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What happened to Earth Day?

Earth Day began decades ago, in 1970, when I was a kid. I remember it as a distinct point in time where the people around me spoke about raw sewage and chemicals being dumped and piped directly into American waterways. Up until that point, Americans had kind of unhappily or grudgingly accepted environmental degradation and pollution as an unfortunate necessity of economic and technological progress.

But fish kills in what older people then clearly remembered as pristine trout streams, and obvious losses of waterways with once- major fishing and waterfowl hunting to untreated, unfiltered, unmitigated chemical and physical waste dumping bothered most Americans. A great deal of this pollution was out in the open, unsightly, and an obvious reflection on Americans as a people. Then the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because of all the dangerous pollution in it, and that image galvanized Americans to clean up our act.

What was happening then was public waterways and air that were shared publicly were being used as a cheap dumping ground by production facilities of all sorts. The American public was bearing the burden of environmental waste, while the same processes that generated that waste also generated income that was privatized. I am 100% for private income, but I strenuously object to using shared waters and air as a cheap garbage disposal, and so did people of all backgrounds in 1970.

Thus was Earth Day born. Fair enough, understandable enough. And the environmental cleanup and protection movement followed closely on its heels. The US Environmental Protection Agency, where I began my professional career, was created soon after Earth Day to address the obvious problems resulting from carelessness with our shared environment.

But now, after decades of increasingly crushing environmental laws and regulations that ridiculously “protect” us down to parts per trillion of chemicals that already naturally occur at those levels in the natural environment….Earth Day represents something totally different than it did in 1970. Today, Earth Day is a celebration of an all-out assault on Western Civilization by people pursuing a ridiculously impossibly unattainable “Net Zero” goal. Meaning that humans should have zero impact on the planet. None. Which naturally necessitates a complete (and unreasonable, undemocratic, authoritarian) overhaul of our way of life, freedoms, choices, food, etc.

Earth Day is now marked and promoted by people who supposedly “know better” what is right for us. And in fact almost 100% of the environmental and even land conservation organizations are politically partisan and politically extreme, embracing all kinds of cultural and economic Marxism while rejecting American capitalism and individual freedom. This shift away from cleanup to directing us on what to eat and when and where is patently bad, unfair, wrong, and in fact is so egregiously foolish it is hurting the credibility of the environmental quality movement.

When environmental groups like Penn Future and Sierra Club always protect one political party and always attack one political party, they are shown to be about partisan politics and not about environmental quality. They are political shells. And when a local land conservancy embraces evil “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” policies that are actually against the founding principles of said conservancy, such as private land ownership and capitalism, then we know that even the once- wonderful land trust movement has been hijacked and turned against America.

So in 2023, Earth Day represented authoritarianism, out of control Big Government, cruel assaults on and corresponding losses of individual personal freedoms and choice, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff. The fact that Earth Day is now openly un-American and anti-America tells us that Earth Day’s promoters are not trying to protect us from pollution, they are trying to take control of our lives and destroy what had been the most free nation on Planet Earth.

Supposedly in the name of saving us from ourselves. To which I and a lot of other Americans say No Thanks.

Today’s “I know what is best for you better than you do” mindset of the environmental movement is what drove me out of working at the USEPA. It is unreasonable, unproven, and every day it is shown to be wrong and wronger.

Instead of all the anti-science climate hysteria sky-is-falling nonsense, Americans should be celebrating the incredible environmental cleanup and success we have had in the past 53 years since Earth Day was first established. Tilting at environmental windmills makes some people feel like they have meaning in their lives, and if they themselves want to take on the burdens they propose for the rest of us, then they can make that choice. But they have no right to try to take away my right of choice, your right of choice. And if there is one clear indication that the loudest voices promoting Earth Day are not serious and do not deserve to be treated seriously, it is the fact that absolutely none of these people do what they say the rest of us must do “to save the planet.”

 

Potent symbol of freedom: A gas kitchen stove

Only in the purposefully chaotic and bizarre power politics of 2021 to 2023 do Americans discover themselves clinging not just to their Bible and their guns, but to the gas stove in their kitchen. Yeah, Ol’ Smoky is now a symbol of your personal freedom.

Why in God’s green earth is the federal government (and several state governments including New York and Washington) trying from several different angles (consumer protection regulation, legislation, and straight-up executive branch political fatwa confiscation) to eliminate stoves that burn natural gas?

Because of control! Of you! By the bureaucrats and the lawless control freaks in government!

They want you hooked up to the electrical grid matrix and completely dependent upon whoever controls that electrical grid. One false move by you, and -POW! – your power goes out and it won’t be restored until you delete that mean “right wing” tweet and stop attending that church down the street.

