#_author:Jerry Adler

[jerryadler-blog]

Want more climate change, faster? The White House reportedly has a plan to help.

  Seven weeks into the Trump presidency, the coal industry and electric utilities are getting restless for their promised relief from the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulates carbon dioxide emissions. But they might not have to wait much longer, according to the authoritative energy news site E&E News, which is reporting that the administration is preparing to set the repeal in motion with an executive order as early as next week.

And there is no “… and replace” in the administration’s reported plans, which also include instructing the Justice Department to stop defending the rule in a case before a federal appeals court. The intention, according to E&E, is to rescind the controversial regulation and replace it with… nothing.

That approach is consistent with Trump’s promises during the campaign to revive the coal industry, and with EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s insistence that the science linking global warming to emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is uncertain. Pruitt said as much in his confirmation hearing, in a testy exchange with Sen. Bernie Sanders, and again Thursday morning on CNBC, where he cited “tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact” from human activity.

As Sanders pointed out, the “disagreement” on this question, as measured by peer-reviewed scientific publications, is actually a 97% consensus in favor of the view that global warming is a human artifact. Each of the last three years has been, successively, the warmest on record.

A January report by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded, “The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.”

Trump himself has not been especially worried about global temperature rises throughout the years. Before he became president, he frequently called for additional warming.

“It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!” he tweeted in October of 2015.

The year before, Trump quipped: “It’s late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast!”

[jerryadler-blog]

Do not go gentle

How many ways can you cover a year? With articles, interviews, videos, slide shows, blog posts, tweets — did we leave anything out? Well, yes, one thing: poetry. So here is Yahoo News’ take on the year that is ending, by our resident poet, Jerry Adler.

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Here aboard the third rock from the sun Five billion times around it we have spun. Or, if you please, two thousand and sixteen And as it ends, we ask, what did it mean?

Like a tattered sticker on a bumper, A faded yard sign, lying in the grass, Proclaiming here once lived a never-Trumper The year is dwindling down and soon will pass.

So let’s take stock of all the wounds and bruises To all the Clintonistas who feel cheated The Bernie Bros and Rubios and Cruzes They did their best but ended up out-tweeted

How many self-important, high-falutin’ Pollsters, anchors, bloggers were upset To look down at their shoes and see that Putin Just took a WikiLeak, and got them wet?

We can see our time is growing short here, Upon the Earth, we’re only just a tenant, Apocalypse, as Nostradamus taught, dear, Won’t happen till the Cubs have won the pennant.

As foretold in the Book of Revelation We’re living in a time of fear and doubt. Four horsemen ride to bring the Tribulation Unless we build a wall to keep them out.

Yet even in the darkness of December Somewhere up ahead there must be light Be guided by this saying, and remember: Do not go gentle into that alt-night.

[jerryadler-blog]

Trump’s truth: the dinner-table standard

Call it the Lewandowski Doctrine: the proposition that in evaluating the statements of a candidate for president of the United States, the proper standard to apply is how would this sound coming from my brother-in-law at the kitchen table?

Specifically, Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, speaking at a forum Thursday night at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, was criticizing what he considered the media’s myopic focus on the accuracy of Trump’s statements during the campaign. “This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

That’s just human nature; the Guinness Book of World Records was, in fact, created precisely for this eventuality, to settle pub bets over whether Secretariat could have beaten Seabiscuit in his prime. But there is no equivalent mechanism for correcting a presidential candidate who time after time during the campaign—and even afterwards—made statements with no basis in fact whatsoever. Lewandowski’s view is that for a large part of the electorate—large enough to win, at least by the measure of Electoral College votes—it didn’t matter. He appears to be right.

[jerryadler-blog]

GOP pollster Frank Luntz: ‘No one will call me a Republican again’

Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican pollster and message guru going back to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, said Tuesday night that he became latest political casualty of Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

“Starting tonight on this show, no one will call me a Republican again, because I’m not part of this,” Luntz told Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric and a panel of guests at the start of Yahoo’s election-night coverage.

“I’m not part of that system, I’m not part of that negativity. This is not something I was involved in this year, I will leave it to others to explain and to try to get themselves out of this mess.”

In a New York Times op-ed, Luntz wrote Monday that the 2016 campaign had convinced him that “the greatest country in the history of civilization has become dangerously uncivilized.”

The GOP focus-group maestro has long been a critic of the way Trump has run his campaign. In October, he described Trump’s White House bid as an “absolute joke.”