"Environmentalists probably believe their propaganda, no matter how delusional," William Perry Pendley said

Here’s the man who knows what Reagan would do

http://washingtonexaminer.com/heres-the-man-who-knows-what-reagan-would-do/article/2538719

By RON ARNOLD | NOVEMBER 7, 2013 AT 7:35 PM

Environmentalists want a Utopian world where they don’t use anything and deprive everyone else of affordable energy so they can’t use anything.

That barbed sentiment comes from a veteran of the Big Green power wars during President Ronald Reagan's administration: William Perry Pendley.

He's better known these days as Mountain States Legal Foundation's outspoken and ground-breaking president - his landmarkSupreme Court win in the Adarand v. Pena civil rights case was called a “legal earthquake” by Time magazine.

His four books have established him as the go-to authority on natural resource politics and law.

Pendley earned his stripes not only as a reconnaissance navigator in the U.S. Marine Corps' Phantom II jet fighters, but also in the Department of the Interior as deputy assistant secretary of energy and minerals during the Reagan years.

It appears that managing a bureaucracy was the tougher of the two jobs from his new account, “Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and why it Matters Today.”

I asked Pendley his thoughts on something that matters today: the recent demise of the Interior Department's little-known agency, the Minerals Management Service, which he helped create.

The MMS was dismantled at the direction of President Obama's appointee, Rhea Suh, profiled in this space previously.

“It came as no surprise,” Pendley told me, “It's the same power play as Obama's war on coal - to make energy so expensive that no one can use it.”

Why was the MMS such a prime target? “The MMS made the federal outer continental shelf oil and gas program efficient, so OCS oil and gas was less expensive to produce – the opposite of Obama’s goal – and that made it a target," he said.

“Before President Reagan,” Pendley explained, “the OCS drilling program's pre-leasing activity was run by the Bureau of Land Management and its post-leasing efforts by the Conservation Division of the U.S. Geological Survey.”

Reagan’s first Interior Secretary, James Watt, Pendley recalled, “took all OCS activity and created the Minerals Management Service to house it, ending a long-running, often acrimonious and inefficient turf battle between the two old-line Interior bureaus.

“Then, drilling companies had a one-stop shop to get permits and to pay royalty fees.” As a result, two Alaska sales soon yielded $2.9 billion in bonus bids.

The MMS made money for the Treasury in the hard-to-understand world of oil and gas and boosted energy products for Americans for nearly three decades.

The Washington Post sneered in disgust that, “MMS grew to become one of the government's largest revenue collectors, after the Internal Revenue Service.”

Pendley said, “Getting rid of the Minerals Management Service for Obama was just a matter of finding the right justification, and BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster was it.”

The April 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was the largest and most traumatic marine oil spill in history.

An explosion killed 11 workers, 87 days of uncontrolled gushing did immense natural and human damage, and BP has paid $42.4 billion in criminal and civil penalties so far. All that is horrendous enough, but politics never lets a good crisis go to waste.

An Obama moratorium on ocean drilling by dozens of rigs with excellent safety records was struck down in court.

Pendley noted that Obama immediately created by executive order a supposedly bipartisan panel run by two Democrats (the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling) to “assess the disaster.”

Translated from Obamababble, what that really meant was “find reasons to stop offshore oil and gas production and regulate the industry out of existence.”

The panel’s report was a political joke, concluding that the isolated, unique BP disaster, “absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur.”

Thus, the efficient, thrifty, productive MMS was proclaimed the scapegoat and took the fall for BP’s culpability, hacked into three pieces with no job but to end the industry they regulate.

In conclusion, Pendley reiterated his leading thought: “Environmentalists probably believe their own propaganda, regardless how delusional it is.

"They want a utopian world where they don’t use anything and deprive everyone else of affordable energy so they can’t use anything.”

William Perry Pendley represents the profound institutional memory of a free people who will need it to rebuild after these dark times are swept away in a roar of joy.

RON ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

Rabid environmentalists use lies and deception. Are the readers of this surprised? This time they got caught out! Read on and stay tuned for part 2.

‘Fractivists’ caught in flood of Colorado lies

http://washingtonexaminer.com/fractivists-caught-in-flood-of-colorado-lies/article/2537929

By RON ARNOLD | OCTOBER 27, 2013 AT 6:45 PM

First of two parts

Massive storms dumped “biblical rainfall amounts” across nearly 2,000 square miles of Colorado last month, according to the National Weather Service.

