GWPF Newsletter: Oregon Climate Bill Drama Ends In Victory For Runaway Senators

Oregon Democrats Say Climate Change Bill Is Dead After Republican Senators Fled The State

In this newsletter:

1) Runaway Oregon Republican Says Lawmakers Won't Return Until 'Expensive' Carbon Tax Bill Scrapped
Fox News, 25 June 2019 
 
2) Oregon Democrats Say Climate Change Bill Is Dead After Republican Senators Fled The State
Slate, 26 June 2019 

 
3) Oregon Climate Debacle Spotlights Enduring US Divisions
E&E News, 26 June 2019
 
4) As United States Divide, The Green New Deal Could Be Democrats’ Undoing In 2020
Joel Kotkin, The Daily Beast, 18 June 2019 
 
5) Japan ‘To Build 20GW Of Coal-Fired Capacity Over Next Decade’
Energy Live News, 20 June 2019
 
6) EU Climate Goals Ditched As Warsaw And Budapest Dig In
Deutsche Welle, 26 June 2019 
 
7) And Finally: Whatever Happened To The Global Warming Hiatus?
Clive Best, 24 June 2019 

Full details:

1) Runaway Oregon Republican Says Lawmakers Won't Return Until 'Expensive' Carbon Tax Bill Scrapped
Fox News, 25 June 2019 

One of the runaway Oregon Republican senators said they won’t return to the state until the “inefficient, complicated, and expensive” carbon tax is scrapped and a bipartisan solution is found.

Oregon State Senator Tim Knopp appeared on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning from an undisclosed location as he and other 11 Republicans remain in hiding to block the looming climate change legislation – all while the state police was authorized by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown to round them up.

He said that the Republican walkout was warranted given the damage the legislation would inflict upon the people of Oregon, but stressed that they too want to combat climate change.

“We do want to take action on climate change but this was a carbon tax and one of the most inefficient, complicated, and expensive ways to address reduction carbon dioxide emissions,” Knopp said.

“All we're saying is it shouldn't cost thousands of manufacturing jobs, raise the gas tax by 20 cents a gallon to start out with, and raise natural gas prices for people who heat their home by almost 50 percent. We think there's a better way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and so we’re holding out and only way we could do that and stop this vote is by not providing a quorum for Democrats to roll over us,” he added.

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2) Oregon Democrats Say Climate Change Bill Is Dead After Republican Senators Fled The State
Slate, 26 June 2019 

A landmark piece of climate change legislation that stalled after Republican senators fled to Idaho to avoid a roll call is likely dead, the top Democrat in the Oregon Senate said Tuesday.

But despite the Republicans’ stunt, the Senate president said it was his own party that did not have the votes to pass the sweeping legislation. It appears Republicans high-tailing it to the hills with police in pursuit are more organized than Democrats who actually show up to work.

“What I’m about to say, I say of my own free will. No one has told me to say this,” said Democratic Oregon Senate President and possible hostage Peter Courtney, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

“House Bill 2020 does not have the votes on the Senate floor. That will not change.”

Gov. Kate Brown, who last week ordered state police to track down missing Republicans, also conceded Tuesday that the legislation was dead, but she blamed Republicans for blocking a bill “that provides a better future for our state and for our children, and the tactics they employed to do so are not just unacceptable, but dangerous.”

Climate activists turned their backs on Courtney as he spoke on the Senate floor. Democrats who supported the law appeared frustrated and even “livid” with Courtney’s declaration, OPB reported. They wouldn’t even speak to reporters.

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3) Oregon Climate Debacle Spotlights Enduring US Divisions
E&E News, 26 June 2019
 
Republicans hailed the developments, saying they were a reflection of voters' concerns over the cost of Democrats' climate policy. 

 
Loggers in Oregon demonstrated against carbon cap-and-trade legislation last week. Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom

Oregon was supposed to be the crowning achievement for greens in a year that has seen liberal states take unprecedented action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Among the string of victories for climate hawks: New York committed to decarbonizing its entire economy by midcentury. New Mexico and Washington pledged to cut all carbon from their power plants. Colorado empowered regulators to green the economy, and Maryland and Nevada ordered up big increases in their supplies of renewable electricity.

But only Oregon had an actual plan for cutting emissions from every sector of its economy.

Early last week, the state appeared on track to join California as the only states with an economywide cap-and-trade system. Democrats, who had labored on the legislation for the better part of a decade, boasted a supermajority in the state Legislature and had pledged to make it a priority. Gov. Kate Brown (D) was an enthusiastic supporter.

