The Governors of Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, and North Carolina have petitioned EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to waive the mandatory ethanol blending requirements established by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The petitioners hope thereby to lower and stabilize corn prices, which recently hit record highs as the worst drought in 50 years destroyed one-sixth of the U.S. corn crop. Corn is the principal feedstock used in ethanol production.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Bebe’s letter to Administrator Jackson concisely makes the case for regulatory relief:

Virtually all of Arkansas is suffering from severe, extreme, or exceptional drought conditions. The declining outlook for this year’s corn crop and accelerating prices for corn and other grains are having a severe economic impact on the State, particularly on our poultry and cattle sectors. While the drought may have triggered the price spike in corn, an underlying cause is the federal policy mandating ever-increasing amounts corn for fuel. Because of this policy, ethanol production now consumes approximately 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop, and the cost of corn for use in food production has increased by 193 percent since 2005 [the year before the RFS took effect]. Put simply, ethanol policies have created significantly higher corn prices, tighter supplies, and increased volatility.

Agriculture is the backbone of Arkansas’s economy, accounting for nearly one-quarter of our economic activity. Broilers, turkeys, and cattle — sectors particularly vulnerable to this corn crisis — represent nearly half of Arkansas’s farm marketing receipts. Arkansas poultry operators are trying to cope with grain cost increases and cattle familes are struggling to feed their herds.

Section 211(o)(7) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) authorizes the EPA to waive all or part of the RFS blending targets for one year if the Administrator determines, after public notice and an opportunity for public comment, that implementation of those requirements would “severely harm” the economy of a State, a region, or the United States. Only once before has a governor requested an RFS waiver. When corn prices soared in 2008, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas requested that the EPA waive 50% of the mandate for the production of corn ethanol. Perry, writing in April 2008, noted that corn prices were up 138% globally since 2005. He estimated that rising corn prices had imposed a net loss on the State’s economy of $1.17 billion in 2007 and potentially could impose a net loss of $3.59 billion in 2008. At particular risk were the family ranches that made up two-thirds of State’s 149,000 cattle producers. Bush EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson rejected Perry’s petition in August 2008.

In the EPA’s Request for Comment on the 2012 waiver petitions, the agency indicates it will use the same “analytical approach” and “legal interpretation” on the basis of which Johnson denied Perry’s request in 2008. This means the regulatory decks are stacked against the petitioners. As the EPA reads the statute, CAA Section 211(o)(7) establishes a burden of proof that is nearly impossible for petitioners to meet. No matter how high corn prices get, or how serious the associated economic harm, the EPA will have ready-made excuses not to waive the corn-ethanol blending requirements.

According to the EPA, Petitioners must show that the “RFS itself” would cause severe economic harm, not merely “contribute” to it. Petitioners therefore must also show that the relief sought would achieve a substantial reduction in the prices of corn, feed, and food.

This reading of the statute effectively prejudges the issue. ”Severe” economic harm typically results from a combination of factors, not one single cause. An ethanol mandate that causes little economic harm when unemployment rates are low, corn production is high, and China’s demand for U.S. corn imports is low could inflict severe harm when the opposite conditions obtain — as they do today.

If Congress wanted the EPA to grant a waiver only when the RFS alone causes severe economic harm, it could have easily said so. The statute specifies no such limitation. CAA Section 211(o)(7) does not tell the EPA to ignore non-RFS factors that might also adversely affect food and feed prices, agricultural employment, and the competitiveness of U.S. livestock producers.

The EPA’s demand that the waiver be a ”remedy for the harm” is the flip side of this same trick coin. By law, the EPA may grant a waiver for only one year at a time. Although a series of waivers might provide a complete remedy, a one-year waiver may have little impact on markets shaped by the RFS’s 17-year (2006-2022) production quota schedule. So the EPA could reject the waiver petitions on the grounds that a piecemeal solution is no solution at all.

