Why Trump Should Not Fund an Oroville Dam Fix
By Wayne Lusvardi -- February 15, 2017… Continue Reading“And yet, the federal government – not to mention the states – has invested shockingly little on such (flood repair) projects in recent years, spending about as much on flood recovery as prevention. Trump has vowed to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, but it’s unclear if levees and dams will be included. Even in California, the center of “the resistance” (to Trump), we need help and cooperation from the federal government. It’s not about petty politics or about Trump’s twisted vision of loyalty, assuming he even honors it. It’s about saving lives.”
– Erika Smith (editorial writer), “There the Threat of Oroville Dam – Then There’s Trump,” Sacramento Bee, February 12, 2017.
“California passed a $7.545 billion Proposition 1 Water Bond in 2015 that includes $395,000,000 for “flood management.”
For Still-Poor China, Coal Pollution from Home Heating
By Greg Rehmke -- February 14, 2017Rapid industrialization spilled pollution across China’s cities, rivers, and skies. Market-reforms in the 1980s opened first agriculture and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) like Shenzhen to local enterprise and overseas investors. Market reforms and factories then expanded across China, bringing prosperity but also pollution from mining and manufacturing. Through the first decades of reform, pollution seemed far less important than jobs when wage rates even in 1990 yielded an average income per person (GNI) of just $330 a year. By 2000, average income had nearly tripled but was still just $940 a year, and by 2015, average income was nearly eight times higher than that–$7,930.
Hundreds of millions migrated from rural China to new assembly plants and textile mills. An estimated 200 million migrant workers still form the “floating population” of informal labor.…
Continue ReadingRetire the Phony ‘Social Cost of Carbon’
By Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen -- February 13, 2017“As a first priority, the Trump Administration must review, revise, reject or even rescind the SCC, and reduce its values well below what Obama used – perhaps even to zero or negative numbers. Doing so will destroy the justification for many expensive, intrusive, punitive, useless, counterproductive regulations.”
“The benefit estimates … will remain orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable SCC estimates, which means the B-C ratios will also remain very high.”
The Obama Administration aggressively used a Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) scheme to justify federal regulations pertaining to carbon-based fuels, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, coal mine and pipeline permit denials, energy development foreign aid, and many other actions.
While “SCC” may sound esoteric or academic, it is a critical concept. Without the artificial and inflated SCC estimates, many recent energy and environmental regulations could not have been justified or promulgated.…
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