This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as items in the news.
1. New round of leaked emails kicks off Climategate II
This just breaking — thousands of new emails have been leaked from alarmist community at Britain’s East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU). They are the same scientists who were involved in the original Climategate fiasco back in 2009. As the Washington Post notes (HT Jon Sanders):
This second batch deals less with the science underpinning climate research than how some of the world’s prominent scientists framed the issue, and recruited colleagues to serve on panels such as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One of the more damning quotes is from an email written to Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU, by the head of the UK Met Office. Again, according to the email to Jones as quoted by the Post:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary. …
James Delingpole, writing for the UK Telegraph, describes the new release of email as follows:
Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa — all your favorite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.
Stay tuned. I’m sure there’ll be more to come.
2. Solyndra vs. Keystone XL
Last week in this newsletter we noted the Obama Administration’s apparent disdain for jobs created without government subsidies. Exhibit 1: his delay in approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
This week I want to call your attention to this excellent article by Robert Bryce comparing Keystone XL to Soyndra, the failed solar power company so enthusiastically promoted and funded by the Administration. The heart of Bryce’s argument are captured in the following paragraphs from his article:
Keystone could create about 13,000 construction jobs in the U.S., according to TransCanada, the company that is pushing the deal. The company also projects that the pipeline could indirectly create another 7,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S. When Solyndra went bankrupt in August, 1,100 people lost their jobs.
But the real contrast between the Keystone XL pipeline and Solyndra can be found by comparing the amount of energy that could come through that pipeline with the amount of energy produced by solar and wind in the U.S.
When completed — or rather, if completed — the pipeline is to have a capacity of about 700,000 barrels of oil per day. At 1.64 megawatt-hours per barrel, that’s enough energy to create more than 1.1 million megawatt-hours of electricity — but we need to haircut that figure by two-thirds to account for the energy we would lose if we converted that fuel into electricity. That leaves us with about 380,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per day.
In comparison, in all of last year, American solar-energy production was 1.3 million megawatt-hours, and wind production was 94.6 million megawatt-hours.
3. Daren Bakst lays out the numbers on solar power generation
My colleague Daren Bakst, director of Legal and Regulatory Studies at the John Locke Foundation, took the opportunity in a recent Locker Room blog post to explain how so often the useful energy output of solar power plants are overstated in the media. He used as a touchstone for his post a recent article from the Triangle Business Journal (not online) that claimed that a new solar power plant in North Carolina will generate enough electricity to power 900 homes. Daren demonstrates how the real number of homes is 179. His post is well worth the read.
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