Guest opinion by Paul Driessen

The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency. The case will determine how far EPA can extend its regulatory overreach, to control “climate changing” carbon dioxide from power plants and other facilities - by ignoring the Constitution’s “separation of powers” provisions, rewriting clear language in the Clean Air Act, and disregarding laws that require the agency to consider both the costs and benefits of its regulations and what it is regulating.

Put more bluntly, the Court will decide whether EPA may deceive the American people, by implementing regulations that have no basis in honest science and will be ruinous to our economy. It is the most important energy, economic and environmental case to come before the Court it in decades.

Suppose a used car dealership routinely rolled back speedometer mileage, deleted customer complaints from its website, posted fabricated compliments, and lied about defects and accidents, to sell more cars. Or a manufacturer misstated its sales and bottom line, failed to mention major safety violations and fines, and made false claims about new product lines, to attract investors and inflate stock prices?

Both would be indicted for fraud. Now apply the same standards to EPA, whose actions and regulations will affect far more people: virtually every family, facility, company and community in the United States. Jurors would likely rule that the agency is engaged in systematic deceit, dishonesty and fraud.

See the Minority Report: EPA’s Playbook: Fraud, Deceit and Secret Science

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy insists there is “no more urgent threat to public health than climate change.” She is determined to impose President Obama’s anti-hydrocarbon agenda. “I just look at what the climate scientists tell me,” McCarthy told Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Translated, she means she talks only to those who advocate climate alarmism, and ignores all contrary scientists and evidence.

In fact, thousands of scientists and studies argue that there is no empirical, observational evidence to support any of her claims. Recent NOAA and NASA temperature data confirm that global warming ended in 1997 and continues today, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increase steadily, improving plant growth worldwide. Seas are rising at barely seven inches per century, and there is no evidence that recent weather events are any more frequent, intense or “dangerous” than what mankind has dealt with forever.

There is no convincing evidence that carbon dioxide emissions have replaced the powerful, complex, interrelated natural forces that have always driven climate and weather changes. No evidence supports the notion that slashing CO2 emissions and trashing our economy will “stabilize” global temperatures and climate variations, or that developing countries will stop pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

EPA brushes all this aside. The agency just assumes and asserts human causes and disastrous results, disregards any and all experts and evidence to the contrary, and ignores any and all costs imposed by its regulations.

It has also violated the Constitution, by rewriting specific Clean Air Act provisions that specify 250-ton-per-year emission limits, in sections that EPA is relying on for its climate rulemakings. To shut down coal-fired power plants, the agency illegally and arbitrarily raised the threshold to 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, and ignored the fact that in 692 bills Congress never contemplated applying these sections to greenhouse gases. Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, EPA will continue rewriting the law, gradually tightening its standards to control millions of natural gas generators, refineries, factories, paper mills, shopping malls, apartment and office buildings, hospitals, schools and even large homes.

EPA and other agencies have paid out billions in taxpayer dollars to finance and hype “research” making ludicrous claims that manmade global warming is hidden in really deep ocean waters or obscured by pine tree vapors; tens of thousands of offshore wind turbines could weaken hurricanes; and climate change will cause more rapes and murders. They have used “climate disruption” claims to justify giving eco-activist groups billions of taxpayer dollars to promote alarmist climate propaganda...spending tens of billions on crony-corporatist “green energy” and “climate resilience” programs… and forcing the United States and other nations to spend hundreds of billions on worthless climate change prevention capers.

EPA’s so-called “science” is intolerable “secret science.” The agency refuses to share it with outside experts or even members of Congress and businesses impacted by its regulations. The agency claims this taxpayer-funded information is somehow “proprietary,” even though it is being used to justify onerous regulations that dictate and impair our lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards and life spans. EPA refuses to be transparent because it wants to prevent any examination of its internal machinations.

Just as bad, EPA routinely ignores its own scientific standards, and many climate reports it relies on come straight from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, as the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow observed in its amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in this case, the IPCC has been caught red-handed presenting student papers, activist press releases and emailed conjecture as “peer-reviewed expert reports.” It has been caught deleting graphs that clearly show its computer models were worthless, and employing junk models like the one that generated Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” to support assertions that it is 95% certain that humans are causing climate change chaos.

