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his morning, Capt. Ed took a macro view of California and pronounced, “Maybe Escape from LA wasn’t so far-fetched after all.” Well, taking a much more micro view, I suggest we add Escape from Ventura as well, because what just happened there is emblematic of how tarnished the Golden State is.

By way of background, I draw your attention to the most recent news release by Santa Barabara Channel Keeper about water quality in the Santa Barbara channel.  Channel Keeper, a spawn of Robert Kennedy’s River Keeper franchise, is an environmental group that crusades for better water quality because, you know, our water quality just sucks so bad.  So here’s what the release said of the waters off Ventura County:

Ventura County beaches also fared better this year than last, showing a 37 percent decrease in the number of beach closing and advisory days – 452 in 2004, down from 720 in 2003. In California overall, the number of beach closing/advisory days decreased by 26 percent in 2004 to 3,985, from 5,384 in 2003.

Wow!  That’s great!  Maybe we could slack off a bit on the over-regulation and enjoy our considerable success at protecting our water quality.

Not on your life.

After a hearing that involved 11 hours of public comment, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) adopted a raft of tough new stormwater pollution rules for Ventura County aimed at keeping local waterways and beaches clean.  The considerable financial burden the unelected RWQCB imposed will fall on taxpayers and land developers, two segments of the population that are just rolling in dough.

Taxpayers are getting creamed because the RWQCB is requiring the city and county of Ventura to step up water quality testing along the ocean beaches because, you know, the ocean’s getting cleaner.  Here’s the Ventura County Star on the action:

The board added language just before the vote that calls for weekly, year-round beach water quality testing along county shores. The county and cities now have to figure out how to pay the tab.

Local officials estimated the cost of compliance at $20 million to $33 million annually, or $60 to $100 per household per year.

Current fees generate about $3 million a year, far short of what’s now needed – and any increase in the fees will require a vote of the electorate, thanks to California’s initiave system (Prop. 218).   Like that vote’s going to pass.  So local government will be stuck – forced by non-elected enviro-bureaucrats to spend money, and probably having to cut cops and firefighters to come up with the scratch.

Developers are getting creamed because the new permit requires all new development be low-impact development, as in:

Under the language, new development and redevelopment projects would have to be designed to capture virtually all runoff and treat the water on-site during most rain events. On projects, particularly infill, where that wasn’t feasible, the runoff would have to be mitigated downstream in the stormwater system to prevent pollution from reaching the oceans.

Got that?  Imagine a downpour cascading down on a large subdivision.  Virtually every drop will have to be contained and treated before it can leave.  Or a shopping center. Or a hospital.  How is this done?  Well, you could build a huge reservoir under the parking lot at considerable expense, or you could slice off a few acres of perfectly developable land and put in a retention basin.

Then you’ll buy some expensive to purchase and expensive to maintain equipment to filter the storm water, or carve off even more acreage for a natural treatment system – a manmade wetland.  And you’ll price your homes, set your rents, charge for your surgeries, sufficiently to recover the extra costs.  Meanwhile, all the developed lands all around you – which produce vastly more runoff than your subdivision, shopping center or hospital – get off without a nickel’s impact since even unelected enviro-bureaucrats are afraid to impose any costs on established residents.

Oh, and this being California, the Building Industry Association of Southern California was not invited to the hush-hush negotiations that resulted in the low-impact development rules.

Of course, it would have been wiser by far to build a regional stormwater treatment plant, paid for by all the taxpayers to clean all the taxpayers’ runoff, but such ideas are not even considered by RWCQBs throughout the state – because they want gutters, storm drains and flood channels to have good water quality.  As if anyone cares.

Bottom line:  For all that money, the quality of water that reaches the ocean to be tested in those weekly tests won’t change all that much, and California, already home to the greenest metropolitan areas in the country, just got less competitive and more expensive because  no one here can control our environmental extremists.

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O

nce upon a time, I bought the environmentalist diatribe against nuclear power.  Once upon a time, I was that kind of fool. I’ve learned a lot since then, and while I can’t verify everything in the email below, it does show just how extensive the Greenie misinformation campaign has been.  The email is from DuPree Moore and ran originally in Greenie Watch.

From 1968 to 1973, I was an engineering officer aboard U. S. nuclear submarines. The chief engineer would routinely sneak back into the engineering spaces and trip some piece of equipment off the line. These were not computer simulations. The equipment really would be in an emergency condition. We would be sitting in the reactor control room, and suddenly alarms would go off. We would have to figure out what had happened, and recover from it. The equipment is designed to survive such accidents. After many decades of operation under those conditions, the Navy has had zero deaths from nuclear power. You are more likely to drown in your bathtub than to die from operating a nuclear reactor.

