AUSTIN - The State of Texas today filed four motions to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing new federal regulations that threaten the Texas economy and jeopardize Texas jobs. Specifically, Texas petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to stay the EPA’s greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding, the Light-Duty Vehicle Rule, the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) Interpretive Rule, and the Tailoring Rule.
Court documents filed by the State explain that the EPA’s Endangerment Finding is legally unsupported because the agency outsourced its legally mandated “scientific assessment” to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had the objectivity, reliability and propriety of its scientific assessments called into question after a scandal erupted late last year. The State explained that the IPCC - and therefore the EPA - relied on flawed science to conclude that greenhouse emissions endanger public health and welfare. Because the Administration predicated its Endangerment Finding on the IPCC’s questionable reports, the State is seeking to prevent the EPA’s new Rules - and the economic harm that will result from those regulations - from being imposed on Texas employers, workers and enforcement agencies.
Texas is also seeking to stay the imposition of the Light-Duty Vehicle Rule, which is predicated on the EPA’s flawed Endangerment Finding. The Light-Duty Vehicle Rule attempts to apply new federal emissions regulations to passenger vehicles such as cars and trucks. Court documents filed by the State explain that the Light-Duty Vehicle Rule is flawed because it purports to regulate pollutants that are not even found in vehicle emissions. Further, although federal law requires that new environmental regulations quantify their purported health and welfare benefits, the EPA failed to include that data when the Light-Duty Vehicle Rule was published. Third, despite a national economic downturn, the EPA also failed to adequately consider the harmful economic impact of the mobile source regulations - even though a thorough economic impact analysis is required by the Clean Air Act.
Under the so-called PSD Interpretive Rule - which the State is also challenging - once a substance is regulated for any purpose, all emissions sources are subject to regulation. Thus, because the Light-Duty Vehicle Rule attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for the first time, that Rule extends those regulations to stationary sources such as factories, refineries, large office buildings with boilers - any stationery location that emits greenhouse gases. Although EPA officials plainly knew their regulations would extend to stationery sources, the federal regulator’s Light-Duty Vehicle Rule economic impact analysis failed to consider the economic implications of imposing its greenhouse gas regulations on factories, refineries, and other large employers.
The State is challenging the PSD Interpretive Rule itself because the Rule leads to absurd results. Effective January 2, 2011, the Rule requires that greenhouse gases be automatically regulated pursuant to the Clean Air Act’s statutorily specified emission level requirements. However, the emission levels were written to control toxic pollution - not carbon dioxide and other non-toxic substances. As a result the Clean Air Act contains lower emission levels than are practicable for regulating high-volume, non-toxic greenhouse gases. Thus, by the EPA’s own admission, the PSD Interpretive Rule produces an absurd result.
To solve the “absurd results” problem of its own creation, the EPA promulgated the so-called Tailoring Rule, which purports to limit greenhouse gas permitting and regulation to only the largest emitters. Texas is challenging the Tailoring Rule because the EPA is attempting to ignore the plain language of the Clean Air Act and rewrite the law to advance its regulatory agenda. The Tailoring Rule would require Texas to reinterpret or revise its ‘State Implementation Plan’ - which is the State’s federally-approved Clean Air Act enforcement program - by Jan. 2, 2011. If the State fails to meet the Administration’s requirement, the EPA will impose its own federal implementation plan upon Texas. Thus, today’s court filings challenge the EPA’s attempts to ignore federal law, impose their federally mandated deadlines and force Texas to spend millions of dollars advancing the Administration’s regulatory agenda.
The State’s petitions for stay ask the court to prevent the EPA from imposing their greenhouse gas regulations until the State’s legal challenge is resolved. By granting the State’s motions to stay, the Court will provide greater regulatory certainty, avoid government waste, and protect Texas jobs. See release here.
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California Braces for Showdown on Emissions
By Adam Nagourney, for the New York Times
LOS ANGELES - A ballot initiative to suspend a milestone California law curbing greenhouse gas emissions is drawing a wave of contributions from out-of-state oil companies, raising concerns among conservationists as it emerges as a test of public support for potentially costly environmental measures during tough economic times.
