Category Archives: climate change
Toxic Toledo
Western Lake Erie suffers toxic algae blooms this time of year. Last Saturday the stuff got into Toledo’s drinking water.
Holy Toledo
Here’s a Daily Beast essay by Toledo Tough, P.J. O’Rourke, embracing toxic water.
Smug Koskinen and a Smidgen of Corruption
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen smugly insisted there isn’t a smidgen of corruption at the IRS. Oh wait, those were President Obama’s smug words. Koskinen smugly insisted he’s never been called a liar before.
He must have meant before he promised to produce Lois Lerner’s emails. Emails he knew at the time were missing.
Michael Gerson says IRS has, “undermined respect for authority. And it doesn’t seem even to understand the damage it has done”.
Well, they’re not the only ones. A year ago EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson conducted official business on an email account under the alias of Richard Windsor. Clever, no? She gave herself an ethics award for the scam. Windsor is now a fat cat at Apple, where Climate Change skeptic shareholders have been told to get lost.
The governing class is losing its fear of humans. Is it too late to yank the chain?
To Victor Davis Hanson the federal government has evolved into a sort of a “rogue organism”.
Add up these various alphabet-soup pathologies — well apart from the NSA, AP, and Benghazi debacles. Government agencies are now eager to venture into areas well beyond their mandates. They will use any means necessary to further the careers of their executives, massage data to enhance the administration’s agenda, or simply abdicate their responsibility to enforce the law at all if it is found to be politically incorrect.
In other words, we are witnessing a new federal government that is a sort of rogue organism that exists for its own enhancement and is willing to do anything necessary to help those who help it.
Carbon Cuts
President Obama made another end run around Congress in order to end the basis of all life on earth.
A 30% cut in carbon emissions from 2005 levels and must be achieved by 2030, or else.
Not a big deal says Robert Samuelson. Carbon emissions are already declining without EPA orders.
By 2012, CO2 emissions had already dropped to 2,023 million metric tons, a decline of 379 million metric tons. That’s 53 percent of the 2030 target. All of this has occurred without federal regulation of greenhouse gases.
The proposal’s real significance is that, if blessed by the courts, it would create a complex and costly regulatory apparatus that, in the future, might govern much of the U.S. economy.
China and India will more than make up for any U.S. cuts. But if you’re going to do it, Samuelson thinks the best way to reduce carbon emissions is to tax them.
If you want less of something, tax it… But there’s little public taste for this. Indeed, support for any anti-global warming legislation is weak. In 2009, when Democrats controlled the House and Senate, they could not pass a bill.
So Obama resorted to regulatory fiat: The EPA sets emission limits under the Clean Air Act. The proposal is hugely complex. Each state receives a target that can be met in many ways, subject to agency approval. This will be challenged in court and, if upheld, will strain the EPA’s administrative capacity. Winners and losers would be determined as much by political pressures as by market forces. It would be a bonanza for lawyers, lobbyists, economic consultants and public relations advisers. Whether it would affect the world’s climate is more questionable.
Krauthammer says the whole thing shows Obama is operating under his own constitution.
Coal Industry
Candidate Obama said he would bankrupt the coal industry in 2008. In 2014 President Obama said he has a pen and a phone and when Congress won’t act he will. Well, Congress wouldn’t act on carbon cap and trade so Obama’s EPA just did.
War on Birds
The Atlantic reported in late April that a huge solar power plant in the California desert is scorching birds with 800 degree heat.
The Ivanpah plant uses 300,000 mirrors to focus the sun on a water filled boiler. When birds fly through that beam the effect is the same as when you focused the sun through a magnifying glass to scorch an ant. Oh, you didn’t do that when you were a kid? Well, here’s what happens:
At times birds flew into the solar flux and ignited.
Not only that:
“It appears Ivanpah may act as a ‘mega-trap,’ attracting insects which in turn attract insect-eating birds, which are incapacitated by solar-flux injury, thus attracting predators and creating an entire food chain vulnerable to injury and death,” concluded scientists with the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in a report that investigated 233 bird deathsrepresenting 71 species at three Southern California solar power plants.
War on Birds
Bird immolation’s not your style? Well, did you know windmills are licensed to behead bald eagles?:
A leading bird conservation organization—American Bird Conservancy (ABC)—has announced its intention to sue the Department of the Interior (DOI), charging DOI with multiple violations of federal law in connection with its December 9, 2013, final regulation that allows wind energy companies and others to obtain 30-year permits to kill eagles without prosecution by the federal government. The previous rule provided for a maximum duration of five years for each permit.
Hardly seems fair if you have malaria due to the ban on DDT in order to save bald eagles.
