Environment Archives - Page 100 of 103

EPA-Mandate Will Mean Higher Electricity Costs, Says Obama Official

February 12, 2014/in Economy, Energy, Environment, News/by Sean Hackbarth

Carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS) mandated in a proposed EPA greenhouse gas regulation on new power plants will mean higher electricity costs, a Obama administration official admitted to a House of Representatives subcommittee.

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When asked by how much CCS will add to the cost of electricity generated by coal plants, Department of Energy Deputy Assistant Secretary for Clean Coal Dr. Julio Friedmann told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that first generation technology will add “something like a 70 to 80 percent increase on the wholesale price of electricity.” The cost increase from more efficient, second generation CCS is expected to onlybe half that amount.

CCS is the cornerstone to EPA’s proposed greenhouse gas regulations for new power plants. The technology is still not commercially viable. As Dan Byers wrote in a post on EPA’s proposed regulation:

The EPA is mandating carbon capture sequestration (CCS), but as an integrated technology, CCS has never been demonstrated on a commercial power plant, and is nowhere near ready for broad deployment. This fact has been argued by the federal government itself….

Not only does the Obama administration acknowledge that the technology isn’t ready, it also admits that it will significantly increase electricity costs.

There is No Global Warming and Will Be None for Decades

February 11, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Science/by Alan Caruba

I recently received an unsigned email about my Sierra Club commentary in which I pointed out that it opposes traditional forms of energy and made a passing reference to Obama’s lie that “climate change”, the new name for global warming, was now “settled science.”

Global warming was never based on real science. It was conjured up using dubious computer models and we were supposed to believe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could actually predict what the climate would be twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now.

The writer of the email disagreed with me. “lol you are a f**king idiot. you don’t believe there is global warming going on? you need to let your prejudices go and stop basing your views on what your political stance is…do you research you f**king faggot.”

Now, not everyone who believes in global warming is as rude as this individual and certainly not as ignorant, but his message suggests that those who do not believe in it do so as the result of “a political stance” when, in fact, our views are based on science.

Anyone familiar with my writings knows that a lot of research is involved. In my case, it dates back to the late 1980s when the global warming hoax began to be embraced by politicians like Al Gore who made millions selling worthless “carbon credits” while warning that “Earth has a fever.”

A small army of scientists lined their pockets with government grants to produce data that supported the utterly baseless charge that carbon dioxide was causing the Earth to warm. They castigated other scientists or people like myself as “deniers” while we proffered to call ourselves sceptics. They were joined by most of the media that ignored the real science. And the curriculums in our schools were likewise corrupted with the hoax.

Then, about 17 years ago the Earth began to cool. It had nothing to do with carbon dioxide—which the Environmental Protection Agency deems a “pollutant” despite the fact that all life on Earth would die without it—and everything to do with the SUN.

A few days after the email arrived, two-thirds of the contiguous U.S.A. was covered by snow. As this is being written, Lake Superior is 92% frozen, setting a new record. As of February 5, the entire Great Lakes system was, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, 77% covered with ice.

On February 1st, NOAA and NASA held a joint press conference in which they released data about 2013’s global surface temperature. They made reference to a “pause” in the temperature that began in 1997. Dr. David Whitehouse, science editor for the BBC, noted that “When asked for an explanation for the ‘pause’ by reporters, Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Dr. Thomas Karl of NOAA spoke of contributions from volcanoes, pollution, a quiet Sun, and natural variability. In other words, they don’t know.”

Both of these government agencies, along with others like the EPA and the Department of the Interior are staffed by people who understand that their employers are deeply committed to the global warming hoax. One should assume that almost anything they have to say about the “pause” is based entirely on politics, not science.

Then, too, despite the many measuring stations from which data is extracted to determine the Earth’s climate, there is a paucity of such stations in COLD places like Siberia. Stations here in the U.S. are often placed in “heat islands” otherwise known as cities. If you put enough of them close to sources of heat, you get thermometer readings that produce, well, heat.

People in the U.S., England, Europe and other areas of the world who do not possess Ph.ds in meteorology, climatology, geology, astronomy, and chemistry have begun to suspect that everything they have been told about global warming is false. Between 1300 and 1850 the northern hemisphere went through a mini-ice age. After that it began to warm up again. So, yes, there was global warming, but it was a natural cycle, not something caused by human beings.

Nature doesn’t care what we do. It is far more powerful than most of us can comprehend.

This brings us back to the Sun which determines, depending on where you are on planet Earth, how warm or cold you feel. The Sun, too, goes through cycles, generally about eleven years long. When it is generating a lot of heat, its surface is filled with sunspots, magnetic storms.

When there are few sunspots, solar radiation diminishes and we get cold. Scientists who study the Sun believe it may encounter another “Maunder minimum”, named after astronomer Edward Maunder, in which the last “Little Ice Age”, between 1645 and 1715, occurred. The Thames in England froze over as did the canals of Holland froze solid.

There is no global warming and scientists like Henrik Svensmark, the director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute, believes that “World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more.” I agree.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Psy guy and is used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. The image was a candidate for Picture of the Year 2006.

AGENDA 21 REVEALED: ICLEI, Comprehensive Planning, Smart Growth, Green, Regionalism

February 10, 2014/in Environment, Government Transparency, News, Policy, Politics, Video/by Dr. Rich Swier

Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the United Nations with regard to sustainable development.[1] It is a product of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. It is an action agenda for the UN, other multilateral organizations, and individual governments around the world that can be executed at local, national, and global levels. The “21” in Agenda 21 refers to the 21st Century. It has been affirmed and modified at subsequent UN conferences.

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During the last decade, opposition to Agenda 21 has increased within the United States at the local, state, and federal levels.[15] In January 2011, Commissioner Richard Rothschild of Carroll County, Maryland became the first elected official in the United States to successfully remove a U.S. jurisdiction from the ICLEI and Agenda 21.[16][unreliable source?] The Republican National Committee has adopted a resolution opposing Agenda 21, and the Republican Party platform stated that “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”

Those who follow Glenn Beck might be aware that Tuesday marks the release of his latest book, “Agenda 21,” the suspenseful and perhaps sobering tale of a futuristic America in which a UN-led program spawned an authoritarian state where individuals are stripped of all personal rights and freedoms.

Oddly, Beck’s novel is not simply a work of fiction, but based on an actual program created by the United Nations by the very same name — “Agenda 21″ — which, according to the UN’s own website, is a “comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, governments and major groups, in every area in which human impacts on the environment.” “agenda 21” conspiracy “glenn beck” research un “united nations” fact plan agenda depopulation earth green Sustainability freedom liberty environment environmental “new world order” international global fema drill u.s. “united states” usa america europe illuminati elite mafia planning world earth media 2013 2014 future banking bank society finance wealth “third world” fear invasion action corporate guilty education “middle class” developer dollar usd suburbs forces camp camping prepare food storage 829speedy bush constitution independence one world government homeland security civil unrest emergency military base alex jones glenn beck blaze infowars gerald celente farrakhan lindsey williams david icke

In so many words, the United Nations seeks to co-opt, via individual governments, and eventually, a “one-world government,” privately held land under the auspices of ensuring its “sustainability.” Worse still, the UN’s Agenda 21 has even laid out plans for “depopulation” or rather, “population control.” If it sounds like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, that is because Agenda 21′s tenets are eerily in line with the demented alternate reality Orwell himself had imagined while scribing the pages of his famed novel.

“Sustainable development” is the catch-phrase Beck urged his Monday evening viewers to be leery of.

Where one can live and what land should be designated for would, under fully-realized Agenda 21 plan, be controlled by the United Nations and a future one-world government. Consider the following section from the UN website on Agenda 21′s plan for “promoting sustainable human settlement development.” Emphasis added: The overall human settlement objective is to improve the social, economic and environmental quality of human settlements and the living and working environments of all people, in particular the urban and rural poor. Such improvement should be based on technical cooperation activities, partnerships among the public, private and community sectors and participation in the decision-making process by community groups and special interest groups such as women, indigenous people, the elderly and the disabled. These approaches should form the core principles of national settlement strategies. In developing these strategies, countries will need to set priorities among the eight programme areas in this chapter in accordance with their national plans and objectives, taking fully into account their social and cultural capabilities. Furthermore, countries should make appropriate provision to monitor the impact of their strategies on marginalized and disenfranchised groups, with particular reference to the needs of women.

