‘Clean-tech’ advocates depict China as a model for U.S. policymakers, because Beijing subsidizes the manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles.
In February, China announced plans to manufacture 1 million electric vehicles by 2015. To make green cars affordable, Beijing would pay automakers to cut the price of a battery car by $8,785 and a plug-in hybrid by $7,320. Of course, the announcement did not mention that millions of Chinese people who are still too poor to own cars would be taxed for the benefit of their wealthier brethren.
Not to be outdone by this visionary plan, President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, also called for incentives to put 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
Neither prognostication is likely to come true.
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Coming out of The New York Times of all places, “Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises.” Unsurprisingly, it has the green groups riled up.
A study released in July by the non-partisan Brookings Institution found clean-technology jobs accounted for just 2 percent of employment nationwide and only slightly more — 2.2 percent — in Silicon Valley. Rather than adding jobs, the study found, the sector actually lost 492 positions from 2003 to 2010 in the South Bay, where the unemployment rate in June was 10.5 percent.
Federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed, government records show. Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.
The weatherization program was initially delayed for seven months while the federal Department of Labor determined prevailing wage standards for the industry. Even after that issue was resolved, the program never really caught on as homeowners balked at the upfront costs.
(Note that it took seven months, as in 210 days or almost 60% of a year, to figure out wage standards for an industry. Good enough for government work.)
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While campaigning for the Presidency, then-Senator Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that he would “bankrupt” the coal industry. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency busily endeavors to fulfill the President’s pledge by imposing unnecessary regulations that are virtually impossible for coal-fired power plants to achieve.
Consider the Utility MACT rule, which seeks to cut US power plants’ emissions of mercury from 29 tons a year to just five. Yet EPA itself estimates that cutting even as much as 41 tons out of total emissions of 105 tons “is unlikely to substantially affect total risk.” In order to achieve these non-existent benefits, the EPA set emissions thresholds that no power plant currently meets.
Then there’s the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. Texas was excluded from the proposed rule. In the final rule, however, Texas was included, due to the supposed need to slightly reduce emissions as monitored 500 miles away in Madison County, Ill.—a locale that meets the EPA air-quality standards in question. The EPA ordered the Lone Star State to reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions 47 % within 6 months, despite the fact that it takes 3 years to install sulfur “scrubber” retrofits on coal-fired power plants.
Already, the electricity industry is sounding the alarm that the regulatory burden is going to take a big toll on power production. Earlier this month, Southern Power, the largest American utility, reported that the EPA’s proposed regulations would necessitate the closing of 4,000 megawatts of coal-fired power, and also $10 to $18 billion for new emissions reductions equipment. In June, American Electric Power, the third largest utility, announced that its plan to comply with pending air quality regulations would shutter 6,000 megawatts of coal power, and spend $6 billion to $8 billion on emissions controls.
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There is a regional dichotomy to the Environmental Protection Agency’s war on coal demand. East of the Mississippi River, the EPA is cracking down on coal using the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. Thanks to lower population density, an abundance of low sulfur coal, and newer plant stock, most states west of the Mississippi are not subject to this regulation.
In order to target western coal, the Environmental Protection Agency is leveraging a long ignored provision of the Clean Air Act designed to improve visibility, known as the Regional Haze rule. Notably, this is an aesthetic regulation, not a health-based regulation. Another facet of the rule is the unique discretion it affords states. According to the EPA’s 2005 Regional Haze guidelines, “Congress evinced a special concerning with insuring that states would be the decision-makers.” Also in the 2005 guidelines, the EPA established recommended emissions controls to comply with the visibility regulation. These recommendations are known as “presumptive limits.”
In a recent oped for the Albuquerque Journal, I explain how the EPA is abusing the Regional Haze rule to run roughshod over elected officials in New Mexico. Here’s the gist:
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No, I’m not making this up, and it’s not a prank.
“A preemptive strike [by extra-terrestrials] would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI [extra-terrestrial intelligence] because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” write researchers from Pennsylvania State University and NASA* in a study entitled “Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis.”
Science correspondent Ian Sample reviewed the study yesterday in the UK Guardian. A pearl from his article:
“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.
Sample shows these speculations the proper respect by posting this picture at the top of his article:
Clearly, the IPPC climate impact assessments are too “conservative” and global warming poses a bigger threat than scientists previously predicted.
The only point I would add to Sample’s knee-slapper of a review is that the “green alien” scienario made its Hollywood debut in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reeves.
In the original 1951 film, Klaatu and his robot Gort come to Earth to deliver an ultimatum: Mankind must end the nuclear arms race and abandon its warlike ways or Earth will be destroyed. In the remake, Klaatu and Gort come to rescue plant and animal species endangered by global warming and to exterminate mankind as punishment for our fuelish ways. Gort pulverizes our fossil-fueled industrial infrastructure and is on the verge of wiping out humanity when Klaatu, moved by the beauty and purity of heart of astrobiologist Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), dies instead for our sins of emission.
