President Obama’s big carbon crackdown readies for launch

Regulation without Representation.

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President Obama’s big carbon crackdown readies for launch

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/carbon-crackdown-barack-obama-106783.html#ixzz320P2ZzbD

By ERICA MARTINSON | 5/16/14 7:20 PM EDT

The EPA will launch the most dramatic anti-pollution regulation in a generation early next month, a sweeping crackdown on carbon that offers President Barack Obama his last real shot at a legacy on climate change — while causing significant political peril for red-state Democrats.

The move could produce a dramatic makeover of the power industry, shifting it away from coal-burning plants toward natural gas, solar and wind. While this is the big move environmentalists have been yearning for, it also has major political implications in November for a president already under fire for what the GOP is branding a job-killing “War on Coal,” and promises to be an election issue in energy-producing states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana.

The EPA’s proposed rule is aimed at scaling back carbon emissions from existing power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases. It’s scheduled for a public rollout June 2, after months of efforts by the administration to publicize the mounting scientific evidence that rising seas, melting glaciers and worsening storms pose a danger to human society.

“This rule is the most significant climate action this administration will take,” said Kyle Aarons at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, one of a host of groups awaiting the rule’s release. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has urged the EPA to “go ahead boldly” with the rule, saying the agency must step in where Congress has refused to act.

But for coal country, the rule is yet another indignity for an industry already facing a wave of power plant shutdowns amid hostile market forces and a series of separate EPA air regulations. Coal-state Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin have joined the criticism, echoing industry warnings that the fossil fuel was crucial to keeping the lights on in much of the U.S. during this past brutal winter.

“You have another polar vortex next year, how many people will lose their lives?” Manchin asked at a POLITICO energy policy forum Tuesday.

Other red-state Democrats like Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky’s Senate race, have disavowed Obama’s EPA proposals — she denounced an earlier agency power plant rule as an “out-of-touch Washington regulation.” West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall, one of the most vulnerable Democrats in November, complained last year that “this callous, ideologically driven agency continues to be numb to the economic pain that their reckless regulations cause.” And Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a top Republican target this year, has voted with Republicans to hobble the agency’s rules.

But supporters say that whatever the political dynamics, the need for acting on climate change is dire.

Next month’s debut comes after a series of scientific reports warning about the rising seas, worsening storms and other havoc that global warming will bring to people around the world, including effects that have already started to appear in the U.S. The White House has spent months in a steady effort to call attention to those findings, as part of an outreach that included having Obama give one-on-one interviews with television meteorologists this month.

“This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now, whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires,” Obama told one of the forecasters. “And people’s lives are at risk.”

‘We can’t sit by silently’

It’s not just the coal industry that’s losing sleep over the rule. Manufacturers and industries like oil refining have been eyeing the power plant regulations as the starting gun for a process that will eventually lead to greenhouse gas limits for a wide variety of businesses.

“These regulations could reduce the diversity of our energy supply, increase electricity and compliance costs for American businesses and shrink our competitiveness,” said Ross Eisenberg, vice president for energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. “We can’t sit by silently while that happens.”

Despite opponents’ warnings that the rule will be a death sentence for coal-fired power, EPA leaders have been adamant that they’ll offer states ample “flexibility” to devise their own ways to cut carbon. Some states may join regional cap-and-trade networks, similar to an existing Northeastern compact that has co-existed with coal plants for years. Others could push for investments in wind and solar power, or in energy efficiency programs that help homeowners and businesses reduce their demand for electricity.

The rule, set to become final in mid-2015, would apply to the nation’s thousands of coal and natural gas-fired power plants. But coal — the cheapest, dirtiest and most abundant fossil fuel — would bear the heaviest burden.

That means its impact could be greatest in states like Kentucky, a major coal producer that gets as much as 90 percent of its power from the fuel — and which as recently as 2010 had the country’s lowest electricity prices. It’s also a crucial state in the 2014 Senate electoral calendar.

