Ken Green’s post on California’s global-warming policy commented on the sad state of California’s economy under the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (Assembly Bill 32, or AB 32) . This raises the question: What is California climatically achieving for its sacrifice?

The answer? Even an immediate and complete cessation of all greenhouse gas emissions from California now and forever would result in no meaningful impact on the future course of climate change.…

It’s easy to bash coal. There’s no romance in the black rocks that provide about half of the electricity in the United States and about 28.6 percent of the world’s total primary energy. And that bashing has become easier still in recent weeks. A few days before Christmas, at a power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge holding pond failed, spilling coal ash contaminated with a variety of heavy metals including arsenic, lead, barium, chromium and manganese over several hundred acres.[1] On December 29, James Hansen, the high-profile NASA scientist who is closely aligned with former vice president Al Gore on the issue of global warming, sent an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, in which he called coal-fired power plants “factories of death.”…

I was invited to comment yesterday over at The New York Times on President Obama’s memorandum to the EPA to reconsider its earlier denial of a waiver requested by the state of California—a waiver that would allow that state to impose its own fuel efficiency standards for passenger vehicles and light trucks.  The simple point I wanted to make at the Times is that allowing this waiver to go through would largely allow that state to dictate fuel efficiency standards for the nation as a whole.  I argued that this is probably a bad thing. State action that imposes significant policy changes on the nation as a whole ought to be enjoined and those decisions ought to be left to Congress.

For those of you interested—and who have a strong stomach— read the comments on the board that follows. …

Robert Bryce is one of the leading journalists on energy issues.  He is Managing Editor of Energy Tribune, and in a recent article gave a mea culpa on oil speculators:

Back in June, I wrote a piece for The American in which I argued that oil prices were being driven higher by the immutable law of supply and demand. Today, with prices plunging to near $40 instead of the $145 level seen in mid-July, it’s abundantly obvious that speculators were a key driver, probably the main driver, of the surge in oil prices that occurred between late 2007 and July.

So, to be clear, I was wrong. The leaders of OPEC were right. So, too, was my pal, Ed Wallace. In May, Wallace, a savvy journalist from Fort Worth who writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Business Week, published several articles [in] which he showed how the unregulated futures market was being used by speculators to push prices upward.