The House of Representatives passed its sixth appropriations bill to fund certain government agencies related to the environment on Friday that would defund many of the Biden administration’s climate-change-focused initiatives.
The Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024 allocates over $25 billion to fund conservation programs, agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management(BLM) and Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) as well as cultural promotion agencies such as the national endowments for the arts and humanities. After spending over 12 hours considering amendments to the bill on Thursday and Friday morning, the House passed the bill by a vote of 213 yeas to 203 nays, with all Democrats but one voting against the bill.
“In drafting this bill, we worked very hard to rein in federal spending while prioritizing critical needs within our Subcommittee’s allocation,” said Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho’s 2nd District, who introduced the bill, at a meeting of the House Appropriations Committee in July to consider the bill. “Cutting funding is never easy and it can often be an ugly, arduous process. But with the national debt in excess of $32 trillion and inflation at an unacceptable level, we must make tough choices to ensure we do not saddle our children and grandchildren with overwhelming debt.”
🚨NOW: I’m leading the FY24 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations debate.
Amid widespread Republican opposition to the many climate change initiatives of the Biden administration, the House considered over 130 amendments on the floor to the bill, mostly from Republican members seeking to deny funds for these initiatives. Many of their amendments failed to pass due to bipartisan opposition.
Among the amendments passed by the House was a provision to deny funds for enforcing prohibitions on plastic straws, which was offered by Republican Rep. John Rose of Tennessee. Another such amendment, offered by Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, denies the government funds to prevent domestic pollutants from adversely affecting foreign countries.
One amendment, by Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, denies funds to implement a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act(IRA) that raises minimum rents and royalties for oil and gas projects. Perhaps the most narrowly passed amendment was one advanced by Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, which denies funds to implement any of President Joe Biden’s climate-change-focused executive orders, which was approved by one vote.
The bill has been opposed by Biden, whose administration released a statement indicating that he would veto it. “These levels would result in deep cuts to clean energy programs and other programs that work to combat climate change, essential nutrition services, law enforcement, consumer safety, education, and healthcare,” wrote the Office of Management and Budget about the bill’s funding levels, adding that it “include[s] billions in additional rescissions from the [Inflation Reduction Act] and other vital legislation.”
In parallel, the Senate has proposed a separate appropriations bill for these departments and agencies, which provides $19 billion more than the House bill and largely supports Biden’s environmental agenda, including $100 million for environmental justice programs, according to a press release from the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-11-04 13:23:332023-11-04 13:25:11House Passes EPA Spending Bill That Defunds Several Biden Climate Initiatives
On September 11, 2023, BOTTINI & BOTTINI, INC. and TAMASHIRO SOGI & BONNER filed the first lawsuit seeking to hold the Board of Directors of Hawaiian Electric liable for the tragic loss of life and property due to the Maui Fire on August 8, 2023.
The case — Rice v. Celeste A. Connors et al., Case No. 1CCV-23-0001181, is pending in Honolulu, Hawaii in the First Circuit court.
The new complaint alleges that between 2019 and 2022, Hawaiian Electric invested less than $245,000 on wildfire-specific projects on the island. Instead of spending necessary funds to prevent fires caused by its equipment, Hawaiian Electric instead spent millions of dollars towards efforts to achieve a 100 percent renewable energy goal, which earned the Company bonuses that the Company’s executives used to increase their own compensation. Defendant Seu, CEO of the Company, was paid 32 times the median compensation of all employees in 2022.
The members of Hawaiian Electric’s Board of Directors were also well aware of the need to adopt and implement a power-shutoff system, as San Diego Gas & Electric and PG&E had done years before, but failed to do so. Darren Pai, a spokesperson for Hawaiian Electric, admitted that the Company did not have a formal power shutoff plan at the time of the Maui fire. The complaint also alleges that the Defendants new about the connection between passing hurricanes and wildfires. In 2020, researchers from the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center established a causal relationship between fires on Maui and O‘ahu to winds from Hurricane Lane.
The complaint alleges that the Defendants breached their fiduciary duties by causing Hawaiian Electric to haul away fallen poles, power lines, transformers, conductors and other equipment from near a Lahaina substation starting around Aug. 12, 2023, before investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) arrived on scene. One of the attorneys for the shareholders, Addison Bonner of Tamashiro Sogi & Bonner, said: “The Defendants’ actions may have violated national guidelines on how utilities should handle and preserve evidence after a wildfire and deprived investigators the opportunity to view any poles or downed lines in an undisturbed condition before or after the fire started.”
Frank A. Bottini, of Bottini & Bottini, a co-counsel for the shareholders, said: “Rather than spend its customer’s money to improve infrastructure maintenance and safety, the Board of Directors of Hawaiian Electric funneled ratepayers’ money to boost their own profits and compensation. This pattern and practice of favoring profits over safety left Hawaiian Electric vulnerable to an increased risk of a catastrophic event such as the Maui fire, which was the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history and the deadliest U.S. fire in over a century.”
The complete complaint can be downloaded from the link below.
When I was in college in southern California many years ago, the smog could be overwhelming. Visibility was low and the sense of being closed-in by a layer of brownish-grey was ongoing. Then, one day it rained. The sky was actually blue and, to my great surprise, you could see the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains in the distance.
In the ensuing 40-plus years, the United States has made great progress in its war against all manner of pollution. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, since the enactment of the Clean Air Act in 1970 through 2019, “the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) dropped by 77 percent.” This has occurred even as energy consumption has remained at an almost constant level — despite growth in the population by about 100 million people.
