Few things have been demonized by the liberal media as much as the process of hydraulic fracturing, aka “fracking,” for oil and natural gas.
To counter the Left’s misinformation on the subject, CFACT has produced a new video of our Conservation Nation YouTube series titled: Drilling into the Truth Behind Fracking. You can watch it here. CFACT’s own Gabriella Hoffman does an excellent job explaining the fracking process, dispelling misconceptions, and telling the story of those working in the field.
Fracking led to America’s world-leading CO2 emissions reductions of recent years (if that’s your thing) while also fueling our prior energy independence (until Biden came along, that is).
Fracking achieves the environmentalist’s goal of emissions reductions without heavy-handed growth of government while also fueling human prosperity. Of course, the Left would hate it.
Claims from radical greens that fracking harms health or contaminates ground water are completely unfounded. Fracking proved that technological innovation from the free market is the best solution to our energy future.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-09-24 19:32:362021-10-07 20:18:00VIDEO: Drilling Into The Truth Behind Fracking
Please use social media, etc. to pass on this Newsletter to other open-minded citizens…
If at any time you’d like to be added to (or taken off) the distribution of our popular, free Newsletter, simply send me an email saying that.
Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone, as some documents (e.g. PDFs) are much easier to read on a large computer screen… We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize display issues.
Note 2: For recent past Newsletter issues see 2020 Archives & 2021 Archives. To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles over the twelve plus years of the Newsletter, we’ve put together archives since the beginning of the Newsletter — where you can search by year. For a detailed background about the Newsletter, please read this.
Note 3: See this extensive list of reasonable books on climate change. As a parallel effort, we have also put together a list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. Both topics are also extensively covered on my website: WiseEnergy.org.
Note 4: I am not an attorney or a physician, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or the WiseEnergy.org website) should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent, licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues, and consult a competent physician regarding medical matters.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00John Droz, Jr.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJohn Droz, Jr.2021-09-20 08:44:342021-10-07 20:18:15AWED Newsletter: Covering COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections
The new CO2 monitoring Mastercard called Doconomy debuted in order to enable “all users to track, measure and understand their impact by presenting their carbon footprint on every purchase.” The credit cards feature the slogan on them reading “DO. Everyday Climate Action” and have a personal pledge on the rear of the card boasting: “I am taking responsibility for every transaction I make to help protect the planet.” The Mastercards feature the UN “Global Climate Action” logo on them as well.
This CO2 tracking credit card is voluntary, yet every day we see a new push to replace voluntary choices with government mandates.
Could we all be subjected to digitally monitored CO2 limits the next time President Biden “loses patience” with us?
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-09-15 06:32:032021-10-07 20:18:26Carbon Tracking Credit Cards
Claims that hurricanes are becoming more frequent and far more powerful (and deadly) are rampant. But are they true?
In the wake of the destruction of Hurricane Ida, President Joe Biden this week traveled to storm-ravaged areas of New Jersey and New York to deliver a “code red” climate change message to the world: extreme weather poses an “existential threat” to humanity.
“The threat is here. It’s not going to get any better. The question is can it get worse? We can stop it from getting worse,” Biden said in the New York City borough of Queens, where he met with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Bill deBlasio and others. “This is everybody’s crisis.”
Biden was echoing what has essentially become conventional wisdom: climate change is making extreme weather much worse.
“Climate change has turbocharged severe storms, fires, hurricanes, coastal storms and floods — threatening millions,” the Washington Post recently reported. “Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer.”
It’s a theme routinely trotted out after hurricanes. Following Hurricane Katrina, a devastating Category 5 hurricane that caused more than 1,800 deaths and some $125 billion in damage in 2006, research claimed Atlantic hurricanes doubled in the last century.
“These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes,” said Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
The idea that humanity is beset by an increased number of “turbocharged” storms is a bit frightening. But is it true?
A Closer Look at the Science
Before you take out a loan to build a storm shelter in your basement, it might be worthwhile to look at data from the American Meteorological Society recently published in the Wall Street Journal. The data show fewer hurricanes are landing on the continental US, not more.
“[D]espite what you may have heard, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent,” explains Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg in the Journal. “In fact, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900.”
The WSJ is a respected publication, but it of course has a reputation for being right of center. So it’s important to note that Lomborg and the Journal are not out on a limb on this one. There is widespread consensus that hurricanes are not increasing in frequency.
“[A] new statistical analysis of historical records and satellite data suggests that there aren’t actually more Atlantic hurricanes now than there were roughly 150 years ago, researchers report July 13 in Nature Communications,” reportedScience News.
The findings reported in Nature Communications were not an outlier. As The Economistreported in 2017 and the Washington Postreported in 2015, a plethora of research shows hurricanes are becoming less frequent, not more frequent.
That is only half of the story, however. While there is general agreement today that global warming is not causing more hurricanes, many scientists and media reports say storms are growing in intensity.
