Firstly, I know. I’ve been bad. I’ve neglected this blog, on account of travel and work pressure. I hope to do a redesign and relaunch some time to make it easier to integrate this blog with my columns and Twitter activity.

That time is not now.

On The Daily Maverick, I recently wrote a column about “fracking” in the Karoo. It was, shall we say, explosive. It got hundreds of comments, many of which I tried to do justice with a reply. It took me four days to write the column, and another three — working 16-hour days — to keep up with the debate. Contrary to the allegations, I do not have the resources of Shell behind me. It’s just me.

However, since then, several posts have appeared challenging my views. Although I thought most of the points were mere rehashes of the great debate at The Daily Maverick, I did write a response to one of them. Since the M&G ThoughtLeader site does not permit comments longer than 250 words, and the author’s own blog doesn’t permit comments at all, some people have asked me to post my response elsewhere. So, here it is. It’s probably best to read them side-by-side:

Allow me to respond, point by point.

* I did not confuse the water use for exploration with total usage. I referred to the former because that is what the Havemann report objects to in calling for a total ban on exploration that could lead to hydraulic fracking. I was clear elsewhere that shale gas production regions typically account for 1.5% of local water use. I noted that this was not insignificant, especially in a dry region. I was also clear that I expect Shell to answer the question of where it will get this water, but that such a demand falls well short of banning drilling, now and forever.

* I did not state that we can trust Shell. What I said was that Shell has a motive not to give the public cause for complaints. I expect Shell to be held to its contractual commitments, just like anyone else.

* Regulatory capture can hardly be blamed on the companies that operate in the regulated space. It happens because of ill-conceived regulation, or outright corruption. Nowhere did I defend this.

* The precautionary principle logically contradicts itself, as I repeatedly stated in the comments to my column (which, despite their extraordinarily high number I kept replying to, as a matter of courtesy and responsibility). It is not possible to prove the absence of risk. Even if it were, not doing something because it might cause harm does not take into account the potential harm caused by not doing it. The precautionary principle says that the precautionary principle cannot be applied because we cannot know the risk of applying the precautionary principle. The point is: show a reasonable expectation of future harm, if you want to ban something. Citing lack of evidence for such harm as a cause to ban something would significantly delay or even block progress.

* If Bob says you stole his chocolate, and you say you didn’t, mere evidence that Bob no longer has his chocolate is not proof that you stole it. I’m sure most of us can see why the logic is perfectly fine.

* Vague allegations, without any specific evidence. Show the evidence.

* Noting that problems are not associated with hydraulic fracturing shows dishonesty, in that the objection is to “fracking”. If drilling is the problem, then say so, so we can argue honestly about the same thing. Of course, that risks having to face the fact that drilling is an even more ordinary activity, about which the risks are well-understood.

* The Environmental Protection Agency is not cited. In fact, doing so would be impossible, because all I said about it was that it would produce preliminary results in late 2012. (I did this to contrast Havemann’s rush job, and to suggest that it might be premature to call for a ban on all future exploration for shale gas.)

* I noted their objectives not to expose bias, but to show that their stated goals go well beyond expressing concern about specific risks. Yes, I’m ideologically a free-market advocate. My other opinions derive from this. I make no apologies for that.

* I attach little value to the greenhouse gas implications of shale gas drilling. Never mind that I don’t believe our own impact on climate change is alarming, but drilling for natural gas is hardly new, and the process against which the TKAG objects does nothing to increase the risk.

* On jobs, all I’d point out is that jobs created by market forces are sustainable. Those created by subsidies and handouts are not jobs, but charity for which everyone else pays tax.

Since you stopped using bullets, allow me to note what I placed in my postscript. I entirely support the right of Karoo farmers to make decisions about their own property. That they do not own their mineral rights, so that Shell does not have to negotiate with them and conclude binding contracts with all the guarantees and compensation clauses farmers might require is not the fault of farmers, nor of Shell, and certainly not of their technique for extracting shale gas. It is the fault of the government.

If you want to object to the powerlessness of Karoo farmers, aim your critique at the right target, and complain about the right problem.

Excuse the lack of formatting. I really am rather swamped at present, as interesting and important as this debate is.

I’ve been travelling, so my blog was not updated last week. It was an entertaining week, however. While I was chairing the highly informative ITWeb MobileBiz conference in Midrand, I was ambushed on Twitter by a fellow who took issue with my column on The Daily Maverick.

I thought the column in question was rather sweet and optimistic: Go ahead, have a baby.

This fellow begged to differ, so I wrote a response this week. It is long, and complete with plentiful citations to satisfy the critic. In a way, it is the serious, academic version of the same column: A glass half-full.

