Report: Trump Fuel Standards Rollback to Cost $457 Billion

This is all just modelling and you get out of a model whatever you put in.  And you can be sure that the benefits of avoiding lightweight cars -- which the Obama standards would mandate -- were not included. Lightweight cars give less protection in an accident so cost lives.  How do you cost lives saved?

And one of the "costs" in their modelling -- global warming -- is just a chimera.

The only benefit in the Obama regulations that I can see is less money spent on fuel. But that is a personal cost not a cost to government.  And fuel costs are much more influenced by the ever changing prices charged at the pump rather than anything else.  And Trump's phone call to King Salman of Saudi Arabia will almost certainly do more to arrange affordable fuel than any set of regulations would.  Keeping fuel prices down is a laudable goal but there are many better ways of arranging that than mandating that people drive around in eggshell cars.

As for California keeping it's own stringent standards, the interstate commerce power clearly gives the Feds authority to regulate anything to do with motor vehicles, regardless of anything governor moonbeam might claim


The Trump administration is expected to announce a pause on vehicle emissions standards this week, setting less stringent levels than Obama-era rules and revoking California’s authority to set its own standards. A forecast released Tuesday from clean energy advocacy group Energy Innovation suggests that the policy change will cost the country $457 billion.

Those costs are fuel-related, and do not account for health implications. The group also linked the policy to over 13,000 additional pollution-related deaths.

“It’s hard to overstate the foolishness of this move,” said Hal Harvey, CEO at Energy Innovation.

According to reports on the administration’s plans, Trump officials will keep fuel emissions standards at the 35 mpg fleet average required in 2020. The Obama administration had increased those requirements to 50 miles per gallon, or 36 miles per gallon in real-world driving, by 2025.

The Trump administration’s rollback was widely anticipated after Scott Pruitt, then Environmental Protection Agency administrator, announced in April that an agency review of the standards determined they should be revised in a joint process with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The plan expected this week would also do away with California’s waiver to set standards more stringent than national requirements, granted by the Environmental Protection Agency under Clean Air Act authority. California’s policies also include EV targets.

Since the administration undertook a review of the standards in March 2017, California has steadfastly defended its legal right to make its own policies. In April, California Governor Jerry Brown said the EPA’s plan to revise standards represented a "cynical and meretricious abuse of power [that] will poison our air and jeopardize the health of all Americans.” In May, the state sued the federal government along with 16 other states and Washington, D.C. Thirteen states plus D.C. use California’s emissions requirements over the federal standards.

Energy Innovation’s analysis finds that economic losses will be most dramatic if the Trump administration revokes California’s waiver. While the policy will bring initial economic gains resulting from the reduced cost of producing less-efficient cars, around 2025 the policy will start costing the country money. Losses accelerate beyond 2030. If the administration leaves California’s waiver in place, the predicted losses will ring in at $274 billion.

The organization’s calculation uses its open-source, peer-reviewed Energy Policy Simulator, which accounts for several sectors of the economy including transportation, land use, electricity supply, buildings, industry and agriculture.

Modeled as a gas tax, Energy Innovation said the policy would top out at an added 57 cents per gallon in 2040.

Loosening emissions standards would also inevitably increase greenhouse gas emissions. Energy Innovation expects the greatest increases in the 2030s, before electric vehicles undercut the share of gas-powered cars. In 2035, the group forecasts an 11 percent increase in emissions with a revocation of the California waiver and a 7 percent increase if the waiver is left in place.

The Obama administration often framed its pollution prevention and climate policies as vital to public health. Energy Innovation’s analysis suggests Trump’s turnaround on vehicle emissions could lead to a bump in premature emissions-related deaths. By mid-century, policy-linked deaths would top 13,000 without California’s waiver and over 8,200 with it.

Harvey points to large metropolitan areas already missing air quality targets, like Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta, as those to be most impacted by the higher mortality rate.

“Every time there is an increase in air pollution, especially in a so-called non-attainment area, you increase asthma attacks,” said Harvey. “Those cause increased deaths.”

Many deaths would be in disadvantaged and marginalized communities located near freeways.

In addition to detrimental health and economic benefits, Harvey said the policy change will leave automakers in a bind. Though manufacturers have lobbied to relax standards in the past, they balked at a potential regulation freeze.

Harvey said the Obama policy aligned federal standards with California’s stricter policies, making it easier for automakers to meet just one standard. If California’s waiver stays put, the U.S. car market will again be torn in two. Car manufacturers hoping to compete in those markets will have to meet the more stringent standards.

“How do you decide your cars [standards] if you have no idea if Trump’s going to win or original regulations are going to prevail? If you’re smart, you’re going to follow the original regulations anyway,” said Harvey. “Car companies have to make multibillion-dollar decisions based on new uncertainty.”

Clarifying the uncertainty will likely be left to the courts. While the administration is already facing legal challenges from some states, the decision this week is expected to prompt more lawsuits.

The two policy actions, freezing the standards and revoking California’s waiver, could find their way to the Supreme Court. Harvey said the courts may decide cases based on the merit of the policy change or defer to the executive branch. President Trump’s recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh — or “Mr. Deference” as Harvey called him — to the Supreme Court may give the administration an edge.

In the past, Kavanaugh has ruled that ultimate authority to craft environmental regulation rests with Congress, not the EPA, although he has called dealing with global warming “urgent.”

SOURCE 




Plastic Bans Could Worsen Pollution

As San Diego debates banning food and beverage containers made from expanded polystyrene (EPS), Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart II and Policy Fellow Camille Harmer argue that a ban would likely create worse problems for the environment. As with most other bans, the prohibitionists fail to adequately consider the unintended consequences of restricting people’s choices.

“Such bans take into account only the styrofoam that ends up in the ocean,” Shughart and Harmer write in Fortune. Reliance on substitute products—such as disposable paper cups, paper food cartons, and paper straws—would likely cause greater paper waste, carbon emissions, and water pollution. A disposable paper cup, for example, requires 20 percent more fossil fuel and 50 percent more electricity to manufacture than the EPS version it would replace, Shughart and Harmer report.

“To address the problems caused by plastic pollution, it’s better to target its improper disposal than plastic itself,” the authors continue. “California would be better off to encourage private recycling options, incentivize people to use EPS in more environmentally friendly ways, or wait until alternatives become more viable.”

SOURCE 




How ‘Green’ Energy Subsidies Transfer Wealth to the Rich

When the Golden State Warriors, who won three of the last four NBA championships, signed All-Star Demarcus Cousins, sports pundits across the country offered the same opinion: The rich just got richer.

In many respects, the same holds true for energy subsidies.

Federal energy programs promise ambiguous policy goals such as abating climate change, spurring innovation, or reducing dependence on foreign sources of energy. But they often lead to situations that help the rich at the expense of middle- and lower-income Americans. That’s because when the federal government gets involved in the energy business, it transfers billions of dollars to the production and consumption of politically preferred sources and technologies—and many of those involve the poor transferring money to the rich.

For instance, a recent study by the Pacific Research Institute found that more than 99 percent of subsidies for electrical vehicles go to households with incomes of $50,000 or higher, and nearly three-quarters go to households with an annual income of $100,000 or more.

Poorer Americans can’t access the $7,500 tax credits because of the high prices of electric vehicles, even after accounting for the generous subsidies, which means they help pay for the subsidies through their taxes but can’t themselves get eligible for the subsidies or other benefits, such as carpool lanes.

To make matters worse, some major car companies are forced to sell electric vehicles at a loss to comply with state mandates and regulations. As Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute explains:

California, along with the nine states that have adopted California’s policy, mandates that zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) comprise a set percentage of the automobile market. The mandated minimum market share for ZEVs is currently scheduled to grow from 4.5 percent of sales in 2018, to 22 percent of the market by 2025; and Gov. Jerry Brown is even contemplating a complete ban on sales of cars with internal combustion engines after 2040.

Complying with these mandates requires companies to maintain ZEV credits that equal their share of the mandate, based on the company’s specific sales. Acquiring sufficient credits requires manufacturers that do not sell enough ZEVs to either sell ZEVs in California at a loss, purchase credits from companies whose ZEV sales exceed their credit requirements, or pay a $5,000 fine per credit that the company is short.

Consequently, the sales mandate has become a subsidy to companies, such as Tesla, that sell more ZEV-qualified vehicles than required by the mandate; and, a penalty on companies whose ZEV sales fall short of the required mandate. The $700 million earned by Tesla via these credit sales, which does not even account for all the credits Tesla has amassed, exemplifies that these subsidies and penalties can be substantial.

Energy subsidies benefit not only wealthy individuals, but also wealthy companies in the form of blatant corporate welfare. The federal government’s loan guarantee program is another subsidy program where government-backed loans have, time and again, gone to companies that simply don’t need any support from the taxpayer.

You don’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to see that some of these projects have financial backing from giant tech firms, massive energy utilities, large investment banks, and other successful corporations.

The Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program granted more than $1 billion in loans for Nissan and Ford to retool their factories. This program is simply a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to these massive companies. These companies should have no trouble financing a project without government-backed loans if they find it is worth the investment.

Eliminating favoritism in markets will benefit all Americans—individuals and businesses alike—not just the privileged few.

