Killing Energy, Killing Jobs, Killing America ... Alan Caruba

Killing Energy, Killing Jobs, Killing America

By Alan Caruba

America has been under attack since Barack Obama took the oath of office on January 20, 2009. The primary target has been the nation’s ability to generate energy for electricity and transportation, without which this nation will slide into Third World status and economic decline.

This appears to be the goal of this administration from the President to his Secretaries of Energy and Interior, to his Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. There is no other rational explanation for what they are doing.

We are days away from the latest Environmental Protection Agency assault in the form of the “MACT” rule allegedly to reduce mercury and other emissions that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says will reduce electricity generation in America by about 81 gigawatts in the years ahead. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said “this could compromise the reliability of the electric system if as much as 8% of generating capacity is subtracted from the grid.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that eleven Governors have written the EPA to ask that it delay the final rule in November. Twenty-five state Attorneys Generals have filed suit “to lift a legal document known as a consent decree that the EPA is using as a fig leaf for its political goals.”

As but one example, in Illinois, Ameron announced the planned shutdown of its Meredosia and Hutsonville energy centers, The Meredosia center generates 369 megawatts. The Hutsonville center has a generating capacity of 151 megawatts.

The EPA, even before the Obama administration, has been using the 1970 Clean Air Act to bludgeon the nation’s ability to access the energy resources required to generate electricity, primarily coal that provides 50% of such generation, and oil that fuels our transportation capability.

In late October, James J. Mulva, the CEO of Conoco-Phillips, addressed the subject of the growing discoveries of natural gas being found throughout the nation. “More than 600,000 Americans already explore, produce, store and produce natural gas, according to consultancy IHS Global Insight.”

At least 15 states now produce shale gas and others may join them,” noting that the largest shale area, the Marcellus which covers much of the Northeast” “already supports 140,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone.”

The Obama administration, beginning with the president’s admitted goal of shutting down as much of the coal industry as possible, has demonstrated his intention of deterring the provision of energy. When the BP Oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the administration imposed a moratorium on all drilling. The decreased production cost 360,000 barrels a day in addition to lost jobs related to oil drilling in the Gulf. Rigs that are needed to drill have since been moved to other sites around the world.

The U.S. is home to more than 150 billion barrels of conventional oil that has the capability of generating thousands of new jobs if access to it was permitted. The most immediate result has been the rise in the cost of gasoline at the pump. Two courts ordered that the moratorium be lifted.

Oil companies currently pay more than $30 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes. Meanwhile the Obama administration has been wasting billions in loan guarantees to essentially useless solar and wind power companies, the latest of which, Solyandra, will cost taxpayers millions when the solar panel producer went belly-up. Others will follow.

Meanwhile, the President crisscrosses the nations demanding higher taxes on companies engaged in coal, oil and natural gas. When Jimmy Carter imposed a windfall tax on oil companies many ceased to explore for new sources here, moving their efforts to other nations. Today, by withholding the necessary permits to produce energy in Alaska, the Trans Alaska Pipeline System is operating at one third of its capacity.

A proposed pipeline from Canada still awaits approval and, on November 6th, led by the Sierra Club, the largest protest against its tar sands is expected to draw thousands to Washington, D.C. to join hands and circle the White House to ensure the Keystone XL pipeline is kept from providing the U.S. with the oil extracted. The proposed pipeline would reduce the U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. The U.S. already has more than 50,000 safely operating oil pipelines to support our transportation and other needs.

In January 2010, Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, warned that the Obama administration “continues to embrace Washington-dominated, command-and-control energy policies focused on mandates, subsidies, and political favors—not market forces.” He criticized “subsidizing one form of energy,” wind and solar, “while restricting the exploration of another,” warning that it “will lead to several measurable outcomes, increasing energy prices across the board, fewer jobs, and a weaker footing in the global economy..”

Nearly two years later, that warning has come true with a vengeance.

Oil, coal, or natural gas, it doesn’t matter to an administration and a president determined to restrict the amount of energy Americans need for their present and future needs. The result, in part, has been a stalled energy sector and a contributing factor in an economy with an estimated 20 million unemployed or under-employed.

The losses in income taxes and the taxes paid by this industry sector, in addition to the hideous borrowing and spending by the Obama administration is doing enormous harm to America and yet Barack Obama wants a second term in office.

Little wonder that Americans fear for the future of the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit. 

The EPA Gets Caught in a Big Fat Lie ... Alan Caruba

The EPA Gets Caught in a Big Fat Lie

By Alan Caruba

The notion that the Environmental Protection Agency uses “science” to justify their regulations is false, just like most of the claims they issue on various aspects of the nation’s environment. Their favorite scam is to estimate the number of deaths they will prevent with some new draconian regulation.

The EPA is the American equivalent of the Gestapo, a ruthless enforcement agency with a very Green agenda that is opposed to the use of many beneficial chemicals, every form of energy, and the right of people to be left alone.

At the top of its list of priorities is the destruction of the nation’s economy with special attention to all forms of energy production. Manufacturing anything comes next, followed by afflicting the nation’s vast agricultural sector. The EPA insists that dust is a pollutant. You can’t farm without generating DUST.

To understand the threat the EPA poses it is necessary to understand that proposed Clean Air regulations are based on the claim that “global warming” is real, is happening, and is caused primarily by carbon dioxide (CO2). The claim is utterly without any scientific merit..

There is NO global warming. At least not the kind Al Gore lies about.

The North and South Poles are not melting; they gain and lose ice in a perfectly natural cycle that has been going on for billions of years. The polar bears are not disappearing. Drilling for oil in ANWR will have zero effect on the caribou. Et cetera!

With our vast reserves of coal and natural gas, the U.S. does not lack for the ability to generate electricity or to refine oil for transportation.

If you want to stay warm this winter, you better hope that utilities keep producing the electricity for your home or apartment’s heating system. Fifty percent of that electricity is produced by cheap, abundant coal and the EPA is hell bent to shut down as many coal mines as possible, leading in turn to the shutdown of utilities that burn coal. Natural gas accounts for just over twenty-four percent of electricity generation and it need hardly be said that the EPA is wary of fracking, the technology to access it.

Blowing the Whistle on the EPA

The big news—the kind even the mainstream media was unable to ignore—was that the EPA’s own inspector general has released a report accusing the agency of cutting corners regarding the “science” cited to justify its effort to declare CO2 a “pollutant.”

Simply stated, without CO2 all life on Earth dies.

It is a gas that plants use for their growth. From a blade of grass to a giant redwood, all depend on CO2, as do all the crops grown coast to coast. Enormous quantities of corn and wheat are grown that contribute to the U.S. economy, feeding both livestock and humans in wondrous ways. Take away vegetation and the animals die. Take away the animals that grace our dinner plates and we die.

Absurdly, the EPA says it is a “pollutant”, a dangerous hazard to our health.

No, the most dangerous hazard to our health is the EPA.

The EPA insists on ignoring all the other natural sources of CO2 as well as the fact that it constitutes less than one percent, 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. The oceans of the world gather it, store it, and release it. The EPA, though, says that when man is involved, it is pure evil.

Mind you, every human exhales about six pounds of CO2 every day. The fact is that the air Americans inhale daily is clean is due to the agency’s early efforts to mitigate some abuses. Those were the days before the EPA abandoned a rational, fact-based approach to its stated objectives. One of its legacies is the idiotic required inclusion of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Made from corn, it actually produces more CO2 to produce and use.

