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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

Email dumps - Palin & U.Va.

FROM-Richmond Times-Dispatch

Blogger Glenn Reynolds recently circulated a comment that highlights yet another glaring inconsistency among the establishment media.

Major organs of the press have been so eager to air the dirty laundry from Sarah Palin's emails — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — that they have turned to "crowdsourcing" to expedite the job. In other words, they're disseminating the material to the general readership so they can find the juicy bits faster.

Contrast that with the vitriol and scorn heaped on conservatives who have requested that the University of Virginia divulge emails written by climatologist Michael Mann when he was employed there. The very idea that anyone would request such private material is an atrocious assault on privacy and academic freedom, is the general view — at least inside liberal echo chambers.

True, Palin and Mann are differently situated. Although both are now private citizens and although all the emails in question were written on the government dime, he has never run for public office, while she has. But the differences are not nearly so great as the manner in which the two cases — or, for that matter, the earlier Climategate email controversy — have been treated.

Repugnant double standards will continue until the day when opinion-makers begin to put principles first and personalities second. That day, we fear, remains very far off. By the way, the Palin emails have redounded to the author's benefit and have left her critics dismayed.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

FROM- Examiner Editorial

Facts explode urban legends of the Left

Koch Industries is a privately held manufacturing and energy conglomerate with more than 70,000 employees and annual revenues of over$100 billion. Larry W. Smith/AP file
Liberals cannot seem to comprehend any policy issue without first identifying themselves as the good guys and somebody else as the bad guys who are to be demonized. In health care, the villains are the insurance companies; in finance, Goldman Sachs; and in energy and politics, it is the Koch brothers, Charles and David. The Kochs own and operate Koch Industries, a privately held manufacturing and energy conglomerate with more than 70,000 employees and revenues of more than $100 billion annually. The Kochs are also politically active libertarians and devoted advocates of free-market capitalism. In addition to providing seed money for the libertarian Cato Institute, they also helped found FreedomWorks, which has been credited with helping to organize Tea Party events. The Kochs also donate money to multiple candidates who oppose higher energy taxes and have spent millions of their own dollars lobbying against those policies in Congress.

But in recent days the Left has greatly exaggerated the Kochs' tactics and influence. The brain trust for the Obama White House, the Center for American Progress, appears to have made it their central mission to demonize the Kochs. Liberal mainstream media outlets like MSNBC have seconded that messaging, thus helping to put the brothers at the heart of a growing leftist urban legend. Reading CAP's blog, ThinkProgress, for example, one would think the Kochs single-handedly defeated Obama's cap-and-trade legislation.

Just this week, the Nation claimed to have exposed an effort by Koch Industries to practice "thought control" on their employees. What the Nation actually had was a benign packet of materials distributed by Koch Companies managers telling employees about state and federal candidates the company's political action committee was supporting (also included in the packet was a reprint of an article from this newspaper). The packet's cover letter explicitly stated: "Of course, deciding who to vote for is a decision that is yours and yours alone, based on factors important to you." The Nation left that part out. ThinkProgress falsely claimed the packet "instructed" employees how to vote.

The Koch legend is so powerful that conventional wisdom on the Left holds that the main reason environmentalists failed to pass cap and trade in the last Congress was they were outspent by the Kochs, with their sinister network of foundations and activist groups on the Right. But now comes an exhaustive new 84-page study by American University public policy communications scholar Matthew Nisbet that documents the false nature of such claims. According to Nisbet, nine liberal foundations spent at least $368 million promoting cap-and-trade-like policies between 2008 and 2010. In contrast, Koch-affiliated foundations spent only $31.3 million.

Unfortunately, instead of correcting the Left's false narratives, President Obama actively feeds them. The cross-country campaign kickoff that Obama is finishing up today was supposed to focus on his deficit reduction ideas. Instead, Obama quickly found out that voters want to talk about high gas prices. Unwilling to embrace the common-sense solution of increasing domestic energy supplies, Obama told a town hall in Reno, Nev., that Attorney General Eric Holder would investigate "the role of traders and speculators" in manipulating gas prices. Holder's "investigation" is pure political theater because, like the Koch brother legend, the idea that speculators cause high gas prices is a complete fiction. Speculators are betting prices will increase, but they don't have to force them upwards. Obama is taking care of that job for them.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

FROM-Washington Examiner

EPA's days as 'rogue agency' are numbered

Lost in the kabuki-dance drama of last week's budget showdown were immensely important votes in the Senate and House on the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to govern through regulation. In the House, 19 Democrats joined the Republican majority in a decisive 255-172 vote to defund the EPA's attempt to circumvent Congress and begin its own cap-and-trade program.

The measure was introduced by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton of Michigan. A companion measure introduced in the Senate by Sen. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, fell just short of the votes needed for passage, despite support from three Democrats.

Supporters of the EPA effort should think twice before cheering the outcome of the Senate vote because, while the regulatory initiative is safe for now, the prospects for its long-term survival are dim, prompting Politico to headline a recent story, "EPA holds on for dear life." The reason the outlook is so grim for the EPA on this issue is the fact that a growing number of congressional Democrats have had enough of being threatened by executive branch political appointees.

The threats started in 2009 when EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson warned that her agency would move with a regulatory version of cap and trade if Congress failed to approve President Obama's legislative version of the program. Predictably, the House, led then by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, approved the Obama bill by a wide margin. But things stalled in the Senate prior to the 2010 midterm congressional election. When Democratic Senate candidate Joe Manchin of West Virginia won election after running a well-publicized TV spot featuring him putting a bullet from a high-powered rifle through a target labeled "cap and trade," Jackson moved to make good on her threat.

Shortly after the House vote last week, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif. -- who opposed the Upton measure -- told Politico that a growing number of his Democratic colleagues were beginning to view the EPA as a "rogue agency." He added, "I think the president's out of step on this one, and he's going to have to get his agency under control."

