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In the News

The All-American Light Bulb Dims, as Freedom Flickers
Deroy Murdock, National Review, 2 July 2010

A Wellspring of Politics, Not Science
William O’ Keefe, Washington Times, 2 July 2010

Running out of Little Green Countries
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 1 July 2010

Blowout Prevention Act Would Blow Out Domestic Production
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 1 July 2010

The Windsurfer’s Windfall
Max Brindle, American Spectator, 29 June 2010

Everyone Knows…Except the Experts
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 29 June 2010

They Loved BP & Enron
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 28 June 2010

Is Obama Putting Ideology above Science?
Detroit News editorial, 27 June 2010

News You Can Use

Price Tag of Obama’s Moratorium

According to a new analysis by the Heritage Foundation, President Barack Obama’s offshore oil ban, if extended through 2035, would:

• Reduce GDP by $5.5 trillion
• Reduce the average consumption expenditures for a family of four by $2,381 per year (and exceeds $4,000 in 2035)
• Reduce job growth by more than 1 million jobs by 2015 and more than 1.5 million jobs by 2030

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

White House Convenes Climate Meeting

Twenty-three Senators finally met with President Barack Obama Tuesday morning to discuss how to move forward with energy-rationing legislation.  Darren Samuelsohn and Coral Davenport reported in Politico that the President made it clear that he wants the Senate to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, but that he recognizes that it may be necessary to settle for something much more modest than the House Waxman-Markey bill.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has indicated that he still wants the Senate to take up energy-rationing legislation when Senators return from the Fourth of July recess on 12th July.  Everything else remains to be decided.  First is the question of whether energy-rationing provisions should be attached to a bill to address BP’s Gulf oil leak or whether it should be a stand-alone bill.  If it is a stand-alone bill, then it will probably be brought to the floor as H. R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill which the House passed by a 219 to 212 vote on 26th June 2009.  That could keep alive the possibility of calling a conference committee and then trying to pass something in a lame duck session after the election.

What might be included in a Senate anti-energy package is still up in the air.

One Possibility:  Utility-only Energy Rationing

One possibility that has been floated and was reportedly suggested by Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) at the meeting with President Obama is a cap-and-trade scheme that covers electric utilities only.  I’m not sure why a utilities-only cap-and-trade scheme would be any easier to pass than an economy-wide one, since everyone understands that it would only be the first step and that for the first ten or fifteen years an economy-wide cap-and-trade really only hits coal.

Another Possibility: Bingaman’s Anti-energy Bill

Another possibility that has been the most likely for a couple months is that the Senate will take up the anti-energy provisions passed out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year.  These include a renewable standard for utilities, new building energy efficiency standards modeled on California’s, and several other “clean energy” provisions.  If that is the way Reid decides to go, then it will put Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the Chairman of the Committee, in charge of the legislation.

That makes sense for several reasons.  First, Bingaman is not Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), a legislative lightweight who is not much more popular with Senate Democrats than he is with Republicans.  Nor is he Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who is even more of a lightweight than Kerry.  Second, Bingaman passed these provisions out of his committee with the support of the ranking Republican, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), so he starts with Republican support and has every prospect of gaining more.  And third, Bingaman’s package does not put a price on CO2 emissions.  This makes it much harder to build public opposition to it as an energy tax.

The death of Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) complicates the situation.  Majority Leader Reid is short one vote until a successor is appointed by West Virginia’s Governor, Joe Manchin.  But Reid might be worse off after a new Senator is appointed.  That’s because Manchin is the most ferocious opponent of anti-coal policies among high-ranking elected Democrats.

Across the States

What Is EPA Doing in West Virginia?

On April 1^st, the Environmental Protection Agency promulgated new Clean Water Act regulations for the discharge of conductivity (i.e., salinity) from surface coal mining operations in West Virginia. The regulations were established in order to protect the Mayfly, a short-lived insect that isn’t even an endangered species. At the press conference to unveil the new standards, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson conceded that the new regulations were stringent enough to outlaw mountain top removal mining. Last week, however, the EPA notified Arch Coal Inc.’s Coal-Mac subsidiary that its MTR project at the Pine Creek Surface Mine in Logan County, West Virginia, would receive a Clean Water Act permit. EPA’s coal crackdown engendered a bipartisan rebuke from almost every state and federal politician in West Virginia, so perhaps the EPA is signaling that it intends to be flexible. Tellingly, the EPA did not make the permit approval public.

