Update: See this powerful interview with Murray Energy CEO on how Obama’s EPA’s plans will cause electricity to double, hurting the poor and middle class most. Prices Obama promised will necessarily skyrocket. He is delivering on that promise.
Also, while announcing her candidacy for the 6th Congressional District in Louisiana, Whitney called global warming a “hoax.” The video is a response to those she describes as “liberals in the lamestream media” who “became unglued and attacked me immediately.”
Calling Al Gore and other liberal politicians pushing global warming “delusional,” Whitney reminds viewers that “The earth has done nothing but get colder each year since the film’s release.”
Whitney then goes on to cite a litany of other scientific facts to rebut and mock global warming believers, including President Obama, whom she calls “foolish” for blaming his lousy economy on warming.
“Last summer,” Whitney reminds, “Antarctica reached the coldest temperature in recorded history. There’s record sheet ice and a 60% rise of ice in the Arctic Sea.”
Using compelling video and a relentless musical score matched only by Whitney’s relentless list of facts, the candidate, who is proud of being described as “one of the most conservative members of the Louisiana Legislature,” rebuts global warming alarmists point by scientific point before reminding voters of the thousands of hacked emails that proved the Climate Research Center of East Anglia “falsified data.”
The video closes with Whitney making a case for developing America’s energy resources and blasts global warming alarmists for using this hoax as a fear tactic to give the federal government control over every aspect of our lives.
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Protect the American People with a Moratorium on Coal Plant Closures
Institute for Energy Research
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Recent events in New England and elsewhere in the U.S. have demonstrated that policies which hurt the U.S. coal fleet are placing the reliability, affordability, and security of America’s electric supply system at risk:
* These policies will significantly increase wholesale electric rates and could increase them by as much as 80 percent according to Dr. Julio Friedmann, Assistant Secretary for Clean Coal at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).1
* The increases will be especially harmful in certain states such as Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wyoming (Figure EX-1).
* Severe economic hardship will be imposed on people who can least afford it, low income families, minorities, children, and the elderly.
Therefore, policymakers, regulators, and electric utilities should institute an immediate moratorium on the premature closure of coal power plants and should reverse planned closures where possible.
Figure EX-1: Potential 2020 Electric Rate Increases From Coal Plant Closures
During the winter of 2014, coal was the only fuel with the ability to meet demand increases for electricity, providing 92 percent of incremental electricity in January/February, 2014 versus the same months in 20132 (Figure EX-2).
Figure EX-2: What Showed Up for Work During the Polar Vortex?2
During the winter of 2013 - 2014:
* Businesses in New England and other parts of the U.S. were curtailed because of a lack of gas infrastructure.
* Natural gas power plants also had a problem getting fuel due to infrastructure issues and at one point many of them had to go offline.
* Gas-based electricity prices increased 1,000 percent as coal and oil plants scheduled for closure picked up the load.
* Without coal, parts of New England, the Midwest, and other regions would have experienced brownouts and blackouts that would have been economically disastrous and would have compromised public health and safety; in many instances it could have been life threatening.
This past winter demonstrated in real time the value of the existing coal fleet. Americans were harmed as the relentless cold indicated that prudent utility practices require large, baseload coal plants to stabilize the grid, keep society functioning, and maintain electricity availability. Many regions suffered; for example, in late January and early February 2014 some locations in the Midwest experienced gas prices as high as $35/MMBtu, and the Chicago Citygate price exceeded $40/MMBtu (Figure EX-3).
Figure EX-3: Chicago Citygate Natural Gas Prices, February 2013/2014(Dollars per MMBtu)
Source: NGI nationalgasintel.com
Government policies that drive over-dependence on natural gas to replace baseload coal put the U.S. electric supply at risk and also endanger:
* The 60 million households who need gas for heating.
* A vast array of firms that use gas in daily operations.
Recent experience in New England and elsewhere represents a troubling indication of the implications of removing coal plants from the electricity generation mix:
* Spot prices of natural gas and electricity may spike significantly.
* Utility bills become unaffordable for many families during price spikes.
* Energy shortages could occur.
* What little industry is left in the Northeast may be forced to leave.
* Average electricity rates in New England are already more than 40 percent higher than the national average and may be headed to be 150 percent higher.
* New York’s electricity prices are now the second highest in the country, only the geographically isolated state of Hawaii has higher prices.
New England is merely the precursor to the national problem which is emerging.