The Sierra Club Hates Energy

February 6, 2014/in Commentary, Energy, Environment/by Alan Caruba

If I told you that you should hate coal, oil and natural gas, you might think I was crazy and you would be right. Everything we do involves these three energy reserves and the U.S. has so much of them that we could be energy independent of the rest of the world while, at the same time, exporting them.

When you think about energy reserves, think about the hundreds of thousands of jobs they represent. Then think about the huge revenue in leases and taxes they represent to the government that needs to reduce its debt. Ultimately, though, try to imagine a nation that does not utilize petroleum in thousands of ways or fails to tap its enormous coal and natural gas reserves to generate the electricity upon which that everything depends.

I recently received an email from the Sierra Club praising the President’s State of the Union speech in which he claimed that climate change—by which they mean global warming—is real and that the science is “settled.” No, the science entirely refutes it—except if one means that the climate has always been a state of change. The most recent climate change is seventeen years of cooling that has gifted us with record-breaking cold as far south as Florida.

What Sierra Club focused on was Obama’s call for “new sources of energy” other than the traditional ones. He was referring to solar and wind energy. A recent news article on CNSNews noted that “Solar power, which President Barack Obama promoted…accounted for 0.2 percent of the U.S. electricity supply in the first nine months of 2013, according to data published by the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration.”

According to the EIA, “the United States is producing less electricity now than it did when Obama took office…From 2008 to 2012, U.S. electricity production declined by 1.7 percent.”

Some might take this as a good thing, but “electricity has gotten more expensive since 2008—with the electricity price index at an all-time high.” So we are paying more while getting less.

The Sierra Club, however, criticized Obama saying “As long as his administration keeps throwing lifelines to old sources of energy like oil and gas, we won’t be able to lead the world on clean energy solutions like wind and solar.” They called for an “end to oil and gas fracking on public lands.” What they are not saying is that the Obama administration has virtually put an end to any exploration and extraction of energy sources on public lands. And you can forget about the massive reserves estimated to exist off-shore of our coasts.

In early January, Mark D. Green, the editor of Energy Tomorrow, a project of the American Petroleum Institute, examined the reality of our vast energy sources. Keep in mind that every product we purchase is dependent in some way on oil. “Every day 143 U.S. refineries convert an average of 15 million barrels of crude oil” that provide power for our vast transportation needs and thousands of other uses. Oil is the basis for the creation of plastic. Try to imagine living without anything that does not utilize plastic in some fashion.

As for natural gas, experts predict that lower prices as more is discovered via fracking, will increase industrial output 2.8 percent by 2015 and 3.9 percent by 2025. Policies that would allow the export of U.S. liquefied natural gas would generate between $15.6 billion and $73.6 billion to the Gross Domestic Product and help reduce our deficits and debt.

The Sierra Club doesn’t want to see the U.S. benefit from coal, oil and natural gas. It wants to see the landmass filled with solar farms and thousands of wind turbines that would not produce enough electricity to meet the needs of nation, let alone a major city. Because they are unpredictable, all require the backup of traditional plants.

Nor does the Sierra Club make any mention of the Obama administration’s war on coal that has forced 153 plants to shut down. It’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed regulations that would require new plants to employ carbon capture and sequestration technology that is not commercially available! Nor is there any reason to capture carbon dioxide, the gas that is the “food” that every single piece of vegetation requires; a gas that plays virtually no role at all in the Earth’s climate.

As this is being written, the State Department just released a report that would clear the way for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada after a five-year delay by the Obama administration. Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil and natural gas. If the U.S. cannot gain access to the oil, it will go to China and other nations.

The prospect of the pipeline was rejected by the Sierra Club. Friends of the Earth announced that it would join with the Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club, and other radical Green groups to hold vigils around the nation Monday to protest its possible approval and construction.

The Sierra Club is not only lying to its members, it is lying to all of us when it says “Getting all of the energy we need without using fossil fuels is no longer a question of whether we can—but whether we will.” We can’t, we shouldn’t, and we won’t…but we must wait until Obama is no longer in office and, as early as the 2014 midterm elections, we must rid our nation of his supporters in Congress.

Then we will watch our nation’s economy expand with more jobs and more revenue.

Another Environmental Lie Exposed: Bees are Thriving

February 2, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Policy, Science/by Alan Caruba

I cannot say it strong enough. Do not believe the lies that environmental groups, particularly those that receive millions from liberal foundations and from members who never question the “science” they claim to justify massive scare campaigns.

One such organization is Friends of the Earth (FOE) and its latest claim is that bees are dying all over the world as the result of the use of pesticides in agriculture and by people protecting their gardens. It is a lie.

The attack on the use of pesticides began in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” that claimed that their use posed a threat to human life. She said “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”

The problem with her opinion is that humanity cannot alter nature, but can protect itself against the diseases and other problems. Humanity endures nature in the form of climate that currently is cooling much of the Earth. Were it not for science, we would not have put an end to polio and reduced other diseases such as malaria by killing the mosquitoes that spread it. We would not have learned how to create water purification systems that protect the residents of cities worldwide. We would not have learned how to increase crops that feed millions thanks to genetic modification.

Is humanity at risk? There are seven billion of us, more than any previous time on Earth.

Why do I defend pesticides? Because, since the 1980s, I have served pest control trade associations by providing communications programs, too often ignored by the mainstream press. In the 1980s I worked for a corporation that produced one of the most extraordinary pesticides invented; one that was applied with water! It so alarmed the Environmental Protection Agency, that it insisted that its multi-million dollar registration be repeated and that company decided to cease making it available in the U.S.

What do pesticides do? They protect us against trillions of insect and rodent pests that spread diseases while some represent millions in property damage—termites—every year. In June 2011, the EPA announced it intended to ban the sale of “the most toxic rat and mouse poisons, as well as most loose bait and pellet products” to residential customers. The only result of such a ban would be millions more rats and mice in their homes!

Rachel Carson’s book predicted the massive loss of bird species due to the use of pesticides. It was a bestseller and is still in print. She was wrong, but she triggered the beginning and growth of environmental groups that have used the same bad “science” to unleash all manner of fears on Americans and worldwide. Friends of the Earth is just one of them.

Recently I received a FOE email from Lisa Archer, its food and technology program director, in which she reported a Valentine’s Day project to stop Home Depot and Lowe’s stores from selling pesticides. The project is based on the totally false claim that all the bees are dying from the use of pesticides; in particular neonicotinoid pesticides that are widely used in agriculture.

The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) disputes this while acknowledging that “In the last decade, a massive decline in bee populations was detected. It was given the name of “Bee Colony Collapse Disorder” and “while the problem seems to have abated somewhat after 2010, periodic declines continued, and fears of recurrent major extinctions persisted.” The fears have been fanned by environmental organizations, but the ACSH revealed new research by scientists affiliated with the Department of Agriculture here and in China, reviewed in “The Scientist” that “provides the first evidence that the bee problem in fact, stems from the tobacco ringspot virus (TRSV), not from pesticides.”

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Not from pesticides despite the FOE’s claim that “neonicotinoid pesticides are killing bees” noting that Europe is banning them. Europe is a hotbed of environmental fears and, ironically, is reversing its trend toward solar and wind energy after it has driven up the cost of electricity there and harmed its economic growth.

The ACSH reports that “the bees may pick up the virus from the pollen of plants that they feed upon, and that the virus may be spread to other bees by mites that feed on them. Once it has gained a foothold in a bee, the researchers determined that TRVS can replicate itself in the bee’s body.”

“This process of a virus moving from one species to another is call ‘host shifting’”.

Writing in 2012, Rich Kozlovich, a pest control expert, reported that “it is not true that there has been a mysterious worldwide collapse in honey bee populations. In fact managed bee hives (which contain the bees which do the vast majority of our pollinating) have increased by a remarkable 45 percent over the last five years.”

He also noted that “most staple foods—wheat, rice and corn—do not depend on animal pollination at all. They are wind-pollinated, or self-pollinating.”

These well-established facts mean nothing to FOE or other environmental organizations seeking to demonize pesticides. It means nothing to the EPA that has banned many extraordinarily effective pesticides from use to protect humans and property.

