Dakota Access Pipeline: Mob rule or Legitimate Protest?

The Protests Over the Dakota Access Pipeline Explained

What you are seeing in the news and in the print media is an example of mob rule and not what it appears to be. Anti-fracking activists are using the public’s misunderstandings of the Dakota Access Pipeline to paint the multi-state project as a blight against American Indians and the environment. But some details about the hotly contested project might dispel some of those misconceptions.

Protesters and members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe have relentlessly blasted the $3.8 billion pipeline, arguing the DAPL’s construction would trample on tribal lands and destroy ancient tribal artifacts. They also argue it could potentially poison waterways, including rivers such as the Missouri River and Lake Oahe.

Here are a few pieces of information to keep in mind when considering what to make of the pipeline’s construction.

The Tribe Never Took Part In The Initial Consulting Process

The Army Corps of Engineers attempted more than a dozen times between 2014 and 2016, according to court documents, to discuss the DAPL route with the Standing Rock. The tribe either failed to respond to requests for consultation or dragged its feet during the process. The Corps sent a letter to the tribe in October of 2014 with information about the proposed pipeline routes as well as maps documenting the known cultural sites the Corps had identified.

“In addition, the letter requested that any party interested in consulting on the matter reply within thirty days,” the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in August. “No response was received from the Tribe.”

The head of the North Dakota Public Service Commission mirrored the judge’s decision earlier, telling reporters that the tribe had plenty of time to voice concerns before the pipeline’s construction.

Julie Fedorchak, who serves as the chairman of the commission, told National Public Radio in an interview Wednesday that Standing Rock Sioux did not participate in the nearly 30 hours of meetings held to determine the pipeline’s southern route.

The tribe’s decision to drag its feet on the issue is odd considering it usually does engage with the commission on other issues, Fedorchak added. It’s also strange based on the sheer amount of angst the project has received in recent months.

The DAPL Runs Parallel to An Already Existing Pipeline 

The DAPL runs parallel to an already existing pipeline built back in 1982 called the Northern Border Pipeline, which already runs through the areas currently being disputed by Standing Rock.

The Northern Border line never received any protests or complaints from demonstrators associated with Standing Rock, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Environmental Impact Statement for the pipeline.

The Government Rerouted DAPL Several Times To Avoid Tribal Lands

Cultural surveys conducted prior to the pipeline receiving the approval show 91 of the 149 eligible sites contained stone features considered sacred American Indian tribes.

The pipeline, which is expected to shuttle more than 500,000 barrels of Bakken oil from North Dakota to Illinois, was rerouted and modified to avoid all 91 of those areas, and all but nine of the other potentially eligible sites.

The modifications convinced the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to deny a motion for a preliminary injunction in September by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, citing the inability of the tribe to show how the pipeline would damage the group’s sacred ground.

The Pipeline Does Not Cut Through Standing Rock’s Reservation 

The DAPL route does not cut through Standing Rock’s reservation — in fact, the entire area is privately owned, meaning the route is located several miles North of the tribe’s ancestral land.

One of the prevailing lies: “This demolition is devastating,” Standing Rock Chairman David Archambault II told reporters in October. “These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced. In one day, our sacred land has been turned into hollow ground.”

The Pipeline Was Moved Over Environmental Concerns

Energy Transfer Partners moved the project South near the Standing Rock reservation because it was 11 miles shorter and considered less damaging to the environment, according to a report the Army Corps of Engineers. The new pipeline also cost $23 million less than the initial route.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers evaluated the Bismarck route, eventually concluding it was not a viable option because of the project’s close proximity to the capital’s municipal water supply wells. The department also determined the northern route would have made it difficult to stay 500 or more feet away from homes, a policy required in North Dakota.

Army Corps of Engineers, in fact, would later deem the new pipeline route crossing Lake Ohae safe in an environmental assessment, arguing that the ETP has “developed response and action plans, and will include several monitoring systems, shut-off valves, and other safety features to minimize the risk of spills and reduce…any potential damages.”

Eminent Domain Was Never Used On The North Dakota Route 

Energy Transfer Partners relied on voluntary easements, which are non-possessory rights to use the property of a landowner without owning the land itself, to construct the pipeline’s southern route near Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation. Much of the land that protesters are occupying during their demonstrations is private property owned by farmers.

Still, federal officials are refusing to evict those hunkered down at makeshift campsites along the DAPL route. Officials believe booting the protesters would harm free speech rights, despite the fact that the land is privately owned.

Here we are with intentional misleading coverage about what should be a non-issue. Yet, a mob has encroached on private property because they are not getting their way. All based on bogus claims.

God and Man Made Global Warming

God and Man Made Global Warming

The Cultural Mandate

By Gary North

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (Gen. 1:28).

Inescapably, the first chapter of Genesis involves us in the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. God, as the creator of all things, must be honored by the entire creation as Lord over all (Isaiah 45:23; Philippians 2:10). But honoring God as creator obviously requires a full acknowledgment of His law-order. Should any Christian deny his responsibility and position in God's plan of creation and history, he stands as a rebel.

There are at least three fundamental economic issues contained in Gen. 1:28: the calling, the question of natural law, and the concept of development.

The Calling

Adam was given tasks to perform in the garden even before Eve was provided as his helper (2:15, 19, 20). Man is therefore not to be defined apart from his calling before God. Even as God "labored" to create the universe, and "rested" the seventh day (obviously, He was not exhausted), so is man, as God's image-bearer, to labor and to rest. God, as self-contained and self-defined, can be defined apart from His creation, but man, as a created being who must serve God in all his affairs, is not self-existent and self-defined. Man is God's vice-regent on earth, a subordinate official, a worker who is to implement God's sovereign rule on earth and in time. Labor is not something added to man as an afterthought; only the curse on labor, as a result of man's rebellion, is a new factor (3:17-19).

Natural Law

Present-day ecological romantics, like Rousseau and nineteenth-century Romantics before them, long for a world which is free from the effects of man the destroyer. In this they are agreed with Christians, for, we assert that the whole creation groans to be delivered from "the bondage of corruption" (Romans 8:21). But Christians "are saved by hope" (Romans 8:24), a hope in God's redemption, not in hope of some return to a "natural" paradise. Man is indeed a destroyer, an ethical rebel who seeks release from God's created law-order. But "man the destroyer" is not the result of "man the controller"; he is the product of "man the ethical rebel." It is not man's dominion over the earth that is illegitimate, but rather man's attempt to dominate the earth apart from God's control over man. Yet the only foundation of man's claim of limited, derivative sovereignty is an acknowledgment of God's ultimate sovereignty. Captains who rebel against generals can expect their corporals to be insubordinate. Our polluted world is rebelling against our lawless, rebellious rulership, not against rulership as such.

The assumption of the ecological romantics is that nature is guided by its own autonomous laws. Man must conform to these hypothetically impersonal laws of nature. Man is therefore to be under nature, dominated by nature, the servant of nature. Nature--the creation--is sovereign in this scheme, not God's decree, a decree which involves personal responsibility of men before God to rule over His creation. This is why the call for a "return to the laws of nature" is ultimately secular and satanic. It is a denial of man's legitimate subordinate sovereignty and hence a denial of God's legitimate absolute sovereignty.

Development

The language of growth is an obscenity inside many ecological circles. If growth is seen as unlimited and costless, it is illegitimate, since the creation was clearly limited even before the fall of man. But this is not to argue that nature is static or was ever meant to be static. Nature as it existed on the fifth day of creation was incomplete; it was "good" as far as it went, but God was yet to add His vice-regent, man, to the order of creation. God created man to subdue nature, develop its full potentialities, and bring forth its fruits more abundantly. Adam was to dress the garden and name (classify) the animals. Such classification was no antiquarian exercise; it was presumably the first step in his overall task of dominion. Selective pruning of the garden and careful selective breeding of the animals were involved. Man is to be an ecologist, but one enforcing God's laws over nature, some of them revealed by God to men by special revelation (such as resting the land every seventh year).

The language of the status quo in nature is ridiculous. Neither man nor nature can escape God's historical decree. History is linear, not circular. The so-called "balance of nature" is not one of eternal repetition, but of development and change. The pruning, calculating dresser of the garden is basic to God's decree. Man is to direct the development of nature, not sit idly on the sidelines, letting it degenerate. Nature is not autonomous; without man it is incomplete. To deny development under man's rule is to affirm the laws of impersonal, autonomous evolution, the rule of "tooth and claw."

Ultimately, it is never a question of development or no development. It is a question of which kind of development. There is no escape from linear history. Either we affirm the cultural mandate, with godly men directing the creation as obedient servants of God, or else a hypothetically autonomous, godless nature controls man's development, thereby thwarting the historical decrees of God. Deny the cultural mandate and you will find yourself clinging to the cosmology of Charles Darwin.

Trees are environment’s best friend

Trees are environment’s best friend

The beginning of the 21st century has brought a lot of attention to climate change. With all the concern over this could-be environmental condition, I have wondered why the Environmental Protection Agency and the nursery industry have not put more emphasis on planting more trees everywhere.

All living plants take in greenhouse gas (co2) and change it into oxygen. Trees give our environment the biggest bang for our buck because of their ever increasing size and the amount each tree consumes of co2.

This is the balance that nature intended and how living plants and man need each other to exist. Someday I might hear the environmentalists and nursery industry explain the lack of public awareness of this fact.

In the meantime, I want to tell you about some great shade trees that grow well and also supply good fall color.

Additional benefits include shade to keep our home cooler in the summer and then dropping those leaves in the fall to let the winter sun help heat the home. Trees also are dirt blockers trapping dirt particles on their leaf surface until rain washes it to the ground below. Trees in leaf also absorb surrounding noise, keeping our home more peaceful. Let’s start with the maple family, a family of trees that grow quite well here in the tri-state.

Maple Autumn Blaze - A great red maple with beautiful red fall color. Relatively fast growing. Average mature size is 40-feet tall and 20-feet wide.

Maple Fall Fiesta – The most colorful and the fastest growing ofthe sugar maple family. Large dark green leaves that turn orange/red in the fall. Average mature size is 40feet tall and 30-feet wide.

Red Oak –The red oak is the best oak tree to plant in the tristate. Unlike it’s cousin the pin oak which is in the red oak family, the red oak turns a beautiful shade of scarlet and this tree drops all of its leaves in the fall.

Average mature size is 50-feet tall and 25-feet wide.

Zelkova Green Vase – Vaseshaped with upright arching branches. Orange to bronze-red fall color. Fast growing to average size of 50-feet tall and 25 feet wide. Leaves are similar to American Elm.

Taxodium Common Bald Cypress – A stately tree that looks like an evergreen during the growing season. It is actually one of three deciduous conifers. Small cones mature in fall. Pyramidal growing, fast growing beautiful tree grows 40-50-feettall and 15-18-feet wide.

Ginkgo Autumn Gold –This is a male ginkgo bearing no fruit. A handsome symmetrical conical form with a beautiful shape growing 50-feet tall and 25-feet wide. Great gold fall color with all the leaves falling in just 24-36 hours in late fall. Pest free as history has it is the only tree to survive the great fire of China.

Linden Greenspire –Maintains a single leader with a nice branching habit. This little leaf linden is about care free as any tree. Grows to 40feet tall with a beautiful rounded shape growing to 20-feet wide. Does well in difficult planting areas.

There are many other great varieties of flowering trees to consider as well, especially if the planting space is limited.

A final tip when planting any tree, please remember that with balled and burlap trees, you don’t want to plant or have planted any tree with a trunk larger than 2 1 ⁄2-inches caliper measured 6 inches from the ground.

Larger balled and burlap trees have 50 to 75 percent of their roots left in the nursery when dug and those trees will not grow for several seasons until the cut roots start to regrow enough to take in more moisture for the top of the tree. In fact, the same tree with a 2-inch trunk caliper will outgrow the larger one in just a few years and cost a lot less topurchase and plant.

Denny McKeown is owner of Bloomin’ Garden Centre 

Don’t join panic, just pay attention

Don’t join panic, just pay attention

By Daniel W. Nebert is professor emeritus in the Department of Environmental Health at Cincinnati College of Medicine.

The media constantly strive to increase newspaper and magazine circulation and the number of radio listeners and television, online and podcast viewers. One effective way to achieve this goal is to exploit the theme: “Should I worry?”

For example, after World War II was the “flying saucer scare.” Worry about an invasion from outer space certainly sold more newspapers and magazines and increased television news-watching. This concern also led to the government-funded program Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

In the 1940s and ’50s, some were convinced that fluoridation of drinking water was a “communist conspiracy.” Fear-mongering has remained sufficiently strong even today in some communities so that fluoride is still not added to city water supplies –despite medically-proven benefits that children drinking fluoridated water have fewer dental cavities due to strengthened enamel.

In the late 1940s began the fright of “nuclear winter,” promoted by Carl Sagan and others. Explosions of multiple nuclear bombs, causing numerous city-firestorms and excessive atmospheric soot, might block sunlight and lead to climate cooling.

In the 1960s came “zero population growth,” endorsed by Paul Ehrlich and others. By 2000, if Earth’s population continued to increase, the planetary food supply was predicted to become depleted. Some followers of this political movement actually decided on having fewer children because of this fear.

Between 1950 and 1970, cooler weather prevailed in the U.S. and Europe, compared with the 1930s ’40s. “Global cooling” became a concern. Major articles in Time (1974) and Newsweek (1975) magazines proposed that Earth might be entering a new Ice Age. Yet, by 1978, the cooling trend of 1945-75 had disappeared.

In 1975, Wallace Broecker, geochemist at Columbia University, was credited with first using the term global warming, in a Science journal article. In 1988 the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its first meeting, which marked the beginning of global warming hysteria. Satellite measurements of extremely accurate worldwide surface temperatures began in late 1978, which did show warming of several tenths of a degree, until 1997 – this coincided with the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC for “creating awareness of global warming.”

For the past 18 years, however, no further statistically significant increases in global surface temperatures have occurred – while fearmongering of “rising carbon dioxide levels” and “climate change” has continued to this day as a political agenda in the media. Wind and solar power, heavily subsidized by governmental funds because they are not otherwise cost-effective, have been championed by environmentalists.

Then came the “Y2K Bug,” fear that all computers worldwide would simultaneously crash, when changing from Dec. 31, 1999, to Jan. 1, 2000. The “computer glitch that scared the world” never materialized.

There are other topics of concern. Childhood vaccinations causing autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) or attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Consumption of commercially- prepared food, or food containing preservatives, rather than “organic” foods, resulting in cancer. Exposure to genetically modified foodstuff causing cancer. All of the above, and many other things, are proposed to be responsible for dramatic increases in childhood ASD, ADHD, asthma and obesity seen today in Western societies.

On a daily basis in the media, each of us is free to choose: “Should I worry?” or “Should I ignore all the hype?”

Perhaps being aware of these issues is acceptable. Being consumed with panic over these issues is not healthy.

Once more with feeling: Gas tax?

Once more with feeling: Gas tax?

by Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — For 32 years I’ve been advocating a major tax on petroleum. I’ve got as much chance this time around as did Don Quixote with windmills. But I shall tilt my lance once more.

The only time you can even think of proposing a gas tax increase is when oil prices are at rock bottom. When I last suggested the idea six years ago, oil was selling at $40 a barrel. It eventually rose back to $110. It’s now around $48. Correspondingly, the price at the pump has fallen in the last three months by more than a dollar to about $2.20 per gallon.

As a result, some in Congress are talking about a 10- or 20-cent hike in the federal tax to use for infrastructure spending. Right idea, wrong policy. The hike should not be 10 cents but $1. And the proceeds should not be spent by, or even entrusted to, the government. They should be immediately and entirely returned to the consumer by means of a cut in the Social Security tax.

The average American buys about 12 gallons of gas a week. Washington would be soaking him for $12 in extra taxes. Washington should therefore simultaneously reduce everyone’s FICA tax by $12 a week. Thus the average driver is left harmless. He receives a $12 per week FICA bonus that he can spend on gasoline if he wants – or anything else. If he chooses to drive less, it puts money in his pocket. (The unemployed would have the $12 added to their unemployment insurance; the elderly, added to their Social Security check.) The point of the $1 gas tax increase is not to feed the maw of a government raking in $3 trillion a year. The point is exclusively to alter incentives – to reduce the disincentive for work (the Social Security tax) and to increase the disincentive to consume gasoline.

It’s win-win. Employment taxes are a drag on job creation. Reducing them not only promotes growth but advances fairness, FICA being a regressive tax that hits the middle and working classes far more than the rich.

As for oil, we remain the world champion consumer. We burn more than 20 percent of global output, almost twice as much as the next nearest gas guzzler, China.

A $1 gas tax increase would constrain oil consumption in two ways. In the short run, by curbing driving. In the long run, by altering car-buying habits. A return to gas-guzzling land yachts occurs every time gasoline prices plunge. A high gas tax encourages demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Constrained U.S. consumption – combined with already huge increases in U.S. production – would continue to apply enormous downward pressure on oil prices.

A tax is the best way to improve fuel efficiency. Today we do it through rigid regulations, the so-called CAFE standards imposed on carmakers. They are forced to manufacture acres of unsellable cars in order to meet an arbitrary, bureaucratic “fleet” gas-consumption average.

This is nuts. If you simply set a higher price point for gasoline, buyers will do the sorting on their own, choosing fuel efficiency just as they do when the world price is high. The beauty of the tax – as a substitute for a high world price – is that the incentive for fuel efficiency remains, but the extra money collected at the pump goes right back into the U.S. economy (and to the citizenry through the revenue-neutral FICA rebate) instead of being shipped overseas to Russia, Venezuela, Iran and other unsavories.

Which is a geopolitical coup. Cheap oil is the most effective and efficient instrument known to man for weakening these oil-dependent miscreants.

And finally, lower consumption reduces pollution and greenhouse gases. The reduction of traditional pollutants, though relatively minor, is an undeniable gain. And even for global warming skeptics, there’s no reason not to welcome a benign measure that induces prudential reductions in CO2 emissions.

The unexpected and unpredicted collapse of oil prices gives us a unique opportunity to maintain our good luck through a simple, revenueneutral measure to help prevent the perennial price spikes that follow the fool’s paradise of ultra-cheap oil.

We’ve blown this chance at least three times since the 1980s. As former French Foreign Minister Jean Francois-Poncet said a quarter-century ago, “It’s hard to take seriously that a nation has deep problems if they can be fixed with a 50-cent-a-gallon” – 90 cents in today’s money – “gasoline tax.” Let’s not blow it again.

What Ebola outbreak would look like in U.S.

What Ebola outbreak would look like in U.S.

By Leo Hohmann

According to a senior health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the world has no strategic plan to contain the worst Ebola outbreak in history while scientists are saying an outbreak on U.S. soil would require sweeping measures.

Total quarantine of cities or sections of infected cities and restrictions on air travel could be expected.

“We’re now in a perfect storm,” Laurie Garrett said in a CFR conference call Thursday in which she described the United Nations World Health Organization as “bankrupt” and drowning in debt. “There is no strategic plan for how this epidemic will be brought under control.”

The same term, “perfect storm,” was also used to describe the Ebola outbreak Thursday by the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Tom Frieden, in testimony before Congress.

If the statements are true, each nation must come up with its own plan to protect its people.

In the United States, that job falls to the CDC in Atlanta. As Frieden testified Thursday, the CDC raised its emergency operations center to Level 1, the highest possible alert in an effort to better coordinate a CDC-organized surge of health professionals and equipment being rushed to West Africa in an effort to contain the Ebola outbreak.

Nearly 900 people have died of Ebola in four west African countries since February.

Frieden also told Congress that it’s “inevitable” that someone with Ebola will get on a plane and fly to the United States, risking an outbreak here.

If, or when, Ebola does show up in the United States, the only way to combat the virus is through strict quarantines, said Dr. Arthur Robinson, a biochemist with Oregon-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness.

“I don’t want to contribute to scaring everybody but at the same time, you’re dealing with total quarantine,” Robinson said. “You might have to quarantine entire small cities. Hopefully that doesn’t happen but it could.”

Robinson, who stresses that he has no inside knowledge of the government’s plans other than what he’s already seen play out, says he doubts the United States would be adequately prepared for a major outbreak of Ebola on its soil.

“I’ve spoken to people who are experts on African diseases and they are not very sanguine about CDC’s ability to deal with things like this,” Robinson said. “Their experience in dealing with bacterial warfare is almost zero, but that’s almost what you have here.

“We know almost nothing, this is a world we’ve barely scratched the surface in,” he continued. “We are probably not prepared. We have nothing that stops a virus other than quarantine and hoping it dies out. It has its own DNA, a code that is also able to penetrate a living cell. The virus takes over the living cell. The cell pops and then those viruses infect other cells. But by itself it is inert. It has the DNA but it does not have the machinery to reproduce itself without a living cell (as its host).”

Ebola is spread through contact with bodily fluids such as blood, sweat, vomit or feces. The symptoms include nausea, vomiting, high fever and diarrhea and there is no known cure. The death rate of the strain now infecting people is about 70 percent. The disease has up to a 21-day incubation period and the virus can live outside of an infected person’s body for hours, possibly days. As a viral hemorrhagic fever, it is one of nine diseases which the federal government has the authority to forcibly quarantine.

A living victim of Ebola “is alive with viruses and their cells are making more virus-infected cells at a tremendous rate,” Robinson said. “If you have contact with the bodily fluids of that person you’re getting a big dose. You get little tiny assaults with viruses all the time and your body is able to overcome them but once it’s in the body it’s a huge dose. People rubbing their eyes or putting their hands in their mouth, it breaks out. And a person infected is just a huge reservoir of the virus and cells that are supporting that virus.”

The very nature of a virus makes it hard to combat without a vaccine and Robinson pointed to the polio virus as an example. “The thing that worries me is this is a virus and viruses are notoriously hard to combat, very difficult to beat because they are not alive most of the time,” said Robinson. “It does not live by itself, but it uses the living thing in which it is embedded to wake up and do its damage. There are viruses all over the place, we live in a sea of viruses, but when one wakes up you’re in a lot of trouble.”

According to a CDC statement released Wednesday, U.S. hospitals can safely manage patients with Ebola. “The key factors are isolation of patients, diligent environmental cleaning and disinfection, and protection of healthcare providers,” the statement said. “Providers in U.S. hospitals should wear gloves, fluid resistant/impermeable gown, and eye protection. In certain situations involving copious body fluids, additional equipment may be needed (for example, double gloving, disposable shoe coverings, and leg coverings).”

The CDC has 20 known quarantine stations throughout the U.S. but it is not known if those would be adequate to contain a full outbreak. A CDC press officer told WND she would have someone “get back with you” Thursday on this issue but no one from the agency followed up.

And other questions abound: Would there be enough testing sites, testing labs and hospitals capable of handling an outbreak? Screening stations would likely be set up at all international airports. For more details on how an Ebola outbreak might affect the United States, see this White House document drafted by the Clinton administration during a less severe Ebola scare in Africa.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced in July it was issuing $840 million to upgrade the emergency preparedness of state and local medical facilities.

But Dr. Jane Orient, M.D., a practicing physician in Tuscon, Arizona, and member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, wonders if it will be too little, too late.

“The fear is they would put people suspected of being infected, but who are actually healthy, in with people who do have the virus, so the threat is you would get it once you’re in quarantine (even if healthy to begin with),” Orient said.

She said the more sensible strategy would be to quarantine people in their homes.

“That is what was done with my grandfather’s generation, and then the family members can take their precautions and watch their symptoms,” Orient said.

She said recent articles about Obama’s executive order giving him authority to quarantine sick people and those suspected of being sick “is really nothing new.”

The U.S. has used governmental quarantine powers dating back to 1878.

