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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Tony Thomas: Warmism’s Martial Plan

Obama declines to bomb an ISIS convoy because burning trucks will boost CO2 emissions … Australia’s defence wallahs fret about rising seas and drowning air bases … alarmist ratbaggery distorts strategy and budgets. Military effectiveness has a new enemy: the climate-scam crowd.
The US military is in flux as President-elect Trump prepares to rid it of Obama’s global-warming overlays. This switch is underway just as the Australian military is starting to adopt Obama-style environmentalism, after a decade’s passive resistance to climate politics.

The ADF has already capitulated to feminists and inclusiveness mavens, with top brass applauding then-Human Rights Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick for her 2014 report castigating the force’s “masculine norms” and “warrior culture”. The ADF was also told by Assistant Defence Minister Stuart Robert in the Abbott government in March, 2015, to recruit an imam for the benefit of the force’s 100 Muslim recruits. The coming capitulation is to the hyped climate “science” of the ANU Climate Institute and Tim Flannery’s crusading Climate Council.

This essay looks at the status quo with environmentalism in the US military, and the recent flow-ons to Australia.

What happens when the military gets climate-minded played out in Syria a year ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin was annoyed at Turkey shooting down a Russian SU-24 bomber. So he blew the whistle on America’s reluctance to attack Syrian ISIS road tankers carting oil into Turkey. Those black-market oil sales generate the main funding for ISIS.[1]

Showing Russian reconnaissance footage, Putin spoke of “vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon…a living oil pipe day and night.” US reporters wondered why the Obama administration hadn’t ordered US planes to blow up the “living oil pipe”. The public explanation from former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell was that Obama did not want “to create environmental damage” or wreck infrastructure that Syrians would need in peace-time.

In an Obama version of shock and awe, A-10s Warthog ground-attack planes and Spectre gunships did start attacking the tankers, but only after leaflet drops to give the ISIS tanker drivers a considerate 45 minutes to “get out of your trucks now and run away from them.”

Concern about CO2 emissions from exploding ISIS oil tankers is just one facet of Obama’s generalship. Since 2009 he has been issuing progressively-tougher Executive Orders to government agencies, including Defence, demanding that global warming issues be raised to top-priority status. Obama has several times publicly declared climate change to be an equal or greater threat than terrorism, and the Obama/Kerry team recently moved climate change talks from the Oval Office to the “Situation Room,” for military/security discussion of active threats to the US.

Dakota Wood, a retired Marine Corps officer and U.S. Central Command planner, says the Pentagon is introducing climate change, right down to military tactics, techniques and procedures level.

China’s military doctrine is less convoluted: “China’s armed forces uphold combat effectiveness as the sole and fundamental standard and work to build themselves into a people’s military that can fight and win.” Putin, like his Chinese counterparts, has not afflicted the Russian military with climate provisos.

Another serious “threat to national security” posited by Obama is from politicians who deny that various extreme weather events are demonstrations of climate change. Whatever dissent existed among the top US brass about the Obama campaign went mainly unspoken, while more ambitious officers competed publicly to burnish their climate credentials. But in mid-2015, General Martin Dempsey, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made his disgust clear by issuing a 14-page policy statement on military doctrine that contains not one mention of climate change.

Trump’s eagerness to drain Obama’s military swamp is evident from his 74 questions to the Department of Energy. He wants to identify all programs tainted by Obama’s junk science, along with the programs’ bureaucratic champions. The specificity of the questions is impressive, and designed to trump any civil-service obfuscation and passive resistance. The Brits take a perverse pride in Yes, Minister bureaucrats who run rings around their politicians. Trump and his realpolitik appointees intend to (and know how to) beat the bureaucrats.

The US Navy’s so-called “Great Green Fleet” reflects Obama’s priorities, and has some direct Australian flow-ons. The background is the Navy target to run 50% on planet-friendly alternative fuels by 2020, along with many conventional energy-saving measures. In practice, if a fuel stock contains as little as 10% biofuel, it can be fudged into the ‘green’ category.

