Tuesday EPA issued its proposed rule (see related post) concerning new source performance standards for greenhouse gas emissions for electric power plants.  This all started when EPA refused to address greenhouse gas emissions coming out of cars.  Cars to power plants.  Some may be wondering how the camel got into this tent. The story begins of course with Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), where the Supreme Court held that greenhouse gases emitted in automobile exhaust were "air pollutants" within the meaning of the Clean Air Act.  This meant that EPA had to ...

Wow!  Whether one likes the president or not, one must concede he's not afraid of leading. Just a little over seven months from the election he has drawn a line in the sand and proposed a rule that may fundamentally alter America's energy mix and takes a big step toward addressing carbon dioxide emissions.  Or it does nothing at all.  We are talking of course of Tuesday's announcement of new source performance standards for electricity plants.   In EPA's words: The EPA is proposing standards of performance that require that all new fossil fuel-fired EGUs meet an ...

In a case of surprising longevity, Comer v Murphy Oil USA, Inc., may finally have been laid to rest. In a decision filed Tuesday, Judge Louis Guirola, Jr., Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, concluded that the plaintiffs in the first climate change liability damages suit were not entitled to a second bite at the apple. And even if they were, their case still failed. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, numerous parties filed scores of lawsuits seeking to find some source to pay for the awful devastation. One suit, Comer, asserted throug...

We were on the front page of the New York Times earlier this week. We wish!  Our marketing department has not cracked that nut yet. Not so the folks at Climate Central. Their press release about their report, Surging Seas, got them a front page spot in New York. It also was picked up by papers of record in Miami, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago, among others. Internet outlets like the Huffington Post and msnbc.com carried it. Even the UK's Daily Mail has picked it up. What was so momentous?  The researchers in our view did three things. The first is typical. They identifi...

There was dismal news out of the North yesterday.  Researchers in Canada have concluded that climate change threatens the national pastime.  In a March 5 article in Environmental Research Letters, researchers Nikolay Damyanov, Damon Matthews and Lawrence Mysak investigated changes in the outdoor skating season over the period 1951 to 2005.  They found "that the outdoor skating season (OSS) in Canada has significantly shortened in many regions of the country as a result of changing climate conditions."  The implications of that are dire:  "This suggests that f...

Apocryphally, the emperor of the Eternal City took out his violin while the city was consumed in a conflagration. In lay terms, Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  Some would like to draw the analogy to climate change policy in the United States, held up based on principles, or partisanship, or grandstanding or blind denial.  Whatever the reason, the climate for making climate change policy has grown decidedly colder since the heady days of 2008 when even the Republican party was on board.    Nevertheless, some are not waiting until prediction becomes reality.  For ...