Despite the setback last week, Inhofe was upbeat because on the four separate votes that were held on his proposal and three alternatives, a total of 64 senators voted to restrain EPA to one degree or another. Inhofe promised to bring the issue back to the Senate in the near future and noted: "When all is said and done, a bipartisan majority in the Senate issued a sobering message to EPA: Its cap-and-trade agenda is wearing thin, suggesting it's time to reverse course to put Congress back in charge of America's energy policy." Obama and Jackson should heed Inhofe's warning.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

FROM-San Diego Union -Tribune

Energy mandates ignore real world

By Union-Tribune Editorial Board

Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 12:01 a.m.

Gov. Jerry Brown is expected in coming days to sign a bill requiring that 33 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2020, much more than the present requirement of 20 percent. This is by far the most ambitious plan of any state, spurred by a determination to reduce the emissions that contribute to global warming and to stop sending billions of dollars each year to oil-producing nations with troubling agendas.

But on two fronts, there is a quality of make-believe to the legislation.

For starters, given the extent of opposition to renewable-energy projects, California was going to struggle to meet the 20 percent requirement by 2020, much less a 33 percent standard.

Who are the most powerful opponents? As has been widely reported in the state and national media, it’s members of the same environmental movement that has led the fight for cleaner energy.

“NIMBY activism has blocked more renewable projects than coal-fired power plants by organizing local opposition, changing zoning laws, opposing permits, filing lawsuits and using other long delay mechanisms, effectively bleeding projects dry of their financing,” concluded a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce report on the obstacles facing green-energy firms, which are often thwarted despite having governmental support and billions of venture capital.

This problem is amply evident in our own backyard with the many attempts to block solar and wind projects in Southern California deserts.

The air of make-believe surrounding the legislation continues with the never-ending attempts to depict a forced shift to cleaner but much costlier energy as a big boon to the larger California economy.

Independent experts hired to evaluate the California Air Resources Board’s upbeat study of the effects of mandating costlier power ridiculed this claim. Indirectly, at least, so did President Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu. He testified to Congress that the U.S. would be at a competitive disadvantage with its economic rivals if it shifted unilaterally to cleaner but costlier energy.

This isn’t rocket science. Energy costs are a key component of many industries, especially manufacturing. Yet even with California’s unemployment at 12 percent for the past year and a half, state leaders want to place a unique new burden on our economy.

Which brings us to an odd twist related to this legislation’s first make-believe element: If green activists prevent construction of renewable-energy plants in California, it may keep energy costs down.

This editorial page thinks there needs to be concerted global action on climate change. We hope that green technology born and made in California helps this global effort. We think most Californians agree with us.

But that doesn’t mean we should have a state energy policy that ignores the powerful green opposition to green goals and Chu’s warning. It’s time for Brown and the Legislature to get real.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

FROM-Washington Times


EDITORIAL: Al Gore’s seawater swindle
Latest report shows oceans are not rising

Eighteen years ago, Al Gore warned that Florida’s coastal regions would one day be wiped off the map. “Because of the rising sea level, due to global warming, in the next few decades … up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated,” Mr. Gore wrote in his book, “Earth in the Balance.” A peer-reviewed study published last month by the Journal of Coastal Research suggests the Sunshine State might last a while.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), co-recipient with Mr. Gore of the Nobel Peace Prize, quantified the sea-level rise as being between 7 and 23 inches by the year 2100. They argued that man’s emissions of carbon dioxide have been heating up the globe. While man’s CO2 is identical to that emitted by polar bears and other animals favored by environmentalists, the left insists “too much” of it is melting polar ice caps. This, the theory goes, makes the oceans swell.

A former research director with the Army Corps of Engineers and a former civil-engineering professor at the University of Florida decided to put the sea-rise claims to the test. They gathered U.S. tide-gauge readings from 57 stations where water levels had been continuously recorded for as long as 156 years. The result did suggest the sea level was increasing in the western Pacific, but this was offset by a drop in the level near the Alaskan coast. “Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in U.S. tide gauge records during the 20th century,” the study’s authors concluded. “Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records.”

Perhaps Mr. Gore knows this. Last year, he reportedly dropped $8.9 million on a new mansion in an exclusive California neighborhood perilously close to the Pacific. With six bedrooms, six fireplaces and nine baths, Mr. Gore’s palatial ocean-view estate hardly reflects the carbon austerity he expects from everyone else. He was even caught a few years ago by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research failing to extinguish all of the lights in his larger home during “Earth Hour” in the Volunteer State.

This time around, fewer people appeared to participate in Saturday’s futile effort to showcase their awareness of global warming by turning off lights and electronic appliances for 60 minutes. According to the Montreal Gazette, power usage in Edmonton, Canada, actually increased by 1.01 percent during Earth Hour. Power usage did drop in Calgary, but as a power company spokesman explained, the drop “was so minuscule that it couldn’t even be attributed to that particular event.”

As more of the cataclysmic predictions of the global-warming charlatans fail to pan out, these feel-good stunts will become more and more irrelevant. That’s good news because Earth Hour is about hating automobiles and electricity, two of mankind’s most important technological developments. Nothing has done a better job of cleaning up cities and extending human life than the availability of power and mobility. Instead of embracing the cold and darkness for an hour, it makes far more sense to turn on an extra incandescent bulb and read a book by its warm glow. Now that would really hasten progress

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

FROM-Washington Times

EDITORIAL: Ending the global-warming argument
 
Leftist resort to the courts is sign of desperation

Leftists are rushing to the judiciary as a refuge against efforts to undermine their global-warming tax schemes. In the current economic environment, the idea of massive hikes in the price of gasoline and other sources of energy has become radioactive. In response, the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Iowa, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont are hoping activist judges will enact policies that elected, accountable representatives are increasingly afraid to touch.

Congress moved this week to overturn an Environmental Protection Agency ruling meant to bring about carbon-dioxide rationing. At the same time, the seven left-leaning states argued in a brief to the Supreme Court that they have the right to sue out-of-state corporations as “public nuisances” for their crime of emitting a harmless, colorless gas that’s essential for life on this planet.

