The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has scheduled a vote on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for the morning of Thursday, 9th May. All the Democrats on the committee will vote for McCarthy. Since they hold a ten to eight majority over Republicans, it is certain that the committee will send the nomination to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote.

What is less certain is whether Senator David Vitter (R-La), ranking Republican on the committee, will have the committee’s seven other Republicans with him in voting against McCarthy. If he does, then the next question is whether Vitter will lead an effort to block a floor vote.

It takes 60 votes to invoke cloture to end debate and move to a vote. So Vitter needs to round up 41 votes to block McCarthy’s confirmation. There are 45 Republicans in the Senate. If Vitter leads the effort against McCarthy, it is likely that he will have two or three Democrats with him. But there are also a number of Republicans who might defect. Several of them don’t like McCarthy, but believe that deference should be given to the President’s nominees unless they are manifestly unqualified or corrupt.

The argument for blocking McCarthy’s confirmation is simply that it is one of the very few shots that Senators will have during the 113th Congress to push back the EPA’s ongoing regulatory onslaught against affordable energy. McCarthy, as Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation for the past four years, has been in charge of writing and promulgating the several Clean Air Act regulations that are designed to close coal-fired power plants. In my view, those Senators who oppose the EPA’s agenda should not be voting to promote the point person for implementing that agenda. She also misled both the Congress and the public about the design and impact of two of the most expensive regulations—new fuel economy targets and the Carbon Pollution Standard. My colleagues Marlo Lewis and Anthony Ward explain her duplicity here.

President Barack Obama submitted his proposed Fiscal Year 2014 budget to Congress on 10th April, 66 days after the legal deadline.  The law does not subject the President to any penalties for missing the 4th February deadline, but no previous President has submitted his proposed budget more than a few days late.  The budget proposes to increase federal spending by nearly five percent over the current fiscal year.

Subsidies for renewable energy and energy efficiency total $23 billion over ten years.  Astonishingly, the President proposes to make wind, solar, and geothermal subsidies permanent.  According to a White House fact sheet: “To provide a strong, consistent incentive to encourage investments in renewable energy technologies and to help meet our goal to double generation from wind, solar, and geothermal sources by 2020, the Budget would make permanent the tax credit for the production of renewable electricity.  The Budget makes the Production Tax Credit refundable so new, growing firms can benefit and provide renewable electricity generation.”

For decades, the leaders in the wind and solar industries have told Congress that they just need a few more years of subsidies before they become competitive with energy produced from conventional sources.  Last December, during the debate over whether to extend the wind subsidy for another year, the American Wind Energy Association came forward with a plan to phase out the subsidy over six years. The Obama Administration has concluded that wind and solar will never become competitive with coal and natural gas.

Senator David Vitter (R-La.), ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, sent a letter on 16th April to Gina McCarthy, Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency, that re-iterates five requests for information that the agency has withheld from the committee or commitments to increase transparency in the future. The letter, which was signed by all eight Republican members of the committee, in effect sets down a marker for McCarthy’s confirmation as EPA Administrator by the Senate.  If McCarthy fails to satisfy the five requests, then the Republicans on the committee will have good reason to vote against her confirmation.

Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said this week that the committee could vote as early next week on McCarthy’s nomination.  That now seems unlikely.  It’s more likely that the committee will vote soon after the Senate returns from a week-long recess on 6th May.

The letter states, “…[W]hile you acknowledged serious problems with EPA’s transparency record, acknowledgement does not equal action.  We want to hold you to your word and ensure that EPA will be fully transparent on the science, economics, and negotiations related to EPA decisions and rulemaking.  For too long, EPA has failed to deliver on the promises of transparency espoused by President Barack Obama, former Administrator Lisa Jackson, and by you.”

The first request is that McCarthy commits the EPA to issue new guidance requiring that all official business be conducted through official e-mail accounts.  The second is that McCarthy turn over to the committee unredacted private e-mails that were used to conduct official business.  These two requests arise out of the “Richard Windsor” scandal.

