May 8, 2016

The White House wants Congress to appropriate $1.9 billion to battle growing Zika outbreaks. Democrats, especially in the Senate, say new money should be spent, while Republicans argue that there is plenty of money and waste in the existing budgets for these and other agencies.

The good news is that these agencies, the World Health Organization, national health ministries, and even neighborhood groups and families can take many relatively simple, cost-effective steps to reduce Aedes aegypti mosquito populations and protect people from Zika and other diseases that these flying killers carry: yellow, dengue and chikungunya fever.

Our article summarizes the situation and the steps that can and should be taken right now: ahead of the Summer Olympics that will bring tens of thousands to Brazil, where many could otherwise be infected by one or more of these diseases, and then spread them even more widely when they go home – and before these diseases infect even more victims in areas where Ae. aegypti are abundant and may be carrying these diseases.

We don’t need billion$ to prevent Zika
Controlling mosquitoes and preventing diseases requires smarter policies, not more billions

Paul Driessen	Dr. Robert Novak

The Zika virus is increasingly linked to serious neurological complications for pregnant women and microcephaly in newborns: smaller than normal heads and brains. It also affects areas of fetal brains that control basic muscular, motor, speech and other functions, leading to severe debilities that require expensive care throughout a person’s life.

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March 26, 2016

Washington’s despotic lawlessness
We’ve had a “try and stop me” president. Now we need one who will invalidate those actions.

Paul Driessen

Washington is out of control. Legislators, judges and unelected bureaucrats want to control our lives, livelihoods and living standards, with no accountability even for major errors, calculated deception, or deliberate, often illegal assaults on our liberties and on citizens who resist the advancing Leviathan.

These themes animate Republican and conservative politics because they are happening – regularly.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is renowned for its annual Ten Thousand Commandments reports on federal rules. A scary but mesmerizing new analysis now maps how the Washington bureaucracy lawlessly imposes agendas that all too frequently contravene or disregard what We the People support, what is best for the nation, and even what Congress has enacted or refused to encode in legislation.

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April 19, 2016

RICO for government climate deniers?
How corrupt and fraudulent is the government “science” that denies natural climate change?

Paul Driessen	Ron Arnold

A self-appointed coalition of Democrat state attorneys general is pursuing civil or criminal racketeering actions against ExxonMobil, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other organizations. The AGs claim the groups are committing fraud, by “denying” climate change. The charge is bogus.

What we contest are false assertions that “humans are creating a dangerous climate change crisis.” We do not accept false claims that “the science is settled” and will not be limited to discussing only “what we must do now to avert looming climate catastrophes.”

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January 18, 2016

Life under
an iron fist
Federal government overseers threaten property and livelihoods of hardworking westerners

Paul Driessen

 

"...So twelve Hebdo staffers murdered by Islamist terrorists is “rational” or excusable, but occupying a federal building is intolerable."

Activists protesting federal land mismanagement and the imprisonment of Dwight and Steven Hammond recently occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters building in Oregon. Some facts, context and perspective may help people understand what’s really going on here.

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September 11, 2015

Obama’s deceitful, unsustainable energy decrees
Wind and solar reap taxpayer loot, while hydrocarbon energy, industries and jobs get pummeled

Paul Driessen

"...already imposed enormous financial, labor, ozone, water, climate, power generation and other burdens on our economy – mostly with trifling benefits that exist only in computer models, White House press releases, and rosy reports..."

“That’s not the American way. That’s not progress. That’s not innovation. That’s rent-seeking and trying to protect old ways of doing business, and standing in the way of the future.”

That wasn’t the Wall Street Journal lambasting the mandate- and subsidy-dependent renewable energy consortium. It was President Obama demonizing critics of his plans to replace carbon-based energy with wind, solar and biofuels, stymie the hydraulic fracturing revolution that’s given the United States another century of oil and gas – and “fundamentally transform” and downsize the US and global economies.

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August 24, 2015

Climate Crisis, Inc.
$1.5 trillion and Larry Bell book explain how profiteers of climate doom keep the money flowing

Paul Driessen

"The Climate Crisis & Renewable Energy Industry has become a $1.5-trillion-a-year business! That’s equal to the annual economic activity generated by the entire US nonprofit sector, or all savings over the past ten years from consumers switching to generic drugs."

