Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson today announced she expects the EPA to weaken its proposed standards for global warming pollution from stationary sources and delay implementation until 2011. Responding to a letter from eight Democratic senators with strong ties to coal, oil, and industrial polluters, Jackson previewed changes to the rule to regulate greenhouse gases which her agency proposed last September she expects to make in its final form. Under the Clean Air Act, the finalization of the greenhouse gas endangerment finding originally expected in March — now, according to Jackson’s letter, in April — will trigger permitting requirements for stationary sources.

Jackson’s proposed “tailoring” rule would have limited permitting requirements to emitters of 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, instead of the automatic statutory amount of 250 tons. The 25,000-ton threshold covers only 14,000 industrial pollution sources nationwide, 11,000 of which are currently covered by the Clean Air Act permitting requirements already.

However, today Jackson announced that the “decision-making process has moved far enough along that I can make several central points based on modifications I expect to make in finalizing EPA’s previous proposals,” including a 2011 start date and a “substantially higher” threshold than 25,000 tons:

– No stationary sources will be required to get a Clean Air Act permit to cover its greenhouse gas emissions in calendar year 2010.

– EPA will phase-in permit requirements and regulation of greenhouse gases for large stationary sources beginning in calendar year 2011.

– In the first half of 2011, only those facilities that must apply for Clean Air Act permits as a result of their non-greenhouse gas emissions will need to address their greenhouse gas emissions in their permit applications.

– Greenhouse gas emissions permit for other large sources will phase in starting in the latter half of 2011.

– Until 2013, the threshold for permitting will be substantially higher than the 25,000 ton limit that EPA originally proposed.

– The EPA will not subject the smallest sources to Clean Air Act permitting any sooner than 2016, after Obama has left office, even if he wins a second term.

Many of the world’s top climate scientists have warned that global emissions of greenhouse gases “almost certainly need to decline extremely rapidly after 2015” if there is to be a good chance of avoiding catastrophic warming.

The conservative Democratic senators who questioned the economic consequences of the EPA’s endangerment finding were led by Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and included Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Pat Casey (D-PA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Carl Levin (D-MI), and Max Baucus (D-MT). Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE), Blanche Lincoln (D-NE), and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) joined numerous Republicans in supporting a bid to overturn the scientific endangerment finding entirely.

If the endangerment finding is overturned, Jackson notes in her letter, “it would undo the historic agreement among states, automakers, the federal government, and other stakeholders” for higher fuel-economy standards, “leaving the automobile industry without the explicit nationwide uniformity that it has described as important to its business.” Not to mention the health and economic costs of failing to reduce our deadly dependence on oil.

Download Jackson’s letter to conservative Democratic senators.

The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) report ignored dynamic ice-sheet disintegration, which was already happening (see Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”).  The IPCC therefore low-balled sea level rise estimates, suggesting seas might rise “only” a foot or two this century, greatly delighting the anti-science crowd (see “Debunking Bj¸rn Lomborg:  Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise“).

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Today’s guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, Senior Fellow at American Progress.

Last month, an NREL study showed that America could generate 20% percent of its power just with wind by 2024.  That would require about 300,000 MW or 300 GW.  The ultimate potential is much, much higher — 30 times higher (!) — as Tom Kenworthy, CAP’s Senior Fellow based in Colorado, explains.

Thanks to improvements in wind turbines over the last decade and a half, the United States has the potential to generate more than three times as much electricity from wind as previously thought, according to a new analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

The assessment of onshore wind energy potential found that the U.S. could produce almost 37 million gigawatt-hours yearly. According to the American Wind Energy Association, that’s nine times our current annual electricity consumption.

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Scientists who challenged the possibility of catastrophic sea level rise in coming decades have retracted their argument. Mark Siddall, whose paper claimed sea level rise from global warming could not be more than 82 centimeters (32 inches) by 2100 — despite other estimates of up to 1.9 meters — asked for the conclusions published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience to be retracted, accepting corrections from researchers who had made the higher estimates. The Guardian misleadingly presented the news with the headline, “Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels“:

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown.

If all one read was the introduction, a reader might get the false impression that sea level rise from global warming is in doubt. The misleading Guardian headline was picked up — as per usual — by the Drudge Report and Marc Morano’s conspiracy site Climate Depot. Right-wing bloggers, unsurprisingly, latched on to the headline without any comprehension of the story:

Betsy Newmark: Another global warming claim that has had to be retracted because of problems with the data.

Sammy Benoit: OOPS Never-mind! Climate scientists withdraw IPCC-related article claiming sea is rising.

JammieWearingFool: Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels.

Jules Crittenden: Warmal scientists are compelled to admit (again) that they don’t know what they’re talking about, retract study that predicted up to a nearly three-foot sea level rise by 2100.

Law professor William A. Jacobson: But now the seas are not going to rise? My dream of a waterfront home is melting away faster than the glaciers.

Caleb Howe: Yet another card removed from the geodesic dome of cards that is AGW hysteria.

However, the retraction instead admits that the paper’s calculations for an upper bound to future sea level rise were incorrect, and sea level rise could be much worse. Siddall’s study, “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change,” used paleoclimate reconstructions to predict that sea level rise from global warming would be constrained to between 7 cm and 82 cm (3 to 32 in) by the end of the century, in line with the estimated sea level rise in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which excluded possible effects from ice sheets.

Unfortunately for the future of human civilization, the best scientific estimates of future sea level rise continue to worsen, as it becomes evident that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass much more rapidly than estimated before 2007. December’s “Global sea level linked to global temperature,” published by Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences projects a catastrophic rise of 0.75 to 1.9 m (2.5 to 6 feet) by 2100:

Figure 3: Projection of sea-level rise from 1990 to 2100, based on IPCC temperature projections for three different emission scenarios. The sea-level range projected in the IPCC AR4 for these scenarios are shown for comparison in the bars on the bottom right. Also shown in red is observed sea-level (Vermeer 2009). The estimate from Siddall 2009 that contradicted Vermeer has been retracted.

Over the past twenty years, actual sea level rise has been at the top of estimated limits since the first IPCC report in 1990. By 2200, scientists warn, the oceans could rise by more than three meters, submerging cities like Los Angeles, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and lower Manhattan.

“If the U.S. were to come with domestic legislation in place, I think the Chinese and the Indians would be prepared to come forward and agree to something legally binding.”

U.S. Aims for Legally Binding Climate Change Agreement in 2010

The U.S. said it wants to reach a legally binding climate-change agreement at a summit in Mexico in December, a sign President Barack Obama hasn’t given up the fight for a global accord to limit greenhouse gases.

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Anti-science ideologues have increasingly made opposition to bipartisan action on global warming a litmus test for Republicans seeking national office (see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy” and “Part 3: RNC Chair Steele withdraws support for Rep. Kirk over his vote on climate and clean energy bill“).  Apparently this litmus test doesn’t just include embracing ideological positions on policy, but also on science.

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Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University and I will discuss the science behind EPA’s endangerment finding:

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The Washington Post‘s premier political cartoonist offers his take on the issue of the day:

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John Podesta has “hope,” but certainly not confidence, that Congress can pass a comprehensive climate and energy bill by this spring, a target date set by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

National Journal interviewed the CEO of the Center for American Progress on climate last week.  Podesta said it’s crucial to cut GHG emissions by the amount the President agreed to in the Copenhagen Accord:  17% below 2005 levels by 2020.   Edited excerpts of the interview follow:

NJ: Do you have confidence Congress can pass a comprehensive climate and energy bill this spring?

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