Natural Resource Defense Council and Natural Gas

Wednesday October 8, 2003

Americans can rest assured: the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) tells us there is no natural gas “crisis.” High prices? Forget it, it’s just temporary, that’s the way gas markets work. Shortages, access problems? Nonsense, a mere figment of the imagination. Thus NRDC, which in 2001 complained that “natural gas is not sufficiently clean,” cautions us “not to overreact” to prices now at historical highs. We need to remove our blinders and see that insidious forces are fabricating problems with natural gas as “an excuse to attack environmental safeguards on extracting and burning the fuel.” NRDC’s curious, obscurantist view appears to be widely shared by environmentalists. U.S. PIRG refers to the “perceived” natural gas crisis—perceived by, say, manufacturers going bankrupt because of exorbitant energy costs? No, that can’t be. This whole to-do is premised on exploitation of fear: “Industry and their supporters are taking advantage of fears of a natural gas shortage to get items from their wish list like exemptions from Clean Air Act standards and invasive exploration in protected waters.”

 

FACT: There is a natural gas crisis, with serious short and long-term consequences, and environmental extremists, who have systematically blocked natural gas production, are a major cause of it. In its recently released Short Term Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration projects that “natural gas spot prices are expected to average over $5 per thousand cubic feet for all of 2003, about 70 percent above the 2002 average.” It also projects that, “Assuming normal weather, residential natural gas prices this heating season (October-March) are expected to be about 9 percent higher than last winter’s average prices.” And in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this summer, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said, “Today's tight natural gas markets have been a long time in coming and futures prices suggest that we are not apt to return to earlier periods of relative abundance and low prices anytime soon.”

 

Clear Skies

Monday October 6, 2003

Does reducing pollution create more pollution? Does cutting emissions of sulfur dioxide, mercury, and nitrogen oxide by 70 percent over the next 15 years mean more kids with asthma? How about more premature deaths? A reply of ‘yes’ would seem contradictory, nonsensical, or, to use a term much in vogue these days, especially in the context of the Bush Administration, ‘Orwellian.’ Yet such is the position of President Bush’s critics, who derisively refer to Clear Skies as something that would have made George Orwell shutter, or write 1984 all over again. Take Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), who on Fox News this past Sunday said the “Clear Skies Initiative becomes a program that actually pollutes the air more and gives more kids asthma.” It is even more iniquitous than that, for it also increases “the number of people who will die earlier than they otherwise would, particularly the elderly, of lung problems as a result of greater air pollution.” In sum, Lieberman argues, “to call it a ‘Clear Skies Initiative’ is, you know, the worst kind of misleading statement by the administration.”

FACT: President Bush’s critics are Orwellian, maintaining as they do that a mandatory 70 percent reduction in power plant emissions means more emissions, and more health problems. According to EPA, Clear Skies will result in 14,100 fewer premature deaths; 8,800 fewer cases of chronic bronchitis; 30,000 fewer hospitalizations for cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms; and 12.5 million fewer days with respiratory illnesses. Again, that’s fewer for each. Moreover, Clear Skies is predicated on the Acid Rain trading program, which passed as an amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1990, and has reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by 33 percent, with near full compliance. Why, even Sen. Lieberman agrees: “Air quality is improving because of the Clean Air Act and the amendments that were adopted under the first President Bush, which were very good amendments.”

 

 

New York Times and Global Warming

Friday October 3, 2003

Speaking in grave tones, the editors of the New York Times have informed us that global warming—man-made, catastrophic global warming, that is—is fomenting “startling changes in landscapes once thought immutable.” They cite several examples, including troublesome signs in Alaska, and now, a new study from three scientists that the Arctic’s largest ice shelf is “disintegrating” (note: the editors studiously avoid discussing their retraction of front-page story in 2001 on the link between global warming and “open sea ice” in Antarctica). Surely proof of man-induced global warming, right? Not exactly: “It is not yet possible, [the three scientists] say, to tie the melting directly to rising atmospheric concentrations of so-called greenhouse gases, or to the human activities—chiefly the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil—that create these gases.” End of story? No indeed, as these scientists, the Times reports, believe a “critical threshold” has been “breached,” with potentially severe consequences at some vague, though surely not too distant, point in the future.

