The Fuzzy Math Of Renewable Energy

I often think that the allure of progressivism mostly turns on inability to do basic arithmetic.  My Exhibit A is affordable housing in Manhattan, where we spend in many cases $100,000 per year to subsidize a family to live in a premium location, only to have the family remaining in "poverty" or near-poverty.  How can this possibly make sense?  But here's something that might make even less sense:  the fuzzy math of renewable energy; or, more precisely, the fuzzy math of how much it will cost to try to make a fully-functioning electricity system run primarily on intermittent sources of power like solar and wind.

You probably missed it, back in September 2014, when then-new Mayor Bill de Blasio made the big announcement that New York City would be reducing its "greenhouse gas" emissions 80% by 2050.  (You always have to love those non-binding commitments by politicians for years long after they will have left office and when most of us will be long dead.)  Here is a picture of de Blasio on the day of that announcement, marching arm-in-arm with the likes of Al Gore and Ban Ki-Moon.      

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So, how to get from here to an 80% cut in CO2 emissions?  The big idea, if you want to call it that, is to use lots more solar and wind power.  But those things only work part-time, and not on demand; so to turn them into a fully-functioning electricity system you need some combination of back-up power from dispatchable sources, and/or storage.  And if it's only the back-up from dispatchable sources, without the storage, then you're probably going to find the dispatchable sources supplying most of the power most of the time.  If you want well upwards of 50% of your power to come from solar and wind, you are going to need storage.  A lot of storage.

And that brings us to the latest:  Last week New York City announced that it would become the first municipality in the U.S. to have a target for energy storage deployment as part of its commitment to cut CO2 emissions.  From Green Tech Media:

Only two U.S. states, California and Massachusetts, have set targets for energy storage deployments. Now New York City has joined them.  The city government unveiled a storage goal of 100 megawatt-hours by 2020 last week. . . .  

And over at Solar Industry Mag, you can feel the excitement:

According to the mayor, this [100 MWH] target will help reduce reliance on the grid by making variable sources of energy production, such as solar panels, usable for more of the day. Energy storage also helps increase the city’s resiliency by providing backup energy when the grid is offline.  “New York City’s new solar and energy storage goals will bring even more clean energy jobs, cleaner air, and electric system benefits to the Big Apple and will help us get the most out of our solar resources,” commented Donna De Costanzo, director of Northeast energy and sustainable communities at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

One hundred megawatt-hours of storage capacity -- that sounds like a lot!  Or does it?  To put it in a little context, a Tesla comes with a battery pack with about 85 kilowatt-hours of capacity.  So New York City's 100 megawatt-hours would represent the storage capacity of around 1200 Teslas.    Cost?  Tesla says it can now produce the battery packs for around $12,000 each.  (Industry critics think it is really double that or more, but let's give them the lower number for these purposes.)  That means that the 100 MWH of storage capacity will cost around $14.4 million.  That's kind of a rounding error in New York City's budget, currently running over $80 billion annually.  And we have all the way to 2020 to accomplish this.  No problem!

But perhaps we should ask, about how long will the 100 MWH of power last our fair city when the wind stops blowing in the middle of the night?  To make that calculation you need to know our ongoing level of usage of electricity, which as far as I can find runs around 10,000 to 12,000 MW.  A little simple arithmetic, and you calculate that when the sun and wind go blank the 100 MWH will carry the City for about -- 30 seconds!  

So maybe we had better buy, say, a full day's worth of storage capacity, just in case we're dealing with a heavily-overcast calm day in the middle of the winter.  Multiply the $14.4 million by 120 (to get an hour) and another 24 (to get a day) and you get a total cost for the storage capacity of $41.472 billion.  This is no longer a rounding error.  And by the way, nothing says that we can't have two, or even three, consecutive fully-calm heavily-overcast days in the middle of the winter around here.  Are we really going to try to deal with this in any meaningful way with batteries?  For a full three days' storage capacity, we'd need the equivalent of over 10 million Teslas worth of batteries.  Is there even that much lithium available in the world?

