The Real Moral Implications of Climate Change Legislation

While Healthcare has captured the airwaves, the issue of cap and trade is roiling just under the surface and will surely attract more attention when our congressional representatives get back to Washington. At the heart of the debate is global warming or climate change as the concerns of catastrophic warming are the impetus for the entire cap and trade scheme.

Here, on CARE’s Blog, we have posted many items on global warming. So many, in fact, that one might think we’d covered everything--which is why this one caught our interest when it came to our in box. Calvin Beisner offers us an new and thoughtful perspective on the topic. We found it interesting and think you will too. Please give it a look and let us know what you think!

(Note: one of the authors of the Heritgae Foundation Study noted below is David
Kreutzer who was the featured guest for CARE's August Confernce Call.)

Today's Global Warming Policy: It's Unbiblical
I've been a pastor, and I know how busy pastors can be. So why would I urge America's Christian leaders and clergy to take on yet another concern, namely, standing against global warming alarmism?

Because while on the surface this might seem like a peripheral issue, it has profound spiritual, moral and economic implications for believers--and especially the poor--that pastors can ill afford to ignore.

It is widely believed that increasing emissions of carbon dioxide are causing global warming that threatens to harm people, wildlife and ecosystems through rising sea levels; increasing droughts, floods and storms; and an altering of natural habitats.

In response, some people propose to fight global warming by slowing or reversing the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere through massive, forced reductions in use of carbon-based fuels--oil, coal and natural gas.

The most recent example is a bill that recently passed the House of Representatives. It would create a so-called "cap and trade" system to reduce CO2 emissions. Emitters would be required to obtain permits, which would be limited in number (the "cap"), from the federal government and could then buy and sell them on the market (the "trade"). The cap would gradually decrease, increasing the cost of energy over time.

A recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that the law would:
• raise the average family's annual energy bill $1,241 (over $100 per month);
• raise electricity rates 90 percent, gasoline prices 74 percent and residential natural gas prices 55 percent;
• raise unemployment by nearly 2 million jobs in 2012, with additional job losses to follow;
• raise the inflation-adjusted federal debt 26 percent by 2035--about $115,00 per family of four; and
• reduce gross domestic product by an average of $393 billion per year, or $9.4 trillion through 2035.

The payoff? About 0.09 degree F reduction in global average temperature in the year 2050. (The real reduction might be only one-tenth as much.) At that rate, counting the costs only through 2035, we'd be paying $940 billion for every one-one hundredth of a degree reduction in temperature. Assuming--optimistically!--that costs after 2035 were slashed in half, we'd end up paying an additional $2.9 trillion, for a total of over $12 trillion, or $1.2 trillion for every one-one hundredth of a degree. That's an awful lot to pay for so little return when growing numbers of qualified scientists reject the case for destructive manmade global warming anyway.

In the face of these facts, we should remember that the Bible requires us to care for the poor. The Apostle Paul wrote that the other Apostles in Jerusalem had one main concern on their minds when he visited them: that he should "remember the poor--the very thing [he] also was eager to do" (Galatians 2:10).

The costs of climate change policy will hit the poor harder than anyone else. Indeed, they can least afford the general rise in prices, and energy constitutes a larger share of their spending than of others with more discretionary income.

But that isn't the only reason pastors should be concerned. Global warming policy is part of a concerted effort to push environmentalism to the fore in American politics and culture. We must recognize such secular environmentalism is hardly limited to good stewardship of God-given natural resources.

Secular environmentalism--in contrast to biblical creation stewardship--is at heart a false religion. It degrades human beings, the crown of God's creation (Genesis 1:26; Psalm 8); it deifies nature in its untouched state as the ideal, contrary to God's mandate for man to fill, subdue, and rule the Earth (Genesis 1:28); and it disregards the poor, who often are harmed by environmental policies like banning DDT, a cheap and safe insecticide that could largely eliminate the malaria-bearing mosquitoes that cost millions of lives every year in the developing world.

Secular environmentalism is also the new face of the anti-human, pro-death agenda. As the Optimum Population Trust put it in 2007, "The most effective national and global climate change strategy is limiting the size of its population. ... A non-existent person has no environmental footprint."

Among many environmentalists, people are the ultimate pollution, and reducing their numbers--through abortion, euthanasia, disease or poverty--is the goal. Replacing wood and dung as fuels for cooking and heating with electricity would prevent 2 to 3 million premature deaths every year in poor countries, yet CO2-restricting policies will make electricity generation more expensive and delay its provision to the poor for decades. Such thinking is more common than you might think; one well-known religious leader once told me that "the last thing" the developing world poor need is cheap, abundant energy. (Brian McClaren, radio interview, 2007)

But there's an alternative. The WeGetIt.org Campaign calls for stewardship of creation based on biblical principles and factual evidence. The heart of the WeGetIt.org Declaration is, "With billions suffering in poverty, environmental policies must not further oppress the world's poor by denying them basic needs. Instead, we must help people fulfill their God-given potential as producers and stewards."

As a pastor, I signed on. Please join me. And please help spread the call for biblically based creation stewardship near and far.

