Water and the Climate Change Industry

“The water you drink today has likely been around in one form or another since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.” – National Geographic

“Water which is too pure has no fish.” - Anonymous

Water is life and it is recyclable, covering 70 percent of our planet; 2.5 percent is fresh water and “only 1 percent is easily accessible, the rest is trapped in glaciers and snowfields.” National Geographic noted that freshwater is in crisis because levels have remained the same over millennia but the human population has exploded to seven billion and thus water use based on population size and animal use is unsustainable. http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/freshwater-crisis/

The climate change industry is growing exponentially, shaped and driven by U.N.’s Agenda 2030, relentlessly introduced, reintroduced, renamed, and first signed by 178 nations in 1992 as Agenda 21. This agenda is driven not by the “saving the planet” narrative, but by global social engineering control and redistribution of wealth to third world nations.

The lynchpin of the now globally-adopted Agenda 2030 is sustainability everything disguised as smart growth/green growth. Everything we do in the civilized world has been declared unsustainable by the global elites who control this climate change industry scam worth trillions of dollars.

To please elitist billionaires and environmentalists around the world, we must fundamentally change according to their plans of de-developing society and regressing to a more primitive lifestyle. They are now regulators of water use, electricity production and use, fossil fuel exploration and use, mining, agriculture, education, medical care, and land use, which will enable them to control the weather and the climate by taxing us into oblivion.

U.N. declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation. They celebrated The World Water Day on March 22, 2014 and the world toilet day on November 19 to remind us that 2.5 billion people have no sanitation and 780 million people do not have access to clean water. http://www.unwater.org/water-cooperation-2013/en/

U.N. alleges that our civilization and standard of living pollute river basins and eating meat and dairy places undue stress on water because those industries use more water to operate.

Some African countries cannot provide clean water to their population yet they are discouraged to produce electricity with “dirty” fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels and electricity, clean water cannot be supplied in sufficient quantities thus water-borne diseases are rampant.

Desalination is frowned upon by environmentalists because it is much more expensive to produce than conventional ways of providing fresh water. Israel that is successfully and relatively inexpensively providing 40% of its water supply from desalination.

According to discovery.com, there are over 15,000 desalination plants around the world that convert ocean water into drinking water either by distillation or reverse osmosis. Environmentalists complain that both processes use too much electricity. Distillation involves boiling the sea water, capturing the steam, separating it into cooling tanks, which then condense the steam into fresh water. Reverse osmosis is filtration that removes the salt and minerals from the water. The brine left behind is usually piped back into the ocean.

Mike Mickley wrote in “US Municipal Desalination Plants: Number, Types, Location, Sizes, and Concentrate Management Practices” that 324 plants were built since 1971 in the United States, capable of producing 25,000 gallons of fresh water per day. The Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego, California is slated for completion in 2016 and will be capable of producing 50 million gallons of fresh water per day, providing 7 percent of the San Diego region’s supply needs.

United Nations bemoans the fact that “85% of the world’s population lives in the driest half of the planet.” The eventual U.N. planned solution will be social engineering in the form of massive population movement from these arid areas to places like Europe and the United States where the rural density per capita is quite low.

IPCC “predicts with high confidence that water stress will increase in central and southern Europe and, that by the 2070s, the number of people affected will rise from 28 million to 44 million. Summer flows are likely to drop by up to 80 % in southern Europe and some part of central and Eastern Europe. Europe’s hydropower potential is expected to drop by an average of 6%, but rise by 20-50% around the Mediterranean by 2070.” (Alcamo et al., 2007)

Data from the World Bank was cited in 2010 which estimated the cost of a yet to be seen 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures to be $70-100 billion per year between 2020 and 2050. Of this cost, anywhere from $13.7-19.2 billion will be water-related. http://www.unwater.org/water-cooperation-2013/water-cooperation/facts-and-figures/en/

Elitists say that, if global population would be allowed to reach the current lifestyle of the average European or North American, 3.5 planets Earth would be needed for sustainability.  That is why population control by any means is considered important. Projections predict 2-3 billion people over the next 40 years. This growth will certainly not come from the senescent white Europeans and North Americans but from third world countries.

As Tom DeWeese wrote in his report, “Sustainablists work to keep these nations from developing or increasing energy use, thereby keeping them poor. Green regulations stop the building of infrastructure. They panic at the idea of increased energy use in developing nations. Instead of working to solve the real problems – the root of poverty - they exploit the excuse of over population and advocate enforcing polices to drastically reduce populations. China’s brutal one child policy of forced abortions and sterilization has become their model.”

How many people does the United Nations believe should inhabit our planet? “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At a more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.” United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment. https://deweesereport.com/2016/05/17/six-issues-that-are-agenda-21/?mc_cid=040d1ca29b&mc_eid=371fc3eeb1

The fact that we have periods of drought and rainy seasons escapes the “sustainablists” narrative. But, we must still use our water resources responsibly. Do we need to have daddy government control water consumption and recreation via smart water meters and other regulations?

