Free Republic

The Weather: Regulations finalized by the California Air Resources Board establish the nation's first state-run cap-and-trade regime. Despite Solyndra, the state will gather solar panels while it may. The 262 pages of regulations implementing California's 2006 global warming legislation, Assembly Bill 32, approved by CARB last Thursday, will probably reduce employment more than it reduces emissions. The only thing it will cap is economic growth by bleeding a patient that is already hemorrhaging red ink. Signed into law in 2006 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the cap-and-trade regulations are intended to force California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels...

California became the first state to cap greenhouse gas emissions across its major industries Thursday when air regulators unanimously approved a plan to allow companies to sell pollution credits as a way to ratchet down heat-trapping gases. The state Air Resources Board took the action almost a year after a nearly identical plan was approved, then delayed by environmentalists who demanded the board consider taxing carbon as an alternative to the cap-and-trade strategy. By 2013, refineries, power plants and the rest of the state's top 600 industrial sources of greenhouse gases will have to cut emissions on average by 10...

The data process used to arrive at the administration’s determination that greenhouse gases endanger “the public health and welfare� violated the Environmental Protection Agency’s own peer review procedure, a new report from the EPA Office of the Inspector General reveals.Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, requested this report in April, asking that the OIG determine whether the EPA “followed key federal and Agency regulations and policies in developing and reviewing the technical data used to make and support its greenhouse gases endangerment finding.� Now, Inhofe is calling for a series of...

I was listening to Neil Boortz last night and he was talking about this new Carbon EPA stuff. He said that the EPA was hiring, get this, 230,000 new employees whose sole responsibility was to process this new paper work. He said that it was going to cost (I think) 1.4 million jobs right out of the box and companies will have to fold, and that some powerplants that we desparate need will be shut down, electricity is going to go through the roof. C02, a natural occuring Gas, is now pollution. He did say that Hermain Cain said the...

The president has found a way to add jobs, after all — 230,000 of ‘em, all within the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s the number of new bureaucrats the federal government will need to hire to implement new proposed greenhouse gas regulations, according to a report by The Daily Caller: The Environmental Protection Agency has said new greenhouse gas regulations, as proposed, may be “absurd” in application and “impossible to administer” by its self-imposed 2016 deadline. But the agency is still asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats — at a cost of $21 billion...

Reading this, especially with the climate doom opening paragraph, I’m left with the idea that it will be used as a tool to limit modern farming practices by going after yield enhancing chemical fertilzers. …it might even be feasible to use the knowledge in order to prevent nitrous oxide from being released into the atmosphere, for example, by additives in fertilizers that preserve the functioning of N2O-reductase… From the Karlsruhe Institute of TechnologyNature: How the N2O Greenhouse Gas Is DecomposedFor the First Time, Microbiologists Identified the Structure of the Bacterial Enzyme that Decomposes Nitrous Oxide and the Decomposition Mechanism The...

As far as summer fashion goes, clothes with built-in electric fans leave a little something to be desired. But Hiroshi Ichigaya has managed to turn his breezy invention into the must-have item of the summer, thanks to sweltering temperatures and a power shortage stemming from the triple disasters that hit Japan in March. The founder of Kuchofuku, or "air-conditioned clothing" in Japanese, says sales for his clothes have increased 10-fold. Phones at his office haven't stopped ringing. "People ask me, why would I want to wear a jacket when it's so hot," Ichigaya, a former Sony engineer, said. "I tell...

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster during the past decade than predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international agencies. According to alarmist groups, this proves global warming is much worse than previously feared. The increase in emissions “should shock even the most jaded negotiators” at international climate talks currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, the UK Guardian reports. But there’s only one problem with this storyline; global temperatures have not increased at all during the past decade. The evidence is powerful, straightforward, and damning. NASA satellite instruments precisely measuring global temperatures...

