Standoff suggests Senate would give up on climate change law that would result in far more limited proposals

By Suzanne Goldenberg

Barack Obama’s hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.

The standoff suggests the Senate would formally give up on climate change law, and recast energy reform as a Gulf oil spill response, that would roll in far more limited proposals such as a green investment bank, or a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions that would apply only to electricity companies.

Read the rest of this story at The Guardian.

Michael Mann

By Bob Knutson

What should we do?

Recently, the Record-Bee published a missive from Michael Mann that attempted to defend the global warming scam. Professor Mann’s so-called research has been so thoroughly refuted by the scientific community that further comment by me would be redundant.

However, the letter from Norman Fleishman in the June 17 Record-Bee requires an answer.

Mr. Fleishman’s assertion that global warming is due to an expanding population’s requirement for heat is brand new, at least to me. Until now it has all been blamed on our collective use of fossil fuels for industry and transportation.

Read the rest of this Letter to the Editor at Lake County Record Bee.

The Kerry-Lieberman energy bill would enervate America

By Pete duPont

A year ago the Waxman-Markey energy regulation bill passed the House. Now before the Senate is the Kerry-Lieberman energy regulation bill, which includes many of the same damaging provisions–government control of many aspects of energy generation, distribution and prices.The debate on this bill is of course colored and influenced by the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, fire and collapse in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.

In response, the federal government has suspended drilling deeper than 500 feet in the Gulf for six months, suspended exploratory drilling off Alaska’s coast and canceled oil leases off the coast of Virginia and in the Gulf–significant decisions that will reduce our oil supplies in the years ahead. All work has been suspended on 33 previously inspected and approved Gulf deepwater drilling rigs. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana reports that will mean 3,000 to 6,000 immediate job losses and perhaps 10,000 more in the months ahead.

As noted in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, beyond jobs there will be significant economic consequences from the shutdowns. According to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, 1,400 jobs will be lost for each platform shut down, for a total of some $330 million a month in lost wages.

So with this current catastrophe influencing our energy policies, where is America going? The Kerry-Lieberman bill is a bit less bad than the Waxman-Markey legislation, but only a bit.

Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.

By Stephen Power

A federal judge Tuesday overturned the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on new deepwater oil and gas drilling, delivering a temporary victory to the oil industry and a rebuke to the White House.The temporary injunction by U.S. District Judge Martin L.C. Feldman appears unlikely to bring a swift resumption of deepwater drilling: Oil companies say they’re reluctant to start new ventures as an uncertain appeals process unfolds.

Ratcheting up the legal battle, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced late Tuesday he would issue an order in the coming days to effectively reinstate the moratorium, which he said is “needed to protect the communities and the environment of the Gulf Coast.”

In addition, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the administration would appeal the decision by Judge Feldman. The case’s next destination is the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which is expected to put the case on a fast track.

Read the rest of this story at the Wall Street Journal.

By Darren Samuelsohn

President Obama’s chief of staff opened the door on Friday for a limited Senate climate bill that focuses on capping greenhouse gases from power plants.

Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal that “a whole range of ideas will be discussed” when Obama hosts senators at the White House next Wednesday, including placing a mandatory limit solely on the heat-trapping emissions from electric utilities.

“The idea of a ‘utilities only’ [approach] will also be welcomed,” Emanuel told the newspaper in an interview.

Read the rest at Politico.

The folly of O’s oil-spill fix

By Ben Lieberman

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.

That’s a Harvard University study’s estimate of the per-gallon price of the president’s global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.

So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?

Good question, because such measures wouldn’t do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.

The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s now-famous words, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste — and what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Read the rest at the New York Post.

President Obama delivered his first Oval Office speech on the heels of his latest visit to the Gulf region – the fourth since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in April. With such an environmental and economic crisis present, the president needs to exert leadership to protect our precious coastal resources and clean up the spill, says Nicolas Loris, a research assistant at the Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.

His message was the wrong one, says Loris. Instead, he continued to politicize the crisis by pushing for cap and trade legislation and to establish a separate claims fund — financed by BP — that will do very little to address the issue at hand. President Obama is right in saying that the Gulf region will bounce back, but not with the policies of cap and trade and banning offshore drilling that he’s suggesting.

Read the rest at National Center for Policy Analysis.

By Marc Oestreich

Former Vice President Al Gore spent the last decade as a larger-than-life figure, more of a symbol than a living, breathing human being. Stolen from the pages of a Danielle Steele novel and plopped on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention, this normally lifeless personality was possessed by the ghost of Madmen’s Jon Hamm and political pop-culture history was made. Al and Tipper’s kiss marked the dawn of Gore’s personal stardom and his pet project: anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmism.

Since his mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Gore has been married to the AGW cause. And just as Al’s and Tipper’s kiss represented the dawn of the most successful movement in pseudoscience, their divorce aptly marks its end.

A stark trend toward accepting empirical science instead of speculation has caused the ground beneath AGW to cave in quickly. Like the news of the Gore divorce, the scientific evidence hit the public as if from nowhere. But both these cases are results of major, longstanding problems instead of a single cataclysmic event.

For AGW alarmism, what were once dismissed as minor discrepancies are being exposed as major contradictions of the scientific facts.

