People for the West -Tucson
Newsletter, May, 2022
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
GLOBAL CLIMATE AND ENERGY POLICIES ARE CRAZY AND DANGEROUS
Current political policies on climate and energy have the potential of putting us back in the “dark ages.” Carbon dioxide, a substance necessary for life on this planet, is now the boogeyman allegedly responsible for a plethora of evils.
In this newsletter, we will examine the real science and point out the dangers of promoting the fake “climate crisis.” It’s all about money and power.
The Greenhouse hypothesis:
Greenhouse gases are said to provide a “blanket” which keeps Earth warm. But, too much greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels are claimed to make the earth dangerously hot and make earth uninhabitable. This despite the fact that over much of the past 600 million years, Earth was about 12°C warmer than now and life flourished. The chart below shows the current major greenhouse gases:
Notice that water vapor is responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide represents only 3.6% of total greenhouse gases. AND carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels represents only 0.1% of total greenhouse gases. YET, political policy claims that reducing or eliminating that 0.1% will save the planet.
The greenhouse hypothesis ignores heat transfer by convection, something that shreds the “blanket.”
There is another hypothesis, supported by physical evidence, on what keeps the Earth warm. This hypothesis claims the atmospheric density, not composition, is what controls temperature. See my post:
What Keeps Earth Warm – the Greenhouse Effect or Something Else? ☼
The Alleged Effects of Climate Change:
“>The Heartland Institute has just published a new book on climate issues. As described by Heartland:
“Over the past half-century, politicians, pundits, and academics have been making wildly incorrect claims about the causes and consequences of climate change, confusing and misleading millions of people around the world. Students and their teachers are not immune to these problems. In fact, in many ways, they’ve been the biggest victims of climate change misinformation. In Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students: Facts on 30 Prominent Climate Topics, authors Anthony Watts and James Taylor use cold, hard facts and well-established data to debunk some of the most prominent climate myths. This easy-to-read book is perfect for teachers and students interested in learning the truth about climate change and its impacts.”
The book is available at Amazon here as a paperback book for $9.99. It is also available as a free PDF download (82 pages) at https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/Books/CaaG-2022.pdf
I recommend this book. Each section has “Key Takeaways” so you can get the gist of the facts quickly. ☼
More on climate:
Most climate political policies are based on the modeling results of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, “very unfortunately, and very critically important, is that the IPCC cannot present any clear scientific facts that [greenhouse] gases actually produce their claimed warming due to climate change. Even worse, the IPCC cannot rationalize their draconian predicted impacts of climate change based on anything except highly suspect climate models, which are so limited and flawed that they cannot produce any predictions that match existing factual results, let alone credible future warming predictions.” – Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) (Read more) ☼
Report: “No Evidence of a Climate Crisis”
by James Murphy
A new report, released this month by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), states that empirical evidence shows that, despite the dire predictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is “no evidence of a climate crisis.” Professor Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo laid out his case in his annual State of the Climate Report (54 pages). (Read more) ☼
Climate-Change ‘Solutions’ Way Worse Than the Problem
by Ron Clutz
Anyone on an investment committee has likely spent untold amounts of time discussing ways to mitigate the impact of climate change, but they’ve likely never heard anyone state one simple and incontrovertible fact: The widespread exploration and production of fossil fuels that started in Titusville, Pa., not quite 170 years ago, has done more to benefit the lives of ordinary people than any other technological advance in history.
Before fossil fuels, people relied on burning biomass, such as timber or manure, which was a far dirtier and much less efficient source of energy. Fossil fuels let people heat their homes in the winter, reducing the risk of death from exposure. Fossil-fuel-based fertilizers greatly increased crop yields, reducing starvation and malnutrition. Before the advent of the automobile, the ability for many people to venture far from their hometown was an unfathomable dream. Oil- and coal-burning transportation opened up access to education, commerce, professional opportunities, and vital services such as medicine. There has been, and remains, a strong correlation between the use of fossil fuels and life expectancy.
