Today the EPA rejected petitions from citizens, groups, and states to reverse its 2009 decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
The states of Virginia and Texas, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, coal giant Peabody Energy Corp. and others sought to reverse the finding.
But the EPA, in rejecting the petitions, specifically cast aside claims that the Climategate e-mails that surfaced late last year have undercut evidence of a warming planet.
Administrator Lisa Jackson said the e-mails and other evidence the petitioners submitted wasn’t convincing. Jackson also made her own attacks on climate skeptics.
“These petitions — based as they are on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy — provide no evidence to undermine our determination. Excess greenhouse gases are a threat to our health and welfare,” she said in a prepared statement. Jackson claimed that the scientists had been cleared of wrongdoing by multiple whitewashes investigations.
“Defenders of the status quo will try to slow our efforts to get America running on clean energy. A better solution would be to join the vast majority of the American people who want to see more green jobs, more clean energy innovation and an end to the oil addiction that pollutes our planet and jeopardizes our national security,” she added.
Petitioners also included, in addition to the CRUtape Letters, evidence of errors in the IPCC report that the EPA based its original ruling to regulate on. The EPA apparently demonstrating its illiteracy, ignored the dozens of errors and hundreds of non-peer-reviewed references to partisan environmental group propaganda as if they were scientific evidence.
“Of the alleged errors, EPA confirmed only two in a 3,000 page report. The first pertains to the rate of Himalayan glacier melt and second to the percentage of the Netherlands below sea level. IPCC issued correction statements for both of these errors. The errors have no bearing on Administrator Jackson’s decision. None of the errors undermines the basic facts that the climate is changing in ways that threaten our health and welfare,” EPA said in summarizing its rejection of the petitions.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Senate’s leading climate skeptic, criticized the EPA’s decision. He said the agency failed to allow an “open, transparent” process to look at the implications of the hacked e-mails and “hear scientists of all persuasions.”
“Open and fulsome debate only strengthens the foundations of scientific knowledge. But EPA chose instead to dismiss legitimate concerns about data quality, transparency, and billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded science as products of ‘conspiracies,’” Inhofe said in a statement Thursday.
Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute, one of the special interest advocacy groups cited in the IPCC report, said, “The endangerment finding is a science-based determination, based on a thorough review of current peer-reviewed scientific literature. Ensuring the EPA can act to reduce these harmful emissions is not only responsible, it is necessary. Delaying action on climate change threatens our country’s health and prosperity.”
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“”Defenders of the status quo will try to slow our efforts to get America running on clean energy. A better solution would be to join the vast majority of the American people””
At least she didn’t call them racists.
No room for argument, anyone that thinks any of it doesn’t make sense, is just defending the status quo.
The vast majority of Americans are not for it…………
“Today the EPA rejected petitions from citizens, groups, and states to reverse its 2009 decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.”
Are we to be shocked? A government agency to willingly giving up the chance to regulate something?
It never happens and this case is no different.
And this is a surprise because … ?
Now you’ll shut down your power plants?
There is NOTHING “open and transparent” about the Obama administration. NOTHING. Lisa is no exception. Push the Progressive (communist ) agenda. Control everyone and everything. Shut down all dissent. Example: SEC is no longer required to honor FOIA requests. Example: Obama’s “advisors” ( Weather Underground, convicted felons, bombers, self declared radical communists, etc. ) . Example: Arizona . Example: Sanctuary Cities. Example: Interfering in timely distribution of absentee ballots for deployed Military . And on and on.
The EPA is only one of many tools being used to implement total tyranny in the USA.
A sad day for science and the American people. Administrator Lisa Jackson demonstrated profound ignorance are a talent for double-speak (0r both) when she said:
“Defenders of the status quo will try to slow our efforts to get America running on clean energy. A better solution would be to join the vast majority of the American people who want to see more green jobs, more clean energy innovation and an end to the oil addiction that pollutes our planet and jeopardizes our national security,” she added.