The EPA effort to regulate CO2 came along with the invention of the global warming hoax that claimed CO2 was “trapping” the Earth’s heat. That is why CO2 and others are deceptively called “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). Manufacturing everything from a donut to megawatts of electricity emits GHGs.

Finally, even the EPA’s inspector general blew the whistle on the utterly deceitful way the EPA arrives at its justification for a vast matrix of regulations that has been stifling the economy for years. The IG has charged that the EPA did not meet its own guidelines for peer review to ensure the integrity of the science stated.

Anyone who has been following the rise and fall of the global warming hoax knows that “peer review” has become a highly corrupted practice. Real peer review is critical to the integrity of any scientific study. When major science journals abandoned the peer review process to publish gibberish about global warming, they put all other new scientific studies at risk.

As Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted, the EPA’s regulation of CO2 emissions would require “230,000 full-time employees to produce 1.4 billion work hours to address the actual increase in permitting functions” that would result if the EPA is allowed to get away with this scandalous hoax. It would cost an estimated $21 billion per year. By contrast, the EPA’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 is $8.973 billion.

The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act gives it the power to regulate CO2, but it does not. It was never intended to, but the Supreme Court in one of its more idiotic rulings opened the door for the EPA claim. In his dissent from Massachusetts v EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia quipped that, as defined by the Court, “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an ‘air pollutant’”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) pointed out that “The EPA’s determination has led to a mountain of Clean Air Act regulations that could cost over a million jobs.” It is noteworthy that Sen. Barrasso said, “EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has regularly assured Congress and the American public that its finding is based on sound scientific practices.” It isn’t. Jackson “should testify immediately,” said Sen. Barrasso, “the American people deserve the truth.”

The EPA has been short on the truth about all of its claims for four decades and needs to be shut down in order to let a truly science-based agency replace it with strict congressional oversight and limitations.

The time is long overdue to pull the plug on the Environmental Protection Agency.

© Alan Caruba, 2011
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Clearing The Air ... Paul Driessen

Clearing The Air

Trying to correct all the disinformation about “mercury and air toxics” is a full-time job

Paul Driessen

Ever since public, congressional and union anger and anxiety persuaded the Environmental Protection Agency to delay action on its economy-strangling carbon dioxide rules, EPA has been on a take-no-prisoners crusade to impose other job-killing rules for electricity generating plants.

As President Obama said when America rejected cap-tax-and-trade, “there’s more than one way to skin the cat.” If Congress won't cooperate, his EPA will lead the charge. Energy prices will “skyrocket.” Companies that want to build coal-fired power plants will “go bankrupt.” His administration will “fundamentally transform” our nation’s energy, economic, industrial and social structure.

EPA’s proposed “mercury and air toxics” rules for power plants are built on the false premise that we are still breathing the smog, soot and poisons that shrouded London, England and Gary, Indiana sixty years ago. In reality, US air quality improved steadily after the 1970 Clean Air Act was enacted. 

Moreover, since 1990, even as US coal use more than doubled, coal-fired power plant emissions declined even further: 58% for mercury, 67% for nitrogen oxides, 70% for particulates, 85% for sulfur dioxide – and just as significantly for most of the other 80 pollutants that EPA intends to cover with its 946-pages of draconian proposed regulations.

It’s time to clear the political air – and scrub out some of the toxic disinformation that EPA and its allies have been emitting for months, under a multi-million-dollar “public education” campaign that EPA has orchestrated and funded, to frighten people into supporting its new rules. PR firms, religious and civil rights groups, environmental activists and college students are eagerly propagating the myths.

EPA’s “most wanted” outlaw is mercury. But for Americans this villain is as real as Freddy or Norman Bates. To turn power plant mercury emissions into a mass killer, EPA cherry-picked studies and data, and ignored any that didn’t fit its “slasher” film script. As my colleague Dr. Willie Soon and I pointed out in our Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily articles, US power plants account for  just 0.5% of mercury emitted into North American’s air; the other 99.5% comes from natural and foreign sources.

Critics assailed our analysis, but the studies support us, not EPA – as is abundantly clear in Dr. Soon’s 85-page report, available at www.AffordablePowerAlliance.org. The report and studies it cites fully support our conclusion that America’s fish are safe to eat (in part because they contain selenium and are thus low in biologically available methylmercury, mercury’s more toxic cousin), and blood mercury levels for American women and children are already below FDA’s and other agencies’ safe levels.

Not only are EPA’s mercury claims fraudulent. They are scaring people away from eating fish, which are rich in essential fatty acids. In other words, EPA is actively harming people’s nutrition and health.

One of the more bizarre criticisms of our analysis contends that mercury released in forest fires “originates from coal-burning power plants,” which supposedly shower the toxin onto trees, which release it back into the atmosphere during arboreal conflagrations. In fact, mercury is as abundant in the earth’s crust as silver and selenium. It is absorbed by trees through their roots – and their leaves, which absorb those 0.5% (power plant) and 99.5% (other) atmospheric mercury components through their stomata.

Another bizarre criticism is that mercury isn’t the issue. The real problem is ultra-fine (2.5 micron) soot particles. So now the “power plant mercury is poisoning babies and children” campaign was just a sideshow! Talk about changing the subject. Now, suddenly, the alleged health benefits and lives saved would come from controlling soot particles. That claim is as bogus as the anti-mercury scare stories. 

Even EPA and NOAA data demonstrate that America’s air already meets EPA’s national standard, which is equivalent to disseminating an ounce of soot (about one and a quarter super-pulverized charcoal briquettes) across a volume of air one-half mile long, one-half mile wide and one story high. That’s less than you’re likely to get from sitting in front of a campfire, fireplace or wood-burning stove, inhaling airborne particulates, hydrocarbon gases and heavy metals. (Search the internet for Danish, EPA and Forest Service studies and advisories on these popular “organic” heating and cooking methods.)

Simply put, EPA’s proposed rules will impose huge costs – for few health or environmental benefits, beyond what we are already realizing through steadily declining emissions under existing regulations. 

Besides bringing mythical health benefits, EPA claims its lower national emission standards will simply put all states and utility companies “on the same level playing field.” This pious rhetoric may be fine for states that get little electricity from coal. However, for states (especially manufacturing states) that burn coal to generate 48-98% of their electricity, the new rules will be job, economy and revenue killers.

Energy analyst Roger Bezdek estimates that utilities will have to spend over $130 billion to retrofit older plants, under the measly three-year (2014) deadline that EPA is giving them, under a sweetheart court deal the agency brokered with radical environmental groups. On top of that, utilities will have to spend another $30 billion a year for operations, maintenance and extra fuel for the energy-intensive scrubbers and other equipment they will be forced to install.

Many companies simply cannot justify those huge costs for older power plants. Thus Dominion Power, American Electric Power and other utilities have announced that they will simply close dozens of generating units, representing tens of thousands of megawatts – enough to electrify tens of millions of homes and businesses. Illinois alone will lose nearly 3,500 MW of reliable, affordable, baseload electricity – with little but promises of intermittent pixie-dust wind turbine electricity to replace it.

