The House of Representatives took the first step on Thursday toward reclaiming its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The Energy and Power (yes, that really is its name) Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee marked up and passed H. R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, which is sponsored by Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.). H. R. 910 would pre-empt EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act unless and until explicitly authorized to do so by Congress.

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EPA Reform Bill Clears First Hurdle

by William Yeatman on March 11, 2011

in Blog, Features

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Yesterday morning, the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee met to mark up H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, but the results was a foregone conclusion. As they say in poker, Republicans had the “nuts.” The legislation, which would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, was co-written by Committee Chair Fred Upton (MI), and it enjoyed the support of all the Rs on the panel. Subcommittee Chair Ed Whitfield (KY) didn’t even bother with a roll call, and the Democrats on the panel didn’t object, so the bill passed by a voice vote alone.

Indeed, the only mystery to yesterday’s vote was whether any of the Subcommittee Democrats would side with the majority party. Already, senior House Democrats Colin Peterson (MN) and Nick Rahall (WV) have sponsored H.R. 910. The most likely Democratic defection, heading into yesterday’s markup, was Utah Rep. Tim Matheson, but he stayed in lock step with his party.

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Climategate Showdown!

by William Yeatman on March 10, 2011

in Blog

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, my colleague Chris Horner and “hockey stick” fabricator Michael Mann are engaged in a highly charged debate on Climategate.

It started with this post by Horner at the Daily Caller. The intro aptly sums his argument:

A federal government inspector general has revealed prima facie proof that the so-called independent inquiries widely if implausibly described as clearing the ClimateGate principals of wrongdoing were, in fact, whitewashes. This has been confirmed to Senate offices. It will not be released to the public for some time because the investigation is ongoing.

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(the fine print) OF THE SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION!!!

by William Yeatman on March 10, 2011

in Blog, Features

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Perhaps you’ve heard about how we’re in the midst of earth’s sixth mass extinction?

According to a recent peer-reviewed study in the preeminent science journal Nature, mankind’s accumulated, deleterious impact on the global environment is reaching a “tipping point,” after which species extirpation will accelerate to a full blown mass extinction, of the sort caused in times past by meteor strikes.

That’s a scary thesis, but the authors offered a message of hope. More precisely, they offered a policy prescription. In order to avoid this mass extinction “tipping point,” mankind must stop habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and global warming. That is, we must stop economic development, which is the “cause” of these supposed “problems.”

Does the underlying science warrant such extreme ends? Not according to Science 2.0’s Hank Campbell. In this excellent analysis, Mr. Campbell eviscerates the study. As he notes,

Taking a few extinct mammal species that we know about and then extrapolating that out to be extinction hysteria right now if we don’t do something about global warming is not good science. Worse, an integrative biologist is saying evolution does not happen. Polar bears did not exist forever, they came into existence 150,000 years ago—because of the Ice Age.

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Another Black Mark against the DOE’s Green Bank

by William Yeatman on March 9, 2011

in Blog, Features

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As I describe elsewhere (here, here, and here), the Department of Energy’s green bank is one of the worst government programs, ever.

For starters, financing is well outside of the DOE’s core competency, so there’s no reason to expect that it could start a successful banking operation from scratch. There’s also the fact that government has a horrid record picking energy ventures in which to invest taxpayer money. As such, the odds of the green bank failing were high when it was created by the 2005 Energy Policy Act.

During the whole of the program’s existence, evidence has mounted confirming that the green bank is a bad idea. The Government Accountability Office, the top federal watchdog, has issued three separate reports raising serious doubts about the DOE’s management of the program. These suspicions were validated when the DOE first loan guarantee, for $535 million, went to a California solar power company, Solyndra, that now teeters on the brink of insolvency.

Unfortunately for taxpayers, it gets worse, because the results of a recent investigation suggest that the green bank lacks transparency. Last week, the DOE’s Office of the Inspector General published a report finding that the green bank program “could not always readily demonstrate, through systematically organized records, including contemporaneous notes, how it resolved or mitigated relevant risks prior to initiating loan guarantees.” According to the report (available here), 15 loan guarantees (out of 18 total) lacked “pivotal” information regarding risk ratings.

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On Energy and Environment, Center Moves Away from Waxman et al.

by William Yeatman on March 9, 2011

in Blog, Features

Post image for On Energy and Environment, Center Moves Away from Waxman et al.

There wasn’t much to report from yesterday’s climate change science hearing before the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Generally speaking, Republican lawmakers used the entirety of their allotted time to question the scientists they had invited, and Democratic lawmakers did likewise. Click here for opening statements, and also for an archived podcast of the hearing.