Charles and David Koch, the billionaires from Kansas who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement, donated $1 million to the campaign to suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act, which was passed four years ago, and signaled that they were prepared to invest more in the cause. With their contribution, proponents of the proposition have raised $8.2 million, with $7.9 million coming from energy companies, most of them out of state.
This latest embrace by the Koch brothers of a conservative cause jolted environmental leaders who are worried that a vote against the law in this state - with its long history of environmental activism - would amount to a powerful setback for emission control efforts in Washington and statehouses across the country.
“It would have big implications,” said George P. Shultz, the former secretary of state, who is a chairman of a campaign to defeat the ballot initiative. “That is one reason why these outside companies are pouring money in to try to derail the same thing. At the same time, the reverse is true: they put this fat in the fire and if we win, that also sends a message.”
Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, who has been traveling California to rally support against the proposition, called it “by far the single most important ballot measure to date testing public support for continuing to move to a clean energy economy.”
The campaign against California’s greenhouse gas law comes as business groups have invested heavily across the country in trying to defeat members of Congress who voted for a cap-and-trade bill that also mandated emission reductions; the bill passed the House but failed in the Senate in the face of strong opposition from lawmakers in industrial states.
Traditionally, public support for environmental measures suffers during tough economic times. Here in California, backers of the initiative have seized on that anxiety - which is particularly acute in this state, with its 12.3 percent unemployment rate - in search of a victory.
“I believe the battle over cap and trade in America is taking place in California on Nov. 2 of this year,” said Dan Logue, a Republican assemblyman from north-central California who wrote the ballot initiative. He added: “What we’re saying is, this is not the time for political correctness. This is a time for putting America back to work; let the experiments happen later.”
The law in question, known as A.B. 32, mandates slashing carbon and other greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, by forcing power companies and industries to cap their emissions and by slashing carbon in gasoline. Some oil industry leaders said it would force them to invest millions of dollars to comply, and asserted that it would force companies to cut jobs and raise the price of gas at the pumps.
Although the vast majority of the money being contributed to fight the law is coming from oil companies, the oil industry is clearly not united in opposition: some major California oil refineries, including Chevron, have notably stayed out of the battle so far.
The ballot initiative, known as Proposition 23, would suspend the law from going into effect as scheduled in 2012 until state unemployment falls to 5.5 percent or lower for at least four consecutive quarters. That has happened only three times over the last 40 years, state officials said; thus, the proposition could have the practical effect of killing the law.
“The company believes that implementing A.B. 32 will cause significant job losses and higher energy costs in California,” said Katie Stavinoha, a spokesman for Flint Hills Resources, the petroleum company in Wichita, Kan., owned by the Koch brothers. “What’s more, the company thinks it sets a bad precedent for other state and federal governments to do the same thing.”
That said, the issue hardly breaks cleanly along business lines, reflecting in part the diverse business environment in California, which has always had a strong research and development sector, powered by venture capitalists ready to finance cutting-edge technology. Many business groups have opposed the drive to suspend the greenhouse law, and the list of of contributors backing the measure is notable for the absence of venture capitalists.
“There is a huge clean energy revolution going on: this is going to happen,” said Thomas F. Steyer, founder of Farallon Capital Management, a hedge fund in San Francisco, and a co-chairman with Mr. Shultz of the campaign to defeat the proposition. “If we’re not careful, it’s just not going to happen in the United States.”
Mr. Steyer has contributed $2.5 million to the effort to defeat the initiative and said he was prepared to contribute an additional $2.5 million.
Mr. Schultz said that since the passage of the law, “a whole industry is developing here, and I might say a lot of jobs are connected with it.” “There’s been a virtual eruption of research and development activities of all kinds on alternate ways to produce and use energy,” he said.
In most years, this should not be a worrisome battleground for environmentalists. The greenhouse gas law enjoyed strong support from the public when it passed four years ago, according polls. The roster of opponents to Proposition 23 includes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, who views the law as a defining accomplishment of his career here.
Early polling suggests that voters who know about the measure are evenly split. Yet supporters said they were concerned that the proposition could slip through at a time when Democratic spirits are low. More significant is the question of how much more supporters of Prop 23 can raise to finance their campaign. Of the $8.2 million raised so far, $1 million came from the Koch firm, $4 million from the Valero Energy Corporation and $1.5 million from the Tesoro Corporation; both corporations are based in San Antonio.