Then everything came crashing down.

Senate Republicans fled the state and went into hiding, denying the Senate the quorum needed to vote on the legislation. Brown sent the state police after them, but Senate President Peter Courtney (D) yesterday said the bill lacked the votes to pass (E&E News PM, June 25).

In the chaos that followed Courtney's announcement, it was not clear if the bill was actually dead. Brown and House Speaker Tina Kotek (D) pledged to fight for the legislation. The governor, speaking to climate activists outside the Capitol, framed Republicans' walkout as an affront to democracy.

"Are you willing to fight on?" Brown asked to cheers from the crowd. "OK, it's going to take time. It's going to take persistence, and it's going to take passion. Do you have the passion? Do you have the persistence? And do you have the patience to make it happen?

"I've said many times, and I'll say it again: Future generations will judge us not on the fact of global climate change but on what we've done to tackle it," Brown said. "We are and we will with your help."

The debate has been animated by threats of violence. Democrats canceled Saturday's legislative session after police warned of a credible threat from militia groups, which had enthusiastically spoken out in favor of the Republican walkout. GOP lawmakers have disavowed the groups.

Jonathan Lockwood, an adviser for the Heartland Institute who acts as a spokesman for the Oregon Republican Party, sought to shift the blame back on Democrats. He argued that the party's liberal Portland base was so hellbent on passing climate legislation that it jeopardized other bills under consideration before the close of the legislative session later this week.
Oregonians would ultimately pay the price, Lockwood said.

"The cap-and-trade bill here in Oregon is a sloppy attempt at passing a crony slush fund in the name of addressing global climate change that fails to adequately address real environmental concerns," Lockwood said.

He added, "The bill gives our corrupt governor and a new slush fund czar total authority to enter our state into binding contracts with other states and even foreign governments."

The showdown highlights an overlooked aspect of this year's wave of climate legislation: Even as other liberal states moved forward with climate plans this year, they did so with minimal Republican support.

Democrats in Washington and Maryland failed to win a single Republican vote for their clean electricity plans. Colorado's 13 climate bills attracted token Republican support, with individual bills often winning a combined two or three votes from GOP lawmakers in both chambers.

Even in New York, a state where Republicans have a long history of championing environmental policy, support for the Climate and Community Protection Act was limited. Seven out of 43 GOP lawmakers in the General Assembly voted for the legislation, which calls for net-zero emissions by 2050. Two out of 22 Republican state senators voted for the bill, which codified the state's carbon reduction targets in law and established a Climate Action Council to develop a plan for meeting the goals (Climatewire, June 18).

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4) As United States Divide, The Green New Deal Could Be Democrats’ Undoing In 2020
Joel Kotkin, The Daily Beast, 18 June 2019 

Places that still produce tangible things need energy, and at prices like those we have today.



If next year’s election is a referendum on Donald Trump, you can hand power to the Democrats now. But fortunately for the president, and the Republican Party, politics remains more about interests than personalities.

More than by cultural memes touching on race, gender, and even taste, the United States are divided by where we live and how we make our living. America, after all, is a vast country and its remarkable economic diversity is what makes it so dynamic and capable against all competitors.

In much of the country, the economy still relies on tangible things—agricultural production, energy, manufacturing and logistics. But in the Northeast and on the West Coast, the economic drivers are intangible—technology, business services, tourism, financial services and real estate.

This has come at a steep cost to the remaining working- and middle-class people of those regions, even as it has inflated the self-esteem of those who are making it in super-star cities. The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo claims that dense urban centers are “the real America.”That’s not so. In reality, most of our economic activity takes place in smaller and mid-sized metropolitan areas, and most of the recent growth, notes demographer Wendell Cox, has not been in places like Manhattan but sprawling, low-density cities of the sunbelt, as well as some in the Heartland. All together, 90 percent of our GDP generated in metropolitan areas is generated outside the densest regions.

The once celebrated American heartland, as Jon K. Lauck notes in his book From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, is now viewed by the great cities as a bastion of narrow-mindedness, religiosity, sexism and racism. To curb the rubes’ political influence entirely, progressives now seek to undermine the electoral college, which would guarantee, among other things, that no presidential candidate need visit the Great Plains.

