July 2014 Climate Change Report

“Energy Regulators Say EPA’s Climate Rule Poses Grid Challenges”

July 30, 2014: The Wall Street Journal reports: “President Barack Obama’s proposed rule to curb carbon emissions from the nation’s power plants could raise costs and affect reliability in the U.S. electricity system, federal regulators told Congress. But the commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the government agency charged with overseeing the electric grid and other parts of the nation’s energy infrastructure, also said at a House hearing that the government has a responsibility to act on climate change. As part of Mr. Obama’s climate agenda, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to cut carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 30% by 2030 based on emissions levels in 2005. States are expected to comply with the rule by using cleaner, though potentially more expensive, energy.”

“EPA foes, friends set to sound off on climate rule”

July 29, 2014: PoliticoPro (subscription required) reports: “An estimated 1,600 people are slated to sound off to the EPA on its proposed climate change rule for existing power plants this week at a series of marathon public hearings. Scientists, lawmakers, environmentalists and industry officials will line up at the hearings to deliver five-minute statements on the merits or shortfalls of the EPA’s plans to cut carbon emissions from the nation’s power generators by nearly a third. The grueling 11-hour sessions, which will be held over two days in Washington, Atlanta, Denver and Pittsburgh, aren’t likely to bridge the massive gap between the Republicans and industry groups that hate the rule and the liberals and environmentalists who love it.”

“Capitol Hill takes on warming as EPA preps for listening sessions”

July 28, 2014: E&E News reports: “U.S. EPA won’t be alone in holding climate change hearings this week. Three congressional committees will also mull the issue, which has been characterized as both the gravest challenge facing future generations and — in the words of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) – ‘the greatest hoax ever to be perpetrated on the American people.’ The committees — two in the Senate and one in the House — have timed their hearings to coincide with EPA’s listening sessions on its power plant greenhouse gas proposal, which will be held this week in four cities (see related story). The Senate Budget Committee tomorrow morning will take a foray into the economic and budgetary challenges that stem from man-made warming and will include testimony from Alfredo Gomez, director of natural resources and environment at the Government Accountability Office, which tracks government budget issues.”

“EPA’s power plant rule wouldn’t mess with Texas – analysis”

July 25, 2014: E&E News reports: “U.S. EPA’s proposal for existing power plants greenhouse gases will be a windfall for states that produce natural gas and a blow to those that produce coal, according to a study released today by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Rhodium Group. The two research organizations found in preliminary study results the draft rule’s impact on a state’s fossil fuels extraction industries will be a more significant economic predictor than its effect on electricity prices or the relative greenhouse gas abatement responsibilities assigned to that state. In fact, the report says, some states that would have to make the deepest cuts in carbon dioxide emissions under the proposal still stand to profit from it, the researchers said, because it will boost sales of the natural gas they produce.”

“Colo. court strikes down city’s fracking ban”

July 25, 2014: EnergyWire reports: “A Colorado court yesterday ruled against the city of Longmont in a fight with state and industry officials over whether the city could ban hydraulic fracturing. The decision could weigh heavily on voters considering potential anti-fracking ballot initiatives in Colorado in November. And the outcome swings the local control pendulum in favor of industry after a series of wins for municipalities in Pennsylvania and New York over the past year. A coalition of environmental groups said it will appeal the decision. The case centered on Longmont’s 2012 decision to ban fracking and wastewater disposal within city limits through a voter-passed amendment to the city charter.”

“Australia’s carbon tax debacle shows why it’s a bad idea”

July 25, 2014: The Washington Examiner reports: “Environmentalists had a global meltdown last week after Australia scrapped its carbon tax. They denounced the move as ‘retrograde’ and ‘environmental vandalism.’ They can fume all they want, but Australia’s action, combined with Europe’s floundering cap-and-trade program, signals that ‘mitigation’ strategies — curbing greenhouse gases by putting economies on an energy diet — are not winning or workable. Australia leapfrogged from being an environmental laggard (initially refusing to even sign the Kyoto Protocol) to a leader when its Green Party-backed Labor prime minister imposed a tax two years ago. It required Australia’s utilities and industries to pay $23 per ton of greenhouse gas emissions. But the tax was an instant debacle.”

