Air Pollution, Mass Killer or Mass Fraud?

Over the years I have examined here many research reports which claimed to show harm from air pollution. Not one was methodogically sound. The article below adds to the evidence that air pollution as we normally encounter it does no harm

Fine particulate matter in outdoor air, also called PM2.5, is the most toxic substance known to man. PM2.5 is responsible for 8 million, or one-in-seven deaths per year on a global basis. A single molecule can kill within just a few hours of inhalation. Or at least that what environmental and health regulatory agencies around the world claim.

PM2.5 is so dangerous that no one noticed it until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started trying to regulate it in the early 1990s. PM2.5 kills, in fact, no one. A point that is easily demonstrated and will be done so here. That we still must talk about PM2.5 is a testimony to the stubborn commitment of regulatory agencies to science fraud.

What is PM2.5?

PM2.5 is fine airborne soot and dust. A PM2.5 particle is about one-twentieth the width of a human hair. The soot form of PM2.5 is emitted by all forms of manmade and natural combustion: from fossil fuel plant smokestacks; truck and automobile exhaust pipes; and furnaces, fireplaces and barbeques to wildfires and volcanoes The dust form of PM2.5 exists as pollen, pet dander, dust and mold. Smokers of all sorts inhale PM2.5 in massive amounts, especially compared to PM2.5 levels in outdoor air. You may think that last point condemns PM2.5 as a killer. But it actually is the among the best evidence that PM2.5 doesn’t kill anyone.

What is the history of PM2.5 regulation?

Having eliminated virtually all large and visible particulate matter from US skies by the late 1980s and having established a massive regulatory program in the proicess, the EPA hit on the idea of regulating smaller PM2.5 to keep its regulatory bureaucracy going.

In the late-1980s, the EPA began funding PM2.5 research at the Harvard University School of Public Health. In 1993, the Harvard group issued an epidemiologic study of six cities in the US claiming to associate higher PM2.5 levels with higher death rates. Another larger EPA-funded study reaching the same conclusion was published in 1995.

These studies caught the eye of EPA’s legally mandated panel of independent scientists and experts (the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council or “CASAC”) who asked EPA for the raw data so that it could review the studies. The agency refused to provide the data. A subsequent request from Congress for the data was also rebuffed.

Based on these two studies, EPA proposed for the first time in 1996 to regulate PM2.5 in outdoor air. The agency claimed that its new regulations would prevent 15,000 deaths in the U.S. per year. As EPA valued human lives at the time at 5 million dollars each, the agency claimed that saving these lives would provide $75 billion worth of economic benefits to the economy per year.

When called upon to review the scientific basis of the proposed rule in 1995, CASAC balked and stated there was insufficient evidence showing that PM2.5 killed anyone. Although the EPA was legally required to obtain the advice of CASAC, the law does not require that the agency accept CASAC’s conclusions. And the EPA did not.

The agency proceeded to regulate PM2.5 for the first time anywhere on the basis that PM2.5 kills. Its success in issuing these regulations emboldened and empowered the agency over the next 15 years to convert and an unknown killer into the most potent killer known to man. The EPA used these claims in a series of regulations during the Obama administration that destroyed 50 percent of the U.S. coal industry.

Does PM2.5 kill anyone?

The EPA, of course, knows that PM2.5 doesn’t kill anyone. Here’s how we know that, too.

Recall that the EPA’s crusade against PM2.5 was launched by the previously-mentioned 1993 and 1995 epidemiologic studies. Epidemiology is the statistical study of disease in human populations, the key part of that description being “statistical.” I could spend pages and pages describing the flaws in EPA’s data and statistical analysis, but your eyes would gloss over and it’s unnecessary thanks to EPA.

In 2012, a group with which I am affiliated, sued EPA for conducting illegal human clinical research experiments involving PM2.5. By the early 2000s, EPA had concluded that any exposure to PM2.5 could kill in a matter of hours and that elderly and sick people were most at risk. To prove its point, conducted numerous experiments on elderly and sick people in which diesel exhaust from a truck was pipelined into an actual gas chamber where the human guinea pigs inhaled very high levels of PM2.5 for hours at a time. This was illegal because researchers are not allowed to conduct Nazi-like experiments where the purpose is to cause harm, especially without the informed consent of the human guinea pigs.

In its defense to our lawsuit, the EPA stated that it conducted the PM2.5 experiments because the PM2.5 epidemiology was only statistics, and as all researchers know, statistics only demonstrate correlation and correlation is not the same as causation. The EPA told the court that the human experiments were needed to establish needed biological plausibility for the claims of the epidemiology studies.

The EPA’s unequivocal admission that epidemiology alone was an insufficient basis to conclude that PM2.5 kills obviates any further need to consider the many significant flaws of the PM2.5 epidemiology.

