In December, EPA finalized the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, one of the most expensive regulations, ever. The Agency says it would cost $10 billion per year; industry estimates are much higher.

In press releases, EPA claims that the rule is necessary in order to protect fetuses from developmental disorders engendered by mercury emissions. This is not true. In fact, EPA found that it is necessary and appropriate to regulate mercury emissions in order to protect a population that doesn’t exist: pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, who annually consume more than 300 pounds of self-caught fish, from exclusively the 99th percentile most polluted freshwater inland water bodies.

The ridiculous Mercury and Air Toxics Rule is only a couple months old, but it’s already having a big impact. On January 26th, Ohio-based utility FirstEnergy Corps announced that it would shutter 6 coal fired power plants, and it cited the mercury rule as the primary reason. The company said 530 employees would be affected by the decision. Some will be relocated, but many will lose their livelihoods. Last week, the Associated Press reported that electricity prices in Ohio regions serviced by FirstEnergy are expected to double, due to the smaller supply of power engendered by EPA’s mercury regulation. In addition to job losses, the absurd mercury rule is raising electricity prices.

Today, FirstEnergy Corp. announced more plant closures caused by the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule. According to a press release issued this morning,

AKRON, Ohio, Feb. 8, 2012 — FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE) announced today that its Monongahela Power Company (Mon Power) subsidiary will be retiring three older coal-fired power plants located in West Virginia by September 1, 2012. The decision to close the plants is based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which were recently finalized, and other environmental regulations.

The company says that the closures will affect 105 jobs.

Also today, the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the impact of the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule. Here are the testimony highlights:

• EPA Assistant Administrator Regina McCarthy dismissed concerns that the mercury rule would affect reliability. According to McCarthy, “EPA’s resource adequacy analysis continues to demonstrate that only a modest amount of generating capacity will become uneconomic to operate under the MATS standards, and removal of this capacity will not adversely affect capacity reserve margins in any region of the country.” This is far from reassuring, however, as EPA’s reliability analysis has been shredded by both federal regulators and other impartial experts. As I explain in a previous post, no one knows whether the Mercury Air Toxics rule would turn out the lights. Only regional transmission organizations—the independent, non-partisan entities that operate the grid—have the expertise to know whether the regulation could affect reliability, and they’ve not yet weighed in.

• Ralph L. Roberson, President of RMB Consulting & Research, Inc., testified that “no technology is available that can meet [the standards established by the mercury rule]. The stringency of the new-unit standards means that no new coal-fired EGU can be built under these standards. In essence, EPA ha adopted standards that prevent the country from building new coal-fueled units.”

• Darren MacDonald, Director of Energy at Gerdau Long Steel North America, stated that “The steel sector is concerned about increased electricity costs and reliability issues that may result from this regulation. This is for the simple fact that all of the compliance costs and reliability risks will ultimately be passed on to us, the consumers. Our concern is that a confluence of new EPA regulations on the utility sector over the next 5 years – capped by the [Mercury and Air Toxics] Rule – will have a substantial impact on our direct cost of doing business.

In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a landmark study of mass hysteria and sociopsychosis titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”

Mackay painstakingly analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, pseudoscience like alchemy and astrology, and witch crazes.  He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is not only not true, but also potentially deadly.  His answer:

“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”

Conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves—I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words.  How he would have delighted in the strange, self-flagellating notion that is anthropogenic warming.  He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment.

In fact, global warming is the most widespread mass hysteria in our species’ history.  The fever that these legions of warmists warn of does not grip the globe, but rather their own brains and blinkered imaginations.

And like every mass delusion, there is danger – danger that Man wil be convinced by these climate cultists to turn his back on the very political, economic, and scientific institutions that made him so powerful, so wealthy, so healthy.

Will the fever break before this happens?  I think so.  I think the fever is breaking, as more and more scientists come forward to admit their doubts about the global warming paradigm, as more and more voters become suspicious of government-mandated schemes to control their “carbon emissions”, which is a bureaucrat’s way of controlling productivity, and therefore freedom.

