Trump Fast Out Of The Gate On Climate Change

Christmas is coming early this year. Several days ago, Trump appointed “one of the nation’s most prominent climate contrarians, Myron Ebel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, to head his EPA transition.” Now, Fox News is reporting as its lead story this morning that Trump is “looking at ways for the U.S. to back out of a landmark climate pact (The Paris Agreement), which would defy an agreement to cut carbon emissions across the globe.” Bravo.

How Trump handles this and how far he goes in addressing the EPA issue will have ramifications far beyond mere “climate change” and its economic impact. The opportunities here are enormous. If Trump does this intelligently, he can go far to restoring the rule of Constitutional law in this country, as well as restoring scientific integrity, both of which have been brutally sodomized by the progressive left, particularly under Obama. In the process, he will place the progressive left in between a rock and a hard place politically.

Myron Ebel

This is the NYT take on Mr. Ebel from a few days ago:

Mr. Ebel leads the Cooler Heads Coalition, a loose-knit group that says it is “focused on dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis.” He has been one of the nation’s most visible climate contrarians, known for dispensing memorable sound bites on cable news shows and at events like the annual conferences sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based group that rejects the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. Mr. Ebell has said that “a lot of third-, fourth- and fifth-rate scientists have gotten a long ways” by embracing climate change. He frequently mocks climate leaders like Al Gore, and has called the movement the “forces of darkness” because “they want to turn off the lights all over the world.” No one, it seems, is immune to his criticism. He called Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, issued in mid-2015, “scientifically ill informed, economically illiterate, intellectually incoherent and morally obtuse.” “It is also theologically suspect, and large parts of it are leftist drivel,” he added.

Mr. Ebel is further described, in a post at Science Blogs, as the “Evil Arch Climate Uber Villain.” What’s the old expression, “you shall be known by the company you keep.” What we are seeing here is the flip side of that expression, equally as valid. I many not know much about Mr. Ebel, but he has made enemies of the right people. Nothing to add here beyond saying that it would be difficult to think of a better choice.

The Paris Agreement

I’ve addressed the Paris Agreement in a previous post, The Audacity of Climate Change. It is the attempt of UN to redistribute the wealth of the the US and the entire developed West into the pockets of government apparatchiks, their cronies, the UN, academics and “scientists” who will be paid to verify the need for this redistribution, and the authoritarian and socialist regimes that have faltered. It is theft on a global scale never before dreamed of. There is a reason China, who stands to rake in a massive amount of wealth and technology under this proposed deal, has already felt it appropriate to warn President Elect Trump not to pull out of the Paris Agreement. Hopefully, Trump’s official response will be appropriately diplomatic – and unprintable in this blog.

Obama committed us to this obscenity without submitting it to Congress for ratification, even though it requires a change in US laws and expenditures of US tax dollars, and thus should be considered a Treaty under the U.S. Constitution. And in March 2016, without any appropriation from Congress of which I am aware, Obama on his own authority authorized “a $500 million grant to the UN’s “Green Climate Fund” as “the first chunk of a $3 billion commitment made at the Paris climate talks.”

Until the age of Obama and a Congress full of spineless eunuchs, something such as this would have been grounds for impeachment. Article II, Section II of the US Constitution limits the power of the President to commit our nation to foreign obligations by requiring that such treaties be approved by “two by thirds of the Senators . . .” Article I Section VIII vests in Congress the sole right to “pay the debts” of our country.

Certainly Trump can unilaterally undo with his pen anything that Obama has done in the first instance with his own pen. But there is much that can be made of this, politically as well as in reestablishing the rule of law, first and foremost.

