RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

The measure of Trump’s picks for his cabinet, including Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, is the reaction of the left. Oh, sure, a main objection is to his business dealings with Russia, as if energy producing companies should have nothing to do with energy producing countries. But many on the left oppose him as a fossil fuel advocate who thinks climate change is an overhyped scam designed to deny us growth and job opportunities through the use of our abundant fossil fuel reserves.

As Andrew Freedman comments on Yahoo News:

If it weren’t real, it might read like a dark climate change comedy. …

Environmental groups were quick to criticize Tillerson. After all, the State Department is tasked with leading America’s diplomacy on climate change.

“This is unfathomable. We can’t let Trump put the world’s largest oil company in charge of our international climate policy,” said Mary Boeve, the executive director of 350.org.

“ExxonMobil is still a leading funder of climate denial and is pursuing a business plan that will destroy our future. Tillerson deserves a federal investigation, not federal office,” she said.

Speaking to reporters after the annual meeting of Exxon stockholders in May, 2008, Tillerson shoved political correctness aside and insisted the science on climate change is not settled and “to not have a debate on it is irresponsible” and that to “suggest we know everything about these issues is irresponsible.” As the Financial Post reported:

Avoiding the political correctness that many oil executives are now showing on global warming, Mr. Tillerson called for a continuation of the debate, rather than acceptance that it is occurring, with the potential consequence that governments will implement policies that put world economies at risk.

“My view is that this is so extraordinarily important to people the world over, that to not have a debate on it is irresponsible,” he said. “To suggest that we know everything we need to know about these issues is irresponsible….

Looking out 25 to 30 years, “everyone agrees that notwithstanding the growth in all other options for supplying energy, renewables, nuclear, biomass alternatives, you are still going to require substantial fossil fuels to meet energy needs, and two-thirds is going to come from oil and natural gas,” he said.

Climate-change skeptic Tillerson spoke of Exxon spending $8 billion of its profits on the Kearl oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. This project alone is aimed at recovering between 4.5 and 6.5 billion barrels of oil. Finding such oil takes money and expensive technology. That money comes from profits.

Kearl is part of the Athabasca oil sands located in the northeastern corner of Alberta, near the city of Fort McMurray. The Alberta government’s Energy and Utilities Board estimated in 2007 that about 173 billion barrels of crude were economically recoverable based on current technology and 2006 prices. But oil prices keep rising and technology keeps advancing. These oil sand deposits cover about 54,000 square mile and contain about 1.7 trillion barrels. Tillerson knows we will always need fossil fuels, as much as we can get, to promote the economic growth America needs. Trump knows it too.

It is the Albert oil sands that produce the oil that would flow through the Keystone XL pipeline that President Donald Trump is expected to approve. Environmentalists opposed Keystone XL because it encouraged oil sands extraction of crude, releasing so-called greenhouse gases in the process. Never mind that the oil would be extracted anyway, only to be shipped to an energy-hungry China via a pipeline to Canada’s west coast.

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, who has represented Montana’s at-large congressional seat for one term, to serve as secretary of the Department of the Interior, according to an individual with firsthand knowledge of the decision.

Zinke, who studied geology as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon and served as a Navy SEAL from 1986 to 2008 before entering politics, campaigned for his House seat on a platform of achieving North American energy independence. He sits on the House Natural Resources Committee as well as the Armed Services Committee.

A lifelong hunter and fisherman, the 55-year-old Zinke has defended public access to federal lands even though he frequently votes against environmentalists on issues ranging from coal extraction to oil and gas drilling. This summer, he quit his post as a member of the GOP platform-writing committee after the group included language that would have transferred federal land ownership to the states.

“What I saw was a platform that was more divisive than uniting,” Zinke said at the time. “At this point, I think it’s better to show leadership.”

Trump also opposes such land transfers, but the provision made it into the official Republican platform.

Zinke recently criticized an Interior Department rule aimed at curbing inadvertent releases of methane from oil and gas operations on federal land as “duplicative and unnecessary.”

“You wouldn’t know he’s a congressman,” Tawney said. “He really prides himself on being a Theodore Roosevelt Republican, and he lives that a little bit more than other people.”

[Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump]

Outdoors activities such as mountain biking and skiing are a major economic driver in Whitefish as well as in Montana overall, where roughly 200,000 residents have big-game hunting licenses and 300,000 have fishing licenses. Zinke, who has been endorsed by the Outdoor Industry Association, has embraced that sector of the state’s economy.

NEWS FLASH: Climate will continue to change under President Trump and EPA administrator-nominee Scott Pruitt, just as it did under President Obama, and has done during every previous President’s time in office. In fact, climate will change exactly as it has been doing since the earth was formed. Temperatures will rise and fall. Storms will increase and/or decrease in frequency and intensity. The future of weather is not dissimilar to J. P. Morgan’s response when asked to predict the stock market: “It will fluctuate.”

