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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

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Biden’s ‘Green New Deal’: Glitter, nonsense, and deception We need to rein in extreme, unattainable policies and seek realistic solutions by Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/bidens-green-new-deal-glitter-nonse

Having spent our adult lives involved with and supporting science and technology, it is frustrating and infuriating to endure uninformed politicians, pundits, and ideologues bloviating about the climate, to say nothing of the pointless dithering about whether we should be referring to climate change or to the climate crisis. But the genuine catastrophe-in-waiting is that the policies they advocate will irreparably damage the economy while leaving the climate essentially unaffected.

The United States’s small global share of greenhouse gas emissions, which is about 15% and declining due to the increased use of natural gas, means that domestic improvements can have only a minimal effect. The underlying premise of the Biden administration’s energy policy is that by the U.S. setting an example of enlightenment and probity, other nations, especially China and India, will elevate altruism above compelling self-interests and follow suit.

Thereby, the advocates of radical climate policies, whether President Joe Biden’s or the more extreme Green New Deal progressives, are prepared to exact an enormous price from the public in pursuit of what amounts to quixotic virtue signaling, a case of tilting at windmills, so to speak.

Many aspects of the Left’s climate policies are steeped in delusion and misleading propaganda. Advocates focus on largely discredited apocalyptic projections about the extent and impact of climate change and offer only favored options for a shift to renewable and clean energy that fly in the face of evidence.

Data from many sources show clearly that solar and wind, the green energy sources in vogue, have costs and disadvantages that are conveniently hidden, while the only readily available new source of clean energy, nuclear power, is demonized. We will summarize below our two lengthy analyses of these issues that appeared here and here.

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Biden’s Catastrophic Global Warming Policies If you thought last year was bad, wait until these proposed policies tear through the economy. Bruce Thornton

By on April 27th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/bidens-catastrophic-global-warming-policies-bruce-thornton/

At the “virtual world summit” President Biden announced that he’s committing this country to cut CO2 emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030. Just trying to reach this ambitious goal will require severely damaging the economy in order to achieve something that won’t stop the alleged catastrophic effects of a rise in temperature that may or may not happen.

If you thought last year’s debacle wrought by self-proclaimed “experts” was bad, just wait until these proposed policies tear through the economy. Once more, the party that “follows the science” will wreak havoc by mistaking a dubious hypothesis for a scientific fact.

As the Wall Street Journal writes, previous such policies have done little to stop what are in fact relatively slight increases in global temperatures. For one obvious thing, whatever suicidal Western nations do, China and India, the world’s first and third biggest emitters, will undo. Even “climate czar” John Kerry admitted that whatever reductions in emissions we accomplish, it will have little impact on warming unless China and India reduce theirs­­––something both countries refuse to do, having made it clear that they will not follow the West into economic suicide.

But didn’t China sign the Paris Accord? Yet under that “parchment barrier,” China is not obligated even to start reducing its emissions until 2030, the same year our emissions are supposed to be drastically reduced. Can nobody in the current administration calculate the huge economic advantage that will accrue to China in ten years? Meanwhile, the communist regime continues to build dirty coal-fired energy plants. And, does anybody believe China’s empty promises, given their record of violating the terms of every agreement it signs with the West, such as WTO and WHO?

Furthermore, that’s just one roadblock. The policies necessary to reduce emissions by the Paris Accord’s 26-28% that Biden and the green lobby want, will be devastating to the economy. As the Journal reports, replacing carbon-based energy with so-called “renewables” would alone ruin the economy, while only lowering global temperatures by a scant 0.17% Celsius, nowhere near the 1.5 degrees that will supposedly stop the predicted global catastrophe. In any case, most of the reduction that occurred during the Obama years was due to natural gas replacing coal––a dividend of the fracking revolution, not Obama’s onerous regulations. So, of course, Biden has banned fracking on public lands, stopped the Keystone pipeline, and continued the animus against nuclear power.

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Obama administration scientist says climate ‘emergency’ is based on fallacy By Dr. Steven E. Koonin

By on April 26th, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/04/24/obama-admin-scientist-says-climate-emergency-is-based-on-fallacy/

‘The Science,” we’re told, is settled. How many times have you heard it? 

