People for the West -Tucson
PO Box 86868, Tucson, AZ 85754-6868 pfw-tucson@cox.net
Newsletter, December, 2016
A New Era For America
by Jonathan DuHamel
On the early morning of November 9, America awoke to a surprise: Donald Trump, instead of Hillary Clinton, was elected President. This outcome was contrary to what the pollsters and mainstream media expected. It was a repudiation of the Washington, D.C. establishment elite, both Republican and Democrat. Perhaps now “hope & change” will mean change for the better, i.e.,reining in federal regulation.
Trump has made a good start by appointing Myron Ebell, who directs the libertarian think-tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team. The EPA is one of the most pernicious agencies in the federal government. EPA regulations have trampled private property rights, and killed much inexpensive electricity generation.
What if, in his inaugural address, Trump were to issue an executive order that says something like “no federal agency shall regulate carbon dioxide emissions from burning of fossil fuels and all existing regulations to that effect are null and void?” Even the EPA admits that the possible effect on climate of its “Clean Power Plan” is prevention of just 0.03°C by the year 2100. That would be a great positive step in quelling the climate madness. It would also boost our economy. EPA regulations on particulate matter have no basis in science.
The EPA itself could be phased out and replaced by the environmental agencies of each state.
The EPA’s “Waters of the United States” rule (WOTUS, see here and here) impacts private property rights because the rule has become so invasive that it regulates every puddle and rill that may occur on or pass through a property.
Trump should reverse most of Obama’s recent designations of National Monuments which are nothing but land grabs that deny beneficial use of federal land. Trump should open up all federal land (except National Parks), and off-shore areas to mineral and energy exploration and development.
The U.S. should withdrawal from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, from the Paris climate agreement and from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC). These agencies and agreements suck money and provide no benefit. In the thousands of pages from reports by the IPCC, they have never produced any physical evidence that carbon dioxide emissions play a significant role in controlling global temperature.
The U.S. should also terminate all federal government subsidies for climate change research and for “renewable” energy. Let the solar and wind turbine companies test the demand for their product on the free market without any artificial markets produced by mandates and subsidies.
Endangered species listings based on projected climate change should be rescinded. In fact, the Endangered Species act should be amended or replaced with something that is more science-based and provides a positive incentive for conservation.
For more background of some of these issues, see my Wryheat blog articles:
EPA Clean Power Plan is Junk Science
EPA’s own human experiments debunk health claims
EPA claims on dangers of particulate matter are false
EPA Clean Power Plan is Junk Science
Replace the Environmental Protection Agency
EPA targets wrong cause of haze in Grand Canyon
The Flaws in the Endangered Species Act
I hope Trump can produce change that returns America to the people. ☼
CLIMATE ISSUES
UN Climate Conference:
Another November event was the UN Climate Change Conference in Marrakech, Morocco, held 7-18 November.
It seems that the UN delegates are terrified of Trump because it could mean the end of their cash cow. (“My only worry is the money,” said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu of Democratic Republic of Congo, who heads a group of the 48 least developed nations. “It’s worrying when you know that Trump is a climate change skeptic,” he toldReuters.).
The conference had two accomplishments:
1) They agreed to delay rules implementing the non-binding Paris Accord until 2018.
2) They produced a “Gender Climate Tracker” that you can download for your iPhone and Android (really). ☼
Other Climate Madness:
Here are some headlines from my post, Climate Madness 9.
There Is A Major Climate Issue Hiding In Your Closet: Fast Fashion.
Children win right to sue US government for climate change inaction.
New study quantifies your personal contribution and guilt over Arctic sea ice melt.
Feds Join Conference on ‘Psychosocial Resilience’ to Climate Change – Causes Depression, PTSD, Suicide, and Spiritual Problems.
Green heads to explode: ‘elimination of GMO crops would cause hike in greenhouse gas emissions’.
The Latest Global Warming Threat: Trick Or Treating.
Explosive coolant being put into cars to fight global warming. ☼
Real Climate Science
Amid scary headlines of melting ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, studies of historic expeditions show conditions today are much like they were 100 years ago.
Scott and Shackleton logbooks prove Antarctic sea ice is not shrinking 100 years after expeditions
by Sarah Knapton
Antarctic sea ice had barely changed from where it was 100 years ago, scientists have discovered, after pouring over the logbooks of great polar explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton.
Experts were concerned that ice at the South Pole had declined significantly since the 1950s, which they feared was driven by man-made climate change.
