Guest post by David Middleton
Much of the sarcasm in this post, as well as some of the material, was borrowed from previous posts of mine.
At first glance, I thought she was flipping the bird at the camera.
Energy and Environment
EPA chief: Trump can’t halt U.S. shift to clean energy
By Brady Dennis November 21
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday gave an impassioned defense of the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policies and insisted the nation’s shift from fossil fuels will continue no matter who occupies the White House.
“The inevitability of our clean energy future is bigger than any one person or one nation,” Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a speech at the National Press Club that was twice interrupted by protesters.
[…]
“Science tells us that there is no bigger threat to American progress and prosperity than the threat of global climate change,” she said. “And if you take nothing else from my speech today, take this: The train to a global, clean-energy future has already left the station. We have a choice. We can choose to get on board, to lead. Or we can choose to be left behind.”
[…]
“Science tells us that there is no bigger threat to American progress and prosperity than the threat of global climate change”… Good fracking grief!!!
Can you say delusional?
The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale University, which has the highest climate costs of the Obama administration’s three models, estimates that global GDP in 2100 without climate change would be $510 trillion. That’s 575 percent higher than in 2015. The cost of climate change, the model estimates, will amount to almost 4 percent of GDP in that year. But the remaining GDP of $490 trillion is still 550 percent larger than today. Without climate change, DICE assumes average annual growth of 2.27 percent. With climate change, that rate falls to 2.22 percent; at no point does climate change shave even one-tenth of one point off growth. Indeed, by 2103, the climate-change-afflicted world surpasses the prosperity of the not-warming 2100.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442383/donald-trump-climate-change
Setting aside the facts that the Social Cost of Carbon is 100% mythical and that neither 2.27% nor 2.22% growth are paths to prosperity (2% growth is basically treading water). We’re supposed to gleefully spend $44 trillion over the next couple of decades based on a statistically insignificant difference between two rolls of the DICE?
Even with U.S. “leadership,” the commitments made by other countries under the Paris agreement look almost identical to the paths those countries were on already. Thus the agreement’s impact is at best a few tenths of a degree Celsius. MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, for instance, projected 3.9°C of warming by 2100 without the Paris agreement and 3.7°C with it.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442383/donald-trump-climate-change
If Ms. McCarthy defines “prosperity” as the difference between 2.27% and 2.22% GDP growth, she is fracking delusional.
If Ms. McCarthy thinks that our salvation from the “threat of global climate change” rests on the difference between 3.7°C and 3.9°C from 1850-2100, she is delusional… Particularly since almost all of the actual observation-based data indicate that the total warming in a “business as usual” scenario will be no more than 2°C from 1850-2100.
This bit is priceless…
“The train to a global, clean-energy future has already left the station. We have a choice. We can choose to get on board, to lead. Or we can choose to be left behind.”
“The train to a global, clean-energy future” is the tiny green “hockey stick” at the bottom of the graph. It runs mostly on corporate welfare and the “train” literally “can’t get there from here”…
Despite the investment of over $1 trillion of private capital and billions in corporate welfare since 2008, wind and solar have actually grown at a slower pace than natural gas and are projected to have a slower growth rate through 2040. Renewables, including hydroelectric, have barely gotten back to where they were in 1930.
Draining the Swamp
The swamp draining can’t begin soon enough. This will be a good start:
Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.
Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.
This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bn next year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.
Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.
“We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.
[…]
Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be “a major setback if not devastating”.
“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.
[…]
“Without the support of Nasa, not only the US but the entire world would be taking a hard hit when it comes to understanding the behavior of our climate and the threats posed by human-caused climate change,” he said.
[…]
Hopefully President Trump’s first budget will zero out some of this…
Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009. As shown in figure 1, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has reported federal climate change funding in three main categories since 1993:
- technology to reduce emissions,
- science to better understand climate change, and
- international assistance for developing countries.
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The major problem is not the political appointees like Gina McCarthy, but the civil service staffers at EPA, many of whom are zealots. It may be required to do a reorganization to RIF the existing staff, as without another very difficult change in law, they are very difficult to fire.
Why doesn’t this EPA buffoon know anything about advanced energy technologies that not only
don’t require subsidies, but that will provide reliable and cheaper power than any other technology, and eliminate the issue of nuclear wastes as well. Think molten salt reactors, children. From several
sources (MIT grads at Transatomic Power, or England’s Moltex Energy , or the Chinese govt crash program) we will get a commercial reactor within 5 years that can be produced in factories, deployed quickly, able to consume nuclear wastes as fuel, never run out of fuel – can even burn Thorium – intrinsically walk-away safe, incapable of spewing radioactive material into the environment or experiencing a core meltdown, can load follow demand, etc Superior operating characteristics and economics will lead all countries to adopt these reactors – no govt subsidies needed. To make decisions about a subject, it is sometimes beneficial to know something about those subjects (sarc.)