SOURCE 





Conservatives get ready to battle a GOP carbon tax bill

Trump would be  unlikely to sign it so this is just a virtue claim

Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., on Monday will become the first Republican to introduce national carbon pricing legislation in nearly a decade, which is prompting an effort by people in his own party to kill it.

“There is a real interest in pretending this is a live issue, but it’s not,” Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, told the Washington Examiner. “What they do is say some Republicans like the idea of the carbon tax. But it will never ever happen. The Republican Party has made it very clear that they are overwhelmingly opposed to a carbon tax.”

Norquist's group will host an event Monday to highlight conservative opposition to the bill, which is designed to tempt Republicans into supporting a tax on carbon emissions by getting rid of the federal gas tax. While Curbelo's supporters are hoping it can gain traction among Republicans, Norquist predicts it's already dead, in part because it would increase federal tax revenues and spend them.

“It’s a really horrid bill if you read it,” Norquist said. “This is a very regressive across the board tax on energy. It is extorting money from American industry. If you had to have the anti-Trump bill, to go against everything he is doing, this is the kill American manufacturing bill.”

Others say Curbelo's action shows Republicans representing states already feeling the impacts of climate change, such as Florida and its rising sea levels, are interested in finding solutions.

“The fervency of opponents’ responses demonstrates that these ideas could have real traction and can happen more quickly than most people think," said Joseph Majkut, a climate scientist at Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank supporting a carbon tax.

Many economists say a carbon emissions tax is the most cost-effective way to fight climate change, and thus could appeal to GOP skeptics.

“It's no secret that attempts to raise the gas tax have created political problems, as have efforts to impose a carbon tax,” Majkut said. “So, if you are standing up a carbon tax and getting rid of the gas tax, it will to a large degree offset the increased costs drivers pay at the the pump. It is an open question whether that is going to help the politics of the bill.”

Curbelo's bill represents the quandry some Republicans are in when it comes to climate change. He is a moderate Republican facing reelection in a purple state whose bill is strategically designed to bridge the wide gap between his party and Democrats.

His bill would impose a tax beginning at $24 per ton of carbon dioxide in 2020, but which rises 2 percent annually above inflation. At the same time, it repeals the federal taxes on gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuels.

“There are a couple of elements in the Curbelo bill that are very positive and that Republicans should like,” said Josiah Neeley, the energy policy director of the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank. “One is the tax swap idea, that if you put in a carbon tax, you can use that to replace revenue from other taxes. This is a standard part of the GOP tax playbook going back to 1986, with the Reagan tax bill, and to last year’s tax cuts."

In a nod to Trump, the legislation would use the revenues from the carbon tax to fund improvements to America’s crumbling infrastructure, some of which would be directed for flood-mitigation projects and other initiatives to protect against climate change. Seventy percent of the money would go to the Highway Trust Fund, the nearly depleted funding source that spreads money to states to help pay for transportation projects.

Another 10 percent of the carbon tax proceeds would be used as grants for low-income households, a provision intended to combat conservative critics who say taxing oil refineries, gas plants, and coal mines for the carbon dioxide they burn would disproportionately harm poorer people who spend more of their income on energy.

Curbelo’s proposal would also restrict the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. That anti-regulatory gesture would prevent a future Democratic administration from creating another Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s signature program to force power plants to reduce carbon emissions.

“The pause or suspension of EPA’s regulatory authority is appealing,” Neeley said. “That may not seem like a pressing thing right now because Trump is not pursuing climate change regulations, but over time, that authority will come back into play, and being able to get out from under that is a real positive.”

Despite the outreach to Republicans, it’s unlikely Curbelo’s bill or any carbon tax legislation can pass the GOP-controlled Congress anytime soon.

Last week, all but six House Republicans voted to approve a nonbinding, GOP-leadership-backed resolution declaring a potential carbon tax harmful to the economy.

Supporters of the Curbelo bill seek to overcome the political hurdle in Congress with data.

A new independent study, led by Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, found that Curbelo’s legislation would cause little damage to the overall economy, while dramatically reducing planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.

The bill would cause reductions in annual gross domestic product between 0.1 and 0.2 percent in the 2020s, while prompting total employment to decline by only between 0.02 and 0.04 percent.

The study projected that Curbelo’s bill would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 30 to 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and 27 to 32 percent reductions by 2025, ahead of the goals set in the Clean Power Plan.

More than two-thirds of these projected emission reductions are expected to occur in the electric power sector, as the tax would prompt acceleration of the ongoing trend of cheaper, less carbon-intensive natural gas replacing coal, and zero-emission renewables, later on, expected to replace gas.

The Curbelo proposal, like any carbon tax, would increase the price of energy-intensive goods such as electricity, home heating fuels, and gasoline. It would hit some industries, such as coal, particularly hard, reducing coal production 50 percent relative to current policy by 2030, the report said.

“A carbon tax doesn't really have meaningful effects on aggregate macroeconomic outcomes,” Noah Kaufman, a Columbia economist and author of the study, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not a big deal for GDP or income growth. But it absolutely does have a disproportionate impact on certain groups, with coal mining being the biggest one. The broad takeaway is that using a carbon tax can achieve emissions reductions at a low cost, although there are important winners and losers to worry about too.”

Neeley hopes Republicans can appreciate the benefits of Curbelo’s bill, although his expectations remain modest.

“The support for this idea is still low for Republicans, but the growth trajectory is in the right direction,” he said.

SOURCE 





Weather catastrophe in Australia: Farmers crippled by the 'worst drought in 100 years' are facing another TWO YEARS of scorching temperatures and no rain

On past form, one has to expect that this is another long-range prediction that the BoM will get wrong.  On principle I predict substantial rain some time over the next summer.

It's not only form, however that makes this an odd prediction.  We have just had an El Nino over 2016/2017 and there is normally at least 10 years between them.  Secondly, El Nino brings warmer water to the East coast and warmer water means MORE rain, not less. So, farmers:  Don't sell your farm yet.


An El Niño event has been predicted for the end of the year, leaving farmers already struggling with a devastating five-year drought facing disaster.

The Bureau of Meteorology announced the odds of an El Niño system forming this year are now twice as high as normal.

El Niño events often result in severe droughts, bringing higher temperatures, lower than average rainfall and increased risk of bushfires, lasting as long as two years.

If an El Niño does form in the latter half of 2018, it could prove catastrophic for parched Australian farmers who have been crippled by a years-long nationwide dry spell which some are describing as the worst drought in 100 years.

BOM senior forecaster David Crock said on Wednesday there is typically about a 25 per cent chance of an El Niño pattern developing.

The likelihood of one forming is now at 50 per cent, approximately double the normal probability.

'During El Niño, rainfall in eastern Australia is typically below average during winter–spring,' the Bureau of Meteorology stated.

'Daytime temperatures are also typically warmer than average for southern Australia. A neutral ENSO phase has little effect on Australian climate.

'Most international climate models surveyed by the Bureau suggest the tropical Pacific will continue to warm.

'Five of eight models indicate this warming will reach El Niño levels in the southern hemisphere spring, while a sixth model reaches El Niño levels in December.'

SOURCE

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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.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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Earth's resources consumed in ever greater destructive volumes

The arm-waving generalizations below are another iteration of a very old chant. The scare even predates global warming. And it still is as asinine as ever. The basic flaw in the scare is philosophical. They fail to consider what a resource is. Because of that simple-mindedness, they overlook a basic truth. Resources are CREATED. A thing is not a resource until somebody finds a use for it.

For instance: There are some parts of the world where there are acres of pesky red pebbles lying around upon the ground: Bauxite. Weipa in Northern Australia is one such place. And those pebbles were useless to man and beast until Hall & Heroult found that they contained aluminium oxide and devised a way to get the aluminium out of them.

Aluminium was once as rare as gold. It is now so common that most households regularly throw it out -- used aluminium foil from food wrapping. Those red pebbles suddenly became a huge resource. And since aluminium is the most plentiful metal in the earth's crust we are NOT going to run out of that very useful metal. And if we include its alloys, it can do just about anything that any metal can do.

And the process of resource creation continues. Plastics are another example. Black sticky stuff -- crude oil -- is the source of an innumerable array of things made out of plastic. And with the advent of fracking, talk of "peak oil" has strangely faded away. And it's only in the 1940s that we found a use for uranium. It can now supply all our electrical power from now to kingdom come if the Green/Left will let it. Curiously, in the early days of nuclear power, the Left welcomed it. It is still the safest form of power generation.

What about food? Ever since Hitler, Greens have been worried about food running out. Hitler launched his war because he thought he needed Russian farmland to feed his Reich.

An excellent answer to that scare is China. Under Mao Tse Tung, China imported lots of wheat from Australia to feed their people. Food certainly does run short under Communism. Soviet Russia also had 70 "bad seasons" in a row. But look at China now. Under Chinese-style capitalism China has become a major food exporter. Have a look at the labels on all those cans of "Own brand" food in your local supermarket. Half of them will be from China.

Those clever little Chinese farmers can grown anything anywhere, more or less. Only their Politburo could not. They can feed a population of over a billion in good style and still have lots left over. They now supply most of the world's garlic and even most of the world's truffles! Is anything sacred? And remember, while feeding us, China also supplies most of our electrical goods!

