For years, I’ve been arguing that a multilateral response to global warming is a pipe dream. According to the International Energy Agency, the “solution” to this supposed problem would cost $45 trillion through 2050. Yet there is ZERO historical precedent for burden sharing of this magnitude, short of war, and the specter of warmer winters simply doesn’t engender the sort of desperate international cooperation as does a threat like the Nazis. (See here, here, here, and here for my take on the fecklessness of climate diplomacy)
So it was with no surprise that I saw this Reuters headline last Friday: Rich Nations Miss Climate Finance Deadline.
By way of background, the December 2009 United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference was supposed to have been the deadline for a legally binding, multilateral treaty to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the Conference was a complete and total bust, for the reason explained above. Instead of a concrete pledge, the Copenhagen Conference ended with nations agreeing to commit $100 billion to a global warming adaptation fund for poor countries. The deadline for contributions was May 1, 2011. Only two countries, Russia and the Ukraine, bothered to acknowledge the deadline, and they did so by sending a letter to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, informing it that they would not be donating any money.
Last Friday, April 29th, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed a challenge to EPA’s “California waiver”. That waiver permitted California to set its own greenhouse-gas emissions for new vehicles. Because CO2 was the major gas that California was seeking to control, its rules amounted to a new, more stringent automotive fuel-economy standard. And because at least 14 other states had adopted California’s standard, its actions may well have effectively replaced the federal CAFE standard with a higher one set in Sacramento.
The California waiver has a complicated history. CARB (the California Air Resources Board) originally filed its waiver request with EPA in late 2005, claiming that the state had a uniquely compelling need to control atmospheric CO2 levels. (The fact that the alleged problem at issue is global warming, not California warming, apparently didn’t faze CARB.) After deliberating for more than two years, EPA denied CARB’s request, finding that it hadn’t demonstrated any extraordinary conditions to justify the waiver.
But in January 2009, one day after President Obama was sworn in, CARB resubmitted its request, and EPA granted the waiver several months later. Then, in April 2010, the Administration, California and the auto industry struck a deal which imposed a higher set of federal fuel economy standards through model year 2016. During that time, California agreed to merge its own newly-approved standards into the federal program, giving the auto industry the national uniformity in standards that it dearly wanted.
As part of the deal, the automakers agreed not to litigate the California waiver. The Chamber of Commerce and NADA (the National Auto Dealers Association), however, filed their own lawsuit, and it was this case that the D.C. Circuit dismissed last week. The court did not reach the merits of the case, ruling instead that neither party had standing to bring the action because they had not shown injury to their members.
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Climate change is real. Climate change is manmade. Manmade climate change has happened within the last twenty-four months.
Leaders in the climate change debate have controlled the message for forty years since the adoption of the Clean Air Act. They have “approached climate change politics with an air of disdain,” according to Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund (established in 1967).
Krupp addressed the changing political climate at Fortune Magazine’s Brainstorm Green Conference in early April and admitted that there is a “newfound hostility to climate policy.” He advised the environmental community to be “more humble” and “less arrogant.” He acknowledged the failure of a comprehensive energy and/or cap and trade policy.
Krupp is correct. With the falsification of climate records exposed—known as Climategate, the American people now see climate change as merely hysteria. Polls show they do not view it as a real problem that we need to address now.
At the same conference, Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, agreed. He said, “Cap and trade cannot be sold and must be reinvented,” adding that it was going to be hard to “resurrect cap and trade.”
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Paul Krugman, never one to mince words when writing about Republicans, looks desperately for common ground on two unrelated issues in his latest column. As a result of a blog post (among other pieces) written by a Professor William Cronon of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin State Republican Party has requested copies of all communication that Cronon has made using his University e-mail related to the recent union struggle in Wisconsin.
They seem to be legally entitled to this information under a state law similar to the Freedom of Information Act. It’s not clear that Cronon’s e-mails could be construed as anything other than embarassing, as he isn’t directly involved in preparing policy summaries that have enormous political implications.
Regardless of how you feel about this specific issue, Krugman errs when he tries to relate this to Climategate, insinuating that they are at all similar:
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The American Lung Association is right up there with the Union of Concerned Scientists as a leftist activist organization pretending to be a professional association with high-minded objectives. In fact, the American Lung Association is a bunch of political thugs. Their latest hit job is putting up billboards in Rep. Fred Upton’s district in Michigan that urge him to “protect our kids’ health. Don’t weaken the Clean Air Act (PDF).” The billboard has a photo of an adolescent girl with a respirator.
The American Lung Association is opposing a bill, the Energy Tax Prevention Act (H. R. 910), that is sponsored by Rep. Upton, the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Upton’s bill, which is expected to be debated on the House floor in early April, does nothing to weaken the Clean Air Act. It simply prevents the Environmental Protection Agency from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Congress never intended the Clean Air Act to be used to enforce global warming policies on the American people. As my CEI colleague Marlo Lewis recently noted, attempts to add provisions to the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 that would allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions were defeated in the Senate. A similar attempt in the House went nowhere.
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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.
Actually, there was no marking up. The Democrats opposed to the bill offered no amendments, and the bill was passed on a voice vote. The full Committee has scheduled a mark-up of the bill next Monday and Tuesday. That means H. R. 910 could come to the House floor by early April. There is no doubt that it will pass the House by a wide margin. The only question is how many Democrats will end up voting for it. My guess is that quite a few Democrats are worried about getting re-elected and will therefore vote for it.
The subcommittee meeting was one long whine by minority Democrats. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), the ranking Democrat on the full committee and chief sponsor of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that failed in the last Congress, said that H. R. 910 would codify science denial. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) chimed in that he was worried the Republicans would try to repeal the law of gravity. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) instead thought that Republicans were trying to repeal the first law of thermodynamics and cause children all over the world to get asthma.
Preventing asthma is now the principal reason brought forward by the global warming alarmists in Congress to cripple the U. S. economy with energy-rationing regulations. Here is what I learned from a ninety-second internet search: “The majority of people with asthma notice that cold, dry air causes more symptoms than mild-temperature or hot, humid air.” Of course, some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists have recently found that global warming is causing a lot of cold weather.
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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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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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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,
My colleague Iain Murray today has an interesting post at the Washington Examiner, about the surprisingly green salaries enjoyed by climate scientists. This excerpt aptly sums his point,
So 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.
Mothers, have your daughter marry a global warming professor!
Read the full post here.
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