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President Obama is trying hard to ignore and obfuscate serious inconvenient realities about his multi-billion-dollar renewable energy schemes, how little energy they provide, and the enormous human and environmental impacts they inflict. Mr. Obama’s real goal, of course, is to “fundamentally transform” and downsize the US and global economies. He is determined to impose this agenda, despite its already limited support and how much lower that support would be if more people understood the costs and consequences.
Thank you for posting my article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues - to help make more people aware of what is happening ...and what it means for jobs, human welfare and environmental quality.
Best regards,
Paul
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Obama’s deceitful, unsustainable energy decrees
Wind and solar reap taxpayer loot, while hydrocarbon energy, industries and jobs get pummeled
Paul Driessen
“That’s not the American way. That’s not progress. That’s not innovation. That’s rent-seeking and trying to protect old ways of doing business, and standing in the way of the future.”
That wasn’t the Wall Street Journal lambasting the mandate - and subsidy-dependent renewable energy consortium. It was President Obama demonizing critics of his plans to replace carbon-based energy with wind, solar and biofuels, stymie the hydraulic fracturing revolution that’s given the United States another century of oil and gas - and “fundamentally transform” and downsize the US and global economies.
The president thinks this legacy will offset the Iran, Iraq, Islamic State and other policy debacles he will bequeath to his successors. His presidential library exhibits won’t likely mention those foreign policy fiascoes or the ways his energy policies mostly benefit the richest 1% of Americans, especially political cronies and campaign contributors while crippling the economy and pummeling millions of families and businesses that depend on reliable, affordable oil, gas and coal energy for their income and welfare.
Mr. Obama and his regulators have already imposed enormous financial, labor, ozone, water, climate, power generation and other burdens on our economy - mostly with trifling benefits that exist only in computer models, White House press releases, and rosy reports from advocacy groups that receive billions of dollars from his Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and other agencies. On August 24, he announced another billion-dollar program to force America to produce 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030: mostly wind and solar, plus a little more geothermal and biomass.
Those sources now provide less than 8% of all electricity, so this is a monumental increase. If the president wants to take credit for any alleged benefits, he must also accept blame for the abysmal failures.
One of the biggest is Solyndra, the solar company that got $535 million in taxpayer-guaranteed loans just before it went belly-up. A four-year investigation found that Solyndra falsified its financials, sales outlook and other business dealings and omitted material facts. However, the Department of Energy failed in its due diligence obligations and apparently buckled under White House pressure to approve the financing.
Par for the course, though, the Justice Department will not seek criminal indictments of any Solyndra officials, nor penalize any DOE apparatchiks for their willing incompetence. After all, a principal investor in the company (George Kaiser) was a major donor to Obama campaigns.
Of course, dozens of other companies also dined at the federal trough, before going under and costing us taxpayers many billions of dollars. But the administration wants more money and mandates - and more rules that destroy conventional energy competitors - to drive his climate and “transformation” agendas.
Meanwhile, he ignores the one truly and steadily innovative business that has generated real energy, jobs, wealth and tax revenues during his presidency - and largely kept the tepid Obama economy afloat: fracking. In fact, his bureaucrats are working to ban the technology on federal lands and regulate it into a marginal role elsewhere, even as the industry reduces its water use, keeps gasoline prices low, finds ways to produce oil at $45 per barrel, and proves its practices do not contaminate drinking water.
The president also ignores inconvenient facts about his “clean, eco-friendly” renewable energy utopia. For example, wind and solar facilities require vast land acreage and are increasingly moving into sensitive wildlife habitats, threatening protected and endangered birds, bats and other species.
The proposed 550-mile Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline from West Virginia shale gas fields across Virginia to southern North Carolina would impact about 4,600 acres (12% of the District of Columbia), and nearly all that land would be restored to croplands or grassy habitats as soon as the pipe is laid. The fuel is destined mostly for existing gas-fired electrical generating units on a few hundred total acres. If all that gas were used to generate electricity, it would produce 190,500 megawatt-hours of electricity per day.
In stark contrast, generating the same electricity with wind would require 46,000 400-foot turbines on some 475,000 acres of land plus thousands of acres of towering transmission lines to urban centers hundreds of miles away. They would be permanent and highly visible eyesores and wildlife killers, crossing deforested mountain ridges and scenic areas, and generating electricity maybe 20% of the time. Building them would require millions of tons of concrete, iron, copper, rare earth metals from China’s ruined Baotou region, and petroleum for the monstrous bird and bat chopping turbine blades.
Energy analyst Robert Bryce says meeting the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan emission goals would require blanketing 34 million acres (an area larger than New York State) with wind turbines.
A 2013 study estimates that US wind turbines already kill some 573,000 birds a year - 83,000 of them bald and golden eagles and other raptors. Far better data from Europe, however, suggests that the annual US death toll is closer to 13 million birds and bats. And our wildlife agencies exempt wind companies from endangered species and other environmental laws. More turbines will multiply the carnage.
Moreover, we would still need the gas-fired units, operating inefficiently on standby spinning reserve status and going to full power dozens of times daily, whenever the wind stops blowing. Ditto for solar.
Using solar panels to generate 190,500 MWH per day would require 1.7 million acres of land - akin to blanketing Delaware and Rhode Island with habitat-destroying panels - plus long transmission lines and gas-fired units. Los Angeles recently refused to buy power from a much smaller 2,557-acre solar project proposed for the Mojave Desert, because of impacts on desert tortoises and bighorn sheep.
President Obama never mentions any of this - or the fact that greater natural gas use is reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which he claims have replaced the sun and other powerful natural forces in driving climate change. This April, US CO2 emissions fell to their lowest level for any month in 27 years. But now that he’s sent coal marching toward history’s ash heap, natural gas is next on his target list.
To top it off, all the billions of dollars, crony corporatism, campaign cash for helpful politicians, feed-in tariffs and Renewable Fuel Standards (mandates and diktats) - and all the habitat and wildlife impacts - will raise the wind, solar, geothermal and biomass share of the nation’s energy mix from 8% today to only 10% in 2040, to supply our growing population, Energy Information Administration analysts project.
Since 2006, US households received over $18 billion just in federal income tax credits for weatherizing homes, installing solar panels, buying hybrid and electric vehicles, and other “clean energy” investments. But the bottom 60% of families received only 10% of this loot; the top 10% got 60% of the total and 90% of the subsidies and tax credits for ultra-expensive electric vehicles, like the $132,000 Tesla Model S. Worse, that $18 billion could have drilled wells to provide safe drinking water for five billion people!
The United States depends on energy-rich fossil fuels, plus nuclear and hydroelectric power - not pie-in-the-sky ideas or smoke-and-mirrors solutions to imaginary climate catastrophes. So does the rest of the world. We cannot afford pseudo-environmental ideologies, climate fabrications and dictatorial decrees.
Germany’s Energiewende (mandated energy transformation) program also seeks to replace coal and nuclear energy with wind, solar and biofuels. It has made German electricity prices (including $31.5 billion in hidden annual subsidies) nearly ten times higher than in US states that still rely on coal for power generation. The program has already killed countless jobs and threatens to send still more energy-intensive companies overseas - to countries that justifiably refuse to slash their hydrocarbon use, CO2 emissions or economic growth in the name of controlling Earth’s eternally changing climate.
Every winter, German, British and other European policies literally kill thousands of poor and elderly people who can no longer afford to heat their homes properly. Where is that vaunted liberal compassion?
Why would the United States want to proceed lemming-like down a similarly delusional energy pathway to economic ruin and the needless deaths of birds, bats and our most vulnerable citizens? Other than reelecting Mr. Obama, what did we do to deserve this? And how can we undo the damage?
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.
NOAA RELEASE: The July 2015 average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.46F (0.861C) above the 20th century average. As July is climatologically the warmest month for the year, this was also the all-time highest monthly temperature in the 1880 to 2015 record, at 61.86F (16.61C), surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by 0.14F (0.08C).
“It just reaffirms what we already know: that the Earth is warming,”said NOAA climate scientist Jake Crouch. “The warming is accelerating and we’re really seeing it this year.”
SORRY JEFF, YOU HAVE BEEN DRINKING TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT KOOL-AID (WARM-AID?).
NASA reported a global anomaly of 0.72C (1.29F), also the highest in their entire record (base period for comparison 1951-1990).
Enlarged
Sure looks conclusive. But global data bases are seriously flawed and easily manipulated and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends.
Numerous versions of the global data have been issued in the past 25 years. Each one produced more and more of an apparent warming, accomplished by cooling the past and allowing urban heat island to run rampant in recent decades. See this NASA change graph DIFFERENCE from the latest version in 2015 from the version in 2008. You can see it has increased the apparent warming from the 1930s to the present by about 0.3C (0.5F).
The net effects of the adjustments made since May 2008 are to generate a more smoothly increasing global temperature since 1880. In fact most all of the claimed warming is in the adjustments to the data.
This is before NCDC adds the adjustments to get the results demanded for. Predictably, NOAA and NASA adjusted their July temperatures as they did in June and May and in 2014 just enough to be able to make the claims warmest ever, all leading up to the UN treaty in Paris later this year.
Meteorologists and in fact NOAA itself in their models ignores this ‘adjusted data’. NOAA uses many raw data inputs to construct a high-resolution global analysis four times a day that is used to initialize the all the models (including their climate models) used by forecasters in government and industry. Weatherbell’s Dr. Ryan Maue compiled the four times a day data going back to 1981 and computes in real-time our own monthly global picture. You will notice with a base period of 1981-2010, the anomaly globally is not even close to NOAA’s 0.81C nor NASA’s 0.72C but just 0.155C. Some of the difference has to do with the base period used for the averages to compute anomalies but most of it is in the adjustments and blending techniques and how they infill for large data gaps or widespread missing surface station data.
Notice the very cold Southern Hemisphere high latitude oceans/ Antarctic, ignored by NOAA though included by NASA.
The temperatures in this reanalysis data shows no warming for over 10 years and the +0.155C anomaly is in the middle of the pack of Julys for the last decade, not the warmest ever. It ranked 10th warmest in the last 20 years.
SATELLITE DATA
Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments, which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The intensity of the signals these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies is directly proportional to the atmospheric temperatures.
The advantage of the satellites is they provide complete global coverage, and are not biased by local heat sources like most weather instruments in cities or airports.
There are two satellite remote sensing groups the NASA UAH site in Huntsville, Alabama and Remote Sensing Systems, a scientific research company located in California, specializing in satellite microwave remote sensing of the Earth.
Both satellite sources showed there has been no warming trend for over 18.5 years. Both showed July and recent months were not even close to being warmest even in just the last 20 years.
Dr. John Christy, Alabama Climatologist and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the UAH said “According to microwave data from satellites going back to 1978, which are precise to within .08 of a degree, “very little warming is taking place.”
UAH assessed lower troposphere temperatures have not warmed for over 18 years. The data showed global temperatures for July 2015 were the 9th warmest in the last 20 years.
July 2015 in the RSS data set just edged out 2003 for 8th place, but it was 0.32 C (0.58F) colder than 1998.
So three much more reliable sources suggest that July 2015 was not remarkable or special from a temperature standpoint
That is not to say that given the strong El Nino underway, we won’t see a spike up as we did in the satellite data in 1998 and 2010, but with a long strong La Nina likely to follow (like we saw in 1998-2000 and 2010/11), global temperatures will dive again and the pause is likely to give way to a slide starting in late 2016. How long NOAA or NASA waits before they let you see it in their data is the question.
