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Trump was right

President Donald Trump claims the fuel-tax riots in France justify his decision to yank the United States out of the “fatally flawed” Paris climate deal.

“I am glad that my friend @EmmanuelMacron and the protestors in Paris have agreed with the conclusion I reached two years ago,” Trump tweeted. “The Paris Agreement is fatally flawed because it raises the price of energy for responsible countries while whitewashing some of the worst polluters in the world.”

Trump added he has been “making great strides in improving America’s environment,” but suggested the Paris agreement put the burden for environmentally friendly policies on American taxpayers.

The tweet came after France delayed plans to implement steep taxes on diesel fuel and gasoline as part of Macron’s effort to reduce emissions.

SOURCE 





Ecofascism







The Long Road to Energy Independence

For the first time in 75 years, the U.S. is a net exporter of oil. That's great news.

America’s energy outlook is changing significantly for the better, which is obviously welcome news … that you’re unlikely to hear from the mainstream media.

Last week, the United States officially became a net oil exporter, a dramatic shift for the country’s energy sector. It’s been 75 years since we could say that we ship out more oil than we take in.

Increased oil production in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania are responsible in part for this new state of affairs. And a recently discovered oil and natural gas reserve in Texas and New Mexico should keep the pumps going for years to come. The massive reservoir contains 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 46.3 billion barrels of oil. It’s the largest such resource ever assessed and is enough to fuel the United States alone for up to seven years.

President Donald Trump campaigned on American energy independence, and since taking office, Trump has initiated several steps to move toward that goal. Those include relaxed federal restrictions on oil and natural gas exploration and drilling, and lifting draconian Barack Obama-era restrictions designed to bring an end to coal production in the U.S.

True energy independence has been a stated goal of every president since Richard Nixon, but no one ever went about it correctly or whole-heartedly. Several Republican and Democrat presidents embraced a policy concoction of more regulation, a reliance on “alternative” energy sources, and austerity measures to manage America’s energy needs. Not surprisingly, all fell short of energy independence.

Meeting America’s energy needs means producing more energy (a.k.a. supply-side economics) — it’s as simple as that. Our last president, who laughably insists he is responsible for America’s current energy boom, was in favor of driving up energy costs for consumers to force less usage (a.k.a. demand-side economics.) The Obama administration was also in favor of betting the ranch on unproven clean-energy technologies that were prohibitively expensive and not all that efficient or clean.

The energy boom that we are currently experiencing makes us less reliant on foreign energy producers, which in turn improves our national security. It also means more jobs to produce energy here at home, and that means a strengthened economy. Good news all around. Well, except for the climate doomsayers.

At the recent climate conference in Poland, alarmists continued their tirade against CO2 emissions, claiming that the world has just 10 years to lower those emissions before we reach the point of no return on rising surface temperatures. They also literally mocked the Trump administration’s efforts to tout fossil fuels.

Many nations at the conference unquestioningly accepted the UN’s latest report, which calls for unspecified drastic changes to industrial emissions. The United States, joined by Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, challenged the report’s findings, with each nation saying they would only note the report rather than accept it.

The U.S. also refused to reaffirm the Paris climate deal at November’s G20 summit, much to the consternation of ecofascists. Yet by following its own policies, the U.S. has lowered emissions during seven out of the last 10 years — something that none of the nations supporting the Paris accords can say. That proves as much as anything that Paris emissions-control standards are about control, not emissions.

Climate change is a ruse to hide a leftist takeover of the economy. America’s rising energy production, and the vigorous economy that comes with it, stands in the way of that goal. So expect leftists to continue targeting Trump’s energy policy and to continue screaming hyperbolic claims that he is destroying the Earth.

SOURCE 





The sky is falling?!?

Ridiculous report claims humans have killed more than half the world’s wildlife in past 48 years

Greg Walcher

A recent World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report claims humans have killed more than half of all the wildlife in the world since 1970. The report attracted media mass attention, even though the actual 145-page essay doesn’t really say that, much less prove it.

