by Jonathan Reisman

Maine’s draft climate action plan update is posted at Maine-Wont-Wait-Draft-10.15.24.pdf. 

It doubles down on expensive and unreliable energy (solar and wind), electric vehicles, youth indoctrination (Climate Corps anyone?), damaging rural Maine, moral preening, and refusing to tell the people of Maine how much global warming will be averted (none) and at what cost (bend over).

I will be having at least three bills submitted in response, led by “An Act to Promote Sound Science and Transparency in Climate Change Policy.” 

Five years ago, one of my first columns laid out the basics and provided a truth in labeling preview. That September 2019 Climate Contrarian column did not make it to the web, so, here is a slightly revised version:

In 2004, I served on a Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Climate Policy taskforce examining how Maine might implement the August 2001 New England Governors/Eastern Canadian Premiers (NEG/ECP) Climate Change Agreement (CCA) to reduce our Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The CCA was an updated regional version of the 1998 Kyoto Protocol signed by President Clinton. The Senate had not and would not ratify Kyoto, and President Bush had “unsigned” it, but then Gov. Angus King and New England’s Governors had pushed back with their own agreement to fight climate change alongside Quebec and the Maritime provinces. The NEG/ECP entity was created by and remains a front for the New England Independent System Operator (ISO), which runs our electric grid, principally Central Maine Power and Bangor Hydro (now Versant) here in Maine. Gov. Baldacci and Maine’s Democratic legislature had adopted the CCA emission reduction goals into statute, and the DEP was trying to figure out how to implement them. I became increasingly alarmed when it became apparent that the DEP was unwilling to tell Mainers how much global warming their emission reductions would prevent and how much it would cost.

After the November 2004 election, I asked my friend the late Rep. Henry Joy (R-Crystal), who had run for the Republican nomination for Governor in 1998 and was a leader in the “Two Maine’s” (as in Maine and Northern Massachusetts) movement, to submit the following bill to the Legislature:

“An Act to Promote Sound Science in Climate Change Policy Summary”: This bill requires that, when the Department of Environmental Protection adopts rules designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the department must issue an estimate of the amount of global warming that will be prevented and the costs that will result from the rules requiring reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

The bill was christened LD72 and is available at http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/bills/bills_122nd/billtexts/LD0072.... The title, sponsors (2nd Congressional District Republicans), and content of LD 72 drove the environmental left and climate alarmists crazy, but its conciseness, clarity, and easiness to understand made defeating it problematic. The climate alarmist narrative was already declaring that the science was settled and that global warming (soon to be climate change and now climate crisis/catastrophe) was an existential apocalyptic threat. The alarmists were loath to admit that, according to their own (apocalyptic) models, the proposed emissions would avert essentially no detectable global warming or that the emissions reductions would significantly raise energy prices. Kyoto’s global reductions would have averted less than 14 hundredths of a degree Centigrade over the next 100 years; Maine’s proposed reductions would do even less by at least three orders of magnitude. Since the science was “settled,” they could hardly argue that it would be impossible or too costly to estimate the amount of global warming averting, something the fiscal note to the bill (minor cost increase) recognized.

The hearings on LD 72 were quite the show. Maine’s business community and national advocates for free markets and capitalism strongly backed the bill. The environmental left howled that it was a right-wing/Koch brothers effort to destroy the planet. The Baldacci administration did not know what to do. For a brief moment, I wondered whether we might be on the verge of a bi-partisan environmental legislation breakthrough that could set the stage for an honest and effective climate change policy in the years to come. It was not to be.

The environmental left and legislative Democrats substituted and passed a completely amended bill with a very different title, charging the DEP to report bi-annually on how cost-effective their emission reduction efforts were, with no mention of how much global warming had been averted and at what cost. To this day, I don’t believe any such report has been made, and the climate alarmists report only how many metric tons of carbon “pollution” emissions have been averted, never how much climate change (none) or at what cost (substantial). 

Here is the amended title and bill summary:

“An Act To Review Climate Change Policy Effectiveness”: This amendment is the majority report. The amendment replaces the bill and changes its title. It directs the Department of Environmental Protection to include in its biennial climate change evaluation a review of the cost-effectiveness of the actions taken toward meeting the greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. It also requires the department to submit a report of its evaluation to the joint standing committee of the Legislature having jurisdiction over natural resources matters, and it authorizes the committee to report out legislation relating to the evaluation to the second regular session of any Legislature.

http://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/bills/display_ps.asp?ld=72&PID=145...

The climate alarmists may well succeed in destroying capitalism, rural Maine, freedom, and prosperity, but some of us are not going to surrender without a fight.