Thursday, December 08, 2016

Existential threat?

As the old saying goes, personnel is policy. And the President-elect has made quite the pick for the Environmental Protection Agency:
Liberals and the environmental left have gone into a tizzy over the selection of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt as Donald Trump's pick to head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi says the Pruitt nomination must be blocked "for the sake of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the planet we will leave our children." New York AG Eric Schneiderman says Pruitt is a "dangerous and an unqualified choice." Independent socialist senator Bernie Sanders declares the Pruitt pick is not only dangerous but also "sad." The League of Conservation Voters calls Pruitt not just a global warming skeptic but "an outright climate denier."
If you think that reaction is a bit strong, try this one from Obama hand Dan Pfeiffer:

High praise indeed
Pruitt has been a prominent member of a group of attorneys general who have been fighting against EPA rulemaking, especially where the energy industry is concerned. This isn't particularly surprising, given he is from Oklahoma, a state that produces a lot of energy. Does that make him an existential threat?

The larger meaning of the Pruitt nomination is simple -- the Washington bureaucracy needs to be reined in. Trump may actually be serious. We'll be watching.

11 comments:

jerrye92002 said...

Notice how the Lefties simply assume that the scam/hoax/biglie of Man-made Global Warming is unquestionable Truth? The fact is there is ZERO proof that the planet will suffer a manmade global warming catastrophe sometime past most of our lifetimes. In the meantime, we can look at the predictions from those computer models so far, and be 95% certain they are WRONG. I still claim if these truths were made public, voters would be pretty ticked off at the Billions being spent "fighting" it.

Gino said...

it was never about the climate, but about power to force your belief system upon others.

this guy is a big threat to that, for now.

i'm in full support.

jerrye92002 said...

I am assuming that, with a word from Trump, the new EPA head can simply withdraw the rules the same way they were originally imposed, from "on high." Now THAT is "hope and change"! And quickly.

Bike Bubba said...

Worth noting is that in calculating eMPG and estimated emissions from hybrid and electric cars, the EPA does not include the power added efficiency of the power plant (typically 30-35%), the fact that nighttime power generation is mostly coal, and the emissions needed to make the battery.

We desperately need someone to rein in the EPA and force them to actually do the science we're paying them to do. The mpg-e of a Tesla is not around 100; it's closer to 15-20 when you include all of these costs. About the same as my 1997 pickup with small block Chevy V-8.

Yes, the Obama EPA is actively making the environment worse.

jerrye92002 said...

What is even crazier is that the EPA HAS done the research. They conclude (according to computer models, of course) that if their full "Clean Power Plan" is implemented and cuts fossil fuel use (I think 50%) it will reduce global temperatures 100 years from now by something like 0.02 degrees-- negligible, in other words! It is absolutely silly!

Bike Bubba said...

Some of the science--but if they're not telling us what the real emissions from an electric car are, at least some is not being done. At the very least, it's not being presented, which brings to mind something my first boss out of college told me; if you didn't document your work, as far as I care, you didn't do it.

jerrye92002 said...

BB, you have a point, but I think mine is bigger. By their own admission and "science," their vastly expensive regulation has a benefit too small to even find, 100 years from now! So why are we told we have to DOOOOO something when the EPA itself says it will not matter a whit if we do? Are they magicians or scientists? Or fools and charlatans?

Bike Bubba said...

Or it's the same point. Analysis without a conclusion is science incompletely done, and what you're saying is that they've wrongly rejected the null hypothesis, no?

jerrye92002 said...

I may not be following your point. If it is that they have absolutely failed to in any way prove their hypothesis, I agree. More importantly, it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to prove their hypothesis because we will not have definitive proof of catastrophic global warming for another hundred years, if ever, AND even at that point we may have no evidence that it was caused by CO2 in total or by man-made CO2 in particular. Their hypothesis is crap.

What is concerning, however, is that even if you accept their total crap predictions, they say what they are doing with their ridiculously expensive policies accomplishes nothing! Other than just saying "it's government," what reason could they possibly have for doing it?

Bike Bubba said...

Jerry, nothing complicated about it; in a good scientific test, you set up a criteria for accepting the alternate hypothesis--say that global climate change is occurring--that will be statistically significant. For the EPA, economic significance comes into this as well.

More or less, if your expected shift is far less than the uncertainty in the measurement, you will generally assume that nothing big is happening--no warming, or no real reduction in warming. You also ask "even if this is absolutely true, is it economically justifiable?". It appears that in the case you mention, the EPA has either not done the calculation, or has proceeded despite it being negative.

In other words, in doing part of the science, they really haven't done the full science they ought to have done.

jerrye92002 said...

Let me try this again: Scientifically speaking, the hypothesis is that 100 years from now, the amount of CO2 humans add to the atmosphere will create catastrophic warming. Therefore, the "test" to prove that hypothesis will not be done, indeed will not be possible, until 100 years from now. Now because the computer models predict intermediate results, we can evaluate the intermediate predictions from those models against current data. The data shows we are more than 95% certain that the models are totally WRONG. Not only that, the underlying science in the model-- the individual assumptions in the model-- are known to be in error, indeed are not even well known or understood. GIGO.

To your other point, the various models have a range of prediction-- uncertainty-- that exceeds the magnitude of predicted warming. The average of erroneous data is still erroneous. And Again, the EPA HAS done the calculation, and using their own models found essentially zero benefit, regardless of what we do with CO2 emissions. Yet they insist we must drastically curb CO2. They don't even believe their OWN data!