“EPA gears up for public hearings on climate rule”

July 24, 2014: The Hill reports: “The Environmental Protection Agency will hold four public hearings next week to hear from people across the country on its carbon pollution standards. The agency said in an advisory on Wednesday that the outreach leading up to its proposal has been ‘unprecedented’ and that so far the agency has received roughly 300,000 comments on the new rules, which call for on the nation’s fleet of existing power plants to cut carbon dioxide pollution 30 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. The agency expects to hear oral comments from about 1,600 people, across the four hearing locations in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Denver, Pittsburgh.”

“Industry to EPA: Climate rule ‘not workable’”

July, 23, 2014: The Hill reports: “Leading industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association, are pressing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to heed warnings that its new climate regulation is ‘not workable.’ The Partnership for a Better Energy Future, which represents 140 organizations, sent a letter to EPA chief Gina McCarthy Monday night calling on her to extend the public comment period for the new rules, make drastic changes to the proposal and hold more public hearings across the U.S. ‘We are all going to tell the EPA that this regulation is simply not workable,’ Jay Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), said on a call with reporters Tuesday to promote the industry push against the rules.”

“Business groups vow court challenge of EPA carbon plan”

July, 23, 2014: Energy Guardian reports: “Manufacturing, refiner and business executives on Tuesday called on the Obama administration to pull back its proposed carbon regulations on existing power plants, which they’ve threatened to oppose in court. “We’re all going to tell the EPA that this regulation is simply not workable,” during the agency’s planned public listening sessions next week, said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers. In a teleconference with reporters, Timmons said NAM and the other groups in the Partnership for a Better Energy Future on Monday sent a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, urging her to extend the 120-day public comment period on the proposal and to order EPA staff to answer questions raised at the listening sessions.”

“Energy and climate change are large factors in U.S. defense, experts tell Senate panel”

July, 23, 2014: ClimateWire reports: “From Iraq to Ukraine, fast-shifting energy needs are changing the face of international security, experts told Congress yesterday. Testifying before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee panel, current and former defense leaders put climate change squarely at the center of security operations, arguing that rising seas and fiercer storms must be taken into account when planning for America’s military future. Some acknowledged that models remain unsettled about precisely how global warming will affect different parts of the globe. But they also dismissed arguments that such unknowns make efforts to prepare for climate change irrelevant.”

“Australian PM’s climate policy questioned by industry, environmental groups”

July 21, 2014: ClimateWire reports: “After the Australian Parliament voted to repeal the national carbon tax Thursday, business, environmental and climate change policy organizations are pushing Prime Minister Tony Abbott to boost his climate policy with a new carbon pricing mechanism or tougher regulations in order to meet the nation’s 5 percent emission reduction goal by 2020. Abbott’s policy, called ‘Direct Action,’ has been criticized by the Labor and Green parties as vague and lacking the regulations to meet the 5 percent objective, and it may not pass through Parliament. ‘We are a conservationist government, and we will do what we think is the sensible thing to try to bring emissions down,’ Abbott said at a press conference Thursday, emphasizing the just-repealed carbon fee as a drag on domestic business. ‘We’re certainly not going to do anything that damages our economy.’”

“Australia’s Carbon Tax Message”

July 18, 2014: An editorial by The Wall Street Journal states: “Tony Abbott scored a big win Thursday when the Senate repealed Australia’s carbon tax, fulfilling the Prime Minister’s most prominent promise from last year’s election. The global intelligentsia is now making Mr. Abbott public climate enemy number one, but he deserves applause for honoring his campaign pledge and removing a burden on the Australian economy. As the first developed nation to rebel against the cost of climate scare-mongering, Australia could start a trend that has greens worried. Mr. Abbott’s Liberal Party doesn’t control the Senate and so had to enlist the support of Clive Palmer, a colorful entrepreneur-turned-politician whose Palmer United Party holds three seats. Mr. Palmer generally turned the debate into a circus that included an appearance by Al Gore, who somehow was led to believe that repealing the tax would lead to a cap-and-trade scheme.”