ClimateGate Update

Mann Exonerated by Penn State Panel Designed To Exonerate Mann

To the surprise of no one, Professor Michael Mann, (creator of the debunked Hockey Stick global temperature reconstruction), was cleared by a Penn State University investigation prompted by Mann’s involvement in the ClimateGate scandal. PSU initiated the investigation in November, 2009, at the behest of alumni. It appointed a panel and tasked it with answering these questions:

I. Did Mann engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly: any actions with the intent to suppress or falsify data?;
2. any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4,as suggested by Phil Jones?;
3. any misuse of privileged or confidential information available to you in your capacity as an academic scholar?;
4. any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities?

In January, the panel exonerated Mann on the first three charges. After learning of PSU’s decision, Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told PSU investigators, “It’s thoroughly amazing. I mean these are issues that he explicitly stated in the emails. I’m wondering what’s going on?” Hear, hear!

That January ruling left little doubt that the “investigation” was a showcase to clear Mann, even though the panel decided that the fourth charge necessitated further inquiry, the results of which were released yesterday. As CEI’s Myron Ebell told the New York Times, “It’s no surprise that it’s a whitewash of Dr. Mann’s misconduct, because it was designed to be a whitewash.”

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary, check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

In the News

States Divided Over New EPA Rules
Shannon Goessling, Washington Times, 21 May 2010

Cap-and-Trade Magic Show
James Valvo, Washington Times, 21 May 2010

Inequitable in Ecuador
Quin Hillyer, American Spectator, 21 May 2010

Electric Dreamin’
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 21 May 2010

Scientists Scramble To Address Radio Campaign
Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, 20 May 2010

The Green Jobs Myth
Investor’s Business Daily editorial, 20 May 2010

The EPA’s Shocking Power Grab
George Allen & Marlo Lewis, Forbes, 18 May 2010

UVA’s Dishonorable Double Standard
Barbara Hollingsworth, Washington Examiner, 18 May 2010

Climate Policy Needs a Team “B”
David Schnare, MasterResource.org, 18 May 2010

News You Can Use

Maybe It’s the Sun

Despite the absence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, Jupiter’s climate changed drastically this month when a giant belt of clouds circling the planet mysteriously disappeared. As noted by the BlogProf, this follows recent discoveries that Triton, a moon of Neptune, is rapidly warming and that Mars’s polar ice caps are evaporating.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Murkowski Resolution Debate Heats Up

In a story in Environment and Energy Daily (reprinted on the NY Times’s web site), Darren Samuelsohn reports that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) predicts the Murkowski resolution of disapproval of the EPA’s endangerment finding will pass the Senate when it is brought to the floor for a vote next week.  “I think it will pass,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “There are a lot of people who will be in the camp of, ‘We should do it, not the EPA.'”

I think that is a sensible observation.  Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is among those who favor reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but who do not want it to be done by using the Clean Air Act.  That is because she has concluded that applying the Clean Air Act to carbon dioxide emissions will result in a regulatory nightmare and wreck the economy (which is also sensible).  This conclusion is gaining ground as Members of Congress look at the issue.  Therefore, I do not think the Senate vote is merely “symbolic,” as political commentator Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute told Evan Lehmann and Jessica Leber of Climate Wire (also reprinted on the New York Times’s web site).

My guess is that Murkowski’s resolution, S. J. Res. 26, will pass narrowly and that pressure will then build on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to schedule a House vote.  One of the interesting results of the congressional primary elections so far is that strong opponents of cap-and-trade in both parties are doing well.  Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com has noticed the trend, as has the Huffington Post.  Democratic House Members worried about their re-election may plead with Pelosi that they need a vote against EPA regulation to take back home. An indication that Pelosi may already be feeling some heat is that this week she said, as reported by Bob Cusack and Ben Geman in the Hill, that Congress should legislate global warming policy rather than let EPA regulate.