The EPA also reports that “Compared to 1970 vehicle models, new cars, SUVs and pickup trucks are roughly 99 percent cleaner for common pollutants (hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particle emissions).” Additionally, the U.S. is increasingly using renewable energy sources. One example: From 2000 through 2018, the use of coal as an energy source fell from about 23% percent of our total energy portfolio to about 13 percent. Similarly, clean natural gas went from accounting for about 24% percent of our energy consumption to about 31%. Other renewable energy sources (nuclear, solar, etc.) are also increasing. And, generally, the industrialized nations of Europe are also making notable progress.
But America still needs oil. A lot of oil. We will continue to need oil for decades to come. That is, unless we want to commit economic suicide.
That seems not to concern people on the environmental Left, who are outraged that President Biden opened up a relatively small sliver of Alaska for drilling. ConocoPhillips will drill 199 wells at three sites in the Willow Project area, employing 3,500 people outright and, over the longer term, several hundred in permanent jobs.
Here’s the irony: While America once again engages in national agony over a modest oil drilling plan, China is laughing up its sleeve at our tortured efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Just last year, China opened roughly two new coal plants a week. As recent report explains, in 2022 China’s construction of coal power plants was “six times as large as that in all of the rest of the world combined.”
India is in much the same boat. “From 2001 to 2021, India installed 168 gigawatts of coal-fired generation, nearly double what it added in solar and wind power combined,” according to one study. While the subcontinental nation is making strides toward clean energy use, the reality is that “its electricity demand will grow up to 6% every year for the next decade.”
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that America abandon its commitment to cleaner sources of energy. Rather, we have to simply be honest: If we tie ourselves to extreme environmental standards while much of the rest of the world keeps employing fossil fuels at record rates, we will only hurt our ability to foster job creation here at home and our capacity to compete successfully in the global economy.
Economic transitions can be hard. Carriage makers were no doubt unhappy with the advent of the automobile. The issue before us is how rapidly we should move toward a “carbon-neutral” economy. Under the Biden administration, even American agriculture is a target. In a biting analysis, Heritage Foundation scholar Daren Bakst reports that at last year’s White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, the administration advocated for policies that would “centrally plan how farmers produce food, what food farmers produce, and what food people eat.” The Biden plan “also appears far more concerned with environmental outcomes than efficiency, productivity, and affordability.”
As America moves toward “clean” energy, we should not do so to appease activists at the cost of jobs, prosperity, sound mining and farming policies, and our continued leadership in international markets. Our country does not exist in pristine isolation any more than the wind stops at our borders.
The only way we get a clean environment is if we have the resources to obtain it. The only way we have those resources is if we have a strong economy. And the only way we have a strong economy is if our laws and regulations make sense.
I love the memory of seeing mountains in the far distance. But I also like filling up my car’s gas tank affordably. We can have both economic growth and environmental health, but only if we also have a strong dose of national common sense.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-03-24 05:17:142023-03-24 05:19:02Environmental Protection Shouldn’t Mean Economic Suicide
A common (legitimate) concern with nuclear is unhealthy radiation, its usage actually emits less radiation than the burning of coal.
There is a deafening silence surrounding nuclear energy. Yet, if you are to believe the current climate alarmism on display, the world’s future is hanging by a thread. Indeed, the forceful climate marches in London last week, the Greta Thunberg-ization of the world’s youth, and David Attenborough’s new Netflix documentary are all symptoms of a growing call to arms. According to them, climate change is real and impending, and, in young Greta’s words, they “want you to panic.”
The situation appears dire. Yet, assuming it is, there seems to be a gap in reasoning. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for a “Green New Deal,” which would seek to remove America’s carbon footprint by 2030 by “upgrading” every single one of the 136 million houses in America, completely overhauling the nation’s transport infrastructure (both public and private), and somehow simultaneously guaranteeing universal health care, access to healthy food, and economic security—without any consideration of cost. In other words, a complete pie-in-the-sky scheme that is more concerned with virtue-signaling than with pragmatic reality.
But if these people truly care about the environment and the damage being caused by climate change, why is no one talking about nuclear?
Nuclear Power
Nuclear is fully carbon-free and therefore a “clean” energy source in carbon terms. This is crucial considering the primary villain of climate change is CO2; switching to nuclear would directly cut out carbon emissions and thus represent a significant step forward, except for the construction phase (which would create a one-off nominal carbon debt about equal to that of solar farms). It has successfully contributed to decarbonizing public transport in countries such as Japan, France, and Sweden.
It is also often overlooked that nuclear is the safest way to generate reliable electricity (and far safer than coal or gas) despite Frankenstein-esque visions of nuclear meltdowns à la Chernobyl, which are ridiculously exaggerated and exceedingly rare.
Nuclear is also incredibly reliable, with an average capacity of 92.3 percent, meaning it is fully operational more than 330 days a year, which is drastically more reliable than both wind and solar—combined.
Finally, whereas a common (legitimate) concern with nuclear is that it creates unhealthy radiation, its usage actually emits less radiation than, for example, the burning of coal. Moreover, the problem posed by waste is more psychological and political nowadays than it is technological. Despite the Simpsons-inspired image of green, murky water, nuclear waste is, in fact, merely a collection of old steel rods; the nuclear waste produced in America over the last 60 years could all fit into a single medium-sized Walmart. Furthermore, it is not only securely stored in concrete-and-steel casks in the middle of deserts, but it also loses radiation over time and can actually be recycled to extend the life of nuclear production by centuries.
