Hill Heat

The public mockery of “environmentalists” for concern about climate pollution began with a The New York Times op-ed by an Ayn Rand acolyte on August 28, 1971. Published with the headline “No, Breathe Easier,” mining executive and propagandist Eugene Guccione falsely claimed that “we are winning the war on pollution” and then called the greenhouse effect “idiocy”.

Unaware that particulate concentration is decreasing, “environmentalists” talk about the New Ice Age Theory. The build-up of dust in the air, so goes the argument, will screen out the sun and we’ll all be turned into ice.

Then there is the Greenhouse Effect Theory. The build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so goes this particular idiocy, will cause a temperature increase throughout the planet… and we’ll drown in the tidal wave resulting from the melting of the polar ice caps, or roast to death.

These so-called theories contradict each other. We cannot both freeze and roast at the same time. It’s either or. But relax. It’s neither. We won’t freeze because there is no such thing as a build-up of particulates in the air, as lots of tests indicate. Nor will we roast because at the present level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it would take about 957 years to triple the current level. Such speculations have no more scientific validity than the prediction that my puppy dog, at his present growth rate, would be fifteen feet long and weigh 900 pounds at age five.

The next week, the Times published a response from climate scientist Stephen Schneider, noting Guccione’s op-ed was both factually wrong and dangerously optimistic about the threat of pollution-induced climate change.

Guccione, a chemical engineer who embraced the ideology of free-market economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Alan Greenspan, was then the editor of Engineering & Mining Journal. He later edited Mining Engineering journal and chaired the Mountain States Lime cement plant in Utah as well as the free-market Committee for Monetary Research and Education. He continued to rail against environmental legislation for impeding the coal and oil industries, argued for subsidizing the domestic oil industry to compete with the Soviet Union, and fulminated against taxation as a form of mugging.

By the 1980s, the Times was running regular climate-denial advertorials from Mobil (and after a merger, ExxonMobil) on its op-ed pages into the 2000s. The tradition continued in the Internet age with dynamic greenwashing Web campaigns co-developed by the Times and ExxonMobil.

Full text of the Guccione op-ed:

South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, enjoying a surge in Iowa polling, has a climate advisor allied with the Trump administration against climate activists.

David G. Victor, recently quoted in a New York Times article criticizing Bernie Sanders’ ambitious climate plan, was identified by journalist Lisa Friedman as a “climate advisor to Pete Buttigieg.”

Not mentioned by Friedman were Victor’s ties to the fossil-fuel industry and to the Trump administration. For the past 15 years, his funding has come from the fossil-fuel industry—in particular the oil giant BP and the electric-utility-backed Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Victor, who is a political scientist, not a climate scientist, by training, sits on the board of EPRI.

In 2004, Victor celebrated a $1.95 million contribution from BP to the program he directed at the time, Stanford University’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. “This new partnership with BP will allow the program to accelerate research in several areas, including the design and operation of market-based policies to address the threats of global warming,” said Victor. “In addition to BP Foundation support, we look forward to learning more from BP’s own experience as an energy company, which touches on every aspect of our program’s research.”

In 2005, Victor published an article calling for a global boom in natural-gas extraction in the name of climate action. “[M]ore programs to build natural gas infrastructures would help the governments of China and India to manage their local air pollution problems while cutting emissions of CO2,” he wrote. “India’s shift to gas is being hampered by the United States–led effort to isolate Iran, which is slowing plans to build an important pipeline from Iran’s vast gas deposits to markets in Pakistan and India. External pressure and assistance to normalize Russia’s gas industry would help to unlock vast Siberian gas deposits for export to China.”

In 2007, Victor celebrated a further $7.5 million contribution from BP with a very similar quotation. “BP’s support has allowed our program to study the world’s most pressing energy problems, such as global warming, energy poverty and the prospects for the world oil market,” said program director and Stanford law Professor David Victor. “In addition to BP Foundation support, we learn from BP’s experience as an energy company because they operate in all the markets where we do research—such as in China and India.”

In 2009, he pushed “clean coal.”

In 2010, Victor helped to found the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, also funded by BP and EPRI.

In 2016, Victor emphasized his empathy for corporate polluters, railing against a study finding that 90 corporations are responsible for most greenhouse pollution. ””It’s part of a larger narrative of trying to create villains; to draw lines between producers as responsible for the problem and everyone else as victims,” he complained. “Frankly, we’re all the users and therefore we’re all guilty. To create a narrative that involves corporate guilt as opposed to problem-solving is not going to solve anything.”

In 2018, Victor was paid by the Trump administration to be an expert witness against the 21 youth plaintiffs bringing suit against the federal government for its inaction on climate change and support of a fossil-fuel economy.

“It is my belief that the dependence on fossil fuels which existed prior to the oil crises of the 1970s, and which exists today, in fact, is the inevitable consequence of history,” Victor wrote. He also argued that it is the renewable energy sector, not the fossil-fuel industry, which enjoys the lion’s share of federal subsidies, and that federal policy has little to do with the financial success of the fossil-fuel industry. He was paid $325 an hour to prepare his testimony.

