The Obama administration has spent three years and billions of tax dollars in efforts to jump start a “green energy” industry in the United States. The president says that “sustainable,” clean energy sources are the wave of the future, vital to America’s future security and the well-being of the entire planet. And yet, after all this time and all that money, all the administration has to show for those efforts are a series of spectacular failures that would make a less arrogant leader blush.

The Solyndra fiasco is the highest-profile of the president’s many green failures, but it’s hardly the only one. Barely a week goes by but that we learn of yet another government-funded “clean energy” boondoggle. Let’s consider a few examples.

Late last year, Beacon Power Company filed for bankruptcy protection. Beacon had previously received a $39 million government-guaranteed loan in order to fund research aimed at producing energy storage devices on an industrial scale. These kinds of “super batteries” are necessary solely to cover for the deficiencies and unreliability of solar and wind power.

Last Thursday, Ener1 Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection. Ener1 develops lithium storage batteries for electric cars manufactured by a company called Think Holdings, AS, which in turn has a manufacturing company located in Elkhart, Indiana. Ener1 received over $130 million in stimulus funds, and a $480 million loan from the Energy Department, promising to deliver 1,400 jobs to Indiana, while Think Holdings would generate a further 415 jobs. To date, Enre1 has created 275 jobs, while Think Holdings is down to 2 people who guard a plant at which about 100 electric vehicles – most of them unfinished – sit idly in storage.

A year ago, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Ener1 as one of “100 Recovery Act projects changing America.” “A year and a half ago, this administration made a judgment,” he said at the time. “We decided it’s not sufficient to create new jobs—we have to create whole new industries.” Unfortunately for Ener1, the free market did not share the Vice President’s enthusiasm. Demand for expensive, short ranged, small electric cars has not materialized, and thus Ener1 has no market for its product.

Even the much-ballyhooed Chevy Volt has turned into a disaster. Fire hazards aside, there is simply no demand for the vehicle beyond some arms of government, a few corporations with cash to waste and rich, tree-hugging celebrities who can afford the luxury of pretentiousness. Chevrolet hoped to sell 10,000 Volts in 2011. Actual sales amounted to 7,671 units. GM has temporarily laid off 1,200 workers on the Volt production line and is considering slowing down production. A recent study concluded that real cost of Volt – when you consider all of the government subsidies involved in developing and building the car – is about $250,000 per unit. To borrow one of the environmental movement’s favorite terms, it’s hard to see how production of the Volt could ever be sustainable in the free market.

More than three years after an initial permit application was filed and following the submission of hundreds and hundreds of pages of additional documents, President Obama announced that he was rejecting TransCanada’s proposal to construct the Keystone XL pipeline because his administration supposedly wasn’t given sufficient time to review the project.  Newt Gingrich called the decision “stunningly stupid” and it’s hard to argue with the former speaker on this one.

The president tried to duck responsibility for the decision, pointing the finger at Republicans in Congress who attached a pipeline provision to the short-term payroll tax cut extension approved last year that required Obama to approve Keystone XL by February 21 or explain why he was killing the project. This is yet another example of the President’s “the buck stops there” approach to leadership.

“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama said. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil.”

The president would have us believe that the State Department had but sixty days to review the project and they couldn’t possibly come to a decision in that short a time. In fact, the State Department has been reviewing the proposed project for over three years. In setting a deadline for the decision, congressional Republicans were not imposing an arbitrary, unreasonable deadline. They were rather attempting to force an end to the dithering and waffling that has gone on for far too long.

The amount of documentation that has been filed and reviewed since TransCanada first filed its permit application in September 2008 is staggering. The company has submitted thousands of pages of data, plans, maps, studies and all of the other bureaucratic flotsam and jetsam that government requires these days. In response, the State Department has generated thousands of pages of its own, including a Final Environmental Impact Statement that spans eight massive volumes. The president’s claim that his administration didn’t have “the information necessary to approve the project” defies credulity. The administration has a mountain of information, and it’s all available on the Internet.

What was really wanting here was time to respond to all of the complaints and pseudo-concerns that obstructionist groups like the Sierra Club and National Resources Defense Council have raised in their attempts to kill the project. As part of our dysfunctional regulatory system, well-heeled environmental groups can (and do) file a practically endless number of comments when permit applications are being reviewed. Typically, the vast majority of such comments are without merit, but that’s not the point as far as the environmental groups are concerned. Their aim is to gum up the works of the system, in the hopes that developers will tire of the process and give up, as well as to establish the basis of the lawsuits that inevitably follow any regulatory decision that runs contrary to their wishes.

Last week Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper demonstrated that he’s more than willing to do that which his counterpart in the White House is unable or unwilling to do: display a little backbone when dealing with radical environmentalists and their pet causes. Harper’s administration both commenced hearings on an alternative pipeline that would be used to ship Canadian crude to China, as well as putting the “green movement” on notice that extremism masquerading as environmentalism will no longer be tolerated in the Great White North.

Clearly Canada would prefer to ship crude recovered from massive reserves in Alberta to Texas via the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Unfortunately, the combination of green fear-mongering and President Obama’s predictable dithering has put approval of Keystone XL in doubt. Per his deal with Congress the President has until February 21 to approve the pipeline project or to explain his refusal to do so. Yet, even if the President does approve the project and risk annoying those among his supporters who worship planet earth even more than they do him, there is no guarantee that construction of Keystone XL would start anytime soon.

As Harper is aware, the United States is as litigious a society as there is on earth and – thanks to the many misguided decisions made in the pursuit of environmental purity by both parties – the massive statutory and regulatory infrastructures that have been constructed in the name of protecting mother earth practically guarantee that environmental groups could tie up an approval of Keystone XL in the courts for years.  It would be silly to put all one’s eggs in one basket in any case, but given the dysfunctional manner with which America addresses environmental issues and energy issues, Harper would be worse than foolish to assume that Canada’s best energy customer will continue to be so.

