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April 26, 2022 - Jim Fetzer
52:51
THE REAL DEAL: CLIMATE CHANGE: MYTH VS. REALITY, PART 9 (23 April 2022) WITH JOE OLSON, P.E.
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This is Jim Fetzer, your host on The Real Deal, where we have a special report, part of our series on climate change, with Joe Olson, who's been doing a brilliant job of debunking the nonsense that CO2 in the atmosphere is causing the Earth to warm, as we've already explained.
Actually, it has the opposite effect.
It cools the Earth in four different respects.
Not only that, it's indispensable for life.
If the zealots who are pursuing this global change agenda are successful, it will not only destroy the economy of the United States, but reduce the quality of life for the world's population generally.
So while they hold it out as an existential crisis that must be acted upon now, lest all life on earth be extinguished, they're actually working to promote a very goal they claim to be opposing.
Joe, it's shocking what's going on here.
Let me mention, by the way, Joe is a co-founder of Principia Scientific, which is doing some sensational job, formed around 2010, when he and his colleagues published their first book, Slaying the Sky Dragon, Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, which I recommend to one and all.
Joe, your opening remarks.
Yes, today we're going to discuss one of the other nefarious government agencies that's responsible for an enormous amount of degradation of our industrial base, certainly, and then also a lot of misinformation from a science standpoint, and that would be the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring about the agrochemical industry and how it was killing all the insects and birds, and so there was a little bit of an environmental movement that started at that time, but then by 1970, There was overwhelming evidence that the Agent Orange that we were using in South Vietnam was dangerous to the environment and to the servicemen that were doing that.
And then we also had the 1968 election of Nixon.
But prior to that, we had the assassinations of MLK.
and RFK, which were causing a whole lot of domestic disturbances, and we can get into a little more of that a little later in this discussion.
But then, in order to resurrect himself, he did the staged Apollo landings on the Moon, which Jim and I have covered in one of our BitChute videos, which has got irrefutable scientific evidence that it's impossible even today to land on the Moon.
And so, moving along, by 1970, on April 22nd, there was the first Earth Day.
And this started to apply a little bit of political pressure to things that were obvious environmental degradations that the government was lax in policing the output from chemical plants in particular and oil refineries and everything else.
So bottom line is they got Congress to pass a bill and on December 2nd of 1970, they passed the Environmental Protection Agency Act.
So that might be one of our earlier slides.
Is that, have we got origins of EPA?
It's there, Joe.
Okay.
I mentioned December 2nd, and here it's talking about Nixon signing the reorganization plan, calling for his establishment, the Senate confirming William Ruckelshaus as its first administrator, and then him signing EP Order 1110.2, creating the initial organization of the EPA.
Okay, well in 1970, I made my first trip to California and was having dinner on Sunset Strip with my girlfriend, and there was a lot of hot rods running up and down Sunset Strip, and we were at the Old World Cafe, which I don't remember exactly where it is on Sunset Strip, but we had an outside table and a L.A.
Police Department pulled a traffic stop on somebody that had been spinning his tires, and they stopped right in front of the restaurant where we were sitting, and the two cops jumped out.
One of them ran and stood behind the passenger C-pillar on the car, which is the, you know, the LATBET.
for this panel back before you get your rear glass with his service weapon drawn.
And the other guy came up to the driver's side to issue a ticket and get insurance and information.
And I was really shocked.
I mean, here I was five feet away from the curb, with a, you know, five foot sidewalk, and we're sitting at a table.
And here's a police officer with his gun drawn at the car right in front of us, that was 10 feet away from me.
And It was like, I was a little disturbed.
I mentioned something to the waiter about it.
He goes, yeah, that's standard procedure because of all the officer shootings we've had in the LA area since the Watts riots of 68 over MLK said that the policy was always to have two man officers and always have one with a gun drawn whenever they approached any vehicle.
So we may be in a situation similar to that now, but that's just to give you a little bit of an anecdote.
The other thing I remember from Los Angeles in 1970 was the sky was just visibly brown.
If you got up on the hills around LA, you could see this this scum just sitting over the top of the city, and so that was back when they still allowed lead.
in automobiles and we had no really no control over emissions of any sort from any of our industries and and certainly not from our vehicles.
So it was a smog capital of the universe at the time Joe absolutely no question about it.
Oh your eyes and nose would sting all day long anytime you were outside it was like even if you were standing on the beach if the wind wasn't blowing the right direction you were still choking Yeah, it was really an insight into what a toxic environment could be, and it's probably not any worse than it is in Beijing today.
