RUTHFULLY YOURS

The EPA has probably cost as many American jobs as China. Not to mention driving up the prices of everything. Now it’s the EPA that’s shedding jobs for a change.

The EPA Tuesday provided to Secrets its first year staff results which show that the agency is below levels not seen since former President Reagan’s administration.

And if just those slated to retire by early 2021 leave, Administrator Scott Pruitt and his team will have reduced a staff of nearly 15,000, to below 8,000, or a reduction of 47 percent.

This doesn’t include the fake CIA Global Warming expert whose retirement is taxpayer funded, but is being routed through the penal system.

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison Wednesday for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job.

He also said he used the time “trying to find ways to fine tune the capitalist system” to discourage companies from damaging the environment. “I spent a lot of time reading on that,” said Beale.

Of course the mass retirements aren’t a done deal yet, but it does look like one of the destroyers of American prosperity will have plenty of time to read about the evils of capitalism. And while it will be at taxpayer expense, EPA operatives will at least be doing less damage when they’re not working for the government.

Climate-change spinmeisters have been in overdrive since late December, hustling to explain how this spate of treacherous, winter weather is all due to global warming…just like they told us. (No doubt, the next thaw or blizzard will be mankind’s fault, too.) But their avowals mostly contradict scientific fact—including facts they have affirmed in reports they helped write themselves—not to mention current weather trends.

On January 4, as a “bomb cyclone” savaged the eastern seaboard, Al Gore tweeted this:

Al Gore
✔ @algore It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis. http://ow.ly/Gdm230hAFv4

Gore, who oddly didn’t include clips of massive snowstorms and record-breaking cold temperatures in his films or paid lectures about global warming, linked to an article written by Michael Mann, a Penn State University scientist, author of the infamous “hockey stick” graph, and the media’s favorite climate mouthpiece.

In his customary, humble fashion, Mann appropriates the two-week stretch of brutal weather as evidence of exactly what he’s been saying all along: “Listening to climate contrarians like President Donald Trump, you might think this constitutes the death knell for concern over human-caused climate change. Yet, what we were witnessing play out is in fact very much consistent with our expectations of the response of weather dynamics to human-caused climate change.” The professor then throws in some maps and graphs to purportedly boost his claim, and concludes with, “so, to the climate change doubters and deniers out there, the unusual weather we’re seeing this winter is in no way evidence against climate change. It is an example of precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.”

Republicans start 2018 with two big economic accomplishments under their belts. The first is passing the $1.5 trillion tax-reform package. The second is withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty and rolling back the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, in effect repealing an Obama tax hike that would have cost Americans $1.3 trillion over eight years.

Cutting taxes is what successful Republicans do. Every Republican president since 1980 who subsequently won reelection cut taxes in his first term. By contrast, President Trump’s pro-growth energy policies are very much his own idea. Perhaps others in the field of 17 primary contenders in 2016 would have acted similarly (such as Ted Cruz), but others would not (such as Jeb Bush), and it’s hard to imagine any of them appointing Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, who has turned out to be one of the stars of the Trump administration.

The potential economic gains are colossal. According to Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Dayaratna, over the next eight years ending the war on hydrocarbon energy will generate 900,000 jobs, add $1.9 trillion to the economy, and cut electricity prices and household energy bills with negligible effects on the climate and sea level. Fully taking advantage of fracking and America’s vast hydrocarbon reserves to 2035 would increase GDP by $3.7 trillion — equivalent to America’s adding two and a quarter Texas-size economies — and make an average family of four over $40,000 better off, all with a temperature change of less than three thousandths of a degree Celsius and a sea-level rise of less than one hundredth of an inch. Like all the best policies, in retrospect, Trump’s energy policies will appear obvious common sense.

While Trump is pushing hard on the gas pedal to accelerate the growth of the American economy, his opposite number in Paris is applying the brake. At President Macron’s behest, in December, the French parliament passed a law banning all production of oil and gas in France and its overseas territories from 2040. Casting himself as savior of the planet, a week earlier, Macron hosted a One Planet summit, ostensibly to commemorate the second anniversary of the Paris climate accord.

A sycophantic promotional video of the event shows the planetary hero planning the summit lunch as an Elysée Palace flunky serves coffee from a silver tray, then hugging guests on their arrival. Like millions of visitors to Paris before them, they board a Bateau Mouche and view the sights of Paris as they sail down the Seine. Everyone looks bored as Macron speaks, apart from the hero’s wife, Brigitte, and his lead supporters (“really good, really fantastic, congratulations,” Arnold Schwarzenegger tells him).

