William Yeatman

It’s Getting Cold Out There
Debra Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 July 2009

No wonder skeptics consider the left’s belief in man-made global warming as akin to a fad religion – last week in Italy, G-8 leaders pledged not to allow the Earth’s temperature to rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Climate Bill Ineffective
Kathryn Gaines, Human Events, 13 July 2009

House Democratic leaders must be in a state of shock. The EPA announced that the Waxman-Markey Bill, the cap-and-trade bill, would not “materially effect global carbon concentrations in the atmosphere.” Why then are Americans being asked to take on $9 trillion ($9,000,000,000,000) worth of spending from 2012-2050 for nothing?

The Cap-and-Tax Disaster
Sarah Palin, Washington Post, 14 July 2009

There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America’s unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won’t bring jobs. Our nation’s debt is unsustainable, and the federal government’s reach into the private sector is unprecedented.

In the News

Congress Gives Your Money to T Boone Pickens
Tim Carney, Washington Examiner, 10 July 2009

Warming Debate Simmers While Obama Poses in Europe
The Oklahoman editorial, 10 July 2009

Global Warming Alarmism Enriches Al Gore, Bankrupts the Rest of Us
Ron Smith, Baltimore Sun, 10 July 2009

Democrats Walk a Fine Line on Tariffs
Zack Hale, National Journal, 9 July 2009

Greenpeace Defaces Abe Lincoln with Alarmist Banner
News Wire Services, 9 July 2009

Smart Grid or Strong Grid?
Robert Michaels, MasterResource.org, 8 July 2009

Climate Czarina Tells GM, “Put nothing in writing”
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner, 8 July 2009

G-8 on Climate Change: Non-change I Can Believe in
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 8 July 2009

Markey’s Moment
John Carlisle, American Spectator, 6 July 2009

Au Revoir to the American Car
Myron Ebell, Washington Times, 5 July 2009

Green Nonsense
Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 5 July 2009

Solar Power Is Looking Dim
Iain Murray, Washington Examiner, 3 July 2009

News You Can Use

The Gore Effect

At ClimateDepot.com, Marc Morano reports on the latest incidence of the “Gore Effect,” the remarkably frequent occurrence of exceedingly cold weather whenever and wherever former Vice-President Al Gore travels to talk about global warming. Next week, Gore will be in Melbourne to launch a new alarmist organization, “Safe Climate Australia”; this week, temperatures in Melbourne hovered around zero degrees Centigrade. For a detailed history of the “Gore Effect,” click here.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Senate Begins Work on Energy Rationing Bill

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on cap-and-trade legislation on Tuesday, 7th July. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar all testified on behalf of the Obama Administration in favor of cap-and-trade, but the Republicans’ only witness, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, stole the show. His written testimony and that of the other witnesses can be found here. In response to a question from Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the committee’s ranking Republican, Administrator Jackson said that the EPA’s analysis was that actions by the United States alone to reduce emissions will not affect global C02 levels. Secretary Chu disagreed with the EPA’s analysis.

EPW Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) had announced that the committee would start marking up their bill on 22nd July and that she planned to be finished before the August recess, which is scheduled to begin on 7th August. But then Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that all committees needed to be finished with their pieces of comprehensive energy-rationing legislation by 18th September. That quickly slipped to 28th September. So now it looks like the EPW Committee won’t begin marking up its version of Waxman-Markey until September.

Green Jobs Nonsense

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s European Affairs Subcommittee held a hearing Wednesday on the European Union’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation set the record straight in his testimony, which can be found here. Ben told me that Senator Barbara Boxer, who is a member of the full committee but not the subcommittee, came in towards the end of the hearing and remarked that despite all of California’s economic problems, the one bright spot is the state’s alternative energy jobs. “Where would we be without them?”  Good question.  What is the effect of raising the costs of production by raising energy prices? Higher prices, fewer sales, lower production, job losses, less investment in new production, less money in people’s pockets to spend on other things. Unemployment in California, which used to be below the national average, is now well above the national average at over 12%.

The EPA Cover-Up-the Saga Continues

Sam Kazman
On June 23d, the last day for public comment in EPA’s Endangerment Docket, CEI unveiled a series of amazing EPA emails which demonstrated that the agency had squelched an internal report critical of its position on global warming. We sent out our first news release on this the next morning. A day later, Rep. Joe Barton and other Republicans held a press conference on the issue, and Reps. Sensenbrenner and Issa issued statements decrying the cover-up. CEI also released a draft version of the concealed report.  The next day, as the House debated the Waxman-Markey bill, Rep. Barton brought the issue up during floor debate as well. At EPA, meanwhile, senior analyst Dr. Alan Carlin was given permission to post the final version of his report on his own website-EPA still refused to post it on the agency website.