France and Sweden
There are explicit success stories that attest to the power of nuclear. France and Sweden, which have some of the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the developed world, both rely heavily on nuclear (72 percent and 42 percent, respectively) rather than on wind or solar power. France generated 88 percent of its electricity total from zero-carbon sources, and Sweden got an even more impressive 95 percent. At the same time, these countries have some of the lowest energy prices in Europe, whereas renewable-heavy countries such as Germany and Denmark have the two highest energy prices on the continent—without much carbon reduction to show for it relative to France and Sweden.
So why, if people such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez care as much about the climate as they claim to, are they seemingly so blindly attracted to over-ambitious, unrealistic proposals? Indeed, a near-utopiazation of renewables fails to take into account many of the issues associated with these while neglecting the advantages of nuclear.
Renewable energy isn’t always reliable, as mentioned (which makes sense when you consider the fact that the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow). When the reliability of these renewables falters (wind turbines only provide energy 34.5 percent of the time, and solar panels an even lower 25.1 percent), expensive and carbon-heavy stop-gap measures act as backup.
Ecological Problems
There are also ecological problems. Wind and solar farms require tremendous amounts of wildlife-cleared land and are often protested by local conservationists. Electricity from solar panels on individual homes, on the other hand, a plan AOC apparently endorses, is twice as expensive, thus making it unaffordable for many American households. Though the debate rages, there is also a case to be made for the fact that wind turbines represent serious hazards to rare and threatened birds such as eagles and other birds of prey. They also threaten marine wildlife such as porpoises and coral reefs.
When compared more directly with various forms of renewable energy, the narrative also skews in nuclear’s favor. Solar farms require 450 times more land than do nuclear power plants; nuclear plants require far fewer materials for production than solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal; and solar produces up to 300 times more hazardous waste per terawatt-hour of energy than nuclear.
Yet the issues aren’t merely technological and ecological. Indeed, there is an argument that renewables such as solar and wind will become more and more efficient and cheaper over time, which is certainly true (though some experts dispute the net validity of this claim). A different problem, however, is that the context within which they are promoted, such as the “Green New Deal,” often translates into economic madness (the GND would cost up to $90 trillion according to some). It is striking how the Green New Deal encapsulates not only climate change but also health care, jobs, and housing.
Indeed, it goes much further than simply combating the issues facing our environment, incorporating a much wider agenda of socio-economic transformation. And this is why some, such as Michael Shellenberger (president of Environmental Progress—a pro-nuclear, climate change NGO), argue that left-wing politicians in the mold of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez idealize renewables: they provide an environmentalist façade for increased government intervention in areas far beyond the climate.
Expensive and Risky, but Worthwhile
Of course, nuclear isn’t perfect; it is still very expensive (though this is increasingly solvable through more standardization and long-termism), the risk of Fukushima-like disasters will probably always exist, and the localized environmental impacts are concerns to be addressed. Most importantly, the political will is still lacking.
Despite the fact that the public and private sectors spent a combined $2 trillion between 2007 and 2016 on solar and wind power, solar energy still only accounted for 1.3 percent, and wind power 3.9 percent, of the world’s electricity generation in 2016. Operating at a scale of 94 times more in federal subsidies in America for renewables than for nuclear, this looks like an unsustainable trend. Imagine if it had been invested in nuclear instead.
Rather, the Ocasio-Cortezes of the world, who are by far the most vociferous when it comes to climate change, should put money where their mouths are. Though this article is far from exhaustive and was unable to account for all the nuances and intricacies of environmental and energy policy, it seems that, at the very least, nuclear deserves a spot at the table if we are serious about saving our planet.
Christopher Barnard is the Head of Campaigning & Events for Students For Liberty UK, as well as a final-year Politics & International Relations student at the University of Kent. He tweets at @ChrisBarnardDL.
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)2022-07-22 14:06:192022-07-22 14:10:28If Climate Change Is a Dire Threat, Why Is No One Talking about Nuclear Power?
The Supreme Court delivered a massive blow to the Biden administration’s climate change plan Thursday, severely limiting the power of federal agencies.
The Court, in a 6-3 decision, limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, significantly curtailing the power of the federal agency. The decision restricts the agency to regulating individual power plants and not the entire power sector.
“Congress did not grant EPA in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act the authority to devise emissions caps based on the generation shifting approach the Agency took in the Clean Power Plan,” Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
The case stems from an Obama-era EPA climate rule and addresses the scope of Congress’s ability to delegate legislative authority to executive agencies.
In August 2015, the EPA adopted the Clean Power Plan that sought to cut carbon emissions by 32% from power plants by 2030.
However, in early 2016, the Supreme Court blocked the plan’s implementation in a 5-4 vote. Plaintiffs successfully argued that the EPA had exceeded its congressional mandate under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which broadly authorizes the agency to issue the “best system of emission reduction.”
The Trump administration repealed the Clean Power Plan and created the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, which included looser restrictions and allowed states to regulate their standards.
“Unlike the Clean Power Plan, ACE adheres to the Clean Air Act and gives states the regulatory certainty they need to continue to reduce emissions and provide a dependable, diverse supply of electricity that all Americans can afford,” former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement at the time.
Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Politics Joseph Postell said the case has to do with the EPA’s authority to regulate major sources of air pollution that are stationary, like smokestacks.
“Does the statute allow the Obama administration to force the state of West Virginia to put more clean power into its energy grid as a means of reducing carbon emissions or does the Clean Air Act force the states to implement technology controls at the actual existing plants?” Postell said.
Postell said the new Trump rules regulated only the existing sources of air pollution rather than requiring new energy generation from sources like wind and solar.
“The Trump administration basically advanced version of what is now known as the major questions doctrine,” Postell said. “When there is a question of major importance or a major question. It has to be resolved by Congress and cannot be kicked over to the agency.”
