Green Notes

De Omnibus Dubitandum

 
De Omnibus Dubitandum is a Latin phrase coined by French philosopher Rene Descartes translated as  “All is to be doubted.”  It's also been translated as "question everything", which is my personal choice, and my personal motto.  Activists in and out of government demand conformity.  They stand on the hill waving a banner saying "I stand for consensus", which isn't much of a motivator, that's why they need government to force everyone into consensus.  But those who 'question everything' have had their minds released from such bondage allowing their thoughts to explore options - and question consensus.

Someone once observed if you find the perfect organization - join it!   But remember, the moment you've joined, it's now become somewhat less than perfect.  No one person and no organization must be above question because the problem with every organization in the world is the same problem - It's run by people and people will aways be people.

Please enjoy this issue of Green Notes!

Rich Kozlovich


All Natural:

The Organic Industry Is in Turmoil  - As Amazon buys Whole Foods, the USDA investigates whether foods sold as “organic” in the U.S. really are. Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, the grocer that brought pricey organic food to the masses, comes during a time of turmoil in the organic industry: The Department of Agriculture is continuing to investigate the importation of millions of pounds of phony organic grains. The move is in response to a lengthy Washington Post exposé published in May that tracked shipments of corn and soybeans from Turkey, Romania, and Ukraine that were labeled “organic” but were not (I wrote about it here). The Post reported that the fraudulent imports were “large enough to constitute a meaningful proportion of the U.S. supply of those commodities,” a troubling development that should raise serious questions about the veracity ................

Book Reviews:

Book Review: Coolidge by Amity Schlaes  - My Take - “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”   -  "Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb" - "the world is full of educated derelicts."  - "Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.― Calvin Coolidge

Vast intelligence isn't really necessary in order to see farther, deeper and wider than everyone else doesn't require vast intelligence.  Higher education can be a wonderful thing, but is it?  My experience is they're not taught how to think - they're taught what to think.  I'm largely an autodidact, with no formal education past high school.....and I was a lousy student.   Being self educated has disadvantages - but learning how to think versus what to think isn't one of them.   I'm reading more than ever, but I'm reading less books, something I intend to fix this year.  It's been reported most CEO's read a book a week, which is what my friend Dr. Jay Lehr does.  That's my goal for this year - a book a week.  Let's give it a try.  A book a week!!!! 

Activsts, Pesticides, Chemicals, Scare Mongering:

How US NGOs are exploiting Europe’s precautionary chemophobia to ban glyphosate and GMOs -The life of an environmental activist in Washington is pretty tough.   The US government does not give her millions of dollars to hold secret meetings. (My Take - Actually the government does give huge amounts of money to NGO's in America, but the real money comes from these tax free foundations like the Tides Foundation)  The risk-based regulatory process means she has to produce evidence to get anyone to listen to her............Their logic is simple. If you are a paid-up lobbyist for the organic food industry running a Washington-based NGO, you are fighting a Congress full of representatives and senators from farming states (California and New York will only deliver four votes on the Senate floor), you have no benchmark for success and can only measure progress by baby steps. Without any scientific evidence or grassroots support, nobody outside of label-happy California takes your fear campaigns seriously. But if you can ban your target substances (glyphosate and certain neonicotinoids are the flavours of the month) in the influence rich but lawyer-weak left-leaning European Commission, you then take that feather in your cap back to DC and try to build regulatory momentum...........
 
Steven Pinker: 'Solutions Create New Problems' - The Breakthrough Dialogue is an annual meeting of a politically diverse group of scientists, professors, journalists, think-tankers, and others who discuss technological solutions to environmental and social problems*. Referring to themselves as "ecomodernists," they represent everything environmentalism should be: pro-science, pro-technology, pro-human, and bipartisan.  One of the featured speakers at this year's Dialogue was the preeminent Harvard scientist Steven Pinker. He is an optimist who believes that, in general, the world is getting better. (Sadly, only 6% of Americans agree with him.) Dr. Pinker concluded his talk with the following insight: "Problems are inevitable. Problems are solvable. Solutions create new problems."........