Climateers Can’t Handle the Truth Lee Raymond’s 1997 climate speech in China is looking better than ever. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Congrats are due for the term “climate denialist,” which in 2016 migrated from Paul Krugman’s column to the news pages of the New York Times.

On Dec. 7, the term ascended to a place of ultimate honor when it figured in the headline, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.”

Unfortunately, never to be explained is precisely which climate propositions one must deny in order to qualify as a denialist. In zinging Mr. Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, the Times rests its unspoken case on a quote from an article this year in National Review, in which he and a coauthor wrote: “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

But this statement is plainly true. No climate scientist would dispute it. Through all five “assessment reports” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel prize—the central puzzle has been “climate sensitivity,” aka the “degree and extent” of human impact on climate.

Greenpeace adopts the same National Review article to attack Mr. Pruitt, lying that he and a coauthor “claimed the science of climate change is ‘far from settled.’”

The science is not settled (science never is), but this is not what Mr. Pruitt was referring to. His plain, unmistakable words refer to a “major policy debate” that is “far from settled”—a statement that indisputably applies even among ardent believers in climate doom. Witness the battle between wings of the environmental movement over the role of nuclear power. Witness veteran campaigner James Hansen’s dismissal of the Paris agreement, which other climate campaigners celebrate, as “worthless words.”

These lies about what Mr. Pruitt wrote in a widely available article aren’t the lies of authors carried away by enthusiasm for their cause. They are the lies of people who know their employers and audiences are beyond caring.

Which brings us a two-part article in the New York Review of Books by representatives of the Rockefeller family charity, desperately trying to make the world care about their fantasy that Exxon is somehow a decisive player in the policy debate—Exxon, not voters who oppose higher energy taxes; Exxon, not the governments that control 80% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves and show no tendency to forgo the money available from them.

The Rockefeller family’s charitable attachment to the climate cause is understandable, though. Their money might instead be used to bring clean water to poor villages, immunize kids against disease, or improve education. But such programs can be evaluated and found wanting due to fraud or incompetence, whereas climate change is a cause to which money can safely be devoted to no effect whatsoever without fear of criticism. CONTINUE AT SITE

Homogenization of Temperature Data By the Bureau of Meteorology by Brendan Godwin

I worked for Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM for 2 years from 1973 to 1975. I was trained in weather observation and general meteorology. I spent 1 year observing Australia’s weather and 1 year observing the weather at Australia’s Antarctic station at Mawson.

As part of it’s Antarctic program, Australia drills ice cores at Law Dome near it’s Casey station. On our return journey in 1975 we repatriated a large number of ice cores for scientific analysis. The globe’s weather and climate records are stored in these ice cores for the past 1 million years approximately.

Australia’s Antarctic program went by the name of Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition or ANARE for short. This is now known as Australian Antarctic Division or AAD. Returned expeditions formed a club called the ANARE Club of which I have been a member since 1975. Members have many functions and reunions and they have a reunion dinner every year. At this dinner there has always been guest speakers from Australia’s Antarctic Division. These guest speakers are usually someone of the caliber of the Divisions Chief Scientist or the Operations Manager and the talks are designed to keep members updated on the Antarctic scientific program.

The annual dinner is also a place where members keep in touch with each other and network and this communication continues throughout the year via email.
The International Panel on Climate Change – IPCC

The IPCC was created by and is a joint 50/50 partnership between the World Meteorological Organisation – WMO and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It has extremely narrow terms of reference in that it’s role is to determine that humans are causing global warming. In that regard it is only looking at human induced forcings over the past 150 years, just to make sure it reaches that result. That makes it a political body with a political agenda.
World Meteorological Organisation – WMO

The WMO has structurally changed since 1974. Today it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. When I went through training with the BOM, the WMO had a shared global headquarters between Melbourne, New York, Moscow and London. I don’t know when this structure changed. Australia had a leading role in the WMO and was a dissemination point for weather data.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – BOM