“We have every reason to believe that they are going to put the money in to run a big television campaign in the most expensive media market in the country,’ said Annie Notthoff, the California advocacy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “We certainly are expecting to have a fight on our hands.”
Supporters of the law, if nervous about the proposition, remain optimistic than they can beat it back at the polls in November, and hope that such an outcome would have the opposite effect nationally that opponents of the bill are seeking. “If the proposition loses, the lesson is going to be there’s no going back,” said Wesley P. Warren, director of programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Californians and Texans have a chance to prevent the alternative energy, ‘green job’ failures and economic pains that Europe went through. European countries are running away from the very same programs and efforts the environmentalists and the politicans they so lavishly support are pushing here. If you live in those states make your voices heard.
White House science adviser John Holdren speaks at the National Press Club in Washington Oct. 8, 2009. (AP Photo)
From the administration that brought you “man-caused disaster” and “overseas contingency operation,” another terminology change is in the pipeline. The White House wants the public to start using the term “global climate disruption” in place of “global warming”—fearing the latter term oversimplifies the problem and makes it sound less dangerous than it really is.
White House science adviser John Holdren urged people to start using the phrase during a speech last week in Oslo, echoing a plea he made three years earlier. Holdren said global warming is a “dangerous misnomer” for a problem far more complicated than a rise in temperature.
The call comes as Congress prepares to adjourn for the season without completing work on a stalled climate bill. The term global warming has long been criticized as inaccurate, and the new push could be an attempt to re-shape climate messaging for next year’s legislative session. “They’re trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff,” said Republican pollster Adam Geller, noting that Democrats also rolled out a new logo and now refer to the Bush tax cuts as “middle-class tax cuts.”
He said the climate change change-up likely derives from flagging public support for their bill to regulate emissions. He said the term “global warming” makes the cause easy to ridicule whenever there’s a snowstorm. “Every time we’re digging our cars out—what global warming?” he said. “(Global climate disruption is) more of a sort of generic blanket term, I guess, that can apply in all weather conditions.”
It’s unclear why Holdren prefers “global climate disruption” over “climate change,” the most commonly used alternative to “global warming.” Asked about the speech, Holdren spokesman Rick Weiss said only that the Office of Science and Technology Policy has been transparent about Holdren’s remarks. “The PowerPoint for Dr. Holdren’s Oslo presentation has been public on our website since the day after he returned,” he said. Click here to see the presentation.
In a 2007 presentation, Holdren suggested a similar phrase change—“global climatic disruption.” The explanation he gave last week was that the impact from greenhouse gas emissions covers a broad “disruption” of climate patterns ranging from precipitation to storms to hot and cold temperatures. Those changes, he said, affect the availability of water, productivity of farms, spread of disease and other factors.
He’s not the first scientist to publicly veer away from “global warming.” NASA published an analysis on its website in 2008 explaining that it avoids the term because temperature change “isn’t the most severe effect of changing climate.” “Changes to precipitation patterns and sea levels are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone,” the report said.
But Republicans predicted that re-branding the issue would have limited effect on the legislative effort. GOP strategist Pete Snyder said he doubts the term is going to change hearts and minds. “Are they going to change the name of weathermen to disruption analysts?” he quipped. GOP lawmakers already exploited a terminology change of their own by re-branding the “cap-and-trade” bill as “cap-and-tax.”
Holdren’s “global climate disruption” isn’t the most convoluted term to grace the climate debate, however. According to the NASA article, early studies on the impact humans had on global climate referred to the relationship as “inadvertent climate modification.” See story here.
By Nicholas Ballasy
President Barack Obama confers with his top science and technology adviser, John P. Holdren. (White House photo)
In a video interview this week, White House Office of Science and Technology Director John P. Holdren told CNSNews.com that he would use the “free market economy” to implement the “massive campaign” he advocated along with Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich to “de-develop the United States.”
In his role as President Barack Obama’s top science and technology adviser, Holdren deals with issues ranging from global warming to health care.
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren wrote along with Paul and Anne H. Ehrlich in the “recommendations” concluding their 1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.
“De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation,” Holdren and the Ehrlichs wrote.
