Does Russia Have a Case? I saw this in a rather short AP piece on the Russia/Ukraine gas disruption: “Does Russia Have a Case?” By Greg Pollowitz 1/8 12:45 PM

Dealing with Warming ### ENERGY 2007 II Dealing with Warming An appeal to reason JIM MANZI If you believe that human emissions of carbon dioxide create a significant risk of negative climate change, the solution seems obvious: reduce emissions. But this conventional wisdom is exactly wrong. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — which recently, together with Al Gore, won the Nobel Peace Prize — projects that, under fairly reasonable assumptions for world population and economic growth, global temperatures will rise by 2.8°C by the year 2100, and that this will begin to create costs equal to 1 to 5 percent of global GDP sometime in the 22nd century. So, it is argued, we should begin, right now, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in order to prevent some or all of these costs. The most frequently discussed methods for doing this are 1) a straightforward tax on carbon and 2) an inefficient, back-door (and therefore politically more palatable) tax on carbon called a cap-and-trade system. Now, 1 to 5 percent of global GDP is a huge amount of money, and an ounce of prevention can be worth a pound of cure. But, in the case of global warming, the values may be exactly reversed: Getting most of the carbon out of the energy cycle today would be very expensive, and a century is a long time to wait for the payoff from this investment. As we all know from everyday life, normally I would rather have a dollar today than the promise of a dollar a year from now. I “discount” the promise: The amount of cash I would be willing to take today in lieu of that promised dollar is termed its “present value,” and the percentage lower I am willing to accept today is called the “discount rate.” When decisions are made on the timescale of centuries, however, discounting can have counterintuitively large effects: Consider that if the legendary sellers of Manhattan Island had put $28 in an account with a 4 percent real interest rate in 1626, they would have enough money in the bank today to buy back all of the land in Manhattan. Albert Einstein supposedly said that “the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest” — and this mathematical reality is central to the correct evaluation of plans to address the risk of climate change. The “Stern Review,” produced by the British government last year, is cited frequently as demonstrating that the world should begin immediate, aggressive emissions abatement. But William Nordhaus, a Yale professor widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on this kind of integrated environmental-economic assessment, has pointed out that a crucial feature of the Stern Review was its assumption of a very low discount rate. To demonstrate just how unrealistic that assumption is, Nordhaus asks us to imagine a scenario in which global warming would lead to zero costs between now and the year 2200, at which point global economic growth would be permanently reduced by 0.1 percent — in other words, that economic output starting in 2200 would be 99.9 percent of what it would have been had there been no global warming. Under this scenario, how much should we be willing to pay today as a lump sum to avoid this cost? Using the assumptions of the Stern Review, Nordhaus points out, we would pay about $30 trillion, which is more than half of the world’s entire annual economic output. Thanks, but no thanks. Why would sophisticated advocates for rapid, aggressive emissions abatement make such an obviously unrealistic assumption? Because they’re in a box. Given current global-warming-impact projections and normal economic assumptions, the costs of global warming justify only limited actions for the next several decades. POLITICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE Nordhaus’s modeling group estimates that the total present value of global-warming-related costs is about $22.6 trillion, which is roughly 1 percent of the present value of total global income over the next several centuries. In other words: If we simply let global warming happen, the world would generate about 99 percent of the present value of wealth it would otherwise have generated had there been no such thing as global warming. The models indicate that we should simply let $17 trillion (about 75 percent) of that $22.6 trillion in damages happen, because it would be more expensive to avoid the damages than to accept them. Nordhaus further estimates that we could avoid the remaining $5 trillion to $6 trillion of damages by “spending” about $2 trillion on a carbon tax designed to encourage abatement. This would provide a net benefit of around $3.4 trillion, or about 0.17 percent of the present value of global GDP over the next several centuries. This carbon tax would be fairly low for a number of years — e.g., in the case of gasoline, about 9 cents per gallon through 2010 — and then ramp up to fairly high levels by the second half of the century. So, if the U.N. forecasts are correct, the global-warming hysteria is about the opportunity to create