Detroit Freep on Supreme Court Decision

Thinking that the Detroit Free Press might have something interesting to say about the April 2 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA must regulate CO2 emissions, I checked out their Web site. An April 9 editorial said that the court was right "to tell the Bush administration that it can no longer brush off global warming," but noted that Congress must start to investigate actions and solutions because "The truth is that the court's decision means only that the Environmental Protection Agency must re-examine an earlier decision not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as pollutants." That process could easily chew up the rest of the Bush presidency without producing meaningful action. EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has already started the dithering.

EPA Administrator Stalling on Action to Regulate CO2

EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is stalling on setting a timetable for his agency's response to the April 2 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA should be regulating carbon dioxide. Senators repeatedly pressed him for a date for compliance, such as four months (suggested by Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.), but Johnson refused to be rushed. "I'm not going to be forced into making a snap decision," he told reporters. The Washington Post reporting on Johnson's appearance before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, quoted Johnson as stating that he doesn't see one environmental issue as more pressing than any other. The court decision focused on emissions from automobiles, but the delay is apparently because the agency is assessing the impact the ruling may have on regulating emissions from power plants and other industrial sources.
"We will move expeditiously, but we are going to be moving responsibly," Johnson said.

Biofuels

The New York Times reports that Tyson Foods and ConocoPhillips are forming a partnership that will produce biodiesel out of pork, chicken and beef fat. The reporter sees this is another sign that agribusiness and farmers will be playing an increasingly important role in the nation's development of alternative energy sources. This sounds like it will be a mega-income producing venture for farmers. Does it also mean reduced Federal agricultural subsidies?
BP has a partnership with DuPont, working on biofuels and Chevron has a research allilance with the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop cellulosic fuels.

Scaring Little Children

The Washington Post reports that Republicans are in a froth about climate change. At the first meeting of Nancy Pelosi's Senate Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming , Sen. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis) questioned "why global warming has suddenly become an issue of national defense" and accused global warming realists of scaring little children.
Democrats want mandatory emissions limits and plan to send a bill to Pres. Bush before the 2008 election. As the world knows, Bush is still calling for more research (isn't almost 20 years of research and a 90% certainty by the scientists monitoring the research enough?) and voluntary measures.
The Post article quotes a national security think tank report written by a battalion of retired Army and Navy brass that warned that global warming poses a "serious threat" to U.S. national security. The report, published by The CNA Corporation, "predicted worsening terrorism and fights involving the United States over dwindling natural resources that will result from a warming of the earth."

Hinkle to Skeptics: Admit You're Wrong

I'm going a little farther afield than I usually do to find an opinion piece by award-winning columnist A. Barton Hinkle in the Richmond Times Dispatch that advises global warming skeptics to admit that they've been wrong all these years. It's time to stop howling at the moon, spitting into the wind and saying that global warming is an act of God (i.e., natural not anthropogenic). I've noticed that since the release of IPCC AR4, skeptics have taken to reminding us of the "Great Global Cooling Scare" of the 1970s as a proof that claims of global warming is wrong are misguided. Hinkle has noticed this, too, and says that A+B doesn't equal C in this case. (My take is that the global cooling scare was a blip in our continuous learning about the atmosphere and other global systems.)
Hinkle writes: "By now denials about climate change begin to have about them the air of arguments against evolution, which rest on the fallacy of thinking that if a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle is missing, then the rest of puzzle does not exist. Not every piece of the climate puzzle has been found."
That last sentence says it all. What many people don't seem to grasp is that this is an ongoing, evolving, ever-changing fluid situation. We'll never know everything about global systems and how they work together, but we can certainly identify problems and likely consequences. The atmosphere is heavily polluted and must be cleaned up if we are to have a healthy place to live.

Resistance is Futile!

After mentioning a Yale survey that found that 83% of Americans think global warming is a serious problem, George Will implies that individual actions are futile in battling global warming. The assault of the "media-entertainment-environmental complex" to get citizens to urge action by their political leaders is unprecedented except during WW I and II, according to Will. He reminds us that in 1997 Congress voted 95-0 against the Kyoto Protocol. That was ten long years ago, George--we know a lot more now than we did then. Will then quotes discredited statistician Bjorn Lomborg on how expensive to the US Kyoto compliance would be. He also quotes a report by CNW Research (a retired marketing guy operating out of his home in Oregon) stating that a Hummer is actually more cost effective and efficient in the long run than a Prius--apparently, the use of zinc in the Prius is the problem. And then he disses Arnold Schwarzenegger's initiatives.
The two biggest global warming skeptics, George Bush and ExxonMobil, are talking nice about the issue and ExMo even claims to have withdrawn support from from its skeptical minions (although I'm not sure I believe the behemoth). People across the country are rallying around the need for action, but blowhards like Will keep telling us action is futile.
Idling in our Hummers won't solve anything, either.