These computer models are built on unproven alarmist assumptions, have never been “validated” and are not merely “unverifiable.” They are flat-out contradicted by real-world evidence right outside the EPA windows, making their results worthless for sound, legitimate public policy. Any yet they drive policy.

In violation of federal laws and executive orders, EPA hypothesizes, concocts or exaggerates almost every conceivable carbon “cost” - to agriculture, forestry, water resources, coastal cities, human health and disease, ecosystems and wildlife. But it completely ignores even the most obvious and enormous benefits of using fossil fuels and emitting plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide: affordable heat and electricity, jobs, transportation, better crop growth and nutrition, and improved living standards, health and welfare.

In reality, hydrocarbon and carbon dioxide benefits outweigh their alleged costs by as much as 500 to 1! That means EPA’s “climate change mitigation” rules impose costs on society that exceed even EPA’s exaggerated regulatory benefits by as much as 500 to 1. The EPA “cure” is far worse than the “disease.”

And let’s not forget that one of Ms. McCarthy’s senior advisors devising the agency’s climate change policies and regulations was none other than John Beale - the guy who bilked us taxpayers out of $1 million in salary and travel expenses for his mythical second job as a CIA agent. To suppose his fraudulent actions did not extend to his official EPA duties defies belief. And yet EPA has apparently taken no steps to reexamine Beale’s analyses or conclusions.

EPA has done all of this knowingly, deliberately, with full knowledge of the grossly deficient foundations of its pseudo science and policies to drive an anti-hydrocarbon agenda, without regard for the consequences that agenda will inflict on millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide.

This goes beyond mere sloppiness or incompetence. It is dishonest. It violates the law. According to standards applicable to every citizen and business in the land, it is fraudulent. By controlling the energy that powers our homes, cars, businesses and nation, EPA’s carbon and carbon dioxide policies will control and impair our economy, wipe out tens of millions of jobs, and kill thousands of people for little or no health or environmental benefits.

The real threat to public health and welfare is not climate change. It is EPA and what this rogue agency is doing in the name of preventing climate change. If the Supreme Court allows this, by giving carte blanche authority to EPA, the battle will rage on countless other fronts, because voters are sick and tired of being lied to, manipulated, defrauded, and forced to pay outrageous prices for oppressive regulations.

Democrats say they plan to use climate change to attack Republicans in 2014. I say, Bring it on!

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death

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The “Reposition” Fairytale
Opinions by Dr. Gordon Fulks

The “reposition” fairytale is indeed crucial to understanding how political activists with no scientific training have promoted the ‘Big Global Warming Lie’ by marginalizing scientific opponents as working for energy companies.

Here is a link to an article about one of the worst perpetrators, Boston Globe journalist Ross Gelbspan:

Within this article is the link to the original memos that Greenpeace obtained.  They involve a proposed 1991 PR campaign involving Dr. Pat Michaels and others that was apparently never executed.

Here are relevant paragraphs from Russell Cook’s analysis in the article above:

“But Gelbspan didn’t discover the memos. They actually were reported in a 1991 New York Times article which claimed they came from an unnamed source at the Sierra Club. Gore’s 1992 book, Earth in the Balance - published five years prior to Gelbspan’s book - says on page 360 that his Senate office received documents”...leaked from the National Coal Association...” and quotes identical lines that appear in Gelbspan’s 1997 book.

So Gore apparently attributed discovery of the “reposition global warming” plan to Gelbspan, a “Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter,” to apparently cover up his role in acquiring and then spinning the plan some four years later. If you read the actual memos you will see the spin is false, too: The memos Gelbspan quotes were a rejected proposal for the PR campaign, and were never actually implemented, thus they would not have been seen by other fossil fuel company executives. There was no industry directive to “reposition global warming,” period.”

The “reposition” story from climate alarmists has been so successfully drilled into the public consciousness that journalists worldwide still use it as their excuse for not covering Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming the way they routinely cover all other topics, namely with balance.

