Some visitors to Spencer’s site complained that “linear trends are not a good way to compare models to observations.” They miss the point. Linear plots show the most fundamental quantity the models are supposed to reveal — the long-term rate of heat accumulation in the tropical troposphere due to greenhouse gases. The graphs above are entirely legitimate.

Nonetheless, to oblige the critics, Spencer and Christy plotted five-year running averages for observations and projections during 1979-2012. The disconnect persists.

Seeing is believing, but things are not always what they seem. Skeptical Science, a Web site devoted to debunking global warming skepticism, asserts that Spencer’s claim about recent warming being only 50% of what the model consensus projects is “flat-out ridiculously wrong” (original emphasis). Observed warming has been “spot on consistent with climate model projections,” Skeptical Science contends. The evidence, supposedly, is in the graph below (click on it to activate the presentation).

Figure explanation: This animation compares the observed global temperature change since 1990 (black curve) to projections of global temperature change from the first four Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports (red, pink, orange, green) and from various “climate contrarians” (blue, purple, green, gray dashed).  The observations are given by the average of 3 primary global temperature datasets (NASA GISS, NOAA NCDC, and HadCRUT4).  All of the IPCC projections have proven to be quite accurate, suggesting high reliability.  The contrarian projections all underestimate the global warming substantially, and in fact they erroneously predict global cooling and are quite unreliable.

So who’s right: Spencer and Christy or Skeptical Science (SS)? The SS graph and commentary are misleading in two ways.

The period covered in the SS graph is a decade shorter than that covered by the Spencer-Christy graph and looks suspiciously like cherry-picking.  By starting their graph in 1990, SS can use the Mt. Pinatubo-induced cold period of 1992-93 to tilt the trend to be more positive. The Spencer-Christy graph begins at the start of the satellite record — 1979 — providing a longer and more representative period.

More importantly, SS uses global surface temperature datasets, which do not accurately represent heat content in the bulk atmosphere. In contrast, Spencer and Christy use temperature data from the tropical troposphere — the place where the models project the strongest, least ambiguous, greenhouse warming signal.

As Christy explained in testimony last August, the popular surface datasets often touted as evidence of model validity are not reliable indicators of the greenhouse effect. Land use changes (urbanization, farming, deforestation) “disrupt the normal formation of the shallow, surface layer of cooler air during the night when TMin [daily low temperature] is measured.” Over time, TMin gets warmer, producing a trend easily mistaken for a global atmospheric phenomenon.

Surface temperatures are not a direct or reliable measure of bulk atmospheric heat content, which is one reason Christy has devoted much of his career to developing a satellite record of global temperatures. Satellite datasets “are not affected by these surface problems and more directly represent the heat content of the atmosphere.”

If the models accurately represented the atmosphere’s heat content, Christy told me by email, the warming rate of the tropical mid-troposphere (TMT) would be 1.4 times that of the surface. In reality, the TMT warming rate is only 0.6 times that of the surface. The models simply project too much warming in the bulk atmosphere.

Spencer sums up the situation thusly: ”I frankly don’t see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models are ‘not inconsistent with’ the observations. Any sane person can see otherwise.”

In 2005, 60% of all petroleum consumed in the U.S. came from imports. The conventional wisdom then and for several years thereafter was that America was fated to become ever-more-dependent on increasingly costly petroleum imports.

Peak oil alarm was in vogue, popularized by books such as Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life after Gridcrash (2006), Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (2006), A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash – We’re Running Out and Don’t Have a Plan (2007), Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (2008), and Confronting Collapse: Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World (2009).

M. King Hubbert, the originator of peak oil theory, correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. domestic petroleum production would peak between 1965-1970. He also forecast a peak in global production by the late-2000s. In 2008, many commentators interpreted spiking crude oil prices as confirmation of Hubbert’s theory.

But Hubbert, who died in 1989, did not live to see the “shale revolution.” During the past decade, advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it economical to extract oil from the pores of rock. Although U.S. petroleum production is still lower than it was at its peak in 1970, it has increased every year since 2008 with no end in sight.

Citi GPS, a highly respected analytic group, argues that “surging supply growth” from fracked shale formations, deep-water wells, and Canada’s oil sands could “transform North America into the new Middle East by 2020.” Peak oil, if it exists at all, is likely decades away, not around the corner, as the books cited above assumed.

In a previous post, I discussed the Energy Information Administration’s  July 2011 analysis of U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The EIA updated its analysis in May 2013. What has changed?

Basically, there’s more of the same. Already by 2010, more than half of all the oil we consumed came from the U.S. But whereas the balance then was 51% domestic and 49% imports, the balance as of 2012 was 60% domestic and 40% imports (exactly the reverse of the percentages in 2005).

