Amid much fanfare, the Obama administration on August 4th unveiled the “final” Clean Power Plan in a rollout that took place at the White House, before a crowd of environmentalists. To be sure, the rule is popular with the green set; however, it is also hugely controversial, due to the fact that it would subject the entire U.S. electricity *system* to EPA control, whereas before electricity markets were the exclusive preserve of States and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

States thus are faced with a usurpation of their authority, and, accordingly, they are champing at the bit to challenge the rule in court. Moreover, bipartisan majorities in both chambers of Congress are opposed to the EPA’s broad grant of power to itself, and GOP leadership appears to be keen on challenging the regulation using the Congressional Review Act, which allows simple majorities in the House and Senate to pass a legislative check on major agency regulations.

Here’s the thing: States can’t sue, and Congress can’t pass a legislative veto, until the Clean Power Plan is published in the Federal Register.

When the rule was announced, EPA said that the rule would be published in normal course. According to Politico:

“We’ll be publishing as soon as practicable,” EPA spokeswoman Melissa Harrison said in an email, explaining, “Typically publication can take anywhere from two weeks to a month. The bigger the print job, often times, the longer the time between signature and publication.” While EPA wouldn’t give an exact date, it has said it will not delay in publishing the rule, as some had previously speculated.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy seconded this notion, saying that the rule’s publication in the Federal Register would “follow a standard process,” as reported by InsideEPA.

So…in early August, concomitant with the announcement of the pre-publication version of the Clean Power Plan, EPA officials publicly stated that the rule would be published in normal course (“anywhere from two weeks to a month”).

But when late August came around—right about the time EPA said the rule would be published and become final—the agency started singing a new tune. On August 31, the Department of Justice filed a court document, on behalf the EPA, regarding an ongoing effort by 15 States and a coal company to arrest the Clean Power Plan before it goes final. In fact, that controversy hinges on when the Clean Power Plan is published in the Federal Register. And Justice’s August 31 memo spoke to this dispositive matter by claiming that

“Consistent with the Agency’s customary practice, EPA is in the process of conducting a final review [of the rule]…prior to transmitting the rule to the Office of the Federal Register… EPA intends to complete this final review process and transmit the rule to the Federal Register no later than September 4…EPA expects, based on past experience with other large rules, that the final rule will be published in the Federal Register by late October.”

Obviously, Justice’s submission gels poorly with EPA’s prior statements. For starters, EPA claimed the rule would be published around late August. Then, when late August came, EPA claimed the rule would be published in late October—three months after the rule was announced at a White House ceremony, and two months after the agency initially said it would be published. EPA states that the cause of the delay is the agency’s “customary practice” of reviewing a final rule after it has been signed by the administrator, but why weren’t EPA’s top officials aware of this “customary practice” when they said the rule would be ready in a month? Also, doesn’t this customary practice raise the spectre of post hoc rationalizations? [click to continue…]

Post image for What Has the Pause Done to the Warming Rate?

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has a must-read post today on Watts Up With That. “The long and model-unpredicted Great Pause of 18 years 8 months in global mean lower-troposphere temperature as recorded in the RSS satellite monthly dataset is inexorably driving down the longer-run warming rate, when the IPCC’s predictions would have led us to expect an acceleration,” he reports.

Monckton Pause RSS 18 Years 8 Months (Sep 8 2015)

 

 

 

The bright blue line shows the 440-month lower-troposphere temperature trend in the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) record. The green line shows the zero degree warming trend during the 224-month “pause” since December 1997, which, as Monckton notes, is “more than half the entire 440-month record.”

Here’s the cool thing (literally). Thanks to the pause, the trend during the full satellite record works out to just 1.21ºC per century. That is substantially below the IPCC’s central estimate in 1990, which (along with NASA scientist Jim Hansen’s overheated prediction in 1988), put global warming on the political map.

Monckton comments:

In 1990, the IPCC had predicted near-straight-line warming of 1 K to 2025, equivalent to almost 2.8 K/century. Of this warming, more than 0.7 K should have happened by now, but only 0.26 K has actually occurred. The IPCC’s central estimate in 1990, though made on the basis of “substantial confidence” that the models on which it relied had captured all the essential features of the climate system, has proven – thus far, at any rate – to be a near-threefold exaggeration.  

The IPCC knows its models are predicting too much warming. In the graph below, Monckton enlarges the right-hand corner of Figure 10.1(a) from the IPCC’s 2013 Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). CMIP3 is the ensemble of models used in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), CMIP5 is the ensemble used in AR5. Although CMIP5 predicts less warming than CMIP3, it still increasingly diverges from reality.