A coal-fired electric power generating plant uses 120 railroad cars full of coal every day. A nuclear plant uses one semi truckload of nuclear fuel rods every few years. All the spent fuel from every nuclear reactor in the United States could be stored on one football field, a pile nine feet tall. Recycle it as the French do, and the pile shrinks to three inches. In 500 years it will be less toxic than coal ash.

It is preposterous to talk about nuclear waste remaining toxic for tens of thousands of years. It is preposterous to talk about tens of thousands of deaths from a nuclear accident. Those analyses are based upon a laughable error. If one person eats 200 aspirin, he will die. These people figure that if 200 people eat one aspirin each, there will be one death. If two million people are exposed to a dose rate of one aspirin per person, there will be 20,000 deaths. In fact one aspirin is beneficial, and low levels of radiation are beneficial. Geographical areas with higher background radiation have lower levels of cancer.

Chernobyl proved just how safe nuclear power is. There was no containment vessel. All radiation was released to the environment. There were less than 200 deaths, all among on-site personnel. An exhaustive international inquiry under the UN found no documented health damage beyond the immediate vicinity (except for a slight increase in thyroid cancer among children, which can be completely prevented by taking inexpensive iodine supplements in the event of a nuclear accident). The area around Chernobyl has been declared a radioactive dead zone at radiation levels about the same as downtown Warsaw, Poland, and five times lower than Grand Central Station in New York City. Plants and animals flourish in the region, showing no ill effects. It is stark raving mad.

Three-Mile Island nuclear accident caused zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation release to the environment. And it was not a close call. It might have been a close call from having much more extensive equipment damage, but the worst possible accident would still have been kept entirely within the containment vessel. There would have been zero deaths, zero injuries, and zero radiation released to the environment. If terrorists flew an airplane into a nuclear reactor, it would not rupture the containment vessel.

During the 1970′s there was an anti-nuclear campaign, similar to the global warming campaign today. It was based on grossly inaccurate information, but it prevailed politically to impose onerous regulations which killed nuclear power as a source of electricity. I have seen a comparison of two nuclear power plants in the United States which began construction at about the same time. One finished up before the new regulations went into effect. It came in on budget, and generates to this day the cheapest, safest, and cleanest electricity on this planet. The second reactor ran afoul of the new regulations. It ran into massive cost overruns, and never was completed.

Lawrence Solomon was part of the anti-nuclear campaign during the 1970′s. Today he has done some excellent research disproving the global warming theory, especially disproving the assertions of a scientific consensus about it; but to this day he is wrong about nuclear power. To this day he says, “Nuclear reactors run flat-out 24/7″, and cannot be adjusted to match power demand. He is simply wrong. The reactor remains critical 24/7, but a reactor can be critical at zero power. The power output automatically matches the power demand. I have personally operated nuclear reactors, and I know for a fact what I am talking about. That is the kind of misinformation which has destroyed nuclear power, the greatest scientific advance in the history of the world.

And that’s the way it is … not the way Greenpeace and others say it is.

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W

hen Obama hysteria mixes with global warming hysteria, the results can be ridiculous indeed, as readers of Grist may have noticed today (probably not, lost in hysteria as they are) upon reading Joseph Romm’s Obama’s First 100 Days Make – and May Remake – History.

This is the third nominee in C-SM’s 2009 Most Ridiculous Story of the Year competition.  The rules are simple:  Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.  So, are your shrill-protectors on? Good, let’s get right into it:

The media just keeps missing—or messing up—the story of the century.

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change—Hell and High Water—then all presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures, and rightfully so.

There is no terror threat. There is no economic crisis. There is nothing you should focus on except global warming and the forced march to alternative energy. I believe the media is on this story well enough, but gosh, they just keep insisting on reporting on other stuff like swine flu, Wall Street, Iraq and politics. Shame on them!

But, shoot, once you understand the threat, you understand why Romm’s so intense:

How else could future generations judge us if the U.S. and the world stay anywhere near our current emissions path, warm most of the inland United States 10 to 15°F by century’s end, with sea levels 3 to 7 feet higher, rising perhaps an inch or two a year, with the Southwest from Kansas to California a permanent dust bowl, and much of the ocean a hot, acidic dead zone — impacts that could be irreversible for 1,000 years if we don’t reverse emissions soon and sharply.

Never mind that we’ve had ten years of cooler temperatures, or that the oceans have been rising steadily at 1/2 to 3/4 inches a year for the last 14,000 years, or that everything he says is based on computer models that didn’t pick up the recent temperature dip. We need to act, and act now! If we don’t, other models might get other things wrong!