“He’s explaining, and he’s losing”

July 18, 2014: The Hill reports: “‘He’ is Tom Steyer, fossil-fuel billionaire past and present, but now a global-warming activist with the zealotry of a convert, a major funder of politicians promoting the climate-change industry, and a scourge of climate deniers, the Keystone XL pipeline and ordinary people for whom inexpensive energy is a central condition for economic advancement. For reasons simultaneously obvious and subtle, Steyer is a bit touchy about the genesis of his vast fortune — the upper-crust cocktail parties can become rather uncomfortable when the expensive booze releases the ire of the environmental lefties — and so he has offered any number of rationalizations for the yawning chasm between his past investments in coal and oil and his current investment in climate change politics.”

“Giving Carbon Capture Another Try”

July 17, 2014: The Wall Street Journal MoneyBeat blog reports: “The previous Energy Journal was pretty down on coal, which is facing huge supply overhangs in a time of falling demand. So to balance that out, today brings some more encouraging news for the black stuff. Electricity producer NRG Energy Inc., in partnership with JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp., is planning to capture some of the carbon dioxide produced by one of its coal-burning plants outside Houston, Texas. The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that from there, it can be piped to, and then injected into, an oil field with the hope that this will prolong the field’s productive life. Carbon capture has been struggling to get off the ground for a decade or more, but has been stymied by exorbitant costs. This latest push, expected to cost at $1 billion, is helped by $167 million of government money in the hope that it will provide a template for others.”

“Do we still need alternative fuels?”

July 14, 2014: Fuel Fix reports: “As the Obama administration struggles to come up with a solution to the dysfunctional renewables fuel standard (RFS), many in the industry are asking the question: do we actually need alternative fuels? In this blog, I tackle that question from the standpoint of a person who believes that the shale oil and gas revolution is real and can deliver sustained supplies for the next decade and beyond. This week in Iraq saw a further escalation in hostilities where conflicts centered on the grab for oil and gas assets. On July 11, Kurdish military forces secured a set of oil fields near Kirkuk and thereby prevented the Iraqi Central government from disrupting the Kurdistan Regional Government’s new independent oil pipeline export spur to Turkey. The move followed news reports of a struggle for control of the Baiji refinery in Northern Iraq following attacks by the militant group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and ISIS’ capture of much of Syria’s oil production capacity.”

“Why the former Ice Age became global warming, then climate change”

July 10, 2014: An op-ed in The Washington Examiner by Anthony J. Sadar, author and Certified Consulting Meteorologist, states: “On June 23, the Supreme Court laid down a small speed bump on the highway leading from ‘carbon pollution’ control to climate nirvana. Yet there is still much bluster from the Obama administration and one of its political enforcers, the Environmental Protection Agency, on the ‘certainty’ of human-caused climate change and the urgency of saving the earth from prosperous people and cheap energy. Of the high court’s ruling, Janet McCabe, acting assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said her agency is ‘very pleased with the decision.’ So hold on to your wallets. But, how certain are predictions of climate change? Well, like the climate itself, the hypothesis of man-made climate change cycles through history.”

“Daniel Yergin on the Future of Energy: Big Gains for Coal and Natural Gas”

July 9, 2014: The Wall Street Journal reports: “The world will soon run out of its most important energy resource because supplies are ‘becoming exhausted.’ To stave off disaster, there must be a quick shift to wind power. No, the warning is not from 2014. Rather, it’s from 1881, eight years before the first pages of The Wall Street Journal rolled off the press. And the speaker was no less than Lord Kelvin, one of the great scientists of the 19th century. That’s a good reminder of how the actual ‘energy future’ can confound the best predictions from the platform of the ‘energy present.’ And the reminders keep coming. Just six years ago, the U.S. was gearing up to spend $100 billion a year importing liquefied natural gas, or LNG, because of the increasingly high cost and apparent scarcity of domestic gas. Now the country is less than two years away from becoming an exporter of LNG, while European industry is migrating to the U.S. to take advantage of inexpensive natural gas. By 2021, the U.S. will be one of the top three LNG exporters in the world.”

“A Climate Activist Bags Himself”

July 9, 2014: A column in The Wall Street Journal by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. states: “In ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ a Hemingway story, a man goes big game hunting who should have stayed home. Tom Steyer maybe should have stayed home. The hedge-fund king has sought to propel himself to the top circle of Democratic money men and possible future officeholders on the strength of his concern about global warming. He wants to spend $100 million this year influencing the midterm elections. All the media lately wants to talk about, though, is his thoroughly postmodern hypocrisy. The New York Times is the latest to investigate his former hedge fund’s investments to increase the output of Indonesian and Australian coal mines to feed China during a period when China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest carbon-dioxide emitter.”

