By Jim Snyder and Kim Chipman

Cap-and-trade may be just the first casualty of the science-doubters in the House and Senate.

“I am vindicated,” says Republican Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who was ridiculed by environmentalists in 2003 when he declared that man-made global warming was the “greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.”

He has reason to crow: His party’s sweep of the midterm elections will bring into office almost four dozen new lawmakers (11 senators and at least 36 House members) who share his skepticism about climate change, according to ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington research group allied with Democrats. They join a smaller group of Republican incumbents, some of whom will assume powerful committee positions in January, who also reject that global warming is an immediate threat.

Their influence could be felt soon. When Obama Administration negotiators arrive in Cancun, Mexico, on Nov. 29 for 12 days of climate-change talks, they will no longer be able to claim that their policy agenda—to push for global action on climate change—has the full backing of Congress.

The day after the Nov. 2 elections, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the new balance of power requires him to scale back his environmental agenda. The President has all but scrapped plans for legislation that would require companies to buy and sell pollution allowances, a so-called cap-and-trade system. Even modest goals could be tough to realize. Republicans say they will seek to roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules, set to take effect in January, limiting carbon emissions, as well as restrictions on coal mining. They also may try to block billions of dollars in federal funds the Administration has directed to wind, solar, and other alternative sources, as well as electric-car technologies, areas Obama pitches as the manufacturing engines of the future.

“It’s hard to spin that it’s a good thing,” says Gerard Waldron, a partner with Washington-based law firm Covington & Burling, referring to the elections that gave Republicans control of the House and more seats in the Senate. “We’re going to focus on our domestic situation, and we’ll have to explain to the world what American democracy looks like.” Companies that have invested in renewables are disappointed. “Climate change isn’t going away,” says Lewis Hay, CEO of NextEra Energy, the largest U.S. producer of wind and solar energy. “We’re going to have to take action sooner or later.”

As an aide to Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who heads a House panel on global warming, Waldron helped write cap-and-trade legislation. The House passed a bill in 2009, but it died earlier this year in the Senate. The bill’s demise led the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary U.S. carbon trading market acquired this summer for $600 million by Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), to announce in October that it planned to shut down at yearend for lack of activity.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who agree the earth is warming because of man-made activity has been in free fall, dropping to 34 percent in October, from 50 percent in July 2006, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Now lawmakers who reject the notion that there is ironclad evidence of global warming are rising in seniority in the House. Representative Ralph M. Hall, a Texas Republican, is in line to chair the House Science and Technology Committee, which oversees numerous federal agencies conducting climate-change research. “Reasonable people have serious questions about our knowledge of the state of the science,” Hall says. Representative John Shimkus of Illinois is vying to become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. At a March 2009 hearing, he said the Bible teaches that climate change won’t destroy the planet.

Such statements could make it more difficult for the U.S. to convince other countries that it can meet its goal, pledged a year ago in Copenhagen, of cutting emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The U.S. will join about 190 countries in Cancun for U.N.-led talks aimed at drafting a new treaty. Obama’s lead negotiator, Todd D. Stern, has said the U.S. will stand behind the target. It’s probably a waste of time, says Inhofe. With Congress unlikely to adopt any carbon limits, negotiators will have little to do “other than swim,” he says.

The U.S. insists it will reduce emissions by raising fuel-efficiency standards and through EPA regulation. The new Congress, however, could vote to delay the EPA rules or prohibit the agency from spending any money to implement them, which would have the same effect. With 9.6 percent unemployment, now is not the time to put new conditions on business, says Representative-elect Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), a skeptic. “We can’t be put in a position where we are going to rush headlong into a policy that is going to tax our businesses and our families,” says Walsh, a Tea Party favorite.

The bottom line: Numerous global-warming skeptics taking office in the next Congress will try to undo President Obama’s environmental initiatives.

Snyder is a reporter for Bloomberg News. Chipman is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Story in Business Week is here.

IBD Editorial

Energy: Former Vice President Al Gore admitted Monday that his pivotal 1994 Senate vote for ethanol subsidies was bad policy but good politics. That says a lot about the reality of environmentalism in government.

As the ethanol tax credit comes up for renewal in Congress on Dec. 31, it’s worth noting it only came about because the vice president cast the decisive 51st vote in favor of it in 1994. At the time, he packaged it as a big move to preserve the environment in a market-friendly, sustainable manner, and for years defended his vote because it was supposedly good for us.

“The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be,” he recounted in 1998.

Now the real story emerges. On Monday he matter-of-factly told a bankers group in Greece it was actually about helping himself. “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president,” the former vice president said.