a net economic benefit of less than 0.2 percent of future global wealth creation. While not everything that matters can be measured by money, this certainly provides a different perspective than the “Manhattan would be an underwater theme park” rhetoric would suggest. Of course, in absolute terms, $3.4 trillion is normally thought of as an amount of money that’s worth pursuing. So why shouldn’t we implement such a tax? To understand why we shouldn’t, let’s move from the world of academic model-building to the real world of geostrategic competition and domestic politics. To realize this gain of $3.4 trillion, we would have to agree to, and enforce, a global, harmonized tax on all significant uses of carbon in any material form. This would require the agreement of — just to take a few examples — the French National Assembly, the Parliament of India, the Brazilian National Congress, the Chinese Politburo, Vladimir Putin, John Dingell, and the U.S. ethanol lobby. As is well known, all these players are completely incorruptible and solely concerned with the comprehensive good of all mankind through all time, and will not let their better judgment be overruled by any narrow, sectarian interests. All this aside, let’s imagine we actually could negotiate such a binding agreement. Isn’t it possible that all the side deals that would be required to get this done would create enough economic drag to more than offset the benefit of 0.17 percent of present value of global output? Our track record in closing and implementing such deals as the Kyoto Protocol, or even the current round of the GATT process — which, remember, is supposed to make the signatories richer — shouldn’t inspire much confidence that the theoretical net benefits will outweigh the costs created by the agreement. Further, even if we got to an agreement de jure, we would then have to enforce a set of global laws for many decades that would run directly contrary to the narrow self-interest of most people currently alive on the planet. How likely do you think a rural Chinese official would be to enforce the rules on a local coal-fired power plant? These bottom-up pressures would likely render such an agreement a dead letter, or at least make it in effect a tax applicable only to the law-abiding developed countries that represent an ever-shrinking share of global carbon emissions. In summary, then, the best available models indicate that 1) global warming is a problem that will have only a marginal impact on the world economy, and 2) it is economically rational only to reduce slightly this marginal impact through global carbon taxes. Further, practical knowledge of the world indicates that 1) such a global carbon-tax regime would be very unlikely ever to be implemented, and 2) even if it were implemented, the theoretical benefits it might create would probably be more than offset by the economic drag it would produce. HEDGE AGAINST RISK? Of course, another possibility remains: Our climate projections might be wrong, and global warming could turn out to be substantially worse than these models forecast. This is the other obvious way to argue for immediate, aggressive emissions abatement. This argument has a strong form (that we know global warming will be worse than consensus models project) and a weak form (that global warming might be worse than these models project). The strong form requires that you either be a conspiracy theorist or believe that you have special knowledge, unavailable to the world scientific community, demonstrating conclusively that the IPCC process has reached an overly conservative consensus. (Ironically, this represents a perfect mirror image of the opposite extreme position, i.e., that global warming is a big hoax.) But this is pretty hard to believe. Any side in this debate can find respectable scientists who are outliers from the consensus position to support more-alarmist or less-alarmist predictions. Large-scale science is the best available means of grinding through these claims to find the best possible approximation to accurate, falsifiable predictions. This process can take time to work, and is imperfect, but like all markets it tends to be self-correcting. Science, in general, works. On the other hand, the weak form — the contention that the impact of global warming might be worse than anticipated — is persuasive. Long-term climate prediction is in its infancy. Climate models are, at a minimum, non-validated, and predicting the cost impact of various potential warming scenarios requires us to concatenate their climate predictions with economic models that predict the cost impact of these predicted temperature changes on the economy in the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd centuries. It is hubris to imagine that these can guarantee accuracy, and impossible to validate such a claim in any event. Nordhaus is admirably realistic about long-term environmental-economic assessment models when he states that their functional purpose is to make sure that our “answers are at least internally consistent.” Ultimately, we can predict reliably neither what impact human activities will have on the climate nor the resulting