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Will EPA abide by the stay placed on the agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan last week by the Supreme Court? Or will EPA continue to implement the rule–albeit in the guise of providing assistance to states?

The question is legitimate because the Power Plan itself exposes EPA as a rogue agency. As attorneys David Rivkin and Andrew Grossman explain in the Wall Street Journal:

It’s one thing for a rule to be unlawful—which happens, and rarely merits a stay—but another for it to be lawless. This one was lawless. That is why the court had to act: to reassert the rule of law over an executive who believes himself above it.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy equivocated when explaining the agency’s policy regarding the stay. As my colleague Myron Ebell noted in the Cooler Heads Digest:

She told the House Agriculture Committee during a three-hour grilling that “Nothing is going to be implemented while the stay is in place. It is clearly on hold until it resolves itself through the courts.” But when McCarthy addressed state air regulators, she said that the EPA would work with any State that wanted to keep working on implementing the rule. Several reporters described her attitude in the speech as defiant. 

Here are McCarthy’s exact words, as reported in The Hill:

“Are we going to respect the decision of the Supreme Court? You bet, of course we are,” she said.

“But it doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we’re working on and it doesn’t mean we won’t continue to support any state that voluntarily wants to move forward.”

That doesn’t cut it. The stay requires EPA to cease implementing the Power Plan until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, or the Supreme Court, renders a final decision on litigation to overturn the rule. That process may take years to complete. If, in the interim, EPA supports state efforts to implement the rule, whether by providing advice, technical assistance, coordination, or mere cheer leading, it will itself participate in implementation. Exactly what the stay prohibits. [click to continue…]

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article that not-so-subtly takes the side of 35 Senators and 62 institutional investors who want the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) to force fossil-energy companies to confess their unsustainability in a carbon-constrained world.

It’s the old self-fulfilling prophesy trick. Adopt lawless regulations aimed at bankrupting fossil-energy companies, lock in those regulations through a non-ratified treaty that dare not speak its name, then coerce those companies into scaring away shareholders, and presto, many will in fact go bankrupt. As their numbers and resources decline, so will their ability to defend themselves against further regulatory attack.

Translating into Borg-speak: “Freedom is irrelevant. Constitution is irrelevant. Your economy will adapt to service us.”

But resistance is not futile. Fossil fuels remain the world’s most affordable energy source for poverty eradication. What’s truly unsustainable is the green project to put an energy-starved world on an energy diet.

The Supreme Court just handed Obama and the EPA a major setback. And for all we know at this point, the next President and Congress will thwart EPA’s Power Grab and Obama’s attempt to bypass Senate review of the Paris climate treaty.

I wrote a short letter to the Times on the S.E.C. article. The editor did not publish it, so I will post it here. [click to continue…]

The Supreme Court’s decision to put a stay on EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan took nearly everyone by surprise. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had already scheduled an expedited review of the Power Plan, and, as the New York Times observed, “the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court.”

The stay is a major setback for the global warming movement. The Power Plan is President Obama’s signature domestic climate policy as well as the sheet anchor of his emission-reduction pledge to the United Nations in the Paris climate treaty negotiations. The stay not only puts the Plan on ice pending final resolution of complex litigation on the merits, a process that could take years, it also indicates that five justices have serious doubts about the Plan’s legality.

The usual suspects were quick to condemn the stay as a partisan decision, a product of coal-fired, oil-fueled Republican politics. A typical Orwellian inversion by rank partisans who would never admit, no matter how overwhelming the evidence, that the Power Plan is an unlawful power grab.

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CEI’s discovery in late 2012 of then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s false-identity “Richard Windsor” email account drew a fair amount of attention at the time.  Some media outlets, realizing they may have been getting the runaround from the “most transparent administration, ever” along with the rest of us, set off on broader campaigns to root out other tricks.  A Windsor-inspired AP inquiry prompted headlines like these.

CEI was forced to sue to get the Windsor emails it at first sought.  The first revelations, from just emails with certain “climate”-related keywords, painted a picture of an agency out of control, sweating the policy sheets with media allies and green group lobbyists…the few they hadn’t brought in-house to ply their trade. We then sought all emails on that false-flag account.   EPA said it would slow-walk this second request to the pitiful tune of 100 emails per month, for the next century.  So we sued.