The problem is that the same staff at NOAA and NASA responsible for running some of the greenhouse models and writing the reports that project the scary scenarios are also responsible for the data bases that validate the forecasts. The actual data should be constructed independently of the forecasts with people who do not have a financial and personal interest in seeing their forecasts verify.
Indeed we see in the independent data sets like the satellite and balloon based ones, widespread model failures. The failure of temperatures to warm invalidates all the other scary scenarios they claim we will or are already experiencing.
Enlarged
There is a lot of flexibility available for modelers to predict a desired result and data source inconsistencies to allow NOAA to be creative with a hybrid of data and models to show whatever the puppet masters in government require. It may be that some really believe in their science and work hard to mine the data, achieving a form of bias confirmation. In other cases it is ideologically or politically driven or simply a matter of job security
A look at all the data suggests that man made global warming is real but the men are in Asheville (NOAA NCDC) and New York CIty (NASA GISS).
We see below, the NASA plot that the politicians, greens, the media and the trolls on the internet love to use to claim the earth is burning and man is responsible.
However, as Lindzen has shown many times, put it on a reasonable scale, it looks very different. What scale would be reasonable?
Well the temperature range during the day at 45N averages 9 to 15C (16 to 27F) depending on the season. The difference from coldest month to warmest month is 30C (54F).
If we choose just the smallest number 9C for the average daily range, even the bogus exaggerated change clearly does not look worrisome.
The average temperature in a room from the sunny end to the darker corner can vary 10F (over 5C). There used to be so much temperature variance in the workplace I spent 25+ years, we had a perceptible breeze blow. Most of the so called warming was shown by NCDC to be at night and not surprisingly in urban areas. This is UHI not AGW.
See NCDC’s Menne graph of USHCN temperature maxima that show the cyclical ocean/solar driven 60 year cycle but no AGW.
Even if NOAA/NASA’s contaminated temperatures were right, they would be undetectable and not mandate we give up the our reliable energy sources for not ready for prime time renewables. This unwise policy would drive up energy prices as we saw destroy economies in Europe. Certainly we should scream aloud to Washington and to our states and cities and towns they don’t need to spend trillions of dollars to address a phoney issue.
By Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng.
In 2002 the PEGG, the journal of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) solicited the following debate on the now-defunct Kyoto Accord (Kyoto Protocol), between Dr. Matthew Bramley and Matt McCullough, P.Eng. of the Pembina Institute, who supported the Kyoto Accord and relied upon the IPCC’s position, and Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Harvard Astrophysicist, Dr. Tim Patterson, Carleton Paleoclimatologist, and Allan MacRae, P.Eng., who opposed Kyoto based on scientific statements in their PEGG article and rebuttal. Link
Now, after 13 years, it is instructive to look back at the two positions and determine how they have fared.
One’s predictive track record is perhaps the only objective measure of one’s competence. The IPCC has a negative predictive track record, because ALL of its scary projections have failed to materialize. The IPCC thus has NO credibility, actually it has NEGATIVE credibility. Probabilistically; based the IPCC’s negative predictive track record, one would more correct if one assumed the opposite of the IPCC’s scary projections.
All the IPCC’s scary projections of catastrophic humanmade global warming, wilder weather, and climate change have failed to materialize, despite significant increases in atmospheric CO2, the purported driver of this falsely-predicted “weather weirding”. According to the best data from satellites, global temperatures measured in the Lower Troposphere (LT) have not increased significantly in about 18 years. Hurricane frequency and intensity are at record low levels. The climate has been remarkably stable despite substantial increases in atmospheric CO2.
The IPCC’s sycophants responded by falsifying the Surface Temperature (ST) record to overstate global warming:
See.
In 2008 I calculated the “Warming Bias Rate{ [for 1979 to end-2007] = (Hadcrut3 ST - UAH LT anomalies) / time = 0.2C/2.8 decades or about 0.07C/decade. That was the apparent Warming Bias Rate in the ST versus the LT.
In 2015 the Warming Bias Rate [for 1979 to mid-2015] = (Hadcrut4 ST - UAH LT anomalies) / time = [0.685 -0.204]/3.5 decades = about 0.14/decade.
THIS IS TWICE THE WARMING BIAS RATE OF JUST ~6 YEARS AGO - AN UNBELIEVABLE INCREASE!
It is extremely improbable that the total (since 1979) difference in the (ST minus LT) temperature anomalies diverged this much in just 6 years. It is much more probable that the ST data was falsified to overstate global warming.
Pembina in its 2002 Rebuttal quoted the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers as follows:
“In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations…
The globally averaged surface temperature is projected [in business-as-usual scenarios] to increase by 1.4 to 5.8C over the period 1990 to 2100.”
In reality, the only quality data - from satellites - shows NO significant global warming for the past 18 years!
Pembina further stated:
“The IPCC, however, finds good agreement between model simulations and observed temperature over the past 140 years, including the temperature increase up to 1940, if the simulations include solar variation and volcanic activity along with emissions of GHGs and particulates.”
In reality, the models quoted by the IPCC have grossly over-predicted the amount of future global warming. These models were utterly corrupted by fabricated aerosol data that was used to justify an incredibly high climate sensitivity to CO2 (ECS). The fabricated aerosol data was used to force the models to hindcast the global cooling that occurred circa 1940 to 1975. This false aerosol data was literally created “out of thin air” and is contradicted by actual data. See Dr. Douglas V. Hoyt’s comments here.
The IPCC and its sycophants have fabricated a false scenario of catastrophic humanmade global warming and wilder weather that has NO credibility and is contradicted by two decades of data. There is evidence of the falsification of climate model inputs and surface temperature data to overstate claims of global warming. .
In comparison, let us review the eight predictions we made on our 2002 Rebuttal [my comments in brackets]:
Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped.
Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming - the alleged warming crisis does not exist. [NO net global warming has occurred for about 18 years.}
Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil. [Note pollution in China and former Soviet Union.]
Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity. [Since the start of global warming hysteria, about 50 million children below the age of five have died from contaminated water.]
Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy - the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt. [Canada adopted Kyoto but then most provinces wisely ignored it - the exception being now-depressed Ontario, where government drank the Kool-Aid.]
Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment - it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution. {Note the air in China.]
Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits.
[We shamed our government into not paying the FSU, but other governments did so, to bribe them to sign Kyoto.]
Kyoto will be ineffective - even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming. [IF one believed the utterly false climate models, one would probably conclude that we must cease fossil fuel consumption.].
The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply - the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels. [Those governments who adopted “green energy” schemes such as wind and solar power are finding these schemes are not green and produce little useful energy. Their energy costs are soaring and those governments are in retreat, dropping their green energy subsidies as they try to save face.]
In summary, all our predictions have proven correct in those venues that fully embraced the now-defunct Kyoto Accord, whereas none of the IPCC’s scary projections have materialized.
So what happens next? Will we see catastrophic humanmade global warming? No, our planet will cool.[excerpts]
I (we) predicted the commencement of global cooling by 2020-2030 in an article published in the Calgary Herald in 2002. That prediction is gaining credibility as solar activity [in current SC24] has crashed… It is still early in the prediction game, but SC25 is also projected to be very weak, so we will probably experience two consecutive very-weak Solar Cycles in SC24 and SC25… IF the Sun does indeed drive temperature, as I suspect, then successive governments in Britain and continental Europe have brewed the perfect storm. They have crippled their energy systems with excessive reliance on ineffective grid-connected wind power schemes. I suggest that global cooling probably WILL happen within the next decade or sooner, and Europe [and the world] will get colder, possibly much colder. I suggest that Winter deaths will increase in the Europe as cooling progresses. I suggest that Excess Winter Mortality rates will provide an estimate of this unfolding tragedy.
Timing is difficult to estimate, but I now expect global cooling to be evident by 2020 or sooner.
Fear-mongering, pollution standards and negligence rules don’t apply when EPA is at fault
Paul Driessen
On August 5, an Environmental Restoration company crew, supervised by US Environmental Protection Agency officials, used an excavator to dig away tons of rock and debris that were blocking the entrance portal of Colorado’s Gold King Mine, which had been largely abandoned since 1923. Water had been seeping into the mine and out of its portal for decades, and the officials knew (or could and should have known) the water was acidic (pH 4.0-4.5), backed up far into the mine, and laced with heavy metals.
But they kept digging until the greatly weakened dam burst open, unleashing a 3-million-gallon (or more) toxic flood that soon contaminated the Animas and San Juan Rivers, all the way to Lake Powell in Utah. To compound the disaster, EPA then waited an entire day before notifying downstream mayors, health officials, families, farmers, ranchers, fishermen and kayakers that the water they were drinking, using for crops and livestock, or paddling in was contaminated by lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.
Three million gallons of turmeric-orange poisonous water and sludge is enough to fill a pool the size of a football field (360x160 feet) seven feet deep. Backed up hundreds of feet above the portal into mine adits, stopes, rooms and other passageways that begin at 11,458 feet above sea level, the flash-flooding water had enough power to rip out a road and propel its toxic muck hundreds of miles downstream. (You can review EPA’s incompetence and gross negligence in these project photos* and post-disaster images.)
Anyone who follows mining, oil spill and power plant accidents knows the EPA, Obama White House and Big Green environmentalist rhetoric: There is no safe threshold for chemicals. They are toxic and carcinogenic at parts per billion. The water will be unsafe for years or even decades. Wildlife will die. Corporate polluters are criminals and must pay huge fines. We will keep our boots on their necks.
This time the White House was silent, and Democrats and eco-activists rushed to defend EPA and shift the blame to mining and mining companies. EPA officials made statements they would never use if a private company had caused the blowout: EPA had simply “miscalculated” how much water had backed up. It was just trying to stick a pipe into the top of the mine to safely pump liquid out for treatment. We were “very careful.” Contaminants “are flowing too fast to be an immediate health threat.” The river is already “restoring itself” back to pre-spill levels, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy insisted.
The evidence strongly suggests that EPA never studied or calculated anything, had no operations plan vetted and approved by state officials or mining experts, was not trying to install a pipe and was grossly careless and negligent. Toxic sludge was carried and deposited along hundreds of miles, contaminating water and riverbeds, where it will be stirred up for years during every heavy rainfall and snowmelt.
Mining engineers told me the prudent approach would have been to push or drill a 4-inch pipe through the rubble into the mine, to determine the water pressure, toxicity and extent of water backup in the mine and then build a strong cofferdam below the portal before proceeding. Simply removing the debris was stupid, dangerous and negligent, they said. It will take years now to correct the damage and assess costs.
A week after the great flood, EPA finally built a series of retention ponds to contain and filter out heavy metals and chemicals. But the August 5 surge and sludge are still contaminating Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico rivers, in arid regions where water is scarce and precious. The Navajo Tribal Unity Authority says meeting EPA standards for clean drinking water could double the tribe’s costs for building a new treatment plant and cost millions more in testing and operating expenses.
EPA says it will pay for testing, property damage, human injuries and hauling safe drinking water. But will it pay to truck in safe water for livestock and irrigation, and pay for crops and livestock lost because there is no water in the meantime, and cover millions in lost incomes for outfitters and hotel operators during what would have been their peak tourist seasons? Exxon paid such costs after the Valdez spill in Alaska; BP did likewise after its Macondo spill in the Gulf of Mexico; so have coal companies.
Shouldn’t EPA do likewise, instead of asserting “sovereign immunity” despite its gross negligence? Shouldn’t it cover these costs out of the millions of dollars it uses for employee bonuses and to pay environmental activists and public relations firms to promote its image and agenda instead of sticking taxpayers with the tab via special appropriations? Will EPA reimburse state and local governments and private charities for assistance they have already rendered? Will it fire the irresponsible officials, or at least demote and discipline them? Will Environmental Restoration pay its fair share?
