IN THIS ISSUE:
- Suggestions for the New Executive Agency Heads
- Global Greening Due to CO2 Enrichment Reconfirmed
- Greenland Has Been Ice-Free in the Past When CO2 Was Lower
Suggestions for the New Executive Agency Heads
The once and future President, Donald Trump, is well-situated to hit the ground running upon taking the oath of office. Trump’s promises to drain the swamp in his first term went largely unfulfilled, through no fault of his own. It took him a while to get his people in place, and even then he never could have realistically anticipated the embedded nature of the long-term, civil-service-protected bureaucrats violently opposed to putting America first and promoting U.S. interests over transnational geopolitical and environmental concerns. Now, knowing what he is up against, Trump is already choosing his cabinet and their subordinates with his eyes wide open and has particular programs and efforts in his sights for the second term. His experience should arm him for greater success.
One area where Trump did make significant headway in his first term was in making America energy-independent. Indeed, Trump’s policies began a domestic energy renaissance, making the U.S. energy-dominant, a net exporting country. This improved our trade balance while aiding our economic partners in Europe and developing countries around the globe with lower energy prices and more reliable energy sources.
President Joe Biden quickly undid all this success. Playing Don Quixote in a futile effort to control climate change, Biden reduced domestic energy production, blocked energy exports, and increased U.S. dependence on China for America’s energy infrastructure.
There are a number of actions Trump can enact on his own as president to put America back on the path to energy dominance and economic and geopolitical sovereignty. First he could, for the second time, withdraw the United States from the costly, ineffective, Paris climate agreement. Then, to make sure it sticks, he could submit it to the Senate for ratification, where it would either go down in defeat or linger unvoted upon. In either case, no future presidential administration could, through its own action, put America back into the agreement and at the mercy of a climate-alarmed/profiteering international elite.
Second, Trump can close any anti-energy efforts created by Biden through executive order, such as the climate and environmental justice programs, the White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council and Advisor Council, and all the programs that flowed from them. This would save billions of dollars in unspent funds. Trump could then attempt to claw back funds already allocated but currently unspent under these and other Biden climate initiatives. Trump could also rescind Biden’s executive order on “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” which forced agencies to consider the possible climate impacts of their actions, as if some crystal ball exists to forecast accurately the short- and long-term impacts of foreign policy and national security actions, for example.
Trump cannot do everything necessary to advance U.S. energy dominance on his own and reestablish sound science at the core of government considerations, however. For this, he needs his cabinet departments and agencies working in lockstep to advance his goals by advancing rules and regulations that further the freedoms and interests of Americans while improving U.S. energy security. His choices of Lee Zeldin to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Doug Burgum for secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI), Chris Wright to run the Department of Energy (DOE), and Brooke Rollins to head the Department of Agriculture (DOA) show Trump understands picking the right cabinet is critical to Making America Great Again.
The EPA can best advance U.S. energy dominance by rescinding the unjustified carbon dioxide endangerment finding imposed by the agency under President Barack Obama. The finding was not based on an independent analysis of the reasonably expected impacts from climate change but relied instead on the faulty projections of flawed computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was created with the assumption that climate change was causing a catastrophe.
Once the endangerment finding is rescinded, the EPA could then withdraw the entire edifice of regulations built upon it, including but not limited to the Clean Power Plan provisions forcing the premature closure of coal power plants, limiting natural gas use for power, restricting methane emissions even when it produces no benefits and imposes high costs, and forcing the adoption of costly, unreliable wind and solar power. EPA should also then withdraw the vehicle emission standards mandated under Biden which will require the use of electric vehicles despite consumers’ choices clearly showing they prefer gasoline and diesel vehicles. Finally, so California’s progressive politicians cannot dictate vehicle choice to the rest of the nation, the EPA should withdraw that state’s Clean Air Act waiver, which the state is using to end the use of cars with internal-combustion engines.
The DOI can quickly advance U.S. energy independence by promptly reviewing the huge backlog of pending oil and gas development leases on public lands and ensuring no unjustified delays are implemented going forward. To that end, the department should impose a 90-day deadline for decisions to approve or reject oil and gas development plans for sold leases. Once a plan with an environmental impact statement is submitted, the DOI should have to produce a prompt decision.
Second, the DOI should offer new energy development leases on public lands quarterly, as the law demands. Biden ignored this law, and despite court rulings saying the government must offer the sales, his administration produced the lowest amount of acreage and leases of any in history. Third, the DOI should follow Trump’s stated preference and halt further offshore wind development unless and until comprehensive environmental impact statements show such leases pose no threat to sea life (including endangered, protected sea mammals such as the North Atlantic right whale), are no threat to traditional uses such as tourism and commercial fishing, and make economic sense.
The DOE’s main contribution to advancing U.S. energy dominance would be to be closed. The country got along just fine without a DOE for the first 200 years of its existence. The trillions of dollars spent by the department since its creation have been wasted without advancing U.S. energy interests. Ending the DOE would be a great project for the Department of Government Efficiency to take on.
The DOE mainly operates laboratories for energy development; entrepreneurs responding to market demand do that best. Rather than entrenched government scientists and bureaucrats wasting trillions of dollars on pet projects, the government should return the money to the Treasury or directly to the people. If it is thought government must fund energy innovation, do so through a series of prizes, such as by giving X billion dollars to the first person or group that reaches specific milestones. Let people compete to build a better energy mousetrap.
As Energy Secretary, Chris Wright should ask Congress to end the DOE’s mission of setting efficiency standards for appliances, and until Congress acts, he should halt any pending efficiency standards the agency issued in the Biden administration’s waning days, have the agency withdraw any stricter standards imposed by Biden to fight climate change, and have the agency reinstate standards from during Trump’s first term. The federal government should have no role in dictating the types of appliances and features of appliances people choose for their homes and places of business. People who place energy efficiency above other goals can choose the most energy-efficient appliances without the government forcing the same choices on everyone else.
