People for the West -Tucson
Newsletter, December, 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
A thought: Since our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels make up just 0.13% to total greenhouse gases, why do we have to eliminate them?
See: Why Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Burning Fossil Fuel Will Have No Effect on Climate
“If there is one thing the world should take away from the Glasgow COP26 [climate] summit, it’s that the most dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions come from the front ends of politicians, not the back ends of cows…” – Walter Russell Mead
See: Methane- the Irrelevant Greenhouse Gas
Senate Democrats Approve Former Eco-Terrorist to Run the U.S. Bureau of Land Management
by Kenneth Artz
The U.S. Senate confirmed Tracy Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on a strict party-line vote of 50 Democrats in favor or the nominee, and 45 Republicans opposed, in early October.
Stone-Manning’s nomination was nearly derailed during hearings designed to vet her by Republicans who argued she was unqualified to serve as BLM director because of her involvement with the eco-terrorist group Earth First! and her past involvement in “tree spiking.” Spiking is a dangerous act of sabotage in which metal spikes are nailed into trees making them unsafe to log. Unnoticed tree spikes have injured loggers in the past when saws they were using struck the spikes, causing the saws to explode. (Read more) ☼
Build Back Better And The Coming Onslaught Of ‘Greenflation’
by Oliver Mcpherson-Smith
After months of telling American consumers that the inflation before their eyes was transitory or just a high-class problem, the Biden administration has finally conceded that prices are indeed on the rise. Unfortunately, the renewable energy provisions within the president’s ‘Build Back Better’ reconciliation bill risk pushing costs even higher. Without overhauling the regulations that restrict the domestic production of critical minerals, the president’s bill will heap even greater demand on already slim resources. (Read more) ☼
Biden’s Inflation Hits Seniors Hard
by Thomas Gallatin
The rate of inflation has hit a 30-year high, rising to 6.2% over last year thanks largely to Joe Biden. nevitably, inflation hits hardest those who are on fixed incomes, like senior citizens. In 2022, Social Security’s cost of living adjustment will rise 5.9%, the highest annual jump in 40 years, and yet it still falls short of matching the Biden-induced rate of inflation. Adding insult to injury, news dropped Friday afternoon that Medicare “Part B” premiums will rise next year by 14.5%. (Read more) ☼
Biden’s cobra presidency
By James Lewis
Have you noticed how Joe Biden says he wants to lower gas prices, so he cancels the Keystone pipeline? He wants to lower unemployment, so he pays people not to work? He wants to beat inflation, so the Fed prints more money? Biden is President Perverse. The Cobra Effect is economics slang for “perverse incentives.” (The Cobra Effect is a sort of an economics joke based on the story that New Delhi had too many cobras at one time, so the city paid a bounty for dead cobras. Then smart Indian people started to raise more cobras to get the bounty, the opposite of the intended outcome. Economists use that story to explain economic stupidity.) (Read more) Read also this article by Ron Clutz: Biden Has the Destructive Touch ☼
Vaccine mandates
The 5th Circuit’s brilliant opinion staying OSHA’s vaccine mandate (Link)
This article shows why the Federal government has no authority to issues vaccine mandates.
See also: Vaccine Mandates and the Decline of Self-Government (Link)
The president has no constitutional authority to require anybody to get vaccinated. Any such power in the president would have to be derived from some delegation of authority from the Congress. [The rest of the article shows why such a mandate would be problematical for Congress to enact.] ☼
Recalls
The Food and Drug Administration has a website that tells you of recalls on many products including food and drugs: https://www.recalls.gov/ ☼
ENERGY
Everybody around Biden needs to go back to Econ 101
By Silvio Canto, Jr.