Electricity costs are set to skyrocket, just as the President promised. Consumers can expect to pay at least 20% more in many states by 2014 or shortly thereafter. According to the Chicago Tribune, hard-pressed Illinois families and businesses will shell out 40-60% more! How’s that for an incentive to ramp up production and hire more workers? How’s that “hope and change” working out for families that had planned to fix the car, save for college and retirement, take a vacation, get that long-postponed surgery?

For a mid-sized hospital or factory that currently pays $500,000 annually for electricity (including peak-demand charges), those rate hikes could add $300,000 a year to its electricity bill. That’s equivalent to ten full-time entry-level employees … that now won't get hired, or will get laid off.

And it’s not just private businesses that will get hammered. As the Chi Trib notes, if the Chicago public school system wants to keep the lights on and computers running for two semesters, by 2014 it will get hit for an extra $2.7 million it doesn’t have, to pay for skyrocketing electricity costs.

Carry those costs through much of the US economy – especially the 26 states that get 48-98% of their electricity from coal-fired power plants – and we are talking about truly “fundamental transformations.” Millions will be laid off, millions more won't be hired, millions of jobs will be shipped overseas – and millions will endure brownouts, blackouts and increasing social unrest.

EPA generally refuses to consider the economic effects of its regulations, except to insist that even its most oppressive rules will generate benefits “far in excess” of any expected costs. Perhaps it will at least consider the obvious, unavoidable and monumental adverse physical and mental health impacts of its rate hikes and layoffs – on nutrition, healthcare, depression, family violence and civil rights progress.

The Environmental Protection Agency has always had a horse-blinder attitude about environmental policy. Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, it has become a truly rogue agency.

It’s time for Congress, state legislatures, attorneys-general, courts and We the People to bring some balance and common sense into the picture. Otherwise 9.1% unemployment – with Black and Hispanic unemployment even higher – will soon look like boom times.

__________

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Using Fear to Ban BPA - The BPA File, Part Two

Using Fear to Ban BPA - The BPA File, Part Two
By Alan Caruba

Writing for Health News Digest.com in early February, Michael D. Shaw noted that bisphenol-A (BPA), a chemical used to make polycarbonate plastics and an ingredient in the epoxy resin used as a protective coating in metal cans, “is one of the most heavily studied chemicals of all time. Indeed, there are more than 6,000 scientific papers devoted to this compound.”

That’s a remarkable amount of research. What’s more remarkable is that no peer-reviewed research has ever shown any harm to humans from BPA in normal consumer use. After a three-year study published in the Oxford journal Toxicological Sciences, even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that there is no threat from BPA.

Despite decades of studies that show no harm, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration still wants to take what it calls “reasonable steps to reduce human exposure to BPA in the food supply.” Yet it is BPA’s use in lining cans and plastic containers that reduces human exposure to botulism and other deadly food-borne illnesses.

What is “reasonable” about limiting something that protects public health and safeguards the American food supply?

Shaw called BPA the “perhaps the favorite target of fear entrepreneurial and ‘environmental’ fund-raising groups, even though there is not a scintilla of evidence shows harm to humans at any rational level of exposure to this chemical.”

Shaw’s observation is best illustrated by news stories promoting studies showing that BPA has been detected in the urine of more than 90 percent of Americans, but those same stories do not mention that BPA measured in human urine samples amounts to 2.6 micrograms per liter, which is 1,000 times less than the EPA reference dose.

If humans were exposed to massive amounts of BPA every day of their lives, they would still face no harm, but actual “exposure” is so small as to be virtually beyond measure.

If science does not support the many claims against BPA then why are there efforts by legislators to introduce new laws to ban BPA and other beneficial chemicals? Politics and fear are no substitute for science. They are used as fund-raising tools for environmental groups and to give politicians the appearance of acting in the public interest.

Unfortunately, the failure to check the facts has made some news media co-conspirators in this scare campaign, whenever they repeat baseless claims about BPA.

This false BPA narrative is so prevalent that in January, Rep. Edward Markey, (D-MA) introduced a bill to prohibit BPA in food and drink containers. Never mind the innumerable studies showing no harm from BPA, the complete absence of any study showing consumer harm from BPA and the half century of safe BPA use.

Rep. Markey claims his bill “will help keep BPA out of our bodies while also ensuring that all food and beverage containers are free from dangerous chemicals.” The truth is that banning BPA from use in metal or plastic food containers would invite potentially fatal health risks from food poisoning.

Eight states, plus Canada and the European Union have already approved limitations on BPA, none of which is based on any evidence that BPA causes harm to human health. The justification has always been the “Precautionary Principle” which requires the banning of something unless it can be proved to be not harmful. Use of the Precautionary Principle in science is akin to malpractice because it is impossible to prove a negative.

The confusion over BPA has so far resulted in sharp divides over whether and how to further regulate it. While the Massachusetts Public Health Council approved new BPA restrictions last year, the California Senate rejected a similar ban in that state in 2010. In Maine, state regulators sought draconian restrictions on BPA only to have Governor Paul LePage offer a regulatory reform program reversing those regulators in favor of having Maine’s standards parallel those of the federal government.

At the federal level, the U.S. Senate last year defeated attempts by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to impose a federal ban on BPA in certain products while the World Health Organization last November recommended against any further regulations to further limit or ban BPA.

Fear tactics, not scientific fact, are the primary drivers being used to deprive Americans of a necessary and safe component in valuable shatterproof plastics and a proven method of protecting food and drink. Only by overcoming a legion of fear-mongers can BPA continue to do so.

Editor's Note: You can read The BPA File - Part One here.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

The Horrid Ms. Browner ... Alan Caruba

The Horrid Ms. Browner
By Alan Caruba

The announced departure of Carol Browner as President Obama’s climate “czar” is very good news for America, given her long record of contempt for the truth regarding “global warming” and a range of other Environmental Protection Agency initiatives when she served as former President Clinton’s director of the EPA.

The decision to leave could have been motivated to put some distance between herself and the White House to afford the President some political cover.

Whatever reason will be put forth for her leaving, the real reason is her justified concern that she will be summoned before a congressional committee to explain why, for example, she deliberately misled Americans during the BP oil spill, going on national television to say that most of the oil was gone. She cited a White House commission created to investigate the spill, implying that the scientist’s report had confirmed the need for a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf when, in fact, they had not supported it.

Browner has been a dedicated socialist, serving as a Commissioner of the Socialist International, an umbrella group for 170 “social democratic, socialist, and labor parties” in 55 nations. According to its “organizing document”, the SI cites capitalism as the cause of “devastating crisis”, “mass unemployment”, “imperialist expansion” and “colonial exploitation” worldwide. This is straight out of the Communist Manifesto.

When her role with SI was revealed, its website scrubbed her photo and evidence of her commission membership. No doubt several of Obama’s “czars” have shared similar views of capitalism. One, Van Jones, was forced to resign as the "Green Jobs Czar" when it was revealed he was a communist.

Obama’s election was, in effect, a socialist takeover of the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Browner’s dedication to the Big Lie of “global warming” goes back to her days when she served as then-Senator Al Gore’s legislative director from 1988 to 1988. Browner’s devotion to environmentalism resulted in her being named Florida’s Secretary of Environmental Regulation from 1991 to 1993. After the 1992 presidential election, she served as a transition director for Vice President-elect Gore.

