Coal-State Dems Unveil Bills Stalling EPA Emission Curbs

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN of Greenwire

This story was updated at 1:05 p.m. EST.

Four influential coal-state Democrats introduced companion bills in the House and Senate today that would block U.S. EPA from implementing any climate-related stationary source rules for two years, a timeout of sorts that they think gives Congress time to pass legislation dealing with the issue.

Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia unveiled the Senate bill, while the House measure was introduced by West Virginia's Nick Rahall, the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, and Alan Mollohan, a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who played a pivotal role in negotiations last year on the House-passed climate bill, also signed up an original co-sponsor.

Rockefeller said in a press release that his bill would give "Congress the time it needs to address an issue as complicated and expansive as our energy future. Congress, not the EPA, must be the ideal decision-maker on such a challenging issue," he said.

"EPA regulation of greenhouse gases would be the worst outcome for the coal industry and coal-related jobs," Boucher said. "Our bill is a responsible, achievable approach which prevents the EPA from enacting regulations that would harm coal and gives Congress time to establish a balanced program."

The Democrats' bills add to a growing chorus of congressional complaints about EPA's plan to regulate for greenhouse gases.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) may push for a vote later this month on a resolution that would overturn EPA's "endangerment" finding, a determination that opens the door to rules covering everything from cars and light trucks to power plants and other major industrial sources.

Murkowski said in a statement that Rockefeller's bill demonstrates "further evidence of the growing, bipartisan, and bicameral resistance to EPA's back-door climate regulations."

"Given the overwhelming opposition to these actions, I'm hopeful that this bill will draw additional support and advance quickly," she added. If it doesn't, Murkowski said she would push for a floor vote on her resolution that is guaranteed consideration under Senate rules.

Murkowksi to date has 41 Senate co-sponsors, including three moderate Democrats. She would need 51 votes for the measure to clear the chamber.

Obama administration officials have shown little interest in the Hill efforts to suspend EPA's efforts.

Responding yesterday to a question from Murkowski about whether she would support a temporary timeout from Rockefeller, Jackson replied, "I support the need for new legislation to address carbon pollution."

"I do not think we're at a fork in the road," Jackson said, adding, "the law says that EPA has to move forward on these issues."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs also said last month that Obama would not support Murkowski's resolution.

Efforts to undercut EPA's regulations have drawn support from industry and labor groups. United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts sent a letter of support to Rockefeller today questioning whether the Clean Air Act is best suited to provide the technological incentives needed to reduce greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants.

"The Clean Air Act has been successful in reducing harmful air pollution in our cities, but it is not designed to address the broader global challenges of climate change," Roberts wrote.

Responding to congressional complaints about climate rules on small polluters, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in recent days has offered more details about the agency's plans for tackling climate change. She said EPA will soon issue a final "tailoring" rule that precludes permitting requirements over the next two years for industrial sources that emit less than 75,000 tons a year. After 2012, EPA would consider moving the threshold to about 50,000 tons per year (E&ENews PM, March 3).

Frank O'Donnell, director of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch, criticized the coal-state Democrats who he said are pushing to suspend Jackson's authorities even more. "The EPA seems to be backpedaling faster than an NFL cornerback, but that doesn't seem to have satisfied the appetite of special-interest opponents of climate action," he said.

Boucher helped negotiate key pieces of the House-passed climate bill to benefit his district's industrial interests, and he often explained that his primary motivation was the threat of EPA rules. In the Senate, Rockefeller stands out as a key swing vote in efforts to pass a comprehensive energy and climate bill. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are aiming to release a bill before the spring recess that starts at the end of this month while targeting a floor debate in the late spring.

Aides to Rockefeller, Rahall and Boucher said they didn't know what the specific plans were for their two pieces of legislation. Rockefeller's bill likely will be referred to the Environment and Public Works Committee. Rahall's bill goes to the Energy and Commerce Committee, where Boucher is a senior member.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), declined comment today when asked about any floor plans on the Rockefeller legislation.

An EPA spokesperson did not immediately return calls for comment.

Click here (pdf) for Sen. Rockefeller's bill, S. 3072.

