Articles Tagged "Law/Policy"

A U.S. appellate court on Friday turned down a request from utilities, oil refiners and the state of Texas to effectively delay the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions by the Environmental Protection Agency.As a result, EPA and state agencies can begin to insist that companies use the "best available control technologies" to restrict emissions of carbon dioxide in order to obtain air permits.

The companies and state of Texas had sought a court order blocking the EPA from moving ahead until the end of a lawsuit challenging the agency's finding that greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants and large industrial facilities endanger the health of Americans.

The companies contend in that lawsuit that EPA regulations would be too costly.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said that the companies "have not shown that the harms they allege are 'certain,' rather than speculative."

The distinction between weather and climate is an important one and the implications for policymakers are huge.

Much of northwest Europe is having an unusually cold start to winter. Admittedly, the British transport network tends to crumble at the first hint of snow, but our near continental neighbours have also suffered disruption.

In the meantime, Iceland and Greenland have enjoyed relatively mild weather, so we cannot simply conclude that the northern hemisphere winter is cold and that this therefore puts in doubt the generally-accepted global warming trend. Supporters of the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis rightly argue that it is the longer-term pattern which is important, not short-term weather patterns, however unusual.

The distinction between weather and climate is important. Records for temperature, rainfall, windspeed or whatever are broken somewhere in the world on an almost daily basis. Some maximum and minimum temperature records have stood for many years because they were caused by an atypical coincidence of factors. They tell us nothing about climate unless there is a definite trend over an extended period of time.

The 12/6 announcement by the Supreme Court to hear an appeal in a global warming nuisance case is a classic example of a double-edged sword. As reported by Fox News:

The Supreme Court announced Monday it will give further consideration to a closely-watched lawsuit filed by environmentalists, eight states and New York City blaming the problems associated with global warming on the carbon dioxide output of five major power companies.

An ultimate judgment against the energy providers could lead to dramatic changes in the energy marketplace and ripple into other industries. But the high court's decision to give the matter closer attention makes that possibility less likely.

In asking the high court to review the case, lawyers for the power companies said the plaintiffs have no standing to file a lawsuit. Instead, they contend, only the federal government through the Environmental Protection Agency has the ability to hold power companies accountable for contributing to global warming.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear what could be the most important environmental case it will decide this year: Huge power companies like Xcel Energy and Duke Energy are appealing a ruling by an appeals court that they can be sued under public nuisance law. If that ruling is confirmed at the highest level, it could open the door to a flood of lawsuits claiming the power companies’ greenhouse gas emissions constitute a nuisance to the general public.

This one has been a long time coming. The case, brought by eight states including New York and California plus some environmental groups, dates back to 2004. First a federal judge threw out the states’ claim, essentially saying that emissions should be dealt with in legislative bodies, not courtrooms. Then the appeals court reversed that ruling, recognizing the eight states’ claim that these emissions contribute to global warming and could be considered under public nuisance law, prompting the power companies to balk and appeal.

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Click source to read FULL report from Bloomberg

Global Warming: The secretary of energy says the U.S. doesn't need to be 100% certain humans are heating the planet to enact policies to mitigate climate change. Apparently just a hunch will do.

Speaking Monday at the National Press Club, Steven Chu said "you don't need 100% certainty" to put solutions in effect. A mere 80% or 90%, he said, is enough. The secretary's not-so-startling comment is revealing on two levels.

First, he admits that, despite the political left's claims that human-caused global warming is occurring and the debate is over, it is not an established fact. It is, at best, speculation.

Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia until the Climate-gate e-mail scandal led to a change in his status, represented the equivocating positions of climate scientists when he refused earlier this year to say that he is certain that humans are heating their planet.

Jones had his chance to establish his position in a February interview with the BBC. But he chose to say that while he's 100% sure Earth is warming, he goes "along with IPCC Chapter 9" on the question of cause.

Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn't help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party's line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities.

National Journal reported last month that 19 of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers declared that the science of climate change is either inconclusive or flat-out wrong. Many newly elected Republican House members take that position. It is a stance that defies the findings of our country's National Academy of Sciences, national scientific academies from around the world and 97 percent of the world's climate scientists.

Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world's top scientific academies and scientists are wrong? I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.

I can understand arguments over proposed policy approaches to climate change. I served in Congress for 24 years. I know these are legitimate areas for debate. What I find incomprehensible is the dogged determination by some to discredit distinguished scientists and their findings.

Click source to read FULL report from Sherwood Boehlert

Kenneth Cuccinelli II, elected as the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia in November 2009, has demanded from the University of Virginia (my university) the e-mails and other information of Dr. Michael Mann, who was an assistant professor of environmental sciences there from 1995 to 2005.

From the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the so-called Climategate affair, we know that Professor Phil Jones was at the center of a conspiracy to manipulate temperature data. His American analogue was Michael Mann. Even though Jones recommended deletion of all e-mails, it is possible that many e-mails will still be found on the UVA server and furnish the "smoking gun" that can tell us just how the temperature data had been manipulated.

The UEA e-mails tell us of attempts to "hide the decline" (of temperature) using "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick." It is important now to discover the truth, either from e-mail evidence or by direct testimony. Unfortunately, none of the investigations so far have delved into this matter, but instead have produced what amounts to a series of whitewashes.

The University of Virginia is fighting the demand for the data using outside lawyers and claiming "academic freedom" among other such excuses. I cannot comment on the legal implications of the AG's investigation. It should be noted, however, that UVA was quite willing to deliver up the e-mails of Professor Pat Michaels when Greenpeace asked for them in December 2009. It makes the UVA protestations sound rather hypocritical.

We live in an Orwellian world where myth and propaganda have replaced science and reason, even at the highest levels of discourse. In May 2010, Science ran a letter signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences attacking Cuccinelli. The letter contained numerous spurious assertions as if they were scientific fact. Lacking expertise and ignorant of the actual data, the signers simply accepted a story that matched their ideological convictions.

In court documents filed last night, the Competitive Enterprise Institute argues that NASA has gone out of its way to avoid turning over records that show the agency reverse-engineered temperature data to better make the case that the planet is becoming warmer.

CEI, which is being represented by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Andrew Tulumello, argues in a pleading filed in Washington federal court that NASA’s request for summary judgment in the Freedom of Information Act suit against the agency should be denied because e-mails and other evidence turned over by NASA suggest that there are additional records that are being withheld.

“Rather than deal forthrightly with a FOIA request on these issues, NASA has engaged in obstruction and delay,” Tulumello writes in the court filing, which was filed late last night in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

CEI argues in the Nov. 3 motion that NASA has additional e-mails and documents on separate servers that relate to changes made to temperature data, but has failed to turn them over. CEI also argues that Dr. James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, and Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at Goddard, used third-party Web sites and e-mail addresses to avoid having those records appear on NASA’s servers.

Deeply irresponsible corporate-sponsored programmes of disinformation have potentially harsh effects upon tens of millions of people

Although there is an important role for scepticism in science, for almost 30 years some corporations have supported a disinformation campaign about climate change science.

It may be reasonable to be somewhat sceptical about climate change models, these untruths are not based upon reasonable scepticism but outright falsification and distortions of climate change science.

These claims have included assertions that the science of climate change has been completely "debunked" and that there is no evidence of human causation of recent observed warming. There are numerous lines of evidence that point to human causation even if it is not a completely settled matter. Reasonable scepticism cannot claim that there is no evidence of causation and some other claims frequently being made by the well-financed climate change disinformation campaign, and they amount to an utter distortion of a body of evidence that the world needs to understand to protect itself from huge potential harms.