Examples of concrete actions taken by Obama's administration to reduce coal in electricity production? EPA's Clean Power Plan issued in the summer of 2014 and currently facing lawsuits from some states. Will likely be neutered by Trump. EPA's 2011 MATS order to limit mercury pollution from coal-fired plants. Subject to plenty of litigation and went to the USSC earlier this year, 5 years after issuance. EPA also in 2011 issued the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that required many states to reduce NOX and SO2 for plants. It was vacated in 2012 by the DC Circuit and reinstated by the USSC in 2014, finally started implementation in 2015. I think you've built a strawman of Obama and then calling hypocrisy when he doesn't conform to your strawman. You say Obama thinks coal is the work of the devil and then criticize for not following through with eliminating it. It seems to me our environmental policy has been rationally focused on reducing or eliminating pollutants and greenhouse gases and doesn't attempt to dictate the winners and losers among the technologies that will get us there. It tries to recognize the costs of pollution in the prices of the fuels. But, if some whiz kid figures out how to make clean coal that is both environmentally and economically feasible, the environmental policy has created an atmosphere in which it can prosper. Forcing people to stop digging up coal or not allowing it to be burned under any circumstance would make that impossible. Obama's policy isn't inherently anti-coal; it is effectively anti-coal because coal sucks on the merits.
One theory of achieving fusion with water for example is harvesting He-3 isotope from the moon. The moon is thought to have an abundance of He-3 isotope whereas it's scarce here on earth. If there was a way to harvest He-3 from the moon in abundance it would be potentially feasible to achieve fusion with good old salt water. For a slight change of topic I found this post on CNN and thought it was refreshing to see bright young minds elsewhere in the world help better their continent by sending a satellite up in space to collect data on better ways to farm crops and more efficiently respond to natural disasters in lieu of global warming changes affecting Africa. It's also more evidence that skin pigmentation or sex has nothing to do with intelligence despite narratives from people like Dei stating otherwise. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/15/tech/girls-design-africa-space-satellite/
I am asking for examples of when Obama sought to directly reduce coal production from federal land. I am aware of both his "clean coal" rhetoric and "clean coal" policy - which may help reduce actual, real pollution. Fact is, clean coal still emits more pollution and more CO2 than natural gas. Reducing coal production from federal land in favor of natural gas production from private land transfers power from the federal government to private organizations. There is an epic disparity between Obama's rhetoric and his policy toward climate change. To be honest, I only know of one instance in his entire 8 years in office in which he sought to directly reduce coal production from federal land, and that did not occur until this year.
I'm not sure why you're so fixated on this moratorium on new leases. Some environmentalists see stopping mining operations as the key; I can't really speak to what Obama thinks on it. But, the moratorium was a pretty minor move in the climate change fight. It was a setup for something that might have been bigger -- charging more for mine leases to pay for the full non-monetary cost of coal. It strikes me as a not very good way to fight climate change because it doesn't leverage markets to develop the right price for the environmental cost of coal. For some reason, you want to say he's not really trying unless he does it this way. That doesn't make any sense to me. He has thrown his executive power around a little bit, like with Keystone XL, but for the most part he has avoided the simple directive and instead tried to build incentive frameworks that will get markets to do the work. Probably, he was hoping Clinton's policy on federal coal mining rights would fit this mold -- setting lease prices at a level that would lead the markets to not favor coal.
What's the point of that, asking about the federal land? Natural gas is less polluting is than coal. Coal is expensive when you make it clean.
Climate change in USA is the last issue that need to be worried. There are so many other problems to be solved first, but none has a ability to do everything within a few years.