This week nineteen free market and conservative non-profit groups sent a joint letter to Senators in support of the Murkowski resolution.  It was written and organized by my CEI colleague, Marlo Lewis.  Marlo and former Virginia Governor and Senator George Allen also published an excellent op-ed on the Forbes Magazine web site that explains why stopping EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is a constitutional as well as economic imperative.

Several environmental groups have been running ads against the Murkowski resolution.  Americans for Prosperity has held a bunch of rallies in support of the resolution in the States of key Senators over the past few weeks.  This week Freedom Action (of which I am director) started running radio ads in six States-Virginia, West Virginia, North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, New Mexico, and Alaska-which tie the ClimateGate scandal to the EPA Endangerment Finding and urge listeners to e-mail their Senators.

Obama Wants To Raise CAFE Again

President Barack Obama today issued a memorandum directing federal agencies to develop tougher new fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks beginning in the 2017 model year and to develop fuel economy standards for medium and big trucks for the first time. This follows the new standards announced in April that will begin with the 2012 model year.  It’s not clear to me that consumers are going to want to buy the models that the Congress and the Obama Administration have decreed will be offered in 2012, but the automakers are now resigned to taking orders from their federal masters rather than their customers. My prediction is that another massive bailout of the automakers is inevitable.

“Invaluable” Climate Reports Released

The National Academies of Science this week released three reports prepared by the National Research Council that endorse the scientific case for global warming alarmism and claim that it is urgent that the federal government adopt mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Former New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin on his New York Times blog called the reports “invaluable.”  Yeah, I’ve got a lot of invaluable junk stored in my basement, too, that perhaps I can interest Andy in buying.

The fact is that these three reports are put-up jobs arranged by NAS President Ralph Cicerone to counter the damage done by the Climategate scandal.  I have seen enough of Dr. Cicerone in action to know that he is a political conman first and a scientist second.  I wouldn’t trust him to give a straight answer on the time of day.  The carefully-chosen members of the NRC committees that wrote the reports are mostly committed advocates of alarmism and energy rationing policies.  Mark Landsbaum of the Orange County Register agrees.

4th International Conference on Climate Change

I was one of 700 people attending the Heartland Institute’s fourth International Conference on Climate Change this week.  As with the first three conferences, Joe Bast, James Taylor, Nikki Comerford, and the Heartland staff put together a well-run conference with many outstanding speakers.  All of the keynote and panel presentations are available on video here.

There are a number of famous names among the speakers who gave excellent talks-Richard Lindzen, Bob Carter, Steve McIntyre, Nils-Axel Morner, Ian Plimer, and others whose talks I missed (which is the problem with having four concurrent sessions).  One less famous speaker, whose talk I recommend watching, is Willis Eschenbach.

Across the States

West Virginia

On Tuesday night, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing in Charleston, West Virginia, on its proposed veto of a Clean Water Act permit for Spruce Fork 1 coal mine in Logan County, which is already operating. The EPA is exercising this authority for the first time ever, in order to protect an insect that isn’t even an endangered species. More than 800 people attended, and scores of miners, small businessmen, and community activists gave testimony urging the EPA to spare their livelihoods. The EPA’s veto would result in the direct loss of 250 jobs paying an average of $62,000, and would also deprive the Logan County school system of more than $17 million annually.

Around the World

Spain

Since becoming President, Barrack Obama has cited the “success” of Spain’s green energy policies eight times, most recently in Illinois, three weeks ago. So it was major news when Professor Gabriel Calzada, an economist at King Juan Carlos University, released a study in 2009 concluding that Spain’s ultra-wasteful green energy subsidies were killing 2.2 jobs for every job they created. After CEI’s Chris Horner broke news of the study in the U.S., the Obama administration commissioned a hatchet job analysis to discredit Calzada’s work. This week, Professor Calzada was vindicated when a government report was leaked conceding that the green energy subsidies are unsustainable. The headline of the Spanish daily La Gaceta says it all: “Spain Admits That the Green Economy as Sold to Obama Is a Disaster.”