But since that is the world as Romm sees it, he just thinks Barack Obama’s first 100 days were peachy:

In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in its first 100 days is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives. While I will present a longer list below — and welcome your additions — three game-changing accomplishments stand out:

1. Green Stimulus: Progressives, Obama keep promise to jumpstart clean energy, economy — conservatives keep promise to jumpstop the future
2. Sustainable Budget: The first sustainable budget in U.S. history.
3. Regulatory breakthrough: EPA finds carbon pollution a serious danger to Americans’ health and welfare requiring regulation

Obama has clearly demonstrated he has a serious chance to be the first President since FDR to remake the country through his positive vision. Indeed, if Obama is a two-term president, if he achieves even half of what he has set out to, he will likely be remembered as “the green FDR.”

Uh-huh. I’ve heard “sustainable” used every which way, but I’ve never heard it used as “driving future generations into a deep cesspool of debt that will paralyze their options and poison their quality of life.” And isn’t it interesting that the fourth most common element – one that is basically us to our core – is suddenly a serious danger to us?

Romm then launches into a tirade against Ronald Reagan for “making conservatives strongly and permanently on the pro-pollution, anti-efficiency, anti-clean-energy side,” and here I thought he was merely correcting some wayward Carter policies.  But what would a leftist rant be without an attack on Reagan?  That was expected, but his next statement caught me be surprise:

… since establishment historians almost by definition focus on the past …

Have you met any historians, establishment or otherwise, who focus on the future?  Me neither.

He then attacks Time’s Joe Klein for an “utter lack of knowledge or interest in the substance of the global warming problem” because Klein wrote this:

The fate of Obama’s first year in office, if not his Administration, will probably be determined by the way he handles four distinct challenges — two in foreign policy and two domestically….

And that’s the second domestic challenge: the realization that Congress will not give Obama everything he wants. Aides say the President’s moments of frustration almost always have to do with Congress. “We know that not every wagon makes it across the frontier,” says a top Obama adviser. “But we’re not willing to decide yet which wagons are going to make it and which aren’t.” In fact, that decision seems more and more apparent: Congress is unlikely to pass the linchpin of Obama’s alternative-energy initiative — a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions to combat global warming and tilt the market toward energy independence but that would also raise energy prices in the midst of a recession.

“The wagon that needs to get through is health care,” says a second Obama adviser, picking up the metaphor. (emphasis Romm’s)

It seems that Klein has reported pretty accurately on the state of affairs in DC, which has nothing to do with whether or not he has an utter lack of knowledge or interest in the substance of global warming policy.  (Romm argues that cap-and-trade is not the linchpin of Obama’s alternative energy initiative, but rather that alternative energy that is the linchpin of Obama’s effort to avert catastrophic global warming.  So what exactly is cap-and-trade? Just some passing fancy of no real consequence? Sheesh.)  He also says all the hooey about cap and trade raising prices should be summarily dismissed because the higher prices won’t kick in until 2012, and the recession will be over by then.

Romm wraps it up with a list of 11 things he really, really likes about Obama’s first 100 days.  I’m not sure I share his enthusiasm; boldface is Romm, standard is me:

1. Obama began the process of blocking the vast majority of new coal plants. Never mind that no viable replacement is in sight and we do still need energy.
2. He began the process of dramatically increasing the efficiency of our vehicles, by stripping them of protective mass, which will result in a steep upsurge in traffic fatalities.  But you wanted to be sacrificed to the global warming god, didn’t you?
3. He appointed a first-rate Cabinet and then unleashed them to start inconvenient-truth telling to the public after 8 years of Administration denial and muzzling of U.S. scientists. First-rate liars, thieves and tax-dodgers, and please, there was no muzzling – it’s just that Bush let both sides be told.
4. In every single major speech, he has focused on the urgent need for the clean energy transition, for a price for carbon (cap-and-trade and “closing the carbon loophole”), and the unsustainability of our current economic system . I just love it when the president of the world’s most successful capitalist nation hawks failed socialistic platitudes and expresses his desire to move beyond success and into gloomy darkness. Can I say “darkness?”
5. He signed into law the tax credits needed to achieve his ambitious goal of 1 million plug-in hybrids by 2015. Yeah, those hybrids with their nickel smelters, acid and costly recycling.  The other night on Top Gear, they followed a 4-cylinder hybrid Prius with an 8-cylinder BMW M3.  The Prius made 17 mpg; the M3 made 19.
6. He signed into law a massive investment in mass transit and train travel. So what if buses and trains are less efficient per capita than cars?
   
