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en. John Barrasso delivered a bit of a barn-burner at yesterday’s Committee on Oversight joint hearing on “Scientific Integrity and Transparency Reforms at the Environmental Protection Agency.” He’s been carrying this particular flag for a while, all but ignored by the Dem power structure. Following are excerpts from his statement:

I am concerned about the shadow cabinet position of Energy and Climate Czar. This vague position “coordinates” energy and climate change policy in the cabinet. This person is not confirmed by the Senate. How the EPA Administrator and the Czar work together remains highly ambiguous. The person appointed to this post is Carol Browner. Browner, coincidently, was the EPA Director under President Clinton. By appointing Browner, the Administration now has two EPA Directors, one confirmed by Congress, the other not. One accountable to Congress, the other not.

Obama has now appointed 18 czars – imagine what the Left would have said if “Bushitler” had done the same.  They’re all problematic, but Browner is particulary so, especially given the economy-crushing global warming agenda Obama is pushing.  Barrasso details some of the more nefarious acts Browner undertook while she was Clinton’s Congressionally overseen EPA chief:

She [a Washington Examiner reporter] stated that “Browner ordered Virginia to reduce the amount of ambient nitrogen oxide, not because levels were anywhere near dangerous, but because that was the only pollutant that had not declined in the past 25 years.” She stated that that Browner proposed banning chlorine, used as a disinfectant in 98 percent of municipal water treatment, “in the absence of any evidence that chlorine leads to cancer or birth defects.”  Indeed, the author points out that Peru was suing the United States for classifying chlorine as a possible carcinogen “because then Peru removed chorine from its water supply, and the resulting cholera epidemic killed thousands.” She also cited Browner’s attempt to get the Food and Drug Administration to ban anti-asthma inhalers because the EPA “considered it more important to get rid of devices that release trace amounts of chlorofluorcarbons than to allow 30 million Americans to breathe easily.” She stated “public outcry, not science, caused the EPA to back off.” These are just a few examples in a larger column that cites many more.

Now this woman is operating in Jack Bauer-like fashion, with no hand, save Obama’s, constraining her.  This is not exactly the model of that transparency thing Obama promised during the campaign.

The Czar positions that the Obama Administration has created seem to be designed to not be transparent. We won’t ever know whether or not politics is trumping science because we can’t get the Czar to come here and testify. Everything will be done in secret, behind closed doors, out of the view of the American people.We need not look much farther than Energy and Climate Czar Browner’s actions over the last few months.

Want an example of how untransparent the czar process is? Barrosso provided a gem:

The New York Times ran an article in May entitled “Vow of silence key to White House-California Fuel Economy Talks.” The article stated that there was a simple rule for negotiations between the White House and California on vehicle fuel economy – “Put nothing in writing.” Mary Nichols, the head of the California Air Resources Board, stated that Browner “quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials.” The paper said Nichols and Browner “decided to keep their discussions as quiet as possible, holding no group meetings and taking care to not leak updates to the press.” Nichols was quoted as saying “We put nothing in writing, ever.” This is unacceptable Madame Chairman.

How are we, the oversight committee, able to do our job with Administration officials putting nothing in writing, holding secret meetings in the dark of night without other officials present. All of this occurring outside the prying eyes of the people. This is not transparency. This is not good government. This threatens scientific integrity.

I wonder how that Times story would have run if it had occurred during the Bush admin and they caught an uncomfirmed Bush appointee saying “put nothing in writing.” We’ll never know.

The good senator concluded by repeating his longstanding request for committee hearings into Browner’s role as energy czar, a request committee chair Babs Boxer ignored. Fat chance any such hearings will happen any sooner than January 2013, when, hopefully, a new Republican majority will rule the Senate.

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hat’s not a typo in the headline – it’s the greenhouse gag, not generic greenhouse gas, because the depravity of declaring the fourth most common element in the universer, carbon, a pollutant and carbon dioxide, the byproduct of human breathing, something needing regulating is coming home to roost.  Like an 800-pound chicken.

In her confirmation hearing, EPA Director of Air and Radiation nominee Regina McCarthy put an end to EPA Director Lisa Jackson’s curt dismissal of concerns by manufacturers and chambers of commerce that EPA was poised to impose greenhouse gas regs on small business.  “It is a myth … EPA will regulate cows, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Huts, your lawnmower and baby bottles,” Jackson said, according the the WSJ, the primary source for this post.

