Ever since the first Climategate e-mail release, the public has become increasingly aware that scientists are not unbiased. Of course, most scientists with a long enough history in their fields already knew this (I discussed the issue at length in my first book Climate Confusion), but it took the first round of Climategate e-mails to demonstrate it to the world.

The latest release (Climategate 2.0) not only reveals bias, but also some private doubts among the core scientist faithful about the scientific basis for the IPCC’s policy goals. Yet, the IPCC’s “cause” (Michael Mann’s term) appears to trump all else.

So, when the science doesn’t support The Cause, the faithful turn toward discussions of how to craft a story which minimizes doubt about the IPCC’s findings. After considerable reflection, I’m going to avoid using the term ‘conspiracy’ to describe this activity, and discuss it in terms of scientific bias.

It’s Impossible to Avoid Bias

We are all familiar with competing experts in a trial who have diametrically opposed opinions on some matter, even given the same evidence. This happens in science all the time.

Even if we have perfect measurements of Nature, scientists can still come to different conclusions about what those measurements mean in terms of cause and effect. So, biases on the part of scientists inevitably influence their opinions. The formation of a hypothesis of how nature works is always biased by the scientist’s worldview and limited amount of knowledge, as well as the limited availability of research funding from a government that has biased policy interests to preserve.

Admittedly, the existence of bias in scientific research - which is always present - does not mean the research is necessarily wrong. But as I often remind people, it’s much easier to be wrong than right in science. This is because, while the physical world works in only one way, we can dream up a myriad ways by which we think it works. And they can’ all be correct.

So, bias ends up being the enemy of the search for scientific truth because it keeps us from entertaining alternative hypotheses for how the physical world works. It increases the likelihood that our conclusions are wrong.

The IPCC’ Bias

In the case of global warming research, the alternative (non-consensus) hypothesis that some or most of the climate change we have observed is natural is the one that the IPCC must avoid at all cost. This is why the Hockey Stick was so prized: it was hailed as evidence that humans, not Nature, rule over climate change.

The Climategate 2.0 e-mails show how entrenched this bias has become among the handful of scientists who have been the most willing participants and supporters of The Cause. These scientists only rose to the top because they were willing to actively promote the IPCC’ message with their particular fields of research.

Unfortunately, there is no way to “ix"the IPCC, and there never was. The reason is that its formation over 20 years ago was to support political and energy policy goals, not to search for scientific truth. I know this not only because one of the first IPCC directors told me so, but also because it is the way the IPCC leadership behaves. If you disagree with their interpretation of climate change, you are left out of the IPCC process. They ignore or fight against any evidence which does not support their policy-driven mission, even to the point of pressuring scientific journals not to publish papers which might hurt the IPCC’s efforts.

I believe that most of the hundreds of scientists supporting the IPCC’s efforts are just playing along, assured of continued funding. In my experience, they are either: (1) true believers in The Cause; (2) think we need to get away from using fossil fuels anyway; or (3) rationalize their involvement based upon the non-zero chance of catastrophic climate change.

My Biases

I am up front about my biases: I think market forces will take care of the fact that “fossil” fuels are (probably) a limited resource. Slowly increasing scarcity will lead to higher prices, which will make alternative energy research more attractive. This is more efficient that trying to legislate new forms of energy into existence.

I also think currently proposed energy policies will cause widespread death and suffering. The IPCC not only destroys scientific objectivity and scientific progress, it also destroys lives.

Therefore, I view it as my moral duty to support the “forgotten science” of natural climate change, a class of alternative hypotheses that have all but been ignored by the IPCC and government funding agencies.

I hope I am correct that most climate change we have experienced is natural. But I also know that “hoping” doesn’t make it so. If I had new scientific evidence that human-caused climate change really was a threat to life on Earth, I would publish it. It would sure be easier to publish than evidence against.

But from everything I’ve seen, I still think Nature probably rules, and that humans (as part of nature) also have some unknown level influence on climate. We know that the existence of trees affects climate - why not the existence of humans?

