Here’s a preview of the kind of transparency we can expect from Gina McCarthy, who has been nominated to replace Lisa Jackson as head of the EPA. When combined with her history of misleading Congress , it is clear Gina McCarthy would fit right in with “the most open administration ever” :
[click to continue…]
2013
There’s an ongoing quest to find signs of global warming in every aspect of everyday life. Over the last few years a rather unique kind of local indicator for GW has emerged, namely the predicted peak cherry blossom bloom of Washington DC’s Tidal Basin.
The peak cherry blossom bloom period has been used frequently as a GW indicator for the last three years. In line with GW claims, the predictions for peak blooms were moved ahead in both 2010 and 2011; in 2010, the revised predicted peak dates were April 1 to April 4; in 2011, they were even earlier– March 29 to April 3. In 2012, the predictions of a peak between March 20 and March 23 were regarded as a first-class sign of GW, with DC’s cherry blossoms being called a “Global Warming Canary” by the Huffington Post. It seemed that the hugely popular cherry blossom festival was in danger of becoming a winter, rather than a spring, event. As stated in a 2012 Washington Post article “Could cherry blossoms one day be blooming in winter?” there is a future possibility of “a blooming period in February instead of March, and a peak bloom in early March, instead of early April”.
So what are the predictions for this year’s cherry blossom? The National Park Service has announced that the peak bloom for Washington’s Global Warming Canary will be March 26 to March 30 — about one week later than last year. Although the actual bloom dates will be determined by the weather in the coming weeks, this year’s prediction of a later peak period does not fit into the alarming predictions of earlier years, or the notion that the shift towards earlier dates will continue.
Given the decades-long nature of climate trends, later peak blooms in a single year don’t prove anything either way about GW. But that was just as true of the 2010 to 2012 cherry blossom seasons, and yet those dates triggered quite a bit of GW alarmist commentary. This year’s prediction hasn’t. Press coverage of GW “evidence” apparently omits incidents that run counter to alarmism. Perhaps that’s not a surprise, but it’s not a healthy sign for public understanding.
And no matter when the blossoms appear this year, let’s all enjoy them—even the GW alarmists among us.
It was a busy week for promoting and opposing a carbon tax. Two studies on the economic effects of a carbon tax that draw opposite conclusions were released by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Brookings Institution. Kevin Hassett, Ph.D., director of economic policy studies at the “pro-business” American Enterprise Institute, continued his advocacy of a carbon tax at a Resources for the Future forum. And most interestingly, former EPA Administrator William K. Reilly, said at a conference that, “The strongest advocate on our task force for a carbon tax was ExxonMobil. I had previously thought that was a public relations thing — I didn’t think they were quite interested in it.”
The National Association of Manufacturers released a study by NERA Consulting on the Economic Outcomes of a Carbon Tax. The NAM study concludes that a tax starting at $20 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted and increasing by 4 percent per year would have a range of negative effects that would ripple through the economy. In particular: “The negative impact of a carbon tax on total manufacturing output would be significant, with output from energy-intensive manufacturing sectors dropping as much as 15 percent and output from non-energy-intensive manufacturing sectors dropping as much as 7.7 percent.”
The NAM study also argues that: “A carbon tax would have a net negative effect on consumption, investment and jobs, resulting in lower federal revenues from taxes on capital and labor. Factoring in lost revenue from reduced economic activity, the net revenue from a carbon tax available for deficit/debt reduction and lower tax rates is relatively small.”
The automatic reductions of $85 billion in federal spending, known as the Sequester, which were agreed to by President Obama, Senate Democrats and House Republicans when the Budget Control Act was passed and signed into law in 2011, started going into effect today, March 1. As President Obama has warned over the past several weeks, the consequences of cutting federal spending by 2.2 percent already are calamitous. Bloomberg News reported that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was going to have to discontinue its survey of green jobs.
Here’s what Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the ironically named Center for American Progress and the author of a book on green energy told Bloomberg: “It’s a huge loss. This means the U.S. will be flying blind on the growth of a very, very important sector in the U.S. economy.”
It may be the White House agrees with my CEI colleague John Berlau, who told Bloomberg that he was glad to see the green jobs survey go. That’s because President Obama promised in the 2008 campaign his policies would create 5 million new green jobs within a decade. The White House later claimed $90 billion in stimulus funding had created 225,000 green jobs (at $400,000 per job). So the president may be happy not to have be reminded by the BLS’s survey of how far he is from keeping his promise.
“U.S. EPA has altered its cellulosic biofuel requirements for 2012 — from 8.65 million gallons to zero,” today’s Climatewire reports. In January, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated EPA’s 2012 cellulosic biofuels standard. “As a result,” Climatewire explains, “obligated parties — oil companies required to show EPA that they blend biofuels in their fuel supply — won’t need to provide information on their compliance. The agency will submit refunds to companies that have submitted payments for 2012 cellulosic waiver credits.”
Who says there’s no justice in this world! For several years the EPA has fined refiners for not purchasing and blending ethanol made from switchgrass, wood chips, and other fibrous, non-edible plants. Refiners protested that there was no commercial cellulosic fuel to buy. The EPA argued that didn’t matter because the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is meant to be “technology forcing.” The agency thus based each year’s cellulosic target on aspirational (rather than realistic) projections of how much cellulosic fuel would be produced. It then cheerfully collected fines for all the gallons of phantom fuel refiners did not blend.