Even though we’ve had 21 consecutive days of non-stop rain, our water bill contained a glossy which stated the necessity to control irrigation via a recommended irrigation schedule. Odd number addresses could water on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. Even number addresses could water on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. And businesses could water on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Installing rain sensors and soil moisture detectors to avoid unnecessary irrigation and further reduce stress on the water system was recommended so that our Service Authority could maintain adequate water pressure in our neighborhood.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) reported that 170,000 public drinking water systems in the country serve 264 million people, transporting 13 percent of the total water withdrawn from the U.S. surface and subterranean sources to residential and commercial buildings via 1 million miles of water main pipe that are deep in the ground and over 100 years old.” The cost of replacing these pipes is $1 trillion and will be passed on to the consumers. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30724-exclusive-dispatch-private-water-industry-says-water-bills-have-to-go-up

A USA Today survey of 100 municipalities found that “residential water bills in at least one in four places have doubled in the past 12 years.” http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/09/27/rising-water-rates/1595651/

Some states fine and jail homeowners who collect rainwater. Even a rain puddle is regulated in other places. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, protecting the delta smelt is more important than irrigating crops that feed millions of Americans.

The voters in Oregon tired of their government’s overt attempt to control their water and land and said no to Nestlé. They rallied and defeated Nestlé’s attempt to privatize their water.

“The issue that brought conservatives and progressives together in this way was clear-cut: keeping Nestlé Waters North America from building a water bottling plant and extracting over 118 million gallons annually from a spring in a small, rural community 45 miles east of Portland.”

Americans drink a lot of expensive bottled water, often just filtered tap water, over 10 billion gallons in 2013. With revenue of $12.3 billion in 2013 and Americans spending $18.2 billion on bottled water in 2014, there is a cash cow in that industry which the International Bottled Water Association is gladly representing. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36129-our-water-our-future-voters-in-oregon-defeat-nestle-s-attempt-to-privatize-their-water

Progressives and the U.N. are obsessed with water, among many other things, as a way to control what people do. Take for instance a golfing community in Texas that pumps water from the Brazos River running next to the golf course. After estimating the number of gallons of water needed to water their lawn, they paid the county for the water plus an additional amount in case they have underestimated their needs. After years of this business arrangement, the county wants to “renegotiate” the agreement because they feel that the course is not entitled to so much of “God’s water.”

Additionally, the residents cannot build cisterns to catch rainfall because “God’s water” would run on the property, seep into the ground, and run off into the river, thus polluting it.

As I described in my previous article, http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/58534 United Nations has a strong vested interest to control our water supply and our passage through the seas, oceans, our shipping, fishing, and mineral and oil exploration on the bottom of the ocean. They are controlling it through Agenda 21, chapters 17 and 18, and through the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) which has not yet been ratified by the Senate for lack of sufficient votes – for now.

Executive Order 13603 from March 16, 2012 gives the Department of Defense authority over all water resources. The order also covers all food, transportation, energy, construction materials, “health resources,” farm equipment, fertilizers, and all fuels that can be commandeered and controlled by our government both in peacetime and during national emergencies. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness

Tombstone, Arizona, “the town too tough to die,” has been embroiled in expensive litigation with the USDA and the Forest Service over its ability to use water from the mountain springs that has provided the desert town with water since the 1880s, predating the Wilderness Act by 80 years.

A Monument Fire in 2011 destroyed the pipes in Huachuca Mountains that carried the water down from its source in the Miller Canyon Wilderness Area. Boulders the size of cars buried the pipes. The Forest Service denied residents the use of heavy machinery to unearth the pipes that were covered in some places by 12 feet of mud. Instead, they could only use wheelbarrows and hand tools because they were protecting an endangered species, a pair of nesting Mexican spotted owls. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/06/12/is-this-owl-forcing-historic-tombstone-az-to-fix-water-lines-with-horses-and-handtools/

The 10^th Amendment protects states and their subdivisions from federal regulations that impede their ability to fulfill essential health and safety functions. “Though the water may originate on National Forest lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, and other federally managed lands, the rights to that water belong to the farms and ranches and cities.” The lawyers for the federal government disagree.

In mid-June 2012, a group of citizens armed with shovels trekked 2 miles up the mountain in 100 degree heat to restore water by hand from the Gardner Spring to the historical Tombstone, Arizona. http://netrightdaily.com/2012/06/tombstone-az-residents-forced-to-use-shovels-and-hand-tools-to-fix-water-supply/

Mr. Gosar said in his one minute speech to the House of Representatives on December 12, 2012, “Our communities shouldn’t need their Congressman or a lawsuit to make basic repairs to infrastructure. The Federal Government should work with us, not against us, to preserve western water supplies.” http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H12DE2-0026:/

Progressives don’t like hydroelectric power generation because it is interfering with nature, aquatic habitats, and the natural flow of rivers. Many dams have been blown up for this very reason. The fact that nature itself causes rivers to flood, creating and destroying habitats at the same time, had been ignored by the progressive agenda.

