I have a piece in National Review Online today outlining the fantasy behind Sen. Lindsey Graham’s latest attempt to keep cap-and-trade alive. Here’s the beginning:

After declaring energy cap-and-trade “dead” in the Senate, the Left’s new favorite Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has been working hard to resurrect it under another name. Working with Senators Kerry (D., Mass.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.), along with lobbyists for the major electric utilities (and, err, Big Oil), Senator Graham appears to have come…

Read the full story

Instead of exercising its “judgment,” as required by Sec. 202 of the Clean Air Act, to determine whether greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare, EPA largely deferred to the judgment of an external agency not subject to U.S. data quality and freedom of information laws — the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC developed three lines of evidence for its conclusion that GHG emissions are causing dangerous global warming. The first is based on the IPCC’s understanding of…

Read the full story

While Duke Energy’s Chairman, CEO, and President, James Rogers, spends millions of dollars of his customers’ money lobbying for cap-and-trade on Capitol Hill, the company’s web page for its South Carolina customers is passing along tips on how to handle cold weather.  Shouldn’t Duke Energy be warning its customers how much more they are going to have to pay to Duke Energy in higher electric rates if Congress…

Read the full story

In recent weeks I have penned four columns debunking the smear campaign against Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution of disapproval to stop EPA from dealing itself into a position to make climate and energy policy for the nation — a power Congress never delegated to EPA when it enacted the Clean Air Act.

Climate Politics: When Will the Sanctimony End? (MasterResource.Org, Mar. 2) debunks the calumny that the Murkowski resolution is “polluter-crafted,” and shows that this pejorative accurately applies to the…

Read the full story

Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and Brooke Oberwetter unite to bring you Episode 82 of the LibertyWeek podcast. In addition to our other stories, we cover Christopher Booker’s recent column on how Climategate has produced a perfect storm for the IPCC (segment begins ~10:20 in).

Read the full story

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Read the full story

The Wyoming House and Senate have passed the nation’s first tax on wind energy and sent the bill to Governor Dave Freudenthal.  The Democratic Governor proposed the new tax to the Republican-dominated legislature last month and so is almost certain to sign the bill into law.

The new excise tax of one dollar per megawatt hour will begin in 2012 and will apply  to windmills that have been generating electricity for three years or more.  Revenues are to be split 60-40 between…

Read the full story

It’s not clear what Al Gore has been doing the past three months since the Climategate scientific fraud scandal broke–perhaps doing a bit of interplanetary travel or hanging out in a remote cave discussing how to de-industrialize America with his fellow global warming alarmist, Osama bin Laden.  No matter, Gore has returned to his global warming crusade with an op-ed in the Sunday New York Times.  And what an op-ed!   “We can’t wish away climate change” is 1896 words, or about…

Read the full story

I am posting Benchmarking US Air Emissions (2006), a joint report by Ceres, NRDC, and PSEG, because it apparently is no longer available on the Internet, and it contains research relevant to the climate policy debate. For example, many of the nation’s biggest CO2 emitters (e.g. American Electric Power) are also leading advocates of cap-and-trade. Does this make Waxman-Markey a “polluter-crafted” bill, and recipients of AEP campaign contributions “polluter-funded” politicians? Yes, if you apply green “logic” without fear or favor.

Read the full story

In today’s Financial Times, noted trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati strays again into the climate change debate - and he doesn’t apply his usually sharp analysis of some unintended consequences of his proposed government actions.

Bhagwati rightly rejects the Copenhagen approach to restricting carbon emissions, but then offers the World Trade Organization model to control both “stock” - previous emissions - and “flow” - ongoing ones.  He sees the WTO’s challenge and dispute settlement mechanism as a way to hold countries “feet to…

Read the full story