Monckton IPCC 10.1(a) Enlarged Sep 8 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note also that a 21st century warming of 1.21ºC is well within the bounds (0.3ºC-1.7ºC) of the IPCC’s lowest projection (RCP2.6), which assumes a 70% reduction in cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 to 2100 compared to baseline projections. In short, the RSS data show about the same warming rate that climate campaigners urge policymakers to achieve via draconian restrictions on carbon-based energy.

What is to be done?

[click to continue…]

Post image for Economic Growth Is the Best Climate Insurance Policy

Declining vulnerability to river floods and the global benefits of adaptation” is the cheery title of a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and reviewed this week by Craig Idso on CO2Science.Org. What caught my attention is the study’s rather obvious albeit unstated implications:

  • Richer is safer.
  • Economic growth is the best climate insurance policy.
  • Climate policies that hinder growth would also reduce investments that make our naturally dangerous climate more livable.

The study, by Brenden Jongman of Amsterdam University and five colleagues, examines three factors affecting flood-related deaths and damages around the globe: hazard (the natural frequency and intensity of floods, without human interventions), exposure (the population and assets located in flood-prone areas), and vulnerability (the susceptibility of exposed population and assets to death and damages). The researchers use high-resolution modeling and empirical data to compare changes in hazard and exposure to changes in vulnerability. The metrics for vulnerability are mortality rates (fatalities as a percentage of exposed population) and loss rates (economic damages as a percentage of exposed GDP).

From the abstract:

We find that rising per-capita income coincided with a global decline in vulnerability between 1980 and 2010, which is reflected in decreasing mortality and losses as a share of the people and gross domestic product exposed to inundation. The results also demonstrate that vulnerability levels in low- and high-income countries have been converging, due to a relatively strong trend of vulnerability reduction in developing countries. Finally, we present projections of flood losses and fatalities under 100 individual scenario and model combinations, and three possible global vulnerability scenarios. The projections emphasize that materialized flood risk largely results from human behavior and that future risk increases can be largely contained using effective disaster risk reduction strategies.

India provides a telling example of the power of adaptation to reduce flood-related vulnerability. Two similar tropical cyclones struck eastern India in 1999 (Cyclone 05B) and 2013 (Phailin). “Exposed population was greater in 2013 due to population growth and development in cyclone-prone areas. However, the vulnerability in the region had drastically decreased with the implementation of a disaster management authority; cyclone shelters and early-warning systems ensured that only a small fraction of the population was vulnerable to this event.” As a consequence, “fewer than 50 lives were lost in 2013, whereas the cyclone in 1999 was responsible for more than 10,000 lives lost.” [click to continue…]

This blog repeatedly has stressed the phoniness of President Obama’s climate agenda.To wit:

  • During his 2012 reelection campaign, he conspicuously skirted mention of climate change. Now he calls global warming the most urgent threat in the world today, on par with war and terrorism.
  • During the 2012 debates, candidate Obama tried to outflank Romney’s right on energy policy. That Obama—the one who was trying to get elected—took credit for booming American oil and gas production. Last week, by contrast, 2nd term Obama claimed that Big Oil was conspiring with the Koch brothers to undermine his green goals.

In short, the President cares about climate change only insofar as he desires a legacy for which he has to pay no electoral price. o-tap

That’s the context for the President’s current itinerary. You might be forgiven for thinking the President is still on vacation (see below), but in fact, he’s in the midst of a “two-week global warming messaging sprint,” as described by Politico.; The Washington Examiner calls it a “climate change tour.”

It started in Las Vegas on the 24th of August, with an evening speech to extol a supposed green energy revolution. Then it moved to New Orleans, where the President talked up his administration’s efforts to render the country more resilient in the face of runaway AGW. The final leg of the trip is now unfolding in Alaska, where yesterday he “stare[d] down a melting glacier,” according to the AP, in a scene that evokes Reagan at the Brandenberg Gates (in bizarro world).

But did the President’s staring contest with a giant block of ice inspire Americans to drop everything and fight climate change? After all, that’s the idea behind his trip—to draw attention to the urgency of solving the climate “crisis.” My limited purpose with this post is merely to demonstrate empirically that the President’s PR tour has changed few to zero hearts, due to the simple fact that no one seems to be paying any attention. [click to continue…]

Post image for Obama’s Alaska Trip: Do We Have a Climate Change Problem or a Russia Problem?

 

 

Is the glass half empty or half full? If you listen to climate activists, melting polar ice can only mean trouble, with competition for previously inaccessible resources setting the stage for great power conflict, a return to Cold War tensions, or worse.

Yet, as noted in a previous post, activists also warn that climate change will promote conflict by making resources scarcer. The Arctic contains 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30% of its undiscovered natural gas, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. If Arctic ice melt leads to greater global energy supply, opens the fabled Northwest Passage, and facilitates trade, it could also foster cooperation and peace.