In the meantime, the Windsor affair became notorious while leaving some in the media confused, possibly unsure that this was such a bad thing so long as it was the right kind of administration doing these things.  As recently as last month it was still being twisted by apologists at the Washington Post, whose reportage of yet another investigation sparked by Windsor included pure invention: “The 2012 request by CREW was sparked by the discovery that Lisa Jackson, then-administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, had been using an alias email at work with the name “Richard Windsor,” largely for personal communication.”

There having been a handful of personal-ish emails among the many tens of thousands of responsive pages— which are largely available, specifically set-aside, online — this is simply made up.  In fact this email account was Jackson’s principal account for corresponding with senior EPA officials, other cabinet officers, White House staff, and the odd lobbyist (CEI’s litigation also revealed that Jackson used her actual personal account, with Verizon, used for corresponding with lobbyists from industry and green pressure groups).

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Earlier this week, University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) atmospheric scientist John Christy testified at a House Science Committee hearing on the Paris climate treaty. Christy’s testimony covers several important topics including the “low effectiveness” of surface temperature records for detecting anthropogenic global warming, the “curious” procedure NOAA scientist Tom Karl used in his “pause-busting” adjustment of sea-surface temperatures, the “tiny” impact the Paris Agreement is likely to have on global temperatures, and the insufficient empirical basis for claims that climate conditions are worsening.

Today’s post focuses on Christy’s rebuttal of a Yale Climate Connections video designed to discredit satellite data as a reality check on the models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to forecast global warming and the associated climate impacts.

What’s got the climate establishment in a tizzy is a chart–Figure 1 in Christy’s testimony–that shows a growing divergence between model predictions and observed temperatures in the mid-troposphere (the layer of air from the surface up to 50,000 feet).

Figure 1: Five-year averaged values of annual mean (1979-2015) global bulk (termed “mid-tropospheric” or “MT”) temperature as depicted by the average of 102 IPCC CMIP5 climate models (red), the average of 3 satellite datasets (green – UAH, RSS, NOAA) and 4 balloon datasets (blue, NOAA, UKMet, RICH, RAOBCORE)

Mid-troposphere (MT) data are a valid test of the models’ accuracy because the MT “overlaps with the region of the tropical atmosphere that has the largest anticipated signature of the greenhouse response by bulk mass – between 20,000 and 50,000 feet.”

Christy notes that in science, the test of whether we understand a natural system is whether we are able to predict its behavior. Thus, “If we are unable to make accurate predictions, then at least some of the factors in the system are not well defined or perhaps even missing.” Hind-casting is no substitute for prediction, because complex hypotheses such as climate models can be adjusted to produce results similar to what has already occurred. Yet Figure 1 shows that the models do not “even reproduce the past climate.”

Indeed, the models “clearly overcook the atmosphere,” overshooting observed warming in the MT by 250%. “The issue for congress here is that such demonstrably deficient model projections are being used to make policy.”

The remainder of this post excerpts Christy’s defense of the satellite data and summarizes his rebuttal of a common criticism of Figure 1.

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The Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) released on 29th January a statement and a technical document that leave no doubt that the Paris Agreement is a treaty according to all international criteria that requires depositing  “instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession” by the parties.  President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, and their legal allies in environmental pressure groups may quibble all they want that, although it may be considered a treaty by the United Nations and the entire international community, it’s still just a piece of paper that doesn’t rise to the level of a treaty requiring ratification by the Senate; but they cannot hide the reality that it is a treaty and according to the U. S. Constitution cannot go into force in the U. S. until it has been ratified by the U. S. Senate.

The UNFCC statement, Bringing the Paris Agreement into Force: Next Steps and National Climate Plans, confirms that the treaty will be open for signature from 22nd April 2016 to 21st April 2015.  The press release issued at the end of COP-21 in Paris on 12th December 2015 first shared the good news that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will hold a hold a “high-level signature ceremony” at UN headquarters in New York City on 22nd April, which the press release refers to as “Mother Earth Day.”

The statement also makes clear that signing the treaty does not bind national parties to it.  That only comes after “at least 55 Parties to the Convention accounting for at least an estimated 55% of total global greenhouse gas emissions have deposited their instruments of ratification, acceptance, approval or accession.” [all emphasis mine]  Thus President Obama may sign the treaty at the UN’s big Mother Earth Day celebration, but in order to become a party to the treaty the United States government will have to do something in addition to signing it.