The raging floods that followed killed at least eight people, damaged or destroyed nearly 2,000 homes, and wrecked more than 200 miles of state highways and 50 state bridges.

The Denver Post ran a front page aerial photo headlined, “Front Range Flooding: Oil spilling into mix,” showing a trashed stream bed with brown stains near a “damaged tank” that “leaks crude.”

Opportunistic flocks of Big Green eco-vultures already embroiled in five local anti-fracking ballot measures pounced on the tragedy as a propaganda vehicle.

Their basic strategy was to pose as "mom-and-pop victims with no money to stop this spilling, but Big Bad Oil is putting zillions into the campaign.”

In fact, the opposite was true. In a Denver Post report, for example, spokesmen for the Washington-based Clean Water Action and Earthworks groups blasted oil and gas drillers for allegedly being responsible for 45,000 gallons of flood-caused oil spills.

Shane Davis, former oil & gas research manager for the Sierra Club's Rocky Mountain chapter, guided CNN, CBS and NPR on media tours in a small plane belonging to EcoFlight, an aerial snooper for great Images of anything resembling environmental damage. The media got horrifying Images of stained water demolishing all in its path.

Davis is something of a fracking-obsessed one-man army: he coined the term “fractivist,” is regional campaign director of Gasland – Josh Fox’s anti-fracking movie crusade – and works closely with Colorado’s local anti-drilling ballot initiatives.

Noted Colorado author Laura Pritchett wrote an impassioned diatribe, “Fracking Fluids in the Flood,” that was featured in OnEarth, an online publication of the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council. That insured the Colorado ballot issues reached a national made-for-mobilization audience.

The Alliance for Sustainable Colorado held a post-flood benefit – for itself – with singer-guitarist Bonnie Raitt. For a donation of just $2,500, you got dinner, concert, and a backstage photo opportunity with Raitt.

Umbrella group Frack Free Colorado boasted members that most never heard of, including Water Defense, Food and Water Watch, Erie Rising, eTown, The Mother's Project, Angel Organic, Fractivist, and Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center.

They “coordinated the delivery of thousands of post cards, e-mails, phone calls and public testimony to the Boulder County commissioners,” but their effort doesn’t show up on campaign finance records.

Get used to that, because this campaign isn’t about the few measly bucks from local moms and pops that get into the record.

Take that obscure group known as Water Defense. It consists of New York C-List actor Mark Ruffalo and a few friends. It's not even recognized by the IRS.

But Water Defense does have a “fiscal sponsor” - IRS jargon for “money funnel” - the New York-based Sustainable Markets Foundation, which also funnels funding for Bill McKibben's anti-fracking 350.org, which also has joint anti-fossil fuel presentations with hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.

The Sustainable Markets Foundation got $8.5 million from more than 30 Big Green foundations interested in stopping fossil fuel development and uses — i.e. powering your car, heating your home, recharging your laptop — thus giving Water Defense a high-clout network.

Food and Water Watch? That' s another Washington-based Big Green outfit that got $34 million from more than 25 Big Green foundations, including $11 million in 2011. This is beginning to look not very local.

No, the locals don’t get the money, they get the benefits of distant big money for activists to do more than a local little money could ever accomplish.

But something happened this time around. During flood recovery, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment sampled water from eight rivers and found "no evidence of pollutants from oil and gas spills in rivers and streams affected by flooding."

Then why was the water stained brown in those aerial photos CNN and the Denver Post published? Matthew Allen of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said, “The total reported amount of oil spills is small compared to the solid waste.”

It was human feces, “20 million gallons, just so we're clear, of raw sewage,” said Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper. In fact, the statewide 45,000 gallons of spilled oil would just wet the bottom of an Olympic-size swimming pool's 660,000 gallons.

The Denver Post was outraged. Editorial page editor Vincent Carroll wrote, “the shameless use of Colorado's floods to attack drilling,” a long piece ripping the unethical tactics of the fracktivists.

But who paid for all that unethical fractivism? Find out tomorrow in this same space in part two.

RON ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

"Obama's EPA... destroying the world's cleanest, most controlled coal industry with fatal regulations. ...on Native American lands."