We now have to suffer the ill-effects of low flush “enviro-friendly” toilets that don’t really save any water since people have to flush them 4-5 times in order to get rid of human waste. To make matters worse, city sewers get stopped up because of low-flush toilets, costing them millions and millions of dollars a year to fix huge clogs. The much touted flushable wipes also choke the small residential pipes and cost homeowners millions of dollars a year to dig them out and replace. Yet there is sufficient water, save for cyclical periods of drought.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

 

Energy Poverty Around the World

The global warming/climate change industry has been aggressively pushing renewable energy, wind, solar, and biofuels for a long time even though the economies of various industrialized countries need much more energy than what renewables generate.

The green activists have been zealously lobbying Congress and the EPA to change the laws, rules, and regulations that would make it much more expensive and difficult for fossil fuel energy producers to survive while passing the higher costs onto consumers, impoverishing those customers on fixed incomes and taking away disposable income from the rest.

Green energy causes electricity poverty around the world. Today the Fraser Institute of Canada, an independent, non-partisan public policy think-tank released a study that found that energy poverty is on the rise in Canada.

"Government policies that raise electricity prices may push some families into energy poverty and further stretch the household budgets of families already in energy poverty," said Taylor Jackson, study co-author and policy analyst at the Fraser Institute.

"Because high energy costs take a large bite out of many household budgets, families across Canada pay the price when government energy policies boost the cost of electricity," said Kenneth Green, the Fraser Institute's senior director of natural resource studies and co-author of Energy Costs and Canadian Households: How Much Are We Spending?

According to the study, Canadian households that make $47,700 or less per year are disproportionately affected by energy poverty.

The Fraser Institute found that in 2013 the three regions most affected by energy poverty were Atlantic Canada at 20.6 percent, Saskatchewan at 12.9 percent and Ontario at 7.5 percent, with a general 7.9 percentage in Canada. “Between 2010 and 2013, energy poverty was on the rise in most provinces.” British Columbia had the lowest at 5.3 percent.

The study authors also found that the Green Energy Act of Ontario is responsible for the increase in electricity prices.

In 2013 Der Spiegel warned us that “the political world is wedged between the green-energy lobby, masquerading as saviors of the world, and the established electric utilities, with their dire warnings of chaotic supply problems and job losses.” http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html

In Germany, the Energiewende, or energy wave (revolution), was “Chancellor Angela Merkel’s project of the century.” It turned out to be a flop, although not as bad as her recent policy of welcoming with open arms of waves of violent Muslims into Europe.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, Merkel “quickly decided to begin phasing out nuclear power and lead the country into the age of wind and solar.” The government-predicted renewable energy surcharge turned out to be higher than the 20 percent price hike.

Of all the companies that must pay the renewable energy surcharge, 2,300 German businesses with lobbying representation, were able to exempt themselves from this green energy surcharge by claiming tough international competition.

Der Spiegel said that German customers were forced to pay 20 billion euros for electricity from solar, wind, and biofuel plants that had a market price of only 3 billion euros. The authors explained that this cost did not include “unintended costs and collateral damage associated with the project.” The costs included the fact that, depending on weather and time of day, the entire country can face “absurd states of energy surplus or deficit.” Solar panels and wind turbines can generate lots of electricity at times and other times zero.

According to Der Spiegel, more than 300,000 German households a year had their electricity cut off for unpaid bills. Caritas, a charity group, called this “energy poverty.”

Sweden, a heavily forested country, used up its biomass from wood and paper industry waste to fuel conventional power plants; once it exhausted this source, it switched to wind farms on land because the offshore ones were very expensive and tended to rust much quicker.

There is no doubt that Americans have also been affected by energy poverty. The Institute for Energy Research is citing the case of the residents in Pueblo, Colorado. The state’s Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act forced inexpensive coal plants to be closed. Their residential kWh rate has increased 26 percent since 2010 when “the new local utility company in Pueblo replaced nearly all its inherited cheap coal capacity with wind and natural gas.” Residential customers, with a poverty rate of 18.1 percent and one third of the population on welfare, had to pay for the large infrastructure bills when the switch was made. Wind turbines were added in order to meet the state’s Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act requirement of 30 percent capacity coming from renewable resources. http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/energy-poverty-coming-america-coal-shuttered-green-power/

At CPAC 2015, during a panel discussion on climate change and global warming alarmism, Gary Broadbent, representing Murray Energy Corporation, the largest privately held coal mine in the U.S., highlighted Obama’s “war on coal” via regulations passed by EPA alone in the last five years totaling 25,000 pages.  Quoting Robert E. Murray, Chairman of Murray Energy Corporation, Broadband said, “Prior to the election of President Obama, coal provided 52% of the electricity generation in our country. Today it is 37%. In our judgement, it will further decline to about 30%, at a maximum.”

Enumerating the 411 power plants designated for closure through 2016, “101,000 megawatts of the lowest cost electricity in America,” CEO Murray wrote that electricity, generated by coal at the plant cost of 4 cents per kWh, will be replaced by “Mr. Obama and his appointees” with 15 cent per kWh electricity from natural gas and 22 cent per kWh electricity from wind and solar power, not to mention the huge subsidies to solar power from American taxpayers.

In CEO Murray’s opinion, the Obama Administration has bypassed illegally Congress, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the States and their Public Utility Commissions, which are “empowered to regulate the availability and cost of electricity.”