And what were the results of those clinical experiments?

Despite exposing hundreds of elderly (as old as 80) and sick people (with asthma and heart disease) to extraordinary levels of PM2.5 (as high as 75 times the level in average US outdoor air), not so much as a gasp, wheeze or cough, much less any death, was reported. The clinical research, in fact, provided not an ounce of biological plausibility to the (dubious) epidemiology.

There is one last important point to make about EPA’s PM2.5 epidemiology. Recall that EPA refused to produce to the CASAC and Congress the raw data used in the epidemiology studies it funded. Frustrated by this most unscientific refusal to share data, I sought a way around the EPA refusal and discovered one.

The state of California provides vital statistics, such as death certificates, to researchers. The state also has the best and most localized air quality readings that can be readily matched to the death certificates. After obtaining some of these death certificates and related air quality data, I did a rough epidemiologic study of my own to see if deaths were in fact correlated with PM2.5 levels. They were not.

I subsequently convinced prominent and expert researchers to obtain 12 years-worth of California death certificate and air quality data and do their own rigorous study. Their study of all deaths in California between the years 2000 to 2012 (more than 2 million) reported no correlation between PM2.5 and death.

Although PM2.5 levels in Chinese and Indian cities can reach quite high levels  e.g., 100 times average outdoor levels in the US  no actual deaths are ever reported. The reason for this is that the level of acidic gases always remains in a safe range. Simply inhaling PM2.5 alone kills no one.

https://junkscience.com/2023/03/pm2-5-mass-killer-or-mass-fraud/

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US to drill for oil in Alaska as Biden OKs $8B Willow Project, 180K barrels a day

The Biden administration on Monday approved a massive oil drilling project in Alaska that is sure to put the president on a collision course with far-left factions of his Democratic Party.

The Willow Project has come under fire from environmental groups, who are already accusing President Biden of reneging on campaign promises to battle climate change and end drilling on public lands.

Some Republicans, meanwhile, lauded the move by Team Biden to finally do something to offset the rising cost of gasoline and start to make the US energy-independent.

Under the plan announced by the Department of the Interior, Houston-based ConocoPhillips can drill at three sites on Alaska’s North Slope — about 219 wells in all — but the federal agency denied the company’s proposal for another two sites.

ConocoPhillips, which is seeking to develop oil and gas leases it purchased in the 1990s, will also have to give up rights to about 68,000 acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The $8 billion Willow Project, according to the company, could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day and create as many as 1,800 jobs during construction and 300 long-term jobs, as well as generating billions of dollars in royalties and tax revenues for the state and federal government.

While the project enjoyed widespread support in Alaska, it has been the subject of an aggressive social media campaign by environmental groups.

The Biden administration has also been under increasing political pressure to ramp up domestic energy production after historic highs in gasoline prices.

The Natural Resources Defense Counsel said in a Twitter posting that it would continue to fight against the project.

​”​It’ll escalate the climate crisis and lock us into decades of dependence on Big Oil executives hell-bent on destroying the planet. The fight isn’t over and we will consider every tool available to stop this climate bomb​,” the organization said.

Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement that by giving the Willow Project the green light, the Biden administration has “made it almost impossible to achieve the climate goals they set for public lands.”

The environmental group also addressed the administration’s attempt on Sunday to offset the blowback it would receive for approving the ConocoPhillips plan by preventing or limiting oil drilling in 16 million acres in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.

“While we celebrate the administration’s unparalleled protections for Alaskan landscapes and waters, the decision to approve the Willow Project may very well wipe out many of these climate and ecological benefits,” Jealous said.

“And by approving one of the largest oil and gas extraction projects on federal public lands, one must ask the question what the Biden administration has in store for the Arctic Refuge,” he said.

Sen. Dan Sullivan​ (R-Alaska) called the Willow Project “critically important” to the state’s economy and national security.​

“Producing much-needed American energy in Alaska with the world’s highest environmental standards and lowest emissions enhances the global environment,” Sullivan said in a statement. ​

Alaska’s other GOP senator, Lisa Murkowski, said approval of the project is a “huge and needed victory for all Alaska.”

​​”This project will produce lasting economic and security benefits for our state and the nation​,” she said on Twitter. ​

https://nypost.com/2023/03/13/biden-greenlights-8-billion-oil-drilling-project-in-alaska/

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Greenies no longer want to save the whales

For about twenty years the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC] engaged the US Navy in a legal battle over the effects of the Navy’s use of Mid Frequency Sonar in training exercises and its impact on marine mammals and other creatures, with one case even reaching the US Supreme court. While there are many different aspects of NRDC’s legal actions, the results of the litigation have produced an enormous amount of scientific data and research regarding the effects of underwater sound on marine creatures, with an emphasis on Sonar and marine mammals.

