Author Archives
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen rebuts arguments from alarmists that recent hurricanes are evidences of the damages of global warming. Indeed, Driessen shows how the use of fossil fuels has dramatically reduced the cost in human life from hurricanes and other severe weather events.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen reports on positive changes in forest management at two federal agencies — Interior under Ron Zinke and Agriculture under Sonny Perdue. New policies will go a long way at reducing deaths of humans, animals, and plants from forest fires, and dramatically lower the costs of forest management while increasing the amount of forest land available for recreation and harvesting. As Driessen says, cleaning out dead, diseased, burned, overgrown trees would bring countless benefits — and make our forests healthy again.
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen quotes multiple climate scientists who explain that high-rainfall tropical storms have battered the Texas coast (and Florida) for generations of recorded history (and likely long before). Thus, the efforts to tie Hurricane Harvey to “climate change” are “disgraceful” — and ignore the reality that Houston was built on impermeable clays and reclaimed swamp lands with a history of subsidence.
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen corrects some assumptions in an earlier article about the energy, land, and materials requirements for creating a totally wind-powered United States. The numbers are staggering — even though based on best-scenario assumptions. The real world situation would likely be much worse. Simply put, the goal of a 100% wind powered nation is a pipe dream.
Croplands, habitats, taxes, family budgets, safety sacrificed to enrich a politically connected few?
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen recounts the terrible destruction of families through the forced closure of mining operations in Peru in the recent past and today in Guatemala — led by a coalition of rich, mostly white liberal “social justice” warriors who fund radical activists to do their dirty work. Sadly, the courts in these Central and South American countries have allowed these protests with no input from the operators, the mine workers, or even fair-minded citizens.
What if wind, solar and electric vehicles operated in a fair market?
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen explains how life without fossil fuels will not be the utopian adventure that advocates for banning them claim. For starters, there would be no more wind turbines or solar arrays because fossil fuels are needed to construct, transport, and install them. Worse, the rest of the world will laugh as we turn backwards to the dark ages.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen champions a new book, for which he provided one essay, entitles, “Climate Change: The Facts 2017,” which covers climate changes through the ages and reveals the devious tricks that alarmist “researchers” have used to modify and “homogenize” actual temperature data to fit their alarmist computer models. Driessen then points out the tremendous human cost of these foolish, people-killing policies that are insisted upon by the radical greens and are sadly being adopted in all too many places.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen explains why the renewable fuel standard is out of touch with today’s energy realities — the ethanol mandates, including for cellulosic ethanol — far exceed even the perceived need. Ethanol ruins gasoline mileage, and gasoline cut with 15% ethanol ruins older automobile and truck engines (pre-2007) and almost all small gasoline-powered engines (including outboard motors, lawnmowers, and more).
Where would Tesla be without subsidies?
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen calls out Duke University, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the British Center for Ecology and Hydrology for falsifying or fabricating data, ignoring critical data (and thus cherry-picking data for the “right” result), and other egregious sins — with a special emphasis on how these and other institutions conspired to make neonicotinoid pesticides into bee killers rather than bee life savers (which they often are).
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen explains the huge costs and inefficiencies of replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and biomass fuels.
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen, with climatologist David Legates, asks those who claim that “we are still in” the Paris climate accord pay their equal share of the U.S. payment mandated by the Paris accords? How also will they justify the loss of jobs, revenues, and even the health of their constituents — almost all of whom were not consulted when these leaders made their high-sounding pronouncements — all of whom did so without providing a pathway for making the payments to the UN or the early retirement of fossil fuel power sources and replacement with the massive, very expensive wind and solar and biomass units needed to keep America’s electrical grid functional without major interruptions in service? The fact is that none of these blowhards can answer these questions, so they prefer to ignore them, hoping they will not have to do so.
The rants of pesticide-hating environmentalists may theaten the honeybee population much more than the subject of their rage — neonicotinoid pesticides that destroy Varroa destructor mites that actually do kill millions of bees. CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen explains that the installation of a beehive on the Vice President’s residence could focus on how to protect bees from these vicious, though tiny, predators that suck the bee’s hemolymph blood-equivalent out of them, compromising their immune systems and vectoring in a dozen of more viruses and diseases into honeybees and colonies.
The hard economic and environmental realities of wind, solar, and biofuels “alternatives” to fossil fuels will likely awaken other leaders – and persuade other nations to Exit Paris.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul K. Driessen — with colleague Mark J. Carr — explain in an open letter to President Trump five major reasons to exit the Paris climate agreement — which was designed to cripple the U.S. economy and enrich elitists while devastating the ability of the world’s poor to escape poverty.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen urges EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to revise the review process for threatened and endangered species to include broad-based Extending the review beyond the litigants and the agencies to include all parties impacted by the designation to have a voice. Only then can the review incorporate all the topics addressed by experts and affected parties — people who can help evaluate the science and policy implications for the affected species, as well as for farming, construction, jobs, families, and other species. This article focuses on recent designations of bumble bees.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen lauds President Trump’s call for a review of recent land withdrawals under the Antiquities Act — as do residents of western states whose economic and personal freedom has been severely impinged by these heartless actions by grandstanding Presidents. While federal agencies own just 0.3% of Connecticut and Iowa, and 0.6% of New York, they own, manage and control 63% of all land in Utah; 61% in Alaska and Idaho; 80% in Nevada; 29% to 53% in the other western states. Restrictive federal land use policies severely affect job creation and economic opportunities for states, communities, families and our nation as a whole, for little environmental benefit.
The New York Times trumpeted the high number of people servicing and installing solar panels. The job numbers actually underscore how wasteful, inefficient and unproductive solar power actually is.