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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

A Trump Administration Is a Catastrophe in the Eyes of a U.N. Climate Conference Obama’s climate policies, or war on coal, helped change several states from blue to red. By Rupert Darwall

Update: After filing the following report this morning from this year’s session of the U.N.’s annual climate meeting, the author went to attend the day’s “conference of the parties” as he had been doing all week, only to be arrested by armed U.N. police and detained for trying to gain entry with a blocked pass. His phone was confiscated and examined, and he was asked whom he had been calling.

Marrakech — Make no mistake. Donald Trump’s election is the worst setback to the climate-change negotiations since they began a quarter-century ago with the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which produced the 1992 U.N. framework convention on climate change. On Tuesday, at this year’s climate conference in Marrakech, French president François Hollande threw down the gauntlet to the president-elect, declaring last year’s Paris Agreement “irreversible from a legal point of view.” The U.S. must respect the climate commitments it had made, Hollande demanded, whose popularity earlier this year dropped to a record low of 17 percent.

Yesterday, it was the turn of John Kerry. In his last speech as secretary of state to a climate conference, Kerry gave an impassioned performance, making up in authenticity what it lacked in coherence. “No one should doubt that the majority of Americans are determined to keep the commitments we have made,” Kerry declaimed to loud applause. Then why didn’t the Obama administration seek congressional approval for the Clean Power Plan and send the Paris Agreement to the Senate for its advice and consent? “The United States is right now on our way to meeting all of the international targets that we’ve set, and because of the market decisions that are being made, I do not believe that that can or will be reversed.” If so, it shouldn’t matter whether the Trump administration annulled the Clean Power Plan.

“No one can stop the new climate economy because the benefits are so enormous,” Kerry continued. Tell that to out-of-work coal miners in Appalachia or to voters in rust-belt states who handed the presidency to Donald Trump. Moments later, the same Kerry was saying that government leadership was “absolutely essential.” Time was running out. Do we have the collective will to save the planet from catastrophe? Kerry asked. “It won’t happen without leadership.”

At an emotional level, it was what the participants at the Marrakech conference craved. But the contradiction between the inevitability of wind and solar power sweeping all before them and the veiled accusation that president-elect Donald Trump would be guilty of a moral betrayal if he backed off the commitments made by his predecessor showed that politics trumps arguments about inevitability. Even so, the unreality of the unstoppable clean-tech revolution was evident in Kerry’s remarks. Developing countries wanted access to affordable energy, the secretary of state acknowledged.

More often than not, that means coal. Most of the huge growth in electricity demand in southeast Asia is going to be met by coal, Kerry warned, negating the benefits of the new investment in renewables. Financing new coal-fired power stations was a form of suicide, Kerry declared. What was he or any other American politician going to do about it? Asian countries are going to do what they’re going to do, and there’s very little America can do to stop them. Without realizing it, Kerry’s argument demonstrates the sense of putting America first when it comes to energy policy.

Big Wind Blown Away in Vermont Big Wind had a rough Election Day in the Green Mountain State. By Robert Bryce

Big Wind lost big last Tuesday.

While it’s not clear what Donald Trump’s election means for federal energy policy, it’s abundantly obvious that the wind-energy sector’s agenda was crushed in Vermont. Indeed, thanks to the resounding — and somewhat improbable — election of a new Republican governor, Phil Scott, it is possible that Vermont could ban construction of new wind projects. And in the towns of Grafton and Windham, voters rejected the proposed Stiles Brook wind project by big margins.

Scott’s whopping nine-point victory over Democratic nominee Sue Minter is all the more impressive considering that Vermont voted overwhelmingly for Democrats at the federal and state levels. Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the Green Mountain State by 29 points, and Democrats won huge majorities of the popular vote in every other state and federal race. Minter was apparently hoping to ride Clinton’s coattails.

Instead, she lost to Scott, despite being backed by a pro-wind-energy PAC called Wind Works Vermont and by one of America’s most prominent environmentalists, Bill McKibben. McKibben is a resident of Vermont (he teaches at Middlebury College) and the founder of 350.org, a group which aims to “stop all new fossil fuel projects.” A few months ago, McKibben published a cover story in the New Republic in which he declared that the American economy should be running solely on wind and solar energy. He has frequently declared the need to “do the math,” but he didn’t bother to note that if such an all-renewable scheme were pursued, it would require a 20-fold increase in Vermont’s wind-energy capacity.