The third request is the whopper.  EPW Committee Republicans ask McCarthy to turn over the underlying data used to promulgate Clean Air Act rules.  Specifically: “That the EPA release a full set of data files for the American Cancer Society Study; the Harvard Six Cities Study; HEI/Krewski et al. 2009; Laden et al. 2006; Lepeule 2012; and Jerrett 2009.”  Congress has been trying to get this sort of data since the late 1990s, when Carol Browner was EPA Administrator.  McCarthy herself agreed to turn over data underlying major Clean Air Act rules in 2011, but has since refused to do so.  It is widely believed that if the data in the studies can be re-analyzed by objective experts, it will show that the health claims for reductions in particulate matter have been wildly exaggerated by the EPA.

The fourth request is that the EPA commits in writing to do economy-wide cost-benefit analyses for all future Clean Air Act  rules, as is required by executive order and by the act.  The EPA typically only looks at benefits to one section of the economy, such as the number of new jobs that will be created by a regulation, and ignores much larger job losses and other negative effects in other sections of the economy.  The fifth request is that the EPA publishes on its web site all petitions for rulemaking, promulgations of new guidance, and notices of intent to sue. In addition, the eight Republicans request that the EPA also make public and give thirty days notice when it enters into negotiations to settle a citizen lawsuit.  This will allow interested parties to intervene before the EPA is able to do one of its notorious “sue-and-settle” deals.

Times have changed since the Wall Street Journal held its first “ECO:nomics—Creating Environmental Capital” conference at the super-swanky Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara.  I was there in 2008 (but, alas, stayed at the Best Western in downtown Santa Barbara) when several hundred investors and corporate CEOs listened to leading crony capitalists, including Jeff Immelt of GE, James Rogers of Duke Energy, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical, and John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers (where Al Gore was also a partner), smugly explain how they were going to strike it rich off the backs of consumers and taxpayers with green energy subsidies and mandates, federal loan guarantees, and the higher energy prices that would make renewable energy competitive with coal, oil, and natural gas once cap-and-trade was enacted.

This year’s sixth annual conference, which I didn’t attend, was also held at the Bacara Resort, but the mood was apparently different.  Yesterday, the Journal ran a six-page supplement that summarized the conference’s highlights.  The lead article by John Bussey was headlined: “Green Investing: So Much Promise, So Little Return: At The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference, the talk was about all the innovations taking place in renewable energy—and about all the investors who are losing interest.”

Bussey writes: “Given all the interest in protecting the environment from mankind’s rapid advance, you’d think this might be the best time ever to invest in renewable energy and the Next Big Green Thing.  Guess again.  Large parts of green-tech investment look like the torched and salted fields left behind by Roman conquerors: barren, lifeless—and bereft of a return on capital. Put another way: In some areas, if you aren’t already investor road kill, you’re likely the hedgehog in the headlights about to join your maker.”

On page two, an article on a talk by John Dears, chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (or Calpers), reveals that their “fund devoted to clean energy and technology which started in 2007 with $460 million has an annualized return of minus 9.7% to date.”  Dears is quoted as telling the conference: “We have almost $900 million in investment expressly aimed at clean tech.  We’re all familiar with the J-curve in private equity.  Well, for Calpers, clean-tech investing has got an L-curve for “lose.”  Our experience is that this has been a noble way to lose money.”

Yes, con artists gaming the system to raise energy prices, impoverish consumers, destroy jobs, and fleece taxpayers can still take comfort that theirs is “a noble way to lose money.”  Long may it remain so.  The entire 2013 ECO:nomics program may be found here. Read it and gloat now—it may be the last one.

