The rule will ensure that the regulatory science underlying Agency actions is fully transparent, and that underlying scientific information is publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation.
“The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end,” said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. “The ability to test, authenticate, and reproduce scientific findings is vital for the integrity of rulemaking process. Americans deserve to assess the legitimacy of the science underpinning EPA decisions that may impact their lives.”
This represents a massive victory for both Pruitt and President Trump in their war on the Green Blob. It’s a victory too for the taxpayer and for free markets.
It means that if this or any future administration in the U.S. wishes to create new environmental policy it must do so on the basis of science which is credible and reproducible and independently verifiable. No longer can policy be slipped through the system on the say-so of a cabal of eco-activists whose “science” is to be taken on trust.
President Trump has once again come out in defense of his embattled Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt.
While Security spending was somewhat more than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt has received death threats because of his bold actions at EPA. Record clean Air & Water while saving USA Billions of Dollars. Rent was about market rate, travel expenses OK. Scott is doing a great job!
Trump has finally risen to the defense of his embattled EPA chief Scott Pruitt. Quite right too, for Pruitt is by some margin the best Administrator the Environmental Protection Agency has had since it was founded by Richard Nixon in 1970.
This is not just because Pruitt is so good. It’s also because his predecessors were so bad. Not merely incompetent, but in several cases actively corrupt, dishonest, and criminal.
As Steve Milloy notes here, all three past Democrat EPA administrators flagrantly violated public records laws, including the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):
Climatologist Dr Tim Ball has won a landmark victory in a long–running legal battle against the green blob. John O’Sullivan reports:
After 3–week trial Canadian judge dismisses all charges in the lawsuit brought against Dr. Tim Ball by British Columbia Green Party leader Andrew Weaver. Climate skeptics are hailing the verdict as a key victory over extremists promoting human–caused global warming. Not a peep from the mainstream media!
“The judge ruled that Weaver was not defamed by me and dismissed the claim completely.This was after almost seven years and thousands of dollars in legal costs.” But Ball lamented, “There are no media reports and my guess is there won’t be any.”
Professor Andrew Weaver is a champion of Canadian greens and Desmogblog (a site funded by a convicted criminal).
This marks the beginning of the end of years of misery suffered by Ball, formerly professor at the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and one of the world’s most prominent and outspoken climate skeptics.
Ball is now aged 79 and should be enjoying a happy retirement. But as he explained recently on the Delingpole podcast for Breitbart, his savings have been exhausted and his peace of mind (never mind that of his poor wife) has been ruined by a serious of vexatious lawsuits – arguably brought about with a view mainly to impoverish, discredit and break him – brought about by the richly funded environmental lobby.
In this time of alcohol-fuelled indolence, late nights, late breakfasts, and “oh God, do I really have to go back to work already?” I think it’s important that we remind ourselves who our enemies are and whom we must destroy utterly in 2018.
For me, there is one candidate that stands out above all the others, not because it’s the most physically dangerous or the most savagely cruel or the most monstrously evil, but simply because it is the most ubiquitous and insidiously vile and repellant.
I’m talking, of course, about the Green Blob.
Over the last year, I’ve written quite a bit about how the entire global warming industry is basically a junk-science-fuelled scam and the biggest financial and scientific scandal in the history of the world.
Some of you may think I’m exaggerating. So in order to stiffen up your sinews, summon up your blood, and gird your loins for the fight in 2018, let me parse for you a recent newspaper editorial which sums up pretty much everything that is wrong with this scam.
It comes from my favorite financial magazine — Moneyweek — and is a summary of an editorial which appeared in the Financial Times.
Read the paragraph, if you can stomach it, then I’ll explain why it drove me to apoplexy when I read it in the bath over Christmas — and why you should be just as annoyed and disgusted as I am:
From the world of science – as opposed to grant-troughing junk science – two more studies confirming that the man-made global warming scare is a myth.
One, a study by Scafetta et al, published in International Journal of Heat and Technology, confirms that the “Pause” in global warming is real – and that “climate change” is much more likely the result of natural, cyclical fluctuations than man-made CO2 emissions.