In 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia vacated everything the day before Biden’s inauguration, according to SCOTUSblog. While the Biden Administration could reinstate the Clean Power Plan, it has instead chosen to draft alternate power plant emissions rules.
The Biden Administration was awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling before releasing its plan, the Washington Post reported.
Following the repeal, West Virginia led a coalition of 20 other Republican-led states and coal companies to file an appeal to ask the Supreme Court to challenge the appeals court decision.
The plaintiffs argued that the appeals court wrongly grants “an agency unbridled power—functionally ‘no limits’—to decide whether and how to decarbonize almost any sector of the economy.” They asked the Supreme Court to preemptively intervene before the EPA issues additional emissions reduction plans or rules using this authority.
Three brief overviews about the US elections, so far:
Due likely to God’s intercession, Republicans did FAR better than the media and pollsters were projecting,
Since the US voting public did not sufficiently cooperate with the plans of the Left, there appears to be a significant amount of shenanigans to keep the President from being reelected, and
It’s now mostly in the hands of lawyers and judges.
As we’ve recommended before, please continue to pray about this election, as God can fix anything.
Thank you for your interest in, and support of, the principles of America.
PS — We are currently examining the Pennsylvania voting result for statistical anomalies (and have found considerable evidence for that (e.g. see here).
Additionally, the President’s team needs attorneys willing to help with Pennsylvania lawsuits (and likely other key swing states: AZ, WI, MI, GA, NV). If you’d like to assist with either of those actions, or how someone who would, please let me know.
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: To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles, we’ve put together detailed archives — where you can search by year, or over the ten plus years of the Newsletter. For a detailed background about the Newsletter, read this. Please email me for a free subscription
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) Global Network Foundation becoming a project of the Tides Foundation should dispel any notion that BLM (2.01) is a nonpartisan group dedicated to nonpartisan solutions for racial and policing challenges. According to the Capital Research Center (CRC), this recent move means the control Thousand Currents has over BLM’s chapters will merely be transferred to yet another prominently liberal group. Thousand Currents is a nonprofit that refuses to be transparent about its financial data, and it has close ties to violent activists like Susan Rosenberg. The shift to the Tides Foundation is little better; in 2018, Tides gave $291 million to leftist groups, ranging from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations to the Hewlett Foundation.
The questionable ethics of the backers behind the BLM Global Network Foundation means any donors to BLM are not contributing to a philanthropic cause, but a radical political movement.
Major corporations such as Amazon (1.29), Apple (1.00), and Facebook (1.00) have supported this blatantly left-wing organization by donating to BLM’s allies. If these companies want to maintain their conservative and apolitical customer base, they should refrain from validating the BLM movement and its unquestionably biased funding source.
Big Tech companies have consistently been one of the worst offenders when it comes to advancing liberal messaging by suppressing right-leaning content. While these companies have repeatedly protested against the idea that they’re anti-conservative, they have pledged to donate generous sums to causes connected to the BLM movement. By moving under the Tides Foundation umbrella, the BLM Global Network Foundation is clearly aligning with the political left. It is not a neutral effort to save black lives. Big Tech should question allying with BLM if their goal is to disprove the existence of an anti-conservative agenda.
Whether a corporation donates to BLM directly or to its allies, that company is clearly favoring one side of the political aisle while vilifying the rest. Corporations will need to decide if they serve the public by delivering a product or a service, or if they intend to operate as political actors who censor those who disagree with them.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png002ndvote .comhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png2ndvote .com2020-09-23 09:40:002020-09-23 09:40:27BLM’s Shroud is Ripped Off — It’s All About Leftist Politics
It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that 2020 has been an interesting year (in the sense of “May you live in interesting times”). Fires, plagues, floods, Presidential impeachment, global economic meltdown, lockdowns: this year has seen them all. And we’re only in September. Thank goodness there isn’t a major election coming up where some are predicting social breakdown in nearly every conceivable scenario or anything…
It’s not quite dogs and cats living together in peace and harmony, but another sign that the end is nigh is that I find myself nodding along to an article of George Monbiot (greenie extraordinaire) in the Guardian. In it, Monbiot argues that blaming overpopulation for environmental concerns is a cop out, particularly for rich people in first world nations who get to lecture the third world on the need to have fewer children while they enjoy a lifestyle with a carbon footprint bigger than that of small central African nations.
As he states, the current population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people. This means that a rising human population is only producing a tiny fraction of the extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions due to consumption growth. Instead, we in the West should be turning our attention on our own behaviours (that latest iPhone, the plane trip to Davos to discuss climate change) rather than fretting about more Indian or African babies.
The example Monbiot gives of Dame Jane Goodall is a good one. She told the World Economic Forum in Davos that if only we had the same population as we did 500 years ago (500 million) then the current environmental issues would not be with us. The audience of course consisted of those with ecological footprints many thousand times greater than the global average. But the greater irony is that Goodall has previously appeared in British Airways advertising. If the world’s population was 500 million, and it was entirely composed of the average UK plane passenger, then our environmental impact would probably be greater than the 7.8 billion people alive today. When it comes to the environment, population size does not matter nearly as much as lifestyle.
Indeed, wishing that the world’s population was one-sixteenth its current size is the same as wishing for the moon and just as useless. Tut-tutting about more people being born over there saves us from having to worry about anything we are doing over here. It is environmental virtue-signalling.
