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Written by Michael Bastasch

Many Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programs are redundant and could be eliminated without hurting environmental quality, according to a new report on reforming the federal bureaucracy.

“The EPA needs to be made more transparent and efficient, a goal that can be achieved while continuing to protect the nation’s environment,” reads the report published by the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) on Wednesday.

CEI gave a series of recommendations on how to make EPA more transparent and accountable, including eliminating regional offices and changing science programs.

“Many of the EPA’s regional offices and grant programs are redundant and should be abolished,” reads the short report written by Myron Ebell, who headed President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team.

“Other reform priorities include improving data quality standards for new research and transferring emergency response duties to the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Ebell wrote.

The group says EPA’s budget “is the most impenetrable of all federal department and agency budgets,” which makes it hard for Congress to know how taxpayer dollars are being spent. CEI wants EPA to do what other agencies do and put forward a budget that “clearly identifies the spender, how much they spend, and the legal basis for the spending.”

No doubt, CEI’s suggestions will be opposed by environmental groups. Activists opposed President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to EPA’s budget and elimination of dozens of agency programs.

“There is no way to sugarcoat this, President Trump has taken a wrecking ball to environmental protection in the US,” Ken Kimmell, president of the Union for Concerned Scientists, told CNN in May. “Frankly I didn’t think this would happen with the severity with this is happening. We have had changes in powers before. Different presidents strike a different balance. But this is a severe attack that we didn’t expect.”

Environmentalists have filed dozens of lawsuits to stop Trump’s policy agenda from going through. Environmental activists even filed suit against the U.S.-Mexico border wall being planned by the Department of Homeland Security, arguing it would hurt endangered species.

Targeting EPA science programs has been on the Republican to-do list for years. Conservative groups and lawmakers worry EPA uses science to back pre-determined policy conclusions.

Republicans have also voiced concerns about the impartiality of outside EPA science advisers, most of whom take agency money to conduct research, creating a potential conflict of interest.

The House passed legislation in March to reform how EPA uses scientific research, but the bill hasn’t gotten much attention in the Senate.

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By Chris White

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt might ask a former Obama-era official to head the agency’s climate debate team, according to a report published Monday.

Steve Koonin, a physicist and former Department of Energy head during the Obama administration, is being considered to lead a “red team, blue team” tactic on climate change, said Myron Ebell, who headed President Donald Trump’s transition team.

“It makes sense because he has positioned himself as an honest broker,” Ebell said. “He doesn’t think that the consensus is what some of the alarmists claim it is, and there’s a lot that needs to be discussed.”

Koonin did not respond to reporter’s questions about the veracity of Ebell’s claims, but added: “I think it would be a good idea if that kind of exercise took place.” He made generally supportive remarks about the red team idea earlier this year, writing in an April editorial earlier that the approach could help deflate the politics surrounding climate change.

“A Red/Blue exercise would have many benefits,” Koonin wrote. “It would produce a traceable public record that would allow the public and decision makers a better understanding of certainties and uncertainties. It would more firmly establish points of agreement and identify urgent research needs.”

The idea essentially pits climate skeptics against academics who argue that human beings are the primary drivers of climate change. Pruitt first announced the idea in June, and has since suggested that the debates should be televised.

Scientists who question climate science frequently lose federal funding. Koonin suggested that prominent climate skeptics such as MIT academic Richard Lindzen and climatologist Judith Curry are among those who have been on the blunt end of the activists’ ire.

President Donald Trump and the EPA enlisted the help of free market group Heartland Institute, which is considered to be the primary academic heavyweight pushing against so-called climate alarmism.

The institute has become a type of boogeyman in liberal circles, mostly because of its skeptical position toward man-made global warming.

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The post Report: Scott Pruitt May Ask Former Obama Official To Lead A Climate ‘Red Team’ appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Michael Bastasch

Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart said that Obama-era smog regulations had “hosed” western U.S. states that struggle with high levels of naturally-occurring pollutants.

“Those of us in the west are kind of hosed by this whole thing,” Stewart told Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt during a Thursday hearing.