Limiting the availability of fossil fuels in the name of climate activism would cut off many of the world’s poor from these benefits. Climate activists worry about a potential “existential crisis” decades down the road, but poor people, really poor people, face an existential crisis every day.
The climate-change solutions the West is pursuing also pose a danger to the environment. The lodestar of the environmental movement today appears to be electric vehicles. One would be hard-pressed to find a product more dependent on resources from extractive materials. An electric car requires almost four times as much copper as an automobile powered by an internal combustion engine. The widely accepted goal of having 30% of the world’s vehicle sales be electric by 2030 would require enormous investments in mining industries that are decidedly not eco-friendly. (Read more) ☼
The Many Benefits of Rising Atmospheric CO2 — An Introduction
By Craig D. Idso — April 6, 2022
Dr. Craig Idso, Chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and a new principal at MasterResource, invites readers to join him in a new series of articles discussing the many ways in which rising atmospheric carbon dioxide benefits humanity and nature.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide: you can’t see, hear, smell or taste it. But it’s there—all around us—and it’s crucial for life. Composed of one carbon and two oxygen atoms, this simple molecule serves as the primary raw material out of which plants construct their tissues, which in turn provide the materials out of which animals construct theirs. Knowledge of the key life-giving and life-sustaining role played by carbon dioxide, or CO2, is so well established, in fact, that humans—and all the rest of the biosphere—are described in the most basic of terms as carbon-based lifeforms. We simply could not and would not exist without it.
Ironically, far too many demonize and falsely label this important atmospheric trace gas a pollutant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of being shunned like the plague, the ongoing rise in CO2 should be welcomed with open arms. (Read more)
Increased Plant Productivity: The First Key Benefit of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment
by Craig D. Idso
Based on the numerous experiments listed there, I can tell you that, typically, a 300-ppm increase in the air’s CO2 content … will raise the productivity of most herbaceous plants by about one-third, which stimulation is generally manifested by an increase in the number of branches and tillers, more and thicker leaves, more extensive root systems, and more flowers and fruit.”
Over the past five decades literally thousands of laboratory and field-based studies have been conducted to examine growth-related responses of plants at higher levels of atmospheric CO2. These CO2-enrichment studies, as they are called, are near unanimous in what they have found—increased levels of CO2 significantly enhance plant photosynthesis and stimulate growth.
I have also calculated the direct monetary benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on both historic and future global crop production. Over the past 50 years, that benefit amounts to well over $3 trillion. And projecting the monetary value of this positive externality forward in time reveals that it will bestow an additional $10 trillion on crop production over the next 50 years. Yet, as amazing as this estimate sounds, it may very well be vastly undervalued. (Read more) ☼
ENERGY
Problems with wind and solar generation of electricity
Besides being unable to respond to supply and demand, wind and solar installations take up very large quantities of land and adversely affect wildlife and their habitat. There are also adverse affects of human health, see:
Health Hazards of Wind Turbines
How infrasound from wind turbines can cause cancer
According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, for the contiguous U.S.:
If all electricity was supplied by nuclear generation, it would require 3,553 nuclear stations with a total footprint of 4,619 square miles.
If all electricity were to be supplied by solar generation it would require 11,674 solar farms with a total footprint of 525,312 square miles.
If all electricity were to be supplied by wind generation, it would require 6,954 wind farms with a total footprint of 1,808,166 square miles. (Source)
Here is how it would look in perspective:
New Study: Wind, Solar Energy Now Killing 48% Of Priority Bird Species With ‘Population-Level Effects’
By Kenneth Richard
Of California’s 23 vulnerable bird species studied (barn owls, golden eagles, road runners, yellow-billed cuckoos…), scientists have found 11 are now experiencing at least a 20% decline in their population growth rates because wind turbines and solar panels are killing them and/or destroying their limited-range habitat. (Read more) ☼
Blackouts Occur When Green Energy Fails
by H. Sterling Burnett, Townhall
Previews of what will happen when green energy fails are popping up all over the world. It’s not a pretty picture of the future. Lessons from California, Texas, Europe, and Australia show that if the “Keep it in the ground” movement succeeds in stopping the use of fossil fuels, the world is worse off. (Read more) ☼
Blood on the blades: are thousands of dead bald eagles too high a price to pay for “clean” energy
by Gregory Wrightstone, CO2Coalition
Last week the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they had sentenced ESI Energy for a “blatant disregard” of federal wildlife laws of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). In their guilty plea to multiple violations, ESI admitted to the killing of at least 150 bald and golden eagles across 50 of its wind-energy facilities since 2012. Nearly all died of blunt force trauma attributable to being struck by a wind-turbine blade.
