Americans in large numbers are turning off TV newscasts, canceling subscriptions to newspapers, and seeking other sources of news. Distrust of the national media has hit an all-time high.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 65 percent of Americans believe that the national news media have a negative effect on our country.
According to a recent Gallup poll, six in ten Americans now have little or no confidence in the national media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 65 percent of Americans believe that the national news media have a negative effect on our country.
Americans are frustrated because they know that many of the “news stories” they read are only opinion columns in disguise. If the story does not fit the liberal worldview, then facts are ignored, dissent is silenced, and Americans are told what to think. Perhaps one of the worst examples of one-sided, biased reporting involves global warming.
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Those who reject the liberal viewpoint that climate change is the greatest threat to our country are ridiculed and ignored. For example, the Associated Press recently amended its stylebook to recommend that those who question the science behind global warming be called climate change “doubters” instead of “skeptics.” But this is inaccurate, since many “skeptics” don’t doubt that climate change has occurred.
Liberal groups continue to attempt to silence debate. The repeated claims that “the debate is over” and that “97 percent of scientists agree that human-caused global warming is real” are false and mislead the public. In testimony before the Science Committee, a lead author of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that the 97 percent estimate “just crumbles when you touch it.”
The source of this “97 percent” myth is a discredited study that attempted to categorize scholarly articles on climate change by the position the papers took on the issue. But most of the papers never took a position on climate change at all. This has not stopped the liberal national media from touting this illegitimate statistic.
Silencing debate is contrary to the scientific method. If these groups were confident about their arguments, they would welcome more debate to test their theories. However, some media outlets, such as the Los Angeles Times, have changed their policies and no longer accept letters to the editor from those who question human-made climate change. That this would happen in a democracy where free speech is enshrined in the Constitution is unbelievable.
Scientists who are not alarmists agree that climate change is a complex subject with many variables. But the liberal national media instead chooses to focus on human contributions and usually fails to provide both sides.
For example, the national media hyped NASA’s finding that 2014 was the hottest year on record. Ignored was the footnote that revealed that NASA was only 38 percent certain this was accurate. Less than fifty-fifty. Americans would have been better served by a coin toss.
Too often, these alarmist announcements are based on manipulations of existing data. And when Congress or independent researchers question federal agencies about the data, they are criticized as “attacking scientists.”
Particularly regrettable is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fails to include all relevant data sources in its monthly temperature news releases. Atmospheric satellite data, considered by many to be the most reliable, has clearly showed no warming for the past two decades. This fact is well documented, but it does not fit the liberal politics of the administration or the national media.
Americans deserve all the facts that surround climate change, not just those that the national media want to promote.
NOAA also published a controversial study last year where scientists altered global surface temperature data and widely publicized their results as refuting the two-decade pause in global warming. This week, a new peer-reviewed study was published in the journal Nature that, according to one of the authors, shows “reduced rates of surface warming” and “essentially refutes” NOAA’s study. Shouldn’t the media acknowledge that their alarmist headlines are based on incomplete information?
Americans will continue to distrust the liberal national media until the media provide objective coverage of the news. Americans deserve all the facts that surround climate change, not just those that the national media want to promote.
Polluted air is a major contributor to the global burden of ill-health. A comprehensive WHO study (Global Burden of Disease) attributes nearly 6 million deaths to it in 2010, second only to overall diet and high blood pressure. It kills more people than smoking, alcohol or drugs. So, when we see headlines such as UK air pollution ‘linked to 40,000 early deaths a year’, it is not something we should dismiss lightly.
This headline comes from a report about a new study - Every breath we take: the lifelong impact of air pollution - recently published jointly by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. These are highly respected professional bodies, but they base their findings on published literature and the figures quoted could themselves be subjected to bias.
The figure reported is for deaths attributed to outdoor pollution in the form of particulates and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). But the study also deals with indoor pollution, saying “There is now good awareness of the risks from badly maintained gas appliances, radioactive radon gas and second-hand tobacco smoke, but indoors we can also be exposed to NO2 from gas cooking and solvents that slowly seep from plastics, paints and furnishings. The lemon-and-pine scents that we use to make our homes smell fresh can react chemically to generate air pollutants, and ozone-based air fresheners can also cause indoor air pollution.”
Radon is a very specific problem, which affects certain parts of the country because of the rock on which houses are built; the greatest problems are in the far South West. Being a radioactive gas, radon can cause cancer when breathed in over a period of time, and is believed to result in about 1,100 lung cancer deaths each year. Second-hand smoke has been a much greater problem, and was still estimated to cause 2,800 deaths annually in 2010. However, these two indoor pollutants - the only ones for which mortality figures are quoted - appear to cause only about 10% of the number of deaths as outdoor air pollution.
To look at the figures in a different way, if we take the current world population to be about 7.4 billion and that of the UK roughly 64 million, we can estimate an annual death rate of around 60,000 in the UK on a pro rata basis. But this assumes that the risk from air pollution is the same in a prosperous western European country as the average for the entire world, the great majority of whose people live in considerably worse conditions than ours. Even so, the 40,000 headline figure seems to suggest that this island is still a pretty polluted place in global terms.