Humans have broken the earth’s climate. Temperatures are rising, sea level is surging, ice is disappearing, and heat waves, storms, droughts, floods, and wildfires are an ever-worsening scourge on the world. Greenhouse gas emissions are causing all of this. And unless they’re eliminated promptly by radical changes to society and its energy systems, “The Science” says Earth is doomed. 

Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that — to paraphrase the classic movie “The Princess Bride” — “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.” 

For example, both research literature and government reports state clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years. When I tell people this, most are incredulous. Some gasp. And some get downright hostile. 

These are almost certainly not the only climate facts you haven’t heard. Here are three more that might surprise you, drawn from recent published research or assessments of climate science published by the US government and the UN: 

 Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century. 
Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago. 
The global area burned by wildfires has declined more than 25 percent since 2003 and 2020 was one of the lowest years on record. 

Why haven’t you heard these facts before? 

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Climatists for Nukes By Robert Zubrin

By on April 25th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/book-review-the-dark-horse-climatists-for-nukes/

A review of The Dark Horse: Nuclear Power and Climate Change, by Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen

“It is an enduring mystery to me why it is that most who insist that climate change is an existential crisis nevertheless continue to oppose what is perhaps the most obvious and scalable solution to the climate emergency: nuclear power.”
— Mark Lynas, British environmentalist, co-author of The Ecomodernist Manifesto

‘Climate changes everything,” says radical green writer Naomi Klein — everything except, of course, the vehement opposition of her tribe to the only proven, reliable, and scalable source of non-carbon energy on earth. This fanaticism has confirmed many observers in their judgment that the green movement’s hatred of nuclear energy is rooted less in concerns about radiation than in fear of the possibility that it could solve a problem they need to have. That said, in recent years there has emerged a center-left movement of climate-crisis true believers who appear willing to entertain nuclear power. This movement has produced a blossoming literature nominally supporting nuclear energy as part of their solution for global warming. Most of these works have been technically illiterate or dishonest, with authors claiming that they are all for nuclear power, but only once nonexistent futuristic types of nuclear systems that would supposedly be much safer and more economical than the pressurized-water reactors (PWRs) and related designs in use today are brought to the market.

However, The Dark Horse: Nuclear Power and Climate Change, by Finnish writers Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen, is a noteworthy exception. It is a fine and truly competent work making the case for nuclear power now, as it really is. There’s no use of fakery to justify decades of environmentalist sabotage of the nuclear industry with specious claims that PWRs are unsafe systems imposed on the world prematurely by the maniacal U.S. Navy captain Hyman Rickover, or other such nonsense. Instead, they take no prisoners, showing how the PWR, conceived by Rickover as the power source for the submarine Nautilus in 1954 and made the basis for the commercial nuclear industry worldwide ever since, was, and remains, a very sound engineering choice. This is so because the PWR, and related types such as the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) and the CANDU Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), all use water both to cool the reactor and to “moderate,” or slow down, its neutrons, making them more effective as fission initiators. As a result, whenever a water-cooled and -moderated reactor loses coolant, or even experiences excessive boiling, it loses moderation and thus power, so it is physically impossible for the chain reaction to ever run away.

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Biden’s Climate Folly By Rich Lowry

By on April 24th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-climate-folly/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Making energy more costly, turning a blind eye to China’s brutality.

The White House, in effect, hosted the highest-powered Zoom call ever Thursday with a virtual summit on climate.

Everyone who is somebody participated, from Vladimir Putin (otherwise plotting a potential invasion of Ukraine) and Xi Jinping (taking time out from grinding Hong Kong to dust) to Pope Francis and Bill Gates.

The story line was big, ambitious goals for reduced emissions and a renewal of U.S. “credibility” after President Donald Trump supposedly trashed it by pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

Biden announced a commitment to cut U.S. emissions in half from 2005 levels by 2030. This was greeted by huzzahs from elite opinion-makers, but the commitment, and the entire effort, is misbegotten.

A key theory driving it is that if the U.S. cuts its emissions, everyone else around the world will as well, preserving Earth as we know it.

But even well-intentioned countries are liable to miss, or to manipulate, their climate targets, whatever they say. And not all countries are well-intentioned.