It all looks a bit stale. There’s a roundtable with former secretary of state John Kerry. Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson are given front-row seats. “We are in the middle of losing this battle,” Macron tells them. There are, he claims, five, ten, 15 heads of governments whose nations will disappear in 50 to 70 years’ time. It’s hardly an inspiring rallying cry.

I returned the other day from a shopping expedition — gas, groceries, pharmaceuticals — with an empty wallet and a troubled mind. Prices for everything had spiked almost overnight, it seemed, and in some cases had nearly doubled. What was formerly a $70 grocery bill was now $107. A standard $75 for a tank of gas now set me back $100. A $30 bill for various pharmaceutical items now topped $40.

On the same day, we had our monthly heating oil delivery, a partial fill-up leaving us $500 poorer, not counting the Hydro One electricity bill of $140. Prices in my overtaxed home province of Ontario were always stratospheric, with many people having to choose between heating their homes and stocking their larders, a condition called “energy poverty.” Industry has fled the province to avoid the crushing tax burden.

Kangaroo courts called Human Rights Tribunals drain the public treasury of increasingly scarce resources while bankrupting unfairly accused defendants. Automobiles require special stickers at a hefty annual sum. Wind turbines rotate their blades lazily — that is, when there is any wind to speak of — defacing the landscape, slaughtering birds by the hecatombs, and producing little in the way of reliable power, albeit at enormous cost to businesses and homeowners. The situation may not be appreciably better in other parts of the Socialist Republic of Canada — Alberta, for example, has also been hard hit; nevertheless, when one factors cost and weather into the domestic equation, Ontario must be near the bottom of anyone’s habitation wish list.

Aside from near-unaffordable living expenses, the mercury has plunged dramatically. We are now in the midst of the coldest winter in living memory, with temperatures plus wind-chill hovering in the minus 40 area. The news channels warn us that merely two or three minutes outdoors without adequate protection — gloves, warm boots, balaclavas — can lead to frostbite.

Cars, trucks and rigs line the icy 401 autoroute at precarious angles. (Indeed, even parts of comparatively balmy British Columbia have endured huge traffic tie-ups and power loss owing to “weather events.”) At the same time the snowfall is relentless, heaping berms three feet high. There is no place remaining to shovel snow off our deck. We have had to hire diggers, snow plows and sanders to clear the steep entrance lane and driveway, adding another strain to the rapidly shrinking budget.

The two elements I’ve focused on of living costs and weather come together both practically and conceptually. Apart from a bevy of new taxes hitting doctors, farmers and small businesses, our pretty boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, ostensibly to fight global warming, imposed an onerous carbon tax on the country, a tariff which has kicked in with a vengeance. This explains in large part why I came home with an empty wallet — prices reflect the new fiscal burden.

That catastropharians consider themselves so much brighter and more insightful than the knuckle-dragging rest of us is not news, yet the vaulting arrogance of climate cultists can still surprise. Take the deep-green Forum for the Future, which cheerfully anticipates penal colonies for skeptics.

The Kerguelen islands are horridly cold and windy specks near the Antarctic, populated by a few score of French scientists and several thousand sheep. But to a leading British green group, Forum for the Future, it has enormous potential as an internationally-run penal colony for global warming sceptics.

The Forum’s founder-director is Jonathon Porritt 67, Eton- and Oxford-bred Chancellor of Keele University, adviser to Prince Charles, and Green Party activist. [1] The Forum’s fancy for Kerguelen can be found in its 76-page report “Climate Futures – Responses to Climate Change in 2030”, written in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, a company which should know better. This scenario, one of five, involves the naughty world delaying the reduction of emissions, for which we must all suffer. The document even conjures a fictional climate criminal and imagines him being deported to Kerguelen in 2028. He is Jean-Claude Bertillon, leader of the No Climate Change Party in Canada, “convicted of denying the existence of climate change”.

The report actually fantasises three penal colonies for climate criminals. The other two are Britain’s frosty South Georgia[2] and the South Island of New Zealand. Written in 2008, the document attempts to show how CO2 emissions will wreck the planet within a couple of decades unless civilisation turns away from the sins of consumerism and economic growth. As we are now almost half-way to the 2030 forecast date it is possible to get a handle on how the Forum’s timeline is working out, and perhaps to gain an inkling of any substance to the report’s assertion that our descendants will look back on us with the same disgust we reserve for the slave-owners of yesteryear.

