RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earth Day has changed a lot since its inception in 1970, and not for the better. In the spirit of the time, it started as a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, idealistic experience. Attendees were prototypic tree-huggers.

In recent years, Earth Day has evolved into an occasion for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize.

Now there’s more heaving tomatoes than planting them.

Instead of focusing on how to preserve and protect nature, many of those stumping for Earth Day on Sunday expressed opposition to environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology and nuclear power. Another pervasive sentiment was disdain for the capitalist system that provides the resources to expend on environmental protection and conservation. (It’s no coincidence that poor countries tend to be the most polluted.)

Rachel Carson, Earth Day’s Patron Saint
School kids are increasingly involved in Earth Day activities, and many are assigned to read Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1962 book Silent Spring, an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects. As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet eminently readable analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic,” Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts.”

Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides even though Silent Spring was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of misconduct.

Carson’s observations about DDT were meticulously rebutted point by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, a professor of entomology at San Jose State University, a longtime member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.

The UN’s emphasis on per capita emissions tells us next to nothing about planetary survivability but a great deal about the world body’s dishonesty. We’d be well rid of a corrosive organisation that is home to more criminals than Chicago in the 1920s. In per capita terms, of course.

What does two plus two equal? Ask almost anyone and they will quickly answer: four. Or perhaps not so quickly, if you’ve asked a recent arts graduate. But even they will get there, eventually, if born with an adequate finger supply.

Let’s suppose, however, that their answer is the same as four but is expressed in a pointlessly complicated way. “36,527 minus 36,523,” they might reply. Or “the composite number found between the two first-occurring prime numbers”. Or “the square root of sixteen”.

For good reason, you might wonder at the motivation behind this mathematical posturing. Maybe your respondent is seeking to embarrass or confuse you, in which case a beating should be arranged. “How many broken ribs do you have?” you may later ask of that composite-number fellow, as a mathematically-themed part of your payment calculations.

Then again, it could be that concealment is the aim.

Certain people—lawyers, for example, and anyone involved in drafting taxation legislation—delight in disguising simplicity beneath needless complexity. I was once directed to a “ground-based facility” at a concert venue; turns out this was a tent. And every journalist has endured police media conferences featuring lines like: “The vehicle was travelling in a northerly direction when it left the road surface …”

Those last two cases are relatively innocent and easily decoded. Not so the language used by our carbon-panic community, who resort to an extraordinary variety of tricks in order to sell their message of doom. They do this because they cannot otherwise escape one awkward and devastatingly simple fact.

Australia produces just 1.3 per cent of the planet’s alleged global warming gases.

This means that even if Australia were to be removed from the earth in its entirety—every factory, every road, every vehicle, every supermarket, every airport, every head of livestock, every coal mine, every speck of soil and every Australian—it would make no significant difference at all to the planet’s carbon-emissions wellbeing. “If reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely better than futile,” Tony Abbott pointed out last year in his excellent London speech, “because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s.”

As one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump signed presidential memoranda to revive both the KeystoneXL and Dakota Access pipelines by expediting the environmental review process. The Dakota Access pipeline is now in full operation. TransCanada’s annual report gives us an update on the Keystone XL pipeline.

“Keystone XL In February 2017, we filed an application with the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC) seeking approval for the Keystone XL pipeline route through that state and received approval for an alternate route on November 20, 2017. On November 24, 2017, we filed a motion with the Nebraska PSC to reconsider its ruling and permit us to file an amended application that would support their decision and would address certain issues related to their selection of the alternative route. On December 19, 2017, the Nebraska PSC denied this motion. On December 27, 2017, opponents of the Keystone XL project, and intervenors in the Keystone XL Nebraska regulatory proceeding, filed an appeal of the November 20, 2017 PSC decision seeking to have that decision overturned. TransCanada supports the decision of the Nebraska PSC and will actively participate in the appeal process to defend that decision. In March 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued a U.S. Presidential Permit authorizing construction of the U.S./Canada border crossing facilities of the Keystone XL project. We discontinued our claim under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdrew the U.S. Constitutional challenge. Later in March 2017, two lawsuits were filed in Montana District Court challenging the validity of the Presidential Permit. Along with the U.S. Government, we filed motions for dismissal of these law suits which were denied on November 22, 2017. The cases will now proceed to the consideration of summary judgment motions. In July 2017, we launched an open season to solicit additional binding commitments from interested parties for transportation of crude oil on the Keystone pipeline and for the Keystone XL project from Hardisty, Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma and the U.S. Gulf Coast. The successful open season concluded on October 26, 2017. In January 2018, we secured sufficient commercial support to commence construction preparation for the Keystone XL project. We expect to commence primary construction in 2019 and construction will take approximately two years to complete.”

After seven years of delays under the Obama Administration and the then-secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Keystone XL pipeline has an approved route and a 20-year commitment for the oil it will carry from Canada to Cushing, Oklahoma, from whence it can be distributed wherever needed throughout the United States. TransCanada is negotiating with landowners along the route for the necessary easements. Those easements will put money into American landowner’s pockets.