Click here (pdf) for H.R. 4753 from Reps. Rahall, Boucher and Mollohan.

Click here (pdf) for the United Mine Workers of America's letter of support.

Al Gore Needs to Change Climate Language

Click here for the story on sparxoo

Ethan Lyon | Mar 02, 2010

Al Gore is taking some serious heat about global warming amid record winters. “I, for one, genuinely wish climate change were an illusion,” Al Gore said in a The New York Times article Sunday. “Climate change” might be the very thing fueling global warming opposition. As the international figurehead of climate change, Al Gore needs to re-think his marketing language if he’s going to curb growing opposition.

Even amid mounting scientific evidence, could the misconception about global warming stem from a simple word choice? As Google Trends illustrates, global warming dominates the lexicon (blue=global warming, red=climate change):

“Global” means everywhere and “warming” implies higher temperatures . Therefore, as Philadelphia and many other cities continue to break winter records, it’s difficult to believe anything is warming. The global warming language makes people question the reality of climate change. In fact, 57 percent of the American public believe global warming is true — down 14 points from October of 2008.

Gore repeatedly uses “climate change” language which is highly ambiguous. It could mean cooling or warming. Is that bad or good? To snuff ambiguity, Gore needs to have a straightforward, descriptive message that speaks to his pro-environment efforts. In fact, “the idea of climate change, actually, was introduced by conservatives, by Frank Luntz in the 2004 campaign,” says professor George Lakoff, a cognitive linguistics professor at University of California, Berkeley. “He found that global warming alarmed people whereas climate change sounded fine. It was just change, as if it just happened, and people weren’t responsible.” To Luntz and conservatives surprise, the global warming language is working in their favor amid record winters.

If “global warming” and “climate change” are not effective, what is? Lakoff believes “climate crisis” conveys the right message. Climate speaks to the big picture (not just weather patterns) while injecting the urgency of “crisis.” As Luntz can attest to, changing two words can have widespread implications. For instance, Luntz helped conservatives alter public perceptions of the estate tax when Luntz re-labeled it, the death tax. Public perception of global warming could be easily changed by a simple word change.

“It’s very important for the scientists to know that they don’t know anything about communication,” says Lakoff. Therefore, it’s Al Gore responsibility to take the lead and convey the correct message. In fact, the relationship between Gore and scientists parallels advertising creatives and account executives. Research and insights from account executives informs the creative. The creative’s responsibility is to then craft a compelling message to sell the product / brand to consumers or businesses. Gore needs to re-think his “creative” to curb the mounting “climate crisis” opposition.

But is it too late? Global warming and climate change are already deeply embedded in the environmental lexicon. For Gore to change the growing global warming opposition, he needs to take a two pronged approach: 1) change his language to “climate crisis,” then tell scientists and other influential proponents of environmental sustainability to follow suit and 2) launch a public awareness campaign that explains why harsh winters can happen amid global warming — using the Lakoff’s “climate crisis” language. If Gore doesn’t convey a clear, self-explanatory, descriptive message, he could get burned.

Image by fortunefad from Stock.Xchng

Major Change Is Needed If the IPCC Hopes to Survive

Well before the recent controversies, the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was marred by an unwillingness to listen to dissenting points of view, an inadequate system for dealing with errors, conflicts of interest, and political advocacy. The latest allegations of inaccuracies should be an impetus for sweeping reform.

by roger a. pielke, jr.

It has been a rough couple of months for the climate science community. Last November someone stole or released over 1,000 e-mails from the University of East Anglia. The e-mails revealed that some scientists were so

THE IPCC UNDER FIRE:
A CONTRASTING VIEW

Robert T. Watson, the former IPCC chairman, says the organization he once headed needs to acknowledge its errors and improve its work, but notes that the evidence of climate change is irrefutable.
READ MORE

entrenched in battle with their scientific and political opponents that they lost their perspective, going so far as to suggest improperly influencing the scientific process of peer review and evading legal requirements to disclose their data upon request. Climate science took another hit soon thereafter when it became apparent that the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained a number of embarrassing errors and an unacceptable amount of sloppy work, such as its erroneous prediction that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, rather than in several centuries or more.

