UPDATE: John Coleman, who recently retired from KUSI has his web site with his daily blogs, essays and videos up and going PLEASE VISIT and spread the word.
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Unleashing EPA bureaucrats on American livelihoods, living standards and liberties
David Rothbard and Craig Rucker
Supported by nothing but assumptions, faulty computer models and outright falsifications of what is actually happening on our planet, President Obama, his Environmental Protection Agency and their allies have issued more economy-crushing rules that they say will prevent dangerous manmade climate change .
Under the latest EPA regulatory onslaught (645 pages of new rules, released June 2), by 2030 states must slash carbon dioxide emissions by 30% below 2005 levels.
The new rules supposedly give states “flexibility” in deciding how to meet the mandates. However, many will have little choice but to impose costly cap-tax-and-trade regimes like the ones Congress has wisely and repeatedly refused to enact. Others will be forced to close perfectly good, highly reliable coal-fueled power plants that currently provide affordable electricity for millions of families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses. The adverse impacts will be enormous.
The rules will further hobble a US economy that actually shrank by 1% during the first quarter of 2014, following a pathetic 1.9% total annual growth in 2013. They are on top of $1.9 trillion per year (one-eighth of our total economy) that businesses and families already pay to comply with federal rules.
A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study calculates that the new regulations will cost our economy another $51 billion annually, result in 224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per year in higher prices for energy, food and other necessities. Poor, middle class and minority families and those already dependent on unemployment and welfare will be impacted worst. Those in a dozen states that depend on coal to generate 30-95% of their electricity will be hit especially hard.
Millions of Americans will endure a lower quality of life and be unable to heat or cool their homes properly, pay their rent or mortgage, or save for college and retirement. They will suffer from greater stress, worse sleep deprivation, higher incidences of depression and alcohol, drug, spousal and child abuse, and more heart attacks and strokes. As Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) points out, “A lot of people on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum are going to die.” EPA ignores all of this.
It also ignores the fact that, based to the agency’s own data, shutting down every coal-fired power plant in the USA would reduce the alleged increase in global temperatures by a mere 0.05 degrees F by 2100!
President Obama nevertheless says the costly regulations are needed to reduce “carbon pollution” that he claims is making “extreme weather events” like Superstorm Sandy “more common and more devastating.” The rules will also prevent up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks in their first year alone, while also curbing sea level rise, forest fires and other supposed impacts from “climate disruption,” according to ridiculous talking points provided by EPA boss Gina McCarthy.
As part of a nationwide White House campaign to promote and justify the regulations, the American Lung Association echoed the health claims. The Natural Resources Defense Council said the rules will “drive innovation and investment” in green technology, creating “hundreds of thousands” of new jobs.
Bear in mind, the ALA received over $20 million from the EPA between 2001 and 2010. NRDC spends nearly $100 million per year (2012 IRS data) advancing its radical agenda. Both are part of a $13.4-billion-per-year U.S. Big Green industry that includes the Sierra Club and Sierra Club Foundation ($145 million per year), National Audubon Society ($96 million), Environmental Defense Fund ($112 million annually), Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace Fund ($46 million), and numerous other special interest groups dedicated to slashing fossil fuel use and reducing our living standards. All are tax-exempt.
As to the claims themselves, they are as credible as the endlessly repeated assertions that we will all be able to keep our doctor and insurance policies, Benghazi was a spontaneous protest, and there is not a scintilla of corruption in the IRS denials of tax-exempt status to conservative groups.
The very term “carbon pollution” is deliberately disingenuous. The rules do not target carbon (aka soot). They target carbon dioxide. This is the gas that all humans and animals exhale. It makes life on Earth possible. It makes crops and other plants grow faster and better. As thousands of scientists emphasize, at just 0.04% of our atmosphere, CO2 plays only a minor role in climate change especially compared to water vapor and the incredibly powerful solar, cosmic, oceanic and other natural forces that have caused warm periods, ice ages and little ice ages, and controlled climate and weather for countless millennia.
