This is very wrong. The emails are worth studying in full, because they raise very serious questions about the credibility of the IPCC, the journals publishing papers on climatology, the government scientific bodies commissioning research into climate and the news organizations covering them.

Moreover, the emails call into disrepute the assertion, frequently made, that the warming of the climate over the past century is known to be “unprecedented”. While it is possible that it is unprecedented, we do not know this for certain, since the proofs advanced are provably flawed.

So what do we know? What do the emails in question tell us?

1. The emails are from a repository from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, an organization which maintains a database of temperatures used by researchers analyzing the Earth’s climate. The database is one of several which are nominally claimed to be independently produced.
2. The emails are not comprehensive, only about 2.5% of the emails sent to and from the professors in question have been released into the wild. The encrypted emails are well enough encrypted that unless the hacker/whistle-blower publishes the encryption key’s pass-phrase, they will not be decrypted in our life-times.
3. The emails that are readable appear to be selected based on the subjects of discussion, primarily around controversies surrounding paleo-climate research, a branch of climatology where ice-cores, tree-cores, sedimentary-cores and other similar geological records are used to attempt to reconstruct climate from periods prior to modern temperature instrumentation. Paleo-climatologists have been instrumental in creating the narrative that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented, dangerous rate.
4. The first controversy, “hiding the decline” is related to an attempt to create a global temperature record by Dr Michael Mann of Penn State, who used records of tree-cores collected at a handful of sites across the world to create a historical temperature record. By measuring the density and thickness of the rings, one can create a record going back about a thousand years of tree growth. Dr Mann used a statistical process that is a variant of Principal Component Analysis to generate identify which sets of tree-cores had growth patterns that most closely tracked temperature in the past hundred years. He presumed that these sets of cores would maintain a similar relationship with temperature throughout the entire record. By mathematically applying this transformation to the tree-core data, he produced the thousand year reconstruction known colloquially as the Mann Hockey Stick, which played a central role in both IPCC reports and in Al Gore’s movie, and Inconvenient Truth. At this point, I should digress to explain several critical flaws in Michael Mann’s work that doom this effort.
• The relationship between tree growth and temperature is not linear, and is not even proportional. Here are all the things that affect tree core growth, according to the late Dr Daly:
1. cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.
2. pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis
3. access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.
4. moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.
5. snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature
• Without a physical correlation, one is left with cherrypicked accidental correlation. I will give an example of this phenomenon by describing a stock-scam. A person wanting to get at gullible people’s money will email 500,000 people telling them that stock A is going to rise in the next month, and 500,000 people that stock A is going to fall. He has a 50/50 shot of being right, so 500,000 people receive the correct prediction. A month later, he selects the group that received the correct prediction and divides them in half and sends each half another set of predictions. Now 250,000 people have received two correct predictions in a row. Another two passes, and now he has 62,000 people that have received 4 correct tips from him in a row. He then contacts these people offering to invest their money for them. This is precisely the sort of cherry picking that mindlessly applying PCA to a series of unrelated parameters will produce.
• The type of PCA Dr Mann used is infamous for creating a spurious rise at the end of a time series when applied to time series of data.
• After 1960, the trees that had been most correlated with temperature ceased to correlate with temperatures and instead showed reduced growth rates that when converted to the apparent temperature showed a dramatic decline of 4 – 5 degrees. This is the “decline” that needed to be hidden, not the decline of actual temperatures, but a divergence of the proxy temperatures from the historical record.
• Dr Mann “hid” this decline in his major paper published in Nature Magazine by splicing in instrumental temperature data into the curve in order to give the appearance that the proxy temperatures were rising in tandem with actual instrumental temperatures when in fact they were diverging. This became known as “Mike’s Nature Trick”
• Dr Mann’s original reconstruction did not extend past 1980, ostensibly because the research of traveling to remote locations to core trees was difficult, expensive, and difficult to get funding for.
• Dr Mann’s reconstruction had no Medieval Warm Period, a period where historical records indicate the Northern Hemisphere was much warmer than ordinary – with warm weather crops being grown in England and Greenland being capable of supporting subsistence farmers.
5. Several scientists raised the above objections to Dr Mann, either in papers they published or face to face in seminars or via direct emails. Rather than responding to them, Dr Mann engaged in scientific misconduct, namely:
   • a) Providing misleading information as to his methods and raw data
   • b) Attempting to have authors and editors of papers that raised objections fired from journals or, if they were academics, from their teaching posts
   • c) Lying to third parties about his actions or the actions of people he was engaged in disputes with.
6. Dr Mann was assisted in this misconduct actively by senior members of the CRU (the organization whose mail server is the source of the emails), and the knowledge of the chairman of the IPCC, an organization that is supposed to be a transparent, non-activist advisor to national governments.
7. Separately from the Issues affecting the Hockey Stick, the CRU was also dealing with people trying to reproduce their database from raw data by stonewalling them, primarily by telling them that the raw temperature data was confidential and that CRU did not have permission from the organizations supplying them to provide the data.
8. The people being stonewalled eventually resorted to using Freedom Of Information Act requests to attempt to pry loose data such as which meteorological stations were the source of raw data that was then processed to produce the database of global temperatures.
9. When confronted with these FOIA requests, senior scientists at the CRU attempted to delete emails that were covered by the FOIA.
10. The raw temperature data was not being produced because Dr Jones of the CRU, who curates the data, had lost track of which stations he had used to produce the database.
11. Dr Jones & members of his team, with the knowledge of the FOIA officer conspired to mislead the people submitting the FOIA requests in order not to admit that they had lost their intermediate work.
12. An inspector general investigating the deletions concluded that these officers willfully and knowingly violated the FOIA, but that having evaded detection for more than six months, the statute of limitations had run out on the crime making it unprocecutable.
13. Simultaneously the scientists conspired with officials in the BBC to suffuse climate change alarmism into the BBC product. This conspiracy went as far as having BBC reporters prep scientists at the CRU how to maximize the impact of their interviews on news-magazine shows.
14. The Scientists who presented a united front that equated anyone who questioned the Mann reconstruction or the CRU database as being on the par with Holocaust Deniers in their emails to each other admitted discomfort, confusion and doubt with their pronouncements in private.

