RUTHFULLY YOURS

In settlement talks with the German auto maker Volkswagen over their cheating on emissions tests by including a gadget that could fool the government, the EPA is trying to force the company to subsidize the American electric car industry to “atone” for its sins.

Washington Times:

According to the report Sunday, the EPA wants VW, the world’s largest automaker by some measures, to produce electric cars at its U.S. manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. It also is using settlement talks with the German giant, to get help in building a network of charging stations throughout the U.S. — the main practical problem with electric cars, given their short range.

The German report did not specify its sources, according to multiple accounts in the English-language press.

“Talks with the EPA are ongoing and we are not commenting on the contents and state of the negotiations,” a spokesman for Volkswagen said. EPA refused to comment to Welt am Sonntag.

Whether the report is accurate or not isn’t the point. The point is, it’s entirely believable. Perhaps more than any other agency in government besides the IRS, the EPA loves to throw its weight around, threatening and bullying companies large and small. How many individual lives have been ruined by this agency’s arrogance and disregard for procedures and the law?

No doubt, what Volkswagen did is despicable. It sought an unfair competitive advantage over its rivals by thumbing its nose at the law. Punishment should be severe, and the company should be forced to make changes to the engines in every auto and truck that is in violation of emissions standards.

But the EPA has no business forcing the company to subsidize the American electric car industry, which can’t sell the American people on its underpowered, overpriced lemons.

The Paris Accord (PA) on global warming, concluded in December 2015, had been viewed as an enhancement of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP). But only some weeks later, the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) effectively “killed” EPA’s “Clean Power Plan (CPP),” the centerpiece of the US commitment to the PA.

The CPP’s carbon regulation had been challenged by 27 states and an array of utilities, coal producers and business groups. A SCOTUS’ February 9 “stay” overturned a DC Court of Appeals panel’s decision to allow the EPA plan to go forward. Although the appeals panel had not stayed CPP, it had established an expedited hearing schedule for the case, which is scheduled to begin on June 2. After the plaintiffs lost their case in the Court of Appeals, they petitioned SCOTUS to issue a “stay,” citing the danger of “irreparable harm.”

Will this now lead to the unraveling of the PA?

The PA may survive after all: If the Appeals Court again upholds EPA, and SCOTUS votes 4-4 (after Justice Scalia’s untimely death), then CPP may proceed. It all depends on the outcome of the November elections. Conversely, however, the fight about CPP, involving 27 states, may affect the outcome of the election. The next few months should prove quite interesting.

The PA is mainly about money transfers, designed to provide a legacy for president Obama. Unlike the KP, the PA has little to do with climate. Although it talks bravely about keeping global warming below 2degC, it never explains how to define and measure this (alleged) “critical” threshold. I recently referred to it as a big “nothing-burger” — borrowing a term used by the late Anne Gorsuch, EPA chief under president Reagan.

Legal Status – Not a Treaty?

As compared with Kyoto, the PA includes both industrialized and developing nations, but its legal status is not well defined: Some nations have considered it a protocol to the (Rio de Janeiro) Global Climate Treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), and have ratified it as an international treaty. On the other hand, the White House (WH) does not label it a formal treaty and has not submitted it to the US Senate for ratification, fearing it will turn the PA down. [Even after nearly 20 years, everyone still remembers the unanimous Senate vote for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (of July 1997) against such a treaty.] Instead, the WH planned to meet US commitments though Executive Orders and by relying on its own interpretations of relevant laws – mainly the Clean Air Act (CAA) and its Amendments.

“Young people in the Middle East are less sectarian” than the radicals who currently dominate the news. The way to defeat radical jihadists is to invest in young people and families, so they can choose a “hopeful life over a glorious death.” — U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham.

Given what the perpetrators of violence have been encouraged to believe by leading radical voices in the Muslim community, attacks carried out in the name of Islam should not come as a surprise.

Despite how badly Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wants to revolutionize the practice of Islam and the country he governs, his government simply lacks the resources necessary to overhaul the country’s educational system to counter the message of hate broadcast by radical imams.

At breakfast recently in Alexandria, Egypt, I struck up a conversation with my waiter, Sherif. He was 25-years-old, about the same age I was when I left Egypt. He had recently graduated from a tourism and hospitality school, just completed his military service and his whole life was in front of him. He said his dream was to become a chef so he could save enough money to marry and start a family. He was willing to work hard for a good life.

