Impending chaos the result of EPA new power on GHG?

It's not just business that wants to slow down the Environmental Protection Agency and its new rules to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. States want the EPA to take another look.

A growing number of state regulators are urging the Obama administration to slow the rollout of proposed federal rules curbing industrial greenhouse-gas emissions, saying the administration's approach could overwhelm them with paperwork, delay construction projects and undercut their own efforts to fight climate change.

The concerns echo some criticisms that business groups -- including the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers -- have voiced about the potential consequence of new regulations, though the states generally don't challenge the legality of the proposed regulations, as some business groups have. Indeed, many state regulators continue to say they support the Environmental Protection Agency's effort to regulate greenhouse gases. Their concerns, they say, have more to do with how quickly such rules should be phased in, and how to pay for an expansion in regulatory oversight at a time when their budgets are in the red.

Regulators from around the U.S., including Kansas, Pennsylvania, Florida and California, are calling on the EPA to go slowly with its new rules, and in some cases warning that they lack funding to regulate some of the new emissions sources that would be covered.

The states' warnings vary in urgency, with some saying the EPA's proposal can be easily tweaked and others urging the agency to reconsider the proposal, predicting dire consequences. South Carolina regulators, in a letter to EPA dated Dec. 23, said the proposal will cause chaos and warned that many construction projects -- and jobs -- are at risk.

Read: BHI's Comments on Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act;
Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking RIN 2060-AP12

Ecological Knowledge vs. Economic Knowledge

You may remember the name of Dr. John Holdren from an earlier post on this blog. Former summer fellow John Macek had written a letter to the editor in response to Holdren's claim that anyone who doesn't tow the line on global warming is "dangerous."

Now NYT columnist John Tierney is reporting that Obama has named Holdren as his science advisor. Tierney has more on Holdren's troubling past here.

It looks like John has more work to do.

Solution Lies in the Free Market System

On Monday, John P. Holdren criticized global warming skeptics for challenging the scientific "consensus" around global warming. He also accused skeptics of stalling the political process necessary to combat global warming:

The extent of unfounded skepticism about the disruption of global climate by human-produced greenhouse gases is not just regrettable, it is dangerous. It has delayed - and continues to delay - the development of the political consensus that will be needed if society is to embrace remedies commensurate with the challenge. The science of climate change is telling us that we need to get going. Those who still think this is all a mistake or a hoax need to think again.

The Boston Globe printed my response today.

SKEPTICS OF climate change not only doubt the "scientific consensus" behind global warming but the proposed mechanism to combat global warming.

Supporters of decisive action on climate change assume that the federal government must step in and solve the global warming crisis using a "cap and trade" or carbon tax program. Advocates of these programs do not realize that both these mechanisms will severely hamper economic growth, and neither plan will slow global warming.

The only way to slow global warming is to allow entrepreneurs to create more energy-efficient products and technologies. As the demand for these products grows, entrepreneurs will naturally react to market forces and direct their energies to producing more energy-efficient products at a cheaper cost. Government intervention is not the solution to this problem, the free market is.

Al Gore, Prohibitionist

Al Gore wants to be Rachel Carson but has revealed himself to be Carrie Nation. He talks about protecting the environment, when all the while he really just wants to banish fossil fuels from the marketplace. There is no better example of his prohibitionist mentality than his recent demand that the United States produce 100% of its electricity from renewable and carbon-free sources in 10 years.

Only about 30% of our electricity currently comes from these sources. The question is what will happen to the fossil fuels that are used to make the remaining 70%, once those fuels are no longer used to produce electricity. The answer is that they will find their way to the market place to be used, as they are now, to produce energy, whether in the United States or abroad. A “strategic initiative” that is aimed at substituting alternative fuels for fossil fuels in the production of one kind of energy is doomed to failure unless it somehow eliminates the value of using the same fossil fuels to produce other kinds of energy.

If Mr. Gore really wants to spur the United States and other countries to use alternative fuels to produce electricity or any kind of energy, he should just sponsor legislation to prohibit the use of fossil fuels. Otherwise, he is just blowing smoke.

BHI's Tuerck on Global Warming Legislation

In this month's edition of Carolina Journal, David G. Tuerck argues persuasively that global warming alarmists ignore -- if not diminish --- the economic costs of climate change mitigation. The tendency among activists and others calling for more aggressive policies against GW rests on a claim that going green will be an economic stimulus. That's not the case.

Tuerck contends the foundation of such economic analysis is based on flawed methodology. The debate could use a dose of more rigorous cost-benefit analysis, a domain left better to economists than environmentalists.

Earlier this year, the Beacon Hill Institute conducted a peer review of the Center for Climate Strategies' (CCS) proposal for climate change legislation in North Carolina. The whole report is available here. Tuerck explains his critique of the NC-CCS:

And the trouble with [the NC-CCS] representation is that it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t create jobs that are good jobs that are adding to the state economy by shifting workers from more productive to less productive activities. You can’t create good jobs, the kind of jobs we want to create, by increasing energy costs, by increasing the price of electricity, by imposing what amounts to new taxes. This is not the way to create jobs. What you have to do, in order to analyze what will really happen, is look at the cost-increasing effects of the legislation, look at the taxes that would be implicitly imposed, and sort out the negative effects that these actions would have on the state economy. You can sort out those effects, as we have tried to do, and you can identify them for their negative effect on jobs and the like. And then, when you’re done with that, you can ask the question, “Is it worth it to pursue this legislation given the negative effects that will actually be imposed?” All these claims about job creation and the like, though, are bogus claims and unsupportable by even the most naïve sort of economic analysis.