Countering the Bias

Scientists are human, and so you will never remove the tendencies toward bias in scientific research. You can’t change human nature.

But you can level the playing field by supporting alternative biases.

For years John Christy and I have been advising Congress that some portion of the appropriated funds for federal agencies supporting climate change research should be mandated to support alternative hypotheses of climate change. It’s time for the pendulum to start swinging back the other way.

After all, scientists will go where the money is. If scientists are funded to find evidence of natural sources of climate change, believe me, they will find it.

If you build such a playing field, they will come.

But when only one hypothesis is allowed as the explanation for climate change (e.g. “the science is settled"), the bias becomes so thick and acrid that everyone can smell the stench. Everyone except the IPCC leadership, that is.

BBC In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists

Britain’s leading green activist research centre spent 15,000 pounds on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves, a vast new cache of leaked ‘Climategate’ emails has revealed. The emails - part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia - shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade. They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output. BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. - David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011

Labour MP Graham Stringer last night said he would be writing this week to BBC director-general Mark Thompson to demand an investigation into the Corporation’s relationship with UEA. ‘The new leaked emails show that the UEA scientists at the Tyndall Centre and the CRU acted more like campaigners than academics, and that they succeeded in an attempt to influence the output of the BBC,’ Mr Stringer said.  - David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011

Using research money to evangelise one point of view and suppress another defies everything I ever learnt about the scientific method. These emails go to the heart of the BBC’s professed impartiality… its actions must be investigated. --David Davis MP, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011

Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s director of strategy and ‘green guru’, is the latest person to admit to doubts about climate change. ‘I’m not sure I believe in it,’ he announced at a meeting of the Energy Department, prompting one aide to blurt out: ‘Did I just hear that correctly?’ Hilton has become a big fan of former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, a vocal critic of the global warming lobby. His new doubts chime with the Prime Minister’s decision to tone down his previous emphasis on environmental measures to concentrate on stimulating economic growth. --Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011

The individual (or individuals) who, in November 2009, released 1,000 emails to and from IPCC-affiliated climate scientists, igniting the Climategate scandal, struck again earlier this week. The leaker(s) released an additional 5,000 emails involving the same cast of characters, notably Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and Michael Mann, creator of the discredited Hockey Stick reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature history. The blogosphere quickly branded the new trove of emails “Climategate 2.0.”

The timing in each case was not fortuitous. The Climategate emails made painfully clear that the scientists shaping the huge - and hugely influential - IPCC climate change assessment reports are not impartial experts but agenda-driven activists. Climategate exposed leading U.N.-affiliated scientists as schemers colluding to manipulate public opinion, downplay inconvenient data, bias the peer review process, marginalize skeptical scientists, and flout freedom of information laws. Climategate thus contributed to the failure of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Similarly, Climategate 2.0 arrives shortly before the December 2011 climate conference in Durban - although nobody expects the delegates to agree on a post-Kyoto climate treaty anyway.

Excerpts from Climategate 2.0 emails appear to confirm in spades earlier criticisms of the IPCC climate science establishment arising out of Climategate. My colleague, Myron Ebell, enables us to see this at a glance by sorting the exerpts into categories.

They know the climate models are junk, but say the opposite in the IPCC reports:

<0850> Barnett:
[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved.  I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer

<5066> Hegerl:
[IPCC AR5 models] So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long suspected us of doing [...] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.

<4443> Jones:
Basic problem is that all models are wrong - not got enough middle and low level clouds.

<1982> Santer:
there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor tests we’ve applied.

Intentional cherry picking of data:

<2775> Jones:
I too don’t see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones certainly will not as we’re choosing the periods to show warming.

<5111> Pollack:
But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.

<5039> Rahmstorf:
You chose to depict the one based on C14 solar data, which kind of stands out in Medieval times. It would be much nicer to show the version driven by Be10 solar forcing

<0953> Jones:
This will reduce the 1940-1970 cooling in NH temps. Explaining the cooling with sulphates won’t be quite as necessary.

<4165> Jones:
what he [Zwiers] has done comes to a different conclusion than Caspar and Gene!  I reckon this can be saved by careful wording.

