Now there’s leadership for ‘ya…

In April 2007 the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection agency has the authority and obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants that contribute to climate change. The ruling also made clear that the EPA could not shrink from this responsibility unless it provides a scientific bases for doing so.

In December 2007, in apparent compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling, the EPA emailed a draft report to the White House that, according to an EPA official, concluded that greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare and should be controlled. The White House refused to open the email and several EPA officials have said the Bush Administration asked for the email to be recalled. It wasn’t. And so the email sat, ignored.

The report also stated that, based on data from the Energy Department, it would be cost effective to set CAFE fuel efficiency standards to 37.7 MPG by 2018. Ten days after the email was sent and left unopened (with no further attempts from anyone to otherwise deliver the information and suggest someone in the Bush White House at least read it), the president signed into law an energy bill requiring CAFE standards at 35 MPG by 2020, less rigorous than the EPA’s ignored recommendation.

This, in conjunction with the EPA/White House fiasco over refusal to comply with numerous subpoenas related to White House influence over EPA administrator Steven Johnson’s decision to deny California’s waiver to set tailpipe emission standards, has drawn increased attention to the EPA’s failure to comply with the Supreme Court ruling.

Despite the failure of the White House to read its email, it apparently knows (of course) what the EPA concluded over six months ago. This past week the White House has successfully pressured the EPA to cut large swaths from the original report, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2trillion in economic benefits to the American economy.

A senior EPA official said the original EPA findings

…showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy to reduce greenhouse gases. That’s not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can’t work.”

White House spokesman Tony Fratto refused comment on discussions between the Bush administration and the EPA – why bother? The EPA has now obviously become the tool of George Bush instead of the an agency in honest pursuit of its mandate to protect the environment.

The ongoing charade of leadership from the White House and EPA administrator Johnson has led to the resignation of Jason Burnett, the EPA associate deputy administrator who had broad authority over climate change regulations. Said Mr. Burnett of his decision to resign:

…no more constructive work could be done on the agency’s response to the Supreme Court. The next administration will have to face what this one did not.”

In fact, we all must face the consequences of what this administration has done, and not done, for and to the American people.

As David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club, says:

All this does is further underscore that the Bush administration has not done anything, will not do anything, and has stood in the way of anyone else doing anything.”

Sources and Further Reading
New York Times – Dot Earth
US Climate Change Program
Associated Press
The Telegram

 

 

 

 

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Last Friday, with only 15 minutes to spare before the House Oversight Committee was scheduled to vote on holding EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and White House official Susan Dudley in contempt of Congress, the Bush administration invoked executive privilege – thus expressing its own contempt for that pesky concept known as “congressional oversight”.

The impending vote from the committee chaired by Henry Waxman was in response to Johnson and Dudley, the administrator of regulatory affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, refusing to hand over subpoenaed documents relating to the EPA’s denial of a waiver allowing California to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes (along with about a dozen-and-a-half other states with similar laws on their books), and possible interference from the White House influencing the decision.

As has been widely reported, documents and testimony from EPA officials strongly suggest that Johnson was initially in support of at least a partial waiver, in accordance with the unanimous recommendation from his own staff, only to make an about-face and deny the waiver after contact with the White House.  

Waxman’s committee has had access to thousands of documents and sworn testimony from EPA officials, but Johnson and the White House have consistently refused to abide the subpoena for specific documents relating specifically to phone calls or meetings between at least one high-ranking EPA official and an assistant to the the president.

The stonewalling from the EPA and White House begin immediately after Johnson announced his decision and continues with Bush’s claim of executive privilege.

Representative Waxman cancelled the contempt of congress vote Friday upon receiving the letter from the White House invoking executive privilege in order to determine Attorney General Michael Mukasy’s rationale for the claim.

Waxman made clear his doubts as to the motives of the White House and the veracity of its assertion of privilege.

I have a clear sense that their assertion of this privilege is self-serving and not based on the appropriate law and rules,” Waxman said from the dais of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing room.

I don’t think we’ve had a situation like this since Richard Nixon was president when the president of the United States may have been involved in acting contrary to law, and the evidence that would determine that question for Congress in exercising our oversight is being blocked by an assertion of executive privilege.

The battle rages on.

 

 

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Global warming related litigation is bound to be big. But the wait is for that one landmark case that will confirm this. Last September´s State of California´s unsuccessful attempt to get six car companies to produce less polluting cars taught us that patience is the name of the game. Regulations are simply not there yet, so the real fireworks -cases involving breaking the rules- are bound to happen in the future. But a community of Alaskan Eskimos suing 23 oil and energy companies might speed things up.

