GWPF Newsletter: Trump’s Budget Targets Obama’s Climate Policies

To Protect $77 Billion Climate Funds, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find

In this newsletter:

1) Trump’s Budget Targets Obama’s Climate Policies

The Washington Times, 16 March 2017 

2) To Protect $77 Billion Climate Funds, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find
Bloomberg, 15 March 2017

3) Trump To Repeal Obama Fracking Rule
The Hill, 15 March 2017

4) Ignore The Critics: If Trump Withdraws From Paris Climate Agreement, He Will Demonstrate US Leadership
Fox News, 15 March 2017

5) Why Are Climate-Change Models So Flawed? Because Climate Science Is So Incomplete
Boston Globe, 14 March 2016

6) And Finally: German Minister Who Criticised Unilateral Climate Targets Recants
Clean Energy Wire, 14 March 2017

Full details:

1) Trump’s Budget Targets Obama’s Climate Policies

The Washington Times, 16 March 2017 
Dave Boyer

President Trump’s first federal budget spells out his intention to end President Obama’s climate-change policies, including eliminating funding for the so-called Clean Power Plan. 

The budget proposal submitted to Congress Thursday would save $100 million in fiscal 2018 by discontinuing funding for climate-change research, international climate-change programs and the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which restricts carbon emissions from power plants.

Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order soon that would direct the EPA to roll back provisions of the Clean Power Plan, issued in 2015 as one of the cornerstones of Mr. Obama’s climate-change strategy.

“Consistent with the president’s America First Energy Plan, the budget reorients EPA’s air program to protect the air we breathe without unduly burdening the American economy,” the White House Office of Management and Budget said in the 62-page spending plan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is considering a legal challenge that argues the EPA exceeded its legal authority by imposing carbon emission limits on operators of existing plants. The regulation aims to cut carbon emissions by about one-third by 2030, based on 2005 levels.

A study commissioned by the American Council for Capital Formation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for 21st Century Energy said Thursday that meeting Mr. Obama’s commitments as part of the Paris climate accord could cost the U.S. economy $3 trillion and 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040.

The study, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting, showed that job losses by 2025 would hit especially hard in four key manufacturing states. It said pursing the Obama administration’s climate policies would cost 74,000 jobs in Michigan, 53,000 jobs in Missouri, 110,000 jobs in Ohio, and 140,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, in sectors such as steelmaking, refining and cement production.

Full story

2) To Protect $77 Billion Climate Funds, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find
Bloomberg, 15 March 2017
Christopher Flavelle



President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies -- in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.  
There is no single list of those programs or their cost, because President Barack Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did. The goal was to get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs hard to disentangle, according to former members of the administration. In some cases, the idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress to even find.

"Much of the effort in the Obama administration was to mainstream climate change," said Jesse Keenan, who worked on climate issues with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and now teaches at Harvard University. He said all federal agencies were required to incorporate climate-change plans into their operations.

The Obama administration’s approach will be tested by Trump’s first budget request to Congress, an outline of which is due to be released Thursday. Trump has called climate change a hoax; last November he promised to save $100 billion over eight years by cutting all federal climate spending. His budget will offer an early indication of the seriousness of that pledge -- and whether his administration is able to identify programs that may have intentionally been called anything but climate-related.

The last time the Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies had climate-related activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone.

But that figure could well be too low. The Obama administration didn’t always include "climate" in program names, said Alice Hill, director for resilience policy on Obama’s National Security Council.

"Given the relationship that existed with Congress on the issue of climate change, you will not readily find many programs that are entitled ‘climate change,’" Hill, who is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, said in an interview. At the Department of Defense, for example, anything with the word climate would have been "a target in the budget process," she said.

The range of climate programs is vast, stretching across the entire government.

Full story

3) Trump To Repeal Obama Fracking Rule
The Hill, 15 March 2017
Timothy Cama

The Trump administration is planning to repeal former President Barack Obama’s landmark 2015 rule setting standards for hydraulic fracturing on federal land.


Justice Department lawyers revealed the decision late Wednesday in a filing with the Denver-based Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where the federal government under had been fighting against the oil and natural gas industry and conservative states to get the rule reinstated.