Native Americans are among chief victims of Big Green's war on coal

By RON ARNOLD | OCTOBER 18, 2013 AT 9:44 AM

http://washingtonexaminer.com/native-americans-are-among-chief-victims-of-big-greens-war-on-coal/article/2537397

 

Global government policies to reduce carbon emissions will not prevent a hydrocarbon world. That’s what the World Energy Congress heard this week from energy research experts Wood Mackenzie.

The firm's president of global markets, William Durbin, said that coal will surpass oil as the dominant fuel later this decade because of aggressive economic expansion in China and India using the cheapest and most plentiful energy resource.

As King Coal rises in Asia - with little or no emissions control - President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is creating a fool's paradise by destroying the world's cleanest, most controlled coal industry with fatal regulations.

That does not play well on America's Indian reservations where the “Great White Father in Washington” virtually prohibits development of its vast coal reserves, much of it the cleaner, low-sulfur anthracite.

“Indian reservations contain almost 30 percent of the nation's coal reserves west of the Mississippi, as well as significant deposits of oil, natural gas and uranium,” wrote Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan in the Wall Street Journal last week.

“The Council of Energy Resource Tribes, a tribal energy consortium, estimates the value of these resources at nearly $1.5 trillion,” Anderson and Regan wrote.

I spoke to Anderson by phone – he’s president of the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), holds a PhD in economics, is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University), has authored 37 books, and has more experience promoting Native American property rights than most anybody outside of tribal lawyers.

Shawn Regan is a PERC research fellow who holds a master’s degree in applied economics.

Anderson’s take on Obama’s coal war: “It’s locking Native Americans in a poverty trap. Indian incomes are about a third of those for all U.S. citizens, and unemployment rates are four times the national average.”

I asked Anderson about his quote from Crow tribal chairman Darrin Old Coyote: "The war on coal is a war on our families and our children."

Wasn’t that considerably more blunt than usual, especially since he said it to Washington state's Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell?

In answer, Anderson sent me an oil drilling map of areas surrounding the Crow and the Fort Berthold Reservations. Each map was full of dots representing drill sites, except inside reservation boundaries where they were scant, yet the oil field invisibly extended inside. Why?

Anderson said “The Bureau of Indian Affairs severely restricts Indians' right to control their own land and, as a result, has left energy resources on reservations virtually moribund. Indians are being made to starve in the midst of their own plenty.”

They’re getting fed up. Ron Crossguns of the Blackfeet tribe's oil and gas department said in an interview, "It's our right. We say yes or no. I don't think the outside world should come out here and dictate to us what we should do with our properties."

You can feel the smoldering anger, but Crossguns also has a wicked sense of humor: A greenie reporter badgered him on and on about oil drilling south of Chief Mountain (Nínaiistáko in Blackfeet) because it’s considered a sacred place, site of ceremonies for centuries.

Crossguns replied to her, “I took a medicine man, a holy man, with me to scout the place and when we got there I asked if it had religious significance to our tribe, our culture. He looked at me and said, ‘What’s sacred is between you and God.’ Then he pointed to the mountain and said, ‘It’s a rock. A big rock.’”

The story is true, but Crossguns relishes telling about the flustered greenie.

The Indians want their land back. They want the right to develop it if they so choose. And it looks like they’re planning to do something about it.

Did I sense a revolution brewing? Anderson said, “Maybe not a revolution. But a change? Yes, definitely.”

Well, a little rebellion now and then is a good thing. I have that on good authority.

RON ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

Shouldn't scientists use science as fact, instead of climate alarmism?

Global Warming: it’s Happening Again

by dennis T. avery

Churchville, VA—Senator Boxer recently held a hearing entitled, “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now.” To honor historic truth, the title “It’s Happening Again” would have suited better.

Heidi Cullen, formerly the alarmist voice at the Weather Channel, was one of Boxer’s key witnesses. In her testimony, Dr. Cullen said that “heavy downpours” have increased by 73 percent over recent decades due to global warming. The U.S. Geological Survey data show no such increase over the past 60 years, though there may have been some increase in rainfall variability. She once was too good a scientist to make a misstatement such as that.

In fact, her side has not been able to give her much alarmist ammunition beyond the never-verified and now-failing computer models. At one point, Senator Vitter (R-LA) asked the panel of experts “Can any witnesses say they agree with Obama’s statement that warming has accelerated during the past 10 years?” After a deafening silence, Dr. Cullen said our focus should be on longer time-periods, rather than the ten years mentioned by Obama. When pressed, however, she admitted that global warming has slowed, not accelerated.