impact of these climate changes on the economy over multiple decades and centuries. So, once we clear away the underbrush, we can see that the case for a carbon tax is really that it would be a hedge against the risk that actual damages from warming will be worse than current projections. Would it be a smart investment? To evaluate this, start with the observation that the primary purpose of such a tax is not to encourage conservation per se, but rather to induce the development of new technologies that can de-link economic growth from damaging accumulations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Increasing the price of carbon would cause some direct reduction in fossil-fuel consumption (e.g., biking to work instead of driving), and get more people to use some pre-existing technologies (e.g., efficient light bulbs), but these effects would be limited: Hairshirts are not enough. We would have to develop new technologies that use energy more efficiently, emit less carbon per unit of energy, remove carbon from the atmosphere, and/or reduce the harm done by carbon dioxide. The real costs of a program to address global warming are crucially dependent on how much time and money it would take to develop and diffuse these technologies, plus the incremental costs per unit of energy (if any) they would impose once deployed. Seen from this perspective, many aspects of the carbon-tax debate become clearer. Carbon-tax advocates pay lip service to the naïve idea that the developing world will impose large carbon taxes if we just “lead by example.” Of course, under the reasonable assumption that the relevant technologies will be developed primarily in the U.S., EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia, it doesn’t really matter that much whether the developing world introduces these taxes, or fails to do so for a long time. The global crusade is a smokescreen: The goal is to tax the use of carbon in the developed world. Further, in spite of the fact that most analyses indicate that the optimum theoretical carbon tax should be quite low for a number of years, most advocates want to push for as large a tax as possible, as soon as possible, in order to force industry to create new technologies quickly. The pain of the tax is the whole point, and, to this way of thinking, more pain means more gain. This would probably “work,” in that it would spur new technological development; but it would be insanely expensive. It’s hard to predict accurately the costs of such a program, but it would certainly start at hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. In practice, the reality is that no matter what happens in the future, the tax would almost certainly not go away for many years, and it would be almost politically impossible to somehow trade away other taxes to keep the total tax burden unchanged. Of course, there are other ways to try to stimulate the development of the required technologies. One obvious approach is to have the government fund technology development directly. I have proposed just such a research program in this magazine (“Game Plan,” June 25, 2007). Even if it had a controlled funding mechanism, it would, like all such programs, be rife with inefficiencies. But consider that the cost of such a program could be single-digit billions per year — a tiny fraction of the costs of imposing a large U.S. carbon tax. You could be massively inefficient, and still be far better off. A large carbon tax is also, most likely, a one-way door: Once we introduce it we’re stuck with it for a long time. Therefore, keeping our options open has great value. What if our models are too aggressive, and there is no practical economic justification for emissions reductions for centuries, if ever? What if the technological leverage point turns out to be a non-point-source scrubber that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at low cost, so that there is really no reason not to emit CO2 all day long? There are very large potential regrets to a carbon tax. The only real argument for implementing a large, immediate carbon tax boils down to the point that you can’t prove a negative. If it turns out that our predictions for global-warming impacts are enormously conservative and disaster looms if we don’t change our ways radically and this instant, then we really should start shutting down power plants and confiscating cars tomorrow morning. We have no good evidence that such a disaster scenario is imminent, but nobody can conceivably prove it to be impossible. Hedging against the risk to future generations of potential unanticipated impacts from global warming is a legitimate job for the U.S. government. Ideally, it would be tackled by the governments of the small number of countries with a sophisticated technology-development capability acting in some kind of coordinated fashion. A massive carbon tax, or its equivalent in the form of a cap-and-trade system, is billed as a prudent reaction to this risk, but it is the opposite: an impractical, panicky reaction unworthy of a serious government. Mr. Manzi is the CEO of an applied-artificial-intelligence software company. “Dealing with Warming” By Jim Manzi 10/19 11:59 AM

