Commentary by James Shott

Those who lived in or near the southern West Virginia and/or southwest Virginia coalfields during the peak of the coal business in the 50s and 60s know that state and local economies thrived because of the tens of thousands of people employed by mining companies and the dozens of companies that supported the industry.

Bluefield, WV’s Norfolk and Western Railway yard was always filled with coal cars, many of them full of the world’s most widely used fossil fuel, that were bound for Norfolk, VA’s port, or ready to be unloaded into trucks for delivery. The rest were empty, heading back into the coalfields to be refilled and brought back for distribution.

They remember the bustling downtown that was the financial, shopping and recreational center of the region’s coalfields, and Bluefield’s population of well over 20,000 residents during the time of peak coal. These are valued memories of the good times.

Today’s population is half that size, and the rail yard is often empty. To those who have seen first-hand the decline of the industry and its effects on local communities, the industry’s decline is a very real and painful thing.

The decline began with natural technological advances, as mechanization gradually began putting hundreds of miners out of work. Over time other forces developed, affecting the industry, including the very recent rise of cheap natural gas. Through all of that, there was always a market for coal.

But the federal government’s assault on coal through excessive environmental regulation, spurred by the hotly debated idea that burning coal pours too much carbon dioxide – a gas essential for life on Earth – into the atmosphere, is the greatest problem. President Barack Obama put this attack into high gear. However, today our air is cleaner than it’s been for 100 years, mostly through evolving technological improvements.

Cloistered away in their comfortable offices in Washington, DC, our public servants frequently have no idea what life is like for those toiling away to pay the taxes that fund their salaries. Perhaps if they got out of Washington more, they would understand the problems they create for the people they serve.

This may be the case with Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who at the invitation of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally visited the state after many invitations over the eight painful years of the Obama administration. But while in the state last week, Moniz suggested there is no war on coal, arguing to the contrary that the Obama administration is working to keep coal as an important part of a low-carbon energy future. He also said that cheap natural gas prices are primarily responsible for coal’s downturn.

The absurd idea that there is no “War on Coal” today would be hilarious, if the reality wasn’t so tragic, and the suggestion that the very recent drop in natural gas prices is the principal reason for coal’s decline is simply false.

This general situation was foretold by Barack Obama back in the 2008 campaign: “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” Obama declared.

Assuming that Moniz has the capacity to recognize the misery the administration for which he works has caused for this region, or really cares about the people affected by its policies, visiting West Virginia much earlier in the administration’s tenure might have made some difference.

Hillary Clinton is on that same path. While campaigning in Ohio earlier this year, she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Trying to make that sound better, she said she favored funding to retrain those put out of work, but she didn’t say what kind of jobs and how many of them are currently waiting for trained workers.

Not long thereafter, while campaigning in West Virginia, she was asked about that comment by a tearful out-of-work coal miner, to which she responded that what she meant was that coal job losses will continue, according to the Daily Caller. See the difference?

Obama’s energy policy is like putting a square peg in a round hole. If you want to put a square peg in a round hole, take some time and think it through: You should gradually and gently reshape the square peg so it will comfortably and appropriately fit into the round hole. Obama’s method is to place the peg on top of the hole and beat it with a hammer until enough of the corners are destroyed so that the peg will go into the hole. And even then, it is a poor fit.

Just as horse-drawn wagons and carriages gave way to motorized vehicles when they came to be, coal’s role as a primary fuel would have changed as better methods evolved. Such a process would have been not only more humane and less destructive, but infinitely smarter than what has transpired.

Through the centuries humans solved life’s problems and improved their lives through applied intelligence. Somehow, they managed to do this without Barack Obama and the EPA.

Cross-posted from Observations

Politics, ideology often trump duty and honor among public servants

Commentary by James Shott

Here in America, the land of the free, it ought to take actual wrongdoing for government to act against individuals and organizations. And when those in positions of authority in government are properly serving the people they work for, that is the way it is.

Alas, that is not always so. It seems to be getting more frequent to see misfeasance by public servants who, rather than seeking out criminal or civil misbehavior, now use their offices that they are paid to operate honorably for purposes outside their scope of responsibility. Apparently the punishment for abdicating one’s sworn duty to honorably do his/her job are insufficient to discourage bad behavior. Or maybe it is because people rarely are held accountable and punished for their misfeasance.

