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Happy Hollow-green
October 31, 2014 Environment

As I’ve said a hundred times. the “E”nvironmental movement is going to be responsible for destroying the planet. Coyote was at a meeting of California State Parks officials, you can’t make this stuff up:

  • I watched a 20 minute presentation in which a woman from LA parks talked repeatedly about the urban heat island being a result of global warming
  • I just saw that California State Parks, which is constantly short of money and has perhaps a billion dollars in unfunded maintenance needs, just spent millions of dollars to remove a road from a beachfront park based solely (they claimed) based on projections that 55 inches of sea level rise would cause the road to be a problem.  Sea level has been rising 3-4mm a year for over 150 years and even the IPCC, based on old much higher temperature increase forecasts, predicted about a foot of rise.
  • One presenter said that a 3-5C temperature rise over the next century represent the low end of reasonable forecasts.  Most studies of later are showing a climate sensitivity of 1.5-2.0 C (I still predict 1C) with warming over the rest of the century of about 1C, or about what we saw last century
  • I watched them brag for half an hour about spending tons of extra money on make LEED certified buildings.  As written here any number of times, most LEED savings come through BS gaming of the rules, like putting in dedicated electric vehicle parking sites (that do not even need a charger to get credit).  In a brief moment of honesty, the architect presenting admitted that most of the LEED score for one building came from using used rather than new furniture in the building.
  • They said that LEED buildings were not any more efficient than most other commercial buildings getting built, just a matter of whether you wanted to pay for LEED certification — it was stated that the certification was mostly for the plaque.  Which I suppose is fine for private businesses looking for PR, but why are cash-strapped public agencies doing it?

In other news, Chile instituted a (small) carbon tax. How did they get it passed? They passed a larger corporate income tax increase at the same time to deflect attention. Their poor population will pay for it, even if the tax itself is a good idea. This is once again great news for American fossil fuel consumers – lower prices are in the pipeline!

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