Politicized sustainability threatens planet and people by Paul Driessen

It drives anti-fossil fuel agendas and threatens wildlife, jobs, and human health and welfare

Sustainability (sustainable development) is one of the hottest trends on college campuses, in the news media, in corporate boardrooms and with regulators. There are three different versions.

Real Sustainability involves thoughtful, caring, responsible, economical stewardship and conservation of land, water, energy, metallic, forest, wildlife and other natural resources. Responsible businesses, families and communities practice this kind of sustainability every day: polluting less, recycling where it makes sense, and using less energy, water and raw materials to manufacture the products we need.

Public Relations Sustainability mostly involves meaningless, superficial, unverifiable, image-enhancing assertions that a company is devoted to renewable fuels, corporate responsibility, environmental justice, reducing its carbon footprint – or sustainability. Its primary goal is garnering favorable press or appeasing radical environmental groups.

Politicized Sustainability is the untenable, even dangerous variety. It relies on ideological assertions and theoretical models as an alternative to actual outside-our-windows reality and evidence. Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” its real purpose is gaining greater agitator and government control over people’s energy use, lives, livelihoods, liberties and living standards. It reflects an abysmal understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction, manufacturing and human rights realities.

The most common definition is that “we may meet the needs of current generations” only to the extent that doing so “will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

Among other alleged human wrong doing, Political Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources. Therefore, we must reduce our current needs and wants in order to save those resources for future generations. At first blush, it sounds logical, and even ethical.

However, under sustainability precepts, we are supposed to predict future technologies – and ensure that today’s resource demands will not compromise the completely unpredictable energy and raw material requirements that those completely unpredictable future technologies will introduce. We are supposed to safeguard the assumed needs of future generations, even if it means ignoring or compromising the undeniable needs of current generations – including the needs, aspirations, health and welfare of the most impoverished, malnourished, disease-ravaged, energy-deprived, politically powerless people on Earth.

For thousands of years, mankind advanced at a snail’s pace. Then, as the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up rapidly, until the speed of change became almost exponential. How today is anyone supposed to predict what might be in store ten, fifty or a hundred years from now?

Moreover, as we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so forth. We did it because we innovated. We invented something better, more efficient, more practical. Each advance required different materials. 

Who today can foresee what future technologies we will have … and what raw materials those future technologies will require? How we are supposed to ensure that future families can meet their needs, if we cannot possibly know what those needs will be?

Why then would we even think of empowering activists and governments to regulate today’s activities – based on wholly unpredictable future technologies, lifestyles, needs and resource demands? Why would we ignore or compromise the pressing needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs?

“Resource depletion” claims also fail to account for new technologies that increase energy and mineral reserves, reduce their costs – or decrease the need for certain raw materials: copper, for instance, because lightweight fiber optic cables made from silica (one of Earth’s most abundant minerals) can carry thousands of times more information than a huge bundle of copper wires that weigh 800 times more.

In 1887, when Wisconsin’s Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit by hydroelectric power, no one could foresee how electricity would come to dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. No one could envision the many ways we generate electricity today.

120 years later, no one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing and networking power than a big 1990 desktop computer. No one expected that we would need so much cadmium, lithium, rare earth metals and other raw materials to manufacture thousands of wind turbines.

No one anticipated that new 4-D seismic, deepwater drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies would find and produce so much oil and natural gas that today we still have at least a century’s worth of these vital energy resources – which “experts” had just told us we would run out of in only a few more years.

And yet, we are still supposed to predict the future 50 or 100 years from now, safeguard the assumed needs of future generations, and ignore the clear needs of current generations. We are also supposed to presume that today’s essential natural resources have to last forever. In reality, they only have to last long enough for our creative intellects to discover real, actually workable replacements: new deposits, production techniques, raw material substitutes or technologies.

Of course, all of this is irrelevant to Politicized Sustainability dogma. That doctrine focuses on ridding the world of fossil fuels, regardless of any social, economic, environmental or human costs of doing so. And regardless of whether supposed alternatives really are eco-friendly and sustainable.

For example, mandated U.S. ethanol quotas eat up 40% of this nation’s corn, grown on over 36 million acres of cropland, to replace 10% of America’s gasoline. Corn ethanol also requires billions of gallons of water, and vast quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel and natural gas … to produce energy that drives up food prices, damages small engines, gets one-third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline – and during its entire production and use cycle emits just as much carbon dioxide as gasoline.

Imagine replacing 100% of US gasoline with corn ethanol. How would that in any way be sustainable?

Mandated, subsidized wind energy requires millions of acres for turbines and ultra-long transmission lines … and billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines’ subsonic noise and light flicker create chronic health problems for susceptible people living near them, and kill millions of birds and bats annually – to produce expensive, intermittent, unreliable electricity that must be backed up by dozens of fossil fuel generators or billions of (nonexistent) land- and resource-intensive battery arrays. 

Meanwhile, American and Canadian companies are cutting down thousands of acres of forests and turning millions of trees into wood pellets that they truck to coastal ports and transport on oil-fueled cargo ships to England. There the pellets are hauled by truck and burned in place of coal, to generate electricity … so that England can meet its renewable fuel targets. How is this sustainable – or “climate friendly”?

Why not just build the fossil fuel power plants … mine for coal and frack for natural gas to fuel them – or build more nuclear power plants – and forget about the ethanol, wind turbines, wood pellets and other pseudo-renewable, pseudo-sustainable false alternatives … until something truly better comes along?

Meanwhile, more than 1.2 billion people still do not have electricity. Another 2 billion have electrical power only sporadically and unpredictably. Hundreds of millions get horribly sick, and five million die every year from lung and intestinal diseases that are due to breathing smoke from open fires … and not having refrigeration, clean water and safe, bacteria-free food.

As Steven Lyazi has noted, these people simply want to take their rightful, God-given places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. Instead, they’re being told “that wouldn’t be sustainable.” They’re being told they must be content with a few wind turbines near their villages and little solar panels on their huts – to charge cell phones, pump a little water, power a few light bulbs and operate tiny refrigerators.

Politicized Sustainability is irrational, unjust, inhumane, eco-imperialistic and environmentally destructive. It is especially harmful to the world’s poor. It’s time to rethink and overhaul this insanity.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on public policy. 

Throwing Away Jobs Under the Paris Climate Accord

Obama deposited about $1 billion in the Green Climate Fund for less developed nations as part of an initial U.S. payment of $3 billion he had scheduled  under the Paris Climate Accord without authorization from Congress.  This unauthorized $1 billion was the equivalent of throwing away 20,000 American jobs at $50,000 per job.  Had he managed to pilfer the full $3 billion, he would have destroyed 60,000 American jobs.

It gets worse.  The U.S. obligation for the Green Climate Fund under the Paris Climate Accord not authorized by the Senate as required by the U.S. Constitution was supposed to grow to $23 billion a year.  The rest of the developed nations were supposed to provide enough transfer money to the undeveloped nations to create an annual transfer of $100 billion a year.   The American contribution was the equivalent of destroying 460,000 American jobs.

Then on top of those plans to kill jobs, Obama and his party killed many a coal miner's job, jobs of those who transport coal, jobs of coal-fired power plant operators, jobs of those whose jobs depended on inexpensive and reliable power, and those who served all of these people with their needs.  He also prevented oil and gas drilling on public lands, prevented the building of pipelines, and planned to harass those providing us with the many benefits of the Shale Oil and Gas Revolution.  He backed mandates and unrealistic dangers to suppress fossil fuel extraction and use generally, driving up all energy costs.  His backing of the Paris Climate Accord was meant to serve as a means to apply pressure on the American people to put up with rising energy costs and the inconveniences of energy unreliability.

