by Marlo Lewis
In a recent issue of the Daily Caller, reporter Jonathan Strong asserts that EPA’s global warming regulations are “no end-run around Congress,” because “This time Congress is being held hostage by its own laws.” That’s exactly what EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and just about every environmental advocacy group in America says. They are mistaken.
Interestingly, much of Strong’s argument leads to conclusion that EPA is engaged in an end-run. His column leaves little doubt that the Clean Air Act (CAA) is a stunningly inappropriate framework for regulating greenhouse gases. That should make him wary of environmentalist claims that EPA is just carrying out the will of Congress.
Strong notes that President Obama and others depicted CAA regulation of greenhouse gases as “heinously bad” when they wanted to spook Republicans into supporting cap-and-trade legislation as a lesser evil. But why would Congress authorize something heinously bad? Granted, Congress does many foolish things, but it has never, ever voted to put EPA in charge of making climate policy.
Strong observes that it “hardly makes sense to hold individual states accountable for their greenhouse gas levels when every pollution source across the planet is contributing to that level.” Yet once EPA issued its December 2009 Endangerment Rule, it set a fateful precedent that could compel the agency to do just that.
The Endangerment Rule is EPA’s official finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. Logically, given that premise, EPA must now develop national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for greenhouse gases, and then compel states to reduce atmospheric levels within five or at most 10 years. The Center for Biological Diversity and other groups are petitioning EPA to establish a NAAQS for carbon dioxide (CO2) set at 350 parts per million (ppm) - about 40 ppm below the current concentration (390 ppm). Yet not even a severe depression cutting global GDP and emissions to, say, 1970 levels, would stop CO2 concentrations from rising.
In short, applying the CAA to greenhouse gases threatens to turn the Act into a de-industrialization mandate, a national economic suicide pact. Yet one of the statute’s core purposes, declared in the first section, is “to promote . . . the productive capacity of the population.” When did Congress vote to rescind that provision?
Strong notes that another “major lever” of the law is the requirement, once greenhouse gases become regulated air pollutants, for newly built or modified industrial facilities to install “best available control technology.” However, Strong concedes, because no cost-effective technology exists to “scrub” greenhouse gases out of emissions, “requiring best technology is inherently limited, even irrational.”
Indeed, he continues, regulated entities have a “unique financial incentive” to cheat on any type of greenhouse gas control system. Unlike other gases EPA regulates, the quantity of CO2 emissions “is basically a factor of how much output there is by a facility.” Ergo, regulating greenhouse gases has a unique potential to curb output and economic growth.
That’s a major reason why climate policy is intensely controversial; why the Senate, via the July 1997 Byrd-Hagel resolution, preemptively rejected the Kyoto Protocol; and why the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill became politically radioactive not long after it passed in the House. It’s also why Congress has never even come close to voting for EPA to establish best available control technology standards for greenhouse gases.
Strong acknowledges that applying CAA permitting requirements to greenhouse gases would produce an administrative “meltdown,” a “bureaucratic Armageddon.” EPA and its state counterparts would have to process an estimated 41,000 preconstruction permit applications per year (instead of 280) and 6.1 million operating permits per year (instead of 15,000). The permitting programs would crash under their own weight, crippling both environmental enforcement and construction activity while exposing millions of non-permitted firms to new litigation risks. A more potent Anti-Stimulus Program would be hard to imagine. This is not what Congress authorized when it enacted the CAA in 1970, nor when it amended the statute in 1977 and 1990.
To avoid such “absurd results,” EPA issued its so-called Tailoring Rule. It revises the statutory definitions of “major emitting facility” so that CAA permitting programs apply only to very large CO2 emitters such as coal-fired power plants, refineries, and cement production facilities. Strong says the Tailoring Rule “significantly bend[s] the letter of the law,” commenting: “Whether that rather sizeable legal leap withstands judicial scrutiny is an open question.” That’s too charitable. “Tailoring” is bureaucrat-speak for “amending.” To avoid absurd results and a political backlash, EPA now presumes to play lawmaker and amend the statute. When did Congress give EPA the okay to flout the separation of powers?
Strong notes that the CAA was enacted in 1970, “before global warming was even on the radar map.” Exactly! And after 20-plus years of global warming advocacy by the U.N., the environmental movement, regulatory bureaucrats, mainstream media, and rent-seeking corporations; and despite pressure from the White House, Democratic control of both the House and Senate, and a $100 million lobbying surge campaign, Congress in 2010 again rejected cap-and-trade. Are we then to suppose that back in 1970, when global warming was not even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, Congress authorized EPA to implement a more “heinous” version of the same, but just forgot to tell anybody?
Read much more here.
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GOP Set to Resist EPA Rules on Global Warming, Op-Ed Declares
Wednesday, 29 Dec 2010 04:26 PM
House Republicans are ready to battle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reverse or delay new climate-change regulations, according to an Op-Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal. The EPA’s new climate-change rules will impede economic recovery, and the only solution is for Congress to overturn the proposed greenhouse gas regulations outright, according to Tuesday’s article, which incoming Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., co-wrote with Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips.
“If Democrats refuse to join Republicans in doing so, then they should at least join a sensible bipartisan compromise to mandate that the EPA delay its regulations until the courts complete their examination of the agency’s endangerment finding and proposed rules,” Upton and Phillips wrote, addingm “There is no way to know whether two years will be sufficient time for the courts to complete their work.”
A federal appeals court denied a motion this to delay the rules, which are set to roll out on Jan. 2.
Calling the controversial EPA rules “an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs - unless Congress steps in,” Upton and Phillips questioned whether carbon even needs regulating. House Republicans are promising a fight if the Obama administration moves forward with any carbon crackdown, they said.
