Climate Chaos Claims Cause Consternation

Posted on April 4, 2018 by matt ohern
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Anyone who thought “manmade climate cataclysm” rhetoric couldn’t possibly exceed Obama era levels should read the complaint filed in the “public nuisance” lawsuit that’s being argued before Federal District Court Judge William Alsup in a California courtroom: Oakland v BP and other oil companies.
The allegations read at times like they were written by a Monty Python comedy team and a couple of first year law students. Defendant companies “conspired” to produce dangerous fuels, the complaint asserts, and “followed the Big Tobacco playbook” to promote their use, while paying “denialist front groups” to question “established” climate science, “downplay” the “unprecedented” risks of manmade global warming, and launch “unfounded attacks on the integrity” of leading “consensus” scientists.
“People of color” and other “socially vulnerable” individuals will be most severely affected, it continues. (They’ll be far more severely impacted by climate policies that drive up energy and food prices.)
Oakland’s lawyers excoriate astrophysicist Wei Hock “Willie” Soon for committing the unpardonable sin of suggesting the sun might have something to do with climate change. They couldn’t even get his PhD degree right. They call him an “aerospace engineer,” and claim he personally received $1.2 million that was actually paid to Harvard University (as multiple, easily accessible documents make clear).
They don’t even mention the billions of taxpayer dollars that have been divvied up year after year among researchers and activists who promote alarmist views on global warming and renewable energy.
Oakland and its fellow litigants expect the court to accept their claims at face value, as “established” science, with no need to present real-world evidence to support them. They particularly emphasize rising seas and the resulting “imminent threat of catastrophic storm surges” that are “projected” by computer models that assume carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is now the primary or sole driver of climate change, replacing the sun, cosmic rays, ocean currents and other powerful natural forces that did so “previously.”
In suing the five major oil companies, they ignore the fact that the companies burn very few of the hydrocarbon fuels they produce. It is the plaintiff city governments and their constituents who have happily burned oil and natural gas for over a century, to fuel their cars, heat, cool, light and electrify their offices and homes, and make their industries, communications, health and living standards possible.
In the process, it is they who have generated the plant-fertilizing CO2 that is allegedly causing the unprecedented global warming, melting ice caps and rising seas. Hydrocarbons also fuel essential backup electricity generators for California’s wind and solar facilities – and provide raw materials for fabrics, plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals and countless other products the litigants use every day.
Equally problematical for the plaintiffs, the “established, consensus” science asserted throughout their complaint and courtroom presentations is increasingly uncertain and hotly debated. As Heartland Institute scholar Joe Bast points out, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now expresses numerous doubts and uncertainties about rates of sea level rise, the role of CO2, the cause and duration of a global warming “pause” that has now lasted some 23 years. Indeed, the temperature spike caused by the 2015-16 El Niño has now almost disappeared, as the oceans and atmosphere continue to cool once again.
The oil companies decided not to present much climate science in the courtroom. However, expert materials prepared by Christopher Monckton, Will Happer, Richard Lindzen and colleagues addressed questions about equilibrium climate sensitivity and related issues in amicus curiae filings for the court.
Oakland’s claim that the oil companies “conspired” to hide and misrepresent “the science” on global warming and climate change is on thin ice. Some reports say Judge Alsup dismissed the claim or ruled that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that there was a conspiracy. In any event, a decision on the merits will eventually be made, the losing party will appeal, and the case will likely end up in the US Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, climate chaos claims continue causing consternation in some circles. Too much money, power, prestige, control and wealth redistribution is at stake for anything else to happen.
Indeed, many in the $1.5-trillion-a-year Climate Industrial Complex are determined to use this issue (and equally malleable “sustainability” mantras) to replace free enterprise capitalism with totalitarian one-world governance; fossil fuel and nuclear power (the source of 85% of US and global energy) with expensive, land-intensive wind, solar and biofuel energy; and the hopes and dreams of poor people everywhere with policies that permit their living standards to improve only minimally, at the margins.
Actually, climate chaos hype-potheses now blame not just carbon dioxide and methane for runaway global warming, but also asthma inhalers and meat diets. The results aren’t just rising seas, warmer and colder weather, wetter and drier seasons, forest fires, nonexistent mass extinctions and the other oft-cited pseudo-cataclysms. They also include shrinking animals, a worse opioid crisis, and the endless litany of often amusing afflictions and disasters chronicled in The Warmlist and its video counterpart.
The “solution” isn’t just keeping fossil fuels in the ground. It also includes accepting profound lifestyle changes and dining on climate friendly insects (not ruling elites; just the rest of us).
And the real effects of manmade climate cataclysm fears are not just soaring prices for less available, less reliable, grid-destabilizing “green” electricity. They also include having to rescue adventurers who try to sail, snowmobile or trek across supposedly melting Arctic and Antarctic ice packs – only to become stranded and frostbitten or have their ships trapped in rapidly freezing ice.
So, what should climate disaster stalwarts do, when temperatures and sea levels refuse to cooperate with Al Gore speeches and computer model “projections” and “scenarios”? Or when forecasts of more hurricanes are followed by a record 12-year absence of any Category 3-5 storms hitting the US mainland?
One strategy is refusing to debate anyone who challenges the dire hypotheses, data or conclusions. Another involves “homogenizing,” “correcting” and manipulating original data, to make Dust Bowl era temperatures less warm – and this year’s long and bitterly cold winter not nearly so frigid, by adjusting records from local temperature stations by as much as 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 Celsius).
As to the numerous articles and studies published on WattsUpWithThat.com, DrRoySpencer.com, ClimateDepot.com, ClimateChangeReconsidered.org and other sites that focus on evidence-based climate studies and research, and challenge assertions like those relied on in the Oakland complaint – the increasingly preferred strategy is to employ algorithms and other tactics that relegate their work to the bottom of search engine results. Long lists of alarmist claims, articles and perspectives appear first, unless a student or other researcher enters very specific search terms. Even the major shortcomings of wind power are hard to find, if you don’t know precisely what you are looking for.
Google, Facebook, You Tube and other search, information and social media sites appear determined to be the arbiters of what information, facts and realities we can access, what our children can learn. They help stigmatize and bully scientists whose research or views do not hew to accepted liberal perspectives, and have even enlisted corporate advertisers into policing the speech of political opponents.
All this from the champions of free speech, tolerance, diversity and inclusion. Just bear in mind:
The issue is not whether our planet is warming, or whether climate and weather are changing. The issue is what is causing those fluctuations, how much is due to fossil fuels versus to natural forces, and whether any coming changes will be as catastrophic as natural forces have caused multiple times in the past. (Imagine what would happen to cities, farms and humanity if we had another Pleistocene ice age.)
All of this once again underscores why America and the world need “Red Team” climate science exercises, more evidence-based climate education, and a reversal of the Obama EPA’s unsupported finding that carbon dioxide emissions somehow endanger human health and welfare.
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Rep. Gerry Connolly Should Support the Freedom From Government Competition Act

