The Patriots

by Ross Hawkins

{A 2014 article with a disturbing message, truth is subservient to an ideological agenda - ED}

The Green Party of England and Wales has called for a purge of government advisers and ministers who do not share its views on climate change. Published 14 February of 2014.

Any senior adviser refusing to accept “the scientific consensus on climate change” should be sacked, it said.

Party leader Natalie Bennett said the rule must apply to all senior advisers, including those with no responsibility for environmental issues.

David Cameron says he suspects recent storms are linked to climate change.

Speaking recently, the prime minister said that while a single weather pattern could not be attributed to climate change, many scientists were talking of a link between the two and the UK should be prepared for more extreme weather.

But some Tory MPs and peers, Lord Lawson being the most prominent, have cast doubt on scientific theories on climate change which argue human activity is predominately responsible for recent rises in global temperatures. 

‘Emergency’

The Greens are now insisting the government gets rid of any cabinet minister who takes a different view on climate change.

Ms Bennett said: "We need the whole government behind this. This is an emergency situation we're facing now. We need to take action. We need everyone signed up behind that."  Pressed on the issue, she agreed that even the chief veterinary officer should be removed if he didn't sign up to the view on climate change also taken by the Green Party.

A policy document released by the party said: "Get rid of any cabinet ministers or senior governmental advisers who refuse to accept the scientific consensus on climate change or who won't take the risks to the UK seriously."

Ms Bennett added: "It's an insult to flood victims that we have an Environment Secretary (Owen Paterson) who is a denier of the reality of climate change and we also can't have anyone in the cabinet who is denying the realities that we're facing with climate change."

She said her party took the consensus view shared by many other organisations including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In September, the UN-backed body said it was 95% certain that humans were the "dominant cause" of global warming since the 1950s.

The party also wants to see staff cuts at the Environment Agency reversed, a bigger budget for the Agency and tougher rules to prevent development on flood plains.

It says money spent supporting fossil fuels should be redirected to help victims of flooding.

by H. Sterling Burnett

The world is facing a stark choice. Should governments restrict energy use by dramatically raising the price of fossil fuels to fight purported human-caused climate change? Or should they permit the continued use of comparatively cheap, entirely reliable fossil fuels by rejecting carbon cap-and-trade schemes, carbon taxes, and mandates restricting the use of fossil fuels?

Put simply: People need to ask themselves whether they want to pay more for the energy they already get.

Advance reports of a new U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study indicate those who believe humans are causing allegedly dangerous climate change are in for some bad news, as The Hill recently reported: “[g]overnments across the globe are ‘nowhere near on track’ to meet their goal of preventing global warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial period.”

According to the IPCC report, only a massive, worldwide transformation of electric power, transportation, and agricultural systems can prevent the global temperature from rising the 2 degrees Celsius or less nations committed to as part of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Commenting on the report, Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s environment minister, said,“We are moving way too slowly. We have to do more of everything, faster. To reach the goals of the Paris agreement we need large structural changes.”

The Rhodium Group estimates to reach “80 percent (or more appropriately, 100 percent) reductions, carbon prices would likely need to exceed $100/ton by mid-century.”

Politicians, faced with the punishment of losing support from voters unwilling to pay more for less-reliable energy, are proving increasingly unwilling to impose the high price on carbon they themselves state is necessary to avert climate catastrophe. As evidence, leaders in Australia, Brazil, and Canada are publicly eschewing their commitments to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, although they remain unwilling to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement as the United States has done.

Elsewhere, in China, Europe, and Japan, for instance, leaders publicly proclaim their fealty to the Paris agreement while missing mid-term emissions-reduction goals, quietly approving new coal and natural gas power plants, and selling more fossil-fuel-powered vehicles.

I have good news. Since the best evidence suggests humans aren’t causing a climate apocalypse, Paris’s failure is nothing to be concerned about. In fact, its failure means it’s more likely there will be abundant energy for all.

by James Taylor

RINOs who apparently weren't much to begin with.

Unfortunately, a handful of congressional Republicans foolishly joined with Democrats to form a group known as the Climate Solutions Caucus. The Caucus claims to support “economically viable” options to restrict carbon-dioxide emissions.

Apparently, the Republicans in the Caucus believe they can walk a tightrope by calling for both severe restrictions on carbon-dioxide emissions and “affordable” energy options — even though these two competing goals are incompatible. Any means of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions would be economically punitive. Rather than trying to appeal to both sides of the political fence, Republicans who join the Caucus are shooting themselves in the foot with liberals and conservatives alike.

