People for the West -Tucson
PO Box 86868, Tucson, AZ 85754-6868 pfw-tucson@cox.net
Newsletter, August, 2017
Real environmentalism can go hand in hand with natural resource production, private property rights, and access to public lands
California’s Climate Craziness
by Jonathan DuHamel
Following President Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, Gov. Jerry Brown of the People’s Republic of California made an agreement with China calling for greater collaboration on countering climate change. (Source) This agreement may be unconstitutional because Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution forbids States from entering into any treaty, alliance, compact, or confederation with a foreign country. The Paris Climate Accord, even with full compliance by all countries, would have almost no effect on global temperature (see details in the lead article of the July newsletter).
According to an article by Bjorn Lomborg in the L.A. Times:
California lawmakers voted to extend the state’s cap-and-trade program for another 10 years.
At the moment, California’s greenhouse gas emissions account for less than 1% of global emissions, and a little less than 7% of U.S. emissions. The state now plans to cut its emissions by the equivalent of 181.5 million tons of carbon dioxide by 2030 — to 40% below its 1990 levels.
Even if California succeeds in making the new cuts and sticks to them for the rest of the century, according to calculations using a standard model of the U.N. Climate Panel, they will amount to a difference of 0.008 degrees Fahrenheit (0.0044 degrees Celsius). California’s official estimates put the cost of its climate change policy at $13 billion to $22.5 billion a year. Read more ☼
California Requires Solar Panels on All Homes and Windmills on All Farms
by Bruce Bialosky
The California Senate Majority Leader Kevin de León has introduced a new bill that would mandate the Golden State get all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045. This replaces a law that was passed in 2016 that dictated that renewable energy sources be 50% of all electricity produced by 2030. This bill moves that requirement up to 2025 with the 50% edict and establishes the new 100% standard 20 years later.
What has not been widely discussed in the press – and buried in the details of the bill – is that all new homes and all homes sold must have solar panels as their source of energy. All apartment buildings with more than four units must install solar panels by 2025, and all commercial and office buildings must do the same. As for farms, they must commit 25% of their acreage to windmills. Read more
See also: Energy costs making California unaffordable for too many ☼
California dumps millions of dollars of unusable renewable electricity to other states
by Larry Hamlin
California’s renewable energy policy pushing huge mandated increases in wind and solar so the state’s globally irrelevant greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets can be met has it’s citizens providing and paying millions of dollars for unusable renewable energy to be sent to other states – and this problem will likely only grow in the future. This happens because solar and wind generation cannot respond to demand. Other states are sometimes paid to take the extra. Read more ☼
And, finally, the California mind set is entering the macabre. California bill proposes disposing of corpses by dissolving them in lye rather than cremating them.According to the authors of the proposed law, this is to avoid putting CO2 into the atmosphere from the cremation of people’s bodies. See: AB-967 Human remains disposal. (Source) ☼
CLIMATE
A Simple Question for Climate Alarmists
by Jonathan DuHamel
“What physical evidence supports the contention that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the principal cause of global warming since 1970?”
(Remember back in the 1970s, climate scientists and media were predicting a return to an “ice age.”)
I have posed that question to five “climate scientist” professors at the University of Arizona who claim that our carbon dioxide emissions are the principal cause of dangerous global warming. Yet, when asked the question, none could cite any supporting physical evidence.
Some of the professors would claim that computer models, when corrected for natural variation, required carbon dioxide emissions to correlate with observed warming of the late 20th Century. But computer modeling is not physical evidence; it is mere speculation. And correlation does not prove causation. Read more ☼
Fake Warming:
A new peer-reviewed study finds that nearly all reported warming in the 20th century is a result of historic adjustments made to the original data. The study concludes: “The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets [Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data, produced by NOAA, NASA, and HADLEY] are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.” Read the study ☼
Modern Warming Is Substantially Artificial, Traced To Urbanization, Bias
By Kenneth Richard
Scientists: Temperature Data Contamination Accounts For 33% – 75% Of Modern Warming
Urban heat from paved roads, buildings, and machinery can artificially inflate temperatures substantially above measured temperatures from non-urban areas. This introduces a significant non-climatic warming bias into long-term records. Heat from an urban (or highly populated) environment can artificially raise temperatures by as much as 3°C to 10°C relative to nearby rural locations. This is true even for villages in the Arctic. Read more ☼
ENERGY
Australia: Senator Claims Green Energy Is Causing A ‘National Emergency’
by Andrew Follett
Australia is facing a “national emergency” of extremely high power prices due to green energy, according to an Aussie senator.
