In the Pipeline: 4/11/12

The Onion Couldn’t Have Written a Better Headline ABC News (4/10/12) reports: Former General Services Administration administrator Martha Johnson missed a lavish Las Vegas conference for government employees because she was already committed to meetings in California at  Solyndra, according to testimony in an official government investigation…Solyndra is the now-bankrupt green energy company that the Obama administration had provided with a $535 million loan through the stimulus…The development, if true, dovetails together two embarrassing but otherwise unrelated episodes for the Obama administration.

Gary Andres.  Michael Beckerman.  Alexa Marrero.  These people are without a doubt some of the best staff ever to serve at the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  Oh, and Chairman Upton has been better than pretty much any other chairman since the Republicans retook the majority The American (4/9/12) reports: U.S. energy policy needs a reboot—a broad reassessment of our strategies—because much of what we thought we knew has either dramatically changed or turned out to be plain wrong…When I first became involved in these issues, President Jimmy Carter told us our domestic energy supplies were running out and a foreign cartel would determine everything from the cars we drove to the temperatures in our homes. The future he painted looked bleak.

NYT is betting on the river card with this article — four paragraphs praising the virtues of affordable energy and then the party line New York Times (4/10/12) reports: Cheaper fuel produced domestically could reduce the cost of shipping and manufacturing, trim heating and cooling bills, improve the auto market and provide tens of thousands of new jobs…It might also pose new environmental challenges, both predictable and unforeseen, by damping enthusiasm for clean forms of energy and derailing efforts to wean the nation from its wasteful energy habits.

If people keep telling the truth, it will destroy the policy process as we know it Forbes (4/10/12) reports: High gasoline prices will fall once Americans start to conserve and they start to innovate. In the batter’s box: gas-to-liquids, or GTL, which can be used to power everything from buses to trucks to planes…Two key factors are at play. First oil prices are at $115 a barrel and second, natural gas is abundant and cheap at just more than $2 per million Btus. There’s a huge incentive to increase the value of that fuel given that the producers don’t want to get to stuck with undeveloped reserves.

You see, not every nation on the planet has gone insane Associated Press (4/10/12) reports: U.S. coal exports reached their highest level in two decades last year as strong demand from Asia and Europe offered an outlet for a fuel that is falling from favor at home…U.S. Department of Energy data analyzed by The Associated Press reveal that coal exports topped 107 million tons of fuel worth almost $16 billion in 2011. That’s the highest level since 1991, and more than double the export volume from 2006.

I wonder if Jim Hansen will shriek about how the NASA alums are trying to silence him Daily Caller (4/10/12) reports: Nearly 50 former NASA scientists, astronauts and technologists are chastising NASA for its position on man-made climate change…In a March 28 letter addressed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, the group of 49 former employees ask NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies to “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites” because “it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”

Roger Pielke (both Junior and Senior) is pretty smart.  So when they say that the IPCC is intentionally misleading people about something, you should probably pay attention Roger Pielker (4/10/12) reports: As I prepared for my lunch seminar which I am giving later today. I had a chance to revisit the press release issued by the IPCC on January 25, 2010 in response to an article that appeared in the UK Sunday Times one day earlier which detailed failures of the IPCC AR4 related to claims made about climate change and disasters…The Sunday Times article was about how the 2007 IPCC AR4 mishandled the issue of the economic toll of disasters and climate change. With the advantage of hindsight, we can now see that the claims made in the Sunday Times article have been completely vindicated and the IPCC press release was full of misinformation (to put it kindly).  This post has the details.