The overarching tale that I see in this whole sordid affair is the usual one; it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup. Losing data, doing sloppy work can be very embarrassing. Had Dr Mann been willing to contemplate that he might be mistaken, instead of assuming that everyone who disagreed with him or raised questions about his work were members of a secret cabal working for the fossil fuel industry and seeking to destroy their reputations, he might have been able to recover his reputation.

In their zeal to not admit weakness, to not consider the possibility that they were mistaken on any of their pronouncements, the scientists in question did a great deal of damage:

1. Researchers who used the CRU/Mann analysis as part of their own work probably wasted time and money that cannot be recovered.
2. The chilling effect of their actions almost certainly quashed research that would have given invaluable evidence to people attempting to deal with climate change.
3. Citizens and politicians were manipulated through fraud and deceit into making decisions that they might not have made had they been provided with accurate data

The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been very lucrative to government officials, scientists who are seen as visionary experts and to NGO’s involved in the environmental movement. This wealth has been extracted from people who deserve to use it for their own ends. For the very poor it has made it harder to make ends meet. The fact that the head of the IPCC was cc’ed on attempts to fire professors who published dissenting views and did nothing damns the UN involvement in the affair.

I’ve long called for the separation of Science and State, which I recognize is a pipe dream. In the absence of this, it is time for people to cease trusting the organizations that permitted the misconduct above to continue.  The efforts to mitigate climate change are interfering with economic development that is needed to bring much of humanity out of the misery of poverty, increasing the cost of living for most people living in the developing world and is creating crony-capitalistic institutions that are ripe for corruption. To steal from Dr Covey’s analogy about cutting a road through the jungle, we are probably cutting a road through the wrong jungle, and there is no point in proceeding until we figure out which jungle we should be seeking out.

I can’t help but think of another piece of legislation that had to be passed “immediately” and “without delay” nearly ten years ago in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The piece of legislation I am referring to of course was the USA PATRIOT Act. I mean what’s not to like? The bill has the words “USA” and “PATRIOT” in them and would make our country safer because the law would give law enforcement the tools needed to fight terrorism.

One of the tools the PATRIOT Act (Sec 213), a.k.a. “sneak and peek” provided law enforcement the ability to delay notification of search warrants of someone suspected of a “criminal offense.” Between 2006 and 2009, this provision must have been used many hundreds or thousands of times against suspected terrorists, right? Try 15 times. This same provision was used 122 in fraud cases and 1,618 times in drug related cases.

Is this what supporters of the PATRIOT Act had in mind when most of them didn’t even read the bill?

So we’ve been down this road before – pass a bill with a name that no one would be comfortable voting against. To vote against the PATRIOT Act might suggest to voters that you are somehow unpatriotic as voting against Obama’s jobs bill will undoubtedly be used in campaign ads to say opponents are “obstructionists” or are not willing to “put politics aside” in order to “put Americans back to work.” And don’t even get me started on all the bad laws that have been passed using names of dead children.

But who is really playing political games here? I think the answer quite clearly is President Obama in this case. He knows damn well that if the economy is still in the shape it is come Election Day he has very little chance of winning a second term unless he can find some way to successfully pin the blame his political opponents. He knows that raising taxes is a nonstarter for Republicans – particularly Tea Party Republicans. There may be some good things in his bill that should be passed (the Devil is in the details of course) that Republicans can support but if it’s all or nothing, the answer will be nothing.

President Obama is counting on the nothing so he can say it’s the House Republicans’ fault that the economy hasn’t recovered. This class warfare rhetoric plays very well on college campuses and union rallies. The worst thing that could happen from Obama’s perspective is if the Republicans call his bluff, pass the bill, and the bill fails to provide the results he claims his bill will achieve (though as a political calculation, it may be a wash as Tea Party voters in-particular would not be pleased either).

