The questioning of Blackburn came during a discussion on Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency and a skeptic of climate-change science.
Cuomo asked Blackburn, vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, for her views on Pruitt and whether he would “be someone who denies” the “basic science” of climate change.
Blackburn said Pruitt “understands” the “heavy burden” the EPA has placed on businesses across the country through regulation. She said, however, that everyone remained in favor of clean air and water.
“Can you be for clean air and water if you do not believe that man has a hand in global warming?” Cuomo asked.
“Of course you can be a believer in clean air and clean water and realize that when you work at global warming or climate change, as it is now popularly called, that it is cyclical and you have to look at it in terms of centuries, not in terms of decades,” Blackburn said.
The congresswoman added: “And the science around that is not a settled science.”
Cuomo, taken slightly aback, asked Blackburn bluntly if she agreed that human actives “contribute greatly to what is warming our planet over time.”
“Do you accept that?” he asked.
“I think that there are those who would say, ‘No, it is more of a cyclical process.’ There are those that will say that we do think humans have something to do with it,” Blackburn replied.
“It’s not some though, congresswoman,” Cuomo quipped. “You know — it’s an overwhelming scientific consensus on the notion of whether man-made activities negatively impact global warming. It’s not an open debate within the scientific community. It is a big majority and a small group of people that resist it.”
Cuomo reiterated that he was “talking about the basic science” and whether she and Pruitt agreed with it.
“The fact is that there is still debate about that and the participation of human beings in this,” Blackburn said. “We all will agree we want the Earth to stay healthy. We want clean air, we want clean water.”
The congresswoman said, however, that it was important to “make certain that we are able to have the energy that is necessary to fuel a productive economy.”
tweet sent by the House Science Committee has caused an Internet meltdown and even drew the ire of Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders speaking at town hall event. Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia)
When the House’s Committee on Science sent out a tweet yesterday linking to a “Breitbart” article that called into question global warming orthodoxy, the backlash from climate alarmists was fast and furious. The tweet referenced an article entitled “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists”. It was written by “Breitbart’s” London correspondent James Delingpole.
In the article, Delingpole quotes information from a “Daily Mail” article showing a nearly one degree Celsius drop in temperatures based on satellitedata. The “Mail” article points to the swings and vacillations of El Nino and La Nina as primary factors, where the tropical Pacific Ocean can be warmer or colder than normal. This seesawing of oceanic cycles, part of ENSO, is what many scientists say have a greater effect on the climate than the trace gas carbon dioxide.
While the tweet’s author is still unknown, it most likely came from the chair of the committee: Rep. Lamar Smith. Smith has long been a skeptic of man’s role in #Climate Change and has been a vocal critic of climate demagoguery. He led a charge to get the emails from NOAA scientists to see if temperature data tampering was occurring.
Sen. #Bernie Sanders, the Socialist-Independent from Vermont, was a bit irked by the tweet. He and other like-minded climate alarmists took to twitter and voiced their dismay about the House committee’s tweet. Sanders wrote:
It’s right out of “Brewster’s Millions.” A rich guy quickly blows through $174 million and in the end, walks away with nothing to show for it. That’s the strange but true story of hedge fund billionaire-turned green activist Tom Steyer.
After making his fortune from investments that include some of the planet’s most environmentally unsound operations, Mr. Steyer said he experienced a “Road to Damascus” moment and repented by becoming “Daddy Greenbucks” to radical environmentalists and their elected champions.
In 2014, after boasting that he would make climate change the top campaign issue, he spent nearly $75 million, mostly from his own deep pockets, making him the election season’s largest single donor.
Politico and others criticized his ads as “super weird” and “bizarre.” One received “Four Pinocchios” from The Washington Post fact-checker for relying on “speculation, not facts, to make insinuations and assertions not justified by reality.”
When is a treaty not a treaty? According to the Obama administration, whenever the president says so. This claim is especially dubious with respect to the Paris agreement on global warming, which as Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has shown, is more ambitious than predecessor agreements that were universally accepted to be treaties.
