The following fisking is of an article posted on CNN Opinion, by Jill Flipovic  on August 21 2018 titled “If Trump and GOP don’t understand climate change, they don’t deserve public office:.

I have added comments to Ms Filipovic essay in red.

The Trump administration’s latest efforts to undo more of Barack Obama’s efforts to slow climate change come as no surprise. Nothing gets this President more excited than trying to undo his predecessor’s legacy.

But his proposed new EPA rules — tagged with the laughable misnomer the “Affordable Clean Energy” rule — are not just vindictive, they are dangerous. The administration wants to allow coal-burning power plants to emit more deadly carbon and to give states greater leeway to allow big-money companies to pollute. The new rules would replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which is aimed at reducing carbon emissions.  

Several things wrong here. First “deadly carbon” is an ignorant thing to say.  Does she not know that virtually every living thing is composed of carbon?   The globe is greening due to the increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2).  Wheat and corn fields are becoming more productive as atmospheric  CO2 increases.   Secondly, her ignorance shows.  She is wrong if she thinks shutting down US coal plants will have any effect on the planet.  Using the warmers own formula for calculating the effect of reduced CO2 emissions by a shutdown US coal plants,  shows that any temperature decrease will be too small to be  measurable.
Thirdly the emission of CO2 from US coal plants is pretty small compared to China.  Her rant is  missdirected.  China is  adding a new coal plant every week. And guess who gave the Chinese  permission to continue doing this until 2030 —none other than forward looking savior Barak O.   Obama thinks we should close our coal plants down but its ok for the Chinese to keep building them.  Not just China , world-wide construction of coal based plants is on the rise.  Coal sales are on the rise.

The proposal reflects a longstanding and fundamentally damaging idea in right-wing politics: That climate change is a matter of opinion, not fact, and that people who have no interest in the facts still deserve to hold political office. 

It is obvious, she belongs to the church of unending climate catastrophes.  If she would look at actual recorded temperatures versus the computer PREDICTION, she might come down off her high horse. Paraphrasing the last sentence, Those who hold catastrophic climate change based upon religious beliefs  do not deserve to write ignorant opinion pieces.

The deluded perspective is not confined to America’s Republican Party. Conservatives in Australia have also latched on to the theory that climate change is debatable, and that efforts to fight it are a liberal conspiracy against big business.

 Well, Germany, and other European countries are increasing their CO2 emissions.  The third world is increasing their CO2 emissions. The Paris Agreement is a scam.  This is evading Ms. Filipovic.  She lives in a world of make believe.  Perhaps that shows that only the US and Australia are not hiding under the covers.

The GOP has long been in the pocket of polluters, who have who have made clear that they are quite comfortable destroying the planet for our children and grandchildren in return for getting rich now. The party has helped to make this denialism politically feasible by systematically undermining the public. 

Once again Ms Pilipovic seems to be ill informed.  What President Trump is doing is to make electricity affordable.   Go look at the reports from England and Germany, two nations that have gone head over heals in renewable energy, about the poor people that are dying because they can no longer afford electricity.  Every intelligent person knows that the people that will suffer the most as energy prices go skyrocketing are the poorest people among us. 

That the new Trump rules will cost thousands of lives — 1,400 every year by the EPA’s own admission — doesn’t seem to matter to this President and his GOP enablers, who put corporate profits first, ahead of citizens’ health. In this, they are joined by a base that seems willing to accept any lie, indignity or even undermining of health and life.

When you read about the deaths of 1400 every year, you may wonder where that came from.   Ms Pilipovic may know but my guess is that she doesn’t.  The Obama EPA knew that the coal plant CO2 emissions were insufficient to justify the “Clean Power Plant” plan.  They needed something else. So, they settled on 2.5-micron particles.  Too small for you to see, but they postulated that people are breathing them in and dying.  They had a problem.  All the test they had run as well as other groups outside of the EPA never found that the 2.5-micron particles were killing people.  So, they got a group of “scientist” to run these tests again.  Guess what.  They found out that it was a serious situation.  Two things are fishy here.  The first that they would not publish their test data.  Of course, no one could disprove their results without access to their data.   BUT the EPA accepted the results.  A new bill has been passed saying that the EPA can no longer use “secrete science”.  And the group of scientists that did this secrete science have amassed over $20, 000,000 doing studies for the EPA.  They know who is buttering their bread.

It’s a sad state of affairs — but also a real and growing threat to a country experiencing wild weather mood swings, the largest wildfires in recorded history, floods, droughts and on and on.

The bible of the warmers is the IPCC reports.  These reports have consistently said that the “wild weather “is not a function of climate change.

In any reasonable universe, those who deny basic scientific facts that connect this grim reality to humans’ role in global warming would be deemed unfit to hold office.

Here we go again. Who is unfit to hold office is the catastrophic global warmers. Get this, James Hansen, the god father of the catastrophic global warming movement says their theory is all wrong.   Click here to read.

Imagine a congressman who questioned whether gravity was real, or a senator who insisted the earth was flat. We would rightly say that they’re intellectually deficient, and that their bizarre theories mean they probably shouldn’t be making vital decisions that affect millions of Americans (not to mention billions more people around the world).

Is this a mistake on her part?  Normally people would say Representatives and Senators not congressmen and senators.

But somehow climate change falls in a different category (along with, among a majority of evangelical protestants, for example, a disbelief in evolution).

This seems to be religious bias.  I was told that liberals never sank that low.

It’s one thing to be ignorant — and, to be sure, many non-climate-change-denying Americans don’t understand the basics of climate change either. But most Americans also don’t understand the details of how a bill becomes law, how our court system works, or how the national budget gets set — all things we expect of our nationally elected officials.

I think we have shown who are the Ignorant ones.

Politicians should similarly be expected to understand the basic science of climate change, and to listen to the scientific experts instead of seeking out the few outliers who confirm their own half-baked beliefs.

Oh yes, such people as Al Gore and Bill Nye are the biggest half baked, maybe only unbaked catastrophic global warmer educators.

Of course, Trump has appointed a series of cronies and amateurs to his cabinet, and he himself holds the highest office in the land, with zero previous experience for the job, zero intellectual curiosity, and zero ability to train his attention on just about anything other than Twitter and Fox News.

Gosh he only amassed several billions of dollars in his business career.  Of course  Barak Obama’s experience as a community organizer made him much more qualified than Donald Trump. (sarc)

Again, showning who the ignorant one is.

His presidency makes full mockery of the theory that those in charge should know anything at all. And with this latest green light to polluters and contaminators, all of us are again paying the price for that unapologetic greed and ignorance.

Repeat.

cbdakota