This claim, Lomborg argues, also is false.
“[No,] there aren’t more powerful hurricanes either. The frequency Category 3 and above hurricanes making landfall since 1900 is also trending slightly down,” Lomborg writes. “A July Nature paper finds that the increases in strong hurricanes you’ve heard so much about are ‘not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.’”
Despite what you may have heard, climate change is not actually causing more hurricanes.
Hurricane activity has actually been decreasing slightly since 1900.
Still, not everyone agrees with Lomborg and Nature. Some believe that the decline in the number of hurricanes is resulting in hurricanes that indeed are more powerful. But how much more?
Chris Landsea, tropical analysis forecast branch leader at the National Hurricane Center, said global warming likely added about 1 percent more power to Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 hurricane. That translated to 1 or 2 mph.
“That is a fairly small increase and most of the computer guidance by global warming models say maybe we could see 3 percent stronger by the end of the century,” said Landsea, speaking during a session on hurricane history in 2019. “That’s really not very much.”
Why so Many Crises?
The actual science of global warming and hurricanes seems fairly clear. Hurricanes are not landing more often on the continental US, but less often. It’s unclear if they are becoming more powerful, but if hurricanes are growing in intensity, it’s not by very much.
These scientific revelations are rather bland, and they seem a stark contrast to claims that extreme weather poses an “existential crisis” to humanity and headlines of “turbocharged” storms.
A person could be forgiven for asking: What gives? What am I supposed to believe? Is a weather apocalypse truly upon us?
If an extreme weather apocalypse is indeed upon us, it is one of many crises we’re told we face. There is no shortage of catastrophes and epidemics, judging from politicians, intellectuals, and media reports. Mass shootings. The coronavirus. The opioid crisis. Forest fires. The list goes on.
While it’s true conflict and crises are common elements of human history, it seems that our modern state of affairs is virtually constant crises. Why?
In his book Crisis and Leviathan, the economist Robert Higgs discusses this phenomenon. Higgs argues that crises are essentially food for the leviathan, a metaphor for the state coined by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and derived from a Biblical sea monster.
Higgs observes that crises have served as the catalysts for the greatest expansions of state power in modern history. The New Deal was the spawn of the Great Depression. The War on Terror and the Patriot Act were the offspring of the 9/11 attacks. And then there is the Pandemic of 2020. Unlike in previous pandemics, public health officials leveraged the full power of the state to attempt to tame COVID-19.
In each crisis, Americans were told the emergency actions taken were not just necessary, but temporary. History, however, shows that once a crisis has passed, “the fattened leviathan continues to hold sway.”
Higgs’s thesis—that crises are the food that feeds the ravenous leviathan, slowly freeing it from the shackles designed to constrain it—calls to mind a meme popular on social media.
“If we let politicians break the law in an emergency,” it goes, “politicians will create an emergency so they can break the law.”
Another version of the meme would be this: Once crises are seen as a legitimate cause for extraconstitutional action, prepare yourself for an abundance of crises.
The Best Way to Fight Extreme Weather
None of this is to say pandemics, extreme weather, shootings, and the like are not real or serious problems. They are.
But it’s important to understand that government is the cause of many of these problems, not the solution. The reality is government isn’t very good at solving simple problems, let alone highly complex ones. Indeed, climate-related deaths are at historic lows—not because governments routinely hit their CO2 reduction benchmarks (they don’t) but because free market capitalism has made human habitats exponentially more resistant to climate-related disasters.
“Better infrastructure, fed by improved technology and wealth, does more to protect lives and property than cutting carbon emissions,” Lomborg explains.
Global temps may indeed be edging upward, but the solution isn’t to give politicians and government bureaucrats the power to regulate the economy with Green New Deal-style legislation designed to curb bad weather.
The solution is to unleash the power of the free market and allow entrepreneurs to build humans a more prosperous and resilient world through human ingenuity.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2021-09-14 08:41:012021-10-07 20:18:32The Myth That Hurricanes Are Getting Worse [Because of Climate Change]
Shortly after my wife graduated from college, she joined Zero Population Growth. Looking back, she tells me it was an emotional reaction fueled by reading Paul Ehrlich’s apocalyptic claims. In his book, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Ehrlich’s book, despite being spectacularly wrong, influenced millions. Zero Population Growth has morphed into the Population Connection. Ehrlich is unrepentant and still claims the collapse of civilization is a “near certainty” in the not too distant future.
Ehrlich is not the only voice proclaiming the end is near. The UK’s “Optimum Population Trust (OPT) believes Earth may not be able to support more than half its present numbers before the end of the century,” TheTelegraph summarized. The OPT movement has attracted followers such as David Attenborough.
In the US, Bernie Sanders recently vowed to support “empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth” as a response to climate change.
Moreover, James Lovelock advanced the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is one “self-regulating organism.” Lovelock forecasts the population of the Earth will fall to one billion from its current total of over seven billion people. Given Lovelock’s cheerfulness about such carnage, it is easy to see why Alan Hall, a senior analyst at TheSocionomist, wonders whether “today’s drives to limit consumption and population” are ideologically related to the eugenics movement from the past century. In his essay “A Socionomic Study of Eugenics,” Hall writes in the Socionomist:
Circa 1900, influential intellectuals in Europe and the U.S. voiced concerns about uncontrolled procreation causing a supposed decline in the quality of human beings. Today, similar groups voice concerns about uncontrolled population growth and resource consumption causing a decline in the quality of the environment…Today’s green advocates brandish images of an overrun, dying planet.
Today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working to aid the lives of children living “in extreme poverty.” In his book, Factfulness, the late professor of international health Hans Rosling, reports on critics of the Gates Foundation who reject such efforts. “The argument goes like this,” Rosling writes. “If you keep saving poor children, you’ll kill the planet by causing overpopulation.”
In the face of advocates for such beliefs, no wonder Hall asks us to reflect on whether we “will make the cut” if those seeking to cull humanity are successful.
Malthusian Doom
We’ve all heard the SparkNotes version of Malthusian predictions of doom caused by overpopulation. Malthus thought food production could not keep pace with population growth. In his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” Malthus anticipated the suffering that awaited humanity.
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
Unlike Ehrlich and others, Malthus had reason to be a pessimist in his lifetime. If Malthus had been writing history or predicting the near future, he would not have been far from the mark.
“The good old days were awful,” observes Johan Norberg in his book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. The year 1868 was one of famine in Sweden. Norberg shares this powerful testimony of a survivor remembering back to his childhood.
We often saw mother weeping to herself, and it was hard on a mother, not having any food to put on the table for her hungry children. Emaciated, starving children were often seen going from farm to farm, begging for a few crumbs of bread. One day three children came to us, crying and begging for something to still the pangs of hunger. Sadly, her eyes brimming with tears, our mother was forced to tell them that we had nothing but a few crumbs of bread which we ourselves needed. When we children saw the anguish in the unknown children’s supplicatory eyes, we burst into tears and begged mother to share with them what crumbs we had. Hesitantly she acceded to our request, and the unknown children wolfed down the food before going on to the next farm, which was a good way off from our home. The following day all three were found dead between our farm and the next.
Sweden was so poor back in the 19th century, Norberg observes, that “it was poorer, with shorter life expectancy and higher child mortality than the average sub-Saharan African country.”
The population of Sweden in 1868 was a bit over 3.5 million. Today Sweden’s population is almost 300 percent larger. Is Sweden more overpopulated today than it was in 1868?
Overpopulation Is Relative
Norberg writes, “In 1694, a chronicler in Meulan, Normandy, noted that the hungry harvested the wheat before it was ripe, and ‘large numbers of people lived on grass like animals.’”
Today people live like animals in North Korea. They, too, eat grass and bark off trees.
Geographically, North Korea is almost 25 percent larger than South Korea. The population of modern South Korea is about double the population of starving North Korea.
Overpopulation is relative to the ability of an economy to provide a decent standard of living, adequate nutrition, and minimize the impact on the environment. Using that measure, North Korea, with more land and fewer people, is overpopulated compared to South Korea. Nineteenth-century Sweden was overpopulated compared to today’s Sweden.
If you think South Korea, with its more modern economy, inflicts more harm on the environment than the poor economy of North Korea, you would be wrong.
The poor people of North Korea “harvest forests for fuel and to make fields during a succession of famines… Some people resorted to eating bark,” the Scientific American noted earlier this year. The result has been widespread deforestation and a denuding of the landscape.
Emaciated looking farmers tilled the earth with plows pulled by oxen and trudged through half-frozen streams to collect nutrient-rich sediments for their fields.
“We went to a national park where we saw maybe one or two birds, but other than that you don’t see any wildlife,” Palmer said.
Dutch soil scientist Joris van der Kamp reports on the North Korean environmental collapse. “The landscape is just basically dead. It’s a difficult condition to live in, to survive.”
Van der Kamp added, “There are no branches of trees on the ground. Everything is collected for food or fuel or animal food, almost nothing is left for the soil.”
Elon Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, but he can find in North Korea a dead landscape with warmer temperatures, more oxygen, and minuscule travel costs compared to the Red Planet. When communism collapses in North Korea, capitalism will terraform the country at an inestimably small fraction of the cost of terraforming Mars.
Restrict the Economy, Create Overpopulation
Based on its ability to support its human population and protect its environment, sparsely populated North Korea is one of the most overpopulated countries in the world.
Norberg explains what Malthus got wrong.
[H]e underestimated [humanity’s] ability to innovate, solve problems and change its ways when Enlightenment ideas and expanded freedoms gave people the opportunity to do so. As farmers got individual property rights, they then had an incentive to produce more. As borders were opened to international trade, regions began to specialize in the kinds of production suited to their soil, climate and skills. And agricultural technology improved to make use of these opportunities. Even though population grew rapidly, the supply of food grew more quickly.
The more specialization and exchange, the wealthier and better fed a growing population will be. In countries like North Korea, Venezuela, and Mao’s China, central planning leads to reduced specialization, which leads to starvation. As Matt Ridley explains in his book The Rational Optimist:
[I]f exchange becomes harder, [people] will reduce their specialisation, which can lead to a population crisis even without an increase in population. The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation. Increasing self-sufficiency is the very signature of a civilisation under stress, the definition of a falling standard of living.
Ridley explains that embracing specialization increases human ingenuity and increases the possibility that more people “can live upon the planet in improving health, food security and life expectancy and that this is compatible with cleaner air, increasing forest cover and some booming populations of elephants.”
In short, Ridley writes, “Embracing dynamism means opening your mind to the possibility of posterity making a better world rather than preventing a worse one.”
No, we are not going to keep adding bodies until the world is groaning at the weight of eleven billion of us and more; nine billion is probably closer to the truth, before the population starts to decline. No, fertility rates are not astronomically high in developing countries; many of them are at or below replacement rate. No, Africa is not a chronically impoverished continent doomed to forever grow its population while lacking the resources to sustain it; the continent is dynamic, its economies are in flux, and birth rates are falling rapidly. No, African Americans and Latino Americans are not overwhelming white America with their higher fertility rates. The fertility rates of all three groups have essentially converged.
Looking at current trends and expecting them to continue is what Hans Rosling calls “the straight line instinct.” That instinct often leads to false conclusions.
Rosling explains why critics of the Gates Foundation’s efforts to save children are dead wrong.
“Saving poor children just increases the population” sounds correct, but the opposite is true. Delaying the escape from extreme poverty just increases the population. Every generation kept in extreme poverty will produce an even larger next generation. The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty and give people better lives.
With better lives, Rosling writes,
parents then have chosen for themselves to have fewer children. This transformation has happened across the world but it has never happened without lowering child mortality.
In the past 20 years, “the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty” has fallen by half. Rosling adds that already the “majority of the world population live in middle-income countries.”
When feverish dreams of doom are used to justify controlling the lives of others, restricting personal and economic freedom, expect more poverty and environmental degradation with real overpopulation like that of North Korea. It is capitalism and freedom that lift humanity out of poverty, vanquish overpopulation, and offer a sustainable future.
Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry’s essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2021-09-11 08:31:182021-10-07 20:18:43The Myth That Our Planet Faces an Overpopulation Crisis
Team Climate hates to debate in a fair forum. The reason? Experts like Marc Morano confront them with the hard data that serves as anti–venom to their propaganda.
Here’s a sample from Marc:
“Even the United Nations admits floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires — either no trend or declining trends on climate time scales. NOAA says that hurricane landfalls are down since 1800, the busiest season, busiest decade…for major hurricanes was the 1940s, so we have a hurricane that hit — Ida…this is nothing short of lobbying using an extreme weather event, a bad weather event to lobby for your political goals. They’ve weaponized the weather and that’s what the Biden administration is doing. It’s what Chuck Schumer is doing, and it’s evidence-free because the more you look at the data there’s always records broken, there’s always extreme weather everywhere on the planet — that’s the norm, nothing unusual now from a climate time scale is occurring.”
Hard data shows deaths from climate are way down and that today’s weather is historically normal, which is anything but alarming. Team Climate finds facts such as these terribly inconvenient.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-09-10 06:34:062021-10-07 20:18:47Watch Morano Out-Debate Climate Guy on Bongino on Fox
Last week, President Joe Biden visited New York to survey the devastation from Hurricane Ida. During his press conference, the president referenced a recent U.N. report that tracks climate change. According to the report, “Global surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over a least the last 2,000 years.” Not surprisingly, Biden used his remarks as an opportunity to advocate for expansive, big-government climate policies, claiming that worsening weather patterns merit a wide-ranging, government-led approach. Without a doubt, hurricanes, fires, and other extreme weather patterns are cause for concern. But how should Christians think about the climate? Yesterday, FRC President Tony Perkins addressed the topic on Washington Watch, offering his perspective on how Christians should approach debates over climate change.
According to Tony, President Biden is correct to note that the climate is changing. Extreme weather patterns are becoming stronger and more frequent. But unlike many in the broader culture who have become gripped with fear about the weather, Christians should approach the topic with a perspective informed by Scripture. And while it may surprise those unfamiliar with the Bible, God’s Word offers insight into how we should think about extreme weather.
First, Christians ought to remember the Bible’s teaching about creation. Genesis 1-2 teaches that God created the heavens and earth. The material creation — including mountains, oceans, deserts, and prairies — were created “ex nihilo,” meaning they were created out of nothing. In short, God spoke, and creation appeared. The doctrine of creation reminds Christians that God is the creator and has control over His creation. Furthermore, Paul explains in Colossians 1: 16-17, “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” Christians understand that God is the creator and sustainer of the world. This understanding undergirds a Christian perspective on the climate. Ultimately, God is in control of everything that happens in the world, and nothing occurs without His knowledge and permission.