So where are our food shortages going to come from? Most governments in the Western world are driven frantic trying to find markets for their surplus food. They do all sorts of strange things to deal with those surpluses. America pays its farmers not to farm part of their land. The characteristic state of food supply markets is glut.

OK. One more thing: What about water? There are droughts a-plenty and a lot of competition for the available water in some parts of the world. Are we doomed to drying out? An instructive example is the Middle East. It has had a lot of drought in recent years. But there is one country in the ME that has plenty of water: Israel. Why? Is it a plot by the learned elders of Zion? No. They don't exist, despite the fact that all Arabs (just about) believe in them. No. Israelis have developed very efficient desalination technology -- so they suck all the water they want out of the sea. They have made seawater a resource. What they do, others can do.

Oh! And what about the pre-Warmism scare that we are running out of phosphates? We were getting most of our phosphates from bird poop and the birds weren't pooping fast enough. We need phosphorous for our bones so that could be bad. Shortly after the scare had got legs, however, a vast new deposist of mineral phosphates was discovered in North Africa. That scare quickly evaporated.

In conclusion, there is just one basic resource: Human brainpower. And that continues to do us proud


Humanity is devouring our planet’s resources in increasingly destructive volumes, according to a new study that reveals we have consumed a year’s worth of carbon, food, water, fibre, land and timber in a record 212 days.

As a result, the Earth Overshoot Day – which marks the point at which consumption exceeds the capacity of nature to regenerate – has moved forward two days to 1 August, the earliest date ever recorded.

To maintain our current appetite for resources, we would need the equivalent of 1.7 Earths, according to Global Footprint Network, an international research organisation that makes an annual assessment of how far humankind is falling into ecological debt.

The overshoot began in the 1970s, when rising populations and increasing average demands pushed consumption beyond a sustainable level. Since then, the day at which humanity has busted its annual planetary budget has moved forward.

Thirty years ago, the overshoot was on 15 October. Twenty years ago, 30 September. Ten years ago, 15 August. There was a brief slowdown, but the pace has picked back up in the past two years. On current trends, next year could mark the first time, the planet’s budget is busted in July.

While ever greater food production, mineral extraction, forest clearance and fossil-fuel burning bring short-term (and unequally distributed) lifestyle gains, the long-term consequences are increasingly apparent in terms of soil erosion, water shortages and climate disruption.

The day of reckoning is moving nearer, according to Mathis Wackernagel, chief executive and co-founder of Global Footprint Network.

“Our current economies are running a Ponzi scheme with our planet,” he said. “We are borrowing the Earth’s future resources to operate our economies in the present. Like any Ponzi scheme, this works for some time. But as nations, companies, or households dig themselves deeper and deeper into debt, they eventually fall apart.”

The situation is reversible. Research by the group indicates political action is far more effective than individual choices. It notes, for example, that replacing 50% of meat consumption with a vegetarian diet would push back the overshoot date by five days. Efficiency improvements in building and industry could make a difference of three weeks, and a 50% reduction of the carbon component of the footprint would give an extra three months of breathing space.

In the past, economic slowdowns – which tend to reduce energy consumption – have also shifted the ecological budget in a positive direction. The 2007-08 financial crisis saw the date push back by five days. Recessions in the 90s and 80s also lifted some of the pressure, as did the oil shock of the mid 1970s.

But the overall trend is of costs increasingly being paid by planetary support systems.

Separate scientific studies over the past year has revealed a third of land is now acutely degraded, while tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon. Scientists have also raised the alarm about increasingly erratic weather, particularly in the Arctic, and worrying declines in populations of bees and other insect pollinators, which are essential for crops.

SOURCE





New Study Claims Global Warming Will Cause Thousands More To Commit Suicide

They are more likely to enjoy the warmth

A July study claims that thousands of more people will commit suicide in the coming decades due to man-made global warming.

Published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday, the study found a one-degree increase in average monthly temperature correlated with suicide rate increases of 0.68 percent and 2.1 percent in the U.S. and Mexico, respectively.

The effect they found is extremely small, and in some cases, not statistically significant from zero. Still, the results were touted in media reports as evidence that increased temperatures exacerbate suicides.

The study predicts between 9,000 and 40,000 more people will off themselves by 2050 because of man-made warming — based on an extreme warming scenario that experts increasingly call “exceptionally unlikely.”

“So we take a specific location and we take a specific month, and we compare cooler versions of that month to hotter versions of that month, and we ask, ‘Are suicide rates different during those two months?’ We indeed find that they are,” lead author Marshall Burke told CNN.

“We find a very consistent relationship between temperature increases and increases in suicide risk,” said Burke, an assistant professor at Stanford University.

A lot of research has been done into suicide rates and temperature. A recent British study found that heat waves exacerbated existing mental health problems in individuals, including suicide.

But Burke’s study only looked at average monthly temperature, which does not give an indication of heat waves or other phenomena that could exacerbate suicides. Higher average temperatures in any given month could be from warmer nights, rather than scorching daytime temperatures.

Cato Institute atmospheric scientist Ryan Maue noted that correlations with monthly temperatures aren’t reliable. Maue also criticized the study’s dependence on Twitter postings to gauge “depressive” speech.

"The suicide and climate change study correlates "monthly average temperature" with suicide risk -- and then projects from RCP 8.5 models into 2050 -- with "social media" postings. Correlating anything w/monthly temperatures is a p-hacking smorgasbord!"

P-hacking refers to the reanalyzing of data until a statistically significant result is achieved. It’s become a major concern in recent years among scientists who fear the practice is damaging their credibility and leading to the hyping of bad science.

Burke’s study averaged monthly temperature correlations across the U.S., which also obscured negative relationships between suicides and temperature increases. Nevada and South Carolina, for example, saw decreases in suicide rates as temperatures increased, but those decreases are obscured in the national average.

The study also claims that temperature increases correlated with a less than one percent increase in “depressive” language on Twitter. However, those results were only significant in one coding, which then had to be adjusted for “lagged effect.”

SOURCE 





Why are people still pushing a carbon tax?

By Natalia Castro

Politicians are feeling the pressure to distance themselves from burdensome environmental policies that show little benefit while draining the economy. As political figures both in the United Stated and Canada, push against a carbon tax, one Florida representative has decided to move in the opposite direction.

Representative Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) has proposed a new carbon tax bill which, according to analysis done by the Wall Street Journal, would likely add three to 11 cents to the average pump price per gallon of gasoline to drivers.

Curbelo has claimed the tax would protect his South Florida coastal district, which he says is vulnerable to the effects of climate change; however, as our friends in Canada have taught us through their own failed policy, a carbon tax will bear significant cost while producing little benefit.

A study conducted by the University of Regina Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainable Communities funded by the Saskatchewan government, found a federal carbon tax would reduce the Canadian provinces gross domestic product (GDP) by almost $16 billion by 2030.

The study also concluded that the federal carbon tax would reduce emissions by less than one mega-ton. This is approximately 1.25 percent of the provinces total emissions yet would maintain a cost of $1,890 per ton to GDP.

As Environment Minister Dustin Duncan explained, “If the whole point of the carbon tax is to reduce emissions, then this model says that for Saskatchewan doesn’t actually reduce emissions, it only hurts the economy.”

Additional research from the University of Calgary estimated a federal carbon tax could cost the average Saskatchewan household more than $1,000 per year.

Across Canada citizens are voting pro-carbon tax politicians out of office and preparing law suits against the federal government.

A majority of Congressmen in the U.S. seem to be learning from Canada’s mistakes.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution affirming that a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide would “be detrimental to American families and business, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”

The measure, sponsored by Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), passed on a 229-180 vote with six Republicans breaking with their caucus and voting against the resolution. Florida Representative Curbelo was one of these Republicans.

Rep. Curbelo needs to get on board with the majority of Republicans in Congress and even many Canadian citizens who view a carbon tax as economically destructive. While producing minimal benefit for the environment, a carbon tax would cost hardworking Americans significantly. If combatting climate change is so important to Curbelo and his constituents, he should look toward free market solutions that do not further harm his people. It is clear in the United States and around the world that a carbon tax is not and never will be a good answer.

SOURCE 





We Are Not Running Out of Forests

Recently on the BBC, Deborah Tabart from the Australian Koala Foundation noted that “85 per cent of the world’s forests are now gone.” Luckily this statement is incorrect.

Moreover, due to afforestation in the developed world, net deforestation has almost ceased. I’m sure that Tabart had nothing but good intentions in raising environmental concerns, but far-fetched claims about the current state of the world’s forests do not help anyone. The record needs setting straight.

After searching for evidence to support Tabart’s claim, the closest source I could find is an article from GreenActionNews, which claims that 80 per cent of the earth’s forests have been destroyed. The problem with that claim is that according to the United Nations there are 4 billion hectares of forest remaining worldwide. To put that in perspective, the entire world has 14.8 billion hectares of land.

