DELINGPOLE: The EPA’s Air Pollution Scare Is Just Another Fake News Myth

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAThttps://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com

By Paul Homewood

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From Dellers on Breitbart:

More fake news from the Washington Post: turns out that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has helped save Americans from a substance which kills 4.2 million people every year – air pollution.

No really. If you believe WaPo it’s the fifth deadliest killer known to man:

The researchers concluded that exposure to particulate pollution was the fifth deadliest health risk of all 79 they studied, ranking behind high blood pressure, smoking and high blood sugar, and about matching high cholesterol — conditions many people upend their lives in order to mitigate. Air pollution exposure was deadlier than having high body mass index or alcohol use.

So clearly, WaPo’s message runs, President Trump would be mad to rein in this vitally important agency.

Except the claims just aren’t true. As Steve Milloy explains in lavish and incontrovertible detail in his book Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA this whole scare story is based on the flimsiest of junk science.

In a chapter called EPA Fails Every Test – because it describes how the EPA fails every test… – Milloy describes failings in the EPA’s methodology so spectacular you’re left gasping in disbelief that this could be the handiwork of a real government agency. Surely, you tell yourself, this must be some kind of Manchurian EPA, a sort of parody organisation designed and funded by some sinister right-wing cabal with the express intention of satirising Big Government lunacy and discrediting the Obama administration which relied on it so heavily to advance its war on capitalism.

But no the Environmental Protection Agency really is as useless as its critics say – and nowhere is this more evident than in the way it concocted a completely dishonest air pollution scandal involving particles classified as PM_2.5.

If you believe WaPo’s editorial, this is the fifth biggest killer of our age. But that’s only because they’ve taken at its word a big new report State of Global Air – which was part funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and which used the same suspect methodology the EPA used to finger PM_2.5 as the major environmental problem it simply isn’t.

Milloy who has testified before a number of Congressional hearings on the subject describes it as the “biggest government science fraud of our time.”

What the EPA and its useful idiots in the media have done is to take the public’s perfectly natural concerns about pollution and air quality – but then demonise air particles so tiny and ubiquitous that it’s quite impossible to regulate against them without damaging whole swathes of US industry.

Which is exactly what the EPA has done. Its ozone rule – introduced to combatPM_2.5 has lumbered the US economy with an estimated $1 trillion in compliance costs and more or less destroyed the US coal industry, wiping out 90 per cent of its value during the Obama years.

So there must be some evidence to justify all those job losses and all that massive economic damage?

Nope. None at all.

You can read the full details on this fact sheet.

Not one single epidemiological study, not one toxicological study, not one clinical study has EVER demonstrated that PM_2.5 is capable of causing death either in the short term or due to prolonged exposure. If these tiny particles (which by the way are produced by dust, pollen, mould, pet dander, forest fires, sea spray and volcanoes, among other natural sources, as well as from cigarette and dope smoking, wood fire burning and fossil fuel burning) were as deadly as the EPA claims, people would be dropping like flies from London to New York to Beijing.

But they’re not. The whole problem is an EPA fabrication. Another fakenews scare, eagerly promoted by the liberal media, in order to stop the Trump administration doing what needs to be done to Make America Great Again.

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March 7, 2017 at 09:24PM

Illustrations of Conjectures Are Not Evidence for Them

via Climate Scepticismhttps://cliscep.com

A new post up at WUWT by Lawrence Hamlin supports the recent Lindzen et al petition for the USA and others to leave the UNFCCC, and he draws attention to this phrase buried deep in the IPCC report (AR5), concerning outputs from coupled socioeconomic and climate models: “The scenarios should be considered plausible and illustrative, and do […]

via Climate Scepticism https://cliscep.com

March 7, 2017 at 08:16PM

The Next Energy Revolution: Tanker’s U-Turn Shows How Shale Is Changing World Gas Trade

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

A cargo of chilled natural gas hauled from Louisiana in late December has become a symbol of how global trade is changing for a fuel increasingly seen as a cheap, cleaner-burning option for countries from Latin America to China and India.

The tanker Maran Gas Achilles passed through the Panama Canal and was headed toward Asia at a speed of 20 knots when, suddenly, it made a sharp u-turn in the Pacific. Next stop: Mexico’s Manzanillo terminal on the southwest coast, where it unloaded.

The abrupt route change shows how the U.S., which began shale gas exports just last year, is creating a new paradigm in an industry that once revolved almost entirely around longterm contracts with set destinations. As the new kid on the block, exporters of U.S. liquified natural gas — led by Cheniere Energy Inc. and Royal Dutch Shell SA — are seeking the best price at any given time. As U.S. exports grow, it’s a strategy that could shift the economics of LNG toward an emerging spot market akin to oil.

“The U.S. puts gas into places on short notice at a good price,” said Jason Feer, head of business intelligence at ship broker Poten & Partners Inc., in a telephone interview. “It’s been flexible. The market’s becoming more short-term and the U.S. has been very effective at meeting those needs.”
The U.S. stands to become the world’s third-largest exporter by 2020, when it’s expected to ship about 8.3 billion cubic feet a day of capacity, or 14 percent of the world’s share, according to London-based consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. That growth is a testament to the power of the shale boom of the last decade, helping to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign energy sources.

Supply Glut

U.S. natural gas futures traded at $2.866 per million British thermal units on Wednesday, compared to latest assessed spot LNG price in Singapore of $5.652 as of Monday.

Drilling technologies such as hydraulic fracturing have made it profitable to tap vast resources of carbon fuels trapped in rock thousands of feet below the surface. The results: A natural gas supply glut stuck stubbornly in place since mid-2015, and billions of dollars redirected toward new export facilities by Cheniere, Dominion Resources Inc., Kinder Morgan Inc. and others.

