President Obama has been in Calgary, Canada, warning his audience of the perils of man-made climate change.
Apparently, it is even affecting their national mammal.
“All of us are going to have to recognize that there are trade-offs involved with how we live, how our economy is structured, and the world that we’re going to be passing on to our kids and grandkids. Nobody is exempt from that conversation,” Obama said.
He also noted that rising oceans risk coastal populations and environmental changes have boosted the frequency of insect-borne diseases.
“Moose right now [have] to deal with tick-borne diseases that they didn’t have to do 10, 15 years ago. I really like moose. I assume, Canadians, you do too,” Obama said. “These are just facts.”
Trump’s prospective new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is a drastic improvement on his predecessor.
For a start, being a skeptic, Pompeo is far less likely to undermine his president’s position on energy and climate change.
You get a good idea of Pompeo the man, his style, and his principles from this 2013 C-Span interview.
Pompeo was Representative for Kansas at the time and sat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
What he was saying back then about President Obama’s disastrous climate and energy policies could have come straight out of one of Trump’s campaign trail speeches:
What it’s [Obama’s war on fossil fuels] done is to drive up the cost of energy for folks who can least afford it. And it’s going to do nothing to solve one of the most enormous problems facing our country today which is jobs. It’ll put folks out of work. It’ll drive manufacturing to other places.
He went on to accuse Obama of “unilateral economic disarmament,” saying:
‘Climate change’ just officially ceased being an important issue in U.S. politics.
President Trump didn’t mention it in his State of the Union address. But nor, much to the disgust of environmentalists – did the Democrats in their rebuttals.
A shocked Huffington Post has named and shamed the key Democrats who could have spoken out but didn’t:
In his speech, Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) didn’t bring up global warming, sea-level rise or the surge in global greenhouse gas emissions, which threaten to become worse as the Republican White House ramps up fossil fuel production to unprecedented levels.
and
Even the State of the Union statement issued by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), considered one of the most hawkish Democrats on climate issues, snubbed climate change.
It was left to Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) to keep the faith:
Isn’t it just the best thingthat we’ve finally got a President of the USA who calls a shithole a shithole?
In fact of all Donald Trump’s many qualities, I think this may be his greatest and his most underrated strength.
But you’re not supposed to say this. At least not in respectable company. Even now – after all his incredible achievements – you’re still only allowed to praise Donald Trump if first you’ve preceded it with lots of disclaimers about how much you deplore his sexism, his brashness, his incoherence and general uncouthness…
I’m not buying that virtue-signalling crap, though. Check out this short film I made on Trump for the BBC this week:
Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times.
More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.
What marvellous news to ease us all into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?
Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”
Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it. It wants us to believe that this is an attack on both science and the environment.
Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.
The next head of NASA is likely to be an ex-Navy fighter pilot turned Republican congressman who believes strongly in space exploration but is skeptical about man-made climate change.
What’s not to like about about Trump’s nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) for the job of NASA’s administrator?
Everything, if you’re a liberal.
According to New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi, Trump just blew the perfect chance to change his “presidency from the chaotic mess of threats, bitterness and bilious paranoia to one of rationality and reasonableness.”
Apparently, the job should have gone to a fully-fledged climate alarmist.
There is no denying that our weather is getting more severe, that the oceans are rising, the Arctic ice is melting and hurricanes are wreaking ever-more havoc each time one pummels another part of the country.
Harvey has officially brought the most destructive rainfall in our nation’s history — more than 51 inches in some areas of Houston. As many as 42,399 humans are in shelters.
Yet in the face of all this, you, Mr. President, have chosen to nominate a climate change-denying partisan politician, Republican Rep. Jim Bridenstine, to head NASA. How can you even think of such a man.
As this planet heats up, we have to look to space. That won’t be done if the man heading NASA denies the science and looks down on the truth of what’s happening in our atmosphere.
It would be nice to dismiss this as the merely the deranged frothings of a rent-an-opinion, left-wing columnist who has bizarrely chosen to borrow her surname from that of the secret police in former Communist East Germany. Unfortunately, she’s by no means the exception. Most liberals think as she does.
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:
A top EPA official has resigned, supposedly in protest at the direction the Agency has taken under President Trump.
Or — as we climate realists prefer to put it — #winning.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland had worked at the EPA for thirty years. But on Tuesday she resigned from her post as director of science and technology in the Office of Water, claiming “the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth.”
Just what incredibly good news Southerland’s departure is can be best be appreciated by reading her farewell letter.
It’s supposed to be her Parthian shot — a damning indictment of the decline of a once-great institution under the wicked Donald Trump and his sinister henchman, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
But, actually, it tells you rather more about the weird, reality-denying mindset which prevails among the inhabitants of the swamp which Trump is busily trying to drain.
(*) Apart from all the other best things ever he has done so far…
Just like The Simpsons in the days when it was good, Trump’s ban on transgenderism in the military is great because it works on so many levels.
If you want to know the likely result of next month’s French presidential election run off, just look at how the markets responded. The euro and the French markets both jumped dramatically.
And this has nothing to do with the underlying strength of the sclerotic, unionised, statist, overtaxed, unproductive French economy or, indeed, with the future of the doomed euro.
It was simply a case of the status quo breathing a sigh of relief that it was going to be business as usual, after all: Emmanuel Macron, the de facto Establishment candidate is now pretty much a shoo-in for the French presidency; his rival, Marine Le Pen doesn’t stand a prayer – of that the Establishment will make sure.
But Brexit. But Donald Trump…
Nope: I’m afraid those arguments just don’t wash in this case. Yes, it’s true the world is in the throes of a revolution in which the globalist elite is gradually being overthrown by populist, nationalist rebels. But it won’t happen yet in France – a country whose political system has more in common with Putin’s Russia or Erdoğan’s Turkey or some African hellhole with a president-for-life than it does with liberal democracies.
That is, Emmanuel Macron is going to win this presidency because it was decided long ago by France’s Establishment that he was the least-worst option of the candidates available.
The fact that he is a hollow man – a slippery, snake-oil-salesman with a winning smile and nice suits – who will do almost nothing seriously to address France’s massive social and economic problems is a help, not a hindrance.
He attended one of France’s most elite schools where he was trained in Civil Service, graduating in 2004. His biography states that in 2007, he served as deputy rapporteur for the Commission to improve French growth headed by Jacques Attali, Macron was 29. But the Commission wasn’t formed until 2008. Obviously he is a bit ‘math challenged’. The Commission report was heavily criticized for its proposal to ‘relaunch immigration’ and ‘open borders’… Attali was ridiculed and called a ‘globalist’.
Sound like anyone we know?
Macron left the Commission, which was shelved September 2010, to work for Rothschilds & Cie Banque where he became an overnight millionaire while working the Nestle acquisition of Pfizer’s nutritional outlet, which closed in 2012. Nestle is a client of Rothschilds. Macron had no experience in acquisitions and mergers whatsoever…
What does one do when one makes millions overnight? Apparently one quits.
He then left Rothschilds to work for Hollande as deputy secretary general of Elysee, and eventually Minister of Economy, Industry and Digital Data in 2014 where he served 18 months before running for Presidency. I’d call that a pretty fast paced runup with little to no political experience or business savvy.
