Green Paganism

By CFACT Ed, Mark Hendrickson  | August 15th, 2020 | Environment @ CFACT 

 

Editor's Note:  While this article is almost two years old, it is in point of fact timeless.  Definition leads to clarity, and we need to understand all this misery being caused by the Biden administration in the name of global warming is in fact foundationally nature worshiping paganism in origin, thought and intent.  Once we understand that, everything else becomes clear.

Many zealous greens are strongly imbued with pagan values. Paganism is generally defined as polytheism mixed in with nature worship. Primitive pagans frequently cowered before the forces of nature, fatalistically resigned to being at nature’s mercy, believing that progress was not only impossible, but a criminal offense against nature. So complete was their submission to nature, and so foreign to them was the idea that individual lives have value, that pagan societies often practiced human sacrifice to appease the gods of nature, particularly the sun god (e.g., the Aztecs).

Let’s forget about polytheism for now. What’s more important are the attitudes toward nature and human life. In the modern scientific era, many people – whether prompted by theistic or humanistic beliefs and values – reject the pagan beliefs that humankind should submit to nature and that individual human lives deserves protection. However, many other people, particularly hardcore greens, reject those principles and replicate primitive paganism by exalting nature and devaluing human life.

Pagan greens insist that we cling to dependence on natural, “clean, renewable” sources of energy, namely, from the wind and sun. Try as they might, though, they can’t coax consistency and reliability out of those fickle natural sources. Nor are wind and solar energy really clean or renewable, since they depend on massive consumption of many “nonrenewable” resources, some of them highly polluting. (They also kill more wildlife than fossil fuels do, but that’s another story.)

Of particular concern are the sometimes rabidly anti-human beliefs of green pagans. They have variously labelled the human race “a virus,” “a disease” “vermin,” “a cancer.” The hatred for humanity is palpable. Here is more: “The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing”; “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs”; “Man is no more important than any other species.”

Like some primitive pagan societies, groveling in fear before the forces of nature, pagan greens believe that some individuals need to be sacrificed for life to go on. Thus, the founder of the Environmental Defense Fund, favored banning DDT because the ban would, “get rid of some of them” (in Ebenezer Scrooge’s words, “decrease the surplus population”) via insect-borne malaria and insect-caused crop destruction. Indeed, the human death toll from banning rather than moderating the use of DDT has exceeded the death toll from communism, making environmentalism the most lethal leftist ideology in history. That shouldn’t be surprising, for communists at least paid lip service (however dishonestly) to “the good of the people,” while pagan greens regard human life as no better than a pestilential germ.

The anti-human animus of pagan greens even gave rise to a pejorative term: “speciesism” – i.e., the belief that humans are superior to other species. Well, in pagan green cosmology, humans may not be superior to other species, but in the real world, we are. Forget about us being at the top of the food chain. Think moon-landings, movie magic, Mozart and McCartney. Humans are unique. Every other species pursues its self-interest without a thought for the long-term survival of other species. Only humans have enough foresight to take deliberate steps to try to conserve other species. Only humans could feel regret and grieve if a beloved species goes extinct. Only humans are clever enough to discover or invent 57 different genders. Sorry, animal kingdom, but it’s no contest – humans are superior.

The contrary belief to speciesism is that all species are equal. That belief can be harmful to humans. About 30 years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency blocked the cleanup of sewage in the Tijuana River Basin on the grounds that the cleanup would endanger the survival of the life forms that dwelled in that toxic (to humans) brew. Yes, federal bureaucrats placed the survival of various bacteria above the health of human beings. That’s pagan!

Another manifestation of anti-human green paganism is their preference for anti-growth agendas. The deadliest environment for a human being is poverty, yet greens work to thwart economic development in developing countries by trying to deny them access to the very fossil fuels that enabled the people in developed countries to climb out of poverty and live thriving, healthy lives. You can read details of these tragic and genocidal policies in Paul Driessen’s superb book, Eco-Imperialism. We need an environmentalism as if people mattered. (As a counterpoise to Friends of the Earth, we could use an environmental advocacy group called “Friends of people who live on Earth.)

Green icon Paul Ehrlich once asserted, “Economic growth is not the solution it’s the problem.” He is 180 degrees off-target. Growth is the solution. If it were true that the more economic development there is, the more polluted our environment would be, then our goose would be cooked. We could conceivably get so prosperous that we’d pollute ourselves to death. But the world doesn’t work that way.

Instead, there is a well-known pattern known as the Kuznets curve (named after the late economist Simon Kuznets who explained the pattern). What happens is that when societies begin to develop and climb out of poverty, pollution rises. But once development gets to the point where basic needs are met and discretionary income rises, people are willing and able to spend money on both pollution remediation and pollution prevention. Consequently, affluent (developed) societies are less polluted than developing societies.

Contemporary green paganism is an atavistic, anti-life fetish. Cloaked in mystical ignorance and wildly misanthropic, contemporary green pagans are as much of a threat to their fellow humans as their primitive forbears ever were.

Authors

• CFACT Ed

  CFACT -- We're freedom people.

• Mark Hendrickson

  Mark Hendrickson, Ph.D., is an economist who has analyzed the global warming story for 30 years.

 

Gore calls for centrally planned civilization in San Francisco

September 14, 2018 by Craig Rucker, 0 Comments @ CFACT

 

“We have to make the decarbonization of the global economy the central organizing principle of human civilization,” said former Vice President Al Gore at a San Francisco forum organized in conjunction with Governor Brown’s “Global Climate Action Summit.”

