A new report surfaced today that confirms what we’ve been saying all along: No country in the world is willing to sacrifice economic growth to fight climate change.
The Climate Action Network, an environmental advocacy group, this week released the Climate Change Performance Index, a ranking of states based on their efforts to stop global warming.
Because “not a single country is to be judged as satisfactory with regard to protecting the climate,” the Index leaves blank the top three spots.
Sweden was ranked #4. The United States finished third from last. Saudi Arabia finished dead last.
The United Nations is huddling in Poznan, Poland, this week to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, but the real news is that part of the global "consensus" on climate change seems to be unraveling. To wit, the myth of "green jobs."
As climate change negotiators headed back into the Poznan International Fair after a two-day break, there was a frosty atmosphere inside and out.
You don't have to be a "climate change sceptic" to assert this unwelcome fact. Professor Gwyn Prins, Director of the LSE's Mackinder Centre for the Study of Long Wave Events, has been advocating measures to reduce what he sees as man-made climate change since 1986. He was a lead author on the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and on the Advisory Board of Friends of the Earth UK. For some years now, Prof Prins has been warning that the Kyoto approach is hopelessly flawed – and his unpopularity in the environment ministries of Europe has grown, precisely as his criticisms of their approach have been vindicated.
India is not a "major emitter" of greenhouse gases and will not volunteer to take on responsibilities that would see it accept legally binding limits, the country's special envoy on climate change has told the Guardian.
European Union nations on Monday dug in for a battle over the costs of tackling climate change, with few signs of compromise emerging ahead of a summit of EU leaders later this week.
Yesterday the UK saw a large group of protesters bring a major London airport to a halt. Plane Stupid (you can’t get them for false advertising, that’s for sure) managed to cancel over 50 flights as the airport closed for five hours while police arrested 56 people, of whom 49 have now been charged.
As Christopher Booker reminds us, eco-activists in the UK were encouraged when a jury found a gang of Greenpeace protesters not guilty of criminal damage to a power station on the grounds that they had a lawful excuse in that they believed they were stopping further global warming. The jury was swayed on what should have been an open-and-shut case by the testimony of none other than James Hansen, NASA’s climate bigwig.
I am not sure if the same “lawful excuse” defense applies in the case of aggravated trespass (perhaps m’learned friends could advise), but it is clear that the Plane Stupid types felt they had such an excuse, declaring that they were “terrified” by the threat of global warming. If it does apply, and Hansen flies in (dwell for a second on the hypocrisy involved) to support these protesters, with the Crown Prosecution Service once again failing to challenge or even balance his evidence, we may be set for a cascade where climate protesters can essentially do anything they want. Property rights will cease to have meaning and the rule of law will collapse, for the law can be set aside in the name of the environment. Britain’s unwritten constitution will have adopted a clause similar to that just adopted by Ecuador. What happens in this case will be of profound importance.
The day after Thanksgiving was the deadline for submitting comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), “Regulation of Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act.” The ANPR is EPA’s preliminary response to the Supreme Court global warming case, Massachusetts v EPA (April 2, 2007). EPA invited public comment on literally hundreds of issues but the main issue in dispute is whether EPA should issue a finding under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new motor vehicles “cause or contribute to air pollution” that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
In two separate detailed comments (see here and here) and a more general comment co-signed by 31 other free-market and conservative organizations, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) explains that an endangerment finding would trigger a regulatory cascade throughout the Clean Air Act, imposing potentially crushing burdens on regulated entities, environmental agencies, and the economy. For example, tens of thousands of previously unregulated buildings and facilities could face new regulation, monitoring, controls, and penalties under the Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program, creating a massive roadblock to new construction and economic development.
In Massachusetts, the Court said that EPA does not have to make an endangerment finding if it provides a “reasonable explanation” why it cannot or will not do so. CEI’s comments present several compelling reasons:
- An endangerment finding would set the stage for multiple policy disasters no Congress would ever approve.
- The only way EPA can regulate GHG emissions under the CAA without risk of administrative chaos and economic devastation is to flout statutory language and effectively amend the Act. Had the Justices known in 2006 and early 2007 what the ANPR and other analyses have since brought to light about the irrational and destructive burdens an endangerment finding would trigger, they likely would have decided the case differently.
- EPA cannot establish GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles yet “avoid inconsistency” with the fuel economy standards enacted by Congress in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act.
- EPA cannot coherently define the “air pollution” related to GHG emissions, hence lacks the requisite subject matter on which to make an endangerment finding.
- Persistent uncertainties regarding climate sensitivity to rising GHG concentrations, the implausibility of climate disaster scenarios, the divergence between model predictions and actual temperature data, and historic declines in U.S. mortality due to extreme weather, air pollution, heat waves, and malaria despite increases in global temperatures make it unreasonable at this time to anticipate endangerment of public health and welfare from global warming.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a Web site with links to the ANPR, EPA’s regulatory docket, the U.S. Chamber’s PSD compliance burden study, industry-specific impact assessments, legal research, and a page featuring comments by almost two dozen organizations. President-elect Obama’s would be well advised to spend several days reviewing the information and analyses on this site.
THE MAIL brings an invitation to register for the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, which convenes on March 8 in New York City. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank, the conference will host an international lineup of climate scientists and researchers who will focus on four broad areas: climatology, paleoclimatology, the impact of climate change, and climate-change politics and economics.
Christopher Booker is correct when he talks about global warming policy as an economic suicide note. Yale economist William Nordhaus recently estimated the full costs of unchecked global warming of 3C at about $22 trillion. That's a lot of money, although it reflects all the assumptions of the global warming alarmists, which Mr Booker rightly questions.
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