May 2013 Climate Change Summary Report

“Examiner Editorial: U.S. should heed failure of cap and trade in Europe”

May 30, 2013: The Washington Examiner reports: “Logging was dead in North Carolina a few years ago, but it’s booming now with the timber industry hardly able to meet demand. In West Virginia, mining continues despite falling domestic demand and the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory efforts to shutter the industry permanently. Big Green environmentalists in America can thank their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic for these developments. European demand for wood and coal is up, but it can’t be satisfied by sources over there due to the European Union’s rigorous limits on greenhouse gases. Those limits have created a series of perverse incentives that have boosted Europe’s carbon-fuel demand instead of reducing it, forcing consumers there to turn elsewhere, including the U.S., for alternative sources. Here’s how it happened: Environmentalists successfully pushed the EU to embrace a cap-and-trade system to limit carbon-based pollution.”

“Renewable fuels: where we should be”

May 28, 2013: An op-ed in The Hill by Fred Cannon, the president and CEO of KiOR, states: “More than one-third of the world’s total energy usage relies on liquid fuels – primarily from fossil fuels. In the first quarter of 2013 consumption outpaced production, and the consumption trajectory is only expected to rise. Energy, especially liquid fuel, involves a global marketplace, and to our benefit in the U.S., Congress passed, and former President George W. Bush signed, legislation that not only fosters domestic energy production from more sustainable sources, but also provides a path for important green house gas emission reductions. So when frustration over that legislation – the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) – is expressed, and done so overlooking the policy’s fundamentals, history and future impact, it deserves to be addressed.”

“EDITORIAL: A climate milestone”

May 21, 2013: An editorial in The Washington Times states: “For Al Gore, it’s ‘a sad milestone.’ Scientists have announced that the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has reached a ‘record’ level of 400 parts per million. Those who cling to the myth of man-made global warming insist this could be the tipping point for the greenhouse effect, causing the planet to sizzle, triggering floods and other catastrophes. Warmists should chill out. This CO2 increase is a triumph of human progress. The usual suspects are crying the usual doom. NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana responded to Mr. Gore’s milestone tweet by reiterating the green godfather’s ‘call to action.’”

“The true cost of biofuels”

May 20, 2013: An editorial in The Washington Times states: “The U.S. Army has recently purchased a large quantity of biofuel-derived jet fuel at a cost of $59 per gallon — in spite of our financial crisis. The insanity of biofuel advocates lingers on like a bad case of the flu that people just cannot shake. As a last-ditch effort to save a doomed energy policy, our politicians are now financing wildly irresponsible genetic-engineering research into creating artificial algae and bacteria they hope will miraculously lower the stratospheric cost of making biofuels. The problem is, the qualities you need to make biofuels even remotely affordable also makes those organisms terribly dangerous to the biosphere.”

“Analysis: Obama climate agenda faces Supreme Court reckoning”

May 16, 2013: Reuters reports: “With a barrage of legal briefs, a coalition of business groups and Republican-leaning states are taking their fight against Obama administration climate change regulations to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups, along with states such as Texas and Virginia, have filed nine petitions in recent weeks asking the justices to review four U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations that are designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. If the court were to take up any one of the petitions, it would be the biggest environmental case since Massachusetts v. EPA, the landmark 2007 decision in which the justices ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.”

“EPA Critics Seek High Court Review Of GHG Rules”

May 13, 2013: Inside EPA reports: “Industry and advocacy groups opposed to EPA’s greenhouse gas (GHG) rules have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court urging it to review an appellate court ruling that broadly upheld the agency’s GHG policies, saying the lower court’s decision was flawed and claiming that the agency’s regulations are illegal. The high court has not yet consolidated the various petitions for review of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s unanimous, unsigned June decision in Coalition for Responsible Regulation, et al. v. EPA, et al. that upheld the climate regulations, but the Supreme Court has set a May 22 deadline for EPA to respond.”

“Foes Suggest a Tradeoff if Pipeline Is Approved”

May 9, 2013: The New York Times reports: “President Obama’s first major environmental decision of his second term could be to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, profoundly disappointing environmental advocates who have made the project a symbolic test of the president’s seriousness on climate change. But could some kind of deal be in the offing — a major climate policy announcement on, for example, power plant regulation or renewable energy incentives — to ease the sting of the pipeline approval?” … For that reason, the approaching decision — expected some time this summer or early fall — offers the president a rare opportunity to set the parameters of the energy debate for the rest of his term and cement his legacy as the first president to seriously address climate change.”

“No Keystone? Alberta Will Just Go North to Arctic”

May 9, 2013: An editorial in Real Clear Energy states: “If President Obama ends up turning down the Keystone Pipeline, which now seems about a 50-50 possibility, does that mean the Canadian tar sands will stay in the ground? Not likely, says Lloyd Alter on Treehugger. He points out that pipeline entrepreneurs have already worked for 30 years to secure permission from native tribes to build the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline to bring natural gas from the north slope of Canada south,. No more permissions would be necessary. All they would have to do would be to use the same right-of-way to carry tar sands to the Arctic Ocean. Of course this is frozen much of the time but global warming seems to be solving that by making the Arctic passable.”

“Oil drilling technology leaps, clean energy lags”

May 3, 2013: Associated Press reports: “Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected. By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae — or powered by hydrogen or cheap batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. When the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow, power would flow out of batteries the size of tractor-trailers. Fossil fuels? They were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age. But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning. Oil companies big and small have used technology to find a bounty of oil and natural gas so large that worries about running out have melted away.”

“U.S. pragmatic approach leads climate talks”

May 01, 2012: A Reuters column by Gerard Wynn states: “National climate negotiators meet this week in Bonn, Germany, in a process which has lost much steam since a debacle in Copenhagen three years ago when countries could not agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. … The U.S. submission presents a pragmatic approach which appears focused on agreeing moderate carbon reduction targets and avoiding a stand-off with China on how to share the burden of emissions cuts between developed and developing countries. A rather weak deal such as this may be most problematic for the European Union, whose executive European Commission has in the past used the U.N. process as a focus for energy policy.”