CFACT is at the summit, where national sovereignty and individual freedom do not seem to part of the conversation.

Gore called for the United States to remain subject to the UN’s Paris Climate Accord despite President Trump’s decision to withdraw and President Obama’s failure to submit the “agreement” as a treaty to the Senate for ratification.

Gore said that, “under the law the first day that the United States of America could actually leave the  Paris agreement is the day after the next presidential election… and under the terms of the treaty if there is a new president… a new president could give thirty days notice and we’re right back in.”

Gore never misses a chance to attribute naturally occurring events to global warming and used this forum to attribute both California fires and Hurricane Florence to climate change.

Take a look at the graph climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer posted earlier this week which shows that while the cost of hurricane damage has risen as a result of intense coastal development, hurricane intensity has not.

Sorry about the inconvenient facts, Al.

________

Endangerment Finding delenda est

Replacing Clean Power Plan with less harmful ACE rule does not fix fraudulent CO2 science

 

Paul Driessen

 

As the Punic Wars dragged on, Cato the Elder reportedly concluded every speech to the Roman Senate by proclaiming “Carthago delenda est” – “Carthage must be destroyed.”

 

Ample evidence suggests that the Obama era Environmental Protection Agency’s “Endangerment Finding” was devised in violation of basic scientific and transparency principles that ignored or excluded extensive evidence that contradicted its preordained outcome. The EF was then used to justify anti-fossil fuel rules that seriously harmed the energy security, jobs, health and welfare of millions of Americans.

 

The Finding must be reexamined. If these contentions are validated, it must be reversed and demolished.

 

In its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that EPA must determine whether emissions of carbon dioxide and certain other atmospheric gases “cause or contribute” to “air pollution” that may be “reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” If the agency found the answer was yes, then it had to regulate those emissions. The Bush EPA failed to take action.

 

However, candidate and President Obama had promised that he would eliminate coal-based electricity generation and “fundamentally transform” America. It was thus a foregone conclusion that his EPA would quickly find a dire threat existed. On December 7, 2009, EPA issued its Endangerment Finding (EF): that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) were pollutants that did indeed “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations” of Americans.

 

The Obama EPA then promulgated its “Clean Power Plan,” which shut down numerous coal mines and coal-fired power plants, eliminated thousands of jobs and severely impacted factories, families and communities across the United States. The CPP also spurred the shift to unreliable wind and solar power.

 

However, any CPP climate change, health and welfare benefits are at best undetectable, in part because the rest of the world – from China, India, Indonesia and Southeast Asia to Australia, Germany and Poland – continue to build thousands of coal-fired power plants and put millions of vehicles on the road.

 

Recognizing this, President Trump pulled the USA out of the Paris climate treaty. His EPA has proposed to replace the Obama Clean Power Plan with an “Affordable Clean Energy” (ACE) plan that lets states take the lead in devising GHG emission reduction programs that best serve their individual energy needs.

 

These are important steps. But they are not enough, because they perpetuate the false claim that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is a “dangerous pollutant.” Even worse, leaving the EF in place would enable any future anti-fossil fuel administration to impose new economy-strangling, welfare-degrading rules.

 

Worst of all, leaving the Finding unchallenged and ignoring the way it was concocted and implemented would sanctify some of the most fraudulent and dictatorial Deep State bureaucratic actions in history.

 

In devising its EF, the Obama EPA did no new research and made no effort to examine the full range of studies and evidence readily available on natural versus manmade climate change. It just cherry-picked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports; deliberately excluded studies that contradicted its predetermined finding; and relied on temperature and extreme weather predictions by computer models.

 

The IPCC itself had long ago ended any pretense of trying to understand the interplay of natural and human influences on Earth’s climate. Instead, for political reasons, it had decided to focus on human fossil fuel use and GHG emissions as the only important factors influencing modern climate change. Its reports reflect that approach – and ignore the growing and readily available body of contrary studies and evidence, such as volumes of studies summarized by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

 

The Obama EPA team even removed one of its most senior experts, who had prepared a contrarian report.  “Your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” his supervisor told him. EPA consulted with alarmist scientists and environmentalist groups, but ignored moderates and IPCC critics.

 

The computerized climate models relied on by EPA are programmed to reflect the assumption that rising atmospheric CO2 levels are the primary factor determining climate and extreme weather. However, the average prediction by 102 models is now a full 1 degree F above what satellites are actually measuring.

 

In fact, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed well above the supposed 350 ppm “tipping point” (they reached 405 ppm in 2017), except for noticeable short-term temperature spikes during El Niño ocean warming events, there has been virtually no planetary warming since 1998 or at least 2002.

 

Moreover, Harvey finally ended a record 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall. Tornados are no more frequent than in the 1950s. Droughts differ little from historic trends and cycles. Seas are rising at just seven inches per century, and Antarctic and Arctic ice are largely within “normal” or “cyclical” levels for the past several centuries. Indeed, reports of vanishing Arctic ice go back nearly a century and low ice levels were documented by Francis McClintock and other explorers long before that.

 

In many cases, older temperature records were adjusted downward, modern records got bumped upward a bit, and government-paid scientists relied on measurements recorded near (and contaminated by) airport jet exhausts, blacktop parking lots, and urban areas warmed by cars, heating and AC vents.

 

Humans might well be “contributing” to temperature, climate and weather events, at least locally. But there is no real-world evidence that “greenhouse gases” have replaced natural forces or are causing unprecedented climate chaos or extreme weather; no evidence that those emissions are “endangering public health and welfare” or that humans can control Earth’s perpetually fickle climate by controlling emissions.