Obama and the Democrats sure worked hard to create American jobs!  What friends they were to the American worker.  Is it any wonder that the fraction of Americans with jobs is so low and those with jobs have gone so long without real pay increases.  The suppression of energy use was clearly going to destroy jobs and slow down the growth of future employment opportunities.  It was clearly going to reduce the growth of the American standard of living.  When you view man as the monster destroying the planet, of course you are going to want to destroy the monster.  This is exactly what Obama and the Democrats are bent on doing.  It is an intention to do great evil.

Man is not evil.  Man is the best there is in reality and the universe.  There is no other measure of the good, but that which is good for the life of each and every individual human being.  The standard of living, whether measured by human security and survival or by human flourishing, is highly dependent upon our freedom to use energy.  An article in the Washington Post a couple of days ago bemoaned the fact that low income Americans would suffer the most due to "Climate Change."  Of course, low income people are always the most vulnerable to suffering natural disasters.  They are also most vulnerable to suffering from the lost jobs I wrote about above.  They are the ones who will suffer the most in the long run if the American economy does not grow at a healthy rate.  If the American economy grows at a good and compounded rate over the years, any climate change that may happen in 2100 will be much more easily dealt with by a generally much more wealthy nation of people.  Taking advantage of our unbelievable wealth in fossil fuels to grow our economy and make all of the technological advances that allows, is the very best way to deal with the vicissitudes of nature.  Who knows, we may have another Ice Age descend on us by 2100.

Suppressing the freedom to use energy is a severely evil act.  That act is justified as a means to save nature or to save the planet, but neither is a value without man.  And, frankly, the wealthier and more developed our civilizations have become, the more they value nature and act to prevent its destruction.  This is not an either or choice.  We should not do harm to man because we are deceived into thinking it is.  Fortunately, Trump has turned away from the evils of the Paris Climate Accord.

Environmentalist Insurance Policies by Paul Driessen

Environmentalist insurance policies

Intellectual ammo for holiday party responses to claims that you need meteorite insurance

Paul Driessen

Many liberals went into denial, outrage and riot mode after November 8. Now they’re having meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees with climate and environmental responsibilities:

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry at Energy, Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt for EPA, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at State, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke at Interior. As Department of Agriculture secretary and multiple assistant, deputy assistant and other senior level positions are filled, the meltdown will likely raise sea levels by several feet.

It’s even worse than “white supremacists” and “Russian hackers” rigging and stealing the election. Having these people at the helm will be an “existential threat to the planet,” say meltdowners.

A typical over-the-top reaction came from an aptly named spokesperson for radical pressure groups and five-alarm climate scientists that feed at the trough of taxpayer and tax-exempt foundation funding “This is the wealthiest, most corporate, most climate-denying cabinet in history,” snorted Kiernan Suckling, director of the anti-development Center for Biological Diversity.

After eight years of anti-fossil-fuel, anti-growth, anti-job, anti-blue-collar policies – and the Left’s fervent wish for eight more years under Hillary Clinton – any Trumpian shift is bound to look that way to them.

So we’re likely to get a bellyful of bombast from like-minded (or ill-informed) office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if they’re too much imbued with holiday spirits. At the risk of offending those who do not share an NRA perspective on gun control (stance, grip, sight alignment, trigger control), here’s a little intellectual ammunition that conservatives may find helpful during those “spirited” discussions.

The United States needs to reduce taxes and regulations that have hobbled energy development and job creation – threatening to put federal bureaucrats firmly in control of our states, communities, livelihoods and living standards. However, as I noted recently, these essential, long overdue changes will come with no reduction in air, water or overall environmental quality standards that ensure our health and welfare. They will address rogue agency actions that actually impair our living standards, health and wellbeing.

Indeed, nearly all these autocratic government actions are based on some variation of the infamous “precautionary principle.” This infinitely malleable pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no cause-effect link can be proven.

Even worse, the bogus principle looks only at often-inflated risks from using chemicals, energy systems or other technologies that activists or regulators dislike – never at the risks of not using them; never at risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using them. Sustainability “guidelines” are very similar.

Just as perversely, if the Powers that Wannabe like a technology, they ignore or actively suppress any harmful impacts. For instance, since wind turbines can supposedly replace fossil fuels, they ignore bird and bat deaths, human health damage from infrasound, and the fact that essential metals are mined and processed under horrendous conditions by men, women and children in African and Asian countries.

Those environmental, health, human rights, and child labor violations are far away (literally not in their backyards), and thus can be conveniently ignored.

So can the poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death perpetrated and perpetuated by extremist groups that campaign tirelessly to shut down industries in developed nation communities – and prevent the poorest nations on Earth from gaining access to modern technologies that improve and save lives.

Eco-extremists claim they can save lives by preventing higher temperatures, rising seas, and more storms, droughts and crop failures due to “dangerous manmade climate change” decades from now. So they block fossil fuel power plants that provide reliable, affordable energy for modern homes, hospitals, schools and factories that improve health and living standards – and end up killing millions right now, year after year.

Climate change has been real throughout history. Sometimes beneficial (moderately warm, with ample rainfall), sometimes destructive (decades-long droughts or cold spells, glacial epochs with mile-thick ice sheets crushing entire continents), it is driven by solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other powerful natural forces that humans cannot control. Carbon dioxide may play a role, but only a minor one, and rising atmospheric CO2 levels make crops, grasslands and forests grow faster and better.

The “unprecedented” manmade climate cataclysms that Al Gore and Barack Obama promised are not happening. For example, we were supposed to get more frequent, powerful and destructive storms; instead, a record 11 years have passed without one category 3-5 hurricane making landfall in the USA. 

To attack fracking and natural gas use, bureaucrats claim methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – but won’t admit that it is 1/235th as prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere (0.00017%), and at least 1/600,000th as prevalent as water vapor (1-4%), the most important GHG.

Their “social cost of carbon” schemes assign ever-higher monetary impacts to every climate and weather problem they can possibly attribute to using carbon-based fuels – but totally ignore the enormous and undeniable benefits of utilizing oil, natural gas and coal that still provide 82% of US and global energy.

They’re convinced their anti-energy diktats will “save the planet,” by shutting down US power plants and factories, despite vastly greater emissions from China, India and a hundred other nations that are rapidly expanding their fossil fuel use, to lift billions more people out of abject poverty, disease and malnutrition.

The same anti-technology activists and bureaucrats also detest biotechnology and genetically modified crops that require less water and can battle insect predators with a tiny fraction of the insecticides required for conventional grains and vegetables. They equally despise another GM marvel, Golden Rice, which prevents Vitamin A Deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year.

Instead of applauding the reduced blindness, malnutrition, starvation and death these crops can bring, precautionary and sustainability extremists obsess about imaginary risks of eating them, allowing more millions to die unnecessarily, year after year. It’s not their kids, after all. Why should they be concerned?

The same callous, phony ethics prevail on the disease front. Eco-activists support bed nets – but not insecticide spraying to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and certainly not DDT, the most powerful, longest-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Sprayed once every six months on the walls of mud or cinderblock houses, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite, and kills any that land. 