The lawsuit is modeled on the historic tobacco case that ended in the biggest ever settlement in US civil law history. It involves 410 Inupiat Eskimo inhabitants of the island of Kivalina. These people live some 70 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the tip of a six-mile barrier reef between the Chukchi Sea and the Kivalina and Wulik Rivers on the Northwest coast of Alaska. They call their town K-vill and want to live there for ever, since they´ve been out there since time immemorial. And because all that is getting a bit of a push, they´re suing 23 corporations in the oil, energy and coal sectors, for sustaining global warming related injury to K-vill. The companies include (pdf) Exxon Mobil, BP, and Conoco Phillips, all three of which have operations in the near vicinity of the North Alaskan community.

 It’s the winter storms to which the K-vill population is most vulnerable. They have witnessed worse effects ever since their winters have become shorter due to warmer weather. The K-vill inhabutants got that officially confirmed by the US Army Corps of Engineers which concluded in 2006 that Kivalina is exposed to risks which are directly climate change related because the melted seas leave them much more vulnerable to winter storms. According to estimates from the US Army Corps of Engineers, relocation costs will run up a bill of $95 million. Other estimates have gone as high as $400 million.

READ THE WHOLE STORY… - Global Warming Related Litigation - Waiting For The Landmark Case

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About two-thirds of Iowa has been declared a disaster area as a result of this year’s flooding.  Reminiscent of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, residents along the Mississippi River are living under curfews and have to pass through check points to see their damaged homes.

Failed government policies are responsible, according to Friends of the Earth, which has launched a Web-driven public campaign to effect changes to national flood and river management policies.  

Given the increasing frequency and intensity of precipitation and flooding in the Mississippi River basin and delta, there’s an urgent need to rethink and re-orient federal government policies.  “The Army Corps of Engineers, along with the rest of the federal government, can no longer waste money and endanger people with futile attempts to overpower Mother Nature - especially as we come to expect 100-year floods every decade.  It is imperative that we stop playing the proverbial fool and start building our lives on secure ground,” FoE asserts.

Need for a Radical Change in Policy, Practice

Specifically, FoE is calling for changes in the longstanding means and methods the federal government, through the Army Corps of Engineers, uses to cope with high precipitation and flooding along the nation’s major waterways.  A shift away from large-scale structural engineering solutions and towards wetland restoration is urgently needed, changes that scientists have been advocating for decades now.

An even more radical change in property development, as well as national flood policy and measures to minimize damage, is necessary if repeats of this and previous years’ flooding are to be avoided however, according to the FoE.  Future building and rebuilding in the Midwest should be set back from waterways and other flood-prone areas, FoE advises. 

Despite spending of billions of tax dollars, federal government and US Army Corps of Engineer efforts to minimize flooding and damages along the Mississippi are failing.  What’s more, expert advice that might lead to more enlightened policy and programs is being ignored, according to the FoE. 

Don’t rebuild in high-hazard flood-prone zones like coastlines and river deltas was expert counsel in a 1966 report to Congress by the Task Force on Federal Flood Control Policy, and was reiterated in the 1973 Report of the National Water Commission, both of which found that flood damages were increasing despite enormous flood control expenditures. 

Wetlands: How to Restore What’s Been Destroyed?

Not surprisingly, ecological research has shown that nature’s has its own, effective ways of coping with high-intensity storms and floods – wetlands.  Unfortunately, private developers with support from tax dollars have wiped most of them out. 

As much as 95% of Iowa’s and Illinois’s wetlands have been destroyed, which contributes to the damages caused by floods, FoE notes.

Restoring wetlands and river ecosystems, typically a secondary consideration in reconstruction efforts to date, would provide a relatively low-cost, low environmental impact means of providing a flood and storm buffer in the Mississippi and other river basins and should move up to the front line of national flood management policy and efforts, it asserts.  

“Both panels [the researchers who carried out the 1966 and 1973 studies] recommended that more attention be paid to relocation out of flood zones and called for greater emphasis on non-engineering solutions.  There is a growing body of evidence that healthy wetlands, in-tact dune systems and other natural ecosystems reduce storm and flood damage, but far too many tax dollars have been spent to destroy these natural systems to facilitate more development,” FoE notes on its web site. 

