Guest SEPP editorial by Sherwood Idso, Keith Idso, and Craig Idso
In a “Highlights” report of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s State of the Climate in 2009 document, which was prepared under the direction of the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, we can read the principal findings of what the document describes as the work of “more than 300 scientists from 48 countries.” Their primary conclusion, as stated in the Report’s first paragraph, is that “global warming is undeniable,” and the Report goes on from there to describe “how we know the world has warmed.” But this, and all that follows, tells us next to nothing about what has caused the warming, which is the crux of the whole contentious matter.
The Report next states, for example, that “recent studies show the world’s oceans are heating up,” which is fine; but then—as if hoping no one will question them—the Report says the oceans are warming, “as they absorb most of the extra heat being added to the climate system from the build-up of heat-trapping gases,” which contention is far from a proven fact, and is—in fact—merely an hypothesis .... and a bad one at that, as we shall soon see.
Another fault of the Report is its hyping of “melting Arctic sea ice,” while it remains silent on the state of Antarctic sea ice, which has been doing just the opposite as it has grown in extent. Likewise, a major inconsistency of the Report is its stating, with respect to temperature, that “a particular year can experience record-breaking highs and lows in any given location,” while, “as a whole, global climate continues to warm.” This is very true; and it can also do so while, as a whole, global climate cools or remains unchanged. And it implies the same thing for all types of weather phenomena (such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc.), which means that the occurrence of any unusually dramatic weather phenomenon in any “particular year” should imply nothing about the long-term trend of that phenomenon or the presumed trajectory of the global climate within which it is embedded. Yet the Report goes on to describe six such extreme events that occurred in the “particular year” of 2009, which would have to have been done for no other reason than to imply that these weather extremes were caused by global warming, which flies in the face of their earlier contention that record-breaking low temperatures in any year say nothing about the long-term thermal tendency of the planet.
Last of all, the Report states that “people have spent thousands of years building society for one climate and now a new one is being created—one that’s warmer and more extreme,” which leads us to wonder ....
How could more than 300 scientists from 48 countries possibly be so wrong? Any student of history and palaeoclimate well knows that earth’s climate has changed dramatically over the past “thousands of years.” During the central portion of the current interglacial period, for example, many parts of the planet were a few to several degrees Centigrade warmer than they currently are. And only a thousand years ago, the Medieval Warm Period was holding sway. Although many of the scientists of Climategate infamy tried mightily to make that period of warmth “go away,” the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has for quite some time now posted a review of a different research project every single week that testifies to the reality of the Medieval Warm Period. And that ever-growing body of research is demonstrating beyond any doubt that there was a several-hundred-year interval of warmth back then that was at many different times (stretching from decades to centuries), and in numerous places (throughout the entire world), significantly warmer than the Report’s highly-touted first decade of the 21st century, and at a time when the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration was far less than it is today.
What makes this particular failure of the Report so doubly damning is the fact that it claims that each of the “more than 30 different climate indicators” it has analyzed “is placed into historical context.” That is obviously not true. And for a parameter so central to the core of the global warming discussion as temperature to not be put into proper long-term context is inexcusable, although quite understandable, especially when one realizes the implications it would hold for the Report’s unfounded contentions about the present state of earth’s climate.
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By James Rosen
With the Obama administration returning to federal court to defend its six-month suspension of oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, industry executives and analysts claimed the ban was more stringent than originally believed, and exerting a greater impact on the lives and livelihoods of Gulf Coast residents.
Lawyers representing Interior Secretary Ken Salazar were back before U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans Wednesday, seeking to fend off court challenges by an offshore drilling services firm to the newest set of industry rules that Salazar instituted on July 12. Those rules were meant to preserve Salazar’s original moratorium order, which Feldman ruled unconstitutional on June 22, and to address the concerns articulated by the judge in his ruling.
But some industry analysts say Salazar’s revised rules go further than his first moratorium order, which was set to last until November 30. The Obama administration said the moratorium was necessary to strengthen the safety of offshore drilling operations in the wake of the April 20 explosion and oil spill aboard the Deepwater Horizon well, operated by British conglomerate BP. The accident killed eleven rig workers and unleashed an estimated 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf.
“They’re painting the getaway car a different color,” said Dan V. Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research in Washington. Kish said the original moratorium applied only to drilling rigs operating in 500 feet of water or deeper, but that the July 12 order by Salazar applies to all floating rigs in the Gulf.