CEI subsequently filed the final report with EPA, demanding that the agency reopen the comment period to allow the public to respond to both the report and to EPA’s atrocious behavior.  We have yet to hear back from the agency.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported our request, accusing the agency of running a “shell game” on the endangerment issue.

On the Senate side, Senators Inhofe, Barrasso and Thune weighed in with questions for EPA and requests for an IG investigation.  The issue was raised yet again during the Senate EPW July 7 hearing, at which Administrator Jackson lamely claimed that Dr. Carlin’s views had been circulated within the agency.  She did not explain why his report had been buried.

In terms of press coverage, there’ve been a growing number of articles, starting with a DowJones Newswire report and extending to other web and print media as well.  Two excellent pieces are a CBSNews Political Hotsheet article and a Wall St. Journal column by Kim Strassel.

Earlier this week the House Appropriations Committee passed a $27 billion budget for the Department of Energy. You might think that the DOE already has enough trouble trying to spend the $39 billion it received in the federal stimulus act enacted earlier this year (that’s almost twice the DOE’s entire budget for 2007), but you’d be wrong-when it comes to taxpayer dollars, the money pit otherwise known as the DOE can’t get enough.

There are many problems with the DOE’s bloated budget, but I’m only going to address the most egregious: The Congress’s support for no-strings-attached “clean energy” loans.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, in 2005, the Congress created a Loan Guarantee Program for “innovative” energy production that reduces greenhouse gas emissions responsible for so-called “global warming” (it hasn’t warmed in a decade, but that’s a different story). With the LGP, the federal government promises to cover the loan in case of default, which makes credit cheaper for borrowers.

The Congress put the DOE in charge of the LGP, despite the fact that the Department has no expertise disbursing loans and its woeful history of picking energy technologies to support. The decision to put the DOE in charge is all the more suspect given that these are risky loans to unproven technologies (according to federal estimates, the default rate is expected to be 50%).

At the time, the Congress seemed to protect the American taxpayer from bad loans by stipulating that the borrower pay a “credit subsidy cost,” a fee equivalent to the value of the risk that the government takes by facilitating cheap credit, unless funds are otherwise appropriated. To date, the Appropriations Committee has yet to allocate funds to pay for the credit subsidy cost, although in the stimulus act passed earlier this year, “Hollywood” Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), inserted language appropriating $6 billion to subsidize the credit subsidy cost for a subset of ultra-green projects.

Assuming that the credit subsidy cost is 10% of the loan, the $6 billion LGP subsidy in the stimulus act puts the taxpayer fully on the hook for $60 billion. But that’s not enough for the Obama administration, which asked for more than $900 million in 2009 and $3.5 billion in 2010 to cover the credit subsidy cost (page 436 of the White House’s proposed budget).

Last month, the Energy and Water Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee seemed to balk at the President’s request. The Subcommittee report stated,

“This Subcommittee has long pushed the Department of Energy on management and cost issues. The bill before us today continues to stress that point to the new Administration and directs the Department to continue to work with the Government Accountability Office (the GAO) to implement its recommendations. The Department continues its 18 year membership in the GAO’s annual list of programs that are at high-risk for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. While the Department has made progress, recent history has shown that there is substantial room for improvements.”

Clearly, the Sub Committee recognizes that the DOE has problems spending taxpayer money. Yet the Sub Committee only recommended a decrease of the President’s proposed subsidy (-$465 million in 2009 and -$1.5 billion in 2010), rather than an outright rejection, and the full Committee agreed.

So the Appropriations Committee believes that the DOE is a “high-risk for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement” but then it chose to remove a major taxpayer protection from “fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement” by allocating more than $2 billion to cover the credit subsidy cost of risky green energy loans. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two entirely opposite thoughts in one’s head at the same time. By this reasoning, Members of the Appropriations Committee are a bunch of whiz kids.

Announcements

The Science & Environmental Policy Project this week sent an open letter from seven prominent scientists to Members of Congress warning them that they are being “deceived” by global warming alarmism. The authors of the letter note that, “the Earth has been cooling for ten years,” and that “the present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists’ computer models.” Read the full letter at www.climatedepot.com.