But new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming. Read more ☼
Accounts from 19th-century Canadian Arctic Explorers’ Logs Reflect Present Climate Conditions
As stated here before, Arctic ice is part of a self-oscillating system with extents expanding and retreating according to processes internal to the ocean-ice-atmosphere components. We don’t know exactly why 19th century ice extent was less than previously or less than the 1970s, but we can be sure it wasn’t due to fossil fuel emissions. (Source)
The widely perceived failure of 19th-century expeditions to find and transit the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic is often attributed to extraordinary cold climatic conditions associated with the “Little Ice Age”evident in proxy records. However, examination of 44 explorers’ logs for the western Arctic from 1818 to 1910 reveals that climate indicators such as navigability, the distribution and thickness of annual sea ice, monthly surface air temperature, and the onset of melt and freeze were within the present range of variability. (Source) ☼
Whoops, turns out concrete is actually a carbon sink
by Anthony Watts
From the “settled science” department and the University or California Irvine, comes this inconvenient fact. For years we’ve been told by academics that cement is another nasty global warming contributor, because of CO2 released during production.
Cement manufacturing is among the most carbon-intensive industrial processes, but an international team of researchers has found that over time, the widely used building material reabsorbs much of the CO2 emitted when it was made.
“It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true,” said Steven Davis, associate professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. “The cement poured around the world since 1930 has taken up a substantial portion of the CO2 released when it was initially produced.” Read more ☼
Global Warming: Policy Hoax versus Dodgy Science
by Dr. Roy Spencer
In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was given a legitimate mandate to clean up our air and water. I remember the pollution crises we were experiencing in the 1960s. But as those problems were solved, the EPA found itself in the precarious position of possibly outliving its usefulness.
As we try to make the environment ever cleaner, the cost goes up dramatically. You can make your house 90% cleaner relatively easily, but making it 99% cleaner will take much more effort.
As any economist will tell you, money you spend on one thing is not available for other things, like health care. So, the risk of over-regulating pollution is that you end up killing more people than you save, because if there is one thing we know kills millions of people every year, it is poverty.
Global warming has become a reason for government to institute policies, whether they be a carbon tax or whatever, using a regulatory mechanism which the public would never agree to if they knew (1) how much it will cost them in reduced prosperity, and (2) how little effect it will have on the climate system.
So, the policy prescription does indeed become a hoax, because the public is being misled into believing that their actions are going to somehow make the climate “better”. Read full post ☼
Study: Earth’s vegetation is causing a global “pause” in CO2 growth
by Anthony Watts
New findings suggest the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere has plateaued in recent years because Earth’s vegetation is grabbing more carbon from the air than in previous decades.
That’s the conclusion of a new multi-institutional study led by a scientist from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). It’s based on extensive ground and atmospheric observations of CO2, satellite measurements of vegetation, and computer modeling. The research is published online Nov. 8 in the journal Nature Communications. Read more see also ☼
Study: Forest Fires in Sierra Nevada Driven by past Land Use Not Climate Change
by Jonathan DuHamel
Researchers from the University of Arizona and Penn State studied fire regimes in the Sierra Nevada Mountain of California for the period 1600 to 2015 and found that land use changes, not climate, were the principal controlling factors. Read more ☼
The Battle with Bureaucracies; The Main Promoters of the Global Warming Deception
by Dr. Tim Ball
There are two major components of the global warming/climate change deception. The involvement of the bureaucrats of each national weather agency and the lack of empirical data. The latter includes inadequate data for creating the climate models and the lack of empirical evidence to support the claims and predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Over the years many individuals began looking at the science behind the IPCC claims that supported their government policies. Many of them formed groups because most needed confirmation; they could not believe what they were finding. They could not believe the levels of corruption, distortion, and misuse of science they found. Read more ☼
West Antarctic Glacial Melting From Deep Earth Geological Heat Flow Not Global Warming
By James Edward Kamis
A few of West Antarctica’s glaciers that lie directly above the 5,000-mile long, world class, heat-emitting West Antarctic Fault / Rift System are bottom melting from deep earth geologically induced high geothermal heat flow and heated fluid flow, not manmade atmospheric global warming. Read more ☼
When Asked To Show Evidence Of Man-Made Warming, Scientists Can’t Do It
By Thomas Richard
There’s probably not a phrase that the global warming alarmists and dim celebrities trying to play the role of intellectuals use more than some variation of “the science is settled.” It’s a catchy phrase that’s intended to shut down debate and shame skeptics.
And it’s simply not true.
The alarmist community has had almost three decades to prove its assumptions, and while it is plausible that there has been a small measure of warming, the disaster many predicted hasn’t occurred.