How Do You Keep Them Down on the Farm . . . ### ENERGY 2007 I How Do You Keep Them Down on the Farm . . . . . . if all they make is a lousy few mil? STEPHEN SPRUIELL Fort Dodge, Iowa When you’re a reporter asking Iowans about ethanol, they tend to ask back, “First of all, where are you from?” If you reply that you’re from New York, they chuckle and nod. After I told one Iowan in the ethanol business that I spent most of my pre-Yankee life in Texas and Oklahoma, he said to me, “Okay, so at least you know that corn comes out of the ground and not off a supermarket shelf.” This sums up how Iowans feel about New Yorkers and agriculture: Our knowledge begins and ends with Whole Foods. But as I drive through Iowa and get a close-up view of corn production, I am reminded of the industrial landscapes of the Northeast. Here, nature is carved up into an endless grid. Towering above the farm plots are hulking metal giants — silos, grain elevators, industrial tractors. It’s not so different from driving up the New Jersey Turnpike. Government support for ethanol, a fuel additive made from fermented corn, has added another industrial feature to Iowa’s increasingly mechanized countryside: the ethanol distillery. Ethanol promotion is just the latest chapter in a saga of government interference in the agricultural marketplace that began seven decades ago. Since the 1930s, farm subsidies have rewarded the heedless overproduction of just a few crops, yielded unmanageable surpluses year after year, and taken a heavy toll on the land. A tiny percentage of America’s farm families now produce almost all of the country’s agricultural output. The more these farmers produce, the more subsidies they receive. For this reason, they frequently spend their government payments on more land, more seed, and more equipment, churning out more food than they can profitably sell. Lawmakers, rather than solve this problem by reducing subsidies, have resorted to the alchemy of ethanol. Their goal is to take a pile of corn that nobody wants and turn it into a source of revenue for American farmers. In states such as Iowa, that has had the effect of putting everything bad about farm subsidies on steroids: the gross inefficiencies, the environmental degradation, and, of course, the redistribution of billions of tax dollars to farm families whose incomes are well above the national average. By mandating the consumption of 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year by 2012, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 sent ethanol makers scrambling to increase production, which in turn sent corn prices — and consumers’ grocery bills — soaring. Goodwill toward farmers is one of the strongest forces perpetuating farm subsidies. Farmers descend from pioneers and represent important aspects of American culture and history. This perception is especially important to politicians; as long as it persists, they believe they can associate themselves with moral uprightness by voting for farm programs. They sell these programs to skeptical voters as a “safety net” for small, struggling farmers down on their luck. For many years, the public did not understand farm programs well enough to know that the benefits go primarily to large farming operations. But rising food costs, combined with reports of commercial farmers’ netting record-breaking profits, are finally starting to change that. COUNTRY CLUBBERS IN DIKE Dennis Kruger operates an enormous farm in Iowa that produces corn and soybeans. Last year, Kruger Farms did $4.7 million worth of business and reported a net worth of $10.3 million. Kruger is also the president of Kruger Seed, a company he recently sold to the agribusiness giant Monsanto. In the 1990s, his family developed the Fox Ridge Country Club in Dike, Iowa, the city in which they live. They sold the golf course, but they still own the surrounding housing development and maintain an elegant residence overlooking one of the wide fairways. (It’s a beautiful course, albeit the only one I’ve ever seen with a farm tractor sitting on the driving range.) Considering Kruger’s apparent financial health, one might be surprised to learn that he is among the top recipients of government aid in Iowa, according to the Environmental Working Group’s farm-subsidy database. Between 1995 and 2005, he received $3.6 million in federal aid, including $730,000 in 2005 alone. Earlier this year, after the Bush administration proposed limiting the amount of subsidies a farmer could receive, Kruger complained to the Omaha World-Herald that such a limitation would hurt his ability to support his family and his seven fulltime employees, and argued that large farms shouldn’t be penalized just for being large. After visiting Dike, I drive north to check up on another recipient of federal aid. In Britt, I find a sea of bleachers overlooking a wide dirt oval and a vast expanse of corn. A sign hanging on a gate informs me that another season of racing events at the Hancock County Speedway ended just days ago, and that the Doug Studer Farms “Night of a Thousand Stars” was one of the season’s last races. I later learn that, in addition to sponsoring