In the News

Fuel Standards Are Killing GM
Alan Reynolds, Wall Street Journal, 2 July 2009

Cap-and-Trade Can’t Deliver Jobs
Detroit News editorial, 2 July 2009

The Enron Revitalization Act of 2009
Robert Bradley, MasterResource.org, 1 July 2009

Facts, Costs, Consequences: Who Cares?
David Harsanyi, Denver Post, 1 July 2009

Global Warming Debate Isn’t Close to Settled
Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 1 July 2009

Americans Will Suffer So Dems Can “Save the Planet”
Jay Ambrose, Orange County Register, 1 July 2009

Democrats Vulnerable after Climate Vote
Jonathan Martin & Alex Isenstadt, Politico, 30 June 2009

Waxman-Markey Flunks Math
Rich Karlgaard, Forbes, 30 June 2009

Climate Bill Hurts the Least among Us
Kenneth W. Chilton, Detroit News, 30 June 2009

Waxman-Markey Is Hilarious, But the Joke’s on Us
Myron Ebell, Townhall, 29 June 2009

ACES Up Her Sleeve
Jeremy Lott & William Yeatman, American Spectator, 29 June 2009

EPA Quashes Dissent on Climate Change
John Hinderaker, PowerLine, 28 June 2009

Creating Green Jobs Means Destroying Other Jobs
Boston Herald editorial, 28 June 2009

The Utterly Misbegotten Climate Bill
John Steele Gordon, Commentary, 27 June 2009

Carbon-gate
Investor’s Business Daily editorial, 26 June 2009

News You Can Use

Waxman-Markey: Big Brother

There are more than 1400 new regulations and mandates in the 1,500 page American Clean Energy and Security Act, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

The Senate

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, 7th July, on energy-rationing legislation. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack are the lead witnesses. Also testifying will be two witnesses representing the U. S. Climate Action Partnership-one from Dow Chemical and the other from Natural Resources Defense Council. The Republican minority have invited Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to testify. He knows a lot about energy.

Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has announced that she hopes to begin marking up the Senate’s version of an energy-rationing bill on 22nd July and finish before the August recess begins on the 7th or 8th. There is a rumor that Boxer intends to use the 946-page version of the Waxman-Markey bill that passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May as her starting point, rather than the 1501-page version passed by the House on 26th July. One possible reason is that agricultural special interests are not particularly happy with the deal negotiated by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and want more from the Senate.

The House of Representatives

The House of Representatives voted 219 to 212 on final passage of H. R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act or Waxman-Markey bill, on Friday, 26th July.  The events last week that led to the narrow victory for proponents of energy rationing were extraordinary. On Monday night, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) sent a new 1201-page version of the 946-page bill his committee had passed on 21st May to the Rules Committee.  The Democratic leadership worked all week to round up votes. On Thursday night the Rules Committee met and at 3:09 AM an additional 309 page amendment was released.

The House began considering the 1510-page bill at 9 AM last Friday morning. The rule provided for one-hour of debate on the rule and then three hours of debate on the bill.  Of the two-hundred some amendments that had been filed, the Rules Committee allowed only one to be offered. Calling this a travesty of the legislative process is like calling D-Day a skirmish.

Debate ended around 7 PM with final passage. Eight Republicans voted Yes. Forty-four Democrats voted No. (To see all the votes, click here). Three Members missed the vote: Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), John Sullivan (R-Okla.), and Jeff Flake (R-Az.). Rep. Flake had announced earlier that he would miss the vote if it were on Friday because he would be attending a Junior Miss competition in which his daughter was participating. The Republican leadership must have already decided that they were going to lose the vote because they apparently accepted Flake’s (to me lame) reason and apparently didn’t put heavy pressure on the eight who voted Yes.

Among the many amusing or riveting incidents during the course of the debate, I only have room to mention a couple. Rep. Tom Price (D-Ga.) asking for a moment of silence for those who would lose their jobs if Waxman-Markey were enacted can be seen here.  A Democrat objected, so there was no moment of silence.

Two Texas Representatives did a great routine. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) made a parliamentary enquiry about where he could find a copy of the 309 pages that were added to the bill at 3:09 AM.  The chairman hemmed and hawed and finally said that she didn’t know. Then Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, made a parliamentary enquiry about whether there was a rule of the House that a copy of the bill on the floor had to be available. The chairman said that she was not aware of such a rule. Then after some more attempts to make enquiries about where a copy of the 309 pages could be consulted, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) disdainfully explained to his inferiors that a copy was in plain sight at the Clerk’s desk and was available on the web site. Then Rep. Barton pointed out that the copy available at the desk was the 1201 pages and a separate pile of the 309 pages, the pieces of which the clerk was trying to insert into their correct places in the 1201 pages.  He enquired whether this was an official copy. The chair said that yes “in effect” it was.