With the projected closure of 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal plant capacity, virtually the entire U.S. is rapidly reaching the brink of significantly higher prices for electricity and being unable to meet either the summer or winter peak demand for power. Unless immediate steps are taken to halt coal plant closures:
* Within the decade entire regions (New England, Florida, California, the Southwest) may be at risk
* Vast areas of the American Heartland from the Southeast to the Plains could face the difficult choice of using gas for either electric power or meeting the heating needs of millions of families, businesses, and farms.
* Forecasts indicate that by 2020, natural gas capacity will exceed coal, nuclear, and hydro capacity combined, creating a lack of diversity of supply issue. The American Public Power Association has demonstrated the difficulties of replacing coal in electricity generation, and found that there must be continued reliance on America’s largest energy resource:
* The U.S. has by far the world’s largest coal supply, nearly 30 percent of the global total.
* Most existing coal-fueled power plants are less expensive than natural gas for electricity generation.
* The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts that coal’s price advantage will continue and grow larger for the next three decades.
* U.S. coal used for electricity generation has increased 170 percent since 1970 as key emission rates (SO2, NOX, PM10) have been reduced by 90 percent.3 Greater use of advanced technologies will continue this progress.
* Advanced “supercritical” technology is highly efficient, and other state-of-the-art technologies result in a key emissions rate that is two-thirds lower than the existing fleet with carbon dioxide (CO2) emission rates as much as 25 percent lower than the oldest plants.4
Current policies are driving reduction of coal generation creating increased dependence on natural gas. However, activist groups and government officials have indicated their desire to reduce natural gas usage as well.
* Activist groups supporting the “Beyond Coal” campaign have initiated a “Beyond Natural Gas” campaign to oppose hydraulic fracturing.5
* Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz contends that natural gas is “too carbon intensive” and must be phased out of electricity generation by 2050. 6
* White House Senior Counselor John Podesta has endorsed the phase-out of natural gas in the electric power sector beginning in 2020. 7
* Ronald Binz, recent nominee to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), said of gas: “On a carbon basis, you hit the wall in 2035 or so with gas. I mean, you do. And it’s certainly helping my state [Colorado]...but we also have to understand that without [carbon capture and storage], I think that’s a dead end, a relative dead end, it wouldn’t dead end until 2035 or so, but that’s when we’re going to have to do better on carbon than even natural gas can do.” 8
Current policies for electrical generation threaten the abundant, reliable and affordable electricity Americans have come to rely upon; they drive coal out as a source of electrical generation, creating heavy reliance on natural gas. In the next phase, natural gas will be driven out as well. This will affect natural gas availability for direct use and power, making electricity more expensive and scarce to Americans and hurting economic growth.
In sum, policies that erode the U.S. coal fleet are placing the reliability, affordability, and security of America’s electric supply system at risk. Prudence requires an immediate moratorium on coal power plant closures and planned closures should be reversed where possible.
While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) still uses the iconic word “unequivocal” to describe warming of the climate system over the past century, a new word has slipped into its lexicon: the “hiatus.” They have begun referring, with a bit of hesitant throat-clearing, to “the warming hiatus since 1998.
Cracked-beakerBoth satellites and surface records show that sometime around 2000, temperature data ceased its upward path and leveled off. Over the past 100 years there is a statistically significant upward trend in the data amounting to about 0.7 C per century. If one looks only at the past 15 years though, there is no trend.
It will by 2017 be impossible to reconcile climate models with reality
A leveling-off period is not, on its own, the least bit remarkable. What makes it remarkable is that it coincides with 20 years of rapidly rising atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. Since 1990, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen 13%, from 354 parts per million (ppm) to just under 400 ppm. According to the IPCC, estimated “radiative forcing” of greenhouse gases (the term it uses to describe the expected heating effect) increased by 43% after 2005. Climate models all predicted that this should have led to warming of the lower troposphere and surface. Instead, temperatures flatlined and even started declining. This is the important point about the pause in warming. Indeed, the word that ought to have entered the IPCC lexicon is not “hiatus” but “discrepancy.”
The chart on this page reproduces an important diagram from Chapter 9 of the IPCC report. The gray line shows the surface temperature record (HadCRUT4 from the UK Met Office) from 1860 to the present. The black line shows the average of climate model runs covering the same interval. The black line in effect sums up mainstream views on how the climate works. Leading theories of major climatic mechanisms are programmed into models, which are then used to simulate the evolution of the climate. All models remain within a fairly narrow neighbourhood of the mean. This implies that the models share an overall central tendency and do not wander too far from it. In that sense the black line can be described as the mainstream thinking of contemporary climate science.
