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Is ANWR drilling key to climate legislation?

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, OCTOBER 21, 2009 — With prospects for a new international agreement on climate change (Kyoto II) in Copenhagen in December faltering, environmentalists in the U.S. may be facing a Hobson’s choice with the climate-energy legislation now before the U.S. Congress. The choice may be to agree to drilling for oil and gas in offshore Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the environmental community has resisted for over 30 years, or the give up cap-and-trade legislation. Take it or leave it?

The New York Times reports that the costs of climate control are likely to kill the Copenhagen meeting. The Economist also predicts failure in Copenhagen. The Obama administration has acknowledged that it will not agree to a global treaty – a follow-on to the ill-fated 1997 Kyoto Protocol – unless the agreement can win approval in Congress. That’s unlikely.

Now, major climate change and energy legislation faces the U.S. Senate, after a controversial bill (Waxman-Markey), unlikely to win support in the Senate, passed the House.

Enter Senate oil-state members from both parties, particularly the two Alaskans. They haven’t made their demands specific, but the political body language is clear. If the administration were to support oil exploration and production in the tiny coastal portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where most petroleum geologists believe large onshore resources are waiting for drill bits, and offshore Alaska, similarly resource-rich, maybe the oil-state legislators could agree to climate change legislation. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

It’s not just Alaskans. Solons from oil states including Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, have doubts and interests, spoken and unspoken, at stake in climate legislation. With 60 votes needed to pass any climate bill in the Senate, and coal-state legislators a major obstacle, the administration’s advocates for climate legislation have a decidedly uphill battle.

One key so far is Republican Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s senior senator (the other Alaskan is Mark Begich, Alaska’s junior, a Democrat). Murkowski is the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, an important position in a chamber where it takes 60 votes to enact legislation.

In a Reuters article in mid-October, Murkowski said she would be open to Democratic-sponsored “cap-and-trade” legislation if Democrats would consider significant efforts to build more nuclear plants and greater opportunities for drilling for oil and gas on-and-off shore. She’s sending a clear political message that more domestic fossil fuel production is as valuable as reduced consumption of fossil fuels.

I see Murkowski’s position as a not-so-veiled reference to drilling in ANWR. That has long been a goal of Alaskan politicians of both parties, with the nukes thrown in for Republican political correctness. Many Republicans and some Democrats, particularly from oil-and-gas states, have supported ANWR drilling, opposed by most environmental groups. The evidence of large oil reserves is compelling. Environmentalists would just as soon not see new oil finds anywhere. That undermines their view that we need to eschew fossil fuels, which, they hope, are a diminishing resource.

Murkowski’s mention of the nukes – of which Alaska has none, and is unlikely to ever have one – was a hint of a political deal. She’s suggesting that states that have and want to expand nuclear power had better get together with the oil-and-gas interests. Together, Murkowski is hinting, there is a coalition to hold climate legislation hostage for other aims. It’s a classic political tactic.

The Obama administration may have sent a message to the Alaskans that it recognizes the nuke-oil ploy. The Interior Department in mid-October approved action on long-delayed oil and gas exploration leases in the Beaufort Sea, off Alaska’s northern coast. That move drew screams of betrayal from environmental groups. The Washington Post quoted Sierra Club lobbyist Athan Manuel, “There is no safe way to drill in the Beaufort Sea. Cleaning up on oil spill in the Arctic’s broken sea ice is next to impossible, and where there is drilling, there are oil spills.” Not accurate, but clearly reflecting the club’s position on Beaufort leases.

The petroleum industry has long supported oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort and the Chukchi Sea to the west, but has been unable to muster sufficient political support in Congress and the Interior Department. It now appears that Interior will allow Beaufort exploration, and the Chukchi may not be far behind. Whither ANWR, long an oily grail for Alaskans and many Republicans in the Congress?

ANWR drilling has been the mark of Satan for some of the Obama-supporting greens. This may set up a confrontation between the forces aimed at reducing fossil fuel development at any level, particularly in Alaska, and those in the internationalist environmental movement who want to put into place a carbon reduction scheme that might allow further development of oil and gas resources. It’s a tension that’s been under the surface of environmentalism for many years.