No warming in 18 years, no category 3-5 hurricane hitting the USA in ten years, seas rising at barely six inches a century: computer models and hysteria are consistently contradicted by Real World experiences.

So how do White House, EPA, UN, EU, Big Green, Big Wind, liberal media, and even Google, GE and Defense Department officials justify their fixation on climate change as the greatest crisis facing humanity?

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August 18, 2015

EPA’s gross negligence at Gold King
Fear-mongering, pollution standards and negligence rules don’t apply when EPA is at fault

Paul Driessen

"Three million gallons of turmeric-orange poisonous water and sludge is enough to fill a pool the size of a football field (360x160 feet) seven feet deep. Backed up hundreds of feet above the portal into mine adits, stopes, rooms and other passageways that begin at 11,458 feet above sea level, the flash-flooding water had enough power to rip out a road and propel its toxic muck hundreds of miles downstream. "

On August 5, an Environmental Restoration company crew, supervised by US Environmental Protection Agency officials, used an excavator to dig away tons of rock and debris that were blocking the entrance portal of Colorado’s Gold King Mine, which had been largely abandoned since 1923. Water had been seeping into the mine and out of its portal for decades, and the officials knew (or could and should have known) the water was acidic (pH 4.0-4.5), backed up far into the mine, and laced with heavy metals.

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August 7, 2015

An errant environmental encyclical
Pope Francis’ prescriptions will perpetuate poverty, disease, premature death in Third World

Paul Driessen

It is an unconscionable crime against humanity to implement policies that pretend to protect the world’s energy-deprived masses from hypothetical manmade climate and other dangers decades from now – by perpetuating poverty, malnutrition and disease that kill millions of them tomorrow.

The Laudato Si encyclical on climate, sustainability and the environment prepared by and for Pope Francis is often eloquent, always passionate but often encumbered by platitudes, many of them erroneous.

“Man has slapped nature in the face,” and “nature never forgives,” the pontiff declares. “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as in the last 200 years.” It isn’t possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society. “Each year thousands of species are being lost,” and “if we destroy creation, it will destroy us.”

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July 13, 2015

Ethanol and biodiesel: Guilty as charged

Paul Driessen

Bogus biofuel trading costs us millions – while the absurd biofuel program costs us billions

Two notorious crooks are helping us wrap up another sordid episode in the saga of the United States biofuel mandates, while further highlighting how bungled and long past its expiration date the program is.

Congress concocted the mandates over fears that US gasoline demand would rise forever and keep the United States dependent on foreign oil, as America’s supposedly limited reserves were depleted. The mandates currently require that we blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol with gasoline every year, and produce over a billion gallons of biodiesel. They hammer us consumers every time we fill our tanks.

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July 8, 2015

Obama and EPA imperil minority welfare
“Clean Power Plan” would bring imaginary benefits – and real health and welfare damage

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek

Entire communities could sink into poverty. Bread winners lucky enough to find work will be forced to take multiple jobs, commute longer distances, and suffer severe sleep deprivation. Families will have to cope with more stress, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse. Nutrition and medical care will suffer. More people will have strokes and heart attacks.

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency and environmental activists frequently claim that climate change will disproportionately affect poor and minority communities. In their view, this justifies unprecedented environmental regulations, like EPA's pending “Clean Power Plan” (CPP) to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fueled power plants 30% by 2030.

But what effect will the regulation itself have on poor and minority communities?

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June 15, 2015

Twin peaks –
twin lies
Supposedly record-high temperature and carbon dioxide levels supposedly bring record chaos

Paul Driessen and Tom Tamarkin

"The central issue in this ongoing debate is not whether Planet Earth is warming. The issue is: How much is it warming? How much of the warming and other climate changes are due to mankind’s use of fossil fuels and emission of greenhouse gases – and how much are due to the same powerful natural forces that have driven climate and weather fluctuations throughout Earth and human history? And will any changes be short-term or long-term … and good, bad, neutral or catastrophic?"

