New National Geographic Documentary Highlights How Ill-Informed Climate Debate Has Become

In announcing the United State’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement last year, President Donald Trump declared, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

A company called RadicalMedia and Bloomberg Philanthropies attempted to counter the president this week with the release of a documentary titled “Paris to Pittsburgh” on the National Geographic Channel.

Taking incredible liberty with the facts and playing on fears and false hopes, the documentary casts a cataclysmic vision of extreme weather, blaming it on fossil energy all along the way.

This is a sad reminder of how ill-informed the national energy debate has become.  It spreads alarmist propaganda and promotes a junk science proposition that the world would somehow be better off without fossil energy, while never disclosing how that same energy has made our world more climate resilient.

Worst of all, the film completely ignores the tragic continuation of energy poverty that myopic, renewable-centric policies inflict on the billions of humans on this planet. They are being deprived of affordable electricity because environmental zealots advocate restricting new fossil energy projects in nations that simply cannot afford to electrify their nations at scale with anything else.

The movie also couldn’t be more ill-timed or poorly titled.

Invoking Paris as some kind of beacon of smart energy policy is beyond ironic — given that Paris is currently burning at the hands of working-class protesters opposed to climate change policies that intentionally increase fuel prices.

Meanwhile, Pittsburgh’s Democratic mayor, in politically motivated sound bites, claims that Paris-like policies are the reason Pittsburgh has cleaned up its act. But the facts on the ground tell a very different story.

Pittsburgh is a beacon of how the environment can be cleaned up with fossil energy, not despite it. Anyone who visited Pittsburgh decades ago can’t fail to note how much clearer its skies are now, and the data backs up that observation. But those gains did not come from myopic anti-fossil energy policies.

Quite the contrary, like many great American cities, Pittsburgh’s environment improved because of technology, not ideology. Despite implications from the film, coal miners, oil and gas drillers, and steelworkers are still around in Pennsylvania. They are just doing their work cleaner and leaner than ever before.

The 90-percent reduction in air and water pollution in Pittsburgh occurred because we found a cleaner way to harness fossil energy through high-efficiency power plants and improved steel manufacturing technologies like Electric Arc Furnaces (EAFs).

One need only track the dramatic drop in air pollution across the country throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s to see that the deployment of these and other pollution control technologies brought about cleaner air, not some anti-fossil fuel ideology or marginal increase in renewable energy.

Aside from the irony of its title, the “Paris to Pittsburgh” film represents the worst kind of junk science and fear mongering.

The fundamental premise of the film is: unless the United States takes aggressive steps to reduce CO2 emissions, we’ll see disastrous impacts from sea level rise on the order of three, six, and even 20 feet. But once the real facts are disclosed, the film’s premise is ridiculous.

Here are the facts: If U.S. emissions were completely eliminated by 2020, the standard RCP4.5 model from the IPCC — which is deserving of criticism in its own right — predicts that the atmospheric concentration of COa would be 2.1-percent lower in 2050. An immediate shift to 100-percent renewable electricity (which is the primary topic of the film), even if it were achieved as soon as next year, would reduce 2050 CO2levels by a mere 0.7 percent.

So the climate zealots’ own data show that eliminating, let alone reducing emissions from the United States will contribute little to nothing to prevent the supposed catastrophic consequences the film uses as the call for the United States to stop using fossil fuels.

The sponsors of this film should spend less time playing games with climate science models and more time practicing basic math.

Meanwhile, the policies required to reduce CO2 emissions in any significant way would do real damage to this country and societies all over the world. The latest IPCC report calls for carbon taxes that would increase fuel anywhere from $1.20 to as much as $49 per gallon by 2030. Parisians are rioting over an increase of just 25 cents-per-gallon, imagine the potential for chaos created by a $49 per gallon increase.

The energy cost explosion from these policies would cripple most economies, including our own. Not to mention what life without access to reliable, abundant energy will continue to look like for billions of global citizens in the developing world who have bigger problems than feeling guilty about how they charge their iPhone.

Weather changes. Climate changes. The real story about weather and climate of the last 100 years is how incredibly resilient humans have become because of access to affordable and reliable fossil energy.

Pittsburgh and America have proven that you can harness fossil energy, make the building blocks of modern society, and clean the environment.

And, no, you don’t need billions of dollars in renewable subsidies to make it happen. You just need science, technology, and economic freedom.

That’s the foundation on which our country was built.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ Is Neither ‘New’ Nor ‘Green’ — It’s Just Socialist

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has championed the “Green New Deal,” an idea rapidly gaining traction in Democratic Party circles.

The “democratic socialist” from New York has pushed for the policy in alarmist terms: “People are going to die,” she says, unless it becomes law. Or perhaps “Americans are dying” already. Either way, we face “cataclysmic climate disaster” unless Congress can “plan and implement a Green New Deal” in ten years.

But the “Green New Deal” has little to do with the environment. It is the latest incarnation of a “red-green” strategy, developed decades ago, which seeks to achieve socialist economic policy through the ruse of environmental crisis.

A decade ago, for example, Van Jones — now a left-wing CNN commentator with an admirably pragmatic streak — published The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. In it, he suggested the U.S. should move to renewable energy resources to avoid higher fuel prices and “climate catastrophe.”

Jones rejected as “scary” and “bizarre” new technologies that would make fuel “out of tar sands and oil shale.” Rather, he argued, the government should promote “green jobs” in renewable energy.

To that end, he envisioned a diverse, working-class political movement embracing formerly elitist policies on the environment as a means to the “transformation of the entire economy,” solving pollution and poverty at the same time.

The book was published a month before Barack Obama won the 2008 election; Jones went on to serve briefly as Obama’s “green jobs czar.”

At around the same time, New York Times columnist and British academic Richard Murphy separately introduced the phrase “Green New Deal” to propose that economic stimulus be used to stimulate renewable energy industries, while ending subsidies and tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry.

These proposals collectively made their way into Obama administration policies, from the grand stimulus of 2009 to restricted oil and gas activity on federal lands.

But these policies failed.

The stimulus largely disappeared into state and local governments, and pet projects like Solyndra, which failed spectacularly.

Meanwhile, innovation in the fossil fuel industry — especially hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” — created a shale boom that made the U.S. the world’s number one producer of oil. Innovation also helped the U.S. shift to natural gas, reducing carbon emissions while growing the economy.

The “Green New Deal,” in other words, has already been tried, and failed.

Nevertheless, Ocasio-Cortez and a new cohort of “progressive” Democrats is determined to try again, borrowing partly from Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2016 (whom Ocasio-Cortez joined at the protests in North Dakota in the winter of 2016 against an oil pipeline near Standing Rock).

The main demand: a shift to 100% renewable energy sources by 2030. The promise, as with Van Jones in 2008, is that the shift will create massive numbers of new working-class jobs.

To place that demand in context, in September, outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that will require the state to achieve 100% renewable energy — by 2045, not by 2030.

That is, by far, the most ambitious renewable energy plan of any state in the Union — and the state government has no idea how to achieve it. There is no backup plan in case the sun and wind alone cannot meet the needs of a growing population. Critics predict electricity shortages and rationing, and hence a poorer economy, unless the state continues to use fossil fuels.

The “Select Committee” Ocasio-Cortez is demanding would draft legislation to achieve the “Green New Deal.” Along with 100% renewables, her plan also calls for “upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety”; and “funding massive investment in the drawdown and capture of greenhouse gases.”

By any measure, Ocasio-Cortez is calling for huge government intervention in the economy.

The environment might benefit — or might not, if big government creates inefficiencies that produce more waste. Better to let the economy do what it has done without — or against — the government: namely, to innovate, creating cleaner fuels and new technologies, including in renewables.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is not “new,” and may not even be “green.” It is just socialism, which is often the opposite of sound environmental policy.

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Dems Announce Climate Committee Guidelines; Ocasio-Cortez Isn’t Pleased

Democratic leadership has formulated the guidelines for the widely anticipated climate change committee, but have bucked environmental hardliners by giving it no real authority or legislative powers.

As part of a rules package that will govern the House for the next two years, House Democrats unveiled the authority and operations of the new “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis” on Tuesday. The new committee will be made up of 15 members — nine Democrats and six Republicans. Kathy Castor, a six-term Democratic representative from Florida, has been tapped to serve as the committee’s chairwoman.

The climate change committee will be tasked to “investigate, study, make findings, and develop recommendations on policies, strategies and innovations to achieve substantial and permanent reductions in pollution,” according to the rules package.

However, the new panel won’t be able to do much else.

The Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will not have subpoena power, nor will it be permitted to vote on bills and send them directly to the House floor for a vote. Members will also not be barred if they accept donations from the fossil fuel industry. The committee is not even being specifically tasked with writing legislation pertaining to the Green New Deal — a vague set of demands by environmentalists that aim to transition the country to 100 percent renewable electricity. (RELATED: Elizabeth Warren Hasn’t Fully Embraced ‘Green New Deal’)

The committee’s lack of power is a major setback for environmental activists who hoped it would serve as a focal point for their Green New Deal agenda. Democratic Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who skyrocketed to fame after unseating a powerful New York congressman in the 2018 primaries — has been the Green New Deal’s biggest purveyor.