But bottom line is, yeah, it was pretty shocking, and it was easy to agree that we needed to do something about that.
So one of the first things that the EPA tackled was the use of tetrahedral tetraethyl lead in gasoline to boost octane, and this was first initiated by GM in 1921.
And it was pretty much an industry standard.
It was very helpful for our World War II aircraft to have leaded gasoline to boost octane for high-performance aircraft, but it wasn't really beneficial for people that were working in these refineries, which in 1924 they had 15 refinery workers die from lead poisoning.
And I think we've got a slide on that.
About those who died from lead poisoning?
Yes.
I'm not sure we do, Joe.
We've got a lot of octane and the history from lead to ethanol of the EPA.
I'm pretty sure it's in there.
I'll be adding stuff in the comments section.
Well, there it is.
The early automotive manufacturer was searching for a chemical that would reduce engine knock.
Working at General Motors in 1921, they found that tetraethylene lead, better known as lead, provided octane to gasoline, preventing engine knock.
That's it.
There are health problems here.
Talked about exposure of lead to children, including anemia, behavioral disorders, low IQ, reading and learning disabilities, and nerve damage.
Wow.
Well, it's pretty undeniable that lead is a toxic substance to have in your environment, but it's also a very strategic metal.
The United States had a lead mine that was operated, I think it's at Doe Creek or Doe Island on the Mississippi River, taken over about 1800 when we bought the Louisiana Purchase.
And that lead mine was in continuous production and produced the vast majority of the lead necessary to win two world wars and also the Civil War.
But it was put out a commission by Obama who said that we don't need to be processing lead in the United States, that we can get all that stuff imported.
And he got a lot of pushback from the military because lead is necessary for shielding.
Particularly around things like nuclear-producing equipment, and then also it's very necessary for soldering and electronics.
It's useful in lead-acid batteries, which are still in large use and still a very practical way of doing DC stored power.
So, bottom line is we don't have any domestic lead production other than recycling at this point, and now we're fixing to launch into World War III, where what are we going to do?
Shoot rubber bullets at them?
Absolutely crazy!
So, anyhow, yeah, I had the visit to LA and the other thing that was shocking besides that was just the, you know, the police behavior and then the massive amount of fog.
So, in 1970, I was also working at an engineering firm in Houston And I was doing mainly air conditioning and electrical design work at that point, but we had a little bit of a slow spell in the office, so they sent me out on the survey crew, because I was taking civil engineering, and they said, well, if you go out on a survey crew, you'll learn some important things about surveying.
So, for a week, we surveyed a solid waste disposal field for the Roman Haas chemical.
company, which was a whole bunch of phenolic waste.
It was about a five-acre site, and the ground looked like silly putty.
I don't know if you remember that from when you were a kid, but it was kind of this clear stuff that was mixed in with clay, and when you walked on it, it kind of sunk and crackled at the same time, but it made your eyes sting the whole entire time.
And then the next week, we were sent over to another Houston Ship Channel which was champions paper and they have these giant paper mills and they have to be, the axis on the mill has to be level at all times and because it's constantly rotating and the loads shift back and forth, sometimes they get a little bit of settlement.
So we had to do a thousandth of a foot elevation loop all the way around the property and tie it back into both sides of the axis for the mill.
And the whole time the place just absolutely stunk so bad it was ridiculous.
Well, the government realized that they had a whole bunch of this toxic stuff that was being produced by plants all over the country, and so in 1980, they passed the Superfund Act.
Can we get to that yet?
We'll let the Superfund slide.
Yeah, yeah, here it is.
Superfund history, 1980.
Yes, go for it.
Right, okay.
At that time, the big cylindrical storage tanks that you saw at refineries were open-topped, and they had a case of a A lot of birds would land on top of those things because the oil would seal off at the top.
It would be heavier oils that would allow a little bit of water to collect on top of them, and the birds flying by would see the reflection.
They couldn't tell the difference between a sunlight reflection from on top of an oil surface or just a little slick of water on top of an oil surface, they'd land and then they would not be able to swim out and they would sink down.
So they had a refinery worker at one of those places that fell into the top of one of those tanks.
And they went, oh, my God, we've got to recover his body.
So it took them several days to pump the tank down.
And when they got down to the bottom, they found like his, the soles of his shoes and his wristwatch, the organic materials had decomposed everything in his body, which is a little bit of shocking news.
But those things were discharging what are called VOCs, volatile organic compounds.
And that was one of the other things that the EPA decided to tackle.