They forced the Navy to admit that their use of sonar had resulted in the unintentional mass strandings of many different marine Mammals in a dozen different instances around the world, primarily involving Beaked whales, that are classified as being low to mid frequency cetaceans. These mammals communicate, navigate and feed using low to mid frequency sounds.

While this series of lawsuits resulted in the recognition of the harm that high powered Sonar can cause to marine creatures, it did not address the issue of the damage that lower sound levels can cause. This also coincided with a growing recognition that the amount of human caused noise in the natural marine environment was reaching a dangerous level, and was having impacts on the creatures that reside there, which may be worse that many of the more visible signs of pollution.

The efforts of NRDC regarding the damaging effects of Naval sonar has saved the lives of many marine creatures by forcing the Navy to comply with the many US laws that protect the environment. They have become one of the worlds leading experts on the effect of noise on marine mammals, yet
curiously they remain silent on the issue of the recent strandings of Whales along the US east coast, as coincidently research vessels using low frequency sonar have inundated the area for geological mapping of the seafloor and substrates for industrial wind power turbines. A group that was so concerned about saving the Whales from underwater noise, has conveniently forgotten their concern because that noise is created by vessels employed by wind companies. Those companies and the US government have worked in unison to deny any link at all between the recent strandings and the work being done for offshore wind development. High level US officials have categorically denied that there is any evidence of the noise being produced having a detrimental effect on marine mammals despite decades of work in regard to the harm being caused by human produced noise in the marine environment. Existing science suggests the link is there.

In a paper by NRDC’s Joel Reynolds, titled “Submarine’s, Sonar, and the death of Whales”, published by William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Revue [vol. 32:759] in 2008, Reynolds writes; “There is no longer a serious scientific debate about the connection between sound and marine
mammal mortality. A range of experts, from the international Whaling Commission’s {IWC} Scientific committee [2004 report] to the U.S. Navy’s own commissioned scientists, have agreed that the evidence linking mass strandings to mid-frequency sonar is “convincing” and “overwhelming”. Consultants retained by the Navy concluded that the evidence of sonar causation is in our opinion, completely convincing and that therefore there is a serious issue of how best to avoid/minimize future beaching events.

Potentially related strandings have occurred repeatedly around the world, with stranded animals found with bleeding around the brain, emboli in the lungs, and lesions in the liver and kidneys, symptoms resembling a severe case of decompression sickness, or the “bends”. Because these injuries occurred in the water, before the animals stranded, scientists are concerned that Whales turning up on shore may represent only the tip of the iceberg, with substantially larger numbers dying off-shore. Other sources of noise, such as the airguns used in seismic surveys, may have similar effects.”

The paper also has this statement; “Though a prominent focus of public concern and reporting in the media, these stranding events represent only one manifestation of injury related to exposure to intense noise. Indeed, it is the cumulative impact that these stressors have on the behavior of marine mammals, particularly in already depleted populations, that may pose the greatest threat; what has been called a “death of a thousand cuts”. Because marine mammals depend on sound to navigate, find food, locate mates, avoid predators, and communicate with each other, flooding their habitat with high intensity, anthropogenic noise poses a substantial risk of interference with these and other activities”.

Footnoting this point; NRDC’s Michael Jasny, quoted Dr. Sylvia Earle’s “death of a thousand cuts “, and stated that “preliminary attempts at modeling the energetics of marine mammals [the amount of energy an animal has to spend to compensate for an intrusion] suggest that even small alterations in behavior could have significant consequences for reproduction or survival if repeated over time”.

Further in the document are these statements; “Also in November 2005, the parties to the Convention on Migratory Species [CMS] passed a resolution naming marine noise among six human threats to cetacean populations. The resolution calls on the CMS’s Scientific Council to assess whether marine noise is adequately addressed in the convention’s threat abatement activities.”

“The UN General Assembly established an “Ad Hoc Open-Ended Informal Working Group to study issues relating to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction” [i.e. on the high seas] In February 2006 that working group convened its first meeting, where it recognized ocean noise as a “growing human pressure” that requires urgent action through international cooperation and coordination.”

Lastly, starting off the recommendations section of the paper is this; “The accumulating scientific evidence of noise-induced harm, including mass strandings of marine mammals around the world, is a wake up call to a significant environmental problem. While its complexity precludes a simple
or an immediate solution, some progress has already been made, both domestically and globally. But much more is clearly needed now, at a point where meaningful and effective solutions can have an impact BEFORE the problem proliferates out of control, it’s causes intractable and it’s impacts
irreversible”.

This last sentence is critical, because we are already near the point where long term damage from the multiple noise sources involved in the production of offshore wind energy is intractable, and its impacts to marine mammal populations irreversible. Extinction is forever.