 

Far from being a “pollutant,” carbon dioxide is the miracle molecule without which most life on Earth would cease to exist. The more CO2 in the air, the faster and better crop, forest and grassland plants grow, and the more they are able to withstand droughts, diseases, and damage from insects and viruses.

 

In fact, a slightly warmer planet with more atmospheric CO2 would be tremendously beneficial for plants, wildlife and humanity. A colder planet with less carbon dioxide would greatly reduce arable land extent, growing seasons, wildlife habitats, crop production and our ability to feed humanity.

 

Equally important, over 80% of US energy still comes from fossil fuels – and the countless benefits of those abundant, reliable, affordable fuels (and their CO2 output) exceed the EPA’s alleged “social costs of carbon” and “human health and welfare impacts” by at least 50 to 1, and perhaps as much as 500 to 1.

 

On a closely related matter, contrary to the “97% consensus” myth, scientific debate continues unabated over recent and future global warming, cooling, storms, droughts, sea levels and other “adverse effects” from oil, natural gas and coal use. Computer models and alarmist climate specialists say the threats are serious. Real-world observations and moderate to skeptical climate experts vigorously disagree.

 

The Obama EPA’s Endangerment Finding ignored all of this. It likewise dismissed the extravagant raw material requirements of expensive wind, solar and biofuel “alternatives” and their adverse impacts on wildlife and wildlife habitats. That makes the 2009 process even more suspect and fraudulent.

 

There is no demonstrable, much less dire or unprecedented, danger to American health and welfare from continued CO2 emissions. The danger is from anti-fossil fuel policies justified by the EF and IPCC. 

 

Simply put, in concocting its Endangerment Finding, the Obama EPA violated the cost-benefit analysis policies and basic standards for honest, open, informed, replicable science. With so much of America’s energy, economy, environment, health and welfare at stake, this cannot be allowed to continue.

 

The Trump Administration must disavow the “CO2 drives climate change” tautology and stop viewing the Endangerment Finding as “established” law and policy. It is no more established or acceptable than were the Supreme Court’s reprehensible 1857 Dred Scott and 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decisions.

 

It is time to reexamine the Endangerment Finding, give it the intense Red Team scrutiny it deserves, and relegate it to the dustbin of history. The Endangerment Finding delenda est.

 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development and human rights.

 

Climate alarmists throw temper tantrum, refuse to debate skeptics

August 28, 2018 by Michael Bastasch, 8 Comments 

• Sixty global warming “campaigners” signed a letter calling on the media to keep skeptics out of their coverage.
• In their public letter, signatories said they would no longer appear in the media alongside their critics.
• “We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real.”

Dozens of politicians, environmentalists, scientists and other global warming activists signed a letter announcing their refusal to take part in public debates with people critical of their global warming claims — in the name of science, of course................“As campaigners and thinkers who are led by science and the precautionary principle, and who wish to debate the real and vital issues arising from human-triggered climate change, we will not assist in creating the impression that climate denial should be taken seriously by lending credence to its proponents, by entertaining ideas that lack any basis in fact,” they wrote.............Refusing to debate those skeptical of catastrophic global warming is nothing new. A similar trend emerged a few years ago that included environmentalists and prominent scientists refusing to debate global warming skeptics in the media............To Read More....

My Take - In the article it's noted by one of those who oppose all the climate change hysteria as saying those who've signed this document about refusing to debate any climate "skeptic" are doing so because they're unqualified to do so. I find this whole idea of accepted "science" is true across the board, including pest control. 

I've asked the trade journals, the NPMA, and anyone else who has the ability to set up a debate to allow me to publicly debate anyone from the pest control industry who disagrees with me about IPM, Green Pest Control, DDT, or any of the many other issues I take as a stand on in defense of our industry.   

 

Je défie!  Le gant est jeté!
 

The U.S. government is still the UN’s top climate alarmist

July 24, 2018 by David Wojick, Ph.D., 0 Comments 

President Trump and Energy Secretary Perry are both vocal skeptics of climate change alarmism, but the US Energy Department is still running one of the top drivers of alarmist science for the United Nations. This engine of alarmism is obscurely named the Climate Model Intercomparison Project or CMIP. Climate change alarmism is based entirely on computer modeling and CMIP is where the core modeling comes from.

What CMIP does is provide the computer climate modeling for the infamous UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading proponent of alarmist science. CMIP itself is a UN activity, part of the UN’s World Climate Research Program. The modeling is done by major climate modeling centers around the world, including a number of US federal agencies. So while the Trump Administrations says it does not support the IPCC, it is actually doing a lot of free work for it.

This should stop..........To Read More....

My Take - Jacques Chirac, former President of France said of the Kyoto Accords:  This is the first step in global governance. Make no mistake about this.  Environment issues are nothing more than the spear point of socialist world governance under control of the most corrupt incompetent organization the world has ever know - the United Nations.  

Then of course there's the Law of the Sea Treaty that would turn over the world's oceans to be administered by the United Nations.  Guess who thought that was just a grand idea? George W. Bush and Condolezza Rice.....and that's when they were in office. 

Adherence to the Kyoto Accords was touted as an absolute necessity to save the Earth, so why is Kyoto dying? Why is it the American public as a whole doesn't even have global warming on their radar as a problem?

1. Is it because it's stupid?
2. Was it because it's unscientific? 
3. Was because it's impractical?
4. Would it have accomplished the goals set in the agreement?
5. Was it in reality all politics?

Answers;

 

Yes, yes, yes, no, yes.

