You’re Going To Hear A Lot About The Upcoming EPA’s Pollution Actions

Greenhouse pollution will come under stricter controls by the EPA in the future.  The agency’s actions will be dictated by a 2007 Supreme Court decision saying the EPA can and should regulate CO2 in the same way it has regulated other sources of pollution in the past.  The new regulations are slated to be implemented starting Sunday, the 2nd of January, 2011.

Of course, the Republican Teabaggers in both chambers of Congress, at the command of the dirty energy industry, will raise absolute hell about any action the EPA takes, Supreme Court decisions they don’t agree with be damned.  Republican Teabaggers have already threatened that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson will likely spend more time answering their witch-hunt-driven questions in Congress than in her office.  Imagine what they outcry would be if the Joint Chiefs of Staff spent more of their time responding to subpoenas than in their Pentagon offices.  Of course, this country has a serious warrior-worship problem.  Such concern doesn’t extend to keeping the environment livable for us.

I wanted to share a part of an article from a New York Times writer, John M. Broder.

For the moment, administration officials are treading lightly, fearful of inflaming an already overheated atmosphere on the issue and mindful that its stated priorities are job creation and economic recovery.

No doubt, John or his editor thought it was pretty clever to insert something like “inflaming an already overheated atmosphere” in an article about regulating greenhouse gas pollution.  Unfortunately, the climate system doesn’t take things like irony into account in responding to that pollution.  It can only respond to physical forcing, which it is already doing.

Without being an activist about the issue, John could have noted a few simple facts: while the EPA’s critics are making the same arguments they’ve made for decades, the globe experienced the warmest November on record just one month ago.  It experienced the warmest December-November on record in the past year.  The 2000s were considerably warmer than the 1990s, which was warmer than the 1980s.  Global warming affects are taking place faster and in more locations than the state of the science said it would just a few short years ago.  But I suppose all those things don’t make for clever writing that “journalists” aim for these days.  Cleverness is better received than accuracy.

EPA & CO2 Part 2 and Alaska Drilling News

An article in yesterday’s Denver Post inspired me to write a follow-up to my diary about the EPA identifying 6 greenhouse gases as agents that “endanger public health and welfare” under the Clean Air Act.

We didn’t have to wait long for the response from the fossil fuel industry, which provided this choice quote:

“The proposed endangerment finding poses an endangerment to the American economy and every American family,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.

No Jack, it doesn’t. Your industry’s lack of foresight and greed-driven actions have endangered the American economy and every American family. Your industry decided not to build refining capacity, ensuring that Americans would suffer under horrendous price spikes, as we saw last year.

We’ve known for 30 years the potential dangers of allowing GHG pollutants to continue to be spewed into the atmosphere, but your industry ensured that little meaningful action be taken during that time to do anything about it. Now, tipping points are being crossed. Widespread, intense droughts are afflicting millions of acres of land worldwide. The globe’s average temperature continues to warm decade after decade. And still your industry is falsely arguing that no action should be taken, lest your members’ shareholders receive less than record profits quarter after quarter.

EPA and Climate Change News

Two very big news stories broke this week regarding the EPA.  In the first, the EPA, under direction from the pro-science Obama administration, will look into whether CO2 should be regulated according to the Clean Water Act.  Back in January, the EPA determined that CO2 should be regulated according to the Clean Air Act (ending years of delay under the Bush “administration”).  Now, they will look into how much more acidic CO2 emissions are making the oceans.  As CO2 dissolves in the oceans in increasing quantities, the chemisty of ocean water is altered.  More acidic water doesn’t allow organisms at the bottom of the ecosystem to form their external shells.  If that happens on a large enough scale, the world’s oceanic ecosystems could collapse.  Since a majority of the world’s people live off of the oceans’ bounty, that would have a deleterious effect on global society’s.  Getting the EPA to regulate these pollutants based on scientific information (and not pre-conceived ideological answers) is good, overdue policy.

This morning, the second piece of big news came out: the EPA is expected to announce today that six greenhouse gases are pollutants and harmful to human health.  Doing so would allow the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions, but the article states that the Obama administration is going to use the announcement instead as leverage to get Congress to pass legislation to regulate the emissions and set up a cap-and-trade system instead.  Before I get into the policy stance and what I think the consequences will be, I want to set the stage with the following:

Potential health impacts from warming, EPA scientists said in their recommendations, include:

• longer and more severe heat waves;
• increased smog in some areas;
• dangerous flooding caused by stronger storms;
• and diseases, including malaria and dengue fever, related to flooding and warmer weather.