Breanne Dougherty, a natural gas analyst for Societe General SA in New York, calls the U.S. push into the global LNG market “an inarguable game changer.”

Having gas delivery that isn’t fixed by destination represents a new type of supply that will undoubtedly lead to more flexible contracts being signed elsewhere around the world, according to Dougherty. U.S. terminals made another key break from the global norm by pricing LNG off of the country’s benchmark Henry Hub in Louisiana instead of tying it to the price of oil, she said.

First to Ship

Cheniere, which built the Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana, was the first to ship shale gas abroad. The Houston-based company is now in the process of starting up its third plant and, alone, is expected to own 7 percent of the world’s export capacity in 2020, according to Energy Aspects.

In its debut year, Cheniere shipped 56 cargoes to 17 countries, including Mexico, China, and India. Last week, it reported its first quarterly earnings gain since 2010.

“We continue to be pleasantly surprised by the speed and magnitude” of demand, said Anatol Feygin, Cheniere’s chief commercial officer, during a conference call last week. “China and India underscored their potential to quickly increase LNG demand and tighten global markets.”

Just a year ago, Cheniere was at CERAWeek by IHS Markit, the energy industry’s yearly get-together in Houston, to talk about the launch of its first tanker from Sabine Pass.

Fegyin is scheduled to present at this year’s meeting on Wednesday, a week after the company’s announcement that it has secured its first deal to tap Canadian shale to supply its LNG production, expanding its influence as one of North America’s largest gas buyers.

Prior to the start of U.S. exports last year, Asia and Europe were seen as the likeliest customers. Gas production in Europe is declining as demand grows and, in some cases, countries have expressed a desire to displace pipeline imports from Russia, seeking to diversify their supply at a time of unsettled geopolitics, according to Dougherty, of Societe Generale.

However, while analysts and traders watched whether Europe would emerge as a big buyer, Mexico, which already imports the most U.S. gas by pipeline, quickly became the largest importer of shipped-in LNG from the U.S., followed by Chile. China, South Korea and Japan boosted buying during the winter. Perhaps the most unexpected customers were in the Middle East, as Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates took in tankers in the backyard of the world’s largest supplier, Qatar.

Dominion Resources Inc. is expected to join the fray as a U.S. exporter by the end of this year, with its Cove Point terminal in Maryland bringing the nation’s export capability to about 3.2 billion cubic feet a day, according to Energy Aspects data.

For natural gas, it’s “a new world order” that not only promises to establish the U.S. as the swing provider, but also allows emerging countries to take advantage of low prices, said Ted Michael, an LNG analyst with Genscape Inc.

Floating Factories

Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan are already taking advantage of the change by using tankers docked at their shores that are basically floating factories, able to convert chilled fuel shipped into the country back into gas so it could be distributed on their pipelines. Outfitting ships with regassification plants are a third of the cost of building an onshore facility, and can be installed in a quarter of the time.

“The revolution has many moving parts,” Michael said. The broadening of outlets for exported gas could “easily” help boost U.S. gas output by about a third to 100 billion cubic feet a day in the next five years, he said.

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via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 7, 2017 at 07:51PM

Five Reasons Why Ridicule Is The Proper Response To Global Warming Alarmists

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

If it seems that the climate radicals are acting desperately because they sense that their “movement” is dying, then that’s probably an accurate assessment.

From EPA employees threatening resistance to Donald Trump’s presidency to junk-science guy Bill Nye appearing on Fox News to tell the world that humans are fully responsible for “the speed that climate change is happening,” the irrational behavior is overflowing.

Of course the alarmists can’t give up their shrillness. They’re still bullies who try to marginalize, shame and silence those who don’t agree with their narrative that man is dangerously overheating the planet through his greenhouse gas emissions.

But they’re the ones who should be mocked. Here’s why:

They’re wrong. The devastating heat they predicted simply hasn’t happened. Climate scientists Roy Spencer, John Christy and others have showed this numerous times.

They’ve hidden their true agenda. The zealots want to destroy capitalism and take over the world’s economy.

Two years ago, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “this is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years.”

A year later, Ottmar Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2008 to 2015, admitted that “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

They’re hypocrites. Every year, delegates, many of them on private jets, fly to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, from where they hector the rest of us about our carbon footprints. The busybodies also regularly jet to the U.N.’s global warming conferences, held in such global hot spots as Paris, Cancun, Copenhagen and Milan. Wherever they go, their accommodations are always lavish, their travels well attended to, and their dining sumptuous. Of course their goal is to strip 21st-century comforts from everyone else in the name of “fighting” climate change.

The hypocrite-in-chief is of course Al Gore. While constantly haranguing the world about man’s carbon emissions, he’s lived the very lifestyle he condemns. From a 20-room home that requires yacht-loads of energy, to banking as much as $100 million from the oil barons who bought his old cable network, to his habit of using private jets to whisk him away to preach his sermons about the evils of fossil-fuel use, his life is a lie.

They’re authoritarians. Merely disagreeing with them is much like disagreeing with the Castros. The clearly deranged Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that some climate skeptics should be prosecuted as war criminals. Last March, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there had been official discussions about prosecuting “deniers.”

This came at the prompting of Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who has suggested the government use organized-crime laws to go after the same people. Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva has targeted, through the use of government police power, climate researchers whose work he doesn’t like, while academic activist David Suzuki has encouraged Canadian politicians to find “a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.”

Leonardo DiCaprio. Here’s a high school dropout who’s become fabulously rich doing what kindergartners do every day — pretending to be someone else and imagining that they are doing something they aren’t doing, and probably never will or would do. It’s called acting and it pays some of its practitioners well.

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via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 7, 2017 at 07:51PM