Dr. Steven Chu, President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee to be Secretary of Energy, enjoyed a collegial confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources today. In two hours, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist answered questions on energy policy and regional issues of concern to the senators on the panel. Several senators, both Democrat and Republican, reaffirmed their allegiance to the continued health of the coal industry, challenging Chu’s previous statement that “coal is my wost nightmare.” Responding to a question by Sen. Jim Sessions (R-AL) on the future of nuclear power, Chu indicated that he doesn’t believe the problems of nuclear waste and global warming should stall the construction of new power plants:

The recycling issue is something that we don’t need a solution today or even ten years from today. We have enough fuel. I think we have to figure out a way to store that spent fuel safely, which is another critical issue in this, and figure out a plan for long term disposition. Having said all of that, it doesn’t mean that you stop everything today. It’s very much like coal. We will be building some coal plants. One doesn’t have a hard moratorium on something like that while we search for a way to capture carbon and store it safely. It’s very analogous in my mind.

Chu’s opposition to a coal moratorium puts him in opposition to the likes of Vice President Al Gore and NASA scientist James Hansen, who believe “the United States must begin a sustained effort to exploit new energy sources and phase out unfettered burning of finite fossil fuels, starting with a moratorium on the construction of coal-burning power plants if they lack systems for capturing and burying carbon dioxide.”

Like Hansen and Gore, Chu has called for a rapid, global effort to dramatically reduce global warming emissions. He began his opening statement by saying:

Climate change is a growing and pressing problem. It is now clear that if we continue our current path we run the risk of dramatic, disruptive changes to our climate in the lifetimes of our children and our grandchildren.

Chu indicated that he believes the more productive focus for the United States government than a coal moratorium is in a heavy emphasis on energy efficiency and conservation, with a commitment to limiting energy demand. He reaffirmed his support for a policy portfolio that includes a federal renewable electricity standard, a low-carbon fuels standard, and a carbon cap-and-trade system instead. The Center for American Progress supports an emissions performance standard to require carbon capture and sequestration at all new coal plants.

“Study Shows Global Warming Will Not Hurt U.S. Economy” — That’s the Heritage Foundation touting a new study by economists from MIT and the National Bureau of Economic Review (NBER).

This study, “Climate Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century” — wildly mistitled and deeply flawed, as we will see — is yet another value-subtracting contribution by the economics profession to climate policy (see Part 2: Robert Mendelsohn says global warming is “a good thing for Canada”).

What makes the paper especially noteworthy, however, is not merely the credentials of the authors, but that they thank such climate economist luminaries as William Nordhaus and Richard Tol for “helpful comments and suggestions.” The only helpful comment and suggestion I can think of for this paper is “Burn the damn thing and start over from scratch.”

Heritage quotes the study:

Our main results show large, negative effects of higher temperatures on growth, but only in poor countries. In poorer countries, we estimate that a 1?C rise [sic -- the Heritage folks haven't mastered the —¦ symbol] in temperature in a given year reduced economic growth in that year by about 1.1 percentage points. In rich countries, changes in temperature had no discernable effect on growth. Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries. We find broadly consistent results across a wide range of alternative specifications.

Heritage then quotes a commentary on the study by right-wing blogger for U.S. News & World Report James Pethokoukis, “Sorry, Climate Change Wouldn’t Hurt America’s Economy.” Pethokoukis also quotes from the study:

Despite these large, negative effects for poor countries, we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP. This result follows from (a) the absence of estimated temperature effects in rich countries and (b) the fact that rich countries make up the bulk of world GDP. Moreover, if rich countries continue to grow at historical rates, their share of world GDP becomes more pronounced by 2099, so even a total collapse of output in poor countries has a relatively small impact on total world output.

[If these excerpts suggest to you that the study authors and the economist commenters are victims of some sort of collective mass hysteria, then you are a getting (a little) ahead of me ... but the fact that thoroughly-debunked denier Ross McKitrick is a commenter on this paper certainly suggests this entire effort is indefensible.]

