zycher A E I

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The National Academy of Sciences endorses the impossible

National Academy of Sciences endorses the impossible

Published July 29, 2026

In a new report, the National Academy of Sciences endorses “extreme event attribution (EEA), a field of climate science that analyzes whether and to what extent human-caused climate change influenced an individual extreme weather or climate event.” This endorsement is based upon purported “expanded observational datasets, large-ensemble simulations, and methodological advancements over the past decade…”

This is balderdash, as the NAS itself concluded (p. 29) in 2016: “Event attribution questions are often posed in terms of a specific actual event, but definitive attribution of a specific event in a deterministic manner is generally not possible.” Have matters changed much in terms of climate predictions over the last decade? No, they have not: The climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were no better in 2021 than in 2014: They continue to overpredict atmospheric temperature trends by a factor of about 2.5.....

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10/19 negin

Backing Denial at the American Enterprise Institute

The American Enterprise Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000, bringing its total to $4.65 million since 1998.

Economist BenjaminZycher, an Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers by John Christy, Judith Curry and other outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate alarmism.”

Last fall, for example, Zycher took aim at the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would receive limited attention.

Zycher took issue with the report’s conclusions in a blog post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on climate phenomena”that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims, human activity is responsible for more than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950; sea level rise has accelerated due to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years.

Zycher also posted a column belittling a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22, alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that she filed the suit to advance her career....

mult promises by exxon to stop funding denial, aei took over for cei after royal soc busted

As I reported in arecent column, just last year ExxonMobil donated $100,000 to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which it has funded to the tune of$4.86 millionsince 1998. The views expressed by AEI economist Benjamin Zycher are 180 degrees from ExxonMobil’s alleged policy positions. Herejectsthescientific consensusabout the causes of global warming,insiststhat a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” and has called the Paris climate agreement an “absurdity.” And Zycher is hardly alone. AEI is just one of dozens of ExxonMobil grantees that have contradicted the company’s public stances on climate over the past two decades, giving climate science deniers in Congress—whose political campaigns aregenerously fundedby ExxonMobil and other oil companies—intellectual cover to ignore the climate crisis.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/oil-execs-spout-disinformation-at-house-climate-disinformation-hearing/

no lnx many

Oil Execs Spout Disinformation at House Climate Disinformation Hearing

December 7, 2021

Elliott Negin

Senior Writer

no lnx

The truth about ExxonMobil's campaign to fund climate science denial

Elliott Negin and Independent Media Institute October 26, 2021

In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant's support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave off government action and maximize its profits—a fact that my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others revealed more than a decade ago.

"Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes," McCoy, then ExxonMobil's senior director of federal relations, said during the interview. "Did we join some of these 'shadow groups' to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

For all his candor, McCoy got at least one thing wrong. ExxonMobil did "join"—in other words, pay—denier groups to spread disinformation to blunt initial government attempts to curb carbon emissions. But McCoy inaccurately used the past tense. In fact, the company continues to fund them.

That videotaped interview caused some major heartburn for McCoy's boss, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, especially since theHouse Committee on Oversight and Reform has invited Woods—as well as top executives from the American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to testify at a hearing on October 28 on the "long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming."

ExxonMobil has been at the heart of that campaign. Since 1998, the company has paid a network of seemingly independent think tanks and advocacy groups more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science and stymie government action. Only Charles Koch and his late brother David, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, are known to have spent more.

In 2020, according to ExxonMobil's most recent corporate grantmaking report, the company spent $490,000 on three grantees—the American Enterprise Institute ($100,000), the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University ($140,000), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($250,000). That amount is down from the $790,000 the company reported it spent on nine climate science denier groups in 2019 and a fraction of what it spent in the past, but there's a catch.

True, the company lost more than $22 billion in 2020 and cut back its grants across the board. But another factor for this decline is that ExxonMobil changed how it reports grants. As first reported by Salon, the company only listed grants of $100,000 or more in its 2020 annual giving report. In previous years, it included grants of $5,000 or more. The change reduces transparency and ultimately means there is no way to tell how much the company spent in smaller donations to support climate disinformation in 2020 or compare the grants it made in 2020 with previous years.

