RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-organic-industry-is-lying-to-you-1533496699

In the mold of “Mad Men’s” Don Draper, clever ad execs know a thing or two about manipulating consumer ignorance, confusion and even fear to sell a product.

Nowhere is this truer than modern food advertising, where dubious health claims and questionable scientific assertions abound. The Food and Drug Administration is supposed to police such deceptive practices, as it sometimes does with ridiculous zeal: Witness the FDA’s warning letter sent to a Massachusetts bakery for including “love” in its ingredient list.

But when it comes to the $47-billion-a-year organic industry, the FDA gives a complete pass to blatantly false and deceptive advertising claims. Consider the Whole Foods website, which explicitly claims that organic foods are grown “without toxic or persistent pesticides.” In fact, organic farmers rely on synthetic and natural pesticides to grow their crops, just as conventional farmers do, and organic products can contain numerous synthetic as well as natural chemicals. As observed by UC Berkeley biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues in 1990, “99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.”

Pesticides are by definition toxic, and many organic pesticides pose significant environmental and human health risks. One is copper sulfate, a widely used broad-spectrum organic pesticide that persists in soil and is the most common residue found in organic food. The European Union determined that copper sulfate may cause cancer and intended to ban it, but backed off because organic farmers don’t have any viable alternative.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/27/from-saving-species-to-empowering

In 1973, the Endangered Species Act passed the U.S. Senate with at vote of 92-0 and the House by a vote of 394-4. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Now, 45 years on, we know that, regardless of the good intentions of the act’s sponsors, the law can be abused by bureaucrats and their extreme environmentalist allies.

The ESA was born out of legitimate concern over occasional disappearances of lineages of living things. No one anticipated the ESA would play a major role in American life, destroying countless jobs and giving federal bureaucrats control over large swaths of the economy. It never occurred to politicians and activists that the law could be used to prevent activities that might indirectly harm obscure groups of plants and animals, even those that don’t qualify as species or even subspecies.

In the era in which the ESA was born, people were aware of the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the dodo and the near-extinction of the American buffalo, and threats to iconic animals such as American alligators and bald eagles. Activists and the media presented these cases as cautionary tales, magnifying extinction fears into threats to wide categories of life.

For example, to obtain a ban on DDT—a ban that, by promoting the spread of malaria, has killed tens of millions of people worldwide—environmentalists pushed the idea that the continued use of this pesticide would extinguish many bird species and result in the “Silent Spring” referenced in the title of Rachel Carson’s classic book. Critical to the debate was an Agriculture Department study seeming to show that DDT caused thin eggshells. The scientist behind the study later admitted that the birds had been fed a low-calcium diet.

Carson’s argument was one of a series of hoaxes that launched the modern environmental extremist movement. At the first Earth Day in 1970, participants complained that corporations poisoned people with sweeteners containing sodium cyclamate (which, in fact, is safe), that a U.S. Army nerve gas experiment had killed thousands of sheep in Utah in 1968 (it didn’t), and that pollution was rapidly pushing the world into a new Ice Age, as future feminist icon Betty Friedan had warned in Harper’s magazine.

Real environmental threats existed but were insufficient to spur the political actions environmentalists wanted. So they made stuff up.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endangered-species-scare-1532646111

By now you may have seen the photos of baby owls that will ostensibly be extinct once Donald Trump finishes demolishing protections for endangered species. Such dystopian predictions warrant a more rational look at the Trump Administration’s efforts to update a 1970s law that isn’t accomplishing what its supporters claim.

The Interior and Commerce departments are accepting feedback on proposals to clarify regulations related to the Endangered Species Act, which Congress hasn’t updated in more than 25 years. The law is a golden idol of the environmental left, though its goal is species recovery and less than 2% of listed species are delisted.

Wyoming Governor Matt Mead noted recently that it “took five lawsuits and fifteen years to delist a recovered gray wolf population in Wyoming,” while the Canada lynx listed some 18 years ago still has “no discernible path to recovery.” Private land owners have little incentive to help because spotting an endangered species is a death sentence for the productive use of their property.