Generally, the urban upper class see the hinterland as deficient, with no place in the modern world economy. As economies built around traditional industries like manufacturing, energy, agricultural, home construction and basic business services struggled during the first decade of this millennium, the progressive clerisy at places like Slatecrowed that these often higher-paying blue collar jobs were never coming back. Generally obsessed with issues of gender or race, many progressive whites—an increasingly radical group— have little more than contempt for the working-class whites who inhabit our smaller towns and cities.

Unlike the tech oligarchs and the financial giants, people working in the tangible economy had little influence under President Obama and, in the case of energy, seemed slotted for a radical downsizing. In contrast, since Donald Trump’s election, growth in the Heartland and southern region has outstripped that of the Democratic base of big cities and fancy suburbs.
Similarly, Trump’s emphasis on restraining China’s industrial juggernaut may be unpopular with gentry politicians in both parties, including Joe Biden, but it’s resonated in the Heartland, which suffered the bulk of the estimated 3.4 million jobs lost since 2001 from China trade. Perhaps if China took the jobs of media personalities, academics and tech oligarchs, we might expect similar concerns in Manhattan, Boston, LA or the Bay Area.

New York City had one million industrial jobs in 1950. Despite its stunning resurgence in the last decade, it now has less than 100,000. The picture is much the same in California.

Yet in other places the industrial economy has surged, adding nearly 500,000 jobs over the past two years. This growth may now be slowing, in part due to trade tensions, but the geography of industrial growth continues to tilt towards less regulated states such as Nevada, Arizona, Indiana and Texas. If Trump’s bumptious tariff policy brings back American jobs—for example with the return of Black & Decker from China announced recently or the possible shift of iPhone production—the beneficiaries likely will not be in Manhattan, Los Angeles or San Francisco, but in Texas, Indiana, Wisconsin or Michigan.

The remarkable resurgence of American energy has tilted the economic momentum further, to the point where barbers in places like Midland, Texas can earn close to $200,000 annually. In the last years of the Obama administration, California, Washington, Massachusetts and New York all experienced rapid GDP growth. But now the most recent Bureau of Economic Advisors report shows that at the end of 2018 income growth is now strongest in the pro-Trump states, with Texas registering six percent GDP growth while states like North Dakota, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania outpace—often by a wide margin—California, Massachusetts and New York.

If you read the established media, or listen to the current gaggle of Democratic wannabe presidents, there’s a giddiness about the party’s leftward lurch, most evident in plans relating to climate change policy. Yet to broad swaths of the country—including in more peripheral parts of blue states—demand to rapidly eliminate all fossil fuel poses something close to its own existential challenge.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can speak about going on a war footing to “fight” global warming in part because there’s not much industry, or for that matter energy generation, in her district spanning parts of Queens and the Bronx. It’s a different matter if you work in the fossil fuel business or at a nuclear power plant. This is already stirring concern among private sector unions who predominate in these sectors, as exemplified by the labor protest at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco in 2016. (Public unions, on the other hand, tend to favor GND since it would expand government employment and power).

In California, 400,000 people worked in the conventional energy industry as recently as 2012, but many of those jobs now seem slated for elimination. Nationally, a fossil fuel wipeout could eliminate roughly 10 million jobs with the impact strongest in Texas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Alaska and Louisiana, and increasingly Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Even broader would be the impact of high energy prices on manufacturing-based economies. Every place in the world—Germany, Australia and California—that has embraced GND-style policies endures sky-high energy prices. Ever higher electricity rates in California are now roughly twice those of neighboring states (despite the Golden State’s huge energy reserves) and one reason why factory jobs are headed elsewhere and “energy poverty” is on the rise.

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5) Japan ‘To Build 20GW Of Coal-Fired Capacity Over Next Decade’
Energy Live News, 20 June 2019

Utility companies in Japan are planning to build around 20GW of coal-fired capacity over the next decade.

The scope of development will depend on how many suspended nuclear reactors resume operation, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Its report suggests increased competition in Japan’s electricity market may also have an effect as new non-coal entrants compete for market share.

However, new coal developments also depend on whether the government will grant environmental approvals, given Japan’s ambition to reduce carbon emissions by 26% by 2030.

The EIA adds: “The environmental approvals will depend on several factors, including the plant’s proximity to population centres and the pace of Japan’s CO2 emissions reduction efforts.

“The Japanese Government has promoted the development of more efficient coal-burning technologies, such as ultra-supercritical coal-fired power (USC) plants, in an effort to meet environmental goals. USC plants emit less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generation than traditional coal-fired plants, although their emissions are still nearly double that of natural gas plants.”