Only three denier groups—the same three named in the 2020 grantmaking report—received $100,000 or more from ExxonMobil in 2019. That year, their grants collectively amounted to $625,000. The other six denier groups the company funded in 2019—the Center for American and International Law ($5,000), the Federalist Society ($10,000), the Hoover Institution ($15,000), the Manhattan Institute ($90,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000)—collectively received $165,000. None of those grants, even if ExxonMobil continued them, would wind up in the 2020 report, given the company's new threshold.

Still, it's worth taking a closer look at where the bulk of ExxonMobil's self-reported climate disinformation budget did go in 2020.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, "Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option." The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that "a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans."

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to "do everything [it] can to prevent" the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—"from becoming law." And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for "the increased use of natural gas" to make "further progress."

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.

The American Enterprise Institute

Economist Benjamin Zycher might be considered the climate science denier in residence at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received $4.86 million from ExxonMobil since 1998.Zycher insists that a carbon tax would be "ineffective," has called the Paris climate agreement an "absurdity," and rejects the scientific consensus about the causes and seriousness of global warming.

Zycher published his most recent broadside against climate science in the Summer 2021 issue ofNational Affairs, a formerly independent conservative policy quarterly thatAEI brought in-house in 2019.In his essay, "The Case for Climate-Change Realism," he falsely argued that the "available science" does not support the notion that human activity is "the single most significant cause of climate change" and the "available data" undercut the assessment that extreme weather events are "evidence of an ongoing climate crisis."

As he has in previous articles, Zycher cited roundly debunked hypotheses for the primary causes of climate change, including a shift in northern Pacific Ocean circulation patterns called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which scientists have determined is incapable of causing a long-term warming trend, and "changes insolar activity," when, in fact, the sun's energy has declined since the 1980s while average global temperatures have continued to climb.

This summer was not a fortuitous time to be peddling discredited theories. On August 9, less than two months after Zycher posted his essay, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark, nearly 4,000-page "code red for humanity" report warning that the climate crisis is close to spiraling out of control and human activity is "unequivocally" to blame.

Zycher's main objective? To make a case, no matter how specious, for continued reliance on fossil fuels, which he falsely claimed are less expensive than renewables. Proposals to cut carbon emissions, including the Paris agreement, would have little real impact, he argued, and could "be accomplished only by substituting expensive energy for cheaper energy." In fact, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, it is "now cheaper to build and operate new large-scale wind or solar plants in nearly half the world than it would be to run an existing coal or [natural] gas-fired power plant." To be sure, no one would confuse Zycher for a scientist or National Affairs for a peer-reviewed journal. But he serves ExxonMobil's interests as a seemingly independent expert who continues to express doubt about climate science and the viability of renewable energy,thereby providing cover for climate science deniers in Congress.

George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center...

loris who will speak for the greed?

ref his url 404

https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-climate-empire-strikes-out-the-perils-of-policy-analysis-in-an-echo-chamber/

9/2018

the American Enterprise Institute —which as an institution takes no positions on policy issues— on September 6 hosted an event on how “carbon” pricing (both explicit and implicit) can be used to implement more effectively the 2015 Paris international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With the exception of one presentation, this panel discussion was not useful in terms of advancing the policy debate, largely because the panelists were chosen so as to present a uniform policy view. The event provided little in terms of valuable information for the attendees and viewers and did a disservice to the American Enterprise Institute.

Because all the panelists are supporters of international climate policy generally and of the Paris agreement in particular, the common and explicit assumption was that the agreement must be strengthened (that is, made more costly), ostensibly so as to limit warming to 2°C or less by the end of the century.None of the panelists made a distinction between natural and anthropogenic warming, nor was the purely political rather than scientific genesis of that goal addressed at the event.