It is the advances of modern science that have protected and extended human life. Banning them just exposes Americans to a range of diseases, some of which kill. Until more Americans understand that the real threat is the EPA and the environmental groups spreading baseless fears, they will continue to be at risk.

If the President Wants to Minimize GHG Emissions, He’ll Approve the Keystone Pipeline

February 1, 2014/in Economy, Environment, Featured, News, Policy, Politics/by Sean Hackbarth

The State Department released its final report on the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline. It not only pulls the rug out from a key argument of pipeline opponents, but it puts the president in an awkward position.

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First, the report undercuts pipeline opponents’ claims that stopping the construction of Keystone XL would block development of oil sands crude development in Canada:

[A]pproval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States based on expected oil prices, oil-sands supply costs, transport costs, and supply-demand scenarios.

The report states that oil transport by rail is “already occurring in substantial volumes,” and “rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if new pipelines are delayed or not constructed.”

In short, blocking Keystone XL will not stop oil sands crude development in Canada.

Second, the report debunks arguments that a pipeline is the most environmentally dangerous of all scenarios. It looked at alternative scenarios if Keystone XL wasn’t approved—i.e. “No Action/maintaining the status quo–and compared their environmental impacts to the proposed pipeline.

The alternative scenarios all have higher greenhouse gas emissions associated with them than Keystone XL. From the report: “The total annual GHG emissions (direct and indirect) attributed to the No Action scenarios range from 28 to 42 percent greater than for the proposed.”

Impacts of Keystone XL alternatives [table]

If the president is as concerned with minimizing greenhouse gas emissions as he says he is, then he should give the pipeline the go-ahead.

Along with its environmental analysis, the report reaffirms the economic benefits from construction of the pipeline that were stated in the draft EIS:

42,100 new jobs.
$2 billion in earnings.
$3.4 billion added to U.S. GDP.

Tom Donohue, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber commented on the release of the report:

The State Department has once again found nothing in its environmental analysis that would prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from moving forward. It’s time for the administration to stop playing politics with a project that will create good-paying American jobs, improve our energy security, and strengthen relations with our closest ally, Canada.

Five years of delays, distractions, and foot-dragging is long enough. It’s time to do what’s right for America, our economy and workers, and our relationship with our special neighbor to the north—approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

Now, we’re in the National Interest Determination stage, where eight other federal agencies and the public can weigh in on whether approving the pipeline is in the nation’s national interest.

Based on all that we know now about the jobs that will be created, the economic impacts, and its minimal effects on the environment, it’s clear that approving the Keystone XL pipeline is in America’s best interests.

FOX News Debate: Global Warmists denounced for using “Medieval witchcraft”

January 28, 2014/in Environment, News, Video/by Marc Morano

Watch the Marc Morano and Bill Nye Climate Debate on FOX With Stossel. Nye Cites ‘Hockey Stick’ as Proof – Says Politicians can fix potholes and the climate – Morano denounces as ‘medieval witchcraft’.

Morano vs. Nye on CO2:

NYE: ‘Do we agree that the atmosphere used to have 250 parts per million, now it has over 400 of carbon dioxide.’

MORANO: Absolutely. We’ve had ice ages at between 2,000 and 8,000 parts per million in the geological history of the Earth. We’ve had similar temperatures with 20 times the CO2 levels…The idea that — that the U.S. or developing world should limit their energy choices based on rising CO2 fears is scientifically baseless. And the geologic record bears that out and the current weather bears it out…It comes down to hundreds of factors are influencing our climate here. CO2 is not the tail that wagged the dog…There’s no more weather extremes over the 20th century. You can go from hurricanes or — we’re at a historic low right now…We had the lowest year on record for tornadoes.’

Morano vs. Nye on Development in Poor Nations:

MORANO: ‘How is the white, wealthy Western Europe world, in Europe and the U.S., going to tell people of color, 1.3 billion in the developing world, they can’t have what we have? Who is Bill Nye to tell [the developing word] they can’t have carbon-based energy?’

NYE: ‘We don’t want to have less. We want to do more with less. And this is where the innovations come in.’

Stossel’s ‘Chill Out’ program with John Stossel on Fox Business – First Broadcast January 23, 2014: Bill Nye the Science Guy, who says he is “frantic” about climate change debates skeptic Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com.

Morano and Nye also debated on CNN in 2012. Also see Morano debating on UN TV in November and his debate on CNN in December 2013.

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Full Transcript below:

Stossel

January 23, 2014 Thursday

SHOW: STOSSEL 9:00 PM EST

Chill Out

BYLINE: John Stossel

GUESTS: Phil Valentine, Alex Epstein, Marc Morano, Bill Nye, Robert Engelman, Bill Bissett, Mark Nelson

SECTION: NEWS; Financial

LENGTH: 7553 words

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is not just cold, this is a killer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If this isn’t climate change, then what is it?

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: As an American, I am here to say we need to act.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(APPLAUSE)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN STOSSEL, HOST (voice-over): All dramatic weather is our fault.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, my god.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma. Horrible.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We know that this is because of the burning of fossil fuels.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Carbon could cost us the planet.

STOSSEL: It makes me want to ask Al Gore about that, but where is he?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He’s out at one of his other houses.

STOSSEL: Whether Gore is right about global warming didn’t matter, you already pay for his remedy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, they’re declaring war, truly, on jobs.

STOSSEL: Who will win this war?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: It’s a happy ending.

STOSSEL: We’ll search for that. That’s our show tonight.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

ANNOUNCER: And now, John Stossel.

STOSSEL: I titled this program, “Chill out,” because after I researched the global warming scare that was my conclusion. We ought to just chill out. But our government isn’t chilling out. You now pay billions to try to fix global warming. And this year, “The Hill,” the Washington newspaper that covers Congress, said climate will be the political battle of 2014. Big money is being spent to convince Americans to vote to spend even more to try to stop global warming. In a moment, we’ll hear from Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” who says he’s frantic about climate change. He’ll debate Marc Morano of climatedepot.com. But first, let me set the terms of debate. People say to me, Stossel, you don’t believe in global warming? But I do. I think it’s a stupid question, because what do you mean when you say global warming? To me, it’s really four questions.

One, is the globe warming? Well, yes. Global temperatures have risen, though not lately so much. Question two, is the warming manmade, is it our fault? Three, is it a crisis?

And four, if it is, can we do anything about it? Bill Nye’s answers to those questions are yes, yes, yes and yes. And for years, he’s told his viewers, beware of…

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL NYE, “THE SCIENCE GUY”: — what we call global warming. Global warming.

The globe is getting too warm. It’s something we’ve got to be careful of. Otherwise, things could get weird.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STOSSEL: Bill Nye joins us now, along with climate change skeptic, Marc Morano. Marc, you first. Why aren’t you scared? Bill and lots of people are.

MARC MORANO, FOUNDER, CLIMATE DEPOT: We’re now able to empirically look at their predictions that they made in the ’80s and start to see them fail. And out of 117 climate models, one analysis showed 114 failed. So when the predictions are failing them, uh, they still claim it’s worse than they thought. But that’s not the case here. So the bottom line is, the burden of proof is on them and they’ve failed to make the case.

STOSSEL: Bill Nye?

NYE: In the year 1750, there were about a billion humans in the world. Now, there are well over seven — seven billion people in the world. It more than doubled in my lifetime. So all these people trying to live the way we live in the developed world is filling the atmosphere with a great deal more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than existed a couple of centuries ago. It’s the speed at which it is changing that is going to be troublesome for so many, uh, large populations of humans around the world. Now, you may have heard of the hockey stick graph. This is where, uh, we compare the temperature of the world over the last 10,000 years with the temperature now. And so we think of that, uh, as the…

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: — of a hockey stick?

NYE: — shaft of a hockey stick…

STOSSEL: — it’s going to shoot up.

NYE: Well, it is shooting up. It’s not going to, it is shooting up. And so it’s the speed that we’re going to have difficulty dealing with. But economically…

STOSSEL: But the temperature hasn’t increased in the past 15 years. It isn’t shooting up.