Last week’s column for The Daily Maverick was about how the news keeps getting better on the climate change front. The dominoes keep falling, and they appear to be gathering speed.

My previous columns on the subject of climate change prompted an extraordinary rant from a cognitive science student named Michael Meadon. Perhaps in pursuance of his research, he looked at my face and concluded that I’m not entitled to an opinion.

It is too tempting not to rebut. Read Meadon’s post first, then read on: Read the rest of this entry »

In a remarkable editorial over the weekend, Australian scientist David Evans renews his argument against government-mandated restrictions on carbon emissions, noting that there is little evidence to show they have anything to do with climate change.

If you’ve followed my sporadic coverage of climate change alarmism, you may recall him as a scientist who worked on carbon accounting for the Australian government, and changed his mind once he saw the evidence on which global warming alarmism was (or rather, was not) based.

Evans was one of the signatories of the open letter to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, on the occasion of the climate change junket in Bali, late last year. He was among several people who weren’t welcome. He has written a paper (link in PDF) in support of his position that CO₂ does not cause global warming, has written a more accessible alternative, and has also penned a remarkable confession: I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train.

His editorial is worth reading in full, but here are some key points:

When I started that job [of writing Australia’s carbon accounting model] in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it. […]

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). […]

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

[…]

Until now the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn’t noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

[…]

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

[…]

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

Don’t expect any of this to make an ounce of difference. To turn a typical alarmist point against them, too many people are invested in the climate alarmism lobby. Some merely for its value in obtaining public money for research, but others, like Al Gore, quite literally. Politicians love the idea of climate change, because it gives them at once an opportunity to appear saintly and selfless, and an excuse to impose measures that increase their power and reward their political benefactors. Many companies buy into it because it gives them marketing collateral, and allows them to gain a slice of a “green” products pie that is expect to top $688 billion by 2010 (link in PDF), not to mention all the spinoffs from trade in an entirely new class of assets — carbon credits — simply conjured out of thin air by governments. The media loves it because, well, scary stories sell magazines.

Expect David Evans to be attacked over everything except the substance of his arguments, by all these people with undeniable vested interests of their own.

But he is right: if climate alarmists demand that the world drastically limit its use of fossil energy, and significantly increase the cost of production — which is the stuff that provide people with food, housing and healthcare, and lift the poor out of poverty — the onus is on them to prove why he is wrong and their solution is unavoidably necessary. And even if he is wrong, they should show why there is no alternative solution to large-scale, invasive government regulation, such as relying on technological innovation and free markets to solve whatever problems people might encounter as a result of global warming.

Their plan is a staggering price to pay for mere precaution, especially when it appears that their fears are based on little more than elaborate speculation. In fact, the precautionary principle — that self-contradictory rule to which environmentalists so often appeal — itself cautions against their grand, megalomaniacal, but ultimately vain schemes to change the climate. But it won’t stop them trying to run your life, scare your children and rob you blind.

Update: Fixed a missing close quote that cut half the paragraph starting with, “Don’t expect any of this to make an ounce of difference.” Proof-reading is under-rated and sadly neglected, on occasion. My apologies.

On the advice of a regular reader, and because I’ve been delinquent in posting recently, I thought I’d post a snippet I sent to a mailing list in response to someone who declared: “We’ve caused thousands of species to go exctint!” or “We’re facing a mass extinction!” or some such hysterical catastrophist trope.

They asked, “Do scientists just make this stuff up, you think?”

The answer, of course, is: “Yes, they do.”

To illustrate, I put together this summary, extracted from Bjørn Lomborg’s classic 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, about whether species are going extinct hand-over-fist, and if not, why some people might think so.

First, the data (sources given at the end):

             #species  #ext*  % ext  #p/a    % p/a*

Vertebrates     47000   321   0.683   0.8  0.00171
Mollusks       100000   235   0.235   0.6  0.00059
Crustaceans      4000     9   0.225   0.0  0.00056
Insects      >1000000    98   0.010   0.2  0.00002
Vasc. plants   250000   396   0.158   1.0  0.00040

Total        ~1600000  1033   0.065   2.6  0.00016
Excl. insects  401000   961   0.240   2.4  0.00060

* Total documented extinctions since 1600AD

These are known species, and documented extinctions. The latter certainly under-report reality, though it isn’t possible to say by how much. That most obviously appears to be the case with insects, an outlier in the data above, so I built a second totals line excluding insects. To give some idea of scale, the 0.24% of all non-insect species to have gone extinct in the last 400 years doesn’t even compare with previous extinctions. The famous dinosaur extinction claimed over 40% of all species. In some 50 separately identified extinction periods, more than 10% of species were wiped out. So losing 1 in 400 is pretty mild, as extinctions go.