“The EPA has its foot firmly on the throat of our economic recovery,” Upton said of the EPA’s “long regulatory assault” against domestic energy producers. “We will not allow the administration to regulate what they have been unable to legislate”.
By Chris Horner
I was taken aback by this paragraph in a Politico story by someone a colleague of mine styles as the best reporter in DC on these issues. It reveals the media are not only telling us what to watch for this year, but getting an early jump:
Despite mounting evidence that the greenhouse gas buildup in the Earth’s atmosphere is causing runaway changes to the climate - NASA this month declared 2010 the hottest year on record - several pollsters say the American public isn’t listening. (emphases added)
Now, the reason no evidence—mounting, or otherwise—of runaway climate change was cited there is because there is no evidence of runaway climate change. Let alone man-made. There is as there always has been a continuing stream of evidence of changes in climate, because change is the sole constant in climate. But it takes an environmentalist or axe-grinding politician to say that whatever happens is evidence supporting his faith and/or agenda. The ‘runaway’ business is just absurdly hyperbolic. Which, again, is why no such evidence was actually cited.
Get this straight because once they agree on a talking point they beat it to death: their new one, of 2010 being the hottest year ‘on record’, would not rise to the level of evidence of man-made warming despite being touted as a self-evident example of cause-effect. This would remain true even if the cited source, NASA—meaning James Hansen’s runaway office, known as GISS—had not also done two things: adjust the historical record to make older years cooler (rewriting history) and ‘extrapolate’ data over vast stretches in the Arctic where they have none...but which happens to be where they find the warming (making history up).
None of which is secret, all of which then makes the above-cited paragraph an embarrassment.
Then the reporter discussed what the global warming industry plans to do about this, and includes the following predictable punch telegraphed.
...Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), co-author of several unsuccessful climate bills over the last decade, said he agrees with the need to make more local connections for the public. Hitting home for him are studies showing lobster and winter flounder moving north out of Long Island Sound.
“It’s not the end of the world, and yet it suggests the world is changing,” Lieberman said. “It’s one small example. The world is full of them.”
Lieberman said he thinks there’s a need for more TV and radio commercials that capture the most eye-catching images. “Just show people what’s happening,” he said. “Show them satellite pictures of the ice caps.”
Yes, the world changes and, of course, if something happens then you did it and their agenda would change it. Even if after billions of dollars and several decades they cannot make their case and are reduced to doing what they started with. Primitively pointing to the world around them and shrieking that the witch—now, the SUV—did it.
Expect the media to run with this. And in response I will show you pictures of, say, the World Trade Center collapsing. Why? Because that is their logic: show you something and say it is evidence that you did it. Example, invoked by a mindless fellow panelist on a tv show last week:
Man-made global warming is causing Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glacier to recede.
How do you know?
Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glacier is receding.
Oh. OK.
The CIA brought the World Trade Center down.
How do you know?
The World Trade Center came down.
Your ‘conclusion’ is actually an assumption. And that’s too stupid even for Washington to re-engineer the economy around. Here’s to an invigorating 2011.
See post here.
By Phil Boehmke, American Thinker
Five years ago the global warming crowd and their comrades in the Labour Party mandated the use of new green technology boilers in Great Britain. Government and environmental experts said that the ‘condensing boilers’ would not only greatly reduce the consumer’s carbon footprint, but would also lower their heating bills. Saving money and saving the planet, what could be better?
The UK Daily Mail reports that during the recent record cold spell in Great Britain, tens of thousands of people were without heat due to a serious flaw in the new boiler’s design.
British Gas is understood to have had 60,000 call-outs in Yorkshire alone. And the cost to call out a plumber? It can be between 200 to 300 pounds on a bank holiday. And don’t forget about VAT (Value-Added Tax).
‘We’ve had double the number of call-outs as in the same period last year,’ says Charlie Mullins, MD of Pimlico Plumbers in London, the country’s largest independent plumbing company.
“It is a massive problem. Some customers were ready to move out because their condensing boilers broke. If I had a choice, I’d put in a non-condensing boiler every time.”
It’s all the more infuriating because the problem causing these breakdowns is so simple. In cold weather, the pipe that takes waste water from the back of the condensing boiler-which isn’t there in a normal boiler-freezes solid, shutting down the system and in many cases causing permanent damage.
Photo courtesy of Daily Mail story here. Enlarged here.
But this problem is just one of many that have plagued this boiler design since they became popular in the Nineties. Many plumbers consider them to be little more than a multi-billion-pound con-trick.
The condensing boilers were designed to recycle the CO2 emissions and steam that would normally be vented outside and then feed it back into the system through the waste water pipe. The new system was touted to increase efficiency by as much as 93%.
In 2005 Labour deputy PM John Prescott made the condensing boiler mandate a key part of his plan to meet the CO2 reduction targets called for in the Kyoto Protocol. Three years later in an effort to sell the green technology boondoggle to the people, the government initiated a program which paid homeowners 400 pounds towards the purchase and installation of the new boilers.
Sales people quickly jumped on the new market and produced glowing savings estimates for their customers. Boiler manufacturers and installers enjoyed a boom as they removed perfectly good boilers and replaced then with the new eco-friendly units. Everything was going smoothly until frustrated consumers discovered that their new boilers didn’t work in really cold weather.
To make matters worse, the new boilers typically last only 3-6 years and the costs of parts to repair the units are outrageously high. One of the bi-products of the condensation process is the creation of acidic water vapor from the dissolved nitrogen and sulfur oxides which corrode the delicate system components. Gee, the old boilers were very reliable and lasted 20 years on average.
Read more here.