Does Sen. Barrasso of Wyoming Really Want Science to Guide Him?
As any principled public servant should, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso was right to intensely grill President Barack Obama's cabinet minister Lisa Jackson about the consequences of regulating carbon dioxide emissions on the American economy.
Not long ago, the Republican lawmaker from Wyoming who sits on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and is, in his private life, a physician, uncovered what he called a "smoking gun" memo that he implies was concealed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where Ms. Jackson serves as chief administrator.
Barrasso says EPA is not being honest about the costs of regulating carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and halocarbons.
In an opinion piece that appeared, interestingly enough, on the Heritage Foundation website immediately after Barrasso's interrogation of Jackson, the senator wrote that efforts to reduce emissions, using the federal Clean Air Act as a lever, are being driven by politics, not science.
"This misuse of the Clean Air Act will be a trigger for overwhelming regulation and lawsuits based on gases emitted from cars, schools, hospitals and small business," Barrasso asserts. "This will affect any number of other sources, including lawn mowers, snowmobiles and farms. This will be a disaster for the small businesses that drive America."
On the face of it, it is inspiring that Mr. Barrasso is declaring himself a lawmaker who champions science over crass politics.
It is also noble that the scientific process of rigorous peer review and scrutiny will be his lens for having a real public discussion about climate change, enforcement of the Clean Air Act (as it relates to, say, snowmobile pollution in Yellowstone National Park and ozone gathering over Wyoming's pristine Wind River Range linked to natural gas drilling), as well as to the impacts of federal regulation -- or lack of it -- on Main Street.
Let us set aside, for a moment, the fact that Mr. Barrasso's essay was published by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that during the Bush Administration was part of a concerted effort backed by the coal and oil industries to foment a deliberate strategy of public misinformation about the causes and effects of a warming planet linked to the burning of fossil fuels. Those attempts continue.
And let us look past the Bush Administration's track record of suppressing science in the formulation of a national energy strategy and enforcement of environmental protection laws.
And let us try to forget the same arguments of alleged economic catastrophe used by Barrasso were invoked by the Heritage Foundation as a reason NOT to regulate Wall Street prior to the current meltdown. Assertions of alleged doom are again rationales for why Republicans, namely, are fighting universal health care and refusing to make hard, necessary -- and inevitably painful -- decisions about the future of Social Security.
Small business owners, local governments, public charities, land management agencies, senior citizens on fixed incomes, and parents who dreamed of sending their kids to college are today well versed in how the Heritage Foundation's anti-regulation agenda toward the financial markets has been a disaster of its own.
All of us are hurting, resentful of using hard-earned tax dollars to bail out banks, pay for executive compensation packages, and keeping two of the major three automakers -- that bucked better fuel efficiency standards -- on life support.
Senator Barrasso deserves praise for saying there should be transparency in government, and that any approach to regulate greenhouse gases ought to consider the impacts, all impacts, on citizens now and in the future.
Therefore, let us hope that, given his unexpected grandstanding for science, the next document senator Barrasso waves before Congress will be the new report compiled by the National Academies of Sciences, the most respected, non-partisan scientific body in the world.
The 24-page document is titled "Understanding and Responding To Climate Change" and it is available free to citizens at www.national-academies.org. In fact, Senator Barrasso and his colleagues ought to order up copies for every citizen in the country.
The National Academies function as official advisors to Congress and federal agencies. The purpose of the report is to promote better understanding of a changing climate, document its impacts and help in "developing effective response strategies."
The report puts to rest the gobbledygook claims that climate change is caused by the sun, volcanoes, or hot air rising out of Washington. In arid rural states like Wyoming, senator Barrasso will find the predictions of impending water shortages to be compelling at a time when large distant urban areas are eyeing its liquid resources.
He will find the parts about future diminished mountain snowpack, and the implications for agriculture, fish, wildlife, drinking water, and recreation to be of keen interest to constituents, too.