One Nation Sen. Malcolm Roberts, a former coal miner, claimed 60,000 households in the state of New South Wales needed government help to keep their electricity on due to the expense of green energy. He called for the government to scrap renewable energy targets (RET) scheme.
Electricity prices rose to 200 cents per kilowatt-hour during a widespread power outage last September. That’s roughly 20 times more expensive than the average U.S. power price. Read more ☼
Economic Return on Energy Investment
Writing for the Global Warming Policy Forum, Economics Professor Michael Kelly brings up an important concept that many writers on energy issues fail to consider: Economic Return on Energy Investment.
In the US, following the Civil War, fossil fuels such as coal quickly replaced biomass (wood) and muscle power (animal and human). The economy boomed. People found the care and feeding of a steam engine is much easier than the care and feeding of horses. City streets became much cleaner, and boots were no longer needed. What was important was not the number of people employed in a particular energy sector, but the employment the energy sector created in other economic sectors.
Kelly’s Economic Return on Energy Investment is a measure of the productivity of various energy types. He finds that 9% of the global GDP is tied up in energy, yielding a return of about 11:1. For coal and gas power plants, the return is about 50:1. For nuclear power plants it is about 70:1. The low values of traditional biomass, and other external issues bring the global value down to 11:1. Applying this analysis to solar photovoltaics, he finds a return of less than 4:1; for wind power, a return of less than 8:1. In brief, there is not much opportunity for solar and wind to lift the third world to modern European standards. Read more ☼
Navy Study Says Wind Turbines Could Disrupt Military Operations
by Andrew Follett, Daily Caller
A Department of Defense study found that industrial wind farms could hamper military readiness, according to a top U.S. Navy official.
The general conclusion of the study confirmed that primary radar detection may be significantly degraded in airspace immediately above wind farms and in some cases beyond the wind farm. When flying in such areas of degraded primary radar coverage, there is increased risk to Navy pilots from civilian aircraft operating without active transponders. Wind turbine’s interference with radar can actually be dangerous to military aviators, according to the letter. Read more ☼
Monumental, unsustainable environmental impacts
By Paul Driessen
Demands that the world replace fossil fuels with wind, solar and biofuel energy – to prevent supposed catastrophes caused by manmade global warming and climate change – ignore three fundamental flaws.
1) In the Real World outside the realm of computer models, the unprecedented warming and disasters are simply not happening: not with temperatures, rising seas, extreme weather or other alleged problems.
2) The process of convicting oil, gas, coal and carbon dioxide emissions of climate cataclysms has been unscientific and disingenuous. It ignores fluctuations in solar energy, cosmic rays, oceanic currents and multiple other powerful natural forces that have controlled Earth’s climate since the dawn of time, dwarfing any role played by CO2. It ignores the enormous benefits of carbon-based energy that created and still powers the modern world and continues to lift billions out of poverty, disease and early death.
3) Renewable energy proponents pay little or no attention to the land and raw material requirements, and associated environmental impacts, of wind, solar and biofuel programs on scales required to meet mankind’s current and growing energy needs, especially as poor countries improve their living standards. Read more ☼
Toxic Waste From Solar Panels: 300 Times That of Nuclear Power
by David Middleton
Japan’s Environment Ministry issued a stark warning: the amount of solar panel waste Japan produces every year will rise from 10,000 to 800,000 tons by 2040, and the nation has no plan for safely disposing of it. Environmental Progress investigated the problem to see how the problem compared to the much more high-profile issue of nuclear waste.
We found: Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants. If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everest (16 km). Read more ☼
Coal in America Is Already Clean. Why ‘Clean Coal’ Is a Boondoggle That Needs to End.
By Nicolas Loris
A power plant once heralded by the Obama administration as the poster child for clean coal is now on its deathbed. The plant hemorrhaged billions in cost overruns despite being heavily subsidized by the federal government. Mississippi regulators are ready to pull the plug.
