CHURCHVILLE, VA—On the10^th birthday of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, officials are lamenting that the world has made little progress in meeting them. No one should be surprised.

Goal # 1 is to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent. The UN says this clearly within reach if there’s the “political will.” “Economic death-wish” would be a better term. The UN wants us to give up 85 percent of our energy system, and use expensive, erratic solar and wind that would do little to reduce greenhouse emissions.

More importantly, we haven’t gotten the massive warming so long predicted by the computer models. If James Hansen had been correct in his 1988 predictions to congress, the planet would already some 2 degrees warmer today than it is. Nor did the computer models predict the Pacific Ocean’s 2008 shift into a massive cool phase, which now looks likely to cool the planet for the next 30 years. Let’s wait for the current La Nina to fade and see what sort of actual warming cycle we are facing.

UN Goal #2:  Convert at least 40 percent of agricultural lands to ecologically sustainable production, with minimized use of agro-chemicals, and expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off and that maintain high levels of biodiversity.

Holy contradictions, Batman!

The most deadly risk from pesticides is that Indian farmers will use them to commit suicide when they can’t pay their debts. Such suicides account for the vast majority of the 100,000 pesticide deaths per year. Accidental ingestion is the other biggie.

Meanwhile, the weeds, bedbugs, mosquitoes and viral crop diseases continue to mutate and proliferate. The chemical companies only make money if their pesticides can safely be approved for use—and suppress pests.

A 2007 University of Michigan study claimed organic farming could produce all the food the world will need, by getting nitrogen from green manure crops. Unfortunately the study overestimated the nitrogen such green manure crops could contribute to food production by at least three-fold. Across the developing world, the crop plants remain starved for nitrogen, and Africa is headed for a truly massive Dust Bowl with accompanying famine.

The UN says it wants “expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off.”  No-till farming is now being used on millions of hectares of vulnerable lands around the world, cutting soil erosion by up to 95 percent, and virtually eliminating runoff. But the system can’t work without herbicides—which the UN wants to ban.

Finally, claims of impending biodiversity losses are now becoming fashionable again as the global warming scare wanes. A decade ago, I estimated high-yield farming had saved about 7 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for more low-yield crops, about the land area of South America. Stanford University recently concluded high-yield farming has saved 6.6 million square miles of wildlife, about the land area of Russia. By far the biggest thing we can do to save biodiversity is to double the yields on the existing cropland—using inputs the UN wants to ban.

The only goal offered in the UN Millennium goals that might work is #4:  Reduce average animal protein intake among rich people by 20 percent. I’m not sure eating somewhat less meat would hurt us rich people, but the UN needs to revisit its math. Livestock eat huge amounts of stuff humans can’t digest—grass, cottonseed hulls, citrus rinds, rice straw. Along with whatever high-yield corn escapes becoming ethanol. The ecological gains from Meatless Fridays are likely to be as ephemeral as the environmental gains we’re supposedly getting from corn ethanol and Jimmy Carter’s solar panels on the White House roof.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC,  is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

President Obama just killed the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility—and with it any realistic chance of actually slashing U.S. carbon emissions without massive consumer costs. Instead of more nuclear energy, he’s putting our energy future in the shaky basket with wind, solar, and biofuels. It’s a recipe for disappointment and disaster.

 

Despite more than $13 billion and 22 years ensuring that Yucca was a safe, long-term nuclear storage, Obama’s energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, told the senate the site is no longer an option. After all, it’s in Harry Reid’s state, and Harry doesn’t want it.   

 

Will Obama leave our children powerless? 

 

He just promised that the U.S. would “double the amount of energy from renewable sources within three years.” But Obama, as Stan Jakuba noted in the Energy Tribune, “should know that that’s not possible.” In fact, over the past decade, renewables declined slightly as a share of our total energy.

 

Currently, less than seven percent of our energy comes from “renewables.” Two thirds of that comes from hydroelectric dams and wood, and the Greens want to tear out existing dams, not build new ones. Nor will they allow the chain-sawing of more forests. Ethanol is already gobbling up one third of our nation’s corn crop for its one percent energy—and doubling that will redouble food prices. Cellulosic ethanol is years away from practical reality and still faces the shortage of cropland.

 

We’d therefore need a ten-fold expansion of solar, wind, and geothermal. That’s more windmills, solar panels, and geothermal plants in three years than we’ve installed in the past 30!

 

It gets worse: both need fossil or nuclear power plants to cover for them when they’re down, which is most of the time. Solar provides power about half the time, wind only about 15 to 30 percent of the time. That’s why Denmark, the global leader in wind, has had to keep its fossil turbines turning.