McCarthy countered her boss, telling lawmakers that litigation could force her office to draft emission rules for small emitters like hospitals, schools and farms.  And, true to form, the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity promptly piped up with Kassie Siegel, its climate warmonger director of the CBD’s Climate Law Institute, saying she is poised to sue for regulation of smaller emitters if the EPA stops at simply large emitters.

The administration is now set to regulate only about 13,000 large emitters, including refiners, smelters and cement plants. The position seems radical next to Siegel’s stand, but when you consider that refiners, smelters and cement plants are all backbones to our industrialized, mobile society, you’ll understand that there’s nothing moderate about Obama’s position; it’s no less extreme, only more efficient, than the CBD approach.

Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) has put a hold on Ms. McCarthy’s nomination in part because of her responses on the greenhouse gas issue.  Barrasso wrote on the Heritage Foundation blog The Foundary (which could, I suppose, itself be regulated under the new regime),

Special interest groups around the country are scheming to sue the EPA to prosecute hospitals, farms, nursing homes, commercial buildings and any other small emitter of greenhouse gasses. These regulations are a dangerous loose cannon in the wrong hands.

When asked about potential lawsuits, Regina McCarthy, the Administration’s nominee as Assistant Administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation said that she will “request that I be informed if any such notice is filed with regard to a small source, and I will follow-up with the potential litigants.”

The solution to this problem is not to have government officials go around asking litigants not to sue. That is not a solution and entirely unrealistic. I quite frankly expect more.

The only jobs this option will create are in law firms as the litigation bonanza begins.

In considering the economic impact of this lunacy, Barrasso cautions that the 1.2 million businesses that might fall under EPA regulation as a result of GHG emission controls would face something akin to the EPA’s current pre-construction permit process, which the agency itself says costs each applicant $125,000 and 866 hours to obtain - and that was in 2007; I’m sure it’s become more costly and less streamlined since then.

Do the math – that’s $150 billion in new regulatory burdens and a billion hours of productivity down the drain.  If you’re sill in school, go into environmental law – the guys who work on regs like these will be the only people making real money in Obamaland.  Meanwhile, our competitors presumably will have avoided this lunacy, making America even less competitive and more vulnerable to foreign business domination.

As all this insanity looms, Rasmussen reports that only about a third of Americans believe human activities are causing climate change, about 50 percent less than believe it is caused by global climatic cycles, so there is opportunity for the GOP to position itself as the party of sanity on climate issues – something McCain reused to do.

And for those who feel the system will have to be on the edge of collapse before we will be able to reign in runaway regulators should keep their eyes on the regulation of GHG emissions in all its ramifications.  This baby is setting up to be one spectactular, collossal train wreck.

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erhaps you’re not aware of the mission Obama has tasked to senior officials in his administration. No, it’s not to re-start the economy, or even to become the world’s best new friend.  No, the orders are simple:  Seek out free enterprise wherever it exists, and squash it.

If that’s not bothersome enough, the fact that evidence for existence of the mission can be found on NPR, National People’s Radio, is a bit eye-opening.  It’s in this interview of Obama EPA chief Lisa Jackson. Roll the tape:

Jackson: “The President has said-and I couldn’t agree more-that what this country needs is one single national road map that tells auto makers who are trying to become solvent again, what kind of car it is they need to be designing and building for the American people.”

NPR reporter (interrupting): “Is that the role of the government, though? I mean that doesn’t sound like free enterprise.”

Jackson: “Well…it is free enterprise in a way…you know, first and foremost the free enterprise system has us where we are right this second…and so some would argue that the government already has a much larger role than we might have when Henry Ford rolled the first cars off the assembly line.”

Jackson can’t find any way to call the fed’s takeover and ongoing control of the automobile sector “free enterprise,” so she simply decides to blame the free economy for the nation’s ills. No, no, it’s not government over-regulation to date, demanding ever more expensive pollution and safety technology that’s to blame, nor is it labor’s unwillingness to face new economic realities that’s behind Detroit’s trouble. It’s not government’s considerable efforts to push the economy into the credit deficit by demanding mortgages be given to people who charitably can be called uncreditworthy.

It’s just that #$%@! free enterprise system that’s to blame.

According to her EPA bio, Jackson has never held a job in the private sector. What a shock.

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watched this hysterical video the other day – “hysterical” in that the people quoted were immersed in hysteria, not “hysterical” as in funny – on the melting of an ice dam holding back in ice shelf in Antarctica.  We’re told with adequate hysterics that the event disaster happened faster than anyone predicted, so the world must be heating up.

(It reminded me of people who live on the beach and are convinced the ocean is rising because their beach is losing sand – like the celebrity Greenies of Malibu.  Of course the ocean looks higher – there’s less sand between them and it!  The sand is disappearing, by the way, in part because water quality regs forbid people from allowing “particulates,” i.e. sand, to enter streams.  That’s why you can’t take sand that’s built up behind a dam and move it to the stream below the dam – where it would have gone had the dam not been there:  Some enviro-bureaucrat decided that would be pollution.)

So why did the Antarctic ice melt faster than the sacred and immutable computer models thought it would if it wasn’t because of global warming?  Well …

New research from NASA suggests that the Arctic warming trend seen in recent decades has indeed resulted from human activities: but not, as is widely assumed at present, those leading to carbon dioxide emissions. Rather, Arctic warming has been caused in large part by laws introduced to improve air quality and fight acid rain.

Dr Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has led a new study which indicates that much of the general upward trend in temperatures since the 1970s – particularly in the Arctic – may have resulted from changes in levels of solid “aerosol” particles in the atmosphere, rather than elevated CO₂. (The Register, UK)

In other words, the Warmies have no idea going on.  But wait!  It’s worse!

Shindell’s research indicates that, ironically, much of the rise in polar temperature seen over the last few decades may have resulted from US and European restrictions on sulphur emissions. According to NASA:

Sulfates, which come primarily from the burning of coal and oil, scatter incoming solar radiation and have a net cooling effect on climate. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent. While improving air quality and aiding public health, the result has been less atmospheric cooling from sulfates. Meanwhile, levels of black-carbon aerosols (soot, in other words) have been rising, largely driven by greater industrialisation in Asia. Soot, rather than reflecting heat as sulphates do, traps solar energy in the atmosphere and warms things up.

Well, if that’s the case, then the environmentalists and their companion bureaucrats did it!  The very people who would save us and the planet from global warming are heating the joint up because they also want to stop acid rain.  And not a one of there sacred, immutable computer models predicted it.

This is just more proof that human intelligence is far too limited and far too polluted with politics and dogma to manage something as vast, complex and changing as the globe’s climate.  But some scientists, all politicians and most bureaucrats have egos nearly as vast, so they want to have a go at it.

Against this backdrop of climate incompetence, let’s turn to the EPA’s little fiasco in the making: its announcement today that it has concluded that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare. The announcement paves the way for a whole new round of regulations designed to stop climate change – as if global cycles are stoppable by mere humans.

Here’s what the American Petroleum Institute had to say:

“The proposed endangerment finding poses an endangerment to the American economy and to every American family. It could lead to greenhouse gas regulations under a law fundamentally ill-suited to addressing the challenge of global climate change. The regulations could impose complex, costly requirements on restaurants, colleges, schools, shopping malls, bakeries and many other businesses and institutions. The Clean Air Act was created to address local and regional air pollution, not the emission of carbon dioxide and other global greenhouse gases.”

I’m with you, Jack, in fact I’m more than with you.  It’s not just that the Clean Air Act is the wrong law to address this, but that the “solutions” that likely will follow by its application could, like the earlier acid rain effort, just end up making things worse, just as “saving” us from acid rain has.

EPA and UN, keep your hands off our planet!

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The ballot-counting hasn’t even stopped and we’re getting our first chilling peak at the future under Barack Obama. Politico reports:

President-elect Barack Obama is strongly considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet post, Democratic officials told Politico.

The selection of Kennedy would be a shrewd early move for the new presidential team. Obama advisers said the nomination would please both Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

It also would raise the profile of the EPA, which would help endear Obama to liberals who may be disappointed on other issues important to the Democratic left because of budget restrictions.

Robert Kennedy is the founder of Riverkeeper, which has been “franchised” through the Waterkeeper Alliance into 177 water quality advocacy and litigation groups, teaming up with trial lawyers to bring big water quality lawsuits. He also is the co-director of the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic and a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Kennedy started Riverkeeper as a community service project after being busted for heroin. He appears to have overcome his drug problems and would enter the Obama administration as the first recovering heroin addict in the United States cabinet.

Besides his partiality for water quality lawsuits over alleged minuscule discharges into water, he’s a global warming hawk who supports economic chaos in the name of saving the planet. During the campaign, he said:

“A sophisticated, well-crafted energy policy designed to de-carbonize America is the centerpiece of Sen. Barack Obama’s domestic economic package.”

You don’t de-carbonize America without jacking up energy costs and imposing massive burdens on industry. And what better time? After all, we’re just in this huge economic crisis.

If Kennedy does in fact become EPA chief, he will be the world’s most powerful radical environmentalist, with the full resources of the federal government behind him and the power to regulate. Welcome to the Obama era.

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