[Editor note: For more background and the likely consequences of EPA’s endangerment finding, see Marlo Lewis, “CO2 Regulation under the Clean Air Act: Economic Train Wreck, Constitutional Crisis, Legislative Thuggery“]
In their recent draft of an endangerment-finding technical support document (TSD), scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conclude that carbon dioxide emissions are a public health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Federal law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is “accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased”; the most recent available; and collected by the “best available methods.” The EPA’s TSD on carbon emissions violates all of these requirements.
Staff researcher Dr. Alan Carlin, given just a few days to review the draft TSD, took EPA to the woodshed because the report offered little more than a bibliography of out-of-date reports and research rather than a rigorous scientific inquiry into the subject.…
Continue ReadingA calm has descended over the federal government’s initiatives in energy amid the furor over health insurance legislation. The respite is welcome, but the sturm und drang of clashing interests will resume in earnest after Congress’s summer recess. There is too much money on the table–our money–for the favor-seekers to ignore.
A Banana Republic?
Increasingly, it is clear that the initial cap-and-trade legislation was insufficiently opaque. Numerous analyses of Waxman-Markey (HR 2454) on this site and others have shown that the proposed cap-and-trade legislation will cost consumers dearly by raising the prices of electricity and gasoline, while ignoring viable sources of clean energy that have not yet found the key to the federal treasury.
With so much money at stake, each of the contestants (call them rent-seekers, some of them reluctant players in the political capitalism game) will attempt to gather up as much of the pot as possible.…
Continue ReadingTaxPayers’ Alliance has just released a new report on the scale that British taxpayers’ money is being used to fund lobbying and political campaigning. We found that £38 million – $60 million – was being spent on taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning in just a year, a portion of which aims to secure greater government intervention to try to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It is about climate alarmism and related policy activism, not sober science and free-market reliance.
Examples
The Sustainable Development Commission, a public sector body with a budget of over £4 million, writes reports arguing that economic growth is a bad thing and that “natural justice tells us that individual emissions of CO2 must, in the long run, converge around the same per capita entitlement.”
The New Economics Foundation are responsible for the Happy Planet Index, which places Saudi Arabia and Burma above the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States in terms of “achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources.”…
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