Month: August 2024

Daily News

TAPS Attack: Biden Administration vs. Alaska

“It is now time for DOI and BLM to prove their worth, and whether they are truly working in the public interest, or merely pandering to the Lower-48 radical environmental elite … trying to shut down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) … [and] Alaska.” ( – U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan, below)

Termite aspirations. That term from Ayn Rand toward the enemies of modern living and human betterment is applicable to many energy issues today. One of the most recent examples regards the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which since 1977 has been transporting crude oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez (800 miles) for tanker shipment to markets. Today, TAPS averages about 450,000 barrels of crude oil per day, accounting for 3.5 percent of U.S. production.

Petition to Close

This June, these environmental groups filed a legal petition to the U.S. Department of Interior to phase-out and decommission TAPS: the Center for Biological Diversity; Pacific Environment; Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic; Alaska Community Action on Toxics; Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition; and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (also see here).

“[TAPS] is approaching the end of its useful life due to mounting climate change-driven damages to both the aging pipeline infrastructure and the entire Arctic ecosystem,” the six petitioners state, also citing “the imperative for the United States to rapidly transition away from fossil fuel-based energy.”

Operating under a 30-year pipeline right-of-way granted by the Bureau of Land Management (Department of Interior) with ten years to run, petitioners seek

a managed phasedown of the pipeline, drafting an updated Dismantlement, Removal, and Restoration (DR&R) plan should also promptly commence. Avoiding the most severe harms from climate change requires immediate action to halt any new fossil fuel development and begin a rapid transition towards more sustainable energy sources, especially in the Arctic. We simply cannot afford a decade more of TAPS operations without any comprehensive analysis of its ongoing, harmful impacts and the need to implement fundamental changes towards a phasedown.

Such would be a “taking” and suggests the need to privatize the public domain in Alaska to avoid political issues, to depoliticize, energy policy in Arctic. Such privatization, in fact, would generate revenue to retire federal debt at a time of fiscal constraint.

Biden vs. Alaska

More is going on to de-develop Alaska’s oil industry from Washington, DC. The Biden-Harris Administration is trying to close more areas on Alaska’s North Slope to oil and gas development. The state of Alaska and native governments within the state are suing Biden-Harris in this regard.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has issued a final Environmental Impact Statement recommending the revocation of Public Land Orders executed in 2021 that would encumber 28 million acres in the state. “Leaving PLOs in place across Alaska serves as a de facto land withdrawal that restricts public access, multiple use, and the transfer of certain selected lands to Alaska Native Vietnam-era veterans,” a press release by Alaskan U.S. senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan stated. “With this action,” Murkowski added:

the Biden administration has wasted an opportunity to do right by Alaska by refusing to lift a single acre of a single PLO anywhere in our state, instead keeping all of these lands in a restricted status. This is effectively a new form of administrative land withdrawal, even though most PLOs in Alaska have served their purpose and are no longer needed. This wouldn’t be acceptable in any other state, but this administration is once again treating Alaska differently—and far worse—than states in the Lower 48.”  

Sullivan noted that the Biden Administration “has issued more than 64 executive orders and actions directly targeting Alaska … harming our jobs and economy, but also our Alaska Native communities, who will be denied access to gravel resources to build out local village infrastructure.”

TAPS is part of this federal attack. Dan Sullivan recently wrote this letter to Interior Secretary Debra Haaland and director, Bureau of Land Management, Tracey Stone-Manning. His inquiry and request foreshadow an all-out attempt to root out the termites at work 4,300 miles away.

I am writing to express my serious concerns with the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to walk away from its commitment to the State of Alaska to revoke Public Land Order (PLO) 5150. Your decision to abruptly abandon the public process associated with lifting PLO 5150, without notice, at the same time that far-left environmental groups are trying to shut down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) raises questions regarding potential collusion between the Biden Administration and the Lower-48 radical environmentalists that want to shut down Alaska.

The revocation of PLO 5150 would enable the conveyance of the land under TAPS to the State of Alaska. As detailed in a letter that the Alaska congressional delegation sent to the Alaska State Director for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on July 8, 2024, BLM recommended that numerous PLOs be partially or fully revoked, including PLO 5150 … But unsurprisingly, BLM also failed to publish an EA for PLO 5150 when it released final SEIS for the Central Yukon RMP, despite BLM’s commitment to Alaska’s DNR to do so.

