An important argument of the opponents of climate change legislation that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions is the belief it would increase the cost of doing business, especially for agriculture.

Agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, which is a main contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. Agricultural opponets say the attempt to regulate greenhouse emissions would increase the cost of the fuel they use to run their equipment.

Nearly 60 percent of the oil used and consumed in the United States is imported from other countries.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the top five exporting countries accounted for 65 percent of United States crude oil imports in October 2009 while the top ten sources accounted for approximately 85 percent of all U.S. crude oil imports. The top five sources of US crude oil imports for October were Canada (1.858 million barrels per day), Mexico (1.015 million barrels per day), Saudi Arabia (0.938 million barrels per day), Venezuela (0.879 million barrels per day), and Nigeria (0.853 million barrels per day).

One of the U.S. major oil partners is Venezuela. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, an estimated 513 billion barrels of technically recoverable heavy oil are in Venezuela’s Orinoco Oil Belt.

This area, according to USGS, contains one of the world’s largest recoverable oil accumulations.

Worldwide consumption of petroleum was 85.4 million barrels per day in 2008. The three largest consuming countries were United States with 19.5 million barrels per day, China with 7.9 million barrels per day, and Japan with 4.8 million barrels per day.

“Knowing the potential for extractable resources from this tremendous oil accumulation, and others like it, is critical to our understanding of the global petroleum potential and informing policy and decision makers,” said USGS Energy Resources Program Coordinator Brenda Pierce. “Accumulations like this one were previously very difficult to produce, but advances in technology and new understandings in geology allow us to assess how much is now technically recoverable.”

“Heavy oil is a type of oil that is very thick and therefore does not flow very easily,” said USGS scientist Christopher Schenk. “As a result, specialized production and refining processes are needed to generate petroleum products, but it is still oil and can generate many of the same products as other types of oil.”

This is the largest accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. The estimated petroleum resources in the Orinoco Oil Belt range from 380 to 652 billion barrels of oil (at a 95 and 5 percent chance of occurrence, respectively). The Orinoco Oil Belt is located in the East Venezuela Basin Province.

Sen. Chris Langemeier, chairman of the Nebraska Legislature’s Natural Resources Committee, has introducede LB 1048, a bill on wind energy.

According to Langemeier, the bill, signed by all members of the committee, is in response to LR 83, an interim study on which the committee has been working since June.

Representatives from various interests, including public power, the American Wind Energy Association, project developers, the environment, and the Power Review Board, worked together to draft language that would allow the development of wind projects for export under our current regulatory system, he said.

“It is the Natural Resources Committee’s intention to reach consensus on and advance a bill that will promote wind energy development while preserving the integrity of our public power system,” Langemeier said.

He said the Natural Resources Committee introduced the bill with the understanding that it is not a finished product as it contains provisions on which the committee and interested parties are still working.

Langemeier said that several of these provisions may be revised. To provide a forum for further discussion and revisions, Langemeier said he plans to conduct briefings that will take place before the public hearing on the bill. The briefings will be open to the public.

“I want to thank those who have participated in the wind study and who have offered their time and resources towards crafting a bill,” he said. “Our public power companies have been particularly dedicated to the study and have shown the strength of their commitment to encourage the growth of wind energy in Nebraska.”

While the U.S. is in engaged over a debate on climate change legislation, a new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years –1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest on record.

“There’s always interest in the annual temperature numbers and a given year’s ranking, but the ranking often misses the point,” said James Hansen, GISS director. “There’s substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Nino-La Nina cycle. When we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated.”

January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Looking back to 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, although there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.

In the past three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.36 degrees F (0.2 degrees C) per decade. In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 1.5 degrees F (0.8 degrees C) since 1880.

“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt. “The difference between the second and sixth warmest years is trivial because the known uncertainty in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”

The near-record global temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America. High air pressures from the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while increasing its tendency to blow from north to south. The result was an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north. This left North America cooler than normal, while the Arctic was warmer than normal.

“The contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the United States’ temperature does not affect the global temperature much,” Hansen said.

GISS uses publicly available data from three sources to conduct its temperature analysis. The sources are weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements.

Other research groups also track global temperature trends but use different analysis techniques. The Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom uses similar input measurements as GISS, for example, but it omits large areas of the Arctic and Antarctic where monitoring stations are sparse.

Although the two methods produce slightly differing results in the annual rankings, the decadal trends in the two records are essentially identical.

“There’s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular perceptions about climate trends,” Hansen said. “In the last decade, global warming has not stopped.”

Working to fight EPA overreach, Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said he is supporting a resolution of disapproval to be introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski which will act as a veto of EPA regulation of greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act.

“Controlling the levels of carbon emissions is the job of Congress. We don’t need EPA looking over Congress’ shoulder telling us we’re not moving fast enough,” Nelson said.

Nelson said he is very concerned about the impact on Nebraska if EPA moves to regulate carbon emissions.

“Many Nebraska agricultural, industrial and energy-related businesses and organizations have warned about the costs they would have to shoulder from EPA regulations,” he said. “Because EPA regulations would be a government-directed command-and-control regime, they would raise the price of energy in Nebraska, add greatly to administrative costs, and create new layers of bureaucracy. The burden would fall squarely on Nebraska families, farmers and businesses.”

Nelson said carbon emissions should be reduced, but not through costly and complicated EPA regulations or a disadvantageous cap and trade proposal in Congress.

“They should be reduced through a comprehensive energy bill that promotes efficiencies and renewable energy through innovation and new technology that will help our state’s economy as we clean up the air,” he said.

Nelson was among more than three dozen senators, including Sen. Mike Johanns, cosponsoring the Murkowski resolution. The legislation is supported by many groups in Nebraska including: Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation, Nebraska Cattlemen, Nebraska Corn Growers Association, Nebraska Dry Bean Growers Association, Nebraska Soybean Association, Nebraska Wheat Board, Nebraska Wheat Growers Association, Nebraska Public Power District, Omaha Public Power District, Nebraska Rural Electric Association, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, and MidAmerican Energy.

Nelson decision to support fighting EPA efforts under the Clean Air Act was criticized by Justin Huck, Repower Nebraska State Director.

“For decades, the Clean Air Act has been a public policy and public health success story; Senator Nelson wants to throw all of that away in favor of a misguided resolution that was written by lobbyists for some of the country’s biggest polluters,” Huck said.

Huck said that the Dirty Air Act would “roll back the clock on decades of progress reducing pollution, putting polluters in control of America’s clean energy future.”

Instead of looking for ways to delay action, Senator Nelson should commit to comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation that will create thousands of jobs for Nebraska residents, decrease pollution, and help end our dependence on foreign oil, making our nation more secure,” he said.