The Wonk Room is reporting and tweeting live from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

A group of four Republican senators, led by climate denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), have lashed out at the Obama administration’s efforts to protect the poorest and most vulnerable people of the world from climate disasters. Inhofe, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) wrote a letter to President Barack Obama telling him to drop an international adaptation fund for the least developed nations — part of the Copenhagen Accord signed last year by President Obama and over 130 other nations. Under Democratic leadership, the United States appropriated $1.3 billion for the climate fund in 2010 (compared to $136.8 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). After citing the budget deficit and high unemployment as reasons not to invest in protecting the vulnerable, the senators attacked the scientific basis for taking action:

In addition, several of the findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning the eventual impacts of climate change in developing countries were found to be exaggerated or simply not true. We understand that reforms of the IPCC process are currently underway and we believe that no American taxpayer dollars should be committed to a global climate fund based on information that is not accurate.

The Wonk Room contacted the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a new volunteer effort by top scientists, to find out what they thought about the claim that the threat to the developing world is too uncertain for the United States to act.

“This is a dishonest climate change denier myth,” top climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, explained. The senators are referring to two or three errors in the thousand-page impacts report that are “so insubstantial that they didn’t even make the summary for policy makers or the technical summary report.”

Dr. Gary Yohe, the Huffington Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, charged the senators with “misdirection and misrepresentation”:

They are continuing an effort of misdirection and misrepresentation so that the debate does not focus on the issue – the urgent need for adaptation and the value to the United States of investing in adaptation (around the world).

Dr. Spencer Weart, a physicist and leading science historian, told us that “senators are incorrect in their claim that there are substantial errors in the IPCC’s evaluation of the science of impacts of climate change on developing nations”:

Unless the senators can point to serious deficiencies in the actual main conclusions about impacts of the IPCC report — which they have not done and cannot do — the prudent thing is to take the IPCC’s severe warnings about impacts at face value and prepare accordingly.

The senators have received a collective $5.1 million from the fossil fuel industry in campaign contributions.

Dr. Weart’s full response debunks in detail the senators’ letter: Read more

In a startling act of fealty to polluter interests, several senators are fighting scientifically guided smog limits that would save thousands of lives a year. Under the guidance of administrator Lisa Jackson, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to clean up one of George W. Bush’s most blatant acts of ignoring science and disregarding the law, when he personally overruled the unanimous recommendations of EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee for an ozone limit no higher than 70 ppb, setting instead an arbitrary and capricious standard of 75 ppb. Jackson intends to instead follow the law by setting a 60-70 ppb standard. However, a group of Democratic and Republican senators led by retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) are trying to preserve Bush’s toxic legacy on behalf of the coal and oil industries in their states, complaining to Jackson that her plan “will have a significant negative impact on our states’ workers and families”:

We believe that changing the rules at this time will have a significant negative impact on our states’ workers and families and will compound the hardship that many are now facing in these difficult economic times.

The pro-smog letter was also signed by Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Kit Bond (R-MO) and David Vitter (R-LA).

Remarkably, the senators do not seem cognizant of Bush’s well-reported act of malfeasance, complaining that “the Agency has not presented new data or evidence to justify its course of action”:

Instead, outside of the regular five-year review process, EPA is choosing to interpret the same basic body of information that existed in 2008 and reach a different conclusion. . .

Given the absence of new or different scientific data, EPA should maintain the current ozone standards, which EPA finalized only two years ago and concluded were adequately protective of public health and welfare with an adequate of safety [sic].

Actually the conclusion EPA staff and scientists drew in 2008, based on the scientific evidence that “ozone has a direct impact on rates of heart and respiratory disease and resulting premature deaths,” was that a standard no higher than 70 ppb was needed. The agency calculated that a standard of 65 ppb “would avoid 3,000 to 9,200 deaths annually,” two to three times more than a 75 ppb standard. The difference is that George W. Bush is no longer the decider.

The senators also claim that the previous smog standards harmed the economy:

We note that many states are only recently coming into attainment with the 1997, 0.084 ppm ozone standard. Attaining that standard required costly mandates on businesses, which greatly restricted the ability of local communities to grow their economies. . .

While we believe we can and should continue to improve our environment, we have become increasingly concerned that the Agency’s environmental policies are being advanced to the detriment of the people they are intended to protect. That is, these policies are impacting our standard of living by drastically increasing energy costs and decreasing the ability of our states to create jobs, foster entrepreneurship, and give manufacturers the ability to compete in the global marketplace.

The claim that attainment with the 1997 standard “greatly restricted the ability of local communities to grow their economies” is without evidence. In fact, the only noticeable effect of the 1997 standards on the economy was to dramatically cut the regulated pollution, making millions of children healthier, even as the economy steadily grew, as this EPA chart shows:

Finally, the senators claim — again without evidence — that “non-attainment” penalties under the Clean Air Act “undermine the economic viability of communities within our states.” In fact, “there is no clear evidence that non-attainment designations or progress in addressing air quality prevent areas from growing,” EPA officials informed the Wonk Room. Areas such as Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and many others have been non-attainment for years and have had very strong growth rates. The EPA tells the Wonk Room:

We see no significant differences in the trend of employment, wages and number of establishments between attainment and non-attainment areas.

There is clear evidence, however, that this effort to ensure that more children have asthma attacks comes on behalf of coal and oil corporations in the senators’ states. Peabody Energy, the “world’s leading coal company,” is based in Missouri and has mines in Indiana, and is a top campaign contributor to McCaskill, Bond, Lugar and Bayh. Murray Energy, the “largest privately owned coal company in America,” is based in Voinovich‘s state. Landrieu and Vitter have collected a combined $1.5 million from the pollution industry, whose refineries and power plants keep killing children and keep sending these senators back to Washington.

Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are working with the White House, environmentalists, and industry to craft comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation, which they plan to unveil on Monday. But Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), both of whom have admitted the threat of global warming, today announced “a narrower competing bill” that resembles the weak legislation passed out of the Senate energy committee last year:

George V. Voinovich of Ohio and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana are developing an energy-only bill that would mandate new renewable and nuclear power production without imposing cuts on carbon emissions.

Lugar first unveiled this plan on March 30, which looks like something from the Carter era. This approach, which has also been floated by energy committee members Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Sen. Lisa Murkowksi (R-AK), has been described by Graham as “half-assed.” Voinovich believes that subsidy-based legislation that fails to reduce global warming pollution is more “doable” than comprehensive reform that pays its own way by putting a price on carbon pollution:

I’d like to get something done. But I’m not sure it would meet the standards of the environmental groups or what Sen. Kerry would like to get done. I’d like to do the doable — move it down the field while I can.

More problematically, Voinovich also announced today that climate legislation “must include a comprehensive preemption provision that goes well beyond language included in previous climate bills” to get his support, a poison-pill stance that would derail the progress made by states across the nation to build a green economy.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) have been jockeying for attention with a bill that addresses the other half of energy reform, a climate-only package with weak targets known as the CLEAR Act.

These senators are participating in a complex dance — if President Obama and the public throw their weight behind real action, then these senators can take credit when elements of their bills appear in the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation. However, if momentum stalls under the weight of polluter lobbying and Beltway indifference to the climate crisis, they can instead say they offered a “pragmatic” alternative.

Unfortunately, such political insurance only covers elected politicians, not people living in the real world.