Trump Takes Hatchet To EPA

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

President Trump has launched the opening salvo in his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Trump is tearing into the EPA’s budget by a reported 24 percent, which if approved by Congress would slash the agency’s $8.1 billion budget to George H.W. Bush-era levels and reduce the EPA’s workforce by one-fifth.

Trump and his newly installed EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, are also beginning an aggressive regulatory rollback at the agency, taking aim at climate change programs instituted or expanded under President Obama.

The president on Tuesday signed an executive order asking the EPA to rewrite a controversial water jurisdiction rule that was central to the agency’s regulatory efforts under the Obama administration.
The moves are in line with Trump’s rhetoric during the presidential campaign, when he promised to hobble an agency he considered bloated, overreaching and a threat to jobs in the United States.

Between the EPA actions and other executive orders fast-tracking two contentious pipeline projects, Democrats and environmentalists are bracing for bigger attacks on Obama’s climate legacy.

“I always took him very seriously when it came to his desire to dismantle the Clean Air and the Clean Water Act, and he’s going to try to go through with it,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said.

Trump’s budget proposal, Schatz said, is “radical, it’s extreme and we will fight it. And of course a budget is a declaration of political objectives and not a binding document, so the committees will have their way with it, and I know we’ll have a fight.”

During the campaign, Trump promised to take a much more conservative approach to environmental issues as president.

He pledged to end the water rule and the Clean Power Plan, allow the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipeline projects to move forward, reform the EPA’s regulatory power and expand fossil fuel development in the United States. So far, he’s made progress on many of those goals, ratcheting up the stakes for environmentalists.

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

March 1, 2017 at 03:14AM

Brian Rogers: The Environmentalist Left’s New Agenda

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

Following the Republican sweep in last year’s election, the Environmentalist Left is now experiencing a total meltdown. “World War III is well and truly underway. And we are losing,” wrote Bill McKibben, founder of the climate activist group 350.org, and a key member of the Democrats’ platform committee last year.

Indeed, as President Trump and GOP leaders breathe new life into the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, left-wing environmentalists are pushing their anti-fossil fuel “Keep it in the Ground” movement even further out of the mainstream with a proposal, called “The Solutions Project.”

Conceived by Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson and endorsed by McKibben and others, The Solutions Project is a plan to move America to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. McKibben offered glowing praise for the proposal in a recent op-ed, saying it comes “as close to winning this war [on climate change] as we could plausibly get.”

What McKibben and his allies fail to tell Americans is that Jacobson’s plan would totally devastate the U.S. economy to the tune of 4 million lost jobs, and would be a land grab the size of North Dakota, as a new AR2 white paper makes clear.

Jacobson buries these details deep in his long report and offers scant analysis or consideration of the costs. He casually notes the project will cost $14.6 trillion – or $429 billion per year if spent equally over the 34 years between now and 2050.

Jacobson also waves off the 4 million lost jobs in traditional energy industries by suggesting the U.S. will see a net gain in jobs from wind and solar. What he doesn’t tell readers is that workers in those potential new jobs will make $10,000 a year less on average than those working today in the current energy field.

In his op-ed supporting the plan, McKibben suggests that powering America with 100 percent renewable energy requires a miniscule amount of land. The actual figure? About two percent of U.S. landmass – the size of North Dakota (or 1.5 New Yorks, or 7.5 Vermonts.)

What’s more, even if this radical proposal were somehow muscled through Congress and the White House, their so-called Solutions Project would require a near-impossible pace of development over 34 years: 40 wind turbines per day, four full-sized solar plants per day, and 6,000 solar roof installations every day for 34 years.

Instead of learning the lessons of 2016 and speaking directly to the concerns of American workers – particularly in the industrial Midwest – the Environmentalist Left is doubling-down on an extreme, anti-human agenda. This is the alternate reality they have created for themselves for 2017 and beyond: a world free of both fossil fuels and common sense.

Brian Rogers is Executive Director of America Rising Squared (AR2), a conservative-based policy organization. He can be found on Twitter @brianrogers99

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

March 1, 2017 at 01:43AM

Polar Bears Are a Pest – Time to End Their ‘Threatened’ Status

via Climate Change Dispatchhttp://climatechangedispatch.com

Earlier this week, as I’m sure you know, was International Polar Bear Day. Usually I celebrate by tossing a well-marinaded bear haunch onto the barbecue – note to novices: DO NOT eat the liver. It’s poisonous –  but I couldn’t this year because of pesky global cooling, so instead, I sat indoors by the fire and […]

via Climate Change Dispatch http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN

March 1, 2017 at 01:18AM

Nick Butler: Britain’s Broken Energy Policy Needs Fixing

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

Every strategy reaches the point where renewal is necessary. Time erodes what once seemed logical. Technology transforms the range of possibilities. Assumptions turn out to have been false flags. That is the situation now for the UK’s energy policy as spelt out in a report published last week by the economics committee of the UK House of Lords*.

The existing strategy flows from the 2008 Climate Change Act, which gave priority to the reduction of carbon emissions. A target of an 80 per cent reduction by 2050 was entrenched in law and, although it has never been clear how it would be enforced, the existence of a legally binding target has shaped decision-making in Whitehall. The goal, to be reached in five-year steps, overrides every other consideration — including cost and security of supply.

Several assumptions underpinned that legislation:

• Nations were about to adopt a common approach to climate change at the Copenhagen conference so there could be no worries about the costs of action damaging UK competitiveness or of emissions simply being produced elsewhere
• The prices of oil and gas would inexorably rise because of a combination of growing demand and scarcity of supply
• As hydrocarbon prices rose, even heavily subsidised supplies from offshore wind or new nuclear would look cheap
• In the process, the UK would build a great new industrial sector providing hundreds of thousands of low-carbon jobs.

The risk of designing a policy around wishful thinking could hardly be better illustrated.

The problems caused by these false assumptions have been compounded by mistakes in implementation. Rather than allowing the target to be met by open competition to find the least expensive answer, ministers promoted specific technologies irrespective of cost. Commitments to intermittent sources such as wind were taken without regard for their impact on the economics of other businesses, such as gas-fired power generation — which is low cost and relatively low carbon.

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

March 1, 2017 at 12:41AM