There appeared to be considerable confusion among the panelists about the actual impact of the Paris accord (0.7°C), even if implemented immediately and enforced strictly throughout this century.The obvious political difficulties of “strengthening” the Paris emissions limits were shunted aside. The panelists seemed not to understand that under the lower Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) GHG concentration scenarios in the latest assessment report (AR5)—those most consistent with the historical trends—the 2°C limit is very likely to be met without any climate policies at all.[emph]

Accordingly, they seemingly did not grasp the implications of the shift begun in the Paris accord from the 2°C limit to a 1.5°C limit, a tacit admission by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that the 2°C limit, again, will be achieved even without international climate policies. Accordingly, that shift is a transparent effort to move the goalposts. Nor did the panelists seem to understand the implications of the higher GHG concentration scenarios used by the IPCC in AR5. Under those scenarios, the reductions in GHG emissions required to reach the 2°C limit will be impossible to achieve.

The “insurance” argument in favor of international climate policy is far weaker than commonly assumed, in part because it ignores the trivial amount of such insurance yielded by plausible emissions reductions, in part because it ignores the potential benefits of anthropogenic warming, and in part because it ignores the likely adverse consequences of government policies to increase energy costs. Such policies would be likely to impoverish additional tens or hundreds of millions of people around the globe, and the implications of an effective international climate policy to drive up energy costs—an international government tax cartel — are not salutary in terms of the economic growth needed to move massive numbers of people out of poverty. Nor are they likely to prove consistent with the preservation of individual freedom in the face of an expansion of the coercive and confiscatory power of states acting both individually and collectively.

Other central points are as follows. The purported administrative ease of a carbon tax is an illusion. The individual emissions-reduction promises made at Paris are unenforceable and can be “met” without any change whatever in underlying emissions behavior. Notwithstanding several assertions by members of the panel, government revenues from a carbon tax are not a social benefit of GHG policies; instead, they are a wealth transfer. The “co-benefits” of GHG policies in terms of reduced emissions of conventional pollutants are a deeply problematic policy justification in the US context. At an international level, in particular for the developing economies, the co-benefits argument for GHG policies might (or might not) be efficient narrowly in terms of improved life expectancies, but the September 6 panel failed even to ask the fundamental question of whether that benefit might be outweighed by the adverse life expectancy effect of higher energy costs and the attendant reduction in national and per capita incomes.

Expansion of unconventional electricity (wind and solar) generation as a tool for implementation of the Paris GHG limits is likely to yield perverse outcomes. Wind and solar generation technologies inflict their own set of serious environmental problems, including a likely increase in the emission of conventional pollutants and GHG as an attendant effect of the up-and-down cycling of backup fossil units used to avoid blackouts in the face of the unreliability of wind and solar power. And the higher costs of unconventional power simply are incontrovertible.

There is little evidence in the available data that increasing GHG concentrations have yielded serious climate impacts. It may prove to be the case that such evidence will emerge, but any such assumption is a poor basis for policy formulation. Moreover, the term “carbon” is little more than political propaganda. One would think that the organizers of this event would have understood that even unanimity on the scientific issues would not yield consensus on the policy issues.

One would think that the economists on the panel would have thought to ask the most basic of cost-benefit questions. One would think that the organizers of this event would have understood that a panel discussion characterized by a common set of assumptions and outlook—one without any contrasting views—would be far more likely to ignore the central policy questions and thus to achieve no advance in policy understanding. In all of those dimensions: One would be wrong.

Print the full report.

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...

benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on energy and environmental policy.

Before joining AEI, Zycher conducted a broad research program in his public policy research firm, and was an intelligence community associate of the Office of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, US Department of State. He is a former senior economist at the RAND Corporation, a former adjunct professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the California State University Channel Islands, and is a former senior economist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He served as a senior staff economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, with responsibility for energy and environmental policy issues.

Zycher has a doctorate in economics from UCLA, a Master in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from UCLA.

