Your Pima County Board of Supervisors doubled down on its climate paranoia during Tuesday’s regular meeting, and came out guns-a-blazin’ against marksmen and miners in the process.
During the call to the audience, a number of speakers trotted out the tired tropes of “climate change” rhetoric: 97% of scientists, the Paris Accords, this being the “hottest decade” in recorded history, ad nauseam. By the time these speakers sit down–which may take more than three minutes if Chair Bronson likes what they have to say–reasonable folks are left wondering if these speakers have ever had an original thought. Let’s do some thinking of our own.
Look at the two standard methods of cooling a building in our desert habitat: Air conditioning, and evaporative cooling. Now, without getting too deeply entangled in the physics, just recall that energy doesn’t simply “go away”: As the sun beats down on a building, we can move that incoming energy from one place to another, but we cannot vanish it. So we either use an evaporative cooler to blow cooled air into the building to offset the sun’s heating, or we use an air conditioner–through complex heat exchange reactions–to transfer the sun’s energy through the air inside the building to refrigerant, which we then pump outside, and then exhaust into the air surrounding the building. Either way, the net amount of energy the sun applies to the building is the same, and either method will transfer the same amount of energy out of the building to get the interior to the same temperature.
Here’s the important part: Air conditioners, even the most efficient on the market, consume more electrical power and waste more energy as heat to do the exact same work of cooling the building. And all that waste heat goes–poof–right out into the environment, contributing further to the urban heat island effect.
(Does everybody agree that the ADI’s Jonathan DuHamel has influenced this author for the better?)
So if the county is so hot to trot to defend against climate change, why can’t we hear the persistent rush of air from swamp coolers under the ruckus of Supervisor Elias thumping his chest for being a climate champion?
That inconvenient truth be damned, another speaker spun a yarn from 1982–the year she moved here–about rains that came every afternoon at 4pm in the summer. In her mind’s eye, the bucolic, rain-washed southern Arizona soils yielded a veritable clockwork rainforest utopia. Perhaps she does not remember the devastating–and well-documented–floods of 1983, or the fact that storms varied from day to day, even back then.
And how is a 30-year span of time sufficient to identify long-scale weather patterns in the desert southwest that may run through a cycle 50, 80, even hundreds of years long? Answer: It isn’t. But because the weather forecast isn’t a copy-and-paste duplicate from a time in recent memory, and because these “environmentalists” do not have personal experience with a longer time horizon, they arrogantly believe that the other humans on the planet are to blame for the change, not some long-running cyclic pattern and not they themselves.
Still another speaker wished for every home and business to have its own rainwater collection cistern. Let’s play that out again in our minds: Without plumbing to capture rainwater, the monsoon’s asperges will drip off the roofline and eventually find soil, through which they will filter into the water table to be pumped out, used, returned, and eventually pumped out again.
If, instead, one goes to great expense to outfit a house with a collection system, that water will not make it into the water table until weeks, maybe months later when, after the monsoon concludes, the homeowner washes a car or waters a plant with it. All the while, that homeowner will continue to draw water from the water table for bathing, dishwashing, or potation.
And, eventually, all of that water will cycle back through treatment facilities or the soil to be used again. Net environmental benefit of the costly water harvesting equipment? Nil. Just like everything else the climate change lobby has forced upon the rest of us for decades.
As at their last meeting, the Supervisors railed against the Trump administration for backing the United States out of the Paris Accords. Even though the agreements are completely non-binding and even though the world’s worst polluters–including China–have made no solid commitment, Pima County is going to save the world by participating in the spirit of the accords, and they reaffirmed that this past Tuesday by passing a resolution. The Paris Accord, they actually said, would bring tremendous economic benefit to Tucson.
Supervisor Elias even proclaimed that “the sky islands make us rich.” How’s that working out for your constituents in the sixth-poorest metropolitan area in the country, Richard? Care to re-think that?
The Supervisors then assaulted mining by taking up a second resolution, a thinly-veiled, party-line attack on Rosemont Copper and the jobs that the company stands to create. This resolution, to the applause of the lemmings in the seats, will continue to create roadblocks for the Rosemont mine by stipulating even more protections for minor water features that already have protection and that Rosemont has already committed to protecting.
Chair Bronson asserted that the “science is real” and that the economic benefits of passing a resolution to wrap more bureaucratic red tape around our natural resources far outweigh the economic benefits of creating jobs.
Backwards thinking like hers will continue to impoverish this town. Look at it this way: Sharon Bronson’s Prius required a great deal of copper to manufacture. Would environmental zealots–who couldn’t conceive of sacrificing the creature comforts technology affords them–prefer to mine the earth for the necessary minerals in the U.S. under the stricture the EPA, state agencies, other federal agencies, and local fat-cats, or would they prefer mining in third-world countries that rape the earth, pollute freely, and pay lip service to the rest of the world by signing meaningless accords? As long as the environmental crowd doesn’t have to look at the mining operations, it would seem, it doesn’t matter how low the standards for environmental protection may be.
These are the worst kind of NIMBYs.
And, as if the Board hadn’t offended enough of the county, Supervisor Valadez used a pair of wildfires–set by absolute idiots, to be certain–to malign the sport shooters of the county as bumbling enviro-fools. If you have any exploding targets in your possession, it’s time to get rid of them. (My advice: Unless you can find a very open space, you had better not dispose of them by shooting them until we get more rain.)
As of Tuesday’s meeting, the county is working on an ordinance to ban all exploding targets–possessing, mixing, making, or using–completely. This is an absolute prohibition with no time constraints and no sunset on the law.
Without question, setting off exploding targets in a hot and dry desert, dangerously close to combustible brush, and before the rains begin is incredibly stupid. Use them in winter, use them in the early spring, but don’t use them around dry brush when it’s over 100-hotter-than-hell-degrees outside. And don’t use them to blow up refrigerators. And don’t try making your own that inadvertently blow up your garage. When you pair a bit of common sense with the label directions, they are safe and fun to shoot.
But that’s just it: You shoot them. And, according to the majority of the board, shooters are bad people. So, rather than propose a window of time in which the use of exploding targets should be embargoed, or rather than making foolish users of exploding targets responsible for firefighting costs–which may already be possible under existing law–the Supervisors have a new way to get their digs in against the vile Second Amendment crowd with a plenary ban, in perpetuity, with no exceptions.
They can limit fireworks to certain times of year, but something that marksmen enjoy shooting? That’s right out.
While the Board of Supervisors hasn’t given much leeway for those of us tired of their climate change pandering, now is the time to make sure they hear loud and clear that you do not want a ban on what are otherwise small, safe, fun shooting sports accessories. This could be yet another case of a few bad actors spoiling the fun for the rest of us, and this would not be the last strike against marksmen from this board. So make a great deal of noise and let’s make sure the Pima County Board of Supervisors knows we are watching them by decrying both the proposed ordinance to ban exploding targets and their pointless, navel-gazing resolutions on climate change.
Unless, that is, the sky islands have made you too rich to care.