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Can termites chew their way to ethanol?

By Kennedy Maize

Can termites lead the way to energy independence? A new study from the University of Florida in Gainsville says the tiny wood chompers and the bacteria in their gut could help turn non-edible plant parts into energetic ethanol.

In a paper to be published in the journal Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining, Florida entomologist (that’s a bug guy) Michael Scharf and colleague Aurelien Tartar describe how termites and the little guys in their gut, known as symbionts, could help turn nasty, hard-to-digest cellulose into drive-a-hol (or maybe drink-a-hol?). We’re talking straw, corn stover, wood, and President Bush’s favorite, switchgrass.

Says Scharf in a university press release, “Through millions and millions of years of evolution, termites and their symbionts have acquired highly specialized enzymes that work together to efficiently convert wood and other plant materials into simple sugars. These enzymes are of the most value to bioethanol production.”

Most ethanol production for fuel in the U.S. comes from converting the sugars in corn, beets, and sugarcane into ethyl alcohol. But that diverts these sugars from food production, a controversial proposition as food prices are rising.

The university notes that “non-edible parts of many plants also contain a large number of sugar molecules, which could potentially be used to produce ethanol. But the problem is that these sugar molecules are far less accessible.” They are, in fact, locked up in “lignocelluose,” the two-by-fours of physical structure in the plant cell walls.

Termites, destructive critters that they are, don’t have problems chowing down on lignocelluose. Many homeowners can attest to that fact.

The key, according to the Florida researchers, is the fine grinding of the cellulosic material provided by the termites’ jaws, and the enzymes from the critters themselves and the critters in their bellies.

Scharf and others have probed the enzymes, looking at what he calls the “termite digestome,” the group of genes that produce the enzymes that break down the cellulose. According to the university, “The work has already provided strong preliminary evidence that the enzymes produced by the termites and their symbionts tend to work collaboratively, with the lignocellulosic material having to be partially digested by termite enzymes before it can be further digested by symbiont enzymes.”

Scharf says, “First, we now have the ability to produce and test individual enzymes for their competency and roles in lignocellulose degradation. Once we identify major players (from termites and symbionts), we can test combinations that may have applications in making bioethanol production more feasible from existing feedstocks, and maybe even other feedstocks that aren’t on our radar screens yet.”

Color me skeptical. I can recall writing stories in the early 1980s about bacteria that eat sulfur and could turn high-sulfur coal into low-sulfur “compliance” coal. Similarly, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I recall writing about how scientists said white rot fungus, commonly seen in wood piles and downed timber, could make a major contribution to cleaning up chemicals at Superfund sites. None of that came to pass.

If it sounds too good to be true, my Pappy used to tell me, it probably is.

Local politics reroutes the PATH project

By Kennedy Maize

Evidence builds for the proposition that constructing new high-voltage transmission remains harder than bringing on new power generation. Facing increasing political opposition in West Virginia and Maryland, American Electric Power, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and Allegheny Energy of Greenburg, Pa., last week said they are going to reroute their planned 765-KV, 290-mile Potomac Appalachian Transmission Highline (PATH) project.

Despite its designation as a national interest project under the terms of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, PATH faced growing citizen opposition, particularly in West Virginia’s prosperous Eastern Panhandle.

All three candidates for West Virginia governor this year, including incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin, opposed the project. The most powerful argument of opponents is that nobody in West Virginia will benefit from the transmission line, but will shoulder substantial costs. Allegheny Power, the Allegheny Energy regulated utility subsidiary, held some 20 open house sessions in area, and received about 2,000 comments, according to the Hagerstown (Md.) Herald-Mail newspaper.

The energy companies’ initial plan involved a new 765-KV line from an existing AEP substation near Charleston, W.Va., to Allegheny’s existing Bedlington substation in eastern West Virginia, a 244-mile run. From there, two 500-KV lines would move the power 46 miles to an existing Allegheny substation near Frederick, Md., allowing the power to be sold into the PJM Interconnection wholesale market.

A major part of the political problem was that the twin-circuit 550-KV lines could have had a visual and land-use impact on Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park, the Appalachian Trail, and Antietam National Battlefield, as well as depressing already-falling local property values. Allegheny Power spokesman Todd Meyers told the Hagerstown paper, “With all the different constraints, all the different historic areas of the parks, communications, etc., and everything we were hearing in the open houses, it was going to be very difficult.”

