Hey Mongo... you gotta report that to the EPA....
Posted on 03/13/2009 11:30:24 AM PDT by rgr
EPA proposes greenhouse gas registry – A first step for climate policy
On March 10 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it will propose a new rule to require greenhouse gas emissions reporting from thousands of businesses nationwide – a prerequisite for any effective climate change program.
A greenhouse gas registry is a database for collecting, verifying, and tracking emissions from specific industrial sources.
Late in 2007 Congress ordered the Bush EPA to create just such a greenhouse gas emissions reporting rule. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration missed its first deadline for publishing a draft of the rule and let the process languish.
However, a good amount of work was done by EPA staff – work that is finally seeing the light of day.
According to the EPA's press release, the draft rule would require about 13,000 facilities to report greenhouse gas emissions.
The agency estimates the reporting will cover 85 to 90 percent of U.S. emissions.
The rule accomplishes this by requiring reports to include "upstream" sources such as fossil fuel suppliers, as well as motor vehicles and stationary sources such as cement plants and power plants. There will be a sixty-day comment period during which the agency will hold two public hearings on the draft rule.
The proposed threshold for reporting greenhouse gases is 25,000 tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Because carbon is only one of at least six gases covered by the draft rule, and each gas has a different impact on global warming, the impacts are measured as CO2e.
The proposed rule does not require third-party certification of a company's emissions report, without which there will be less certainty and accountability. The draft rule does, however, require electronic reporting, and intends to use existing reporting programs where practicable and develop a new reporting system for all other cases.
A comprehensive emissions registry is crucial to ensuring efficiency and accountability in any forthcoming climate change legislation. We cannot reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we do not know who is emitting and how much.
Congress is now drafting greenhouse gas cap-and-trade legislation. For any such program to work well, data on the emissions of every covered facility are required so that the appropriate number of carbon "credits" are allocated. The data also help ensure emissions reductions are actually being made. The European Union moved ahead with its cap-and-trade program before it had a decent accounting of per-facility emissions.
The price of carbon crashed when it became clear that too many credits had been allocated, eliminating the incentive to cut emissions. The Europeans fixed the problem and are working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The EPA’s new draft rule should help the U.S. avoid Europe’s mistake. Unfortunately, the Bush administration's inaction has cost us vital time. The proposed registry would not begin collecting data until 2011 for emissions in 2010.
GOVERNMENT big money gab of all time
Someone should post a pic of the farting cowboys in Blazing Saddles.
I think we should all send formal letters to the EPA asking stupid questions, such as whether we should take beano or lastaid to help combat climate change, etc.
We should be creative, with no two letters alike, so that they will have to spend time and resources on our mail.
HQ Standard Postal Mailing Address
Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20460
(202) 272-0167
Emissions from Northeast power plants decline
March 10, 2009 07:25 PM By Beth Daley, Globe Staff
New figures being released Wednesday show the recession helped drive down global warming emissions from Northeast power plants last year to their lowest levels in at least nine years.
But the decline could have the perverse effect of delaying more lasting reductions under a landmark 10-state pact to fight man-made climate change.
Northeast emissions last year dropped about 9 percent from 2007, according to preliminary projections by Point Carbon, a consulting and research firm. The Norway-based company said the recession, combined with power plants burning cleaner natural gas, appear to be the main reasons.
The drop in emissions is good for the environment in the short term. But oddly, it has the unintended effect of delaying the more important, longer-term impact of a program to reduce greenhouse gases. That program, designed by 10 Northeast states and called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or ReGGI, is a model for national legislation being drafted in Washington.
The initiative sets a cap on carbon emissions that is designed to decrease over time. The arrangement, called a “cap and trade” plan, works like this: Power plants obtain emission allowances from states for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, with plants that emit larger amounts having to obtain more allowances than cleaner ones.
As the cap is lowered, there are fewer available allowances, pushing the price up and thus encouraging the dirtiest power plants to instead invest in cleaner technologies. Over time, cleaner power plants will then outcompete dirtier ones.
(But with emissions now about 17 percent below the ReGGI cap, allowances are not in particular demand, so the market forces are not kicking in. Emission allowances are not expected to get high enough anytime soon to spark investment in clean energy.)
“(ReGGI) was designed to lower emissions below business as usual, but business as usual has changed,’’ said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge-based research and advocacy group. “The lesson is you have to have a system you can adjust as circumstances change. The urgency of the science shows ... we need to be ambitious.”
That lesson is an important one for the Obama administration as it crafts its own “cap and trade” legislation designed to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. If the cap is set too high, little happens.
But even with that shortcoming, the architects of ReGGI win praise for developing the only existing mandatory cap and trade carbon market in the US. ReGGI states’ officials also get credit for standing strong against political pressure to give away emission allowances for free. As a result, the program has already raised over $145 million from auctioning emission allowances, according to Worcester-based World Energy, which runs the auction.
Another auction is scheduled for next week. In Massachusetts, much of its $28 million share is going into energy efficiency.
“ReGGI is path-breaking,’’ said Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University’s environmental economics program and an expert on cap and trade programs. He said it showed “you can have an auction and it can work.”
Still, Stavins says ReGGI is narrow in scope, and any national cap and trade program should regulate emissions at major “upstream” sources of emissions, such as at coal mines to minimize the number of entities that have to be subject to regulation.
