RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the Senate’s ongoing confirmation hearings, knee-jerk liberals keep asking President Trump’s appointees – even though the question is totally irrelevant to the secretaries being questioned – about global warming (AGW, for anthropogenic global warming), aka global climate change. Surprisingly, most of those appointees have affirmed their “belief” in climate change. In the light of the president’s deletion of all mentions of AGW and climate change from the White House website at high noon on January 20, those appointees might want to reconsider their stance. In affirming the “reality” of AGW, these cabinet appointees buy into the two points that liberal climate fanatics seem to miss, but which President Trump seems to get.

First, when, for a decade, the globe’s temperatures refused to budge, those doctrinaire doomsayers who publicly “believe” in their patently corrupted “climate science” quietly tried to change the subject. Without making a big deal out of what is, after all, a very big deal, those obsessive climate Gore-clones tried to move away from decrying global warming and toward viewing with alarm their new menace, global climate change.

Their reasoning is simple. When the globe stopped getting hotter in the late 1990s, and since these facts slipped out despite all that “climate scientists” could do, the view-with-alarmists had to move to a more defensible position. After all, the globe’s dynamic climate changes every day. No two days are alike. Never have been, never will be. So they can actually tell the “truth” when they point to “climate change.”

These private-sector doomsayers were supported by Obama’s own climate minions – bought and paid for “experts” working for NASA and NOAA, as well as those over at the Pentagon – and even in the CIA – who had been commanded to buy into the absurd fiction that climate change is America’s greatest threat. With that “official” position about to change, President Trump’s go-along-to-get-along nominees might want to rethink their position.

The bigger issue these climate-waffling appointees need to address is one the doomsayers never admit to. President Trump seems to grasp this bigger issue, if only because he has often referred to both AGW as a hoax. His cabinet nominees should ponder this and pay close attention to the logical fallacy President Trump sees lurking behind the entire issue of climate change.

The only way AGW could possibly be important is if there were just one perfect, ideal global climate that benefits everyone and harms no one. If you follow the climate fanatics’ flawed logic, that one ideal, perfect global climate was that unnamed benchmark year, sometime in the 1980s. Those grant-addicted “climate scientists” can’t agree on a benchmark year, but climate fear-mongers act as if any variation from that perfect Year Zero benchmark climate must be a bad change.

The Trump Administration has a long to-do list, not least at a lawless Environmental Protection Agency. Sending early signals will be important, and one opportunity for Administrator nominee Scott Pruitt would be to revoke the Pebble Mine veto.

In February 2014 the EPA took the unprecedented step of issuing a pre-emptive veto, blocking a proposal to create America’s largest copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. The veto was a message to every developer that EPA would stop any project the environmental left opposed—with no hearing and sham science.

Under the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps of Engineers has the primary job of evaluating projects. The law gives EPA a secondary role of reviewing a project, and then potentially vetoing one—though only with cause. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s decision to veto before Pebble had even applied for permits or received a Corps review was a first in the Clean Water Act’s history.

A subsequent 346-page investigation (requested by Pebble) by former Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen provided evidence that EPA had decided on its veto as early as 2010. That was well before native tribes (with EPA encouragement) asked the agency to intervene. EPA then built a façade of science and procedure, inventing a phony watershed assessment based on a hypothetical mine to justify its veto.

Internal agency documents show that EPA staff and officials were also in constant contact with activists who opposed the mine. The Cohen report noted that the evidence raised “serious concerns as to whether EPA orchestrated the process to reach a predetermined outcome; had inappropriately close relationships with anti-mine advocates; and was candid about its decision-making process.”

The Pebble veto is above all a trammeling of state’s rights. Alaska owns the land for the project and protested EPA’s decision to cut the Corps and state out of the process. The Pebble proposal is controversial even in Alaska, with arguments on both sides. But the state’s residents, legislators and regulators were robbed of influence by a federal agency that pre-empted the normal process. The EPA essentially set itself up as the sole regulator of every watershed in the country.

Donald Trump has encouraged his cabinet nominees to take the initiative as soon as they’re on the job, and one area ripe for action is reversing the Obama Administration’s habit of letting its green-energy obsessions interfere with national defense. A good place to start is reviewing a wind farm that could compromise a crucial U.S. defense radar in southern Virginia.

