Celebrate EPA’s withdrawal of job-killing ozone standards – but prepare for more onslaughts

Millions of Americans recently celebrated the demise of the Environmental Protection Agency’s job-killing ground-level ozone regulations. While a toast was appropriate, we shouldn’t drink too much champagne just yet.

As with the Battle of Midway and Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s Tokyo Raid in early 1942, White House action on this single EPA rule is merely a welcome victory in a long struggle. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce may have declared, “Now, at least they’re listening,” but other observers say the EPA and Obama administration are still tone deaf.”

Indeed, a major factor in the White House decision on ozone was a map showing that 85% of America’s counties would be out of compliance with the Clean Air Act if the new rules were implemented. That would mean no new construction or manufacturing projects could begin - and no jobs “created or saved” - until billions are spent to bring existing facilities into compliance with arbitrary new ozone standards.

Many of those counties are in politically important states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia - which better explains the administration’s sudden “conversion,” than does any supposed recognition that its rules are unnecessary and harmful. Moreover, the ozone rule was not killed; it was postponed until after the 2012 elections, to safeguard jobs: White House, administration, Democrat and SEIU jobs.

The administration’s mile-long regulatory freight train merely paused to shunt the ozone boxcar onto a siding, to be retrieved later. The engines and remaining cars are still roaring down the tracks, heading for a collision with a sick economy that has left 14 million Americans jobless, 9 million forced to take part-time work, 2.5 million who have given up looking for jobs, and 46 million on food stamps.

Orchestrated environmentalist outrage over the delayed ozone rule may deflect attention from the rest of the freight train, and make it easier to impose hundreds of other regulations. In fact, reams of complex Dodd-Frank financial rules and Obamacare health sector regulations are still onboard, as are National Labor Relations Board unionizing schemes, Agriculture and Interior Department land use regulations, and many others.

The Energy Department continues to lavish taxpayer dollars on expensive wind and solar projects that provide minimal energy at exorbitant cost, even after two more solar companies went bankrupt, costing Americans another $1 billion and 1,900 jobs.  Solyndra alone cost US taxpayers $535 million, to create 1,100 temporary jobs at $485,000 apiece. They’re all gone now.

Citing Energy Department reports, the Washington Post reports that the $39-billion loan guarantee program, which President Obama promised would “create or save” 65,000 jobs, has instead spawned a measly 3,545 new, supposedly permanent jobs - after blowing nearly $18 billion, or $5 million per job.

Green jobs? Greenback jobs is more like it - taxpayer greenbacks for Obama and cronies. Worse, by draining billions from taxpayers, consumers and productive sectors of the American economy, the administration is killing two to three traditional, sustainable jobs for each greenback job it creates.

Then there is EPA, which even in this toxic environment remains the biggest single job-killing agency in government. Its ozone rulemaking is just one of dozens it has planned, finalized, or brought to the brink of sign-off and implementation.

Unable to get cap-tax-and-trade passed in Congress, EPA has its economy-killing carbon dioxide rules waiting on a railway siding, until the November elections spur a regulatory frenzy. It is still preparing coal-fired power plant emission rules to control the 0.5% of mercury that actually enters America’s atmosphere from those facilities, as well as expensive regulations on heavy-duty trucks.

“Cross-state” air pollution regulations will force utilities in a few states to install billion-dollar retrofits on coal-fired power plants that EPA computer models say could (minimally) affect air quality hundreds of miles away. EPA claims 20 states affect downwind states during the May-September NOx/ozone season, but demands that Florida shoulder 79% of the national responsibility.

It claims seven states affect Houston’s air quality, but wants Florida to provide 94% of the alleged benefits for the Texas city, 800 miles away, across the sultry, largely windless summertime Gulf of Mexico - after Florida utilities already reduced their NOx emissions by two-thirds since 2003. EPA also says Texas must retrofit power plants that might affect Illinois communities 400 miles away.

Even crazier, EPA is using outdated air pollution measurements to justify these rules. In reality, data from recent years show the supposedly impacted cities already meet national ambient air quality standards.

EPA’s “maximum achievable control technologies” (MACT) rules will impact power sources in factories and refineries. Its “reciprocating ignition compression engine” (RICE) rules will curtail the availability of thousands of backup, “peaking” and emergency generators at colleges, hospitals, malls, groceries and other facilities. When storms knock out power, or heat waves strain overloaded grids, the dearth of electricity will cause brownouts, blackouts and widespread chaos, especially in hospitals.

