• Climate Change,  Global Warming

    Will California Auto FEEBATES or “FREEBATES” Be an Issue in November?

    Among other issues in Climate Change Redistributionist policies promoted by the California Democrat Legislature and RINO Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    A team of researchers from the University of California completed a comprehensive study to assess the potential design, implementation, and benefits of a feebate program in California as well as possible stakeholder responses. This interim document summarizes the study’s key findings. A forthcoming project final report will include a more detailed presentation of results, and complete documentation on modeling and analysis tools, study methods, and limitations.

    Feebates are a market-based policy for reducing emissions from passenger vehicles. A one-time fee is levied on relatively high-emitting vehicles when they are sold new. These funds are used to provide rebates for lower-emitting vehicles when they are sold new. As required in the scoping plan for the state’s climate change law, AB 32, ARB undertook this comprehensive study to consider measures that could be used as alternatives or complements to direct regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new passenger vehicles.

    The research team developed manufacturer and consumer models with unprecedented level of detail, accounting for vehicle redesign schedules, differences in automakers’ individual product offerings, California-specific consumer preferences, and concurrent performance-based light-duty vehicle GHG emissions standards. More than 50 distinct scenarios were developed. The UC Davis team led the modeling effort and the UC Berkeley team conducted consumer focus groups and a statewide survey.

    Read the entire research report here (Pdf file).

    Here is the original poop on the Feebates Research contract.

    AB 32 specifically states that if the Pavley regulations do not remainin effect, ARB shall implement alternative regulations to control mobile sources to achieve equivalent or greater reductions of
    greenhouse gas emissions (HSC §38590). ARB is currently evaluating the use of a feebate program as the mechanism to secure these reductions, should that be necessary. A feebate regulation would combine a rebate program for low-emitting new vehicles with a fee program for high-emitting new vehicles. This program would be designed in a way to generate equivalent or greater cumulative reductions of greenhouse gas emissions compared to what would have been achieved under the Pavley regulations.


    As described in the 
    Scoping Plan (VolumeI, p. C-61), ARB is commissioning a study to analyze the benefits from the implementation of a feebate program for new vehicles in California, both in place of
    and in addition to the Pavley standards.  The study will assess elements of program design including fee and rebate levels, point of regulation, implementation strategy, consumer response, and interaction with other AB 32 programs. 

    Based on standard research contract processes, ARB issued a research solicitation to University of California and California State University researchers for pre-proposals to analyze the potential
    design and benefits of a feebate program for California.  Through this solicitation process, the team from the Institute of Transportation at University of California, Davis, led by Dr. David
    Greene and Prof. David Bunch, in collaboration with researchers from University of California, Berkeley and Irvine campuses was selected todevelop a full proposal for funding. 

    The full proposal was reviewed by the Research Screening Committee (RSC) at their November 2008 meeting and approved by the Board in December 2008.  Work on the contract began in January
    2009.  The research team released an Interim Statement of Findings with preliminary study highlights in May 2010.  A final report with complete documentation of methodology and results will be
    delivered to ARB later in 2010 for formal review by the RSC.

    Now, this stuff is scary. California Big Government spends countless funds trying to manipulate the free market again – in other words increase taxes to further an ideological goal – climate change.

    And, American automakers are not sitting still.

    From the press release:

    Automakers responded to California’s proposed car “feebate” tax today by saying this is not the time for another government program that will put consumers further in debt or drive up thegovernment deficit.  The program of feebate taxes being considered by California has proved to be costly to consumers in both Canada and France.

    “Since automakers are investing heavily in more fuel-efficient autos, we want to put more of them on the road….to improve the environment, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to strengthen our bottom line.  But a feebate tax is not the way to do it,” said Dave McCurdy, president & CEO, Alliance.  “Experience in France and Canada shows that feebate taxes raise costs to consumer one way or another, either through an extra feepaid when buying a new car or through higher income taxes to fund the program.”

     Automaker arguments against the Climate Change Car Tax – I mean the FREEBATE.

    • Consumers understand that feebates are taxes.  Feebate proposals have been discussed since 1989 and there is a reason they are rarelyadopted:  in other countries, feebates have become just another source of revenue for the government or a reason to raise taxes.  Canada started a feebate program in 2007, and within two years, Canada ended the consumer rebates, or subsidies, but kept the consumer fees, or taxes.  In France, taxpayers are subsidizing the feebate
      program.  Rebates are exceeding fees paid, so the French program cost taxpayers 600,000 Euros in 2009 (or about $800 million).
    • There already is a nationwide program.  In April, EPA and NHTSA finalized a new multi-year national standard to reduce carbon dioxide(CO2) and fuel use through 2016.  Just last week, on May 21, automakers joined federal policymakers at the White House to launch the next phase of coordinated NHTSA and EPA regulations to address fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions through 2025.  Sincethere is a new national mileage/CO2 standard for autos, the proposed state feebate represents another layer of government regulations on top of existinggovernment regulations.
    •   The feebate will have unintended consequences.  Many consumers feel there are already too many additional costs and government fees when buying a new vehicle.  If the government imposes these fees on new cars, consumers will either hold on to their older (less efficient) cars longer, or choose to buy a used vehicle to avoid the extra tax.       
    • A feebate always ends up penalizing somebody unfairly. If the government determines who gets rebates and who pays fees by vehicle size, there is an extra tax burden on farmers, tradesmen, small business and large families who depend on these vehicles.  If the government decides who wins and who loses by picking the best and worst performers in each vehicle class, then there will be a situation where a small car will carry a fee while apickup truck generates a rebate.