Republicans have said they also intend to use Obama’s climate policies as a wedge in states such as Alaska, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina and Iowa — all places where the GOP has a chance to pick up a Senate seat now held by Democrats.

Outside the fence

Obama commanded the EPA to write the rule last summer, when he announced his climate strategy at Georgetown University. Its fate will be crucial to Obama’s legacy, and it may give the U.S. added leverage at major climate negotiations next year in Paris.

The rule’s legal fine print will be crucial, since the EPA is relying on a section of the Clean Air Act that has never been used for such a sweeping program. But a string of recent court victories has left the agency confident that the rule will withstand the inevitable legal challenges.

People who follow the agency have long expected the EPA to take on existing power plants, and the broad contours of its likely approach have been a topic of conversation among observers for years.

"Global Warming: A noted researcher who questioned the climate's sensitivity to greenhouse gases says his paper is not being published for ideological reasons and because it might fuel doubt in the climate change story.

First the climate change zealots tried to manipulate the data. [ClimateGate I] Now they are trying to control the debate they claim is over.

It's not over, though, and the science is not settled as true science never is. But those, such as Swedish climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson, who dare to challenge the climate change orthodoxy are being silenced in an organized campaign.

In an echo of the infamous Climategate scandal at Britain's University of East Anglia, one of the world's top academic journals has rejected the work of five experts, including Bengtsson. One peer reviewer said the paper "is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of 'errors' and worse from the climate skeptics media side."

The Climategate scandal was a direct result of scientists at Britain's Climate Research Unit and others, such as Michael Mann, conspiring to manipulate "unhelpful" data and to "hide the decline" in global temperatures.

The Climategate emails leaked in 2009 made it abundantly clear that the suppression of skeptical papers in learned journals and conflicting data from the alarmist establishment has long been widespread and organized within the field of climate science.

Bengtsson's paper suggests that climate is probably less sensitive to greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide than is acknowledged by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Bengtsson and his co-authors say that more research needs to be done to "reduce the underlying uncertainty."

The IPCC has not exactly been a bastion of scientific certainty or even honesty. Its claims have led to tabloid predictions of islands disappearing under rising seas — islands, such as Tuvalu, which are still there — and wild reports that the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing.

The Bengtsson paper was submitted for publication in the leading journal Environmental Research Letters. But it failed the peer-review process and was rejected. Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, was stunned not only by the rejection but also by the virulent reaction to him even daring to question climate change orthodoxy, which many consider to be almost a religious cult.

In early May, Bengtsson had joined the advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group that questions the reliability of climate change claims and the costs of policies taken to address warming. Within a week he had to resign after being subjected to verbal abuse from a community he once respected. He was ostracized. One German physicist compared Bengtsson's joining of the group to joining the Ku Klux Klan.

"I had not expect(ed) such an enormous worldwide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life," he wrote in his resignation.

"Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship."

The actions of this once-peaceful community, he wrote in his resignation letter, now reminded him of McCarthyism.

Bengtsson, 79, quoted in the Daily Mail, said it was "utterly unacceptable" to advise against publishing a paper on political grounds. He called it "an indication of how science is gradually being influenced by political views."

"The reality" of climate, he said, "hasn't been keeping up with the (computer) models."

Judith Curry, climatologist and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the campaign against Bengtsson "a disgraceful display of climate McCarthyism by climate scientists, which has the potential to do as much harm to climate science as did the Climategate emails."

Indeed, among warmists the only acceptable line of inquiry seems to be: Are you now, or have you ever been, a climate skeptic?

—Investors.com

I know.  Will this man never stop trying to destroy our country?  

I heard last night that Gore predicted that in 2008 we would be done because of climate change.  Funny, we are still here.  I also heard that while some ice is melting other is freezing much more.  I just think we go through cycles and no matter what we do things will be as they are.  Besides, why are we always the ones that do these things while other countries do nothing?