Myron radio phone-in to young turks

Not much activity showing up from Myron Ebell of late, so I have dug up this unusually critical interview of him from 2006 where, for a change, they didn't give him a free ride to spout his outrageous lies:

Presenter: Should we even be trying to reduce our gasoline consumption?

Ebell: One of the things we have been working on for a long time is trying to produce more oil and gas in this country. We have tremendous reserves, but they're locked up because they're off-shore (which the government controls) or on federal land (which the government controls).

Presenter: Why, when I asked you that question about gasoline consumption, isn't it it every American's answer, "Yes, of course we should try"?

Ebell: No I don't think so, and it's very wrong to say that anybody else is trying. In Europe, since 1990, their emissions from transportation has gone up 26%, even when their price for gasoline is between 6 and 7 dollars per gallon.

Presenter: What's Europe got to do with it? If we are able to reduce our consumption of gasoline, is that not in some way a good thing?

Ebell: Well, we do reduce our consumption of gasoline whenever we have an economic recession. The problem with replacing consumption of gasoline is that every alternative is more expensive.

Presenter: What about cost to the environment?

Ebell: I don't see any of these alternative fuels as being better for the environment. Producing biofuels has huge environmental costs. Blah blah. Food costs. Blah.

Presenter: So if we stop using so much gasoline, the rest of the world will starve?

Ebell: No. If we go down this line of using biofuels, Lester Brown warns that the rest of the world may starve because we export so much food for them.

Presenter: What about fuel efficiency? You've said that higher fuel efficiency standards costs lives. That seems proposterous.

Ebell: The National Academy of Sciences report that the current standards cost between 1300 and 2600 lives per year in increased fatalities.

Presenter: How are those people dying?

Ebell: Because they're buying smaller and lighter cars than they would otherwise buy.

Presenter: But they're running into accidents with the enormous cars.

Ebell: If you look at what kills people in an accident, survival rate increases if you're in a larger and heavier car.

Presenter: I'd refocus that argument if I were you.

Ebell: Think about this, if the auto makers were intentionally not producing cars as safe as they could and were costing between 1300 and 2600 lives per year, Ralph Nader would sue them out of existance. Yet if it's a government regulation it's somehow okay.

Presenter: That's a ridiculous argument... You work for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. How much of your funding comes from big oil companies?

Ebell: Our budget is $4million a year, and we raise one third from corporations, one third from individuals, and one third from charitable foundations. Our corporate funding comes from across the board.

Presenter: But all people would say oil and gas, Myron, you can say it.

Ebell: No, actually, our funding is confidential.

Presenter: Is there one oil company in there? You don't have to name it.

Ebell: *Laughs*

Presenter: The new chairman in the senate environmental committee is Barbara Boxer. She replaces Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma, who is insane. Do you agree with my assessment?

Ebell: I think it's the other way around. I know both of them, and I know who the kook is.

Presenter: Jim Inhofe has referred to global warming as a lie, environmentalists as nazis, says it's all exagerated by the media and hollywood elites. But you think Boxer is the insane one?

Ebell: Yeah. She's not insane. She's just the typical California flakiness.

Presenter: You're talking to a couple of California flakes right here. Inhof says that global warming is a theory. You obviously agree with him.

Ebell: Right. The world temperature has been going up a little bit. The question beyond that is, so what?

Presenter: 900 peer reviewed studies say that humans are causing it, that it's a big concern. They're the leading scientists. Don't tell me they're a bunch of kooks.

Ebell: Those 900 peer reviewed studies don't say it's a big concern. Scientists typically don't make value judgments. Mike Colmos of the Tyndall Centre wrote an op-ed piece saying that climate alarmism has gone way too far. The science doesn't support saying global warming is a catastrophe, it says it's a problem.

Presenter: Should we try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Ebell: Our view is what's called "no regress". If you have policies that reduce emissions that don't bankrupt the economy or make people energy poor, sure. But if you're going to raise the costs in the way that makes people really have to struggle, and if you consign parts of the world where hundreds of millions of people don't have access to electricity to never getting electricity, because the benefits of energy far outweigh the rather minor consequences of climate change.

Nothing new here that wasn't already covered in past posts on the M.E. Climate, including.

The heavy car report was dissected last January in A collision between a heavy Ebell and an SUV.

The other angle about how you can't reduce energy use because it would deny access to electricity by all the poor people in the world is a sick joke, given how little they care. The infomercial trying to put forward this theory was pulled from youtube following copyright violations of a cooperative power company who actually do something constructive and didn't much like the association with this bunch of shroud-waving cowboys.

This explains why they're now using the inferior service of viddler.com which no one watches, so who cares? Why does anyone still donate to this "Institute"? Does Myron Ebell still have a job? Who knows? But there's plenty remaining of his toxic legacy to keep the Climate going for the next hundred years.