Increased Precipitation and a Warming Climate

“No single weather event can be attributed to global warming, and it is impossible to say that the recent heavy rains in the Midwest are caused by the climate crisis, but it is clear that in the aggregate, humans’ continued pumping of massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is causing more extreme weather,” the FoE wrote as part of its public appeal and political action campaign.

It cites the following as evidence of link between increasing frequency and intensity of floods and precipitation in particular regions:

- A 1995 analysis from the National Climatic Data Center showed extreme weather events in the United States were already increasing in ‘statistically significant’ ways;

- In 2002, scientists called increased precipitation ‘an expected outcome of climate change’ that ‘may cause losses of U.S. corn production to double over the next 30 years’;

- In 2004, an article published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology found that, "Over the contiguous U.S. precipitation, temperature, stream flow, heavy and very heavy precipitation … have increased during the 20th century";

- Also in 2004, scientific models predicted ‘greater increases in extreme precipitation’ due to global warming.

Political change is vital and possible, FoE urges, noting that the president appoints the Army Corps of Engineers’ leaders and is charged with ensuring that they have access to the knowledge, expertise and resources required to enact more enlightened flood control and waterway management policies.

As part of its more immediate political action campaign, it has organized a Congressional petition, which can be accessed via this link.

-Andrew Burger

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Strong language perhaps, but this is no time to mince words. 

When Dick Cheney claims that the only impediment to increased domestic oil and natural gas production is the refusal of Congress to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he isn’t telling you the truth.

When Wall Street Journal writer Daniel Henninger publishes an article using phrases like “environmental moralisms” for a reality he fails to comprehend, instead invoking fear (“Nikita Khrushchev said, ‘We will bury you.’ Forget that. We’ll do it ourselves”) and political dogma for his false argument that the only thing blocking the United States to Drill! Drill! Drill! is Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he is either ignorant of or simply does not care about the truth.

Dick Cheney’s time is long past (not too many people believe what he says anyway). The Wall Street Journal doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Stuck in reverse with the thought that the key to our energy needs lay in the “moonscape” of the Arctic Reserve (as Henninger, who likely has never even been to Alaska, let alone ANWR, puts it) Dick Cheney and  Daniel Henninger do us all a grave disservice.

This is, or course, the sort of non-leadership, vision-less tripe we expect from Cheney and the Journal. It isn’t the first time they’ve lied to us, and it sadly won’t be the last.

But let’s imagine for a moment that the vice president and Henninger actually told us the truth:

Imagine that they told you the hard truth that increased domestic drilling does not, in fact, correlate into lower gas prices.  

Since the 1990’s, the federal government has consistently encouraged the development of its oil and gas resources and the amount of drilling on federal lands has steadily increased during this time. The number of drilling permits has exploded in recent years, going from 3,802 five years ago to 7,561 in 2007.

Between 1999 and 2007, the number of drilling permits issued for development of public lands increased by more than 361%, yet gasoline prices have risen dramatically contradicting the argument that more drilling means lower gasoline prices. There is simply no correlation between the two” (emphasis mine)

And what if they told you that oil and gas companies aren’t using a significant portion of federal lands already open to energy development?

Even if increased domestic drilling activity could affect the price of gasoline, there is yet no justification to open additional federal lands because
oil and gas companies have shown that they cannot keep pace with the rate of drilling permits that the federal government is handing out.

In the last four years, the Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land; yet, in that same time, 18,954 wells were actually drilled. That means that companies have stockpiled nearly 10,000 extra permits to drill that they are not using to increase domestic production.”

These are the some of the conclusion from the House Natural Resources staff committee report The Truth About America’s Energy: Big Oil Stockpiles Supplies and Pockets Profits (pdf). 

Representative Nick Rahall of West Virginia, chairman of the Natural Resources committee introduced the Responsible Federal Oil and Gas Lease Act of 2008 that would force Big Oils hand – “use it or lose it” as David Sassoon characterizes it in his article at SolveClimate.com.

The bill would impose the same requirements that coal has had with their 20–year leases – show that they are “diligently developing” resources with them.

As it is now oil and gas companies are sitting on leases and 68 million acres already leased for energy extraction go undeveloped.

It makes you wonder why Cheney and Henninger aren’t telling us the truth.

 

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The cloture motion voted on yesterday in the Senate would have moved the Climate Security Act forward, thwarting the Republican filibuster and allowing for more substantial debate on the proposed cap and trade legislation.

As we reported yesterday the motion was rejected.

Find out how your senator voted on the cloture motion on amendments of the Lieberman–Warner Climate Security Act. (a yea vote means continuing debate on the bill, a nay vote effectively kills it)

 

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