Historically, the environmental movement has finessed its internal contradictions by agreeing that no Arctic development was necessary as long as “renewable” alternatives such as wind, solar, and geothermal were on the agenda. Now industry advocates of oil and gas exploration have called out the greens: Agree to oil and gas exploration or forget any kind of greenhouse gas control regime. Renewable energy is off the table. It is worthwhile, but impracticable as a replacement for fossil fuels. Smart politicians, despite what they say publicly, understand that there is no significant fossil-renewables tradeoff that works. So a deal could be cooking.

Lisa Murkowski said in a press release that she saw the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service decision to approve Beaufort Sea exploration as “an encouraging sign that Alaska’s oil and natural gas resources will continue to play a major role in America’s energy security.”

The opposition of environmental groups appears irrelevant, as they are unable to produce evidence that off-shore and on-shore drilling has resulted in severe environmental damage. Ironically, an administration that has won wide-spread environmental support can now blow off its green wing when it comes to oil and gas exploration.

Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has introduced a bill that would exploration on the “1002 lands” of the Arctic refuge (established in the 1980 law creating the refuge). Those acres are a small and furiously contested part of the enormous ANWR territory in northern Alaska. Few doubt that the coastal acres harbor large amounts of oil and natural gas. Oil is already seeping to the ground in the area, a classic indication of large and accessible reserves..

Under the 1980 Alaska lands law, 1.5 million ANWR coastal acres are allowed for exploration out of a total of 19 million acres in the reserve, most of it in the Brooks mountain range to the south. Under the terms of the law, oil and gas exploration is off limits in most of the ANWR territory, but can be allowed in the land defined in section 1002 of the law, a portion of the coastal plain bordering the Beaufort Sea and the Canadian border. Oil and gas exploration in this region requires positive Congressional approval, which has never happened. Numerous oil seeps, and a secretive exploration well by native Alaskans, allowed under the 1980 act, suggest major oil reserves in the disputed 1002 territory.

Responding to the Interior decision on Beaufort drilling, Begich said, carefully phrasing his response to avoid the ANWR issue, “This decision shows Secretary Salazar and the Obama administration recognize the importance of Alaska’s abundant offshore oil and gas resources, and it brings us one step closer to environmentally-responsible development offshore of Alaska. They are getting the balance right: including safeguards for important subsistence resources and allowing drilling to go forward.”

Ironically, onshore oil production, such as might occur at ANWR, is far less potentially polluting than offshore rigs, which might show up at the Beaufort and Chuchki Sea sites. Existing onshore production at the Prudhoe Bay complex and its gathering and pipeline system have an exemplary environmental record. Environmentalists in the 1970s opposed the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) to move North Slope crude to tankers in Valdez as a potential environmental hazard. They were wrong.

Tanker shipments from the end of the pipeline in southern Alaska proved to be the environmental hazard, as the Exxon Valdez crash and spill in 1989 demonstrated. TAPS has proven to be a safe, reliable way to move crude oil. It is a system that local wildlife have embraced, as many photographs of grizzly bears walking on top of the warm pipeline, and caribou grazing under it, have shown.

Dynastic political history is interesting when it comes to the Alaska energy issue. Lisa Murkowski’s father, Frank Murkowski, was a Republican senator from Alaska from 1981 to 2002, and governor of Alaska from 2002 to 2006. He was chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from 1995 to 2002, where he tirelessly and unsuccessfully pushed for ANWR drilling. When he became Alaska’s governor, he named his daughter, Lisa, a member of the Alaska legislature, to succeed him in the Senate. She was elected in her own right to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Frank Murkowski, tainted by scandals not directly associated with him, lost big in a three-way Republican primary battle for the GOP nomination for governor in 2006. The winner of the contest was the largely-unknown maverick Wasilla mayor Sarah Palin (with 51% to 31% for businessman Joe Binkley, and 19% for incumbent Murkowski). Palin went on to win the general election, and in 2008, became Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain’s running mate.

There is speculation that Palin might challenge Lisa Murkowski, who is up for reelection in 2004, in the Republican primary. Alaska’s poisonous and dynastic politics would resume. Stay tuned.

Nuke Notes: New names for the NRC and another, lame poll on public support for nuclear power

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, OCTOBER 23, 2009 — The Obama administration is moving to get the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission fully staffed, naming two Democrats, MIT nuclear scientist George Apostolakis and former Clinton administration Department of Energy nuclear chief Bill Magwood, to the commission That fills two vacancies on the five-member commission.