“U.S. Seen as Biggest Oil Producer After Overtaking Saudi Arabia”

July 9, 2014: Bloomberg reports: “The U.S. will remain the world’s biggest oil producer this year after overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia as extraction of energy from shale rock spurs the nation’s economic recovery, Bank of America Corp. said.  U.S. production of crude oil, along with liquids separated from natural gas, surpassed all other countries this year with daily output exceeding 11 million barrels in the first quarter, the bank said in a report today. The country became the world’s largest natural gas producer in 2010. The International Energy Agency said in June that the U.S. was the biggest producer of oil and natural gas liquids.  ‘The U.S. increase in supply is a very meaningful chunk of oil,’ Francisco Blanch, the bank’s head of commodities research, said by phone from New York. ‘The shale boom is playing a key role in the U.S. recovery. If the U.S. didn’t have this energy supply, prices at the pump would be completely unaffordable.’”

“Climate of Conformity”

July 7, 2014: An editorial in The Wall Street Journal reports: “As loyal left-wingers go, Caleb Rossiter is a trouper. He’s supported every left of center cause going back to the Cold War, but lately he’s become a partial dissenter against the new religion of climate change. And now he’s been put out in the cold. The Institute for Policy Studies terminated Mr. Rossiter’s fellowship two days after he wrote a May 5 op-ed for these pages. Mr. Rossiter, who is also an American University adjunct professor of math and statistics, argued that the computer modeling used to support claims that the earth is headed for a climate catastrophe is far from definitive. But more important from a moral point of view, he wrote that limiting fossil fuels would make it harder for Africa to escape poverty. In a May 7 email, IPS Director John Cavanagh and Foreign Policy in Focus co-director Emira Woods informed Mr. Rossiter that, ‘Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours that a productive working relationship is untenable.’”

“Nine states join lawsuit against EPA climate rule”

July 2, 2014: The Hill reports: “Nine states are joining coal company Murray Energy in suing the administration for its proposal to cut carbon pollution from existing power plants. Murray Energy called the new standards, which are a signature piece of President Obama’s climate change legacy, ‘illegal, irrational, and radical’ when first filing the lawsuit June 18. Now, West Virginia, Alabama, Alaska, Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming are joining the lawsuit, and filed a brief to the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia late last week. ‘EPA’s assertion of authority denied it by Congress imposes real harms on the States now: States have to undertake huge amounts of burdensome work now to develop plans to meet the anticipated rule and cannot wait for the final rule and still have any chance of meeting the indicated deadlines,’ the brief from the nine states says.”

“EDITORIAL: Gassing the environment”

July 2, 2014: An editorial in The Washington Times states: “It’s not easy being green. Environmentalists must not only take a stand for a cleaner and colder planet, but must embrace contradiction with the enthusiasm of a Zen master. Supporting renewable energy means setting up enormous bird-slicing windmills and insect-frying solar panels. It means celebrating natural gas, which leftists just can’t bring themselves to do. The Environmental Protection Agency reported in April that America’s ‘greenhouse-gas’ emissions — carbon dioxide and methane, primarily — fell 3.4 percent from 2011 to 2012. For those who fear CO2 — the gas that makes flowers bloom and plants grow — this ought to be cause for breaking out the champagne. Except, it’s not. The spoilsports of the left refuse to raise a glass of bubbly to natural gas.”

“Obama Continues his Attack on U.S. Energy”

July 1, 2014: Canada Free Press reports: “The delay of the Keystone XL pipeline is a perfect example of the way President Obama and his administration has engaged in, not just a war on coal, but on all forms of energy the nation has and needs. Even his State Department admits there is no reason to refuse its construction and, as turmoil affects the Middle East, there is an increased need to tap our own oil and welcome Canada’s. The latest news, however, is that Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil—to Asia. The pure evil of the delay is compounded by the loss of the many jobs the pipeline—that will not require taxpayer funding—represents to help reduce the nation’s obscene rate of unemployment and to generate new revenue for the nation. That’s what oil, coal, and natural gas does.”