Science should indeed be the foundation of public policy. To say so, but then to act otherwise, is political hypocrisy at its worst.
This column from Todd Wilkinson first appeared in the Jackson Hole News & Guide newspaper. Based in Montana, he writes about the environment for a number of national magazines and newspapers.
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Sadly, Wyoming has a history of head-in-the-sand ecology practices/views.
oh you obviously do not know much about T Boone "money" Pickens. He is all about the MONEY, not the wind power. He is also fishing for water rights on all the land he has put wind power on. There is always another end game in mind, like of course, money. He is no environmentalist at all. Give me a break. Who stands to profit now?
There is no shortage of political hypocracy on either side of the arguement when it comes to science. Science, after all is all about discovery where as politics is all about solutions. This seems to be especially so with climate change.
Dr. Barrasso, MD, is supposed to be a man of science. Ha! I lived in that state with the Wind River Mountains off my deck for 25 years and many people in that state are in denial about lots of things. When I moved from Wyoming 2 years ago, we were having 107 degree days that summer. I noticed our winters getting warmer and our summers getting hotter over those years. One year the robins never migrated. No longer did we experiece -36 in the winter. A night that got down to -16 made the news! Water is a huge, huge issue in Wyoming and there isn't much of it to draw from under the ground. Wells are being drilled deeper and deeper and getting little potable water. Then there's the natural gas company that has fouled a number of wells in the area in which they drill. One water well in the area exploded due to the amount of natural gas that had seeped in. My neighbors never did get compensated for their destroyed wells by the gas company. Instead, the corporation made sure their cases were tied up in court for a long, long time. Unfortunately, Dr. Barrasso will do nothing for the people of Wyoming. Meanwhile, the people will be facing a long period of decline. This next bust will be devastating, I know, I'd lived through one back in the 1980's.
Not everyone who denies Global Warming and decries science is a religious fundamentalist, but every religious fundamentalist denies Global Warming and decries science.
The good news is that the only demographic which is not deserting the increasingly unhinged Republican Party in droves is frequent church goers. As the Party merges with this group and alienates itself from the majority as a permanent fringe group, the influence of religion in government and pseudo science (can you say "intelligent Design") will finally wane.
And the congregation shouted "HALLALUEHLAH!"
Any disagreement with the Church of Global Warming results in instant ad hominem attacks. Go look at the research cited in this article: it accepts as it's starting position the IPCC position on anthropogenic causes of climate change. That's hardly science: it's religion. Take the initial position advanced on faith, and you can get to the result you want.
Oooops, there you go again, with that Republican quasi-logic.
By following your logic, you would also have a problem with any article that cited any research that accepts a starting position that nuclear physics, or electric theory, or quantum theory was true.
I bet you would, however, be totally OK with any research that was based on a starting point that "creation science" was unquestionably true.
Todd: Science and Religion appear querulous bedfellows. Yet there is one trait that steadfastly unites them.
How quickly both silenced by awkward and unanswerable questions.
The Heritage Foundation, that proud CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION that is funded by the rich, for the rich and of the rich with all those wonderful TAX SUBSUDIES....
One Scorched Senator right off the grill, comin' right up...
I love how there are too many reasons deniers give to justify themselves.
1) Global warming isn't happening.
2) Global warming is happening, but not the way you think it is.
3) Global warming is happening, but what the hey? There's nothing we can do.
This is the famous "borrowed kettle" logic. It means, basically, that ideology is ruling the deniers' minds.
I love how the Global Warming advocates explain away any science that conflicts with their religion of global warming.
1. It got hotter last century, so it's going to be really hot pretty soon.
2. The CO2 levels that rose during the last warming period were caused by the cavemen autos.
3. Everybody who denies what we believe is a Fundamentalist Christian who thinks the world is flat.
4. It's not really just global warming, it's really climate change.
5. As soon as we set up this new tax and revenue stream, the earth will be saved and you can relax.
Excellent comment but don't expect anything but Heritage Foundation papers from him. As a third generation Wyomngite I can tell you if it doesn't moo, bleat ,or say baa or come from a hole in the ground our federal level representatives have no interest in it.