President Barack Obama’s budget plan assumes there will be about $79 billion in revenue in 2012 from the sale of greenhouse gas permits under a cap and trade program. Both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California have said they want to pass climate change legislation this year.
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed establishing a national system for reporting greenhouse gas emissions that could serve as a baseline for a national cap and trade program. Meanwhile, US Representative Edward J. Markey of Malden, who chairs key energy and global warming panels, is writing a global warming and energy bill that includes emissions trading.
Obama’s cap and trade will result in factories and other businesses closing, and hundreds of thousands more people unemployed.
Global warming is a hoax. Without greenhouse gases the earth would be too cold for humans. A major greenhouse gas is WATER VAPOR. Carbon dioxide is present in the atmosphere in only trace amounts — currently about 380 parts per million. The recent trend is global cooling, not warming. The whole cap & trade plan is idiocy.
that what they want
Eat some Cabbage and Beans, wait 12 hrs, then show up at the “Registry” with some Industrial size Flatulance.
Give Prizes for the Best/loudest polluting Emissions. Judge shoul attend in HAZMAT SUIT....
Harrass the Ridiculous EPA !
CITIZENS UNITE !
So this is like whack-a-mole now. A new and horrible policy pops up every day and it’s not possible to contain each one. This must be part of the Alinsky strategy.
Please don't.
But it brings up the question, "How much tax will levied against us for bean consumption?" And "Can we get carbon credits for taking Bean-o?"
I shall simply start adding a ‘carbon’ surcharge to my invoices.
The last report I heard was that each household will have an extra $1300/year added to their energy bills.
Climate Change Conference:
Genocidal Global Warming Policies will Kill Hundreds of Millions
March 10, 2009 (EIRNS)—Yesterday, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the originator of the petition against Al Gore’s global warming hoax which as of now 32,000 scientists have signed, told the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change, that the people like Al Gore who promote global warming alarmism are committing genocide by the withdrawal of technology from the developing world. Speaking at the conference hosted by the Heartland Institute in New York City, he said, “there is a current example of genocide by the removal of technology, and that is the ban on DDT, and that has resulted in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and has left half a billion infected with malaria.”
The three-day conference is the second annual event sponsored by The Heartland Institute. The speakers include Lord Christopher Monckton, who prepared the “Global Warming Swindle” video tape, MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen, and Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist.
Dr. Lindzen said that “the process of co-opting science on behalf of a political movement has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science—especially since the issue has been a major motivation for funding. Most funding for climate would not be there without this issue. And, it should be added, most science funded under the rubric of climate does not actually deal with climate, but rather with the alleged impact of arbitrarily assumed climate change.
Dr. Robinson also said that policies promoted by propagating alarmism, are much worse than the ban on DDT, because they will lead to rationing of energy. This rationing of energy will have the biggest impact on the Third World populations, who are trying to uplift their standard of living by the application of energy and technology. He noted, “that the billions of people who live at the lowest level of human existence will suffer greatly from the rationing of energy, and this, in turn, will lead to the death of hundreds of millions, or possibly billions.”
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, gave a keynote address to conference, in which he accused the European Union governments of being global warming “alarmists,” while hiding their actual intentions. “They probably do not want to reveal their true plans and ambitions—to stop economic development and return mankind several centuries back,” said Klaus. “It is evident that the climate change debate has not made any detectable progress. It reminds me of the frustration people like me felt in the communist era.”
Like Klaus, Lindzen pointed to the evil political intentions: “Once it is understood, the silliness of the whole issue becomes evident—though those who are committed to warming alarm as the vehicle for a postmodern coup d’etat will obviously try to obfuscate matters.”
Lindzen and other speakers noted that “the global mean temperature anomaly has not increased statistically significantly since at least 1995,” adding that this does not disprove the warming thesis, but that “for the public this fact is likely to be crucial.”
In his presentation to the conference, Lord Christopher Monckton used ridicule and humor in his attack on the genocidal fraud of global warming. Monckton said, “that the global warming alarmists should be referred to as bedwetters.”
He called Al Gore’s science advisor, James Hansen, the Dr. Strangelove of NASA, saying, “that Hansen’s big scare of sea level rise of 426 feet was too preposterous to be believed and that the only threat from sea-level rise is the one being created by the bedwetters.”
Monckton said, “There never was a climate crisis, there is not a climate crisis, and there will be no climate crisis. Since there is no climate crisis, the leaders of the world must have the courage to do nothing.”
Monckton said that there is no climate crisis, and told the conference that the environmental movement has gone too far. “The environmental movement has to be outlawed, because their policies have murdered 40 million people, mainly children, with the ban on DDT.” He added, “They have caused mass starvation and food riots with their nonsensical drive for bio-fuels. The forces of darkness in the environmental movement want create a new dark age in which humanity is pushed back to the Stone Age and without the right to light a fire.”
Global Warming Swindle!
The GW cultists will surely call you a ‘denier’! LOL
Surely there are enough rational voters that will kill any bills that attempt the ‘stealth tax’ . Right?
Hey Mongo... you gotta report that to the EPA....
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The Best Global Warming Videos on the Internet |
The downside is that so will we...
If a company captures its CO2 emissions, purifies it and resells the by-product to, oh say, Coca-Cola, will I have to report the release to the EPA when I open a can of Coke?
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