For 80 per cent of the forest area to have already been destroyed and for 4 billion hectares to remain, 135 per cent of the planet’s surface must have once been covered in forests. GreenActionNews’ claim not only implies that 5.2 billion hectares of deforestation occurred at sea, but that every bit of land on earth was once forested. Ancient deserts, swamps, tundra and grasslands make mockery of that claim.

Amusingly, GreenActionNews’ claims that “forest is unevenly distributed: the five most forest rich countries are the Russian Federation, Brazil, Canada, the United States of America and China.” Country size and forest area do not always correlate, but it is hardly “uneven” that the five largest countries also hold the world’s largest forest areas.

Anyhow, slightly more than 31 per cent of the world is covered in forest. The world does continue to lose forest area, but consider the rate and location of this loss. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the annual rate of deforestation has more than halved since the 1990s. Between 2010 and 2015, the world has gained 4.3 million hectares of forest per year, while losing 7.6 million hectares of forest per year. That accounts for a net decrease of 0.08 percent of forest area each year.

Some argue this data is faulty, because the FAO defines forest area as including natural forests and tree plantations. But that criticism is illegitimate. The FAO makes it clear that “93 per cent of global forest area, or 3.7 billion hectares in 2015,” was natural forest. Natural forest area decreased at an average rate of 6.5 million hectares per year over the last five years, a reduction from 10.6 million hectares per year in the 1990s. Put differently, natural forest loss is declining by 0.059 percent per year and is heading towards zero.

The reason why most people labor under a misapprehension about the state of the world’s forests is that news stories often ignore afforestation. In about half of the world, there is net reforestation and, as Matt Ridley puts it, this isn’t happening despite economic development, but because of it.

The world’s richest regions, such as North America and Europe, are not only increasing their forest area. They have more forests than they did prior to industrialization. The United Kingdom, for example, has more than tripled its forest area since 1919. The UK will soon reach forest levels equal to those registered in the Domesday Book, almost a thousand years ago.

It is not just rich nations that are experiencing net reforestation. The “Environmental Kuznets curve” is an economic notion that suggests that economic development initially leads to environmental deterioration, but after a period of economic growth that degradation begins to reverse.

Once nations hit, what Ridley dubs the “forest transition,” or approximately $4,500 GDP per capita, forest areas begin to increase. China, Russia, India, Vietnam and Bangladesh are just some of the nations that have hit this forest transition phase and are experiencing net afforestation.

Poor people can’t afford to care about the environment very much, because other priorities – such as survival – are more important. If that means that a rare animal must be killed and eaten, so be it. “The environment is a luxury good,” says Tim Worstall of the Adam Smith Institute, “it’s something we spend more of our income upon, as incomes rise.”

A recent study from the University of Helsinki highlights that between 1990 and 2015, annual forest area grew in high and mid-income nations by 1.31 per cent and 0.5 per cent respectively, while decreasing by 0.72 per cent in 22 low income countries.

The Kuznets curve not only applies to forest area, but also biodiversity. Ridley gives the example of three apex predators: wolves that live in developed countries of Europe and North America, tigers who mainly inhabit mid-income India, Russia and Bangladesh, and lions, which live in poor Sub-Saharan Africa. Following the Kuznets curve, wolf numbers are rapidly increasing, tiger numbers have been steady for the last 20 years (and have just began to increase), while lion numbers continue to fall.

To encourage reforestation and environmental protection, the answer is a simple one – adopt economic policies that encourage rapid development and urbanisation. As people grow rich and move to the cities, more money becomes available for environmental protection and more land can be returned to nature.

Thankfully Tabart’s claim was wrong and historically unprecedented poverty alleviation that has occurred in the last 50 years means that more countries are increasing their forest area. Yearly net deforestation is fast approaching zero and according to current trends, within the next couple of decades net afforestation will be the norm. This tremendous news is something to truly shout from the treetops.

SOURCE 





Environmentalists undermine national security

Environmental advocacy groups that take the Defense Department to court appear to operate as foreign agents working to help China and undermine the U.S. Navy and America’s military readiness in the Asia-Pacific region, congressional leaders suggest.

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, and Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee,  called on two environmental groups to submit documents that “identify any policies or procedures” the groups took to ensure compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Bishop and Westerman last month wrote the two groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity.

In a letter to Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the two Republican lawmakers expressed concern about China’s “extensive perception-management campaign” and the “NRDC’s role” in assisting these efforts.

The environmental group’s press releases and other written correspondence “consistently praise the Chinese government’s environmental initiatives and promote the image of China as a global environmental leader,” their letter says.

An aide to the House committee told The Daily Signal in a phone interview that there is “a significant level of engagement between the NRDC and Chinese government officials.”

And, the aide said, “the American people should know about the group’s relationship with foreign governments whether or not the connection is direct or indirect.”

The New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit advocacy group founded in 1970, has $306.2 million in net assets, according to tax records. The group’s website says it “works to safeguard the earth” and has more than 3 million members and “online activists.”

The nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, based in Tucson, Arizona, was founded in 1989 and has $18.3 million in net assets, tax records show.  The group’s mission is “to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction,” and it has about 1.6 million members, according to its website.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires anyone who acts as an agent of foreign principals “in a political or quasi-political capacity” to disclose that relationship periodically, as well as all “activities, receipts, and disbursements in support of those activities,” according to the Justice Department.

The law, which predates World War II, is the subject of legislation from Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., that he says “corrects long-standing loopholes exploited by lobbyists of foreign entities to conceal their work to influence U.S. government activities.” The bill also clarifies reporting requirements, authorizes investigative tools, and establishes enforcement safeguards, according to Johnson’s office.

Both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity complied with June deadlines set by Bishop’s House committee to submit information detailing compliance with the law.

Neither group is registered as a foreign agent, and both maintain they operate in America’s national interest despite their close ties to foreign governments and litigation against the U.S. military.

A second committee aide told The Daily Signal that up until now the requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act have not been as strictly enforced as they should be.

“Historically, the Justice Department has not utilized FARA, and there’s limited case law and a need for clarity,” the second aide said.

The House Judiciary Committee approved Johnson’s bill in January, but the full House has not taken it up. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced a companion bill.

Lawsuits Against Navy Draw Scrutiny

The political activism of the Natural Resources Defense Council continues to coincide with China’s geopolitical interests, while it regularly files lawsuits against the Pentagon aimed at constraining military exercises vital to national security, Bishop and Westerman say in their letter to the NRDC.

The organization “collaborates with Chinese government entities deeply involved in Chinese efforts to assert sovereignty over the South China Sea in contravention of international law,” the two Republicans say. It also works to “discredit those skeptical of China’s commitment to pollution reduction targets” who seek to report honestly on environmental data, their letter says:

When engaging on environmental issues concerning China, the NRDC appears to practice self-censorship, issue selection bias, and generally refrains from criticizing Chinese officials. … Of note, the NRDC collaborates with Chinese government entities that are deeply involved in Chinese efforts to assert sovereignty over the South China Sea in contravention of international law.

By contrast, the NRDC takes an adversarial approach to its advocacy practices in the United States. In fundraising materials, the NRDC claims to have ‘sued the [U.S. government] about once every 10 days’ since President Trump was inaugurated. Over the last two decades your organization has also sued the U.S. Navy multiple times to stop or drastically limited naval training exercises in the Pacific arguing that navy sonar and anti-submarine warfare drills harm marine life. We are unaware of the NRDC having made similar efforts to curtail naval exercises by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Although China is “actually the world’s top polluter,” the first committee aide told The Daily Signal, the NRDC goes to great lengths to avoid criticizing the Beijing government’s actual environmental record.

“The NRDC is totally in the tank for China, and they are the MSNBC news for China,” the aide said. “The NRDC is developing the notion that China is an environmental leader and promotes the idea that China can be trusted to reduce emissions. When you see the NRDC photos of China, they show how beautiful and clean China is, but they don’t say anything about all the pollution. Instead, we get this heavenly, angelic portrayal of China.”

The Republican lawmakers’ letter to Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, focuses on a lawsuit the group filed against the Defense Department in concert with a coalition of environmental groups in Japan and the U.S. The suit calls for halting the planned relocation of the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to a less-populated part of the Japanese island of Okinawa.

The Center for Biological Diversity “appears to have engaged in political activities within the United States on behalf of the government of the Japanese Prefecture of Okinawa and other foreign entities to influence plans regarding [Marine Corps Air Station] Futenma’s relocation,” the letter says.

Both the U.S. and the central government in Japan have made relocation of Futenma a priority, the letter explains.

“The committee seeks clarification about the nature of CBD’s close relationship with Okinawan government officials and foreign environmental groups,” the congressmen write.

Green Activists Deny Being Foreign Agents

In their letters to the two environmental groups, Bishop and Westerman make the point that the Foreign Agents Registration Act “is clear about registration requirements for a person or group acting in the political or public interests of a foreign entity, even when done through intermediaries.”

They also highlight the penalties attached to the law, which include fines that could reach as high as $10,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

The Daily Signal emailed both environmental groups to ask their response to the committee’s letters and seek comment on the allegations that they operate as foreign agents.

Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, released a statement lashing out at Bishop:

Rob Bishop is the one working against American interests, first by trashing our national monuments and now its democratic principles at the behest of the fossil fuel industry. He’s abusing his position, tarnishing the House of Representatives and making a fool of himself with these amateurish McCarthy tactics.