 

That leaves only one hope for cost-effective base-load electricity in the U.S.—natural gas from shale. Technology (human ingenuity) has come to our aid again, in the nick. Massive new gas wells are tapping the enormous shale-gas reserves under north Texas’ Barnett formation, Louisiana’s Haynesfield shale, and the Marcellus formation that runs from New York through West Virginia. Shale boosted our natural gas output by 9 percent in 2007, even while drillers were pulling rigs to avoid dropping the price even lower than $5 per 1000/cu/ft.

 

The high-tech breakthroughs: computerized drills that can go sideways along the shale layers, and “frakking”—pumping water and sand into the gas wells to break the shale layers and wedge them open.

 

Though gas is a fossil fuel, it’s much cleaner than coal. Even Nancy Pelosi told “Meet that Press” last year that “I see in natural gas a clean, cheap, alternative to fossil fuels”.

 

That leaves one hope: That Obama will not hit our stumbling economy with a carbon tax. Either cap-and-trade or an outright carbon tax will hit all consumers hard and they are designed to do so. Their purpose is to drive all carbon sources from our economy, including natural gas.  

 

Never mind that the lack of global warming since 1998—and the sharp drop in global temperatures since 2006—clearly show that the earth’s climate is not strongly linked to CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. The CO₂/temperature correlation since 1860 is 22 percent while the sunspot index correlation 79 percent. Now, the Pacific Ocean has entered a cool phase, and these coolings have historically lasted 25–30 years. Europe has accepted no binding carbon limits; Australia has announced a tiny 5 percent reduction target.  

 

Obama? We’ve written that only a fool would impose high energy taxes during a massive recession, while temperatures are declining. Only a fool—or a heedless ideologue.

 

Sources:

 

Stan Jakuba, Energy Tribune, “Obama’s Stumble: Wind Power” March 6, 2009.

Data source: EIA, U.S. Dept. or Energy; www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=1390

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

ALEX AVERY is the Director of Research and Education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. He regularly writes and speaks about agricultural, food safety, regulatory and global population issues. His book, The Truth about Organic Foods is rapidly changing the debate about the future of farming and food.

By:  Dennis T. Avery

Nuclear power and genetically engineered rice are set to help rescue the world from global warming. This isn’t really what anti-tech activists had in mind when they launched the campaign against fossil fuels, hoping to restrict our current lifestyles.

The British government has just announced that it will encourage a new generation of nuclear power plants to “supply unlimited amounts of electricity to the national grid,” to offset its declining energy harvests from North Sea oil and gas.

Meanwhile, a California genetic research firm is collaborating with a Chinese province to create UN-approved “carbon offsets,” by encouraging Chinese farmers to plant a new genetically engineered rice variety. The biotech rice needs only half the normal amount of nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same yield, and thus emits far less nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as CO₂. 

Britain’s sudden move to expand nuclear power represents a major shift from the Labor government’s 2003 stance that nuclear power was “an unattractive option” for its energy future. Since then, oil prices have hit record highs and Middle East Islamic turmoil has further increased the importance of “energy independence.”  Nor has any more attractive energy option than nuclear come forward.

Britain thus joins France (80 percent of its electricity nuclear), Finland (building a new nuclear plant), Germany (Chancellor Merkel says she will not decommission her nuclear plants after all), and Eastern Europe (building several nuclear facilities) as pro-nuclear powers. China and India are planning and building dozens of nuclear facilities.

NRG Energy of Texas has filed for two new U.S. nuclear plants to come on line in 2014, reportedly the first of a new wave of American nuclear expansion.

The biotech rice might be as important to our Greenhouse future as the nuclear power. The International Rice Research Institute estimates that rice production around the world adds 100 million tons of CO₂ equivalents per year because only about half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice is absorbed by the plants. Much of the rest passes into the air as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse agent.

Arcadia Bioscience’s new rice plants would cut nitrogen fertilizer use by 50–60 percent without reducing rice yields. The new technology would also sharply reduce the amounts of natural gas needed by fertilizer makers to capture natural nitrogen from the air.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions through American lifestyle changes, in contrast, would probably require at least a two-thirds cut in U.S. energy use. The Marshall Institute suggests that a couple could achieve their share of such a greenhouse cut if they 1) gave up driving any car;  2) moved to a smaller home heated with natural gas (in increasingly short supply) rather than coal or oil; 3) set their thermostat 10 degrees lower in winter and 10 degrees higher in summer;  4) replaced their windows with energy-efficient types; 5) refused to fly; and 6) reduced their electric bills to half the current U.S. family average. Driving, flying, reading after dark and home freezers would put their emissions footprint far beyond any greenhouse limits. Obviously, a few Americans could or would comply.

Any massive shift to such lean lifestyles, however unlikely, would doom the suburbs, and require us to recreate the “tenements” that crowded our cities 100 years ago. Even then, most industrial production would have to be banned because of greenhouse emissions. Even imported manufactures would have to pay “energy taxes” on the CO₂ used in their production. 

On the other hand, the earth’s net warming since 1940 is 0.2 degrees C, and there is a 95 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots, not with CO₂.