Allegheny said it will examine a new path for PATH that eschews the Bedlington site. Instead, the developers will look at a new substation further south, ducking Berkeley and Jefferson counties in West Virginia and Washington County in Maryland. The company said it will also scrap the twin 500-KV lines for a single 765-KV cable. Bedlington could not have handled the 765-KV line, Meyers told the Herald-Mail.

This will, of course, put a crimp in the utilities’ schedule for the project, which they hoped to have in service in 2012. Meyers told the newspaper the route change would eat up three months in the schedule. There is no way to verify that; these disputes typically spin out much farther into the future than the developers ever privately anticipate or publicly acknowledge.

The 2005 energy law, giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority to override state objections to new power lines that the Department of Energy judges are important nationally, has yet to be tested. Some serious analysts question whether it will work at all.

One problem: before state regulators can act, frequently local interests must weigh in. If local opposition is intense, state regulators have an incentive to play stall-ball, repeatedly delaying action on the transmission project, hoping that time will take the decision out of their hands. According to legal experts, it isn’t clear that state inaction represents a rejection of the power line, triggering federal review.

I suspect years will pass, with much state and federal litigation, including at least one trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, before the meaning of the 2005 legislation begins to get clarified. The fast track express envisioned by Congress looks more and more like a slow local, with many whistle stops along the line.

That prompts a reminder from one of the most perspicacious politicians of all time, the late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.): All politics is local.

Expect big-time spending in a new administration

By Kennedy Maize

What will the new president really do once on infrastructure spending, despite the anodyne economic platitudes of the campaign?

My guess is we will see the greatest economic stimulus effort since WW2. Deficits be damned. That’s probably good. The economic enemy is deflation, not inflation, if the Great Depression is any guide.

Keynes, Bernanke, and other scholars of the depression showed that falling prices – and the increase in the value of the dollar, which fewer people held – were drivers of the economic hard times. Today, with financial markets worldwide intertwined, that may be even more the case.

I’m not an economist, but I’ve read pretty widely in the field. My sense is that neither Obama, the likely winner, nor McCain (is he Bret or Bart Maverick?), are making much sense about economic issues so far.

Unfortunately, political folk wisdom prevents the candidates from speaking the truth. The conventional wisdom – see Washington Post columnist David Broder, who should know better as a child of the Depression – is that we must cut back on spending, save more, invest more prudently (that is, don’t give credit to folks who need it), and otherwise engage in the policies of Herbert Hoover and FDR prior to WW2.

That made sense during a period of sustained growth during the Clinton administration. With tax revenues flowing in from a booming economy, the government could accumulate a substantial economic cushion. Bush spent it all, and more, to his discredit, much of it on his feckless adventures in the Middle East. Now the economy is in free fall

I don’t buy the conventional wisdom that we need to return to the Clinton policies. That strikes me as fighting the last war – the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s, which Clinton policies and the strong economy overcame – and ignoring the realities of what faces us today.

Credit markets are cramped. Lenders don’t trust counterparties. The result of that flows across the global, interconnected economy, producing a worldwide depression (dare I use the word). Mostly thanks to W and his incoherent economic policies, all of which drained from his determination to conquer the world, the world faces a sure recession and a possible depression. Bush’s policies placed hegemony ahead of the economy, and now we are all paying the price.

With credit unavailable or unaffordable, economists tell us that economies move toward cash. Gold becomes the medium of exchange and dollars a fiat (nothing to do with the Italian car company, affectionately know as “fix it again, tony) currency. That further distorts markets, leading toward worldwide economic gridlock. It’s not a pretty sight, and millions of middle-class, working-class people will suffer. No major infrastructure projects will be built. That’s where we are today.

What to do? Spend, spend, spend. Pump up the economy with cash and credit liquidity.

I suspect that both Obama and McCain (or at least their economic advisors) understand what’s going on, and what to do about it. They are not willing to publicly challenge the folk wisdom as Nov. 4 approaches. But when Obama delivers his first State of the Union address, look for radically different policies than we have seen the candidates advance to date.

Expect big spending on infrastructure – maybe even an interstate, interconnected electric grid. Bridge repairs will become popular. So will sewage treatment and water quality projects, maybe even replacement and upgrades of water and sewer pipes in urban areas (which would employ a large number of workers at good wages, at a task desperately needed).

The trick for taxpayers (and Congress, there’s the rub) will be to develop mechanisms for distinguishing good projects from bad in this coming rush to spend. I confess that I don’t have any ideas about how to do this.