At the same time, NRC Commissioner Dale Klein, chairman during the Bush administration, announced he will resign his term, ending June 30, 2011, when a successor to his Republican seat is sworn in.

Klein’s resignation creates the possibility of a nomination trifecta. Under the law that governs the NRC, three members of the five-member commission should represent the party of the president. The Obama administration elevated Greg Jaczko, a Democrat (who is tied to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada) to chairman , The other sitting commissioner is Republican Kristine Svinicki, an appointment pushed by former Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig.

So far in his tenure Jaczko has been outvoted by the Republican holdovers, limiting what he has wanted to do. With the two vacant seats to be filled by Democrats and Klein’s vacancy (a Republican seat), Jaczko should be able to assert greater control at the NRC.

In his Oct. 16 letter to President Obama, Klein, protege of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wrote, “I offer my resignation effective upon my nominated successor taking office as a member of the commission.”

In other atomic energy political news, the Nuclear Energy Institute has issued the latest in its yawn-inducing, predictable, periodic public opinion polls, finding that Americans prefer nuclear power plants over hot dogs, baseball, apple pie and Chevrolets.

The pollster, no surprise to followers of nuke politics over the past 30 or so years, is Ann Bisconti. She’s been finding overwhelming public support for nukes from the days of the Atomic Industrial Forum through the U.S. Committee for Energy Awareness to the NEI. The name changes, but the institution remains the same – the Washington lobbying group for the nukes.

NEI’s latest poll finds that 80% of Americans favor “low-carbon energy sources, including nuclear, hydro, and renewable” technologies. Golly, what a surprise. According to the survey, 60% of Americans said they favor nukes. The straight-faced news release from the NEI said, “This the ninth straight year that favorability levels have averaged more than 60% in surveys conducted by Bisconti Research Inc.”

Well, duh? How many new nuclear plants have begun construction in that nine-year string? None. How many new nuclear plants have begun construction since Bisconti began polling for the nuclear lobby? None.

Could it be that survey research on the support of Americans for nuclear power is meaningless? That’s the conclusion I draw from this long record that suggests that public opinion polling has no impact on nuclear power development. Maybe the respondents are lying? Or maybe they don’t much care?

I’ve long argued that this sort of public opinion polling is wasteful and useless. The latest poll doesn’t change my mind in the least. Nothing about it is persuasive, as it simply repeats what NEI, and predecessor organizations, have found for decades, and validates what they have wanted to find, which, I suspect, is why they commissioned the polls.

How to Cherry-Pick Recent Climate Data

By Kennedy Maize

For those of us who follow the ever-contentious global warming debate, one of the key areas of conflict is the recent climate record. Is the globe warming, cooling, or just puttering along. It’s a game that depends on where you start and how you aggregate the data. Each side accuses the other of “cherry-picking” the data.

So I refer readers for whom this matters to a posting on Rob Bradley’s fine MasterResources.org blog by Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger, an environmental scientist with, in my judgment, a level head and no zealotry. His recent posting, A Cherry-Picker’s Guide to Temperature Trends (down, flat–even up), is required reading for a constructive conversation about climate change.

Check it out. You will be rewarded with clear-headed advice about how to make your arguments. While Bradley’s blog is in the camp of climate skeptics, it’s among the fairest and most intellectually honest I have come across (other than this one, of course).

By way of entertainment, Bradley has waged a running intellectual gun battle with former Clinton administration DOE renewable energy official Joe Romm, who now works for John Podesta’s liberal think tank Center for American Progress, where he lobbies on climate issues. Podesta was a former Clinton advisor and the chief of the Obama transition team.

Romm, who has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT (and he will tell you that repeatedly when challenged on science, as if no one else has brains), is a clever guy. He was a consistent winner for years in the Washington Post’s “Style Invitational” irrepressible snarkathon.

But Joe doesn’t have a sense of humor when it comes to climate, as Bradley and others (and that includes me) have discovered face-to-face (or, in my case, voice-to-voice when he was at DOE). I hope he comments on Knappenberger’s blog post.

