Free Republic

The United Nations body that oversees greenhouse gas reductions is reeling from another cap-and-trade scandal that may have put 600 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere — roughly speaking, the annual CO2 output of Canada or Britain — while the emissions were ostensibly suppressed, according to an independent study. In the process, the fraudsters, largely in Russia and Ukraine, were likely able to transfer credits for more than 400 million tons of their apparently bogus greenhouse savings by April 2015 into Europe's commercial carbon trading system — the largest in the world — thereby undermining that continent's ambitious...

GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush says that he believes human activity is contributing to climate change, and that the U.S. is obligated to do something about it. “The climate is changing; I don’t think anybody can argue it’s not. Human activity has contributed to it. I think we have a responsibility to adapt to what the possibilities are without destroying our economy, without hollowing out our industrial core,” Bush said in an interview with Bloomberg BNA published Thursday.

Jeb Bush on Friday in New Hampshire called for the U.S. "to work with the rest of the world to negotiate a way to reduce carbon emissions.” The remarks at a "Politics & Eggs" event brought praise from billionaire Tom Steyer's group NextGen Climate, which has spent millions in recent elections blasting Republicans on climate change. "Jeb Bush demonstrated leadership today on the issue of climate change—distancing himself from the other Republican presidential hopefuls and demonstrating why climate change doesn’t have to be a partisan issue," the group said in an email to reporters. "Today in New Hampshire, Bush expressed...

Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee is not waiting for the state legislature to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, but instead has issued an executive order to implement a cap-and-trade program, eliminate coal power and fund green energy projects. “This is the right time to act, the right place to act and we are the right people to act,” Inslee said. “We will engage the right people, consider the right options, ask the right questions and come to the right answers — answers that work for Washington.” Inlsee argues that more action is needed if the state is to meet climate goals passed by...

Taxes: The president may try to satisfy both environmentalists and pro-growth blocs by tying the shovel-ready project curiously left out of the State of the Union to just-introduced carbon-tax legislation. Having failed to lower the sea levels in his first term, President Obama, in the first SOTU of his second term, highlighted the need for fighting climate change and proposed an Energy Security Trust Fund to siphon off money from those who actually produce abundant and useable energy to fund alternative energy sources which constitute a rounding error in the percent of energy produced by various sources. Two days later,...

Energy: The president's proposed Energy Security Fund will stifle the private energy sector boom and provide permanent funding for future Solyndras and electric cars that nobody wants. And what about that pipeline, sir? A nonexistent crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and in justifying his proposal for a cap-and-tax scheme, President Obama claimed in his State Of The Union that "the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15." He was lying. The fact is, according to new data released quietly last October by Britain's Met Office, the world's natural post-Ice Age warming trend stopped...

The Obama administration is surging forward with a first-of-its-kind EPA rule for new power plants, in what Republicans and industry groups say will inflate electricity prices and possibly kill off coal, the preeminent U.S. energy source. The EPA announced the rule Tuesday, with a goal to curb carbon dioxide emissions by imposing strict regulations on new coal-fired plants, including a limit that caps plant emissions to not more than 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour of energy generated. "Right now there are no limits to the amount of carbon pollution that future power plants will be able to put...

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 Air Resources Board due to vote on the adoption of first US mandatory cap-and-trade emissions scheme... the California Air Resources Board was due to vote on Thursday afternoon on the adoption of an emissions trading scheme. "This is the final yes: we are going to move forward with California," said Gary Gero, president of the Climate Action Reserve, a voluntary registry. The decision was seen to be significant because California accounts for about 13% of the world economy, and the state has a history of being the leader on environmental initiatives. "California can drive national action," Gero said. The...

California's plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions and put a price on carbon is set to take effect without delay on Jan. 1 after the Air Resources Board today voted to make final adjustments in the regulation. The board first approved the cap and trade program last December, but in an unusual move the board took up the final pieces of the nation's only comprehensive limit on greenhouse gases. It is the last major regulation the board considered to meet the requirements of AB32, California's greenhouse gas reduction law.