New York state senatorial candidate Julia Salazar was joined by Democratic primary winner Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in Bushwick to honor campaign workers who canvassed on her behalf. Shutterstock

Ocasio-Cortez blasted Democratic leadership Monday for not giving the committee subpoena authority or meeting any of her other “reasonable” demands.

The Sunrise Movement — an environmentalist organization and major supporter of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal — was even more critical.

“The mandate for Speaker Pelosi’s Select Committee on the Climate Crisis is out and it’s everything we feared,” Sunrise co-founder Varshini Prakash stated Wednesday. “1) It allows members to accept fossil fuel money; 2) It has no mandate to create a plan on the 12-year timeline mandated by the world’s top scientists; 3) It has no language on economic and racial justice, or a just transition.”

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Mass Transit Is a Gov’t Failure

Hans Bader

I like subways, and spent most of my adult life taking them to work. Unfortunately, most people prefer to drive.  It can take an hour and a half to take buses and trains to work for a commute that would take only half an hour by car. Mass transit is largely a failure, and continues to decline despite growing subsidies to many mass transit systems. Light rail systems are white elephants. The money spent on light rail would be better spent on bus lines. The underground corridors used for some subways might better be devoted to self-driving cars.

Randal O’Toole describes just what a failure mass transit is in this country, a failure on every level, in a recent Cato Institute report:

“Nationwide transit ridership has declined steadily since 2014, with some of the largest urban areas, including Atlanta, Miami, and Los Angeles, losing more than 20 percent of their transit riders in the last few years. While this recent decline is stunning, it results from a continuation of a century-long trend of urban areas becoming more dispersed and alternatives to transit becoming more convenient and less expensive.

“Those trends include a dispersion of jobs away from downtowns and increasing automobile ownership, both of which began with Henry Ford’s development of the moving assembly line in 1913. As a result, per capita transit ridership peaked in 1920 at 287 trips per urban resident per year, and have since fallen to just 38 trips per urbanite in 2017.

“Congress began federal subsidies to transit with passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, and since then federal, state, and local governments have spent well over $1 trillion on subsidies aimed at reversing transit’s decline. Yet those subsidies have failed to do more than slow the decline, as the trends that have made transit obsolete and nearly irrelevant to the vast majority of urban Americans have overwhelmed the subsidies … transit carries fewer than 3 percent of commuters to work in half the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, as well as in the vast majority of smaller ones, making transit nearly irrelevant to those regions except for the high taxes needed to support it. Due to moderate gas prices, increasing auto ownership, and the growth of the ride-hailing industry, the nation likely reached ‘peak transit’ in 2014.

“The supposed social, environmental, and economic development benefits of transit are negligible to nonexistent. Federal, state, and local governments should withdraw subsidies to transit and allow private operators to take over where the demand still justifies mass transit operations.”

His very readable and interesting full report is available at this link.

So-called bullet trains generally turn out to be white elephants. South Korea is abolishing its celebrated high-speed rail line from its capital Seoul to a nearby major city because it can’t even cover the marginal costs of keeping the trains running. Most people who ride trains don’t need maximum possible speed, and most of those who do will still take the plane to reach distant destinations. Despite Japan’s much vaunted bullet trains, most Japanese don’t take the bullet train either, they take buses, because the bullet train is too expensive. Bullet trains do interfere with freight lines, so Japanese freight lines carry much less cargo than in the United States, where railroads — rather than trucks — carry most freight, thereby reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

California’s so-called bullet train is vastly behind schedule and over budget, and will likely never come close to covering its operating costs once it is built. As Reason magazine noted, transportation officials have warned that California’s misnamed “bullet train” is a disaster in the making. California is drastically understating the costs of its high-speed rail project. Just the first leg of this $77 billion project will cost billions more than budgeted. And the project is already at least 11 years behind schedule.

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Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse

Radical environmentalists have really been taking it on the chin at the multiplex. They are perfect villains for our times: well-intended enough to often seem somewhat reasonable, but meddlesome busybodies whose hopes and dreams are to radically reduce standards of living in order to effect some utopian scheme or another that will return the world — or worlds — to an unsullied Eden.

Thanos, the villain (and protagonist, really) of the $2 billion-grossing megahit, “Avengers: Infinity War,” was basically an omni-powered Paul Ehrlich. Whereas the comic book version of Thanos sought to kill half of the universe in order to prove his love for an anthropomorphized Death, the film version was driven insane by his home planet’s self-immolation after a series of resource wars. Determined to eliminate suffering over food and land, over clean water and clean air, Thanos used the Infinity Gauntlet not to create abundance of each but to kill half of all living things.

Again, this is Ehrlichian in its madness: The author of “The Population Bomb” argued for years that the planet is overpopulated and that famines will wipe out a significant portion of humanity. It could still happen, I suppose — global warming could inspire an “Interstellar”-style blight; the skies could go dry — but, frustratingly for the doomsayers, life on Earth keeps getting better despite the “overpopulation” our precious blue orb continues to shoulder.

“Aquaman” is the surprise hit of the winter, racking up more than $800 million worldwide so far. And while Jason Momoa’s bro-tastic turn as Arthur Curry is earning deserved plaudits from male and female audiences alike, it’s Patrick Wilson’s King Orm who caught my eye. Orm hopes to unite the underwater clans of Atlantis in order to create an unstoppable army that will destroy life on the planet’s landmasses.

But Orm is no madman. His genocidal war is not the result of personal trauma or ideological insanity. It is, rather, a version of self-defense: The surface dwellers dump their trash into the water, strangling the sea life; the surface dwellers spew their smoke into the skies, choking the ocean with particulates; the surface dwellers hunt to extinction the ocean’s animals, depriving the Atlanteans of conveyances. Humanity must die so Atlantis might live.

You saw something similar in “Kingsman: The Secret Service” a few years back. Amongst the most reactionary films of our age, “Kingsman” featured as its villain a tech guru named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson). This billionaire was so disgusted by humanity’s excesses and so riled by the excretions of the masses that he engineered a plot to kill all of us in the most horribly violent manner possible. He invented a device that would cause man to turn against man, mother against child, sister against brother — with bare hands, we would tear each other apart. In so doing, the planet would be cleansed of humanity’s foul stench. Once free of the riffraff, wealthy swells and fabulous celebrities would reclaim the planet for themselves and rebuild the world in their image. Clean. Pristine. Free of the gauche hordes who have rendered our air travel unbearable and our beaches crowded messes.

Environmentalists make a useful villain because their malevolence can be obscured by a patina of reasonableness. Global warming and other manmade problems are going to end the world if we don’t do something — so just about anything is justified! But their villainy resonates with the masses because they actually do want to make life worse for people, for the most part.

There’s a reason France convulsed in recent weeks, as middle-class protesters angered by taxes pushed for by environmentalists took to the streets. Environmentalists want to increase the costs of everyday goods and services by taxing carbon. They want you to fly less and to pay more, via offsets, when you do fly. They want you to stop eating meat. They want you to stop having kids. They want to deprive you of disabled-friendly plastic straws — and they’re coming for your delightful balloons next. They want to turn your corpse into food for plants because even the sweet release of death cannot save you from the environmentalist menace.

There is no aspect of your life that environmentalists don’t want to tinker with, no realm immune from their meddling: just think of those poor small-businessmen whose livelihoods were destroyed by a deranged EPA bureaucrat in the 1984 classic “Ghostbusters.” On the plus side, this makes them pretty solid villains. Expect to see more of them in our big-budget films going forward.

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Your guess is as good as theirs

Jeff Jacoby

WONDERING WHAT SORT of winter Americans are in for, The Wall Street Journal last week checked the 2019 edition of the venerable Old Farmer's Almanac, which is published each year in Dublin, N.H. It predicts a mild winter with "above-normal temperatures almost everywhere" this season.

To confirm that forecast, the Journal also checked the equally venerable Farmer's Almanac based in Lewiston, Maine. It warns of that Americans should expect "teeth-chattering cold, plentiful snow" and a "chilly, wintry mix."

They can't both be right. Yet each almanac is confident in its predictions, and each claims a high rate of accuracy. Does that sound familiar? Of course it does. It sounds like the endless parade of experts, insiders, and pundits who routinely predict the future, and routinely get it wrong.

The other day Politico rounded up a handful of the least prescient political predictions of 2018. Among them: Huffington Post reporter Matt Fuller's prophecy that Joe Crowley would be the next speaker of the House, Carnegie Endowment scholar David Rothkopf's assurance that the US embassy would remain in Tel Aviv, and CNN journalist Frida Ghitis's forecast that President Trump's approval rating would crumble to just 25 percent. In fact, Crowley lost his seat in Congress to political neophyte Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US embassy was relocated to Jerusalem, and Trump's approval rating remains above 40 percent.