So, the Harper government opened hearings on the Northern Gateway pipeline, an alternative route that would send crude from Alberta to Kimat, British Columbian, where it would be loaded onto tankers and shipped to energy-starved China. To be sure that the pipeline faces opposition and its own bureaucratic obstacles as well, but with hundreds of billions of revenue at risk it is clearly well worth the effort to move forward on both tracks. Keystone XL is surely the preferred – and sensible – way to get Alberta’s crude to market, but Northern Gateway will do just fine if the United States is too stupid to approve a project that is so clearly in our national interest.

For not only would Keystone XL generate tens of thousands of new jobs, both in terms of construction jobs and in terms of a myriad of employment opportunities down the supply chain, it would also take a huge bite out of overseas oil imports. At full capacity, Keystone XL would provide about ten percent of America’s crude oil demand, without the slightest risk of a foreign tyrant cutting off production or closing a supply route.

As I have noted on more than one occasion, in recent years the United States EPA has been acting more and more like a revenue-generating arm of the government than an agency that’s actually interested in protecting human health and the environment. A recent story published in the New York Times amply illustrates the point: fuel suppliers are being fined for failing to add a “green fuel” – cellulosic ethanol – that doesn’t actually exist into their gasoline blends.

Cellulosic ethanol has long been a particularly prized panacea among environmental groups. As any moonshiner knows, conventional ethanol has long been produced by fermenting naturally grown sugars. These sugars are readily available and relatively easy to get at in corn for example, which is why ethanol production plants commonly use corn as their feedstock.  However, even Al Gore eventually realized that it was rather idiotic to take millions of acres of farmland out of food and feed production in order to “grow” a fuel that (in many gases) actually ends up on the deficit side of the energy ledger. Cellulosic ethanol theoretically addresses those concerns.

There are sugars theoretically available in cellulose, a naturally-occurring polymer found in all sorts of plant life. If you can figure out how to get at those sugars, then you can make ethanol out of things that don’t have a lot of intrinsic value and that don’t compete with food and feed crops, like tree trimmings and corn cobs. Unfortunately, getting at those particular sugars is (for a lot of reasons that would bore the heck out of the average reader) extremely difficult. Like the Chevy Volt, the concept of cellulosic ethanol is very attractive, but the reality is expensive and impractical.

Expense and practicality are hardly matters of concern to environmentalists though. Environmentalists prefer the pixie dust approach to dealing with energy policy: if they believe hard enough, their wishes will come true. They wanted cellulosic ethanol and once Democrats took control of Congress after the 2006 elections, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid duly granted their wish. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated the use of certain minimum quantities of cellulosic ethanol that started at 100 million gallons in 2009 and ends at 16 billion gallons is 2022. (Annual US gasoline sales are about 130 billion gallons, by way of comparison). In 2011, oil companies were mandated to sell at least 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol.

This was a problem for oil companies, because there are no plants currently producing cellulosic ethanol. And so, using her authority under the Clean Air Act, USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson duly issued penalty demands of $6.8 million to oil companies for not using a non-existent fuel.  If the rallying cry in 1776 was “No Taxation Without Representation!”, perhaps the equivalent in 2011 ought to be “No Penalty Without Reality!”

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the sadly representative case of an Idaho couple dragged through the ringer by our aggressive, money-hungry, bullying EPA. It’s essentially a due process case, intended to settle the narrow question of whether or not individuals should have immediate access to the judicial system when the EPA takes action against them. But there’s more here, because the saga of Mike and Chantell Sackett is a harrowing tale that illustrates just how out of control this agency is.

You can read all about the Sacketts’ fight at the Pacific Legal Foundation website. In brief, the story is this: Six years ago, the couple bought a 0.63 acre parcel alongside a lake, intending to build a house. They started construction, and – like any number of individuals (as opposed to developers) building homes – they didn’t do a formal wetlands delineation before starting to move earth and dump gravel. (A “wetlands delineation” is the investigative process by which experts decide whether there is a wetland on site on not.)

At this point, I need to veer off of the main story for a moment to describe what a wetland is as far as regulators are concerned. Not surprisingly, the regulatory definition of a wetland has little to do with the common sense definition.

First of all, a wetland need not actually be wet. It is rather primarily defined by hydrography (i.e. water flow patterns), soil classification and the type of vegetation present. In my career, I have seen it determined that a couple of tire ruts with a few cattails growing in them are “wetlands.”

For a wetland to be regulated, it must also be connected to “waters of the United States,” which are basically any navigable river, lake or other body of water. Thus, in my tire rut example, the ruts were determined to be part of waters of the United States because they drained into a ditch, which ran into a creek, which ran into a small river, which eventually drained into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which drains into the Des Plaines River, which drains into the Illinois River, which is a navigable water way. So there you go.

When most people think of wetlands protection, they think of big swamps and fens teaming with aquatic birds and beavers engaged in wholly unregulated construction projects. That happens, but much more often wetland protection is about tire ruts, tiny pools or a smattering of cat tails on the edge of a pond. It’s regulation for regulation’s sake, in other words, for delving into such minutia does nothing to improve the world.  The EPA, Army Corps of Engineers and Congress are all at fault here: Congress for granting the Agency and Corps such broad authority and the two regulatory bodies for wielding it so grandiosely.

Back to the Sacketts. The couple got sucked into this surreal world. The EPA ordered them to stop construction and to return the 0.63 acre site to its original condition. If they didn’t, the EPA said it could fine the couple up to $37,500 per day for non-compliance. In fact, the Agency can take such unjustifiably punitive action, for such is the power that Congress has surrendered to it. Unfortunately, it’s not at all unusual to see the EPA use its remarkable ability to levy ridiculous fines as a club in just this way.

Here we come to a rather interesting nuance of the underlying law. The EPA maintains that, under the Clean Water Act there can be no judicial appeal of its ruling that the Sacketts’ property contains a wetland until and unless the EPA actually takes action – in the form of a fine or permit denial, for example. So, simply by doing nothing, the EPA can effectively kill this (or any) project. If the couple defies the Agency’s cease and desist order, they know that they are potentially subject to huge fines. Once the penalty demand comes in they can appeal the EPA’s decision to a court, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that they would win. Thus, the Sacketts face the uncomfortable choice of building and playing Russian Roulette with their life savings, or not building and abandoning both their dream and their property.

