Paris Climate Conference

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
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OK. Cool. Thanks. It helps me to know where you’re coming from.

The wikipedia link you put up is a good start. I’ve got kids out of school for a long weekend, so I don’t have a lot of time, but as you read that wiki article, do you notice this intro?
The Clean Power Plan is a policy aimed at combating anthropogenic climate change (global warming) that was first proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in June 2014, under the administration of US President Barack Obama.[1] The final version of the plan was unveiled by President Obama on August 3, 2015.[2]

It’s aim is combating AGW, but look at the article. Nowhere in it will it tell you about how it will effect global temps. Why? Because the EPA has admitted that it’s effects are unknown, or may be negligible. The computer modeling looks like the quote I put up earlier, with regard to impact on AGW. They admit this. The EPA says they can’t estimate it’s effects at meeting this aim.

Which brings me to your next point, clipped from that wiki page. A good one.

OK. Why is President Obama talking about asthma and heart attacks? Because he needed a way to sell something aimed at AGW that admittedly doesn’t really address GW very well. But addressing air pollution is good right? And doing stuff like reducing particulates that might cause some asthma? Not so fast. We already have air quality legislation in place for that.

If we drill down into the numbers, it looks like the EPA may be double counting health benefits from The Clean Power Plan with previously legislation and protections already in place in legislation like The Clean Air Act.

2014 -
The combination of large costs and zero climate benefits explains why the president argued in a recent radio address that the new rule would prevent “up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks” in the first year, rising thereafter, presumably because of ancillary reductions in such other effluents as particulates, mercury and nitrogen oxides. (Carbon dioxide does not cause adverse health effects even at concentrations many times higher than those current or projected.)

**But those pollutants already are regulated under other sections of the Clean Air Act, and the legal requirement is that those regulations “protect the public health” with an “adequate margin of safety,” without consideration of costs. Is it the position of the Obama administration that those regulations do not satisfy the requirements of the law? **Or is the EPA double-counting the health benefits from other regulations already in force? Or is the EPA assuming further health benefits from reducing pollution levels that already are lower than those at which the epidemiological analyses suggest no adverse effects?****

No one knows, because the EPA analytic methodology to a substantial degree is obscure and the EPA’s answers to analysts’ questions often are unclear. Source, Benjamin Zycher of AEI.

Tricky, right?

With regard to what this legislation will cost? The EPA is projecting all these savings in energy bills? Well, there are A LOT of economists and energy analysts who disagree. It’s already showing itself to be very costly, particularly for certain states like the Mountain States. The estimate I put up earlier of 50 Billion per year may be high, since that one comes from econmists friendly to the energy producers and businesses. Ok, maybe cut that in half if you’re skeptical? That’s still just NUTS if you think about what it’s supposed to do. I believe nearly everybody who is looking at this, outside of the EPA and the environmental groups, will tell you that it’s going to be costly, and that the EPA estimates of the costs and the projected efficiency of renewable sources are not realistic. It wouldn’t be so controversial otherwise. There have been MANY studies attacking the economics of the Clean Power Plan, and some of the very twisted political arithmetic behind it, including some good ones out of places like MIT, looking at the same climate models used by the EPA from the National Center for Atmospheric Research. That’s part of why we’re seeing so many lawsuits from it, and because some of the legal footing that it was passed on is highly disputed.

Anyway, long story short but the economics of this thing are far from settled. And as you drill down, it’s incredibly complicated. Why do I know about any of this? My mom was an administrator for a company that runs electrical power plants. She’s certainly not unbiased, but she could school all of us in this stuff. I pick up a few things from talking to her, and it’s made me more interested in trying to understand it as I’ve seen it effect the economics of my hometown.

I may not be here for a few days, maybe a week. Things are busy at the Puff house right now.

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For sure. And that’s because we’ve long had policies like the Clean Air Act in place to reduce smog, particulates, etc… I’m absolutely NOT saying we shouldn’t regulate our air and water. We should, and we do. Regulating this stuff within our own borders is one thing. Trying to regulate it on a global scale is orders of magnitude more difficult.

As I understand it, we had some pseudo-agreements with China prior to Paris, and they had already begun to renege on those.

Absolutely no one is surprised.

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Like I said, I don’t know anything about this plan, so I’m not really ‘coming from’ anywhere in particular about it. I simply googled it because its cost/benefit ratio as presented in your comment was was so absurd as to strain credulity. Put simply, no one would propose legislation expected to cost $50 billion/year, the outcome of which would be to bend the temperature curve by less than the margin of fluctuation.

You may not like Obama, but I don’t think you consider him a fool. And only a fool would propose something as absurd as the legislation as characterized in your comment. Hence my search for a different framing of the legislation.

I think you’re splitting hairs here. ‘Combating AGW’ doesn’t have to mean ‘bend the temperature curve;’ it can reasonably be construed as referring to ameliorating the effects of AGW.

