Ryan Young's defecation of the day

The CEI's demented blog is hitting hit new lows with contributions from their new "Fellow in Regulatory Studies", Ryan Young.

Since, to him, all regulations are bad, he's invented a game of picking a page out of the Federal Register at random, discovering he's unable to understand it, and then writing any old shite and linking to it.

Here's an example:

The ninth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.

Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Department of Transportation ($70.3 billion 2009 budget, 58,622 employees)

Before any regulation goes into effect, the proposal is released to the public for a comment period. Anyone who is interested can write the agency and say why they think the new rule is a good or a bad idea. CEI does this regularly, by the way (see here and here). [those links have nothing to do with this regulation -- MEB]

Agencies are legally obliged to take all comments into account before going forward with the rule. And sometimes, they really do listen.

Because of overwhelmingly negative comments, DOT has decided not to go forward with a proposed change to federal school bus policy (isn’t education supposed to be a local issue?).

Read all about it on page 30,499 of the 2009 Federal Register.

Except you can't "read all about it" on that link, because it's a note about the withdrawal (without a copy of the regulation), where it explains:

On November 18, 2008, FTA issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend its school bus operations regulations... to provide clarification about the regulations in the context of the recent decision by the U.S. District Court... and generally, to update the regulation based on experience and industry practice.

...Although FTA received a good deal of support for the NPRM, many commenters opposed it. Generally, critics of the NPRM believed that FTA was attempting to restrict opportunities for its grantees to provide transportation, when in fact, FTA was attempting to allow its grantees to provide service it historically has allowed.

FTA finds, moreover, that many commenters misunderstood FTA's objectives to rectify a significantly outdated regulatory scheme.

So it looks like a rewrite of an existing regulation, which you, Mr Young, probably haven't even looked at. And your point is what, exactly? Is your story only that it was withdrawn following consultation? And? So?

But it get's worse. Here's his previous post:

The eighth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.

Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.3 billion 2007 budget, 17,964 employees).

When an agency screws up really badly, political leaders will usually step in and pass some reforms. For example, the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent visa approval letters to two 9/11 hijackers – six months after the attacks. Congress responded by changing the agency’s name.

I haven’t heard of any outrageous bungling at the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste. But I’m wondering; OSW is also changing its name. It is now ORCR – the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery.

According to the "regulation":

On January 18, 2009, the Office of Solid Waste (OSW) was reorganized and changed its name to the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery (ORCR). The name change reflects the breadth of the responsibilities/authorities that Congress provided to EPA under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the primary authorizing statute. ORCR has three divisions, which consolidate the operations of the six divisions under the OSW structure.

What was the problem again? How did your twisted tiny mind arrive at the subject of 9/11 from this?

This from a guy who probably takes out his stinking garbage to the kerbside each week so that the hated Government bureaucracy can cart it away and deal with it. How dare the Government say anything about how mixed up it is. Don't you know we've got a planet to screw up here? We, at the CEI, are working as hard as we can.

And while we're at it, how dare the Government tell people not to flush plastic diapers down the toilet either, because it clogs up the sewage system and floods into the road and the Government has to come out and deal with it. Because you, Mr Ryan Young, don't sound like the kind of guy who would even notice when someone cleaned up your shite.

Your purpose is just to create it.

Myron's punny word play

Trojan Hearse?

Dear oh dear. This is a pretty dire title from the dire man who is our one and only Myron Ebell.

The Murdoch empire's New York Post has just given Ebell another breath of publicity oxygen by publishing a shock-ed piece by him yesterday.

Now, apparently both Murdoch the elder and Murdoch the younger are concerned about climate change. So why do they want to publish malicious Myron Ebell lies in their paper, such as:

Realize, too, that almost every recession of the last 60 years, including today’s mess, has followed a sharp rise in energy prices.

Funny how the 1930s recession took the development of a whole new economic theory (Keynsianism), now being applied, to understand its reasons. To Myron, whose purpose is to spread any kind of lies about the facts of life in pursuit of oil and coal company short term money, the answer was simple. What stupid people we had in those days.

Of course, the official onset of this current recession did coincide with a huge oil price hike in 2008. But if you thought the housing bubble was going to carry on expanding had that not occured, you'd be pretty stupid -- which you would be if you ever took anything out of the latest Myron Ebell commentry. Myron blames the whole thing on to many regulations in the state of California.

He did not predict a recession on the back of the huge oil price rise in 2008, of course. Since that was a speculation bubble, not a tax, and all the money went into institutions like Exxon rather than into public funds, he was happy with it.