In 2010, almost half (49%) of all petroleum imports came from the Western hemisphere. By 2012, more than half (53%) of all imports came from the Western hemisphere.

In 2010, the top five foreign suppliers (as a share of total imports) were:

Canada (25%)
Saudi Arabia (12%)
Nigeria (11%)
Venezuela (10%)
Mexico (9%)

In 2012, the top five foreign suppliers were:

Canada (28%)
Saudi Arabia (13%)
Mexico (10%)
Venezuela (9%)
Russia (5%)

Intestingly, Canada’s share (28%) equals that of the entire Persian Gulf combined (28%).

On Monday, May 20, in room 406 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building, the Competitive Enterprise Institute held a Congressional staff and media briefing on “EPA’s FOIA Scandals: ‘Richard Windsor,’ Gina McCarthy, and the Abuse of Power,” given by Chris Horner, author of The Liberal War on Transparency and CEI Senior Fellow. Video of Chris’s presentation is available below.

Hold the presses! A U.S. Government interagency working group has just released its updated Technical Support Document (TSD) on the social cost of carbon (SCC).

This is joyous news in some circles. “The ‘Social Cost of Carbon’ Is Almost Double What the Government Previously Thought,” Climate Progress enthuses. Why are they pleased? Because the higher the SCC, the stronger the (apparent) case for suppressing the production and export of hydrocarbon energy in general, and for blocking the Keystone XL pipeline in particular.

SCC is an estimate of how much damage an incremental ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions does to humanity and the biosphere. SCC estimates are driven by assumptions about such issues as climate sensitivity (how much warming results from a given increase in CO2 concentrations), climate impacts (how warming will affect weather patterns and sea-level rise), economic impacts (how changes in global temperature, weather, and sea-level rise will affect agriculture and other climate-sensitive activities), and technological change (how adaptive capabilities will develop as climate changes).

Modelers feed the assumptions into computer programs called “integrated assessment models” (IAMs). By tweaking those values, the modeler can get pretty much any result he desires. Outcomes also vary based on the discount rate selected, i.e., how much people are assumed to value income in the future compared to income in the present.

Using three IAMs, three discount rates (2.5,% 3,% and 5%), and a fourth value representing low-probability catastrophic impacts, the interagency group calculates four SCC estimates for the year 2020. In the working group’s 2010 TSD, the SCC estimates were $7, $26, $42, and $81 (2007$). In the updated TSD, the corresponding estimates are $12, $38, $58, and $129 (2007$). Excuse me, but even for the high-impact projections, the updated estimate ($129) is 59% higher than the 2010 estimate ($81), which is more than a tad shy of “almost double.”

Let’s cut to the chase. Those who say the SCC is bigger than the government previously thought merely recycle the old saw that climate change is ”worse than scientists previously thought.” They are mistaken. The climate change outlook is better than we have long been told.

One reason the updated estimates are higher is that the IAMs contain an “explicit representation” of sea-level rise “dynamics.” Are the modelers keeping up with the scientific literature? Consider two recent studies

• King et al. (2012): The rate of Antarctic ice loss is not accelerating and translates to less than one inch of sea-level rise per century.
• Faezeh et al. (2013): Greenland’s four main outlet glaciers are projected to contribute 19 to 30 millimeters (0.7 to 1.1 inches) to sea level rise by 2200 under a mid-range warming scenario (2.8°C by 2100) and 29 to 49 millimeters (1.1 to 1.9 inches) under a high-end warming scenario (4.5°C by 2100).

If 21st century sea-level rise is more likely to be measured in inches rather than feet or meters, shouldn’t SCC estimates decline?

And what about the 15-year period of no-net warming, which the climate science establishment did not predict and still struggles to explain? The warming pause is hard to square with the mantra of “worse than we thought.” It is evidence that the SCC is lower than they thought.

Let’s look at the disconnect between what they predicted and what happened.  The graph below comes from NASA scientist Roy Spencer: 

Figure explanation: The thin colored lines are projections of global temperature from 44 models used in the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report. The black line is the IPCC’s best estimate. The thick blue and red lines are satellite measurements of lower troposphere temperature in the tropics.

Have the IAMs been corrected in light of real-world observations? No. The climate sensitivity assumptions come straight out of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (TSD, p. 12).

More recent studies, summarized by Cato Institute climatologist Chip Knappenberger, indicate that the IPCC’s best estimate of climate sensitivity is too hot.