So, getting back to the lead, I attended a seminar put on by the Brass Manufacturing Institute for plumbers, and this was back when the EPA was trying to push their law of zero lead.
Okay, so you have two things that are really common in the plumbing and fire suppression system industries, and one of them is a material called bronze, which is copper and approximately 12% zinc, and the other is brass, which is, I mean, 10, and then the other is brass, which is copper, And zinc.
So, you have three elements there.
You have copper, you have tin, and you have zinc.
And these are found in ores, where they're mixed with other things, including lead.
And it was the industry standard to refine out a certain economically viable portion of that lead, and then go ahead and make castings with it.
And this is what they use for valves, and they use them a lot in pumps.
and fittings for your fire hose connections and you know so they're widely used in the potable water plumbing industry and then also in the fire industry and the EPA came out with a rule that you could have zero lead in any brass or bronze castings.
Zero?
Zero lead Joe?
That's just absurd to have anything with a zero tolerance!
That's the problem.
So what it did is immediately increase the material cost by over 25%.
That was number one.
And number two, the lead that's in there actually is a little bit of a binding agent and it made it easier for them to machine.
So they ended up having a 25% increase cost in machining just because the stuff would fracture and break.
So the industry, the plumbing and fire suppression industries, did their own private research.
They said, you know, here we have these brass castings with 500 parts per million of lead entrained in a crystalline structure of two other metals, and we have subjected this to a wide range of alkalinities, which is, you know, your pHs, and then also Uh, everything else that we can test with, and we have found no migration of the lead in these castings into the water supply.
Can we, you know, get an exemption from this?
And they provided independent testing, which the EPA said, uh, we don't believe your independent testing, so no.
And so then at least the fire side of it said, well, we're completely independent.
We have, we have check valves to keep us from being connected to a potable water system.
So we can't even backflow into them.
And so can we have just the fire connections exempted?
And the EPA again said no.
So there we have a case of a cost benefit ratio that was never performed and a 50% increase in the material and finished product costs due to EPA Well, it's a practical impossibility, Joe.
are just based on a bunch of people that never had any amount of college education, had the zero amount of objectivity, but they virtue signal about, we're going to reduce everything to zero.
Well, that's a really poor way of doing things.
Well, it's a practical impossibility, Joe.
No wonder the cost would skyrocket and the benefits be marginal.
Well, okay.
And then we'll skip over to the ozone issue.
Well, we got a slide here about the San Jacinto River waste pits.
Right.
Oh, well, that brings up another little scam.
When the industry got caught having all of these waste pits, like the Roman Hoss that I mentioned previously, they decided, well, you set up a super fund, you can pay us to get rid of these toxic wastes.
And the government went, oh, okay.
So they not only did they get paid for producing the waste pits, They got paid for getting rid of the waste pits, and that turned into a whole separate scandal when they found out that a large majority of the contracts for the waste were being awarded to mafia front companies, which would just redistribute it and take it to other sites that were not being monitored by the EPA.
So we'll move this Superfund site from this location to that location and tell everybody that we've solved the problem.
Absolute insanity.
Right, and then you can do the same for the site where you moved and have the EPA discover it and then pay you again.
Yeah, yeah.
It's an endless money chain for these people, you know, because when you start off being a crook, it's hard to stop.
So that's where we are.
It sounds like the EPA is doing more damage than good, Joe.
I mean, I'm having a hard time, based on what you're relating, appreciating the role of the EPA.
It seems to be a burden and not a benefit to society.
Oh, it gets worse.
Let's continue.
Let's pull up the EPA ozone.
I had that as slide number six, but I don't know what yours is.
I got diesel fuel standards and rulemaking, the Montreal Protocol, so we may be missing a slide, Joe.
You want to talk about it?
Or ozone.
I've got lots on ground level ozone pollution.
Right, yeah.
Just pull up the ozone and we'll just talk about that briefly.
Go for it.
Okay, yeah, the EPA set ozone levels.
Now, here's the thing about ozone.
Ozone has a real short half-life, estimated to be about 30 minutes to an hour.
Ozone is produced several different ways.
Number one is by the interaction of cosmic rays with oxygen molecules in the atmosphere.
It breaks the two oxygens.
Oxygen is a diatomic molecule, so you don't have just one oxygen atom floating around out there.
You've got two that are bound together.
The same thing with nitrogen, okay?
So, when it gets hit by a cosmic rays, it knocks the two apart, and while the one oxygen is looking for another one oxygen to connect to, it goes, well, until I can find that other Perfect oxygen match.