Although it cannot be stated definitively that wind energy was the deciding factor in Scott’s win over Minter, it is abundantly obvious that wind has been one of the most divisive issues in the state. During the Democratic primary for governor, two of the three candidates, Matt Dunne and Peter Galbraith, opposed wind-energy development. In fact, Galbraith made opposition to wind energy the primary focus of his campaign. In the August primary, Galbraith came in third, with about 6,500 votes. Shortly after the primary, he told me that wind-energy development “was the issue [in the Democratic primary] and I think in the general election it will be an issue as well.” It appears that nearly all of Galbraith’s supporters went on to vote for Scott, who ended up beating Minter by more than 27,000 votes.

Green Elites, Trumped The planet will benefit if the climate movement is purged of its rottenness. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Hysterical, in both senses of the word, is the reaction of greens like Paul Krugman and the Sierra Club to last week’s election. “The planet is in danger,” fretted Tom Steyer, the California hedge funder who spends his billions trying to be popular with green voters.

Uh huh. In fact, the climate will be the last indicator to notice any transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. That’s because—as climate warriors were only too happy to point out until a week ago—Mr. Obama’s own commitments weren’t going to make any noticeable dent in a putative CO2 problem.

At most, Mr. Trump’s election will mean solar and wind have to compete more on their merits. So what?

He wants to lift the Obama war on coal—but he won’t stop the epochal replacement of coal by cheap natural gas, with half the greenhouse emissions per BTU.

He probably won’t even try to repeal an egregious taxpayer-funded rebate for wind and solar projects, because red states like this gimme too. But Republican state governments will continue to wind back subsidies that ordinary ratepayers pay through their electric bills so upscale homeowners can indulge themselves with solar.

Even so, the price of solar technology will continue to drop; the lithium-ion revolution will continue to drive efficiency gains in batteries.

Mr. Trump wants to spend on infrastructure, and the federal research establishment, a hotbed of battery enthusiasts, likely will benefit.

In a deregulatory mood, he might well pick up an uncharacteristically useful initiative from the Obama administration. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission quietly is revisiting a scientifically dubious radiation risk standard that drives up the cost of nuclear power. CONTINUE AT SITE

Worried About Climate Change and Income Disparity? For only $150K, you, too, can tour the globe by private jet with the New York Times’ finest thought leaders. By Heather Mac Donald

The New York Times has been editorializing on a nearly daily basis since the election about the danger posed by President-elect Donald Trump to the very future of the earth. Rallying its readers on Thursday for the coming “Trump Years,” it argued against “fear or despondency” because “there is too much to be done.” For starters, according to the Times: “There is a planet to save. The earth is in peril from a changing climate no matter how many deniers say otherwise.” The day before, the paper had lamented that Trump may “repudiate last December’s Paris agreement on climate change, thereby abandoning America’s leadership role in addressing the biggest long-term threat to humanity.”

In the short term, however, if you’re a Times executive, marketer, or columnist, it’s still time to party, with all the oomph that a gasoline-fueled, capitalist economy can provide. In October, the Times announced its first-ever “Around the World by Private Jet” tour, slated for early 2018. “An Exclusive Private Charter,” in the words of the “luxury travel” firm of Abercrombie & Kent, will transport a mere “50 guests” to exotic locales in luxury hand-made leather flat-bed seats with “relaxing massage and adjustable lumbar support,” as a “dedicated flight crew attends” to their needs. The “guests” will “Enjoy Exclusive Events & Privileged Access,” such as private dining in Bogota’s Salt Cathedral, camping in luxury in the Moroccan desert, and exclusive after-hours access to the Blue Lagoon in Iceland.

The tour’s “exclusively chartered Boeing 757” ordinarily seats up to 295 passengers, of the pathetically non-“high-luxury” variety. So the carbon footprint of the Times’ 50 guests will be close to six times that of a commercial-jet traveler. If any of the guests feels a twinge of guilt over his greenhouse-gas emissions, he can chase it away by “enjoying a champagne toast inside an Icelandic ice funnel,” before learning “how climate change is affecting the land of fire and ice.” That’s after having been whisked to Easter Island to “learn how climate change is affecting” that location.

Al-Qaeda Slams Obama for ‘Astonishing and Deceptive’ Inaction on Climate Change By Bridget Johnson (???!!!)See note please

The color green is mentioned in the Koran and it is prominent in the symbols and flags of Hamas , Hezbollah
Image result for flag of hezbollah
Image result for hamas flag

and other assorted vermin……rsk

Al-Qaeda slammed the Obama administration for being all talk and no action on climate change and protecting the environment in a new issue of their English-language how-to magazine for lone jihadists.

The new special issue of Inspire, published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Al-Malahem Media, is titled “The 9/17 Operations” — the Sept. 17 attacks on a race in New Jersey, a street in Manhattan and a shopping mall in Minnesota. ISIS claimed responsibility for the third attack, in which nine people were stabbed.