The worst thing the congress could do for this economy would be to pass this bill as hastily as the PATRIOT Act was a decade ago. The best thing congress could do is for its members to actually read the bill and have a rational discussion* and debate it line by line. Whether Obama’s intentions are for good or ill, there will be seen and unforeseen consequences if the bill does pass. A top down approach (as I think this bill is) is rarely if ever a good recipe for an economy. No one is smart enough to plan the economy, not even the brain trust of the Obama administration (this should be obvious by now).

Just because the president says his bill will create jobs doesn’t make it so.

*LOL

Rick Moran writes a piece for Pajamas Media today that illustrates the bait and switch Obama pulls on the American people.

Sounding for all the world like someone who just experienced a “road to Damascus” moment on energy, Barack Obama embraced offshore drilling for oil and ordered wide swaths of previously pristine ocean open to the depredations of greedy and rapacious oil companies.

Or if you’re not one of Obama’s wacky green supporters, Obama gave the go-ahead for tapping the biggest expansion of energy reserves in history.

Or did he?

In fact, what Obama giveth with one hand, he taketh away with another. Some leases already in motion have been canceled while potentially huge deposits of oil and natural gas are still off-limits, including the entire Pacific coastline of the United States from the Mexican border to Canada. In addition, in order to expand drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the president must get the authorization of Congress. This would have been a snap when gas was $4 a gallon, but is much less a certainty today.

Other leases that had been approved in Alaska have also been canceled for further environmental study. Of course, the president didn’t even bother to mention the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — sacred calving grounds of the porcupine caribou — which would yield as many barrels of oil as all the areas the president opened for drilling combined. And the slow motion approval process guarantees that I will be retired and getting to and from our little grocery store here in Streator, Illinois, riding a donkey before a drop of that East Coast oil makes it to market.

What is the point of this welcome but ultimately less-than-half measure to expand our domestic oil production? Note the word “drill” used in just about every headline in the media about this story. The president is sending a signal to the American people that he has heard their cries of “drill, baby drill” and has deigned to respond favorably. Citizens will think better of him for it, despite the fact that it will not increase domestic oil production until the president is long out of office and considered an elder statesmen. Perhaps he will have been elected president of the world by then, but if we’re still in Afghanistan I wouldn’t bet on it.

Yeah, so much for “drill, baby, drill”. Plus, Obama made this announcement in front of a F/A-18 Hornet fighter that is slated to run on a mix of 50% jet fuel and 50% biofuels on Earth Day. This “drilling” announcement was designed to position Obama towards the center while at the same time bribing squishy Republicans who are open towards voting for cap and tax along with “moderate” and “conservative” Democrats who are reluctant to vote for it. As expected, state run media lapped it up and dutifully reported it as Obama wanted them to and to complete the disinformation campaign, they even found far left politicians and activists who were outraged.

Ultimately, this proposal is simply just an early April Fool’s joke by Barack Obama on the American people. It takes away existing oil leases and ultimately does not expand drilling in the US while at the same time giving Obama political cover to push cap and tax and the rest of his “green energy” subsidies. Unlike most April Fool’s jokes, this one is not funny. Instead, it will ultimately cost the average American family at least $1500 more a year in energy costs.

Catastrophe Denied: The Science of the Skeptics Position (studio version) from Warren Meyer on Vimeo.

Warren is local to me (he lives about three miles away actually), and runs both the excellent libertarian small business and economics blog CoyoteBlog, and the absolutely essential climate blog Climate Skeptic.

TARP: Notwithstanding the wide-ranging areas this money was targeted to (i.e. auto bailouts) and the fact that when it was determined it would lose less than planned the difference would be spent elsewhere, this was nothing more than a bald-faced attempt to shore up balance sheets to forestall economic reality. I said at the time that much of this activity was designed to slow down the contraction and hope that the economy could grow out of the doldrums in the meantime, but that it risks causing rampant inflation when money velocity actually picks up. Worst, it had the potential for the government to buy the worst garbage paper the banks had on offer, essentially being an economic sinkhole of major proportions. Luckily it has not been as bad as anticipated, largely because government meddling in the internal affairs of banks has caused them to try like hell to pay it back quickly and get themselves out from under its terms.

Stimulus: The stimulus was billed as a way to jumpstart shovel-ready infrastructure projects, but it was quickly apparent that the only thing shoveled was a load of BS. Stimulus was little more than a giveaway to state and local governments to continue spending beyond the ability of their states to support and reward them for overspending the proceeds of economic expansion as if the bubble would never pop. While employment has plummeted in the private sector, government is growing — never a good sign to a libertarian. Here in high-tax California, we need to slash our state public sector, not bail it out.