The data prior to the year 2000 represent historical reconstructions. Modelers were able to “peek at the answer” since they could not only observe inputs to the climate system (such as historical greenhouse gas levels, volcanic activity, solar changes and so forth) but also the simulation targets, namely average temperatures, when tuning their models. The match over the historical interval is therefore not proof of model accuracy since the models were forced to line up with observations.
But as of around 2000, the models are run prospectively, and this is where they begin to fail. Prior to 2000, the gray and black lines continually touch and cross, diverging and converging as they track each other over time. Whenever they drift apart for a few years they quickly turn and close up again.
But the post-1999 gap is something new. It has not only run the longest of any previous gap but it is still widening. Even if the black line were to rise over the next few years, it is difficult to foresee it ever catching up to and re-crossing the gray line. In other words, it is difficult to see models and observations ever agreeing again.
The IPCC briefly discussed the seriousness of the model-observation discrepancy in Chapter 9 of the 2013 report. It reports that over the 1998-2012 interval 111 out of 114 climate model runs over-predicted warming, achieving thereby, as it were, a 97% consensus.
The IPCC informally proposes several candidate explanations for this discrepancy, including the possibility that models are simply too sensitive to greenhouse gases, but does not identify a solution to the problem.
The absence of warming over the past 15 to 20 years amidst rapidly rising greenhouse gas levels poses a fundamental challenge to mainstream climate modeling. In an interview last year with the newspaper Der Spiegel, the well-known German climatologist Hans von Storch said “If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models.” Climatologist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech recently observed “If the 20-year threshold is reached for the pause, this will lead inescapably to the conclusion that the climate model sensitivity to CO2 is too large.”
We will reach the 20 year mark with no trend in the satellite data at the end of 2015, and in the surface data at the end of 2017. With CO2 levels continuing to rise, it will at that point be impossible to reconcile climate models with reality and the mainstream consensus on how the climate system responds to greenhouse gases will begin breaking apart.
Defenders of the current paradigm need to come up with an explanation as to why there has been no warming over an interval with rapidly increasing greenhouse gas levels. Natural mechanisms that might be strong enough to override greenhouse warming are starting to be proposed in the scientific literature. The problem is that the “science is settled” crowd spent the last 20 years insisting that natural mechanisms are puny compared to greenhouse warming, which is why they were so sure that greenhouse gases are the driving force in climate.
There are important policy implications of this situation. Benefits and costs of climate policy are analyzed using so-called Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which build simplified representations of climate processes into dynamic economic models. The problem is that IAMs are calibrated to mimic climate models, not reality. To the extent climate models overstate the effects of CO2, so do IAMs, thereby yielding exaggerated estimates of the social cost of carbon emissions and overly stringent policy prescriptions.
Information will emerge over the next few years that has the potential to upend our understanding of the effect of CO2 emissions. At this point it seems unlikely that climate models in their current form will survive another five years. There is a high probability of new information emerging in the next two to four years that strongly affects calculations of the long term optimal policy stance on greenhouse gas.
There is no downside to awaiting this information. Though climate activists are always in a hurry, climate itself is a slow-moving issue. There is little benefit to acting now rather than, say, two years from now, but potentially major benefits, since what we learn over the next couple of years will make a major difference in understanding what the optimal course of action over the next century looks like. Waiting to get all these final, crucial facts could prevent countries from making very costly mistakes on how they manage fossil energy resources over the coming century.
Ross McKitrick is a Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Guelph.
It is not a top priority for the public, only the administration/EPA.
Make your reservations by calling 877-632-9001 or 702-632-9000 or online here.
In order to receive the group rate, callers must identify their affiliation with the 9th International Conference on Climate Change.
About the Conference
Come to fabulous Las Vegas to meet leading scientists from around the world who question whether “man-made global warming” will be harmful to plants, animals, or human welfare. Learn from top economists and policy experts about the real costs and futility of trying to stop global warming.
Meet the leaders of think tanks and grassroots organizations who are speaking out against global warming alarmism. Don’t just wonder about global warming… understand it!
The event will start Monday, July 7, 2014 with a cocktail reception followed by dinner. On Tuesday and Wednesday, July 8-9, we will start with breakfasts featuring keynote speakers and awards ceremonies followed by sessions, lunch, more keynote speakers and more sessions. A preliminary schedule for the event is here.