Interior’s sensible principle seems to be that the law should be more predictable, including harmonizing the standards for listing and delisting. The current process makes it easy to list a species but hard to remove it even when the evidence of recovery is compelling. Also welcome is a proposal that wildlife classified as “threatened” won’t receive full treatment as “endangered,” which has defeated the purpose of a distinction that is supposed to allow for proactive rehabilitation.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/07/extinction-honest-science/

Warmists’ predictions of climate doom haven’t come to pass or anything like it, but give them credit for agility and perseverance in always concocting a fresh scare. The latest meme to keep grants flowing and careers on track: the purported mass die-off of species large and small.

With no significant warming for 20 years, the climate alarmists need better scares. The temperature rise of about 0.8 degC in more than 100 years is not only non-scary, it’s been immensely beneficial for feeding the globe’s burgeoning population. Now the “extreme weather” furphy is at work, with any storm or flood attributed by Al Gore and the Climate Council to fossil fuel emissions. There’s the purported “ocean acidification” but I’m yet to see evidence that it has hurt a solitary crab, let alone a species.

As for sea-level rises, well, check my birthplace, Fremantle, butting the Indian Ocean: its tide gauge shows 12 cms rise in the past 120 years – compare that with 20cm for the length of my hand. To cap it off, the warmists, including the green-colonised CSIRO, have had to recognize that extra CO2 in the 30 years to 2010 has greened the earth to the extent of two and a half Australias in area.[1]

There are two handy scares still slithering around: “The Anthropocene” and “The Sixth Mass Extinction”. Both are fakes. Both are foisted on kids by green/Left educators. Both require as supposed remedies a supra-national enforcement agency run by the Left/liberal crowd, along with a roll-back of capitalist progress.

Here’s an example. I was in Chicago in 2013 and visited its great natural history centre the Field Museum (named after a 19th century $US9m donor Marshall Field). In the “Evolving Planet” gallery for kids, there was a chart, “The Geologic Time Scale” showing the classic geologic ages (Silurian, Devonian etc) with markers for the first five extinctions. At the top it read “Today” with a picture of a metropolis, and an arrow labeled “Sixth Mass Extinction”. A red-neon “Extinction Clock” ticked over each time another species supposedly becomes extinct. In the hour or two since the gallery opened, the counter had added another 22 supposed extinctions. The count was based not on reality but fanciful modeling 30 years ago by Harvard professor and environmental activist Dr E.O Wilson, who claimed that 30,000 species were going extinct per year. The true number of known extinctions per year among the planet’s reputed 10 million-or-so species and averaged over the past 500 years is about two, according to the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Yet climate activists want to compare this alleged“Sixth Extinction” with the end-Permian “great dying” (250 million years ago) and end-Cretaceous dinosaur die-off (66 million years ago).

As for the“Anthropocene”, it refers to the present geological era in which humans supposedly dominate the planetary processes and destroy other life forms. The label was first seriously proposed in 2001 by co-Nobelist Paul Crutzen, of ozone-hole fame. It supposedly succeeds our 11,500 year old Holocene, the brief warm spell that has fostered our agriculture and civilisation. No such era and label as “Anthropocene” has been endorsed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the global naming authority. An ICS working group (AWG) endorsed the concept in 2016, positing a start date of 1950. Most geologic eras last about three million years, so the ICS is in no hurry to make a ruling.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/the_latest_global_warming_scare_might_make_you_want_to_kill_yourself.html

Too many “scientists” have too much grant money and too much computer time on their hands, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars in grant money ($32.5 billion from 1989 to 2015, according to the Science and Public Policy Institute) that the federal government has been dispensing for “climate change research.” Put together a proposal to find a new scary correlation, and odds are you’ll be bringing in the federal cash, to the delight of your university (that gets to appropriate a third or so of the grant for “overhead”). That’s why we have hundreds and hundreds of bad things that global warming (or climate change) supposedly will cause.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the latest claim, one that bears the imprimatur of Stanford University.

