Obama's Climate/Public Health Threat Claim
Right out of EPA Faux Scare Playbook
Following a
playbook designed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as described in
memos the Obama administration fought to keep secret, on April 7 President
Barack Obama announced efforts to highlight the alleged public health impacts
of climate change on children and minorities. Obama made the announcement
personal, noting he was terribly frightened once when he had to rush his
daughter Malia to the emergency room when she couldn’t breathe due to asthma.
As an asthma
sufferer myself, I can attest such an attack is frightening. However, as a
recent study (one in a long line of studies) shows, asthma attacks and the
increasing rates of asthma have nothing to do with global warming, and
everything to do with poverty, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and indoor
air quality. It is shameless of Obama to exploit his daughter’s asthma to push
his politically unpopular climate agenda.
The recent study,
authored by a research team led by Dr. Corrine Keet of Johns Hopkins Children’s
Center, found no link between outdoor air quality and childhood asthma. Rather,
the study points to indoor air pollution, from secondhand smoke, mold, rodents,
and the like, as a significant factor in childhood asthma cases. EPA does not
have authority over indoor air pollution.
Discussing the
study in Environment & Climate News, Paul Knappenberger, assistant
director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, said, “Clearly,
I think it undermines one of the primary excuses used by the EPA to regulate
carbon dioxide emissions and some types of air pollutants as well.”
Since science has
not established a link between climate change and public health, much less a
specific link between global warming and the health of children or minorities,
one cannot help but wonder why the administration is pushing this line of
argument.
A memo released as
part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request examining EPA
rule-making reveals the administration’s motives. The March 2009 memo shows EPA
feared it was losing support for its climate efforts because opinion polls
consistently showed the public ranked fighting global warming very low on its
list of priorities. The memo describes EPA’s decision to shift the debate from
concerns about melting ice caps and declining polar bear populations, to
promoting the idea global warming poses a direct threat to public health,
especially children’s and minorities health. Quoting the memo,
Most Americans will
never see a polar ice cap, nor will [they] ever have a chance to see a polar
bear in its natural habitat. Therefore, it is easy to detach from the
seriousness of the issue. Unfortunately, climate change in the abstract is an increasingly
“and consistently” unpersuasive argument to make. However, if we shift from
making this issue about polar caps [to being] about our neighbor with
respiratory illness we can potentially bring this issue home to many Americans.
According to the
memo, EPA took steps to raise concerns about climate change among minority groups
and women, using headline-catching “hooks” concerning social justice and
children’s health.
Per the memo, “We
must begin to create a causal link between the worries of Americans and the
proactive mission we’re pushing.”
Chris Horner, an
attorney and senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, obtained
the memo through FOIA. Horner said, “This memo shows EPA’s recognition the
global warming case is consistently an unpersuasive argument to make, and thus
required a facelift, from a pro-scarcity movement of wealthy white elites to a
racial and “social justice issue.”
Considering how the
mainstream media unquestioningly parrots every claim made by the Obama
administration concerning climate change, it did not surprise me reporters
failed to link the president’s April 7 announcement to the recently uncovered
EPA memos. Evidently bad climate news, as opposed to the truth, sells papers.
-- H. Sterling
Burnett
SOURCES: The Blaze;
The Bradenton
Herald; Environment
& Climate News; and Climate Change
Weekly
IN THIS ISSUE
Asia, UK foil
carbon-reduction efforts ¦ West Virginia allows school climate debate ¦ Steyer,
Bloomberg, anti-energy political funding go big(ger) ¦ Warm blob in Pacific
alters climate ¦ India cracks down on Greenpeace ¦ Planet Earth is greening
ASIA, UK FOIL
CARBON-REDUCTION EFFORTS
Climate activists
must be pulling out their hair in light of energy news coming out of Asia and
the UK. Bloomberg Business reports China intends to cut prices for
electricity generated by coal-fired plants in an attempt to lower companies
operating costs and aid a struggling economy. This move would seem to undermine
the country’s commitment to cap carbon dioxide emissions and to rein in coal
use to improve the nation’s air quality. In addition, Japan, long a leader in
commitments to cut carbon dioxide, expects to build at least 43 new coal-fired
power plants in the coming decade. While the country will continue to use nuclear
power, post-Fukushima, the amount of power from nuclear plants will fall.
Coal-generated electricity will replacing a portion of nuclear power’s present
share of power and support future growth in the Japanese economy.
In a further blow
to anti-fossil fuel activists, UK Oil & Gas Investments claims to have made
a significant oil find close to Gatwick Airport in West Sussex, possibly
yielding up to 158 million barrels of oil per square mile. If the estimate
proves accurate, the site could hold more than 8.6 billion barrels of oil รข€“
almost a fifth of the amount oil pumped out of the UK’s North Sea holdings in
the past 40 years. Development of the field would boost England’s relatively
moribund economy, where living standards have fallen below 2008 levels, and
also increase the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.
SOURCES: Bloomberg;
The Telegraph;
and Foreign Policy
WEST VIRGINIA
ALLOWS SCHOOL CLIMATE DEBATE
West Virginia’s
state board of education has taken a stand for sound science in the classroom.
