Robert L. Bradley Jr. is also author of The Mirage of Oil Protection (1989), Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience (2 volumes: 1996), and Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (2000), as well as shorter studies on energy history and policy.  He received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award for 2002 for his work on energy sustainability issues.

Back of the Book Cover Points
Table of Contents
Introduction

Back of the Book Cover Points

1.  The energy sustainability issues of resource depletion, reliability (security) and pollution have been effectively addressed by market entrepreneurship, technology, and, in the absence of private property rights, measured regulation.  Continuing improvement is expected.

2.  The remaining carbon energy-related sustainability issue concerns anthropogenic (man made) climate change.  Current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations are approximately 52% above pre-industrial levels with an associated increase in global warming potential of 66%.  Emissions released in the mining, transportation, and combustion of oil, natural gas, and coal account for a large majority of this accumulation.

3.  The balance of evidence points toward a benign temperature "greenhouse signal."  A greenhouse signal has not been identified with weather extremes or "surprises."

4.  Enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations create tangible benefits to offset any costs associated with anthropogenic climate change.

5.  Liberal energy markets foster wealth creation, adaptation, and social resiliency-a positive strategy to deal with inevitable climate change, natural and anthropogenic.  In addition, free-market reforms in the energy sector harness self-interest in energy efficiency, which have historically tended to reduce GHG emissions per unit of energy.

6.  Mandatory GHG emission reductions beyond no-regrets produce costs in excess of benefits under realistic assumptions, including discounting future benefits (if discernable) to compare to near-term costs.

7.  Serious efforts to equilibrate the carbon cycle will have to employ novel sequestration strategies given increasing energy usage, supply constraints with renewable energies, and political and economic limitations with nuclear power.

8.  Activist proposals for GHG reductions such as a cap-and-trade programme should be cognisant of the unintended consequences of open-ended regulatory regimes driven by temporary political majorities.

9.  The precautionary principle should be applied to government intervention limiting GHG emissions (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol), not just acts of man on the natural environment.  Economic risks, in other words, must be evaluated along with environmental ones.

10.  The major threat to energy sustainability is statism, not depletion, pollution, reliability, or anthropogenic climate change.  Major government interventions in energy markets, such as price controls, access restrictions, or carbon suppression, create the energy problems that non-politicized, free market processes work to prevent.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Carbon-energy Sustainability
Growing Supply
Declining Pollution
Improving Quality
Increasing Consumption/Falling Intensity
False Alarms
Relative Superiority
Conclusion

3. Issues in Climate Science
Natural and Anthropogenic Change
Scientific Optimism
     Millennium Warming: More than Thought
     Benign Warming Distribution
     Extended Period for Warming Adaptation
     Overestimated Model Warming
     Water Vapour Feedback Revision
     Moderated Forecast of Sea Level Rise
     Increased Weather Extremes-Unconfirmed
     Deep Distant Warming: Still a False Alarm?
Conclusion

4. Issues in Climate Economics
Carbon Dioxide-A Positive GHG
IPCC Damage Analysis v. Mainstream Economics
     1995 IPCC Report: Economic and Social Dimensions
     2001 IPCC Report: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
     Kyoto Modelling Studies
Realism -- Optimism
Realism -- Restraint
     Discounting
     Politicisation v. Optimisation
Sequestration vs. Mitigation
Conclusion

5. Framing the Policy Issues
The Kyoto Conundrum
Stasism and "Problematic" Warming
Precautionary Principle
Poverty
Conclusion

6. Climate Policy
"No Regrets" GHG Reductions
Beyond No Regrets: A Little Something?
     Nordhaus/Boyer Proposal
     Cap-and-Trade
Beyond No Regrets: A Lot of Something?
Environmentalist/Environmental Regret
     Hydro and Nuclear Power
     Kyoto Compromises
     Emission Trade-offs
     Renewable Trade-offs
     A Technological Fix?
     Corporatism (Corporate Welfare)
Conclusion

7. Conclusions

Appendix A: Falsified Carbon-energy Alarmism

Appendix B: IPCC Support for Climate Optimism

Appendix C: W.S. Jevons: First Critic of Renewable Energy

Introduction

The interaction between man and climate has interested scientists and the public for centuries.  Global warming and cooling scares predate the current concern over global warming that began in the 1980s.  Most recently, new theories and improved detection techniques have raised concern that man's influence is altering global climate beyond its natural fluctuation through an enhanced greenhouse effect.  In the context of energy sustainability issues, anthropogenic (man-made) climate change has become the major issue confronting the modern carbon energy economy.  Other energy "sustainability" issues such as depletion, pollution, and reliability (security) have proven amenable to market incentives, technological progress, and, in some cases, government regulation.  The prophets of carbon energy alarmism have been proven wrong time and again along the way.

This monograph addresses several key questions.  What does atmospheric science (climatology) currently conclude about the anthropogenic influence on global and regional climate?  What does the relatively new speciality of climate economics, or more broadly climate political economy, conclude about the future benefits and costs of the human influence on climate?  And most importantly, what public policies towards greenhouse gas emissions are supported from the balance of evidence presented by climate science and climate economics?  These questions involve six linkages shown in Figure 1 that travel from economic change all the way to climate policy that impacts economic change.

Figure 1: Economic-Energy-Climate-Policy Nexus

Answers to these questions point towards climate optimism and policy restraint.  The human influence on climate, tending towards warmth, moisture and carbon fertilisation, promises significant benefits to offset anticipated costs.  The evidence to date of the anthropogenic influence has been moderate and benign.  Climate models suggesting a far worse future have trouble squaring with this past and depend on highly simplified physical representations of climate that are prone to being falsified by more realistic (and complicated) climate processes that are now just becoming better understood.

Turning to public policy, government intervention to "protect the climate" or "slow climate change" has a surprisingly limited impact on overall carbon emissions and a predictably large negative impact on energy availability, dependability, and affordability.  The panacea of renewable energy is problematic on environmental and non-environmental grounds upon close inspection.  Reduced overall energy usage is not an option.  As history has shown, total energy consumption can rise as energy intensity per unit of economic activity falls.  The technological revolution towards a hydrogen energy economy could still be carbon-energy-based, and the commercialisation of hydrogen as a mass energy carrier remains decades away, as it has been for well over a century.

Increasing energy sustainability points toward an enhanced carbon energy era where ever more innovations with crude oil, natural gas and coal-and a growing number of close substitutes in between-make energy more plentiful and cleaner for an open ended future.

The critics of carbon energies have not proved that there is a problem that justifies a radical departure from a consumer-oriented energy economy.  Nor do they propose adequate solutions to the problems they suppose exist.  Human ingenuity within a framework of private property, free markets, and problem-based regulatory reform has made carbon energies one of the most significant economic and environmental triumphs of our time.  The true threat to energy sustainability are the activist/alarmist policies that are being advanced in the name of energy sustainability-a conundrum that the best evidence and arguments of both natural and social science warn against.