This seems surprising, given the end of coal fires brought about by the Clean Air Act, for example. During the lifetimes of many of us, we have seen London and other major cities reveal their true colours once the layer of black soot had been removed. Also, despite the justified bad publicity about diesel engine emissions recently, both petrol and diesel engines have become much cleaner and more efficient and the removal of lead from petrol has removed a major source of one very serious pollutant.
The other anomaly is that the problems from outdoor air pollution appear to be much greater than for indoor pollution in the UK, in contrast to the global situation.
To go back to the report, “A WHO global burden of disease analysis identified household air pollution as an extremely important risk factor accounting for an estimated 4.3 million deaths worldwide in 2012, mostly in low- and middle-income countries and including some 99,000 in Europe. Around 60% of these deaths are due to stroke (34%) and ischaemic heart disease (26%), with the remainder accounted for by COPD (22%), acute lower respiratory disease (12%) and lung cancer (6%)”.
That’s about 70% (4.3 million out of a total of 6 million) due to indoor air pollution. If we consider simply the deaths due to outdoor pollution - estimated at 1.7 million globally - the UK’s pro rata share would be less than 15,000. Knowing that urbanisation in developing countries is proceeding rapidly and that Beijing and Delhi, to name but two, suffer from horrendous pollution at present, it seems highly likely that the UK figure would be well below that. So, what is the reality? How much of a problem is external air pollution in a rich modern society?
Given these contradictory figures, we really can’t say, but there are two main possible answers: either that there are many more deaths globally from air pollution than is recognised or that the risks in Western Europe are overstated. There again, another possible explanation is that life expectancy in developing countries is significantly lower, so that many people die from other causes before the heart or lung diseases brought on or exacerbated by pollution (and that typically kill older people) can take their toll.
Whatever the reason, we can see the need to take a broader view and put the findings in perspective. The report from the Royal Colleges reports, for example, the total estimated deaths due to PM2.5 (very fine particulates) as 28,861, or 75 per 100,000 people over 30. But to put it another way, the number of days of life lost is, on average, 194 for women and 182 for men. Would people be less worried about dying six months earlier than statistics would suggest towards the end of a long life than about the headline figure of total deaths?
These discrepancies also point towards a real problem with epidemiological studies: attribution of death or disease to a single cause when there may be a number of contributory factors. In our safe, prosperous European countries we worry increasingly about risks which we once took for granted. That doesn’t mean that we should ignore urban air quality, neither should we stop opening windows to get fresh air into houses, but the real problems globally are in the developing world: indoor cooking fires and highly polluted cities.
Finally, the report inevitably includes a reference to the modeled impacts of climate change on health: “If we act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to target levels by 2050, we can have a real impact. An analysis for the European Commission suggests that, each year in the UK, this would prevent the following impacts related to local and regional air pollutant exposure: 5,700 deaths, 1,600 hospital admissions for lung and heart problems and 2,400 new cases of bronchitis.”
Reliance on the output of models which have failed to predict the pattern of global temperatures over the past twenty years doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Modeling of all sorts should be seen as giving a picture of what might happen given a particular set of circumstances, and should not be confused with evidence.
The recent Supreme Court decision stopping the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan and war on coal in its tracks, at least for the duration of the president’s term, is very much in the news. So is his attempt to impose a $10.25 (35-40%) tax on every barrel of crude oil produced in or entering the United States.
My article this week ties all of this together - and offers a few lessons in free enterprise capitalism for the more economically challenged among us.
Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
Tax oil to subsidize wind?
Obama wants to punish oil industry to advance climate agenda. So do Hillary, Bernie and Mike
Paul Driessen
If you want more of something, mandate it, subsidize it and exempt it from regulations. If you want less of something, punish it with taxes and regulations. Put more bluntly, the power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy. This is the First Rule of Government.
No presidency has ever come close to the Obama Administration in employing the rule to advance its ideologies and agendas. No industry has been so favored as renewable energy over the past seven years. No sector has been so thoroughly vilified and subjugated as fossil fuels during that period.
Thankfully, Congress refused to impose a cap-tax-and-trade regime on carbon-based energy and U.S. jobs, families, economic growth and living standards. However, EPA and other Obama agencies simply replaced unsuccessful legislative initiatives with regulations, often employing highly innovative statutory interpretations to justify its actions - and courts too often bowed to this “agency discretion.”
Nowhere was this more heavy-handed and destructive than in the coal and climate change arena, where a regulatory tidal wave inundated mines, power plants, companies, families, communities and entire states. Other EPA and Interior Department rules blocked leasing, drilling, fracking and other energy activities on millions of acres of government-administered lands, onshore and off, and even on state and private land.
Thanks to determined efforts by state attorneys general and other parties, however, a number of these regulations were stymied in courts of law. Nowhere was this more important than this week’s Supreme Court decision to block implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan while lower courts consider some 30 lawsuits over its legality, state sovereignty, the scope of agency discretion in interpreting and rewriting federal laws, and the plan’s effects on energy, jobs, health and welfare.
That means this noxious regulation will be “vacated” for the remainder of Obama’s presidency.