Under standards that EPA and environmentalists apply to the private sector, Gold King was a disaster. However, the accident could also be an impetus for reflection and responsible regulatory reform.
Anti-mining pressure groups and factions within EPA will use this accident to press for new layers of mining rules, bonds, payments and liabilities. They are unnecessary and will only restrict the jobs, expertise and revenues needed to ensure that exploration, mining, reclamation and repair of abandoned (orphan) mines are done properly. Modern mining, processing and pollution prevention methods are vastly superior to those employed even 50 years ago, and do not cause the exaggerated impacts alleged by Earthwatch and others. Moreover, the metals and minerals are essential for the wondrous technologies and living standards, the health, housing, transportation and recreational pursuits, that we enjoy today.
The Gold King blowout was predictable and preventable. The mine was leaking slightly polluted water, but the problem was not serious and was being addressed, and the former mining town of Silverton, CO had repeatedly asked EPA not to intervene or make Gold King a Superfund site. Mining engineers and other experts were available, and some had offered their insights and expertise. EPA ignored them.
EPA - and all government agencies - should end their We-know-best and We-know-what-we’re-doing attitudes… and seek outside advice from real experts in the trenches. They should also develop careful operating plans, assess worst-case scenarios, and take steps to ensure that the worst doesn’t happen. Sometimes they just need to do nothing, get out of the way, and let the private sector handle problems.
But they should support Clean Water Act and other revisions to make it easier, less costly and less fraught with potential liability for companies or coalitions of dedicated parties to fix pollution discharge problems at the relatively few abandoned mines that are leaking contaminated water at worrisome levels.
EPA’s new view that these pollutants are not as toxic as previously claimed and that nature can and does clean things up is refreshing, even if self-serving. (My use of “toxic” in this article mostly reflects currently prevailing agency, activist and public health industry attitudes and safety standards.)
Standards for maximum contaminant levels and maximum safe exposures are often absurdly low, and the concept of “linear no threshold"(that there is no safe exposure or blood or tissue level for lead, cadmium, arsenic and other metals) is outdated and wrong, Dr. Edward Calabrese and other experts argue.
Pollution, exposure and blood levels are often safe at significantly higher levels than regulations currently allow. Moreover, low levels of exposure to radiation and many chemicals can actually provide protection from cancer, disease and pollutants. While this concept of hormesis is generally ignored by current regulations, we know that a little alcohol improves heart functions, whereas a lot causes multiple problems; an 80 mg aspirin can prevent strokes, but a bottleful can kill; and many vaccinations inject disease strains that cause a person’s immune system to produce antibodies and prevent the disease.
The Obama EPA is already using WOTUS rules on water and a Clean Power Plan on electricity generation and climate change to control virtually everything we make, grow and do. Congressional committees, presidential candidates, businesses and citizens need to get involved, debate these issues, ask tough questions, and work to implement appropriate reforms. Our courts and Congress must not allow another collusive sue-and-settle lawsuit - or a new regime of government controls and mine closures that would drive yet another nail into the coffin of western state and local economies ... and cleanup efforts.
Gold King presents a teachable moment. Let’s make sure we learn the correct lessons.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.
* It appears that EPA deleted its entire photo album, so that people can no longer view them. We are trying to find a citizen archive of the images and will link to it, if possible. Again we have “the most transparent administration in history” (quoting President Obama) at your service.
Update: See also Lary Bell’s “Dirty Facts Behind Obama’s Clean Power Plan”, August 10, 2015:
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By Paul Driessen
President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency just issued its deceptively named “Clean Power Plan.” Mangling and twisting 280 words in the Clean Air Act, EPA devised 1,560 pages of regulations (plus appendices and technical materials), demanding that states slash their electric utility sector carbon dioxide emissions 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. That means returning CO2 emissions almost to 1975 levels, while our population increases by 40 million.
For 30 states that currently get nearly all their electricity from coal or natural gas, these rules spell disaster. They will bankrupt families, businesses, industries, and even entire communities and states.
My article this week examines these rules, the Intolerant Left’s attacks on anyone who criticizes EPA or any part of the “progressive” agenda, and actions we must take to reverse this destructive environmentalist totalitarianism.
Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
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EPA’s punitive, fraudulent Clean Power Plan
Congress, states and our next president must end EPA harm to human health and welfare
The Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Power Plan (CPP) requires that states reduce their electric utility sector carbon dioxide emissions an average of 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. EPA twisted 80 words in the Clean Air Act into 1,560 pages of regulations (plus appendices) demanding that utilities return CO2 emissions almost to 1975 levels, while our population grows by 40 million.
Some 30 states will have to slash their power plant CO2 emissions by more than 32% and at least 12 will have to implement 40-48% reductions. That is a tall order, since all those states now get 50-96% of their electricity from coal, and all of them depend on coal plus natural gas for nearly all their electric power. Imposing that transition and a conversion to 20% or more expensive and unreliable wind and solar energy by 2030 will be disastrous. It will bankrupt families, businesses, industries, communities and even states.
Electricity rates will rise not merely to the 15-17 cents/kWh in “green energy” states like California, from the 8-9 cents per kilowatt-hour currently paid in coal-reliant states. They could skyrocket to the 36-40 cents/kWh now paid in Denmark and Germany (70-80 cents when taxpayer subsidies are included).
That will hammer everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do. It will impair our livelihoods, living standards, liberties and life spans. And these destructive rules are being imposed by callous, imperious, unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucrats who are circumventing our laws and Constitution; disregarding the clear will of Congress, which has rejected nearly 700 climate bills; and colluding regularly with radical Big Green pressure groups on sue-and-settle lawsuits and new regulatory edicts.
Under the CPP, everything business owners, workers, families and communities strived for their entire lives will be at risk. Millions of workers will lose their jobs, leaving more families destitute and welfare dependent, their sense of self-worth destroyed. Many will have to choose between buying food and gasoline, paying the rent or mortgage, going to the doctor, giving to their church, or saving for retirement.
Families will face severe sleep deprivation, greater stress and depression, and more drug and alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse, theft and robbery. Nutrition and medical care will suffer. More people will have strokes and heart attacks. More will die prematurely or commit suicide. More elderly people will perish from hypothermia, because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly.
Instead of acknowledging any of this, EPA employs a “social cost of carbon” scheme that places arbitrary inflated costs on damages it claims result from alleged climate risks from using carbon-based fuels. It includes every imaginable and imaginary cost of using fossil fuels - even absurd claims that its anti-energy plan will reduce asthma rates, which have been increasing while pollution rates are going down.
Meanwhile, the EPA and White House ignore even the most obvious benefits of using fossil fuels.
The Obama EPA keeps its questionable data and analyses secret, refusing to share them even with Congress or governors. It ignores the fact that global temperatures haven’t budged in 18 years, and no category 3-5 hurricane has hit the USA in a record 9 3/4 years - contrary to all climate alarm predictions. About the only thing EPA does admit is that slashing America’s CO2 emissions, and causing all this economic havoc, will prevent less than less than 0.03 degrees F of global warming 85 years from now.
These green dictators refuse to debate any of this. Indeed, they do not want anyone to talk about it.
The intolerant Left is “killing free speech,” says liberal commentator Kirsten Powers. It is committed to tolerance, pluralism and reasoned debate only for itself, and only to advance its agenda. Otherwise, it applies “authoritarian demands for intellectual conformity,” and relentlessly vilifies and tries to silence anyone who speaks up, asks inconvenient questions or challenges the “progressive” worldview.
“Free speech”, says George Will, “has never been… more comprehensively, aggressively and dangerously threatened than it is now. Today they are attacking the theory of free speech… the desirability of free speech ...and indeed the very possibility of free speech...”
As if on cue, the IRS targeted numerous conservative groups and the Milwaukee prosecutor and police monitored emails, invaded homes, seized computers and records, and threatened jail for anyone who disclosed these abuses, to intimidate and silence Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s supporters.
Their actions destroy our fundamental First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly, association and debate. Worse, they severely impair the unalienable rights of people to enjoy affordable, reliable energy and the quality jobs, living standards, health and welfare it brings.
“The ruling class demonizes any questioning of its demands,” says Boston University professor emeritus Angelo Codevilla. “The pretexts differ” from issue to issue,” he notes. “But the reality is the same: Bow or be persecuted… Consequently, if we wish to remain who we are in the face of threats and declamations meant to force us to honor intellectual and moral falsehoods, we have no alternative but clearly and loudly to distinguish between true and false, and fully make the case for what we believe to be right.”
We must not mince words regarding the evils that energy and climate totalitarianism inflict on families, industries, communities and nations. We must confront the deceit and deceivers, abuses and abusers - and present the hard, ugly realities of what life would be under conditions imposed by eco-extremists.
Right now, we have too many taxes and regulations, too much secrecy and fraud, too many extremists, and far too little accountability in EPA. There is too much eco-religious fervor, too little science and humanity. Poor and minority families are hurt most of all. Our governors, state and federal legislators, attorneys general, courts, next president, and citizen, industry and scientific groups need to take action.
* Refuse to comply with the CPP. Curb the excessive power and representation of environmentalists and bureaucrats in our government. End the constant collusion and the sue-and-settle lawsuits between government agencies and radical environmentalist pressure groups. Cut agency budgets, especially the billions of dollars that EPA and other agencies give to anti-energy advocacy organizations and biased advisory panels.
* Gain access to thus-far secret EPA, NOAA, IPCC and other data, computer codes, models and studies - and subject them to full review by independent experts, to determine which assertions, policies and regulations are valid, and which are based on serious error, deceptive claims or outright fraud.
* During the review process, suspend and defund implementation of regulations and programs that raise serious questions about their honesty and validity. Terminate rules and programs found to be based on fraud, junk science, doctored data, collusion or concocted evidence - and penalize or terminate agency personnel who have engaged in deceptive or fraudulent practices.
* Ensure that regulatory agencies and their advisory councils are honest and transparent; that they represent a broader spectrum of expertise, viewpoints and interests than they do now; and that they fully assess evidence for and against proposed regulations, and their true benefits and costs.
* Restore federalism and the separation of powers for Congress and state governments, and end the deference that courts too often give to agency discretion and authority for even outrageous actions and power grabs by federal agencies.
* Present true stories of workers and families whose jobs and businesses have been threatened or destroyed by EPA and other government policies, programs and diktats; how these citizens have fought back; and their victories over energy, environmental and economic totalitarianism.
These vital actions will almost certainly be opposed by President Obama, Democrats, environmentalist pressure groups, and other members of the Climate Crisis and Renewable Energy Complex. But they are absolutely essential if the United States is going to have an economic and employment revival, and poor, minority and blue-collar families are to be protected from fraud, regulatory excess and ruling elites.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.
UPDATE: On Patriot Post and Drudge today.
All This for .01 Degrees Celsius?
By Joe Bastardi, Patriot Post
As the president reveals his plan to reduce greenhouse gases to save us from an apocalyptic atmosphere, I wish to remind people of three things:
1.) The true hockey stick of the fossil fuel era: Global progress in total population, personal wealth and life expectancy.
This is truly amazing. To show how fossil fuels played a roll in expanding the global pie, there are many more people alive today living longer and enjoying a higher GDP. One has to wonder if someone against fossil fuels is simply anti-progress. Ironic since many in the camp of anthropogenic global warming like to label themselves “progressive.” They’re certainly anti-statistic given something like this staring them in the face.
2.) The geological time scale of temperatures versus CO2.
As much as I struggle, I can’t see the linkage. Maybe it’s like one of those books where you have to stare at it and cross your eyes to see the picture.
