People for the West -Tucson
Newsletter, May, 2021
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
STATE OF THE UNION
An Alternative to Statehood for Washington, D.C.
by Jonathan DuHamel
On April 22, 2021, the Democrat-led House of Representatives passed a bill paving the way to grant Washington, D.C. statehood. This has long been a Democrat party goal in order to gain two more Democrat Senators. The touted reason for this change is to grant citizens of Washington D.C. the same representation and voting rights as citizens of states.
Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution established a federal district independent of any state. The Founders established such a federal district because they didn’t want states interfering with the seat of federal government. It would probably take a constitutional amendment to change the situation and that is not likely.
There is a simpler processes to provide residents of the federal district the same representation and voting rights as citizens of states. That is to redraw the boundaries of the federal district. Residential and business areas of the District of Columbia could be ceded back to the state of Maryland. Washington, D.C. residents would then become citizens of Maryland with all the voting and representation rights enjoyed by other citizens of Maryland. Only the two to three square miles that contain federal buildings and the National Mall would remain as an independent federal district. That, of course, would frustrate Democrat goals of power. ☼
The 10 Radical New Rules That Are Changing America
by Victor Davis Hanson
1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.
2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.
3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality.
4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history.
5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote.
6) Hypocrisy is passé. Virtue-signaling is alive.
7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it.
8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers.
9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project require any evidence or historical knowledge.
10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity.
(Read more for explanation of each point) ☼
President Biden held an international video conference on “Earth Day” claiming that we have get rid of fossil fuels to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to save the planet, event thought there is no physical evidence that such emissions have any significant control of global temperature, but:
While ignorant politicians are saying we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, much of the world is increasing coal use to provide reliable electricity. Here are some recent headlines:
Africa to double coal fired power by 2030 (link)
India meets climate goals early by doubling coal, and keeping it as main energy source for next 30 years (link)
In 2020 China built three times more coal power than the rest of the world (link)
Russia eyes big plans for coal production and exports (link)
Un-Greening: Mexico gives up on renewables, revives coal industry (link)
The UK’s “End of Coal” lasted a whole week (link)
Colombia announces coal support for decades to come (link)
Coal rescues Germany from its renewable energy folly (link)
France relights coal power plants to keep the lights on (link)
Coal’s Share Of Global Energy Supply Has Been Increasing For 50 Years, IEA Reports (link)
Dr. Jay Lehr opines: “The alarming claims made at Biden’s summit bear little resemblance to reality. The ‘solutions’ proposed would in the main cause massive economic pain and expense for little or no environmental benefit. In some cases they would cause more environmental harm than benefit.” (Read more) ☼
Speaking of ignorant politicians: At the “climate summit,” John Kerry, Biden’s “climate czar” said this:
“…getting to net zero [carbon dioxide emissions] is gonna be hard, really hard…that will depend on breakthrough technologies and breakthrough innovations. But even if we get to net zero, we still have to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.” He’s saying essentially that cuts won’t matter, but technology and innovation will. He also seems to erroneously think “net zero” applies to getting ALL of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which will end all plant life on Earth if it happened. (Source)
SOME INTERESTING EDITORIALS:
Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It
How big green activists with China ties are jeopardizing America
Biden’s electric vehicle plan is a road to nowhere2020 Should Have Been The Year We Demanded Reform of the FDA and CDC, But We Didn’t. Now It’s Come Back to Bite Us.
Depressed? Console yourself with the wit and wisdom of Thomas Sowell ☼
PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES
The High-Speed Rail Money Sink: Why the United States Should Not Spend Trillions on Obsolete Technology
by Randal O’Toole, Cato Institute
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s proposal to make the United States a “world leader” in high-speed rail would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt for construction of new rail lines plus tens of billions of dollars of annual deficit spending to subsidize operating costs. In exchange, such a high-speed rail network is likely to carry less than 2 percent of the nation’s passenger travel and no freight. High-speed trains were rendered obsolete in 1958, six years before Japan opened its first bullet train, when Boeing’s 707 entered commercial service; the airliner could cruise at more than twice the top speeds of the fastest scheduled high-speed trains today. Air travel cost more than rail travel in 1964, but average airfares today are less than a fifth of the average fares paid by riders of the Amtrak Acela, the only high-speed train operating in the United States.
