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The Republican minority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, led by the ranking Republican, Senator David Vitter (R-La.), last week criticized the Office of the Inspector General of the Environmental Protection Agency for lackadaisical investigations of several areas of continuing malfeasance at the EPA. One area is the OIG’s flawed and incomplete report on the use of private and alias e-mail accounts by high EPA officials to conduct official business.  EPW Republicans note that the “OIG relied solely on interviews of EPA officials willing to co-operate, and never examined in any way actual staff e-mails.”

Their criticism continues: “Additionally, according to the OIG, they have no authority to review the use of private e-mail accounts for agency business beyond asking the employee if they had ever improperly used a private e-mail account, and did not follow-up or fact-check.  Moreover, investigators never spoke to former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson or former General Counsel Scott Fulton, two senior level officials who played central roles in the controversy, nor did the OIG examine or compare the practice of using alias accounts by Administrator Jackson and past Administrators. The OIG also did not review the e-mails showing that EPA officials were inappropriately using their e-mail accounts that were produced in response to multiple FOIA requests.”

Those Freedom of Information Act requests were filed by Chris Horner, my CEI colleague.  The revelations that the EPW Republicans are complaining about resulted primarily from lawsuits filed by CEI because the EPA refused to comply with the law.  In a press release, Horner states: “Although EPA officials, like Region 9 Administrator Jared Blumenfeld, denied use of private e-mail accounts for business purposes to the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, just this week the EPA produced more than 150 megabytes of supposedly non-existent, EPA-related e-mails from Blumenfeld’s Comcast account.”

Horner continues: “Blumenfeld is only one of numerous officials whose use of private e-mail accounts CEI uncovered.  Others include former Region 8 Administrator James Martin, who has since resigned, and current Region 2 Administrator Judith Enck, whose account appears to be the same one she used during previous work at an environmental pressure group.  So far, e-mails from these types of accounts have revealed relationships between EPA officials and special interest groups that are far too close for comfort.”

The EPW Republicans’ statement lists seventeen political appointees at the EPA whose use of private e-mail accounts for conducting private business have been revealed by CEI’s FOIA litigation.

John Podesta, President Obama’s top energy and climate advisor, has been quietly preparing tougher U.S. emission reduction commitments for the successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, slated for adoption in Paris in 2015.

Podesta is also an influential behind-the-scenes player in the “High Level Panel of Eminent Persons” advising UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on “transformative” Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the world. As you might expect, combating climate change is a major goal of the Eminent Persons’ SDG report.

What, you may wonder, is “sustainable development”? It is a rhetorical term devised by Western environmentalists to gloss over the basic incompatibility between their hostility carbon energy and developing countries’ imperative need to consume more carbon energy to lift their peoples out of poverty.

Perpetuating the obfuscation, SDG report boasts that, thanks partly to UN programs, there are half a billion fewer people today than in 2000 who fall below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day. But then the report laments that previous efforts “fell short” by not promoting “sustainable patterns of consumption and production,” and warns that poor people will “suffer first and worst from climate change.”

What the report conveniently overlooks is that most of the poverty eradication of the past three decades took place in China – a country whose economic development is overwhelmingly fossil-fueled. In China alone, 680 million people moved out of extreme poverty during 1981-2010. In the process, China became the world’s second-largest economy and largest CO₂ emitter. Environmentalists did not know how to combine poverty eradication with coercive de-carbonization in the 1990s and 2000s, and they still don’t know.

Former French President Jacques Chirac called the Kyoto Protocol the “first step towards an authentic global governance.” Could Obama and Podesta revive the flagging fortunes of the UN-centered global governance agenda?

One risk is that developing countries will be lured by promises of foreign aid into joining the club of the carbon-constrained. That would be a tragic loss because government-to-government aid is a dependency trap that stifles rather than stimulates development

Another risk is that Obama, advised by Podesta, a long-time advocate of bypassing Congress, will commit the U.S. to international emission reduction targets through executive agreements that, unlike treaties, do not require Senate ratification.