According to the complaint, carbon-dioxide emissions from various power plants around the country “increase smog and heat-related mortality”; “raise sea levels, thereby inundating low-lying property such as much of New York City’s infrastructure”; “lower water levels in the Great Lakes, harming commercial shipping and hydropower production in New York”; and “make it impossible for several species of hardwood trees to survive in Vermont, Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island.” It goes on to claim “even one degree of global warming will double the number of heat-related deaths in New York City, to 700 per year.”

Never mind that none of these calamities have actually happened, or that if they did, there would be no link to the companies under legal assault. Never mind that if the power companies were to cease operations, it’s likely heat-related deaths from the lack of air conditioning would be far more real than the casualties from these imaginary catastrophes. Still, it’s enough for the ‘60s-era radicals who traded their tie-dyed T-shirts for judicial robes that someone claiming to be a scientist says it’s true. That includes people like Pennsylvania State University Prof. Michael E. Mann, who created the famous hockey-stick graph that served as the centerpiece of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning global-warming infomercial, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Ever since the Climategate e-mail scandal exposed how Mr. Mann’s graph used “a trick” to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, public support also has declined for the fable that cosmic irritation at mankind’s exhalations has made things hotter by an imperceptible one-third of one degree over the course of a decade. In 2000, media-driven climate hysteria peaked with 72 percent of those surveyed by Gallup indicating they were worried about global warming. That number fell to 51 percent in a Gallup poll released Monday, with four in 10 Americans saying the seriousness of global warming was being exaggerated.

Lawmakers sense this skepticism in their constituents and can no longer get away with pursuing policies that sacrifice jobs and economic prosperity on the pagan altar of warmism. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 34-19 on Tuesday to adopt the “Energy Tax Prevention Act” which denies the EPA any authority to regulate water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and other naturally occurring gases as if they were actual pollutants. On Tuesday, Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, promised a vote on the Senate version of the bill introduced by Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, and his 43 co-sponsors, only to retreat the next day when it became apparent Mr. Inhofe had more support than expected.

It’s time for the Supreme Court to put the states’ bogus argument on ice.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

EDITORIAL
FROM-Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Energy failure

Recent rolling blackouts in Texas and a natural gas "emergency" in New Mexico during a cold snap should focus attention on the empty promise of the Obama administration's "Team Green" approach.

At issue is what the administration's energy policies -- shifting from conventional sources to "green alternatives" -- will mean for Americans already feeling the chill when energy supplies don't keep pace with public demand.

In Texas, The Dallas Morning News reported that the blackouts stemmed from a breakdown of clustered coal-fired power plants, which was compounded when natural gas-fired backup plants didn't have enough fuel. And record cold prompted New Mexico's demand for natural gas and the resulting shortages.

But how will Texas and New Mexico meet existing demands, never mind future needs, amid punishing federal regulations that demonize conventional energy sources -- namely coal and natural gas?

Instead of providing help, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency has been fighting Texas over regulating new power plants. And similar regulations already are crimping domestic oil and natural gas drilling, according to The Heritage Foundation.

The service disruptions are a stark reminder that Congress must tap into readily available abundant domestic energy sources to meet the nation's growing demand for fuel. Otherwise more Americans might find themselves left in the cold in the middle of winter.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

FROM-Detroit News



Don't overreact to possible global warming

Jay Ambrose / Scripps Howard News Service

There's a new book out, something called "Hot." The author worries how his little girl will suffer if something isn't done about global warming, says a New York Times reviewer confiding that the concern broke his heart.

Here's something that should also break his heart. If we do the wrong thing about the climate, we might do far more harm than global warming ever could, maybe killing children.


It's utterly amazing that so many journalists and others inundate us regularly with scare stories demanding that the United States take fierce anti-warming action while scarcely ever pausing to mention the possible futility of it all — or the costs.

Those costs will get us if we don't fight back, and those saying so aren't just radio hosts of the kind that make leftists urge censorship. They are people like William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who thinks man-made warming is real and dangerous. He has calculated what would happen in the long haul if the world were to implement an anti-warming plan like Al Gore's and has some numbers to share: Costs would outweigh benefits by $21 trillion.

One meaning of that figure for undeveloped countries could be that they remain impoverished, sticking with old-fashioned energy sources such as human brawn and maybe a windmill tossed in occasionally. Think of famine. Think of widespread disease. That would be the story unless developed countries gave them hundreds of billions despite recessions, high unemployment and their own Third World trajectories, all induced by the senselessness of cap-and-trade overreach.

Nordhaus does think some strategies could be effective, but there are reasons any effort might be of little avail. If India and China do not join the parade, nothing is accomplished by any American program, and the Chinese have not been spotted signing up. If the warming trends aren't bad, it's all a lot of hollering about very little, and some climatologists say the trends are mild.

One of them is Patrick Michaels who was at the University of Virginia for 30 years. His study convinces him nothing disastrous lies around yonder bend. Another is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He believes gloomy computer simulations are bogus, that the climate changes we are seeing could be more natural than man-made.

While some fanatically vile environmental activists try to make it sound as if anyone disagreeing with their conjectures is on the take, uncertainties abound about human-caused, calamitous climate change.

A better answer is to adopt one sane course of action that Mark Hertsgaard, the author of "Hot," recommends: adaptation. Another answer if climate does veer in ruinous directions could be along the lines of something the famed physicist Freeman Dyson has suggested. In not too many more years, he suspects, we will have bioengineered plants capable of absorbing huge amounts of the atmospheric carbon dioxide believed by some to be the devil behind a coming hellfire.

The main thing is to avoid what happened with DDT. Because of a ban to protect wildlife from the pesticide in this country, it became more scarce,

and a consequence was its being employed sparingly if at all in wildlife-safe, indoor spraying to combat malaria in Africa. Though not always, DDT can be enormously effective in stopping the disease while posing minimal threats.

