Is There Any News In The New York Times That Is Not Fake?

I'm old enough to remember when the New York Times used to have long articles filled with facts and figures, data and statistics on one issue or another.  Well, that was then -- before they had to lay off half the staff.  Now they produce articles just as long, but the formula has changed.  Instead of doing difficult leg work and collecting the real facts and figures, the new formula is to utter some obviously false statement as if it were a fact, and then fill in the rest of some multi-thousand-word article with standard-issue progressive talking points all dependent on acceptance of the false fact as the starting point. 

Friday's example of the phenomenon was an endless "climate change" article which blamed the West African refugee exodus on global warming, backed up with ridiculous and obviously false statements about the African Sahel region, like "droughts [have become] more frequent and more fierce," and it has become "impossible to grow enough food" -- when everybody who follows the actual data knows that the Sahel region has become both wetter and more agriculturally productive in recent years.  

Today's Times contains multiple more examples of the same phenomenon.

Yes, there is another one of these endless "climate change" articles, again occupying the lion's share of page A1 plus a page and a half (A14 and A15) in the interior.  This time, they're trying to convince us that polar bears are "climate refugees" because they turn up at remote Alaskan towns to look for food at the local garbage dump.  What is the evidence that polar bears are "climate refugees"?  Please, don't expect any facts and figures on what is happening with temperatures or ice coverage in the Arctic; that would tax the poor reader's intelligence way too much.  Instead, we'll just make one of those broad statements of "fact" without citing any actual source or data:

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and the ice cover is retreating at a pace that even the climate scientists who predicted the decline find startling.

Can we actually confirm those statements from any independent source?  Over at Not A Lot of People Know That, Paul Homewood is ready with an actual collection of facts and figures to counter the "hottest Arctic ever" hype that seems to be coming out all over the place.  Here, for example, is a chart of Arctic temperature anomalies from 1979 to present per UAH:  

Looking at that chart, you might be forgiven for observing that Arctic temperatures had been dropping rather steadily since 2010, and then there was a spike just this past year associated with the 2015-16 El Nino.  (And if you follow the subject, you will know that the 2009-10 spike was also associated with a major El Nino, while the 2015-16 El Nino-related spike has been rapidly dissipating all over the world in recent months.)  So how exactly do we know that the 2015-16 spike has anything to do with human carbon emissions, or that it is anything more than a one-year El Nino-related anomaly?  Somehow, in around 4000 words, the Times does not have enough space to address that question. 

And how about the Times's statement that Arctic ice cover "has been retreating at a [startling] pace"?  Here is a chart of Arctic ice cover for the past several years from the Danish Meteorological Institute:

Sure looks like 2016 ice cover is right in the same range now (December) as in 2012 - 2015 -- and the September minimum was a lot lower in 2012.  But why should we let a few facts get in the way of a good narrative?

At Watts Up With That, Eric Worrall points out that the locals in the northern Alaska villages are dependent on tourists who come to see the polar bears.  Could there be an alternative explanation to the "climate refugee" narrative for the prevalence of the bears in the villages?:

Regarding the large numbers of bears around Kaktovik, does anyone think it possible locals whose income depends on “hundreds of tourists” visiting to see the bears might be deliberately leaving some food out?

Meanwhile, over at the editorial page, the lead editorial is given over to attacking HUD Secretary-designate Ben Carson for his allegedly "warped view of housing."  What is wrong with Carson's view?  He is skeptical of the idea that subsidized HUD housing actually helps the beneficiaries, as opposed to trapping them in poverty and dependency for life.  And in particular, Carson has expressed skepticism that HUD's latest "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing" scheme -- placing subsidized housing in wealthier communities and suburbs -- will accomplish anything meaningful for the intended beneficiaries.  After all, says Pravda:

Research shows that integrating poorer families into healthier, mixed-income neighborhoods has improved prospects for them and their children.