Cash for clunkers: Billed as a stimulus and environmental program, cash for clunkers was pure destruction of economic value. Cars with an average market value of roughly $1500 — productive, useful assets — were rendered completely inoperable. In a perverse unintended consequence, it dried up the supply of older used cars (and thus increased the price of said cars), hurting some of the poor who might not be able to afford better vehicles. Paying people to dig and then fill up holes would have been economically stupid, but cash for clunkers is the equivalent of asking them to put uranium in those holes so that hole could never be safely dug again. Pure economic insanity.

But Cash for Caulkers is somewhat different. For those unfamiliar with the proposed program, it gives tax subsidies to people who work to make their homes more energy-efficient. The draft would provide a 50% rebate on materials and labor up to $12K per household. As a libertarian, I don’t much believe that the government should have the responsibility to fix economic burst bubbles. But this particular policy has several features that make it much more effective and efficient economic stimulus than much of what the federal government has done.

• This policy primarily targets those in the building/construction trade, arguably the hardest hit of the economic downturn. Since the housing bubble was partially created by bad government policy, it is at least preferable to help these folks find a more orderly transition than the welfare line.
• Home weatherization and energy efficiency is often a large initial expense with a long time horizon to pay back. Due to increased social and geographic mobility, it is often ignored by homeowners who don’t know if they’ll be in their homes long enough to make the efficiency gains worth it. Thus, improvements in home energy efficiency are underproduced by the market.
• Because this will reduce energy consumption in some homes, it may have the positive externality of reducing demand on energy for all users (thus hopefully lowering price). Again, this positive externality suggests that energy efficiency improvements are underproduced by the market.
• Finally, unlike Cash-for-clunkers, which destroyed and replaced useful economic assets, Cash for Caulkers actually improves existing economic assets. There is a lasting economic benefit to reduced energy usage for the present and future owners of these homes.

Of course, I cannot claim that I’m in favor of this program. The positive aspects I list above are ascribed to my ideal cash-for-caulkers policy, which I am certain will not closely resemble what comes out of the sausage-factory on Capitol Hill. Waste, fraud, and abuse are certain to be rampant. In a cost-benefit analysis of the size of the program, one can’t assume Congress will determine either cost or benefit rationally. It is picking economic winners and losers, which is partly responsible for getting us into the Great Recession in the first place. And finally, while it might have been an interesting idea BEFORE the TARP, stimulus, and cash for clunkers, I think we’ve already gone so far into deficit spending that it’s a good idea to stop while we’re only a few trillion behind. It appears that the country has hired Barack Obama to dig a deficit hole and [hopefully] fill it back up, but he simply refuses to stop digging.

So if I’m not in favor of the program, why am I writing this post? Frankly, it’s because I saw the level of derision that the policy got on several fronts (including from Jon Stewart). Done properly (which I don’t expect Congress to be capable of delivering), it would have been a timely program that helps those who are most affected by the housing crash while improving existing assets that might not be otherwise improved. Done properly, it could actually be seen as an investment in our future — and by that I mean an actual investment, not simply “spending”, which is politicospeak for that word.

It might sound silly, but home weatherization actually has potential at being smart policy. After a year of horrible, bad, not-very-good-at-all government spending and giveaway programs, to see one that actually has promise shouldn’t cause scorn and derision as its primary reactions.

Or do they?

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote a very interesting article which makes very much the opposite point.

The goals of the climate change crowd are not reduction in global warming but the enactment of a world-wide system of regulation which puts business under government control and transfers wealth from rich nations to poor ones under the guise of fighting climate change. Should the emissions come down on their own, as they are doing, the excuse for draconian legislation goes, well, up in smoke.

The facts are startling. In 1990, the year chosen as the global benchmark for carbon emissions, the United States emitted 5,007 millions of metric tons of carbon (mmts). Kyoto specified that emissions must be reduced to a level 6% lower than in 1990. For the U.S., that means 4,700 million metric tons.

American carbon emissions rose year after year until they peaked in 2007 at 5,967 mmts. But, in 2008, they dropped to 5,801 and, in 2009, the best estimate is for a reduction to 5,476. So, in two years, U.S. carbon emissions will have gone down by more than 500 mmts – a cut of over 8%.

President Obama has pledged to bring the U.S. carbon emissions down by 17%. He’s halfway there.

All this without government regulation, taxation, or phony “carbon credits”.

In all honesty, I really don’t know what to make of the science behind the man made global warming debate* but I have been a skeptic since the issue has been part of the public debate (and long before the whole ClimateGate scandal broke). I don’t doubt the phenomenon of global warming at all; the earth has warmed and cooled many times over billions of years without the intervention of man. Why wouldn’t the earth warm up again regardless of man’s intervention?

My skepticism aside, the fact that carbon emissions are being reduced on the part of private actors without government force isn’t all that surprising. Over the last several years, global warming “awareness” has been broadcast on an almost daily basis and the market has responded.