The estimate is that millions of African children died because of misplaced values and overreactions.

That's worse than heartbreaking.

Sanity slowly returning to global warming policy

EDITORIAL FROM-Washington Examiner

Somebody should check the water Gunter Oettinger is drinking because it must contain something that restores common sense in critically important public policy discussions. Oettinger is the European Union's energy commissioner and, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, he has dashed hopes of Big Green environmentalists worldwide with these words: "If we go alone to 30 percent, you will only have a faster process of deindustrialisation in Europe. I think we need industry in Europe, we need industry in the U.K., and industry means CO2 emissions." He was referring to proposals that the EU increase its current carbon monoxide emissions reduction goal from 20 percent to 30 percent. Oettinger predicted that what is left of European industry would flee the continent and move to Asia if that happens. The net result would be loss of jobs and economic vitality in Europe and quite possibly even more emissions because Asian countries will not impose such draconian reductions on industry.

Meanwhile, here in America, the Department of Agriculture reported this week that corn reserves are at their lowest level in nearly two decades. Federal officials, according to the New York Times, say the reserves are down because ethanol producers are buying corn as fast as possible in anticipation of a federal policy allowing the amount of corn-based fuel mixed with gasoline to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent. The price of a bushel of corn has doubled in the face of that demand, going from $3.50 a bushel to more than $7 a bushel, which drives up food prices more generally. "The price of corn affects most food products in supermarkets. It is used to feed the cattle, hogs and chickens that fill the meat case, and is the main ingredient in Cap'n Crunch in the cereal aisle and Doritos in the snack aisle. Turned into corn sweetener, it sweetens most soft drinks," the Times reported. There was no indication in the Times story that those same federal officials will do anything about this situation, but at least they recognize the connection between rising food prices and increasing ethanol production.

Rising corn prices in the United States are mirrored worldwide, thanks to growing demand for biofuels in response to mandates from government officials concerned about "being green." The same thing happened in 2008, but the experts dismissed it as a product of an extremely rare convergence of factors that won't likely be repeated any time soon. But, as Princeton University's Tim Searchinger wrote in The Washington Post, "this 'perfect storm' has re-formed not three years later. We should recognize the ways in which biofuels are driving it." Thus, we are reminded of the Law of Unintended Consequences. American policymakers would do well to stop listening to environmental ideologues and start drinking from the same fountain of common sense that clarified Oettinger's thinking.

Or an Intellectual Sickness

FROM-Boston Herald

Reliable forecast under the weather

By Michael Graham

Meet the global weirdos. They’re the ones telling you that all the snow outside is proof that it’s getting warmer. Only, they don’t call it “warming” anymore.

No, that was back in the “Earth has a fever” days. Back when Al Gore was predicting that the ice caps were melting, the polar bears were drowning and Manhattan would sink beneath 20 feet of water “in the near future.”

But then something happened. Since 1998, temperatures have been relatively flat. We’ve got more polar bears than ever, and Manhattan is buried under snow. For a planet-roasting crisis that threatened the human race with extinction, there doesn’t seem to be much actual warming.

So then the mantra became “climate change.” The liberals formerly known as “warmists” began predicting that we would experience fundamental changes in our weather. Scientists at the University of East Anglia — the Harvard of climate change — said snow would be “a very rare and exciting event.” Children wouldn’t know what it was.

As for summers, in the wake of Katrina “change-ist” groups like realclimate.org predicted “global warming will make hurricanes even worse in the future.”

What happened? Nothing. Europe has had three winters in a row of snow and cold temperatures. In the Atlantic, “there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of hurricanes in the last five years,” according to meteorologist Art Horn. “The total energy in all hurricanes around the world has plunged since 1993. The opposite of what was predicted.”

So the new fall back is “global weirding.” The site thedailygreen.com has a “Weird Weather Watch” page. The uber-liberal Huffington Post ran a story in August headlined “Global Weirding”: Extreme Climate Events Dominate The Summer.”

“The extreme climate events all across the globe must say something about whether climate change is already upon us,” the HuffPo insisted. “Extreme is the new normal.”

They quote a professor of “environmental studies and politics” from Oberlin College who says, “More hottest hots, driest dries, wettest wets, windiest wind conditions. So it’s all part of a pattern.”

Gore is on board, too. He’s now merely claiming rising temperatures will “create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters.”

Not “warming,” but “weirding.” Not “heating,” but “havoc.” Which is how global warming can cause more snow, less snow, no snow, avalanches, heat waves, cold snaps, wetter wets, drier dries, gingivitis, delirium tremens and irritable bowel syndrome  . . . all at the same time!

Global warming — is there anything it can’t do?

Well, the one thing it apparently doesn’t do is help predict the weather. The UK’s Met Office stopped giving seasonal forecasts last year after mis-predicting warmer winters three years in a row. Meteorologists without a warmist agenda like Piers Corbyn and AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi, on the other hand, continue to pay the bills by making predictions directly contrary to the “weirdos.” Oddly, they don’t have degrees in politics.

For a theory to be scientific, it must be fallible — capable of being proven false. If every weather condition can be used to “prove” global warming simply by being declared “weird,” then it’s not science. It’s a joke.

Which is exactly what the environmental movement has become.

Price Of Junk Science

FROM-IBD


Global Warming: After the 1998 tobacco deal, many wondered where the next battleground for the shakedown lawyers would be. Few wonder now. The legal war over climate change is heating up — and it'll be costly.

The $246 billion tobacco settlement, reached by 46 state attorneys general and the tobacco industry, was not designed to improve public health. It was simply a way to line lawyers' pockets and create a slush fund for lawmakers.

Private plaintiffs' lawyers took in $8.2 billion in legal fees, and states have spent their share of the funds on items unconnected to tobacco-related illnesses and anti-smoking education.
It was, as we said a few years ago, "a naked cash grab."

Having exhausted that lucrative source, trial lawyers went trolling for another. Would it be the fast-food industry? Gun makers? What about companies that sell sugary drinks? Or those making pharmaceuticals?

While those industries will be beset by suing lawyers, they will be spared relative to the target that attracts the most attention. As we predicted on these pages, global warming will be the vehicle for the next litigation lottery. And the media are finally picking up on this.

"Climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake," AFP reported Sunday.

Though not yet widespread, climate-related lawsuits have "ballooned" in the last three years, AFP said. Deutsche Bank says filings in the U.S. alone went from 48 in 2009 to 132 last year. "Entrepreneurial lawyers" are stalking prospective defendants, while businesses and insurers are trying to find ways to protect themselves.

While none of the lawsuits has been successful, the sheer volume of future suits is expected to generate what Rutgers law professor Howard Latin predicted in 2007 would be "one of the biggest legal practices in the next 20 years."

The typical defendants are energy-related companies and those that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, or whose products generate CO2, which is supposedly causing the planet to heat.
We've found no reliable estimates as to how much global warming litigation will cost. But this we do know: It will be expensive, and painfully so.

AFP reports that "compensation for losses inflicted by man-made global warming would be jaw-dropping, a payout that would make tobacco and asbestos damages look like pocket money."

The potential defendants in global warming litigation have a far bigger financial footprint than the handful of giant tobacco companies who were victimized by the settlement.

The costs won't be borne only by big corporations that deserve to be separated from their money, either. They'll be passed on to consumers, who will have to pay a tax in the form of higher prices for the next generation of goods that will be made as producers go to great lengths to avoid future litigation.

The fact is, the trial lawyers wouldn't have chosen climate change if they didn't think it would be lucrative. They're confident that they can show that contributions of CO2 emissions are causing the Earth to warm, which in turn is causing harm to the environment.

Of course, lawyers aren't shy about using junk science in the courtroom.

John Edwards, a former U.S. senator and one-time vice presidential candidate, made a fortune out of suing doctors in medical malpractice cases, claiming that physicians' errors were causing cerebral palsy in infants during childbirth.

The real science, though, pointed to genetics, not botched deliveries, a fact revealed during, not after, the roughly 10-year period that Edwards was trying cerebral palsy cases.

Our courthouses should be bastions of justice, not sources of cheap wealth or chambers that create laws out of thin air that no legislature would pass. Lawmakers create the policies that govern our judicial system, and they have both the authority, and the duty, to ensure that global warming litigation doesn't become legal plunder.

What should be on trial is the global warming guesswork that passes as science, not the producers in our economy.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media


FROM-OC Register

Editorial: Put up or shut up on global warming

t is time for an independent investigation of whether or to what degree human activities are creating catastrophic global warming. It should be conducted by scientists untainted by advocacy and uncompromised through receiving taxes or private funding to advance or debunk the theory.

Many in the new Congress were elected on promises to re-evaluate global warming claims used to justify Draconian regulations. A "team of nongovernment and non-U.N. experts must be established with access to all the raw data, records, adjustments, fudges ... and computer codes currently being black-boxed by government scientists," says Robert Ferguson, president of the nonprofit Science and Public Policy Institute for "sound public policy based on sound science." We agree.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have resisted Freedom of Information Act requests for release of unadjusted raw data and documentation of their adjustments to them. Good science requires theories be tested.

Even proponents of catastrophic manmade global warming theory say the average global temperature increased 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past century. We must be certain such tiny changes and the cataclysmic predictions based on them are valid before imposing huge economic sacrifices, infringing personal freedoms or levying new taxes.

A good place to start is temperature data. NASA and NOAA, which together receive nearly half a billion dollars a year in tax funding for climate research, "have been systematically fiddling the worldwide temperature record for years, making 'global warming' look worse than it is," according to a new paper by meteorologist Joe D'Aleo, an American Meteorology Society fellow.
"[W]hen data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data" to agree with models' projections, says MIT meteorologist Dr. Richard Lindzen.

Research by meteorologist Anthony Watts found that 89 percent of U.S. ground temperature stations do not meet NASA's standards for distance between stations and adjacent heat sources, seriously compromising readings. That's before NASA "adjusts" the raw data, adding more significant additional false warming, Mr. Watts says.

"The raw temperature data produced by the ... stations are not sufficiently accurate to use in scientific studies or as a basis for public policy decisions," he concludes.
Thousands of e-mails leaked in 2009 from Britain's Climate Research Unit showed researchers lamented the "hapless state" of their temperature records, including "hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy and duplicate stations," and "no uniform data integrity."

CRU Director Phil Jones later conceded "temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated," bringing into question the U.S. records because, "almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same."

An independent analysis also should be made of climate computer models and the purported cause-and-effect relationships assumed between greenhouse gases and higher temperature, rising sea levels and melting glaciers.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media


FROM-OC Register

Editorial: Reasons to cool it on global warming

A man perhaps as responsible as anyone for debunking global warming hysteria was in town last week to speak to the curious and the converted at Chapman University. Dr. Fred Singer also spoke with us about the state of global warming.

Dr. Singer, chairman of the Science and Environmental Policy Project and professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, concedes that global warming alarmists persist in their efforts to control our lives, fortunes and economies, but he notes that opposition from scientists and others like him have significantly impeded that cause.

Congress and the White House have, at least for now, abandoned plans to adopt a cap-and-trade regulatory scheme that would drive up energy prices and penalize emitters of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. House Republicans have introduced several bills to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from doing administratively what Congress couldn't muster enough votes to do, curtail carbon emissions, also at great economic harm. When the new Congress convened last week, the House killed the committee devoted solely to climate change and energy issues.

Back-to-back annual international climate conferences resulted in no binding agreements among the attending 190-plus nations to implement carbon trading, carbon taxing or wealth redistribution, all foundational to alarmists' plans to wean the world from fossil fuels to combat global warming.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is in court to force release of documents at the University of Virginia to determine whether a fraud investigation is warranted into tax-funded climate research conducted by global warming proponent Michael Mann. The private American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center filed a freedom of information request last week seeking similar records concerning Mr. Mann, a leading proponent of global warming theory who now is at Pennsylvania State University.