Note: The EPA argues the exact opposite when the issue is whether or not to pull a regulatory trigger. In such cases, even small contributions to an alleged harm are considered sufficient grounds for regulation, and even minute regulatory contributions to the hoped-for solution are deemed fully justified and legally required.

Take, for example, the EPA’s heavy-duty truck greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards. The EPA estimates that the standards for model year (MY) 2014-2018 heavy-duty vehicles will reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations by 0.732 parts per million, which in turn will avert an estimated 0.002-0.004°C of global warming and 0.012-0.048 centimeters of sea-level rise by the year 2100 (Proposed Heavy Truck Rule, p. 74289). Such changes would be too small for scientists to distinguish from the “noise” of inter-annual climate variability. The EPA acknowledges no obligation to demonstrate either that heavy-truck GHG emissions alone harm public health and welfare or that regulating MY 2014-2018 heavy-truck GHG emissions would have a major impact on global warming.

Consider also the EPA’s Utility MACT Rule for coal-fired power plants. The agency acknowledges that U.S. mercury (Hg) emissions constitute only 5% of global anthropogenic Hg emissions and only 2% of the total global Hg pool, and that U.S. power plant emissions account for only 0.6% of the global pool. More importantly, the EPA estimates  — based on dubious epidemiological evidence and questionable demographic modeling – that the MACT Rule’s Hg emission reductions will avert the loss of 0.00209 IQ points per child in a guesstimated population of 240,000 subsistence fishing households. IQ points cannot be measured out to five decimal places. The MACT Rule’s microscopic mercury-related health benefits are literally undetectable and unverifiable. The EPA is completely undaunted by such facts. In the agency’s words (Proposed Utility MACT Rule, p. 24978):

However, as the U.S. Supreme Court has noted in decisions as recently as Massachusetts v. EPA, regarding the problem of climate change, it is not necessary to show that a problem will be entirely solved by the action being taken, nor that it is necessary to cure all ills before addressing those judged to be significant. 549 U.S. 497, 525 (2007).

In stark contrast, when the issue before the EPA is whether to grant regulatory relief, then the regulation itself must be shown to cause severe harm, and even temporary relief must be shown to cure all ills (or most of them). This is not surprising. Being a regulatory agency, the EPA does not accord the harms of over-regulation the same weight as the harms of under-regulation.

So in all likelihood, the EPA will deny the Governors’ waiver requests, even though a waiver would undoubtedly lower and stabilize corn prices to some extent.

This cloud may have a silver lining. If the EPA once again refuses to balance the interests of corn farmers against those of other industries and consumers, it will furnish new evidence that the RFS is a policy disaster. Especially if the drought persists into 2013, an EPA that won’t heed the reasonable requests of domestic livestock producers, seven governors, 156 House members, 26 Senators, the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and other food security advocates will build support for RFS reform — or repeal.

Last week, I posted a commentary on NASA scientist James Hansen’s study and op-ed, which attribute recent extreme weather to global climate change. In the op-ed, Hansen stated:

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

My commentary concluded: “Hansen’s sweeping assertion that global warming is the principal cause of the European and Russian heat waves, and the Texas-Oklahoma drought, is not supported by event-specific analysis and is implausible in light of previous research.”

Although Hansen does not explicitly attribute the ongoing U.S. drought to global warming, he does blame global warming for both the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought and the current summer heat. And in his study, Hansen states: “With the temperature amplified by global warming and ubiquitous surface heating from elevated greenhouse gas amounts, extreme drought conditions can develop.”

This week on World Climate Report, Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger argue that the current U.S. drought “is driven by natural variability not global warming.” Their post (“Hansen Is Wrong“) is concise and layman-friendly. Here I offer an even briefer summary.