It's not only weather and politics that prognosticators botch. Financial predictions are notoriously unreliable. A research paper released this year by the International Monetary Fund documented the decades-long failure of economists to spot a looming recession until it was already well underway. "Treasury yields have been forecast to rise every year for the past decade," noted the Wall Street Journal in November 2017, "yet they have gone down more often than not."

From military predictions to technological predictions to sports predictions, when experts foretell the future, it's always safest to assume they're wrong. And just as that's true of short-term predictions, it's also true of long-term predictions.

On Jan. 1, 1901, at the dawn of the 20th century, the editors of The Boston Globe surveyed the international scene and assured its readers that "the rise of Germany" posed no cause for concern, since "of all the nations she is probably the least corrupted by the lust of conquest." In 1968, the Foreign Policy Association published "Toward the Year 2018," an anthology of predictions by a dozen "eminent leaders" of where the world would be 50 years in the future. A few auguries they got indisputably right — several contributors accurately foresaw a world in which computers and information technology would play a key role. But many of their predictions — from man-made hurricanes used as weapons to anti-gravity cars — were laughably off-base.

It isn't being snarky or arch to stress how inept experts are at predicting the future. It's being prudent. Because they are deeply knowledgeable in a particular field, experts are more prone than others to view the world through a too-narrow lens, assuming that the current trends they understand so well are indicators of what is to come. Their expertise reinforces their confidence in their own analysis, blinding them to contrary data or disconfirming evidence. That helps explains why those who knew the most about the Soviet Union, for example, didn't foresee its collapse in 1991. Or why judicial experts, such as constitutional-law professors and former Supreme Court clerks, aren't very good at predicting how the high court will rule.

In the 1980s, political psychologist Philip Tetlock asked 284 political experts to make roughly 100 predictions of future events, and to assign a degree of probability to their forecasts. Two decades later, with the benefit of hindsight, Tetlock was able to analyze the accuracy of the experts' predictions. What he discovered was that they hit the mark only slightly more often than if they had guessed at random. Non-experts who keep up with current events by regularly reading the newspaper, concluded the New Yorker in a review of Tetlock's study, "can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote."

That's worth keeping in mind as 2019 gets underway, and from every quarter self-assured sages and savants materialize to tell you what to expect. As you listen to their smart, persuasive, credible prophecies, just remember: Most of them, most of the time, will be wrong. (You can take my word for it. After all, I'm an expert.)

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Trump EPA to Repeal Another Obama Admin Anti-Coal Regulation

The Environmental Protection Agency published its proposed revision of the Obama administration’s carbon dioxide emission standards for new coal power plants in late December. The Obama standards effectively ban investment in new coal generation—a policy Congress never approved and would not pass if put to a vote. EPA’s proposal will help restore the separation of powers and safeguard affordable energy for American consumers.

In more technical terms, EPA is proposing, under the Clean Air Act, to revise the agency’s 2015 determination that partial carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the best system of emission reduction (BSER) for new coal units. A CCS system uses various technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and deliver the emissions for storage in underground geologic formations.

Since new coal power plants are already more costly to build than new natural gas combined cycle power plants, and CCS increases both capital and operating costs, the Obama rule powerfully deters investment in new coal generation.

EPA now proposes that the best system of emission reduction is the most efficient commercially-viable coal boiler combined with best industry practices. New coal power plants would have to meet a standard of 1,900 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour rather than the current more stringent standard of 1,400 pounds per megawatt-hour. To put those numbers in perspective, just one megawatt-hour is about as much electricity as the average American home consumes in three and a half weeks.

EPA’s proposal is based on an updated analysis of the cost and geographic availability of carbon capture and storage. EPA finds that CCS-based emission standards are “exorbitantly costly” and not “achievable” in all parts of the country, providing the justification for a new rule replacing the Obama standards.

Although carbon capture systems can substantially increase power plant construction costs, EPA is most concerned about the increase in operating costs. In deregulated markets, where units with the lowest operating costs are the first to be “dispatched,” CCS power plants would likely go to the back of the queue, rendering them uncompetitive or even unable to recover their capital costs.

Geographic constraints compound the problem. Clean Air Act performance standards must be “achievable”—a term determined by case law to mean achievable “anywhere in the country” by the “industry as a whole.” However, EPA finds, the significant water consumption requirements of most CCS systems make them “prohibitively expensive” to deploy in arid regions of the country.

In addition, the only two utility-scale CCS power plants in existence—Petra Nova in Texas and Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan—depend financially on the sale of carbon dioxide for use in nearby enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations. Many potential sites of new coal power plants are not near oil fields. For that reason, too, CCS-based emission standards are not “achievable.”

In a press conference on the proposal, EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler stated: “By replacing onerous regulations with high, yet achievable, standards, we can continue America’s historic energy production, keep energy prices affordable, and encourage new investments in cutting-edge technology that can then be exported around the world.”

Critics instantly declared EPA’s proposal useless because the agency expects “few, if any” new coal power plants to be built in an era of cheap gas. But Wheeler and EPA are not trying to guarantee a market for coal generation. Rather, they seek to rescind an unlawful regulation that blocks investment in new coal capacity regardless of how market conditions evolve.

Critics also claim the proposal would exacerbate climate change because the proposed CO2 standards are less stringent than the Obama standards. That complaint conflicts with the first one because the potential number of new U.S. coal power plants that might be built under the revised standards is too small to significantly increase U.S. emissions or have any detectable climatic effects.

What both criticisms overlook is that hundreds of new coal power plants are being built overseas, especially in Asia. Access to efficient U.S. coal technology might help limit developing countries’ emissions. More importantly, if U.S. firms are free to compete in the global marketplace for advanced coal technologies, they can bring affordable energy to millions of people, helping them live healthier, more prosperous lives.

Developing future technologies is far more likely if the U.S. coal industry itself has a future. The prior administration’s unrealistic and unlawful standards—for both new and existing coal power plants—were tantamount to a regulatory death sentence.

Consumers are best served when economic competition rather than bureaucratic machination picks energy-market winners and losers. EPA’s proposal will advance that principle in law and national policy.

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Ninth Circuit Hands Trump A Big Win Against Youth’s Global Warming Lawsuit

The Trump administration’s battle against a global warming lawsuit brought by 21 youths will continue into 2019 after a federal court handed the government a big win over the holiday season.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in a Dec. 26 ruling largely missed by major media outlets.

The court granted DOJ’s petition for interlocutory appeal that decreases the chances of the climate lawsuit going to trial anytime soon.

The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel is the very same one that in March 2018 ruled against Trump administration petitions for a writ of mandamus, which allows a higher court to overrule a lower court before a case is decided.

Environmentalists handling the case on behalf of youth activists immediately filed a petition asking the District Court of Oregon to restart trial proceedings in light of the appeals court ruling.

“The bottom line is, this case is ready for trial, and should not be held up by further appeals,” said Julia Olson, chief legal counsel and executive director of Our Children’s Trust, the activist group handling the climate lawsuit.

“The government has used the power of their office and the depth of taxpayer coffers to waste precious time and resources to avoid trial in this case, and now the court has capitulated with little scrutiny,” Olson said in a statement.

Our Children’s Trust filed suit against the federal government in 2015 on behalf of 21 youths, aged 11 to 22, arguing their right to a “stable climate system” was being violated. The suit asks the court to order the government to issue laws and regulations to fight global warming.

The government should move “to ensure that atmospheric CO2 is no more concentrated than 350 [parts per million] by 2100 … to stabilize the climate system,” reads the group’s legal complaint.

The youth lawsuit is just one of a handful of global warming lawsuits being brought before state and federal courts in recent years as environmentalists, Democratic politicians, and trial lawyers turn to the courts to advance the climate agenda.

Youth activists, however, base their legal reasoning on the idea that the “public trust doctrine” also requires the government to ensure a “stable climate system.”

Many legal experts are doubtful activists will succeed in getting the courts to force other branches of government to push climate policies.

The U.S. District Court in Oregon ruled in 2016 the youth plaintiffs had standing to sue, which was reaffirmed by the Ninth Circuit in March.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the youths’ climate lawsuit could proceed in November 2018 after initially granting the Trump administration’s request to stay the climate lawsuit.

However, the Supreme Court’s unsigned opinion also stated the reasons the Ninth Circuit rejected the Trump administration’s petition for mandamus relief were “to a large extent, no longer pertinent.”

Ninth Circuit Appeals Judge Michelle Friedland claims in her four-page dissent the lower court only approved the Trump administration’s appeal is because it “felt compelled” to by the Supreme Court’s November opinion.

“We could then resolve any novel legal questions if and when they are presented to us after final judgment,” Friedlander wrote in her dissent, which argues the climate lawsuit should go to trial.

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New York Times Praises Greenie Nut Who Killed Himself To Save Earth

The New York Times has treated one man's deranged act of self-immolation as some sort of noble sacrifice worthy of reverence.