Of course, we could always deal with this problem by having a full set of back-up dispatchable power plants at the ready for the calm nights and cloudy days.  At around $3.5 billion per 1000 MW capacity, that will be another $50 billion or so for back-up capacity you may use say, three to five days per year.  No problem!  I could try to criticize de Blasio for not playing straight with the citizenry when he makes big announcements that he is wasting some millions of dollars on totally meaningless amounts of storage capacity, but why bother?  I really don't think he is capable of doing this level of arithmetic.

Meanwhile, pay attention to the news out of South Australia.  That's the large Australian state covering the middle-southern section of the country, with the main city being Adelaide.  On September 25 something called the Grattan Institute put out a Report on the situation of electricity supply in South Australia, and warning of problems to come.  It seems that South Australia has set out to make itself the world leader in generating electricity from renewables, mostly wind.  According to the Grattan Report, wind now supplies about 40% of the electricity in South Australia.  Is that any problem?  The Report discusses two big issues:  (1) the intermittency of the wind power is leading to wild price swings in the wholesale electricity market when the wind suddenly stops blowing and there is a shortage of back-up, and (2) the intermittency also affects the reliability of supply.  From the Report:

On the night of 7 July, the wind was hardly blowing in South Australia and the sun had gone down. Two coal plants had closed earlier that year, and an electricity connection that provides power from Victoria was effectively closed for upgrades. As a result, gas was supplying nearly all the state’s power needs. At 7.30pm, the wholesale price of electricity shot up to $8900 per megawatt hour, a staggering sum when wholesale prices in the eastern states average about $50 per megawatt hour.  Price spikes are a fact of life in the electricity market. Far more troubling was South Australia’s average wholesale price for the month of July - $229 per megawatt hour, more than three and a half times that of the eastern states. . . .   [T]here must be a separate review of the market to ensure that power flows reliably and affordably. . . .  The events of July in one state were a canary in the coalmine, warning of the risks in Australia’s power future. It is time to listen. 

Very prescient on their part!  On September 28 there was a big storm in South Australia, and the entire state was plunged into a blackout.  Was the heavy reliance on wind power and shortage of back-up the cause of the blackout?  That issue is currently subject to big dispute between backers of wind power on the one hand, and skeptics on the other.  An investigation is under way.  The precipitating cause of the blackout seems to be that the storm knocked over 20 or so big transmission towers.  But would that be enough to throw the whole state into blackout absent the problems cause by reliance on wind power?  Here is a round-up from Australian blogger Joanne Nova.  Judge for yourself.

Why Do They Use Those Private Email Accounts?

In my rather limited law practice these days, one of the things I am doing is helping the Energy & Environment Legal Institute in its cases against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman seeking disclosure of public records information as to his communications with other AGs and environmental activists relating to his supposed investigation of ExxonMobil.  Today we got his response in one of the cases.  The response contains a paragraph that will give you some insights into how this FOIA game works, and also why people like Hillary Clinton like to use private email accounts and servers.

In our case, the requesting entities were very alert to the private email game, and therefore they specifically requested that private email accounts be searched for requested documents.  But the New York AG's office simply ignored that specific request, and said they were just not going to do it.  Here is the response of the New York AG on that issue:

Although the Request had specified that it sought communications of Attorney General Schneiderman "using either his official or non-official email and text messaging accounts (e.g., Gmail, private cell phone as well as State-provided accounts)," the OAG does not search personal accounts of its employees in the ordinary course of fulfilling the nearly three thousand FOIL requests it expects to receive in 2016 . . . , unless the Records Access Officer has reason to believe that a personal account includes responsive records that are not also on the OAG's network. . . .  Here, the Records Access Officer had no reason to believe that the Attorney General's personal email account was the exclusive custodian of any potentially responsive OAG records.  All OAG employees, including the Attorney General, have been instructed to refrain from using personal accounts for OAG business. . . .  

(This is from page 5-6 of the AG's Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Petitioner's Article 78 Proceeding.  The document is publicly available from the court's website, but unfortunately you need an account and a password to get access.  If you have such an account, the case number is 101181/2016.)

A couple of things there are of interest.  First, they say that they don't search for private emails, even though specifically requested, unless they "ha[ve] reason to believe that a personal account includes responsive records . . . ."  Well, did they take the trouble to ask?  And the answer is, they completely fail to address that obvious question.   What's your guess as to the answer? 