What’s more, Kish said there are effectively two moratoria in place: the formal one, targeting deepwater drilling, and an informal one targeting shallow-water drilling operations. “About half of the rigs in the shallow waters of the Gulf are not operating,” said Kish, “because they can’t get permits from the government agency that is supposed to give them permits. So, in essence, what’s happening is that much of the fleet of deep- and shallow-water rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, which supplies a third of our domestic oil, are being laid up, put in cold storage, awaiting the government to make a decision one way or the other.”
Analysts said that of the thirty-three deepwater rigs in the Gulf, along with another eight under construction and committed to operate in the Gulf, at least four have already left, or are preparing to leave, the U.S. for foreign shores, pursuing contracts in emerging markets like the Egypt, the Congo, Brazil, and Greenland.
Each rig, the analysts said, costs approximately $500-600 million to build, and is constructed under strict debt-financing terms that require the owners to have long-term drilling contracts secured in advance. “If those contracts, which have been abrogated by the federal government here, are not generating revenue to pay the debt on these rigs,” said Eric Smith, a professor at the Tulane University business school, “the rigs have to leave. And when they leave...we’ll finish our moratorium and we’ll say, ‘Go back to work,’ and the oil operator is going to say, ‘With what?’ because the equipment will be gone, without any reasonable chance of getting it back anytime soon.”
Smith calculated that current restrictions effectively halting shallow- and deepwater drilling in the Gulf account for the loss of a combined 137,000 jobs, and impose a cost of $3 billion in “payroll effects,” with Louisiana consequently suffering a loss of $300 - $400 million in tax receipts. Smith’s assessment is in line with some of the projections put forward by Dr. Joseph R. Mason of Louisiana State University, who estimated in a recent analysis that the moratoria will inflict “broad economic losses within the Gulf region and throughout the nation as a whole,” to the tune of $2.7 billion in economic activity.
“The administration is in thrall to the environmental community, unfortunately, and as a result, they’re playing that card, and I think to try and slow up, or increase the cost of, hydrocarbons,” said Smith. “I don’t blame them for doing that; I just think that’s the reality...After the [1989] Exxon Valdez accident, after the [1969] Santa Barbara accident, we certainly did study the accidents to figure out what went wrong and then take some corrective action. But we didn’t shut down the industry in the meantime.”
Secretary Salazar’s point man on Gulf drilling operations is Michael Bromwich, director of the new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the new incarnation of the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service.
Bromwich is presently embarked on a listening tour in the Gulf Coast. He told an audience in Mobile, Alabama on Tuesday that he doesn’t see the moratorium extending beyond November 30, and held out hope that it could conceivably end sooner than that. “I’ve asked, and BP has agreed to provide, very detailed descriptions and analyzes and lessons learned on spill containment, on oil spill response, and on drilling safety,” Bromwich said. “All of that information is extraordinarily relevant to determine whether—when everything is taken into account, including the economic impact—whether the drilling, whether the deepwater drilling moratorium can be shortened, [and] drilling can resume sometime before November 30.”
At the same time, Bromwich made clear that the economic impact of the deepwater drilling moratorium is not his primary concern in his Gulf Coast events this week. He told the audience in Mobile: “Economic impact is something that we’re paying attention to, that we care deeply about. We’ve heard about the pain and suffering that people are going through and that certainly is being taken into account. But that is not the central purpose of these forums, which is to gather information [on drilling safety].”
The co-chairs of the blue-ribbon panel appointed by President Obama to investigate the BP disaster and its after-effects indicated that they will include the economic impact of the moratorium in their final report.
Former Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is one of the co-chairs, told the Washington Post that the final report of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling will address such questions as: “How effective was the moratorium? How well was the moratorium administered and managed? What were the consequences . . . on the side of safety, encouraging enhanced response, as contrasted to the economic aspects?”
Graham’s co-chair, William K. Reilly, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, expressed more palpable skepticism about the wisdom of the moratorium, telling the Post: “I don’t understand why it would take six months to vet thirty-three [deepwater] rigs for safety, environmental compliance, regulatory integrity. It’s never been made clear to me, and the testimony we received in New Orleans [on July 12] was not convincing on that.”
See where Texas sues feds over drilling ban here.
