[I'm not sure this Independent story is quite that big a deal, but it got Drudge all globally hot and bothered with the banner headline and pic below, so at least the deniers and delayers will all see it.]
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The CAFE we could have had
White House intervention at the EPA is back in the news.
The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming finally received some long-awaited documents from the EPA. In a letter to President Bush, Committee Chairman Markey indicated what the EPA was recommending before the White House stepped in to weaken the regulations. First Representative Markey sets the stage:
On May 14, 2007, you directed EPA, along with other agencies, to prepare a regulatory response to Massachusetts v. EPA by the end of 2007 and to complete it by the end of 2008. According to reports, EPA staff spent about six months developing this proposal, and transmitted both a positive finding of endangerment to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a draft regulatory proposal to require the equivalent of 35 miles per gallon (mpg) fuel economy standard from the fleet of cars and light trucks by 2018 to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in early December, 2007.
Frontline, CBS, and CNN this week
Climate Progress was (or is supposed to be) featured in:
- Great frontline story Tuesday on the human impact today of climate change in Asia and Africa (video online here) — a prequel to a 2-hour special this fall.
- CBS Evening News piece tonight on CIBC oil report (which is how I came to blog on it).
- CNN report tomorrow morning on a new hydrogen fueling station in California.
Energy and climate are hot — stay right here for the cutting edge news and analysis.
California leads the way toward climate sanity
How do you return greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 while promoting jobs, competitiveness, and public health? Conservatives in the U.S. Senate think it can’t be done. California knows it can.
The Air Resources Board has just published their Scoping Plan here. How do they cut 169 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2020? Efficiency, efficiency, renewables, renewables, and even some conservation:
Given that the single biggest source of California’s GHG emissions is transportation, surging oil prices will make it that much easier for them to achieve this target and increase the savings for California consumers and businesses.
Unlike U.S. Senate conservatives, Californians understand that the multiple benefits of action — and the cost of inaction — greatly exceed the costs of action:
White House Pretended EPA Email Outlining ‘Unequivocal’ Global Warming Threat Was Spam
The New York Times revealed yesterday that the White House’s global warming denial reached levels of absurdity that would be hilarious if the stakes weren’t so high. Last December, senior EPA officials tell the Times, White House officials literally refused to open the e-mail from the EPA that concluded that “greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled.” The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin fills in more details:
And upon learning that EPA had hit the “send” button just minutes earlier, the White House called again to demand that the e-mail be recalled. The EPA official who forwarded the e-mail, Associate Deputy Administrator Jason Burnett, refused, said the sources, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations.
That fateful December confrontation — Burnett “sent the e-mail to the White House Office of Management and Budget at 2:17 p.m. Dec. 5 and received the call warning him to hold off at 2:25 p.m.” — was the culmination of months of effort by the EPA following April’s Supreme Court mandate to take action on global warming pollution. As documents shown to the House Global Warming Committee under threat of subpoena revealed, “EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson determined that man-made global warming is unequivocal, the evidence is both compelling and robust, and the administration must act to prevent harm rather than wait for harm to occur before acting.”
Instead, the administration acted to prevent the EPA from following its legal and moral duty. After the White House rejected the EPA’s efforts, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson reversed his decision to allow California to regulate tailpipe greenhouse emissions. All work at the EPA on global warming ceased, and in May Burnett announced his resignation.
Today, Johnson’s EPA is expected to unveil a censored version of the report it submitted to the White House in December, as an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” asking for new round of comments on whether global warming represents a threat to human health and whether it should take action. This administration knows full well that global warming represents a very present threat to our health and security, as reports issued this month by its scientific and intelligence agencies reveal. Of course, Bush impeded those reports as well. The scientific assessment was submitted under court order, four years after its legal deadline, and the intelligence assessment was classified despite being based on public information.
Burnett — who came to the EPA with an anti-regulatory background — is now telling reporters he resigned because the White House threw away his efforts to confront the threat of global warming. In an email to the Post, he wrote:
The White House made it clear they did not want to address the ramifications of that finding and have decided to leave the challenge to the next administration. Some [at the White House] thought that EPA had mistakenly concluded that climate change endangers the public. It was no mistake.
Last Friday, Bush asserted executive privilege to prevent the House Oversight Committee from investigating his involvement in this gross dereliction of duty.
UPDATE: At Dot Earth, Andy Revkin reminds us the Bush stonewalling of the EPA on global warming began “just two months into his first term to abandon his campaign pledge in 2000 to restrict carbon dioxide from power plants.” A March 7, 2001 memorandum from the EPA to the White House recommended that the carbon dioxide pledge be kept, but a group of non-scientists rejected the plea. Among the cabal of right-wing officials with industry ties who blocked action in 2001 was the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Marcus Peacock, now the number-two official at the EPA.
Must read CIBC report: $7 gas by 2010, 10 million cars off the road, 1970s style GDP growth
CIBC World Markets has just released a stunning yet detailed economic analysis of near-term oil prices and impacts. The PDF has some excellent figures I will convert to JPEGs.
The two key pieces are “Getting off the Road–Adjusting to $7 per Gallon Gas in America” and “Oil and Growth–That 70s show Re-Run“. Main points:
- “That additional 200,000 barrels per day pledged from Saudi Arabia is a pittance compared to the four million barrels per day this year that depletion will hive off world production. What little increase in production Saudi is capable of will probably all be gobbled up by that country’s own voracious appetite for energy.”
- China’s recent oil subsidy drop? Another yawner: “Most North Americans would gladly line up at the pumps for China’s now $3.25 a gallon gas.”
- “The only supply response to date has been yet another round of cost overruns and lengthy project delays running the gamut from Canadian oil sands to deepwater Gulf of Mexico wells.”
- “With the basic laws of supply and demand no longer operative in crude oil markets,” CIBC is”compelled to once again raise our target prices for oil” to “an average price of $200 per barrel by 2010.” That “should translate into a near-$7 per gallon pump price within two years, a 70% increase from today’s already record levels.”
- “Higher oil prices spell stagflation for the US economy next year” and beyond. The report has a good analysis of why “The US economy has managed to avoid feeling the full brunt of oil prices over the last few years, but 2009 will be the year that its luck runs out.”
The analysis seems very solid and suggests the only thing that can “save” us from near-$7 gas by 2010 is a major global recession, but even that would only be a temporary respite. The implications for Detroit is staggering:
Gas prices kill the “Green Acres” dream
“Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise,” was the NYT story yesterday:
Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas.
Green acres is the place to be
Farm living is the life for me
Land spreading out, so far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.
Just off Singing Hills Road, in one of hundreds of two-story homes dotting a former cattle ranch beyond the southern fringes of Denver, Phil Boyle and his family openly wonder if they will have to move close to town to get some relief.
New York is where I’d rather stay
I get allergic smelling hay
I just adore a penthouse view
Darling, I love you,
but give me Park Avenue.
But life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable.
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
