By David J. Sanders
Unfortunately for Gary Voigt and Richard Ford, their contributions to the Governor’s Commission on Global Warming were not what they had hoped for or expected. Both men brought with them significant expertise and experiences, along with solid reputations, which, in the end, should have enhanced the commission’s work.
Voigt leads the state’s Electrical Cooperatives and has worked with numerous national organizations and on task forces aimed at leading the country toward energy efficiency. Ford is a respected environmental economist and from his post at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has spent years publishing, studying and teaching.
But both men recognized problems early on.
“The commission members themselves weren’t as big of participants as was CCS, quite frankly,” Voigt said. CCS is the Center for Climate Strategies, which has been revealed in this space to have dominated the GCGW’s work from start to finish. “Commission members didn’t have the input; CCS’s consultants had most of the input. There was a structure and a goal.”
Voigt explained that before the commission started its work, McKinsey & Company, the venerable business consulting firm, released a study outlining cost-efficient methods of reducing greenhouse gases. That study, for Voigt, would have been a logical starting place or, at least, a good resource for the GCGW. “My thought was ‘Let’s do those things that reduce cost, reduce the need for new capacity and transmission, before we go to the other side of the curve where we begin to pay big dollars for strategies with questionable benefits,’” he said.
Ford saw looming problems, both with CCS’s involvement and their processes, which commission members eventually approved, although CCS’s methods lacked standard analytics, which are part of environmental economics. Ford explained that in order to perform a true economic analysis of the policy recommendations, both “allocative and technical” efficiencies had to be quantified.
He explained to the commission the necessity for measuring both efficiencies, but nothing changed. “A true economic analysis was never done,” he said, which is why he voted against every policy proposal that claimed to have a cost savings.
Within the CCS/GCGW report, many of the 54 policy recommendations were assigned a cost and a savings number that was calculated in dollars per million metric tons of CO2, which Voigt said was “worse than worthless.”
Referencing studies from the Electric Power Research Institute, he explained that if the industry continues to make investments in existing and emerging technologies, then they could reduce the levels of CO2 emissions by 45 percent by 2030. He said that preferred approach would result in a 50 percent increase in cost to ratepayers during that period.
Conversely, Voigt pointed out that by adopting the Kyoto Protocols or the same types of renewable energy portfolio mandates, cap-and-trade agreements and CO2 taxes CCS advocates, ratepayers would see a 260 percent increase in energy costs with roughly the same reduction in emissions as without mandates.
Voigt said studies show that the impact temperatures between the two approaches is negligible — only .07 degrees centigrade. “If you do it right, we can achieve the same goal at low cost to the economy. If we do it wrong we could destroy the economy effectively,” he said.
In light of that information, he thought the GCGW would consider these “rational strategies,” which would “get us to the same place” in terms of reduction in carbon emissions. But when he shared the data with the commission, “Everyone said, ‘that’s a good idea’ and then we went back to the CCS agenda.”
Why would anyone prefer the more costly approach? “You have to ask the question, ‘what is CCS’s objective?’” which he said isn’t to reduce CO2, but rather to push “carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and RPS standards.”
For Voigt it’s simple; besides the well-meaning environmental ideologues, there are some individuals and organizations that are pushing mandates because they stand to benefit financially.
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David Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and is a host of the Arkansas Education Television Network’s “Unconventional Wisdom.” His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com.
