People for the West -Tucson
Newsletter, March, 2019
PO Box 86868, Tucson, AZ 85754-6868
pfw-tucson@cox.net
Real environmentalism can go hand in hand with natural resource production, private property rights, and access to public lands
A Petition From Southern Arizona Ranchers
A group of Southern Arizona ranchers are exercising their First Amendment rights in seeking a redress of grievances from their senators and congressman.
The following is a petition to the federal government written by several ranchers on the Arizona-Mexican border. These ranchers have to deal everyday with illegal crossings and lack of proper infrastructure that would make our southern border more secure. Unlike politicians spouting talking points, these ranchers have first hand knowledge of what is really going on along our southern border. The federal government is failing to adequately protect the private property rights of these ranchers.
One of the ranchers, Jim Chilton, is a friend of mine and I have been on his ranch which lies south of Arivaca, AZ, and extends to the Mexican border. On the ranch, the Mexican border is marked by a four-strand barbed wire fence. That’s all. There are many trails from the border through the ranch. Two years ago Jim set up cameras on two of the trails. During that time the cameras captured approximately 500 trespassers going both north and south. Jim suspects he has recorded drug smugglers. The ranch headquarters has been burglarized twice and often water supply pipes to stock tanks have been broken. The smugglers have free run of the ranch because there is no real barrier.
The Petition:
Whereas, one of the most active drug smuggling and human trafficking corridors in the Nation is the international boundary between Nogales and Sasabe, Arizona;
Whereas, 25 miles along the border area south of Arivaca is marked by only an old four-strand barbed wire cattle fence;
Whereas, the Sinaloa Cartel has control of this 25-mile international boundary and of the thousands of square miles of minimally patrolled ranchland adjacent to it inside the United States, due to lack of adequate border infrastructure, the Border Patrol has been largely restricted to a “Defense in Depth” strategy which is inefficient due to rough terrain and inadequate access and allows the presence of well- equipped cartel scouts on top of our mountains to successfully direct drug and human trafficking;
Whereas, although the Tucson Station Patrol Agent-in-Charge and Border Patrol agents try their best to do their job, the lack of access and infrastructure, cartel scout presence, and rough terrain and inefficient “Defense in Depth” strategy creates a de facto “no man’s land” in which border ranchers live and work;
Whereas, the national Border Patrol Council Vice President, Art del Cueto, has asserted on national television that under the present situation, no more than 50% of illegal crossers are apprehended;
Whereas, Border Patrol agents are headquartered in Tucson, eighty miles and three hours from the border on our ranches and there are no roads paralleling the border and no efficient north-south access for the Border Patrol to respond to incursions; and
Whereas, current “defense in depth” strategy means the Tucson Station Border Patrol agents are dispersed across the 4,000 square miles of area of responsibility and are operating in the “backfield” instead of operating on the 25 linear miles of the actual border;
Therefore be it resolved, Border ranchers petition our government to construct an adequate security barrier such as a Bollard-style fence at the border, good all-weather, well-maintained roads leading to the border and along it, adequate, modern flood gates at water crossings, appropriate surveillance technology to monitor Border Patrol personnel and border status, air mobile support, and reliable communications for Border Patrol agents to call for back-up, and forward operations bases near the border barrier to effectively secure the international boundary between Nogales and Sasabe, Arizona.
The petition is signed by these ranchers: Jim Chilton, Chilton Ranch; Tom Kay, Jarillas Ranch; John R. Smith, Arivaca Ranch; Ted Noon, Oro Blanco Ranch; and Lowell Robinson, Tres Bellotas Ranch. ☼
CLIMATE
The systems which control global climate are very complex with many variables. It is absurd to think that just one variable, carbon dioxide, which is only 0.04% of the atmosphere, is the major controlling factor.
Here are links to some of my Wryheat blog articles that counter climate alarmism:
Climate change in perspective – a tutorial for policy makers
A simple question for climate alarmists – where is the physical evidence
The Broken Greenhouse – why CO2 is a minor player in global climate
Evidence that CO2 emissions do not intensify the greenhouse effect – the greenhouse hypothesis fails.
An examination of the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide
What keeps Earth warm – the greenhouse effect or something else?
How much global warming is dangerous?
Effects of global warming on humans
Carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth
A Summary of Earth’s Climate History from a Geologist’s Perspective by Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, Emeritus Professor of Geography, California State University, Stanislaus
Earth scientists have learned that earth was significantly warmer than present (by perhaps about 8 to 10 °C) for about 80% of the earth’s 4.6-billion-year history.