The terrible disasters that the President and other climate alarmists attribute to fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are creatures of computer models that have gotten virtually no predictions correct. That should hardly be surprising. The models are based on faulty assumptions of every size and description, and are fed a steady diet of junk science and distorted data. We shouldn’t trust them any more than we would trust con artists who claim their computers can predict stock markets or Super Bowl and World Series winners even one year in advance, much less 50 or 100 years.
The models should absolutely not be trusted as the basis for regulations that will cripple our economy.
Contrary to model predictions and White House assertions, average global temperatures have not risen in almost 18 years. It’s now been over eight years since a category 3-5 hurricane hit the United States – the longest such period in over a century. Tornadoes are at a multi-decade low. Droughts are no more intense or frequent than since 1900. There were fewer than half as many forest fires last year as during the 1960s and 1970s. Sea levels rose just eight inches over the last 130 years and are currently rising at barely seven inches per century. There’s still ice on Lake Superior in June! Runaway global warming, indeed.
This is not dangerous. It’s not because of humans. It does not justify what the White House is doing.
Asthma has been increasing for years while air pollution has been decreasing. The two are not related. In fact, as EPA data attest, between 1970 and 2010, real air pollution from coal-fired power plants has plummeted dramatically and will continue to do so because of existing rules and technologies.
For once the President is not “leading from behind” on foreign policy. However, there is no truth to his claim that other countries will follow our lead on closing coal-fired power plants and slashing carbon dioxide emissions. China, India and dozens of other developing countries are rapidly building coal-fueled generators, so that billions of people will finally enjoy the blessings of electricity and be lifted out of poverty. Even European countries are burning more coal to generate electricity, because they finally realize they cannot keep subsidizing wind and solar, while killing their energy-intensive industries.
Then what is really going on here? Why is President Obama imposing some of the most pointless and destructive regulations in American history? He is keeping his campaign promises to his far-left and hard-green ideological supporters, who detest hydrocarbons and want to use climate change to justify their socio-economic-environmental agenda.
Mr. Obama promised that electricity prices would “necessarily skyrocket” and that he would “bankrupt” the coal industry and “fundamentally transform” America. His top science advisor, John Holdren, has long advocated a “massive campaign” to “de-develop the United States,” divert energy and other resources from what he calls “frivolous and wasteful” uses that support modern living standards, and enforce a “much more equitable distribution of wealth.” The President and his Executive Branch bureaucrats are committed to controlling more and more of our lives, livelihoods and liberties.
They believe no one can stop them, and they will never be held accountable for ignoring our laws, for their corruption, or even for any job losses, deaths or other destruction they may leave in their wake.
Every American who still believes in honest science, accountable Constitutional government and the right of people everywhere to affordable energy and modern living standards must tell these radical ideologues that this power grab will not be tolerated.
David Rothbard is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), a nonprofit educational organization devoted to both people and the environment. Craig Rucker is CFACT’s executive director.
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Obama’s climate change diversion
By Frank Beckmann
Is President Obama’s interest in climate change motivated by Hurricane Sandy, or by recent poll numbers?
The Obama administration’s war on affordable energy ramped up a major notch this week with release of the government’s latest guess about future weather events, something it calls the “National Climate Assessment.”
The administration, anxious to continue taxpayer-provided subsidies to politically-favored green energy firms that return the favor with campaign contributions to Democrats, claims it used the expertise of hundreds of “experts” to come up with the findings.
A cursory glance of the participants shows no participation by climate realists but leading report authors from environmental political action groups like Second Nature, The Nature Conservancy, Planet Forward, and the misnamed Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that is not made up of scientists at all and which also advocates for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament.
The government’s report is full of alarms claiming America is already experiencing the effects of “climate disruption” - the newest name created by this crowd of hucksters - in the form of records for higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising seas, droughts, floods and melting polar ice.