Now that real science presented by real scientists is well on the way of putting the Kyoto Accord and Anthropogenic Climate Change  in the dust bin of history maybe it is a good time to look at that other junk science “global problem solver” treaty. The Montreal Protocol, which caused us to lose methyl bromide.

We can only hope!

Then we might take a shot at repealing the ban on DDT. Unless I've missed something that ban was not accomplished by legislation. It was imposed by the first director of EPA, William Doyle Ruckelshaus. If that's so, and I think it is, and we know all the claims about DDT are not only unscientific, they're based on the lies told by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, why don't we petition the current director of EPA to revoke the ban?

I've been told by greenies over and over again that Rachel Carson didn't call for the ban on DDT, and they're right. But after reading her book no reasonable person could come to any other conclusion. Convenient wasn't it?

The Montreal Protocol and the Kyoto Accord are both junk science.  The science was never very strong in the beginning and as time goes by it has become even less tenable.

Pest controllers or “exterminators”, which is what we all are, who continue to invalidate 70 years of quality pest control provided by our industry to the public with their compromising attitudes to all this green sponsored balderdash - I say shame on you!

As you follow the events surrounding global warming (Kyoto Accord), Law of the Sea Treaty, Montreal Protocol, the efforts by globalists to take over the internet, presumably to allow for greater flow of information (countries like Libya, North Korea, China, etc. are really concerned about this) and now the Cybercrime Treaty you can’t help but come to the conclusion that Jacques Chirac was right when he said that Kyoto was the first step in global governance.

I know, I know, there's no such thing as a conspiracy.....unless of course it's a vast right wing conspiracy.  .

CLIMATE HOAX MELTDOWN: Gallup Poll Proves America’s Jaded Outlook

By Andrew West July 23, 2018

When it comes to methods of engaging the youth vote, America’s liberal left has a nasty habit of exploiting emotion and injecting their bleeding heart ethos into just about anything. This is simply because the youth vote, currently residing within the millennial generation, is quite susceptible to the more heartbreaking facets of our society. These are a malleable sort of American, hellbent on signaling their virtue in whatever cause Hollywood and the mainstream media hope to drum up support for on any particular day..............When you take a look at the country as a whole, however, it turns out that “global warming” doesn’t tend to ping the radar one bit...........To Read More....

The Next Ice Age

By S. Fred Singer July 23, 2018


While most people still worry about global warming, I am more concerned about the next Ice Age. A glaciation would present a serious problem for survival of our present civilization, akin to a nuclear winter that many worried about 30 years ago.

Nuclear winter is all fantasy, of course; but ice ages are for real.

Natural warming of the Earth reached a peak 65 million years ago. The climate has been generally cooling ever since. Antarctic ice sheets started growing 25 million years ago. In the last 2.5 million years, the Earth entered the period of Ice Ages [the geological name is The Pleistocene] and has been experiencing periodic glaciations where much of the land was covered by miles-thick ice sheets...............Read more

Sacred peer-review takes a big hit

July 10, 2018 by CFACT, 722 Comments

 

 Global warming alarmists suffered a big hit this week in their effort to deify shoddy “peer-reviewed” climate papers. Stanford University medical professor John Ioannidis, in an interview with Agence France Presse (AFP), blew the lid off the trustworthiness of the peer-review process.
 

When the alarmist community seeks to push a new argument or messaging strategy in the global warming debate, they first have one of their pseudo-scientists write an article for publication in a compromised peer-reviewed journal. The political left has infiltrated and taken over most science journals that address political hot topics, much as they have taken over most of the “mainstream” news media. This is especially the case regarding global warming issues. As the leaked Climategate emails revealed, editors of science journals typically are prominent alarmists or deliberately coordinate with prominent alarmists in the selection of articles and messaging.

The “peer-review process” typically involves the editor sending a submitted article to a team of reviewers who are outspoken climate activists. After the paper is published, global warming activists and their media allies typically cite the peer-reviewed nature of the paper as evidence that its conclusions are infallible. Any who question the methodology or alarmist conclusions are then labeled science deniers.

According to Ioannidis, the peer-review process guarantees little in terms of trustworthiness even before political agendas compromise the issue.

“[W]hen studies are replicated, they rarely come up with the same results. Only a third of the 100 studies published in three top psychology journals could be successfully replicated in a large 2015 test,” AFP reported, summarizing Ioannidis’ findings.

“Medicine, epidemiology, population science and nutritional studies fare no better, Ioannidis said, when attempts are made to replicate them,” according to AFP.

When only a third of peer-reviewed studies reach the same results when they are replicated by outside authors, this is a serious problem. Regarding climate change papers, the peer-reviewed papers are likely even less reliable – before even considering the inescapably political nature of the topic – because many papers address predictions and models for which it is impossible to test the paper’s conclusions against objective evidence. For example, when a scientist invents a climate model predicting rapid global warming or seriously negative future climate impacts, and when a paper summarizing the results of his or her model appears in a peer-reviewed journal, there is no way at the time of publication to compare the climate predictions against real-world observations. This adds an additional level of doubt to the accuracy of global warming predictions published in peer-reviewed science journals. And this is before taking into consideration the inherently political nature of the global warming debate and the political agendas of journal editors and their carefully selected article reviewers.

The lesson to be learned is the liberal media engage in laziness or deliberate misrepresentation when they cherry-pick certain peer-reviewed studies and claim that anybody who questions them is “attacking science,” “attacking scientists,” or being a “denialist.” Sound science requires critically testing theories and predictions – including those published in peer-reviewed science journals – against objective evidence.