What better way to invalidate the Paris Agreement than to submit it to the Senate for a vote. Trump should announce his intent to do this with a speech to the effect that the President does not have the power claimed by Obama to obligate us to this deal without the advice and consent to the Senate. And to truly troll the progs, Trump should chastise the Senate for their failure to hold Obama to account. How many progressive talking heads will sputter because Trump is reinforcing rule of law? How empty will be the prog refrain that Trump is the a fascist if he reinforces the limits of Presidential power. And undoing climate regulation will have a palpable economic effect. So make every Democrat in the Senate vote on this agreement. Put them on record. It will be important when, in two, four or six years, after the economic impact is felt, they are up for reelection.

Other Actions Needed

Trump has already stated plans to nix most of the GHG based environmental regulations that have been put into effect since 2009, when the EPA unilaterally declared GHG’s to be pollutants. That is wonderful, but here again, there are other opportunities and certain steps that we need to take.

One, we as a nation have been spoon fed that the “science is settled,” that there is an “over-whelming consensus,” and that apocalyptic gloom and doom awaits us if everyone does not immediately give the prog left all of our money so that the progs can buy private jets in order to get to climate change conferences on time. So Trump has to educate the country that there are real problems with the underlying “science” or he is going to run into a progressive buzzsaw.

But it should not be hard to do this, even for a layman such as Trump. I’ve covered those problems in some detail in a prior post. At its most fundamental level, the very historical data being used to prove anthropogenic global warming, none of it has any indicia of trustworthiness:

. . . what Karl did in 2015 – i.e., adjusting our historic temperature records – is something that our government record keepers at NASA and NOAA have done multiple times over the past two decades. Those changes to the temperature record, never published for comment or publicly justified, have been coming (dare I say it) fast and furious over the last three years because raw temperature data has shown no warming since 1997: “By the count of researcher Marcia Wyatt In a widely circulated presentation, the U.S. government’s published temperature data for the years 1880 to 2010 has been tinkered with 16 times in the past three years.”

And here is the mystery about those changes: Every major adjustment of our temperature records during the past two decades has been to adjust pre-1950 temperatures downwards and post 1950 upwards, thus creating an ever greater illusion of warming. As science writer Richard Booker wrote in the Telegraph a few months ago, “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever.”

This in turn raised two issues that Trump should address. One, the current people in charge of our temperature records at NASA and NOAA are the foxes guarding the hen house. They’re John Dillinger as the lone bank vault guard on the nighwatch. Those entire sections need to be fired and replaced.

Two, Trump would go a long way to both selling these changes and in fighting back against the inevitable prog buzz saw heading his way by discussing just how corrupt the practice of science has become in all fields in this country.  He should institute series of systemic fixes to return integrity back to the field and practice of science. I covered this in detail in a prior post, but just to recount:

1. Make people understand that science is defined wholly by the process of hypothesis, testing, observation, result, reproduction. Just because a man in a lab coat makes a conclusory statement has nothing to do with science. It is the process that is important, and the results of any experiment that is not verified is not valid science.
2. Congress needs to pass the secret science bill requiring that government agencies may rely only on studies that have been validated or reproduced. This utterly corrupt practice of relying on studies that have not been validated or reproduced because key data is withheld must end.
3. When taxpayer dollars are used to fund scientific studies, those studies must adhere to the scientific method – a requirement that must be ruthlessly enforced. Any scientist whose name appears on a study that does not contain all of the raw data, etc., necessary to allow for the validation and reproduction of the study should thereafter be permanently barred from receiving any government grants.
4. We must require that proposed changes to the temperature record be published in advance, as well as all of the underlying work and algorithms, so that they can be subject to comment and validation.
5. As the role of publications, peer review, and gatekeepers, their importance in the world of “publish or perish” academia is very significant. The government should take comprehensive steps to lessen their role in all fields of science. Trump should announce the creation of some sort of public, searchable government database that collects and collates the results and information necessary to validate or reproduce all government-funded studies as well as any and all private studies that scientists might submit for inclusion. There seems to be no other way to lessen the corrupt practices and biases that, as Climategate revealed, have irrevocably tainted the peer review and publication process, and that have played such a huge role in limiting voices that dissent from the approved “science.”