Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

Republicans citing regulatory costs they say cripple the economy

if the EPA hadn't been all over Bear Stearns' case, inhibiting their free market creativity with environmental regulations, the CDO bubble would never have burst, AIG would be riding just as high today as in 2007, and half a dozen of the biggest US banks that went belly up would still be solvent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/world/asia/china-us-xi-obama-apec.html

China and the United States made common cause on Wednesday against the threat of climate change, staking out an ambitious joint plan to curb carbon emissions as a way to spur nations around the world to make their own cuts in greenhouse gases.

The landmark agreement, jointly announced here by President Obama and President Xi Jinping, includes new targets for carbon emissions reductions by the United States and a first-ever commitment by China to stop its emissions from growing by 2030.

Administration officials said the agreement, which was worked out quietly between the United States and China over nine months and included a letter from Mr. Obama to Mr. Xi proposing a joint approach, could galvanize efforts to negotiate a new global climate agreement by 2015.

i'm sure we'll still all die of hunger in 40 years, but this seems like good news.

inhofe is taking over for boxer? just shoot me.

ALEC has drafted model legislation to eliminate the EPA over a period of 5 years, replacing it with a committee of a rotating cast of 300 state environmental officials (6 per state). ALEC members will consider adopting it during their annual meeting in early December in DC.

haha

they propose replacing the 15,000 EPA employees with 300 people on a committee, which would result in a lowering of the EPA budget from ~8.2 billion to 2.0 billion. 2 billion for 300 committee member comes out to 6.66666666666666 million per committee member.

(i know, i know, they would propose paying the committee members a reasonable amount (not a devil amount) and then spend the rest on contractors)

Every future post to this thread should be preceded by this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2BNmn8TYdE

the proposal/memo is behind a paywall but goddamn it is hilarious and terrifying. The series of "WHEREAS" is just fucking incredible.

lol @ breathtaking "WHEREAS" series

have you seen it? it's just unbelievable.

sorry, no, i was just not paying attention / thinking of "in general". can you link to it? i can probably get through and it would be fun to take a look.

it's on insideepa which is paywalled, and i don't want to post too much of it here or some shady character will murder me in my sleep. but here's two representative WHEREASes:

WHEREAS, 3nvironmental quality is a demand of all 4mericans, but environmental problems, where they remain, vary in type and s3verity, and the best, least costly solutions are l1kely to be found more quickly with experimentation, innovation, and competition between st4te agencies working with industry c0unterparts than in a highly-bureaucratic, centralized, environmental agency in Washington, D.C., f4r removed from the day-to-day problems and 1ssues confronting disparate state and r3gional populations;

(ah, i see, they really care about the environment, but believe that the environment would be best served in a decentralized fashion led by the states (which aren't bureacratic at all! teeheeeeheeeeeee!! sorry.) disagree but at least that's you know, an opinion)

WHEREAS, r3cent and recently proposed regulations and rules including but not limited t0: new Ozone standards, the Cr0ss-State Air Pollution Rule, the proposed carbon dioxide standards for new and 3xisting power plants, new and unreasonably stringent short-term ambient air quality
standards for n1trogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, new rules targeting c0al-fired boilers such as Bo1ler MACT, new rules targeting stationary internal c0mbustion engines, and the new WOTUS rule all c0me with huge costs, but there is no 3vidence that they will provide any measurable
benefit to human health, qual1ty of life, or the environment;

(oh, i see. ALEC's view of environmental policy is so cutting edge that they don't see any evidence that improving air quality standards for NOx and SOx would provide any measure benefit to health. and regulating CO2 from power plants? nah, that won't help humans any. nope)

why is there no liberal equivalent to ALEC

that would be socialism

thanks for the sample k4rl

70 inches of snow today in buffalo. take that, libtardos!

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy

they get slammed pretty hard in the comments, I was amused

there are liberal think thanks that draft model legislation, maybe not as brazenly as ALEC though. and they don't have a fraction of the influence.

(reply to Οὖτις)

i don't think the fact that ALEC drafts model legislation is so bad. the main problem is how awful that legislation is, and how readily state legislators will put their names to it.

i mean if there was a liberal version of ALEC and state legislators made use of its model legislation (adjusting that legislation for the state concerned) i wouldn't complain!

you don't think the relationship between the corporate membership of ALEC and the process ALEC engages in is problematic?

pondering this did get me thinking about the prospect of a national model legislation cooperative, which is sort of a fun idea.

Isn't corporate membership both problematic and a strong reason that ALEC is as powerful as they are?

corporations are people too my friend

a national model legislation cooperative

yeah this would be great

i think it's a neat idea too, but who would cooperate in the cooperative?

Isn't corporate membership both problematic and a strong reason that ALEC is as powerful as they are?

