2014

Two Wednesdays ago, the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee held a hearing on EPA’s illegitimate Clean Power Plan, about which I reported in last week’s Cooler Heads Digest. For the details, check out the Digest; for this post, my purpose is only to draw attention to the brilliant opening statement made by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY). He took aim at the role special interests played in crafting the rule. Below, I’ve provided a partial transcript:

On July 6th of this year, the NYT wrote a piece about the outsized role that the Natural Resources Defense Council had in developing the EPA’s new regulations to curb power plant emissions…The article says it was a remarkable victory for the NRDC. Now, for those outside the beltway, NRDC is a $120 million a year lobbying machine, backed by Hollywood elites. It is absolutely shameful to me that the EPA, under the direction of this administrator, would allow a team of lawyers and lobbyists to draft their regulations…

…EPA has decided to push a rule that was drafted behind closed doors by powerful, wealthy Washington lawyers and lobbyists at the NRDC. Let’s be clear, NRDC is a wealthy, elite, powerful lobbying machine with more influence over decision making in Washington than any ordinary U.S. citizen. They have millions which gives them access. The EPA has turned a deaf ear on those that don’t.

…If I’m wrong, then NRDC and the EPA and its Administrator can and should provide all records and documents that are requested by Members of this Committee and my House colleagues on how these new regulations for coal-fired power plants were crafted. Because right now, it sure looks like a trio of high powered Washington lobbyists write their regulations for them.

If what the [New York] Times is reporting is what the EPA Administrator has called “preposterous,” then the EPA must comply with any committee and FOIA requests for these docs. Comply [with these requests], so we can know the truth. If the answer is no, that you will not comply, or that there are more record keeping mishaps, broken hard drives, or lost files, then we’ll know the truth as well.

Sen. Barrasso’s challenge is a welcome development. I wish his staff good luck and Godspeed in its efforts to uncover the extent to which special interests were given the run of the mill at EPA after having helped get the President elected. Alas, the staff’s task will prove a slog, something we know from experience.

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Christopher Monckton of Brenchley yesterday posted an excellent commentary about the warming “pause” on Watts Up With That. In previous posts on this topic, Monckton has tracked the pause in the Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSS) satellite dataset. For example, in June, he reported that the global warming trend of the previous 17 years 9 months — September 1996 through May 2014 — was “zero.”

In yesterday’s post, Monckton plots the average of five datasets: the RSS and UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) satellite datasets and the GISS (NASA), HadCRUT4 (UK Climate Research Unit), and NCDC (NOAA) surface station datasets. The averaged datasets show a period of 13 years 4 months with no net warming.

This all flies in the face of the ‘worse than we thought’ school. Nearly a quarter of all fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution occurred during 2001-2010 (see chart below). Yet in the past 13-plus years, not only has there been no acceleration in warming, there has been no warming trend.

Source: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center

Now to the heart of the matter. Monckton compares the observed warming in the five datasets with the projected warming in IPCC reports. [click to continue…]

[EPA’s Clean Power Plan] has the potential to comprehensively reorder the jurisdictional relationship between the federal government and states as it relates to the regulation of public utilities and energy development. . . . .[States] will have entered a comprehensive “mother-may-I?” relationship with the EPA that has never before existed. — FERC Commissioner Tony Clark

Five Commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) testified today on EPA’s Clean Power Plan before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power.

FERC’s Tony Clark

EPA’s Clean Power Plan establishes carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction targets for the electric power sectors of 49 states. The Plan outlines four “building block” strategies states are likely use to meet their respective targets: (1) improve the efficiency of coal power plants, (2) shift base load generation from coal to natural gas, (3) shift electric generation from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear, and (4) reduce electricity consumption through demand-side management (DSM) programs.

In his briefing memo, Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) asserts that EPA’s proposed rule “would require significant changes to the way electricity is generated, transmitted, and consumed in States across the country.” Two witnesses spoke directly to that point.

FERC Commissioner Philip D. Moeller described the fundamental change contemplated by the Clean Power Plan as a switch from “economic dispatch” to “environmental dispatch”:

For decades we have relied on the concept of “economic dispatch” of electric generation. Simply put, the power plants with the lowest operating cost are called first to generate electricity — with various reliability requirements and other factors as part of the decision, depending on the structure of various markets. By moving to what is essentially “environmental dispatch,” units will be called to generate primarily based upon the emission profile of the unit.

It is hard to imagine how giving low-carbon generation priority over low-cost generation would not increase electric rates. It is also not hard to imagine how pushing renewables higher in the “merit order of dispatch” could complicate the task of balancing loads and ensuring grid reliability.

