RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_supreme_court_clean_energy_and_the_clean_air_act.html

When we hear about “clean” energy these days, it generally refers only to solar and wind, which do not emit CO2. CO2 is never mentioned as a “criteria pollutant” in the Clean Air Act or any amendment. Yet in 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States, in a 5-4 decision in the case of Massachusetts v. EPA, declared CO2 a Clean Air Act pollutant. I wonder how many have noticed the possibility of a constitutional conflict here.

I note that the designation of “clean energy” evidently does not cover nuclear (or hydro), although these also do not emit CO2 in generating electricity. The reason seems to be mainly ideological. Climate alarmists illogically prefer solar and wind, in spite of their well recognized erratic nature and intermittency – requiring (fossil-fueled, CO2-emitting) standby power plants on the electric grid. These must always be ready to fill any unacceptable supply gaps “when the Sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow.” A federal investment tax credit and other subsidies also favor S&W in spite of their many shortcomings.

But CO2 is not a pollutant by any stretch of the imagination. CO2 is a natural constituent of Earth’s atmosphere and a vital fertilizer for all growing plants. Without atmospheric CO2, there would be no agriculture and indeed no life on Earth. Its putative impact on the climate is minor. For example, I have shown that CO2 has no definitive influence on sea level rise – even though plaintiff Massachusetts claimed fear of massive inundation to establish “legal standing” in its lawsuit against the EPA.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/clean-power-plan-repeal/

The Clean Power Plan is headed for the crematorium. Good riddance.

CPP was the textbook example of the Obama administration’s attempt to supplant Congress by interpreting the administrative state’s regulatory scope as effectively unlimited. Prior to CPP, the Environmental Protection Agency had regulated the emissions of electricity-generating plants individually to ensure that they did not exceed pollution limits. The Obama administration ran wild with its regulatory ambitions, using CPP to impose renewable-energy quotas on the states and adopting through administrative fiat limits on carbon dioxide emissions that Congress has repeatedly declined to impose. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant as traditionally understood — it is what human beings exhale — but it is a greenhouse gas, and global warming is an obsession of contemporary progressives.

The Supreme Court, understanding the radical expansion of executive power embodied in CPP, took the unusual step of delaying its implementation so legal issues could be worked out (a process that Trump’s intervention of course will end). Donald Trump ran for president promising to lighten the regulatory load on the coal industry, and once he was elected, his administration set about doing so. President Barack Obama was fond of justifying his expansive interpretation of presidential powers with two words: “I won.” Well, guess who else won.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-the-climate-apocalypse-1534894336

Of the Obama Administration’s many power grabs, none was more audacious than its bid to regulate coal-fired electric power out of business. The Trump Administration is now proposing to rewrite the rule in a way that honors the law and still reduces carbon emissions, yet it is being portrayed as radical.

The disparate treatment reflects the double standard toward climate-change policy in the media. Anything that enhances government control of the energy economy and punishes fossil fuels is seen as virtuous, while solutions that defer to the states and don’t punish carbon fuels are a sellout to business. How about looking at the legal and energy merits?

The most notable fact about the draft Environmental Protection Agency rule introduced on Tuesday is its modesty. Rather than dictating from Washington, the rule restores the cooperative federalism of the Clean Air Act by giving states much-needed flexibility to balance their energy needs while cutting CO2 emissions.

The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to implement the “best system of emission reduction” for pollutants, which the agency has long applied to individual power plants. The Obama anti-carbon crusaders soared over that language to compel states to reorganize their electric grids to favor renewable fuels.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/eco-groups-push-for-vegan-electricity-free-from-animal-byproducts/

No, you did not accidentally click on The Onion or the Babylon Bee. Yes, vegan electricity is now a thing. Ain’t capitalism grand? I mean, capitalism has solved so many real problems and now it’s solving made-up problems.

Prior to reading the HuffPost article titled “The Dirty Secret in Your Electricity: Animals” I had no idea that animal byproducts are used in the production of electricity. And I had no idea because I had literally never thought about it. Or cared. Still don’t. But some people care. Deeply, in fact.

Before delving into the “solution,” you should probably be made aware of the “problem” So, to that end, you should know:

Most of the electricity in countries like the U.S. and the U.K comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewables such as wind power, as well as nuclear energy, likewise feature in the mix. But energy can also be derived from breaking down animal byproducts, like poultry poop, and even whole animals, into gas that can be burned.

In fact, it gets “worse,” because, “In December, the U.K newspaper The Times reported that British energy firm SSE had sold energy generated at Scotland’s Barkip power station using dead farmed salmon unfit for human consumption.”

