RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-next-step-on-climate-change-1490740870

The executive orders on climate change President Trump signed this week represent a step in the right direction for U.S. energy policy and, importantly, deliver on Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to roll back burdensome regulations affecting American companies. But it will take more than the stroke of a pen to make lasting progress and reverse the momentum of the climate-change movement.

On Tuesday, in a series of orders, Mr. Trump instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to rework its Clean Power Plan, which would restrict carbon emissions from existing power plants, mainly coal-fired ones. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the CPP pending judicial review.

Mr. Trump also directed the Interior Department to lift its current moratorium on federal coal leasing and loosen restrictions on oil and gas development (including methane flaring) on federal lands. And he instructed all government agencies to stop factoring climate change into the environmental-review process for federal projects. The federal government will recalculate the “social cost of carbon.”

These actions are a good start, but all they do is reverse many of the executive orders President Obama signed late in his second term. While easy to implement and theatrical to stage, such measures are largely superficial and may prove as temporary as the decrees they rescind.

Because they don’t attack the climate-change regulatory problem at its root, Mr. Trump’s orders will not provide enough clarity to U.S. energy companies—particularly electric utilities and coal-mining companies—for their long-term business forecasting or short-term capital investment and head-count planning.

To accomplish that, the Trump administration, led by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, needs to target the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which labeled carbon dioxide as a pollutant. That foundational ruling provided the legal underpinnings for all of the EPA’s follow-on carbon regulations, including the CPP.

It also provided the rationale for the previous administration’s anti-fossil-fuel agenda and its various climate-change initiatives and programs, which spanned more than a dozen federal agencies and cost the American taxpayer roughly $20 billion to $25 billion a year during Mr. Obama’s presidency.

The endangerment finding was the product of a rush to judgment. Much of the scientific data upon which it was predicated—chiefly, the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—was already dated by the time of its publication and arguably not properly peer-reviewed as federal law requires.

With the benefit of hindsight—including more than a decade of actual-versus-modeled data, plus the insights into the insular climate-science community gleaned from the University of East Anglia Climategate email disclosures—there would seem to be strong grounds now to reconsider the EPA’s 2009 decision and issue a new finding.

President Trump is expected as soon as next week to order the Environmental Protection Agency to rescind its Clean Power rule that is blocked by the courts. But the President faces another test of political fortitude on whether to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.

That’s suddenly uncertain. Mr. Trump promised to withdraw during the presidential campaign, correctly arguing that the accord gave “foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use.” His transition team even explored strategies for short-cutting the cumbersome, four-year process of getting out of the deal.

But the President’s is now getting resistance from his daughter, Ivanka, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who are fretting about the diplomatic ramifications. No doubt many countries would object, and loudly, but this risk pales compared to the potential damage from staying in the accord.

President Obama committed as part of Paris to cutting U.S. emissions by 26% compared with 2005 levels by 2025. Even Mr. Obama’s climate regulatory programs—all imposed without Congressional votes—would only achieve about half that commitment. Mr. Trump is killing those Obama programs, which means the U.S. may not reach that Paris promise. Why stay in an agreement that the Trump Administration has no interest or plan for honoring?

Another risk is that the U.S. might at some point be coerced into compliance. Mr. Obama joined the accord without congressional assent and endorsed the lengthy withdrawal process precisely to bind future Administrations to his climate priorities. Since Mr. Trump’s election, the international climate lobbies have debated ways to muscle the new Administration to comply.

These include imposing punitive tariffs on U.S. goods or requiring the U.S. to hit targets in return for other international cooperation. Mr. Tillerson might consider that Paris will be used as leverage against him in future international negotiations.

Lawyers and domestic environmental groups are also exploring how to use lawsuits to enforce the deal. Greens are adept at finding judges to require environmental regulations that Congress never intended. Such sympathetic judges today pack the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and include Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in 2007 joined four liberals to redefine the Clean Air Act to cover carbon as a pollutant.

Remaining in the Paris pact will invite litigation to impose the Paris standards and direct the EPA to impose drastic carbon cuts that would hurt the economy. Energy companies are aware of this threat, and despite Exxon’s recent pledge to pour $20 billion into Gulf Coast facilities, other companies remain wary of U.S. regulation. They will be warier if Mr. Trump looks like he’s waffling on his climate positions.