A standard measure of drought in the U.S. is the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), which measures the combined effects of temperature (hotter weather = more soil evaporation) and precipitation (more rainfall = more soil moisture). “The more positive the PDSI values, the wetter conditions are, the more negative the PDSI values, the drier things are.” The PDSI for the past 117 years (1895-2011) shows a small non-significant positive trend (i.e. towards wetter conditions). There is no greenhouse warming signal in this data.

What Hansen is claiming, however, is not that U.S. temperatures are causing drought but that global warming is causing drought. So Pat and Chip attempt to determine the influence of global temperatures on U.S. temperatures. They find that about 33% of U.S. temperature trends is explained by global temperature variations, although there is little relationship from year to year.

Figure explanation: The observed annual U.S. temperatures from 1895 through 2011 (open circles) and that part of them which is explained by global temperatures (black circles).

Pat and Chip then compare the black part of the chart above (the portion of U.S. temperatures influenced by global temperatures) with the PDSI. They find no relationship between global temperature variations and U.S. drought conditions (graph below, left) but a significant relationship between PDSI and non-global warming factors (graph below, right).

Pat and Chip conclude: “In other words, the situation is as it always has been. And the 2012 drought conditions, and every other drought that has come before, is the result of natural processes, not human greenhouse gases emissions.”

The worst drought in 50 years has destroyed one-sixth of the U.S. corn crop. The USDA’s World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WSDE) report, released Friday, projects the smallest corn crop in six years and the lowest corn yields per acre since 1995.

As acreage, production, and yields declined, corn prices spiked. Last week, corn futures hit a record high of $8.29-3/4 per bushel.

If corn prices remain  high through 2013, livestock producers who use corn as a feedstock will incur billions of dollars in added costs. “These additional costs will either be passed on to consumers through increased food prices, or poultry farmers will be forced out of business,” warn the National Chicken Council and National Turkey Federation.

Even before the drought hit, corn prices were high. Prices increased from $2.00 a bushel in 2005/2006 to $6.00 a bushel in 2011/2012, notes FarmEcon LLC. A key inflationary factor is the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), commonly known as the ethanol mandate. Since 2005, the RFS has required more and more billions of bushels to be used to fuel cars rather than feed livestock and people.

Suspension of the mandate would allow meat, poultry, and dairy producers to compete on a level playing field with ethanol producers for what remains of the drought-ravaged crop. That would reduce corn prices, benefiting livestock producers and consumers alike.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has authority under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) to waive the RFS blending targets, in whole or in part, if she determines that those requirements “would severely harm the economy or environment of a State, a region, or the United States.” The pressure on her to do so is mounting.

On July 30, a coalition of meat, dairy, and poultry producers petitioned Jackson to waive the 2012 and 2013 RFS blending requirements. From the petition:

As detailed below, the extraordinary and disastrous circumstances created for livestock and poultry producers by the ongoing drought in the heart of our grain growing regions requires that all relevant measures of relief be explored and taken where possible. One of these measures must be the amount of grain utilized for the production of renewable fuel. The ongoing drought is taking an enormous toll on the nation’s corn crop. As we detail below, the 15.2 billon gallon  renewable fuel standard (“RFS”) in 2012 coupled with the prospect of a 16.55 billion gallon standard in 2013 will require the renewable fuels industry to utilize a major portion of the drought-limited available corn supply. The drought-induced reductions in the corn supply means that the mandated utilization of corn for renewable fuels will so reduce the supply of corn and increase its price that livestock and poultry producers will be forced to reduce the size of their herds and flocks, causing some to go out of business and jobs to be lost. In addition to this direct harm, these herd and flock reductions will ripple through the meat, milk and poultry sectors, causing severe harm in the form of more job and economic losses. This drought-induced harm exists now, will continue to exist into the latter part of 2012 and 2013, and could continue to be felt in 2014 depending on the policy choices made now.