Myron Ebell is very happy for American families to pay high prices for gas, but only if private corporations get all the money. If there is any chance that the money will go into public social and infrastructure programs that directly benefit said American families, he can't stand it.

Myron also writes:

For that matter, similar government policies in Britain are already costing families $1,200 a year—and that’s in just the early stages.

Where? What? I've not heard of that. Is this something he picked up out of the latest Charles Dickens novel? Or is it part of the systematic misrepresentation of how people live in Britain, with an allegedly broken health service that not one of us would trade for that truly hellish one all the corporate-lobbiests are fighting hard to preserve in America?

Stay in hell, Myron.

Myron's Blaby reading list

The right wing UK think tank Social Affairs Unit publishes the Standpoint Magazine which has Baron Lawson of Blaby on its advisory board.

So Myron Ebell is just the man to write a book review of Lawson's utterly shite book An Appeal to Reason: A Cook Look at Global Warming:

First published last year, Lord Lawson's Appeal is the best short book on the entire range of issues in the global warming debate that is available from a British publisher. This paperback edition with a substantial new afterword is therefore most welcome. Lawson is lucid, thoughtful and fair-minded. The book's highly useful footnotes and bibliography attest to Lawson's familiarity with the wide range of scholarship on the many scientific disciplines that contribute to understanding the climate and with the major economic analyses of the energy-rationing policies proposed to deal with warming.

That should not be surprising. Lawson was an active participant in the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, which took expert testimony from a wide range of scientists and economists. In 2005, the committee produced the best official report on global warming that has so far been done. Although leading peers from all three major parties were involved and agreed unanimously, their report has been ignored by all three major parties. Its conclusions, you see, were "sceptical".

Unusually, Myron's appraisal of this terrible report -- which has probably been summarized into Lord Blaby's publication -- is almost accurate.

The abstract includes:

We have some concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, with some of its emissions scenarios and summary documentation apparently influenced by political considerations.

There are significant doubts about some aspects of the IPCC's emissions scenario exercise, in particular, the high emissions scenarios. The Government should press the IPCC to change their approach.

As it turns out, years of political considerations have influenced the IPCC to seriously under-estimate the emissions and climate change scenarios. Today, in 2009, it appears that reality is, not surprisingly, running ahead of the predictions.

So, we're screwed, aren't we, as it was already looking bad on the over-conservative predictions.

Well, not according to Baron Stern of Brentford whose book, also reviewed by Myron, is called A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, which is based on The Stern Review. Myron writes:

Although the mammoth Review appears to be a most professional piece of work and contains an impressive economic apparatus, its methodology and analysis have been rubbished by leading resource economists. The include William Nordhaus of Yale, Richard Tol with multiple academic appointments, Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge, and a team headed by David Henderson, former chief economist at the OECD (to whom Lawson dedicates his book).

...On the science, Stern claims that the case for alarm is indisputable. In fact, however, he does not base his case on scientific facts and observations but rather on the alarming predictions of computer models.

I'm sorry. I've got to stop you right there. When we put a rocket into space, its trajectory is entirely based on a computer models to send it to where we want it to go. You have a problem with that? What we have here are computer models telling us that the environment is going where we don't want it to go.

As Lawson points out, this is a public relations con by the alarmist industry. The computer models have no forecasting ability, nor do United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists claim that they do, however much they give that impression.

On the economics, in a section titled "Why some economists got it so badly wrong", he dismisses in two pages the economists, more distinguished and expert in the field than he is, who criticised his Review. Rather than explaining why this consensus is wrong, Stern mounts his high horse and claims that the economists who disagree with him do so because they are morally obtuse. This is comical. Lawson aptly compares him to Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.

So there you have it. The "economists more distinguished and expert in the field than" Stern is are William Nordhaus, Richard Tol, and Sir Partha Dasgupta. Myron used these names before, massively exaggerating their qualifications and fraudulently claiming that their conclusions agreed with him during some Congressional testimony in December 2007, and they didn't complain, so it's safe to use them again. After all, no one outside the Myron Ebell Climate has heard of them, whereas people have heard of Bjorn Lomborg, whom Myron is not going to be so silly as to claim has any economic qualifications at all.

But let's finish the poncey review:

...Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House...

Stern's global deal looks to me like a series of Heath Robinson contraptions that must be made to run in perfect harmony. I'm not surprised that the Labour government finds it an alluring prospect, but I am disturbed that the intellectual adolescents now leading the Conservative Party have found an agreeable guru in Stern as well.

The Tories would in my view do much better if they listened to the sage advice of one of their soundest leaders of the past half century — the former Energy Secretary and Chancellor, Nigel Lawson.