Posted on March 21, 2018 by matt ohern
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What do parking lots, lotteries, roads, airports, horse race tracks, parks, recycling, golf courses, mapping, food service, pest control, and zoos have in common?
All across America, these are activities formerly operated by government that are now being run as businesses through privatization, contracting out, or public-private partnerships.
Cities as diverse as Chicago, Phoenix, Charlotte, Indianapolis and San Diego all have impressive bipartisan records for undertaking various forms of managed competition – turning government monopolies into enterprises subject to a competitive market.  Mayors and Governors, Republicans and Democrats, have discovered the power of the market to improve the delivery of commercially available services.
In Virginia, the Competitive Government Act (2.2 Code of Virginia 5512-5513) assures that, “The Governor shall cause to be conducted an examination of the commercial activities that are being performed by state employees at state agencies and institutions to ensure such activities are being accomplished in the most cost-efficient and effective manner.”  
These laws implement the “’Yellow Pages’ Test.”  That’s a principle that says if government is doing something that can also be obtained from a private company listed in the Yellow Pages of the phone book, it should be studied to determine if service quality, cost, and innovation can be improved through the private sector so that government employees are focused on higher priority, “inherently government” activities only the government can perform.
There is a critical need to implement such a reform in the Federal government.  According to the Office of Management and Budget, 1.2 million Federal employees, 53 percent of the non-postal, non-uniformed military workforce of the Federal government are in jobs that are commercial in nature.  Most of these jobs and functions have never been analyzed for potential private sector performance.
In order to implement the Yellow Pages Test across the Federal government, Senator John Thune (R-SD) and Representative John J. “Jimmy” Duncan, Jr. (R-TN) will introduce the Freedom from Government Competition Act.  This bill does not mandate privatization, divestiture, or contracting out.  However, it does put in place a process to review every commercial activity in the Federal government so we can assure taxpayers they are getting “the most bang for the buck” of their tax dollar we spend, as is the case in Virginia law.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has begun action on H.R. 1339. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-11-VA) is a senior member of the committee and Vice-Ranking Democrat.
The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the new Fairfax County Executive “warned the Board of Supervisors that the county of 1.1 million residents must learn how to do more with less until and unless more businesses move into Fairfax and federal spending in the county rises back toward a peak of $26.4 billion in 2012.”  With its large concentration of federal contractors, Fairfax, and Northern Virginia, stand to gain immensely by the enactment of H.R. 1339.
When Congress held a hearing on the bill, witnesses included two Thomas Jefferson Institute supporters,  Maurice McTigue the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and John Palatiello, a government reform consultant from Reston.
With an annual deficit of more than $600 billion and a national debt now exceeding $21 trillion, we cannot afford to perpetuate inefficient bureaucracies and have government doing things better left to private enterprise.  For the good of the Nation and Northern Virginia, Rep. Connolly’s leadership in support of H.R. 1339 is needed.
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Scientific Knowledge vs Social Constructionism

