Avertible catastrophe

Remember the old adage about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good? Well, that's like the organizing principle of the environmental lobby and the Federal government.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

If we had a leader in the White House, a President with some executive experience or even just concern about doing the right thing, the oil would still be leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, but the effects might not be quite so catastrophic...

Carlin on CRU

Remember Alan Carlin? He was the EPA scientist that suggested to the agency that "the extensive portions of the EPA's Endangerment TSD which are based upon the old science are no longer appropriate and need to be revised" and was told that

the time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision...

Well, he's back, and he's got a good piece at Pajamas Media.

the EPA — perhaps at the urging of others in the Obama administration — has proposed to regulate GHG emissions on the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports … and reports primarily based on the IPCC reports.

This is highly unusual for the EPA. I cannot think of any instance where the EPA depended so heavily on non-EPA synthesis reports to justify proposed regulatory action in their almost 39 years of existence.

...

It seems clear to me that if a group (such as the EPA) wanted to get an objective scientific judgment on climate change science, CRU et al — and therefore the IPCC — might be the last place that they would want to rely on.

...

Despite the uproar concerning CRU et al’s data and research, the basic problem remains — the UN hypothesis that increases in GHGs/CO2 will result in significant increases in global temperatures has not been confirmed by comparisons with real world data. Unless it is, attempts to decrease GHG/CO2 emissions in order to significantly change global temperatures are very likely to fail. This is the primary question that the EPA and climate scientists need to address before any control efforts are undertaken.

There are some good links in there, too. Read it all...

"the administration has decided to move forward..."

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been watching this story play out...


The National Council on Environmental Economics has examined the Environmental Protection Agency's Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act. (As we all remember, the Supreme Court decided that the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and the EPA promptly decided to regulate carbon dioxide and methane.) So the EPA is preparing an "endangerment" analysis on how Americans are "endangered" by carbon dioxide and methane, and getting ready to propose new regulations.

Of course, you can't do things like that without some analysis of the impact, of the costs and the benefits. so the NCEE has reviewed the draft proposal, and has some comments. But they aren't being released - the EPA is trying to suppress the analysis. Why is that? Well, as the Director of the National Center for Environmental Economics Al McGartland wrote to Alan Carlin, the NCEE scientist who prepared the review:

The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision...I can only see one impact of your comment given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.

And the comments that would have such a negative impact?

The current Draft TSB is based largely on the IPCC AR4 report, which is at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field...
- Global temperatures have declined - extending the current downtrend to 11 years...at the same time atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to increase and CO2 emissions have accelerated...
- The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for the operation of such processes...
- A new 2009 paper finds that the cruial assumption in the GCM models used by the IPCC concerning strongly positive feedback from water vapor is not supported by empirical evidence and the feedback is actually negative...
- A new 2009 paper...suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth's global temperatures...
...these are just a few of the new developments since 2006...the extensive portions of the EPA's Endangerment TSD which are based upon the old science are no longer appropriate and need to be revised...

But the science doesn't really matter - "the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment..."