Second, in Matthew 24, Jesus tells His disciples about events and changes that will occur as the end of time draws near. Specifically, Jesus mentions great storms and natural disasters, noting, “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places” (Matthew 24:7). From Jesus’ explanation, we can draw an important conclusion, which is that while these changes are scary, we should not be alarmed. In fact, Jesus told His disciples that these events would occur so they would be sobered minded, not alarmist.
Third, it is important for Christians to recall that the Bible explains why natural disasters happen in the first place. In short, all evil and suffering can be traced to the fall of humanity into sin (Genesis 3). Man’s rebellion against God not only resulted in humanity’s spiritual and physical death but had implications for creation as well. As Romans 8:22 explains, “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” Sin not only affects humanity, but the whole of creation, and sin is ultimately behind the evil that ravages our lives.
Considering the wide-ranging effects of sin, Tony made an important point, noting:
Man is responsible for the changing climate. Our sin has corrupted the environment. It began in the Garden of Eden with the fall of man and the climate as only gotten worse ever since. But the solution is not bigger government that will take more of your money and more of your freedoms and promise more things that they cannot deliver on.
Significantly, climate change, natural disasters, war, famine, poverty, and civil unrest are part of living in a fallen world. Christians should care about these issues and do whatever is in their power to push back against the corroding effects of sin — wherever they appear. But followers of Jesus should not expect the government to be able to provide all the solutions and hand over their freedoms for a false sense of security. In fact, Christians need to be wary of those who want to use issues like the changing climate to take away freedoms and impose policies that will have harmful and unintended consequences.
Christians should not forget that God is the one who calms the storms and is Lord over the elements. As Tony remindedWashington Watch listeners,
If you and I take the warning that Jesus has given us, not to scare us but to prepare us for what is unfolding in the times in which we live, we will be better prepared to face them and to minister through them so that others might come to know the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and be free from their sin and experience life abundantly.
Ultimately, Jesus warned us that things would get difficult in the final days. But even as circumstances and events become more challenging, believers have an opportunity to point others to the hope of the gospel. While maintaining a posture of trust toward God and refusing to panic or surrender our basic rights, Christians can encourage others and strengthen our faith as we trust in Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2021-09-10 05:38:062021-10-07 20:18:48VIDEO: A Biblical Perspective on Climate Change
Please use social media, etc. to pass on this Newsletter to other open-minded citizens…
If at any time you’d like to be added to (or taken off) the distribution of our popular, free Newsletter, simply send me an email saying that.
Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone, as some documents (e.g. PDFs) are much easier to read on a large computer screen… We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize display issues.
Note 2: For recent past Newsletter issues see 2020 Archives & 2021 Archives. To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles over the twelve plus years of the Newsletter, we’ve put together archives since the beginning of the Newsletter — where you can search by year. For a detailed background about the Newsletter, please read this.
Note 3: See this extensive list of reasonable books on climate change. As a parallel effort, we have also put together a list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. Both topics are also extensively covered on my website: WiseEnergy.org.
Note 4: I am not an attorney or a physician, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or the WiseEnergy.org website) should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent, licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues, and consult a competent physician regarding medical matters.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00John Droz, Jr.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJohn Droz, Jr.2021-09-07 07:39:282021-10-07 20:18:59AWED NEWSLETTER: From COVID to Climate and Energy to Elections.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments introduced lockdowns and other restrictions, with clear social and economic consequences. But there are growing signs the world could see more lockdowns in the future — for climate change.
The initial months of the pandemic starting in March 2020 saw the vast majority of states impose stay-at-home orders and other restrictions. The majority of states also introduced mask mandates and social distancing requirements, along with limits on public gathering, and many of these policies were in effect for months.
It is evident that lockdown policies had widespread social and economic consequences. The closure of schools kept more than one billion children out of school globally, and studies suggest a lack of in-person schooling has dramatically reduced academic performance.
In spite of these concerns, scientists and climate activists have pointed to the supposedly positive impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on the environment. A steep decline in social and commercial activities led to huge reductions in carbon emissions and other climate metrics, NBC News reported.
The Department of Health and Human Services established a new office late in August to make climate change a public health issue. During the pandemic, public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued broad policy changes ranging from general health recommendations to the federal eviction moratorium.
Under a potential climate lockdown, governments and public health bodies could exercise similar authority to enforce sweeping changes to environmental and energy policy. This could entail extreme energy-saving measures such as limits on private-vehicle use, consumption of animal products and fossil fuel drilling.
A study published in Nature Climate Change in March found that carbon emissions fell by around 2.6 billion metric tons in 2020. Researchers concluded a pandemic-scale lockdown once every two years would lead to an equivalent decline in emissions over the long-term.
