People for the West -Tucson
PO Box 86868, Tucson, AZ 85754-6868 pfw-tucson@cox.net
Newsletter, October, 2016
A Matter of Values
by Jonathan DuHamel
People for the West is a 501(c)3 corporation which means we cannot advocate for or against candidates for political office. We can, however, comment on values. You can decide which, if any, candidates hold values similar to yours.
At PFW, we favor limited, constitutional government, free enterprise, and hold property rights dear. Government, especially the federal government, has increasingly been smothering our individual rights through questionable laws and myriad regulations.
” America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and loose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”– Abraham Lincoln
“Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck.” —Thomas Jefferson (1822)
Regarding the matter of values and attitude, I came up a poignant essay which shows how far we have come from original principles. I reproduce it here with a few edits:
Children of the 1930s & 1940s “The Last Ones”
by Carl D. Peterson, Newstimes (source)
Born in the 1930s and early 1940s, we exist as a very special age cohort. We are the “last ones.” We are the last, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the war itself with fathers and uncles going off. We are the last to remember ration books for everything from sugar to shoes to stoves. We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans. We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available. My mother delivered milk in a horse drawn cart. We are the last to hear Roosevelt’s radio assurances and to see gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors. We can also remember the parades on August 15, 1945; VJ Day.
We saw the ‘boys’ home from the war build their Cape Cod style houses, pouring the cellar, tar papering it over and living there until they could afford the time and money to build it out.
We are the last who spent childhood without television; instead imagining what we heard on the radio. As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood “playing outside until the street lights came on.” We did play outside and we did play on our own. There was no little league. The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like. Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.
Newspapers and magazines were written for adults. We are the last who had to find out for ourselves. As we grew up, the country was exploding with growth. The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow. VA loans fanned a housing boom. Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work. New highways would bring jobs and mobility. The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics. In the late 40s and early 50’s the country seemed to lie in the embrace of brisk but quiet order as it gave birth to its new middle class. Our parents understandably became absorbed with their own new lives. They were free from the confines of the depression and the war. They threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined. We weren’t neglected but we weren’t today’s all-consuming family focus. They were glad we played by ourselves ‘until the street lights came on.’ They were busy discovering the post war world. Most of us had no life plan, but with the unexpected virtue of ignorance and an economic rising tide we simply stepped into the world and went to find out.
We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed. Based on our naïve belief that there was more where this came from, we shaped life as we went. We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future. Of course, just as today, not all Americans shared in this experience. Depression poverty was deep rooted. Polio was still a crippler. The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 1950s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks. China became Red China. Eisenhower sent the first “advisors” to Vietnam. Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power. We are the last to experience an interlude when there were no existential threats to our homeland. We came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, climate change, technological upheaval and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with insistent unease.
Only we can remember both a time of apocalyptic war and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. We experienced both.
We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better not worse. We did not have it easy. Our wages were low, we did without, we lived within our means, we worked hard to get a job, and harder still to keep it. Things that today are considered necessities, we considered unreachable luxuries. We made things last. We fixed, rather than replaced. We had values and did not take for granted that “Somebody will take care of us”. We cared for ourselves and we also cared for others.
We are the ‘last ones.’ ☼
“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.” —Thomas Jefferson (1802)
THE CLIMATE CIRCUS
The U.S. Should Withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
by Nicolas Loris, Brett D. Schaefer and Steven Groves
In order to satisfy its commitments to the recently signed Paris Agreement on climate change, the Obama Administration plans to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2025 by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels. If the U.S. follows through with this plan by restricting access to carbon dioxide–emitting natural resources, American households and businesses will incur higher energy costs. These increases in costs will, in turn, slow economic growth and reduce per capita income growth while having little to no impact on the projected warming. Withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change would send a clear signal that the U.S. believes that the widespread international approach is costly and ineffective and would avoid future arrears to the UNFCCC as current law should prohibit U.S. financial contributions after the Palestinian Authority formally acceded to the treaty. Withdrawal would will not preclude the U.S. from studying climate change, understanding the risks, and working with a smaller group of nations through informal arrangements to undertake appropriate steps. It would, however, prevent abuse of the UNFCCC framework as a vehicle for asserting U.S. commitments while avoiding Senate advice and consent in the treaty process.