About the Author: CFACT

CFACT defends the environment and human welfare through facts, news, and analysis.

Brett Kavanaugh put a serious damper on EPA power grabs

July 10, 2018 by Michael Bastasch, 17 Comments @ CFACT

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s choices to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, has played a role in reining in executive branch agencies.

Kavanaugh, one of the most conservative judges on the D.C. Circuit Court, has authored opinions skeptical of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations many conservatives see as abuses of federal power.

“On these issues, he’s someone who would take seriously the idea that agencies only have the authority Congress granted them,” Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“If one’s primary concern is stuff related to administrative law, then he has more experience than she does,” said Adler, who teaches environmental, administrative and constitutional law classes.

Kavanaugh’s position on the D.C. Circuit Court means he’s authored opinions on many environmental law cases, including high-profile dissents on major environmental law cases.

Kavanaugh, a former President George W. Bush appointee, dissented in the D.C. Circuit’s 2012 decision not to rehear legal action brought against EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.
During oral arguments over the legality of the Clean Power Plan, Kavanagh said, “Global warming is not a blank check.”

Kavanaugh used a similar line when striking down Obama administration regulations on hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, in 2017.

“Climate change is not a blank check for the President,” Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion, ruling the EPA did not have the power to regulate greenhouse gases under its authority over ozone-depleting substances.

Kavanaugh also dissented in the D.C. Circuit’s upholding of Obama administration regulations on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Kavanaugh’s dissent was affirmed by the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that struck down the Obama-era rule.

“No regulation is ‘appropriate’ if it does significantly more harm than good,” former Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion in 2015.

Some Democrats and environmental activists fretted that Kennedy’s departure from the court could mean the EPA’s authority to issue global warming regulations could be overturned. That authority was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA.

The Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision was only possible because Kennedy sided with liberal justices. Some fear Kavanaugh would tip the balance against EPA authority.

“Nothing environmentally good is going to come out of replacing Anthony Kennedy with anyone whom Donald Trump believes is qualified to sit on not only the Supreme Court, but any court,” former Sierra Club lawyer David Bookbinder told E&E News.

However, Adler said it’s unlikely the court overturn Massachusetts v. EPA because of its strong tradition of “stare decisis” — latin for “to stand by things decided.”

“It’s one thing to overturn a bad constitutional decision because Congress can’t fix that,” Adler said, though he added a Kennedy-less court could narrow the application of Massachusetts v. EPA.
 
“It’s not going to be overturned,” he said.

Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter

This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller

About the Author: Michael Bastasch writes on energy, climate and the environment for the Daily Caller.

 . 

Ontario’s new premier must save the province

Neither Ontario nor any country should follow its example on energy and environmental policies

Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

On March 8, 2018, former US Vice President Al Gore visited Ontario, Canada in an attempt to help then-Premier Kathleen Wynne win the June 7 provincial election. Gore said, “I travel all over the world, and I cite Ontario as an example of a provincial government that is doing it right: creating jobs, building the base for economic progress, while also staving off the severe danger that the climate crisis poses to all of us.”

In reality, Ontario’s approach to climate change and so-called green energy has been a disaster – an extreme example of what governments around the world should not do. That may be part of the reason Ms. Wynne lost to Doug Ford.

Ontario’s situation is dire. In “Ontario MPP ‘proud’ of province’s debt and ‘would do it again’”  (April 1, 2018), National Post writer Triston Hopper explained:

“Ontario’s debt, which currently stands at $311.7 billion, is the most held by any sub-sovereign government in the world. It has also grown precipitously under the current Liberal government, who first took government when Ontario’s debt stood at $138.8 billion.”

To fix the province’s woes, new Conservative Premier Doug Ford must first understand the causes of the problems. A major issue has been crippling energy and environmental policies.

The real rot in Ontario began in 1992, when then-premier Bob Rae appointed businessman and former UN Under-Secretary-General Maurice Strong to be the Chairman of Ontario Hydro, the province’s publicly owned electricity utility.

At the time, Ontario was an economically sound, prosperous province. All this started to change when Strong applied the energy and environmental policies he proposed for the entire world through his creation of the United Nations Environmental Program and his chairmanship of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (officially, the UN Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED).

At UNCED, Strong introduced Agenda 21, a global energy and environment policy of world-shattering implications, and got it ratified. It was also at the Earth Summit that world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The UNFCCC’s primary objective was defined as achieving “stabilization of greenhouse gas [GHG] concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system.”

Under this scheme, the fact that in 1992 (and even today) we had no idea what concentration of GHGs would lead to “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” was immaterial. The die was cast. The world-wide climate alarm had begun.

The UNFCCC even redefined the basic guidelines for the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The guidelines now restrict “climate change” to include only variations due to human activity. Specifically, Article 1 of the UNFCCC treaty states:

“‘Climate change’ means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.”

The definition predetermines the outcome of the IPCC’s work. In particular, since the IPCC is required to support the Framework Convention, it had to change its mandate from its original purpose of studying all causes of climate change to the UNFCCC’s political definition of manmade climate change.

So the IPCC’s mandate was changed to assessing “the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change.…”

The problem is, you cannot determine the human effects unless you first know the extent and cause of natural climate change. The fact that we cannot meaningfully forecast the weather beyond 72 hours in advance demonstrates how little we understand about natural climate change and its causes.

But the new IPCC mandate worked perfectly to support Strong’s anti-development agenda. He needed “science” to prove that increasing GHG emissions from industrial activities (especially carbon dioxide or CO2) would cause dangerous global warming. Since rising emissions are a natural outcome of increasing global production, energy use and prosperity, linking emissions to alleged climate changes and extreme weather events allowed Strong to target the world’s major energy source: fossil fuels.

