By Reuters

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) are scheduled to formally unveil on Wednesday a compromise U.S. climate change bill they want passed this year.

Besides bringing down emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, it would expand offshore oil drilling and nuclear-power production in a move to appeal to a broader number of senators.

Here are highlights of the bill, called the “American Power Act,” according to a summary of the legislation being circulated to senators and obtained by Reuters:

Carbon emissions reductions
By 2020, carbon pollution would be cut by 17 percent from 2005 levels. By 2050, a reduction of more than 80 percent would be achieved. These are the same goals included in the climate bill passed by the House of Representatives in June. The short-term goal is slightly less than the 20 percent cut approved in November by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The summary did not specify, but sources have said the carbon-reduction requirements on utilities would begin in 2013.

Carbon price collar
Carbon prices would rise at a fixed rate over inflation. Initially, floor and ceiling prices for carbon pollution permits required of electric utilities would be set at $12-$25. The floor would increase at 3 percent annually over inflation and the ceiling at 5 percent annually over inflation.

In the event of unusually high carbon prices, a strategic reserve would ensure the availability of “price-certain allowances.”

Backers aren’t calling it “cap and trade,” but in practice, that is what it appears to be.

Read the rest of this story at Cnet.

Related Reading: Section by Section Analysis of the American Power Act

Global Warming Hysteria Might be a Crime

By Steve Milloy

Are academics some special subspecies of humans who are beyond suspicion and above the law? That’s the question being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming’s poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli is under assault by the climate-alarmist brigades for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mr. Mann’s hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Mr. Cuccinelli recently sent the university a civil investigative demand requesting e-mails and other documents pertaining to Mr. Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s rationale is simple to understand: Mr. Mann’s claim to fame – the infamous “hockey stick” graph – is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether it is intentional fraud.

Developed in the late 1990s, while he was at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Mann’s hockey-stick graph purports to show that average global temperature over the past millennium was stable until the 20th century, when it spiked up, presumably because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”) as proof that humans were destroying the planet.

But by the mid-2000s the hockey-stick graph was revealed for what it was – pure bunk.

Skeptics first became suspicious because the hockey stick failed to show two well-known periods of dramatic swings in global temperature – the so-called Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Mr. Mann’s indignant refusal to share his data and methods with skeptics only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, skeptics discovered that the hockey stick’s computer model would produce a hockey-stick graph regardless of what data was input. But it gets worse.

Mr. Mann apparently created the hockey stick by cherry-picking data he liked and deleting data he didn’t like. While the vast majority of the hockey stick is based on temperature data extrapolated from tree rings going back hundreds of years, the tip of the blade (representing the late 20th century) was temperature data taken from thermometers. Beyond the obvious apples-and-oranges problem, Mr. Mann appended the thermometer data to the hockey stick at a point at which the tree-ring data actually shows cooling. This cooling trend data was then deleted. This is what is referred to by the now-famous “Climategate” phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to … hide the decline.”

Read the rest of this piece at the Washington Times.