Climate policy experts told the Daily Caller that climate lockdowns are not a far-fetched scenario and warned the Biden administration’s focus on climate change as a public health issue could lead to similar restrictions on American public life.
“If climate activists were allowed, they would take us from COVID lockdowns straight into climate lockdowns,” said JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy. “Now that they’ve seen arbitrary lockdowns successfully imposed under the guise of a “public health emergency,” they can’t wait for federal, state and local declarations of a climate emergency to achieve the same sort of dominance over us.”
“Treating climate change as a health issue is ridiculous,” added CO2 Coalition executive director Greg Wrightstone. “Climate alarmists seek to exert government control over energy production and use it to advance an upside down world view.”
“The Biden-Harris administration wants to turn the attention of every federal agency to climate change,” noted Competitive Enterprise Institute energy director Myron Ebell. “Requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to waste valuable resources on climate change rather than on protecting and improving people’s health is criminal lunacy.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2021-09-05 06:13:162021-10-07 20:19:04Think COVID-19 Lockdowns Were Bad? Climate Lockdowns Could Be Next
If “news” is about how today differs from yesterday, the press missed a lot of news in the long-awaited new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was issued a few weeks ago.
After 41 years of promoting a fuzzy and unsatisfying estimate of how much warming might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the world’s climate science arbiter has finally offered the first real improvement in the history of modern climate science.
Through five previous U.N. assessment plus their predecessor, the 1979 Charney Report, the likely worst-case was a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius. This came from averaging the result of inconsistent computer climate simulations about which the IPCC knew only one thing: They couldn’t all be right and perhaps none were. In another departure, the U.N. panel now says the dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.
The report also notes, as the press never does, the full impact of these emissions won’t be manifested until decades, even a century, later. The ultimate likely worst-case effect of a doubling of CO2 might be 4 degrees, but the best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees, or 1.6 degrees on top of the warming experienced since the start of the industrial age.
You might not wish this on your least-favorite planet, but compare it with media coverage of the U.S. National Climate Assessment in 2018, which paraded as a nearly foregone conclusion a temperature increase of 6.1 degrees.
No, the new report isn’t a reason to stop worrying about climate change, on the unlikely assumption that your previous level of worry corresponded to the actual science. But if you’ve been buying the media’s exaggerations, you can relax quite a bit.
The words most quoted in the press weren’t found in the U.N. report or even its executive summary. They were the claims of a pair of U.N. officials that the report heralded a “code red for humanity” and, even more devoid of meaning, that “no one is safe” from a warming planet.
In reality, no creature makes the whole planet its home but picks those zones it finds most equable. Even with technological help, humanity is present, and thinly so, on 20% of the earth’s land surface. The boundaries of this presence will shift in response to a changing climate, as they have in the past.
By now, though, the press and the climate science impresarios know each other too well, thus scripted idiocies abound. This week’s massive rainstorm in the Northeast reflexively was described as a consequence of climate change. Never mind that heavy rains always happened and, in any case, climate policy can’t be a solution for a New York City storm-drain system designed not to withstand a five-year storm, let alone a 100-year storm.
Or take the U.S. government’s claim that July was the hottest month on record. Unmentioned in any news report that I could find, the margin of error in this measurement was 10 times as large as the purported difference over the previously claimed hottest month of July 2016.
Imagine the news industry was still able to discern news. If the latest in a 40-year succession of climate forecasts differs from its predecessors in finding temperature change and emissions not as bad as previously projected, this would qualify as news. That is, to a media not wedded to the senseless assumption that climate science can only produce a succession of ever more dire discoveries……
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2021-09-05 05:26:132021-10-07 20:19:05WSJ: Media Can’t Handle The Climate Truth
Hurricane Ida brought powerful wind and rain to Louisiana and drenched the Northeast.
Devastating fires have consumed California forests and burned people out of their homes.
Politicians and pressure groups, from President Biden on down, rushed to capitalize on people’s heart-rending losses, and exploit them to push the global warming narrative.
“The past few days of Hurricane Ida and the unprecedented flash floods in New York and New Jersey is yet another reminder these extreme storms and the climate crisis are here.”
“Global warming is upon us, and it’s going to get worse, and worse, and worse, and that’s why it’s so imperative that we pass the two bills.”
Embattled Governor Gary Newsom, speaking on the Caldor and Dixie fires, vowed to,
“continue to lead on climate change, and that is our resolve and commitment to take a backseat to no one in this country in terms of our commitment to radically change the way we produce and consume energy.”
There is a chorus of voices conflating our weather with climate in ways scientific data does not support.
Hurricane Ida strengthened over a warm Gulf of Mexico. Yet there is no trend that shows the Gulf warming in a meaningful way. This is U.S. government data. Could any number of wind turbines, solar panels, or electric vehicles have meaningfully altered this temperature data, or for that matter Hurricane Ida?
