Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson recently announced that her agency would proceed with twice-delayed regulations targeting power plants that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Mrs. Jackson’s decision ignores three vital pieces of information that should make it easy for Congress to prevent unelected bureaucrats from regulating CO2: • The EPA inspector general’s finding that EPA did not follow federal data quality standards in preparing its “endangerment finding” regarding greenhouse gases. • The profusion of scientific dissent. • The massive economic costs and minimal environmental benefits. In …
If clean-energy means “low-carbon” (a definition to which I object), then the U.S. is way, way ahead of China in the clean-energy race. If it means low-everything-else, we are still way, way ahead, since China has a pathetic record on controlling genuine pollution. Getting hung up on commoditized solar-panel or wind-turbine production ignores the phenomenal increase in coal-generated power in China—an increase that swamps that country’s installed wind and solar production. From parity with the U.S. around 2005, China’s CO2 emissions will grow to roughly double America’s in 2012. Here’s …
The Environmental Protection Agency called a Daily Caller report “comically wrong” this morning. That is an interesting analysis given that the EPA’s hideously bad global warming regulations are more of a joke than actual regulatory structure. Either way, the fun and games will soon end when Americans are paying higher energy prices and businesses are shedding jobs as a result of these “comically wrong” regulations. Earlier this week, The Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle wrote that “The Environmental Protection Agency has said new greenhouse gas regulations, as proposed, may be “absurd” …
Acid rain. Expanding deserts. Global cooling. As Reason.tv explains in its video “The Top Five Environmental Disasters That Didn’t Happen,” all of the above were moments of environmental hysteria that led to nothing. Others they cite? Frankenfoods, the end of biodiversity (the claim that 70-80% of the Earth’s species would be extinct by 1995), running out of energy, a “silent spring” (an apocalyptic prediction about pesticides), and Malthusian famine (hundreds of millions of people starving to death by the 1970s). Under the Obama Administration, concerns over the environment — and …
Realizing the costs and folly of instituting a massive greenhouse gas regulatory regime, Members of Congress stopped cap-and-trade legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), from becoming law in the last Congress. But their job is not complete. Now unelected bureaucrats at the EPA are attempting to bypass the legislative process through regulatory dictate by using The Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide. The problem is that Congress never intended The Clean Air Act to cover CO2 and the result of doing so would extract …
All the world mourned the human toll taken by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Thousands of lives were lost; hundreds of thousands more shattered. Of course, natural disasters inflict economic destruction as well, and estimates of the recent disasters’ cost to Japan are now coming in. Catastrophe modeler Risk Management Solutions Inc. (RMS) puts economic losses from the earthquake and tsunami between $200 billion and $300 billion. That estimate, RMS says, “reflects not only property damage but secondary consequences, such as disruption to power supplies, evacuations and decommissioning of several …
When the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill passed in the House before last year’s summer recess, Members voting for its passage heard loudly from constituents. Since then the Senate has been reluctant to move forward with a counterpart. It took Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Kerry (D-MA) nearly a year to release their cap and trade bill. But what Congress has failed to do, the Environmental Protection Agency is willing and able. The agency has already begun the process of imposing costly and environmentally questionable CO2 cuts by using …
From the department of irony, Britain’s weather supercomputer for predicting climate change is one of the nation’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide: The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters. The massive machine – the UK’s most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory – was installed in the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter, Devon. It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to …
Ever hear of Alan Carlin? Probably not, and that is the way the Obama Administration wants to keep it. Dr. Carlin is an Environmental Protection Agency veteran who recently wrote a damaging report, warning that the science behind climate change was questionable at best, and that we shouldn’t pass laws that will hurt American families and hobble the nation’s economy based on incomplete information. Despite its promise to put science above politics, the Administration has suppressed Carlin’s report, banned him from writing or speaking about climate change, told him to …
Today the House Energy and Commerce Committee will begin a multi-day markup on the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill. Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been busy lobbying his own caucus for the necessary 30 votes to get the bill out of committee for weeks, but the bill’s fate is still in doubt. Considering that global warming legislation is a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s agenda (he needs the tax revenues to fund his other big spending priorities), why can’t the Obama administration convince their own party that their energy tax …