7. He signed into law the tax credits needed meet his ambitious goal of doubling renewables in his first term. Yeah, let’s check back on that little gem of Really Big Talking.
8. He signed into law the funding needed to jumpstart a 21^st smart grid that is critical to enable the renewable energy, energy efficiency, and plug-in hybrid revolution. Of course the private energy sector could do this themselves with the sort of incentives Obama is showering on “ambitious” goals like “doubling renewables.”
9. He signed into law the single biggest investment in the deployment of energy-efficient technology in U.S. history. He bought some cars and light bulbs – one of the stimulus program elements I actually liked – except I think mercury-laden screw-in fluorescents are a dangerous joke.
10. For the first time in three decades, he more than doubled the annual budget for advanced energy efficiency, renewable energy, and low carbon technology. Why not? He’s spending like there’s no tomorrow on everything else.

My friend Frank has been arguing elegantly about the need for a less mocking tone when confronting environmental issues, and instead engaging in conservative environmentalism, pointing out that there are more cost-effective, free market was to confront our environmental challenges. I like his thinking but think there’s also a need to confront the loons and call them loons, and I offer as exhibit one of my argument this concluding paragraph from Romm:

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this history-making first 100 days won’t remake history. It’s more than possible that we won’t stop catastrophic warming. But if we don’t stop the 100s of years of misery, of Hell and High Water,” [sic] that will almost certainly be because the conservative movement threw their entire weight behind humanity’s self-destruction — because conservative in both chambers refuse to conserve anything, including a livable climate, and willingly sacrificed the health and well-being of the next 50 generations of Americans for their ideology.

It makes my stomach turn. I don’t know a conservative who isn’t also a conservationist, or perhaps more accurately, a believer in stewardship, the biblical concept the enviros have tried to turn into “sustainability.” The Good Lord taught us to use His creation for our sustenance, but also to protect it so future generations could use it. We are not the evil drones Romm portrays; we are just stewards who want rationality, economic sensibility, an end to agenda-driven over-regulation and a return to sanity.

Romm succeeds in moving us farther from all those noble goals.

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ver heard of VHEMT, pronouned “vehement?”  It’s the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group of earth lovers who must not believe much in evolution because they’re not buying this whole “man as the culmination of evolution” storyline one bit.  Its manifesto:

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens … us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, anothe rray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature’s “experiments” have done throughout the eons.  It’s going to take all of us going.

Shakers on a global scale!  Fortunately, we know their movement will become extinct long before mankind does.  These folks don’t like themselves, or us, much because we are ” a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet.”  That would be the planet that has belched forth volcanos and rivers of sulfurous noxiousness, that has mudslides and billowing sandstorms that choke and suffocate all sorts of critters.  The planet that spawns hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes, which greedily and amorally extinguish all sorts of life.

It would be the planet that once had dinosaurs, which disappeared without any help from man. The same planet that has been through global warming before, without the help of dinosaurs in SUVs:

One theory [of the extinction of dinosaurs] holds that cold, brought on by the Sun’s concealment [after the meteorite strike], is what did them in, but a team of paleontologists led by Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, argues otherwise. Some dinosaurs (warm-blooded, perhaps) were surprisingly good at withstanding near-freezing temperatures, they say.

Witness the team’s latest find, a diverse stash of dinosaur fossils laid down just a few million years before the big impact, along what’s now the Kakanaut River of northeastern Russia. Even accounting for continental drift, the dinos lived at more than 70 degrees of latitude north, well above the Arctic Circle.

And they weren’t lost wanderers, either. The fossils include dinosaur eggshells – a first at high latitudes, and evidence of a settled, breeding population.

It’s true the Arctic was much warmer back then, but it wasn’t any picnic. The size and shape of fossilized leaves found with the bones enabled Godefroit’s team to estimate a mean annual temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, with wintertime lows at freezing. (source)

How do the VHEMT folks, who put all the blame on us, explain how you can get “dinosaurs,” “well above the arctic circle” and “mean annual temperature of 50 degrees” in the same short story? There’s only one answer: The earth’s clilmate cycles warm and cold whether we’re here or not.

To think that we can stop global warming by hobbling progress and prohibiting comfort takes a grand ego indeed, an ego as large as the folks at VHEMT, who actually think they can argue us into eliminating ourselves. Here’s one of their arguments; see if it makes you want to forgo kids and grandkids:

That little clip has only gotten a couple thousand hits, by the way, but it gets huge positive ratings from its viewers.

Never mind that Paul Erhlich wrote about all this in The Population Bomb 41 years ago and has been proved dead wrong; the evil of the human population and the immorality of procreation are memes far more resiliant than the swine flu virus (at least I hope so!).  Our inherent evilness and the desire to turn us off (either through extinction, like VHEMT would have, or by a government-enforced restrictions on our pleasures, which is the goal of green movement) fuels support for massive government “solutions” to the global warming “problem.”  

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Y

esterday, a group of unelected know-it-all bureaucrats decided it’s not enough that California residents alread are crushed under the second-highest tax burden in the nation, they will impose a massive new tax so they might tip at global warming windmills and force us into their choices for our cars.

The LA Times happily established the motivation for this newest attack on Californians’ wallets:

California took aim Thursday at the oil industry and its impact on global warming, adopting the world’s first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that runs cars and trucks.

Oil built this economy; oil fueled the state; oil made fortunes that created universities and endowed charities, but oil is the bogeyman of the Warmies and must be killed at all cost because they think tiny increases in a negligible atmospheric gas are going to kill us all. So CARB, the California Air Resources Board, voted 9 to 1 to pass a complex new rule that will drive up the cost of gasoline and, they hope, penalize hapless car drivers into reducing their fuel consumption by a quarter in the next decade.

And, of course, they hope this false economy will finally create huge consumer demand for electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and, as the LAT hopefully put it, “jump-start a host of futuristic biofuels” from algae, woodchips and other stuff that’s been around forever and has yet to produce energy anywhere near as efficiently as good ol’ God-given crude.

Still, CARB, which calls itself “ARB” in a bold move to reduce electron waste, said:

“The new standard means we can begin to break our century-old dependence on petroleum and provide California with greater energy security” said ARB Chairman Mary D. Nichols. “The drive to force the market toward greater use of alternative fuels will be a boon to the state’s economy and public health – it reduces air pollution, creates new jobs and continues California’s leadership in the fight against global warming.”

Nichols is a long-time California greenie, and one of its most powerful. She started the Los Angeles office of the nation’s richest, most powerful environmental law firm, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and started her many stints on CARB in 1974, when Jerry Brown appointed her its chair. She also was an Assistant Sec at EPA under Clinton. In other words, she’s been forcing environmentalism onto the public for 25 years, and doing quite well at it. The CARB release continues:

According to ARB analyses, to produce the more than 1.5 billion gallons of biofuels needed, over 25 new biofuel facilities will have to be built and will create more than 3,000 new jobs, mostly in the state’s rural areas. Production of fuels within the state will also keep consumer dollars local by reducing the need to make fuel purchases from beyond its borders.

CARB doesn’t bother to tell us how many perfectly good jobs in oil will be displaced by this Quixotic scheme, nor does it deal with the 8,000 pound gorilla in this little matter: water. Many of the rural areas they hope to bring these jobs to already have unemployment rates over 40 percent because water deliveries have been cut back so much farmers can’t grow crops. Where does Nichols expect to find the water to grow the biofuel stock, and where, oh where, does she think she’s going to find the hundreds of gallons of water needed to process each gallon of biofuel?

But they plow on. Forcing the cost of transportation up so they can force us into the cars they want us to drive, or better yet, onto the buses they don’t ride in themselves.

This state is going to Hades in hyperdrive. I’d move, but the LAT tells me 35 states are watching CARB’s action with gleeful anticipation, hoping to follow in California’s path at their earliest convenience. Watch out! California may be coming to a neighborhood near you soon.

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B

eing fortunate residents of Earth, we do have quite a lot to celebrate today … and I do wish Earth Day were a celebration instead of a dreadful day full of dire recitations of the evil man, particularly capitalist man, does to the planet and political grandstanding about saving the earth. As if the Earth could be saved by new-comer pipsqueaks like us … and as if the Earth needed saving in the first place.

But grandstand they will.  In his long-awaited Earth Day proclamation, Obama called for us to protect the nation’s natural resources like, you know, oil, because it “not only fulfills a sacred obligation to our children and grandchildren, but also provides an opportunity to stimulate economic growth.”  He apparently has missed the lesson on how much economic growth oil has stimulated.

Similarly, the eco-loons at Al’s multi-million dollar Repower America.org, made their “green equals jobs” pitch via an email:

We’ve been running ads and talking to people across the country to raise awareness about the carbon pollution loophole. And by adopting our call, President Obama has demonstrated that he understands that a cap on carbon pollution will lead to rapid growth in clean energy investment and create millions of jobs. With unemployment at 8.5%, we know there is no time to waste.

But without swift action from Congress, these jobs will be allowed to go elsewhere, as other nations continue to outpace us on progress towards a clean energy economy.

Not mentioned in this cheery little Earth Day tome is the inconvenient truth that for every new job created by new, high-priced alternative energy, there are many more jobs taken away. Start with the jobs of people who work exploring for oil, extracting oil, refining oil, delivering oil, marketing oil, and figuring out how many billions of dollars in taxes are due the government for those sales of oil. Then add the millions of jobs that will be lost as businesses fold due to rising energy prices brought on by alternative technologies that are not yet ready for prime time.  And the jobs that will be lost because lost oil tax revenues plus billion-dollar alternative energy incentives inescapably will result in crushingly higher taxes on everyone (expect Obama’s favorite class, the under-achieving).

It will be a net loss in jobs, believe me. Slapping together solar panels will not replace those jobs, nor will building windmills off the Hyannis Port coast … nor will, even, defending those windmills against lawsuits brought by the Kennedys.

So celebrate Earth Day as it should be celebrated: Thank God for giving us such a wonderful place to live, and commit to being a better steward of the resources He gave us … which means fighting deep green lunacy vigorously, and adopting light green practices like conservation religiously.

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I

watched this hysterical video the other day – “hysterical” in that the people quoted were immersed in hysteria, not “hysterical” as in funny – on the melting of an ice dam holding back in ice shelf in Antarctica.  We’re told with adequate hysterics that the event disaster happened faster than anyone predicted, so the world must be heating up.

(It reminded me of people who live on the beach and are convinced the ocean is rising because their beach is losing sand – like the celebrity Greenies of Malibu.  Of course the ocean looks higher – there’s less sand between them and it!  The sand is disappearing, by the way, in part because water quality regs forbid people from allowing “particulates,” i.e. sand, to enter streams.  That’s why you can’t take sand that’s built up behind a dam and move it to the stream below the dam – where it would have gone had the dam not been there:  Some enviro-bureaucrat decided that would be pollution.)

So why did the Antarctic ice melt faster than the sacred and immutable computer models thought it would if it wasn’t because of global warming?  Well …

New research from NASA suggests that the Arctic warming trend seen in recent decades has indeed resulted from human activities: but not, as is widely assumed at present, those leading to carbon dioxide emissions. Rather, Arctic warming has been caused in large part by laws introduced to improve air quality and fight acid rain.

Dr Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has led a new study which indicates that much of the general upward trend in temperatures since the 1970s – particularly in the Arctic – may have resulted from changes in levels of solid “aerosol” particles in the atmosphere, rather than elevated CO₂. (The Register, UK)

In other words, the Warmies have no idea going on.  But wait!  It’s worse!

Shindell’s research indicates that, ironically, much of the rise in polar temperature seen over the last few decades may have resulted from US and European restrictions on sulphur emissions. According to NASA:

Sulfates, which come primarily from the burning of coal and oil, scatter incoming solar radiation and have a net cooling effect on climate. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent. While improving air quality and aiding public health, the result has been less atmospheric cooling from sulfates. Meanwhile, levels of black-carbon aerosols (soot, in other words) have been rising, largely driven by greater industrialisation in Asia. Soot, rather than reflecting heat as sulphates do, traps solar energy in the atmosphere and warms things up.

Well, if that’s the case, then the environmentalists and their companion bureaucrats did it!  The very people who would save us and the planet from global warming are heating the joint up because they also want to stop acid rain.  And not a one of there sacred, immutable computer models predicted it.

This is just more proof that human intelligence is far too limited and far too polluted with politics and dogma to manage something as vast, complex and changing as the globe’s climate.  But some scientists, all politicians and most bureaucrats have egos nearly as vast, so they want to have a go at it.

Against this backdrop of climate incompetence, let’s turn to the EPA’s little fiasco in the making: its announcement today that it has concluded that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare. The announcement paves the way for a whole new round of regulations designed to stop climate change – as if global cycles are stoppable by mere humans.

Here’s what the American Petroleum Institute had to say:

“The proposed endangerment finding poses an endangerment to the American economy and to every American family. It could lead to greenhouse gas regulations under a law fundamentally ill-suited to addressing the challenge of global climate change. The regulations could impose complex, costly requirements on restaurants, colleges, schools, shopping malls, bakeries and many other businesses and institutions. The Clean Air Act was created to address local and regional air pollution, not the emission of carbon dioxide and other global greenhouse gases.”

I’m with you, Jack, in fact I’m more than with you.  It’s not just that the Clean Air Act is the wrong law to address this, but that the “solutions” that likely will follow by its application could, like the earlier acid rain effort, just end up making things worse, just as “saving” us from acid rain has.

EPA and UN, keep your hands off our planet!

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I

am a conservative to the core, which supports my frequent criticisms of global warming both in concept and in application.  As a conservative, I am more interested in truth than dogma, so I want a spirited and open debate on anthropogenic global warming, and I don’t want it to be used as an excuse for massive new government expansions, whether it’s actually occurring at levels that threaten us or not.