As a general rule, I believe that reducing waste and increasing efficiency is not only good for the environment but also cost effective. Being environmentally conscious should not mean sacrificing quality or increasing costs.

A good Capitalist wants to have the car with the best mpg rating without sacrificing safety. It’s not because the Capitalist is necessarily concerned about man made global warming nor that s/he wants to “stick it to the BIG oil companies” but simply s/he wants more bang for his/her buck (greedy Capitalist!).

On a personal level, I use the reusable shopping bags not because I am overly concerned about too many plastic bags filling up the public landfill but simply because the reusable bags are stronger. I am quite willing to pay the $2 it costs to buy the stronger, reusable bag because it means fewer trips between my vehicle and my home without fear of the bag tearing in the process.

Many of these “green” innovations have benefits beyond combating pollution.

But even if everything Morris and McGann writes is true and even if the Kyoto targets are met (or even exceeded), this will not be enough for the global warming extremists**. If carbon emissions are reduced by 17%, they will move the goal posts and demand 20 and 25% reductions. When these goals are not met, the extremists will demand more government regulation despite what the free market has achieved on its own.

*I’m not a climatologist and neither are most people who will read this post.
**As they also point out.

Nongqawuse was a teenager and a member of the Xhosa tribe in South Africa.  One day in April or May of 1856, she went down to the river to fetch water.  When she returned, she said that she had encountered the spirits of three of her ancestors who told her that her people must destroy their crops and kill their cattle.  In return, the sun would rise red on February 18, 1857, and the Xhosa ancestors would sweep the British settlers from the land and bring them fresh, healthier cattle.  (Some of the Xhosa cattle had been suffering from a lung ailment, which may or may not have been brought by the British settlers’ cattle.)

Astonishingly, the Xhosa chieftain, Sarhili, agreed to do exactly as this young girl urged.  Over the next year, a frenzy occurred in which it is estimated that between 300,000 and 400,000 cattle were killed and crops destroyed.  Historians sometimes call it the “Great Cattle Killing.”

But on February 18, 1857, the sun rose as usual.  It was not red.  And the Xhosa ancestors did not show.  But the Xhosa people had destroyed their livelihood.  In the resulting famine, the population of the area dropped from 105,000 to less than 27,000.  Cannibalism was reported.  Following Nongqawuse’s advice was a calamity of staggering proportions for the Xhosa people.

Like Nongqawuse, Gore tells us that the sun will soon rise red over the land.  Well, maybe.  But already the models that he relies on have been proven wrong.  The intense period of warming that these models predicted over the past ten years never came to pass.  Yet we are repeatedly told that it’s still coming and that it’s just a little late.  Apparently, we should pay no attention to the fact that the polar ice is expanding again.  Instead, we must put the brakes on our use of energy–the very thing that makes the modern world possible–to avoid antagonizing the spirits of our ancestors, I mean to avoid climate disaster.

The most infuriating aspect of the fear-mongers’ movement is that their solution to climate change is for humanity to adopt an economic system that has brought misery and death nearly every time it has been tried.  From the tropics to the poles,  free markets have brought prosperity, comfort and longevity to the masses.  No matter how well intentioned they are, the fear-mongers threaten to wreck the engine that allows the Earth to support a human population in the billions.

The Earth’s climate is in a state of flux. The notion that humanity should doom itself to privation and famines in a futile attempt to maintain climactic parameters within a set of narrow bands is the height of folly.  If we kill our cattle, we too will starve.

So you can imagine I’m not a big fan of HOA’s, and there’s a little bit of schadenfreude in watching them get their hands slapped… But I still can’t support this (via Ezra Klein — hence calling this “good” — on Waxman-Markey):

Lots of small tweaks were added in the past day or two. And some of them were good! Rep. Dennis Cardoza, for instance, added a smart amendment to discourage neighborhood associations from prohibiting solar panels of aesthetic grounds.

So, they can tell you not to paint your door green, but they can’t stop you from filling your roof with a solar array the size of a tennis court.

I have a coworker facing this issue right now. He lives in Newport Beach, CA, and his HOA has some waterfront homes. One of his neighbors with oceanfront (cliff, not sand) is planning to put solar panels down the face of the cliff to electrically heat his pool. This, of course, is California. There are environmental laws, and the HOA doesn’t want to see this happen either. But being California, they ALREADY have laws that stop the HOA or anyone else (including the Greens) from interfering, because solar energy takes precedence. Now it sounds like this will extend nationwide.

This is one of those issues that gets thorny for libertarians. It comes down to property rights, but the question of what legitimate hindrances can be placed on the owners by HOA’s. After all, an HOA is a contract that a buyer of a house willingly enters into. But it doesn’t seem to me like an issue in which Congress has any right to intervene.

As a renter who is waiting for the complete collapse of the market before I buy a home, I know that I may be faced with a tough decision regarding my purchase based upon whether or not I’ll choose a neighborhood with an HOA, and whether the existence of an HOA is enough to dissuade me from the house we otherwise find desirable. But I know what I don’t want, and that is for Congress to be the one telling my HOA what it can or cannot do.

