On Wednesday, January 2, California, along with 15 other states, sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, alleging EPA unlawfully rejected California's request to regulate automotive greenhouse gas emissions more stringently than national standards.
In rejecting California's request, EPA noted greenhouse gas emissions do not have any state-specific qualities and are best addressed through national and international policy. Accordingly, California failed to show the "compelling and extraordinary" circumstances required for states to obtain an EPA waiver.
First the credit crunch, now the energy crunch. Just as household electricity bills go stratospheric the first coal-fired power station to be built in Britain for more than 30 years has been approved by Medway Council in Kent. The £1 billion plant at Kingsnorth, near Ashford, will be coal-burning – and carbon-producing – so is hardly an example to India or coal-rich China on how not to overheat the planet. But it will be built if only for one reason – to keep the lights on in the south of England.
The European Commission is considering proposing a carbon dioxide tariff on imports from states failing to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, while also considering a toughening-up of the EU's own emission trading system.
According to a draft commission proposal, firms from heavily polluting countries outside Europe would be obliged to buy EU carbon emission permits as part of the bloc's Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), Reuters reports.
The former House Speaker’s latest book, "A Contract with the Earth" co-authored with Palm Beach Zoo CEO Terry Maple, is an appalling paean to environmental naivete and taxpayer-subsidized profiteering.
While the book’s theme — i.e., let’s all just happily pitch in and do what it takes to save the environment — may sound reasonable, at least on a superficial basis, Mr. Gingrich’s notions are often wrong or simply bizarre, and his prescriptions amount to little more than a full embrace of rent-seeking "green" business and left-leaning eco-activist groups, both of which often masquerade as "protectors" of the environment.
The stark headline appeared just over a year ago. "2007 to be 'warmest on record,' " BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that "the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007," surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998. But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.
Continuing with the theme from yesterday on Maryland's Commission on Climate Change, today in the Washington Examiner I dissect many of the interim recommendations sent by the commission to the Maryland General Assembly. This includes the carbon cap I mentioned, which is even more aggressive than California's:
However, if you ask anyone involved with the commission how they intend to reach those targets, you get the standard shoulder shrug.
“If you asked me right now, how are you going to do it? What exactly are you going to do? The answer is, I don’t know,” Tad Aburn, director of the state’s Air and Radiation Management Division within the Maryland Department of the Environment, told The Associated Press last month.
Speaking of Aburn, he is the one in charge of withholding from me on a public records request I made to the Maryland Department of the Environment, as outlined earlier this week in an Examiner editorial. MDE is telling me one thing (they have 12 pages that fulfills my request) and they are telling Red Maryland blogger Mark Newgent another (that they have 3700 pages and it will cost him $1381 to get what he's asking for).
My request seeks all records related to MDE's relationship with the Center for Climate Strategies, a global warming advocacy group cloaked in "objective technical advisor" garb for state commissions. CCS's process in every state where they work claims to be "fully transparent," so I am still wondering what they want to hide in Maryland.
First we see that predictions of 2008 temperatures – as the fourth straight year of global cooling – is further confirmation of a warming trend. This just makes sense coming two weeks after the BBC informed us that the third straight year proved the very same thing. If this is warming, I’m not sure we can afford much more of it.
Of course, one might think we had learned our lesson about making January predictions about the year’s weather.
Even better, we hear news of a “First-ever study to link increased mortality specifically to carbon dioxide emissions”. It’s about time, the alarmists have been claiming this connection for years, and it looked like they may be forced to give up the ship.
Quite a dynamic field for being “settled”.
Yes, those declining global mean temperatures are a sure sign that global warming is getting worse. Of course, the forecasters at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia could be wrong, again:
“LONDON (Reuters) – 2008 will be slightly cooler than recent years globally but will still be among the top 10 warmest years on record since 1850 and should not be seen as a sign global warming was on the wane, British forecasters said. The Met Office and experts at the University of East Anglia on Thursday said global average temperatures this year would be 0.37 of a degree Celsius above the long-term 1961-1990 average of 14 degrees and be the coolest since 2000.”
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has gone up roughly four per cent since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997. This was followed by the hottest year on record, which was caused by a huge and prolonged El Nino in the southern Pacific Ocean. The GMT then went down in 1999, and since then the annual global mean temperature has been flat. When does a trend become statistically significant? Well, when a paper was published that identified a three-year trend of an increased melting rate in Greenland, that was considered significant enough to publish in a scientific journal and to receive huge press coverage. But nine years-and-counting of steady temperatures is evidence that global warming is booming along?
The state of Maryland, which is running a climate change study commission like many other states, is ready to implement laws restricting carbon dioxide emissions before its panel even finishes its work. The Maryland Commission on Climate Change released interim recommendations early last month, which include a call for emissions reductions even greater than those made by California last year. The state legislature is ready to go to work now on it, the Associated Press reports:
Several lawmakers say a proposal to cap carbon emissions — possibly the nation's toughest plan to reduce greenhouse gases — stands to become the most ambitious bill of the General Assembly session. The environment could be a main topic of debate because the state's looming budget problems were largely addressed in last fall's special session.
The carbon bill, endorsed by a task force set up by Gov. Martin O'Malley, would call for carbon reductions of 25 percent by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050. If approved, the goals would be the nation's strongest carbon-reduction plans.
The caps could headline a long list of environmental proposals.
No kidding. If the interim recommendations are taken seriously by the General Assembly like the carbon cap is, then the state is in for serious economy-busting measures, which include a public benefits fund (a tax on electricity); mandating a higher percentage of renewables in its electricity-generation sources; greater tax subsidies for greenhouse gas emission reduction and energy efficiency; and new transportation initiatives like higher fuel taxes and pay-as-you-drive insurance.
As I’ve written in the past for the John Locke Foundation’s Carolina Journal, this partial menu of options is the adopted brainchild of an advocacy group called the Center for Climate Strategies, who manage these commissions for several different states and give them all their ideas. The difference with Maryland, it seems, is that their lawmakers aren’t bothering to wait until the ink is dry on the commission’s recommendations.
H/T: Mr. Horner
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