Dewitt Walton – 9/12/13

This page was last updated on September 13, 2013.

Respond to climate change; Dewitt Walton; Beaver County Times; September 12, 2013. An editor’s note says, “The writer is the special assistant to the International President, United Steelworkers.” As a reminder, the “International President, United Steelworkers” (Leo W. Gerard) is a foreign national.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“There are no better investments to be made than the ones we make in our own communities. President Obama recently took action to address climate change in communities throughout the country by announcing the first ever limits on carbon pollution, as well as plans to prepare our infrastructure for the effects of climate change, invest in our clean energy infrastructure and promote energy efficiency.”

[RWC] Mr. Walton failed to mention President Obama couldn’t get Congress to approve his plan even when Democrats were the majority in both the House and Senate. Since he’s in the USW, I guess Mr. Walton doesn’t care about his coalmining brothers and sisters in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

I wonder how long it will take the USW to realize steelmaking requires carbon. Then again, USW management may not care. You see, according to “Steelworkers a minority within their own union,” as of 2005 less than one-third (about 180,000 out of about 600,000) of USW “members [are] employed in the primary and fabricated metals industries.”

In the realm of “green energy,” we had Solyndra, A123 Systems, Ener1, Abound Solar, et cetera. As a reminder, these four companies eventually filed for bankruptcy after receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in grants/subsidies/loan guarantees paid for by local, state, and federal taxpayers. It appears Solyndra alone will cost federal taxpayers about $528 million and tax-credit sweeteners thrown in to attract private investors could cost us a few hundred million dollars more. Adding insult to injury, A123 Systems (Red Chinese) and Ener1 (Russian) went under foreign ownership as part of their bankruptcy proceedings.

“Today we must respond to the urgent call for action because, more frequent extreme weather as a result of climate change demands that we safeguard our communities. Stronger and more damaging storms, flooding, heat waves, prolonged drought and other disasters are here to stay, and we can’t wait to act. The costs of inaction are real and mounting, as the recent wave of extreme weather events across the world makes clear.”

[RWC] What BS! Mr. Walton simply made up a list of things he would like to be true but are not. Mr. Walton didn’t provide his definition of “extreme weather,” “more frequent,” or the baseline he used. If Mr. Walton could have cited truthful information to support his wild claims, why didn’t he? You may recall this was the same stuff we heard after the 2005 hurricane (Katrina, Rita, Wilma) season. If you’re counting, we’re closing in on our eighth relatively mild hurricane season in a row. Note, “mild” does not mean zero hurricanes. To date, there has been one hurricane (Humberto) in 2013. According to NBC News, “Humberto missed out by a mere three hours on the record of being tardiest first arrival in a hurricane season in the satellite era. Hurricane Gustav formed at 8 a.m ET on September 11, 2002.”

Please read my paper “Manmade Global Warming.”