Look, it sounds really good that Obama wants to increase leverage on Congress.  But I honestly don’t see how this convinces ConservaDems or Cons to change their stance on the subject.  They’re still going to be under tremendous pressure from corporate lobbyists to gut cap-and-trade – either by setting the cap way too high or by allowing far too many allowances to the heaviest polluters.  The only way I see CO2 being regulated to the degree it needs to be to alleviate future impacts after a flawed cap-and-trade plan is established is for the EPA to assume the responsibility it’s been given.  Unfortunately, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has now gone on record as saying her agency would not act alone.  Would they act after a flawed bill is enacted, since technically Congress would have acted?  I don’t know.

Congress, especially the Senate, is filled with climate change deniers.  They’re going to trot out their tired talking points about how the EPA is going to base their decision on junk-science and liberals are running around like Chicken Little trying to destroy our economy.  I will of course keep watch for a Republican like Snowe to publicly support and vote for a good cap-and-trade, but that doesn’t account for Sens. Bayh, Landrieu, Nelson(s) or Sen. Specter from joining their science-hating colleagues.  How much will they give away to the Cons in return for what will be a no-vote anyway?

There remains a great deal of work to do on everybody’s part.  This problem won’t be solved today, despite the urgency many of us feel to do so.  Two very good steps were taken this week.  I applaud the Obama administration and the EPA for them.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

Carmakers Want To Ignore the California Market

Is it any wonder the American car industry (at least the “Big 3)  finds itself on the brink of collapse?  Their executives have made bad business decisions for decades, after which the American government has been forced to step in and help them clean up their mess.  American auto corporations want to continue their failed business models — this time by arguing to the EPA that a weak, national greenhouse gas standard needs to be implemented instead of having California and 13 other states implement standards that are more stringent.  It is foolhardy to try to dictate the world’s 7th largest economy what they can and cannot implement.  Especially in a country that supposedly values the ability of states to implement policies that are more stringent than those at the national level.  Especially when those same auto corporations have no problems meeting foreign countries’ standards regarding vehicle safety and performance.

Their argument that having more than one regulation to follow is too onerous is pathetic.  The market is speaking: Californians are pressuring their elected officials to introduce policies to keep themselves healthier and safer.  If the auto corporations can’t meet those standards, they won’t be able to sell anything in California eventually.  It’s their decision.  Californians shouldn’t be forced to accept a dirtier and more dangerous environment just because some executives and shareholders are greedy.  Either the market is “free” as many pro-corporatists like to argue or it isn’t.

A simple solution would be to manufacture vehicles that met California’s standards, since they would be more stringent.  Then they wouldn’t be kept out of any market.  But the standards aren’t the real issue here – profit is.  Manufacturers want to hoard profit again (if they ever get profitable).  They’ll do what they’ve done in the past 50 years: fight every regulation and policy that takes a penny away from them.  Unless it’s nationalized health care.  They’ll fight that even though it’s absolutely killing their bottom line.  Like I asked above: is it any wonder the industry is on the brink of collapse?  Either today’s manufacturers get their act together and meet today’s market requirements or they fail and tomorrow’s manufacturers will do it for them.

Kudos to President Obama for asking the EPA to look at the California GHG regulations again.  It wasn’t done appropriately under the Bush “administration”.  It will be done so now.

EPA Will Review Potential CO2 Dangers

Back in the dark days of the Bush “administration”, the EPA was prohibited by the science-hating Bushies from controlling CO2 emissions.  Elections, as Bush famously said, have consequences.  In this case, the 2008 election means that the EPA will review the CO2 emissions control policy.

At a minimum, over 100 planned coal plants will be immediately impacted.  If CO2 is, as it should be, regulated by the EPA as pollution, the costs of operating a coal power plant will finally begin to more closely reflect reality.  Coal plants have operated for yeas at a lopsided advantage over other types of plants.  As a mature industry, coal should be able to pay for itself.  It should not receive any more taxpayer dollars and should instead by charged to operate according to its real costs on society and the planet.

More generally, operating costs for everybody will go up in the short term as those costs are passed along.  That, in turn, will have a direct influence on the imperative to develop clean energy infrastructure that doesn’t have the same costs associated with it.  The “sky-is-falling’ message will be incessant from the over-indulged coal industry.  Keep the following in mind as they gear up their multi-million dollar marketing campaigns: more jobs will be created and maintained with renewable energy; the health of people will improve with time as old coal plants are shuttered; our emissions of climate change-forcing gases will slow down and eventually decrease.

Kudos to the Obama administration. This won’t be a silver-bullet solution, but it is one step in the correct direction.

Obama, Emissions & The Auto Industry

President Barack Obama made his first series of important moves on energy policy yesterday.  He directed regulators to quickly determine whether California and 18 other states can impose stricter car emissions and fuel efficiency than the EPA mandates nationally.  He also ordered the Transportation Department to enact short-term rules on how automakers can improve fuel efficiency of their new models based on a 2007 law. The law requires that by 2020, new cars and trucks meet a standard of 35 miles per gallon, a 40 percent increase over the previous standard.

The auto companies have nashed their teeth very forcefully throughout the 2007 law passage and now its enactment.  They have done so while driving themselves into near-obsoletion.  Their sales have plummeted in the past couple of years, but especially in 2008.  Why?  Because they bet the market would do one thing and it did the other.  What has their main complaint been with these potential regulations?  That they would force the corporations to sell one kind of car in California and another in the rest of the country.  How ridiculous is this claim?  Very, when you realize that these same corporations are already selling vehicles that produce fewer emissions and get much better gas mileage in other countries.

GM, until last month, had been the world’s number one autoseller for decades.  Were all those cars sold exclusively in America?  Of course not.  They sold cars in Europe and Asia; in countries who have mandated much higher fuel efficiency standards than did the U.S.  GM and Ford built plants overseas that manufactured cars that met those standards.  They did so and they remained profitable.  What has destroyed their bottom line was spending millions of dollars to lobby the U.S. government to not impose those same standards here.  So the car corporations forced themselves to make one kind of car to sell in the U.S. and another in the rest of the world.  That led to their current financial struggles.

Cons and pro-corproate Democrats often cite the virtues of the mythological “free-market”.  Here is an opportunity for them to do so again.  If GM, Ford and Chrysler can’t read the market’s signals, don’t they deserve to go under?  Won’t some other entrepreneurial entity come forward to fill the needs of the market?  Darn right, it will.  So what President Obama is doing is allowing our government to help out our mature industries.  GM, Ford and Chrysler are on the brink of collapse.  Obama is extending a helping hand to them, allowing them to continue their existence when they did everything in their power to end it by their own hands.

As usual, corporate media types misread the middle America realities before their eyes.  A “senior editor” (isn’t that impressive?) at CNN writes that

There is an idea afoot in the land that automakers are holding back on small cars because they would rather sell high-margin pickups and SUVs.

It isn’t true. They hold back on small cars because nobody wants to buy them. And since they are hard to sell, automakers can’t make any money on them. If there was steady, predictable demand, you would see waves of good, small cars.

The history of auto sales in 2008 provides a case in point. When gas prices spiked, sales of small and hybrid cars shot through the roof. After prices came back down, dealers couldn’t give them away.

How badly can one person misread the market?  Auto corporations definitely held back on small cars in their pursuit of the more profitable SUBs and pickups.  How many small car advertisements do you see?  Now think of how many truck & SUV ads you see.  Millions of dollars of marketing spent every year by every automaker is the cost of all that advertising.  Small car profits can’t justify themselves in the face of large vehicle profits.  It is a pretty simple business decision.  The problem is not every potential cost is adequately accounted for by the auto corporations.  Well over 1 million Toyota Priuses have been sold in America.  The technology in the Prius?  GM and Ford said Americans wouldn’t want it.  Why then do people remain on waiting lists for the car?  The manufacturing hasn’t caught up to the demand, just the opposite of what the CNN editor wrote.

The last sentence I quoted?  An even worse misread of the economy, if that’s possible.  When did gas prices start coming down in 2008?  In September, when the economy started to collapse.  Dealers can’t give any vehicle away right now.  There are thousands upon thousands of vehicles sitting around in port cities like Los Angeles.  That has never happened until last year.  American’s credit has been cut, and that was the only thing that allowed for our recent economic activity to occur.  Without that credit, people are starting to realize their post-inflation wages haven’t increased in years.  They have no money to buy cars.  Or appliances.  Or houses.  That’s why 500,000 people are losing their jobs every month.  It’s not because gas prices are $1.75 instead of $4.25, despite what the CNN editor wants you to believe.