At first, AGW was a smooth talker. Graphs, models, charts, PowerPoints, and Hollywood movies all worked to persuade. As questions began to arise, however, patronizing and talking down turned small spats into explosive arguments. The Michael Mann “hockey stick” diagram was exposed as being based on a trick that would make any trend look like a spike. Gore’s new mansion was built in an area he had predicted would be underwater in the near future. The Climategate scandal showed us AGW was hiding the facts. Stories weren’t adding up.

Read the rest at Heartland Institute.

Overreaching EPA Goes Rogue

By Iain Murray

The Senate undermined its constitutional role last week with a vote that allows the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The 53 senators favoring this huge delegation of authority to the executive branch disregarded the principle of separation of powers. The low quality of the debate that preceded the vote, as well as its result, should put an end to the Senate’s reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body.The motion being debated and voted on was simple. It was to disapprove the ruling by the EPA, known as the endangerment finding, that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. According to the terms of the Congressional Review Act, under which Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, brought the motion, the resolution would have terminated the legal force and effect of the finding. It was most assuredly not a vote on the science upon which the EPA based its decision.

Yet this was the prime argument used by the resolution’s opponents. Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, for example, compared the motion to a vote to repeal the law of gravity. This was possibly the most embarrassing Senate argument since former Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska Republican, insisted that the Internet was “a series of tubes.” It also set up a straw man. Nothing in the resolution sought to overturn one word of the scientific case for global warming – or even mentioned it.

Read the rest at the Washington Times.

Fifty three of the Senate’s 59 Democrats gave unelected, overpaid bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a green light yesterday to do pretty much whatever they choose in their quixotic crusade against global warming. All 41 Republicans and six brave Democrats voted for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution nullifying the EPA’s recent usurpation of authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the U.S. economy to combat greenhouse gases. Thankfully, this craven surrender of congressional authority isn’t the last word on the issue, assuming that the November elections produce a Senate with enough backbone to reassert the legislature’s rightful power.

In the meantime, it’s vital to understand how bureaucracies function. Whatever else they may do, leading bureaucrats always do two things, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress: They limit choices available to the rest of us by imposing regulations that increase government power and thus justify expanding their budgets and staffs; and they protect themselves and their turf by suppressing internal dissent, often at any costs.

Read the rest of this editorial at the Washington Examiner.

In a boost for the president on global warming, the Senate on Thursday rejected a challenge to Obama administration rules aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other big polluters.

The defeated resolution would have denied the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to move ahead with the rules, crafted under the federal Clean Air Act. With President Barack Obama’s broader clean energy legislation struggling to gain a foothold in the Senate, the vote took on greater significance as a signal of where lawmakers stand on dealing with climate change.

“If ever there was a vote to find out whose side you are on, this is it,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The vote was 53-47 to stop the Senate from moving forward on the Republican-led effort to restrain the EPA.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., predicted the vote would “increase momentum to adopt comprehensive energy and climate legislation this year.”

But Obama still needs 60 votes to advance his energy agenda, and Democrats don’t have them yet. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said the vote made clear that a majority in the Senate back either a delay or an outright ban on “the Obama EPA’s job-killing, global warming agenda.”

Republicans, and the six Democrats who voted with them to advance the resolution, said Congress, not bureaucrats, should be in charge of writing climate change policy. They said the EPA rules would drive up energy costs and kill jobs.

But Democrats, referring frequently to the Gulf oil spill, said it made no sense to undermine efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions and reduce dependence on oil and other fossil fuels.

Read the rest of this story at Fox News.

From CBC News

The Nunavut government does not think the polar bear should be classified as a species of special concern under the federal Species at Risk Act, says territorial Environment Minister Daniel Shewchuk.

Shewchuk said there is no clear evidence to support assigning that status to the polar bear despite recommendations to the contrary by Environment Canada and a federal scientific panel.

“We live in polar bear country,” Shewchuk told reporters in Iqaluit on Friday afternoon. “We understand the polar bears, and we do actually think our polar bear population is very very healthy, with the exception of a couple of populations that we are taking action on.”

The polar bear was most recently designated a species of special concern in 2002. “Of special concern” is the least serious “at risk” designation – one level below “threatened” and two levels below “endangered.”

Currently, the special-concern designation has been suspended while the government reviews the polar bear’s status and decides whether to renew the classification or change it.

An arm’s length scientific panel, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), reviewed the polar bear’s status in 2008 and recommended that it remain in the special-concern category.

Change of Position

The recommendation has initiated a long process of hearings and consultations, including a round of hearings in Nunavut in April.

Environment Canada is expected to decide in a couple of months whether to renew the special concern status.

Shewchuk said while the Nunavut government originally agreed with the special-concern listing, it changed its position after consulting with Inuit hunters and others on a recent community tour.

“Through direct consultation, they are unanimous in their belief that polar bears have not declined,” Shewchuk said.

Read the rest of this story at CBC.

By Ben Webster

Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.

The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect – there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”

The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.

Read the rest of this story at London Times.

From Rasmussen Reports

Voters in recent months have been increasingly skeptical of the idea that global warming is chiefly caused by human activity, but the number who blame long term planetary trends instead has now fallen back to its lowest level in nearly a year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 40% of Likely U.S. Voters now say global warming is caused primarily by human activity, while slightly more (44%) say long term planetary trends are to blame. Five percent (5%) blame some other reason, and 10% are not sure.

Read the rest of this story at Rasmussen Reports.