Congressman Mitchell and I disagree about a lot of things. Abortion, social security and government health care, school choice and education policy, many economic issues, government intervention and regulations in general, and the overall wisdom of his party leadership and the DNC…

However, I have to give the man some credit. He has generally been good on energy policy, and on guns since he came to congress (as a local politician his record on guns was mixed). He was also against the auto industry bailout, against TARP, and especially against the unconstitutional TARP bonus tax. He’s even reasonable on national security issues, and veterans affairs.

I believe he has ably represented the interests of his district within the congress; and bucked the leadership when he thought it was best for the district (if perhaps not bucking them enough outside of issues of direct interest to the district).

Today, he voted against his leadership; choosing to vote for the greater good of Arizona, and of the nation; against the Waxman cap and trade bill.

Unfortunately, we all lost in that vote; but senate leaders are already saying it’s dead on their floor… so we’ll see.

Last week, and again this morning, I urged congressman Mitchell by telephone to both his offices, and by email, to vote against the bill; as it was against the interest of both the district, and the nation. This evening, having found out how he voted, and reading his statement on the issue, I called to thank him.

We may disagree with our elected representatives, we may have voted for the other guy, we may think they are the wrong person to be in that chair; but once they are there, they are OUR representatives. The peoples representatives.

Letting them know how you feel about something, how important it is to you, what benefit or harm it will do you personally; it works. It may not seem so much of the time, but most congressmen really do care about what the people of their districts think; if for no other reason that it improves their chances for reelection.

So participate. Let them know. After all, it can’t hurt; and it just might make a difference.

Many people have commented that Obama has effectively given Pelosi and Reid free rein to insert as much prok as they wish into their spending bills while pontificating in mock outrage about the need to reduce pork.  The question on many people’s minds is ‘why?’

In the meantime, Obama has been stacking his administration with idelogues who are convinced that the only way to save the human race from extinction in the coming years is to radically reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses that are emitted by human activity by radically reducing standards of living.  In effect, much like George Bush secretly preparing for an invasion of Iraq from the outset of his administration, Obama appears to be preparing for a Great Leap Forward to radically alter the production and consumption of energy.

The early stages of these efforts can be seen in the effective take-over of the U.S. car industry with mandates to produce green cars that consume far less gasoline.  It also can be seen in the early promises to employ people in “green” jobs paid for by the government.  Banks that now have the Federal governemnt as a major shareholder are being encouraged to make loans to ‘sustainable’ projects.

And, in order to get these questionable and expensive bills passed, the government is breathlessly making announcements about the dire economic emergency we find ourselves in, despite the numerous statistics that imply otherwise.  More troublingly, the government has moved to cut off debate, painting people who are either skeptical of their aims, or who question the effectiveness of their measures to meet their stated goals as being reactionary ideologues who are obstructing needed reforms mindlessly or out of greed.

The manifold failures of the George Bush administration did not come as a surprise to many.  Every major policy initiative, every major hiring and firing decision, every piece of legislation was, to a greater or lesser degree, scrutinized by intelligent people who then accurately predicted the outcome, and publicized it nationally.  It was the ability of the Bush administration to marginalize opponents while buying supporters off with pork projects that allowed the Bush administration to veer so far onto dangerous ground before they were forced to rethink their position and alter course.  Had these voices carried greater weight earlier in the administration, the Bush administration would not have been able to engage in inflationary spending, and wreck the U.S. military to the degree that they did.

6000 years or so of written history stand in mute testimony to the danger posed by the hubris of kings. We know that the massive increases in government spending will wreck the economy – not improve it.  We know that the increased taxes and regulatory uncertainty will hinder investments in capital goods – not enhance them.  We know that when workers are diverted from productive tasks to make-work projects, we are all left poorer as a result.  We know that increased regulation and surveillance by the government will not result in greater happiness of the population.

We cannot afford Obama to get the same pass that LBJ did.  The destructive policies, once put in place, will do great long-term harm to the bulk of the citizenry.  We must all do our part to turn the public against the Obama administration’s adoption of Bush’s political strategies.

I call upon all of you reading this, work on the Obama supporters you know.  Point out calmly, non-judgmentally, all the dangerous warning signs surrounding his presidency.  Turn his base against him, and he cannot do anything but fall.

Key line: “So, why don’t we ever talk about the suns contribution to global warming? …Well, because we can’t regulate it, tax it, or make it feel guilty for what it’s doing“.

Got it in one there friend.

There’s no profit, political gain, or power to be grabbed from acknowledging the real causes, and real effects of whatever global warming there actually is. So, the interested parties simply ignore all that, shout down anyone who disagrees with them, and go about seizing as much power as they can, in a disorderly fashion.

From “What You Oughta Know“, a website with videos explaining an assortment of general, and sometimes esoteric knowledge.