3.) EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted that the steps being taken would only prevent .01 degrees Celsius of warming, but it was the example that counted for the rest of the world.
This article sums that up pretty nicely.
This in addition to the fact that, in 2011, she admitted she did not know how much CO2 was in the atmosphere. And its lines of evidence for this are provably false!
Given the facts, I can’t help but wonder: Did policymakers ever take Economics 101, or a course in how to read a chart?
When I see simple questions that can raise doubts, if not outright debunk all this, it’s like watching the opening from the old Twilight Zone Series: “You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!”
Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm.
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UPDATE: Letter from Dr. Gordon Fulks to Yahoo and President Obama:
Hello Everyone,
Obama is about to ramp up his ‘War on Coal next week (link)
Opinion on Yahoo is running heavily against him. I added this:
Mr President:
You need to listen to independent scientists who have been telling you for a long time that the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory you promote is a scam. Fifteen of us again proved to you last year that the “Three Lines of Evidence” in your National Climate Assessment purporting to prove the government’s scientific case against carbon dioxide are FATALLY FLAWED. Just search for our ‘NCA Rebuttal’.”
There has been no unusual warming since WW2 when human CO2 emissions began slowly increasing. In fact the only (very modest) warming trend we have seen was from 1977 to 1997, twenty years out of seventy. And over the most recent two decades, there has been no trend at all, according to NASA’s satellite data. Furthermore, the Climate Models that your paid scientists use to predict catastrophe have been UNABLE to accurately forecast the global temperature over the satellite era (since 1979). Even these captive scientists admit that they are wrong by a factor of two globally and a factor of 3.5 in the tropical mid-troposphere. They know that there is no ‘Hot Spot’ as their theory predicts.
Isn’t it time to admit that you have lost the scientific battle and will eventually lose the political one? Once people realize that your ‘War on Coal’ is a war on their pocketbooks, they will demand an end to the nonsense. No one wants to pay trillions of dollars for fraud.
You cannot ignore the truth forever.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
P.S. I have NO conflicts of interest in this matter.
Here is the link to our ‘NCA Rebuttal’. Yahoo does not allow commenters to include actual links.
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The Unsettling, Anti-Science Certitude on Global Warming
Climate-change ‘deniers’ are accused of heresy by true believers. That doesn’t sound like science to me.
By John Steele Gordon, Wall Street Journal
Are there any phrases in today’s political lexicon more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers”?
The first is an oxymoron. By definition, science is never settled. It is always subject to change in the light of new evidence. The second phrase is nothing but an ad hominem attack, meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers,” those people who maintain that the Nazi Holocaust is a fiction, ignoring the overwhelming, incontestable evidence that it is a historical fact. Hillary Clinton’s speech about climate change on Monday in Des Moines, Iowa, included an attack on “deniers.”
The phrases are in no way applicable to the science of Earth’s climate. The climate is an enormously complex system, with a very large number of inputs and outputs, many of which we don’t fully understand - and some we may well not even know about yet. To note this, and to observe that there is much contradictory evidence for assertions of a coming global -warming catastrophe, isn’t to “deny” anything; it is to state a fact. In other words, the science is unsettled - to say that we have it all wrapped up is itself a form of denial. The essence of scientific inquiry is the assumption that there is always more to learn.
....
Climate science today is a veritable cornucopia of unanswered questions. Why did the warming trend between 1978 and 1998 cease, although computer climate models predict steady warming? How sensitive is the climate to increased carbon-dioxide levels? What feedback mechanisms are there that would increase or decrease that sensitivity? Why did episodes of high carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere earlier in Earth’s history have temperature levels both above and below the average?
With so many questions still unanswered, why are many climate scientists, politicians - and the left generally - so anxious to lock down the science of climatology and engage in protracted name-calling? Well, one powerful explanation for the politicians is obvious: self-interest.
If anthropogenic climate change is a reality, then that would be a huge problem only government could deal with. It would be a heaven-sent opportunity for the left to vastly increase government control over the economy and the personal lives of citizens.
Moreover, the release of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in 2009 showed climate scientists concerned with the lack of recent warming and how to “hide the decline.” The communications showed that whatever the emailers were engaged in, it was not the disinterested pursuit of science.
Another batch of 5,000 emails written by top climate scientists came out in 2011, discussing, among other public-relations matters, how to deal with skeptical editors and how to suppress unfavorable data. It is a measure of the intellectual corruption of the mainstream media that this wasn’t the scandal of the century. But then again I forget, “the science is settled.”
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Consumers Will Pay Big for Obama’s Alternative Energy Push
By Dr. Larry Bell, University of Houston
President Obama’s war on coal brings new meaning to his lead from behind strategy. It involves replacing reliable fossil energy sources with pixie dust-powered alternatives.
Only one day following the Supreme Court’s ruling to block EPA’s planned power plant mercury emission regulations, he committed the U.S. to a goal of generating 20 percent of all electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
That means at least three times more subsidies than we currently blow on windmills and burn with sunbeams...and that’s a lot.
Wind and solar each already receive more than 50 times more subsidy support per megawatt hour than conventional coal, and more than 20 times more in terms of average electricity generated by coal and natural gas.
According to U.S. Energy Information Administration figures, annual “Federal interventions and subsidies” for wind (4.4 percent of American electricity) costs for taxpayers ranged from $5.5 billion and $5.9 billion between 2010 and 2013, and from $1.1 billion rocketing up to $4.5 billion for solar (0.4 percent of our electricity) during that period. For comparison, those allocated to fossil fuels (about 60 percent of total electricity) dropped from $4 billion to $3.4 billion.
Although lemming powers of observation aren’t highly regarded, wouldn’t you think witnessing fellow critters plunge en masse over cliff edges would offer cause for some among them to reconsider the perilous path ahead?
Painful EU experiences offer teachable lessons. Consider Denmark for example. On Earth Day, 2010, President Obama praised the country as a great green power model. And yes, while the country theoretically produces about 20 percent of its electricity from wind and solar, CEPOS, a Danish think tank reported that this only supplied between 5 percent and 9.7 percent of average annual demand over the previous 5-year period.
Danish consumers pay the highest electricity rates in Europe, more than three times more than we do.
Existing German energy policies, where 7.8 percent of electricity comes from wind and 4.5 percent derives from solar, force households to fork out for the second highest power costs in Europe often as much as 30 percent above the levels seen in other European countries. (900,000 German households had their electricity shut off for inability to pay during a recent cold winter period.)
Such circumstances are only likely to worsen with Angela Merkel’s plans to wean the country off fossil fuels and nuclear power. Subsidies for wind power which deliver only about one-fifth of the theoretical installed capacity are three times higher than those paid for conventional electricity.
President Obama also lauded Spain as a fine example of renewable energy progress. Yet a study released by researchers at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos a few months later presented a far less enviable picture.
Over the previous eight years the Spanish government had spent $791,597 in subsidies to create each green energy job, and exceeded $1.38 million per wind energy job.
Each of those green jobs cost 2.2 jobs in lost opportunities elsewhere in the workforce, and each MW of installed wind energy capacity destroyed 4.27 other jobs.
Italy’s wind and solar experience record is even worse. According to a study conducted by researchers at the Bruno Leoni Institute, the amount of capital required to generate one job in the renewable sector would create between 4.8 and 6.9 in the industrial sector or elsewhere just based upon subsidies alone.
Of the 50,000 to 120, 000 renewable jobs they propose to create by 2020, 60 percent will be temporary.
Experiences in the United Kingdom are reportedly similar to those in other EU countries. A study by Verso Economics determined that each renewable job “created” by subsidies displaced 3.7 others in their general economy. “Renewable Obligations” which increase market prices for electricity from renewable sources cost U.K. consumers an additional $1.75 billion during 2009/2010.
In 2011 British wind turbines produced a meager 21 percent of installed capacity (not demand capacity) during good conditions.
As in Germany this has necessitated importation of nuclear power from France. Also similar to Germany, the government is closing some of its older coal-fired plants - any one of which can produce nearly twice the electricity of Britain’s 3,000 wind turbines combined.
Yeah, and then there’s our own uber-green California, which mandates that renewables provide 33 percent of the state’s electricity by 2020 and proposes to increase to 50 percent by 2030.
Over just the past three years their electricity rates have already risen by 2.18 cents per kilowatt hour - about four times the national rate - as more and more wind and solar came on line.
Meanwhile, so long as natural gas drilling is restricted, climate crisis hoax-premised EPA regulations strangle fossil power generation, and nuclear energy expansion is delayed, we are racing hell-bent along the same road to perdition. Let’s consider the peril before joining the EU and California lemming pack in a final, fatal jump.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom” (2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012).
Read more here.
Pope Francis’s Laudato Si encyclical is often eloquent, always passionate, but too often encumbered by platitudes and simply erroneous thinking. The pope believes climate change is largely manmade and driven by a capitalist economic system that exploits the poor. That’s why, he says, we must radically reform the global economy, promote sustainable development and wealth redistribution, and ensure “intergenerational solidarity” with the poor.
On all of this he certainly has a lot of new friends in the United Nations, Big Green and Climate Crisis, Inc. It is tremendously disappointing that he seems unable to think these issues through, open his mind to and ideas, speak with scholars outside his closed circle, and promote policies that will actually help the poor instead of condemning them to continued poverty, disease, despair and early death.
My article this week shows where I believe Pope Francis went wrong and why free market capitalism and hydrocarbon energy remain the best way forward.
Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
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An errant environmental encyclical
Pope Francis’ prescriptions will perpetuate poverty, disease, premature death in Third World
Paul Driessen
The Laudato Si encyclical on climate, sustainability and the environment prepared by and for Pope Francis is often eloquent, always passionate but often encumbered by platitudes, many of them erroneous.
“Man has slapped nature in the face,” and “nature never forgives,” the pontiff declares. “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as in the last 200 years.” It isn’t possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society. “Each year thousands of species are being lost,” and “if we destroy creation, it will destroy us.”
The pope believes climate change is largely manmade and driven by a capitalist economic system that exploits the poor. Therefore, he says, we must radically reform the global economy, promote sustainable development and wealth redistribution, and ensure “intergenerational solidarity” with the poor, who must be given their “sacred rights” to labor, lodging and land (the Three L’s).
All of this suggests that, for the most part, Pope Francis probably welcomes statements by his new friends in the United Nations and its climate and sustainability alliance.
One top Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official bluntly says climate policy is no longer about environmental protection; instead, the next climate summit will negotiate “the distribution of the world’s resources.” UN climate chief Christiana Figueres goes even further. UN bureaucrats, she says, are undertaking “probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the global economic development model."[emphasis added]
However, statements by other prominent prophets of planetary demise hopefully give the pope pause.
Obama science advisor John Holdren and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, in their Human Ecology book: “We need to de-develop the United States” and other developed countries, “to bring our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.” We will then address the “ecologically feasible development of the underdeveloped countries.” [emphasis added]
Ehrlich again: “Giving society cheap energy is like giving an idiot child a machine gun.” And most outrageous: The “instant death control” provided by DDT was “responsible for the drastic lowering of death rates” in poor countries; so they need to have a “death rate solution” imposed on them.
Radical environmentalism’s death campaigns do not stop with opposing DDT even as a powerful insect repellant to prevent malaria. They view humans (other than themselves) as consumers, polluters and “a plague upon the Earth” never as creators, innovators or protectors. They oppose modern fertilizers and biotech foods that feed more people from less land, using less water. And of course they are viscerally against all forms and uses of hydrocarbon energy, which yields far more energy per acre than alternatives.