In centuries hence the global warming boogey man will be seen for exactly what it is – The Great Delusion.  Future generations will wonder how so many people could have believed something so suicidally ridiculous.

Unless they read Charles Mackay’s wonderful book.

In a previous post here, I noted the major problems with House GOP leadership’s proposal to link revenue from expanded domestic energy production with the Highway Trust Fund in their surface transportation reauthorization legislation. Since then, the three major portions have cleared their respective committees: House Natural Resources approved the drilling proposals, Transportation and Infrastructure passed the primary highway bill, and the revenue link was cleared by Ways and Means. A vote by the full House is expected sometime next week.

Observers expect the bill to fail, not only because there is very little for Democrats to like, but also because principled fiscal conservatives — from our “user-pays” coalition to Heritage Action to Club for Growth to RedState — have all slammed the legislation as a Big Government wolf wrapped in pro-market, pro-growth sheep’s clothing. This proposed bill would continue to federally fund highways at unsustainable levels and fails to address how states are to begin reconstructing their portions of the Interstate system. For instance, it explicitly bans states from tolling existing Interstate segments even for the purpose of reconstruction. Reconstruction to current highway construction guidelines by definition increases capacity, yet the tolling section author(s) apparently didn’t find this additional capacity enhancing enough to justify allowing states to implement an intelligent financing mechanism that can actually pay for the needed investment.

Furthermore, the bill seemed to have been assembled with little care as to how certain provisions might impact the real world. For example, a reasonable proposal to increase maximum truck weights on federal highways was defeated in committee in large part because the legislative author(s) of that provision did not include a way to pay for the increased wear and tear. An example of a clean pay-for in this case would have been to simply remove the cap on the annual Heavy Vehicle Use Tax and perhaps adjust the Tire Tax and Truck and Trailer Sales Tax rates accordingly. Or perhaps allow states to opt-in and take over funding responsibility of the additional wear and tear. But did they include such a pay-for or devolution option? Of course they didn’t, and that underscores the problem.

There are essentially two very different (rational) options for moving forward: (1) greatly increase user taxes (primarily fuel taxes) at the federal level to fund reconstruction; or (2) start devolving highway funding to the states and permit them to toll (and contract with private partners) existing sections of Interstate to finance reconstruction.

In our view, option (2) is far superior. The federal government has no real business funding highways and it has proven through years of ineptitude that it is not capable of effectively doing so. Like every highway bill since ISTEA (1991) — which was the first reauthorization following the completion of the Interstate Highway System — Congress appears willing to punt, rather than address in any meaningful way the serious problems of the status quo.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post here at GlobalWarming.org, CEI held a briefing on Capitol Hill along with the Reason Foundation, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and Natural Resources Defense Council (yes, you read that correctly) explaining why moving away from a “user-pays/user-benefits” highway funding principle would be a grave mistake. See that previous blog post for more detail on “user-pays.” You can watch the video of the briefing below:

Mega Star Brad Pitt made a guest appearance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show this past Wednesday where he made a point to condemn the traditional gas-guzzler with an analogy of his new Academy Award-nominated Moneyball.

Brad explains:  “It (Moneyball) was the story of this small market team that found the game unfair, they could not compete.  They couldn’t buy the talent and if they developed the talent it was poached by the rich team, so what are they going to do to level the playing field?  And these guys started questioning 150 years of baseball knowledge and they started with the question, ‘Just because we’ve been doing it this way for so long, does that mean it’s right?’ I equate it to the automobile, like if we invented the automobile today, would we invent a car, would we say, ‘I know!  We’ll run it on a finite fossil fuel. We’ll export a half a trillion dollars of our GDP.  We’ll spend hundreds of billions of dollars on our military to protect that interest, and it will pollute the environment!’ You know, it just doesn’t make sense!”

I give Brad two thumbs, way down, for this elitist tripe.  What celebrities seem to miss is that historically, the introduction of the fossil-fueled automobile has been one of the greatest emancipators, leveling the playing field by lifting many out of poverty through the access of affordable mobility.  In The Best-Laid Plans, Randal O’Toole writes:

Not only are we more mobile, this mobility is far more egalitarian than mass transportation was in its heyday.  Well over 90 percent of American families have at least one car, and many of those who don’t could own one but choose not to.  Some new cars cost more than $100,000 while some used cars cost less than $1,000, but they all have more-or-less equal access to nearly all America’s highways, roads, and streets.

The biggest benefit is increased incomes.  The incredible mobility provided by the mass-produced automobile has significantly boosted personal incomes in the past century.  We typically think people buy more cars only when they can afford to do so, but the reality is more complex.  Incomes are increased by auto ownership as much as if not more than ownership is increased by higher incomes.

One hundred years ago, the average American worker earned, after adjusting for inflation to today’s dollars, about $10,600 a year.  By 1929, when half of all Americans owned an auto, this had increased to $17,000 a year.  Today, income per worker (including benefits) exceeds $72,000 per year, more than seven times what it was before the automobile.  Much if not most of this increase is due to the automobile.  (205-6)

Regardless of the automobile’s inability to meet the standards of the Hollywood glitterati, it has freed the average person from geographic and economic isolation.  Brad, who makes millions per film, has had the luxury to be one of the first of the Hollywood royalty to own a $100,000+ electric Tesla Roadster that was released in 2010.  I have no hard feelings towards Brad’s personal automobile predilections, so he should keep his contempt for the car that I drive to himself.

To view Brad’s performance, click here  and fast-forward to the 2 minute mark to get directly to the analogy.

I and several of my CEI colleagues were looking forward to an informal debate late Friday afternoon on energy policy sponsored by McKinsey and Company, the global consulting firm.  As part of their “Drinks and Debate” series, McKinsey’s Washington, DC office invited David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation and Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress’s Climate Progress blog to make some remarks and then take questions from an audience of around 40 people representing all shades of the political spectrum.  It sounded like a lot of fun because Romm often seems enraged and slightly deranged in his frequent blog posts, but unfortunately Romm cancelled at the last minute.  Our host explained that Romm had pulled out without giving a reason and that his side of the debate would be represented by a bottle of Corona Light.  It was still fun: David Kreutzer gave an engaging and stimulating presentation, as he always does, and the bottle of Corona Light proved to be more rational and less misleading than Romm.

Bryan Walsh in Time Magazine broke the big story this week that the Sierra Club received over $25 million from the natural gas industry to serve as a corporate shill for the natural gas industry’s attacks on the coal industry.  Walsh wrote: “TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past.”

McClendon and Chesapeake Energy several years ago funded a multi-million dollar advertising campaign against the coal industry called “Face it, coal is filthy.”  Two months ago, it was revealed that McClendon and Chesapeake had given as much as $100 million to the American Lung Association, one of the most reprehensible of the environmental pressure groups, to fund the ALA’s “Fighting for air” disinformation campaign.

As noted here last week, the sparks flew at a Jan. 25 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing titled “The Volt Fire: What Did NHTSA Know and When Did They Know It?“ Three witnesses testified: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Administrator David Strickland, General Motors (GM) CEO Daniel Akerson, and John German of the International Council on Clean Transportation. My earlier post was based on newspaper accounts of the hearing. Over the weekend, I watched the archived video of the proceeding and read the testimonies and Committee Staff Report. Here are the key facts and conclusions as I see them:

• The Volt battery fire occurred on June 2, 2011 in the parking lot of a Wisconsin crash test facility. The car caught fire three weeks after the vehicle had been totaled, on May 12, in a side-pole collision. The fire caused an explosion that destroyed not only the Volt but three other vehicles. The blast hurled one of the Volt’s components (a strut) a distance of nearly 80 feet.
• The fire was caused by the leaking of coolant into the Volt’s powerful 300-volt battery, which had been punctured by the crash.
• NHTSA could have avoided the fire had it run down (“drained,” “depowered,” “discharged”) the battery after the crash. This raises obvious questions: Was NHTSA responsible for the fire? Was the agency’s six-month silence partly an attempt to hide regulatory incompetence?
• The Volt is a safe car; consumers should not fear to drive it. Gasoline-powered vehicles are more likely than battery-powered vehicles to burn after a crash. The post-crash explosion from a damaged gas tank can occur in seconds as opposed to weeks. Electric vehicle batteries are harder to puncture than gas tanks. NHTSA tried and failed to replicate the fire by crashing other Volt test vehicles. To induce another battery fire, NHTSA had to impale the battery with a steel rod and rotate it in coolant with special laboratory equipment.
• GM is retrofitting Volt batteries to make them stronger and more leak proof, and is updating safety protocols to ensure batteries are depowered after crashes.
• NHTSA kept silent about the fire for six months, acknowledging it only after Bloomberg News broke the story on November 11, 2011.
• GOP Committee members produced no smoking gun evidence of collusion to cover up the Volt battery fire, such as an email saying ‘We’ve got to keep this under wraps or it will depress Volt sales, jeopardize EPA’s fuel economy negotiations with automakers, and make President Obama look bad.’
• Nonetheless, the Obama administration’s heavy investment (financial and political) in GM in general and the Volt in particular creates an undeniable conflict of interest.
• NHTSA determined the cause of the fire in August 2011, yet waited until November 25 to advise emergency responders, salvage yard managers, and Volt owners how to avoid, and reduce the safety risks associated with, post-crash fires.
• Administrator Strickland’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, it is difficult to explain the agency’s secretiveness apart from political considerations that should not influence NHTSA’s regulatory deliberations.

Conflict of Interest

The Committee’s Staff Report makes a strong case that the Obama administration has invested too much financial and political capital in GM and the Volt to be an honest broker of potentially damaging information about the vehicle. Consider the business side of the relationship:

• President Obama made the unilateral decision to use $50 billion in Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) funds to bailout GM. Through the bailout, the government acquired a 60% equity stake in GM plus $8.8 billion in debt and preferred stock; it still owns 26.5% of GM stock.
• The Administration spent $2.4 billion of Stimulus funds on the development of technologies for the Volt and other electric vehicles. Such funds include ”$105.9 million directly to GM for production of high-volume battery packs for the Volt, $105 million to GM to construct facilities for electric drive systems, and $89.3 million to Delphi Automotive Systems, a former division of GM, to expand manufacturing facilities for electric drive power components,” the Staff Report notes.
• The U.S. Treasury picked four of five new GM board members in July 2009, including Mr. Akerson, who became CEO in January 2011.
• Volt buyers already qualify for a $7,500 federal tax credit but President Obama thinks they shouldn’t have to wait until after filing their taxes to get the rebate. The President’s FY 2012 Budget (p. 36) proposes to “transform the existing $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles into a rebate that will be available to all consumers immediately at the point of sale.”

They don’t call it “Government Motors” for nothing. Although the company is paying off its debt to taxpayers, “ward of the state” is not a completely unfair description. In effect, when NHTSA investigated the Volt battery fire, the government was investigating a partly-owned subsidiary of — itself.

On the political side, President Obama has tied his reputation (hence his re-election prospects) to GM and the Volt:

• Obama claims the GM/Chrysler bailout saved one million auto industry jobs.
• He touts the Volt as “the car of the future.”
• The Volt’s success is critical to his goal, announced in the 2011 State of the Union speech, of putting “a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.”
• Consumer acceptance of electric vehicles like the Volt may also be critical to the economic practicability of EPA and NHTSA’s proposed carbon dioxide (CO2)/fuel economy standards for model years (MYs) 2017-2025, which the White House considers one of the administration’s “hallmark achievements.”