<3994> Mitchell/MetO
Is the PCA approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems to me that in the case of MBH the answer in each is no

<4241> Wilson:
I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures. [...] The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.

<4758> Osborn:
Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it!

<0121> Jones:
[on temperature data adjustments] Upshot is that their trend will increase

Cherry picking of authors to get the right spin in the IPCC reports:

<0714> Jones:
Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.

<3205> Jones:
Useful ones [for IPCC] might be Baldwin, Benestad (written on the solar/cloud issue - on the right side, i.e anti-Svensmark), Bohm, Brown, Christy (will be have to involve him ?)

Subordinating science to a political agenda:

<4716> Adams:
Somehow we have to leave the[m] thinking OK, climate change is extremely complicated, BUT I accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.

<1790> Lorenzoni:
I agree with the importance of extreme events as foci for public and governmental opinion [...] ‘climate change’ needs to be present in people’s daily lives. They should be reminded that it is a continuously occurring and evolving phenomenon

<1485> Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.

<2428> Ashton/co2.org:
Having established scale and urgency, the political challenge is then to turn this from an argument about the cost of cutting emissions - bad politics - to one about the value of a stable climate - much better politics. [...] the most valuable thing to do is to tell the story about abrupt change as vividly as possible

<3332> Kelly:
the current commitments, even with some strengthening, are little different from what would have happened without a climate treaty. [...] the way to pitch the analysis is to argue that precautionary action must be taken now to protect reserves etc against the inevitable

<3655> Singer/WWF:
we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and b) in order to get into the media the context between climate extremes/desasters/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and energy

<5131> Shukla/IGES:
["Future of the IPCC”, 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

Intentional cover-up:

<2733> Crowley:
Phil, thanks for your thoughts - guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in the open.

<2440> Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process

<1577> Jones:
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

Candid comments not reflected in public statements:

<4693> Crowley:
I am not convinced that the “truth” is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships

<4141> Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media

<1682> Wils:
[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]

<3373> Bradley:
I’m sure you agree - the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.

Predictably, Michael Mann asserts that these excerpts are “taken out of context.” To my knowledge, neither Mann nor his comrades has supplied the context that supposedly puts these comments in a better light. Note too that Mann and all other Climategate malefactors assert that the leaked emails were “hacked” and “stolen.” There is no solid evidence to support this allegation. For all we know, the leaker was an insider - a whistleblower fed up with CRU’s refusal to comply with freedom of information laws. When they decry the “illegal hack” of the CRU server, they speak not as scientists weighing evidence but as partisans pushing spin. Exactly the portrait that emerges from the leaked emails.

Science reporter David Appell, hardly a climate change skeptic, writes that, “Even trying to guess at the context and keeping it in mind, some of these [Climatgate 2.0] excerpts are inexplicable.” In fact, Appell states, “just reading the README file emails, these sound worse than I thought at first - their impact will be devastating.”

That the leaker opposes the IPCC agenda of climate alarm and energy rationing is obvious - why else release the emails in the run-up to U.N. climate conferences? But it is far from obvious - as IPCC apologists assume - that the leaker is a shill for Big Oil or King Coal. A possible explanation of motive may be infered from the README file’s opening lines:

/// FOIA 2011 0 Background and Context ///

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

“One dollar can save a life” - the opposite must also be true.

“Poverty is a death sentence.”

“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

I would put it this way. There are risks of climate policy as well as of climate change, and the former may far outweigh the latter. More than one billion people on planet Earth live in energy squalor and struggle to survive without electricity, motor vehicles, and mechanized agriculture. Putting an energy-starved world on an energy diet is neither humane nor enlightened.

A professor who served on a panel that won a Nobel Peace Prize for its work on climate change got a polite but skeptical reception at the fifth annual Kern County Energy Summit Wednesday.

The summit put on by the Kern Economic Development Corp. featured a range of speakers from the energy sector, including oil and gas, wind, solar, utilities, investment banking and government.

The keynote speaker was Mark Jaccard, who teaches in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Jaccard—with former vice president Al Gore and colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for helping to raise awareness of global warming.