Ohio Repeats Maryland’s ‘Take this Bulb and Shove It’ Fiasco

By Kennedy Maize

In the words of shade-tree philosopher and New York Yankee Hall-of-Fame catcher Yogi Berra, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has put on hold a plan by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to send out compact fluorescent light bulbs to its customers, unbidden, and bill them for the bulbs in their rates.

Here’s the Energy Daily story, which clearly misuses uses the term “free”:

“At the request of the state’s governor, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio … ordered FirstEnergy Corp. to halt a program to give free compact fluorescent light bulbs to its customers, citing concerns about the cost of the energy efficiency initiative.

In a statement, Alan Schriber, chairman of the commission, said the agency had received many phone calls and e-mails about the cost of the program, under which FirstEnergy is sending two bulbs to each of its customers.

“Schriber said the commission had approved the program, but not the charge that the utility is putting on customer bills to pay for it. He cited media reports as putting the cost at 60 cents per month for three years, amounting to $21.60 [per customer] for the life of the program.

‘The PUCO has not approved these additional dollars nor have we received a request by the company to do so,’ he said.

“‘Today, I received a letter from [Ohio] Gov. Ted Strickland (D) asking that the PUCO postpone the program until such time as we can address several questions raised by the governor, members of the Ohio General Assembly and FirstEnergy customers related to program details and costs. Until the PUCO has specific details regarding the program costs, FirstEnergy should not deploy its compact fluorescent light bulb program.’

“FirstEnergy, which says the bulbs will save customers $60 in electricity costs over their operating lifetime, agreed to the commission’s request and pledged to work with the agency to ‘respond to its questions and determine how best to proceed.’”

What’s going on with these utilities? Don’t they read and remember their own industry’s recent history? Whomever came up with this FirstEnergy light bulb program should be fired immediately, as should the managers who approved it. The utility is going to end up apologizing to its customers, giving them the bulbs, and eating the entire cost. The public relations damage will be lasting.

Ohio isn’t that far from Maryland and Pennsylvania, where Allegheny Energy got entangled in an almost exact precursor of what is going to happen to FirstEnergy. Nearly two years ago – close to Christmas 2007 – Pennsylvania-based Allegheny Energy shipped a CFL bulb to each of its 220,000 Maryland customer accounts, with no coherent explanation, disclosing in fine print that the utility would recover the cost in rates (with a return on investment). The utility said it was responding to an initiative approved by the Maryland Public Service Commission.

It was a public relations and regulatory disaster, with the MPSC denying any culpability in approving the program. Allegheny ended up eating the costs and suffering a PR plastering in the Maryland media. It was part of an ill-advised industry strategy advocated by some utility executives, such as Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers, that utility energy efficiency programs should not require customer advanced approval. Rogers and others have advocated an “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” approach to efficiency programs. The Allegheny and First-Energy approaches amount to “sock it to ‘em and let ‘em scream.”

Marylanders screamed, and opted out en mass. The program crashed. The utility had energy-efficient egg on its face.

It looks like Ohioans are going to do the same screaming, with the same results.

The cost of the light bulbs to customers in the First Energy plan, spread out over three years, amounts to over $20. That’s for the equivalent of two 60-W incandescent bulbs that are available in bulk for about $2 each, according to LightBulbsDirect, a web-based provider. The utility says the bulbs will save $60 over their projected nine-year life. Maybe. Maybe not. CFL’s have a history of not meeting rated lifetime projections.

But the numbers are mostly irrelevant. What’s shocking is the arrogance of the utility to take a regulatory requirement to promote energy efficiency and turn it into a program where customers have no choice but to accept the bulbs and pay the utility-determined price, which, no doubt, results in the maximum regulated return on investment. There is no way that these bulbs are “free.”

But they will be free after the Ohio regulators are through with reviewing the program. FirstEnergy, like Allegheny Energy, will eat the cost of the unwanted light bulbs.

FirstEnergy has a deserved long-term reputation as a fumbling, bumbling utility. This latest fiasco adds to that rep. Those who do not understand history – even recent history—appear, as big-time philosopher George Santayana observed, doomed to repeat it.