Hey, Myron, you know when the food starts running out because the environment is so screwed and depleted (as predicted) that there's no longer enough to go around, you will cry Uncle for the government to hand out some food rations to your family, as always happens in a famine.

There are famines in all parts of the world today, and it ain't your corporations like your Exxons or Starbucks that organize the relief. It's usually the UN or some other government-backed organization.

You know why?

Because there's no f***ing money to be made out of feeding destitute people after a crisis when they've used up everything they have left.

This has been your Moment of Hatred. Good Day!

Lie! Lie! Lie!

These two goggling newts appeared on Lawrence "There ain't no recession" Kudlow's execreble TV show, which is so loud-mouthed and ranty it makes The Myron Ebell Climate read like a computer textbook.



The show was a feast of hate for future generations of people -- which is just how Myron Ebell likes it -- and the segment was called "Drill! Drill! Drill!":

Kudlow: It is my view that the Obama administration doesn't want to drill! They're taxing oil companies! They're taxing gas companies! They don't like the oil shale play! The great basin in Wyoming is a phenomenal source! Let me just read you, Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation says [in a lie published as long ago as 18 December 2007]: "If full scale production of shale began within five years the US could completely end its dependence on OPEC by 2020."! Oil! Natural gas! Shale! Why not! Help me out here! We're going to get soaked again with a huge oil shock to wreck the economy!

Ebell: You're absolutely right, Larry. You're on the side of the American people. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, ever since they got into power, have been back-tracking the progress we made last year when people finally found out that this country has huge energy resources that have been locked up by the congress and previous administrations.

A lot of good things were done last year, and now Secretary Salisar at the Interior is cancelling oil leases. They all say they're in favour of it, just like Daniel Weiss (I don't know if he is in favour of it; he is different from the administration), but they say they are in favour of it in theory, but in practice everything they're doing is designed to raise energy prices.

...

Kudlow: Myron, I'm going to be crusading on this in the weeks and months! I'm going to go back to where I was last summer! Drill! Drill! Drill! Myron. But I want to ask you: Not only do they not want us to drill, but they don't want nuclear power either! So I don't get it. Aren't we playing right into the hands of our enemies overseas?

Ebell: Yes. President Obama and the Democratic Congress want energy prices to go up, and I believe that the Center for American Decline -- I'm sorry -- the Center for American Progress wants that as well.

Ultimately, the irresponsibility for what these clowns say on network TV in a popular format in which they are encouraged to Lie! Lie! Lie! without any fact checking or correcting of what they say rests with CNBC.

But that's no reason for anyone who still survives in the future not to hate Myron Ebell as the physical embodiment of everything in the nexus of media-power-politics-economics in this age which has doomed us to what could have been an avoidable disaster.


Meanwhile: Last night was CEI's 25 anniversary dinner. I wonder what's on the menu. If they can afford it, it's probably an endangered species like blue fin tuna.



We are fighting a war against future generations. And we are winning.

Is this the final generation of Ebells?

Humanity could very well be in hell, where hell is defined as truth realized too late -- E. O. Wilson

ABC news broadcast the two hour special

Earth2100: Is this the Final Century of Our Civilization?.

The note from the producer says:

The scenarios in Earth 2100 are not a prediction of what will happen but rather a warning about what might happen. They are based on the work of some of the world's top scientists and experts, as well as peer-reviewed articles from publications around the world. These notes are just a glimpse of the wide and diverse sources used to develop this program.

It is important to add that not all of the scientists we interviewed would agree with each specific scenario we present, or with our exact time frame. For example, some experts think that the more catastrophic events we depict would be unlikely to happen before the middle of the 22nd century, while others, like Jared Diamond, think that they could happen much sooner.

Though there is some disagreement about the specifics, there is widespread agreement among the 50-plus experts we spoke to in the course of our 18 months working on this show that if we do not change course in the near future, the collapse of our civilization is a real possibility.

It is towards this collapse that Myron Ebell works night and day to drive us. He does it by lying and suppressing the facts while being paid by fossil fuel companies run by people who do not care if we all die.

The CEI's latest video offering is pretty stupid. It's always Al Gore, isn't it? The text ends with:

There is no global warming crisis.
The earth hasn't warmed for a decade.
But politicians are using this so-called crisis as an excuse to raise taxes, choke our economy and control our lives.
Don't let them push us into a new "1984".

I have no idea what that thing they've badly edited onto her white T-shirt is. I thought it was a penguin. The original had some kind of Mac symbol:



The Clinton one had an Obama symbol:



That's enough of that. It's not a game. This pissing about you do has miserable consequences. You ought to know that.