We know the heartbreaking executive order to begin the long process of rolling back the Clean Power Plan is coming. As for when, reports indicate that if healthcare passes and Gorsuch is confirmed, it could be as soon as Monday. Or if those things don’t happen quickly, the EO could be next month. But we’re pretty sure it’s going to happen at some point. We take it on faith and take it to the heart, but the waiting is the hardest part.
In the meantime, let’s take a look at some recent rebuttals to contrarian claims.
For example, Jeff Jacoby, a columnist at the Boston Globe, recently wrote about how Scott Pruitt was right to question the link between climate change and CO2. According to some actual scientists over at Climate Feedback, Jacoby’s column was “highly inaccurate” and “full of logical fallacies.”
Speaking of inaccurate and illogical, the Trump administration’s U-turn on fuel efficiency standards, and specifically their claims about saving jobs, are addressed by professor John DeCiccio, who unpacks the fiction behind these claims. Because the lies will just keep coming, but we won’t back down.
Trump is also promising to bring back coal, something that even Mitch McConnell has said probably isn’t going to happen. The reason for this isn’t the success of any “War on Coal,” but the good ol’ Free Market. A recent report from Moody’s shows that while it costs $30 per megawatt hour to run coal plants (in the Great Plains), wind is winning on price, at a mere $20 per megawatt hour. This is one of the reasons that CO2 levels have leveled off (though not quite free falling), welcome news in these scary times.
Meanwhile, Breitbart’s James Delingpole recently took issue with news reports that the Great Barrier Reef is experiencing a massive die-off as a result of warming. As usual, Delingpole’s entire argument rests on… nothing but a contention that all the scientists are wrong and their studies are biased. But the scientists at Climate Feedback feel differently, rating a New York Times story about the die-off as accurate and of high scientific credibility.
Fortunately, a new literature review also looked at 120 studies on marine impacts of climate change and found that, despite the contention of folks like Delingpole, there’s no widespread bias among climate studies.
Now it will certainly come as a shock that Delingpole is wrong, or that Trump’s promises to revive the coal industry are empty, but please try and refrain from any outbursts.
Save that energy to react to the coming executive order, and the years of rulemaking Pruitt will have to guide the EPA through to justify the change.
But until then, we’ll just have to settle for one Last Dance with the Clean Power Plan...
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