Dr. Cullen knows about longer climate cycling. She is an expert on the long, natural 1,500-year climate cycle that gave us the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, and more than 600 previous warming/cooling cycles over the past 1 million years.

In fact, Dr. Cullen studied the sediments that accumulated downwind of Akkadia, in the Persian Gulf. She discovered that the first impact of a “little ice age” on the Akkadian Empire (in today’s Iraq) at 2200 BC was a 300-year drought! The drought caused mass starvation and abandoned towns; then for another 200 years, shepherds wandered the semi-arid wasteland. Eventually, a return of global warming brought back stable and favorable cropping conditions to Iraq, new immigrants recreated the irrigated farming that had supported the Akkadians, and the urbanization of human cultures resumed. (This has happened seven times in the last 6000 years.)

Her science career was looking good; but, she chose to become a TV star and author of a book entitled The Weather of the Future. The book, unfortunately, abandons everything she learned about the documented 1,500-year climate cycle. If Dr. Cullen had remained true to her scientific training and experience, she would have told us that the global climate is constantly cycling, but within natural parameters.

The Modern Warming has followed the long and intensely cold Little Ice Age. We cannot predict how long the Modern Warming will last, but it is virtually certain to last another 200–400 years, with a maximum temperature about the same as the highly beneficial Medieval and Roman Warmings. Then, inevitably, the warming will shift abruptly into another “little ice age,” or even into a full Ice Age. What will the successors of Dr. Cullen have us do then?

In the short term, the weather will obey the dictates of the Pacific Ocean, our biggest heat sink. The Pacific’s 60-year warm/cool cycle, superimposed on the 1,500-year cycle, currently predicts continued global cooling—until long after the current crop of politicians has retired or been defeated.

Dr. Cullen tried becoming famous with honest science, and hardly anyone noticed her. Now, her current celebrity is likely to fade with the declining temperatures.

Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 2442; email to cgfi@mgwnet.com. Visit our website at www. cgfi.org

What is it about data and scientific fact that "climate experts" don't understand? They continue to push alarmism, when it is constantly being disproved.

Delaware’s “future weather”

We’re getting burned by phony science and authoritarian power grabs

Paul Driessen and David R. Legates

During this hot, wet summer, a “national climate expert” recently told Delawareans that they can expect even hotter summers – with a climate like Savannah, Georgia’s – by the end of the century.  The culprit, naturally: runaway global warming.

Savannah residents are long accustomed to their climate and, thanks to air conditioning and other modern technologies, are better able to deal with the heat and humidity. Nevertheless, the impact on Delaware will be disastrous, Dr. Katherine Hayhoe claims. Nonsense.

Her forthcoming report promises to be no different from other proclamations that persistently predict dire consequences from climate change – and then present taxpayers with a hefty bill. In this scenario, the State’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) paid $46,000 for her report, presumably to suggest that “independent scholars” support the state’s positions.

The preliminary release of her report reads like the script from a bad disaster movie – think The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth. Like them, it also plays fast and loose with the facts.

It fails to mention the extreme cold that many places around the globe experienced recently.  Europe and Russia in particular suffered through bitter cold the past two winters. The report likewise ignores the fact that average global temperatures have not risen at all over the last sixteen years; in fact, Earth has actually cooled slightly during the past decade.

For its really scary worst-case scenario, Dr. Hayhoe says Delaware’s temperatures will rise astronomically in coming decades: with more than two full months of endless days above 95°F and a hundred-fold increase in days with temperatures at or above 100°F by 2100.  “Trends to more extreme highs and fewer extreme lows already are apparent,” Dr. Hayhoe asserts. Except they are not. 

Data from 970 weather stations across the United States reveal that more record daily maximum air temperatures were set in the 1930s than in any recent decade, and no increase in frequency of higher temperatures has been observed since 1955. The Delaware State Climatologist examined New Castle County Airport records in Wilmington and found no long-term trend in either the total number of days or the number of consecutive days with maximum air temperature above 90°F.

The same can be said for days where temperatures remain below freezing.

Globally, daytime high temperatures do not show significant warming – and most of the warming that has been observed is confined to nighttime low temperatures. Nighttime lows are driven by turbulence (or lack thereof) near the surface, not by the accumulation of energy related to CO₂ warming of the deep atmosphere.

