Heartland Weekly: The Left’s Misleading Green Jobs Claims

Published July 17, 2017

If you don’t visit Freedom Pub and the Heartlander digital magazine every day, you’re missing out on some of the best news and commentary on liberty and free markets you can find. But worry not, freedom lovers! Heartland Weekly is here for you every Monday with a highlight show. Subscribe to the email today, and read this week’s edition below.

Real Energy Expert Destroys John Oliver’s Ignorant, Profanity-Laced Rant About Coal
Rich Trzupek, Breitbart
Last month, HBO funnyman John Oliver spent an episode of his show Last Week Tonight delivering a profanity-laced rant demonizing coal, coal-energy advocates, and presidents of the United States who don hard hats. He did so following the formula that Jon Stewart has used so successfully throughout his career: Be witty and quote a lot of apparent facts in order to back up your satirically-expressed opinion about any issue and hope your audience will accept you as an expert. In this vein, Oliver’s coal rant was so full of misrepresentations, exaggerations and confusion that a dozen columns could be written debunking it. READ MORE

Heartland Institute Experts Comment on Latest Senate GOP Obamacare ‘Fix’
The Republican Caucus in the U.S. Senate on Thursday released another bill aimed at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. The bill would allow the sale of less-generous insurance plans currently outlawed by Obamacare, offer Medicaid block grants to the states, and let people pay for health insurance out of their HSA accounts, but it also would retain many of Obamacare’s tax hikes and subsidies. READ MORE

The Left’s Misleading Green Jobs Claims
H. Sterling Burnett, Washington Times
Solar- and wind-generated power, being much more expensive than conventional fossil-fuel-generated electricity, would only be used sparingly if not for massive government subsidies. While fossil-fuel producers and users pay billions of dollars of taxes and fees to the government, renewable-energy sources are net tax sinks. But the most glaring problem for green-energy proponents is the jobs created by the wind- and solar-generated energy industries are wasteful and inefficient compared to traditional energy jobs. READ MORE

Featured Podcast: U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) – Reducing D.C.’s Promotion of Policing for Profit
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) discusses with Budget & Tax News Managing Editor Jesse Hathaway a letter he and lawmakers from both parties sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, asking him to reform the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil asset forfeiture practices. Currently, Lee says, the U.S. government encourages local and state law enforcement agencies to violate Americans’ rights to due process and property, by offering an avenue through which states’ restrictions on civil asset forfeiture can be bypassed, by laundering profits from policing through the federal government. That practice, which has all the wrong incentives, must end. LISTEN TO MORE

HEARTLAND’S PODCASTS NOW ON SOUND CLOUD
Heartland’s podcasts have grown steadily since going “daily” in 2010—on pace for nearly two million downloads in 2017 on iTunes! Now, the Heartland Daily Podcast is also available on SoundCloud, so you have yet another convenient and dynamic way to listen to the country’s best podcasts on school reform, budgets, taxes, health care, environment, energy, and constitutional reform. Follow us on SoundCloud, and grab the easy-to-use player to embed on your own blogs or social media accounts. CLICK HERE

Chris de Freitas, R.I.P.
Tom Harris, Freedom Pub
The International Climate Science Coalition reports the passing Professor Chris R. de Freitas, a climate scientist who spoke at Heartland’s climate change conferences and challenged his fellow academics to take a closer look at the science of climate change. He died at the age of 69 on July 11 after a two-year battle with cancer. READ MORE

The Crisis of Integrity-Deficient Science
Paul Driessen, CFACT
In just the past week: Duke University admitted that its researchers had falsified or fabricated data used to get $113 million in EPA grants, a New England Journal of Medicine (NJEM) article and editorial claimed air pollutants kill people but blatantly ignored multiple studies contradicting that claim, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science published an article on pesticides whose authors violated multiple guidelines for scientific integrity. What’s happening to scientific integrity? Our most respected universities, medical journals, and science societies have failed to uphold the high standards they once shared, and their integrity crisis puts all of us at risk. READ MORE

Utah Teachers Union Sues to Prevent Public from Seeing Teachers’ Past Misconduct
Teresa Mull, School Choice Weekly
Utah’s largest teachers union doesn’t want the public to know about its members’ bad behavior. From the Salt Lake Tribune: “Utah’s largest teachers union is suing the state school board over a new website that allows the public to search a database of disciplinary actions taken against educators.” Looks like Kass Harstad, an attorney representing the union, would prefer the website report preemptively on teacher misdeeds, rather than “retroactive” ones? Either way, it’s clear the teachers union has something to hide, and as usual, will fight shamelessly and selfishly to keep itself in power. READ MORE

As Think Tank Closes, Its Free-Market Legacy Burns Bright
Michael Hamilton, Consumer Power Report
The National Center for Policy Analysis is closing its doors after 34 years of researching and promoting free-market alternatives to government regulation. It served as a beacon of light guiding elected officials to the right decisions for more than three decades, an impressive and important contribution to the world. A lighthouse no longer in use is no failure, as anyone who has visited a lighthouse knows. The moment its light fades, it becomes a monument – not only to its own bright past, but to all other lighthouses. READ MORE

Environment & Climate News: Senate Considers Bills to Reclaim Regulatory Authority
The 2017 August edition of Environment & Climate News is available online in PDF format. In this edition, read about how Congress’ successful use of the Congressional Review Act was able to undo 14 Obama-era regulations. There is also a story about how the managers of California’s public employee pension fund have resisted attempts to divest from fossil fuel companies. Read about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s costly methane reduction plan, and other important stories on energy and the environment. READ MORE

Bonus Podcast: Willie Soon: Climate Science is Not About Consensus, It’s About Facts and Evidence
The day after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate agreement, MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote a letter to the “MIT Community” saying Trump got the science and the economics wrong. Climate scientist Willie Soon, a frequent speaker at Heartland’s climate conferences, and a team of climate researchers responded with a letter showing MIT’s President is wrong on both the climate and the economics. In this podcast, Soon explains why the Paris treaty would not have helped the climate or prevented climate change, but it would have harmed the U.S. economy and kept millions around the world in poverty. LISTEN TO MORE

When ‘Single Payer’ Won’t Pay
Peter Ferrara and Lewis Uhler, Washington Times
Obamacare added about 16 million more dependents to Medicaid, an increase of almost 30 percent in just five years. As a result, nearly 70 million Americans are now dependent on Medicaid, a program intended to be a safety net program for the poor and not a middle-class entitlement program. Medicaid’s low reimbursement rates have caused a flight of doctors from the program, meaning politicians can claim to be “providing health care for all” while actually turning Medicaid into an institutionalized means of denying health care to the poor. READ MORE

Nine Years After The Financial Crisis, A Debt Limit Is No Solution To U.S. Debt Problems
John Merrifield and Barry Poulson, Investor’s Business Daily
The United States responded to the 2008 financial crisis with an aggressive Keynesian fiscal stimulus and emerged as one of the most indebted nations in the world. Gross debt now exceeds gross domestic product. The Congressional Budget Office projects the private debt-to-GDP ratio will increase to 150 percent over the next three decades. Debt overhang of this magnitude is accompanied by retardation and stagnation in economic growth; slower growth, in turn, makes it more difficult to reduce debt burdens. READ MORE