Tag Archives: greenhouse gas emissions

Changing The Rules–Introducing Science And Common Sense

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On Tuesday, Legal Insurrection posted an article about the Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to rescind greenhouse-gas limits for coal- and natural-gas power plants.

The article quotes CBS News:

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to repeal rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas, an action that Administrator Lee Zeldin has said would remove billions of dollars in costs for the industry and help “unleash” American energy.

The rule change, proposed last year, could be announced as soon as Monday, according to two people familiar with the proposal, and represents a fundamental shift from efforts by Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama to address climate change and clean up industrial pollution, often in low-income and majority Black or Hispanic communities.

The rule, which is expected to face immediate legal challenges, also could prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, people familiar with the proposal said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the final rule had not yet been made public.

Not all scientists agree that greenhouse gases are a bad thing. There is one school of thought that says more carbon dioxide increases crop production and provides other benefits.

The article concludes:

In a nutshell, the EPA’s repeal does not excuse power producers from controlling genuinely hazardous emissions; it refocuses federal oversight on pollutants such as mercury, toxic metals, and other compounds that directly threaten public health.

At a time when Americans depend on dependable electricity for air-conditioning, industry, and rapidly expanding AI capability, practical policies that reinforce grid reliability and affordability without needlessly endangering the environment are likely to command far more public support than ideological mandates built around immature or prohibitively costly technology.

The Democrats and their media minions may choose to overlook those successes, but households and businesses will recognize the value of a policy that protects the air they breathe, the power system they rely on, and hopefully offers a more abundant and less expensive supply of energy.

The true environmentalist balances the welfare of the environment and the people who live in it.

The Times They Are A’Changing

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On Friday, The Epoch Times reported that Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy will be removing the unreasonable fossil fuel emissions standards put in place by the Biden administration.

The article reports:

In December 2023, the DOT’s Federal Highway Administration finalized a rule establishing a method to measure and report transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions.

The rule required state-level agencies to establish targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles traveling on national highways. These emission targets were intended to become more stringent over time, and agencies were required to report on their progress in meeting them. The rule did not specify how low the targets should be but allowed agencies the discretion to set goals appropriate for their communities.

The rule was set up to “confront the increasingly urgent climate crisis,” according to the executive summary, and was expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This was part of a plan to reach “net-zero emissions by no later than 2050,” according to a 2021 White House fact sheet.

On Jan. 29, Duffy approved a proposal to rescind the rule.

The article concludes:

The action is in line with several executive orders recently issued by President Donald Trump, including the “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions” and “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” the department stated.

All DOT offices are required to identify and report, within 10 days, programs and policy statements that are subject to Trump’s relevant executive orders, according to the memo, and revoke nonconforming rules.

Duffy also signed an order to lower costs “through smarter policies, not political ideologies.” Under the order, it must be ensured that all DOT loans and grants are based on “sound economic principles, positive cost-benefit analyses, and pro-economic growth priorities.”

Duffy said these actions are a step toward restoring commonsense governance and merit-based policies at the Transportation Department.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are focused on eliminating excessive regulations that have hindered economic growth, increased costs for American families, and prioritized far-left agendas over practical solutions,” he said.“The American people deserve an efficient, safe, and pro-growth transportation system based on sound decision-making, not political ideologies. These actions will help us deliver on that promise.”

This is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sea Temperatures Cooling

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I am not claiming to understand what I am about to report, but I do find it interesting.

On Wednesday, wattsupwiththat posted an article about surface ocean temperatures are cooling–not warming. No one seems to understand why.

The article reports:

Surface ocean temperatures are plunging rapidly around the world with scientists reported to be puzzled at the speed of the recent decline. Less puzzlement was to be found when the oceans were ‘boiling’ during the last two years. Plebs flying to Benidorm for an annual holiday and causing ‘global heating’ was a favourite explanation, although mainstream media put it in marginally more polite terms. For almost two years, this boiling ocean trope has been a reliable standby for every alarmist spiv promoting the Net Zero insanity. But expect the scare to be parked for a while along with coral reefs, polar bears and Arctic sea ice. It is a very good bet that nobody in mainstream media is going to report the oceans are cooling at what are remarkably dramatic rates. Few fear-mongering points will be on offer for drawing attention to this inconvenient news.

The article includes this graph:

This year the temperature shown by the black line flatlined until April compared with the substantial rise in orange for 2023. It then fell more sharply than last year and is now 0.2°C lower.