In each case, their claims are disputed by observable facts and the historical record, a willful flaw for this bunch of amnesia victims.
Here are just a few examples.
Only last year, the government’s own climate observers at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) reported a record low number of tornadoes and the longest pause ever in the occurrence of big hurricanes.
Meantime, the mild temperature increase late last century has been replaced by 17 years - almost two decades - of pauses and mild cooling, despite increasing levels of harmless CO2 in the atmosphere and despite the doctored U.S. temperature record created over the past two decades by activist James Hansen of NASA.
Add to that verified scientific observations of increasing polar sea ice and incontrovertible facts showing droughts and floods in the past - as long as a thousand years ago and more, long before our reliance on cheap fossil fuels - were far worse.
The Obama administration points to Hurricane Sandy as the greatest recent climate disaster which supposedly moved Obama to decide on quicker presidential action on the environment - headlined in a way that moved the Benghazi and Obamacare debacles off the front page.
Know this: environmental extremists are trying to attribute every major weather event - regular occurrences since the formation of this violent planet Earth that we call home - to manmade “climate disturbance,” claims that are “not reasonable, not science, and not honest,” according to Walter Starck, environment policy adviser at the Heartland Institute think tank.
These are the same people who earlier protested that individual weather occurrences could not be used in defining wider climate characteristics.
The greatest danger of the latest report from the Obama administration is not the realization that our government is again trying to mislead the American public, like it did on Benghazi and Obamacare, but the cost it threatens to impose on Americans through higher energy costs and job losses, especially in states like West Virginia that rely on coal, and North Dakota which has been booming because of oil exploration.
Again, amnesia takes over because the real evidence is available.
Germany has spent $140 billion on green energy over the last decade but its CO2 output has been rising the past three years and the Merkel government is backing off taxpayer subsidies to the previously favored wind energy industry.
Why?
Due to some of the highest utility prices in the world, several German government officials have proposed a cap on electricity prices while Chancellor Angela Merkel warns of “problems in terms of energy supply’ if they keep the renewable price surcharges in place.
Similar examples are available throughout Europe and the United Kingdom but our ruling class in Washington either ignores, or isn’t aware, of these realities.
Instead, they continue producing their “sky is falling” alarms over global warming/climate change/climate disruption, oblivious to the costs their own plans would place on the American public.
Of course, why should they care?
After all, if Obama follows through on his executive actions in the energy field, the alarmists will receive even more of our taxpayer money through subsidies, and these so-called scientists will continue to receive billions of tax dollars every year to continue their “studies,” while we pay the price for a war on the plant food known as CO2, which makes up about three-tenths of one percent of the world’s atmosphere.
Unspoken is the real war here, on America’s energy supply and jobs. That is truly alarming.
Frank Beckmann is host of “The Frank Beckmann Show” on WJR-AM (760) from The Detroit News.
Update; See how Botkin dismantled the IPCC report here.
Obama climate report as ‘filled with misstatements contradicted by well-established and well-known scientific papers’
Prominent Scientist Dr. Botkin, who has studied climate change for 45 years, told the Committee in Q&A: ‘I have been concerned about global warming since 1968 and in the 1980s, it looked like the weight of evidence lent towards human induced climate change, to a significant extant, and since then it’s moved against it.’
Later in the hearing, Botkin elaborated: ‘I was concerned that there was a human induced climate warning and I gave talks and TV interviews that said that, but since the middle of the 1990s, there is evidence that is running against that.
For example the temperature change is not tracking carbon dioxide very well. Then there is the information from the long term antarctic ice core and some from recent paper in the arctic, that suggest that carbon dioxide does not lead temperature change, it may actually lag it significantly or may not lead it at all, and if that is the case that is still an open but important scientific evidence.
So there are several lines of evidence that are suggesting that it (AGW) is a weaker case today, not a stronger case.”
