In the midst of all this, the UN released its latest “climate change” report. It predicted that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by the effects of climate change, from rising sea levels to droughts, and the result will be an increase in the risk of violent conflict around the globe. The report asserts that global warming will be responsible for food production being reduced by two percent annually, and the result will be a 20 percent increase in malnutrition in children.15
I’m not buying it, and it appears to me that the public isn’t buying it, either.
But just when you think you’ve seen it all, they pull a stunt that tops the rest.
John Beale was one of the many agents at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) committed to advance the Obama climate agenda. To give you an idea of Beale’s character, he applied for and was issued a handicapped parking permit because he claimed he suffered from malaria that he’d contracted while serving in Vietnam. Beale never served in Vietnam, nor did he have malaria. He just thought that his convenience was more important than that of someone who really needed the access. And Beale wasn’t some low-level clerk. He was the top climate change expert at the EPA and helped reauthorize the Clean Air Act. He was also the highest-paid member of the agency, which was a pretty neat trick given that he took as much as eighteen months off in a row.
The reason Beale was able take such extended leaves was because he convinced the EPA hierarchy that, in addition to his duties at the EPA, he was a CIA operative. The people running the EPA believed him. When he’d return from his sojourns—which were usually spent on Cape Cod, in his northern Virginia home, or at a variety of vacation spots to which he’d fly first class, stay in four-star hotels, and rent limousines, all on the company dime—he’d tell his environmental pals that he’d been on assignment in Pakistan or at CIA headquarters in Langley.
How long was Beale able to pull his con off? For decades. When he retired in 2011, the agency gave him a farewell dinner cruise on the Potomac. They also forgot to take him off the payroll. Beale received and cashed his full-time paycheck for nineteen months before the agency finally realized the mistake.
Beale was convicted and sentenced to thirty-two months for his crimes in late 2013.16
Beale’s ruse might even be amusing if he didn’t hold such influence in the EPA. In meetings with Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, Beale said he wanted to develop proposals, ones that could be introduced through legislation or through EPA regulation, that would enable the administration to increase its stranglehold on American energy production. In testimony Beale admitted he wanted to “modify the DNA of the capitalist system.”
Responding to Beale’s testimony, Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, explained that “the real agenda behind this administration’s energy and environmental policies is just what President Obama has said it is: to fundamentally transform America.”17
The Environmental Pilferage Agency
By the way, you might have heard the name Gina McCarthy before. McCarthy was issued a subpoena that demanded she hand over data from taxpayer-funded EPA studies that had been conducted nearly twenty years ago. Based on these studies, which assert microscopic airborne particles kill thousands of Americans every year, the EPA put in place new ozone regulation standards that would cost the U.S. economy an estimated $90 billion a year. That would make them the most expensive regulations in U.S. history. McCarthy has refused to comply with the subpoena. Her reason for not releasing the data? Maybe it’s because an independent study has found “no statistical correlation” between airborne microscopic particles and deaths in the state of California.18
I use the term independent in the most facetious way I can convey. The EPA is one of the most corrupt agencies in modern American history. As I see it, its only rival is the IRS.
The agency’s latest attempt to expand its power over the release of greenhouse gases by automobiles has been expanded to include those released by power plants and other facilities, which in my opinion are already overregulated. A coalition of thirteen state attorneys general, industrial groups, and utility companies is challenging the EPA’s regulatory power grab, and the case, Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, has gone to the Supreme Court.19
Louisiana senator David Vitter had this to say: “This case marks an extremely critical point in clarifying just how far the Obama Administration can extend their regulatory overreach, including by rewriting the Clean Air Act to suit its needs.”20
Vitter has cause to be concerned. The EPA said in its defense against the suit that emissions standards for passenger cars should be applied also to gas pollutants from stationary facilities. In other words, the EPA is expanding its power over the release of pollutants by automobiles to include those released by power plants and other facilities. Kentucky congressional representative Ed Whitfield went even further, saying the agency’s move to broaden the scope of its regulatory powers reflects “an unprecedented expansion of regulatory control over the U.S. economy.”21
E-mails also document the collusion among environmentalists and EPA officials as they work together to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline. Wyoming senator John Barasso says it this way: “These damning e-mails make it clear that the Obama administration has been actively trying to stop this important project for years.”22
One of the e-mails in question was sent by Sierra Club radical environmentalist Lena Moffitt to Michael Goo, an EPA policy administrator who himself had been a stalwart of the environmental movement before he hired on with the EPA. Moffitt thanked Goo for meeting with her and her colleagues about the Keystone XL Pipeline and how to “engage” so that they could further disrupt plans to go ahead with Keystone. Barasso went on to say, “Despite the fact that Keystone XL has bipartisan support in Congress and from governors, environmental extremists inside and out of the administration are working behind closed doors to kill it.”23
In addition to appeasing environmental radicals, the Obama administration has another reason to hold up approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline: Wealthy Democratic backers of the president have a great deal of money invested in companies who are in competition with the company that will build the pipeline. Virginia Democratic senator Tim Kaine opposed Keystone approval, saying, “In my view, there is now enough evidence to conclude that construction of this pipeline is not in America’s long-term interest.” What Kaine didn’t mention was his conflict of interest. He has as much as $50,000 invested in Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, a company that is looking to build a pipeline that would compete directly with Keystone to transport oil from Canada through the United States.24
Obama’s anti-energy policy came home to roost during the Ukrainian crisis that began in February 2014. Let me explain to you how the actions of this ideologically blinded president—who has clung to an energy policy based on fabricated data and his own and the radical left’s use of energy policy to cement their power grab in the United States—have not only come home to roost for Americans who suffer economically from his policies but for America’s allies from Europe to the Middle East as well.