The green group also provided The Daily Signal with a copy of the letter it sent to the committee, disputing the allegations.

The letter focuses on the center’s efforts to conserve the Okinawa dugong, a sea creature closely related to the manatee. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the species as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act.

The center’s efforts on behalf of the dugong are “controlled and directed” by its board of directors and executive director, not any foreign interest, the letter says. Thus its activities on Okinawa “are exempt” from the law, the letter argues.

“If Reps. Bishop and Westerman are truly confused about the center’s motivation and control, it is perhaps because they abuse their position of power so regularly, and are so deeply influenced by powerful corporate donors, that they are unable to conceive of people being motivated by empathy, public interest and respect for the rule of law and democracy.”

On its website, the Center for Biological Diversity describes how it has used “innovative legal tactics to secure new protections for the dugong,” which involves litigation against U.S. military operations.

China’s Use of ‘Lawfare’

The Natural Resources Defense Council released two statements in response to the committee.

In the first, the NRDC says it works to advance American values, and that its activities in China are to ensure “a more sustainable future for everyone.”

In the second, the group addresses a June 13 letter Bishop and Westerman sent to Defense Secretary James Mattis asking for information about the impact of environmental litigation on military readiness.

The congressmen called Mattis’ attention to already-identified acts of Chinese espionage inside the U.S. They also pointed out that “China’s employment of lawfare is inherently more difficult to detect” because the Chinese can conceal political motives behind the actions of seemingly sympathetic causes such as environmentalism.

The Republican lawmakers suggested that China may be exploiting America’s legal system as part of a larger strategy to “erode” the U.S. military advantage in the Asia-Pacific region.

“For example, the impact of marine life from the U.S. Navy’s use of active sonar and underwater explosives has been the subject of several lawsuits led by the Natural Resources Defense Council dating back to the 1990s,” Bishop and Westerman wrote Mattis.

The congressmen also cited information from the Navy describing how environmental litigation “unreasonably restricted Navy training and testing activities.”

Although the Supreme Court has concluded there hasn’t been a “documented episode of harm to a marine mammal caused by naval sonar,” their letter to Mattis notes, lower courts continue to rule otherwise with decisions that restrict naval exercises.

‘Weaponization’ of Environmental Law

Green groups typically invoke the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 in legal actions against the U.S. military. That law requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impact before implementing projects.

The House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing in April on what it called “Weaponization of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Implications of Environmental Lawfare.”

The committee defines lawfare as “an attempt to use the courts to damage or delegitimize projects that litigants oppose, or to distract time and resources that would otherwise go to implementing the project, or to win a public relations victory.”

The environmental law was “originally intended to increase awareness regarding the effects of federal actions on the environment,” a committee memo says, but its “vague and ambiguous language has exposed the federal government to excessive litigation and resulted in perverse outcomes for agencies, the environment and taxpayers.”

The last time reforms were made to the National Environmental Policy Act was in 1986, committee aides told The Daily Signal. Since serious national security implications are attached to environmental lawsuits against the military that cite the law, lawmakers can make a strong case for a new round of reforms, they said.

“It would be a good idea to link NEPA reform with national security, but the Department of Defense has not been helpful here,” the first aide said. “Defense Department officials won’t come right out and say NEPA is a terrible law, they will just say it’s a problem that they can work around.”

“But the Defense Department has a lot to gain from NEPA reforms, the aide added. “They would not be so bogged down in court.”

SOURCE 

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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.  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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Carbon Tax May Bring Down Canadian PM Justin Trudeau

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a problem: the only way his government can keep a promise is to make millions of voters angry just as the next federal election rolls around. It’s a pickle, but it’s one of his own creation.

The promise (threat?) was to impose a federal carbon tax next year on any province that did not develop a version of its own that met federally dictated benchmarks. The tax would begin at $10 per emitted tonne of carbon dioxide before rapidly increasing to $50 per tonne by 2022 — estimated to be equivalent to more than 11 cents per litre of gasoline. This is all, of course, in the name of meeting Canada’s international pledges to reduce our CO2 emissions.

The problem is that Prime Minister Trudeau now faces a much different political environment than he apparently took for granted. A year ago, nine of 10 provinces were on board with the Liberal plan (though in some cases this meant agreeing to implement provincial versions). Today (as anti-carbon-tax campaigner Jim Karahalios happily pointed out this week in the Financial Post) Saskatchewan, the original renegade, has been joined in opposing Trudeau’s carbon-tax plan by Ontario and Prince Edward Island, with Newfoundland and New Brunswick signalling they too might bail. Alberta’s NDP government is four-square behind the plan, of course, but it’s very likely be toppled by the United Conservative Party next year, in part over this very issue.

The federal Liberals certainly can push ahead with their threat to “backstop” unco-operative provinces, which is a polite word for imposing a federal tax against the popular will. But doing so during an election year cannot be an appealing prospect. Their softening poll numbers suggest the election will be competitive and that the Liberals will need to be strong in Ontario. Does Trudeau really want to spend an election campaign telling Ontarians he’s going to force a tax on them over the sustained (and, no doubt, loud) objections of Premier Doug Ford?

Does he want to risk his Atlantic Canadian stronghold by going to war with P.E.I., New Brunswick and/or Newfoundland? And if Alberta defenestrates it’s pro-carbon-tax government, does Trudeau suppose he’ll stand a chance even holding what little he has now in Alberta in a federal election shortly afterward? And most importantly: Does any of those bode well for federal-provincial co-operation or national unity?

SOURCE 




Secretary Zinke unveils plan to reorganize the Department of Interior

By Printus LeBlanc

When Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke was sworn in, he came into a department that has not reorganized in 150 years. However, in the same timeframe new agencies were created, miles of red tape were introduced, and volumes of rules were added. The mammoth bureaucracy and inefficiencies have made the department one of the more despised government arms. Secretary Zinke sees that as a challenge and has embarked on an ambitious reorganization mission to make Interior more user friendly and less hostile to the people it is supposed to serve.

The Department of Interior is responsible for conservation and management of most federal land and natural resources. The agency is operating in 2,400 locations with over 70,000 employees around the U.S. Interior sites get over 500 million visitors to them each year. Everything from the food in the grocery store to the raw materials used to make Navy ships has at some point fallen under the purview of Interior. It would not be a stretch to say the department touches more lives everyday than any other federal agency, with the exception of the IRS. For this reason, it is important the agency run smooth and efficiently delivering the seamless customer service. But it doesn’t.

Imagine two fish in a river, one salmon and one trout. The salmon falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Commerce and the trout us under the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in the Department of Interior. Upstream is a dam built and controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers, and downstream is another dam maintained by the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) also in the Department of Interior. The river continues with forests on one bank, under the U.S. Forestry Service (USFS) of the Agriculture Department, and the other bank has an Indian Reservation, falling under the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Now imagine a bridge is needed across the river.

The proposed bridge would have to get approval from multiple cabinet level agencies, waste thousands of man hours on red tape, and spend millions before a single shovel of dirt is even removed. By time the project is started, it is outdated, let alone finished. If it is an energy production project, the extra time and bureaucracy will cost the companies involved millions of dollars. That alone could sink the project.

To get an idea of how egregious the bureaucracy in the Department of Interior one only has to look at time it takes to approve Applications for Permit to Drill (APD). In FY 2016, the average wait time for drilling permits was 257 days, despite the rules requiring the permits to be reviewed within 30 days. With a wait 8 times longer than the rule states, why would anyone want to do business with the federal government?

Zinke’s reorganization plan will redraw the regional maps. The new regions were drawn using watersheds and ecosystems generally following county lines. The new regions will be more involved in the decision process instead of D.C. making all the decisions. More authority will be given to personnel in the field. How does someone in Washington D.C. know what is happening in Utah or Arizona?

The new regional maps will also put someone in charge. As often is the case today no one knows which agency takes the lead on projects that deal with multiple agencies, which is almost all of them. The new regions will have Interior Regional Directors (IRDs). The IRDs will report directly to the Deputy Secretary and be responsible for corralling the multiple agencies in their region while moving the ball forward on projects. This is what halts so many current projects. No one knows which agency will take the lead.

Zinke plans on rolling out the plan in Alaska first. The nation’s largest state is in a single time zone almost all DOI bureaus operate there, and there is only one state government to deal with. The conditions make it perfect for the pilot program.

Secretary Zinke is right, it is time for Interior to be reorganized. The massive bureaucracy answers more to the D.C. swamp than it does the people it is supposed to serve. Zinke’s plan should be embraced by all limited government politicians in Congress. Here is another chance to drain the swamp, hopefully Congress will bite.

SOURCE 





Europe Drought Not Due To Climate Change Says Austria’s ZAMG

Northwest Europe has been awfully dry since April this year, and Germany is on track to set a new record for most days over 30°C this year. Real experts says it’s due to natural cycles.
Moreover, acute drought conditions have taken hold across parts of northern Europe and the situation threatens to significantly worsen before things improve.

Naturally the climate change ambulance chasers are coming out and pointing the finger at manmade climate change.

