By Phil Kerpen, AFP

The New Hampshire House of Representatives today voted overwhelmingly - 246 to 104 - for New Hampshire to become the first state to repeal an up-and-running global warming cap-and-trade energy tax system. The state senate is expected to follow suit with a similarly veto-proof repeal. The move has major implications both in the region and nationally.

Since 2008, New Hampshire has been one of the 10 members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a power plant-only cap-and-trade system that holds quarterly auctions requiring electric utilities to buy carbon dioxide permits. The cost of those permits is buried in the rate base and passed on to customers in the form of higher electricity prices. The tab is $28.2 million so far and rising - the state budget estimate for the next year jumped to $70 million in hidden energy taxes under the RGGI cap-and-trade program. Moreover, the program has become a honey pot for corrupt special interest giveaways to corporations, as a recent report from Grant Bosse of the Josiah Bartlett Center showed.

RGGI was supposed to segue directly into a national cap-and-trade system, and was designed by Lisa Jackson, now EPA administrator, when she ran New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection. The pitch to industry was that they could get a head start on buying cap-and-trade permits for two or three dollars each, and make a fortune when a federal bill passed with permit prices ten times that or higher. Now that a federal bill is dead, RGGI is a lose-lose for everyone except the politicians who get to spend the money and the special interests receiving subsidies.

The overwhelming veto-proof, bipartisan vote today means that New Hampshire is now on a path to doing something that looked impossible just a couple years ago - repeal a cap-and-trade program. In the process, it could deal the death blow to cap and trade both regionally and nationally.

While RGGI can survive the loss of a small state like New Hampshire, it could probably not survive the loss of a large state like New Jersey, where a repeal effort is picking up steam fast, with at least 37 co-sponsors. The bill, sponsored by Alison Littell McHose in the state assembly and Mike Doherty in the state senate, added its first Democratic co-sponsor last week in State Senator Paul Sarlo. Activists in the state are making state cap-and-trade repeal the top issue in a campaign year where the entire state legislature is in cycle, and the New Hampshire repeal could raise the New Jersey bill’s profile enough for Governor Chris Christie to finally come off the fence and support repeal.

The national implications are also huge, considering the brick wall of opposition Barack Obama ran into on his cap-and-trade plan in 2009. It now looks like the only path to a national cap-and-trade bill would be for Republicans to again (as they did in 2008) nominate a pro-cap-and-trade presidential candidate. But the presidential nomination runs through New Hampshire, and with debates set to start soon, there will be tremendous pressure on one-time cap-and-trade supporters like Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty to distance themselves from that advocacy and take a strong anti-cap-and-trade stance in a state that overwhelmingly rejected the policy on the state level.

With the New Hampshire fight well underway, green groups will go all out to pressure and intimidate state senators not to support repeal and kill their cap-and-trade dream. New Hampshire state senators should hold firm and follow the strong message sent by today’s bipartisan 246 to 104 House vote. If they do, they can deal the death blow to cap-and-trade - not just in New Hampshire, but perhaps nationally.

Phil Kerpen is vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity.

See the Union Leader story on the vote here.

by E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Founder and National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

Hanging in the Balance: Our Constitutional Order-and the Poor

Move over, executive branch. Congress is feeling its oats.

For several years the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been forcing creative “interpretations” on the Clean Air Act (CAA) - as in creation out of nothing. The CAA doesn’t mention climate change as a potential danger or give EPA authority to combat it. It doesn’t mention carbon dioxide or give EPA authority to regulate it. Nonetheless, EPA has been asserting authority to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases on the grounds that they promote dangerous global warming.

It began quietly on December 18, 2008, with a seemingly innocuous interpretative memo about the CAA from Bush administration EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. A year later, on December 15, 2009, Obama’s new EPA came out swinging with a “finding” that carbon dioxide (essential to all life and nontoxic at 100 times ambient levels) is a “dangerous pollutant.” After that, EPA promulgated ten other regulations, rules, and interpretations, including six on a single day, December 30, 2010. In a “tailoring rule,” EPA effectively amended the CAA by asserting that though the Act requires regulation of a “dangerous pollutant” source if it might emit over 250 tons per year (100 tons in certain instances), EPA will, in the case of CO2, regulate only those that might emit a hundred times as much.

EPA’s usurpation of legislative power in the tailoring rule was so blatant that it generated loud bipartisan protest from members of Congress early last year, though under solid Democratic control Congress as a whole failed to act. With Republican control of the House, reduced majority for Democrats in the Senate, clear public opposition to cap and trade and other climate legislation, and the 2012 elections looming for Democrats who saw former colleagues who supported cap and trade defeated, Congressional resistance to EPA’s violation of Constitutional separation of powers is growing.

First to strike was Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), who with ten co-sponsors on January 31 introduced S. 228, the Defending America’s Affordable Energy and Jobs Act, to strip the entire executive branch of all authority to regulate greenhouse gases with respect to climate change. On February 2 Senator James Inhofe (R-OK, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee), and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY, chairman of the energy subcommittee), released a discussion draft of a similar bill . And Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is preparing a bill that, while less sweeping (it would delay EPA regulations for two years pending further Congressional consideration), bears the same message: Get off our turf.

Barrasso’s ambitious bill would permit regulating greenhouse gas emissions only for their potential toxic effects from direct contact with humans but would prohibit regulating them “based on climate effects.” And it would prohibit federal enforcement of any state laws regulating greenhouse gases for climate purposes and deny states authority to tax or penalize any entity for greenhouse gas emissions in another state or to limit import of “products or electricity...based on greenhouse gas emissions” in another state.

Barrasso’s bill is so sweeping that some pundits think it has about as much chance of becoming law during President Obama’s term as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - rocked by Climategate and other scandals over the past year - has of being voted the most trusted, transparent, and unbiased scientific body in the world. But the three bills’ introduction - and others like them - make it increasingly likely that EPA will get its wings clipped, partly because there’s more than turf protection at stake.