At the hearing, Mr. German testified that plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles are not needed to meet the new fuel economy standards, because improvements in turbochargers and other technologies are rapidly increasing the fuel efficiency of internal combustion engines. That may be so.

Nonetheless, the administration wants and expects the standards to expand the market for electric vehicles. As the Staff Report points out, according to EPA and NHTSA’s proposed rule (p. 75085), “After MY 2020, the only current vehicles that continue to meet the proposed footprint-based CO2 targets (assuming improvements in air conditioning) are hybrid-electric, plug-in hybrid-electric, and fully electric vehicles.” Accordingly, the proposal provides ”regulatory incentives” to encourage manufacture of electric vehicles during MYs 2017-2021 (pp. 75012-75013).†

Also relevent in this connection, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) — EPA and NHTSA’s partner in developing the CO2/fuel economy standards — projects that, under the standards, plug-in hybrids, battery-electric vehicles, and fuel cell vehicles will account for 15.4% of all new cars sold in California by 2025.

It just so happens that the Volt battery fire and NHTSA’s “preliminary” (off-the-record) investigation occurred while EPA, NHTSA, CARB, automakers, union labor, and environmental groups were negotiating the MY 2017-2025 fuel economy standards. Adverse publicity sparked by the battery fire could have complicated the “optics” of the negotiations, recharging the old debate over the safety risks of fuel economy regulation.

In short, the auto bailout, the Stimulus subsidies, the fuel economy rulemaking, and President Obama’s high-profile endorsement of the Volt created incentives for NHTSA to keep the Volt fire incident under wraps. A NHTSA Administrator would have to be a saint not to be tempted. Saints don’t lie. At a previous hearing before the Committee, Strickland denied under oath plain facts that he must know to be true.‡

The Timeline

The Staff Report also lays out a timeline that suggests a plan to keep Congress and the public in the dark until NHTSA and GM figured out how to eliminate the safety concern that the fire and explosion undeniably created.

The Wisconsin testing facility performed the crash test on May 12, 2011. NHSTA first learned of the fire on June 6. The agency retained a fire investigation firm to determine the cause of the explosion, because one of the other vehicles — or even an arsonist — might have started the fire. On July 5, the firm notified NHTSA that the Volt caused the fire. According to Strickland’s testimony, NHTSA determined in August that coolant leaking into the damaged battery was the source of the fire, although a second side-pole test in September did not damage the battery, leak coolant, or start a fire.

Bloomberg broke the story of the June fire on November 11, 2011. Not until November 25, the day after the previously described laboratory test caused a Volt battery to catch on fire, did NHTSA open a formal safety defect investigation. The formal inquiry took eight weeks. On January 20, 2012, NHTSA announced it was officially closing the safety probe following GM’s announcement that it would strengthen the structure around the battery and make other modifications to prevent and detect coolant leaks. But, on December 6, 2011, only two weeks into the investigation, and months in advance of the modifications GM is now implementing, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared the Volt to be safe to drive.

During the formal investigation the agency evaded Committee requests for information:

Upon learning of the vehicle fire through press reports, Chairman [Darrell] Issa, Chairman Jordan, and Rep. [Mike] Kelly wrote to NHTSA Administrator Strickland on December 7, 2011, asking for answers about the Volt fires and NHTSA’s investigation of the matter. After failing to respond before a December 21, 2011 deadline, NHTSA promised to respond in full by January 6, 2012. However, NHTSA once again failed to respond to the new deadline, providing the Committee with no response and no explanation for the delay. . . .Only after a second letter sent on January 10, 2012, reiterating the Committee’s request for cooperation, did the Committee finally receive an incomplete response to the narrative questions posed in the latter on January 12, 2012, followed by a staff briefing on January 17, 2012. After six weeks of stonewalling, NHTSA provided the Committee with some documents on Thursday, January 19, 2012.