It remains to be seen whether the House and the Senate can resolve their differences on the latest budget bill, but the Senate version promises to back the Obama administration into an uncomfortable corner with regard to the proposed Keystone XL pipleline. As part of Saturday’s 89 – 10 vote to extend payroll tax cuts for another two months, the Senate gave the president a sixty-day deadline to make a decision on the Keystone project. The White House had rejected the idea including outright approval of the project in the bill, but said that the two-month deadline was acceptable.

Assuming that the House and Senate can agree on a compromise bill, it’s likely that the Keystone provision will survive and that will be interesting. Obama has been loath to pick a side on the pipeline issue. On the one hand, if he kills the project, the president opens himself to criticism for denying Americans access to a plentiful source of North American crude and for losing this opportunity to create a plethora of jobs without spending any tax dollars. Yet, if he allows the project to move forward, Obama is sure to annoy the environmental activists who form part of his base.

It’s hard to believe that environmentalists have any other places to go in the coming election and it’s almost as unlikely that they would choose to stay home out of pure petulance over the pipeline. Nonetheless, the Obama team has always been ultra-cautious when it comes to its perceived base and this is another example of the phenomenon.

Pressed to make a decision on the pipeline, the president instead kicked this particular can down the road last month. The administration decided to study an alternative route for the pipeline, which would conveniently have delayed any decision until after the 2012 election. It was the best of two political worlds in a lot of ways. By postponing the decision, Obama could tell environmentalists that he was duly evaluating every bit of data before coming to a decision, while he could simultaneously claim not to have shut down the project out of hand.

By imposing a sixty-day deadline, the Senate bill would force the president to pick a side, something he clearly hates to do. If the budget bill goes through, as it seems destined to, the administration will be forced to decide who it is willing to offend. Environmentalists will be offended if Obama approves Keystone XL, while trade unions will be equally upset if he decided to kill it.

As a senator, Barack Obama was addicted to this particular word: “present.” Time and again Senator Obama employed his favorite word to avoid taking a position on the great issues of the day. Once he was elected president, voting “present” seemed to no longer be an option. Or so we thought.

The president’s decision not to make a decision on the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline is, in all effects, another present vote. Caught between two opposing points of view, Obama understood that taking one side or another was fraught with political consequences. So, he did what he does best: the president kicked the can down the road.

On the one hand, this administration’s singular inability to do anything to fight unemployment is a huge liability as we roll into the next election cycle. Construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would ultimately bring about 800,000 barrels per day of Canadian oil down to U.S. refineries, would create hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs, and would secure an important source of non-OPEC oil.

If Obama had come out squarely against Keystone XL, he would have left himself open to charges – entirely justified – that he refused to take an action that would have immediate and measurable effect on both the economy and the unemployment situation. Moreover, it would also anger the unions that would stand to benefit from the massive construction project, unions which are important to the president both in terms of campaign contributions and votes.

It would have been idiotic to openly kill the project this close to an election. Think about it. Construction of Keystone XL would result in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into the economy, much of it in the form of wages, and the government wouldn’t have to shell out even one of our tax dollars to make it happen. How can anybody possibly be against it?

But, on the other hand, the so-called “green vote” is also important to this president. It’s hard to see why. I mean – seriously – is a hard-core enviro-activist going to vote for the Republican candidate? They should, since Republican administrations have been responsible for more draconian environmental statutes than any Democratic administration, but that’s not the way the tree-hugging crowd sees it – reality being something of an alien concept among the greenies.

The enviros despise Keystone XL, for a couple of reasons. They’re certain that oil from the pipeline will leak into shallow aquifers in Nebraska, which will contaminate the water that farmers in the state use to grow government-subsidized corn crops which is turned into government-mandated ethanol at government-subsidized plants.

This would, of course, be a disaster – for the government at least – and it must be admitted that pipelines do leak now and again. On the other hand, a gigantic pile of government laws and regulations ensure that when anyone contaminates soil or groundwater the guilty parties are held financially liable and forced to pay for a thorough clean up.

Among the many difficulties that the state of California has been facing, one in particular is looming larger and larger: the power problem. The state is slowly coming to grips with the fact that its preferred sources of electric power – wind and solar – are neither cheap nor reliable. Yet, California is committed by law to increasing the use of wind, solar and other forms of renewable energy. The economics don’t come close to supporting this model. And so – quite predictably – the folks who operate the wind mills and solar plants want Californians to pay even more for the power, despite the fact that residents of the state pay some of the highest rates in the nation.

According to Department of Energy data, Californians paid an average of 14.74 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2010, compared to the national average of 11.51 cents per kilowatt-hour. Prices have risen by almost fifty percent over the course of the last decade, and a study by Bloom Energy suggests that prices will continue to rise by five to seven percent per year for the foreseeable future. Overall, only five other states in the nation have higher electricity costs than California. Energy is getting more and more expensive just at the time the cash-strapped state can least afford it.

How did California arrive at this crisis point? It started when the legislature decided to adopt a Renewable Portfolio Standard, or “RPS,” for the state. Like most RPS programs (thirty-three states currently have them) California’s mandates the use of more and more renewable power to generate electricity each year. The intent, of course, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with fossil fuel combustion.

California’s RPS is especially aggressive, with a requirement that thirty-three percent of the electricity sold in the state originate from renewable sources of energy by the year 2020. Other states that have adopted RPS require lower renewable percentages (twenty to twenty-five percent is typical) and the final compliance dates are farther out. That doesn’t mean that the other RPS states won’t face the same kind of problems that California is dealing with, it just means that the day of reckoning won’t arrive quite as quickly as it has in the Golden State.

The leftist myth is that wind power and solar power are “free,” because you don’t have to pay for the energy sources. The reality is quite different. While the energy source doesn’t cost anything, all of the other things that factor into the cost of this kind of power are expensive. First there’s the installed cost of the plant. According to Department of Energy figures, the installed cost of a wind turbine is about on par with building a new coal plant, on a dollars-per-kilowatt generated basis. The installed cost of solar is about four times that of a coal plant, and almost ten times that of a natural gas-fired plant. So, before a single electron goes anywhere, the operator has debt-service to factor into his pricing.