Heritage Foundation economists estimate that American household electricity expenditures will increase 15 percent to 20 percent over the next decade as a result of the Administration’s global warming regulations. Other economic consequences of the Administration’s war on affordable energy over the next two decades are estimated to be:
An overall annual average shortfall of nearly 400,000 American jobs, including an average manufacturing shortfall of over 200,000 jobs; A total income loss of more than $30,000 for a family of four; and an aggregate U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) loss of over $2.5 trillion. Read full report ☼
Tropical Hotspot ‘Fingerprint’ Of Global Warming Doesn’t Exist In The Real World Data
One of the main lines of evidence used by the Obama administration to justify its global warming regulations doesn’t exist in the real world, according to a new report by climate researchers.
Researchers analyzed temperature observations from satellites, weather balloons, weather stations and buoys and found the so-called “tropical hotspot” relied upon by the EPA to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant “simply does not exist in the real world.”
They found that once El Ninos are taken into account, “there is no ‘record setting’ warming to be concerned about.”
“These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s claim of a Tropical Hot Spot (THS), caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world,” reads the report by economist James Wallace, climatologist John Christy and meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo. Full post by Michael Bastasch. ☼
Scientist Sees No Link Between Accumulated Cyclone Energy And Global Warming Over Past 30 Years
by P Gosselin
Atmospheric research scientist Dr. Philip Klotzbach tweeted a chart showing that accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) has not risen at all in 30 years, despite earlier massive hype and hollering by climate scientists and media, who insist “man-made” global warming is causing more frequent and intense cyclones. Read more ☼
Scientific Literature Substantiates Insignificant CO2 Influence
by Kenneth Richard
The explanation that water vapor and clouds are the most dominant contributors to the overall greenhouse effect — and that the CO2 contribution is insignificant by comparison — has been well known and documented in the scientific literature for decades.
For instance:
Between the years 1992 and 2014, anthropogenic CO2 emissions rates grew by 65%, or from a yearly average of 6.1 gigatons of carbon (GtC) in 1992 to a rate of 10.1 GtC by 2014 (Global Carbon Budget, 2014). However, according to a new Nature paper entitled “A Hiatus of the Greenhouse Effect” by Song, Wang, & Tang (2016), there has been an overall hiatus to slight decline in the influence of the greenhouse warming effect on temperature beginning in 1992, which has coincided with the well-established pause in global warming since the early 2000s. Read more ☼
Arctic Sea Ice — it all melted before and it didn’t matter
by JoNova
Matt Ridley in The Australian explains how every man and his dog is forecasting the doom of the Arctic sea ice, and not only have they been wrong year after year, but they all assume that if the ice all melts it’ll be a global disaster. But Earth’s already been-there done-that, and for years, and it was no-biggie. Polar bears obviously got through it, as did seals. Humans without protective solar panels somehow spread far and wide, and generally flourished. Read more
Northwest Passage Was Open In 1904
Captain Amundsen navigated the northwest passage in 1904 – New York Times ☼
President Obama Demands Intelligence Agencies Draft Plans to Combat Climate Change
by Eric Worrall
President Obama is asking 20 federal offices to work together on a national security strategy to address climate change.
How does the CIA, the NSA, and all the other agencies in the bottomless government agency alphabet soup respond to a demand that they plan for combatting climate change? Do they simply analyse what is happening around the world, and make stuff up when it becomes apparent that climate is not a significant issue? Or do they try to look busy, by harassing ordinary people who oppose government policy? (Source) ☼
ENERGY
Despite Claims to the Contrary, Science Says Fracking Not Causing Increased Earthquakes
by Marita Noon
Despite these dramatic accusations, the science doesn’t support them. The USGS website clearly states: “Fracking is NOT causing most of the induced earthquakes.” An important study from Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences on the Oklahoma earthquakes makes clear that they are “unrelated to hydraulic fracturing.”
