Blog

Salazar’s New Order Contradicts His 2010 Order

by Marita Noon on November 8, 2011

in Blog

Post image for Salazar’s New Order Contradicts His 2010 Order

Weeks after the infamous BP oil spill in late-April 2010, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency that managed leasing and regulation, was split up into three parts.

Addressing the reorganization, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, said: “We will be able to strengthen oversight of the companies that develop our nation’s energy resources.” He addressed a perceived conflict of interest between departments due to the leasing and regulatory functions being in one agency—one brings in revenue and one regulates (and perhaps punishes) the businesses generating the income.

His mid-May 2010 actions bring his new Secretarial Order to reorganize a different agency into question.

[click to continue…]

This Week in the Congress

by Myron Ebell on November 6, 2011

in Blog

Post image for This Week in the Congress

Sen. Rand Paul Files for Vote to Overturn Cross-State Air Pollution Rule

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has filed a resolution under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to disapprove the Environmental Protection Agency’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR).  A vote on the Senate floor could come as early as 9th or 10th November. The CSAPR has come under intense criticism from a number of States and several major electric utilities.  EPA has responded by proposing some limited modifications.

Under CRA rules, once thirty Senators have sponsored a resolution of disapproval, it can be brought to the floor at any time even if the Majority Leader opposes doing so, no amendments are in order, a final vote cannot be blocked by procedural maneuvers, and passage requires only a simple majority rather than the 60 votes usually required.

If the Senate passes the resolution, which seems possible but unlikely, the House will probably schedule a vote within a few days.  The House has already voted for a rider to delay the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.  If both chambers pass the resolution, then it will be up to President Obama to sign or veto it.

[click to continue…]

Auto Dealers Rebut “Concerned” Scientists

by Marlo Lewis on November 4, 2011

in Blog, Features

Post image for Auto Dealers Rebut “Concerned” Scientists

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and seven other green groups sent the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) a letter (dated October 19) criticizing NADA’s opposition to President Obama’s plan to increase new-car fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by Model Year (MY) 2025.

The UCS letter parrots the administration’s claims about the many wonderful benefits more stringent fuel economy standards will achieve during MYs 2017-2025. In a letter dated November 2, NADA points out that the claimed benefits depend on assumptions, such as future gasoline prices and, most importantly, whether consumers will want to buy the cars auto makers are forced to produce.

The UCS letter neglects to mention that, according to the administration’s own estimates, the MY 2025 standard would add at least $3,100 to the average cost of a new vehicle. NADA also notes other likely consumer impacts:

  • Vehicles that currently cost $15,000 and less effectively regulated out of existence.
  • Weight reductions of 15%-25%, with potential adverse effects on vehicle safety in collisions.
  • 25% to 66% of the fleet required to be hybrid or electric, even though hybrids today account for only 2-3% of new vehicle sales.

The “concerned” scientists also completely ignore NADA’s critique of the legal basis of Obama’s fuel economy agenda. [click to continue…]

Keystone XL Pipeline: Alleged Conflict of Interest Much Ado about Nothing?

by Marlo Lewis on November 2, 2011

in Blog, Features

Post image for Keystone XL Pipeline: Alleged Conflict of Interest Much Ado about Nothing?

Blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline — the $7 billion, 1,700-mile project that could create 20,000 construction jobs and eventually transport 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil from friendly, stable, democratic Canada to hubs in Oklahoma and Texas — has become the environmental movement’s top agenda item.

This is not surprising, because Canada’s booming oil sands industry demolishes two popular narratives of green ideology — the claim that oil is a dwindling resource from which we must rapidly decouple our economy before supplies run out, and the notion that most of the money we spend on gasoline ends up in the coffers of unsavory regimes like Saudi Arabia. In reality, more than half of all the oil we consume is produced in the USA, and we get more than twice as much oil from Canada as from Saudi Arabia.

Much of the anti-Keystone agitation is vintage ’60s stuff. In late August, during a weeks-long protest rally outside the White House, 800 demonstrators (including celebrities Margot Kidder and Daryl Hannah) were handcuffed and bused to local police stations. In late September, more than 100 demonstrators were arrested trying to enter Canada’s House of Commons. In October, 1,000 protesters showed up outside President Obama’s $5,000-a-head fundraiser in San Francisco, and organizers claim 6,000 demonstrators will encircle the White House on Sunday, Nov. 6.

Meanwhile, oil bashers on Capitol Hill are engaging in some political theater of their own. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), two other senators, and 11 congressmen requested that the State Department’s inspector general (IG) investigate an apparent conflict of interest in the preparation of State’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Sanders et al. point out that Cardno/Entrix, the firm State commissioned to conduct the EIS, listed TransCanada, the corportion proposing to build the pipeline, as a “major client.” This “financial relationship,” they suggest, could lead Cardno/Entrix to low-ball the project’s environmental risks. They even insinuate that Cardno/Entrix may have understated oil spill risk just so it could later get paid by TransCanada to clean up the mess.

Earlier this week, State responded to Sanders et al. As far as I can see, there’s no there, there.

[click to continue…]

College Students: Check Yourself Before You Wreck the Economy

by Jackie Moreau on November 2, 2011

in Blog, Features

Post image for College Students: Check Yourself Before You Wreck the Economy

College students enticed by the environmental activist movement should give serious consideration to the consequences of their actions before jumping on this bandwagon.  This unsettling epiphany came to me as I read EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s recent remarks condemning the coal industry at a Sierra Club-hosted event at Howard University.  Her speech incited students to join the green ranks of the Sierra Student Coalition’s “Campuses Beyond Coal” initiative, which aims to eliminate campus-owned coal plants in a move to go “beyond coal” and onto “100% clean energy solutions.”  Whether students recognize it or not, they do not live in a bubble and their university is not isolated from the community in which it is embedded.  Students who support this cause must be held accountable for destroying the livelihoods of working people of that community and the economic opportunity for future generations that industries like the coal industry afford.