More on IPCC SWG Report

The Post's main article on the IPCC's Second Working Group report talks about the negotiations that went into the consensus-building to create the final report. "The climax of five days of negotiations . . . which was based on 29,000 sets of data, much of it collected in the last five years. 'For the first time we are not just arm-waving with models,' Martin Perry, who conducted the grueling negotiations, told reporters." The United States, China and Saudi Arabia objected to some of the stronger language in the report. More than 120 nations attended the meeting. Changes to the report had to be approved by the scientists who wrote that section of the report. Approval by consensus of every report is SOP for the IPCC and its subcommittees. The report breaks down the scientific predictions into regions, and predicts that climate change will affect billions of people.
The third Post article tells how climate change threatens the world's natural wonders, including the Great Barrier Reef and tropical rainforests, according to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. WWF reps observed the conference and issued their own report on regions and species affected by global warming.

Post quoting global warming supporters, not skeptics

The Washinton Post carries three articles this morning on the IPCC's Second Working Group report on "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability." Marc Kaufman writes about the changes to the American southwest. "Global warming will permanently change the climate of the American Southwest, making it so much hotter and drier that Dust Bowl-scale droughts will become common, a new climate report concludes." Then instead of turning to energy industry skeptics to balance the report, Kaufman bolsters the IPCC findings by quoting other scientists who also attribute the changes to climate change: "Independently of the new study, others [climate scientists] note that the Southwest has been experiencing environmental changes besides drought that many believe are associated with global warming." The last sentence, though, mentions "others" who think the changes are due to natural climate shifts.

5 (Believers) - 4 (Skeptics)

Monday's Supreme Court decision to repudiate the Bush administration's denial of the government's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions is a great step forward in battling climate change. However, at this point it's a more of a symbolic victory since the EPA could stall for years (or at least until the next administration comes in). In an ABC News on-line article, the Sierra Club's Josh Dorner said, "It puts a process into motion that essentially compels the EPA to at some point issue regulations on carbon dioxide. I think, obviously, that process will be a slow one and we might see some action in Congress before that process comes to full fruition."
The only skeptics quoted in this article were the four dissenting justices.
The Washington Post notes another environmental case, Environmental Defense et al. v. Duke Energy Corp. et al ., in which the court unanimously supported a Clinton-era initiative to force old coal-powered power plants to install pollution-control equipment.
The L.A. Times called the high court's ruling a victory for California.
The NYT called the ruling a "strong rebuke" to the Bush administration.

ABC News Global Warming Videos

ABC News On-Line has a nice set of global warming videos.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/
Global warming 101, retreating glaciers, goodbye to wildlife, etc.
Definitely worth checking out.

Skeptics at the WSJ

In doing research for another project, I've discovered that the Wall Street Journal is a bunch of global warming skeptics! Their main constituency being business people, I guess that's not too surprising, but as some people have come to realize, if the planet is burnt to a crisp, the economy will suffer!

Problems Down Under

Australia, the only country that puts more CO2 in the air per capita than the United States, is rumbling about environmental issues. An ABC local radio interview with Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull reported "In its chapter on Australia, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [report published in January] predicts more intense and more frequent heatwaves and fires, along with floods, droughts and storms."
Turnbull's response: "We have a whole climate change adaptation framework underway, we are very focused on adapting to climate change. And you have to remember that the changes to our climate over the next ... well, most of this century for all of our lifetimes in any event, the changes in our climate are built into the systems." (What?)
Then the reporter reveals: "The Auditor-General has assessed the protection of threatened species . . . [and] finds the Environment Department hasn't been resourced . . . despite asking four times for more funding." No money for threatened species.
An Aussie environmentalist says: "There's been a failure to implement this legislation. It's not doing the job of protecting our threatened species and our biodiversity in Australia."
Australia is the only other major country that didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol.