CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN VOWS TO RESIST TRUMP'S CLIMATE POLICIES
BY WARREN MASS
SEE: http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/24950-california-governor-jerry-brown-vows-to-resist-trump-climate-policies;
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
California Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, who has a record as a strong environmentalist and who has attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and the Climate Summit of the Americas in Toronto, has said that he will take California in a different direction if the incoming Trump administration relaxes environmental regulations or measures to fight against so-called “climate change.”
Brown gave an interview to the New York Times, which reported that he pledged to bypass Washington and work directly with other nations and states to defend and strengthen California’s environmental policies, which are already the most aggressive in the nation. Following the line prevailing among those who insist that carbon emissions contribute to climate change and global warming, Brown maintains that strict regulations are necessary to prevent such environmental calamities — a theory that has been disputed by many scientists.
“California can make a significant contribution to advancing the cause of dealing with climate change, irrespective of what goes on in Washington,” said Brown in the Times interview. “I wouldn’t underestimate California’s resolve if everything moves in this extreme climate denial direction. Yes, we will take action.”
“Climate denial” is a term coined by supporters of the theory that climate change and so-called global warming are anthropogenic (caused by human activity) to dismiss those — including many respected environmental scientists — who have offered evidence to the contrary.
During the interview, Brown described Trump’s election as a setback for the climate movement, but predicted that it would be a temporary setback.
“In a paradoxical way, it could speed up the efforts of leaders in the world to take climate change seriously,” he said. “The shock of official congressional and presidential denial will reverberate through the world.”
Brown is not the first governor of California to buy into the global warming theory and to impose strict regulations on the state’s industrial segment. His predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed Executive Order S-3-05 in June 2005 that set so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets for California as follows: by 2010, reduce GHG emissions to 2000 levels; by 2020, reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels; and by 2050, reduce GHG emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels.
Brown followed up by signing Executive Order B-30-15 in April 2015, adding the intermediate target of reducing GHG emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
Even the Times, which might be expected to be supportive of Brown’s liberal agenda, pointed out the pitfalls of the path the Golden State has taken, observing:
The environmental effort poses decided
risks for this state. For one thing, Mr. Trump and Republicans have the
power to undercut California’s climate policies. The Trump
administration could reduce funds for the state’s vast research
community — including two national laboratories — which has contributed a
great deal to climate science and energy innovation, or effectively
nullify state regulations on clean air emissions and automobile fuel
standards.
“They could basically stop enforcement of
the Clean Air Act and CO2 emissions,” said Hal Harvey, president of
Energy Innovation, a policy research group in San Francisco. “That would
affect California because it would constrain markets. It would make
them fight political and legal battles rather than scientific and
technological ones.”
The Times also quoted a statement from Rob Lapsley, the
president of the California Business Roundtable, who warned that
California’s aggressive regulatory agenda would make it difficult for
the state to attract companies that might prefer to locate to states
that are more business friendly. Said Lapsley:
If the other states pursue
no-climate-change policies, and we continue to go it on our own with our
climate change policies, then we would be at a competitive disadvantage
for either relocating companies or growing companies here, particularly
manufacturing factories.
Considering the dire economic consequences of imposing strict carbon
emissions regulations on industry, it would seem prudent before putting
them into effect to first weigh both their environmental and economic
consequences to determine if they are necessary, or even desirable. As The New American’s
writers have pointed out in numerous articles over the past several
years, there is no unanimous consensus on climate change and global
warming among the scientific community. Those articles have quoted many
respected scientists offering evidence that not only are periods of
global warming more likely to be the result of natural cyclical changes
than human (anthropogenic) activity, but that the warming process has
reversed itself and our Earth may actually have entered a cooling
period!As we noted in a recent article, climate blogger Tony Heller reported on November 13 that over the last eight months, global temperatures over land have cooled a record 1.2°C. Heller’s findings were charted on a graph posted on the website realclimatescience.com. Heller was one of the speakers at the ninth International Conference on Climate Change held on July 9, 2014 in Las Vegas, delivering a talk titled “The Emperor’s New Climate.”
While this latest report may come as a surprise to many people, longtime readers of The New American will not be among them. In an article published by this magazine in 2013, foreign correspondent Alex Newman observed:
So-called global-warming alarmists are in
a frenzy after the latest climate data confirmed the Earth actually
appears to be entering a potential cooling trend, sea-ice cover in
Antarctica is growing to record levels, tornadoes and hurricanes are at
record lows, and more.
While we could cite dozens of articles debunking both the theory that
carbon emissions generated by humans are causing global warming, and
the propaganda asserting that there is a consensus among scientists
supporting that theory, space allows only one more reference. That is an
article posted today titled: “Biggest Fake News Story: Global Warming and Phony Consensus.” The report cites a recent article in The Atlantic
asking: “Are Climate Scientists Ready for Trump?” The article's writer,
Robinson Meyer, posed several questions, including, “How should climate
scientists react to a president-elect who calls global warming a
‘hoax'? How much should they prepare for his administration? And should
they prepare for the worst?”In The Atlantic article, Meyer notes that on the first day of the recent American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco, the thousands of assembled scientists heard from Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes, the politically motivated ideologue who is most responsible for perpetrating the “scientific consensus” fraud regarding anthropogenic (human caused) global warming, or AGW.
The New American’s Alex Newman pointed out that this magazine has repeatedly reported on the fraudulent methodology used by Oreskes and Australian global warming activist John Cook to arrive at their unsubstantiated claims of near-unanimous consensus for their global warming theory. The article notes that Prof. Richard S. J. Tol and Dr. Benny Peiser are but two of the experts who have exposed Oreskes and Cook, showing that only one percent of climate research papers — not 97 percent — support the “consensus” view claimed by the AGW alarmists. (See here, here, and here.)
The article continues:
However, no amount of debunking, and no
amount of evidence, will change the “crisis” mindset that grips many of
the media commentators. CNN’s Chris Cuomo is a prime example of the
arrogance of ignorance among the committed AGW media meisters. In a combative “interview”
on December 12, CNN’s Chris Cuomo went after Trump adviser Anthony
Scaramucci, repeatedly citing the false claim that the science is
settled and that “science” has declared we must accept vast new global
governance and controls to avert planetary catastrophe.
Since the AGW is a major source of global warming disinformation,
Newman offers this advice to the incoming Trump administration: “The new
administration must move quickly and decisively to dismantle and defund
the huge federally-funded AGW lobby and withdraw all U.S. support for
the UN’s destructive Paris Agreement, which President Obama has illegally tried to bind the United States to through executive agreement.”Biggest Fake News Story: Global Warming and Phony Consensus
Former Climate Chairman Calls Out Inaccuracies of Data and Models
Education Author Exposes Environmentalist Movement’s Agenda
Princeton Physics Professor Discredits Anthropogenic Climate Change Theory
Climate Scare Over: Top Experts Expose Scam at Freedom Confab
Media Blasted for “Fake News” on Trump's Climate Stance
With Obama Out, Communist China Takes Lead on UN “Climate” Scam
Skeptic to UN Climate Conference: Global Warming Is Bunk
Greenies, Lefties Protest Dakota Access Pipeline With Violence
Climate-change Report: Record Global COOLING Over Last Eight Months
Earth Is Cooling, Sea Levels Not Rising, Scientists Say
Establishment Boasts Its Paris Climate Agreement Now a Done Deal
Multiple Studies Refute Claims of Rising Seas Due to Global Warming
Documentary “Climate Hustle” Exposes Global-warming Con Job
Climate-change Computer Models Fail Again — and Again, and Again