As I reported last week, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) used the prerogative reserved to the Speaker and Majority and Minority Leaders to speak as long as he wished.  His concluding powerful speech lasted more than an hour. Parts of it can be seen here. About twenty minutes in, Chairman Waxman enquired whether Mr. Boehner was going to be allowed to speak without limit. The chair ruled that it was the custom of the House to listen to the leader. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) then spoke only for a few minutes.  She told the House to remember that the Waxman-Markey bill was about four words: jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

By the way, it was reported earlier this week that Chairman Henry Waxman was hospitalized in Los Angeles after saying that he felt unwell. I hope he’s just tired out from his mighty efforts to get his bill through the House and wish him a speedy recovery.  I learned from the news stories that he’s just about to publish a book, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works.  I bet it’s worth reading.

Across the States

EPA Bites Off More Than It Can Chew

The Environmental Protection Agency this week issued a waiver allowing California to regulate vehicular tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases. As noted by CEI’s Marlo Lewis, the waiver has far-reaching consequences. It gives environmental lawyers the legal grounds under the Clean Air Act to compel the EPA to regulate hundreds of thousands of small businesses. To read more about this regulatory nightmare, click here.

Around The World

If We Start a Trade War, Will China Still Lend Us $ to Pay for Green Jobs?

The AFP reports today that Chinese officials are “firmly opposed” to provisions in the American Clean Energy and Security act that would force the President to impose “border adjustments” (a.k.a. tariffs) on the carbon content of imports from developing countries that aren’t fighting climate change by rationing energy. Earlier this year, Chinese officials warned that retaliation is likely if the U.S. resorted to carbon tariffs, which could lead to an economically ruinous trade war.

India (Again) Rejects Emissions Reductions

Jairam Ramesh, Indian Environment Minister, this week told Reuters, that India “will not accept any emission-reduction target, period. This is a non-negotiable stand.”

President Barack Obama rode into the White House promising open and honest government. So why did his administration bully a career official at the Environmental Protection Agency into silence?

Last week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a 98 page report written by Alan Carlin, a 38 year veteran of the EPA, on the shaky science employed by global warming alarmists. Mr. Carlin had submitted the report to his superiors for the EPA to consider as it deliberated whether or not carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare. As noted by my colleague Marlo Lewis, an “endangerment” finding isn’t mere bureaucratese. Instead, it’s a legal tripwire that would spark an economically ruinous regulatory chain reaction under the Clean Air Act (to read more on that, click here).

But the EPA would not consider Carlin’s report. In a series of incriminating emails, Carlin’s boss bluntly informed him that his report would remain secret for political reasons.

Late Thursday night, CEI went ahead and posted a draft version of the document, which you can read here.

In a not-so-subtle dig at the supposed backwardness of his predecessor four months ago, President Obama said that science is “about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.” Now we learn that his administration has silenced a critical voice in the EPA. Is this the change we were promised?

Members of Congress are suitably outraged. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), cited the report on the floor of the House of Representatives last Friday. Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) told FoxNews that he intends to investigate the matter further.

The story has made big waves in the media. For accounts, click on this links: New York Times, San Francisco Examiner, Michelle Malkin, Dow Jones (Subscription Req’d), American Spectator, and National Review.

In the News

The Climate Change Climate Change
Kimberly Strassel, Wall Street Journal, 26 June 2009

The Renewable Energy Scam
Darren Bakst, National Review Online, 26 June 2009

Perversities of Whackman-Malarkey
Kenneth Green, Masterresource.org, 26 June 2009

Trojan Hearse
Myron Ebell, New York Post, 25 June 2009

Tilting at Green Windmills
George Will, Washington Post, 25 June 2009

Will Congress Switch off the Lights?
Iain Murray, Washington Times, 25 June 2009

A Looming Cap-and-Trade War
Patrick Michaels & Sallie James, Planet Gore, 24 June 2009

Pelosi Will Profit from Energy Tax
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner, 24 June 2009

Waxman-Markey: Death Knell for U.S. Jobs, Low-Cost Energy
Robert Murray, The Hill, 22 June 2009

Campaign Slogans Won’t Solve Virginia’s Energy Woes
William Yeatman & Jeremy Lott, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 21 June 2009

News You Can Use

What a Difference 3 Months Makes!