By contrast, maximum daily temperature is a measure of the energy content of the deep atmosphere, and is thus a much better measure of the warming due to greenhouse gases. The lack of a signal in maximum temperature suggests that the rate of warming due to CO₂ is relatively small – and certainly much smaller than climate models suggest.

As for precipitation, Dr. Hayhoe claims that both floods and droughts will increase, with “more rain arriving as heavy downpours, and more dry periods in between.”  This assertion was dispelled in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on extreme events, released last summer. 

The IPCC report concluded that “in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense or shorter; for example in central North America.” Similarly, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has produced plots that show which parts of the United States are classified as moderate to extreme for dryness and wetness. While both conditions show considerable variability, neither exhibits a significant trend. NOAA also concludes that snowfall records show no long-term trend, and recent record snowfalls are the result of natural variability.

Why should Delaware’s or the nation’s future be any different than the past fifty years of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations?  Dr. Hayhoe’s bases her extreme scenarios on climate models – the same models that have predicted major temperature trends that have not materialized; greatly exaggerated short-term trends in rainfall, droughts and violent storms; and failed to predict the lack of warming since 1998.  So why should we believe them now?

The real reason behind this report is to provide the State with the justification to enact draconian measures to control Delawareans’ energy use and provide major subsidies for “alternative” and “renewable” energy projects.  Delaware Secretary of the Environment and Energy Collin O’Mara says, “We need to make sure we have good science driving our decision-making in the years to come.” Apparently, $46,000 has bought the State precisely the “science” he wanted to hear.

O’Mara came to Delaware in 2009, as part of Governor Markell’s administration.  Billed as “the youngest state cabinet official in the nation,” O’Mara is a self-proclaimed climate-change and energy “entrepreneur.” During his tenure in Delaware, he has spearheaded the administration’s efforts on “climate change mitigation,” renewable energy subsidies and “sustainable development.”

During the last 4-1/2 years, the Markell Administration has “invested” in Fisker Automotive, leaving the State’s citizens on the hook to pay for an automobile assembly plant that has created zero new jobs and produced zero cars. 

Bloom Energy, which hails from the same town as O’Mara (San Jose, CA), has also been the happy beneficiary of enormous State subsidies and exceptions from environmental regulations. Delaware now labels natural gas as a renewable resource, for example – but only if it is burned in a Bloom fuel cell. This enables the State to funnel taxpayer and ratepayer money from renewable energy credits to Bloom. To top it off, if the State ever decides to renege on the deal, the legislation requires that the State immediately pay Bloom twenty years worth of profits.

O’Mara has also been busy with rule-making by executive fiat. Without any public discussion or debate, and without any vote by the State legislature, O’Mara signed into law new “green” energy standards that make the First State’s emission rules even more stringent than Federal regulations, via a clever process known as prospective incorporation. Through this, all provisions from the California Code of Regulations are automatically “updated,” to ensure that Delaware’s Code is consistent with California’s.

That means any changes to the California Code implemented by the most environmentally dogmatic, job-killing and bankrupt state in the Union are immediately and completely binding via Delaware regulations.  With no presentation to the people, no discussion or vote by the General Assembly, and not even any case-by-case intervention by Delaware’s executive branch, California regulations are automatically the law in Delaware. With the stroke of the pen, Delaware has surrendered its sovereignty to California.

Armed with this new “scientific” report, what draconian measures might Mr. O’Mara and the Markell Administration have in store for the citizens of Delaware? Time alone will tell. However, given their track record thus far, Delawareans are going to get burned – and not by global warming.

Even worse, the same sneaky shenanigans are being played out in other states, in Washington, and all over the world, through the UN, EU and environmentalist pressure groups – in the name of saving the planet from computer model and horror movie disasters. These are bigger power grabs than anything King George III tried. We the People need to take notice, and take action.

___________

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, black death (Merril Press, 2012). David Legates is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and has studied climate change for thirty years.

The multiple light colored lines track projections of mean global temperature for the lower Troposphere by 44 climate models. The dark black line is the 44-computer-model average, which is what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses as its best estimate of predicted “catastrophic manmade global warming.” The two brightly colored lines represent the actual satellite temperature records measured by the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH – blue) and Remote Sensing System (RSS – red). These two lines demonstrate that actual planetary temperatures are far below what IPCC models predict. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming-slowdown-the-view-from-space/