Senator Kerry:  Has your study been peer reviewed?
Kenneth Green:  No, I don’t work in the peer review literature, Senator. I don’t work for a university.

Steven Hayward, the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently said, “The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.”  He may have had in mind his AEI colleague Kenneth Green, whose lack of knowledge on climate was laid bare for all to see by Sen. John Kerry in today’s Finance Committee hearing.

I don’t know what is more revealing and embarrassing for Green and AEI — that Green couldn’t actually name a single peer-reviewed study in his defense or that when Kerry calls him on it, his only defense is an appeal to authority — his own “opinion” (!):

Green:  All I can say, Senator, is that I read the IPCC reports, the science of climate change report in its totality cover to cover, I follow the latest journals, my doctoral degree is in environmental science and engineering.  I daresay I’m capable of understanding the literature and forming my own opinion. I –

Kerry (interrupting):  Has your study been peer reviewed?

Green: Pardon me?

Kerry: Has your study been peer reviewed?

Green: No, I don’t work in the peer review literature, Senator. I don’t work for a university.

That is uber-weird.  Green seems to be suggesting (falsely) that you have to work for a university to write peer reviewed research.  Play the video.  It sure sounds that way — otherwise the second sentence is a pure non sequitur.

Kerry: So, you don’t submit your studies for any peer review?

Green: Ah, no.

Kerry: You realize that there are something like two or three thousand studies all of which concur which have been peer reviewed, and not one of the studies dissenting has been peer reviewed?

Green: That’s not correct, Senator.

Kerry: Show me a peer reviewed study.

Green: I’ll send you a list.

Kerry: Please, because nobody else has.

Green: I’ll be glad to.

With the help of AEI’s staff, Green will probably be able to find a handful of now-debunked peer-reviewed studies that “support” his position, but it remains telling that he couldn’t name a single one when asked in a public forum.  Kerry called his bluff, and Green folded.

Here’s the early part of the exchange:

Green:  Canada, for instance, can agree to a target and if they don’t do anything they can’t be sued into government compliance.  The U.S. is unique in the status it gives treaties, when we sign a treaty, we live up to it.  Other countries can sign treaties and not live up to them.  That is a fundamental difference that makes the U.S. hesitant to embrace treaties as a general role, and I think wisely because treaties have a very high status in American law that is not necessarily reflected in the other countries.

Kerry:  Well, actually Dr. Green, that’s not entirely true. (Laughs a little)  I’m sorry.

(Republican senator demurs in the background)

Well, let me tell you why it’s not, Senator:  I was at the treaty signing which we ratified unanimously in the U.S. Senate — the 1992 framework convention, which George Herbert Walker Bush negotiated, and it’s been 18 years since, and we haven’t done a thing to meet it.   In last 8 years emission in U.S. in green house gasses went up 4 times faster than in the 1990s.  So that’s the reason we’re talking about the need to move to a mandatory reduction — because we didn’t, and nobody else did, either.  A few people tried, here and there.  So you just can’t just throw that stuff out there and say we do it, they don’t, blah blah blah.

You don’t accept that you have to hold it at 2 degrees.  You may know something that thousands of other scientists don’t.  You know, they won a Nobel Prize; you and I didn’t.   And they won it for their work that said you got to hold it at 2 degrees Centigrade.

The G 20 … said we have to hold it at 2 degrees Centigrade.  Maybe you know something we don’t about where the tipping point is.  But I got a lot of scientists that I respect, who’s life work — from John Holdren who’s now the science advisor to the president, to Jim Hansen over at NASA and a bunch of others — who tell us that we have a ten year window to meet the standard of keeping the temperature from rising over 2 degrees Centigrade, or you reach a tipping point….

All of the evidence is coming back faster and to a greater degree than they predicted underscoring the predictions they made.  At some point you have to step back and say these guys are making sense because what they said is going to happen is happening and it’s happening faster and at a greater risk.

If this had been a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it.  Here’s more:

Kerry: Every most recent scientific update, and I get them periodically.  I ask them to come in and say what’s happening; is it less than, what’s the rate?  And without exception they look at me and say “Senator, I can’t even talk about some of the things that are happening today publicly because people won’t believe it.”  Like columns of methane rising out of the ocean floor that you can light a match to and it will explode and burst into the open air because the permafrost is melting.

