CO2 and the Climate

[Sigurdur]

[blustnmtn]

"Heat waves provide the perfect optics for those who want to push climate alarmism arguing CO2 is causing the world to dramatically overheat."

perhapsallnatural.blogspot.com/2022_02_07_archive.html

"Researchers that push a CO2 driven climate crisis, argue that it is the shift in the average global temperature that results in more extreme heat waves and more record high temperatures.
But that is misinformation. Any honest and critical thinker will readily see the peak in USA heatwaves, as illustrated by the EPA, happened in the 1930s and there is no correlation with the global warming trend."

[missouriboy]

The thrill is gone.  Probably has something to do with a vise-like grip on their nether regions.

wattsupwiththat.com/2022/06/25/cheers-climate-backtracking-germany-pushes-for-g-7-reversal-on-fossil-fuels-in-climate-blow-u-turn-in-global-efforts-to-fight-climate-change/

[blustnmtn]

Jun 26, 2022 15:43:53 GMT missouriboy said:

The thrill is gone.  Probably has something to do with a vise-like grip on their nether regions.

wattsupwiththat.com/2022/06/25/cheers-climate-backtracking-germany-pushes-for-g-7-reversal-on-fossil-fuels-in-climate-blow-u-turn-in-global-efforts-to-fight-climate-change/

Interesting how reality occasionally bites.

[flearider]

just saying it's not warm over here atm .. weather site saying 19c .. my thermo saying bullshit 13c .. winds blowing oh i've put my fire on

[missouriboy]

Jun 26, 2022 17:42:57 GMT flearider said:

just saying it's not warm over here atm .. weather site saying 19c .. my thermo saying bullshit 13c .. winds blowing oh i've put my fire on

48F - 9C this morning at 6 am here in Middle Earth.  No wind off the ocean but I needed a sweater for my morning walk.  My house is NOT the official recording station ... but 48 F is the lowest June 27th minimum recorded since 1888 ... tied with 1926.  Other low years include the infamous 1970s La Nina years that recorded minimums in the low 50s.  One observation is just that.  But this is the 6th day of summer, and Charles Oscar seems to have a hitch in his giddy up.  Bad year to be caught with your BTU stores down.  The Germans and others may be seeing the error of their ways in short order.  The new Alaskan bumper sticker ...  Let the Woke Bastards freeze in the Dark.

The thrill is gone.

[Sigurdur]

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.022055499

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years

[code]

WSJ

Pete Buttigieg’s Climate Toll Road
An extraordinary new rule ignores what the Supreme Court just said about regulation.
By The Editorial Board
July 10, 2022 5:53 pm ET

www.wsj.com/articles/pete-buttigieg-runs-off-the-road-supreme-court-transportation-highways-emissions-climate-environment-11657310842?st=99sz51oh3jjbwzb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

[walnut]

Jul 11, 2022 4:39:10 GMT code said:

WSJ

Pete Buttigieg’s Climate Toll Road
An extraordinary new rule ignores what the Supreme Court just said about regulation.
By The Editorial Board
July 10, 2022 5:53 pm ET

www.wsj.com/articles/pete-buttigieg-runs-off-the-road-supreme-court-transportation-highways-emissions-climate-environment-11657310842?st=99sz51oh3jjbwzb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

I guess I've used up my free views

[ratty]

Jul 11, 2022 4:43:04 GMT walnut said:

Jul 11, 2022 4:39:10 GMT code said:

WSJ

Pete Buttigieg’s Climate Toll Road
An extraordinary new rule ignores what the Supreme Court just said about regulation.
By The Editorial Board
July 10, 2022 5:53 pm ET

www.wsj.com/articles/pete-buttigieg-runs-off-the-road-supreme-court-transportation-highways-emissions-climate-environment-11657310842?st=99sz51oh3jjbwzb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

I guess I've used up my free views

Copied text before it disappeared ....

To adapt what Stalin said of the Pope, how many divisions does the Supreme Court have? That seems to be the implicit slogan of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who on Thursday ignored the High Court’s recent ruling with a proposed rule requiring states to reduce CO2 emissions on highways—that is, banish gas-powered vehicles.

In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court ruled that regulatory agencies can’t impose costly new regulations without a clear direction from Congress. The feds had interpreted an obscure corner of the Clean Air Act to impose costly climate rules on power plants.

