Top EPA Official Admitted His Yahoo Email Was A ‘Channel’ For ‘Offline Chats’ With Environmentalists

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) former head of policy described his private email account as a “channel” for “offline chats” with left-wing environmental lobbyists, according to newly released emails.

Former EPA Policy director Michael Goo wrote to an environmental lobbyist in 2011 “if you want to have an offline chat just let me know you are using this channel,” referring to his Yahoo email account.

Goo’s admission is detailed in an updated report by the free-market Energy and Environment Legal Institute (EELI). EELI updated its February 2016 report on EPA collusion with environmentalists after the agency recently handed over a batch of new emails from Goo’s account.

Obama’s Electric Car Fail: None Meet the 150-mile-per-gallon standard he promised

Obama’s Electric Car Fail

Only 40% of Obama’s electric cars are on the road. None meet the 150-mile-per gallon standard he promised.

Last year 17.5 million cars, SUVs, and light-weight trucks were sold in America. A mere 115,000 of those (two-thirds of one percent) were electric vehicles. Let’s press the rewind button back to the 2008 presidential campaign trail, in which Barack Obamadeclared:

we will help states like Michigan build the fuel-efficient cars we need, and we will get one million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years. [bold added]

In March 2009, two months after he became President, Obama delivered a speech at theSouthern California Edison Electric Vehicle Technical Center in which he similarlyasserted:

we will put one million plug-in hybrid vehicles on America’s roads by 2015.

In these closing months of 2016, it’s reasonable to ask how those green promises worked out. In short: abysmally.

Governments at both the state and national level have tried to persuade consumers to buy electric vehicles by offering rebates totaling thousands of dollars a pop. But only about 400,000 are currently on US roads, including those purchased by government bodies. The only way we reach a million is by counting all the electric vehicles in the entire world.

Despite spending billions, Obama delivered less than half of the electric cars in the time frame he promised. And let’s not forget his insistence that these cars would achieve the equivalent of 150 miles per gallon. A 2016 US Department of Energy list of the 11 most efficient electric vehicles indicates that not a single one meets that criteria. BMW’s i3achieves 124 miles per gallon. The Chevrolet Spark is in second place at 119, and Vokswagen’s e-Golf is in third at 116.

The 11 best-case-scenario electric vehicles on the road eight years later fall 25% short of what Obama said would be entirely normal. Between them, they average only 112 miles per gallon. In other words, Obama and his speech writers were pulling numbers out of the air in 2008, confidently promising to meet goals they had no reason to believe were actually feasible.

Time and again, we run up against this problem. Anyone can stand at a podium and promise to make all manner of green fantasies come true. But even US presidents with billions at their command …

Obama’s Post Presidency Plans: Anti-Capitalism Global Warming Venture Capitalism?

http://lidblog.com/obamas-post-presidency-plans-anti-capitalism-global-warming-venture-capitalism/

Guest post by Conor Coughlin Radical anti-capitalist groups are celebrating Obama’s post-presidential plans to join the ranks of the EPA’s Billionaires Club and become a Captain Of Industry. As the former leader of the Free World, he can now direct his vast brain-power on income inequality, leveling the playing field and eliminating barriers to competition by fellow ‘community organizers’ seeking to profits in the world of Venture Capitalism. Mainstream media all agree, Silicon Valley and environmental hipsters couldn’t have selected a more qualified spokesman for the Banksters, Oil Barons and Wall Street con-artist promoting peace and prosperity through Free Trade agreements crafted in secrecy. After all, is it really secret if all the stakeholders negotiating behind closed doors produce the expected outcomes? Why shouldn’t Obama be seen as the next Ken Lay of Enron fame, a trusted ally for the Wall Street environmental lawyers promoting the cutting-edge science of the EPA. What other administration has contributed more public support to the Energy Foundation, Prosperity Partnership and Clinton Global Initiative, and the other secretive UN organizations that produced the Paris Climate Accord. If that whole Venture Capitalist gig doesn’t work out, his pals at the Green Sports Alliance can make him a part-owner in an NBA franchise. Better yet, they could give him the Seattle Seahawks as a reward for allowing diversity in America’s sports programs. No Standard-No Problem! Experience across the country over the past 30 years has shown that energy savings can be estimated accurately enough to warrant tens of billions of dollars in investments in efficiency programs, and an industry of experts has developed best practices for measuring and verifying energy savings. Currently there is no national standard to measure energy savings from energy efficiency programs. Instead, each state commission (or utility board in the case of publicly owned utilities) develops its own measurement and verification protocols NRDC REPORT (R: 12-11-A) Legions of lawyers agree, Obama’s really smart! He trusts the science produced by radical front groups like Climate Solutions, which produced the Poised For Profits report on behalf of government while a franchisee of the notorious Earth Island Institute. Climate Solutions operated the Harvesting Clean Energy program, possibly the largest government-funded scientific research program of its type in history. Climate Solutions was listed as a non-profit under the Earth Island Institute from 1999 until 2003, when it became a separate non-profit with funding provided by Washington State. It’s unique brand of science became the basis for the Prosperity Partnership, a Puget Sound non-profit group …

Is Obama Worried About A Global Warming Apocalypse?