To be fair, “A spokesperson for SSE told HuffPost the company was unable to confirm whether diseased salmon had definitely been used to generate electricity because the Barkip station ‘just takes waste to save it going to landfill,’ but said it would be ‘fair to assume it took fish carcasses at one point.'”

Now that you’ve been acquainted with the dastardly “problem” of non-vegan electricity, I’m sure that you’ll be relieved to learn about the “solution.” Thankfully, concerned people are finally taking a stand in the defense of diseased salmon that may or may not be used to power things like the lights in children’s hospitals or homeless shelters or, *gasp* the kennels in humane societies. As animal rights activist Lex Rigby told HuffPost, “Those who chose not to eat fish, whether for ethical or welfare reasons, would be ‘disgusted’ to discover that energy providers had used sick fish to produce energy.”

That concern for sick fish has created the market for vegan electricity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271044/junk-science-and-leftist-folklore-have-set-bruce-thornton

The Left Coast is burning. Oregon is fighting 13 wildfires encompassing 185,000 acres. California is battling 19 fires, including tornados of fire called “fire whirls,” which have gobbled up 577,000 acres and left eight dead. A good progressive who never lets a crisis go to waste, Governor Jerry Brown told Californians, “With climate change, some scientists are saying that Southern California is literally burning up.” He warned that man-made global warming created a “new normal,” and that “more serious predictions of warming and fires to occur later in the century, 2040 or 2050, [are] now occurring in real time.”

A few days later Brown had a tweet-duel with President Trump, who in contrast claimed, “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws,” like those against thinning and clearing forests: “Tree clear to stop fire spreading!” Seems like on this issue, the allegedly doltish Trump has the better argument than the Berkeley and Yale-trained Brown.

Indeed, doctor of environmental science and forester Bob Zybach for years has been the Cassandra warning about misguided policies on forest management. According to Zybach, wildfires began to increase in the late 70’s, at the same time policies moved away from active management of forests to a more hands-off “natural” approach. In the past, “Mostly fuels were removed through logging, active management — which they [the Feds] stopped– and grazing,” Zybach said in an interview. “You take away logging, grazing, and maintenance, and you get firebombs.”

In other words, leaving the forests to “nature,” and protecting the endangered Spotted Owl created denser forests––300-400 trees per acre rather than 50-80–– with more fuel from the 129 million diseased and dead trees that create more intense and destructive fires. Yet California spends more than ten times as much money on electric vehicle subsidies ($335 million) than on reducing fuel in a mere 60,000 of 33 million acres of forests ($30 million).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/round-up-the-usual-lawyers-1534375738

The world’s most widely used herbicide isn’t carcinogenic, but it’s now a corporate toxin. On Friday a California jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289.2 million in damages for failing to give sufficient warning about the “substantial dangers” of its signature weed killer known as Roundup. Shares of Bayer, which recently acquired Monsanto, have plummeted this week in anticipation of a legal onslaught from plaintiff lawyers.

The San Francisco Superior Court case involved Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2014. Working as a school groundskeeper, Mr. Johnson routinely used Roundup, and he now claims its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused his cancer. The jury examined gory photos of the lesions that covered up to 80% of his body, and in testimony Mr. Johnson described how even wearing clothing caused excruciating pain. Such emotional testimony would elicit sympathy in any jury of human beings.

But legal claims are supposed to be about the law and evidence. And the problem for Mr. Johnson is that there’s overwhelming scientific evidence that glyphosate does not cause cancer. One comprehensive study, published last November in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, investigated cancer incidence among nearly 45,000 licensed pesticide applicators who had been exposed to glyphosate.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/08/obrien-climate/

With climateers now saying the fabled two-degree warming limit won’t be enough after all, a decent PM might react thus: ‘As the science is settled, we’re redirecting all those climate dollars to fixing the grid because, if it’s going to get hot, we’ll need cheap, reliable power and lots of air conditioning’.

An interesting juxtaposition in a recent Australian. My eye was first caught by an article about a paper, lead-authored by Professor Will Steffen, predicting that beyond 2C of global warming all hell will break loose. Fortunately there was also an eminently readable piece by Professor Ian Plimer arguing the case for the beneficial effect of CO2 and demolishing the notion that it could lead to Steffen-like outcomes.

The apocalyptic ‘hothouse earth’ alarmism postulated by Steffen et al was quite common about ten years ago but has been somewhat muted of late as a consequence of the planet’s refusal to behave as catastropharians insisted it would: CO2 has risen but the global temperature, even with BoM-style gingering of temperature records, has not risen to any significant degree if at all. I wonder if President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement might have anything to do with the re-emergence of this kind of junk ‘science’? As the US was the primary source of all those climate dollars and they have dried up, the panic amongst climate careerists is very nearly palpable. Expect to see many more of Big Climate’s rent-seekers and grant-snafflers stepping up the hysteria.

