Reuters: ‘Obama climate agenda faces Supreme Court reckoning’

Analysis: Obama climate agenda faces Supreme Court reckoning | Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/16/us-usa-court-environment-idUSBRE94F07820130516

(Reuters) – With a barrage of legal briefs, a coalition of business groups and Republican-leaning states are taking their fight against Obama administration climate change regulations to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups, along with states such as Texas and Virginia, have filed nine petitions in recent weeks asking the justices to review four U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations that are designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
If the court were to take up any one of the petitions, it would be the biggest environmental case since Massachusetts v. EPA, the landmark 2007 decision in which the justices ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The court’s decision on whether to take up any of the petitions, likely to come in October, could help shape or shatter the administration’s efforts to solidify its climate change agenda before President Obama leaves office in 2017.

The EPA regulations are among Obama’s most significant tools to address climate change after the U.S. Senate scuttled in 2010 his effort to pass a federal law that would, among other things, have set a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

The petitions give the court various options for cutting back on, or even overturning the 2007 ruling, according to John Dernbach, a law professor at Widener University in Pennsylvania, who represented climate scientists in the 2007 case.

If the court decides to hear any of the petitions, it “would be opening a really big can of worms,” he said.

The rules being challenged apply to a cross-section of polluters, from vehicles to industrial facilities. A federal appeals court in Washington last summer upheld the rules, which were issued by the EPA under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA is a federal agency responsible for protecting human health and the environment.

The number of petitions filed is unusually large.

The court only had five petitions to choose from in 2011 when it chose to review Obama’s landmark healthcare law, which various states and business groups opposed. Lawyers involved in the process say the petitions, which raise different arguments, are not part of a centrally-coordinated plan, and that parties that joined the same petition are working closely together.

The petition filed by Texas, for example, was joined by 12 states. The U.S. …

Analysis: Warmist John Cook’s fallacy ‘97% consensus’ study is a marketing ploy — ‘Cook’s study shows 66% of papers didn’t endorse man-made global warming Cook calls this ‘an overwhelming consensus’

Excerpt:

Most of these consensus papers assume the theory is correct but never checked. They are irrelevant.

The papers listed as endorsing man-made global warming includes “implicit endorsement”, which makes this study more an analysis of funding rather than evidence. Cook gives the following as an example of a paper with implicit endorsement: “‘. . . carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change’. Any researcher studying carbon sequestion has almost certainly not analyzed outgoing radiation from the upper troposphere or considered the assumptions about relative humidity in climate simulations. Similarly, researchers looking at the effects of climate change on lemurs, butterflies, or polar bears probably know little about ocean heat content calculations. These researchers are “me too” researchers.

6. Money paid to believers is 3500 times larger than that paid to skeptics (from all sources).

Cook seems to believe there are organized efforts running to confuse the public. Is that a projection of Nefarious Intent (NI) coupled with conspiratorial suggestions of mysterious campaigns?

Contributing to this ‘consensus gap’ are campaigns designed to confuse the public about the level of agreement among climate scientists.

Given that he is confused about what science is, he probably would think people are trying to confuse him when they give it to him straight.

His own personal bias means he is the wrong person to do this study (if it were worth doing in the first place, which it isn’t).

It has all the hallmarks of activist propaganda, not research. Cook tries to paint skeptics as doing it for the money, but blindly ignores the real money on the table. Governments have not only paid more than $79 billion in research, they also spend $70 billion every yearsubsidizing renewables (an industry which depends on researchers finding a link between carbon dioxide and catastrophic climate change). Carbon markets turn over something in the order of $170bn a year, and renewables investment amounts to a quarter of a trillion dollars. These vested interests depend entirely on a catastrophic connection — what’s the point of cutting “carbon” if carbon doesn’t cause a crisis? Against these billions, Cook thinks it’s worth mentioning a 20 year old payment of $510,000 from Western Fuels? And exactly what was Western Fuels big crime? Their primary goal was allegedly the sin of trying to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact)’ which as it happens, …