Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews is author of the new CEI study, “The Other National Debt Crisis: How and Why Congress Must Quantify Regulation.” He discusses a few of his many ideas for deregulating the economy, including a regulatory budget, improved cost analysis, and lowering the threshold of “economically significant” regulations from $100 million to $25 million. This would require OMB to review more than the roughly 5 percent of new rules that it currently analyzes. The other 95 percent should not slip through the cracks.
OMB
One federal government study says federal regulations cost $1.75 trillion. Another says it’s $62 billion. That’s a difference of almost a factor of 30. Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews compares the two, and talks about the hazards of calculating regulatory costs and benefits. As it turns out, $1.75 trillion might be an understatement.
Here’s an excerpt from an early 1980s Office of Management and Budget report:
An agency subject to the provisions of the Federal Reports Act may enter into an arrangement with an organization not subject to the Act whereby the organization not subject to the Act collects information on behalf of the agency subject to the Act. The reverse also occurs.
Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and Marc Scribner collaborate to bring you Episode 83 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We cover the ever-growing deficit, the Reagan legacy, Cablevision v. ABC, the RNC’s fundraising strategy and David Paterson on scandal watch.
Your host Richard Morrison and guest co-hosts William Yeatman and Ryan Young conspire to bring you Episode 64 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the big vote on health care legislation, squeezing more energy from the ground and the warming that wasn’t there. We continue with the British expense scandal, and the Obama administration’s love for new rules and regulations.
In “The Dog Ate Global Warming,” published yesterday in National Review Online, Cato Institute scholar and climatologist Patrick J. Michaels delivers a body blow to the “science is settled” dogma.
There are three core issues in climate change science: detection (Is it warming, and if so by how much); attribution (What’s causing the warming we observe?); and, sensitivity (How much warming will a given increase in greenhouse gas concentrations produce?). As I argue in a previous post, all of these issues remain unsettled, and more so today than at any time in the past decade.
Although climate sensitivity is the most important issue (because if climate sensitivity is low, then there is no “planetary emergency,” hence no need for “urgent action”), detection is in a sense primary, because without reliable temperature data it is impossible to resolve the other two issues.
The claim that the latter half of the 20th century was warmer than any comparable period during the past 1300 years is largely based on surface temperature records subject to several well-known warming biases. Urbanization generates artificial “heat islands.” Agriculture and irrigation in places like California’s Central Valley also produce local warming effects. Retired meteorologist Anthony Watts has documented that nearly nine out of every 10 U.S. weather stations fail to meet the U.S. Weather Service’s minimum requirement that temperature sensing equipment be placed at least 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from artificial heat sources such as air conditioner exhaust vents, waste water treatment plants, and parking lot pavements.
Michaels now exposes the shocking fact that the data allegedly underpinning the most influential surface temperature record are missing and apparently have been destroyed. The record is known as Jones-Wigley for its authors, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The IPCC relied exclusively on this record until its 2001 report.
For years, Jones and Wigley declined to share the raw data from which they constructed their record. Recently, however, Jones told University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. that they could not share their data with him, because the data no longer exist:
Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenized) data.
Michaels says the “data storage availability” excuse is “balderdash,” since “All the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s.”
The bigger point, of course, is that if other scientists cannot examine the raw data, they cannot assess the accuracy and objectivity of the “value-adding” adjustments Jones and Wigley made to produce their global temperature record.
In addition to providing another reason to reject the “science is settled” dogma, disappearance of the Jones-Wigley data is of direct relevance to EPA’s pending endangerment finding. The Jones-Wigley temperature record is part of the evidence on which EPA bases its judgment that “air pollution” from greenhouse gas emissions “endangers public health and welfare.”
Use of the Jones-Wigley temperature record in a rulemaking clearly flouts federal data quality standards. Under OMB guidelines implementing the Federal Data Quality Act, data quality consists of four elements: objectivity, utility to users, integrity of information, and reproducibility in the case of “influential scientific or statistical information.”
Now, if the original Jones-Wigely data have been destroyed, then it is impossible to assure “integrity of information.” For all we know, Jones and Wigley goofed in their calculations or choice of methodologies, or even manipulated the data to produce a pre-determined result. By the same token, it is impossible to “reproduce” the Jones-Wigley temperature record, because there are no data to reproduce it from. Yet, as a factual basis of both the IPCC reports and the EPA endangerment finding, Jones-Wigley indisputably qualifies as “influential scientific or statistical information.”
Michaels’s terse conclusion speaks volumes: “No data, no science.” For decades, Jones-Wigley has been a mainstay of the alleged ”scientific consensus” supporting Kyoto-style energy rationing. Warmists have a lot of explaining to do.
Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent a draft proposed rule to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would exempt small emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2) from Clean Air Act (CAA) pre-construction permitting requirement, Greenwire reports.
The proposed rule, as described in Greenwire, is blatantly illegal. It is a tacit admission that the Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA set the stage for an economic disaster. It is additional evidence that Mass v. EPA was wrongly decided. It confirms CEI’s warning that the Court’s ruling imperils a core constitutional principle — the separation of powers.
In Mass. v. EPA, the Supreme Court, by a narrow 5-4 majority, decided that CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) are “air pollutants” within the meaning of CAA, and gave EPA three options: (1) issue a finding that GHG-related “air pollution” “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” (2) issue a finding of no endangerment, or (3) provide a “reasonable explanation” why the agency cannot or will not exercise its discretion to make such a determination.
The Court further held that if EPA makes a finding of endangerment, then it has a duty, under CAA Sec. 202, to develop and adopt GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles.
EPA picked option (1), and last month, it sent OMB a draft proposed rule to establish GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles.
Although the Court majority asserted that an endangerment finding could not lead to “extreme measures” and would only require a cost-constrained adjustment of existing federal fuel-economy standards (see. p. 28 of the decision), in fact the endangerment finding will trigger a chain reaction throughout the CAA — a regulatory cascade potentially exceeding in cost, scope, and intrusiveness the Kyoto Protocol and many other GHG-control schemes Congress has never seen fit to pass.
For starters, establishing GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles will by definition make CO2 a CAA-regulated air pollutant. As such, CO2 would automatically be ”subject to regulation” under the Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program (CAA Sec. 165). Under the CAA, any firm that plans to build a new “major” stationary source, or modify an existing major source in a way that would significantly increase emissions, must first obtain a PSD permit from EPA or a state environmental agency.
A PSD source is “major” if it is in one of 28 listed categories and has a potential to emit 100 tons per year (TPY) of an air pollutant, or if it is any other type of establishment and has a potential to emit 250 TPY (CAA Sec. 169).
And there’s the rub. Whereas only large industrial facilities have a potential to emit 250 TPY of air contaminants such as sulfur dioxide or particulate matter, an immense number and variety of entities – office buildings, hotels, big box stores, enclosed malls, small manufacturing firms, even commercial kitchens – have a potential to emit 250 TPY of CO2. A September 2008 report commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that 1.2 million buildings and facilities – most of them currently unregulated under the CAA – actually emit 250 TPY of CO2. All would be vulnerable to new PSD regulation, controls, paperwork, penalties, and litigation.
To obtain a PSD permit, firms must document their compliance with ”best available control technology” (BACT) standards. Even apart from any technology investments needed to comply with BACT, the PSD permitting process is costly and time-consuming. In a recent year, each permit on average cost $125,120 and 866 burden hours for a source to obtain, EPA estimates. No small business could operate subject to the PSD administrative burden.
The costs, uncertainties, and delays from applying PSD and BACT to CO2 would have a chilling effect on economic development and construction activity. It would turn the CAA into a gigantic Anti-Stimulus Package in a period of financial crisis and high unemployment. Definitely not something the Obama administration wants on its record in the 2010 election season.
EPA’s July 2008 Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) outlined several administrative remedies to shield small entities from PSD requirements, all of doubtful legality. But if the Greenwire article is accurate, EPA is opting for the most brazenly illegal option of all. It proposes to revise, on its own authority, the PSD threshold from 250 TPY to 25,000 TPY.
Now friends, under the 1984 Supreme Court case of Chevron v. NRDC, EPA has considerable discretionary authority in interpreting the CAA where the statute is “silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue.” But there is nothing ambiguous about the number 250. No matter how you squint at the page, 250 is 100 times smaller than the threshold EPA proposes to put in its place.
According to Greenwire, Sierra Club’s David Bookbinder, a counsel for petitioners in Mass. v. EPA, “said the rule would also deflect claims from Republican lawmakers and industry groups that the Obama administration is seeking to regulate small emission sources such as doughnut shops, schools, and nursing homes.” But the Obama administration’s intent is not the issue. The issue is whether EPA, as a matter of law, must apply PSD requirements to doughnut shops, etc. once it starts regulating CO2 under Sec. 202.
Greenwire then quotes Bookbinder: “Putting this rule in place deflates a lot of political rhetoric about regulating CO2.” Well, I hope industry and the GOP are not so naive as to put their trust in an illegal rule. A rule that flouts clear statutory language of the CAA can provide no durable protection from the regulatory cascade that an endangerment finding and EPA adoption of motor vehicle GHG emission standards would unleash.
EPA’s proposed draft rule is a tacit admission of what CEI has said all along: EPA cannot regulate CO2 under the CAA without endangering the U.S. economy — unless EPA plays lawmaker, amends the Act, and violates the separation of powers. When the Supreme Court handed down the Mass. v. EPA decision, it set the stage for a constitutional crisis.
Of course, the bigger constitutional crisis stemming from Mass. v. EPA is that we could end up with an energy suppression regime far more costly than Kyoto or Waxman-Markey, yet without the people’s elected representatives ever voting on it.
For the gory details, see my blog post on MasterResource.Org and my comment (pp. 28-56) on EPA’s proposed endangerment finding.
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