This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as items in the news.
1. New ozone standard could destroy over 7 million jobs
After only three years of what many had already considered to be an oppressively low ozone standard of 0.75 parts per billion (ppb) the Obama EPA is now very likely to lower the standard again. Their new standard, which would probably be 0.65 ppb, would end up throwing much of the country — and all of North Carolina — out of compliance. It would prevent new projects from being approved and impose draconian new costs on electrical utility customers. The standard would be so restrictive that even North Carolina’s Division of Air Quality opposes it.
Now there is a study (reported on here) by University of Mississippi economics Professor William Shugart, which argues that the EPA would be imposing a huge burden on the American economy. As reported by Shugart, "A study by the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, a 75-year-old organization that provides economic research and training for business executives, warns that the new standard would destroy an estimated 7.3 million jobs nationwide and add $1 trillion annually in new regulatory costs beginning in 2020."
Shugart further notes that "EPA’s action amounts to rewriting the Clean Air Act to suit its own bureaucratic and ideological objectives. At a time when the Obama administration should be focused on job creation and the nation’s economic recovery, promulgating stringent new environmental rules should be its last priority. … While this might seem innocuous enough, setting a more-stringent ozone standard will in fact cause economic havoc."
2. Hypocrite of the Year Award goes to Al Gore
Gore was recently caught leaving his limo idling for over an hour while he was giving a talk at a conference in Gothenburg, Sweden.
3. For those of you who say there is no support in the scholarly scientific literature for a more skeptical position on global warming …
PopularTechnology.net has started cataloguing this literature and is up to 800 articles. And in case you want to do some research, here’s the list.
4. Speaking of Popular Technology …
Here is a great illustration of how, simply by manipulating the scale on graphs showing global temperature change over time, alarmists can easily mislead, if not outright deceive the public. I just discovered this site. It looks like they do some great work.
5. Weekly Ozone Report
As noted last week, the ozone season ended on October 31. On a summary note, the 2010 ozone season, running from April 1-October 31, had the second fewest number of high ozone days of the last 10 years.
Links to recent JLF reports on ozone:
https://www.johnlocke.org/research/show/spotlights/234
https://www.johnlocke.org/research/show/spotlights/229
