RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/21/rent-s

President Trump announced last month that his administration will take actions to allow the year-round sale of fuel containing 15 percent ethanol, which is currently banned during summer months. The rent-seeking justification for this expansion of a flawed policy revved up immediately, in the form of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Iowa U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst. They lauded the decision, as well as the existing federal mandate to blend ethanol with transportation fuels, citing the contributions to the nation’s job growth, GDP, and tax revenues.

The same arguments could be made for a federal law mandating that all the alcohol in hard liquor and mouthwash be derived from corn. Would that be sound public policy?

Politics aside, any defense of U.S. ethanol policy must embrace a series of fallacies which include:

ethanol produced from corn makes the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels,
ethanol lowers the price of gasoline,
an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline boosts the overall supply of gasoline, and
ethanol is environmentally friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.

Although none of these claims is true, the ethanol lobby continues to promote them, and many politicians—particularly in the major corn-producing states—seem intoxicated by them.

Politicians like to say that ethanol is environmentally friendly, but these claims are misleading. Although corn is a renewable resource, it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than ethanol from sugar cane. Moreover, ethanol yields about 33 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly. Fuel costs for Americans are often artificially inflated due to the low energy content of ethanol (in spite of a possible octane boost) and the high costs faced by fuel companies trying to comply with ill-conceived fuel regulations. In a 2014 study, the Congressional Budget Office found that raising the mandated use of corn ethanol raises motor fuel prices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-green-logrolling-classic-1542579487

For a perfect example of green daydreaming gone awry, look to the waters off Virginia Beach, which will soon feature two wind turbines with blades rising as tall as the Washington Monument. It’s impressive engineering, but it makes zero economic sense, according to Virginia’s utilities regulators. They’ve issued a scorching order that . . . approves the project. Yes, the surprise ending is that their factual analysis doesn’t matter under a green fiat from the state Legislature.

Dominion Energy , Virginia’s biggest utility, plans to spend $300 million to build the two turbines 27 miles off the coast. Together they will produce 12 megawatts of power, enough for 3,000 homes. This first pair of turbines is a “demonstration project” to let Dominion gather data and experience. Then, as soon as 2024, it could begin dotting the adjacent waters with hundreds more, enough to generate 2,000 megawatts and light 500,000 homes.

This summer Dominion asked Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, which regulates electric utilities, to deem the plan “prudent.” As reason to act swiftly, it cited pressure to cut carbon emissions. Senate Bill 966, championed by Dominion and signed in March by Gov. Ralph Northam, set a state objective of 5,000 megawatts of solar and wind power by 2028.

The commission’s 20-page order, issued Nov. 2, is a takedown from front to back. “Dominion’s customers will pay the costs of this Project,” it says. The two turbines will generate electricity at 78 cents a kilowatt-hour—compared with 9.4 cents for new onshore wind, 5.6 cents for new solar, and around three cents for energy bought on the open market.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/16/misguided-environmentalism-blame-californias-wildfires/
The saddest part about these fires in California is that they are self inflicted. Californians should not allow such mismanagement to continue.

I grew up in California’s Ventura County and have family in both southern and northern California. Right now, the most deadly fire in California’s history is racing across northern California. The Camp Fire has already killed at least 56 people, burned down 7,700 homes, and destroyed the entire town of Paradise. A brush fire is also wreaking havoc on southern California. The Woolsey Fire has destroyed 98,362 acres, killed two people, and damaged several Hollywood landmarks such as the set of “MASH” and the Reagan Ranch.

Article after article blames two things for California’s frequent fires: global warming and human action. For example, a BuzzFeed article is titled, “How A Booming Population And Climate Change Made California’s Wildfires Worse Than Ever.” While dry conditions make fires more likely and people often start them, this misses the big picture. President Trump summed it up on Nov 10. He wrote, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor … Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/climate-scientists-discover-error-in-m

Two researchers have been forced to issue a major correction to a recent study indicating oceans have been warming at a significantly higher rate than previously thought due to climate change.

The paper, published October 31 in the scientific journal Nature, suggested ocean temperatures have risen roughly 60 percent higher than estimated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, after errors in the authors’ methodology were identified, they realized their findings were roughly in line with those of the IPCC, after all.

The researchers’ alarming findings were uncritically reported by numerous mainstream-media outlets but Nic Lewis, a mathematician and popular critic of the consensus on man-made climate change, quickly identified errors.

“The findings of the . . . paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote in a critique of the paper. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”

Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who co-authored the paper, said he and his partner, Laure Resplandy of Princeton, quickly realized the implications of their mistake once Lewis pointed it out.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-judicial-keystone-kop-1542153881

More and more liberal federal judges are posing as the front line of the anti-Trump resistance and subjugating the law to their political preferences. Consider the Obama appointee who last week blocked the Trump Administration’s permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

The oil pipeline has already been stuck in regulatory quicksand for a decade. In 2008 TransCanada applied for a permit to move up to 830,000 barrels of bitumen crude per day from the Alberta oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. The State Department under a 2004 executive order must approve cross-border projects to ensure they serve the “national interest.”

Amid a drawn-out review, the Obama State Department issued five determinations that the pipeline would have no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions. Its final environmental impact statement in 2014 said bitumen would be extracted irrespective of the pipeline, and shipping the crude by rail or tanker instead would result in 28% to 42% greater CO2 emissions as well as more leaks.

Barack Obama ignored those findings and offered Keystone as a sacrifice to the 2016 Paris climate agreement. The U.S. government must “prioritize actions that are not perceived as enabling further GHG emissions globally,” the Obama Administration concluded.

TransCanada sued in federal court and under Nafta’s Chapter 11 investor-state arbitration, but it caught a break when Donald Trump was elected and his Administration granted the permit. Yet now it’s back to rolling the boulder uphill as environmentalists have sued.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/democrat-politics-raises-costs-of-infrastructure-projects/

Democrats favor improving infrastructure as long as it takes longer and costs more.

W hy can’t the United States build or repair infrastructure on a par with countries in Europe or Asia? Why can’t we have all the nifty new airports, bridges, and trains that seem to spring up overnight in other parts of the world? The answer, in one word, is Democrats. Two groups that are virtually owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic party retard infrastructure progress here. One is labor unions, and the other is environmental activists.

The latest example of the absurd reach of the latter is to be found in the U.S. district court of Montana, where Obama-appointed Judge Brian M. Morris halted completion of the Keystone XL pipeline once again, ruling that President Trump’s permit to grant the bid by TransCanada Corp. to finish the pipeline that would transport oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska “hadn’t considered all impacts as required by federal law,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The first “final environmental review” approving construction was released by Hillary Clinton’s State Department seven years ago, concluding the impact on global warming would not be severe. Another “final environmental review,” also approving the project, was released in 2014 by John Kerry’s State Department, which also foresaw little impact on global warming. Floundering for any excuse to block the pipeline, Judge Morris concern-trolled members of the energy industry by wondering whether the project would be profitable enough given fuel prices. That is for oil guys to worry about, not judges. One interested party observed that Keystone would have “very little impact” on U.S. gas prices. That observer was the person who gave Judge Morris his job, Barack Obama.

The problem is larger than the endless delays on Keystone, though. Because of what Robert Kagan dubbed “adversarial legalism,” routine public improvements are tied up like Gulliver by the Lilliputians with a thousand environmental reviews. In a given year, some 350 Environmental Impact statements and 50,000 Environmental Assessments are being produced by the federal government. Meanwhile individual states and municipalities duplicate these requirements by slathering on their own regulations. Let it not be said that the U.S. doesn’t produce anything: We are the masters of paperwork. Progressive columnists keep wondering why we can’t be more like China and get things done; then they go out to brunch with their human-roadblock friends, all those litigators from the NRDC and Greenpeace and all the other economic reactionaries who spend their lives on lawsuits to stop American progress.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/renewable-mandates-and-carbon-taxes-lost-big-on-tuesday/

On Tuesday, Democrats won a majority in the U.S. House as well as gubernatorial races in several key state races. But a look at the results from four states — Colorado, Arizona, Florida, and Washington — shows that voters are still skeptical of bans on hydrocarbon production, renewable-energy mandates, and carbon taxes.

In Colorado, a state that has been trending Democratic, voters elected a Democratic governor, Jared Polis, and gave Democrats a majority in the state senate. But Coloradans handily rejected (57 to 43 percent) Proposition 112, which would have prohibited oil and gas drilling activities within 2,500 feet of homes, hospitals, schools and “vulnerable areas.”

The initiative was endorsed by numerous environmental groups including 350.org, Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Had it passed, the initiative would have effectively banned new oil and gas production in Colorado, the fifth-largest natural gas producer in the US. To defeat Proposition 112, the oil and gas industry in Colorado spent some $34 million.

In Arizona, voters overwhelmingly rejected (70 to 30 percent) Proposition 127, a ballot initiative that would have required the state to get 50 percent of its electricity from renewables. Had it passed, the initiative could have forced the closure of the 3,900-megawatt Palo Verde Generating Station, the biggest nuclear power plant in the U.S.

The fight over the proposition was the most expensive ballot initiative in the state’s history, with opponents, led by the state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service, spending some $30 million. Proponents of the measure spent about $23 million, about $18 million of which came from California billionaire Tom Steyer, who told The New Yorker in October that “We’re on the side of the angels. . . . This is a black-hat, white-hat fight.” Steyer, a leader of the impeach-Trump wing of the Democratic Party, is contemplating a run for president in 2020.

Although Steyer lost the ballot initiative in Arizona, he got a win in Nevada on Question 6, which will require the state’s utilities to get 50 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030. Steyer was a key backer of Question 6, which passed 59–41 percent. But the mandate won’t become law unless it passes again in 2020.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-green-ballot-trouncing-1541719310?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=2&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Tuesday’s election highlighted that more voters like Donald Trump’s policies than like him. Consider this week’s voter embrace of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth energy positions, via nationwide rejection of initiatives to raise energy costs.

Most notable was Washington State’s defeat of a carbon tax for the second time in two years. Climate activists designed the 2016 measure to be “revenue neutral” in hopes of masking the costs but still lost big. This time they aimed to win over progressives by promising to earmark carbon tax revenue for green subsidies and other spending.

The tax would have raised gas prices by 13 cents a gallon in 2020 and 59 cents a gallon by 2035—in a state that already has some of the highest gas prices in the country. While Seattle residents bought it, suburban and rural voters killed the measure 56%-44%.

Colorado voters rejected (57%-43%) a ballot measure that would have shut down most new oil and gas exploration. Proposition 112 would have banned such exploration within 2,500 feet of any structure deemed a “vulnerable area” by the state or local government—which would have meant most of the state.

A Common Sense Policy Roundtable analysis estimated a $218 billion hit to Colorado’s GDP from 2018-2030, and Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper warned that strangling an industry that accounts for 15% to 20% of the state economy could trigger a recession. Democratic Gov.-elect Jared Polis has supported drilling limits in the past, though even he opposed Prop 112. We’ll see if he and the all-Democratic state Legislature continue to heed voters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/global_warming_and_fake_science.html

About 10 years ago the brand name global warming was changed to climate change. The reason was simple. The Earth was failing to warm. An additional benefit of the climate change slogan was that everything that goes wrong with the weather can be blamed on climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels. The 2012 hurricane Sandy, that flooded parts of New York and New Jersey, is routinely blamed on climate change. The great New England hurricane of 1938 struck the same area and was vastly worse, killing more than 600 persons. That could not be blamed on climate change caused by CO2, because CO2 was not an issue in 1938. Blaming Sandy on CO2-caused climate change is simply a made-up story without scientific foundation. Just because there are plenty of scientists making a connection between climate change and Sandy does not mean that a scientific foundation exists. It does mean that plenty of scientists are eager to benefit from natural disasters.

The idea that scientists are neutral observers resistant to political influence and money is naïve. Scientists are bought and sold every day in the courtrooms of America as paid witnesses. Scientific organizations lobby relentlessly and effectively in Washington. The National Academy of Science pretends to be the government’s advisor on scientific matters. Somehow their recommendations always suggest that more money should be spent on science. Global warming, a.k.a. climate change, has been a bonanza for a large segment of the scientific community. Just as with other special interest groups, the policy recommendations of the science community are heavily influenced by the prospects of getting money from the government. We need science, but science cannot be allowed to run wild.

Computer modeling is the basis for the predictions of climate doom. Computer modeling is hard to do properly, but easy to manipulate to produce the results that are most beneficial to the scientific community. Computer models are excellent vehicles for weaponizing confirmation bias – searching for, or manufacturing, data that confirms one’s biases. Scientists that see the massive holes in the global warming theory are reluctant to speak up because they will be attacked if they do. Getting in the way of money from Washington is not allowed. Yet, there are hundreds of prominent scientists that do speak up. Suppression of global warming skeptics by means of fear and intimidation is not the practice of science. It is the practice of totalitarian politics.

There are forces, known and unknown, that can change the climate. From 1910 to 1940 the Earth warmed strongly. That warming cannot be blamed on CO2. Nobody knows what caused that warming. Yet the warming from 1970 to 2000 is confidently blamed on CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That is a leap of faith, because we don’t know if the recent warming was really caused in part or totally, by the same unknown force that caused the early century warming. The global warming computer models are not remotely good enough to resolve this question.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/twilight_of_the_green_follies.html

For more than two and a half centuries, human kind has lived under an irreconcilable dichotomy – the benevolent revolution we call the enlightenment, and the inevitable reactionary counter-revolution that followed it – a dichotomy that has continued to our days.

The enlightenment introduced a number of revolutionary concepts that demolished the church dogma that had dominated the Middle Ages. It established reason and empirical knowledge as the source of authority leading to the scientific revolution beginning with Copernicus and the heliocentric theory of the universe. In government, the enlightenment brought about the radical idea of individual liberty with John Locke’s call for “life, liberty and property.“ The revolution reached its apotheosis in the late 18th century with the American Constitution and its idea of “inalienable rights” given to us by our Creator and of a government based on the consent of the governed. All of this was based on the unshakeable belief in progress driven by man and the Judeo-Christian civilization’s fundamental belief in the primacy of man over nature.

Yet no sooner did these radical ideas gain wide currency in the West than the reactionary counter-assault materialized. It started with Jean-Jacque Rousseau, considered by many the father of the totalitarian temptation, and his idea of an all powerful state using coercion as means of imposing an imaginable “general will.” Since then, humanity has struggled to reconcile two ideologies that are fundamentally at odds: one based on the rights of the individual, the other espousing the unlimited power of the state. The latter one found its culmination in the bloody totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, best expressed in Mussolini’s dictum “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” And it is this veneration of the coercive powers of the state that fundamentally unites Nazism, fascism and communism despite other marginal differences.