The main disadvantage of high-speed trains, other than their slow speeds compared with air travel, is that they require a huge amount of infrastructure that must be built and maintained to extremely precise standards. (Read more) ☼
The ‘Clean Electric Vehicle’ Fairy Tale
by Thomas Gallatin, Patriot Post
There are at least three significant factors that compromise the popular image of electric vehicles being more environmentally “responsible.” First, there’s the highly toxic nature of lithium batteries, which are the essential component in making electric vehicles possible. Second is the disposal of spent batteries. Third is the means by which power is generated for those batteries. (Read more). Also, is the issue of mining the required metals.
See: Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check : “Among the material realities of green energy:
Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.” ☼
ENERGY
It takes big energy to back up wind and solar
By David Wojick
Power system design can be extremely complex but there is one simple number that is painfully obvious. At least it is painful to the advocates of wind and solar power, which may be why we never hear about it. It is a big, bad number.
To my knowledge this big number has no name, but it should. Let’s call it the “minimum backup requirement” for wind and solar, or MBR. The minimum backup requirement is how much generating capacity a system must have to reliably produce power when wind and solar don’t.
For most places the magnitude of MBR is very simple. It is all of the juice needed on the hottest or coldest low wind night. It is night so there is no solar. Sustained wind is less than eight miles per hour, so there is no wind power. It is very hot or cold so the need for power is very high.
We often read about wind and solar being cheaper than coal, gas and nuclear power, but that does not include the MBR for wind and solar. What is relatively cheap for wind and solar is the cost to produce a unit of electricity. This is often called LCOE or the “levelized cost of energy”. But adding the reliable backup required to give people the power they need makes wind and solar very expensive. (Read more) ☼
Fracking Ban Threatens American Jobs and Derails Our Environmental Progress
By Stephanie Catarino Wissman
Now the global leader in natural gas and oil production, the U.S. has set the standard for safe, reliable, and affordable energy. America’s energy sector supports more than 10 million jobs across the nation, driving nearly $290 billion of capital investment – all while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But unrealistic energy policies and bans on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could swiftly undo years of progress and economic growth.
A nationwide ban on fracking would have disastrous consequences, including a potential loss of $7.1 trillion in cumulative GDP and millions of jobs by 2030, likely triggering a recession. Furthermore, a ban would reverse our growing energy self-sufficiency and return us to the days of depending on foreign suppliers. Families could see household energy costs spike by an average of $618 per year, including higher prices for natural gas, electricity, gasoline, and heating oil, at a time when many cannot afford it. (Read more) ☼
CLIMATE
Where Is The “Climate Emergency”?
by Willis Eschenbach
Despite my asking over and over in a host of forums, to date nobody has been able to tell me just what this supposed “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!” actually is and where I might find evidence that it exists. Here are some facts for the folks that think that the climate is a real danger to humanity. (Read more – 39 pages that debunk alarmist claims) ☼
CO2 Levels Highest in 3.6 Million Years, Yet Temperatures Are Not Following Suit
By James Taylor
Federal bureaucrats and their media allies are conducting a targeted public relations campaign promoting reports that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are higher than at any point in the past 3.6 million years. This, they say, is more proof of a climate crisis. However, current temperatures are nowhere near the highest they have been in that same time span. That begs the question, is carbon dioxide really the ‘control knob’ for global temperatures, as climate activists assert? The disconnect between ‘highest-ever’ CO2 emissions and real-world temperatures that are not following suit is powerful evidence that the Earth is far less sensitive to fluctuating carbon dioxide concentrations than alarmists assert.
According to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) press release, “The atmospheric burden of CO2 is now comparable to where it was during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period around 3.6 million years ago, when concentrations of carbon dioxide ranged from about 380 to 450 parts per million. During that time sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.”
