The George C. Marshall Institute no longer exists and the organization’s superb monograph, “Connecting Climate Change and National Security,” is not easy to find. The topic is hot once again. So, I am pleased to post the study here. Enjoy!
Due to some glitch, my comment letter on the Obama EPA’s proposed “Carbon Pollution” Standards for new fossil fuel power plants was never posted on CEI’s Web site. So I am posting it here.
The House is expected to vote this week on H.Con.Res.119 expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax is detrimental to the U.S. economy. The House passed similar legislation in June 2016 by 237 to 163, with six Democrats voting in favor and no Republicans voting against.
The vote is apparently timed to put House members on record once again before Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R.-Fla.), co-chair of the so-called Climate Solutions Caucus, introduces a carbon tax bill he reportedly has been shopping to colleagues, businesses, and environmental groups. [click to continue…]
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is expected to release the proposed Clean Power Plan repeal rule on Tuesday, October 10. Someone leaked the proposal on Friday, October 6. To read it, click here.
On Thursday, July 20, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on President Trump’s nomination of Kirkland & Ellis attorney Jeffrey Bossert Clark to be Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD).
To help inform public discussion of the nomination, I post below several pertinent documents. [click to continue…]
Guest post by Rupert Darwall
Last Tuesday, an event of such magnitude struck the latest round of the climate conference – talks which have been going on in various forms since the early 1990s – that the response of many participants and NGOs is to pretend nothing’s happened and carry on as before. Today is gender and education day at the COP22 in Marrakech. Gender equality and the empowerment of women is written into the preamble of last December’s Paris Agreement, the climate treaty that President Obama ratified without sending to the Senate for its advice and consent. ‘Gender justice is climate justice,’ as one feminist NGO puts it.
There are Feminists for a Fossil Fuel Free Future. You can download a Gender Climate Tracker app for iPhone and Android. ‘Our existing economies are based on gender exploitative relationships,’ one speaker told a side meeting. ‘The first ecology is my body,’ another declared. Sexual and reproductive rights require climate justice. ‘Sixty percent of my body is water. What I’m drinking takes me to my city and to the health of the planet.’
The climate change negotiations are a never-ending process symbolized by the initial adorning every poster and lectern at the conference. Marrakech is the 22nd conference of the parties under the 1992 UN framework convention on climate change – COP 22; the twelfth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – CMP 12; and the first session of the conference of the parties serving as the meeting of the parties to the Paris Agreement – CMA1.
Far from creating institutional overload, climate change is much more than it might appear to the naïve observer. It is about remoulding society and changing the global economy. It has set in motion a process that accretes constituencies and sucks in government agencies as it extends its scope and strengthens its hold by creating the justification for huge slush funds of climate finance. Marrakech sees parties being urged to raise their ambition from $100bn a year of annual climate funding to $500bn. It creates a momentum that seems unstoppable. As President Obama’s climate envoy, Jonathan Pershing, pointed out today, it was a Republican Congress that extended subsidies for wind and solar. ‘It’s not going to stop in a context of a change of administration,’ Pershing pointedly added.
Well, it might do just that. When in 1982, Al Haig asked Ronald Reagan why he was rejecting the Law of the Sea, Reagan replied: ‘Al, that’s what the last election was all about … It was about not doing things just because that’s the way they’ve been done before.’ The Paris Agreement and the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan which is its domestic counterpart would, if implemented, damage the United States far more than the Law of the Sea ever could have done. But the answer is the same as Reagan’s. Quit the whole damn shebang.
In a recent letter to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Troutman Sanders attorney Peter Glaser argues that “EPA far understated the effects of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) by exaggerating the amount of coal generation that will retire even without the rule.” Ironically, the smoking gun evidence is in the agency’s updated modeling, which now tallies with U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data.
Here’s how the numbers break down.
In EPA’s “base case” for the CPP, the agency assumed that in 2016, almost 20 percent of coal capacity would disappear even if the rule were not adopted, reducing coal generation to 214 gigawatts (GW).
However, EPA’s Cross State Air Pollution Rule Update, published October 26, estimates there will be 268 GW of coal generation in service through the end of 2016.
EPA’s new estimate for 2016 is now roughly in line with Energy Information Administration (EIA) data. EIA’s Electric Power Monthly shows 272 GW of coal capacity in service as of August 2016.
EPA estimates coal generation capacity under the Power Plan will decline to 174-183 GW by 2030 (Regulatory Impact Assessment, Table 3-12).
Bottom line: To comply with the CPP, U.S. coal generation will have to decline by about one third.
On Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals released a 320-page transcript of the marathon oral argument on EPA’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emission standards for existing fossil-fuel power plants, the agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP).
To my knowledge, the transcript is not available on the Court’s Web site. To make the document more easily accessible to the public, I am pleased to post it on GlobalWarming.Org.
To read/download the oral argument, click on the highlighted text in the first paragraph above.
U. S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping will announce that their two countries are officially joining the Paris Climate Treaty when they meet on Saturday, 3rd September, ahead of the G-20 summit meeting in Hangzhou, China. The South China Morning Post reported on 25th August that the announcement would occur on Friday, 2nd September, but an environmental reporter told me today that Saturday was the day.
President Obama’s action in joining the treaty without ratification by the Senate is clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate’s authority. Article Two, Section Two, Clause Two of the U. S. Constitution states: “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”
The U. S. State Department insisted at COP-21 in Paris last December that calling it the Paris Agreement rather than the Paris Climate Treaty would help President Obama evade the constitutional requirement of Senate ratification. Obama Administration officials continue to insist that it is an executive agreement that only requires the President’s approval. Marlo Lewis, my CEI colleague, details why it is a treaty and not merely an executive agreement in this analysis, and Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation makes a similar analysis here.
Negotiators at COP-21 went along with the charade that it’s not really a treaty for the United States. However, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat considers it a treaty. The relevant UNFCCC web page is headlined: “Paris Agreement—Status of Ratification.” The information note prepared by the UNFCCC Legal Affairs Programme on the Entry into Force of the Paris Agreement: Legal Requirements and Implications begins: “1. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states that ‘a treaty enters into force in such manner and upon such date as it may provide or as the negotiating States may agree’.”
Moreover, every other country considers it a treaty and is going through its normal procedures for joining a treaty. Patrick Goodenough in CNS News reported recently that even in China, which is ruled by a Communist Party dictatorship, the government has referred the treaty to the Standing Committee of Parliament for its approval.
The fact that President Obama knows that Paris is a treaty inadvertently slipped out just this week. Valerie Richardson reported in the Washington Times that: “Speaking at a conservation summit in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Mr. Obama said elected officials in the U.S. must continue to work on policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after he leaves office in January. ‘It’s not going to happen if we boast about how we’re going to scrap international treaties, or have elected officials who are alone in the world in denying climate change, or put our energy and environmental policies in the hands of big polluters,’ Mr. Obama said.”
It will be a bitter irony if President Obama does indeed unilaterally commit the United States to the Paris Climate Treaty on 3rd September for it was on that day in 1783 that United States negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris officially ending the American Revolutionary War with the United Kingdom. An official U. S. government web page includes this comment: “The three American negotiators, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, proved themselves to be masters of the game, outmaneuvering their counterparts and clinging fiercely to the points of national interest that guaranteed a future for the United States.”
Clinging fiercely to the national interest is not really President Obama’s thing. Another difference between then and now is that the Continental Congress meeting in Annapolis ratified the Treaty of Paris on 14th January 1784.
The South China Morning Post reported on Thursday that U. S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping “are set to jointly announce their ratification” of the Paris Climate Treaty when they meet on 2nd September before the G-20 Summit. This is curious because ratifying treaties in the United States requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
Here is the language from Article Two, Section Two, Clause Two of the U. S. Constitution: “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”
The article by Li Jing references this curious requirement: “There are still some uncertainties from the US side due to the complicated US system in ratifying such a treaty, but the announcement is still quite likely to be ready by Sept 2,” said a source, who declined to be named.
In China’s Communist Party dictatorship, ratification merely requires their Maximum Leader to say, “So be it.”
Later in the article, Li Jing again tries to explain the inscrutable U. S. methods for ratifying a treaty: “US law allows the nation to join international agreements in a number of ways, including through the authority of the president.”
Lo and behold, the President of the United States can ratify a treaty in the same way as China’s Maximum Leader. He merely has to say the magic words, “So be it.” And it is so. Who knew that President Barack Obama has become our Maximum Leader, or perhaps I should say our dear Maximum Leader?
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