Nuke Waste Confidence: A Confluence of Ironies

By Kennedy Maize

Here’s an interesting set of ironies. The Republican majority on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken a position that, at least formally, blocks new nuclear reactors in the U.S., while the sole Democrat on the commission, Chairman Greg Jaczko, widely viewed as opposed to the agenda of the nuclear industry, has voted against the GOP majority and for a more open door to new nuclear reactors.

The formal issue is the NRC’s “waste confidence” finding. This is a legally-required ruling where the NRC must say that the U.S. has reasonable plans to store spent nuclear fuel in a way that assures public safety. A year ago, the NRC agreed that this was the case, agreeing to draft statement by the NRC staff. The staff ruling came in the face of serious doubts about the viability of the Yucca Mountain, Nev., project, the sole approach of the U.S. government toward spent nuclear fuel storage, other than on-site storage in cooling pools or dry casks.

In late September, the only two Republican members of the NRC – former chairman Dale Klein (a favorite of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and Commissioner Kristine Svinicki (an aide to former Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig)– voted to reject the NRC’s staff’s draft 2008 finding, based on the decision of the Obama administration to dump the Yucca Mountain, Nev., waste dump.

That the vote was partisan is not in doubt. While Jaczko, a disciple of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has been an opponent of the Yucca Mountain project, the Republicans in the Senate and on the NRC, have supported the project.

The NRC has two vacancies, both set for Democrats, but the Obama administration has not moved to fill the. Under law, the NRC consists of three members of the president’s party, and two members of the minority party.

The NRC waste confidence ruling is necessary before U.S. companies can move forward to build new nuclear projects. The NRC in 1990 formally approved a waste confidence finding. But Klein and Svinicki voted in October to revisit the issue, given that the Obama administration has essentially pulled the funding plug on the Yucca Mountain project, providing no substantial money for the project in the Department of Energy’s latest budget proposal.

Klein, NRC chairman during the George W. Bush administration, said, “I strongly believe that the commission should give the public an opportunity to comment on whether and, if so, how the administration’s recent announcements of changes in the nation’s high-level waste repository program should affect the proposed update.” Does the public have any significant views on the Yucca Mountain issue or the nation’s nuclear waste policy? Doubtful.

Jaczko, in a separate statement a day later, said he supports the earlier, October 2008, NRC staff decision, noting that the “staff paper makes it clear that the commission’s waste confidence decision is not based on the Yucca Mountain program, but rather that safe disposal for high-level waste and spent fuel in a mined geological repository is technically feasible.”

The nuclear industry lobby treated the NRC decision as a temporary anomaly. Steve Kraft, the Nuclear Energy Institute’s chief waste lobbyist, told The Energy Daily, the NRC decision “was not something we were expecting, but it is not the end of the world.” Kraft predicted that the NRC, after getting new information, presumably from the industry, “will come up with maybe not exactly the same answer, but certainly an answer that satisfies the question, and have the rule in place fairly soon, hopefully sometime in the first quarter of 2010.”

Kraft may be spinning a desired outcome of which he has no real knowledge.

Said a long-time observer of the nuclear industry, “I’d be surprised if the NRC can deal with this issue in 2010, not just in the first quarter. Klein wants to leave the commission, the White House hasn’t come up with Democrats to fill vacant seats, and the waste issue is on the way-far-back burner, where Harry Reid wants to keep it. In the meantime, there doesn’t seem to be much interest on Wall Street in financing new nukes. Don’t hold your breath on this one.”

Don’t Let the Dim Bulbs Prevail in the Lighting Market

By Kennedy Maize

In journalism, we call it “burying the lead.” That’s what the New York Times did in a Sept. 25 story headlined “Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize.” The story said that the U.S. Department of Energy is prepared to pay $10 million for development of an efficient, cost-effective replacement for the venerable, everyday 60-W incandescent light bulb.

That’s interesting, but the real story is that the government is now admitting, after more than 25 years of hype, that the compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) is a failure. This is despite a major marketing effort by the government, designating the CFL bulb as an “Energy Star” product, worthy of purchasing by those consumers who want to be “green.” At the urging of federal and state governments, many utilities are subsidizing purchase of CFL bulbs (including a clumsy, embarrassing program from Allegheny Energy two years ago, sending the bulbs to its customers without properly informing them that the cost of the lightbulbs would be added to their bills).