BOM’s headquarters are in Melbourne. Australia has claim to 5.9 million square kilometres, about 42% of Antarctica. That claim is on hold while the Antarctic Treaty is in place. On the Antarctic continent Australia has 3 full time stations, Mawson, Davis and Casey, as well as a 4th, Macquarie Is., in the Southern Ocean. BOM has a full time presence on all these stations. Weather data is collected throughout the day and night at all these stations. At Mawson in 1974, we collected not only our own data but all the weather data from Davis, the Japanese station at Syowa and the Russian station at Molodezhnaya. Mawson sent all this data to the Overseas Telecommunications Commission – OTC in Sydney where it was forwarded on to BOM in Melbourne. A second Russian station, Mirny, was collected by Casey and forwarded on the BOM Melbourne via OTC.

BOM used this data, in conjunction with all the observational data obtained from all the weather stations and observational points throughout Australia, as part of Australia’s weather maps and forecasting. Additionally, Melbourne was the WMO distribution point for all weather data in our region. BOM Melbourne collected and collated all this data and forwarded it on to the WMO.
Temperature Data and IPCC’s Climate Change

In 2013 I attended an ANARE Midwinter Dinner – MWD. Australian Antarctic Division – AAD’s Acting Chief Scientist Dr Martin Riddle was our guest speaker at this function. I met with him over canapes before the dinner and spoke with him for about 20 minutes. I tried to get a sneak preview what his talk was going to be about. He said he was Australia’s lead scientist on the IPCC and, aside from giving us an update on the scientific program in the Antarctic, he was going to talk about climate and global warming. I asked him, were we not in an interglacial warm period in the 100,000 year Milankovitch Cycle and wasn’t all this current warming natural? His jaw dropped and was aghast. Our discussion ended there and he raced off not looking too happy. I couldn’t help but getting the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the Milankovitch Cycles. It seemed like no one was supposed to know this.

It seems apparent that we all are just supposed to listen to what the IPCC are telling us and don’t ask questions. So what are the IPCC telling us?

The IPCC have produced 102 climate models to predict our future climate. The world’s meteorological organizations use weather models to forecast and predict weather and have been for many years. They have proved to be very accurate over 4 days and reasonably accurate over a week. The IPCC’s climate models are notoriously inaccurate. We’ve had these models now for some 30 years and we now have 30 years of data to compare them against. They are not even close to accurate.

Obama’s ‘Permanent’ Drilling Freeze He claims his latest executive order can’t be repealed—ever.

The White House is attempting to overload the bandwidth of its successor with a surge of new regulation, and the latest is a ban on oil drilling in much of the Arctic and Atlantic. This rule even purports to be “permanent,” unchangeable by any future President for all time. We’ll see about that, but in the meantime spare us the liberal panic about Donald Trump’s supposed authoritarianism.

The last-gasp executive action prohibits federal offshore drilling and mineral leases on some 3.8 million acres from Virginia to Maine and 115 million acres off the coast of Alaska, including some of the world’s great untapped repositories of hydrocarbons. President Obama rolled out the rule in concert with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the greens are cheering that still more fossil-fuel regions will be walled off from exploration.

For years federal regulators have obstructed oil production on already leased lands. Royal Dutch Shell holds the sole drilling permit in Alaska and in 2015 suspended operations in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas despite $7 billion of sunk investment. So in a sense the new rule is merely truth in advertising.

But the press corps is rushing to euphemize Mr. Obama’s “creative” interpretation of a “rarely used” provision of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Ocsla allows that the President “may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the Outer Continental Shelf.” Because the law does not explicitly give the President the power to un-withdraw lands, the White House touts the rule as a forever condition. In other words, this is Mr. Obama’s typically illegal M.O.

Congress passed Ocsla, as the law’s preamble states, in order to make the “vital national resource reserve” that is the continental shelf “available for expeditious and orderly development.” The power to lock is also the power to unlock. Bill Clinton used Ocsla to withdraw 300 million offshore acres from an area that was already a designated marine sanctuary, but George W. Bush reinstated about 50 million.