Julie Walsh

Congressional Budget Office, March 12, 2009: “The price increases caused by a cap-and-trade program would impose additional costs on households. For example, without incorporating any benefits to households from lessening climate change, CBO estimates that the price increases resulting from a 15 percent cut in CO2 emissions could cost the average household roughly $1,600 (in 2006 dollars), ranging from nearly $700 in additional costs for the average household in the lowest one-fifth (quintile) of all households arrayed by income, to about $2,200 for the average household in the highest quintile.”

Congressional Budget Office, June 20, 2009: “CBO estimates that the net annual economy wide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion-or about $175 per household.”

Inside the Beltway

The Moment of Truth

Myron Ebell

The House Democratic leadership rushed the Waxman-Markey bill to final passage by a narrow vote on Friday afternoon. It’s been a busy week. Late Monday night, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) sent a substitute version of H. R. 2454 to the Rules Committee. The 946-page bill passed by his committee on 21st May had become a 1201-page bill. Then early Friday morning the House Rules Committee sent the 1201 pages to the floor with an additional 309 pages released around 3:09 AM. The Rules Committee provided for three hours of debate and allowed only one of the 200-odd amendments that had been filed to be offered.

Such a short debate on major legislation is almost unprecedented. They have had to rush because they realized that the bill is such a turkey that the only way to get it through is to force members to vote and then find out later what’s in it. What they are going to find out is that it’s full of little payoffs to scores and scores of Members.

Even though there was only three hours of debate (as Rep. Joe Barton [R-Tex.] remarked, the House had spent nearly that much time on some commemorative bills), there were several priceless moments.  More on those next week. I expect that campaign operatives at the House Republican Campaign Committee are licking their lips at all the video clips they are going to have to run in teevee ads of Democrats saying that Waxman-Markey will create jobs, boost the economy, and only cost each of us a postage stamp a day.

But just as the debate was winding down at around 5:40 PM and moving to votes on the amendment and then final passage, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) gave one of the closing speeches. The Speaker, Majority Leader, and Minority Leader traditionally are not limited by the clock and can speak as long as they want. After about twenty minutes, Chairman Waxman made a parliamentary enquiry as to whether there were any limits on how long the minority leader could speak. The Chair ruled that it was the custom of the House to listen to the Leader.

So the Digest is going to press as Minority Leader Boehner continues to speak. The Republican leadership has put out a statement that he plans to read the all 309 pages of the bill that appeared early Friday morning. It appears, though, that he’s not reading it, but summarizing each section. Rather than finishing in time for dinner or even in time to catch a flight out of town for the Fourth of July recess, it might be a long night. I expect that the House will pass Waxman-Markey on a close vote, something like 224 to 207. If it goes very late, the vote totals on both sides will go down as Members give up and go home. As people begin to dig into and see what’s in it, my guess is that it will become a sick joke, suitable fodder for late night comedians.

The Science

EPA Suppresses Internal Memo on Climate Science

Sam Kazman

In his closing remarks on Waxman Markey, Rep. Barton discussed the recent revelations of EPA squelching an internal report that criticized the agency’s stance on GW. Those revelations were made by CEI three days earlier, when it disclosed a series of EPA emails in which a senior career analyst at the agency was bluntly informed by his boss that his report would remain secret for political reasons. CEI filed the emails in EPA’s Endangerment Docket, and demanded that EPA produce the full report, extend the time for public comment, and pledge to take no reprisals against the analyst.  EPA’s press people went into spin mode, but as of Friday had not produced the final report.  Late Thursday night, CEI went ahead and posted a draft version of the document, which you can read here.

To read media accounts of the memo, click on the following links: New York Times, San Francisco Examiner, Michelle Malkin, Dow Jones (Subscription Req’d), American Spectator, and National Review

Like a snowball that gains momentum down a steep hillside, the Waxman-Markey Clean Energy and Security Act (a.k.a “energy tax”) keeps getting bigger and fatter and more dangerous as it works its way through the Democratic caucus to a vote before the full House by the end of the week.

Consider: In only the past seven days, the text of the bill has grown by 300 pages!

Part of the added girth comes from powerful committees that have partial jurisdiction over the bill, and their input has been uniformly awful.