Since 1968 I have published research on theoretical global warming, its potential ecological effects, and the implications for people and biodiversity. I have spent my career trying to help conserve our environment and its great diversity of species. In doing so I have always attempted to maintain an objective, intellectually honest, scientific approach in the best tradition of scientific endeavor. I have, accordingly, been dismayed and disappointed in recent years that this subject has been converted into a political and ideological debate.
Dr. Botkin joins many other scientists who recently publicly dissented from man-made climate fears.The global warming movement continues to lose scientists, many formerly with the UN IPCC. See more here.
Jan Blits, Reforming the Campus
May a public university manipulate a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request of a faculty member in an effort to squelch the politically incorrect side in the on-going climate wars? The University of Delaware, which has a long, sorry history of political correctness, seems to think that it may, even if its actions violate the faculty member’s academic freedom, Delaware’s FOIA law, and the University’s own FOIA policy.
In December, 2009, David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who was the Delaware State Climatologist from 2005 to 2011, received a FOIA request from Greenpeace. It sought Legates’ “e-mail correspondence and financial and conflict of interest disclosures” “in the possession of or generated by the Office of the Delaware State Climatologist” from January 1, 2000, concerning “global climate change.” Legates is an outspoken critic of the evidence used to show the human effect on climate.
Under Delaware state law, FOIA requests to the University for a faculty member’s academic materials are limited to activities supported by state funding. During Legates’ tenure, the State Climate Office received no state (or University) funding. Nor did Legates receive any state funds for his work as State Climatologist, and the State Climate Office never undertook activities concerning “global climate change.” In short, none of Legates’ work fell within the scope of the FOIA request.
Nevertheless, UD Vice President and General Counsel. Lawrence White, decided that Legates must provide more than Greenpeace had requested, not only all State Climate Office documents, but all documents he had on global climate change, whether or not Greenpeace had requested them. White’s expansive list, covering all of Legates’ teaching, research and service materials going back to 2000, included work unrelated to the State Climate Office, whether conducted on Legates’ own time or on University time, through his personal e-mail or his University e-mail, on his personal computer or a University computer, both in hard files and on computer disks. According to White, Legates had no choice. As a faculty member, White instructed him, Legates had to comply with the request of “a senior University official.” It seemed not to matter to White that the Delaware FOIA law limits requests to state-funded activity and UD’s own policy limits it further to research that is state-funded.
The Virginia Supreme Court recently ruled that, despite Virginia’s FOIA law, the University of Virginia was correct in refusing to comply with a FOIA request for the records and e-mails of a former faculty member, Michael Mann, famous (or infamous) for his alarmist “hockey stick” image of the recent rise in global air temperature. The Virginia law had made all UVA faculty members subject to FOIA requests. The Delaware law, in contrast, restricts requests to faculty who are state-funded and to the work they carry out with state funds. (State money accounts for only a small portion of UD’s revenue.) For many years, the University administration has designated some faculty as doing state-funded work, but kept or removed faculty members from the list if administrators believed that they were likely to receive an unwanted FOIA request. For reasons administrators have declined to explain, a small portion of Legates’ teaching salary was, curiously, placed on the list of state-funded activity shortly before Greenpeace filed its FOIA request in 2009.
A month after Greenpeace’s request to Legates, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an opponent of Greenpeace, filed a nearly identical FOIA request with UD for information on three other Delaware faculty members. These three had contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group often (and recently) warning of the catastrophic effects of global warning. White said no, “because the information you seek does not relate to the expenditure of public funds.” When asked to explain the disparate treatment, White told Legates that he (Legates) did not understand the law. Muddling his own argument, White said that while the law did not require him to give Greenpeace all the documents he had requested from Legates, the law did not prohibit him from requiring Legates to produce them. His authority as a “senior University official” evidently trumped Delaware law and University policy. Under pressure, Legates submitted all the demanded materials in March, 2010.