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel reports here on Russia’s extreme heat that’s has contributed to higher death rates and wildfires, plunging Moscow into a thick, choking smog. Hat-tip to reader DirkH.
The following NASA photo shows where it’s hot, and where it’s cool.
Hot spot in Russia. Source here.
So far 7600 sq km have burned. NASA’s Terra satellite shows that the fires began in later July, when temperatures in the areas were 12C and more above normal. One sees how the heat is concentrated in one spot, while the remainder of the continental area is near normal or even cool. Russian meteorologists say they are unable to find anything in the archives that compares to this, not in the last 1000 years.
While warmists are quick to pin the blame on climate change, others point out that the fires have other primary causes. Der Spiegel writes that much of the blame for the catastrophe goes to the authorities and mismanagement of forests:
Forest fire experts say the authorities also get most of the blame for the catastrophe. Large fires like this one in Russia are caused primarily by man.
According to Johann Goldammer of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry at the University of Freiburg:
There is no evidence that the fires ignited by themselves because of the drought.
Goldammer says that excessive deforestation of the landscape may be a factor in the fires because they leave barren steppe-like landscapes that tend to dry out quickly and become a tinderbox.
But then Goldammer’s makes the dubious claim that this was caused by the fact that the forests had been put into private hands, and then recommends Soviet-style land use!
It has something to do with sustainable land use, like land-use in the old Soviet Union, where it was much more efficient than today.
Now that’s the way to solve problems. I suggest Goldammer read up on how the Soviets managed to run the entire country into the ground.
By Anthony Watts
From the University of Leicester: An ancient Earth like ours
Enlarged here.
Geologists reconstruct the Earth’s climate belts between 460 and 445 million years ago
An international team of scientists including Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester, and led by Dr. Thijs Vandenbroucke, formerly of Leicester and now at the University of Lille 1 (France), has reconstructed the Earth’s climate belts of the late Ordovician Period, between 460 and 445 million years ago.
The findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA - and show that these ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.
The researchers state: “The world of the ancient past had been thought by scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon dioxide levels much higher - over twenty times as high - than those of the present. However, it is very hard to deduce carbon dioxide levels with any accuracy from such ancient rocks, and it was known that there was a paradox, for the late Ordovician was known to include a brief, intense glaciation - something difficult to envisage in a world with high levels of greenhouse gases.”
The team of scientists looked at the global distribution of common, but mysterious fossils called chitinozoans - probably the egg-cases of extinct planktonic animals - before and during this Ordovician glaciation. They found a pattern that revealed the position of ancient climate belts, including such features as the polar front, which separates cold polar waters from more temperate ones at lower latitudes. The position of these climate belts changed as the Earth entered the Ordovician glaciation - but in a pattern very similar to that which happened in oceans much more recently, as they adjusted to the glacial and interglacial phases of our current (and ongoing) Ice Age.
This ‘modern-looking’ pattern suggests that those ancient carbon dioxide levels could not have been as high as previously thought, but were more modest, at about five times current levels (they would have had to be somewhat higher than today’s, because the sun in those far-off times shone less brightly).
“These ancient, but modern-looking oceans emphasise the stability of Earth’s atmosphere and climate through deep time - and show the current man-made rise in greenhouse gas levels to be an even more striking phenomenon than was thought,” the researchers conclude.
Reference: Vandenbroucke, T.R.A., Armstrong, H.A., Williams, M., Paris, F., Zalasiewicz, J.A., Sabbe, K., Nolvak, J., Challands, T.J., Verniers, J. & Servais, T. 2010. Polar front shift and atmospheric CO2 during the glacial maximum of the Early Paleozoic Icehouse. PNAS doi/10.1073/pnas.1003220107.
Comments:
stevengoddard says:
August 10, 2010 at 8:31 am
Completely clueless paper.
They assume that the difference in temperature during the Ordovician was due to “5X CO2” and negate their own reasoning about the Ordovician ice age.
How is it that all the corals and sea shells didn’t dissolve? Romm tells us that a few ppm is all that is needed to turn their shells soft. Have the chemical properties of Aragonite changed?
Read more here.
By Anthony Watts
WUWT readers may recall last week that the “Our Climate” iPhone app was released and announced here. It has quickly become a best seller on the iTunes store.
It has also quickly become a target.
