Paul Ryan touts non-existent EPA staffing cuts in budget deal
By Mark Hand
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) took credit Wednesday morning for cutting the number of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees, saying Republican leaders negotiated an omnibus budget deal Sunday night that would reduce the EPA employee count to 1989 levels.
“We reduced the EPA staffing levels to pre-Obama, back to 1989. So we knocked the staff down to what we had in 1989,” Ryan told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
The problem with Ryan’s statement is that the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee’s own summary of the budget deal clearly shows it isn’t true. The negotiations resulted in “holding the EPA to the current capacity of 15,000 positions,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ)’s office stated in its fiscal year 2017 omnibus budget summary.
The Trump administration has vowed repeatedly to make major cuts to the EPA, but with the agency emerging temporarily unscathed in the new agreement, Republicans have been scrambling to characterize it as a win.…
Cheers! Momentum in Trump Admin has turned against UN Paris climate agreement
Foes of the Paris climate agreement have gained the upper hand in the ongoing White House debate over whether the U.S. should pull out of the historic pact, according to participants in the discussions and those briefed on the deliberations, although President Trump has yet to make a final decision.
Senior administration officials have met twice since Thursday to discuss whether the United States should abandon the U.N. accord struck in December 2015, under which the United States pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
The president’s aides remain divided over the international and domestic legal implications of remaining party to the agreement, which has provided a critical political opening for those pushing for an exit.
On Thursday several Cabinet members — including Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, who’s called for exiting the accord, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who wants it renegotiated, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who advocates remaining a party to it — met with top White House advisers, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Both Ivanka Trump and Kushner advocate remaining part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, even though the president has repeatedly criticized the global warming deal.
During that meeting, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, White House counsel Don McGahn informed participants that the United States could not remain in the agreement and lower the level of carbon cuts it would make by 2025.
The administration is working to unravel many Obama-era policies underpinning that pledge, and the economic consulting firm Rhodium Group has estimated that the elimination of those policies would mean the United States would cut its emissions by 14 percent by 2025 compared with 21 percent if they remained in place.…
Pull Out Of Paris Climate Deal, US Energy Group Tells Trump
The U.S. president needs to pull the country out of the Paris climate agreement in order to stimulate the oil and gas sector, a trade group said. The Western Energy Alliance, a trade group representing the business interests of the exploration and production sector in several western states, said President Donald Trump should pull out of the multilateral climate agreement for the sake of oil and gas industries. “With an end to the regulatory overreach that has been stifling the oil and natural gas and many other industries, we can get on with the business of helping the president create thousands of new jobs,” it said in a recent statement.
Source: Pull Out Of Paris Climate Deal, US Energy Group Tells Trump…
NY Times Columnist Finds Out What Happens When You Question the Global Warming Narrative
…In Bret Stephens’ debut column for the New York Times, the Pulitzer prize-winning author cautioned global warming activists to maybe perhaps not claim “total certainty” about the science behind their proposed policies.
Using the Clinton campaign’s reliance on data versus traditional campaigning as an example of certainty leading to a disastrous loss, he turned to topic of global warming. He said the right words to lead off (emphasis mine):
“…while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the NorthernHemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming…
What he added next had heads exploding:
“…much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities.
It should be obvious to scientists or anyone who even took a science class in school that projections of how climate change will affect us 20 years from now are just that – projections. And projections are rarely, if ever, 100 percent correct. Still, global warming activists claim absolute certainty.
Stephens quoted a Times reporter who covered climate issues, who said that while the science activists relied on was scrupulous, the “boosters” themselves weren’t – using hyperbole to effect policy changes (a fancy way of saying “scare tactics”).
“Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”
Nowhere did he dismiss global warming concerns or say he personally didn’t believe in it; he simply offered a strategy that might help others win people to their point of view.
