President Trump has come under scorching criticism for his climate change policies, but apparently he is doing something right.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 2.7 percent last year, the first year of the Trump presidency, even as the administration slashed environmental regulations and global emissions continued to climb.
“Thanks to President Trump’s regulatory reform agenda, the economy is booming, energy production is surging and we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources,” said Andrew Wheeler, acting administrator of the EPA.
The yearslong decline in U.S. emissions has been widely credited to the oil and gas boom. Power plants increasingly turned from coal to natural gas as innovations in extraction technology resulted in lower prices.
“These achievements flow largely from technological breakthroughs in the private sector, not the heavy hand of government,” Mr. Wheeler said. “The Trump administration has proven that federal regulations are not necessary to drive [carbon dioxide] reductions.”
Don’t muddy the issue with facts.
Obumbles didn’t build this either.
But but but can Trump lower the seas lower than 0bama has???
That America has reduced emissions by a much larger amount than any other country via increased use of natural gas was pointed out by Patrick Michaels on Mark Levin’s show Sunday evening.
“Dr. Patrick Michaels on the truth about global warming”
https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/dr-patrick-michaels-on-the-truth-about-global-warming .
” ..LEVIN: Dr. Michaels, everybody says this global warming, it’s a terrible thing. The oceans are going to rise, we just talked about this. The hurricanes are going to be more intense and so forth, and you’re saying not really.
Well, we never talk about this, are there benefits from some increased heat on the planet?
MICHAELS: Yes, the whole philosophy here is straight out of Voltaire. You know, Pangloss and the best of all possible worlds, we don’t live in the best of all possible climates. And our atmosphere is not in the best of all possible composition.
So what’s happened as it’s warmed this half a degree in the late 20th Century and the CO2 has gone up and up in the atmosphere, well, what we’ve done is we’ve created a greener and greener planet and the greening of the planet earth is profound. There’s a very recent paper that just came out a couple of months ago, showing tremendous increases in how much green matter there is on the planet.
LEVIN: Vegetation.
MICHAELS: Vegetation. The largest increases by the way are in the tropical rainforest. It’s growing like topsy.
LEVIN: Is that why we never hear about it anymore?
MICHAELS: I don’t know why we don’t hear about it anymore, but it sure is growing, and in grassland, which is lot of it is used for agriculture either …
LEVIN: Prairies.
MICHAELS: Prairies that cows either go on or we harvest it for hay, the data for 17 years of satellite data show the grassland, green mass, if you will, is growing at 5% per year. That’s huge.
Another paper, “Nature” magazine by Ziaxen Ju (ph) two years ago looked at the planetary greening and said what are the causes? He did something called a factor analysis. Seventy percent of it was a simple direct effect of putting more carbon dioxide in the air because it’s plant food. And one of the other big causes of the planetary greening was climate change, the warming of the planet. Yes, we never hear about this, but it’s real.
LEVIN: So even though it’s warming just a little bit, it has an enormous positive impact on the planet. …….
LEVIN: What happened?
MICHAELS: Well, we got a President (Trump) that wasn’t going for it, and he promised to get out of the Paris Accord on Climate Change, that’s an agreement that was hatched in December of 2015, in which the nations of the world submit what are called voluntary plans to reduce their emissions.
So, for example, we volunteered to reduce our emissions at pretty substantial percentage. The Indians volunteered to increase their emissions, the Chinese volunteered to increase their emissions until 2030 whereupon they might level off.
So the president looked at that and he says, this is a bad deal. What I just told you, doesn’t that sound like a bad deal?
LEVIN: Yes .
MICHAELS: And he got out of it. Meanwhile, what country on earth reduced its emissions the most? Of all the nations on earth? The US of A.
LEVIN: So this would have formalized an agreement where we’re compelled to lower and the Chinese and the Indians could increase?
MICHAELS: Yes. Now, the thing – but nobody is compelled. There’s no enforcement mechanism in the Paris Accord. So when our negotiator, John Kerry came back and was on the Sunday TV shows, he said, well how are you going to enforce this? What are you going to do countries that don’t do what they said they were going to do? He said, “We’ll shame them.” Honest to God, I guess we have a shame bomb now and that’s going to do something. Of course, emissions are going up.
LEVIN: Why have we lowered ours?
MICHAELS: We have lowered ours largely because of good old capitalism and technology, discovering that we were not running out of natural gas, that if we just break rocks underneath our feet, we can extract the natural gas from shale.
LEVIN: Fracking.
MICHAELS: Fracking, that’s right. And so we’re substituting natural gas which is cheaper for coal for electrical generation, and that produces about half as much CO2 per unit electricity as a coal plant does, and so our emissions are going down, and I see a lot of big companies are experimenting with natural gas for large scale transportation. You can do to on a railroad because the size of the engine doesn’t matter. It might be able to do it in trucks, so the emissions, it’s more efficient, the emissions go down and then 30 or 40 years from now, because there are so many pressures to be efficient, I don’t know what technology we will have, but I’ll bet it will be more efficient. The old advertising slogans, the future belongs to the efficient, well, welcome to the United States. …”
Well, don’t you know Obama set that up so Trump could take all the credit for it?
Just like the economy!