Today, the restaurant where Sherif works pays him around 500 Egyptian pounds (less than $64) a month. He spends most of his wages on bus fare commuting back and forth to work from one of the poorest sections of Alexandria. Tips keep him slightly ahead, but during slow times Sherif is forced to borrow money to cover his bus fare.

To make matters worse, the neighborhood in which he lives is a stronghold of the Salafists (also know as Wahhabis), an ultra-conservative Sunni Islam religious movement.

The tsunami of radicalization and the Islamization of Egypt began a few years before I left Egypt in 1979. By the early 1970s, Wahhabism had reached the country, brought there by Egyptians who had been living and working in Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states.

Usually, in regular Lenten services, for seven weeks until Easter, solemn memories of divine mercy on the sinners of the world take center stage for Christians. But not in this liturgy. Center stage was instead given to committing a sin of evil speech: launching a lie about an Israeli-made water shortage suffered by Palestinians. The lie is a sin in which all the member churches of the WCC are invited to participate.

Those leaders of Protestant churches, turned into political propagandists, used the pulpit of Jerusalem unjustly to call upon the Protestant faithful worldwide to listen to Palestinian water libels against the State of Israel.

This liturgy abused the biblical readings as a means of invigorating the equally false Kairos Palestine message, that Israel takes the Land of Palestine and has no right to be where it is.

A close look shows no scientific analysis, neither of water distribution nor of water politics for the territories of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The Palestinians certainly are experiencing a water crisis; the question is to what extent are they themselves are responsible for it, and to what extent are their own leaders responsible for keeping them as victims for effective international “marketing.”

“We’ve come closer than ever to banishing the scourge of malaria from the planet,” National Security Advisor Susan Rice said in a speech Monday outlining the spending plan.”

This statement by Susan Rica is as false as blaming a video for Benghazi. Malaria was largely eliminated in Africa with the use of DDT…the false and destructive muse of false environmentalism, Rachel Carson damned the use of DDT with misleading and poorly researched information in her book “Silent Spring” and doomed three generations of Africans to the agony and devastation of malaria. Read “DDT Should Not Be Banned-This insecticide is critical for controlling a dangerous upsurge in malaria “By John Dyson of Harvard Center for International Development” http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidinthenews/articles/SA_Readers_Digest_1200.html

The Obama administration plans to use an additional $200 million to expand its fight against malaria, expanding services to 70 million more people in Africa and accelerating a global effort to eradicate the disease.

The boost in funding for the President’s Malaria Initiative—which must be approved by Congress for fiscal 2017—would expand malaria prevention and control services to 332 million people in West and Central Africa, or 92% of those at risk there, officials said. The money would also be used to help two countries eliminate malaria: Zambia, where the national government and multiple international organizations have developed a strong program, and Cambodia, an epicenter of emerging resistance by malaria-carrying parasites to antimalarial drugs.

The new funding—$129 million of which the administration said would come from unspent Ebola emergency-response funds—would increase the initiative’s budget to $874 million in fiscal 2017. The initiative would use the funds to bring its services to three new countries—Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Cameroon—and to expand existing services in Burkina Faso, said a senior U.S. Agency for International Development official. READ MORE AT SITE

In the days and weeks ahead President Obama will face an important decision: whether to allow the conflict in Syria to escalate by approving Turkey’s and Saudi Arabia’s direct intervention, or to come to terms with the continued survival and expanding area of control of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Informed commentators note that this may be the most significant foreign policy decision the President will have to make after seven years in office:

With the Russian-backed Syrian army encircling Aleppo, cutting off Turkish supplies to rebels and advancing on the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa, a panicked Saudi Arabia and Turkey have set up a joint headquarters to direct an invasion of Syria that could lead to a vast escalation of the war. And there’s only one man who could stop them: President Barack Obama.
The stakes are high: a Turkish-Saudi invasion would risk direct confrontation not only between their own ground forces and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) of the government in Damascus, but also—more significantly—between Russia and NATO, since Turkey is a member of the alliance. The known unknown is whether Washington has the clout to stop its “allies” in Ankara and Riyadh from presenting the U.S. with a fait accompli.