I use the word “endangerment’ in the title specifically to allude to the fact that the Supreme Court, at the behest of the Environmental Protection Agency, declared carbon dioxide, the gas that makes life on Earth possible, is in fact a danger to human life. Who would have thought this possible except for those desiring to rule over all human life.
The powerful benefits of fossil fuels have been largely ignored the past four decades as so much of the public focus has been on your carbon footprint. This is defined as the amount of fossil fuel energy consumed per person. It is an entirely fraudulent scare tactic regarding the resource that has enabled America’s outstanding standard of living. Burning petroleum in your car uses less energy, encumbers less land and emits less carbon dioxide than burning a bio-fuel like corn ethanol. But we should not even be making any statement on carbon dioxide that casts it as a dangerous gas. It is not.
EPA lied to the Supreme Court to convince them carbon dioxide was a pollutant. It is not. It is the breathe of life allowing us all to enjoy life on planet Earth. We can go a step farther by saying that our carbon dioxide footprint actually shrinks our physical footprint on the earth.
Replacing fossil fuel based electric generation with wind and solar power generation would require massive amounts of land and the destruction of natural habitats in return for less energy efficiency. This sadly is what our new administration is calling for. and will likely call for it for the length of their term in power.
While the uninformed, misinformed and those knowingly lying consider wind and solar to be clean, it is not. In their book Fueling Freedom, authors Steve Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White state that an average wind farm uses 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete for every megawatt it produces. In contrast, natural gas combined cycle power plants use about 3 metic tons of steel and 27 cubic meters of concrete.
Germany’s energy transformation to wind and solar has now caused them to build dozens of new coal fired plants to keep up with the loss of capacity required by its population. Due to intermittent wind and solar power, electric costs have tripled there.
Any discussion of energy and the environment sooner or later comes around to the Environmental Protection Agency formed by President Nixon’s Executive Order in 1970. Now it is one of the most powerful unrestrained and politicized agencies of the Federal Government. This writer served their as an advisor in the 1970s when an excellent safety net of environmental protections were established. It all changed in 1980 when 40 years of radical insurgents began to fill its now 10,000 strong regulatory staff. Obama’s administration passed dozens of economically stifling rules that had no benefit to public health or the environment .
While Trump over turned many restrictions, the deep state held forth on anything relating to climate change or energy. Dr. Will Happer, a renowned scientist now focusing on our climate, spent a year in the Whitehouse advising Trump. He resigned after recognizing the power of the deep state’s radical staff, to thwart sensible revisions to climate policy. They have been contemptuous of engineering realities, sound science and human concerns.
EPA’s power may grow by an order of magnitude under the new administration which boasts that climate change is an existential threat to the world. In fact it is an existential threat, not because of the Earth’s temperature but because of government’s attempt to control if not enslave the citizenry, by limited the energy available to them. This will eventually require energy rationing.
Labeling carbon dioxide as a pollutant is one of the climate change lobby’s more absurd gestures. Actually the idea that adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere endangers life has been ridiculous from day one. The money, power and media control of the dialogue has made the impossible appear possible to a scientifically limited public. As one who has spent over 6 decades dealing with our energy resources, I believe the man-caused climate change scam is no less without merit than if the left had insisted we stop mining the earth’s minerals for fear that we would reduce the mass of the earth such that its gravitational pull would decline and we would all float away.
The EPA has gone a long way toward making a reality of Al Gore’s dream of making the environment “the organizing principle of society”. A plan Mr. Gorbachev adopted upon leaving the leadership of the Soviet Union.
Under the Obama administration EPA invented a huge pool of health risks to justify more stringent regulation. Climate change is the mother of them all.
Many people still believe that economic growth leads to environmental degradation when the opposite has always been true. The improvement in environmental conditions and economic growth in the US has gone hand in hand the past half century, as more money became available to improve our air, water and soil. Not a story told in the mainstream media. A period when the use of fossil fuels has doubled.
Affordable electricity has improved human welfare in the 20th century moe than any other technology. Yet well over a billion people in the world have never seen an electric light switch. Policies now asserted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and our own government limit or prohibit financing for affordable fossil fuel fired electric generation in developing countries.
This elite green perspective cruelly denies the world’s poorest families basic light heat, and cooling, on which health and well being depend.
Note: Portions of this article were excerpted from the book FUELING FREEDOM with permission of the authors Steven Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White. It is the in this authors opinion the best source of information on our nations energy resources.