The EPA's New MoveIs the NAT GAS Act an EPA Trojan horse? The debate over the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act of 2011, or NAT GAS Act, has focused mostly on the question of whether the federal government should use hefty subsidies — $64,000 per truck — to interfere with the free-market allocation of resources. On that point, a surprisingly large number of Republicans are siding with their central-planning-advocate colleagues on the other side of the aisle. But why are so many Democrats enamored with big corporate-welfare giveaways to the natural-gas industry in the first place? The...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) announced Thursday that he would pull out of a regional climate pact by the end of the year, delivering a political setback to the fledging effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming. In a news conference, Christie said the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a 2005 accord in which 10 states agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants 10 percent by 2018, would not be able to meet its goals. The program requires plants in the region that burn fossil fuels to buy pollution allowances for the carbon they...

EPA: ‘Nothing to fear’ on climate regs By Andrew Restuccia - 04/26/11 10:43 AM ET Environmental Protection Administrator Lisa Jackson said Tuesday that the public has no reason to fear the agency’s pending climate regulations. “I believe there is nothing to fear from common-sense use of the Clean Air Act to begin to put this country in the direction of moving towards addressing our greenhouse gas emissions,” Jackson said during remarks at an energy conference in Washington. The EPA has begun phasing in greenhouse gas standards for new and modified power plants and refineries. The regulations have come under attack...

Republicans on a key House panel approved a bill Tuesday that would permanently block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a 34-19 vote. The bill won the support of every Republican and three Democrats: Reps. Mike Ross (Ark.), Jim Matheson (Utah) and John Barrow (Ga.). It’s the latest step forward for the legislation, which would prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources such as power plants and refineries. The bill, authored by House Energy Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), is expected to come...

Cooling trend could be on the way unless thwarted by greenhouse gassesLOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, February 28, 2011—There’s an old saying that if you don't like the weather in New Mexico, wait five minutes. Maybe it should be amended to 10,000 years, according to new research. In a letter published recently in the journal Nature, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers and an international team of scientists report that the Southwest region of the United States undergoes "megadroughts"—warmer, more arid periods lasting hundreds of years or longer. More significantly, a portion of the research indicates that an ancient period of warming...

Bolivia blames capitalism Mexico: Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism was responsible for climate change in his speech at the Climate Change Summit Thursday and he insisted on the need for the developed countries to make new commitments to reduce their greenhouse effect gas emissions. “We are sometimes debating only the effects of global warming, and not the causes, and we should be responsible and debate those causes,” said the Bolivian President in the high level segment of the 16th Climatic Change Summit in Cancun. Morales recalled the responsibility of the Governments so that key decisions are adopted to face...

Sacramento -- The California Air Resources Board violated state environmental law in 2008 when it adopted a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gases and again last year when it passed cap-and-trade regulations, a San Francisco Superior Court judge has ruled in a tentative decision. If the decision is made final, California would be barred from implementing its ambitious plan to combat global warming until it complies with portions of the California Environmental Quality Act, though it's not yet clear what the air board would have to do to be in compliance. The state's plan, which implements AB32, the Global Warming...

BRUSSELS (AFP) – Hackers stole two million tonnes of polluting rights in a five-day raid this week on the European Union's carbon emissions trading system, an EU source said on Thursday. The volume of carbon credits stolen in online action, which a European Commission spokeswoman was "possibly concerted", represents just a fraction of global industrial greenhouse gas permits, but is potentially worth many millions of euros. The scale of the theft, which involved five unnamed EU states, was revealed a day after Brussels shut all 27 national trading registries for a week, citing inadequate online protection. Credits stolen just from...

LONGVIEW, Wash. - A coalition of conservation and clean energy groups applauded the state's decision to intervene in their challenge to the permit for a coal export terminal in Longview. The state contends that the Cowlitz County commissioners did not go far enough in considering greenhouse gas emissions outside the immediate boundaries of the project before issuing the permit for construction of the massive coal export facility. "We are very pleased that the state is calling for full disclosure of the risks to Washington's environment posed by this coal export facility," said Jan Hasselman, an attorney for Earthjustice, who filed...