Except when it leads to policy outcomes that are far worse than virtue-signalling. Population panic has led to barbaric, coercive population control measures in many countries throughout the world. And this is not an historical problem: UK foreign aid was helping to fund crude, dangerous and coercive sterilisation in India as recently as 2011, it was justified on the grounds that it was helping to “fight climate change”. (At the same time the UK aid was also pouring money into developing coal, gas and oil plants around the world…)
“To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.”
And both Monbiot and Pope Francis had perhaps been reading this very blog, since nearly a decade ago I wrote of the thinly-veiled condescending bigotry underlying much of the West’s panic about overpopulation. Perhaps now that the more people are coming around to the view that the world’s population will stop growing in a few decades, we will see less insistence on the kinds of arguments Monbiot is railing against.
Marcus Roberts was two years out of law school when he decided that practising law was no longer for him. He therefore went back to university and did his LLM while tutoring. He now teaches contract and… More by Marcus Roberts.
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Meet the “new” Green New Deal…same as the old Green New Deal.
When House Democrats introduced their new climate plan it’s clear they did so not as a serious proposal, but to give cover to Joe Biden. Their problem? Not even their own members are buying it.
You might recall the first version of the Green New Deal met with disaster even among Democrats. Despite her prime role as a media darling, AOC has never had the ability to bring her Green New Deal to a vote in the House. Democrat leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, never signed on to it and the bill was so radioactive not a single member of the Senate voted in favor of it.
For all the attention the eco-radicals and the media garnished for the first Green New Deal, it seems like not a single leader in Washington was eager to actually vote for it. Of course they had good reason, they know it spells catastrophe.
Now Democrats are taking the lemon-with-a-new-coat-of-paint approach to their environmental policy by hoping you won’t notice their new “plan” is just as out of touch as the old one. The goal is clear: Democrats are betting this proposal will appear more reasonable than the original Green New Deal and Biden won’t look like an AOC climate puppet. However, it’s just as much a threat to America’s middle class families, or even worse.
Under the plan, every American will need to budget for a new electric vehicle in the years ahead. They will also need to prepare for skyrocketing electric bills that are the result of government restricting the open energy market. Families already struggling to make ends meet will have to grapple with electric bills increasing 17 percent and forced to pay thousands to come into compliance with the law. All this at the same time millions of their neighbors lose their job in energy producing states like Pennsylvania, Louisiana and New Mexico.
That’s exactly why not all House Democrats are on board with Green New Deal 2.0. New Mexico Democrat Congresswoman Xochitl Torres Small, who represents an energy rich district, has come out against the new plan calling it “out of touch with the reality on the ground in New Mexico.” Without a doubt, more representatives in other energy rich states will reach the same conclusion.
Of all the descriptions of the House Democrat climate plan, “out of touch with reality” might just be the nicest.
The dirty little secret of both Green New Deal plans is that neither is a serious proposal designed to actually pass Congress. They are designed for one reason: to help Joe Biden appease radical environmental special interests and … Bernie voters.
The House Democrat plan allows Joe Biden to pretend he’s flexing green muscles while also distancing himself from the first Green New Deal. The problem for Biden and House Democrats is that no one was fooled by the original Green New Deal, and not even his own party will buy into this one.
Larry Behrens is the Western States Director for Power The Future, an organization fighting for America’s Energy Workers. He is a former journalist and previously served as Communications Director for New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez. You can find him on Twitter at @larrybehrens and @PTFNewMexico or email at larry@powerthefuture.com
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2020-07-12 06:58:152020-07-12 06:58:15BEHRENS: Green New Deal 2.0 Doesn’t Make Biden Look Any Less Radical
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declinedby an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s
Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?
In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism
Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.
Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.
The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.
The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.
Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.
Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
The invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.
“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”
That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.
I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.
This article has been republished with permission from the website of Environmental Progress, which was founded by Michael Schellenberger.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2020-07-06 06:37:452020-07-06 06:38:20I was wrong. We scared you unnecessarily, says environmentalist
Forget everything government officials, many media outlets, and “activist scientists” have warned about the damaging effects of carbon dioxide, because in reality there’s no cause for alarm, a group called the CO2 Coalition urges.
Scientists, engineers, and policy analysts who are part of the nonprofit organization turned out in force Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, outside Washington.
“Atmospheric CO2 is not a pollutant, it is in fact the very elixir of life,” Craig Idso, a science adviser to the CO2 Coalition, said during a panel discussion at CPAC exploring the benefits attached to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The CO2 Coalition, founded in 2015, describes its mission as “educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.”
[ … ]
“Adding CO2 to the atmosphere enhances plant water use efficiency,” he said.
Increased levels of carbon dioxide could boost plant growth and make plants more resistant to droughts, he said. This could lead to increased food production, which in turn could offset projected food shortages.
‘There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.
‘Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species…It is “extremely likely” that a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.’
Earth’s Geologic History Fails CO2 Fears: ‘The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming…When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today.’
Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore also stated that oil is the ‘most important source of energy to support our civilization.’ Dr. Moore said, “If it is the aim of ‘environmentalists’ to stop fossil fuel production and use, end fracking, end coal mining, end use of oil, then they are promoting a policy that would have disastrous consequences for human civilization & the environment. If we stopped using fossil fuel today, or by 2020 as Gore proposes, at least half the human population would perish & there wouldn’t be a tree left on planet within a year, as people struggled to find enough energy to stay alive…”
Physics Professor William Happer discredits the negative effects of CO2 on the planet and whether or not climate change is man-made. He also goes into detail of why the United Nation’s models are incorrect despite their overwhelming confidence that significant warming is taking place due to human activity.
John Casey, author and former NASA rocket scientist, has taught me three facts about the climate:
The climate changes.
