October 2011

Post image for The Person at the Top Can Make a Big Difference

“When paperwork gets in the way of benefits, that’s a problem.” So said John Bemis, Secretary-designate of New Mexico’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, appointed by Governor Susana Martinez. What is significant about Bemis’ comment, made during a presentation in front of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association’s Annual meeting on October 3, is that it represents a total change in attitude from the previous administration and is indicative of the difference one person—at the top—can make.

The change in attitude in NM presents a case study from which the rest of the US would be wise to learn.

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Post image for Victims of EPA’s Wetland Exploitation Speak Out at Sen. Rand Paul’s Roundtable

If there was ever a bully that deserved detention, it is the bureaucrats that run unchecked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  One only has to listen to the heartbreaking accounts of ordinary, innocent American citizens who have been treated like criminals by this rogue agency to get a sense of a Goliath crushing David into the ground.  Senator Rand Paul’s roundtable forum, “Property Wrongs: A Discussion with Victims of the U.S. Government’s Assault on Private Property,” held on October 12, 2011, gave folks who have been bullied by government agencies the chance to share their disheartening realities with the public.

The discussion began with Sen. Paul addressing the problems we face today: keeping up with the myriad regulations imposed upon the individual by unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats.  Instead of the passage of laws by Congress, where public debate and influence can be exercised, agencies like the EPA rule by administrative fiat, which is leading to exorbitant penalties that do not fit the “crime.”  The agencies responsible for this over-criminalization of laws have taken a toll on property owners and their faith in the government as the protector of their rights.

The once lovely face of Lady Liberty now wears the quintessential looks of the mean kid on the playground: class bully.  The saying “Because I said so”, comes to mind.  Rand Paul is working on a bill targeted at putting bureaucracy bullies in a well-deserved time-out. The stories I will share are of those who have been bullied specifically by the EPA’s ever-expansive interpretation of its own authority under the Clean Water Act.

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Post image for 25 States Ask Court To Delay Utility MACT

On November 16, the EPA is expected to publish a final regulation setting Maximum Achievable Control Technology for coal-fired power plants (the “Utility MACT”). It would be the most expensive regulation, ever. According to the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, the price tag is as much as $100 billion a year. Coal supplies almost 50% of America’s electricity, yet there isn’t a single coal-fired power plant in the country that currently meets the standards set forth by the regulation. Outrageously, the EPA’s primary justification for the Utility MACT is to protect America’s supposed population of pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen from mercury.

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Post image for Energy and Environment News

A Backchannel “Cloud” Was Apparently Established to Hide IPCC Deliberations from FOIA
Anthony Watts, Wattsupwiththat, 17 October 2011

Obama’s Big Green Mess
Daniel Stone & Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beast, 17 October 2011

What about Gov. Perry’s Wind Power Baggage?
Vance Ginn, Master Resource, 17 October 2011

The Destructive Nature of Corn-Fueled Politics
Washington Times editorial, 14 October 2011

Obama’s Solyndra Talking Cure Fails
Tim Cavanaugh, Reason, 14 October 2011

This Week in Washington

by Myron Ebell on October 16, 2011

in Blog

Post image for This Week in Washington

Perry Releases Energy Plan

Texas Governor Rick Perry on 14th October gave a major speech on energy policy at a steel plant near Pittsburgh.  His campaign also released an energy policy white paper that spells out the details of Perry’s policy commitments.  In short, Perry as President promises to increase oil and gas production quickly and substantially on federal lands and offshore areas; block or repeal all the Obama Administration’s new Clean Air Act regulations, including regulation of greenhouse gas emissions; radically downsize the Environmental Protection Agency and turn local environmental issues over to the States; stop allowing environmental law to be made by settling lawsuits with environmental pressure groups with consent decrees; and eliminate all federal energy mandates and subsidies.  Perry claims that his plan will provide a major boost to economic growth and create 1.2 million new jobs.  Looking over the plan, my guess is that 1.2 million jobs is a lowball figure if his proposals were fully implemented.

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Post image for Smash Capitalism, Liberate the Planet?

Occupy Wall Street is a chaotic collection of people with conflicting messages. According to the New York Times, they represent “A feeling of mass injustice.” They want to:

  •  make banks safer, and let them fail,
  • name and shame fat cat salarymen,
  • free legislators from special interests, and
  • change the United States’ two-party system.

One sign seems to cancel out another. Some, like “End the Fed,” could be seen at a Ron Paul or Tea Party rally. Some, like “unf*#@ the world,” are vague. Others, like, “Smash Capitalism, Liberate the Planet,” represent an underlying mindset.

It would be easy to write them off as a group of kooks who will go away after they have had their ten minutes of fame. However, what began as an apparent grassroots movement may have been high-jacked. Commenting on Occupy Wall Street, Nancy Pelosi said “God bless them.” According to the Washington Post, “Prominent House Democrats are embracing the Occupy Wall Street protests” and CNN reports that labor unions have pledged their support: “Wall Street protests swelled Wednesday to their largest numbers yet, after local unions pledged support to a third week of demonstrations against income inequality, corporate greed, corruption and a list of other social ills.” Rush Limbaugh believes George Soros money is behind the protests.