But radical ideologues focus on trivial, irrelevant side effects that “some researchers say could be linked” to DDT use – and let 600,000 parents and children die excruciating deaths every year from malaria.

Every one of these anti-technology, “precautionary” attitudes is the environmentalist equivalent of protecting American kids from powerful chemicals, fatigue, nausea, hair loss, and increased risk of illness and infection – by banning chemotherapy drugs, and just letting the little cancer patients die.

They are the equivalent of requiring you to carry a $10,000-a-year insurance policy that covers you only if you are killed by a meteorite – or by a raptor or tyrannosaur. At least meteorite risks are real, if extremely remote.

Raptors and T rexes exist only in our imaginations, special effects computers and movie theaters – much like the manmade climate chaos and other precautionary extremism that come from computer models and PR hype, and drive too many of our policies, laws and regulations.

Have fun at your holiday parties. This season promises to be even more animated than most.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.

Brown University Dorms Do It In the Dark

This is the sixth March that Brown University dorms are having a Do it in the Dark competition to reduce energy use.  Actually, it is to reduce electricity use in particular.  They are not doing this to save the university money, so it can lower its tuition.  No, they are doing this to Save the Earth!  The administration is telling the students, mostly eager to hear the message, that this is "a time when there is a growing concern about the environmental impact of traditional energy sources."  Never mind the obvious fact that this is a time of lessening concern about the environmental impact of traditional energy sources as much more clean-burning natural gas is available.

Erin Donnellan, a student academic engagement coordinator in the Office of Energy and Environment says "the competition will, in part, lead to more sustainable living for students."  Christopher Powell, assistant vice president for sustainable energy and environmental initiatives, says “I believe this experience really is an attempt to drive home the message that we can all contribute to the global warming dilemma through individual actions.” I wonder what effect their salaries have on the cost of tuition at Brown and what they add to the learning experience at Brown?

To save energy in prior years during the March competition, students have turned off the lights and limited their showers.  Now what idiot does not turn off the lights on leaving a room just to save money?  But at Brown perhaps they turn off the lights while in a room in March so they have a reason not to study.  Now that is really compatible with the reason they went to Brown!  Not taking showers?  I remember when that was the rage among Pembrokers in the late 1960s.  You do not want to be in the same classroom with a bunch of unbathed students.  Besides, does Brown use electricity to heat water, or do they use the usually more efficient natural gas heating of water?

The draconian anti-free speech code of Brown apparently offers no protections to the feelings of those who understand that catastrophic man-made global warming is a falsified hypothesis, or that people stink when they do not shower, or that the EPA just makes up its claims that the mercury output of coal-fired power plants is significant to human health.  No the herd at Brown just eats up the propaganda of the Progressive Elitists and questions nothing.

As a physics graduate from Brown let me tell you dorm competitors how to win this reduction in electricity competition:  Use a lot more energy in your dorm the other months of the year so you can show a great decrease without lowering your standard of living and negatively impacting your learning during the month of March.  Whatever you do, remember that your family is paying a fortune for you to get your Brown education and try to learn as much as you can in March.  No, do not just memorize the propaganda.  Actually apply your rational faculty to the critical evaluation of ideas and to the accuracy of your observations so your family will get their monies worth from a Brown "education."  Too bad Brown does not push sustainability and efficacy in education!

Why Increasing the Federal Gasoline Tax is Bad

Aside from the fact that Americans are finally catching a break on their expenses in an economy with far too few decent jobs, stagnant wages, more businesses shutting down than started, and increasing food, housing, and tax expenses, there are many other reasons why the federal gas tax should not be increased.

Some say that the highway infrastructure is decaying and more federal money is needed to repair it.  This is actually a false claim.  The Federal Highway Administration says otherwise.  According to it, the condition, safety, and quality of the US road system has been steadily improving.  A 2009 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago concluded that for twenty years the road system had improved.  It even said that the median road was fully suited for higher speed transportation than the law allowed.

The federal government certainly loves having control of the dispensing of the income from the federal gas tax.  It used to be a favorite means of funding earmarks used as demonstrations of a Congressman's or Senator's ability to send money to his home district or state.  The money was frequently wasted or used inefficiently.  The "bridge to nowhere" was one famous example, but was really only one of many such abuses of the taxpayers.

It has been estimated that increased costs in highway projects due to the federal requirements of Davis-Bacon laws mandating high wages, due to an executive order of Obama diverting many projects to labor union workers while minimizing competitive bidding, greatly increased environmental and other federal requirements, and the siphoning off of taxes to pay for the federal bureaucracy, that 30% of the federal gas tax revenues are wasted.

It is worse than that.  Much additional federal gas tax revenue is still diverted to other transportation policies very much in vogue among Progressive Elitists.  These diversions are the main reason that so many Progressive Elitists want to increase the federal gas tax.  They divert large sums to rail projects, almost all of which lose money in operation.  They also divert money to bike and walking paths, which may make it easier for some Elitists to get their exercise, but which is hardly a purpose consistent with the U.S. Constitution.  Neither for that matter are the money-losing passenger rail and bus systems they like to fund in major metropolitan areas, or in some cases in low density areas as is the case in the massive cost and massive operational loss rapid rail system being built in California.

At least the Interstate Highway system has a cover under the Constitution as a system of "post roads," which were meant to tie a far-flung country together with communications and make it more defensible in a period of our history when that was needed.  Since 2008, spending on the actual road system has not increased.  The increase in spending of the federal gas and diesel taxes has fueled the 38% increase in funding of non-highway projects adored by the anti-road Progressive Elitists.  The present federal fuel taxes are actually adequate to fund road construction and repair for the next 10 years.

Republicans sometimes like the federal gas tax because it is a use tax, while Democrats see it as a sin tax to discourage fossil fuel use consistent with their failed hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming.  The 16% of the federal gas tax revenues spent on non-highway purposes are especially unrelated to national needs and should be funded and controlled by local governments, if they should be funded at all.  There is no reason rural people with longer driving distances between points of interest should be funding commuter systems in New York City, where no one owns a car and only pays the federal gas tax indirectly when they take a cab.  There is no reason that rich and local environment-ignorant New Yorkers should be deciding what the environmental requirements of highway projects are in Oklahoma or North Dakota.

And why is it that the fraction of the federal gas tax collected in each state that is returned to projects in that state has varied hugely from state to state over the life of the federal tax?  Some states have been huge winners and some huge losers, with the losing states outnumbering the winning states.  Generally, Pengyu Zhu of Boise State University and Jeffery Brown of Florida State University found in a 2013 paper that the federal fuel tax redistributed money from poorer to wealthier states and from higher transportation need states to lower transportation need states.  The tax distribution is biased against those states with more miles of highway and more use of that highway.

When a project is largely funded by federal money, state and local governments have little incentive to see that the money is spent wisely.  This seemingly free money from the federal government induces the states and local governments to make expensive lobbying efforts to obtain it and adds to our huge special interests problem in government.

The idea that the federal government should increase its control of the U.S. road system and other transportation systems by increasing the federal gas tax, Charles Krauthammer and Senator James Inhofe notwithstanding, is a very bad idea.  Georgia Republican Tom Graves introduced a better idea, the Transportation Empowerment Act, in the House of Representatives in November of 2013 to greatly reduce federal involvement and its highly inefficient meddling in local transportation matters with a greatly reduced federal gas tax.  Senator Mike Lee co-sponsored the bill in the Senate.