Surely if President Obama possesses an asserted authority to declare an agreement identical in form and more ambitious in substance than previous treaties to be a non-treaty then President Trump will have the authority to reach the opposite, more plausible conclusion.
There is little doubt that the Trump administration will reject the Paris agreement, but the option of properly recognizing it as a treaty and allowing the Senate to formally reject it has several advantages.
First, it prevents the dangerous precedent of a president binding the country and his successor to international commitments without the broad support that the Constitution requires through the advice and consent process. Secondly, it sidesteps the question of whether the withdrawal provision of the Paris treaty itself forces us to wait four years before withdrawal is effective. Finally, it exposes as false the talking point that skepticism of the Paris agreement is outside the political mainstream.
John Kerry, who infamously declared global warming a greater threat to the United States than terrorism, gave his final speech on the subject this week to the UN functionaries in Marrakech, Morocco. He offered a soothing fantasy.
“No one should doubt the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the United States who know climate change is happening and who are determined to keep our commitments that were made in Paris,” Kerry said to applause.
Last week’s election emphatically showed the opposite. The Midwest delivered the White House to Trump, who dominated among the working class voters who care far more about how much they are paying to fill up the gas tank and keep their lights on than they do about what United Nations computer models predict about the climate in decades or centuries – the results of which show minimal change anyway. Appalachian voters in particular preferred Trump in a stunning 469 of 490 counties.
The Paris treaty is a magnificent example of the bad deals made for America that ultimately paved Donald Trump’s path to the White House.
Specifically, the Paris treaty effectively bans coal-fired power plants
Unified Republican control of the federal government over the next two years augurs a sea change in US environmental policy like nothing since the late 1960s and ’70s, when America’s landmark environmental laws were first passed.
If Donald Trump and the GOP actually follow through on what they’ve promised, this time around will be a lurch in the opposite direction. Federal climate policy will all but disappear; participation in international environmental or climate treaties will end; pollution regulations will be reversed, frozen in place, or not enforced; clean energy research, development, and deployment assistance will decline; protections for sensitive areas and ecosystems will be lifted; federal leasing of fossil fuels will expand and accelerate; new Supreme Court appointees will crack down on EPA discretion.
Some of these moves will be easy for Trump and Republicans in Congress to pull off. Others will be harder: Senate Democrats and environmental groups in court will fight them tooth and nail, as they did during the Reagan and Bush years. But there’s no escaping the fact that the GOP is in a strong position to demolish and reshape the regime of environmental protection that has been built up over the past 50 years.
Never mind Trump — the GOP Congress has a radical environmental agenda ready to go
Donald Trump’s promise to dismantle President Obama’s climate regulations have gotten plenty of attention. But it is only the tip of the iceberg, a fraction of what Republicans in Congress have been pushing for over the years.
…
Here are 11 top environmental priorities for Trump and a GOP Congress
1) Kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan
The GOP is nearly united in its hatred of Obama’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan. There’s only one Republican senator left, Susan Collins of Maine, who has ever defended it. Killing or degrading the CPP will be a top priority.
In 2007’s Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases could, if judged dangerous to human health or welfare, be considered pollutants subject to the Clean Air Act. Shortly thereafter, EPA’s scientists judged them dangerous to both.
That means EPA must, by law, act to reduce greenhouse gases. The Obama administration followed through on this by enacting fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks (see below). It also set up the Clean Power …
Diplomatic or deluded? Insiders say Trump won’t ditch deal
By Jean Chemnick, E&E News reporter Published: Monday, November 14, 2016
MARRAKECH, Morocco —
Excerpt:
Skeptic: Expect climate reversals. ‘It’s about time!’
U.S. climate skeptics begged to differ.
“The body of evidence suggests one ought to expect that any executive action on this front from the past eight years will indeed face a sincere effort at modification or reversal,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher Horner, an outspoken opponent of Obama’s climate policies, in an email.
Marc Morano, who publishes the climate skeptic site ClimateDepot.com, said the president-elect was not only “the most strongly skeptical” Republican president or nominee ever but unlikely to be swayed by global pressure.
“Even going back to the 1980s, Trump’s political philosophy was a form of ‘America first’ and not very supportive of international trade or similar agreements,” he said.
