Many researchers (or their institutions) are likely to want their work to be EPA usable, even if EPA does not fund it. They will then adopt usability practices from the beginning, which may be a new way of doing research. This is exactly what the open science movement is calling for.
EPA regulators would only be allowed to consider scientific studies that make their data available for public scrutiny under Pruitt’s new policy.
Data specialist Justhy Deva Prasad encourages the better use of available data — with appropriate action the data call for — by governments in particular to protect citizens from dangerous threats to their health and safety. He further shows how the failure to properly use data in disaster prevention strategies yielded bad results from Fukushima, Superstorm Sandy, ongoing California wildfires, andOroville Dam. And public officials should be held accountable for their failures.
As CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen explains, federal revenues from offshore drilling fell from $18 billion in 2008 to just $2.5 billion in 2016 thanks largely to Obama era policies while state revenues from closer-in rigs went up. The Trump-Zinke proposal would open federal waters (outside the 3-mile limit) to drilling, with huge potential revenues and contributions to national security. The planning and evaluation process, Driessen argues, should not be impeded.
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen laments the long, arduous battle to open the Keystone XL pipeline — an action that would eliminate the need for 1,225 railroad tanker cars per day (450,000 per year) or 3,500 semi-trailer tanker trucks daily (1,275,000 annually) that currently transport oil to refineries, saving lives and costs and creating jobs in rural America. Driessen also recounts the many ways that fossil fuels enrich humanity — from feed stocks for paints, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other products to powering the manufacturing centers that create computers, smart phones, healthcare technologies, vehicles, and batteries.
New Zealander Bryan Leyland and Canadian Tom Harris, both of the International Climate Science Coalition, argue that the United States is setting a bad example and harming its own people — and those in developing nations — by continuing the EPA’s war on coal, nuclear energy, and natural gas. Wind and solar have major problems with reliability, cost, and adverse health and environmental impacts that their proponents gloss over, whereas emissions from modern, highly efficient coal-fired power plants with stack gas cleanup consist almost entirely of water, CO2, and nitrogen.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen weighs in on the attempt by the International Agency for Research on Cancer to shut down sales and use of glyphosate despite numerous studies showing that the world’s most commonly used herbicide does not cause cancer. Indeed, Driessen notes, even the process by which the IARC made its determination is fatally flawed.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen wishes the entire world a happy time of thanksgiving — for the fossil fuels, hydroelectric power, and other contributions to reliable, affordable energy that has powered a dramatic shift in life expectancy and standards of living and world health, lifting billions out of poverty. He further challenges us to extend these blessings to the billions who even today lack the blessings of energy, in part because of elitist, eco-imperialist refusal to underwrite the financing of anything but renewable energy that is unreliable, expensive, and only in some cases the best (short-term) option.
Scot Faulkner assesses the Trump Administration, noting that the President has failed to bring on board people who would actually carry out his agenda and instead has surrounded himself with Never-Trumpers whose goal is to block his agenda.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen explains how the election of trial lawyer buddy John Bel Edwards as Governor of Louisiana has paved the way for Green lawsuits against oil and gas companies that are nothing more than shakedowns — claiming the energy industry as a whole is responsible for coastal land erosion in the state.
CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell reports that President Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has dealt a death blow to the scurrilous practice of the EPA colluding with interest groups to alter public policy through staged litigation that denies opponents of their punitive schemes no opportunity for their own day in court.
Paul Driessen, author of “Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death,” explains the vast difference between Real Sustainability, which implies wisely using our resources and always looking to innovate, and Politicized Sustainability, a radical policy that focuses on focuses on ridding the world of fossil fuels, regardless of any social, economic, environmental, or human costs of doing so — and regardless of whether supposed alternatives really are eco-friendly and sustainable.
The U.S. Supreme Court fell for junk science when it approved the EPA’s “finding” that carbon dioxide is the chief driver of global climate change, notes CFACT advisor Dennis T. Avery. The EPA models have all been proven false using historical and current data, and thus there is no scientific underpinning for this jobs-killing, energy-crushing decision. The hope is that, with Justice Neil Gorsuch now on the bench, the Court will overturn its own “Endangerment” finding.
CFACT science and policy advisor H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute reports that the EPA (and other federal agencies) skew the real cost-benefit numbers in promoting massive regulations. One example: While the Obama Clean Power Plan might have saved 21,000 lives (as the EPA claimed), the rules would also also resulted in from 102,500 to 164,000 early deaths. The HONEST Act hopes to correct these discrepancies.
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?
Eight top scientists responded to complaints by Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Rafael Reif and others condemning President Trump for withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, stating strongly that he had done the right thing for America. The authors cite temperature and other climate data that are at odds with the computer modeling upon which the global warming theory is founded — and show that myriad claims by warmists are either false or misleading. Number one with a bullet is that carbon dioxide is a killer when in fact is is the life-giving catalyst for plant growth.
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.
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.