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If so, then I’m bad to the bone, because my favorite scene in the James Cameron mega-hit was the one where the jarhead mercenary blasted the blue peoples’ home tree to smithereens. TIIIIIIIMBEEEER!!!!!!! Gotta get me some of that unobtainium!

I am kidding-I don’t actually condone the destruction of an alien civilization for the sake of extracting a rare, valuable mineral*, although I did love the scene in question. Rather, my intent is to make light of Cameron’s clichéd eco-plotline, which centers on the supposed evils of natural resource extraction.

In Avatar, the “bad” guy is a huge corporation intent on exploiting deposits of “unobtainium,” an anti-gravity mineral, on a distant planet. The “good” guys are a race of humanoid giants, who look blue, but act very, very green.

Over the course of the nearly 3-hour movie, the bad guys try to kill the good guys to get at the magic rock, but the good guys win a big battle, and send the bad guys back to earth, which, we are told, is heavily polluted.

As if the take home message-drilling/mining is wrong!-wasn’t heavy-handed enough, Cameron has one of the blue people come right out and say it: Minerals should be kept in the ground.

Uggh. What a load.

And what a pity. The most popular movie ever is predicated on the notion that human civilization shouldn’t exploit its natural resources. Millions of people, around the world, will be exposed to this nonsense.

There was a time when humans were an engineering-minded people intent on creating wealth by conquering nature. As I recently wrote in my hometown paper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

From the 18th century to the 20th century, heavy industry-such as coal mining-was the primary metric of a nation’s economic development. Industry was exalted. To be industrialized was to be civilized.

Times have changed.

In today’s America, heavy industry is considered “dirty.” Instead of goods and services, the United States manufactures environmental lawyers and government regulators.

Raw capitalism is left to the Chinese, who busily build a coal-fired electricity plant every week to power the production of exports for the global market. By contrast, environmental lawyers in the United States recently celebrated the 100th scuttling of a proposed coal plant.

This dubious accomplishment is facilitated mightily by eco-fables of the Avatar sort.

*I should note that I am all for the destruction of a non-reasoning species’ habitat for the extraction of mineral deposits. For example, I wholeheartedly disagree with the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to shut down coal mining in Appalachia in order to protect a species of bug that lives for a day. When it comes down to a conflict between human beings’ welfare and that of a bug, or even a polar bear, I fall squarely on the side of mankind.

At his BBC blog Andrew Neil lays out the itemized fraud from the 2007 UN IPCC report that has been rolling out in recent days, previously reported by the BBC and other formerly mainstream media as “sound” and “consensus” science. So many “Gates,” and so many discredited reporters:

But the flood gates really opened after the IPCC had to withdraw its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would likely all have melted by 2035, maybe even sooner.

This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the [World Wildlife Fund], which the IPCC swallowed whole….

Then at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny — indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

Now after Climate-gate, Glacier-gate and Hurricane-gate — how many “gates” can one report contain? — comes Amazon-gate. The IPCC claimed that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by “tropical savannas” if temperatures continued to rise.

This claim is backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF. Indeed the two authors are not even scientists or specialists on the Amazon: one is an Australian policy analyst, the other a freelance journalist for the Guardian and a green activist.

Yep, this is the “scientific consensus” that Al Gore based his post-VP life upon; the imagined groundswell that so many politicians used to justify government growth; the nonexistent evidence that journalists cited to justify their alarmism activism. It’s the two words that every global warmist (whether lying or deceived themselves) threw in the face of skeptics in an attempt to intimidate. Didn’t work!

No wonder why hardly any of them wanted to debate and those who did got slaughtered. We tried to explain that the “consensus” was an illusion. You — yes, I’m talking about you, Society of Environmental Journalists — would have none of it.

Now you’re stuck in the shoes of the environmental equivalent of Jayson Blair as your newspapers and television stations fall apart, and while what’s left of your audience doesn’t care about the issue you hold so precious. But it’s your good fortune that you still qualify for the do-nothing flack positions that are plentiful in both government and nonprofit arms of the environoia industry.

Last Thursday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced a resolution of disapproval, under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to overturn EPA’s endangerment finding. Murkowski’s floor statement and a press release are available here.

As you’d expect, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and other apostles of Gorethodoxy were quick to condemn the resolution as an attack on the Clean Air Act, science, public health, and the children.

Rubbish!

At a press conference she organized on the same day the resolution was introduced, Boxer and others tried to spin the Murkowski resolution as a referendum on science – as if Congress, King Canute-fashion, could alter the results of scientific research.  

A strong case can be made that the endangerment finding is scientifically-challenged. But that’s not what the Murkowski resolution is about.