That's right, "research shows" that integrating poor families into wealthier neighborhoods improves their prospects.  Here's the "research" I recommend to the reporters and editors at Pravda.  Get outside of your damn offices, open your eyes, and walk around your home island of Manhattan.  It is the wealthiest large county in the country, and not by a little.  And it is home to proportionally more HUD-subsidized housing than anywhere, housing around 8% of the population of the island.  Many of those HUD-subsidized "projects" are in or immediately adjacent to some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, including Park Avenue on the Upper East Side, the Lincoln Center area on the Upper West Side, Chelsea on the Lower West Side, and close to three miles of the waterfront along the Lower East Side.  These projects are right in the midst of the largest agglomeration of high-paying jobs in the world.  And with all that, the residents have not been helped one tiny little bit to escape from poverty, or to improve their prospects.  The "poverty rate" in these projects is said to exceed 50%, and the turnover rate is a ridiculously low 3%, meaning that essentially everyone who ever gets in gets trapped in poverty and stays for life.  Seventy years or so into a massive investment in subsidized housing as a supposed "anti-poverty" initiative, most of the formerly-poor people in Manhattan have exited poverty -- except the residents of the HUD-subsidized housing.  If HUD-subsidized housing is such a total and abject failure at getting anyone out of poverty in super-wealthy Manhattan, what exactly is the explanation for how it is ever going to work somewhere else?

At Pravda, everything they say is fake.  I guess we just have to get used to it.   

 

The New York Times Goes Full "Fake News"

It seems just days ago that the New York Times was all worked up over the threat of "fake news," and particularly how some fake stories may have helped swing the recent election to Trump.  For example, just before the election on November 6, the big headline was "Media's Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News."  On November 20 there was a deep analysis of the nefarious processes by which "fake news" gets wide dissemination, "How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study."  And on the same day, an anguished call for the proprietors of Facebook to crack down on the use of their platform for spreading fake information:  "Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Must Defend the Truth."    Looking at these and many other such stories, you might even get the idea that Pravda might care a little about having the news be real, as opposed to maybe only caring about getting its preferred candidate elected.

Before you get too far believing something so ridiculous, you will really need to check out today's effort.  In a paper that is six columns in width, five of them across the top of the front page are occupied by a picture of some migrants in a pick-up truck heading out across the Sahel in Niger toward Libya and, they hope, on to Europe.  Immediately underneath, a three-column-wide story is covered by the big headline of the day, "Escaping Drought and War on a 'Road on Fire.'"  The story continues on to the entirety of pages A10 and A11 in the interior of the paper.  This is the story of seemingly an entire generation of young men in West Africa picking up and heading north in search of a better life.

Oh, the sub-headline of the article is "Carbon's Casualties."  The article is part of the Times's series of gigantic articles on what are supposedly the terrible effects of "climate change." 

[P]eel back the layers of their stories and you find a complex bundle of trouble and want that prompts the men and boys of West Africa to leave home, endure beatings and bribes, board a smuggler’s pickup truck and try to make a living far, far away.  They do it because the rains have become so fickle, the days measurably hotter, the droughts more frequent and more fierce, making it impossible to grow enough food on their land. . . .  This journey has become a rite of passage for West Africans of his generation. The slow burn of climate change makes subsistence farming, already risky business in a hot, arid region, even more of a gamble.

So -- what is the source of this information that "droughts [have become] more frequent and more fierce," making it "impossible to grow enough food" in the Sahel region?  You won't find it in this article.  Try to confirm that information elsewhere, and you will find exactly the opposite:

From Reuters, June 1, 2015, citing a study in Nature Climate Change (no climate change skeptics!):

Rising greenhouse gases have boosted rainfall in the Sahel region of Africa, easing droughts that killed 100,000 people in the 1970s and 1980s, in a rare positive effect of climate change, a study said on Monday. . . .  "Amounts of rainfall have recovered substantially," said Rowan Sutton, a professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at Britain's Reading University and co-author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Or this from a report by Philipp Mueller for the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

The Sahara is actually shrinking, with vegetation arising on land where there was nothing but sand and rocks before.  The southern border of the Sahara has been retreating since the early 1980s, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa. There has been a spectacular regeneration of vegetation in northern Burkina Faso, which was devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago. . . .  The main reason for the greening of the Sahara and the Sahel has been an increase in rainfall since the mid-1980s.  Of the 40 rainfall stations across the Sahel, most of them have been observing an increase in rainfall.

And how about that bit about the days being "measurably hotter"?  Get far enough into the endless Times article, and you find this:

Meanwhile, in what is already one of the hottest places on Earth, it has gotten steadily hotter: by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1975, Fews Net has found.