Those of us who know that CO2 is a wonderful plant food that has little impact on global climate are not defending the status quo. We are defending ourselves from draconian, nanny-state, policies that will further hamstring or economy and weaken us in nearly every sense of the word.
So called ‘clean energy’ is not clean, but it is much more expensive. The military, like everyone else, will operate less efficiently if it is required to utilize more expensive and less efficient forms of energy. While one has to struggle to explain how CO2 is a threat to national security, conjuring unsupportable scenarios of future calamity, it is not difficult at all to show that the EPA’s ruling is the real threat to national security. Our military and our country run on oil because that is the best and most efficient way to do it. Preventing the most efficient use of resources is the fastest and easiest way to weaken a country.
Finally, I will put an end to my ‘oil addiction’ when the folks at the EPA put an end to their ‘food addiction’. Does that language really work? I certainly hope not!
EPA’s Jackson is confusing climate change with the desire to create “green” jobs. “If you’re not convinced man-made CO2 is affecting the climate, it means you are against green jobs, which are good at any cost”
Also, I see not a single hint that the ruling’s biggest effect will be to increase costs of making electricity by burning US coal. “We’re going to tax coal to reduce dependence on foreign oil.”
More unscientific effluvium from hopelessly corrupt government officials who seem deadset on destroying what’s left of our economy in their idiotic and misguided quest to “save mankind” from the horrors of a lifegiving plant nutrient.
“Excess greenhouse gases are a threat to our health and welfare,” she said
So what is EPA’s plan to reduce excess water vapor,which is by far the greatest greenhouse gas?
An illuminating perspective on Lisa Jackson and her ilk by Prof.em. A.M. Codevilla in The American Spectator:
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print
Quote: “The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever ‘agency policy’ they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any ‘agency policy’ you will be informed that it was formulated with input from ‘the public’. But not from the likes of you.”
Isn’t that just swell?
As the EPA approved millions of gallons of dispersants with little though to consequences, likewise the voters by the millions will seek out new faces to get this politically correct monster off our backs.
We don’t need no stinking evidence, we can fund our own grants to prove our own crap science. So the fact that it’s all a lie doesn’t bother them?
After all, Obowma promised the world he would be giving out American’s money to every pit on the planet, and you know he has to keep at least one promise. It’s all about wealth transfer, needs no truth or reason. Just give them your money.
Politically this looks like socialist turkeys voting for Christmas.
Oh dear! I really can’t see this ending well for the EPA after November.
I am from the UK but, unlike the MSM over here, I don’t think Americans are even slightly stupid.
Currently I am stocking up on popcorn 🙂
The Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency found 8 more errors in the 8 (out of 44 total) chapters they examined:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/07/bias_and_ipcc_report
Listed in the blue frame quarter way down the page.
So, along with sinking a good chunk of the Netherlands there’s at least 10 errors in AR4.
Re:
FergalR says:
July 29, 2010 at 4:39 pm
———————————-
I’ve just noticed that 3 of the mistakes are from the Summary for Policymakers, so the numbers of chapters I list is wrong.
For the common people like me, some facts about CO2:
CO2 follows temperature, not the other way. Open a coke and you´ll see it: The more you have it in your warm hand the more gas will go out when you open it.
CO2 is the transparent gas we all exhale (SOOT is black=Carbon dust) and plants breath with delight, to give us back what they exhale instead= Oxygen we breath in.
CO2 is a TRACE GAS in the atmosphere, it is the 0.038% of it.
There is no such a thing as “greenhouse effect”, “greenhouse gases are gases IN a greenhouse”, where heated gases are trapped and relatively isolated not to lose its heat so rapidly. If greenhouse effect were to be true, as Svante Arrhenius figured it out: CO2 “like the window panes in a greenhouse”, but…the trouble is that those panes would be only 3.8 panes out of 10000, there would be 9996.2 HOLES.
See:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28018819/Greenhouse-Niels-Bohr
CO2 is a gas essential to life. All carbohydrates are made of it. The sugar you eat, the bread you have eaten in your breakfast this morning, even the jeans you wear (these are made from 100% cotton, a polymer of glucose, made of CO2…you didn´t know it, did you?)
You and I, we are made of CARBON and WATER.
CO2 is heavier than Air, so it can not go up, up and away to cover the earth.
The atmosphere, the air can not hold heat, its volumetric heat capacity, per cubic cemtimeter is 0.00192 joules, while water is 4.186, i.e., 3227 times.
This is the reason why people used hot water bottles to warm their feet and not hot air bottles.
Global Warmers models (a la Hansen) expected a kind of heated CO2 piggy bank to form in the tropical atmosphere, it never happened simply because it can not.
If global warmers were to succeed in achieving their SUPPOSED goal of lowering CO2 level to nothing, life would disappear from the face of the earth.
So, if no CO2 NO YOU!
From the article, the EPA says, “The endangerment finding is a science-based determination, based on a thorough review of current peer-reviewed scientific literature.”
It may be of interest at some point to produce a peer review tree within climate science. It seems that much of what passes as “peer review” is siphoned through a few select individuals and entities. It would seem that the climate tree is lacking in diversity. Prove the lack of diversity, and you prove the lack of “robustness” in the science.
Lisa is quoted as follows:
‘“These petitions — based as they are on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy — provide no evidence to undermine our determination. Excess greenhouse gases are a threat to our health and welfare,” she said in a prepared statement. Jackson claimed that the scientists had been cleared of wrongdoing by multiple whitewashes investigations.’
Same old, same old. Claim the science is settled, damn the evidence to the contrary, and then change the subject from science to her preferred policy positions. This is called practicing science without understanding. We really need to create a new law which makes it illegal to practice science without an hypothesis. The law should have the same character as the law that makes it illegal to practice medicine without a license. She is keeping the Chicago Carbon Exchange alive, but barely.
Elections have consequences!
Lisa Jackson should stop breathing to limit her carbon footprint.
Just remember this in November at the ballot box.
Here in Lies the Body of the
United States of America
a World Leader
Brought Down by His Own Hand
Sadly Missed by Many
RIP
7-29-2010
I doubt Lisa Jackson has even read the Summary for Policy Makers of the last IPCC report. If she, or anyone else, actually read the entire report it would be evident that the alarmist community has proven nothing. There exists absolutely no empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that man-made CO2 is changing the climate of the planet. Also, since when is American policy directed by U.N. propaganda?
Computer models are not evidence. I think most of us can agree that the greenhouse effect is real and that theoretically a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentrations might result in a net global warming of about 1 degree C in about 90 years (when most of us are dead). There is no evidence that anthropogenic CO2 has caused or is causing any measurable warming to date. Nothing but delusional belief suggests anything even close to catastrophic climate change.
This ruling was not based on science, it was based on political ideology. The EPA is not a scientific agency. It should be defunded and eliminated. I would love to see the EPA’s “top scientists” on AGW debate Dick Lindzen, Pat Michaels, Roy Spencer, John Christy and Craig Idso. In the end Lisa Jackson is just a foot soldier in the Obama regime. Obama’s political pals have way too much at stake with cap & trade and their investments in CCX to back down. All we can do is put up a good fight and vote the bums out at our earliest opportunity.
I did not think Obama could kill the USA so fast. I was wrong. The country will essentially be dead by 2011 after the lame duck session finishes passing the rest of the laws designed to strangle the country in red tape. I am sure David Rockefeller, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, the Clintons and Obama are planning a big bash to celebrate the death of this once great country.
Theo Goodwin says:
July 29, 2010 at 4:51 pm
[…] “She is keeping the Chicago Carbon Exchange alive, but barely.”
BINGO!