Fracking - Its Water and Land Use Advantage

Deroy Murdock has an interesting article on fracking and its green advantages on the CFACT website.  Fracking is often denounced because of its use of water to fracture deep shale formations to allow trapped natural gas to flow to the collection pipe.  Yet, compared to many other sources of energy, especially many favored by so-called greens, fracking actually uses very little water.  See the amazing comparison chart below and evaluate for yourself how distorted a viewpoint many so-called greens and environmentalists promulgate.

So contrary to the impression many people have, fracking uses far less water to produce a million BTUs of electricity than do nuclear power, coal, corn ethanol, or soy biodiesel.  But note that natural gas, nuclear power, and coal all use vastly less water than do the so-called renewable energy fuels.

Let us look at the land use comparison as well:

Once again, natural gas as a source of energy does best with respect to land use.  Note that nuclear energy and coal use less land than any of the so-called renewable energy sources, especially less in the case of solar and wind energy.

Murdock also points to the "Cuisinart" nature of the wind generation farms with respect to birds and bats.  Some versions of solar energy plants that use mirrors to concentrate solar light deal out death to birds by frying them.  So wind and solar have a wildlife cooking theme, leaving fracking with a wildlife preservation advantage.

Of course none of this would matter if fracking had proven a significant cause of ground water contamination.  Even the EPA with its determination to undermine fossil fuels as energy sources has not been able to document any significant ground water contamination.

Still another concern with solar and wind power generation is the fact that these plants are usually far from population centers and due to their low-density energy generation over a large plant area, they have a huge copper wire requirement.  In addition, each wind power generator uses about 3 tons of copper in its pick-up coils in its electrical transformer.  Given the increased cost of copper in recent times, this large copper requirement is not an insignificant cost factor in the price of electricity from solar or wind energy plants.

The More Flexible Obama EPA Post-Election Ambush

Obama has had several of the new rules promulgated by his radical EPA put on hold until after the election.  Apparently, missile defense shields are not the only topic on which he will have more flexibility after the election.  He is well aware that these rulings will cause the loss of many jobs and he does not want those job holders and their families to know this before the election.  This is especially a dirty trick on the poor and those on fixed incomes that the Democrat Party used to pretend to champion.  They are already spending about 24% of their very limited incomes on energy largely due to the out-of-control efforts of the EPA to raise energy prices for fossil fuels and to mandate the increased use of very expensive alternative energy sources.  With friends like these, the poor need no enemies.

Senator Jim Inhofe has had a report written by the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works which was published in October and documents the long list of new rulings that EPA is going to slam the American economy with after the election when Obama will be more flexible.  The results of the EPA rulings on hold will be the virtual elimination of the use of our huge coal reserves which have provided Americans with the least expensive electricity and energy in general in the world.

This Obama administration is also intending to limit the use of oil, not just foreign oil, but also U.S. oil.  This is the real reason that Obama prevented the building of the Keystone XL pipeline which would have brought a much needed supply of Canadian oil from Alberta and American oil from the shale oil deposits of North Dakota to Cushing, Oklahoma and to the Gulf of Mexico oil refineries which have been getting less and less oil from mismanaged nationalized oil companies in Venezuela and Mexico.  Killing the Keystone XL pipeline cost us 20,000 jobs immediately and about 465,000 jobs total by 2035.  That dependable supply of oil would have increased jobs in the Bakken shale oil formation of North Dakota, increased refinery jobs, increased other chemical industry jobs, and provided lower cost oil, gasoline, plastics, and fertilizer to all of the economic activities dependent upon them.  Our exports of products would have been increased.

The Obama administration is planning to replace state regulation of tight shale oil formation fracturing with federal regulations so that oil and gas from our huge shale oil and gas formations can be reduced and made more expensive.  Oil companies have been using hydraulic fracturing since 1949 when it was pioneered in Duncan, Oklahoma.  Since then it has been used 1.5 million times without any proven case of water contamination, which has even been admitted by the radical EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.  Yet, it is in the name that such contamination might happen that very expensive regulations are to be slapped onto frakking operations.  The real reason is to prevent the use of fossil fuels because the Democrat Party has bought into the nonsensical hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and has little care about how many jobs are eliminated and how much the cost of living rises as they chase that chimera. 

The Obama administration has succeeded in reducing the production of natural gas on federal lands and in federal waters by 11% in 2011 compared to 2010.  They decreased oil production from these areas by 14%.  But oil and gas production on private land is regulated by the states and such states as Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan have been allowing oil and natural gas production to boom.  This has created a shale gas industry with 600,000 jobs, which is expected to grow to 870,000 by 2015.  By 2035, there may be 1.6 million jobs in the industry.  In 2010, this nascent industry was already adding $76.9 billion to the U.S. GDP.  If re-elected, Obama and his many henchmen are determined to keep this wondrous development for jobs and our standard of living from happening.

According to an April study released by the U.S. Geological Survey, North America has 26% of the world's recoverable conventional oil resources.  This excludes our rich shale oil, tight oil, and heavy oil resources, which are gigantic.  We have 30% of the world's technically recoverable conventional natural gas resources.  We have the largest coal reserves in the world.  The oil and gas industries are already adding nearly a billion dollars a day to the economy and this is all that has keep us from falling back into a state of contracting GDP.  American households have saved about $566 million a day in natural gas expenses due to the drop in natural gas prices due to hydraulic fracturing.  All of this the Obama team wants to make useless and take away from Americans because they are foolish enough to buy into the unproven, and indeed failed, claim that CO2 emissions by man are catastrophically warming the planet.

What are the slew of new regulations intended to strangle Americans use of energy?

Greenhouse Gas Regulations:  Intended to be worse than the Cap and Trade legislation that could not make even through the totally Democrat House and Senate of 2009 and 2010.  The rules will cost $300 to $400 billion a year.  Gasoline and home energy bills will go up greatly.  Energy use in power plants, schools, restaurants, hospitals, churches, and farms will all be regulated, though they will be phased in so the frog will not jump out of the pot.  The first restrictions implemented will kill most coal-fired electric power plants in keeping with Obama's promise to do that.  At least 175 coal-fired power plants are on the chopping block.  At least 37,000 farms and ranches will require greenhouse gas permits at an average cost of $23,000 a year.  This will cause the cost of meat and dairy prices to rise.

Ozone Rule:  The EPA places a low-ball cost on this rule of $90 billion a year.  Others say it will cost $1 trillion a year and obliterate 7.4 million jobs.  Why so much destruction?  Because 650 additional counties will likely be placed in the non-attainment category for ozone limits.  These counties will be prohibited from further development, so no new jobs can be created in them and existing plants will be forced to close.

Hydraulic Fracturing Regulations:  14 Obama administration agencies are trying to wrest control of hydraulic fracturing regulations from the states.  These include the EPA, the Energy Dept., the Bureau of Land Management, the Center for Disease Control, the Dept. of Agriculture, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The cost for new permits and well workovers to bring them into compliance will cost from $1.50 to $1.62 billion.  Added costs per well of $253,800 are estimated and bringing a well back into use to re-stimulate fracture will cost $233,100.  Obama has efforts underway to apply the Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Effluent Limitations Guidelines to shale gas extraction and to coal-bed methane gas.