Time to Get Rid of the EPA? Scott Pruitt May Be Just the Guy to Do It Trump’s nominee for the EPA Administrator could — and should — abolish the agency. By Henry I. Miller

Several commentators have characterized the selection of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to become the next EPA Administrator as a sharp stick in the eye to the agency and its employees. They’re right — and seldom has any herd of federal bureaucrats been more deserving of it. For decades, in administrations Democratic and Republican alike, the EPA has been relentlessly ideological, politicized, corrupt, and incompetent.

When I joined the Food and Drug Administration in 1979, I was essentially apolitical and knew next to nothing about federal regulation. I was a science nerd who had spent the previous 16 years in college, graduate school, medical school, and postdoctoral training. It didn’t take long until I learned about the jungle of government bureaucracies, and one of the harshest lessons concerned the perfidy and incompetence of one of the FDA’s siblings, the EPA.

I found the EPA to be relentlessly anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-industry. The only thing it seemed to be for was the Europeans’ innovation-busting “precautionary principle,” the view that until a product or activity has been definitively proven safe, it should be banned or at least smothered with regulation. In fact, during international discussions and negotiations over the harmonization of biotechnology regulations in which I participated, the EPA often seemed allied with the European Union and committed to working against U.S. interests.

To my astonishment, I found that there were entire groups within the EPA whose function it was to lie to the Office of Management and Budget and to Congress about the rationale for and impacts of their proposed regulations. And over the years, I discovered that there is a kind of underground railway by which the most incompetent, disaffected, and anti-industry employees from other regulatory agencies find their way to the EPA, creating a miasma of dysfunctional governance.

During the two decades since I left government service, I’ve continued to watch the EPA’s shenanigans with a mixture of awe and vexation. Policy by policy and decision by decision, the EPA has decimated the nation’s competitiveness, ability to innovate, and capacity to create wealth. Its policies and decisions have single-handedly killed off entire once-promising sectors of biotechnology, including bioremediation (the use of microorganisms to clean up toxic wastes, including oil spills) and microorganisms that when sprayed on plants could prevent frost damage.

The EPA’s expansive and ever-expanding regulations impose huge costs on American businesses and, ultimately, on consumers. An analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimated that the annual cost of compliance with EPA regulations alone is more than a third of a trillion dollars. Ideology is one thing, but corruption and abuse are quite another. A scheme was exposed some years ago that would have diverted EPA “research” funds to pay outside public-relations consultants. This payola scheme is similar to the agency’s longstanding practice of buying influence by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to certain favored nonprofit organizations — money that, according to the inspector general and Government Accountability Office, is dispersed with no public notice, competition, or accountability. The GAO investigators documented systematic malfeasance by regulators, including: 1) making grants to grantees who were unable to fulfill the terms of the grants; 2) favoring an exclusive clique of grantees without opening the grants to competition; 3) funding “environmental” grants for activities that lack any apparent environmental benefit; and 4) failing to ensure that grantees performed the objectives identified in the grants.

The EPA’s Science Deniers The agency changes its view on fracking and water without evidence.

Speaking of fake news, the political scientists at the EPA have rewritten the conclusion of a report in order to cast doubt on the safety of hydraulic fracturing. Consider this EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s parting gift to Donald Trump.

Last week the EPA issued the final version of a five-year study evaluating the impact of hydraulic fracturing, the oil and gas drilling method known as fracking, on groundwater contamination. The draft report released last year for public comment concluded that fracking has not “led to widespread, systemic impact on drinking water resources in the United States.” The EPA’s findings haven’t changed, but its conclusion has.

After being barraged by plaintiff attorneys and Hollywood celebrities, the EPA in its final report substituted its determination of no “widespread, systemic impact” with the hypothetical that fracking “can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances” and that “impacts can range in frequency and severity” depending on the circumstances.

Any technology has the potential to inflict some damage—self-driving cars can be hacked to go haywire—and the EPA explains that drinking-water contamination could occur if wastewater is incorrectly disposed or wells are poorly sealed. In Pavillion, Wyo., the EPA’s faulty construction of a monitoring well caused contamination.