Figure explanation: Climate sensitivity estimates from new research published since 2010 (colored), compared with the range given in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (black). The arrows indicate the 5 to 95% confidence bounds for each estimate along with the mean (vertical line) where available. Ring et al. (2012) present four estimates of the climate sensitivity and the red box encompasses those estimates. The right-hand side of the IPCC range is dotted to indicate that the IPCC does not actually state the value for the upper 95% confidence bound of their estimate. The thick black line represents the IPCC’s “likely” range.

Otto et al. (2013), a study published last month in Nature, also indicates that climate sensitivity is lower than the IPCC’s best estimate. Lower sensitivity means less warming and less damaging impacts, which should translate into lower SCC estimates.

No matter. We can predict with high confidence that agencies with a stake in regulating CO2 will continually predict that climate change is worse than predicted. Hence it’s also predictable that each iteration of the TSD will feature higher SCC estimates than the previous edition.

Even if these SCC reports were not assumption-driven hocus-pocus they would still be one-sided and misleading, because they ignore the social costs of carbon mitigation. The connection between livelihoods, living standards, and life expectancy is more than etymological. People use a portion of their income to enhance their health and safety. Unsurprisingly, numerous studies find that poverty and unemployment increase the risk of sickness and death. From which it follows that anti-growth policies like cap-and-trade and carbon taxes can easily do more harm than good to public health.

Fossil fuels remain the chief energy source of what Cato Institute scholar Indur Goklany calls a “cycle of progress” in which economic growth, technological change, human capital formation, and freer trade co-evolve and mutually reinforce each other. Given the continuing importance of fossil fuels to human flourishing and the mortality risks of poverty and unemployment, the social cost of carbon mitigation can easily exceed that of climate change.

As in global warming advocacy generally, the risks of climate change policy are nowhere acknowledged in the TSD. Even if the TSD got the science right, it would still be partisan and biased unless paired with a rigorous and thorough analysis of climate policy risk. Prediction: A credible analysis of climate policy risk is something the interagency working group will never produce.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal gave a fascinating snapshot of the stupidity of the global solar market. As it is with all good news reports, the first paragraph says it all:

BEIJING—Solar-panel makers in China are open to raising prices and limiting exports to the European Union as a way to avoid steep trade tariffs, industry representatives said Thursday.

Allow me to put this in perspective. European consumers want solar panels. Indeed, they are forced to want them, due to Soviet-style green energy production quotas enacted by the EU. That’s the context: Europeans wanting/having to buy this product.

Against this backdrop, manufacturers in China are OFFERING to raise prices. They aren’t colluding to make more money; rather, they are voluntarily raising prices against their better judgment. Why? Because EU officials are threatening to raise prices by slapping tariffs on imports of Chinese solar panels (which, again, are products that Europeans want to buy).

Keep in mind as well that the EU’s threatened tariff would co-exist with national-level subsidies, known as “feed in tariffs,” designed to suppress the price of solar panels. This is true in Germany and Spain, off the top of my head, and likely true in other countries.

So there’s an EU policy that forces Europeans to buy solar panels. Yet there is also an EU policy meant to make solar panels much more expensive. Finally, there are several European policies meant to make them much cheaper. Got that?

Such are the endless and inefficient complexities wrought when government creates an industry out of whole cloth, as any member of the Gosplan could have told you.

E&E EnergyWire (subscription required) last week reported that Virginia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has endorsed federal legislation that would open offshore Virginia to oil and gas drilling. This is a major shift from his failed 2009 campaign, during which he opposed offshore drilling. On energy policy, McAuliffe also has done a U-turn on coal. In 2009, he pledged to never allow a coal fired power plant; now, he doesn’t mention coal-fired power, but his campaign does support increased coal exports.

McAuliffe’s abrupt shift in energy policy mirrors President Barack Obama’s performance during debates with GOP candidate Mitt Romney in late 2012. During his first term, President Obama’s administration imposed a suite of policies meant to inhibit hydrocarbon energy production in the United States. Yet during the debate, when the American public was paying attention, the President championed his supposed support for more oil and gas drilling, and even claimed to be a booster of the coal industry.

Today in National Review Online, Mark Mills has a terrific column titled “Unleash the Energy Export Revolution.” He begins by calling out the irrationality of our government’s current anti-energy export policy: 

On May 17, the Department of Energy (DOE) approved just the second license in America to export natural gas. Nineteen more applicants still wait. Yes, private businesses, willing to spend tens of billions of private capital, are lined up for a schoolyard game of “Mother May I” to get permission to export a product that the U.S. is uniquely good at manufacturing. So good, in fact, that America is now the world’s No. 1 producer, with no end in sight. What a world. 

