Donald Trump Declares ‘New Age Of American Energy’
via Climate Change Dispatch
http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN
US President Donald Trump set out to obliterate his predecessor Barack Obama’s legacy on climate change as part of a bid to unleash America’s energy potential. Mr Trump last night signed a sweeping executive order slashing measures from the Obama era, a move that was welcomed by the oil and coal industries as a bold […]
via Climate Change Dispatch http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN
March 29, 2017 at 12:14AM
So how did the California drought end?
via Climate Change Dispatch
http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN
We were told that the multi-year California drought was caused by humans, fossil fuels and CO2. So how did it end? After all in 2015, this was the standard reportage. Here’s an example from a no doubt solemnly intoned NBC News report: In parched California, rainfall patterns are essentially the same as they were 120 […]
via Climate Change Dispatch http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN
March 29, 2017 at 12:14AM
Caroline Lucas’ Carbon Spewing Trip
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
http://ift.tt/16C5B6P
By Paul Homewood
Guido exposes the latest green hypocrisy:
Green Party leader Caroline Lucas flew in business class to Washington yesterday on a gasoline guzzling, CO2 spurting aeroplane which dumped almost a tonne of carbon into the atmosphere. A spokesman for Lucas confirmed to Guido that she flew on British Airways and said:
“Caroline is in Washington DC on a work visit with the Environmental Audit Committee. Travel was arranged by the [Environmental Audit] Committee.”
A popular carbon footprint calculator states an average flight from London to Washington pumps out 0.92 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – equivalent to 4 months average C02 emissions by a household. In 2009 Lucas compared holidaymakers flying to Spain to thugs stabbing people in the street:
“When asked if flying to Spain was as bad as knifing a person in the street, Ms Lucas said: ‘Yes – because they are dying from climate change.’”
Killer!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT http://ift.tt/16C5B6P
March 28, 2017 at 10:30PM
Trump’s Executive Order On Energy: This Time, He Listened To The Lawyers
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com
President Donald Trump announces his executive order on energy at the EPA. (Photo by Ron Sach-Pool/Getty Images)
Unlike those orders, which have been suspended by federal courts, this one leaves the administration with a rich variety of legal and tactical choices on how to proceed with the mission of eliminating Obama-era regulations on fossil fuels.
The 7-page order released this afternoon reverses a string of Obama’s executive orders, including findings on the dangers of human-induced climate change and methane emissions. It also orders federal agencies to examine all of their actions related to the previous administration’s scientific findings on climate change with orders to “suspend, revise, or rescind” rules and regulations or begin the notice and comment period to reverse them. These are all legal steps that will spawn lawsuits by states and environmental groups opposed to the Trump administration’s regulatory rollback, but likely to run directly into the broad discretion given to federal agencies to interpret the law under the so-called Chevron doctrine.
The order doesn’t rescind Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which has been suspended by the Supreme Court while a Washington appeals court considers its fate. But the order lays the groundwork for rescinding it by instructing Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt to review and potentially “take legal action” to reverse the legal memorandum the Obama administration relied upon to justify the CPP’s sweeping controls on the electric utility grid. To accomplish that goal the EPA reversed a decades-old understanding of a tangled section of the Clean Air Act that the incoming administration can choose to reinterpret.
“The lawyers really had their way with this one,” said said Thomas Lorenzen, a partner with Crowell & Moring in Washington and former assistant chief of the Justice Dept.’s environmental law section. “It is a very carefully constructed order.”
Eliminating the previous administration’s legal memorandum could be a speedier way to get rid of the CPP, although it would still have to go through a notice and comment period as well as the inevitable legal challenges. The government wouldn’t have to delve as deeply into the scientific record, however, which the Obama administration provided in ample detail to justify its plan. Instead, the Trump administration would argue the CPP, which takes a systemwide approach toward reducing CO2 emissions, is based on an incorrect reading of federal law. The new EPA plan could return to “inside the fence” regulations on individual power plants, still holding them to strict efficiency standards that will be hard for coal plants to meet, but not eliminating them entirely. The CPP used “outside the fence” regulations imposed on entire regional electricity grids to effectively remove coal plants from the mix.
The order also calls for the elimination of the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, as well as its findings on the cost of global warming, which it pegged at $42 a ton by 2020. Effective immediately, the administration will use Bush-era standards to judge the cost of carbon emissions.
The Trump administration still faces hurdles, including a federal appeals court ruling upholding the Obama administration’s findings on the dangers of CO2 emissions from automobiles. But the new administration can use Chevron deference to its advantage here as well, Lorenzen said: The court ruling, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn, says the Obama administration’s finding was reasonable. The EPA under Pruitt need only muster enough scientific evidence to show that its findings are also reasonable, a relatively low bar for an agency to get over.
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
March 28, 2017 at 10:13PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 