This debacle of bad governance and really bad government overreach is all because a gas stove provides Americans with independence from the electric grid. While the electric grid can be controlled with the flip of a switch or two, as can the power meters on our individual homes, a gas stove operates either from a huge natural gas main pipeline that takes a lot of effort to turn off, which effects multiple city neighborhoods, or from a large propane tank in the back yard.

Propane tanks for residences run from 100 gallons to 3,000 gallons in size, providing the careful homeowner with potentially several years of cooking and heating independence until a fill-up is needed. Hooked up to a non-stop 24/7 gas main, a home can heat and cook with a gas stove 24/7. And in fact, I have personally seen an elderly woman in my neighborhood huddled up in front of her gas stove to stay warm in the winter, while the electric power was down and unavailable. This ability to run your own kitchen and home disconnected from the electric grid is serious independence from control and monitoring!

And the control freaks hate it hate it hate it!

There is a good reason Barack Hussein Obama recently installed a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury vacation beach front mansion on flood-proof Martha’s Vineyard Island. When you have a large propane tank and the power goes out, you can always run a powerful electrical generator off of that propane, as well as heat and cook with your gas stove. Some people even have the old fashioned style natural gas lights in their homes, and they work great! It is like whatever happens with the power grid doesn’t really apply to people with natural gas stoves. You are completely OK and independent.

Turns out, Obama did at least this one thing right in his life, although he won’t admit that he is a hypocrite about it, because the guy is constantly hectoring us about the evils of the propane gas in his tank. I say, if a serial liar Marxist Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama can have a gas stove and the huge propane tank out back to keep the stove fired up and cooking 24/7 off-grid, then an honest-to-goodness genuine red-blooded American like you can have one, too. Just on principle, no questions asked.

What is truly interesting about this subject is the bogus and openly fake “study” supposedly done by the Rocky Mountain Institute that the gas banners and book burners supposedly relied on for their screams of horror and outrage about “the dangers of gas stoves“. Click the link above and see for yourself. This is not a study, nor does it rely on real studies. It is a political brochure with pictures. The concerns that RMI lists are based on the improbability/impossibility of people sitting inside a gas-fired oven while it is on fire, and do not take into account ambient air dilution, stove top hoods and exhaust fans, or the risks from alternatives to gas stoves.

It is as if the only thing that RMI cares about are the potential risks (none of which are proven with actual long term study data showing a strong correlation between gas stoves and related health problems); they don’t even talk about the benefits of gas stoves. Not the least of which is that clean burning natural gas emits far fewer and less pollutants than coal-fired power from the usual electrical power plants where we get most of our electricity.

This gas stove banning business is all about bureaucrats directly controlling your home life, which means your personal freedom. They used a fake “study” by a 100% partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called Rocky Mountain Institute to “inform” their chums in the partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called the mainstream media, who in turn created the (fake) astroturf political target for partisan and ideologically driven politicians who don’t give a fig for the actual scientific truth or for you or for freedom.

Whenever we see so-called “science” claims like this gas stove ban hype that cannot be challenged or debated with its proponents, then we know it is not science, it is propaganda.

Cling to your gas stove for dear life. Do not let go of it, do not give it up, and vote out of office any elected official who supports banning gas stoves. These are bad people, controlling people, who believe they know best how you must live your life. Even the life you live in your own kitchen, frying up chicken and plantains and sauteeing vegetables, all of which really do throw up a whole bunch of oily particles in the air that can get into your lungs. And believe it or not, this is a subject I know a lot about, because after finishing graduate school I took several courses on this subject at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and got “A” grades.

Take it from me, the RMI “study” is BS, the supposed health issue about gas stoves is BS, and I’m not even a doctor. Keep your gas stove, and toss out the RMI study and its claim that your gas stove is dangerous. Live free, my friends. Breathe that free American air and rejoice.

Obama installs a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury beach front mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and so should you

Just so we are all on the same page about what a racist disgrace Obama is, here he is happily posing with racist disgrace Louis Farrakhan. Don’t listen to anything Obama says, he is a racist dirt bag.

Earth Day Myths

Earth Day…talk about climate change, the climate and meaning of this ‘hippie holiday’ has really changed since it was first declared. What began as a plea for help and attention as so American rivers were so polluted that when the Cuyahoga caught on fire, it was only slightly more fascinating than the huge fish kills in the lower Hudson, is today a sort of Mother Earth May Day Against Capitalism. Gone are the clear lines in the sand that modern industrialization had gone too far with its pipelines dripping green goo direct from factory floor work aprons to the local waterway. Now, today, Earth Day is not about fixing polluted waterways, but about “fixing” capitalism to death.