Stewart represents Salt Lake City and rural parts of Utah, which he says are burdened by air quality regulations they can’t meet. The Obama administration lowered ground-level ozone, or smog, standards from 75 to 70 parts per billion in 2015.

Stewart said the lower ozone standard is nearly impossible for some parts of Utah to meet because of episodes of naturally-occurring ozone during the summer and winter. Utah’s high elevation and unique geography make it prone to high levels of background ozone.

“These are very remote places and yet they are out of compliance with ozone, and there’s not a thing in the world they can do about it,” Stewart said.

“It’s not like there’s factories spewing or a lot of cars that are driving through there and creating the pollution and the particulate matter. It’s naturally-occurring,” he said. “We have these rural communities that are not compliant with ozone and can’t get compliant — there’s not a thing in the world they can do.”

“The Native Americans living there 500 years ago would have been not in compliance with the rules that have been proposed by the previous administration,” Stewart said.

Utah has struggled to come into compliance because of non-man-made sources of ozone pollutants from wildfires vegetation and animals. Utah also suffers from stratospheric intrusions that bring down atmospheric ozone during cold weather inversions.

Such intrusions can “can increase ground-level ozone concentrations by 20–40 ppb,” according to Utah regulators. The state also has to deal with ozone transported across the seas from Asia, furthering adding to compliance woes.

Indeed, a 2014 report by the right-leaning American Action Forum found an ozone standard set between 60 and 70 parts per billion would put 100 state and national parks out of compliance.

Utah joined a coalition of states suing the Obama administration to overturn the 2015 ozone rules. Pruitt was party to the suit as Oklahoma attorney general. In April, a federal court agreed to delay the ozone suit so EPA could review the rule.

Pruitt announced last week the agency would review the ozone rule pursuant to a White House executive order to eliminate costly regulations.

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The post GOP Lawmaker Says Native Americans Living 500 Years Ago Would Be Out Of Compliance With EPA Air Rules appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Andrew Follett

For the seventh time, a government agency has contradicted claims made by environmentalists and found hydraulic fracturing doesn’t pose a grave threat to drinking water.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published a study Wednesday that examined 116 water wells across the energy-rich regions of Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. The study found 9 examples of water contamination in the wells, but every case was either naturally occurring or not linked to fracking.

“Another day, another study confirming fracking is not a major risk to groundwater,” Steve Everley, a spokesman for Texans for Natural Gas, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“This report comes less than a year after the U.S. EPA’s landmark study that also found no evidence of widespread water pollution from fracking,” Everley said. “It’s time to put to rest the false claim that the shale revolution has threatened Americans’ drinking water supplies, because the science clearly does not support it.”

Eight of the nine contaminated well samples came from groundwater that was older than 2,500 years, suggesting natural processes were at play. The one non-ancient was not found to be contaminated by fracking. Wells contained methane isotopes and hydrocarbon gas compositions indicating biological origins, and not from fracking or industrial activities.

This is the seventh U.S. government study to conclude fracking is not a major risk to drinking water supplies.

For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a five-year study in 2016 that found fracking was not causing widespread groundwater contamination. A 2014 report by National Energy Technology Laboratory, which is run by the Energy Department, made a similar finding.

Environmentalists at the blog Ecowatch responded to such studies by arguing, “millions of Americans know that fracking contaminates groundwater and for the EPA to report any differently only proves that the greatest contamination from the industry comes from its influence and ownership of our government.”

Even scientists whose research was directly financed by environmentalists couldn’t find evidence that fracking contaminates groundwater.

“Our funders, the groups that had given us funding in the past, were a little disappointed in our results,” Amy Townsend-Small, the study’s lead researcher, told Newsweek in last April. “We haven’t seen anything to show that wells have been contaminated by fracking.”

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The post SEVENTH Gov’t Study Says Fracking Isn’t A Threat To Groundwater appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Michael Bastasch

President Donald Trump will fulfill his campaign pledge to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, two sources with direct knowledge of the decision say.