Yet after reviewing more than 1,000 studies, the EPA couldn’t find more than limited evidence—mostly alleged by plaintiff attorneys—of operational failures causing contamination. That the EPA uncovered only a few instances of contamination among a million some wells reinforces its prior conclusion that fracking doesn’t threaten the drinking-water supply.

The EPA now asserts that “significant data gaps and uncertainties” prevent it from “calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts.” For instance, water-quality data was not collected everywhere prior to the introduction of fracking, which has allowed plaintiff attorneys to ascribe any contamination to oil and gas companies.

Methane can leak into groundwater naturally, and the EPA even notes that “site-specific cases of alleged impacts” are “particularly challenging to understand” because “the subsurface environment is complex.” Scientists have documented methane in the shallow subsurface of Susquehanna County, Pa.—one area of alleged fracking contamination—dating back more than 200 years.

Academia on the Verge of a New Dark Age Leo Goldstein

Editor’s Introduction: It has been widely reported that President-elect Trump is considering cuts to NASA’s Earth division, which is a major source of “climate change” research. Broadly speaking, climate change research has become a cause favored by the political left and dis-favored by the political right.

The following article by Leo Goldstein is a strongly-stated criticism of global warming theory that focuses on the political left’s support for the theory.

One of the strongest and most longstanding political/social prejudices has been that Liberals represent Science and Reason, while Conservatives oppose them. This opinion was probably imported from Europe, where it had some ground in the Enlightenment period. But it has never been the case in America. The fact that overwhelming majority of post-WWII scientists held liberal beliefs is not evidence, because scientists comprised only a tiny minority of Liberal or Conservative supporters.

Over the last thirty years, in fact, Liberalism has been taken over by the hard Left, abandoned science and reason, and become a hotbed of obscurantism and oppression. The myth that Democrats were the party of science but Republicans were anti-science played a significant role in this downfall. One notable phenomenon is the rise of the so-called “postmodern science,” a product of cultural studies.
AL GORE’S WAR ON SCIENCE

Al Gore played a unique role in corrupting and degrading the American scientific enterprise. He belonged to the group of “Atari Democrats” who made an early alliance with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but Gore had neither aptitude not training in science. He was no friend of science. Gore compared science to the Faustian bargain:

“[W]e have chosen to escape the Malthusian dilemma by making a set of dangerous bargains with the future worthy of the theatrical legend that haunted the birth of the scientific revolution: Doctor Faustus. Some of these bargains have already been exposed …” (Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992, pp. 127-128)

In 1993-2000, Vice President Gore removed many distinguished, independent-minded scientists from the leadership of the American scientific community, replacing them with his political allies—especially from the environmentalist movement. For example, he fired Will Happer from the position of the Director of Science in the DOE, after Professor Happer suggested measuring the UV radiation impact of the alleged ozone layer depletion. This and other symptomatic cases are described in Michael Gough’s excellent book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking(2003). Gore’s staff further demanded that distinguished oceanographer Roger Revelle’s name be removed from an article against global warming alarmism that Revelle had co-authored. Gore’s unsuccessful attempts to intimidate Professor Fred Singer and to manipulate Ted Koppel, then an ABC anchor, were well-publicized as well.

But the media and academics believed that science had no enemies on the left, so these misdeeds were largely ignored. The publication of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994) by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, the Sokal affair (in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article of deliberate gibberish phrased in politically correct cant to Social Text, and got it published), and similar expressions of academic dissent were too little and too late. Other processes leading to the corruption of National Academy of Sciences and scientific societies are outside the scope of this article.
“POSTMODERN SCIENCE” AND CLIMATE CHANGE

A scientific theory must match empirical observations. This is the essence of the scientific method, universally accepted for at least four centuries. Francis Bacon formulated it in 1620. A liberal arts education has long included sciences and required observations of nature or lab experiments. More recently, Karl Popper refined our understanding of the scientific method. It is currently accepted that any scientific theory must be testable (“falsifiable”) – the theory must have a non-trivial inference which is observable and can be demonstrated to be wrong (“falsified”) if the theory is incorrect. A theory contradicting natural or experimental observations must be rejected.

