After a year on the job, the Obama administration has learned little about energy. They still claim that “green” jobs will be created in the electrical generation sector if only we switch to more wind and solar energy projects.

Their claim that 5 million new jobs will be created in the energy sector over the next ten years is just not credible. Consider that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the entire electrical generation industry, from mining, manufacturing equipment, power generation, and transmission, currently employs just under one million people. Where is Obama going to put 5 million more people? Will he have platoons of people peddling bicycles hooked to small generators? And in the State of the Union speech, he pushed for job-killing climate legislation in spite of recent events showing that the data have been fudged. During the speech, Obama was laughed at after referring to the “overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” First the audience laughed, then Pelosi and Biden, and finally Obama himself smirked at the insanity of his remark. Maybe his speech writers should read the news.

So called “green” energy is more expensive than fossil-fuel generated electricity, so energy costs would necessarily increase. Our economy is very sensitive to energy costs, so rising costs would more likely result in job losses rather than more employment.

According to a Cato Institute study (Policy Analysis 280), wind generation costs are 6-7¢ per KWh vs. 3¢ for natural gas, 2.2¢ for coal, and 1.7¢ for nuclear. Solar power costs 38¢ to 53¢ per KWh. The Cato report also said that the materials required for thermal-solar projects were 1,000 times greater than for a similarly sized fossil-fuel facility, and therefore would create substantial incremental energy consumption and industrial pollution. A major environmental cost of photovoltaic solar energy is toxic chemical pollution (arsenic, gallium, and cadmium) and energy consumption associated with the large-scale manufacture of photovoltaic panels. The installation phase has distinct environmental consequences, given the large land masses required for solar farms–some 5 to 10 acres per MW of installed capacity.”

 The Administration touts “fast-tracking” solar development in the west, but has limited permits to 670,000 acres of more than 30 million suitable acres available.

Wind-generated electricity, especially, is intermittent and unreliable, so that it requires conventional backup generating capacity. Energy companies will have a hard time monitoring and switching between generation sources to meet demand and prevent blackouts or brownouts.

The Interior Department policy does not help wind-power. The Cape Wind Project in Nantucket was to be the first off-shore venture, but Interior will allow the area to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, thus precluding development.

During the State of the Union speech, Obama gave lip service to off-shore petroleum exploration. During the Bush administration, Congress lifted a moratorium on off-shore exploration, but Obama’s Interior Department has imposed a de facto moratorium while they “study” a leasing program. In 2009, the administration leased less land for energy development than that of any other year on record, according to the American Energy Alliance. And government revenues from leasing in 2009 were just one-tenth that in 2008. Meanwhile China is buying up all the leases it can get, some close to American shores.

The Interior Department has withdrawn most of the offered leases for natural gas in Utah, delayed oil shale research and demonstration projects in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, and blocked uranium mining in Arizona. Obama proposed development of nuclear energy. But, last year, in a sop to Senator Harry Reid, the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository was closed, so nuclear waste will continue to be stored in barrels near the generating plants rather than safely underground.

Biofuels such as ethanol require heavy government subsidies. According to the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, ethanol subsidies amount to the equivalent of $1.95 per gallon on top of the gasoline retail price. At present, no automobile manufacturer will extend an engine or parts warranty for vehicles that use more than 10 percent of ethanol content in fuel, except for vehicles specifically designed to run on E- 85 fuel. This means that the majority of cars on the road today in the United States are not under warranty for anything other than gasoline containing 10 percent ethanol or less. Currently, ethanol displaces about 2% of gasoline and saves relatively little in petroleum imports. Ethanol is not as energy efficient as gasoline. A 2006 study by Consumer Reports found that an E-85 vehicle delivered 27% less mileage than a similar gasoline-powered vehicle. A study from Stanford University found that ethanol-powered E-85 vehicles significantly increased ozone, a prime ingredient of smog.

While the Obama administration is all starry-eyed over “green” energy, it is unlikely that solar, wind, and biofuels taken together would ever account for more that 2- to 3% of total energy use. For the next few decades, at least, fossils fuels with continue to provide about 85% of energy.