But I suspect there are folks in think tanks, government, and in the political parties who can propose effective ways to separate quality infrastructure spending from greasy pork, bridges that serve the larger public from bridges to nowhere.

So what society needs to do, led by a new president of whatever party, is revitalize the way we look at infrastructure investments. We can’t remove these decisions from naked politics, but we need to find a way to use the politics of infrastructure spending to inform decisions that blend politics with prudence.

I know, it’s easy to say. Not easy to do. But it’s the only way we can direct federal funds toward national objectives in a sensible way, without wasting enormous amounts of taxpayer money on stupid, but locally-popular, spending. Some waste is inevitable, but the way government allocates resources today almost guarantees that waste will overcome value. That must change.

The way to rescue today’s economic mess is to spend a lot, but prudently. It’s not an easy task.

Any ideas?

Sarah Palin’s Arctic: hot or cold?

A report from the front lines of the alleged global warming war. The Anchorage Daily News reported on Monday, Oct. 13, 2008, that summer snow loss in the state in 2008 was less than winter snowfall, reversing a trend of two centuries.
The newspaper said that “unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July, and August.” Translated: the ballyhooed Alaska glacier melt may be reversing.
The paper quoted U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molina that “the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.” Most Alaska glaciers, said Molina, had positive mass balances for the year, meaning they have gained ice over the course of the year.
What effect does climate change – whatever that means – have on Alaska’s glaciers? Hard to say, Molina told the Anchorage newspaper, as small temperature changes can have big impacts on the glaciers. What’s the difference between the Little Ice Age, when the Alaskan glaciers advanced in the 16th-19th Centuries, and the recent warming? According to Molina, about 3 degrees.
When I took geology courses at Penn State in the mid-1960s, one of my professors noted that a 2 degree drop in North American temperatures would result in the halt of the retreat of glaciers, and a resumption of their historic march across the upper Midwest. No thanks. I’ve been warm and I’ve been cool. Warm is better. Although I must confess I love Alaska and would move there tomorrow if it made economic sense.
The Anchorage newspaper got it right. Does the ebb and flow of Alaska’s glaciers mean anything for public policy? “Nobody knows,” wrote the paper. “Climate is constantly shifting. And even if the past year was a signal of a changing future, Molina said, it would still take decades to make itself noticeable in Alaska’s glaciers. Rivers of ice flow slowly. Hundreds of feet of snow would have to accumulate at higher elevations to create enough pressure to stall the current glacial retreat and start a new advance.”
In a related matter, meteorologist Anthony Watts in his blog notes that “the predictions for record low [Arctic] sea ice minimums in 2008 were not met, and 2008 ended up about 9% higher than in 2007 at the end of the season.” Watts adds, with honest intellectual conservatism, “I’m not one to read much into this, as to do so would be to make the same mistake as was done earlier this year when the [National Snow and Ice Data Center] melt trend led one researcher there to conclude that we’d see an ‘ice free north pole.’”
Bottom line: don’t believe any of the catastrophic claims of the climate decons when it comes to Alaska. The picture is far more complex than the common understanding. Polar bears aren’t endangered. The Arctic Ocean is not becoming the Gulf of Mexico. Science has no real grip on what’s going on up there, other than accumulating empirical data.

