The Obama Administration is rejecting the proposed route of a pipeline that would bring oil from Canada’s oil shale region to refineries and ports in the Southern United States:

WASHINGTON — The State Department was expected to announce later Wednesday that it cannot recommend going forward with the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline within the 60-day deadline set by Congress, putting the politically charged project on hold indefinitely, administration officials said.

The administration has until Feb. 21 to decide the fate of the 1,700-mile pipeline to carry heavy crude oil from formations in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Officials are expected to announce that they cannot meet that deadline and that they are looking for ways to complete a thorough environmental review before making a final decision on the project.

The action for now means the permit for the pipeline is rejected although the pipeline company will be allowed to submit a new proposal with an altered route. The Obama administration had sought a year’s delay to find a new route for the pipeline. But Republicans in Congress demanded that the administration accelerate the schedule and make a decision by mid-February, and included that provision in the payroll tax bill passed last month.

The State Department is expected to say that routing, environmental and safety concerns raised by the project are too complex to be decided on that abbreviated timetable and is recommending that President Obama reject it for the time being.

The pipeline has become a political flashpoint, with proponents saying it will create thousands of jobs and help wean the nation off of Middle Eastern oil, while opponents charge that it furthers dependence on dirty fuels and threatens sensitive lands and water supplies in the Great Plains.

The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, at a briefing with reporters Wednesday before the State Department released its announcement, was sharply critical of the Republican-sponsored legislation that he said had forced a decision before the project could be fully studied.

“In a purely partisan effort to score a political points, Republicans in Congress insisted on inserting an extraneous provision in a bill that had nothing to do with pipelines,” he said. “The State Department has made it clear that setting an arbitrary deadline through this purely political effort would put State Department in a corner and severely hamper their ability to review an alternate route, a new pipeline route, in a proper way.”

Not surprisingly, Republicans are denouncing the move and vowing to continue putting pressure on the Administration to approve the project:

A spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner’ put out a response, based on news reports of the State Department’s recommendation, reminding everyone that the language in the payroll tax bill stipulates that only the president has authority to block the permit — not the State Department.

“President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese,” said Brendan Buck, Mr. Boehner’s spokesman. “The president won’t stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight.”

The Republican presidential candidates have all endorsed the pipeline, saying it will create jobs, and have used it as a cudgel to criticize Mr. Obama. They say that his reluctance to quickly approve the project is harming the economy and forcing Canada to seek other markets for its oil.

“As to the pipeline,” former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts said at a recent campaign appearance in South Carolina, “how in the world can anyone justify saying to Canada: ‘We don’t want that pipeline coming here. We know it’s important for you to be able to make progress and provide for your own finances. We know that if we stall long enough, you’ll not have the opportunity to bring a pipeline to America. Instead you’ll build a pipeline for China.’ “

I noted back in December that the House Republicans may have made a big mistake in insisting that the temporary extension of the Payroll Tax cut include a provision requiring the Administration to make a decision on the pipeline now rather than waiting until 2013 as had been the plan. State Department officials said at the time that the deadline set by Congress did not provide sufficient time for the studies that are required by law to be completed before a decision can be made. Accordingly, the deadline may have inadvertently created the situation where the Administration had no choice but to veto the proposed route, which pipeline advocates have said they would be willing to reconsider given the objections that have been noted in states along the route even by politicians who favor the pipeline.

Moreover, one pipeline advocate warned that by appearing to back the President into a corner, the House Republicans were basically daring the President to reject the plan:

Some political observers said the effort by Congress to pressure the president into making a quick decision might have backfired. Last week, John Engler, a former Michigan governor who is now head of the Business Roundtable, said “no chief executive likes to be painted into a corner by anybody, whether another nation or a legislative body. There are a couple of ways to react, and one of them is a negative way.” Engler and the Business Roundtable support the pipeline project.

In the press release announcing the decision just this afternoon, the State Department cites a number of factors for the rejection, but states that a revised route could be considered in the future:

Ironically, this announcement comes on the same day that the President’s own jobs council made some interesting recommendations:

President Obama’s jobs council called Tuesday for an “all-in approach” to energy policy that includes expanded oil-and-gas drilling as well as expediting energy projects like pipelines.

“[W]e should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands,” states the year-end report released Tuesday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines.

“The Council recognizes the important safety and environmental concerns surrounding these types of projects, but now more than ever, the jobs and economic and energy security benefits of these energy projects require us to tackle the issues head-on and to expeditiously, though cautiously, move forward on projects that can support hundreds of thousands of jobs,” the report says.

The report retreats slightly from an interim report released in October that addressed the Keystone XL pipeline directly. The interim report appeared to offer cautious support for Keystone, calling on officials to “balance” environmental protections while realizing what it called the benefits of the pipeline.

But Keystone supporters will point out that the year-end report released Tuesday argues that energy projects like pipelines will result in economic and security benefits. It even echoes a common refrain from Republicans and the oil industry: that such energy projects “can support hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

This decision is not the end of the matter by any means. You can expect the House Republicans to try to make this an issue again in the upcoming negotiations over the permanent extension of the Payroll Tax cut as well as by other means. The Republican candidates for President will, no doubt, be united in their opposition to the President’s decision, and this is going to be an issue in the upcoming Presidential race. In reality, nearly all of the concerns that the State Department and pipeline opponents have voiced to this project can be easily addressed, including the question of whether the route of the pipeline itself poses a threat to underground aquifers. There’s no rational reason not to approve it, and I’ve to think that the Canadians are looking at this and just shaking their head in confusion over how stupid we Americans could possibly be to allow something so simple to get caught up in the idiotic world of partisan politics.

My prediction? Regardless of who is elected President in November, this project will be approved sooner rather than later.

The BBC is reporting that a group of scientists is theorizing that the increased carbon emissions responsible at least in some part for the rise in global temperatures may be delaying the onset of the next Ice Age:

The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear.

Researchers used data on the Earth’s orbit and other things to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one.