This is an amazing story of how Gore and Gelbspan successfully misused (and still misuse) old memos to smear all scientists who disagree with them as alleged oil company shills.

This tactic has largely obscured the fact that neither Gore nor Gelbspan has any scientific training to allow them any legitimate opinions on climate science.  They have been able to leverage their ignorance into an alleged majority opinion by marginalizing ALL who disagree with them, including especially those of us with strong academic credentials.

Senate Democrats throw pajama party to warn of global warming impacts at the capitol even though there has been no warming for 18 years.

UN hides model failures
Posted By Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller On 2:38 PM 03/07/2014

The United Nations doesn’t want you to know the facts about global warming, according to a new report out of Europe.

Over the years climate scientists have been reducing their estimates of how much global warming will occur over the next 70 to 100 years if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were doubled - an estimate called “climate sensitivity.”

But readers of the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment would be ignorant of this, according to a report by the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The IPCC’s fourth climate assessment in 2007 estimated that the Earth would warm 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century - this estimate was in a range of warming from 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. But as the 2000s wore on and little warming occurred, climate scientists began to lower their climate sensitivity estimates from 3 to 2 degrees Celsius in a century and only 1.5 degrees of warming in the next 70 years.

But this revelation was only hinted at in the IPCC’s 2013 climate assessment. Instead of lowering their central climate sensitivity measure down from 3 degrees Celsius, the IPCC simply did not give a central estimate and just reduced its lower-bound warming estimate from 2 to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Now the IPCC’s warming range for the next hundred years is 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.

“Good empirical evidence of both long-term warming and that over a seventy year period now imply very different expectations of future warming than do climate models - some 40% to 50% lower to 2081-2100,” according to the study by independent UK climate scientist Nic Lewis and Dutch science writer Marcel Crok.

“This is almost certainly the most important finding of climate science in recent years, particularly since there are good reasons to doubt the reliability of climate model forecasts,” the authors continue.

“However, in its report the IPCC only alludes to this issue in an oblique fashion,” the authors add. “Moreover, rather than reducing its best estimate of climate sensitivity in the light of the new empirical estimates, it simply reduced the lower bound of the uncertainty range and omitted to give a best estimate, without adequately explaining why it had been necessary to do so.”

The IPCC only added a paragraph on why they did not give central climate sensitivity estimate in the technical summary of its final report - published in January 2014, four months after the report’s initial release.

Climate sensitivity is used by policymakers to predict global temperature increases and economic costs, and therefore is a crucial estimate to nail down. In the U.S., the Obama administration is using the UN’s climate sensitivity measures to come up with its “social cost of carbon” (SCC) estimate, which applies monetary damages to each ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere.

Last year, the Obama administration raised the SCC from from $21 per ton to $37 per ton before the president went public with his plans to cut U.S. emissions 17 percent by 2020. Raising the SCC inflates the benefits of policies that reduce carbon emissions, therefore, giving more justification to Obama’s fight against global warming.

“The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way,” Obama said in his 2014 State of the Union Address. “But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say, ‘Yes, we did.’”

But the recent GWPF report casts doubt on Obama’s justification for raising the SCC to $37 per ton, as it was based on the UN’s misleading climate assessment. If the IPCC can no longer give a central climate sensitivity estimate, can the Obama administration credibly peg a price to carbon dioxide emissions?

“It should be obvious that no SCC estimates should be published until a credible climate sensitivity probability distribution is developed,” wrote attorney Francis Menton in his comments to the White House on the SCC changes. “This multi- agency effort has relied on the IPCC work, but IPCC’s own results imply that the U.S. government should stop publishing any estimates of SCC until such a credible distribution exists.”

The Obama administration, however, has showed no indication that it intends to scale back its SCC estimate or scrap it altogether.

Watch for the movie “blue” coming soon that will recolor green, painting that radical agenda in its true color - red.