Earlier this year, radical environmentalist David Buckel demonstrated his love for planet Earth by lighting himself on fire in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in order to set an example in the fight against climate change. In a suicide note, the 60-year-old gay rights activist said his use of fossil fuels to immolate himself was to make a point about what humans are already doing to themselves.

"Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result," Buckel wrote in his note. "My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves. Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death."

In an obvious ploy to somehow articulate his derangement as something poetic, Buckel likened his death by inferno to that of Buddhist monks who would self-immolate to protest China's occupation of Tibet. "This is not new, as many have chosen to give a life based on the view that no other action can most meaningfully address the harm they see,” he wrote. "Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded actions, and help others give a voice to our home, and Earth is heard."

For its annual "The Lives They Lived" obituary, The New York Times treated Buckel's destructive act of intense misanthropy with such reverence that it's practically impossible to tell if they wished others followed in his footsteps: ​

In Buddhism, which Buckel studied with his characteristic deliberateness, self-immolation can be a kind of communication. "To burn oneself by fire," the activist Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in a 1965 letter to Martin Luther King, “is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance.” In his own letter, Buckel wrote about Tibetan monks who set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule because "no other action can most meaningfully address the harm they see."

The obituary then describes the life Buckel lived as being "saintlike" and whose final moments could be interpreted as "an incandescent act of speech."

For years, Buckel sought to negate the harm he caused with a continual turning of windrows [a composting technique] and recycling of water, until these measures came to seem inadequate.

One challenge with climate change is that the problem is so large it cannot be grasped. What can be grasped: A healthy man with a satisfying career and a loving family — a man who lived an almost saintlike life of helping others — died in a painful way in a public park in Brooklyn, abruptly reducing a unique living system to ash. Buckel appears to have seen his final moments as an incandescent act of speech.

As noted by LifeNews, The New York Time's reverential treatment of Buckel's suicide stands in sharp contrast to the media guidelines from the World Health Organization about reporting on suicide victims. "Glorifying suicide victims as martyrs and objects of public adulation may suggest to susceptible persons that their society honors suicidal behavior," says WHO. "Instead, the emphasis should be on mourning the person’s death."

SOURCE   





Australia: New Queensland coal mine to hire 350 workers

MORE than 350 workers will be hired at a new coal mine in Central Queensland in the latest sign of a resurgence in the state’s resources sector.

Fitzroy Australia Resources is gearing up to recruit the workers for its Ironbark No 1 coking coal mine 35km northeast of Moranbah.

Queensland’s surging coal and LNG sectors will fuel record Australian resource and energy export earnings this financial year.

Coal, both coking used to make steel and thermal used to generate electricity, is expected to overtake iron ore as Australia’s largest resource and energy export.

Fitzroy is partnering with employment company SES Labour Solutions to recruit and train the workers for the mine, which is the first development from a suite of assets acquired from Brazilian mining giant Vale in 2016. Fitzroy also purchased the neighbouring Carborough Downs mine and Broadlea project from Vale.

Fitzroy chief executive Grant Polwarth said the partnership with SES would help “de-risk” the development of Ironbark No 1, which will share major infrastructure with Carborough.

Operations at the underground greenfield mine, which will be able to produce six million tonnes of coal a year, is expected to start in the first quarter of 2020.

It is expected to provide opportunities for 160 contractors in the production phase and up to 350 operational staff.

“Employing some 350 new Fitzroy personnel is very exciting for our business and the region, and it comes with both great opportunity and challenges,” Mr Polwarth said.

SES Labour Solutions executive general manager Nathan Sharpe said recruitment for the new roles will begin at end of this year, with half of the workers to be new to the industry.

“Because this is a new mine, this is an opportunity to build a culture from the ground up,” said Mr Sharpe, a former Wallaby captain.

“There has been a certain amount of automation in underground mining, but workers need to have team working skills as they have to rely on each other in what can be a dangerous environment.”

Mr Sharpe said Queensland’s resources sector was experiencing a buoyant period helped by solid commodity prices.

“Most of the major commodities are priced at a good level, and resources companies are investing in assets that they were not previously looking at mining,” he said. “They can now plan for the future.”

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 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

*****************************************

China Ignores Paris Climate Accord As CO2 Emissions Rapidly Rise

Despite being lauded by President Obama for signing the Paris UN Climate Change Accords, China is still rapidly expanding greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping issued a ‘U.S.-China Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change’on March 31, 2016 stating that both nations were signing the Paris Accords and would take further “concrete steps” to “use public resources to finance and encourage the transition toward low carbon technologies as a priority.”

The joint statement on climate change was trumpeted as creating “an enduring legacy of the partnership.”

President Obama’s “concrete steps” for the U.S. to combat climate change included issuing an Executive Order ‘Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change’, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to cut 32 percent of power plant carbon emissions by 2025, mandating higher vehicle mileage, substantially limit oil and gas drilling on public lands and requiring energy-efficient building codes.

The Heritage Foundation estimated that if the Paris Accords Obama signed were fully implemented, it would have achieved a .36 degree Fahrenheit reduction in global temperatures.

But the economic costs of Obama’s Paris commitments over the next 20 years would have included the loss of $2.5 trillion in GDP, 400,000 jobs, over $20,000 less income per family of four; and about 17 percent higher electricity prices.

The Paris Accords’ also commitment so-called ‘advanced nations’ to provide $100 billion in ‘Green Climate Fund’ subsidies for reparations to developing countries to fund infrastructure improvements.

With the U.S. share already set at about $22 billion, Obama‘ Joint Presidential Statement’ committed the U.S. to increase climate change subsidies.

Despite already being the planet’s largest contributor of greenhouse emissions at 22 percent, China was required by the Paris Accords to curtail emissions’ growth only by 2030.

China did commit to promoting a “global clean and low-carbon energy transition, especially towards sustainable, affordable, reliable and modern energy services.”

To quantify China’s actions since signing the Paris Accords, the GWP Foundation issued an analysis titled, ‘China’s Climate U-Turn.’

According to the GWP analysis, China now has the world’s largest number of renewable energy installations. But as a percent of China’s total electric power production, wind accounts for 2.7 percent and solar accounts for just 0.5 percent.

Given the higher costs of maintaining interruptible power, the Chinese authorities curtailed about 50 percent of wind unit potential production.

Low utilization rates are also blamed on poor wind-farm siting, failing to build power grid connections, and installing inefficient wind turbines.

China’s air pollution levels did decline last year due to a reduction in electric power produced from coal. But greenhouse gas emissions grew due to a 15 percent increase in the use of natural gas.

As a result, China’s annual pollution levels remained 72 percent higher than World Health Organization guidelines.

Rather than planning for a post-carbon future, The International Energy Agency reported that China has been the world’s largest oil importer since 2013.

China has signed new oil supply agreements with Oman, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Angola, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Congo, South Sudan, Brazil, Venezuela, and Canada.

China is set to be the world’s largest LNG importer in two years and is building natural gas import pipelines from Russia, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan

To keep its domestic coal miners employed, China increased its consumption of coal last year for the first time since 2013. As part of its “Belt and Road” initiative, China has plans to build 700 coal-fired electric plants across the Eurasian plain.

One of Donald Trump’s first actions after being inaugurated as President of the United States was issuing an Executive Order withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Accords.

China’s state news agency Xinhua led media outlets around the world in calling Trump’s move a “huge setback” in the global battle against climate change.

The official China news source deemed the move a U.S. retreat from the “common aspiration of mankind for a low-carbon future.”

SOURCE   






Tale Of Two Stations…Striking Contrast: Urban Tokyo Warms Strongly While Rural Island Station Shows No Warming

Hachijojima is a rural-type island off the coast from the megapolis of Tokyo in the Pacific.

What makes Hachijojima interesting is that it is ideal for comparing its trend to a heavily urban environment, like Tokyo’s.

Such a comparison can allow us to see the urban signal on measured data, like temperature. The following chart shows that there has been no warming at this island over the past 70 years, using the unadjusted data from the Japanese Meteorology Agency (JMA):



Now when we compare rural Hachijojima to massively urban Tokyo, using the mean daily maximum temperature, we can clearly see the urban heat island (UHI) effect:

While Hachijojima has seen no only a modest warming trend since 1980, modern urban Tokyo has seen a strong warming. This is very likely due to the urban heat island effect where steel, concrete and asphalt store energy from the sun and fuels consumed by cars, buildings and factories.

The data for both stations go way back to 1907:

From 1907 to 1935, the trend for both was very similar, with no rise. Then there was a rise for both stations from the 1930s to 1961. Note how in this period Tokyo temperature rose more quickly than Hachijojima.  Next came the cooling of the the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, followed by the most recent warming.

Note how the most recent warming since the 1980s has been far stronger in Tokyo then it has been in rural Hachijojima. Tokyo, once significantly cooler, is about as warm as Hachijojima today.

And since the peak in 1998, Hachijojima has been cooling a bit while Tokyo has been warming!