An amazing line-up of speakers! Play the speakers matching game and win a free admission ticket.
Speakers already confirmed include Marita Noon, Anthony Watts, John Coleman, Lord Monckton, Joe Bastardi, David Kreutzer, Joseph D’Aleo, and Walter Cunningham. For more speakers and their bios click here.
The past eight International Conferences on Climate Change were unqualified successes. The conferences were extensively covered by the international media and allowed more than 1,000 experts to share information and ideas regarding the latest science, economics, and politics regarding global warming. More than 4,000 people have attended an ICCC; videos of the presentations are available online at http://climateconferences.heartland.org/.
DON’T MISS THE 9th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Registration is now open!
General registration is just $129 and includes all conference meals and sessions.
Register for the event here, or call 312/377-4000 and ask for Ms. McElrath or reach her via email at zmcelrath@heartland.org.
That slick expression you’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts, now has a deeper meaning in this latest stage of the post-enlightenment. If your facts plainly contradict someone else’s orthodox beliefs, then you are simply being “unhelpful” or even “harmful” and should therefore be suppressed. That’s to be done not by logical refutation or counter argument, but intimidation, bullying, shunning, character assassination and threats to a person’s career or livelihood.
Basically, the gloves come off and you get mobbed by a gang of like-minded thugs. Destroy the person, not the argument.
It’s the sort of behaviour one could expect of a medieval theocracy whose dominance is under threat by the advance of reasoned argument. Indeed, the humanists of Europe fought that battle from the late seventeenth century onwards, resulting in what’s commonly known as the Age of Enlightenment. There’s a lot more to it but from then on, a clear separation was to be made between things which could be proved by a process of reasoning and matters which were purely a matter of individual faith.
For the first time, a line between Church and State was being drawn. It was hard-fought by both sides since it was at heart more about who would control the minds of men; the clerics or what was called at the time the natural philosophers.
Last week, the distinguished Prof. Lennart Bengtsson, whom I’d term a warmist rather than an alarmist, resigned from an advisory committee of the GWPF, an unpaid post he’d barely been in for two weeks. The reason he’d been forced to resign was an intense campaign of vilification and intimidation. Former colleagues even refused to work with him and his papers in the publication process were suddenly being rejected for what was obviously non-scientific reasons. Bear in mind, he’d already had over two hundred papers published, so obviously knew what would be viable in terms of publication. Most tellingly, one of the rejected papers highlighted the glaring disparity between computer climate predictions and the real world data.
What’s most disturbing about the treatment of Prof. Bengtsson, is the people acting like common or garden thugs were supposedly men of science rather than outraged clerics stamping down on a heretic. As Marvin asked, what’s going on?
Even a casual acquaintance with the history of science teaches us one simple thing; it advances across a battlefield drenched in the blood of sacred cows. The Earth revolves around the Sun? Something falls to Earth because it’s being pulled by some invisible force rather than just having weight? Space can bend and time can run at different rates depending on where you are in something called a gravity well? Continents can actually move? Where’s your head? Are you insane?
Given that recurrent pattern of outrageous and heretical ideas becoming text-book orthodoxy, I do tend to think over carefully even the most startling ideas. More often than not, I see the flaw in the idea but I always examine the idea, not the person articulating it. If you don’t do that, you’re a believer rather than a person of reason.
It’s that sort of thinking which ultimately makes the practice of science an unforgiving profession. You can propose a really beautiful theory, but it only takes one person to prove it wrong, just one. Most cruel of all, your beloved brainchild can appear to pass all the tests for years but is later found out to be wrong or nothing more than a special case of a bigger, more complete theory and there goes your life’s work. Your attempt at being a someone of historical note becomes at best nothing more than a footnote annotation of you being that rather silly person behind the subsequently discredited theory of whatever. Everybody knew it was a rubbish idea all along.
It’s a tough gig and it’s all too human a temptation to start bending the rules as you begin to see the whole house of cards you’ve invested so many years in starting to wobble. Their first stab was something called post-normal science, which when you strip off the sociology verbiage and oily sophistry, was nothing more than a proposal to abandon the scientific method. Your theory was so important, so crucial, that it simply fell outside the passe science processes of the last few hundred years. It didn’t need things like that tiresome phase of testing your theory’s predictions against reality. Not even a largely cowed science establishment would grovel on its knees in abasement and come around to swallowing that.