Reflect on all of this a moment. Unelected, unaccountable UN bureaucrats have given themselves the authority to upend the world economic order and redistribute its wealth and resources with no evidence that any alternative they might have in mind will bring anything but worse poverty, inequality and death.
Moreover, beyond the dishonest, arrogant and callous attitudes reflected in these outrageous statements, there are countless basic realities that the encyclical and alarmist allies sweep under the rug.
We are trying today to feed, clothe, and provide electricity, jobs, homes, and better health and living standards to six billion more people than lived on our planet 200 years ago. Back then, reliance on human and animal muscle, wood and dung fires, windmills and water wheels, and primitive, backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk farming methods made life nasty, brutish and short for the vast majority of humans.
As a fascinating short video by Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling illustrates, human life expectancy and societal wealth has surged dramatically over these past 200 years. None of this would have been possible without the capitalism, scientific method and hydrocarbon energy that radical, shortsighted activists in the UN, EPA, Big Green, Inc. and Vatican now want to put in history’s dustbin.
Over the past three decades, fossil fuels - mostly coal - helped 1.3 billion people get electricity and escape debilitating, often lethal energy and economic poverty. However, 1.3 billion still do not have electricity. In India alone, more people than live in the USA still lack electricity; in Sub-Saharan Africa, 730 million (equal to Europe) still cook and heat with wood, charcoal and animal dung.
Hundreds of millions get horribly sick and 4-6 million die every year from lung and intestinal diseases, due to breathing smoke from open fires and not having clean water, refrigeration and unspoiled food.
Providing energy, food, homes and the Three L’s to middle class and impoverished families cannot happen without nuclear and hydrocarbon energy and numerous raw materials. Thankfully, we still have these resources in abundance, because “our ultimate resource” (our creative intellect) has enabled us to use “fracking” and other technologies to put Earth’s resources to productive use serving humanity.
Little solar panels on huts, subsistence and organic farming, and bird-and-bat-butchering wind turbines have serious cost, reliability and sustainability problems of their own. If Pope Francis truly wants to help the poor, he cannot rely on these “alternatives” or on UN and Big Green ruling elite wannabes. Who are they to decide what is “ecologically feasible,” what living standards people will be “permitted” to enjoy, or how the world should “more fairly” share greater scarcity, poverty and energy deprivation?
We are all obligated to help protect our planet and its people - from real problems, not imaginary ones. Outside the computer modelers’ windows, in The Real World, we are not running out of energy and raw materials. (We’re just not allowed to develop and use them.) The only species going extinct have been birds on islands where humans introduced new predators and raptors that have been wiped out by giant wind turbines across habitats in California and other locations. Nor are we encountering climate chaos.
No category 3-5 hurricane has struck the USA in a record 9-3/4 years. (Is that blessing due to CO2 and capitalism?) There has been no warming in 19 years, because the sun has gone quiet again. We have not been battered by droughts more frequent or extreme than what humanity experienced many times over the millennia, including those that afflicted biblical Egypt, the Mayas and Anasazi, and Dust Bowl America.
The scientific method brought centuries of planetary and human progress. It requires that we propose and test hypotheses that explain how nature works. If experimental evidence supports a hypothesis, we have a new rule that can guide further health and scientific advances. If the evidence contradicts the hypothesis, we must devise a new premise - or give up on further progress.
But with climate change, a politicized method has gained supremacy. Based on ideology, it ignores real-world evidence and fiercely defends its assumptions and proclamations. Laudato Si places the Catholic Church at risk of surrendering its role as a champion of science and human progress, and returning to the ignominious persecution of Galileo.
Nor does resort to sustainable development provide guidance. Sustainability is largely interchangeable with “dangerous manmade climate change” as a rallying cry for anti-hydrocarbon, wealth redistribution and economic transformation policies. It means whatever particular interests want it to mean and has become yet one more intolerant ideology in college and government circles.
Climate change and sustainability are critical moral issues. Denying people access to abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy is not just wrong. It is immoral and lethal.
It is an unconscionable crime against humanity to implement policies that pretend to protect the world’s energy-deprived masses from hypothetical manmade climate and other dangers decades from now by perpetuating poverty, malnutrition and disease that kill millions of them tomorrow.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
El Ninos always produce a global pop in temperatures. So expect that this next 6 months or so even in the only accurate data, from satellites. Strong El Ninos usually are followed by a pendulum like strong La Nina with a cooling. Major volcanoes can override or diminish any warming as El Chicon and Mt. St. Helens did in the early to mid 1980s and Pinatubo/Cerro Hudson did in the early to mid 1990s.
As we have written after the coldest January to March for the northeastern United States (10 states plus DC), and a cooling of 3F for the last 20 years in winters, you may not want to hear what solar scientists are telling us.
The month, UK astrophysicists in a release (http://www.rt.com/news/273169-solar-cycle-ice-age/) reported that:
“Our planet is just 15 years from a new ‘mini ice age’ that could cause extremely cold winters characterized by the freezing of normally ice-free rivers as well as by year-round snow fields in areas that have never witnessed such climate conditions before, a group of astrophysicists claim.
The scientists drew this conclusion based on a new model of the sun’s activity that reportedly enables the researchers to make “extremely accurate predictions” of changes in solar activity.”
The study findings were presented at the National Astronomy Meeting on July 9 and published in the Royal Astronomical Society papers.
Their new model based suggests we will see the conditions last experienced during what was called the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago.
The Maunder minimum is a name of a period between 1645 and 1715 characterized by prolonged low solar activity as well as by extremely cold winters in Europe and North America at the heart of the climatic period between 1550 and 1850 called the ‘Little Ice Age.’
This finding is not unique nor new. “My opinion is that we are heading into a Maunder Minimum,” said Mark Giampapa, a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m seeing a continuation in the decline of the sunspots mean magnetic field strengths and a weakening of the polar magnetic fields and subsurface flows.”
Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov who heads Russia’s prestigious Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg warned in a 2013 paper that: “after the maximum of solar Cycle-24, from approximately 2014, we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age.”
Enlarged
Australian Scientist, Dr. David Evans remarked “As we head to the UN meeting in Paris 2015 where global bureaucracy beckons, a sharp cooling change appears to be developing and set to hit in the next five years. Yet consortia of five-star politicians are not preparing for climate change, only for global warming. Around the world a billion dollars a day is invested in renewable energy, largely with the hope of changing the weather. Given that 20% of the world does not even have access to electricity, history books may marvel at how screwed priorities...of ‘bureaucratized science’ were”.
Do I believe it? Yes! When I taught in college in the cold late 1970s, I had a panel in the second Northeast Storm Conference (now in its 41st year) on factors in climate. The panel included MIT’s Hurd ‘Doc’ Willett, who showed how the sun’s cycles (22 years, 180-200 years and others) affected the climate. He predicted then a cool down starting in the 1990s. I have published peer reviewed papers that showed how though the sun’s detectable brightness (called irradiance) only changed 0.1% over most 11 year cycles, there were amplifying factors that greatly increased the sun’s affect on climate on decadal and century scales (everyone recognizes earth sun orbital parameters affect our days, seasons and the longer term cycles of glaciation it is all the other time frames that try to ignore).
These amplifiers include ultraviolet radiation that varies 6 to 8% in the 11 year cycle and produces heat from ozone chemistry in the high atmosphere in low and middle latitudes, geomagnetic activity that causes the ionization heating and displays called the ‘aurora’ and also the solar wind modulated galactic cosmic rays that affect the amount of cloudiness (and through that, solar heating) we experience. All of these have been shown from empirical evidence to produce more warming when the sun is active and less when it is quiet.
So what remedy should we pursue? I turn again to Dr. Abdussamatov who I met over a year ago in a Las Vegas climate convention. There was the language barrier, but he spoke enough English and I did have some Russian coursework in high school and college so we did understand each other.
Dr. Abdussamatov points out that Earth has experienced such major cooling occurrences five times over the last 1,000 years, and that: “A global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse gas emissions. The common view of Man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect.”
“The most reasonable way to fight against the coming Little Ice Age is a complex of special steps aimed at support of economic growth and energy-saving production in order to adapt mankind to forthcoming period of deep cooling which will last approximately until the beginning of the 22nd century. Early understanding of reality of the forthcoming global cooling and physical mechanisms responsible for it directly determines a choice of adequate and reliable measures which will allow the mankind, in particular, population of countries situated far from the equator, to adapt to the future global cooling.”
Given that cooling produces more mortality and suffering than warming, we should take this seriously and push back at efforts to drastically disrupt our energy solutions to combat a failing prophecy that politicians, our universities and the compliant media have been indoctrinating our children and the masses on for two decades.
By John Reid
The Enlightenment
The development of modern science in the late 18th century went hand in hand with the rise of modern industrial capitalism. Its potteries, mines, steam engines, mechanization, and science itself, were all done by private enterprise. The role of government was to enforce patents and maintain a healthy legal and commercial environment.
Nowadays most scientists are paid by the government. What passes for science has largely become taxpayer-funded Environmentalism. Environmentalism has taken over much of science.
Scientists discover, understand and inform. Environmentalists preach.
Quote
“All of us ... are borrowing against this Earth in the name of economic growth, accumulating an environmental debt by burning fossil fuels, the consequences of which will be left for our children and grandchildren to bear. Marcia McNutt - Chief Editor, Science Magazine.”
This is preaching. There is no scientific justification for this statement, which was made by the editor of one of the world’s most prestigious science journals. It is a statement of militant Environmentalism, pure and simple. To say that she should have known better is to misunderstand the situation. It would be like saying that the Communists, who controlled big chunks of the Australian trade union movement in the 1950s, “should have known better”. Environmentalists are way ahead of those old Communists; their “Long March through the Institutions” is now a fait accompli.
It works like this: activists use science to push for international action on a science-related issue in an area such as health or environment. Then, an international agreement is established, and the science on which it is has been based becomes institutionalized and funded by government. Time and again, when this happens, “the science” stops being science. This is because the scientists working on the relevant topic start being advocates and stop being researchers. After all, they are now being paid by the bureaucracy to support a particular doctrine, not to discover new stuff.
Real science, which requires a sceptical and innovative frame of mind, then withers on the vine.
Here are some examples:
Radiation Health
In 2012 I received 7000 milli-Sieverts of radiation as treatment for prostate cancer. I found out from the Web that this is twice the fatal dose! I became curious about how I came to survive this assault and I discovered that radiation administered in moderate doses is not cumulative and is not especially harmful. In my case it was definitely beneficial.
But the International Committee for Radiological Protection says otherwise . They say radiation effects are always cumulative and that there is no safe dose: see here about Wade Allison’s book, Radiation and Reason.
But you can’t be too careful, I hear you say. Well, yes you certainly can be too careful. The Japanese government was too careful when it forcibly relocated 100,000 people following the Fukushima meltdown.
The facts:
Number of deaths: about 1600 people.
Cause of deaths: Suicide mainly.
Number of cases of radiation sickness: 3 people.
Number of deaths caused by radiation: none!
The suicides arose from the social dislocation which occurred when people were compelled to leave their homes and their farms and their jobs and their schools to be relocated to the other side of Japan for reasons of political correctness.
The 1968 London Convention on Ocean Dumping
This forbids the disposal of poisons such as heavy metals in the deep ocean. Hydrothermal vents were discovered in 1977, 9 years after the convention took place. Also known as “black smokers”, they lie on mid-ocean ridges and above volcanic hotspots, 2 to 3 kilometres below the surface of the ocean. Every year they pump into the ocean:
500 tonnes of Arsenic, 1500 tonnes of Lead, 50,000 tonnes of Copper, 140,000 tonnes of Zinc and many other metals including Uranium and its radioactive daughters. This has been going on for, perhaps, a billion years or so.
