Environmentalism

CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell hails the action by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to seek peer-reviewed investigations of facts and fictions regarding key areas of agreement and dispute on climate policy. Bell notes that Mother Nature is a far bigger player in climate change than is human activity, and that indeed even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits that the climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system.

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.

Aside from protests by Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio, and friends, the public didn’t seem to raise its carbon dioxide (CO2) anguish much above the Russians-election frenzy when Trump exited the Paris Climate Accords. Statistician Bjorn Lomborg had already pointed out that the Paris CO2 emission promises would cost one hundred trillion dollars ($100 trillion) […]

CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell calls out Ben Santer, Kerry Emanual, and Naomi Oreskes for their shrill opposition to genuine peer review that might well expose fake science. And for good reason. Santer is one of the top perpetrators of false and misleading information through his work with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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.

CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell chronicles the hysteria over climate change over the past 100 years– starting in 1922 when the Washington Post predicted most coastal cities would be uninhabitable “within a few years.” But by 1974 Time Magazine was warning of an impending Ice Age. It was back to warming by 1989 — but the warming trend fizzled out by the end of the world (er, Y2K) — leaving money-hungry activists with “climate change” as their solgan word — a term now defined as anything that happens is bad but we at the UN can just have all of your money,

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.

CFACT policy advisor Larry Bell notes that even Fox News’ Chris Willace has drunk the Kool-Aid, as he assaulted President Trump for refusing to subject American citizens to the whims of a UN agreement that intentionally targeted the U.S. for punishment. Apparently, there are a large number of Americans who still want to be horsewhipped for the sins of their forebears (which while vile were universal at the time). Wallace, it appears, has joined the Jellyfish backbone crowd.

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.

To the consternation of alarmists, New York Times op ed writer Bret Stephens openly questioned the “consensus” that has demanded uniform acceptance without question of the global warming/climate change orthodoxy. As CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell reports, Stephens asserts that ordinary citizens have a right to be skeptical of an “overweening scientism.” He wisely warns us to remember that “history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”

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.

President Trump could save the U.S. economy $3 trillion and 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by opting out of the Paris climate agreement — a very bad deal for the United States. So says CFACT policy advisor Larry Bell,

CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen chides the conferees at the upcoming water summit in Chicago to admit that the ongoing hysteria over “climate change” has distracted regulatory agencies and state and local governments fromaddressing much more significant issues related to clean water (and others as well). The economic malaise that resulted from Obama’s war on coal — and thus on coal miners — has led to an unprecedented increase in opioid addiction that is just one sign of the assault on families conducted in the name of climate change. Meanwhile, Milwaukee dumps unrtreated wastewater and sewage into Lake Michigan, and many U.S. cities have failing water and wastewater systems taht might have been updated had it not been for the monies redirected toward enriching global warming advocates.

As the environmental movement unfolded, Presidents courting green votes have increasingly used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to sequester large swaths of land — and water — from future public and private use — all too often without the advice and consent of elected officials and citizen groups. These seizures have cost states and private citizens the use of these properties, and the revenue and enjoyment that come from such uses. President Trump’s executive order is step 1 in putting a stop to these unpopular land grabs and hopefully to reopening noncritical acreage to a variety of human uses.

As CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen points out, REAL science is easily distinguished by fake science. His latest evidence compares the testimonies of three real scientists (Dr, Roger Pielke, Jr., Dr. Judith Curry, and Dr. John Christie) versus heralded pseudo-scientist Michael Mann (who was caught cherry-picking data to “prove” his “hockey stick” thesis) at a recent House Science Committee hearing. Pielke, Curry, and Christie all described the science that lies behind their stances, while Mann resorted to an ad hominem attack on “climate deniers.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s designation of the the rusty patched bumblebee as endangered has already set in motion a rash of legal actions to block individual projects and stop all development in large swaths of land.

By Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek “If you could pick just one thing to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy,” Bill Gates has said. “Access to energy is absolutely fundamental in the struggle against poverty,” World Bank VP Rachel Kyte, and Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen agree. The UN Development Program also calls […]

President Donald Trump will recommend cutting the EPA budget 31 percent.

CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Drieseen outlines the various justifications for wind turbines and biofuels and shows the fallacies behind arguments in their favor. The simple truth is that renewable energy costs more, and that hurts the poor, who are doubly stung as their tax dollars are given as subsidies to wealthy speculators (like Warren Buffett, who chortled that the subsidies are the reason he makes money from wind).