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The whole world seems to be nervously awaiting the outcome of the presidential election, which is just 10 days away — perhaps no group more than the global climate cabal. Climate and energy policy is a topic barely mentioned on the campaign trail, and in the debates. But voters are going to decide in November whether America keeps spending billions to be a “leader” in global climate action schemes or pull out of the scam altogether ... and maybe for good.
On Episode #132 of The Climate Realism Show our guest is Steve Milloy, publisher of Junkscience.com, senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, and member of the EPA transition team for the first Trump presidency. The Biden-Harris administration has pledged billions of US tax dollars for “global climate action.” Would it be too late to get a refund on that if Trump is elected? Would a second Trump administration get even more aggressive with producing oil and gas? Could he end the taxpayer-subsidized and failing “green energy” industry with the stroke of a pen? And what will the next four years of climate policy look like if Kamala Harris wins?
Heartland’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the week and take your questions in the chat. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET this Friday and every Friday.
Creators & Guests
Host
H. Sterling Burnett
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., hosts The Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News podcast. Burnett also is the director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, is the editor of Heartland's Climate Change Weekly email, and oversees the production of the monthly newspaper Environment & Climate News. Prior to joining The Heartland Institute in 2014, Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, ending his tenure there as senior fellow in charge of environmental policy. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations within the field. Burnett is a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission, served as chairman of the board for the Dallas Woods and Water Conservation Club, is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, works as an academic advisor for Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, is an advisory board member to the Cornwall Alliance, and is an advisor for the Energy, Natural Resources and Agricultural Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Guest
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues.
Guest
What is Heartland Daily Podcast?
The “fire hose” of all podcasts produced by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank.
That's right, Greta. It is Friday, and it is the best day of the week because it is it is the day that the Heartland Institute broadcasts the Climate Realism Show. My name is Jim Lakeley. I'm the vice president of the Heartland Institute and the host of this here program. And, speaking of that, there is nothing else like the Climate Realism Show streaming anywhere online.
Jim Lakely:So I hope you will like, share, and subscribe, and leave your comments under this video because all of that helps convince YouTube's biased algorithm to nonetheless smile upon this program and to get the show in front of even more people. And a reminder, because Big Tech and the legacy media do not approve of the way we cover climate and energy policy on this program, Heartland's YouTube channel has been demonetized. What a shock. And, actually, we're gonna get to that later in the show. So if you wanna support this program, please visit heartland.org/tcrs.
Jim Lakely:That's heartland.org/tcrs. That stands for the Climate Realism Show, and you can help us make sure that this, show keeps being made every single Friday. Any support you can give us is warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated. And we also wanna thank, today as we do before every show, our streaming partners. That would be junk science.com, CFACT, Climate Depot, and What's Up With That.
Jim Lakely:These this here program is streaming on their x accounts right now, and so hello to everybody on, Elon Musk's now free x platform. Today, as usual, we have with us Anthony Watts, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and publisher of the most influential influential climate website in the world. What's up with that? Also, h Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, and Linnea Lukin, research fellow for energy and environment policy at Heartland. And we are so happy to welcome back again to the program a very special guest, Steve Malloy.
Jim Lakely:He is, the author of several books, including Scare Pollution, How and Why to Fix the EPA, which we're gonna get to again in a minute, Green Hell, How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do TO Stop Them, and what is maybe my favorite title of his books, and this one goes back a ways, Junk Science Judo, Self Defense Against Health Scares and Scams. Steve Molloy, you're also the climate hoax slayer at Junk Science on X. Welcome to the show again.
Steve Milloy:Thank you, Jim.
Jim Lakely:So great to have you with us. And, of course, Steve was also a member of, the first Trump administration's EPA transition team. And, who knows? Maybe he will be again, in a few weeks. We should be so lucky.
Jim Lakely:Steve is also a member of the Heartland Institute's board of directors and a policy adviser to us on climate and energy policy. So, good to have you here. You know, right before we, we're we're all backstage, before the show goes live, and we were chatting about, you know, the election and about, the changes in climate energy policy that may be upcoming, depending in 2025, depending on the outcome of that election. Looking forward to getting to that, as our main topic for today. But before we get into that, we are going to get into Anthony Watts' favorite segment, and that is crazy climate news of the week.
Jim Lakely:Hit it, Andy.
Anthony Watts:I never get tired of watching that.
Jim Lakely:I know. I know. It's supposed to be it's supposed to be full screen. It wasn't supposed to show my, top of my hair there end of that. I don't know what happened with that thing, but, yes, that's always fun.
Jim Lakely:At
Anthony Watts:least you didn't set your hair on fire. Right?
H. Sterling Burnett:You know? No. No. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:It could've it could've it could've been pretty dangerous. Yeah. For sure. Alright. Here we go.
Jim Lakely:So our first item, this week is, from Yahoo News and, the story's headline, could global warming make our winter weather worse? New study offers insights. The new study finds that abnormally warm temperatures in the Arctic could bring cold air outbreaks and heavy snowfall to North America. Nor'easters, blizzards, arctic outbreaks, the dreaded polar vortex. Winter's arsenal of misery is on its way, ready or not.
Jim Lakely:And against this backdrop of winter's imminent arrival comes a new study that says unusual heat in the Arctic caused by global warming is bringing more of the fierce winter weather we loathe here in the United States. Speak for yourself. Specifically, the study finds that abnormally warm in the Arctic are associated with cold air outbreaks and heavy snowfalls here in North America. Quote, in recent decades, the warming in the Arctic has been much faster than in the rest of the world, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification, the study said. Numerous other studies report that the Arctic is warming either twice, more than twice, or even 3 or 4 times as fast as the rest of the globe on average.
Jim Lakely:This faster pace of warming is often attributed to the melting of sea ice, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Woah. Okay. As sea ice disappears, it is replaced by a growing expanse of dark ocean water that absorbs sunlight rather than reflecting it. I could go on, but I don't want to.
Jim Lakely:Steve, I believe the slogan of your website, is all the junk that's fit to debunk. So we're gonna give you first crack at pointing out the junk science on display and all the assumptions in this story already.
Steve Milloy:You know, I think they have to explain why Arctic sea ice, you know, at the minimum was the same as it was in 2012. I mean, since 2012, we've had probably, I don't know, close to 700,000,000,000 tons of emissions. Where is the warming? I you know, it's this this claim that the Arctic is warming 4 times faster, I looked into that a little bit this weekend. You know, I'm not I'm not really, I I don't think there's any there there for that.
Steve Milloy:There's hardly any surface stations, a lot of guesswork going into that. I think it's just more climate hoax.
Jim Lakely:I I would
H. Sterling Burnett:I would point out, as importantly, is I just wish the climate models don't change. The emission scenarios don't change. I wish they would just, across them, have a consistent output because I've heard for decades, we won't we'll see soon see the end of snow because of global warming, that we'll no longer have winter because of global warming. Kids won't know what it's like to make snowballs or to, make snow you know, to throw snowballs or make snowmen. So is it the end of snow, or is it worse winters?
H. Sterling Burnett:And how does warning cause worse winters? Did we never have a polar vortex before or nor'easters? I suspect we did. Oh, wait. I know we did.
H. Sterling Burnett:So it's get your story straight, stick to it, and then when it's debunked, but don't keep switching back and forth to which, you know it's like playing whack a mole with these guys.
Anthony Watts:I would point out that the term polar vortex has only recently been popularized in the media because it sounds scary. But, you know, it goes all the way back to 18 53. And if you take a look at our climate at a glance website, we have a section on the polar vortex, which was named in The Washington Post story as the cause of all of this. And the key takeaways are, the phrase polar vortex is erroneously used by the media to link climate change and severe weather events. It was first identified as a cause for some instances of severe weather winter weather events in 1853.