More troubling, though, is NHTSA’s long silence between June 6, when the agency learned of the fire, and November 11, when Bloomberg reported the incident. The Staff Report comments:

NHTSA’s six month silence on the Volt’s fire risks has baffled safety advocates. Joan Claybrook, a former Administrator of NHTSA and well-known auto safety expert, told the industry newspaper Automotive News that “not to tell [the public] anything for six months makes no sense to me. NHTSA could have put out a consumer alert and I think they should have done so.” She went on to say, “I believe they delayed it because of the fragility of sales.”

During the Q&A portion of the hearing, Administrator Strickland asserted it would be “irresponsible and frankly illegal” for NHTSA to “disclose anything” or say there was “something wrong” with the Volt while still engaged in “fact finding.” He did not cite the statutory provision that supposedly imposes such restraint. Although no fan of the risk-averse Precautionary Principle, I am at a loss to understand how a car fire and explosion could be serious enough to warrant ongoing tests over six months but not serious enough to mention to Congress, Volt owners, emergency responders, or potential customers.

On November 25, when NHTSA launched its formal investigation, the agency issued several safety guidelines such as keep damaged vehicles in open areas rather than inside garages or enclosed buildings, contact experts at the vehicle’s manufacturer who can discharge the propulsion system, and do not store damaged vehicles near other vehicles. Those precautions made practical sense the moment NHTSA figured out what caused the fire, in August 2011. Yet NHTSA waited another three months, and only after Bloomberg spilled the beans, to communicate important safety information to emergency responders, salvage yard managers, and Volt owners.

Concern about the “fragility of sales” may account for the delay. As noted earlier, another factor may have been negotiations over MY 2017-2025 fuel economy standards. From the Staff Report:

The fire occured on June 2, 2011. NHTSA’s investigation and response to that fire proceeded concurrently as the agency finalized negotiations on fuel economy and emissions regulation for model years 2017-2025. Bloomberg News broke the story on the Volt fires on November 11, 2011. NHTSA and EPA formally proposed the joint rulemaking for fuel economy on November 16, 2011, and nine days after the joint proposal was official, on November 25, 2011, NHTSA officially addressed the questions raised by the Volt fire and announced a formal defect investigation. Clearly, it would be inappropriate if NHTSA had stayed silent on the Volt battery’s safety risks in exchange for GM’s cooperation in the rulemaking.

Agency Error?

Another plausible motive for keeping mum may simply be embarrassment. The fire would not have occurred had NHTSA depowered the battery after the May 12 test crash. According to the Staff Report:

After news of the June Fire became public in November, GM Spokesman Greg Martin insisted that GM had long since established a set of safety protocols to prevent a fire after the Volt’s battery had been damaged. “The engineers tested the Volt’s battery pack for more than 300,000 hours to come up with the procedures, which include discharge and disposal of the battery pack,” he said. Mr. Martin went so far as to claim that “had those protocols been followed after [the May 12th test], this incident would not have occurred.” Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, stated he was “surprised NHTSA didn’t depower the battery after the first test in May, since it is standard procedure to drain fuel out of a conventional gasoline powered vehicle.”

German testified that, “All junkyards know to discharge the battery pack before storing, just as they remove fuel from the gas tank.” Implication: NHTSA, or its test facility, was incompetent or careless. When pressed on this point by Subcommittee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), German responded that he wrote his testimony in haste and meant to say “disconnect” rather than “discharge.” However, in the follow up, German did not challenge Jordan’s argument, based on German’s written testimony, that NHTSA should have done what junkyards know to do — depower, not merely disconnect, the battery. Asked why NHTSA did not do that, German replied: ”Again, those questions are better directed to NHTSA. The one thing I can say is there has not been a recorded case of a battery pack catching on fire. So it may have just been oversight. I don’t know.”

Conclusion

In the Q&A, Administrator Strickland said that “it took every second” for NHTSA’s technical team to determine what went wrong and how to fix it, and that is why NHTSA did not notify the public about the Volt battery fire and explosion until six months after the incident. That is not credible.