But then came “postmodern science,” with its constructivist epistemology, which declared science to be nothing more than what scientists say is true. In the postmodern framework, physical laws are just social conventions. If we were to take these postmodernists (or cultural constructivists) seriously, we would have to believe that gravity comes and goes as scientific opinion changes. This nonsense seems too absurd to do any real harm in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, it has seriously harmed scientific institutions and scientific education, not least because it became a cornerstone of the climate pseudo-science. For example, the climate models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are “validated” by comparing their results to other IPCC models rather than to actual climate change data.

Walter Starck: If Only Sharks Ate ‘Experts’

Walter Starck, a regular Quadrant contributor, has been researching coral reefs for more than 50 years
“Half-baked notions of environmental evangelism being presented as sound science by self-proclaimed “experts” have played a major part in driving a majority of our small primary producers out of their industry. These were the flexible, low-overhead operations which played a key role in providing abundant low cost food and raw materials. The result has been steep price increases in food, housing and energy going from among the most affordable in the world and rising to among the most expensive.

Now we have the highest level of personal debt in the world, half the population signed up as indentured servants to the banks for most of their working lives and much of the remainder in an ongoing battle to pay for rent, food and energy. Regardless, the eco-salvationists are doubling down on demands for still more restrictions.”
No surprise that sharks are attracted to areas where food is plentiful and, likewise, learn to avoid dangerous locales. In this regard they are far smarter than green-thinking alarmists, who denounce netting while remaining pointedly unaware that a rotting shark drives away fellow predators.
The legal protection of sharks and ever-increasing restrictions on commercial fishing have resulted in a significant increase in coastal shark populations around Australia. Combined with a growing population and more people in the water this has also led to a significant increase in attacks over recent years. Government now faces conflicting pressures in demands to save the lives of both people and sharks.

Politicians simply cannot take the time to become well informed on the myriad issues they must deal with so they have to rely heavily on the advice of experts. This works well in matters where there is a firmly founded body of knowledge, but less so in areas where knowledge is sketchy, conflicting and uncertain. Unfortunately we now have certified “experts” for every occasion, including topics about which we are in fact quite ignorant. Such “experts” know only what they have been taught in the degree mills, and what they offer is not so much evidence but more opinion and ideology. In environmental matters this situation is both common and compounded by a vigorous suppression of any questioning where a particular perspective has been deemed ethically correct by an academic community which leans overwhelmingly to the political left.

Although employing shark nets off popular swimming beaches has a well-established record in greatly reducing attacks, academic “experts” now deem this to present an unacceptable risk to “endangered” marine life. If their proclaimed expertise included any practical knowledge of sharks and shark fisheries they would know nets are not only effective but pose little risk to overall shark populations. It simply causes them to avoid the netted area.

In World War II night vision was critically important in many military activities, and good night vision depends on a healthy intake of Vitamin A. This is normally supplied from fresh vegetables but these were impossible to provide in many situations. The synthesis of Vitamin A had not been achieved at that time but shark liver oil was known to be a particularly rich natural source. As part of the war effort shark fisheries were initiated in a number of different areas and the fishermen soon learned that taking the liver and discarding the bodies quickly drove other sharks away from an area. Decaying shark flesh appears to be a strong shark repellent.

When shark netting is employed off beaches there is an initial high catch which quickly declines along with sightings in the general area. The overall catch and area affected is tiny relative to the wider population. Most importantly, to be maximally effective the carcasses of any sharks caught should be left in the area, not disposed of elsewhere.

Like most animals, sharks are attracted to areas where they are fed and likewise soon learn to avoid areas where they are in danger. No marine fish or invertebrate has ever been exterminated by fishing and the effect of introducing a few danger zones for them so that we too can enjoy the sea with minimal risk would be only a small price to pay for them or us.