When a well uses the hydraulic fracturing enhanced recovery technology, millions of gallons of water, plus sand and chemicals, are pumped into the well at high pressure to crack the rock and release the resource. When the oil or gas comes up from deep underground, the liquids injected come back to the surface too. This is called flowback water. That water is separated from the oil and/or gas and may be reused, recycled, or disposed of in deep wells known as injection wells—which are believed to be the source of the induced seismic activity.
This type of wastewater is produced at nearly every oil and gas extraction well—whether or not it is fracked. While the hydraulic fracturing process is typically only a few days, the produced water can be brought to the surface with the oil and/or gas for years. Read more☼
Obama administration orders ND pipeline construction to stop
by Devin Henry
A federal judge Friday denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s request to halt construction on the 1,170-mile pipeline. The administration’s decision came shortly after that decision.
The tribe had sued over the Army Corps’ approval of the project under a historic preservation law, but the judge ruled that regulators had acted properly when issuing permitting for the project.
The Obama administration said it would not authorize construction on a critical stretch of the Dakota Access pipeline, handing a significant victory to the Indian tribe fighting the project the same day the group lost a court battle. Read more ☼
Obama Kept His Promise, 83,000 Coal Jobs Lost And 400 Mines Shuttered
by Andrew Follett
This Labor Day, America has 83,000 fewer coal jobs and 400 coal mines than it did when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, showing that the president has followed through on his pledge to “bankrupt” the coal industry. Read more ☼
Chamber: Fossil Fuel Ban on Federal Lands Would Cost Billions
by Jack Fitzpatrick
The U.S. stands to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue if it bans fossil fuel extraction on federal lands and waters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned on releasing a study quantifying the potential economic impact.
The report by the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy said such a policy would block 25 percent of the country’s natural gas and coal production, and cut $11.3 billion in annual royalties, $70 billion in annual GDP, and 380,000 jobs.
The Department of the Interior announced in January it would freeze coal leases on federal land for three years, and the “Keep it in the Ground Act,” introduced in the House by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and the Senate by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), would ban fossil fuel extraction offshore and on federal lands.
That would “have a direct, harmful effect on the American economy, and in particular decimate several states that rely heavily on revenues from federal land production,” said Karen Harbert, the institute’s president, in a statement. (Source) ☼
ECONOMY
The Experiment: Capitalism versus Socialism
by Paul Driessen
What if we could destroy a country’s political and economic fabric through a natural disaster – or a war – and then rebuild one half of it using capitalism as its base, while the other rebuilds on a socialist foundation? Let the virtues of each system work their magic, and then see where the two new countries are after fifty years. Actually, we’ve already performed The Experiment. It’s post-war Germany – and the outcome ought to end the debate over which system is better. Read more ☼
Wall Street Journal: Why Venture Capitalists Gave Up on Renewables
by Eric Worrall
Wall Street Journal has written a fascinating explanation for why venture capitalists have given up on renewables.
Two experts say high costs and low returns sent venture capitalists fleeing. A new funding model, they say, is crucial.
A decade ago, clean-energy companies were the hot trend that venture capitalists were chasing. Oil and natural-gas prices were on the rise and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” had just made its premiere.
But high hopes that the clean-energy sector would replicate the big returns of biomedical and software startups quickly faded. Instead, monumental losses piled up: Venture-capital investors lost more than half of the $25 billion they pumped into clean-energy technology startups from 2006 to 2011. Read more ☼
“One of the greatest mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” — M. Friedman, 1975
REGULATION
EPA Mandate Created A $1 Billion Market In Fraudulent Biofuel Credits, Says Criminal Investigator
by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller
There may be $1 billion worth of fraudulent biofuel credits circulating in the U.S., according to a former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) criminal investigator.
“Based on my experience, I believe the cost of these fraud schemes to victims and consumers, including taxpayers and obligated parties, is approaching $1 billion,” Doug Parker, the president of E&W Strategies, wrote in a report on biofuel fraud, commissioned by the oil refining Valero Corporation. Read more ☼
Emails reveal collusion between EPA and green groups on crafting climate-change rules
By Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times
A newly released cache of government emails offers more evidence of behind-the-scenes collusion between the Environmental Protection Agency and green groups in crafting greenhouse-gas regulations, including an effort by one green lobbyist to enlist the EPA in fundraising. Read more ☼
The cost of better gas mileage
Washington Times
The roadside cross, displaying a name, perhaps plastic flowers and sometimes a teddy bear attached with duct tape, is a symbol of the broken hearts left behind by someone who died on that spot. After years of declining traffic fatalities, the number of lives lost on the nation’s roads and highways is rising again. As authorities search for a cause of the mounting human toll, one factor likely won’t be considered: the regulations mandating higher engine fuel efficiency that compromise vehicle safety.