By a vote of 6 to 2, the board approved amended standards for the discussion of
climate change. As the Charleston Daily Mail reports, where the original
standards required students to ask questions only about the rise in global
temperatures, ignoring temperature declines, the new standards require them to
discuss changes “ temperature increases, declines, and relative stasis. In
addition, the amended standards add “natural forces” as an area of study for
their possible influence on climate change.
As a result of these
changes, West Virginia’s standards break with the rest of the nation in no
longer solely pushing the unsupportable claim the debate is over, humans are
causing catastrophic global warming. Rather, students in West Virginia will
learn multiple evidence-based points of view exist concerning the causes and
consequences of climate change, and they will be encouraged to explore those
points of view.
SOURCES: Charleston Daily
Mail and West Virginia
Public Broadcasting
STEYER, BLOOMBERG,
ANTI-ENERGY POLITICAL FUNDING GO BIG(GER)
It seems the
well-funded green lobbying group Sierra Club and billionaire, anti-freedom,
anti-market activists Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer are doubling-down on
their political spending in hopes of making the fight against global warming a
winning issue in 2016.
Through his NextGen
Climate project, Steyer spent more than $74 million trying to make climate
change a central issue in the 2014 midterm election. He and the Sierra Club
threw millions of dollars at the 2014 election in a spectacularly failed effort
to keep pro-fracking climate skeptic candidates from winning senate and house
seats. Though polls showed neither climate nor fracking were critical wedge
issues in 2014, in key races candidates publicly backing fracking and
questioning the danger of climate change won.
Steyer has
committed to spending additional millions in the 2016 elections to defeat
climate skeptics. The Sierra Club, with a $30 million kick-in from Bloomberg
and $30 million in matching grants, pledged to spend up to $60 million to
promote candidates who work to close coal-fired power plants and defeat
candidates who don’t hew to the alarmist party line. Bloomberg has supported
the Sierra Club’s anti-fossil fuel political efforts for a number of years. In
2011, for example, through his Bloomberg Philanthropies, he pledged $50 million
to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
Based on its lack
of success in previous elections, and recent polling data showing climate
change remains far down the list of the public’s concerns, I harbor hope this
triumvirate of energy evil will wind up throwing more good money after bad in
the next election.
SOURCES: Grist.com
and Politico.com
WARM “BLOB” IN PACIFIC ALTERS CLIMATE
Nature dominates
climate and weather once again. Science Daily reports a common element
in recent weather: oddness. The West Coast has been warm and parched; the East
Coast has been cold and snowed under. Fish are swimming into new waters, and
hungry seals are washing up on California beaches. Human-caused climate change is not the
culprit. Rather, a large, relatively long-lived warm area of surface water,
nicknamed “the blob” in 2014, apparently part of a natural Pacific Ocean
pattern, is affecting everything from West Coast fisheries and water supplies
to East Coast snowstorms.
According to two
University of Washington papers appearing in Geophysical Research Letters,
the blob, currently stretching more than 1,000 miles in each direction and 300
feet deep from Mexico to Alaska, emerged in the fall of 2013, raising ocean
temperatures 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal.
The blob’s origins, while yet to be explained, were traced to a persistent
high-pressure ridge resulting in a calmer ocean for the past two winters, so
less heat was lost to cold air above.
SOURCE: Science Daily
INDIA CRACKS DOWN
ON GREENPEACE
India has stepped
up its fight against Greenpeace. As does the rest of the world, India needs
fossil fuels to sustain and improve its economy, in order to bring its millions
of people out of poverty. Yet Greenpeace is dedicated to eradicating fossil
fuel use.
Greenpeace recently
organized large protests against a coal mining project in central India,
critical to electrifying rural regions of the country and kickstarting a number
of stalled industrial projects. The government claims Greenpeace violated rules
about how it is allowed to spend foreign funds it receives. In early April, India
suspended Greenpeace India’s ability to receive foreign funds and froze its
bank accounts, arguing the group had “prejudicially affected the economic
interest of the state.”
The current
skirmish with Greenpeace is not the first time the Indian government has
accused radical Western environmental groups of interfering with the country’s
internal development. The Washington Post notes, “In 2012, the former
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had accused American and Scandanavian groups of
obstructing the commissioning of a nuclear power plant in the southern state of
Tamil Nadu and mounting a campaign against genetically modified crops. At the
time, Singh stated the foreign groups did not appreciate รข€˜the need for our
country to increase the energy supply.”
India’s tolerance
of foreign-funded activist groups appears to have reached a breaking point.
SOURCES: The Hindu
and Washington Post
PLANET EARTH IS
GREENING
A new study in Nature
details the greening of the Earth. According to the study, despite ongoing,
though slowing, deforestation in tropical regions, the world added vegetation
cover overall between 2003 and 2013. The team of scientist used satellites to
measure naturally emitted radiation to measure the amount of vegetation worldwide.
They found government reforestation in China, forest regrowth in
deindustrialized parts of the former Soviet Union, and an increase in greenery
in the savannas, shrublands, and desert edges in Africa, Australia, and South
America. Overall, the changes resulted in a more-than-4-billion-ton increase in
carbon-gobbling vegetation since 2003.
SOURCE: Washington Post
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