Liberal Republican congressman Carlos Curbelo (FL) co-founded the Caucus at the urging of the leftist Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL). The CCL advocates for carbon-dioxide taxes that would immediately raise the cost of all traditional energy sources. Within a decade, the CCL taxes would add more than a dollar per gallon to the price of gasoline, with similar and higher price hikes imposed on other forms of energy. CCL trumpets a social-justice-warrior agenda and routinely advocates for left-wing policies. Why in the world would Republicans sign on to these radical ideas by joining forces with CCL?

Caucus members should know economically viable carbon-dioxide restrictions are a fallacy. Conventional energy sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas dominate because they are substantially more concentrated, affordable, and reliable than wind and solar power. Whether accomplished through government mandates or taxes, transforming our economy from one running on affordable energy sources to one that’s dependent on expensive and unreliable energy would severely punish all consumers and industries.

Some global warming activists attempt to argue a carbon-dioxide tax could be revenue-neutral and thus economy-friendly. However, there’s no credibility to this claim. The whole point of a carbon-dioxide tax is to drive up conventional energy prices so high that consumers won’t purchase them anymore and will instead buy already-expensive wind and solar power. When this occurs, consumers pay higher prices directly to energy providers rather than in government taxes — thus, there is little or no direct government tax revenue collected or returned to consumers to compensate for their higher energy bills. Even worse, energy bills skyrocket and disposable income falls. Even if a carbon dioxide tax were crafted to be “revenue-neutral,” it could never be crafted to be “pocketbook-neutral” or “household budget-neutral.”

So, if these policies are surely doomed to fail, what is motivating Republicans to join the Caucus? For most members, the answer appears to be virtue-signaling and political calculation. Some Republicans believe that expressing concern about global warming will soften their appeal to liberal and moderate voters.

However, polls consistently show voters rank global warming among their least-important concerns. Thus, virtue-signaling on global warming will win over very few, if any, liberal or moderate voters. On the other hand, Republicans joining the Caucus will ostracize their conservative base, encouraging them to stay at home or vote for a third party. These naive GOP members also face a greater risk of drawing a strong challenge from the right in their next Republican primary.

Fortunately, very few Republicans side with Al Gore and the United Nations. The vast majority of GOP congressmen do not believe in a global warming crisis and continue to reject the drumbeat of government intervention promoted by environmental zealots.

The few Republicans on the Caucus represent the liberal fringe of the party. In fact, these Republicans have voted for liberal positions more than conservative positions, according to the Heritage Action “Congressional Scorecard.” By contrast, 84 percent of Republicans who are not part of the Caucus have voted in favor of the conservative position more often than the liberal position. Thus, a good way to determine whether your Republican congressional representative is a RINO — a “Republican in name only” — is to check if he or she is a member of the Caucus.

Republicans should think long and hard before joining the Climate Solutions Caucus. Simply put, the Climate Solutions Caucus is a lose-lose-lose proposition.

Energy, environment, and climate reporting at the usually solid Washington Examiner are increasingly taking on the left’s language and agenda. Why are the Examiner’s two lead energy and climate reporters advancing leftist politics rather than straight reporting, and why is the paper allowing this to happen?

In June 2017, the Examiner hired Josh Siegel to join John Siciliano covering energy, environment, and climate news. Siciliano had a solid track record of just-the-facts reporting and had worked as a reporter for The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation.

Two months after bringing Siegel on board, the Examiner launched Siegel and Siciliano’s “Daily on Energy” report, with each day’s edition containing several short write-ups of energy, environment, and climate issues. Lengthier versions of many of the short write-ups later appeared in the Examiner as stand-alone articles.

Shifting Toward Politicized Language

Since launching the report, Siegel and Siciliano have taken a significant turn toward the political left. Its substance, tone, word choice, and quoted sources consistently advance leftist messaging on energy, environment, and climate issues.

For example, in news articles regarding the Trump administration’s proposal to enhance energy grid reliability by crediting coal and nuclear power for being on-demand power sources with on-site fuel storage, Siegel and Siciliano consistently refer to the proposal as “the coal bailout.” While anti-coal activists can make a shaky argument that assigning monetary value to electric grid security is a “bailout” for the energy sources that provide that security, the argument is exactly that–a political argument.