As the Senator made clear in her floor statement, and as you can see from the text, the resolution is a referendum on the propriety of EPA taking control of the economy without so much as a by-your-leave from the people’s elected representatives. The Murkowski resolution vetoes the endangerment finding’s regulatory force and legal effect, not its intellectual content.

EPA’s endangerment finding, as I explain in this column on Pajamas Media, would launch an era of runaway regulation without representation. The Murkowski resolution is a gutsy action to safeguard the economy, government’s accountability to the people, and the separation of powers under the Constitution.

In an update to my blog on the alleged melting of the glaciers atop the Himalayas (and imminent extinction of the yeti), the scientist behind the bogus claim in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report claiming the Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the , did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the coordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 relied on magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled into a 2005 report by the warmist World Wildlife Fund. Lal and his team then cited this as their source.

Moreover, the WWF article also contained a arithmetic error. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 meters a year should in fact have said 23 meters – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121, said the newspaper.

As to the 2035 melting date, it “seems to have been plucked from thin air.”

Which is only right, considering how very thin the air is atop the Himalayas.

As I mentioned yesterday, Scott Brown’s election is making the Democrats do all kinds of things that they wouldn’t have considered even last week. Bloomberg reports that cap-and-trade is dead (citing California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, for one) for this year, so the Dems’ thinking is to try and move some of the alt-energy initiatives into a jobs bill:

Chief executives officers of Exelon Corp., Nike Inc., and 81 other companies [yesterday] urged Obama and lawmakers to enact climate legislation. In a letter, the group called for “strong policies and clear market signals that support the transition to a low-carbon economy and reward companies that innovate.”

The new Senate version of the jobs bill may include funding for a “cash for caulkers” program providing grants to make homes more energy efficient, said Lowell Ungar, policy director for the Washington-based Alliance to Save Energy.

“The money will run out from the recovery act and if there’s not further legislation to push these retrofits, there’s a real risk that the infrastructure we’re creating right now will wither,” Ungar said in an interview. “The people who are being trained right now to do these retrofits will no longer have jobs.”

Translation: “Rewarding companies that innovate” means giving them taxpayer dollars or else they’ll go out of business. Mr. Ungar could not have said it more plainly.

Today, Reps. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Sam Graves (R-MO), Trent Franks (R-AZ), and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) sent a letter to Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator Cass Sunstein sharply critical of EPA’s December 7, 2009 finding that “air pollution” from carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) endangers public health and welfare. 

“On the basis of EPA’s endangerment finding,” the legislators warn, “virtually every economic activity undertaken in America stands to come under the thumb of federal regulation.” They explain: “These actions begin with EPA’s and the Department of Transportation’s proposed new light vehicle emission standards, continue through greenhouse gas (GHG) preconstruction and operating permit requirements for stationary sources and extend as far as the mind can contemplate.” They continue: “In these ways, EPA threatens to burden our economy with vastly expanded regulation not contemplated by Congress when it passed the Clean Air Act.” 

Yes, indeed. As I discuss here and here, EPA’s endangerment finding starts a regulatory cascade that could (1) subject tens of thousands of previously unregulated small businesses to Clean Air Act (CAA) Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting regulations, (2) subject millions of small businesses to CAA Title V operating permit requirements, and (3) compel EPA to establish national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) that would effectively require the United States to de-industrialize. The Supreme Court pushed EPA to make the endangerment finding in its April 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision.

The four Members of Congress ask OIRA chief Sunstein to make EPA convene a Small Business Advocacy Review Panel to develop and evaluate regulatory alternatives to mimimize the endangerment finding’s impacts on small business. Until and unless EPA does this, the lawmakers say, the endangerment finding should be “withdrawn.”

The representatives acknowledge that EPA’s proposed October 2009 Tailoring Rule  “seeks to delay for a handful of years the imposition of requirements on sources emitting less than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.” However, this fix is by design temporary, and it is legally dubious, since EPA would be flouting clear statutory language. Under the CAA, entities must obtain a PSD permit in order to construct or modify a facility with a potential to emit 250 tons per year of a CAA-regulated air pollutant, and a Title V permit in order to operate a facility with a potential to emit 100 tons per year.

EPA estimates that if these provisions are enforced as written, the number of entities applying for PSD permits would jump from 280 to 41,000 per year, and the number applying for Title V permits would jump from 14,700 to 6.1 million per year. The flood of permit applications would overwhelm agency administrative resources, the permitting programs would implode under their own weight, construction activity would grind to a halt, and millions of firms would find themselves in legal limbo — all in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  

It will be interesting to see how Sunstein responds to the lawmakers’ letter. Will he stick up for small business and honor the spirit of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA), or will he bless EPA’s evasive legal semantics? 