Several state legislatures are considering bills this year to repeal or eliminate renewable energy mandates for generating electricity.  This week, Greg Lawson of Ohio’s Buckeye Institute arranged for me to testify before the Ohio Senate’s Public Utilities Committee on a bill to repeal their two-part mandate, which was enacted in 2008.  Ohio’s law requires that 12.5% of the electricity consumed in Ohio be generated from renewable sources by 2025 and another 12.5% from “advanced energy technologies,” also by 2025.  A third title requires major increases in energy efficiency, but it is not targeted for repeal in the bill under consideration.

My testimony is posted here. The other witnesses, all in favor of repeal, were Greg Lawson of the Buckeye Institute, Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute, Travis Fischer of the Institute for Energy Research, and Michael Farrin, a Ph. D. candidate at Ohio State University.  A short summary of the hearing was posted at SaveOurSkylineOhio.

I was impressed by the capability of the Senators on the Public Utilities Committee on both sides of the aisle, but was especially impressed by the chairman, Bill Seitz.  He was a major opponent of the renewables mandate when it was passed in 2008 and is now leading the effort to repeal it.  The main sponsor of the bill, SB 34, is Senator Kris Jordan, who is not a member of the committee.  Ohio is home to several of the leading anti-wind activists in the country, including Tom Stacy, who attended the hearing, along with Kevon Martis, an anti-wind leader in Michigan.

In the News

The Martyrdom of Mark Steyn
James Delingpole, The Spectator, 14 February 2014

Green Energy’s Animal Killing Problem
Andrew Stiles, National Review Online, 14 February 2014

Putting an End to EPA’s ‘Secret Science’
Ron Arnold, Washington Examiner, 13 February 2014

President Obama, This is Your ‘Energy Moment’
Mark Perry, AEIdeas, 13 February 2014

Icy Blast Heats Up Coal Debate
Darius Dixon & Erica Martinson, Politico, 13 February 2014

Building on Quicksand: The Social Cost of Carbon
Kevin Dayaratna & David Kreutzer, The Foundry, 12 February 2014

CO2 Benefits Exceed Costs by…50:1, More?
Richard Bezdek & Paul Driessen, Master Resource, 11 February 2014

Obama’s Energy Policy Hurts African Poor
Bjorn Lomborg, USA Today, 8 February 2014

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In the News

Green Hypocrisy on the Keystone Pipeline
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 6 February 2014

Trade Gap Shrank in 2013 as U.S. Fuel Exports Climbed
Jeanna Smialek, Bloomberg, 6 February 2014

Flat Temperatures, Still More Ills
Robert Bradley, Jr., Master Resource, 5 February 2014

Time To Rein in EPA
Bill Wilson, FoxNews.com, 5 February 2014

Don’t Blame Climate Change for the California Drought
Charles Cooke, National Review Online, 4 February 2014

Obama’s Energy Policy Is Right out of Al Gore’s Creation of the Internet
Steve Hayward, Forbes, 4 February 2014

State Department Assessment Blows Away Keystone Pipeline Foes’ Objections
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 3 February 2014

The Sierra Club Hates Energy
Alan Caruba, Canada Free Press, 3 February 2014

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In the News

War on Coal’s Collateral Damage Will Hit Non-Coal States, Too
Filip Jolevski & David Kreutzer, The Foundry, 31 January 2014

Steyer’s Jingoistic Anti-Keystone Ad Gets 4 Pinocchios
Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 31 January 2014

Social Cost of Carbon vs. Climate Science
Chip Knappenberger, Master Resource, 31 January 2014

Fossil Fuels Deserve Our Thanks
Alex Epstein, Forbes, 30 January 2014

10 Reasons Why Intermittent Renewables Won’t Work
Gail Tverberg, Oil Price, 30 January 2014

Climate Science Is for Second-Raters Says World’s Greatest Atmospheric Physicist
James Delingpole, Guardian, 29 January 2014

A Good Fracking Story Missed by the Media
Christopher Harper, Washington Times, 29 January 2014

Europe’s Stark Renewables Lesson
Rupert Darwall, Wall Street Journal Europe, 28 January 2014

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