Pethokoukis himself then offers a conclusion that, though amazing, is not utterly ridiculous given a narrow misreading of this absurdly narrow, easily-misread study:

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It’s amazing enough that the normally staid International Energy Agency recently said we’ve run out of time (see IEA says oil will peak in 2020). Now Business Wire reports:

According to a new survey by BDO Seidman, LLP, one of the nation’s leading accounting and consulting organizations, 48 percent of chief financial officers (CFOs) at U.S. oil and gas exploration and production companies agree that the world has reached its peak petroleum (liquid hydrocarbon) production rate or will reach it within the next few years, while another 52 percent disagree with that statement.

I think the headline is wrong, though:

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I actually thought Stephen Chu’s confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary was pretty boring. The Dems certainly didn’t want to trip him up. But the GOP didn’t really ask him any tough questions, like how the heck are you going to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels in just four decades?

Perhaps everybody just realized that he is the most highly qualified person ever to be nominated for the position (see Top 5 reasons Chu is a great energy pick — #1: “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal”). Perhaps he was just too smart to be pinned down.

The most worrisome thing I heard was when Evan Bayh (D-IN) said that he wasn’t going to be able support a climate bill before China bought in to emissions restraints in a serious and verifiable manner. That is the “China Excuse” for inaction, and it inevitably leads to The U.S.-China Suicide Pact on Climate, where they won’t act unless we do and we won’t act unless they do. Obama must break that cycle — and I expect he will.

The Greenwire (subs. req’d) story on the hearing is excerpted below:

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Apparently the media got the story wrong [what a shock!].

I had noted that the story clearly was wrong in my post “Ignore the media hype and keep Googling — The energy impact of web searches is very LOW.” Now TechNewsWorld reports:

A Harvard researcher spent much of Monday setting the record straight about his research and how it relates to Google’s energy consumption….

One problem: the study’s author, Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, says he never mentions Google in the study. “For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google,” Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. “Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site.”

And that tiny amount of CO2 is, as they say, nothing to blog home about. Dog bites man.

Wissner-Gross deserves some of the blame for this media miscoverage since he still hasn’t published his study on-line as far as I can tell, which is odd for a study on online energy use. People I know who are familiar with his methodology do question it.

A U.S. climate bill should set a target of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20% to 30% below 1990 levels by 2020. That conclusion is based on the latest science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA, among others, but it also involves matters of timing and U.S. cap-and-trade design. To achieve its goals, domestic climate legislation should limit the use of both international and domestic offsets.

The United States has the technology and resources to reduce its emissions levels substantially below 1990 levels by 2020 (see “Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?“), and having already lost much of its credibility in the international community by failing to act, there is no time to lose in adoption of binding targets to avoid the risks of dangerous impacts of global warming.

That is the Executive Summary of a new report I have written for the Center for American Progress (Full report here). I have changed my thinking on the 2020 target a bit in the past year for three reasons:

1. Scientific observations and analysis in 2007 and 2008 make clear the pace and threat of climate change has accerated (see #’s 8, 7, and 3 here).
2. We must try to keep open the option of going much lower than 450 (see ” Stabilize at 350 ppm or risk ice-free planet, warn NASA, Yale, Sheffield, Versailles, Boston et al“)
3. Politicians insist on effectively watering down their 2020 targets with rip-offsets (see “Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill update: Probably no U.S. CO2 emissions cut until after 2025“).

The full report is reprinted below:

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Okay, this is not as big a deal as, say, the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin would have been. But, Watts Up With That is currently leading the online (i.e. non-scientific) Weblog Awards voting for Best Science Blog, as feared (see “Weblog Awards duped by deniers — again!“).

Watts is a major global warming denier and sufferer of anti-science syndrome, as evidenced by his reprinting and endorsing a broad-based attack on the integrity of the entire scientific community [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"].

If this annoys you in the least or if you are just feeling bored today, you should vote here for Watts’ closest competitor, Pharyngula. Vote soon, though. The “polls” close today, Tuesday, at 5 pm EST.