A recent NOAA article is just what Doctor Doom ordered. It claims the 18-year “hiatus” in rising planetary temperatures isn’t really happening. (The “pause” followed a 20-year modest temperature increase, which followed a prolonged cooling period.) The article states:

“Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.”

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June 1, 2015

Curbing EPA abuses
Action needed now to end EPA deception, fraud, collusion, tyranny and destruction

Paul Driessen

"In short, we should take Dylan Thomas’s advice – and rage, rage against the dying of the light – due to regulations that are dimming the lights in our homes and the light of liberty and American exceptionalism."

Russian President Vladimir Putin is outraged that the United States has indicted 14 FIFA soccer officials, accusing them of corruption, racketeering, fraud and conspiracy, involving bribes totaling over $150 million in kickbacks for awarding tournament rights.

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May 11, 2015

The Iceman Cometh?
Could a quiescent sun portend a new little ice age: a chilly era for humanity and agriculture?

Paul Driessen

President Obama, Al Gore and other alarmists continue to prophesy manmade global warming crises, brought on by our “unsustainable” reliance on fossil fuels. Modelers like Mike Mann and Gavin Schmidt conjure up illusory crisis “scenarios” based on the assumption that carbon dioxide emissions now drive climate change. A trillion-dollar Climate Crisis industry self-servingly echoes their claims.

But what if these merchants of fear are wrong? What if the sun refuses to cooperate with the alarmists?

“The sun is almost completely blank,” meteorologist Paul Dorian notes. Virtually no sunspots darken the blinding yellow orb. “The main driver of all weather and climate … has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century. Not since February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots.”

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May 4, 2015

Silencing skeptics, conservatives and free speech
Congressional Democrats and Vatican join White House and Leftist assaults on basic rights

Paul Driessen

Our scientific method and traditions of free speech and open debate are under assault as never before, by intolerant inquisitors in our media, universities, government agencies, and even Congress and the Vatican.
They threaten our most basic rights and freedoms, our political and scientific processes – and ultimately our continued innovation and invention, energy reliability and affordability, job creation and economic growth, and modern living standards, health and welfare.

Congressman Grijalva and Senators Markey, Boxer and Whitehouse sent letters to universities, think tanks and companies, demanding detailed information on skeptics’ funding and activities – in an attempt to destroy their funding, reputations and careers, while advancing “crony climate alarm science.” Equally intolerable, Democrats and the White House are blocking efforts to ensure that environmental regulations are based on honest, unbiased, transparent, replicable science that accurately reflects real-world evidence.

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April 28, 2015

A message for Pope Francis
It’s not climate change – but energy restrictions based on climate fears – that threaten the poor

Paul Driessen

"This is the real reason that climate
change is a critical moral issue..."

Pope Francis plans to deliver an encyclical on climate change this summer. To pave the way and outline the Pope’s positions, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a workshop on the topic, April 28 in Rome. The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Heartland Institute will be there.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, director of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and an author of the draft encyclical, says the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that “our planet is getting warmer.” Christians have a duty to help the poor, “irrespective of the causes of climate change,” and address what Pope Francis apparently believes is an imminent climate crisis. The encyclical will likely present global warming as “a critical moral issue” and increase pressure for a new climate treaty.

That raises serious questions, which I have addressed in many articles – and which prompted Dr. E. Calvin Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation to write an open letter to Pope Francis. The articles and letter reflect our years of studying climate change assertions and realities, and the ways climate-related restrictions on energy harm poor families far more than climate change will.

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April 21, 2015

The Whitehouse-White House inquisition
Sen. Whitehouse says reaction to intimidation is “overheated” – but he ignores Tides Foundation abuses

Paul Driessen

Several weeks ago, Democrat Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Barbara Boxer and Ed Markey sent Spanish Inquisition-style letters to universities that employ Dr. Willie Soon and other skeptics of the “dangerous manmade climate change” thesis, demanding information about the scientists’ funding. The senators were roundly criticized for their actions – prompting Mr. Whitehouse to post an angry response on the Huffington Post, saying the criticism was unwarranted and unfair.