Here’s my two cents. Whatever happens to the polar ice cap in coming decades, nations are more likely to cooperate and resolve disputes peacefully if the United States possesses the capability and will to deter aggression. As factors determining national security risk, potential adversaries’ longstanding geopolitical ambitions and evolving capabilities are likely to matter more than climate change.

The Obama administration, it seems, is worried about Russia’s expanding presence in the Arctic, but wants the public to think we have a climate change problem rather than a Russia problem. Staring down a melting glacier is just so much easier than standing up to Vladimir Putin.

Today is the second day of the President’s three-day trip to Alaska “to shine a spotlight on the impacts of climate change.” As reported in the New York Times by Julie Herschfeld Davis, Obama will “propose speeding the acquisition and building of new Coast Guard icebreakers that can operate year-round in the nation’s polar regions, part of an effort to close the gap between the United States and other nations, especially Russia, in a global competition to gain a foothold in the rapidly changing Arctic.” 

Russia is far ahead of us in ice breakers, and the “gap” is growing:

The aging Coast Guard fleet is not keeping pace with the challenge, the administration acknowledged, noting that the service has the equivalent of just two “fully functional” heavy icebreakers at its disposal, down from seven during World War II. Russia, by contrast, has 41 of the vessels, with plans for 11 more. China unveiled a refurbished icebreaker in 2012 and is building another.  

Russia is also building military bases. Davis quotes Alaska Gov. Bill Walker, who traveled with the President on Air Force One yesterday:

“It’s the biggest buildup of the Russian military since the Cold War,” Mr. Walker said, noting Alaska’s proximity to Russia. “They’re reopening 10 bases and building four more, and they’re all in the Arctic, so here we are in the middle of the pond, feeling a little bit uncomfortable.”

Constructing new ice breakers and “evaluating the feasibility” of extending the port in Nome, Alaska, don’t seem like much of a strategy to counter the Russian military buildup, and the White House is not describing them as such.

The map below, from an Aug. 31 NYT article by Stephen Lee Meyers, shows the Arctic areas with a >50% chance of large undiscovered oil and gas reserves, each country’s exclusive economic zone, international waters (“high seas”), and Arctic waters under Russian control.

Arctic Exclusive Economic Zones

 

 

 

 

 

Portions of the region are still in dispute, Wikipedia reports:

Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States all regard parts of the Arctic seas as national waters (territorial waters out to 12 nautical miles (22 km)) or internal waters. There also are disputes regarding what passages constitute international seaways and rights to passage along them.

Russia, for example, views the Northern Sea Route (NSR) stretching from the Bering Sea to the North Atlantic “as internal waters, and thus subject to transit fees, while the international community views the NSR as an international passage,” note Heather Conley and Carolyn Rohloff of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Meyers of the NYT paints a vivid picture of “Russia’s scramble for the Arctic.” [click to continue…]

Post image for Clean Energy Incentive Program: New Unlawful Element in EPA’s Power Plant Rule?

 

 

EPA’s recently finalized Clean Power Plan (CPP) contains a key policy initiative not discussed or even mentioned in the proposed rule: the Clean Energy Incentive Program (CEIP). Through the CEIP, EPA will award extra emission allowances and emission rate credits to states that “act early” to increase generation from wind and solar power and/or reduce electricity demand via energy-efficiency measures. By “early,” EPA means before the 2022-2030 CPP compliance period.

You might suppose EPA would explain the legal authority for a substantive policy change affecting potentially hundreds of regulated entities, but there appears to be no discussion of the CEIP’s statutory basis in either the final rule, the CEIP fact sheet, or EPA’s proposed “backstop” Federal Plan.

What accounts for this curious omission? Does EPA not explain the legal basis for the CEIP because it can’t?

In the climate policy debates of the late 1990s and early 2000s, “credit for early action” was an issue of recurring controversy. What most policymakers, interest groups, and activists eventually acknowledged is that current law does not authorize any federal agency to award regulatory credits for “early” or “voluntary” reductions of greenhouse gases. Ironically, some of today’s most aggressive CPP advocates helped forge the ‘consensus’ that federal agencies lack statutory authority to implement an early action credit program. [click to continue…]

imagine damage agency could do to grid

imagine the damage EPA could do to the electric grid

The irony with the Gold King Mine spill may be thicker than the toxic waste.  The same EPA, that apparently didn’t know what happens when you blow a hole in a dam, claims clairvoyance when it comes to predicting the future climate.  Three centuries into the future. And not just big-picture stuff.  For instance they have calculated the dollar impact your current microwave oven’s digital display will have on climate for every year until 2300 (this is not a joke).