The Chinese head of their LFTR programme is on record as saying they expect first commercial Thorium reactor no sooner than 2030
The molten salt reactors will only be able to be operational quickly in the US if (IFF) the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can accelerate its processes. They can only be operational quickly if (IFF) all NGO / nuclear protest legal actions are resolved quickly, decisively and across the whole of the model range (no mor lawsuits for each and every installation – leagally clear them once). They can only be deployed quickly if the anti-nuclear propaganda of the last several decades is publicly shown to be rubbish and protesters laughed at. I should think that by now we would know that valid technology and valid science really don’t mater much – we now live in the world of hopes and reams, where whatever some activist says is taken as ground truth.
I get what you are saying, but the simple fact is that present nuclear reactor technology is safe and has a very low cost per kilowatt-hour. So-called nuclear wastes (used reactor fuel rods) need only be processed to remove the neutron poisons so they can continue to be used as fuel. (This will not be significantly different for thorium, which produces fission wastes according to a very similar spectrum with U-235 or Pu-239, -240, and -241.) There are thousands of tonnes of uranium and thorium in every cubic kilometer of seawater. Reactors built within containment vessels (de rigeur for about half a century in the United States) are “incapable of spewing radioactive material into the environment.” If you are concerned about uranium enrichment or core meltdowns, I recommend the CANDU reactor (look it up), which cheerfully does without either.
Thorium is fine, but it is NOT NECESSARY. There is nothing intrinsically wrong or debilitating with present-day nuclear reactor technology. It is perfectly adequate and economical. What is necessary is to remove the political stigma about nuclear power per se, and this can be done by knocking the nonsense down like a pesky fly. And, as already mentioned, put the permitting process under rational management.
Interesting.
” The train to a global, clean-energy future has already left the station. We have a choice. We can choose to get on board, to lead. Or we can choose to be left behind.”
The last bit of the sentence fits perfectly with President Obama’s tendency to “lead from behind”.
So what is all the fuss about?
While they are kvetching about the distant future productivity cost of NOT doing anything about AGW, how about the cost of doing the WRONG things today. Like negative compound interest, the losses in GDP every year from fruitless ventures will multiply lost GDP in the out years.
Without government’s thumb on the scale and appropriations, the hype on climate change will disappear. Talk about the ultimate echo chamber…
Has EPA penalized itself for the Animas River spill?
‘Bye, Gina! Don’t go away mad, just go away…
To me, Gina McCarthy appears to be a very angry person, even to the point of being filled with hatred. All that such people need to do to satisfy that hatred is to pick a side. Then, any action taken against any opposing side(s) becomes justified, regardless of moral or rational basis to the contrary.
she is a modern liberal so indeed filled with HATE is accurate.
Let us propose a toast to the new TRUMPOCENE!
“The train to a global, clean-energy future has already left the station. We have a choice. We can choose to get on board, to lead. Or we can choose to be left behind”.
Wow, so many questions.
Okay first, if the train has already “left the station”, then how are we supposed to “get on board”? Fly? Secondly, if we managed to get onboard somehow, then what – are we supposed to suddenly, magically “lead” the train by I suppose suddenly becoming train engineers?
Her flawed ‘train has left the station” analogy is understandable though, in that the idea is for us to act now, “before it is too late”. This is a typical ploy for someone trying to sell you snakeoil.
Hansen’s ‘death train’perhaps?
I agree with the EPA and Trump. Can the progress be stopped? Not once it is economically viable to stand on its own. Given the current pace and my personal opinion, I believe 30 – 50 years. Better hedge my bet to an even 100.
“Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding…”
—————–
As long as Gavin Schmidt gets defunded (and ousted,) then the world will be a much better place.
I would like to see Schmidt forced into a mea culpa situation and acknowledge his many erroneous assumptions. Perhaps an intervention is required …
“Science tells us that there is no bigger threat to American progress and prosperity than the threat of global climate change”…
What they are really trying to say there, but won’t is:
“Science tells us that there is no bigger threat to American progress than the threat of prosperity ”…
That’s the way that I see it.
“No greater threat …. than that of global climate change…” Really? Try EMP! – The true threat – now! Avoidable with a fraction of the costs now wasted – and requiring the re-employment of many workers now idled.
I hope Trump keeps NASA’s evidence of Climate Change page up but just annotates it with facts showing it was pure specious crap. The perpetrators of the scam need to be jailed.
I don’t understand why Trenberth is complaining, because his organization stands to benefit from the shift of money from Gavin to him.
What makes you think the money going to GISS will be redirected to NOAA? I think the money to GISS will just stop.
“The cost of climate change, the model estimates, will amount to almost 4 percent of GDP in that year.”
The ‘cost of climate change’ is really the ‘cost of the demonstrably false belief that man has any significant effect on the climate’. It looks like they are seriously low balling the cost of this mistake, because it only seems to include the presumed indirect costs of warming, while the piece of the pie they ignore is all the money and opportunity wasted attempting to mitigate a problem that can’t exist. They actually consider this waste to be positively adding to the GDP!
The most expensive component of this cost is too large to be measured in dollars which is the damage done to the integrity of science by allowing political narratives to drive scientific conclusions.
Where is ol’ Griff when he is needed? AWL!!!
Day out – and some internet problems… apologies to anyone who asked me a question & has had no reply… haven’t been able to make browser work. I love computers…
This should be an easy “your fired” for Trump when the head of the EPA doesn’t know how much CO2 is in the air.
Also I’ve been looking for how much the U.S. spends on climate change per year. I’ve found from tens of billions to hundreds of billions. Anyone have an idea?
This is a little dated (to 2014) but gives a good idea of what the trend has been in the recent past…
Federal Climate Change Expenditures Report to Congress: ~$22 billion dollars per year,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/legislative_reports/fcce-report-to-congress.pdf
Wait, wait. I thought the purpose of NASA was to promote the multitude of Muslim accomplishments in the sciences. I don’t wish to be pejorative, but didn’t Obama actually say that some years ago?
Yep,
Obama directs NASA to reach out to Muslims,
http://www.space.com/8725-nasa-chief-bolden-muslim-remark-al-jazeera-stir.html
He most certainly did…
Oops, I misspoke yesterday, “EPA Chief Urges Staff To Finish Obama’s Agenda Before Trump Takes Over”
Nov 11, 2016
Oops! I wrote yesterday that “Gina McCarthy has announced that the EPA has effectively stopped working on a cap and trade scheme and their other ambitious plans related to the Clean Power Plan (CPP), Waters of the United States (WOTUS), etc. to prepare for the orderly transfer of power.”
Self-righteousness rarely goes quietly into that good night “and the world looks just the same and history ain’t changed….” I should have known that the early reports were wrong.
It is still safe to assume that energy, environmental safety, wireless broadband, the electrical grid and their convergence will continue to play a preeminent role in America’s future, even without the moral rectitude and certainty of the current EPA. Steve
I hope the screen door hits her in the ass on the way out
You had to go and give me that visual, didn’t you?
“God will get you for that, Walter.”
I would lie to kick her in the ass. Except my foot would b soiled.
The EPA has developed into a formidable behemoth:
“… Since 2006, the EPA Criminal Enforcement Program spent approximately $715 million fighting ‘enviro-crime.’ With 200 Special Agents, the EPA also spent millions of dollars on military-style weaponry … for example: $2.1 million purchased guns and ammo up to 300MM – the majority of these expenditures were on weapons “up to 30MM” ($1.73 million).
Other checkbook entries included body armor, camouflage and deceptive equipment, unmanned aircraft, night vision, radar equipment, tactical sets, kits, and outfits …”.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2015/10/21/the-climate-change-liberation-army-and-u-s-environmental-protection-agency-epa-adventurism/#26f44e6941b9
And all that must be transferred immediately to the armed forces.
Climate change is on balance good! A Limerick and explanation.
The Epoch named Anthropocene:
Man’s fire appeared on the scene.
CO2, it is good
makes it green, grows more food.
To call it THE threat, that’s obscene.
A longwinded defense of CO2: https://lenbilen.com/2016/11/22/climate-change-is-on-balance-good-a-limerick-and-explanation/
If we could predict the climate, not weather, for 1, 10, 100 yrs ahead, 100% accuracy, what benefit could we derive from that?
Now how much would it cost if we could?
What is the likely cost/benefit?
Now mathematics tells us that we will never be able to predict 1yr at 100% accuracy. So I propose that we stop all climate modelling, all climate research and switch to a sane, expandable energy system and a sane adaptable environmental system.
Not proud of the English in this but I’m tired
The EPA should be relegated to advisory status.
McCarthy should be brought before congress (as should her predecessor), for destruction of public documents and contempt of congress.
Hopefully, once the ‘swamp’ is cleaned out, they can start putting traps out for the rats.
The EPA should be eliminated entirely. Virtually every state in the nation has an EPA of its own. Let each state deal with these issues as it deems fit. 50 states, 50 laboratories. Get the issue down to the local level where it belongs.
The train to a global, clean-energy future has already left the station. We have a choice. We can choose to get on board, to lead. Or we can choose to be left behind.”
The name of that train is: “The Gravy Train” which features billions in government funding, salaries, graft, favoritism, political agenda, biased science and corruption. It needs to have a “train wreck” and we need a new way of doing things that focuses on authentic science, that uses critical thinking and has real world accountability. Apply it rationally to our energy, environmental and other policies.
Go after the real pollution in the air, water and soils. Since the EPA made its political decision to declare CO2 as pollution in 2009 (to regulate it under the Clean Air Act) and we’ve heard all about carbon “pollution” for a decade, many people’s brainwashed minds would probably explode if they tried to comprehend the scientific fact that CO2 is actually a beneficial gas.
Rather than trying to understand it, unfortunately most will instead fight the truth vs going along for a ride on the “reality train”.