Then there’s the cost of the infrastructure needed to get the power to market. This means new transmissions lines, switchyards and all of the other pieces needed whenever power plants are built. But, the infrastructure is especially expensive because the footprints of wind farms are so large, as compared to a conventional fossil-fuel plant. The large footprint (and relative inaccessibility of wind turbines) also drives up maintenance costs. Add everything up and wind and solar power cannot compete with conventional sources of power in the free market.

The wind and solar industries have heretofore thrived thanks to government subsidies and Renewable Energy Tax Credits. The taxpayer effectively generates roughly one-third of the gross revenue that wind and solar power plants receive, far more than any other portion of the energy sector. Absent that level of government support, wind and solar power plants could not survive given the price-structure that naturally arises in a competitive market. There is a real danger that an assertive Republican-led House will not approve another extension of Renewable Energy Tax Credits in the coming year. Without that program, the wind and solar industries in California will die on the vine, no matter what the state’s RPS demands are. Thus the wind and solar lobbies are pushing legislators hard to approve legislation that will force consumers to pay a premium for their particular forms of power. They can see the writing on the wall: the D.C. gravy train is drying up, so it’s time for Plan B.

New revelations suggest that the brewing scandal involving the solar panel industry may run much deeper than the failed Solyndra company. According to a report published by The Daily Caller, officials at at least four other solar companies that received billions in loan guarantees have donated large sums of money to prominent Democrats like President Obama, Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Barbara Boxer. In addition, tumbling stock prices suggest that some, if not all, of the companies in question may be heading for financial trouble.

Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer based in Fremont, California that received $535 million in federal loans, was touted by the Obama administration as an example of the kind of cutting edge, green technology leader that America needs to invest in. The company subsequently declared bankruptcy and, when called upon to testify before a Congressional committee, Solyndra executives repeatedly invoked the 5th Amendment rather than answer questions about the fiasco. Now, it appears that the scandal is spreading. According to The Daily Caller’s John Rossomando:

Companies like First Solar, SolarReserve, SunPower Corporation and Abengoa SA have already, collectively, received billions in loans through Obama administration stimulus programs to build solar power plants in the southwestern United States. Yet each, with the exception of the privately held SolarReserve, has seen its stock price hammered at the same time it was lobbying the Obama administration and Congress for billions in loan guarantees.

For example, according to The Daily Caller, Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser raised over $50,000 for President Obama in 2008. Kaiser has ties to both SolarReserve and Solyndra. Lee Bailey, a SolarReserve board member and U.S. Renewables Group investor, has donated $21,850 since 2008 to Democratic candidates, including President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and California Sen. Barbara Boxer. SolarReserve also paid more than $100,000 of lobbying fees to the Podesta Group. The Podesta Group is run by Tony Podesta, brother of Obama transition team head Leon Podesta. In the same vein, SunPower, spent almost $300,000 in lobbying fees with a close confidante of Harry Reid’s, as well as making hefty campaign donations to influential Democrats.

Meanwhile, the value of these companies appears to be dropping precipitously. The price of both SolarReserve and SunPower stock has dropped more than sixty per cent in just a few months, and Abengoa SA stock dropped over thirty five per cent in six months. (First Solar is privately held, so financial data is not available.) Nonetheless, not only have they received billions in federal loan guarantees, the Department of Energy just authorized a billion more.

The administration and “green energy” advocates tout solar as a vitally important source of green energy and claim that DOE seed money pouring into companies like these will pay off in the long run. There is certainly some demand for solar panels in the residential and commercial markets, but it’s hard to see how any US company will be able to compete with solar panels built in China given all of that nation’s manufacturing advantages in commodity markets. Solyndra tried to compete in that market and failed miserably, if predictably.

But, as dubious an investment in the residential and commercial market is, investment in the power market is even shakier. Solar power does not, will not and cannot play any significant role in electrical generation for a couple of very good reasons. First, the installed cost of a solar plant is more than double that of an equivalently-sized coal plant, and more than ten times the cost of a gas turbine plant. And then, because the sun doesn’t shine all of the time, solar plants spend most of their time not running. The metric used to determine availability is called the “capacity factor.” This is a measure of how much power a plant actually produces, as compared to the amount of power the plant could produce if it were running at peak capacity every hour of the year. A typical nuclear plant runs at an annual capacity factor of around ninety percent. Coal plants usually operate in the sixty to seventy-five percent range. Most solar plants operate at capacity factors of less than twenty five percent.

There’s no free market incentive to build power plants that are much more expensive to build and operate far less than other technologies. Without the grants, loans, subsidies and tax breaks, no one would choose to use solar energy to enter the power market. Yet, that is the very market that First Solar, SolarReserve, SunPower Corporation and Abengoa SA are going after, and Obama’s Department of Energy is pouring billions and billions into the companies to make it possible.

To provide a little perspective on just how paltry a contribution solar power makes to electric generation, consider that the entire United States’ electric generation fleet totals a little over 1.1 million megawatts of capacity. Of this, about 640 megawatts, or 0.05%, is currently solar. Over the next five years, the Department of Energy projects that over 75,000 megawatts of new capacity of all sorts will come on line, a figure that includes 2,883 megawatts of solar power. That will move solar’s potential contribution up to a whopping 0.3% of the total.

Solar power combines enormous construction costs and pitiful reliability in a way that no other power source does, and the numbers reflect that simple truth. The fact is that solar power can do virtually nothing to replace reliable fossil and nuclear plants. The only thing that solar power has been able to achieve is to separate taxpayers from billions of their hard-earned dollars. As the Solargate scandal spreads, more and more Americans are wondering why that has been allowed to happen.

One month after passing an initial environmental review, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project crossed another significant hurdle, as a series of State Department hearings in states affected by the project drew to a close. Like any recent project involving any sort of fossil fuel use, the Keystone XL pipeline drew the usual crowd of protesters and fear-mongers. Yet, recognizing the importance of the project in both economic terms and in terms of energy independence, Keystone XL has garnered a surprising amount of public support as well.

