Prometheus » Blog Archive » Understating the Mitigation Challenge, IEA 2008

You should conclude from this exercise that it is possible, even probable, that the IEA has underestimated the mitigation challenge by a very large amount. Consequently, the IEA’s cost estimates depend upon first assuming a very low rate of growth for carbon dioxide emissions, starting from a misleading baseline. This will have the effect of making the challenge look smaller and less costly (and yet, even in the IEA scenarios the challenge is huge and expensive).

I cannot help but think that mitigation policies are poorly served by getting the scope of the challenge wrong at the outset. I suspect we are dooming them to failure.

INTERVIEW:UN FAO Aide:Food Crisis Looms; A candid admission

While attention is distracted by the international financial crisis and the drop in grain prices has taken the urgency off of dealing with soaring food prices, a new, more severe, food crisis is looming, according to a top economist from the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO.
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"We are worried (and) wanted to be even a bit more alarmist" due to the drop off in attention, Abbassian said.

Sam Kazman, IBD: Chevron's Orwellian Crude Discovery

Chevron should know better, yet its Web site offers an easy-to-e-mail cartoon showing an "Oil Addiction Treatment Center" with bikes parked outside. Chevron's accompanying advice: "The average American uses 25 barrels of oil every year. So how about cutting back on that habit?"

It's one thing for government to urge us to conserve in a crisis. During World War II, for example, government posters reminded us that "waste helps the enemy," and that "when you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler." But wartime is, thankfully, the exception, not the norm.

Or at least it used to be. But the global-warming alarmist campaign that triggered Chevron's ads is on the verge of becoming a war of its own, to be waged 24/7. This war will almost certainly go into high gear under President Obama, with his promise of an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

If carbon dioxide is the enemy, then we are all enemy agents, complicit from the first cry we let out at birth. And if Chevron's "Energy Saved Is Energy Found" slogan smacks of doublespeak, it may be because the global warming campaign itself is so similar to the perpetual war in George Orwell's "1984."

The dispatches in this war come not from far-off battlefields, but from vague climate fronts. We're besieged with news stories about such items as Mt. Kilimanjaro's vanishing snows (though a British court found their disappearance unrelated to warming) and Al Gore's PowerPoints on the alarming correlation between increased CO2 and higher temperatures (even as it turns out that the temperature spikes came before those of CO2, belying the latter's causal role).

And just where is the warming? Despite increasing CO2 levels, global temperatures have been level, if not declining, for the last decade. When the warming doesn't occur as predicted, there are other Orwellian tricks — alter the rhetoric to "climate change," or devise an excuse for why the warming won't arrive for another decade.

(A study in last May's issue of Nature, for example, blamed oscillating ocean currents for the delay.)