― ya'll are the ones who don't know things (Karl Malone), Tuesday, December 2, 2014 5:31 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean yeah--a comparative cooperative would only be useful if it had muscle. a list the size of OFA's for ex

maybe some primacy of cooperative shares belonging to the experts who'd write the model leg and the remainder & say voting on big picture policy directions could go to the fuller contributing membership

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/12/02/electricity-free-air-conditioner-sends-heat-space/

Idle daydreams of applying this as a geoengineering solution.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fossil-fuel-lobbyists-bolstered-by-gop-wins-work-to-curb-environmental-rules/2014/12/07/3ef05bc0-79b9-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html

With support from industry lobbyists, many Republicans are planning to make the Environmental Protection Agency a primary political target, presenting it as a symbol of the kind of big-government philosophy they think can unify social and economic conservatives in opposition.

“There is a palpable anger at the EPA in America,” said Nate Bell, a Republican state legislator from rural Arkansas who championed a measure at the ALEC meeting supporting the replacement of the agency. “Mention them, and you will get laughed out of any coffee shop or feed store in my district.”

on the plus side,

Another proposed resolution would call for abolishing the EPA and replacing it with a committee of state officials. The idea was put aside after some corporate lobbyists cautioned that it could hurt ALEC’s credibility.

looooo

Nevertheless, participants said, the anti-EPA feelings ran so deep at the meeting that an ALEC task force weighing the various proposals agreed to create a “working group” to further consider ways state legislatures could support replacing the federal agency.

oh

i imagine that the rooms where ALEC working groups craft model legislation are filled with deafening piped in moaning and wailing sound effects

Water woes in Lima: A glimpse of our future?

http://roadtoparis.info/top-list/10-climate-change-controversies-now-that-cause-settled/

refreshing to see a list of legitimate climate controversies! thanks for linking to that leee

a dose of rare good news:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) administration said Wednesday that it will block gas development by hydraulic fracturing, bringing to an end a six-year study process and kicking off what could be years of lawsuits from developers who want to tap rich Marcellus shale deposits.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/12/17/cuomo-administration-rules-against-fracking/

what do the falling oil prices mean for global warming?
i'm pretty overwhelmed by all of the factors involved and i don't know enough to parse out spin from science. will this probably be a good or bad thing for climate change or is it just way too early to tell/a non-issue?

Anything that increases the demand for oil, thereby increasing its consumption, is ecologically bad. But the oil prices are volatile, and IIRC all the easy-to-get oil is mostly sucked up, so the costs of extraction in the (near-)future are probably going to rise.

oil prices are dropping because demand is dropping (which is good). demand is dropping for all kinds of reasons (natural gas boom for one) - but the bigger goal, beyond prices, is to keep demand down

Production temporarily exceeds demand because 2013-2014 is when a "bulge" of upstream megaprojects came on line, shale drillers took on tons of junk debt to pay for marginally economic wells, and the Chinese economy has been flat since 2012. Saudi Arabia and a number of other players (particularly NY investment banks) can benefit from shaking the tree to knock out marginal players. A lot of shale-play assets are going to be transferred from shareholders to stronger hands by end-2015, when the megaproject backlog begins looks rather thin. As far as I can tell, most of the price movement to date is just Saudi talk stampeding futures market longs to the exits, as there isn't much to account for it in global or U.S. demand or stocks (which are not exceptional). I'm sure big bonuses will be lavished at J. Aron & Co. this season.

It won't last. New deepwater and Canadian oil sands are economic above $75/bbl, its not entirely clear some shale plays were economic even at $90, without gullible bond buyers. Still, probably not a great time to be in North Dakota or South Texas.

As for greenhouse emissions, this sort of pricing noise is terrible for green energy projects. I want a stable $150/bbl (and carbon-equivalently high coal) to make wind/solar/storage plausible investments for utilities, and electric vehicles plausible for consumers.

Sorry yeah I meant shale there dunno why I typed natural gas

60 degrees on the mid-atlantic seaboard on boxing day

no scientific evidence, i tell you. none!

50 Doomiest Graphs of 2014

If these trends continue – and there’s no reason to expect that they won’t – the next 40 years will see almost all vertebrate species extirpated.

Read in the LA Times this morning that Alaska didn't have a single day in 2014 where the temperature was below 0 F (-17.8 C), which has never happened before.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-baked-alaska-20150103-story.html

NB: that record refers to Anchorage AK, not the whole state.

OK, that makes more sense. The trend still holds.

Wish Godzilla would just come and kill us all already tbh

Also I think I saw that Los Angeles just had its first day where the daily high was under 60 F in about a year.

For fun!

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0115/Sea-level-rise-rapidly-accelerating-say-scientists

Not to mention

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-human-activity-has-pushed-earth-beyond-four-of-nine-planetary-boundaries/2015/01/15/f52b61b6-9b5e-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

2014 officially the hottest year on record, US government scientists say

Cheer up, Ned.