One might expect that with mammals, whose extinction rate is the highest by a large margin, the documented extinction rate is much closer to reality. Not many mammals escape our attention.

For mammals (a subcategory of vertebrates in the table above) we have 4500 species, 110 extinctions, which is 2.444% of the total, and 0.00611% per annum.

The total number of species, as well as the actual extinction rates among them, are pure speculation. Now it’s not exactly reasonable to extrapolate from mammals, but let’s do so, to develop a worst-case scenario for all species. Then we get an extinction rate of 0.006% per annum for all species. It is possible that some non-mammal species go extinct at a higher rate, but I don’t have any data either to confirm or deny this, so let’s work with 0.006% per annum.

This is high, but certainly not catastrophic. (Whether it is too high, getting worse, or what, if anything, we should do about it, is beyond the scope of this post.)

Al Gore, in his 1993 book Earth in the Balance, says “40,000 species go extinct per year”. Problem is, he is exaggerating by at least a factor of four. Even if he weren’t exaggerating, he performs a trick well known to those who lie with statistics: he fails to mention the denominator of that fraction. 40,000 of 100,000 is a lot. 40,000 of a million is not a lot. 40,000 of 10 million is negligible. So if our estimate of 1.6 million total known species is correct, even Al Gore’s exaggeration is somewhere between not a lot and negligible.

But if that number is wrong, where did he get it? The answer is that he got it from a British ecologist, Norman Myers. And where did Norman Myers get it? He made it up.

No, really, he made it up! Pulled it out of thin air.

Here’s how. As long ago as 1979, he wrote that until 1900, one species went extinct every four years; since 1900, one species per year went extinct. So far so good.

He then referenced a conference from five years earlier, which had “hazarded a guess” of an extinction rate of 100 per year at present, as the “overall extinction rate among all species, whether known to science or not”.

That hazardous guess seems way out of proportion to the rate Myers accepted for the period 1900-1974, being suddenly 100 times higher with only global cooling and the oil crisis to blame. Even if it includes species not known to science, that’s a rather dramatic jump.

But not to Myers. He is underwhelmed and undaunted, and goes on: “Yet even this figure seems low. Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this man-handling of natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of 1 million species — a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average extinction rate of 40,000 species per year, or rather over 100 species per day.”

That’s it. That’s the totality of his argument. The lot. There’s no data, no citations, no research, no extrapolation from known facts, nothing. Just an assumption, pulled out of thin air, of a million extinctions in 25 years, which he then in wonderful circular fashion divides up to get an extinction rate 40,000 times higher than he himself says occurred in the first three-quarters of our century.

See the problem? That 40,000 number, which almost thirty years later seems to be “common knowledge”, because scientists and activists have stated it as fact, is an invention. Complete fiction. No bearing on reality whatsoever. But it’s scary! Woooo!

If we know about 1.6 million species, don’t you think we’d have noticed a million extinctions by now? I’ll bet most people can’t even cite, off the top of their heads, just a few examples of actual extinctions; let alone dig up a list of the tens or hundreds of thousands that would be indisputably on record if Al Gore and Norman Myers hadn’t been dead wrong. The irony of the newspaper headline above, 25 years after Norman Myers made up his million-in-25-years number, is the stuff a sub-editor lives for.

So when someone raises extinctions as this major catastrophe, I say, “people make this stuff up”. Not because I’m being argumentative, or because I’m being controversial, but because they really do make this stuff up.

(Source: Lomborg 2001, p250ff, citing among others Bailie and Groombridge, 1997, Walter and Gillett 1998, May et al, 1995:11, Reid 1992:56 and, of course, Myers 1979:5.)

Last week, the Financial Mail led with a lengthy cover story on the oil price and its implications for the South African economy. It contains some very enlightening facts, such as a chart which shows that for every ten units of fuel South Africa uses for a unit of production, the United Stats uses only nine, and both China and the world average operate more efficiently, at eight units. Ours is a much more energy-intensive economy than even the United States. (So why exactly there’s a windmill on the graphic is beyond me.)

Our consumption of oil since 1980 is up by 60%, compared to 20% in the US, and minus 20% in many European countries. In an energy intensive economy that actually grows (unlike, say, Europe), this is to be expected, and in itself is a positive sign. But the article is right to point out that both of these facts put us at a comparative disadvantage when global oil prices rise.

What the article neglects, however, it to consider consumption as a function of price, which in South Africa is controlled by the state. Our fuel, like our electricity, has been kept cheap compared to competing economies, which means that we can — or could, until recently — afford to favour energy over other resources such as time, labour, or high-technology, to drive production. (Much of this is because our fuel tax is comparatively low. Still 27% too high, of course, as pointed out in a previous post, but much less than in many other economies.)

