In The News
Natural Resource Defense Council and Natural Gas
Wednesday October 8, 2003
FACT: There is a natural gas crisis, with serious short and long-term consequences, and environmental extremists, who have systematically blocked natural gas production, are a major cause of it. In its recently released Short Term Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration projects that “natural gas spot prices are expected to average over $5 per thousand cubic feet for all of 2003, about 70 percent above the 2002 average.” It also projects that, “Assuming normal weather, residential natural gas prices this heating season (October-March) are expected to be about 9 percent higher than last winter’s average prices.” And in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this summer, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said, “Today's tight natural gas markets have been a long time in coming and futures prices suggest that we are not apt to return to earlier periods of relative abundance and low prices anytime soon.”
Clear Skies
Monday October 6, 2003
FACT: President Bush’s critics are Orwellian, maintaining as they do that a mandatory 70 percent reduction in power plant emissions means more emissions, and more health problems. According to EPA, Clear Skies will result in 14,100 fewer premature deaths; 8,800 fewer cases of chronic bronchitis; 30,000 fewer hospitalizations for cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms; and 12.5 million fewer days with respiratory illnesses. Again, that’s fewer for each. Moreover, Clear Skies is predicated on the Acid Rain trading program, which passed as an amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1990, and has reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by 33 percent, with near full compliance. Why, even Sen. Lieberman agrees: “Air quality is improving because of the Clean Air Act and the amendments that were adopted under the first President Bush, which were very good amendments.”
New York Times and Global Warming
Friday October 3, 2003
FACT: The Times editorial creates the misleading impression that anecdotal evidence of glacier melting can be extrapolated globally. It can’t. A 2002 study in the journal Progress in Physical Geography examined the ‘mass balance trends’ in 246 glaciers worldwide from 1946 to 1995. The author found that “there are several regions with highly negative mass balances in agreement with a public perception of ‘the glaciers are melting,’ but there are also regions with positive balances.” This holds true even within continents. In Europe, “Alpine glaciers are generally shrinking, Scandinavian glaciers are growing, and glaciers in the Caucasus are close to equilibrium for 1980-95.” Globally, adding all the results together, “there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”
Earth Justice and the boycott of Gov. Mike Leavitt’s nomination to be the next EPA Administrator
Thursday October 2, 2003
FACT: As is the case with much of the environmental community, Earthjustice, whose sole reason for existence is to file lawsuits, is well-schooled in the fine art of obstructionism, having tied up environmental progress in the courts for years, and now “taking a stand” against instituting a permanent leader at EPA. No group, as the Sacramento Bee reported, has more won more in legal fees than Earthjustice. The Bee noted that an Earthjustice attorney charged $350 an hour, a higher rate than those charged by many experienced attorneys in San Francisco. In one endangered species case, the group submitted a bill of $439,053 to the Justice Department, and settled for $383,840.
Not So Moderate Carper Bill
Monday September 29, 2003
FACT: The Carper bill, relative to Clear Skies, is anything but moderate, and in fact would impose significant costs on businesses and the economy. According to a newly released study by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which compared Clear Skies with Carper, the costs associated with implementing Clear Skies between 2005 and 2025 would fall short of $25 billion. By contrast, projections of the cost of the Carper bill, under the most likely scenario studied, show costs of about $98 billion over the same period. That's about $1,000 per household, and four times as much as Clear Skies. If that difference isn’t convincing enough, EIA also found that, under an alternative scenario, the Carper bill’s price tag could run as high as $160 billion, or six and one-half times as much as Clear Skies.
EPA-White House Response to the World Trade Center Collapse
Friday September 26, 2003
Nonsense. A reasonable examination of the available evidence wholly undermines Moeller’s assertions. Moreover, contrast Moeller’s views with, of all sources, the New York Times editorial page, which essentially dismissed the entire issue as “retrospective nitpicking.” The Times, no friend of the Bush Administration, also agrees with the most recent scientific findings about air quality since September 11: “The broader public faced little or no risk from breathing the outdoor air once the initial cloud settled.”
True, the Times editorial merely reflects one opinion, so, to be fair, Moeller’s claims below are closely measured against the EPA IG report’s findings and other relevant sources. Not surprisingly, Moeller’s claims ring just a bit hollow:
MOELLER: The recent report by the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency should by all rights have New Yorkers - and others concerned about whether their government is capable of lying about public health and safety - out in the streets. Yet the report has not generated the media coverage and public attention it deserves.
Why? Certainly the allegations in the report are scandalous: They detail the White House's deliberate manipulation of the information that was released about the air quality in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center. "The White House Council on Environmental Quality," said the report, "influenced ... the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced the EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."
FACT: For starters, Moeller’s conflation of the words “deliberate manipulation” and “influence” is brazenly misleading. Obviously, the words “manipulate” and “influence” have quite different meanings. It’s no shock or scandal that CEQ coordinated, at the request of the President, the multi-agency task force (including EPA and OSHA) that organized the response effort. Put simply, CEQ had a statutory duty to participate in the planning. It’s ludicrous to suggest that CEQ should not have played any role.