NYE: When you cherry-pick the data for certain surface temperatures, you end up with a — a very small change. It’s hardly noticeable. These people try to introduce the idea that scientific uncertainty, plus or minus a few percent, is equivalent to doubt about the whole thing. This is perfectly analogous to the cigarette industry and cancer, trying to introduce the idea that since you can’t…

(CROSSTALK)

NYE: — prove any one thing, the whole thing is in — is in doubt.

(CROSSTALK)

STOSSEL: As a consumer reporter. Just hang on one second, Marc. I’ll give you a shot. As a consumer reporter, I’ve covered 1,000 scares. Lawn chemicals, cell phone radiation…

MORANO: Sure.

STOSSEL: Pesticide residues, plastic bottles killing people, power lines, Mad Cow Disease was going to kill everybody. And always the example is, yes, there were doubters about cigarettes. I mean that one example doesn’t mean that the global warming scare is correct.

But, Marc, I — I should let you speak.

MORANO: Yes. For him to bring up cigarettes — the global warming scientists are the ones fulfilling a narrative. I mean we have Michael Oppenheimer, one of the lead U.N. scientists, took an endowment from Barbra Streisand. These Hollywood — the climatologists to the stars.

STOSSEL: Well, they’ve got to…

MORANO: He’s also…

STOSSEL: — get money from…

(CROSSTALK)

STOSSEL: — Barbra Streisand wants to give me money, I’ll take it.

MORANO: Right. But it’s so insulting to imply that somehow skeptical scientists are on the pay like tobacco companies. It’s the height of arrogance when you look at the actual data, the global warming scientists, through government grants, foundations, through media empowerment, have the full advantages of government money, foundation money, university money. There’s not even any comparison. And yet, these skeptical scientists, as their numbers have grown, we’ve had scientists like James Lovelock, who — the inventor of the Gaia Earth Theory, who has reversed himself.

STOSSEL: But a lot of climate scientists, serious ones, are genuinely worried.

MORANO: The ones you’ll always point to these ‘genuine’ climate scientists are from the United Nations. And the United Nations, the head of it, Rajendra Pachauri, came out last year or the year before and said their mission is to make the case that CO2 is driving global warming. They put the cart before the horse. And what happened was many U.N. scientists have now turned on it. Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish scientist, has just come out and said we wouldn’t even have noticed the warming of the 20th century if it weren’t for modern instrumentation. And the idea of the hockey stick that Bill Nye mentioned is absurd. That has been, you know, called, quote, “statistical rubbish,” unquote. And hundreds of scientists in dozens and dozens of studies have shown both the Medieval and the Roman warming period. And these appeared in peer-reviewed journals, were as warm or warmer than current temperatures.

STOSSEL: Bill?

NYE: See if we can agree about this. There used to be a billion people a couple of centuries ago. Now there are seven billion.

STOSSEL: We agree on that.

NYE: There used to be…

STOSSEL: And the air is cleaner and people are living better.

MORANO: Yes.

STOSSEL: And fewer people are starving because of capitalism and industrialization.

NYE: Do we agree that the atmosphere used to have 250 parts per million, now it has over 400 of carbon dioxide.

STOSSEL: Yes. There’s more greenhouse gas out there.

MORANO: Absolutely. We’ve had ice ages at between 2,000 and 8,000 parts per million in the geological history of the Earth. We’ve had similar temperatures with 20 times the CO2 levels.

STOSSEL: Climate does change.

MORANO: Sure.

STOSSEL: And if you look, over time, we have a graph here from just the year 1000 to today, we had the Medieval warm period, we had the Little Ice Age, big changes.

NYE: You’ve really, uh, you’ve really messed with the far right hand side of the graph.

MORANO: That’s the United Nations graph from 1990, pre-hockey stick…

NYE: Yes.

MORANO: — before they reinvented past temperatures.

NYE: Do you agree that it’s never happened this fast?

MORANO: Actually, we’ve had, without benefit of mankind, similar CO2 levels in the recent (geologic) past without mankind’s influence. And I think…

(CROSSTALK)

MORANO: — the speed had nothing to do with it.

NYE: What about the weight?

MORANO: It comes down to hundreds of factors are influencing our climate here. CO2 is not the tail that wagged the dog. Another scientist who has essentially reversed herself is Judith Curry from Georgia Institute of Technology. She now says openly that you cannot control climate by reducing emissions. And that seems to be the entire premise of the United Nations, that somehow, if we tweak emissions through carbon taxes, cap and trade, we can alter weather patterns. You opened up with tornadoes and Barbara Boxer. She actually went down to the Senate floor the day of tornadoes and implied a carbon tax would help prevent future tornado outbreaks. This is Medieval witchcraft.

STOSSEL: It seems like every time there’s a new weather extreme, some people say the cause was manmade global warming.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tomorrow morning, 90 percent of the country will face below normal temperatures. If this isn’t climate change, then what is it?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We know that this is because of the burning of fossil fuels.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: In one year, we have had the largest tornado ever recorded on Earth. And we have had the fastest hurricane ever recorded on Earth. And they’ve hit within six months of each other.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma, horrible. Carbon could cost us the planet.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STOSSEL: That was Senator Barbara Boxer the day of — the very day of the Oklahoma tornado. So, Bill, global warming is going to cost us the planet, causing these tornadoes?

NYE: Well, you see, the planet will be here — well, the planet will be here, but if we have to…

STOSSEL: We won’t?

NYE: — continually rebuild and displace people.

MORANO: The idea that the United States or developing world should limit their energy choices based on rising CO2 fears is scientifically baseless, as I just mentioned. And the geologic record bears that out and the current weather bears it out. There’s no more weather extremes over the 20th century. You can go from hurricanes or — we’re at a historic low right now…

STOSSEL: The Oklahoma tor — tornado was the biggest ever.

MORANO: And they have better monitoring. We had the lowest year on record for tornadoes. And since the 1950s…

STOSSEL: There were fewer tornadoes.

STOSSEL: I’m struck, researching this, how — how there’s constant media hysteria. And it changes. In 1941, it was reported…

MORANO: Yes.

STOSSEL: — that World War II caused weather extremes. In 1961, “The New York Times” said scientists agree the world’s becoming colder. Scientists worried about a new ice age. Now we worry about warming.

Shouldn’t we be skeptical?

MORANO: Yes, and I’m sure people would say, well — science has advanced so much more. Well, science is always going to advance. The point is, this is the narrative of our day. And Bill keeps going on about overpopulation. The problem is, is that people now recognize one of the biggest problems is under population. As the developing world gets more and more carbon-based energy, India and Africa, and starts developing, the population is going to level off. So the hysteria has been there. You can go back…

NYE: So we disagree about the facts, Mr. Morano.

MORANO: You can’t disagree about facts. You’re…

NYE: The problem…

(LAUGHTER)

NYE: — and the problem is not just that there are more people in India and China, it’s they are using more energy than they ever used to use.

MORANO: And God bless them. They need that.

NYE: They want to live the way we live in the de…

STOSSEL: Why is that a problem?

NYE: They want to live the way we…

STOSSEL: That’s a good thing…

NYE: — live in the developed world.

MORANO: Would you deny them that?

NYE: So…

MORANO: I interviewed Jerry Brown, who said that they couldn’t emulate American lifestyle. Well, who is he — how is the white, wealthy Western Europe world, in Europe and the United States, going to tell people of color, 1.3 billion in the developing world, they can’t have what we have? Who is Bill Nye to tell them they can’t have carbon-based energy, which we…

STOSSEL: Well, let Bill Nye…

MORANO: — took full advantage of.

STOSSEL: — answer that.

NYE: We don’t want to have less. We want to do more with less. And this is where the innovations come in.

MORANO: Sure.

NYE: This is where the emerging technologies come in.

But embracing, uh, technologies that produce extra carbon dioxide, extra greenhouse gases, at this point in human history, is not in our best interests.

STOSSEL: I just want to play one more…

NYE: So…

STOSSEL: — video example to end. This idea that politicians can fix the climate strikes me as arrogance. And I think we heard arrogance six years ago from our president after he defeated Hillary Clinton.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STOSSEL: Bill, isn’t this the conceit of the self-anointed, politicians are going to fix the climate?

NYE: By way of example, is it conceit when politicians claim they’re going to fix potholes in the street?

STOSSEL: No, they can do that.

