First, see Dorian de Wind’s piece ; it has a bearing on this.

Did you know that George W. Bush is still president?  It’s true.  And he’s still got plenty of ways to worsen things before his term is over, leaving us a country discredited in the eyes of our own allies, a more toxic and unstable environment, a military stretched to the breaking point, and an enormous deficit.

He merrily signed off at the G8 by saying his ‘"Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,’ knowing full well he was going to stave off any progress on climate change to the end of his term. Today’s Washington Post reports:

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare — a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.

The Bush Administration discovered a great truth:  a bare-faced lie, however it may be discredited, is as good as the truth if you pretend you believe it and act on it anyway.  And if you don’t mind being called out as a liar, you can lie with complete impunity so long as there is no person with the authority (or the spine to wield it) to stop you. 

As they’ve done many times before, administration employees have selectively altered the agency’s findings to reach a conclusion that better reflects Bush’s wishes.

Check out today’s story in WaPo.  According to it, today’s EPA report —an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking —will override its own December 5 finding:

backed up by a lengthy scientific analysis — that global warming is unequivocal, that there is "compelling and robust" evidence that the emissions endanger public welfare and that the EPA administrator is "required by law" to act to protect Americans from future harm. (WaPo; emphasis added)

How could this happen? 

It happens because such a finding would trigger a number of measures that Bush doesn’t want triggered on his watch, according to — guess who — that malignant offshoot from the executive branch known as the Cheney Branch.  It’s true.  Look:

"They argued that this increase in regulation should be on the next president’s record," not Bush’s, said a participant in the lengthy interagency debate, referring principally to officials in the office of Vice President Cheney, on the White House Council on Environmental Quality, on the National Economic Council and in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).(WaPo).

In its unaltered form, the changes heralded by the findings in the report would have had substantial economic as well as environmental benefits.  Sadly, those changes would have also have done two things that Cheney isn’t going to let happen on his watch — I mean, Bush’s.

1. Trigger ’sweeping’ regulatory requirements under the Clean Air Act;
2. Cost utilities and automakers billions of dollars.

To read the details of how the first set of findings developed (’after resistance from the Cheney branch) after Bush’s order to the EPA to begin ‘the first steps’ toward regulation, see WaPo here.  (This is my favorite detail: ‘Some officials began carrying around copies of Bush’s executive order, waving it while arguing with senior political appointees.’(WaPo))   Read about Cheney’s energy adviser here.

WaPo conscientiously informs us that the full story of what it tactfully calls the ’sidetracking’ (as opposed to, say, the ‘hijacking’) of the original finding isn’t known.  Someone told an ‘EPA deputy associate administrator to withdraw the finding after it was emailed to Susan Dudley, head of the  OMB’s regulatory review office. (WaPo). But here’s a clue:

An official said the person involved was "more senior than the head of OMB," but declined to be more precise. (WaPo)

We do know, of course, that in April 2007, the Supreme Court (Massachusetts v. EPA)  told the EPA that it needed to get its thumb out and either determine whether greenhouse gases are a threat to humankind or explain why it couldn’t.(WaPo-07)  Or, as The Washington Post put it at the time, ‘[It] rebuked the Bush administration yesterday for refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, siding with environmentalists in the court’s first examination of the phenomenon of global warming.’

The court ruled 5 to 4 that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by improperly declining to regulate new-vehicle emissions standards to control the pollutants that scientists say contribute to global warming….

"EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. The agency "identifies nothing suggesting that Congress meant to curtail EPA’s power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants," the opinion continued.  (WaPo-07)

According to today’s article, this made an impression on EPA officials.. 

After the court ruling, in Massachusetts et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al.,"people were bouncing back and forth into each other’s offices, saying, ‘Can you believe this? Look at this decision; look at the language; this is so strong,’ " recalled one agency official, who like the others asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. "People thought, ‘We are going to move forward and do the right thing.’ "(WaPo; emphasis added)

Right.  The White House simply did what any sulky child does when it’s been ‘rebuked’ and told to do what it doesn’t want to do:  dragged its feet by…

….editing its officials’ congressional testimony, refusing to read documents prepared by career employees and approved by top appointees, requesting changes in computer models to lower estimates of the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide, and pushing narrowly drafted legislation on fuel-economy standards that officials said was meant to sap public interest in wider regulatory action.(WaPo).

