This weekly newsletter, focused on environmental issues, highlights relevant analysis done by the John Locke Foundation and other think tanks, as well as items in the news.

1. So What’s the Fracking Problem?

Hydraulic fracking is a method for extracting natural gas and oil from shale rock located thousands of feet underground. Thanks to technological breakthroughs in using this technique, vast new sources of gas and, to a lesser extent, oil here in the United States are becoming economically viable. These sources are located all along the eastern seaboard including in parts of North Carolina. As a result, the price of natural gas has been in decline for a decade.

But of course, since these new sources of natural gas are driving costs down and will allow Americans to live prosperous lives, the environmental movement has come out in full force trying to stop fracking. There is nothing that threatens the environmental movement’s power position more than inexpensive energy. That is why there is nothing being proposed by environmental pressure groups in the area of energy policy that will not have the effect of driving up the cost of energy to American consumers. If energy is controlled, then lifestyles can be controlled.

Last week an article in the Wall Street Journal took on the environmentalists’ claims one by one, showing why they have no grounding in science. A partial list of claims made by enviros and debunked by the Journal include:

  • fracking contaminates drinking water
  • fracking has polluted drinking water with methane gas

  • fracking releases toxic or radioactive chemicals

    And of course no such list would be complete without this one:

  • fracking causes cancer

 

2. Chinese coal plants cause both warming and cooling

For years we have been hearing that, going forward, the most important source of CO2 emissions, and therefore the cause of global warming, will be China. That is because China’s massive economic growth is being fueled by coal-fired power plants. But, inconveniently for the global warm-mongers, over the last 10-15 years, depending on who you talk to and what temperature data you are looking at, there has been no warming trend. In fact, it appears that there may have been some cooling — in spite of the fact that CO2 concentrations continue to rise.

As one of the Climategate scientists wrote back in 2009, "the fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t."

Now a study has come along that blames — you guessed it — coal-fired power plants for the lack of warming and possibly for cooling. It should be noted that one of the authors of this article is Michael Mann, fabricator the now discredited hockey-stick graph. In this case, it’s supposedly not the CO2 changing the climate, but the particulates generated from burning coal — which, by the way, are local, not global. Of course, the study ignores other possible explanations for the lack of warming, such as the lack of sunspot activity, because of course any change in the climate whatsoever has to be caused by human activity. Apparently if it was up to nature itself, the climate would always stay the same — or at least global temperatures would.

To read interesting commentary and rebuttals of this new study, go here and here.

 

3. Ozone Report

Each week during the summer ozone season this newsletter will report how many, if any, high-ozone days had been experienced throughout the state during the previous week, where they were experienced, and how many have been recorded during the entire season to date. While many environmental groups express concern about air quality, the John Locke Foundation is the only organization that keeps up-to-date track of the actual ozone data and reports it in an unfiltered manner on a regular basis.

The ozone season began on April 1 and ends October 31. All reported data are from the North Carolina Division of Air Quality, which is part of the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

During the period from June 27 through July 3 there were 18 reported high-ozone readings, which occurred on nine different monitors throughout the state over four days. Mecklenburg County’s four monitors registered four high readings, and Lincoln County’s one monitor registered three. That was the most registered on any single monitor during the week. So far this season there have been 71 readings on various North Carolina monitors that have exceeded federal standards of 0.75 parts per billion.

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