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Post image for The  EPA Hurts the Poor, Again

As a lifelong sufferer of asthma, I have always depended on inhalers to provide me with fast-acting, lifesaving medicine.  Fortunately, I am able to afford expensive prescription inhalers, but many Americans hit hard by the faltering economy are not so lucky.

Until now, however, there has been a cheaper option for low-income families—over-the-counter, epinephrine-based inhalers have helped an estimated 1-2 million people treat their asthma for about $20 per unit (the prescription brands can cost up to 3 times that amount).

But now thanks to our out-of-control federal government, low-income Americans will be denied this over-the-counter relief as of December 31.

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Post image for New Report Casts Doubt on Ethanol Policy

A recently released report on the future of the biofuel industry, by the National Research Council concludes that the cellulosic ethanol targets are unlikely to be met and casts doubt on the utility of the renewable fuel standard. The report can be downloaded  (after a free registration) here, though the report itself exceeds 400 pages, so its not easy reading. Allow me to include a long quote from the conclusion:

A key barrier to achieving RFS2 is the high cost of producing biofuels compared to petroleum-based fuels and the large capital investments required to put billions of gallons of production capacity in place. As of 2010, biofuel production was contingent on subsidies, tax credits, the import tariff, loan guarantees, RFS2, and similar policies. These policies that provide financial support for biofuels will expire long before 2022 and cannot provide the support necessary for achieving the RFS2 mandate. Uncertainties in policies can affect investors’ confidence and discourage investment. In addition, if the cellulosic biofuels produced are mostly ethanol, investments in distribution infrastructure and flex-fuel vehicles would have to be made for such large quantities of ethanol to be consumed in the United States. Given the current blend limit of up to 15-percent ethanol in gasoline, a maximum of 19 billion gallons of ethanol can be consumed unless the number of flex-fuel vehicles increases substantially. However, consumers’ willingness to purchase flex-fuel vehicles and use E85 instead of lower blends of ethanol in their vehicles will likely depend on the price of ethanol and their attitude toward biofuels. Producing drop-in biofuels could improve the ability to integrate the mandated volumes of biofuels into U.S. transportation, but would not improve the cost-competitiveness of biofuels with petroleum based fuels.

This covers much of what CEI has concluded: cellulosic ethanol is too expensive to be widely produced, it is likely to remain so in the future, and blends exceeding 15% are tricky given the lack of cost competitiveness. This is why the Renewable Fuel Standard should not exist. Previous CEI work on cellulosic ethanol can be read here.

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When it comes to America’s energy policy, we are continuing our headlong rush, like lemmings over a cliff, to self-extinction. September 30 was the deadline by which the Department of Energy needed to get the remaining billions in stimulus funds out the door. Apparently, no one learned any lessons from the Solyndra scandal.

Shoveling $4.7 billion in stimulus funds to four solar projects is a big issue being covered by the national media. In two little states, the lemming analogy is still relevant, though under reported.

Both Delaware and Rhode Island are a part of the floundering Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), and both have a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), requiring cuts in carbon emissions and increases in renewable energy. Both raise energy costs to consumers.

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Post image for Arctic Ice Loss: Portent of Doom or Reason to Rethink IPCC Climate Sensitivity Assumptions?

“Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in new research,” reports an Associated Press (AP) article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The impact is significant and yet only a piece of the ongoing and accelerating response to warming of the Arctic,” Dr. Robert Bindschadler, emeritus scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Center, told the AP.

The Canadian team’s research confirms MIT scientists‘ recent finding that the Arctic is shedding ice much faster than forecast by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), published just four years ago (2007). Which of course is taken to mean that global warming ‘is even worse than scientists previously believed.’

Not so fast, say climatologists Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, editors of World Climate Report (WCR). Paradoxically, more-rapid-than-projected Arctic ice loss is additional evidence that IPCC climate models are too “hot” — that is, overestimate climate sensitivity and forecast too much warming.

In IPCC climate models, decline of Arctic sea ice is treated as both a consequence of rising greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations and as an important “positive feedback” that amplifies the direct GHG warming effect. Al Gore popularized this idea in An Inconvenient Truth, noting that as Arctic ice melts, less solar energy is reflected back to space and more absorbed by the oceans.

But, as WCR points out, if the IPCC models’ climate sensitivity estimates were correct, then the greater-than-expected positive feedback from greater-than-expected Arctic ice loss should be producing greater-than-expected global warming. Yet, despite the extra unanticipated warming influence from accelerating ice loss, the world is warming more slowly than IPCC models project.

Far from being a portent of doom, greater-than-projected ice loss, coinciding as it does with smaller-than-projected warming, indicates that actual climate sensitivity is less than model-estimated sensitivity.

Similarly, argues WCR in a related post, had IPCC models properly accounted for the planet’s recovery from the cooling effect of aerosols blown into the stratosphere by the Mount Pinatubo volcano eruption, they would be projecting even more warming than they do now. Yet model current projections already exceed the observed warming of the past 10-15 years.

The relevance to the survival of civilization and the habitability of the Earth? WCR explains:

The reason that all of this is important is that climate models which produce too much warming quite possibility are doing so because they are missing important processes which act to counteract the warming pressure exerted by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations—in other words, the climate sensitivity produced by the climate models is quite possibly too high.

If this proves to be the case, it means that there will be less future warming (and consequently less “climate disruption”) as greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase as a result of our use of fossil fuels.

Evidence continues to mount that this is indeed the case.