0.7 of a degree?  That's not even enough that you could tell if it happened without a thermometer. 

Really, is it possible to get any more fake than this?

 

A Modest Proposal

(It occurs to me that some readers -- particularly younger ones who have studied English-language writers only since the banishment of Dead White Males from the university curriculum -- may be unfamiliar with the reference in the title to the classic 1729 essay by Jonathan Swift.  If you haven't read it, here is a link.  As you will see, my proposal is considerably more modest.)

I will not be the first to point out the clear signal sent by President-elect Trump with many of his cabinet appointments of an intent to reverse major policies of the Obama administration in many areas.  To consider just a few examples:

  •  Department of Education.  Its mission under Obama (and to be fair, under prior Presidents as well) has been to use the piles of free federal money to prop up overpriced and ineffective unionized government schools so that the unions can maximize their revenue, and any and all reforms can be avoided.  Trump nominee Betsy DeVos is a leader in advocating for charter schools and school choice, and is a bete noire of the teachers' unions.
  • Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Its mission under Obama (and again, also under prior Presidents) has been to provide subsidized apartments to people deemed to be poor, and thereby keep those people trapped in poverty and dependency for their entire lives.  Trump nominee Ben Carson has been a leading advocate for reducing dependency on the government among poor people, and particularly among blacks.
  • Department of Energy and EPA.  Their mission under Obama has been supporting and funding global warming alarmism, subsidizing uneconomic intermittent energy sources, and trying to put energy from fossil fuels out of business.  Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry actually advocated eliminating the Department of Energy during his own presidential campaign.  EPA Administrator-designate Scott Pruitt has spent years initiating lawsuits against EPA seeking to strike down some of its major regulations.

So, when the new guys at the top come in, can they just turn these agencies around and start with new policies?  If you read the Constitution, the answer would seem to be, of course they can!  (Article II, Section 1: "The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.")  But realists will recognize that there are only a handful of political appointees at the top of each department or agency, while the thousands of "permanent" or "career" employees are protected against firing by civil service laws.  And somehow these people think that, while the political appointees come and go, the career employees are the ones who really run the place.

How bad will be the resistance to change?  We got a preliminary indication a couple of days ago after the Trump "landing team" for the Energy Department sent a 74-part informational questionnaire to the department.  One of the areas of inquiry was a request for the names of department staffers who had worked on "climate change" programs.  Does that request seem reasonable to you?  It did not seem reasonable to the current DOE or its staffers.  They have "rejected" these requests for information.  From The Hill on December 13:

The Department of Energy said Tuesday it will reject the request by President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team to name staffers who worked on climate change programs.  Energy spokesman Eben Burnhan-Snyder said the agency received “significant feedback” from workers regarding a questionnaire from the transition team that leaked last week.  “Some of the questions asked left many in our workforce unsettled,” Snyder said.

Well, I guess that's how it works in the Federal Government:  If the requests of your new boss make you "unsettled," you just "reject" them.  And if that's how they react to a simple request for information as to who is doing what, imagine how they are going to react when they actually get an assignment to do something that runs counter to what they think should be done! 

The article in The Hill goes on to quote from the employees' union boss, articulating the view that there is nothing political about this, and the staffers are just neutral, a-political experts trying to go about their jobs:

“My members are upset and have questions about what this means. These are all civil servants who do their jobs,” Tony Reardon, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement.  “They have no wish to be caught up in political winds — they are nonpartisan employees — scientists, engineers, statisticians, economists and financial experts — who were hired for their knowledge and they bring their talent and experience to the job every day,” he said, adding that the union “will do all it can to ensure that merit system rules are followed.”

Actually, no.  There is absolutely nothing "nonpartisan" about this.  The Department of Energy is substantially if not entirely engaged in carrying out policies that are favored by Democrats and opposed by Republicans -- policies like promoting and subsidizing wind and solar energy and hamstringing and restricting fossil fuels.  Do you think that even the Energy Information Agency is nonpartisan?  Don't be ridiculous.  Their "levelized cost of energy" reports are carefully engineered to defraud the American people into supporting "renewable" energy by downplaying the real costs of wind and solar energy by a factor of five or ten or more.  The same overt or covert partisanship is equally if not more true at Education, HUD, EPA, and, for that matter, throughout the government.  

