RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the hysteria over global warming heats up, carbon taxes have become the “cool” option. Environmentalists love them. So do politicians, who are more than happy to raise taxes while scoring political points.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/06/why-carbon-taxes-actually-increase-global-emissions/

Carbon taxes, or other analogous pricing schemes, are now prevalent in Western Europe, and are making headway in North America. For example, California recently joined forces with the Canadian Provinces of Ontario and Quebec to create an integrated cap-and-trade carbon market.

On top of this, many well-known economists support carbon taxes, thinking they’re the best way to mitigate man’s contribution to climate change. A relatively new report written by thirteen leading economists under the direction of professors Nicholas Stern and Joseph Stiglitz—who won a Nobel Prize in 2001—recommends the adoption of a global carbon tax. The tax would value carbon emissions somewhere between 50 and 100 USD per ton by 2030, and would cost upwards of $4 trillion. Theoretically, the tax would raise the cost of using carbon-intensive sources of energy, thereby nudging producers to switch from fossil fuels to “green energy” sources like wind and solar power. Likewise, it would raise the cost of electricity, thus creating an incentive to use energy more efficiently.

As an abstract principle of theory, this seems to make sense. There’s just one problem. It won’t work.

In reality, carbon taxes are just that: taxes. They’re a money-grab dressed up with good intentions. Worse still, carbon taxes will not reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, adopting carbon taxes in the West will actually raise global carbon emissions by offshoring economic activity from relatively environmentally-friendly places, like the USA and Germany, to places with lax environmental laws, like China.

Open Markets & Offshoring

Wealth is like water: it flows to the lowest possible point, and continues to do so until the level is equal. This is why consumers chase cheaper goods, why investors look for undervalued companies, and why multinationals offshore to cheaper markets. This last point—offshoring—is why Western carbon taxes will actually increase global emissions.

President Trump announced Monday that he will dramatically reduce the acreage of two national monuments. The order ends excessive federal control of Utah land, allowing residents to protect their own territory and conserve their cultural relics.

Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to give Presidents emergency authority to prevent the looting and destruction of national treasures. The law said designated monuments should be limited to “the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects,” but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama misapplied this power to carry out a Washington land grab.

Without public comment, the federal government unilaterally seized control of more than 3.2 million acres of southeastern Utah that together constitute the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. Residents and their elected representatives had minimal influence on the draconian land-use restrictions imposed by Washington bureaucrats. In September, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke described how the Antiquities Act had been abused “to prevent public access and to prevent public use” of land, harming everyone from cattlemen to cross-country skiers.

Last spring Mr. Trump ordered a review of 27 supersized monuments. The Interior Department made recommendations only after accepting formal public comment. Mr. Trump announced Monday that he would shrink Bears Ears by about 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly 46%.

Over the past few days, thousands have marched in Salt Lake to oppose the decision. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance denounced the order as “the single most harmful attack any president has ever launched on public lands.” The group claims the Trump Administration acted “at the behest of ideological extremists and dirty energy barons,” adding that the decision is “an insult to the tribes that advocated to protect Bears Ears.”

Calm down, guys. Most of the two million newly undesignated acres are still public lands, subject to rigorous federal and state protections. The Trump Administration increased Native American representation on the advisory Bears Ears Commission.

As part of the tax reform bill passed by the Senate, Republicans included an amendment that would open a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploration.

ANWR comprises nearly 20 million acres of pristine wilderness. The bill authorizes drilling in less than 10% of that area.

Washington Examiner:

“This small package offers a tremendous opportunity for Alaska, for the Gulf Coast, and for all of our nation,” Murkowski said before the vote. “We have authorized responsible energy development in the 1002 area.”

Democrats have long been successful in blocking Republican efforts to allow energy exploration in a 1.5 million acre section of the 19.6 million acres of ANWR known as the “1002 area,” where billions of barrels of crude oil lie beneath the coastal plain.

But this year, Republican control of Congress and the White House spurred Senate Republicans to consider the provision with the tax reform measure under budget reconciliation rules that allow it to avoid a filibuster and pass with a simple majority vote.

Senate Democrats have blasted the process Republicans used to advance the ANWR bill, considering it an unfair way to change the character of a refuge that has been protected since 1960.

Democrats and environmentalists say drilling would harm the ecosystem of what they describe as one of the wildest places left on earth, inhabited by animals such as polar bears, caribou, and arctic foxes.

Opposition to drilling in ANWR has been irrational. Even Democrats have to admit that the tiny fraction of the reserve that will be opened to development will barely impact the ecosystem or any animal, rare or not.

Environmentalists oppose opening ANWR because, well, fossil fuels. When 90% of the wilderness set aside by Congress will be protected and preserved, the argument that oil exploration will destroy the land doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

To get the oil from the refuge to the coast would require construction of a pipeline. But we’ve built pipelines in Alaska before with little or no impact to the ecosystem.

The “best” argument made by the greens for not drilling in ANWR is the impact on one of our largest Caribou herds.

Science:

To the west of the Arctic refuge, in the heart of the North Slope oil fields, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Central Arctic caribou herd shifted calving areas away from well concentrations. And in longterm studies of the Porcupine herd (named after the Porcupine River in the Yukon and Alaska), Johnson found that even decades after oil development in the Canadian portion of its range, caribou were still avoiding areas within 6 kilometers of roads and wells.

