Green Education: Global Warming

Cato Institute scholars Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger have produced a layman-friendly yet thoroughly referenced draft report summarizing “the important science that is missing from Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” a U.S. Government document underpinning the EPA’s December 2009 endangerment rule, the foundation of all of the agency’s greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations. Pat and Chip’s draft report, titled Addendum: [...]

On Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied by 7-1 a petition for a full-court re-hearing of its 2-1 decision last summer to dismiss litigation challenging EPA’s approval of the sale of E15 at retail motor fuel pumps. E15 is a blend of 85% gasoline and 15% ethanol. In both decisions, Judge Brett Kavanaugh was the sole dissenter, and both [...]

Heritage Foundation economists David Kreutzer and Nicolas Loris have posted an assessment of the economic impacts of a carbon tax that starts out at $25 per ton and increases by 5% annually (after adjusting for inflation). Rather than use industry data or assumptions, they compare two policy scenarios (“side cases”) from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook [...]

Global warming alarmists have seized upon an announcement by NOAA this week that 2012 was the warmest year in the U. S. historical record going back to 1895.  For example, Joe Romm writes on his ClimateProgress blog that, “2012 showed that the record-smashing weather extremes of 2011 weren’t a fluke, they were a pattern.” According to [...]

In An Inconvenient Truth (pp. 280-281), Al Gore enthused about a Science magazine study by Princeton economists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala. The study concluded that, “Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half century.” Gore claimed the policies Socolow and Pacala recommend, “all of which [...]

In Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA, petitioners — a coalition of industry groups, states, and non-profit organizations — sought to overturn the EPA’s endangerment, tailpipe, triggering, and tailoring rules for greenhouse gases (GHGs). In June of last year, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the EPA, upholding the four [...]

Powerful dissenting opinions can sometimes persuade a higher court to review a lower court’s ruling. Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), the Supreme Court decision empowering the EPA to act as a super legislature and ‘enact’ climate policy, is a prime example. In 2005, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Bush administration EPA properly exercised its discretion when [...]

That fossil fuels are bad for people and the planet is a cardinal tenet of both mainstream and radical environmentalism. Cato Institute scholar Indur Goklany offers a dramatically different assessment in Humanity Unbound: How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity. Global average life expectancy (the best single indicator of health) hardly changed through most of human [...]

The wind energy production tax credit (PTC) expires at the stroke of midnight, Dec. 31, unless Congress votes to renew the tax break. A one-year extension would add an estimated $12.1 billion to deficit spending over 10 years. A six-year extension, advocated by the wind industry, could add $50 billion. The fiscal cliff looms and the [...]

Environmental activist Bill McKibben and his organization, 350.org, are on a ”Do the Math” tour in which they urge colleges and universities to “divest their endowments, estimated at a total of $400 billion nationwide, from the fossil fuel industry.” The 350.org campaign is explicitly modeled on the 1980s divestment campaign that persuaded many universities to dump their stock in companies doing business in [...]

Numerous politicians, pundits, and activists, and even some scientists blame fossil-fuel emissions for the death and devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. Such allegations are ideological, not scientific. As noted previously on this blog, when hurricane damages are adjusted (“normalized”) to account for changes in population, per capita income, and the consumer price index, there is no long-term trend such [...]

Yesterday on NPR’s radio program To the Point, I said it was dishonorable for ExxonMobil to support a carbon tax. I compared ExxonMobil’s reported embrace of carbon taxes to Enron’s lobbying for the Kyoto Protocol. Enron was a a major natural gas distributor and saw in Kyoto a means to suppress demand for coal, natural gas’s [...]

In a fiery speech yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) ”calls out” “climate deniers.” In the first half of the speech he goes ad hominem, attacking opponents as “front groups” who take payola from “polluters” to “confuse” the public by selling “doubt” as their product. First a bit of free advice for the good Senator: Your team has been playing nasty from day one. [...]

A new study conducted by Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) for the National Council of Chain Restaurants (NCCR) estimates the impact of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) on the chain restaurant industry. PwC used the following research strategy. First, PwC examined 11 public and private sector studies estimating the extent to which the RFS increases ethanol utilization beyond what [...]