House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said he would “absolutely” seek to keep greenhouse gas limits alive in a House-Senate conference if the Senate approves energy legislation this summer that omits carbon provisions.”It would be open in conference to consider because our bill has it,” Waxman told The Hill Wednesday.
Waxman authored a sweeping climate and energy bill that the House narrowly approved last year that merges an “economy-wide” cap-and-trade system with other provisions to boost alternative energy and energy efficiency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Environmental Protection Agency is poised to seize new power to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide unless Congress acts to stop them.Â
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. Â
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.Â
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.
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.
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.â€
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!”
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.
Corruption: The carbon trading system being pushed here has spawned crime and fraud across the pond. Cap-and-trade is not about saving the planet. It’s about money and power, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.
All across Europe authorities have been conducting raids, rounding up individuals involved in a new version of Climate-gate. This time the data aren’t corrupted. Europe’s Emissions Trading System is. The system is so sick, it’s turned out to be a scam built upon a scam.
Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids by British and German authorities as part of a pan-European crackdown on carbon credit VAT tax fraud.
U.K. officials announced raids on 81 offices and homes, nabbing 13 people in England and eight in Scotland. The operation involved 450 investigators from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office.
German authorities raided 230 locations, including the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the offices of RWE, one of the largest energy firms in Europe. The German operation involved 1,000 investigators targeting 50 companies and 150 suspects.
The amount of money involved in carbon trading is huge and the temptations vast. While our Congress demagogues about banks and their “complex financial instruments,” they are simple compared to cap-and-trade, which as we have noted involves essentially the buying and selling of air. Throw in an oppressive value-added tax and you have a recipe for corruption and fraud.
Last December, Europol, the European criminal intelligence agency, announced that Emissions Trading System fraud had resulted in about 5 billion euros in lost revenues as Europe’s carbon traders schemed to avoid paying Europe’s VAT and pocket the difference. In announcing the raids, the agency said that as much as 90% of Europe’s carbon trades were the result of fraudulent activity.
Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.
Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore’s appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation’s philanthropic leaders.
“Time’s running out (on climate change),” Gore told them. “We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together.”
Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.
The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn’t that special?
In November last year a file appeared on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a startling view into the world of climate research.
In what has become known as Climategate, one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation.
Moreover, the emails showed collusion with other prominent researchers in the US and elsewhere. The CRU supplies many of the authors for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One might have thought the revelations would discredit the science underlying proposed global warming policy. Indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits.
But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the effect of the emails appears to have been small.
The general approach of the scientific community (at least in the US and Britain) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the files in detail (they mostly have not) and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with widespread carbon control. This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty.
There were, of course, the inevitable investigations of individuals such as Penn State University’s Michael Mann (who manipulated data to create the famous “hockey stick” climate graph) and Phil Jones (director of the CRU).
The investigations were brief, lacked depth and were conducted mainly by individuals already publicly committed to the popular view of climate alarm. The results were whitewashes that are incredible given the data.
This video documents Chicken Little’s journey to Washington DC to see the king. Unlike the traditional children’s story, Chicken Little decided to make his trip once he discovered that the sky wasn’t falling after all and that claims of man-made global warming were untrue. Chicken Little went to Washington to stand-up for his friends at Minnesotans for Global Warming (M4GW), including Elmer-Welmer, Ducky Lucky, Henny Penny and other American patriots. His friends had recently come under attack by “warmers” like Michael Mann.
By Ben Geman
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