One is tempted to praise a man who admits mistakes, but the magnitude of what Gore actually did through his cynically cast vote as an elected leader in a position of trust suggests sorry isn’t enough. Gore’s vote drove food prices higher, trashed the environment, and drew American capital into inefficient energy sources over efficient ones. This should be an object lesson in the importance of not trusting politicians on the environment.

Start with what it is - a tax credit for special interests that has cost U.S. taxpayers $16 billion. And costs are rising. The centrally planned ethanol mandate has risen from 7.5 billion gallons by 2012 to 35 billion by 2022. In the last year alone, it’s cost $7 billion. From the tax credit, refiners make a profit on blended ethanol even when it costs more than gasoline, an unfair price distortion.

No wonder refiners told farmers they could buy all the corn they could grow - Uncle Sam was picking up the tab. Today, 41% of all corn grown in America goes to ethanol - not to the dinner table.

Among the unintended consequences, farmland that had been efficiently planted with multiple crops ended up as monolithic cornfields, using 1,700 gallons of water to make a gallon of ethanol. Food prices surged as the government’s ethanol monster got fed.

As corn exports fell, inflation soared abroad. In Mexico, riots broke out over rising tortilla prices. Inflation hurts the poor most. Then there was the product itself, ethanol, a fuel that’s been around since the days of Henry Ford. It burns 30% less efficiently than other forms of energy, such as oil, clean coal, shale and natural gas. As IBD wrote earlier this month, ethanol “has never made much sense economically or environmentally.” Gore confirms this.

Still, ethanol mandates did wonders for Gore’s political life, bringing him everything from a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for environmentalism to big bucks to speak in places like Athens, Greece. By his own admission, Gore’s mistake came at our expense and for that he deserves scorn. More importantly, the feel-good era of environmentalism by government diktat must end.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of environmentalism to satisfy one man’s ambitions. See post here.

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The European Mess caused by the enviro socialist agenda. Will US follow?

This Quantitative Easing cartoon is hilarious and tells you how an inexperienced government team - here the Fed - can make an endless series of mistakes about the ecconomy much as the government has done with the environment, health care, etc.

By Bob Carter, Quadrant Doomed Planet

Early in the recent election campaign, Julia Gillard was reported as saying that there would be no tax on carbon (dioxide) while she led the federal government.

Instead, she said, “What we will do is we will tackle the challenge of climate change”, which turned out to mean the appointment of an assembly of 150 citizens to advise on the ways and means - a suggestion that prompted immediate public derision.

Just before voters went to the polls Ms Gillard again stated categorically: “I rule out a carbon tax”. Of course, that statement was rapidly rescinded after the election of a hung parliament created the political imperative that Labor court the Green and independent members who now held the balance of power.

Making a dramatic U-turn, Ms Gillard rapidly segued to a new policy position. This involved scrapping the idea of a citizen’s assembly and erecting in its place a new Multi-party Committee on Climate Change (MCCC) to advise on policy options, which now again were to include of necessity (hat tip to the Greens) a carbon dioxide tax.

With the Liberal-National coalition declining to participate, the MCCC ended up as including the PM herself as chair; her own Deputy Leader, Wayne Swan, and Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet; Greens leader and deputy-leader, Bob Brown and Christine Milne; and independent Tony Windsor, with the first lower house Green MP Adam Bandt as an additional “advisor”.

The primary question that the MCCC needed to deal with, of course, was whether dangerous climate change is occurring, and if so what policy options might be available to mitigate it? First and foremost then, there was a scientific issue to be resolved.

The committee’s state of mind on that issue was rapidly clarified by Ms. Gillard, who announced on September 27 the starting assumption that a carbon dioxide price was required to reduce “pollution” and to encourage investment in low-emission technologies.

A belief in anti-carbon dioxide measures to combat dangerous warming was therefore a pre-requisite for participation in the committee. As well, Ms. Gillard also announced that under the MCCC’s terms of reference its deliberations and papers were to remain confidential until otherwise agreed.

In such circumstances, it was scarcely surprising, though certainly scandalous, that only one of the four expert advisors appointed to the committee, Will Steffen, was actually a scientist at all - the other three appointments representing an economist (Ross Garnaut), a business regulator (Rod Sims) and a social policy expert (Patricia Faulkner).

Professor Steffen, the Director of ANU’s Climate Change Institute, is a senior participant in IPCC activities and also a long-time advisor to the federal Greenhouse Office.

On November 12, the Climate Spectator reported the four main scientific points that Will Steffen had delivered to the MCCC. With a commentary on each, they are as follows.