Jon Stewart in this video — ‘be patient; this gets amazing!’ — explains one technique that was apparently used to good effect.  Via The Washington Post:

By late November, [EPA Administrator Stephen L.]  Johnson  had held a meeting with his staff at which he advocated finding a danger to public welfare and praised the agency’s technical supporting document as "excellent." But when [Deputy Associate Administrator Jason] Burnett sent the proposal to the White House, the OMB staff refused to open it, and it sat in limbo for months.(WaPo; links added)

EPA officials, speaking anonymously, say that the Bush administration — as it has before, with other officials — pressured them to make findings that would reflect the Bush administration’s wishes.  This aspect of the Bush administration — the willingness of its minions and gremlins to support the distortion of fact — is something I still can’t get my head around.  We all know it’s happened before — and I’m not even thinking of the Iraq war.  Remember when Surgeon General (2002-2006) Dr. Richard Camorna resigned?  Remember him claiming he’d been ‘muzzled‘ and the examples he gave of exactly how?

WaPo concedes that the full story of how Bush’s environmental regulations got ’sidetracked’ isn’t known.  Of course it isn’t. The full story of how the Bush administration managed to bury information that would have proved it was doing what everyone knows it was doing won’t emerge till Bush is out of the White House and officials feel free to accept those book deals.

Here, according to The Washington Post,  are some of the distortions that the Bush administration foisted on the public by having its appointees change information in the reports:

EPA determined that global benefits of reducing carbon are worth $40 per ton, but the report will state that this isn’t an official estimate.  And their supporting evidence will be omitted.

‘Dozens’ of pages on ‘cost-effective’ ways to reduce greenhouse gases have been cut out.

The benefits of tighter-fuel economy standards (originally estimated to be $2 trillion) have been recalculated based on the assumption that gas in the future will cost $58 per barrel instead of, say, $140, reducing the benefits to between $340 and $830 billion.

Edward Markey (D), Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming got off a good one: 

"If this administration spent the same effort fighting global warming as they do editing and censoring global warming documents, the planet might not be in such dire straits."(WaPo).

Markey, who is naturally quite frustrated, says his staff was apparently allowed to see a copy of the EPA’s  Dec. 5 finding, but not to keep a copy. (WaPo).Well, naturally.  There are rules about these things — we don’t want unofficial findings circulating around out there.

So there it is:  the Bush Administration finds the way to keep on doing nothing till Bush’s term is over, at least with respect to climate change.

Or — maybe he’s right!   As I often say, just because someone habitually lies doesn’t guarantee that they sometimes won’t tell the truth.  That’s the hell of the Bush Administration — you can be fairly sure that Bush and his cronies will lie, but you can’t be 100% sure with respect to any particular fact.  Maybe the EPA’s first findings were really highly questionable —oh, never mind the scientists — and Bush is just showing laudable caution here.

But would you like to bet the planet on it?

Recommended: 

• Note to Bush:  Don’t Brag About U.S. Pollution
• Climate Progress

CROSS-POSTED AT BUCK NAKED POLITICS

In today's "People Can Prove Whatever They Want If They Really Try Hard Enough" moment, Swiss scientists claimed early this week that efforts to clean the air over Europe the past three decades are responsible for at least half of that continent's 1°C rise in temperatures since 1980.

In an interesting chicken and the egg conundrum, scientists in America claimed Thursday that global warming causes smog.

So, cleaning the air causes global warming -- which ends up leading to higher levels of smog?

Let's start with the Swiss study reported by NewScientist Wednesday (emphasis added, photo courtesy Reuters):

GOODBYE air pollution and smoky chimneys, hello brighter days. That's been the trend in Europe for the past three decades - but unfortunately cleaning up the skies has allowed more of the sun's rays to pierce the atmosphere, contributing to at least half the warming that has occurred.

Since 1980, average air temperatures in Europe have risen 1 °C: much more than expected from greenhouse-gas warming alone. Christian Ruckstuhl of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland and colleagues took aerosol concentrations from six locations in northern Europe, measured between 1986 and 2005, and compared them with solar-radiation measurements over the same period. Aerosol concentrations dropped by up to 60 per cent over the 29-year period, while solar radiation rose by around 1 watt per square metre (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034228). "The decrease in aerosols probably accounts for at least half of the warming over Europe in the last 30 years," says Rolf Philipona, a co-author of the study at MeteoSwiss, Switzerland's national weather service.

See? That's what you get for trying to clean the air!