Abstract
The period from 2000 to 2016 shows a modest warming trend that the advocates of the anthropogenic global warming theory have labeled as the “pause” or “hiatus.” These labels were chosen to indicate that the observed temperature standstill period results from an unforced internal fluctuation of the climate (e.g. by heat uptake of the deep ocean) that the computer climate models are claimed to occasionally reproduce without contradicting the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGWT) paradigm. In part 1 of this work, it was shown that the statistical analysis rejects such labels with a 95% confidence because the standstill period has lasted more than the 15 year period limit provided by the AGWT advocates themselves. Anyhow, the strong warming peak observed in 2015-2016, the “hottest year on record,” gave the impression that the temperature standstill stopped in 2014. Herein, the authors show that such a temperature peak is unrelated to anthropogenic forcing: it simply emerged from the natural fast fluctuations of the climate associated to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. By removing the ENSO signature, the authors show that the temperature trend from 2000 to 2016 clearly diverges from the general circulation model (GCM) simulations. Thus, the GCMs models used to support the AGWT are very likely flawed. By contrast, the semi-empirical climate models proposed in 2011 and 2013 by Scafetta, which are based on a specific set of natural climatic oscillations believed to be astronomically induced plus a significantly reduced anthropogenic contribution, agree far better with the latest observations.
Note also that it says the computer-modelled predictions of climate doom relied on by all global warming alarmists to support their thesis are wrong.
President Trump is to take his first step towards scrapping President Obama’s “stupid” and “job killing” Clean Power Plan, an aghast New York Times reports.
The Trump administration will repeal the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s effort to fight climate change, and will ask the public to recommend ways it could be replaced, according to an internal Environmental Protection Agency document.
The draft proposal represents the administration’s first substantive step toward rolling back the plan, which was designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector, after months of presidential tweets and condemnations of Mr. Obama’s efforts to reduce climate-warming pollution.
But it also lays the groundwork for new, presumably weaker, regulations by asking for the public and industry to offer ideas for a replacement.
In 2016, when it launched the plan at Obama’s behest, the EPA declared that the Clean Power Plan was a vital, cost-effective way of combating climate change which would ultimately benefit the U.S. consumer.
That shrieking you can hear is the sound of the Green Blob, mourning the loss of another of its tentacles.
If you believe the liberal media, the ACSNCA – as probably no one ever called it – was a vital organization established by President Obama in 2015 as part of his career-defining mission to combat climate change:
The 15-member Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment included academics, corporate representatives, and local officials who were tasked with helping public and private-sector officials understand the findings of the National Climate Assessment so that the information could factor into their long-term planning.
Put more simply, the panel, which was founded in 2015, existed to make sure government data was able to help both the public and private sectors prepare for the inevitability and disruptiveness of climate change.
Yeah, whatever. In reality, it was just more expensive, entrenched bureaucracy; more jobs for the usual suspects from the green gravy train; more intrusive environmental policy inserted by these faceless apparatchiks at every level of government.
To get an idea of the people we’re dealing with – and of why the U.S. taxpayer has reason to thank Trump for nipping this operation in the bud – consider the committee’s chair Richard H. Moss.
The way New Yorkmagazinedescribes him below, you’d think he was some kind of scientific expert:
Germany has ‘massively weakened’ its climate action plan for next week’s G20 summit in Hamburg in order to appease Donald Trump.
According to a shocked report in the green, EU-linked propaganda outlet Climate Change Newsthis represents a disastrous cultural surrender which
“….shows the degree to which the German presidency has bent to the will of the Trump White House.”
In public, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been talking tough on climate change, promising to put it at the forefront of the G20 summit and making none-too-subtle swipes at any world leaders out there who happen to dissent from her position.
Without naming him, Merkel appeared to lament U.S. President Donald Trump’s uncertainty about human-induced climate change, saying, “We can’t, and we won’t, wait until the last person on Earth is convinced of the scientific evidence for climate change.”
Behind the scenes, however, it would appear that Merkel’s negotiating teams have been bending over backwards to tone down the climate action plan and avoid an embarrassing rejection by Donald Trump.
This can be seen by comparing the two draft climate action plans for the summit, one from March and the revised one from May. According to Climate Change News, American negotiators have watered it down considerably.
“The US massively weakened the language in the energy part of the action plan,” one source with knowledge of the negotiations said. “It pushed for references to so-called ‘clean’ fossil fuels and made it less explicit that the energy transition has to be built on energy efficiency and renewables.”
“It also provided cover to some other G20 members – such as the Saudis and Russia – to weaken some climate sections of the document, including the pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”
Here are some of the elements which have been removed from the original draft:
A 2025 deadline for the end of fossil fuel subsidies
References to the risk of “stranded assets”
A call for “the alignment of public expenditure and infrastructure planning with the goals of the Paris Agreement”
A push for carbon pricing
A commitment to publish mid-century decarbonisation blueprints by next year
A pledge to develop a “profound” climate plan for multilateral development banks
Seven references to the UN’s 2018 review of nationally-determined contributions
11 references to the 2050 mid-century pathway for net zero emission
16 mentions of infrastructure decarbonisation
In other words, this represents the most massive victory for climate rationalism and energy realism – and a crushing and humiliating defeat for the global green blob.