And then there's that great line "All OAG employees, including the Attorney General, have been instructed to refrain from using personal accounts for OAG business . . . ."  Great!  Oh wait -- weren't all State Department employees, including the Secretary of State, instructed to refrain from using personal accounts for official business?  Of course they were!  But then, we know that at least if you rank high enough, even when caught red-handed you will not be punished for ignoring that instruction -- not even a slap on the wrist.

And just in case you don't recall from earlier this year, here is an article from the Daily Caller back in March on the systematic use by officials at EPA of private emails in their communications with environmental lobbyists.  That scandal was broken largely through persistent FOIA requests from the same Energy & Environment Legal Institute (although I did not represent them in those matters.)  Daily Caller quotes E&E Executive Director Craig Richardson as follows:

EPA has essentially outsourced it’s rule-making function to ‘green’ activists and rent-seeking lobbies hell-bent on destroying traditional energy sources in an effort to replace [them] with renewables, an industry that their wealthy benefactors are already making a killing at the taxpayer and ratepayer expense,” Richardson said.

How our government works.  And the public is not to be allowed to find out about it.  Lovely, isn't it?

How Much Is Income Underreported In Census Figures?

Further to yesterday's post, I thought it would be useful to reprise this post from last November.  The post is titled "Literally Everybody Gets Taken In By The Poverty Scam."  It discusses an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Doar of AEI, and a study that Doar cited by Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and Nikolas Mittag of Charles University.  

The Meyer/Mittag study is really quite breathtaking in its findings of the extent to which Census figures, derived from their population surveys, underreport income and receipt of government benefits.  How much in the way of government benefit payments do you think the Census Bureau misses when they send out survey forms and just take whatever answer people give without any kind of verification or double check?  Five percent?  Ten percent?  Get real:

The Meyer/Mittag study implies that the CPS survey is capturing at best half of government benefit payments. 

And what chance is there that the reporting is any better of off-the-books income, illegal income, and income from sporadic and gig work (day laborer, handyman, landscaping, musician, etc., etc., etc.)?  This income very largely goes to the lower two quintiles of the income distribution, and substantially drives the official (fake) statistics on "income inequality."  Of course people don't tell the Census Bureau about income they don't report to the tax man!  Would you?  How can you be sure that Census is not sending your response over to the IRS to catch you?  

This known underreporting gives Census an enormous reservoir of known unreported income to play with when they have some political reason to tweak their numbers.  The underreported income is likely at least 10% of all income, maybe even 15 - 20%.  (This 2011 study estimates 18-19% of income is not reported to the IRS.  Why would Census be any different?)

Funny, but Census gets very worked up when it thinks its decennial population survey might be missing around 3 or 4 percent of the people.  But when its income surveys miss around 15% of income (approximately $3 trillion), nobody raises a peep.  Hey, it's politically convenient -- for the "main project" of government, which is further growing the government.

Fraudulent Advocacy For Government Growth

I have already had two posts (here and here) on the preposterous new Census report on incomes and poverty released two weeks ago.  And then yesterday the New York Times has again given the lead position in its print edition (upper right hand corner of the front page) to a story substantially relying on figures from this same Census report.  I'll give you all three tiers of headlines:  "WITH PAY RISING, MILLIONS CLIMB OUT OF POVERTY / ECONOMIC TIPPING POINT / More and Better Jobs -- Blacks and Hispanics Gain the Most."  That's certainly good news for Hillary on the day of the first presidential debate!  And just in case you don't think that this Census report is planned as the linchpin of Hillary's campaign on issues relating to the economy, I remind you that some of its key "findings" were front and center in her personally-signed op-ed in Pravda on September 21 ("My Plan For Helping America's Poor").  

So is there any reality to the numbers in this Report, or is it all just a scam put out by the government and regurgitated by Pravda to put their collective thumb on the scale of the election?

The answer as to the government is that it is clearly a scam.  With Pravda, as usual, you are left scratching your head as to whether they are part of the fraud, or have been taken in by the government's fraud.  I'll let you decide that -- not that either alternative is good for them.