The pipeline, running from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast, would have the capacity to bring an additional 700,000 barrels of crude oil pumped out of Canadian tar sands. The United States imports roughly 10 million barrels of crude per day, so completion of Keystone XL has the potential to displace a fair amount of the crude that we currently import from overseas. In a world where China and India are gobbling up as much crude supply as they can through long-term contracts, it obviously makes sense to ensure our own energy security through projects like this. Yet, the environmental Left has been doing everything it can to muddy the waters of a decision that should be crystal clear when it comes to this new pipeline.

The State Department hearings reflected much of the poisonous influence that the environmental Left and their partners in the mainstream media have had on many otherwise reasonable, hardworking Americans. The environmental Left’s core messages are: 1) there is no level of acceptable risk, 2) there are no environmental missteps, only environmental disasters, and 3) anyone who disagrees with message one or two is lying and, most likely, in collusion with evil corporate polluters.

Consider, for example, how the concerns of one farmer in Nebraska were reported by Canadian wire service Postmedia News. Farmers Scott and Bruce Boettcher, who drove four and a half hours to attend the hearing, are highlighted in the story:

Their lifetime of experience has made them highly skeptical of studies — by both TransCanada and the State Department — that conclude environmental damage from an oil spill would be limited and localized. The water is not static — it moves, Bruce says, and oil spilled into it will move, too.

“Them scientists are not telling the truth about that ground,” he told Postmedia News during a break in the Lincoln hearings.

In fact, the highly sophisticated models that are used to determine the extent and severity of oil spills do indeed take into account the fact that water moves. We know, from decades of experience, how any kind of groundwater contamination will act and how severe the potential damage is. And, after all those decades of experience, we’ve gotten very, very good at both limiting the size of the inevitable (if very occasional) spill and remediating any environmental effects.

Yet, environmental groups and their media allies latch onto any story – no matter how convoluted – that will play to the tired old narrative that America is dangerously polluted and each new project brings us a step closer to environmental catastrophe. In addition to supposedly poisoning ground water in Nebraska, the environmental Left asserts that crude taken from Canadian oil sands is more greenhouse gas-intensive than other forms of crude and that emissions of other pollutants will increase as well if this “dirty” crude is allowed to enter the United States.

Both claims are silly. When you add everything up, oil sands crude is middle of the pack when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, and the fact that the crude is “dirtier” only means that refineries have to do more to remove contaminants, not that the release of more contaminants into the environment will be allowed. In any case, somebody – somewhere – is going to refine this supply of crude. Growth in Asia guarantees that there will be no shortage of demand for a long time. So the real question is: do we want to make a deal with our neighbor to help stabilize our own energy picture, or do we want them to sell it to somebody else? Either way, the wells in Alberta will keep pumping.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has hinted that she is inclined to rule favorably on the project. With an election year fast approaching, it would appear to be in the administration’s best interest to push Keystone XL through, if only to raise a little political capital among the millions of Americans who remain distressed by the economy, gas prices and unemployment.

The political advantages were made clear during the recent hearings. While hearings of this type usually only bring out the critics, many supporters of the Keystone XL pipeline stepped up to the microphones to urge the administration to move forward. The administration is expected to announce its decision by the end of the year. Whatever the decision, it is sure to be challenged in court by the parties who disagree with it, but that small ray of sunshine peeking through the gloom of our cloudy energy future suggests that the process – as cumbersome and time consuming as it may be – is moving forward at long last.

Last week a team of scientists working at CERN, the European scientific research organization, published a research paper that has rocked the scientific community. According to their data, gathered as part of a research projected named “OPERA,” neutrinos generated at the CERN research facility located on the Swiss-French border were found to travel faster than the speed of light.

Not a lot faster, mind you. The data shows that the particles made the 454 mile trip from the CERN facility to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy 61 billionths of a second faster than light in vacuum. That’s all of two thousandths of a percent difference, but in the weird world of sub-atomic physics, it’s quite a remarkable result.

Einsteinen physics set the universal speed limit at the speed of light over one hundred years ago. It quickly became one of the bedrocks of modern physics, a universally accepted fact as seemingly unshakable as the Newtonian relationship between gravity and mass. Anything that challenges that tenet will necessarily make physicists take another look at relativity theory.

The scientific method demands that the results must be independently verified, so it will likely be a while before we can definitively confirm or deny the finding. Still, the CERN scientists took many months to carefully check and recheck their data before publishing a result that was sure to upset the apple carts of so many physicists.

“After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation,” said Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for OPERA and a professor a the University of Bern.

Could this finding have unexpected consequences in other fields, most notably in the field of climatology? Advocates of the theory that burning fossil fuels is causing catastrophic global warming have long claimed that there is consensus among scientists about that relationship. Many scientists would challenge that claim, including this one, for the complexity of climate science and the multitude of intertwined forces that affect the climate requires measured, necessarily nuanced, explanations of the role that greenhouse gases play in the system. Instead, many global warming proponents like to deal in absolutes and they thus pretend that the effect of greenhouse gases on the climate far outweighs all others. This is effectively the “consensus” they claim exists in the scientific community.

Another respected scientist took a stand in the worldwide debate over the source and importance of climate change. Last week, Dr. Ivar Giaever, professor emeritus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, professor at large at the University of Oslo and a 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) in protest over the society’s rigid stance on climate change.

A part of the official APS statement with regard to global warming states that the “evidence is incontrovertible” that human activities have led to rising global temperatures through increased emissions of carbon dioxide. Like many scientists in a variety of disciplines, Giaever was offended by the implication that the science is settled and no further research or discussion about the issue is needed.

“In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of a proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” Giaever said in an e-mail to Kate Kirby, executive officer of APS. “The claim…is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

The idea that global warming is such a critical issue that the kind of intellectual debate that is central to the scientific process should not be allowed goes back to the Clinton administration. It was then that Vice President Al Gore stated with finality that the “science was settled” and the supposed crisis was so acute that the traditional scientific process should be abandoned.

That pronouncement, especially coming from someone with no scientific training like Mr. Gore, offended and continues to offend many a scientist. Nonetheless, a number of scientific organizations like APS, the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, have definitively stated that dangerous global warming is real and that mankind is definitely the cause.