In the Atlantic, the turnaround has been even more dramatic. Temperatures have cooled quickly since May and in the central equatorial region are up to 1°C colder than average for this time of year. The American weather service NOAA notes that the high SSTs at the start of the year were the strongest warm event since 1982. The rapid transition from warm to cold SST anomalies (current temperatures compared over a longer past trend) was said to be remarkable. “Never before in the observed record has the eastern equatorial Atlantic swung so quickly from one to another extreme event,” observes NOAA.

   The article concludes:

The recent El Niño was powerful although the natural distortion in the centigrade anomaly record was not as large as those produced by a previous El Niño around 2015-16. Over the last 25 years, all of the global temperature boosts – apart from those retrospectively added by state-funded compilers – have occurred at around the same time as El Niño formations. Strong oscillations have been recorded in 1998, 2016 and 2024. As we have seen, alarmists have taken full advantage of the changes wrought by the latest El Niño effect, particularly the warmer ocean temperatures that have arisen. As with most natural variation, that process is being reversed – what goes up, usually comes down.

According to NOAA, SSTs in three of the four locations around the Pacific used to determine the presence of an El Niño are now below the long term trend. Temperatures have also dropped considerably in many parts of the Pacific down to 300 metres as the graph below for the central and eastern area shows.

Meanwhile, spare a thought for narrative-driven messengers such as the BBC’s Georgina Rannard. Last August she claimed that while scientists have known that the sea surface would continue to warm up because of greenhouse gas emissions, “they are still investigating exactly why temperatures have surged so far above previous years”.

What a difference a few months makes in the climate alarmism business.

The bottom line here is very simple (even though the article isn’t). The earth goes through cycles. Man is not significant enough to impact these cycles to any great degree. We need to keep our air and water as clean as possible, but we also need to allow for economic growth.

When The Courts Limit The Bureaucracy, Life Is Good!

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On Friday, The Epoch Times reported that a Texas judge has struck down a regulation that was issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in 2023.

The article reports:

The rule was issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in 2023 as part of President Biden’s efforts to slash carbon emissions in half by 2030.

Specifically, it required state transportation departments and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to both measure their transportation-related emissions on the U.S. highway system and set their own emission reduction targets.

Additionally, the measure required state DOTs and MPOs to report biennially on their progress in meeting the declining targets. FHWA would also assess the state’s progress toward achieving those targets, according to the rule.

Texas sued the DOT in December, arguing the agency lacked legal authority from Congress to enact the rule, and that it violates the Administrative Procedure Act.

In his ruling, Judge James Hendrix of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas agreed, stating that the Biden administration lacked authority under law to impose the greenhouse gas emissions performance measure.

“When a regulation attempts to override statutory text, the regulation loses every time, regulations can’t punch holes in the rules Congress has laid down,” the judge wrote, citing a previous case, Djie v. Garland.

The article concludes:

In finalizing the rule in December last year, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the performance measure would provide states with a “clear and consistent framework to track carbon pollution and the flexibility to set their own climate targets.” Officials also said transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

A spokesperson for the highway administration, which is part of the Transportation Department, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement: “ The Department of Transportation (DOT) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) remain committed to supporting the Biden-Harris Administration’s climate goals of cutting carbon pollution in half by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.”

“We are reviewing the Texas court’s decision and determining next steps,” the spokesperson added.

When are we going to go back to the time that the people who were elected to make the laws made the laws. We are being governed by a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, and that is not what our Founding Fathers designed. It’s time for Congress to read the Constitution and take their responsibilities seriously.

 

 

A New Level Of Insanity

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On Saturday, WattsUpWithThat posted an article explaining how cancer treatments contribute to global warming.

The article notes:

Operating rooms are a massive source of greenhouse gas production for hospitals, representing 70% of their waste and generating three to six times as much carbon as the rest of health systems.

Cancer care is an obvious target for greener efforts within surgery, Berlin notes, because it often involves intense levels of care over a short period of time.

Plus, minimally invasive surgeries that require a lot of energy, including robotic-assisted operations, have become common treatments for cancers ranging from colorectal and uterine cancer to head and neck cancer. A robotic-assisted hysterectomy, for example, produces as much carbon as driving more than 2,200 miles in a car — the equivalent of a road trip from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Los Angeles.