 

FACT: The Times editorial creates the misleading impression that anecdotal evidence of glacier melting can be extrapolated globally. It can’t. A 2002 study in the journal Progress in Physical Geography examined the ‘mass balance trends’ in 246 glaciers worldwide from 1946 to 1995. The author found that “there are several regions with highly negative mass balances in agreement with a public perception of ‘the glaciers are melting,’ but there are also regions with positive balances.” This holds true even within continents. In Europe, “Alpine glaciers are generally shrinking, Scandinavian glaciers are growing, and glaciers in the Caucasus are close to equilibrium for 1980-95.” Globally, adding all the results together, “there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”

 

Earth Justice and the boycott of Gov. Mike Leavitt’s nomination to be the next EPA Administrator

Thursday October 2, 2003

Showering accolades on their brothers-in-arms, environmental groups hailed the boycott of Gov. Mike Leavitt’s nomination to be the next EPA Administrator, orchestrated by 8 Democrats and 1 Independent on the EPW Committee. Earthjustice, formerly the Sierra Club’s legal defense arm, and whose slogan is “Because the Earth Needs a Good Lawyer,” distinguished themselves from the pack, viewing the Leavitt boycott as equivalent to a patriotic act: “The Senators who refused to be placated by vague answers and meaningless assurances did their constituents, and their children and grandchildren, a real service today. Regardless of party, all Senators have a constitutional duty to ensure that our nation’s laws will be upheld.” (Actually, in point of fact, Senators swear an oath to uphold the constitution, which includes that important clause about advice and consent; interesting, too, that the group has a sudden affinity for the constitution.)

FACT: As is the case with much of the environmental community, Earthjustice, whose sole reason for existence is to file lawsuits, is well-schooled in the fine art of obstructionism, having tied up environmental progress in the courts for years, and now “taking a stand” against instituting a permanent leader at EPA. No group, as the Sacramento Bee reported, has more won more in legal fees than Earthjustice. The Bee noted that an Earthjustice attorney charged $350 an hour, a higher rate than those charged by many experienced attorneys in San Francisco. In one endangered species case, the group submitted a bill of $439,053 to the Justice Department, and settled for $383,840.

Not So Moderate Carper Bill

Monday September 29, 2003

Much to the dismay of environmental groups (or, equally plausibly, could it be to their liking, as a boon for fundraising?), support for the President’s Clear Skies initiative is growing. Recently, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, and key governors in the South and West announced their backing for the plan, which will bring greater emissions reductions quicker and more cheaply than the status quo. Yet attention of late has focused on the Clean Air Planning Act (a.k.a. “the Carper bill”), principally because of its perception as the “moderate” alternative to Clear Skies, and hence more politically attractive. This moderation thesis is premised, for the most part, on the relative costs between the two bills. A so-called "EPA analysis" of the Carper bill released in May -- and quickly discredited by the agency itself -- was characterized by some to mean that, “industry would essentially see a negligible increase in its total cost of operating power plants than under the Bush plan.” It was also characterized that the CO2 controls in the Carper bill “added only a slight cost increase to industry.”

 

 

FACT: The Carper bill, relative to Clear Skies, is anything but moderate, and in fact would impose significant costs on businesses and the economy. According to a newly released study by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which compared Clear Skies with Carper, the costs associated with implementing Clear Skies between 2005 and 2025 would fall short of $25 billion. By contrast, projections of the cost of the Carper bill, under the most likely scenario studied, show costs of about $98 billion over the same period. That's about $1,000 per household, and four times as much as Clear Skies. If that difference isn’t convincing enough, EIA also found that, under an alternative scenario, the Carper bill’s price tag could run as high as $160 billion, or six and one-half times as much as Clear Skies.

 

 

EPA-White House Response to the World Trade Center Collapse

Friday September 26, 2003

For those seeking a rational, fact-based treatment of the EPA-White House response to the World Trade Center collapse surely won’t get it by reading Susan Moeller’s op-ed in the September 25 edition of Newsday. Moeller, who teaches media and international affairs at the University of Maryland, writes of a “scandal” and “deliberate manipulation” on the part of the White House.

 

Nonsense. A reasonable examination of the available evidence wholly undermines Moeller’s assertions. Moreover, contrast Moeller’s views with, of all sources, the New York Times editorial page, which essentially dismissed the entire issue as “retrospective nitpicking.” The Times, no friend of the Bush Administration, also agrees with the most recent scientific findings about air quality since September 11: “The broader public faced little or no risk from breathing the outdoor air once the initial cloud settled.”

 

True, the Times editorial merely reflects one opinion, so, to be fair, Moeller’s claims below are closely measured against the EPA IG report’s findings and other relevant sources. Not surprisingly, Moeller’s claims ring just a bit hollow:

 

MOELLER: The recent report by the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency should by all rights have New Yorkers - and others concerned about whether their government is capable of lying about public health and safety - out in the streets. Yet the report has not generated the media coverage and public attention it deserves.