What was the first thing you learned in that Econ 101 class that you were required to take in school?: supply and demand. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, heating costs for American families will increase by 54 percent this winter, making it the most expensive in over a decade. Given President Biden’s statements on the 2020 campaign trail, where he launched a war on domestic energy production, this was entirely predictable. (Read more)
See these articles for more:
Biden Is Waging All-Out War On American Energy (Link)
Biden’s Marxist Treasury Nominee Wants To Bankrupt Energy Companies (Link)
Americans Are Paying A Steep Price For Biden’s War On Energy (Link)
How Biden Is Laying The Foundation For America’s ‘Great Reset’ (Link)
Why Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Bill Should Be Torn Asunder (Link)
Tapping The Strategic Petroleum Reserve Will Make Oil Supplies Worse (Link)
Biden urges G20 leaders to increase energy production as coal surges, oil crunch continues (Link)
China Still Burning More & More Coal (Link)
COP26 aims to banish coal. Asia is building hundreds of power plants to burn it (Link)
‘Saved by coal’: Far from COP26, another reality in India (Link)
55 New Coal Power Stations Under Construction In India (Link)
Biden’s 85-vehicle motorcade a textbook example of hypocrisy from ‘limousine liberals’
(Link)
The Environmental Left’s Sustained Assault on American Oil and Gas (Link PDF 12 pages)
To anyone following the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats, there is no doubt about their intent to bog down the U.S. oil and gas industry with damaging policies in order to bolster renewable and so-called “green” energy sources. And they are exploiting every legal, legislative, and financial tool to accomplish it.
Why Was Hunter Biden Part Of China’s Takeover Of Key Global Metal Supplies? (Link)
A New York Times investigation into Beijing’s stranglehold on the material needed to make electric car batteries reveals that the president’s son helped a key acquisition. Why are we only finding about this now?
Were Biden’s Claims at COP26 Climate Change Summit Accurate? (Link) ☼
There’s a Huge Problem With Senate Democrats’ Proposal to Bring Down Gas Prices
by Leah Barkoukis, Townhall
A group of Senate Democrats expressed their dismay over rising gas prices in a letter to President Biden this week, urging him to “consider all tools available at your disposal to lower U.S. gasoline prices.” Their ideas included “a release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and a ban on crude oil exports.” They also want to ban oil and gas exports. But energy experts sounded off on their proposed strategies for bringing down prices, calling them “pure folly.” These would have the opposite effects and could kill the U.S. oil business. To see why Read more here. ☼
The Role Of Critical Minerals In The Clean Energy Transition
By Paul Homewood
An energy system powered by clean energy technologies differs profoundly from one fueled by traditional hydrocarbon resources. Solar photovoltaic (PV) plants, wind farms and electric vehicles (EVs) generally require more minerals to build than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant. Since 2010 the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables in new investment has risen. (Read more) ☼
CLIMATE
The Orgy Of Hypocrisy
By Paul Homewood
[Note: COP26 is the UN’s Conference of Parties on climate where bigwigs try to scare us and extract more money from us.]
The parade of 400 private jets parked up at Scottish airports as world leaders, royalty and billionaires gushed out more carbon within a 24-hour period than most of us will in a lifetime in order to arrive at Cop26 and preach that we must all change our lives forevermore in order to reach Net Zero by 2050. (Read more) ☼
The Profound Junk Science of Climate
By Norman Rogers
Climate change prophecy hangs its hat on computer climate models. The models have gigantic problems. The climate models are an exemplary representation of confirmation bias, the psychological tendency to suspend one’s critical facilities in favor of welcoming what one expects or desires. Climate scientists can manipulate numerous adjustable parameters in the models that can be changed to tune a model to give a “good” result. Technically, a good result would be that the climate model output can match past climate history. But that good result competes with another kind of good result. That other good result is a prediction of a climate catastrophe. That sort of “good” result has elevated the social and financial status of climate science into the stratosphere. (Read more) ☼
The Real Problem with COP26: Not Its Hypocrisy but Its Goals
by Keith Lockitch
The annual spectacle of thirty thousand people converging from around the world for a massive energy-intensive extravaganza — complete with politicians and celebrities jetting in on carbon-fueled private jets — has prompted predictable cries of hypocrisy. But the real problem at COP26 is not hypocrisy, nor its failure to commit to its purported goals. The problem is that the very goals, themselves, are completely divorced from reality.
The aim of the Paris Agreement is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, which is viewed as a threshold intended to avert apocalyptic climate change.