[click to continue…]

Matt Ridley on Climate Change, Scientific Heresy

by Brian McGraw on November 2, 2011

in Blog, Features

Post image for Matt Ridley on Climate Change, Scientific Heresy

Matt Ridley, a prolific author (among many other professional accomplishments) recently name-checked by Bill Clinton as one of the “smartest, most penetrative thinkers” remains one of the highest profile skeptics toward the likelihood of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Last week he delivered the 2011 Angus Millar Lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in Edinburgh. The title of his talk was “Scientific Heresy,” and it detailed extensively why he remains skeptical on this issue. You can read the entire text of the talk here. A PDF with accompanying graphs and charts is here.

Here are a few excerpts, though the speech in its entirety should not be missed if you follow this debate:

Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.

Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a “denier”. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists “believe” in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word “believe” about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing. [click to continue…]

Green Special Interests Launch Another Sleazy Attack Ad

by William Yeatman on November 1, 2011

in Blog

Post image for Green Special Interests Launch Another Sleazy Attack Ad

As I’ve noted before, environmentalist special interests run the sleaziest attack ads in the business.

Until very recently, MoveOn.org held the dubious honor of having produced the vilest enviro attack ad. In early 2010, the far-left political advocacy group ran a television spot insinuating that three Members of the Senate (including two Democrats who are also mothers) were forcing cigarettes upon pregnant women. Their crime was to have voted to rein in the EPA’s global warming power grab.

Move On was knocked off its perch upon the sleaze heap on October 12, when Environment Ohio issued an ad suggesting that Rep. Steve Stivers (Ohio) FED A BABY WITH A GERBER JAR FULL OF MERCURY. I’m not kidding! See for yourself.
[click to continue…]

Permitting Access to Domestic Resources Creates Jobs

by Marita Noon on November 1, 2011

in Blog

Post image for Permitting Access to Domestic Resources Creates Jobs

Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the country and is one of the worst in foreclosures. “In my district,” Nevada Assemblyman Hansen reports, “one in seventeen houses is in foreclosure. One in eight is vacant. The people are economically desperate. Meanwhile we have an industry that would love to open up mines and create jobs with an average salary of $80,000. Unfortunately we also have a government that takes ten years to permit a mine.”

No wonder 77% of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.

[click to continue…]

Is Flood Magnitude in the USA Correlated with Global CO2 Levels?

by Marlo Lewis on October 31, 2011

in Features

Post image for Is Flood Magnitude in the USA Correlated with Global CO2 Levels?

No — or, more precisely, not  yet — conclude R.M. Hirsch and K.R. Ryberg of the U.S. Geological Survey in a recent study published in Hydrological Sciences Journal.

“One of the anticipated hydrological impacts of increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is an increase in the magnitude of floods,” note Hirsch and Ryberg. Righto! Google “global warming” and “flood predictions,” and you’ll find more than 2.7 million sites where this hypothesis is affirmed or at least discussed. The researchers explain:

Greenhouse gases change the energy balance of the atmosphere and lead to atmospheric warming, which increases the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere, which in turn, potentially changes the amount of precipitable water.

Sounds plausible, but all weather is local or regional, and a lot more goes into making weather than average global temperature.  In addition, all flooding is local or regional, and a lot more goes into determining flood risk than local or regional weather patterns.

As Hirsch and Ryberg point out, “human influences associated with large numbers of very small impoundments and changes in land use also could play a role in changing flood magnitude,” and “at time scales on the order of a century it is difficult to make a quantitative assessment of the changes in these factors over time.”

That, however, did not stop good ol’ Al Gore from claiming that global warming is responsible for a decade-by-decade increase in the number of large floods around the world (An Inconvenient Truth, p. 106). Gore’s source was a chart from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (Figure 16.5, p. 448): [click to continue…]

The Consequences of our Biofuel Policy

by Brian McGraw on October 31, 2011

in Blog

Post image for The Consequences of our Biofuel Policy

Dave Juday, a commodity analyst writing in The Weekly Standard, has a long essay covering the largely negative consequences of our nation’s ethanol policy. He covers many of the familiar arguments, such as rising food costs and the ongoing nonexistence of cellulosic ethanol, but also many topics less often covered by the media, such as the clever ability of corporations to take advantage of these subsidies in ways that were not intended:

For a time, the $1 tax credit provided a huge incentive to import soy oil from South America, blend it with a small amount of petroleum diesel to claim the U.S. tax credit​—​the blending often occurred while the tanker ship was still in port​—​and then re-export the blended fuel to Europe to further capture EU subsidies. That little scheme was known as “splash and dash,” and it was a $300 million subsidy to promote domestic biofuel use that did not in fact subsidize biodiesel use in the United States.

Consider the absurdity of splash and dash at its height: According to the Department of Energy, in 2008 the United States produced 678 million gallons of biodiesel and exported 677 million gallons. We imported 315 million gallons, and domestic U.S. consumption was 316 million gallons. That particular stratagem ended in 2009, but exports haven’t. Despite not meeting the mandated minimum for domestic biodiesel use last year, more than a third of the biodiesel produced in this country was exported in 2010. [click to continue…]

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →