EPA Grants Frozen, Employees Muzzled

[KeithE]

[Haruo]

Suspend it but don't take it back. You may well need it again soon.

[William Thornton]

Hooey.

Fake news and hair on fire mode.

Feel sure the new administration will be in a perpetual battle with the mandarin class.

[Dave Roberts]

Sadly, the Trump supporters are quickly learning that they are not receiving what they thought. The state of West Virginia went strongly for Trump, but they are finding that their benefits from the Black Lung Fund and the benefits for disabled miners under the ACA.

[KeithE]

[KeithE]

[William Thornton]

Mandarin class = bureaucrats

Trump should doggone well try and get control... Especially the EPA. De

[Haruo]

Haven't heard from Flick, I'm guessing he's happy.

[KeithE]

[William Thornton]

Best I can see, any level of fake news, nonsense conspiracies, and the like are moving full speed here on this blog. The silly notion of restrictions on free speech is just folderol. Vent away though...no law against that.

[Haruo]

Although formal restrictions on free speech are probably a ways off, the old PC has been in many quarters replaced by a new PC, where e.g. it is verboten (ein gutes Wort, nich) to speak Spanish. Naturally this gets my dander up in ways restrictions on the use of words like "squaw" just can't compete with.

[David Flick]

[David Flick]

[David Flick]

[KeithE]

[ET]

As one of Obama's last regulatory tidbits was from the EPA and essentially will, within a couple of years, regulate things as trivial as 3-way light bulbs out of existence along with others styles previously exempt, the more Trump can lock down the EPA bureaucratic idiocy the better. There's just too many bureaucrats with too much time on their hands trying to tell the American people "gummit knows best" how to run their lives and what things they should and shouldn't be able to do, buy or use. "You need more corn in your gas tank". "You shouldn't be using this kind of light bulb". Etc., etc., etc.

Besides, last time I checked I don't believe my employer - or probably any employer - has granted me the right to use the company Twitter feed as I see fit. I think this is much ado about nothing. No First Amendment issue here. Move along.

But then I think...REALLY? There are actually folks who spend a slice of their life reading tweets from national park staff and we are using tax money to pay people to write messages in 140 characters or less on such stuff? This is a "government is good" example? If this is government waste, I doubt one can ever come up with a valid example of one.

"Burning one gallon of gasoline puts nearly 20lbs of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. #climate". I say, "So?"

According to , there are approximately 2.996 X 10 to the 12th power tonnes (not pounds, mind you) of CO2 in the atmosphere. So working a little Excel magic, I get the following:
1) That's 2,996,000,000,000 tons of CO2
2) Or, 5,992,000,000,000,000 pounds of CO2
3) burning a gallon of gas contributes 0.00000000000000334% more CO2 to the atmosphere.

My point? It's a useless tweet. There's no way to know if 20 lbs is good or bad or makes no difference at all. Of course, we have no idea if this actually ADDS to the amount of CO2 or some part of it is mitigated through carbon absorption by plants, trees, etc.

A quick "googling" yields that humans 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day to the atmosphere. That means, simply by existing, Americans contribute 713,000,000 lbs of CO2 to the atmosphere PER DAY. The world population contributes almost 17,000,000,000 pounds - 17 BILLION - to the atmosphere just by existing - PER DAY.

And then, if you exercise, that might go as high 8 lbs per day. And if all that exercise leads to a longer life, that means you may be contributing more than your "fair share" of CO2 to the atmosphere during your life and maybe we ought to consider a "carbon tax" on you or cap your limits by "capping" you. (I trust the regulars here recognize that last one as a bit of satire. Keith will be displeased with me, but at times its hard to take this climate stuff seriously.)

[Haruo]

[David Flick]

[KeithE]

[David Flick]

[KeithE]

[David Flick]

[Jim]

Interesting thing about graphs is that, like myriads of other documents, they can be interpreted in different ways. In a graph above somewhere the temperature increase/decrease and the increase/decrease in volume of CO2 in the atmosphere follow similar trajectories, the increase and decrease in each reflected in the other. The alarmist says the increase in CO2 obviously causes an increase in temperature while the “normalist” insists that an increase in temperature causes an increase in CO2-volume. Actually, the graph shows neither, only the pattern, meaning that something causes the pattern, perhaps something like the change in the number of sunspots on the sun or a slight change in rotation or relationship of earth to sun – who knows? I see only that the statistics point out a pattern but give no reason for it.

[David Flick]

[KeithE]