Climate Change Bill dead for now

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dan_s
Posts: 34465
Joined: Fri Apr 23, 2010 8:22 am

Climate Change Bill dead for now

Post by dan_s »

A climate change bill sponsored by John Kerry (D-Mass), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) was to have made its debut in the Senate Monday. In an effort to structure the bill to overcome a filibuster, its authors had combined caps on carbon emissions with expansion of off-shore oil and gas drilling, nuclear energy generation, and clean coal technology. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) called it a gas tax. Green Peace and Friends of the Earth called it a giveaway to polluting industries. Obama called it a job creator. Thankfully this nasty piece of legislation has gone up in flames as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid moved Immigration “Reform” (also called “Amnesty” by some and an important election year issue) to the front of the queue. Lindsey Graham would not stand for it and now the climate bill is dead, apparently for the rest of this Congress since members will soon be too busy campaigning to do any more legislating. Without Graham, lame ducks are unlikely to impress us with major climate legislation after November. Meanwhile the State of Arizona has taken matters into its own hands and enacted its own state statute under which it will enforce immigration laws that it believes the federal government is not enforcing. More good news: Reid is just talk. He does not have an immigration bill ready so the nation gets a double reprieve. Two prospective pieces of legislation sputter and die amidst campaign posturing. I will confess to experiencing a certain thrill upon witnessing this confusion and chaos. I think it’s an encouraging sign.

Before we break out the champagne, however, remember that there is more than one way to skin a cat as we saw when Obama’s EPA declared carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Sneaking up from the wings is “America’s Commitment to Clean Water Act” introduced by House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-Minn) just in time for Earth Day.

The original Clean Water Act managed to pass constitutional muster by limiting its scope to “navigable” waters of the United States to justify federal jurisdiction under the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause. Oberstar’s H.R. 5088 amends the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (aka Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C. 1251) “by striking ‘navigable waters of the United States’ each place it appears and inserting ‘waters of the United States.’’’ Lest any isolated mud puddle be accidentally left out of the expanded federal regulatory authority, “final authority regarding jurisdiction under this Act remains with the Administrator.”

A Senate version of this Clean Water bill, S. 787, cleared the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last year but did not make it to the floor. Constant vigilance.
Dan Steffens
Energy Prospectus Group
dan_s
Posts: 34465
Joined: Fri Apr 23, 2010 8:22 am

Re: Climate Change Bill dead for now

Post by dan_s »

This next article is from Dr. Howard Hayden, The Energy Advocate (and Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut). It is a very informative and well done letter to the Department of State over proposed new energy legislation and is worth running in its entirety.

To: Department of State

Date: 23 April 2010

Re: U.S. Climate Action Report 2010. 5th ed.

Many states around the nation are trying to enact laws to restrict carbon emissions, and industries too numerous to mention have begun making changes hoping to be fully prepared to comply with laws they haven’t seen yet. Congress is considering laws in hopes that they can avoid having EPA impose its own version of CO2 restrictions.

Before jumping on this bandwagon, we should be certain that we understand the science. U.S. Climate Action Report 2010, 5th ed. might be understood by some Americans to be the definitive word; however nary a word in the report even pretends to establish a link between CO2 and putative global warming, show that the increase in CO2 concentration is due to human activity instead of natural causes (such as natural warming of the oceans), show that either an increase in CO2 concentration or an increase in temperature is, on balance, bad (or worse than laws restricting CO2 emissions), or do any science whatsoever.

Despite screams to the contrary, a vast number of scientists dispute the findings of the IPCC. Perhaps the Department of State believes that “the science is settled.” If so, please let us know which of the two dozen models – see Fig. 1 showing a slight disagreement by a factor of 3000 among the models – settled the science so that all of the others can be thrown into the dustbin of failed science and de-funded.



Figure 1: Graph from IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, showing calculations by various models. Note that the range of values spans a factor of 3,000.

Like an ant crawling out an anthill and concluding that the world is made of 1-millimeter rocks, global-warming activists have looked at the last three-millionths of one percent of the earth’s climate history and made brash conclusions about climate, and especially their understanding of it. They wax eloquent about results from computer models. In the longer view – see Fig. 2 – we see that the last million years or so are rather anomalous. The highest CO2 concentrations during the last many ice ages and interglacials are lower than at any other time for the last 300 million years. The dinosaurs lived when CO2 concentrations were 5 to 20 times as high as now. Indeed, such large creatures could not survive without the very verdant conditions afforded by adequate plant food known as carbon dioxide.



Figure 2: Carbon dioxide concentrations for the last 600 million years. Points represent actual measurements; lines represent computerized smoothings. The most recent million years is in a very narrow strip to the left of the graph, with concentrations less than 400 ppmv. The right-hand scale is in multiples of quaternary average.

That long history teaches us something else. We have all been in an auditorium when somebody was testing out the sound system and there was a sudden screech owing to a “tipping point” wherein the amplified sound at the microphone was loud enough to be picked up and made louder yet. If the people did not act immediately to cut the gain of the amplifier, and everybody just left the room and locked the door, the screech would persist forever if the power remained on. This behavior, often called “running to the rail” by electronics folks, is characteristic of all positive feedback systems. Once you reach the tipping point, there is no return. If high levels of CO2 were to cause the earth to reach a tipping point, it would have done so a long time ago, and we wouldn’t be here talking about it.

All in all, there is a best policy to direct toward climate change, and that is to have the courage to do nothing. We humans have precious little to do with climate. When and where did you read anything from climate alarmists that said that humans are responsible for about 3% of all CO2 emissions? When and where did you read anything from climate alarmists that said that warming oceans emit CO2? When and where did the climate alarmists tell you about CO2 levels that were up to 20 times current levels when dinosaurs roamed the earth? When and where did alarmists tell you that the conditions they openly worry about have repeatedly happened without turning the earth into an oven?

Nowhere and never, did you say? Perhaps you should consider that you have been deliberately misled.

Cheers,

Howard Hayden The Energy Advocate
www.energyadvocate.com
Dan Steffens
Energy Prospectus Group
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