If climate activists’ theory is correct that carbon dioxide is the primary factor influencing global temperature changes, then current temperatures should be just as warm as they were 3.6 million years ago. Yet they are not. (Read more) ☼
The Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Global Temperature for the Last 425 Million Years
by W. Jackson Davis
Note: This long (51 pages) and very technical paper concludes that: “The principal findings of this study are that neither the atmospheric concentration of CO2 nor ΔRFCO2 [Marginal radiative forcing] is correlated with temperature over most of the ancient (Phanerozoic) climate. Over all major climate transitions of the Phanerozoic Eon, about three-quarters of 136 correlation coefficients computed here between T and atmospheric CO2 concentration, and between T and ΔRFCO2, are non-discernible, and about half of the discernible correlations are negative. Read full paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/5/4/76/htm ☼
NOAA Debunks Biden’s Administration Basis For The Green New Deal – Global Temperatures Are in Decline
from C3Headlines
NOAA’s database of global temperature observations confirm that the Trump administration policies did not cause an increase in global warming, much to the chagrin of Democrats and their climate experts. Instead, at the end of 2020 there existed a 5-year cooling trend – for both land and ocean – that has extended into the first two months of 2021.
This lengthy cooling trend essentially debunks the need for the Biden ‘Green New Deal’ since the purported climate existential threat, emergency, crisis, apocalypse and/or extinction menace does not exist.
The empirical evidence from government agency cannot be more clear: dangerous, rapid global warming from human CO2 is without any merit. (See graphs) ☼
What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t & why it matters
by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., The Wall Street Journal
After a stint at the Obama Energy Department, Steven Koonin reclaims the science of a warming planet from the propaganda peddlers. Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.
Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department. Mr. Koonin argues not against current climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false. (Read more) (Koonin’s article in New York Post) ☼
Dangerously Stupid Science: Solar Geoengineering
By Jim Steele
A new report from the National Academies of Sciences recommended the United States pursue a robust research program into solar geoengineering, to reflect sunlight and forestall some of the worst effects of global warming. Seeking $200 million over 5 years for research from the Biden administration, those scientists push a climate crisis narrative, arguing greenhouse gas emissions are not falling quickly enough and, “Without decisive action and rapid stabilization of global temperature, risks from a changing climate will increase in the future, with potentially catastrophic consequences” This should alarm everyone. Not because a climate crisis is real, but because solar geoengineering is the height of stupidity and truly endangers humanity. Still solar blocking experiments were planned for June 2021 in Sweden. Fortunately objections from other scientists, environmentalists, and Indigenous groups just cancelled those plans … for now. (Read more) ☼
When Climate Alarmism Meets Cancel Culture
by Bjorn Lomborg
The academic and activist faction that sets the threatening tone in the climate conversation wants dissent eliminated, leaving themselves the only ones authorized to tell you how scared you should be. To avoid wasting trillions, we should not let them. (Read more) ☼
My Wryheat blog articles, the real climate science:
A Review of the state of Climate Science
A Summary of Earth’s Climate History-a Geologist’s View
Problems with wind and solar generation of electricity – a review
The “Social Cost of Carbon” Scam Revisited
ATMOSPHERIC CO2: a boon for the biosphere
Carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth
Impact of the Paris Climate Accord and why Trump was right to drop it
New study shows that carbon dioxide is responsible for only seven percent of the greenhouse effect
Six Issues the Promoters of the Green New Deal Have Overlooked ☼
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“The United States has always frustrated the global ambitions of Marxists. A country founded
as a democratic republic, having neither royalty nor nobility, and based upon economic
principles of entrepreneurial capitalism has never been fertile soil for the class-based
revolution of which the Marxists dream. But today’s collectivists believe they have found
America’s Achilles’ heel, the key to the success that has eluded them for so long. They are fomenting hostility and drumming up fervor based not upon class but upon race.” —Laura
Hollis
“Given that the last presidential election was hotly contested, that Democratic congressional
majorities are minuscule and that the Supreme Court is unsympathetic, the left seeks to change
the rules to stay in power rather than adjust its unpopular policies. … Adam Smith said of
successful nations that they have a lot of ‘ruin’ in them. He meant that a dissolute, leisured and
ahistorical generation has to waste a lot of its generous inherited wealth before it runs out. We
are learning how much will soon be left of what our ancestors bequeathed. And the rest of the
world is watching — some with glee, others with horror.” —Victor Davis Hanson
“The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.” – Mikhail Gorbachev (He was underscoring the importance of advancing Marxist objectives by creating an emergency to convince people they must surrender freedom to be safe.)
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” —Thomas Jefferson (1816)
“Liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments.” —Alexander Hamilton (1788)
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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:
and
If you like murder mysteries, try Lonni’s novels. See descriptions and links at:
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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