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...]
Blame Global Warming for Hurricane Harvey?
In the hallowed tradition of Rahm Emanuel's "You never let a serious crisis go to waste," ThinkProgress followed Emanuel's advice when it wrote, "As of 10 a.m. ET on Thursday, Trump had posted seven tweets from his personal @realDonaldTrump account. ... Not a single tweet mentioned the potentially devastating storm or warned Gulf residents to prepare for the incoming wind, rain, and possible flooding." A frequent visitor to Cornwall Alliance's Facebook page who excoriates us at every … [Read more...]
On global warming, the American public gets it!
This is simply amazing. After all the hype by media, politicians, entertainers, alarmist climate scientists, and even a Nobel Peace Prize-winning former Vice President, only 28% of Americans think climate scientists understand the causes of climate change "very well." That's one finding of a Pew Research Study on which Scott Rasmussen reports in his #Number of the Day for August 21, 2017, which begins: Twenty-eight percent (28%) of Americans think that climate scientists understand the … [Read more...]