The National Transportation Safety Administration calculates that 35,092 persons died on U.S. roadways in 2015, a 7.2 percent increase over 2014, and the largest increase in 50 years. “Despite decades of safety improvements, far too many people are killed on our nation’s roads every year,” says U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “Solving this problem will take teamwork, so we’re issuing a call to action and asking researchers, safety experts, data scientists, and the public to analyze the fatality data and help find ways to prevent these tragedies.”
Unless Mr. Foxx’s problem-solvers can repeal the laws of physics, the uptick may foretell a worsening trend. The U.S. Department of Transportation has cranked up fuel economy regulations, called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program, or CAFE, forcing auto manufacturers to redesign their cars and trucks with lighter weight — some say “flimsy” — material. Plastic is a poor substitute for steel. Read more ☼
Will the National Academy of Sciences Allow Epa to Get Away with Murder?
by Joseph Bast
Is EPA lying when it says even trace amounts of PM in the air kill hundreds of thousands of people every year? Or is it lying to hundreds of volunteers who participate in experiments involving exposure to levels of PM that EPA claims are toxic?
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been twisting science and epidemiology to fit an extreme environmental agenda for years, but finally, finally!, it may be about to be hoisted with its own petard. Assuming, that is, that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) doesn’t ignore its legal and ethical mandate to perform an honest evaluation of EPA’s misconduct.
A merry band of public health experts has been on EPA’s trail for several years, hoping to expose a profound dilemma: Either EPA broke the law by sponsoring human experiments forbidden under domestic and international law, custom, and medical/scientific ethics, or it has repeatedly lied to Congress and the American people about the health threat of exposure to low levels of particulate matter. Read more ☼
BLM sage grouse guidelines will bury land users in paperwork
by Thomas Mitchell
The Bureau of Land Management this past week issued eight guideline memos instructing federal land managers in 11 Western states as to how they are to carry out policies intended to protect greater sage grouse — a move that threatens to bury ranchers, miners, oil and gas explorers and construction companies under a mountain of paperwork and impose lengthy delays, while doing little to actually protect the birds.
The move comes a year after the Interior Department declined to list sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act but instead issued reams of land use restrictions meant to protect the grouse, even though the number of male grouse counted in leks across the West had increased by 63 percent between 2013 and 2015, according to the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies.
Restrictions are being imposed even though sage grouse are legally hunted in many Western states, including Nevada. Read more ☼
Senator Markey’s Climate Education Act Goes The Wrong Way
by David Wojick
The “Climate Change Education Act” (S.3074) directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to establish a climate change education program focused on formal and informal learning for all age levels.
The program would explore solutions to climate change, the dangers we face in a warming world, and relatively small changes in daily routines that can have a profound global impact. The legislation also establishes a grant program to support public outreach programs that improve access to clean energy jobs and research funds so local communities can address climate mitigation and adaptation issues.”
There is a lot not to like here, beginning with the false scientific claims. The first is hyping the supposed dangers we face in a warming world, which simply do not exist.
In summary this so-called Climate Education Act does nothing that is good, for the climate or the students. It is based on false science and pushes NOAA in the wrong direction. NOAA should be trying to understand climate change, not promote renewable technologies in the name of dangerous global warming. Read more ☼
Government Workers Now Outnumber Manufacturing Workers by 9,932,000
By Terence P. Jeffrey, CNSNews.com
Government employees in the United States outnumber manufacturing employees by 9,932,000, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Federal, state and local government employed 22,213,000 people in August, while the manufacturing sector employed 12,281,000. (Source) ☼
How a New California Climate Law Will Strangle Manufacturing
by David Kreutzer
California just hung up a big “Manufacturing Workers Need Not Apply” sign. It took the form of extended, stricter, and even less realistic carbon dioxide regulations.