Mr. Trump’s best bet is to exit the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which could be done in a year and would result in a simultaneous withdrawal from Paris. That would quickly end the litigation risk.

Mr. Tillerson said at his confirmation hearing that he believes the U.S. should remain in the Paris pact to have a “seat at the table” for the climate debate. But the U.S. doesn’t need Paris to have a say in global energy policy.

America has already done more to reduce CO 2 emissions with its natural-gas fracking revolution than has most of the world. Many of the Paris signers want to use the pact to diminish any U.S. fossil-fuel production. Mr. Tillerson will also be on the back foot in Paris discussions as he tries to overcome his past as an oil company executive.

The best U.S. insurance against the risks of climate change is to revive economic growth that will drive energy innovation and create the wealth to cope with any future damage—if that day arrives.

Policy details aside, the worst part of Mr. Obama’s climate agenda was its lack of democratic consent. He failed to persuade either a Republican or Democratic Congress to pass his regulation and taxes. So he attempted to impose that agenda at home through the EPA and abroad via Paris to use international pressure against domestic political resistance. One certainty: The diplomats at Turtle Bay and in Brussels didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Mr. Smith, a Texas Republican, is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He is rated a minus 4 by the Arab American Institute for his strong support for Israel.

Transparency for thee, but not for me—that seems to be the motto of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. Last year they led a group of their colleagues—dubbed the “Green 20”—in a sweeping initiative to target dissenting views on climate change. Exxon Mobil, for instance, was asked to turn over decades of documents.

The Green 20 investigations have been criticized as blatantly political. Last year a federal judge overseeing Ms. Healey’s suit against Exxon expressed concern that she may be conducting it in “bad faith.”

For nearly a year, the congressional committee I lead has been trying to understand the effects of these investigations on scientific research. Unfortunately, the attorneys general have obstructed our inquiry at every turn. Last July, after two months of unanswered requests for information, the committee issued subpoenas to Mr. Schneiderman and Ms. Healey.
The subpoenas asked for communications between Green 20 offices and environmental activists. This would show the level of coordination in this campaign to harass and silence scientists who challenge prevailing climate-change orthodoxies. The attorneys general have refused to comply, hiding behind vague excuses.

The committee has not sought information about the investigations of Exxon. Instead, our interest is in discovering how this attempt at intimidation affects federally funded scientific research. Then we may consider changing the law to allow this research to continue.

The hypocrisy of the attorneys general here is evident—though perhaps understandable. Mr. Schneiderman has accepted nearly $300,000 in campaign donations from environmentalist donors, including members of the Soros family. He has also used the investigation as a way to curry favor with anti-Exxon billionaire Tom Steyer for a potential gubernatorial run, according to the New York Post.

We all have them, friends who believe the planet is on a CO2-fuelled collision course with a catastrophe that can only be averted by directing large sums to rent-seeking wind farmers and the like. If you know someone like that, here’s a simple, handy guide to the climate scam.
A school teacher I know tells his pupils that ‘Saying does not make it so’, that facts are the key to knowledge, not opinions. Nowhere is this truer today than in the so-called ‘climate debate’. Here, much fails the facts test. Topping the list are claims of unprecedented warming from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Resultant droughts, rising sea levels, more frequent and severe storms and other catastrophes are assumed. A switch from CO2-producing fossil fuels to renewable energy, especially wind and solar, is deemed essential.

Similar dire climate predictions have been around since the late 1970s. And in all that time, none has come true. None at all. Undeterred, the climate soothsayers ignore their failures and carry on as if nothing had happened. The fact that good science should produce good predictions, and this is not happening, is also largely ignored. Instead, impending climate doom, and what must be done to avoid it, is orthodox thought in much of government, academia and environmental groups everywhere. This thinking is much at odds with key facts.

A most important fact is that Earth’s four and a half billion year history tells us we are now cooler than average, not warmer. Indeed, for 80% of that history Earth had no ice caps and dinosaurs lived near the South Pole for millions of years. There were ice ages, too, with thick ice down to the Canadian border and across northern Eurasia. Indeed, this was the norm for the last 800 000 years, with ice ages, separated by warmer interglacial periods, coming and going each 100 000 years or so.

