Ed
Berry is a PhD atmospheric physicist.
From:
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 7:09 AM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: Turning Off The Lights In America
How They Are Turning Off the Lights in America
On October 31, 2009, the
once largest aluminum plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another
American industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company
in Montana will shut down its aluminum production because it cannot purchase
the necessary electrical power to continue its operations.
How did this happen in
America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability.
America's industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the
world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before
accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to
purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.
America grew because of innovation and hard work
by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast
natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the
ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been
extinguished. Why?
Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a
contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply
electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th
US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible
with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power
Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of
Columbia Falls Aluminum.
But the real reasons are
much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to
find sources of electricity other than Bonneville?
We need to look no further
than the many environmental groups like the Sierra Club and to America's
elected officials who turned their backs on American citizens and in essence
themselves, for they too are citizens of this country. These officials bought
into the green agenda promoted by the heavily funded environmental groups.
Caving to pressure, they passed laws and the environmental groups filed
lawsuits that began turning off the lights in America. The dominos stated to
fall.
They began stopping nuclear
power plants in the 1970's. They locked up much of our coal and oil resources
with land laws. They passed tax credits, which forces taxpayers foot the bill
for billionaire investors to save taxes by investing in less productive wind
and solar energy projects.
In 1988, the Environmental Protection
Agency called a meeting of atmospheric scientists and others with environmental
interests. I remember well the meeting I attended in the San Francisco Bay
Area. The meeting was in a theater-like lecture room with the seating curved to
face the center stage and rising rapidly toward the back of the room. Attending
were many atmospheric scientists whom I knew from Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute and some local colleges.
The room became silent when
a man walked up to the lectern. He told us that the next big national problem
was global warming. He explained how human carbon dioxide emissions were
trapping the earth's radiation like a greenhouse and causing the atmosphere to
heat beyond its normal temperature. He said this will lead to environmental
disasters. He finished by saying the EPA will now concentrate its research
funding toward quantifying the disasters that would be caused by our carbon
dioxide.
The room was silent. I was
the first to raise my hand to ask a question, "How can you defend your
global warming hypothesis when you have omitted the effects of clouds which
affect heat balance far more than carbon dioxide, and when your hypothesis
contradicts the paper by Lee in the Journal of Applied Meteorology in 1972 that
shows the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse?"
He answered me by saying,
"You do not know what you are talking about. I know more about how the
atmosphere works than you do."
Not being one to drop out of a fight,
I responded, "I know many of the atmospheric scientists in this room, and
many others who are not present but I do not know you. What is your background
and what makes you know so much more than me?"
He answered, "I know
more than you because I am a lawyer and I work for the EPA."
After the meeting, many of
my atmospheric science friends who worked for public agencies thanked me for
what I said, saying they would have liked to say the same thing but they feared
for their jobs.
And that, my dear readers,
is my recollection of that great day when a lawyer, acting as a scientist,
working for the federal government, announced global warming.
Fast forward to today. The
federal government is spending 1000 times more money to promote the
global-warming charade than is available to those scientists who are arguing
against it. Never before in history has it taken a massive publicity campaign
to convince the public of a scientific truth. The only reason half the public
thinks global warming may be true is the massive amount of money put into
global-warming propaganda. The green eco-groups have their umbilical cords in
the government's tax funds. Aside from a few honest but duped scientists living
on government money, the majority of the alarms about global warming –
now called "climate change" because it's no longer warming
– come from those who have no professional training in atmospheric
science. They are the environmentalists, the ecologists, the lawyers and the
politicians. They are not the reliable atmospheric scientists whom I know.
Nevertheless, our
politicians have passed laws stating that carbon dioxide is bad. See
California's AB32 which is based upon science fiction. (For readers who take
issue with me, I will be happy to destroy your arguments in another place. In
this paper, we focus on the damage to America that is being caused by those
promoting the global-warming fraud.)
In the year 2000, America
planned 150 new coal-electric power plants. These power plants would have been
"clean" by real standards but the Greens managed to have carbon
dioxide defined legally as "dirty" and this new definition makes all
emitters of carbon dioxide, including you, a threat to the planet. Therefore,
using legal illogic, the Sierra Club stopped 82 of these planned power plants
under Bush II and they expect it will be a slam-dunk to stop the rest under
Obama.
And now you know the real
reason the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company had to shut down. America stopped
building new power plants a long time ago. There is now no other source where
the company can buy energy. Our energy-producing capability is in a decline and
it is taking America with it.
I used to belong to the Sierra
Club in the 1960's. It used to be a nice hiking club. In the late 1960's the
Sierra Club began turning its attention toward stopping nuclear power. Then I
quit the Sierra Club. It continues to prosper from the many subscribers who
think they are supporting a good cause. What they are really supporting is the
destruction of America brick by brick. The Sierra Club and similar
organizations are like watermelons – green on the outside, red on the
inside. They are telling us we have no right to our own natural resources, and
in doing so they are sinking America.
Inherent in ecology are
three assumptions: "natural" conditions are optimal, climate is
fragile, and human influences are bad. Physics makes no such assumptions. By
assuming climate is fragile, the global warming supporters have assumed their
conclusion. In fact, the climate is not fragile. It is stable. The
non-adherence to physical logic in the global-warming camp is what makes many
physical scientists say that global warming is a religion.
So we have a new age
religion promoted by environmentalists, incorporated into our laws and
brainwashed into our people that is now destroying America from the inside.
Like a vast ship, America
is taking a long time to sink but each day it sinks a little further. The
fearsome day awaits, when America, if not quickly recovered by its real
citizens, will tilt its nose into the water to begin a rapid and final descent
into oblivion ... her many resources saved for whom?
October
24, 2009
Edwin X Berry, PhD [send him mail]
is an atmospheric physicist and certified consulting meteorologist with Climate
Physics, LLC in Montana. Visit his
website.
Copyright © 2009
Edwin X Berry, PhD