According to Chairman Murray, while we came within 700 megawatts of reducing loads to 61 million Americans in 13 states during the Polar Vortex of 2014, “China has been building a new 500 megawatt coal-fired plant every week for years, [and] burned about 4.0 billion tons of coal last year.”

New Water Heaters Compliant with EPA Regulations

Photo: Wikipedia

If you ask an engineer, he will tell you that CO2 is not a pollutant, and burning fossil fuels has made the Earth greener because their emissions are rapidly assimilated by sunlight. As Dr. Klaus Kaiser had explained, “incomplete combustion can cause air quality problems, not because of CO2 but due to soot particles and nitrogen oxides,” particularly in high density urban areas where the air tends to be stagnant. There is a reason why Chicago, the ‘Windy City,’ has not had an air quality problem.

The green biomass, including trees and plants, is 99 percent carbon and water. This carbon comes from atmospheric CO2, including CO2 dissolved in rain water or taken up by the oceans. “Higher atmospheric CO2 dramatically accelerates growth of green biomass above a minimum concentration of 200 parts per million (0.02%).  Below that concentration (about 50 percent of CO2 level in the air today), it’s difficult for plants to keep growing.”

The carbon cycle/photosynthesis is a complex bio-energy process where solar energy is converted into green biomass. Almost all atmospheric CO2 comes from volcanoes, decaying biomass such as forests, oxidized by atmospheric oxygen, and then from forest fires and the burning of fossil fuels. When fossil fuels are burned, CO2 is released into the atmosphere and the carbon goes back into the carbon cycle, forcing the growth of new green biomass. It is a known fact that greenhouses add CO2 in order to accelerate plant growth. Somehow, the climate change industry proponents have calculated that the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide, the gas of plant life, to society is $38.

Solar and wind energy are excellent sources for powering low-power appliances during emergency conditions and for powering high-power appliances in remote locations. Marxist environmentalism has been used to advance the corrupt agenda of “climatism,” escalating in the war on coal which resulted in expensive electricity, hurting the poor and the middle class.

 According to Jonathan Fahey, quoting a University of Chicago study released in June 23, 2015, installing new windows, replacing insulation, and making other home efficiency improvements fell 2.5 times short of the projected energy savings. Because the study looked at low income homes, a second study surveyed middle-income homes and the results were similar. http://econresearch.uchicago.edu/content/do-energy-efficiency-investments-deliver-evidence-weatherization-assistance-program

Making older homes more energy-efficient may not be the “cheapest way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.” Weatherizing and cash-for-caulking may not reduce energy use much either. “Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said that weatherization programs for low-income households are typically among the least cost-effective energy efficiency measures.” http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/2015/06/24/study-home-efficiency-upgrades-pay/29233141/

It is very expensive for low income homes to replace windows, water heaters, and air conditioners when they are still serviceable. Can you convince homeowners when your data is based on computer models that exaggerate the energy savings? It is much cheaper to fix a leak or replace a bulb.

According to the Plumberologist, a Virginia contractor service, starting in 2015 customers can no longer buy traditional electric water heaters like those they already own.  What is available now is called heat pump technology. Your new water heaters “will have an AC unit on top that pulls heat from the air in the room to heat the water rather than producing all the heat by itself.”

As a former southern resident and owner of an AC heat pump, I can attest to my ten-year struggle with such an expensive unit that froze in summer time and never cooled my house adequately, and froze in winter time when it never warmed my house sufficiently. After ten years of so many repair calls that I lost count, I finally replaced the monstrosity with a much more efficient, less expensive, and traditional unit. And there was certainly no shortage of hot air in the atmosphere year round.

The Plumberologist identified several issues with these new heat pump water heaters:

-          At 2 feet taller, they may not fit in older homes or condos where space is an issue

-          The lightest units weigh at least 450 lbs., necessitating an extra person to install, doubling the service cost

-          Because heat pump water heaters need several hundred cubic feet of warm air to work,  homeowners will need more than a closet or small basement space to install one; and, wherever it is installed, “the room will be as cold as a freezer”

-          Because you are buying now two appliances, a water heater and air conditioner, “heat  pump heaters are twice as expensive” as the old electric water heater

Why is the EPA making homeowners buy appliances such as this heat pump water heater we do not need nor can afford, for paltry water heating efficiency in the months when we aren’t heating our homes, which for Virginians is about six months a year?

The Plumberologist suggested switching to a gas-powered water heater – if you can afford it. A tankless gas water heater is “up to 25 times more efficient than the most efficient electric water heater and, the unit pays for itself in less than 10 years.” http://plumberologist.com/electric-water-heater-replacement/

One way or another we’ll have to pay the EPA piper in order to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere that supposedly causes manufactured global warming. My plants are already suffering from the short and cooler summer.  At least the EPA will let us have hot water.

Replacing the EPA

“It’s time for the national EPA to go. The path forward is now clear and simple: A five-year transition from a federal government bureaucracy to a Committee of the Whole composed of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D.
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

To those who say this would fail to adequately protect the public’s health or the environment, I urge you to reflect on the poor job currently being done by EPA, and then to meet some of the men and women staffing state EPA offices and see for yourself the sophistication, commitment, and resources they have to do the job. You will not remain doubters for long.”                 -  Jay Lehr, Ph.D.

