Liberal Doom and Gloom 90 Years Ago

If you told me in 1922 that global warming was going to drown the planet because of melting icebergs, or that “at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared,” replaced by moraines of earth and stones, or that seals vanished, I might have believed you. 

“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” said the Washington Post on November 2, 1922, citing a report to the Commerce Department received from Bergen, Norway. This report was based on statements by fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers; “soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.” Additionally, the report said that “scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.” As a logical thinker, if this were true, I would have definitely considered the Gulf Stream a possible cause of the alleged warming, not the greenhouse gases, or the currently maligned CO2.

The Washington Post continued in its 1922 article, “Within a few years, it is predicted that due to the ice melt, the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.”

John Lockwood, who found the above-mentioned article said, “This was one of several such articles I have found at the Library of Congress for the 1920s and 1930s. I had read of the just-released NASA estimates that four of the 10 hottest years in the U.S. were actually in the 1930s, with 1934 the hottest of all.” (www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/aug/14/inside-the-beltway/81073443/#ixzz2YeDw8i6n)

If you told me in 1977 that the earth was in danger of freezing, and, after seeing the Time Magazine cover picture of a penguin surrounded by solid ice with the caption, How to Survive The Coming Ice Age, I might have believed you.

After Time magazine told us again in 2006 that we should “Be Worried, Be VERY Worried,” with the picture of a lone polar bear walking through water, presumably the melted ice, I would have thought twice before I believed the special report on global warming. I would have seen a pattern of misinformation emerging.

When Al Gore, the authority who narrated the 2006 documentary titled, “An Inconvenient Truth,” with questionable data for which he subsequently received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, I definitely considered it global alarmism, an agenda pushed by environmentalists who were and are interested in making money on renewable energy and on the newly emerged market of carbon taxes, swaps, and credits.

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Agenda 21 arm of the United Nations and Al Gore Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/

By now, if the doom and gloom alarmists were right, we should have either drowned in melted ice or should have frozen to death. They must have missed the science class experiment with ice cubes floating in a full glass of water - when the cubes melt, water does not overflow the glass, it simply replaces the mass of the ice cubes.

The “science” of global warming is not settled at all, it is just a media publicized “consensus.”  Yet the coal-generated energy which produces 49% of our electricity is under attack by environmentalists, the EPA, and policy-makers alike, a deliberate and concerted effort to bankrupt those who use coal instead of its clean, renewable, and expensive cousins, solar, wind, and biofuels to generate energy.

There is a vast effort to minimize the size of cars and the type of fuel used,  by replacing gasoline-driven and hybrid cars with electric cars although the electricity generated to recharge these electric cars still comes mostly from coal.

President Obama’s moratorium on domestic drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, scarce new drilling permits on land, and the blocking of the XL Keystone pipeline are evidence of the war on oil and coal, the war on American economic prosperity.

There is an abundance of oil, the earth keeps generating it. “The idea that petroleum is formed from dead organic matter is known as the ‘biogenic theory’ of petroleum formation and was first proposed by a Russian scientist almost 250 years ago.  In the 1950's, however, a few Russian scientists began questioning this traditional view,” postulating that petroleum could form naturally deep inside the Earth” and not necessarily from fossils. (http://www.livescience.com/9404-mysterious-origin-supply-oil.html)

OPEC should be worried because vast reserves of new oil have been discovered in tar sands. If extraction is allowed and perfected to minimize ecological damage, there is enough oil to change the dynamic of the crude oil market. North Dakota’s economy is already booming.

The emissions of the much maligned CO2, the cause of the alleged man-made global warming/climate change must be reduced, according to the EPA new rules, to no more than 1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour of production from new fossil-fuel plants with a capacity of 25 megawatts or larger. (Congressional Report Service, R42496, June 10, 2013)

According to Peter Folger, the new rule proposed under Section 11 of the Clean Air Act, should be easy to satisfy by new natural gas-fired combined-cycle power plants without additional costs. However, new coal-fired plants would only be able to meet the standards by installing carbon capture sequestration (CCS) technology.

Although Congress appropriated $3.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for research, development, and demonstration of CCS large-scale deployment by 2020, “to date, there are no commercial ventures in the United States that capture, transport, and inject industrial-scale quantities of CO2 solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration.” (Peter Folger, June 10, 2013, CRS R 42496, Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Research, Development, and Demonstration at the U.S. Department of Energy)

A Department of Energy Inspector General audit found that only a small fraction of the $3.4 billion appropriated for research and development of carbon capture sequestration (CCS) has actually been used so far.

The EPA has missed its April 2013 deadline to issue the final rule on fossil fuel power plants because it has to review more than 2 million comments received from the public.

To modify or block the EPA’s proposed new rule, Congress can use legislation such as H.R. 2127, prohibiting the EPA from issuing any rule limiting the emissions of CO2 from any existing or new source utility that uses fossil-fuels to generate electricity until carbon capture sequestration (CCS) becomes economically and technologically possible.

EPA’s new rule considers CCS the only “essential technology” if new coal-fired power plants are to be approved and built in the U.S. However, there are other important factors that are not taken into account: costs of competing fuel sources such as natural gas, electricity demand, regulatory costs, infrastructure, rail, and electric grid development.

According to Dr. David Sponseller, “Some sequestration occurs in the oil industry, which injects CO2 down hole in order to enhance the flow of oil from some wells. They cannot inject air because the 21% oxygen in the air would burn with the oil and/or gas due to the high temperatures below. But with CO2 the oxygen is already fully combined with carbon and can no longer react when it encounters the hydrocarbons down hole.”

On June 6, 2013, Oklahoma’s Burbank oil field started carbon dioxide injection. Chaparral Energy, Inc. is moving CO2 from a fertilizer plant in Coffeyville, Kansas, to Burbank through an 8-inch, 68-mile pipeline. A 23,500-hp compressor station in Coffeyville feeds the CO2 to Burbank, Oklahoma. (Oil and Gas Journal, July 1, 2013) http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/volume-111/issue-7a/general-interest/carbon-dioxide-injection-starts-in-oklahoma-s.html

From the alarmists worrying about the imminent flooding of coastal cities in 1922, flooding that never occurred, to the “ice-age” doom and gloom predictions of 1977, which also never happened, and back to the unfounded fear of rising oceans today, the main stream media seem all too eager to scare the public into accepting draconian policy measures that implement the latest expensive fad, costing billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies and higher energy costs passed on to consumers.

Dr. David Sponseller stated that “Only 130 ppm CO2 have been added to our atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This increase is dwarfed by the 210,000 ppm of life-giving oxygen.”

It would be far wiser to admit that man’s activity on earth has little influence on natural temperature cycles or on calamitous weather events. Big government and its expanding bureaucracy should leave its citizens alone to live their lives without oppressive and costly control of energy production.