Worse for them, it’s impossible to say with any degree of certainty that the warming that has happened — and quite possibly there’s been none at all — was caused by man. Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled throughout its existence. It’s part of the natural cycle.
Yet the alarmist community persists and never acknowledges that it might be wrong. At the same time, when its members are pressed to prove that their one-way beliefs are indeed fact, they can’t do it. Read more ☼
ENERGY ISSUES
Protected forests in Europe felled to meet EU renewable targets – report
by Arthur Neslen, The Guardian
Protected forests are being indiscriminately felled across Europe to meet the EU’s renewable energy targets, according to an investigation by the conservation group Birdlife.
Up to 65% of Europe’s renewable output currently comes from bioenergy, involving fuels such as wood pellets and chips, rather than wind and solar power.
Bioenergy fuel is supposed to be harvested from residue such as forest waste but, under current legislation, European bioenergy plants do not have to produce evidence that their wood products have been sustainably sourced.
Birdlife found logging taking place in conservation zones such as Poloniny National Park in eastern Slovakia and in Italian riverside forests around Emilia-Romagna, where it said it had been falsely presented as flood-risk mitigation. Read more ☼
Analysis: Adding More Solar, Wind Power Increases Dependence On Fossil Fuels, ‘Doubles’ CO2 Emissions
By Kenneth Richard
As the reputed world leader in green energy policy, Germany plans to eliminate nuclear power as an energy source in the next 5 years. Adding more wind and solar power ultimately raises CO2 emissions, as more fossil fuel backup capacity must be built. Read more ☼
Obama Tears Up Drilling Permits to Stop Gigantic Energy Boom in Colorado
By Chriss W. Street
Sally Jewell, the U.S. interior secretary, just cancelled leases to drill for natural gas on federal land in Colorado, in a last-ditch effort to stop an energy boom bigger than Bakken Shale discovery in North Dakota.
Jewell’s Bureau of Land Management claimed that the 25 “Mancos” energy drilling leases now being cancelled were just a non-performing portion of 65 leases on “lands managed by the White River National Forest” and “amount to less than ½ of 1 percent of the active leases on public lands in the state of Colorado.”
But the 25 properties were “non-performing” only because they have been tangled in red-tape since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, even though they were leased in 2005 during George W. Bush’s administration.
The BLM manages nearly 700 million acres of federal lands in the United States. Because of tight restrictions, the “onshore” oil and gas wells on BLM lands accounts for just 11 percent of the natural gas supply and five percent of the oil supply in the United States. Read more ☼
The Facts About the Dakota Access Pipeline That Protesters Don’t Want You to Know
by Rep. Kevin Cramer
For more than three months, thousands of protesters, most of them from out of state, have illegally camped on federal land in Morton County, North Dakota, to oppose the construction of a legally permitted oil pipeline project that is 85 percent complete.
The celebrities, political activists, and anti-oil extremists who are blocking the pipeline’s progress are doing so based on highly charged emotions rather than actual facts on the ground.
This 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline will deliver as many as 570,000 barrels of oil a day from northwestern North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to connect to existing pipelines in Illinois. It will do this job far more safely than the current method of transporting it by 750 rail cars a day.
The protesters say they object to the pipeline’s being close to the water intake of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. However, this should be of no concern as it will sit approximately 92 feet below the riverbed, with increased pipe thickness and control valves at both ends of the crossing to reduce the risk of an incident, which is already low. Read more ☼
Peak Oil Indefinitely Postponed
by David Middleton
The U.S. Geological Survey has made its largest discovery of recoverable crude ever under parts of West Texas, the federal agency announced.
A recent assessment found the “Wolfcamp shale” geologic formation in the Midland area holds an estimated 20 billion barrels of accessible oil along with 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. That’s three times higher than the amount of recoverable crude the agency found in the Bakken-Three Forks region in the upper midwest in 2013, making it “the largest estimated continuous oil accumulation that USGS has assessed in the United States to date,” according to a statement.
“The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more,” said Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the USGS Energy Resources Program. Read more
USGS press release, USGS Assessment paper ☼
It’s Official: Falling Carbon Emissions In US Have Little To Do With EPA Regulations
by Andrew Follett, Daily Caller
Scientists found that American carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell again for the third straight year because of hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — and not environmental regulations, according to new data.
Early projections from researchers at the Global Carbon Project found that global emissions will only rise by about 0.2 percent relative to last year, largely because U.S. CO2 emissions declined by 2.6 percent in 2015 and are expected to fall an additional 1.7 percent this year. This dramatic shift can be mostly attributed to fracking.