UNFCCC

Bloomberg reported this week that Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat, will succeed Yvo de Boer as the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on July 1st. Soon after the announcement, she told reporters that she is confident that a legally binding, international greenhouse gas emissions reductions treaty can be reached in 3 years. We’ve heard that before. In 2007, de Boer championed the “Bali Roadmap,” which was supposed to lead to a climate treaty at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC last December in Copenhagen, Denmark. Of course, the Copenhagen Climate Conference foundered amid recriminations over how to share the $45 trillion price tag for a global climate treaty.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

In the News

The Coming Anti-Carbon Clampdown
Chris Horner, Energy Tribune, 23 April 2010

Alcoa Loves Green, But Not the Environment
Tim Carney, Washington Examiner, 23 April 2010

A Reality Check on the Neo-Malthusian World
Indur Goklany, MasterResource.org, 23 April 2010

Climate Scientist Sues Paper for Libel on Climategate Coverage
Dave Adam, Guardian, 22 April 2010

Cap-and-Trade = VAT
Chris Horner, Daily Caller, 22 April 2010

Climate Science in Denial
Richard S. Lindzen, Wall Street Journal, 22 April 2010

Two Energy Giants, a Difference in Approach
Institute for Energy Research, 22 April 2010

Why I Am Enlarging My Carbon Footprint
Robin of Berkley, American Thinker, 22 April 2010

A Happy Earth Day
G. Tracey Mehan, American Spectator, 22 April 2010

The Solar Power Scandal in Spain
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 21 April 2010

Buying Carbon Offsets May Ease Eco-Guilt, But Not Global Warming
Doug Struck, Christian Science Monitor, 20 April 2010

Fannie Mae Owns Patent on Residential “Cap-and-Trade”
Barbara Hollingsworth, Washington Examiner, 20 April 2010

Failure Would Have Many Benefits
Marlo Lewis, National Journal, 19 April 2010

News You Can Use

Tea Partiers Oppose Cap-and-Trade

More than 365,000 respondents voted online to determine the top three planks of the tea-party movement’s political platform. The second most popular of the 21 issues that were up for a vote: “Reject cap and trade: Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.”

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Kerry-Graham-Lieberman: Payoffs for Everyone, Taxes for You-Know-Who

It appears that Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) are finally going to release a draft outline of their compromise, middle-of-the-road, some-payoff-for-everyone energy-rationing bill on Monday.  Both Kate Sheppard on the Mother Jones web site and Juliet Eilperin on the Washington Post web site report that Senator Kerry shared details of the bill in a Thursday conference call held by the We Can Lead coalition of business leaders who hope to make a buck from energy rationing.

Sheppard and Eilperin both report that the draft bill will pre-empt the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act and also pre-empt States from setting lower emissions targets.  Instead of a gas tax or a “linked fee,” the draft will require oil companies to buy ration coupons to cover the emissions of their products.  Call it whatever you want, it’s still a tax.

It appears that the cap-and-trade scheme for electric utilities is still in the draft, but according to both blogs, it now includes a price collar setting a floor and a ceiling on the cost of ration coupons.  In addition, Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman have adopted the cap-and-dividend idea from the energy-rationing bill introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Me.), S. 2877.  Thus some of the additional costs of electricity will be rebated to consumers.  I’m not sure how this squares with a story by Darren Samuelsohn in Environment and Energy Daily  (and reprinted on the New York Times’s web site here) earlier in the week that the draft would give more free ration coupons to the electric utilities.  Perhaps the free coupons will be distributed in the early years of the scheme and consumers will get their rebates in the later years.

Kerry claimed on the conference call that three major oil companies would support the bill in addition to the Edison Electric Institute.  The three most likely are Shell, BP, and Conoco Phillips.  He also said that they were still working on provisions to allow more offshore oil production.

Among the goodies will be an exemption for agriculture from emissions limits, loan guarantees for twelve new nuclear plants, $10 billion for research and development of carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power plants, “financial incentives” for natural gas and electric vehicles, and a four-year exemption for manufacturing industries.  The bill will also include the anti-energy provisions marked up by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year.  These include a renewable electricity requirement and new building energy efficiency standards.

As I mentioned last week, the three Senators do not plan to introduce a bill with actual legislative language, but instead will turn their draft over to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).  Reid will try to put together a package that he can bring to the floor and get sixty votes.