NYE: It is conceit when politicians say they’re going to time the traffic lights?

STOSSEL: No, they can do that.

MORANO: No, they can do that.

NYE: Is it conceit when politicians — is it conceit when politicians say they’re going to clean up the water in Chesapeake Bay?

STOSSEL: Nope.

NYE: Is that inappropriate?

Those — those things have been done.

STOSSEL: Right.

MORANO: Those are doable.

NYE: This is the same thing on a much, much larger scale.

STOSSEL: Thank you, Bill Nye and Marc Morano.

NYE: Thank you.

STOSSEL: To keep this conversation going on Facebook or Twitter, if you use that hash tag chillout, you can let me and others know what you think.

City of Port St. Lucie, FL withdraws from Seven50 Regional Plan

January 28, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Policy/by Dr. Rich Swier

A growing movement consisting of Florida citizens is pushing back against any effort to regionalize Florida under the banner American Coalition 4 Property Rights (AC4PC). This is part of new urbanism promoted across Florida as the Seven50 Plan. The Florida Seven50 Plan includes the counties of Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin, Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe. Indian River, Martin and St. Lucie Counties have since dropped out of the Seven50 Plan. Florida Seven50 is one of eleven plans to create “mega regions” in America.

The intent is to blur city and county boundaries and place control for land use and zoning decisions into the hands of unelected regional committees and their staffs.

The Port St. Lucie City Council voted a unanimous approval on January 27th to withdraw from the Seven50 Regional Plan. Item 11(i) on the meeting agenda read:

RESOLUTION 14-R20, PROVIDING FOR THE REPEAL OF THE CITY OF PORT ST. LUCIE RESOLUTION 10-R41; PERTAINING TO THE FEDERAL SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES INITIATIVE; PROVIDING FOR AN EFFECTIVE DATE.

The actual approved resolution is at this link: http://psl.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=&event_id=769&meta_id=96769

Leigh Lamson in an email states, “Special thanks goes out to Bert Shadowen, Emil Viola and the AC4PR. Sorry if I left out any others.”

According to Leigh Lamson, “The Florida Seven50 plan is supported by Michael Busha and his wife who live in Stuart, FL. Stuart is the home of the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council (TCRPC), one of the 2 sponsors of the Seven50 Regional Plan. Michael is the Executive Director of the TCRPC. Both are strong proponents of sustainable development, and one of them is even on the Martin County School Board. Seven50 is ALL based on the false science of global warming and rising sea levels. Their livelihood is based on advancing all of it. But guess what, the Busha’s live out on Sewell’s Point in a million dollar home on the water and drive expensive SUVs.”

Video below is of Andres Duany speaking to Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council meeting on May 17, 2013 about the “mega regions”:

On June 16th, 2009 the US Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Transportation (DOT) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a new partnership to “coordinate federal housing, environmental protection and transportation planning and investment.” The goal to “better align their national funding programs and to promote the creation of comprehensive investment plans to strengthen the economy and promote the environment of the Nations regions.”Funding was authorized by Congress in 2009 and was provided to the HUD Sustainable Communities Office. According to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and the HUD website:

The mission of the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities is to create strong, sustainable communities by connecting housing to jobs, fostering local innovation, and helping to build a clean energy economy.

In order to better connect housing to jobs, the office will work to coordinate federal housing and transportation investments with local land use decisions in order to reduce transportation costs for families, improve housing affordability, save energy, and increase access to housing and employment opportunities. By ensuring that housing is located near job centers and affordable, accessible transportation, we will nurture healthier, more inclusive communities which provide opportunities for people of all ages, incomes, races, and ethnicities to live, work, and learn together.

A Very Cold Reality

January 27, 2014/in Commentary, Energy, Environment, News, Policy/by Alan Caruba

It’s not as if those in the Northeast have not experienced bone-chilling cold or that it is predicted to extend from the Midwest down into our southern States. There may possibly be a snow storm that will require the National Football League to reschedule the Sunday, February 2nd Superbowl at the MetLife stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Crews spent 18 hours working to remove the snow from last week’s storm.

A visit to IceAgeNow.info yielded headlines of news stories last week that included “Record Cold—Millions of Americans hit by Propane Shortage”, “Ice and Snow Closed Texas highways This Morning”, “Ice-cover Shuts Down Work on New Hudson River Bridge”, and so you understand this is a global phenomenon, “Kashmir—Heaviest January Snowfall in a Decade”, “Heavy Snowfall Sweeps Eastern Turkey”, “Romania—Heavy Snowfall and Blizzard”. And “Bangkok Suffers Coldest Night in Three Decades—Death Roll Mounts.”

Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo of WeatherBell Analytics and editor of IceCap.us says that, as the President addresses the nation on Tuesday, every State will have freezing temperatures and parts or all of 27 States will be below zero.

All this is occurring as President Barack Obama is anticipated to talk about “climate change”, a warming Earth, during his Tuesday State of the Union speech. He will be speaking to the idiots who still think the Earth is warming because they are too stupid or lazy to ask why it is so cold.

Michael Bastasch, writing for The Daily Caller on Saturday, confirmed D’Aleo’s and other meteorologist’s forecasts. “The bitter cold that has hit the U.S. East Coast is expected throughout February, and on Jan 28—the day of the address—the Mid-Atlantic region is expected to be hit with freezing cold air that could drive temperatures below zero in big cities among the I-95 corridor.”

Washington, D.C. will be one of those cities, but as Bastasch reported, “Environmentalists and liberal groups are urging Obama to use the speech to reaffirm his commitment to fighting global warming. ‘President Obama should rank the battle against climate change as one of his top priorities in his State of the Union speech next week’, said Center for Clean Air Policy president Ned Heime.”

For environmentalists, it does not matter if the real climate is a deep cold. They committed to the lies about global warming in the late 1980s and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change (IPCC) has maintained the hoax ever since. Along the way we learned that the computer models on which it based its assertions and predictions were rigged and bogus, but that has not deterred the IPCC which is now referring to a “pause” in global warming. This is lying on a global scale.

It was the environmental group Greenpeace that put out a television advertisement featuring a Santa Claus telling children that he might have to call off Christmas because the North Pole was melting. How malicious can they get? When a group of global warming scientists and tourists took a ship to the Antarctic to measure the “melting” ice down there, the ship got caught in the ice which also resisted the efforts of two icebreaker ships to rescue them.

We are dealing with environmental groups, the IPCC and government leaders like Obama for whom the telling of huge and blatantly obvious lies about global warming is nothing compared to the billions generated by the hoax for the universities and scientists that line their pockets supporting it and industries that benefit by offering ways to capture carbon dioxide or conserve energy by first banning incandescent light bulbs.

The “pause” has lasted now for seventeen years and, as is the case with all climate on the Earth, the reason is the Sun.

A report published by CBN News noted that “The last time the sun was this quiet, North America and Europe suffered through a weather event from the 1600s to the 1800s known as ‘Little Ice Age’ when the Thames River in London regularly froze solid, and North America saw terrible winters. Crops failed and people starved.”

Jens Pedersen, a senior scientist at Denmark’s Technical University, said that climate scientists know the Earth stopped warming 15 years ago. But the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of which Pedersen is an expert reviewer, suppressed a recent report from its own scientists that the U.N.’s climate model has been proven wrong.

“Global warming is nowhere to be found,” said David Deming, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado, in a January 16 commentary in The Washington Times. “As frigid conditions settled over the nation, global-warming alarmists went into full denial mode”, adding that “weather extremes also seem to bring out the lunatic fringe” and that is why the public is being told that cold weather has been caused by global warming!

Whatever the President has to say about “climate change” should be taken as just one more example of five years of lies to advance policies that have nothing to do with the welfare of Americans needing jobs or the execrable Obamacare attack on the U.S. healthcare system.

The cold reality may well be a Superbowl played on another day and a President for whom the truth is incidental to his shredding of the U.S. Constitution, the increase in the nation’s ever-growing debt, a lagging economy, and his intention to by-pass Congress rather than working with it.

That kind of thing will put a chill up any American’s spine if you think about it.

