“We need to save our environment from environmentalists and EPA – and safeguard our liberties, living standards and lives against the arrogance of too-powerful politicians and bureaucrats. How we will be able to do that is one of the greatest challenges we face today.”
Imagine if instead of ten furlough days for each of the 17,000 employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the department let employees choose which programs to eliminate from EPA’s $8.5 billion annual budget.
Assuming the most agenda-driven, anti-environmental programs were chosen, down the climate-change rathole the cutters would go, leaving the real air and water areas for continued EPA focus.
Good Timing
A strong case can be made to cut climate first. Numerous articles document how European climate policies have been disastrous for affordable energy, economic growth, entire industries, people’s jobs and welfare, wildlife habitats and human lives. Even the IPCC, BBC and Economist have finally recognized that average global temperatures have not budged since 1997.
The EU economy is teetering at the precipice, people are outraged at the duplicity and the price they have been made to pay, the Euro Parliament has voted to end subsidies for its Emissions Trading Scheme, and the global warming and renewable energy false façade is slowly crumbling.
Ignoring all of this, five-alarm scientists, eco activists and government bureaucrats are meeting yet again – first in Bonn, Germany June 3-14 for the 38th (!) meeting of UN climate treaty promoters and wordsmiths, then in Warsaw, Poland November 11-22 for 19th (!) Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. They are determined to hammer out a new treaty, demanding more restrictions on fossil fuel use, before the tide turns even more inexorably against them.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing more anti-hydrocarbon regulations and more statements decrying the horrors that will befall us if we don’t immediately slash carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
Real Science vs. Alarmism
Two points must be kept uppermost: the global warming “disasters” exist only in computer models, Hollywood movies and alarmist assertions; and the “preventative measures” are worse than the disasters.
The issue is not whether greenhouse gases “contribute to” climate change. Virtually all scientists acknowledge that. The only relevant issues are: how much; whether these gases now dominate planetary climate variation, supplanting the solar, atmospheric, oceanic and other forces that have warmed and cooled our Earth throughout its history; and whether human GHG/CO2 emissions will cause dangerous climate changes that are unprecedented or worse than those mankind has confronted since time immemorial.
The evidence does not support EPA or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change positions on these issues.
Average planetary temperatures have not budged in 16 years, even as atmospheric levels of plant-fertilizing CO2 have climbed steadily. For many areas, the past winter was among the coldest in decades, and both the US and UK just recorded one their coldest springs on record. The frequency and severity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts are no different from observed trends and cycles over the last century.
In fact, 2012 set records for the lowest number of strong tornadoes since 1954 and the number of years with no category 3 or higher hurricane making landfall in the USA. Arctic climate and sea ice are within a few percentage points of their “normal” levels for the past fifty years.
EPA: Time for Climate Re-think
These facts, and many more, completely contradict computer model predictions and alarmist claims. Moreover, as Climategate and numerous studies have shown, the “science” behind EPA’s ruling that carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare would be comical if it weren’t so conjectural, manufactured, manipulated and even fraudulent. Here are just a few examples out of hundreds.
The EPA and IPCC insist they rely entirely on scholarly peer-reviewed source material. However, fully 30% of the papers and other references cited in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) were not peer reviewed; many IPCC “lead authors” were graduate students or environmental activists; and many sources were actually master’s degree theses or even anecdotal statementsby hikers and mountain guides.
The IPCC claimed Himalayan glaciers would “disappear by the year 2035,” depriving communities in the region of water. This assertion was based on a World Wildlife Fund press release, which was based on a non-peer-reviewed article in a popular science magazine – which was based on an email from a single glaciologist, who later admitted his prediction was pure “speculation.”
The IPCC lead author in charge of this section subsequently said he had included the Himalayan glacier meltdown in AR4 – despite his knowing of its false pedigree – because he thought highlighting it would “encourage” policy makers and politicians “to take concrete action” on global warming.
Almost 90% of the National Weather Service’s climate-monitoring stations relied on by the IPCC and EPA to prove “unprecedented” warming failed station placement standards, by being too close to air conditioning exhaust vents, blacktop and other heat sources. The heat contamination caused the stations to report higher than actual temperatures.
Claims that 97% of scientists or peer-reviewed climate science papers “agree that humans are causing global warming” are just as false or manufactured. The oft-cited consensus just doesn’t exist.