The authors — and Porritt himself — long for an eco-catastrophe that would eliminate all public doubts about climate doom. Their manifesto says,

“Because of a chilling lack of confidence in our leaders … our only hope would be for an isolated, serious pre-taste of climate change to happen soon enough for the political and behavioral response to have a useful impact.”

This is probably wishful thinking, as Porritt, founder director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, pointed out:

‘I have occasionally fantasised about a low mortality-count scenario where a Force Six hurricane takes out Miami, but with plenty of warning so the entire city is evacuated with zero loss of life. The insurance industry in America would collapse because this could be a $50-60 billion climate-related ‘natural’ disaster. The industry wouldn’t be able to cope with that. There would be knock-on pain throughout the global economy, massive, traumatic dislocation. This would act as enough of an injection of physical reality, coupled with financial consequences for leaders to say: ‘Ok, we’ve got it now. This isn’t just about some nasty effects on poor countries: this is devastating for our entire model of progress.’ The response to that would be a negotiated transition towards a very low-carbon global economy that builds increased prosperity for people in more equitable and sustainable ways.’”

In today’s crazy world, Western politicians are wasting billions of taxpayer dollars force-feeding costly unreliable green energy in the bizarre belief that this will somehow change Earth’s climate.

Even more incredible, they fear global warmth and seem hell-bent on creating global cooling. They should study climate history. It is snow and ice, cold dry air, and carbon dioxide starvation we need to fear, not a warm, moist, fertile, bountiful atmosphere.

Climate change is natural and unstoppable.

Just 20,000 years ago, Earth was in one of its recurring glacial phases. A thick massive ice sheet smothered Canada, Iceland, Greenland, North Asia, and Europe as far south as London. Much of the animal and plant life of the previous warm era was extinguished. Even in warmer lands not covered by the ice sheet, plants suffered as the cold oceans removed moisture and carbon dioxide plant food from the atmosphere.

Then, because of changing cycles in Earth’s orbit and tilt, reinforced by changing solar cycles, the sun warmed the frozen lands. The great ice sheets melted, sea levels rose and the warming oceans expelled moisture and CO2 plant food into the atmosphere. Plant life recovered. Tundra, forests, grasslands and herbivores advanced towards the pole and fish became abundant in the shallow seas that flooded coastal plains. Hunters, herders, farmers, and fishermen followed the food.

Human population increased greatly. They gave thanks for the warmth, and worshipped the sun.

But the peak of the modern warm era is past, and the natural cycles controlling global temperatures are pointing downwards.

Only an idiot with a death wish for life on Earth would attempt to accelerate our inevitable descent into the next ice age.

Luckily, their costly war on warmth is totally futile, but their war on carbon energy will prove tragically misguided in the cold times ahead.

Freezing temperatures in the U.S. Northeast have pushed up heating costs, creating serious stress for many Americans. Although the rich world’s energy poor are largely forgotten in discussions about climate policies, they bear an unfair burden for well-meaning proposals. That reality is being laid bare this icy winter as energy and electricity prices surge.

When we think about energy poverty, we imagine a lack of light in the world’s worst-off nations, where more than one billion people still lack electricity. This is a huge challenge that the world can hope to address as it reduces poverty and expands access to grid electricity, largely powered by fossil fuels.

But there is a less visible form of energy poverty that affects even the world’s richest country. Economists consider households energy poor if they spend 10% of their income to cover energy costs. A recent report from the International Energy Agency shows that more than 30 million Americans live in households that are energy poor—a number that is significantly increased by climate policies that require Americans to consume expensive green energy from subsidized solar panels and wind turbines.

Last year, for the first time, the International Energy Agency tried to calculate the global scale of this problem. The IEA estimates that in the world’s rich countries—those that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—200 million people are in energy poverty. That includes 1 in 10 Americans, although the IEA notes that the highest estimates for the U.S. approach 1 in 4.

People of modest means spend a significantly higher share of their income paying for their energy needs. One careful study of energy usage in North Carolina found that a lower-income family might spend more than 20% of its income on energy. Among people with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty line, energy costs regularly consumed more than a third of their budgets.

Europe, where renewable subsidies are about three times as high as in the U.S., provides a window into America’s possible energy future. Higher costs from policies like stringent emissions caps and onerous renewable-energy targets make it even harder for the poorest citizens to afford gas and electricity. In Germany, more than 30% of the population spends at least one-tenth of income on energy. Some estimates show that half of Greeks are in energy poverty, according to the IEA.