Judy Curry on the persecution of a climate heretic at the University of Washington. Her summary: "JC reflections "The climate change advocacy disease seems to have affected many of the UW faculty and graduate students. Apart from the issue of activism potentially getting in the way of scientific objectivity, the big issue here is that the Chair attempted to ‘institutionalize’ this activism with the I-1631 support letter. I have to say I find this very inappropriate behavior for a Chair, and I’m surprised that the higher administration didn’t reprimand him for this (in the old days I would have been reprimanded for this at Georgia Tech, but under the current administration, who knows). Faculty members were pressured into signing that letter, since the Chair controls their reappointments and promotions, salary, teaching assignments, etc. The public ‘shaming’ meeting is beyond the pale, particularly the Chair’s behavior during this meeting. After this behavior, I cannot imagine how the UW faculty and administration can have any confidence in the leadership of their current Chair. "And finally, a closing comment about Cliff Mass. While this can’t be fun for him, I’m not too worried about Cliff Mass: Cliff has friends in high places and an enormous ‘bully pulpit’ in terms of his blog and radio show. Trying to take him down isn’t going to work. "I have much more to say on this situation and the broader implications, I will write more in a follow on post." https://judithcurry.com/2018/12/12/cliff-mass-victim-of-academic-political-bullying/
this may be of interest to folks who've followed or participated in this thread over the past several years. Curry has another post on attribution issues in climate science, "Early 20th century global warming": https://judithcurry.com/2019/01/23/early-20th-century-global-warming/ The question she asks: "A careful look at the early 20th century global warming, which is almost as large as the warming since 1950. Until we can explain the early 20th century warming, I have little confidence IPCC and NCA4 attribution statements regarding the cause of the recent warming. "This is an issue that has long interested me. Peter Webster wrote a previous post Mid 20th Century Global(?) Warming, which focused on the warm bump that culminated in the 1940’s. My interest in this period was reignited while working on my report Sea Level and Climate Change. Then, the recent paper by Zanna et al. discussed in Ocean Heat Content Surprises further made the wheels turn." and then after her analysis and discussion, her conclusions: "In order to have any confidence in the IPCC and NCA attribution statements, much greater effort is needed to understand the role multi-decadal to millennial scales of internal climate variability. "Much more effort is needed to understand not only the early 20th century warming, but also the ‘grand hiatus’ from 1945-1975. Attempting to attribute these features to aerosol (stratospheric or pollution) forcing haven’t gotten us very far. The approach taken by Xie’s group is providing important insights. "Once we do satisfactorily explain these 20th century features, then we need to tackle the 19th century — overall warming, with global sea level rise initiating ~1860, and NH glacier melt initiating ~1850. And then we need to tackle the last 800 years – the Little Ice Age and the ‘recovery’. (See my previous post 400 years(?) of global warming). The mainstream attribution folk are finally waking up to the importance of multidecadal ocean oscillations — we have barely scratched the surface re understanding century to millennial scale oscillations, as highlighted in the recent Gebbie and Huybers paper discussed on Ocean Heat Content Surprises. "There are too many climate scientists that expect global surface temperature, sea ice, glacier mass loss and sea level to follow the ‘forcing’ on fairly short time scales. This is not how the climate system works, as was eloquently shown by Gebbie and Huybers. The Arctic in particular responds very strongly to multidecadal and longer internal variability, and also to solar forcing. "Until all this is sorted out, we do not have a strong basis for attributing anything close to ~100% of the warming since 1950 to humans, or for making credible projections of 21st century climate change" (emphasis added).
I used to be a climate skeptic as well (I have a degree in physics by the way), as correlation isn't causation in my book. What convinced me was the fact that climate models predicted if the warming was indeed man made Co2, then there should be heating in a specific layer of the atmosphere and actual cooling in some other layers - and that it would be nighttime temperatures that would increase over daytime. All of those things would rule out things such as solar forcing, aerosols, and variations due to earth's rotations and glacial cycles. The data bore out that all of the predictions of climate models were 100% true and ruled out these other causes. So I'm always puzzled when scientists like Curry - who is indeed well educated and a true scientist talk about solar forcing as a possible cause, when it flies in the face of simple observed facts that don't fit with that explanation. In science, the ability of a theory to predict a result that eliminates other explanations is the gold standard for proof. Climate science has met that standard. Why is Curry not addressing these facts?
Makes about as much sense as the defeat at the Alamo in 1836 proves that a US-Mexico border wall will keep out undocumented immigrants. At least they are consistent.
Cojete Mojo has been here for almost a decade and he still doesn't comprehend the basic difference between weather and climate. Or he's just a shill playing a part.