Chemical Scaremongering: It’s time to dismantle the alarmism industry - It’s great news the Trump administration is starting to dismantle the junk science life-support system for government overregulation. Budget cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and reforms of science advisory panels at the Department of Interior and EPA, stir hope the agencies’ longstanding reigns of terror via “science” may come to an end.  But let’s not stop at EPA and Interior. Office of Management and Budget chief Mick Mulvaney could save taxpayers $690 million per year by eliminating the National Institute of Environmental Health Science (NIEHS), which is at least 20 years past its expiration date. At the very least, its Obama-appointed director, Linda Birnbaum, should be removed immediately............

Dictatorship of the Landlords - The Green Roots of the Housing Crisis - The methodology underpinning this posting consisted of a representative survey of land-use and housing documents published by leading free market advocacy groups. Of the 100 groups investigated, 21 were found to have both prominence within the pro-market advocacy community, and to have devoted conspicuous resources to the land/housing issue. From these 21 groups (Cato Institute, Heartland Foundation, Fraser Institute, Frontier Centre, Institute for Public Affairs et al), 33 reports and 35 articles were dissected. To clarify certain statistics, several additional articles and reports from the mainstream media and from government agencies were summoned. A recent Harvard study on housing and a paper on commercial property from the Journal of Real Estate Management also proved helpful. To keep things germane, the canon was restricted to documents published during the last decade.

Animal Rights:

Officials cave in to wacky animal rights activist demand - In a bizarre marriage of the animal rights movement and the “safe spaces” mentality, public officials caved in and censored a something because it was deemed “insulting” to cattle, who now have been granted a safe space, cleansed of anything that might offend them.  This was not engineered by the offended cattle themselves for undisclosed reasons, but rather by activists purportedly speaking on their behalf. They must be consulting their clients via some form of nonverbal communication not on my bandwidth.  For all I know, cattle love a ribbing. This union of outré mentalities may be a marriage from hell, but it happened in Toronto.  A Canadian Press dispatch informs us that Billy Bishop Airport:.............

CCD

How Capitalism Saved the Bees - You've heard the story: Honeybees are disappearing. Beginning in 2006, beekeepers began reporting mysteriously large losses to their honeybee hives over the winter. The bees weren't just dying—they were abandoning their hives altogether. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder, soon became widespread. Ever since, beekeepers have reported higher-than-normal honeybee deaths, raising concerns about a coming silent spring.........

DDT

Double D(DT) - Not a Bra. A New Form Of The Insecticide - No matter how safe DDT may be (and it's probably far safer than you think), there can be no downside to using less of it, provided that it works as well. Thanks to chemists at NYU, this may become possible. Pretty cool. But before we go into this...  The obligatory chemistry lesson! Don't skip it. I'll find out. (BTW, just for yuks. Anyone know what the music is? The notes are real.)..........

Enemies of humanity - After being infected again with malaria last July, I spent almost a month in a Kampala hospital. Paying for my treatment was extremely difficult, as it is for most Ugandan and African families. I was lucky I could scrape the money together. Many families cannot afford proper treatment..Where and how can they get the money to go back to the hospital again and again, every time a family member gets malaria, when they also need food, clothes and so many other things – or malaria makes them so sick that they can’t work for weeks or even months? Many parents can do nothing except watch their loved ones die in agony, and then give them a simple burial.
rarely even hear about, like chronic dysentery. It saps people’s strength for years and leaves them with severe liver and kidney damage. Cerebral malaria causes lifelong learning and memory problems. ...............

Diseases:

CDC Study Sheds Light on New Lyme Disease-Causing Bacteria - A new species of bacteria that causes Lyme disease needs the same amount of time for transmission after a tick bite compared to previously implicated bacteria, according to new research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Existing guidelines for frequent tick checks and prompt removal of attached ticks remain the same..........

Endocrine Disruption:

Banalising the Risk Perception of Endocrine Disruption - These are claims the Risk-Monger made last week … and some people mistook my use of an image of a baby (assumedly consuming deadly doses of soy) as a legitimate attack … even coming to the defence of soy. They missed the point. It is not about the actual risk to our hormonal systems from coffee, soy and chick peas – a risk that is extremely low to the point of insignificance (except maybe for newborns). Rather, it is a communications method I would advise risk managers to enforce: what I call imposing the “banalisation of risk perception” on the endocrine disruption debate..........

