Some Trump Officials May Be Trying To Kill Coal

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

President Trump has painted himself as the savior of America’s coal industry and the countless miners who have been crushed by its demise.

“For those miners, get ready because you’re going to be working your asses off,” Trump said in a May 2016 speech in front of a crowd holding up “Trump digs coal” signs.

While Trump has moved to rip up regulations burdening the coal industry, his most senior economic aide doesn’t look like he’s jumping on the coal train.

“Coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore as a feedstock,” Gary Cohn said, aboard Air Force One on Thursday, referring to raw materials that get converted into a fuel.

Cohn, who serves as director of the White House National Economic Council, instead praised natural gas as “such a cleaner fuel” — and one that America has become an “abundant producer of.”

While Trump rarely talks up the potential of renewable energy, Cohn sounds like a fan.

“If you think about how solar and how much wind power we’ve created in the United States, we can be a manufacturing powerhouse and still be environmentally friendly,” Cohn said.

Cohn’s comments stand out, but not because they are inaccurate. They jive with what energy experts have been saying for some time. It’s just that Cohn’s comments sound like ones that were written by President Obama’s speechwriters, not Trump’s.

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

May 26, 2017 at 02:07PM

Pope’s Climate Essay Won’t Convince Trump, It Didn’t Even Work On Catholics

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

Pope’s encyclical on climate change appealed to liberals, but conservative Catholics were driven away by the values it invoked

Following their tense and grumpy meeting this week the Pope cheekily presented Donald Trump with a parting gift: his 165-page Encyclical on Care for our Common Home, better known as Laudato Si, in which he outlines his commitment to action on climate change.

Trump’s face, shared widely on social media, hardly suggests any great delight and we cannot expect that a dense theological text will trigger his climate epiphany

But then Trump was never the intended audience. The critical question is whether, in the two years since it was released ahead of the Paris climate conference, the papal encyclical has shifted opinion among Catholics. And unfortunately the answer is “probably not”.

On the face of it the encyclical should have been a key moment in galvanising global action. Climate change is a complex issue around which people require clear guidance – what social theorists call “elite cues” – from trusted high profile figures. And who could be more trusted to the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics than the leader of their church?

But climate change is also an exceptionally politically divided issue. A team at the University of Queensland recently reviewed surveys in over 56 countries and concluded that political orientation was by far the largest determinant of attitudes to climate change. Nowhere is this more the case than in the United States where attitudes to climate change are more strongly divided between left and right than any other single issue – including such hot button topics as gun control and abortion.

Three major US studies have found that liberal Catholics were far more motivated and inspired by the encyclical than conservative Catholics. The most recent study, published last week in the International Journal of Cognitive Science, concluded that “encyclical messages were processed through the perceptual filter of political ideology”. We have no research on the response of Catholics outside the United States but can be reasonably confident, based on wider research on climate change attitudes, that these findings could extend to other developed countries.

What was more surprising, though, was that the encyclical actually increased polarisation. Research by Yale University found that following the publication of the encyclical the number of Catholics who strongly trusted the Pope as a source of information about global warming increased by a quarter. The number who strongly distrusted him doubled.

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

May 26, 2017 at 01:17PM

Too Dangerous To Go Fishing Due To Ice, Canadian Coast Guard Warns

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

The Canadian Coast guard is telling Newfoundland fishermen not to go fishing because of sea ice that’s packed into bays on the northeast coast of the island.

“I would definitely say don’t go out,” said Trevor Hodgson, superintendent of ice for the Atlantic region.

“If you’re in port, that’s the safest place for you to be. If you’re out of port, in open water, don’t try and get back through that ice pack to get into port. Choose another, alternate route,” Hodgson added.

It’s particularly bad now because of the storm that hit the island over the long holiday weekend pushing thick, heavy ice into shore.

Hodgson said he’s fearful fishermen are going out not realizing the potential danger.

“It’s definitely not something that an icebreaker may be able to assist you through. It’s something that you’re probably going to get stuck in for a few days,” he said.

Hodgson said the dense, heavy, tough ice is similar to what’s found in the Arctic. It’s been crushed up by the storm and has heavy packed ice underneath it.

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

May 26, 2017 at 12:05PM

Trump’s Economic Adviser: Obama’s Global Warming Pledge ‘Crippling’ US Growth

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

A top White House economic adviser said Thursday that keeping the Obama administration’s global warming pledge to the United Nations would be “highly crippling” to economic growth.

“We know that the levels that were agreed to by the prior administration would be highly crippling to the US economic growth,” chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said aboard Air Force One Thursday, referring to former President Barack Obama’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris climate agreement.

Obama pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. But that plan would be economically harmful, according to Cohn, and experts say they would not reduce emissions enough comply with the Paris agreement.

President Donald Trump promised to cancel the 2015 United Nations pact while on the campaign trail. Now, Trump says he will make a decision on the agreement following the G7 summit in Italy this week. Nearly 200 countries agreed to a U.N. deal in 2015.

“The president has told you that he’s going to ultimately make a decision on Paris and climate when he gets back,” Cohn said. “He’s interested to hear what the G7 leaders have to say about climate.”

Trump “wants to do the right thing for the environment,” Cohn said. “He cares about the environment. But he also cares very much about creating jobs for American workers.”

Even if Trump keeps the U.S. in the Paris global warming agreement, it will almost certainly fail.

The significant reductions to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions required by the agreement are extremely difficult to achieve due to the immense costs involved. Scientists estimate that simply limiting global warming to the Paris agreement targets would require the annual installation of 485,000 wind turbines by 2028. Only 13,000 turbines were installed in 2015, despite the enormous tax breaks and subsidies offered to wind power.

“It would require rates of change in our energy infrastructure and energy mix that have never happened in world history and that are extremely unlikely to be achieved,” Glenn Jones, a professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M who co-authored the study on the feasibility of the agreement, told Science Daily. “For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it.”

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

May 26, 2017 at 11:43AM