The Endangered Animal Act of Futility

January 24, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News/by Alan Caruba

David W. Snook, 57, of Bridgewater, New Jersey died on Wednesday, January 15, when two deer leaped into the path of his Dodge Ram on Route 206. One of them was airborne when it smashed through the front windshield, striking him before exiting out the rear window. This caused the truck to veer into the guardrail and come to rest in a ravine.

In 2012, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection estimated that the Garden State was home to 110,000 deer. Each year about 35,000 are killed in hunts and those of us who live here owe the hunters a debt of gratitude. In my county of Essex, home to Newark, the freeholders regularly hire hunters to cull the herd that shares its home with one of the most densely populated counties in the state.

Need it be said that the animal rights crowd is always upset about this. New Jersey also has a fairly sizeable bear population and during the hunting season, between 250 and 450 are “harvested” as the Fish and Game agency calls it. They have been found in all 21 counties of the state. And state officials now estimate that there are more coyotes in New Jersey than bears.

Suffice to say New Jersey’s animals are not suffering from a decline in species, nor facing extinction any time soon. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that this is true nationwide. However, to justify one of the dumbest laws ever passed, the Endangered Species Act, some 1,500 species are classified with fuzzy definitions of being “threatened”, “endangered” or “recovered.”

The Act was signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, who also gifted us with the Environmental Protection Agency, currently doing everything in its power to destroy the coal industry and plants that use it to generate electricity. They claim that the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a threat to the climate, but ignore the many other natural sources of CO2, including all seven billion humans that exhale six pounds of it a day. And that all species would die without CO2 maintaining all the vegetation on Earth.

What is never mentioned is that species extinction has been around as long as there have been species. It was not CO2 that killed the dinosaurs and 75% of other species that had dominated the Earth for 180 million years and there were no humans around to blame for the Great Permian Extinction when more than 90% of all life on Earth disappeared—animals, plants, trees, fish, and even algae. Most geological eras have come to a close with calamitous events.

In December 2013, the Obama administration granted industrial wind farm operators a 30-year permit to kill legally protected bald eagles and golden eagles without being subject to legal repercussions. Wind energy has killed 1.4 million birds and bats every year, including those regarded and protected as threatened such as California condors, bald eagles, and Indiana bats. Apparently, if you are producing 1% percent or so of electricity, it’s okay to kill these creatures. Meanwhile everyone else pays higher electricity bills.

The dirty little secret about the Endangered Species Act is that environmentalists have used it for years to deter all manner of economic development by claiming some fish or other creature was endangered if you built a hospital, new homes, or in the case of the dunes sagebrush lizard which lives in the West Texas and Southeast New Mexico Permian Basic when oil companies want to explore and extract this energy resource that will generate jobs and huge tax revenues to help reduce the national debt.

It is insanity to think humans can or should do anything to “save” various species. The most dramatic and tragic evidence of this has been the twenty-year effort to “save” the northern spotted owl. The result was to close millions of acres of federal forests in the Northwest from logging, devastating the once flourishing timber industry.

In July 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would permit the killing of barred owls believed to be killing the spotted owls. The sawmills that once thrived are mostly gone, along with their jobs, and revenue. The forests are overgrown and are immense fire traps. And the Fish and Wildlife Service thinks that spending $127 million might restore the spotted owl population over the next 30 years.

This kind of stupidity is criminal.

How effective has the Endangered Species Act been? As it enters its 41st year it has “recovered” less than 2% of the approximately 2,100 species listed as endangered or threatened since 1973. A December 17 Wall Street Journal article reported that “it has endangered the economic health of many communities and created a cottage industry of litigation that does more to enrich environmental activist groups” that pays their salaries.

The Endangered Species Act is a huge failure. It should be repealed, but don’t expect Congress to do anything that sensible.

High Energy Prices Has Europe Rethinking Energy Strategy

January 24, 2014/in Economy, Energy, Environment, Must Read, News, Policy/by Sean Hackbarth

Europe is realizing that reliable, affordable energy is critical to economic competitiveness, and policies that pick energy winners and losers can have unintended consequences. This stems from a New York Times story on how the European Union (EU) is rethinking how it deals with greenhouse gas emissions:

On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.

It also decided against proposing laws on environmental damage and safety during the extraction of shale gas by a controversial drilling process known as fracking. It opted instead for a series of minimum principles it said it would monitor.

Europe pressed ahead on other fronts, aiming for a cut of 40 percent in Europe’s carbon emissions by 2030, double the current target of 20 percent by 2020. Officials said the new proposals were not evidence of diminished commitment to environmental discipline but reflected the complicated reality of bringing the 28 countries of the European Union together behind a policy.

The “complication” being that high energy prices is one factor that’s holding back Europe’s economic competitiveness.

Take Germany, which is undergoing a energiewende or “energy revolution,” an attempt to drop both nuclear and fossil-fuel energy use from its economy and rely primarily on renewable energy. The Economist explains this audacious goal:

Germany’s last nuclear plant is to be switched off in 2022. The share of renewable energy from sun, wind and biomass is meant to rise to 80% of electricity production, and 60% of overall energy use, by 2050. And emissions of greenhouse gases are supposed to fall, relative to those in 1990, by 70% in 2040 and 80-95% by 2050.

In order to ramp up electricity production, renewable energy is heavily subsidized. So much so that Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe. As the London Telegraph reports, the result is that German companies are becoming less competitive:

Energy prices are 40% more expensive than in France and the Netherlands, and the bills are 15% higher than the EU average. Even though Germany’s energy-intensive manufacturing sector is given a break with reduced levies, industries such as chemicals and steel are among the hardest hit, with energiewende costs of up to €740m a year.

Ironically, since Germany is giving up nuclear energy, it must turn to new coal-fired power plants for baseload electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

These kinds of unintended consequences happen when government stacks the deck for one type of energy source, especially one that’s not yet market competitive.

While Europe wades through its self-inflicted morass, this is also a lesson for environmental groups demanding that the Obama administration stop pushing an “all of the above” energy strategy (which has been lip service) and go solely down the renewable energy path.

Renewable energy has a role in a country’s economy. However, renewable energy that’s more reliable and competitive doesn’t come out of thin air; it needs innovation and investment, and both require a growing economy; and a growing economy needs dependable and affordable energy.

A sound energy policy is one that embraces America’s energy abundance and diversity. America’s energy security needs nuclear, coal, natural gas, and renewables, and a robust energy mix means more certainty for businesses to invest and grow.

Visit Energy Works for US to learn more about the Institute for 21st Century Energy’s proposals on making renewable energy more competitive and making America more energy secure.

ACTION ALERT: Time to help Ethanol bite the dust

January 21, 2014/in Economy, Environment, Must Read, News/by Dr. Rich Swier

After years of dramatically increasing the amount of ethanol required in gasoline, EPA is finally beginning to reserve course. But EPA needs to hear from you. If you think that EPA shouldn’t force people to use ethanol, let them know today.

For the first time since 2007, the EPA has proposed a slight cut to the amount of ethanol that must blended into the nation’s fuel supply this year. But this may not happen unless the EPA hears from you.

Ethanol can be harmful to engines, especially at the levels EPA has proposed in the past. And worse, the current law forces farmers to turn food into fuel because the law requires Americans to consume billions of gallons of ethanol a year, even if they don’t want to.

Although progress has been made, there’s still more work to do. The Renewable Fuel Standards Program (RFS) is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the belief that government bureaucrats can accurately predict gasoline demand years in advance, as well as ethanol production and demand.

Tell the EPA that reducing the ethanol mandate is not enough. Congress must repeal the RFS to let the free market flourish and support a healthy energy future.

David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D. writes, “The ethanol mandate in the federal Renewable Fuel Standard increases corn prices and food prices. This harms consumers and distorts the domestic and international commodity market. While waiving the mandate would be an improvement, eliminating it is the best choice.”

Using food for fuel is immoral. According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday. This equates to 16,438 children a day. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving. Since you’ve entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger.

