This past Saturday, Governor Sebelius vetoed the third (and final) piece of legislation that proposed two new coal-fired power plants in western Kansas.

There’s still a chance that legislators will attempt an override on May 29th. Like last time, an override is a given in the Senate, but the House votes are in question.

Her comments are starting to sting, and you can tell she’s sick of the shenanigans:

Rather than working toward a compromise solution, legislative leaders recklessly chose to jeopardize important initiatives for businesses and communities across our state by combining them with energy legislation I have previously vetoed twice. …this maneuver has done nothing to address the issues at hand – developing comprehensive energy policy, providing base-load energy power for Western Kansas, implementing carbon mitigation strategies and capitalizing on our incredible assets for additional wind power.

This third attempt to build the coal plants is unique in that the legislation pairs the coal plants with economic development incentives. Sounds like it should give coal proponents a leg up, until you find out that under the Kansas constitution, no single piece of legislation can undertake two subjects. So there’s a good chance that for this legislative session, the final attempt will be forced to die with a whimper. Let’s hope so.

– Kari Manlove

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is an obscure Cabinet-level office that oversees the activities of all the federal agencies of the Executive Branch. Under President Bush, the OMB has become administration’s primary mechanism for politicizing the work of the Environmental Protection Agency, as congressional investigations have discovered.

Bush’s political appointees to the OMB and EPA share personal ties and a common right-wing ideology of defending corporate polluters against environmental regulation. The individuals listed below joined the administration directly from anti-regulatory think tanks or from the staff of Republican congressmen.

Yesterday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) held an oversight hearing into OMB interference with EPA decisions on ozone and greenhouse gases, at which EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson yet again put in a performance that “rivals Alberto Gonzales” and failed to turn over subpoenaed documents. Today, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) held an oversight hearing into OMB interference with the EPA risk assessment process for toxic chemicals. Tomorrow, the House Global Warming Committee will hold a vote to recommend that Johnson be found in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with their subpoena.

Here are a few of the major figures linking the OMB to the EPA:

John D. Graham

Former Administrator of the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

John D. Graham

BACKGROUND: Administrator of the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) from 2001 to 2006. Called “the man behind the curtain” by OMB Watch, Graham “made his anti-regulatory agenda clear upon entering office.” In 1990, Graham founded the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, an industry-funded think tank that fights environmental regulation. Graham is now the dean of the RAND Graduate School, the military think tank’s private school. His protegés — Marcus Peacock and George Gray — now hold top positions in the EPA.

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Roger Pielke has jumped the shark.

The ultraconservative Washington Times, in yet another media piece that misunderstands the recent Nature article on warming (see here), writes:

Roger A. Pielke, environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, and not previously a global warming skeptic, reacted to the Nature article: “Climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global-warming policy.”

Who is this “not previously a global warming skeptic”? Let me call him Mr. Pielke, since, unlike Dr. Jekyll’s, Mr. Hyde, Dr. Pielke and Mr. Pielke look exactly the same. The friendly non-skeptical heretic Dr. Pielke explicitly said on this blog that the “acceptable level” of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide is 450 to 500 ppm (see here). The friendly Dr. Pielke has also said achieving such a target would require more than 14 wedges (see here), which is a bloody lot of effort.

But Mr. Pielke says climate models have no practical use. Yet it is climate models that tell us that if we don’t stabilize near 450 ppm, the consequences for the climate and humanity will be an unmitigated catastrophe. If climate models are of no practical use, then why go to all that effort mitigating? Why not do nothing — as the Washington Times prefers — and just go to 1000 ppm?

That’s why Mr. Pielke is the go-to guy for quotes on not mitigating …

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The year of living stupidly is over. No longer must we put up with the nonsense that Bush’s policies are anything but an outright catastrophe for greenhouse gas emissions and future generations.

The EIA reported yesterday:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels increased by 1.6 percent in 2007…. Factors that drove the emissions increase included … a higher carbon intensity of electricity supply.

President Bush immediately released a statement:

We are effectively contributing to the problem of global climate change through flawed energy policy, obstructionist domestic and international climate policy, and general disinformation.

Okay, he didn’t release that statement, but he should have, given that after EIA revealed the temporary dip last year, he claimed:

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The list of very knowledgeable folk who still are pushing no-till farming as a greenhouse gas mitigation strategy even though science passed them by a while ago include:

• Sen. John McCain (see “Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic)
• Princeton University*
• The Chicago Climate Exchange
• The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

I buried the science in the McCain post, but it deserves higher visibility. As a major review article from Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, “Tillage and soil carbon sequestration–What do we really know?” concluded:

In essentially all cases where conservation tillage was found to sequester C[arbon], soils were only sampled to a depth of 30 cm or less, even though crop roots often extend much deeper. In the few studies where sampling extended deeper than 30 cm, conservation tillage has shown no consistent accrual of SOC [soil organic carbon], instead showing a difference in the distribution of SOC, with higher concentrations near the surface in conservation tillage and higher concentrations in deeper layers under conventional tillage.… Long-term, continuous gas exchange measurements have also been unable to detect C gain due to reduced tillage. Though there are other good reasons to use conservation tillage, evidence that it promotes C sequestration is not compelling.

[Conservation tillage is "broadly defined as any tillage method that leaves sufficient crop residue in place to cover at least 30% of the soil surface after planting.]

This is actually not especially new research. The review article went online in June 2006, and, of course, as a review article, it was based on even earlier research — including a 1981 (!) study that came to the same exact conclusion:

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