Manipulation (especially of the deliberate kind) implies something sinister, as the definition suggests: to tamper with or falsify for personal gain. Moeller probably should have watched the September 4 NBC interview with EPA IG Nikki Tinsley. According to reporter Lisa Myers, Tinsley “stopped short of accusing anyone of lying or of knowingly providing false information.” Or she could have read the IG report: "In regard to the monitoring data, we found no evidence that EPA attempted to conceal data results from the public.”
Further, as the Senate EPW Committee staff report on the IG report, EPA IG staff stated that there was no conspiracy or attempt to suppress information. The report also addressed directly the supposed “scandal” of the press releases EPA sent out in the days after September 11.
“When asked to compare the statements in the final press releases to those in the draft releases,” the report states, “the OSHA official questioned by EPW staff in every instance believed the changed or added language more clearly communicated the real risks of asbestos exposure than the draft.” Notably, the only existing asbestos standard that was applicable to ground zero was an OSHA standard.
MOELLER: But the story about the administration's distorting the health risks for those living and working near Ground Zero is remaining, at best, on the inside pages of the newspapers.
FACT: Distorted the health risks? Again, actually reading the report before drawing conclusions about “scandals” is very important. As the EPA IG stated: "(The IG) spoke to a number of experts in the field of environmental monitoring, including physicians, industrial hygienists, and researchers. These experts generally agreed that the levels of airborne asbestos detected in the air outside the perimeter of Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan did not present a significant increase in long-term risk to the public."
Subsequent research by scientists from the University of California has confirmed these findings. Reporting on that research, the Times wrote that, “most residents and workers downtown—while they may well have suffered from the dust at the collapse and periodic wafts from the smoke plume—were largely spared the prolonged exposure that usually raised the greatest health concerns.”
President Bush and the Environment
Tuesday September 23, 2003
FACT: The fatuousness of these claims is obvious to the sober minded, including award-winning environmental journalist Greg Easterbrook, a senior editor of the New Republic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution—two institutions, incidentally, quite well-known for their moderate to liberal views on public policy issues. Easterbrook’s comments, from his piece in the September 22 issue of Time, are worth quoting in full: “[N]othing you hear about worsening air quality is true. Air pollution is declining under President Bush, just as it declined under President Clinton…Aggregate emissions, the sum of air pollution categories, have fallen 48 percent since 1970, even though the U.S. population rose 39 percent during that period…In 2001, there were fewer than half as many air-quality warning days across the country as in 1988…And the Midwestern power plant emissions that Northeastern commentators constantly depict as horror? Such emissions are a problem—but a declining problem. Levels of sulfur dioxide from Midwestern power plants have dropped 40 percent in the past two decades, even as electricity production keeps rising.”
Hurricane Isabel and Global Warming
Monday September 22, 2003
FACT: This ‘SUVs-release-CO2-causing-global-warming-causing-hurricanes’ syllogism is patently false. Even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a bountiful source of the alarmists most absurd contentions, says that, “Overall, there is no evidence that extreme weather events, or climate variability, has increased, in a global sense, through the 20th century.” And since 2000, reams of scientific research have confirmed the IPCC’s findings. David Legates, an expert hydrology researcher, testified to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on March 13, 2002: “Clearly, claims that anthropogenic global warming will lead to more occurrences of droughts, floods, and storms are wildly exaggerated.” What about the supposed heightened severity of storms and hurricanes, caused by global warming? According to the American Insurance Association, “The real problem is the tremendous growth in population, homes, commercial development in the most hurricane-prone regions of the United States, especially Florida and other states along the Southeast and Gulf coasts.”
Union of Concerned Scientists, Global Warming, and Fungi
Thursday September 11, 2003
FACT: In its drive to propagate “sound scientific information,” the UCS “overlooked” a recent Washington Post story that casts serious doubt on anthropogenic theories of global warming. Beneath the snowpack of the Colorado Rockies, scientists discovered fungi emitting large quantities of carbon dioxide and methane—a phenomenon totally unconnected to SUVs. As the Post reported: “Indeed, scientists said, if other regions of the world have similar fungal communities thriving under their winter snows, as now seems likely, climatologists will have to revise their models of global warming to accommodate fungi's surprisingly massive role in the winter production of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.” Global warming models “can no longer ignore fungi in snowy regions and seasons as they have, scientists said—especially because about 40 percent of Earth's landmass is covered with snow for at least part of the year.” Steven Miller, a mycologist, or fungus specialist, at the University of Wyoming, and someone the UCS might want to call, said that, “we have relatively little knowledge of what the inputs and outputs are for CO2.”
The High Price of McCain-Lieberman
Monday September 8, 2003
FACT: Lieberman-McCain does bring manifold certainties, but of a wholly different kind than Nappier and others believe. What is the certainty for shareholders? The Congressional Budget Office couldn’t be clearer: “Losses to industry—in the form of lower stock values—would be broadly distributed among investors…” What is the certainty for the economy? According to the Energy Information Administration, cumulative GDP (in 1996 dollars) declines by $1.4 trillion. What about certainty for workers? Lieberman-McCain, according to EIA, would cost 50,000 coal industry jobs. And as CBO said: “Many coal workers could lose their jobs if carbon emissions were reduced significantly.” And certainty for consumers? The bill would drive up home energy costs by 46 percent, forcing consumers to pay $444 more for energy each year.