Amidst Obama’s inexorable war on American energy, consumers, jobs, and prosperity, his EPA is in the process of promulgating 4 new pollution rules that will bury the coal industry and “necessarily” raise the price of electricity on American households. They are the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for Utilities (MACT), the Cooling Water Intake Structures regulation, and the Disposal of Coal Combustion residuals. The former two have already been finalized while the latter two are close behind. Today, the D.C. Circuit Court struck down the EPA’s authority to implement the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.
In August 2011, Obama’s EPA imposed a cap and trade style program to expand existing limitations on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-fired power plants in 28 “upwind” states. They claimed that they had unlimited authority pursuant to the Clean Air Act to cap emissions that supposedly travel across state lines. The EPA admitted that the rule would cost $2.7 billion from the private sector and force many cole-fired power plants to shut down. Priorities USA might have even run an ad against Obama claiming that his superfluous regulations cause workers to lose their health insurance and die.
Luckily, several southern states decided to sue the EPA in federal court. In EME HOMER CITY GENERATION, L.P. v. EPA, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the EPA had exceeded its authority under the Clean Air Act in two respects:
First, the statutory text grants EPA authority to require upwind States to reduce only their own significant contributions to a downwind State’s nonattainment. But under the Transport Rule, upwind States may be required to reduce emissions by more than their own significant contributions to a downwind State’s nonattainment. EPA has used the good neighbor provision to impose massive emissions reduction requirements on upwind States without regard to the limits imposed by the statutory text. Whatever its merits as a policy matter, EPA’s Transport Rule violates the statute. Second, the Clean Air Act affords States the initial opportunity to implement reductions required by EPA under the good neighbor provision. But here, when EPA quantified States’ good neighbor obligations, it did not allow the States the initial opportunity to implement the required reductions with respect to sources within their borders. Instead, EPA quantified States’ good neighbor obligations and simultaneously set forth EPA-designed Federal Implementation Plans, or FIPs, to implement those obligations at the State level. By doing so, EPA departed from its consistent prior approach to implementing the good neighbor provision and violated the Act.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the majority opinion, created more jobs with that decision that Obama did throughout his tenure.
While this is definitely a big victory, and underscores the importance of putting conservatives on the DC Circuit Court (which has original jurisdiction over many federal policy issues), we still need to continue a robust legislative assault against these cap and trade style regulations. The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act still serve as an albatross around the necks of job creators and can still be used to justify many of the impending regulations, even after the court’s decision.
When Republicans take back control of government, they must move to roll back most federal involvement in regulation of pollution. With the states more than happy to pick up the slack, especially the blue states, federal involvement in this regulatory scheme can only be harmful. Rules and regulations that could potentially affect the lifeline of local economies must only be debated and implemented on a local level.
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Listen to this excellent interview with meteorologist Anthony Sadar, CCM, Air Pollution Meteorologist (In Global Warming We Trust, a Heretics Guide)
Perspective of a Lifetime on Atmospheric Modeling
By Anthony J. Sadar
The president vowed to make climate change a top priority in his second term, suggesting that a major assault on industry is coming if he is re-elected. So before the potential onslaught, some real-world perspective on climate change is essential.
First, note that the tool used to both develop future global climate scenarios and to panic the public on meteorological mayhem is atmospheric modeling.
Most of my nearly 35 years of professional life has been involved with atmospheric modeling in one way or another. I began my scientific career in meteorology in the late ‘70s. Back then, calculating air quality impacts of air pollution sources, such as smokestacks and vents, involved using a simple statistical calculator and some basic graphs derived from empirical studies—a rudimentary form of modeling.
Over the years, with more powerful computers and sophisticated graphics, air pollution meteorologists, like me, were able to analyze in more depth and with finer detail contaminant concentrations as they spread from their emission locations.
Today, air-quality models are coupled with some of the very same meteorological models used in climate studies. In this way, state-of-the-science estimates can be made to determine whether, for instance, a proposed industrial facility will contribute to unacceptable deterioration of air quality.
Air pollution models have long been used to evaluate just about any significant operation from the smallest chemical plant to the largest nuclear or coal-fired power plant. Furthermore, the models are useful in anticipating the consequences of mundane releases of contaminants to catastrophic outbursts from accidents or terrorist attacks that disperse gases or particles like chlorine dioxide or anthrax.
What I and so many other air modelers have discovered is that, as impressive as modeling has become, model results beyond the immediate downwind distance of the pollution source and within a relatively brief amount of time, are not very reliable, despite the awesome computing power available today. We know that dependence on their output is quite limited and to extrapolate too far beyond the bounds of the model assumptions is foolhardy.
Compare the experience of thousands of non-academic air modelers with the largely academic and government climate modelers. Their combined efforts have produced impressive results in scope and scale, yet, like air pollution modeling, their model outputs for long-term global climate conditions still boil down to limited guesses.
Regardless, a bit of understanding about the global atmosphere has been spun into a trillion-dollar bonanza by a colaition of supporters. These cheerleaders take the form of career politicians, bureaucrats, environmental and social activists, academics and educators, technologists and consultants, journalists, bloggers, and groupies of all stripes.
