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With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set to finally enact stricter air pollution standards in accordance with the Clean Air Act and two subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions requiring them to do so, powerful Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are working to make sure that the new standards never see the light of day. The specific measures being targeted are the EPA’s new standards for carbon emissions from power plant smoke stacks.

Fred Upton (R-MI), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, along with Republicans Joe Barton (TX) and Ed Whitfield (KY) sent a letter last week to the White House, demanding that the Obama administration take action to stop the EPA from regulating carbon emissions from power plants.

From their letter:

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Global financial institutions including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have released a new set of recommendations for G20 countries to meet their goal of providing $100 billion a year in aid for developing nations to combat climate change. In addition to calls for charges on carbon emissions and higher prices for carbon-intensive fuels, the financial experts said the first source of funding should come from redirecting fossil fuel subsidies.

In a move that will surely leave the dirty energy industry in a fit of rage, global economists said that fossil fuel subsidies should be cut and redirected towards helping developing nations fight climate change. The total amount spent on industry subsidies for G20 countries is currently $60 billion a year, more than half of what the countries have pledged to spend per year on climate initiatives and renewable energy projects.

From The Huffington Post:
  

The draft paper says the starting point should be a review of fossil fuel subsidies, amounting to $40 billion to $60 billion a year. But many of those subsidies are handed out in poor countries, where people living on the edge of subsistence need help, for example, to buy cooking gas. Still, subsidy reforms in industrialized countries and emerging economies could contribute $10 billion a year to a climate fund, it said.

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The examples of conservative misinformation—devoutly believed by followers, repeatedly asserted by ideological leaders and media outlets—are growing too numerous to count. I seriously cannot keep track any longer, and this is an area where I specialize.

A new one has cropped up: Call it light bulb madness. My sometime co-blogger Jon Winsor, FrumForum, and Joe Romm/Media Matters have all you want to know about it. Brief summary: Many conservatives, and conservative media outlets (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News) are claiming that a 2007 law about to take effect banned incandescent light bulbs, and thus rammed compact-fluorescents down our throats.

It’s the kind of cry virtually assured to make individualist-slash-free market conservatives angry: How dare the government  touch my freedoms? And it has even led to legislation to reverse the “ban,” sponsored by Texas’s Joe Barton.

Trouble is, there is no “ban.”

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U.S. House Representative John Shimkus (Republican-Illinois), who has opposed cap and trade legislation because he believes God will not allow the earth to be destroyed by global warming, is running to become the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman.

In 2009, at a congressional hearing on cap and trade legislation, Rep. Shimkus said, “The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over.  Man will not destroy this Earth.  This Earth will not be destroyed by a Flood.”  This week in an interview with Politico, Shimkus reaffirmed these views:  when asked about climate change he stated once again that God will not allow the world to be washed away in a flood.

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Rep. Joe Barton, already implicated in an effort to mislead Congress about the science of climate change, is obviously choosing offence as his best possible defence, renewing his slander of Penn State climate scientist and “Hockey Stick” author Dr. Michael Mann.

As then-co-chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Barton was responsible in 2006 for inviting the increasingly controversial statistician Edward Wegman to prepare a critique of Mann’s iconic hockey-stick-shaped graph illustrating a 1,000-year climate reconstruction. Although Barton has denied that he had a previous relationship with Wegman, implying that the subsequent report and hearing were not a set-up, John Mashey has documented the extensive direction that Barton provided to Wegman through Barton staff member Peter Spencer.

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Plagiarism and poor scholarship rife in statistician’s tight circle

The blogger Deep Climate has released another devastating analysis of the shoddy scholarship and obvious cheating that characterized the work of the statistician Edward Wegman and his team, authors of a report to Congress that Deep Climate calls “nothing more than a politically motivated attack on climate science and scientists from the start.”

DeepC, surely on of the most careful, thorough and tireless researchers currently working the climate blogosphere, has been here before, collecting evidence that demonstrated massive plagiarism by Wegman and his proteges when they were preparing their Republican-commissioned attack on Michael Mann’s oft-vindicated, but still controversial hockey stick graph.

As on the last occasion, DeepC has prepared a side-by-side analysis showing the work of Wegman and his principal assistant Yasmin Said juxtaposed with the documents from which they mined a shocking amount of their material. It’s shocking because they didn’t attribute any of it and, on many occasions, the few efforts they made to change the text merely obscured or rendered insensisble the original meaning. It’s not just that they were cheating, they were doing it in a way that invites applications of the term “incompetent.”