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.
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.
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.
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.
The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to seize new power to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide unless Congress acts to stop them.
Carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor a threat to human life or the environment. Despite new predictions that the Earth is entering a new cooling phase, the EPA intends to cap carbon dioxide emissions to stop nonexistent global warming. The impact this will have on business, jobs and the economy is staggering. Carbon dioxide is emitted as a byproduct of virtually every energy source. Everything from transportation, heating, electricity, manufacturing and more will be impacted.
Senator Lisa Murkowski plans to bring to the Senate floor on June 10th, her resolution to disapprove the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated using the Clean Air Act. The resolution is brought under the rules of the Congressional Review Act. It cannot be filibustered and needs only 51 votes to pass.
Senate passage of S. J. Res. 26 will send a strong message to the White House and will put pressure on the House to vote on the resolution. It appears that the vote will be very close and could go either way. It’s critical that Senators hear from their constituents.
Rallies are planned around the nation on Thursday, June 3rd at the local offices of Senators who will be back home for a Senate recess from May 28th through June 7th. Visit your senators’ local offices in person and register your support for the Murkowski Resolution.
The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.
Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.
Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.
“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”
President Obama has been very made clear that his top domestic priorities are health care and global warming. We all know what happened on health care. Now the date is set for the key Senate showdown on global warming: June 10. That’s when the Senate will vote on a resolution introduced by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (S.J. Res. 26) that would overturn the EPA’s global warming regulations. It’s not subject to filibuster. There is no place for weak-kneed senators to hide. In just two weeks we’ll know where every member of the Senate stands.As I’ve previously discussed here in the Fox Forum and documented on www.ObamaChart.com, the Obama administration is not waiting for Congress to enact a national cap-and-trade program to move ahead with its global warming agenda.
Under the watchful eye of White House Climate czar Carol Browner (who originally developed the legal theory of using the 1970 Clean Air Act as a global warming law, bypassing Congress) the EPA is moving forward on a staggering regulatory power grab that includes about 18,000 pages of appendices and will eventually regulate nearly every aspect of the U.S. economy.
Tony Blair is set to earn millions of pounds advising an American businessman on how to make money from tackling climate change.
By Sri Carmichael
The former prime minister will be paid at least £700,000 a year to act as a “strategic adviser” to Khosla Ventures, a venture capitalist firm founded by Indian billionaire Vinod Khosla.
The Californian company bankrolls businesses hoping to profit from technology that helps reduce global warming and carbon emissions.
Mr Blair secured the job thanks to his “influence” and high level international contacts, whom he will be expected to lean on to open doors.
He has told friends he needs £5 million a year to fund his lifestyle.
90 top global warming scientists have turned their sights on the biomass energy industry, until recently seen as allies, warning that biofuels sometimes increases rather than decreases greenhouse gas emissions.
By Lawrence Solomon
“There may be a public perception that all biofuels and bioenergy are equally good for the environment and are all lower in carbon emissions than fossil fuels, but that’s not true,” said one of the signatories, Dr. William Schlesinger of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in a press release yesterday aimed at the U.S. Congress. “Many produce just as much or more carbon pollution than oil, gas, and coal. If our laws and regulations treat high-carbon-impact bioenergy sources, like today’s corn ethanol, as if they are low-carbon, we’re fooling ourselves and undercutting the purpose of those same laws and regulations.”
That ethanol in your gas tank, the climate change scientists are telling us, could be bringing us closer to Armageddon by undercutting their efforts at saving the world. “Many international treaties and domestic laws and bills account for bioenergy incorrectly by treating all bioenergy as causing a 100% reduction in emissions regardless of the source of the biomass,” the scientists explain.”Under some scenarios, this approach could eliminate most of the expected greenhouse gas reductions during the next several decades.”
It’s like watching the lights go out over the West. Sinan Unur has mapped the surface stations into a beautiful animation. His is 4 minutes long and spans from 1701-2010. I’ve taken some of his snapshots and strung them into a 10 second animation.
You can see as development spreads across the world that more and more places are reporting temperatures. It’s obvious how well documented temperatures were (once) in the US. The decay of the system in the last 20 years is stark.
For details on just how sinister the vanishing of data records is, see my previous post on Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo’s extraordinary summary of Policy Driven Deception.
Sinan points out that people might not realize that many thermometers haven’t actually disappeared - they are often still collecting data - it’s just that their records are not being included in the “global” compilations. Though, as Watts and D’Aleo point out, sometimes these forgotten thermometers are still used to calculate the baseline averages.
With months of closed doors meeting and cutting deals with industry, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) finally unveiled their cap-and-trade bill. After helping to craft the bill, this bill contains many giveaways to industry and the end result is this bill that will increase the cost of every aspect of business and cost every individual citizen to turn on the lights and put gas in the car.
Sens. Kerry and Lieberman have put together an enormously expensive government power grab worse than the recently passed health care reform bill. It will create huge costs for every American family, job losses and redistribution of wealth with no environmental benefit. The escalating costs, mandates, penalties, regulations and taxes in this bill will prove to be a death blow to our economy as it struggles to climb out of a recession. This bill actually creates 60 new agencies, boards, reports and programs that will only bleed money while strangling businesses. This is by far the most egregious expansion of government in history, and our economy cannot withstand it.
University professors aren’t known to be the most organized bunch, but in Virginia they do seem to have found a cause in opposition to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s subpoena to the University of Virginia seeking documents related to the work of climate scientist Michael Mann.
The Union of Concerned Scientists today released a letter it said has been signed by 800 scientists and professors in Virginia urging Cuccinelli (R) to drop his efforts to collect documents about Mann. Cuccinelli has said he is investigating whether Mann defrauded the public as he sought grants to perform research into global warming. Mann left U.-Va. in 2005 and now teaches at Penn State University.
Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, a scientist who has written more than 150 peer-reviewed papers has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.
The hottest new trend in climate change may be global cooling, some researchers say.
Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University and author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.
“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists. This, he says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell from 2060 to 2090.
To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.
To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving would simply have to increase, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The research also appears in the March edition of the journal Energy Policy.
The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.
In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consumes 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.
Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.
In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.
“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”
Editor’s note: It seems it’s not really about carbon dioxide or fossil fuel. It’s about making the unwashed masses drive less - even if it’s an electric car. Elitists to peasants: “Get in the trains and stay out of my way!”
‘Expect global cooling for the next 2-3 decades that will be far more damaging than global warming would have been’
By Marc Morano
A prominent U.S. geologist is urging the world to forget about global warming because global cooling has already begun.
Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook’s warning came in the form of a new scientific paper he presented to the 4th International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago on May 16, 2010. Dr. Easterbrook is an Emeritus Professor at Western Washington University who has authored eight books and 150 journal publications. Easterbrook’s full resume is here.
Dr. Easterbrook joins many other scientists, peer-reviewed research and scientific societies warning of a coming global cooling. Easterbrook is presenting his findings alongside other man-made global warming skeptics at the three day conference in Chicago.
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.
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