On Sunday, most Americans took the time to reflect on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that shook the nation to the core. Most Americans honored the victims of that awful day, expressed their gratitude to the young men and women on the front lines of the fight and prayed for peace. Most Americans did those things — but not all, because the tenth anniversary of 9/11 has a much different meaning for those on the Left.

Economist Paul Krugman, whose New York Times blog proclaims that he in some way exemplifies “The Conscience of a Liberal,” used the anniversary to express all of the sneering contempt that the Left has for the war against terrorism. The post title, “The Years of Shame,” provides the premise for Krugman’s disdainful chastisement, but would better encapsulate the deranged left-wing theatre of the absurd played out during the post-9/11 decade. The conspiracy theories, the cries of “no blood for oil,” anti-Bush hate parades and admiration for “freedom fighters” (terrorists), all aspects of the legacy of 9/11 that the Left absolves itself from and is gradually erasing from the historical record.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons. The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame.

Could we have at least added Michael Moore to the list? Ironically, the atrocity was a unifying event, albeit ever so briefly. For a few weeks after 9/11, Americans were about as unified as they have been at any time since Pearl Harbor. People of all sorts gathered together under the silent skies that followed that terrible day, reflecting on the nature of good and evil and pledging that this horrific crime would not go unpunished. For a moment, political divisions were unimportant, as American pride and determination flared brightly in the nation’s soul.

It wasn’t destined to last. The tragedy of 9/11 did indeed become a wedge issue, but to blame that on the Right, or on heroes like Giuliani and Bush — and exclusively, for that matter — is an absurdly ignorant portrayal of events. The war against terrorists and their supporters had barely begun before the Left’s poisonous propaganda machine kicked into gear.

That the Left was ever interested in unity after 9/11 is likewise ludicrous — and to hear complaints from a man who refers to Republicans as “vile” and burned effigies of the Bush administration at his 2008 election night party, is nothing short of surreal. (Indeed, the very petty partisan discord sown by Krugman on such an emotionally painful occasion should disabuse us of the notion that he has any use for “unity.”) Depending on the day during the previous administration, Bush was either a dupe being manipulated by (fill in the villain of the day) or an evil mastermind. We need no further proof that the Left’s outrage was manufactured than the deafening silence that fell over much of that side of the political spectrum after Barack Obama took office. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue. Gitmo is still open. And it even turns out that civilian trials for terrorists really are a bad idea. There is no shame in the way that America has taken the war to the enemy, but there is plenty of shame in the way those efforts were so vigorously undermined.

Last week, the California State Senate passed its own version of the controversial “DREAM Act,” one that sets it squarely apart from its neighbor Arizona when it comes to illegal immigration. While Arizona and the states that have followed its lead want to play hardball, California has gone the other way: instead lobbing a softball to illegal immigrants that rewards the very behavior that government is supposed to prohibit.

The California bill will allow illegal immigrants who attended state high schools for three or more years to receive state-funded financial aid for college. According to sponsors, the measure is expected to cost California tax-payers about $40 million per year. About 40,000 illegal immigrants currently attend college in the state.

On the one hand, $40 million is a drop in the bucket compared to California’s debt, which exceeds $375 billion – almost twenty per cent of the state’s annual GDP. At least that’s the way supporters of the measure look at it. On the other hand, those Californians who would like the state to start addressing its massively bloated budget see this move as just another step toward fiscal disaster. Not only is the state spending more money it doesn’t have, the move sends another signal to illegal immigrants that California is a safe haven, putting even more pressure on state services.

“The actions of the California Legislature come against the backdrop of the state’s fiscal crisis,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “While billions of dollars are being slashed from needed programs, while state universities and colleges are cutting programs and admission, and while there is an insufficient amount of government aid available to help legal residents pay for college, the Legislature continues to work overtime to find new benefits they can bestow on illegal aliens.”

The California Assembly is expected to pass the bill this week, and Governor Jerry Brown is expected to sign it. This is a litmus-test issue in the eyes of many advocates for illegal immigrants in California, and they have made it clear that they expect Brown to keep his campaign promises to support their efforts.

“Governor Brown will weigh his political future on the California Dream Act,” said Randy Ertll, executive director of El Centro de Accion Social in Pasadena. “The immigration issue is now being used by both parties, Democrats and Republicans, as a way to win or lose elections.  Tallies are being kept on how certain legislators are voting when it comes to immigration issues, and during campaign time pro- or anti-immigration campaigns are launched to persuade voters.”

There is a good deal of truth behind Ertll’s thinly-veiled threat. Polling data clearly shows that the illegal immigration issue neatly divides elitists and run-of-the-mill voters about as sharply as any major issue of the day. National Review’s Mark Krikorian laid out the distinction quite clearly:

“[A] candidate’s immigration statements become a populist diagnostic tool, serving as a way to determine whether a candidate is one of Them (the elite) or one of Us (the people),” he wrote.  “And certain words and phrases are flashing lights that you’re one of Them: ‘comprehensive,’ ‘undocumented,’ ‘jobs Americans won’t do,’ ‘virtual fence,’ ‘we can’t deport 11 million people,’ and so on.”

It’s taken a while, but Barack Obama may be starting to catch on to the fact that his much more savvy Democratic predecessor in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton, figured out fairly early: a Democratic President doesn’t have to kowtow to the environmental movement. Democrats can rather ignore them, because whom else are greenies going to vote for? Republicans? Nope. Ralph Nader? Big deal. Much the same is the case with the African American community: Democrats have a monopoly on the green movement and thus they can afford to ignore its wishes.

It did, admittedly, take what was – or at least should have been – a no-brainer of a decision for Barack Obama to finally say no to the wishes of the eco-left. Last week Obama, like George W. Bush before him, directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to leave the ambient air ozone standard right where it is, at seventy-five parts per billion.

If that’s not quite good news for the economy, it’s certainly less bad news. Lowering the ambient air ozone standard further, as so many environmental organizations wished, would have been a disaster for America. It would have added billions of dollars in costs to industries located in areas that have heretofore been spared the worst of the EPA’s regulatory burden, driven up the price of fuel and created even more job losses.

