Even before the ink was dry on former President Barack Obama’s signature mandating the creation of Clean Power Plan (CPP) regulations, state governments and industry were rushing up the courthouse steps to challenge the plan and block its implementation. Despite the fact CPP is just two years old, it has already traveled a long and winding road to its final oblivion (one hopes)! CPP required states to reduce their electric power sector carbon-dioxide emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels … [Read more...]
Forget Climate Change, Defend America!
George Orwell, call your office. In what Huffington Post's Alexander Kaufman called "an Orwellian rhetorical shift away from a scientific reality," the Department of Defense "scrubbed its latest National Defense Strategy of all references to climate change." In all likelihood, Orwell would call the 30-year campaign for climate alarmism---with all its oxymoronic appeals to "scientific consensus," its sleight-of-hand temperature data homogenizations, its revisions of past data to exaggerate … [Read more...]
Larry Bell takes NY Times reporter to the woodshed for taking President Trump to the woodshed
Kendra Pierre-Louis will rue the day when she took it on herself to teach President Donald Trump the difference between climate and weather. So will the New York Times, the newspaper in which she did it. Why? Because she was right. And that meant she and the Times were wrong. Larry Bell took her to the woodshed in the first few paragraphs of his latest column: President Trump’s December 28 tweet connecting an upcoming "Coldest New Year’s Eve on record" with not paying "trillions … [Read more...]
Is Climate Change a National Security Threat? The Answer Is Blowin’ in the (Political) Wind
Let me see if I understand this. For the under President Obama, climate alarmists kept telling us that since the Administration officially said climate change was a threat to national security, we had to believe it, because ... government says so, that's why. Now the Trump Administration has released its new National Security Strategy, and it has officially removed climate change from the list of national security threats. Does that mean we don't have to take climate change seriously … [Read more...]
Time to Replace the Antiquities Act?
Yesterday President Donald Trump announced 2 million acres of reductions in the size of two tracts of land---Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante, set aside by President Obama as national monuments under the 111-year-old Antiquities Act. Predictably, Green lobbyists are up in arms. Ordinary citizens---not so much. Conservatives are celebrating, particularly because Trump's action is a move back toward federalism. As Shawn Regan writes in National Review, the act "allows … [Read more...]
Heritage Foundation: Policymakers have a moral obligation to end the war on fossil fuels.
Kevin Dayaratna, A senior statistician and research programmer in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, wrote an article this week in the Washington Times on the economic boosts of allowing hydraulic fracturing on government lands. He also clearly laid out the negative economic impacts of rising energy prices when climate alarmist policies are put into effect. From making our morning coffee to riding the D.C. Metro, and whether for powering the computer screen or printing the … [Read more...]
Bonn: Funeral for the Paris Agreement
Media are abuzz with the climate conference at Bonn. The conference seeks to strengthen the commitments made by signatories of the Paris Agreement. The UNFCCC, the wing of the United Nations responsible for ‘tackling’ climate change, has been advocating for immediate actions to mitigate what it calls Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). The storyline at climate change conferences remains the same—a continuous clarion call to decrease carbon dioxide emissions, the greenhouse … [Read more...]
Ending ‘Sue-and -Settle’ Extortion
Last week, federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive aimed at reducing “sue-and-settle” lawsuits. For those who like voters to have input in the creation of environmental regulation, this is a great move. For decades, environmental advocacy groups have exerted outsized influence—and profited financially—from “friendly” lawsuits against the EPA. These lawsuits have been a conduit for activists inside and outside the EPA to get new regulations in … [Read more...]
Two Cheers for Trump Infrastructure Permitting Order
One of the biggest barriers to investment in infrastructure all across the United States is the long, costly, and unpredictable permitting process. If you have any doubts, just consider the Keystone XL pipeline extension. Proposed by TransCanada in 2008, approved by the Canadian government and the state of South Dakota in 2010, it floundered around in the Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, and State Department for another five years before President Barack Obama rejected it … [Read more...]
Trump and the end of Obama’s bitter ‘war on coal’
Cornwall Alliance advisory board member Dr. H. Sterling Burnett, who is also a research fellow on energy and environment at the Heartland Institute, published a great piece at The Hill a couple of days ago. Here are some excerpts: Before he was elected president, Barack Obama promised to bankrupt coal companies, and after eight years of his administration’s anti-energy policies, that pledge turned out to be one of the few promises he kept. Obama imposed regulations limiting coal mining near … [Read more...]