John Cook, a generally reasonable Aussie who runs a blog oddly titled “skepticalscience” (odd, since it isn’t skeptical, but pushes the consensus) also has an iPhone app. Knowing that he wouldn’t get enough traffic on his blog to effectively smack down this new informational threat, he turned to the Guardian, and was immediately offered a guest essay there.
The title? Climate change denial? There’s an app for that.
How sad that Cook and the Guardian had to resort to such a cheap shot.
Problem is, that essay appears to have backfired as “Our Climate” continues to grow. Right after that Guardian piece by Cook, downloads surged. So much in fact, Apple itself is even promoting it on the iTunes (installed Mac and PC application) front page now!
Have a look:
I hate it when that happens.
There are more than 230,000 Apps in the App store - Only 40 Apps are featured in this front page category at any time, so this is a singular achievement and opportunity for the truly skeptical side of the story to be heard.
Get the app for yourself here.
Don’t have an iPhone? Tell a friend who does.
And for the record, I don’t make a dime from this. I have no ownership or revenue sharing in it whatsoever.
As an aside, I wonder if Cook has seen the latest Gallup poll on Global Warming in Australia?
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Australians’ Views Shift on Climate Change
By Anita Pugliese and Linda Lyons
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Australians’ attitudes about global warming could be a factor later this month in the general election where climate change has emerged as an issue. The percentage of Australians who are aware of climate change and say it results from human activities fell from 52% in June 2008 to 44% in March 2010, while the number attributing it to natural causes increased 10 percentage points.
Enlarged here.
Such a shift is particularly noteworthy among a population that follows the global warming debate closely. Awareness of climate change in Australia remains among the highest measured in the world—97% say they know “a great deal” (24%) or “something” (73%) about the issue. Therefore, the “climategate” controversy that surfaced in late 2009 may partly explain some of the shifts in Australians’ attitudes on primary causes. Published e-mails from University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—one of the world’s leading climate study institutions—called CRU’s research into question. The accusation that CRU was manipulating the data to inflate the case for human-caused climate change has since been refuted.
Global warming also lost traction as a perceived direct threat to Australians. Twenty-two percent of Australians currently describe its threat to themselves and their families as “very serious,” down from 31% in 2008. Although fewer Australians perceive it as a serious threat, the majority (69%) continue to believe that climate change poses a very or “somewhat serious” personal threat.
Enlarged here.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009—which produced weaker outcomes than many expected—and the Australian government’s delayed action on climate policy, may have sent a signal to some Australians that global warming is not as serious as they previously believed.
Implications
In addition to the economy, healthcare, and immigration, climate change will be a key topic in the Aug. 21 national general election that pits new Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Labor party against opposition leader Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition. Both parties have pledged to reduce emissions by at least 5% by 2020, but via different approaches. With such attentiveness to climate change issues, Australians will be monitoring each candidate closely.
See more here.
By Dr. Vincent Gray
The IPCC and most climate scientists are obsessed with Linear Trends. They are encouraged by the fact that the only regularly available statistical treatment of irregular information on “scientific” calculators and computer spreadsheets is a “linear regression” calculation, using the method of least squares. Most people do not appreciate that its results are unreliable unless the original data are from a representative sample, uniform in time and place, and they approximately fit the Gaussian “bell” curve in every way. including by being symmetrical
Yet anybody who has attended any lecture on mathematical statistics and even many popular introductions to the subject must know that there are several mathematical models that may be more successful in studying irregular data. For example, extreme observations may follow the binomial distribution, which was traditionally successful in explaining the frequency of deaths from horse kicks in Prussian army corps. There are some people who are prepared to support the exponential distribution, which predicts escalating change extending to infinity, an impossible outcome for any climate trend except for those projected by the most enthusiastic environmentalists.
There are many reasons why linear trends are not a useful means of studying climate events. Samples are usually not representative. Observations usually take place at different times, using different methods or instruments and often in different places. The distribution curve of observations is often not symmetrical. The calculated “linear trend” may be quite different, depending on the starting and finishing point of the sequence. Ignorance or deliberate disregard of these necessities means that many opinions on the climate which have disregarded them are unsound.
One important consideration which seems to be ignored by most climate scientists is the treatment of irregular changes to an otherwise fairly steady sequence from rare or unforeseeable events.
