Posts from — January 2010

This post is Part 2 of my examination of EPA’s Tailoring Rule – the Agency’s attempt to amend the Clean Air Act’s (CAA) Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and Title V operating permits program so that they can be applied to carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) without spawning an economically-chilling administrative morass. Yesterday’s post argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA set the stage for an administrative disaster that EPA rightly describes as “unprecedented” and “absurd.” Today’s post examines the adequacy of the Tailoring Rule as a regulatory relief measure, finds it woefully inadequate, and advises EPA not to oppose legislative action to protect the economy from Mass. v. EPA‘s regulatory fallout.

V. Tailoring Rule: Small Business Protection Is Temporary, Dubious, and Incomplete

Industry is unlikely to challenge the Tailoring Rule, since it aims to shield substantial numbers of small entities from PSD and Title V regulation of CO2 for a period of six years. However, the business community would be unwise to rely on the Tailoring Rule for protection from the regulatory fallout of Mass v. EPA.

First, as noted earlier, the Tailoring Rule is actually an Amending Rule and, hence, is legally dubious. The Tailoring Rule proposes sweeping “categorical exemptions” from the PSD and Title V programs, and, as EPA acknowledges, courts generally have looked with disfavor upon such broad carve-outs in previous administrative necessity cases (TR, 55313). [Read more →]

(Note: This column is adapted from a forthcoming article, co-authored with former Virgiania Governor George F. Allen, in the University of Richmond Law Review.)  

December 28, 2009 was the final day to submit comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposed Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule.  This is the rulemaking in which EPA proposes to “tailor” the Clean Air Act’s (CAA or Act’s) Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and Title V operating permits program so that they can be applied to carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) without spawning an economically-chilling administrative morass.

The Tailoring Rule is an eye opener, because it reveals, or rather confirms in spades, that the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA has created an almost bottomless well of “absurd results” — disastrous consequences that EPA can avoid only by poaching legislative power and amending the Act.

The present post is Part 1 of a two-part column the argument of which may be summarized as follows:

1. In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court legislated from the bench, authorizing and indeed pushing EPA to control GHG emissions for climate change purposes. This is a policy decision of immense economic and political magnitude that Congress never intended or approved when it enacted and amended the CAA.
2. Regulating GHGs under the CAA leads inexorably to “absurd results,” including an economy-stifling administrative quagmire.
3. To prevent GHG regulation from overwhelming agency administrative resources and blocking economic development, EPA proposes to suspend, for six years, the “major” source applicability thresholds for the CAA pre-construction and operating permits programs. That is, EPA proposes to amend the Act. This violation of the separation of powers compounds the constitutional crisis inherent in the Court’s substitution of its will for that of the people’s elected representatives.
4. The small-business protections proposed in the Tailoring Rule are temporary, legally dubious, and incomplete. Even if courts uphold the Tailoring Rule, despite its flouting of clear statutory language, it will not avert the most absurd result of the Court’s misreading of the CAA:  regulation of CO2 and other GHGs under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program.
5. EPA runs enormous political risks leading the charge for GHG regulations not approved by Congress. It is in the Agency’s best interest not to oppose legislative action to overturn the endangerment finding and Mass. v. EPA or block EPA regulation of CO2 from stationary sources.

Today’s post covers points 1-3; tomorrow’s covers points 4-5. [Read more →]

As projections of catastrophic climate changes are being beaten down by the far less than catastrophic actual climate response, other calamities that may result from our untoward use of fossil fuels are being offered up for our consideration. Besides the well-worn pitfalls of our failure to achieve energy independence, or to be the first to grasp green technologies, a new problem is being worked into the mix—ocean acidification.

Ocean acidification. Sounds bad doesn’t it. Much worse than say, “the oceans are becoming less basic” which is a more accurate, but less worrisome-sounding description. In either case, it is used to describe the situation in which the oceans absorb an increasing amount of carbon dioxide as the atmospheric partial pressure of CO2 increases. The dissolution of CO2 in the oceans has the net effect of increasing the hydrogen ion concentration which drives the ocean’s pH lower. The pH of the global oceans averages about 8.1 so it is considered a base rather than an acid (acids have pH values less than 7.0) and has perhaps dropped by 0.1pH units (a logarithmic scale) since the Industrial Revolution.

The reason we are being told that this is bad, is that it potentially disrupts some ocean ecosystems, primarily coral reefs and other calcifying organisms. The idea is that a lower pH interferes with the production of shells and/or causes the shells of some organisms to dissolve—leading to thinner, weaker defenses and other detrimental effects increasing the vulnerability of these organisms and jeopardizing the livelihood of other organisms that depend on them leading to a downward spiral of ever-increasing breadth.

Eager to bring this to the attention of the general public and shore up the public’s waning concerns about global warming (and rally them behind anti-greenhouse gas legislation), the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) produced a 21-minute movie titled “Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification” narrated by Sigourney Weaver. Here is taste of what is inside:

Carbon dioxide pollution is transforming the chemistry of the oceans, rapidly making the water more acidic. In decades, rising ocean acidity may challenge life on a scale that has not occurred for tens of millions of years. So we confront an urgent choice, to move beyond fossil fuels or to risk turning the ocean into a sea of weeds.