Commissioner Tony Clark views the basic change in political terms. The Clean Power Plan replaces cooperative federalism with a hegemonic system in which EPA has final say on how states generate, transmit, and consume electricity: [click to continue…]

Yesterday, CEI published a new study by me, on EPA’s Clean Power Plan. In a nutshell, I argue that the EPA’s rule lacks an electoral mandate, contravenes congressional intent, and was crafted by special interests. In a word, the regulation is illegitimate.

Yesterday I participated on a Heritage Foundation panel on ‘Extremism at the EPA: A Discussion on Federal Overreach, Regulation Costs, and Climate Realities.’ Fellow panelists were Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Penn.) and Heritage’s David Kreutzer. The event was hosted by Heritage Fellow Nicolas Loris. I’ve reposted the video below.

Rep. Kelly started things off with a rousing speech in defense of affordable energy. Kreutzer then debunked the so-called “social cost of carbon,” the dubious statistic on which EPA relies in order to justify its climate regulations. Finally, I discussed the illegitimacy of EPA’s recently proposed Clean Air Act regulations for greenhouse gases from existing power plants, known as the Clean Power Plan. Kreutzer starts at the 44^th minute; I start at the 58^th minute. Over at the Daily Signal, Natalie Johnson wrote a story on the panel.

The top story in international climate news this week is the Margarita Declaration issued in the name of 130 ‘social’ (non-governmental) organizations participating in the July 15-18 Social Pre-COP meeting on Margarita Island, Venezuela. The groups don’t sign the document, so we don’t know which (or how many) of them actually endorse it. Basically it’s a rant demanding that ‘social’ organizations have more clout in climate treaty negotiations. Participants seek in particular to influence the UN-sponsored COP 20 negotiations in December, in Lima, Peru.

The Margarita Declaration is attracting media attention because it (1) blames the climate ‘crisis’ of the “current capitalist hegemonic system” (par. 46), and (2) rejects solutions “whereby wealthy industrialized countries and corporations ultimately seek to use climate change as a source of profit” (par. 19). The latter include such ‘green economy’ policies as carbon trading and restrictions on deforestation in developing countries.

Some commentaries have pounced on the Declaration as smoking-gun proof that climate activists are watermelons — green on the outside, red on the inside. The environmental movement has no lack of collectivist impulses. Consider the obsession with “consensus” (groupthink), the popularity of social cost of carbon analysis (a pseudo science reminiscent of Marx’s labor theory of value), the zeal for green energy mandates (Soviet-style production quota), and the relentless lobbying for political-pricing of energy (cap-and-trade, carbon taxes) to correct alleged “market failures.”

Nonetheless, there are important differences. [click to continue…]

EPA’s Clean Power Plan, its carbon “pollution” rule for existing power plants, proposes carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction targets that states can meet only by enacting (or tightening) three of the four main climate policies contained in H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, popularly (or unpopularly) known as Waxman-Markey. Those policies are: cap-and-trade, renewable energy quota, and demand-reduction mandates.

The fourth Waxman-Markey policy, performance standards requiring new coal power plants to install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, is the centerpiece of EPA’s carbon “pollution” rule for new coal power plants.

Waxman-Markey narrowly passed in the House in June 2009, but once exposed as ‘cap-and-tax,’ it became a major political liability. Senate leaders tried to rebrand the proposal as “pollution limits” and “linked fee,” but that fooled no one, so eventually they pulled the plug on all companion bills. Cap-and-trade was a critical issue in the November 2010 elections. In the House, “virtually every close race was lost by a Democrat” who voted for Waxman-Markey, observes Cato Institute scientist Patrick Michaels. In contrast, “every close Senate race was won by a Democrat,” in no small part because they mothballed cap-and-trade.

In a democracy, policy is supposed to derive from statutes, which in turn are supposed to derive from elections. Cap-and-trade remains in such bad odor that neither President Obama nor other Democratic leaders campaigned for it in the 2012 election cycle. Indeed, President Obama ran to the right of Mitt Romney on energy issues, even accusing his rival of being anti-coal. Yet Obama’s EPA now acts as if it has a legislative and popular mandate to implement the old Waxman-Markey agenda.

A somewhat unique feature of American democracy is federalism. This allows each state to be a “laboratory of democracy,” empowering Americans to “vote with their feet” for and against state policy regimes they like or dislike. The Clean Power Plan would stifle such choice and competition. [click to continue…]