Now the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wants to take this abuse of authority on the road. It cites an obscure provision in federal law that authorizes it to set national “performance” goals for the national highway system. The law defines these goals as safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction, system reliability, freight movement and economic vitality, environmental sustainability and reduced project delivery delays.

FHWA says this “environmental sustainability” language allows it to regulate CO2 emissions. Mr. Buttigieg needs a vocabulary lesson. Climate and environment are different even if the left conflates them.

While rising CO2 emissions over time affect the climate, these effects are global. Federal highway performance standards are intended to protect the local environment from traditional vehicle pollutants such as NOx or from highway construction. Brushing past this inconvenient distinction, FHWA declares that its “proposed GHG measure would help the United States confront the increasingly urgent climate crisis.”

The Biden Administration’s climate ends always justify its illegal regulatory means. FHWA claims that states will have flexibility in setting CO2 reduction targets but in the same breath declares they must align with the Administration’s goals to reduce emissions. In other words, states have flexibility as long as they do as the Administration tells them. If they don’t, they risk losing federal highway funding. This is coercive federalism.

It’s not even clear how states would comply with the rule. Unlike traditional vehicle pollutants, CO2 can’t be easily measured by air quality monitors. Are states supposed to ban gas-guzzlers and heavy-duty trucks from the road like vehicles that fail smog checks? Will they have to gauge truck tailpipe CO2 emissions at highway weigh stations?

Possibly. The proposed rule also says states will be required “to establish declining targets for reductions in tailpipe CO2 emissions” on the national highway system. This sounds like DOT conscripting states into regulating vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, which states are expressly barred from doing under federal law.

The Obama and Biden Environmental Protection Agency let California impose its own emissions standards and electric-vehicle mandate. Now progressives complain most EV sales are in California and coastal states that heavily subsidize them. The DOT rule appears intended to force other states to subsidize EVs or punish drivers of gas-powered cars.

Even progressives must doubt that Mr. Buttigieg has the power he’s claiming. As evidence, their Build Back Better bill gave the FHWA money to write a rule requiring “States to set performance targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and “establish an incentive structure to reward States that demonstrate the most significant progress” and “consequences” for those that don’t.

Had the bill passed, Mr. Buttigieg would at least have an express Congressional authorization. Instead, he’s doing what the Court criticized as finding “‘in a long-extant statute an unheralded power’ representing a ‘transformative expansion’” in authority. The Court’s West Virginia decision sets guardrails to prevent regulators from driving off the constitutional road.

Mr. Buttigieg is running rough-shod over the Constitution’s separation of powers. But at least the Justices have now empowered lower courts to stop him, and let’s hope they do.

[walnut]

Jul 11, 2022 4:54:41 GMT ratty said:

Jul 11, 2022 4:43:04 GMT walnut said:

I guess I've used up my free views

Copied text before it disappeared ....

To adapt what Stalin said of the Pope, how many divisions does the Supreme Court have? That seems to be the implicit slogan of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who on Thursday ignored the High Court’s recent ruling with a proposed rule requiring states to reduce CO2 emissions on highways—that is, banish gas-powered vehicles.

In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court ruled that regulatory agencies can’t impose costly new regulations without a clear direction from Congress. The feds had interpreted an obscure corner of the Clean Air Act to impose costly climate rules on power plants.

Now the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wants to take this abuse of authority on the road. It cites an obscure provision in federal law that authorizes it to set national “performance” goals for the national highway system. The law defines these goals as safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction, system reliability, freight movement and economic vitality, environmental sustainability and reduced project delivery delays.

FHWA says this “environmental sustainability” language allows it to regulate CO2 emissions. Mr. Buttigieg needs a vocabulary lesson. Climate and environment are different even if the left conflates them.

While rising CO2 emissions over time affect the climate, these effects are global. Federal highway performance standards are intended to protect the local environment from traditional vehicle pollutants such as NOx or from highway construction. Brushing past this inconvenient distinction, FHWA declares that its “proposed GHG measure would help the United States confront the increasingly urgent climate crisis.”

The Biden Administration’s climate ends always justify its illegal regulatory means. FHWA claims that states will have flexibility in setting CO2 reduction targets but in the same breath declares they must align with the Administration’s goals to reduce emissions. In other words, states have flexibility as long as they do as the Administration tells them. If they don’t, they risk losing federal highway funding. This is coercive federalism.