Editor’s note: For more on CalPERS history of gross financial mismanagement, see this excellent post by my colleague Ivan Osorio.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) seldom lets Senators vote on amendments to bills, but last week he agreed to a “vote-a-rama” on the budget bill.  Hundreds of amendments on all sorts of issues were offered and many of them are being voted on.  Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) offered an amendment (#261) to put the Senate on record against any tax or fees on carbon dioxide emissions.  The Senate voted on this anti-carbon tax amendment on Friday, 22nd March.  Fifty-three Senators voted in favor, with 46 opposed. Sixty votes were required for passage under Senate rules.

All the no votes were from Democratic members.  The 45 Republican Senators were joined by eight Democrats in voting for Blunt’s amendment.  The Democrats were: Max Baucus of Montana, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

The newspaper industry has named this week Sunshine Week to focus attention on the importance of open government and public access to information.  The Obama Administration has gotten into the spirit of Sunshine Week with daily posts on the White House blog and the Department of Justice blog, which talk about the importance of transparency and trumpet the Administration’s achievements.  President Obama after all promised in the 2008 presidential campaign that his administration would be the most transparent in history.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way.  For example, CEI’s Chris Horner has filed multiple ongoing lawsuits to try to force the Administration to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.  The Republican minority staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee have been having fun with daily posts that chronicle example after example of Obama Administration stonewalling and failures to comply with federal open government laws.

But it’s no longer just a partisan complaint.  Glenn Greenwald published a column in London’s Guardian this week headlined, “Obama’s secrecy fixation causing Sunshine Week implosion.”  The sub-headline reads, “Even the most loyal establishment Democrats are now harshly denouncing the president for his war on transparency.”

Representatives Steve Scalise (R-La.), Joe Barton (R-Tex.), and 103 other original co-sponsors introduced a resolution expressing the sense of Congress that a tax on carbon dioxide emissions would harm the U. S. economy.    Scalise is chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee and Barton is former chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.  H. Con. Res. 24 would not forbid the House from passing a carbon tax bill in the future simply because Congress cannot bind itself in that way.

The purpose of the resolution rather is to build congressional and public opposition to a carbon tax.  Some observers have said this is unnecessary because neither the House nor the Senate would vote for a big new tax on energy use.  That is true.  Moreover, the White House has said repeatedly that they have not and will not propose a carbon tax.  That is also true.  However, the White House’s denials are carefully worded not to rule out supporting a carbon tax proposal that was part of a comprehensive and bipartisan budget or tax reform deal.  The White House really wants Republicans to propose a carbon tax.

The attraction for including a carbon tax in any big budget or tax deal is considerable for the big spenders in Congress because it’s the only thing on the table that would raise a lot of new revenue.  A tax of twenty dollars per ton of carbon dioxide emitted would raise over $100 billion in its first year.  By burying it in a package, no Member of Congress would have to take an up or down vote on a stand-alone carbon tax and could still protest in public that he was against the carbon tax but had to accept it in order to pass the whole package.  A further problem is that these big budget and tax deals are negotiated in secret by House and Senate leaders, chairmen and senior members of the relevant committees, and the White House.

As it happens, the day before Scalise and Barton introduced their resolution, Representative Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) released a discussion draft of “carbon-pricing” legislation. “Putting a price on carbon could help solve two of the nation’s biggest challenges at once:  preventing climate change and reducing the budget deficit,” Waxman said in a press release.

It was a busy week for promoting and opposing a carbon tax.  Two studies on the economic effects of a carbon tax that draw opposite conclusions were released by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Brookings Institution.  Kevin Hassett, Ph.D., director of economic policy studies at the “pro-business” American Enterprise Institute, continued his advocacy of a carbon tax at a Resources for the Future forum.  And most interestingly, former EPA Administrator William K. Reilly, said at a conference that, “The strongest advocate on our task force for a carbon tax was ExxonMobil.  I had previously thought that was a public relations thing — I didn’t think they were quite interested in it.”