“If we can lower our greenhouse gas output, we have a chance to extend the lifespan of our patients and expand access to timely care,” Agbafe said. “And we think it’s really important that the surgical community is proactive at being at that table.”

…Some sustainability shifts may come even sooner at Michigan Medicine.

For instance, the Department of Anesthesiology recently launched the Green Anesthesia Initiative, or GAIA for short. Its mission: become more environmentally conscious about the types and rates of anesthesia its providers use, another area Agbafe and Berlin say is ripe for improvement.

“This is a topic of fairly intense discussion right now in the field, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” said George Mashour, M.D., Ph.D., the chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and the Robert B. Sweet Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical School. “Unlike other industries, I don’t think that we require massive disruption in order to make progress because, fortunately, we have options.”

Several inhaled gases regularly used for anesthesia are A-list offenders when it comes to greenhouse gas production. Nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, is a greenhouse gas, a direct ozone depleter and does not dissipate from the atmosphere for more than a century after it’s produced.

However, the inhaled anesthetic sevoflurane has much less of an environmental impact than nitrous oxide and other common inhaled agents, so Mashour says it would be a good alternative.

“The overall goal is to shift away from some of these egregious culprits and start making better choices about which drug we use and then also how we use it,” Mashour said.

Do we really want the climate police controlling the medical profession? This could be very bad very quickly.

The Continuing War On Energy

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On Tuesday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the Biden administration’s continuing war on energy.

The article reports:

Half of all U.S. states penned a letter to the Biden administration, arguing against its decision to reverse a Trump-era rule allowing energy firms to transport natural gas via rail.

“Biden’s war on energy is a war on America’s poor and working-class,” Landry said in a statement Monday evening. “It is high time the Biden Administration to put America first. Biden’s environmental virtue-signaling is burdening American families and jeopardizing the safety and security of our homeland.”

Natural gas is the largest source of electricity production in the U.S., accounting for about 40% of all generation, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Republican attorneys general’s letter noted, citing Environmental Protection Agency data, that greenhouse gas emissions have decreased 11.7% overall and a whopping 33.1% from electricity generation between 2005-2019.

They argued emissions have decreased as reliance on natural gas has increased over the past decade. Relying on domestic natural gas production for electricity generation also makes the U.S. less dependent on foreign producers, the states said.

America has managed to decrease its greenhouse emissions by using natural gas. China on the other hand has increased its use of coal for generating electricity. It makes no sense for America to cripple its economy when curtailing our emissions will have little or no impact on the overall greenhouse emissions around the world. It might make us feel noble, but all it will do is eliminate America’s middle class. The article notes that environmental groups, which have also opposed pipeline projects, argued rail transport of natural gas was too dangerous. Meanwhile the price of gasoline at the pump is rapidly rising because America has lost its lead in energy production. It is not surprising that there is evidence that Russia is working with America’s environmentalist movement.

A Judge Gets It Right

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On Friday, The Daily Caller posted an article about one of President Joe Biden’s key climate initiative. The initiative declared that there were “social costs” of continued greenhouse gas emissions.

The article reports:

A federal district court in Louisiana halted one of President Joe Biden’s key climate initiatives implemented shortly after he was inaugurated in January 2021.

Judge James Cain, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, concluded that the policy — which declared there were “social costs” of continued greenhouse gas emissions — caused significant harm to Americans, according to his ruling published Friday. The federal judge granted a motion for a preliminary injunction, pausing implementation of the policy.

“Plaintiff States have sufficiently identified the kinds of harms to support injunctive relief,” Cain wrote in his ruling. “Moreover, the Court finds that the Plaintiff States have made a clear showing of an injury-in-fact, and that such injury ‘cannot be undone through monetary remedies.’”

The article concludes:

Biden has pushed renewable energy alternatives, including solar and wind projects, aggressively since taking office in 2021. The White House has outlined plans to ensure the entire U.S. grid is carbon-free by 2035 and the economy reaches net zero emissions by 2050.

The Biden administration has also waged a war on traditional energy production, nixing the Keystone XL pipeline, ditching an oil drilling project in Alaska and confirming it would review the possibility of shutting down a Michigan pipeline supplying much of the Midwest.

Former President Donald Trump nominated Cain to the bench in 2018, and the Senate overwhelmingly confirmed him a year later.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The cure for federal government overreach is a judiciary that has read the U.S. Constitution and is willing to follow it.

