Currently, ecoblog Grist is featuring a post (“Love and Long Distance Travel in the Time of Climate Change“) about one person’s ethical quandary over whether to fly home for the holidays more than once, due to the attendant egregious greenhouse gas emissions. The writer lives in Seattle; her family resides in Pittsburgh. Between the two cities, each round trip would contribute .57 tons of CO2 to runaway, catastrophic, apocalyptic global warming, according to the Flight Carbon Footprint Calculator. She ultimately chose to make one flight, having concluded that the consequences of two flights are far too dire…
…At the very same time, Grist is holding a fundraiser “sweepstakes,” for which the grand prize includes “a voucher valued at two thousand dollars ($2,000) to be used toward airfare [for two] to San Jose, Costa Rica.” The carbon footprint of a Seattle-San Jose round trip is .87 tons CO2. For two, that’s 1.74 tons—or about 40 % of the global per capitaannual average.
This apparent contradiction in things Grist brings to mind one of my all time favorite statistics. In 2008, a class at MIT calculated that the absolute floor for an American’s annual carbon footprint—even that of a homeless, ascetic monk—is 8.5 tons per person, more than twice the global average. [click to continue…]
Fewer voters than ever have a favorable opinion of the Environmental Protection Agency, and a plurality say that its regulations and actions hurt the economy.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 32% of Likely U.S. Voters have a favorable opinion of the EPA, the lowest finding in the three years the question has been asked.
Over at Grist, Ben Adler repackaged press releases from Sierra Club and NRDC into a story about the supposed leniency of EPA’s final coal ash rule, a pre publication version of which was issued last Friday. Of course, retransmitting pressers by environmental special interests is nothing new for Grist’s brand of “independent green journalism.” And if the author had limited himself to parroting green groups, I’d have no reason to post. But in the second half of his blog entry, Adler took it upon himself to try to do some real reporting, and that’s when he got into trouble. To be precise, he reported on the wrong rule. [click to continue…]
The White House Council on Environmental Quality on 18th December released the second draft version of a guidance document on how federal agencies should consider climate impacts in preparing Environmental Impact Assessments under the National Environmental Policy Act. The first draft version was released in 2010. CEQ invited public comments for 60 days.
In keeping with NEPA regulations that require Environmental Impact Statements to consider the direct, indirect, and cumulative environmental impacts of proposed projects and actions, the guidance document recommends that the direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts of greenhouse gas emissions be included in preparing EISs. This includes “upstream” and “downstream” emissions connected to the project. Thus a new bridge that would allow the transport of tens of millions of tons of energy-intensive goods over its lifetime could have an enormous carbon footprint.
Reports stated that the guidance document recommends that climate impacts be considered in the NEPA process when any project or action would increase greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent annually.
This is not correct. The document states that a quantitative analysis is only necessary when emissions exceed 25,000 tons annually. Considering the impacts of lower annual emissions is required but does not necessarily require quantification. [click to continue…]
An inconvenient truth encountered by global warming alarmists is voter indifference. Poll after poll suggests that Americans lend ultra-low priority to climate change (rightlyso). This is why candidate Obama ran to the right of Romney on energy/environment policy during the 2012 campaign.
Individual agency—antithesis of Prof. Proctor’s take on AGW
Indeed, voter apathy in the face of climate change drives AGW activists batty with frustration, so much so that they refuse to acknowledge the phenomenon. Instead of accepting the truth at hand—that everyday Americans simply don’t care about global warming in a lifetime filled with more pressing matters—climate worry warts, especially those in academia, are given to grand conspiracy theories about how nefarious fossil fuel industries spend untold billions to manipulate the American polity into its current ambivalence regarding the imperative to “do something” about global warming.
Of course, this thesis is belied by a cursory Google News search of the term “climate change,” which reliably engenders a parade of horribles on the impending catastrophic impacts in store for civilization. To wit, here is a representative sampling of first-page headlines from just such a search, conducted this morning:
“Risk of dengue fever increases due to climate change” (Fox News);
“Climate change could cost US coasts $1 trillion by 2100” (Science Now);
“Another threat from climate change: bad-tasting shrimp” (LA Times);
“Will global climate change ground commercial airlines?” (Top Secret Writers).
As usual, there weren’t any “denier” headlines. Which raises an obvious question: How is climate messaging almost always alarming, if industry is pulling all the strings? [click to continue…]
EPA’s Clean Power Plan establishes carbon dioxide (CO2) performance standards for each state’s electric power sector. The standards are calibrated in lbs. CO2/MWh, which translate into statewide CO2 emission caps. On average, states will have to reduce their power-sector CO2 emissions 30% below 2005 levels by 2030.
