On November 23, 2009 the Congressional Budget Office issued “Economic and Budget Issue Brief: The Costs of Reducing Greenhouse-Gas Emissions.” This brief echoed many of the points The Heritage Foundation has made in its reports, WebMemos, blogs and our responses to a request from Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. For example: A. The CBO correctly notes that efficiency mandates (standards) don’t lower the cost of cap and trade. Here’s how they say it: “However, standards would tend to increase the costs of a cap-and-trade …
All the talk in Washington is surrounding a government health insurance plan, but there’s a little discussed insurance plan in the Boxer-Kerry cap and trade bill that’s worth some attention. The Senate version of the cap and trade bill includes a section that grants the President the authority to “direct relevant federal agencies” to impose additional greenhouse gas regulations. Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and John Barrasso (R-WY) have been working assiduously to uncover the true costs of cap and trade legislation. Greenhouse gas concentrations are measured in parts per million …
Spin the wheel and whatever number the ball lands on will be the new tipping point we must get below; if not, catastrophic global warming to cause 2012-style disasters on our planet. A few years ago the upper limit on carbon dioxide was 450 parts per million (ppm), which meant an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Now it’s 350 ppm: In the past four years, climate scientists, led by NASA’s James Hansen, have dramatically altered the goal. To avoid the collapse of the continental ice-sheets and …
The road to Hell was paved with good intentions and so too are California’s green energy initiatives. Environmental activists point to California as the petri dish for the burgeoning of a green economy. Last week, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Lisa Jackson, gave a speech at the Governor’s Global Climate Summit change held in Los Angeles, which highlighted the important role that California has played in climate change legislation: California has been out front on energy efficiency, greenhouse gas reduction, transportation innovation, and so much more. In many ways, the country …
As Congress tries to knock out the economy in one fell swoop with its economically dangerous cap and trade proposal, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking a different approach: proposing smaller, regulatory jabs at the economy with the intent to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. First, the EPA worked with the Department of Transportation to propose new vehicle standards – a 5 percent annual increase in fuel economy starting with the 2012 model year, reaching 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. Last week, they announced the …
The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” In case you haven’t heard, that was Secretary of Energy Steven Chu discussing your ability to curb greenhouse gas emissions. As long as we’re acting like teenagers, we might as well be treated like them. According to the Obama administration, we can’t understand what greenhouse gases are, so we’ll use the terms “carbon pollution” or “heat-trapping emissions” instead. From …
Global warming skeptics generally fall into four camps. 1.) We are in a period of global warming just as we could enter a period of global cooling in the future. 2.) The earth is warming but it’s not attributed to man-made activities. 3.) There is some truth to man-made warming but it falls far short of being a crisis. 4.) Global warming is real, man is considerably causing the problem, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Climatologists from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released report that …