Experience

Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute, 2009–2020
President, Benjamin Zycher Economics Associates, 2004–13
Associate, Intelligence Community Associates Program, Office of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, US Department of State, 2010–12
Adjunct Professor of Economics and Business, Martin V. Smith School of Business and Economics, California State University, Channel Islands, 2009–10
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 2006–09
Senior Economist, RAND Corporation, 1998–2004; Economist, RAND Corporation, 1985–91
Adjunct Professor of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1985–2000
Vice President, Research, Milken Institute, 1991–98
Senior Economist, Arroyo Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 1983–85
Senior Staff Economist,President’s Council of Economic Advisers, 1981–83

Education

PhD, economics, University of California, Los Angeles

MPP, public policy, University of California, Berkeley

AB, political science, University of California, Los Angeles

REF 2 PRETTY MUCH RECYCLED above

https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/democrats-want-rejoin-the-paris-accord-lets-recall-why-it-was-such-bad

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/exxonmobil-is-still-bankrolling-climate-science-deniers/

no lnx

ExxonMobil is still bankrolling climate science deniers

Written by Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute October 23, 2019

ExxonMobil says it believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also says it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

Then why, after all these years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts to rein in carbon emissions?

According to the company’s latest grantmaking report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include its annual dues to trade groups such as theAmerican Petroleum Institute, which opposes a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65 million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the 2017-18 election cycle went to climate science deniers.

Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s 2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the company has spent some $37 million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

The shred of good news here is that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.

So what did ExxonMobil get for its money in 2018?

Underwriting Climate Denial at the U.S. Chamber

In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in $350,000 for the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to $365,000.

Two years ago, the Chamber sponsored a widely debunked report that wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S. economy. President Trump used that report as his primary rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.

Earlier this year, however, the Chamber posted a new statement on its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position. “We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international cooperation.”

Does that mean the Chamber has finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power plant carbon emissions, and supports the Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber spokesman told Politico in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken the U.S. commitment to it.

Backing Denial at the American Enterprise Institute

The American Enterprise Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000, bringing its total to $4.65 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, an Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers by John Christy, Judith Curry and other outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate alarmism.”

Last fall, for example, Zycher took aim at the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would receive limited attention.

Zycher took issue with the report’s conclusions in a blog post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims, human activity is responsible for more than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950; sea level rise has accelerated due to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years.

Financing the Manhattan Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3 million.

Like the Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, alleges the international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.

Cass’s colleague, Senior Fellow Robert Bryce, has been bashing wind power for years and, like President Trump, he wildly overstates its threat to birds. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his bogus argument.

Still another Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in May titled “What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind, solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a June report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution. The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at least $85 billion in damages.

Aiding and Abetting Congressional Gridlock

On top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67 percent of the $1.65 million it spent during the2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1 million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate science deniers. It then spent$11.15 million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more than any other oil and gas company.

One of the most talked-about climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at least five nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent, voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution, which passed by a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.

ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate lawsuits.

In a surprise move, however, the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends recently deleted the provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which are facing more than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol Hill.

Author’s note: Besides the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000) and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups: American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

full (of it)

American Enterprise Institute — which as an institution takes no positions on policy issues — on September 6 hosted an event on how “carbon” pricing (both explicit and implicit) can be used to implement more effectively the 2015 Paris international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With the exception of one presentation, this panel discussion was not useful in terms of advancing the policy debate, largely because the panelists were chosen so as to present a uniform policy view. The event provided little in terms of valuable information for the attendees and viewers and did a disservice to the American Enterprise Institute.

Because all the panelists are supporters of international climate policy generally and of the Paris agreement in particular, the common and explicit assumption was that the agreement must be strengthened (that is, made more costly), ostensibly so as to limit warming to 2°C or less by the end of the century. None of the panelists made a distinction between natural and anthropogenic warming, nor was the purely political rather than scientific genesis of that goal addressed at the event.

There appeared to be considerable confusion among the panelists about the actual impact of the Paris accord (0.7°C), even if implemented immediately and enforced strictly throughout this century. The obvious political difficulties of “strengthening” the Paris emissions limits were shunted aside. The panelists seemed not to understand that under the lower Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) GHG concentration scenarios in the latest assessment report (AR5)—those most consistent with the historical trends—the 2°C limit is very likely to be met without any climate policies at all.