At a recent Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, you provided a series of excuses to explain away your failure, claiming BLM’s “plates are full” and that your decision to abandon the EA process for PLO 5150 was a “collective decision about workload with the Department.” Such a statement is a complete and utter affront. Indeed, the voices of Alaskans are yet again being ignored by your Administration. This became abundantly clear during your recent visit to Alaska, when you ignored requests to meet with State and tribal leaders, yet continue to meet with representatives of the very groups trying to eliminate resource production in Alaska.

Unsurprisingly, as you know, and perhaps in coordination with your team at BLM, on June 12, 2024, a coalition of far-left environmental groups petitioned DOI and BLM to take the following actions:

  1. Immediately initiate scoping for supplemental environmental review of the TAPS;
  2. Complete an SEIS for TAPS with “meaningful” alternatives and mitigation measures; and,
  3. Draft a plan for the dismantlement and removal of TAPS, and the restoration of the right of way.

Their request is a significant undertaking, as in 2020, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) concluded that, on average, it takes 4.5 years for an agency to complete an environmental impact statement, compared to an EA, which takes a much shorter period of time.

It is now time for DOI and BLM to prove their worth, and whether they are truly working in the public interest, or merely pandering to the Lower-48 radical environmental elite. DOI is required to respond to the petition, “within a reasonable time…[and] proceed to conclude a matter presented to it.” So, if DOI and BLM choose to move forward with the environmentalists’ petition, it will confirm my suspicions that DOI and BLM’s plates are, in fact, not “full” and that leadership decisions regarding “workload with the Department” are intended to cater to their far-left allies, given an SEIS for TAPs will take a significantly longer period of time than an EA for PLO 5150.

With that in mind, I request that BLM provide to my office not later than September 13, 2024 the following records:

  1. Communications with Third Parties: All records reflecting communications (including emails and email attachments, text messages, Teams chats, iMessages or any other communication app messages, telephone call logs, calendar entries, meeting agendas, meeting notes or memoranda, faxes, or any other physical or electronic records reflecting communications, including those that have been deleted or in draft form but are recoverable) that “officials within the United States Department of the Interior exchanged” with any person who is not an employee of the U.S. Federal Government regarding: (i) Public Land Order 5150; (ii) the Trans-Alaska Pipeline; or (iii) the Central Yukon Resource Management Plan. Please search from January 1, 2021 through the date of the search.
  2. Decision Documents: All records reflecting communications (including emails and email attachments, text messages, Teams chats, iMessages or any other communication app messages, telephone call logs, calendar entries, meeting agendas, meeting notes or memoranda, faxes, or any other physical or electronic records reflecting communications, including those that have been deleted or in draft form but are recoverable) between officers or employees of the federal government (between or internal to any department or agency), which concern, reflect, relate to, or include:
    A. Any determination, discussion, or identification of deficiencies within the “Central Yukon Draft Resource Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement, Alaska,” published by the Bureau of Land Management on December 11, 2020, including those determinations, discussions, or identifications of deficiencies regarding Alternative E, which recommended lifting PLO 5150;
    B. Any determination, discussion, or identification of the ground on which the decision was made to recommend retention of PLO 5150 in the “Central Yukon
    Proposed Resource Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement, Alaska,” published by the Bureau of Land Management on April 19, 2024; and
    C. Any determination, discussion, or identification of the grounds on which to approve or deny the petition filed with Secretary Haaland by the Center for Biological Diversity, Pacific Environment, Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on June 12, 2024 requesting “a supplemental environmental impact statement for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System & Plan for dismantlement, Removal, and Restoration.” …
  3. Personal Emails and Texts: Personal emails and texts sent by the following list of employees from January 20, 2021 through the date of the search:
    A. All communications, including any attachments, sent to or from any nongovernmental email address or phone number established, controlled, or used by any of the following employees.
    B. All records referring or relating to the use of any nongovernmental email address or phone number established, controlled, or used by any of the following employees.
    C. All communications, including any attachments, made or received in connection with the transaction of government business using any nongovernmental email account or nongovernmental communications device established, controlled, or used by the following employees….
  4. Calendars: All calendars or calendar entries for the following individuals, including any calendars maintained on behalf of these individuals (e.g., by an administrative assistant) from January 20, 2021 through the date of the search: …

I request that the calendars be produced in a format that includes all invitees, any notes, and all attachments. Please do not limit your search to Outlook calendars alone. Please produce any responsive document be it paper or electronic, available on a government-issued or personal device used to track or coordinate the time the individual allocates to agency business.