“The progressive wing wants radical change, and climate change is one of those areas where this has really been the most palpable,” Victor told the Times. “The Sanders plan claims to deliver radical change, but it can’t work in the real world.”

This is a decidedly strange perspective-it is precisely “radical change” in the “real world” that the Sanders plan and Our Children’s Trust are working to avoid. The approach of Victor and his client Donald Trump – and worryingly, Buttigieg’s – is the one risks radical change.

Update:

Via Emily Atkin’s Heated newsletter, Victor responds:

Victor also sharply criticized the Hill Heat article, accusing it of using deceptive language regarding his testimony in the youth climate lawsuit. “It is truly unbelievable,” he said. “This is the kind of factless innuendo that is why we have not made more progress on the climate problem, and it’s very disappointing to see.”

Because the lawsuit is against the Trump administration—and because Victor was paid to testify on the government’s side—the Hill Heat article described Victor as being “allied with the Trump administration against climate activists.” But Victor said he was brought on as a witness for the government when the case was originally brought against the Obama administration.

“Because of continuity of government, when the president changes, the government keeps on going. So Right now it’s Trump. Soon, it will hopefully be Buttigieg.”

Victor’s definition of “factless innuendo” seems to be “facts he doesn’t like.”

This is a fact: Victor is being paid by the Trump administration to testify against youth climate activists.

This, however, is an opinion: That he decided to work against youth climate activists when Barack Obama was president doesn’t make his decision less contemptible.

Constructing factless innuendo is left as an exercise for the reader.

Coral Davenport, one of The New York Times’ few environmental reporters, is repeating her past mistakes on Keystone XL reporting. The Keystone XL pipeline would connect Canada’s tar sands to Texan oil refineries, allowing the high-carbon product to reach the global oil market. Over its forty-year intended lifetime, the pipeline’s tar sands crude would have a greenhouse-pollution footprint of about 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of forty new coal-fired power plants. By any reasonable measure, the Keystone XL pipeline is a major piece of infrastructure for the Canadian tar-sands industry and a significant threat to a safe climate.

In a recent story entitled “Experts Say That Battle on Keystone Pipeline Is Over Politics, Not Facts,” Davenport claimed that the tar-sands pipeline has little real policy significance.

But most energy and policy experts say the battle over Keystone overshadows the importance of the project as an environmental threat or an engine of the economy. The pipeline will have little effect, they say, on climate change, production of the Canadian oil sands, gasoline prices and the overall job market in the United States.

On Earth Day last year, Davenport penned a nearly identical story, writing, “when it comes to the pipeline’s true impact on global warming, energy and climate change experts — including former Obama administration officials — say Keystone’s political symbolism vastly outweighs its policy substance.”

The original version of last year’s story understated the scale of the tar-sands pipeline’s greenhouse pollution by a factor of ten.

Davenport’s new story relies on experts who have done work on behalf of the oil and gas industry, leading with Robert Stavins, the influential Harvard Kennedy School economist who has studied climate policy for the last thirty years. Stavins claims:

“The political fight about Keystone is vastly greater than the economic, environmental or energy impact of the pipeline itself. It doesn’t make a big difference in energy prices, employment, or climate change either way.”

An active supporter of the boom in natural gas extraction, Stavins also opposes the climate movement’s campaign to divest universities and other institutions from the fossil fuel industry.

It does not appear that Stavins has conducted any published work on Keystone XL or the economics of Canadian tar sands. However, a Kennedy School doctoral candidate named Gabe Chan has analyzed the climate economics of Canada’s tar sands. Chan and his co-authors found that under global policy that maintains a safe climate, Canada’s tar-sands development would collapse. The study raises serious questions about whether approval of Keystone XL is consistent with the international climate commitments the State Department has made at the direction of President Barack Obama.

The other people denoted as “experts” by Davenport are Robert McNally, a former George W. Bush official who now works as an professional advocate for the oil and natural gas industry, and Christine Tezak, a pipeline-finance analyst, who bet that Keystone XL would be approved in 2011 (as did her current boss, Kevin Book).

Stavins has done consulting work for Chevron, Exelon, Duke Energy, and the Western States Petroleum Association. Neither McNally nor Tezak publicly disclose their clients who are part of or invest in the fossil-fuel industry. None have a scientific background, and none have published work analyzing the environmental impact of the Keystone XL pipeline.

In the words of climate scientist John Abraham, “People who think Keystone is a minor issue don’t understand science and they sure don’t understand economics.”

In a New York Times Earth Day story, the usually excellent Coral Davenport grossly misrepresents the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline’s true impact on global warming, and questions the wisdom of pipeline opponents like the activists now encamped on the National Mall.

The pipeline is intended to ship upwards of 830,000 barrels of tar-sands crude a day for a 40-year lifespan. The pipeline will add 120-200 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent to the atmosphere annually, with a lifetime footprint of 6 to 8 billion tons CO2e. That’s as much greenhouse pollution as 40 to 50 average U.S. coal-fired power plants. Furthermore the Keystone XL pipeline is recognized by the tar-sands industry as a key spigot for the future development of the Alberta tar sands, which would emit 840 billion tons CO2e if fully exploited.