Anthony Watts:Claims that climate change is creating new and more severe polar vortex events are not supported by either observational evidence or computer climate models. So there.
Jim Lakely:So there.
Anthony Watts:I mean, it just it just more scary rhetoric from people in the media that don't have a clue what they're talking about.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, you and you've got and you've got reporters. You've got climate reporters that have to report on something. They have to turn out, content every day. They have their marching orders. They're supposed to talk about scary climate change, incorporate it into as many stories as they can.
H. Sterling Burnett:So I think this is part of that too.
Steve Milloy:And and, you know, Anthony, correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that even Kevin Trenberg has, run away from this idea that, you know, warming is causing the polar vortex. I believe he did it in a nature commentary, 10 years ago when this when it sort of first
Anthony Watts:Right. Right. But the media never got the memo. That's the problem.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Well, you know, this the way the story was the phrasing in the story reminded me, you know, of how, you see all those series of stories where, like, Finland is is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, and and, you know, Canada is warming like, a 1000 places on Earth are all warming at higher than an average rate when that is really statistically impossible.
Steve Milloy:You know, just go look at, on the GIST website, you know, the Goddard and Super Space Studies. They've got this globe. It shows you where all their surface stations are. You can go, you know, move the globe around and look at what they have in the Arctic, and there's there's really hardly anything there. I mean, it's really just made up stuff.
H. Sterling Burnett:I I don't think it's that the post didn't get the memo, Steve. I think it's that they only publish things from Trendbirth or man or anybody else when it supports a single narrative.
Steve Milloy:Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:And when they when they disavow or, say something different. You know, look, we've I I cover studies in climate change weekly, every week. Studies that say that recently, a a study said that, most of a lot of the warming can be attributed to poor maintenance of surface station boxes, you know, and and other things. Another study came out recently talking about the saturation effect. It's it's not just Will Happen and them talking about it, other, you know, peer reviewed literature, but that goes against the narrative.
H. Sterling Burnett:And so The Post isn't reporting on those studies
Steve Milloy:Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:And neither are the rest of the mainstream media.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Well, you know, I think the whole hoax is based on the notion that, you know, the the truth just goes around the world before no. The the the lie shoots around the world before, you know, the truth gets out of bed. And we're at the point now where, okay, we're out of bed, and it's, you know, it's pretty easy to dismantle the whole lie. It wasn't it wasn't so easy in the beginning, but it's it's getting easier every day.
Jim Lakely:And and don't forget that, very deep pocketed left wing, nonprofit, philanthropy groups are funding nothing but climate alarmist, coverage in places like the Associated Press and The Washington Post. You know, this is bought and paid for alarmism. That's why you don't get any balanced coverage. That's why every What? That is correct.
Jim Lakely:Every single story is a complete, panic show, and it's paid for that way. Alright. Yeah.
Anthony Watts:It's it's it's not the panic show. It's the climate gong show.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. I know. Unfortunately, we don't have Chuck Barris here to hit that gong for us. Anyway, we usually save questions for the end, and I do encourage everyone to, get their questions in.
Jim Lakely:So we'll have q and a at the end. But I thought I'd just pull this up right now, as it's we're talking about it. That's from, Beau Gus. I get it. I get it, Beau Gus.
Jim Lakely:He asks, has anyone actually, mapped the arctic temps during a winter cold snap?
Anthony Watts:Well, I'm sure they have. But here's the problem. The you know, Andy had that map up showing the globe of the the world. If we can go back to that, I wanna point out something really important. That's Antarctica.
Anthony Watts:Flip it around, to the other side. There we go. There's the Arctic up right there. Now look at Canada. We got all these widely spaced stations.
Anthony Watts:There isn't a single station at the North Pole. Zilch. 0. Nada. Unlike down in Antarctica where they actually have one at the South Pole.
Anthony Watts:But here's the deal. As you go further north, the stations get sparser and sparser. And as a result, they have to extrapolate the the temperature from these across large distances up to 1200 kilometers of NASA. And so as a result, what you have is one station can buy us half of the Arctic. In the case of a station like at Eureka in Nunavut, this is a a small habitat of human habitation, and they have to have energy there to stay alive.
Anthony Watts:And so waste energy from their encampment actually makes it into the thermometer. But even worse, they're in a situation where they're near a mountain, and fawn winds or a katabatic winds come downslope and create a huge warming effect that has absolutely nothing to do with climate. It may last 2 or 3 hours, and it'll cause the high temperature spike to go up 20 to 30 degrees or maybe as high as 50 degrees above normal for that area. And, of course, that gets recorded in the climate database even though it has nothing to do with climate. It's a weather event.
Anthony Watts:And so the data that we're getting from these Arctic stations is highly suspect. And, so, you know, plotting them, yeah, you can plot them, but it doesn't really make a Philippines worth a difference in the whole scheme of things because the data itself is suspect.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And this is why people should tune in to the Climate Realism Show every Friday. Look at the kind of stuff you learn. And, producer Andy, fantastic work finding that map that turned into another, little talking point for us. So they're very, very good.
Speaker 1:Very good.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Let's move on to our second item. This is from, a wonderfully titled media outlet called Motor Biscuit. Electric truck fire burns down brand new German fire station. The, station, Stettletendorp, is new, really new.
Jim Lakely:In fact, the new fire station opened its bay doors less than 1 year ago. The station could accommodate 10 fire engines and many firefighters. However, a tragic fire destroyed the fire station despite its fire firefighting purposes. According to Euronews, the fire originated with, quote, an emergency vehicle belonging to the fire department, which contained lithium ion batteries and an external power connection. Unfortunately, the electric emergencies vehicle blaze destroyed at least 10 fire truck models and caused around €25,000,000 in damage.
Jim Lakely:Now, firefighters' woes and electric vehicles aren't a new phenomenon. Departments in the United States have different tactics for battling EV battery fires. Ideally, first responders can suppress EV fires with mass quantities of water. However, some firefighters claim that depending on the circumstances, it's best best to cordon off the area and allow the EV to burn and eventually, I guess, burn itself out. Well, you know, Sterling, I'll start with you here.
Jim Lakely:You know? Allowing a fire to burn itself out, took out, in this case, 10 useful lifesaving fire trucks and caused 27 or €25,000,000 in damage. Where where where to start Really?
H. Sterling Burnett:With the idiocy of this particular story. Having an EV fire truck, for 1, having it plugged in, you know, with all we know about fires from these things, having it plugged into your station. But, you know, the the stupidity, in one sense, started even before then. Brand new fire station. I guess firefighters just think, well, we're firefighters, so we're immune.
H. Sterling Burnett:Has no fire alarms? Had no had no fire suppression system?
Anthony Watts:Well, that's We don't need fire alarms. We have fire experts right there. Exactly.
H. Sterling Burnett:Badges. With fire alarms, we don't need no stinking fire alarms. We're firefighters. Yeah. I don't know what you're thinking.
H. Sterling Burnett:So the first truck goes up in flames. Okay. Are they all just sort of compacted around it? We're not on far enough away for you to go over and drive them out of the garage as a as a brave firefighter? You know, was nobody in the firehouse despite the fact that all the trucks were there?
Anthony Watts:There might have been a slave vehicle.
H. Sterling Burnett:About this story. But, you know so it's like, you've got the error with no smoke alarms, evidently no fire suppression system, or at least not one gear to fight electric vehicle fires, which should tell you something right there. You've got electric vehicle, a fire vehicle plugged in indoors in a closed space next to vehicles that I presume have diesel in them. It's just it was a, a Murphy's disaster waiting to happen.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. As I'm fond of saying, and it's very apt in this case, the stupid, it burns. Yeah. It really did. It did.