It is the latest in a series of high-profile Obama environmental rules the Trump administration is repealing or working to change.

Earlier Wednesday, President Trump asked the Environmental Protection Agency to consider weakening greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars.

Trump has ordered the EPA to consider repealing Obama’s Clean Water Rule, and will soon seek to undo the Clean Power Plan, the coal leasing moratorium for federal land and other climate and environmental regulations.

Attorneys said the Interior Department and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have been reviewing rules as part of a White House directive on reducing unnecessary and burdensome regulations.

Attorneys said that Interior would formally propose to repeal the rule within 90 days. That will start a process, likely to take a year or more, of undoing a rule that was a high priority for Obama and took many years to write.

Greens slammed the Trump administration’s decision Wednesday.

Full story

4) Ignore The Critics: If Trump Withdraws From Paris Climate Agreement, He Will Demonstrate US Leadership
Fox News, 15 March 2017
Brett D. Schaefer

In December, 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Paris Agreement on climate change. That signature did not come cheap. To satisfy its Paris commitments, the Obama Administration announced plans to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions anywhere from 26 to 28 per cent below what they were in 2005—plans that would steeply raise energy costs on American households and businesses and impede job growth.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, made opposition to the Paris Agreement crystal clear during his Presidential campaign: “We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”

Now some supporters of the Paris Agreement are urging President Trump to break this promise. But they can’t really argue that the Agreement is an effective way to address climate change; MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change projects that, even if every country followed through with its promises, the Paris agreement would reduce warming by only 0.2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.

Instead, the argument is that honoring the Paris Agreement is all about U.S. leadership.  As Timmons Roberts and Caroline Jones wrote in a recent Brookings Institution paper : “To renege on our commitments … in support of the Paris Agreement would weaken America’s ability to muster enthusiastic support on important international policies we might care about.“

This is fantasy. Gratitude is a rare commodity in international affairs – just look at the vast majority of U.S. foreign assistance recipients. They routinely vote against the U.S. most of the time in the U.N.

Those arguing for the U.S. to remain in the Paris Agreement are less interested in bolstering U.S. leadership than in ensuring that they have means to criticize Trump when he fails to follow Obama’s other ineffectual climate policies.

Repudiating the Paris Agreement would be akin to ripping off a Band-Aid – a small pain in the form of anger from the U.N. and other governments committed to the agreement, but after that, nothing.

How do we know this? Because President George W. Bush lived through discarding the Paris Agreement’s predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The Clinton Administration signed the Protocol in 1998, despite unanimous Senate resistance. President Bush correctly concluded the Protocol would be ineffective in addressing the problem and impose heavy economic costs on the U.S economy, particularly to the manufacturing sector.

Despite strong pressure from the U.N. and European governments, Bush held firm by announcing that he would not ratify or implement the agreement.
What was the impact of Bush’s actions on American leadership role? Foreign governments criticized the decisions, but continued to cooperate and work with the U.S. More importantly, they learned that the U.S. was willing and able to resist diplomatic pressure in order to protect American interests.

Having other countries know that the U.S. President is resolute is valuable diplomatic currency, not fecklessness.

There are broader U.S. constitutional and security interests to consider too. The Paris Agreement is a supplementary agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). President Obama misused the UNFCCC framework to avoid seeking Senate advice and consent for the Paris Agreement under Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

Conservatives should insist that the President repudiate the Paris Agreement to correct that action alone.

Full post

5) Why Are Climate-Change Models So Flawed? Because Climate Science Is So Incomplete
Boston Globe, 14 March 2016
Jeff Jacoby

Pruitt got it right: Measuring human impacts on climate is indeed “very challenging.” The science is far from settled. That is why calls to radically reduce carbon emissions are so irresponsible — and why dire warnings of what will happen if we don’t are little better than reckless fearmongering.
 

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt said on CNBC's Squawk Box that he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

‘DO YOU believe,” CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new director, in an interview last Thursday, “that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?”

