Re: Incompetent Biden Admin Leaned On Questionable And Misleading Science To Justify Halting Natural Gas Hub Approvals

[Biden Bunglers]

On 14 Mar 2022, Rudy Canoza <notg...@gmail.com> posted some
news:AZJXJ.133203$r6p7....@fx41.iad:

> Nobody in the Biden administration has a single sliver of credibility.

The Biden administration relied on questionable and misleading
scientific material to support its decision to pause new approvals of
liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.

In January, the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on approving
new LNG export terminals so that the Department of Energy (DOE) can
expand its reviews to include facilities’ climate impacts, a move
celebrated by climate activists and slammed by industry groups and
elected Republicans alike. In written testimony to Congress earlier in
February defending the policy, Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk
pointed to billion-dollar disasters (BDDs) as a proxy for the intensity
of climate change, and he also cited projections based on a de facto
“worst-case” emissions scenario that critics have derided for failing to
accurately project emissions in the present, let alone the future; both
statistics are misleading and questionable.

Turk’s testimony states that “our understanding of the economic and
human impacts from climate change has only sharpened” since 2019, when
the agency last published its estimates for the full lifecycle
greenhouse gas impacts associated with American LNG exports.

Turk leads off by comparing the number of BDD events recorded in 2019
and 2023, observing that 2019 saw 14 natural disasters that caused
damages in excess of $1 billion while there were 28 such instances in
2023. These statistics are sourced from the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (RELATED: Electric Appliance
Advocates Backed Study Driving Push To Ban Gas Stoves)

Download this PDF

https://www.scribd.com/document/706242405/David-Turk-Testimony#download&f
rom_embed

However, using BDD events as a proxy for meteorological conditions is
misleading for several reasons. Primarily, this is because population
and asset density has increased in coastal areas susceptible to natural
disasters. The increased loss potential in coastal areas means that the
same exact hurricane in the same exact place may not have caused $1
billion in damages in 1980 as it might inflict today.


NOAA acknowledges as much, having previously told the DCNF that “the
number and cost of disasters are increasing over time due to a
combination of three things: increased exposure (i.e., values at risk of
possible loss), increased vulnerability (i.e., where we build; how we
build) and climate change that is increasing the frequency of some types
of extremes that lead to billion–dollar disasters.”

Put another way, there are several factors that influence the frequency
of BDD events other than meteorological conditions and things that are
related to climate change. Notably, NOAA does not express natural
disaster costs in terms of American gross domestic product (GDP). Roger
Pielke Jr. — an academic who writes extensively about politicized
science and considers climate change to be a real and serious threat —
has conducted his own analysis and found that “North American
catastrophe losses as a proportion of U.S. GDP clearly show no upwards
trend” over time.

“There is no peer reviewed science that attributes any part of
increasing disaster losses to changes in climate,” Pielke previously
told the DCNF. “To see evidence of changes in climate, look at climate
data, not economic data.” (RELATED: ‘National Embarrassment’: Key Stat
Used In Biden Admin’s Landmark Climate Report Is Misleading)



In addition to the BDD statistics, Turk asserts that climate change
could result in an annual loss of $2 trillion in federal government
revenues by the year 2100, citing analysis conducted by the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB).

However, the OMB analysis relies on de facto “worst-case-scenario”
projections that appear to be predicated on the Representative
Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario. RCP8.5 is essentially the
term used by climate scientists to describe a situation in which the
world continues to use fossil fuels and produce emissions without
adjusting course.

The OMB analysis that Turk cites states that the $2 trillion hit to
annual revenues could occur “under a scenario in which climate change
reduced U.S. GDP by 10.0 percent compared to a no-further-warming
counterfactual, as projected by the Network for Greening the Financial
System as the tail risk under current policies.” The Network for
Greening the Financial System’s analysis on various climate change
scenarios, which the OMB’s analysis cites, was funded by grants from
Bloomberg Philanthropies and the ClimateWorks Foundation, two
left-of-center charitable foundations that focus their work on climate
change-related initiatives.

The RCP8.5 scenario estimates American GDP loss by 2100 to be 10.52%,
according to the International Monetary Fund, putting it on par with the
assumptions made by OMB to qualify its claim — cited by Turk in his
testimony defending the LNG export terminal approvals pause — that
climate change could force a $2 trillion reduction in annual federal
revenues by 2100.

However, the RCP8.5 model has serious flaws.

For example, a 2020 paper by two climate scientists published in Nature
found that RCP8.5 should not be treated as a reference or baseline case
for potential outcomes related to climate change, in part because global
carbon dioxide emissions are lower than the levels projected by RCP8.5.
The paper argues that the bifurcation between reality and RCP8.5
projections will only intensify over time, referencing the International
Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2019 projections for emissions assuming continuity
of current energy policy to make this point.


“RCP8.5 projects to 2100 a six-fold growth in global coal consumption
per capita, while the International Energy Agency and other energy
forecasting groups collectively agree that coal consumption has already
or will soon peak. Also, RCP8.5 foresees carbon dioxide emissions
growing rapidly to at least the year 2300 when Earth reaches more than
2,000 [parts per million] of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations,”
Pielke wrote in a 2021 analysis that he coauthored with Justin Ritchie,
a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia’s
Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “But again,
according to the IEA and other groups, fossil energy emissions have
likely plateaued, and it is plausible to achieve net-zero emissions
before the end of the century, if not much sooner. Today, projections
that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels will increase
dramatically for the next 50, 100, or 300 years are simply implausible.”

Setting aside the credibility of the statistics Turk cited in his
testimony, energy sector experts previously told the Daily Caller News
Foundation that the decision will fail to reduce global emissions while
also empowering foreign production in places like Russia and Qatar.
Would-be importers of American LNG will not scrap longer-term plans to
import because the Biden administration has altered timelines for new
export capacity, so they will lean on Russian and Qatari LNG that is not
produced as cleanly as American gas to plug the gap, the experts told
the DCNF.

The Department of Energy and the White House did not respond immediately
to requests for comment.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/02/17/biden-admin-questionable-misleading-sc
ience-natural-gas-pause/