Voinovich Enters the Pre-Emption Fight

Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) this week circulated a proposal to remove all authority from the executive branch and the States to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under any existing legal authority.  This would include the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Water Act, as well as the Clean Air Act.  As Robin Bravender reported in Climate Wire (which was reprinted by the New York Times here), the proposal would also end all public nuisance lawsuits.

Voinovich could offer it as an amendment to the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman energy-rationing bill or to some other bill on the Senate floor.  If enacted, it would mean that it would be up to Congress (the people’s representatives) to decide whether and how to deal with global warming.

At the same time, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) continues to try to figure out how to get 51 votes for her resolution of disapproval of the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.  One major obstacle remains Senator John Rockefeller’s (D-WV) bill to delay EPA regulations for two years, which is meant to give some of his fellow Democrats an alternative to voting for Murkowski.  One solution might be to offer Rockefeller’s bill, S. 3072, as an amendment to some bill on the Senate floor.  If it fails, then these Senators will not have an excuse for voting against Murkowski’s resolution.  If it passes, then Senators who voted for it will have to explain why they are going to flip and vote no on Murkowski’s resolution.

Across the States

Wisconsin

Major climate legislation was shelved in Wisconsin on Earth Day after both the Assembly and the Senate refused to vote on the measure before the legislative calendar ended. The bill would have mandated that 25% of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2025, and it failed because Wisconsin lawmakers feared the political fallout of adding expensive renewable energy to the state’s electricity portfolio-thereby increasing utility bills.

California

In late 2008, the California Air Resources Board was excoriated by a peer-review panel of economists for publishing a politicized economic analysis that exaggerated the benefits and minimized the costs of AB 32, California’s global warming law. As a result, CARB commissioned a new analysis by a supposedly non-partisan team of economists led by Stanford Professor Larry Goulder. The report was released a month ago, and it largely echoed CARB’s original conclusion that AB 32 will create jobs and is good for the economy. CARB claims that the new report vindicates its old report, but new evidence suggests otherwise. ClimateWire this week reported that Larry Goulder is on the board of directors of a non-profit that is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a political campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would suspend AB 32. This is a clear conflict of interest, and it demonstrates (again) that CARB manipulates the evidence to support its political agenda.

Around the World

Bonn

The first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations since the Copenhagen Climate Conference took place in Bonn, Germany, from April 9^th to April 11^th. Negotiators spent most of the meeting coming to an agreement on how many more meetings to convene before the 16^th Conference of the Parties this September in Cancun, Mexico. After many hours of haggling, they agreed to hold two.

Washington, D.C.

In Washington, D.C. this week, representatives from 17 industrialized countries participated in the Major Economies Meeting, U.S.-led negotiations for a climate treaty that. The meeting served primarily to dampen expectations in Cancun this September for a legally binding successor treaty to the failed Kytoto Protocol. U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern told reporters, “We don’t want to let expectations far outstrip what can be done” in Cancun.

Cochabamba

The stalled negotiations in Bonn and Washington, D.C. angered the 15,000 participants to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which is occurring this week in Cochabamba, Bolivia. According to Reuters, Bolivian President Evo Morales kicked off the Conference by noting that, “We are gathered here because the so-called developed countries didn’t meet their obligation of establishing substantial commitments to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen.” Later, an official from the UN was jeered off the stage.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Announcements

Tomorrow at 3:30 p.m. EST, CEI’s Myron Ebell and Christopher Horner address the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on “Saving Freedom from the Hoax of Global Warming.”  Also featured on the panel are Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com and Ann McElhinney, producer of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria.  Watch it live on Townhall.com/cpac.

CEI this week released the first ever music video in the skeptic rock genre. Watch “How I Wasn’t Gored into Submission,” by Marlo Lewis.

The Heritage Foundation will host Bruce Allen, co-founder of SOS California, who will speak on “How Offshore Oil & Gas Production Benefits the Economy and the Environment,” on February 24^th from noon-1:30 PM. To learn more and RSVP, click here.

