“This election is about climate change.” Bernie Sanders has made this statement numerous times and his success in his primary battle with Hillary Clinton has forced her to the left on climate issues to win his endorsement. For example, as Secretary of State she supported exporting fracking technology to foreign countries to encourage natural gas development. She frequently differed with New York’s Cuomo on the fracking ban in that state. However, in a campaign ad for the NY primary she changed her position and supported the ban. To get the support of Bernie’s acolytes and the big money environmental true believers in the Democrat Party she’s going to abandon any pretense of common sense and join the “Hate Carbon” crowd.
March 6, 2016 Clinton said, “By the time we get through all my conditions, I doubt there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.”
Hillary’s turn around on fracking was extracted by Bernie Sanders as a condition of his endorsement. This may turn out to be a political mistake as Jade Clemente pointed out in a Forbes article called “Hillary Clinton’s Mistake on Fracking for Natural Gas” (March 13, 2016). Ohio sits atop the Utica Shale and Pennsylvania atop the Marcellus Shale both of which are being drilled using fracking. The economic benefits for both states is substantial. No one has ever won the Presidency with out carrying those two states.
Of course, Hillary also supports Obama’s Clean Power Plan that is essentially a war on coal. Ohio is also a big coal producing state. It is expected to cost $650 billion in lost GDP and shutter 66 power plants. The EPAs own projections show the coal industry will shrink by 48 percent. But, I saw a piece the other day that claimed the power plant closures were 4 times greater already than the EPA had projected.
A lot of power plants have been switching to natural gas but now Hillary promises to shut that down as well. Good luck keeping the lights on.
I have read numerous explanations written by warming enthusiasts on the difference between “global warming” and “climate change”. Apparently it boils down to the “effects” of global warming – sea level rise, melting glaciers, more droughts, forest fires, etc. This change in terminology was prompted by the finding by the IPCC that temperatures were not rising as predicted while CO2 levels continued the upward trend. This threw the whole theory and modeling of global warming into doubt. Time to change the name to confuse the issue. It’s still global warming though.
The Obama Administration has already spent heavily on climate change. Hard to get an exact figure as it is scattered among various government agencies but it looks like $32.8 billion on climate studies and $79 billion for tech related research. The SBA estimates the regulatory cost at $1.75 trillion. Taken together, big bucks to study a non-problem.
Consider this…. It snowed in three states last week – Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. That has not happened in 30 years. It also snowed in the Alps…. Up to 30 cm in Eastern Switzerland and Italy. People are starting to talk about global cooling (“Is the Earth Cooling” by Peter Ferrara, Forbes). Astronomynow.com has a piece called “Diminishing Solar Activity May Bring New Ice Age by 2030”.
This is based on rapid cooling recently in the upper atmosphere and ZERO sunspot activity on our source of heat….. the sun. There is a picture of the sun without a single sunspot on the website “Wattsupwiththat”.
The last time that happened for an extended period was 1645 to 1715 and was called the Maunder Minimum and that period was also called the “Little Ice Age”.
The sun goes through sunspot cycles of generally 11 years but can last 30 to 70 years like the Maunder Minimum. The current cycle began in 2008 and is on course to have the lowest sunspot activity since accurate records began in 1750.
If we go into another Little Ice Age we are going to look pretty stupid for falling for the big scam of global warming. We may live to welcome a little global warming.