Perhaps the best-known recent episode of such public dis-service was the targeting for harassment of conservative organizations that had filed for non-profit status with the IRS, a function under the control of one Lois Lerner.

During a Congressional hearing investigating the affair, Lerner refused to answer questions, hiding behind the 5^Th Amendment’s protection from self-incrimination, later resigning her federal position and, having avoided criminal charges, lives peacefully on her government pension.

While Lerner used her IRS position against political adversaries, public servant misbehavior also creeps into the area of harassing ideological adversaries. The environmental left’s position that burning fossil fuels significantly harms the environment is based upon evidence so weak and heavily disputed that a substantial number of Americans – perhaps a majority – reject the idea. Unable to convince people through the strength of scientific evidence, the liberals then resort to using the power of government to force people into line.

This time the target is ExxonMobil and a dozen independent groups that are in the crosshairs of a state prosecutor because they do not accept the idea that fossil fuels significantly damage the environment, and have had the unmitigated gall to express their opinion publicly.

Earlier this month ExxonMobil released a copy of an April 19 subpoena filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey demanding forty years of communications regarding climate change from the company and the organizations. Exxon has filed a motion for injunction in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, accusing Healey of waging a politically motivated fishing expedition aimed at silencing oppositional opinion on climate change.

Did Exxon engage in legally actionable fraud as Healy claims? “Fossil fuel companies that deceived investors and consumers about the dangers of climate change should be, must be held accountable,” she said, referring to what she called the “troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew, what industry folks knew and what the company and industry chose to share with investors and with the American public.”

Healy’s statement suggests that someone can be held criminally liable for knowing the left’s argument about climate change, and failing to discard their own opinion in favor of that argument. Merely knowing that the environmental faction thinks fossil fuel use is harming the environment makes you legally obligated to adopt it, even if you do not agree and, more importantly, even if there is no actual proof that assumption is correct.

Healy and the fellow travelers on the left seem to believe that their opinion becomes truth, merely because they believe it, even if it has never been proven true or valid, and if you disagree you can face legal action. Free speech and the First Amendment apparently no longer apply where climate change is concerned.

Of this poorly thought through legal fiasco, Alex Epstein, whose Center for Industrial Progress is one of the dozen organizations targeted by Healy along with Exxon, had this to say: “What ExxonMobil is being prosecuted for is expressing an opinion about the evidence that the government disagrees with … There is a fundamental distinction in civilized society between fraud and opinion.”

In his excellent book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Epstein advances the position that fossil fuel use has provided millions and millions of people wonderful advantages in terms of higher living standards, increased life expectancy, decreased infant and child mortality than they would have had without fossil fuels, and he references the manic climate change narrative that produced repeated predictions of doom that did not materialize.

A fundamental truth in the United States is that one may hold and espouse any opinion he or she chooses, without regard to whether that opinion is true or false; it is not a crime to disagree, even if the subject is climate change.

This effort to force acceptance of the weak theory of fossil fuels damaging the environment is an initiative of “AGs United for Clean Power.” This perhaps signals a coming expanded effort to silence disagreement. But it has aroused the attention of 13 attorneys general, who signed a letter to their counterparts across the country that said: “We think this effort by our colleagues to police the global warming debate through the power of the subpoena is a grave mistake.”

Whether that letter will help redirect AGs tempted to the dark side or not is unknown. But it is a step in the right direction.

Cross-posted from Observations

Clearing the air on fossil fuels: Here is the rest of the story

Commentary by James Shott

A few years ago Hal Willis, a scientist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, resigned from the American Physical Society after 67 years as a member, citing the global warming/climate change issue and the blind allegiance to global warming theory by so many of the Society’s members, as well as the organization’s failure to challenge these members in the name of true scientific investigation, and citing trillions of dollars of research funding as a major reason the practice of true science on climate change has been replaced by ideological advocacy.

Of the climate change issue Willis said, “It is the greatest pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a scientist.” His position has support from other scientists, among them Dr. Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel Prize-Winner for physics.

Giaever joined more than 70 Nobel Science Laureates in signing an open letter in October of 2008 expressing strong support for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, who had said “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Seven years later he believes Obama’s warning was a “ridiculous statement.” He told a Nobel forum last July, “I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem.”

Dr. Richard Lindzen is emeritus professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT. Citing the growing shrillness of the cries about “global warming” during his 30 years there, during which time he says “the climate has changed remarkably little,” he notes that the less the climate changes, the louder the warnings of climate catastrophe become.

