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Weekly John Locke Foundation research division newsletter focusing on environmental issues.

This newsletter highlights relevant analysis done by the JLF and other think tanks as well as items in the news.

1. Breaking News: Pull Back on high cost energy mandate gains strength in NC Senate

After being defeated in the House Commerce Committee, a much stronger Senate version of the House proposal to pull back on North Carolina’s mandate to use expensive renewable sources of energy to generate electricity, SB 365, passed the Senate Finance Committee today. The Senate version of H298 freezes the current mandate at 3 percent and then eliminates it completely in 2023.  It is currently scheduled to rise to 12.5 percent over the next eight years, including energy efficiency measures.

It is likely that this Senate version will make it to the Senate floor. For more information on the progress of SB 365, and therefore the prospects for lower electricity rates, follow this issue on CarolinaJournal.com over the coming days.

2. Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s prostitution-global warming connection: a new twist on the effects of prosperity

Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to "transactional sex" for survival.

This is the lead sentence in a story from the April 30th edition of the Hill.

Here’s how the reasoning goes: "the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. …these changes can be particularly harmful for women."

Because of this Barbara Lee (D-Calif) and some other house Democrats are proposing a resolution that states:

[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health,

So there you have it. Extreme global warming will lead to more poverty and less food production which will force women into prostitution and (horrors) early marriage in order to support themselves. But here’s the rub; in all the most alarmist IPCC scenarios the way you end up with huge global temperature increases in through massive economic growth and wealth creation, especially in the underdeveloped world. Under the IPCC’s warmest scenario, net GDP per capita in developing countries will reach $61,500 per year by 2100 — double that of the United States in 2006. In 2200 under this scenario, developing world per capita income would be $86,200. In other words, the developing world will be over 60 times wealthier than it is today by 2100. Just to put this in perspective, between 1900 and 2000, the United states became 6 times wealthier.

So where does this leave Congresswoman Lee’s predictions? Well, either she has come up with a whole new socioeconomic analysis which argues that increased prosperity leads to more prostitution, or all this new wealth hypothesized by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is going to be generated by this burgeoning and massively growing prostitution industry. Like her compatriots in NC’s green energy movement, I guess Rep. Lee is a big believer in multiplier effects.

3. Ozone Report of 2013

The 2013 ozone season began on April 1 and, as in the past, each week during the ozone — often called smog — season, this newsletter will report how many, if any, high ozone days have been experienced throughout the state during the previous week, where they were experienced, and how many have been recorded during the entire season to date. According to current EPA standards, a region or county experiences a high ozone day if a monitor in that area registers the amount of ozone in the air as 76 parts per billion (ppb) or greater. The official ozone season will end on October 31. All reported data is preliminary and issued by the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources. During the period from April 22 to April 28 there were no high ozone days recorded on any of the state’s monitors.

The table below shows all of North Carolina’s ozone monitors and the high reading on those monitors for each day of the 7 day period, April 22-28.

Click here for the Environmental Update archive.