Posted on March 21, 2018 by matt ohern
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C.E. Larson is a professor of mathematics and applied mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University, and he’s a big believer in the scientific method as a way of thinking and accumulating knowledge. He’s also worried that a proposed new General Education curriculum winding its way through the VCU bureaucracy is so loaded with trendy, anti-scientific thought that it will make the university “a public and national embarrassment.”
“The proposed curriculum not only appears to be unrigorous and unfocused, but the main problem is that it is implicitly anti-science, at a time when we need to produce graduates — and citizens — who are critical thinkers, and can think like scientists, no matter what discipline they study,” he writes in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
VCU’s current curriculum is conventional, imposing minimum requirements for quantitative literacy, research & academic writing, humanities/fine arts, social/behavioral sciences, and natural physical sciences. The proposed curriculum uses a very different framework for organizing the curriculum: foundations of learning (writing and critical analysis); diversities in the human experience; creativity, innovation, and aesthetic inquiry; global perspectives; and scientific & logical reasoning.
Given the requirement for scientific &; logical reasoning, one might be forgiven for wondering what Larson is worried about. It appears that he was triggered by some of the nomenclature in the proposed curriculum.
There is only space here to mention a single offending guideline from VCU’s proposed General Education curriculum: “Recognize how knowledge is constructed differently in various communities.” Knowledge of course is knowledge. But there are fashions in academia that suggest that the most important kinds of knowledge are somehow not universal, and that there is no “truth” to scientific laws.
One of these trends, alluded to in this curriculum guideline, is “social constructivism” or the “social construction of knowledge.” The main idea here seems to be that because people discover scientific laws, the discoveries must be somehow dependent on the backgrounds (cultural, political, etc.) of the scientists who made them. …
A better guideline here would be to recognize how knowledge is universal, and acquired only slowly over time with great effort, by serious and thoughtful researchers across the planet.
A reading of the proposed curriculum reveals other indicators of leftist/progressive thinking:

  • “Understand and evaluate patterns and processes affecting social organization and distributions of power and resources” — again, it’s all about the power.
  • “Examine patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and other forms of social grouping.” The emphasis on inclusion and exclusion, of course, is a leftist preoccupation.

At the risk of getting all philosophical on you, comrade reader, I do believe there is a modicum of truth to the theory of the social construction of knowledge. Knowledge is socially constructed — what else could it be? Embedded in our genome? Further, it is fair to say that there is a powerful tendency for people to construct modes of thought that support and/or justify their own culture, religion, class, nationality, race, ethnicity, affinity group or interest group. Indeed, this is a universal characteristic of human behavior.
However, that’s not to say that all knowledge is socially constructed. Some knowledge comes closer to reflecting reality than other knowledge. Some approaches to acquiring knowledge allow us to send astronauts to the moon and develop cures for cancer that other approaches cannot. Invariably the approaches that advance technology are based upon empiricism and the scientific method. The scientific method — creating falsifiable hypotheses and testing those hypotheses — is, like everything human, less than perfect and subject to bias, blindness and corruption. But over the long haul, it has worked better than any other approach to acquiring knowledge, and the proof, visible in technological marvels, is there for all to see.
Applying the scientific method to the study of human behavior — psychology, sociology, economics, politics, etc. — is more problematic than the physical sciences because (a) human behavior is so extraordinarily complex and influenced by such a vast number of variables, and (b) people have a greater stake in the outcome, which, therefore, may bias the process of scientific inquiry. (Thus, for example, we get supposedly scientific studies finding that liberals have higher IQs than conservatives.)
While the “scientific” process of acquiring knowledge about human affairs is riddled with pitfalls, it is superior to the process that says we all believe what we want to believe, that knowledge is purely a construct of power, and he (or she, or they, or ze) with the most power imposes his language, mental constructs, and cultural/political views on others.
It’s one thing for individual professors to adopt the constructivist paradigm. It’s another thing for a university administration to embed that paradigm within the curriculum. Is that what VCU’s proposed curriculum seeks to do? It’s hard to tell. Is studying “diversities in human experience” a means to entrench leftist/progressive thought? Given the temper of higher education today, I do share Larson’s concerns. But the curriculum also gives emphasis to “scientific & logical reasoning.” I hate to pre-judge the outcome.
(This article first ran in Bacons Rebellion on March 8, 2018)
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Maintain the Old or Buy the New?

