Monday, January 09, 2023
Biden Agenda Collides with Liberal Sacred Cows Over Nevada Lithium Mine
Opponents of the largest lithium mine planned in America urged a federal judge in Nevada on Thursday to vacate the federal government’s approval of the project until it completes additional environmental reviews and complies with all state and federal laws.
A district judge, Miranda Du, said after a three-hour hearing at Reno that she hoped to make a decision “in the next couple months” on how to proceed in the nearly two-year-old legal battle over the Bureau of Land Management’s approval of the mine Lithium Nevada Corporation plans near the Nevada-Oregon line.
Lawyers for the company and the Bureau of Land Management insisted the project complies with American laws and regulations. But they said that if Judge Du determines it does not, she should stop short of vacating the agency’s approval and allow initial work at the site to begin as further reviews are initiated.
Lawyers for a Nevada rancher, conservation groups and Native American tribes suing to block the mine said that should not occur because any environmental damage would be irreversible.
Dozens of tribe members and other protesters rallied outside the downtown courthouse during the hearing, beating drums and waving signs at passing motorists.
Judge Du has refused twice over the past year to grant temporary injunctions sought by tribal leaders who say the mine site is on sacred land where their ancestors were killed by the United States Cavalry in 1865.
Lithium Nevada and the Bureau of Land Management say the project atop an ancient volcano is critical to meeting the growing demand for lithium to make electric vehicle batteries — a key part of President Biden’s push to expedite a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
“It is the largest known lithium deposit of its kind,” a lawyer representing the company, Laura Granier, told Judge Du Thursday. “Our nation and the world will suffer if this project is delayed further.”
Opponents say it will destroy dwindling habitat for sage grouse, Lahontan cutthroat trout, pronghorn antelope and golden eagles, pollute the air and create a plume of toxic water beneath the open-pit mine deeper than the length of a football field.
“We need a smart energy future that transitions our economy from fossil fuels to renewables without sacrificing rare species in the process,” said the deputy director of the Western Watersheds Project, Greta Anderson. The group also petitioned in September for protection of a tiny nearby snail under the Endangered Species Act.
The Bureau of Land Management fast-tracked the project’s approval during the final days of the Trump administration. The Biden administration continues to embrace it as part of the president’s clean energy agenda.
Demand for lithium is expected to triple by 2030 from 2020. Lithium Nevada says its project is the only one on the drawing board that can help meet the demand.
A lawyer for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Will Falk, said that “in this rush for lithium in Nevada, the BLM went way too fast in permitting this mine.”
A lawyer for the Western Mining Action Project representing several environmental groups, Roger Flynn, said the agency wants the project to move forward even though it botched the environmental reviews it was determined to complete before President Trump left office.
“Meanwhile, there will be this immediate, permanent massive environmental damage,” Mr. Flynn said.
Thursday’s hearing marked the first on the actual merits of the lawsuit filed in February 2021. It will set the legal landscape going forward after the riders of the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals upheld a ruling in Arizona that voided federal approval of a copper mine.
That potentially precedent-setting decision raises questions about the reach of the Mining Law of 1872 and could have a bearing on disposal of waste rock at the lithium mine in the high desert about 200 miles northeast of Reno.
In addition to the cultural and environmental concerns about the potential effects, the new Ninth Circuit ruling halting the Arizona mine in July was a focus of Thursday’s hearing.
Judge Du told lawyers on both sides she was interested in “the extent to which (that case) controls the outcome of this case.”
The San Francisco-based appellate court upheld the Arizona ruling that the Forest Service lacked authority to approve Rosemont Copper’s plans to dispose of waste rock on land adjacent to the mine it wanted to dig on a national forest southeast of Tucson.
The service and the Bureau of Land Management long have interpreted the Mining Law of 1872 to convey the same mineral rights to such lands.
The riders of the Ninth Circuit agreed with a district judge, James Soto, who determined the Forest Service approved Rosemont’s plans in 2019 without considering whether the company had any mining rights on the neighboring lands.
He concluded the agency assumed under mining law that Rosemont had “valid mining claims on the 2,447 acres it proposed to occupy with its waste rock.”
A Justice Department lawyer for the Bureau of Land Management, Leilani Doktor, said the Forest Service and the BLM are under “different regulatory schemes.”
“Each step of the way, BLM followed its own regulations,” she said.