Truth be told, the hearing’s pedigree is more interesting than the hearing was. Last week, the same subcommittee held a hearing on pending EPA regulations for greenhouse gases, in order to inform the debate on H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, legislation that would check the EPA’s authority to enact climate policy under the Clean Air Act. During these hearings, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), who is a master parliamentarian, leveraged an obscure procedural rule to demand a hearing of the minority party’s choosing. Subcommittee Chair Rep. Ed Whitfield, in an act of Congressional comity, granted the request. Ergo, yesterday’s “dueling science” hearing.

There was one notable element to yesterday’s action: The extent to which the center is moving away from the Democratic leadership on energy and environment policy. Rather feebly, Rep. Waxman concluded by asking that the majority party agree to postpone tomorrow’s scheduled mark up of H.R. 910…until Tuesday. It was a weak negotiating tactic.

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Waxman’s Latest Talking Point Is Wrong

by William Yeatman on March 8, 2011

in Blog, Features

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Jean Chemnick at Energy & Environment News this morning reported on a Center for American Progress event yesterday, during which U.S. Representative Henry Waxman made an eye-catching claim about the politics of energy rationing. According to Waxman, the conventional wisdom that “energy and environmental issues are more regional than partisan” is wrong, because “there is now a starker divide between the parties on environmental issues than at any time during my career.”

The record suggests otherwise. Consider,

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Primer: President Obama’s War on Domestic Energy Production

by William Yeatman on March 7, 2011

in Blog, Features

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Coal

Clean Water Act: The EPA has invented a “pollutant”— salinity—in order to stop surface coal mining in Appalachia. It claims that this “pollutant” harms an order of short-lived insect, the Mayfly, which has not been proposed for listing as an endangered species. The EPA has set a numeric water quality standard for salinity which effectively bars new surface coal mining permits.

Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act: Despite the fact that the 1977 SMCRA explicitly authorizes “valley fills” (a necessary byproduct of surface coal mining in the steep terrain of Appalachia), the Department of the Interior is working on a re-interpretation of the so-called “100 feet buffer rule,” a regulation derivative of SMCRA, which would effectively outlaw valley fills, and, as a result, Appalachian surface coal mining.

Oil and gas

Red Tape: The de jure moratorium on deepwater drilling permits in the Western Gulf ended on 22 October 2011, but the de facto moratorium remains. Two weeks ago, a federal judge in eastern Louisiana (the same one who overturned the first moratorium, and who then found the Department of the Interior in contempt for issuing an identical, second moratorium), ordered the Interior Department to act on 5 pending permits within 30 days. Interior is also slow-walking shallow water permits.

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Update on the States

by William Yeatman on March 7, 2011

in Blog

Maryland

Offshore wind energy is so expensive that even the Democratic-controlled State Legislature is balking at the price tag of Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s (D) proposed “Maryland Offshore Wind Energy Act.” The legislation would force the state’s investor owned utilities to minimum 20-year contracts for 400 megawatts to 600 megawatts of offshore wind power. Governor O’Malley’s office estimates that the legislation would cost ratepayers about $1.50 a month, but this projection is based on unrealistically optimistic assumptions. Independent analyses peg the costs at up to $9.00 a month. The disparity in estimates has elicited a negative response from O’Malley’s own party in the legislature: the Washington Post reported this week that two Democratic lawmakers key to the bill’s prospects have suggested they need more time to vet the legislation than is left in this year’s session.

Kentucky

By a bipartisan vote of 28 to 10, the Kentucky State Senate last week passed a resolution exempting the coal industry from EPA regulation, according to the AP. The non-binding resolution, which was introduced by Sen. Brandon Smith (R), is now before the House of Representatives.

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Cooler Heads Digest 4 March 2011

by William Yeatman on March 4, 2011

in Blog, Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

The End of the Permitorium? Guess Again
Jazz Shaw, Pajamas Media, 4 March 2011

John Holdren: White House Malthusian
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 3 March 2011

A James Inhofe Victory Lap
David Weigel, Slate, 3 February 2011

New Interpretation of Antarctic Ice Cores
Anthony Watts, WattUpWithThat, 3 February 2011

The Ignorance of Think Progress
John Hinderaker, Powerline, 3 March 2011

The Electric Car Pipe Dream
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner, 2 March 2011

Utilities Sell You out on Global Warming
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 1 March 2011

The Failure of Green Energy
Larry Bell, Forbes, 1 March 2011

California’s High Speed Rail Boondoggle
Philip Klein, American Spectator, 1 March 2011

Can Tomatoes Take Any More Global Warming?
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 28 February 2011

News You Can Use

Climate Science: 10th Highest Paid Profession

In the Washington Examiner this week, CEI’s Iain Murray crunched the numbers, and found, “global warming professors are the tenth highest paid profession in the nation and the third highest paid profession in the public sector. In terms of median earnings, they are paid as much as the average private sector CEO.”

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Inhofe-Upton Legislation Introduced

Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, on Thursday introduced identical bills to pre-empt the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act until authorized by Congress. The Energy Tax Prevention Act is H. R. 910 in the House and S. 482 in the Senate.

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