Jaccard continued to warn of the perils of a warming earth at Wednesday’s speech to several hundred people at the Marriott Hotel, and addressed doubters head-on.

“We cannot wish away the climate risk,” he said. “We must guard against the tendency in each of us to believe only what’s in our self-interest.

“Right now, we’re on a path to dramatically disrupt the climate, eco-system and oceans of the planet on which we depend. We need to take dramatic action.”

Jurisdictions such as California are leading the effort to limit carbon emissions, Jaccard added, but “more can and must be done.”

Although Jaccard is a relentless advocate for limiting greenhouse gases, he does not condemn the use of fossil fuels entirely, and in 2005 wrote a Donner Prize-winning policy book called “Sustainable Fossil Fuels.”

“Say no to burning fossil fuels, but don’t throw the CO2 fuels out with the fossil fuel bathwater,” Jaccard said.

The professor favors cap and trade systems that make emitting CO2 expensive, and carbon capture and sequestration technology that captures emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities and injects it deep underground to isolate it from the atmosphere.

Still, at the end of his address, Jaccard faced questions from audience members who clearly were dubious.

One person asked what made Jaccard so sure that global warming was man-made and not a result of natural warming and cooling cycles.

“One hundred and fifty years ago, people were predicting that if we continued to dump these gases into the atmosphere, temperatures would rise, and the increase would be dramatically different from the natural 10,000-year cycles that you’re talking about,” Jaccard replied. “And that’s exactly what’s happening.”

Another person, no doubt cognizant of the speaker’s home base, asked how a warmer world would be bad for cold places such as Canada.

“It’s actually not that hard a sell (in Canada),” Jaccard said. “You just have to think about the mountains that some of you like to hike in around here or the streams you like to fish in.”

It’s not that the earth will warm up, then flatten out and everyone will adapt to that new reality, Jaccard insisted. “The end-point of that path looks something like Venus. It’s really hot. At some point, we’re going to panic and say we need to do something about that.”

Jaccard cautioned against “cherry picking” scientists who are far outside the mainstream of scientific thought on global warming and its causes.

Approach the issue as you would a business decision, he said. If you were drilling for oil and three scientists told you that you faced some serious risks but one said you had nothing to worry about, wouldn’t you mitigate against risk based on the majority consensus?

The overwhelmingly conservative audience would have none of it, and even Jaccard conceded the issue is becoming more polarizing over time as Republicans, in particular, become increasingly skeptical.

After the summit, oil industry engineer Mike Familia said he found earlier presentations on wind industry potential in Kern County “interesting,” but wasn’t impressed by the keynote speaker.

“I guess he’s one of those experts who speaks so matter-of-factly about things that I don’t think are so matter-of-fact,” he said. “I think there was another side of the discussion.”

ICECAP Note: Here again we hear the claim that the hot Venus surface is because of runaway greenhouse warming but the heating is a result of a very dense atmosphere.  Venus’s atmosphere, composed chiefly of carbon dioxide produces a surface pressure 90 times greater than that on Earth. The pressurized atmosphere at the surface warms the air temperature to 467C (872F) - hot enough to melt lead. The surface of Venus experiences acid rain, due to the clouds of sulfuric acid clouds. 

Of all the planets in the Solar System, the seasons of Mars are the most Earth-like, due to the similar tilts of the two planets’ rotational axes. The lengths of the Martian seasons are about twice those of Earth’s, as Mars’ greater distance from the Sun leads to the Martian year being about two Earth years long. Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about -87 C (-125 F) during the polar winters to highs of up to -5C (23F) in summers. The wide range in temperatures is due to the thin atmosphere and the resulting low atmospheric pressure, and the low thermal inertia of Martian soil. The planet is also 1.52 times as far from the sun as Earth, resulting in just 43% of the amount of sunlight.

The restrictions on our free speech are not just increasingly oppressive - but increasingly political:

THE whitewash begins. Now that the carbon tax has passed through federal parliament, the government’s clean-up brigade is getting into the swing by trying to erase any dissent against the jobs-destroying legislation.