The New York Times’ multi-part series profiling President Barack Obama’s legacy on global warming reveals the president is a fan of a book on how “climate change and overpopulation” could cause modern civilization to collapse.

Obama was apparently a fan of Jared Diamond’s 2005 book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” which “explored the environmental changes that wiped out ancient societies like Easter Island and discussed how modern equivalents like climate change and overpopulation could yield the same destruction,” according to NYT.

An Obama aide told NYT he “recalled” the president mentioning Diamond’s book. Diamond is also the author of the controversial book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” focusing on the natural factors of why certain civilizations eclipsed others, and his later book “Collapse” focuses on why civilizations failed.

Obama’s concern about potential global warming-induced doom didn’t end with Diamond’s book. NYT details Obama’s worries that global warming was making weather more extreme and sea levels rise faster — meaning millions of “climate refugees.”

Obama’s Climate Change Diversion: ‘Endures humiliation at the G20 for a toothless deal’

President Obama will tolerate a lot for an opportunity to push his climate-change agenda. At this weekend’s G20 summit meeting of the world’s developed (aka “rich”) nations, which account for 85 percent of the world’s economy, his Chinese hosts really poured on the humiliation.

Unlike every other national leader, Obama was not given an opportunity to descend directly from his airplane on to a red carpet. The face-conscious Chinese denied him a staircase, forcing him to descend from the belly of Air Force One, a snub fully reported overseas in the Guardian but touched on only lightly in our newspaper of record, the New York Times. When Obama raised the issue of China’s militarization of the islands it has constructed in the South China Sea, President Xi Jinping told him China would “unswervingly safeguard” its claims in the area. When the American president raised the issue of human rights, Xi told him not to interfere in China’s internal affairs. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all came when Xi praised the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions, the issue on which Obama had come to take a victory lap, “It was under Chinese leadership that much of this progress was made.”

Xi was wrong on both of these counts: the Paris accord will not limit emissions, and China was a reluctant signatory to the agreement forged in Paris, largely by Obama, and whereas America agreed to drastic cuts in emissions, China made no such promise. All it agreed to do, at some date in the distant future—perhaps 2030 if that proves convenient—is to begin slowing the rate of increase of its emissions relative to the growth in the country’s GDP. Not a word about ending China’s financing coal plants in other countries—92 in 27 countries is the current count of the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative, enough new coal-fired capacity to offset all the plant closures and emissions reductions planned in the United States for the next decade. No surprise that Xie Zhenhua, China’s senior climate change negotiator in Paris, says the deal struck there is “fair and just, comprehensive and balanced.”…

Warmists lament G20 climate summit: ‘Failed to set a timeline for when the UN climate agreement must be ratified’

On Monday night, the world’s biggest economies shook hands and pulled the curtain closed on the annual G20 summit in Hangzhou, China. And while climate change made headlines during the summit as two of the world’s biggest emitters officially joined the Paris climate agreement, climate and environmental activists are more concerned with what the G20 failed to consider than what it did.

“The G20 failed to set the right priorities,” Pirmin Spiegel, General Director at the Catholic Bishops’ Organisation for Development Cooperation — a member of the international Climate Action Network — said in a statement. “They don’t seem to care for our common home. While climate change is only one of ‘Further Significant Global Challenges Affecting the World Economy’, the biggest problem and — at the same time — the one-size-fits-all solution G20 offers to these challenges is growth. They stick to the same old tools that have not been able to solve the climate crisis and global inequality.”

…

Despite two of the world’s largest emitters formally entering into the Paris agreement — and the agreement itself being that much closer to coming into force globally — the G20 summit failed to set a timeline for when the agreement must be ratified.

In the official communique adopted by leaders at the summit, nations agreed to “ complete our respective domestic procedures in order to join the Paris Agreement as soon as our national procedures allow.” And while the communique “[welcomes] those G20 members who joined the Agreement and efforts to enable the Paris Agreement to enter into force by the end of 2016,” it doesn’t actually say anything specific about adopting the agreement by the end of the year. According to the Indian Express, India’s chief negotiator at the summit pushed for the exclusion of strict deadlines in the communique, arguing that the country was not prepared, domestically, to ratify before the end of 2016.

That’s not necessarily the end of the world, but it does leave the agreement hanging in the balance —India is one of the world’s top emitters, but there are pathways to ratification even if India doesn’t enter the agreement before 2016 (the World Resources Institute outlines those possibilities here). A vague timeline, however, is bad news both for activists in the United States, who want to shore up the agreement before a potential Trump presidency, and developing and low-lying nations, which …

Obama’s Promise kept: 83,000 coal mining jobs lost since 2008

Promise kept: 83,000 coal mining jobs lost since 2008

By Rick Moran

It was during the 2008 campaign that candidate Obama first promised to destroy the coal industry. Since then, more than 400 coal mines have closed, six major coal companies have filed for bankruptcy, and more than 83,000 coal miners have lost their jobs.

