File this one under regulatory trainwreck. NERA Economic Consulting has just published a study on the combined economic impacts of EPA’s Clean Air Transport (CATR) Rule and Utility Maximum Available Control Technology (MACT) Rule.
NERA estimates the rules will impose $184 billion in cumulative costs on the electricity sector, increase average U.S. electricity prices in 2016 by 12%, and reduce net U.S. employment by 1.4 million jobsduring 2013-2020.
“It is important to note that this report only covers CATR and Utility MACT,” comments Brandon Plank of the Republic Policy Committee. “It does not include the costs of EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act, New Source Performance Standards for refineries and utilities, ozone and particulate matter standards, reclassification of coal ash, etc.” (See chart below.)
Here is the NERA study’s summary of key results: [click to continue…]
Liberal partisans claim that Republicans are at “war” with science, based largely on former President George W. Bush’s supposedly anti-science disposition, but they present only half the story. A strong case can be made that the Obama administration, too, is warring with science. Consider,
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Today The New York Times ran two dueling opinion pieces featuring Robert Bryce, author of a number of books, and Tom Friedman, who chose this column to unleash his inner Paul Ehrlich. The latter column will make regular NYT readers anxious and depressed, the former will make them angry.
Bryce argues that though wind and solar farms do not produce emissions, they require a whole lot of land, significant natural resource inputs, and new transmission lines. He believes that these shortfalls are under appreciated by renewable energy proponents, and the scaling of renewable energy might have other environmental consequences. California appears to have plenty of land, but that is to meet a 33% renewables goal, which is unlikely to satisfy environmentalists, and California has much more land than other states. The takeaway is that all energy choices have their tradeoffs:
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How long will scientists have to measure annual economic damages from hurricanes before they can confidently say that global warming is making storms stronger? In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claimed the evidence is already clear in the damage trends of the last several decades. But a new study finds that any warming-related increase in hurricane damages won’t be detectable for a century a more. [click to continue…]
How Big Biz Banned the Bulb
John LaPlante, The Michigan View, 7 June 2011
Will MSM Look into the Global Warming Abyss and Find Their Character?
Russell Cook, Big Government, 7 June 2011
Dear Sierra Club, I Resign over Your Support for Anti-Environmental Wind
Jen Gilbert, Master Resource, 7 June 2011
Romney: Obama’s Next Energy Czar?
Michael Grunwald, Time, 7 June 2011
WaPo Fact Checker Obliterates Obama’s Auto Bailout Claims
Tom Blumer, News Busters, 7 June 2011
Michigan in EPA’s Carbon Vise
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 6 June 2011
Tonight in Taylorville, Illinois, the Department of Energy will hold the first of 3 field hearings on the environmental impact of FutureGen 2.0, America’s biggest boondoggle.
If you are unacquainted with FutureGen, it was George W. Bush’s marquee energy initiative, a $1 billion public-private partnership to build a coal-fired power plant that “captured” greenhouse gas emissions and piped them underground for storage.
President Bush proposed the project in 2003, but the Congress initially was skeptical. In 2005, the House Appropriations Committee rejected Bush’s request for FutureGen funding. Members called it a “maybe” program, too risky to merit the investment.
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The head of General Motors, Dan Akerson, has called for an increase in the gasoline tax of up to one dollar a gallon. Akerson’s proposal illustrates, in a nutshell, the perversity of the federal government’s fuel economy standards for new vehicles.
The program is known as CAFE (for Corporate Average Fuel Economy). CAFE has been criticized on several grounds: it limits consumer choice; it jacks up the price of new vehicles; it forces new fuel-saving technologies to be rapidly employed without adequate testing; and, worst of all, it increases traffic fatalities by forcing cars to be made smaller and lighter, reducing their crashworthiness. CAFE’s advocates claim that the law saves consumers money in the long run by reducing their gasoline costs, but if that’s true then we wouldn’t need a federal law imposing these technologies on the public.
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An article in yesterday’s UK Mail.Online provides another stark reminder of the inexorable law of unintended consequences. “California’s attempts to switch to green energy have inadvertently put the survival of the state’s golden eagles at risk,” writes reporter David Gardner. [click to continue…]
“Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time?” in The Vancouver Sun
It’s Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.
Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.
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In 2005, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) issued an alarming warning that global warming would displace 50 million people, so-called “climate refugees,” by 2010. Last April, the UNEP was humiliated when the Asian Correspondent published an article, “What Happened to the Climate Refugees?,” noting how, from 2005-2010, populations increased in the very areas of the world that the UNEP had claimed would suffer the largest losses of people due to climate change. Shortly thereafter, the UNEP removed mention of “50 million climate refugees” from its website, and told the German periodical der Spiegel that it wasn’t responsible for the statistic.
You’d have thought the United Nations would have learned its lesson, but it’s back for more. Over the weekend in Oslo, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres unveiled the “Nansen Principles,” a set of guidelines to address the purported problem of climate refugees displaced by natural disasters supposedly caused by global warming.
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