Consider China, which the Biden administration has been desperate to get on board. Amazingly enough, climate envoy John Kerry was the first Biden official to visit China, signaling that climate change is more important to the administration than China’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan, its aggression in the South China Sea, its suppression of the Uyghurs, its predatory trade practices or its theft of intellectual property.

Kerry got verbiage from the Chinese about tackling climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”

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Biden And Kerry Get Humiliated On Earth Day, But Are Too Dumb To Realize It Francis Menton

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084

 Earth Day. The first such day was 51 years ago, April 22, 1970.

Since that first one, Earth Day has served as an annual opportunity for sanctimonious socialist-minded apocalypticists to issue prophesies of imminent environmental doom. Here from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a great list of some 50 or so such predictions uttered since the late 1960s, all of which have since been proven wrong. Interestingly, the ones from the time of the first Earth Day mostly concerned overpopulation, famine, and global cooling. Today, those things seem ever so quaint.

Somewhere along the line, the prophesy of a coming ice age faded away, and global warming surged forth as the much more fashionable doomsday prediction. Today, fealty to the global warming apocalypse orthodoxy is a prerequisite for admission to polite society. Our President goes around repeating the mantra that climate change is an “existential threat,” even as he signs Executive Orders and re-directs half the energies of the vast federal government to fight it.

And what better opportunity than the annual return of Earth Day for our great leaders to demonstrate their deep climate change sincerity? Thus last week we had President Biden’s personal climate emissary to the world, John Kerry, traveling to Shanghai to triumphantly welcome China on board with the official plan to “save the planet” through ending the use of fossil fuels; and today, Biden himself has followed up with his Earth Day Climate Summit, a virtual event said to be attended by leaders of some 40 or so nations, including the likes of China, India and Russia. Surely, things have now completely changed course since the evil Trump has been banished, and the world will shortly be saved by the re-invigoration of the glorious Paris Climate Agreement.

The problem of course is that China, Russia, India, and for that matter all the rest of the developing countries, don’t care a whit about the whole climate change thing, and they also know that the Paris Agreement is a total scam. For a developing country, the basic strategy reflected in Paris is to hit up the U.S. and Europe for a lot of money, while simultaneously getting the more developed countries to cripple their own economies even as you yourself commit to absolutely nothing.

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President Biden’s 50% Emissions Reduction Target Is Political Theater, Not Serious Policy Wayne Winegarden

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynewinegarden/2021/04/22/president-bidens-50-emissions-reduction-target-is-political-theater-not-serious-policy/?sh=74d3939c5351

At the 2021 global climate summit, President Biden committed the U.S. to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Cutting emissions in half is a great talking point and a satisfying sounding goal. Unfortunately, the 50% – 52% reduction goal is more of a political statement than an achievable policy. Even a cursory look at the data raises serious questions regarding the goal’s achievability.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2019 were around 6.6 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions (see the black line in the Figure). Relative to the benchmark year of 2005, this means total GHG emissions in the U.S. are down 11.6% (compared to the U.S. emissions peak in 2007, emissions are down 12.0%). On an annual basis, GHG emissions declined approximately 0.9% each and every year between 2005 and 2019.

Under the assumption that the current trends will continue, emissions will decline to a bit under 6.0 billion metric tons by 2030, or a total decline of 19.8 percent compared to 2005 (see the black dotted line in the Figure). Clearly, this progress is important from a global climate change perspective, but insufficient for the Biden Administration. Their goal is for a decline that is more than 2.5 times as large as our current declines (see the red dotted line in the Figure).

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We’ve Lost Count Of How Many ‘Last Chances’ We’ve Had To Save The Planet

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/23/weve-lost-count-of-how-many-last-chances-weve-had-to-save-the-planet/

John Kerry said earlier this month that we’ve reached “the last best opportunity we have to get real and serious” about global warming. What’s the difference between him and a loon walking down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue wearing one of those sandwich boards proclaiming the end of the world is nigh? We’re struggling to see any.

Kerry, the Biden administration’s special presidential envoy for climate – an office that amounts to much less than a bucket of warm spit – is part of a chorus of fearmongering that goes back more than three decades. 