Originally, the Clean Energy and Security Act was designed to tax energy in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions thought to cause so-called global warming, but Democrats on the Agriculture Committee negotiated pro-ethanol provisions into the legislation, which made a bad bill worse. By forcing Americans to use ever more corn-fuel in their gas tanks, the Congress raises grocery bills (by increasing the price of food) and gives drivers more pain at the pump (ethanol is more expensive that gas). So now Americans face the prospect of an energy tax for so-called global warming, plus an ethanol tax on food and fuel, all in the same bill.

The bill is likely to become even more harmful when the Ways and Means Committee weighs in. The members of that influential Committee want to add language that would force the President to impose carbon tariffs on imports from developing countries such as China and India. They would undoubtedly retaliate with tariffs on imports from American manufacturers. History informs us that a trade war would inflict severe damage on a global economy that is already ailing.

Many of the added pages to the Clean Energy and Security Act result from the House leadership’s aggressive push to buy off members of the Democratic Party with the hundreds of billions of dollars in energy taxes that the federal government would reap from the cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme in the legislation. It’s politically dangerous for many Democratic moderates to vote for an energy tax, so leadership has to make it worth their while. These giveaways and favors, of course, come at the expense of American taxpayer.

And the bill continues to grow, because House leadership still hasn’t accumulated enough votes to pass the bill. There are more people to buy off, more pages to write, and more money to take from Americans.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute today charged that a senior official of the U.S. Environment Protection Agency actively suppressed a scientific analysis of climate change because of political pressure to support the Administration’s policy agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

As part of a just-ended public comment period, CEI submitted a set of four EPA emails, dated March 12-17, 2009, which indicate that a significant internal critique of the agency’s global warming position was put under wraps and concealed.

The study the emails refer to, which ran counter to the administration’s views on carbon dioxide and climate change, was kept from circulating within the agency, was never disclosed to the public, and was not added to the body of materials relevant to EPA’s current “endangerment” proceeding. The emails further show that the study was treated in this manner not because of any problem with its quality, but for political reasons.

“This suppression of valid science for political reasons is beyond belief,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “EPA’s conduct is even more outlandish because it flies in the face of the President’s widely-touted claim that ‘the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.'”

CEI’s filing requests that EPA make the suppressed study public, place it into the endangerment docket, and extend the comment period to allow public response to the new information. CEI is also requesting that EPA publicly declare that it will engage in no reprisals against the study’s author, a senior analyst who has worked at EPA for over 35 years.

Yesterday, I announced “It’s on!,” in reference to the upcoming battle on the floor of the House of Representatives over a humongous energy tax co-written by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), the Chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Security and Global Warming. The bill they wrote, the Clean Energy and Security Act,  is a Frankenstein-like patchwork of anti-energy and energy rationing measures designed to make energy more expensive and less reliable, which is why Waxman had a heck of a time getting the bill out of his own Committee last month. In fact, he had to buy off moderate Committee members from his own party, one by one, with the hundreds of billions of dollars that the federal government would tax American energy consumers over the life of the legislation.

Moving it out of his own Committee was a slow process, and earlier this week, few observers thought that Waxman had the time to buy off all the moderate members of the majority party caucus before the July 4^th vacation. But two nights ago, House leadership took the procedural steps to put the energy tax before the full House for vote by Friday.

As of yesterday afternoon, the bill’s passage still seemed uncertain, because almost all Republicans were lined up against it, and a band of moderate and rural Democrats, perhaps as many as 45, had expressed a variety of misgivings and were negotiating with Waxman through Rep Colin Peterson (D-Minnesota), the powerful Chairman of the House Ag Committee. Waxman and the House leadership need 218 votes to pass the anti-energy bill, so it was far from certain that they had the numbers.

That changed last night, when Waxman and Peterson reached a deal, according to E&E News (Subscription required). It wasn’t a very even transaction: Waxman caved, and Peterson won everything he wanted. The terms of the deal are wonkinsh but the take-home points are simple-farmers get regulatory support for ethanol (which raises our food bills and increases the price of our gas), farmers will get paid to grow nothing (because doing nothing has low carbon footprint), and Waxman gets the votes for his bill (which will raise the price of everything made from energy, which is everything).

After round 1, our side (i.e., supporters of affordable energy and opponents of energy rationing) is wobbly. YET THERE IS STILL HOPE! For moderates in the majority party, this bill is a career-killer. Just because Waxman has bought the agribusiness special interests, doesn’t mean there isn’t within the majority party a silent minority that is terrified of the electoral consequences of voting for a bill that hurts all American consumers and all American businesses.