Oh and here are the links he mentioned in the video:

Pacific Research Institute:
the documentary, more information

Reid A. Bryson – scroll down for ice cap article

Solar Activity: A dominant factor in climate dynamics – scroll down read sections in blue

BBC’s The Great Global Warming Swindle

Other possible causes for global warming

Oh and just for fun, here’s the same sites take on “Liberals vs. Conservatives“… which is really a pretty solid explanation of the foundations of minarchist positions:

And a great take on the bailout:

“Because there is no disaster that immediate, decisive, wrong action cannot make worse”

Today we find a bit of evidence that may only support this point:

The $25 low-end estimate [Francisco] Blanch recites is based upon a furthering destruction of Chinese and other emerging-market growth in 2009, and it is astounding if it turns out to be true.

We have witnessed the perfect storm of declining commodity pricing in the last six months — a tsunami of credit tightening, capital withdrawal on a massive scale, dollar strength, weakening emerging-market growth and finally a deflationary spiral that seems to never be ending.

The oil markets, if they represent perfect efficiency as the equity markets normally do, would indicate either that Francisco is very, very wrong with his oil predictions or that we are in for far deeper problems with the rest of our economy. Far-forward contracts of oil are trading at a premium to front months rarely seen before in my history of trading the stuff and in a way that looks unbelievable to other longtime participants.

As I write this piece, January crude is trading for delivery later this month at $43.40 a barrel. Amazingly, January crude for delivery in December of 2009 is trading at $57.50 a barrel, a premium of more than 32%. This premium (contango) nature of the markets has rarely been so great and would allow for a riskless trade. One could buy crude oil for delivery this month, store it and sell next January’s contract for delivery 12 months later. With margin, storage and financing costs, you’d still clear a healthy 11% profit.

Now, I’m a big fan of futures markets. However, futures markets don’t represent truth, they represent an aggregate of belief — and are often trustworthy because it’s belief backed up with money. As such, futures markets tend to be extremely accurate when correct. When wrong, though, they’re often spectacularly wrong, because when groupthink takes over, belief becomes decoupled with reason. This could be easily seen in the housing market, houses representing a similar case to a futures market (i.e. you buy and hold, betting the price in the long-term future will continue to rise, and then even more so recently with house “flippers” speculating on near-term future prices), where the belief that it will simply keep going up only enhances the height it reaches before the inevitable crash.

But I don’t think that is the case here. The pundits are all asking “how low will oil go.” The futures market says it’s headed up. If the futures traders were trading these contracts at $25/bbl, I’d call it groupthink, the belief that things are just going to spiral down worse out of control. But they’re not, they’re exercising a contrarian point with the $57/bbl price. When pundits and futures traders disagree, I know who I’m more likely to trust.

I think what we’re seeing here is a confluence of unintended consequences that many people only purport to understand. Extremely complex are markets making moves that appear contrary to “normal” behavior, and thus everything is becoming very unpredictable. Bailouts here, money-printing there, and debt deflation out of left field have all thrown markets out of whack. It’s going to take time to sort this out, but the oil futures traders are assuming that when it finally happens, we’re more likely to be at $57+/bbl than $25/bbl.

They [and I] may be wrong… When dealing with such complex systems, it’s hard to gauge all the inputs and outputs and every relationship between them. But when you take the prospective theories about what’s going on, I think the plausibility of demand destruction creating a 70% downward move in prices is in question. I think the belief that this is a strong dollar / credit crunch issue is a lot more plausible, and with all the money-printing going on worldwide, I don’t see how anyone can reasonably predict $25/bbl oil.

Venezuela will back repeated cuts in OPEC oil production until prices stabilize, Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez says, and Russia is proposing closer cooperation with the oil cartel.

Ramirez said Wednesday that his country will back a proposed 1 million barrel per day cut when OPEC meets Saturday in Cairo. If that doesn’t halt the price slide, “We will keep cutting until the market stabilizes,” he said during a visit by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Oil prices fell below $54 a barrel Thursday as dismal U.S. economic data and rising crude inventories outweighed the possibility of production cuts by OPEC and non-member Russia.

…

Russia, the largest oil producer outside OPEC, produces around 11 percent of the world’s oil and it could be eager to seek new customers to shore up its suffering economy. OPEC output is estimated at about 31.5 million barrels a day — about 40 percent of daily world demand.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has said OPEC should work to keep global oil prices in a “band between $80 and $100.”

I normally explain price moves using conventional terms of supply and demand. In this case, though, the rules are somewhat different*. There is certainly some demand destruction that has reduced the price of crude oil, but I hardly think it’s a large enough change to move from $147/barrel to $50/barrel oil. At this point, the price of oil seems artificially low, considering the fact that fundamental supply and demand forces haven’t changed.

Yet the response from OPEC, Venezuela, and the big oil companies is the same as if the price decline was natural — they reduce production. This is not only true of the state-owned oil companies, but areas such as Canadian tar sands and some of the more difficult offshore fields have stopped production or shelved new exploration projects. This only makes sense, of course, as the marginal cost of production of many of these projects is well over $50/barrel, and they don’t want to lose money.