In a recent video presentation by Prager University, he said that participants in the climate change debate fall into one of three groups.

Group One, he says, is associated with the scientific part of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group 1), and are scientists that generally believe recent climate change is due to burning fossil fuels, which releases CO2 (carbon dioxide) and might eventually dangerously harm the planet.

Group Two is made up of scientists who, like Lindzen, don’t see the problem identified by Group One as an especially serious one. They say there are many reasons why the climate changes – the sun, clouds, oceans, the orbital variations of the Earth, as well as a myriad of other inputs, none of which are fully understood.

Group Three is made up of politicians, environmentalists and the media. Climate alarmism provides politicians money and power and environmentalists also get money as well as confirmation of their religious zealotry for the environment, while the issue satisfies the media’s need for a cause to support, money and headlines. Said Lindzen, “Doomsday scenarios sell.”

From the climate alarmists’ point of view, virtually every problem on Earth stems from climate change, as Lindzen said, “everything from acne to the Syrian civil war.”

The Director of the Center for Industrial Progress, and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein, shows us in a Prager University video presentation that contains thorough sourcing for his assertions that burning fossil fuels has improved the lives of millions in the developed world by helping solve their biggest environmental challenges, purified their water and air, made their cities and homes more sanitary and kept them safe from potential catastrophic climate change.

Could we have built reservoirs, purification plants, and laid networks of pipes to bring clean water to homes without fossil fuels, he asks? Fossil fuels can do the same for those in the developing world, if the powers that be will allow it. More fossil fuel use equals more clean water, he said.

He further shows that despite an increase in fossil fuel use from 1.5 billion tons in 1970 to around 2.0 billion tons in 2010, emissions dropped from about 300 million tons to about 150 million tons during the same period. This resulted from using anti-pollution technology powered by … fossil fuels.

If CO2 emissions cause harmful changes in the environment, and if emissions have increased, then more people must be suffering “climate-related deaths,” due to things like droughts, floods, storms and extreme temperatures. But no, Epstein said. “In the last eighty years, as CO2 emissions have rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide has rapidly declined – by 98 percent.”

“In sum,” Epstein said, “fossil fuels don’t take a naturally safe environment and make it dangerous; they empower us to take a naturally dangerous environment and make it cleaner and safer.”

A large segment of the public has bought into the “we are killing our environment” idea put forth by the climate alarmists, and now meekly accept it when the United Nations and their own government advocate harmful solutions to climate change, ignoring the mounting pile of contrary data. Consequently, the economic damage done to regions of the U.S. and the thousands of American workers put on the unemployment line by the foolish policies of the Obama administration basically are accepted as necessary.

A strong case has been made that fossil fuels aren’t significantly harmful, and that they have been and will be extraordinarily helpful to the people of the world, if only we will listen.

Cross-posted from Observations

Commentary by James Shott

Frantic over the flood of evidence that shows that climate change is a natural phenomenon and is not made significantly worse by fossil fuel use, which runs contrary to the narrative that fossil fuel use is slowly killing the planet, officials in two states have begun using government power to punish those who dare to speak against the climate change demagoguery.

The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky writes, “California Attorney General Kamala Harris has joined New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in trying to prosecute ExxonMobil for supposedly lying to its shareholders and the public about climate change, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times reported that Harris is investigating what ExxonMobil ‘knew about global warming and what the company told investors.’”

Von Spakovsky’s article in The Daily Caller continues: “Neither Harris nor Schneiderman recognizes the outrageousness of what they are doing — which amounts to censoring or restricting speech and debate on what is a contentious scientific theory. In fact, they want not just to stop anyone who questions the global warming theory from being able to speak; they want to punish them with possible civil sanctions or even criminal penalties.” He goes on to suggest the two AGs badly need a refresher course on the First Amendment.

While trying to punish contrary opinions through government oppression is fairly new to the climate change debate, proponents of human-caused climate change have long been guilty of hiding inconvenient data, distorting and manipulating data, and ignoring a more recent and more accurate method of measuring the Earth’s temperature that does not produce “favorable” data.

For example, 37 years of satellite-based instrument measurements have provided the world's most accurate and unbiased temperature data. These measurements are free from coverage gaps and siting problems – such as artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts – that pollute measurements of land-based instruments. Satellite measurements show no warming of the climate for 18 recent years. Despite their own satellite data, NASA advances theories based upon land-based measurements, which support the human-caused warming theory.