I’m also a frequent critic of regulatory madness of all ilk; in fact, C-SM has a category named “Regulatory Madness” where you can find a compilation of these posts.  Conservatives can abide by a certain amount of regulation, but with the knowledge that regulations are government weeds, and once they take root they want to do nothing but spread and grow.

So, with this background, I found this comment posted to yesterday’s post on cap and trade to be very intreguing:

Laer,

You keep missing opportunities to reframe the debate on climate change in terms favorable to a conservative approach.

In my view, conservatives will never regain political power in California (and elsewhere) until they address the issues that are important to those that believe in global warming. Simply ridiculing their beliefs is counter productive.

As a fiscal, social and environmental conservative, I say we start promoting conservative principles to improve the quailty of our air and our water, preserve our natural resources, conserve energy, develop alternative energy sources and achieve energy independence.

Rather than belittling efforts to stop global warming, we should emphasis how conservative approaches to addressing the issues above can be achieved with far fewer resources and far less government intervention than any scheme cooked up by AGW alarmists.

So, the next time an alarmist asks “do you believe in climate change?” we should answer “no, but I do have a better way to (fill in the blank).”

Frank

I like very much the idea of being a political, social and environmental conservative.  Frank mentions specifically air and water quality as areas where environmental conservativism should be applied.  Boy should they.  Check this out:

Congressman Farr (D -Natch – CA) has introduced HR 21, dubbed “Oceans 21,” a bill that directs federal agencies to implement the bill’s new National Ocean Policy “to the fullest extent possible” within two years of enactment of the legislation.  That means the “marine ecosystem” health must be maintained with “complete diversity” and the “physical,chemical, geological, and microbial” ocean environment must be maintained to protect that diversity.  How much should it be protected?  Why, to the fullest extent possible.  Not practicable, but possible.

Forget desalination plants or offshore oil rigs.  They will impact the marine ecosystem too much under Oceans 21.

And forget questioning the wisdom of the bill or its application. Farr has that covered with liberal environmentalism:

H.R. 21 also provides that the National Ocean Policy “shall” be implemented such that “the lack of scientific certainty should not be used as justification for postponing action to prevent negative environmental impacts.” (memo from the law firm Nossaman LLP)

Twenty-one members of Congress were so unconcerned about advancing regulation without scientific certainty that they signed on as co-sponsors.

Like Frank, I am an environmental conservative.  I believe in the Bible’s admonition that we serve as stewards of God’s creation, sustaining the resources He bequeathed to us for the future generations He expects us to parent.  But I live my life working for the regulated community, trying to help them find a little wiggle room in a forest of crushing rules and regs, and I am not as optimistic as Frank that we can prevail against the onslaught without some frontal attacks.

I feel here like I felt on Jan. 20 when I wrote that I could not support the success of President Obama, because the success of his policies was too dangerous to the future of America.  I would like to be as optimistic as Frank that holding to conservative principles, including polite deference to other points of view, can be enough.  I want to stand apart from shrill, hysteric environmental liberals and be more thoughtful, clear and polite.

 In my work, I am.  When I write a letter protesting something as costly, imposing and ridiculous as Oceans 21, my language is proper, contained and even complimentary at times.  When I blog … well, not so much.

I have to run to drop Incredible Daughter #3 off at school, then to a long meeting.  I hope to get back to this because Frank’s comment really fascinates me.

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ext Thursday, Interior Sec. Salazar will be in San Francisco on the final stop of his four-city tour to solicit comment on offshore oil leases. We know where Obama stands on the matter – if offshore drilling can be made completely safe, he doesn’t oppose it unless it would further the imminent destruction of the planet by global warming, which of course he figures it does.

Salazar’s tour comes as the fed agency that administers the offshore oil and natural gas leasing program, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), considers the size, timing, and location of the areas to be considered for federal leasing. MMS bases its recommendations in part on the public comments, and the enviros are pulling out the stops. Here’s a bit of an email I got from Endangered (yawn) Earth:

Offshore drilling has the potential to have a negative impact on species already in peril.

The Endangered Species Coalition is encouraging our members and activists to attend the hearing and testify on behalf of threatened and endangered species. …

Secretary Salazar will be at these hearings. We understand it is short notice but if at all possible please attend …. Your message can be simple:

“Offshore drilling poses risks to a number of endangered species. But these risks cannot be properly addressed while the Bush Administration’s Consultation rules and polar bear exemptions remain in place. Hundreds of thousands of public comments were received opposing the changes but were ignored by the last administration, please listen to these comments and overturn these rules. I urge you to act quickly and use the opportunity given to you by the U.S. Congress and President Obama to restore protection.” …

Also, in a show of solidarity we are asking people to wear white for the Polar Bear!