DOE has now admitted that CFLs won’t meet the needs of most consumers. The market has also demonstrated this fact. Consumers aren’t buying the more expensive CFLs. In a separate article in the Times (Sept. 28), the head of DOE’s Energy Star program wrote to the lighting industry that sales of CFLs were plummeting, down 25% from 2007 figures. Richard Kearney wrote that “it’s apparent that the market is heading in the wrong direction.” His prescription: more subsidies for the politically-correct bulbs. Wrong choice.

DOE’s new $10 million “L Prize” program demonstrates the problems with CFLs and the government’s brainless response to market failure. DOE has specified that the winner of its $10 million light bulb sweepstakes must provide the same amount of light and color, produced by the old-fashioned 60-W Edison incandescent bulb; it must use only 10-W of power, last 25,000 hours; 75% of the bulb must be made in the USA (a clear sop to union labor).

The article in the Times noted that consumers “rebelled against the (CFL) bulb’s shortcomings: the light output from compact fluorescent bulbs was cold and unpleasant, their life was much shorter than claimed, many were large and undimmable, they would not work in cold environments, and they contained polluting mercury.” My artist wife, a major consumer of cable TV home makeover shows, noted that she had never seen an interior designer recommend CFLs as part of a remodeling job.

In short, CFL’s are a classic market failure, which DOE is now trying to address by more market intervention. It won’t work.

The agency faces a real problem. In 2007, a feckless Congress, aping command-and-control economies in Europe, mandated a phase-out of incandescent bulbs by 2012. It was a classic example of legislative stupidity.

What to do? DOE’s response: try to find a technological winner, as decided by a panel of Washington bureaucrats, and impose that on the marketplace. That’s where we are now.

My guess is that nothing the light bulb makers – Phillips, GE, and Osram Sylvania – can come up with will satisfy consumers used to cheap, effective, if inefficient, Edison bulbs. The inefficiencies, in aggregate in the total economy, may be great, but they don’t translate to an average household.

The result, initially, will be a thriving black market for incandescents (stockpile now, boys, for sales later), followed by a repeal of the provision in the law.

My advice is that the government should do absolutely nothing, and then go back to Congress to argue that the legal requirement was ludicrous, and government should let people make their own decisions about light bulbs. Any other course of action is, well, dim-bulbism.

Climate Policy High Road and Low Road

By Kennedy Maize

Oh! ye’ll take the high road and
I’ll take the low road,
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye–

Old Scottish folk ballad

When it comes to climate legislation, the Obama administration has chosen the low road – administrative action by the Environmental Protection Agency. At the same time, the administration is also backing the high road – legislative action by the U.S. Congress.

My suspicion is that neither will get to Scotland. That’s a good thing.

I define the EPA’s proposed rule under the Clean Air Act as the “low road” because it is an attempt to skirt the processes that the country usually uses when confronting game-changing issues, such as global warming. Those are decisions traditionally made by the direct representatives of the people, the Congress. The approach of the administration – which appears to assume that legislation in Congress will fail — while approved by the Supreme Court, is still a stealth path to significant policy. It’s undemocratic by definition.

The administration proposes to regulate carbon dioxide using provisions in the air law, most recently amended in 1990, that provide vague authorities, twisted to accommodate the administration’s policy preferences, regardless of the views of the representatives of the people. The action presumes that Democratic and environmental activists know better than the American people about whether greenhouse gases are a problem.

The EPA route will involve a notice of proposed rulemaking, an extended comment period, and a promulgation of a final rule. Each step along the way will provide opportunities for parties on all sides of a very complex issue to sue the agency, clamoring for tests in the federal courts. It will be a policy dog’s dinner.

The federal circuits likely will come up with differing opinions on the validity of the EPA’s proposed rules, leading to multiple decisions in the appeals circuits. That suggests an ultimate Supreme Court review. The crux of the EPA approach, given the constraints of the air law, is traditional command-and-control, focusing on rules for every major stationary CO2 emitter. Experience has shown that this approach, while it reduces pollution, is inefficient and costly, and may produce less environmental bang for the taxpayer buck

While many environmental groups favor that familiar approach, it’s not going to work. CO2 is not a criteria pollutant, and establishing arcane regulatory approaches such as “best available control technology,” “prevention of significant deterioration,” and “new source performance standards” just won’t get to the goals of the regulators. CO2 is a different air pollution duck, where the usual command-and-control conventions won’t work.

