The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a stay on the Clean Power Plan – the heart of the Obama administration’s climate-change policy – which puts a hold on the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of the plan’s rules and restrictions until the litigation is resolved. Right?
Apparently not for Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who in a recent interview brushed off the idea that the justices would have anything to say about the issue.
“But we have been one of the more aggressive states saying, ‘We don’t care what the Supreme Court says about the Clean Power Plan,’ we recognize we want to have the cleanest air possible,” he said.
A circuit court in December refused to halt the Clean Power Plan before the U.S. Supreme Court issued the stay last month. The plan seeks a 32 percent cut in the power industry’s carbon output by 2030.
The governor was being interviewed by Ryan Warner on the “Colorado Matters” program on Colorado Public Radio when the conversation turned to global warming.
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Warner said a program listener was wondering about the state’s requirement that a certain percentage of energy come from renewables.
“So in 2004, voters decided that it should be 10 percent by 2020; before you took office, that got bumped up to 30 percent for investor-owned utilities,” Warner said.
The host noted the listener suggested other states were getting ahead.
“Isn’t it time,” he asked, “we sent signals that we are still serious about moving forward on clean energy beyond 2020?”
Warner raised the question of a 50 percent renewables standard by 2030.
“So I certainly wouldn’t do it without sitting down and seeing what it would cost, you know what our citizens would have to pay for their electricity,” Hickenlooper answered. “It goes to prove that you’re never going to satisfy everybody. But we have been one of the more aggressive states saying ‘We don’t care what the Supreme Court says about the Clean Power Plan,’ we recognize we want to have the cleanest air possible.”
The governor continued: “I think we need to look at, you know, what are our core values? We want to cleanest energy we can have, reduce our carbon emissions in every way possible, but we want to do so in such a way that saves money. Well, it might well be certainly in the next couple of years if we’re looking at these large-scale industrial solar plants, they’re saying they might come in lower than natural gas plants.”
When Warner asked whether it would be a market-based decision, Hickenlooper said no.
“I think the market helps nudge the universe from time to time, but I don’t think we would. … We’ve never left it to a completely market-driven decision.”
The Energy Policy Center at the Independence Institute, a Colorado-based think tank, commented that Hickenlooper “continues to back his state agency – the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment – moving forward on Clean Power Plan implementation despite a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court.”
A report Monday by The Hill said Obama administration lawyers were just beginning their fight for the climate rule for power plants that the justices put on hold.
The regulations for carbon dioxide from power plants were opposed by dozens of states and energy companies who told the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia the EPA was assuming a “breathtaking expansion” of power.
Obama’s lawyers told the court the opposite, saying the rule would “achieve cost-effective [carbon dioxide] reductions from an industry that has already demonstrated its ability to comply with robust pollution-control standards through the same measures and flexible approaches. The rule fulfills both the letter and spirit of Congress’s direction.”
The appeals court is just the start of a long process as activists try to re-establish the Clean Power Plan.
The rule’s on hold for now, apparently except for Hickenlooper, because of a Supreme Court decision to suspend it during the litigation.
The issue of global warming has prompted some startling positions in recent months.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., warned that climate change makes women prostitutes, the Department of Homeland Security called it a high priority and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream memorialized it. A poll showed 91 percent of Americans simply aren’t that concerned about it.
There also were headlines tying Jack O’Lanterns to climate change. And Ebola, too.
Only a few months back, WND reported on a study that said global warming, instead of causing ice caps to melt and flood lowlands around the world, now was causing the sea level rise to slow.
“Is there anything global warming can’t do?” Marc Morano asked on his Climate Depot site in response to the recent NASA assessment.
“Now it seems that there is so much global warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels.”
He noted that 30 years ago, scientists blamed global warming for sea level decreases.
The new theory behind the slowdown is that as the Earth becomes more parched as a result of humans pumping more water out of the ground, water that otherwise would cause oceans to rise is “being absorbed” by lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, much as a sponge absorbs water.
The estimate is that 3.2 trillion gallons of water “has thus been soaked up and stored and is not pouring into the streets of coastal cities.”