I'll just connect to an existing oxygen diatomic atom, and that makes O3, and so that's what ozone is, but it's reactive, and so it doesn't have a long life period, but it's caused from cosmic and solar rays, gamma rays, and then it's also caused by electrical sparks And it's also caused by the radiation is in the 256 micron range.
Joe, when it has such a short half-life, how much trouble can it cause?
Well, that's what we're fixing to get into.
Yeah, and bottom line is ozone has been used as a water treatment, which is far safer than chlorine, which is what most of the Western world is using at this point.
But it was first used in the municipal water supply of France in 1900, and it's currently used in over 2200 major world cities worldwide.
When you step out of a shower in Paris, you have this morning after thunderstorm Fresh air in the bathroom and that's the exact same thing that you get from an electrical spark from lightning going through from a thunderstorm and you walk outside and the air smells so fresh that's because it's ozone enriched because the lightning passing through the air creates ozone.
So it's a wonderful disinfectant.
It has a lot of health benefits and very few health negatives but the EPA decided that they were going to conduct war on ground level ozone When in fact, and then they also had the Montreal Protocol, which we'll get to in just a second, but they decided that they would make ground level ozone a major health problem and they want to restrict it to zero point
Now, in order for EPA to pass any of their regulations, they supposedly have to do a cost-benefit analysis, but nobody checks them on their cost-benefit analysis, and they've got one catch-all that they use for absolutely everything, and that is asthma.
And asthma is not a disease, it's a collection of symptoms.
And so you get rashes, or you have a runny nose, or your eyes itch, or you've got a sore throat, or you cough, or you know you're short-winded.
All of those are asthma symptoms, and all of those are caused by an endless list of things that the EPA has decided to demonize and then conduct false medical benefit studies to offset the enormous practical costs to eliminate those products from the marketplace.
This is enormous built-in federal scam, Joe.
I mean, a taxpayer promoted scam on the My God!
We're paying for the EPA and then they're charging us for phony studies and improper results that are going to impair our life and lower its quality.
This is embarrassing.
Yeah, well, the list of things that they include is causing asthma, is ozone, NOX, which is normally nitrogen dioxide, volatile organic compounds, VOCs, which he mentioned, particulates, sulfur, in particular sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead.
And so we'll go through those in a little bit more detail.
The VOCs are something that you can control fairly well, and they should be controlled because we actually don't need to have formaldehyde cabinets and IKEA furniture that's outgassing VOCs in our environment, but You know, they are what they are.
The next thing that they mentioned was particulates, and they put particulates in there so that they could get rid of wood stoves because they're claiming that wood stoves are releasing carbon into the environment.
Never mind that if you're not burning the excess cellulose that you burn in a wood stove that it's going to decompose and bacteria are going to turn it into atmospheric carbon dioxide regardless.
So it doesn't matter whether you burn it fast and recover the heat and you're able to do cooking and keep your house warm with a wood stove from a yield of a timber or agricultural area where you have an excess amount of cellulose.
Never mind that it has practical benefits to the people of the planet to be able to utilize that carbon sink heat source.
They want to outlaw wood stoves, so it's going to be something that causes asthma.
And then sulfur.
Diesel fuel had generally about 500 parts per million of sulfur in diesel fuel.
In diesel fuel, sulfur works as a lubricant, and so we had diesel mechanical in fuel injected systems that were almost 100 years old that were operating in truck engines and industrial engines tractors tanks all sorts of equipment that had diesel with 500 parts per million but there again the California Air Quality Board decided that they wanted to have
Zero lead work?
Why not we do zero sulfur?
So they started cutting back on the allowable amount of sulfur that was in diesel fuel and the claim was that, you know, we're going to reduce this sulfur dioxide And that's going to stop acid rain and it's going to stop all these asthma cases.
Well, acid rain was another case that was pretty ridiculous.
But in order to cut down on the amount of sulfur dioxide that was being emitted, they went after the coal industry first.
And that's when the coal industry started doing research.
They pulverized the coal so that they could put it in as Pretty much of a flash heat dust, so they reduced a lot of their production there, and then they put scrubbers in their stacks, and one of the things that they got out of the stacks was an enormous amount of sulfur.
And what did they do with the sulfur?
They turned around and sold it to fertilizer companies, because there are six elements in the periodic table that are mandatory for even the simplest organic system on this planet.
So, sulfur is a mandatory organic DNA component.
If you don't have sulfur, you don't have a replicable life form.