NHTSA understood the cause of the fire in August 2011, and the practical steps required to minimize safety risk – don’t keep a crashed electric vehicle in enclosed spaces or near other vehicles, arrange for experts to depower the battery — did not take another three months to figure out.

The administration’s heavy political and financial investment in GM and the Volt created a conflict of interest. The government’s ownership stake in GM and President Obama’s cheerleading for the Volt gave NHTSA an improper incentive to balance its safety mission against the administration’s political goal of boosting Volt sales. The perceived importance of electric vehicle sales to NHTSA, EPA, and CARB’s fuel economy agenda created an additional incentive to hide information that might depress Volt sales. Finally, agencies are not immune to the all-too-human desire to avoid blame for mistakes, and some experts say NHTSA should have known to drain the Volt battery after the crash test.

Absent smoking gun evidence, it is not possible to prove that political considerations account for NHTSA’s six-month silence. On the other hand, there is a simple way for Administrator Strickland to prove that political considerations were not a factor: Produce documents dated well prior to the Bloomberg story discussing when and how NHTSA planned to share the information with the public. If such documents exist, Strickland did not mention them at the hearing.

† During MYs 2017-2021, emissions from grid-based power used to recharge an electric vehicle will not be counted when assessing its compliance with EPA’s CO2 standards, and each plug-in vehicle sold will count as more than one car when calculating the manufacturer’s fleet-wide average fuel economy.

‡ Strickland, along with EPA officials Gina McCarthy and Margo Oge, denied that motor vehicle greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards are ”related to” fuel economy standards. They surely know better. CO2 constitutes 94.9% of all GHGs emitted by motor vehicles, and “there is a single pool of technologies . . . that reduce fuel consumption and thereby CO2 emissions as well” (EPA/NHTSA Tailpipe Rule, pp. pp. 25424, 25327). Motor vehicle GHG standards are, thus, strongly “related to” fuel economy standards. Strickland, McCarthy, and Oge had to deny this because otherwise they would have to admit (1) that EPA’s grant of a waiver allowing California to regulate motor vehicle GHG emissions conflicts with the Energy Policy Conservation Act’s express preemption of state laws or regulations “related to” fuel economy, and (2) that EPA is implicitly prescribing fuel economy standards, even though the Clean Air Act grants the agency no such power. 

Recently, I blogged about EPA’s big mercury lie. In a nutshell, the Agency claims that its ultra-expensive new Mercury and Air Toxics rule is appropriate and necessary in order to protect fetuses from developmental disorders. Yet, according to EPA’s own analysis, the new mercury regulation serves to protect America’s supposed population of pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, who eat 300 pounds of self-caught fish reeled in exclusively from the most polluted bodies of water. To put it another way, this regulation, which costs $10 billion annually, safeguards a population that doesn’t exist.

Already, this ridiculous regulation is killing jobs. Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. last Thursday announced that it would retire six coal-fired power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland, in order to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule. According to the company, 530 employees will be affected. While FirstEnergy stressed that some workers would be relocated, it is certain that many will lose their jobs.

In the proposed Mercury and Air Toxics rule, EPA has the gumption to claim that the regulation would be a net job creator (see 76 FR 25076). EPA acknowledges that the mercury rule would eliminate jobs at coal-fired power plants, but the Agency believes that more jobs would be created in the emissions control industry. In light of the purposelessness of the Mercury and Air Toxics rule, EPA’s claim that the regulation is a job creator is like saying that it is good economic policy to blow open a hole in the earth with dynamite and then pay people to fill it back in.

President Barack Obama spoke up for the economic interests of the little guy in his State of the Union speech to Congress on January 24th.  On January 26th, the President spoke in Las Vegas about using taxpayer dollars to improve the economic well-being on one of those little guys in particular—Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens.  He urged voters to support the Pickens Payoff Plan (officially titled the NAT GAS Act), a bipartisan bill sponsored in the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and in the House by Representative John Sullivan (R-Okla.).