From a historical as well as a geological perspective, warming trends are beneficial for humans, for agriculture, and for plants and animals. No “tipping points’ were reached during past geologic intervals when temperatures and CO2 concentrations were much higher than present. In fact, life flourished during these relatively warmer conditions.
For the past 2 million years (Quaternary Period), the earth has been in an ice age comprised of some 20 major glacial/interglacial cycles. Each cycle was characterized by very wide swings of temperature and precipitation.
For the past 10,000 years, the earth has experienced an unusually warm and stable (interglacial) climate known as the Holocene Epoch. The stable and favorable climate of this interglacial allowed for the development of agriculture and human civilization.
71% of the earth is covered with ocean water. 90% of the world’s ice is in Antarctica. Our instrumental climate records only extend about 100 to 150 years back. There are still not enough weather stations on the earth to determine the average temperature of the earth. The best data from satellites and the Argo (ocean robot) systems suggests the planet has been cooling slightly since 1998.
Exhaustive analyses of proxy paleoclimatic records (deep sea cores, ice cores, tree-rings, glacial deposits, soils, loess sequences, cave deposits, pollen studies, etc.) by scientists reveal that past climate changes are complex and of varying frequency and magnitude. There is much we still don’t agree on. Many scientists, including myself, believe climate change is cyclical and these cycles are of varying periodicities.
The main climate drivers include variations in solar output, ocean circulation dynamics (the ocean stores some 22 times more heat than the atmosphere and circulates that heat around the globe), and orbital variations in the earth-sun-moon system.
Carbon dioxide has a negligible effect on atmospheric temperatures. Rather, because the oceans hold about 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere, and because the oceans and atmosphere exchange CO2, CO2 fluctuations are mainly caused by changes in ocean temperatures. And ocean temperature changes are mainly driven by the sun.
Because we have seasons, the earth is constantly warming and cooling in various locales. Weather and climate change is a constant. But is the earth as a whole warming or cooling? The answer to this question depends entirely upon the length of the climate record being analyzed. On the basis of many paleoclimatic records, earth scientists agree that the general trend over the past 3 million years has been toward cooling; the trend over the past 15,000 years has been toward warming; the trend over the past 5,000 years has been toward cooling; and there has been a warming trend since Little Ice Age maxima about 1650 AD. The earth warmed very slightly between about 1975 and 1998, and since 1998 the trend has been toward cooling. Read full post☼
The Five Top Arguments Against Climate Alarmism
by tonyheller
1. Climate alarmism is based mainly around fear of extreme weather. This concept is deeply rooted in human nature, and has its roots in ancient stories of giant floods, famines and plagues – caused (of course) by man’s sins. Climate alarmists are tapping into that primal fear, and pushing the same idea of extreme weather and floods caused by mankind’s carbon sins. The reality is that there is no legitimate evidence extreme weather is increasing or sea level rise is accelerating. The fears are baseless.
2. Climate alarmism is much like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. People may not see any evidence of catastrophic climate change or sea level rise, but their opinion is irrelevant because 97% of scientists believe we are doomed due to global warming. Only a small handful of people whom the press and politicians quote over and over again are allowed to state an opinion, and they are claimed to represent 97% of the world’s millions of scientists.
“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.” – Michael Crichton
3. Academics have been making apocalyptic predictions for decades. All have failed miserably, yet they keep repeating the same misinformation over and over again. Had their forecasts been correct, we wouldn’t be here now to have this discussion.
4. Climate alarmism is completely dependent on graphs and useless climate models generated by a small handful of people. The graphs are generated through scientifically corrupt processes of data tampering and hiding data.
5. The most important argument against climate alarmism is that the proposed solutions are unworkable, dangerous, and useless. They were made without consulting engineers, and have zero chance of success. A robust discussion about our energy future is needed, but that discussion is censored in favor of propaganda. (Read source for details) ☼
The CO2 Derangement Syndrome – a historical overview
by Dr. Norman Page
A very large majority of establishment academic climate scientists have succumbed to a virulent infectious disease – the CO2 Derangement Syndrome. Those afflicted by this syndrome present with a spectrum of symptoms .The first is an almost total inability to recognize the most obvious Millennial and 60 year emergent patterns which are trivially obvious in solar activity and global temperature data.