The IPCC’s handling of the allegations of errors have compounded its problems. Its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, responded to the first public questions about the Himalayan glacier error by dismissing the allegations as “voodoo science” and the work of climate skeptics. Later, when the sheer weight of the evidence forced the IPCC to correct the erroneous claim in public, it was further revealed that IPCC authors had been aware of the error but were unable to get it changed prior to the report’s publication and had remained strangely silent about it in the years since.

As if this was not bad enough, Pachauri has faced a range of criticism for directing more than a quarter of a million dollars in consulting and appearance fees over the past several years to the non-profit organization that he directs in India. These payments came from companies and investors with a direct stake in the outcome of climate policy negotiations, including Deutsche Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Pegasus investment fund. Pachauri has not helped the image of the IPCC by responding forcefully but unpersuasively, explaining that his many business connections — such as enhanced oil recovery and carbon trading operations — are in the common interest, rendering any sort of conflict of interest policies unnecessary.

Photo by Saeed Khan/Getty Images

Rajendra Pachauri, left, chairman of the IPCC, along with Orgunlade Davidson, center, and Bert Metz, the co-chairmen of the IPCC Working Group III, at a 2007 press conference in Bangkok.

With all of these troubles facing climate science and the IPCC, some have called for the organization to be reformed or terminated, or at least for its chairman to resign. I have been a strong critic of the IPCC, not least because of its improper treatment of work that I have contributed to on weather-related disasters and climate change. However, I think the IPCC is worth sustaining, but only if it addresses the institutional factors that have led to its recent troubles and a corresponding loss of public trust in the climate science community.

There are some advocates and climate scientists who ask that we ignore the recent failings of the IPCC, because admitting that there is a problem might give succor to skeptics opposed to action. I have a different view. Standing up for climate science means addressing problems, not ignoring them or politicizing them.

I have first-hand experience with the panel’s errors and wrongheaded behavior. In its 2007 report, the IPCC included a graph that showed a smoothed line representing increasing global temperatures since 1970 on top of a smoothed line showing the increasing costs of weather-related disasters. The implication of the graph is not difficult to discern — the increasing costs of catastrophes are related to rising temperatures.

Unfortunately, not only is this implication contrary to all peer-reviewed science on this subject, but the IPCC created this misleading graph from whole cloth, intentionally mis-cited it, and when questioned by an expert reviewer of a draft of the report, falsified information in its much-touted peer review process. When challenged in recent weeks, the IPCC quickly issued a press release calling the claims “baseless” but completely ignoring the substantive issues. In recent days, a leading German scientist went so far as to suggest that the IPCC’s actions on disasters and climate change were tantamount to “fraud.”

As with the glacier issue, IPCC stonewalling has proven not to be a sustainable response. In recent weeks, the IPCC author who created the disaster cost graph has explained that it was merely “informal” and that it

The IPCC desperately needs a mechanism for resolving allegations of error in its work.

should not have been included because of its potential to mislead. And mislead it has. Just last week Australia’s climate change minister, Penny Wong, fell prey to the IPCC’s misdirection when she invoked the IPCC press release to explain in error that “the science on the link between these catastrophes and climate change has not been credibly challenged.”

There is however no such link. The book chapter that included the data that served as the basis for the misleading IPCC graph reached a starkly different conclusion than that suggested by Minster Wong: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.”

A peer reviewer of the IPCC questioned the unsupported allegations in the report, and asked what I, as someone whose work was being questioned, thought about the report’s claim. The IPCC responded to the reviewer that I had changed my mind about my own research conclusions, a bald lie. I have complained to the IPCC about these various issues, only to receive a polite but substance-free response followed by extended silence.

My frustrating experience with the IPCC suggests that it desperately needs a mechanism for resolving allegations of error in its work. Its current ad hoc manner of response encourages the panel to politick by press release rather than undertake a careful evaluation of claims. Imagine how different things might be if the IPCC recognized in a positive manner anyone who found a legitimate mistake in its report, with errata and corrigenda continuously updated. Such acceptance of fallibility would show that the panel is open to close scrutiny and values the accuracy of its reports above all else. This would be a welcome improvement to the defensive and sometimes arrogant attitude demonstrated in recent months.