The Court held that punishing refiners for what the ethanol industry failed to do is not “technology forcing”:
EPA applies the pressure to one industry (the refiners) [citation omitted], yet it is another (the producers of cellulosic biofuel) that enjoys the requisite expertise, plant, capital and ultimate opportunity for profit. Apart from their role as captive consumers, the refiners are in no position to ensure, or even contribute to, growth in the cellulosic biofuel industry. “Do a good job, cellulosic fuel producers. If you fail, we’ll fine your customers.” Given this asymmetry in incentives, EPA’s projection is not “technology-forcing” in the same sense as other innovation-minded regulations that we have upheld.
Zeroing out the RFS cellulosic blending targets established by the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) is long overdue. [click to continue…]
The Washington Post reports that the President is poised to nominate Gina McCarthy to succeed Lisa Jackson (a.k.a. “Richard Windsor”) as EPA administrator. If/when the Senate takes up her confirmation, lawmakers should know that McCarthy, the current chief of Air Regulation at the EPA, has a history of misleading Congress and the public on two of EPA’s most expensive regulations.
As CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis points out in a 2011 editorial:
[McCarthy and other EPA officials] denied under oath that motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards are “related to” fuel economy standards. In so doing, they denied plain facts they must know to be true. They lied to Congress.
He elaborates:
That greenhouse gas emission standards implicitly regulate fuel economy is evident from the agencies’ own documents. As EPA and NHTSA acknowledge in their joint May 2010 Greenhouse Gas/Fuel Economy Tailpipe Rule (pp. 25424, 25327), no commercially available technologies exist to capture or filter out carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from motor vehicles. Consequently, the only way to decrease grams of CO2 per mile is to reduce fuel consumption per mile — that is, increase fuel economy. Carbon dioxide constitutes 94.9% of vehicular greenhouse gas emissions, and “there is a single pool of technologies… that reduce fuel consumption and thereby CO2 emissions as well.”
That’s not the only time she’s willfully confused the public on a major regulation.
The Environmental Protection Agency released to Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute late in the evening on Friday, 15th February, part of the second of four batches of e-mails that respond to a Freedom of Information Act request. EPA was forced to turn over the approximately 12,000 e-mails only after CEI filed suit in federal court. On 20th February, the EPA released some more e-mails in order to get close to the 3,000 they promised the court they would release each month for four months. All the e-mails have been posted on the web by the EPA and may be seen here.
Since EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson recently left office, the EPA no longer needs to guard her Richard Windsor alias e-mail address. Thus Richard Windsor now appears as the recipient or sender of the e-mails.
Many of the e-mails are heavily redacted. The reason claimed by EPA for most of the redactions is that they are part of the pre-decisional deliberative process and therefore exempt from FOIA. CEI will be going back to court to challenge many of these redactions as improper and some as laughably so. The judge will have a lot of fun reading to do.
Two e-mails that were not redacted concern the Coal Ash Rule. The first e-mail, dated 15th December 2009, is from Allyn Brooks-LaSure in the Administrator’s office and is addressed to Jackson and several other EPA officials. It can be found as numbered document 476 in Part B of the second release. Brooks-LaSure writes:
Administrator, you have your own Christmas carols…
And then copies a December 15, 2009 blog post by Rob Perks, Director of the Center for Advocacy Campaigns at the Natural Resources Defense Council:
First, it was 1,200 emails of the Washington Post daily headlines, Google alerts of everything written about the Environmental Protection Agency on a given day and a compendium of blogs that mentioned the EPA. Then, having had their fun, EPA officials got serious in the second tranche of emails they released to CEI late Friday, pursuant to a court ruling that ordered the agency to comply with our FOIA requests. This time, we got actual emails … that revealed a lot … about the fine art of redaction. Remember, this is the production of the most powerful regulatory agency of the most transparent administration in history. “We have nothing to hide,” the EPA has told us. Sure doesn’t seem that way to us:
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress on 12th February gives me new hope for America’s economic prospects. The fact that a president who is so thoroughly misinformed and misguided has not been able to totally wreck our economy is evidence of the resilience of America’s institutions and of the entrepreneurial spirit of its citizens. This does not mean that I expect our current robust one percent economic growth will continue; on the contrary, I expect a colossal recession in the next few years as a result of the disastrous policies being pursued by the Obama Administration and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
The President spent more time talking about energy and climate than any other issues. He noted that greenhouse gas emissions (which he called “dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet”) have declined in the past four years, but did not mention that economic stagnation is one of the major causes. Nor did he mention that global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase rapidly because of robust economic growth in China and other industrializing countries.
He went on to say: “But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Yes, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.”
A report published in October 2012 by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) links soaring corn and agricultural commodity prices to food riots and turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East.
Although several factors may contribute to political unrest, acknowledge Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam and two co-authors, “the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices.” In poor countries with little or no local agriculture to “buffer” swings in global supply conditions, the central government “may be perceived to have a critical role in food security. Failure to provide security undermines the very reason for existence of the political system.”
In short:
When the ability of the political system to provide security for the population breaks down, popular support disappears. Conditions of widespread threat to security are particularly present when food is inaccessible to the population at large.
Soaring food prices triggered food riots in both 2008 and 2011.
Figure explanation (references omitted): Time dependence of FAO Food Price Index from January 2004 to May 2011. Red dashed vertical lines correspond to beginning dates of “food riots” and protests associated with the major recent unrest in North Africa and the Middle East. The overall death toll is reported in parentheses. Blue vertical line indicates the date, December 13, 2010, on which Dr. Bar-Yam and colleagues submitted a report to the U.S. government, warning of the link between food prices, social unrest and political instability. Inset shows FAO Food Price Index from 1990 to 2011. [click to continue…]
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