So, they decided they would demonize sulfur in diesel fuel, and then it was pointed out by people in the industry that if you calculate the amount of diesel uh so2 that was released into the atmosphere it was less than the amount that was released from forest fires because trees have sulfur in them and when you burn trees you end up getting that so it's like why are we having to do this well never mind you you'll have to do it and you'll reduce the efficiency of your team
so what you're telling me is all these political all these policies are being fashioned on the basis of a completely unscientific understanding of the the elements of the processes involved and why they're important In other words, it's based on half-assed science.
This is embarrassing.
You got the taxpayers expending vast sums of money to do stupid, pointless projects that are going to inhibit and compromise the quality of life.
Wood-burning stoves!
For God's sake, humanity has benefited from burning wood for millions of years, roughly.
Yes, well, it keeps getting worse because the enormous amount of sulfur dioxide that's in the Earth's atmosphere is released by volcanic vents and volcanoes.
So, you know, it's not like we're the worst thing on the planet.
The planet's the worst thing on the planet if you want to get bioptic and live in a zero tolerance environment.
And that's exactly what the EPA thinks they can create in their little unicorn and rainbow land.
Yeah, we have a slide about the diesel sulfur regulations in 1993.
Yeah, here we go.
Diesel fuel standards and rulemaking.
Right.
1993.
Right.
In that article, they claim that it could be up to 5,000 parts per million, but that wasn't the average number.
So that's why they always do conflatory terms like that.
It's like, it could be up to 5,000 parts per million instead of saying average 500 parts per million.
But anyhow, by 2006, they knocked it down to 15 parts per million.
So, and then what happened is when you started affecting the combustion ratio that way, then you also started increasing the amount of nitrogen oxide that was being produced.
So, bottom line is they solve one problem, they create another, and that's good because they're in the process of creating and solving as many problems as they can that give them more and more dictatorial control over everybody.
Now we'll get back to the Montreal Treaty.
This is all unbelievably disillusioning.
Joe, this is unbelievably disillusioning.
Here you go, the Montreal Protocol.
Right, this was passed in September 15th of 1987, and this outlawed hydrofluorocarbons, and those are what was used for manufacturing Freon.
And Freon has another couple of products, in particular Halon, which is a really useful product.
Halon is attracted to site of combustion.
So if you have a Halon fire extinguisher in, say, a computer room or in a room with a whole bunch of art treasures that you don't want to have damaged by a water fire sprinkler system, you can spray Halon in the room, and the Halon particles will migrate to the source of combustion and and the Halon particles will migrate to the source of combustion and put it out It's an absolutely miracle fire suppression product.
But when NASA was trying to find a fire suppression system for their...
Lunar landers and their space shuttle and the Skylab, they decided to use CO2 because CO2, even in concentrations of 80,000 parts per million for up to an hour exposure, had minimal biological effects and none up to 50,000 parts per million.
So they decided it was safer to use CO2 as a fire suppression on the space shuttle, on the space station, instead of using halon.
But by outlawing halon, they also made things like the fire at Notre Dame easily preventable, which were not preventable because they took that particular product off the market.
Now there's a great article down at Timothy Casey's site, We've mentioned him before, but his article is on volcanic halocarbons, and turns out that Fluoride, which is one of the compounds that's in Freon, is also the 13th most common element on the planet.
It's a member of the halogen family, and it's highly reactive with a whole bunch of things.
It produces thousands of compounds naturally out of volcanoes, and the volumes of fluorocarbons that are in the air because of volcanic activity dwarf the amount of production that was done by humans with their production of Freon.
And if you look up at the various classes of Freon, they have a specific gravity of around 4.0, which means they're four times heavier than normal air, which means they don't rise up into the atmosphere.
They don't eat holes in the ozone.
It had nothing to do with that.
It had to do with the fact that DuPont and Dow, who were joint owners of the Freon patents, did not have a continuing patent.
And when it expired, they wanted to make Freon illegal.
And then after they made it illegal, 20 years later, they turned around and said, well, that patent's been fixed to expire.
So we're going to make that product illegal.
And now we'll come in with a new Uh, Freon substitute product.
So, you want to know why your air conditioning costs keep going up and up and up?
It's because instead of having an open market generic Freon that you could buy for next to nothing, you have these industrial chemical monopolies that want to have a continuing patent of high price.
Very same model that's being used by the pharmaceutical industry, which surprisingly enough are co-defendants in the chemical and pesticides and herbicide industries.
So bottom line is you have the same mental attitude going on the part of the industrialists that run these particular corporations and the EPA that's supposedly in charge of stopping them.
So anyhow, now we've got a slide, I believe it's number 10 on the good and bad ozone.
Good and bad ozone.
Oh yeah, yeah.