In the News

The Sound of Alarm
Richard Lindzen, Boston Herald, 19 February 2010

Rep. Boucher Struggles To Quell Voter Anger over Cap-and-Trade Vote
Amy Gardner, Washington Post, 18 February 2010

Senator Inhofe Responds to Tom Friedman
EPW Minority Press Blog, 18 February 2010

DOD Ignores Climate Policy Risks
Marlo Lewis, National Journal, 18 February 2010

Trump Tells Gore: You’re Fired!
FoxNews.com, 17 February 2010

The Disappearing Science of Global Warming
Peter Ferrara, American Spectator, 17 February 2010

The Continuing Climate Meltdown
Wall Street Journal editorial, 16 February 2010

IPCC’s Missteps
Juliet Eilperin & David Fahrenthold, Washington Post, 15 February 2010

It’s Not a Dirty Air Act
William Yeatman, Fargo Forum, 14 February 2010

Boulder Struggles with Green Dream
Stephanie Simon, Wall Street Journal, 13 February 2010

What To Say to a Global Warming Alarmist
Mark Landsbaum, Orange County Register, 12 February 2020

News You Can Use

Drill, Baby, Drill

E&E Greenwire (subscription required) reported this week that U.S. gross domestic product would lose $2.36 trillion and American consumers would pay an additional $2.35 trillion for energy if oil and gas on federal lands remain under moratoria through 2030, according to a study recently released by the National Association of Utility Regulatory Commissioners. Click here to read the report.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Big Businesses Jump from SS Cap-and-Trade

The big news this week was the withdrawal from the U. S. Climate Action Partnership by BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar.  I have written blogs for Fox Forum and Pajamas Media on the significance of these defections from the principal big business coalition lobbying effort for cap-and-trade. Tim Carney has also written a column for the Washington Examiner that analyzes the motives of major corporations seeking to raise energy prices and diminish economic growth by enacting cap-and-trade.

Lots of Lawsuits Challenge Endangerment Finding

I promised last week to list the lawsuits filed by the deadline Tuesday that challenge the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated using the Clean Air Act.  Luckily for me, Robin Bravender of Greenwire wrote an article doing my work for me.  The New York Times picked it up and posted it on their web site here.  Sixteen separate lawsuits were filed, according to Bravender.  Most of the suits have more than one plaintiff.  For example, the suit filed by my group, CEI, also includes the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Freedom Works.  A number of industry groupings have filed suits, as have three States-Texas, Alabama, and Virginia.

The federal DC Circuit Court of Appeals will now consider the cases.  According to CEI counsel Sam Kazman, the Justice Department may move to have them all dismissed on the grounds that the endangerment finding doesn’t actually regulate anything.  If the court agrees, then the plaintiffs will re-file them when the first regulations-the “tailoring” rule and the new vehicle fuel efficiency standards become final in March.  The court will role all the suits into one case, but may allow a number of briefs to be filed by the various plaintiffs.  On the other side, sixteen States and New York City have asked to be allowed to intervene on EPA’s side.

CEI, Fred Singer of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change, and Kenneth Haapala of the Science and Environmental Policy Project filed a petition with EPA on 12th February to reconsider the endangerment finding, but new revelations in the Climategate scientific fraud scandal over the weekend caused them to amend their petition with new materials on Tuesday.Obama Announces Nuclear Subsidies

President Barack Obama went to a union job-training center in Prince George’s County, Maryland this week to announce that the administration had approved an $8 billion loan guarantee to the Southern Company to build two new nuclear power plants in Georgia.  The guarantee depends on Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of construction and operating permits for the two plants.

The loan guarantee was made under authority of the 2005 omnibus energy act, which is intended to jump-start a new generation of nuclear power plants in the U. S.  President Obama said that the federal guarantee was necessary so that the U. S. would not fall behind other countries in the race to develop energy sources that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Over fifty new nuclear plants are being built in other countries.  John Broder of the New York Times reported that Obama’s support for nuclear is one of the reasons that environmental pressure groups are losing their enthusiasm for him.

Graham Releases Draft of Energy Bill

Now that cap-and-trade is dead in Congress, various piecemeal energy-rationing proposals are moving to the front burner.  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is circulating a draft bill that would require utilities to produce an increasing percentage of their electricity from renewable sources.  New nuclear plants and coal-fired power plants equipped with carbon capture and storage would qualify as well as wind, solar, and biomass.