Florida Numeric Nutrient Criteria:  In 2009, the Obama EPA determined that it would set federal numeric nutrient water standards under the Clean Water Act for the state of Florida.  The standard the EPA said it was going to set in 2010 was widely criticized as infeasible both technologically and economically.  The state of Florida set its own standard and was upheld in doing so by a Florida administrative judge in June 2012.  The state submitted its standard to the EPA and the EPA had to approve it in 60 days or disapprove it in 90 days by law.  The EPA has done neither, once again demonstrating the lawlessness so common in the Obama administration.  It appears that the EPA is just waiting until after the election in the important state of Florida before asserting its arbitrary will.

EPA Control of Water Sites:  The EPA has proposed a new guidance document of April 2011 under the Clean Water Act that allows it to govern almost every body of water in the U.S., no matter how small.  This is based on their reinterpretation of recent Supreme Court decisions.  The EPA estimates that 17% of the non-jurisdictional determinations will be reversed under the new guidance.  This new guidance was unable to pass the heavily Democrat House and Senate when it came up for approval.  The new guidance would force state and local governments to perform many new duties many of them do not want to do.

Storm-Water Regulation:  As part of the Chesapeake Bay Settlement Agreement in 2009, the EPA announced setting new nationwide storm-water rules.  The proposed rule will establish a post-construction storm-water run-off standard and massive changes to storm-water systems.  Green infrastructure techniques such as green roofs, rain gardens, and permeable pavement will be required.  States, municipalities, and property owners will incur huge costs.  This may be the most expensive rule in the EPA's history.

Tier III Gasoline Regulations:  The current limit on sulfur in gasoline is 30 ppm and the new limit will become 10 ppm.  The initial cost to achieve this in refineries will be $10 billion and the annual cost thereafter will be $2.4 billion.  Gasoline cost may be increased by 9 cents a gallon.

Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Rule:  This rule would apply to about 200,000 boilers and their emissions of mercury, dioxin, particulate matter, hydrogen chloride, and carbon monoxide.  They burn natural gas, coal, fuel oil, biomass, refinery gas, or other gas to produce steam used to heat buildings, produce heat for manufacturing purposes, or to produce electricity.  The EPA claims the capital cost will be $9.5 billion, though IHS Global Insight did a study that concluded it will cost $20 billion.  The Small Business Administration says it will cause a major increase in regulatory costs for businesses, institutions, and municipalities.  The Department of Commerce says it would cause job losses of 40,000 to 60,000, which is much higher than EPA estimates.  The Senate Minority Report says it will reduce GDP by $1.2 billion and destroy nearly 800,000 jobs, but that combination of costs and jobs lost does not make sense to me.

The methodology for producing the requirements of this ruling is terrible.  The initial ruling had 5,800 comments citing technical and statutory errors.  21 governors and more than 100 Congressmen had objections.  EPA officials finally admitted they had failed to "calculate standards that fully reflected operational reality."  The most current version of the proposed standard says that a boiler already in existence must have an average emission limit achieved by the best performing 12% of boilers in the given boiler category.  A new boiler must have emissions equal to or better than the best existing boiler.  There is a terrible catch here as well.  The best is defined for each of the controlled substances.  The best fuel and design to reduce mercury emissions may be very different than the best to reduce particulate matter, for instance.  In fact, the best boiler for each of the six substances does not meet the new MACT standard for this reason.  The standard is not technologically and economically feasible.  What is more, four of the regulated substances meet the statutory requirements for health-based standards and were so treated in previous versions of boiler MACT rules.  The proposed rule now establishes no threshold beyond which the emissions are thought to have no significant consequences.  The EPA argues that they cannot set such a threshold, but this negates their argument that they can calculate the health benefits of their new proposed ruling.  Furthermore, the EPA misstated the health benefits by assuming that all particulates, no matter their composition, have the same harmful health consequences.  I have already discussed the issues relating to mercury emissions extensively here and here.

Cement MACT Rule:  This EPA rule is expected to shut down 18 cement plants and cost up to 80,000 jobs.  This will increase our importation of cement from China and increase the cement cost of construction of roads, bridges, and buildings by 22 to 36%.

316(b) Cooling Tower Rules:  Provides for stricter protection of fish in cooling tower reservoirs.  The costs are estimated to be between 384 and 460 million dollars a year.  The value of the benefit is thought to be $17 million.

Coal Ash Ruling:  The proposed EPA coal ash rule declaring coal ash a hazardous substance will cost from $79 to $110 billion over 20 years.  It will destroy between 184,000 and 316,000 jobs with especially bad consequences for Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Missouri.

Farm Dust Regulations:  The EPA is considering tightening its controls on farm dust under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for coarse particulate matter (PM10).  The new standard may require farmers and ranchers to stop many common practices and activities.  Many businesses may have to decrease their output drastically and many may go out of operation.

Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasures Rule:  Farmers and ranchers will be required to develop and implement costly oil and gasoline spill prevention plans.

The overall impact of these EPA rulings on the economy and on employment will be huge.  If implemented at all in their present proposed or EPA-favored form, the economy will go into a recession of the GDP reduction kind.  There is a pattern of EPA lack of concern for any rational weighing of the value of health or environmental consequences with economic and human consequences.  Whether people are allowed to earn a living is of little concern to the EPA under Obama.  Being responsive to radical environmental groups and to global warming alarmist groups is their top priority, aside from Obama's re-election.  Since Obama will have much more flexibility after his last election, as he famously told the Russian Medvedev, many of these rulings by the out-of-control and radical EPA will haunt American consumers, workers, and producers under a second Obama term.

David Kelley: Whose Environment?

David Kelley, founder of The Institute of Objectivist Studies and now Chairman of The Atlas Society, has written a very interesting, and for me enjoyable, essay in which he explores the concept of the environment.  He notes that environment is a highly abstract concept.  He continues:

It refers to the totality of external conditions that an organism of a particular type can interact with and that affect its survival, as opposed to its internal structure and processes.  For every species there is a different environment, set by its nature.

This sounds like what I learned in biology in the 10th grade, but that knowledge has been lost in our government-run, politically correct modern schools and in our media and political discussions.  Kelley goes on to ask:

What is the referent of "the environment"?  The answer is that the term doesn't have a referent, because it is not intended to do real cognitive work.  It is a political code-word, like "family values," that signals allegiance to a set of causes.  These causes relate in diverse ways to our physical environment.  Some of the particular causes are reasonable, some are not.  But my point is that they are not held together by a coherent ideology, even a false one.  They are held together by various unexamined assumptions (e.g., resources are limited, business is rapacious), feelings (fear of exhausting resources, guilt about prosperity), and images (dark satanic smokestacks, the beautiful blue-green planet from space).  In this respect, "the environment" is what Ayn Rand called a floating abstraction, which acquires its content through emotions and associations rather than by derivation from reality.

Kelley goes on to talk about the environment of human beings as a species.  I am sure you will find it a delight to read his essay.  Please take the time to do so, for as he says, we will never

succeed in creating a free, rational, and -- in the sense of the term -- a fully humane society until we establish the right conceptual framework in which to think about specific issues.

Excessive Recycling

A great deal of taxpayer money is being wasted by many local governments on excessive levels of waste material recycling according to J. Winston Porter, President of the Waste Policy Center.  It turns out that excessive recycling may not only be an unwise use of your personal time, but it can be more environmentally damaging and costly than dumping waste into landfills.

From 1985 to 1989, Dr. Porter was the Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In this capacity, he served as the national program manager for the Superfund and RCRA (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act) programs.  He set an EPA goal at that time for 25% recycling of all municipal solid waste (MSW).