Interviewing Washington insiders who have offered various forms of support for the Keystone XL project, Davenport claims instead that “Keystone’s political symbolism vastly outweighs its policy substance.” To support the claim, Davenport then erroneously underestimates the global warming footprint of the pipeline by a factor of ten. Davenport’s crucial error is to contrast the actual carbon footprint of existing fossil-fuel projects — such as US electric power plants (2.8 billion tons) and tailpipe emissions (1.9 billion) — to the impact of the pipeline’s oil being dirtier than traditional petroleum, without explaining that she was switching measurements:

Consider the numbers: In 2011, the most recent year for which comprehensive international data is available, the global economy emitted 32.6 billion metric tons of carbon [dioxide] pollution. The United States was responsible for 5.5 billion tons of that (coming in second to China, which emitted 8.7 billion tons). Within the United States, electric power plants produced 2.8 billion tons of those greenhouse gases, while vehicle tailpipe emissions from burning gasoline produced 1.9 billion tons.

By comparison, the oil that would move through the Keystone pipeline would add 18.7 million metric tons of carbon [dioxide] to the atmosphere annually, the E.P.A. estimated.

[There are two side errors in the passage: Davenport uses “tons of carbon” where she means “tons of carbon dioxide equivalent”. One ton of carbon is the equivalent of 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide. All of her numbers refer to tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent. Secondly, the estimate was not made by the E.P.A. but by a State Department contractor hired by TransCanada; the E.P.A. cited that analysis but did not make the calculations.]

What the oil-industry contractor for the State Department actually calculated is that the oil that would move through the Keystone pipeline would add 147-168 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere annually, 1.3 to 27.4 million of which (central estimate 18.7 million from the draft assessment) are because tar-sands crude is dirtier than other petroleum sources. Those 18.7 million tons are the “incremental” or “additional” footprint of the pipeline, not the full 160 million-ton footprint.

Based on this order-of-magnitude measurement-switching error, Davenport incorrectly concludes that “the carbon emissions produced by oil that would be moved in the Keystone pipeline would amount to less than 1 percent of United States greenhouse gas emissions, and an infinitesimal slice of the global total.”

In fact, the carbon dioxide emissions produced by oil that would be moved in this single pipeline would amount to 3 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and half a percent of the global carbon footprint. Only thirty-two countries have larger annual footprints than this single tar-sands project.

Climate scientist John Abraham made this point in The Guardian last week. “People who think Keystone is a minor issue don’t understand science and they sure don’t understand economics,” he wrote.

How on earth could Davenport and the pipeline supporters she cites — Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kevin Book of the fossil-industry consultancy ClearView Energy Partners, former Obama White House climate advisor Jason Bordoff of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, Adele Morris of the Brookings Institution, and fossil-industry lobbyist David Goldwyn (a former advisor for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and also a Brookings fellow) — make this basic and outsized mistake?

Putting aside any possible political and economic motivations to support the intentions of the global petroleum industry, the intellectual failure rests on an obvious error made subtle through convolution.

Whether one is looking at actual or incremental footprints of carbon-infrastructure projects, the results should be equivalent from a policy standpoint, although the numbers would be different. Why, then, does the incremental analysis used by the EPA and the State Department’s oil-industry contractors appear to give the absurd result that the Keystone XL impact is “infinitesimal”?

The methodology of incremental footprint analysis assumes a baseline of future projected carbon pollution, and then looks whether a given project would increase or decrease the baseline. The validity of incremental-footprint analysis thus depends on the baseline.

In line with scientific warnings, President Barack Obama and the U.S. State Department have committed to limiting global warming to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. In the International Energy Agency’s 2°C scenario, global oil consumption would fall by 50 percent from current levels by 2050, within the intended operating lifetime of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The Keystone XL final environmental impact statement instead assumes that global oil demand will increase over that time period. The baseline used is the Energy Information Administration’s 2013 Annual Energy Outlook, which projects that global oil consumption will increase by 30 to 40 percent by 2040. In that scenario, the world would be on a pathway for rapid and catastrophic global warming of 4 to 6°C (or greater) by 2100.

No matter the analysis, the Keystone XL pipeline is incompatible with climate security. The global-warming impact of constructing Keystone XL is only “infinitesimal” if you assume catastrophic global warming is inevitable and that the signed climate pledges of the United States government are worthless.

Perhaps Ms. Davenport should ask Levi, Book, Bordoff, Morris, and Goldwyn if that is their assumption.

Update May 2: The Times has posted a correction:

Correction: May 2, 2014

An article and an accompanying chart on April 22 comparing the projected Keystone XL pipeline with other sources of carbon emissions referred imprecisely to projected emissions from tar-sands oil moving through the pipeline. Producing and burning that oil would emit 18.7 million more metric tons annually than would conventional oil, or far less than 1 percent of United States emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The tar-sands oil would not emit 18.7 million tons total, but about 150 million tons, or less than 3 percent of United States emissions.

The correction itself is in error; the estimate of 18.7 million metric tons is not from the E.P.A., but is from the draft assessment prepared by TransCanada contractor Environmental Resources Management for the State Department.