In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years – but emissions have been so high that it will not

“At current levels of CO2, even if emissions stopped now we’d probably have a long interglacial duration determined by whatever long-term processes could kick in and bring [atmospheric] CO2 down,” said Luke Skinner from Cambridge University.

Dr Skinner’s group – which also included scientists from University College London, the University of Florida and Norway’s Bergen University – calculates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would have to fall below about 240 parts per million (ppm) before the glaciation could begin.

The current level is around 390ppm.

Other research groups have shown that even if emissions were shut off instantly, concentrations would remain elevated for at least 1,000 years, with enough heat stored in the oceans potentially to cause significant melting of polar ice and sea level rise.

Of course, a good part of this is guesswork because the precise conditions that cause the Ice Ages that have waxed and waned over the Earth over billions of years aren’t precisely known. Part of it seems to involve subtle differences in the Earth’s orbit. There have been suggestions recently that there was a relationship between the cycle and the pattern of sunspot activity. And, now, of course, we have the possibility that human activity itself will have an influence on the crisis, perhaps extending an interglacial period that would have ended relatively soon geologically speaking. As I’ve noted before, it isn’t really surprising to learn that human activity has an impact on the climate of the planet

Of course, this study is already being cited by opponents in the entire “climate change” debate which has become far too political for something that ought to be a matter of science:

Groups opposed to limiting greenhouse gas emissions are already citing the study as a reason for embracing humankind’s CO2 emissions.

The UK lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, for example, has flagged up a 1999 essay by astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, who argued that: “The renewal of ice-age conditions would render a large fraction of the world’s major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population.

“We must look to a sustained greenhouse effect to maintain the present advantageous world climate. This implies the ability to inject effective greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the opposite of what environmentalists are erroneously advocating.”

Luke Skinner said his group had anticipated this kind of reception.

“It’s an interesting philosophical discussion – ‘would we better off in a warm [interglacial-type] world rather than a glaciation?’ and probably we would,” he said.

“But it’s missing the point, because where we’re going is not maintaining our currently warm climate but heating it much further, and adding CO2 to a warm climate is very different from adding it to a cold climate.

Indeed. In fact if we were living in a world where the evidence indicated that a severe Ice Age was imminent, it might arguably be a good idea to increase carbon emissions, or in some other way create conditions that would lead to a Greenhouse Effect in the atmosphere. That’s not really where we are right now, though, and it’s worth noting that we don’t really know how accurate these conclusions are.

I’m sure the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world will point news like this as proof that global warming is a good thing now, which will be a diversion from their typical line that there is no such thing as climate change to which human activity contributes. It’s a simplistic argument, but it’s one that sells easily to the masses. Such, I suppose, is the price of living in a country where scientific literacy is so appallingly ignored.

H/T: Jazz Shaw

As James Joyner noted on Friday, the Republicans scored a minor victory on Friday when the final Fiscal Year 2011 budget bill ended up including a rider that barred the Energy Department from spending money to enforce the regulations on light bulb energy efficiency set to go into effect in January. It turns out, though, that the industry is already on track to phase out the old-style incandescent bulb regardless of what the House GOP might want to do;

Despite all the heated rhetoric and political brinksmanship, the delay hardly matters. The looming possibility of the new standards, signed into law by President Bush in 2007 — and the fact that places like Europe, Australia, Brazil and China have already put similar measures in place or intend to do so — has transformed the industry. A host of more efficient products already line store shelves and poke out of light sockets.

“Bottom line, the standards are moving forward unabated,” said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has promoted the standards. Calling the delay in enforcement a “speed bump,” he added, “Incandescent light bulbs are not going away due to the standard, they are just getting better. The new ones that meet the standard will use 28 percent less power and look and perform exactly like the old one.”

Many of the alternatives to incandescent bulbs are more expensive. But industry executives, government officials and environmental advocates say they often last longer and save money by reducing electric bills. Traditional incandescent bulbs, which essentially use the same technology as Thomas Edison’s original lights, waste most of their energy by converting it to heat instead of light. That problem is largely remedied in newer technologies like compact fluorescent lights (C.F.L.’s) and light-emitting diodes (L.E.D.’s).

The major problems at the moment, of course, is that most C.F.L. bulbs contain small amounts of mercury and generally cannot be disposed of in the trash the way a normal incandescent bulb can. Popular Mechanics noted some years ago that the amount of mercury in the average CFL is roughly 5 milligrams, which isn’t considered a health risk. Nonetheless, the presence of a potentially deadly element in a normal household product has raised some degree of understandable concern among consumers, and has also been exploited by demagogues who seem to be suggesting that your light bulbs will kill you. The disposal issue is an additional inconvenience, a minor one perhaps but still a change from the way things have been, and when you’re taking about a consumer product that has barely changed in 100 years even small changes can be seen as a big deal. As for LED’s, it doesn’t seem we’re there yet, at least not to the extent that light from an LED bulb provide the same natural lighting effect that traditional bulbs do.

In any event, though, the industry is changing, and it’s not entirely thrilled with the GOP right now:

The rider may have advanced GOP talking points about light bulb “freedom of choice,” but it didn’t win them many friends in the industry, who are more interested in their bottom line than political rhetoric.

Big companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania spent big bucks preparing for the standards, and the industry is fuming over the GOP bid to undercut them.

After spending four years and millions of dollars prepping for the new rules, businesses say pulling the plug now could cost them. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association has waged a lobbying campaign for more than a year to persuade the GOP to abandon the effort.

Manufacturers are worried that the rider will undermine companies’ investments and “allow potential bad actors to sell inefficient light bulbs in the United States without any fear of federal enforcement,” said Kyle Pitsor, the trade group’s vice president of government relations.

So, if industry wants these rules, why is the GOP grinding them to a halt? Republicans say they’re pro-choice when it comes to light bulbs.

Conservative groups and tea party favorites in the House, including GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, have accused the government of a heavy-handed attempt to ban incandescent bulbs and limit consumer freedom.

“This wasn’t a light bulb manufacturer to me; this was an issue of the fundamental freedom of the American people and one more area where the federal government was encroaching in a place where it didn’t belong,” said Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, who has backed multiple efforts to block the standards.

It always seemed odd to me that people on the right were investing so much time and energy into what seems to be such a relatively minor issue. Yes, it seems odd that the government decided, seemingly arbitrarily (and under a Republican President), to replace a technology that has worked reliably for 100 years with, as James Joyner put it earlier this year, unproven technology that’s 50 times as expensive. However, in the grand scheme of things, this is hardly the largest intrusion on individual liberty perpetrated by Congress in recent years, many of which the self-styled champions of liberty on the right have been strangely silent about. Why the outrage over this, for example, and not a President who  asserts for himself to detain people without trial for an unlimited period of time, or the right to listen in on the private conversations of American citizens who happen to be calling unapproved countries, or to kill American citizens? Every restriction on individual liberty should be objected to, but some are far more important than others, and getting outraged over a light bulb ban while being silent in face of all the rest strikes me as a case of misplaced priorities.

Kevin Drum raises another concern about this issue that I haven’t really seen anyone, left or right, bring up before;

I confess that the unanimous support for these standards from the lighting industry gives me pause. Industries only support laws that will improve their profitability in one way or another, so I assume that this law does exactly that. This is, obviously, not inherently good for consumers.

The American light bulb industry lobbied strongly in favor of these new standards in 2007, and some have suggested that one reason for their support was the fact that it would give them an advantage over incandescent light bulb manufacturers overseas who would have more difficulty retro-fitting their manufacturing facilities to comply with the new regulations. There’s also the fact, noted above, that other nations had already adopted similar standards, so it would obviously be easier for them if one of the largest markets on the planet was on board as well.  Drum is right to be suspicious of the fact that the industry was so eager to see these regulations adopted, because it smacks of the same kind of crony capitalism we usually see when industry and government are in bed together.

Nonetheless, despite the temporary reprieve granted by the budget bill, it seems fairly clear that the incandescent bulb is on its way out. If the technology is there to replace it, that’s great. If this is all the result of yet another corrupt deal between business and government, then I would suggest we’ve all been taken in yet again.

Congressional Republicans got a major concession as price for averting a government shutdown: saving the incandescent light bulb, at least now.

Politico (“Spending bill blocks light bulb standards“):

The shutdown-averting budget bill will block federal light bulb efficiency standards, giving a win to House Republicans fighting the so-called ban on incandescent light bulbs.

GOP and Democratic sources tell POLITICO the final omnibus bill includes a rider defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient.

DOE’s light bulb rules — authorized under a 2007 energy law authored signed by President George W. Bush — would start going into effect Jan. 1. The rider will prevent DOE from implementing the rules through Sept. 30. But Democrats said they could claim a “compromise” by adding language to the omnibus that requires DOE grant recipients greater than $1 million to certify they will upgrade the efficiency of their facilities by replacing any lighting to meet or exceed the 2007 energy law’s standards.

It’s a rather silly issue, especially since the phase out of inefficient bulbs was signed into law by a Republican president (albeit with a brand new Democratic Congress). But it’s one that gained tremendous salience with a public not wishing to be told what to do on something so trivial.

Here’s Mitt Romney on climate change in June:

It seemed like a straightforward question on a second-tier issue: Would Mitt Romney disavow the science behind global warming?

The putative Republican presidential front-runner, eager to prove his conservative bona fides, could easily have said what he knew many in his party’s base wanted to hear.

Instead, the former Massachusetts governor stuck to the position he has held for many years — that he believes the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to that pattern.

Romney’s answer to the question about climate change last Friday during his first town hall meeting since announcing his second presidential campaign allowed him to demonstrate what he hopes voters will see as a new and improved candidate — an authentic leader with core convictions.

But the exchange in New Hampshire also served as a fresh indicator of Romney’s great quandary. He must shed the flip-flopper reputation that haunted his last presidential campaign while also appealing to conservative voters wary of his past support for near-universal health care, abortion rights, same-sex marriage and other positions befitting a politician elected in liberal Massachusetts.

So far, Romney’s reviews from the right are not positive. His views about climate change in particular put him at odds with many in his party’s base.

“Bye-bye, nomination,” Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday on his radio talk show after playing a clip of Romney’s climate remark. “Another one down. We’re in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it.”

Then came the Club for Growth, which issued a white paper criticizing Romney. “Governor Romney’s regulatory record as governor contains some flaws,” the report said, “including a significant one — his support of ‘global warming’ policies.”

And Conservatives4Palin.com, a blog run by some of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s more active supporters, posted an item charging that Romney is “simpatico” with President Obama after he “totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax.”

A Romney spokeswoman declined to comment about the criticism but did provide excerpts from Romney’s 2009 book, “No Apology ,” in which the candidate articulates the same environmental positions.

Here’s Mitt Romney on climate change in Pittsburgh earlier this week:

My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us.

National Review’s Katrina Trinko tries to argue that Romney really hasn’t changed his position here:

In June, Romney made similar comments, saying, “I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer. … I believe that humans contribute to that. I don’t know how much our contribution is to that.”

So while Romney did not specifically mention that he believed humans are partially responsible for climate change in these comments, he has previously been careful to stress how little is known about what causes climate change and how he himself is uncertain over how much of it is caused by humans. It looks like it would have been more precise for him to have said “we don’t know fully what’s causing climate change …” and noted that he believes humans are playing some role, but this is not the first time Romney has stressed how little is known about what is causing climate change.

Nice parsing there, but it strikes me that this just plays into the general perception on the right that Romney will do whatever it takes to get elected. How else to explain backing away from the position he took in June?

“The science is not settled on this.  The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense,” Perry said.  “Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said here is the fact. Galileo got outvoted for a spell,” he said. (source)

The video is here:

The first thing that struck me about this was the phrase “The science is not settled” as that has been the conservative mantra on evolution for decades.  It is also a phrase that demonstrates an ignorance of what science is and how it works.  It is like the favorite “evolution is just a theory!”

A corollary to this is that Huntsman’s position, i.e., that science has to be taken seriously, is currently rejected, in general, by the GOP candidates (and, by extension, many GOP voters).

It is one think to disagree over the appropriate policy responses to the science, but yet another to simply dismiss science out of hand because one doesn’t like what it is saying.

The second thing that struck me is the Galileo line.  I think that the best retort to the deployment of said scientist comes from James Fallows:

To spell it out: until this evening’s debate, the only reason anyone would use the example of Galileo-vs-the-Vatican was to show that for reasons of dogma, close-mindedness, and “faith-based” limits on inquiry, the findings of real science were too often ignored or ruled out of consideration. And Perry applies that analogy to his argument that we shouldn’t listen to today’s climate scientists? There are a million good examples of scientific or other expert consensus that turned out to be wrong, which is the point Perry wanted to make.

[...]

The reason I think this stings over time is that it’s like someone who tries to fancy himself up by using a great big word — and uses it the wrong way.  Hey, I’ll mention Galileo! Unfortunately in mentioning him, I’ll show that I don’t know the first thing about that case or what an “analogy” is. It’s better to be plain spoken.

This is on target, methinks.

Indeed, Perry presented this analogy as if Galileo was caught up in a scientific battle with other scientists when, in fact, he was the scientist battling non-scientists.  As such, governor, that analogy does not mean what you think it means (or, to. paraphrase a debate line from many years ago:  you, governor, are no Galileo).

The third thing that struck me is that everything Perry said will resonate with a lot of voters.  A lot of voters, especially in the GOP base, do not believe the science, and even if they are unsure on the subject, they tend to believe that all talk of climate change is just an excuse for liberals to destroy the economy (as such, like everything GOP these days, the opposition to even discussing climate change is based in concerns about higher taxes and more regulations).

Yesterday, the Obama Administration announced that the President had rejected a proposed new rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that was aimed at reducing smog in the atmosphere:

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Business groups and Republicans in Congress had complained that meeting the new standard, which governs emissions of so-called ground-level ozone, would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The White House announcement came barely an hour after another weak jobs report from the Labor Department and in the midst of an intensifying political debate over the impact of federal regulations on job creation that is already a major focus of the presidential campaign.

The president is planning a major address next week on new measures to stimulate employment. Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail have harshly criticized a number of the administration’s environmental and health regulations, which they say are depressing hiring and forcing the export of jobs.

The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion. The change would have thrown hundreds of American counties out of compliance with the Clean Air Act and required a major enforcement effort by state and local officials, as well as new emissions controls at industries across the country.

The administration will try to follow the more lenient Bush administration standard set in 2008 until a scheduled reconsideration of acceptable pollution limits in 2013. Environmental advocates vowed on Friday to challenge that standard in court, saying it is too weak to protect public health adequately.

Not surprisingly, environmental groups are not happy about the decision, and they’re clearly frustrated by the fact that the President seems to think that they have nowhere else to go politically:

For green groups, President Barack Obama’s retreat on ozone standards is another reason to question how aggressively they want to support his reelection in 2012.

Even more bruising: The realization that they may not have much choice.

“We have no place else left to go but home,” said one official at a major environmental group, speaking on background Friday. “So the enviros come out looking weak once again because of today and we’re all screaming bloody murder.

“But you know what,” the official said. “At the end of the day, I don’t think the White House is unhappy to hear us complain.”

That could be a dangerous assumption for the administration to make, warned activist Ralph Nader, the former Green Party candidate who siphoned off enough votes in 2000 to deny the White House to Al Gore.

“I know [Obama] thinks all these people voted for him and they have nowhere to go in 2012 because the Republicans are worse,” said Nader, speaking during yet another day of White House protests against a proposed tar-sands-oil pipeline from Canada. “But they can stay home.

They can closet their enthusiasm. They can end their contributions to him. And that’s not what he needs to be reelected.”

A similar warning came from MoveOn Executive Director Justin Ruben, calling the ozone decision just the latest in a series of disappointments.

“Many MoveOn members are wondering today how they can ever work for President Obama’s reelection, or make the case for him to their neighbors, when he does something like this, after extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, and giving in to tea party demands on the debt deal,” Ruben said in a statement. “This is a decision we’d expect from George W. Bush.”

The reaction on the left side of the blogosphere evidences the same level of frustration. Daily Kos calls the Administration’s explanation for its decision “blatantly preposterous.”  Lawyers, Guns & Money laments the compromises made by yet another President that the environmental lobby had pinned its hopes on:

The president’s greatest power on environmental issues is through the executive branch and working with regulatory agencies. We saw George W. Bush do this very effectively-he wanted to eviscerate environmental regulations and he did. But Obama has generally refused to go down this road. While I think most of us were encourage by the appointment of Stephen Chu as Secretary of Energy, his appointment of Ken Salazar as opposed to someone like Raul Grijalva as Secretary of the Interior was very disappointing. Salazar has always been friendly to the energy industry and we’ve seen his Department of the Interior follow that path. Obama has not been strong on rallying for the National Park Service (which provides jobs, good environmental management considering the number of visitors and a big place in Americans’ hearts). He hasn’t pushed much for wilderness or new protections for federal lands. He signed the wilderness bill in 2009, but that was drafted before he took office.

Like most other issues, Obama caved on clean energy pretty fast, opening up drilling off the Atlantic Coast, apparently thinking this would get petroleum companies behind his energy policy, which showed his typical naivete when it comes to how Washington works. He stopped deepwater drilling after last year’s oil spill but that’s on its way back to pre-spill heights with no real additional regulations to prevent future problems.

And now we see Obama opposing the rules on clean air developed by his own EPA, apparently because he buys into the idea that environmental regulations hurt the economy and cause unemployment, an assertion commonly repeated but without empirical evidence.

It’s all extremely discouraging.

Of course it is, but that’s because the President doesn’t just represent the environmental lobby and isn’t just in office to enforce their idea of utopia. He represents the nation as a whole, and he has to consider the entire national interest when he’s making decisions like this one. Despite what the excerpt above claims, it’s fairly obvious that regulations that increase the cost cost of doing business do have an impact on economic growth, which in turn has an impact on hiring and unemployment. At some point, a trade off needs to be made between environmental purity and other national interests, and it’s not at all clear to me that the Administration made a mistake here, even if you accept the arguments of the environmentalists. Making it more expensive to do business while the economy teeters on the brink of another recession makes no sense whatsoever, and the Administration would have been irresponsible to allow that to happen.

Digging deeper, though, you find that these proposed rules were so stringent that compliance likely would’ve been prohibitively expensive for businesses in many parts of the country:

Critics say the new EPA target levels are overly burdensome and unrealistic.

“The EPA has set the proposed range so low, between 60 and 70 ppb, that they’re getting very close to background levels,” Alicia Meads, energy and resources policy director for the National Association of Manufacturers, said. “So, essentially, if the EPA sets it close to 60 ppb, areas like Yellowstone National Park are going to be in non-attainment.”

In addition to expected job losses, Meads said costs for meeting these new regulations would be split between local governments, small businesses and industry.

In a letter to Obama urging him to stop these regulations, a coalition between NAM and 35 state-level manufacturing associations cites a Manufacturers Alliance study that estimates the EPA’s new ozone regulations would eliminate 7.3 million jobs by 2020.

If local governments refuse to comply with these mandates, Mike McKenna of the American Energy Alliance said they will put their federal highway funds in jeopardy. The EPA could also take over the local government and develop a plan for them.

According to McKenna, athough the EPA doesn’t administer federal highway funding, the Clean Air Act gives the agency the power to withhold the funding if local governments don’t follow its mandates.

Based on this, it seems clear to me that the President made the right decision here. Even if you believe that the already existing rules need to be strengthened, and that isn’t clear by any means, these rules clearly went too far and clearly should not have been implemented in a time of economic stagnation. What environmentalists don’t seem to understand in situations like this is that there’s a cost-benefit analysis that needs to be made when considering regulations like this, and, sometimes, the cost far outweighs the benefit. This was one of those times.

The investigation into the federally guaranteed loans to the now-bankrupt solar energy firm Solyndra has already begin, and ABC News reports that House investigators the White House became directly involved in the loan application process in order assist Solyndra in obtaining the loans that it has now defaulted on:

House investigators said they have uncovered evidence that White House officials became personally involved in an Energy Department review of a hot-button $535 million loan guarantee to the now-failed California solar company Solyndra.

The allegation surfaced in a letter House Energy Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) sent to the White House Thursday night, saying he planned to accelerate efforts to understand an investment deal that may have left taxpayers out half a billion dollars.

“We have learned from our investigation that White House officials monitored Solyndra’s application and communicated with [Department of Energy] and Office of Management and Budget officials during the course of their review,” the letter says.

Thursday’s letter, which calls on the White House to turn over correspondence between administration officials, Solyndra and its investors, presents the most pointed suggestion that the White House had direct involvement in the financing.

“How did this company, without maybe the best economic plan, all of a sudden get to the head of the line?” Upton told ABC News in an interview this week. “We want to know who made this decision … and we’re not going to stop until we get those answers.”

This isn’t necessarily a new revelation. Way back on May 24th, ABC News was reporting the Administration had cut corners on behalf of the firm in order to get the loan approved:

The Obama administration bypassed procedural steps meant to protect taxpayers as it hurried to approve an energy loan guarantee to a politically-connected California solar power startup, ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News have learned.

The Energy Department in March 2009 announced its intention to award Solyndra Inc. a $535 million loan guarantee before receiving final copies of outside reviews typically used to vet such deals. An independent federal auditor who has reviewed the energy loan program said moving so quickly without completing thorough reviews risked exposing the program to claims of political influence and put taxpayers at greater risk.

“There’s a consequence if you don’t follow a rigorous process that’s transparent,” said Franklin Rusco, an analyst with the Government Accountability Office. “It makes the agency more susceptible to outside pressures, potentially.”

The Solyndra loan guarantee, advertised by the administration as part of its signature effort to create jobs while weaning the U.S. from traditional energy sources, already has drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have requested documents from the Energy Department as part of an investigation into how the company qualified for government support and then, a year later, closed a plant, laid off workers, and eventually had to renegotiate the terms of the loan guarantee. The shortcuts at the dawn of the deal identified by government auditors have stoked more questions.

The Energy Department said at the time that they had gathered enough independent evidence to approve the loan. However, one of the the key investors in Solyndra was the Oklahoma-based George Kaiser Family Foundation. George Kaiser, who heads the foundation, is a billionaire who also happens to a man who raised large amounts of money for Barack Obama. That, combined with the reported intervention by White House officials, raises some significant questions about the role the White House played in getting a company with a terrible balance sheet a multi-million dollar federally guaranteed loan. As it turns out, though, Solyndra isn’t the only company with connections to the Obama White House that got such loans:

Several political allies of the president have ties to companies receiving Energy Department loans, grants or loan guarantees. For instance, the venture firm of another top Obama bundler, Steve Westly, has financially supported companies that won more than half a billion dollars in energy grants and loans during President Obama’s time in office, iWatch News and ABC News reported in March. Relatively few applicants succeed in winning such benefits. The Energy Department said every one of those awards was won on merit.

Perhaps that will turn out to be the case, but based on the before and after picture of Solyndra it’s pretty clear that the criteria the government was using to determine the viability of the companies it was loaning money to was nowhere near adequate. As I said yesterday, this is by no means surprising. Government bureaucrats simply don’t have the incentive to be careful with these types of decision in the manner that private investment managers do, because they face no consequences for being wrong. That. faced with the possibility of political pressure from the White House, is yet another reason why Government should not be in the venture capital business to begin with.

Rich Lowry calls this “Obama’s Enron.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but at the very least it does call into question the credibility of the Administration’s entire “Green Jobs” initiative and, if political pressure was indeed applied to the Energy Department then it’s a serious public integrity problem to say the very least. Count on hearing the name Solyndra in the news a lot over the coming months.

H/T: Mediaite

In a move that may cause some of his boosters on the right to recoil in distaste, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie parted with conservative orthodoxy on Global Warming:

In case anyone had any doubts on where Gov. Chris Christie stands on climate change, he made his position crystal clear this afternoon: It’s real and it’s a problem.

In vetoing a bill (S2946) that would have required New Jersey to stay in a regional program intended to curb greenhouse gases — a program Christie plans to leave by the end of the year — the governor said “climate change is real.”

He added that “human activity plays a role in these changes” and that climate change is “impacting our state.”

Christie’s words are his strongest to date in regards to climate change, a hot-button issue among the same conservatives nationwide who are clamoring for the governor to enter the 2012 presidential race.

This is a change from the position that Christie took last year when he was asked about the issue and expressed skepticism about the role that human activity might play in changing the earth’s climate. It’s not an entirely unexpected changed, though. When Christie announced that New Jersey was pulling out of a compact among Northeastern states that was designed to reduce greenhouse gases, he said he was doing so because he didn’t think the program was working as intended, not because he doubted the science:

Christie’s stance on climate change shouldn’t really come as a surprise, though. He has opposed offshore drilling for oil and liquified natural gas off of New Jersey’s coast sinc he started his campaign for Governor, and has come out in favor of increased investment in solar and wind energy. These are not uncommon stands for a Republican in New Jersey, or anywhere else in the Northeast for that matter. Recently, Christie has been making an effort to highlight his environmental record, focusing on protection of the Jersey Shore (the beaches, not the television show), which is the state’s top tourist destination.

Of course, the Governor’s comments echo those made earlier this week by Jon Huntsman, of course, and while I have yet to see any reaction to Christie’s comments from bloggers on the right, it will be interesting to see how this impacts the Christie boomlet that we’ve seen of late. At the same time, I fail to see why Christie’s comments should be all that controversial. As he noted, the vast majority of climate scientists accept the idea that human activity has contributed significantly to changes in the Earth’s climate, and that worldwide average temperatures are, in fact, rising. Why  this should be a political issue at all is incredibly puzzling. This is science, not a matter of opinion, and unless you believe that the entire scientific community is engaged in some vast conspiracy to lie to the world, then it seems to make sense to accept what they’ve said. What we do with that information, of course, is a different story.

Perhaps Christie’s celebrity status on the right will shield him from criticism on this issue. Nonetheless, the reaction to Huntsman’s statement this week laid bare the antipathy to science on the right, and the rather idiotic manner in which conservatives deal with this issue. As I noted back in May, it doesn’t have to be this way:

There’s a way of approaching this issue intelligently. Unfortunately, largely because of a view on the right that seems to say any discussion of “climate change” as the pathway to communism, it’s an impossible one to have.

And when conservatives take the pronunciations of talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh on this issue more seriously than they do the words of actual scientists, the odds of having a rational discussion with them about climate change decrease exponentially.

One of the regular themes of the old OTB Radio program* was that a major obstacle to hybrid vehicles dominating the market was that we couldn’t make enough batteries. President Obama apparently wasn’t a listener (it’s understandable; he’s a busy man). Among the pie-in-the-sky programs rattled off during January’s State of the Union was a goal of a million of these cars on the road by 2015.

While the target is, coincidentally I’m sure, happily after Obama’s political fate is sealed, the goal is highly unlikely absent either radical changes in technology overnight or an increase in the supply of the necessary rare earth elements.

Lee Allison, state geologist and Director of the Arizona Geological Survey, provides this handy chart of what goes into the Toyota Prius:

The problem is threefold: The demand is high, the supply is limited, and the major supplier is China–with Russia and Brazil controlling most of the rest. Oh, and China is moving to keep more of its supply at home.

Business Insider‘s Jim Powell.

The overall EMM market isn’t huge, but it’s large enough to leave room for other suppliers. At this time, China supplies more than 98% of that market. Fluorspar is used in acids and fluorine-based chemicals, so a lot of chemical companies need it, as do steel and aluminum manufacturers. Fluorspar is more than 50% supplied by China.

Graphite’s another mineral that’s also controlled largely by China. There used to be a fair number of producers in North America and Europe, but most of them shut down over the last 10 years as China outpriced them in the market. Graphite is a refractory used primarily in nuclear reactors and batteries. Actually, there’s more graphite than lithium in lithium-ion batteries.

Tungsten is somewhat underappreciated for what it does. It’s widely used in tooling, in the mining industry—even in products, such as the Blackberry. Those little vibration elements used in the Blackberry are made of tungsten. China currently produces in excess of 80% of the global supply of tungsten with a handful of minor suppliers in Canada and Russia sharing the rest.

Of course, China also dominates the supply of rare earths, which are pretty mainstream because even though it’s a very tiny market, REEs are very critical elements. There are lots of investment options there—almost too many.

As to the recent attempts by China to curb REE exports, Powell notes “we have a somewhat unreliable supplier—one that may at any time just use it internally to satisfy its own demand.”

Tudor Van Hampton of the NYT Wheels blog argues that we should bypass some of these problems by looking for alternative technologies.

One such technology, called switched reluctance, might offer a viable alternative. It uses a steel rotor that spins freely inside a housing of wires. Controlled by complex algorithms and solid-state switchgear, the motor can turn at variable speeds and at high torque levels.

“Essentially, you can get the same type of performance without needing to use rare-earth magnets,” said Scott Nieberle, a vice president at Nidec Motor Corporation, a switched-reluctance motor manufacturer based in St. Louis.

Amusingly, while Nidec Motor is “based in St. Louis,” its parent, Nidec Corporation, is Japanese and owns most of the related patents. Regardless, the technology, which has been in use going on three decades, hasn’t yet been adapted for automotive use. So, we’re going to be dependent on REEs for the foreseeable future.

While the Russians and Brazilians are catching up, American companies are just getting into the game. As Daniel McGroarty notes at the American Resources Policy Network,

Right now, China provides 97 percent of global Rare Earths production.  The U.S. provides a fraction of one percent.  But shift to known reserves – the potential to provide future supply – and the numbers tell a different story:  China has 36 percent of known reserves, with the U.S. accounting for 13 to 15 percent.

With China keeping more and more of its Rare Earth elements off of the world market, how does the Administration expect the automotive industry to reach its goal in four years without exploring the resources available to us in America?

Curious as to how the Administration is hampering exploration, I reached out to McGroarty, who explained via email,

The annual Behre Dolbear Report rates the U.S. last (of all 25 countries assessed) in terms of length of the permitting process, which typically runs 7 to 10 years or more.  In contrast, Industrialized nations like Australia review and permit new mining projects in 1 to 2 years — and do so without abandoning environmental and safety standards.  It’s time U.S. policymakers assessed the impact of the permitting process — at all levels of government — with the goal of removing unnecessary obstacles to resource development.  Market signals are encouraging U.S. development, and capital will flow to worthy projects.  The last piece is to align policy in a way that promotes responsible domestic development and decreases unnecessary foreign dependency.

The report, “2011 Ranking of Countries for Mining Investment,” is available in PDF form here. It’s worth noting that the United States is ranked among the highest countries in terms of the economic and political systems and have the highest possible rating (along with only Canada and Australia) for least corruption; we remain a great place to invest because of stability, the rule of law, ease of movement, and so forth. But, as McGroarty notes, we are awful in terms of permitting delays–and not just compared to authoritarian states that don’t care about the environment. Indeed, Australia is the highest-rated country in this category.

Most countries have environmental regulations equal, at a minimum, to the standards established by TheWorld Bank Group. The issue addressed here is not the strength of the regulations but the timeframeinvolved in obtaining permits. Contributing to delays are intervention by NGOs opposed to miningdevelopment; groups with legitimate concerns about the effect a project will have on their community orlifestyle; and, often, corruption on the part of bureaucrats in poorer countries.

Permitting delays are now a global issue. With the internet everywhere, issues at operations in onecountry become the concerns and examples to be used against a completely unrelated mining projectelsewhere. As this situation continues to evolve, the business environment will likely favor firms that aggressively take a proactive stance concerning societal and environmental issues. This will not guarantee success though, as corruption and other factors could still scuttle otherwise viable projects.

[...]

Permitting delays in the United States are the most significant risk to mining projects. A few miningfriendly states (Nevada, Utah, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Arizona) are an exception to this rule but arenegatively impacted by federal rules that they are bound to enforce. The United States is ranked lowest, ata 1 due to the average 7- to 10-year period required before mine development can begin.

In terms of Behre Dolbear’s overall rankings, the United States does quite well, ranking 6th overall with 41 points out of 70. But Australia (57), Canada (52), and Chile (51) are well ahead of us and  Brazil (45) and Mexico (44) are above us, too.  Matching Australia on permitting speed would catapult us the the top tier with 49 points. And matching Canada on taxes would put us at second place with 53.  Getting to the top spot would require addressing myriad things Behre Dolbear lump together as “social issues,” which refers mostly to environmentalism and general attitudinal factors towards mining that are not easily solvable. Indeed, the United States gets a double hit in this regard, in that these “social issues” doubtless explain most of the permitting delays.

It’s unlikely we can catch up to the Chinese, who not only have a substantial head start but an autocratic regime that completely prioritizes extraction over long-term environmental concerns. That’s neither politically possible here nor, frankly, something we want to emulate. We don’t want to compete in a race to the bottom. But I’m completely comfortable competing with the likes of Australia and Canada on an even regulatory and taxation footing.

_______________
*We went into hiatus after BlogTalkRadio changed their business model to a pay-to-podcast format and my search for a viable alternative ended without success.

Unlike Mitt Romney, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum isn’t straying from the conservative line on the issue of climate change:

Rick Santorum is no Mitt Romney when it comes to global warming science.

Appearing Wednesday on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, the former Pennsylvania GOP senator jumped at the chance to distinguish himself from his Massachusetts rival by displaying his climate skeptic credentials.

“I believe the earth gets warmer and I also believe the earth gets cooler,” Santorum said. “And I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man, through the production of CO2 — which is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the man-made part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas — is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all the other factors, El Niño, La Niña, sunspots, moisture in the air. There’s a variety of factors that contribute to the Earth warming and cooling.”

Santorum’s remarks contrast with those of Romney, who on Friday told a town hall crowd in Manchester, N.H., that “I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that.”

Limbaugh blasted Romney on his radio show for the remarks. “Bye-bye, nomination,” the conservative commentator said.

Later in the program, he turned to Santorum for comment. Unlike Romney and some of the other GOP presidential candidates, the former senator has never backed cap-and-trade legislation or other mandatory policies to curb greenhouse gases.

“To me, this is an opportunity for the left to create — it’s really a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm,” Santorum said. “And so it’s been on a warming trend so they said, ‘Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer.’ Just like they did in the ’70s when it was getting cooler. They needed the government to come in and regulate your life because it’s getting cooler.

“It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life,” Santorum added. “And I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.”

Santorum’s comment strikes me as a perfect example of what’s wrong with the way both sides of the political aisle handle the “climate change” debate (and calling it “climate change” is really kind of silly because the climate is always changing). As I see it, the issue really involves three separate questions, only one of which is political:

I. Is the climate of the Earth changing?

This is in many ways, both the most simplistic, and the most important, question of all. The short answer is, yes the climate is changing. We know from examining fossil records, stone stratas, sediments in the ocean, and ice cores from both poles that the climate has changed dramatically, and many times, over the 4.5 billion years or that the Earth has been a functioning ecosystem. According to some theories, it was dramatic and quick changes in the climate that led to many of the mass extension periods that the Earth has experienced over its lifetime, including the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and made the rise of mammals possible. We also know that temporary changes in the climate can occur, such as the various Ice Ages that have shaped the geography of Europe and North America, the “Little Ice Age” of the 16th through 19th Centuries, and the worldwide climate change that happened after the eruption of Mount Krakatoa.

So, yes, the climate is changing, it’s changed before and it will change again. That’s what a living ecosystem does.

The more complicated question is whether the present climate is changing at a faster rate in the past, or at least at a faster rate than we might be able to adapt to without causing major property loss from rising sea levels and disruptions to agriculture. Here, the consensus seems to be that the global climate is changing at a rapid pace, for example there seem to be major changes occurring in Arctic to the point where there might actually be a Northwest Passage in 40 years or so. Given that this is science, though, there’s disagreement on many of these issues. and at least some suggestion that some of the data supporting the consensus hypothesis may be exaggerated. But this is a scientific question, not a political one. Asking a political candidate there opinion on this issue strikes me as making about as much sense as asking them how they feel about String Theory or Quantum Physics. Unless they are actually trained in the field, they aren’t going to know what they’re talking about.

Which brings us to the second question

II. What is causing the climate to change?

Since it’s already pretty clear that the climate of the Earth changes on an ongoing basis, this strikes me as being somewhat of a trick question. The climate will change no matter what conscious or unconscious choice we make. Man is as much part of the ecosystem as cows and whales are, and we all impact the environment in different ways. In fact, man has been impacting the climate of the Earth since the day that the first caveman lit the first fire, sending carbon and other elements into the air. Again, this strikes me as a scienitific question rather than a political, but it’s the one that gets wrapped up the most in politics.

Among some environmentalists, it seems as though the attitude exists that man is somehow an irritant to the Earth’s ecosystem, rather than part of it. They seem to give more of a moral claim to cows, or forest fires, than they do to human beings who build a factory that makes clothes to keep them warm. This is both illogical, and entirely wrong. Man is part of the environment, but that doesn’t mean he has to live like a savage, or that his civilization is a bad thing. The Earth would continue exist if we weren’t around, but it would be a planet full of animals who act mostly on instinct, not an intelligent species. We shouldn’t have to apologize for who we are, and we shouldn’t have to harm our standard of living in the name of some idiotic vision of Gaia.

On the right, though, things aren’t much better. They don’t seem to think we need to worry about anything we do, that we could have continued belching unfitted soot into the skies without worrying about it. That’s simply foolish, as anyone who lived in the Northeastern United States in the 70s and 80s and remembers the term “acid rain” can tell you. Treating the environment foolishly is, well, foolish. And answering the environmentalists by saying we don’t need to do anything is little more than putting your hands over your eyes and playing a game of “See No Evil.”

So, that brings us to the final question.

III. What, if anything, should we do to avert climate change?

This is the only question that I think is wholly political, because it involves making appropriate choices, and keeping in mind a few simple facts.

First, even if we turned off every bit of electricity and every device that spews carbon into the atmosphere, it would likely have very little impact on the immediate future. Not even counting the widespread use of fire before then, the Industrial Revolution has been a fact of life on Earth for more than 200 years, if there is any impact to be had from that, we’re going to feel it whether we like it or not. Of course, doing something like this would be entirely unreasonable, but then so would imposing onerous restrictions on automobile companies that result in more expensive cars that don’t necessarily contribute much to “saving” the environment. There needs to be a cost benefit analysis that takes in account the costs that any of these ideas imposes on society along with the supposed benefits they would bring about, because not every “pro-environment” reform is worth the costs it would impose. We also need to reconsider the idea of whether using a command-and-control model to bring about these changes is really the best way to do things. Several environmental economists have written over the past several years about so-called “Free Market Environmentalism,” and their ideas ought to be considered.

There’s a way of approaching this issue intelligently. Unfortunately, largely because of a view on the right that seems to say any discussion of “climate change” as the pathway to communism, it’s an impossible one to have. Which pretty much describes the status of every important issue facing the country today.

A trio of studies on the effects of organophosphate pesticides on mental development showed one consistent finding: exposure increases the chance of lower IQs and impaired mental development.

These bug killers, which can cross the human placenta, work by inhibiting brain-signaling compounds. Although the pesticides’ residential use was phased out in 2000, spraying on farm fields remains legal.

The three new studies began in the late 1990s and followed children through age 7. Pesticide exposures stem from farm work in more than 300 low-income Mexican-American families in California, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and their colleagues report. In two comparably sized New York City populations, exposures likely trace to bug spraying of homes or eating treated produce.

[...]

Findings from all three studies appear online April 21 in Environmental Health Perspectives.

“There was an amazing degree of consistency in the findings across all three studies,” notes Bruce Lanphear of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. And that’s concerning, he says, because a drop of seven IQ points “is a big deal. In fact, half of seven IQ points would be a big deal, especially when you see this across a population.”

No comment here – this just makes me sick to my stomach. In far too many ways, our modern world resembles an uncontrolled lab experiment. I am very much in favor of the prospect of using technology to improve our way of life, but I wish we would slow down and start looking more deeply into the potential consequences of things before they’re unleashed into the world.

Nitrogen pollution costs Europe between 70 and 320 billion euros ($100bn-$460bn) per year in its impact on health and the environment, according to a major European study launched in Britain on Monday.

[...]

The first European Nitrogen Assessment, the result of a five-year research programme, found that the costs represented more than double the benefits for the continent’s agriculture sector.

The ENA was to be launched Monday at a five-day international conference in Edinburgh.

The study was carried out by 200 experts from 21 countries and 89 organisations, who came up with recommendations on how to reduce the amount of nitrogen in water, the air, the earth and ecosystems.

The solutions, as you might expect, involve going back to more traditional and effective ways of fertilizing the soil.  Nitrogen pollution, especially when it enters rivers as runoff, is particularly nasty.