Porter supports the recycling of about one-third of MSW.  This is about the national rate of recycling now.  The EPA has set a target of 35%.  In the Washington Metro area, several counties are recycling at higher rates.  Montgomery County recycles 44.2% of its MSW, Arlington County recycles 42.8%, and Fairfax County recycles 40% of its trash.

Montgomery County has a formal goal to recycle 50% of MSW and forces every county business to file a recycling report every year with the county.  It spends $18.8 million a year on residential recycling pick-ups alone.  It also runs ads in Spanish on Fox News telling Spanish speakers listening to Fox News in English that it is the law that they must recycle in Montgomery County!  Much more is spent on commercial education and enforcement, recycling center operations, and other programs.  The Montgomery County Recycling Chief, Eileen Kao, does not know what the total cost is.  This is rather reminiscent of the school board not knowing what the public school cost per student is in the county!  Taxpayer money is just too easy to come by for anyone to worry very much about how it is spent.  Recycling in the Democrat suburbs of the area is popular, even if it is carried out beyond rational levels.

Porter notes that landfills are readily available in most of the country and they are now much safer and cleaner.  They are better located, much hazardous waste is now excluded, there are methane gas and surface water controls, and nearby ground water is better monitored.  Liners and leachate collection systems are used in most new landfills.  Much of our trash can now rest peacefully in landfills with no real environmental consequences.

Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says that recycling aluminum cans and white office paper usually makes sense.  However, recycling much of the remaining trash is neither environmentally nor economically sensible.  For instance, recycling glass, as we must do in Montgomery County, makes no sense.  Ground glass is essentially sand, so it can sit peaceably in landfills.  Recycling this heavy material with movement in trucks and processing for reuse, costs more energy than the use of sand to simply make new glass.  But, local governments that want bragging rights for their high recycling percentages, love recycling glass because it is relatively heavy and the goals are measured by weight!

According to the EPA, in 2008, about 56% of paper was recycled, 7.1% of plastic, 23.1% of glass, and 21.1% of aluminum.  About 33.2% of all waste was recycled.  The bulk of the paper is either corrugated boxes, of which 70% was recycled in 2002, or newspapers, of which 62% was recycled in 2002.  In 2002, only 54% of office paper was recycled and 47% of aluminum.  Interestingly, the white office paper that makes the most sense to recycle was less recycled than corrugated boxes and newsprint.  Another interesting observation is that aluminum does make sense to recycle, but the recycling of aluminum in 2008 was at a 21.1% level, which was less than half what was recycled in 2002 when 47% was recycled!  There is a curious inversion of logic here.  The more sense it makes to recycle a material, the less likely it is to be recycled!  Glass, newsprint, and corrugated boxes are more likely to be recycled than aluminum!  This is likely to be due to a simple fascination with bulk and weight, as opposed to economics.

Many states have set recycling goals at percentages well above rational levels.  Among these are:

At 70%:  Massachusetts, Rhode Island

At 65%:  New Jersey

At 55%:  Maine

At 50%:  California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia

At 45%:  District of Columbia

At 40%:  Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Texas

One area of good news is that since 1990, the generation of MSW has increased at about the same rate as the population has.  From 1980 to 1990, there was an increase of MSW by 34.9%, while the population grew by only 10.1%!  Thanks in good part to significant weight reductions in the packaging of products, the amount of waste per person has not increased since 1990.  In 1980, a 2-liter PET bottle weighed about 65 grams, but in 2002, it was only 47 grams.  An aluminum can in 1980 weighed 19 grams, but in 2002 it was down to 13 grams.  A glass soda bottle went from 255 grams to 165 grams.  A steel, tin-coated soup can went from 48 to 35 grams.  A half-pint milk carton dropped from 14 to 9 grams from 1980 to 2002.  In most cases these reductions in materials use required improved materials and improved processing of materials.  This is work my laboratory plays a role in with its materials characterization, failure analysis, and quality control services.

High School Trash

A local Silver Spring High School, John F. Kennedy High School, very recently brought an 80-year-old woman to court because she left a bag of trash in the high school lobby. Well, actually she did it twice and they took her to court the second time because she left a note on the bag with her name. The trash was left by high school students throughout her neighborhood when they walked through on their way back from local fast food restaurants where they bought their lunches or on their way back to school for after-school activities. Adlyn Cook had asked the school to address the problem a number of times prior to leaving a bag of trash in the school lobby the first time and the school had ignored her.

Montgomery County schools are very much creatures of the progressive left. They have a strong environmental bias, including such nonsense as a belief in man-made global warming. But, they apparently do not mind if their students trash nearby neighborhoods. If the school principal were a responsible person and if he actually believed in what they teach, then he should have issued a rebuke to his students and called our heroine, Adlyn Cook, and thanked her for taking the time to pick up the garbage. Basically, he should have shamed the students for making an 80-year-old woman pick up their garbage. Then, he should see to it that the students are allowed to leave the school for lunch only if they do not leave their garbage behind and he should have provided adequate trash cans for the garbage they would carry back to school with them. He might organize an after-school service group to check the neighborhood and pick up after the, hopefully, few bad eggs. But, no, in a fit of government official arrogance, the school filed criminal charges of unlawful dumping of garbage against Adlyn Cook. She was issued an order to show up in court, which was delivered to her home by three officers.

In the end, the criminal charge was set aside and Adlyn Cook had to perform service work in the high school cafeteria as a result of a mediation procedure. The school principal has now agreed to meet with her in September and discuss the trash issue. I wish her good luck. I know from personal experience that high school principals in Montgomery County do not care much of a fig for the students or parents of students, let alone their neighbors.

There is even more to the story. After the principal, one Thomas Anderson, had her name from the trash bag, he had a "no trespassing" order issued against Cook. This prevented her from serving as an election judge during a special election. She has been an election judge for 20 years. Also, the results of the mediation of 29 June were not passed on to the court by a scheduled court date of 14 July. Cook, thinking the matter was over, went on a vacation trip and when she came back, she found that there was an arrest warrant on her for failure to show up in court. She turned herself in the police and they checked up on her story and withdrew the warrant.

Anderson says she handled it wrongly, but admits that sometimes things have to be done in an extreme way to get attention. He says the school also wants there to be no trash in the neighborhood. Too bad that was not his focus when Adlyn Cook called the school numerous times before leaving the trash in the school lobby. Too bad he was not thinking about that when he had no trespassing orders and complaints of criminal trash dumping issued.

This account is based on the story in the Burtonsville Gazette of 29 July 2009 written by C. Benjamin Ford.

The Fly Ash Environmental War on Coal

Robert Tracinski has directed my attention to a report in the New York Times called Coal Ash Spill Revives Issue of Its Hazards in which every effort is made to scare people into believing that coal ash or fly ash is hazardous, while giving them few facts to support that thesis. Let us examine what is said about its dangers. The article about the recent quasi-government TVA power and water authority fly ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee says,

Federal studies have long shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium, which can cause cancer and neurological problems.

“Most of that material is inert,” said Gilbert Francis Jr., a spokesman for the authority. “It does have some heavy metals within it, but it’s not toxic or anything.”Mr. Francis said contaminants in water samples taken near the spill site and at the intake for the town of Kingston, six miles downstream, were within acceptable levels.

But a draft report last year by the federal Environmental Protection Agency found that fly ash, a byproduct of the burning of coal to produce electricity, does contain significant amounts of carcinogens and retains the heavy metal present in coal in far higher concentrations. The report found that the concentrations of arsenic to which people might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could increase cancer risks several hundredfold.