I haven’t even touched on the environmental benefit of regulating emissions standards.  That has to be done, and done today.  Our climate forcing is making itself felt in an increasing number of ways.  We have the opportunity to try to alleviate the worst of climate change.  The American people spoke in November: they want to make the best of that opportunity.  Dinosaurs like the CNN editor just haven’t caught up to that reality yet.

Colorado Politics: CU Chair; Environment vs. Jobs; Ozone Pollution; Oil & Gas Poll

It’s interesting that this piece of news didn’t garner much discussion: The University of Colorado is looking to hire an endowed chair in conservative thought and policy.  This is the result of something the Cons have perfected: play the refs and get the bonus.

CU is currently developing a $9 million program which will bring nationally recognized conservative scholars to teach on the Boulder campus. The program will allow CU to create an endowment for a visiting chair in conservative thought.

What exactly is the push for this crazy idea?  It all arises from the Republican penchant for self-victimization.  The whole world is out to get every singe Con-servative, according to them.  The push is coming from entities like the American Enterprise Institute and the Independence Institute who have conducted “studies” demonstrating how crazy liberal every public college in America is.  What doesn’t get related by the corporate media is AEI and II are funded exclusively by conservatives.  Their “studies” are slanted from the start to show what they want them to show.  Because they’re so well funded and organized, they can push things like hiring a “chair of con-servative thought”.  How then, you might ask, could a place like CU in “ultra-liberal” Boulder even consider such a thing?  This is what happens when a partisan like Bruce Benson is hired as University President.  I haven’t read any stories about how CU is suddenly swimming in cash due to Benson’s superior fundraising abilities.  But CU is suddenly getting a chair in conservative thought.  Gee, I wonder how that happened.  Can you imagine the screams from the Cons if CU were to hire a chair in progressive thought?

More topics below.

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Pollution in Parks, Governors & Global Warming, Arctic Sea Ice

An EPA plan would allow coal power plants and oil refineries to be built closer to National Parks.  The EPA is being run by pro-corporate hacks appointed by Bush.  The way in which pollution levels in the parks would change under the EPA plan.  Instead of monitoring three- and 24-hour results, pollution will be averaged over an entire year before action is taken to control it.  Republicans’ plans to foul our public lands comes closer every day.  How patriotic.

12 governors signed a pledge yesterday to work against global warming forcing.  The document was signed at the end of a two-day international conference hosted by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The meeting was held in advance of the U.N.-sponsored climate change treaty negotiations being held in Poland next month.  Among the realistic assessments, here is a quote from Sabine Miltner, a director at Deutsche Bank:

She said sufficiently reducing emissions will require capital investments of roughly $500 billion a year between 2010 and 2030. Miltner suggested the U.S. and other governments weighing economic stimulus packages invest some of the money in energy efficiency projects, transmission lines for renewable power sources and public transportation systems.

It’s always nice to see more realists address the environment and the economy at the same time.  My Governor, Bill Ritter, was among the signees.  His New Energy Economy plan is well under way.  Seeing as how it will end up costing more later if we do nothing now, I’m glad Ritter and others are taking action, despite the science-haters in Bush’s government.

Arctic sea ice reformed quickly during October, as expected.  It’s not hard for a small layer of ice to form with sub-freezing atmospheric temperatures and 24-hour darkness.  The areal extent at the end of the month was still well below the 1979-2000 climatological average.  It should be noted that the rate of ice formation slowed noticeably by the end of the month.  Also of note is the large anomaly of high atmospheric temperatures in a deep layer above the Arctic Ocean.  As the warm water gave off its heat once the Sun retreated from the sky and prior to ice formation, massive amounts of energy in the form of heat was transferred from the Ocean to the atmosphere above it.  The NSIDC notes:

In the past five years, the Arctic has shown a pattern of strong low-level atmospheric warming over the Arctic Ocean in autumn because of heat loss from the ocean back to the atmosphere. Climate models project that this atmospheric warming, known as Arctic amplification, will become more prominent in coming decades and extend into the winter season. As larger expanses of open water are left at the end of each melt season, the ocean will continue to hand off heat to the atmosphere.

As I’ve written before, the total area of ice that melted this year set a record: 10.58 million square kilometers (4.08 million square miles).

News Links & Discussion 9/2/08

Personal incomes fell in July by 0.7%.  Remember, inflation in June was over 9%.  Americans had 10% less buying power than they did before.  Republican economics at work!