The so-called “clean” energy company — a subsidiary of NextEra Energy — was fined $8 million, or about $53,300 per carcass. It turns out that the fine and sentencing was NOT because they killed many dozens of our national symbol, but rather that they killed them without first acquiring the necessary permits that would have legalized the slaughter.
Why would ESI simply fail to do the paperwork that is regularly a part of the process for permitting wind facilities? The answer: money, and a lot of it. Unknown to most citizens is the fact that the Fish and Wildlife Service has established a “take limit” for wind energy companies to kill bald eagles. FWS regularly imposes fines on oil companies and electric transmission firms for inadvertent deaths of bald eagles, all the while giving its seal of approval to green-induced eagle carnage on a grand scale from turbines. (Read more) ☼
Time to Tear Down America’s Own Barriers to Energy Security
By Akash Chougule
Energy costs that were already soaring are now moving even higher as markets react to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s a stark reminder of how connected energy security is to national security.
The response from the political class has been all too predictable. Politicians are looking to mask the pain with cynical short-term maneuvers such as releasing supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or declaring a gas tax holiday. These would do little or nothing to reduce prices or ease security concerns.
Right out of the gate, the Biden administration moved to limit or stop domestic production by blocking natural gas pipelines, freezing drilling on federal lands and waters, and killing the Keystone XL pipeline. These decisions and others have resulted in less domestic oil and gas production and higher energy-related costs in the U.S. In Biden’s first year in office, crude oil production dropped from 2020 levels by nearly 100,000 barrels per day.
The most extreme activists are leveraging outdated regulations to block energy innovation. And the White House’s reversal on reforming the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is undermining its own energy and infrastructure goals. On the one hand, they say they want to help the economy by modernizing roads, bridges, and power systems. On the other hand, they want to go back to half-century-old regulations that are inapplicable to these times and proven to delay projects and raise costs.
The administration should not only restore the previous administration’s reforms aimed at boosting domestic energy supplies but go further and make structural changes to NEPA that would drive down the costs not only of renewable energy, but all energy and infrastructure projects. (Read more) ☼
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Tightens Gas Pipeline and LNG Regulations
by Kevin Stone
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) narrowly adopted stricter regulations and licensing requirements for natural gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) transport.
The new guidelines were enacted along party lines, with the three Democrat commissioners supporting the changes while the two Republicans dissented.
The new rules specify that required environmental analyses necessary for FERC approval of pipelines and new LNG facilities must address environmental justice issues and any effects the pipeline might have on climate change. (Read more) ☼
China Continues To Laugh At Western “Green Energy” Foolishness
by Francis Menton
With an energy cost crisis now striking Europe and to a lesser extent the U.S., some cracks have begun to appear in the “net zero” utopian dreams being pursued almost universally by Western politicians. We are supposed to believe that the official fossil fuel suppression policies will stop “climate change” and “save the planet” through the mechanism of rapid aggregate reductions of emissions of CO2 and other “greenhouse gases.” The rescue of the planet’s climate will make worthwhile our sacrifices in the form of higher energy prices, increased taxes to support subsidies to renewable energy, and restrictions on lifestyle. But in fact, that narrative is all so much hogwash. In the West, twenty plus years and trillions of dollars of subsidies for “green energy” schemes have achieved only some marginal reductions in the share of final energy consumption derived from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, fossil fuel usage continues to soar. (Read more) ☼
Oil Industry Report Warns of Massive Job Losses From Biden’s Anti-Drilling Agenda
by Thomas Catenacci
The Biden administration’s failure to pursue a plan for offshore oil and gas leasing will have long-term impacts on American jobs, gross domestic product, and energy security, an industry report found.