Somehow the people pushing this attack are conveniently forgetful that the greatest industrial pollution has occurred not under capitalist markets, but under rigid authoritarian socialist governments. But people like me are not forgetful, because to forget is to see freedom dry up and vanish; capitalism is fundamentally about human freedom and choice. Socialism being “green” is a myth, because socialism is never about choices, like the choice to be free of pollution. Rather, socialism is about top-down control and coerced obedience, at any cost. And in Russia and China, the environment was the very first thing to be sacrificed for industrial mass production.

Here are two big Earth Day-related myths.

Myth Number One: Environmental Groups are About Environmental Quality. Sorry, hate to say it, but most so-called environmental groups today are not about the environment or protecting environmental quality. Rather, most environmental advocacy groups are politically partisan about implementing socialism, and attacking capitalism, and the environmental issues they talk about are just one pathway. Have you ever seen an environmental group criticize Democrat Party officials? Like really get after them and hound them.

Nope, not like they demonize Republicans.

Some years ago, Pennsylvania had a Democrat governor, Ed Rendell. Like all good liberals, Rendell could not stay away from money to buy votes with, and so he dropped the natural gas drilling bomb on Pennsylvania public lands. Environmental groups were silent as our state forests went from quiet hinterlands to super industrialized moonscapes in just months. Crickets chirped and not a human voice was raised in opposition to this huge damage to our public lands.

However, literally the day Rendell’s successor took office, Penn Future and other environmental advocacy groups were out in force at the Capitol with bullhorns proclaiming Tom Corbett to be “Governor Corporate,” because of his supposed unhealthy commitment to….natural gas drilling. The guy hadn’t been governor for one minute and already the supposed green groups that had looked the other way while Pennsylvania public lands were criss-crossed with pipelines and drilling rigs were proclaiming him the environmental anti-Christ. Corbett had made zero decisions about drilling on Pennsylvania public lands, but because he was a Republican and Rendell a Democrat, the supposed environmental groups lined up and attacked Corbett and protected Rendell.

So don’t be fooled; the environmental groups are not so much about the natural environment as they are about shaping the political environment inside the US Capitol and state capitols around America. They are mostly fakes. I give land trusts and conservancies credit for actually doing real environmental work, but even they have become infected with the PC buzzwords and partisan political nonsense to the point where their credibility is often at stake.

Myth Number Two: Climate Change is About Environmental Quality. Human-caused climate change, as it is propounded by the various bullies supposedly expert in it, is based only on really lousy computer models and scanty data at best, faked data at worst. Other than these two weak legs, the notion of human-caused climate change stands on literally nothing. The climate change movement has been riven with scandals (East Anglia University, my alma mater Penn State’s Michael Mann etc) and scientists who are facile about jumping back and forth over lines separating science and policy and politics. These scientists decided the cash was greener on the side of climate alarmism, and so they went with the corporate foundation money.

Earth’s climate is changing. It has always changed. Volcanos, huge storms, meteors, tectonic shifts, glaciers advancing and receding and advancing again without any human intervention…Planet Earth is a really dynamic place. Its climate is a product of all kinds of factors, most of which are outside human control. But this reality does not diminish climate change’s usefulness as a vehicle for advancing big government totalitarianism.

My main objection to human-caused climate change alarmism isn’t so much that it is obviously and shamefully fake, or even that it is another evil effort to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over free people. Rather, climate change alarmism detracts from the very real and potentially solvable problems of invasive species, ocean overfishing, surface water pollution, forest fragmentation, farmland loss, and other actual, verified environmental issues. That are not as sexy as the climate sky is falling message. Fake climate change casts its pall over all real environmental issues, and undermines their claim on people’s attention.

If the conservative movement is overly skeptical about environmental anything, to the point where deriding even real environmental issues has become its own form of conservative political correctness, it is because the very fake environmental advocacy groups gave up their integrity and believability, by polluting real environmental issues with fake climate change nonsense. Their adherence to evil climate change religion did it.

As scary media-creation child activist Greta Thunberg admitted, climate change isn’t really about the environment; it is about gaining political control and force-implementing socialism and changing a whole array of policies in Western Civilization, at great cost, while China, India and Pakistan move forward with their gushing pollution-based economies, at no cost.

What kind of normal job-holding American can really get on board with that?

 

 

SB 619 captures tug of war between big government and the citizenry

SB 619 is PA state senator Gene Yaw’s fix to a problem that should not even exist. And yet, this bill is being greeted by so-called environmental advocates as some sort of “attack” on environmental quality and environmental protection.

Senate Bill 619 is about one simple thing: Making Pennsylvania state government regulators spell out exactly what is, and what is not, an environmental spill that is so bad that it contaminates waterways and is a violation of our state “clean streams” law.