Morano has attended these summits in previous years to tell participants the United States wouldn’t make good on the promises the Obama administration officials made in the negotiating rooms. He arrives in Marrakech this week for events highlighting how “Clexit,” as he’s termed the U.S. departure from international climate efforts, would play out.
“Climate skeptics are back,” Morano said in an email to E&E News. “They now control the House, Senate and … the Presidency. Expect both international and domestic climate agenda to be reversed. It’s about time!”
Trump’s transition team is mulling a strategy that includes departure from the Paris Agreement alone or from the broader U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Leaving the underlying convention means the United States would no longer be party to Paris the following year.
That would be a 180-degree shift from the current U.S. stance on climate. Indeed, Obama was credited with helping to bring last year’s deal home through persistent bilateral engagement with other countries, especially China.…
Noam Chomsky: ‘The Republican Party Has Become the Most Dangerous Organization in World History’
By C.J. Polychroniou
Noam Chomsky speaks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 12, 2015.Ministerio de Cultura de la Nacion Argentina
But what exactly does Trump’s victory mean and what can one expect from this megalomaniac when he takes over the reins of power on Jan. 20, 2017? What is Trump’s political ideology, if any and is “Trumpism” a movement? Will U.S. foreign policy be any different under a Trump administration? Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the U.S. was ripe for the rise of an authoritarian figure. Now, he shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election, the moribund state of the U.S. political system and why Trump is a real threat to the world and the planet in general.
Q. Noam, the unthinkable has happened: In contrast to all forecasts, Donald Trump scored a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton, and the man that Michael Moore described as a “wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath” will be the next president of the U.S. In your view, what were the deciding factors that led American voters to produce the biggest upset in the history of U.S. politics?
A. Noam Chomsky
Before turning to this question, I think it is important to spend a few moments pondering just what happened on Nov. 8, a date that might turn out to be one of the most important in human history, depending on how we react.
No exaggeration.
The most important news of Nov. 8 was barely noted, a fact of some significance in itself.
On Nov. 8, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) delivered a report at the international conference on climate change in Morocco (COP22) which was called in order to carry forward the Paris agreement of COP21. The WMO reported that the past five years were the hottest on record. It reported rising sea levels, soon to increase as a result of the unexpectedly rapid melting of polar ice, most ominously the huge Antarctic glaciers. Already, Arctic sea ice over the past five years is 28 percent below the average of the previous 29 years, not only raising sea levels, but also reducing the cooling effect of polar ice reflection of solar rays, thereby accelerating …
There are big things happening in the news, especially if you care about climate change.
On Friday, the historic Paris Agreement officially went into effect, months earlier than anyone expected. And on Monday, countries from around the world convened in Marrakesh, Morocco for the beginning of the annual U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where leaders are hoping to begin the process of turning the agreement from a historic moment into reality.
In a normal year, these two events would be huge, headline making news. But, if you live in the United States, you probably didn’t notice this was going on. You probably didn’t care — too caught up in the final sprint of what has been one of the most divisive presidential elections in recent history.
And, for once — for now, for the next 48 hours — that’s okay. Climate change is a huge story, arguably the biggest story in the world, due to the sheer magnitude of the problem and its consequences. But it’s hard to talk about these two events — the Paris Agreement and the conference to discuss its implementation — unless you know whether Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States. Because depending on who wins the election, the world is facing two very different paths.
…
Donald Trump has a plan, too — but it’s not about helping the United States maintain its position as a leader on climate action. He wants to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, a process he could begin during his first term and witness the completion of if he is re-elected.
Even if he doesn’t officially pull the United States out of the agreement, the domestic energy policies Trump has made public — opening up offshore drilling and federal coal leases, dismantling the Clean Power Plan — would make it really difficult for the U.S. to meet its commitment of reducing emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. He has also promised to completely cut federal spending on clean energy research and development, which would effectively slow down the transition to a carbon-free economy just as the consequences of unfettered carbon pollution are becoming increasingly clear.
Noam Chomsky speaks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 12, 2015.Ministerio de Cultura de la Nacion Argentina