The anti-nuclear movement spawned today’s radical environmentalism. Using the ‘front group’ tactic beloved of communist agitators, it fed lies to sympathetic reporters and whipped reasonable concerns into hair-trigger sensitivities. Its progeny is your last and ever more outrageous electricity bill.

An essential aspect of the vigilance that sustains liberty is the capacity to learn the lessons of history. What follows describes how radical activists captured the environmental movement as a part of the march through the institutions of Western society. The worldwide campaign against nuclear power became the foundation and testbed for the strategy and tactics of using environmentalism to de-industrialise and demoralise the West. The most recent manifestation of the movement is the climate scare and the push for expensive and unreliable renewable energy.

In 1980, the late John Grover thoroughly documented the anti-nuclear campaign in The Struggle for Power: What We Haven’t Been Told and Why! This account is drawn from his research. Grover was a mining engineer with an eye for the tactics of the Fabians and their more radical fellow travellers. He named some of the people and the main groups involved in the anti-uranium mining and anti-nuclear power movement, both internationally and locally.

The anti-nuclear movement started in the 1950s while American and Russian bomb tests were dispersing plutonium into the atmosphere. This aroused reasonable objections and also a very different kind of resistance to the Western nuclear deterrent and nuclear power in general. The 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty answered the reasonable concerns and was not a problem for the nuclear power industry, but in the 1970s the US created 20,000 government employees dedicated to improving the environment. Nuclear power stations soon became a target due to “thermal pollution” from their cooling systems, this tack being backed up by fear campaigns about the dangers of radiation.

Two sensationalized books appeared in 1969/70, The Careless Atom by Sheldon Novick and Perils of the Peaceful Atom by Richard Curtis, the former garnering generally favourable and accepting reviews that would set the standard for all the media sympathy to come. The books’ appearance also marked the start of the all-out campaign against nuclear energy.

In 1971 Ralph Nader, bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation network, began to work with lawyer Anthony Roisman and the Union of Concerned Scientists to combine the efforts of environmental groups and public interest lawyers against atomic power. According to Grover, by 1977 environmental interests funded as many as 600 environmental lawyers in the US with a budget in the order of $45 million, much of it devoted to energy-stopping. They worked on a wide front, using legal action to delay projects, lobbying Congress and government agencies, recruiting churches and distributing publicity material to the general public. They fuelled exaggerated perceptions of the dangers of radiation and the purported incompetence of the industry. A long-established environmental group, the Sierra Club in California, became more extreme during the 1970s and turned against nuclear power. It was highly influential due to its well-connected membership and a budget of three millioncareless atom dollars, a very hefty sum in 1977.

Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. Mr. Randall is the NAS’s director of research and a co-author of its new report, “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science.

Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?

The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination.

All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so. For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39% of them.

“Julie Borlaug is the head of public relations for startup Inari Agriculture Inc. and the granddaughter of Norman Borlaug, who pioneered new wheat varieties and large-scale farming methods that revolutionized food production in Mexico and India in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Borlaug’s advances have been credited with saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.”

Zachary Lippman, a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, stood among 2 acres of his experimental crops, including some altered with a gene-editing technology called Crispr-Cas9, one of the most ambitious efforts yet to improve on what nature created.

He plucked a tomato, held it up and asked: “Will people eat it?”

That question is rippling through the food industry, where a battle for public opinion is under way even before the new gene-edited foods hit the market.

Proponents including scientists and agriculture-industry executives say gene editing in plants could transform agriculture and help feed a growing global population. Organic farmers and natural-food companies say it may pose risks to human health and permanently alter the environment by spreading beyond farms.

The agricultural industry is desperate to avoid a repeat of the acrimonious and costly battles it fought over the genetically modified crops currently on the market, even though authorities such as the Food and Drug Administration and World Health Organization have deemed them safe. Seed companies and farm groups have spent millions of dollars on campaigns promoting the benefits of biotech crops, while fighting labeling requirements and proposals to block their cultivation.Although biotech crops have become ubiquitous on U.S. farms, covering more than 90% of corn and soybean acres, consumer mistrust of genetically modified organisms, called GMOs, has grown. A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center showed 39% of U.S. adults believe foods made from GMO crops are less healthy than conventional versions.

Imagine if the head of a federal agency announced a new policy for its scientific research: from now on, the agency would no longer allow its studies to be reviewed and challenged by independent scientists, and its researchers would not share the data on which their conclusions were based. The response from scientists and journalists would be outrage. By refusing peer review from outsiders, the agency would be rejecting a fundamental scientific tradition. By not sharing data with other researchers, it would be violating a standard transparency requirement at leading scientific journals. If a Republican official did such a thing, you’d expect to hear denunciations of this latest offensive in the “Republican war on science.”

That’s the accusation being hurled at Scott Pruitt, the Republican who heads the Environmental Protection Agency. But Pruitt hasn’t done anything to discourage peer review. In fact, he’s done the opposite: he has called for the use of more independent experts to review the EPA’s research and has just announced that the agency would rely only on studies for which data are available to be shared. Yet Democratic officials and liberal journalists have denounced these moves as an “attack on science,” and Democrats have cited them (along with accusations of ethical violations) in their campaign to force Pruitt out of his job.