Mike van Biezen addressed the satellite measurement result in an article published on The Daily Wire online discussing ten of the “many scientific problems posed by the assumption that human activity” is causing climate change. In his commentary, the adjunct professor of physics, mathematics, astronomy and Earth science at Loyola Marymount University and Compton College, acknowledges things he says we know to be correct, such as that the global average temperature has increased since the 1980’s; since the 1980’s glaciers around the world are receding and the ice cap of the Arctic Ocean has lost ice since the 1980’s, especially during the summer months; and that the average global temperature for the last 10 years is approximately 0.35 degrees centigrade higher than it was during the 1980’s.

But while acknowledging that those points from 25 years ago are true, and charging that the global warming community exploits those facts to prove that human activity has caused increased temperatures, he then asserts that “no direct scientific proof or data has been shown that link the current observations to human activity.  The link is assumed to be simply a fact, with no need to investigate or discuss any scientific data.”

Among the many things he says are falsely assumed to be linked to human activity:
** Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today’s temperatures are unusual
** Current temperatures are always compared to the temperatures of the 1980’s, but for many parts of the world the 1980’s was the coldest decade of the last 100+ years
** The world experienced a significant cooling trend between 1940 and 1980
** Urban heat island effect skews the temperature data of a significant number of weather stations
** The CO2 cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes
** There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution
** Glaciers have been melting for more than 150 years
** “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming

Biezen provides scientific arguments to refute those commonly advanced ideas, and explains why they fail to demonstrate a connection to climate change from human activity, threatening the comfort and success of human-caused climate change advocates.

The American left, whose ideas routinely fall to logical counter-arguments, frequently resort to force of one sort or another to combat their opponents. Desperation clearly has set in, as evidenced by the radical and tyrannical use of government force by the California and New York AGs to silence dissent. But they and others who think they can quiet the voices of dissent should remember that the United States thrives because it protects its citizens’ right to think for themselves and make their own decisions based on their own preferences.

Whatever you believe about human activities contributing to changes to Earth’s climate, honest people of all ideological persuasions must agree that if you have to deceive the public in order to gain support for your ideas, perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with those ideas.

Cross-posted from Observations

The Paris climate conference focused on fear, not climate reality

Commentary by James Shott

The Paris climate conference is now over. The Christian Science Monitor reported on Saturday that the rap of the chairman’s gavel “signaled unanimous – if not unanimously enthusiastic – support from all parties engaged in this year's UN climate talks. It comes at the end of a year scientists say will likely be the hottest ever on record.”

After all the time involved and the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced getting the hundreds of representatives from 196 nations all in the same place, and then back home again, the agreement does not put the world on a path toward what scientists regard as a safe level of global warming, but the agreement sets forth a clear path for countries to identify their own targets for CO2 reduction. Ultimately, participants want a global carbon-free environment by 2060, at the latest, meaning that every car, building, plane, ship, train, and power plant would have to operate without burning any fossil fuels.

Days prior to the closing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told the ministerial session, “The clock is ticking toward climate disaster,” and former Vice-President Al Gore compared the need to combat climate change to the abolition of slavery, giving women the right to vote and the civil rights battle. Gore said, “The right choice is to safeguard the future for the next generation and for the generations to come.”

There were scary stories of rising sea levels, causing residents of low-lying areas like the Marshall Islands to lobby strenuously for the agreement, while droughts, flooding, and other extreme weather events were predicted to increase elsewhere on the planet if CO2 emissions aren’t reigned in. And to make sure to attract the attention of enough third world countries, billions of dollars in support for affected economies is on the table, supposedly to be paid by the rich countries, like the United States.

The whole world is concerned because of the idea that too much CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophes sometime in the distant future. Carbon dioxide is what plants that produce oxygen for us to breath live on.

All of this scare mongering tended to overshadow the dismal record of climate predictions and data manipulations from the not-so-distant past that casts doubt on the need for turning the energy universe upside-down. Here are some of the scary predictions of global warming catastrophes that did not come true:

* By 1980 all of the important animal life in the sea will be extinct.
* By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.
* The world will be eleven degrees colder by the year 2000.
* By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by half.
* A general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.
* Within a few years children just aren't going to know what snow is.

Add to those failed prognostications a global warming hiatus for at least16 years, according to the British Met Office, and energetic disagreement about man-caused climate change among climate scientists, and the agreement looks like a gigantic global shakedown.