Coal ash and water quality rules will raise costs even further for nearly half of America’s power plants - and electricity users - for minimal environmental gain.

For three years EPA has used global warming claims to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, which could create hundreds of thousands of American refinery, construction, manufacturing, financial and other jobs - and stymie Shell’s oil drilling plans in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea.

In every instance, EPA claims “the regulatory benefits far exceed the costs.” However, as independent natural scientist Dr. Willie Soon and other analysts have documented, the health, welfare and environmental risks and benefits have frequently been exaggerated or even fabricated.

Worse, EPA steadfastly refuses to consider the significant adverse effects that its rules will have on human health and welfare. The cumulative weight of these rules will send energy costs skyrocketing and kill millions of additional jobs, Affordable Power Alliance co-chair Niger Innis points out.

Poor and newly jobless families will be even less able to afford gasoline, clothing, healthcare, proper nutrition and other basic needs, Innis notes. Many will suffer increased stress, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and crime rates. Many low income families will be unable to afford proper heating during frigid winter months or air conditioning during summer heat waves. People will die.

Equally outrageous, while it may have shunted its ozone boxcar onto a railway siding, EPA is ramping up its campaign to rally support for its dangerous policies. Under its “Plan EJ 2014” initiative and other programs, the agency is “leading from behind” - funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to minority, low-income and environmentalist groups that will advance EPA’s rulemaking, permitting, compliance, enforcement and other agenda items under guise of “environmental justice” and “civil rights” claims.

The Environmental Protection Agency is setting the stage for a national disaster.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson insists she wants “a real conversation about protecting our health and the environment.” By all means, let’s have that conversation. It’s likely, however, that she and her radical allies will not enjoy it one small bit.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Since the inception of Weatherbell last winter, we warned the ‘super’ La Nina of 2010/11 would have major implications. We focused correctly weeks to months in advance on the potential of strong tornado outbreaks, devastating flooding from late snowmelt and heavy rain in the central states, growing drought and heat in Texas and an impact hurricane season with east coast and Gulf coast landfalls likely.

Weatherbell also predicted that the La Nina would weaken into this summer but return for a second winter. This was based on a cold Pacific Decadal Oscillation which usually means La Ninas last two years or more. NOAA came onboard to this thinking in making the La Nina return official in August.

Weatherbell sees the impact of this return La Nina will be again global in nature and significant. Another harsh winter is expected in China and at least the first half of the winter in North America and Western Europe. More heavy snow will accompany the cold as our outlook will show next week

With widespread cooling, WeatherBell Analytics Meteorologists Joe Bastardi and Joe D’Aleo are predicting the global temperature, which has average near 0.2C above normal this year after being over 0.4C above normal last year, will drop to near -0.15C BELOW by March. This is similar to what we saw in 2008.  This will mean the yearly cooling trend, off the warm year of 2010, which is underway now, will continue in 2012, which is liable to be the coolest year since the late 1990s. 

Computer modeling is now starting to see this. The JAMSTEC Frontier model captures the cooling for both hemispheres this December to February. Most of that southeast United States warmth would come in late winter.

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The model shows cooling of the Atlantic to the cold mode, at least temporarily, is likely over the coming 6-9 months following the cooling of the Pacific.  The drop is already starting with September. It is likely to be 0.1 to 0.2C cooler than August, which read 0.33C above.

The upcoming ocean cooling can be seen in the same Frontier Model. While there is already the horseshoe of cold water currently surrounding the central Pacific Kuroshio warm plume, which is characteristic of the cold PDO, the model shows the Atlantic will cool and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation will turn negative again as it did in 2008. This will result in a global temperature decline.

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The recent warming in the satellite era can be tied to first the warm PDO and dominance of El Ninos from 1977 to 1998 and then a step warming after 1995 when the Atlantic warm mode ensued. The Pacific has cooled with 7 La Ninas now since 1999 which has flattened the warming.  A cooling of the Atlantic would result in a step down global cooling.