The ozone that's up in the stratosphere is what keeps the UV light from hitting the planet, which keeps us from having enormous increase in cancer rates, and so that's the good ozone.
The ozone that's formed down at ground level Supposedly from discharges from automobiles is the bad ozone, even though ozone in either location absorbs the UV light and so it doesn't really matter to the living things.
And then surprisingly enough, and I can find an article on it, I just didn't find it this morning, but I will find the article and put it down in the show notes.
Ozone is discharged by plants at night when they're doing their purge and in their photosynthesis process.
So, during the day they absorb carbon dioxide from the air and then they release oxygen, but at night they reverse the process to kind of clean out their filters and so at night they release a little bit of oxygen and some of that oxygen is released as ozone.
So, bottom line is a good percentage of the ozone is produced by the plants that we're supposedly saving by preventing uh discharge of ozone into the environment it's uh it's pretty much of a pretzel logic to try to figure out what the hell these people are talking about
but then the next thing is we have the epa decided to expand their uh jurisdiction and so they had the navigable water act you know joe i don't think we have everything in here you want to have in here i'm I'm gonna make a suggestion.
Okay.
Okay, we were discussing the Navigable Water Act, which was added to the EPA's little tool chest of ways to screw over society.
And basically, what they've interpreted from that, when it was originally passed, it was meant that the EPA had jurisdiction over navigable waterways.
Well, to you and me, that would be something you could go get in a boat and go from the ocean up to the furthest northern port.
And at that point, it's no longer navigable.
But the EPA went ahead and extended that to, well, if you've got a dirt road on your farm and you've got a rut and it fills up with water, we're going to declare that a navigable waterway.
And so that's the extent that the EPA has extrapolated their power base on that.
And they've done enormous amount of damage.
And if we're missing a slide or two, when I write the comments that are going to go with this presentation, I will put the actual articles and the links for anything that's missing.
So just read what we put underneath this when we post it, and then that will give you the explanation you need to understand anything that's missing in the way of slides.
And I apologize, Jim, and I had a little bit of a...
Difficulty getting things sorted out.
Now, most people remember the damaging storm that we had in August 17th of 2017 along the Gulf Coast, and that affected Texas and Louisiana heavily, and that was Hurricane Harvey, where we had 44 inches of rain over a two-day period of time over a five-county wide area, and it was pretty much uniform.
Now, one thing they don't tell you is that in the Houston area, there was one watershed which did not have any amount
of flood damage, and that was the Sims Bio Watershed, and the reason why is because in Harris County, after a major flood that they had, I believe, like in 1936, where Buffalo Bio flooded a whole bunch of downtown Houston, they created the Harris County Flood Control, and they had been doing mediocre jobs of improving our drainage areas.
We have a 1,770 square mile county Which the highest elevation is 350 feet above sea level and but bottom line is if you take the stream water line most of these streams are meander around and they're like several hundred miles long and they only have at maximum About a 300 foot drop over 100 miles, so you don't have much of a gradient to work with in your natural drainage systems.
And so, ostensibly, we're going to improve the drainage systems in the county and provide storm drainage detention areas, like we have the Attucks Dam and other things, that we're supposed to alleviate downstream flooding by delaying the release of that water.
So, bottom line is, by 1980, the Harris County Flood Control had decided to target the Sims Bio Watershed.
They charged a fee of, I believe, about $5,000 per acre for any development inside that watershed, and they started using those funds to make channel improvements and detention pond improvements along the Sims Bio Watershed.
Well, when EPA director was installed by Clinton in the early 90s, he was elected in 92, so early, mid-90s, somebody went to him and said, look, Harris County Flood Control is charging these detention ponds all across the county, Harris County Flood Control is charging these detention ponds all across the county, charging these various bio-detention systems, and they're creating county-wide detention ponds, and we're concerned that those things are going to allow silt to migrate
And we're concerned that those things are going to allow silt to migrate into Galveston Bay and kill all the marine life in Galveston Bay.
So we got an order out of the Dallas EPA that Harris County could no longer charge watersheds for making silt.
watershed-wide improvements, that everything had to be done on an individual basis by the developers inside each individual project.
So if you've got a lot that's, say, a one-acre lot, you have to have 20% of your land area dedicated to putting in a storm detention pond.
And so that enormously drove up the cost for development, number one, from two standpoints.
One, One, you had a loss of usable land area, and number two, you had the cost of building and installing this ridiculous system that's nothing but a giant mosquito trap.
Who benefited from this, Joe?
I mean, who came up with this harebrained scheme?
