RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ah, science. If you’re even loosely engaged in the wild and dark art that is politics these days, you know by now that “science,” as a word, has taken on an almost mystical meaning. “Science,” in many of its modern incantations, now serves as a form of code, as vague and fuzzy as a Wiccan chant. For a growing number of political activists, the meaning is simple: Science, you see, is a lively mix of standard progressive hobbyhorses, tossed wild-eyed and cranky into one cantankerous bag.

Witness the upcoming March for Science, scheduled for Saturday, April 22. This also happens to be Earth Day, which is nice enough — and hey, who could object to a good old-fashioned rah-rah session for science? I, for one, always welcome a refresher on string theory, or the confounding conflict between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, or that long, troubling episode in our planet’s history when a few impertinent continents apparently traipsed all the way over to the other side of the globe and no one was there to panic about it.

Alas, this March for Science does not appear to be largely about science, or about people who know a great deal about science, or even about people who want to know a great deal about science. (It would be kind of fun, in fact, to quiz earnest potential attendees about the details of the scientific method, or whether Johannes Kepler should finally win that well-deserved Oscar.) Keeping up with today’s hottest trends, the March for Science has wrapped itself in identity politics, cranked up the oven to “scorch,” and potentially set things on track to unceremoniously collapse into one giant intersectional soufflé.

The troubles brewing within the March for Science surfaced in January, marked by a now-deleted official tweet: “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues.” Since then, the addled march has torn through four different diversity statements, shellacked by critics on both sides. (Harvard’s Steven Pinker bashed the march’s “anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric,” while others complained the statement didn’t go far enough.) The march’s latest set of “Diversity and Inclusion Principles,” when paired with its more shame-faced and apologetic sibling, the “Statement on Diversity and Inclusion,” tops out at over 1,000 words.

You might think that this amounts to a protest march protesting too much. But the hits keep coming. When Bill Nye, the children’s TV personality-turned-science-advocate, was announced as an honorary chair of the march last week, critics bemoaned his status as a white male. Oddly, no one seemed particularly riled up about the fact that Nye is not an actual “scientist” at all. “I was born a dorky white guy who became an engineer,” Nye told BuzzFeed, reportedly “baffled” at the brouhaha. “I’m playing the hand I was dealt. We can’t — this march can’t solve every problem at once.”

More and more conservatives are proclaiming the virtues of clean energy. At least that’s what some groups want you to believe. In reality, far-left “charitable” foundations have given pretend conservatives millions of dollars to advance a climate chaos, renewable energy agenda – channeling the funds through intermediary groups, to OxiClean the transactions and limit transparency and accountability.

The huge Green Profiteers Network has to be at least somewhat bipartisan to ensure continued mandates, renewable portfolio standards, production and investment tax credits, regulatory exemptions and other subsidies that have made Climate Crisis, Inc. a $1.5-trillion international business. With global financial and insurance giants allying with that crowd and determined to procure some $93 trillion (!) by 2030 to create a “de-carbonized” and “sustainable” world economy, the effort has intensified.

But now it must contend with President Donald Trump. His growing list of executive orders and regulatory reviews is rapidly reversing eight years of Obama “Clean Power Plan,” “social cost of carbon” and other regulatory decrees; laying the foundation for reversing EPA’s absurd finding that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare; and putting the United States in a position to lead the world back from the brink of Paris pact pandemonium and wealth redistribution.

Other countries will likely follow these energy and climate actions, says Cornwall Alliance ethicist Calvin Beisner, thereby “sparing their citizens from the crushing costs of pointless policies to mitigate global warming, by raising energy costs and prohibiting the most reliable, affordable forms of energy.” These actions are vital, because “the greatest threat to the environment is not affluence. It’s poverty.”

Radical environmental groups are nevertheless preparing to battle every Trump action in our courts, legislatures, newsrooms … and streets. Preparing to join all the prominent big-name groups is a host of like-minded, tax-exempt, pseudo-free-enterprise outfits, many operating under the umbrella of the Conservative Energy Network. This 2016 creation includes Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, an environmentalist Christian Coalition of America, Citizens for Responsible Energy Reform – and Conservatives for Clean Energy (CCE), launched in 2014 as an “educational” and “charity” organization.

Following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking “all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement.”

The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.

Holdren’s buddy, Tom Karl, authored a report in 2015 attempting to disprove the hiatus in global warming that had been widely acknowledged by many scientific groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The warming pause threatened to undermine the justification for a costly climate-change pact that was being negotiated at the time: How could world leaders commit trillions in tax dollars to stop global warming if it wasn’t actually happening?

Karl’s report came to the rescue just months before the Paris Climate Conference. In announcing his findings, Karl said the “new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.” How convenient. His analysis was eagerly accepted by the international science community, but others were leery about its timing; the House Science Committee has been leading an inquiry into the report for nearly two years.

But a retired top official at NOAA has now confirmed suspicions about the veracity of Karl’s research and about whether politics — not science — were at play. In February, John Bates, the former head of NOAA’s climate-data archive, wrote a lengthy exposé detailing misconduct at NOAA related to the report. The allegations included using inappropriately “corrected” datasets, violating agency protocol on data review, and failing to archive the data. In the most damning allegation, Bates said: “In every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation.” (You can read more about Bates’s allegations here and a subsequent smear campaign by the scientific establishment here.)