Scary scenario. But as with most good horror movies, the real world proves to be a much more benign locale. [Read more →]

A recent NYT article discussed a proposal by economist Ross McKitrick to tie CO2 taxes to global temperature increases. McKitrick’s overall aim is to offer a compromise that, he argues, should satisfy those who think the government needs to take drastic action and those who think carbon emissions pose no serious long-term threat. Although McKitrick’s idea is clever, it has theoretical difficulties and (in my opinion) would certainly not work in practice.

McKitrick’s Proposal to Tie CO2 Taxes to Temperature

The NYT story does a good job summarizing the idea:

[McKitrick] suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

If the skeptics are right and the earth isn’t warming, then the penalties for burning carbon would stay small or maybe even disappear. But if the climate modelers and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct about the atmosphere heating up, then the penalties would quickly, and automatically, rise.…

Specifically, [McKitrick] proposes tying carbon penalties to the temperature of the lowest layer of the atmosphere (called the troposphere, which extends from the surface of the earth to a height of about 10 miles). He suggests using the readings near the equator because climate models forecast pronounced warming there.…

The carbon tax might start off at a rate that would raise the cost of a gallon of gasoline by a nickel — or, if there were political will, perhaps 10 or 15 cents. Those numbers are all too low to satisfy environmentalists worried about climate change. [Read more →]

The times are changing in the wake of Climategate. And more is to come as the polluted science embedded in the email exchanges gets reviewed by talented amateurs and pros alike on the blogosphere (see Climate Audit,  Roger Pielke Jr., and WattsUpWithThat, in particular).

Given time, the rethink will go mainstream. Scientists are truth seekers at heart, but an entrenched mainstream of climate scientists–so many of them friends and political allies–will need to be nudged out of their denialism.

Old voices are challenging their ‘mainstream’ colleagues, and new voices are coming forth. I have seen this clearly here in Houston (examples below), and I expect it is happening elsewhere.

Consider what Andy Revkin, the recently retired climate-change science writer at the New York Times, told the public editor at the Times regarding Climategate: “Our coverage, looked at in toto, has never bought the catastrophe conclusion and always aimed to examine the potential for both overstatement and understatement.”

Sounds like the Times will report both sides of the issue now, rather than just trumpet alarmism as it was prone to do in the past (remember William K. Stevens?). Joe Romm at Climate Progress (Center for American Progress) is furious at this development, but just maybe over-the-top Joe has himself to blame for getting Revkin and the like to want to report on both sides more than ever before. And Romm himself is now considered damaged goods by the Left, thanks to the four-part expose by the Breakthrough Institute.

Climategate, in short, is making quite a difference. But much more courage is needed.

Dr. Michelle Foss (University of Texas at Austin)

Consider Michelle Michot Foss, an internationally respected energy economist with the University of Texas at Austin who is past president of both the U.S. Association for Energy Economics (2001) and the International Association for Energy Economics (2003). Her December 8th letter to the New York Times read: [Read more →]

 [Editor Note: This piece originally appeared in the Calgary Herald on December 28th. It should be noted that a new website is devoted to Climategate.]

Responses to “Climategate”–the leaked e-mails from Britain’s University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit — remind me of the line “Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That’s because you’re in denial.”

Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN’s Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it’s only a few intemperate scientists; there’s no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let’s persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python “nothing to see here, move along” routine is David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.

Unfortunately for Professor Reid, old saws won’t work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public’s perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.

What’s catastrophic about Climategate is that it reveals a science as broken as Michael Mann’s hockey stick, which despite Reid’s protestations, has been shown to be a misleading chart that erases a 400-year stretch of warm temperatures (called the Medieval Warm Period), and a more recent little ice-age that ended in the mid-1800s. No amount of hand-waving will restore the credibility of climate science while holding onto rubbish like that.

Climategate reveals skulduggery the general public can understand: that a tightly-linked clique of scientists were behaving as crusaders. Their letters reveal they were working in what they repeatedly labeled a “cause” to promote a political agenda.

That’s not science, that’s a crusade. [Read more →]

Best of MasterResource 2009: This post originally appeared on September 5th.

Julian Simon (1932–98) is an inspiration to those of us here at MasterResource and, indeed, the whole capitalist movement. Indeed, it was he who characterized energy as the master resource and human ingenuity as the ultimate resource.

In honor of Simon, I have reproduced some quotations from his works and invite readers to add their favorite in the comment section.

“The world’s problem is not too many people, but a lack of political and economic freedom.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 11.

“There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all—human beings. . . . [An] increase in the price of peoples’ services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 581.

“Human beings create more than they destroy.”

- Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, N.Y.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 580.

“Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven. . . . My message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers: our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot.”

- Julian Simon, “Introduction,” in Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 27. [Read more →]