Complete title: EPA To Require Power Plants and Refineries To Use Pollution-Reduction Technologies To Trim Greenhouse Gas Emissions (CNSNews.com) -- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, it will decide which pollution-reduction technologies work best for power plants and refineries and will then set regulations over the next two years that require those industries to implement similar pollution-reduction technologies.However, the EPA acknowledged that it does not yet know how much greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced through its new regulatory plan. Also, the American Petroleum Institute criticized the EPA's action...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama's administration said Thursday it will regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, after legislation on climate change died in Congress. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would regulate fossil fuel power plants and petroleum refineries -- which together emit nearly 40 percent of US greenhouse gases -- starting in 2012.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California regulators on Thursday approved the first system in the nation to give polluting companies such as utilities and refineries financial incentives to emit fewer greenhouse gases. The Air Resources Board voted 9-1 to pass the key piece of California's 2006 climate law — called AB32 — with the hope that other states will follow the lead of the world's eighth largest economy. State officials also are discussing plans to link the new system with similar ones under way or being planned in Canada, Europe and Asia. California is launching into a "historic adventure," said Mary Nichols,...

SANTA CRUZ -- The Los Gatos startup that pledged to turn greenhouse gas into cement has landed its first job: a sidewalk in the city of Santa Cruz. While a relatively small project, the 400-foot walkway off Morrissey Boulevard will serve as a big test for plans by the environmentally minded Calera Corp. to capture carbon dioxide exhaust from the Moss Landing Power Plant and fashion it into commercially viable construction materials, like cement. "We're at the point where we want to start using our materials in the built-in environment," said Martin Devenney, vice president of materials development at Calera....

Skeptics of cap-and-trade have found their cinematic answer to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in Bjorn Lomborg’s new documentary, Cool It. Lomborg, 45, has an innocent-sounding résumé: He is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a Danish think tank that researches cost-effective ways for governments to spend aid money. However, the film begins with clips of scientists denouncing him as a traitor, a parasite, and an idiot. In one shot, Stephen Schneider, the late Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University, tells the camera crew that they’re “not helping the world” by publicizing Lomborg’s efforts....

The author of the book Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century's Hottest Topic, Steve Goreham, is a contributor of articles at American Thinker, and according to the dust jacket of his book, he is a business executive who holds an M.S. in electrical engineering and an MBA. One can imagine the immediate response from those who follow Al Gore, the IPCC, and other promulgators of human-induced global warming: "Aha! Yet another person with ties to a right-wing website who is utterly unqualified to write about climate science." The irony is that the most influential presentations for the Gore/IPCC...

It sounds innocuous enough. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued new guidelines Thursday requiring state and local authorities that issue pollution permits based on federal standards to use the "Best Available Control Technology," or BACT. The stated goal is to achieve a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. Most of the facilities affected by the new guidelines will likely be power plants, refineries and cement production operations. What the BACT guidelines simply mean, according to the agency, is this: "After taking into account technical feasibility, cost and other economic, environmental and energy considerations, permitting authorities should narrow the...

The dumbest criticism the Democrats' media sheep make of Tea Party members is that Tea Partiers don't accept the global warming nonsense that most Democrats and their media sheep have fallen for. Most Tea Party members aren't climate experts, but they are smart enough to recognize a political con when they see one. In business cons, police warn that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. In political cons, if something sounds too bad to be true it probably is too bad to be true. Like most con artists, the people attempting to continue Enron's global...

In 1997, Henry Payne, the political cartoonist for the Detroit News and editor of TheMichiganView.com, said he was in Washington D.C. for a press conference on the international agreement on climate change called the Kyoto Protocol. Payne recalled the first question of the press conference was asked by the New York Times environmental reporter. "How do we get Americans to stop driving SUVs?" Payne said the reporter asked. Kyoto sets binding agreements for 37 countries for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations. Payne said the rest of the press conference was "simple cheerleading" by reporters. He used...

An insight into how liberals and conservatives differ not just in politics but also ways of thinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7awFypTnrOw

GENEVA (AFP) – Climate scientists must urgently look into changes in atmospheric currents linked to devastating floods in Pakistan and wildfires in Russia, UN climate and weather bodies said on Wednesday. Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research Programme, told AFP that changes, known as blocking episodes, can prevent humidity or hot weather dispersing. That intensified heavy rain or heatwaves and locked them over an area, he explained, potentially with a growing impact on extreme weather events that scientists expect to happen more frequently with global warming. Asrar said that European researchers had modelled the blocking pattern in atmospheric...