However bad will be the impact of the Gold King Mine spill on the Colorado watershed, and on those who live near and depend on that water, the overall impact of the spill will be small compared to the damage that will be done by EPA’s affordable-energy-killing CO2 rule finalized recently.

Acting on their pretend knowledge of the future, the EPA issued the final version of the Clean Power Plan (CPP). The plan targets CO2 emissions but its supporters do a lot of hand waving to make people think CO2 is dirty.  It isn’t.  Carbon dioxide is colorless, odorless, and non-toxic.  Without CO2 there would be no green plants.  That’s right, Simba, without CO2 there would be no circle of life.  CO2 is also a necessary byproduct of getting energy from hydrocarbon fuels like natural gas, coal, and petroleum.

Natural gas and coal provide two-thirds of the electric power generated in the U.S. (petroleum is a non-player in power generation, accounting for about 1 percent of generation).  And there’s the rub.  In the U.S we have centuries of coal and gas reserves, but the CPP forces us to turn away from these most abundant, affordable, and reliable sources of electric power.  Taking a fuel like coal off the menu will only drive up the price of electricity and generate economic ripple effects that will cut income and destroy jobs.

[click to continue…]

Post image for Keystone XL Review Five Times Longer than Average — AP

 

“The federal review of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas has dragged on for nearly seven years, more than five times the average for such applications,” Josh Lederman of the Associated Press reports.

“The White House insists it’s simply following a standard and well-established process,” but AP’s analysis of data from the Federal Register, State Department records, congressional correspondence, Congressional Research Service reports, and pipeline owners suggests otherwise:

Under a George W. Bush-era executive order, oil pipelines crossing U.S. borders require a presidential permit, setting off a government-wide review coordinated by the State Department.

An Associated Press examination of every cross-border pipeline application since 2004, when Bush revised the process, shows that the Keystone review has been anything but ordinary.

Since April 2004, when Bush signed his order, the government has taken an average of 478 days — less than a year and a half — to approve or reject all other applications. TransCanada has waited nearly seven years for a ruling.

Moreover, former Bush White House officials who worked on the executive order say the State Department-coordinated process was intended to expedite approval of cross-border pipelines, not delay it:

Approving a pipeline permit “was seen as the most routine, boring thing in the world,” [said] Robert McNally, who was an energy adviser to Bush.

Here’s how the process is supposed to work:

Under Bush’s executive order, the State Department receives permit applications and circulates them to agencies such as the Commerce Department, Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. The agencies have 90 days to offer opinions. If the State Department decides to grant approval, it notifies other agencies, which have 15 days to object before a permit is issued.

Yet:

More than 16 months have passed since the State Department’s 30-day public comment period ended. The State Department has not disclosed whether any agencies have objected to the pipeline. The department has said it is continuing to review the application “in a rigorous, transparent, and objective manner.” [click to continue…]

On Tuesday, August 11, the EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy, will present a talk entitled “The Promise of the Clean Power Plan” at a Resources for the Future Policy Leadership Forum at 12:15 pm at the RFF auditorium at 1616 P Street, NW, Washington, DC.  Regarding the talk, former EPA official Alan Carlin has prepared the following handout on behalf of  the Cooler Heads Coalition:

You are unlikely to hear today why the EPA so-called “Clean Power Plan” (CPP) needs to be rescinded, so this is an alternative view for your consideration concerning the Plan:  [click to continue…]

Post image for Gasoline or Ethanol: Which Is More Polluting?

 

 

Adding ethanol to gasoline makes it cleaner and reduces air pollution, right? So biofuel lobbyists would have us believe. However, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) comes to the opposite conclusion.

Lead author Jason Hill of the University of Minnesota Department of Bioproducts and Biosystem Engineering summarized key findings of the study at a recent House Science Committee hearing. To determine which is cleaner, gasoline or ethanol, researchers must “compare these fuels over their full life cycle.” Hill explains:

That is, we need to consider the damage caused by producing them in addition to using them. For gasoline, the life cycle includes extracting and refining crude oil, and distributing and combusting the gasoline itself. The life cycle of corn ethanol includes growing and fermenting grain, and distilling, distributing, and combusting the ethanol itself.

Although combustion emissions from ethanol are lower than those of gasoline, production emissions from ethanol are higher. So much so that on a life-cycle basis, ethanol is the larger source of five different air pollutants: primary fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen oxides (NOx), amonia (NH3), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and sulfur oxides (SOx).

Ethanol vs Gasoline, Jason Hill, House Science, July 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those results are an additional reason EPA should resist pressure from biofuel lobbyists to increase Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) blending targets for 2014-2016. As Hill cautions: [click to continue…]