Climate change is real and there is no question that man has contributed to it. However, Democrats get into a twit on this issue – witness their reaction to Mr. Pruitt. In their condemnation of Mr. Pruitt, does the Left consider that the EPA has usurped powers that belong to Congress and the states. Do they think of what heats and cools their offices and homes? What allows cars to travel long distances? What life would be like without cheap and abundant electricity? Fossil fuels continue to get cleaner and the equipment that is powered by them gets more efficient. Sanctimonious Democrats belittle those who do not drink their Kool-Aid. They use climate to trivialize opponents. Skeptics simply ask: How much of climate change is due to man and how much to nature? The answer: no one knows. We do know that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to greenhouse gasses that affect weather. But we also know that other factors affect temperatures and weather: the tilt of the earth on its axis, solar output, the orbit of the earth around the sun, volcanic activity. Assigning blame makes less sense than finding means of adaption.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Roger Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, wrote of how he was abused when he raised questions about conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in an area of his expertise. He was attacked, not just by other academics, but by media, politicians and activists. There is a “group think” mentality on the part of “climate change” advocates that is frightening, as it slanders those who dare question their assumed collective wisdom. There is much we don’t know about a host of subjects, including climate. As they should, the curious seek answers. In a statement that said more about him than his opponents, President Obama, in a post-election interview with Jann Werner of Rolling Stone, said: “The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions.” Is it surprising for a society of 320 million people to have myriad opinions? Would President Obama prefer we hew to a single line of thought? Civil societies are supposed to debate differences, not have leaders who demand obeisance and disparage opponents.

After eight years of torment at the hands of President Obama and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the electoral shoe is now on the other foot, with Republican President-Elect Donald Trump preparing to take the helm in January.

The real battle to come may be fought on the ground of climate change, the sacred cow of the left. A pair of articles posted at Real Clear Politics on the nomination of Oklahoma attorney general and EPA nemesis Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlight the challenge for Republicans and the distress for Democrats.

The Hill recounts the “Supreme Court’s landmark 2007 climate change ruling” and the Obama EPA’s subsequent 2009 “Endangerment Finding” that carbon dioxide “threatens both public health and welfare.”

The result of the Endangerment Finding was to “pave the way for EPA to finalize the proposed greenhouse gas emission standards for light-duty vehicles,” among other actions.

Since Congress has been unwilling to intervene in the EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act, the task at hand for the incoming EPA administrator, according to The Hill, is to reverse the Endangerment Finding:

As long as the Endangerment Finding stands, any EPA, including one headed by Pruitt, will be in court defending against any subsidiary attempt to halt or reverse any regulation of carbon dioxide[.] … So the Endangerment Finding must be reversed.

The Hill predicts “the scientific cat fight of our time”:

The academy is going to howl, and Washington’s science lobbies … are going to go berserk.

… In nominating Pruitt, the administration is signaling that it is clearly up to such a fight – and not just over climate change.

Personnel is policy, as they say, and despite his meeting with the High Priest of Climatology, Al Gore, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be the new head at EPA, shows Trump is serious about pulling back the curtain to expose climate fraud, leaving climate zealots as unsettled as the alleged “science” they trumpet.

Pruitt has already fought the various unconstitutional power grabs that essentially established it as the fourth and unelected branch of government. As Tom Borelli notes in Conservative Review:

Pruitt’s concerns of EPA overreach also includes the agency’s controversial, “Waters of the U.S.” rule that significantly expanded the federal government’s regulatory reach to include ditches on private land. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to address the regulation that he called one of the “most intrusive rules” and Pruitt could execute the new president’s goal to neuter its impact.

Every puddle in America, every creek running through a farm or ranch would become subject to regulation by the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. Pruitt has set dead aim on this and other EPA abuses.

In an article in National Review, coauthored with fellow attorney general of Alabama, Luther Strange, Pruitt opined that climate science isn’t settled and should be subject to a vigorous debate. He argued that EPA dictates are no different than the tyranny America rebelled against in its founding, and that EPA has no justification to bypass the will of the people as expressed through its elected representatives:

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…..

Donald Trump had barely finished announcing his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency before the left started listing its million reasons why Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was the worst nomination in the history of the planet: He’s an untrained anti-environmentalist. He’s a polluter. He’s a fossil-fuel fanatic, a lobbyist-lover, a climate crazy.

Mr. Pruitt is not any of those things. Here’s what he in fact is, and the real reason the left is frustrated: He’s a constitutional scholar, a federalist (and a lawyer). And for those reasons he is a sublime choice to knock down the biggest conceit of the Obama era—arrogant, overweening (and illegal) Washington rule.

We’ve lived so many years under the Obama reign that many Americans forget we are a federal republic, composed of 50 states. There isn’t a major statute on the books that doesn’t recognize this reality and acknowledge that the states are partners with—and often superior to—the federal government. That is absolutely the case with major environmental statues, from the Clean Air Act to the Clean Water Act to the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Congress specifically understood in crafting each of these laws that one-size-fits all solutions were detrimental to the environment. Federal bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency traditionally and properly existed to set minimum standards, provide technical support, and engage in occasional enforcement. States, with their unique knowledge of local problems, economies and concerns, were free to innovate their own solutions. CONTINUE AT SITE