On August 1, bi-partisan groups of 156 House Members  and 26 Senators sent letters to Jackson asking her to “adjust” the RFS targets in light of the drought and rising corn prices. The House letter argues, in part:

As you are aware, U.S. corn prices have consistently risen, and the corn market has been increasingly volatile, since expansion of the RFS in 2007. This reflects the reality that approximately 40 percent of the corn crop now goes into ethanol production, a dramatic rise since the first ethanol mandates were put in place in 2005. Ethanol now consumes more corn than animal agriculture, a fact directly attributable to the federal mandate. While the government cannot control the weather, it fortunately has one tool still available that can directly impact corn demand. By adjusting the normally rigid Renewable Fuel Standard to align with current market conditions, the federal government can help avoid a dangerous economic situation because of the prolonged record high cost of corn.

 On August 9, Secretary General of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Jose Graziano da Silva called for an “immediate, temporary suspension” of the mandate  to help avert a repeat of the 2008 food crisis.

Also on August 9, the Govs. of Delaware (Jack Markell) and Maryland (Martin O’Malley), both Democrats, sent Jackson a letter in support of the industry coalition’s petition. From the Governors’ letter to Jackson:

In 2012, more than 40% of the U.S. annual corn supply was to be used to meet the RFS corn based ethanol requirements established annually by the EPA. If you were to exercise your statutory authority to waive the RFS standards for the next year, it would make more than 5 billion bushels of corn available to the marketplace for animal feed and foodstuffs, driving down costs and significantly lessening the financial impact to Delmarva’s [Delaware-Maryland-Virginia] poultry farms and consumers. While there may be some who question the true price impact of waiving the RFS standards for a limited period, those debates are quantitative, not qualitative, as it is not in dispute that a waiver would put downward pressure on corn pricing. Given the likely impacts to the poultry industry, not to mention the increased cost of food for consumers, of this dramatic increase in price due to the undersupply of corn, it is hard to imagine any scenario when exercising your authority would be more appropriate.

There is, alas, little chance Jackson will waive any part of the RFS. That would be asking an executive agency to put economic rationality ahead of political calculation in a presidential election year. President Obama today makes his fifth visit to Iowa this year. Iowa, with six electoral votes, is the heart of corn country. Supporting a waiver to lower corn prices would spoil the President’s photo ops.

Today’s Greenwire (subscription required) reports that the USDA has announced it will purchase up to $170 million worth of meat, poultry, and catfish to help producers who have been adversely affected by high corn prices. The fix on offer is not to scale back regulatory excess but to expand corporate welfare.  

A study by NASA’s James Hansen and two colleagues, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that during the past 30 years, extreme hot weather has become more frequent and affects a larger area of the world than was the case during the preceding 30 years. Specifically, the study, “Perception of climate change,” reports that:

• Cool summers occurred one-third of the time during 1951-1980 but occurred only 10% of the time during 1981-2010.
• Very hot weather affected 0.2% of the land area during 1951-1980 but affected 10% of the land area during 1981-2010.

Hansen is the world’s best known scientist in the climate alarm camp and a leading advocate of aggressive measures to curb fossil-energy use. He and his co-authors are up front about the policy agenda motivating their study. The “notorious variability of local weather and climate from day to day and year to year” is the “great barrier” to “public recognition” of man-made climate change and, thus, to public support for policies requiring “rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions.” When heat waves or drought strike, the authors want the public to perceive global warming. On Saturday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Hansen summarizing the study’s results.

Heat waves will become more frequent and severe as the world warms; some areas will become drier, others wetter. Those hypotheses are not controversial.

What the Hansen team concludes, however, is controversial. The researchers contend that the biggest, baddest hot weather extremes of recent years — the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought, the ongoing Midwest drought – are a “consequence of global warming” and have “virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

There’s just one small problem. The reseachers do not examine any of those events to assess the relative contributions of natural climate variability and global warming. The study provides no event-specific evidence that the record-setting heat waves or droughts would not have occurred in the absence of warming, or would not have broken records in the absence of warming. 