We are in the Holocene inter-glacial period now. It officially began 11 700 years ago, but not in a clear-cut way. Gradual warming followed the ice age peak about 25,000 years ago until a cold spell 14,000 years ago chilled things down again and temperatures swung wildly by 5C or so until the current warmer times began about 12,000 years ago.

During the last ice age, sea levels were some 130 metres lower than today, thanks to water locked-up in ice caps. With warmer times, some ice melted and seas rose to near current levels in just a few thousand years. Today, they are rising by only 16cm or so per century; a tiny change compared with the rapid changes in the early Holocene days and some contrary claims today. The lower sea levels exposed our continental shelf, joined Australia to Tasmania and PNG and left the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) high and dry for tens of thousands of years. Then, as the ice melted, Tasmania and PNG became islands and the GBR re-generated some 8,000 years ago in its previous position.

Similar things happened throughout the world. Rising Holocene waters separated England from Europe, formed the Dardanelles and the Black Sea and remade the world map. Humans flourished in the warmer climate, with 60% of the Holocene averaging 2C higher than today. The hottest time was some 7 000 years ago, with other peaks at 4000, 2000 and 1000 years back. Although there were no thermometer readings in these times, reliable proxies are available using lake sediments, pollen fossils and such, and evidence of what crops grew where and tree-lines on hills and in marginal areas. Indeed, the old joke that the Roman Empire went only as far north as wine grapes would grow has some truth to it. In fact, they grew grapes and citrus in parts of England that until recently would not support either crop. The Chinese too grew crops along the Yellow River in those times that won’t grow there today. And, for history buffs, Hadrian’s route across the Alps could not be used today as it is permanently closed with ice and snow.

Thus, we know that Holocene temperatures were often warmer than now and varied constantly – and wild temperature swings occurred just prior to the Holocene period. When we take this longer view, the recent temperature increase of about 0.8C since 1880 falls well within the limits of previous natural change, and is neither unprecedented nor dangerous.

Climate change fanatics will use any tool they can find to force draconian regulations on the public in the name of their holy church. Nothing is off limits.

For example, see this effort to claim that climate change (and environmental problems in general) is racist:

With unchecked federal power in the executive branch, all communities will feel the pain of President Donald Trump’s attacks on environmental protections. Communities of color, who face higher barriers to living and working in areas free from pollution and climate impacts, as well as greater economic and health disparities, are likely to be hit first and worst.

A recent report by Front and Centered, a statewide coalition we help steer, showed that toxic pollution sites awaiting cleanup in Washington state are often in neighborhoods with a high share of people of color and people with lower incomes.

The National Equity Atlas illustrates that air-pollution exposure in the Asian Pacific Islander population is 34 points worse than it is for the white population in Washington state. The University of Southern California Program for Environmental and Regional Equity report, The Climate Gap, documented how climate change will worsen air pollution disparities, increase the cost of basic necessities, and reduce job opportunities unevenly and harm agricultural jobs, a sector in which Latino immigrants are the majority of the workforce.

Combined with the Trump administration’s war on immigrants, the Asian Pacific Islander and Latino communities are at greater risk from an assault on environmental protections.

Of course, it’s not surprising that people with lower incomes are more likely to live near polluted places. It’s not like Beverly Hills is known for its handling of toxic waste. The only people who live near areas like that are people with no choice. After all, the presence of such problems is what makes those areas more affordable.

Climate-change alarmists who have been largely unchallenged by the media over the past decade have finally met their match in Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And it ain’t pretty.

Since the premiere of his new nighttime show, Carlson has frequently confronted the dogma of man-made global warming, pushing “experts” to cite data and evidence to back up their claims rather than allowing them to repeat well-worn platitudes about a scientific consensus and the planet’s impending doom. In January, Tucker took on California State University professor Joseph Palermo, who wrote, “If President Trump and his cohort believe the science of global warming is bogus, then they shouldn’t be allowed to use the science of the Internet for their Twitter accounts” based on the commonly accepted factoid that “98 percent of all scientists” believe the climate is changing because of human activity. When Carlson repeatedly asked Palermo to give the source of that figure, which Carlson correctly said was unknowable, the professor couldn’t do it. Climate fail.