By Act of Congress, the EPA gets to set ambient air standards by itself, unless the president intervenes. This is the ultimate in job security for a bureaucrat; a way of ensuring that the EPA’s work is never – can never – be done. It wasn’t that long ago that the ambient air standard for ozone was 120 parts per billion, a value that both EPA and environmental groups then assured us was the dividing line between healthy and unhealthy air.

Unfortunately for the EPA, America cleaned up the air to the point that just about every county met that goal. What to do? If you’re the EPA and you actually meet a goal, the choices are: 1) declare victory (and lose funding), or 2) move the goalposts back so that you stay relevant. Guess which choice the agency always makes? Such was the case with ozone standard, with the EPA sliding the goalposts back under Clinton and again under Bush.

Yet, even though the Bush-era standard was lower than the Clinton-era standard, Bush was bad for the environment, while Clinton was good, according to the leftist narrative. This self-fulfilling prophecy manifested itself many times, including when Bush’s EPA lowered the ozone standard.

Back then, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) had recommended lowering the ozone standard to as little as 60 parts per billion. (The standard was then 80 parts per billion.) President Bush considered CASAC’s advice and weighed that against the economic price that would be paid and decided – rightly in my opinion – that the tiny improvement in already good air quality wouldn’t come close to offsetting the economic consequences. For those economic consequences – job loss, reductions in income and all the rest – have every bit of an impact on the health and welfare of the populace as does the environment in which we live. And so, by presidential order, the EPA lowered the standard to a reasonable level: 75 parts per billion.

A confrontation between Muslims celebrating the end of Ramadan at the Rye Playland amusement park in Westchester County, New York and local authorities turned ugly yesterday, in a perfect demonstration of the toxic influence agitation outfits like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have had on American discourse. “It’s clear, this all happened because we’re Muslim,” said Dena Meawad, an 18-year-old Muslim woman who was in the midst of the action. She, of course, is the aggrieved victim of the supposedly racist, sexist and, above-all, Islamophobic American society.

Three years ago, Westchester County, which operates Rye Playland, put a policy into effect that forbids people from wearing headgear on certain rides. That rule was imposed because of safety concerns, both that a hat landing on the tracks of certain rides could cause problems and that some coverings – like a head scarf – could represent a strangulation hazard. Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of Westchester County Parks, said the Muslim American Society of New York was informed about the headgear rule on multiple occasions in advance of yesterday’s event, during which about 3,000 members of the society visited the park. “Part of our rules and regulations, which we painstakingly told them over and over again, is that certain rides you cannot wear any sort of headgear,” Tartaglia said.

Some of the young women attending the event either didn’t get the message or chose to ignore it. According to reports, some Muslim women began arguing with police over the rules when they were denied entrance to rides. The confrontation escalated to the point that about 100 police converged on the park to get the melee under control. Fifteen Muslims, including three women, were taken into custody. Two park rangers were injured in the fracas.

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was naturally quick to take offense over the incident. “In this heightened state of Islamophobia, a woman wearing a hajib is an easy target these days,” said Zead Ramadan, president of CAIR – New York. Except that’s not even remotely the way that America works “these days.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently promised that the Obama administration would finally make a decision on whether or not to permit construction of a new pipeline that would deliver Canadian crude oil to the United States. The Keystone-XL pipeline would create jobs, provide a significant and stable new source of oil and give the economy a badly-needed shot in the arm. So, naturally, environmentalists are outraged by the plan.

On Tuesday, protesters led by actress and environmental activist Daryl Hannah demonstrated in front of the White House, calling on the administration to stop the pipeline, which would eventually deliver over 800,000 barrels of crude per day to refineries in Texas. To put that in context, the United States currently consumes about 18,000,000 barrels per day of petroleum products, so 800,000 barrels is a substantial number. Hannah has likened the protest against the pipeline to the civil rights movement and maintains that civil disobedience is necessary to fight what she and her fellow environmental activists see as a monstrosity. True to her word, Hannah was arrested after ignoring orders from U.S. Park Police to move from the spot where she was sitting down in front of the White House.

Following their playbook, environmentalists have tried to demonize the Keystone-XL pipeline in any way they can, no matter how spurious the argument. For example, the crude that will flow through the pipeline originates in the tar sands of Alberta. It is “dirtier” (in the sense that it has more contaminants that must be removed) than “sweet” crude. Because it’s dirtier, environmentalists claim that refineries will pollute more when processing it. Like so many aspects of the environmental movement, this seemingly logical conclusion doesn’t hold up once you scratch beneath the surface a bit.

Refineries are subject to a plethora of standards that limit the amount of pollutants they can release into the air and into the water. None of these standards is based on the type of crude oil that a refinery processes. The EPA does not care if a refinery is processing the sweetest crude available or if it’s processing crude so foul that it’s sometimes called “dinosaur dung” in the trade. The limits are the limits – period – and refineries that process crude from the tar sands will be held to the same standards to which they have always been held. So rather than polluting more, refineries that process dirtier crude have to improve their processes in order to handle them and still meet pollution limits. This modernization process has already begun.

Economist Paul Krugman took to the pages of The New York Times on Sunday in order to regurgitate Sierra Club talking points regarding global warming and to castigate the Republican Party for being “anti-science.” As Roger Simon noted, like just about everybody else writing about the issue, Krugman doesn’t bother to explain or understand the science or the nature of the robust scientific debate that has been going on for some time. Instead, he relies on the Left’s preferred method for analyzing scientific issues: a moistened finger held up to the wind.

Krugman’s central thesis is that theory that mankind is causing catastrophic climate change has to be true, because “97 to 98 per cent of scientists” agree that it’s true. You’ll see the “97 to 98 per cent” number appearing quite often now. It’s become a key talking point of the alarmist crowd, as they struggle to regain relevance in a world that has a harder and harder time taking them seriously. But where does that amazing number come from? It arises from a 2009 survey that two University of Illinois researchers conducted. 10,257 Earth scientists responded and, much to the U of I professors’ chagrin, the results were far from satisfying to the alarmist crowd.