The National Association of Manufacturers released a study by NERA Consulting on the Economic Outcomes of a Carbon Tax. The NAM study concludes that a tax starting at $20 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted and increasing by 4 percent per year would have a range of negative effects that would ripple through the economy.  In particular: “The negative impact of a carbon tax on total manufacturing output would be significant, with output from energy-intensive manufacturing sectors dropping as much as 15 percent and output from non-energy-intensive manufacturing sectors dropping as much as 7.7 percent.”

The NAM study also argues that: “A carbon tax would have a net negative effect on consumption, investment and jobs, resulting in lower federal revenues from taxes on capital and labor. Factoring in lost revenue from reduced economic activity, the net revenue from a carbon tax available for deficit/debt reduction and lower tax rates is relatively small.”

The Brookings Institution released a study by Adele C. Morris on The Many Benefits of a Carbon Tax.  The Brookings study proposes a tax starting at $16 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted and increasing by 4 percent per year to reduce the deficit and to lower the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent.  The study proposes 15 percent of the revenues from a carbon tax go to benefits for poor people who would be hurt most by higher energy prices.  Morris also argues in the study a carbon tax would make at least some EPA regulations of greenhouse gas emissions redundant and unnecessary.

The details of a carbon tax were discussed on Feb. 27 at a Resources for the Future seminar on Comprehensive Tax Reform and Climate Policy.  A video of the seminar can be viewed here.  Participants included Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, Billy Pizer of Duke University, Joe Aldy of Harvard University, Larry Goulder of Stanford University, Rob Williams of the University of Maryland, and Ian Parry of the International Monetary Fund.  Aldy worked as an adviser on climate policy in the Obama White House.  Pizer worked in the Treasury Department during the George W. Bush (when Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, was Treasury Secretary) and Obama Administrations to devise a model carbon tax.

William K. Reilly was one of the speakers at the Climate Leadership Conference this week.  The conference was hosted by the Climate Registry, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and the Association of Climate Change Officers.  It was sponsored by a long list of companies and organizations, including Bloomberg BNA News.  The “headline sponsor” was the Environmental Protection Agency.

Erica Martinson filed several short reports for Politico Pro, which is available to paid subscribers only.  In one of Politico Pro’s e-mails to subscribers dated 2/28/13 12:01 PM EST Martinson wrote:

Oil companies are expecting — and sometimes advocating for — a carbon tax, former EPA Administrator William Reilly said today. Two companies, ConocoPhillips and Shell, “have a virtual tax they append to their [internal rate of return] calculations when making new capital expenditures,” he said. “It’s $25 a ton for Conoco; $75 a ton for Shell. So Congress may not be acting, but companies are anticipating somebody will someday,” Reilly said.

The George H.W. Bush-era EPA leader recently participated on an energy policy task force and found ExxonMobil’s position interesting, he said. “The strongest advocate on our task force for a carbon tax was ExxonMobil. I had previously thought that was a public relations thing — I didn’t think they were quite interested in it,” he said.

The task force Reilly refers to is the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Strategic Energy Policy Initiative, which released its report at a press conference on Feb. 27.  Reilly was one of four speakers at the press conference, along with his three fellow co-chairmen: former Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Gen. James Jones, former National Security Adviser to President Obama.  Other members of the task force include William Colton, vice president of ExxonMobil, and Ralph Cavanaugh of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The task force’s 50 incoherent energy policy recommendations can be read here.

In other carbon tax news, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, asked Treasury Secretary nominee Jacob Lew during his confirmation hearing about the Obama Administration’s position on a carbon tax.  Lew responded, “The administration has not proposed a carbon tax, nor is it planning to do so.”   The Senate confirmed Lew by a vote of 71 to 26 this week.  Senator David Vitter (R-La.), ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, followed up on Lew’s statement by sending a letter to President Obama asking him whether he opposes the carbon tax bill introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders (Independent Socialist-Vt.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

The automatic reductions of $85 billion in federal spending, known as the Sequester, which were agreed to by President Obama, Senate Democrats and House Republicans when the Budget Control Act was passed and signed into law in 2011, started going into effect today, March 1.  As President Obama has warned over the past several weeks, the consequences of cutting federal spending by 2.2 percent already are calamitous.  Bloomberg News reported that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was going to have to discontinue its survey of green jobs.