The online Austrian Wochenblick reported here, however that the finger pointing is misguided, and writes that the northern European heat is merely weather and not related to manmade climate change.

Klaus Haslinger, climate scientist at the Austrian Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG), told the Wochenblick that the very dry conditions fundamentally are “nothing more than a weather phenomenon and that it has nothing to do per se with ‘manmade climate change.”

Haslinger, who specializes in regional climate analysis, modelling, hydrology and drought, explains that the dry weather is due to a blocking high positioned over Scandinavia and that acts to prevent moist Atlantic air from reaching Northern Europe. He told the Wochenblick that the situation, however, looks very different in southeastern Austria.

Southern Europe wetter than normal

While extremely dry conditions persist over northern Europe, much of southern Europe is seeing the opposite.

A couple of days ago meteorologist Joe Bastardi of WeatherBell Analytics tweeted charts which show that although a large part of Europe is dry, the situation was far worse across much of Europe back in 2003:

Joe explains that the northern European drought is likely because of the sudden cooling in the northwest Atlantic, which leads to the development of the summer ridge.

In his most recent Saturday Summary beginning at the 14:10 mark, Joe explains more what’s behind Europe’s recent weather anomalies: natural ocean cycles – namely El Nino and a cold North Atlantic.

Central Europe summers tending wetter

And when it comes to drought and climate change, climate alarmists like to tell us that periods of extreme dryness are only going to get worse as global temperatures rise. Yet a recent long term study shows worldwide droughts have decreased over the recent decades:

Central Europe has trended wetter over the past 15 years

Concerning Central Europe going dry during the summer, as a number of climatologists warned in the wake of the extremely hot and dry 2003 summer, Central Europe summers have in reality gotten wetter, and not dryer.

In 2016 I wrote here that 11 of 13 the previous summers had seen either normal or above normal precipitation in Germany. Since then the years 2016 and 2017 were normal and above normal in terms of precipitation respectively. That now means 13 of the past 15 years have been normal or above normal wet.

After this summer Germany will finally be able to book a dry one.

The climate “experts” have once again been shown to be totally wrong with their forecasts of scorched Central European summers.

SOURCE 




NYT 'News' Story Is Full-Page Ad for Latest Children's Crusade Against Climate Change

“Teenagers Fight Climate Change, From the Front -- Meet the Leaders of a National Movement Called Zero Hour," reads the headline. Is it a press release? An opinion piece? No, a full-page “news” story in Sunday’s New York Times, following the same laudatory tone and lack of journalistic rigor that characterized the paper's coverage of the last children's crusade, for gun control.

Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks, intern-reporter at the New York Times, orchestrated the fawning interviews of six representatives of the ostensibly teen-led movement at the D.C. offices of the Sierra Club – all participants having no doubt arrived from all over the country by non-polluting means:

Some of them met on Instagram. Others coordinated during lunchtime phone conferences. Most of them haven’t even graduated from high school.

The teenagers behind Zero Hour -- an environmentally focused, creatively minded and technologically savvy nationwide coalition -- are trying to build a youth-led movement to sound the alarm and call for action on climate change and environmental justice.

Zero Hour’s website is headed with an Obama slogan, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which is certainly a clue as to the left-wing activist bent of the organization.

The story was less a journalistic experience than free full-page publicity for yet another left-wing “climate change” crusade (but without the ideological labels), complete with posed pictures of the six teens [emphasis mine]:

For the last year, a tight-knit group spanning both coasts has been organizing on social media. The teenagers kicked off their campaign with a protest on Saturday at the National Mall in Washington, along with sister marches across the country.

As sea levels rise, ice caps melt and erratic weather affects communities across the globe, they say time is running out to address climate change. The core organizing group of about 20 met with almost 40 federal lawmakers about their platforms on Thursday, and hope to inspire other teenagers to step up and demand change.

“The march is a launch. It isn’t, ‘That’s it, we’re done,’” said Jamie Margolin, the founder of Zero Hour. “It means it doesn’t give them an excuse to be like, ‘I don’t know what the kids want.’ It’s like, ‘Yes, you do.’”

They are trying to prove the adults wrong, to show that people their age are taking heed of what they see as the greatest crisis threatening their generation.

....for the last few years, Ms. Margolin has worked to raise awareness about climate justice issues. A passionate writer, she went through an “op-ed phase,” submitting essays to publications, like one titled “An Open Letter to Climate Change Deniers” published in the monthly magazine Teen Ink.....

At a Princeton University summer program last year, she met other teenagers interested in taking action on climate change and created Zero Hour. They began to plan a huge protest in the nation’s capital. On social media, Ms. Margolin espoused factoids and reached out to other young activists.

Yoon-Hendricks let another activist throw in an attack on SeaWorld:

Before joining Zero Hour, Nadia Nazar considered herself mostly an animal-rights activist. When she was 12, she saw a PETA video on slaughterhouses and immediately became a vegetarian.

“I had just gotten a cat,” Ms. Nazar said. “What if my cat was that cow?”

She got her start as an activist by trying to persuade people in her neighborhood not to go to SeaWorld, which has been criticized over its treatment of animals. (“I was slightly successful in that.”)

The Times has always looked to “the children” to save the planet, even back in 1970, although back then the paper’s coverage, while just as promotional, was at least more frank in discussing the left-wing milieu that surrounded such "environmental" crusading.

SOURCE 






Electricity Bills in South Australia and Other Australian States Skyrocket

South Australians pay three times as much as Americans for electricity

Like many European countries, South Australia is betting on renewable energy for its electricity, closing coal plants in favor of less carbon sources, with the outcome that its residents are becoming energy poor due to skyrocketing electricity prices.

The region’s reliance on subsidized, intermittent and unreliable wind and solar power has resulted in skyrocketing power prices. Over 100,000 Australian families had their power cut off last year, and another 100,000 are on payment plans with their power providers, making over 200,000 residents energy poor in one of the most energy-rich nations in the world.

109,000 Australian households had their electricity disconnected last year because they were unable to afford their electricity bills, which included over $3 billion in subsidies for Chinese- made solar panels and wind turbines. Electricity bills include the cost of generating power, transmitting it through high-voltage lines, distributing it to homes and businesses, and government subsidies provided to encourage development of renewable energy.

In Victoria, one of Melbourne’s bayside pubs is rationing its heating and cooling and cutting down on staff because of power bills that have reached $24,000 a month. The pub will have to sell over 120 additional pots of beer each day to keep pace with power bills that have tripled from $8000 a month after last year’s closure of the Hazelwood coal power plant. The closure of the 1600-megawatt Hazelwood plant in March 2017 resulted in the loss of over 20 percent of the state’s generation capacity. The electricity company blames the closure of the Hazelwood plant for the tripling of the pub’s power bill.

In Victoria, average retail household power bills increased almost 16 percent to $1275 compared to a year earlier. Average wholesale prices in 2017 increased 85 percent in Victoria (VIC) and 32 percent in South Australia (SA). Average wholesale prices in New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland (QLD) increased 63 percent and 53 percent, respectively.

Prior to the Hazelwood plant’s closure, the plant’s access to low-cost coal kept power prices among the lowest in the electricity market that supplies eastern Australia. Without the Hazelwood plant, the region became a net importer of electricity in the second half of 2017. To cope with the loss of coal-fired electricity, 500 percent more natural gas was used for power generation in 2017 and renewable energy surged, particularly roof-top solar as consumers looked to alternate sources rather than their power supplier.

Conclusion

South Australia, Victoria, and other Australian states are suffering from high electricity prices and potential blackouts because of their unsustainable mix of intermittent renewable energy with insufficient back-up power. Because of high electricity prices and energy poverty, residents with the help of the government are looking towards solar rooftop panels and home storage batteries, which are also costly, to form a virtual power plant and hopefully lower prices.

The United States should learn from Australia’s experience and not be too hasty at turning its generating sector over to intermittent renewable energy. Wind and solar power represent almost 8 percent of the current U.S. generating mix, which so far has not destabilized the grid.

But, costly tax credits for wind power have caused negative electricity prices that have resulted in traditional technologies, at times, being uncompetitive.  Wind generators are awarded tax credits equivalent to cash from taxpayers for generating power even when there is no financial need for it. Without the proper back-up power and policies that support it, the United States could end up facing similar cost and unreliability issues and challenges as these Australian states.

SOURCE

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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.  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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United Nations Sending Millions To Corrupt Countries In The Name Of Green Energy

An initiative by the United Nations meant to promote green energy has been plagued with inefficiency and rampant funding of programs through corrupt governments.

The Green Energy Climate Fund had ambitious goals when it was launched by the United Nations in 2010. Based in Songdo, South Korea, and employing 250 people, the organization’s mission is to boost renewable energy development in third-world countries with money donated from richer countries.

Former President Barack Obama was a major supporter of the initiative and pledged $3 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The Obama administration was only able to donate $1 billion before President Donald Trump entered office. Unfortunately for the GCF, the Republican president was not a fan of the program. In his 2017 decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, Trump also indicated he would not be donating the remaining $2 billion.

While his decision was widely derided by environmentalists and other progressive groups, not everyone agreed the GCF was worth investing in.