We just voted $400 million to move Newstalk, Alaska, to move it inland because of what’s happening in terms of the ice melt.  There’s some 400 villages threatened.  Ask Lisa Murkowski, or Mark Biggouch about what’s happening in Alaska.

All I can say to you is that we have to employ the Precautionary Principle here.  If I’ve got a few thousand scientists over here and you and a few others over here, the weight is pretty heavy to say to me that as a public person I ought to implement the precautionary principle.  And if I have chief executives like Jeff Immelt, Lou Hay, and Chad Holliday of Dupont and a bunch of other people who run Fortune 500 companies telling me, “Senator, we have to price carbon.  And we want certainty in the market place,” I’m going to listen.

Unless you can give me an overpowering reason why those guys are all wrong, and I don’t think you have….

Green:  All I can say, Senator, is that I read the IPCC reports….

He may have read them, but he didn’t get anything out of them.

Green’s lame defense of himself is no surprise since he regularly spouts stuff like, “No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” — from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).  And last month, he weirdly compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals.

Kudos to Senator Kerry for exposing this American Enterprise Institute “expert.”

CAP’s Russell Sterten helped with this post.

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Memo to media:  The ever-shrinking Chamber of Commerce is not “the voice of business.”  Indeed, we now know that besides being anti-scientific, it is anti-democratic, not even bothering to consult with its own Board of Directors on its own climate policy — in direct contradiction to its stated policy.

Greenwire (subs. req’d) reports the amazing news:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce staff decides the trade group’s climate and energy policy positions without approval from the board of directors, Nike Inc. charged as it formulated a plan to call for greater chamber openness.

Nike, which last week left the chamber’s board of directors but decided to remain a chamber member, described a lack of transparency at the group that conflicts with how the chamber describes its operations. Beaverton, Ore.-based Nike said it is determined to work for changes in the group.

“We just weren’t clear in how decisions on climate and energy were being made,” said Brad Figel, Nike’s director of government relations. “They’re not being made at the board-of-director level, because we’re a member of the board of directors. We were not consulted. We’re convinced that’s not really where the action on climate change is being made.”

As previously documented, the vast majority of the major businesses on the Chamber’s board who have a publicly stated their position on climate legislation support strong action (see here).

Kenneth Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, defended the Chamber’s anti-democratic denialism:

“Generally speaking,” Green said, “what you have is a charismatic leader who makes the policy decisions, probably based on the policy recommendations of staff … and a board that is mostly ceremonial.”

Well, “charismatic” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.  Compromised, maybe (see “Are Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue’s Ties to Union Pacific Railroading the Companies that Support Climate Policy?“)

But what is truly stunning about Nike’s charge and Green’s defense is that it is in direct contradiction to the Chamber’s stated policy on its website about its Board (here):

The Board of Directors is the principal governing and policymaking body of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The board’s membership is as diverse as the nation’s business community itself, with more than 100 corporate and small business leaders serving from all sectors and sizes of business, and from all regions of the country.

Directors determine the U.S. Chamber’s policy positions on business issues and advise the U.S. Chamber on appropriate strategies to pursue. Through their participation in meetings and activities held across the nation, Directors help implement and promote U.S. Chamber policies and objectives.

But Green, a leading right-wing denier, has blurted out what is obviously common knowledge among the conservative establishment — the Board is purely a fig leaf to cover up its own denialism, which William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs himself blurted out in August with his Luddite call for “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” on global warming (see also Chamber falsely claims “We’ve never questioned the science behind global warming”).

The Chamber’s entire website is filled with claims that need rewriting:

Not.  NRDC’s Pete Altman has this ist:

Quit US Chamber: Exelon, PNM Resources, PG&E, Apple.

Quit US Chamber Board: Nike.

Says Chamber doesn’t represent their views on climate: Johnson&Johnson, General Electric, San Jose Chamber of Commerce.

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The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.