The next line of defense was declaring that it was all settled. It had been so thoroughly proven, incidentally an impossible thing for any scientific theory, that it was no longer an open question. Move along now. The proof had been done by taking a vote and the novel idea of science by consensus rather than scientific method was born. There was to be no debate but it fell foul of that rebellious child it largely shaped, the skeptic blogosphere, which insisted on taking a can opener to every hermetically sealed debate, and so often found Blake’s great red dragon of chaos ready to emerge from it grinning in triumph.
By now, they were increasingly desperate men in a hurry towards some finishing line only they could see, and acted accordingly. It’s not very hard to get inside that.
You start to cheat, but somehow you know it’s not really cheating. You massage the data by tweaking it a little bit, just a teensy weensy little bit, moving it in the right direction. Once on that slippery slope, it becomes all too easy to get imaginative with the methods as well. By then, you’ve slipped so far into that mortal sin zone of science, all that’s left is stopping your ears to any criticism, shutting your eyes and defending it desperately at any cost. It’s your own inner voice making those carping objections. Nobody will notice, nobody will check.
But they did.
In the end, you’ve nowhere left to go but denying anyone wishing to replicate your work the data or details of your methodology. It’s all way too far over their head and anyway, they only want to use it against you. Anything but that sort of cooperation, because then the whole sordid game would be up. All would be lost. You fudge, you delay, you tell them the data is lost, it’s protected by commercial IPR agreements, you hide behind FOI legislation and in the end you threaten to sue them if they won’t leave you alone. At the same time, you play the martyr card; why are they persecuting me?
That’s a delaying stratagem you can play for a few years but the day finally arrives when someone else demonstrates that the results of applying your grand theory simply don’t match up to the real world data.
When that happens, all you’ve got left is to attack them for threatening your theory with real world data. That’s the terminal madness, the final naked abandonment of any lingering threadbare pretense of being a scientist. Go after the man, and simply ignore whatever it is he’s saying. Threaten him, destroy him, eviscerate him, smash him down into the ground, stamp on his face and somehow all will be well again.
To answer Mr Gaye’s question, that’s how we arrived at the Bengtsson scandal.
Intolerant belief is clawing back the ground it lost in the age of enlightenment, but the people doing it this time around are actually crusading fundamentalists pretending to be scientists. They’re nothing more than a new age sect of clerics who’ve allowed their messianic beliefs to swamp their judgement to the point where they’ve essentially traduced a branch of science, but for the best of all possible intentions. They are, after all, on a mission to save the very planet.
What’s particularly appalling about what can only be termed this wave of counter enlightenment, is that it’s mainly being driven from the universities and centres of higher education, the very institutions which were the original driving force behind the age of enlightenment. In too many areas, there’s a rigidly orthodox view and woe betide any lecturer, never mind a sprog undergraduate, who dares question it.
This imposition of uniformity and stifling of dissent can only lead to a medieval academic sterility, and in my opinion it already has. Yes, our technology has advanced geometrically but that’s just been a simple process of engineering refinement; double the power, halve the size, go for the manufacturing economies of scale and consequently sell it to them cheaper and cheaper. It’s nothing more than Moore’s law in motion, if you’ll excuse the alliteration. There’s actually nothing fundamentally new coming out of what’s supposed to be our ideas factories.
What we haven’t had is an original Einstein-class theory emerge from academia for nearly four decades. It’s all been refinements. Given an agreement with that assessment, you either assume we’ve discovered every one of the big secrets of the universe, which would be a first in the whole history of science, or something is very seriously wrong.
Bengtsson had to be destroyed. Not only was he opening up a dialogue with the climate skeptics, which meant he was straying away from the teachings of the one true church, but he’d also called into serious question the ability of the computer models to generate credible climate predictions. They are taken to be oracles by the church, incapable of error and far surpassing such primitive efforts as Delphi. The fact that the models’ predictions have been demonstrably wrong for nearly two decades is irrelevant.
This is end of days behaviour. They’ve been cast out alone into the political wilderness, governments are backing away from green agendas, the media and general public are bored with climate scares, research grants are getting cut everywhere, nobody can afford the renewables, the common people hate windmills and are organising against them, carbon legislation is dead in the water, the annual climate conference has become a cynical joke and young people not only don’t give a damn about saving the planet, but have started to snigger at those who persist in lecturing them about it.
Their very public and violent intimidation of Bengtsson will probably ensure there won’t be another attempt at rapprochement by a high-profile warmist with the skeptics. They are in effect skipping over the bargaining phase in the death of their belief system.