At the DOA, Rollins can end the programs that encourage farmers to make fighting climate change an important factor in their production decisions via subsidies for actions that reduce output by increasing their costs. As part of its “all of government” approach to fighting climate change, the Biden administration instigated a whole new slew of farm subsidies, some of which undercut efforts to increase production and secure the food supply. Under Rollins, the DOA should end these policies and make American farming great again by making it about putting food on peoples’ plates rather than controlling global temperatures. Farmers should decide what should be planted and raised, and by what methods, not government bureaucrats offering the promise of taxpayer support.
Rollins should also refocus the U.S. Forest Service’s actions on forest management and timber production. This would benefit U.S. construction and reduce the fuel load that has been a core contributing factor to the recent spate of large wildfires. Letting nature take its course, as Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton did by reducing timber production, was a never a good idea but in fact a recipe for disaster after 100 successful years of active fire suppression. Increasing timber harvests and replanting result in cleaner air by reducing the fuel for wildfires, and it lowers carbon dioxide emissions and increases carbon dioxide uptake, for those who are concerned about that.
This list of worthwhile energy actions is hardly comprehensive; these are just some that can be started and possibly completed within the first year of taking office.
Energy dominance is a worthwhile goal. It is good for Americans’ pocketbooks, good for U.S. economic progress, and it would advance U.S. geopolitical aims. Climate change does not pose an existential crisis, but an economically crippled, energy-encumbered United States makes the world less safe and individual households poorer.
Sources: Climate Change Weekly; Real Clear Politics; The Center Square; Climate Realism
Global Greening Due to CO2 Enrichment Reconfirmed
The Heartland Institute’s Climate at a Glance: Global Greening has summarized a number of studies produced in recent years that have described the general greening of the Earth that has resulted from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Now new research published in the journal Science Direct has reconfirmed the widespread net greening of the Earth and “fact checked” prior research to filter out spurious greening or browning trends for specific regions, producing a more accurate assessment of overall global trends.
The researchers analyzed 42 years of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data from 1982 through 2023, recorded by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellites which measure the Earth’s reflectance. They produced refined trends for areas that have had plant growth expansion or diminishment over time, using a model/method called True Significant Trends (TST) which captures, analyzes, and tests multiple gridded data to reduce false positives or spuriously attributed trends, to produce a more accurate trend detection.
The scientists found significant trends in nearly 40 percent of the data they analyzed, reducing the size of area prior research had indicated showed positive or negative vegetation trends. The researchers write,
… we found that conventional workflow identified up to 50.96 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface as experiencing statistically significant vegetation trends. In contrast, the TST workflow reduced this to 38.16%, effectively filtering out spurious trends and providing a more accurate assessment. Among these significant trends identified using the TST workflow, 76.07% indicated greening, while 23.93% indicated browning. Notably, considering areas (pixels) with NDVI values above 0.15, greening accounted for 85.43% of the significant trends, with browning making up the remaining 14.57%. These findings strongly validate the ongoing global greening of vegetation.
If this research is correct, although less surface area of the Earth has experienced any trend in increased or decreased vegetation than previous research indicated, nearly 40 percent of the planet has experienced changing vegetation trends, and they are overwhelmingly positive, with greening accounting for 76 to 85 percent of the trend, depending on the stringency of the standard for measuring greening.
CO2 fertilization is real, folks, and it is positive, despite the nonsense some climate doomsters still try to peddle.
Sources: Science Direct; Climate at a Glance: Global Greening
Greenland Has Been Ice-Free in the Past When CO2 Was Lower
To hear promoters of climate alarm tell it, the important climate history of the Earth has all occurred during the last 100, 1,500, 2,000, 12,000, or 125,000 years. These are mere blips in geologic time and even human history, especially when trying to understand the correlation between carbon dioxide trends and temperatures, and other important trends such as sea levels and ice loss or expansion.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined glacial till collected in Greenland, in particular the plant fragments, wood, insect parts, fungi, and cosmogenic nuclides collected in 1993 from below 3 km of ice at Summit, Greenland. An analysis of the material and where it lies within the boreholes/ice cores provides a snapshot and timeline of the waxing and waning of the glaciers in the region, indicating complete exposure, lengthy periods of time with significantly more and less ice than at present, and the chemical composition of the atmosphere at these times correlating with different surface conditions.
“The presence of poppy, spike-moss, fungal sclerotia, woody tissue, and insect parts in the GISP2 till shows that tundra vegetation once covered central Greenland, mandating that the island was largely ice-free,” report the team of 11 researchers from universities and research institutes across the United States and in Denmark.
At present, with carbon dioxide (CO2) at 420 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere, the ice sheet at Summit, Greenland exceeds 3,000 meters in thickness, whereas Summit was ice-free at times in the geological past, between 250,000 and 1.1 million years before present. This was during periods when CO2 concentrations were 275 to 290 ppm, similar to what existed when the Earth began to recover from the Little Ice Age beginning in the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries.
As Kenneth Richard writes at No Tricks Zone in reporting on the study,
The authors of this study use existing knowledge of Greenland’s climate (for example, Summit’s mean July temperature is -7°C) to calculate how much warmer Central Greenland was “when the ice was gone” during the last 1.1 million years. Controlling for lapse rate, Central Greenland’s average surface air temperatures were likely +3 to 7°C in July when it had no ice sheet.
That was with CO2 levels much lower than at present, indicating that atmospheric CO2 has not been a controlling or even a driving factor in the expansions and declines of Greenland’s ice levels throughout history.
Sources: Climate Depot; PNAS
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H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