McCain, Palin Ticket Doesn’t Really Dig Coal

Desperate to score points in a crucial state where they are in the double-digit dumps, the Republican McCain-Palin presidential ticket rolled out their heartfelt support for “clean coal technologies” at a rally in Scranton, Pa., this week. Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin appeared in full throat. Her homage to coal, of course, came despite McCain’s announced goal to deploy 45 new nuclear generating plants by 2030.
The only problem with the Palin appearance is that Scranton is “hard-coal” country. That’s anthracite coal, a high BTU-low sulfur product that isn’t relevant in the 21st century. Most of it was mined out in the 19th and 20th century to heat homes. What’s left isn’t economically significant. The U.S. Department of Energy describes domestic anthracite as “very rare in the United States,” as opposed to bituminous coal, which is plentiful, both in Appalachia, the Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain west.
Scranton is Democratic Veep nominee Joe Biden’s home turf. He grew up here, son of a blue-collar family, and later moved to Delaware, where he became a U.S. senator. The Pennsylvania region is traditionally – although not reliably – Democratic (and was the home ground of the radical Molly McGuire coal labor union movement of the 1870s). Coal was once king, and still has a hold on the hearts and memories of the folks in the region. But coal has little economic purchase today.
Coal hasn’t been a significant economic factor in northeastern Pennsylvania for close to 40 years. The attempt of the Republican ticket to link anthracite coal and Republican politics makes little local sense. National Republican political strategists, it seems, can’t distinguish hard from soft coal.
At a rally in Scranton, GOP Veep nominee Palin said, “Drill, baby, drill and mine, baby, mine, yes!” She drew cheers from a Republican crowd. She claimed, according to the New York Times, that a Republican clean coal plan “is going to create over 30,000 new jobs where they are needed most, in places like Ohio, West Virginia and right here in Pennsylvania.”
Maybe. But her policy prescription meant little in local terms, where unemployment is a big issue. There won’t be any mining in northeastern Pennsylvania. There’s nothing to mine. No developers will build coal-fired plants of any flavor, clean, green, or otherwise. So there are no jobs for the region in the McCain-Palin plan.
Hard coal is relatively clean, very expensive to mine, and a bad candidate for “clean coal technology,” whatever that means. Sorry, Sarah, your rhetoric is entirely empty here.
Nor is anthracite a significant contributor to U.S. coal production. It is not a major fuel for power generation and only a tiny contributor to U.S. energy production. Palin’s sense of geography and geology was dramatically skewed, although I doubt she or her handlers knew it.
Palin’s clean coal call would make more sense at the further western reaches of the Keystone State, where bituminous coal has long been king. One of the legendary coal seams – one which lends itself to “clean coal” gasification – is Pittsburgh No. 9. That’s a long way from Scranton and its largely mined-out anthracite deposits.
It the West, it’s soft coal, or bituminous and subbituminous, far better fuel for conventional power plants and plants that combine coal gasification with combined-cycle gas-fired generation. That’s what “clean coal technology” is all about; it’s not about anthracite coal.
But I guess we shouldn’t expect anything like technical accuracy and precision in our political candidates. For the Palin propagandists, Pennsylvania is Pennsylvania, and coal is coal, and the state’s electoral votes are up for grabs.
I wonder if the Republican strategists have any idea about the differences among eastern high-Btu, high sulfur bituminous coals and the low-Btu, low-sulfur products of the Powder River Basin? Do they care?
If they achieve power – an unlikely prospect today – the McCainites will have to learn a lot about coal if they wish to implement rational energy policy.

Loan guarantee gridlock

It’s gridlock on the road to the U.S. nuclear renaissance. Electric companies and consortia – 15 in all so far – are asking the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for combined construction and operating licenses for 24 new nuclear units under the terms of the 2005 Energy Policy Act.

The companies are all seeking the loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy provided under the 2005 law. The nuclear industry is seeking to guarantee 80% of the construction costs of the new units, which it claims is necessary to secure private-sector financing for the other 20%. It’s fair to call the 2005 law a nuclear bailout, as it pledges the full faith and credit of the U.S. government to back the DOE loans, meaning the companies will get a gold-plated credit ratings.

Here’s the radioactive rub. The law sets aside only $18.5 billion for the loan guarantees (and Congress is unlikely to increase that amount).

In a press release last week, the DOE said the applications for loan guarantees total a whopping $122 billion, supporting a total construction cost of $188 billion for the full slate of units.

On top of that, the worldwide credit market has cramped to the point where Energy Secretary Sam Bodman told reporters in Paris in late September that the atomic renaissance worldwide could slow to a halt. Even China and India could have problems raising the capital necessary for new nukes.

The U.S. numbers are interesting, seeing that three years ago the nuclear industry was estimating capital costs for new nukes at $3-$4 billion a unit. If you divide $188 billion by 24 units, the capital costs have doubled to almost $8 billion for each new unit. That means only three units could get the full 80% federal subsidy the industry wants. If the cost grows to $10 billion per unit – a distinct possibility given the strains in the supply chain for nuclear equipment and labor – only two plants could get DOE guarantees.

What to do? Bodman suggested to a House committee in February scaling back the percentage, perhaps to 40%. That would mean the plant owners would have to come up with a far larger portion of the funds to build the plant, at a time when financial institutions are even wary of lending money to car dealers to buy inventory for the new model year.