Expansion of unconventional electricity (wind and solar) generation as a tool for implementation of the Paris GHG limits is likely to yield perverse outcomes. Wind and solar generation technologies inflict their own set of serious environmental problems, including a likely increase in the emission of conventional pollutants and GHG as an attendant effect of the up-and-down cycling of backup fossil units used to avoid blackouts in the face of the unreliability of wind and solar power. And the higher costs of unconventional power simply are incontrovertible.

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On September 6, the American Enterprise Institute — which as an institution takes no positions on policy issues — hosted an event on how “carbon” pricing (both explicit and implicit) can be used to implement more effectively the 2015 Paris (COP-21) international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Several related issues were addressed as well.1Thisevent was organized by my AEI colleague Aparna Mathur and the moderator, Adele Morris, of the Brookings Institution. Mathur introduced the topic and the panelists to the attendees and viewers. The panel comprised Joe Aldy from Harvard University, Daniel Besley from the World Bank, Maureen Cropper from the University of Maryland, and Ian Perry from the International Monetary Fund.

An interesting group indeed, but for reasons to be discussed below, the whole was vastly less than the sum of the parts; this event for the most part was a waste of time, with the exception of the presentation (at 48:25) by Cropper.2 At a macro level, Mathur’s initial comment (at 1:30) that “disagreement” is a fundamental value at AEI was rather inconsistent with the makeup of the panel, uniformly comprising supporters of international climate policy generally and of the Paris agreement in particular; the common and explicit assumption was that the agreement must be strengthened (that is, made more costly), ostensibly to limit warming (whether natural or anthropogenic) to 2°C or less by the end of the century.3 I discuss that goal below. Nor is it surprising that to a substantial degree the attendees also apparently (from the questions asked) were self-selected supporters of climate policy.

Virtually the only note of disagreement that emerged was a question (at 1:17:50) from one member of the audience who referred to an earlier essay of mine that noted that the Paris agreement, if implemented immediately and enforced strictly throughout this century, would reduce global temperatures in 2100 by 0.17 degrees—barely more than the standard deviation (0.11 degrees) of the surface (land-ocean) temperature record—at a cost of at least 1 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) annually, inflicted disproportionately on the world’s poor.4

That is why a Green Climate Fund was established at COP-16 in Cancun in 2010; it is intended to raise “$100 billion per year by 2020,” with an “initial resource mobilization period” from “2015 to 2018,” for the purported costs of climate change mitigation and GHG reduction policies borne by the developing economies.5 The various political leaders in the developed economies in 2010, including President Barack Obama, were all too willing to push the effective beginning of the annual $100 billion promises to 2020, obviously because by then most or all would be out of office and thus relieved of the responsibility actually to produce the promised funding.

Thus far a total of $10.2 billion has been “pledged,” and the central feature of the just-concluded climate talks in Bangkok was vociferous complaints from the intended beneficiaries about the prospective failure of the developed economies to deliver the promised funding.6 It is very far from obvious that the hoped-for annual $100 billion in donations will materialize beginning in 2020.

Returning to the question posed by the attendee, Aldy responded (at 1:18:22) by making a fundamental analytic error: He asserted that the trivial temperature effect of the Paris agreement was for the five-year period during which the agreement would be effective.7 That is simply incorrect: The predicted temperature impact of 0.17 degrees by 2100, derived from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) climate model under assumptions exaggerating the effects of reduced GHG emissions, again is for the notional Paris emissions reductions if implemented immediately and maintained until the end of this century.8

In terms of orders of magnitude, there is no dispute about this, notwithstanding Aldy’s slight sneer about the absence of consensus on the point; that Aldy seems not to understand it is, frankly, shocking. None of the other panelists corrected him, a display of either ignorance or cowardice. His distinction between the 1997 Kyoto promises applicable to the developed economies and the 2015 Paris promises by almost all the world’s economies was not relevant in the context of the actual question that had been posed, and the same observation applies to his various assertions about an “expansive approach” and “voluntary pledges.”