Global warming is the assertion that the Earth is rapidly warming as the result of the buildup of “greenhouse gases”, most particularly carbon dioxide.

The “theory” is now totally discredited, but continues as justification for a variety of policies such as the administration’s emphasis on wind and solar energy, attacks on the coal and oil industries, and efforts that would drive up the cost of electricity to business, industry, and all consumers.
Browner is on record saying that global warming is “the greatest challenge ever faced” despite revelations in 2009 that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had rigged the computer model's global temperature records to advance the fraud.

Global warming is the basis for the Cap-and-Trade legislation that was stalled in the Senate during the first half of Obama’s term. Since then, the EPA under Lisa Jackson, a Browner acolyte, has asserted that it intends to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The EPA has no such authority under the Clean Air Act. Such regulations would have a devastating affect on the nation’s economy.

In December 1992, President-elect Bill Clinton named Browner as his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency and she was confirmed by the Senate on January 21, 1993. She would become the longest-serving EPA director.

Despite a J.D. degree from the University of Florida College of Law in 1979, Browner has frequently shown a contempt for the law. In 1995, she used her position at the EPA to lobby more than a hundred grassroots environmental groups to oppose the Republican-led Congress’s regulatory initiatives to curb the EPA. In doing so, she violated the Anti-Lobbying Act. The Browner-led EPA was strongly rebuked by a bipartisan subcommittee of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

On her last day as EPA Director, Browner ordered a computer technician to delete all her computer files despite a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve those files. It was later learned that three other high-ranking EPA officials had also violated the judge’s order. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth held the EPA in contempt of Congress in 2001.

During secret negotiations with auto industry executives on behalf of the Obama administration, Browner directed them “to put nothing in writing” as she orchestrated an agreement to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards. Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions.

In these and countless other unknown ways, Carol Browner has used the reins of power as EPA Director and later as President Obama’s climate advisor to assert EPA and government control over every aspect of the lives of Americans, limiting their choices, and in the process harming the nation’s economy.

Until the nation is released from the grip of such environmental/socialist zealots, its future remains in jeopardy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

EPA’s Texas power grab ... by Paul Driessen and Willie Soon

EPA’s Texas power grab
Hollywood climate monsters are a lousy basis for energy and economic policy
Paul Driessen and Willie Soon

Any Texas granddaddy will tell you he’s seen it all, when it comes to weather and climate extremes. Tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves, blizzards, droughts, flash floods, and storms that bring unique combinations of wind, dust, thunder and hail.

Any Lone Star citizen will point out that Texas is America’s leading producer of crude oil, natural gas and (heavily subsidized) wind-based energy. It has the second largest workforce and gross state product in the USA, produces more electricity than any other state, and refines one-fourth of our petroleum – for a country that is 85% dependent on fossil fuels.

Mess with Texas, and the damages will reverberate throughout our nation.

So why is the US Environmental Protection Agency sending federal agents to Texas – to arrest the state’s economy for the “crime” of emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4)? Texas is also challenging EPA over other arbitrary new air pollution standards, but that’s another article.

Cowboys and cowgirls recognize CO2 as the plant-fertilizing “gas of life” and CH4 as natural gas and cow farts. Scientists will tell you carbon dioxide is 0.0387% of Earth’s atmosphere and methane is 0.000179 percent. Anyone with an eighth grade economics education or ounce of common sense knows CO2 is what results when CH4 heats homes, generates electricity, fuels cars and factories, and makes our health, welfare and living standards possible.

But EPA says they are “greenhouse gases” that cause “runaway global warming.” So the ideologues who run this agency are telling Texas to start regulating its power plants and refineries into bankruptcy or oblivion – or EPA goons will take over its air quality programs and economy.

Since few cowboys and cowgirls – or even college grads or most PhDs – are experts on “greenhouse” gases and radiation physics, let’s take a quick look at what’s behind these EPA claims.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says her agency’s actions will “protect human health and welfare” and “ensure environmental justice,” which are “threatened” by rising temperatures and “global climate disruption.” Let EPA regulate these evil greenhouse gases, she promises, and the climate will remain “stable” and average global temperatures will never be more than 2 degrees higher than now. Bunk.

Ms. Jackson willfully ignores the immense harm that driving up energy prices will have on jobs, state revenues, people’s health and welfare, and even human lives. But her views are supported by scientists like Dr. Richard Alley, Michael Mann’s colleague at Pennsylvania State University, all handsomely paid by EPA and other federal agencies for raising alarms about global warming.
Alley was recently extolled in the New York Times (which no real, red-blooded Texans reads) as a “major voice of climate science.” He says that under a true worst-case scenario of doubling the concentration of CO2 and methane, our planet will fry due to 18 to 20 degrees F of global warming.

This much gas of life and cow farts, the great professor insists, would result in “an addition of heat so radical that it would render the planet unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants.” He bases this horrifying prediction on computer models that assume human CO2 and CH4 control our climate – not the sun and dozens of powerful, complex, interacting natural forces.

The fact is, mankind has been emitting gas of life and cow farts since time immemorial. However, according to MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen, we are still only 80% of the way toward doubling the greenhouse gas levels found in our atmosphere at the start of the Industrial Revolution (0.0280%). But taking Dr. Alley’s computer models and doomsday predictions at their word, 80% of the way should mean temperatures in the great state of Texas should have warmed some 14 to 16 degrees between 1860 and 2010.

Hooo-weee … is that HOT, or what?

Something doesn’t seem quite right here. National Climate Data Center studies show Texas’ annual mean temperature fluctuates from year to year – but has generally been 65 to 71 degrees F, from 1895 through 2010. (We don’t have reliable data before 1895.) From the rear view of flatulent Texas longhorns, that’s a change of just 6 degrees, up or down, with no two years of identical weather, for 116 years!

Where in tarnation are those extra 10 to 12 degrees of warming that Professor Alley (in his generous spirit of “worst-case scenarios”) assures us are happening? Did the Grinch steal them? Or are those missing degrees just lurking out there, waiting to surprise us the instant CO2 levels hit 560 ppm (0.0560% of the atmosphere)? Does nature actually work that way: no response, no response – then, bam!?!? Disaster!

He and Professor Mann and Penn State sure did get a lot of millions from us taxpayers, to cook up all these disaster scenarios. So there must be something to them. (One of their buddies got a pile of taxpayer cash for saying dinosaur farts “may have contributed to global warming” 70 million years ago!)

But farmers and ranchers in Texas just cannot find that missing “heat” in their cows or plants or wild grasses. No one can find that “heat” in hurricane, tornado, hail or dust storm records, either. In fact, NOAA tells us, strong tornadoes, among top-three ranks in wind and damage scales, have been occurring less and less since record intensities during 1950s and 1960s.

That’s just the opposite of what the good professor, his sidekick Al Gore and their Climate Doomsday Gang say will happen. But isn’t that good news for Texas?

In fact, using their logic, we could argue that, since CO2 has been rising while tornado intensity is falling, maybe we should increase carbon dioxide even more, to eventually turn tornadoes into dust devils. Or say decreasing CO2 emissions could cause stronger tornadoes and damage to ramp up again.

