“The [EPA] Proposal ignores the obvious association between increased GHG emissions and positive health and welfare benefits. GHG emissions and improving quality of life are associated because the economy runs on energy, and that energy is principally derived from fossil fuels.”
Several detailed and extensive comments were submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding their proposed Standards of Performance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions for New Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units documenting new and influential science that the EPA did not assess when issuing the proposed standards. Instead, EPA simply deferred to their Endangerment Finding that they issued in December 2009.
As yesterday’s post pointed out, a lot is new in the rapidly evolving field of climate (change) science, and thus the EPA Endangerment Finding is getting a bit stale—or should I say becoming “endangered.”…
Continue Reading“The scientific modeling of climate change, and its possible impacts on human welfare, are very technical…. When experts try to summarize the fields for the layperson, they sometimes present matters in misleading ways, however inadvertent. William Nordhaus’s treatment of the economics literature, and RealClimate’s discussion of the accuracy of climate models’ temperature predictions, are good examples.”
At the Institute for Energy Research (IER) blog, I rebutted Yale economist William Nordhaus’s New York Review of Books criticism of a Wall Street Journal editorial by 16 “global warming skeptic” scientists, including MIT’s Richard Lindzen.
To understand the full point-counterpoint, the interested reader should consult the above links chronologically. Elsewhere I have challenged the entire case for a carbon tax. However, in the present post I want to focus on just two issues in the overall debate, that were raised in the wake of my initial IER post:
… Continue Reading(1) the timing and amount of net damages from climate change, according to the best economic models, and
(2) what the climate scientists mean when they talk of a “confidence interval” in temperature projections.
New Science Endangers EPA’s “Endangerment Finding"
By Chip Knappenberger -- July 12, 2012The public comment period for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed Standards of Performance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions for New Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Generating Units closed on June 25, 2012. A number of extensive comments were submitted arguing that the basis of the Endangerment Finding—that human greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations”—has become so outdated as to require a thorough re-assessment.
Strong cases were made that the EPA failed to completely consider new and influential scientific results which have a direct relevance to the impact that climate change as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions may have on the public health and welfare.…
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