Steffen’s theory is that, once we get to 2C warming above pre-industrial levels – now only 1.2C away, as it happens –there will be “a cascade of feedbacks with terrible consequences for ecosystems, society and economies”. Without action, we are told, “the feedbacks could lead to a much higher global average temperature than any inter­glacial in the past 1.2 million years.”

The theory used to be that increasing atmospheric CO2 would drive increasing atmospheric temperature, which would, in turn, lead to more floods, droughts, cyclones and extinction of species. Whilst increasing CO2 is regarded as the initial trigger, the real damage, warming-wise, will be done as other factors come into play — methane released by a melting arctic tundra, for example. This is the “feedback” that has climate scientists so preoccupied it is a wonder they can marshal the concentration to lodge their latest grant applications. Well, perhaps not.

In any case, the IPCC has a metric to gauge all this “climate sensitivity”. There are two main versions – Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and Transient Climate Sensitivity. They are defined as follows:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/wind_and_solar_energy_good_for_nothing.html

The defenders of wind and solar claim that subsidies are a minor help to get a new industry going. These defenders counter critics with the fallacious claim that fossil fuels receive huge subsidies. Actually, the fossil fuel industry pays huge taxes.

Focusing on explicit subsidies is the wrong approach for understanding the subsidies provided to wind and solar. The explicit subsidies include such things as a 30% construction subsidy for solar and a 2.3-cent-per-kilowatt-hour subsidy for wind. Both technologies benefit from tax equity financing, a scheme based on special tax breaks and gaming the corporate income tax of a highly taxed corporate partner.

A better way to measure the wind and solar subsidies is to look at the benefits and losses to the economy. A net loss to the economy implies a subsidy. Once it is recognized that a subsidy is present, the next step is to figure out who is paying for it. Invariably, it is either the taxpayer or the consumer of electricity.

For example, if it costs $5 a bushel to produce soybeans, and they are sold in the soybean market for $4 a bushel, there is a net loss to the economy. Someone has to pay for the loss. That someone could be the farmers, soybean speculators, or taxpayers if the government subsidizes the loss. Selling soybeans for $4 that cost $5 makes the economy poorer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/they-wont-sink-zinke-1533855298

To serve in the Trump administration is to deserve hazard pay, and lately that’s especially true of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

The green-industrial complex claimed Scott Pruitt’s scalp last month, ginning up a storm of ethics allegations that forced his resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now it has shifted focus to Mr. Zinke. But it’s hitting walls. Mr. Zinke isn’t giving his detractors easy opportunities. He has aides who know and follow the rules, and backing in the White House and in Congress.

Not that the incoming is pleasant. Few movements are better funded and coordinated or more messianic than the environmental left. They despise a Trump team that is correcting decades of backward energy and environmental schemes and are working furiously to bring down the reformers. Unlike green groups of 20 years ago, which focused on policy, today’s effort is focused almost entirely on personal destruction.

Mr. Zinke’s antagonists include the usual big-dollar organizations, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, many of which are now staffed or run by former Obama officials; self-described watchdog groups like the Western Values Project, that are closely tied to major environmental and labor groups; and congressional allies such as Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, who call daily for investigations. The coalition produces an assembly line of allegations, which the mainstream media dutifully pass along.
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Their problem is that they can’t find any real stink with Mr. Zinke. Mr. Pruitt was hit with an array of allegations, many nonsensical, but what tipped the scale against him were those in which he seemed to be using his position for gain or wasting taxpayer dollars. The critics have tried desperately to do the same to Mr. Zinke, with no luck.

One claim was that he secretly arranged a Puerto Rico contract for an energy firm from Whitefish, Mont., his hometown. The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General tells me it never opened an investigation, and even Democrats have dropped it in embarrassment.

Mr. Zinke’s foes more recently claimed he has misused his office to promote a land development in Whitefish. But the story involves a foundation from which Mr. Zinke resigned upon becoming secretary, and a project that has been on the table for ages.

The groups have also tried to go after him on spending, including three chartered flights. But the inspector general found Mr. Zinke had followed “relevant law, policy, rules and regulations.” It also found all the trips were “reasonable,” save one—and Mr. Zinke’s staff wasn’t to blame since it received prior approval from ethics officials for every flight. Then there has been the attempt to claim he violated the Hatch Act by attending political events while out on official duties. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (a permanent government body that monitors federal personnel issues) in May said Mr. Zinke had done everything legally. Every “scandal” is of this type; lots of smoke, but never any fire. CONTINUE AT SITE