Somehow, we don’t think carbon dioxide or methane has quite this power. We suspect there are a lot of other, far stronger, natural forces at work – causing all kinds of cyclical climate patterns. Ms. Jackson and Dr. Alley’s computer-created monsters might have a role in Frankenstein, raptor and blood-lusting alien movies. They should play no role in dictating Texas energy use and economic decisions.

So now the alarmists from the Climate Doomsday Gang have a new scare. Global warming from rising CO2 is going to cause more vector-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever and West Nile Virus. Are you a-trembling in your bull-doodoo -covered boots now?

If Texas didn’t have decent history books in its classrooms, people might actually buy this scary story. But as those books show, malaria was eradicated in Texas and the USA during the 1950s, thanks to DDT, window screens and medical advances – not because the state’s climate got too hot or cold, wet or dry for anopheles mosquitoes.

Moreover, from 1980 to 1999 there were 62,514 cases of dengue fever (from mosquito bites) in northeastern Mexico. Meanwhile, just across the border, only 64 cases of dengue were counted in Texas. The disparate disease rates are clearly not due to the climate, but to differences in housing, medical care, wealth and technology.

The alarmists need to get their computer models, scenarios, scare stories and climate cops out of Texas. If they don’t, Governor Perry and his Texas Rangers should arrest them for violating Lone Star rights to energy, jobs, health and the American Dream.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality. Willie Soon is an independent climate scientist and solar physicist. Both are pro-Texas climate rationalists, who rely on evidence-based science and don’t get spooked by GIGO computer scenarios and Hollywood monsters.

Greenwashing America ... Alan Caruba

Greenwashing America
By Alan Caruba

Every time you see some product being sold as “Green”, allegedly safer or beneficial for the environment, you can be sure that it is more expensive than a comparable product that does the same thing without making this claim.

Everything you eat, drink, wear or use begins as a “natural” product. It is absurd to think that calling it “Green” improves it in any fashion. Countless inspections before anything reaches the marketplace ensure product safety. To put it another way, a carrot is a carrot is a carrot.

Recently I received a news release from a public relations firm touting clients selling Green products such as “Parsley Plus All-Purpose Cleaner”, along with “stylish organic bed linens, “natural and organic clothing”, a “99.6% natural line” of shampoos, and, “100% Bamboo towels.”

In a similar fashion, every time you hear a corporation claiming it is concerned about the environment you can be sure that it is trying to protect itself against lawsuits from environmental groups or Environmental Protection Agency action that will eat into its profits and dividends.

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Misleading Claims on ‘Green’ Labeling” cited a study asserting that “more than 95% of consumer products examined committed at least one offense of ‘greenwashing’, a term used to describe unproven environmental claims, according to TerraChoice, a North American environmental-marketing company that issued the report.”

“Environmental-marketing company”? By reading further down in the article, one learns that “TerraChoice was recently acquired by Underwriters Laboratories, an independent product-safety certification organization”, adding that both companies “could benefit if more manufacturers seek third-party verification of the eco-claims.” You think?

Consumers Union, an independent testing company, has built its reputation on its review of various products. Underwriters Laboratories has done the same, but there is no reason to believe any Green product claim, particularly since TerraChoice has announced it is probably a scam. Not surprisingly, third party certification has been offered by some major environmental organizations as yet another way to raise a few bucks.

It is no accident that the term “greenwashing” is akin to “brainwashing”, a term that came out of the Korean War when it was learned that American prisoners of war were subjected to “re-education” by their captors.

Communists have always been big on re-education, a practice of nations such as China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and others where you were expected change your mind and learn to love Big Brother. The alternative was that you either stayed in their concentration camps or were systematically murdered for the crime of having been an intellectual, a landowner, or a bourgeois capitalist.

Communism murdered more people in the last century than all its wars combined.

Environmental organizations, in league with an unquestioning mainstream media, have been greenwashing and brainwashing the public for decades. It usually takes the form of scare campaigns and, in the case of supermarket products, it is directed a chemicals, plastics, how livestock is raised, or some other totally superfluous “issue” that has nothing to do with the quality, price or safety of the product. The object is always the same, to lay a guilt trip on the consumer, i.e., to greenwash them.

Green product claims go hand-in-hand with the metastasizing Green regulations whose bottom line raises the costs of everything in America these days. Angela Logomasini of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is an expert on regulatory affairs. When it comes to the environment, Congress passed 1,163 new laws between 1973 and 2006. Ms. Logomasini found that only 85 of those statutes reduced government regulation, while 795 increased it. The remaining were deemed to lack significant regulatory impact.

Five of the fifty volumes containing the federal regulatory code are devoted exclusively to environmental regulation and an additional twelve also address environmental regulation in some respect. The Small Business Administration concluded that environmental regulation is the leading regulatory expense for businesses with fewer than 20 employees, averaging $3,296 per worker.

Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency that generates the new laws and regulations is totally out of control. It has been on a regulatory binge anticipating a Congress controlled by Republicans. Nothing rational explains President Obama’s continued reference to greenhouse gas emissions, Green cars, and, especially, Green jobs when so many Americans are out of work..

The EPA, created by Richard Nixon with an executive order in 1970, has to be downsized to its original mandate, ensuring clean air and clean water. When it began to define rain puddles as navigable waters and ordinary dust as a pollutant, you have to know just how crazed and dangerous it has become.

It will take a generation or two for Americans to shake loose of the insanity that is environmentalism. Long seen as a religion, it seeks total control over every aspect of your life.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" his popular blog and thereafter on dozens of other websites and blogs. If you love to read, visit his monthly report on new books at Bookviews. To visit his Facebook page, click here For information on his professional skills, Caruba.com is the place to visit.

Good Intentions, Horrible Consequences ... Pastor David Rosales

Good intentions, horrible consequences
Destroying jobs and hurting families, in the name of preventing climate change
Pastor David Rosales

God does not judge us by our intentions, but by what we actually do. The consequences of our actions matter, both intended and unintended.

We need to keep that in mind, as our nation ponders whether to enact new rules that some say are needed to “break our addiction to oil,” prevent “dangerous global warming,” and replace hydrocarbon energy with “renewable” power.” These rules include climate and energy bills that some Senators want to enact after the November elections, and new regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency is already imposing on America’s transportation, construction and manufacturing industries.

The extent and importance of natural and human influences on the climate are hardly settled. Whether alternate energy sources, like wind and solar power, can actually provide sufficient energy for our dynamic, energy-dependent economy is equally subject to debate.
Meanwhile, other, more pressing questions are not being sufficiently addressed.

Few are more important than the impacts these rules are likely to have on poor and minority families. Proponents of climate change and renewable energy policies insist that the effects will be positive. However, Europe’s experience strongly suggests that the exact opposite would occur.
As Greece, Hungary and other countries teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, a new report notes that families in Eastern Europe are increasingly being forced to heat with wood and lignite coal, because they cannot afford electricity. This is leading to deforestation around cities, high levels of indoor air pollution and chronic lung diseases, in addition to rising carbon dioxide and soot emissions.

In England, high energy taxes, the closure of coal-fired power plants, and a legally mandated transition to “green” energy have sent prices soaring and put 5.5 million households in “fuel poverty” – meaning they can no longer afford to heat their homes properly. Soaring energy prices have forced companies to lay off workers, especially in energy-intensive industries.
Average annual energy bills climbed from $1,620 in 2005 to $2,250 by the end of 2009, the National Housing Federation says. Analysts for an energy switching company project that household bills could skyrocket to $8,000 by 2020. People have been shocked and angered, and pensioners are burning books to stay warm, because they are cheaper than “carbon-priced” coal otherwise used in small home heaters.

According to the NHF, some 25,000 more people died during the winter than during the summer – mostly poor pensioners with circulatory, respiratory and other health problems. That underlines the reality that cold weather is always more deadly than heat waves or a couple degrees increase in average global temperatures. It also underscores the importance of affordable energy.

American politicians claim none of this will happen here, because some of the hundreds of billions in new energy taxes raised under a cap-and-trade regime would be rebated to poor families.
But how will a $500 or so rebate to the poorest families help them and middle class households pay for $2,000-4,000 in higher annual energy, food, transportation, clothing, healthcare and other living expenses, caused by climate and renewable energy legislation? What about families whose breadwinners are laid off, because their employers had to reduce their work forces to pay soaring energy bills?

Energy cost rebates to poor families do nothing to help businesses and factories pay for electricity, heating, cooling, transportation and raw materials expenses that will likely add thousands or even millions to annual operating costs. They don’t help offices, shops, schools, hospitals, churches and other organizations pay energy costs that are rocketing upward.
School districts, for example, will have to pay far more to operate buses and heat buildings. That will mean increased debt, higher local taxes, teacher salary cuts and workforce reductions, or reduced music, athletic and special education programs.

Climate policies that are supposed to help reduce carbon emissions will, ironically, drive jobs overseas to countries that have less restrictive environmental protections than we do – and global carbon dioxide levels will continue to increase.

To impose costs like these – based on computer models, politicized science and bald assertions that fossil fuel use is causing a climate disaster – is morally wrong. It violates the trust we have placed (or misplaced) in our elected officials and our regulators.

Before taking any final action on climate and energy laws, politicians and regulators must demonstrate clearly and convincingly that we face an imminent manmade crisis, that their proposals will in fact prevent the crisis, and that they will safeguard families, businesses and workers from these devastating economic impacts. Thus far, they have failed to make that case.

It may be expedient politics to insist that “We have to do something,” for the sake of demonstrating concern or activity. But that is not leadership – and it isn’t moral to make workers and poor families pay for this folly.

David Rosales
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David Rosales is the Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Valley, a Southern California church with more than 9,000 attendees, the national radio host of A Sure Foundation, and an Advisor for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

The EPA’s Long War on Chemicals ... Alan Caruba

The EPA’s Long War on Chemicals
By Alan Caruba

One of the shows I enjoy watching on the Science Channel is “How It’s Made.” All manner of things we use to enhance our lives start out as raw materials and the process of manufacture is a miracle of transformation.

Virtually all forms of manufacturing require some chemical element, often several. Given the indispensability of chemicals in society and commerce, does it strike anyone as odd that, if you were born after 1960, there’s a high likelihood that you grew up being told that “chemicals” are bad?

In 1962 Rachel Carson kicked off this bizarre notion with her bestselling book, “Silent Spring” and environmental groups have maintained a steady drumbeat of scare campaigns to drive home the message that chemicals are dangerous. However, it is rarely noted that most of the claims she made in her iconic book have long since been disproved by science.

One branch of science is called toxicology. Among its most honored truths, attributed to Paracelsus (1493-1541) is that “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” This has been shortened to the statement that “The dose makes the poison.” The truth of this is obvious to most people and perhaps best illustrated vaccines. By introducing a minute element of a disease into our bodies, our immune systems can build resistance to it.

But problems arise when an ill-informed media latches on to the latest junk science craze and splashes misleading stories across newspapers and TV. Missing from virtually all of these stories are key facts – that a bunch of laboratory rats have been exposed to some chemical in doses far higher than would normally occur, for instance, or in ways that would never happen in real life, and then calling it a threat. But humans are not rats and this kind of sloppy science and extrapolation comes with serious issues of data interpretation.

This is one way in which the Environmental Protection Agency’s long war on chemicals is perpetuated. Much of the EPA’s abuse of power comes in the form of chemical action plans, which involve little oversight, even less transparency and little-to-no public accountability. However their power to over-regulate, remove valuable products from the market, and hobble commerce is almost unparalleled.

Currently in the EPA’s chemical action plan crosshairs are siloxanes, a type of silicone which, in turn, comes mostly from sand. Siloxanes are inert, non-allergenic, odorless and colorless. They’ve been safely used for decades in thousands of consumer and industrial products – everything from medical cream and sunscreen to automobile tires, high-efficiency insulation and spacecraft.

There are a wide variety of siloxanes, but the EPA isn’t saying which ones have been targeted making it almost impossible for outside parties to provide any sort of meaningful input to the process. If you wanted to stack the deck against something, that would be a great way to do it.

Another aspect of this latest EPA caper is that the agency draws much of its power from the Toxic Substances Control Act, otherwise known as TSCA. But TSCA is in the process of a congressional overhaul which will probably spill over into next year when a new and possibly Republican-controlled Congress returns in January. Why would EPA want to rush through a chemical action plan for siloxanes when it knows that Congress is still working on TSCA reform?

An unduly harsh chemical action plan for siloxanes could have devastating effects on our limping economic recovery. There is no single substitute for siloxanes that performs as well so industry would be faced with costly reformulations for their products and their manufacturing processes. If a particular business found this too expensive, they’d have to shut down, throwing more Americans out of work. If they can afford it, those costs would undoubtedly be passed along to consumers. And for what? No amount of research has shown any environmental benefit to banning siloxanes.

Since its establishment by an executive order in 1970, the EPA has become the master of misinformation and disinformation intended to drive all manner of beneficial chemicals out of the marketplace and to maintain a level of public fear concerning anything that involves chemicals. Siloxanes and the people who depend on them are merely in line to become the latest victims of the EPA.

It should be renamed the Ministry of Propaganda.

Alan Caruba

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Crisis! New York style vs the real thing ... Paul Driessen

Crisis! New York style vs the real thing
Our obsession with pesticide “risks” has very different consequences for America and Africa
Paul Driessen

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite” is no longer a fashionable good-night wish for Big Apple kids, even in the city’s high-rent districts and posh hotels. Growing infestations of the ravenous bloodsuckers have New Yorkers annoyed, anguished, angry about officialdom’s inadequate responses, and “itching” for answers.

Instead, their Bedbug Advisory Board recommends a bedbug team and educational website. Residents, it advises, should monitor and report infestations. Use blow-dryers to flush out (maybe 5% of) the bugs, then sweep them into a plastic bag and dispose properly. Throw away (thousands of dollars worth of) infested clothing, bedding, carpeting and furniture.
Hire (expensive) professionals who (may) have insecticides that (may) eradicate the pests – and hope you don’t get scammed. Don’t use “risky” pesticides yourself. Follow guideline for donating potentially infested furnishings, and be wary of bedbug risks from donated furniture and mattresses.

New Yorkers want real solutions, including affordable insecticides that work. Fear and loathing, from decades of chemophobic indoctrination, are slowly giving way to a healthy renewed recognition that the risk of not using chemicals can be greater than the risk of using them (carefully). Eco-myths are being replaced with more informed discussions about alleged effects of DDT and other pesticides on humans and wildlife.

Thankfully, bedbugs have not been linked to disease – except sometimes severe emotional distress associated with obstinate infestations, incessant itching, and pathetic “proactive” advice, rules and “solutions” right out of Saturday Night Live.

It is hellish for people who must live with bedbugs, and can't afford professional eradication like what Hilton Hotels or Mayor Bloomberg might hire. But imagine what it’s like for two billion people who live 24/7/365 with insects that definitely are responsible for disease: malarial mosquitoes.

Malaria infects over 300 million people annually. For weeks or months on end, it renders them unable to work, attend school or care for their families – and far more susceptible to death from tuberculosis, dysentery, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition and other diseases that still stalk their impoverished lands.

This vicious disease causes low birth weights in babies and leaves millions permanently brain-damaged. It kills over a million annually, most of them children and mothers, the vast majority of them in Africa. It drains families’ meager savings, and magnifies and perpetuates the region’s endemic poverty.

Emotional distress? Imagine the stress that comes from having no escape from destitution and disease; having to support a child with a perpetual ten-year-old’s mental functions; burying your baby, wife or sibling; or wondering whether you can walk twenty miles to a clinic, before the child you are carrying dies, and whether the clinic will have (non-counterfeit) medicine to cure her.

Frustration over absurd bedbug “solutions”? Imagine the reaction Africans must have to “malaria no more” campaigns that claim they will (eventually) eradicate the disease solely with insecticide-treated bed nets, drugs, “capacity building,” education and (maybe someday) mosquitoes genetically engineered not to carry malaria parasites. As to insecticide spraying, and especially DDT – fuggetaboutit.

DDT is the most powerful, effective, long-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Spraying the eaves and inside walls of mud huts and cinderblock homes every six months keeps 80% of the flying killers from entering. It irritates most that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land. However, many aid agencies refuse to encourage, endorse or fund spraying.

Many don’t even want to monitor mosquito and malaria outbreaks, or determine actual success in reducing disease and death rates. That would be more difficult and expensive than counting the number of bed nets distributed, and underscore the embarrassing reality that their “comprehensive” (and politically correct) insecticide-free programs achieve only 20-40% reductions in morbidity and mortality. By contrast, as South Africa and other countries have demonstrated, adding insecticides and DDT can bring 95% success.

We would never consider 20-40% fewer deaths a “success” for American children. Why should Africa?

Since EPA banned DDT in 1972 – after the United States and Europe had eradicated malaria – billions have been stricken by the vicious diseases, and tens of millions have died. That is intolerable.

We need adult supervision and informed debate on pesticide policies, laws and regulations. We can no longer leave those decisions to unaccountable anti-chemical activists in pressure groups and government agencies. These zealots are making decisions that determine the quality of life for millions of Americans, especially poor families – and life itself for billions of malaria-threatened people worldwide.

If not for the economic and mental health of Americans afflicted by bedbugs – support responsible, ethical policies for Africa’s sick, brain-damaged, and dying parents and children.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and consultant to the forthcoming malaria-really-no-more film, “Three Billion and Counting.”

Big Green Lies are Imploding ... Alan Caruba

Big Green Lies are Imploding
By Alan Caruba

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As World War Two wound down, in 1945 Italian partisans found Benito Mussolini and his girlfriend trying to flee to Switzerland. They shot both of them and then hung them by their heels in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. He had led the National Fascist Party and had been the 40th prime minister from 1922 until being deposed, jailed, and rescued by his pal Adolf Hitler.

I was reminded of this when I read a list of 1970 Earth Day predictions because, sooner or later, lies implode and the liars must be held accountable.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something”, said Kenneth Watt, an ecologist, when asked about global warming.

“Civilizations will end within 15 to 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” said George Wald, a Harvard biologist.

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” said Barry Commoner, a Washington University biologist.

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” predicted Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and author, none of whose predictions ever came true.

It’s been 40 years since the first Earth Day.

This, of course, brings us to the greatest serial liar of our era, former vice president Al Gore, author of “Earth in the Balance”, the star of “An Inconvenient Truth”, Nobel Prize winner, Oscar winner, and surely worthy of being metaphorically hung by his heels for general repudiation, disdain, and ignominy.

Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com and the GreenHellBlog, reported that Al Gore told a conference call of supporters that the battle to enact a Cap-and-Trade bill, imposing limits on so-called greenhouse gases, and creating “carbon credits” to be bought like medieval indulgences for the remission of sin, that “The federal government has failed us.”

No, what failed was the long, relentless and utterly mendacious campaign to convince people that global warming was an actual event and a genuine threat to the Earth. It never was because it was utter fiction. Well, the part about massive increases in the Earth’s overall temperature was. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and has gone through a succession of ice ages and warming periods since it began.

To demonstrate how deranged Gore is, he actually blamed a “biased right-wing media…bolstered by professional deniers.” There is The Wall Street Journal and Fox News whose reporting reflects a conservative philosophy and outlook, but the rest of the mainstream media has been so demonstrably left-wing there was little else available to the public until the advent of cable television and the Internet. And they all lied about global warming.

In November 2009 the release of thousands of emails between the small band of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “scientists” revealed they were a cabal of data fabricators who were by then increasingly alarmed that global warming wasn’t happening despite their best efforts to deceive the entire world. The event was dubbed “Climategate.”

Now we learn that a U.S. funded agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has become mired in a new scandal involving numbers for the Great Lakes region that misrepresent average temperatures there. The latest word as of Wednesday, August 11, is that NOAA has removed an entire NOAA-16 satellite data set from its website--leading some to wonder if a decade’s worth of North American data will be discredited.

In sum, do not trust NOAA and most definitely, do not trust the Environmental Protection Agency that is desperately trying to get authorization to regulate carbon dioxide on the grounds that it is causing global warming. This isn’t just a rogue agency. The EPA has the look of a criminal enterprise bent on destroying the U.S. economy.

There is NO global warming and hasn’t been any for a decade as the Earth has been cooling thanks to a predictable lack of sunspot activity known to affect the overall planetary temperatures.

The Green lies are imploding. In the midst of a very ugly recession, the nation’s governors can do us all a favor by ending all funding to the various “environmental” programs tied to the global warming fraud.

The next Congress, if power is transferred to the Republican Party, should begin to trim the budget of billions of bogus “climate” and related “environmental” related programs.

It’s time to send the liars packing. It’s time to regain our fiscal and environmental sanity.

Alan Caruba

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© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

The EPA Must Be Stopped! ... Alan Caruba

The EPA Must Be Stopped!

By Alan Caruba

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On August 12, the Environmental Protection Agency sent out a press release, “EPA Proposes Rules on Clean Air Act Permitting for Greenhouse Gas Emissions”.

It is a frontal attack on the U.S. economy that is currently in the throes of a decline that has not been seen since the Great Depression.

If the EPA succeeds in this Big Lie, the provision of affordable energy in America will cease.

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing two rules to ensure that businesses planning to build new, large facilities or make major expansions to existing ones will be able to obtain Clean Air Act permits that address their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”

The Clean Air Act does not cover carbon dioxide (CO2) which the EPA deems the primary GHG. This is because it poses no threat to the environment and, indeed, is a vital and essential element of the environment insofar as all vegetation from a blade of grass to a giant Sequoia tree is dependent on it for growth.