races at the speedway, Studer Farms sponsors the Alan Mondus Racing team from Lakeville, Minn. According to the press release announcing his Mondus sponsorship, Studer is “a long time supporter . . . of racing.” So, I suppose, are American taxpayers; Studer Farms has received around $2.1 million in farm subsidies since 2000. It’s not clear how much of that has gone to local racing events in Britt, but the exact number isn’t important. The point is that the government is providing income support to people who can afford to build country clubs and sponsor racing teams. The Studers and the Krugers are also cashing in on the spike in corn prices created by the 2005 ethanol mandate. They are among the 8 percent of family farming operations whose size makes them “commercial farms” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This small subclass reaps most of the benefits when the government subsidizes agriculture — as opposed to the 92 percent of farm-dwellers who derive either all or most of their income from sources other than farming or subsidies. These smaller farmers are expected to see a slight increase in their average household income this year, to somewhere around $71,500. Commercial farmers, on the other hand, are expected to earn an average household income of over $200,000 — an increase of 22 percent from what they made in 2006. The USDA, which calculated these estimates, reports that the windfall for commercial farmers is due in large part to “demand from the rapid expansion of ethanol production.” This is good news for farmers, but what about consumers? As millions of acres have shifted from producing food to producing fuel, food prices have gone up across the board. Ethanol is not the only culprit; rising standards of living in Asia and a weak U.S. dollar are increasing demand for U.S. beef and pork overseas, which also drives up their prices at home. But there is broad agreement that increased demand for ethanol has had an impact on food prices. It’s simple economics: Although farmers have planted a lot of new corn, they haven’t planted enough to replace all the corn they’ve sold to ethanol plants. That means there is less corn to feed cows and pigs at a time when worldwide demand for beef and pork is rising. Scarcity means higher prices. Is ethanol at least driving down the price of oil? Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson thinks so; he cited ethanol’s potentially palliative effect on high oil prices to defend his Iowa-caucuses-inspired flip-flop on the issue. Confronted with his votes against ethanol subsidies in the Senate, Thompson told the Associated Press, “When I was in the Senate, I think oil was at $23 a barrel.” This answer implied that, with oil above $80 a barrel, we need federal support for ethanol to get the price back down. As it turns out, though, ethanol does not make gas cheaper, but high oil prices do make ethanol more expensive. Petroleum is a major input in the manufacture of ethanol — it is required not just to make ethanol, but to transport it to points of sale (since ethanol is corrosive to pipes, and must be moved by truck). In fact, there’s good evidence that making ethanol requires more petroleum than making gasoline does. So if high oil prices should make us want to use less oil, we should be diminishing our ethanol consumption right now, not boosting it. This inconvenient truth also means that ethanol won’t do much to reduce CO2 emissions. It will, however, disrupt water supplies — and a just-released report from the National Research Council finds that this is already happening in some regions, for two reasons. First, farmers are planting new corn on formerly uncultivated land — which means an increase in the total acreage that must be irrigated. Second, farmers are planting corn on acres that formerly grew other, less water-intensive crops. To put the size of this shift into perspective, consider that we now have more corn growing on American soil than at any time since World War II, when the farms of Europe had been devastated by war and America was feeding two continents. The result is not just a depletion of water resources, but more erosion and runoff into streams and rivers. Fertilizer content in this runoff has led to rampant algae growth in some river deltas, and this has decreased the water’s oxygen content so drastically that no other organisms can survive. THE NATIONAL-SECURITY ARGUMENT Thompson made another argument that bears mentioning because it is as old as the ethanol debate itself: Federal assistance for ethanol, he said, is “a matter now of national security.” Energy independence from the Middle East was the rallying cry for ethanol in 1974, when Congress first started promoting it as a response to the oil embargo. But the argument is as spurious today as it was back then. First, even the biggest of proposed ethanol supports — an increase in mandated ethanol consumption from 7.5 billion to 15 billion gallons per year, as called for in the energy bill Congress is currently debating — would barely dent America’s gasoline consumption, which is approximately 150 billion gallons annually. Two-thirds of our oil is imported, meaning that