But it was Carlson’s takedown of Bill Nye the Science Guy, a television personality and celebrity climate promoter, that exposes the intellectual chicanery behind this crusade. During an interview on Carlson’s show on February 27, Nye goofily claimed that people who question claims about global warming suffer from cognitive dissonance: “We in the science community are looking for information why climate change deniers, or extreme skeptics, do not accept the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” Nye went on to say that denial is denial, the evidence is overwhelming, and the question of whether humans are causing climate change is “not an open question, it’s a settled question.”

Now usually when these charges are made by someone who purports to possess expertise in climate science (Nye has a degree in mechanical engineering), the interviewer acquiesces, immediately surrendering the debate to the climate activist. But Carlson wouldn’t back down: “To what degree is climate change caused by human activity? . . . Is it 100 percent, is it 74.3 percent? If it’s settled science, please tell us to what degree human activity is responsible.”

Speaking of deregulation (see nearby), President Trump on Tuesday ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider an Obama Administration rule that seized control over tens of millions of acres of private land under the pretext of protecting the nation’s waterways. EPA chief Scott Pruitt will now follow due process to rescind one of his predecessor’s lawless rule-makings.

In 2015 the Obama EPA reinterpreted the Clean Water Act with a rule extending its extraterritorial claims to any creek, muddy farm field, ditch or prairie pothole located within a “significant nexus” of a navigable waterway. EPA defined significance broadly to include any land within the 100-year floodplain and 4,000 feet of land already under its jurisdiction, among other arbitrary delimitations.

Mr. Trump summed it up well, if not eloquently, when he said “it’s a horrible, horrible rule” and “massive power grab” that has “sort of a nice name, but everything else is bad.”

The rule would force farmers, contractors and manufacturers to obtain federal permits to put their property to productive use. After recent flooding in California, millions of more acres could come under EPA’s jurisdiction. Green groups could use the rule to block pipelines, housing projects or any development they don’t like. Farmers might be prohibited from using fertilizers that could flow downstream.

Bill Nye, a mechanical engineer and “science guy” television personality, appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Monday evening to discuss climate change. Pushed by Fox host Tucker Carlson on exactly what percentage of climate change is caused by humans, Nye gave a very unscientific answer — 100 percent. He said climate “deniers” suffer “cognitive dissonance,” but maybe it is the “science guy” himself who cannot accept that there is reason to doubt climate change.

When Carlson asked, “to what extent is human activity responsible for speeding up [climate change]?” Nye responded, “One hundred percent. Humans are causing it to happen catastrophically fast.”

The problem with this answer should be obvious from a scientific perspective. During the show, Carlson acknowledged that the climate is changing, and even that human activity might be contributing to it. But as he explained, “the core question from what I can tell is, why the change? Is it part of the endless cycle of climate change or is human activity causing it?”

If human activity has an impact, then to what degree? Carlson asked, “Is 100 percent of climate change caused by human activity? Is it 23.4 percent? It’s settled science, please tell me to what degree human activity is responsible.”

Rather than pointing to a specific number, Nye hemmed and hawed. He argued that “instead of happening on timescales of millions of years, or let’s say 15,000 years, it’s happening on the timescale of decades, and now years.” But the self-described “science guy” dodged the fundamental question — to what degree is human action exacerbating climate change? And how can we be sure?

After the host pressed him, Nye finally gave his “100 percent” answer. In most realms of human endeavor, 100 percent is not a serious answer — especially in science, where the simplest movement in physics can be broken down into various factors including air resistance, normal forces, velocity, et cetera.

When Carlson pressed Nye on what the climate would look like today, without human activity, the “science guy” actually provided a rather interesting answer. “The climate would be like it was in 1750, and economics would be that you could not grow wine-worthy grapes in Britain as you can today.”
The difficulty with this picture is that it is static. Nye assumed that the climate would not have changed since 1750, during the intermittent “Little Ice Age,” when the Earth’s climate took a dip. Nye seemed to be thinking that without the increase in carbon emissions caused by human activity, the Earth would be experiencing another ice age today. He did not address how scientists could know this with any certainty, however.