The new chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee wants to investigate "the quality of climate science." Meanwhile, public sentiment has turned against alarmists as the more immediate press of economic issues have outweighed questionable claims of climate catastrophe predicted for decades in the future.

Dr. Singer contends the science always has been on the side of skeptics. We tend to agree. On close inspection, the much-touted "consensus" that global warming is a manmade threat never was true. Such matters in the scientific community are difficult to document, other than anecdotally. But thousands of scientists, including climatologists, meteorologists and researchers, even some formerly affiliated with the U.N.'s own climate-change panel, have voiced their qualms and complaints with warmist orthodoxy.

Dr. Singer estimated "the number of skeptical qualified scientists has been growing steadily." He estimates "it is about 40 percent now."

Climate computer models that forecast frightening temperature increases over the next century "basically, are unreliable," Dr. Singer said. Nontoxic CO2 is not a pollutant and, contrary to alarmists' claims, is beneficial as a natural plant food. "One of the best things to do is put more CO2 into the atmosphere," he suggested with a smile.

Dr. Singer contends the fanatical drive to subsidize so-called renewable energy sources will only drive up conventional energy prices, while some people will purchase faddish alternative energy devices that will be less reliable and still more expensive, even after their subsidies. Atmospheric temperatures will be unaffected, but special interests' pockets will be lined. All things considered, it's prudent to cool it on the global warming front.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media


FROM-Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Global warming?

EPA power expands as blizzards blow

In modern public relations, half the battle is won if you can get the media to embrace your choice of wording.

For example, take "carbon pollution."

No one supports "carbon pollution." So when the activist pro-regulation group Greenpeace said it welcomed last week's announcement that the "EPA has finally announced the schedule by which it will regulate carbon pollution," the casual listener might have cheered that something was finally being done about nasty, gritty, airborne soot.

But sooty particulate emissions from furnaces and power plants have long been subject to strenuous regulation.

Instead, those who promote vastly greater and more expensive regulation of the energy industry -- those who would love to see America's industrial output decline as our personal electric bills soar, in part to purposely paralyze industrial and economic development in America and Europe until the unregulated Third World can "catch up" -- are purposely using the misleading phrase "carbon pollution" when they really refer to power plants emitting carbon dioxide.

When a single carbon atom has bonded with two oxygen atoms, it forms a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is not a pollutant, but is in fact used in the metabolism of plants, vital to the survival of life on earth. To now brand carbon dioxide a "pollutant" is verbal manipulation of the first order.

Environmentalists theorize that the activities of mankind are churning historically unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that this carbon dioxide is acting as a "greenhouse gas," trapping solar heat and thus causing the planet to warm to such an extent that it many endanger life on earth.

There are several problems with this theory. First, while there might have been some minor warming in the late 20th century -- a whistle-blower has revealed much of the supporting data was unreliable or simply faked -- there appears to have been no warming in the past decade, despite the fact that none of the Draconian penalties now proposed has been in effect.

Second, the geological and historical records indicate there have been periods of higher carbon dioxide concentration in the past, and that they lagged rather than preceded solar warming. There is also evidence that earth was once much warmer than it is now -- and that life did just fine.

But the biggest problem with global warming theory as now propounded is that it lacks a vital component of any legitimate scientific theory: deniability. The theory allows any change in weather to be attributed to global warming, while preventing any climate pattern from disproving it. Far from sound science, it is an article of faith.

Global warming theorists predicted a warm, dry winter. Instead, English and Northeast American airports are shut down under unusually heavy snows. It's snowing in Tasmania (where it's now high summer.) The National Weather Service says Nashville and Atlanta could see serious snowfall this week for the first time in 17 years.

So, if there's drought and unusually warm weather, we should attribute it to man-caused global warming. But if the world is seized in a new deep freeze, we can also attribute that to man-caused global warming?

That's quite a theory. It's almost as honest as the term "carbon pollution."

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media


FROM-THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

EPA blows off Congress, voters


After his climate agenda was dealt a major setback by Republican victories in November, President Barack Obama said, "Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way." Now his administration has announced its intention to skin the cat another way, despite questionable underlying science and certain economic harm.

Legislative efforts to impose costly cap-and-trade restrictions on greenhouse gases, ostensibly to curb global warming, already had ground to a halt in the Democratic-controlled Congress before November's balloting. After the election, the president acknowledged his preferred method to reduce emissions would be dead on arrival in the new Congress, where Republicans will have control of the House and have picked up six seats in the Senate.

But last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it will regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and oil refineries next year rather than await for enabling law.
Who needs Congress if the administration can accomplish the same thing by fiat?

There's a reason such specific regulations aren't approved by legislative bodies. Their alleged effectiveness and real costs would have to be defended in open debate by representatives answerable to voters. Even in California, where the sweeping and unnecessary Global Warming Solutions Act was passed in 2006, the particulars weren't included in the legislation. Instead, the California Air Resources Board was given broad authority to draft entirely arbitrary and what promise to be economically harmful regulations, nearly invulnerable to a complaining public. The administrative state is beyond voters' reach.

There's also a reason cap-and-trade couldn't pass even the Democratic-controlled Congress this year. As the New York Times recently acknowledged, the Obama administration scaled back its ambitions after climate legislation died in the Senate, challengers "mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change" and polls showed the public "more doubtful about the science."
Those are all good reasons to shelve this bad idea, even before considering the economic harm likely to result from the proposed drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

"If the regulations actually force companies to make meaningful emission reductions, they will drive up energy costs and be very expensive," observed Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who headed the EPA's air and radiation office under President George W. Bush and now represents utilities and other greenhouse emitters that would be affected.

But the EPA, much like California's ARB, now intends to fashion de facto taxes and impose strict regulations that will be almost impervious to public criticism. Almost.

