E2-Wire

EPA on Monday affirmed a decision to delay imposing greenhouse gas emission restrictions on stationary sources like power plants and manufacturing facilities until next year.

“This is a common sense plan for phasing in the protections of the Clean Air Act. It gives large facilities the time they need to innovate, governments the time to prepare to cut greenhouse gases and it ensures that we don’t push this problem off to our children and grandchildren,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a news release.

The rule relates to when permit requirements to build or expand a large facility will include greenhouse gas emissions standards. In the Monday announcement, EPA said permits will not include greenhouse gases until a final nationwide rule takes effect in January 2011.

An EPA fact sheet and the final notice can be seen here.

The U.S. EPA on Monday announced steps to gather environmental information on a widely used plastics additive called bisphenol A, or BPA, that may cause developmental problems in children and present other human and ecological risks.

The agency released an “action plan” for BPA that includes reviews that could lead to new restrictions on the chemical.

The agency said it plans to begin a rulemaking under the Toxic Substances Control Act that addresses whether BPA presents an unreasonable risk to aquatic species.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is expressing "deep disappointment" with climate legislation Sen. John Kerry and two colleagues are crafting.

Leaders of a contrarian environmental think tank, The Breakthrough Institute, have a way to get beyond the climate science wars: Break the link between global warming research and the push for low-carbon energy.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, in a new essay in Yale Environment 360, argue that environmentalists are too eager to link natural disasters and dangerous weather to man-made climate change.

They say this is a losing hand that has been made even weaker by the furor over the now-infamous hacked climate science emails, and controversy surrounding the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Financial Times takes the latest look at the U.S. natural gas boom and the debate over hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

Fracking is the drilling method that’s enabling production of huge shale gas supplies -- but with questions about the effects on water quality and human health in tow.

The FT piece notes that the gas industry is touting recent comments by Energy Secretary Steven Chu about the climate benefits of the fuel.

Harvard economist Robert Stavins posted a short and provocative essay on his blog Sunday about cap-and-trade’s spectacular fall from rhetorical grace.

(I say rhetorical because, as he points out, some form of cap-and-trade remains part of all the major Capitol Hill climate change bills. What's dead, at least for now, is the "economy-wide" cap-and-trade idea the House appoved last year.)

Stavins notes that the recession and the Wall Street crisis – which battered the reputation of trading markets – had something to do with cap-and-trade becoming politically toxic.

But then, the heart of his argument (and the italics are his):

Such a move would bypass the broad energy and climate plan that Sens. Kerry, Graham Joe Lieberman plan to unveil.

Sarah Palin used her Saturday speech in Nevada before Tea Party activists to call for wider domestic oil drilling and nuclear power development, alleging the White House and Congress are risking U.S. security by allowing continued reliance on foreign energy.

Palin bemoaned the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on oil imports – including payments to “regimes that do not like America” – and cited the risk of al-Qaeda attacks on Middle East oil fields.

“Just think what that would do to our economy as we become more beholden to these volatile, dangerous regimes because Congress and those in the White House choose to not allow us to develop our own God-given resources in the United States of America,” Palin told a conservative rally in Searchlight, Nev., the hometown of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D).

White House officials, when boasting about their work on climate change and energy, like to say the big 2009 stimulus law was a big step forward.

They’re right, insofar as it represented a massive jump in federal spending on climate change programs. A new Congressional Budget Office report tallies the extent of the increase.

“From 1998 through 2009, appropriations for agencies’ work related to climate change totaled about $99 billion (in 2009 dollars); more than a third of that sum – $35.7 billion by CBO’s estimation – was provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” states a post on CBO’s blog about the new study.

Senators writing climate and energy legislation are vigorously courting business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.