What is disappointing is that instead of a focus on how businesses can reduce fuel as a component in production, or a discussion of price, price controls and how they might affect both suppliers and consumers, the article spends much of its time talking up the alarmist scenarios of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, known as ASPO. Price deregulation is relegated to a short sidebar by a different writer, which predictably notes that lifting price controls in a steeply rising market is likely to be a political non-starter.

ASPO is an outfit born out of “Peak Oil” alarmism, a group of assorted environmentalists, socialists, economic illiterates and special-interest lobbyists, who have been whingeing for decades about a looming peak in oil production. I’m pleased to see at least one oil company CEO, Tony Hayward of BP, has taken on ASPO president Kjell Aleklett, in a wager reminiscent of the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, on a similar subject: the scarcity of natural resources. Simon won that bet handily, and I’d urge Hayward to take Aleklett’s complaint about the low prize pot (or rather, barrel) at face value. Double up. Go all in. Maybe set something up so others can buy shares in the bet too.

Fair enough, the ASPO alarmists, headed in South Africa by one Simon Ratcliffe, have been asked to inform the Thabo Mbeki presidency’s scenario planning exercise about their whacky, apocalyptic prophesies, so perhaps their arguments deserve to be better known, lest they become deluded government policy. But one would expect a finance publication to be a little more critical in its assessment of ASPO’s claims.

The Peak Oil paranoiacs say that much of what they predicted appears to be coming to pass. Well, that’s not quite true. They predicted that we’d run out of oil and have a crisis. Or more accurately, that we’d reach a production peak and then have a crisis. Price never really featured in Peak Oil alarmism until the oil price began its most recent run-up, when it became a convenient “told you so” data point.

The obvious response to their argument has always been: it doesn’t really matter if we’re running out of underground oil, if it becomes more costly to exploit, or if Americans are too stupid to use their own underground oil resources.

If scarcity does not increase, the case is trivial. There’s no problem. If it does increase, however, prices will simply rise. If prices rise, consumers will be forced to become more efficient, and more uneconomical resources such as tar sands and alternative forms of energy will become more profitable. Canada’s vast shale oil deposits, previously hard or impossible to mine, are being exploited at full steam (if you’ll excuse the pun). Even at the current meagre recovery rate of about 10%, they are second only to Saudi Arabia in their bounty. If the extraction technology improves, they could double proven global oil reserves. Their exploitation became economical only recently, so this kind of expensive production wasn’t even considered by the Peak Oil doomsayers at the time. Their simplistic argument, if I recall correctly, went something along the lines of “if it takes more than the equivalent of a barrel of oil to extract a barrel, it cannot be economically extracted”. Better technology, higher prices, economies of scale, or other forms of energy, never entered the static, linear systems in their muddled little heads. But then, perhaps that’s because they won’t profit from finding and producing energy. I sure hope they’ve sold their shares in the stupid companies that are flocking to Canada for a piece of the action.

So, the price mechanism works its magic once again, and the “crisis” is a non-event. Scarcity is the very reason the price mechanism exists; without scarcity, it couldn’t exist. Price has always managed to distribute scarce resources to where they are most productive. It has always motivated people to find alternatives, or find better, more efficient ways of doing things.

But that’s not what the ASPO people say. They posit two “scenarios”. The first is “business as usual”, in which all of us are complete idiots and sit around ignoring scarcity and rising prices until we starve or kill each other (or both). As if we aren’t smart enough to economise or seek alternatives. Every day, you can hear people talking of ways to save fuel, including fairly extreme measures like moving closer to work, or working from home. Why would fuel be something unique? Why would consumers be insensitive to price rises until there is “a big oil shock”?

Shocks are only likely to occur in regulated markets, where producers and consumers are not able to adjust to surpluses or shortages, because of artificial restrictions, prices, taxes or other market distortions imposed by the state. Last year, the oil price took a breather, to the consternation of market watchers, who found it hard to comprehend a market so badly distorted by regulation, subsidies and outright extortion by governments.

The other ASPO scenario is wholesale restructuring of the economy, central-planning style. A vast web of quotas, rations, subsidies and taxes should be created, all with draconian legislative force. Combined with “a huge investment” in energy austerity and alternative energy sources, this, ASPO says, will solve all our problems and make us live happily ever after. Why it considers expensive fuel a “crisis”, but shrugs off a “huge investment” as just some bitter medicine we’ll have to swallow, is never quite explained. And what happens if our “huge investment” turns out to be misdirected, is never considered. No, the socialist panacea prescribed by Dr ASPO will cure all our ills. After all, the government knows what is best, and can make our commercial choices for us, since we’re too stupid to look after ourselves.