* NASA is apparently taking some heat — or at least some good natured ribbing — for this paper. [click to continue…]
“It’s only fair. That’s the principle I’ll be fighting for during the next phase of this process.” President Obama, August 2, 2011
What if you paid $38,000 to lease a house and were then told you cannot move in until some studies are done to determine if it is safe, but you do not get your money back? Years go by while the landlord is holding your money. That’s not fair!
But this is exactly what the Obama administration has been doing to the oil and gas industry since May of 2010. The same Obama who is crisscrossing the country touting “fair.”
On Friday, a US District Judge, appointed by Obama, decided that the administration wasn’t playing fair.
In October 2010, the Western Energy Alliance (WEA), representing more than 400 independent natural gas and oil producers in the western states, filed a lawsuit against the federal government to force action on oil and gas leases that companies had already paid for. The leases had been purchased at Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lease sales. But because of environmental protests and uncertainty over endangered species, the BLM has a backlog of leases needing additional examination.
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Last week on this site I cautioned skeptics not to jump to conclusions about the Department of Interior’s (DOI’s) suspension of polar bear biologist Charles Monnett, who is also under investigation by the department’s inspector general (IG).
Monnett, you may recall, was lead author of a 2006 study on drowned polar bears that helped turn the bear into an iconic victim of global warming. The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) cited Monnett’s study four times in its Jan. 2007 proposed rule to list Ursus Maritimus as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
Skeptics are supposed to insist on seeing the evidence before making up their minds. I was concerned that some of our brethren were too quick to pronounce Monnett guilty when it was not even clear why he was suspended or on what charges he is being investigated. Claims that the scientific rationale for listing the bear is “melting away” have no basis in any information released by DOI or its IG.
What puzzled me in particular was the fact that a DOI spokesperson asserted the agency’s suspension of Monnett had “nothing to do with scientific integrity,” yet two IG agents interrogating Monnett told him they were investigating “allegations” of “scientific misconduct” having to do with “wrong numbers . . . miscalculations.”
Earlier this week, IG Special Agent David Brown sent Monnett a letter that seems to clear up what the investigation is about — a potential violation of federal conflict-of-interest rules. [click to continue…]
On Monday, I noted that Team Obama plans to set new-car fuel-economy standards for model years (MYs) 2017-2025, a nine-year period, despite the fact that the authorizing statute, the Energy Policy Conservation Act, 49 U.S.C. 32902(b)(3)(B), restricts the setting of fuel-economy standards to “not more than 5 model years.” No matter how hard or long government lawyers squint at the text, 5 does not mean 9. In the words of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the standards proposed for MYs 2022-2025, which reach 54.5 mpg in 2025, are “outside the scope of law.”
Since writing that post, I have learned that Team Obama will try to finesse the legal problem by basing the MYs 2022-2025 fuel economy standards solely on EPA’s authority to set emission standards under CAA Sec. 202. This is Bizarro World jurisprudence.
EPA will be setting de-facto fuel-economy standards, pretending that GHG standards are not fuel-economy standards, but specifying CO2 reduction percentages that the agency avows, and everybody knows, convert directly into percentage increases in fuel economy.
Nobody but the judicial activists who gave us Massachusetts v. EPA can say with a straight face that when Congress enacted CAA Sec. 202, it meant to transfer the power of setting fuel-economy standards from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to EPA. Nor would any non-Bizarro lawyer contend that CAA Sec. 202 authorizes EPA to set fuel economy standards as many years into the future as the agency sees fit, despite EPCA’s explicit limit of “not more than 5 model years.”
Last month the EPA released its proposed 2012 cellulosic ethanol “mandate.” It suggests that there will be somewhere between 3.45-12.9 million gallons of qualifying cellulosic ethanol produced in 2012, though the number will be finalized in November. Note, as discussed previously, the industry has still not produced any qualifying cellulosic ethanol, and the EPA has consistently lowered the ‘mandate’ by over 90% in previous years. (A recently announced cellulosic plant claims it will produce cellulosic ethanol from, wait for it, corn waste. So much for being a bridge fuel to the future).
In comments on the proposed 2012 production volumes, the ethanol industry begged the EPA to use the higher end of the standard:
In contrast, Brooke Coleman, executive director of the Advanced Ethanol Council, urged the EPA to continue its aggressive goals regarding cellulosic biofuels, stating that the agency’s mandated volume directly affects the industry’s ability to produce fuel. “There is this funny thing going here where you guys have to go out and measure capacity, but the numbers you come out with and the amount of capacity that you put into the Federal Register will have a giant effect on how much capacity we actually create,” he said.
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