How bad is the partisanship in the government?  Surely, you say, there must be at least a few Republicans in the government who can be counted on to keep things fair!  If you think that, you are deluding yourself.  Analyze the election results from the District of Columbia, and you come away realizing that virtually every single person who works for the federal government is a Democrat.

Here are the presidential results from the District of Columbia.  Hillary Clinton got 90.9% of the votes, a percentage far higher than her percent in any of the fifty states.  (Her highest percentage in any of the states was in Hawaii at 62.3%.)  Donald Trump and Gary Johnson between them won just 5.7% of the votes in D.C., about 17,600 votes in total.  But think about this:  Washington has a substantial Republican establishment.  The RNC is headquartered in DC.  The Republicans held substantial majorities in both the House and Senate before the recent election, and the Republican members of Congress plus their committees had something in the range of 4000 staffers based in the District.  And those people have families.  And there is a substantial group of Republican, conservative and libertarian think tanks and policy organizations based in D.C. -- as examples, consider the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Federalist Society, and so forth.  And their staffers also have families.  Add up all the professional and paid Republican and conservative-side people in Washington and their families, and you have accounted for literally every Republican vote in the District.  The number of Republicans actually working in the government has to be so small that you will need a microscope to find them.

And yes, it is absolutely reasonable to expect that every single one of the government employees regards Trump and his people as illegitimate interlopers, and those employees will do everything in their power to hinder and obstruct any agenda of reform.

So, what to do about it?  The obvious first answer is, fire these people and hire new ones who will do your bidding.  Unfortunately, that is likely to be a poor answer.  The so-called "civil service" protections for career federal employees go back to the 1880s.  Do they violate the constitutional provision that vests all executive authority in the President?  I would say they do, but you could litigate that issue for the entire next four years without getting any definitive result and without getting rid of a single person.  You might even lose outright.

So here's the modest proposal: If the government cannot fire these people, then it can assign them to other tasks in other places.  By fortuitous coincidence, the recent several years have seen downsizing in two sectors known for having very large buildings, many of them located in remote and out-of-the-way areas.  Those two sectors are manufacturing and retail.  Places like rural Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Arkansas, and upstate New York -- not to mention northern Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and even Alaska -- are littered with abandoned K-Marts, JC Penney's and Sears stores, as well as abandoned factories of all sorts.  These buildings can be leased for a song.  Hundreds of federal employees can be assigned to each such location.

Send each such employee a memo:  "Starting Monday morning at 9 AM, your job will be located at the former Sears Hometown store, 2308 11th Avenue West, Williston, North Dakota.  If you report for work, you will await such assignments as may be given to you at that location.  If you do not show up, your pay will be continued until your unused vacation and sick leave are exhausted, and then your pay will stop."

Inside the former Sears or K-Mart, there can be row upon row of hundreds of desks and chairs.  But I highly recommend that these employees not be provided with any computer or cell phone at taxpayer expense.  Why waste the money?  They can communicate with headquarters in Washington by U.S. mail.  It's not like they are doing anything productive.

Something tells me that the incoming Trump team will stop short of adopting my proposal.  But they should adopt it.  For the next four years, essentially every federal employee in Washington is going to be conducting an unrelenting guerilla campaign to undermine everything the administration wants to do.  If the administration only pushes back a little, it will be steamrolled by the permanent government Blob.  Time to act decisively!  If anyone can do that, it is Trump.

UPDATE, December 16:  The normally sensible Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View comments on the Trump transition team questionnaire to the Department of Energy (asking for names of DOE employees working on "climate change" matters) as follows:

[The Department of Energy] should not comply with this request unless some law requires it. This request reeks of witch-hunting people because they might have views on climate change that our president-elect, or someone on his staff, dislike. That is no way to run an organization, or a nation.

What?  The incoming administration has an absolute right to find out who is working on what, and to re-direct people from working on Project A to Project B.  Career employees have no "right" to continue to spend taxpayer resources on projects that the newly elected representatives of the people do not want done.  How is this a "witch hunt"?  If the new people do not find out who is working on Project A, and stop that work, and direct the effort over to Project B, then they are not doing their job.