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Biden Administration Admits Canceling the Keystone Pipeline Killed Thousands of Jobs and Cost Billions
A new report quietly released by the Biden administration includes a bombshell admission: President Biden’s action to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline killed thousands of jobs for workers and cost billions of dollars.
Fox News reports, “The report, which the Department of Energy (DOE) completed in late December without any public announcement, says the Keystone XL project would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had a positive economic impact of between $3.4-9.6 billion, citing various studies.”
At a time when America’s economy is struggling – largely as a result of Biden’s war on American energy – the Keystone Pipeline would have created jobs and lowered costs. Fox News Continues, “Keystone XL had been slated to be completed early this year and transport an additional 830,000 barrels of crude oil from Canada to the U.S. through an existing pipeline network, according to its operator, TC Energy.”
The report was only released publicly because Senate Republicans forced the administration to do that through legislation. Daniel Turner, the founder and executive director of Power The Future, blasted the administration for killing the pipeline and trying to bury this report.
“Joe Biden’s adherence to the green agenda destroyed jobs, destroyed revenue and is costing America’s working families untold money in inflation,” said Daniel Turner, Founder and Executive Director of Power The Future. “The Keystone XL pipeline was a commonsense solution to our nation’s energy infrastructure but because it was approved by President Trump, Joe Biden couldn’t help but destroy it for petty political reasons. Joe Biden often talks about creating ‘good union jobs’ but it’s clear he will always put politics before people.”
In 2021, PTF met with the pipeline workers who were betrayed by Biden’s decision to kill Keystone. We featured their stories because these are the Americans we fight for every day. These are the workers who lost their jobs, and they are the ones providing us all with affordable and abundant American energy. Now, the White House has admitted what we’ve been saying for years: this decision hurt people and our economy.
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Zero population idiot exhumed
One of the biggest blowhards of all time
Earth is headed for a sixth extinction, warned biologist Paul Ehrlich on "60 Minutes" this Sunday. And since Ehrlich has predicted about 20 extinctions over the past 60 years, he's a leading expert on the issue.
Couldn't "60 Minutes" find a fresh-faced, yet-to-be-discredited neo-Malthusian to hyperventilate about the end of the world? Why didn't producers invite a single guest to push back against theories that have been reliably debunked by reality? Because the media is staffed by environmental pessimists and doomsayers who need to believe the world is in constant peril due to the excesses of capitalism. And Ehrlich is perhaps our greatest alarmist.
His 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," is among the most destructive of the 20th century. The long screed not only made Ehrlich a celebrity but gave end-of-day alarmists a patina of scientific legitimacy, popularized alarmism as a political tool, and normalized authoritarian and anti-humanist policies as a cure. Ehrlich's progeny are other media-favored hysterics by other antihumanists, such as Al Gore or Eric Holthaus or Greta Thunberg, who skipped learning history and science because she also believes we are on the precipice of "mass extinction." And none of this is to mention the thousands of other Little Ehrlichs nudging you to eat insects, gluing themselves to roads and demanding you surrender the most basic conveniences and necessities of modernity.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over," the opening line of "The Population Bomb" reads. "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," Ehrlich wrote. It was likely, he went on, that the oceans would be without life by 1979 and the United States would see its population plummet to 23 million by 1999 due to pesticides. "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years," he famously told Mademoiselle in 1970.
When Julian Simon offered the biologist his famous wager, Ehrlich responded by saying, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Instead, Ehrlich picked five natural resources he believed would experience shortages due to human consumption. He lost the bet on all counts, as the composite price index for those commodities, copper and chromium and so on, fell by more than 40%, despite there being 800 million new people during that time.
It's not merely that Ehrlich is always spectacularly wrong about the future but that he remains unrepentant. In 2009, Ehrlich argued that "perhaps the most serious flaw" in "The Population Bomb" was that it was "much too optimistic" about the future. "We will soon be asking: is it perfectly OK to eat the bodies of your dead because we're all so hungry?" Ehrlich warned in 2014. One year later, there were 200 million fewer people suffering from hunger than in 1990, despite there being 2 billion more people inhabiting the Earth.
And much like today's environmentalists, Ehrlich offered a slew of authoritarian economic prescriptions to salvage the Earth. Though in 1977's "Ecoscience," a book he co-authored by Barack Obama's future "science czar" John Holdren, Ehrlich toyed with the idea of adding "sterilant to drinking water or staple foods" and compelling abortions to save the world from human beings.
How could "60 Minutes" frame this ridiculous man as a foremost expert on the future?
