Ken Salazar gets an ass-kicking. Over to you, Capitol Hill.

Michelle Malkin at MichelleMalkin.com, June 23, 2010

For all his John Wayne rhetoric on the BP oil spill, President Obama has failed to administer a swift kick to the ample, deserving rump of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. No matter. Federal judge Martin Feldman has now done the job the White House won’t do.

In a scathing ruling issued Tuesday afternoon, New Orleans-based Feldman overturned the administration’s radical six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling – and he singled out Salazar’s central role in jerry-rigging a federal panel’s scientific report to bolster flagrantly politicized conclusions. In a sane world, Salazar’s head would roll. In Obama world, he gets immunity.

The suit challenging Obama’s desperately political ban was filed by Covington, La., rig company, Hornbeck Offshore Services, which spoke on behalf of all the “small people” in the industry whose economic survival is at stake. As the plaintiffs’ lawyer argued in court, the overbroad ban promised to be more devastating to Gulf workers than the spill itself. “This is an unprecedented industry-wide shutdown. Never before has the government done this,” attorney Carl Rosenblum said.

Scientists who served on the committee expressed outrage upon discovering earlier this month that Salazar had — unilaterally and without warning — inserted a blanket drilling ban recommendation into their report. In fact,seven panelists explicitly opposed a blanket ban as “punishing the innocent.” As Feldman recounted in his ruling:

In the Executive Summary to the Report, [Salazar] recommends “a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs.” He also recommends “an immediate halt to drilling operations on the 33 permitted wells, not including relief wells currently being drilled by BP, that are currently being drilled using floating rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness, the Summary also states that “the recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” As the plaintiffs, and the experts themselves, pointedly observe, this statement was misleading. The experts charge it was a “misrepresentation.” It was factually incorrect.

Allow me to be more injudicious: Salazar lied. Salazar committed fraud. Salazar sullied the reputations of the experts involved and abused his authority.

And for what purpose? To exploit the Gulf crisis, appease the eco-extremists, and stymie the economic recovery to which the Obama White House pays oily lip service.

The scientists whose views were misrepresented reportedly received an apology from the evidence-doctoring Salazar, but where are the consequences? Where is the accountability? Terrific news: Salazar, the report-rigger, is in charge of overseeing the new overseer. That’s right. The Teflon Interior Secretary spent Monday afternoon swearing in another bureaucrat, litigator Michael Bromwich, who will head the newly-named “Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement” (formerly the beleaguered Minerals Management Service).

According to Salazar, Bromwich “will be a key part of our team as we continue to change the way the Department of the Interior does business.” Present company exempted, of course.

Judge Feldman soberly illuminated the way the Department of Interior does business in concluding that Salazar’s “invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.” Salazar, with his boss’s blessing, imposed the blanket moratorium on Hornbeck and 33 permitted rigs without a shred of threat/safety analysis. Of course, Hope and Change have always been exercised with Arbitrary and Capricious power.

The White House immediately announced plans to appeal the ruling. But for once, Chicago-on-the-Potomac has run smack in the rule of law and lost. For all the other small people over whom the Obama administration has run roughshod, let’s hope it sets a lasting precedent.

CALIFORNIA ECONOMY ‘LEAKING’ EMISSIONS

From Jon Fleischman’s  FlashReport

Tom Tanton
June 14, 2010

The non-partisan Legislative Analyst Office (LAO) recently reported implementation of AB 32– the state’s cap-and-trade law signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2006 – will cause ‘economic leakage’ to states in the region with far less regulation.  The LAO evaluated the cost of California’s ‘go it alone’ approach to climate change and found a negative, near-term economic loss.  However, more importantly, not only will implementation harm the state’s bottom line, it will also do nothing to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).
The LAO reported May 13 California’s economy will likely be adversely affected in the near term. Implementing the California Air Resource Board’s (CARB’s) Scoping Plan will raise the state’s energy prices which are already among the highest in the country. This will further impact the state’s economy by causing the prices of goods and services to rise, lowering business profits, and reducing production, income, and jobs. It will also worsen the already devastating state and local budget crises.
These adverse effects will occur, in large part, through ‘economic leakage’.  In other words in order to avoid such burdensome regulations, businesses already in California will relocate out of state and out of state businesses will avoid expanding here. While it is true there will be both winners and losers under AB 32, including gains in so-called "green" jobs, the net economy-wide impact in the near term will likely be negative.
The LAO only analyzed ‘economic leakage’ but ‘emissions leakage’ is equally important.  Based on data from the Energy Information Administration and Bureau of Economic Affairs, California is already the third best performing state in terms of minimizing GHGs.  Every dollar we send out of state (via purchases, outside manufacturing etc.) increases the amount of emissions in states with lower GHG performance records. Depending on where California sends those dollars, the increase in emissions can be anywhere from 2 to 9 times as much. Implementing AB 32 as proposed by CARB is completely counter to the law’s stated intent – to reduce emissions.
The LAO correctly notes a shift away from manufacturing towards service industries.  While that shift has been going on for years, manufacturing remains a vital aspect of California’s economy along with agriculture and mining. Manufacturing’s contribution remains over 4 times that of the service sector. These productive areas are particularly trade sensitive, and are critically important to ensuring businesses and individuals acquire enough capital to spend on services like education and transportation.  This aspect of the LAO analysis and, more importantly, the underlying CARB analysis is particularly troublesome. It ignores the difference in income producing activities and expenditure activities. This further disregards low wage earners in service sector jobs and associated reduction in taxable state personal income.
There are many sides to this debate but we can all agree California’s economy is in trouble.  We should be taking steps to rectify our problems, not add to them.  Let’s not compound our issues with implementation of AB 32 when we can least afford it. 
________________________________________________

Tom Tanton is President of T2 & Associates. Mr. Tanton served 28 years at the California Energy Commission, including 6 years as Principal Policy Advisor, and subsequently at the Electric Power Research Institute as General Manager of Renewables and Hydroelectric.

The IPCC consensus on climate change was phoney, says IPCC insider

Lawrence Solomon
June 13, 2010 – 8:50 am

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

Read more at the National Post.