A new California bill extends legislation previously set to expire in 2020 and imposes dramatically deeper emissions cuts for 2030. Under the new measure, California must cut its carbon dioxide emissions to a level 40 percent below its 1990 level by 2030.
It’s worth noting that California’s population is projected to be 50 percent higher in 2030 than it was in 1990. It’s also worth noting that carbon dioxide is colorless, odorless, and nontoxic. Its purported health and climate impacts result from carbon dioxide’s effect on global warming. However, no amount of emissions regulation in California (or even the United States as a whole) will have a significant impact on global warming —the developing world’s demand for affordable energy will swamp any cuts made by the U.S.
But the added regulatory burden will almost certainly drive up energy costs, which is bad news for consumers and businesses—and especially bad for energy-intensive industries like manufacturing.
California’s existing regulations have already done damage. Since 1990, California energy prices have risen faster than the rest of the country. By 2014, the average price of electricity in California was 46 percent higher than the average for the country as a whole; and even more problematic for manufacturing jobs, the industrial price of electricity in the state was 75 percent higher. Read more ☼
PROPERTY RIGHTS
A UN and tribal takeover?
By Lawrence Kogan
A massive 792-page Senate Energy Committee bill threatens to authorize federal bureaucrats to cede extensive control over western state water and property rights, energy development and forest management to Native American tribes, local UN sustainability councils, and radical environmentalist groups. Certain provisions could undermine the foundations of our nation from within our nation.
S.2012, the North American Energy Security and Infrastructure Act of 2016, incorporates some 393 amendments. Incredibly, it is being driven forward by U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and other members of Congress behind closed doors. Probably very few have read the bill in its entirety. Virtually none understand its likely impacts on western and other rural lands, water and property rights, potentially throughout America, or on the families and communities whose lives will be upended.
This secretive approach – with no opportunities for meaningful public examination or comment, even by those who will be most affected – is almost unprecedented. It could well become another example of “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it.” But numerous people will have to live with the consequences, while the authors and implementers walk away exempted, unscathed and unaccountable.
The bill’s tribal government forest management provisions are extremely harmful and could severely diminish the constitutionally protected rights of private property owners throughout the United States, the Western States Constitutional Rights consortium emphasizes. Read more ☼
MISCELLANEOUS
Ron Arnold picks apart the Union of Concerned Scientists
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is not a professional scientific organization, instead it pursues left-wing advocacy on technology, environmental, and energy issues—regardless of what the scientific data show. Despite the impression given by its name and the image the way in which the media portrays it, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is not a professional scientific organization; in fact, for a $25.00 donation, you can also become a “concerned scientist.” Read more ☼
The Inevitable Evolution of Bad Science
by Ed Yong
“A simulation shows how the incentives of modern academia naturally select for weaker and less reliable results. Now, imagine you’re a researcher who wants to game this system. Here’s what you do. Run many small and statistically weak studies. Tweak your methods on the fly to ensure positive results. If you get negative results, sweep them under the rug. Never try to check old results; only pursue new and exciting ones. These are not just flights of fancy. We know that such practices abound. They’re great for getting publications, but they also pollute the scientific record with results that aren’t actually true. As Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet once wrote, ‘No one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive.’” Read more ☼
Two Hundred Million Dollar Scientific Grant Fraud Case
Federal Prosecutors have launched a gigantic fraud case against Duke University, North Carolina, accusing Duke University of embezzling $200 million in federal research grants, by presenting doctored data with their grant applications. Read story ☼
The Gipper: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” ☼
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Newsletters can be viewed online on Jonathan’s Wryheat Blog:
https://wryheat.wordpress.com/
See my essay on climate change:
https://wryheat.wordpress.com/climate-in-perspective/
The Constitution is the real contract with America.
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People for the West – Tucson, Inc.
PO Box 86868
Tucson, AZ 85754-6868
Jonathan DuHamel, President & Editor
Dr. John Forrester, Vice President
Lonni Lees, Associate Editor
People for the West – Tucson, Inc. is an Arizona tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) corporation. Newsletter subscriptions are free.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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