FAA computer practices leave quite a bit to be desired.  Two computer centers are supposed to operate for the entire country?!  Similar systems in different industries require multiple redundancies.  The FAA has also had many problems with adequately staffing properly trained air traffic controllers.  That’s a trend that started under St. Ronnie Reagan’s union busting days.  Republicans argue that investing in new technologies would require (gasp!) raising taxes.  Because crashing planes and a crippled air system are so much more desirable.

Union members make more and have better health insurance.  Their wages and benefits are part of the reason why corporations and their Republican lackeys have always attacked unions so viciously.

The Arctic becomes an island.  For the first time in recorded history, the Arctic ice sheet can be circumnavigated.  This year’s 2nd lowest ice extent (so far) on record means it will take quite different conditions to build the pack back up to the 1979-2000 average.  What’s left is thinner and weaker than before.

EPA emission limits are rejected by a federal appeals court.  It is absurd to think that the EPA should be able to limit what emission targets states can set for themselves, as long as they aren’t higher than the federal standard.  This decision is yet another slap in the face to the Bush-friendly EPA managerial appointments.  Not that that will stop them from continuing to act like a-holes for the next 120 days.

Marilyn Musgrave wants more debate time with challenger Betsy Markey, who has led in polls since May for the CO-04 seat.  This is a direct reversal of the 2006 race when Musgrave refused to debate challenger Angie Paccione as she led in polls all the way to election day.  Don’t give her any chance, Betsy!

The Space Shuttle program could be extended past the currently planned retirement date of 2010.  NASA is rightfully concerned that the U.S. would then have no platform to get astronauts to the ISS and Low Earth Orbit until the Orion capsule’s planned 2015 service entry.  One of the things Iraq has shown us is that projects and policies aren’t about available money, they’re about political will.  There is no reason for NASA to be beholden to an increasingly contentious Russia for passage to a space station that American taxpayers mostly paid for.

Oil prices down and this is the money quote:

Stocks slumped more than $7 a barrel Tuesday morning as investors bet that the damage from Gustav was not as bad as had been feared. Prices also dropped due to the stronger dollar, which makes dollar-traded commodities cheaper for overseas investors. Additionally, investors continued to bet that global demand for oil is waning.

Isn’t it nice to know that we’re getting gouged at the pump while Wall Streeters bet on this and that and the other thing?  Also note that oil prices have fallen 25% off their high of $147.20 on July 11.  Has American demand fallen by 25% this year?  Has American supply risen by 25% this year?  Nope.  More importantly, global demand has in no way fallen this year. Neither has global supply.  Republicans keep talking about the “free market” and how it will lower oil prices.  Those prices weren’t supported by market fundamentals.  They were propped up by speculators that have been scared off by the threat of regulation introduction by the Democratic Congress.  The lesson: Republicans cause oil and gas prices to rise; Democrats cause oil and gas prices to fall.

Will future Gulf landfalling hurricanes weaken like Katrina & Gustav?  Joe Romm argues that with much warmer future oceans (based on a business as usual approach), hurricanes moving across the Gulf may not have to contend with cooler sea surface temperatures closer to land.  That would mean more devastating storm damage as storms would maintain some or much of their open-water potency.  Also of concern: warmer Mississippi waters and warmer delta waters that would allow stronger hurricanes to affect more areas inland from the Gulf.

Random Linkies 7/17/08

Imagine the chances: energy companies contaminated water in wells by Parachute, CO and made someone sick. At the same time, the companies are heavily lobbying the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to not adopt rules that would include environmental controls. Now, why would they fight against those kinds of rules, I wonder…

The EPA released a Global Warming and Health report. I’ll give you one guess who stymied its release. That’s correct: the Bush “administration”, which has worked hard to deny and delay such information from being relayed properly to Americans.

“Risk (to human health, society and the environment) increases with increases in both the rate and magnitude of climate change,” scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency said. Global warming, they wrote, is “unequivocal” and humans are to blame.

Betsy Markey and Marilyn Musgrave debated recently. Betsy isn’t letting Marilyn get away with any b.s. charges. It’s probably part of the reason why Betsy is doing a better job of fundraising than Marilyn. That and Marilyn is a hate-monger who refuses to accomplish much for her district.

Xcel estimates that about 47,000 of its customers will have their power cut off due to missed payments. Let’s see, the price of energy hasn’t gone down in what, seven years. Our take home pay hasn’t gone up in the same time-frame. And Republicans think folks like this are just a bunch of whiners. Being unable to pay for your electricity is a result of immoral conservative economic policies. Which is why they’re losing elections these days.