How do we know that this is a scam as respects the government?  Easy -- we just compare what they say to what we can prove that they know.  What they say is the list of principal statistics appearing at the top of the Summary in the Report:

• Real median household income increased 5.2 percent between 2014 and 2015.1 This is the first annual increase in median house- hold income since 2007.

• The number of full-time, year- round workers increased by 2.4 million in 2015.

• The official poverty rate decreased by 1.2 percentage points between 2014 and 2015.

• The number of people in poverty fell by 3.5 million between 2014 and 2015. 

Now, do you detect any hint there that the lion's share of these favorable year-over-year changes may have resulted from a methodological change rather from real increases in incomes or declines in poverty?  I've done my best to look through the Report itself to find some disclosure of that.  Admittedly, there are lots of links in the Report for those interested in learning more about the methodology, and life is not long enough for me to follow all of those.  Believe me, they are also relying on most to all journalists having constraints on their time that will prevent them from getting to the bottom of this.  But then there's John Crudele of the New York Post, who had an article on September 20 titled "Census income figures are a joke -- if not fraud."  Crudele's article then had a link to this 2015 Census paper describing the details of changes to methodology that they planned to implement fully in their next report on incomes and poverty.

So let's take a look at that paper.  This is what they know.  The paper's subject is proposed changes to methodology in the surveys that generate Census's main reports on income and poverty.  And why are they undertaking these changes?

Previous research shows the ASEC [Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey] suffers from misclassification of certain types of income, general underreporting of income, and historically under-reported enrollment in means-tested government programs (Meyer et al., 2009) 

Yes, the whole idea is to correct for prior "general underreporting of income."  And by the way, there's no doubt that there is massive underreporting of income on these surveys.  For starters, there's almost no chance that anybody gives them much if any honest information on underground economic activity, which is estimated at around 10% of the economy (and far more than that among those reported to be in the lower quintiles of the income distribution).  So what are they now going to do about it?  The answer is, they propose a modest re-design of the survey, with about half a dozen changes that include follow up questions for people who refuse to answer or leave blank the answers to questions about their income, and specific follow-up questions designed to elicit more information about income from retirement accounts and from government programs.  (By the way, even with those changes, it's abundantly clear that incomes are still massively underreported, but probably a little less so.)

Now, will all of those things make a quantitative difference?  Actually, as part of this paper, they report on results of a quantitive evaluation of giving the new and old surveys to a large sample to see what difference it makes.  And the answer?  It's in Table 1!  Using the new survey form causes reported "real median income" to increase by 3.0%.

Wait a minute!  Does this mean that they absolutely know that the supposed 5.2% increase in real median incomes reported in the most recent report is actually 2.2% in real change and 3.0% in methodology change?  That's sure the way that I read it.  Of course, the difference between 5.2% growth in incomes and 2.2% is the difference between robust growth on the one hand and barely-above-stagnation on the other.

And clearly the purpose of this game is to create an appearance that disastrous government programs that in fact keep incomes down and poverty up have now suddenly worked, just in time to elect Hillary.  Don't believe me?  Let's go back to the Pravda article from yesterday:  

Government programs — like Social Security, the earned-income tax credit and food stamps — have kept tens of millions from sinking into poverty year after year. But a main driver behind the impressive 1.2 percentage point decline in the poverty rate, the largest annual drop since 1999, was that the economy finally hit a tipping point after years of steady, if lukewarm, improvement. . . .  About 43 million Americans, more than 14 million of them children, are still officially classified as poor, and countless others up and down the income ladder remain worried about their families’ financial security. But the Census Bureau’s report found that 2015 was the first year since 2008, when the economic downturn began, that the poverty rate fell significantly and incomes for most American households rose. 

Really, is it even possible to be this appallingly ignorant?  If you know anything at all about government statistics on "poverty," you know that the earned-income tax credit and food stamps do not count in the measure of poverty.  With one hundred percent certainty, those two programs have not kept one single person out of poverty, at least as measured and reported by the Census Bureau.  Pravda thinks these programs have kept "tens of millions from sinking into poverty."  Good grief!

And then, of course, Pravda takes the methodological change to mean that suddenly "pay [is] rising" and "millions [are] climb[ing] out of poverty."  All fake.  The closest thing we have to a real number (not in this report) is that GDP rose in 2015 by 2.4%.  It's above total stagnation, but barely.