However, readers shouldn't be too concerned, for the following report from Reuters Friday makes it clear that global warming will increase smog (emphasis added):

U.S. environmental regulators quietly published a draft study on Thursday that linked global warming to higher levels of smog that could harm human health, a report green groups said stood in contrast to the Bush Administration's slow movement on climate change.

The draft report published by the Environmental Protection Agency in the Federal Register said, "Climate change has the potential to produce significant increases in near-surface (ozone) concentrations in many areas of the U.S."

It said parts of the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and lower Midwest show some increases in ozone in study simulations, and the seasons in which ozone is a problem could last longer as a result of higher temperatures.

Confused? Well, this should add to that condition, for in 1987, the developed nations of the world entered into a treaty called the Montreal Protocol. This was designed to reduce and eventually eliminate the production and release of a number of substances thought at the time to be depleting ozone.

Wouldn't it be fascinating if such efforts lead to cleaner air around the world which ended up warming the planet, and that additional warmth is now breaking down the very ozone we thought we could save?

Even more hysterical was the August 2007 United Nations finding that "the biggest emissions-cutting projects under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming have directly contributed to an increase in the production of gases that destroy the ozone layer."

Lest we not forget the September 2007 study that debunked the consensus concerning exactly "how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change."

In the end, doesn't all this simply prove that it's not nice to fool Mother Nature?

Oil sets new record near $146 a barrel

Oil prices spiked Friday as continued tensions in the Middle East and concerns of renewed violence in Nigeria pushed the price for a barrel of oil to a record near $146.

By midday in Europe, light, sweet crude for August delivery rose $3.53 at $145.18 a barrel electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices at one point jumped well over $4 to a record $145.98.

Governors call for boost in home heating aid

N.H. governor: 'It's potentially a crisis and I don't use that word lightly'

BOSTON - Governors from across New England, warning that some families may have to choose between food or warmth this winter, have called for a sharp boost in federal home heating aid.

Lawmakers push new energy bill, tapping reserve

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As the United States grapples with surging fuel costs, U.S. lawmakers on Thursday renewed calls to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and will attempt to pass new energy legislation aimed at increasing domestic production as early as next week.

A Bipartisan Fix for the Oil Crisis

As president of Gulf Oil, New England's largest independent petroleum company, and as someone who has spent his life in and around energy markets, I find the tone and substance of the current debate about our energy policy to be profoundly disappointing.

Partisan sides are using a serious crisis to advance political agendas, create political attack sound bites, and launch hearings to "expose" the culprit. Pick your favorite: speculators, Big Oil, environmentalists, China, India, etc.

This is not leadership.

OPEC chief keeps mum on possible output hike

VIENNA (AFP) - OPEC secretary general Abdalla Salem El-Badri declined to say Thursday whether the cartel would be prepared to boost output at its next meeting in September in order to help curb the rise in oil prices.

"September is a long time away and we will decide at that meeting," El-Badri told a news conference here to present the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' annual World Oil Outlook.

Brown blunders in pledge to secure Nigeria oil

Gordon Brown is being accused of preparing for a military adventure in Africa after he pledged to provide backing to the Nigerian security forces. His announcement prompted the collapse of a ceasefire in the oil-rich Niger Delta and helped to drive up crude oil prices on world markets.

Chinese provinces worst hit by power shortages

(Reuters) - Over a dozen Chinese provinces have begun rationing power supplies as coal shortages and unprofitable electricity tariffs curb generation, driving the country toward its worst summer power shortages since 2004.

The government has forecast a peak power shortfall of 10 gigawatts for the summer, about 1.4 percent of capacity, but a handful of provinces alone are forecasting more than double this.

The following table details the situation in six of the worst hit provinces.

Cotton futures fall precipitously in last fortnight

In the case of cotton this energy debacle is affecting both supply and demand. On the one hand it becomes much more expensive to grow a crop and we wonder how growers will be able to stay ahead if prices remain at 70 cents/lb. On the other hand we have textile mills that face a similar problem since they use a lot of energy to produce and transport yarn and fabrics. Without the ability to pass on these increases, we may lose bales on both sides of the balance sheet. Crop production will probably continue to decline next season, but mill use could also drop as consumers retrench and some mill capacity is being idled.