Energy:

Monumental, Unsustainable Environmental Impacts - Demands that the world replace fossil fuels with wind, solar and biofuel energy – to prevent supposed catastrophes caused by manmade global warming and climate change – ignore three fundamental flaws.  1) In the Real World outside the realm of computer models, the unprecedented warming and disasters are simply not happening: not with temperatures, rising seas, extreme weather or other alleged problems.  2) The process of convicting oil, gas, coal and carbon dioxide emissions of climate cataclysms has been unscientific and disingenuous. It ignores fluctuations in solar energy, cosmic rays, oceanic currents and multiple other powerful natural forces that have controlled Earth’s climate since the dawn of time, dwarfing any role played by CO2. It ignores the enormous benefits of carbon-based energy that created and still powers the modern world, and continues to lift billions out of poverty, disease and early death..........

Insanity and hypocrisy Down Under - The Wall Street Journal called it the energy shortage “no one saw coming.” Actually, a lot of people did see it coming. But intent on pursuing their “dangerous manmade climate change” and “renewable energy will save the planet” agendas, the political classes ignored them. So the stage was set.  As an Australia-wide heat wave sent temperatures soaring above 105 degrees F (40.6 C) in early 2017, air conditioning demand skyrocketed. But Adelaide, South Australia is heavily dependent on wind turbines for electricity generation – and there was no wind. Regulators told the local natural gas-fired power plant to ramp up its output, but it couldn’t get enough gas to do so. To avoid a massive, widespread blackout, regulators shut off power to 90,000 homes, leaving angry families sweltering in the dark. ..........

Tesla battery, subsidy and sustainability fantasies - The first justification was that internal combustion engines polluted too much. But emissions steadily declined, and today’s cars emit about 3% of what their predecessors did. Then it was oil imports: electric vehicles (EVs) would reduce foreign dependency and balance of trade deficits. Bountiful oil and natural gas supplies from America’s hydraulic fracturing revolution finally eliminated that as an argument. Now the focus is on climate change. Every EV sale will help prevent assumed and asserted manmade temperature, climate and weather disasters, we’re told – even if their total sales represented less than 1% of all U.S. car and light truck sales in 2016 (Tesla sold 47,184 of the 17,557,955 vehicles sold nationwide last year), and plug-in EVs account for barely 0.15% of 1.4 billion vehicles on the road worldwide........

Energy & Environmental Newsletter: July 24, 2017  - The newest edition of the Energy and Environmental Newsletter is now online. To start to balance the incessant Russian “news” stories, below I’ve supplied a few pertinent articles that you won’t see in the mainstream media.

EPA:

EPA's suspect science - President Trump's budget guidance sought to cut $1.6 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency's $8.1 billion expectation. Shrieks of looming Armageddon prompted Congress to fund EPA in full until September 2017, when the battle will be joined again. Then EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said he would prioritize Superfund cleanups based on toxicity, health-impact and other factors. The ensuing caterwauling suggested that EPA had no priorities since Bill Ruckelshaus (EPA's first administrator, 1970-1975). But consider some standard EPA practices...........

ESA, Butterflies, Pollinator

Citizen Science Delivers “Unprecedented View” of Monarch Butterfly Parasitoids - Thanks to citizen volunteers, scientists now know more than ever about the flies that attack monarch butterfly caterpillars. Since 1999, volunteers participating in the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project have collected and raised more than 20,000 monarch eggs and caterpillars, and they've recorded incidents of those specimens being parasitized by fly larvae. They have also collected.........

Global Warming:

• Thought For the Day: Al Gore, Global Warming and the Left

Climate Change Weekly #254: Cities Committing Costly Climate Mistakes - As one of its first official acts of the 115th Congress, on January 5, the U.S. House of Representative passed the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2017 (H.R. 26), referred to as the REINS Act. The bill requires Congress to approve all new major regulations, meaning any regulation having an impact of $100 million or more on the economy.  The REINS Act is a good start – an antidote to the disease of over-regulation ailing the nation. While some regulations may protect human health or the environment, many – especially in the area of climate, energy, and environmental policy – provide no or minimal measurable benefits while imposing huge costs on people and the economy............