‘Can California Cars Save the Climate?’ ‘There’s not a single automaker that makes money on an electric car’
…Via: http://capitalandmain.com/can-california-cars-save-the-climate-0420
Co-published by Fast Company
Eric Noble works in the automobile industry, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t worry about climate change. When he and his two sons, 11 and 15 years old, travel south to surf on Baja’s Pacific Coast a few times a year, they can detect the impact greenhouse gases are having on the earth. “We can see the sea level rising,” he says. “Little coastal roads we used to be able to drive on are inundated now. This is happening.” He understands that transportation is responsible for more than a quarter of the greenhouse gases that linger in our atmosphere, and light-duty vehicles—passenger cars, mostly—emit close to two-thirds of that pollution.
And so Noble, who is president of the Orange County, California-based automotive consulting firm CarLab, also worries whether California’s strict zero-emissions vehicle strategy, which forces automakers to market exhaust-free hydrogen-fueled and battery-powered vehicles in the state, is really the most consumer-friendly, egalitarian way to go. Not just in California and the nine states that have followed its lead on emissions standards, but throughout the nation.
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California is moving rapidly toward low-carbon electricity generation. But even with a cleaner grid, or solar charging stations in home garages, it’s not enough for car makers to sell a handful of clean cars to do-gooder early adopters. People have to buy them in sufficient numbers to make a difference. Even with substantial perks for drivers—a $7,500 federal tax credit for a pure electric vehicle, carpool lane privileges, the quiet power of an electric motor—manufacturers still lease their cars cheap, and at a loss.
“There’s not a single automaker that makes money on an electric car,” Noble says. Tesla, with its rising stock shares and fame, turned a slim profit in the third quarter of 2016, but likely because of $139 million in ZEV credits it sold to less-green manufacturers. General Motors expects to lose money on every unit it sells of its new Chevrolet Bolt, the all-electric car pitched as an answer to “range anxiety,” because, if you’re careful not to drive it too hard, it can last for 238 miles on a charge.
Warmist rips fellow warmists as ‘more interested in political & intellectual purity than they are to fighting climate change’
Look at today’s People’s Climate Marches. They include entire sections dedicated to the anti-nuclear movement? Can anyone tell me what happens when you pull nuclear out of your energy mix? Well Energieweinde showed that the nuclear was not replaced by renewables, but rather by coal. When Diablo Canyon closes in California, the result will be an increase in the amount of greenhouse gases emitted as they will be making up that low-carbon power with natural gas.
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So what have the climate crew done for us recently? They are punishing one of their biggest allies in the free press, while alienating political leaders who have gone to bat for them. They are fighting against low-carbon energy alternatives because those alternatives don’t represent their preferred technologies. Rather than accepting compromises that could help advance their cause and implement policies that can provide realistic reductions in carbon emission they are out on the streets holding their protests. Protests where they reserve entire sections for groups intended solely to the task of attacking potential allies. I despair for my cause and have started to resign myself to failure because these people are more interested in political and intellectual purity than they are to fighting climate change.…
DiCaprio attends climate march in DC then ‘he left the event, driving off in a Tesla’
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The Soros funded People’s Climate March
…Claim: GOP rethinking their disdain for UN Paris climate accord – ‘Co-opt it, don’t crush it’
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Republicans are increasingly adopting the point of view that there isn’t much upside to walking away from the Paris accord beyond the burst of satisfaction it would give core Trump voters. Politicos who were once among the most vocal opponents of the agreement are reconsidering, as they grow concerned about the prospect of the United States removing itself from one of the most influential forums for steering global energy policy — and one that doesn’t place particularly onerous obligations on the nation.
Co-opt it, don’t crush it, is fast becoming a mantra among a broadening circle of advisors to the administration, much to the horror of the free market absolutists and anti-globalism activists who took the accord for as good as dead the day Trump was elected. The president plans to announce by the end of May what direction the administration will go.…
Planned Parenthood: ‘The Climate Crisis could have devastating effects on people’s reproductive health’
https://twitter.com/PPFA/status/858353946036928512
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