Trump is working with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt and a small group of administration officials to work out how withdrawal will happen, Axios reported Wednesday. Trump is deciding between waiting three years to withdraw, as dictated by the accord, or pulling out of the United Nations overarching climate treaty.

Exiting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been championed by conservatives who want to make sure a future president can’t simply rejoin the Paris agreement, which 147 countries signed onto in 2016.

Pruitt met with Trump Tuesday to discuss the Paris accord, sparking a wave of speculation the president had decided to live up to his campaign promise. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the two discussed “the president’s upcoming decision of the Paris climate accords.”

“Ultimately, he wants a fair deal for the American people, and he will have an announcement on that shortly,” Spicer told reporters Tuesday.

Axios previously reported Trump told close confidantes he would pull out of the Paris agreement, despite calls from European leaders and some in his own administration to stay in the accord.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres made a last ditch attempt to keep Trump in the agreement during a speech at New York University Tuesday night. Guterres said countries that leave the Paris accord will be left behind.

“The sustainability train has left the station,” Guterres said. “Get on board or get left behind.”

Trump’s decision to leave, if true, would be a huge blow to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House aides Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn, all of whom pushed for the U.S. to remain in the Paris accord.

Conservative groups and Republican officials intensified their efforts to get Trump to withdraw from Paris in the past week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republican Senators sent a letter to Trump in late May urging him to withdraw.

“We applaud you for your ongoing efforts to reduce over regulation in America,” the senators wrote. “To continue on this path, we urge you to make a clean exit from the Paris agreement so that your administration can follow through on its commitment to rescind the Clean Power Plan.”

Trump will announce his decision on the fate of U.S. involvement in the Paris agreement this week.

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The post REPORT: Trump To Withdraw From The Paris Climate Accord appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Andrew Follett

A top White House economic adviser said Thursday that keeping the Obama administration’s global warming pledge to the United Nations would be “highly crippling” to economic growth.

“We know that the levels that were agreed to by the prior administration would be highly crippling to the US economic growth,” chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said aboard Air Force One Thursday, referring to former President Barack Obama’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris climate agreement.

Obama pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. But that plan would be economically harmful, according to Cohn, and experts say they would not reduce emissions enough comply with the Paris agreement.

President Donald Trump promised to cancel the 2015 United Nations pact while on the campaign trail. Now, Trump says he will make a decision on the agreement following the G7 summit in Italy this week. Nearly 200 countries agreed to a U.N. deal in 2015.

“The president has told you that he’s going to ultimately make a decision on Paris and climate when he gets back,” Cohn said. “He’s interested to hear what the G7 leaders have to say about climate.”

Trump “wants to do the right thing for the environment,” Cohn said. “He cares about the environment. But he also cares very much about creating jobs for American workers.”

Even if Trump keeps the U.S. in the Paris global warming agreement, it will almost certainly fail.

The significant reductions to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions required by the agreement are extremely difficult to achieve due to the immense costs involved. Scientists estimate that simply limiting global warming to the Paris agreement targets would require the annual installation of 485,000 wind turbines by 2028. Only 13,000 turbines were installed in 2015, despite the enormous tax breaks and subsidies offered to wind power.

“It would require rates of change in our energy infrastructure and energy mix that have never happened in world history and that are extremely unlikely to be achieved,” Glenn Jones, a professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M who co-authored the study on the feasibility of the agreement, told Science Daily. “For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it.”

The likely costs of the kind of wind and solar power program the scientists say would be necessary to actually slow global warming would be measured in the tens of trillions of dollars, and even then success would be far from assured. The scientists conclude that other methods of reducing CO2 emissions, such as significantly increasing the number of nuclear reactors, would run into political opposition from environmental groups.

Scientists’ conclusions are mirrored by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy’s comments during a that the Clean Power Plan (CPP), her agency’s signature regulation aimed at tackling global warming, was meant to show “leadership” rather than actually prevent projected warming.

EPA repeatedly argued that the point of the Clean Power Plan was to show the world America was serious about tackling global warming in order to galvanize support for United Nations delegates to sign the Paris Agreement.