Some years ago I received an Email from John Christy on the subject of his MSU satellite temperature series to the effect that it has been dominated by two sets of essentially irregular events. These were the volcanic eruptions by El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991 which caused a cooling, and the various manifestations of the El Nino weather pattern which provided unusually high temperatures, particularly in 1998. He commented that if the two earthquakes had taken place later and the 1998 El Nino had been earlier, then the temperature trend would have been negative instead of positive.
Phil Jones at CRU actually took this idea up some years ago (1990s) when he published an extra set of temperature anomaly figures which had been “corrected” for the influence of El Nino. It was withdrawn so they could recruit the 1998 El Niño upwards blip to form part of a “linear trend” which demonstrated the effects of carbon dioxide emissions.
One strange fact is that the calculated projected results of increases in carbon dioxide follow a decreasing, logarithmic path, not a linear one.
Although the Mean Global Surface Temperature Anomaly Record is supposed to be “corrected” for such problems as site change, instrument change, time of observation bias, and for “gaps” in the record, nobody seems to consider that perhaps a more plausible “trend”:might be found by applying “corrections” for changes in the number of stations, and such irregular events as volcanic eruptions and the various ocean oscillations. It may be easily possible to correct for El Nino which disrupts the sequence for a fairly short time but more difficulty with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which appears to have a periodicity of about 60 years. Then there is the sun, whose influence is currently not well understood, yet undoubtedly underestimated by the IPCC.
The “correction” of the surface record for urban and land change effects now seem to be admitted by CRU from Phil Jones but they continue to issue the biased figures.. It seems increasingly likely that if realistic corrections could be implemented for all the uncertainties, natural events, and human effects on the ground, there will not be much evidence left to support claims for effects from greenhouse gas emissions.
The most blatant example of the use of an unusual event to claim an otherwise non-existent “linear trend” is in the reports of the Pacific Island Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project of the Australian Government.. The “Linear Trends” that they report for the 12 Pacific Islands, for instance at their latest Report here depend on the recorded depression of the ocean in all of the islands that took place during the two Tropical Cyclones of 1991 and 1992. Without these two events there are no significant recorded changes in sea level at any of the 12 Pacific Islands since then. They must be praying hard that a similar cyclone does not turn up to ruin their precious “trends”
It is even possible that this recorded depression was an artifact caused by the disturbances in the sea in the vicinity of the instruments during the storms
All other sea level records have been affected by storms of one sort and another. by seismic actability, by building and removal of minerals and ground water, besides the usual geological correction for isostasy. As with the temperature, one wonders how much would be left for the effects of greenhouse gases if all of these were done realistically.
By Shikha Dalmia, Fortune
The Reid energy bill abandons cap-and-trade, dooming the cause.
Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid’s energy legislation, released Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!
This is not just my read of the situation; it is also that of Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate-turned-Democratic-apparatchik. In his latest column for The New York Times, Krugman laments that “all hope for action to limit climate change died” in 2010. Democrats had a brief window of opportunity before the politics of global warming changed forever in November to ram something through Congress. But the Reid bill chose not to do so for the excellent reason that Democrats want to avoid an even bigger beating than the one they already face at the polls.
Not only does the bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a cap-and-tax--oops, cap-and-trade--scheme, it even avoids capping emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient and the nation’s fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas. This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the “comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President Barack Obama had been threatening.
Krugman blames this outcome on--you’ll never guess this!--greedy energy companies and cowardly Republicans who sold out. But the fault, Dear Paul, lies not in them, but in your own weakling theories.
The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support. Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It included major utilities (Duke Energy ( DUK - news - people )) and gas companies (BP ( BP - news - people )) that stood to gain by hobbling the coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. Meanwhile, the Breakthrough Institute, a highly respected liberal outfit whose mission is to rejuvenate the progressive movement in this country, points out that environmental groups spent at least $100 million over the past two years executing what was arguably the best mobilization campaign in history. Despite all of this, notes Breakthrough, there is little evidence to suggest that cap-and-trade would have mustered more than 43 votes in the Senate.
This means that lucre is not the only motivating force in politics. Indeed, lobbyists are effective generally when they represent causes that coincide with the will of constituents, which is far from the case here. Voters are reluctant to accept economic pain to address remote causes with an uncertain upside. Heck, they are dubious even when the cause is not so remote and has a demonstrable upside. Take Social Security and Medicare. It is a mathematical certainty that, without reform, these programs will go bankrupt, jeopardizing the health care and retirement benefits of tens of millions Americans. Even though the cost of action is far smaller compared with the cost of inaction, persuading voters to do something is an uphill battle.