 

Dr. Jay Lehr, Science Director at the Heartland Institute, gave a speech at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness conference in Ontario, California, on the topic of “Replacing the EPA.” The author of more than 500 articles and editor of 30 books captivated the audience with his bold proposal to eliminate and replace the mammoth Environmental Protection Agency with a smaller organization composed of a committee of six individuals chosen from all 50 states. He called his plan “Addition by Subtraction.”

In his opinion, the 15,000 employees based in Washington, D.C. and in regional offices around the country “do not do useful work whatsoever.”  Dr. Lehr names himself the “most competent person on the planet” to write a proposal for the elimination of the EPA, saving the taxpayers $6.2 billion annually and improving the environmental protection” because he is the “only scientist alive that played a major role in establishing the EPA.”

Among the many pieces of legislation Dr. Lehr helped write are included the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, Clear Air Act, Federal  Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, and Comprehensive  Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (now Superfund).

Dr. Lehr admits in his proposal, “Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency,” that “these acts worked well in protecting the environment and the health of our citizens, with the exception of Superfund, which proved to be too overreaching and wreaked havoc with U.S. business as company operating within the law were fined countless dollars and required to pay huge sums after the fact for clean-up of waste disposal that had been within the law at the time of the activity.” (pp. 1-2)

Viewing his plan as penance, Dr. Lehr found it appropriate and fitting that the person who helped form the EPA (December 2, 1970) should contribute to its dismissal via a plan that took him two years to develop. Dr. Lehr was happy to announce that Governor Scot Walker of Wisconsin, presidential candidate, has adopted this entire EPA replacement plan.

EPA regions of the U.S.

Dr. Lehr served on a panel in 1968 which was tasked by the director of the Bureau of Water Hygiene in the U.S. Department of Health to study the potential to expand the bureau’s oversight into a full environmental protection organization.” The panel succeeded and the EPA was created. He wrote that around 1981 “liberal activist groups recognized EPA could be used to advance their political agenda.”

Referring to England, Lehr quoted Samuel Adams, who wrote on Jan. 20, 1772 in the Boston Gazette, “If the public are bound to yield to obedience to the laws to which they cannot give their approval, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.”

Unfortunately today, it is not just the EPA, but many other agencies whose unelected officials produce endless regulations, Lehr added. We have an “over-criminalization in this country” because of endless regulations people have no idea exist, rules that Americans “probably break at least once a week.” He continued, “There are now in the federal regulatory handbook, 200 volumes of 80,000 laws, and 300,000 regulations written by various agencies with the EPA number one offender.”

James Madison warned us in the Federalist papers that … “laws should be made by men of their own choosing. If the laws are so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood,” then we have a serious problem.

Dr. Lehr believes that we are subjected today to so many laws that few people can track. “Big Business, Big Government, and Big Special Interests collude to make such laws” that give them advantage over the competition. “We have a warped economy,” Lehr said, “where the rich get richer, with the rest having less opportunity because the big three are gaming the system to gain political influence… They get privilege.”

Enabling the big three who handicap competitors and take full advantage of public subsidies, “EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of liberal activist groups." Its rules account for about half of the nearly $2 trillion a year cost of complying with all national regulations in the U.S.” (Wayne W. Crews, Ten Thousand Commandments, Washington, D.C.:  Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2014)

Calling it a “rogue agency,” Dr. Lehr proposed to replace, not fix the EPA, by systematically dismantling it and replacing it with a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. National EPA could be phased out over five years, said Dr. Lehr. “The Committee of the Whole would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval.” (Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency, Jay Lehr, Ph.D., The Heartland Institute, p. 7)

He proposes that “the EPA research laboratories should be left in place at the national level to answer scientific questions, and even these laboratories must be substantially reorganized.” (Ibid, p. 6)

Specifically, 10 regional offices would be established, cutting back the budget from $8.2 billion to $2 billion a year, and reducing staff from over 15,000 to 300 in the national EPA headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. Of the 300 employees working, there will be six delegate-employees from each of the 50 states.

When asked how he would deal with the potential growth of the new EPA, Dr. Lehr admitted that this detail has not been worked out yet. The chairman of the Committee of the Whole would be elected by the 300 delegate-employees to a three-year term.

The drawdown would be:

-          Year One – all employees would be told of the five-year transition period to allow them time for alternate employment; all 300 new employees would transfer, start working, and decide assignments to various subcommittees

-          Year Two – Offices of Policy, Administration and Resource Management, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance will be relocated from Washington and from regional offices to Topeka

-          Year Three – Offices of Air and Radiation and Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention would transfer to Topeka

-          Year Four – Offices of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, and Offices of Water would be moved to Topeka

-          Year Five – Offices of Chief Financial Officer, General Counsel, Environmental Information, and the Office of the Administrator would also move to Topeka.

Transition members would be assigned periodically to Washington, D.C. and to regional offices to study the activities of the existing branches. If attrition is high early on, transfer of responsibility may be earlier than planned. Each state would be allocated $20 million to augment the new responsibilities.

Dr. Lehr, as one of the founders of the EPA, believes strongly that his plan can be implemented “efficiently and quickly.”