On cue comes the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which this week issued warnings to businesses that they will face whopping fines of up to $1.1m if they blame the carbon tax for price rises.

It says it has been “directed by the Australian government to undertake a compliance and enforcement role in relation to claims made about the impact of a carbon price.”

Businesses are not even allowed to throw special carbon tax sales promotions before the tax arrives on July 1.

“Beat the Carbon Tax - Buy Now” or “Buy now before the carbon tax bites” are sales pitches that are verboten. Or at least, as the ACCC puts it, “you should be very cautious about making these types of claims”.

There will be 23 carbon cops roaming the streets doing snap audits of businesses that “choose to link your price increases to a carbon price”.

Instead, the ACCC suggests you tell customers you’ve raised prices because “the overall cost of running (your) business has increased”.

If wild words on climate change must be stamped out, why not start with Tim Flannery instead?

I cannot understand why Paul Krugman is held in such high esteem as an economist when he does not understand the simple fact that solar is not economic because it only supplies power when the sun is shining, not when the customer needs it. Maybe that is not in Krugman’s Economics 101 but it is definitely in Common Sense 101. In simple terms he may understand , when everyone supplies potatoes at the same moment to the market the product is not worth much - this Dr Krugman, is called a glut- maybe you have heard of the term. 

At midday on a sunny day, solar panels provide a glut of power for a short while and then nothing.  Unfortunately like potatoes people require power all year round and solar is basically useless in that context. Dropping solar panel prices does not change the equation and no one would buy solar power unless they were forced to because the idea is fundamentally stupid. The only thing that would change the scene is suitable battery storage to enable solar power to be stored and make it a marketable quantity.

Krugman also goes on a rant against fracking showing the terror that this cheap new power source is engendering among environmentalists. He is very concerned about indirect costs of coal but neglects to calculate the huge cost of solar power subsidies and feed-in tariffs. He also thinks that Solyandra’s failure was caused by technological success - not because it was a silly idea to start with which could be very simply tested with a model and proper costing. What he calls “technological success” , normal mortals without the advantage of a PhD , would call “bad management” and “inability to compete with the Chinese in manufacturing.”

Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

Cost-effective solar ? Krugman must be living on another planet! 

Rainstorm or wind farm? The circled area contains a wind farm, making it unclear whether it is also raining there.

This one’s really off the radar.

Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy sources, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: “blank spots” that distort radar readings.

Now government agencies that depend on radar—such as the Department of Defense and the National Weather Service—are spending millions in a scramble to preserve their detection capabilities. A four-star Air Force general recently spelled out the problem to Dave Beloite, the director of the Department of Defense’s Energy Siting Clearinghouse.

Spinning wind turbines make it hard to detect incoming planes. To avoid that problem, military officials have blocked wind farm construction near their radars—and in some cases later allowed them after politicians protested.

Shepherd’s Flat, a wind farm under construction in Oregon, was initially held up by a government notice that the farm would “seriously impair the ability of the (DoD) to detect, monitor and safely conduct air operations.”

Then Oregon’s senators got involved.

“The Department of Defense’s earlier decision threatened to drop a bomb on job creation in Central Oregon,” democratic Senator Ron Wyden noted in a press release.

Beloite told FoxNews.com that the project was given the green light by the military only after scientists at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory assured the Department of Defense “that there were algorithms and processors they could design for not too much money that would mitigate the problem.”

Beloite said that the MIT technology has proven successful in the last few months.

“[The problem] has been addressed. And I have a letter from the deputy director of operations from U.S. NORAD that says ‘step one of the two-step fix worked so well that we recommend we don’t spend any more money on step two.’”

The fix the MIT scientists came up with tells the radar not to pay attention to signals in a very small area.

“You just tell the radar processor, ‘you’re going to have clutter here. Don’t display it.’ You create a tiny blank spot [in the radar map] directly above the turbine,” Beloite told FoxNews.com.