1. The Earth is warming (100 per cent certainty). 

It is trivially true that the Earth has warmed over the last 20 thousand and also over the last 150 years. An alternative viewpoint is that the Earth has cooled over the last 10 thousand years; it all depends upon the length of your piece of string.

But most importantly of all, and over the time scale that counts for testing the hypothesis of dangerous global warming, since 1998 the Earth has failed to warm at all despite an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide of more than 5 per cent.

Steffen’s 100 per cent certain statement is, therefore, also 100 per cent ambiguous and 100 per cent misleading.

2. Human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause of the warming observed over the last half-century at least (about 95 per cent certainty).

Goodness gracious, in 2007 even the IPCC was only 90 per cent certain that the “net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming”. One hopes that Professor Steffen has shared with the committee the new evidence that now leads him to even greater certainty.

In reality, and despite IPCC’s overstatement in 2007, no measurable, empirical evidence for global warming is yet known that requires a human influence to explain it, and that despite the expenditure of many tens of billions of dollars seeking just such evidence.

3. Despite considerable uncertainty about the specific consequences of climate change in future, we know that the risks to society and environment are very large, and are growing as we gain more knowledge.

The switch in language from dangerous warming to “climate change” is strange, and greatly changes the argument. For climate change includes the hazards of cooling as well as warming, a much needed risk assessment that the IPCC has completely failed to undertake.

At best, three things are implicit in this confused statement. The first is that we cannot predict future climate change (true, which is what makes its “mitigation” a tad difficult). 

Second, yes, the risks of climate events and change are large, as exemplified by disasters that we read about in the media every week; but, no, climate risks are not getting larger as we become more knowledgeable.

Third, and as more and more independent commentators are concluding, faced with real but indeterminate (in the sense that both warming and cooling are possible) climatic risk, the appropriate and cost-effective precautionary policy is of course to be prepared to adapt to either.

4. The scientific basis and imperative for rapid and vigorous action to reduce emissions is overwhelming. Decarbonisation of the economy by 2050 is required to meet the 2C guardrail.

The “2C guardrail” is a political ambition with no basis in science. “Decarbonisation” actually means “decarbondioxideisation”, and is an expensive and futile (regarding its effect on future climate) proposition.

Carbon dioxide is an environmentally beneficial trace gas, and there is no scientific basis for taking action to reduce its production via industrial processes.

In 2006, Professor Steffen provided a report to the Australian Greenhouse Office that contained the same four lines of inaccurate advice just discussed. The arguments consist largely of re-cycled assertions from the now discredited 2007 IPCC report.

The IPCC’s arguments were unsound in 2007 and remain unsound now, as documented in a due diligence audit that was accomplished last year by four independent scientists and provided to Climate Minister Wong by Senator Fielding.

Senator Fielding’s advisors also recommended that an independent commission of enquiry was needed into the global warming issue, as a prerequisite to setting new and more sensible climate policy, a call that has recently been echoed by other commentators.

The Canberra climate committee is a farce. Whilst its members have been indulging in play school politics, the Canadian Senate, paying attention both to the real science and to the result of the US election, has rejected a Climate Change Accountability Act that called for greenhouse gases to be cut 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Commenting, Canadian PM Stephen Harper said that the Act: “sets irresponsible targets, doesn’t lay out any measure of achieving them other than...by shutting down sections of the Canadian economy and throwing hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people out of work”.

Meanwhile, under budgetary exigency, the governments of France and Britain have already moved to dismantle significant parts of their bloated global warming bureaucracies, President Obama has acknowledged the demise of cap-and-trade legislation in the US, and N.Z. has announced a rethink about applying its carbon dioxide bill to the farming sector as was originally intended.

These political decisions have followed on from the dramatic swing in public opinion that occurred after Climategate, and they herald the almost complete collapse of global warming alarmism internationally. Yet they appear to have passed unnoticed in Canberra, and remain mostly unreported by the Australian press.

Meanwhile, the Canberra charade that is the MCCC continues, sustained only by government spinmeisters who produce sillier justifications for the introduction of a carbon dioxide tax with every day that passes.

The government wants to declare a price on carbon dioxide, and businesses (especially energy suppliers) want certainty. As others before me have pointed out, these twin needs can best be met by allocating a price of $0 per tonne to carbon dioxide emissions - forthwith.

Time to catch up folks; global warming alarmism is on its deathbed.

Bob Carter, is a geologist and environmental scientist from James Cook University, and author of Climate: the Counter Consensus. The three other independent science advisors to Senator Fielding were David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth.

See post here.