Under Delaware law, FOIA requests must be answered within ten days (unless there is need to consult with an agency counsel), but White did nothing with Legates’ materials for more than 15 months. In June, 2011, he hired a third-year law student to sort through them. “We have interpreted that language [of the Delaware FOIA law] to mean that we are obliged to produce records, otherwise non-privileged, that pertain to work by Dr. Legates that is supported through grants from state agencies,” White wrote. The law-student’s trolling came up short. The resulting file contained, in its entirety, 1) two e-mail exchanges about federal, not state, funding sources, 2) an invitation from a state agency to give a talk on climate change, for which Legates was not paid, and 3) a report to the Governor and General Assembly on the Delaware Water Supply Coordinating Council, which Legates had no hand in writing and in which he is not mentioned, but which he was simply given when he joined the Council.
White had listed a second category of documents, however, which he said the University was also “obliged” to produce. “[A]nd class-room related work such as syllabi, instructional materials, and class postings, (because a small portion of his salary was paid out of state-appropriated funds).” The file of these teaching documents contained 1) materials from Legates’ introductory course on “Climatic Processes,"2) two e-mail exchanges with two off-campus professors about climate change and the classroom, and a third about his speaking in a graduate course, 3) his 2010 CV, and 4) his Climatologist agreement and related correspondence with the Governor’s Chief of Staff. Again, contrary to White’s false claim, the University has no obligation to produce teaching materials. Its own FOIA policy excludes requests for such materials. Teaching has always enjoyed the full protection of academic freedom. Administrators may not examine it except for cause. Despite claiming that he was “obliged” to produce the materials, White, unable to square his action with official policy, state law or rules of academic freedom, tried to trivialize it as harmless: “[T]hese materials strike me as innocuous in the extreme, and I propose to turn them over all over the Greenpeace.”
That was not all. White also decided “to produce copies of speeches, papers, presentations and other materials that were created by Professor Legates and subsequently published, delivered in lecture form, or otherwise made public.” Many of these public items were gathered from the internet by the law student. While conceding that the state FOIA does not require the disclosure of public materials and Greenpeace had not requested them, White said that he would “turn them over [to Greenpeace] only because it seems potentially provocative to me NOT to surrender documents that are already in the public domain” (his caps). Never at a loss for a pretext to trample faculty rights, White, having claimed that it was harmless to violate Legates’ rights, now claimed that it would be harmful NOT to violate his rights.
This is not the first time the University of Delaware has violated a faculty member’s academic freedom and tried to silence controversial research. Twenty-five years ago, the University banned receiving grants from the foundation supporting the research of a faculty member, Linda Gottfredson. In banning the funding, the University granted that for it to “direct...its attention to the content or method of any faculty member’s research or teaching” would violate the faculty member’s academic freedom. Gottfredson won at federal arbitration when she showed that the University did precisely what it stipulated it must not do (full disclosure: I was her co-plaintiff). When reminded of this precedent and the University’s own stipulation, White, reaching for still another excuse to violate Legates’ rights, said that academic freedom does not impede FOIA requests. State law trumps University policy, he said. When reminded that Legates’ materials included nothing that was subject to the Delaware FOIA law, White dismissed the objection out of hand, without answering it. As he disdainfully declared yet again, the faculty member did not adequately understand the intricacies of the law.
It would be bad enough had White properly applied the FOIA law and UD policy to Legates, but only Legates, and exempted the three politically correct faculty from the burden he levied on Legates. But, much worse, in the guise of asserting his administrative authority and his superior understanding of the law, White repeatedly misrepresented and ignored the established policy and law. Again and again, he fabricated his own policy and law, and justified his actions against Legates on specious grounds. He used his position as Vice President and General Counsel to transform faculty protections against political interference into a cudgel to silence one side in the current climate debate.
See more here.
Meanwhile at UVA, the administration spent a $1M to prevent Michael Mann’s emails from being released because that violated his privacy rights as a faculty member. If you’re on the right (really the left) side of this issue you are protected, if not your a target.