Similarly, a 2006 study by the federally chartered National Research Council found that these coal-burning byproducts “often contain a mixture of metals and other constituents in sufficient quantities that they may pose public health and environmental concerns if improperly managed.” The study said “risks to human health and ecosystems” might occur when these contaminants entered drinking water supplies or surface water bodies.

The contents of coal ash can vary widely depending on the source, but one study found that the mean concentrations of lead, chromium, nickel and arsenic are three to five times higher in the Appalachian coal that is mined near Kingston than in Rocky Mountain or Northern Plains coal.

Stephen A. Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said it was “mind-boggling” that officials had not warned nearby residents of the dangers. “The fact that they have not warned people, I think, is disastrous and potentially harmful to the residents,” Mr. Smith said. “There are people walking around, checking it out.” He and other environmentalists warned that another danger would arise when the muck dried out and became airborne and breathable.

Another 2007 E.P.A. report said that over about a decade, 67 towns in 26 states had their groundwater contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps. For instance, in Anne Arundel County, Md., between Baltimore and Annapolis, residential wells were polluted by heavy metals, including thallium, cadmium and arsenic, leaching from a sand-and-gravel pit where ash from a local power plant had been dumped since the mid-1990s by the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Maryland fined the company $1 million in 2007.

Let us try to do some critical thinking here. The first quote says that coal ash contains significant quantities of lead, arsenic, and selenium. Of course, this may well mean that some coal ash does or that the average amount is in some context considered significant. That context may be that drinking water over a lifetime which has high concentrations of coal ash in it, may cause the occasional cancer or neurological disease. Perhaps if most of a spill is cleaned up in 8 weeks, there is no reason to believe any harm is likely. Or, maybe this coal ash either does not have the heavy metals in it or they are in a form which does not readily leach into water, especially in the winter when the water is cold.

Then there is the EPA report which says that arsenic from fly ash might cause a 100-fold increase in cancer. Again, does that apply to this TVA plant's fly ash? It may not have arsenic in high enough concentrations to significantly exceed that we digest from food or breathe in from normal dust. As for the 100-fold increase in cancer, that could mean that the probability for 100,000 people of one person getting cancer rises from 0.0001 to 0.01. There may be many other dangers we all face daily that exceed the danger of this 100-fold increase in the likelihood of cancer. We surely need more information before we go off half-cocked and screaming that we are in mortal danger.

The National Research Council report quote is full of maybes and mights. Again, it is difficult to assess the real danger from this. This might just be a case in which they are calling for more study of the issue and are not issuing a declaration of real danger. Or again, the situation may be such that some fly ash under certain conditions does pose a real danger, but suitable response to the fly ash spill at the TVA plant can mitigate these concerns.

The comment that the mean lead, chromium, nickel, and arsenic concentrations in Appalachian coal is three to five times higher than in Rocky Mountain or Plains States coal may simply mean that fly ash from those coals is rarely, if ever, of danger and that Appalachian coal ash is occasionally dangerous. But, once again we have no definition of what situations are dangerous.

The next comment that the fly ash might become airborne and breathable may be nonsense. If it were inclined to become airborne, it would seem unlikely that the plant would have been allowed to pile it up in the first place. It would have been blown away and many complaints would have been issued. The fly ash materials I have analyzed in my lab were too coarse-grained and heavy to become airborne. These were commonly being investigated as additives to concrete or other composite materials and may not have been representative of all coal ash post-combustion products, but my first point seems to indicate that they likely are. Generally, the coal plants would not like to have a fine powder waste product to have to contend with, so I am sure that they have a preference for a coarse-grained product.

The last quote that 67 towns in 26 states had their groundwater contaminated by heavy metals from fly ash dumps may very well indicate a real problem. Yet, any amount of a heavy metal may be called contamination, though its concentration is way below the level sufficient to do any proven harm. Perhaps they mean that there was proven harm in these cases, but one cannot tell this from the quote. When there is, then it is reasonable to require that fly ash with leachable heavy metals is stored in such a way that any leachate is contained and rendered harmless. This may be necessary at some vulnerable sites or with some types of fly ash.

The article gives one the sense that the author is delighting in finding the TVA irresponsible. Of course, the TVA was irresponsible in allowing the earth dam holding the fly ash back to break. This semi-governmental agency was cavalier with the public safety in that the fly ash might have killed people as it flowed downhill and it certainly did great property damage. Possibly, the TVA was also cavalier from the contamination standpoint even when the fly ash was contained. But, the laboratory analyses of the town's water did not show that it was dangerously contaminated, at least yet. Perhaps, depending on where the town's water comes from, it might be so in time. We cannot tell from the article. What we can see in the article is a consistent attack on the use of coal to generate electric power. More than 50% of our nation's electricity is generated from coal-fired power plants. These cavalier environmental extremists are threatening half of our electricity supply with an as yet very weak case against the environmental hazards of coal.

It is also a valid concern that cutting off 50% of our electricity would bring major hazards to people. Going up and down stairs in the dark is less safe than doing so with the lights on. When refrigerators and freezers suffer a power outage, food spoils. Many people will not throw it all away, so some may be likely to suffer increased food poisioning. Some people with medical problems must have reliable electricity. Many businesses need reliable electricity and will generate faulty, dangerous products without it. Other businesses will go out of business and former employees may blow their brains out in their depression due to losing employment and benefits. If we turn away from coal, which presently produces relatively inexpensive electricity, to more expensive alternatives, many people will feel they are less able to afford medical expenses and will forego medical examinations and treatments. This is a real danger. Attempts to improve human safety can be very complex and should be thought through with great care.

Of course, it would be a very good thing to greatly increase our use of nuclear power. It has an excellent safety record.

Poor Forecasting of IPCC 2007 4th Assessment

The 2007 assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was examined and assessed by Kesten C. Green and J. Scott Armstrong, who are specialists in scientific forecasting methodologies. Green is with the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit, Monash University, Victoria, Australia and Armstrong is a professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Armstrong founded a number of journals on scientific forecasting and has written several books on the subject.

In an article published in Energy & Environment, they examine the IPCC report of 2007 for its use of scientific forecasting principles. This is the latest U.N. report claiming that man is causing dramatic increases in world temperatures and what these increases will be over the next 92 years. Green and Armstrong conclude that these forecasts by the U.N. IPCC violate scientific forecasting principles badly and are not a good basis for developing scientific or public policy.

Chapter 8 of the report provides some information, albeit inadequate, on the forecasting methodology used by the IPCC. It turns out that a huge effort was made in the 1990s to establish what good scientific principles for forecasting were. Many forecasting scientists made a joint effort to elaborate these principles and established 140 principles. Green and Armstrong used these principles to judge the scientific methodology of the forecasts made in the IPCC report and found that there was enough information in the report to make that judgment on 89 of the 140 principles. The IPCC violated 72 of the 89 principles for which sufficient information was provided to make a judgment! Green and Armstrong say that many individual failures to follow a particular principle would of itself make nonsense of the 92 year predictions of the report.

This is a very damning evaluation of the IPCC report and the predictions it makes. "The forecasts in the Report are not the outcome of scientific procedures." "We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder."