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) recommends 50% of all coal generation to come from USC plants by 2030.

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6) EU Climate Goals Ditched As Warsaw And Budapest Dig In
Deutsche Welle, 26 June 2019 

Poland and Hungary said they will put their own economies first after rejecting an EU bid for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. All very well, but the latest episode in their battle with Brussels will affect us all.

EU leaders failed last week to set a target for carbon neutrality by 2050, the European Commission's proposal backed by 24 of the EU's member states, but vetoed by Poland, Hungary, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

Supporters of the plan hoped the 28-member bloc could show it was leading the global shift to cleaner air ahead of a key UN climate summit in September. Instead the 2050 date was dropped into a footnote, which read: "For a large majority of member states, climate neutrality must be achieved by 2050."

Fair for who?

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called for a "fair" transition to zero emissions. "We don't want a situation in which caring for the world's climate will happen at the expense of the Polish economy," he said.

The Polish economy is one of the few in Europe to have seen uninterrupted growth throughout the financial crisis and austerity period, although heavily boosted by EU funds since the country became an EU member in 2004.

Warsaw's apparent recalcitrance comes as Poland's ongoing tussle with the European Commission over judicial reforms that lower the retirement age for Supreme Court judges enters potential end-game territory. And the language from Warsaw drew on Poles' historical legacy, usually a winner when bolstering domestic support. "Poland could not develop during the 50 years following the Second World War, like France, Austria or the Netherlands did," said Morawiecki.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, having initially wavered in his support for the 2050 target, finally said he could not commit to it until a plan to finance it was agreed. "So let's start to talk about money!" he said, adding that "we are open, we will negotiate."

In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis called the efforts "ecological hysteria," and asked "why should we decide 31 years ahead of time what will happen in 2050?"

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7) And Finally: Whatever Happened To The Global Warming Hiatus?
Clive Best, 24 June 2019 

The monthly temperature values in over 4000 CRUTEM3 stations have all been continuously changed, and it is these changes alone that have resulted in transforming the 16 year long hiatus in global warming into a rising temperature trend. But all these changes have only affected temperatures AFTER 1998.

The last IPCC assessment in 2013 showed a clear pause in global warming lasting 16 years from  1998 to 2012 – the notorious hiatus. As a direct consequence of this  AR5 estimates of climate sensitivity were reduced and CMIP5 models appeared to clearly overestimate trends. Following the first release of HadCRUT4 in 2012  the ‘headline’ that followed was that 2005 and 2010 were now marginally warmer than 1998. This was the first dent in removing the hiatus. Since then each new version of H4 has showed further incremental warming trends, such that by 2019 the hiatus has now completely vanished. Anyone mentioning it today is likely to be ridiculed by the climate science community. So how did this reversal happen within just 7 years? I decided to find out exactly why the post 1998 temperature record changed so dramatically in such a short period of time.

In what follows I always use the same algorithm as CRU for the station data and then blend that with the Hadley SST data. I have checked that I can reproduce exactly the latest HadCRUT4.6 results based on the current 7820 stations from CRU merged with  HadSST3. Back in 2012 I downloaded the original station data from CRU –  CRUTEM3. I have also downloaded the latest CRUTEM4 station data.

Figure 1 compares the latest HadCRUT4.6 results with the last version of HadCRUT3.

Figure 1. Comparison of HadCRUT3 and the latest HadCRUT4.6 Notice how all trends pivot around the 1998 El Nino peak.

I had assumed that the reason for the apparent trend change was because CRUTEM4 had added many new weather stations in the Arctic (removing some in S.America as well), while additionally the SST data had also been updated (HadSST2 moved to HADSST3). However, as I show below, my assumption simply isn’t true.

To investigate I recalculated a ‘modern’ version of HadCRUT3 by using only the original 4100 stations (used by CRUTEM3) from CRUTEM4 station data.  The list of these stations are defined here. I then merged these with  both the older HadSST2 and HADSST3 to derive annual global temperature anomalies. Figure 2 shows the result. I get almost exactly the same values as the full 7820 stations in HadCRUT4. It certainly does not reproduce HadCRUT3! 

Figure 2. The black curve is based on “modern” CRUTEM3 stations combined with HADSST3 and the Yellow  curve is “modern” CRUTEM3 stations with HADSST2

This result provides two conclusions.

1. Modern CRUTEM3 stations give a different result to the original CRUTEM3 stations.

2. SST data is not responsible for the difference between HadCRUT4 and HadCRUT3

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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.