Bipartisan Pushback on EPA Carbon Policing

Amid worldwide challenges to global warming theory, bipartisan opposition is forming in Congress as prominent Democratic voices join Republican critics of the Obama administration's pending greenhouse gas regulations.

Two powerful Democratic committee chairmen — Missouri's Ike Skelton and Minnesota's Collin Peterson, of the House Armed Services and Agriculture committees, respectively — joined Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson in advancing a bill to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous, which empowered the agency to regulate the emissions.

"If Congress doesn't do something soon," Mr. Peterson said, "the EPA is going to cram these regulations through on their own. I have no confidence that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without severe harm to all taxpayers."

The House bill comes as the Senate considers its own amendment to the Clean Air Act to strip the EPA of authority to regulate the emissions. The House and Senate efforts would roll back the EPA to its original mission, which never considered greenhouse gases to be pollutants.

The EPA, meanwhile, is preparing regulations that will, in effect, give unelected bureaucrats control over the economy, which is likely to substantially increase energy and consumer prices, without affecting global temperatures. Even global warming zealots concede that if all nations had conformed to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol's proposed emission limits, temperatures would be essentially unchanged.

But the restrictions would have severely harmed nations' economies. The Senate in 1997 wisely rejected Kyoto, 95-0.

Congress may be motivated by the economic downturn, declining global temperatures for more than a decade and almost daily revelations that global warming's so-called "settled science" is, at least, flawed, and perhaps rigged.

The latest in a series of damaging revelations was a disclosure of errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claim that global warming could cut African crop production up to 50 percent in 10 years. The claim has appeared in IPCC summary reports and in speeches by its chairman and secretary-general, arguing to cap greenhouse gases. African nations based $100 billion in reparations demands from the U.S. and other developed nations partly on that assertion.

However, the claim wasn't based on peer-reviewed science — a situation similar to hyped claims about glaciers melting in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas, Amazon rain-forest depletion and severe hurricanes and floods. "On reading (IPCC documents) I cannot find support for the statement about African crop yield declines," said professor Chris Fields, the new lead author of the IPCC climate impacts team.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming late last week called for an independent investigation of IPCC climate reports, and for its chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, from India, to resign. "The integrity of the data and the integrity of the science have been compromised," Mr. Barrasso said.

For too long Congress and others believed these assertions, whether from the supposedly credible IPCC or global warming zealots. It's good to see prudent caution before it's too late.

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