More generally, we can see that we have a bureaucracy that understands its core mission to be producing numbers that support the continuation of woefully failed government programs and the ongoing growth of useless bureaucracies to run those programs.  In the off years they produce wildly underreported income numbers and inflated poverty numbers to guilt the people into supporting bigger budgets to address the problems; and then in the election years they tweak the methodology in secret to generate numbers that falsely show some sudden progress against the problems so that the candidates known to support the bureaucracy can have talking points for their campaigns.  Is it any wonder that most Americans have complete disgust with their government?

A Brief Tour Of Current New York "Economic Development" Initiatives

It's anybody's guess as to whether the subject of the economy's performance will even come up at tonight's debate.  My guess is that it will come up minimally if at all -- because the moderator will not view the subject as casting a sufficiently favorable light upon the preferred candidate.  But if it does come up, we already know that the preferred candidate is ready with her "economic development" plans, all of which involve lots more government spending to "rebuild infrastructure" and "create jobs."

To put this in context, I thought you readers might be interested in what passes for "economic development" by the state and local governments in New York.  After all, Hillary's agenda is nothing more than a nationalized version of the New York groupthink, so observing New York will give you perfect insight into what you are in for in a Hillary presidency.  The summary of the experience with New York's "economic development" efforts is (1) very large spending for minuscule (or negative) results, and (2) pervasive corruption.  Indeed, New York's experience underscores the ever-present question of whether it is even possible to engage in economic-development-through-government-handout without ending up with pervasive corruption.  You be the judge!

Affordable Housing

In New York City, the signature economic development program is "affordable housing."  I have covered this many times before (see this tag for more details than you can bear), but the summary is the highest possible government giveaway for the smallest number of beneficiaries.  For example, many thousands of residents of New York City public housing projects live in waterfront developments where apartments would have values of easily $2 million each, and up to $5 million, if they were only allowed to become part of a free market -- yet the residents are still deemed to be poor!  

In this affordable housing game, the government mostly got out of pure socialist-model government development and ownership a couple of decades ago.  Instead, in more recent years, the affordable housing has been "incentivized" by two principal methods:  (1) free handouts of the land, and (2) the so-called 421-a tax abatement program.  In the free-handout-of-land category, we have for example the now-under-construction Essex Crossing (formerly called Seward Park) on Delancey Street at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, and the new La Central project in the South Bronx.  In this model, government starts out owning the land; and instead of just selling it to the highest bidder, they request "proposals" from developers, and award the development rights based on some political criteria.  Is there any chance that this process can be free from corruption?  I wouldn't think so, although I haven't seen any recent indictments.

And then there is the 421-a tax exemption.  The basic idea is that a developer can get reduced property taxes by committing to build housing that meets criteria for "affordability."  This program actually expired at the end of 2015, and since then there has been an ongoing negotiation about its renewal, participants including the governor, legislative leaders, representatives of developers, and representatives of labor unions.  Why labor unions, you ask?  Because in New York, labor unions, by reason of political contributions, hold sufficient sway over politicians to demand that government housing subsidies only go to developments that somehow favor union labor.  The latest on these "negotiation" came to light last month.  As reported in The Real Deal on August 23:

According to a one-page proposal sent to developers and seen by the New York Times, developers would not be required to hire union contractors or pay prevailing wages in return for the tax break. But they would have to pay workers a minimum of $65 in wages and benefits for 300-unit-plus projects south of 96th Street in Manhattan and $50 in Brooklyn and Queens – $15 of which would be paid by New York State. Developers would also be required to set aside 25 or 30 percent of the units for below-market rents, the Times reported. It wasn’t immediately clear how the state would finance the wage subsidy.

You read that right -- our genius governor thinks it's a good idea for the state government to subsidize the wages of construction workers, who are making $50 to $65 per hour, to the tune of $15 per hour of taxpayer funds.  Rumor has it that he also believes in perpetual motion machines. Anyway, as of this writing, 421-a remains expired.  But the betting is that it will be revived, with a generous helping of taxpayer money to people already well in the top half of the income distribution.