Republicans wasted no time last week announcing they will oppose the administrative implementation of what couldn't pass Congress. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, expected to become chairman next month of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said, "There are serious questions about EPA's decision to move forward with these job-killing regulations that will usurp power from states, violating the principles of federalism that are the backbone of the Clean Air Act."

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, foreshadowed the battle. "I think we ought to start with a two-year pause" in upcoming regulations, said Simpson, who is expected to head a House panel controlling the EPA's budget.

We look forward to the open debate, which will be an opportunity to stem the frantic rush to solve the global warming nonproblem, while exposing the shaky science behind climate alarmism and informing the public of its actual costs.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media


FROM-The Washington Times

California's 'cap-and-trade' escapade

Golden State pushes climate change over business climate

The fact that the lame-duck Congress balked at endorsing "cap-and-trade" legislation didn't deter California from approving its own version of the extreme green scheme for restricting industrial emissions. The move bolsters the state's reputation as the left coast's home for ideas out of left field. Soon Americans will witness what happens when global-warming hysteria worsens an already sick economy.

California's Air Resources Board approved a cap-and-trade system on Dec. 16 that covers 360 businesses at 600 locations statewide. In its first phase, starting in 2012, electric utilities and other large manufacturers will receive free permits allowing emissions at their current levels. In the second phase, taking effect in 2015, refiners and distributors of gasoline, diesel, natural gas and other fuels will be required to buy emissions permits at auctions or purchase them from other companies. Gradually, the state will reduce the number of permits available, making them more expensive. To avoid exceeding their emissions limits, companies will be forced to develop dubious new methods of doing business.

Two inconvenient truths are getting in the way of the liberals' energy-free utopia. First, cap-and-trade is a solution in need of a problem; it's intended to remedy global warming while the earth is getting cooler. Second, the scheme is transparently a means of wealth redistribution that allows the political class to punish producers and reward the unsuccessful - a sure recipe for social dysfunction.

Global warming was recently rebranded as "climate disruption" to downplay the dearth of evidence correlating purportedly rising temperatures and increases in industrial emissions. In the West, California residents of the Sierras can be excused for joining the ranks of skeptics as they are buried beneath snow measured in yards rather than inches. In the East, Americans as far south as normally balmy Georgia have been shoveling the white stuff. Countless anecdotes back up global temperature readings that reveal a distinct cooling trend since 1998.

Even environmentalists in surfer land admit the economic impact of cap-and-trade is uncertain. The estimated cost of permits purchased by California businesses ranges between $3 billion and $58 billion by 2020. Job "leakage" predictably will result when any new green jobs are offset by existing jobs disappearing as businesses flee the state to escape onerous climate regulations. Enterprises that stay put will incur higher business costs, which will be passed along to consumers, making life in California more expensive than it already is.

Ultimately, families - rich and poor alike - will pay that bill in the form of higher prices at the cash register. Accordingly, the Air Resources Board authorized the creation of a Community Benefits Fund to funnel money back into impoverished communities, or as President Obama would say, "spread the wealth around." This policy reflects classic liberal dogma that encourages dependency rather than independence, all while undermining the American way.

The limping global economy has many nations reconsidering bureaucratic fads concocted when times were good and economic growth allowed for expensive social experiments. Times have changed. With U.S. unemployment around 10 percent and rising, it's time for America's anti-growth ideas to melt away

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media



FROM-Pittsburgh Tribune

Loons in Cancun

Another costly United Nations conference on wealth redistribution under the guise of climate change has come to a predictable close.

"Experts" trotted out disputed "science" to buttress predictions of climate cataclysms. Notes British columnist Christopher Booker in The Telegraph, the same United Kingdom National Weather Service computer that predicted a four-degree rise in global temperatures over the next 50 years also "has consistently got every one of its winter and summer forecasts hopelessly wrong" over the past three years.

Climate cluckers couldn't come to terms on arbitrary emissions cuts. But they did come up with a "Green Climate Fund" to shuffle $100 billion in aid by 2020 to poor nations. No details yet on how deeply the duly concerned intend to reach into Uncle Sam's wallet.

What unfolded over two weeks was more of a circus than any meaningful scientific consensus on complex global weather patterns. The direction was set with an opening prayer to Ixchel, the Mayan mood goddess.

And how strange that no one mentioned the "carbon footprint" left by thousands of pampered delegates, who didn't get to Cancun by paddling canoes.

From this nonsense Mr. Booker derives a fitting conclusion. "The global warming scare may have been fun for the children while it lasted, but the time has come for the joke to be declared well and truly over."

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media



FROM-Chicago Tibune


End the binge

Aid to ethanol has gone on too long.

"I'm Al Gore, and I'm an alcoholic." No, that's not exactly how the former vice president began his recent mea culpa on alternative energy. But he admitted he had an unwise dependence on alcohol—corn-based ethanol as an ingredient in auto fuel, to be precise—and tried to steer others from the same course.

Gore's dependence was not physiological but political. He backed federal support of the industry as a member of Congress because he wanted to win the votes of farmers in his home state of Tennessee and, when he ran for president, in Iowa. "It is not good policy to have these massive subsidies," he says, now that he no longer aspires to elected office.

Maybe his admission has started something. Even many current politicians are swearing off the stuff.

It's not every day that California Democrat Barbara Boxer, one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate, joins forces with Arizona Republican Jon Kyl, one of the most conservative. But they and 15 other senators signed a letter calling the existing 45-cent-per-gallon federal subsidy to ethanol fuel and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported ethanol "fiscally irresponsible and environmentally unwise." They oppose renewal of the two programs, which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.

Yet there's talk that an extension of the subsidy, and even a boost in the tariff, could be included in the tax deal reached by President Barack Obama and Republican leaders. That would be a terrible mistake.

The fiscal tab of the federal tax credit comes to about $6 billion a year, which is more than the entire savings from President Obama's two-year freeze on federal civilian pay. The more dire our fiscal predicament grows, the harder it is to justify this special-interest expense.