Can all this be explained by CO2? Honestly not.

Obviously the urban heat island (UHI) effect is the real driver in Tokyo and is corrupting urban data, while natural ocean factors may be at work to account for the difference as well.

SOURCE   





Michigan Lawmaker Wants To Fine Restaurants Hundreds For Handing Out Plastic Straws

A Michigan state lawmaker is pushing two bills that would impose a hefty fine on distributing plastic straws unless requested and ban single-use plastic items such as cotton swabs, cutlery and plates, the Michigan Capitol Confidential reports.

Democratic Rep. Tom Cochran introduced the pair of bills, House Bill 6504 and House Bill 6505, Nov. 27, 2018 to start a conversation about single-use plastics and “the impact they have on our environment.”

“I guarantee my bills are not going to get a hearing or any movement,” Cochran told the Capitol Confidential. “I felt very strongly that I wanted to make a statement and hopefully move the conversation forward and I’m working with my colleagues to hopefully get the issue taken up in the future.”

Bill 6504 would ban the sale of all single-use plastics by 2024, except in cases where no “sustainable alternative” exists. Bill 6505 would charge restaurant owners with a misdemeanor for giving plastic straws to customers unless the customer explicitly requests one.

The misdemeanor’s penalty is unclear. One section says those guilty of violating 6505 are “punishable by a fine of $500.00 for each day” the law is violated. Another section says a restaurant owner will be warned for the first two violations and fined $25 per violation after that, but no more than $300 annually.

Cochran did not respond to requests for comment and clarification.

On Sept. 20, Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation banning full-service restaurants from handing out plastic straws unless requested by a customer. Restaurants in violation can be fined up to $300 a year. Individual cities in the state have enacted much stiffer penalties, such as Santa Barbara’s that hits straw ban violators with six months in jail or $1,000 in fines.

Seattle banned plastic straws and utensils at “all food service businesses, including restaurants, grocery stores, delis, coffee shops, food trucks, and institutional cafeterias” on July 1. Violators are fined $250 per infraction.

Several restaurant chains, such as McDonald’s and Starbucks, have begun transitioning from plastic to paper straws on their own.

SOURCE   





Polar Bears: Why All You’ve Been Told Could Be WRONG

On the afternoon of July 3, Aaron Gibbons, a hunter from the Inuit hamlet of Arviat on the north-west shore of Hudson Bay, took his three children on a boat trip.

Gibbons, 31, had a well-paid job at Meadowbank, a gold mine deep in the Arctic tundra, which took him away for weeks at a time.

But when he was home, he loved to deploy the inherited skills of his ancestors.

‘He was an experienced provider of country food for his family,’ says his uncle, Gordy Kidlapik, 60, a hunting veteran. ‘His father had brought him up that way, and he was good at it.’

Aaron and his children were headed for Sentry Island – seven miles across the bay from Arviat – a popular spot for picnics, hunting and fishing, where they planned to harvest some of its abundant supply of Arctic tern eggs.

In dappled summer sunshine, the island is idyllic – a place of rugged moorland, shingly beaches, and brilliant green shrubs.

Unfortunately, polar bears like tern eggs, too, and the family hadn’t been there long when Gibbons realized that a mature male, 9ft in length from jaws to rump, was stalking them.

He yelled at the children to get back in the boat, and as they scrambled to escape, he stood his ground on the beach. For reasons that remain unknown, he was without his rifle.

The bear pounced, and while his 12-year-old daughter desperately radioed for help, Aaron was mauled to death.

His friend William Tiktaq, 32, told me:

‘That evening, I was in the party that recovered his body. I put a tarp on top of him in the boat, so the salt water wouldn’t get to him. He was badly mauled. There were bites everywhere. It’s not a sight you want to see.’

Six months later Aaron’s death, the first fatal attack by a polar bear in the Hudson Bay area for 19 years, is still a raw and emotional wound, described with sadness and horror by everyone I met.

Its impact was intensified by a second mauling in August, when a mother bear and a cub attacked a group of three Inuit hunters near Naujaat, 500 miles to the north, killing Darryl Kaunak.

‘These deaths have been a blow to the whole community – all of us are in shock,’ Evelyn Qasuk, 43, a mother of four children, told me. ‘

It makes me nervous about my kids walking around outside the house. Everyone says there are more polar bears, and they’re not scared of us. Ten years ago, they’d run when they saw a human. Now they’re no longer shy. They keep on coming.’

Part of a chain of coastal settlements in Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory,

Arviat, population 2,800, is a snowy huddle of low, well-insulated buildings and very remote. The nearest road connected to the rest of Canada is at Winnipeg, 800 miles away.

For six days before my arrival, blizzards and ice on the runways had forced the Arctic carrier Calm Air to cancel its Arviat flights.

Last week, Arviat’s minimum temperature hit minus 36C. However, as I rapidly discovered, its people – who are almost all Inuit – are as warm as its weather is brutal.

They also turned conventional wisdom on its head, saying that polar bears are not in crisis, nor even in decline: the main problem, according to the people who know them best, is that there are too many of them.

Climate change – cited as the reason for their imminent demise, due to rising temperatures shrinking the ice essential to their survival – may be altering their behavior, but the Inuit say they are adapting, and remain fat and healthy, and perfectly able to breed.

Scared and exasperated by the threat the bears pose, some Inuit leaders are voicing a demand which, if granted, may trigger a global furor akin to Japan’s decision to resume commercial whaling.

They want to be allowed to increase their permitted polar bear hunting quota to reduce numbers.

Like almost any story about polar bears, the summer maulings were soon slotted into a familiar narrative. They were, it was claimed, one more symptom of climate change caused by humans, which is said to be rapidly driving the bears towards extinction.

‘Without action on climate change, we could see dramatic declines in polar bear numbers by mid-century,’ says campaign group Polar Bears International (PBI). The reason: ‘Loss of their sea-ice habitat and reduced access to their seal prey.’

According to PBI’s conservation director, Geoff York,

‘what we’re seeing across the Arctic as sea ice recedes is that more polar bears are spending time on shore… It is creating that perfect storm of potential for human-bear conflict’.

In places such as Arviat, adds Professor Andrew Derocher of the University of Alberta, there might appear to be more bears, ‘but you can’t equate seeing more bears with there being more bears’.

All that was happening was that the bears were spending more time near humans, and hence becoming more visible.

Around the Arctic, polar bears – estimated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to number in total about 26,000 – are divided into 19 ‘sub-population’ groups.

Prof Derocher said he had ‘no hesitation’ in saying that the sub-population in the Arviat region, known as West Hudson Bay, has ‘declined from historic levels’. Eventually, the level would become ‘unsustainable’. Already, he says, the bears have become skinnier and less able to reproduce, while fewer cubs grow to adulthood.

The people of Arviat vehemently disagree, their knowledge derived from centuries of survival in the harshest environment imaginable and co-existence with bears and other wildlife.

Inuit elder David Alagalak, 74, spent his early years living in a traditional stone hut and shot his first adult bear in 1952 when he was nine.

He says: ‘The population in this area has increased by 300 to 400 percent. Everywhere the hunters go, they see polar bears. There are a lot more than in the past.’

William Tiktaq adds:

‘When I was a kid, I didn’t worry about bears. Now you have to keep your eyes open and your ears clean. I wish the scientists from down south who say they’re dying out would come and spend a year, or even five years, and they would know about this increase. If we had scientists living here, they would have a different perspective.’

Mayor Bob Leonard, originally a southerner who has lived in Arviat for 45 years, agrees: ‘Something has happened in the past six or seven years. We never used to see bears, even if we went camping somewhere like Sentry Island. People are angry and afraid.

And because of the claims scientists have made in the past, which turned out not to be true, they don’t care much for what scientists say. You get the sense the world looks at this place as a large zoo and has to have an opinion on it. That can get irritating.’

Since polar bear sightings began to increase, Arviat has employed bear ‘monitors’ who patrol its perimeter and unpaved streets on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs, a type of quadbike) or, when it’s snowy, on ski-doos. Their job: to ‘deter’ bears who pose a threat and chase them away.

One of them is Gordy Kidlapik’s friend Leo Ikhakik, 56. He’s had many close calls – such as the time his ATV’s wheels got snared in a fishing net at a former whaling spot jutting out into the bay: ‘I couldn’t move forward or backward.’

He radioed for help, but by the time it came, ‘there were five polar bears coming towards me, real close’.

On another occasion, the main fuse on his ATV blew when he was at the village dump – ‘the polar bears’ restaurant’, where they find lots of goodies. Fumbling with the electrics, he managed to get it going, once again encircled by five bears.

The first stage in deterring a bear is to fire a blank, ‘crackshot’. The problem, Ikhakik says, is that you’re ‘training a bear not to be scared of it because it knows it won’t get hurt’. Next, he will try a rubber bullet, aiming at the rump.

But if even that doesn’t work, rather than kill a charging bear with a high-velocity rifle round, he will try to hit it with another rubber bullet on the nose.