The president, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and their allies are not happy. They promise to charge ahead with their “fundamental transformation” of the United States, via other tactics and edicts.
The oil patch is one of the few industries that kept the Obama economy (and presidency) afloat - primarily because of fracking, which slipped in under the EPA/environmentalist radar but is now under constant attack by Interior and Big Green. It created millions of jobs, channeled billions of dollars to local, state and federal treasuries, brought gasoline prices below $2 per gallon, and saved American families billions: every penny not spent on gasoline puts $1 billion a year back into our pockets.
So how does Obama intend to repay the industry, now that it has fallen on hard times? Amid a sluggish global economy and record oil and gas production, oil prices have plunged below $30 a barrel - forcing the oil patch to lay people off, many companies to retrench or ponder bankruptcy, and many communities to confront reduced employment, consumer spending, real estate values, and revenues.
But as part of his last-gasp, $4.1-trillion, $503-billion-deficit 2017 federal budget, the president wants Congress to slap a $10.25 tax on every barrel of domestically produced or imported oil. He says this will raise some $400 billion over the next ten years.
This will allow him to increase EPA’s budget to $8.3 billion, pour $1.7 billion a year into the “climate fund,” and channel hundreds of billions into high speed rail, wind, solar, biofuel, “eco-friendly” cars and other “green” energy schemes. It thus means more opportunities for unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to pick winners and losers, expand their fiefdoms, and pad their bonuses and pensions.
Thankfully, the proposal is “dead on arrival” in Congress. Enough members understand (even if the president does not) that this tax will not be “paid for by the oil companies.” It will only be collected by oil companie and then passed along to every American family and business, in the form of higher gasoline prices and higher costs for everything produced or transported using petroleum: food, clothing, plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, housing, healthcare, and countless other products and services. Even ethanol and other biofuels require petroleum, as do organic food and electric cars.
Mr. Obama, however, sees additional advantages to a 35% oil tax. It lets him stigmatize Big Oil yet again.
It advances his goal of ending our “addiction” to fossil fuels that still provide 82% of US and 87% of global energy ‘ because they are the most abundant, reliable, affordable energy sources available today; because they sustain modern economies and living standards, and help lift billions out of poverty and disease. Would Obama also have us end our “addiction” to food, shelter and human companionship?
An oil tax would also help him promote the climate treaty he signed in Paris. The Supreme Court’s slap-down of EPA’s plans to regulate fossil fuels into oblivion means the United States is far less likely to implement the president’s unilateral commitment to the accord’s emission reduction demands (and massive wealth transfers, via climate “adaptation and reparation” payments) even assuming the Senate ultimately approves the treaty, under its “advice and consent” authority. That in turn means developed and developing nations alike are even less likely to slash their CO2 emissions, carbon-based energy use, economic growth and living standards, for no progress in controlling nature-driven climate change.
Finally, all that devoutly wished for tax revenue would enable Mr. Obama to repay his debts to crony corporatist friends like Elon Musk. His Tesla Motors company continues to hemorrhage investor money despite massive infusions of taxpayer cash in the form of CO2 rules, subsidies, loans, $7,500 tax credits per car purchased, and free charging stations, so that the wealthiest 1.0 or 0.1 percent will buy the pricey cars. In 2015 alone, Tesla lost another $889 million, on revenues of $4.05 billion.
We’ve come to expect this from President Obama. Equally depressing, we also expect it from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, former DemoRepublican candidate-in-waiting Michael Bloomberg, most of today’s Democratic politicians, too many Republican pols, most government “public servants,” and certainly those who are “feeling the Bern” or think “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women” by voting for a certain candidate. (Hint: Ms. Albright didn’t mean Carly or Sarah.)
Indeed, Mrs. Clinton wants to have a half billion more solar panels deployed during her first four years in office, “enough clean energy to power every home” in America, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $200 billion a year. Plus free education, free universal healthcare, and more. Senator Sanders doubtless agrees.
It is a sad, painful assessment of their economic literacy and of our high schools, colleges, business communities and politicians’ ability to empower students and voters through economic literacy, a grasp of socialism’s abject failures and horrid excesses, and an appreciation of free enterprise capitalism’s incomparable record of improving the health, living standards and prospects of billions.
It’s also a sad commentary on liberal-progressive “climate justice” and “compassion” for coal mine, power plant and oil patch workers and families who have been pummeled by their policies - and for poor, minority and blue collar families that would be hit hardest by the Obama oil tax. Those families pay a far larger share of their incomes on energy, food, clothing and other necessities than do Barack, Hillary and Michael’s upper-crust friends, Bernie’s Wall Street benefactors, or even middle class families:
Families making less than $30,000 a year spend 26% of their after-tax income on energy, while families that make over $50,000 a year spend only 8% and those in upper 1% spend only a fraction of 1 percent.
Were President Obama to succeed on his oil tax, “stop climate change” and “leave all fossil fuels in the ground” agenda, his “legacy” would be making tens of millions more Americans jobless, energy deprived and impoverished and keeping billions beyond our borders mired in abject poverty, disease, malnutrition and despair. It’s up to informed citizen-voters to ensure this does not happen.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.