Regulation: An initiative to suspend California's draconian climate law has qualified for the November ballot. The people can now choose between jobs and junk science and fight hot air at the ballot box. Thomas Jefferson once said that when people fear the government, there is tyranny, but when government fears the people, there is liberty. And right now there are politicians and bureaucrats in Sacramento who are at least very concerned. An initiative to suspend Assembly Bill 32 officially qualified for the ballot last week by gathering more than 800,000 signatures, far more than the 433,971 required. Those who signed...

Californians heading to the polls in November will vote whether to derail the state's landmark greenhouse gas emission law. Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced this afternoon that the measure to delay Assembly Bill 32, the 2006 law mandating the state reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, has qualified for the ballot. Proponents, who needed to submit at least 435,000 valid voter signatures to make the cut, reached the threshold for qualifying through the random sample process. The measure, called the California Jobs Initiative, calls for delaying implementation of the regulations until the state unemployment rate --...

This fall, voters will decide the fate of California's landmark greenhouse gas law. A measure that would suspend proposed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions has qualified for the November ballot.

Overregulation: The Senate votes on blocking a government bureaucracy from usurping power never delegated to it by Congress. This administration may put Copenhagen above the Constitution, but we the people have other plans. The GOP's 1994 "Contract with America," a gift that keeps on giving, hopefully will rescue us once again from the clutches of an unelected bureaucracy, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been allowed by the Supreme Court to regulate every breath we take and every machine we operate. When cap-and-tax legislation was introduced in Congress, the Obama administration threatened that if Congress failed to act, the EPA...

The Senate has rejected a bid to stop the Obama administration from imposing regulations on greenhouse gases, giving a boost to President Barack Obama as he pursues broader clean energy legislation. Senators turned back a resolution that would have rescinded the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Supporters of the measure, mostly Republicans, argued that the EPA had usurped the authority of Congress to set climate policy and that the EPA regulations would increase energy costs and kill jobs.

SANTA FE -- The New Mexico Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for a state regulatory panel to resume consideration of a petition to establish a cap on greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The justices vacated a lower court ruling that effectively halted the state Environmental Improvement Board's process for gathering expert testimony and public comments related to an environmental group's emissions proposal.

Science: An Icelandic scientist says climate change spurs volcanic eruptions such as the one disrupting air traffic in Europe. Rather, the evidence suggests volcanoes cause global cooling and Arctic ice to melt. The stunning eruption of a volcano under Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier has disrupted air traffic over the continent of Europe as vast plumes of steam and ash were spewed into the atmosphere. Once again, we witness the power of nature over man even as man blames himself for nature's acts. Almost every malady on earth has been blamed on global warming, so it wasn't all that surprising when Freysteinn...

Climate Science: Noted scientists at a Chicago climate conference declare that global warming is not only dead, but that the planet faces a big chill for decades to come. What about those frozen wind turbines? It's not exactly Copenhagen or Kyoto, but the 700 scientists attending the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, had some chilling news of their own in the most liberal sense. "Global warming is over — at least for a few decades," Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the gathering. "However, the bad news is that...

The EPA's Shocking Power GrabThe agency is making federal decisions without the consent of Congress George Allen and Marlo Lewis, 05.18.10, 04:16 PM EDT The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is carrying out one of the biggest power grabs in American history. The agency has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act--powers never delegated to it by Congress. It has done this by declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, in a proceeding known as the "endangerment finding." On Tuesday the U.S. Senate will debate and...

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House. Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore's appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation's philanthropic leaders. "Time's running out (on climate change)," Gore told them. "We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together." Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the...

Here's hoping this puts and end to this entire smelly mess. For the second during the past few week, cow farts have been absolved of causing global warming. This reports says that bovine toots may actually reduce greenhouse gasses. Two weeks ago air quality expert Dr Frank Mitloehner said the IPCC report linking livestock to global warming is very exaggerated. This made cows ecstatic, as they no longer have to walk around with silly pink tanks on their backs to collect their farts for science.

