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Bureaucrash Crasher-in-Chief Lee Doren and CEI Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell take to the streets and offices of Washington’s environmental establishment as citizen reporters to find out what the global warming alarmists thinks of the Climategate scandal.

>>>Watch the video HERE.

For years, Al Gore has steadfastly refused to debate the global warming issue.  Most recently, he ignored a put-up-or-shut-up challenge on the Glenn Beck Show from climate policy expert Lord Christopher Monckton, a former British government adviser.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute hopes to change all that with the release of a new video campaign.  In it, CEI offers Mr. Gore a $500 check, together with the proceeds of a world-wide email pledge-a-dollar drive, all aimed at persuading Mr. Gore to accept Lord Monckton’s challenge.

Warren Buffet, one of the most respected investors in America, recently purchased Burlington Northern, one of the nation’s largest railroads with some 32,000 miles of track.  BN like almost all railroads carries coal – lots of it from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to the nation’s electrical power plants.  But President Obama and his Green allies are trying to end the use of coal in America.  If they succeed, the rail sector will collapse.

Buffet, according to the Wall Street Journal weekend edition is “betting on good old fashioned stuff – such as grain, coal for power plants and consumer goods imported from Asia – and the need to move it.”  Let’s hope he knows something we don’t – perhaps, Obama is about to do a “Clinton” reversal.  That would be good for America, for affordable energy and (ironically) also good for the Democratic party.  We can hope.

First published online at NRO

Senators from California and Massachusetts this week emulated their state colleagues in the House, Representatives Waxman and Markey, by introducing the Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade bill. This may be it, although it is ever-changing. It contains the same basic content as the House bill, but aims to be “stricter” (read: more expensive) by asking for 20 percent reductions in emissions by 2020, rather than the 17 percent demanded by the House. (As an aside: Look for forthcoming economic analyses from EPA, etc., that will somehow conclude this will be cheaper than the House bill).

Here’s a quick summary from Greenwire of the main points and differences from the the House Bill. My comments are in italics.

Overall, the early draft of the Boxer-Kerry legislation includes four titles that take aim at greenhouse gas emissions across multiple economic sectors, as well as a “transition and adaptation” section aimed at helping the nation cope with the costs of a climate bill and the expected repercussions of global warming.

Note that the Bill explicitly recognizes that it has costs. The fact that they attempt to mitigate these costs through wealth redistribution doesn’t alter that fact. The money has to come from somewhere, as this bill certainly isn’t creating new wealth.

Both the early draft and the Boxer-Kerry bill due for release tomorrow will leave blank key information about how the senators intend to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars in emission allowances. Following the path of Democratic leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, those figures will come next month when Boxer releases a chairman’s mark of the bill before an EPW Committee markup.

While this section is key to getting industries on board by buying them off, it isn’t key to the overall costs (except in so far as it increases them by adding inefficiencies). As Peter Orszag has said, the overall costs are the overall costs regardless of whether permits are auctioned or given away.

To deal with economic uncertainties, the draft Boxer-Kerry plan would establish a strategic allowance reserve that allows U.S. EPA to sell credits into the carbon market via an auction in the event credit prices rise faster than expected.

This is a “safety valve” that admits that the entire cap-and-trade concept could be catastrophic for the economy.

The draft also mirrors the House on offset projects that allow industry an alternative compliance option to pay farmers and other landowners for environmentally friendly projects. Both the House-passed bill and this early Senate draft allow capped sources to collectively use emissions offsets to meet 2 billion tons of their obligations annually – divided evenly between domestic and international credits, with the amount of international credits allowed to increase if insufficient domestic offsets are available.

As the Breakthrough Institute has shown, even modest use of this provision could mean that domestic emissions don’t decrease at all.

The early draft of the Boxer-Kerry bill heeds environmentalists’ requests by removing a section of the House bill that would have restricted EPA’s ability to enact climate change regulations.

Which means that we could have a double whammy of cap-and-trade plus the admitted disaster of EPA regulation.  So much for the argument that we need cap-and-trade to save us from the zeal of the EPA.

Like the House bill, the Boxer-Kerry draft would provide emissions allowances to fund commercial deployment of carbon capture and sequestration, although it does not provide specifics. It also establishes performance standards for emissions of greenhouse gases from new coal-fired power plants.

As the environmentalists like to remind us, “clean coal” does not yet exist and there is no guarantee that it will be able to meet the requirements of the bill in practical fashion, despite the funding.

…There are also significant differences between the Senate draft and the House bill.

For example, Boxer and Kerry propose a different approach for oversight of the carbon market, which in the House bill is shared between FERC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with FERC regulating the cash market for allowances and offsets and CFTC handling the derivatives market. The draft Senate plan, in contrast, would place the carbon markets under a single regulator – the brief carbon market section would have CFTC regulate both markets. It also broadly empowers the regulator to prevent manipulation of these markets and eliminate “excessive speculation” that adds to price volatility. Lawmakers are likely to seek more detailed provisions that place controls on these markets.

At least they appear to have recognized that they’re setting up a subprime carbon market.  The only problem is that strict regulation removes the incentives that trading is supposed to bring in the first place.

Elsewhere, the draft Boxer-Kerry bill does not include House-passed language that would bar EPA – for six years – from considering greenhouse gas emissions from so-called international indirect land-use changes when implementing the national biofuels mandate.

I haven’t examined this directly, but this seems to imply that clearing away rainforest for biodiesel is fine by Boxer and Kerry.