The changes are cyclical.
There is nothing mankind can do to change these natural cycles.
As John notes the only thing that mankind can do is prepare for these changes using good science and the best climate prediction tools to warn us of the coming changes.
End of story. Let the real science begin!
RELATED VIDEO: Tucker Carlson versus Bill Nye (Feb. 27, 2017).
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/co2-e1488281099774.jpg333640Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2017-02-28 06:34:502017-02-28 07:41:27Carbon Dioxide is the ‘Elixir of Life’
The side that defines the vocabulary of a debate, wins the debate. So we could ask: as we fight the global-warming scam, why are we using the language of the scammers? It’s harder to combat “carbon” taxes, “carbon” credits and callow “carbon” appeals if we accept that at issue is “carbon.”
Calling CO2 “carbon” is like calling H2O “hydrogen.” Carbon is about as useful to a plant aspiring to photosynthesize as a tank of hydrogen is to a dehydrated man in a desert. Carbon dioxide and carbon are not the same thing any more than a fox and foxglove are the same thing.
If chemical formulas are meaningless and one element or atom between friends can be ignored, try inhaling copious amounts of CO. It’s also “carbon,” being in fact more “carboney” ratio-wise than CO2. But carbon monoxide is poisonous to fauna and flora while carbon dioxide is plant food, which is why botanists pump it into greenhouses.
Likewise, would you like some chlorine with your food, sir? Sodium is poisonous; chlorine is poisonous. Combine the two — NaCl — and you have table salt. Chemistry is our friend.
It would be nice to think that the carbon crew is just being friendly and familiar. But not only would calling CO2 Mr. Dioxide be just as inaccurate, there’s clearly an agenda here. Carbon, the primary element in coal, conjures up images of spewing sky-blackening soot into the air. It’s a dark brand of marketing.
In fact, I challenge those crafting “carbon tax” bills to call CO2 “carbon” in their legislation’s text. They won’t because I suspect it wouldn’t stand up in court, as factories don’t actually emit carbon. The alarmists will either specify carbon dioxide or define, tendentiously, what “carbon” means for the “purposes of the bill.”
Of course, carbon isn’t really a villain, either. It’s the fourth-most abundant element in the universe, and man is known as a “carbon-based life form.” Given the latter, if extra atoms and elements and how they react with each other can be ignored when formulating labels and definitions, we could say that Al Gore’s birth was a carbon emission.
Honest people should reclaim the language and reboot the debate by rejecting “carbon” talk. As for those knowingly using the term for propaganda purposes, they should have a huge carbon footprint placed firmly on their carbon-based posteriors.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/environmntal-news.jpg350640Selwyn Dukehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngSelwyn Duke2017-01-07 10:09:422017-01-07 10:09:42Let’s Stop with the Carbon Con Already
The ‘fake news’ that Trump had somehow moderated or changed his “global warming” views was not supported by the full transcript of the meeting.
Heartland Institute President Joe Bast had this to say about the full transcript of Trump’s meeting: “This is reassuring. The Left wants to drive wedges between Trump and his base by spinning anything he says as “retreating from campaign promises.” But expressing nuance and avoiding confrontation with determined foes who buy ink by the barrel is not retreating.” The Heartland Institute released their skeptical 2015 climate report featuring 4,000 peer-reviewed articles debunking the UN IPCC claims.
Trump’s climate science view that there is “some connectivity” between humans and climate is squarely a skeptical climate view. Trump explained, “There is some, something. It depends on how much.”
Trump’s views are shared by prominent skeptical scientists. University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott has said: “The fundamental point has always been this. Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2) is as misguided as it gets.” “It’s scientific nonsense,” Stott added. Stott is featured in new skeptical climate change documentary Climate Hustle.
Trump cited his uncle, a skeptical MIT scientist: “My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was … a long time ago, he had feelings — this was a long time ago — he had feelings on this subject.” (Yes, other MIT scientists are very skeptical as well. See: MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Mocks 97% Consensus: ‘It is propaganda’
It is also worth noting that Trump’s often cited 2012 tweet about climate change stating “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” was clearly a joke and he has said it was a joke. It is further worth noting that climate skeptics do not believe the conecpt of “climate change” was “created” by China.
The media have created a cartoon-version view of Trump’s climate views. If he says anything short of global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese, then the media claims Trump flip-flopped.
And in what has been described as “fake news”, the publisher of NYT tried to sell CO2-induced storms to Trump; but Trump refused to accept the claim.
NYT’s Arthur Sulzberger: ‘We saw what these storms are now doing, right? We’ve seen it personally. Straight up.’
Trump countered: ‘We’ve had storms always, Arthur.’
Trump is accurately citing the latest climate science by noting that extreme weather is not getting worse. See: 2016 ‘State of the Climate Report’
The U.S. has had no Category 3 or larger hurricane make landfall since 2005 – the longest spell since the Civil War.
Strong F3 or larger tornadoes have been in decline since the 1970s.
Sea level rise rates have been steady for over a century, with recent deceleration.
Droughts and floods are neither historically unusual nor caused by mankind, and there is no evidence we are currently having any unusual weather.
Trump’s claim to have an “open mind” on U.S. climate policy and his comment that “I’m going to take a look at” withdrawing from the UN Paris agreement are more nuanced than his previous blunt statements that the U.S. will cancel the UN agreement. But those comments in the context of the interview are hardly a flip-flop or major signal of changing views on the issue.
University of Pennsylvania Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack noted in 2014, “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”
In layman’s terms: All of the so-called ‘solutions’ to global warming are purely symbolic when it comes to climate. So, even if we actually faced a climate catastrophe and we had to rely on a UN climate agreement, we would all be doomed!)