The industry is fighting a roll-back in the scale of the loan guarantees, but has no viable option to offer instead, other than more money from Uncle Sam. Retiring Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), former chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, tried last year to eliminate the cap on loan guarantees and give DOE open-ended authority to determine how much debt it would guarantee. House Democratic leaders balked and Domenici’s idea died.

Clearly, most of these industry-proposed units won’t be built. Some may, and none may. DOE said it will apply the criteria laid out in June when it issued the solicitations for loan guarantees to rank the applications. The most significant criteria – worth half of the points on the agency’s scoring scale – is creditworthiness. The agency then plans to inform the applicants where they stand in the DOE queue. That may persuade some to drop out.

A second, more substantive, round of submissions from the loan guarantee applicants is due December 19. Based on those, DOE says it will “enter into negotiations that will lead to the eventual issuance of loan guarantees.”

On top of the financial issues, there is a major political component. Note the word “eventual” in the DOE press release. Last February at a Platts nuclear conference in Rockville, Md., which POWER covered, the nuclear industry was pleading with DOE to issue to loan guarantee solicitations immediately, so the entire process could play out before the November elections. The industry wanted to pour concrete before Nov. 4, effectively locking in the guarantees.

DOE has failed to put the loan guarantees on a fast track. So it appears almost certain that a new administration and a new Congress will be in place before the nukes can get their loan guarantees. As a result, there may be none, even if the industry is able to raise capital in the private sector.

Iced in by global warming

Folks, this is a true story. We do not make this stuff up. As the late, great comic Steve Allen used to say, “I kid you not.”

An NBC television crew, dispatched to the Arctic to show the horrendous effects of global warming – an ice-free Northwest passage – was stalled in the Arctic Sea for nearly a month at the end of the so-called summer, socked in as the crew attempted to document the effects of warming. The production crew for the Today show was aboard a Canadian Coast Guard vessel, the ice-breaker Amundsen, heading out from Resolute Bay in early September to check out the allegedly ice-free Northwest Passage, when weather happened.

In a post to the MSNBC web site, correspondent Peter Alexander wrote, “Producer Paul Manson and I, along with cameraman Callan Griffiths and soundman Ben Adams, were sent here on assignment to report on climate change and the Arctic for an upcoming broadcast. The primary news peg – and one reason for our visit – is that for only the second time in recorded history the Northwest Passage is ice free, effectively clearing this shortcut between Europe and Asia.”

Oops. The plan, according to Alexander, was to chopper off the Canadian ship after filming the footage the crew needed to make the story. Not so fast. “Freezing rain and harsh weather” kept the helicopter on the ship. “The ship kept going and our chance to get off passed.”

The Today crew spent 23 days locked onto the Canadian ship by ice and foul weather. Alexander whined, “Since we were done shooting two weeks ago, we’ve been left with a lot of time to fill.”

The TV crew apparently filled the time by chowing down on the ship’s food stores. Wrote Alexander, “Meals have become a priority. It’s often the only way we can keep track of what time and day it is. Thursday is a favorite – breakfast crepes.” Yum-oh.

Don’t fear for the health of our ice-stranded TV crew. The ship offers a workout room, fitted with a treadmill, two stationary bikes, and a bench for free weights. Notes Alexander, “Running on a treadmill when the ship is rocking could easily pass at it’s own Olympic sport.” [Having done the same, I second that remark.]

The hilariously sad tale of the trapped Today team produced copious responses on the global warming skeptic blog Watts Up With That, hosted by former television meteorologist Anthony Watts. It is one of the classiest, most intellectually-honest climate skepticism sites on the web. Among the more amusing posts relative to the NBC ice ship:

* Leon Brozyna. “Talk about presumptive arrogance: for only the second time in recorded history the Northwest Passage is ice free. And how many times in the past couple hundred years did it happen and no one noticed or cared? And how will they spin it if the Arctic sea ice expanse starts increasing over the next few years (both minimum and maximum)? Silly question. They’ll just ignore it and move on the next panic attack.

* Bill Ryan. “For only the second time in recorded history the Northwest Passage is ice free? They failed to mention that the last time was 1903.”

* Pompous Git (might this be a pseudonym?). “Let’s see. Amundsen navigated the Northwest Passage in 1906. Henry Larsen did it twice, in 1940 and 1944. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Storis did it in 1957. Willy do Roos did it in 1977 in a 45-foot yacht. The first cruise ship to do it was MS Explorer in 1984. And so on….Not bad for a passage that’s only been open twice in history!”