CEQ Announces that NEPA Will Include Climate Change

The White House Council on Environmental Quality this week proposed that federal agencies should consider greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of possible global warming when preparing Environmental Impact Statements and Reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

Across the States

WyomingWind Tax

This week the Wyoming House Revenue Committee passed H.B. 101, the nation’s first proposed excise tax on wind power. H.B. 101 runs counter to the efforts federal government and most states, which offer generous taxpayer subsidies to “green” energy sources like wind power, but Governor Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, told the Casper Star-Tribune that wind power producers “are not entitled to a free ride.”

Around the World

Wrong Resignation at Wrong Job

Yvo de Boer, the head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, announced this week that he will step down in July. It is widely perceived that the resignation was prompted by the UNFCCC’s failure to achieve a legally-binding international energy rationing scheme at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, and while that may be true, one wonders if this was the right resignation at the right job. After all, it has been revealed in the last month that the UNFCCC’s sister body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, used shoddy science to produce its supposedly definitive assessment reports on global warming (see: Himalayan-gate, Amazon-gate, North Africa-gate). In light of these egregious errors, shouldn’t IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri also resign?

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.

Announcements

A video of “Deconstructing Global Warming,” a Cooler Heads Coalition briefing by Dr. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is now available online at GlobalWarming.org.

In the News

Our Choice or Al Gore’s Choice?
Nick Loris, Heritage Foundry, 6 November 2009

Climate Policy Imperils China, India
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 5 November 2009

Election Defeats Make Dems Cautious on Climate
Jonathan Salant, Bloomberg, 5 November 2009

Remarks by Czech President Václav Klaus on Cap-and-Trade
Washington Times Briefing “Advancing the Global Debate over Climate Change Policy,” 4 November 2009

The Four Horsemen of Cap-and-Trade Defeatism
Chris Horner, Energy Tribune, 4 November 2009

The Economics of Climate Change: Essential Knowledge
Jerry Taylor, MasterResource.org, 4 November 2009

GW Alarmism Given Same Status as Religion
Stephen Adams & Louise Gray, Telegraph, 3 November 2009

Video: Stop Energy Rationing in Australia
Cori Bernardi, Herald Sun, 26 October 2009

News You Can Use

Expensive Failure of Cap-and-Trade in Europe

Between January 2005 and the end of 2008 the European Union’s cap-and-trade scheme cost consumers €93 ($123) billion or €185 ($245) per person, according to “The Expensive Failure of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme,” a new report by Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

EPW Passes Kerry-Boxer

The big news this week is that after days of partisan wrangling, the Senate and Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday passed the Kerry-Boxer energy-rationing bill. The vote was eleven to one, with Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) the one no vote.  The committee’s seven Republicans boycotted the mark-up session and did not vote. Chairman Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) high-handed tactics have so poisoned the Senate atmosphere that I think the Kerry-Boxer bill is now dead for the 111th Congress (which continues to the end of December 2010).

Under committee rules and precedents, no mark-up session can be held unless a majority of committee members including at least two members of the minority are present. The Republicans began boycotting the mark-up on Tuesday because, as the committee’s ranking Republican, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), insisted, it was premature to mark up the bill because official cost estimates had not been completed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Chairman Boxer then had EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson meet with the committee.  She explained that it would take EPA several weeks to complete a full analysis of the bill, but that it didn’t matter because the bill was similar to the Waxman-Markey bill and therefore the costs would be similar. The problem with this claim is that the EPA’s analysis of Waxman-Markey underestimated the costs by making highly unrealistic assumptions. For example, EPA assumed that nuclear power would double by 2035.

Faced with the Republican boycott, Chairman Boxer interpreted the rules to the effect that two members of the minority were required to consider amendments, but not to vote on final committee passage.  So she then went ahead and marked up her “chairman’s mark” version of S. 1733 with no Republicans present. The problem I see here is that the chairman’s mark is an amendment to S. 1733 in the nature of a substitute. Thus I conclude that Chairman Boxer has violated her own interpretation of the committee’s rules.

It was obvious before Boxer went ahead with what Inhofe called the “nuclear option” that this would unite Republicans in opposition to the bill.  So I can only conclude that Boxer or the Democratic leadership have concluded that Kerry-Boxer is dead.  By voting it out of committee, they at least have something to take to COP-15 in Copenhagen in December.  Senator Baucus’s no vote is also significant.  As Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he has as much jurisdiction over cap-and-trade legislation as does the EPW Committee.  He did not sound pleased with what Boxer was doing.