My article examines his complaints, the tenets of the climate change catechism, climatologist Judith Curry’s recent testimony before the House Science Committee, and the real problem of financial incentives and abuses in climate science: hundreds of billions of dollars spent by governments and special interest foundations to support alarmist science; bankroll renewable energy projects; further enrich billionaires like Warren Buffett, whose secretive funding of anti-pipeline campaigns means oil gets transported by his Berkshire Hathaway-owned railroad; and support reelection campaigns for political friends who keep the gravy train on-track.

Thank you for posting my article, quoting from it and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues … in time for Earth Day.

Best regards,
Paul

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April 15, 2015

The Obama climate monarchy
Using the EPA, CEQ and other federal agencies to fundamentally transform America

Paul Driessen

ISIS terrorists continue to butcher people while hacking into a French television network. Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons remains on track. In a nation of 320 million people, American businesses hired only 126,000 workers in March, amid a pathetic 62% labor participation rate. Wages and incomes are stagnant.

And yet President Obama remains fixated on one obsession: dangerous manmade climate change. He blames it for everything from global temperatures that have been stable for 18 years, to hurricanes that have not made US landfall for nearly 9.5 years, and even asthma and allergies. He is determined to use it to impose energy, environmental and economic policies that will “fundamentally transform” our nation. He launched his war on coal with a promise that companies trying to build new coal-fired power plants would go bankrupt; implemented policies that caused oil and gas production to plunge 6% on federal lands, even as it rose 60% on state and private lands; proclaimed that he will compel the United States to slash its carbon dioxide emissions 28% below 2005 levels by 2025, and 80% by 2050; and wants electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

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April 7, 2015

Perverse climate “morality”
Current climate policies mean energy deprivation, poverty, disease and death for billions

Paul Driessen

You’ve got to admit, liberal are masters at describing every initiative they launch as “the moral thing to do.” Their campaign for draconian energy regulations and a new global warming treaty is no exception. Protecting people, wildlife and ecosystems from climate catastrophes is the greatest moral cause of our time, alarmist scientists, activists, politicians, bureaucrats, clerics and journalists insist. Rubbish.

It has nothing to do with morality. It’s all about money, power and control. It narrowly defines “morality” to ignore the incredible benefits that fossil fuels and electricity bring to people everywhere – while dismissing the enormous harm their policies will wreak on families and ecological values that they profess to care so much about. And it makes no mention of the fact that they will rarely, if ever, be held accountable for their falsehoods and fraudulent science, or the damage and deaths they cause.

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March 30, 2015

The tip of the climate spending iceberg
How your tax and consumer dollars finance Climate Crisis, Inc. and hobble America

Paul Driessen

Lockheed Martin, a recent Washington Post article notes, is getting into renewable energy, nuclear fusion, “sustainability” and even fish farming projects, to augment its reduced defense profits. The company plans to forge new ties with Defense Department and other Obama initiatives, based on a shared belief in manmade climate change as a critical security and planetary threat. It is charging ahead where other defense contractors have failed, confident that its expertise, lobbying skills and “socially responsible” commitment to preventing climate chaos will land it plentiful contracts and subsidies.

As with its polar counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg is invisible to most citizens, businessmen and politicians. The Lockheed action is the mere tip of the icy mountaintop.

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March 23, 2015

Radical environmentalism’s death campaigns
Its anti-DDT war is a lethal “death-rate solution” imposed on Third World countries

Paul Driessen

The terms racism, white supremacy, crimes against humanity are bandied about so often that they have become almost meaningless. But they are absolutely appropriate in an arena where they are too rarely applied: radical environmentalism’s campaigns that perpetuate poverty, disease and death, by denying Earth’s most impoverished and powerless people access to modern life-saving technologies.

Imagine activist groups preventing you from having your child vaccinated against polio or hepatitis, or from starting her on chemotherapy for leukemia – because they are “concerned” about “possible side-effects” and the “ethics” of permitting such “risky” procedures. Absurd! you say. Outrageous!