What’s more surprising — that a leading conservative scholar would admit that his entire movement may be brain dead or that he thinks the movement’s best hope is … wait for it … Glenn Beck.

Steven F. Hayward is “the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute” who has, his bio notes, “written biographies of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and of Winston Churchill.”

I think it has been obvious for a while that the conservative movement should be renamed the conservative stagnation:

But who would have imagined a leading conservative intellectual like Hayward would make the following damning admission in his concluding paragraph:

The single largest defect of modern conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge liberalism at the intellectual level, in particular over the meaning and nature of progress.

Duh.

Of course, if Hayward is what passes for a conservative intellectual these days, then the phrase is obviously little more than an oxymoron, since AEI’s website contains an inane 2004 piece by him titled, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” that repeats a litany of long debunked denier talking points and concludes “global warming theory all but evaporated.”  Or how about his 2003 piece asserting, “Even the lowest of the IPCC’s emissions projections is probably too high, which means that the projections of global warming may be too high as well.”  That last sentence would be true — if you only reversed “low” and “high” [see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm"].

But I digress.

Modern conservative has nothing to say about the meaning and nature of progress.  What more proof could there be than the hero Hayward turns to in this Dark Ages for the right wing:

Beck, for one, is revealing that despite the demands of filling hours of airtime every day, it is possible to engage in some real thought. He just might be helping restore the equilibrium between the elite and populist sides of conservatism.

No, Hayward isn’t writing a piece for The Onion.  But he is stuck in the same anti-science, anti-intellectualism that blinds all conservatives.  Remember:

But even outside of the realm of climate, Beck is a pure anti-intellectual wing-nut, as these factoids collected by a CAP intern make clear:

Yes, the American Enterprise Institute annoints Glenn Beck the new intellectual leader of the conservative movement stagnation.  You can’t make this stuff up.

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In a bizarre pop-culture flip-flop, Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute has compared the mild-mannered EPA administrator to Dirty Harry:

You can just see Jackson standing there with a .44 magnum in her hand, and a steely glint in her eye, telling industry “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Seriously!

Let me get this straight, the right-wing is now saying it’s bad to be like Clint, the quintessential tough guy hero lionized by conservatives because he’ll do whatever is needed to save human life? That means Green is directly equating U.S. industry with the psychopathic serial killer and criminals that Clint fights in the iconic 1971 movie.

Well, logic was never a priority of Denier-Industrial-Complex Kooks (DICKs) like Green, who regularly spouts nonsense like, “We’re back to the average temperatures that prevailed in 1978....  No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” -- from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).

In fact, Green’s analogy makes no sense whatsoever since Jackson is simply obeying the command of the highest court in the land to regulate carbon pollution (see here).  Green entirely omits the fact that in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were pollutants and that the EPA would have to regulate them if they were found to endanger public health and welfare.

So the only part of the analogy that makes sense is that deniers and delayers like Green oppose the rule of law -- while Jackson is trying to enforce it.

Ironically, in its zealous quest to kill climate action, AEI has done another flip-flop. Jackson proposes to start regulating only “large industrial facilities that emit at least 25,000 tons of GHGs a year.”  Jackson explained, “This is a common sense rule that is carefully tailored to apply to only the largest sources -- those from sectors responsible for nearly 70 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions sources.”  She told the Governors Climate Summit in Los Angeles, “we can begin reducing emissions from the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitting facilities without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the vast majority of our economy,” adding, “The corner coffee shop is not a meaningful place to look for carbon reductions.”

But Green doesn’t believe in common sense -- he urges big polluters to sue to make sure small businesses and farmers are regulated also:

For that matter, the large emitters would be wise to sue for this also, both to ensure that they’re not the only ones disadvantaged by the EPA’s actions, and to make manifest the insanity involved with EPA regulating greenhouse gases.

Note that for Green and the American Enterprise Institute, obeying the Supreme Court is “insanity.” You don’t have to be Dirty Harry to realize which side of the law he is on.