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The post Trump’s Economic Adviser: Obama’s Global Warming Pledge ‘Crippling’ US Growth appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Michael Bastasch

A study meant to debunk a claim made by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt in his confirmation hearing ended up doing the opposite — it proved him right.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, found that Pruitt’s claim of a “leveling off of warming” over the past two decades is unsupported by satellite-derived temperature data, which measures the lowest few miles of the atmosphere.

Researchers supposed debunking of Pruitt, however, centers on a selectively quoted line from his testimony, which cuts out the administrator’s reference to the global warming “hiatus.”

Scientists have been debating the “hiatus” in warming for years, trying to parse out its causes and, in some cases, if it’s due to bad measurements in surface temperature readings. But the “hiatus” is extremely apparent in satellite temperature readings, stretching for about two decades.

“Mr. Pruitt claimed that ‘over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming,’” reads the study, quoting Pruitt’s confirmation hearing testimony from January.

But Pruitt actually said: “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming, which some scientists refer to as the ‘hiatus.’”

Pruitt was clearly referring to the “hiatus,” or lack of significant warming, in the satellite temperature record that started in the late 1990s and continued until the recent El Nino began in 2015.

“This study seems to be an unwarranted kneejerk reaction to Pruitt’s ‘leveling off’ of warming comment,” Dr. Roy Spencer, a climate scientist who operates one of the satellite datasets relied upon by the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“But Pruitt’s comment in testimony wasn’t that precise, and it’s true that the previous warming became much weaker and approached zero over a period of approximately 20 years until the 2015-16 warm El Nino event,” Spencer said.

Pruitt has come under attack from environmentalists and some scientists for his comments on global warming. Most recently, opponents criticized Pruitt for saying that he didn’t believe carbon dioxide was the main driver of recent warming.

Major media outlets, including The Washington Post, picked up this new study’s results, criticizing Pruitt and his management at the EPA. WaPo reported, “Scientists just published an entire study refuting Scott Pruitt on climate change.”

Researchers found that “the tropospheric warming from 1979 to 2016 is unprecedented relative to internally generated temperature trends on the 38-year timescale,” according to the study.

Based on what Pruitt actually told Congress in January, however, the study essentially proves that he was correct.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue pointed out on Twitter that data presented in the study shows a slowdown in warming in the last 20 years. Maue also noted how authors used several studies on the “hiatus” in their citations, but refused to use the term in the study.

The study’s authors used climate models to show the warming trend in satellite data couldn’t be explained by natural warming, which excludes man-made greenhouse gases.

“Our results support and strengthen previous findings of a large human-caused contribution to warming,” the study found.

But the study doesn’t address why satellite data doesn’t show nearly as much warming as predicted by climate models that include human emissions. In fact, satellites only show about half the warming predicted by climate models.

“What really matters is that observed warming in recent decades has only been about 50 percent of what the average climate model says should be happening,” Spencer said. “Studies like this are a distraction from that fact, which I suspect was the authors’ intent.”

Spencer’s data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) showed no significant warming for roughly two decades — from the mid-1990s to 2015.

The Remote Sensing System (RSS) satellite dataset, compiled by researchers in California, shows a lack of warming from 1997 to 2015. RSS operators noted the “troposphere has not warmed quite as fast as most climate models predict.”

“Just because it has warmed a little in the last 20 years does not mean climate models are correct, and that global warming is a serious problem,” Spencer said.

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The post Climate Scientists Trying To Discredit Trump’s EPA Chief End Up Proving Him Right appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

By Sen. Rand Paul

It is my duty as a senator to uphold and defend the Constitution. One of my most important responsibilities in this role is to provide advice and consent on treaties, a check and balance on the Executive Branch. It gives us the opportunity to make sure the deals we’re signing up for are good for all Americans.

President Obama wanted to cement his legacy of environmentalism through the Paris Agreement on climate change. Obama also knew the Senate would never ratify the agreement, so he deliberately labeled it as an “executive agreement” to avoid the ratification process and unilaterally pledged the support of the United States with the stroke of a pen.

