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Shell Oil Company has announced it must scrap efforts to drill for oil this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska. The decision comes following a ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air permits. The move has angered some in Congress and triggered a flurry of legislation aimed at stripping the EPA of its oil drilling oversight. Shell has spent five years and nearly $4 billion dollars on plans to explore for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. The leases alone cost $2.2 billion. Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says obtaining...

However, the state has reluctantly agreed to let the EPA impose the federal plan for now, because the agency could have blocked construction or expansion of projects that need the air permits. The new rules, which took effect Sunday, add greenhouse gases to the list of pollutants covered under air-quality permits and will eventually require the largest polluters to reduce emissions. The federal intervention widens a rift between Arizona and the EPA, which have been feuding over a dust-control plan in Maricopa County. "It's not a good situation, but our approach will prevent a bad situation from getting worse," said...

The EPA has threatened dozens of Texas refiners and chemical and plastic makers with penalties if they don't begin taking steps to bring their air pollution permits into compliance with federal law by late December. The blunt threat was made in a recent letter by the Environmental Protection Agency's administrator in Texas, heightening tensions in a standoff that has already reached the courts. Texas has sued to block the EPA from rejecting its so-called flexible permits. On Tuesday, Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a brief in the case, fleshing out his arguments in a July petition that the agency had...

Pollution Control: From cars to coal mines, the imposition of economy-killing restrictions is under way. Are the new EPA regulations on auto emissions the precursor to regulating carbon dioxide by executive order? In announcing the Environmental Protection Agency's first regulations on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cars, Administrator Lisa Jackson has promised they won't be the last such rules stemming from the EPA's "endangerment finding" that carbon dioxide, six pounds of which every human being exhales every day, is a dangerous pollutant. "These are the first regulations that cover greenhouse gas emissions in the United States," Jackson told reporters in...

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is comparing climate change skeptics to those who disregarded the Nazi threat in America in the 1930s, adding a strident rhetorical shot to the already volatile debate over climate change. "It reminds me of an event that took place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s," said Sanders, perhaps the most liberal member of the Senate, during a Senate hearing Tuesday. "During that period of Nazism and fascism's growth-a real danger to this country and democratic countries around the world- there were people in this country and in the British parliament who...

... Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., on Thursday signed on as co-sponsors to a new resolution offered by Murkowski that would effectively veto the Environmental Protection Agency's formal declaration last year that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare. With that formal endangerment declaration, the agency is prepared to move forward with new limits on emissions from vehicles in March. EPA lawyers and environmental law experts say the tailpipe limits would automatically lead to requirements that new or modified power plants, refiners and other industrial facilities emitting carbon dioxide...

The Obama administration’s EPA ruling is an attempt to force Congress’s hand.Typically, when a law is passed or a regulation proposed, its champions believe that the action will be beneficial to society. But that’s not the case when it comes to steps that the Obama administration took last week, when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued an “endangerment” finding that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are harmful pollutants and therefore subject to EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act. Jackson issued the finding largely because the Obama team believes—or at least thinks that Congress believes—that EPA regulation of CO2...

Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters nationwide say they’re at least somewhat angry about the current policies of the federal government. That figure includes 46% who are Very Angry. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 27% are not angry about the government's policies, including 10% who are Not at All Angry........ The data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 71% who are angry at federal government policies today is up five percentage points since September. Even more stunning, the 46% who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points from September.

The EPA’s finding that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant explains why the administration wasn’t too concerned over possible failure at Copenhagen. This was their Plan B. The finding is an environmental Sword of Damocles held over the head of the U.S. with a warning that if cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer is not signed into law, the full regulatory fury of an unelected bureaucracy will be unleashed on the American people and the U.S. economy.

Step aside, elected Members of Congress. If you can’t pass cap and trade legislation, The Environmental Protection Agency will move in with massively complex and costly regulations that would micromanage just about every aspect of the economy. They announced today that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (GHGs) threaten public health and the environment. Since 85 percent of the U.S. economy runs on fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, imposing a cost on CO2 is equivalent to placing an economy-wide tax on energy use. The kind of industrial-strength EPA red tape that the agency could enforce in the name...

Junk Science: The Environmental Protection Agency's sneak attack on the U.S. economy and our freedoms, curiously timed for the opening day of the Copenhagen climate charade, won't go unchallenged. Nor should it. (snip) EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in a conversation with Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has in effect admitted the finding was based on the junk science and data manipulation practiced at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). "She told me that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true," Inhofe said. Dr....

Republicans and conservative think tanks are calling for the Obama administration to revoke its declaration that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant subject to EPA regulation on the grounds that the EPA's primary source of information for the finding was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the source of the highly controversial "Climategate" e-mails. Newsmax has verified there are 34 references to IPCC information in the EPA's 25-page "Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases," which was published in the April 24 edition of the Federal Register (pages 18886-18910). This is the document the EPA used...

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in a way that could hurt business. The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. Jackson, however, tried to strike a tone of cooperation in her address Wednesday, explaining that the EPA's new powers to regulate greenhouse gases will be used to complement legislation pending...

COPENHAGEN – The top U.S. environmental official told a divided U.N. climate conference Wednesday that the Obama administration's moves to "make up for lost time" and cut greenhouse gases would complement congressional action and wasn't intended to bypass recalcitrant lawmakers. The comments by Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson came on the same day that the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu — which would be among the first victims of rising seas — was rebuffed by the conference in an attempt to demand strong action against major polluting countries. Jackson suggested the EPA's decision Monday that greenhouse gases should...

On Monday, the EPA announced its endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. One can infer from the timing of the announcement that the administration may have taken this action at this time in order to bring something to the table at the Copenhagen COP15 meeting. From a scientific viewpoint, it was an odd time to do so — given that the very recent Climategate disclosures would presumably have taken some time to digest and analyze for their possible effects on vital conclusions. So the timing may have been based more on the political, rather than the scientific, factors involved. But from...

Monday afternoon the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and said it will begin to draft and enforce regulations. Even the EPA realizes these moves will be a disaster for the US economy (and to our own selves as one of those gases, CO2, is what humans ad to the atmosphere every time they exhale). Rasmussen asked American "likely voters" what they thought about the EPA announcement and reaction was split 41% to 41%. But the EPA can write and enforce their regulations without the consent of Congress. When...

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declare carbon a toxic pollutant Obama pulls end run As I wrote here yesterday, I believe the feeding frenzy currently taking place at the Copenhagen trough will result in the ultimate global governance of every man woman and child on the planet. A climate treaty may not actually be signed and agreed upon by the 192 countries whose representatives are currently living LARGE on caviar and limousines at the conference, but the rules such a treaty might impose will still take effect. The main reason to believe this will happen is that President Barack Obama has...

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking steps to regulate greenhouse gases, even though the issue remains far from settled in Congress, where a key Senate committee is debating a major climate change bill. In hearings before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee Tuesday, several moderate Democrats expressed concerns that the EPA is jumping the gun in mandating new curbs on greenhouse gas emissions across a slew of industries. “There is a great deal to be gained by certainty so people can make plans,” said Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter. “If the EPA continues to have flexibility we don’t know...

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Max Baucus said Tuesday he has "serious reservations" about climate legislation newly unveiled by his Democratic colleagues, signaling that lawmakers may have to pull back from some ambitious goals in order to line up needed votes. "I have some concerns about the overall direction of the bill," Mr. Baucus (D., Mont.) said at the start of hearings in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "I have serious reservations with the depth of the mid-term reduction target in the bill and the lack of preemption of the Clean Air Act." Mr. Baucus -- who's also chairman of...