It’s not even clear how states would comply with the rule. Unlike traditional vehicle pollutants, CO2 can’t be easily measured by air quality monitors. Are states supposed to ban gas-guzzlers and heavy-duty trucks from the road like vehicles that fail smog checks? Will they have to gauge truck tailpipe CO2 emissions at highway weigh stations?

Possibly. The proposed rule also says states will be required “to establish declining targets for reductions in tailpipe CO2 emissions” on the national highway system. This sounds like DOT conscripting states into regulating vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, which states are expressly barred from doing under federal law.

The Obama and Biden Environmental Protection Agency let California impose its own emissions standards and electric-vehicle mandate. Now progressives complain most EV sales are in California and coastal states that heavily subsidize them. The DOT rule appears intended to force other states to subsidize EVs or punish drivers of gas-powered cars.

Even progressives must doubt that Mr. Buttigieg has the power he’s claiming. As evidence, their Build Back Better bill gave the FHWA money to write a rule requiring “States to set performance targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and “establish an incentive structure to reward States that demonstrate the most significant progress” and “consequences” for those that don’t.

Had the bill passed, Mr. Buttigieg would at least have an express Congressional authorization. Instead, he’s doing what the Court criticized as finding “‘in a long-extant statute an unheralded power’ representing a ‘transformative expansion’” in authority. The Court’s West Virginia decision sets guardrails to prevent regulators from driving off the constitutional road.

Mr. Buttigieg is running rough-shod over the Constitution’s separation of powers. But at least the Justices have now empowered lower courts to stop him, and let’s hope they do.

Seems like the democrats do not have much time to get their crazy agenda to the finish line, and even then it would surely mostly be rolled back?

[ratty]

Jul 11, 2022 5:03:49 GMT walnut said:

Seems like the democrats do not have much time to get their crazy agenda to the finish line, and even then it would surely mostly be rolled back?

You would hope .....

[ratty]

A comment from reddit .....

EPA Now Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place on CO2

There are lots of happy reports on the Supreme Court’s ruling throwing out EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan. Some go so far as to suggest that EPA is barred from regulating power plant CO2 emissions.

It is not quite that simple and the result is rather amusing. EPA is still required to regulate CO2 under the terms of the Clean Air Act, but that Act provides no way to do that regulation. The Clean Power Plan attempted to expand an obscure minor clause in the Act to do the job but SCOTUS correctly ruled that the clause does not confer that kind of massive authority.

EPA is between a rock and a hard place. It should tell Congress that it cannot do the job and needs a new law, along the lines of the SO2 law added to the Act in 1990, curbing emissions. But such a law has zero chance of passing in the foreseeable future.

EPA is stuck. What they will now do is anybody’s guess. Enjoy their dilemma!

[walnut]

Jul 11, 2022 3:59:09 GMT Sigurdur said:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.022055499

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years

Figure 4 seems to support the null hypothesis,

"Superficially, this observation would seem to imply that pCO2 does not exert dominant control on Earth's climate at time scales greater than about 10 My. A wealth of evidence, however, suggests that pCO2 exerts at least some control [see Crowley and Berner (30) for a recent review]. Fig. 4 cannot by itself refute this assumption. Instead, it simply shows that the “null hypothesis” that pCO2 and climate are unrelated cannot be rejected on the basis of this evidence alone."

"A wealth of evidence"... except that the data shows that it did not happen on the tested time scale.

[missouriboy]

Jul 11, 2022 12:27:46 GMT walnut said:

Jul 11, 2022 3:59:09 GMT Sigurdur said:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.022055499

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years

Figure 4 seems to support the null hypothesis,

"Superficially, this observation would seem to imply that pCO2 does not exert dominant control on Earth's climate at time scales greater than about 10 My. A wealth of evidence, however, suggests that pCO2 exerts at least some control [see Crowley and Berner (30) for a recent review]. Fig. 4 cannot by itself refute this assumption. Instead, it simply shows that the “null hypothesis” that pCO2 and climate are unrelated cannot be rejected on the basis of this evidence alone."

"A wealth of evidence"... except that the data shows that it did not happen on the tested time scale.

AND they would not give a fig one way or the other, as that has never been the issue.  THE ISSUE is power and control.