Or, as comedian Yakov Smirnov might say, “What a country!”

Mills makes several salient points.

The DOE’s control over gas exports and the Department of Commerce’s control over crude oil exports come not from any constitutional requirement but rather from statutes enacted in 1938 and 1975, when conventional wisdom held that America was in danger of running out of gas and oil. Advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing make such depletionism an “outdated” idea. 

The easiest way to grasp the folly of self-inflicted barriers to U.S. energy exports is substitute “words like wheat, soy, microprocessors, or even software, for the words natural gas and ask whether it makes sense for bureaucrats and politicians to be empowered with decisions about where American firms can sell what they produce cheaper, better, and more productively than any other country.”

Since literally thousands of entrepreneurial firms of all sizes compete in today’s hydrocarbon shale fields, the new era of domestic energy production “is not a ‘Big Oil’ game (though they’re buying into it now), but a classic reprise of America’s ‘can do’ era.” Moreover, unlike the first U.S. hydrocarbon revolution, today’s oil and gas boom is “widely distributed,” occurring “in dozens of states.” Mills comments: “We’ve been looking for a manufacturing- and small-business-driven economic revolution. Well, it’s here.”

The shale boom has already attracted $150 billion in foreign direct investment, and done so without subsidies, regulatory preferences, or Stimulus loans. It could pull in $5 trillion in additional investment in the next decade if official Washington allows Americans to compete in the global marketplace.

The boom has already created millions of jobs and generated billions in federal and state tax revenues despite political opposition, ideological attacks, and restrictions on gas and oil development on federal lands. “Imagine what could be done,” writes Mills, ”if Washington decided to flip the intellectual framework from delay, oppose, and control to accelerate, encourage, and unleash.”

Mills recommends that Congress strip the DOE and the Department of Commerce of their antiquated powers to control gas and oil exports. He also indicates how such reforms should be sold to the Obama administration — as “consistent” with the President’s National Export Initiative, which aims to double U.S. exports over 2010 levels by 2015.

Mills’s NRO column draws upon his recent study, The Case for Exports: America’s Hydrocarbon Industry Can Revive the Economy and Eliminate the Trade Deficit.

Over at National Review, Eliana Johnson has an excellent post about my colleague Chris Horner’s latest FOIA find. Evidently, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson took her Congressional-mandated transparency training using her false identity, “Richard Windsor.”And Mr. Windsor did well, because she was rewarded with three certificates attesting to her being a “scholar of ethical behavior.”

Documents released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, for three years, the EPA certified Windsor as a “scholar of ethical behavior.”

The agency also documented the nonexistent Windsor’s completion of training courses in the management of e-mail records, cyber-security awareness, and what appears to be a counter-terror initiative that urges federal employees to report suspicious activity.

The EPA made the certifications public in response to a FOIA request from Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who was tipped off to Jackson’s use of the Windsor account by agency employees while he was researching his 2012 book, The Liberal War on Transparency. Horner says that the EPA probably issued agency-wide training requirements for anybody who wished to maintain an active e-mail address, “never contemplating a false identity or fake employee would be created.”

So…EPA’s bloated bureaucracy thought that Lisa Jackson’s alias, the existence of which is a violation of transparency ethics, was a real person, and the agency awarded him/her a citation for ethics. Ladies and gentleman, your taxes at work!

This strange juxtaposition (i.e., Lisa Jackson ostensibly demonstrating her ethical behavior in the act of committing a gross ethical violation) immediately brought to mind the end of Billy Madison, when Billy’s nemesis, Eric, had a meltdown over “business ethics.”

Yesterday, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) hosted a climate change conference in a technology park in Fairmont, W.Va.

A mixed panel of warmistas and skeptics featured Marc Marano of Climate Depot, Scott Denning of Colorado State University, Jim Hurrell of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Joe Casola of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Annie Petsonk of Environmental Defense Fund, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, and John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who participated by satellite link.

I emailed Dr. Christy and asked for permission to post his presentation on GlobalWarming.Org; he promptly sent me the files.

Dr. Christy’s Power Point presentation is available here. The accompanying text is available here. The main takeaway points:

• Popular scare stories that weather extremes – hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods — are getting worse are not based on fact.
• In the U.S., high temperature records are not becoming more numerous.
• Climate models significantly overestimated warming during the past 15 years.
• Even if climate models were correct, a 50% reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions by 2050 would avert only 0.07°C of warming by 2100.
• If a policy is not economically sustainable, it’s not politically sustainable.
• The climate change impact of enhancing CO2 concentrations has so far been small compared to the public health and biospheric benefits provided by affordable, carbon-based energy.