Then there are the environmental questions. Ethanol is actually worse than ordinary gasoline when it comes to some pollutants. True, it does generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions — but that savings could be canceled out if forests are cut down to expand corn production, because trees absorb so much carbon dioxide. Some estimates also suggest it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than the gallon contains, making the whole exercise pointless.

The excuse for this favor to corn farmers and ethanol producers is that it reduces our dependence on foreign oil. But the effect is modest at best. In 1997, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office) said that "ethanol's potential for substituting for petroleum is so small that it is unlikely to significantly affect overall energy security."

If reducing our reliance on foreign oil producers were truly the goal of federal policy, the government wouldn't be so intent on keeping out foreign ethanol. The high duty on imported ethanol, noted the 17 senators, "discourages transportation fuel imports from Brazil, India, Australia and other sugar producing countries, and leads to more oil and gasoline imports."

In better fiscal times, it was easier to excuse our leaders for having their fun doling out subsidies for ethanol and protecting its makers from competition. But it's time for the party to end.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media

Editorial: Global warming challenge

FROM-OC Register

The possibility of suspending California's Global Warming Solutions Act, a law unlikely to change temperatures but certain to wreak economic havoc, appears to have increased dramatically.

Two large Texas-based refineries have pledged as much as $2 million to pay for signature-gathering to place an initiative on the November ballot that would suspend the global warming law if passed by voters, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing Sacramento sources.

California refineries of the two companies, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., would be forced to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But the initiative would delay implementation until unemployment level drops to 5.5 percent for at least a year.

Unemployment is now at 12.4 percent.
The last thing California needs is an unnecessary law that drives up costs for businesses, prices for consumers and could send many of both fleeing the state.

The Times reported Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had asked businesses not to support the ballot measure. The initiative is sponsored by Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Linda, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, and the People's Advocate, a Sacramento-based anti-tax group. They have until April 24 to gather 433,971 valid signatures.

It's time the public vote on the increasingly questionable theory underlying California's law. Leaked documents have shown climate scientists paid by government grants may have rigged data, suppressed conflicting information and blocked skeptical scientists from inspecting their studies and submitting alternate theories.

Global warming alarmism would penalize huge economic sectors by forcing the purchase of government permits to emit greenhouse gases, while imposing other costly conditions to switch to uneconomical, taxpayer-subsidized alternative fuels.

The science behind the global warming is highly speculative. Several disclosures in recent months have shown many catastrophic claims were based on slipshod documentation, not peer-reviewed studies. A recent disclosure from Sweden's Goteborgs Universitet showed only 62 percent of sources cited by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were peer-reviewed in the its 2001 report.

Meanwhile, Dr. Phil Jones, head of Britain's Climate Research Unit was forced to step down after thousands of leaked e-mails revealed he may have suppressed and altered data. He testified last week in the House of Commons that he withheld data of countries including Sweden because those nations' prohibited release. But he was almost immediately rebutted by the nonprofit Stockholm Initiative "for a rational climate policy," saying "All Swedish climate data are available in the public domain" and "that fact has been clearly explained to Dr. Jones."

Claims of catastrophic global warming are based on computer models derived from increasingly questionable data by a relatively small cadre of scientists, who have profited for years from government and private grants to study the alleged threat. We say, let's have a vote.

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Sanity in the Main Stream Media




EDITORIAL: EPA's global-warming power grab

Senate should overturn greenhouse gas regulations

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Scientific scandals and record snowfalls have begun to melt away the congressional appetite for more global-warming regulations. On Sunday, to take the latest example, a major scientific journal admitted that "oversights" compelled the retraction of its conclusion that sea levels were rising as a result of increased worldwide temperatures. Reports of this sort make it increasingly difficult for members of Congress to enter iced-over districts to ask their constituents to make economic sacrifices in an attempt to appease Mother Earth into favoring us with colder weather.

This does not mean, however, that the left has given up on global warming as a means of exerting more government control over the economy.

To avoid a potentially messy vote, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency has turned to the administrative rule-making process to impose climate-control regulations. In December, the agency made an "endangerment finding" that declared that six gases - including the carbon dioxide you are exhaling as you read this - are putting the planet's well-being in peril. The first major rule based on this finding will be finalized next month.

President George W. Bush's EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, warned that such a finding would result in a major government power grab. "[T]he potential regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land," he explained.

Fortunately, Mr. Obama's team might not get away with it. So far, 40 senators have signed on to an effort by Sen. Lisa A. Murkowski, Alaska Republican, to nullify the EPA endangerment finding. Three Democrats have been willing to co-sponsor the legislation, but Senate sources suggest a number of others may be willing to vote for the bill when it comes to the floor.

Mrs. Murkowski, who takes a moderate stand on the issue, is key to lining up the bipartisan support required for passage. In the past, the Alaska senator has embraced government efforts to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, including a limited form of cap-and-trade. Her resolution is evidence that both sides of the global-warming issue can agree that such a fundamental public-policy question should not be decided by unelected bureaucrats. Both sides also should be troubled by the EPA's twisting of the Clean Air Act, which originally was designed to cut down on actual pollutants, into regulating so-called greenhouse gases.

Instead of preventing smokestacks from belching noxious fumes and toxic chemicals harmful to the health of human beings, the agency has made its new enemy No. 1 a cow chewing grass in a field. Citing U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the EPA declared "enteric fermentation" - a fancy phrase to refer to a cow's natural emissions in the field - to be the primary source of methane, which is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in planetary warming.

The EPA placed what it called a "primary reliance" on reports like those of the IPCC instead of conducting independent research to make its finding. Given the retractions and revelations of faulty science surrounding the global-warming religion, especially at the IPCC, it's time to take the issue out of the EPA's hands so Congress can address it in the open. The Senate should pass Mrs. Murkowski's disapproval resolution when it comes for an expected vote next month.


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