Cooler Heads Digest 19 February 2010

Announcements

Tomorrow at 3:30 p.m. EST, CEI’s Myron Ebell and Christopher Horner address the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on “Saving Freedom from the Hoax of Global Warming.”  Also featured on the panel are Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com and Ann McElhinney, producer of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria.  Watch it live on Townhall.com/cpac.

CEI this week released the first ever music video in the skeptic rock genre. Watch “How I Wasn’t Gored into Submission,” by Marlo Lewis.

The Heritage Foundation will host Bruce Allen, co-founder of SOS California, who will speak on “How Offshore Oil & Gas Production Benefits the Economy and the Environment,” on February 24^th from noon-1:30 PM. To learn more and RSVP, click here.

In the News

The Sound of Alarm
Richard Lindzen, Boston Herald, 19 February 2010

Rep. Boucher Struggles To Quell Voter Anger over Cap-and-Trade Vote
Amy Gardner, Washington Post, 18 February 2010

Senator Inhofe Responds to Tom Friedman
EPW Minority Press Blog, 18 February 2010

DOD Ignores Climate Policy Risks
Marlo Lewis, National Journal, 18 February 2010

Trump Tells Gore: You’re Fired!
FoxNews.com, 17 February 2010

The Disappearing Science of Global Warming
Peter Ferrara, American Spectator, 17 February 2010

The Continuing Climate Meltdown
Wall Street Journal editorial, 16 February 2010

IPCC’s Missteps
Juliet Eilperin & David Fahrenthold, Washington Post, 15 February 2010

It’s Not a Dirty Air Act
William Yeatman, Fargo Forum, 14 February 2010

Boulder Struggles with Green Dream
Stephanie Simon, Wall Street Journal, 13 February 2010

What To Say to a Global Warming Alarmist
Mark Landsbaum, Orange County Register, 12 February 2020

News You Can Use

Drill, Baby, Drill

E&E Greenwire (subscription required) reported this week that U.S. gross domestic product would lose $2.36 trillion and American consumers would pay an additional $2.35 trillion for energy if oil and gas on federal lands remain under moratoria through 2030, according to a study recently released by the National Association of Utility Regulatory Commissioners. Click here to read the report.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Big Businesses Jump from SS Cap-and-Trade

The big news this week was the withdrawal from the U. S. Climate Action Partnership by BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar.  I have written blogs for Fox Forum and Pajamas Media on the significance of these defections from the principal big business coalition lobbying effort for cap-and-trade. Tim Carney has also written a column for the Washington Examiner that analyzes the motives of major corporations seeking to raise energy prices and diminish economic growth by enacting cap-and-trade.

Lots of Lawsuits Challenge Endangerment Finding

I promised last week to list the lawsuits filed by the deadline Tuesday that challenge the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated using the Clean Air Act.  Luckily for me, Robin Bravender of Greenwire wrote an article doing my work for me.  The New York Times picked it up and posted it on their web site here.  Sixteen separate lawsuits were filed, according to Bravender.  Most of the suits have more than one plaintiff.  For example, the suit filed by my group, CEI, also includes the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Freedom Works.  A number of industry groupings have filed suits, as have three States-Texas, Alabama, and Virginia.

The federal DC Circuit Court of Appeals will now consider the cases.  According to CEI counsel Sam Kazman, the Justice Department may move to have them all dismissed on the grounds that the endangerment finding doesn’t actually regulate anything.  If the court agrees, then the plaintiffs will re-file them when the first regulations-the “tailoring” rule and the new vehicle fuel efficiency standards become final in March.  The court will role all the suits into one case, but may allow a number of briefs to be filed by the various plaintiffs.  On the other side, sixteen States and New York City have asked to be allowed to intervene on EPA’s side.

CEI, Fred Singer of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change, and Kenneth Haapala of the Science and Environmental Policy Project filed a petition with EPA on 12th February to reconsider the endangerment finding, but new revelations in the Climategate scientific fraud scandal over the weekend caused them to amend their petition with new materials on Tuesday.Obama Announces Nuclear Subsidies

President Barack Obama went to a union job-training center in Prince George’s County, Maryland this week to announce that the administration had approved an $8 billion loan guarantee to the Southern Company to build two new nuclear power plants in Georgia.  The guarantee depends on Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of construction and operating permits for the two plants.

The loan guarantee was made under authority of the 2005 omnibus energy act, which is intended to jump-start a new generation of nuclear power plants in the U. S.  President Obama said that the federal guarantee was necessary so that the U. S. would not fall behind other countries in the race to develop energy sources that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Over fifty new nuclear plants are being built in other countries.  John Broder of the New York Times reported that Obama’s support for nuclear is one of the reasons that environmental pressure groups are losing their enthusiasm for him.

Graham Releases Draft of Energy Bill

Now that cap-and-trade is dead in Congress, various piecemeal energy-rationing proposals are moving to the front burner.  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is circulating a draft bill that would require utilities to produce an increasing percentage of their electricity from renewable sources.  New nuclear plants and coal-fired power plants equipped with carbon capture and storage would qualify as well as wind, solar, and biomass.

CEQ Announces that NEPA Will Include Climate Change

The White House Council on Environmental Quality this week proposed that federal agencies should consider greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of possible global warming when preparing Environmental Impact Statements and Reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

Across the States

WyomingWind Tax

This week the Wyoming House Revenue Committee passed H.B. 101, the nation’s first proposed excise tax on wind power. H.B. 101 runs counter to the efforts federal government and most states, which offer generous taxpayer subsidies to “green” energy sources like wind power, but Governor Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, told the Casper Star-Tribune that wind power producers “are not entitled to a free ride.”

Around the World

Wrong Resignation at Wrong Job

Yvo de Boer, the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, announced this week that he will step down in July. It is widely perceived that the resignation was prompted by the UNFCCC’s failure to achieve a legally-binding international energy rationing scheme at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, and while that may be true, one wonders if this was the right resignation at the right job. After all, it has been revealed in the last month that the UNFCCC’s sister body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, used shoddy science to produce its supposedly definitive assessment reports on global warming (see: Himalayan-gate, Amazon-gate, North Africa-gate). In light of these egregious errors, shouldn’t IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri also resign?

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.