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We want to continue to demonstrate to the public that the cyclical events of the global climate and the associated extremes are tied into well established natural causes and importantly PREDICTABLE. As we have with the extreme events of this past year, we trust the forecast of this before the fact, rather than explaining after will make this point once again. The last AMO warm phase lasted about 20 years, so the return to the cold Atlantic and global cooling is likely to occur this decade even if this is another temporary change.

Weatherbell has had a US winter outlook since June 1, which many are now mimicking and the latest NOAA forecast is remarkably similar too. A more detailed outlook will be out September 28, but we are available for worldwide ideas. Also as we have outlooks also for Europe and the far east where major impacts are forecast.

The bottom line is a global temperature drop is coming to the coldest levels in at least several years, and there are winter implications that if you get the jump on, may be of benefit to you

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Mainstream media mouthpiece left shamefaced as fifty international climate experts break ranks to defy global warming cult and denounce junk science.

Washington Post op-ed writer Richard Cohen was last week caught lying while bad mouthing Texas governor, Rick Perry’s presidential candidacy. Cohen, who would have his readers believe humans are dangerously warming the planet, jumped the shark to attack skeptic Perry over his stance on the man-made global warming issue (AGW). Cohen spouted the kooky claim that skeptic scientists “could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth, if there are any left.”

Sadly for Cohen the facts below prove he is just another mendacious mainstream propagandist of climate alarmism.

For instance, the shocking truth is that all 5 official data sets show global cooling since 2002 while a third of all stations sustain a long term cooling trend for their entire history.

Indeed, so infuriated over the blatant lies is Nobel Prize winning physicist, Dr. Ivar Giaever, that last week he resigned in disgust from the American Physics Society for their part in sustaining the now utterly debunked AGW propaganda.

The physics professor who scooped the Nobel Science Prize in 1973 sagely notes, “It is amazing how stable temperature has been over the last 150 years.”

Professor Giaever and the rank and file of scientists are increasingly aware that the ‘consensus’ Cohen and his collaborators alludes to is little more than 77 of 10,000 scientists polled.

Surge in Government Climate Experts Going Skeptic

To further llustrate just how off base Cohen’s spin really is just observe the increasing number of experts who actually worked for the IPCC as contributors / editors / reviewers now turning against global warming junk science. (Hat Tip: The Galileo Movement).

Below, for Cohen and those other mainstream media deniers of climate realism, is a list of just 50 former IPCC experts whose voices your prejudiced ears refuse to hear:

See the 50 responses here.

Been There, Done That In The Arctic
Posted on September 18, 2011 by Steven Goddard

Tamino is hopping mad about Joe D’Aleo’s suggestions on WUWT that the Arctic has been this warm in the past, and that ice has melted in the past.  The gradual education of Tamino is a worthy - though hopeless cause.

The current Greenland warming, while not yet quite matching the temperatures of 70 years ago

- Walt Meier NSIDC

“Examination of several proxy records (e.g., sediment cores) of sea ice indicate ice-free or near ice-free summer conditions for at least some time during the period of 15,000 to 5,000 years ago”

- Walt Meier NSIDC

CLEVELAND, Feb. 16 (A.A.P.) Dr. William S. Carlson, an Arctic expert, said to-night that the Polar icecaps were melting at an astonishing and unexplained rate and were threatening to swamp seaports by raising the ocean levels.

Leading Arctic expert from 1953
Dr. Ahlman urged the establish- ment of an international agency to study conditions on a global basis. Temperatures had risen 10 degrees since 1900. The navigable season along Western Spitzbergen now lasted eight months instead of three.

Leading Arctic expert from 1947
It was concluded that near Polar temperatures are on an average six degrees higher than those registered by Nansen 40 years ago. Ice measurements were on an average only 6½ feet against from 9¼ to 13 feet.

Russian report from 1940
The Norwegian, Captain Wiktor Arnesen, who has just returned from the Arctic, clains to have discovered an island 12 miles in circumference near the Franz Joseph Island, in latitude 80.40. He says that the island previously was hidden by an iceberg between 70 and 80 feet high, which has melted, showing the exceptional nature of the recent thawing in the Arctic.

See many more stories that demonstrate this has happened before.

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Sea level decline continues

The latest sea level numbers are out, and Envisat shows that the two year long decline is continuing, at a rate of 5mm per year.