More ironic, the political focus is mostly on countries where the declining wildlife populations do not live, and the solution suggested is so vague it couldn’t possibly address the issue.

The hype about the document, an annual harangue called the “Living Planet Report,” is not surprising, considering the source. This is the same organization that told us a decade ago we would all have to abandon Planet Earth.

“Earth's population will be forced to colonize two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a… study by the WWF. [The study] warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. The report… reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades.”

That was a remarkable conclusion, especially considering that 71% of the Earth’s surface is water. That means humans would have to have destroyed virtually every square inch of land on Earth for the report to be credible. So it’s incredible that the WWF and its annual report continue to attract media attention.

This year’s diatribe claims almost 60% of all the fish, birds and animals on Earth have been killed by people in two generations. It proposes “a new global deal for nature,” a companion for the Paris Climate treaty. Except unlike Paris, the proposed “new deal for nature” has no numbers and no specific goals. In fact, there is no definition of what the agreement might entail.

Rather, it includes vague suggestions that we’re not locking up enough land from public access, nor creating enough national parks, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas and other “unpeopled” places. For the United States, that means the WWF is not satisfied that laws, regulations and other actions have already prohibited mining, drilling, timber harvesting and other human activities on 427 million acres of federal land. That’s the size of Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined, and it does not include state and private lands that have also been closed to most human activity.

The report’s language is decidedly European and American, using policy terms common to the western environmental industry. For example, it discusses the “progress” in removing dams in the USA – levying special criticism on agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley – and approvingly cites efforts to designate more wild and scenic rivers.

It continues the ongoing criticism of western mining, timber production and “unsustainable agriculture,” accusations with which we’re all too familiar. In truth, these people simply want to stop most human uses of land, water and other resources of the American West.

There is another major problem with using this report to further that goal. The wildlife it laments do not live in the American West. Many are found in countries where energy-deprived, jobless, hungry, desperate people cut down forest habitats for fuel, eat wildlife to survive, and kill other species to sell their ivory, horns or meat for a few dollars.

Also, keep in mind that the reported declines in wildlife populations are based on computer modeling, not actual counting of actual animals. Still, even if you give such a report the benefit of the doubt, as many will, the dangers cited are from “warming oceans choked with plastic,” allegedly toppled rain forests, and supposedly dying coral reefs. Thus, populations are said to be tanking worst in the oceans and tropics, including an 89% decrease in South and Central America.

But make no mistake – the U.S. is nonetheless at fault. The report claims “crop failures brought on by climate change” are the reason caravans of Central Americans stream to the United States illegally. That’s why we must “urgently transition to a net carbon-neutral society and halt and reverse nature loss – through green finance and shifting to clean energy and environmentally friendly food production.”

How those terms are defined or implemented in a truly ecological, sustainable manner (more vague, malleable, politicized terms), the report does not say.

In a way, the details in this report may actually disprove its own conclusions. The U.S. and Canada are among the countries that use the most natural resources. Yet the worst wildlife declines are in the tropics, not in North America. The prime examples cited are African elephants, whale sharks, orangutans in Borneo, wandering albatross near Antarctica, jaguars in South America, gharial crocodiles in India and Nepal, and giant salamanders in China.

To note just one example where the WWF gets its “green finance” and “clean energy” facts completely upside down, a major reason orangutans are disappearing is that their habitats are being cleared to make room for palm oil biofuel plantations. How that is ecological or sustainable the WWF does not say.

The World Wildlife Fund is not the only Chicken Little constantly warning of a dire future. A similar article, published in the National Academy of Sciences journal last spring, was even more shocking. It claimed that since the dawn of civilization, humans have caused the loss of 83% of all mammals and half of all plants on Earth.

That’s because, WWF says, “the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life.” However, the WWF and many other environmental industry groups, also oppose modern mechanized farming practices and seeds that significantly increase yields, allowing farmers to feed more people from less land. Still more ironies and non sequiturs.

So while you stop driving cars and heating your homes, you might also need to stop eating – while you pack for the trip to some other planet.

If we are not Chicken Little, is the sky still falling?

Via email

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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