E. Calvin Beisner is the National Spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

Do We Really Want Expensive Experimental And Bureaucratic Mechanisms To Fix Climate Change?

When Diana Furchtgott-Roth “speaks,” we have learned to listen. The articles we use of hers always offer fresh insight on an energy issue. (She does write on other topics too, due CARE’s focus, we only use her pieces that address energy.) A new approach or a unique angle on today’s energy issues are what we hope to offer here in the CARE Blog. Therefore, we use quite a bit of Diana’s work. If you have not read her previous postings here in Comments About Responsible Energy, we encourage you to go back and read them. You, too, will appreciate her commentary.

This one is of particular interest at this time due to its position on the calendar--in between the time when the House passed their version of climate change legislation AKA “cap and trade” and the time when the Senate brings it up for debate. This period in history brings global warming to the forefront. Here Diana postulates that if climate change is a real issue and man-made carbon dioxide is an issue, than the problem would be better solved by going nuclear than by taxing carbon emissions. Here’s a great perspective as represented in her entire article: “A nuclear strategy would avoid the experimental and bureaucratic mechanisms for awarding emissions permits to power plants and other polluters and for monitoring compliance and trading…”

Read on. We think you’ll find her approach to be a great angle to add to your mental database on energy.

It's Time to Go Nuclear
With the Senate committees poised to consider versions of the expensive climate-change bill narrowly approved by the House of Representatives, it's time for the country to take a fresh look at nuclear power, which already generates 20 percent of our electricity.

The Environment and Public Works Committee and the Finance Committee hope to finish drafting a bill before the August recess. Floor debate and a vote will come only after Labor Day, to be followed later in the autumn by House-Senate conference. Whatever the Senate finally does, the process will be contentious and protracted.

Senator Judd Gregg (NH) told me in a telephone conversation that the Senate Republican Conference recommends a national strategy to build 100 nuclear power plants by 2030, in addition to the 104 that are now in operation. "This will clean up the air," he said, "and reduce reliance on foreign oil. This is a much more constructive approach than the climate change bill," which would create limits on carbon-dioxide emissions and a system for trading permits to emit them.

The House bill, if enacted, would raise $847 billion over 10 years while adding $821 billion to federal spending. It is effectively a tax increase with large, negative economic implications. That huge sum would not pay for the additional electric power a growing economy must have. It would be the added cost of curbing climate-warming emissions and of developing energy from renewable fuels.

Nuclear power has its problems, including delays in licensing and substantial up-front costs, but it can generate additional power for economic growth at a cost lower than that of the cap-and-trade bill.
A nuclear strategy would avoid the experimental and bureaucratic mechanisms for awarding emissions permits to power plants and other polluters and for monitoring compliance and trading, as well as compulsory efficiency standards for automobiles and household appliances and mandatory use of renewable fuels, such as wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric power.

If we're going to wave goodbye to the invisible hand by spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on wind and solar power, and on giving motorists tax-funded incentives to drive electric cars, then it's reasonable to ask whether subsidies for nuclear power might be less costly and achieve the same environmental results. The answer is probably yes.

The House's planned expenditure of $800 billion could fund 100 nuclear power plants with proven technology and no greenhouse gas emissions. This could be faster and less expensive than new emissions allowances, carbon sequestration, and wind, solar, and biofuel technology.

Despite generating 20% of America's electricity and its role in the U.S. commercial power grid since 1957, nuclear power is not without problems.

Energy is relatively inexpensive to generate once a plant is built, but plant construction requires a capital outlay of $6 billion to $8 billion. Since projects take five years to complete, a substantial portion of the funding is interest. Hence, some government subsidies or loan guarantees are necessary just to fund the project.

Four companies planning nuclear reactors-UniStar Nuclear Energy, NRG Energy, Scana Corporation, and Southern Company-are among those reportedly under consideration for a share in $18.5 billion in federal funding. Due to financial considerations another company, Exelon, announced this week that it is shelving its plans for a new power plant in Texas, and in April AmerenUE abandoned a planned plant in Missouri.

As well as difficulties in funding, delays can be caused by local site-permitting issues. Some communities may welcome the "green" jobs and additional tax revenue provided by a new nuclear power plant, but some will resist. Approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can be made faster than in the past with standardized designs and congressional support.

The issue most familiar to Americans, disposal of spent uranium fuel rods, has generated headlines as Congress has argued about where to store the radioactive waste. How to transport it there safely also is an issue. The prior selection of Yucca Mountain in Nevada has stalled, since President Obama has not allocated any funding for the facility in the 2010 budget.

In this, the United States can learn from France, which generates over 80% of domestic electricity production from atomic energy and prides itself on being in the forefront of the global environmental movement. It reprocesses the spent rods at the power plants and does not have one giant, national storage facility. Local storage and reprocessing avoid transporting nuclear waste across the country.