But it is not clear how those behavioral changes might affect population size. “We get into a more nuanced conversation: ‘Does this mean there are going to be a lot fewer caribou, [or] a little fewer?’” Johnson says. “What [development] means for population dynamics is the million-dollar question.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“When scientists resort to fantasy instead of observable, repeatable experiment by skeptics, then we have abandoned reason.”

Science and politics used to be very separate institutions. Where they did overlap, science was nonpartisan. The role of scientists was to provide objective evidence — and dispassionate, nonpolitical interpretations of that evidence. Indeed, one rarely if ever could detect the political leanings of any particular scientist. Also, science and religion used to get along, at least for the most part.

Today, that has changed, and the results include significant dangers for society. For example, the topic of climate change has produced the myth of “settled science.” Science is never settled. While we all may agree that the climate does change, there is an anti-capitalist agenda behind the claims of many scientists — that we must radically reduce our standards of living to prevent climate catastrophe. Politics and ideology, not science, promote that so-called scientific view.

But there is an even deeper and darker implication involving the politicization of science. Its first major public confrontation was in a state court case, dubbed the Scopes Monkey trial, which tested a law that forbade the teaching of Darwinian Evolution theory in public schools. On a legal maneuver, Darwinism technically lost that particular trial, but all subsequent federal court rulings since then, have upheld the theory of evolution as accepted fact. Contrary theories are essentially forbidden. Evolution is “settled science.”

It is not the purpose of this commentary to litigate the theory of evolution, or any other particular scientific theory. Rather, it is to examine the cultural fallout from that theory. The late paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, is quoted as having said that, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.”

What Darwin and Simpson have done, along with others, is to introduce into society the physicalist paradigm, the one that holds that nothing exists except stuff, that is, material reality. According to physicalism, there is no spirit, no God, no eternal afterlife. By extension of that paradigm, you and I are nothing more than stuff, that is, the atoms that make up our physical bodies. If that is to be considered true, then it necessarily must follow, at least eventually, that we have no inherent right to be treated as anything more than protoplasm, nothing more than just another species of animal.

That paradigm is, of course, dangerous. It contradicts not only the Bible, but also the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of our nation, which states that we are endowed by our Creator — repeat, by our Creator — with certain inalienable rights, including life and liberty.

The Keystone XL pipeline cleared its final major regulatory hurdle Monday, but the fight isn’t over as opponents have seized on a spill last week on another TransCanada pipeline. The wonder is that the company still wants to build anything in the U.S. after the way it has been treated.

The good news is that the Nebraska Public Service Commission voted 3-2 to allow TransCanada to build a pipeline traversing the state. The federal government has already given its blessing, and Nebraska was the last state hold-out.

Nebraska officials refused to sign off on the preferred Keystone XL route, approving an alternative that the commission says would better protect water resources and endangered species, adding that it “would have little environmental impact.”

But it also means TransCanada will have to deal with a new set of landowners. So the pipeline is all but certain to face further litigation from property-holders and environmental groups. TransCanada says it will now begin “assessing how the decision would impact the cost and schedule of the project.”

The usual Keystone XL opponents are now claiming that last Thursday’s 5,000-barrel leak in South Dakota is proof that pipelines are inherently dangerous. “These pipelines are bound to spill, and they put communities, precious drinking water, and our climate at risk,” said Rachel Rye Butler of Greenpeace.

Their real agenda is to keep oil and gas in the ground, though Americans still rely on petroleum for 37% of their energy. But in the real world, which is marred by reality and risk, pipelines have an enviable safety record.

More than 99.99% of oil moved by pipeline arrives at its destination safely. Compared to rail, pipelines are 2.5 times less likely to have an accident that results in an oil spill, the Fraser Institute concluded after assessing Canadian government data between 2004 and 2015. A Manhattan Institute report looked at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s annual accident data between 2007-2016. Per billion ton-miles, oil pipelines charted the lowest rate at 0.66. Railways came in at 2.20, and roads at 7.11.

South Dakota’s Keystone pipeline, where last week’s spill occurred, has safely delivered more than 1.5 billion barrels of oil since opening in June 2010. TransCanada had isolated the affected portion of pipeline within 15 minutes. South Dakota’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources said emergency precautions “seemed to work very well,” and the spill didn’t spoil surface or drinking water.

It’s important that we feel that we’re fighting this crisis like our lives depend on it, because in fact they do,” said New York mayor Bill de Blasio, announcing the city’s latest energy mandate, which will require about 14,000 buildings to upgrade their boilers, windows, roofs, and water heaters. Hyperbole on climate change is nothing new to de Blasio or to Governor Andrew Cuomo—and it’s necessary to help justify their claims that New York can cut its greenhouse-gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. Both leaders have signed on to the Under 2 MOU, an agreement between states, cities, and provinces worldwide that commits signatories to slash emissions by 80 percent, or to less than two tons per capita per year.

At his September news conference at Brooklyn Bridge Park, de Blasio made it clear that the new regulations on older buildings are just one part of his “80 x 50” plan. Cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions, he said, “would be achieved either by a voluntary action of the private sector or by mandate.” De Blasio likes mandates. The new ones—subject to city council approval—would require landlords to complete building retrofits by 2030 or face stiff fines.

Even if we stipulate that increased energy efficiency in New York buildings is a good thing, the emissions-reduction targets are financially burdensome and unrealistic. Cuomo’s appointees at the New York State Public Service Commission have mandated that buildings must slash their energy use by 600 trillion BTUs by 2030. But as economist Jonathan Lesser points out in a recent report for the Manhattan Institute, the New York Independent System Operator has projected that those energy savings will be about 51 trillion BTUs—or about one-twelfth the required amount.