“We always have to be worried about government overreacting and quarantining healthy people with sick people and people quarantining themselves and not going to work,” Orient said. “The situation is always going to be exacerbated if the population thinks their government is not telling them the truth, or is covering up.”

She said the vast majority of citizens living under the old Soviet Union believed in UFOs “and the reason they did was because the government said UFOs didn’t exist and the government must be lying like it always does. So the risk is that even if the government is telling the truth, for a change, the people just won’t believe it.”

Orient said there is no evidence the Ebola virus can be spread by airborne germs such as a sneeze, but nor is there any proof that it can’t, “so maybe we’ll find out late in the game.”

She said body fluids such as sweat or saliva could be found on any city surface.

“I don’t know (about Ebola) but some viruses can live for a couple weeks, and then the question arises, is it possible Ebola could develop air-born mutation,” Orient said. “So I would say, don’t panic, but people need to be aware this is a possibility. Unfortunately it starts off like a bad case of the flu.”

She said the CDC has put out communications that the disease can only be spread by direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, “but that looks so contradictory to the way they transported these two patients to Atlanta, with extreme caution. When people in space suits are telling you ‘oh don’t worry, there’s no danger of this spreading,’ they have no credibility.”

Frieden, meanwhile, continues to try to tamp down any concerns. He exuded confidence that everything is under control in his latest press release, issued on Wednesday.

“The bottom line with Ebola is we know how to stop it: traditional public health. Find patients, isolate and care for them; find their contacts; educate people; and strictly follow infection control in hospitals. Do those things with meticulous care and Ebola goes away,” Frieden said the release. “To keep America safe, health care workers should isolate and evaluate people who have returned from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in the past 21 days and have fever or other symptoms suggestive of Ebola. We will save lives in West Africa and protect ourselves at home by stopping Ebola at the source.”

Robinson is less cheery about the CDC’s capabilities. He said there is no denying the fact that there are some cultural practices in west Africa that help the disease spread that are not present in American culture. That’s the good news.

“A person dies in Africa and the culture of poverty helps a disease like this spread because they don’t bury their dead right away, they don’t take certain precautions,” he said. “But if it appears in the U.S., if we get a couple of cases I think people would be looking for places to hide. These things are not trivial. We’ve just scratched the surface there’s so much we don’t know about these diseases.”

Death Valley Sets New Temperature Record — for Coolness

Death Valley Sets New Temperature Record — for Coolness

Death Valley, Calif., which holds the world record for the highest temperature ever recorded, hit a high of just 89 degrees on Sunday, Aug. 3 — the coolest high temperature on record for the date.

Climate Depot, a website skeptical of manmade global warming claims, linked to an article in The Washington Post disclosing that the Death Valley temperature was 15 degrees lower than the previous record of 104 degrees set in 1945.

The Aug. 3 reading was just the eighth time that a high in the 80s has been recorded in Death Valley on any date in July or August. Weather records have been kept there since 1911.

Among the locations that were hotter than Death Valley on Aug. 3 were Boise, Idaho (99 degrees), Spokane, Wash. (93), Casper, Wyo. (92), and Missoula, Mont. (91), the Post reported.

The average August high in Death Valley is 115 degrees, 26 degrees higher than the Aug. 3 temperature.

Death Valley is the site of the lowest elevation in North America, 282 feet below sea level. It set the world's hottest temperature record of 134 degrees on July 10, 1913.

The relatively cool temperature on Aug. 3 resulted from extensive cloud cover that blocked out much of the area's usual intense sunshine.

Climate Depot also linked to a NewsBusters article citing some "ridiculous" claims from global warming alarmists about what climate change has done or threatens to do in the future:

• July 2014 articles in several British newspapers suggested that redheads could be "extinct" in Scotland as the weather there warms.

• A media source in Britain said some "experts" believed an increase in UFO sightings in the U.K. in 2008 could be linked to global warming because extraterrestrials are concerned about what man is doing to the planet.

• In 2007, a scientist in Germany claimed global warming would make the earth spin faster on its axis due to a shift of water from the equator to the poles.