China And The Paris

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On April 2nd, The New York Post reported:

Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed in the 2016 Paris accords to bring his country’s climate-warming greenhouse-gas emissions to a peak before 2030 and make China “carbon-neutral” by 2060, but reality tells the opposite story.

A new study shows that the People’s Republic generated over half of the world’s coal-fired power in 2020, up nine points (to 53 percent) from 2015 — the year before Xi made his pledge.

And China actually opened more coal plants in 2020 than it had in the prior three years combined — three times as many new coal plants as the entire rest of the world.

On February 19th, CBS News reported:

When the U.S. signed the agreement in 2016, its first NDC target was to get “in the range” of an economy-wide 17% drop below 2005 greenhouse gas levels by 2020. It also aimed to achieve a subsequent decrease of 9-11% of 2005 levels by 2025, meaning the U.S. would reduce greenhouse emissions by 26%-28% in the first ten years of the Paris Agreement.

So China gets to increase greenhouse gases until 2030 while we have to drop our greenhouse gas levels by 2025. Has anyone thought through the economic implications of this for each country?

Yesterday the U.K. Daily Mail reported that China released a greater volume of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere in 2019 than all of the world’s developed nations put together.

The article reports:

The analysis considered six greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride. 

Global emissions have risen 11.4 per cent in the last decade to reach 52 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019, with China responsible for 27 per cent of this.

The second-worst emitter was the US — accounting for 11 per cent of the total — with India edging out the EU for the first time to come in third at 6.6 per cent.

The article at the U.K. Daily Mail paints a sympathetic picture of China’s increase in greenhouse emissions, stating that since greenhouse gases linger, other civilized nations have been contributing to the total for many more years than China. That still does not change the fact that the Paris climate accord ties the hands of the United States economy while giving China a free ride.

Another Unsung Accomplishment By President Trump

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Hot Air is reporting today that America reduced its greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

The article reports:

Increased natural gas consumption helped bring down U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, according to a recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Chances are you haven’t heard. That’s because the mainstream media and environmentalists insist on condemning the Trump administration for championing fossil fuels even though the United States is doing a better job at reducing emissions than many other countries that signed the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

The public can credit much of this success to the fracking boom, which has made natural gas much more plentiful. Cheap, abundant natural gas has gradually been displacing coal, which emits about twice as much carbon dioxide. A recent Rhodium Group study found that coal-fired power generation dropped by 18% last year, the lowest level since 1975.

The article concludes:

Meanwhile, thanks to a huge abundance of cheap natural gas (generated via fracking), America reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 2% in 2019 after previously cutting them by the same amount the prior year. In fact, U.S. emissions went down by 12% between 2005 and 2017. By next year, American emissions are projected to be the lowest they have been since 1991, a time when the population was much lower than it is now.

By comparison, how are the “good” countries who signed on to the Paris accord doing? As it turns out, France Germany and the United Kingdom all missed their emissions reduction goals last year. Germany’s emissions actually increased after they started gutting their nuclear power program and were forced to restart some coal-fired plants to keep the lights turned on.

The only countries that are given high marks for meeting the climate agreement’s objectives are very small nations with low populations and not very much economic or industrial activity. So who are the real bad guys in this story? Before any global consortium starts trying to dictate to us how to handle our greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps they should get their own houses in order and follow our example. Rather than just talking about reducing emissions, we’re actually doing it. And we didn’t need a treaty with anyone else to get the job done.

The reason the success of America in reducing greenhouse gases is not heralded is that the success goes against the purpose of the climate change agenda–it doesn’t allow tyrannical countries to shake down democracies and republics.The goal of the climate change rhetoric is to redistribute the world’s wealth–to take money from countries that have prospered under the free market and give it to countries where the government controls the economy. America’s success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions simply does not fit the desired template.

Spin vs. Reality

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The Washington Examiner posted an article today about the latest events in the climate change debate.

The article reports:

Speaking at the United Nations in December, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drew cheers by saying the United States was “still in” the Paris Climate Agreement. Green activists applauded Pelosi’s defense of the international climate accord, which President Trump had vowed to exit. These activists claim that remaining in the Paris Agreement will help reduce global emissions.

They are wrong.

European leaders have spent years trying and pointedly failing to solve the climate crisis with regulation. Whether intentionally or not, U.S. policymakers have mostly avoided top-down solutions. And counterintuitively, or perhaps it should have been intuitive, the U.S. now leads the developed world in reducing carbon emissions.