Calls for government to take ever stronger action on climate change can seem like selfless appeals to democracy and shared responsibility: The gist is that everyone should carry the burden and pay more. But that isn’t what happens. Policies aimed at addressing climate change can easily end up punishing the poor. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s been a bad year for global warming propagandists, but fear not: Here comes a polar vortex to make it worse for them.

The unrelenting Arctic blast arrived on Christmas Eve and it remains the holiday houseguest from Hell that won’t leave: Record-breaking cold and snowfall are tormenting the eastern half of the country, and it’s only going to get worse. Weather models predict Americans will ring in the New Year while shivering under the lowest temperatures in 70 years, and the first day of 2018 could set record lows everywhere east of the Rockies.

Folks are being warned about the health risks associated with sub-zero temperatures, which could last beyond the first week of the year and stretch as far south as east Texas. It’s even too cold for the most intrepid thrill-seekers: Cities are canceling the Polar Bear Plunge on New Year’s Day due to inhumane air and water temperatures.

It marks a frustrating end to a dreadful year for climate-change activists, who have been frozen out of the Trump Administration. After Trump’s election, environmentalists prophesied the end times, labeling the president and his advisors “anti-science” and bracing for catastrophe. Climate scientists and bureaucrats at scientific agencies reached out for counseling, seeking ways to cope with life under the Trump regime; many have resigned “in disgust.”

But for once, the climate crowd’s “dire” predictions came true. Our “Denier-in-Chief” wasted no time dismantling Obama’s climate change legacy by appointing climate skeptics to fill top cabinet posts, exiting the Paris Climate Accord, repealing the Clean Power Plan, scrubbing government websites of climate change references, and promoting American fossil-fuel use abroad. If this wasn’t bad enough for them, now the climate crowd is trying incoherently to explain to frigid Americans—who are muttering “global warming, my ass” under their double-wrapped scarves—how this frigid weather is actually caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Never one to miss an opportunity to incite his foes, President Trump sent out this tweet Thursday night:
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!

Animal spirits revived this year after the Trump Administration halted its predecessor’s regulatory predations. Consider the Interior Department’s legal memo last week that rescinds an Obama Administration policy of criminalizing citizens who accidentally kill migratory birds.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 makes it a federal crime to “pursue, hunt, take, capture or kill” migratory birds. Offenders can be punished with up to six months in prison and fined $15,000 per violation. The law was originally intended to protect birds migrating between Canada, Mexico, Japan, Russia and the U.S. from poachers who sold their feathers for a profit.

Over the last 100 years, the list of protected birds has grown to more than a thousand species including crows, ducks and finches. President Obama added nearly 200 bird species to the list while calling open season on energy companies whose activities “incidentally” harm birds. In 2011 federal prosectors charged seven oil companies in North Dakota after more than two dozen birds flew into their tar pits.

An equal opportunity business harasser, the Obama Administration targeted wind farms operated by Duke Energy and PacifiCorp Energy that were found to have maimed hundreds of birds. Individuals also wound up in the government’s crosshairs—for instance, a tree-trimmer in Oakland was investigated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 after accidentally injuring five black-crowned night herons.

I’ve written about the descent of the formerly prestigious Scientific American into social justice blogging before. But this jumps the shark. And all the starving polar bears on the ice floes. And Al Gore’s mansion and private jet.

Men Resist Green Behavior as Un-Manly

Please, tell us more.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity.

Like caring more about brand virtue signaling than doing anything useful?

But surely this is based on solid research. After all, research was clearly mentioned.

In one study, we threatened the masculinity of male participants by showing them a pink gift card with a floral design and asking them to imagine using the card to purchase three products (lamp, backpack, and batteries). Compared to men shown a standard gift card, threatened men were more likely to choose the non-green rather than green version of each item. The idea that emasculated men try to reassert their masculinity through non-environmentally-friendly choices suggests that in addition to littering, wasting water, or using too much electricity, one could harm the environment merely by making men feel feminine.

This comes from two associate professors of marketing. Their solution is to put more wolves on eco-friendly products. That will be less threatening.

At the end of the article, there’s this notice. “Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about?”

If you’re a marketing scientist who specializes in putting wolf virtue signaling, please send your peer-reviewed paper to the Scientific American.