This causes a major problem for two reasons, assuming that the fundamentals haven’t changed:

• It takes supply offline in the short-term, and due to the nature of drilling, shutting down existing fields may reduce the ability to pump oil from those fields in the future. I.e. if a field is pumping 500,000 bbl/day before being shut down, it may only reopen with the capacity to produce 460,000 bbl/day. Thus, taking oil offline in the short term reduces potential oil recovery in the long term.
• Reduction of exploration projects reduces oil supply in the future. While this may only push out exploration projects 2-3 years, current IEA projections of decline suggest that we should be searching for oil right now — and fast.

What does this mean for future oil prices? They’re going to go up, and they may be going up faster than before. This isn’t a return to the norm, this is the swinging of a seesaw. We’re at a low point right now, but an 800-lb gorilla just got on the other side.

Of course, to hear that oil prices are too cheap is not a common theme these days, as here in California gas has dropped under the $2/gallon mark. From a personal level, of course, I’m enjoying the reprieve. But now may simply be the best time to jump out and buy yourself a gas-saving auto, because these prices will not last.

* The new paradigm can still be related in terms of supply and demand, but it’s the supply of money that has shrunk. The deleveraging process has sucked money out of a number of markets, and while the monetary base hasn’t shrunk (in fact it is growing quickly), the velocity of money is far lower. In a fractional reserve world, that has a deflationary effect. Demand is still strong for gasoline, but there is a far smaller supply of dollars on a commodities trading floor to pay for it — all this at a time when the costs of production are still paid in old dollars. Supply and demand still applies, but it requires a different vantage point to understand the change.

Why can’t the European Union just adopt a strategy of energy independence and wean itself from Russia and the “stans”?

Of course, there is no way for Europe to be “independent” with respect to natural gas. There aren’t sufficient reserves in Europe to meet the current demand. A reduced supply of natural gas will necessarily result in higher prices for energy. Higher prices for energy translate to reduced economic development and everybody being poorer. Why should the Europeans impoverish themselves?

Of course, the writer of the editorial, William Sweet, is not really opposed to Europeans purchasing gas from non Europeans; he praises a pipeline being developed to ship it from Nigeria.  Rather, he seems upset with people buying gas from Russian suppliers. Why?

Russia has repeatedly shown its willingness in recent years to cut off gas supplies for political reasons, basically to bring countries it considers its satellites to heel, notably Ukraine. Of course it wouldn’t dare cut supplies to a country like Germany, which gets about half its gas from Russia. But where German and Russian interests and values collide, Russia could manipulate markets to get its way and use the threat of its market power to ward off diplomatic or military action.

In other words, if Europeans are trading with Russians, they might refuse to back some third party who is contemplating some intervention targeting Russia. Hmm, I wonder who this unnamed party might be?

A recent survey by London’s Financial Times found that European mistrust of Russia has increased sharply in the past six months: the proportion of respondents who consider Russia the greatest threat to world stability rose from just a few percent in July to nearly 20 percent in September, putting it well ahead of Iran and almost as high as China. It may come as a shock to many American readers, however, that the United States still ranks in European minds as the greatest threat to world stability, scoring over 25 percent in September.

And here we see the problem. If Europeans are trading with Russians, they might not side with the U.S. in a dispute with Russia.

This article highlights why I have mixed feelings about my IEEE membership. The work it does in developing and maintaining standards is wonderful. But their consistent support for the American military-industrial complex gives me pause. Like IBM supplying Hollerith tabulators to the Nazis with no concern for what they were being used for – there is no U.S. military or security program, no matter how abusive of civil liberties or vulnerable to tyrannical misuse that IEEE won’t support. Normally the IEEE leadership concerns itself solely with the technical problems that are needed to enhance U.S. government power.  In this case, the Spectrum editorial board is going further and demanding that European politicians adopt policies solely for the benefit of the U.S. government (and to the detriment of people living in Europe).

Yes, the Russian government has imperial ambitions. Yes, Putin’s government is a fascistic one. However, if Russians are trading with Europeans, if the Russian economy integrates with the European one, the likelihood of of a Russian millitary attack of Europe is much lower.  Increased economic integration between Europeans and the people living in former Russian satellites will also reduce the likelihood of conflicts between Russia and the satellites as well (especially since it would lead to greater Russian/former satellite integration as well).

Bastiat’s dictum applies:

If goods don’t cross borders then armies will.

The U.S. government’s global hegemony is ending. If IEEE wishes to retain its technical leadership in a multipolar world, it should stop viewing itself as a unofficial arm of the U.S. government and stick to its valuable work in developing standards.

Unlike the debates we have already seen in this cycle, the candidates in this debate actually debated the issues!

*The candidates who could theoretically receive the requisite electoral vote to win the presidency