‘I’ve lost count of the times I’ve stopped a bear like that. They really protect their noses. They find food with them, and that’s how they sense danger.’

Ikhakik and his fellow monitors have become very necessary. In mid-winter, with pregnant bears hibernating and males far out on the sea ice, the danger seems remote, though a huge male was seen at the Arviat dump the night before I arrived. But in warmer seasons, bears have become a constant presence. On some days, Ikhakik has had to deter up to 20. The record is 26.

One day, Kidlapik says: ‘I saw a bear that popped out between two buildings, right after school ended – the children were just going home.’

It chased two girls who, thankfully, managed to get inside their house and shut the door in time.

On other occasions, ‘bears have come right up to local hunters,’ says Kidlapik. ‘They’d be butchering an animal they’d just harvested and it would take it away. One guy had just harpooned a beluga whale and was getting ready to tow it back in his boat. He ended up having a tug-of-war on the beach.

‘Bears get close to fishermen’s nets, then start chasing them, to protect the catch they now see as theirs. It used to be normal to camp out. Today you can’t, because there are too many bears. You might travel 40 miles out in an ATV, but you make sure you get back home, even if it’s the middle of the night.’

Halloween, says Ikhakik, was especially challenging – because ‘there were so many bears around and so many kids on the streets’. They put on extra patrols, but many families decided it was too dangerous for their children to go out. Trick or treating mostly happened within the confines of the community center sports hall.

Many people in Arviat have encountered mortal peril. Tiktaq told me: ‘One time there were three of us, driving in a line on ATVs. My friend was leading and he thought he’d passed a rock. I was in the middle and the rock got up. It was a big, lone male and he started running towards my brother, who was at the back. If he hadn’t swerved, the bear would have got him.’

And, say the Inuit, the bears are not ailing. According to Kidlapik: ‘They’re not coming here because they’re starving. And they’re still mating, still having cubs.’

He illustrates his point with a series of photographs he has taken in and around Arviat in all seasons over the past two years. They show bears of both genders at every stage of life – and all nourished and healthy.

Part of Ikhakik’s job is to record details of every bear he sees and to estimate its weight. He says: ‘You often hear that the lack of ice is killing the bears but it’s not true. The bears are healthy. Once in a while with any species you’re going to come across sick animals: you’ll find skinny, limping caribou. But 95 percent of the time, these are healthy, big, fat bears.

‘I respect people who say there’s a crisis. But when you’re doing bear work, as I do, you’re going to have a better side of the story. They wouldn’t hire me to protect the townspeople if they didn’t need me, and I’m not seeing them dying out.’

So who is right – the scientists and campaigners or what the Nunavut government calls Inuit ‘TEK’ – traditional ecological knowledge? Despite the bears’ iconic status, it is impossible to give a definitive answer.

Scientists use two main methods to estimate the changing size of polar bear sub-populations: ‘mark and recapture’, which requires bears to be tranquilized and tagged, and aerial surveys. But both have huge margins of error.

According to scientists, three of Canada’s 13 bear sub-populations are in decline, including West Hudson Bay.

However, a new Nunavut government bear management plan cites TEK from Inuit communities that contradict this: they say none of the bear populations are shrinking, while nine are increasing.

Meanwhile, a study published in 2016 revealed past cases where TEK and scientists disagreed about bear sub-populations – and claimed the Inuit were eventually proven right.

SOURCE   





Australia: Built and paid for by the poor

Sunlight is free, as any number of solar power advocates will remind you.

But converting sunlight into electricity very definitely is not free. This applies even if you do not have solar panels installed at your property.

The costs of solar energy to the general community are created by government subsidies that encourage solar panel installation. This means that your money is financing at a significant level the solar panels being fitted throughout Australia.

As the Daily Telegraph reports, tax-funded subsidies to the one-in-four Australian households that have installed solar panels add $45 a year to the average power bill of every family in NSW.

Analysis of electricity costs by power giant EnergyAustralia shows that Australia’s eight million households are helping to pay off the solar systems of the two million people who can afford them.

If you pay taxes but do not have the spare cash to install solar panels yourself, bad luck. Those taxes will instead help fund the installation of solar panels for those with sufficient wealth to do so.

This is clearly an inequitable arrangement, and it just as clearly hits Australia’s most economically-disadvantaged taxpayers hardest.

In fact, they are hit twice: once by subsidies, and again by higher power costs that in part are due to a continued push for renewable energy sources over reliable and inexpensive coal.

Yet Labor, supposedly the party representing society’s battlers, is poised to make this unfair situation even worse.

Labor leader Bill Shorten’s plan to introduce further subsidies for households that install battery storage for solar systems is forecast to send costs even higher.

Again, further subsidies will only offer a discount to those who are already able to afford their share of battery storage installation. But the less well-off will make up the difference.

“Our concern is not with solar power,” EnergyAustralia chief customer officer Chris Ryan told the Daily Telegraph. “It’s about fairness.

“With electricity prices at record highs, it’s time to look at whether one group of Australians should be paying more for their electricity than they need to for the privilege of funding other households’ solar systems.”

One group of Australians should not be subsidising wealthier Australians. This is a reversal of how charity works. It is Robin Hood giving to the rich.

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 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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Something else left out of the "models"

A model with things left out isn't a model

Many mountains in Indonesia and neighboring Papua New Guinea consist of ancient volcanic rocks from the ocean floor that were caught in a colossal tectonic collision between a chain of island volcanoes and a continent, and thrust high. Lashed by tropical rains, these rocks hungrily react with CO2 and sequester it in minerals. That is why, with only 2% of the world's land area, Indonesia accounts for 10% of its long-term CO2 absorption. Its mountains could explain why ice sheets have persisted, waxing and waning, for several million years

Now, researchers have extended that theory, finding that such tropical mountain-building collisions coincide with nearly all of the half-dozen or so significant glacial periods in the past 500 million years. "These types of environments, through time, are what sets the global climate," said Francis Macdonald, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when he presented the work last month at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. If Earth's climate has a master switch, he suggests, the rise of mountains like Indonesia's could be it.

SOURCE




A strange system







Free Up Markets to Reduce Wildfire Damage and Lower Energy Bills

Shortly before wildfires such as the Camp and Woolsey fires ravaged Northern and Southern California, respectively, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a contentious bill making it easier for the state’s investor-owned utilities—primarily, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric—to recover wildfire costs from ratepayers, but don’t expect the flames to die down anytime soon.

The legislation arose out of the calamitous wildfires the state has experienced the past couple of years and utilities’ fears about their abilities to cover potentially billions of dollars in damages. PG&E faces a possible $15 billion liability for wildfires that wreaked havoc on Northern California’s wine country last year, and contends that it might be forced into bankruptcy if the California Public Utilities Commission does not allow it to cover the costs with rate increases on consumers.Senate Bill 901, authored by state Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa), largely sidestepped the broader reforms Gov. Brown had sought to reduce liability exposure for the utilities.

California law is unusual in that utilities may be held liable for fire damage caused by their equipment even if they were not negligent in maintaining it and followed all safety rules (such as wind blowing a tree down onto power lines and sparking a blaze). SB 901 did, however, direct the CPUC to consider PG&E’s financial status in deciding its liability for the 2017 fires, and may allow the company to pass along costs it cannot financially bear (however that is determined) in the form of bonds to be paid by ratepayers over time.

The legislation also requires utilities to beef up protections of their equipment, and provides some much-needed relaxing of logging restrictions on private land. A greater focus on wildfire prevention efforts such as removing excess fuel through vegetation clearing and controlled burns is also long overdue, and will be funded to the tune of $200 million a year for five years from the state’s cap-and-trade fund. Environmental policies preventing thinning to keep forests in a “natural” state, as well as drought conditions and a bark beetle infestation that have killed millions of trees, have created tinderbox conditions and significantly exacerbated wildfire damage. The money would go a lot farther, though, if the forest-thinning services were competitively bid instead of just doled out to Cal Fire.

In fact, privatization of wildfire services in general would likely substantially reduce costs. Approximately 40 percent of all wildfire services are already provided by the private sector, according to the National Wildfire Suppression Association, which represents more than 250 companies in 27 states employing about 10,000 private firefighters and support personnel.

The state should also stop interfering in insurance markets. An August study prepared for the California Natural Resources Agency by the RAND Corporation and Greenware Tech noted that insurers complain that the California Department of Insurance prevents them from using probabilistic wildfire models to project future losses and has not allowed them to raise homeowners insurance rates high enough to cover the full risk-based cost of policies in high-risk areas, which would discourage building in the most fire-prone locations.

Despite the significant risk to which it exposes investor-owned utilities in the state, strict liability is probably appropriate under the existing regulatory system. It is the same compensatory standard to which governmental agencies are held, and, as the state courts have noted, the eminent domain powers granted to electric utility companies under the Public Utilities Code and the government-protected monopolies under which they operate make them more akin to public agencies than unfettered private companies. Under such a system, where utilities face no competition and property owners cannot opt out if they are targeted for eminent domain action, it makes sense to spread the costs of wildfires among the utilities and their customers, who all share the benefits of the utilities’ electricity generation and transmission infrastructure.