President-elect Donald J. Trump during a meeting at The New York Times’s offices in Manhattan on Tuesday.
[….] THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, opinion columnist: Mr. President-elect, can I ask a question? One of the issues that you actually were very careful not to speak about during the campaign, and haven’t spoken about yet, is one very near and dear to my heart, the whole issue of climate change, the Paris agreement, how you’ll approach it. You own some of the most beautiful links golf courses in the world …
FRIEDMAN: But it’s really important to me, and I think to a lot of our readers, to know where you’re going to go with this. I don’t think anyone objects to, you know, doing all forms of energy. But are you going to take America out of the world’s lead of confronting climate change?
TRUMP: I’m looking at it very closely, Tom. I’ll tell you what. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. It’s one issue that’s interesting because there are few things where there’s more division than climate change. You don’t tend to hear this, but there are people on the other side of that issue who are, think, don’t even …
SULZBERGER: We do hear it.
FRIEDMAN: I was on ‘Squawk Box’ with Joe Kernen this morning, so I got an earful of it.
[laughter]
TRUMP: Joe is one of them. But a lot of smart people disagree with you. I have a very open mind. And I’m going to study a lot of the things that happened on it and we’re going to look at it very carefully. But I have an open mind.
SULZBERGER: Well, since we’re living on an island, sir, I want to thank you for having an open mind. We saw what these storms are now doing, right? We’ve seen it personally. Straight up.
FRIEDMAN: But you have an open mind on this?
TRUMP: I do have an open mind. And we’ve had storms always, Arthur.
My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was … a long time ago, he had feelings — this was a long time ago — he had feelings on this subject. It’s a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know. I know we have, they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists. Where was that, in Geneva or wherever five years ago? Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about. I absolutely have an open mind. I will tell you this: Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important. Safety is vitally important.
And you know, you mentioned a lot of the courses. I have some great, great, very successful golf courses. I’ve received so many environmental awards for the way I’ve done, you know. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work where I’ve received tremendous numbers. Sometimes I’ll say I’m actually an environmentalist and people will smile in some cases and other people that know me understand that’s true. Open mind.
JAMES BENNET, editorial page editor: When you say an open mind, you mean you’re just not sure whether human activity causes climate change? Do you think human activity is or isn’t connected?
TRUMP: I think right now … well, I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies. You have to understand, our companies are noncompetitive right now.
They’re really largely noncompetitive. About four weeks ago, I started adding a certain little sentence into a lot of my speeches, that we’ve lost 70,000 factories since W. Bush. 70,000. When I first looked at the number, I said: ‘That must be a typo. It can’t be 70, you can’t have 70,000, you wouldn’t think you have 70,000 factories here.’ And it wasn’t a typo, it’s right. We’ve lost 70,000 factories.
We’re not a competitive nation with other nations anymore. We have to make ourselves competitive. We’re not competitive for a lot of reasons.
That’s becoming more and more of the reason. Because a lot of these countries that we do business with, they make deals with our president, or whoever, and then they don’t adhere to the deals, you know that. And it’s much less expensive for their companies to produce products. So I’m going to be studying that very hard, and I think I have a very big voice in it. And I think my voice is listened to, especially by people that don’t believe in it. And we’ll let you know.
FRIEDMAN: I’d hate to see Royal Aberdeen underwater.
TRUMP: The North Sea, that could be, that’s a good one, right?
[…]
MICHAEL D. SHEAR, White House correspondent: Mr. Trump, Mike Shear. I cover the White House, covering your administration …
TRUMP: See ya there.
[laughter]
SHEAR: Just one quick clarification on the climate change, do you intend to, as you said, pull out of the Paris Climate …
‘The Trump Taboo’ at UN climate summit: He is ‘omnipresent…even though nobody is saying his name’ – ‘There is a taboo word at this year’s 22nd UN climate change summit: Trump. The president-elect is omnipresent in Marrakesh. You can feel him lurking behind talks on low-carbon economies and in the cracks between climate-induced loss and damage. He’s never directly addressed, but he’s always in the room. You can tell from the anxiety in people’s voices and their disapproving headshakes, heavy with concern for what the future for action on climate change holds.’
Many Americans are again confused over how the President and the United Nations can say we are at grave risk from man-made global warming (a.k.a climate change) when we continue to get pummeled by brutal, record shattering, winter storms. If this situation has you confused, take heart. You are not alone.
Once again the natural world has slapped the ‘warmist’ community down hard with yet another record breaking blizzard in the northeastern US between January 22 and January 24, 2016. Winter storm ‘Janus’ (a Weather Channel designation) dumped record snow totals in the major cities of the USA with a major snowstorm that stretched from Arkansas to Massachusetts. Here are but a few examples of the storm’s wrath:
New York City saw 26.8 inches of snow fall in Central Park, the second highest ever recorded. It missed tying the all time record by one tenth of an inch. JFK Airport had 30.5 inches of snow. Washington’s Dulles airport measured 28.3 inches, the second highest ever. Baltimore had 29.2 inches, its largest snow total ever recorded. The list of snow events and the breadth of this winter calamity that dumped record snow from the central US to the mid-Atlantic states to the Northeast was truly one for the record books.
What is also shocking about this ‘snowmageddon’ is that according to the manmade global warming crowd, none of this was possible. We were told by United Nations scientists there was not supposed to be any snow anywhere on the planet after 2003! And who can forget the previous terrible winter of 2014-2015 here in the US, where new temperature and snow records were routinely broken. Again, that mercilessly long and cold winter was not possible either according to the climate models from the UN and the U.S. government. How can the impossible happen so often?