Southern Company’s Kemper County Energy Facility had intended to use carbon capture and sequestration technology to gasify the coal, but instead, the plant has been running on natural gas since 2014. The Mississippi Public Service Commission has unanimously passed a motion that the plant should only use natural gas moving forward. Read more ☼
REGULATION
New Study Claims To Expose The ‘Science Charade’ Behind Some EPA Regulations
by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller
A new study highlights how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is able to game the rule-making system to cloak contentious policy decisions as based on science.
Susan Dudley, president of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, and Marcus Peacock, executive vice president of the Business Roundtable, published a report to highlight the “perverse incentives involved in developing regulations” as part of EPA’s air quality setting standards.
The report outlines problems in the regulatory process from the way Congress wrote the Clean Air Act to how EPA staff and agency science advisers present the data to the administrator. All this creates a “science charade” to mask controversial decisions, the report claims. Read more ☼
EPA-funded lab faked research results on respiratory illnesses, whistleblower lawsuit claims
Fox News
Duke University has admitted that one of its lab technicians falsified or fabricated research data on respiratory illnesses that were used to get large grants from the Environmental Protection Agency. Read more ☼
Trump EPA to rescind Obama ‘Waters of America’ power grab
By Rick Moran
The Trump administration EPA announced that they will rescind one of the biggest power-grabs by a federal agency in U.S. history.
In 2015, the Obama EPA finalized a rule that would have brought almost all “navigable” waters in the U.S. under federal government control. The “Waters of the U.S.” rule targeted creeks, streams, and inland rivers even if they were on private property. The rule would have given the EPA jurisdiction not only over the water, but over much of the surrounding land as well. But one of the first acts of the Trump administration was to order a review of the rule with the intent of repealing it. Read more ☼
MISCELLANEOUS
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Estimated Cost and Timing of Downlisting and Delisting Mexican Wolf
We expect the status of the Mexican wolf to improve such that we can downlist to threatened status in approximately 16-20 years. We expect to achieve delisting criteria in approximately 25-35 years for a total estimated cost of $262,575,000. These timeframes are based on expectation of full funding, implementation as provided for in the recovery plan and implementation strategy, and full cooperation of binational partners. (Source) ☼
$2 Million Government Program Gets 17 People Jobs
By Kelsey Harkness
A government-funded job training program that promised to turn hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s coal country into computer coders so far has spent $2 million to place 17 people in tech jobs and may have left others worse off, The Daily Signal has learned.
The program, a private-public partnership between state and federal agencies and Interapt, a Louisville-based software development company, is a product of President Barack Obama’s TechHire Initiative of 2015. Read more ☼
POINTS TO PONDER
“The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.” — Milton Friedman
Milton Berle: “You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”
Albert Einstein: “Only two things are infinite– the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not so sure about the former.”
Oscar Wilde: “Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go.”
“But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth.” —Thomas Jefferson (1805)
Dr. Judith Curry on climate alarmism: “The bottom line is that the simple story pushed by the consensus enforcers of a simple climate problem and a simple energy solution is a goldilocks fairy tale. Given that their careers have been invested in this fairy tale, its little wonder that they regard anything other than their enforced consensus as ‘pernicious.’” (Source)
Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government has no authority to provide material welfare for its citizens. And as a general principle, governments should not be involved in faux “humanitarianism,” except perhaps in the immediate aftermath of unforeseen calamities such as earthquakes and hurricanes. The best thing government can do to alleviate the suffering of the needy is protect the private organizations that do it as a matter of course — and stay out of their way. – Charles Scaliger
“We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.” —Thomas Jefferson (1782)
“In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.” —Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)
“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.” —Samuel Adams (1749)
“The powers of the general government will be, and indeed must be, principally employed upon external objects, such as war, peace, negotiations with foreign powers, and foreign commerce.” —Joseph Story (1833)
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Our Mission
1) Support private property rights.
2) Support multiple use management of federal lands for agriculture, livestock grazing, mining, oil and gas production, recreation, timber harvesting and water development activities.
3) Support a balance of environmental responsibility and economic benefit for all Americans by urging that environmental policy be based on good science and sound economic principles.
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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