Here’s what Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the ironically named Center for American Progress and the author of a book on green energy told Bloomberg: “It’s a huge loss.  This means the U.S. will be flying blind on the growth of a very, very important sector in the U.S. economy.”

It may be the White House agrees with my CEI colleague John Berlau, who told Bloomberg that he was glad to see the green jobs survey go.  That’s because President Obama promised in the 2008 campaign his policies would create 5 million new green jobs within a decade.  The White House later claimed $90 billion in stimulus funding had created 225,000 green jobs (at $400,000 per job).  So the president may be happy not to have be reminded by the BLS’s survey of how far he is from keeping his promise.

The Environmental Protection Agency released to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute late in the evening on Friday, 15th February, part of the second of four batches of e-mails that respond to a Freedom of Information Act request.  EPA was forced to turn over the approximately 12,000 e-mails only after CEI filed suit in federal court.  On 20th February, the EPA released some more e-mails in order to get close to the 3,000 they promised the court they would release each month for four months.  All the e-mails have been posted on the web by the EPA and may be seen here.

Since EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson recently left office, the EPA no longer needs to guard her Richard Windsor alias e-mail address.  Thus Richard Windsor now appears as the recipient or sender of the e-mails.

Many of the e-mails are heavily redacted.  The reason claimed by EPA for most of the redactions is that they are part of the pre-decisional deliberative process and therefore exempt from FOIA.  CEI will be going back to court to challenge many of these redactions as improper and some as laughably so.  The judge will have a lot of fun reading to do.

Two e-mails that were not redacted concern the Coal Ash Rule.  The first e-mail, dated 15th December 2009, is from Allyn Brooks-LaSure in the Administrator’s office and is addressed to Jackson and several other EPA officials.  It can be found as numbered document 476 in Part B of the second release.   Brooks-LaSure writes:

Administrator, you have your own Christmas carols…

And then copies a December 15, 2009 blog post by Rob Perks, Director of the Center for Advocacy Campaigns at the Natural Resources Defense Council:

Call it a gift or a curse, but I have a thing for song parody. I’m like the Weird Al Yankovic of environmentalists. Usually my peculiar “talent” gets displayed at the office holiday party. Who can forget my odes to coal belted out last year by NRDC’s in-house carolers?

Unfortunately, I missed this year’s party due to travel. But never fear, I give to you the 2009 coal carol—ba-rumpa, bum, bum.

Coal Ash Regs Are Comin’ To Town

She’s making a list/Priority: High/Gonna find out who’s wet or dry

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!

Yes, Lisa Jackson/Is making all haste/EPA’s cracking down/On combustion waste

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!

She knows which landfill’s leaching/She knows which pond might break/She knows they all lack liners/Close ‘em down, for goodness sake!

One-thirty million tons/Ev-ery year/Spew from coal plants/Far and near.

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!

So, you better watch out/Coal waste fly/A high hazard, Either wet or dry.

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!

Apparently, putting companies out of business and workers out of jobs adds to the holiday spirit just as much at the EPA as it does at environmental pressure groups.

The second e-mail (document 506 in Part B) regarding the Coal Ash Rule is dated 30th December 2009 and lists the attendees at a forthcoming meeting to discuss the rule.  Eleven EPA officials and staffers are listed as attending along with Lisa Evans and Marty Hayden of Earthjustice, Eric Schaeffer and Jeffrey Stant of the Environmental Integrity Project, Bruce Niles and Mary Ann Hitt of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, Scott Slesinger of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Patrice Simms of Howard University, and Jackie Kruszewski of the Southern Environmental Law Center.  To be fair, the very next e-mail reminds Jackson of a fifteen minute phone call scheduled with Steve Leer, CEO of Arch Coal.