Dressing in white.  How cute.

If you remember the polar bear fiasco, the Bush admin approved listing the bear as threatened even though its populations are growing and the threat to the polar icecap was unproved (and since shown to be unfounded, as the winter freeze-up this year was record-breaking.) But Bush added some rules that allow oil exploration, so the enviros are using the Salazar hearings, which are about offshore oil, not Alaska oil, to protest extraction of any hydrocarbons anywhere, for whatever reason.

What a good idea that is! According to the feds, the U.S. has enough oil and natural gas to fuel more than 65 million cars for 60 years and enough natural gas to heat 60 million homes for 160 years. In fact, the U.S. government estimates that there are 30 billion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable oil on federal lands currently closed to development. So what better idea can we come up with than leaving all of it unexploited?

Although a five-year plan approving increased offshore drilling was released in January, Salazar has directed Interior Department scientists to produce new reports and has extended the public comment period to September, to allow for this little comment-fest. He’s hoping that comments will give the admin cover as it works to deprive us of the easiest route to greater energy independence – which happens to be exactly the route a large majority of Americans endorse. How loony is that?

Fortunately, you can comment without having to go to San Francisco and risk confrontation with gays who are angry you exist and enviros dressed in white in solidarity with polar bears who would just as soon put them out of existence because they’re probably pretty tasty.

Just go to Energy Tomorrow’s Take Action on Access page and spend about three seconds sending out your letter (click the email icon)  or your tweet, Facebook post, YouTube clip or whatever, they’re all there,  encouraging MMS and Congress to allow greater access to domestic energy reserves. And please link to and forward this post – let’s get some letters generated!

And if you want to dress in black in solidarity with crude, that’s OK, too.

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t’s as if the economy were robust, spewing out money to burn.  It’s like everyone agreed there was an imminent threat of global environmental collapse because of human activity.  It’s as if everyone was eagerly awaiting higher costs to everything.

It’s as if the Dems didn’t have a brain in their heads:

House Democratic leaders unveiled a sweeping plan to fight climate change and boost renewable energy this morning, including mandates for renewable electricity nationwide and a market-based system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan … is a “discussion draft” authored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D- Beverly Hills), the committee chairman, and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. Among the bill’s provisions:

* A nationwide mandate for renewable energy — such as wind, solar and biomass — in electric power generation, starting at 6% in 2012 and rising to 25% by 2025.

Shall we discuss the cost of developing that infrastructure out of thin air?  Or the plausibility of the entire concept?  Or the need, considering our coal, oil and natural gas reserves, our hydroelectric capabilities and potential, a nuclear industry just waiting to re-emerge?  (All quotes from the LA Times, BTW.)

* A “cap-and-trade” program to restrict greenhouse gas emissions by requiring utilities and other emitters to hold “allowances” for the carbon dioxide they send into the atmosphere. The level of allowances would shrink annually to reduce carbon emissions to 3% below 2005 levels by 2012, to 20% below 2005 levels by 2020 and to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

Shall we discuss this a bit?  I did with the American Petroleum Institute earlier today, and here’s what the good folks there told me:

API hasn’t taken a position on the topic of cap-and-trade per se, but we have been very outspoken about the potential costs of the cap-and-trade proposal in the administration’s 2010 budget.

Based on the administration’s initial estimate, it appeared the proposal would generate $646 billion in revenues.  Our calculations indicate that about 60% of that would come from oil and natural gas, which equates to about $400 billion. Later administration estimates indicated that the revenues could be three times the $646 billion figure, so it appears the burden on this industry – and on consumers – could be much higher than originally anticipated.

You’d think that before madcap schemes are introduced for discussion, someone somewhere might have a handle on how much destruction the proposal will cause family budgets across America.  But really – $646 billion or three times that amount; do we really need either?

* A national standard, akin to California’s, limiting carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and a new low-carbon fuel standard to further support bio-fuels and low-emission alternatives to gasoline.

Can we discuss this?  Is this really what the automobile industry needs right now?  Perhaps it would be better to get them back on their feet again before cutting them off at the ankles.

Remember, no alternative technologies are ready for market without cap and trade to penalize existing technologies.  They cannot produce enough energy, and they cannot produce it cheaply enough. Cap and trade is just a fancy name for government tromping all over the free market in the name of “saving the planet.”

The planet doesn’t need saving.  The economy does.  And the free market’s on life support.

P.S.: The LA Times report quoted several environmentalist, most of whom were positively giddy about the day’s development.  I sent the reporter this email:

Just read your story and was amazed to find that apparently there wasn’t a single source from industry anywhere for you to get a quote from. Really? Just representatives of environmental groups?

Guess what?  No response.

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