But, although it’s everywhere today, the fear of world-ending, apocalyptic climate change is baseless and hysterical. We’ve already experienced a temperature increase of around 1 degree C since the preindustrial era. And that has been accompanied, explains energy expert Alex Epstein, “by the greatest increase in human well-being in human history, including a record low level of deaths from climate-related causes — which have decreased at a rate of 98% over the last century.” As documented in numerous recent works, there is copious data showing the huge improvements in all measures of human well-being and refuting the apocalyptic claims of environmental alarmists.1 Arguably, we face greater risks from the policies aimed at allegedly combating climate impacts than from those impacts themselves.
The real threat the world faces when it comes to the risk of severe climate events is not a little more global warming, it’s our culture’s relentless assault on energy — amply on display at COP26. By their decades-long opposition to every form of affordable, reliable energy, environmentalists, politicians, and climate activists have managed to demonize the energy sources and industries that literally keep us all alive. (Read more) ☼
2001-2019 Warming Driven By Increases In Absorbed Solar Radiation, Not Human Emissions
By Kenneth Richard
Three new studies affirm the increase in absorbed solar radiation associated with decreased reflection by clouds (albedo) has been the “root cause” of the positive Earth Energy Imbalance and global warming since the early 2000s. (Read more) ☼
New Study With Groundbreaking Results: “Connection Between Cosmic Rays, Radiation Budget Reaffirmed”
By P Gosselin…
Connection between cosmic rays, clouds and radiation budget is reaffirmed…CO2 role thus has to be much smaller. (Read more) (Read full paper) ☼
Lomborg: We’re Safer From Climate-Related Disasters Than Ever Before
by Bjorn Lomborg
Activists constantly talk about the existential threat climate change poses and the deaths natural disasters inflict—but they never quite manage to total up these deaths. One reason is that it’s easier to bend the data about disaster frequency than to bend death statistics. Death tolls tell a very clear story: People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before. As this series of articles has covered already, many of the fearful descriptions you hear of souped-up hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires aren’t accurate. And estimates of costly but increasingly frequent climate damages are typically designed to mislead. (Read more) ☼
Here’s How America Reduced Emissions More Than Any Other Major Country Despite Leaving The Paris Accords
by Thomas Catenacci, Daily Caller
The US. reduction in emissions has nothing to do with trying to do something about greenhouse gas emissions or global warming. It’s all due to the economics of natural gas from shale oil and gas revolution. The so-called “shale revolution” was the rapid development of hydraulic fracturing technology, or fracking, between 2010-2011 in the U.S., which led to a massive increase in the amount of crude oil and natural gas produced. Fracking led to hundreds of thousands of energy industry jobs in the U.S. (Read more) ☼
Climate Change Fueled Witch Hunts… Then and Now
by Gregory Wrightstone, CO2Coalition
European witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries targeted witches that were thought to be responsible for epidemics and crop failures related to declining temperatures of the Little Ice Age. A belief that evil humans were negatively affecting the climate and weather patterns was the “consensus” opinion of that time. How eerily similar is that notion to the the current oft-repeated mantra that Man’s actions are controlling the climate and leading to catastrophic consequences? (Read more) ☼
MISCELLANEOUS
Many fake papers published in science journals (my title)
From JoNova blog
Nature and Elsevier are agog and aghast that hundreds of junk papers filled with random word salad have been published in their esteemed journals.