Once the science was determined, the bureaucracies of national offices such as Environment Canada could push policies to cripple energy production, industry and development. Other countries and regions were slow to adopt these principles, but in Ontario Strong was able to use his position at Ontario Hydro with impunity, to implement the crippling policies he orchestrated in Rio.

In so doing, he stopped nuclear programs, closed coal plants, and diverted funds to alternate energies that were already shown not to work. . As one report summarized:

“The electrical scam in Ont. started with the Bob Rae NDP government when Maurice Strong, Rae’s god-father, broke up Ontario Hydro. The electricity scam continued through the Harris and McGuinty Governments. Today Premier Kathleen Wynne and the liberal party administer the Enron styled electrical rate manipulation scam.”

Other premiers since, right through to Wynne, tried to privatize Ontario Hydro. But all failed to deal with the problem. Meanwhile, the cost of energy became an increasing drag on the economy and cost of living.

When Strong started as Ontario Hydro Chairman, the province had one of the most powerful provincial economies. It was consistently classified as a “have” province in the federal government equalization program, which begun in 1957 and designated provinces as “have” or “have not” based primarily on their ability to generate tax revenue.

In the ensuing grand socialist scheme, between 2012 through 2018, nearly C$121 billion was transferred from the “have” provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Saskatchewan to the “have not” provinces of Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Quebec – and Ontario. (See the table.)

From Strong’s tenure onward, Ontario energy costs continued to sap the vigor of its economy. Once an industrial powerhouse and the home of hundreds of thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs, Ontario lost many of these jobs when companies either left the province or went bankrupt. Contributing to the downward spiral were skyrocketing electricity prices.

For consumers and small businesses, electricity prices have increased from 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour for all times of the day in 2002 to 13.2 cents per kWh in 2018 during peak usage times – a 200% rise. Electricity rates for larger businesses follow the market rate and so vary widely throughout the day. For example, at 5 pm on June 26, 2018, the rate was 22.14 cents per kWh!

Independent energy researcher and former Ontario Independent Electricity Market Operator board member Tom Adams concludes, “The root cause of Ontario’s power rate cancer started with the coal phase-out” – which went from 7,587 megawatts of coal-based electricity in 2003 to zero by 2014!

To supposedly “lead the world” in “stopping global warming,” the provincial government closed all of Ontario’s coal-fired electricity stations, which provided about 25% of the province’s then-inexpensive electricity in 2002. And yet, even in 2003, Ontario accounted for a measly 0.5% of global CO2 emissions.

So regardless of what one believes about the causes of climate change, the sacrifice was worthless.

Making matters even worse, the Ontario government spent billions of dollars erecting about 8,000 industrial wind turbines. In a report co-authored by University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick, Mr. Adams noted: “Solar and wind systems provide just under 4 percent of Ontario’s power but account for about 20 percent of the average commodity cost.”

Electricity market expert and University of Montreal professor Pierre-Olivier Pineau has observed, today “Ontario is probably the worst electricity market in the world.”

And so, Ontario went from being an economic powerhouse to joining the ranks of “have not” provinces that receive payments from Canada’s equalization program.

Not surprisingly, access to abundant, reliable, inexpensive energy has been a major factor differentiating the “have” and “have not” provinces. Mostly because of Hibernia oil, Newfoundland and Labrador became a “have” province. The other “have” provinces are also energy-rich: Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.

So, the question now is: Can premier-elect Doug Ford get Ontario back on track with a sound energy policy? There is no better place for him to start than by publicly opposing the myth that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous global warming.

There is plenty of scientific evidence to support this. Ford need only consult the reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change,  which summarize thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that either refute or cast serious doubt on the climate scare.

Let’s hope Ford uses this important tool – and that the next example Ontario sets for the world is how to rebound from a green energy disaster.

Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition.

Ted Cruz demands investigation into taxpayer-funded global warming ‘advocacy’

June 22, 2018, by Michael Bastasch, 3 Comments

Senators asked federal investigators to look into whether or not several National Science Foundation (NSF) grants broke federal law, including funding projects lawmakers sought to “influence political and social debate” on global warming.

“We find NSF’s stewardship of the federal taxpayer dollars devoted to the latter project particularly egregious for a number of reasons,” Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Oklahoma Sens. James Lankford and Jim Inhofe wrote in a letter sent Thursday evening to NSF Inspector General Allison Lerner.

“We are also requesting the NSF OIG investigate whether the ‘research’ or outcomes of these projects constitute violations of the Hatch Act or any other federal statute or regulation,” the GOP lawmakers wrote.

Lawmakers’ letter to NSF’s Office of Inspector General came after NBC News reported the non-profit group Climate Central “reached more than 500 local TV weathercasters” as part of its “Climate Matters” program that launched in 2012.

The “Climate Matters” program was backed by two NSF grants totalling more than $4 million that were rewarded in 2009 and 2014, according to federal records. The grants were issued to two universities and Climate Central...........To Read More.....

Thirty years, and we're still waiting for global warming predictions to come true

It's astonishing how wrong the experts have been.

June 23, 2018 By Rick Moran

It was June 23, 1988 when NASA's Dr. James Hansen testified before Congress about the coming catastrophic warming of the planet.  He gave three different scenarios for the progress of global warming over the next 30 years. Well, it's 30 years on from that testimony. How did Hansen do?....... Skeptical arguments against climate change are dismissed out of hand by scientists like Hansen, because many of them have staked their careers and reputations on the notion of catastrophic climate change.

