June Green Watch notes

The Obama administration announced, “On America’s path toward a clean energy future, solar power is an increasing- ly important building block. That’s why we installed solar panels on the roof of the White House; it’s a clear sign of our commitment to energy efficiency.” The administration claims that the solar array will provide 6.3 kilowatts of power when the sun is shining. On an average day, that works out to less than one-and-a-half percent of estimated White House electricity usage. That’s less than the percentage by which U.S. residential electricity usage typically increases in a year.

Being an environmentalist means never having to say you’re sorry. Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future liberal Democratic U.S. Senator from New York, warned the Nixon administration in 1969 that Global Warming would put Washington, D.C., and New York City under water by the year 2000. Stanford Prof. Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1970 that pesticides “may have already shortened by as much as a decade the life expectancy of every American born since 1946.” Prof. Peter Gunter of North Texas State University declared, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India . . . By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” Al Gore predicted that the North Pole ice cap would be gone by 2013.

 
Now comes the latest report from the Obama administration on Global Warming, which the report euphemistically refers to as “climate change” because no one disputes that the climate changes. (For example, there is universal agreement that New York City is no longer under a glacier.) Michio Kaku of the City College of New York, the science-explainer on “CBS News This Morning,” emphasized the report’s account of a recent increase in catastrophic weather—an increase that Warmers predicted, but which never actually occurred. Said Kaku: “This report is dramatically different from all previous reports on climate change. Previous reports talk about climate change as being in the future, maybe decades in the future. This report says, ‘uh-uh,’ it’s here and now. It has arrived. It’s a fact of life, costing perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage. People talk about 100-year storms, 100-year hurricanes, 100-year floods, heat waves and forest fires. . . . [P]eople’s homes are in danger.”

 
Who is Professor Kaku, the source of science information for CBS News? He’s been a board member of WBAI, which is the radical Pacifica radio station in New York City, and a board member of Peace Action (formerly SANE/Freeze), the leftist organization that opposed President Reagan’s efforts to defeat the Soviet Union. At the 1999 funeral of WBAI’s program director, where the deceased was praised as a “revolutionary” and a “comrade,” Kaku led the crowd in a chant of “The people, united, can never be defeated.”

 
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century,” is getting some help in his efforts to dismember Ukraine and dominate Europe. About a quarter of the natural gas that warms the people of Europe comes from Russia, most of that gas running through Ukraine. Given the natural gas boom in the U.S., the result of the fracking revolution, American gas could help make it possible for Euro- peans to resist Putinist aggression. But environmentalist leader Bill McKibben, founder of the environmentalist group 350.org, has attacked the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export terminal in Cove Point, Maryland, and at least 20 other LNG facilities. He writes in Politico that, “like the Keystone XL pipeline for tar sands oil and the proposed export of dirty-burning coal through new terminals in the Pacific Northwest, this liquefied gas plan is bad in almost every way.”
Meanwhile, McKibben’s group leads the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry Canadian oil to refineries in the U.S. Who benefits from this opposition? Scott McKibben of the Canadian Free Press wrote: “If
the U.S. does not take full advantage of the Canadian oil sands resource, China certainly will to a greater and greater extent. In February 2013, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, CNOOC, closed the $15 billion acquisition of Canada’s Nexen Oil Company—a company with a significant stake in the Alberta oil sands. Most environmentalists think globally and must realize that delaying Keystone only gives China more clout in securing a larger portion of the oil sands. And then who wins? Certainly not Mother Earth, given China’s horrid environmental record.”

 
Wyoming has become the first state to reject K-12 “Next Generation Science Standards” that would require teach- ers to promote Global Warming beliefs in the classroom. Ron Micheli, president of the state board of education, said the board will review whether “we can’t get some standards that are Wyoming standards . . . we can all be proud of.” Twelve states have adopted the NGSS.