I disagree with this. There are plenty of powerful interests (I’m thinking of the fossil-fuel energy and related industries) that are motivated to oppose this legislation for reasons that have nothing to do with its effect on anything other than their bottom line. And as they know that objecting to legislation because it hurts their bottom line is a nonstarter PR-wise, they instead gin up cost-benefit analyses that make the legislation seem ludicrously costly and futile.

In short, the existence of an industry-driven controversy doesn’t imply that the economics are truly unsettled.

I suggest we focus on the “good ones,” then, and avoid those that are obviously compromised by self-interest.

Sound familiar? The fossil-fuel interests fought for years (decades?) to demonstrate that the existence of AGW itself was “far from settled.” Now that even major fossil-fuel interests are being forced (by the science) to admit AGW is real, they have shifted their doubt-sowing strategy to the economics of mitigation. Same song, second verse.

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That just tells me that you’ve been following the science part of the AGW issue, and not so much the US environmental law/ policy part. The CPP is a complete restructuring of our energy sector, and it’s the most sweeping environmental policy addressing AGW of the Obama presidency. It’s too big to miss.

You’d think a plan this BIG would involve the legislative process, right? I agree. Unfortunately, it didn’t go through our congress. This is EPA regulation. It’s a policy change. It was all done with rule by fiat. Written by the beuracrats at the EPA. Obama using the power of the pen.

Well, yes and no. Under the CPP Coal is a big looser, but natural gas is a big winner. People who make solar panels are big winners, as are the electrician’s unions that install them. It gave Obama a nice win with the environmental lobby. On down the line. You’d think it would be a winner for nuclear, but it isn’t. In fact, if it holds, some of the states who have nuclear power would be switching to dirtier natural gas.

Not so. Economists are FAR from being in agreement about predicting the effects of something this HUGE on our economy, and with HOW the economics of AGW is calculated. And the EPA hasn’t been very transparent about telling us all where the numbers come from, and some of the numbers they have released look pretty unconvincing. To nearly everybody. The Wiki link you put up is a good example. It’s all benefit with no cost, according to whoever wrote the Wiki page, right? Think about that for a moment.

President Obama and his head of the EPA estimated the CPP would cost 8.5 Billion per year. That 8-9 Billion number depends on an ENTIRELY rosy picture of how this would go. All the new technologies will be cheaper, more efficient, better in every way. Major tech advances in wind and solar would have to make those technologies cheaper by 2019, in fact. Yep. And Carbon Capture and Save technology implemented at all the coal power plants. Sound good? Sure. Never mind the fact that not a single major coal power plant has that technology now. Let’s not forget they are counting hypothetical asthma sufferers who wouldn’t miss work because they’d be breathing air that is… wait for it… already below recommended levels.

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Fun fact about the CPP and Obama. It’s currently tied up in the courts, and we’ll be waiting to see if the EPA on steroids will get slapped down by the SCOTUS. Obama talked about how law professor, Laurence Tribe was a mentor for him at Harvard. This must have been a little painful.

Perhaps the harshest and most influential critique came from Harvard University Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence Tribe. Tribe, a “liberal legal icon” who served in the Justice Department for President Obama’s first term, stated in testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that the “EPA is attempting an unconstitutional trifecta: usurping the prerogatives of the States, Congress and the Federal Courts—all at once. Burning the Constitution should not become part of our national energy policy.”

This goes into some of the legal part, and how the CPP takes power away from the states, and gives it to the EPA.

Trump: The First 100 Days
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Yes, it is a shame that Obama and the Congress couldn’t cooperate on a matter as important as this.

But don’t miss the forest for the trees here. Neither the EPA nor Obama would push regulations that would cost $50B/year in order to bend the temp-curve by such a trivial amount.

This is not surprising (economics ain’t call ‘the dismal science’ for nothing). Hence my suggestion we stick to the least-biased economic analyses that are available.

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I suspect you’re right in that they see CO 2 reduction as a worthy enough goal. About costs, we’ll likely never know which estimates are correct. We can be fairly sure it would be more than $8-9 Billion, and less than $39 Billion (NERA Ecomonic Consulting Study). The $50 Billion per year is an estimate of economic impact from the US Chamber of Commerce. Businesses expecting a lot costs for power.

Regarding studies, the 2015 MIT Climate study gets quoted a lot by people on both sides.

I think it’s fairly well accepted that 1) the CPP likely won’t be effective in reducing AGW, but 2) the CPP would reduce carbon.

Some of you guys might like this article from Reason. I like them a lot.

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I was not a fan of that evolution. Climate takes too much energy out of my brain to really speak about, although I see that I owe EyeDentist a response here so will try to get to it eventually.

The subject is practically poisoned in the public at large. This is probably the single worst thing that could happen for discussion of the attribution problem, mechanistic problems, and policy problems.

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I meant to say this to you the other day, and got distracted. @ China. Fun fact from Puff’s mom, “They do have scrubbers on their newer coal burning power plants, but they generally keep them turned off to save money. The scrubbers are there for inspections.”

Haha! We can expect them to do a lot of pretending. I don’t think it’s about a lack of regulations. It’s about priorities. They’re spending a lot of money building little islands.