Yet even in the heyday of the consensus on global warming there was never this kind of certainty. The ClimateGate scandal--in which prominent climatologists were caught manipulating data to exaggerate the observed warming--has significantly weakened this consensus. But even if it hadn’t, climate change is too complex an issue to ever be established with anything approaching iron-clad certainty. Hence, it was inevitable that it would run into a political dead-end.
This is exactly what the Reid bill represents. Indeed, if Democrats backed-off from their grand designs to cut carbon emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 with sizable majorities in Congress and a “celestial healer” in the White House there is little chance that they will ever be able to accomplish anything better at a later date. And if America--the richest country in the world and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases--won’t act, there is a snowball’s chance in Mumbai that India or China will.
Of course, authoritarian countries have a little bit more leeway than democracies to push unpalatable remedies. But it is not within the power of even China’s autocrats to shove an energy diet down the throat of their people on the theory that the pain from it will be short-lived because it will trigger a search for better and cleaner energy alternatives--the totality of the green pitch for action.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few more whimpers left in the global warming movement before it finally passes. On the international front, the buzz is that the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change currently in the works will be even more alarmist than the previous one. However, thanks to ClimateGate, it will give greater play to alternative voices. ‘Going forward, the general perception won’t be one of consensus,’ notes Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor, an expert on energy issues, “but one of increasing appreciation of disagreement on the issue.”
Domestically, green groups will prod the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions more aggressively. But this will be harder to do when Republicans inevitably make gains in Congress in November. Indeed, they will likely revive a Senate resolution floated by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, banning the EPA from regulating emissions from stationary sources, which lost by just four votes last month. Global warming warriors are also talking about fighting the battle for emission cuts state-by-state. But they will lose on that front too. California, which embraced such cuts four years ago, is already facing a ballot initiative in November to scrap the law, as it loses business and jobs to other states. Indeed, the same collective action problems that prevent global action on climate change will inevitably bedevil state-level action too.
The global warming warriors will likely have to go through the five stages of grief before accepting that their moment has passed and the movement is dead. Thinkers more sophisticated than Krugman will no doubt point to many proximate causes for its demise beyond evil Republicans such as lack of engagement by President Obama, bad economic timing, filibuster rules, what have you.
The reality is, however, that the crusade was doomed from the start because of its own inherent weaknesses. RIP.
Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a biweekly Forbes columnist. Robert Soave of University of Michigan provided valuable research assistance for this column.
OKLAHOMA CITY—The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering a crackdown on farm dust, so senators have signed a letter addressing their concerns on the possible regulations.
The letter dated July 23 to the EPA states, “If approved, would establish the most stringent and unparalleled regulation of dust in our nation’s history.” It further states, “We respect efforts for a clean and healthy environment, but not at the expense of common sense. These identified levels will be extremely burdensome for farmers and livestock producers to attain. Whether its livestock kicking up dust, soybeans being combined on a dry day in the fall, or driving a car down the gravel road, dust is a naturally occurring event.”
Read the letter to EPA signed by 21 senators including Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn
Many in the Oklahoma farming industry are opposed to the EPA’s consideration. One farmer said the possible regulations are ridiculous.
“It’s plain common sense, we don’t want to do anything detrimental,” said farmer Curtis Roberts. “If the dust is detrimental to us, it’s going to be to everybody. We’re not going to do anything to hurt ourselves or our farm.”
Roberts, a fourth generation farmer and rancher in Arcadia, said regulating dust in rural areas will hurt farmers’ harvest, cultivation and livelihood.
“Anytime you work ground, you’re going to have dust. I don’t know how they’ll regulate it,” Roberts said. “The regulations are going to put us down and keep us from doing things we need to be doing because of the EPA.”
Oklahoma Farm Bureau President Mike Spradling said the rules could be detrimental to farmers across the Sooner State.
“We as an organization do not feel dust is a pollutant,” Spradling said. “It would almost be impossible to comply with what’s being addressed now from the EPA as in agriculture. We’re doing everything we possibly can.”
“It’s just common sense, we don’t like dust in the morning but it’s something we got to live with,” Roberts said.