The U.S. Chamber Finds a New Leader

The U. S. Chamber of Commerce on November 3 sent a letter to Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Chairman and Ranking Republican, respectively, of the Environment and Public Works Committee, that touted an op-ed published in the New York Times on October 11^th by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as the way forward on energy-rationing legislation. The letter, signed by the Chamber’s executive vice president, Bruce Josten, said in part: “Senators Kerry and Graham have set forth a positive, practical and realistic framework for legislation, one that echoes the core principles that the Chamber embeds in all of its communications on climate policy. The Chamber agrees with a great deal of the principles set forth by Senators Kerry and Graham….”

The Chamber’s letter immediately made a big splash on Capitol Hill.  Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer read the letter into the record at one of the committee’s attempted mark-up sessions on the Kerry-Boxer bill and said, “This  really is a game-changer.”

The Environmental Defense Fund, which has masterminded the campaign against the Chamber that has included several major corporations withdrawing their memberships, praised the letter. My group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, did not.  We sent out a press release calling on small businesses to withdraw from the Chamber and join with us in continuing to fight against energy-rationing legislation.

The Chamber responded by saying that they hadn’t changed their position on what kind of legislation it would support.  That may be so, but the timing was clearly designed to boost the supporters of energy-rationing legislation-which it did.  Moreover, the Chamber has now identified Senators Kerry and Graham as the leaders on the issue that the Chamber will work with and follow.  The Chamber claims to support solid, workable, commonsense, realistic, and practical climate policies.  And John Kerry is just the Senator to lead us to those policies?  Solid, workable, realistic, practical, commonsense-yes, those are just the words that come to mind when Senator Kerry’s name comes up.

Across the States

Oregon Government Deliberately Underestimated Cost of Green Power by 40 Times

An investigation by the Oregonian shows that state officials deliberately underestimated the cost of Governor Ted Kulongoski’s plan to lure green energy companies to Oregon with taxpayer subsidies, resulting in a program that cost 40 times more than unsuspecting lawmakers were told.

Around the World

Copenhagen Already a Failure

Next month in Copenhagen, the United Nations will host negotiations for a treaty to mitigate climate change. The December conference was supposed to be the deadline for a final agreement, but diplomats are far apart on how to distribute the huge costs of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. This week, Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framewoprk Convention on Climate Change, told Bloomberg that too little progress has been made to conclude a treaty at a summit in Copenhagen next month, and that it may take another year.

Solar-Here Today and Gone Tomorrow

Julie Walsh

According to the Boston Globe, last year Evergreen Solar built a new factory in Massachusetts with $58 million in state aid, but is now shifting its assembly of solar panels from there to China. Plus Evergreen will be writing off $40 million in equipment, due to the move. The biggest irony in this story is that one main reason solar panel factories will move to China is that Chinese energy prices to assemble them are less!

Marlo Lewis goes further, “China is investing heavily in solar panel and wind turbine manufacture, but China does not cap carbon. Also, only a small fraction of China’s production of solar photovoltaic generators – 20 megawatts out of 820 megawatts (2%) produced in 2007 – is for China’s domestic market. So capping domestic carbon emissions is not a prerequisite to success in exporting clean-tech products, nor is having a large domestic market for such products.”

Chinese solar has been growing by leaps and bounds. One reason-“China is not enforcing environmental regulations, and many of the new factories are dumping toxic silicon tetrachloride (a byproduct of polysilicon production) directly into nearby farmlands.  For perspective, 4 tons of this toxic byproduct is produced for every ton of polysilicon. Because it is expensive (the cost to produce one ton is approximately $84,500 versus the Chinese companies making it for $21,000 to $56,000 a ton) and time-consuming to set up systems to recycle the hazardous materials, companies are instead dumping indiscriminately, and people close to these sites are complaining of illness, crop failures, acrid air, and dead fields.” (ilovecarbondioxide.com)

Obama recently went to Florida to announce his plans for modernizing the electric grid, and visited a major new solar energy facility. And where were those solar panels manufactured? The Philippines.