The Impending Collapse Of The Global Warming Scare

Over the past three decades, the environmental movement has increasingly hitched its wagon to exactly one star as the overwhelming focus of the cause, namely "climate change."  Sure, issues of bona fide pollution like smog and untreated sewage are still out there a little, but they are largely under control and don't really stir the emotions much any more.  If you want fundraising in the billions rather than the thousands, you need a good end-of-days, sin-and-redemption scare.  Human-caused global warming is your answer!

Even as this scare has advanced, a few lonely voices have warned that the radical environmentalists were taking the movement out onto a precarious limb.  Isn't there a problem that there's no real evidence of impending climate disaster?  But to no avail.  Government funding to promote the warming scare has been lavish, and in the age of Obama has exploded.  Backers of the alarm have controlled all of the relevant government bureaucracies, almost all of the scientific societies, and the access to funding and to publication for anyone who wants to have a career in the field.  What could go wrong?

Now, enter President-elect Trump.  During the campaign, as with many issues, it was hard to know definitively where Trump stood.  Although combatting climate change with forced suppression of fossil fuels could be a multi-trillion dollar issue for the world economy, this issue was rarely mentioned by either candidate, and was only lightly touched on in the debates.  Sure, Hillary had accused Trump of calling climate change a "hoax" in a November 2012 tweet.  (Actual text: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make American manufacturing non-competitive.")  But in an early 2016 interview, Trump walked that back to say that the statement was a joke, albeit with a kernel of truth, because "climate change is a very, very expensive form of tax" and "China does not do anything to help."  Trump had also stated that he intended to exit the recent Paris climate accord, and to end the War on Coal.  So, was he proposing business-as-usual with a few tweaks, or would we see a thorough-going reversal of Obama's extreme efforts to control the climate by fossil fuel restrictions?

With the recently announced appointments, this is starting to come very much into focus.  In reverse order of the announcements:

  • Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State.  As of today, we still have as our chief diplomat the world leader of smugness who somehow thinks that "climate change" caused by use of fossil fuels is the greatest threat to global security.  He is shortly to be replaced with the CEO of Exxon.  Could there be a bigger poke in the eye to the world climate establishment?  I'm trying to envision Tillerson at the next meeting of the UN climate "conference of parties" with thousands of world bureaucrats discussing how to put the fossil fuel companies out of business.  Won't he be laughing his gut out?
  • Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy.  Not only was he the longest-serving governor of the biggest fossil fuel energy-producing state, but in his own 2012 presidential campaign he advocated for the elimination of the Department of Energy.  This is the department that passes out tens of billions of dollars in crony-capitalist handouts for wind and solar energy (Solyndra!), let alone more tens of billions for funding some seventeen (seventeen!) research laboratories mostly dedicated to the hopeless task of figuring out how to make intermittent sources of energy competitive for any real purpose.
  • And then there's Scott Pruitt for EPA.  As Attorney General of Oklahoma, another of the big fossil fuel energy-producing states, he has been a leader in litigating against the Obama EPA to stop its overreaches, including the so-called Clean Power Plan that seeks to end the use of coal for electricity and to raise everyone's cost of energy.

You might say that all of these are very controversial appointments, and will face opposition in the Senate.  But then, Harry Reid did away with the filibuster for cabinet appointments.  Oops!  Barring a minimum of three Republican defections, these could all sail through.  And even if one of these appointments founders, doesn't the combination of them strongly signal where Trump would go with his next try?

So what can we predict about where the climate scare is going?  Among members of the environmental movement, when their heads stop exploding, there are plenty of predictions that this will be terrible for the United States:  international ostracism, loss (to China!) of "leadership" in international climate matters, and, domestically, endless litigation battles stalling attempts to rescind or roll back regulations.  I see it differently.  I predict a high likelihood of substantial collapse of the global warming movement, both domestically and internationally, over the course of the next couple of years.

Start with the EPA.  To the extent that the global warming movement has anything to do with "science," EPA is supposedly where that science is vetted and approved on behalf of the public before being turned into policy.  In fact, under Obama, EPA's principal role on the "science" has been to prevent and stifle any debate or challenge to global warming orthodoxy.  For example, when a major new Research Report came out back in September claiming to completely invalidate all of the bases on which EPA claims that CO2 is a danger to human health and welfare, and thus to undermine EPA's authority to regulate the gas under the Clean Air Act, EPA simply failed to respond.  In the same vein, essentially all prominent global warming alarmists refuse to debate anyone who challenges any aspect of their orthodoxy.  Well, that has worked as long as they and their allies have controlled all of the agencies and all of the money.  Now, it will suddenly be put up or shut up.  And in case you might think that the science on this issue is "settled," so no problem, you might enjoy this recent round-up at Climate Depot from some of the actual top scientists.  A couple of excerpts:

Renowned Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson:  'I’m 100% Democrat and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on climate issue, and the Republicans took the right side. ' . . .

Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever: ‘Global warming is a non-problem’ – ‘I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.’

Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years.  Questions like:  Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted?  How do you explain an almost-20-year "pause" in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated?  What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of "warmest year ever" when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago?  Suddenly, the usual hand-waving ("the science is settled") is not going to be good enough any more.  What now?

And how will the United States fare on the international stage when it stops promising to cripple its economy with meaningless fossil fuel restrictions?  As noted above, people like Isabel Hilton predict a combination of ostracism and "loss of leadership" of the issue, most likely to China.  Here's my prediction:  As soon as the United States stops parroting the global warming line, the other countries will quickly start backing away from it as well.  This is "The Emperor's New Clothes," with the U.S. in the role of the little kid who is the only one willing to say the obvious truth in the face of mass hysteria.  Countries like Britain and Australia have already more or less quietly started the retreat from insanity.  In Germany the obsession with wind and solar (solar -- in the cloudiest country in the world!) has already gotten average consumer electric rates up to close to triple the cost in U.S. states that embrace fossil fuels.  How long will they be willing to continue that self-destruction after the U.S. says it is not going along?  And I love the business about ceding "leadership" to China.  China's so-called "commitment" in the recent Paris accord is not to reduce carbon emissions at all, but rather only to build as many coal plants as they want for the next fourteen years and then cease increasing emissions after 2030!  At which point, of course, they reserve their right to change their mind.  Who exactly is going to embrace that "leadership" and increase their consumers' cost of electricity by triple or so starting right now?  I mean, the Europeans are stupid, but are they that stupid? 

And finally, there is the question of funding.  Under Obama, attaching the words "global warming" or "climate change" to any proposal has been the sure-fire way to get the proposal whatever federal funding it might want.  The Department of Energy has been the big factor here.  Of its annual budget of about $28 billion, roughly half goes to running the facilities that provide nuclear material for the Defense Department, and the other half, broadly speaking, goes to the global warming cause:  crony capitalist handouts for wind and solar energy providers, and billions per year for research at some seventeen (seventeen!) different energy research laboratories.  During the eight Obama years, the energy sector of the U.S. economy has been substantially transformed by a technological revolution that has dramatically lowered the cost of energy and hugely benefited the American consumer.  I'm referring, of course, to the fracking revolution.  How much of the tens of billions of U.S. energy subsidies and research funding in that time went toward this revolution that actually produced cheaper energy that works?  Answer:  Not one single dollar!  All of the money was completely wasted on things that are uneconomic and will disappear as soon as the government cuts off the funding spigot.  All of this funding can and should be zeroed out in the next budget.  Believe me, nobody will notice other than the parasites who have been wasting the money.

If the multi-tens-of-billions per year funding gusher for global warming alarmism quickly dries up, the large majority of the people living on these handouts will have no choice but to go and find something productive to do.  Sure, some extreme zealots will find some way to soldier on.  But it is not crazy at all to predict a very substantial collapse of the global warming scare over the course of the next couple of years.

The environmental movement has climbed itself way out onto the global warming limb.  Now the Trump administration is about to start sawing off the limb behind them.    

 

Will The Trump Administration Tackle Government-Generated "Fake News"?

At this blog, I have generally used the tag "Government Fraud" to refer to the various intentionally deceptive data and statistics issued by our government to induce the people to support further growth and bigger budgets for the government.  But in the last few weeks we have a new cool term for such intentionally deceptive information masquerading as news, namely "fake news."  OK, I'll adopt the term for the time being.

As discussed in Friday's post, the people coining the term "fake news" seem to think that the big problem is a few crank websites vying for attention on social media, while at the same time they seem to be completely unaware that far and away the biggest purveyor of fake news is the government itself.  The list of government-generated intentionally deceptive data and statistics is long and dishonorable.  I gave a few examples in Friday's post, and further, I have argued that all of the most important government statistics are fraudulent, including prominent examples like how the poverty rate is calculated, how government spending is accounted for in GDP, and how government debt obligations are reported (failing to accrue anything for Social Security and Medicare liabilities). 