The regulatory approach will produce outcomes that none of the parties to the dispute will view as legitimate. There will be disputes over whether command-and-control and technology rules are producing adequate reductions. Nor will regulators be able to determine with any certainty whether “pollution” generators are meeting their regulatory goals, as measurement will be arbitrary and opaque.

Nor do I see any way to expedite the legal process in the courts. It may be a decade or so before the validity of the EPA’s proposed plan gets a judicial thumbs up or thumbs down, or, most likely, a thumbs horizontal, with multiple remands to lower courts. Can you spell “gridlock”?

The administration is proposing the regulatory approach because it fears the results of the high road: congressional action in the name of representative government. It is plain to me that Congress will not approve anything like the House-passed Waxman-Markey everything-including-the-environmental-kitchen sink legislation. Nor will the just released draft crafted by Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer of California, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and John Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, take wing and fly through the Senate.

Ironically, as the Washington Post noted in an editorial, the Boxer-Kerry bill provides only for a CO2 emssions cap, but not, as in the House bill, a cap-and-trade regime. That suggests a major fight in the Senate, if not in committee, then on the floor, perhaps then in a House-Senate conference committee.

The Senate Democratic leadership is simply scared silly of cap’n’trade. So it punts, with the Senate Finance Committee on the receiving end. Acknowledging that the Boxer-Kerry bill doesn’t address the “trade” component of cap’n’trade, Kerry said that the hot, green cap’n’trade potato is going to be in the hands of the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Montana Democrat Max Baucus.

As with health care legislation, I suspect Baucus will end up with the legislative whip hand, as the climate legislation could potentially derail the administration’s plans for vastly expanding federal powers while, at the same time, reducing the deficit. But the committee could easily fumble the punt, to continue the football metaphor.

The political problem that faces the Senate, and the Finance Committee, is the prominence of coal-state legislators. Just as West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller was the administration’s nemesis on the “public option” in health care reform, so he is likely to be when it comes to climate legislation. He’s the senior Democrat on the committee after Baucus.

Let’s tick off a few of the coal states that have a dirty dog in the fight: Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Washington, Alaska. I may have missed a few, but the point is that coal is a mighty force in the Senate, not just a pasteboard villain.

The Obama administration faced a partisan split on health care. It faces a bipartisan, and regional, split on climate legislation. Coal states and coal-consuming states appear to me to be at the controls of the administration’s climate juggernaut in Congress. It is politically powered by coal.

What does that mean? My take is that nothing approaching U.S. climate legislative consensus will be available by December and the latest climate policy festival in Copenhagen. The U.S. will try the kind of policy shuck-and-jive that Al Gore performed at Kyoto in 1997, with ridiculous results. Let’s hope the administration’s soft-shoe is less persuasive in Denmark than it was in Japan, where the result was a U.S.-brokered deal that the U.S. Congress eschewed, and that is universally viewed as a policy failure.

In fairness, let’s acknowledge that the “high road” faces the same post-legislative obstacles as the EPA low-road. The EPA will have to promulgate proposed rules under any legislation that Congress passes. Those rules will go through the same legal meat-grinder as the administration’s approach. We’re probably looking at another decade of policy stalemate either way. Nevermind.

I don’t think the U.S. will ever embrace the kind of hard, pedal to the brake, climate policy greens have been advocating for more than a decade. The evidence doesn’t support such an approach, as the climate appears to be reluctant to follow the guidelines laid out by the half-cocked wizards of climate modeling. The politics suggest that hard regulation, rather than adaptation, would be poisonous policy, both confiscatory and incompetent.

Perhaps the best advice comes from the late Ronald Reagan, when, as U.S. president, he famously said (although he may have been borrowing from someone else, as he was wont to do), “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

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Is ANWR drilling key to climate legislation?

Nuke Notes: New names for the NRC and another, lame poll on public support for nuclear power

How to Cherry-Pick Recent Climate Data

Ohio Repeats Maryland’s ‘Take this Bulb and Shove It’ Fiasco

Nuke Waste Confidence: A Confluence of Ironies

Don’t Let the Dim Bulbs Prevail in the Lighting Market

Climate Policy High Road and Low Road

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