See Former Governor John Sununu on the Politics of Global Warming...It Ain’t Pretty and read more here.
February 24, 2014 by Anthony Watts

WUWT has been granted exclusive first access to this new legal document challenging the EPA’s proposed use of calculations on SCC.

While this submission to OMB from Attorney Menton may look forbiddingly legalistic document to many WUWT readers, a number of you may well have signed one or more of the Amicus Briefs and other materials cited in it.It is important to read this because it provides a window into the future of a potential carbon tax in the USA.

I consider it a “must read” for those of you who are very concerned about the EPA’s current and proposed CO2 –related regulations. EPA uses its Social Cost of Carbon estimates to justify all such regulations. And, these estimates are also being used as recommended starting points for future carbon taxes. Enough said as to why it makes sense to read and think about the submission?

If not, you will note it begins by showing that using IPCC’s own words, its estimates of Climate Sensitivity must be treated using what the mathematics of decision theory would call under “Complete Ignorance Uncertainty.” Therefore, EPA’s reliance on IPCC is hardly justified.

Next, it argues that, in the court room, EPA’s own Endangerment Finding was predicated on three easy to understand “Lines of Evidence,” where each has now been shown to be invalid.

The three lines of evidence used by the EPA are A. B. and C.

The hot spot has not appeared, surface temperatures are stalled, and climate models aren’t modeling reality, yet, in the arcane world of the court system, EPA presses on as if these problems don’t exist.

Finally, it points out that the methodology now being used to calculate the SCC estimates is total nonsense for EPA’s purposed use, yet they are being considered “good to go” at this stage of the game.

Attorney Francis J. Menton, Jr. wrote a long letter in this issue to the OMB which can be sen in the long full post on WUWT here.

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Will Supreme Court permit EPA deceit and tyranny?

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in what could be the most important energy, economic and environmental case to come before it in decades. Here at CFACT, we have been following this case (Utility Air Regulatory Group vs. EPA) for some time now.

In fact, CFACT submitted two amicus (friend of the court) briefs for it: the first arguing that the Supreme Court should hear the case; the second presenting a more detailed analysis of what is at stake and how the Court should decide the case.

Environmentalist groups and the Obama Administration say the issue is whether the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to require that power plants and other industrial facilities get EPA permits to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Questions by the justices during oral arguments suggest that some are very skeptical about EPA’s assertions of authority, while the Court’s liberal wing seems inclined to give the agency the broadest possible authority to interpret the law, decide the science and regulate as it wishes.

If the Court sides with EPA, there will be virtually no limitations on how far Executive Branch agencies can go, in twisting science, laws and our Constitution to advance their agendas – while ignoring facts, genuine science, and the impacts of regulations on our lives, livelihoods and liberties.

CFACT’s analyses, amicus briefs and articles demonstrate that the issues are far more fundamental and important. The real issues before the Court are these:

How far can the EPA and Obama Administration extend their regulatory overreach, by rewriting the Clean Air Act, ignoring the Constitution’s “separation of powers” doctrine, and disregarding federal laws that require them to consider both the costs and benefits of their regulatory actions?

May the EPA and Obama Administration ignore the fact that, between 1989 and 2010, Congress considered and rejected almost 700 bills addressing various aspects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and simply impose their radical anti-hydrocarbon agenda by executive fiat?

May the Executive Branch continue to ignore the enormous benefits of using hydrocarbon energy and emitting carbon dioxide including affordable heat and electricity, better crop growth and nutrition, more jobs, and improved living standards, health and welfare and focus solely on the alleged and exaggerated “costs” of carbon and carbon dioxide?

Should EPA be permitted to impose these job-killing greenhouse gas regulations even though full compliance with them would achieve zero benefits, because emissions from rapidly developing countries will continue increasing total atmospheric CO2 levels, and because climate change is driven not by carbon dioxide, but by natural forces over which we have no control?

In short, should the EPA and Obama Administration be permitted to continue regulating in a manner that can properly be described as deceitful, fraudulent, illegal and unconstitutional?

Let’s hope the Supreme Court agrees the answer is a firm “No.”

For nature and people too,

Craig Rucker
Executive Director CFACT