A recent and extreme example of government-generated fake news is the reporting of comparative costs of various forms of energy (e.g., coal, oil, natural gas, wind, solar) in the form of so-called "levelized costs."  I wrote two posts about this in August, here and here.  A prime goal of the Obama administration has been to use government levers of regulations and subsidies to put the fossil fuel industry out of business and replace fossil fuel energy generation with so-called "renewables."  To get public support for that plan, the government has needed a metric for comparing the costs of fossil-fuel energy versus "renewables" that will make the renewables appear much cheaper than they actually are.  The "levelized cost" metric serves this function. 

"Levelized cost" as used in the government reports addresses only what the next kilowatt hour of energy from this source will cost.  In the case of the fossil fuel plant -- which can generally be turned on or off as needed to generate power -- that metric is a fair proxy for the cost of getting reliable electricity from a working electricity system consisting mostly of this type of source.  But in the case of, for example, wind turbines, the "levelized cost" of electricity from a certain turbine gives you little to no indication of what it will cost you to get reliable electricity from a working system mostly fueled mostly by wind turbines.  That's because a working electricity system fueled mostly by wind turbines requires additional massive costs that a fossil fuel system does not:  huge excess capacity (perhaps 300 - 400%) to deal with conditions of light wind; gigantic batteries to store power for conditions of no wind at all, which can persist for days; extra transmission lines to bring electricity from windier areas to the rest of the country; and finally, an entire array of fossil fuel back-up plants for those occasions when the wind doesn't blow for a week and the batteries are dead.  

As I reported at this post, a demonstration project by a South Korean utility to create a functioning electricity system mostly fueled by wind ended up with costs on the order of ten times the costs of the conventional system, by the time the excess capacity, storage and fossil fuel back-up were taken into account.  Oh, and over the course of a full month, the experimental system only generated 42% of its electricity usage from wind.

And yet, check out the big report out from the Energy Information Agency in August.  The title, "Levelized Cost and Levelized Avoided Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2016," tells you all you need to know.  Look at the charts starting on page 6, and you will find that for energy sources you might be considering investing in today, wind is always reported to be the cheapest, generally about 10% less than the next cheapest which is natural gas.  Coal and oil are up from there.  But, you ask, if I want to have a system mostly relying on wind, how much excess capacity will I need?  How much battery storage will I need?  How much extra transmission capacity will I need?  How much fossil fuel back-up will I need?  How much will those things cost?  How much will those things increase the cost of electricity?  You will find no answers to those questions here.  Please, this is not real news, it is fake news.  They are hoping that you are not smart enough to ask the relevant questions, and that you will be deceived.

And now for the big question:  Do we have any reason to think or hope that the new Trump administration can penetrate through the barrage of fake news coming out of these government agencies and start basing policy on real information?  In the case of many of the issues I have been harping on over the years (e.g., poverty rate, GDP, entitlement accruals) I have not yet seen anything to indicate one way or the other.  However, on the specific issue of the costs of renewable versus fossil fuel power, yes, we do have reason to hope.  That reason is found in a questionnaire containing 74 questions that has been submitted by the so-called transition "landing team" at the Department of Energy.  The questionnaire appeared in the Washington Post on December 9 here, and then was analyzed in detail by Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That on December 10 here.

Here are questions 55, 56, and 57 from the questionnaire:

55 EIA’s assessments of levelized costs for renewable technologies do not contain back-up costs for the fossil fuel technologies that are brought on-line to replace the generation when those technologies are down. Is this is a correct representation of the true levelized costs?

56 Has EIA done analysis that shows that additional back-up generation is not needed? How does EIA’s analysis compare with other analyses on this issue?

57 Renewable and solar technologies are expected to need additional transmission costs above what fossil technologies need. How has EIA represented this in the AEO forecasts? What is the magnitude of those transmission costs?

Now, I don't have any information on who the people are who put together this questionnaire, and this "landing team" seems to have preceded the naming of Rick Perry as Energy Secretary designate by quite a bit.  But it is immediately evident that these people know what they are doing.  Further evidence of their competence can be found in questions on other subjects, including, for example, questions about DOE's loan guarantees (these were the people who guaranteed the Solyndra loan) and questions about why DOE supports seventeen (seventeen!) different energy research laboratories.  Read Eschenbach's analysis in full at the link.