As the evidence continues to show this not to be the case, their arguments devolve into personal attacks on their critics. The ignoramuses who write on "science" for mainstream publications lap up the predictions of doom and gloom, knowing it's what the public wants.   We may be close to a tipping point on opinions regarding climate change, as the preponderance of evidence that says Hansen's and his colleagues' predictions of catastrophe have been, at best, exaggerated and, at worst, deliberately misleading continues to grow...........Perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.  The debate over global warming is at the confluence of science and politics.  And any time politics is involved, you can expect dishonesty and slavery to an ideological agenda having nothing to do with science.................To Read More

This Obama-era UN-EPA agreement has to go

June 18, 2018by Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.,8 Comments @ CFACT


As the Trump White House continues its cleanup of the mess — foreign and domestic — left behind by the Obama administration, it should toss out a little-noticed document that entangles the U.S. in some of the worst schemes ever cooked up by U.N. bureaucrats and their cronies in the global environmental movement.

On September 16, 2016, the Obama EPA entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). Concluded just a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election, the MOU bears the signature for the U.S. of then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. In the document, UNEP and the Obama EPA vow to “consolidate, further develop and intensify their cooperation and effectiveness to achieve their common goals and objectives in the field of the environment.”

And therein lies the problem. For the “common goals and objectives” shared by the U.N. body and the Obama administration are specifically crafted to hamstring American fossil-fuel energy development, promote an assortment of politically fashionable, but otherwise uncompetitive, green technologies and products, and perpetuate the deplorable living conditions in the world’s poorest countries.

An Instrument of the Paris Climate Accord

The document was signed nine months after the adoption of the U.N.-sponsored Paris climate accord, and the wording of the MOU leaves little doubt that it was seen as an instrument to underscore America’s commitment to curtail its production and use of energy in the name of combatting climate change. Thus, UNEP and the Obama EPA agreed to “cooperate on responses to climate change,” including mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, reducing short-lived climate forcers and supporting adaptation and resilience to climate change.

Taking these and similar steps, the MOU says, will enable the advance “toward green economies and resource-efficient societies through collaborative activities to promote and support sustainable consumption and production.” In truth, “green economies” are those with taxpayer-subsidized and government-mandated renewable energy (primarily wind and solar). And what constitutes “sustainable consumption and production” is in the eyes of the beholding bureaucrat, empowered either by the administrative regulatory state or by legislation adopted at the behest of deep-pocketed special interests.

All of this is to be pursued through jointly held symposia, seminars, workshops, study tours, collaborative research and development projects, exchanges and training programs and other forms of cooperation that strengthen the bonds between UNEP and the U.S. Under the MOU, each side is to name a “Senior Coordinator” to oversee the holding of “regular joint meetings on matters of common interest.” To make sure the two sides stay in touch, “such meetings are to take place at least once every six months in accordance with an agenda approved by them in advance of every meeting.”

The outfit the Obama administration teamed up within the MOU, UNEP, was founded in 1972 by wealthy Canadian businessman Maurice Strong; it is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya and has an office conveniently located in Washington, D.C. Strong (1929–2015) was Under-Secretary-General of the U.N. when he founded UNEP and was an early advocate for combatting what he said was human-induced climate change, then known as global warming.

In keeping with Strong’s vision, UNEP has worked closely with the Bonn-based United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For its part, UNFCCC has enthusiastically spread climate alarmism and gone to extraordinary lengths to deny the residents of the world’s poorest access to reliable and affordable electricity and transportation fuel, thereby perpetuating their poverty.

Anti-American Agenda

Given UNEP’s pedigree and the Obama administration’s unbridled hostility to fossil fuels, President Trump should scrap the UNEP-EPA MOU. Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt inherited the MOU from their predecessors and are under no obligation to adhere to its content. The White House has already withdrawn from the Paris climate accord, and President Trump chose to skip the climate-change session at the recent G7 meeting in Quebec.

Continued fealty to the Obama-era MOU runs counter to the president’s goal of American global energy dominance, which is anchored to our abundance of oil, natural gas, and coal. The ties that bound the UN and the Obama administration should not be allowed to constrain the choices of everyday Americans .

Even if the MOU is “non-binding,” so, too, are the commitments all parties agreed to under the Paris climate accord.  But recognizing the threat the Paris accord posed to U.S. energy security, the Trump White House wisely walked away from it. The UNEP-EPA memorandum is little more than an implementation tool of the Paris agreement and should suffer the same fate.

Both are part of what is, at its core, a decidedly anti-American agenda.

This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller

About the Author: Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT.

There is No Such thing as “Greenhouse Gasses”

By Adrian Vance May 9, 2017

“Greenhouse gas” is the label used to demonize carbon dioxide, CO2, methane, CH4 and all chloroflurocarbons.

The last two are not IR energy absorbers and there is no “greenhouse effect” in the atmosphere as gases cannot form surfaces like the glass that is responsible for greenhouses gathering and trapping heat.

If there were a shield between the Troposphere and Stratosphere it would work both ways. Sunlight would not enter, nor would any other light. Earth would be utterly dark! If there were a partial shield we would see a much greater intensity of sunlight when our rockets leave the atmosphere, but the increase is gradual and an expected function of the thinning atmosphere.

Nonetheless, every Ph.D. scientist promoting this myth talks about “the greenhouse effect” with seeming authority. They not only know better, but use the phrase as “comity code” telling peers, “Don’t out my scam and I will not expose yours,” justifying it with “We’re getting more money for science!” Ph.D. scientists universally feel they should be getting much more money from us because they are so much smarter than us! That is not the way the world works. We reward new products, processes and services. And, they are not so damn smart.......To Read More....