Let’s assume the underlying assertion that supplies are on an irreversible, long-term, downward trend are true. They may well be (beyond the trivial fact that no resource is infinite), though that is far from the only reason prices are rising, and anyone who makes firm predictions on when critical depletion would make oil unviable as a source of energy is either brave or stupid or both. But that oil will one day be too expensive to profitably extract is not an unreasonable expectation. That this will inevitably be followed by “societal and economic disintegration”, however, as Ratcliffe once told MiningMX.com, does not follow.

The fact that ASPO’s preachers make only two prophesies is very revealing. Both are extreme. One is designed to put the fear of god into policy makers and the voting public, so they’ll buy the other as their only salvation. ASPO looks suspiciously like a lobby for all those companies that today can’t make an honest buck selling alternative energy solutions or more economical equipment. I hope the government treats them with as much skepticism as it would treat the oil industry: as just another pressure group, lobbying for preferential treatment for their vested interests.

If the presidency accepts ASPO’s doomsday scenarios as likely, and formulates policy accordingly, I sure hope you’re in on Tony Hayward’s bet. Spare cash will come in handy in a socialist utopia.

The fairest and surest way to resolve this “crisis” is simply to set the market free. Deregulate prices, even if they rise as a result, and even if they put inefficient companies out of business. People will make a plan. They always have. The world didn’t end when the horse became obsolete, or electricity replaced gas. It became better, healthier, more productive. Let alternative solutions to high-priced fuel fight it out on a level playing field, where nobody is forced to use anyone’s solution, no solution is unfairly advantaged or held back by subsidies or taxes, and no nanny-state restrictions are in play. May the best solution win.

If you really care about global warming, there are a whole bunch of things you probably think you shouldn’t be doing that you should, and vice versa. The environmental religion of the modern age, in which an angry Gaia will punish us for our sinful ways, but we can redeem ourselves by sacrifice and self-denial, has spawned a mythology of classical proportions. The problem is that many of those myths, spouted as accepted wisdom by an uncritical media and special-interest activists, appear to be just plain wrong.

Wired magazine goes to the actual science — remember science? — and makes some proposals for those who really care about climate change, and think not only that reducing carbon emissions will actually help, but delude themselves that it is possible to reduce them enough to make even a little dent in anticipated warming.

Here is its list, each of which is explored further in a separate article:

• Live in Cities: Urban Living Is Kinder to the Planet Than the Suburban Lifestyle
• A/C Is OK: Air-Conditioning Actually Emits Less C02 Than Heating
• Organics Are Not the Answer: Surprise! Conventional Agriculture Can Be Easier on the Planet
• Farm the Forests: Old-Growth Forests Can Actually Contribute to Global Warming
• China Is the Solution: The People’s Republic Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Hardware
• Accept Genetic Engineering: Superefficient Frankencrops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work: Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory
• Embrace Nuclear Power: Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy
• Used Cars — Not Hybrids: Don’t Buy That New Prius! Test-Drive a Used Car Instead
• Prepare for the Worst: Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

It doesn’t say all of these are good ideas, of course. There are excellent reasons to slash-and-burn overgrown, bug-infested jungles, to plant more productive crops, sure. But there are also plenty excellent reasons not to cut down old-growth forests. However, if your policy goal is to reduce carbon emissions, which seems to be the sole fetish of environmentalists and policy makers, then all of these points, including razing the rainforests, are valid.

Meanwhile, the US Congress is about to debate a cap-and-trade scheme that will vastly expand government powers and revenue, cost consumers trillions in bureaucratic red tape, tax and lost economic growth, and achieve very little indeed. In welcoming an open floor debate on these mushy measures, the Wall Street Journal writes:

The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John Warner are calling “landmark legislation.” They’re too modest. Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.

Ouch. Nothing like a fat bureaucracy to infringe on the liberty and prosperity of the people. Nothing like a first-country moral crusade to give developing-country leaders ideas to foist upon their long-suffering people. Nothing like an overbearing state to hold down the development of the poor.

As if $130 oil isn’t reason enough to consider more fuel-efficient cars, reduce energy usage in industry and invest in alternative energy sources.

While we wait for this legislative disaster, however, would the disciples of St Al please report to the consistory, so they can get cracking on Wired’s measures?

(Hat tip: Climate Skeptic.)

The decision to add the polar bear to the list of threatened species, on the basis that global warming threatens its habitat, is dangerous, and it’s going to hit Americans — and anyone who buys American products or relies on American investment capital — in their pockets. Not only trade, but similar decisions made by other countries or by international bodies, will spread this damage worldwide.