The more I see from the Trump transition effort, the more I am impressed by it.

The Fake News And The News That's Fake

It seems that Hillary's supporters just can't accept that she lost because she was a terrible candidate -- a worse candidate even than Donald Trump!  So the election must have been stolen from her by some fraudsters or crooks.  Russian hackers!  James Comey!  And now the latest, "fake news."

I follow the news rather closely, and yet somehow this whole "fake news" thing never even rose to my attention until after the election was over.  Now that it seems to be the big thing, I've gone looking for some of it to see if it could really have been anything important in the election.  It does seem that some completely made-up stories circulated widely on social media platforms like Facebook, often with an origin that no one can seem to trace, and other times with origins at sites with names and looks that seem real but are counterfeit.  Many of these "fake news" stories appeared in the weeks and months prior to the election.

Then of course, there is another, closely-related category.  These are the stories that have circulated in the actual mainstream media, with the full weight of their authority and supposed fact-checking, but with no more relation to truth or reality than the "fake news."  Call this second category the "news that is fake."  Many such stories have also circulated at times carefully calculated to attempt to influence a political result.  

I thought it might be fun to compare some examples of the "fake news" to other examples of the "news that is fake."  See which you think are more consequential.

An analysis at Buzzfeed on November 16 finds the following to be the top five "fake news" stories in the three months prior to the election, ranked by what they call "Facebook engagement."

OK, you have to admit that that's a pretty good list.  On the other hand, I seem to have failed to see any of them at the time.  Maybe that's because I avoid Facebook like the plague.  Meanwhile, let's just pull out a tiny smattering from the category of "news that is fake."  For example:

  • On September 13 the Census Bureau released figures for things like household income and the so-called "poverty rate" for 2015.  According to the report, in a year when GDP had only increased 2.4% over the prior year, median household income had somehow gone up 5.2%, and the poverty rate had gone down a full 1.3%.  These supposed figures, and others in the report, were literally impossible, and should have elicited extreme skepticism from all serious media.  See my post on the subject here.  But instead, the report became the lead story in literally every major media outlet, from the New York Times here, to the Wall Street Journal here, and many others.  Within a day, John Crudele of the New York Post had revealed the reported figures to be an artifact of methodology changes at Census, carefully buried in the report and timed for maximum impact on the election.  None of the sources that had breathlessly parrotted the Census figures ever issued a correction.
  • Whatever you might think about the controversy over supposed man-made global warming, one thing that cannot be disputed is that no connection has been shown between atmospheric warming and extreme weather events, such as hurricanes or floods.  Indeed, the most recent years have seen a remarkable dearth of hurricanes and tornadoes.  In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "My Unhappy Life As A Climate Heretic," Roger Pielke, Jr. pointed out that "There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally," and noted that even the politicized IPCC has agreed with that conclusion.  And yet over at the New York Times, with reportage on this subject led by climate crusaders Justin Gillis and Coral Davenport, it is complete gospel that global warming causes increases in extreme weather events.  For example, in the run-up to the recent election, an article from September 8 by Davenport linked "climate change" to "extreme weather" and flooding that had just occurred in Louisiana.  Just today, we have another article by Davenport attacking Trump EPA nominee Scott Pruitt and containing this gem:  "Without additional government policies, energy and environmental experts say, the shift from coal, oil and natural gas will not be rapid or substantial enough to stave off the worst impacts of a warming atmosphere, including rising sea levels, more powerful storms, more devastating droughts and food and water shortages."
  • Or, consider the mother of all "news that is fake" stories, the report by Dan Rather and CBS News on September 8, 2004, in the run-up to the 2004 election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, that Bush had committed certain misconduct, including disobeying a direct order, in connection with his service in the National Guard.  The report was based on obviously forged documents.  Those behind the report, including Rather and his producer Mary Mapes, continued to defend it for years afterward.  Mapes wrote a book defending the story in 2005, and a movie based on that book, titled "Truth," came out in 2015.

If we had all day here, I could come up with another dozen examples just as good.  Is there any doubt that the "news that is fake" category is much more consequential?