But Inspire editor Yahya Ibrahim said of the pressure-cooker attacks on the East Coast: “This time Al-Qaida did not come out to declare responsibility for the operations, this is because America is witnessing a new form of operations and new form of tactics … They are indeed the heroes of Lone Jihad.”

Inspire said the timing of the attacks “has both a political and security dimension, this is because carrying out an operation during the same days of the 9/11 anniversary increases the sense of fear, insecurity and brings back the past memories in details; especially when the operation targeted the same place – Manhattan.”

They theorized that “because preparing a single pressure cooker bomb may take at least a week, it is likely that preparations for the operation took more time than anticipated” and may have been planned closer to the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Qaeda praised all of the operations as an “exceptional success” for achieving a goal of “reviving fear and terror at a time when successive American administrations lie to their people, convincing them that they have crushed ‘terrorist’ groups and disrupted their capabilities and therefore the American citizens live in a peace, safe and stable life.”

They panned, though, the use of a timer for the New Jersey bomb; runners were not injured in the explosion as the race had been delayed. “In this case, we prefer the use of a remote control detonator as used by the Tsarnaev brothers in the Boston Marathon.”

They suggested that a restaurant in Chelsea would have been a better target than a Dumpster, and cautioned jihadists who don’t plan on committing suicide to be careful about leaving fingerprints. “It was better to put the bomb in a place where people are gathering and standing around it, such as a shopping center,” said the review of the attack. “This is because people pass by quickly besides garbage containers and they don’t normally stand beside them. This explain[s] the result of the injured in the operation.” Thirty-one people were injured in the blast.

The issue reviews pressure-cooker bomb construction, locations and camouflage in order to cause the most harm.

The magazine also notes that U.S. airstrikes against al-Qaeda leaders doesn’t degrade the group but makes the terrorists “more committed to their principles.”

As al-Qaeda has previously done in the pages of Inspire, this issue tried to appeal to African-Americans by highlighting police shootings of black men.

Donald Trump was not specifically mentioned in the new issue. President Obama’s final address to the United Nations General Assembly in September was slammed as rehashing U.S. policies such as support for Israel that carry over regardless of the administration. “Some of them say that they will wait for the next president who might give them hope and best handle their issues… Undoubtedly, the kitchen that draw most of the American foreign and internal policy is the same one, the parties rotate to play the same roles and the president executes the outcomes. Therefore, the role that the president is playing is just an executive role.”

“We admit to say that America has ruled the world for the past two decades, and is still considered the most powerful nation in the world,” states the review of Obama’s speech. “And America has to admit to us that we have insulted and subjugated its arrogance.”

Al-Qaeda makes clear that they don’t care about party affiliation. They do, however, make a pitch against climate change.

“The environment has suffered from America’s policies. In latest official statistics of International [sic] Health Organization, it mentions that 92% of the world population are breathing polluted air. Moreover, 6.5 million people are dying annually because of air pollution,” the magazine says. “One of the main cause of pollution results from American factories, which produce 36.1% of greenhouse gases. Despite that, up to this day America hasn’t taken any tangible steps to reduce these harmful gases.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Tony Thomas Finally, Warmists Find a Real Threat

Whatever else he does, President-elect Donald Trump can be counted on to shoo those green snouts out of the climate-scare trough — first by repealing Obama’s executive orders, then by re-directing from the UN to domestic environmental concerns. It’s a beautiful thing.
“I’m feeling very flat today,” snuffled Amanda McKenzie, CEO of Tim Flannery’s crowd-funded Climate Council. As she should, given that President-elect Trump will end the trillion-dollar renewable-energy scam so beloved by the council.

McKenzie continues, “Progress on climate change can feel hopeless and it’s tempting to give up and turn away.” But instead, she rattles the tin for donations of $10 a month “to allow us to undertake some massive projects next year that will power communities and everyday Australians to spearhead our renewable energy transition.” Good luck with that, Amanda.

Throughout the Western world, green lobbies are likewise oscillating between despair and self-delusion over the Trump election.

Trump’s agenda – as per his election website – includes

Unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves.
Declare American energy dominance a strategic economic and foreign policy goal of the United States.
Become, and stay, totally independent of any need to import energy from the OPEC cartel or any nations hostile to our interests.
Rescind all job-destroying Obama executive actions.
Reduce and eliminate all barriers to responsible energy production, creating at least a half million jobs a year, $30 billion in higher wages, and cheaper energy.