H. Sterling Burnett:You can bet they're not gonna buy
Anthony Watts:any more electric fire trucks. I can tell you that.
Steve Milloy:I for for firefighters not to be be prepared, I don't think water works on EV, battery. You need something else. And and if you've ever driven past one of these, vehicle fires, it's really warm. It's a lot warmer than a regular fire. The fact that they're not prepared is just you know, when this starts happening in the United States, there's gonna be a real problem.
Steve Milloy:Will people's homes start going up?
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, they have, unfortunately, asked the people in New York where these things have started fires and taking down tenement buildings.
Anthony Watts:So bikes.
H. Sterling Burnett:I'd like to think I'd I'd like to it's killing people. I'd like to think that, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, I gave a presentation, Texas Plut Policy Foundation, that coal that they would come to their senses on coal, that they would not shut down baseload coal because it would cause unreliability problems. I was wrong. People are that stupid. Well, I would like to think that the first time someone dies because of an electric vehicle fire and it happens multiple, multiple, multiple times again, the Consumer Product Safety Commission gets involved and says, you know what?
H. Sterling Burnett:These aren't safe on the roads. These aren't safe in your house. It's time to withdraw them until we fix this problem, but I I would be wrong about that. It's people are that stupid, or they're just that bought in to the climate scare narrative and the need to do something even if it kills your neighbors or yourself.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Yeah. No. You know, certainly, that's a great point with the with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. You know, in 19 eighties, I you know, they they banned lawn darts pretty quickly.
Steve Milloy:Lawn darts had killed a few, you know, people throwing them at kids and stuff, had killed a few people. But ebikes, for example, have killed a lot more. Just in New York City alone, they killed a bunch. And, they're still in the market.
H. Sterling Burnett:Still on the market.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I mean Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:I mean, most sorry. No.
Anthony Watts:Go
Linnea Lueken:ahead. Most of the the ebikes that have gone up, I I can't say all of them, but I know a few of the big stories about the ebikes were from people modifying them. This isn't to say that they can't or won't spontaneously combust because they can and they will, and as has been shown, especially if the battery is damaged. But, you know, people like to get past the limiters. I know certain people who may or may not have, battery powered, like golf carts that enjoy modifying them in order to get them to go beyond the speed limiter that's installed in them.
Linnea Lueken:And that kind of tends to be what compromises the battery.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, but
Steve Milloy:but but this is happening.
Linnea Lueken:You can't put it out. Yeah.
Steve Milloy:No. But, you know, it all that this kind of stuff is foreseeable. People fool with stuff. You know, lawn darts, you can use lawn darts safely, but they were banned. You can have you can use an ebike safely, and you can have but, but people are still gonna fool with it, and bad things are gonna happen and and and to innocent people, not not the user necessarily.
Steve Milloy:I mean, there are a a raft of stories where, you know, someone has left their ebike, their modified ebike, or or whatever plugged in in, like, the entry vestibule, but the whole place goes up and kills people that are, you know, not the owners.
H. Sterling Burnett:It's not just the people that fiddle with it, though. I mean, you know, when it when the ebike thing broke out in a first floor, sales, ebike sales store in India, no one had fiddled with those bikes.
Steve Milloy:That's embarrassing. Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:It caught fire and killed people. Yeah. You know, I'm sorry. The Biden administration is pushing, has subsidized, and people have bought into it electric school buses. They're putting their children on death traps.
H. Sterling Burnett:And you know what? Just last week, the Biden administration said, oh, no. No. We're doing a recall on those. We gotta recall those.
H. Sterling Burnett:Something like 300 buses have already been put out there. You were endangering children when you did it. Now you've recalled them. What are they gonna have to go back to? What that's a real question because in a lot of these programs, you have to scrap your old bus.
H. Sterling Burnett:When you get an e bus, you have to get rid of it and not on the resale market. It has to be destroyed because they don't want it out there spewing emissions. So what do you do when your electric bus has been recalled, but you've already scrapped your diesel bus.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And and we have to remember why this all this madness is even happening, and that's because this is supposedly going to save the Earth from the awful effects of human activity and life on this planet that we have to do. We have to go to all ebikes and all e trucks because that's the way to save planet, and instead, we see what the results are. So and none of it is necessary. For sure.
H. Sterling Burnett:Necessary. That's right.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Let's let's move on to, item number 3 in crazy climate news of the week. And this one, was a favorite of Anthony's. He shared this earlier in the week, so here it is. From CNN, scientists say the slime in your dishwasher could unlock a solution to global warming.
Jim Lakely:Scientists have scoured the depths of the ocean and outer space for microbes to help slow global warming. They're now looking at a new and unlikely place inside your home. A group called 2 Frontiers Project, funded by biotech company Seed Health, is asking people in the United States to look for, quote, weird microbial growth at home in a quest to find the next microorganism that could suck planet heating carbon dioxide from the air or help break down environmental pollutants. Extremophile microbes thrive in harsh environments and develop unique properties which can be harnessed by the biotech industry and used in climate solutions, says the executive director of that company. Though microbes live on every home surface, the group is especially interested in those that live in more extreme environments, including places with high temperatures such as dishwashers, air conditioners, microwaves, solar panels, hot water heaters, and shower heads.
Jim Lakely:Volunteers who sign up to the, extremophile campaign will be asked to take photos of any microbial growth around their home. Well, think slime, crusty mats, stringy growth, the project's website prompts, and answer the questions about what you see. Alright. I'm not gonna read anymore because this is getting really gross. Anthony, this really is gross, and it reminded you of a movie you've seen.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. It's just it's amazing to me. Yeah. You know what's gonna happen. Right?
Anthony Watts:So they're gonna find the perfect slime organism, that takes c 02 and converts it to even more slime. And so they're going to then say, okay. Well, we need to, we need to enhance its slime making and c o two grabbing capabilities. So they're going to engineer a super slime microbe. You just know it's coming, and it's gonna save the earth.
Anthony Watts:But, see, here's the problem. The more c o two this thing absorbs, the more slime gets generated. And what's gonna happen? Well, we've already seen this movie back in 1958. Right?
Anthony Watts:Remember this movie, some of you, the blob?
Jim Lakely:Oop. There it is. Yep.
Anthony Watts:There it is. It it this is literally slime that's gone amok. Right? And that's what we're gonna end up with. These scientists go super engineer, super slime, c o two eating, you know, systems.
Anthony Watts:We're gonna have the the blob all over again.
H. Sterling Burnett:So what you're saying, Anthony, is that in the end, it was the blob that was the good guy, that aliens sent the blob to Earth to reduce our c o two levels in part by eating c o two emitting people. And, you know, that's
Anthony Watts:the carbon that they wanna get rid of. Right?
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. No. So it's it's it's it it turns out it's the hero of the movie, and we've misunderstood it all this time.
Anthony Watts:Right. Steve McQueen was way off base with his whole thing.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Well, I
Linnea Lueken:I'm thinking as long as this ends up like the blob or like that one, goosebumps story about the, like, slime can that was growing in the bathtub. Yeah. As long as it turns out like that and this isn't like the thing where you have some horrible
Steve Milloy:I don't understand this. What what is it with dishwashers? I mean, you know, if they're looking for green stuff that absorbs c o two, we already have oceans full of it. Right?
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. It's called algae.
Steve Milloy:It's called yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:We also have, it it What's
Steve Milloy:my dishwasher got to do
Anthony Watts:with it?
H. Sterling Burnett:And personally, I don't wanna see green slime in my dishwasher. And I don't wanna see it elsewhere in my home. Next, they're gonna come out and say they're gonna oh, black mold has gotten a bad rap. It's it's it's actually, you know, absorbing c o two, so you need to not get rid of it in your home before you sell it. You should use it as a a a a, there you go.
H. Sterling Burnett:Use the black mold as a screen selling point for your home.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Well, here's the problem.
H. Sterling Burnett:This is this is my carbon capture, black mold over here.
Anthony Watts:Okay. Here's the problem, Sterling. You know, the Biden administration has been cracking down on appliances. So now the dishwashers are going to be green and energy efficient and use less water. So they may not be able to generate enough slime to save the planet.
Anthony Watts:That's gonna be the problem in the future. Right? Let's see the problem in action.
H. Sterling Burnett:Get yourself some phosphate tablets and put it in your dishwasher.
Anthony Watts:The 1986 movie, not the original 1958, but it's still relevant. The blob. You're muted, Jim.
Jim Lakely:I'm sorry. Yeah. I had 5 I had 5 seconds to find a blob clip on Twitter and then get it downloaded. So, yeah, I got the 86 version, but it's still pretty good. I do remember seeing the original, 1955 or 56, Steve McQueen movie.
Jim Lakely:And when I was a little boy, it was scary, but I'm actually scared of this idea that we're going to now be scouring our homes for, you know, a a life or planet saving microbe. And then, you know, this the whole thing seems like a terrible idea to me and funny too.
Anthony Watts:Mhmm. Alright. Well, you know, what's really gonna be cool is the the people that the just stop oil people will get pieces of this blob, and they'll use it to, you know, weld themselves to the street or something with the blob.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. For sure. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:Gonna eat them first.
Steve Milloy:Thank god.
Jim Lakely:We we call this segment crazy climate news of the week for a reason, and that, we we seem to be able to find something that out crazies last week every single week. So we'll
H. Sterling Burnett:You remember, they used to have something called pet rocks. Someone actually was buying rocks as pets. Well, now the the, the voluntary extinction movement, what's their what's the name of the group that does that? Extinction Rebellion. Extinction Rebellion.
H. Sterling Burnett:They can adopt a pet blob.
Jim Lakely:It's still difficult to take out for a walk on a leash, but they can probably figure it out.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, they won't be around long enough to worry about walking on a leash if it's the right glove.
Jim Lakely:Yep. That's true. Alright. Well, let's get to our meme of the week, here. And, this also comes from Anthony Watts who shared it in our, company Slack this week.
Jim Lakely:The choice is simple. Your, ICE your ICE engine won't start, get a new, $125 battery. If your EV engine won't start, get a new $3,030,000 battery. And, Yeah. You know, I was driving I was I was driving around today, and and, I was wondering why my Waze, application was actually taking me in a weird way to get home, avoiding this, freeway that I usually take.
Jim Lakely:And then when I got back on the freeway and looked behind me, I saw that there was a car on the side of the road that was, smoking and in flames. And I slowed down and got a good look at it, and it was an electric vehicle. So, on the side of the road that the fire department was just standing there watching burn. They didn't really know
Steve Milloy:what's going on.
Jim Lakely:Yep. They're too hot. Yeah. That's that's what happens there. Alright.
Jim Lakely:So let's get into we're gonna get into our main topic today, which is, basically the politics of of climate policy, and the presidential election and what may happen after the election. But before we get too deep into that, I wanna point out to our our audience that you must you must follow Steve Molloy on x. His his account is at junk science.
Steve Milloy:Yeah.
Jim Lakely:He is prolific, and several times a day, many times a day, you will find interesting things that he's brought up for discussion, usually junk, that he will debunk. But, Anthony, again, suggests we bring a few up on screen, and we'll have you talk about them, Steve. This one here, breaking news. Global warming will be twice as bad as predicted. I thought it was already bad.
Jim Lakely:Now it's gonna be twice as bad. This is very, very discouraging news. Earth is on track for a catastrophic 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming this century, UN warns.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. So, look, these guys have never been right about anything. And when they double down, it's just 2 times 0. So, you know, it's just amazing to be you know, even for themselves, I I guess they they count on their audience as being too stupid for words and not having any memory. They're they're always wrong.
Steve Milloy:They're never right, and and they keep doubling down. And and, you know, I I think this is coming to an end, but, you know, we're gonna have to go through an awful lot before it's over.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so 3.1, where is that? Because I thought it was we had to keep it under 1.5 c, and then there are models that go from anywhere from 3 to, like was it 5 degrees Celsius by the day?
Steve Milloy:1 All this is just it it's just ridiculous stuff. I mean, you know, there's no such thing as a global temperature to start with. All of these temperatures are just really made up. You know, we have so we have, an average of made up temperatures. It's just it's all nonsense.
Steve Milloy:I mean, I you you could spend hours debunking every aspect of that, but I just I'm going you know, the the the shortest distances, they've never been right. They're they're never gonna be right.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Alright. We'll bring up another one here, Andy. This one is, the UN's verdict on climate progress over the past year. There was none.
Jim Lakely:So, don't say that Steve doesn't, you know, always share bad news. This is actually good news, I guess.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. So, you know, how many trillions have been spent in the last year? How much alarmism has there been? And what's I mean, even the UN admits, nothing's been accomplished. And, you know, if you go into this report, which is my favorite annual UN reports, the emissions gap report, it it tells you how how much they failed every year.
Steve Milloy:And they have this graph in there, I think I posted on my X feed yesterday, showing from 1990 through last year, how emissions have just gone up basically at the same rate. I mean, they have had absolutely no impact on anything, although they've been scaring us for decades and spending 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, which, you know, if we're gonna spend money, could go into solving real environmental problems or other problems that that are real. But instead, we're just we're just wasting it on this climate cult. It's just gross.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Well, there's there's one more thing that I wanted to bring up and and I'm well, you said in that in that tweet that, you you know, the climate hoax is essentially dead. And I know that, Donald Trump has used the term hoax, and, you give yourself credit for popularizing that with him. I think you should. I think you should.
Steve Milloy:No. No. No. No. Let me look.
Steve Milloy:All of us have been involved in this for a long time. Anthony, Sterling, you, and others others of our friends, we've been doing this for decades. You know, Trump picked it picked it up from all of us collectively, you know, more than 10 years ago. And so this is we're on the verge of electing a guy who thinks climate is a hoax. I mean, it's an incredible accomplishment that we don't really get credit for.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Alright. Well, as we, as we now we're going to to flow into, how this this presidential election may affect climate policy and climate communications, really. And I think, really, the the global climate agenda, I don't know, maybe I'm being too optimistic. It could be it could be at serious risk.
Jim Lakely:But the first story I wanted to to mention actually involves the Heartland Institute, and this is from, AFP, the Global wire service. Google urged to step up efforts to demonetize climate falsehoods. It says here, civil society groups implored Google on Thursday, so this was just yesterday, to rigus rigorously enforce its policy to demonetize environmental disinformation, saying ads placed alongside climate denial content persistently popped up despite the tech titans' pledge to crack down. The open letter, addressed to Google chief Sundar Pichai and endorsed by thousands of signatories, comes in the wake of major hurricanes in the United States sparking an avalanche of disinformation and just weeks before the UN COP 29 Climate Summit. In 2021, Google announced a policy prohibiting ads alongside content that deny the existence and causes of climate change, seeking to ensure disinformation peddlers cannot monetize its influential platforms, including YouTube.
Jim Lakely:But the letter signed from a dozen groups, including the union of concerned scientists and tech watchdog center and the tech watchdog center for countering digital hate, said the ads have not stopped. While Google has demonetized some content by the Heartland Institute, that's us, a conservative US think tank Watch Dogs have continued to find ads alongside its misleading climate messaging on YouTube, the letter said. I can report that I haven't seen it, but, if it is happening, I think we earned 2¢. I think it was I thought it was a mistake. I thought it was a glitch.
Jim Lakely:I looked up our in the back end of our our channel. I think we made 2¢ in September. So that was a that was a mistake. It urged Google to, quote, immediately and permanently demonetize heart the Heartland Institute, unquote, as well as other outlets that spread climate disinformation. You know, we could we could go on with this.
Jim Lakely:I I can stop there, but you get the idea. And and the reason I'm bringing this up, not just to, you know, kinda humble brag about the fact that the Heartland Institute is the number one target for the climate sensors around the globe, that they're they're singling us out in a letter to Google to to shut us down, which they've already done, it is that if Kamala Harris is elected as president of the United States, she she is on the record many times talking about how, quote unquote, misinformation and disinformation needs to be stopped on places like X and and, and Facebook and YouTube. And so, you know, Donald and and the Biden Harris administration has the the Twitter files exposed this. They they were they were, for a long time, collaborating with the collaborating is one word for it with the social media companies telling them that, this piece of information, I don't like it. We don't like it here in the regime, and so you must take it down.
Jim Lakely:And if you don't, there could be consequences. That was the very clear and sometimes, explicit communication from the administration to social media platforms. There is a single one right now, and that's x, that will not collaborate with the government to silence speech that the regime doesn't like. But if if Kamala Harris gets, gets elected, you could expect, I would imagine, Steve Malloy, that the climate censorship, apparatus will crank down even harder.
Steve Milloy:Well, look. I mean, they're trying to crack down on Musk. Right? So they're investigating him for all you know, from EVs to election interference, all kinds of, you know, illegal election contributions. They're gonna come after him.
Steve Milloy:They are coming after him. And, you know, and and I gotta say something about x. You know, x is much better now than it was before Musk bought it, but I think there's still some internal suppression of of, climate skeptics on x. I think we we all have difficulty getting our message out. There's there's just some cadre of text there that are, you know, keeping us down, and, I I hope that Elon can one day flush his people out.
Steve Milloy:You know, Elon is open to other points of view. He's supporting Trump. Trump wants to end the ED mandate, which would help Elon, but he's supporting him anyway because he, you know, understands there are much bigger things at stake. But and and by the way, you know, Google has also demonetized me. And then every time I make a, you know, a video, put it on my website, I actually put them up on Google as well.
Steve Milloy:I get this little, Google screen saying climate change is real. Don't believe this guy.
Jim Lakely:Oh, yeah. That that's the that's the tag at the bottom of every one of our video.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Let
H. Sterling Burnett:let me ask about something about this demonetization. They said they don't want ads to run alongside our work or or climate skeptics, climate realist work. What if what if there are companies that actually want their ads to run? You know, it's like, there's a market. There's an untapped market there that that you might be able to reach if you advertise next to people like us.
H. Sterling Burnett:What if they go to Google and say, we want to run our we want our ads run there. Yeah. And how do you know that that hasn't happened? Maybe that's why to the extent that we've got they got 2¢ in September. Maybe that's because there are some places that say, look.
H. Sterling Burnett:There's a market there for this stuff. Well, and in fact that market.
Steve Milloy:I mean, if we're a problem that we need to be demonetized, we must be making some money from somebody. Right? So there's some demand there, but but they don't really care. I mean, it's it's almost like, you know, they got a a lock on market share. They no no longer care about capitalism, freedom.
Steve Milloy:Now it's time to just squash us.
H. Sterling Burnett:It's well, it's it's like the old bomber, saying, if you're not catching flack, you're not over the target. Mhmm.
Linnea Lueken:No. Has anyone was this directed at Steve, this question? Has Elon taken up your offer for a debate? I don't want to call
Steve Milloy:No. So taking up I don't think he's gonna do that. No. I don't mean I don't mean to pick on him, but sometimes, you know, he says some really dumb things about climate. I mean, you know, he's he's such a smart guy.
Steve Milloy:He's a brilliant guy. Right? He can land a rocket and have sketch it.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah.
Steve Milloy:But but, you know, you you put him in front of a video and ask him, in front of a camera and ask him about climate, he's just gonna say some dumb stuff, which Well I don't I don't get it.
Jim Lakely:Well, if if, if Trump is is if Trump is elected again, Steve, and you're part of the EPA trans transition team again, maybe you'll run into him in the White House while he's collecting his, inner his government efficiency czar staff, and you can, you know, give him a cup of coffee and have a sit down and, and then have Yeah.
Steve Milloy:I don't understand. I mean, you know, he's a smart guy. He's intellectually curious. He like seems to like to learn new things about everything else. I mean, he's been open to becoming a conservative, right, or, you know, at least open to supporting Trump and free speech.
Steve Milloy:He gets that. But the climate stuff just goes
H. Sterling Burnett:Look. There's a lot of smart people in the world. Yeah. Just because you're smart doesn't mean you know everything or get everything right. No.
Steve Milloy:That's for sure.
H. Sterling Burnett:I mean, you know, look. I say what you will about Jeff Bezos. I do not think he's a stupid man. Evil, perhaps, but not stupid. And, I don't think Musk is is evil, but even as as bright as you can be, you can be wrong.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. No. For sure. Yeah. Well, some of the other items here that that may happen in a, in a in a Harris administration, that would be an extension of the Biden administration, which is an extension of the Obama administration, and that is the administration of 1,000,000,000 of dollars of our money, of taxpayer dollars in so called federal climate funds.
Jim Lakely:We have a story here. I don't know if, I'm reading it on my screen, so I don't know if Andy has it up on the screen yet from The Hill, saying how 8 non this is back from, April, but it says that 8 nonprofit institutions will administer $20,000,000,000 in federal funds designated for combating climate change and reducing pollution. You know, this is from the, I guess, from the inflation reduction act, which had nothing to do with inflation and had a lot to do with climate spending, for all of these groups. So, yeah, the the what's on the ballot here is whether, you know, the the the cabal, the the coordination between left leaning climate alarmist, nonprofits just basically lining their pockets with our money to, you know, to be the the in in the street shock troops for climate action, which is basically the destruction of Western civilization in our way of life.
Steve Milloy:You know, so so far, there's been a $140,000,000,000 of inflation reduction act money spent. Almost half of that money has gone to 5 battleground states. And, you know, when when that bill passed, it occurred to me that, like, this is just gonna be walking around money. You know, it's an old term for just buying votes, basically. And that's really what, you know, 3034 others 34 states got 70,000,000,000 and 5 states got 64,000,000,000, and they're all battleground states.
Steve Milloy:So, you know, you do the math.
H. Sterling Burnett:Oh, you misunderstand you misunderstand, Steve. You're you're looking at that in a really bad light in a bad light. As you probably don't realize, it just turns out that those 5 states are more affected by climate change than every other state around them. They are uniquely situated such that climate change affects them more.
Steve Milloy:No. It's just it's so dishonest. And the thing is is that it's hard to get people interested in this. I mean, it should be pretty outrageous that, you know, the, Biden Harris, administration is dropping tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars to get itself reelected, and Republicans are like, what? What?
Steve Milloy:You know, it's it's like when it gets to climate, Republicans just unplug their brains. They can't figure it out.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I think it's because a lot of Republicans are afraid of, they're more afraid of being not wrong on the issue, but positioned as wrong by the media. I think despite the fact that Trump has been such a force for, like, untethering the Republican terror of the mainstream media, and what they you know, whether or not they're getting, like, good boy points from random journalists. I think despite that, major like mainstream Republicans are still intimidated at the thought of having a journalist say like, you know, hit him with the kind of stuff that they hit, Vance with at the, debate, you know, where they just, like, toss in their little comments at the end of the question. You know, he gives them a a solid answer about how we don't you know, how the Biden Harris administration don't even actually believe in what they're promoting because all they're doing is exporting emissions to other countries. They're not actually cutting emissions.
Linnea Lueken:He made that point during the debate, and all the, the little moderator had to say real quick at the end was, and climate existential threat that all scientists agree. Blah blah blah.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. You're absolutely right. Yeah. I mean, the media, they're like these dogs that smell fear. And Republicans, you know, they're afraid of being asked about climate when all they really they only need to know one thing and a little bit that they can come back to the media with, and the media will completely melt down because these they they these guys know nothing either.
Steve Milloy:Right? I remember Gina McCarthy, who was Biden's EPA chief or, Obama's EPA chief and and Biden's climate czar. Once she was testifying in congress, and the congressman from Texas, Joe Barton, asked her how much c o two is in the atmosphere, she had no idea. And and she was she's the e she was the EPA chief. And another time, Sessions, who was Trump's first AG, when he was a senator, he was asking her questions about the the, climate models and how they weren't working.
Steve Milloy:She didn't know about that either. None of these people know anything. They're, you know, they they know their talking points. They know the Republicans are afraid, and that's how they succeed.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. But that's what it's the the problem is, Republicans don't wanna be ridiculed, especially by certain media sources, which they think are which they think, I don't think it's true as much anymore, but which they think are inordinately influential. They're read by people that Republicans care about the opinion of. Yeah. And they don't want to not be invited to the right parties for being the wrong kind of guy because there's a lot of that.
H. Sterling Burnett:You know? Right. Every every time you hear one saying my good friend, truth is, I think a lot of them aren't good friends, but they sure wanna be at the same party.
Anthony Watts:They do. They do.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. They do. Well, I I wanna I wanna ask 2 quick things, and then maybe we can talk about both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and how these things might be different. But one is, EPA's power plant, standards, for for greenhouse gas emissions. You know, so so they seem to keep putting out more stringent, regulations on this topic, despite I I thought there was a Supreme Court decision that might have slowed this down a little bit, but it did not.
Jim Lakely:I know Sterling is follows this, this topic very closely as does Steve. And then there's just also the the the broad, goal of net zero that is huge in Europe. The the the term net zero isn't used as much here in the United States, at least by politicians walking the soil of the United States, but you have, you know, climate czar, John Kerry over in Europe, and at the WEF talking about net zero and all of that. It's an obsession in Great Britain, net zero, and it's going to cost it's gonna actually cause a political revolution very soon in that country, I I I actually predict. But, Steve and and, and and the rest of the panel here, what about, how would a Trump presidency affect the EPA's ever more stringent and and unrealistic and not scientific, and it doesn't improve quality of life?
Jim Lakely:Power plant restrictions differ if, Donald Trump was president, and, and I and would the net zero project be dead forever if Donald Trump was elected president?
Steve Milloy:Well, so those are great questions. I think that, you know, since Biden did everything administratively, Trump could roll back everything administratively. And he will also be supported by 2 new supreme court decisions, the one in 2022, West Virginia versus EPA, which said that EPA can only do what Congress authorized, and, the one this year, which, basically rolled back the Chevron decision, allowing federal agencies to just make up the law when there is none. So, I I I think they everything Biden did that's important will be rolled back, and, you know, of course, there's gonna be it'll be total war, as there will be on everything the Trump administration does. It'll just be total war.
Steve Milloy:There will probably be preemptive suits, and, you know, there will be resistance from EPA staff and all federal agency staff. So we're we're all gonna have a lot to do for the next 4 years, for sure.
H. Sterling Burnett:I you know, the power plant rule has become, a version of the wetlands rule. For decades, now the supreme court has said, no, you've gone too far on wetlands. You you you can't do what you're doing. And and and rather than saying specifically, rather than laying down the law and said, this own you can only cover wetlands that are adjacent to ports and major rivers, which ships can go down. And other than that, it's left to the states.
H. Sterling Burnett:The the courts never give them that guidance, but they keep saying the EPA's wetland rule is too big, is too large. They give these piddling, oh, nexus, significant nexus, you know, which the EPA then uses to, basically write a stricter rule.
Steve Milloy:Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:And it gets sued, and the court strikes it down, you know, after years, and they say, oh, we got the message this time. And they go back and write a new rule, which is even stricter. Now, under Trump, he wrote a rule that that tried to comply with the court orders. And Biden came in. And, Trump, just like Biden has been sued, Trump was sued over that rule.
H. Sterling Burnett:It was wearing in its way through the courts, and Biden came in and says, oh, we're no longer defending that rule. We're writing a new one so you can drop this so the courts can drop the suit.
Steve Milloy:Well
H. Sterling Burnett:The the greenhouse gas rule is the same thing. The courts have said, you can't impose the kind of cost it imposes. It has to be done by Congress. Major it's a major questions. It has to be explicit, and it has to be imposed by Congress.
H. Sterling Burnett:And the EPA says, oh, we understand. And so they come back with another rule, which still violates what the court has said.
Steve Milloy:Well, I, you know, I think you're looking at a uniquely rogue administration. You know, recall the Supreme Court said that Biden could not just forgive student loans. So they just went back and, you know, did it a different way. And and so they did that with the power plant rule as well. I mean, congress has still not authorized EPA to regulate power plants in the way that EPA want Biden, EPA wants, but they're doing it anyway because, you know, their real goal is just to throw a monkey wrench into the coal industry and the utility industry and cause chaos and make everybody even more dependent on on government.
Steve Milloy:And, you know, that that's just kind of the strategy. And, you know, we we have rogue out of control government right now, and and, you know, hopefully, that could be fixed soon or at least ameliorated.
Jim Lakely:For sure. Alright. Well, let let's get to the questions and answer portion of the program. Linea, take it away.
Linnea Lueken:Sweet. Thank you very much. Okay. So this is a here's a question from, which comes right from the discussion we were just having, so I'm gonna put it up now. And he says, does the EPA actually have lawmaking purview?
Linnea Lueken:Surely, they are a nonelected body. Steve?
Steve Milloy:No. EPA can only do what congress has authorized EPA to do. They can issue regulations that have been authorized by Congress. EPA has become a law unto itself, obviously. And it's it's very easy for EPA to get away with this because Republicans refuse to learn anything about the environment.
Steve Milloy:You know, I've been working on these issues for more than 30 years, and it it's you know, I can't tell you how much how many, members and Republican staff I have met with over the decades, and it just you know, it it bounces off 95% of them. There are some of them that get it, but precious few. And, of course, the Democrats, you know, they they don't really know about any of this stuff. They don't, either, and they don't care, but they're very good. They take the talking points from the from the, green groups and move forth, and Republicans are completely disarmed.
H. Sterling Burnett:What you know, how it works, sorry, Bartfest, is Congress passes a law with broad generalizations, and it leaves it to the administrative agencies to interpret these things, to write the detailed regulations. And then when the regulations are costly or bad, they've done this with endangered species as well, Congress says, oh, we never intended that. Don't don't vote against us because of that because that's not that's a rogue agency doing what it wants to do. Basically, they they are conscious. We we wash our hands.
H. Sterling Burnett:They're conscious pilot. They, congress could act. And in fact, under Biden, they've acted more often under any other administration, including with Democrats on board passing resolutions saying these rules aren't in line with the law we passed. Unfortunately, the congressional review act that, allows these resolutions, That's open to presidential veto, and he's vetoed everyone. The the the honestly, to to my mind, there shouldn't be a veto over things like this.
H. Sterling Burnett:Congress wrote the law. The president signed the law. Congress knows what it intended when it wrote the law. And if it says we didn't intend that, should be that should be the last word on the matter. They should have they shouldn't have to go through the the executive to approve that.
H. Sterling Burnett:They should be able to go directly to court and say, we, congress, who wrote this law, have said and we're interested parties. We've written this law. We've said, this isn't what we said.
Steve Milloy:Yeah.
H. Sterling Burnett:Strike it down.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you very much. Okay. Here's another one, to to the panel. Chris, who asks, how can the EPA's determination that c o two is pollution be unwound?
Steve Milloy:Who's that for?
Linnea Lueken:Anybody who wants to take it. It's a tough one.
Steve Milloy:Well, so e EPA could start a rulemaking, to undo it's it's called the endangerment finding. EPA could undertake a rulemaking and undo it. The Trump EPA a a new Trump EPA could do that. And I would love to see this litigated in court. Certainly, there would be evidence there's there's a videotape of John Dingell, congressman from Michigan, now deceased, one of the authors of the Clean Air Act, and I there's a video of him clearly in a house hearing saying, we never intended for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, and we never and and we didn't we didn't say that expressly because we didn't imagine there would be a supreme court stupid enough, and those are his words, or dumb enough to allow that to happen.
Steve Milloy:And, of course, in 2007, Massachusetts v EPA, that's exactly what a supreme court did, 5 to 4. So, you know, the good news is that Trump EPA could unwind it, and, this time, I hope they do.
H. Sterling Burnett:Well, I'm I hate to disagree with Steve, but I'm gonna say I don't think the EPA can unwind it, Precisely for what you said, Steve. The court ruled it. The EPA didn't rule it was pollution. The court ruled it was pollution.
Steve Milloy:And what they did
H. Sterling Burnett:told the EPA what they then told EPA was that and if it's pollution, and we say it is, any emission under the court's ruling is pollution.
Steve Milloy:Well, I I disagree with you, Sterling. The the ruling of the court is that EPA could regulate c 02 if it found it was pollution. And, of course, in the as soon as Obama came in, the Obama EPA found that c o two was pollution and started regulating. A Trump EPA could find that it's not pollution and unwind it.
H. Sterling Burnett:Now when I read the well, okay. We're gonna I guess we're gonna disagree, but I'm gonna my reading of it was, the court said any emission qualifies as pollution. All the EPA has to determine is whether it's an endangerment. Not all pollution may be dangerous, but if this endangers anyone, then you have the right to regulate it. And that's what the EPA did is they issued an endangerment finding.
H. Sterling Burnett:Okay. Here's a pollutant. The court said it's an admission, so it's a pollutant. And thus, we just gotta determine whether it's endangerment. And they looked at the IPCC, and they said the IPCC says it's endangering us.
H. Sterling Burnett:So we visit our endangerment finding.
Steve Milloy:We see this as the right That's a that's a whole another kettle of fish, but I think that EPA could unwind it. Okay. There's all sorts of petitions. I think Heartland is might even be a party to some of these petitions.
H. Sterling Burnett:To overturn the endangerment findings.
Steve Milloy:Yes. Because EPA could do that.
H. Sterling Burnett:And, EPA can say it's not endangerment, but I don't think they can say it's not pollution. I think the court has I think a new I think a new court has to
Anthony Watts:do that.
Steve Milloy:The supreme the supreme court has not ruled that c o two is pollution.
Jim Lakely:I'll jump in here.
H. Sterling Burnett:I'll send you links after the show.
Steve Milloy:Just They have called it pollution in dicta, but it's not binding or anything like that.
Anthony Watts:Alright. All of the legal rhetoric aside, I think you have to go right back to the science, and here's how I view it. Carbon dioxide is part of the natural life cycle of everything on earth, literally. I mean, it's it's it is key to photosynthesis. And without carbon dioxide, everything stops.
Anthony Watts:But the whole idea of net zero is ridiculous. But, you know, we could point out that it'd be just as ridiculous to call water vapor a pollutant. Water vapor is also something generated by mankind in voluminous amount, and it goes into the atmosphere. Right? And it is also a greenhouse gas.
Anthony Watts:And so let's get rid of all the water vapor, and we'll all walk around like dried up mummies. You know? That's the kind of logic that we need to apply here. We need to go back to the science and say carbon dioxide is part of the natural world. It is not a pollutant, and don't treat it as such.
Anthony Watts:I mean, other things, you know, like chlorophora carbons and our CFCs on the atmosphere with ozone, yes. Those are pollutants. Those are manmade pollutants that are not part of the natural world. We need to make sure that the court understands and separates this distinction.
Steve Milloy:Anthony, that's a great point. I water vapor CO 2 should be likened to water vapor. You know, if you're gonna regulate CO2, you gotta regulate water vapor too, which would be impossible. Right. And my my only point of disagreement with Steve is is
H. Sterling Burnett:maybe because
Linnea Lueken:I'm just a pessimist after being in this for a much briefer amount of time than you guys have. But I'm looking around and seeing the way that Republicans typically talk about carbon dioxide and they talk about it as though it is a pollutant.
Steve Milloy:Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:And that is a major problem. We've got stuff going through right now where they are trying to put together a, like, a committee to do an accounting on all of our businesses in the United States to determine how bad of pollutants from carbon dioxide, our businesses are so that they can brag about it against China.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Yeah. No. That that's absolutely true. You know, on top of the just the intellectual hurdle, there is the hurdle that, you know, the wind and solar and carbon capture industries, and even the oil industry, you know, there's all they they all have ways of making money off the green news scam, and so they're all gonna be very hesitant about supporting any rollback of that.
Steve Milloy:A lot of these companies just in their own, you know, language in their in their public statements, you know, if if you're a publicly owned company, you can't lie. Right? You can't lie. It's it's illegal. And if if they have to walk back any of this climate stuff, they're gonna be subject to all sorts of litigation for making crazy statements about global warming.
Steve Milloy:So it's a very complicated issue. But in my view, the EPA could roll back the notion that c o two is a pollutant that needs is endangering the planet and all that.
Linnea Lueken:Well, here's a comment from one of our viewers, Bo Gus, who's always here. He says, Steve, please use any poll you have to get Trump to fund only climate research that foresees global cooling. Let's see how robust that global warming science really is.
Steve Milloy:Well, what do you mean? We are cooling. Right, Anthony? It's been cooling for the last,
Anthony Watts:years. Yeah. After the 2015, 2016 El Nino, yes, we're very slowly going down. Although we did get a spike last year, we went back up due to the water vapor from Hunga Tonga and also the El Nino last year. It's coming down again.
Anthony Watts:So, you know, this is just natural variation in progress. The only problem that we've got as humans is we have such short lifespans in in terms of how the world and geologic time operates. We don't have records back very far, and so we haven't observed events like this before even though they've happened before.
Steve Milloy:You know, Anthony, the Washington Post ran a graph a month ago, I think, showing that the Earth has been cooling for 485000000 years, and those global temperatures are as valid as any global temperature today. So and I think, Anthony, you said this. Is the earth warming or cooling? Well, how far back do you wanna go? Right?
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Exactly. That was a great graph too, and, you know, it backfired on them because, you know, it was clearly not a crisis today compared to what it was, you know, 50000000 years ago.