Does Aldy know of work predicting that the future temperature effect of the notional Paris GHG emissions reductions would not be trivial? If so, let him provide the relevant references. Perhaps Aldy believes that emissions limitations substantially more stringent than those incorporated in the Paris agreement will be implemented. But that would be a deeply dubious assumption given the difficulties already observed in the many years of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. In any event, the small predicted effect of much stronger emissions limits is discussed below.

Aldy then stated that he “do[es]n’t care” about the science, as he is not a scientist; neither am I, but that does not transform willful ignorance into a virtue.9 In his view, an expansive international climate policy is an imperative because there is uncertainty about the risks of (anthropogenic) climate change, which he asserts are “irreversible”—a term that he failed to define—so that investment in insurance is an obviously sensible policy path. This is the so-called climate “fat tail” insurance justification—not at all an argument to be dismissed out of hand—which I address below.

Morris continued that part of the audience discussion (at 1:20:28) by asking Cropper to address the social cost of carbon calculation—an irrelevancy in terms of the question posed by the attendee—and then, before moving on to the next attendee question, concluded with an appeal to authority: “We can just incorporate by reference the work of the National Academies and the University of Chicago and all the other fine scholars in this field in response to Mr. Zycher’s view.”10

Does Morris actually believe that to be a rigorous argument? Does she know of work by “the National Academies and the University of Chicago and all the other fine scholars in this field” showing that the Paris agreement would yield climate effects greater than trivial? Or that the costs would be small? As with Aldy above: Let Morris provide the actual references that she insists we “just incorporate . . . in response” to whichever of my arguments she has in mind.

A well-trained scholar like Mathur, for whom I have a high regard, should know that such is the sort of sloppiness inevitable in panel discussions structured as little more than infomercials, notwithstanding her opening paean to AEI’s emphasis on “disagreement and debate and . . . vigorous back-and-forth between the panelists themselves and the audience.”11 A well-trained scholar like Mathur should know that intellectual progress is impossible unless scholars and policy professionals are forced to confront conflicting views directly. If Mathur really believes in debate, she should have organized a different panel or at a minimum not arranged for AEI to host a panel so blatant in its groupthink mentality. That she chose not to do so, yet again, suggests that “disagreement and debate” actually are not high among her priorities.12 I recommend that she change this approach when next she returns to this (or any other) topic.

In this report, I discuss first some dimensions and implications of the goal of limiting temperature increases to 2°C by 2100. Second, I discuss the uncertainty/insurance argument prominent in the general debate over climate policy. Next, I discuss Perry’s assertion that one benefit of a carbon tax would be “administrative ease.” I then address several related topics: the voluntary promises (Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs)13 made by the various participants at COP-21, government revenues as “benefits” of climate policies, the “co-benefits” (reduced emissions of conventional pollutants) of reductions in GHG emissions, the cost and environmental impacts of unconventional electricity, the available data on such climate phenomena as sea levels and cyclones, and the discussion in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of extreme climate dangers.14 Finally, I offer some concluding observations.

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notes...

ne cites himself:

:{:{4}::{Mathur, “Implementing the Paris Agreement”;}::{Benjamin Zycher,}::{“}:The Absurdity That Is the Paris Climate Agreement:{,” American Enterprise Institute, May 25, 2017;}::{J. Hansen et al., “}:GISS Analysis of Surface Temperature Change:{,”}:Journal of Geophysical Research:{104, no. D24 (December 1999): 30997–31022; and Bjørn Lomborg, “}:Global Warming’s Upside Down Narrative:{,” Project Syndicate, April 17, 2014.}:

5Green Climate Fund, “Resource Mobilization;” UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, “COP 16,” November 29–December 10, 2010; and Green Climate Fund, “Resource Mobilization.”

6Green Climate Fund, “Status of Pledges and Contributions Made to the Green Climate Fund;” and Kaweewit Kaewjinda, “Bangkok Meet Fails to Finalize Draft on Climate Change Rules,” WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, September 9, 2018.

7Mathur, “Implementing the Paris Agreement.”

8National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-Gas Induced Climate Change: A Regional Climate SCENario GENerator,” University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, 2007....}: