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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Biden’s Continuing War on Energy Independence Brandon J. Weichert

https://the-pipeline.org/bidens-continuing-war-on-energy-independence/

The Biden administration is terminating the seven remaining oil leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). These seven leases represented the last vestiges of the Trump era of America’s energy dominance. With the termination of these seven leases, the Biden administration has signaled to the world that it’s going to kill affordable energy for Americans along with U.S. energy dominance in the name of “saving our planet.” And just what does president Biden think he’s saving our planet from? “Climate change,” of course.

Thanks to Biden’s short-sighted decision, energy analysts report that the United States will produce 140,000 barrels of oil per day less than previously. This means that American energy consumers can anticipate a concomitant increase in their average fuels costs. Not surprisingly, the ecochondriacs who dominate America’s political, media, and educational sectors today rarely take into account basic economics. In this case, the law of supply and demand. The cut in American energy production will force the U.S. to rely more heavily on unstable foreign sources of fossil fuels, such as those in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela.

In September, the government of Saudi Arabia surprised the world when it chose to cut oil production. This move has spiked the price of oil on the world market. Many energy experts are projecting that the cost of oil could spike to $100 per barrel or more. Meanwhile, Russia, another major fossil fuel producer, has also decided to cut production. Tack on increasing demand from China, the world’s second-largest economy with one of the largest middle-classes in the world, and you’ve got the perfect storm of energy insecurity for an America thanks to the radical Biden administration climate agenda.

Who benefits from the increased price of oil? The very regimes that the United States has problems with. Although the Saudis are a longtime regional partner in the Middle East, the U.S.-Saudi relationship has long been fraught, even before 9/11. The Biden administration has become especially antagonistic toward the Kingdom over their human rights abuses. Yet, by cutting American domestic energy production, Biden is ensuring the U.S. will be even more dependent on this unstable, even distasteful ally.

Biden’s Attack on Electricity: By Mario Loyola

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/10/16/bidens-attack-on-electricity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

Lights out

Marxism had many trappings of a religion. But fortunately, its major claims were of this world and could be falsified. Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, the living conditions of workers deteriorate and that only by seizing the means of production can they improve their lot. After a few generations of communism, nobody in Europe believed that anymore.

The climate-change movement has a similar vulnerability. Its religious trappings are plain enough: the attribution of natural catastrophes to human wickedness, revelations of the apocalypse, persecution of heretics. But at the end of the day its claims are material — and falsifiable.

With climate change, we are told, living conditions will deteriorate, and only by decarbonizing the economy can we avoid those losses. It may take several more generations to convince people one way or the other, but in the meantime there is a quick way to discredit the claim, and that is for government to implement a policy that is so costly and catastrophic in the near term that people generally start wondering whether climate policies might not be considerably more dangerous than climate change.

Such is the thin silver lining on President Biden’s latest round of climate policies, by far the most ambitious yet. In April, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed two rules that, if implemented simultaneously, would wreck America’s electricity grid. The first was vehicle-emissions standards that would require two-thirds of all vehicles made in America to be fully electric by 2032. That’s barely eight years from now. The second would require the large natural-gas and coal plants upon which the nation’s electricity depends for “baseload” power to adopt carbon-capture-and-storage technology (CSS) (in which carbon dioxide is removed from the power-plant exhaust by a chemical process, then transported by pipeline to be injected deep underground) or switch to “green” hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced by renewable sources) by 2038 at the latest.

Both rules rest on thin legal ice. For the vehicles rule, the EPA is defining each “class” of vehicle as including fully electric cars of the same size as the relevant combustion-engine vehicle; then it sets the emission standard so low that no combustion-powered car can possibly meet it. As a result, there is no way for carmakers to comply with the “fleet average” standards by improving emissions in their existing vehicles, as the Clean Air Act contemplates. Rather, carmakers will have to switch to producing fully electric vehicles (EVs), regardless of whether the charging infrastructure is in place and the grid can handle the ballooning demand. The Supreme Court insisted last year in West Virginia v. EPA that the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA power to require utilities to switch to different kinds of power plants; the same principle should apply to the engines in our automobiles.

Even Bill Gates is backtracking — the air’s gone out of the climate-crisis balloon Glenn H. Reynolds

https://nypost.com/2023/09/25/even-bill-gates-is-backtracking-the-airs-gone-out-of-the-climate-crisis-balloon/

Has the air gone out of the “climate crisis” balloon? 

It’s starting to look like it. Some other causes du jour are looking limp lately, too.

Oh, hysteria is still out there. In Boston this month, I passed a church where the door bore a lurid poster reading “DUE TO GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS, WORSHIP IN SANCTUARY 9-17-23 CANCELED.”

If it were really a global crisis, wouldn’t you want to be praying?

I first thought it was referring to Hurricane Lee, which had been predicted to bring apocalyptic storm conditions to Beantown. 

Lee, though, veered out to sea, and that Sunday was sunny, warm and delightful. 

(While the soldiers of God had fled the scene in advance, the armies of Mammon were out in force on the Boston Common, in the form of a massive cannabis fair. Say what you will about the stoners, they’re not prone to panic or overthinking.)

But this seems actually a case of closing church so parishioners could go to New York to “Join us in the March to End Fossil Fuels,” which is even more amusing, since traveling uses a lot more fossil fuels than staying in Boston and praying for an end to fossil fuels, which would be at least as effective.

Bill Gates, however, is pumping the brakes on climate panic. 

Speaking at a New York Times event, he observed that heavy-handed policies won’t work: “If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’”

TEN REASONS NOT TO OWN AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/26/10-reasons-not-to-own-an-ev/

From California to New York to Washington, Democrats are using the coercive force of government to herd Americans into electric vehicles. Here are 10 reasons why we should resist both this egregious abuse of power as well as the social pressure that demands we all go electric:

The mandates are an egregious abuse of power. Where do government officials, both elected and unelected, derive the authority to tell Americans what vehicles they cannot own and what vehicles they must own? There is none. Yes, there are laws intended to keep dangerous cars and trucks off the streets for safety reasons. But no automobile is a threat just because it burns gasoline or diesel. Dare we say that those who buy an EV are complicit in securing for the state a power it was never intended to have?

The mandates are an egregious abuse of power Part ll. The federal government oversteps its constitutional limits when it tells manufacturers that two-thirds of the vehicles they build must be electrified.

EVs are not zero-emission vehicles. As one of our contributors wrote in a well-researched, heavily sourced piece, life-cycle assessments show that the “manufacturing, charging, operating, and disposing of electric vehicles produces more of every major category of pollutants than conventional cars.” 

The EV manufacturing chain is an environmental malignancy. That same writer, James D. Agresti, president of Just Facts, has also noted “the ‘environmental implications’ of mining lithium to make batteries for electric cars ‘would directly counter the intent’ of ‘incentivizing electric vehicle adoption.’” He further makes the case by citing a Brookings Institution study, which “found that ‘continued reliance on China’ will ‘increase the risk that sourcing of critical minerals will cause or contribute to serious social or environmental harms.’”

EVs are fire hazards. All automobiles catch fire, but EVs burn hotter, longer, and take far more water to extinguish than a conventional car that’s burning. Firefighters use about 500 gallons of water to put out regular car fires. EV fires can require from 6,000 gallons to 20,000 gallons to get the job done. Oh, yes, the smoke from an EV fire is particularly toxic, not terribly dissimilar to that of Zyklon B.

Climate Militants Disrupt Peoples’ Lives as UN Climate Summit Looms Hysteria replaces reason. by Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-militants-disrupt-peoples-lives-as-un-climate-summit-looms/

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has made many fear-mongering declarations about climate change over the last several years. This past July, he raised his decibel level of hysteria by claiming that the “era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.” To underscore his clarion call to action by world leaders gathering in New York City for the UN’s annual General Assembly High-Level Week, the Secretary General decided to convene a Climate Ambition Summit on September 20th. Never mind the huge carbon footprints created by all the foreign dignitaries flying into New York to blow hot air as usual.

The objective of the UN Climate Ambition Summit is to go beyond the commitments that countries made in 2015 as part of the Paris agreement on climate change. UN member state governments and private sector stakeholders are expected to step forward with detailed plans of action to combat climate change with mitigation and adaptation measures, and to deliver commitments for funding the achievement of “climate justice.”

Discussing his climate summit, Secretary General Guterres declared that “the planet can’t wait.” He wants rich countries to take “a quantum leap in their efforts to reduce emissions,” in order to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels. China, however, gets a free pass, despite the fact that it remains the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gasses and continues to build an abundance of coal-fired plants. The UN and other multilateral organizations still treat China as a “developing” country, even though its economy ranks globally as the second largest.

In the lead-up to the climate summit, climate justice warriors are taking to the streets, conducting disruptive protests to demand an end to fossil fuels now. This follows a years-long pattern of actions that have included defacement of works of art at museums, occupation of buildings, deflating tires of SUVs, and blocking traffic for extended periods of time – in capitalist countries, of course. Not in Communist China.

Although these militant tactics have often backfired by antagonizing many people whose lives have been significantly disrupted as a result of the militants’ actions, the climate justice warriors are doubling down.

First Time Tragedy, Second Time Farce Michael Walsh

https://the-pipeline.org/the-column-first-time-tragedy-second-time-farce/

Girl-children and their Pied Pipers took to the streets of Manhattan over the weekend, demanding — demanding! — an end to all traditional sources of energy and the immediate installation of the net-zero, carbon-free, powered-by-unicorn-farts utopian future they believe they’re owed because, well, just because. The “March to End Fossil Fuels” was an orchestrated kickoff to “Climate Week” convened to Save the Planet and featured appearances by the usual suspects, including la Pasionaria herself, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well notable lefty actors such as Susan Sarandon, Kyra Sedgewick, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, and Kevin Bacon, who all have time on their hands since they’re on strike from play-acting in films. (Full disclosure: so are the writers, which includes me.) According to the entirely one-sided story by Seth Borenstein of the AP:

“We have people all across the world in the streets, showing up, demanding a cessation of what is killing us,” Ocasio-Cortez told a cheering crowd. “We have to send a message that some of us are going to be living on, on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now. And we will not take no for an answer.”

This protest was far more focused on fossil fuels and the industry than previous marches. Sunday’s rally attracted a large chunk, 15%, of first-time protesters and was overwhelmingly female, said American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies environmental movements and was surveying march participants.

Of the people Fisher talked to, 86% had experienced extreme heat recently, 21% floods and 18% severe drought, she said. They mostly reported feeling sad and angry… Among the marchers was 8-year-old Athena Wilson from Boca Raton, Florida. She and her mother Maleah, flew from Florida for Sunday’s protest. “Because we care about our planet,” Athena said. “I really want the Earth to feel better.”

Gary Gensler Tells a Climate Whopper The SEC Chairman fibs to Congress about his pending disclosure rule.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gary-gensler-sec-climate-disclosure-rule-congress-testimony-ef28eda6?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

When is a climate policy not a climate policy? Apparently when Chairman Gary Gensler of the Securities and Exchange Commission is trying to disguise the intent of his forthcoming climate-disclosure rule while testifying before Congress.

The SEC last spring proposed a highly controversial rule that would require public companies to disclose their putative climate risks and greenhouse-gas emissions, including those of suppliers and customers. The rule is expected to be finalized soon and will likely meet a swift legal challenge under the Supreme Court’s major questions doctrine because Congress never authorized it.

Mr. Gensler told the Senate Banking Committee last week this was no big deal. The rule “is built on multi-decades authority about disclosure” going back to New Deal legislation, he claimed. Nice try.

The 1934 Securities Exchange Act allows the SEC to mandate disclosures that are “necessary or appropriate in the public interest or for the protection of investors.” But even the Obama SEC in 2016 conceded that “a specific congressional mandate” would be necessary before adopting a climate disclosure rule. How does it benefit the public and investors to require, say,Walmartto calculate its greenhouse-gas emissions? The mandate will merely increase business costs, which will be passed on to customers.

Mr. Gensler also claimed he is merely trying “to bring comparability to that which is already happening” and that “over 80% of the top 1,000 companies in 2021 were making climate disclosures.”

But climate and greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t equally material to all businesses. His one-size-fits-all regulation is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Democrats’ Latest Break With “The Science” By David Lewis Schaefer

https://amac.us/newsline/society/democrats-latest-break-with-the-science/

Last week, the Biden administration announced what the New York Times called its “most aggressive move yet to protect federal land from oil and gas exploration,” not only banning drilling in 13 million acres of what the Times termed “pristine” wilderness in Alaska, but also canceling the remaining drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) issued by the Trump administration.

While “young environmentalists,” according to the Times, were still “angered” by Biden’s decision in March to allow the $8 billion Willow project to proceed, calling it a betrayal of the president’s campaign promise of “no new drilling, period” on federal lands and waters, the administration has stressed that its ban on other projects along with the lease cancellation will substantially “reduce the carbon emissions that result from burning oil and gas that are driving climate change.”

The legality of the administration’s cancellation of previous leases will undoubtedly be challenged in court. Beyond that fact, its anti-drilling policy ignores a vast array of problems resulting from the war on fossil fuels: rapidly rising energy costs, large subsidies to manufacturers of electric cars that few consumers want, increasing America’s reliance on oil imports from unreliable suppliers with despotic regimes like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, bans on fracking that leave oil-rich areas like western New York suffering from widespread unemployment, and so on.

Biden’s climate change rhetoric also ignores the continuing debate around claims that burning fossil fuels is causing a dangerous rise in world temperatures. (See, for instance, the distinguished climate scientist and former Obama energy department official Steven Koonin’s 2021 book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, as well as several books by the head of the Copenhagen Consensus Bjorn Lomborg.) It also disregards the infinitesimal contribution that drilling in Alaska would make to world CO2 emissions – particularly in contrast with China, which keeps constructing many new (“dirty”) coal-burning power plants each year, even while pledging to start reducing its emissions “in the future.”

All this calls into question the boast made by Democrats, beginning with the first Obama administration, that they, unlike Republicans, believe in following “the science,” not just on climate change, but a whole host of other issues.

The inevitable EV implosion By Ron Ross

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/the_inevitable_ev_implosion.html

The electric vehicle honeymoon is over. Don’t expect the marriage itself to last much longer either.  

The mass conversion from internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEs) to electric vehicles was never more than a Democrat/environmentalist hallucination anyway. It was the most ill-conceived government policy objective in modern history.

The transition should have been a non-starter. It’s riddled with numerous deal killers. It’s like having a dozen fatal diseases all at the same time.

Any goal as massive as a total conversion from ICE vehicles to EVs requires careful planning and infrastructure preparation. It would necessitate a rapid doubling of electricity generation and grid expansion. In today’s world that’s impossible.

EV promoters could never deliver on their promises. Their grandiose assurances were nothing more than wishful thinking.

There was no market research. Hmm — I wonder why. There were no feasibility studies. Hmm — I wonder why. Did they actually believe everyone would tolerate spending hours to charge their vehicles rather than the minutes they were accustomed to?

Scientists responds to critiques of new study: ‘Reply to erroneous claims by RealClimate.org on our research into the Sun’s role in climate change’ By Marc Morano

https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/09/11/scientists-responds-to-critiques-of-new-study-reply-to-erroneous-claims-by-realclimate-org-on-our-research-into-the-suns-role-in-climate-change/

In the last month, we have co-authored three papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals collectively dealing with the twin problems of (1) urbanization bias and (2) the ongoing debates over Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) datasets:

Soon et al. (2023). Climate. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179. (Open access)

Connolly et al. (2023). Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e. (Still in press, but pre-print available here)

Katata, Connolly and O’Neill (2023). Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0122.1. (Open access)

All three papers have implications for the scientifically challenging problem of the detection and attribution (D&A) of climate change. Many of our insights were overlooked by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their last three Assessment Reports (AR), i.e., IPCC AR4 (2007), IPCC AR5 (2013) and IPCC AR6 (2021). This means that the IPCC’s highly influential claims in those reports that the long-term global warming since the 19th century was “mostly human-caused” and predominantly due to greenhouse gas emissions were scientifically premature and the scientific community will need to revisit them.

So far, the feedback on these papers has been very encouraging. In particular, Soon et al. (2023) seems to be generating considerable interest, with the article being viewed more than 20,000 times on the journal website in the first 10 days since it was published.

However, some scientists who have been actively promoting the IPCC’s attribution statements over the years appear to be quite upset by the interest in our new scientific papers.

This week (September 6th, 2023), a website called RealClimate.org published a blog post by one of their contributors, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS). In this post, Dr. Schmidt is trying to discredit our analysis in Soon et al. (2023), one of our three new papers, using “straw-man” arguments and demonstrably false claims.