That’s one promise the president worked hard to keep.

Daily Caller:

A 2015 study found the coal industry lost 50,000 jobs from 2008 to 2012 during Obama’s first term. During Obama’s second term, the industry employment in coal mining has fallen by another 33,300 jobs, 10,900 of which occurred in the last year alone, according to federal data. Currently, coal mining employs 69,460 Americans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Much of the blame for the job losses is targeted at federal regulations aimed at preventing global warming, which caused coal power plants to go bankrupt, resulting in a sharp decline in the price of coal.

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” Obama said during a 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board. Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also pledged that “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Employment has fallen so drastically because coal production has fallen by 15 percent since 2008 as companies have been forced by environmental regulation to shut down 400 mines due to decreasing demand. Companies opened 103 new mines in the U.S. in 2013 while 271 coal mines were idled or shut down, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations and cheap natural gas have devastating coal companies as well, even forcing Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, to declare bankruptcy earlier this month. Other American coal companies have faced financial problems too. Arch Coal filed for bankruptcy as well in January and coal companies like Alliance Coal announced mass layoffs.

As a result, many ex-coal miners are unemployed and Appalachian “coal country” has faced very real economic devastation as a result. The coal-producing areas of eastern Kentucky have an unemployment rate of 8 percent unemployment rates and parts of West Virginia have double-digit unemployment.

Obama and many

…

Warmists rejoice: ‘Breakthrough as US & China agree to ratify UN Paris climate deal’

The United States and China, the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, have announced they will formally ratify the Paris climate change agreement in a move campaigners immediately hailed as a significant advance in the battle against global warming.

Speaking on Saturday, on the eve of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, US president, Barack Obama, confirmed the long-awaited move, the result of weeks of intense negotiations by Chinese and American officials.

“Just as I believe the Paris agreement will ultimately prove to be a turning point for our planet, I believe that history will judge today’s efforts as pivotal,” said Obama, who was speaking in the presence of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.

“Where there is a will and there is a vision and where countries like China and the United States are prepared to show leadership and to lead by example, it is possible for us to create a world that is more secure, more prosperous and more free than the one that was left for us,” added Obama, for whom the commitment is part of a final push to secure a green legacy for his presidency.

Earlier China had announced it would formally ratify the Paris accord with President Xi vowing to “unwaveringly pursue sustainable development”.

“Our response to climate change bears on the future of our people and the well-being of mankind,” Xi said, according to the Associated Press.

Obama said the joint announcement showed how the world’s two largest economies were capable of coming together to fight climate change.

“Despite our differences on other issues we hope that our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire greater ambition and greater action around the world,” he said.

“We have a saying in America that you need to put your money where your mouth is,” Obama told an audience at Hangzhou’s West Lake state guesthouse. “And when it comes to combating climate change that is what we are doing … we are leading by example.”

If the Paris agreement comes into force this year as hoped, it means the nearly 200 governments party to it will become obliged to …

Obama and Xi Formally Commit U.S. and China to Paris Climate Accord

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/world/asia/obama-xi-jinping-china-climate-accord.html?_r=0

HANGZHOU, China — President Obamaand President Xi Jinping of China formally committed the world’s two largest economies to the Paris climate agreement here on Saturday, cementing their partnership on climate change and offering a rare display of harmony in a relationship that has become increasingly discordant.

On multiple fronts, like computer hacking and maritime security, ties between China and the United States have frayed during the seven and a half years of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The friction has worsened since the ascension of Mr. Xi as a powerful nationalist leader in 2013.

Yet the fact that he and Mr. Obama could set aside those tensions to work together yet again on a joint plan to reduce greenhouse gases attests to the pragmatic personal rapport they have built, as well as to the complexity of the broader United States-China relationship, a tangle of competing and congruent interests.

At a ceremony in this picturesque lakefront city, the two leaders hailed the adoption of the Paris agreement as a critical step toward bringing it into force worldwide. Together, China and the United States generate nearly 40 percent of the world’s emissions, not far from the threshold of 55 percent required for the global pact to take effect.

“Despite our differences on other issues, we hope our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire further ambition and further action around the world,” Mr. Obama declared.

Mr. Xi praised the Paris agreement as a milestone, adding, “It was under Chinese leadership that much of this progress was made.”…

UN Paris climate deal: US and China formally join pact

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37265541

The US and China – together responsible for 40% of the world’s carbon emissions – have both formally joined the Paris global climate agreement.

After arriving with other leaders of G20 nations for a summit in the city of Hangzhou, Mr Obama said: “History will judge today’s effort as pivotal.”

CO2 emissions are the driving force behind climate change.

Last December, countries agreed to cut emissions enough to keep the global average rise in temperatures below 2C.…

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