Posted on March 21, 2018 by matt ohern
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When your car has a flat tire, a dead battery, and needs an oil change, you have two choices. Take care of these tiresome but routine tasks, or buy a new car. Few of us can afford the latter option, and even if we did, new cars need maintenance, too. Otherwise we would just have a junk yard filled with inoperable cars. That truth applies to all machines, but also to roads, bridges, campgrounds, reservoirs, and other property.
During my tenure at the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, I noticed a recurring conference for State Parks officials, so I decided to go check it out. It was the annual meeting of NASORLO, the National Association of State Outdoor Recreation Liaison Officers. That is, state officials whose job includes administering a federal program called the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The four-day conference’s main purpose was (and is every year) to ensure that all the states sing from the same hymnal in lobbying Congress and the Interior Department for shares of the money.
Created in 1965, LWCF was designed to use revenue from the depletion of one natural resource (offshore oil and gas) to support the conservation of another (land and water). Royalties paid by oil and gas companies producing from the Outer Continental Shelf (this year $900 million) go into the fund, which was dedicated to maintaining and preserving national parks, rivers and lakes, national forests, and wildlife refuges, as well as matching grants for state and local park and recreation projects.
Like most federal programs, it has morphed, today providing grants in many other outdoor recreation categories. It has also become the primary tool for land acquisition, both at Interior and in the States. Congress has frequently broken the original promise and diverted some of the funds elsewhere, despite an unfathomable maintenance backlog on public lands. It is now estimated that national parks face a backlog of $30 billion, and states say they now need $27 billion from LWCF. To put that in perspective, the 46,000 state and local grants awarded throughout the program’s 52-year history total only about $7 billion.
Congress is set to reauthorize the program again later this year, but even so, a fund generating less than a billion annually can hardly keep up with such immense maintenance needs. One reason is that far more of the funds are used to acquire new land and easements than to maintain existing facilities. After all, buying a new car is always more glamorous than changing the oil.
Outdoor recreation is a $28 billion industry in my home state of Colorado, where LWCF has invested over $268 million in the State. Such investments are important to many other States – several of which have even larger recreational industries – so no wonder a major lobbying industry has evolved to keep the money flowing. It includes not only NASORLO, but also the LWCF Coalition, National Association of State Park Directors, American Recreation Coalition, National Park Trust, National Recreation and Park Association, Outdoor Industry Association, Society of Outdoor Recreation Professionals, and many more.
These days, Interior spends over $200 million a year buying land. That raises the perennial question: how much is enough? The government already owns 635 million acres, almost a third of the United States. That includes 250 million acres of BLM, 193 million acres of national forests, 84 million acres of national parks, and 150 million acres of wildlife refuges. And as the maintenance backlog demonstrates, the government cannot begin to manage it all. Reports estimate that nine of every ten miles of park roads are crumbling, along with unsafe bridges, and 6,000 miles of trails needing repairs. And over 115 million acres of catastrophic fires over the last 20 years (2 million of them in Colorado) attest to the utter failure of national forest management.
Perhaps that is why the Administration has proposed slashing LWCF acquisitions by 95 percent in its 2019 budget request, while increasing state grants. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is a steadfast supporter of the LWCF concept, but this is about land acquisition, not conservation.
Reaction from the LWCF lobby was swift, and predictable. One Senator said reducing acquisitions would “wipe out” the program, and the entire outdoor recreation industry. He called it “an assault on our national parks.” Another was even more hyperbolic: “It’s like the President has been watching too many President’s Day sale ads, and now he thinks everything must go.”
Calm down; nobody is selling anything. But they may be asking the glaring question – shouldn’t we maintain what we already have, before buying more?
–