As someone who’s a skeptic of catastrophic global warming, that suits me fine since since I think the only way we can now lose this struggle is to enter into negotiations to achieve some unnecessary compromise when to all intents and purposes we’ve already won. It’s just the trivial exercise of the endgame we’ll be playing out for the next few years. Mate in two with no way of stopping it.
As someone who loves science, I regret it won’t be possible to come up with some fig leaf deal of damage limitation for science as a whole, a way of letting them retire discreetly from the field in defeat, and will instead now have to stand and watch climate science becoming a complete laughing-stock, and undoubtedly by implication, science in general. The true believers will ensure this thing is doomed to go down all the way to the equivalent of Berlin, April ‘45, the last bullet and complete destruction.
I’ll take no pleasure in that, but it wouldn’t stay my hand for an instant. I’m quite happy to watch them burning themselves right down to the ground, and we’ll rebuild the seared reputation of science afterward. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s had to be done and it’s not a priority of mine.
There’ll be a week or so of tut-tutting but in the end the sect will get away with yet another Pyrrhic victory and continue to do so, until the leadership in science grasps the nettle and finally decides to stand up to them. The reality check for that leadership is that the cat is out of the bag. The window of opportunity to get your own house in order is fast closing and the standing of science as a whole is now downrange of the firing line. Wield the scalpel now and cut out the cancer, or prepare to lose the patient.
Inexorably, the general public have come to think global warming might have been nothing more than a bogus scare, but what they do know for sure is that it was scientists doing the scare mongering. That’s why for instance the Australian government can feel free to do a savage 90% chop of its spend on climate change, knowing there won’t be any great outcry from anyone other than the grant money junkies. Nobody else gave a peep. It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of how much collateral damage mainstream science is going to take with the crash of climate science.
The indulgent “in” joke of how silly, corrupt and degenerate climate science actually is, has now moved well outside the smug and knowing smirks of the science club insiders. If you’ve any doubt about that, then you haven’t thought about the significance of last Friday’s front page of the Times.
As the Environmental Protection Agency prepares major new regulations on carbon emissions, the agency’s top watchdog is warning that fraudulent environmental data may be influencing its work.
The findings could provide fodder for critics of the new regulation, who warn that it could cost the U.S. economy billions and cause hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their jobs.
“The EPA lacks a due diligence process for potential fraudulent environmental data,” the agency’s inspector general warned in a report released on Thursday. Existing processes for weeding out such data, the report said, are “out of date or unimplemented.”
“Our survey of EPA regional staff on their knowledge and use of the EPA’s fraudulent data policies and procedures found that a majority of respondents were unaware there was a policy, and approximately 50 percent expressed the need for such policies and procedures,” the report said.
The EPA relies in large measure on federal contractors to gather environmental data on which the agency bases its regulatory decisions. However, a lack of communication with those contractors and clear guidelines on investigative procedures has created confusion with respect to the processes by which fraudulent data is rooted out and corrected.
Similar problems plague interactions between EPA and state environmental regulators, the report found.
“The agency lacks policy on communicating case information with the states and other regulating parties during investigations,” the IG wrote. As a result, “potentially negative consequences for human health and environmental protection may be not be communicated or addressed.”
The EPA said it would initiate a number of corrective actions to remedy the problems. The IG was satisfied with the actions, saying “recommendations are considered resolved and open with corrective actions ongoing.”
Without those corrective actions, the report warned, the agency risks undermining public confidence in its regulatory work.
A lack of public confidence could be troublesome for the agency as it rolls out new regulations on existing coal-fired power plants that are sure to stoke controversy in Washington and around the country.
Aimed at reducing what the administration calls “carbon pollution,” the regulations could reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $51 billion and cause average job losses in excess of 200,000 every year through 2030, according to a study released this week.
“These carbon rules are another example of Washington bureaucrats picking energy winners and losers,” said Sean Hackbarth, a spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce, which commissioned the study. “The biggest losers will be Americans who lose their jobs and feel the brunt of higher electricity costs.”
Thought the report challenged the EPA’s justification for its decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act relied on politically-biased science that did not meet minimal federal Information Quality Act requirements for objectivity, the DC Circuit Court refused to allow lawyers to submit the IG report to the court for their evaluation of the EPA’s right to proceed with regulatory assault on moving and later stationary sources of CO2.
Not only has our administrative and legislative branches failed us but our legal system has stopped being the check and balance the founding fathers expected they would be.
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