California formally adopted the nation's most comprehensive so-called "cap-and-trade" system Thursday, an experiment by the world's eighth-largest economy that is designed to provide financial incentives for polluters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. State officials said they hoped other states and Washington, D.C., would follow suit, calling the plan a "capstone" among the suite of tools California can use to reduce the pollution linked to climate change and cut dependence on foreign oil.

California plan(s) to launch their long-promised cap and trade program to fight global warming starting tomorrow (Oct. 20, 2011). (Not coincidentally) Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will include these two headlines that are up already online: Japan Reconsiders Plan to Cut Carbon Emissions And, EU Weighs Pullback on Cutting Emissions

John Holdren? Population-control-John Holdren? Mitt, you have a problem. Investor’s Business Daily: The GOP front-runner for 2012 sought advice on global warming and carbon emissions from the president’s current science czar — an advocate of de-developing America and population control. Politics is said to make strange bedfellows, but no coupling in our view is more bizarre than when John Holdren, now President Obama’s assistant for science and technology, once advised GOP presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on environmental policy. Holdren’s bizarre views are best suited for an adviser to someone like, say, Pol Pot. He views humanity...

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in danger of losing his 2012 Republican primary front-runner status, Wednesday tweaked his position on global climate change, saying he does not know if humans are the primary cause. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, also said he would not place restrictions on carbon emissions if elected and did not favor spending heavily on climate solutions. He was asked about global warming at a town hall meeting in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and said he believed the world is getting hotter and humans contribute in some way to the change. "Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah,...

A large group of 2008 Barack Obama supporters are now banking on Mitt Romney for the upcoming presidential election. That’s according to a report from Fox News that says a shift in Wall Street support could mean as much as a $150,000 boost for Romney’s campaign. “I think Romney could at least split Wall Street with Obama, which is something McCain really didn’t do,” said Charlie Gasparino, a reporter for Fox Business News. None of the expected bank presidents showed up to a recent fundraiser for President Obama, he added.

Economist Greg Mankiw does so here and here. the virtue of market-based policies to deal with externalities is that they are more efficient than command-and-control regulations. In the case of carbon emissions and global climate change, putting a price on carbon is supposed to be a better substitute for government micromanagement. Apparently, that lesson is lost on the writers of the bill now making its way through Congress. Although the bill changes incentives by putting a price on carbon, it also offers a large dose of command-and-control regulation. Essentially, the sponsors don't seem to believe that getting incentives right is...

WATCHING today’s Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea_Party faction, with no adult supervision, I find my mind drifting back to the late 1980s when I was assigned to cover the administration of George H.W. Bush, who I believe is one of our most underrated presidents. I have long admired the elder Bush for the deftness with which he dealt with the collapse of the Soviet empire. But, in later years, I came to admire him even more for the fact that he believed that math and science were not matters of opinion — a view increasingly rare in...

A year after President Barack Obama signed into law the most extensive financial regulations since the Great Depression, Wall Street so far is putting its political money elsewhere. Employees of Goldman Sachs Group gave Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney $238,250 in the last three months, more than workers at any other company, according to a computer-assisted analysis of Federal Election Commission data. Obama took in $10,113. Four years ago, employees of New York-based Goldman gave $994,795 to Obama and $234,275 to Romney, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group. For both candidates, it was more than...

Green Corruption: The Environmental Protection Agency is giving funds to charitable organizations to attack GOP members of Congress. Did you know telling the truth about climate change causes childhood asthma? We have heard the litany of horrors that climate change is said to bring about — retreating glaciers, rising sea levels, drought and flooding, disease and famine. Now we are told that fighting the EPA's power grab to regulate greenhouse gases will lead to an increase in childhood asthma. The American Lung Association, considered one of America's most credible and worthy charities, has placed four billboards in Michigan's 6th Congressional...

en. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday that he's open to reviewing the use of nuclear power in the United States. Speaking on radio station 550 KFYI, McCain said that although he's not ready to "abandon" nuclear power, he's open to reviewing how and where it's used in the United States, once the nuclear reactor crisis in Japan is resolved. "I'm not prepared by the way to say that we should abandon nuclear power because I think it's a major contributor [to] our energy needs but I am prepared, once this is over, to make an evaluation as to whether our...