Environmentalists failed to convince the US legislature to enact draconian new laws to enforce costly measures whose benefits are at best speculative. Having failed to make their case, they fall back on what appears to be an innocent and even noble regulatory decision. They know listing the polar bear as threatened opens the door for litigation to enforce their ideas about carbon dioxide emissions on others, on the basis that any such emissions contribute to the destruction of the polar bear’s habitat.

Bloomberg’s Kevin Hassett says “this action will almost surely go down in history as the turning point in the global warming debate”. In an editorial titled Polar Bear Ruling to Bring Tsunami of Lawsuits, he writes:

Environmental groups are already preparing legal challenges. Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity told USA Today last week that the Endangered Species Act requires agencies now to address greenhouse gases, and warned that “we can and will go to court to enforce the law.”

Not only big companies will feel it. In theory, they could sue you for the car you drive, or the air-con you install in your home. And you won’t have a big company’s crack squad of expensive lawyers to protect you from the attack dogs of the green left. In short, this is a big deal. A very big deal.

At least we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that these superior beings (environmentalists, not polar bears) are obviously smarter than the rest of us, and care more too. So perverting the judiciary to achieve their political aims is a small thing when they’re saving the world from certain destruction. In fact, perhaps we should start a Fascist Party, so they can protect us from ourselves.

The poor panda, which really is endangered, had no chance. It was never, ever, going to be this profitable to the cause.

Well, that’s it then. The Al Gore Inc special interest lobby has won another victory. The US has declared the polar bear to be an endangered a threatened species. So from today, global waffling alarmists can cite the doomed polar bear in support of their doctrinaire opposition to energy production, industrial projects and economic development.

Care to make further strides in reducing poverty, increasing life expectancy, growing prosperity and improving quality of life? Sorry, poor pretty polar bear cubs with small plaintive voices will stand astride history yelling, “Stop!” This is what, these days, they call “progressive”.

Yesterday’s press release was to the point:

Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne today announced that he is accepting the recommendation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing is based on the best available science, which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future, the standard established by the ESA for designating a threatened species.

I’ve pointed out in considerable detail before, polar bears should not be listed by any reasonable interpretation of the various criteria that apply. The motives for listing them as endangered threatened — opposition to oil exploration and pathological fear of climate change — are also quite explicitly stated by the green lobby. The only possible scientific reason for listing them (the reason cited by Kempthorne) is wild speculation about future changes in their habitat, combined with the assumption that polar bears won’t bother to adapt to their environment, if it did indeed change.

But here’s what’s really happening to the population:

(Studies, in chronological order, are by: IUCN, Schuhmacher, DeMaster & Stirling, Nowak & Paradiso, Watson, Garner, Truett & Johnson, Schliebe, Lunn et al, IUCN, IUCN. Background photograph is by Steve Amstrup of the US Geological Service.)

Alarmists have a nasty habit of citing the high estimate in 1996, and the low estimate in 2006, to make their case for being alarmed. This technique, of carefully selecting time intervals to “prove” a dubious point by noting changes from an outlier, is a very common and simple means of lying with statistics. Given these studies, the more honest interpreter would use the longest available data series along with the most conservative estimates, to guess at a doubling in the population in the last 40 years. Or, if you prefer, you can assume the early research for technical reasons to be incomplete and inaccurate, and argue that the population appears stable at worst. However, that would appear to be unnecessarily pessimistic, as this article from last year points out:

“There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a … lot more bears,” biologist Mitchell Taylor told the Nunatsiaq News of Iqaluit in the Arctic territory of Nunavut. Earlier, in a long telephone conversation, Dr. Taylor explained his conviction that threats to polar bears from global warming are exaggerated and that their numbers are increasing. He has studied the animals for the Nunavut government for two decades.

Native wisdom, usually treated with great reverence by the environmentalist left, is undoubtedly a crock of self-serving lies in this case:

Inuit hunters make their own estimates of the polar bear population based on the number of animals they encounter on their travels. Taylor says scientists have ignored the anecdotal evidence of the Inuit, who say bear numbers were rising. Inuits also report more polar bears wandering into their towns and villages, where they are a threat to children.

“I’m pretty sure the numbers [of polar bears] are climbing,” says Pitselak Pudlat, an Inuit hunter and manager of the Aiviq Hunters and Trappers Organization at Cape Dorset, Baffin Island. “During the winter there were polar bears coming into town.”

(To be fair, note the chart in my earlier post, which shows growing, stable and declining populations.)

I reckon if the environmentalists are really so concerned about tiny areas of industrial activity in the vast wildernesses of the Arctic, they should just ship the fluffy little maneaters to the Antarctic. It’s uninhabited by people, full of nutritious food, and the ice is getting thicker, over there.