The post TAPS Attack: Biden Administration vs. Alaska appeared first on Master Resource.

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August 20, 2024 at 01:07AM

Daily News

No, Evie Magazine, Climate Change is Not Causing Anxiety

From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

Evie Magazine, a conservative-leaning women’s publication, recently posted an article titled “Climate Change Anxiety Is A Cause For The Decline In The Birth Rate,” in which the author claims that human-caused global warming is leading to climate anxiety which misdirects its wrath at larger families. This is mostly false. Climate change is not producing anxiety so much as false and misleading alarmist media coverage is, but it is true that blaming large families for bad weather is equally wrong.

The article begins with writer Carolyn Ferguson claiming that “last year was the hottest year on record for the world,” and that the United States is somehow warming faster than the rest of the world, and that “many are feeling the effects of global warming this year.” This is false.

The idea that any given country is heating up faster than the rest of the world has been done to death, and has been claimed for just about every single country on the planet. It should be obvious that every place on earth cannot be warming faster than the rest of the world. Scientists are selecting regions and comparing them independently over different timeframes, using different datasets and methods, whatever timeframe is most optimal to show the most warming. This makes these comparisons basically worthless.

The fact for the United States is that the record of high temperature anomalies, that is, extreme heat, has not shown an increase in those high temperature events since the best records begin in 2005. (See figure below)

According to longer term data, heatwaves in the U.S. today are less frequent and severe than they were in the 1930s, as seen below:

Likewise, as discussed in this Climate Realism post, the change in the number of days with temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit has actually declined for the majority of the country. Only 10 U.S. states show an increasing trend.

Even looking at proxy data globally which give an idea of ancient temperatures do not indicate we are in a period that can be described as “the hottest on record.” Today’s temperatures according to some sources appear similar to that of the Medieval or Roman warm periods, roughly 1000 to 2500 years ago, respectively. Media claims to the contrary are just propaganda.

The majority of the abnormal warming from last year occurred in Antarctica, where temperatures remained well below freezing, but was simply “less cold” than normally occurred during certain months, particularly September. A significant portion of last year’s heat globally was boosted primarily due to the natural El Niño cycle, which is known to bump up average temperatures for much of the globe. This effect is easily traced in the temperature records.

This is not to say an average warming has not occurred over the past hundred-plus years, but it is not unprecedented nor is it alarming.

The Evie post proceeds to claim that aggression rises amid higher temperatures, writing “one of the most often overlooked corollaries is a rise in communal anger and aggression.”

The “heat makes people crazy” idea has been floated several times over the years, but even the article the Evie post links to admits that it’s likely heat is not the main factor in most of the studies that found aggression. The social sciences and psychology experiments are rifle with uncontrollable variables. Without attempting to conduct any studies, the plain fact that places like Florida and Mexico, the Bahamas, and other hot tropical locales are popular relaxation destinations seems to throw cold water on the hypothesis. Why would anyone go someplace that makes them angrier or more aggressive for vacation?

Discomfort can be aggravating, certainly, but it’s not just higher temperatures alone. Ferguson then gets to the claim that mental health professionals are “seeing more patients come in with symptoms of climate change anxiety, which is supposedly the root of many activists’ anger when it comes to large families.”

Climate Realism has written extensively about how misleading the climate anxiety diagnosis is, here, here, and here, for examples, often shifting the blame from the true culprits. Something like “climate anxiety” does exist – but it is a media-driven phenomenon because of the constant drumbeat of impending doom, not from actual lived experience of warming. Constant media coverage telling people that we are hurtling towards “global boiling,” that every weather extreme is because of you and your neighbor’s use of gasoline, including from typically conservative publications like Evie Magazine, is what is causing anxiety in people.

While Evie is right that climate activists should not turn their ire on big, traditional families, they are wrong that climate anxiety is a legitimate phenomenon.

As Ferguson correctly concludes in her piece, if someone decides not to have kids, “that’s their prerogative, but they should know this decision will likely have little impact on saving our planet.”