American oil production would decline by roughly 500,000 barrels per day and at least 57,000 energy industry jobs would be lost if the administration declines to issue a five-year leasing plan by July, according to a report published Tuesday by the American Petroleum Institute and the National Ocean Industries Association. U.S. GDP would decline $5 billion per year under the projection, the study further showed. (Read more) ☼
Problems with electric vehicles:
Electric Vehicles Have A Very Dirty Secret
Why Electric Vehicles Are A Bad Investment
Electric Cars not Ready for Showtime
The Truth About Living With An Electric Car ☼
The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions
from International Energy Agency
Executive Summary:
An energy system powered by clean energy technologies differs profoundly from one fuelled 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.
The types of mineral resources used vary by technology. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite are crucial to battery performance, longevity and energy density. Rare earth elements are essential for permanent magnets that are vital for wind turbines and EV motors. Electricity networks need a huge amount of copper and aluminium, with copper being a cornerstone for all electricity-related technologies. Read more of the executive summary. Read full report 287 pages. ☼
STATE OF THE UNION
Biden’s Red Tape and ‘Green’ Agenda
by Nate Jackson
His order to reinstitute longer environmental reviews will delay infrastructure projects and make them more expensive. The Biden administration is restoring stricter environmental standards for approving new pipelines, highways, power plants and other construction projects, including requiring consideration of how such projects might affect climate change. The changes announced Tuesday reinstate National Environmental Policy Act measures that had been removed by former President Donald Trump, who said that federal regulations were needlessly hindering much-needed infrastructure projects. (Read more) ☼
Biden Wants to Regulate Everything — Even Your Air Conditioning
by Stephen Moore, Townhall
Once upon a time, the mantra of the libertarian Left was “keep the government out of the bedroom.”
President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to regulate any gadget or appliance with an electric switch that turns on in your house or your driveway. New Department of Energy rules will dictate the amount of water that comes out of your showerhead, how much warm air comes out of your heater and how much cool air comes out of air conditioners. There is even talk about gadgets monitoring your home’s temperature in the winter and summer months. This is all reminiscent of the low-flush toilets mandated during the Bush and Obama years. These were designed to save water, but there was so little water flow that you had to flush two or three times. So it ended up not saving water at all.
Light bulbs, swimming pools, refrigerators and freezers are all subject to the same regulatory schemes. (Read more) ☼
Biden’s insulting response to our inflation crisis
New York Post
President Joe Biden just set another record: The worst inflation since 1981, as consumer prices climbed a staggering 8.5% over the 12 months ending in March.
That’s our sixth straight month of inflation above 6%, and our 11th straight month above 5%.
The White House response? A waiver to allow usually banned sales of high-ethanol gasoline over the summer, which impacts only the gas sold at 2,300 gas stations nationwide, out of around 150,000 total. This inflation is costing the typical family (median household income of $67,500) at least $5,000 a year. (Read more) ☼
Rare Earth Minerals And The Coming Green-Energy Inflation
by Mark P. Mills, Wall Street Journal
If you think inflation is bad, wait until the rest of the commodity markets really heat up. On both sides of the Atlantic, leaders promise that more green energy—solar, wind, and electric vehicles—will cure Western overreliance on volatile oil and natural gas and further isolate Russia. But that cure would be far worse than the disease because green energy’s staggering use of basic minerals will fuel inflation. (Read more) ☼
Fuel Producers, States Challenge New EPA Rule Effectively Mandating Electric Vehicles
by Kevin Stone, Heartland Daily News
An unlikely coalition is challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) revised fuel economy rules.
At issue is a revised fleetwide. corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard of 55 miles per gallon in model year 2026. The shortened timeline for the much higher fuel economy forces automakers to reduce their fleets’ carbon dioxide emissions by 22.6 percent more than previous rules required.
