By Chris Moody, Daily Caller

Speaker John Boehner that Congress should “be looking into” quelling subsidies for oil and gas companies, President Obama sent a letter to House and Senate leaders urging them to pass his proposal to end tax credits for oil companies and transfer them to other companies that produce energy through other means.

“I am writing to urge you to take immediate action to eliminate unwarranted tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, and to use those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said in a letter addressed to Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

In an interview with ABC News this week, Boehner said that oil and gas companies will “pay their fair share in taxes and they should,” adding that subsidies for oil companies are “certainly something that we oughta be looking at.”

Boehner’s spokesman said in reaction to Obama’s letter that the president’s proposal would do nothing to lower gas prices, suggesting Republicans would not take up the measure.

“The Speaker wants to increase the supply of American energy and reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and he is only interested in reforms that actually lower energy costs and create American jobs,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel. “Unfortunately, what the President has suggested so far would simply raise taxes and increase the price at the pump.”

Daniel Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, an oil industry think tank, said Obama has long supported policies that would increase the price of oil, including limits on oil production in the United States, and is now pointing fingers at the oil companies for high gas prices.

“Now that his plan is bearing expensive fruit Americans don’t like, his attempt to shift blame away from his actions is pathetically akin to what we would expect from Hugo Chavez or some other third world populist.  His chickens are coming home to roost,” Kish said.

In the past, Congress has not shown much interest in Obama’s call to transfer the subsidies. The president’s budget proposals for the past two years have called for removing the subsidies for oil companies, but the proposals never made it through Congress. The Senate last year defeated a measure shortly after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that would effectively end all tax breaks and subsidies now being targeted by the White House.

Citing last year’s vote, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment, also suggested that Obama’s initiative was unlikely obtain the votes needed to pass through Congress.

“My bet is this won’t happen,” he said.

While in the Senate, even Obama voted for an energy bill in 2005 that extended the 14.6 billion in subsidies and tax breaks for oil and gas companies. The bill passed the Senate 74-26. Read story and comments here.

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Paging RGGI States: Here’s Your Cap-n-Trade Reality Show
By Chris Horner

There’s a new documentary out exploring the scam the greens and (mostly) the Dems tried to pull over on you, nationally, and succeeded in cramming into numerous key states as part of their plan to soon say again how unfair it is that only a few suffer under such bad judgment, so really, everyone must be forced to do it to ‘level the playing field’ to right this wrong.

Trading on Thin Air interviews a wide array of parties to deconstruct the morass in which Europe finds itself, California is wading into, and several states like New Hampshire, New Jersey and Delaware are trying to wiggle out of. It is available on Hulu (Netflix, too, I understand, if you view that way).

You can see Trading on Thin Air story on HULU.

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

In a setback for environmentalists, the Supreme Court signaled Tuesday that it would throw out a huge global warming lawsuit brought by California and five other states that seeks limits on carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants in the South and Midwest.

Encouraged by the Obama administration’s top courtroom lawyer, the justices said the problem of regulating greenhouse gases should be left to the Environmental Protection Agency. It is too complex and unwieldy to be handled by a single federal judge acting on a “public nuisance” lawsuit, some of them said.

A defeat for the lawsuit would put more pressure on the administration and the EPA to enforce limits on carbon pollution in the face of strong opposition from congressional Republicans, environmental advocates said.

“The stakes will be very high. The question is whether they can deliver,” said David Doniger, a climate change expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The issue debated before the high court Tuesday was not whether greenhouse gases are causing global climate change, but who should regulate them. The decision involves politics, economics and science, the lawyers said.

“It’s a question of tradeoffs,” said Peter Keisler, a lawyer representing the power producers. “There is no legal principle here to guide the decision” if it were made by a judge.

Keisler, a former George W. Bush administration official, was joined by acting U.S. Solicitor Gen. Neal Katyal in urging the justices to throw out the lawsuit against the power plants as too sprawling.

“In the 222 years that this court has been sitting, it has never heard a case with so many potential perpetrators and so many potential victims,” Katyal began. Everyone on the planet is an emitter of carbon dioxide, he said, and everyone is a potential victim of global warming. Judges and courts are not suited to handling global problems through a lawsuit, he said.

In their comments and questions, it became clear that the justices - liberals and conservatives alike - also were dubious of allowing a single judge to decide on the regulation of greenhouse gases.

This “just sounds to me like what the EPA does,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a New York state lawyer who was defending the lawsuit. A judge cannot be “a super EPA” who sets and enforces detailed regulations, she said.

Four years ago, the justices cleared the way for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Since then, the government has adopted stricter standards for new motor vehicles, which take effect next year. But regulation of power plants has stalled. The agency says it will propose new rules in July.

All the while, the states have pressed ahead with their suit against five large power producers. It began in 2004 during the time when the Bush administration maintained that it had no authority to tackle global warming.

Lawyers for California, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Iowa, as well as New York City, sued the power plants that were responsible for 10% of the nation’s carbon emissions. They said these gases were causing the globe to heat up, posing a threat to U.S. coastal communities and to crops in the heartland. It asked for a judge to impose limits on the emissions.