 

 

 

 

Butler on Business, May 7, 2014, EPA and other topics

My 2 radio segments with Alan Butler on the rogue EPA and other topics, May 7, 2014. I come on at the 1 h 22' mark.

http://host1.cyberears.com//26123.mp3

Butler on Business, April 23, 2014

My 10 minute commentary on EPA biggest land grab of our land via waterways. I come on at the 43 minute mark.

http://host1.cyberears.com//25884.mp3

Abundant Energy Supply Strangled by Environmentally Driven Regulations

The Committee on Energy and Commerce convened on March 25, 2014 to hear testimony on H.R. 6, the “Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act,” introduced by Rep. Cory Gardner. This bill was precipitated by the Energy Information Administration’s statement that “America’s natural gas has been raising since 2006. EIA projects such increases to continue through 2040, and expects domestic production of natural gas to remain well above domestic demand.” 

Chairman Fred Upton believes that our natural gas surplus is needed by “our allies around the world” and we should engage in “a mutually beneficial trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG).” In his opinion, federal policy has not yet “adjusted to the new reality of American energy abundance, and in fact Obama administration red tape often stands in the way of the potential benefits of the energy boom.”

Besides job creation at home, “constructing and running the LNG export facilities and additional energy industry jobs as natural gas producers expand their output to meet the increase in demand,” Chairman Upton believes that H.R. 6 would help Ukraine and Eastern and Central European countries who are dependent on Russian natural gas. Russia would have less “leverage over these nations” and prices of LNG would come down. https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/hr-6-domestic-prosperity-and-global-freedom-act

The Hoover Institution agreed that “the hydrocarbon boom in the United States has been driven by fracking.” Shale-gas production through fracking in North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York accounts for 44 percent of total U.S. natural gas output. http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/170026

Predictions in the 1970s indicating that America would run out of natural gas were wrong. Even the production of oil fell (1990-2008), increasing our oil dependency on imports from unstable and hostile nations. The International Energy Agency reported that in 2013 U.S. production of crude oil increased by 991,000 barrels a day and oil imports declined by 16 percent.

Newsmax.com wrote that “America produced an average of about 12.1 million barrels of crude oil, natural gas liquids, and biofuels a day in 2013 – that’s 300,000 barrels a day more than Saudi Arabia and 1.6 million more than Russia, the two previous leaders.”

Gary D. Libecap, Economics professor at the University of California and research fellow at Hoover Institution, said that “fracking and natural gas production have been good for the economy, good for democracies worldwide, and good for the environment.” Environmentalists would probably disagree since complaints have been lodged with the EPA about the deleterious effects on soil and ground water from fracking and horizontal drilling.

Energy experts believe that the Obama administration slows or prevents drilling on federal lands by delaying and denying permits. Consequently, production on federal lands fell 23 percent since 2007. According to the Institute for Policy Innovation, the federal government owns 28 percent of U.S. land, 62 percent in Alaska and 47 percent in 11 western states. http://www.ipi.org/

The current administration chooses instead to concentrate on very expensive and insufficient wind and solar energy generation, particularly solar. In addition to the 34 failed green companies funded with taxpayer dollars, of which Solyndra was the poster child of a $535 million colossal failure, the Aqua Caliente Solar Project in Yuma, Arizona takes the top spot with $967 million in federal loans. Yuma has an unemployment rate of 26.1 percent. So far, the Yuma project created 10 permanent jobs. When completed at the end of this year, the solar facility will have 16 permanent employees. It will only cost taxpayers $60.4 million per job creation. http://lastresistance.com/5226/obama-spends-967-million-create-10-solar-energy-jobs/

Fracking on the other hand, creates real jobs and helps towns like Midland, Texas to increase per capita income three times the national average and to reduce unemployment to a low 2.9 percent, while extracting oil which is needed to produce energy and to run our large economy.

Because the current administration believes that carbon pollution drives climate change, the proposed budget for FY 2015 includes a $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund to fight man-made (anthropogenic) global warming. Our electricity generation from “dirty” coal will then be curtailed by EPA’s expensive job-killing and coal fire-plant closing regulations and we will be stuck with huge electric bills and potential shortages.  

Our way of life depends on electricity - lights, refrigerators, air conditioning, furnaces, computers, internet, radios, TVs, ATMs, banks, grocery stores, cell phones, chargers, medical devices, life support systems, operating rooms, gas pumps, electric cars, plants, farms, refineries, water purification, sewer systems – 68 percent is generated by fossil fuels, 20 percent by nuclear, and 7 percent by hydro power. http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2014/03/22/us-electricity-system-in-regulatory-and-terrorist-crosshairs-n1812722/page/full

According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA), net energy generation from coal has dropped from 49 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2012. Right now, the shortage is partly offset by increases in natural gas.

