McKitrick: Ontario's Green Energy Act a failure

via the Financial Post:

The pledge by Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak to roll back key provisions of the Ontario Green Energy Act is a courageous move and deserves to be applauded. It will likely spark intense debates as we head into the upcoming election. It is hard to say whether public opinion will be on his side, but the facts certainly are.

The Green Energy Act (GEA) was proposed as both an environmental policy and a job-creation policy. It is misguided on both scores.

With regards to job creation, there is nothing special about subsidizing electricity generation. It’s just as harmful as subsidizing anything else. We have long and lamentable experience in Canada with failed job creation schemes based on subsidies to money-losing industries. From Sprung cucumbers to Bricklin sports cars, governments have regularly learned and relearned, at taxpayer expense, the immutable rule that if a business plan depends on subsidies, the jobs it creates are not sustainable, and if the business is profitable on its own, it doesn’t need subsidies.

more.

Global Warming or a lot of hot air?

Video of Sunday Night's special: Global warming or a lot of hot air with host Bret Baier of Fox News. Here's part 1:



Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.
Watch these while you can. I suspect that YouTube may pull them.

Illegal curve?

Looks like an illegitimate the hockey stick has been exposed. But will it receive anything more an a 2 minute minor penalty?

The T3 tax

Canadian economist, Dr. Ross McKitrick proposes a carbon tax based on and tied to actual measured levels of anthropogenic global warming. To the climate alarmists, this is called putting you money where your mouth is.

From today's Financial Post: [emphasis added]

The approach is based on two points of expert consensus. First, most economists who have written on carbon-dioxide emissions have concluded that an emissions tax is preferable to a cap-and-trade system. The reason is that, while emission-abatement costs vary a lot, based on the target, the social damages from a tonne of carbon-dioxide emissions are roughly constant. The first ton of carbon dioxide imposes the same social cost as the last ton.

In this case, it is better for policy-makers to guess the right price for emissions rather than the right cap. Most studies that have looked at that the global cost per tonne of carbon dioxide have found it is likely to be rather low, less than US$10 per tonne. We don't know what the right emissions cap is, but, if we put a low charge on each unit of emissions, the market will find the (roughly) correct emissions cap.

Second, climate models predict that, if greenhouse gases are driving climate change, there will be a unique fingerprint in the form of a strong warming trend in the tropical troposphere, the region of the atmosphere up to 15 kilometres in altitude, over the tropics, from 20? North to 20? South. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that this will be an early and strong signal of anthropogenic warming. Climate changes due to solar variability or other natural factors will not yield this pattern: only sustained greenhouse warming will do it.

Temperatures in the tropical troposphere are measured every day using weather satellites. The data are analyzed by several teams, including one at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) and one at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in California. According to the UAH team, the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly (its departure from the 1979-98 average) over the past three years is 0.18C. The corresponding RSS estimate is 0.29C.

Now put those two ideas together. Suppose each country implements something called the T3 tax, whose U.S. dollar rate is set equal to 20 times the three-year moving average of the RSS and UAH estimates of the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly, assessed per tonne of carbon dioxide, updated annually. Based on current data, the tax would be US$4.70 per ton, which is about the median mainstream carbon-dioxide-damage estimate from a major survey published in 2005 by economist Richard Tol. The tax would be implemented on all domestic carbon-dioxide emissions, all the revenues would be recycled into domestic income tax cuts to maintain fiscal neutrality, and there would be no cap on total emissions.

This tax rate is low, and would yield very little emissions abatement. Global-warming skeptics and opponents of greenhouse-abatement policy will like that. But would global-warming activists? They should -- because according to them, the tax will climb rapidly in the years ahead.

The IPCC predicts a warming rate in the tropical troposphere of about double that at the surface, implying about 0.2C to 1.2C per decade in the tropical troposphere under greenhouse-forcing scenarios. That implies the tax will climb by $4 to $24 per tonne per decade, a much more aggressive schedule of emission fee increases than most current proposals. At the upper end of warming forecasts, the tax could reach $200 per tonne of CO2 by 2100, forcing major carbon-emission reductions and a global shift to non-carbon energy sources.

Global-warming activists would like this. But so would skeptics, because they believe the models are exaggerating the warming forecasts. After all, the averaged UAH/ RSS tropical troposphere series went up only about 0.08C over the past decade, and has been going down since 2002. Some solar scientists even expect pronounced cooling to begin in a decade. If they are right, the T3 tax will fall below zero within two decades, turning into a subsidy for carbon emissions.

More at Newsbusters.

It sounds logical enough. A carbon emissions tax offset by income tax cuts. If anthropogenic global warming continues to increase, the carbon tax will increase accordingly. If, as many suspect, man-made global warming is greatly exaggerated and temperatures do not rise as predicted, the tax will remain low or even disappear if temperatures cool.

Let's see if this proposal has any legs.

Kyoto: It's like your RRSP

Kyoto goals are more strict than we've been told, experts say:

It's well known by Kyoto insiders that the target all federal parties talk about -- roughly a 26-per-cent cut in carbon emissions by 2012 -- is just the start. It would leave the country far behind its legal requirements.

The single most important part of the protocol is a twist that's seldom mentioned in public: Canada's target is a five-year average, not a goal to reach by the end of the Kyoto period.

"We can't just hit the target once at the end of the period," said economics professor Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph. "If we are 100 megatonnes over in the first year, we have to be 100 megatonnes under the target another year to offset the first year."

Kyoto measures carbon emissions in megatonnes, or millions of tonnes.

Canada's average emissions over Kyoto's full 2008-2012 measuring period must be 26-per-cent below today's level.

The country hasn't made any reduction yet, and the Jan. 1 start of the Kyoto period is just 271 days away. Carbon emissions have risen steadily for years.