The Senate draft also has a modest nuclear title, although pro-nuclear senators are likely to push for significant incentives in the final measure. The bill’s nuclear title would steer money to the Energy Department for implementing programs to expand expertise in the nuclear field. Advocates of expanding U.S. nuclear power say there are not enough nuclear engineers and other experts to work on the hoped-for buildout of new reactors.

The nuclear title also has a section titled “Nuclear Waste Research and Development,” but it is left blank, stating “to be supplied.”

This title is so modest that it is clearly an afterthought.

The bill of course raises several questions. Here are a few, courtesy of Senator Inhofe.

There will be many more, of course.

– Sen. Boxer, in the bill’s findings, you laud the merits of nuclear power, and seem to suggest supporting measures to encourage its expansion.  Yet the bill lacks several essential measures to make that happen.  Why?

– Sen. Boxer, why does your bill include “climate change worker adjustment assistance”?  Does this mean that your bill will cause workers to lose their jobs?

– Sen. Boxer, your bill allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, on top of your cap-and-trade mandate.   How is this conducive to regulatory certainty?  Does this conflict with your call for a “market-based” program?   – Sen. Boxer, by providing “rebates” to electricity consumers, are you acknowledging that, as President Obama said, electricity prices will “necessarily skyrocket” because of your cap-and-trade bill?

– Sen. Boxer, how does the “rebate” program work?  Does it mandate that local distribution companies cut checks to consumers?  Would those checks completely offset electricity price increases for consumers?  Or is that the local distribution companies could provide “rebates” through, say, energy efficiency programs?

– Sen. Boxer, your “price collar” is tied to a “strategic reserve fund,” in which a limited number of allowances could be issued at the collar (ceiling) price.  This is not a true “safety valve.”  David Montgomery with CRA International wrote that, “Without a true safety valve based on an open window and unlimited sales and purchases, there will continue to be significant risks that allowance prices will uncontrollably exceed the collar, in one direction or the other. The result will be a system in which price volatility increases the difficulty of long term investment planning, with the additional uncertainty of how legislation itself will change if a period of unexpectedly high (or low) prices occurs.”  Why is he wrong?

-Senator Boxer, because this is a global issue, how does your draft ensure that other developing countries, such as China and India, will make binding emissions cuts that are as strict as those that are required for the United States under this Act?

Okay, this time they’ve gone too far!

Now, says the Washington Post, environmentalists are trying to wipe out plush toilet paper!

They say that’s because plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made from older trees – though not what’s defined as “old growth” by any means. And older trees, they say, are better for absorbing carbon dioxide and thereby slowing global warming.

(Have you noticed that there’s nothing that can’t be tied into global warming?)

They want us Americans to wipe with the same stuff Europeans use, made from recycled paper goods.

Well, I’ve been to Europe a lot and while I’m no xenophobe I must say their toilet paper is just one grade above sandpaper. No, ifs, ands, or butts about it.

They’ll get my soft toilet paper when they pry it from my cold dead hands!

(Though I really don’t want to be found dead sitting on “the throne” . . . )

The EPA, supposedly the Environmental Protection Agency, has become the Economy Poisoning Agency. In the name of preventing a global warming apocalypse, President Obama’s EPA is on the verge of declaring carbon dioxide a pollutant and then controlling our entire economy through energy regulations. This would result in huge increases in our energy bills and virtually everything we buy. Yet to do this, of course, EPA had to ignore science. In fact, EPA was found in June to have suppressed a report by one of its own senior analysts that concluded that EPA’s global warming “science” was incomplete and out-of-date. EPA has tried to spin its way out of this fiasco, even proposing to shut down the office in which its whistleblower works!

The EPA’s possible economy-crushing activities have prompted a grass-roots email campaign to pressure EPA into changing course on its pending “Endangerment” proceeding, the rulemaking underlying all EPA global warming proposals. CEI and Freedom Action, a new organization affliliated with CEI, urge concerned citizens to join the fight by writing EPA with an easy form to tell EPA to put their regulatory plans on hold until they clear up this scandal and reveal ALL of the science.

The Washington Post has discovered that poor people in poor countries need access to modern energy.  In an excellent article on today’s front page, Emily Wax details the energy poverty of Africa, India, and Pakistan.  And she draws the obvious conclusion that has evaded most of the establishment media for years: that’s why India and other developing countries aren’t going to sign on to any UN treaty that mandates reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions.  They don’t need an energy diet; they need thousands of coal-fired power plants.

Wax writes: “Just one in four Africans has access to grid electricity, according to the World Bank. More than 500 million Indians, roughly half the population, have no official access to electricity, and those who do are experiencing rolling brownouts as India’s Power Ministry tries to make up for a 25 percent shortfall in electricity generation. The developing world’s dearth of power hinders prosperity and adds another layer of difficulty to daily life.

“In much of Africa, families depend on generators, candles, kerosene lamps and firewood. Blackouts force shops to close early, schools to cancel classes and hospitals to turn away patients. Foreign investors become wary of parking their money in Africa, experts say.  ‘Big companies in Africa seem to get most of their electricity from generators, or they build their own power plants,’ said Thomas Pearmain, an Africa energy analyst for IHS Global Insight.”

Of course, environmental pressure groups say that poor countries need to avoid “our mistakes” and build a new energy economy using renewable sources and new technologies.  The problem is that most of these new sources provide a lot more sanctimonious self-satisfaction than energy.  I recently drove through upstate New York on a mild summer day.  I saw over seventy windmills in several groups along the way.  Not a single one was turning.  That’s because the wind doesn’t blow much in the summer (when demand is highest because of air conditioning).  In sub-tropical countries like India there isn’t much wind at any time of year.