Weather Channel Co-Founder John Coleman: EPA’s climate regs ‘drive me nuts’ – ‘Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant’
By Meteorologist John Coleman
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at the direction of President Barack Obama will propose cutting the carbon dioxide (“greenhouse-gas”) emissions from the nation’s power plants by an average of 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 today (according to all advance information flowing out of Washington DC). This represents one of the boldest steps the U.S. has taken to fight global warming/climate change.
Saturday the President signaled both the importance of the rule to his legacy on environmental protection and the bruising fight ahead by joining a conference call with congressional Democrats, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and White House counselor John Podesta to rally support.
Obama dismissed complaints that the rule will hurt the economy by driving up electricity prices, and told the Democrats listening: “Please go on offense” to promote the plan’s benefits. The president suggested that rather than having an adverse effect on the economy — as critics say — his rule to limit carbon pollution will boost the economy by $43 billion to $74 billion.
The proposed regulation will permit states to achieve the reductions in climate-warming pollutants by promoting renewable energy, encouraging greater use of natural gas, embracing energy efficiency technologies or joining carbon trading markets.
The 30 percent reduction represents an average. Individual states may be directed to cut carbon emissions at levels that are greater or less than that overall figure.
I am certain you know by now that this action “drives me nuts”. Here’s why:
Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant. It is naturally occurring trace gas in the atmosphere that is essential to life on Earth. A living creatures emit CO2 when we breath out. All flora (from vegetables to weeds to trees) must have CO2 for photosynthesis. It is invisible, and odorless.
- Carbon Dioxide is not a significant greenhouse gas. It does result in slight warming of the atmosphere but because it is only a trace gas the impact is totally insignificant. The theory that CO2 is a super greenhouse gas that triggers radiative forcing through interaction with water vapor to cause highly significant warming has totally failed to verify and has been totally debunked by many well qualified scientists.
- Even if the United States reduces its emissions of CO2 it will have little or no impact since developing nations, particularly in Asia, are greatly increasing their emissions of CO2.
The president’s plan …
Obama EPA’s Real Motive?! Flashback 1975: Obama Science Czar John Holdren warned U.S. ‘threatened’ by ‘the hazards of too much energy’
Flashback 1975: Holdren Said Real Threat to USA Is Cheap Energy
Holdren’s bizarre 1975 essay on the perils of cheap energy.
The essay appeared in The Windsor Star of August 1975 under the title Too Much Energy, Too Soon, A Hazard and was an attack personally penned by Holdren against the idea of trying to provide plentiful, cheap energy for the future. This, he said, would be totally the wrong move, and begins his article by handing down the following warning:
The United States is threatened far more by the hazards of too much energy, too soon, than by the hazards of too little energy, too late.
The Windsor Star. Aug. 1975. Too Much Energy, Too Soon, A Hazard.
Of course – all those foolish people worrying about what they’d do if the aging power stations weren’t replaced should’ve been worrying about too much cheap, plentiful energy. We all know how dangerous that can be, right? Holdren lists some of these dangers as:
. . . diverting financial resources from compelling social needs, making hasty commitments to unproved technologies, and generating environmental and social costs that harm human welfare more than the extra energy improves it.
And it doesn’t get much clearer than that, I’m afraid, not least because there’s not really much of an argument here to start with. Holdren’s basic position, I think, is that rather than investing in silly things like power stations and infrastructure, the nation should be investing in social goods like modern dance workshops and radical art seminars that are a real investment for the future.
What, for example, can we make of the following warning?
Mounting evidence suggests that the United States is approaching (if not beyond) the level where further energy growth costs more than it is worth.
Don’t forget, Holdren was writing this in 1975, not 2011. Too much energy in 1975? I guess that must’ve been why Jimmy Carter was wearing the sweater in the White House then and talking about “malaise”. The good old days.
Now pay attention, because after the waffle of the first few paragraphs of his article, Holdren starts to reveal his real animus towards modern America (as it then was). He is aware that people will think his ideas smack of “primitivism” but fires back that this sort of objection is just what you would expect of a decadent capitalist society:
In a society that
Czech Physicist & Fmr. Harvard U.’s Dr. Lubos Motl: ‘EPA’s carbon planning emulates communism’ –
Motl’s full report here: http://motls.blogspot.com/2014/06/epas-carbon-planning-emulates-communism.html
Excerpts:
‘The five-year plans in communism, and to a lesser extent also the analogous four-year plans in Nazism, were a wishful thinking…Nevertheless, they existed and forced everyone to modify his or her expectations. Because these expectations turned out to be wrong, imbalances on the market almost always emerged.’
So even if the carbon dioxide were harmful in some way, this communist-style planning based on random numbers that a pack of clueless arrogant bureaucrats has made up would cause more harm than benefits…What the EPA is planning isn’t useful for anyone because CO2 is a beneficial gas we call life whose positive roles are uncountable and whose negative impact is pretty much non-existent. Even this elementary point – an elementary point that every sufficiently intelligent schoolkid understands after she learns something about fire and photosynthesis and before she is 10 years old – is just too difficult for the green brains at the EPA.
The word “pollution” in that sentence is a piece of a dirty toxic propaganda, of course. In reality, they talk about CO2 which is no pollution in any sense – it is a natural gas that unavoidably accompanies a big part of the essential economic activities in the modern world and that is the primary source of the biological material within plants – and therefore also animals.’
…
Obama’s new climate war opens: May be ‘the moment that the U.S. fully committed to fighting climate change’
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/207787-obamas-new-climate-war-opens-today#ixzz33TyAPen5…
Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore: ‘Carbonistas hide under blankie when challenged to say what CO2 level they want us to aim for. Below 150ppm all plants die. At 1600 happiest’
Carbonistas hide under blankie when challenged to say what CO2 level they want us to aim for. Below 150ppm all plants die. At 1600 happiest.