Charlotte County Environmental Hazard Sunrise Waterway/Sunshine Lake

January 19, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News/by Sherry Smart

Several months ago I went along with three others to look at, take pictures and gather water samples from this area, we used all the criteria necessary to gather uncontaminated samples of water, put them on ice and immediately left that area and went to have the samples tested in North Port, all at no expense to the county of Charlotte. The results were given to the Charlotte County Commissioners. While at the site I personally could smell and see the hazardous water.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/AMYEXirYQEQ[/youtube]

Bill Bigelow along with others in his group has been studying/investigating for nearly a year the four-year Sunrise Waterway/ Sunshine Lake fiasco. Bill has personally have talked to hundreds of people about the conditions/causes/management of the situation since it first appeared in 2009 on the County’s radar screen when residents living on those waters began complaining to certain commissioners and the CC Administrator that serious problems were taking place along the Sunrise Waterway at the Gertrude Avenue bridge crossing directly behind the County’s sewer lift station.

Mr. Bigelow’s team has now completed assembly of an extensive archive of facts/communications from CC residents to commissioners/Administrator/County administrative department heads/County engineers/CCU/ProLime, etc. Without any doubt, we now can assess blame for the continuous inept/out of control nature of the remedial actions taken by the Administration to solve this serious environmental problem, which will now cost taxpayers over $4 million dollars rather than miniscule $15,000 related to a “fix” proposed in 2010 (see discussion of the “fix” below for details), which was never implemented by Administration.

Our group’s pending indictment charges were significantly augmented this past week when the public was advised ProLime, the lake/waterway dredging contractor, submitted to Administration personnel in July 2013 a significant contract “change order” and this request was not brought to the attention of the Commission until just recently. The change order submitted cited the contractor’s need of approval for an addition of $1.2M to the original $2.4M contract. The change order cited: (1) the significant additional extraction amounts of debris still existing in the waters (debris extraction was nowhere addressed in the contract, although evidence clearly shows Administration knew there was significant debris embedded in both waters before the contract was executed); and (2) a near doubling of the estimated volume of algae mat to be extracted over the original County estimates used in establishing the original contract pricing. Some of this discrepancy was apparently due to the existence of sediment being found in the algae mat, which condition also was not addressed by the Administration in arriving at the contract’s estimated extraction “volume”. Additionally, other contract discrepancies/omissions/conflicts badly described the amount of algae-cyanobacteria to be extracted leading to conflicting interpretations by the parties as to the contract terms, including when contract performance would be fulfilled by ProLime.

In 2011, MSBU contracted with Atkins group of Tampa, Florida to evaluate the water quality of these two waterways and, given the major amount of goop being generated, provide remedial actions necessary to identify and correct the problem. Atkins advised the County that the “point” source(s) of the mat growth had to first be determined and recommended several investigative procedures be initiated by the County to identify the source(s). Once such analyses were complete, Atkins would recommend several additional long-term initiatives to eliminate the mat and assure the problem would not recur.

County Administration chose to ignore the Atkins recommendations plus the alerts/warnings from residents on the waters and, as a result, the problem continues to grow rapidly and the dredging operations have become stymied by poor County management of the situation. Such lack of action by the Administration on such recommendations is unacceptable for Atkins stated such water conditions are the worst they had ever witnessed in Florida. The dredging operation has now stopped due to lack of approval for the change order submitted nearly 6 months ago. Many people in the Administration and the Commission have ignored/ wrongfully disputed the content of the Atkins report, but we note Atkins was recently retained by the County (after all existing cyanobacteria mass has been extracted from the two waters) to recommend/initiate actions that will stop recurrence of any such algae growth in the future.

Given many people residing on these two waterways are now reporting health problems associated with the terrible smell and air borne bacteria being disbursed throughout the area, and given that certain commissioners apparently now prefer to pick a fight with ProLime and depict the company as the cause of/fall guy in this still unresolved problem, which it definitely is not, this situation is truly out of control.

Our group senses massive lawsuits against the County forming on the horizon. Based on the evidence at our disposal, the County will probably have no legitimate chance to defend itself in such lawsuits.

It is time for instigation of clear thinking by the Commissioners to solve this problem. The Commission must take over total control of the problem from the Administrator/Administration, for they have proven since early 2010 (when Ray Sandrock was made Administrator) they are incapable of properly/closely managing this massive problem/dredge to a satisfactory solution and conclusion. Given this situation represents a serious/expensive/huge environmental problem, a change in managerial personnel handling the problem is mandatory.

It is time for the County to commence investigative action, as recently recommended by one of our group’s members, which actions mirror the 2011 Atkins recommendations, which were not followed. Listed below are the actions, which must be implemented quickly given the severity of the situation:

Construct a weir-half round on the 72” drainage pipe (the “fix”) on the Sunrise Waterway near Tamiami Trail, which will meaningfully raise the water level of the waterway from a very low level thereby impeding the expansion of the algae bacterial mat and its contents from leaving the waterway out into the waters entering Alligator Bay and then into Charlotte Harbor (see discussion below covering the “fix”);
Investigate (via TV monitoring) all CCU sewer pipes having proximity to Sunrise Waterway and Sunshine Lake to determine whether the pipes show deterioration/ cracks whereby fecal contaminated rain water during heavy rain storm conditions can escape from the pipes and be conveyed onto the Elkcam Blvd. swales above and then be drained into a storm grate inlet that will discharge the contamination into the Sunrise Waterway behind the sewer lift station. Any structural problems discovered with any of these sewers must be immediately dealt with by sleeving the pipes to eliminate all escape routes for the feces/contaminated water;
Investigate whether the Sewer Lift Station vault on Elkcam Blvd. is defective , which if defective can allow feces or fecal contaminated liquids to leech into the ground and be transmitted into the Sunrise Waterway. To do this, CCU must conduct deep soil tests around the lift station and out to the waterway to rule out existence in the soil of any fecal coliform or other bacteria related to human waste contamination. Immediate repairs must be made to the lift station/vault if damage/cracks, etc. are confirmed;
Investigate whether the cast iron pipes under the slabs and laterals of homes located on the waters, which transmit feces from each residence near the waterway/lake to the sewer system, are damaged and, if so, the homeowner must replace such pipes. Smoke testing conducted in 2011 by CCU on several dozen homes in this area showed that several of the homes tested failed the test meaning their pipes/laterals were cracked and fecal contaminate water was infiltrating soil near the waterway. However, CCU took no action to verify the problems identified in the test were corrected by the homeowner; and
Before the dredge is completed, the County should have a police team dive in the two waters to inspect all areas dredged. This inspection will determine whether ALL debris in such waters has been extracted. Atkins stated any remaining algae mat not extracted (including that attached to submerged debris) will cause the algae to continue to grow.

The Commission should quickly approve the dredging contract change order and amend the many sections of the contract causing confusion between the County and ProLime to make performance under the contract readily determinable/calculable by both parties.

Finally, our group is asking the Commission replace Ray Sandrock, as County Administrator, for the evidence we have assembled overwhelmingly shows he and several of his top lieutenants have ignored citizens’ warnings, alerts and complaints about problems in the two waters since early 2010 (when Sandrock became Administrator) and he/his Administration personnel refused to follow through/implement a simple, cheap (less than a $15,000 cost) “fix” identified in the early part of 2010 to stop proliferation of the bacteria growth. Such fix required a standard permit from the state to initiate. The fix was agreed upon by the then Commissioner Bob Starr and the then Administrator, Roger Baltz, and Mr. Sandrock, Baltz’s successor, was advised of the fix, knew of the permit requirement and was told by Baltz and Starr of why the fix was needed. However, the required permit was never applied for and hence the fix (the same” fix” as discussed in Investigative Recommendation No.1 above) was never implemented, which has caused the remedial cost of taxpayer funding required to escalate to a staggering amount probably exceeding over $4M to solve a problem, which should have been solved in 2010. Unbelievably, we now understand Administration last month applied for the permit they stonewalled for 18 months before.

We note Sarasota County has just fired its County Administrator; the reason cited was the Administrator’s managerial approach was made the county’s employees angry. Wow! The case against Ray Sandrock dismissal makes the Sarasota firing look like child’s play.

In closing, our group is prepared to initiate taxpayer initiatives against Mr. Sandrock if the Commissioners refuse to replace him irrespective of the multitude of factual evidence presented. We intend to submit to the Commissioners an Indictment Document citing the many specific/factual charges worthy of dismissal. Given the strong interest in this initiative, we expect the document will be signed by hundreds of CC taxpayers. If necessary, there will also be additional initiatives taken for we strongly believe county management must be placed under capable hands of a non-bureaucrat with a strong business background and the proven ability to develop and manage an efficient budget, which respects/safeguards taxpayers’ monetary contributions. The current occupant of the CC Administrator position is a bureaucrat who has proven since he has held the office he could care less about what the citizens and taxpayers of this county think or what they want from their Administrator.