The Buffalo Billion

Upstate cities like Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica and Binghamton have been hemorrhaging jobs and population for decades; and of course the "solution" proposed by our state government is not lower taxes or fewer regulations, but rather massive subsidies for favored businesses.  The governor's current baby is the "Buffalo Billion," a taxpayer "investment" of a billion dollars or so supposedly to revive that moribund town.  It turns out that $750 million of the billion got claimed by just one project, a massive factory on the site of a former steel plant, for the use of Elon Musk's Solar City venture to build solar panels.  I last wrote about this giveaway back in July, when it emerged that Musk was going to temporarily "save" the near-bankruptcy Solar City by merging it into the somewhat-less-near-bankruptcy Tesla.  I would say that there is next to zero chance of the taxpayers ever recovering any of the $750 million.

But wait -- it gets worse!  Last week came down a complaint from Preet Bharara's Southern District of New York prosecutor's office alleging pervasive bribery and kickbacks in connection with the Buffalo factory.  Here is a copy of the Criminal Complaint.  The basic allegations are that would-be contractors on the project paid large sums (in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to people in the governor's office and/or state-connected economic development corporations to direct the construction business their way.  Really, was there any chance that this was not going on? 

Hurricane Sandy Relief

Hurricane Sandy -- wasn't that in 2012, now almost four years ago?  Yes, but this is New York, and therefore the state is still passing out taxpayer money to "rebuild."  And to whom?  Why, to waterfront homeowners whose homes were damaged or destroyed by the storm.  Nicole Gelinas has a piece in today's New York Post.  Example, please:

It’s bad luck, sure, to buy a house on the coast and then learn it’s vulnerable to flooding. That’s what happened to one Broad Channel resident, who told the Wall Street Journal he paid $365,000 in 2008 for his home, which the city is paying $600,000 to elevate.

As Gelinas rightly points out, two-thirds of New York City residents do not own their homes at all, much less waterfront homes.  

When the state gets the idea that it can create economic development through government handouts, this is what you get.  Can it really be any other way? 

Climate Alarmism Airheads

At the link site RealClearPolitics, when they link to one article on a topic, they often also have a link to another article giving a different or opposite perspective on the same topic.  This morning they posted a link to my article from Monday, "The 'Science' Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing."    Sure enough, the adjacent link was to an article by uber-alarmist Bill McKibben, titled "Recalculating the Climate Math."  I thought you readers might enjoy a comparison of the two.

My post featured a new Research Report just out from a group of prominent independent scientist and mathematicians, that subjected EPA's so-called "Endangerment Finding" to rigorous validation (or invalidation) as against the best available empirical evidence from 13 different sources.  EPA's Endangerment Finding is the regulatory determination that forms the basis for the current campaign of the Obama administration to fundamentally transform the energy sector of the economy, to put coal mines and coal miners and coal power plants out of business, to reduce and restrict the use of fossil fuels, and to cost the American public hundreds of billions of dollars -- all to "save the planet."  Yet as it imposes these enormous costs, EPA somehow skipped the step of conducting any rigorous validation/invalidation exercise of the Endangerment Finding against the best available evidence.  "Science," of course, is the method by which hypotheses are proposed, and then those hypotheses are subjected to rigorous validation/invalidation tests as against the best empirical data.  After applying that method in the best tradition of science, the conclusion of the Research Report that I discussed is that EPA's Endangerment Finding has been invalidated.  

Now, a person might very reasonably want that conclusion to be subjected to meticulous scrutiny.  That's why the authors of the Report posted all of their data and methods publicly, so that anyone could take whatever potshots they want.  The key to science is reproducibility.  Maybe somebody can find other or better data that lead to a different result.  Maybe somebody can find a flaw in the math.  Maybe somebody can propose an alternative interpretation of the data under which the alarmist hypothesis survives.  Who knows?  Have at it!

And then there's McKibben's article.  Really, is there any bigger airhead in the world of climate alarmism than this guy?  As far as I can figure out, he doesn't even know what the scientific method is.  A fair description of his article is that it is pitched to college humanities majors who may have taken one basic science course in junior high school, and may have been taught about the scientific method, but have long since forgotten the part of the method that involves testing the hypothesis against the data. 