In 2012, I made this prediction concerning the Keystone XL Pipeline:
Simply by relaxing the EPA stranglehold on oil and gas production, we would begin to economically isolate rogue regimes in the Middle East in a way no vague “economic sanctions” of the kind Obama has talked about but never instituted could ever do. If we go ahead with what I’m calling for here—approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline—within as little as a decade I predict we would be able to supply not only all of our own oil and gas needs, but those of our European allies as well.25
I’d like to make an addendum to those prophetic words. Not only would it isolate rogue regimes in the Middle East, it would isolate Vladimir Putin.
I never trusted Putin. I don’t know why anyone who lived through the Cold War would. But I respect his savvy. He knows both his limitations and what he is not limited by.
And our president doesn’t limit him. He ignored Obama’s threats—that his takeover of eastern Ukraine would cost him—and why not? The truth is that Putin supplies Europe with a significant amount of its energy, as much as half of some countries’ total energy supplies. You see, Putin has for the past decade and more been exploiting Russia’s substantial oil and natural gas resources through an aggressive exploration and drilling policy. He built pipelines to transport the enormous lode of energy he tapped from Russia through Ukraine to European customers.
In other words, while Obama was delaying the Keystone XL Pipeline project for more than five years on the basis of phony environmental standards and appeasing his green-energy cronies, Putin cornered Europe’s energy market.
If Obama had moved ahead with approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline in the first year or two of his administration, we would have been able to step in and ship natural gas and oil to our European allies. Had that been the case, the Russian dictator might not have acted as he did in Ukraine and Crimea, given that he would not have had the energy leverage that Obama’s reckless and corrupt energy policy gave him. If Obama had given the go-ahead to Keystone even only two years ago, the United States would not have had to bow to Putin.
How could Obama not know this? That’s the question. Is this another case of the current administration intentionally misusing our energy policy to weaken the U.S. internationally?
Is the situation in Ukraine part of a master plan the president has desired since he took office?
He certainly wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on in Ukraine. Instead, he was out campaigning, outlining the next stages of his agenda in an attempt to distract America’s attention from the domestic and foreign policy disasters—from Obamacare to the Middle East to Putin—that are unfolding before our eyes. Appearing in front of a group of political donors as Putin’s military was advancing into Crimea and massing troops on the Russia-Ukraine border, Obama explained the situation in Ukraine this way: “We may be able to de-escalate over the next several days and weeks, but it’s a serious situation and we’re spending a lot of time on it.”26
Not a word about the Russian and Ukrainian casualties or the military, financial, and energy crises Putin’s actions are generating. As I see it, the only thing Obama seemed worried about was his being able to advance his agenda through incessant campaigning.
So is it that he doesn’t care that his energy policy is making the world more dangerous? It certainly seems that way.
At home, his energy policy may be doing even more damage.
Let me give you some examples of what I mean.
Obama has had no problems admitting that his energy policies would raise the cost of electricity for all Americans and would likely put the coal industry out of business. The president explained it this way:
When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.… Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal-powered plants would have to retrofit their operations. That’ll cost money; they will pass that money on to consumers.27
Two years later, his then soon-to-be-appointed secretary of energy, Steven Chu, said this: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline [in America] to the levels in Europe.”28
He was setting the United States up for a conversion to green energy that he would engineer by throwing taxpayer money—billions’ worth—to his green-energy cronies like Solyndra. Unfortunately, Obama ignores the fact that the energy from green sources like wind and the sun now provides only two-tenths of 1 percent of the U.S. electricity supply and are so diffuse that they will likely never provide more than 1 or 2 percent of the total energy needed to run this country.29
There are other considerations where green energy is concerned. For instance, wind-power installations kill more than 1.4 million birds and bats every year, and that number will only increase as windmill farms spread across the United States.
