May 2014

My colleague Chris Horner appeared on Cavuto last night to talk about the politics of climate change and green energy. Video below.

On April 30th, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait authored an uninformative article about environmental cases before the Supreme Court, in which he penned this whopper: “In 2007, the Court not only allowed but actually ordered the EPA to regulate heat-trapping gasses.”

By erroneously claiming that the Supreme Court directed EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, Chait commits a mistake commonly rendered by cheerleaders of the President’s climate agenda. (As an aside, this is the second occasion of late that we’ve taken the time to correct an energy/environment policy mistake by Chait.)

Here’s the background: During the Bush administration, States and environmentalists petitioned the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. EPA refused, claiming that it didn’t have the authority to do so, because greenhouse gases do not constitute a “pollutant” as defined by the Act. The States and green groups then sued, and the case ultimately went before the Supreme Court. In a 2007 ruling, Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court found that greenhouse gases are indeed Clean Air Act “pollutants” and, therefore, that the agency possesses the authority to regulate.

However, the Supreme Court did NOT “order the EPA to regulate heat-trapping gases.” Regarding whether to proceed with a Clean Air Act regime for greenhouse gases, the Massachusetts v. EPA Court concluded:

[O]nce EPA has responded to a petition for rulemaking, its reasons for action or inaction must conform to the authorizing statute. Under the clear terms of the Clean Air Act, EPA can avoid taking further action only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do.

I’ve formatted the key part: EPA doesn’t have to act on greenhouse gases if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot. The agency’s rationale, moreover, must be grounded in the statute.

Finding a “reasonable explanation” in the Clean Air Act for not regulating greenhouse gases isn’t difficult, because the statute wasn’t written with global warming in mind. Rather, Members of Congress drafted the law to mitigate conventional pollution, like nitrogen oxides or sulfur dioxide. Greenhouse gases, on the other hand, are an entirely different problem; their ubiquity (relative to conventional pollution) does not comport well with the means established by the Clean Air Act. As a result, if one earnestly applied the letter of the law to greenhouse gases, EPA would have to regulate the construction of every edifice larger than a mansion. Taken to its logical conclusion (i.e., a National Ambient Air Quality Standard for greenhouse gases), climate change regulations under the Clean Air Act would necessitate de-industrialization. [click to continue…]

As I write this post, White House energy and environment adviser John Podesta is speaking at a conference held by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and he just said that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology is “a ways off in my opinion,” as tweeted by Amy Harder of the Wall Street Journal. This is a significant concession because one of the Obama administration’s top priorities, a proposed regulation known as the Carbon Pollution Standard, would require all new coal-fired power plants to install CCS. However, under the Clean Air Act, EPA is not authorized to impose pollution control technologies that are not yet “adequately demonstrated.” As we’ve long argued, EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standard, which is due to be finalized this summer, is illegal as proposed, because CCS is not yet market viable. It’s nice to hear that Obama’s top climate adviser agrees.

A new study by researchers at Brigham Young University finds that the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s barely makes the top 10 list of the worst droughts of the past 576 years in southern Utah. The study also finds a 17th century wet period that exceeds any period of heavy rainfall in the 20th century and “dwarfs the 1980s wet period that caused significant flooding along the Wasatch Front.”

From the abstract:

We present a 576-year tree-ring-based reconstruction of streamflow for northern Utah’s Weber River that exhibits considerable interannual and decadal-scale variability. While the 20th Century instrumental period includes several extreme individual dry years, it was the century with the fewest such years of the entire reconstruction. Extended droughts were more severe in duration, magnitude, and intensity prior to the instrumental record, including the most protracted drought of the record, which spanned 16 years from 1703 to 1718. Extreme wet years and periods are also a regular feature of the reconstruction. A strong early 17th Century pluvial exceeds the early 20th Century pluvial in magnitude, duration, and intensity, and dwarfs the 1980s wet period that caused significant flooding along the Wasatch Front.