So what did Obama sign us up for in exchange for maybe reducing global temperature by 0.2°C by 2100? Experts predict that by 2040, the agreement could cost us 6.5 million lost jobs—a number significantly larger than the entire population of Kentucky. It will cost us $3 trillion in lost GDP. For each household, the average annual lost income could be as high as $4,900.

These numbers are jaw dropping. Why can’t we work toward a future that protects both our environment and our jobs? Why did the past administration always force the latter to be a martyr for the former?

Thankfully, President Trump has the opportunity to reverse course on Obama’s mistake.

The U.S. government should be beholden to one authority and one authority alone – our Constitution – and not some UN bureaucrats.

President Trump has delivered on almost all of his promises to have an America First energy plan. He has directed the EPA to suspend, revise, and rescind certain actions related to the Clean Power Plan. He has removed regulatory roadblocks to American energy independence, including signing the resolution Congress sent him to repeal the Stream Buffer rule. He has also instructed agencies to review existing administrative policies harming domestic energy production.

But there’s one missing piece to being truly America First, something President Trump promised on the campaign trail. He promised he would cancel the Paris Agreement as president. Can we really have an America First energy plan if we are needing to seek the endorsement of the U.N. as we make determinations about our country’s environmental and energy policies? The federal government should be beholden to one authority and one authority alone—our Constitution—and not some U.N. bureaucrats.

I ran for Senate to protect Kentucky jobs and restore the Kentucky coal industry from regulatory overreach. I stood right behind President Trump as he signed the bill I cosponsored to repeal the Stream Buffer rule.

I previously introduced a resolution requiring the Paris Agreement to be considered a treaty needing the Senate’s advice and consent. I am keeping my word to Kentuckians.

That is why I introduced a resolution Monday, with a companion resolution cosponsored by Congressman Andy Barr, calling on President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an agreement which experts believe will not actually solve the environmental issues it was intended to address.

We founded our country on a system of checks and balances, and no president should have the unilateral authority to make such significant international commitments without input from Congress.

I look forward to President Trump following through on his promise to exit this agreement.

Republican Rand Paul represents Kentucky in the United States Senate.

EDITOR’s NOTE: The views expressed are those of the author, they are not representative of The Libertarian Republic or its sponsors. This Op/Ed was originally written for Fox News and is being used with expressed permission.

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The post Sen. Rand Paul: Say Au Revoir to Paris Climate Agreement appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Chris White 

Two advisers on the EPA’s science advisory board resigned Friday “in protest” after the Trump administration dismissed the group’s co-chairman.

“It is with certain regret and concern — and in protest — that we submit our resignations as members” on the Board of Scientific Counselors, scientists Peter Meyer and Carlos Martin wrote in a letter.

Their decision to leave the board comes shortly after EPA head Scott Pruitt jettisoned five academics from a scientific advisory board the Trump administration believes is a rubber stamp for many of the climate rules crafted during the Obama-era. He intends on replacing the deposed scientists with representatives from industries the EPA is responsible for regulating.

Martin explained his decision on Twitter, telling his followers that he “just resigned from EPA subcommittee to protest removal of [Robert Richardson] @ecotrope & Courtney Flint,” who headed the board. “Painful professional decision.”

EPA officials are convinced the departure of Courtney Flint and Robert Richardson was political, and not a matter of shaking up the board.

Flint, a professor of resource sociology at Utah State University, said earlier this month that the dismissal was “unexpected” and should be considered a “red flag” to others on the board.

One of Flint’s fellow board members made a more pointed criticism on Twitter after he was dismissed.

“Today, I was Trumped,” Robert Richardson, an environmental economist at Michigan State University, wrote on Twitter. “I have had the pleasure of serving on the EPA Board of Scientific Counselors, and my appointment was terminated today.”

The EPA maintains it wants to add diversity to the academic-heavy board. Pruitt is trying to refashion the EPA, transitioning the agency from one that fights man-made global warming to one that protects human health and the environment.

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