Sixteen states, plus groups representing the fossil fuel and ethanol industries in 15 states, are challenging the Biden EPA’s emissions rules. They argue the EPA’s new standards effectively mandate a national transition from internal combustion powered vehicles to electric vehicles starting in 2026. (Read more) ☼
The Specter of Shadowbanning, Explained
by Michael Swartz
The threat posed by the stealthy suppression of conservative media on social media platforms cannot be overstated. There’s no doubt deplatforming is newsworthy, but the much more subtle and insidious action being taken by the Big Tech giants is shadowbanning. Way back in 2018, about the time Jones was being shown the door by social media, The Economist explained the practice:
The currency of social networks is attention. A shadowban, in theory, curtails the ways in which that attention may be earned without blocking a user’s ability to post new messages or carry out typical actions on a network. Shadowbanned users are not told that they have been affected. They can continue to post messages, add new followers and comment on or reply to other posts. But their messages may not appear in the feed, their replies may be suppressed and they may not show up in searches for their usernames. The only hint that such a thing is happening would be a dip in likes, favorites or retweets — or an ally alerting them to their disappearance. (Read more) ☼
SEC Abandons Mission, Goes Woke on Climate Change
by H. Sterling Burnett
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has gone full-on woke on climate change.
Stepping well outside its legal mission to protect investors from fraud and the markets from insider trading and manipulation, the SEC has decided it knows what the managers of publicly traded companies, portfolio and fund managers, and investors should care about.
The SEC’s proposed rules would require publicly traded companies to track and report on the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their own operations and those of companies in their supply chain and the electric utilities that supply them power. In addition, companies will have to report on how climate change is affecting their businesses now, how it is likely to affect them in the future, and what they are doing in response, including steps they are taking to reduce non-toxic greenhouse gas emissions.
These rules will take hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars away from businesses’ core operations, to carry out the SEC’s mandate to predict future climate to account for its fiscal effect on business operations and act as their brothers’ keepers by tracking their power companies’ and suppliers’ emissions as well as their own. (Read more) ☼
The SEC’s climate proposal is not grounded in sound science
by Andy May, Washington Examiner
Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission released a new rule for public comment that would require public companies to report the climate-related impact of their businesses. Since it has been well established in multiple IPCC reports that the human impact on climate has never been observed, only modeled, this seems unnecessary.
The climate models used by the IPCC and NOAA to “compute” the human impact on climate have already been invalidated by Drs. Ross McKitrick and John Christy in their well-known Earth and Space Science peer-reviewed paper. The SEC proposed rule erroneously gives the impression that destructive climate events are increasing in frequency. This is not so. (Read more) ☼
Parting thoughts:
“Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.” —Benjamin Franklin (1722)
“The problem is that the oil is in Louisiana and Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas and North Dakota and Alaska and in many other states. But the dipsticks are in Washington, DC. This is a problem of simple economics.” —Senator John Kennedy
“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.” —Thomas Jefferson (1787)
“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)
“Climate-change moralists love humanity so much in the abstract that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and oil in the concrete. And they value humans so little that they don’t worry in the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant costs cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people’s ability to travel or keep warm. … Elite ideology divorced from reality impoverishes people and can get them killed.” —Victor Davis Hanson
“The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices — paid by others.” —Thomas Sowell
“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
Where the scare goes the money goes” – Larry Bell
“It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.” —John Adams (1756)
“I remember when jokes were jokes and news was news. Now jokes are the news and the news is a joke.” —Scott Adams
A new study from the San Francisco Fed shows it was Biden himself who put America on this grim trajectory. Specifically, it was the massive $1.9 trillion stimulus dumped into the US economy in early 2021 by the president’s American Rescue Plan. … The damage it did has been massive. Median OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] inflation went from around 1% to 2.5% during 2021. Here? From under 2% to 7% (5% excluding food and energy). And it kept on rising after that, to the nearly 8% we see now. The details are uglier still: Per the latest data, fuel oil is up almost 44%; gasoline, 38%; meat and eggs, 13%. Put in concrete terms, a recent Bloomberg calculation translates this to an added $433 per month in household expenses for 2022.” —New York Post editorial board)
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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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