Four more states - Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and North Carolina - endorsed the suit when it reached the high court. But 23 other states, led by Indiana, said the suit posed a “political question” that should not be resolved by a judge. Read more here.

By Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks, Bill Kininmonth & Des Moore

Government misadvised on global warming

On November 10 last year, the government’s Multi-party Climate Change Committee (MCCC) received a summary of the state of global warming science from its sole scientist member, ANU’s Professor Will Steffen. (see Powerpoint presentation here).

All policy discussion conducted within the committee since has been predicated upon the accuracy of Professor Steffen’s advice, which was that a high risk of human-related dangerous warming exists and that urgent steps need to be taken to curtail carbon dioxide emissions.

In a more recent speech last week, Climate Minister Combet indicated his continuing reliance upon the views of Professor Steffen, who had advised him that:

there is 100% certainty that the earth is warming, and that there is a very high level of certainty it will continue to warm unless efforts are made to reduce the levels of carbon pollution being sent into the atmosphere.

By quoting just this one statement acceptingly, the Minister encapsulates the ignorance of the government to the underlying science of climate change, which has long since moved on from the alarmist global warming simplicities of the IPCC and its Australian cheer leaders.

Politically committed to introducing a new carbon dioxide tax, the government campaign to condition public acceptance of it has moved into overdrive over the last few months. Steps taken since the election include the establishment of a parliamentary Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, a Climate Commission chaired by Professor Tim Flannery and an address at the National Press Club by Climate Minister Combet.

These and other conduits of government influence are transmitting messages based on the same unaudited, partial IPCC advice that has dominated global warming politics worldwide for the last 10 years.

Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an unelected, unaccountable (to Australian citizens) United Nations body made up of government officials, and its reports on climate change are authored by persons selected by the IPCC and supported by their respective governments.

There has never been a comprehensive independent scientific review of any IPCC report by a member government or by an official audit body. Nonetheless, the following five events, drawn from a much larger group of happenings, have demonstrated to all the political nature of the IPCC and its scientific advisers, and greatly damaged the credibility of the organisation as a source of accurate policy advice on climate change:

In December, 2008, 103 scientists, including 24 Emeritus Professors, wrote to the Secretary General of the United Nations about what they saw as the unsubstantiated, alarmist projections of warming by the IPCC, concluding that the “approach of curbing CO2 emissions is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it - because attempts to drastically cut CO2 emissions will seriously slow development”.

In November, 2009, the leaking of the “Climategate” papers drew public attention to the malfeasant way in which scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, undertook their research on the IPCC’s global temperature record;

During 2010, a group of more than 40 Fellows of the Royal Society of London insisted on a revision of the Society’s (formerly alarmist) statement on global warming; the revised document acknowledged, inter alia, that “It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future”.

In February this year, 36 leading US scientists wrote an open-letter to Congress in which they disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, citing 678 peer-reviewed references in support; and

Also this year, a large group of members of the American Physics Society described the IPCC account of climate change as an “international fraud, the largest we have ever seen”.
It is clear, therefore, that large groups of highly qualified, professional persons exist who reject both the IPCC’s dangerous global warming paradigm, and also the need for government action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

In the absence of an official audit of IPCC science, in 2009 the four scientists among us were asked by Senator Steve Fielding to help him in his discussions with then Climate Minister Penny Wong over emissions trading legislation. Like her successor, Minister Wong turned to Professor Steffen for advice, which written advice we then audited for Senator Fielding (see PDF here).

Over the last few weeks, we have produced similar due diligence reports on the Geelong meeting of the Climate Commission, the Labor Party’s internal strategy document on climate change, a letter written by Minister Combet in response to a request for information as to the cost of AGW policy, Mr Combet’s policy address at the Press Club, and Professor Steffen’s November, 2010, advice to the MCCC (see powerpoint here or pdf here).

An accrued listing of these reports, with web links, is available here…

Having considered carefully all the arguments put forward by the government and its scientific advisors, we conclude:

(i) that there is no proven threat of dangerous warming of human origin,

(ii) that costly attempts to cut Australian carbon dioxide emissions will cause no change in future climate, and

(iii) that to the considerable degree that the science of climate change remains uncertain, the appropriate policy setting should be one of preparation for and adaptation to all climate events and hazards as they occur.

Despite the ready public availability of our reports, and of similar analyses by other independent scientists that also demonstrate there is no justification for continued alarm about global warming, neither the government nor its scientific advisors have offered answers to the criticisms presented. Meanwhile, the MCCC continues on its stately way, its members making major public policy decisions awhile that are based upon patently flawed and inadequate scientific advice.

Good public policy is seldom formulated on the back of determined ignorance, accompanied by an ostrich-like refusal to participate in rational public discussion.

Authors:

Bob Carter is a geologist, David Evans a mathematician and computer modeller, Stewart Franks a hydrologist and engineer, Bill Kininmonth a meteorologist and former Director of the National Climate Centre, and Des Moore a former Deputy Secretary of Treasury.

See the real Australian science community’s due diligence responses to Steffen and his band of of miscalcitrant psuedo-scietists and opportunist ideologs here.

See the legitimate Australian science community’s due diligence responses to Steffen and his band of psuedo-scientists and opportunist ideologs here.