The CPP is unlawful for a multitude of reasons, but surely one of the most bizarre is that EPA’s alleged statutory authority, §111(d) of the Clean Air Act (CAA), prohibits the agency from promulgating any such regulation.
Specifically, §111(d) bars the adoption of performance standards for existing facilities in source categories already regulated under §112. EPA has been regulating power plants under §112 since December 2011, when it finalized the Mercury Air Toxics Standards (MATS) Rule.
On the day EPA published the CPP in the Federal Register (June 18, 2014), Murray Energy, the nation’s largest privately-owned coal company, petitioned the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to stop EPA from further work on the rulemaking. The petition argued that EPA’s §111(d) regulatory authority is limited to existing sources not already regulated under §112. Eight days later, nine states led by West Virginia filed an amicus brief in support of the petition. And last week, Murray Energy submitted a brief urging the Court to halt EPA’s “illegal” rulemaking and vacate the agency’s “erroneous legal opinion” that it may doubly regulate sources under §111(d) and §112.
EPA, of course, argues that the §112 exclusion in §111(d) does not apply to CO2 and does not preclude the agency from requiring states to adopt CO2 performance standards for existing power plants.
Today’s post will review the legal arguments, pro and con, on whether EPA may regulate existing power plants under both §111(d) and §112.
Last Sunday’s (invaluable) Platts Energy Week with Bill Loveless featured an enlightening interview with Platts Director of News John Kingston, in which the reporter rightly identified subsurface property rights as the key to the American energy renaissance.
Per Mr. Kingston,
It was the right of private people to own their own mineral rights which really has been one of the sources of the boom. It turns out that was the key to our energy policy.
Hear, hear! By allowing private parties to own subsurface mineral rights, and thereby profit off oil & gas production, the U.S. incented both output and innovation. Alas, a major reason technological breakthroughs in oil and gas production—collectively known as “fracking”—have not spread the world over is that in many countries, subsurface mineral rights are owned by the state. And because private parties in such countries don’t have “skin in the game,” they’ve every incentive to oppose drilling below their lands, as they’d bear the burden of drilling (i.e., proximity to an industrial practice) without any of the direct benefits.
Granted, it’s hard to develop an argument about a complex, technical subject in a 760-word column, but Milbank doesn’t even try. He takes cheap shots and spouts off without knowing whereof he speaks.
Milbank starts with a snarky putdown, asserting that “though Bezdek is an economist, not a scientist, he played one on Monday.” How so? Some of Bezdek’s slides show the fertilization effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions on crop yields and plant growth. For example:
That is not playing scientist, it is citing scientific research.
Another slide shows that, over the past 250 years, CO2 emissions closely correlate with population growth, life expectancy, and per capita GDP. [click to continue…]
Earlier today, I posted a primer on the EPA’s pending coal ash rule. In fact, the rule is almost assuredly going to be a far superior regulation than the shoddy version EPA originally drafted. And the means by which the rule improved in quality sheds much light on a little noticed yet supremely important component of the rulemaking process: White House regulatory review.
White House Regulatory Review: The Bare Bones Basics
White House regulatory review is conducted by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA (pronounced inside the beltway as “O-Eye-Ra”) was created by Congress with the enactment of the Paperwork Reduction Act in 1980. OIRA’s broad mandate is help alleviate the paperwork burdens imposed by the federal regulatory state on American businesses and private individuals.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan substantially increased OIRA’s authority with the promulgation of Executive Order 12291, which required that federal agencies submit their proposed and final regulations to OIRA for review. Thus, OIRA became a primary means by which the President could affect regulatory policy. President Clinton updated the terms of OIRA’s regulatory review in 1993 with the issuance of Executive Order 12866. The two Orders did not engender materially different procedures.
All “major” rules are subject to OIRA review, although rules promulgated by independent executive agencies are exempt from the process.
OIRA Review of EPA’s Coal Ash Rule: An Interagency Smack Down
In late 2009, EPA submitted its original draft to OIRA, which proceeded to lay the smack down. A summary of its brutal review is available here, and a redline version of OIRA edits is available here. The documents demonstrate that it was amateur hour at the EPA during the first months of the administration when it put together the proposal: [click to continue…]
Today marks a court-ordered deadline for EPA to promulgate a final coal combustion residual (CCR) rule pursuant to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. To be sure, the agency could ignore the deadline, as the courts have no means readily at hand to prod the agency into action today. That said, the agency is widely expected to promulgate the rule this afternoon. What follows is the shortest, most thorough primer of the rule on the web. [click to continue…]
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