Even worse, EPA is using these bogus claims to justify actions that will be as devastating for Americans as they have been for Europeans. EPA is supposed to protect our environment, health and welfare. Instead, it “safeguards” us from exaggerated or illusory risks, and issues regulations that endanger our health, wellbeing and wildlife far more than any reasonably foreseeable effects from climate change. Its anti-fossil fuel mandates will put EPA in control of nearly everything Americans make, ship, eat and do.
Bad Science … Human Suffering
As fuel and regulatory compliance costs increase, companies will be forced to outsource work to other countries, reduce work forces, shift people to part-time status, or close their doors. Poor and minority families especially will be unable to heat and cool their homes properly, pay the rent or mortgage, buy clothing and medicine, take vacations, pay their bills, give to charity, save for college and retirement, or eat nutritious meals.
Reduced nutrition and medical checkups, along with the stress of being unemployed or involuntarily holding two or more low-paying part-time jobs, also lead to greater risk of strokes and heart attacks, and higher incidences of depression, alcohol, spousal and child abuse, and suicide.
EPA has also used specious climate change, resource depletion and air quality claims to justify 54.5 mpg fuel efficiency standards for vehicles. This will force more people into smaller, lighter, less safe cars – causing thousands of needless additional serious injuries and deaths every year.
Energy Consequences
The obsession with “dangerous manmade global warming” also has dire environmental consequences. Regulators and environmentalists have given heavily subsidized wind turbine operators a free pass, allowing them to slaughter millions of birds and bats every year – including bald and golden eagles, hawks, condors and whooping cranes.
Rainforests and other wildlife habitats are being cut down, so that “innovators” can produce $50-per-gallon biofuels, to replace oil and natural gas that the world still has in abundance and could easily produce with conventional, enhanced and fracking technologies.
US forests are also being chopped down – to fuel electricity generation in Europe, where regulations prohibit both fossil fuels and tree cutting, but promote subsidized “renewable” energy. So American trees and wetland/forest habitats are being turned into wood pellets for shipment to Britain and other EU countries: 1.9 million tons of pellets in 2012, to burn in power plants that consumed over 7 million tons of wood last year and expect to double that by 2020. Insane maybe – but sustainable or ecological?
EPA and the groups it funds and allies with gladly trumpet the benefits that GHG/CO2 regulations will supposedly bring, by preventing illusory and exaggerated climate change disasters. However, they studiously ignore the enormous adverse impacts that GHG rules will have on people’s health, wellbeing, life spans, environmental justice and environment. This is understandable but can no longer be tolerated.
Would the IPCC, Global Change Research Program or EPA “ever produce a report saying their issue is of diminishing importance – so much so that EPA regulations of greenhouse gases are not needed?” climatologist Patrick Michaels wonders. Or that another UN treaty, or more restrictions on fossil fuel use, economic growth and poverty eradication, could be postponed for a decade or more? “Not unless they are tired of first class travel and the praise of their universities, which are hopelessly addicted to the 50 percent ‘overhead’ they charge on science grants” from federal agencies (ie, from taxpayers).
IRS … EPA
Like the Internal Revenue Service, EPA finds, targets and severely punishes anyone who violates any of its ten thousand commandments, even inadvertently. EPA’s climate change actions, however, are not inadvertent. They are deliberate, and their effects are far reaching and destructive.
And yet, these increasingly powerful bureaucrats – who seek and acquire ever more power and control over our lives – remain faceless, nameless, unelected and unaccountable. They operate largely behind closed doors, cutting deals and arranging sweetheart “sue and settle” legal actions with radical environmentalist groups, to advance ideological agendas.
They give hardly a moment’s thought to the impacts that their regulations and other actions are having on our lives, jobs, health, welfare and environment. They know that, for them, there is no transparency, accountability or consequences – only the remotest possibility of meaningful (or even any) repercussions or liability, even for gross stupidity, major screw-ups or flagrant abuses.
We need to save our environment from environmentalists and EPA – and safeguard our liberties, living standards and lives against the arrogance of too-powerful politicians and bureaucrats.
How we will be able to do that is one of the greatest challenges we face today.
1) Civil disobedience, en masse.
2) Stop agreeing that “greenhouse gases contribute to climate change”. They do not. At best, water vapor plays a major role in WEATHER CHANGE, that’s all. Even the skeptics (including you) are confusing themselves by not realizing they are all talking about weather, not climate–in particular, global climate, which just means global mean surface temperature. The globe, with its mean surface temperature, is an unchanging stage upon which weather and regional climates play their recurrent roles.