William Yeatman

Obama’s Awful Energy Picks

by William Yeatman on December 11, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama made centrist choices for cabinet positions that deal with economics and national security, but yesterday he went off the deep end with his energy picks.

Secretary of Energy has traditionally been a cheerleader for domestic energy producers in the coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear industries, as noted last week by Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal.

Obama took a different tack by selecting Steven Chu to run the Department of Energy (DOE). Dr. Chu is a Nobel Prize winning physicist, which is great. But he is also a big advocate of throwing taxpayer money at renewable energy to save us all from climate change, which is very bad. 

Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said that a Chu-led DOE “is like going to a Mensa meeting after eight years of being trapped in the Flat Earth Society."

Mr. Weiss’s endorsement should come as no surprise given that his boss, John Podesta, is in charge of the team that selected Dr. Chu. Weiss’s snarky comment is, however, illuminating. It reflects well the statist’s faith in the expert’s ability to fix any problem, social or natural, real or imagined. Whenever, I hear this statist refrain, I always think of the Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s wonderful report on the fallibility of the handsome geeks who thought they were smart enough to manufacture, execute and win a war in Vietnam.

For the newly created energy czar position, Obama selected Carol Browner. She, too, has chugged the green kool aid. She once told reporters that, “Taking action now [ie, enacting statist energy policies to fix the earth] will allow us to avoid the worst climate impacts and will drive the creation of a clean energy economy, in which we exchange carbon-dependency for greater energy independence and new clean energy jobs.”

Both choices indicate that the President-elect is serious about his campaign pledge to price coal out of the market. This willingness should be terrifying for anyone paying attention to America's inadequate electricity supply.

We Are All Saudi Arabians

by William Yeatman on December 10, 2008

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 Green Jobs Myth

by William Yeatman on December 10, 2008

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."

UN Climate Talks Going Nowhere

by William Yeatman on December 10, 2008

in Blog

As climate change negotiators headed back into the Poznan International Fair after a two-day break, there was a frosty atmosphere inside and out.

Kyoto Is Dead

by William Yeatman on December 9, 2008

in Blog

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 Rebuffs Obama

by William Yeatman on December 9, 2008

in Blog

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.

EU Nations Battle over Billions in Carbon Pork

by William Yeatman on December 9, 2008

in Blog

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.

Rule of Law at Stake in UK

by William Yeatman on December 9, 2008

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.

ANPR

by William Yeatman on December 9, 2008

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.

Healthy Skepticism on Climate Change

by William Yeatman on December 9, 2008

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.

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