Rather than try to state the theme of McKibben's article for him, I'll quote his own words:

The future of humanity depends on math. And the numbers in a new study released Thursday are the most ominous yet.  Those numbers spell out, in simple arithmetic, how much of the fossil fuel in the world’s existing coal mines and oil wells we can burn if we want to prevent global warming from cooking the planet. In other words, if our goal is to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do?

Here’s the answer: zero.  That’s right: If we’re serious about preventing catastrophic warming, the new study shows, we can’t dig any new coal mines, drill any new fields, build any more pipelines. Not a single one.    

Now, the proposition that a given amount of burning of fossil fuels and adding of CO2 to the atmosphere will lead to a given amount of global temperature rise, such as the two degrees Celsius cited by McKibben -- that's what we call in science a "hypothesis."  Mr. McKibben, can you kindly share with us the empirical data and the methodology by which this hypothesis has been quantitatively validated to the extent that it can and should now be used to justify taking hundreds of billions of dollars of assets (whose value arises out of their being able to provide cheap energy to the masses) and rendering those assets valueless? 

You will not find the answer to that question in this article.  But, McKibben claims, the answer is to be found in the "new study released Thursday"!  Here is a link to that study.  And guess what?  You won't find the answer to my question there either!  This "study" treats the relationship of CO2 ppm in the atmosphere with temperature rise as a total given, and makes no attempt to support the quantitative relationship function or tie it to empirical data of any kind.  In a chart on page 6, the report asserts that the 2 degrees C limit of temperature rise will be hit when cumulative human CO2 emissions hit about 850 gigatons.  But how do they know that?  What is the empirical basis for the quantitative relationship function that they use?  Try studying the report and see if you can find it.  After several reads, the best I can find is this on page 12:

We know from atmospheric physics that the key factor determining the extent of global warming is the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over time. 11

Aha!!  We "know" this is true, because of "atmospheric physics"!  And that's all you'll find here.  If you want to know any more of how we got this, you'll just have to follow footnote 11.

Go all the way to the end of the report, and here is the text of footnote 11:

Temperature change is roughly proportional to total cumulative CO2 emissions (until emissions peak, and assuming smooth variations in emissions). IPCC Climate Change 2013, Working Group 1 report, sec.12.5.4, pp.1108ff, http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter12_FINAL.pdf.  See also Reto Knutti presentation to UNFCCC Structured Expert Dialogue 2013-15 Review, 13 November 2013, ‘Relationship between global emissions and global temperature rise’, at https://unfccc.int/files/science/workstreams/the_2013-2015_review/application/pdf/7_knutti.reto.3sed2.pdf.

Once again, it's just more ex cathedra statements without any clue as to whether or how they have been empirically validated.  Go ahead and follow the links in the footnote as well.  Here is what you will find: UN IPCC modelers treating their models (i.e., hypotheses) as proved without empirical validation of any kind.  There are no further references.  You have hit the end of the road.  That's it.

So now, in the Research Report that I discussed in my post, we have a serious rigorous effort of validation or invalidation of the climate models (as applied in EPA's Endangerment Finding).  And the result is that, once ENSO (El Nino/La Nina) effects are backed out, there is no atmospheric warming in the 13 best data sets left to be explained by the CO2 greenhouse effect.  In the report that McKibben relies on, there is no empirical validation of the key hypotheses at all, whether in the report itself or in its references.  The difference is: one is science, that is, testing of the hypothesis against the best empirical data; and the other is just argument from authority.  Hey, we're the priests here!  Of course our hypothesis is true -- we say so!  How dare you ask us to validate it empirically!

Meanwhile, all of this is fairly meaningless in terms of any possible real world effect on the climate.  The "commitment" just made by China is to cause its emissions to "peak" in 15 years; and in the meantime they plan to build hundreds of additional coal-fired power plants, far more than replacing the emissions from any that we might close.  India equally has no intention of stopping the increase in the use of coal until everyone in that country has electricity, which again will be hundreds of power plants from now.  Japan closed all of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima accident in 2012, and replaced that electricity with additional fossil fuel resources.  Most of Africa remains to be electrified.  What say you to these things, McKibben?  If just the U.S. shuts its fossil fuel resources, how does that change anything?

But yes, our President has totally signed on with the McKibben program.  So has Hillary Clinton.