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March 19, 2015

Crony biofuel politics wag the dog
A governor and his son lobby for ethanol – and expect presidential candidates to endorse it

Paul Driessen

At its recent Agricultural Summit in Des Moines, the Iowa corn ethanol lobby successfully pressured a number of Republican presidential hopefuls into supporting extending Renewable Fuel Standards that require blending larger and larger amounts of ethanol into gasoline. Failure to back the RFS means sayonara to any White House hopes, the lobbyists told candidates. As a result, many of them dutifully said what attendees wanted to hear. But now that they have bowed to the biofuel gods and kowtowed to Iowa corn growers, those candidates need to pay closer attention to what’s actually happening in the energy, climate and political arenas.

My article recaps the bizarre goings-on at the Iowa Ag Summit, and lays out the facts about ethanol and its deceptive justifications.

Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.

Best regards,
Paul

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March 2, 2015

Climatist Jihad?
Climate Crisis extremists attack experts who challenge claims of imminent climate Armageddon

Paul Driessen

ISIL and other Islamist jihad movements continue to round up and silence all who oppose them or refuse to convert to their extreme religious tenets. They are inspiring thousands to join them. Their intolerance, vicious tactics and growing power seem to have inspired others, as well.

After years of claiming the science is settled and unprecedented manmade catastrophes are occurring right now, Climate Crisis, Inc. is increasingly desperate. Polls put climate change at the bottom of every list of public concerns. China and India refuse to cut energy production or emissions. Real-world weather and climate totally contradict their dire models and forecasts. Expensive, subsidized, environmentally harmful renewable energy makes little sense in world freshly awash in cheap, accessible oil, gas and coal.

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February 12, 2015

Vilifying realist science – and scientists
Ultra-rich Green groups attack climate scientists who question “manmade climate chaos” claims

Paul Driessen

This article responds to scurrilous attacks on my colleague Willie Soon, a superb scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

In addition to his regular work on solar and atmospheric topics, Dr. Soon devotes a substantial amount of his own personal time to investigating climate change, and particularly the influence of solar variability on Earth’s climate. For that his integrity has been under repeated assault by global warming alarmists – in government, Big Green organizations and academia – who worry that his work threatens their “dangerous manmade climate change” thesis … and funding. My article defends Dr. Soon and his courageous colleagues, and highlights the real moneyed interests that I believe should be made more transparent and held more accountable.

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January 27, 2015

I come to bury Renewable Fuel Standards
Not to praise ethanol mandates that kill jobs, raise food costs, and hurt poor families and wildlife

Paul Driessen

In a fascinating “strange bedfellows” collaboration, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) are cosponsoring a bill to abolish the corn ethanol Renewable Fuel Standard – which mandates that increasing volumes of this gasoline supplement be produced every year. Ethanol is a costly, subsidized, environmentally harmful replacement for gasoline. Their bill deserves to be passed ASAP.

The United States is already making more ethanol than motorists are using, even under the duress of federal mandates. Because fracking has driven oil and gasoline costs down, ethanol now costs more per gallon than gasoline, but gets less mileage per tank. Growing the corn that should be food, and turning it into fuel, requires enormous amounts of land, water, fertilizer, pesticides … and hydrocarbon fuels. As my article explains, the list of reasons to end this food-to-fuel mandate goes on and on – leaving its crony capitalist proponents to cite “dangerous manmade climate change” as their final (equally pathetic) justification for it.

Thank you for posting my article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.

Best regards,
Paul

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January 27, 2015

Methane deceptions
Deception, agenda and folly drive latest Obama EPA anti-hydrocarbon rules. Are farmers next?

Paul Driessen

“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama insisted in his 2015 State of the Union address. So now he wants his Environmental Protection Agency to compel drilling companies to slash methane emissions, which he says contribute to “dangerous manmade climate change.”

However, companies already control their methane emissions, and the supposed warming effect of this gas is wildly inflated, by as much as 100 times. Moreover, there is no evidence that we face dangerous manmade warming or climate change, now or in the near future. What we are really dealing with is a catechism of climate cataclysm: near-religious zealotry by an alarmist scientific-industrial-government-activist alliance – and EPA’s determination to use methane’s alleged impacts on Earth’s climate to control a highly successful fracking industry that has thus far been largely free of federal interference, because it operates mostly on state and private lands that are governed effectively by state and local regulators.
Thank you for posting my article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues. Click here to continue.

Best regards,
Paul