America didn’t need a treaty–we just needed a President who understood how to balance environmental policy and the freedom and interests of the American people.

The article explains why the American approach has worked:

…instead of banning fossil fuels outright, the U.S. embraced natural gas amid a boom in its production. Thanks to a process called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” we’ve managed to tap new reserves of natural gas. In 2015, the U.S. surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top producer of natural gas. By 2018, energy companies produced over 60% more natural gas than they had two decades earlier. This newfound abundance of natural gas has helped our nation transition away from coal, which emits twice as much carbon dioxide.

Thanks to this shift, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have hit 30-year lows, even as global emissions have increased by 50% during the same period. And since 2005, natural gas has done more to reduce power sector dioxide emissions than all renewable energy sources combined, according to the Energy Information Administration.

By eschewing regulation, America has also spurred additional emissions-reducing innovations in the private sector. Freed from red tape, U.S. energy firms have been able to devise and implement a host of groundbreaking green technologies. For example, a new technology called CleanWave strips chemicals from fracking wastewater using positively charged ions and bubbles. The Texas-based energy firm Apache reduces greenhouse gas emissions by powering fracking engines with natural gas instead of diesel.

The article concludes:

While the rest of the world fumbles with green energy policies, the U.S. continues to reduce emissions. We don’t need regulation to guarantee future success. American firms will continue to combat climate change, as long as we let them.

The free market works any time you let it.

I Guess This Is One Way To Deal With The Problem Of Farting Cows

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The environmentalist seem very concerned about the problem of farting cows. Somehow they fail to mention that the cow population has actually decreased since 2014 (article here). However, they are sincerely interested in taking away our steak dinners.

Breitbart posted an article yesterday about the latest plan to deal with farting cows.

The article reports:

Ermias Kebreab, an zoology professor at the University of California–Davis, led a team in producing a bovine meal regimen containing varying levels of Asparagopsis armata, a strain of red seaweed, and fed it to 12 dairy cows over a two-month period. In a mix containing just 1 percent seaweed, the cows’ methane emissions went down by a stunning 60 percent.

“In all the years that I’ve worked in this area, I’ve never seen anything that reduced it that much,” Kebreab said.

A 2012 United Nations report revealed that the earth’s cattle population produces more carbon dioxide than automobiles, planes, and all other forms of transport combined. Moreover, the cow pies they drop and the wind they break produce a third of the world’s methane emissions, which traps 84 times as much heat as carbon dioxide.

In the summer of 2016, EcoWatch published an article confirming that greenhouse gas emissions from livestock actually account for a higher percentage of total global emissions than the world’s 1.2 billion automobiles.

Kebreab’s cow experiment sought to replicate results from researchers at Australia’s James Cook University, who mixed bacteria from cows’ digestive systems with red seaweed and discovered a significant decrease in methane production. Their experiment suggested that tweaking a cow’s diet to include 2 percent seaweed could reduce its methane emissions by as much as 99 percent.

The article concludes:

According to Dobbins, seaweed farming may be a “triple win.” It furnishes a way to grow nutritious food for both cows and people, provides coastal jobs, and improves the marine environment.

“Everything you do in food production has pluses and minuses relative to the environment,” he has claimed. “Seaweed farming, if done correctly, actually comes out more on the plus side.”

While flatulence is an issue, studies have suggested that cow belching is a much bigger problem because of the methane produced in cows’ stomachs.

“Despite misconceptions, most cow methane comes from burps (90%) rather than farts (10%),” Michael Battaglia wrote in October, 2016, in the Conversation.

So now we have to start worrying about burping cows?

What Does The Green New Deal Have In Common With The United Nations’ Solutions To Global Warming?

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Yesterday Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial about the Democrat’s Green New Deal. Oddly enough, when you look at the consequences of the policies of the Green New Deal, they have a lot in common with ideas espoused by the United Nations.

The motives of both are somewhat questionable.

In March 2016, I posted an article with the following:

…Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”

Mad as they are, Edenhofer’s comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement’s dirty secret. Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit.

“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

Let’s compare that to the Green New Deal.

Investor’s Business Daily reports:

Reading the Green New Deal (GND) plan, put out Thursday by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, one is tempted to think it’s not real, just a joke from the satirical “The Onion.” The individual planks in the plan, individually and collectively, sound like the rantings of someone who should be institutionalized, not like a rational political plan to solve a real problem.