This means that by 2012, Canada must reach reduction levels far deeper than 26 per cent, so the average cut will be 26 per cent.

It's like your RRSP, Mr. McKitrick said. If you don't contribute in the early years, you'll have to contribute much more in the final years to compensate.

Meanwhile, A new poll finds most Canadians are in favour of Canada meeting its Kyoto targets -- just as long as it doesn't cost them anything.

Climate Change Power List

The Financial Post published today what it calls a Climate Change Power List, naming the top 20 people who wield the most influence in Canada. The expected players are there, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper at #1, Kooky Suzuki at #2, the current leader of the Liberal Party of Canada at #4, Environment Minister John Baird at #7, and Financial Post editor and climate change skeptic Terence Corcoran at #20.

Here's what they had to say about Dr. Ross McKitrick, who was placed at #9:

Ross McKitrick, Economist, University of Guelph

Sphere of Influence: Climate-change skeptics
Objective: To challenge conventional scientific wisdom on global warming

Ross McKitrick is best-known for his critique of climatologist Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, which purports to show how global temperatures have spiked in recent decades, after 1,000 years of relative stability. McKitrick argues that the graph — featured prominently in UN reports and the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — is based on faulty data. He says that global warming is not yet a scientific certainty.

A senior fellow at the Fraser Institute think-tank, McKitrick has been widely attacked because he is not a scientist. But he is also a frequent commentator in major media and has appeared before parliamentary committees.

His book Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming, co-authored with mathematician Christopher Essex, was runner-up for the 2002 Donner prize in public policy writing.

Shattered Consensus

Four Authors Discuss Their New Book on Climate Science

Shattered Consensus consists of nine expert essays on global warming, covering the earth's temperature history and disparities between what has been predicted about climate change and what has actually been observed. On February 24, 2006, four of the authors discussed their chapters and the meaning of their research for climate science and public policy.

Dr. Oliver W. Frauenfeld is a Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences Division of Cryospheric and Polar Processes, University of Colorado, and a Contributing Author to the IPCC Working Group 1 Fourth Assessment Report. Slides from his presentation are found here.

Dr. Pat Michaels is Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and the Virginia State Climatologist. He is the author of four books on climate change, including Meltdown and Satanic Gases. Slides from his presentation are found here.

Dr. David R. Legates is the Director of the Center for Climatic Research and an Associate Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware. Slides from his presentation are found here.

Dr. Ross McKitrick is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, B.C. Slides from his presentation are found here.

Also contributing to Shattered Consensus are Sallie L. Baliunas, Robert C. Balling Jr., Randall S. Cerveny, John Christy, Robert E. Davis, Eric S. Posmentier and Willie Soon.

From the George C. Marshall Institute.

McKitrick on CBC

Dr. Ross McKitrick appeared on Politics with Don Newman on CBC today. If you missed it, the video should be available here after 7:00 pm tonight.

h/t: Just Right

Independent Summary for Policymakers released today

The Fraser Institute has released its Independent Summary for Policymakers.

News Release:

London, UK - An independent review of the latest United Nations report on climate change shows that the scientific evidence about global warming remains uncertain and provides no basis for alarmism.

In 2006, independent research organization The Fraser Institute convened a panel of 10 internationally-recognized experts to read the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report and produce an Independent Summary for Policymakers. The result, released today, is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of the science. This independent summary has been reviewed by more than 50 scientists around the world and their views on its balance and reliability are tabulated for readers.

While a lot of effort goes into producing the large IPCC reports, its complex message is often obscured by its accompanying Summary for Policymakers. That summary report does not come from the scientific community. Instead it is developed through political negotiations by unnamed bureaucrats from various governments. Critics of past summaries point out they downplay and gloss over areas of uncertainty and data limitations,” said Dr. Ross McKitrick, coordinator of the independent review and senior fellow with The Fraser Institute.

The debate around climate change has become highly politicized and alarmist. So we asked a team of highly qualified scientists to look at the IPCC report and produce a summary that they felt communicates the real state of knowledge. Our intent with this document is to allow people to see for themselves what is known and what remains highly uncertain within climate change science.”

Read the Executive Summary or download the full Independent Summary for Policymakers.

Independent Summary for Policymakers

A Policy Briefing of another sort, presented by the Fraser Institute.

(LON, UK) Climate Change Without the Spin: An Independent Summary for Policymakers of the New IPCC Report

Date: February 5, 2007

Speaker(s):
Dr. Ross McKitrick
Senior Fellow, The Fraser Institute

Event Brochure: IPCC Flyer.pdf

Event Outline:
On February 2, 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its Fourth Assessment Report on the science of climate change. In past reports, most attention has been focused on the Summary for Policymakers, a negotiated text that is not produced by the scientific community itself, and which has been criticized for inadequately communicating the complexity and uncertainty of the underlying science.

Last year, the Fraser Institute convened a panel of internationally-recognized expert scientists to produce an Independent Summary for Policymakers (ISPM), a detailed and balanced overview of the new IPCC report. The ISPM has since been reviewed by approximately 50 scientists around the world.

The ISPM is not a critique of or a response to the IPCC report. Instead, it aims to make the science that went into the underlying report accessible to the general public. It is, in essence, a summary of climate change science written and reviewed by scientists.

Please join several of the ten co-authors of the ISPM, along with a number of authorities in the area of climate change policy, for the global launch and presentation of the Independent Summary for Policymakers. This document will be concurrently distributed globally through the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Network.

***Confirmed VIP Guests***
Lord Nigel Lawson
David Henderson, former Head, Economics and Statistics Department, OECD
Dr. Andrei Illarionov, former economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin

Note: Dr. McKitrick is co-author of Taken by Storm.