The PNAS study (hereafter, “Hansen”) finds that the bell curve showing the distribution of extreme hot weather has steadily moved to the right as the planet has warmed from 1951 to 2011. Events that were once outliers (right hand tail) in 1951-1980 occur with increasing frequency in each subsequent decade, and today’s most extreme events did not occur in the baseline (1951-1980) period.

One question that springs to mind is whether 1951-1980 is an appropriate baseline for assessing trends in extreme weather. Consider the graph at the top of this page, which shows the U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index (source: U.S. Climate Change Research Program). In the U.S., the period of 1951-1980 was not representative or typical of prior decades.

In recent testimony before the Senate, University of Alabama in Hunstville climatologist John Christy made a by-the-numbers case that when data from the 1920s-1940s are included, there is no long-term trend in U.S. extreme heat events. Christy finds that:

• More state all-time high temperature records were set in the 1930s than in recent decades.
• More state all-time cold records than hot records were set in the decades since 1960.
• In a database of 970 weather stations, daily all-time high temperatures occurred more frequently before 1940 than after 1954.
• The 1930s set twice as many daily maximum temperature records than were set in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s.
• More Midwest daily maximum temperature records were set in the heat waves of 1911 and the 1930s than in the 2012 heat wave.
• The Palmer Drought Severity Index for the continental U.S. shows considerable interannual variability but no long-term trend from 1900 to the present.
• The upper Colorado River Basin experienced more frequent multi-decadal droughts in the 19th, 18th, 17th, and 16th centuries than in the 20th century.

Viewed in the context of Christy’s longer datasets, Hansen’s 1951-1980 baseline period looks anomalous, not the following three decades.

Hansen’s own plot of U.S. climate data going back to the 19th century also shows a period of pronounced warmth in the 1930s and 1940s, i.e. prior to his baseline.

Hansen is looking at all Northern hemisphere data whereas Christy is looking just at U.S. data. But the U.S. arguably has the best long-term weather data of any country in the world. What would have been the result had Hansen used only U.S. data and chosen an earlier period as the baseline, say 1925-1954, when there was far less greenhouse ‘forcing’ but many daily high temperature records? It is doubtful his statistical results would be anywhere near as dramatic.

Hansen argues that global warming, not weather patterns associated with drought (La Niña) and heat waves (atmospheric blocking), caused the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought. La Niñas and blocking patterns ”have always been common, yet the large areas of extreme warming have come into existence only with global warming.” Therefore, Hansen concludes, today’s extreme anomalies have at least two causes, “specific weather patterns and global warming.”

This is spin, speculation, or ‘trust-me-I’m-the-expert’ assertion. Chase et al. 2006, a team of scientists from Colorado and France, found “nothing unusual” in the 2003 European heat wave that would indicate a change in global climate. Look at the global temperature map included in the study. During June, July, and August 2003, more than half the planet was cooler than the mean temperature from 1979 through 2003. Europe – a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface – was the only place experiencing high heat. Does it make sense to attribute that local anomaly to global warming?

Figure explanation (courtesy of World Climate Report): 1000–500 mb thickness temperature anomaly for June, July, and August 2003. Green and blue tones indicate below-normal temperature anomalies.

Similarly, a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) analysis found that the 2010 Russian heat wave “was mainly due to natural internal atmospheric variability.” The study specifically addressed the question of a possible linkage to anthropogenic climate change:

Despite this strong evidence for a warming planet, greenhouse gas forcing fails to explain the 2010 heat wave over western Russia. The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave. It is not known whether, or to what extent, greenhouse gas emissions may affect the frequency or intensity of blocking during summer. It is important to note that observations reveal no trend in a daily frequency of July blocking over the period since 1948, nor is there an appreciable trend in the absolute values of upper tropospheric summertime heights over western Russia for the period since 1900.

