At Tuesday’s House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulation, Dr. Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science, presented a scary assessment of global warming’s impact on U.S. grain yields. Field’s written testimony states, in pertinent part:
In the United States, the observed temperature sensitivity of three major crops is even more striking. Based on a careful county-by county analysis of patterns of climate and yields of corn, soybeans, and cotton, Schlenker and Roberts (Schlenker and Roberts 2009) concluded that observed yields from all farms and farmers are relatively insensitive to temperature up to a threshold but fall rapidly as temperatures rise above the threshold. For farms in the United States, the temperature threshold is 84˚F for corn, 86˚F for soybeans, and 90˚F for cotton. For corn, a single day at 104˚F instead of 84˚F reduces observed yields by about 7%. These temperature sensitivities are based on observed responses, including data from all of the US counties that grow cotton and all of the Eastern counties that grow corn or soybeans. These are not simulated responses. They are observed in the aggregate yields of thousands of farms in thousands of locations. [click to continue…]
Earlier this week, the House Energy & Commerce Committee held its third hearing on the Energy Tax Prevention Act, a bill to stop EPA from determining national policy on climate change through the Clean Air Act, a statute enacted in 1970, years before global warming was even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. The hearing, requested by ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), was entitled Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations.
Although Democrats are now the minority party in the House, they got more witnesses (4) than did the majority (3). I don’t know how Rep. Waxman pulled that off. Did he ever let Republicans have more witnesses when he was in the chair? No. Would he return the favor if Dems regain control of the House? Doubtful.
The most effective minority witness, IMO, was Dr. Richard Somerville, whose testimony updates the continual — and predictable — refrain that ‘climate change is even worse than we previously predicted.’ Much of Somerville’s testimony is drawn from a report he co-authored called the Copenhagen Diagnosis.
It’s not my purpose here to provide an alternative assessment of climate science, though if you’re looking for one, check out Drs. Shirwood and Craig Idso’s Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future: Pursuing the Prudent Path.
My beef, rather, is with Somerville’s claim that he’s simply a spokesman for science, not for an agenda. It’s amazing he can say this with a straight face and in the same testimony spout partisan cant about the Climategate scandal. He writes: [click to continue…]
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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As I describe elsewhere (here, here, and here), the Department of Energy’s green bank is one of the worst government programs, ever.
For starters, financing is well outside of the DOE’s core competency, so there’s no reason to expect that it could start a successful banking operation from scratch. There’s also the fact that government has a horrid record picking energy ventures in which to invest taxpayer money. As such, the odds of the green bank failing were high when it was created by the 2005 Energy Policy Act.
During the whole of the program’s existence, evidence has mounted confirming that the green bank is a bad idea. The Government Accountability Office, the top federal watchdog, has issued three separate reports raising serious doubts about the DOE’s management of the program. These suspicions were validated when the DOE first loan guarantee, for $535 million, went to a California solar power company, Solyndra, that now teeters on the brink of insolvency.
Unfortunately for taxpayers, it gets worse, because the results of a recent investigation suggest that the green bank lacks transparency. Last week, the DOE’s Office of the Inspector General published a report finding that the green bank program “could not always readily demonstrate, through systematically organized records, including contemporaneous notes, how it resolved or mitigated relevant risks prior to initiating loan guarantees.” According to the report (available here), 15 loan guarantees (out of 18 total) lacked “pivotal” information regarding risk ratings.
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There wasn’t much to report from yesterday’s climate change science hearing before the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Generally speaking, Republican lawmakers used the entirety of their allotted time to question the scientists they had invited, and Democratic lawmakers did likewise. Click here for opening statements, and also for an archived podcast of the hearing.
Truth be told, the hearing’s pedigree is more interesting than the hearing was. Last week, the same subcommittee held a hearing on pending EPA regulations for greenhouse gases, in order to inform the debate on H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, legislation that would check the EPA’s authority to enact climate policy under the Clean Air Act. During these hearings, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), who is a master parliamentarian, leveraged an obscure procedural rule to demand a hearing of the minority party’s choosing. Subcommittee Chair Rep. Ed Whitfield, in an act of Congressional comity, granted the request. Ergo, yesterday’s “dueling science” hearing.
There was one notable element to yesterday’s action: The extent to which the center is moving away from the Democratic leadership on energy and environment policy. Rather feebly, Rep. Waxman concluded by asking that the majority party agree to postpone tomorrow’s scheduled mark up of H.R. 910…until Tuesday. It was a weak negotiating tactic.
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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,
Coal
Clean Water Act: The EPA has invented a “pollutant”— salinity—in order to stop surface coal mining in Appalachia. It claims that this “pollutant” harms an order of short-lived insect, the Mayfly, which has not been proposed for listing as an endangered species. The EPA has set a numeric water quality standard for salinity which effectively bars new surface coal mining permits.
Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act: Despite the fact that the 1977 SMCRA explicitly authorizes “valley fills” (a necessary byproduct of surface coal mining in the steep terrain of Appalachia), the Department of the Interior is working on a re-interpretation of the so-called “100 feet buffer rule,” a regulation derivative of SMCRA, which would effectively outlaw valley fills, and, as a result, Appalachian surface coal mining.
Oil and gas
Red Tape: The de jure moratorium on deepwater drilling permits in the Western Gulf ended on 22 October 2011, but the de facto moratorium remains. Two weeks ago, a federal judge in eastern Louisiana (the same one who overturned the first moratorium, and who then found the Department of the Interior in contempt for issuing an identical, second moratorium), ordered the Interior Department to act on 5 pending permits within 30 days. Interior is also slow-walking shallow water permits.
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Elsewhere, I’ve described two fronts the Obama administration is waging against coal production in Appalachia (see here and here).
Since the President took office, environmentalists have been urging the administration to open a third front against Appalachian coal. This one pertains to the so-called “fill rule.” Here’s how the Sierra Club describes it: “In 2002, the Bush administration changed a key Clean Water Act rule to allow mining companies to dump their waste into waterways. Known as the “Fill Rule,” it allows mountaintop removal coal mine operators to bury Appalachian streams with their waste.”
As I demonstrate below, virtually the whole of the Sierra Club’s characterization of the “fill rule” is incorrect, starting with the fact that the rule originated with the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration. In fact, the “fill rule” is a relatively innocuous regulation that acts primarily to allow the EPA’s long held definition of “fill material” to trump that of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The “Fill Rule”: A Tortuous History
The Clean Water Act prohibits all pollution discharges into navigable waters, unless the “polluter” obtains a permit. Generally speaking, there are two such variances: (1) Section 402 permits, for “point source” discharges (like a pipe), which are issued by the EPA or by a state agency whose guidelines are EPA-approved and (2) 404 permits, for “dredge and fill” projects (such as filling a swamp to create a new housing development), which are issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in accordance with guidelines set by the EPA.
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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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