In addition to the cost of the radar development, taxpayers are on the hook for more than $1 billion in subsidies for the construction of the Shepherd’s Flat wind farm, according to a 2010 memo from Larry Summers and two other White House economic advisors.

The fix for military radar doesn’t work so well for weather forecasters, however.

“It’s a lot easier to filter out interference for aviation,” Ed Ciardi, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Radar Operations Center in Norman, Okla., told FoxNews.com. “The real problem is when rain and the wind turbines are mixed together [on the radar map.] And it’s all confusing… sometimes [forecasters] throw up their hands and say, ‘who knows?’”

When the situation is unclear, Ciardi said, “they’ll play it safe and maybe extend a warning.”

Ciardi said there have been occasional false alarms due to wind farm interference, but the Weather Service hasn’t failed to issue any storm warnings yet.

“We’re more worried about the future ... we’ve seen quite a few proposals for wind farms around our radars. And we have been… trying to convince them to stay a good distance away,” he said.

One strategy is to ask wind farm owners to turn off the propellers during storms. Another is to convince them to install devices that measure wind speeds and rainfall, so that there would no longer be much need for radar there.

“It all comes down to money and who’s going to pay for it,” he noted.

Meanwhile, top radar scientists are working on developing a fix that works for weather radar.

“It’s slow progress, and they say it’s extremely difficult—that they need more money and more time. The solution, I would say, is probably five years down the road, Ciardi said.

Mr. President, after today’s vote on President Obama’s failed infrastructure plan, I urge my colleagues to turn their attention now to a bill that is proven to create jobs and give our economy a much-needed boost.  Of course, I’m talking about the bipartisan highway bill that I am sponsoring with my good friends, Senators Boxer, Vitter and Baucus. Most people are amazed at how close Senator Boxer and I are on this issue.

While I appreciate President Obama’s acknowledgement that infrastructure spending is highly effective at spurring job growth, it is clear that his plan was all show with no substance.  His bill was purely a political opportunity: it gave him a chance to stand in front of a bridge and make a speech about creating jobs, knowing full well that his bill would never pass. 

The problem is that President Obama has been talking the talk without walking the walk.  He has spoken more about infrastructure than any other President since Eisenhower proposed the interstate system, but he has done substantially less than any other President.  The most notable example is the “no-stimulus” bill that allocated less than 3% to fund roads and bridges, while a majority of the funds went to wasteful spending, which clearly failed to stimulate the economy. He has made the entire process political and that has been a significant obstacle to getting our highway bill done. 

The good news is that today’s votes, on both the Democrat and Republican infrastructure bills, showed that there is a strong bipartisan majority in the Senate that supports creating jobs and strengthening our economy by rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges.  Fortunately, Senator Boxer and I are about to unveil our highway bill, which will do just that.  I would like to commend Senator Boxer for her leadership and dedication to this effort.  Together, with Senators Baucus and Vitter, we have put together a good bill, which makes a number of important policy reforms and maintains the current level of funding. 

As both parties are trying to create jobs and spur economic growth through building highways and bridges, most Americans are unaware of just how damaging excessive regulations are to our economy. 

The EPA alone has an unprecedented number of rules that are destroying jobs and decreasing federal revenue.  Five of the most expensive ones stand out.  They are: 

1) Greenhouse Gas Regulations - $300 to $400 Billion in lost GDP per year

2) Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards -$676.8 billion in lost GDP by 2020

3) Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) - $1 Billion in lost GDP

4) Utility MACT - $184 Billion in compliance costs between 2011 and 2030

5) Cement MACT - $3.5 Billion in compliance costs

Fortunately, in September, President Obama withdrew EPA’s proposed toughened ozone standards.  With an election coming up, he clearly did not want to be responsible for the enormous cost, or the 7 million jobs that would be destroyed by this rule.  But the fight isn’t over yet.  He is punting on a number of these regulations until after the election. 

Even Democrats have gone on record warning of the high costs of regulating carbon.  During the cap-and-trade debate, the Democrats’ mantra was that greenhouse gas regulations would be far worse than cap-and-trade legislation.  As EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson explained, “I have said over and over, as has the president, that we do understand that there are costs to the economy of addressing global warming emissions, and that the best way to address them is through a gradual move to a market-based program like cap and trade.” And as Senator Kerry warned in a New York Times Op Ed, “If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations. Imposed regulations are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.”