Similarly, California rainfall always varies greatly from year to year. Here, for example, is the precipitation data for San Diego. Rainfall is low this year, yet not as low as many other years, some over a century ago. Who truly believes that taxes, redistribution or energy mandates could have meaningfully brought more or less rain? Would that even be desirable if they could?
When Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans flooded, not because of climate change, but because aging levies and pumps failed. We spent the last sixteen years improving the levies and pumps. This year they held. That’s what genuine “infrastructure” investment looks like.
CFACT stands with everyone who has suffered loss from fire, wind or flood. Count on our thoughts, prayers and action.
We must manage our forests better, harden the New York City Subways against storm surge and rain as required, and continue to ensure our noble first responders have the equipment and planning they need to protect us.
There has always been extreme weather and always will.
Exploiting the suffering caused by nature’s fury to push radical redistribution and climate policies is shameful.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-09-04 07:34:242021-10-07 20:19:08Biden Wrong On Fires and Ida
Leave it to Team Climate to exploit the crisis in Afghanistan and get everything wrong.
Marc Morano featured on Climate Depot a bizarre headline from Newsweek which implied that the Taliban might not be so bad after all. This is because, apparently, the Taliban wants to curry good will with the world community by fighting climate change! Pay no attention to the bombings, beatings and beheadings!
Newsweek quotes Taliban official Abdul Qahar Balkhi saying,
“‘We believe the world has a unique opportunity of rapprochement and coming together to tackle the challenges not only facing us but the entire humanity,’ Balkhi added, ‘and these challenges ranging from world security and climate change need the collective efforts of all.’”
So there you have it … the Taliban are really just a bunch of conscientious woke liberals. Unbelievable.
A suicide bomber just detonated a bomb at the Kabul airport. There are multiple explosions and gunfire. That’s what the reality of evil extremism looks like. This has ZERO to do with climate.
Let’s hope President Biden’s mind-boggling bungling of the situation in Afghanistan, coupled with the horrific acts by evil extremists in that troubled land, rip the blinders off all of us and focuses us on what real tragedy looks like and how to fight it going forward.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-08-27 06:29:532021-10-07 20:19:52Afghanistan Climate Nonsense
“It’s getting late early,” said that great 20th century philosopher, Yogi Berra.
For President Joseph Biden, this nugget from the New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher sticks like butterscotch as his policy blunders pile up and Americans increasingly feel their baleful effects. They include the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, menacing inflation, the human tidal wave over the open southern border, the new coronavirus outbreak, and his war on American energy.
These are a few of many examples that suggest his presidency may soon implode, before his first year concludes. By contrast, it took Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon until their third and fifth years, respectively, for their presidencies to collapse beyond recovery.
President Biden’s war on American-produced energy is galling and—dare I say—un-American. This is because of two recent administration actions that contradict his purported climate policy and confirm the blizzard of lies about the implications of climate change.
First, last May the president lifted U.S. sanctions on companies that were constructing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, which expands the market for Russian fossil fuel energy. That same Russia is governed by Vladimir Putin who we’ve been told incessantly for years is the worst dictator alive – until Mr. Biden gave him this energy gift for no discernable return benefit.
Then there was the president’s national security advisor, a man named Jake Sullivan, who last week called on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase production and exports in order to lower gasoline prices. OPEC, he said, “should move faster to restore the global supply of gasoline … higher gasoline prices, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global [economic] recovery.” The same day, the president’s top economic advisor urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the gasoline market for any illegal conduct.
Clearly, President Biden and his administration are starting to panic about rapidly increasing gas prices and broader inflation. They are so worried, their entreaty for more oil exposes their climate policy as a gigantic fraud.
Google up “Biden existential threat” and the results go on interminably. The president habitually claims that climate change is the “existential threat of our time.” This is dogma in his administration and for many in Congress. But does Mr. Biden really believe? His gift to Russia and mendicancy toward OPEC suggest otherwise.
From day one of his presidency, Mr. Biden set forth to act on his claim of climate catastrophe by curbing domestic energy production in oil, gas and coal, starting with executive orders to cancel construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and stop new energy leases on federal lands. Another order last January committed the U.S. to a “whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis” and established “climate considerations as an essential element in U.S. foreign policy and national security.”
Except when it’s not.
The Biden actions on Nord Stream 2 and OPEC reveal these climate directives to be at best, rhetorical; at worst, a lie.
Seven months later, energy prices are skyrocketing and Americans are feeling the pinch. This is no accident or happenstance.
The 12-month period through July, overall price inflation increased 5.4 percent, the highest in 13 years, while energy prices surged nearly 24 percent, more than four times the general rate. The ripple effect of skyrocketing energy prices will reverberate throughout the economy with each passing month, with higher manufacturing costs, higher shipping costs and more.