A Closer Look At Oil Speculators

In my earlier editorial for InterPress Service, “Changing Games in the Global Casino,” I called for similar measures now in the House Bill HR 6377. The damage I cited to real people and real companies is growing daily, as food prices lead to hunger and oil prices lead to bankruptcies in trucking, fishing, airlines and other industries. In the USA, the towns of Gary and Terre Haute, both in Indiana, have lost all air service due to airlines going bust. Mass transit is still crumbling and often non-existent for people trying to find other means than driving to work. Infrastructure, mass transit and energy conservation have been ignored for decades in the USA in favor of continued subsidies of some $230 billion per year to oil, gas and nuclear energy, all big political contributors and sponsors of ad campaigns to deny the realities of global warming.

KGB INTERROGATION: Des King

If we look at the peak oil projections, we’ll be using in 2030 by their projections the same amount of oil we use today, which does mean that as the demand for energy grows around the world we will need to find more and more alternate sources. In fact, we’ll need to find those anyway, because if you look at the increase in the likely demand for energy over the next 20 odd years to 2030, it is projected that the world will be using 50 per cent more energy in 2030 than it’s using today, from all sources and our oil, whether it be 86 million barrels a day or 110, is not going to increase in line with the energy demand increases. So we need all the energy sources we can get. That is, more coal, more biofuels, more nuclear energy, more wind, more solar, and these are all based on projections by the National Petroleum Council.

Petrol report a wake-up call: environmentalists

Petroleum engineer Phil Hart from the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas believes it will not be long before the demand for oil will outstrip supply.

"Oil production has been essentially flat since 2005, and we have only another couple of years at this same sort of level of production before we start seeing oil production going into decline," he said.

Untapped local oil could boost fuel

UNTAPPED sources of oil within Australia could provide the country with fuel into the next century, a Queensland energy company says.

Queensland Energy Resources has called for a national focus on securing a domestic oil supply, urging the Federal Government and business sector to focus on solutions rather than gloomy outlooks.

World Made by Hand, Part I

In World Made by Hand, Kunstler answers the question posed by Rodney King in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots. “Can’t we all just get along?” Well, no. Not in an unraveling land of rapidly diminishing resources. It’s the same continent, but a different world.

Is There an Oil Shortage?

The popular perception of the recently skyrocketing oil price is that there is an oil shortage in global energy markets. The perceived shortage is generally blamed on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting countries (OPEC) for “insufficient” production, or on countries like China and India for their increased demand for energy, or on both.

This perception is reinforced—indeed, largely shaped—by the Bush administration and its neoconservative handlers who are eager to deflect attention away from war and geopolitical turbulence as driving forces behind the skyrocketing energy prices.

Campos oil basin workers could strike

BRAZIL: Oil workers on Petrobras' offshore platforms in the Campos Basin offshore Brazil have threatened to go on strike for five days, starting on July 14, according to a story from Reuters. The workers are calling the strike to force state oil company Petrobras to count the day workers leave platforms to return to shore as a full working day.

Iraq to hold major oil conference in Oct

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq will hold a major oil and gas conference in October to allow foreign oil firms to get a better understanding of the country's energy potential, the Oil Ministry said on Wednesday.

The Oct 17-19 energy conference and exhibition will be the first event of its type in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. More than 50 international oil companies would take part, Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told a news conference.

ExpressJet to suspend operations as of September

WAPA) - Houston based American airline, ExpressJet Holdings, said today it would suspend branded commercial operations as of September 2nd, blaming high fuel costs.

"If we had any other choice, we would not take this difficult action", Jim Ream, ExpressJet's president and chief executive, said in a statement. "However, rising fuel prices has made the operation impossible to sustain".

Giant oilfield to raise Saudi output

The Khurais project is a key element in Saudi Arabia's $60bn plan to increase its production capacity.

The Kingdom's aim is to be able to produce 12.5 million barrels a day by the end of next year, though Saudi Arabia generally keeps some spare capacity.

Its current production is about 9.7 million barrels a day.

Chevron sees downstream loss in second quarter

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chevron Corp said on Thursday it expects second-quarter earnings from its exploration and production operations to rise on higher oil and gas prices, but will be offset somewhat by a loss at its refining and marketing business.

Fannie and Freddie Are Surely Doomed

According to CSIRO speculation, ethanol will play a much bigger role in Australia’s fuel mix, along with fuel cells, coal-to-liquids, and plug-in-hybrids. We’ve got exposure to each of these potentially vast markets with our share tip recommendations in the small cap letter. It’s going to take a portfolio of energy experiments to get the world over the Peak Oil hump—and that’s if we get over the hump.