My concern is will this contamination remain in the boundaries of Charlotte County? Is there a possibility that if this is not handled quickly and appropriately that we who live in North Port could possibly be subjected to this contaminated spillage?

Global Cooling Awareness Project Launched

January 6, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News/by Dr. Rich Swier

The Orlando, Florida headquartered Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC), has launched the “Global Cooling Awareness Project” (GCAP). The purpose of GCAP is to draw attention to the growing concern among the world’s scientists and climate researchers that a new record setting cold climate epoch may have begun.

The GCAP will be a listing of science educators, researchers, and science-degreed individuals, similar to that of the Global Warming Petition Project started by Dr. Arthur Robinson in 1998 at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM). That decades-long project eventually compiled a list of over 30,000 professionals who signed a short statement that they were opposed to the concept of manmade global warming.

The SSRC has already begun to encourage the signup of the GCAP with an initial batch of mailings on January 1, 2014, to original Petition Project signatories. The GCAP is expected to take at least two years of consistent effort to reach or exceed the numbers seen in the Petition Project.

According to SSRC President, John L. Casey, “We have been deeply honored that Dr. Arthur Robinson has been so helpful in getting the GCAP started by providing the list of the Petition Project signers as well as his advice on how to proceed. There is no question that Dr. Robinson’s project has become one of the most visible and important counters to the deeply flawed concept of manmade global warming.

Now that global warming has ended and a challenging cold climate has begun, it is time to up the gain globally on preparing for the coming cold.

The SSRC’s December 10, 2013 edition of the Global Climate Status Report (GCSR)© for example, shows that of twenty four climate parameters we keep track of, eighteen now show global cooling as the dominant trend. The remainder of the set of parameters are expected to switch to cooling within the next five to ten years. It is vital that the world changes its focus from debating the now thoroughly discredited notion of manmade climate change, to the far more important subject of preparing for the approaching decades of what may be extreme cold weather.

“The Global Cooling Awareness Project is the next logical extension of Dr. Robinson’s history-making Petition Project. It will once more allow scientists and experts worldwide to have a voice in telling the truth about climate change,” notes Casey.

Dr. Robinson adds his own thoughts to the GCAP by saying, “The Petition Project has been a long labor of love and necessity to help tell the truth about the so-called ‘consensus of scientists’ that allegedly supported manmade climate change. The tens of thousands of science professionals who signed the Petition have clearly shown that the ‘consensus’ just like manmade global warming, is also just another politically motivated myth. I strongly endorse Mr. Casey’s Global Cooling Awareness Project and urge every science professional to lend their support to his cause. John like me, has endured the expected ‘slings and arrows’ for years from those who wants us to believe in something that does not exist so they can gain more power and control over our lives, all at the expense of scientific integrity. We need more researchers like John Casey, who are willing to risk everything to make sure the truth is told.”

Further supporting the launch of the GCAP is world renowned sea level expert, Dr. Nils-Axel Morner. From his office in Sweden, Dr. Morner says, “The start of the Global Cooling Awareness Project is yet another indicator of the quality and strength of leadership in climate research coming out of the SSRC. Recently, I helped coordinate an important climate research document that made a firm statement that the Sun and its interaction with the other planets are what drive climate change on Earth. Mankind’s influence is negligible. John Casey joined other world leaders in climate research to co-author that position paper. It has been my pleasure to have supported his efforts to make sure the truth about the world’s climate and especially the reality of global sea level measurements and sea level rise predictions, are properly told. I think we must stress that all forces must now be redirected to real problems in the real world, and leave the propaganda nonsense of global warming. But I don’t think we should substitute the global warming hysteria for a global cooling hysteria. Mr. Casey and I have both forecast a significant drop in global sea levels in the coming cold climate epoch. I hope that others will also accept that conclusion as well as the need to sign on to the Global Cooling Awareness Project.”

The Global Cooling Awareness Project is open to anyone with a hard science or engineering degree at any level. To sign up for the GCAP, interested participants need only go to the “Global Cooling Awareness Project” page at the SSRC website. They then need to simply send an email back to the SSRC with the requested contact information and their approval of the following statement:

“I _______________ do hereby agree that the last planetary climate phase of global warming which was produced primarily by natural cycles, may have ended, and that a long, cold, climate epoch is now likely.”

Applicant’s names will be posted in the GCAP registry after verification.

President Obama’s “Climate Change” Lies

January 6, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News/by Alan Caruba

The extreme cold that gripped the nation at the beginning of the year just added to the growing public dismissal of the claims that “greenhouse gas emissions” would lead to a dangerous stage of “global warming.” Indeed, even the charlatans that have devoted decades to this hoax are now using the phrase “climate change.”

We tend not to recall what the weather was like a year ago. In May 2013, Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute, noted that “Lots of us are commenting on the U.S. having the second coldest spring in the official thermometer record (starting ca. 1860) and the coldest since 1975. This cold spring highlights another climate cycle that has nothing to do with carbon dioxide (CO2).”

Records of cold weather are being broken all around the nation and the world. That’s not exactly what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been predicting since it was set up in 1988 to get nations to sign onto the Kyoto Protocols to reduce CO2 emissions, claiming they were causing warming.

We are all going to have to pay attention to what President Obama will have to say in his forthcoming State of the Union speech and other pronouncements about “climate change” because that is going to be a major theme of his as he begins the second year of his second term. Climate change ranks right up there with “If you want to keep your healthcare plan, you can. Period.”

Last February, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an extremely liberal group, wrote Obama to say “We are inspired and gratified by your commitment to address the threat of climate change. Still gushing, they said that the “science of climate change…calls for action to swiftly and deeply reduce heat-trapping emissions and better prepare our nation for now unavoidable impacts.”

If one merely refers to “climate change” without specifically identifying it, how can the UCS be so sure that emissions from our cars, trucks, manufacturing, and of course the coal-fired plants that, until Obama arrived, provided half of all the electricity Americans need and use. To save us all from the “climate change” 150 of these plants have been closed since he took office.

To replace them, the Obama administration “invested” in a variety of wind and solar businesses, most of which promptly went bankrupt with our taxpayer funds. To get us to stop driving, Obama advocated high-speed railroads in a nation where people routinely get on an airplane to get to distant cities. Amtrak has never made a profit since it was created in 1970.

The President, however, can be counted upon to talk about “climate change” as if recent examples of it threaten our lives. The facts say something else. For example, there has been NO global warming for over 17 years. In 2013 there was a record quiet tornado season and severe tornadoes have been declining for 40 years.

Other than tropical storm Sandy in 2012, the U.S. has gone more than 8 years without a major hurricane strike and the U.S. has experienced the fewest forest fires in three decades and, over the same time period, there has been no sea level rise on the west coast of the U.S. or Canada.

In contrast, an Antarctic global warming expedition of 74 eco-tourists, certain that sea ice there was melting, was trapped by it. In the summer of 2013, all manner of yachts, sailboats, and others got trapped by sea ice while trying to sail the Northwest Passage after being told it would be free of ice. It turned out that 2013 recorded the second highest volume of sea ice ever recorded.

It’s not that the climate is not changing. The climate—measured in decades and centuries—has always changed and it does so in remarkably predictable cycles. The period between ice ages is 11.500 years. We are overdue for the next one, though we did have a mini ice age from 1300 to 1850.

All this scientific data guarantees one thing. The President is lying when he talks of “climate change” by which he means a warming cycle. He is lying when he blames it on carbon dioxide which plays no role whatever in climate change. The $7.45 billion his administration gave to 120 nations between 2010 and 2012 to cope with “climate change” was an utter waste of our taxpayer dollars. Given the nation’s $17 trillion in debt, it was money we did not have, but which added to our debt.

Recall, too, that Obama refused to negotiate with the Republican Party in 2013 when it wanted to reduce such spending, resulting in the government shutdown that was blamed on the GOP.

You can forget about “climate change”, but you should keep in mind what the President is doing to bankrupt America and deny it the production of the energy it needs as the weather gets colder.