Yvo de Boer

It’s not just income taxes that might trash the dreams of Joe the Plumber.

Ready or not, Joe and the rest of us are also about to get mugged by the commissars of climate change. On this, I’ve got a bipartisan beef, since both John McCain and Barack Obama have bought into the panicked Al Gore storyline that the earth has a man-made “fever.” Both candidates are promising to meet it with dramatic and costly new forms of government control.

This comes even as Europe, after its fling with the Kyoto treaty, is backing off from grand pledges to cut carbon dioxide emissions, having decided that the whole thing is too expensive. But United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls climate change the “defining issue of our time,” and the U.N. early last year announced that scientific “consensus” had been reached: The climate is in crisis, and it’s man-made. At the U.N. this has morphed into calls for wealthy countries to choke their own productivity and compensate the rest of the world for the weather.

In the coming weeks a monumental decision will be made that will influence the future evolution of global climate policies. A single country has in its power the ability to alter the course of global negotiations and change the dynamics of a political debate characterized by gridlock. That country is . . .

Since 2005, Shell Oil has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy leases in hopes of exploring for oil off the coast of northern Alaska. Based on past drilling, the area seems a sure bet for increasing domestic oil supply. But so far Shell has not been allowed even to look for oil on these leases, much less extract any of it.

Why? Because the regulatory and permitting process covering offshore energy development for most of the nation guarantees delay, and because of a legal system that has no sense of urgency in making a decision -- any decision.

Two years ago, environmentalists teamed up with Alaska Natives who depend on subsistence whaling for their livelihoods and culture. They sued in federal district court in Alaska in July 2007 to stop Shell's exploratory drilling, claiming that it could disturb the whales and interfere with traditional bowhead-whale hunts. The case was quickly elevated to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals where it has languished since. While Shell has worked earnestly with whalers to meet their concerns, there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency among federal regulators or the courts.

[Excerpt]  As summer turned to fall, sky-high pump prices in the face of a weakening economy led to lower demand and a drop in those prices. In other words, market forces do work, and they tend to counter big price moves in one direction or the other. The financial meltdown may have weakened faith in markets over the last few weeks, but the precipitous decline in oil and gasoline prices should help strengthen that faith.

Of course, markets can work only if they are allowed to. The biggest threat to the functioning of energy markets right now is costly cap-and-trade legislation in the name of fighting global warming. These measures would set a limit on the emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. This cap-and-trade legislation, and the energy use restrictions that would result from it, would create an unprecedented level of interference by the federal government in the energy sector and the overall economy. Bottom line: Such legislation would lead to gasoline rationing and higher prices.

“The Interior Department, bound by the Endangered Species Act, has declared polar bears a ‘threatened’ species because they might be endangered ‘in the foreseeable future,’ meaning 45 years. (Note: 45 years ago, the now long-forgotten global cooling menace of 35 years ago was not yet foreseen). The bears will be threatened if the current episode of warming, if there really is one, is, unlike all the previous episodes, irreversible, and if it intensifies, and if it continues to melt sea ice vital to the bears, and if the bears, unlike in many previous warming episodes, cannot adopt,” says George Will. (1)

Never mind that the overall polar bear population has increased from about 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today, and that the only two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past fifty years. Also, ignore the fact that polar bears wee around 100,000 years ago, long before at least one interglacial period (Eeemian) when it was much warmer than our present Holocene. Clearly, they survived long periods of time when the climate of the Arctic was much warmer than at present. (2) But obviously, they aren’t expected to survive this present warming without help from the regulators.

Tierney wonders why so many greens refuse to even consider nuclear energy.

Which energy path, hard or soft, should we take? That was the question I put to Lab readers, and I liked a lot of the answers better than what either presidential candidate offered in last night’s debate. While John McCain stressed the hard path of nuclear power and Barack Obama stressed the soft path of renewable energy, they both operated from the same assumption: it was their duty to chart the nation’s energy future.

I prefer the answer offered in a comment by Lee Schipper of the International Energy Agency. Instead of choosing either path, he suggested, impose a tax on carbon emissions, remove subsidies and then see whether utilities build nuclear reactors or wind farms or solar arrays.