From the DAILY CALLER

Nick Pope
Contributor

President Joe Biden is reportedly preparing to restrict offshore oil and gas drilling in his final days in office, a move that would placate the environmentalist lobby and potentially obstruct President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to unleash the U.S. energy sector, according to Bloomberg News.

Biden’s reportedly forthcoming order would permanently ban new lease sales for oil and gas drilling in certain regions of the outer continental shelf, according to Bloomberg News, which cited anonymous sources familiar with the situation. Some elected Democrats and many well-funded green groups have pushed Biden to implement permanent environmental policies in the waning days of his presidency to fluster Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

While the scope of the order is currently unclear, there have been internal discussions about targeting certain areas off the coast of California and in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Bloomberg News. It is also unclear when the administration will announce the policy, though it could be within a matter of days. (RELATED: White House Touts Support Of Confrontational Enviro Group That Harassed Admin Officials, Dems)

President Joe Biden waves to the press as he walks

While many of the Biden administration’s energy policies will be relatively easy to reverse, the reportedly forthcoming offshore drilling decree will be permanent and “difficult-to-revoke” because it is enabled by a law that permits presidents to protect federal waters from drilling without clearly allowing them to walk back prior designations, according to Bloomberg News. Still, Trump could try to roll back Biden’s order, though it is not clear whether or not he would be successful. The offshore protections are clearly at odds with Trump’s campaign promise to unshackle and unleash the U.S. energy sector.

The Biden administration also worked to reduce offshore oil and gas activity by issuing the most restrictive five-year leasing schedule in modern history in 2023.

The lame duck administration has also been working to finalize climate policies and disburse funding for various green initiatives in the wake of the election, doing things like blocking oil and gas development in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains for 20 years and finalizing massive taxpayer-funded loans for green energy companies.

The White House did not respond immediately to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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From ClimateREALISM

By H. Sterling Burnett

Forbes and NBC News were among several media outlets that ran what turned out to be ill timed articles on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day claiming climate change threatened to end snow on Christmas. This is false. Despite repeated claims of the “end of snow,” made repeatedly by myriad mainstream media outlets in the past, data show snowfall amounts overall have remained relatively stable over the past few decades, with, if anything, snow falling earlier while declining late in the season with a slightly earlier arrival of spring. Overall snow trends are virtually unchanged, and white Christmases are as frequent or infrequent as they have been historically going back to the little ice age prior to the late 1800’s when, due to entirely natural factors, winters were more severe.

Forbes’ Christmas Day article, “Will Climate Change End the Dream of a White Christmas?” and NBC’s Christmas Eve story, “How climate change is making white Christmas a rare event,” were both misleading and particularly ill-timed. Misleading because snowfall and snowpack on or around Christmas is not becoming rare, and ill-timed because even as the stories were running, New York and Boston, among other areas on the Eastern Seaboard were experiencing their first White Christmases in years, with more than one inch and four inches of snow on the ground respectively in the two cities. Lest on think that proves the point that snow for Christmas is becoming a rarer occurrence is these locations, it turns out snowfall and snowpack is relatively rare for both cities on Christmas due to their locations on the Atlantic ocean which moderates temperatures across the region.

Misleadingly bemoaning the disappearance of show, Forbes wrote:

For generations, the allure of a white Christmas has captured imaginations worldwide, a phenomenon immortalized in songs and movies. Yet, as global temperatures rise due to climate change, the possibility of snow-covered Decembers is slipping further out of reach in many regions. Recent data reveals the chilling truth that climate change is reshaping winters, and the implications go far beyond holiday aesthetics.

According to NASA, the planet’s average surface temperature has risen by about 1.1°C since the late 19th century, with most warming occurring in the past 40 years. Winters, once defined by prolonged snowfalls, are growing shorter and milder.

Neither Forbes nor NBC are the first to assert that climate change means the end of snow. Sadly, for media integrity, they also likely won’t be the last make such false claims. The New York Times, CNN, and the Daily Telegraph, among other promoters of fake climate news, have made such claims previously. Climate Change Weekly and Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, have debunked such claims in the past couple of years.

Had Forbes and NBC looked beyond the slight rise in temperature to speculate about snow’s decline, and rather looked at long-term snow data, as captured by the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, they would have found, that snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere has increased over the past 50 years of modest warming. (See the graph, below)

In fact, the now seemingly discontinued site, Cold Weather Report, during its operation detailed the number of snow records set in the United States and around the globe in recent years. Electroverse has an even longer, continuous track record for covering unusually severe cold and snow events and the harms they cause. Forbes and the other mainstream media outlets seemingly can’t be bothered to check the records discussed in sites like this before running their annual, seasonal slate of misleading alarming climate change stories about the end of snow.

As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Snowpack, NASA satellites also have measured a modest increase in snow cover across North America, Europe, and the Northern Hemisphere as a whole since the 1980s. (See the graph, below)

Some falls, winters, and springs will see colder temperatures and more snow than others, some will see the opposite, warmer temperatures and less snow, but long-term, there has been no trend in declining snowfall, snowpack, or snow extent during the recent period of modest warming. Credible news outlets should report this fact rather than trying to push alarm and climate action based on a false narrative about the end of white Christmases.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.