That said, the existing regulatory system is at fault for creating “too big to fail” regional utility monopolies in the first place. A central planning commission that grants monopoly rights and dictates prices and “acceptable” profit levels sounds more characteristic of a socialist or totalitarian state like North Korea or the Soviet Union, but that is the state of energy markets in California.

A better solution would be to open up competition by eliminating regional government-granted energy monopolies with eminent domain powers and treating the provision of electricity like other goods and services. Fully privatizing the energy and insurance markets and eliminating government monopoly protections would do much more to reduce energy costs, increase innovation and reduce losses from wildfire damage than any measures currently being discussed in Sacramento.

SOURCE 






Bernie Sanders Obsesses Over Climate Change, Yet He Spent $300k On Private Jets In October ALONE!

Like most Democrats, Bernie Sanders is a major hypocrite when it comes to climate change. He claims to care about the environment so much, but he travels in private jets that guzzle tons of unnecessary fuel and harms the environment.

A public report from the Federal Election Commission shows that Commie Bernie spent upwards of $300,000 on just private air travel in just OCTOBER alone!

Here’s more from the Washington Examiner:

“Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2018 re-election campaign spent nearly $300,000 on private jet services in October, a report from the Federal Election Commission shows.

Sanders, a climate change hawk, went on a campaign blitz involving nine states to stump for Democratic candidates ahead of the November midterm elections, according to VTDigger. His aggressive campaigning likely served as a preamble for the independent senator’s potential bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.

Sanders, who flew on private Apollo jets, has already positioned himself highlighting climate change as a major economic, infrastructure, and national security challenge in 2020. His busy travel schedule came the same month he issued a stark warning ahead of the November elections on the planet’s impending doom if humanity remains largely asleep at the wheel combating environmental threats.”

If he cares so much about the environment, why doesn’t he just fly coach like the rest of us? For being such a “socialist”, he sure does live like a CAPITALIST!

With climate change likely to be a key talking point for Democrats in the 2020 election, it will be easy for Trump to point to the hypocritical actions of establishment Democrats like Bernie Sanders.

SOURCE 





Hot start to 2019 after Australia ends its third-warmest year

Warmist apparatchik Peter Hannam (below)is slipping.  He seems happy that Australia's average temperature was only the third warmest.  But, according to Warmist theory, 2018 should be THE hottest.  According to Australia's Cape Grim, CO2 levels shot up in 2018, particularly in the second half.  Download the CO2 data here.

We should be roasting.  The BoM do their best to create the impression that we are but the averages tell the story.  Peter seems to think our temperatures support global warming.  In fact they starkly contradict it


The searing end to 2018 for much of Australia will likely make it the third-hottest on record for maximum temperatures with little early relief in sight in the new year, preliminary data from the Bureau of Meteorology shows.

For mean temperatures, 2018 will also come in among the top five, according to bureau meteorologist Skye Tobin. The year was also "very much drier" than average for Australia, particularly in the south-east.

In New South Wales, Hay, Ivanhoe and Wilcania recorded the highest temperatures, reaching 44 degrees Celsius while in the east, there was little relief with the mercury peaking at 40 degrees in Penrith.

All but one of the country's top 10 hottest years have occurred since 2005, a result "in line with long-term trends resulting from anthropogenic climate change", the bureau said in a summary on 2018's national weather.

Australia was hardly alone in recording a hot year. "For the globe as a whole, 2018 is likely to be the fourth-warmest year on record, continuing the recent pattern of very warm years," the bureau said.

Temperatures are now about 1.1 degrees above the pre-industrial norm. That's more than half way to the 2-degree upper limit of warming almost 200 nations agreed to work towards under the Paris climate agreement signed in 2015.

Every year since 1978 has been above the 1961-90 average for mean temperatures, the bureau said.

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 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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MSNBC’s Chuck Todd Kept ‘Climate Deniers’ Off His Hour-Long Global Warming Special

They're dead-scared of contradiction.  They know they cannot handle it.  If you want balance, go to a gym

NBC’s “Meet the Press” devoted the full hour of its Sunday program to talk about climate change, and the show focused the bulk of its time discussing the matter with a who’s who of climate activists.

MSNBC host Chuck Todd kicked off the program with a promise to the audience: the show will avoid debating the science of climate change. Instead, the hour was dedicated to asking various well-known climate activists about how to inject talk of global warming into American politics.

“We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period,” Todd said at the top of the broadcast. “We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”

Outgoing Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown was also on hand to discuss his solutions. He called rising global temperatures a serious threat, something akin to what Americans faced at the outset of WWII. He said the U.S. is not doing enough to address the problem.

“[N]ot even close, and not close in California, and we’re doing more than anybody else, and not close in America or the rest of the world,” said Brown, who crafted a position as one of President Donald Trump’s biggest opponents.

He added: “We’ve got to get off this idea, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’ No, it’s the environment.”

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made similar comments, telling Todd he is still mulling a presidential bid in 2020.

“I will be out there demanding that anybody that’s running has a plan. And I want to hear the plan, and I want everybody to look at it and say whether it’s doable,” the billionaire philanthropist said. (RELATED: House Democrats Are Lining Up Behind What Could Be The Largest Expansion Of Government In Decades)

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are wrestling with a new flock of activist lawmakers who are pushing the party further to the left on climate policies. One of the ideas coming from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is the Green New Deal.

Sanders, a self-avowed socialist, and Ocasio-Cortez want to move the U.S. to 100-percent green energy, federal job guarantees for workers forced out of their fossil fuel jobs, guaranteed minimum income and universal health care. Analysts warn the Green New Deal could come with a monster price tag.

Eliminating fossil fuels and transitioning to a 100-percent renewable electric grid could cost as much as $5.2 trillion over two decades, according to a 2010 study by the conservative Heritage Foundation. That’s about $218 billion to move the grid away from coal and natural gas.

Mainstream Democrats are hesitant, especially those who remember the party’s failed carbon tax experiment in 2010, which ultimately helped thrust them into a political wasteland after the GOP won both houses of Congress that year.

SOURCE 





Trees Found Under Glaciers Discredits CO2 Climate Theory

Between 60 and 40 thousand years ago, during the middle of the last glacial, atmospheric CO2 levels hovered around 200 ppm – half of today’s concentration.

Tree remains dated to this period have been discovered 600-700 meters atop the modern treeline in the Russian Altai mountains.

This suggests surface air temperatures were between 2°C and 3°C warmer than today during this glacial period.

Tree trunks dating to the Early Holocene (between 10.6 and 6.2 thousand years ago) have been found about 350 meters higher than the modern treeline edge.

This suggests summer temperatures were between 2°C and 2.5°C warmer than today during the Early Holocene when CO2 concentrations ranged between about 250 and 270 ppm.

None of this paleoclimate treeline or temperature evidence correlates with a CO2-driven climate.

“Samples of wood having an age of 10.6–6.2 cal ka BP were [the Early Holocene]found about 350 m higher than the present treeline. It seems that the summer temperature was 2.0–2.5 °C higher and annual precipitation was double that of the present day”

“Buried wood trunks by a glacier gave ages between 60 and 28 cal ka BP and were found 600–700 m higher than the present upper treeline. This evidences a distinctly elevated treeline during MIS 3a and c. With a correction for tectonics, we reconstructed the summer warming to have been between 2.1 and 3.0 °C [higher than today].”

SOURCE 






Arctic sea ice volume has GROWN over the past 12 years

Arctic sea ice has not been cooperating at all with the doomsday scenarios of the global warming alarmists. Some of them said it should have gone ice-free in late summer by now.

A recent chart shows that late summer Arctic sea ice volume has GROWN over the past 12 years, and not plummeted as the alarmists once warned:



Note how predictions made back in 2007 by "leading experts" were completely wrong, and sea ice volume instead has been rising modestly, thus totally surprising and shaming the doomsday prophets.

Yet today the media as a whole continue to lend credibility to these totally failed experts. Is it only natural that citizens are distrustful and regard much climate reporting as "fake news"?

In summary: the polar ice has been holding up well for more than 10 years. The earlier predictions are totally wrong. And in historical context, there is more ice today at the poles than at most times over the past 10,000 years.

SOURCE 





COP 24: Dangerous rules recently added to Paris Climate Accord

Buried in the 133 pages of gobbledygook agreed to at last week's UN climate summit are two very dangerous provisions. These greatly advance the green cause known as "loss and damage."

This is where the green goal is for the developed countries like America to pay for all of the damages supposedly due to climate change, especially in the developing countries. Given that pretty much all bad weather is now attributed to human caused climate change, the potential amount of wealth transfer is simply staggering. I explain this in my May article titled "Absurd "loss & damage" policy advances at UN's Bonn climate summit."