“Resources must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. “This effort must be largely political, especially with regard to our overexploitation of world resources, but the campaign should be strongly supplemented by legal and boycott action against polluters and others whose activities damage the environment. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.”
CNSNews.com asked Holdren about this passage on Tuesday after he participated in an Environmental Protection Agency forum celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Clean Air Act.
CNSNews.com asked: “You wrote ‘a massive campaign must be launched to restore a high quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States’ in your book Human Ecology. Could you explain what you meant by de-develop the United States?”
Holdren responded: “What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality. Thanks a lot.”
CNSNews.com then asked: “And how do you plan on implementing that?”
“Through the free market economy,” Holdren said.
CNSNews.com also asked Holdren to comment on the declaration he made in 1995 along with co-authors Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily of Stanford University that mankind needed to “face up” to “a world of zero net physical growth” that would require reductions in consumption.
“We know for certain, for example, that: No form of material growth (including population growth) other than asymptotic growth is sustainable,” Holdren, Ehrlich and Daily wrote in an essay for the World Bank titled, “The Meaning of Sustainability.”
“Many of the practices inadequately supporting today’s population of 5.5 billion people are unsustainable; and [a]t the sustainability limit, there will be a tradeoff between population and energy-matter throughput per person, hence, ultimately, between economic activity per person and well-being per person,” Holdren, Ehrlich and Daily wrote. “This is enough to say quite a lot about what needs to be faced up to eventually (a world of zero net physical growth), what should be done now (change unsustainable practices, reduce excessive material consumption, slow down population growth), and what the penalty will be for postponing attention to population limitation (lower well-being per person).”
Holdren would not comment Tuesday about this statement, saying he had to get to another engagement.
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Obama’s Science Adviser: Don’t Call it ‘Global Warming’
By Eric Scheiner, CNS News
John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says that the term “global warming” is “a dangerous misnomer” that should be replaced with “global climate disruption.”
At the Environmental Protection Agency’s 40th celebration of the Clean Air Act on Tuesday, Holdren said, “I think one of the failures of the scientific community was in embracing the term ‘global warming’. Global warming is in fact a dangerous misnomer.” And in a speech last week in Norway, echoing remarks he made at a 2007 speech at Harvard University, Holdren said the term “global climate disruption” should be used instead of “global warming.”
At the 2010 Kavli Prize Science Forum in Oslo, Norway on Sept. 6, Holdren gave a presentation entitled “Climate Change Science and Policy: What Do We Know? What Should We Do?” The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has posted a PDF-version of Holdren’s presentation of that speech on the White House Website. One panel in the presentation says: “‘Global warming’ is a (dangerous) misnomer. That term implies something...uniform across the planet, mainly about temperature, gradual, quite possibly benign. What’s actually happening is...highly nonuniform, not just about temperature, rapid compared to capacities for adjustment, harmful for most places and times. We should call it ‘global climate disruption.’”
Rudy Baum, the editor-in-chief of Chemical and Engineering News who attended the event in Oslo, and wrote in his blog about Holdren’s remarks. The blog states: “Holdren then discussed the Obama Administration’s views on climate change. ‘Global warming’ is a dangerous misnomer,” Holdren observed. “It suggests that the changes are uniform, primarily about temperature, gradual, and likely benign. None of these are true.”
“In fact, Holdren pointed out, the changes that are occurring are highly nonuniform, not only about temperature, occurring rapidly, and quite harmful to the environment. The correct term, he said, should be ‘global climate disruption.’”
On Sept. 13, 2007 during a presentation at the World Affairs Council of Northern California, Holdren said, “The widely used term of global warming is in fact a misnomer.”
“I like to use the term ‘global climatic disruption’ in preference to ‘global warming’ or even ‘global heating,’ which is maybe a little better,” Holdren said.
When addressing the issue during a Harvard symposium on Nov. 6, 2007 Holdren said, “The first message is that ‘global warming’ is a misnomer. It implies something gradual, something uniform, something quite possibly benign. And what we are experiencing is none of those. It is rapid in relation to the capacity of societies and ecosystems to respond. It is highly non-uniform and it is certainly not benign. And that’s why I prefer the term ‘global climate disruption’ to ‘global warming.’” See post here.
See post here. See much more on Climate Depot.