The technical document, The Paris Agreement: Next Steps, makes it clear that the additional action required is ratification.

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It is with great sadness that I report the death of Robert M. Carter on 19th January in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, several days after suffering a heart attack.  He was 74. The Heartland Institute has a tribute by Joe Bast plus tributes from many friends and colleagues. It also has videos of many of Bob’s excellent talks at Heartland International Climate Conferences.  A short, more formal obituary may be found here.

Bob was a fine man, an outstanding scientist, and one of the leading climate realists in Australia and the world.  It was my good fortune to get to know Bob and his wife Anne over the last decade when he came to America to speak at Heartland’s climate conferences.  He was in good form at Heartland’s conference in Paris on 7^th December. I and many, many people around the world have lost a good friend.  The Cooler Heads Coalition has lost an esteemed ally.  May he rest in peace.

Over at Energy in Depth, Steve Everley posts a detailed rebuttal of Stanford professor Mark Jacobson’s widely-cited study, which claims that building a 100% renewable U.S. energy system will more than justify the costs. Even if we care little about the potential climate and air quality benefits, Jacobson and his allies contend, we should demand a rapid transition away from conventional (fossil and nuclear) energy, because that will create millions of jobs.

Everley summarizes the views of other researchers who argue that Jacobson underestimates the cost and feasibility of replacing fossil and nuclear energy with wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable technologies. But he also makes an original contribution to the debate.

Everley shows that according to Jacobson’s own data, transitioning to a 100% renewable energy system by 2050 would destroy more than 3.7 million permanent jobs. That exceeds by more 1.1 million the 2.6 million permanent jobs Jacobson estimates would be created.

Source: Mark Jacobson

The proper goal of economic policy is to foster wealth creation, not job creation. Consider, for example, that replacing mechanized agriculture with subsistence agriculture would create lots of farm labor jobs, but it would also produce lots of poverty, hunger, sickness, and death.

Nonetheless, when renewable-energy advocates claim their agenda is “about jobs,” examining the net employment impacts of their schemes is fair game. See, for example, economist Gabriel Calzada’s study finding that Spain’s renewable energy subsidies destroyed about 2.2 jobs for every 1 job created.

Everley’s entire post is worth reading. Below is a summary in his own words. [click to continue…]

At the Paris climate conference, President Obama got exactly what he wanted: the framework for a multi-decade, global campaign of political pressure directed chiefly against Republicans and their fossil-fuel industry allies.

The Paris Agreement does not directly impose “legally binding” emission-reduction and “climate finance” commitments on the United States. But both conservative gloating and green grousing about the treaty being “toothless” overlook what matters most in climate policy: politics.

Obama will use the Agreement to claim that EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other elements of his climate agenda are promises America has made to the world. The Agreement, moreover, will establish the institutional framework for a global coalition of 190+ foreign leaders, legions of UN bureaucrats, scores of green pressure groups, and hundreds of corporate rent-seekers. The coalition will demand that future Congresses and the next president enact and adopt whatever additional laws and regulations are needed to meet Obama’s emission-reduction pledge — known in bureaucratic parlance as the U.S. “Nationally Determined Contribution” (NDC).

The Agreement contemplates that Parties will submit ever-more “ambitious” NDCs every five years. So the global coalition will be poised to demand that future U.S. NDCs also be turned into laws and regulations. No chains are as binding as those we forge for ourselves!

The Paris pressure cooker is recycled process socialism. There’s an old joke that socialism (spending other people’s money) would be fun if it weren’t for all the committee meetings. Actually, socialist leaders got their jollies at such meetings, which employed a confessional exercise called criticism and self-criticism to cure “false consciousness,” inculcate doctrinal conformity, and enhance understanding of and allegiance to “the plan.”   

The parallel to the Paris regime is striking. The Agreement and accompanying “Decision of the Parties” envision endless rounds of meetings and reports. The incessant bureaucratic activity will facilitate the naming and shaming of Parties who doubt the so-called consensus of scientists, deviate from their five-year plans, or fail to demonstrate the desired climate “ambition.”  [click to continue…]