Siegel and Siciliano refer to the proposal matter-of-factly as “the coal bailout,” as if such a label was factual and beyond dispute rather than a loaded political argument. Just as strikingly, Siegel and Siciliano never use the term “bailout” to describe wind and solar power or the many government programs, subsidies, and policies that benefit them, even though wind and solar power receive more subsidies than all conventional energy sources combined.

When reporting on Sen. Marco Rubio noting that sea level rise will continue, regardless of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, Siegel and Siciliano cite the aggressively leftist Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in an attempt to rebut Rubio. Worse yet, they present the UCS as an objective arbiter of scientific disputes. The journalists claim, in their October 15 report, “What the science says about sea level rise: The Union of Concerned Scientists last week published a report…” (emphasis in the original).

Using Leftist Language To Talk About Climate Science

Siegel and Siciliano also use the left’s biased and loaded language when discussing global warming. In their October 10 report, they write that President Trump “has denied climate science.” Trump has never said there is no such thing as climate science, which would be the factual definition of “denying climate science.” Trump acknowledges climate science exists; he merely sides with the many thousands of scientists who are skeptical about predictions of an imminent crisis.

Moreover, the term “denier” was inserted into the global warming debate by environmental leftists who want a more loaded term than “skeptics” to vilify people who are skeptical of alarming global warming predictions. The term was reportedly chosen in an effort to equate skeptics of an imminent global warming crisis with contemptibly racist Holocaust deniers, which is historically the most common use of the term “denier” in the political context.

Siegel and Siciliano are likely familiar with the history of the term and the strong objection skeptics take to being unfairly besmirched by it. Yet they still used it to describe Trump.

On October 18, the two journalists released another biased and inaccurate criticism of Trump on climate issues. They wrote, “Trump on Tuesday continued to falsely assert that the science is unsettled on climate change and its causes…” Yet the causes of climate change are very unsettled.

For example, a 2016 survey of more than 4,000 American Meteorological Society meteorologists reveals 33 percent believe humans are not responsible for most or all of the earth’s recent warming. Even among the 67 percent, many undoubtedly believe a warming earth will not create the climate catastrophe the the environmental left predicts.

Moreover, every new publication by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contains different predictions than the previous publication, and each report explicitly states there is a degree of uncertainty in its predictions. In fact, IPCC predictions of future climate change have dropped significantly over the years, from a prediction in its initial report, in 1990, of 0.3 degrees Celsius warming per decade, to its current prediction of 0.2 degrees per decade.

Real world observations also show temperatures are rising closer to 0.15 degrees per decade, which defies the predictions in all of the IPCC reports. Yet Siegel and Siciano state that it is false to claim there is scientific uncertainty regarding global warming.

In their same October 18 report, Siegel and Siciliano launched a cheap personal attack on Trump, using a false global warming narrative as a hook. They write that, during a recent media interview, Trump “claimed he has a ‘natural instinct for science’ because his uncle worked as a professor at MIT.”

While Trump claimed a natural instinct for science, and noted earlier in the conversation that his uncle was a professor at MIT, Trump did not say he has a natural instinct because his uncle was a professor at MIT. Siegel and Siciliano’s inaccurate description, while subtle, tells a false narrative that clearly conveys ridicule for a person who he believes his uncle’s work at MIT automatically makes him an expert.

But that is not what Trump said at all. It is difficult to believe such an error, and one that appears designed to ridicule Trump, appeared accidentally.

Why So Biased?

Many more examples exist. Why have Siegel and Siciliano deviated from objective reporting and taken on the left’s language and agenda? People would be forgiven for expecting that from the New York Times or the Huffington Post, but the Washington Examiner? The paper, like the Wall Street Journal, has a conservative editorial board and has historically aimed its news reporting at the middle. But this kind of reporting is not the middle. It better reflects the typical media bias towards the left that the Examiner has built a reputation contrasting with fairer reporting.

Is there a hidden follow-the-money story here? Is there an editor pushing these reporters in a leftist direction? Is this an example of two reporters succumbing to the leftist ideology that is so pervasive inside the Beltway? Or is this just an example of the Washington, D.C. political swamp rearing its ugly head? I don’t know, but it is tragic and sad that the political left has subverted the energy, environment, and climate reporting of a respected newspaper.

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James Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy and vice president for external relations at The Heartland Institute.