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At the Climate Depot, Morano pointed out the widely divergent predictions about the effect of global warming on sea level in the scientific community.
He noted that in 1987, Florida State University geology professor William Tanner said climate change would cause the sea level to fall. Tanner plotted 4,000 years of sea-level data on 5,000 years of climatological data, Morano said, and every time the climate cooled a couple of degrees, the sea level went up.
Even further back, the National Science Foundation estimated that a large part of the Antarctic ice mass appeared to be collapsing, which could cause oceans to rise by “almost 20 feet.”
“It has nothing to do with a warmer climate, just the dynamics of unstable ice,” said a scientist at the time.
Morano pointed out the sea level rise over the past 200 years or so “shows no evidence of acceleration, which is necessary to assume a man-made influence.”
“Sea level rise instead decelerated over the 20th century, decelerated 31 percent since 2002 and decelerated 44 percent since 2004 to less than 7 inches per century. There is no evidence of an acceleration of sea level rise, and therefore no evidence of any man-made effect on sea levels. Sea level rise is primarily a local phenomenon related to land subsidence, not CO2 levels. Therefore, areas with groundwater depletion and land subsidence have much higher rates of relative sea level rise, but this has absolutely nothing to do with man-made CO2.”
WND has reported extensively on global warming, including a few months back when, despite no rise in average global temperature for nearly two decades, some two-dozen scientists with major U.S. universities urged President Obama to use RICO laws to prosecute opponents who deny mankind is causing catastrophic changes in the climate.
That’s the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which can put people in jail.
In a letter addressed to Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren, the scientists said they “appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress.”
“One additional tool – recently proposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change,” they wrote, according to Politico.
The scientists said their critics’ methods “are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry,” which was the target of a RICO investigation that “played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking.”
“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.
But WND reported new evidence indicates the polar ice cap is growing, not shrinking.
Blogger Steven Goddard at Real Science cited information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, showing the Arctic ice mass, as of Sept. 7, 2015, was substantially bigger than it was in September 2012.
“Nobel Prize winning climate experts and journalists tell us that the Arctic is ice-free, because they are propagandists pushing an agenda, not actual scientists or journalists,” he said.
In the past three years, he pointed out, the Arctic ice mass “has gained hundreds of miles … much of which is thick, multi-year ice.”
WND long has reported the predictions of an ice-free Arctic by scientists who believe mankind is causing global warming.
But in just last few winters, Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. And Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw the coldest days ever recorded, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.
London’s Independent newspaper declared at the turn of the millennium, “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, saying snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he claimed at the time.
Former vice president and current carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore told an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.
See Gore:
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A 2013 column by Mark Hertsgaard was headlined: “The End of the Arctic? Ocean Could be Ice Free by 2015.”
He wrote: “Say goodbye to polar bears and a whole lot of ice. New research suggests the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2015, with devastating consequences for the world. Can it be stopped?”
Goddard also cited Gore’s prediction that the “polar ice cap may disappear by 2014.”
Taking one more step back in time, the BBC said the Arctic summers would be ice-free by 2013.
Sierra Club Canada also said in 2013 that the Arctic sea ice would vanish that year.
Tim Ball, a former University of Winnipeg climatology professor, said global temperatures have been dropping since the turn of the century, prompting the change in terminology from “global warming” to “climate change.”
Activists are also spending less time discussing temperatures and more time pointing to more extreme events such as tornadoes, droughts, cold snaps and heat waves. Ball said there’s a shred of truth there, but it’s being badly distorted.
“Yes, there’s been slightly more extremes,” he said in an interview with WND and Radio America. “That’s because the jet stream patterns are changing, because the earth is cooling down. All the arguments about sea-level rise, about Arctic ice disappearing, if you recall it’s not that long ago that our friend Al Gore was saying that there would be no summer ice in the Arctic. I think the year he set for it was 2014. That proved to be completely wrong.”
Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Tim Ball:
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“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.
Scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project, which has gathered the signatures of at least 31,487 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
They say, “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plan and animal environments of the Earth.”
Robinson, who has a doctorate in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/dem-governor-disses-supreme-court-ruling/
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