BYU’s press release, which provides more detail, follows. It includes a short video in which lead author Matthew Bekker explains how his team extracts and analyzes tree ring samples to estimate drought conditions prior to modern stream flow records. [click to continue…]

Has global warming made heat waves more lethal in Sweden? That’s the conclusion of a study by Swedish scientist Daniel Oudin Åström and colleagues, published last October in Nature Climate Change (NCC). The researchers examined the association of mortality and extreme temperatures in Stockholm. They found that the number of “heat extremes” increased from 220 in 1900-1920 to 381 in 1980-2009. After adjusting for urban heat-island effects, they conclude that climate change was responsible for 288 out of 689 heat-related deaths in the latter period.

Why mention this now? Last week, NCC published a rebuttal by Chip Knappenberger, Patrick Michaels, and Anthony Watts. The authors also posted commentaries on their respective blogs.

One thing that puzzled me right off the bat is Åström et al.’s definition of “heat extreme”: any two-day period when the temperature exceeds 67.2ºF. To some of us who hail from the Sun Belt, 67°F is still sweater weather.

Knappenberger et al. find two major flaws in the Åström study. First, the Swedish scientists mistakenly assume that all warming not due to urban heat islands must be due to anthropogenic climate change. But Stockholm’s climate is also affected by a natural mode of climate variability called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The AMO was primarily in its negative (cold) phase during 1900-1929 and primarily in its positive (warm) phase during 1990-2009. The difference between the two phases “is likely to be responsible for some portion of the increase in extreme-heat events identified by Åström et al. and inappropriately attributed to global climate change,” Watts writes.

Second, and more importantly, the Åström team ignores a relevant finding from another Åström et al. study on extreme temperatures and mortality in Stockholm. The key concept here is “relative risk” — an estimate of how much likelier an individual is to die from exposure to a particular risk factor relative to individuals who are not exposed.

In that study, Åström and colleagues found that the relative risk of dying from extreme heat in Stockholm was about 20% in the beginning of the 20th century. But in the NCC study, they estimate that the relative risk of dying from extreme heat in 1980-2009 was 4.6%. In other words, people in Stockholm today are only about one-fourth as likely to die during heat waves than was the case in the early 20th century. [click to continue…]

…because agency employees are too busy watching pornography!

Allow me to explain: The statutes that authorize EPA’s regulatory programs—the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, etc.—are rife with date-certain deadlines by which EPA must complete its regulatory responsibilities. The agency, however, is woeful at meeting these deadlines. For example, since 1994, EPA has missed 98% (196 out of 200) of its Clean Air Act deadlines, by an average of 5 years. Because EPA won’t do its job, environmental special interests are able to leverage a legal strategy known as “sue and settle” into effective control of the EPA’s regulatory agenda. See this issue brief for the whole story.

I’d long thought that EPA ignored its statutory duties because the agency was pouring agency resources into greenhouse gas regulations (which is, mind you, a discretionary regime—unlike statutory deadlines, which are non-discretionary, and should, therefore, take priority). But now I’m not so sure. Reports the Washington Free Beacon’s CJ Ciaramella.

An Environmental Protection Agency official spent up to six hours a day on the taxpayer dime looking at pornography, according to the EPA Inspector General.

Allan Williams, the deputy assistant inspector general for investigations, told the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that his office had discovered an EPA official who habitually watched porn on a government computer.

“One such investigation involves a career EPA employee who allegedly stored pornographic materials on an EPA network server shared by colleagues,” Williams testified. “When an OIG special agent arrived at this employee’s work space to conduct an interview, the special agent witnessed the employee actively viewing pornography on his government-issued computer. Subsequently, the employee confessed to spending, on average, between two and six hours per day viewing pornography while at work. The OIG’s investigation determined that the employee downloaded and viewed more than 7,000 pornographic files during duty hours.”

Washington Free Beacon later reported that this particular employee received a performance bonus, despite his evident porn problem. Below, I’ve posted video of the House Government & Oversight Reform hearing exchange, in which the EPA confirms the bonus. Unbelievable!