Why? Certainly the allegations in the report are scandalous: They detail the White House's deliberate manipulation of the information that was released about the air quality in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center. "The White House Council on Environmental Quality," said the report, "influenced ... the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced the EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

 

 

FACT: For starters, Moeller’s conflation of the words “deliberate manipulation” and “influence” is brazenly misleading. Obviously, the words “manipulate” and “influence” have quite different meanings. It’s no shock or scandal that CEQ coordinated, at the request of the President, the multi-agency task force (including EPA and OSHA) that organized the response effort. Put simply, CEQ had a statutory duty to participate in the planning. It’s ludicrous to suggest that CEQ should not have played any role.

 

Manipulation (especially of the deliberate kind) implies something sinister, as the definition suggests: to tamper with or falsify for personal gain. Moeller probably should have watched the September 4 NBC interview with EPA IG Nikki Tinsley. According to reporter Lisa Myers, Tinsley “stopped short of accusing anyone of lying or of knowingly providing false information.” Or she could have read the IG report: "In regard to the monitoring data, we found no evidence that EPA attempted to conceal data results from the public.”

 

Further, as the Senate EPW Committee staff report on the IG report, EPA IG staff stated that there was no conspiracy or attempt to suppress information. The report also addressed directly the supposed “scandal” of the press releases EPA sent out in the days after September 11.

 

“When asked to compare the statements in the final press releases to those in the draft releases,” the report states, “the OSHA official questioned by EPW staff in every instance believed the changed or added language more clearly communicated the real risks of asbestos exposure than the draft.” Notably, the only existing asbestos standard that was applicable to ground zero was an OSHA standard.

 

 

MOELLER: But the story about the administration's distorting the health risks for those living and working near Ground Zero is remaining, at best, on the inside pages of the newspapers.

 

 

FACT: Distorted the health risks? Again, actually reading the report before drawing conclusions about “scandals” is very important. As the EPA IG stated: "(The IG) spoke to a number of experts in the field of environmental monitoring, including physicians, industrial hygienists, and researchers. These experts generally agreed that the levels of airborne asbestos detected in the air outside the perimeter of Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan did not present a significant increase in long-term risk to the public."

 

Subsequent research by scientists from the University of California has confirmed these findings. Reporting on that research, the Times wrote that, “most residents and workers downtown—while they may well have suffered from the dust at the collapse and periodic wafts from the smoke plume—were largely spared the prolonged exposure that usually raised the greatest health concerns.”

 

President Bush and the Environment

Tuesday September 23, 2003

In a refrain as predictable as the rising sun, environmental groups and their allies in the Democratic Party say President Bush has amassed the “worst environmental record in history” (worse than, presumably, Hitler and Stalin). No press release or fundraising event is complete without the epithet. The proof of this statement is obvious, they say, because President Bush is “gutting” clean-air protections and “rolling back” clean air laws (one Democratic notable even complained of the President’s refusal to regulate CO2, saying that emissions of the life-sustaining gas are “killing people” and “causing asthma” in children). Things are getting worse for everybody, but most especially for the elderly, children, the poor, the downtrodden…etc. Air pollution, according to their most objective assessments, is spewing out of smokestacks (as one green group put it) at “runaway levels,” all because of President Bush’s policies, including reform of New Source Review.

 

FACT: The fatuousness of these claims is obvious to the sober minded, including award-winning environmental journalist Greg Easterbrook, a senior editor of the New Republic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution—two institutions, incidentally, quite well-known for their moderate to liberal views on public policy issues. Easterbrook’s comments, from his piece in the September 22 issue of Time, are worth quoting in full: “[N]othing you hear about worsening air quality is true. Air pollution is declining under President Bush, just as it declined under President Clinton…Aggregate emissions, the sum of air pollution categories, have fallen 48 percent since 1970, even though the U.S. population rose 39 percent during that period…In 2001, there were fewer than half as many air-quality warning days across the country as in 1988…And the Midwestern power plant emissions that Northeastern commentators constantly depict as horror? Such emissions are a problem—but a declining problem. Levels of sulfur dioxide from Midwestern power plants have dropped 40 percent in the past two decades, even as electricity production keeps rising.”