With inflation rearing its ugly head, maybe the “existential threat” of climate change is not so existential and not even a threat, after all. The claptrap about a “zero-carbon economy” by the Biden team becomes just that with their public plea for more carbon-spewing crude oil from overseas.
As former President Jimmy Carter learned more than 40 years ago, the inflation genie is very hard to put back into the bottle quickly and Americans do not react well.
It is one thing for President Biden and his team of adherents to Tweet about climate change and issue executive orders. When these and other policies take hold and the inflationary effects occur (as I predicted), their demand for more foreign oil is further evidence of a house of cards that is climate policy.
Sometimes presidential difficulties result from events beyond their control. Jimmy Carter did not abet inflation and Donald Trump did not unleash the coronavirus, but the issues engulfed them and cost them both re-election.
By contrast, Richard Nixon’s problems from the Watergate scandal were self-inflicted. So it is with President Biden’s climate policies and much else afflicting the nation.
Joe Biden became a U.S. Senator when Mr. Nixon was still president and he surely recalls the hapless Carter presidency shortly thereafter. Before it is too late, President Biden should jettison this fruitless climate crusade – something he never truly embraced while a 36-year senator. Rather than beg OPEC for more oil, the president should immediately re-open American oil and gas production and restore our nation’s energy independence.
Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at CFACT. He has researched and advocated for a variety of policy issues, including education reform and fiscal policy, both in the non-profit sector and in government in the administration of former New York Governor George Pataki. He previously wrote and edited The Chalkboard weblog for the NY Charter Schools Association, and has been published in numerous media outlets, including The Hill, New York Post, Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. Twitter: @PeterMurphy26. Website: https://www.petermurphylgs.com/
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-08-24 09:18:252021-10-07 20:20:00Biden Climate Change Policy a ‘House of Cards’
The horrible tragedy in Afghanistan revealed a Biden Administration divorced from reality.
President Biden and his people not only failed to validly assess the ramifications of their actions, they froze like deer in headlights and proved unable to adapt and respond as new information became available.
Afghanistan turned the Biden team into a bunch of fact-challenged “Baghdad Bobs.”
As the Taliban took control of town after town and were approaching Kabul, State Department spokesman Ned Price could not process what was happening. On Friday (the thirteenth) he told NPR “The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces have 300,000 fighters at their disposal, 300,000… In fact, President Biden’s budget request for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces going forward has $3.3 billion of support… If you look at it on paper, they once again have over 300,000 troops. They have an air force. They have special forces. They have heavy equipment. The Taliban has almost none of this. The Taliban is a force of some 70,000 to 80,000, less than a third of the size of what the Afghan government can muster.”
Three days later President Ashraf Ghani had fled and the Taliban controlled Kabul.
Ned Price spent the last few years as Director of Policy and Communications at National Security Action, a left-wing think tank focused “on advancing American global leadership and opposing the reckless policies of the Trump Administration.” Price was one of President Biden’s earliest appointments. The Biden Administration is filled with feckless bureaucrats like Price.
The Biden Administration did not understand Afghanistan. They failed to formulate a valid plan for withdrawal, but worse, once proven wrong, they were unable to reassess and respond. “On paper” Kabul remained secure.
We can learn a great deal from Biden’s Afghanistan debacle.
The Biden Administration smugly lectures us on scores of topics as if they possess great insight to which we all must yield.
They are almost always WRONG. Unfortunately, unlike Afghanistan, it usually takes far longer to learn just how wrong they are.
Climate change is “an existential threat” Biden tells us with a wag of his finger. The science is settled and not to be discussed. Maybe on paper or computer models, Mister President, reality however, continues to reveal the models to be too hot, and the weather to be natural.
It is the Biden Administration’s climate policies that are actually making America less secure. Last week Biden had the audacity to call on OPEC to pump more oil, while he does everything to strangle American-made energy production to make us more dependent on nations who hate us.
As Biden forces us to adopt more inefficient, intermittent solar and wind and short-range electric vehicles, it also forces greater reliance on China. China has a near-monopoly on the rare Earth minerals necessary to make renewables and EVs. With China embracing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, expect the Chinese government move quickly to exploit Afghanistan’s vast resources including lithium and oil.
Here’s a frightening reality. Biden’s military and foreign policy bureaucracy that failed so dramatically, is MORE ABLE than the people running his energy, environment, economic, immigration, criminal justice and the rest of American policy.
Americans must wake up to the reality that left-wing policies do not work across the board.
Wrecking our electric grid is a terrible mistake. So are the higher taxes, new entitlements and waste in Biden’s $3.5 trillion spendapalooza bill.
Biden’s bureaucrats and left-wing zealots are dead wrong across the board and must be stopped before they do further damage.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCommittee For A Constructive Tomorrow2021-08-24 09:10:192021-10-07 20:20:00Biden Clueless On Much More Than Afghanistan
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00John Droz, Jr.http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJohn Droz, Jr.2021-08-23 08:18:242021-10-07 20:20:05NEWSLETTER: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.