It’s as bad as it sounds — one retracted title was: “‘Sea level height based on big data of Internet of Things and aerobics teaching in coastal areas’. “
They are shocked that scammers who were “organised” and “sophisticated” found tricks to get published — wait for it — not just by hyping up, adjusting and exaggerating their cherry-picked papers and incompetent models, but with nothing more than fake e-mails “with ‘univ’ instead of ‘uni’ and ‘-ac.uk’ instead of ‘.ac.uk’”. That’s right, the highest and most intellectual “peer review” journals in the world have such inadequate, nonexistent standards, that not only do they fail to weed out weak papers, they couldn’t even defend themselves against randomized nonsense coming from fake professors with dodgy emails. In other words, no one who matters even reads the papers before they are published. (Read more)
See also: The Progressive Neo-Racist Cancer Has Completely Destroyed The AMA (Link) ☼
Colorado Officials Vote To Drop ‘Sex Offender’ Term Because Of Its ‘Negative Impact’ — On Sex Offenders. (Link) ☼
If You Read It In The Mainstream Media, It’s Wrong — Plastics Edition
by Francis Menton
A detailed study of the relative environmental impacts of plastic versus other alternative materials for applications including bags and straws, as well as other things such as textiles and cars, shows that plastics have minimal environmental impacts, and most importantly, have far lower environmental impacts than any reasonably available alternatives for the applications in question. There is a formal method of analysis of environmental impacts called “life cycle assessment,” or LCA, that takes account of all of the environmental impacts of use of a given material for a given application at all stages of the process, from extraction through disposal. 24 LCA studies considering the subject of environmental impacts of plastic bags versus alternatives show that the single-use polyethylene bags we use today have much lower environmental impact than potential replacements such as bioplastics, paper, unbleached paper, cotton or organic cotton. . . . To replace plastic bags with paper bags requires 2.7x more energy, 1.6x more carbon dioxide emissions and 17x more water usage. (Read more)
[Note: you have to scroll down to middle of the article to get to the point] ☼
Largest Welfare Increase in U.S. History Will Boost Government Support to $76,400 per Poor Family
by Robert Rector and Jamie Hall, Heritage Foundation
The Biden Administration’s revised Build Back Better Act would be by far the largest increase in means-tested welfare spending in U.S. history. If the so-called Build Back Better Act would build anything, it would be the most bloated welfare system the United States has ever had. It doesn’t just sharply increase welfare payments, it strips work requirements, hikes marriage penalties, and includes payoffs to teachers’ unions and other special interests. Far from helping families out of poverty, this would trap them in costly and harmful government dependence. (Read the details 103 pages) ☼
Health benefits of coffee:
From https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34455881/
The main findings were the following: first, coffee may contribute to the prevention of inflammatory and oxidative stress-related diseases, such as obesity, metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes; second, coffee consumption seems to be associated with a lower incidence of several types of cancer and with a reduction in the risk of all-cause mortality; finally, the consumption of up to 400 mg/day (1-4 cups per day) of caffeine is safe.☼
Health benefits of red wine:
From: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30096779/
The most recent studies confirm the valuable role of moderate wine consumption, especially red wine, in the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, cognitive decline, depression, and cancer. In the meantime, recent studies also highlight the beneficial role of red wine against oxidative stress and in favor of desirable gut bacteria. The beneficial role of red wine has been attributed to its phytochemical compounds, as highlighted by clinical trials, where the effect of red wine has been compared to white wine, non-alcoholic wine, other alcoholic drinks, and water.
PARTING THOUGHTS
“Rejection of American heroes of the past is an essential element of Democrat revolutionary ideology. One can only observe in astonishment as slaveholding Founding Fathers like Jefferson are strongly rejected on “moral grounds” by the very same Democrats who shout their approval of and support for abortion.” – Daniel Mallock (see full post)
In fact, all that we call weather are the ocean and atmosphere acting to resolve differences in temperatures, humidities and pressures. It is the natural result of a rotating, irregular planetary surface mostly covered with water and illuminated mostly at its equator. – Ron Clutz
“[Joe Biden] continues to assure the public that he won’t raise taxes on those who make less than $400,000. But, Mr. President, inflation is a tax. It is the unfairest tax of all. You don’t have to be Bill Gates or Warren Buffett to realize that you’re paying this Biden tax every time you fill up your gas tank.” —Stephen Moore
“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue; or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.” —James Madison (1788)
“There is nothing so good that politicians can’t make it bad and nothing so bad that politicians can’t make it worse. Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state. Crime is bad but politicians have made it worse by going easy on criminals.” —Thomas Sowell
“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to peole who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.” – Thomas Sowell
“The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.” —Thomas Sowell
“If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.”—Plato
“An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.” —Thomas Jefferson (1813
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. …” – Richard Feynman
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” —Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken
Wryheat Climate articles:
A Review of the state of Climate Science
The Broken Greenhouse – Why Co2 Is a Minor Player in Global Climate
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
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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/
and
https://wryheat.wordpress.com/2019/01/03/a-review-of-the-state-of-climate-science/
If you like murder mysteries, try Lonni’s novels. See descriptions and links at:
https://wryheat.wordpress.com/lonnis-murder-mysteries/
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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