As an example, while Barack Obama is busy regulating America’s coal-fired electricity generating plants out of existence, China is constructing new plants. According to the Heritage Foundation’s Nicolas Loris, we should be wary of China’s commitment to reduce emissions. China is by far the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and is currently constructing 350 coal-fired power plants and has plans to build another 800.

The Wall Street Journal notes, “In 2013 China burned 3.9 billion tons of coal, almost as much as the rest of the world.” Obama seems to think that harming the U.S. economy by shutting down U.S. fossil fuel-burning facilities will negate China’s feverish coal-burning economy. Loris asks pointedly, “This is the country that we’re going to trust to peak emissions 15 years from now?” 

And trust is the operative word: all countries are on scouts honor to do what they have said they will do, without official oversight or penalties.

According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013 “Historical Data Workbook,” 87 percent of the energy mankind uses every second comes from burning fossil fuels.

People who live in cold climates use them to warm their homes, and people who live in warm climates use them to cool their homes. Fossil fuels are used to plant and harvest crops that feed people, and are used to transport food from places where food is produced to places where it is needed and wanted. They are used to light the darkness, to entertain us, transport us, diagnose disease, communicate with each other, mass-produce products we need and want, and to provide security in our homes and for the nation.

Fossil fuel use has improved the lives of millions of people worldwide, and millions more can benefit from it. There are no replacement technologies that even approach filling the void Obama and the other climate change advocates are creating. We are on course for a disaster.

Cross-posted from Observations

Here’s the other side of the argument: Appreciating fossil fuels

Commentary by James Shott

Predictions of horrible things happening if we continue burning fossil fuels are fairly common these days. Man is killing the Earth by continuing to use fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – to power electricity generation, make motor vehicles go, and now even to cook your dinner outside on the grill.

This compulsive thinking has driven the Environmental Protection Agency to dictate that the nation reduce the 2005 level of carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030, despite that doing so will cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars, all to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by one-tenth of a percent.

Almost no one argues that global warming isn’t a reality. However, the current period of global warming has taken a timeout for well more than a decade. Most people know that for thousands of years there have been alternating periods of warming and cooling on the Earth. The important question is, however, whether the low level of recent warming is significant, and more to the point, whether or not the actions of human beings contribute significantly to the slight warming period that is now on hold.

The carbon-mania gripping environmental scaremongers in the U.S. ignores the plain fact that compared to China and India, among others, the U.S. is by far a minor contributor of carbon emissions.

Two things have been forgotten – or perhaps conveniently covered up. One is the long list of predicted global catastrophes that have not come to pass. The other is how much better the lives of human beings are because we have learned how to use fossil fuels to make our lives better.

According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013 “Historical Data Workbook,” 87 percent of the energy mankind uses every second comes from burning one of those fossil fuels.

People who live in cold climates use fossil fuels to warm their homes, and people who live in warm climates use fossil fuels to cool their homes. Fossil fuels are used to plant and harvest crops that feed people, and are used to transport food from places where food is produced to places where it is needed and wanted. Fossil fuels are used to light the darkness, to entertain us, transport us, diagnose disease, communicate with each other, mass-produce products we need and want, and to provide security in our homes and for the nation.

And we also do not hear how much better the lives of the poorest people living in the direst conditions on Earth could be if we were helping them to use fossil fuels to their benefit the way the developed world does.

Technology enables us to modify the way we use fossil fuels to control our climate to our advantage, and to progressively improve the way we use fossil fuels to do less harm. Because of technological advances our air today is much cleaner than it was a hundred years ago. Technology not only provides many wonderful assets for us, but also improves itself, so that these crucial technologies now cause little harm to the environment.

Imagine where the world would be today if we had never learned to use fossil fuels and to develop those technologies for our benefit. Imagine what would happen if suddenly all of the facilities that burn fossil fuels for electricity production and for other purposes just simply stopped doing so for several weeks.

And perhaps that is what is needed to get the American people to open up to the truth that using fossil fuels not only is good for us, but also is not harmful to the environment to a significant degree.

A major fallacy in the war against fossil fuels is the belief that they are harmful because they are dirty, and “natural” sources of energy like wind and solar power are not harmful because they are not dirty. But both wind power and solar power also have their negative side, in addition to not being capable of replacing fossil fuels any time in the foreseeable future.

The rare Earth elements needed for wind turbines, for example, can be acquired only through an enormous and complex mining process to find and excavate them. And that mining process requires machinery driven by fossil fuels.

Establishing a wind farm on a mountaintop requires a great deal of clearing of wooded lands and the building of roads for access and towers for transmission lines. Enormous solar farms both substantially warm the acres of land beneath them and attract and kill birds.

Many leading environmentalists, including those who predict fossil fuel catastrophe, hold as their most important value what they call “pristine” nature or wilderness nature unaltered by man. They see humans as a plague upon the Earth.

Alex Epstein, author of the excellent book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, holds human life as his most important value. When you accept that human life is the most important consideration, then small infringements on nature and the environment that yield great advances and benefits for humans are perfectly acceptable.

That is the sensible way to look at it. That is the human way to look at it.

Cross-posted from Observations

Potpourri: Environmentalism, Obamacare and high school seniors

United Nations environmental figure reveals new goal

Its enemies dislike capitalism in great part because it is based, generally, upon people doing what they want when they want to, and the United States, even with this current infection of liberalism/progressivism, stands as a grand tribute to the blessings of capitalism. For some 150 years the United States’ capitalist economy has achieved what other nations and economic models dreamed of and promised, but never came close to.

Monarchs, dictators and other leaders dislike capitalist liberties, preferring to limit the freedom of their subjects. They are much easier to control that way. But that control produces harmful limitations.

Environmentalism is a great enemy of capitalism, not because of its ultimate goal so much as its irrational methodology, which has done so much damage to our nation.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made an interesting admission, at a news conference last week in Brussels. She said that the goal of her convention is not to save the world from ecological calamity. That goal is instead to destroy capitalism.

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said, as reported by Investors Business Daily.

Bloomberg News, reporting on comments made by Ms. Figueres in an interview, wrote that China, in contrast to the U.S., is able to implement policies “because its political system avoids some of the legislative hurdles” other countries have. Or in other words, “Damn those freedom-loving capitalists!”

Environmentalists hope that a new international treaty will be approved at the climate change conference in Paris later this year. Environmental goals will be much easier to achieve if all nations sign on to the U.N. plan and agree to beat their citizen-subjects into submission, no matter how much unnecessary pain and suffering that entails.

It should be clear why the United Nations wants to kill capitalism, since that is the source of America’s ability to resist that power-hungry organization’s efforts to become a world government.

The U.S. needs to abandon the United Nations.

Obamacare co-ops going broke

Writing for The Daily Signal online, Melissa Quinn reported that after receiving $2.5 billion from the federal government, most of the 23 nonprofit insurance companies created under the Affordable Care Act are going broke. If they have to shut their doors, taxpayers will be responsible for an average of roughly $108 million for each of them.

The Daily Signal reported that leading insurance rating firm A.M. Best found that all but one of the co-ops experienced operating losses through September 2014. “A.M. Best is concerned about the financial viability of several of these plans,” the report states. The exception is Maine Community Health Options, which received $132.3 million from the government.

State requires students to pass citizenship test to graduate

Here’s an idea that deserves to be copied by the other 49 states and the District of Columbia. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a law into effect last week that requires high school students to pass the same test immigrants must pass to become citizens in order to graduate, the first such law.

“Why is such a requirement thought to be necessary?” you may ask. Is there a rationale for why existing Americans should know less about their country than immigrants wanting to become Americans?

Consider that a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2011 found that “just 15 percent of Americans could correctly identify the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, while 27 percent knew Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol.” Only 13 percent knew the U.S. Constitution was signed in 1787. And just 38 percent were able to name all three branches of government.”

To pass, students would have to correctly answer just 60 of 100 questions. Here are some examples:

·      How many amendments does the U.S. Constitution have?

·      If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?

·      Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?

                  To provide schooling and education

                  To issue driver's licenses

                  To make treaties

                  To build roads

·      Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of the states?

·      Who was president during World War I?

The sponsoring organization, Civics Education Initiative, hopes all 50 states will be mandating the test by the 230th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 2017.

Now the government wants to control the Internet

The Internet is one of the most successful modern creations, but whenever something is successful, the control freaks in Washington get all excited.

Under a scheme referred to as “Net Neutrality,” the Internet will be declared a “public utility” and the FCC then gets to decide what Internet service providers can charge and how they operate. Less freedom; higher costs: What’s to like about this? Let your Congressional Representative and Senators know you oppose Net Neutrality before the vote scheduled for February 26.