“In 1989 the United Nations gave us 10 years to save the world,” science site Watts Up With That posted last year. 

Guess blogger Eric Worrall then went on to list more than a dozen “last chances” to stop global warming.

“If we do not heed this last chance, I’m sure there will be another last chance in the near future, just like all the previous last chances,” he said.

Dire, way-off-base predictions have been the hallmark of radical environmentalism for at least a half century. Reason’s Ronald Bailey took “a look back” in 2020 at the first Earth Day and the forecasters “who got the future wrong.” He notes that the world did not have to halve the planet’s population or stop economic growth completely “to prevent the imminent ecological cataclysm.”

Nor have we run out of natural resources, been forced to shut down automobile travel, ban luxury items, and wear gas masks in urban areas due to air pollution (though the doomsters among us are happy that we’ve been forced to mask up for a least a year for another reason).

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Biden’s 10-Year Climate Plan He’s committing the U.S. to a far-fetched CO2 emissions goal without a vote of Congress.

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-10-year-climate-plan-11619132440?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Was President Biden trying to impress China’s Xi Jinping at Thursday’s climate pep rally by committing to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by half below 2005 levels by 2030? His pledge tees up sweeping new government controls over the economy of the kind you might see in one of Mr. Xi’s five-year plans. Mr. Biden now has a 10-year version of central economic planning.

Mr. Biden’s virtual world summit was intended to coax China and other emerging countries to make more aggressive emissions reductions. The U.S. accounts for less than 15% of global CO2 emissions, Mr. Biden told world leaders. Emissions in the U.S. and Europe have been falling since 2005 as natural gas and renewables have replaced coal power.

But rising emissions from China have swamped these declines. At the Paris climate summit in 2015, China committed only to begin reducing emissions in 2030, and it has continued to build coal plants and expand industrial production. China’s CO2 emissions increased by more between 2015 and 2018 than the U.K.’s total emissions in 2018 (see nearby chart).

All of the CO2 commitments made in Paris, including Barack Obama’s to reduce U.S. emissions by 26% to 28%, would reduce the Earth’s temperature increase by a mere 0.17 degree Celsius by 2100—not even close to the 1.5 degrees that is supposedly needed to head off doomsday. Yet Mr. Biden now wants to double down on Mr. Obama’s futile climate gesture.

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John Kerry’s Climate Kowtow How much will Biden trade away in exchange for empty promises?

By on April 20th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerrys-climate-kowtow-11618873552?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

These columns noted last year that putting John Kerry in charge of climate negotiations with China was a recipe for coming home “dressed in a barrel.” After Mr. Kerry’s sojourn to Shanghai last week, the question is: What happened to the barrel?

President Biden’s climate envoy emerged from two days of meetings with counterpart Xie Zhenhua with a joint statement that says little new. The two sides say they “are committed to cooperating with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis.” Both countries will work “to strengthen implementation of the Paris Agreement” limiting carbon emissions. Mr. Kerry didn’t make any big concessions to Beijing, and Beijing didn’t make any new promises about emissions limits it would break anyway.

In one sense that’s a relief. But all this empty hot air isn’t cost free in U.S. prestige and the missed opportunity to engage in more important talks. Making climate the sole focus of an early visit tells the Chinese that the U.S. puts that single issue above everything else in the bilateral relationship. China is happy to jibber-jabber about climate with the Americans if it means not having to engage on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing’s repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang, the South China Sea, North Korea, or intellectual property theft.

But Beijing is clear that it will ignore any carbon-emissions commitments that might impinge on China’s economic growth. “Some countries are asking China to do more on climate change,” deputy foreign minister Le Yucheng said last week. “I am afraid this is not very realistic.”

Instead of triggering a rethink in Beijing, Mr. Kerry’s Shanghai jaunt gave China’s leaders a new opportunity to go on the public-relations offensive. “China welcomes the U.S. return to the Paris agreement and expects the U.S. side to uphold the agreement,” vice-premier Han Zheng told Mr. Kerry in a jab at Washington’s withdrawal from the pact under President Trump. Mr. Kerry also flattered Beijing by all but begging President Xi Jinping to join another global climate confab later this week.

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