Trump says Obama’s onslaught of regulations has been a massive self-inflicted economic wound denying Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under their feet: “This is the American People’s treasure, and they are entitled to share in the riches.” ore than that, the president-elect’s common-sense policies make the 20,000 climate careerists and activists in Marrakech, led by Vice-President John Kerry, seem comically irrelevant. They were supposed to be implementing the feeble Paris climate accord – notwithstanding that China has just announced a 19% expansion of coal capacity over the next five years.

Trump and Hillary on climate By Anthony Bright-Paul

On the campaign trail, Trump, a Republican, backed more fossil fuel production in the U.S. and vowed to “cancel” the Paris agreement. He has repeatedly suggested that climate change is a hoax. His Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, in contrast, has called for urgent action on climate change.

There in a nutshell you have the difference between the two challengers for the Presidency of the United States of America.

Some apparently highly intelligent people constantly talk about ‘tackling climate change’. But is this intelligent? This is not a question of science, but a question of definitions and of the correct use of the English language.

Strictly speaking, to talk about tackling climate change is an affront to intelligence and an affront to language. How is climate defined? ‘The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period’. So we see at once that climate is intimately connected to the weather.

Change is defined as ‘make something different’. So, what does all that mean? It means in a nutshell that all those who are fighting climate change want to make the weather static.

Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? It is like saying, ‘I am against tomorrow’. Only an imbecile would make such a statement. Yet we have world leaders, Presidents, Popes and Prime Ministers all trying to stop change.

Of course, the unDemocrats are rioting. They are burning effigies of Donald Trump. These unDemocrats are against democracy, even though they call themselves Democrats. We have the same phenomenon in England. A democratic referendum took place, where the majority wanted to leave the EU. So the unDemocrats are peeved. The same thing is happening on a bigger scale in the United States.

The American people should congratulate themselves in having elected indisputably the most intelligent of the contenders.

A Keystone Resurrection Trump should drop his royalties demand and revive this job creator.

Donald Trump promised in his victory speech Tuesday that he will “rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” Allow us to suggest a great place to start: Approving the Keystone XL pipeline that President Obama rejected to satisfy his climate friends.

TransCanada’s Keystone could carry some 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to Nebraska, and the company said in a statement this week that it is “fully committed” to building the pipeline. TransCanada said that it is “evaluating ways to engage the new administration on the benefits, the jobs and the tax revenues this project brings to the table.”

In 2015 TransCanada withdrew its route application after seven years of haggling with the Obama Administration, which rejected the pipeline despite favorable environmental reviews from its own State Department. President Obama said that approving Keystone would undercut U.S. “global leadership” on climate change. In other words, the President wanted leverage at the Paris climate drum circle—and Keystone would enrage Democratic campaign donors like Tom Steyer.

TransCanada has challenged the decision in federal court, and it is unclear if the company would be forced to restart the application process. Mr. Trump said in his campaign that he’d approve Keystone, but has also demanded royalty payments, a demand he should drop. By the company’s estimates the pipeline would add $3 billion to GDP, including millions in property taxes and create more than 40,000 jobs. Cost to taxpayers? $0.

Keystone fulfills several of Mr. Trump’s ostensible goals, including energy exploration. The pipeline could carry 100,000 barrels a day from North Dakota, which would encourage more development. And no one benefits more than America: 70% of refined products pumped through Keystone would stay in the U.S., according to a report last year from IHS, and that means consumers will enjoy lower prices. By the way, environmental objections were always bogus: Pipelines emit less carbon than rail systems and result in fewer spills. CONTINUE AT SITE

Green Elites Face Trump Threat A chance to clean up rampant cronyism in the energy sector won’t soon return. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents an important opportunity. It’s a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, “For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!”

We are referring, of course, to America’s green-energy elite.

With a Hillary Clinton victory on Tuesday, America’s ludicrous Tesla subsidies would be certain to continue—because so many Democratic politicians aligned with the company, especially in California, are themselves too big to fail.

Washington’s Kafkaesque fuel mileage rules would only become more Kafkaesque. By forcing car makers and their customers to invest in economically unjustified fuel-saving technology, they’ve already perversely contributed to last summer’s breaking of a decade-old record for miles traveled and fuel burned.

Ethanol’s alleged greenhouse benefits have long since been scientifically debunked. Its putative contribution to America’s “energy security” has been rendered a joke by the fracking revolution. Never mind. Corn farmers like a handout, and corn-state senators like being re-elected. The cost to American motorists: $10 billion a year.

And making sure it remains so—we hardly needed the latest WikiLeaks dump to tell us—have been a handful of activist hedge-fund billionaires like Tom Steyer and Nat Simons. In the recent dump of emails stolen from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, we see these men, in return for being willing to write four-figure checks to Democratic candidates, fishing for reassurance that policies that cost the American people billions, with no benefits, will be embraced by the next Democratic administration.