You would think that in late 2019, 243 years after the founding of America, all state governments would be run by responsible adults who are committed to the wellbeing of their fellow citizens first and foremost. A commitment like that would first and foremost be to the rule of law and the due process rights that undergird and frame everything that is American representative government. Simply put, the government cannot willy nilly decide for itself, based on ambiguous, general, opaque, undefined, arbitrary standards, what is an environmental contamination, and what is not an environmental contamination.

In representative government, We, The People are entitled to know our boundaries, where the borders are to our behavior, and where the government gets to step in and correct us. This understanding keeps us from making decisions in good faith that end up getting us entangled with government enforcers who hit us with fines and penalties for making an incorrect decision.

Presently, and unbelievably, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has no clearly defined standards for what qualifies as a reportable spill and contamination into a waterway. PA DEP’s entire standard is, get this, for real: “We will know it when we see it.”

Folks, I am not exaggerating, I am not making this up. This is how much infinite latitude the state government has now and wants to maintain. This means that literally every time something – a cup of coffee, a can of paint, a bucket of mine sludge, or any miniscule part thereof – falls from its original container into the environment, and into or next to a waterway, it must be reported to PA DEP. And PA DEP reserves the right to fine whoever is responsible, irrespective of whether or not that spill involved anything dangerous, toxic, or at such a small dilution that it is de minimus in its effect.

In practice, this means that PA DEP both chases its tail going after ridiculously unimportant “spills” that pose no threat to anything, which underserves the citizenry who underwrite PA DEP’s budget, and that the agency also holds a huge arbitrary hammer over the head of every single citizen, contractor, and industrial or commercial operator in or passing through the Commonwealth. While being arbitrary is bad enough, reports from the field – you know, the little people who actually work outside getting stuff done for the rest of us consumers – is that plenty of PA DEP staff use that arbitrary standard in capricious ways. These PA DEP staff are, simply put, empowered to be vindictive and petty little tyrants whenever they want to be.

To their shame, the opponents of SB 619 are acting as if the bill is some sort of assault on environmental quality, when it is not, not even close. The PA Fish & Boat Commission is actually on record opposing SB 619 because it allows for “interpretation” in the law. This is embarrassingly bad government to say things like this. Needless to say, the private sector opponents of SB 619 say even worse and less accurate things than the PFBC has written.

Can you imagine something so horrid as there being two sides to a story, some “interpretation” about what happened, and not having just one omnipotent government agency position, take it or take it, because you can’t leave it, because the government agency has 100% of the say in what happened, and you can’t figure it out until some government employee tells you? Is it really so terrible to rein in our government agencies and require them to live by defined standards like the rest of us have to live? Like our Federal and State Constitutions require? Like a whole bunch of other states already have?

SB 619 simply asks PA DEP to establish criteria and standards so that the citizenry and the industries they work in can know when they are following the law, and when they are not. It asks government employees to live by the rules everyone else must live by. It asks government to not engage in arbitrary and capricious behavior, which undermines everything our Republic and our Commonwealth are about. You know, that liberty and freedom stuff that seems so insignificant to the self-appointed guardians of environmental quality. One thing is clear: My fellow environmental professionals may care about the environment, but they do not care about democracy or good government.

This bill is not about environmental quality, it is about democracy, the role of government, good government, government transparency and accountability, and limits on government power. It represents the tug of war going on nationwide between people who want unfettered big government power, and those of us who want government to live within the Constitutional boundaries everyone else lives in.

SB 619 needs to be implemented now.

(c) 2006 Bonnie Jacobs

A brief, simple reminder

With the obvious flaws in the new religion of human-caused global warming/ global cooling/ climate change, way too many conservatives lump together all of the environmental issues and then dismiss them with equal carelessness.

Just a reminder: Clean air comes from nature’s natural processes, mostly from trees and other large plants that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen.

Another reminder: Clean fresh water comes from underground filtration through rock layers and sand, in undisturbed or otherwise healthy watersheds.

Both clean air and clean water are necessary for human life to continue as we know it. Both air and water are produced by free ecosystem services that nature perfected for a long time. Humans can kind of reproduce these processes mechanically, but they are energy-dependent and hard to maintain.

Yes, the whole global climate change religion thing is a political effort to shut down western civilization and transfer its wealth to authoritarian countries. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real environmental quality problems. Fact is, humans pollute, and pollution needs to be resolved. Fouling our own nest is a sloppy, stupid thing to do. We don’t need to do it.

So quit lumping all environmental issues in with human – caused global climate change politics. Focus on the real, measurable problems and solve them. Ignoring them is foolish, and humans are not fools. Basic land and water conservation are necessary to keep people healthy.