The state's controversial global warming law still has the support of a majority of Californians despite growing doubts about its potential impact on the economy, according to a Field Poll released Tuesday. The poll shows 58 percent of registered voters support Assembly Bill 32, which will require significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. The poll was commissioned by Next 10, a San Francisco nonprofit group that supports green technology and reducing gases blamed for global warming. Next 10 released the survey as AB 32 is essentially fighting for its life; a conservative group, bankrolled by Texas oil companies, is pushing a...

Regulation: The New York Times says the EPA should use its authority to regulate our very breath if a Democratic Congress isn't "goaded" into action. Whatever happened to government of the people? It's been a pattern of this administration that if the American people are adamantly opposed to it, ram it through anyway. So it's been with the health care overhaul, offshore drilling restrictions and now the Environmental Protection Agency threatening to become the uber-regulator of the air we breathe. The New York Times says in a Saturday editorial regarding that last item that if Congress fails to enact cap-and-trade...

Insulated by an outer crust, the surface of the earth acquires nearly all of its heat from the sun. The only exit for this heat to take is through a door marked "Radiation." And therein lies a tale... Recently, I chanced upon an Atmospheric Science Educator Guide [PDF] published by NASA. Aimed at students in grades 5 through 8, it helps teachers explain how so-called "greenhouse gases" warm our planet Earth. These guides are interesting on a number of levels, so I recommend you look them over. But what caught my eye was this: Question: Do all of the gases in our atmosphere absorb heat? Answer: (Allow students to discuss...

The President launched a new government website on Monday called Climate.gov, hoping to prove once and for all that Global Warming is a reality, and not a myth, despite the fact that Climate Change scientists have been 'hiding the decline' for years and that the IPOCC's integrity has been strongly discredited. Nevertheless, it didn't take too long for skeptics to realize that the con artists at Climate.gov had intentionally omitted some of the sea ice data: The sea ice data, cited from NSIDC, stops in 2007. 2008 and 2009 sea ice data and imagery, available to even the simplest of...

Regulations: A California legislator pushes a November ballot initiative to free the state from the job-killing shackles of a 2006 law designed to fight climate change. The other choice is freezing in the unemployment line. At last report, California's unemployment rate was 12.3%, with 2.25 million residents looking for work. So one would assume the first rule of holes would apply — when you're in one, stop digging. Yet there was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touting his state's green initiatives in Copenhagen as California barrels toward full implementation of its own version of job-killing cap-and-trade. "The desire and hope and desperate...

Simultaneously increases nutritional value of the milk & fights global warming The first program in North America to naturally decrease global-warming gases caused by cows’ burps (enteric emissions) has been announced by environmental pioneer Stonyfield Farm, the world’s leading organic yogurt company (www.stonyfield.com). An unexpected benefit of the program is that it also significantly increases the nutritional value of the milk. “This is a watershed moment for the U.S. dairy industry,” said Stonyfield President and CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg. “By changing the feed we give our cows, we can simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve milk’s nutritional content in a...

WASHINGTON — The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association filed a petition Dec. 23 in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent greenhouse gas (GHG) “endangerment finding” rule. The endangerment finding does not in and of itself regulate greenhouse gases, but it is a step in the process for GHG regulation under the Clean Air Act. The rule provides the foundation for EPA for the first time to regulate GHGs from small and large sources throughout the economy, including farms, hospitals, office buildings and schools. Not science-based The cattlemen’s association claims EPA’s finding is not based on...

Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years. Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff. Scientists (and here we use the word...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

Instead of “blackmailing” Congress, President Obama is “greenmailing” Congress by forcing them to comply with his order that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulate greenhouse gasses. But Congress—an institution not known to give up power without a fight—has yielded to the president prematurely. In fact, already Congress has enacted legislation that limits the regulatory power of the EPA. Last summer, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, (R-Kansas) passed an amendment to the EPA appropriations bill establishing that “none of the funds made available in this Act or any other Act may be used to promulgate or implement any regulation requiring the issuance of...