This suggestion is, admittedly, not as funny as the pathetic caveat Kempthorne, having caved to the pressure groups, adds to his press release:

In making the announcement, Kempthorne said, “I am also announcing that this listing decision will be accompanied by administrative guidance and a rule that defines the scope of impact my decision will have, in order to protect the polar bear while limiting the unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.”

Good luck, Mr Kempthorne. You have a polar bear’s chance in hell. Perhaps you can get a job with Al Gore’s investment company, though. The self-serving capitalists of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers certainly owe you one. Maybe he’ll let you be a roadie on his next great rock star tour.

Update: The term “endangered” is a catch-all term (as in “Endangered Species Act”), but also indicates a particular classification, different from “threatened”. I have read the US Endangered Species Act (and its IUCN counterpart), and should have known to be less careless with these terms. Corrected where necessary.

Every entrepreneur that’s in the business of making something new or better would love to get government subsidies to help them “reach economies of scale”, or “pay for the social benefit of being green”, or some such thing. Of course they would. Government intervention can reduce the risk of innovation, and can even force customers to buy your product whether they like it or not. Such subsidies are fundamentally unjust, however, because in effect, taxpayers end up paying for the research and carrying the risk, without being able to share in the entrepreneur’s profits should he succeed. I’d also like to do business on those terms. After all, the only cost of such a subsidy is a pledged vote. It would put a floor below my losses, and boost my potential profits, all at some other sucker’s expense. Nice. And that sucker can’t even argue, because tax is the sole remaining debt for which people still get thrown in prison.

This Cato Institute paper from 2005 explains the problem neatly:

The current debate about U.S. oil policy is equally enlightened. It is dominated by a special-interest lobby whose primary interest is to enrich automakers and alternative-fuel producers, and by journalists whose enthusiasm for the green agenda has clouded their understanding of basic economics.

My question is, when a private organisation raises a prize purse, and the contenders look like this, who needs government subsidies anyway?

(Click on any of the images for the relevant Popular Mechanics page.)

I haven’t looked into the economics of each car, because that’s not my problem. The Tesla Roadster, for one, has already proven perfectly competitive and very, very desirable. All that’s required is an investor with his own money to stake on the notion that a market might exist. Governments are not only singularly unsuited to determine the latter, but have no right to gamble taxpayer money on it.

So welcome back to the glory days of the industrial revolution, when ingenuity, risk and free market capitalism built the modern world. And thanks to the X-Prize Foundation for demonstrating that the economics of human action and progress is alive and kicking.

PS: Prescient typo, perhaps, on www.tesla.com? “The associated domain name has been reserved by a GANDI’s customer and parked as unsued.”

The Australian, a newspaper in, well, Oz, reports that global warming appears to have stopped in 1998, that 2007 saw a 0.7°C drop in temperature, and that sunspot activity suggests we may be entering a period of global cooling again. Despite the mass hysteria at Al Gore’s hot air concerts.

Sorry to ruin the fun, but the ice age cometh

[…] Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously. […]

Then a regular reader (hat tip: Hard Rain) sent me a post by Tim Blair, an Australian blogger, which saved me half the trouble. He covers the subject more than just well, and includes a reference to my favourite¹ Czech physicist, Luboš Motl. Lumo, as he signs his posts, noted that despite what the media believes sells well on climate change (panic! doom!), the Amazon.com bestseller list begs to differ.

Lumo also has an interesting titbit on Al Gore’s film. Remember those ice cliffs that he waxed so lyrical about? When he almost got tears in his eyes over their spectacular beauty, and the thought that one day, they might be gone? The producers of the alarmist blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow must be proud. After all, they made the computer-generated images.

I have often said (though I’m not sure whether I’ve written) that by 2030 or so we’ll all be worried about the next ice age. Warming appears to have reached a peak in 1998, and solar activity appears to be heading for a new low. As the Australian (article, not blogger) suggests, solar output is more closely correlated to temperatures measured on earth than atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, which anyway seem to be an effect of global warming, not a cause. Solar activity also accounts for the strange up-down-up temperature trend (despite steadily rising carbon dioxide) of the 20th century, as well as for the 1000-year temperature maxima and minima that Michael Mann tried to erase for the benefit of the UN IPCC.

This point about the influence of the sun on climate (well duh!) is made in several books on the subject, and is summarised well in The Great Global Warming Swindle, an excellent polemic made for Channel 4 in Britain last year. (You can buy it on DVD, or if you’re lucky download it from Google Video. It’s well worth watching, if you haven’t yet seen it.)