What the government should do is remove restrictions to exploration and development of our domestic resources. For instance, in 2007, the Department of the Interior inventoried 99 million acres of federal land which it estimated to contain 21 billion barrels of oil and 187 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. DOI found that due to restrictive regulations “just 3 percent of onshore Federal oil and 13 percent of onshore Federal gas are accessible under standard lease terms.”

The Department of Energy estimates that the Green River formation in NW Colorado, SE Utah, and SW Wyoming contains 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in shale that could be economically produced. That is more than three times the total reserves of all Mid-East oil fields.

Off-shore resources are also restricted. The Minerals Management Service (of DOI) estimated that there are about 86 billion barrels of undiscovered, recoverable oil and about 420 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, recoverable natural gas in the Federal Outer Continental Shelf of the United States, but 85% of this resource is off limits due to federal and state restrictions.

The U.S. has vast coal supplies which could be turned into gasoline, diesel, and other fuels. Coal reserves in Illinois alone, for instance, have the energy equivalent of all the oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. The process was invented by the Germans in 1920 and perfected more recently by Sasol in South Africa. According to Business Week, Sasol “churns out 160,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel a day, enough to cover 28% of South Africa’s needs, without using a single drop of crude oil, imported or otherwise.” Cost is equivalent to about $30- to $35 per barrel of oil. This source alone could end our dependence on Mid-East oil.

Investors Business Daily (IBD) points out that China is attempting to lock up oil reserves throughout the world, including “in America’s backyard, Argentina, Venezuela, and Canada, and in a country America presumably dominates, Iraq.” At the same time, American oil companies are being discouraged by government, from exploring and exploiting domestic reserves. IBD opines that “What the world is witnessing is the largest peaceful transfer of power in history. Energy means power, and while the U.S. is consumed by environmental ideologies and climate rhetoric, it is committing economic hara-kiri in the process. China, riding on energy acquisitions with little competition, will propel itself into the economic stratosphere.” Obama’s stated goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil seems to be based on a green fantasy, blinded by ideology.

The Science and Public Policy Institute has published a paper on Surface Temperature Records, in which the authors document the following points:

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

A PDF file of this 111-page report is available here:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf

Pima County and the City of Tucson have a cooperative project to study the regional water supply and demand. “The ultimate goal of this effort is to assure a sustainable community water source given continuing pressure on water supply caused by population growth.”

Water is vital to life, so there is concern about the current drought in the Western U.S. and its impact on our water supply. In Arizona, our supply from the Lower Colorado River system stands at just 56% capacity as of Jan. 19, 2010, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. The Salt River system, supplying Phoenix, stands at 79% capacity, and the Verde River system is at 34%.

Some claim that the current drought is the result of human-induced global warming; others blame the ozone hole. However, droughts are naturally occurring and cyclic.

According to NOAA, “Droughts occur throughout North America, and in any given year, at least one region is experiencing drought conditions.” “Droughts similar to the 1950s, in terms of duration and spatial extent, occurred once or twice a century for the past three centuries (for example, during the 1860s, 1820s, 1730s). However, there has not been another drought as extensive and prolonged as the 1930s drought in the past 300 years. Longer records show strong evidence for a drought that appears to have been more severe in some areas of central North America than anything we have experienced in the 20th century, including the 1930s drought.”

In the Pacific northwest, Knapp et al, found that widespread and extreme droughts were concentrated in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries when the planet was considerably colder than the 20^th century.

In a separate study of mean water-year flow on the Columbia River, Gedalof et al. found that “persistent low flows during the 1840s were probably the most severe of the past 250 years,” and that “the drought of the 1930s is probably the second most severe.” They say also that ” recent droughts were not exceptional in the context of the last 250 years and were of shorter duration than many past events.”

In Montana and Idaho, Gray et al. (2004) found that “both single-year and decadal-scale dry events were more severe before 1900,” and that “dry spells in the late thirteenth and sixteenth centuries surpass both the magnitude and duration of any droughts in the Bighorn Basin after 1900.”