Under the RFA, agencies are to convene a small business review panel unless the agency head certifies that the proposed regulation will not have a “significant impact upon a substantial number of small entities.”  In a recent year, each PSD permit on average cost $125,120 and 866 burden hours for sources to obtain (just the paperwork and administrative costs, exclusive of any associated technology investments). The going rate for Title V administrative fees is $43.75 per ton, implying a virtual carbon tax (exclusive of administrative expenses) of $4,375 for a small business emitting 100 tons of CO2 per year. The Tailoring Rule estimates (p. 55338) that if small sources of CO2 must comply with the law as written, rather than as doctored by EPA, they will incur an expense of more than $38 billion just for Title V compliance over the next six years.  A significant economic impact by any standard.

Note also that the $38 billion figure refers just to the direct expenses small firms would incur to comply with Title V. It does not include the reduced output and job losses due to the diversion of resources to regulatory compliance. Nor does it include the loss of investment in firms that, due to their sheer number, face years of delay and uncertainty in obtaining permits to build or operate their facilities.

The endangerment finding is what tees up all these costs and consequences, so you’d think it would be a no brainer that it has ”significant impact upon a substantial number of small entities.”

Well, EPA says otherwise. In the Endangerment Finding (p. 66545), Administrator Lisa Jackson certifies that EPA’s findings “do not in-and-of-themselves” impose new requirements on small entities. Hence, there’s no need for an RFA review panel. Similarly, EPA’s GHG motor vehicle standards proposal (p. 49628) certifies that it would not have a significant impact on a substantial number of small entities, since the standards would apply to automakers, very few of which are small businesses.

By making new cars more costly, however, the rule could adversely affect thousands of auto dealers, most of whom are small businesses. EPA says not a word about that potential impact. More importantly, the GHG motor vehicle standards are what directly trigger the PSD and Title V requirements.

EPA says the Tailoring Rule (p. 55349) won’t have a significant impact on a substantial number of small entities, because it “will relieve the regulatory burden associated the PSD and Title V operating programs for new and modified major sources that emit GHGs, including small businesses.” So EPA acknowledges there is a burden to be relieved — a PSD/Title V burden. Where does that come from?  The endangerment finding and the GHG motor vehicle emissions rule. Yet EPA claims those actions have no impact of any consequence for small business.   

Isn’t legal hair-splitting grand? Of course, the findings “in-and-0f-themselves” regulate nothing — but they compel the adoption of GHG motor vehicle standards under CAA Sec. 202, which then automatically trigger pre-construction permitting requirements under Secs. 160-160 and operating permit requirements under Secs. 501-507.

The endangerment finding also sets the stage for regulation of GHG emissions from motor fuels under CAA Sec. 211, non-road engines and vehicles under Sec. 231, the establishment of GHG new source performance standards (NSPS) for scores of industrial source categories under Sec. 111, and the establishment of economy-wide NAAQS regulation of GHGs under Secs. 107-110.  ”Yes, Your Honor, I pulled the trigger, but I am innocent; the bullet killed the man!”

And if litigation and the logic of the CAA compel EPA to establish NAAQS for CO2 and other GHGs, which could easily qualify as the most expensive rulemaking in history, you can bet your bottom dollar what EPA will say. There’s no significant impact on a substantial number of small businesses, because NAAQS “in-and-of-themselves” don’t regulate anybody. The actual regulation of businesses large and small will be done by the states, through their State Implementation Plans (SIPs). “Once the rockets are up who cares where they come down, that’s not my department,” says Wernher Von Braun.

Small business clearly needs an advocate in the room and at the table whenever EPA deliberates about any regulatory action pertaining to greenhouse gases and CO2. Congress enacted the RFA to protect small business from regulatory excess. Right now it’s not working. Cass Sunstein has an opportunity to ensure that small businesses have a say in regulatory decisions affecting their very survival. He should seize it.

“The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, a large number of them may disappear by 2035 because of climate change.” Such was the lede of one of countless articles about how 1.3 billion Asians were in imminent danger of first flooding and then drought. And that’s not to mention the certain extinction of the abominable snowman.

You didn’t need a Cray computer to figure that this was nonsense, that temperatures would have to more or less instantly soar to incredible heights and stay there for this to happen. (As it turns out, 18 degrees Centigrade.) But people wrote it, read it, and believed it. You’d think a magazine with the name Technology Review would know better, yet its latest issue declares: “The Himalayan glaciers that feed rivers in India, China, and other Asian countries could be gone in 25 years.”

Why did they say it? In part, because it was convenient. And in part because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it in its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). Now the IPCC is saying, “Whoopsie!”

In a statement released on Wednesday, the group admitted “poorly substantiated estimates.” More specifically, it appears to have been based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published in 1999. That story, in turn, was based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist in Delhi. And Hasnain has since admitted his assertion “speculation” unsupported by any formal research.

The IPCC says it will “probably” issue a formal correction. “Probably?”

But admit it guys, wasn’t it fun while it lasted?