    I think Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina will both pick up on this program and the potential for increasing the price of automobiles – and for what? Global Warming and Al Gore hysteria?

    The State of California has NO business messing around here. The Democrat dominated Legislature and RINO Hollywood Governor have enough problems balancing their own budgets and not messing around with the automobile markets.

  • Al Gore,  Climate Change,  Day By Day,  Global Warming

    Day By Day March 1, 2010 – Nobel Intent

    Day By Day by Chris Muir

    Al Gore and the World Climate Change or Global Warming Cabal are jokes. And, they are frauds.

    But, what are a few mistakes in the science , right?

    I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

    It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

    But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

    The Nobel Prize has been denigrated with Al Gore winning for climate fraud and President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize as he fights two wars against Islamic extremists.

    Should Al Gore give back his Nobel Prize?

    Why?

    It isn’t worth anything, anyway.

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  • Climate Change,  Day By Day,  Global Warming

    Day By Day February 3, 2010 – Hot Err

    Day By Day by Chris Muir

    Well, the MSM has been slow to publish the outright lies and the scandal surrounding man-made global warming and climate change.

    This is a tough time for climate science. The Guardian’s new revelations about the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia might help to explain the university’s utter failure to confront its critics. They could also explain why the head of the unit, Phil Jones, blocked freedom of information requests and proposed that material subject to those requests be deleted. He has been spared a criminal investigation only because the time limit for prosecutions has expired.

    The emails I read gave me the impression that Phil Jones had something to hide. Now we know what it might have been. The Guardian has discovered that Jones appears to have suppressed data that undermines a paper he published in Nature in 1990. The paper claimed that Chinese weather stations show that local heating
    caused by urbanisation has very little effect on the temperature record. It now seems that much of the data they used is worthless and the documents required to validate it do not exist. The paper might be 20 years old, but in a way that makes the scandal worse: Phil Jones has had 20 years in which to issue a correction. Even after the hacking in October last year, he has still not done so.

    And, we are all paying for the bogus climate change science.

    What we need is for some impartial, non-political agenda driven science. Is that too much to ask?

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  • Climate Change,  Day By Day,  Global Warming

    Day By Day February 2, 2010 – Virgins

    Day By Day by Chris Muir

    The entire issue of Global Warming and man-made climnate change is falling apart and why?

    The science is just not there – well, it has been falsified to satisfy a political agenda.

    Fancy that.

    You have to assume that America’s dying monodailies are now actively auditioning for state ownership. How else to explain the silence of the massed ranks of salaried “environmental correspondents” on the daily revelations emerging from the fast disintegrating “scientific consensus” on “climate change”? You get livelier coverage from the Chinese press.

    But in competitive newspaper markets they still know a story when they see one. Surely the most worrying sign for the thuggish enforcers of “settled science” is that even the eco-lefties at The Guardian and The Independent, two of the most gung-ho warm-mongers on the planet, are beginning to entertain doubts. From The Independent:

    Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung…

    However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.

    Oh, right. Very scientific. From The Guardian:

    It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist…

    Wang said: “I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more…”

    Ah, yes. The old dog-ate-my-tree-rings excuse yet again. As Andrew Bolt notes, the Warmergate scandal is actually a media scandal, too: This example actually suggests how complicit the media has been in keeping the global warming scare alive by failing to report what was actually under its nose.

    And, then, there is the latest.

    Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

    A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

    You know what they say about fooling the people – all of the time. Falsified data, indeed.

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  • Arnold Schwarzenegger,  Climate Change,  Global Warming

    Chicken Little Arnold Schwarzenegger Warns California About a San Francisco Under Water Due to Climate Change

    This tour is designed to promote awareness of the challenges we face from climate change in California, and the kind of things that we can do together to overcome those challenges

    Didn’t Arnold receive the e-mail about the faked global warming/climate change data?

    A British university said Thursday it would investigate whether scientists at its prestigious Climatic Research Unit fudged data on global warming.

    Thousands of pieces of correspondence between some of the world’s leading climate scientists were stolen from the unit at the University of East Anglia and leaked to the Internet late last month. Skeptics of man-made global warming say the e-mails are proof that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence showing that global warming was not as strong as generally believed.

    California is bankrupt and Arnold has yet to balance a budget yet he parades around the state touting this nonsense. Too bad Californians cannot TOTALLY RECALL this idiot Governor.

    Gad, Ahnold cannot leave office soon enough.


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  • Climate Change,  Day By Day,  Global Warming

    Day By Day December 1, 2009 – The Hot Gates



    Day By Day by Chris Muir

    Chris, one thing about the scientific method is that there is free and open disclosure of data, peer review and repeatability.

    Didn’t anyone suspect the manipulation of global warming data for a political agenda – a long time ago? Maybe when Al Gore received a Nobel Prize for a movie?

    How about when climate change skeptics were branded with Saul Alinsky type ridicule?

    It is time for MORE science and less politics.

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