We should not forget other monstrously bad predictions, the ‘warmist’ community has proffered. NOAA scientists were telling us along with Al Gore, that the Arctic sea ice would be completely gone by 2008, then revised that to 2013. Of course neither happened. Global sea ice, especially in Antarctica, is in fact, growing rapidly.
Greenhouse gas emissions recently reached 400 ppm, yet the predicted overheating of the Earth is not happening – on the contrary. The 800 lb gorilla in the climate laboratory that the manmade warming community ignores is, that there has been no meaningful growth in global temperatures for eighteen years! That includes the so-called warmest year ever – 2015. Unfortunately, my colleagues and I have observed that the US government can no longer be relied upon to tell the truth about the Earth’s climate or its temperature.
The United Nations certainly cannot be trusted either. The corruption of climate science via its climate reports issued since 1990, has been so deep seated within that organization for so long, that we must now conclude they simply are unable and unwilling to be truthful. The UN climate models of which they, the US media, and our government are so enamored, are well over 100% in error in many of the models in predicting global temperature variation. Yet, the predictions from these failed models are still offered up as evidence of the need to shut down coal and CO2 production worldwide. Further, recent data suggests that the Earth’s climate appears to be relatively insensitive to CO2! Even the UN is now confused.
It is my fondest hope that we can put the sad era of manmade global warming behind us soon and begin the preparations needed for the rapidly approaching cold epoch, a message I have been spreading since 2007. Starting this year, a long term decline in global temperature begins. It will be at the bottom during the 2020’s through the 2030’s. This time will be grim for our species as the cold era starts its destruction of crops around the world.
We humans are easily confused about the climate. Many of us actually believe what we want to believe, and not what the facts tell us we should. Worse; we are often intentionally deceived by our leaders.
The natural world does not suffer from these afflictions. It is never confused.
AUSTIN, Texas – A team of prominent scientists gathered in Texas today at a climate summit to declare that fears of man-made global warming were “irrational” and “based on nonsense” that “had nothing to do with science.” They warned that “we are being led down a false path” by the upcoming UN climate summit in Paris.
From Left to Right: Dr. Will Happer, Dr. Richard Lindzen & Dr. Patrick Moore.
Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, derided what he termed climate “catastrophism.”
“Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial,” Lindzen said.
Lindzen cautioned: “The most important thing to keep in mind is – when you ask ‘is it warming, is it cooling’, etc. — is that we are talking about something tiny (temperature changes) and that is the crucial point.”
Lindzen also challenged the oft-repeated UN IPCC claim that most of warming over past 50 years was due to mankind.
“People get excited over this. Is this statement alarming? No,” Lindzen stated.
“We are speaking of small changes 0.25 Celcius would be about 51% of the recent warming and that strongly suggests a low and inconsequential climate sensitivity – meaning no problem at all,” Lindzen explained.
“I urge you when looking at a graph, check the scales! The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree,” he noted.
“When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period. And they are arguing over hundredths of a degree when it is uncertain in tenths of a degree,” Lindzen said.
“The UN IPCC wisely avoided making the claim that 51% of a small change in temperature constitutes a problem. They left this to the politicians and anyone who took the bait,” he said.
Lindzen also featured 2006 quotes from Scientist Dr. Miike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, admitting that claims of a climate catastrophe were not the “language of science.”
“The discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device,” Hulme wrote to the BBC in 2006. “The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science,” Hulme wrote.
“Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?” Hulme continued.
Lindzen singled out Secretary of State John Kerry for his ‘ignorance’ on science.
“John Kerry stands alone,” Lindzen said. “Kerry expresses his ignorance of what science is,” he added.
Lindzen also criticized EPA Chief Gina McCarthy’s education: “I don’t want to be snobbish, but U Mass Boston is not a very good school,” he said to laughter.
Lindzen concluded his talk by saying: “Learn how to identify claims that have no alarming implications and free to say ‘So what?’”
Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers, called policies to reduce CO2 “based on nonsense.”
“Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. They are all based on computer models that do not work. We are being led down a false path.
“Our breath is not that different from a power plant,” he continued.
“To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?” he asked.
“Coal, formed from ancient CO2, is a benefit to the world. Coal is CO2 from ancient atmospheres. We are simply returning CO2 to the atmosphere from which it came when you burn coal. And it’s a good thing since it is at very low levels in the atmosphere. We are in a CO2 famine. It is very, very low,” Happer explained.
Happer continued: “CO2 will be beneficial and crop yields will increase.” “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture,” he added.
Happer then showed a picture of polluted air in China with the caption: “Real pollution in Shanghai.”
“If you can see it, it’s not CO2,” Happer said.
“If plants could vote, they would vote for coal,” Happer declared.
Happer also rebutted the alleged 97% consensus.
“97% of scientists have often been wrong on many things,” he said.
Ecologist and Greenpeace founding member Dr. Patrick Moore discussed the benefits of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“Let’s celebrate CO2!” Moore declared.
“We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said.
“We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” he continued.
“The deserts are greening from rising CO2,” he added.
“Co2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years,” Moore said.
Note: CFACT’s new skeptical documentary, Climate Hustle, is set to rock the UN climate summit with red carpet’world premiere in Paris.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/noncense-e1448045510163.jpg384640Marc Moranohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMarc Morano2015-11-20 13:53:152015-11-20 14:00:05Prominent Scientists Declare Climate Claims Ahead of UN Summit ‘Irrational’ – ‘Based On Nonsense’