The IPCC is also in desperate need of putting into place conflict-of-interest policies. It staggers belief to learn that the panel operates with absolutely no mechanism for handling actual or perceived conflicts of interest. Because the IPCC has no requirement for disclosure of potential conflicts, it is likely that the organization itself is unaware of what other potential conflicts may exist beyond those of its chairman, which were raised by several of his critics in the British media.

To protect institutional integrity, the establishment of such procedures is deemed essential in virtually all expert advisory bodies. For instance, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) explains that “no individual can be appointed to serve (or continue to serve) on a committee of the

The IPCC has fallen well short of performing as a credible, trusted, and legitimate advisory body.

institution used in the development of reports if the individual has a conflict of interest that is relevant to the functions to be performed.” The NAS makes clear that issues of conflict of interest are not about the morality of individuals or the worth of causes that they serve, but are about maintaining trust and legitimacy in the integrity of advice. The parent bodies of the IPCC — the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization — do have conflict of interest policies, but remarkably they do not apply to the IPCC.

The calls for Pachauri to resign miss the larger institutional context. Were he to resign and the institution simply continue as it has, in the absence of implementing rigorous and transparent conflict of interest policies, absolutely nothing would be gained. The IPCC needs to put into place conflict of interest guidelines and then let the chips fall where they may. To suggest that climate science should be free of such guidelines sends a message of hubris that can only serve to undermine trust in its work. If institutional mechanisms to manage conflicts of interest make sense for doctors, journalists, lawyers, and scientific advisors outside the field of climate, then they surely make sense for the IPCC as it informs high-stakes decisions around the world on climate policy.

The IPCC also needs improved mechanisms of accountability to its own admirable objectives. For instance, while the IPCC has a mandate to be “policy neutral,” its reports and its leadership frequently engage in implicit and explicit policy advocacy. For instance, IPCC leaders often take public

Efforts to minimize the IPCC’s troubles are likely to further erode public opinion of climate science.

stands in support of, or opposition to, certain policies on climate change, such as when its chairman weighs in on U.S. domestic legislation. The IPCC reports, particularly Working Group III, reflect a particular policy orientation, which is decidedly not “policy neutral.” To cite one example, the IPCC has concluded that the world has all the technology that it needs to achieve low stabilization levels. However, this conclusion ignores a significant body of academic work (such as by New York University professor emeritus Martin Hoffert and colleagues) suggesting that the world does not in fact have all the technology that it needs.

The IPCC also emphasized emissions trading over other policy options, largely endorsing the approach of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. With the Climate Convention in tatters after the Copenhagen meeting last December, we are now experiencing the consequences of the IPCC’s policy myopia and deviation from neutrality, as there are essentially no alternative approaches to climate policy suggested by the IPCC report. It had placed all of its eggs in one basket.

The IPCC is an important institution, but it has fallen well short of performing as a credible, trusted, and legitimate advisory body. Rebuilding what it has lost will take considerable effort and a marked change of course. Some defenders of the IPCC explain that the problems found in the report are only a few of many conclusions, or not particularly important as compared to the headline conclusions. Such efforts to minimize the IPCC’s troubles are likely to backfire and further erode public opinion of climate science, which recent polls suggest has taken a serious hit.

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Similarly, efforts of some to demonize those who criticize the IPCC as “skeptics” or opponents to action on climate change only serve to intensify the politicization of climate science. Dealing with climate change is indeed important, but so, too, are issues associated with the integrity of scientific advisory bodies. We should be fully capable of addressing the challenge of climate change while at the same time focusing on sustaining the integrity of climate science.

Standing up for climate science means openly supporting reform of the IPCC while underscoring its institutional importance. The climate science community has failed to meet its own high standards. If the IPCC continues to pretend that things will soon get back to normal or that it need only castigate its critics as deniers and skeptics, it will find that its credibility will continue to sink to new lows. It is time to reform the IPCC.

Click here to read a contrasting view from former IPCC Chairman Robert T. Watson.