Moreover, the proposed regulation of CO2 is based on the global warming fraud that says that it is responsible for a significant warming of the planet. There is not a scintilla of proof of this and, indeed, the Earth is presently in one of its natural cycles of cooling, not warming.

Thus, there is no scientific justification for the regulation of carbon dioxide no matter how many times the EPA says there is.

The EPA release says “projects that will increase GHG emissions substantially will require an air permit.”

If American industry, particularly the targeted “power plants and oil refineries”, are required to get GHG permits, it will put yet another huge sector of the nation’s economy under the thumb of the most insidious exponents of the global warming fraud, enemies of any economic growth.

“The Tailoring Rule covers large industrial facilities like power plants and oil refineries that are responsible for 70 percent of the GHGs from stationary sources,” says the EPA news release.

What it doesn’t say is that this power to regulate that does not exist in the present Clean Air Act.

It will cause electricity costs to skyrocket along with gasoline and all other oil derivatives. It will utterly wreck the U.S. economy that is already in dire straits.

If an invading nation had imposed these kinds of restrictions on Americans, we would be in the streets with guns and any other means to fight them.

There is NO global warming. Carbon dioxide plays NO role in this non-event.

This is regulation by deception, by lies, by the arrogance of environmentalists who view the human race as a cancer on the planet.

And, naturally, they have waited until Congress has gone on recess to “propose” this attack on the nation.

Take action! Contact your Representatives and Senators. Drown the White House in protests.

The EPA must be stopped!

Alan Caruba
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Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, science and business writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.© Alan Caruba

EPA morphs into the 'Blob'

(Published here with permission from TYSK NEWS.)

EPA morphs into the 'Blob'

From TYSK News

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Remember the old Sci-Fi flick The Blob? The Blob engulfed everything in its path.


“A mysterious creature from another planet, resembling a giant blob of jelly, lands on earth. The people of a nearby small town refuse to listen to some teenagers who have witnessed the blob's destructive power. “In the meantime, the blob just keeps on getting bigger.” [source]

Not content with declaring the air you exhale as a pollutant – a.k.a. carbon dioxide – the EPA is now considering the regulation of dust!!

Specifically, the dust generated by the evil practice of ... farming.

EPA to Crack Down on Farm Dust

OKLAHOMA CITY — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering a crackdown on farm dust, so senators [21 Senators – link for letter] have signed a letter addressing their concerns on the possible regulations.

The letter dated July 23 to the EPA states, "If approved, would establish the most stringent and unparalleled regulation of dust in our nation's history." It further states, "We respect efforts for a clean and healthy environment, but not at the expense of common sense. These identified levels will be extremely burdensome for farmers and livestock producers to attain. Whether its livestock kicking up dust, soybeans being combined on a dry day in the fall, or driving a car down the gravel road, dust is a naturally occurring event."

Many in the Oklahoma farming industry are opposed to the EPA's consideration. One farmer said the possible regulations are ridiculous.

"It's plain common sense, we don't want to do anything detrimental," said farmer Curtis Roberts. "If the dust is detrimental to us, it's going to be to everybody. We're not going to do anything to hurt ourselves or our farm."

Roberts, a fourth generation farmer and rancher in Arcadia, said regulating dust in rural areas will hurt farmers' harvest, cultivation and livelihood.

Full article here: http://tinyurl.com/295xhpg

You Must Love the EPA--Or Else! ... Alan Caruba

You Must Love the EPA--Or Else!

By Alan Caruba

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency comes as close to George Orwell’s version of Big Brother as any element of the federal government. It operates on a totally irrational basis, ignoring anything that even passes for real science. Through its regulatory power it imposes insane mandates that drive up the cost of everything and is trying to drive major elements of energy provision out of business.

What, for example, is the EPA doing offering “tips to protect eyes, skin from the Sun’s harmful rays”? Does the EPA sell sunscreen products? Charged with cleaning the nation’s air and water, why is it venturing into areas better served by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services? Charged with keeping the U.S. waters clean, why has the EPA launched a “National Water Conservation Campaign” complete with tips such as checking the toilet for “silent leaks” or replacing your showerhead with a “WaterSense labeled model.” Do we really need the EPA in the business of approving some showerheads over others?

The answer is that the EPA wants to be involved with all aspects of people’s lives and sees no limits on its authority or power and it wants you to love it for all the effort it is making to save you from a horrible death.

Recently the EPA classified milk as oil! How crazed is that???

It based this on the fact that milk contains animal fat which is a non-petroleum oil. The result is that dairy farming has become even more costly and you can bet the costs will be passed on to consumers. While the Gulf of Mexico is polluted by millions of gallons of oil from the BP disaster, Frank Konkel of Silver Sky Dairy in Hesperia, Michigan, and all other dairy farmers will have to develop and implement spill prevention plans for milk storage tanks. The rules are set to take effect in November.

In another blow to the economy, in late June the EPA announced it was voiding certificates of approval for the import of up to 200,000 gas-powered off-road motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles. The reason? The EPA “suspects that tailpipe emissions information was either incomplete or falsified.” All vehicles imported or manufactured in the United States are required to have certificates of conformity which are issued by the EPA. I suspect the EPA does like any vehicle that runs on gasoline and is used for recreational purposes.

The tentacles of the EPA reach into every enterprise in the nation. Like the FBI, the EPA even has its own fugitive list. When not magically changing milk into oil, the EPA continues its crazed campaign to regulate every aspect of life in America.

In June, it finalized requirements under its national mandatory greenhouse gas reporting program for “underground mines, industrial wastewater treatment systems, industrial waste landfills, and magnesium production facilities.” The target this time is methane, among the most minor elements of the Earth’s atmosphere one can identify. In 1998, the amount of methane in the Earth's atmosphere was estimated to be 1,745 parts per billion. Swamps and bogs around the globe naturally produce methane and always have. Identifying it as a “greenhouse gas” is part of the global warming hoax that claims methane and carbon dioxide are causing the Earth to heat up. Apparently no one has told the EPA that the Earth has been cooling for the past decade.

And, finally for the purpose of this quick look at EPA lunacy, to the joy of the taxpayer-subsidized biodiesel industry, the EPA announced that it would require the domestic use of 800 million gallons of biodiesel in 2011. It is made from animal products. This is part of the EPA’s never-ending war on oil.

As a close observer and expert on the oil industry pointed out to me, “The EPA always speaks in pints, quarts and gallons. That makes it sound larger. Step back and 800 million gallons equals 19 million barrels of biodiesel annually. This is the proverbial drop in the bucket when total oil demand is 5,501 million barrels annually.” Biodiesel and biofuels have been subsidized with taxpayer’s money for some three decades at this point. The annual biofuel ethanol production increased only 16% in 2009 to 256 million barrels. This annual production is less than 8% of U.S. foreign oil imports of 3,307 million barrels. There is no way ethanol can replace foreign oil. There is no sensible reason to go on subsidizing biofuel or biodiesel.

The EPA has been totally out of control almost from the day it was established in 1970 by an executive order. Within two years it banned DDT. That ban was picked up by the World Health Organization and the result has been an estimated 400 million people who have since died from malaria. If that isn’t genocide, I don’t know what is.

Alan Caruba

© Alan Caruba, 2010
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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.