Even worse, EPA will need to hire 230,000 additional employees and spend an additional $21 billion to implement its greenhouse gas regime.  And all of this economic pain is for nothing: as EPA Administrator Jackson also admitted before the EPW committee, these regulations will have no affect on the climate. 

Now it has become clear that this entire effort is built on a faulty foundation.  In April 2010, I asked the EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) to investigate the process leading up to the endangerment finding to determine if EPA had come to that conclusion properly.  Of course, the endangerment finding is the basis of EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases.  In September 2011, the OIG completed its report and found that the EPA had not come this conclusion properly - in fact, it found that the scientific assessment underpinning the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gasses was inadequate and in violation of the Agency’s own peer review process. 

The Inspector General’s investigation uncovered that EPA failed to engage in the required record-keeping process leading up to the endangerment finding decision, and it also did not follow its own peer review procedures to ensure that the science behind the decision was sound. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson readily admitted in 2009 that EPA had outsourced its scientific review to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This is an institution whose credibility has already been called into question.  Even so, EPA still refused to conduct its own independent review of the science.  As the EPA Inspector General found, whatever one thinks of the UN science, the EPA is still required - by its own procedures - to conduct an independent review. 

This report confirms that the endangerment finding, the very foundation of President Obama’s job-destroying regulatory agenda, was rushed, biased, and flawed.  It calls the scientific integrity of EPA’s decision-making process into question and undermines the credibility of the endangerment finding.

This is not the only example of EPA cutting corners on the process.  In the wake of the IG report, it now appears that EPA has cut corners on the proposed Utility MACT rule as well.  My EPW committee staff has found that the peer review procedures for the Utility MACT Technical Support Documents are inadequate.  Indeed, EPA’s own Science Advisory Board criticized the Agency for “missing or poorly explained” data and methods.  Given the cost and reliability effects of the proposed rule, it is critical that EPA be held accountable for the process leading up to the decision to regulate. Utility MACT is projected to be one of the most expensive rules in the Agency’s history.  It will cost billions of dollars, significantly increase electricity rates, force a large number of plant closures, and, along with the Cross-State rule, destroy nearly 1.4 million jobs.  Cutting corners on a rule with such devastating effects on our economy is unacceptable.

I have asked EPA to answer some important questions on this matter and if that information is not forthcoming, I will request that the EPA IG conduct an investigation of the Utility MACT rulemaking process as well. 

My concerns about EPA cutting corners were only exacerbated today as the Agency finalized the scope of its plan to study hydraulic fracturing.  When EPA first announced that it would be conducting this study, I said that in order for it to be credible, it must be based on the best available science, and follow a legitimate, objective peer-review process, as well as rely on data and expertise from state oil and gas regulatory agencies, and independent groups such as the Ground Water Protection Council. 

EPA has failed to follow these reasonable guidelines.  In fact, even before the scope of the study was finalized today, EPA was already collecting data samples at undisclosed fracking sites across the country.  Because these samples were obtained without adhering to a publicly available final study plan or testing procedures, the validity of this data is called into question.  EPA should not have begun conducting the study without ensuring that the process is fully transparent, and in accordance with sound science. 

Let’s keep in mind that a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report shows us that we have enough natural gas to meet American demand for 90 years; but we can’t get to those vast resources without hydraulic fracturing.  The first use of hydraulic fracturing occurred near Duncan, Oklahoma in 1949.  It has been regulated by states and used efficiently for decades, while playing an important role in strengthening America’s energy security and creating millions of good-paying jobs.  We should be expanding, rather than hindering this development, especially when we most need to spur economic growth.

Mr. President, it’s time to end the political theater in Washington and finally do our job to help Americans get back to work.  It’s time for this administration to reverse course on overregulation and work with us to pass a realistic bipartisan highway bill that will help get our economy back on track. Let’s do the right thing.