It's not clear that government funding of energy and environmental projects is necessary. But if that's how Congress wants to spend tax dollars, Americans should press for further development of clean nuclear power.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a senior fellow and director of Hudson Institute's Center for Employment Policy. She is the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Advancing The Fears Of Climate Change = More Control

Do you wonder what people from other countries are thinking about America when they look at the shenanigans we are going through surrounding our current economic crisis and the approach to deal with the supposed climate change threat? Especially when other countries that have gone before us are realizing the folly of their ways and ditching their plans?

Here is an interesting view from Australia, from one of the writers for the Whiskey and Gunpowder newsletter. Usually we feature their energy writer Bryon King who was our featured guest on the June CARE Conference Call. Dan Denning may be new to most of the Comments About Responsible Energy Blog readers, But we believe you’ll find his comments of interest.

Cap and Trade: The Death of the Industrial West
Hey, here’s a question to start off with. If Bernie Madoff gets 150 years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme, what do you think the people who designed Social Security and the Superannuation scheme (Australia's version of a retirement or pension plan) ought to get?

And speaking of colossally stupid government programs, you may have seen the news that the U.S. House of Representatives passed a climate change bill on Saturday by a narrow vote of 219-212. The cap-and-trade bill, otherwise known as Waxman-Markey (for the nominal writers of the bill), mandates that U.S. manufacturers and utilities reduce carbon emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050.

Under the sausage making process that is the American Congress, the bill was filled with compromises. Congressmen from coal-producing states or states with lots of manufacturing jobs had to be bribed into supporting it through various means. It must now go the Senate, which must pass its own version of the bill.

If the Senate bill is different from the House bill (and it almost always is, given the different agendas in both bodies and the need for more bribes), the two bills go to “reconciliation.” That’s where a committee made of members from both houses settles on a final compromise version of the two bills and sends them back to their respective bodies to be voted on. Then it gets sent to the President to become the law of the land.

By the way you may have missed an amendment to the bill that’s stirred a bit of controversy. It was inserted the night before among the bill’s 1,200 pages, which you can be sure none of America’s elected officials actually read. The amendment placates Congressmen from Rust Belt states who worry about losing even more manufacturing jobs to the developing world (China). It requires the U.S. President to make a “border adjustment” on goods from countries that do not cap or reduce carbon emissions by 2020. It’s a tariff.

Already President Obama has backed off that particular amendment. He says, “At a time when the economy worldwide is still deep in recession and we’ve seen a significant drop in global trade, I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there.” Very careful, sure. But you already did send the signal didn’t you?

For what it’s worth, we think this was all an exercise in political window dressing to get some version of a bill passed. If the Senate and the House actually agree on a climate change bill that puts a high tax on carbon, then the apotheosis of Obama will be complete.

We will take The One at his word, though. Besides, as everyone knows, the real purpose of the bill is not to start a trade war (although it may do so). The purpose is to make conventional energy more expensive AND--in an era of declining government tax receipts and rising liabilities--to create a huge new source of government revenues by taxing carbon. It’s a revenue and power grab by an institution (the Nation state) that finds itself increasingly off-balance.

It’s also a massive project in socioeconomic engineering that ignores the reality (and physics) of energy generation in an industrial society. It’s true the world could benefit from cleaner and cheaper energy. But cleaner and more expensive energy is a recipe for economic suicide. It’s something Western nations seem particularly keen on committing, although we can’t really figure out why. It could be that the global Left simply finds modern life aesthetically ugly and consumerism (with all that pesky individual choice) a vulgarity that should be destroyed via legislation.

But speaking strictly in economic terms, unless a region or a country has ample hydroelectric or geothermal resources, it’s impossible to meet base load electricity needs reliably with renewable energy. Advocates envision a world full of ultra-long life batteries, windmills, and solar farms. But it’s just a fantasy. If the climate bills become law in Australia and America, it will accelerate the deindustrialising of Western economies and mean the transfer of even more manufacturing jobs to the developing world.

Of course maybe that’s just what the architects of these laws want. Who knows? We know they want to tax productive enterprise and make the bulk of the population dependent on government handouts. That makes people compliant and easily controllable. That is big government Utopia. Advancing the fears of climate change is the easiest way to get more control.

We’d expect to see the construction of a lot more natural gas fired power plants in the coming years in the West (although they are more expensive than coal-fired plants). All those re-chargeable plug-in hybrids have to get their electrons from somewhere. If it’s not going to be coal (which will be taxed out of existence), it’s probably going to be cleaner-burning natural gas power plants, powered by both conventional and unconventional gas.

Right now, global LNG capacity is rising and stockpiles are fairly high. But if you keep your eye on the big picture and we see a transition of the world’s power plant fleet from coal to natural gas, it obviously favors gas producers and explorers. Australia is moving ahead by leaps and bounds in this area with conventional offshore production in the North West Shelf and Timor Sea and more unconventional production (hopefully) from coal-seam-gas in Queensland.


Dan Denning, Melbourne, Australia

Dan Denning is the author of 2005’s best-selling The Bull Hunter. A specialist in small-cap stocks, Dan draws on his network of global contacts from his base in Melbourne, Australia, and is a frequent contributor to The Daily Reckoning Australia.