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Regulatory Onslaught Has Stopped New Power Generation - Science Played Little Role in Moratorium - Inhofe Motivated by Principles not Politics - Gore Reverses on Ethanol - Climategate is still the Issue
November 22, 2010

Posted by David Lungren David_Lungren@epw.senate.gov

"Regulatory Onslaught Has Stopped New Power Generation" - "Science Played Little Role in Moratorium" - "Inhofe Motivated by Principles not Politics" - "Gore Reverses on Ethanol" - "Climategate is still the Issue"

Inhofe EPW News Roundup

Roll Call: Inhofe Is Happy to Stand Apart  - "He's not seen as a rebel around here by any means ... but he's an independent thinker," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said of the Oklahoma Republican. Inhofe, 76, is comfortable being a contrarian. In an interview last week, he recalled a time when one of his grandchildren "came up to me and said, ‘Pop-I, Why do you always do things that nobody else does?' ... and I said, ‘because nobody else does.'" ..."This earmark debate is a great example" of Inhofe's indifference to public opinion or peer pressure, Graham added. ... Inhofe's colleagues said he is motivated by principles, not politics: "He's very passionate and he can be as partisan as the best of them. But deep down, he wants to help people," a second Republican Senator said ...While most Members look to avoid intraparty confrontation, Inhofe appears to welcome it, taking pride in often being the most hated man in the room.

WSJ Editorial: EPA's Regulatory Onslaught Has Stopped New Power Generation - The scale of the EPA's current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. This surge already outpaces the Clinton Administration's entire first term-when the EPA had just been handed broad new powers under the 1990 revamp of air pollution laws. ... The hyperactive Ms. Jackson is also stretching legal limits to satisfy the White House's climate-change goals, now that Senate Democrats have killed cap and trade. The EPA's "endangerment finding" on carbon is most controversial, but other parts of her regulatory ambush may be more destructive by forcing mass retirements of the coal plants that provide half of America's electricity. The electric industry in particular is being forced to choose between continuing to operate and facing major capital expenditures to meet the increasingly strict burden, or else shutting down and building replacements that use more expensive sources like natural gas. Either way, the costs will be passed through to business and consumers as higher rates, which is the same as a tax increase.

WSJ Editorial: Science Played Little Role in the Moratorium  - The IG findings include no evidence the decision to shut down an entire industry-at a huge cost to jobs and long-term drilling safety-was done with input from engineers, scientists, economists or anyone with day-to-day oversight of U.S. drilling. S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, former head of the Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore drilling, said she learned about the ban from a deputy, and only after the fact. ... Allow us to guess: White House aides knew a moratorium was unjustifiable, and they didn't want to disclose their plans to peer-reviewers whom they knew would object. The Administration was by late May already taking political heat for its handling of the spill and perhaps it felt a moratorium would help make it look tough on the oil industry. In other words, thousands of Gulf Coast jobs may have been sacrificed as a way to deflect political blame from the White House and onto industry.

NYT: Nations That Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China's Need   - That is partly because emissions accounting standards focus on where a fuel is burned, not where it is dug up; because the coal trade is a lucrative business; and because the labor-intensive mining industry creates jobs.  Vic Svec, senior vice president of Peabody Energy, the world's largest private coal company, said it was "planning to send larger and larger amounts of coal" to China.  "Coal is the fastest-growing fuel in the world and will continue to be largely driven by the enormous appetite for energy in Asia," he said.  Last year, the United States exported only 2,714 tons of coal to China, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. Yet that figure soared to 2.9 million tons in the first six months of this year alone - huge growth, though still a minuscule fraction of China's coal imports. ...China, which was a perennial coal exporter until 2009, the first year that it imported more than it sent out, is expected to import up to 150 million tons this year. ... Another emerging customer is India, whose coal imports rose from 36 million tons in 2008 to 60 million tons in 2009, the last full year for which data is available.

Anthony Watts: Climategate is still the Issue  - This week marks the one year anniversary of the release of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that we now know as Climategate.  Very few have actually bothered to read the emails and documents for themselves. They have never read for themselves how temperatures in the database were "artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures" or the "hundreds if not thousands of dummy stations" which somehow ended up in the database, or how the exasperated programmer resorts to expletives before admitting he made up key data on weather stations because it was impossible to tell what data was coming from what sources. ... Regardless of what one thinks of the veracity or independence of these so-called investigations into the climategate scandal itself, what has followed has been a catastrophic meltdown of the supposedly united front of scientific opinion that manmade CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming. 

Reuters:  Al Gore : U.S. Corn Ethanol "Was Not a Good Policy"  - Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said support for corn-based ethanol in the United States was "not a good policy", weeks before tax credits are up for renewal. "It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol," said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank. "First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small. "It's hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going." He explained his own support for the original programme on his presidential ambitions. "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

Investor's Business Daily : The Climate Cash Cow  - A high-ranking member of the U.N.'s Panel on Climate Change admits the group's primary goal is the redistribution of wealth and not environmental protection or saving the Earth.  Money, they say, is the root of all evil. It's also the motivating force behind what is left of the climate change movement after the devastating Climate-gate and IPCC scandals that saw the deliberate manipulation of scientific data to spur the world into taking draconian regulatory action Left for dead, global warm-mongers are busy planning their next move, which should occur at a climate conference in relatively balmy Cancun at month's end. Certainly it should provide a more appropriate venue for discussing global warming than the site of the last failed climate conference - chilly Copenhagen.

Wash. Times Editorial : Administration Kills Gulf jobs on Spurious Grounds - Interior IG Mary L. Kendall reported last week that the staff of White House energy czar Carol M. Browner improperly edited a report on how to improve safety in deep-sea drilling. The effect was to indicate falsely that there was scientific support for President Obama's decision to impose a six-month moratorium on such energy production. The truth was that seven scientists and industry experts peer-reviewed a number of new safety measures but didn't sign off on the moratorium. Five of the seven favored targeted inspections rather than an outright ban. The difference was important. The Obama administration persistently peddles the myth that its decisions are driven by science rather than politics. White House editing of the report fed this myth and provided a veneer of purportedly scientific cover for the politically controversial moratorium.

WSJ: Cap and Retreat  -   A cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions has been touted by environmentalists as a market-friendly mechanism to reduce global warming. Well, the market has spoken. The Chicago Climate Exchange, which advertises itself as "North America's only cap and trade system for greenhouse gasses," is shutting down. ... The market collapsed in 2009 when the price fell to $1, and trading all but ceased this summer. The fate of the carbon trading market closely followed the prospects of passing a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions in Congress. Once the Senate rejected the cap-and-tax scheme -because the tax would have cost millions of jobs-many corporations suddenly lost interest in paying for greenhouse gas emissions. A market that green groups had predicted would exceed $500 billion a year in trading is now flat-lined.

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