Replied Pruitt: “No. I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no — I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

It was an accurate and judicious answer, so naturally it sent climate alarmists into paroxysms of condemnation. The Washington Post slammed Pruitt as a “denier” driven by “unreason.” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii called Pruitt’s views “extreme” and “irresponsible” — proof of his unfitness to head the EPA. Gina McCarthy, who ran the agency under President Obama, bewailed the danger global warming poses “to all of us who call Earth home,” and said she couldn’t “imagine what additional information [Pruitt] might want from scientists” in order to understand that.

Yet for all the hyperventilating, Pruitt’s answer to the question he was asked — whether carbon dioxide is the climate’s “primary control knob” — was entirely sound. “We don’t know that yet,” he said. We don’t. CO2 is certainly a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, but hardly the primary one: Water vapor accounts for about 95 percent of greenhouse gases. By contrast, carbon dioxide is only a trace component in the atmosphere: about 400 ppm (parts per million), or 0.04 percent.

Moreover, its warming impact decreases sharply after the first 20 or 30 ppm. Adding more CO2 molecules to the atmosphere is like painting over a red wall with white paint — the first coat does most of the work of concealing the red. A second coat of paint has much less of an effect, while adding a third or fourth coat has almost no impact at all.

There is a popular theory that atmospheric CO2 amplifies the creation of water vapor, thereby increasing warming through a “positive feedback loop.” But that theory so far is mostly speculative; climate projections using models based on it have consistently failed, nearly always predicting far more warming than has occurred. It should go without saying that if scientists cannot yet make accurate predictions about future climate change, then their understanding of climate science remains highly incomplete.

Earth’s climate system is unfathomably complex. It is affected by innumerable interacting variables, atmospheric CO2 levels being just one. The more variables there are in any system or train of events, the lower the probability of all of them coming to pass. Your odds of correctly guessing the outcome of a flipped coin are 1 in 2, but your odds of guessing correctly twice in a row are only 1 in 4 — i.e., ½ x ½ Extending your winning streak to a third guess is even less probable: just 1 in 8.
Apply that approach to climate change, and it becomes clear why the best response to the alarmists’ frantic predictions is a healthy skepticism.

The list of variables that shape climate includes cloud formation, topography, altitude, proximity to the equator, plate tectonics, sunspot cycles, volcanic activity, expansion or contraction of sea ice, conversion of land to agriculture, deforestation, reforestation, direction of winds, soil quality, El Niño and La Niña ocean cycles, prevalence of aerosols (airborne soot, dust, and salt) — and, of course, atmospheric greenhouse gases, both natural and manmade. A comprehensive list would run to hundreds, if not thousands, of elements, none of which scientists would claim to understand with absolute precision.

Full post
 
6) And Finally: German Minister Who Criticised Unilateral Climate Targets Recants
Clean Energy Wire, 14 March 2017

The Chief of the Federal Chancellery, Peter Altmaier, threw his weight behind Germany’s self­imposed plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, after calling national climate targets the “wrong path” last week. Germany will stand by its emission goals, Altmaier told the Clean Energy Wire in an interview.
 

Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Minister of the Chancellery Peter Altmaier; photo: Federal Government of Germany/Kugler
 

Newspaper commentators said Altmaier’s controversial remarks from last week marked the start of climate policy election campaigning. Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany should specify its 2050 CO₂ target soon after the autumn federal election.

“We have defined different goals in the past, such as the 2020 and 2050 targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The 2050 target is the same as in the EU. We stand by the existing targets,” Altmaier told the Clean Energy Wire.

With his statement, Altmaier clarified controversial remarks he made last week at a meeting of the Christian Democrats’ (CDU) Economic Council, a CDU­-affiliated business association, where he said: “I am completely convinced that the path of national targets is wrong.”

German newspaper Die Welt had reported from the event in an article entitled “Federal government gives up solo runs in climate protection”. Altmaier called for “European and international targets” instead, Die Welt wrote.

The chancellery chief later sent out a message on Twitter saying “Please quote fully: I called for ‘ambitious’ EU targets instead of special national goals. #MyOpinion”

Altmaier now told the Clean Energy Wire he had only voiced his own personal opinion and did not question current targets. “This is not a departure from government policy.”

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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.