Some further comments of interest are:

• "Complex models (those involving nonlinearities and interactions) harm accuracy because their errors multiply."
• "Given even modest uncertainty, prediction intervals are enormous." This means that a prediction of a future value of a property will have very large errors. Predicting the sales of General Motors over the next five years is a much simpler problem than predicting average global climate over 92 years, but the error in predicting General Motors sales is still likely to be very large.
  
• "When there is uncertainty in forecasting, forecasts should be very conservative."

Among other interesting comments in this article is a reference to a surveys performed by Bray and von Storch in 1996 and in 2003 of 1,060 respondent climate scientists throughout the world. 47% disagreed with the statement that "Climate models can accurately predict future climates." 35% did agree with the statement. One of the things that people do not properly appreciate is how the U.N. IPCC has weighted its selection of scientists to participate in the report to favor those who are anthropogenic global warming alarmists and tends to disregard the judgment of those who disagree in the summaries written for the IPCC assessments.

The IPCC reports are principally about pretense, not about good science.

The Fallacy of Man the Vicious Animal Killer

A great many Americans believe that we are greatly endangering the animals of the United States by virtue of our high technology, mobile, and reasonably comfortable lifestyle. They believe that we have pushed those other animals of North America, which we commonly simply refer to as the animals, as though we were not animals ourselves, to the verge of extinction. Where they are not almost extinct, their survival has become more brutish and nasty than ever before. Cities now cover the continent and there is nowhere for wild animals to live anymore. We build roads everywhere and our mining, lumbering, and oil and gas fields are destroying animal habitats everywhere outside the cities. We have no right to deprive these other animals of their place in the environment and ought to return to the status of the Noble Savage in order to claim no more resources than it is our right to do.

This flies in the face of both simple everyday observation and the observations of many scientists who have studied a wide variety of animals. Since those scientists who do publish or broadcast alarmist claims of the deaths and extinctions, usually possible future extinctions, of the animal kingdom's denizens get far more publicity than do those who report that the animals are holding their own in most cases, let us concentrate on what we ourselves see, if we are observant at all. Certainly the states of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio ought to be among the worst states for animals if they are fairing badly in the onslaught of habitat destruction by voracious humans. I speak of these states because I hear news accounts more regularly about the deer, raccoon, fox, and rabbit populations in this area of the country than in others. I also travel about in them more than in other states over the time period since 1971.

In the 1970s, I lived in Cleveland. In Cleveland, not in one of its bedroom communities. We had rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons in the neighborhood on a regular basis. In 1980 we moved moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC suburb. In our yard we see squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, mice, moles, and voles. In the woods along the Paint Branch Creek a few hundred yards away, I constantly see deer, as I did last weekend on a bike ride. I have also seen opossums there. In the woods near College Park, home of the University of Maryland, I have seen many raccoons. On my drive to my laboratory in Columbia, MD in the Baltimore - Washington corridor, I constantly see deer and foxes, both silver and red. Of course, I also smell skunks with great frequency. I have seen muskrats on the drive to work. I have had both skunks and foxes in front of my laboratory. I just returned from a bike ride along a bike path through a large residential neighborhood in Columbia and I saw three deer on this ride. When we moved here in 1980, the number of deer was starting to grow and their numbers were way up in the late 1980s. It has only been in the last 10 years that I have made frequent sightings of foxes.

On a trip to Virginia, I saw a coyote in a park east of the Appallachian Mountains. On trips in Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, I am constantly seeing deer. Twice in Maryland, deer have run into family cars. Just over a week ago, a deer in Rochester, New York ran into my daughter Katie's car. Everywhere we hear and see the evidence of a burgeoning deer population causing more and more car accidents. Yet the deer populations continue to grow. Apparently, as we have become more wealthy and more people move to metropolitan areas, we hunt less and the hunting is apparently more of a factor in decreasing deer populations than is their foolish tendency to run into cars. Perhaps another factor favoring deer population growth in many areas outside the growing metropolitan areas was the long term reduction in the amount of land being farmed. In much of the country, land farmed in the late 1800s and early 1900s has reverted to forest and woodlands. But this has not been a necessary factor in the increased deer or fox populations, since they are growing even in the face of the growth of the Washington - Baltimore high population corridor.

Once upon a time, most Americans did not want to see foxes. They worried that the foxes would eat their chickens, cats, and small dogs. Nowadays, people are clearly more tolerant of them and even of coyotes, whose population is also growing. Reports are that puma and black bear populations are also growing. Apparently, when people are not dirt poor and when farms are better equipped to provide their farm animals with more protected housing, more and more people are not driven to exterminate carnivorous animals or to worry quite so much that the deer might eat a few ears of corn. Generally farmers are making very good money these days.

Maybe humans are not so voracious after all. Maybe they become less so as their lives become more secure and they feel less threatened. Maybe they even acquire some significant joy in seeing other creatures thrive and living well. I do. Yet, we see this happening even in cities and metropolitan areas. If this is the case, should we be so ready to believe that drilling for oil and then producing it and delivering it by pipeline is going to kill off the caribou? Well, that experiment has now been done. The results are in. The caribou herds are growing, not dying off. Similarly, we hear that some future possible few degrees of warming is going to decimate the polar bears. Well, the warming of the 1970s to 1998 did not do that. In fact, the polar bears did just fine. For them, it is not swings of a few degrees of temperature that matter so much as how much they are hunted. Rather the same situation as with the deer or foxes and coyotes.

There is no reason to prevent the exploration, drilling, and production of oil and gas on the Federally owned lands that dominate most of the western states or of the lands and waters of the northern areas of Alaska or anywhere else. We can easily both find and produce oil and have a habitat very suitable for wild animals. Apparently, the animals are more adaptable and sturdy than many give them credit for being. In fact, some animals just love oil fields and pipelines. In the late 1960s I worked in oil fields and on pipelines in the summers to earn money for college. In the oil fields along the south bank of the Red River in Texas, the copperheads and scorpions just loved the pumphouses as a place to live. Along the pipeline in north central Oklahoma and another in west Texas that I worked on, the prairie dogs loved to establish colonies straddling the pipelines. Why? Because the pipelines are heated in the winter to allow the oil to flow better. Prairie dogs are not fools. They like warmth in the winter. Working on the pipelines you had to be careful however. Sometimes, rattlesnakes by the several dozen would move into prairie dog colonies. They really like the ready-made holes and the warmth also.

Many scientists can be bought with research money, and/or with fame, and/or with political correctness incentives. Some courageous scientists will buck such political delusions, but many non-scientists may not be able to or inclined to read their published work and make a critical analysis of it for themselves. However, most Americans do evidence significant analytical capability in their own line of work and this has made them the most productive workers in the world. So, when you see yourself that so many animals are flourishing, as you must see, or smell in the case of the ubiqutious skunk, trust in your own ability to evaluate the claims that man is eradicating the animals and appropriating all the resources of the planet to his own needs and leaving nothing for the other animals. This politically correct thesis is clearly nonsense.

So, do not buy the line that man must not drill for oil and gas in the Federal lands of the west or in the north slope of Alaska. Do not accept the idea that drilling in the oceans will pollute all the beaches and kill the fish. Actually, the fish thrive around the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Do not believe the nonsense when environmentalist radicals claim that the caribou will be eradicated by a single pipeline across Alaska or even by several. Use your common sense. Do not go gently into the night and the dank cave that those who worship the Noble Savage would thrust you into. Demand your use of energy so man can continue to be nobly productive and creative in building a world ever better for man and also for the animals who seem to be thriving even as we thrive.