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August 20, 2024 at 12:02AM

Daily News

Regulators need to stop assuming they can get away with everything

How can we rein in the administrative state?

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August 19, 2024 at 11:10PM

Daily News

Fuel Load and Forest Fires

Don Healy

Over the past several years, I have been corresponding with many local journalists regarding the cause of the recent increase in forest fires in the U.S. Using the written word alone has garnered only modest success. While a few now mention fuel load in their articles, the mention is cursory at best with them harping back to increasing temperature as the driving force. Concluding that are more graphic approach was necessary I decided to use a period of Covid isolation to enhance my limited skills using the charting functions of Microsoft Excel. The following is the result when comparing U.S. data on acres burned to temperature and to fuel load:

Examining the situation from this perspective makes it very clear that fuel load is by far the dominant factor. This also confirms what we were taught by the forestry professors at Oregon State University in the late 1960s.

The rationale behind the chart and the sources for the data are as follows: The graph compares the number of acres burn in U. S. forest fires in recent decades to the two major conditions responsible for this increase, temperature and fuel load. The dashed orange “acres burned” line on the graph illustrates the increase in the acreage of forest fires that has occurred in the U.S. in the past four-plus decades. This data comes from the U.S. Interagency Fire Center. (Source: https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires) This record used to extend back to the 1920s but was recently amended to cover the period from 1983 to the present, due to concerns about the earlier methods of determining burned acreage. Unfortunately, the Agency has nothing to replace this earlier data. Many are using this amending of the prior record to conclude that earlier periods, particularly the 1920s and 1930s, experienced fewer fires than were originally recorded. That assumption appears unwarranted in light of other peer-reviewed studies, the logs of some of the earlier Spanish and English explorers, anecdotal evidence from many of the early settlers, and even an account by Mark Twain during his visit to Tacoma in the 1880s. However, the data in this graph has been limited to currently approved data.

Upper solid blue line on the chart is the volume of merchantable timber on all ownerships in the U.S. and was obtained from the surveys conducted by the U.S.F.S. every ten years covering both hardwood and softwood timber species. (Source:  United States Department of Agriculture Forest Resources of the United States, 2017A Technical Document Supporting the Forest Service 2020 RPA Assessment Sonja N. Oswalt, W. Brad Smith, Patrick D. Miles, and Scott A. Pugh. https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/57903) The dots on this line represent the precise data results from the surveys.

This record actually extends back to 1953 and shows that from 1953 to the last survey in 2017, merchantable timber volumes have increased by 60%. The U.S.F.S. inventory figures for 2017 were 985,238 million cubic feet. Therefore each digit on the left vertical axis represents 100,000 cubic feet. Not having any data on total biomass, the timber inventory figures have been used as a proxy for total fuel load. In reality, the fuel load increase is probably much greater than indicated since non-merchantable trees, shrubs and grasses, some highly invasive, have not been included. Going forward, the CO2 fertilization effect may further impact the fuel load situation by both increasing the growth rate of virtually all plant life, and its ability to increase the drought resistance of plants and trees. As an example, red alder trees are growing about 20% faster than they were in 1950.

The center dashed green line charts the change in the average annual temperature in the contiguous U.S. from 1983 to the present in degree F. This data is from the National Weather Service. (Source: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-temperature-index/time-series/anom-tavg/1/0) This graph was designed to show visually how much temperature has increased within the framework of normal human existence. The top horizonal blue dashed line is at 130 degrees F., slightly below the highest temperature record in Death Valley, and the bottom horizontal dashed magenta line represents -50 degrees F, (the coldest recorded was actually -70 degrees F.) In virtually all reporting today monitoring climate, temperatures are shown in tenths of a degree that greatly magnifies very small changes. It is important to compare data such as temperature changes, fuel load and acres burned on scales equitable for that comparison.

Comparing these three elements on a rational scale shows that acres burned tracks fuel load rather closely, while the small change in temperature is barely noticeable. However, most media and official reports stress the role of increasing temperature, with seldom a mention of the fuel load issue. If we are to deal effectively with the forest fire issue it is imperative that we get the foundational data correct first so we can develop effective strategies to deal with this major threat to mankind.

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August 19, 2024 at 08:03PM