Let’s begin with what the plan promises: “a massive transformation of our society with clear goals and a timeline.”

That’s a sweeping, explicit pledge of radical socialist change. And that’s  not all. It offers “a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all.”

The editorial at Investor’s Business Daily concludes:

“The so-called Green New Deal resolution presented today by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., is a Back-to-the-Dark Ages Manifesto,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. “It calls for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in ten years, ‘upgrading all existing buildings’, and replacing our vehicle fleet with electric cars and more mass transit. And turning our energy economy upside down must be accomplished while ending historic income inequities and oppression of disadvantaged groups. Needless to say, the costs would be stupendous, and the damage done by its policies would be catastrophic.”

We’re grateful that President Trump threw down the gantlet against socialism during his Tuesday night State of the Union address. As he said, “America will never be a Socialist country.” And he drove that point home by adding: “We were born free and we will stay free.”

Scourge Of Socialism

We hope he’s right, and America’s declining education system and the increasingly far-left mainstream media have’t made socialism a palatable choice against the extraordinary success of  the free market. Socialism is among humanity’s worst ideas and it has failed everywhere — everywhere — it has been tried.

Those who don’t think the socialist disaster of Venezuela can happen here are sadly — tragically — mistaken.

It should never be tried again, anywhere, but especially not here.

They idea that a country can prosper by guaranteeing everyone a comfortable standard of living whether they choose to work or not goes against human nature. Prosperity comes from achievement, and achievement is generally spurred on by the rewards it receives. If hard work is not rewarded, there will be no great achievements. It’s that simple.

We Might Take Them Seriously If They Practiced What They Preach

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The Washington Free Beacon posted an article yesterday about some recent actions by Senator Bernie Sanders. It seems that according to the Federal Election Commission, Senator Sanders spent nearly $300,000 for private jet travel in the final stretch of his campaign for re-election to the Senate.

The article reports:

Air travel is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, with some estimations saying that the aviation industry accounts for about 11 percent of transportation-related emissions in the country. The environmental impact is greatly magnified in cases of private flights, which carry far fewer people per trip than commercial jets.

Sanders claims on his website that “climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet” and puts the blame chiefly on the growing rate of emissions being produced by the transportation sector.

“Global climate change is real, it is caused mainly by emissions released from burning fossil fuels and it poses a catastrophic threat to the long-term longevity of our planet,” he writes. “The transportation sector accounts for about 26 percent of carbon pollution emissions.”

The Sanders campaign told the Washington Free Beacon it purchased “carbon offsets” to balance out emissions produced on the trip.

“The campaign purchased carbon offsets from Native Energy to support renewable energy projects and invest in carbon reduction projects to balance out the emissions produced on this trip,” Jones said in an email.

The Washington Free Beacon was unable to identify payments made by the campaign to the environmental group. Jones says the purchase will appear in the campaign’s next filing.

So let me get this straight–it’s okay to have a ginormous carbon footprint as long as you are rich enough to buy carbon credits. Meanwhile, all of us little people are supposed to go broke paying ever increasing prices for energy caused by regulations to lower carbon emissions put on us by people who have no intention of curtailing their carbon emissions. Seems a little unfair to me.

Ugly Rears Its Head In The House Of Representatives

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Sometimes dumb ideas come from Republicans as well as Democrats. I am about to illustrate that fact. Yesterday Representative Ted Deutch of Florida introduced H.R. 7173 into the House of Representatives. The bills description is, “To create a Carbon Dividend Trust Fund for the American people in order to encourage market-driven innovation of clean energy technologies and market efficiencies which will reduce harmful pollution and leave a healthier, more stable, and more prosperous nation for future generations.” Never trust the government to create a trust fund–remember the Social Security Trust Fund–it was robbed during the 1960’s (by the government that created it).

Let’s talk about this trust fund for a moment.

The bill states:

“A carbon dividend payment is one pro-rata share for each adult and half a pro-rata share for each child under 19 years old, with a limit of 2 children per household, of amounts available for the month in the Carbon Dividend Trust Fund.”

Do you really want the government commenting or being involved in any way with how many children you have in your family?

The Hill posted an article yesterday about the bill. The article included the following:

…the bill would charge companies when they produce or import fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, based on their expected greenhouse gas emissions.