Who didn't push back against it?
Where was the Army Corps of Engineers saying this is not a problem?
Where was our Harris County Flood Control saying this is not a problem?
Where was our State Water Quality Board, which does pretty good work, where were they standing up against any of this overreach?
Absolutely insane.
So bottom line is we had a functional system that could have potentially, between 1995 and 2017, reduced the flooding impact on all of our county, but we were ordered to not use a system that had already proven itself functional by the EPA in Dallas, which had no investment in what happened in the Houston area and virtually no pushback from any of the local authorities.
So that's why we end up with this stupid stuff.
This is enough to bring a serious citizen to tears.
I mean, this is so calamitous.
The stupidity involved here, Joe, is just monumental.
Right.
And then, you know, what happened in Hurricane Harvey was not a unique incident.
They make this claim about 100-year floods.
Well, I've lived in Harris County for almost all of my adult life, and I've lived in one particular location for 40 years, and I've witnessed a dozen hundred-year floods, because it's like, well, that's a hundred-year flood.
That's a hundred-year flood.
This is a a metric that was developed by the real estate industry to give them the maximum amount of developable land based on where they set this floodplain elevation in cooperation with the Army Corps of Engineers, which does virtually nothing in the way of solving flood control problems.
You want a great book on that, you need to read a book called Rising Tide by John M. Berry on the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
And I used to go to a website that was put on by a weatherman who flunked out of college science and math.
And so he went out to become a weather guesser.
And anybody that's watched TV weatherman knows that they can't do an accurate three-day forecast.
But he managed to get funding from the Heartland Institute to do a study on positioning of the animals.
N.O.A.A.
temperature and weather recording devices and he was able to find a whole bunch of amount of urban heat and bad placement of the monitoring stations and you know it was a reasonable study but you got to figure United States is three percent of the world land area and In the United States, we don't have 10% coverage of weather station recording data, and so anything that you had in the way of that is nothing but anecdotal evidence to begin with.
So that's an insignificant problem to point out, and it's insignificant because they go back and readjust all the past temperatures to make it colder in the past so they can make it look like it's warmer in the present.
The whole thing is just absolute 100% fraud.
But anyhow, he had a website and he banned the use of the terms Principia Scientific, Slayers, Faux Science, Electric Universe.
Who did this?
Who did this?
This is suppressing you specifically, Joe.
Oh yeah, because this guy is a lukewarmist, and I met you at the Heartland Institute convention in Las Vegas, and I challenge you, Tony, anytime to debate me on science of atmospheric radiation physics, because you won't debate me, because you don't know any science, and you know you'll get your clock cleaned.
So anyhow, one day before he banned me on his website, he put down something, it was like the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, and he said, oh, it was the most devastating natural disaster in American history.
Killed 6,000 people.
I said, well, You might have forgotten about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston.
He goes, oh, okay, the 1900 hurricane in Galveston killed 10,000 people.
And I said, well, it also isn't the worst disaster in the United States because you forgot about the 1927 flood on the Mississippi.
And he goes, oh, and at that point, he does this little thing where he does a pointer on both sides and he puts snip and he goes, this guy's an idiot.
I'm not going to post his comments.
And then he goes and says, well, the 1900 killed 10,000 people.
And he goes another snip and he goes, well, the 1927 flood killed over 20,000 people.
Flooded 27,000 square miles with an average depth of 10 feet deep.
So, what happened in the winter of 1926 and the spring of 1927?
There was record snowfall across the entire watershed of the Mississippi River, and this goes from the Ohio River all the way up in And Pennsylvania and almost to Lake Erie, all the way across the northern part of the United States, up the Mississippi tributary that goes up to Minnesota and Canada, and then out the Missouri River all the way over to the continental divide next to Oregon.
So you have this enormous area that had record snowfall, And the Army Corps of Engineers had been spending billions of dollars for a hundred years trying to come up with ways of solving the problem and they said, oh, we've got flood control on the Mississippi down to a science man, it'll never flood again.
Then we had two tropical storms move over in June of 1927.
So they had record rainfall, similar to what we had during Harvey, in addition to massive amount of snowmelt that was already going to be flood stage coming down the Mississippi from all three of these giant tributaries, the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers.
So that flooded 27,000 square miles, like I mentioned before, destroyed one-third of the U.S.
agriculture production in the year 1927.
So we've had enormous amounts of problems prior to anything that they're claiming in the way of hydrocarbon production Number one.
And number two, we have an Army Corps of Engineers who has failed miserably, repeatedly, as far as their predictions and their projections.