Nature is the biggest polluter of the ocean and the London Convention is a joke. In fact it is worse than a joke because it precludes sensible, practical solutions to important environmental problems. For example, without it we could dispose of radioactive waste in deep ocean trenches where it would be out of harm’s way until it is ultimately subducted under the earth’s crust by geological processes.
Climate Change
The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the most egregious example of this science-destroying institutionalization. It is all the more virulent because it feeds into the pre-existing mindset of Left and Green ideologies about “Corporate Greed” and “Mankind wrecking the planet”.
Billions of dollars are being pumped into this. Tens of thousands of climate modellers, their technicians and their computer jocks are the self-righteous recipients. They are not going to give up their funding easily - for them this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and, what is worse, most of them sincerely believe that they are saving the planet.
Over the last 30 years, Climate Science, once a forgotten little wallflower, has become a rock star.
There is really no solid evidence that human activities affect global climate. It is only a theory. Computer models based on this theory have no predictive power; they are complicated curve-fitting exercises and, like all such curve-fitting exercise, they fail catastrophically outside the range of the fit.
On the other hand there is ample evidence that so-called “greenhouse gases” do not affect global temperature to any observable degree (see my UNFCCC Submission to the Federal Government for more detail), viz.:
The observation that the amount of industrial CO2 added to the ocean-atmosphere system since the beginning of the industrial revolution, about 400 Gigatons, is only a tiny fraction of the total amount in the system, 32,000 Gigatons.
The observed rate of decrease in temperature with height, the adiabatic lapse rate, is measured many times a day throughout the world by weather balloons and it fits a simple convective heat transport model of the lower atmosphere. It does not fit a simple radiative heat transport model; there is no blanket of CO2 “holding the heat in”.
Careful comparisons of small changes in global average temperature with variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration indicate that the latter lags the former by about ten months indicating that temperature increases cause CO2 increases and not the other way around.
The global distribution of atmospheric CO2 concentration recently observed by NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory does not support the view that increases in this gas are largely due to Western industrial activity. Rather, the gas appears to emanate from the rice paddies and rain-forests of the Third World (see here and here).
The observation that global average temperature has a variance spectrum which is “red” at every time scale from one year to 100,000 years (i.e. the longer the time scale the bigger the variation). The small variations (~0.8C) which occurred during the 20th Century are only to be expected. They are random walk excursions. There is nothing to explain. Climate science is like picking patterns in TattsLotto numbers. Meteorologists can predict the weather up to about a week ahead. That’s as good as it gets.
But if you are a scientist who is part of the climate change institution this evidence is all irrelevant. The “Science of Climate Change” was frozen sometime back in the 1990s when the IPCC was first set up. Nowadays it is just a matter of running ever more complex computer simulations and making more “projections” of future climate and its alarming consequences.
And, of course, re-jigging the data so that it fits the models better.
We often hear it said that “97 percent of climate scientists agree...” and so on
Well they would, wouldn’t they.
About the author: I have a PhD in Upper Atmosphere Physics from the University of Tasmania. I have worked for the Australian Antarctic Division and CSIRO in auroral physics, ocean waves and fluid dynamic modelling. I am a scientist - I discover things. I discovered cosmic noise absorption pulsations and I discovered the physics underlying the frequency down-shifting of surface gravity waves. I am presently working on a method for distinguishing between cyclical behaviour and random walk excursions in natural time series.
“People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.”
Walter C. Langer
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The scientist who influenced Laudato Si, and who serves at the Vatican’s science office, seems to believe in Gaia, but not in God.
By William M. Briggs
St. Francis of Assisi’s hymn Laudato Si’ spoke of “Brothers” Sun and Fire and “Sisters” Moon and Water, using these colorful phrases figuratively, as a way of praising God’s creation. These sentimental words so touched Pope Francis that he named his encyclical after this canticle (repeated in paragraph 87 of the Holy Father’s letter).
Neither Pope Francis nor St. Francis took the words literally, of course. Neither believed that fire was alive and could be talked to or reasoned with or, worse, worshiped. Strange, then, that a self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican named Hans Schellnhuber appears to believe in a Mother Earth.
Gaia
The Gaia Principle, first advanced by chemist James Lovelock (who has lately had second thoughts) and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, says that all life interacts with the Earth, and the Earth with all life, to form a giant self-regulating, living system.
This goes far beyond the fact that the Earth’s climate system has feedbacks, which are at the very center of the debate over climate change. In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him.
This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine - a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God.
What’s this have to do with Schellnhuber? In the 1999 Nature paper “’Earth system’ analysis and the second Copernican revolution,” he said:
Ecosphere science is therefore coming of age, lending respectability to its romantic companion, Gaia theory, as pioneered by Lovelock and Margulis. This hotly debated ‘geophysiological’ approach to Earth-system analysis argues that the biosphere contributes in an almost cognizant way to self-regulating feedback mechanisms that have kept the Earth’s surface environment stable and habitable for life.
Geo-physiological, in case you missed it. Cognizant, in black and white. So dedicated is Schellnhuber to this belief that he says “the Gaia approach may even include the influence of biospheric activities on the Earth’s plate-tectonic processes.” Not the other way around, mind you, where continental drift and earthquakes effects life, but where life effects earthquakes.
He elaborates:
Although effects such as the glaciations may still be interpreted as over-reactions to small disturbances - a kind of cathartic geophysiological fever - the main events, resulting in accelerated maturation by shock treatment, indicate that Gaia faces a powerful antagonist. Rampino has proposed personifying this opposition as Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
Mother Earth gets the flu and instead of white blood cells and a rise in temperature to fend off the infection, it sends white ice and a decrease in temperatures. How? Geophysiologically! I remind the reader that our author, writing in one of the world’s most prominent science journals, does not use these propositions metaphorically. He proposes them as actual mechanisms.
Schellnhuber echoes the theme of a cognizant, i.e. self-aware, planet in another (co-authored) 2004 paper in Nature 2004, ”Climbing the co-evolution ladder,” suggesting again that mankind is an infection, saying that mankind “perturbs ...the global ‘metabolism’” of the planet.
Tipping Points
Schellnhuber, a one-time quantum physicist who turned his attention to Mother Earth late in his career, was also co-author of a 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper ”Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system,” which asked select scientists their gut assessment about the arrival of various “tipping points.” Tipping points are a theme of Schellnhuber’s research (see inter alia this and this).
Tipping points are supposed moments when some doom which might have been avoided if some action had been taken, is no longer possible to avoid and will arrive no matter what. Tipping points have come and gone in climate forecasts for decades now. The promised dooms never arrive but the false prophets never quit. Their intent is less to forecast than to induce something short of panic in order to plead for political intervention. When the old tipping point is past, theorists just change the date, issue new warnings and hope no one will notice.
One of the tipping points Schellnhuber asked about was the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, depending on what the temperature did. All of the selected experts (who answered the questions in 2004 and 2005) gave moderate (~15-25%) to quite high probabilities (50-80%) for this event to have occurred by 2015. The ice did not melt.
Schellnhuber Michelangelo Gaia
From a paper for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Hans Schellnhuber and Maria Martin, illustrating the idea of a methane tipping point. As a modification of Michelangelo’s iconic image from the Sistine Chapel, Earth replaces God, and Adam puts Earth at risk of descending into a fiery abyss.
Schellnhuber presented more tipping points to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2014 in the co-authored paper, ”Climate-System Tipping Points and Extreme Weather Events.” In that paper, Schellnhuber has a “scientific” graph with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Adam “flicking” a planet earth over a methane tipping point, such that the earth would roll down into a fiery pit labeled the “Warming Abyss.” Hell on earth.
The Problem of People
Schellnhuber is most famous for predicting that the “carrying capacity” of the earth is “below” 1 billion people. When confronted with this, he called those who quoted him “liars.” But he then repeated the same claim, saying, “All I said was that if we had unlimited global warming of eight degrees warming, maybe the carrying capacity of the earth would go down to just 1 billion, and then the discussion would be settled.” And he has often said that this temperature tipping point would be reached - unless “actions” were taken.
The man is suspicious of people. In that same interview he said, “If you want to reduce human population, there are wonderful means: Improve the education of girls and young women.” Since young women already know where babies come from, and since this knowledge tends neither to increase nor decrease population, the “education” he has in mind must be facts about how to avoid the consequences of sex. Austin Ruse discovered a 2009 talk in which Schellnhuber said the earth “will explode” due to resource depletion once the population reaches 9 billion, a number that the UN projects in 2050. Presumably he wants earth to avoid that fate, so he must support the population control that Pope Francis so clearly repudiated in his encyclical.
Bad Religion
Confirmation bias happens when a scientist manipulates an experiment so that he gets the outcome he hoped he would get. When Schellnhuber invites only believers in tipping-points-of-doom to characterize their guesses of this doom, his view that the doom is real will be confirmed. And when he publishes a paper that says, “Scientists say world is doomed” the public and politicians believe it. Scientists skeptical of the doom are dismissed because they are skeptics. This isn’t good science. It’s really bad religion, and a pagan one at that.
Global warming research is characterized by an insider’s club. If you believe, you’re in. If you doubt, you’re out. This is also so at the Pontifical Academies of Science where Schellnhuber was appointed by Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. The bishop locked scientists with contrary views out of the process, scientists he has repeatedly dismissed as “funded by the oil industry.” Given this, how likely is it that the Holy Father was fully aware of the views of the chief scientist who advised him.
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Biden: If You Don’t Believe in Manmade Global Warming, You Must “Deny Gravity” As Well
By Philip Hodges
Yeah, well, if you do believe in manmade global warming, you probably also believe that bailing out the green industry and bankrupting other energy sectors will convince the weather to stop being so “unpredictable.”
John Kerry said something similar not too long ago, that manmade global warming is an “elementary truth” like gravity. I don’t think it’s quite the same thing. Gravity has been observed since the beginning of time. People may have not had all the equations that described it, but everyone knew it was there. Everyone knew that if you dropped an apple, it would fall to the ground. No one disputed it.
The fact that there is such scientific opposition to the idea of manmade global warming, and the fact that so much of the data have been “adjusted” in order to yield more “suitable” dire global warming predictions, shows how unsettled it is. It’s the opposite of something like gravity. And like one commenter noted, “I’d think we’d have noticed if gravity had just stopped for over 18 years.”
Manmade global warming is not science. It’s mostly politics, mixed in with unfounded assumptions and just enough scientific half-truths that people believe in it.
The Blaze reported:
In his first public speech since the death of his son, Vice President Joe Biden tore into skeptics of man-made climate change.
Biden criticized the House Republican budget he said would cut the Energy Department’s renewable energy budget by 40 percent.
“As hard as it is to believe, many of these same people continue to deny the reality of climate change,” Biden said Tuesday at the White House Clean Energy Investment Summit. “They also deny gravity. But they also deny there is such a thing as climate change. That’s the problem. The point is the safety and security of the United States of America and every community across the country.”
“As a consequence of this, many investors are pulling back from early-stage research in clean energy, labs and startups,” Biden said. “There has been an 85 percent decline in traditional state early stage venture capital investment in clean energy over the last seven years.”
He noted the reports of a leaked Vatican document from Pope France calling for action on climate change and blaming human activity.
“The front page of the Washington Pope Post,” Biden corrected himself and joked. “They sometimes think they are pope.”
He read the headline and quoted from the article that said the leaked encyclical said, “The poor of the earth are shouting.” They will be screaming if your administration gets their way.