But instead of using the money to pay for health or community projects, the new bill would distribute it to the public. Its backers say those “dividends” would offset the increased costs from the carbon tax, like higher utility and gasoline bills, for about 70 percent of households.

Dividend funds would be handed out by the Treasury Department under the bill, based on the number of people in a household.

“It’s transparent and easily trackable. You know where the money is going. It protects the American family so that families are not adversely impacted. Dividends would protect most families from cost increases,” Ben Pendergrass, senior director of government affairs at Citizens’ Climate Lobby, told The Hill.

“The market signals should still be there to guide things like fuel efficient cars and dividends protect people who can’t make that transition immediately.”

The bill would also prohibit the federal government from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from the sectors that are taxed, unless the taxes aren’t effective after 10 years. That is an effort to attract support from Republicans, who are nearly united in opposition to Environmental Protection Agency climate regulations.

Rooney focused on the economic benefits of the bill, saying in a statement Wednesday that the revenue carbon neutral fee is good policy and a way “to support emerging alternate sources of energy.”

This bill is a really bad idea. It paves the way for more government intrusion into our private lives and takes more money from Americans. America has cut its greenhouse gas emissions without crippling our economy. We are quite capable of doing so in the future without stifling economic growth and creating even bigger bureaucracies.

 

The Problems With The Climate-Change Report

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The Daily Signal posted an article today about the new Climate Report presented to President Trump.

These are the four areas of the report that are questionable at best:

1. It wildly exaggerates economic costs.

2. It assumes the most extreme (and least likely)climate scenario.

3. It cherry-picks science on extreme weather and misrepresents timelines and causality.

4. Energy taxes are a costly non-solution.

The article notes that the study was partially funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer’s organization. How is this supposed to be an objective study?

The article further notes how the study came up with the economic costs:

The study…calculates these costs on the assumption that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That temperature projection is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.

The article notes that the climate trajectory used in the study is not realistic. The article states:

Despite what the National Climate Assessment says, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 is not a likely scenario. It estimates nearly impossible levels of coal consumption, fails to take into account the massive increase in natural gas production from the shale revolution, and ignores technological innovations that continue to occur in nuclear and renewable technologies.

When taking a more realistic view of the future of conventional fuel use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the doomsday scenarios vanish. Climatologist Judith Curry recently wrote, “Many ‘catastrophic’ impacts of climate change don’t really kick at the lower CO2 concentrations, and [Representative Concentration Pathway] then becomes useful as a ‘scare’ tactic.”

The article explains how some of the data in the study is being manipulated:

Another sleight of hand in the National Climate Assessment is where certain graph timelines begin and end. For example, the framing of heat wave data from the 1960s to today makes it appear that there have been more heat waves in recent years. Framing wildfire data from 1985 until today makes it appear as though wildfires have been increasing in number.

But going back further tells a different story on both counts, as Pielke Jr. has explained in testimony.

Moreover, correlation is not causality. Western wildfires have been particularly bad over the past decade, but it’s hard to say to what extent these are directly owing to hotter and drier temperatures. It’s even more difficult to pin down how much man-made warming is to blame.

Yet the narrative of the National Climate Assessment is that climate change is directly responsible for the increase in economic and environmental destruction of western wildfires. Dismissing the complexity of factors that contribute to a changing climate and how they affect certain areas of the country is irresponsible.

The article explains why carbon taxes are not the answer:

Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposed a carbon tax of between $135 and $5,500 by the year 2030. An energy tax of that magnitude would bankrupt families and businesses, and undoubtedly catapult the world into economic despair.

These policies would simply divert resources away from more valuable use, such as investing in more robust infrastructure to protect against natural disasters or investing in new technologies that make Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 even more of an afterthought than it already should be.

Climate change has been with us as long as the earth has existed–they found plant fossils under the ice in Greenland. The question is, “How much impact does man have on climate, and do we have the ability to impact climate in a positive way?” Considering some of the mistakes we have made in the past when tampering with nature, I truly believe we need to attempt to keep our air and water as clean as possible and leave the rest to nature.

America Is Reducing Its CO2 Emissions

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bp Global posted an article recently detailing CO2 emissions for 2017.

The article reports:

Global CO2 emissions from energy in 2017 grew by 1.6%, rebounding from the stagnant volumes during 2014-2016, and faster than the 10-year average of 1.3%.