Linnea Lueken:So we've got this, this question here, which kind of segues from what you're just saying. In Europe, there's a photo doing the rounds of a Roman road that has been uncovered because of glacier retreat. Is this real? And if it's real, it's great for a case against the green left. And and I think I'd pitch this one to Anthony because, we've covered this quite a few times on this kind of thing quite a few times on climate realism.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. You know, the point is is that this kind of stuff happens all the time. We have glaciers that are receding, and then they uncover remnants of past civilizations or, people hiking up in the mountains or whatever it was, agriculture in Greenland, that kind of thing. So when the glaciers retreat and you find this stuff, you know, whatever it might be, you have to ask yourself, well, wait a minute. How could it have been warmer back then when there was no ice to allow this stuff to happen versus today.
Anthony Watts:Because isn't today the only crisis that we have? And that's what is a what a lot of the media completely misses because none of these students that come out of college today can think logically. They can't think for themselves. They can only regurgitate what is told to them by their scientific masters. And so they don't question these things when they very well should be.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Now when they find these artifacts, it's really funny. Invariably, you know, the the key piece of information is that the glaciers retreated. That's how we found the artifact, but they never asked how the artifact get there in the first place. Yeah.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Israelites.
Linnea Lueken:Trees or the hunger stones or whatever it is.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. There's there's there was a a story I covered a while ago in Climate Change Weekly about, what they found was basically what was tantamount to a highway in the past. This this this trail in, I forget which Scandinavian country where people have been traveling it traveling it evidently for 100 of years, with lots of scattered, what we would call today trash, but, you know, their bones, some furs, all sorts of things, tools, things like that. And, it recently got uncovered, and it's like, well, hold it. That means that, you you age these things.
H. Sterling Burnett:And back then, people were traveling this route, and they said, you all, that's right. Yeah. People were traveling. You'd be woodcuts from the, the 16 1500 where you see a a Scandinavian, mountain village about to be wiped off the map because of the expanding glaciers. And back then, they weren't they weren't, happy about the fact, you know, when when the glacier started to retreat, the people in that village weren't unhappy about the fact.
H. Sterling Burnett:Now, of course, that was before we had a global ski industry, and now they can profit off the glaciers and, and want them to to to stick even if it wipes the whole city off the map. But, it's it's ridiculous. No history
Linnea Lueken:at all. We have a few more questions. I'm gonna try and get get to them quick. I've got 2 here for Anthony from Kite Man Music. I'm a I'm also curious about the, the answer to these.
Linnea Lueken:So we're gonna go first question, is AMOC slowing down? And you might wanna say what that is.
Anthony Watts:Well, the answer to that is yes, no, and maybe. Because it's like every year oh, it's it's speeding up. No. Wait. It's slowing down.
Anthony Watts:Oh, no. No. It it's catastrophe in the making. It's gonna collapse. Every year, they flip flop on this, and it's all model based, and it's all a load of crap.
Anthony Watts:I'm sorry. That's what it is. It's model based science that keeps predicting completely opposites every year. We've got, stories at climate realism where you can go back and look at you know? The AMOC is speeding up.
Anthony Watts:The AMOC is speeding down. The AMOC is gonna collapse. The AMOC is gonna speed up and roast us all. Whatever. None of these things have any basis in reality.
Anthony Watts:They're all, as Steve Malloy likes to point out, PlayStation climatology.
Linnea Lueken:What is what is the AMOC?
Anthony Watts:The Atlantic Railroad overturning circulation. Basically, part of the part of the Gulfstream.
Steve Milloy:Now, Anthony, what's the I think there was a study that came out last month, under the Washington Post report. It may may have been something in Nature where they said that, the way they've been measuring the AMOCs with a some sort of, submarine cable. And, they failed to account for the change in the Earth's magnetic field, and, you know, the current is as strong as it's ever been.
H. Sterling Burnett:That was, that was for the, Gulf Stream that feeds into the Atlantic, and I covered that, I think, last week or the week before in, Climate Change Weekly.
Steve Milloy:I thought it was AMOC.
H. Sterling Burnett:Yeah. No. This is the Gulf Stream.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Just to clarify because we were all talking before, the AMOC is the Atlantic Meridontal Overturning Circulation. And, basically, it is the conveyor belt that brings warmer water from the tropics up to the Arctic, and then it sinks, then it comes back down. And it's part of the the planet's regulatory temperature system, its own thermostat. And so that's why the climate scientists are so freaked out about it because they're afraid the thermostat's gonna break, and we're all gonna roast or we're all gonna freeze, you know, like you saw on the day after tomorrow, which was one of the worst climate science based movies ever to be produced, even so bad that Gavin Schmidt at, NASA guess that it was bad.
Anthony Watts:So when you know he's dissident, you know it's bad. Okay. I got
Steve Milloy:a fact, Dick Sterling, it was the AMOC in that study that they use the, submarine cable on. So there you go. I'll send it to you after.
H. Sterling Burnett:Okay. You can do that. You can do that.
Linnea Lueken:Here's our our next question. So are we expecting a cold winter this year?
Anthony Watts:Yes. In some parts of the United States and not in other parts.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. It's tough to say. That's for sure. Okay. Let's see.
Linnea Lueken:Here we go. From Chris, he asks, has Trump promised to leave the Paris agreement again? I'm hoping that might encourage other countries like mine to follow suit if he does before we all die from cold, hunger, and poverty.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. I don't I don't think, I can't recall him mentioning it, but I know that it's high on everybody's, list of priorities. Some of us think that the way to get out of it is for him to recognize the Paris Climate Agreement as a treaty and submit it to the senate where the senate can kill it and be and be done with it once and for all.
Anthony Watts:I hope that if he does get out of it, he drives a stake through the heart of it to prevent us from ever getting back into it. Yep.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. If tyrannical lockdowns didn't reduce the dreaded c o two levels, what kind of scenario would reduce it to the UN's liking and how could they do that? I think the I think the trick answer to that question is, there is no level that would reduce it or there is no level that they have in mind, that they would reduce it to. And therefore, this is a, an infinite scam that they can forever raise money off of. That's my thought.
Steve Milloy:Yeah. Well, I mean, John Perry's goal is to suck out of the atmosphere all the CO two that's been put there since industrialization, which is about 1.6 trillion tons, which would, you know, probably cost, 2 quadrillion dollars to do. So yeah. No. It's it's a long term scam for sure.
Jim Lakely:I just heard John Kerry say, and the rest of it just kinda went you know?
Linnea Lueken:And this is so this is kind of a related question, so I'll put it up too. How will we know if that $20,000,000,000 improves the climate?
Anthony Watts:Oh, you can't improve the climate for 20,000,000,000. It has to be $20,000,000,000,000,
Steve Milloy:And then
Anthony Watts:then it'll move it maybe a tenth of a degree. Maybe.
Linnea Lueken:That's right. Yeah. We just need a couple more 1,000,000,000,000. A couple more $1,000,000,000,000, and then the weather will be good forever.
Anthony Watts:Yes. And eating bugs. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:Well, the theme of today's show was about, climate and the presidential election. I think we did a pretty good job of laying out scenarios of what may or may not happen depending on, what is it now? 10 days until the election? It's amazing. It's amazing.
Jim Lakely:So, whichever way the election turns out, this Climate Realism Show will still be here every Friday at 1 PM EST, 12 PM CST, to go over the crazy climate news of the week, to bring on fantastic guests like the one we had today, Steve Molloy. So, thank you all for watching and, listening to this podcast, if you're only listening to the audio version. Please, every time you are curious about the climate, visit climate realism.com.visitclimate@aglance.com.visitwhat'supwiththat.alwaysgotoheartland.org, and, of course, we cannot forget the great junk science dot com, who is one of our streaming partners along with CFACC Climate Depot and the aforementioned What's Up With That? Thank you all for being here this week, and we will talk to you next week. Bye bye.