This causes the natural climate cycle variability to appear frightening and emotionally overwhelming. Critical thinking capacity is badly degraded. The delusionary world inhabited by the eco-left establishment activist elite is epitomized by Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes science-based fiction, “The Collapse of Western-Civilization: A View from the Future”
Oreskes imagines a world devastated by climate change. Intellectual hubris, confirmation bias, group think and a need to feel at once powerful and at the same time morally self-righteous caused those worst affected to convince themselves, politicians, governments, the politically correct chattering classes and almost the entire UK and US media that anthropogenic CO2 was the main climate driver. This led governments to introduce policies which have wasted trillions of dollars in a quixotic and futile attempt to control earth’s temperature by reducing CO2 emissions. Read more ☼
ENERGY AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL
The Farcical “Green New Deal”
by Richard A. Epstein, Hoover Institution
The dominant source of energy for the foreseeable future for both the United States and the world will be fossil fuels, chiefly in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. Throughout the world, many groups will push hard for massive subsidies to wind and solar energy. Yet, that attempt, no matter how bold, will fail to shift the overall balance of energy production toward green sources. The fatal drawback of wind and solar is their lack of storability. Solar works when the sun shines. Wind works when breezes blow. Both often provide energy when it is not needed and fail to provide it when required. Any legal diktat that puts these renewable sources first will only produce a prolonged economic dislocation. Pie-in-the-sky proposals like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which stipulates 100 percent of energy needs be supplied by “clean, renewable, and zero emissions” sources, should be dead on arrival.
The major challenge of sound energy policy today is to find ways to make the production of fossil fuels both cheaper and safer. Fortunately, private-sector innovation has paid off handsomely such that the total social cost of fossil fuels has trended sharply downward and shows every indication of continuing to do so. The point is especially true with fracking, which has been driven by large cumulative improvements at every stage of the production process. Since 1950, carbon dioxide emissions have increased over fivefold, but, as policy analyst Marlo Lewis has demonstrated, it is difficult to link these emissions to any negative global consequences. After all, over the same period of time, there have been massive increases in life expectancy, crop yields, and wealth. In my view, the current scientific record offers no support for the claim that increases in CO2 emissions pose an immediate, let alone existential, threat. Indeed, global temperatures have declined 0.56 degrees Celsius between 2016 and 2018 for the largest two-year drop in the past century—a trend that has gone largely unremarked upon in the press. Read more ☼
Gas Shortages Give New York an Early Taste of the Green New Deal
From the Global Warming Policy Foundation
The state is dependent on imports even though it sits atop the abundant Marcellus Shale.
The combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—sometimes known as the “shale revolution”—has enabled Texas, Pennsylvania and other states to produce record quantities of natural gas, some of which is being frozen, loaded onto giant ships, and transported to customers in places like Chile, China and India. Thanks to the environmental policies of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York has missed out on this windfall.
Now, in a preview of what life might be like under the Democrats’ proposed Green New Deal, some New Yorkers are about to face a natural-gas shortage. Consolidated Edison, an energy utility that provides gas and power to the New York City area, announced last month that beginning in mid-March it would “no longer be accepting applications for natural gas connections from new customers in most of our Westchester County service area.” The reason for the shortage is obvious: The Cuomo administration has repeatedly blocked or delayed new pipeline projects. As a Con Ed spokesman put it, there is a “lot of natural gas around the country, but getting it to New York has been the strain.”
New York policy makers have also killed the state’s natural-gas-drilling business. In 2008 New York drillers produced about 150 million cubic feet of natural gas a day—not enough to meet all the state’s needs, but still a substantial amount. That same year legislators in Albany passed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, the process used to wring oil and gas out of underground rock formations. In 2015 the Cuomo administration made the moratorium permanent. By 2018 New York’s gas production had declined so much that the Energy Information Administration quit publishing numbers on it.
New York now imports nearly all of its gas even though part of the Marcellus Shale, one of the biggest and most prolific sources of natural gas in the country, extends into the state’s Southern Tier region. To get an idea of how much gas the state might have been able to produce from the Marcellus, New Yorkers can look across the state line to Pennsylvania, which now supplies about two-thirds of the gas consumed in New York. At the end of 2018, Pennsylvania drillers were producing about 18 billion cubic feet of gas a day. That’s more gas than Canada now produces. Read more
Related: In 2006, before the shale revolution, Pennsylvania produced 175,950 mcf of natural gas, in 2017 it produced 5,463,888 mcf, an increase 0f 3100%. In 2006, New York produced 55,980 mcf, in 2017 it produced 11,395 mcf, a decline of 80%. Many New York politicians are promoters of the Green New Deal, this must be what they have in mind. ☼
Why ‘Green’ Energy Is Futile, In One Lesson
by John Hinderaker
Here in Minnesota, we are enduring a brutal stretch of weather. The temperature hasn’t gotten above zero in the last three days, with lows approaching -30. And that is in the Twin Cities, in the southern part of the state.