Biden warned the United States was a threshold for taking action.
“This is a critical moment for our country - not only for us but for our children and grandchildren,” Biden said. He’s right, their future will be dim if we follow the scientifically illiterate ideologically driven prescriptions of the administration.
He later added, “By 2025 we expect to double fuel efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon -saving American families $1.7 trillion at the pump.”
He’s worried about green energy investors. I wonder how much he’s got invested. It’s in his best interest to get as many people jumping on the green energy bandwagon so that his investments and those of his liberal buddies grow. That’s what this whole global warming thing is about. Everyone knows it’s not science. It’s about investments and “market trends.” The EPA’s Gina McCarthy admitted the EPA policy is not about ecology but an ‘investment’.
Read more
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EPA Clean Power Plan Will Hit Blacks And Hispanics Hardest
By Harry Alford, Investor’s Business Daily
The Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental activists frequently claim that climate change will disproportionately affect poor and minority communities.
This, they argue, justifies unprecedented environmental regulations like the EPA’s soon-to-be-finalized “Clean Power Plan” to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030.
But what effect will the regulation itself have on minority communities? A new study commissioned by my organization, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, answers this question.
The Clean Power Plan will lead to lost jobs, lower incomes and higher poverty rates for the 128 million blacks and Hispanics living in America. This should serve as a warning to federal and state lawmakers as they prepare for this sweeping regulation to go into effect in the coming months.
The underlying economics explain why this regulation will inflict the most severe harm on our communities.
The study estimates that restructuring America’s energy grid, which the EPA’s rule will require, will lead to $565 billion in higher annual electricity costs by 2030, when the regulation will be fully implemented.
With blacks and Hispanics spending a larger share of their income on energy than whites, the burden of higher costs will fall hardest on minorities. We will be hurt again through job losses, as businesses take steps to mitigate the damage of higher overhead.
The study estimates that this single regulation will cause cumulative job losses for blacks and Hispanics of roughly 7 million and 12 million, respectively, over the next 20 years. Over the same time period, black families can expect their annual incomes to fall by $455, while Hispanics will take home $515 less per year.
This regulation will also impose higher costs of living, which again hit minority families the hardest. Today, blacks spend 10% more of their income on housing, 20% more on food, 40% more on clothing and 50% more on utilities than do white families.
Similar disparities exist for Hispanics: 5% more on housing, 10% more on utilities, 40% more on clothing and fully 90% more on food.
By raising energy prices, EPA’s rule will make these essential items more expensive - knocking minority communities down another rung on the economic ladder.
These factors - fewer jobs, lower incomes and higher costs of living - threaten to impoverish millions. The study estimates that the regulation will increase black and Hispanic poverty by 23% and 26%, respectively. We work hard to provide a better future for our children, yet this regulation only pushes the American dream even further out of reach.
The only good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways that states can mitigate, or altogether avoid, this regulation’s impending impact.
Already, more than a dozen states have sued the EPA over the rule, which faces legal opposition from experts on both sides of the aisle. Other states should join this suit.
State leaders could also refuse to implement the plan altogether. As currently written, the regulation calls on unelected state environmental agencies to draft their own state plans and submit them directly to the EPA for review and approval. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin has signed an executive order blocking her state’s environmental agency from submitting a plan. Other states have introduced legislation to the same effect.
The grim reality is that the EPA wants states to do their dirty work for them. By submitting a plan, states will become complicit in the agency’s plan to shut down reliable power plants, impose higher energy costs and plunge minority families deeper into poverty.
For the sake of their constituents, elected officials have an obligation to fight this federal takeover of state authority.
Lawmakers in Washington and state capitals should act soon. The EPA is scheduled to release its final regulation next month, kicking off a one-year period before states will be forced to comply. As this deadline approaches, our elected officials should determine how best to confront - and resist - the Clean Power Plan. They should remember that the well-being of millions of minorities hangs in the balance.
Alford is president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
Here is what many main stream media outlets are calling ‘monster storm Bill’ or a massive storm...hyperbole to the extreme.
Over a dozen Bills would fit comfortably inside of Texas (as well as the entire world’s population with quarter acre homes and property despite the proclamations of some very big name people worried about the world running out of room and calling for an effort to depopulate the planet from 7 to under 1 billion). One will be standing aside the Pope Thursday when he reads his encyclical.
I don’t mean to minimize any pain for those who a few years back suffered from drought and now flooding. We are reliving the 1950s as honest brokers like Huug van den Dool at CPC have noted based on analogs of global ocean temperatures. Devastating Hurricane Audrey occurred in June 1957 following the megadrought that lasted 7 years in Texas (this drought was less than half that one).
The rains this past year have been promoted as unprecedented. You may recall the drought the last 4 years (June to May to incorporate this wet May) was called the start of a permadrought from Climate change. See how the last 12 wet months or the prior 48 months of dryness were both not unprecedented. The trend flat a few years ago is up slightly.
After it leaves the too wet south central states, the storm will help improve soil moisture to the northeast where the last two months have been too dry.
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Thinkprogress has continued their hype campaign based on NASA data shenanigans
“Historically, the global temperature trend-line is more like a staircase than a ramp. We now appear to be headed for a step-jump in global temperatures - one that scientists have been expecting. NASA reported this week that this was the hottest five-month start (January to May) of any year on record. Climate expert and UK Guardian columnist John Abraham put together this chart of how the start to 2015 compares to previous years. As Abraham notes, “2015 is a whopping 0.1C (0.17F) hotter than last year, which itself was the hottest year on record.”
Sorry John you are wrong again (I can’t remember a day when Soros funded TP and Abraham have even been correct). Note I would have used the word right, but of course TP is far, far left.
The global data that goes into the models run by NOAA four times a day (not manipulated because they need to get the forecasts right) says this year to date is unremarkable (middle of the pack back to just 2005).
The satellite data (average of RSS and UAH6.0) also shows no warming since 1996 and certainly nothing remarkable in 2015.
Yes there will be a poke up with the El Nino in upcoming months (always does) but with the Atlantic colder and the sun heading toward a long, deep slumber, watch out below the last years of this decade. The Royal Society say the pause (now 18.5 years) would have to last 50 years before they would regard their theory as questionable. I hope I am around long enough to watch them (all of them) admit their failures. I suspect like Erlich’s doom projections of the 1970s of millions of death starting in the 1980s from starvation from overpopulation and scarcity of resources/famine, this whole scare may just disappear into the dustbin of history. My fear though is that the damage to our economy and way of living will be unrepairable as they are discovering too late in Europe.
Update: See this excellent, comprehensive review of the Karl/Peterson Science paper finding that there is no hiatus by Dr. Calvin Beisner.
See this from No Tricks Zone on how NCDC destroyed Maine’s true temperature history by every means possible to achieve their goal of erasing the pause.
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Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller
Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a study Thursday claiming there’s no hiatus in global warming. But new satellite-derived temperature measurements show there’s been no global warming for 18 years and six months.
“For 222 months, since December 1996, there has been no global warming at all,” writes climate expert Lord Christopher Monckton, the third viscount Monckton of Brenchley
“This month’s [satellite] temperature - still unaffected by a slowly strengthening El Nino, which will eventually cause temporary warming - passes another six-month milestone, and establishes a new record length for the Pause: 18 years 6 months,” Monckton adds.
Monckton’s data comes as NOAA scientists release updated data purporting to show there’s actually been no hiatus in global warming. NOAA scientists made adjustments to temperature records to show more than twice as much warming as the old analysis at the global scale from 1998 to 2012.
“Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus,’” wrote NOAA scientists in a new study.
The difference between Monckton’s data and NOAA’s data is that satellites measure the lowest few miles of the atmosphere, temperature measurements from government scientists rely on thousands of weather stations, buoys and ships across the world’s surface.
Both satellites and surface temperature readings, however, showed prolonged periods without statistically significant warming trends - 15 years for surface temperatures and more than 18 years for satellites.
Scientists have already pushed back against NOAA’s new study. The news site Mashable interviewed about a dozen climate scientists not involved in the study, and nearly all of them said “the study does not support the authors’ conclusion that the so-called warming pause never happened.”
“Instead, they said it simply proves that changing the start and end dates used for analyzing temperature trends has a big influence on those measurements, a fact that was already widely known,” Mashable reported.
“The main claim by the authors that they have uncovered a significant recent warming trend is dubious,” scientists with the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in an open letter on the NOAA study.
“The significance level they report on their findings (.10) is hardly normative, and the use of it should prompt members of the scientific community to question the reasoning behind the use of such a lax standard,” they wrote.
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See Ross McKitrick’s analysis of the different data sources and artifacts here.
As Canadian Climatologist Tim Ball observed:
“Once Environment Canada bureaucrats convinced the politicians that CO2 and global warming was a problem they were on a treadmill. They ignored evidence, such as the complete failure of their predictions. They are very unlikely to tell politicians, who have based strong public positions on the information that they were wrong. They effectively said the science was settled, which is never true.
This is what happens when scientists are bureaucrats. It’s time to close down Environment Canada and take scientists out of bureaucracies completely because their scientific integrity is inherently compromised.” (Tim Ball)
The radical environmentalist/bureaucrat in charge of the NOAA data sets (which by the way are provided to NASA and Hadley for their use) describes his efforts to save the world as a knife fight.
Peterson’s data goes to NASA for their own set of ‘adjustments’. See how since 1980, every new data set version has been cooler in the early 20th century and warmer late. Yes there is man made global warming but the men are in Asheville and the Bronx.
Einstein said
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.
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It is time to rid our national data center of the bureaucrats.
Ron Arnold, Executive Vice-President of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise
Why do so many climate-related news reports sound like propaganda written by zealous, even fanatical, environmentalists who could never be called impartial or objective?
Why have reporters belonging to the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) abandoned the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, which includes a pledge to support “open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant,” and instead promoted retaliation against scientists with whom they disagree, often calling for the censorship of climate-alarm skeptics?
Deep-Seated Emotions
The evidence suggests SEJ’s actions weren’t based solely on the perennial need for sensational headlines or the usual left-wing politics of covering the environment beat. It’s more personal. Many environmental journalists seem driven by emotions aroused before they entered journalism school: fear and loathing of modern technology and the flourishing human populations it brings.
That’s the core of the environmental catechism as taught by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth.
Many green beat reporters appear to harbor feelings of misanthropic self-loathing, as National Book Award novelist Jonathan Franzen said of himself in The New Yorker: “I was raised as a Protestant and became an environmentalist, but I’ve long been struck by the spiritual kinship of environmentalism and New England Puritanism. Both belief systems are haunted by the feeling that simply to be human is to be guilty.”
This makes environmentalism and journalism a treacherous coupling. The father of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Bert Bolin, said as much. In his 2008 A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change, Bolin wrote, “There has been an unfortunate polarization of the way the media report the climate change issue. ...It was non-governmental groups of environmentalists, supported by the mass media, who were the ones exaggerating the conclusions that had been carefully formulated by the IPCC.”
The scientific evidence was weak, but the environmental journalists’ belief was strong, so they lied. Period.
Once greens attained real influence, environmental reporters emerged as vengeful authoritarians driven by power and a furious intolerance toward doubters who threatened their belief and personal status. The science, as Heartland Institute Policy Advisor Norman Rogers pointed out, is just window dressing.
Joyfully Wearing ‘Pareto’s Blindfold’
Rogers took his cue from the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, who, in 1901, wrote in The Rise and Fall of Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology: “The greater part of human actions have their origin not in logical reasoning but in sentiment [emotion]. Man, although impelled to act by non-logical motives, likes to tie his actions logically to certain principles; he therefore invents these a posteriori in order to justify his actions.”
