EPA’s New Fuel Regulations Will Avert 0.0026 Degrees Of Warming

The EPA’s new carbon dioxide regulations for heavy trucks is meant to help the U.S. meet its goal of reducing emissions to fight global warming.

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There’s just one problem: CO2 regulations on heavy trucks will have little to no impact on global warming over the next 85 years, according to the EPA’s own analysis.

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The EPA says limiting carbon dioxide from heavy trucks will reduce emissions by more than 1 billion metric tons by 2050. Cutting CO2, the agency says, will create up to $34 billion in “climate benefits” along with up to $40 billion from reducing traditional pollutants. Regulating heavy trucks are part of the Obama administration’s goal of reducing U.S. CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050.

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Sounds like Obama administration regulations will accomplish a lot. Well, not really. The EPA’s own analysis found that by 2100 “the global mean temperature is projected to be reduced by approximately 0.0026 to 0.0065°C, and global mean sea level rise is projected to be reduced by approximately 0.023 to 0.057 cm.”

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Source: U.S. EPA

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To put that into context, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts temperature rises of between 1.8 and 4.8 degrees Celsius and expects sea levels to rise 23 to 56 centimeters from 1990 to 2100. That means CO2 regulations for heavy trucks would only reduce warming by a fraction of what it’s projected to be — and that’s assuming EPA’s models are correct.

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Via: Daily Caller

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[VIDEO] Industry on edge as EPA prepares to regulate airline emissions

The Environmental Protection Agency will soon announce it plans to regulate airline emissions, asserting they contribute to global warming and endanger public health, according to industry and environmental groups. 

Those findings will prompt a regulatory process for the EPA to determine and enforce aircraft emissions limits, following a similar effort to limit emissions by cars, trucks and power plants. 

But conservatives say higher airplane efficiency standards will only force airlines to raise ticket prices or install more seats on already cramped flights. 

"Airlines already have a tremendous incentive to reduce fuel burn, and reduce CO2 emissions right now," said Sam Batkins, the director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum. "Airplanes themselves are already efficient and are already getting more efficient each year." 

Airlines are among the most efficiency-minded transportation industries. Normally tight-margin companies, the less fuel airlines burn, the more money they make.   

"There's not a market failure in airline efficiency," said Batkins. 

However, environmental groups contend airlines are failing to realize their full fuel-efficiency potential. 

"They can be doing things a lot more efficiently than they are now. And they've reached the peak of their incentive -- now they need a little push from the federal government to extract increased reductions," said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. "If the president is serious about hitting his climate target, which is reducing greenhouse gases by 28 percent in 2025, below 2005 levels, he can't ignore imposing additional greenhouse gas reductions on this uncontrolled industry." 

Becker said the industry could use lower-carbon fuels, idle engines less and further upgrade its systems. 

Via: Fox News

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EPA Chief: Just Trust Us On Climate Science

DON'T THINK SO!!!!!!

Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, speaks at the Center for American Progress' 2014 Making Progress Policy Conference in Washington Nov. 19, 2014. (REUTERS/Gary Cameron)

Americans are just going to have to trust the EPA’s 44 years of experience dealing with environmental issues when it comes to figuring out ways to cope with man-made global warming, says the agency’s chief.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told Big Think in an interview that while there are limits to how much the federal government can do for issues like global warming, the public needs to trust how the EPA translates the “complicated” science into real-life actions.

“Well I think we all have to recognize the strengths and limitations of government action,” McCarthy said. “But here’s what I think we can do at the federal level more effectively. We can speak to the science because it’s complicated and we do a lot of research and we do a lot of translation of the science into what it means for people so that the decisions can be made on the basis of real science and on the basis of a real technical understanding.”

“That’s how it has worked in EPA’s career for 44 years at EPA is we’ve listened to the science and the law and we have let solutions take off in the marketplace which is where the cheapest, most effective always win,” McCarthy said. “That’s why EPA can move environmental standards forward so effectively and grow jobs at the same time.”

The EPA is on the verge of finalizing rules limiting CO2 emissions from power plants as part of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda. Republicans and industrial lobbies have opposed the rules, saying they will be costly and do nothing to stem warming.

McCarthy, however, has continually argued the EPA’s so-called “Clean Power Plan” will send a signal to the world the U.S. is serious about dealing with global warming and spur innovation in green technology.

“Now what you really want to do at the national level is send long-term signals,” McCarthy said. “And those signals go to people in markets because the best thing EPA and other regulatory agencies need to do is set standards based on what we think the science tells us, the law tells us and what’s achievable.”

“It’s like being in a race and the federal government, you know, says what direction to run and they shoot the starting gun, but the ones in the race become the businesses, the entrepreneurs, the people who are driving new technologies,” she said.

Via: Daily Caller

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ANALYSIS OF COSTS CAUSED BY EPA REGULATION

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed onerous new limits carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. The standards would prevent construction of new facilities, gradually close older ones and eventually affect even gas-fired units, says Paul Driessen, senior policy adviser for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

EPA says the rules will safeguard our health and welfare from storms, sea level rise and other ravages of man-made climate change. They are in addition to 1,900 other Obama-era regulations designed to curtail or terminate coal mining and use — and dictate activities affecting air and emissions, land and soils, waterways and puddles.

Many scientists challenge EPA’s claim that carbon dioxide controls climate change.

• They point to solar, cosmic, oceanic and other factors the agency ignores; and note that higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) spur plant growth and green our planet.
• They point out that humans contribute only 4 percent of the CO2 that enters the atmosphere each year, and U.S. coal-based power generation is responsible for only 3 percent of worldwide human CO2 emissions.

In other words, the power plants EPA wants to shut down account for a trivial 0.01 percent of the carbon dioxide added to Earth’s atmosphere annually, raising CO2 levels to about 0.04 percent of the atmosphere.

Via: Human Events

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UN climate report sneaks in worldwide carbon emissions limits

The United Nations’ climate report has already garnered criticism from scientists, but now fights are brewing around the 2,200-page document’s advocacy for a global cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fifth assessment of the Earth’s climate which asserted “95 percent” certainty that global warming was manmade while receiving criticism for glossing over the lack of significant warming in the last 15 years.

One highly contentious paragraph in the report states that society cannot emit more than one trillion tons of carbon dioxide for global temperatures not to warm more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

“[F]or warming due to CO2 emissions alone to be likely less than 2°C at the time CO2 emissions cease, total cumulative emissions from all anthropogenic sources over the entire industrial era would need to be limited to about… one trillion tonnes of carbon,” reads the report.

More than half of this carbon allowance has been used, according to the New York Times, and the report’s authors noted that carbon emissions would have to be limited even more than one trillion tons once other greenhouse gases other than carbon are taken into account.

“Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” said Thomas F. Stocker, IPCC co-chairman. “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.”

UN scientists have not so subtly suggested that countries effectively limit their economic development, since the carbon-intensive energy is the main driver behind rapid industrialization in developing nations like China and India. This suggestion of a global carbon cap was not welcomed by developing nations who fear that their share of the emissions “pie” would be diminished through bullying from developed countries.

“Despite a concerted disinformation campaign to the contrary, there has been no increase in hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts over the past 50 years—a period over which we supposedly used half of our carbon budget for all time,” economist David Kreutzer of the conservative Heritage Foundation told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Via: Daily Caller

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