This is not really a surprise since the worldwide economy improved during 2017. However, the article reports which countries increased emissions and which countries decreased emissions.

The article reports:

Carbon emissions from energy use from the US are the lowest since 1992, the year that the UNFCCC came into existence. The next largest decline was in Ukraine (-10.1%).

The largest increase in carbon emissions in 2017 came from China (1.6%), a reversal from the past three years when the largest increases in emissions came from India. China’s emissions in 2017 were 0.3% higher than the previous peak in 2014. China has had the world’s largest increments in carbon emission every year this century except in four years – 2000 and between 2014-16.

The next highest increment came from India where emissions rose by 4.4%, though lower than its 10-year average (6% p.a.).

Together, China and India accounted for nearly half of the increase in global carbon emissions.EU emissions were also up (1.5%) with just Spain accounting for 44% of the increase in EU emissions. Among other EU members, UK and Denmark reported the lowest carbon emissions in their history.

President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. It is important to look at the above information in view of that agreement.

According to The New York Times on May 31, 2017:

Under the deal (The Paris Climate Accord), the Obama administration pledged to cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 as well as to commit up to $3 billion in aid for poorer countries by 2020. (The United States has delivered $1 billion to date.) China vowed that its emissions would peak around 2030 and that it would get about 20 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by then. India would continue to reduce its carbon intensity, or CO2 output per unit of economic activity, in line with historical levels.

So under the Paris Climate Accord, the U.S. would cripple its economy and pay money to other countries. China would not really do much before 2030, while America would have to be below 2005 emission levels before 2025. President Trump again withdrew America from an unfair deal, while actually accomplishing the aim of the agreement without crippling the American economy. Meanwhile, China and India, who signed the deal, are increasing their carbon emissions. This is typical of how those who want to weaken America to achieve their goal of one-world government operate. Americans need to understand that America is the biggest obstacle to one-world government, particularly with President Trump in charge.

 

 

Things That Just Make You Wonder

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Investor’s Business Daily posted an article yesterday about the Paris Climate Accord. It seems as if President Trump did the right thing by pulling America out of the agreement.

There is still no agreement among scientists as to the role that man and his civilization play in climate change. Obviously the climate has been changing continually since man has inhabited the earth. There is a documented period of global warming during the Middle Ages, and there is no way that carbon emissions could be responsible for that. There are also plant fossils found beneath the ice in Greenland, another indication that the climate has changed over time. We all remember the TIME Magazine cover during the 1970’s warning of the coming ice age. We also know that our local weatherman is not accurate 100 percent of the time.

The article at Investor’s Business Daily reports:

According to the latest annual UN report on the “emissions gap,” the Paris agreement will provide only a third of the cuts in greenhouse gas that environmentalists claim is needed to prevent catastrophic warming. If every country involved in those accords abides by their pledges between now and 2030 — which is a dubious proposition — temperatures will still rise by 3 degrees C by 2100. The goal of the Paris agreement was to keep the global temperature increase to under 2 degrees.

Eric Solheim, head of the U.N. Environment Program, which produces the annual report, said this week that “One year after the Paris Agreement entered into force, we still find ourselves in a situation where we are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of millions of people from a miserable future. Governments, the private sector and civil society must bridge this catastrophic climate gap.”

The report says unless global greenhouse gas emissions peak before 2020, the CO2 levels will be way above the goal set for 2030, which, it goes on, will make it “extremely unlikely that the goal of holding global warming to well below 2 degrees C can still be reached.”

The article concludes:

What the report does make clear, however, is that all the posturing by government leaders in Paris was just that. Posturing. None of these countries intended to take the drastic and economically catastrophic steps environmentalist claim are needed to prevent a climate change doomsday. As such, Trump was right to stop pretending.

Whether you believe in climate change or not, the Paris climate accord amounted to nothing, or pretty close to it. Even the UN admits that now.

We need to look at the balance between civilization of the environment. America is one of the economic leaders in the world and yet one of the least polluting. Look at the progress we have made in recent years–many of our formerly polluted rivers are being cleaned up, the industries that created the ‘super fund sites’ are now controlled to the degree that they can no longer ruin the environment, waste disposal has improved, and carbon emissions for cars and factories have decreased.

The following chart is from the Energy Information website:

We are making progress. The Paris Agreement would not have positively impacted that progress–it would only have crippled the American economy.