California Gov. Jerry Brown Seeks Permanent Ban on Oil and Gas Drilling An end-run at Trump. Katy Grimes

California Gov. Jerry Brown wants President Barack Obama to permanently ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in the state – except of course, on Brown’s personal land.

In an attempt to lock in environmental protections before President-Elect Donald Trump takes office in January, Brown sent a letter this week to the president saying that allowing any new oil and gas drilling would be detrimental to climate change goals and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

President Barack Obama last month released a plan to ban any new drilling off the coasts of California, Oregon or Washington until 2022.

A six-year ban on oil and gas drilling wasn’t enough for California Gov. Jerry Brown, who will be gone from the Governor’s office in 2018.

Brown’s latest ploy is another in a long line of maneuvers to set California apart from the rest of the country on climate change policy, and is an end-run at Trump, who has said he plans environmental policy roll backs at the Environmental Protections Agency.

Brown’s demand was announced at the luxurious and historic Hotel del Coronado, near San Diego, where he and other government and nonprofit leaders launched the International Alliance to Combat Ocean Acidification. The alliance, made up of California, Oregon, Washington, France, Chile and numerous environmental groups, plans to fast track environmental regulations to fight against “ocean acidification.”

“The health of the ocean is at great risk,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. “The food security of the planet is at risk. Whether my grand kids can fish for salmon when they grow up is at great risk.”

Brown said he didn’t know if Trump would have the authority to overturn a permanent prohibition. “I’m not waiting for what Washington may or may not do,” Brown said. “I’m doing whatever I can for the resources of California, and any other state or country that will join with us. This is not about politics. It’s about survival within the lifetime of the people of this room.”

Brown’s Go-It-Alone Plan

This isn’t Gov. Jerry Brown’s first scheme to set California apart from the rest of the nation on energy policy.

June 30, 2008, the governors of Alaska, British Columbia, California, Oregon, and Washington signed the Pacific Coast Collaborative Agreement, amounting to a ‘compact,’ which is prohibited between states without Congressional approval.

The Conservative Case for Nuclear Energy It’s reliable, safe, and, unlike solar and wind, doesn’t eat up huge swathes of land. By Robert Bryce

As the Trump transition team prepares to take power in Washington, they should be making the conservative case for nuclear energy.

During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump declared: “Nuclear power is a valuable source of energy and should be part of an all-the-above program for providing power for America long into the future. We can make nuclear power safer, and its outputs are extraordinary given the investment we should make.”

Being pro-nuclear doesn’t require adhering to any particular orthodoxy on climate change or greenhouse gases. Conservatives should support America’s nuclear-energy sector for three reasons: generation diversity, technological leadership, and land sparing.

Before going further, let’s be clear: The U.S. nuclear sector is in crisis. Over the past three years, utilities from Vermont to California have shuttered six reactors, and another five are slated to close. The most recent announced closure, of the 800-megawatt Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, came just days after Illinois legislators passed a bill that will provide subsidies to keep three reactors in that state in operation. While it’s unclear how many reactors may ultimately be prematurely shuttered, the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas has estimated that up to 40 percent of all U.S. nuclear capacity could be closed over the next decade or so.

Many factors are to blame for the nuclear sector’s woes, including low natural-gas prices, aging reactors, post-Fukushima regulations, and heavily subsidized wind and solar. The result is that many reactors can’t make money selling their electricity into wholesale markets, where prices are at, or near, 15-year lows.

What is to be done? President-elect Trump and Congress should move to preserve existing reactors and pave the way for the next generation of safer, cheaper reactors. To be sure, keeping existing reactors will require some of them to get financial help. But those subsidies will help the U.S. maintain a diverse set of generation assets. The polar vortex in early 2014, when extreme cold led to a surge in electricity demand, proved the importance of that diversity. During that time, numerous coal- and natural gas-fired plants faltered, but America’s reactor fleet operated at 95 percent of its capacity. Without those plants, large parts of the country could have been hit by blackouts.