“It was more of a political document than a scientific document,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told me. “People need to know how the [climate] alarmists have taken over agencies like NOAA and NASA. This is about trying to get the truth out.” Judicial Watch also filed a separate lawsuit against NOAA in 2015 attempting to get the datasets used in Karl’s paper.

Mark Twain, author of the now politically incorrect Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Good advice, especially for those who play fast and loose with facts and truth. And relevant in the internet age when articles, headlines, words and photos are preserved in perpetuity.

Lies, built upon lies, eventually become so tangled that the truth may be forever lost down the rabbit hole. Rather than starting with the truth, to avoid having to remember the labyrinthine path taken by each additional falsehood.

CNN, the network famously referred to by President Trump as “fake news”, should heed the advice of Mark Twain. Otherwise they are likely to be tripped up over their own contradictory stories, in this case only a few years apart.

In 2015, CNN ran a story with the headline, “Did climate change cause California drought?” Less than two years later, CNN ran this headline, “California’s drought is almost over.” Is the irony of these two headlines lost on the journalistic mavens of CNN? Probably. But the internet remembers, happy to take CNN to task over their contradictions.

After all, CNN totally missed the humor in a Sean Spicer quip during a recent White House press briefing. In response to reporters pestering him about mythical Trump-Russian collusion, Spicer responded, “If the President puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that’s a Russia connection.” CNN, missing Spicer’s joke just as they missed the irony of climate change causing then somehow stopping a drought, ran a fact checking story to tell us that Russian dressing isn’t really Russian. Thanks, intrepid journalists. Did CNN ever fact check Barack Obama’s claim to have campaigned in 57 states with a news report telling us that there aren’t really 57 states?

Back to the California drought. Despite the accusatory headline tying the drought to climate change, buried in the article is a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration arguing that the California drought is not due to climate change. In fact, this region suffered “megadroughts” eons ago, long before humans were driving SUVs and burning coal for electricity.

In other words, the recent California drought is one of many in this arid region. Likely made worse by water supply and demand, rather than climate change. A growing population in Southern California, consuming ever increasing amounts of water. And the cyclical nature of droughts.

As one would expect from a president who is a master of political theater, the backdrop for this week’s announcement of his executive order “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth” was dramatic: President Trump, with twelve all-American-looking coal-miners flanking him, announced that he was undoing a number of President Obama’s climate policies, while announcing a number of pro-energy-development ones. As is typical with this president, though, the media were so wrapped up in the theater that the substance of the order was almost entirely buried in many stories.

But while the green lobby was rending its garments and proclaiming the end of the world, more astute observers noticed what Trump’s executive order didn’t do — which was arguably more important than what it did.

Notably, the president did not (1) withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement or (2) start a process to repeal the EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon emissions, which underlies the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.

Some (though by no means all) conservatives are up in arms about this, as EPA administrator Scott Pruitt was supposedly particularly active in beating back proposals to challenge the endangerment finding, while Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was supposedly active in lobbying to stay in the Paris Climate Agreement. At first blush, this seems hard to square with the records of two men who were being denounced as enemies of the people by the environmental lobby from the moment of their nominations, but in their early approaches to the issue they are showing a disposition that is more pragmatic than radical.

This is not a surprise to more seasoned observers of energy policy on the right. Those who have actually worked with Pruitt stressed that, contrary to the media caricature, he was not an ideological Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Instead, he is going to carefully and methodically go after EPA overreach while focusing on cleaning up air and water in tangible ways.

The endangerment finding found that greenhouse gases threatened human health and welfare, which provided the legal justification for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. But Pruitt, along with several senior White House aides, argued that attempting to overturn the finding would be a messy and protracted court battle that would be very unlikely to succeed.

Meanwhile Tillerson did not want to rush into immediately withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. with all of the attendant blowback it would cause among key allies, when the administration has more important diplomatic priorities.

Conservative critics of Obama’s climate policies may be justifiably angered at Trump’s refusal to act on these issues in this executive order, but for an administration that cares a lot about winning, it did not make sense to act in a way that would likely result in a loss. If Trump really wants to roll back the endangerment finding, his best bet is probably a revision of the Clean Air Act (which would in and of itself be a bruising fight) that would explicitly strip out CO2 from the law’s jurisdiction. This would meet the demands of conservatives who have long complained that the Clean Air Act is an inappropriate vehicle for regulating greenhouse gases.

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, and The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030, and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School.
Climate approach rehashes a failed policy that wasted decades.

President Trump’s executive order eliminating President Obama’s standards for power plants guts the main U.S. measure to reduce harmful carbon emissions, and in doing so reveals the emptiness of the Paris climate treaty.

The science is clear-cut: Climate change is real and mostly caused by humanity. Obama committed America to major carbon cuts.

According to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. promised to cut more energy-related CO2 emissions than any country in the world from 2013 to 2025, under the Paris climate treaty.

The problem is that this promise never had much ground in reality.

The primary measure America offered to achieve the promised cuts was the Clean Power Plan, which required the U.S. power sector to reduce CO2 emissions.

Yet this plan, even if fully enacted, would have achieved just a third of the U.S. promises under the Paris Agreement. If it had remained in effect for the entire century, my peer-reviewed research using United Nations climate change models found that it would have reduced temperature rises by an absolutely trivial 0.023 Fahrenheit at the end of this century.

Without the Clean Power Plan, U.S. emissions will likely increase slightly.

Yet, despite eliminating the actual policy that it relied on to achieve its promises, America will remain party to the Paris treaty, which has been sold to the world as the ultimate deal to fix climate change.