But realism and humility about the limitations of climate modeling must set in soon with enough scientists and those of the general public who care enough to pay attention. Let’s face it: if Mr. Obama gets his way in November, then more than our supposed climate future with be in dire straits.
Meteorologist Anthony J. Sadar is the author of In Global Warming We Trust: A Heretic’s Guide to Climate Science (Telescope Books: www.telescopebooks.com).
Sensible, responsible energy policies must replace today’s subsidies and crony corporatism
By Paul Driessen
America needs more economic growth, domestic manufacturing, jobs and secure, affordable energy to make those things happen.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney understands that achieving this goal requires unleashing American ingenuity, reducing excessive regulatory strangleholds on businesses and working capital, and allowing safe, proven technologies to tap and utilize our vast onshore and offshore deposits of oil, natural gas and other energy riches. He knows we can do all this without sacrificing important environmental values.
President Obama fervently believes the solution is to unleash more taxes, regulations and regulators, keep our subsurface resources off limits, and impose a painful transition from hydrocarbons to wind, solar and biofuel energy. He aligns with and listens to environmentalist agitators who detest hydrocarbons, frighten people into thinking fossil fuel production and use will destroy the planet, and conceal the
adverse health, economic and environmental effects of “green” energy “alternatives.”
The Obama vision has been an unmitigated disaster. Countless failures, bankruptcies and layoffs are matched by a need for perpetual subsidies taken from hard-working, productive people and businesses, and given by unaccountable bureaucrats to failed technologies and companies, run by crony corporatists who return the favor by contributing substantial portions of our compulsory taxpayer largesse to the reelection campaigns of cooperative politicians.
The Romney vision, by contrast, actually works. Bain Capital investments brought us Staples, The Sports Authority, Steel Dynamics and many other success stories. More recently, on the energy front, America’s private sector ingenuity, sweat and perseverance launched new technologies and discoveries that abruptly ended the myths of “peak oil” and “imminent depletion” of US and global petroleum.
Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, for example, was developed by private industry, funded by private investors and tested on private lands. It did not have to depend on taxpayer subsidies, approval by federal bureaucrats, or access to shale deposits on federal lands.
Had it been otherwise, “fracking” would never have gotten off the ground. The incredible North Dakota, Texas and Pennsylvania oil, gas, jobs and revenue boom would never have occurred. Vast deposits of oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids would have remained trapped in shale rock formations, thousands of feet below Earth’s surface.
Natural gas prices would still be above $8 per thousand cubic feet (million Btu), instead of in the $2.50 to $3.00 range. America would still be looking overseas for fuels to replace the coal that the Obama EPA is effectively eliminating from our energy, electricity, employment and economic picture.
But thanks to drilling and fracking on private lands, under commonsense state regulations, US oil and gas production is increasing, for the first time in 15 years, despite continued leasing and drilling moratoria on federal onshore and offshore lands. America is on the threshold of a manufacturing renaissance fueled largely by access to abundant, reliable, affordable fuels and petrochemical feed stocks, to power and supply raw materials for factories, refineries and chemical plants.
Plentiful gas from the Marcellus shale formation has persuaded Shell to plan a $2biillion ethane “cracking” plant near Pittsburgh creating 10,000 construction jobs and 10,000 permanent jobs. Steel plants, electric utilities and countless other industries will also benefit from shale gas.
Citigroup’s “Energy 2020” report says the US petroleum industry could add “as many as 3.6 million jobs by 2020 and increase the US gross domestic product by as much as 3 percent,” while also generating billions of dollars in lease bonuses, rents, royalties and taxes for local, state and federal governments.
Fracking could bring new jobs and revenues to depressed areas of Maryland, New York, Ohio and other states. Expanded access to our newfound century’s worth of hydrocarbon energy will keep prices low and reverse the flow of manufacturing jobs out of our country, providing jobs for millions of American graduates and unemployed workers, and creating a new prosperity for current and future generations.
Moreover, the energy, manufacturing, employment and economic benefits will be unencumbered by worrisome environmental impacts. Hydraulic fracturing has been utilized since 1949, and has been carried out more than 2.5 million times, safely and without causing any serious harm.
Fracking fluids are 99.5% water and sand, combined with chemicals that keep sand particles suspended in the liquid, fight bacterial growth, and improve gas flow and production. Most additives used today are vegetable oils and common, biodegradable chemicals found in cheese, beer, canned fish, dairy desserts, shampoo, and other food and cosmetic products. Steadily improving technologies, techniques and regulations will further reduce environmental risks.
For those still worried about catastrophic manmade global warming, natural gas emits far less carbon dioxide than coal. It doesn’t create waste disposal or radiation disinformation that has stymied nuclear power expansion. Unlike wind turbines, it doesn’t slaughter birds and bats. Unlike solar power, it doesn’t require blanketing millions of acres of wildlife habitat with photovoltaic panels.