More people are likely to take their own lives as the planet warms, say researchers at Stanford University and UC Berkeley in a study published Monday that suggests yet another worrisome impact of climate change.

The multidisciplinary research team looked at nearly 1 million suicides in North America and found that hotter temperatures correlate with higher suicide rates. The warming projected through 2050, the group figures, could increase suicide rates by 1.4 percent in the U.S. and 2.3 percent in Mexico over that time, resulting in 21,000 additional deaths in the two nations.

The role of heat, the authors said, may be just as significant as other, more well-known drivers of suicide, like economic hardship, which also pushes rates up, and suicide prevention programs and gun control legislation, which tend to push rates down.

I certainly feel despair when it gets too hot. That’s why I moved to coastal California, where it rarely gets into the nineties. But if this holds water, we ought to see that suicide rates pretty closely correlate with average temperatures. A look at suicide rates by country reveals no such relationship. Here are the top 20 countries:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/flint-michigan-water-no-lead-poisoning/

The city’s kids made photogenic victims, but thankfully the scare was overblown.

The numbers are in on the lead contamination of Flint, Michigan’s water in 2014–15, and it’s time for a sigh of relief. Medically speaking, the lead in the water turned out to be a non-event.

The increase in lead content in children’s blood after the water debacle was small. Tiny, in fact. How tiny? It was basically statistical noise: 0.11 micrograms per deciliter, which is within the range of normal fluctuation. Two experts explain in the New York Times:

A similar increase of 0.12 micrograms per deciliter occurred randomly in 2010-11. It is not possible, statistically speaking, to distinguish the increase that occurred at the height of the contamination crisis from other random variations over the previous decade.

Lead is dangerous and it’s proper to be vigilant about it. In terms of municipal management, or politics, the lead saga in Flint shouldn’t be overlooked. Any negligence should be adequately punished. If you behave in a grossly careless way and somehow no one gets hurt, you were still grossly careless.

Yet in terms of lead in the water in the Flint, the inescapable takeaway from the Times op-ed by professors Hernán Gómez, the lead author of the study “Blood Lead Levels of Children in Flint, Michigan: 2006–2016,” and Kim Dietrich, the principal investigator of the Cincinnati Lead Study, is that the children of Flint dodged a bullet when the city water supply was switched from the Detroit River to the Flint River in 2014. (In 2014–15 there was an outbreak of the bacteria-based Legionnaires’ disease in Flint that caused the deaths of 12 people, but ten of the 12 were linked to a single hospital called McLaren Flint.)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/yes-heat-waves-are-a-part-of-nature/

As often happens when extreme weather hits, the media is featuring excited claims that the July heat wave is due to man-made climate change. But it isn’t. These events are easily explained as natural phenomena, yet a major practice used by those exploiting climate and environment for a political agenda involves claiming natural events are unnatural.

The Guardian is a familiar source of these stories. In “Heatwave sees record high temperatures around world this week” (July 13), the Guardian’s global environment editor Jonathan Watts writes:

Record high temperatures have been set across much of the world this week as an unusually prolonged and broad heatwave intensifies concerns about climate change.

On June 28, the Washington, D.C.-based group Public Citizen, through two members of the Public Citizen’s Climate and Energy Program,issued a “NOTE TO REPORTERS AND EDITORIAL BOARDS” with this headline:

As Extreme Heat Warnings Sound in New York This Weekend, Remember to Connect the Dots Between Extreme Heat and Climate Change

The sub-headline was even more definitive:

Extreme Heat and Record-Breaking Heat Are Linked to Climate Change

There is no doubt that some places have seen record high temperatures of late. For example, Glasgow just had its hottest day on record, hitting 89.4°F (31.9°C). But consider how short the historical record is: about 120 years.

That’s 0.000000026% of the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.

There were many times when the planet, Glasgow included, has been far hotter (and colder) than today. Consider the situation in the continental United States on July 1 and 2, as illustrated in the following figure: CONTINUE AT SITE