Fake News: Global Warming Edition

Brian C. Joondeph

Fake news has become part of the daily lexicon due to efforts of once respected news outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN to destroy the candidacy and now the presidency of Donald Trump.  Fake news is produced with the singular goal of advancing a political agenda – the agenda of the left. Fake news has also permeated another cause near and dear to the left: climate change, formerly known as global warming. 

The Daily Mail reported on a high-level whistleblower at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealing fake news from the government agency. Specifically, NOAA "[r]ushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change."......More

What fun! John Cook rides again!

By Jon Ray @ Greenie Watch

 He is the author of the famous 97% claim and a most energetic defender of Warmism.  And he certainly is a crook Cook.  He makes a great pretence of science by reporting known facts but ignoring or leaving some things out. He then pretends that he has proven global warming.

But his latest is a superb example of psychological projection. He takes some well-known examples of psychological defence mechanisms and purports to find examples of them among climate skeptics.  But exactly those same mechanisms are common among Warmists.  An excerpt:

I’m a cognitive psychologist interested in better understanding and countering the techniques used to distort the science of climate change. I’ve found that understanding why some people reject climate science offers insight into how they deny science. By better understanding the techniques employed, you can counter misinformation more effectively.

Every movement that has rejected a scientific consensus, whether it be on evolution, climate change or the link between smoking and cancer, exhibits the same five characteristics of science denial (concisely summarized by the acronym FLICC). These are fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking and conspiracy theories. When someone wants to cast doubt on a scientific finding, FLICC is an integral part of the misinformation toolbox.

 

He points to no specific examples of each fallacy among skeptics so, very briefly, let me point out how those fallacies apply to Warmists:

• Fake experts:  Al Gore
• Logical fallacies:  Some extreme weather events imply a general increase in extreme weather events
• Impossible expectations:  No change is too small to be worth noticing.  Even temperature changes in the hundredths of one degree mean something.  No change is small enough to prove temperature stasis
•  Cherry picking:  Looking at only a short run of temperature records.  The Central England Temperature record goes back to 1659 and shows no trend
•  Conspiracy theories:  Big oil is behind climate skepticism

Perhaps most amazing in Cook's latest screed is the way he refers to his own 97% paper.  He accurately describes it as showing that:

"Among the papers stating a position, 97 percent agreed that humans are causing global warming"

He completely skates over the fact that two thirds of the papers he examined took no position on global warming.  So only ONE THIRD of all scientists, and not 97%, agreed with global warming.  It's typical Cook.  He quotes facts but ignores their full implications.

And, as far as I can see,  that goes for all of the other claims in his paper.  For instance:  He wades in to the uproar generated by the David Rose article which questioned a paper by NOAA's Tom Karl.  He implies that Rose is wrong and the Karl paper is right.  So there has been no C21 temperature "pause".  He "forgets" to mention that, in the Fyfe et al. paper, some prominient Warmist scientists also distanced themselves from the Karl paper.  Cook is so unbalanced it is a wonder he doesn't fall over.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: ‘Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant’

By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotFebruary 14, 2017 10:23 AM with 0 comments

Alito: 'A pollutant is a subject that is harmful to human beings or to animals or to plants. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It’s actually needed for plant growth. All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting.' .......... OK, then what is the EPA to do? Well, no problem. They took out their pen and crossed out the numbers that Congress enacted, and they wrote in their own numbers. Amazingly, four of my colleagues said this is a reasonable interpretation of the statute. And therefore, it is OK.

Now, if the administrative agency can do that, I don’t know what an administrative agency cannot do. Lawmaking power has been transferred from Congress to the executive......To Read More.....

Democrats’ Real Global Warming Fraud Revealed

Dennis T. Avery

Democrats are devastted by their recent lost elections.  They will be even more devastated as we learn the details of their massive global warming fraud.  Dr. John Bates, a former high level NOAA scientist, set off a furor by revealing that a recent NOAA paper, which claimed global warming hadn’t “paused” during the past 20 years, was fraudulent. The paper was timed to undergird Obama’s signing of the hugely expensive Paris climate agreement.

This is only a tiny fraction of the climate fraud.......@ American Thinker

Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate

2008, Science and Environmental Policy Project / S. Fred Singer

In his speech at the United Nations’ climate conference on September 24, 2007, Dr. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, said it would most help the debate on climate change if the current monopoly and one-sidedness of the scientific debate over climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were eliminated. He reiterated his proposal that the UN organize a parallel panel and publish two competing reports.

The present report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) does exactly that. It is an independent examination of the evidence available in the published, peer-reviewed literature – examined without bias and selectivity. It includes many research papers ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific results that became available after the IPCC deadline of May 2006.

The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warming. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed thetwentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence......To Read More....

Trump's likely science adviser calls climate scientists 'glassy-eyed cult'

Hannah Devlin

The man tipped as frontrunner for the role of science adviser to Donald Trump has described climate scientists as “a glassy-eyed cult” in the throes of a form of collective madness.  William Happer, an eminent physicist at Princeton University, met Trump last month to discuss the post and says that if he were offered the job he would take it. Happer is highly regarded in the academic community, but many would view his appointment as a further blow to the prospects of concerted international action on climate change.  “There’s a whole area of climate so-called science that is really more like a cult,” Happer told the Guardian. “It’s like Hare Krishna or something like that. They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science.”.....To Read More....