It’s the economy, stupid. As Barrasso’s bill puts it, “any action to control emissions of greenhouse gases...would result in substantial impacts to major sectors of the economy.” I.e., EPA’s war on carbon dioxide will have casualties - lost economic productivity, lost jobs, rising prices for energy and everything else, and consequently declining living standards and rising death rates, especially for the poor.

More specifically, economic analysis by the Beacon Hill Institute indicates that implementation of a “Renewable Portfolio Standard” like that proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union message (shifting 80% of our energy use to renewables by 2035 - virtually the same goals embodied in 2009’s Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill) would lower economic production enough to cause an additional 12,000 premature deaths per year. And such a standard is essentially what would be required in order to implement EPA’s war on carbon dioxide.

How any of these bills will fare is anybody’s guess right now. But one thing’s clear: Our Constitutional order, our economic prosperity, the welfare of the poor, and even human lives hang in the balance in this turf war between Congress and the President.

See also this Pajamas media story “Put the REINS on EPA” that suggests we defund EPA, something we strongly support.

By S. Fred Singer

Many must be wondering whether the state of California is beyond repair.  This is particularly true after the November 2010 elections when its citizens voted for the same politicians that have brought them the same failed policies.  As deficits mount and taxes increase, productive people and enterprises are leaving California for more hospitable states.  Inevitably, there will be a tipping point when the state divides between a large welfare population that controls the vote and the rich who live in gated communities but whose tax revenues cannot support the state’s obligations.

Good indicators of the outward migration are the prices of U-Haul vehicles.  To rent a 26-foot truck one-way from San Francisco to Austin costs $3236, and yet the one-way charge for that same truck from Austin to San Francisco is just $399.  Even so, U-Haul has to pay its employees to drive the empty trucks back from Texas.

According to CEI, California is a state where public employees have three times the pension benefits of private employees and 20% higher pay, in addition to secure jobs.  This becomes quite evident when one looks at the salaries paid to California’s university administrators, where deans can make over $300,000 per year, according to the LA Times.  Keep in mind also that the California education system is super-heavy with deans, provosts, and other administrators.  Having served as a dean, I can vouch for the fact that deans are mostly paper-shufflers who have abandoned teaching and research. 

It is not surprising that the politics of the UC faculty is heavily skewed.  According to the LA Times, the ratio of political donations in 2008 to Democratic vs. Republican candidates was 800 to 1 for UC Berkeley—and even higher for some of the smaller campuses. 

Wrote Jack Pitney, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, on the National Review’s blog. “California voters approved of President Obama’s performance by a 10-point margin, whereas the national electorate disapproved by nine points.” “It’s a different kind of state,” he said.  That may be the understatement of 2010.

A large part of the state’s Democratic tilt comes from its massive Latino population, who voted for Democrats two to one. The Los Angeles Times noted that it made up 22% of the voting pool, “a record tally that mortally wounded many Republicans.”

How bad has it gotten in the erstwhile Golden State?  According to Investor’s Business Daily:

Some 2.3 million Californians are without jobs, for a 12.4 percent unemployment rate—one of the highest in the country. From 2001 to 2010, factory jobs plummeted from 1.87 million to 1.23 million—a loss of 34 percent of the state’s industrial base. With just 12 percent of the U.S. population, California has almost a third of the nation’s welfare recipients; meanwhile, 15.3 percent of all Californians live in poverty.

The state budget gap for 2009-2010 was $45.5 billion, or 53 percent of total state spending—the largest in any state’s history. Unfunded pension liabilities for California’s state and public employees may be as much as $500 billion—roughly 17 percent of the nation’s total $3 trillion at the state and local level.

California is rapidly approaching bankruptcy, a new experience for states, with New York and Illinois not far behind.  According to the Wall Street Journal (Nov 8, 2010), California has $70 billion of general obligation debt—and that does not include the $500 billion unfunded pension liability.  At some point, will it ask Congress for a bailout, and how likely is that with the new Republican majority?

Assistant editor of opinionjournal.com Allysia Finlay (a lapsed Californian who still wears Birkenstocks) writes: “...your government is run by a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public sector unions, and legislative bums...When you inevitably crash and burn, don’t count on us to bail you out.”

Columnist George Will has a few choice things to say in a Dec 26, 2010 essay: “80 cents of every government dollar goes to government employees’ pay and benefits.” He cites an example: “A typical San Francisco resident with one dependent pays $953 a month for health care, while the typical city employee pays less than $10.” He too warns against any kind of federal bailout.

William E. Simon Jr. relates in the online Wall Street Journal: “California faces its most serious budget crisis since the Great Depression.  Newly inaugurated Gov. Jerry Brown is inheriting a deficit that is expected to be at least $28 billion over the next 18 months.  Nonpartisan legislative analysts project a long-term structural gap of some $20 billion per year between revenues and expenditures in the state’s general fund, on an annual budget that is now $93 billion.”

California also boasts an energy commission, created by Jerry Brown during his first term as governor.  Its lead website headline, as Schwarzenegger was leaving, was an FAQ about “new light bulb standards.”

......

This says it all about Schwarzenegger’s energy policies: completely beholden to environmental fantasy. ...  one of Schwarzenegger’s self-identified “legacies” was his signing of AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.  AB 32 will soon lead to further increases in California’s already nation-leading electricity and transportation fuel costs.  The George C. Marshall Institute estimates that AB 32’s low-carbon fuel standard and cap-and-trade scheme will hit California families for an additional $570 to $6,500 per year in higher transportation costs.”

See the full post in American Thinker here.

S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.  He lectured in California on energy policy and climate change.