“This is a welcome development, given the endemic corruption in the countries and organizations on the receiving end of GCF dollars,” Ross Marchand, the director of policy at Taxpayer Protection Alliance, said in a statement to The Daily Caller News Foundation. The Taxpayer Protection Alliance, which monitors wasteful spending by the U.S. government, has been critical of the GCF’s handling of money.

“How can we trust, for instance, that the $5 million given by the GCF to the Tajikistan government will be allocated wisely, given the country’s abysmal corruption rankings? Given the exposure of ‘anti-corruption’ officials in that country as corrupt themselves, there is absolutely zero accountability for dispersed U.S. dollars,” Marchand continued.

In the eight years since it began, the GCF has committed around $4 billion to more than 75 projects around the world. However, a number of its investments have struggled to implement their intended goals, exemplifying the realities that come with doing business in impoverished, dysfunctional countries.

For example, a $30-million solar project in Zambia has been delayed repeatedly. Engineers for the project cite the government’s inability to provide basic information as a reason for the continued setbacks.

Hope for better renewable energy development in the African country appeared less likely after members of Zambia’s Industrial Development Corporation were revealed to have falsified legal documents and involved in worldwide, criminal activity.

Vietnam — a nation that is ranked 107th out of 180 in Transparency International’s index of corrupt countries — is also a recipient of GCF investment.

The Southeast Asian country received $80 million in funding, along with another $100 million from the World Bank.

A government executive in Vietnam’s energy industry was sentenced in January to life in jail for embezzlement and corruption — giving the international community reason to worry about its investments.

“American taxpayers deserve better than having their hard-earned dollars redistributed to strongmen in their cronies in the name of ‘sustainability,’” stated Marchand.

SOURCE 





Burning clothes is not just snobby, it’s a flaming obscenity

RACHEL JOHNSON slams labels for torching expensive gear to stop it going to the 'wrong people'

I was really repulsed by the revelation that Burberry (and other ‘elite’ labels) put to the torch tens of millions of pounds of expensive, perfect, box-fresh gear a year simply to stop it being snapped up by the ‘wrong people’.

They hope to stop these high-end goods ending up in discount stores or on eBay, thereby making it easier to sell new-season stock for top whack on the grounds of its premium, scarcity value.

How snobby is that? It really was a shocker. This fire sale of new expensive schmutter when so many people all over the world don’t have fresh water, sanitation, a shirt on their back… It was almost as awful as shops and restaurants all over the UK binning masses of edible, nutritious food while millions of people are hungry and so many children go to school without breakfast.

Back to Burberry burning its own brand. This isn’t just another fashion fail from the company, remember, that almost ate itself with anxiety about a so-called ‘chav’ hijack of its iconic, British, deluxe, elite etc identity (as it describes itself on its website) when one, funny picture of former EastEnder Danniella Westbrook clad in a Burberry check kilt, with matching bag, toddler, and buggy went viral 16 years ago.

This is possibly the ugliest example of capitalism I have encountered in my life, and confirmation that we’ve hit peak over-consumption and peak disposable fashion at once. It’s verging on the criminal. Enough.

Yes, I know the three-trillion-dollar clothing industry employs millions of people and is the bedrock of the economy in many Third World countries. And I know that the fashion industry contributes almost £30billion to the UK economy.

But these healthy numbers hide how wasteful and damaging our addiction to clothes is. Fast fashion is cheap – Primark jeans for pocket money all round – but it costs the earth. The industry’s environmental footprint is beyond immense.

We binned billions of pounds of clothes last year (many of them mine), filling many acres of landfill (I promise I try to think of this every time I pop into Zara). Creating textiles consumes untold millions of resources and requires 93 billion cubic metres of precious water a year, and the greenhouse gas emissions belched out are more than those of all international flights and maritime shipping put together.

Even if Burberry says it turns last season’s belted trenches to ash in ‘specialist incinerators able to harness the energy from the process’, I so don’t care. This is not on trend.

What is, is upcycling. It is four-minute showers and feeding your wedding guests food destined for landfill, as one happy couple did last week (I admit I was disappointed they hadn’t actually scraped the grub out of dumpsters).

It’s charities such as The Felix Project, collecting delicious food that would otherwise go to waste to distribute it in paper bags to thousands in need. It’s wearing the same outfit twice (the Duchess of Cambridge), or even 20 times or more (Princess Anne).

It is outrageous that the industry destroys valuable stuff that other people have worked all hours to produce (often in China) at no small cost to the environment, stuff that so many people actually need as well as merely want.

Stay classy, Burberry – and this means putting the planet rather than your brand first. There really is only one of those.

SOURCE 






Luddite eco-imperialists claim to be virtuous

Uber-organic campaign enshrines primitive agriculture and malnutrition as human rights

Paul Driessen and David Wojick

Not every poor person in impoverished places around the world aspires to the modern living standards they see and hear about: indoor plumbing, electricity for lights, a refrigerator and stove, a paucity of disease-carrying insects, top-notch schools and hospitals, their children living past age five. But many do.

Not every poor African, Asian or Latin American farmer wants to give up his backbreaking, dawn to dusk traditional agricultural practices, guiding his ox and plow, laying down meager supplies of manure to fertilize crops, surviving droughts, repeatedly hand spraying pesticides to battle ravenous insects – to reap harvests that often barely feed his family, much less leave produce to sell locally. But many do.

Unfortunately, they often face formidable foes. An absence of electricity, roads and other infrastructure. Corrupt, kleptocratic governments. Nonexistent property rights and other collateral to secure loans. Powerful, well-financed eco-imperialists whose policies perpetuate poverty, malnutrition and disease.

Banks and other carbon colonialists glorify limited wind and solar energy for poor villages, while denying financial support for fossil fuel electricity generation. Anti-chemical fanatics promote bed nets and narrowly defined “integrated pest management,” but bitterly oppose chemical pesticides and the spatial repellant DDT to kill mosquitoes, keep them out of homes and prevent deadly malaria.

Radical organic food groups battle any use of genetically engineered crops that multiply crop yields, survive droughts and slash pesticide spraying by 75% or more. They even vilify Golden Rice, which enables malnourished children to avoid Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death.

Now poor country families face even harder struggles, as a coalition of well-financed malcontents, agitators and pressure groups once again proves the adage that power politics makes strange bedfellows. Coalition members share a deep distaste for fossil fuels, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, corporations, capitalism, biotechnology, and virtually all aspects of modern agriculture.

Their growing social-political movement is called “AgroEcology.” While the concept is studiously vague, it essentially asserts that indigenous, traditional farmers must be shielded from market forces and modern technologies, so that they can continue using ancient, primitive, “culturally appropriate” methods.

AgroEcology is anti-GMO organic food activism on steroids. It rejects virtually everything that has enabled modern agriculture to feed billions more people from less and less acreage and, given the chance, could eliminate hunger and malnutrition worldwide. It is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers and chemical insecticides – and even despises mechanized equipment like tractors, and the hybrid seeds and other advances developed by Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution.

AgroEcology advocates tortured but clever concepts like “food sovereignty” and the “right to subsistence farming by indigenous people.” It promotes “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices,” thus excluding the vast storehouse of non-indigenous learning, practices and technologies that were developed in recent centuries – and are readily available to anyone with access to a library or internet connection.

Or as they put it: “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” Food sovereignty also “focuses on production and harvesting methods that maximize the contribution of ecosystems, avoid costly and toxic inputs, and improve the resiliency of local food systems in the face of climate change.” (The 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty. In Mali!)

Some adherents even seek the “re-peasantization” of Latin American society!

AgroEcology has the financial backing of far-left foundations like the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which collectively have committed more than $500 million to a raft of like-minded NGOs.

Its precepts and policies are approved and actively promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and other UN agencies at their taxpayer-funded international conferences. These agencies are even beginning to demand adherence to über-organic practices as a condition for receiving taxpayer funding for agricultural development programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. (But taxpayers and legislators who provide the funding have been permitted little substantive input on any of this.)

It’s all justified – and often accepted without question in government agencies and universities – by reference to the politically correct, virtue-signaling terminology of our era: sustainability, sustainable farming, dangerous manmade climate change, social justice, indigenous rights, self-determination.

Also typical, anyone opposing these ideologies, policies and demands is vilified as a “willful supporter” of violence against women, “land-grabbing” by multinational corporations, peasant farmer suicides, “mass expropriation and genocide” of indigenous people, and crimes against humanity.

Imagine how intolerant AgroEcology ideologues would react if a farmer wanted to assert his or her food sovereignty and self-determination – by planting hybrid corn, using modern synthetic fertilizers or (heaven forbid) planting Bt corn (maize), to get higher yields, spend less time in the field, spray fewer pesticides, or improve the family’s living standards by selling surplus crops. And yet many want to do exactly that.

“By planting the new Bt cotton on my six hectares [15 acres], I was able to build a house and give it a solar panel,” Bethuel Gumede told the late Roy Innis, then chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, during a trip to South Africa. “I also bought a TV and fridge. My wife can buy healthy food, and we can afford to send the kids to school. My life has changed completely.”