to achieve true energy independence ethanol would have to replace 100 billion gallons of gas. That’s just not going to happen. Second, only around 5 million automobiles in America are “flexible-fuel vehicles” — cars that are equipped to run on a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline (known as E85). That’s out of 135 million registered passenger cars in the United States. Also, owing to a scarcity of service stations that sell E85, most people who drive flex-fuel cars fill them up with regular gas. Simply mandating the consumption of more ethanol at the refinery level won’t change these structural impediments to its adoption as an alternative to gasoline. None of this is to deny that there is a legitimate market for ethanol. All gasoline must contain additives known as “oxygenates,” and ethanol is one of them. Gasoline blenders have turned increasingly to it since MBTE — another additive — was found to contaminate groundwater. Most cars can run on blends of up to 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline. Offering consumers this “gasohol” choice lets them voluntarily support agriculture while using less gas. Gasohol is available all over Iowa, and it fuels most of my travels around the state. But the momentum behind federal support for ethanol militates toward the production of far more than the market can absorb. Recent news reports confirm that, in a rush to expand production, the industry built too much capacity in the wake of the 2005 mandate. Even before the mandate, ethanol support took on a dizzying array of forms. There are tax credits for refineries that buy ethanol; tariffs to block the importation of cheap, sugar-based ethanol from Brazil; loan guarantees for investors in ethanol plants; and, in some states, direct payments to ethanol producers. But the pièce de résistance in this banquet of corporate welfare is the mandate. Amazingly, President Bush and much of Congress support doubling it. WAY TOO MUCH The general manager of an ethanol distillery I tour in northern Iowa — a friendly and intelligent man with a broad knowledge of the industry — says of the phased-in consumption levels set by the 2005 mandate: “We are ahead of that curve already.” Industry-wide, he says, distilleries are producing more ethanol than Congress has ordered refineries to buy, and he confirms that “the anticipation [of the mandate] rather than the [mandate] itself” is what led to the building of so much capacity. Ethanol makers may be producing above the mandated levels, but refineries aren’t buying more than the law requires. This has led to cooling demand. After my visit to his distillery, I speak a second time to the general manager in Iowa. He says: “Is there a foundation to the rumors that demand is slowing down? Yes, there is.” He mentions several plants that have either suspended construction or “laid off their folks and closed their doors.” For this reason, the ethanol lobby is growing ever more frantic in its demands that Congress increase the mandate and force refineries to use their surplus production. But among producers “there’s a much greater degree of caution,” says the general manager. “There’s a lack of confidence” in Congress’s ability to pass a higher mandate in time to alleviate the industry’s immediate problems. The biggest of those is of course the surplus — a failure not of hardworking people like the general manager, whose small distillery predates the ethanol boom, but of the federal policies that overheated the industry. It’s a failure whose roots go back to the “temporary” Depression-era farm-subsidy program. Far from helping impoverished farmers, it has become a welfare system for mega-farms that expand and overproduce year after year, purely to receive more subsidies. In corn’s case, federal support for ethanol was supposed to make the problem go away. Instead, Congress stands ready to bail out the industry again. If it does, we can expect ethanol surpluses for a long time. “How Do You Keep Them Down on the Farm . . .” By Stephen Spruiell 10/18 10:15 AM

Energy Week 2007 Be Not Afraid During the last week of September, 2003, oil was selling in U.S. spot markets for $23.86 a barrel. If one asked economists back then what would happen to the economy if oil prices were to hit $80 four years hence, they would have almost certainly predicted economic ruin. But the inflation, unemployment, and recession that supposedly follow oil price shocks are nowhere on the macroeconomic radar screen. If the economy goes into a tailspin, it will be in response to bad news in the housing market, not the oil market. “Be Not Afraid” By Jerry Taylor 9/28 8:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 Our Generational Mission Editor’s note: This piece is excerpted from Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg Copyright © 2007 by Bjorn Lomborg. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. In one recent survey in Australia, environmental concern came in as absolutely the most important priority for the leaders of the world, before eliminating poverty or dealing with terrorism, human-rights issues, and HIV/AIDS. In another survey, the United States, China, South Korea, and Australia found improving the global environment a more important foreign-policy goal than combating world hunger. South Korea put it first on its list of the top sixteen global threats. “Our Generational Mission” By Bjorn Lomborg 9/28 5:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 The Break-Up After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, environmental groups saw an opening. They realized that national-security hawks would be open to proposals to replace Middle Eastern oil, which they believed was financing terrorism, with alternative energy sources. Overtures were made. Then, slowly but surely, “bipartisan” coalitions began to produce reports aimed at killing two birds with one stone — the flow of dollars to terrorists and the risks of global warming. The proposals may sound compelling, but they will do nothing to strengthen America, and would weaken it instead. “The Break-Up” By Iain Murray 9/28 5:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 A Whole New World? Global warming is a complex issue to figure out, but one thing about it is actually quite simple — discerning which side dominates the debate right now. For the past year, those who view global warming as a crisis justifying a major federal response have had just about everything going in their favor. “ A Whole New World?” By Ben Lieberman 9/28 5:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 Foul Winds for Renewable Energy Several years ago, Cape Wind Associates proposed the nation’s first offshore windfarm in Nantucket Sound. They sought to build 130 wind turbines several miles off the coast on Horseshoe Shoal. The Sound is an ideal location for offshore wind production. The surrounding land masses and relatively shallow water would protect the installation from storms and make it easier to erect and maintain the 258-foot turbine towers. Upon completion, the wind farm could provide approximately 75-percent of Cape Cod’s electricity, reducing the need to rely on nearby fossil-fuel-fired power plants. As good as it sounds, the project faces strong opposition. “Foul Winds for Renewable Energy” By Jonathan H. Adler 9/28 5:00 AM

Books A Step Toward Climate Rationalism Editor’s note: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246). When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opened a White House conference on global warming by saying, “We must cut the Gordian knot of fossil fuels,” it’s a wonder she could be heard over the guffaws from all the great and good who feel they’ve struck a blow for global survival if they watched an Emmy Awards show featuring a red carpet made of recycled water bottles. “ A Step Toward Climate Rationalism” By Rich Lowry 9/28 12:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 America’s Strategic Vulnerability America’s dependency on foreign oil is a major strategic vulnerability for our nation. One element in al Qaeda’s war against us is to target the U.S. economy by driving up the price of oil in the hope that severe recession and higher inflation will follow. Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda terrorists have spoken many times about the need to “mount … operations accordingly” in order to hit energy supply points in the Middle East and other regions to spike oil prices. Moreover, while most of the world’s known reserves are in the Persian Gulf, oil supplies are no more secure elsewhere on the globe. In Russia and Venezuela, Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez have rolled back democracy and utilized oil and gas as foreign policy weapons. Nigerian supplies — our fifth-largest supplier — are endangered by internal strife. Oil’s availability is uncertain and its price at the mercy of countries where our values aren’t typically shared and our interests aren’t their first priority. “America’s Strategic Vulnerability” By John McCain 9/27 12:15 PM

Energy Week 2007 A Gaseous Future Detroit – With gas prices over $3 a gallon and violence roiling the Middle East, the political drumbeat for oil alternatives has never been louder. President Bush has vowed to “change how we power our automobiles,” and a newly elected Democratic Congress is demanding drastic increases in auto fuel efficiency aimed at achieving “oil independence.” Quick to reflect the public mood, auto companies are touting gas substitutes and predicting the twilight of the gas engine. “A Gaseous Future” By Henry Payne 9/27 5:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 De-Clogging Energy Regulation Energy bills are a dime a dozen in Washington and many state capitals. They are the multipurpose solution reputedly solving every energy problem; they do everything from raising taxes for oil and gas companies, to subsidizing ethanol and plug-in hybrids, to threatening oil company executives with prison for “price gouging,” to promoting wind power (except, of course, when it might spoil Ted Kennedy’s sailing). Every gasoline price spike yields a cascade of proposed legislation and an outcry from politicians. “ De-Clogging Energy Regulation” By Andrew P. Morriss 9/27 5:00 AM