EPA’s retrofitting regulations and the requirement to use non-existent carbon capture technology, has resulted in coal fire plant closures. This prompted Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, to propose an amendment to H.R. 3826 (http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3826)

that would make sure that EPA’s standards for all types of new power plants use existing technology.  Rep. Smith said, “By requiring carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that doesn’t even exist, the EPA’s new power plant proposal effectively bans new coal power. There is no coal power plant anywhere in the world that can meet the EPA’s radical proposal.” http://schweikert.house.gov/press-releases/rep-schweikert-cosponsors-amendment-to-curb-epa-overreach-on-power-plant-emissions-standards/

Robert Romano explained that “largely as a result of coal plant closures, overall electricity generation in the U.S. has dropped from 4.005 trillion kWh in 2007 to 3.89 trillion kWh in 2012, meanwhile end use has only decreased from 3.89 trillion kWh to just 3.832 trillion kWh. The difference between electricity generation and end use, or implied spare capacity, has dropped from 115 billion kWh to 58 billion kWh from 2007-2012.” This decrease of 50 percent is troublesome - steady demand would cause eventual brownouts. http://netrightdaily.com/2014/03/epa-lost-mind/#ixzz2vaOr9QUP

According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), approximately 11.5 million American homes use wood burning stoves for heat. EPA issued new rules on emissions of particles and gases released from residential wood stoves and other wood-fired heaters built after 2015 and the rules will be more stringent in five years.  EPA “estimates that 85,695 wood stoves will be manufactured and sold in 2015.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/epa-moves-to-regulate-new-wood-stoves/2014/01/03/b08cb232-7484-11e3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html

The airborne particulates allowed change from 15 micrograms per cubic meter to 12. Bob Adelman put it in proper perspective, “Secondhand tobacco smoke in a closed-car exposes a person to 3,000-4,000 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter.”  According to John Crouch of the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, particulate pollution from wood burning stoves often occurs because consumers use insufficiently dried wood.

I wrote about cook stoves in my book, “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy.” The drive to replace cook stoves with “clean cook stoves” with chimneys came from the United Nations and translated into grants of $100,000 to $750,000 awarded by the Department of Energy through the “Clean Biomass Cook stove Technologies” initiative.  The grants were intended to help 100 million households in third world countries by 2020. http://www.amazon.com/U-N-Agenda-21-Environmental-Piracy-ebook/dp/B009WC6JXO/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396282329&sr=1-1&keywords=UN+Agenda+21%3A+Environmental+Piracy

Two studies evaluated the “clean cook stoves” and found that they delivered the same amount of measured pollution as the previous stoves. RESPIRA (Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors) showed improved air quality but not overall health.  “Up in Smoke,” a much larger study from MIT showed same amount of measured pollution and no significant change in overall health. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is forging ahead with studies in Ghana, Nepal, and Kenya in spite of the two studies’ results.

Should our power grid fail because of a solar flare, EMP, cyber, or terrorist attack, we will experience a civilization setback and population demise that is hard to fathom. While our administration concentrates on environmental issues, on April 16, 2013, terrorists attacked a power substation near San Jose, California as reported by the Wall Street Journal on February 5, 2014.  The fact that this very important piece of information was not reported by the media until a year later is disturbing. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778

Terrorists cut fiber optic cables and destroyed 17 transformers by causing them to leak oil coolant, resulting in overheating and failure. The targeted attack which lasted one hour indicated that the terrorists were very knowledgeable. The repairs took 27 days. Those maintaining the grid were able to reroute power and avoid blackouts.

Electricity is delivered to us through “a complex, interconnected system of power lines, substations, and transformers called the power grid. The entire United States is divided into just three separate grid segments: East, West, and Texas.” (Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek)

Billions are spent on “climate change prevention,” and on expensive smart meters that endanger and harm our health and attack our privacy, while our complex grid is easy prey to sabotage and attacks, protected only by cameras and chain link fences. It is not just that electricity prices must “necessarily skyrocket,” as our President promised, our grid is a sitting duck to potential attacks, and our energy production is being reduced significantly by overly stringent EPA regulations.

 

Global Warming, EPA, and Exploding Toilets

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson posed an interesting question in support of the idea that we should not worry about cutting carbon emissions, “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”

The upcoming state of the union will address global warming in the coldest day of SOU address in history.  (Steven Goddard/Real Science)

The presidential memo of January 9, 2014 announced the establishment of a Quadrennial Energy Review which will concentrate on implementing a new energy policy for our country’s “infrastructure for transporting, transmitting, and delivering energy.” This review will explore “additional executive or legislative actions to address the energy challenges and opportunities facing the nation.” http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/09/presidential-memorandum-establishing-quadrennial-energy-review

This review will seek input from “nongovernmental, environmental, faith-based, labor, and other social organizations and contributions from the academic and non-profit sectors.” Mark Pryor (D-Ark) introduced the Quadrennial Energy Review Act of 2013 but the bill had a low chance of passing even though the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology made the Quadrennial Energy Review recommendations in March 2013. Plans are underway to push and finance local “clean energy” projects around the nation.  http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/another-unreported-obama-end-run-around-congress/#w82pwZEs9l9s5RLf.99

The global warming “explorers” from Australia who got stuck in miles and miles of Arctic ice and had to rescued, at great expense to many countries who used boats and helicopters powered by fossil fuels, were on a mission to capture footage and evidence of imagined melting polar ice caps.

The lives of billions of humans are rearranged for the worse at great expense and inconvenience to suit the globalist agenda of global warming in the summer and climate change agenda in the winter.

