“Obama’s federal government can weatherize your home for only $57,362 each.” That was the headline in a Los Angeles Times story yesterday, based on numbers from the GAO. Nobel prize wining energy secretary Steven Chu blames government red tape. Who would of thought it? The Energy Department disputes GAO figures.
Read the Story: http://tinyurl.com/y8dxvgw
In his inaugural speech, President Obama said that “We will restore science to its rightful place…” I took that to mean that policy would be based on good science. In April, he declared that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” But instead of the professed ideal, Obama appointed ideologues. His science advisors seem to be large on radical ideology and short on objective science.
Science Czar, physicist John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, favors some radical cures for global warming and advocated population control. Holdren has proposed, “organized evasive action: population control, limitation of material consumption, redistribution of wealth, transitions to technologies that are environmentally and socially less disruptive than today’s, and movement toward some kind of world government” (Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977). Also in that book, the authors proposed putting chemicals in the water supply to make women infertile and engineering society by taking away babies from undesirables and subjecting them to government-mandated abortions.
On climate change, Holdren’s long term goal is “equal per-capita emissions rights,” meaning that a country may emit only an amount of carbon commensurate to the number of its persons, not on the basis of its production. For example, the U.S. would be allowed to release only about 20 times as much carbon as Ecuador, although the U.S. produces 144 times the goods and services. (IBD)
More recently, Holdren said that global warming is so dire, that the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air. He is considering shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. “It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.” (AP) For the past 30 years we have spent billions cleaning up the air. Holdren’s proposal of once again polluting the air logically implies that removing the pollution itself was responsible for global warming, not CO2.
Physicist Steven Chu, Energy Secretary, said, “It is now clear that if we continue on our current path, we run the risk of dramatic, disruptive changes to our climate in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren,” adding, “at the same time, we face immediate threats to our economy and our national security that stem from our dependence on oil.” (New York Times) See: Your Carbon Footprint Doesn’t Matter for a rebuttal. For more on energy policy see here and here.
Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California’s snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean “no more agriculture in California,” the nation’s leading food producer. Chu added: “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going.”
And on a Fox News report, April 18, Chu said that Caribbean nations face “very, very scary” rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases. Note that last December the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, in a country that is very concerned with sea level, reported: There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.
Astronomer James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA (and a hold over from previous administrations), said, “The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.” Last June, Hansen called for coal and oil company CEOs to be “tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”
Lisa Jackson, head of EPA, is a chemical engineer. In her first move as EPA chief, Jackson pledged to make science “the backbone for EPA programs.” Really? Why then did the EPA just declare that CO2, a substance vital to all life on Earth, is a dangerous pollutant hazardous to human life and the environment? Where is the evidence? This move is the EPA’s most stupid, and most political; one that will trigger a regulatory maze unlike we’ve ever seen before.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s science advisor, Nina Fedoroff, biologist, (also advisor to Condoleezza Rice) told the BBC that, “humans had exceeded the Earth’s limits of sustainability… We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people… There are probably already too many people on the planet.”
To round out Obama’s science team, Carol M. Browner, a lawyer, not a scientist, became Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change (Energy Czar). According to a Michelle Malkin article, Browner is a neon green radical who until recently was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change. Browner was head of the EPA from 1993-2000. On her last day in office, nearly eight years ago, Browner oversaw the destruction of agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve its records. Early in her first term as EPA head, Browner got caught by a congressional subcommittee using taxpayer funds to create and send out illegal lobbying material to over 100 grassroots environmental lobbying organizations. Browner exploited her office to orchestrate a political campaign by left-wing groups, who turned around and attacked Republican lawmakers for supporting regulatory reform.
It seems to me that President Obama is not getting the best of advice. These advisors, while they may have good credentials, seem to have let zealotry overcome sound science.