Researchers working in the Pyramid Lake area of Nevada found that for the past 2,740 years “intervals between droughts ranged from 80 to 230 years; while drought durations ranged from 20 to 100 years.” Another study in the same area found that the longest of these droughts occurred between 2,500 and 2,000 years ago and between 1,500 and 1,250, 800 and 725, and 600 and 450 years ago, with none recorded in more recent warmer times.

In the Rocky Mountains, Gray et al. (2003) found a pattern of droughts that they say “may ensue from coupling of the cold phase Pacific Decadal Oscillation with the warm phase Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.”

Research on the Upper Colorado River Basin shows “a near-centennial return period of extreme drought events in this region.” The major drought of 2000-2004 was not as severe as 1844-1848, and was similar to droughts in the early 1500s and early 1600s. They conclude, “these analyses demonstrate that severe, sustained droughts are a defining feature of Upper Colorado River hydroclimate.” And the results show that more severe droughts are associated with colder cycles.

Work in Arizona and New Mexico shows that “sustained dry periods comparable to the 1950s drought occurred in “the late 1000s, the mid 1100s, 1570-97, 1664-70, the 1740s, the 1770s, and the late 1800s.”

Drought cycles are most closely correlated with various solar cycles of 1,533 years (the Bond cycle), 444 years, 170 years, 146 years, and 88 years (the Gleissberg cycle). Asmerom,et al. report that periods of increased solar radiation correlate with periods of decreased rainfall in the southwestern United States (via changes in the North American monsoon). These solar cycles control the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the El Nino system which control weather and climate in the southwest. We are just entering solar cycle 24 and it seems very sluggish. That could mean that we will be spared from an intensifying drought.

For specifics on Tucson’s water supply see:

http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2009/06/21/water-supply-and-demand-in-tucson/

For a primer on drought see:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/drght_home.html

To understand the proxies used in paleoclimate research see:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/primer_proxy.html

References:

Papers reviewed by http://www.co2science.org/subject/d/summaries/droughtusawest.php

Asmerom, Y., Polyak, V., Burns, S. and Rassmussen, J. 2007. Solar forcing of Holocene climate: New insights from a speleothem record, southwestern United States. Geology 35: 1-4.

Benson, L., Kashgarian, M., Rye, R., Lund, S., Paillet, F., Smoot, J., Kester, C., Mensing, S., Meko, D. and Lindstrom, S. 2002. Holocene multidecadal and multicentennial droughts affecting Northern California and Nevada. Quaternary Science Reviews 21: 659-682.

Gedalof, Z., Peterson, D.L. and Mantua, N.J. 2004. Columbia River flow and drought since 1750. Journal of the American Water Resources Association 40: 1579-1592.

Gray, S.T., Betancourt, J.L., Fastie, C.L. and Jackson, S.T. 2003. Patterns and sources of multidecadal oscillations in drought-sensitive tree-ring records from the central and southern Rocky Mountains. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2002GL016154.

Gray, S.T., Fastie, C.L., Jackson, S.T. and Betancourt, J.L. 2004. Tree-ring-based reconstruction of precipitation in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, since 1260 A.D. Journal of Climate 17: 3855-3865.

Hidalgo, H.G., Piechota, T.C. and Dracup, J.A. 2000. Alternative principal components regression procedures for dendrohydrologic reconstructions. Water Resources Research 36: 3241-3249.

Knapp, P.A., Grissino-Mayer, H.D. and Soule, P.T. 2002. Climatic regionalization and the spatio-temporal occurrence of extreme single-year drought events (1500-1998) in the interior Pacific Northwest, USA. Quaternary Research 58: 226-233.

Mensing, S.A., Benson, L.V., Kashgarian, M. and Lund, S. 2004. A Holocene pollen record of persistent droughts from Pyramid Lake, Nevada, USA. Quaternary Research 62: 29-38.

Ni, F., Cavazos, T., Hughes, M.K., Comrie, A.C. and Funkhouser, G. 2002. Cool-season precipitation in the southwestern USA since AD 1000: Comparison of linear and nonlinear techniques for reconstruction. International Journal of Climatology 22: 1645-1662.

Woodhouse, C.A., Gray, S.T. and Meko, D.M. 2006. Updated streamflow reconstructions for the Upper Colorado River Basin. Water Resources Research 42: 10.1029/2005WR004455.