Pump up the Volume Yesterday, the National Review Institute held a panel event in D.C. on energy policy and national security. If you missed it, watch it here: “Pump up the Volume” By Kathryn Jean Lopez 9/26 10:42 AM

Energy Week 2007 All Circuits Misloaded We’ve been hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan from the Republican presidential field of late, but there is little trace of him in the position papers issued by the various campaigns thus far. Take energy. Whereas candidate Reagan proposed to solve the energy crisis of the 1970s by abolishing the Department of Energy, deregulating the energy sector, and letting free markets rip, candidates Giuliani, Romney, McCain, and the rest propose to solve today’s energy crisis with elaborate national energy plans, lavish subsidies for favored fuels and industries, mandatory renewable-energy consumption orders, and government dictates to manufacturers regarding how energy-related goods and services are made. “All Circuits Misloaded” By Jerry Taylor 9/26 7:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 Painting the Court Green A specter is haunting the U.S. economy — the specter of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), empowered by activist judges, attempting to implement Al Gore’s climate policies. “Painting the Court Green” By Marlo Lewis 9/26 6:30 AM

Energy Week 2007 Lessons Of Kyoto Later this week, President Bush hosts a summit of the world’s major economies on energy and climate change. The purpose is to hammer out some type of agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The summit will take place after a United Nations conference on the same subject. “Lessons Of Kyoto” By Patrick J. Michaels 9/26 5:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 Greener Pastures Three months ago, prior to this year’s Group of Eight (G8) meeting, President Bush surprised the world when he called for setting a global goal for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, replacing the Kyoto Protocol which will expire in 2012. This month, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, he adopted the Sydney Declaration on Climate Change, Energy Security and Clean Development, and this week he will follow up on his call by playing host to the first Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change, which, in addition to the G8 members, will include Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, and South Africa. “Greener Pastures” By Gal Luft 9/26 12:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 Turning Oil into Salt A determined pack has begun to race its engines and to try to shoulder us off the road toward energy independence. It’s time for those determined to stay on the track to drive aggressively. “Turning Oil into Salt” By R. James Woolsey 9/25 5:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 “What Would Jesus Drive?” Why is the mainstream media suddenly so interested in Evangelical views on the environment? Before 2006, you would have looked hard to find stories on the subject. This started to change in 2002, when an outfit called the “Evangelical Environmental Network” launched a campaign that asked: “What would Jesus Drive?” The mainstream media gave the campaign positive coverage.The big publicity started in February 2006, however, when several major media outlets reported the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI). The brief document was signed by 86 Evangelical leaders, who announced their support for what The New York Times called “a major initiative to fight global warming.” As part of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, they called for “federal legislation that would require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through ‘cost-effective, market-based mechanisms.’ ” Similar stories have followed the views of Richard Cizik, of the National Association of Evangelicals, who is a strong believer in catastrophic, human-induced global warming. ““What Would Jesus Drive?”” By Jay W. Richards 9/25 5:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 Biofueling Disorder Would you believe that the weather in Indiana could trigger popular unrest in China? Global demand for fuel made out of food is growing so fast that grain supplies are becoming dangerously thin. In this market, a hiccup in agricultural production — like a drought in America’s Corn Belt — could cause food prices to skyrocket in countries like China that depend on food imports. When poor urbanites in developing nations suddenly cannot afford to eat, they just might take to the streets in anger. “Biofueling Disorder” By William Yeatman 9/24 6:00 AM

Energy Week 2007 Like a Virgin This past February, Richard Branson announced the “Virgin Earth Challenge,” a $25 million prize for the development of “a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.” His aim was to unleash the creative energies of innovators and inventors around the globe with the promise of a substantial economic reward. If past experience with prizes is any guide, this Virgin Earth Challenge could reap great dividends — and even do more to encourage climate-friendly technologies than decades of federally subsidized research. “Like a Virgin” By Jonathan H. Adler 9/24 6:00 AM