While the president makes a flourish about his pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey or two every year, he may be issuing a death sentence on our national bird. For the next thirty years, wind-power installations will be allowed to kill as many bald eagles and golden eagles as they want. The language of the imperative is cold: It calls what I see as the slaughter of the symbol of America the “non-purposeful take of eagles.”
Take in this context means “murder.”30
In other words, if you’re building a wind-power farm, you don’t have to follow the endangered species rules that other Americans must adhere to.
It’s not just wind farms that kill birds. The glare from huge solar arrays that are often installed in remote areas can confuse migratory birds, including pelicans, causing them to think they are flying over bodies of water. When they attempt to land on what they see as water, they are often injured or killed by the heat generated by the solar panels.31
As he ignores the killing of eagles, under the endangered-species legislation Obama has diverted water from California farmers who desperately need it to maintain America’s food supply in order to save the smelt. Instead of letting a few fish perish, Obama is sending California’s drought-diminished water supply out into the Pacific Ocean.
The Real Cost of Our Climate Policy
Obama’s purpose is to push alternative energy “solutions” that would compete with coal, oil, and natural gas. But there was something rather important that Obama and his climate comrades never bothered to find out. According to Prof. Larry Bell, renewable energy is not compatible with the existing power grid transmission and distribution system. It’s costing Germany nearly $100 billion just to adapt its current energy delivery system in order to accommodate renewable energy, he says. The grid in the United States is hundreds of times larger and more complex than Germany’s, and even planning to convert it to adapt to renewable sources would likely cost more than $100 billion. The cost of the conversion itself is so astronomical, it’s not even raised in conversation.32
Guess what all of this time, energy, and money going into alternative sources has produced? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the electricity price index in the United States rose to a new record high in January 2014. It’s exactly what Chu claimed he wanted to happen. At the same time, Department of Energy data indicates that electricity production has declined since Barack Obama took office—it hit its peak in 2007 and has slid downward every year since. We’ve added 14 million people in the United States since then, and we’re producing nearly 5 percent less electricity than we did only a year ago to supply their needs. The Obama administration doesn’t even understand the law of supply and demand.33
Recently, Obama waved his executive-order wand and created what he calls climate hubs. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the creation of seven of these climate centers in January 2014. “Climate hubs are part of our broad commitment to developing the next generation of climate solutions,” he said. Although Vilsack refused to directly answer reporters’ questions on the cost of the hubs, estimates say that they will cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars. The hubs are supposed to help farmers and rural communities respond to the risks of climate change, including drought, invasive pests, fires, and floods. This type of information, as one strategist told Fox News, can also be found in the Farmers’ Almanac, which you can buy online for $6.79. The proposed locations are at existing Agriculture Department facilities and/or at agricultural universities, most of which have the same capabilities as the proposed hubs.
It’s interesting to note that according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fires, specifically wildfires, are part of climate change. News to me. I thought wildfires were actually exacerbated by the federal government’s unwillingness to go into forests and clear out debris. When trees and other vegetation die, they are currently left on the forest floor. This is done in the name of letting nature take its course instead of managing nature responsibly. Countless birds, animals, and hum
ans suffer when the dead vegetation fuels forest fires. They kill people and destroy wildlife habitat and humans’ homes. And then there is the amount of particulate matter that is spewed into the atmosphere as a result of these fires, matter that—if environmentalists are correct—exacerbates climate change. Even if they’re right, they’re wrong.
If the last decade’s temperature data are any indication, we may be entering into another ice age. According to many scientists, the sun is in a period of what is known as “solar lull,” which could predict a long period of global cooling. Dr. Richard Harrison, the head of space physics at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England, told the BBC he’s never seen anything like this. “If you want to go back to see when the sun was this inactive… you’ve got to go back about 100 years,” he said.34
So the problem isn’t rising oceans that threaten to submerge coastal areas around the world after the polar ice caps melt from global warming; it’s the onset of a new ice age. A similar phase of sunspot inactivity known as the Maunder Minimum occurred in the 1600s and triggered what has become known as the Little Ice Age. It lasted well into the nineteenth century—we’ve been pulling out of it gradually over the last hundred years—and it killed about a quarter of the people in northern Europe.
My question is this: Are we facing another Maunder Minimum? “There is no scientist alive who has seen a solar cycle as weak as this one,” says Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Andrés Munoz-Jaramillo. Another solar observer, David Hathaway, head of the solar physics group at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Marshall Space Flight Center, agrees: “I would say it is the weakest in 200 years.”35
They’re talking about the virtual disappearance of sunspots during the past year. Normally the number of sunspots rises and falls in eleven-year cycles, and we should currently be at the peak of the cycle, when the sun is producing the highest output of sunspots, a phenomenon that contributes to the earth’s warming. Instead, the sun has effectively gone to sleep at a time when it should be producing sunspots at its maximum levels.36
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 17