Many of the respondents indicated that they believe that natural forces are much more important than mankind’s paltry contributions to climate trends. Some questioned the validity of the models that have been used to predict massive forcing attributable to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. All in all, it wasn’t the kind of response that the researchers were looking for when they were trying to prove consensus. So, the professors decided that 10,180 of the scientists who responded weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, “overwhelming consensus” was demonstrated once again. See Laurence Solomon’s marvelous analysis of the survey for more details.

This attempt to silence dissent across scientific disciplines is a sad and troubling feature of the global warming alarmist movement. As a scientist and a skeptic, I often hear alarmists tell me that I’m not qualified to opine on global warming because I’m merely a chemist. I’m not a climatologist, so my vote should not count. Now, having specialized in air quality work for the past thirty years, having run many dispersion models (related to, but not the same as, climate models) and knowing a fair bit about thermodynamics, I’ll flatter myself to think that I know a whole lot more about the issue than 99% of the people writing about it in the mainstream media. And yet, people like Krugman feel no shame when they speak authoritatively about an issue they don’t understand in the slightest. I’ll make Mr. Krugman a deal: I won’t write about exchange rate instability if he will take a pass on atmospheric science.

There is no question that carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” play a role in the complex climate system that is planet earth. No scientist denies that. But the stupefyingly oversimplification that leftists like Krugman cling to – that global warming is wholly and directly caused by our use of fossil fuels – is about as idiotic as saying that unemployment rates in Arkansas determine growth in national GDP. The global warming question is, in fact, five distinct questions:

1. Is the planet’s climate changing?

2. If so, is the rate of change cause for concern?

3. If so, can human activities contribute to the rate of change?

4. If so, is the degree to which human activities contribute to the rate of change significant compared to other forces?

5. If so, is it wiser to attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that it is to adapt to the changing climate?

Only if one answers all five questions in the affirmative can one justify further reductions in fossil fuel use. When one considers how scientists answer those questions, we find that the number who would answer every one with an unqualified “yes” hardly represents any sort of consensus at all. See the Heartland Institute’s detailed analysis, “You Call This Consensus,” for more.

We all know that the Obama administration trots out the evil corporate stereotype time and time again. Whenever they need to justify another big government program, the president and his advisors are quick to criticize oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, insurers, the banking industry and anybody else who dares to turn a profit in the private sector. There is one significant exception to this rule however: the $150 billion conglomerate known as General Electric.

The company, its chairman, Jeffery Immelt, and the Obama administration have recently been the target of pointed criticism after GE announced its intention to partner with China’s state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation to develop airliners. In addition to concerns over China’s dubious record in honoring patents and keeping industrial secrets, many see the move as a slap in the face to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who work for Boeing and for companies who are part of Boeing’s vast supply chain.

The irony of course is that Immelt, who Obama tapped to head the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, approved a venture that would both create overseas jobs and threaten domestic employment. “We are all in and we don’t want it back,” said Lorraine Bolsinger, chief executive of GE Aviation Systems.

But this is nothing new when it comes to Immelt and Obama’s cozy relationship, and the way that GE has profited from both corporate welfare and government-sponsored rigging of the marketplace. Anyone who was surprised by GE’s latest move hasn’t been paying attention.

“Jeff Immelt is perhaps the CEO who is most cozy with President Obama,” journalist Tim Carney said in an interview with John Stossel. “General Electric is structuring their business around where government is going . . . high-speed rail, solar, wind. GE is lining up to get what government is handing out.”

Arguably, no company has positioned itself better to take advantage of the “green revolution” in American energy production. The flip-side of GE’s commitment to “eco-engineering” is that the company would be hurt badly if the nation returned to a sensible energy policy that utilized the full spectrum of our vast natural resources.

This week the Obama administration’s EPA postponed a final decision on whether or not to further reduce the nation’s ambient air ozone standard. It was the fourth such postponement of a choice that is sure to have significant political and economic ramifications, if it is ever made. Further lowering the ozone standard would almost surely have a significant negative effect on the nation’s already beleaguered manufacturing sector, while leaving the standard where it is would further annoy the president’s leftist base. And so, once again, the EPA is going to delay the decision for further study, though this is surely an issue that has been studied to death.

There is little doubt among those of us who do environmental regulatory work for a living that Obama’s EPA will lower the standard eventually. It’s a very important goal among the green portions of the left, having slammed George W. Bush repeatedly for not acceding to their demands. Though it would have been politically inexpedient for Obama’s EPA to take action now – because it would be the height of folly to pile on another job-killing measure in this miserable economic climate – it’s hard to believe that the Obama administration would walk away from the issue for all time.

The stakes are high, and so of course is the rhetoric, which means that both the science and risk-benefit evaluation that should go with such a decision get lost in the fog of recriminations and name-calling. That’s a shame, but it’s emblematic of how politicized environmental issues have become in the nation today. Allow me to offer the kind of explanation that the mainstream media won’t, or can’t, provide.

The ambient air ozone standard refers to the amount of that chemical – a molecule consisting of three oxygen atoms, rather than the standard two – is in the air we breathe. At ground level, ozone is generally considered “bad,” whereas high up in the atmosphere, where it protects us from ultraviolet light, it is considered “good.” (Amusingly, some home air purifying systems generate ozone, which manufacturers claim is the solution to all your indoor air pollution woes.)

Ozone, we have been told, is linked to asthma and other respiratory diseases, and so we must set the standard lower in order to reduce the incidences of such illnesses. It’s a story that has grown a little tiresome on this, its fourth re-telling. The original ozone standard under the Clean Air Act was one hundred twenty parts per billion. The Clinton-era EPA lowered that to eighty parts per billion and the Bush-era EPA lowered it further to seventy five parts per billion. (Averaging periods enter into the scheme too, but suffice it to say that each iteration represented a more stringent standard.)

Even though the Bush-era EPA promulgated a tighter standard than the Clinton-era EPA, the Bush standard was condemned by the environmental-advocacy industry (i.e., the Sierra Club, American Lung Association, etc.) because George W. Bush was elected as a Republican and the leftist narrative insists that Republicans can do nothing right when it comes to Mother Earth, while Democrats like Bill Clinton can do nothing wrong.