The bill, H. R. 1380 in the House and S. 1863 in the Senate, would provide huge new subsidies to buyers and users of heavy duty trucks that use natural gas.  Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels, which builds and runs natural gas service stations.  He also has major investments in a number of companies in the natural gas industry.  The value of these investments would probably increase by several billion dollars if the bill were enacted.

However, Pickens has been clear that he has spent $100 million “of his own money” to promote the Pickens Your Pocket legislation only out of love for his country.  “I’m sure not doing this for the money,” he told the New York Times last May.

Another little guy who would do well if this Boonedoggle becomes law is billionaire George Soros, who has recently invested heavily in a company that builds natural gas-powered trucks, according to a story in Big Government. This makes President Obama’s concern for the little guy truly bipartisan.  Pickens is one of the biggest donors to Republican candidates, while Soros is the biggest donor to left-wing groups.

One heartwarming aspect of this story has just come to light.  It seems that the White House doors are always wide open for visits by the little guys.  Politico reports that Pickens has visited the White House seven times since Obama became president. He was also a frequent visitor during the Bush years.

The Boonedoggle bill was introduced in the House last April and quickly gained 186 co-sponsors, including around 80 Republicans.   A number of free market and conservative groups sent a joint letter to Congress opposing the bill, which has convinced 19 Republicans to withdraw as co-sponsors.  This means that the Pickens Payoff Plan has very little chance of passing the House as a separate bill.  However, President Obama’s support could improve the chances that Senator Reid will be able to include it as a provision in a larger bill.  The most likely candidate is the bill extending a wide variety of other business tax breaks that will probably be taken up in the next month or two.

The Pickens Payoff Plan is just one of many brazen attempts to pick the pockets of American taxpayers.  Many similar schemes have been enacted that benefit corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, wind power, solar power, electric and hybrid vehicles, and a number of agricultural commodities.  What’s odd about President Obama signing on to this particular Boonedoggle now is that natural gas prices are now so low that no taxpayer subsidies are needed to encourage the switch from diesel to natural gas trucks.  Big companies are investing billions of dollars of their own money to build natural gas trucks and the infrastructure needed to fuel them.  Natural gas cars are probably only a few years away, as well.  It already makes economic sense, and therefore it is already starting to happen.

So much for consensus.

For years, climate change cultists have attempted to shut down public discourse over global warming by assuring us that “the debate is over,” that scientists are in lockstep agreement that Man is steam-frying his own planet.

That was always bunk, of course.  For one, if the scientific debate was really over, no one would have to say it.  There just wouldn’t be any debate.  No one these days goes around saying “the debate is over” about heliocentrism.  That’s because no one questions the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun – there is literally no debate.

Second, the fact that it was so often politicians and/or celebrities (or a bizarre hybrid of the two like Al Gore) intoning the “debate is over” canard, instead of actual scientists, was a major clue that something was amiss with the “consensus” claim.

(The Washington Post famously reported on Gore’s scientific acumen: “For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6…and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”)

Sadly for Gore et al, a growing number of scientists are publically expressing skepticism about anthropogenic global warming, emboldened by a flood of new data that casts doubt on the whole “climate change” paradigm (I address some of this new data in my latest piece for the Washington Examiner).

Just last September,  Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, resigned from the  American Physical Society (APS) over that organization’s climate change orthodoxy.  In his resignation letter to APS, Giaever explained:

“I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:

‘Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

And this week in the Wall Street Journal, a group of sixteen prominent scientists, including physicists, meteorologists and climatologists, come forward to express solidarity with Giaever, writing that:

“…large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.”

So why do so many still cling to the hope of climate change catastrophe?  The scientists offer their own view, again in the Journal:

“Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet.”

The entire piece is an absolutely stunning rebuke to the whole bogus  “consensus” argument.  It is well  worth reading and sharing.  Hopefully it will encourage other scientists who harbor doubts to come forward.  The truth is that this debate is not over:  It’s really only just beginning.

And that’s a good thing.