Thousands protest in Niger against power, food woes

NIAMEY (Reuters) - Around 30,000 people marched through Niger's capital Niamey on Thursday to protest against the high cost of living and electricity blackouts caused by disruptions in power supplies from neighbouring Nigeria.

It was one of the biggest public protests seen in recent years in the landlocked Sahel state, which is a leading world exporter of uranium but, like many African nations, has suffered the squeeze of sharp increases in oil and food prices.

Pickens' plan is bold — too bad it won't work

The proposal is typical Pickens, who's known for bold predictions and grandiose proposals. His plan for a billion-dollar water pipeline from the Texas Panhandle early in the decade still doesn't have any takers.

Indonesia's Budget May Face Pressure as Oil Rises

(Bloomberg) -- Indonesia's budget may come under pressure as the government prepares to increase subsidies to cap fuel prices and match a jump in crude that has more than doubled in the past year.

``If oil prices increase to $170 a barrel, of course there will be problems,'' Vice President Jusuf Kalla said in an interview in Jakarta yesterday. The government, which bases its budget assumptions for oil to average at $140, will spend more to cap pump tariffs should fuel costs extend gains, he said.

Entrepreneurs lug cheap Mexican fuel across border

TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - U.S. and Mexican entrepreneurs with an eye for a quick buck are buying subsidized fuel in bulk in Mexico and hauling it across the U.S. border to make big profits, officials say.

With a yawning gap between the cost of Mexico's state-subsidized fuel and record U.S. pump prices, tanker truck owners and people doing business on the border are filling up tanks or plastic barrels with Mexican fuel and selling it in the United States.

CFTC says no evidence of oil manipulation, hoarding

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission told Congress on Thursday there is no evidence that market traders are working together to push up crude oil prices or that oil supplies are being hoarded.

"We have no evidence that people are hoarding oil," CFTC Chairman Walter Lukken told a House Appropriations subcommittee.

He also said the CFTC doesn't "see systemically in the current market" that traders are "working together" to drive up prices.

Two Takes: Energy Independence Is Neither Practical nor Attainable

There is now no liquid fuel that can largely replace oil for transportation. We are stuck because of the scale of the industry and—despite criticism—oil's efficiency. A gallon of gas, refined from African oil, is cheaper than a gallon of Maine sparkling water. Political alternatives like corn-based ethanol have required huge subsidies and convulsed food markets but produced only 430,000 barrels per day in 2007— 2 percent of U.S. oil consumption.

Brazil shifted to ethanol. But its ethanol is derived from sugar, the economics of which are dramatically different from those of corn, which has less energy content. And it explored for oil offshore, using Brazilian petrol to cut back oil imports. Commentators also omit that Brazil is a small gasoline market—4 percent the size of the United States—an ignored issue of scale.

A low carbon diet

The price of oil is only going one way: up. We literally cannot afford not to invest in renewables.

Shucking the Hype: St. Louis Fed Analyzes Ethanol

While increasing our use of ethanol for fuel may make a small dent in the demand for oil, the potential benefits must outweigh the potential costs if ethanol is going to be viable in the long-term.

Biofuels And Biodiversity Don't Mix, Ecologists Warn

Rising demand for palm oil will decimate biodiversity unless producers and politicians can work together to preserve as much remaining natural forest as possible, ecologists have warned. A new study of the potential ecological impact of various management strategies found that very little can be done to make palm oil plantations more hospitable for local birds and butterflies. The findings have major implications for the booming market in biofuels and its impact on biodiversity.

Japan's MMC to Sell Electric Cars Next Year - Nikkei

TOKYO - Mitsubishi Motors Corp will begin selling its electric car to individual customers in Japan from summer 2009, slightly ahead of schedule, banking on strong interest amid record-high fuel prices, the Nikkei business daily said.

EPA: Smog could get worse with global warming

WASHINGTON - Global warming could worsen smog and stretch what typically is a summer pollution problem into the spring and fall, government scientists predicted Thursday.

Smog is most likely to get worse in the Northeast, lower Midwest, and mid-Atlantic regions of the country, where numerous counties and cities are already struggling to clean up the air, according to a draft analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In Namibian desert, the heat is on to address climate change

GOBABEB, Namibia (AFP) - It was never easy living among the Namib desert's spectacular vistas, with ancient camel thorn trees providing sparse shade and huge red sand dunes reflecting the burning hot sun.

But signs that climate change may be worsening the already harsh conditions in this patch of desert have led to novel experiments and skillful improvisation under some of the world's hottest weather.