So, what they ended up saying is that, well, the 1927 year flood was a 500 year flood.
Wrong.
We have very accurate records about flooding on the Mississippi River for over 200 years.
If you have an event that happens in the Mississippi River anytime in that 200 years, that's a 100-year event because you could have the same conditions happen again next year, and so that would be two in a 200-year period.
So, that's a 100-year flood.
So, what happened in Harvey was not a 500-year flood.
It was a 100-year flood.
What happened in the rising tide Mississippi flood of 1927 was at most a 100-year flood.
So we've got another set of duplicitous government agents that are sitting there telling you all of this reassuring science garbage that has no basis in any amount of scientific fact.
Now, the next thing that they decided to extrapolate more power to for the EPA was the Endangered Species Act, and this is 16 U.S.C.
1531, which was passed in 1973.
And this is where they decided to extend their power to protect the Pacific smelt By making sure that we dump all of our potable water out of all of our water reservoirs in California so that we can keep this little minnow alive and then the Oregon Spotted Owl that's been protected since 1990 because they can only live in old growth forests and if we
continue to cut any trees we're going to end up disturbing the root system of an old growth tree and that's going to cause these owls to disappear when they found out that the owls actually don't care they'll they'll camp out new growth just as easily as old growth.
So bottom line here's we have a whole series of things that the EPA has done ostensibly to protect our health and safety with minimal amount of impact on health and safety an enormous amount of and economic costs to every citizen in this country.
And we have a rogue agency that has just as poor a supervision and just as poor a track record as the CDC and the FDA, and we're not allowed to challenge them on any front at all.
It's absolutely absurd.
And that's why I wanted to spend today talking about the absolute facts about what a sham organization EPA is and what their contribution has been to this climate scare hysteria that's been going on for decades now.
Well, Joe, even in spite of missing slides, you've done a masterful job of presenting a devastating indictment of the EPA And I think no one viewing what you've had to say today could have any doubt about it.
This has just been a catastrophe for the nation.
And of course, Like, as the CDC continues to destroy our nation, so too has the EPA been doing its contribution toward that very end.
There are also the ones that are doing the mileage standards that are forcing us to have these 50 miles per gallon automobiles and everything else that's associated with that particular part of it.
So they're just another bully pulpit weapon in the hands of the globalists that own the industries that they're supposedly policing.
And it's just all part of an organized effort to completely hamstring any further development by the vast majority of people on the planet because they want to reel over a planet with a couple of kings and a whole bunch of serfs.
And that's the bottom line mission that has evolved out of the EPA.
Not that they haven't done some useful things.
If you could compare an air sample of Los Angeles from 1970 and today, Enormous improvements.
So yes, we've done enormous things to improve our particular environment, but we've offshored a lot of that industrial waste to other environments.
So on a net worldwide basis, the EPA has been an enormous failure because where we could have cleaned up those industries and done better The bottom line is the motivations of these people are never correct.
They're never as intelligent as they tell you they are.
Instead, we offshored it and turned the rest of the world into the toxic waste dump that we've eliminated some of in our country.
So the bottom line is the motivations of these people are never correct.
They're never as intelligent as they tell you they are.
They're never informed.
And they will never debate anything with anybody that has actual knowledge.
Everything is just a complete echo chamber ridiculous excuse.
And yeah, exciting news for today.
There's a Alex Kristinov did a piece on the UK and the EU just buckled and said that they will allow buying Russian oil and gas and pay for it in rubles so their bluff lasted about a week and then all of a sudden they decided that they would cave because they realized that hydrocarbon energy is an indispensable portion of modern life and so unless we're all prepared to live like the Amish
You better get used to having fossil fuels because they are minimal environmental negative impact and offsetting environmental positive impacts because atmospheric carbon dioxide has a provable linear rate of increase in photosynthesis Up to 1600 parts per million, which would be a fourfold increase in the production level of all of the plants on this planet if we had more CO2.
And there's absolutely zero negative impacts from having CO2 in the atmosphere.
And we know there's no prospect of running out of oil because it's not a fossil fuel of limited quantity, but something produced by Earth naturally in unending quantities.
Joe, you're doing a sensational job with this series.
I cannot thank you enough.
This is Jim Fetzer, your host on The Real Deal, thanking Joe Olson once again for his anti-global warming series that is seeking to inform the public about the reality of our environment and our relation thereto for the benefit of our future, if only we can get through the knuckleheads who are doing their best to destroy our planet every single day at taxpayer expense.
Thanks for joining us today.
We'll be back with another in short order.
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