Fundamentally, Green wants to use the legal system to pervert the process.  And this scorched earth strategy is one the big polluters are threatening, too.  I’ll end this post with an analysis -- “It’s Hard To Hide An Oil Refinery Behind a Donut Shop” -- from David Doniger, Policy Director at NRDC’s Climate Center, and former “director of climate change policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and, before that, counsel to the head of the EPA’s clean air program”:

Two years ago, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that EPA has the authority and responsibility to use the existing Clean Air Act to cut dangerous global warming pollution.  And under President Obama, EPA is starting act.  Under the clean car peace treaty unveiled in the Rose Garden last March, Administrator Jackson has proposed nationwide global warming pollution standards for new cars and trucks, modeled on California’s path-breaking standards.  And EPA is working on carbon limits for big power plants, oil refineries, cement plants, and other big factories responsible for most of our heat-trapping pollution.In a fairly desperate reaction, some of America’s biggest polluters – led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Petroleum Refiners Association (NPRA), and others – are trying to scare America’s small businesses owners into thinking it’s them that the EPA is after.

If they force me to curb my pollution, the big boys say, they’ll come after schools, homes, and hot dog stands.  No one is safe, they shout.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

But it’s hard to hide an oil refinery behind a donut shop.

So what is EPA really doing?

Well, when EPA issues its final clean car standards next March, certain other things happen automatically under the Clean Air Act.  The most important is that when companies build or expand big pollution sources -- power plants, oil refineries, or cement kilns, for example -- they will have to install the “best available control technology” (BACT) for carbon dioxide and the other global warming pollutants.  This is nothing fancy.  It’s what they’ve done for years for other dangerous pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

EPA is proposing to set “thresholds” -- carbon pollution levels that separate big sources that will have to meet these requirements from small ones that will not.

This is a common sense concept that NRDC and other environmental groups proposed a more than a year ago.

But along come lawyers and spokesmen for the big boys arguing that EPA can’t do that.  If you regulate any of us, you have to regulate all of us, down to the donut shop.

It’s hostage taking.  We’re gonna take everyone down with us.  Listen to Charles Drevna, of the National Petroleum Refiners Association:

“This proposal incorrectly assumes that one industry’s greenhouse gas emissions are worse than another’s,” Drevna said. “Greenhouse gas emissions are global in nature, and are not isolated to a few select industries. The Clean Air Act stipulates unequivocally that the threshold to permit major sources is 250 tons for criteria pollutants.  EPA lacks the legal authority to categorically exempt sources that exceed the Clean Air Act’s major source threshold from permitting requirements, and this creates a troubling precedent for any agency actions in the future.”

EPA argues that it can set a different threshold -- it has proposed 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide -- to recognize that each power plant or other big source emits roughly 100 times more carbon dioxide than conventional pollutants like sulfur dioxide.  Accordingly, EPA says the proposed 25,000 ton threshold respects Congress’s decisions about which big plants should have to install the best available control technology, and which small ones should not.  Congress, EPA contends, never wanted to treat mom and pop shops the same as the big boys.  In short, EPA argues that its new thresholds avoid absurd results and administrative nightmares.

The big boys’ lawyers are getting ready to argue that EPA can’t do this, that only Congress can change these threshold numbers.  They claim the courts will strike EPA’s rule down.  But who’ll bring that suit?  It won’t be NRDC or any of the other environmental groups active in this fight.  And it’s not clear that the big boys have “standing” – the kind of legal injury needed to take to take this complaint to court.  And the courts themselves have recognized the doctrines of avoiding absurd results and administrative nightmares.

So I’m betting on EPA.  And then, with small businesses safely shielded, the Chamber and NPRA will have no one to hide behind.

What’s more likely is that Congress will clear this up well before the courts weigh in, by writing the EPA’s thresholds into new comprehensive climate and energy legislation.  That’s an idea with support from both environmental organizations and responsible companies.

Maybe I’m a dreamer, but it’s never too late for the Chamber and its allies to stop the scare-mongering and join the effort to pass this new legislation.

Well, the Chamber’s call for a ‘Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century’ worked out so well for them (see “Nike runs fast and loud from the incredible, shrinking U.S. Chamber Board over its global warming denial"), that if they want to pursue this lawsuit, which I suspect will be equally popular with their members, I say, “Go ahead, make my day!”

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