Many marine mammal species migrate annually along the North American coast and they have had to adapt during their lifetimes to a growing amount of human created noise, some of it deadly. It has created a high stress life for them with a confusing array of sounds including low frequency noise from distant sonar and seismic testing, which can trigger fight or flight responses. Repeated stress responses can be detrimental physiologically to animals and could lead to premature death. The average life span of every species of Whales along the US coast has dropped dramatically in the last few decades, coinciding with the rise in human produced noise in the marine environment. Have Whale species in the North Atlantic reached the tipping point in how much human produced noise they can withstand and still survive, or have they passed the point of no return with the recent introduction of almost relentless noise from low frequency sonar research vessels along the coast?

NOAA and BOEM are closing their eyes to science and scientific protocol in regard to the recent Whale strandings. They ignore a growing mountain of evidence indicating that many species of whales are more sensitive to sound then previously thought, with research showing tagged Cuvier’s beaked
Whales responding to only 89 dB re 1 u Pa. A paper published by Frontiers in Marine Science, entitled; “Impacts of Navy Sonar on Whales and Dolphins: Now beyond a Smoking Gun? By E.C.M. Parsons in 2017 cites numerous recent studies showing Whales sensitivity to sound is greater than believed, and he reasons then that the US harassment levels of sound are far higher than they should be, with TTS and PTS being reached at lower levels then acknowledged. Almost all of the research that’s been done has admitted to not having enough science to be certain of any effects of under water noise but they all urge the use of the Precautionary Principle in regard to its possible effects. This important paragraph highlights that:

“The importance of not delaying conservation action when a concern exists, but scientific data and analysis have not incontrovertibly established the threat exists, i.e. “the precautionary principle”, has been enshrined in a number of international laws [Hey,1991] including the 1992 Convention on
biological Diversity [Principle 15 of the so-called “Rio Summit”]. Because of this level of uncertainty and difficulty in establishing beyond a reasonable doubt trends and threats in cetacean populations, it has been argued that in order to effectively conserve and manage populations one must be precautionary, as otherwise catastrophic declines in cetacean populations could occur before science catches up with the problem”.

We only have one last chance to save the North Atlantic Right Whale from extinction, scientific protocol calls for us to make the most of it. Endangered marine mammals are facing a survival crisis that is complicated by the increase in human made noise, which may even have more population level effects then ship strikes and fishing gear encounters. The sheer enormity of Biden’s offshore wind projects dwarfs in size and scope any previous usages of the marine environment throughout history, its effects are bound to be enormously destructive to the entire marine ecosystem of the east coast. No one should be able to ignore science just because it doesn’t suit their purposes.

https://fisherynation.com/noaa-and-boem-ignorance-is-bliss-by-jim-lovgren

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Renewables: the more you have, the more you pay for backups

Cold, still weather in the UK this week triggered high demand for electricity at a time when wind turbines were idling. That forced National Grid to use a back-up coal(opens a new window)-generation plant for the first time this winter.
Depending on Mother Nature for electricity means accepting her inconsistencies. Back-up is required, and keeping it available has a cost.

In the US, electricity demand is on average 15 per cent higher during July than January according to the US Energy Information Agency. In the much cooler UK, a government study during 2012-2013 revealed that demand rose 36 per cent in the winter.

Lex charts showing the mix of UK’s electricity generation and the penetration of intermittent renewables

Intermittent supply adds to the challenge of balancing the grid. Wind and solar power made up 31 per cent of the Texas grid’s capacity last year, up from 9 per cent ten years prior. That intermittency is a vulnerability.

Indeed, an unusually cold snap in early 2021 forced a system increasingly dependent on intermittent power into blackouts. That prompted calls for more nuclear and gas-fired power plants. Consumers would pay, though it could add just $2 on a typical $100 power bill, say power researchers E3.
Lex charts showing how gas-fired power generation will still be needed to cover demand peaks in 2030

In contrast, UK power needs are reasonably well anticipated via capacity auctions. Run by government, these aim to provide generation for expected demand. A recent auction for capacity in 2026/27 cost £5.7bn over the 15-year period of the longest contracts, according to analysis by Aurora Energy Research. Consumers also pay for this, partly through the environmental levies which can make up a quarter of bills.

Power capacity differs from “firm” power capacity, Lambert Energy Advisory points out, depending on reliability and intermittency. In winter months, the UK government gives the accolade of “firm” to gas-fired turbine power plants at 90 per cent of capacity, wind at 9 per cent and solar at under 3 per cent.

Consumers end up paying to build little-used firm power capacity. The conundrum is that the greater the overall share of renewables in the energy mix, the more customers will have to spend on these largely redundant backups.

https://www.ft.com/content/91d341f8-b945-4f3a-85b2-ba738a5b4f2f

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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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