Cooler Heads Digest 13 August 2010

In the News

Japan Owns up to Costs of Green Economy
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 13 August 2010

What’s Going on with the New “Skeptical Science” Website?
John Droz, Jr., MasterResource.org, 13 August 2010

The Real Nuclear Option
Iain Murray, Washington Examiner, 12 August 2010

The Real Gulf Disaster
Lou Dolinar, National Review, 12 August 2010

Spinning the Defeat of Cap-and-Trade
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 11 August 2010

What the Chinese Really Think of Global Warming
James Delingpole, Telegraph, 11 August 2010

The Dejected Greens
Paul Chesser, Spectator.org, 10 August 2010

Smart Grid and the Electricity Market
William Yeatman, The Oklahoman, 7 August 2010

News You Can Use

Sierra Club Is Spending Big Bucks To Make Energy More Expensive

The Politico reported that the Sierra Club is spending $18 million this year and has 100 employees across the country working on challenges to coal-fired electricity, said Michael Brune, the group’s executive director. He hopes to increase the budget to $25 million next year.

California Cold

Daily July temperatures in Southern California averaged about 5 degrees below historical norms, and overall summer temperatures are flirting with all-time cold records.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

EPA Plots To Regulate Carbon

The EPA this week issued two more proposed rules designed to implement the agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.  The first rule deals with thirteen States that are not legally prepared to begin issuing permits for greenhouse gas emissions.

The Clean Air Act requires that stationary sources of listed pollutants be regulated if they emit more than 250 tons of that pollutant per year.  The EPA has already released the so-called Tailoring Rule that changes the limit for greenhouse gas emissions to 75,000 tons.  That change is being made without any legislative authority.

The first of EPA’s proposed further rules tells the 13 States that they need to change their laws so that they can now regulate stationary sources of greenhouse gas emissions, but only such sources that emit more than 75,000 tons annually.  Some States have the 250 ton limit written into their own state air pollution laws.  A few other States prohibit regulating any pollutants not specifically listed in their own state laws.  Under the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration program, state environmental agencies are responsible for issuing New Source Review permits.

The States that EPA is telling to comply are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, and Texas.  The chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Attorney General sent a letter last week telling the EPA why Texas will not change its laws in order to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and explaining why what the EPA was doing was illegal.  The Digest covered this humdinger of a letter last week.  If you didn’t read it, we have posted it on GlobalWarming.org here.

The EPA’s second proposed rule would deal with States that refuse to comply by taking permitting authority away from state environmental agencies and creating a federal permitting process for those States.  Regulatory chaos is only a couple years away now.

Gore Hijinks

Former Vice President Al Gore returned to the public debate this week in a conference call held by his group Repower America (which is also known as the Alliance for Climate Protection).  Gore was realistic about the next-to-nil chance for passing cap-and-trade in the 111th Congress.  He bitterly blamed a long list of the usual suspects: Big Oil, King Coal, the dominant right-wing media, professional deniers (that’s us!), and even the Senate.  According to Gore, the greedy corporations who oppose energy rationing spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat cap-and-trade.

This is of course fantasy.  Big corporations hoping to make billions and billions of dollars off the backs of consumers through the higher energy prices caused by cap-and-trade are the ones that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their own self interest.  Moreover, three of the five biggest oil companies-BP, Shell, and Conoco Phillips-support cap-and-trade.

Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers are among the companies that hope to strike it rich.  Gore is understandably bitter because his dream of becoming a global warming billionaire based on comparatively modest investments in green energy made golden by cap-and-trade have gone poof.

Gore even claimed that cap-and-trade had died in the Senate because our system of government wasn’t working the say the Founders intended it should work.  If he meant Thomas Jefferson (founder of the Democratic Party), he’s probably right.  But luckily for us, Jefferson didn’t attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and had little influence on our system of checks and balances, which are designed to thwart both the mass of people from robbing the rich and the elites from robbing the people.

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.