It is Obama's Democrats who are hypocritical by proclaiming a science based policy while ignoring the data.
Because of the thermal inertia of the Oceans and the noise in and variable quality of the NH land based record , the British Hadley Center Global Sea Surface Temperature gives the best overview of the real temperature trends.Anyone ,including Journalists ,can check this for themselves. (Google Hadley CRU and scroll down to SST GL). The data show that Earth warmed about 0.8 degrees during the 20th century but has been cooling since 2003.
2008 was cooler than 1997 - 11 years with no net warming and CO2 up 6% - contradicting the IPCC models which clearly have got CO2 - temperature sensitivities and feedbacks wrong,.Garbage in garbage out.
The geological record shows the sun is the main climate driver, The current quiet sun suggests the possibility of a Maunder minimum with 20 - 50 years of colder temperatures and shorter growing seasons during which we would need more CO2 not less to help maintain the food supply.
Cryosphere Today shows that global sea ice is now above the 1979 - 2000 mean , the Japanese satellite shows more Arctic sea ice today than any year post 2003.
The Eco-industrial complex and the Mass media have promoted AGW as a means to the end of the greatest political- economic power grab since the rise of communism.The press has again failed to do due diliggence .The CO2 crisis is as real as Bush's WMDs.
False analogy--we have nothing to lose by fixing a climate crisis, even if we can't prove it's happening to your satisfaction (I'm guessing we never will). Invading a sovereign nation, however, has proved utterly disastrous.
We have a LOT to lose, Tim. Cap and Trade, and carbon taxes, are a massive new revenue stream to the government. They want it badly. It will award power over our energy use to the federal government. Think of the analogy of Social Security, which was pitched as a small intrusion, with 1/2% of income from the worker and 1/2% from the employer. That is now up to 7.65% from each. When did you ever know a federal tax to lessen? Once they get this in place, everything, everything that is either produced with energy or that uses energy will cost us more so the feds can have more of our money to increase the size of government. They don't give a rats ass about the environment: all they want is more tax dollars to use to bribe their voters.
Here's a site that pretty much debunks each "point" made here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
That bit about 1997 is the one I find most galling. The idea here is that the warming of the globe occurs in steady increments, year by year. That's just nuts. All data are noisy. 1997 (although I thought it was 1998) was the hottest year on record. This doesn't mean things are cooling, it just shows the nature of the data. You could go back over the records and find a few short term periods where what we've seen in the past ten years has happened. The people that put forth this argument are liars.
1998 was the hottest year as you thought.Why did you say 1997 was the hottest?
Some data are clearly more noisy than others .The SST data is clearly less noisy than the land data.Your argument seems to be that cooling data is noise but that warming is real.And that those who disagree with your assumptions are liars .Not too persusive to the unbiased observer .
Unbelievable. Go look closely at the site you tout as being so believable..... It includes such nonsense as "86% of climate experts believe that there's no way to keep warming at 2 degrees C". Of course, if you read the article, the scientist polled were at the Copenhagen conference, which means they were ALL global warming believers to start with. Included in the poll, proudly, were the authors of the IPCC report on global warming. What in the hell would you expect them to say? Perhaps I should poll Southern Baptists on the validity of the Bible. The global warming believers all rely on circular logic, taking the basic two controverted facts as a given in their favor: that CO2 causes warming, and that increased CO2 levels are caused by man. Neither of those facts have been proven, only assumed for purposes of modeling.
Just follow the money. Barrasso does
My point exactly. Who stands to profit from Cap and Trade? Gore. The Federal Government, already smacking it's lips over the billions of new taxes they can spend to retain power. T. Boone Pickens, who has put all his money into wind power. You enviros are falling for a scam much like the emails about the Nigerian princesses who want you to hold their money for them.
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