Global warming has become a very profitable business which generates billions and billions of dollars annually. The success of global “green growth” and “clean energy” plans comes after decades of brainwashing in school, with teachers and TV touting the man-made (anthropogenic) hoax and the worship of Gaia, mother Earth.

The talking heads who advocate social justice, climate justice, environmental justice, and equality, bike riding to work and school, saving animals at the expense of humans by re-wilding millions of acres of private and government land, living in 200 square ft. apartments the size of shipping containers, riding in dangerous tin cans, installing bird-chopping, health endangering wind mills, expensive solar panels who fry thousands of birds, using bio fuels with more ethanol that destroys car engines, have not given up their lavish lifestyles or their entire wealth. They still fly in jets with huge carbon “footprints,” own numerous cars, boats, and yachts, live in huge mansions on beaches that are supposed to be underwater when the ice melts.

Aaron Dykes of the ACTIVISTPOST.COM reported that in the Agenda 21 friendly Austin, Texas, in the name of Smart Growth, small high-rise apartments and condos are built, “driving is discouraged, cars are made to back-in angle park, pay to park, and even bicycles are rented out at an absurd rate - $12 for an hour, and up to $75 per day.”  http://www.activistpost.com/2014/01/trendy-bicycle-rentals-cost-75day-in.html

A picture is worth a thousand words. It is interesting to see the regionalism map, proposed Emerging Megaregions for 2050 America. http://www.america2050.org/sync/elements/america2050map.png

How would the state and federal government confiscate/purchase private property so quickly? One way is through eminent domain and environmental conservation. Another method is by property seizures through ObamaCare. 

In more than half the states, ObamaCare comes with an expansion of Medicaid. A 1993 federal law gives the states the right to recoup the costs of Medicaid by seizing the property of Medicaid recipients who have passed away. 

The Washington Post believes the enforcement of this 1993 law under ObamaCare expanded Medicaid “scary but improbable.” This option was rarely used before the Medicaid expansion and national data is scarce. However, the state of Oregon confiscated $41 million assets from 8,900 people from July 2011 to June 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/little-known-aspect-of-medicaid-now-causing-people-to-avoid-coverage/2014/01/23/deda52e2-794e-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html

Some well-informed people are now afraid to sign up for ObamaCare Medicaid expansion – they want to be able to pass their private property on to their heirs.

EPA regulations, EPA is arguably one of the most powerful agencies in America today, are suffocating private citizens and industries alike, destroying jobs and the economy, changing the face of America forever in the process.   

After wasting billions on “environmental justice” for minority communities in the U.S., the EPA is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to help towns in Mexico like Nogales and Ensenada to “go green.” http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/01/u-s-funds-environmental-projects-in-Mexico/

Everyone is familiar with the low-flow flushing commodes mandated by the EPA in order to save the planet. These commodes do not save water because users must flush several times in order to get rid of waste. Sewer pipes get clogged and homeowners must spend thousands of dollars to dig up and replace the narrow sewer pipes, clean the mess, and replace damaged/smelly/wet/mildewed furniture, walls, and carpet. Water departments spend millions each year flushing their sewer systems that also become clogged from low-flush toilets.

A high-pressure flushing system was developed to help with this problem. Unfortunately this part causes commodes to explode. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Flushmate, the maker of Pressure Assist, recalled 351,000 units in the U.S. and 9,400 in Canada, made between March 2008 and June 2009. In June 2012, 2.3 million units of the same system made between October 1997 and February 2008 were recalled. Do they manufacture a high-pressure flushing Bidet? http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/michigan-company-recalls-exploding-toilets/-/1719418/24083138/-/15noetx/-/index.html

If you are familiar with the miles per gallon requirement for cars ( making them smaller, lighter, and less safe in the process), you will understand the new rating for homes that the Department of Energy is imposing in order to reduce the nation’s energy consumption.

The Home Energy Scoring Tool will be voluntary at first for homeowners looking to “renovate or remodel homes, lower utility bills, improve the comfort of their homes, or reduce energy usage.”

In time, the score derived will be a mandatory to document improvements in compliance with DOE standards when you sell your home. The DOE recommends getting the Home Energy Score “as soon as the program becomes available in your area.” The scoring program started in 2012.

To arrive at such Home Energy Score, a “qualified assessor” comes to your house and collects 40 measurements of your home’s walls, windows, cooling, heating, lighting, etc. The assessors are only available through DOE’s participating partners, state and local governments, utilities, and non-profit organizations (environmental groups).

The scoring fees range from $25-125 and there are more than 25 participating partners and 175 qualified assessors. DOE stated that 8,500 homes have been scored so far. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/doe-plugs-energy-rating-homes-similar-mpg-rating-cars#sthash.xKO9LgXV.dpuf

The software is based on “typical homeowner behavior” (who decides what is typical behavior and how?), with a 1-10 point scale accounting for zip codes assigned to over 1,000 weather stations.

No matter how many times the global warming hoax has been debunked, it remains a very profitable business for global elites aided by government fiat and crony capitalism, while the masses are harmed economically through heavier taxation, loss of property, loss of wealth, loss of freedom, and loss of mobility.