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ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/

And in the artcic, ice extent from satellite has been increasing now for a week. If the trend up continues (likely unless changing winds moves ice near the edge out to the Atlantic or compresses it), it will have fallen 6.4% short of 2007’s satellite age record.

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The following shows in green the ice this year that was not there in 2007, the red in 2007 areas with ice that have less than 15% cover on this date (enlarged).

See how natural factors explains the decline and how the ice has varied in a predictable multidecadal cycle over the last century here.

The snow is beginning to show up in Canada and Siberia (enlarged).

Unlike Gore, the IPCC and Krugman, a deserving Nobelist speaks out. See also this IBD editorial.
Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears. Climate Depot has obtained the exclusive email Giaever sent titled “I resign from APS” to APS Executive Officer Kate Kirby to announce his formal resignation.

Dr. Giaever wrote to Kirby of APS: “Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I cannot live with the (APS) statement below (on global warming): APS: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’

Giaever announced his resignation from APS was due to the group’s belief in man-made global warming fears. Giaever explained in his email to APS: “In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from 288.0 to 288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

Giaever was one of President Obama’s key scientific supporters in 2008. Giaever joined over 70 Nobel Science Laureates in endorse Obama in an October 29, 2008 open letter. In addition to Giaever, other prominent scientists have resigned from APS over its stance on man-made global warming. See: Prominent Physicist Hal Lewis Resigns from APS: ‘Climategate was a fraud on a scale I have never seen...Effect on APS position: None. None at all. This is not science’

Giaever, a professor at the School of Engineering and School of Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears. He was featured prominently in the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of (then) Over 700 Dissenting International Scientists from Man-made global warming. Giaever, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Giaever was also one of more than 100 co-signers in a March 30, 2009 letter to President Obama that was critical of his stance on global warming. See: More than 100 scientists rebuke Obama as ‘simply incorrect’ on global warming: ‘We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated’

Giaever is featured on page 89 of the 321 page of Climate Depot’s more than 1000 dissenting scientist report (updated from U.S. Senate Report). Dr. Giaever was quoted declaring himself a man-made global warming dissenter. “I am a skeptic...Global warming has become a new religion,” Giaever declared. ‘I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around,” Giaever explained. “Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don’t really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money,” he concluded.

Giaever also told the New York Times in 2010 that global warming “can’t be discussed—just like religion...there is NO unusual rise in the ocean level, so what where and what is the big problem?”

This is not the first climate induced headache for the American Physical Society. It’s strict adherence to man-made global warming beliefs has created a stir in the scientific community and let to an open revolt of its scientific members.

On May 1, 2009, the American Physical Society (APS) Council decided to review its current climate statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. The decision was prompted after a group of over 80 prominent physicists petitioned the APS revise its global warming position and more than 250 scientists urged a change in the group’s climate statement in 2010. The physicists wrote to APS governing board: “Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.” An American Physical Society editor conceded that a “considerable presence” of scientific skeptics exists.

In October 2010, the APS suffered more scientific woes when another one of its prominent physicists resigned. The late Physicist Hal Lewis, who died in May of 2011, excoriated the APS leadership for its strict dogmatic like adherence to man-made global warming beliefs. See: Prominent Physicist Resigns: ‘Climategate was a fraud on a scale I have never seen...Effect on APS position: None. None at all. This is not science’ & See: Prominent Physicist Resigns From American Physical Society: ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’—APS President Curtis Callan ‘seems to have abandoned most ethical principles...APS has become a corrupt organization’ & see: APS responds to resignation of Dr. Hal Lewis—AND Dr. Lewis Responds Back To APS!

APS President has been under fire as well. See: ‘APS President Callan didn’t even bother to discuss the ClimateGate and the petition inspired by it with Will Happer and Robert Austin’

Below is the full text of Dr. Ivar Giaever’s full letter of resignation to the APS:

From: Ivar Giaever [ mailto:giaever@XXXX.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 3:42 PM
To: kirby@aps.org
Cc: Robert H. Austin; ‘William Happer’; ‘Larry Gould’; ‘S. Fred Singer’; Roger Cohen
Subject: I resign from APS

Dear Ms. Kirby

Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed fro288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.

Best regards,
Ivar Giaever
Nobel Laureate 1973

PS. I included a copy to a few people in case they feel like using the information.