It would take a lot of work to point to any tangible factor that's worsened for humans since the 1970s. There is less war, terrorism, poverty, hunger, child mortality, genocide, death due to weather, illiteracy, etc. By nearly every quantifiable measure the environment is also better now than it was 55 years ago -- which is why contemporary alarmists have learned to prophesy "climate" catastrophes 30 or 40 years out. Perhaps Ehrlich's biggest mistake was living long enough to be proven wrong dozens of times. (Then again, in 1932, the year he was born, a man could expect to live to 61. Today they will likely live to be 77. Dr. Doom is 90.)
Fears about "overpopulation" are regularly cited by journalists -- who often live in the densest, yet also the wealthiest places -- as if it's one of the world's most pressing problems, like the threat of war or the election of Republicans. Every hurricane, tornado and flood is treated as the opening of the Seventh Seal. The media will seek out the struggling commercial fisherman but fail to speak to any of the billions of humans in developing nations whose lives have dramatically improved in virtually every aspect over the past decades. While we hyperventilate over Elon Musk or Kanye or elections, and scary climate disasters, scientists have made one of the most exciting energy breakthroughs in our lifetimes, perhaps in history.
They always do. We may have many problems in our spiritual lives or our political lives, but human ingenuity has dependably overcome demand
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Australian carbon credit scheme is controversial
An official review of Australia’s $4.5bn carbon credit market has rejected allegations the scheme was a rort, concluding the system was “essentially sound” but needs an overhaul across regulation and transparency to boost public confidence.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen appointed former chief scientist Ian Chubb in July 2022 to carry out a review of Australia’s carbon credit scheme following allegations by whistleblower Andrew Macintosh that a majority of credits issued by the Clean Energy Regulator were flawed.
The Australian Carbon Credit Units scheme has attracted considerable criticism from environmental groups and others associated with the program, who say it is wasting taxpayer funds without cutting carbon emissions.
However, the official Chubb Review released on Monday found the ACCU scheme was essentially sound and it had not found evidence of widespread problems in the sector.
“In recent times, the integrity of the scheme has been called into question – it has been argued that the level of abatement has been overstated, that ACCUs are therefore not what they are meant to be, so that the policy is not effective,” the Review found.
“The Panel does not share this view. While the Panel was provided with some evidence supporting that position, it was also provided with evidence to the contrary.”
The Review found there may be several reasons for the “polar-opposite” views.
“One is likely to be a lack of transparency, meaning that third parties cannot access the relevant data and so different conclusions can be drawn, and all genuinely held.”
Still, the review led by the former chief scientist has suggested breaking up the powers currently managed by the Clean Energy Regulator in order to boost the effectiveness of the scheme with separation of governance, ACCU purchasing and method development functions.
The Australian Government purchasing of ACCUs “should be moved out of the CER and into another Australian Government body to avoid actual or perceived conflicts of interest,” the Review found.
“The multiple roles of the CER, in developing methods, regulating projects and issuing ACCUs, and administering government purchase of ACCUs, results in potential conflicts of interest and risks reduced confidence in scheme arrangements and governance.”
It also called for legislative changes to maximise transparency, data access and data sharing “to support greater public trust and confidence in scheme arrangements.”
Among 16 recommendations made in the Review are for no new project registrations be allowed under the current avoided deforestation method and the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee should be re-established as the Carbon Abatement Integrity Committee “as soon as practicable” with adjusted terms of reference, membership and functions.
The federal government has accepted in principle all 16 recommendations and said it would consider funding arrangements to implement the changes through the 2023-24 budget.
The Carbon Market Institute said it was critical to “align and escalate public and private investments” in industrial decarbonisation and emission reductions across the economy.
“This is a scheme that has developed and evolved over more than a decade, and investors and the community should be encouraged by the Independent Review Panel’s findings that its framework is sound, and the proposed improvements can also now be embedded to ensure a more transparent, robust system that can be scaled up,” CMI chief executive John Connor said.
The review followed criticisms by Mr Macintosh, an academic at ANU and the ex-head of the government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee. Professor Macintosh has described the carbon market as “largely a sham” and said the majority of carbon credits did not represent real cuts to emissions.
More recent analysis by investment house Allan Gray concluded concerns about the integrity of the ACCU scheme were “valid and warrant further investigation”.
Some 30 per cent of ASX 200 companies use carbon credits to reduce their emissions – almost half specifically note their use of ACCUs, Allan Gray found.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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