The new provisions added at the Katowice, Poland summit meeting do not yet call for this sort of compensation, but they lay the groundwork for it. This is because they allow the developing countries to build their fantasy case in detail. Liability lawyers are going to love this.

These are basically paperwork provisions, but as I said in an earlier article on the Katowice summit, paperwork has implications.

First off, there is to be an annual report of climate change actions and events. This report was originally intended to facilitate verification of each country's claimed climate change efforts under the Paris Agreement. Each country has what is called "Nationally Determined Contributions" for addressing climate change and the idea is that their progress needs to be monitored. Thus the UN-speak for this yearly report is called the "Transparency Framework" because it is designed for watching what countries are doing.

The sorts of things originally intended to be reported are CO2 emissions, emission reductions, adaptation projects, as well as financial transactions. The latter are a big deal, especially funding by developed countries to developing countries.

However, it is now the case that developing countries can also annually report loss and damage from climate change. They will certainly do this and they have every incentive to make the numbers as big as possible. I can imagine countries competing to see who has been hit hardest. They are, after all, hoping to get paid and the bigger the hit the more they make.

Countries can even include projected future loss and damage. (Damage refers to things that can be fixed, albeit perhaps at great cost. Loss includes things like lives and crops.) These projections open the door to wild speculation using computer modeling, along the lines of the recent reports from the IPCC and the National Climate Assessment.

The second provision has to do with what is called the "Global Stocktake." This is a recurring five year assessment, based on the cumulative Transparency Framework reports. Here we can expect to see truly huge numbers for global losses and damages. (It remains to be seen if preposterous claims can be challenged within the UN process.)

All of the above is artfully designed to put pressure for compensation on America and the other developed countries. These numbers can also support claims for compensation in the Courts. There is even a proposal to have a big tax on fossil fuels, the proceeds going to pay for losses and damages.

Here is how proponents of this monster tax put it in a recently released 32 page report titled "The Climate Damages Tax: A guide to what it is and how it works." They ominously say this:

"A day of reckoning is coming. There is a price for heating up the planet and to date the fossil fuel industry have fled the table without paying the bill. When climate change has brought devastation, poorest countries and communities have been left to pay. The Climate Damages Tax (CDT) proposal set out in this paper can help rectify this situation by making the fossil fuel industry pay for their damage."

It is mind boggling that the developed countries allowed this to happen in Katowice. Under UN rules any country can veto a position, so the developed countries should have piled on the vetoes. Note that the U.S. is still at the table; in fact they successfully challenged a motion to "welcome" the latest IPCC scaremongering report, on the grounds that they do not accept it as accurate.

But this nice gesture is as nothing compared to allowing developing countries to make unsupported claims for trillions of dollars in loss and damage, which is just where we are now going under these dangerous new Paris Accord provisions. Then the question of compensation will hit the fan for sure.

SOURCE 





Let's Follow The Climate Money!

Paul Driessen

The climate crisis industry claims 24/7/365 that fossil fuel emissions are causing unprecedented temperature, climate and weather changes that pose existential threats to human civilization and our planet. The only solution, Climate Crisis, Inc. insists, is to eliminate the oil, coal and natural gas that provide 80% of the energy that makes US and global, cpossible.

Failing that, CCI demands steadily increasing taxes on carbon-based fuels and carbon dioxide emissions.

However, as France's Yellow Vest protests and the latest climate confab in Poland demonstrated, the world does not accept CCI's assertions. Countries worldwide are expanding their fossil fuel use, and families are refusing to reduce their living standards or their aspirations for better lives.

Moreover, climate computer model forecasts are completely out of touch with real-world observations. There is no evidence to support claims that the slight temperature, climate and weather changes we've experienced are dangerous, unprecedented or caused by humans, instead of by the powerful solar, oceanic and other natural forces that have driven similar or far more serious changes throughout history.

More importantly, the CCI "solutions" would cause unprecedented disruption of modern industrialized societies; permanent poverty and disease in poor countries; and serious ecological damage worldwide.

Nothing that is required to harness breezes and sunshine to power civilization is clean, green, renewable, climate-friendly or sustainable. Tens of billions of tons of rock would have to be removed, to extract billions of tons of ores, to create millions of tons of metals, concrete and other materials, to manufacture millions of wind turbines and solar panels, and install them on millions of acres of wildlife habitats - to generate expensive, intermittent energy that would still be grossly insufficient for humanity's needs. Every step in this process requires fossil fuels - and some of the mining involves child labor.

How do CCI alarmists respond to these points? They don't. They refuse to engage in or even permit civil discussion. They rant that anyone "who denies climate change science" is on the fossil fuel industry payroll, thus has a blatant conflict of interest and thus no credibility, and therefore should be ignored. 

"Rebuttals" to my recent "We are still IN" article cited Greenpeace and DeSmogBlog as their "reliable sources" and claimed: I'm "associated with" several "right-wing think tanks that are skeptical of man-made climate change." One of them "received $582,000 from ExxonMobil" over a 14-year period, another got "$5,716,325 from Koch foundations" over 18 years, and the Koch Brothers gave "at least $100,343,292 to 84 groups denying climate change science" in 20 years, my detractors claimed.

These multi-year contributions work out to $41,571 annually; $317,574 per year; and $59,728 per organization per year, respectively - to pay salaries and overhead at think tanks that are engaged in multiple social, tax, education, medical and other issues . not just energy and climate change.

But let's assume for a moment that money - especially funding from anyone with a "special interest" in the outcome of a research project - renders a researcher incapable of analyzing facts fairly and honestly.

Then apply those zero-tolerance, zero-credibility Greenpeace-DeSmogBlog-CCI standards to those very same climate alarmists and their allies - who are determined to shut down debate and impose their wind, solar and biofuel policies on the world. Where do they get their money, and how much do they get?

Billionaire and potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg gave the Sierra Club $110 million in a six-year period to fund its campaign against coal-generated electricity. Chesapeake Energy gave the Club $26 million in three years to promote natural gas and attack coal. Ten wealthy liberal foundations gave another $51 million over eight years to the Club and other environmentalist groups to battle coal.

Over a 12-year period, the Environmental Protection Agency gave its 15 Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee members $180.8 million in grants - and in exchange received quick rubberstamp approvals of various air quality rules. It paid the American Lung Association $20 million to support its regulations.

During the Obama years, the EPA, Interior Department and other federal agencies paid environmental pressure groups tens of millions in collusive, secretive sue-and-settle lawsuit payoffs on dozens of issues.

Then we get to the really big money: taxpayer funds that government agencies hand out to scientists, computer modelers and pressure groups - to promote global warming and climate change alarmism.

As Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore noted recently, citing government and other reports: 

* Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

* The Feds spent an estimated $150 billion on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama's first term.

* That didn't include the 30% tax credit/subsidies for wind and solar power: $8 billion to $10 billion a year - plus billions more from state programs that require utilities to buy expensive "green" energy.

* Worldwide, according to the "progressive" Climate Policy Initiative, climate change "investment" in 2013 totaled $359 billion - but this "falls far short" of the $5 trillion per year that's actually needed.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change echoes those greedy demands. It says the world must spend $2.4 trillion per year for the next 17 years to subsidize the transition to renewable energy.

Bear in mind that $1.5 trillion per yearwas already being spent in 2014 on Climate Crisis, Inc. research, consulting, carbon trading and renewable projects, according to the Climate Change Business Journal. With 6-8% annual growth, we're easily looking at a $2-trillion-per-year climate industry by now.

The US Government Accountability Office puts United States taxpayer funding alone at $2.1 billion per year for climate change "science" . $9.0 billion a year for technology R&D . and $1.8 billion a year for international assistance. Total US Government spending on climate change totaled $179 billion (!) from 1993 through 2017, according to the GAO. That's $20 million per day!

At the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit, 29 far-left foundations pledged to give $4 billion over five years to their new Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming campaign. Sea Change Foundation co-founder Nat Simons made it clear that this "is only a down payment"!

And I get pilloried for working with organizations that received $41,571 to $59,728 per year from fossil fuel interests . questioning claims that fossil fuels are causing climate chaos . and raising inconvenient facts about wind, solar and biofuel replacements for coal, oil and natural gas.

Just as outrageous, tens of millions of dollars are squandered every year to finance "studies" that supposedly show "surging greenhouse gases" and "manmade climate change" are creating dangerous hybrid puffer fish, causing salmon to lose their ability to detect danger, making sharks right-handed and unable to hunt, increasing the number of animal bites, and causing US cities to be overrun by rats.

Let's apply the Greenpeace-DeSmogBlog-Climate Crisis, Inc. standard to them. Their massive multi-billion-dollar conflicts of interest clearly make them incapable of analyzing climate and energy matters fairly and honestly - and disqualify them from participating in any further discussions about America's and the world's energy and economic future.

At the very least, they and the institutions that have been getting rich and powerful off the catastrophic manmade global warming and climate hustle should be cut off from any future federal funding.

Via email

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

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

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