• An Australian publication asserted in 2009 that global warming could endanger Italy's pasta production by destroying the country's durum wheat crops.

Climate Change and Captain Kirk

Climate Change and Captain Kirk

by Robert P. Murphy

For some time now I’ve been trying to convey just how ludicrous it is that the US government’s anti-carbon policies are based on computer simulations of the global economic/climate system through the year 2300. A recent piece by David Kreutzer and Kevin Dayaratna (an economist and computer programmer, respectively, at the Heritage Foundation) is the best I’ve yet seen:

When you switch on the kitchen light tonight, how will it affect Captain James T. Kirk and the intrepid crew of the Starship Enterprise?

Captain Kirk is a fictional character, of course, but the question — thanks to the EPA — is all too real. The agency calls it the “Social Cost of Carbon.” In the SCC they claim to have an estimate, measured in dollars per ton of CO2, for all the damage that your free-and-easy light-switching today will impose on the world from now until the year 2300, at which point Captain Kirk would be 77. To save Kirk and the rest of future Earth from a panoply of speculative, incremental horrors, the EPA has plans to nudge your carbony little fingers away from that switch and many others.

The two authors then go on to describe their results when they tweak 2 of the 3 computer models that the Obama Administration’s Working Group used to calculate the “social cost of carbon”:

Like the EPA, we ran the DICE model (created by William Nordhaus) and the FUND model (by Richard Tol). But we used more recent peer-reviewed estimates of CO2′s impact on world temperature (here and here), and we ran the models using a 7 percent discount rate (that is, the rate at which we value short-term effects over long-term effects), as stipulated by the OMB and curiously ignored by the EPA, which used 2.5 percent, 3 percent, and 5 percent.

The simple substitution of the discount rate drops the SCC estimate by more than 80 percent in the DICE model and pushes it to zero or even negative for the FUND model. (Here it might be appropriate to observe a moment of sympathetic silence for Richard Tol, a lead and convening IPCC author, who was recently excoriated by his former brethren for publicly stating the painfully obvious: Some impacts of warming are good.)

Updating the estimates of CO2′s impact on temperatures drops the SCC estimates by 40 to 80 percent. When the 7 percent discount rate is used in conjunction with the updated CO2 impacts, the FUND model indicates a better-than-even chance the SCC is negative.

That is, using more up-to-date numbers renders a range of estimates so broad that it is not clear whether CO2 emissions should be restricted or subsidized. Are these changes debatable? Absolutely. Is the debate on these topics over? Absolutely not. We cannot calculate how today’s trip to the grocery will harm humanity in three centuries. Nevertheless, the EPA is forging ahead with regulations employing a SCC of about $40 per ton for the near term.

Incidentally, I haven’t personally vetted their computer runs, but their results are consistent with my own simulations run on the DICE model when I tweaked it for a paper in The Independent Review. And as I explained in my Senate testimony last summer, the FUND model does indeed show “positive externalities” of global warming for modest warming, which means that the use of a high enough discount rate would render a prima facie case for subsidizing carbon dioxide emissions.

Of course, we aren’t seriously proposing government subsidies on the grounds that CO2 emissions confer “social benefits” that aren’t being fully internalized by the emitters. The point is that even taking the Administration’s case on its own terms, it’s not even clear that CO2 emissions are a bad thing. And to repeat, we’re not inventing “the Heritage Foundation computer model.” Rather, we are running 2 of the 3 computer models that the Obama Administration team used to come up with these figures for federal agencies.

Last point: You might wonder why they (and I) didn’t try peeking under the hood of the third model, the so-called PAGE model. The answer is that it’s proprietary, and the creator (Chris Hope) doesn’t make the code publicly available. (If you email him, he gives conditions under which you can use it, which involves paying him for a pretty expensive training session.) That’s of course his prerogative–and I mean that sincerely, I don’t expect him to volunteer his time or post his proprietary code for the world to download–but it makes it impossible for outside researchers to vet the government’s reported figures when one of the computer models involved is inaccessible. One would think that when federal officials selected the representative computer models to use when estimating the “social cost of carbon,” they would pick models that are publicly available.