It’s also a spectacular vindication of the Trump presidency.
As I argued in December last year before the inauguration, Trump had the potential to become a climate super hero: the one man on earth with the power to turn back the tide of green lunacy which has swamped the planet for last four decades.
The Green Blob’s tentacles extend everywhere: into our kids’ classrooms (where they are brainwashed with environmental propaganda); into our universities (where whole departments have now been hijacked by green junk science—because hey, that’s where the money is); into the mainstream media (most of which repeats, unquestioningly, the spurious claims of impending eco-disaster put out by environmental activists and publicity-hungry university departments); into business, which now wastes billions on environmental compliance and billions more on energy costs artificially inflated by the almost entirely unnecessary government-mandated drive for renewables); into government (where few politicians, even now, have the nous to appreciate that they have been sold a pup and who still continue to inflict more “sustainable” initiatives on their hapless electorates); into the economy, where jobs have been killed and growth blighted by measures designed by eco-fascists on a self-admitted mission to destroy Western industrial civilisation; into the environment, which has been ravaged by the very things we’re told are supposed to help save it—from bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes to those forests in the US which have been chopped down to create wood-chip biofuels to be burned at Britain’s Drax power station to the rare-earth minerals mined in appalling conditions in China to make wind turbines; into the cost of living (inflated by green taxes, regulations and tariffs), where in some cases people have been driven into fuel poverty and an early death because governments like Obama’s have caused electricity prices “necessarily” to “skyrocket” by mandating renewables over cheaper, more reliable fossil fuel.
This insanity has been allowed to prevail, largely unchecked, for over four decades. While enriching a corrupt few, it has caused misery to billions. It costs the global economy at least $1.5 trillion every year in “decarbonisation” expenditure which serves no purpose other than to give virtue-signallers a warm glow of self-righteous satisfaction.
And no major politician, anywhere in the world, has had either the courage or the conviction to deal with it.
Until now.
Yes there have been a few wobbles on the way, including some resistance even from within his own administration. But though the battle is far from won, what’s clear is that Trump really means what he says about making America’s energy economy great again. (And undoing the disastrous legacy of the Obama administration).
I just watched Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, get eaten alive by Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace.
Not only was it an ugly and painful sight but it was also a very dispiriting one.
Here is the guy who was carefully selected to be in the vanguard of President Trump’s war on the Green Blob which, for decades, has been doing untold damage to liberty, the scientific method, and the economy.
And he can’t even answer a few basic and obvious questions about why the job he is doing is necessary, important, and right.
Wallace asked him about the UN’s view that it was 95 percent likely that more than half the temperature increase since the mid-20th century is due to human activity.
Pruitt sweated, stuttered, and floundered.
Wallace asked him about NOAA’s claim that 2015 and 2016 are the hottest years on record.
Pruitt had no convincing comeback.
Wallace asked him the age-old question beloved by climate alarmists: “What if you’re wrong? What if CO2 is causing dramatic climate change and we as humans are responsible?”
Pruitt just didn’t know how to respond.
There should have been nothing complicated or unexpected about these questions. They are the kind of thing any half-way decent interviewer might have asked, be he a hostile one or a semi-friendly Fox News one playing devil’s advocate.
And if Scott Pruitt had had even the most cursory briefing and media training in his new role, he should have been prepared for them.
Not only should he have known the most effective answers to give; but he should have been so confident in the rightness and truth of his cause that he should have been able to seize the moment and make the points that really need to be made about President Trump’s environmental policy: that it is being enacted for the good of science, for the good of the economy and the core mission of Making America Great Again.
How could Scott Pruitt not do this?
Any one of us on the skeptical side of the argument could have pointed him to dozens of leading scientists — and hundreds if not thousands of papers and articles — that could easily have enabled Pruitt to say what needed to be said.
He could have noted the incompetence, corruption, and mendacity of the heavily politicized IPCC; the dishonest manipulation by organizations like NOAA — indeed especially NOAA — of the raw temperature data; the utter meaninglessness of the “hottest year evah” claims so often made in the liberal media.
And he could easily have batted off the “What if you’re wrong?” question by making perhaps the most important point of all that needs to be made about the “war” on “carbon”: that what it all comes down to is cost benefit analysis. To whit: the trillions of dollars being spent every year on the possibility that there might be a problem, a) could be spent much more usefully elsewhere and b) are doing more harm than good.
Pruitt was incapable of doing this though because, trained lawyer though he is, he is simply not on top of his brief.