We see climate saints like Bill McKibben and Joe Romm conspiring at their behest to silence a scientist for saying perfectly accurate things about the lack of evidence for a worsening of extreme weather events. We see Mr. Podesta himself trying to orchestrate a media mugging of liberal Harvard Law Prof. Larry Tribe for representing the coal industry.

And to what end, exactly?

Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, is hardly a green-energy naysayer. Yet last week he estimated that even if electric vehicles accounted for half of global auto sales (currently EVs account for less than 1%), oil consumption would nevertheless continue to rise because the “demand growth is not coming from cars, it’s from trucks, aviation and the petrochemical industry and we don’t have major alternatives to oil products there.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Michael Angwin : How Green Activists Nuked Themselves

The anti-nuclear movement had everything going for it, from copious funding and the support of international NGOs to sympathetic press coverage and parliamentary supporters. Yet its crusade petered out, laid low by bogus science and ardent, absolutist ratbaggery.
Australia’s environmental warriors have failed in their campaigns over the past 40 years to stop the Australia’s uranium mining industry. In the past decade in particular, the anti-uranium movement has suffered devastating defeats, as uranium mining has expanded with bi-partisan support from Labor and conservative parties. It’s instructive to analyse why.

The anti-uranium movement operated on a permanent basis through the nation’s foremost environmental organisations and hundreds of other smaller organisations. It had access to considerable financial resources[1], to sympathetic media and to Commonwealth and state parliamentary sympathisers. It was gifted three nuclear accidents as a platform for its advocacy.

Given these propitious circumstances, how did the movement fail so completely to impede the development of Australia’s nuclear industry? What accounts for this monumental failure of policy, strategy and tactics? First, let’s look at the past decade’s landmark political decisions in support of uranium. The process began with the Howard Coalition government, and the ALP followed suit.

The centre-left Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, endorsed uranium mining and exports ten days after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed by a tsunami
Eight months later, Ms Gillard announced her government would export uranium to India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, contrary to ALP policy. Shortly after, the policy fell humbly into line with her decision
Four uranium projects were approved under mainstream environmental laws, despite the close involvement of the anti-uranium movement in the assessment process
In 2016, South Australia’s centre-left government began to implement a Royal Commission report that endorsed SA as a suitable place for a global nuclear waste repository.

The anti-uranium movement emerged in the early 1970s to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The movement next turned its attention to domestic uranium mining, using the Fraser government’s decision to permit mining at Ranger as a focus for activism. By the end of the 1970s, an anti-uranium strategy had emerged: frame uranium as a class-based issue and connect it with a broader political assault on the capitalist status quo; establish many small, local opposition groups; coordinate their activities; frame the movement as large, vigorous and publicly-supported; focus on emotions, especially fear; and target traditional land owners as a key point of resistance to mining.

However, even as insiders conceded at the time, ‘the ’70s movement did not fundamentally threaten Australia’s nuclear industry’.[2] The movement declined during the 1980s. The rise and decline of the Nuclear Disarmament Party paved the way for the co-option of the anti-uranium movement by the Labor Party[3]. The movement then declined even more rapidly, and uranium economics became much more important in shaping uranium development.

By the mid-1980s, anti-uranium activism tried a more mainstream advocacy strategy of influencing public opinion.[4] By the late-1990s, the movement’s strategy had become, by default, ‘isolated campaigning’.[5] While some environmental NGOs continued to fund full-time ‘anti-nuclear campaigners’, isolated campaigning has become the norm.

Why did it fail? A first clue is found in this history. The policy, strategy and tactics of the movement were shaped by Marxist ideological[6] beliefs. This never appealed to a mainstream Australian audience, which is more interested in workable solutions for real problems. The anti-uranium movement also faced the global failure of its founding ideology: in the 1980s, the Cold War ended and Soviet communism collapsed.

The ideological failure of the anti-uranium movement was accompanied by a long series of startling policy, strategy and tactical errors, particularly in making claims that had no credibility. For example, anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott once claimed[7] a Howard/Bush conspiracy, involving the owners of the Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway, to store America’s nuclear waste at Muckaty Station, once proposed as the Federal government’s low-level nuclear waste site. This vast claim was based on the small fact that a subsidiary of Halliburton, a company with which former US vice-president Dick Cheney was once associated, was one of the handful of companies in a joint venture, to operate the rail road. There are many examples of this kind, and they illustrate the weakness of the anti-uranium movement’s advocacy: policy makers won’t take you seriously if you prosecute your case with selective facts, used out of context and without perspective.