Unfortunately, facts like these have not stopped peak oil diehards and anti-hydrocarbon activists in and out of the Obama administration. They have become master fear mongers and propagandists, advancing their “just say no” opposition to North American fossil fuel energy and using lawsuits, lobbying, fabrications and demonstrations to block drilling, fracking, the Keystone XL pipeline, coal mining and burning, and countless other projects, while promoting subsidies, favoritism, and exemptions from environmental laws for wind, solar and biofuel programs.
During his first inaugural address, in the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt told the American people, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Environmental extremists take the opposite tack, arguing that the only thing we have to fear is… just about everything.
We need jobs and renewed economic vitality. We all want a clean environment. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, industries of all kinds have made tremendous progress in reducing emissions and improving safety, efficiency and sustainability. They will doubtless continue to make further progress.
But giving in to fear and hysteria, and throwing more roadblocks in front of responsible energy and economic development, creates far more harm than benefit for our nation and its people.
Team Obama is the government arm of the environmental extremist lobby. It’s time to replace it with a Romney team that understands, encourages and enables sensible, responsible North American energy and economic development.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death.
In his Aug. 6 op-ed, “A New Climate-Change Consensus,” Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp speaks of “the trend- a decades -long march toward hotter and wilder weather.” We have seen quite a few such claims this summer season, and Mr. Krupp insists that we accept them as “true.” Only with Lewis Carroll’s famous definition of truth, “What I tell you three times is true,” is this the case.
But repetition of a fib does not make it true. As one of many pieces of evidence that our climate is doing what it always does, consider the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s year-by-year data for wet and dry years in the continental U.S.
From 1900 to the present, there are only irregular, chaotic variations from year to year, but no change in the trend or in the frequency of dry years or wet years. Sometimes there are clusters of dry years, the most significant being the dry Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. These tend to be followed by clusters of wet years.
Despite shrill claims of new record highs, when we look at record highs for temperature measurement stations that have existed long enough to have a meaningful history, there is no trend in the number of extreme high temperatures, neither regionally nor continentally. We do see the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s setting the largest number of record highs, at a time when it is acknowledged that humans had negligible effect on climate.
What about strong tornadoes? Again there is no trend. Last year was an unusually active season, and unfortunately some of those storms ravaged population centers. We were told that these disasters were the result of human CO2 emissions. Yet 2011 was only the sixth worst for strong tornadoes since 1950 and far from a record. And have any of us heard about this tornado year? Why not? Because 2012 has been unusually quiet. Most of the tornado season is behind us, and so far the tornado count is mired in the lowest quintile of historical activity. As for hurricanes, again there is no discernible trend.
Regarding wildfires, past western fires burned far more acreage than today. Any climate effect on wildfires is complicated by the controversial fire suppression practices of the past hundred years.
Lurid media reporting and advocates’ claims aside, even the last comprehensive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report noted that"archived data sets are not yet sufficient for determining long-term trends in [weather] extremes.” Yet this has not stopped global warming advocates from using hot summer weather as a tool to dramatize a supposedly impending climate Armageddon.
In a telling 2007 PBS interview, former Sen. Tim Wirth gloated about how he had rigged the 1988 Senate testimony chamber to dramatize the impact of NASA scientist James Hansen’s histrionic testimony on imminent danger from global warming: “We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer...So we scheduled the
hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington or close to it.”
Not content to gamble on the vagaries of weather statistics, Mr. Wirth also boasted, “What we did is that we went in the night beforehand and opened all the windows . . . so the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room . . . when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.” Tricks like those described by Sen. Wirth have been refined to an art to promote the cause of economically costly action to prevent supposedly catastrophic consequences of increasing CO2.
Contrast these manipulations with the measured and informative Senate testimony of climatologist John Christy earlier this month.
In an effort to move the science debate completely into the political arena, Mr. Krupp implies that with the exception of a few enlightened Republican governors and captains of industry, most “conservatives” are climate skeptics - and vice versa. But some of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include the politically liberal physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever; famously independent physicist and author, Freeman Dyson; environmentalist futurist, and father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock; left-center chemist, Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the
German environmental movement, and many others who would bristle at being lumped into the conservative camp.
Whether increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is bad or good is a question of science. And in science, truth and facts are not the playthings of causes, nor a touchstone of political correctness, nor true religion, nor “what I tell you three times is true.”
Humanity has always dealt with changing climate. In addition to the years of drought and excessive moisture described above, the geological record makes it clear that there have been longer-term periods of drought, lasting for many years as during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to many decades or centuries. None of these past climate changes, which had a profound effect on humanity, had anything to do with CO2, and there are good reasons for skepticism that doubling CO2 will make much difference compared to natural climate changes.
It is increasingly clear that doubling CO2 is unlikely to increase global temperature more than about one degree Celsius, not the much larger values touted by the global warming establishment. In fact, CO2 levels are below the optimum levels for most plants, and there are persuasive arguments that the mild warming and increased agricultural yields from doubling CO2 will be an overall benefit for humanity. Let us debate and deal with serious, real problems facing our society, not elaborately orchestrated, phony ones, like the trumped-up need to drastically curtail CO2 emissions.
Roger W. Cohen
Fellow, American Physical Society
La Jolla, Calif.
William Happer
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.
Richard S. Lindzen
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Mass.