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Posts tagged economics
De-FARMization – Climate Bill Makes Tree Planting More Lucrative Than Farming
Jan 3rd
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.
The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation’s incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.
According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.
Mr. Vilsack, in a little-noticed statement issued with the report earlier this month, said the department’s forecasts “have caused considerable concern” among farmers and ranchers.
“If landowners plant trees to the extent the model suggests, this would be disruptive to agriculture in some regions of the country,” he said.
He said the Forest and Agricultural Sector Optimization Model (FASOM), created by researchers at Texas A&M University, does not take into account other provisions in the House-passed bill, which would boost farmers’ income while they continue to produce food. Those omissions, he said, cause the model to overestimate the potential for increased forest planting.
Mr. Vilsack said he has directed his chief economist to work with the EPA to “undertake a review of the assumptions in the FASOM model, to update the model and to develop options on how best to avoid unintended consequences for agriculture that might result from climate change legislation.”
Depression Good for Reducing Carbon Emissions
Dec 9th
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
December 8, 2009
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States has made remarkable progress in reducing carbon emissions. “Carbon dioxide output from the U.S. energy sector has probably fallen half as much as would be needed to meet the 2020 emissions reduction target the Obama administration took to the Copenhagen climate-change summit,” reports Bloomberg.
It is said the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will be 5.45 billion tons this year, or 8.6 percent below the 2005 level of 5.96 billion tons. Prior to the Copenhagen climate scam confab, the Obama administration said the U.S. is willing to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases “in the range of 17 percent” below the 2005 level by 2020.
As the EPA told us yesterday, such reductions will be imposed without input from Congress and the American people.
How did we get here? It’s the economy, stupid.
“Falling U.S. emissions are the result of the ‘weak economy,’ which grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the third quarter after shrinking for a year, and a cleaner fuel mix in the electricity sector, the EIA said in its December Short-Term Energy Outlook,” writes Bloomberg.
Storm clouds on the horizon, however. “After falling 6.1 percent this year, energy-related CO2 emissions should increase 1.5 percent next year on ‘projected improvements in the economy,’ EIA said. This would put 2010 emissions at 7.2 percent below the 2005 level, making the 2020 target harder to reach relative to the 2009 total.”
Bummer. But fear not tree-huggers and would-be globalists. If the bureaucrats teaming up at Copenhagen as I write this have their way, they will cut the carbon emissions in stupendous fashion and usher in an era of permanent economic “recession.”
Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too | Nigel Lawson – Times Online
Dec 5th
Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions
Nigel Lawson
The Times
November 23, 2009
Exactly a fortnight from today, the United Nations climate change conference opens in Copenhagen. Its purpose is (or was) clear: to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
Under Kyoto, all those developed nations that ratified the treaty (all, in practice, except the US) agreed to cut their carbon emissions to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The successor treaty, to be agreed at Copenhagen, was intended to secure a cut in global emissions, from the developed and developing world alike (and China has now overtaken even the US), of 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, leading to more or less total decarbonisation by the end of the century.
As Gordon Brown declared in his Guildhall speech only a week ago, Copenhagen must “forge a new international agreement … [which] must contain the full range of commitments required: on emissions reductions by both developed and developing countries, on finance and on verification”.
This is a pretty tall order; and, needless to say, nothing of the sort will be agreed. Even if the Kyoto 5 per cent cut is achieved, it will be only because the developed world has effectively outsourced a large part of its emissions to countries, such as China and India, without Kyoto constraints. Not only is 50 per cent rather more severe than 5 per cent, but (except in the unlikely event of world industry migrating to Mars) a global target removes the escape route of outsourcing emissions.
via Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too | Nigel Lawson – Times Online.
Economists and Climate Science: A Critique – World Economics – The journal of current economic analysis and policy
Dec 5th
Economists and Climate Science: A Critique David Henderson
Volume 10, Number 1, 2009, pages 59 – 90
This paper presents a critique of the characteristic treatment by economists of climate science, which appears as over-presumptive and uncritical. While the paper draws on a range of illustrative cases, the main focus is on six recent and important contributions. The present author argues that the authors and sources concerned, along with a good many others not quoted, have accepted too uncritically the received view as to the current significance of anthropogenic global warming and its possible dangers. They have placed undue trust in the official advisory process that governments have created and rely on, and disregarded evidence that puts that process in question. Hence there is a missing dimension in their treatment of policy aspects: they have not caught on to the need to strengthen the basis of policy by making the advisory process more objective and professionally watertight.
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