How could “the party of science,” as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to transparency and peer review? Because better scientific oversight would make it tougher for the EPA to justify its costly regulations. To environmentalists, rigorous scientific protocols are fine in theory, but not in practice if they interfere with the green political agenda. As usual, the real war on science is the one waged from the left.

The New York Times in an article reporting on President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the regulatory state, hit upon a divergence of thought on the Right.

The Times quoted Gordon Lloyd, a professor emeritus at Pepperdine University and a preeminent scholar of the American Founding and the nature of limited government. Rather than defend Trump’s efforts to chip away at the administrative state, Lloyd instead compared Trump’s actions to “Lenin dismantling the institutions.”

The comment likely raised a few eyebrows because, by and large, most on the Right would consider the deconstruction of bureaucracy a positive development; a long sought after goal, even. To reside on the American Right, generally, means you see regulation and regulators have run amuck—and certainly have extended beyond the safe confines of the Constitution.

But Lloyd’s comment points to an area where the minds of some limited government proponents diverge. While we may all agree on the principle that regulations are most effective when they are few, targeted and efficient, the disagreement comes over how we arrive at the sweet spot.

Trump has garnered plaudits with some on the Right for his aggressive tactics toward reining in the regulatory state: an executive order mandating that for every single regulation that is issued, two are repealed; appointment of judges who hold a skeptical view of the agency-friendly judicial doctrine known as “Chevron deference,”and directing his Cabinet heads to simply repeal regulations they deem to be economically harmful or outside the agency’s mission. (EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, for all the unfavorable press coverage he’s received, has been a champion in this regard.)

Environmentalism has a long history of attracting cranks, loons and zealots.

There was the Unabomber, whose Manifesto was all but indistinguishable from Al Gore’s Earth In Balance.

There was James Lee, the eco-terrorist who in 2010 was shot by police at the Discovery Channel after taking hostages, leaving behind rambling messages protesting about “overpopulation” and the need to “the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies.”

Now there is David S Buckel, a lawyer who burnt himself to death in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, apparently in the belief that this would set some kind of moral example to all those people out there bent on destroying the planet.

Here is how Buckel put it in an email to the New York Times:

“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

Buckel may, as the New York Times describes him, have been a “prominent” lawyer who did much good work in the field of gay rights. But the very last thing I hope anyone will do is to listen to his final words on the environment.

First, he is wrong historically. The history of human progress is the history of a journey from primitive conditions, long working hours and backbreaking toil into one of much greater leisure, abundance and health. This is one of the many things that fossil fuels have done for us: by supplying the energy intensity equivalent of many hundreds of horses, many thousands of men. Compare the average lifespan of people who lived in the West before the Industrial Revolution and people who live in it now. The disparity makes an absolute nonsense of that stuff about “many” dying “early deaths”: people had it way worse in the pre-industrial age.

There is mounting pressure on warmist researchers to come up with arguments, if not evidence, that will stand up in court. As climate models continue to get it wrong, often spectacularly so, the carpetbaggers’ various lawsuits are in dire jeopardy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t stop trying

With the international political, financial and reputational stakes so high, it was only a matter of time before climate change appeared in the dock, handcuffed to its partner in prognostication, the dodgy discipline of extreme weather attribution.

Attribution, n., the art of evaluating the relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or an event, according to one’s prejudices.

To make sense of the climate change scene today, it is best to begin with the end game: the orthodoxy’s search for an argument, however abstruse, that will stand up in court. It needs one sufficiently “robust” to ensure developed countries—still effectively on trial in the United Nations, where a protracted “loss and damages” claim awaits resolution—and fossil fuel companies are legally liable to pay multi-billion-dollar “climate reparations” to the alleged victims of “carbon pollution”, be they in the developing world or in the path of a natural disaster.

Indeed, the credibility of the “relatively young science” of extreme weather attribution, the legitimacy of its ambition to “tease out the influence of human-caused climate change from other factors”, the whole alarmist movement and fate of the UN’s Green Climate Fund, all crucially depend on delivering such a legal argument.

How did we get to this point? When the climate change meme was planted successfully in the collective mind a decade ago as the most serious existential threat facing humankind, the orthodoxy wanted it to stay there. A sense of public anxiety had to be maintained, despite the risk of apocalypse fatigue syndrome.

So it created an Attribution of Climate-related Events (ACE) initiative. The international research agenda gradually shifted to the tricky territory of extreme weather attribution.

ACE’s first workshop was held on January 26, 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, at the Pei-designed National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Lab. Attendees included Myles Allen (Oxford University), Martin Hoerling (NOAA, USA), Peter Stott (UK Met Office, Hadley Centre), Kevin Trenberth (NCAR) and David Karoly (University of Melbourne). Its objective was to:

develop a conceptual framework for attribution activities to be elevated in priority and visibility, leading to substantial increases in resources (funds, people, computers) and both a research activity and a framework for an “operational” activity, that sets forth a goal of providing a lot more concrete information in near real time about what has happened and why in weather and climate.