The Texas-Oklahoma drought of 2011 was a record breaker. According to NOAA (State of the Climate in 2011, p. 166), “Several climate divisions in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the Rio Grande and Texas Gulf Coast river basins, had record low values for the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index in the 117-year record.” For Texas, 2011 was also a year of record heat. However, this correlation is not evidence that global warming was the principal factor. Detection and — more importantly — measurement of the impact of global climate change on the Texas drought requires a long and complicated analysis.

Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon conducted a “preliminary analysis” of the role of global warming in the Texas drought. Although far from definitive, it is (to my knowledge) the most detailed and thorough analysis to date.  Nielsen-Gammon examines Texas drought and temperature data, climate modeling studies, and data on natural climate cycles (La Niña/El Niño, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation) to estimate the potential contribution of global warming. Here are some of his findings:

• Some IPCC AR4 climate models “at one extreme” project precipitation to increase in Texas, while others project a substantial decrease. “The general model consensus is that precipitation is likely to decrease a bit, but it’s not a sure thing.”
• The model-projected change is “smaller in magnitude than the past observed multi-decade-scale changes,” which indicates that “global warming is not going to be the dominant driver of mean precipitation changes, at least for the next several decades.”
• From 1895 to 2010, precipitation in Texas increased overall, by more than 10%.
• There has been no net change in Texas precipitation variability since 1920.
• Although the 2011 drought was the most severe 1-year Texas drought, it was not the most severe in the instrumental record. That distinction belongs to the 1950-1957 drought. Aside from 2009 and 2011, all the droughts that rank as most severe in at least 1% of the State occurred in 1956 and earlier.
• Texas summer temperature in 2011 was record-breaking because of the drought rather than the other way around. “This record-setting summer was 5.4 F above average.  The lack of precipitation accounts for 4.0 F, greenhouse gases global warming accounts for another 0.9 F, and the AMO [Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation] accounts for another 0.3 F.  Note that there’s uncertainty with all those numbers, and I have only made the crudest attempts at quantifying the uncertainty.”

 Among Nielson-Gammon’s key conclusions:

So I conclude, based on our current knowledge of the effects of global warming on temperature and precipitation, that Texas would probably have broken the all-time record for summer temperatures this year even without global warming.

This drought was an outlier.  Even without global warming, to the best of my knowledge, it would have been an outlier and a record-setter.

* * *

Until we learn more, it is appropriate to assume that the direct impact of global warming on Texas precipitation interannual variability has been negligible, and that the future variability trend with or without global warming is unknown.

In short, Hansen’s sweeping assertion that global warming is the principal cause of the European and Russian heat waves, and the Texas-Oklahoma drought, is not supported by event-specific analysis and is implausible in light of previous research.

A concluding comment on what might be called Hansen’s political science is in order. Hansen believes the “great barrier” to aggressive action on climate change is the ”notorious variability” of weather and climate at local scales. But the public’s rejection of cap-and-trade, the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen treaty agenda, and the GOP/Tea Party opposition to the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy are only partly related to public “perceptions” of climate change risk. More important is the fact that nobody knows how to run and grow a modern economy with zero-carbon energy.

The Breakthrough Institute develops this thesis in great detail in a collection of posts titled the “Death of Cap-and-Trade.” Because affordable energy is vital to prosperity and much of the world is energy poor, it would be economically ruinous and, thus, politically suicidal to demand that people abandon fossil fuels before cheaper alternative energies are available. But that is exactly what warmistas like Hansen urge the U.S. and other governments to do – lock up vast stores of carbonaceous fuel and penalize fossil energy use before commercially-viable alternatives exist.

As the Breakthrough folks argue, if you’re worried about climate change, then your chief policy goal should be to make alternative energy cheaper than fossil energy. Instead, the global warming movement has attempted to make fossil energy more costly than alternative energy, or to simply mandate the switch to alternative energy regardless of cost. Al Gore’s call in 2008 to “re-power America” with zero-carbon energy within 10 years is epitomizes this folly. More “moderate” variants would only do less harm, less rapidly.