Yesterday, central Minnesota experienced a natural gas “brownout,” as Xcel Energy advised customers to turn thermostats down to 60 degrees and avoid using hot water. Xcel put up some customers in hotels.
Why? Because the wind wasn’t blowing.
Utilities pair natural gas plants with wind farms, in order to burn gas, which can be ramped up and down more quickly than coal, when the wind isn’t blowing.
Which raises the question: since natural gas is reliable, why do we need the wind farms? The answer is, we don’t. When the wind isn’t blowing–as it wasn’t yesterday–natural gas supplies the electricity.
It also heats homes, and with bitterly cold temperatures and no wind, there wasn’t enough natural gas to go around. The resulting “brownout” has been a political shock in Minnesota. Read more ☼
Green New Deal Will Cost $93 Trillion, Says Think Tank
Written by Michael Tennant
The Green New Deal (GND) being pushed by far-left Democrats such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could cost the country as much as $93 trillion — that’s $653,000 per household — over a decade, according to a new report from the American Action Forum (AAF). Read more
STATE OF THE UNION
Obama-era ‘Waters of the United States’ Rule Scuttled
By Bonner R. Cohen
Continuing its rollback of Obama-era regulations President Donald Trump has claimed are unnecessarily hampering the U.S. economy without appreciably improving the environment, the Trump administration pulled the plug on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2015 Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule.
Farm groups, homebuilders, realtor groups, and property rights advocates, among others, sued to block the rule, stating WOTUS was among the most far-reaching rules ever issued in EPA’s 48-year history in giving the federal government power to limit the uses of millions of additional acres of private and state property. Read more ☼
Supreme Court curbs power of government to impose heavy fines and seize property
BYAndrew O’Reilly, Fox News
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled to drastically curb the powers that states and cities have to levy fines and seize property, marking the first time the court has applied the Constitution’s ban on excessive fines at the state level. The high court’s ruling could now limit the ability for states and cities to carry out what critics – on both sides of the political divide – say is an increasingly common practice of imposing steep fines and seizing property.
Timbs’ legal team, at the Institute for Justice, cast the decision as a blow against the practice of civil forfeiture, the legal process by which law enforcement officers are able to take assets from people suspected of involvement in a crime without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing. Read more ☼
Border Patrol Chief Agrees With Trump That There Is a Border Crisis
BY Jason Hopkins, The Daily Signal
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost broke down in a testimony to Congress why the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border qualifies as a national security crisis.
“There is an ongoing debate as to whether this constitutes a border security crisis or a humanitarian crisis. Let me be clear, it is both,” Provost, President Donald Trump’s top border official, said during a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee. Read more
Parting Thoughts:
“Any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate.” —Ronald Reagan
“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.” —James Madison (1792)
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” —Frederic Bastiat
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” — Thomas Jefferson
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Scientists best serve public policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics. If the scientific community will not unfrock the charlatans, the public will not discern the difference — science and the nation will suffer.”— Philip Handler, former president of the National Academy of Sciences
Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker questioned the media’s open embrace of biased reporting. Baker warned reporters that they should stick to demonstrable facts and avoid jumping to any conclusions beyond them. Leave those conclusions to your readers, he argued. He, for example, didn’t care for the practice of reporters labeling Trump’s misstatements “lies,” which he rightly saw as an editorial judgment masquerading as news:
“The difference is not what I think or what I might express and an opinion or even given reasonable grounds to believe, but what my reporters can report as facts. And if you’re going to report as a fact that something is a lie, you have to know that it’s not only an untruth, not only a falsehood, you have to be able to be able to impute two things in the mind of the speaker: one, knowledge that it is actually untrue; and two, a deliberate intent to deceive.” (Source)
Within an op-ed piece “Manly decency was once the order of the day” occurs this scene:
The Magnificent Seven risk their lives, and ultimate lose four, defending a dirt poor Mexican farm village. The children of the village had derided their fathers in their apparent inability to protect them. One of the seven, Charles Bronson, delivers the greatest speech about fatherhood in all of cinema, lecturing a group of hero-worshiping young boys.
“Don’t you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun. Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility. For you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do this because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery.”
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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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