That’s the location of one of America’s two Relocatable Over-the-Horizon Radar (Rothr) sites. Rothr, which is run by the Navy, provides long-range surveillance of aircraft and surface ships through the Caribbean to South America. The two Rothr sites—the other is in Texas—are crucial for tracking foreign military operations, drug runners and other criminals.

The Navy—informed by MIT and government studies—has long held that wind farms within a 28-mile radius of a Rothr site interfere with its ability to function. In 2011 the Spanish wind-turbine manufacturer Iberdrola nonetheless applied to build a giant wind farm in North Carolina near the Virginia border. The farm’s more than 100 turbines, some more than 500 feet tall, would fall within 28 miles of the Rothr site, some as near as 14 miles.

For years the U.S. military opposed the wind project. General John Kelly, then leading U.S. Southern Command, told Congress that the wind farm “could and likely will adversely impact our Rothr systems,” adding that while the Pentagon was working with “developers and stakeholders to develop potential mitigation solutions,” he had “little confidence we will succeed.” Gen. Kelly is now Mr. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security.

So it was a surprise to many when the Pentagon reversed itself in October 2014 and approved the project. The preamble in its agreement with Iberdrola says “it is an objective of the DoD to ensure that the robust development of renewable energy resources . . . may move forward in the United States.” And we thought the Pentagon’s mission was to defend against America’s enemies.

The wind-farm agreement refers vaguely to “mitigation” and “de-conflicting” activities but doesn’t list actions that Iberdrola performed to gain approval. The Navy later said a new study showed the farm would not interfere with the Rothr mission, though it has refused to release that study. The agreement also bars the government from stopping the turbines save for “emergency circumstances.”

The site’s first turbines are due to be up and running soon, and state legislative leaders in North Carolina recently sent a letter to Mr. Kelly asking him to intervene. They want the Trump Administration to shut down the wind farm or require the developer to shut down the turbines whenever they degrade the Rothr signal by more than 5%.

The Obama Administration used the military as a spear for its green agenda, but evidence is growing that these demands (biofuels, electric military vehicles) have come at a cost to military readiness. Mr. Kelly and new Secretary of Defense James Mattis can reassure the military and the public by focusing defense back on national security and away from climate-change indulgences.

Man-made global warming is a hoax created by the elite to make money and damage the U.S. economy, according to President-elect Donald Trump – and his picks for prominent roles in the administration prove he is serious about “ending the scam.”

Trump met with Dr. Will Happer, an outspoken climate change skeptic, on Friday in New York and sources in Washington report the prominent Princeton University professor is joining the administration.

In 2015 Dr. Happer declared UN “policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. We are being led down a false path. To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?“

Dr. Happer, who specialises in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy, also blasted mainstream media pundits for distorting facts and misleading the public, declaring himself “outraged by distortions of CO2 & climate intoned by hapless, scientifically-illiterate newscasters.”

Trump is building a team of climate change skeptics, suggesting we are about to experience an abrupt change in policy. In November,Trump selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling his determination to dismantle President Obama’s legislation on climate change.

“Obama thinks it’s the number one problem in the world today. I think it’s very low on the list,” Trump said on the Hugh Hewitt show, indicating a major shift in U.S. policy.

Trump continued: “You know in the 1920s people talked about global cooling, they thought the earth was cooling. I believe there is weather and I believe there is change and I believe it goes up and it goes down and it goes up again and it changes depending on years and centuries.”

Pointing out that U.S. manufacturing and the economy as a whole has suffered since climate change rules were introduced by global organizations – making everybody poorer, except the elites who profit from the fearmongering – Trump has promised to make America competitive again.

Trump’s anti-establishment views on climate change have come under sustained attack by the mainstream, but Dr. Happer has the president-elect’s back, criticizing the sheeplike groupthink of the majority and the attempt to limit freedom of speech and scientific endeavor.

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product.

Some of our states have forgotten this founding principle and are acting less like Jefferson and Adams and more like George III. A group of Democratic attorneys general has announced it intends to criminally investigate oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming. Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda. Pretended offenses, indeed.

We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.

The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken, and the representatives of the American people had no opportunity to object or offer their own suggestions. The checks and balances built into our system of government were simply ignored as inconvenient impediments to the president’s agenda.