It would seem that the ice age alarmism is starting already, just as global warming alarmism started just about when Newsweek published its infamous cooling panic story in 1975. Pity Newsweek recanted in 2006. Upon publishing a story by Sharon Begley on the global warming “denial machine”, for “Newsweek Project Green”, the editor wrote:

Our story is not a piece of lefty cant. […] In 2040, will the editor of NEWSWEEK hold up this week’s issue as an alarmist and discredited report in the tradition of 1975’s “global cooling” story? One can hope, for that would mean America and the rest of the world had reversed the effects of warming so quickly that climate change will seem as rare and remote as polio. But I fear our successors will find that our concerns were the right ones, and that we were on the safest of scientific ground this week. Denying reality does not make it go away. Facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things.

No, it didn’t take until 2040. It took just a couple of weeks, before this story itself was shredded by an editorial which described it as a “moral crusade”, “self-righteous indignation”, a “vast oversimplification” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading”. And that was just Newsweek’s self-criticism. Guess they should have stuck to their global cooling guns in the first place.

Good thing they call it “climate change” now, so the media can sensationalise, we can panic, and bureaucrats and activists can claim our money, no matter what happens.

Update: After all that, I forgot to add the link right at the top of the post, to The Australian. Fixed now.

1. True, I don’t think I know more than one. [↩]

There’s a ton of hype over the crisis in food prices. Apparently, food is too expensive. One would think this constitutes a “price signal”, but no, whenever something is too expensive or too cheap, NGO activists, special-interest lobbyists and populist media argue that “government must do something”. This is untrue as often as it is true that “government must stop doing something”.

In this case, it could probably stop slashing and burning our food.

I argued some of the reasons for food inflation in a previous post, and noted in particular that biofuel subsidies are perverse incentives, and eliminating them is the first answer to the misguided, knee-jerk question about what government can do. (The second is to drop all other tariffs, levies and subsidies, first on agriculture, and then on fuel, which constitutes a major input cost for producers.)

South Africa has a national biofuels strategy that is barely out of its diapers, complete with taxpayer-funded subsidies, imminent fuel-composition mandates and government-owned shares in private companies. (The company I have in mind, in which the government took a 25% stake in 2005, has been too busy spending taxpayer money to bother constructing a website.) So that first answer will probably be the last to be considered by the motley crew of interventionists, statists, socialists and marxists that populate our government. Reflection, review and self-criticism aren’t among their strong points.

Let’s see how the rich US is faring with biofuel. Two Washington Post writers today write of what they call ethanol’s failed promise (via Blue Crab Boulevard, which also has news of, wait for it, food shortages and panic hoarding, right there in the rich ol’ US of A). Neither of the writers lack in green credentials, and in fact, they cite environmental concerns and energy use before noting the impact on food supply:

These “food-to-fuel” mandates [i.e. ethanol subsidies and fuel composition laws] were meant to move America toward energy independence and mitigate global climate change. But the evidence irrefutably demonstrates that this policy is not delivering on either goal. In fact, it is causing environmental harm and contributing to a growing global food crisis…..

[…] It is now abundantly clear that food-to-fuel mandates are leading to increased environmental damage. First, producing ethanol requires huge amounts of energy — most of which comes from coal. Second, the production process creates a number of hazardous byproducts, and some production facilities are reportedly dumping these in local water sources. Third, food-to-fuel mandates are helping drive up the price of agricultural staples, leading to significant changes in land use with major environmental harm.

If the United States can’t afford ethanol subsidies, why on earth is South Africa hell-bent on burning its food stocks for fuel? When the biofuels strategy was first adopted, maize prices were low, and a surplus was being produced. Biofuel, said the government, would “soak up” that surplus. I’m no expert on the state of our agricultural markets or on prices of specific farm produce, but elementary economics suggests that if a surplus causes low prices, but farmers are not induced by the price mechanism to switch to different, more profitable crops, because they can sell their surplus to the government’s pet biofuels makers instead, this might explain why the supply of food is now under pressure.

Not to mention this business of “requiring huge amounts of energy”. My electricity will probably be cut two hours from now, for four hours. This can happen two or three times a week. What for? To produce ethanol? So we can run our cars on biofuel while the poor go hungry? So we can bash SUV owners for driving environmentally-friendly food-guzzlers?

Meanwhile, the UN too is dithering, waffling about how the Green Revolution that has halved world hunger since the 1960s was actually a failure, and we should all switch to organic farming. Yeah, that’ll help. Let the poor eat boutique honey. Douglas Southgate, of the Free Market Foundation, has a more elaborate take on its latest sustainable agriculture report (the link might only work for a week). And South Africa’s policy makers simply swallow what the green lobby and the UN wonks feed us.

Sometimes, the depth of insanity among government bureaucrats, whether American, South African, or global, is truly amazing. Slash and burn, guys. Go ahead. Good intentions never fed anyone, but then, hunger victims don’t vote.