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The Potential of Mileage-Based User Fees

Posted on March 21, 2018 by matt ohern
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“A Higher Gas Tax Won’t Fix America’s Highways.” That headline on a March 2nd Bloomberg news story is correct, since per-gallon fuel taxes are increasingly unsustainable, due to ongoing changes in vehicle propulsion methods. That point was stressed in the 2018 Economic Report of the President, released late last month by the Council of Economic Advisers. “Innovations such as user fees for vehicle miles traveled—as are being pioneered in Oregon, for example—and highway tolls that vary with congestion can increase efficiency and raise needed revenues to pay for infrastructure improvements and additions to capacity,” the report said.
Transitioning from per-gallon to per-mile, however, will be a complicated endeavor. Public opinion surveys show little support for per-mile charging—in part because most people don’t understand it. Many think it would be an additional “tax” on driving and most also assume that it would require the government to keep track of when and where everyone drives. That’s why the growing number of state pilot programs, partly funded by federal grants, is critically important. Some general lessons from the pilot programs thus far are that:

  • It’s important to offer motorists a choice of ways to pay;
  • Participants always understand that the per-mile charge is instead of, not in addition to, the gas tax;
  • Commercial vendors can handle communications and account management, keeping any detailed data out of the government’s hands.

Participation in a pilot program leads to far greater understanding of how mileage-based user fees would work, and participant surveys show high levels of satisfaction and generally a judgement that paying per mile is fair, including for rural residents who mostly drive gas-guzzling vehicles like pickup trucks.
Getting underway this year are pilot projects in a number of new states, as well as the first multi-state projects: one between California and Oregon and another encompassing a group of states along I-95 on the east coast. In addition, commercial trucks are being added to pilot projects, including the pilot being run by the I-95 Corridor Coalition.
Given how much is still to be learned, calls for Congress to launch a federal MBUF are very premature. That applies to a proposal earlier this month by well-meaning Rep. Sam Graves (R, MO), a contender to be the next chairman of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee after current chairman Rep. Billl Shuster (R, PA) retires at year-end. Graves proposed adding a “federal mileage tax” as an alternative to current calls for increasing federal gasoline and diesel taxes. In addition to being premature, imposing an additional federal “tax” on motorists and truckers could create a serious backlash against the MBUF concept.
In my view, the biggest challenge facing this needed transition is the idea that it should be a tax, rather than a user fee. Fuel taxes began as pure user taxes: highway users paid the tax, the money was set aside in dedicated highway funds, and the proceeds were spent to benefit those same highway users. That principle was pretty well adhered to for about 50 years, but since then has broken down. Both federal and state governments now spend fuel taxes on a wide array of public works projects, many of which produce little or no benefit to those who pay for them. And that, in turn, explains the vehement opposition to a federal “tax increase” right after Congress has given Americans a significant tax cut. (See recent statements by Speaker Paul Ryan, Americans for Prosperity, and any number of taxpayer groups.)
The single most important success factor to enable the needed transition from per-gallon to per-mile is to make MBUFs true highway user fees, not some new kind of tax. In designing the MBUF, we should try to solve all the problems with fuel taxes. One of those, of course, is the ongoing changes in vehicle propulsion. Another is that fuel taxes are not indexed for inflation. But the third is that, to most people, they are no longer user fees but taxes, pure and simple. And that means endless debates and battles over increasing them, when needed, to maintain high-quality roadways as travel grows and the cost of building and maintaining them increases.
We don’t fund our other vital infrastructure that way. We pay our electric bill directly to the electric company, based on how much we have used. We pay our natural gas bill the same way, and our water bill, and our cable/satellite bill, and our mobile phone bill. In all these vital utilities, we don’t have endless political battles over rate increases needed to add capacity to maintain high-quality service. Only the highway system is plagued by such battles—and that’s because highways are funded by a tax.
There are two paths we could go by. One path is to implement a “vehicle miles tax” whose purpose is to fund the vast array of over 100 federal surface transportation programs now encompassed by the Highway Trust Fund. The other is to implement “mileage-based user fees” that really are user fees, restoring the users-pay/users-benefit principle that is the basis of funding all our other public-purpose infrastructure. As Led Zeppelin sang, “There’s still time to change the road we’re on.”
(This article first ran in the March issue of Surface Transportation Innovations)
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