“I grow maize on a half hectare,” Elizabeth Ajele told him. “The old plants would be destroyed by insects, but not the new biotech plants. With the profits I get from the new Bt maize, I can grow onions, spinach and tomatoes, and sell them for extra money to buy fertilizer. We were struggling to keep hunger out of our house. Now the future looks good.”

Equally relevant, how can agricultural practices that barely sustained families and villages before the advent of modern agriculture possibly feed the world? As Dr. Borlaug said in 2006: “Our planet has 6.5 billion people. If we use only organic fertilizers and methods on existing farmland, we can only feed 4 billion. I don’t see 2.5 billion people volunteering to disappear.”

AgroEcology promoters like Greenpeace, Food & Water Watch, Pesticide Action Network, Union of Concerned scientists and La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way) pay little attention to any of this. They’re too busy “saving people” from “dangerous” hybrid seeds, GMOs, agribusiness, farm machinery and chemicals. Not that any of them would ever want to toil on any of the primitive farms they extol.

Greenpeace frightens Africans by claiming “some researchers think DDT and DDE could be inhibiting lactation” in nursing mothers. So families are afraid to use DDT, and millions die from preventable malaria, while still more millions suffer permanent brain or liver damage from the disease. Would it also oppose cancer-curing chemotherapy because it causes hair loss and reduced resistance to infections?

Modern instruments can detect chemicals in mere parts per billion (the equivalent of a few seconds in 32 years) or even parts per trillion (a few seconds in 32,000 years). That’s hardly a threat to human health.

But Luddite eco-imperialists and über-organic food activists stridently oppose any manmade fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, while saying “natural” pesticides commonly used by organic farmers are safe. In reality, copper sulfate can kill humans in lower doses per kilogram of body weight than aspirin, and exposure to rotenone causes Parkinson's Disease-like symptoms in rats and can also kill humans.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, US and EU government agencies, and real human rights advocates should challenge and denounce AgroEcology agitators and their financial enablers for advancing fraudulent claims that perpetuate malnutrition, poverty and human rights abuses in the world’s poorest countries. They should also cut off funding to any government agencies that support AgroEcology nonsense.

Via email





Are Record Temperatures Evidence of Manmade Global Warming?

It is a slam-dunk certainty that American mainstream media will seize upon a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, “Southern California sets all-time heat records amid broiling conditions,” as justification for its continuing support of the contested theory of man-caused global warming. It has already happened with a Yahoo News story claiming that the new temperature records world-wide prove man causes climate change.

But there are problems in pursuing that path.

First, days that reach and exceed 117-degree temperatures have been known to happen for a very long time in the interior basin of southern California, sometimes referred to as “Death Valley” (though not to be confused with the literal Death Valley). There, temperatures rise above 120 degrees regularly nearly every summer.

The United States’ official all-time record high of 134 degrees F was set July 10, 1913, in California’s real Death Valley. A meteorologist quoted in the L.A. Times article intimates that is where the recent hot air originated, having been pushed westward (advected) over into the Los Angeles basin from an area of strong high pressure (anticyclone) centered farther inland.

Second, by 2018 (into the 21st century) a burgeoning urban heat island (one that now encompasses Los Angeles City proper, Los Angeles County, and the surrounding suburbs) has grown enough to produce excessively high temperatures to a much greater extent today than in past decades, when the population of California was much smaller.

The Los Angeles urban heat island adds more than four degrees to the daily maximum temperature over and above what it had been when earlier records were set in the 1950s. It was in the nature of things and about time for meteorological conditions to force upward a statistical departure from the accustomed, already hot and dry conditions Angelinos experience every passing summer. Weather records are made to be broken.

Third, a similar outbreak of record high temperatures (during several iconic record-setting heat waves of the past) persisted for weeks across the Upper Midwest and into the Atlantic states some eight decades ago during the 1930s (Dust Bowl). Extreme heat and drought happened in 1934 and again in 1936.

Our Midwestern and Great Plains forebears, who suffered greatly through the Depression years, also suffered through many summers when the daytime temperatures exceeded 100 degrees F and night-time temperatures remained in and above the mid-80s. In July 1936 the City of La Crosse, WI, experienced ten consecutive days when the maximum temperature reached or exceeded 100 degrees. On July 14 of that year, it was 108 in La Crosse, its all-time record. On that same date, the thermometer in Wisconsin Dells topped out at 114, the state’s all-time record high.

Record high temperatures happen, somewhere—in fact, in many somewheres—every day here and there around the world. So do record lows. They’re weather phenomena, not evidence of long-term climate change.

So take a seat Los Angeles, and join the club. Your turn came. Other places have had their turns. Still others will have them in the future. Most will have them repeatedly over centuries. Get used to it. It’s weather, not cli

SOURCE 




Summer Causes Climate Change Hysteria

by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Summers in the U.S. are hot. They always have been. Some are hotter than others.

Speaking as a PhD meteorologist with 40 years experience, this week’s heat wave is nothing special.

But judging from the memo released on June 22 by Public Citizen (a $17 million per year liberal/progressive consumer rights advocacy group originally formed by Ralph Nader in 1971 and heavily funded by Leftwing billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations), every heat wave must now be viewed as a reminder of human-caused climate change. The memo opines that (believe it or not) the news media have not been very good about linking weather events to climate change, which is leading to complacency among the public.

The June 22 memo focus was on the excessive heat in New York state, so let’s begin our journey down Hysteria Lane there. The official NOAA average maximum temperatures for every June since 1895 in New York looks like this:

The long term trend is not statistically different from zero. June 2018 is not yet available at the NOAA website, but from what I’ve seen for the global June Climate Forecast System map at WeatherBell.com, it looks like it was near the long-term (20th Century) average.

The memo also made mention of the widespread record warmth the U.S. experienced in May, 2018. New York had it’s 7th warmest May on record this year, and the long-term linear warming trend there since 1895 is weak (0.22 F/decade) and not statistically different from zero at the 95% confidence level. The May warmth in the U.S. was regional, as expected for weather variations, with much of Canada being exceedingly cold:

When do you suppose the hottest temperature ever recorded in New York was? Clearly, with global warming, it must be in the last 20 or 30 years, right?

Wrong. It was 109 deg. F. on July 22, 1926 in Troy, New York. In contrast, the state record for the coldest temperature was much more recent: -52 deg. F on Feb 18, 1979, at Old Forge, New York.

What about this week’s heat wave? Let’s look at NOAA’s GFS forecast model 5-day average temperatures for this week (Monday through Friday, July 2-6, 2018, graphic from WeatherBell.com):

As you can see, the excessive heat is (again) regionally isolated, which is exactly what we expect for weather… not for climate change. See those colder than average areas? Why aren’t those being blamed on climate change, too? They look like they approximately cancel out the warm area over the Northeast U.S., which is often the case for weather (not climate change) variations.

That was a 5-day forecast for this week. Next let’s look at what was actually observed over the last couple days (July 1-2), which were very hot in the Great Lakes and Northeast:

What we see is that there were unseasonably cool temperatures in the western U.S., again an indication of a temporary and localized weather pattern… not “global warming”, which would be warm everywhere.

How about extreme high temperatures in the U.S in general? Here are the yearly total number of days above 100 and 105 deg. F, again for the years 1895 through 2017, based upon official NOAA data:

We see no trend in the number of days with excessive heat.

So, what do we make of the claims in the Public Citizen memo? Well, they mention that we have seen 1.1 deg. C of warming since the Industrial Revolution. Think about that. Less than 2 deg. F warming in about 200 years, part of which is likely to be natural, based upon temperature proxy estimates over the last 2,000 years for the Northern Hemisphere:

Am I claiming that there is no such thing as human-caused warming? No. I’m claiming that it is overblown. The Public Citizen memo makes much of recent record warm years clustering together, which sounds alarming — if one doesn’t mention the small fractions of a degree involved. If there was no natural year-to-year variability, and the temperature was increasing at 0.01 or 0.02 deg. F every year, then every successive year would be a record warm year…but who would care? The rate of ‘global warming’ is too weak for any one person to notice in their lifetime.

Furthermore, we already know the climate models (which are the basis for proposed changes in energy policy to get us away from fossil fuels) are producing generally twice as much warming of the atmosphere-ocean system as has been observed. The most recent energy budget analysis of surface and deep-ocean warming suggests that the climate system is only half as sensitive to our CO2 emissions as you are being told…. maybe 1.5 deg. C of eventual warming from a doubling of atmospheric CO2. At 410 ppm, We are currently half way to doubling.

And even THAT reduced estimate of future warming assumes ALL of the warming is human-caused! If a portion of recent warming is natural, the less the human-caused global warming problem becomes.

Finally, the Public Citizen memo claims that today’s technology would already allow 80% to 100% of our energy to come from renewable sources. This is patently false. Solar and wind are relatively diffuse (and thus expensive) sources of energy which are intermittent, requiring fossil fuel (or nuclear) backup. It would be exceedingly expensive to get even 50% of our energy from such sources. Maybe someday we will have such technologies, but until that day arrives, the massive amount of money that would be required to achieve such a goal would worsen poverty, which historically has been the leading cause of premature death in the world.

SOURCE. (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
 
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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.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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