 

Hurricane Isabel and Global Warming

Monday September 22, 2003

As Isabel swept through the Eastern seaboard whipping up a broad swath of destruction, environmentalists just couldn’t contain themselves, as they seized yet another opportunity to advance highly questionable—if not outright silly—theories about the “linkage” between global warming and extreme weather events. Though it offered some qualified statements—“Although it is impossible to say that any individual storm is caused by global warming”—Worldwatch Institute breezily vitiated them by citing “clear connections” between Isabel and global warming. “Heat in the atmosphere is the fuel that leads to stormy weather,” the Institute wrote in a Sept. 16 press release, “and meteorological studies indicate that rising temperatures will tend to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme storms, particularly the violent thunderstorms that occur in some parts of the world.” The Institute went on to write that man-made greenhouse gases are a major cause of global warming—and that as temperatures rise, so too will the frequency and severity of hurricanes (the solution to this, according to the Institute, is…the Kyoto Protocol).

FACT: This ‘SUVs-release-CO2-causing-global-warming-causing-hurricanes’ syllogism is patently false. Even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a bountiful source of the alarmists most absurd contentions, says that, “Overall, there is no evidence that extreme weather events, or climate variability, has increased, in a global sense, through the 20th century.” And since 2000, reams of scientific research have confirmed the IPCC’s findings. David Legates, an expert hydrology researcher, testified to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on March 13, 2002: “Clearly, claims that anthropogenic global warming will lead to more occurrences of droughts, floods, and storms are wildly exaggerated.” What about the supposed heightened severity of storms and hurricanes, caused by global warming? According to the American Insurance Association, “The real problem is the tremendous growth in population, homes, commercial development in the most hurricane-prone regions of the United States, especially Florida and other states along the Southeast and Gulf coasts.”

 

Union of Concerned Scientists, Global Warming, and Fungi

Thursday September 11, 2003

As part of its advocacy campaign for the Lieberman-McCain global warming bill, the Union of Concerned Scientists has unequivocally declared on its website that “global warming is real and underway.” According to the esteemed team of green white coats, “the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming is becoming clearer everyday.” What, exactly, is becoming clearer? On what issue or issues have ambiguities or complexity been removed or clarified? None other than “human-induced” global warming, stemming from the menace of SUVs and coal-fired power plants. “The most important causes [of global warming] include the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, gas, and oil.” This information is part of the union’s earnest desire to educate the unenlightened about global warming science. “At UCS, we’re working to bring sound scientific information to policymakers and the public to educate them about global warming.”

 

 

FACT: In its drive to propagate “sound scientific information,” the UCS “overlooked” a recent Washington Post story that casts serious doubt on anthropogenic theories of global warming. Beneath the snowpack of the Colorado Rockies, scientists discovered fungi emitting large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane—a phenomenon totally unconnected to SUVs. As the Post reported: “Indeed, scientists said, if other regions of the world have similar fungal communities thriving under their winter snows, as now seems likely, climatologists will have to revise their models of global warming to accommodate fungi's surprisingly massive role in the winter production of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.” Global warming models “can no longer ignore fungi in snowy regions and seasons as they have, scientists said—especially because about 40 percent of Earth's landmass is covered with snow for at least part of the year.” Steven Miller, a mycologist, or fungus specialist, at the University of Wyoming, and someone the UCS might want to call, said that, “we have relatively little knowledge of what the inputs and outputs are for CO2.”

 

 

The High Price of McCain-Lieberman

Monday September 8, 2003

Does legislation to regulate carbon dioxide emissions provide industry and investors with “certainty”? Put another way, does legislation such as the Lieberman-McCain climate bill remove political uncertainties that complicate long-term investment planning, and in turn depress shareholder value and economic growth? There are many propagating this view, including NRDC and Denise Nappier, the Connecticut state treasurer. As Nappier testified before the EPW Committee on June 5, opposing command-and-control climate change policies “can erode shareholder value and place today’s seemingly solid investment in jeopardy.” And further: “The consequences for those companies that do not act responsibly today and take steps to assess and mitigate the risk associated with climate change can be quite devastating.” By “acting responsibly” Nappier means, of course, supporting policies—Lieberman-McCain, to name just one—that place an artificial cap on carbon emissions, which she argues “is an investor security issue of the highest magnitude.”

 

FACT: Lieberman-McCain does bring manifold certainties, but of a wholly different kind than Nappier and others believe. What is the certainty for shareholders? The Congressional Budget Office couldn’t be clearer: “Losses to industry—in the form of lower stock values—would be broadly distributed among investors…” What is the certainty for the economy? According to the Energy Information Administration, cumulative GDP (in 1996 dollars) declines by $1.4 trillion. What about certainty for workers? Lieberman-McCain, according to EIA, would cost 50,000 coal industry jobs. And as CBO said: “Many coal workers could lose their jobs if carbon emissions were reduced significantly.” And certainty for consumers? The bill would drive up home energy costs by 46 percent, forcing consumers to pay $444 more for energy each year.

 

 

 

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