The whole affair is further demonstration of the air-headedness of commercial network television and the acolytes of man-made global warming. The brains of the network news operations have been frozen in the Arctic Sea of conventional wisdom for years. They don’t have the least economic or intellectual incentive to check things out, as reality might depress ratings.

It’s sad. There is little solid climate reporting – skepticism rather than accepticism – in much of the main-stream media, including the major print publications, the networks, and the cable channels. It’s only on the web – and in the blogs – where hard-hitting, skeptical reporting on climate issues can be found, done by folks with academic credentials and street cred. Many geeks, few airheads. Count me among the geeks.

The meaning of Kyoto’s failure

Did the now-irrelevant 1997 Kyoto Protocol reduce global carbon dioxide emissions, or even slow the rate of increase?

No, according to Global Carbon Project, established in 2001 to measure worldwide, man-made carbon emissions patterns. According to the project’s “Global Carbon Budget,” released Sept. 25, “Anthropogenic CO2 emission have been growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the previous decade, despite efforts to curb emissions in a number of Kyoto Protocol signatory countries.”

Pep Canadell, Washington-based executive director, said, “This new update of the carbon budget shows the acceleration of both CO2 emissions and the atmospheric accumulation are unprecedented and most astonishing during a decade of intense international developments to address climate change.” How’s that for an admission of failure?

The report found that atmospheric CO2 concentrations grew to 383 parts per million in 2007, an annual increase of 2 ppm since 2000, and a third faster than in the previous 20 years, the project said.

This report will cause considerable hand-wringing among climate change activists. Their likely response will be that the world must work much harder through international institutions to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and that the U.S. must become a full-fledged participant. The assumption is that global warming is both bad and preventable, the recent increases intolerable, and only a mega-Kyoto approach can work to reduce emissions.

That paradigm looks to me to be entirely feckless. It seems to me it wouldn’t have made any difference if the U.S. had been a willing participant in Kyoto or not. Worldwide emissions would have continued to rise substantially (not led by the U.S.). There is no evidence I’ve seen that international action of any kind can reduce carbon dioxide emissions, or even reduce the growth of emissions. The whole Kyoto paradigm, based on the 1987 Montreal Protocol to reduced CFC emissions and save the Antarctic ozone layer, is fraudulent.

Those of us who are greenhouse skeptics ask: so what if global CO2 emissions increased dramatically? Since the turn of the 21^st century – despite apparent CO2 emissions increases – global temperatures haven’t increased and may have gone down. That data doesn’t seem to affect the debate.

Nor is the evidence that a warmer world is a worse world is at all convincing. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin – perhaps the worst choice for a vice presidential running mate in U.S. history – understands that a warmer Alaska is not a bad thing, and not unique over the past 100 years. She’s lived there all her life. More than a decade before she was born, Alaska was much warmer than today. Alaska’s climate is cyclical. She’s a dope, but she understands Alaska.

A new, 35-page paper from climate guru Richard Lindzen of MIT, the world’s leading warming skeptic, argues that environmental politics, the emphasis on modeling as opposed to empirical data, and government funding agendas have polluted the scientific debate over climate change. In short, he argues, “political correctness,” not science, is driving the warming debate.

Conceptual models, rather than empirically-based hypotheses, have come to dominate climate science, argues Lindzen. The map has come to dominate the territory.

Lindzen writes, “For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not all these factors are unique to climate science, but the heavy influence of politics has served to amplify the role of the other factors. By cultural factors, I primarily refer to the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs. The latter serves to almost eliminate the dialectical focus of the former. Whereas the former had the potential for convergence, the latter is much less effective. The institutional factor has many components. One is the inordinate growth of administration in universities and the consequent increase in importance of grant overhead. This leads to an emphasis on large programs thatnever end. Another is the hierarchical nature of formal scientific organizations whereby a small executive council can speak on behalf of thousands of scientists as well as govern the distribution of ‘carrots and sticks’ whereby reputations are made and broken. The above factors are all amplified by the need for government funding. When an issue becomes a vital part of a political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research.”

Powerful language, which I find persuasive. Let’s hear a refutation.

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Can termites chew their way to ethanol?

Local politics reroutes the PATH project

Expect big-time spending in a new administration

Sarah Palin’s Arctic: hot or cold?

McCain, Palin Ticket Doesn’t Really Dig Coal

Loan guarantee gridlock

Iced in by global warming

The meaning of Kyoto’s failure

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