America’s CO2 emissions have fallen by 12 percent since their high in 2005. Fracking is the primary reason for the decline in American CO2 emissions, and not the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to reports published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). One of these reports attributes falling CO2 emissions to “decreased use of coal and the increased use of natural gas for electricity generation.”
Natural gas emits about half the CO2 of coal power, and is already cheaper than coal in many locations due to fracking. The EIA estimates roughly 68 percent of the falling CO2 emissions are due to the switch from coal to natural gas. Read more ☼
MIT: traditional incandescent light bulbs, reinvented, may make a comeback
From MIT News:
Researchers combine the warm look of traditional light bulbs with 21st-century energy efficiency
Traditional light bulbs, thought to be well on their way to oblivion, may receive a reprieve thanks to a technological breakthrough. Read more ☼
ENVIRONMENT ISSSUES
Tapped out: science shuts down an anti-fracking myth about drinking water
By Kathleen Sgamma
Two days after Donald Trump’s election victory, environmental regulators in Wyoming debunked one of the biggest claims of anti-oil and gas activists: That hydraulic fracturing – also known as fracking – contaminated drinking water in Pavillion, Wyoming, a small town of roughly 240 people.
For years, anti-fracking activists have cited Pavillion’s plight over and over again as proof that hydraulic fracturing must be banned. Josh Fox, director of the anti-fracking movie Gasland, has probably done more than anyone to spread this assertion. Fox even got himself arrested at a 2012 congressional hearing on the Pavillion case. I got to watch that happen: I was a witness at the hearing for the oil and gas industry
It was all a myth. Not even President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) believed it was true. In fact, the so-called contamination in Pavillion – announced to the world in 2011 – was almost certainly caused by the EPA itself. Read more
☼
Newly discovered EPA report says ozone measurements may be way off – cities may be in compliance
by Forrest M. Mims III
Accurate ozone measurements are required by the Clean Air Act, for public health, many jobs and billions of dollars are at stake. Yet since 1999 the EPA has failed to acknowledge erroneous ozone measurements biased upward by mercury vapor and other interferences.
Measurement error may apply to a supposed ozone spike in San Antonio on October 3, 2016, for on that day much of Texas was blanketed by smog and mercury vapor from coal-burning power plants. San Antonio may now be subject to EPA sanctions for a violation it may not have committed. Read more ☼
Gov’t Admits Ethanol Mandates Are Expensive And Failing
By Andrew Follett, Daily Caller
Federal ethanol mandates are extremely expensive and won’t meet their goals, according to a new report published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
GAO’s report concluded that producing advanced biofuel is extremely expensive, takes a long time to produce and likely won’t meet its goals of reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil or to lowering carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Read more ☼
EPA Rushed ‘Waters Of The US’ Rule To Appease Environmentalists
by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rushed a major water regulation to appease the political ambitions of the White House and environmentalist allies,according to a report by congressional investigators.
Regulators based the “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, on politics rather than science, according to the report. WOTUS expands federal power over bodies of water, including those on private property. Read more ☼
MISCELLANY
Trump and College Chaos
by Walter E. Williams
If one needed more evidence of the steep decay in academia, Donald Trump’s victory provided it. Let’s begin by examining the responses to his win, not only among our wet-behind-the-ears college students, many of whom act like kindergarteners, but also among college professors and administrators. Read more ☼
WaPo op-ed calls on America to get rid of states
By Jon Street
A new Washington Post op-ed calls for “getting rid of” states in the United States of America and moving to a system where only federal and local governments exist.
“States are a relic of the past. It’s time to get rid of them,” Lawrence R. Samuel, a Miami-based author, wrote in the piece published Tuesday. Read more ☼
Why the Electoral College?
Patriot Post Staff
Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump in the popular vote, though Trump won the presidential election by surpassing the 270 electoral vote threshold. Predictably, this has resulted in outrage among leftists who argue that, in a democracy, the popular vote should determine the election outcome. In most cases, it does. But there are a few instances (like Tuesday) in which the electoral count is at odds with the popular vote.
But there’s a reason for it. Sadly, those who are protesting and rioting across the nation lack a fundamental understanding of American politics and why the Founders were leery of deciding a presidential election based solely on the popular vote. It boils down to the fact America is not a pure democracy; rather, it is a Republic designed specifically to prevent the tyranny that inevitably accompanies pure democracies (majority rule). The fact so many people, particularly millennials, don’t understand or care to comprehend the electoral system’s importance reflects badly on our increasingly progressive education system, which teaches that America’s system is a fraud and should be amended to mirror that of other countries. That assertion is wrong and deeply troubling. See video ☼
“During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.” —Thomas Jefferson (1805) ☼
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
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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
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