We can think of this as “Pareto’s Blindfold” and apply it to climate reporting: Reasoning about science with many environmental reporters is futile because you’re not dealing with science or reason, you’re dealing with illogical principles invented to justify their fear, loathing, human guilt, and retribution. Reporters can’t see this, much less admit it to themselves.
With the Obama administration’s Machiavellian collusion, reporters who are more environmentalist than journalist now rule the climate beat.
Big Money Supports Alarmism
You can credit the SEJ, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with more than 1,200 member reporters and academics in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and 27 other countries, with the general decline in journalistic standards among environmental journalists. SEJ has received 119 grants from 35 notorious anti-development foundations, totaling $9.5 million since 1999. With this financial prompting, the SEJ’s stalwarts, including Andrew Revkin (The New York Times), Seth Borenstein (Associated Press), and Suzanne Goldenberg (The Guardian), have led the decline of climate news into ideological warfare.
To many SEJ writers, it is not possible for them to be biased, because issues have only one side: their own.
Associated Press’ Borenstein asserted, “The nature of reporting is to get two sides to an issue. But the nature of science reporting is to get what’s really happening.”
SEJ thinks whatever isn’t environmental dogma is a lie, as indicated by its reference webpage “Climate Change: A Guide to the Information and Disinformation.”
SEJ writers also promote “false balance,” the notion that giving opposing views concerning climate change any mention at all is not real balance because skeptics are liars paid to undermine the truth. Thus, Pareto’s Blindfold justifies total censorship.
Public Sees Through Hype
Fortunately, the public has resisted this biased climate journalism. A March Gallup Poll found the number of people saying they worried “a great deal” about global warming peaked in 2000 at 72 percent. Despite increasingly hyperbolic media coverage, the number of people greatly worried about climate change fell to 55 percent in 2009 and has remained there since. Significantly, 42 percent of Americans think reporters exaggerate the seriousness of global warming, and only 21 percent think media reports are generally correct.
Perhaps a big reason behind newspapers’ declining readership is reporters’ increasing abandonment of their traditional fourth-estate role as government watchdog and defender of dissent in favor of promoting the “official” views of government and large bureaucratic institutions.
Climate reporters have stooped to reprehensible smears to destroy skeptic scientists with false “science-for-sale” allegations in orchestrated campaigns with extremists such as Greenpeace. The true colors of their yellow journalism are showing, loud and ugly. Link.
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When will Climate Scientists admit they were wrong?
By Patrick Michaels, CATO
This article appeared in TownHall.com on May 29, 2015.
Day after day, year after year, the hole that climate scientists have buried themselves in gets deeper and deeper. The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science.
The story is told in a simple graph, the same one that University of Alabama’s John Christy presented to the House Committee on Natural Resources on May 15.
The picture shows the remarkable disconnect between predicted global warming and the real world.
The red line is the 5-year running average temperature change forecast, beginning in 1979, predicted by the UN’s latest family of climate models, many of which are the handiwork of our own federal science establishment. The forecasts are for the average temperature change in the lower atmosphere, away from the confounding effects of cities, forestry, and agriculture.
The blue circles are the average lower-atmospheric temperature changes from four different analyses of global weather balloon data, and the green squares are the average of the two widely accepted analyses of satellite-sensed temperature. Both of these are thought to be pretty solid because they come from calibrated instruments.
“The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science.”
If you look at data through 1995 the forecast appears to be doing quite well. That’s because the computer models appear to have, at least in essence, captured two periods of slight cooling.
The key word is “appear.” The computer models are tuned to account for big volcanoes that are known to induce temporary cooling in the lower atmosphere. These would be the 1982 eruption of El Chichon in Mexico, and 1992’s spectacular Mt. Pinatubo, the biggest natural explosion on earth since Alaska’s Katmai in 1912.
Since Pinatubo, the earth has been pretty quiescent, so that warming from increasing carbon dioxide should proceed unimpeded. Obviously, the spread between forecast and observed temperatures grows pretty much every year, and is now a yawning chasm.
It’s impossible, as a scientist, to look at this graph and not rage at the destruction of science that is being wreaked by the inability of climatologists to look us in the eye and say perhaps the three most important words in life: we were wrong.
An MIT professor of meteorology is dismissing global-warming alarmists as a discredited “cult” whose members are becoming more hysterical as emerging evidence continues to contradict their beliefs.
During an appearance on this writer’s radio show Monday, MIT Professor emeritus Richard Lindzen discussed the religious nature of the movement.
“As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that’s what’s happening here. Think about it,” he said. “You’ve led an unpleasant life, you haven’t led a very virtuous life, but now you’re told, you get absolution if you watch your carbon footprint. It’s salvation!”
Lindzen, 74, has issued calm dismissals of warmist apocalypse, reducing his critics to sputtering rage.
Last week, government agencies including NASA announced that 2014 was the “hottest year” in “recorded history,” as The New York Times put it in an early edition. Last year has since been demoted by the Times to the hottest “since record-keeping began in 1880.”
But that may not be true. Now the same agencies have acknowledged that there’s only a 38 percent chance that 2014 was the hottest year on record. And even if it was, it was only by two-100ths of a degree.
Lindzen scoffs at the public-sector-generated hysteria, which included one warmist blogger breathlessly writing that the heat record had been “shattered.”
“Seventy percent of the earth is oceans, we can’t measure those temperatures very well. They can be off a half a degree, a quarter of a degree. Even two-10ths of a degree of change would be tiny but two-100ths is ludicrous. Anyone who starts crowing about those numbers shows that they’re putting spin on nothing.”
Last week, after scoffing at Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ call for a Senate vote on global warming, Lindzen was subjected to another barrage of diatribes. At his listed MIT phone number, Prof. Lindzen received a typical anonymous call:
“I think people like you should actually be in jail,” the male caller told him, “because you must know where this is all leading not the people you support and take your money from to make these outrageously anti-human comments (also ‘know’
… In other words, you’re a sociopath!”
Lindzen chuckled when the voicemail was replayed.
This writer asked him if, as has been alleged in some of the warmist blogs, he is taking money from the energy industry.
“Oh, it would be great!” he said with a laugh. “You have all these people, the Gores and so on, making hundreds of millions of dollars on this, Exxon Mobil giving $100 million to Stanford for people who are working on promoting this hysteria. The notion that the fossil-fuel industry cares - they don’t. As long as they can pass the costs on to you, it’s a new profit center.”
Lindzen said he was fortunate to have gained tenure just as the “climate change” movement was beginning, because now non-believers are often ostracized in academia. In his career he has watched the hysteria of the 1970’s over “global cooling” morph into “global warming.”
“They use climate to push an agenda. But what do you have left when global warming falls apart? Global normalcy? We have to do something about ‘normalcy?’”
As for CO2, Lindzen said that until recently, periods of greater warmth were referred to as “climate optimum.” Optimum is derived from a Latin word meaning “best.”
“Nobody ever questioned that those were the good periods. All of a sudden you were able to inculcate people with the notion that you have to be afraid of warmth.”
The warmists’ ultimate solution is to reduce the standard of living for most of mankind. That proposition is being resisted most vigorously by nations with developing economies such as China and India, both of which have refused to sign on to any restrictive, Obama-backed climate treaties. Lindzen understands their reluctance.
“Anything you do to impoverish people, and certainly all the planned policies will impoverish people, is actually costing lives. But the environmental movement has never cared about that.”
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EPA Plan to Ban Coal Hits Major Roadblock
By Phil Kerpen
The EPA proposal to impose a de facto ban on new coal-fired power plants received more than two million comments from the public - but it looks like it was just one five-page comment from the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) that sent EPA scrambling back to the drawing board.
The draft rule mandated the use of so-called carbon capture and storage, a technology that would inject carbon dioxide underground but which has so far proved to be little more than a white elephant experiment. To mandate this technology, the law required the EPA to prove it was “adequately demonstrated” and “commercially available.” Thanks to E&E Legal, they failed.
Dawn Reeves at Inside EPA broke the story that carbon capture and storage has apparently been dropped from the agency’s final rule regulating greenhouse gas emissions. She also, curiously, reports that the White House may not allow the EPA to back down, instead forcing the agency to defend the legally indefensible in court.
But whether they win now or not until the issue is litigated, E&E Legal has scored a huge victory for the rule of law and economic common sense.
I reached out to Chris Horner, their lead author on the comment that carried the day.
“We submitted comments for the record explaining that EPA had made a mockery of the interagency review process, ignoring the government’s own experts in order to push an ideological agenda,” Horner said.
That’s a crucial point because if the EPA is demonstrably not serving as an expert but an ideological actor, it would not warrant deference in court, making its whole global warming agenda vulnerable.
E&E Legal obtained information proving that expert analysis from the Department of Energy actually concluded the opposite of what the EPA claimed when they asserted that carbon capture and storage had been “adequately demonstrated.”
“The truth is that the experts had persuasively argued the opposite, in effect, that carbon capture and storage has been demonstrated to be not viable,” Horner said. “Making this more egregious, the Department of Energy had paid a quarter of a billion taxpayer dollars to learn this information and lesson that EPA ignored and even misrepresented.”
The EPA was caught red-handed faking science and ignoring expert opinion, in effect requiring a technology that they knew did not practically exist. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that their actual intended purpose was indeed to impose a de facto ban on coal-fired power plants. And they might have gotten away with it if E&E Legal hadn’t busted them.
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States Rebel Against EPA’s Clean Power Plan
State Officials have gone on the offensive against the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) limiting carbon-dioxide emissions at existing fossil-fuel-fired power plants.
The CPP would establish state-by-state carbon emissions rate reduction targets.
Gov. Mary Fallin, R-Okla., in late April issued an executive order arguing that the EPA “has exceeded its authority under the Clean Air Act,” the 1970 federal law requiring the EPA to take steps to reduce air pollution that harms the public’s health, from which the EPA claims authority for the CPP.
Fallin also prohibits the state’s Department of Environmental Quality from participating with the development of plans to implement CPP regulations.
And she said that if the CPP is adopted this summer, she “will not submit” a State Implementation Plan (SIP) intended to ensure full compliance with the federal mandate, Thomas K. Lindsay disclosed in an article for realclearpolicy.com.
Nine days after Fallin issued the executive order, Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz to discuss what Abbott predicted would be “grave consequences for the State of Texas” if the CPP is enforced.
Abbott’s press advisory said the CPP “will certainly result in higher energy prices for Texans, killing jobs and stagnating Texas’ unprecedented economic growth.”
The Texas House of Representatives is considering a bill that would require the state, like Oklahoma, to deny the EPA’s request that it submit a SIP for the federal mandate.
Texas and Oklahoma are not alone, observes Lindsay, director of the Centers for Tenth Amendment Action and Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He cited one survey disclosing that there are now 32 states “in which elected officials have expressed firm opposition” to the CPP.
Several U.S. senators have proposed legislation to combat the CPP. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., head of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee’s Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee, and six other senators introduced the Affordable Reliable Energy Now Act (ARENA).
The bill would extend the CPP’s compliance deadlines pending review by federal courts, and bar any state from being forced to implement a SIP or a Federal Implementation Plan if the state’s governor concludes that doing so would harm the state’s economy.
ARENA would also prohibit the EPA from withholding federal highway funds from states that are found to not be in compliance with the CPP.
FOOTNOTE: According to The Atlantic, the EPA itself admits that the CPP’s effect against the threat of climate change will be so small, reducing warming by 0.016 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, that it will be impossible to measure.
See how EPA’s 3,373 regulations are 6,552 times as long as the Constitution; 46 times ss long as the bible here.