Nearly doomed by too little CO2 - Aside from protests by Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio and friends, the public didn’t seem to raise its CO2 anguish much above the Russians-election frenzy when Trump exited the Paris Climate Accords.   Statistician Bjorn Lomborg had already pointed out that the Paris CO2 emission promises would cost $100 trillion dollars that no one has, and make only a 0.05 degree difference in Earth’s 2100 AD temperature. Others say perhaps a 0.2 degree C (0.3 degrees F) difference, and even that would hold only in the highly unlikely event that all parties actually kept their voluntary pledges............ 

UPDATE: Michael Mann Doubles Down over ‘Contempt’ Issue - Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann doubles down on his crumbling SLAPP lawsuit versus Tim Ball with a statement of denial from his lawyer posted on Mann’s Facebook page and tagged with #FakeNews. In a screed of hand-waving assertions, the statement fails to deny Mann abused process, breached a written undertaking during the trial and, as a consequence, now faces the most serious court sanctions.  Earlier this week, an emboldened Dr. Tim Ball, Canada’s most famous skeptic climatologist, came out, all guns blazing with stunning news in what is billed as the “science trial of the century.” The outcome of this case will have grave knock-on implications on the validity of all government secret science relied upon in the hotly-contested ‘man-made global warming’ debate.  Conspicuously, Mann’s attorney, Roger McConchie, who “literally wrote the book” on Canadian libel law, does not deny Mann is in breach of a legally-binding undertaking signed by both parties last February. It turns out Mann duped Ball into signing a deal that gave Mann more time (as if six years of litigation time wasn’t enough!)...........

Climate Hoaxers Receive Bombshell of Bad News In New Study - The political left and their globalist overlords have been relying on seriously faulty data to perpetrate the global warming hoax, according to a new study. As far as the concept of globalism goes, the climate change hoax is one of the most valuable tools available. The goal of these anti-sovereignty types is to unite global governments under a new umbrella, previously referred to in different iterations as a New World Order, wherein a massive amount of power is consolidated into the hands of a few malleable individuals. That way, the rights and opinions of the global population are no longer in opposition to the whims of this elitist cabal who will work tirelessly to influence this consolidated power structure for their own success. .........

A Bomb Explodes the Global Warming Myth - A simple device assembled for less than three dollars, discounting the soda you consume, can end an era that has cost America more than $1 trillion! This “bomb” does not explode: It implodes the myth of “global warming.”  The device sits on a south-facing window sill on a sunny noon hour with a clear blue sky.  It is a 2.5 liter soda bottle, rinsed clean of the sugary fluid it contained.  It has 325 milliliters of water as the volume was 2,725 milliliters and it now contains 2,400 milliliters of air.....

Junk Science:

'Little Black Book of Junk Science' Goes to Congress, and More Outreach  - 1. In Washington, D.C., I went to Capitol Hill and met with the Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who was intrigued by our Little Black Book of Junk Science. Rep. Smith keeps a copy of the U.S. Constitution in one suit pocket and I encouraged him to keep our book in the other. He didn't commit to that just yet but he asked for copies to be sent to him so he could give it to the committee and that is part of our goal. We want it in the hands of every member of Congress and everyone in America too. It's time to take decision-making back from activists and engage in evidence-based thinking again.  He had his scheduler Gina take the picture on the left, which I told him was a nice thing to do, and he replied, "I want to be able to tell people I know you."  That's the mark of a savvy diplomat, folks............

Risk:

Risk-based or Hazard-based Regulation - is is a three-part blog. In part one I look at the irrationality of hazard-based regulation. In the next blog, I will identify the type of person who promotes it – someone I will call the “contrapreneur”. Finally, their success will be explained as only possible in a vision-less world where expediency is the political virtue. oday, no doubt, most of us have managed the following risks.......Risk-management is ubiquitous. From the moment we get up to after we fall asleep, we are managing our exposure to hazards with every decision we take. The formula is very simple:............

This and That:

• Casting a Fire Ant Colony with Molten Aluminum