Solyndra Inc., a renewable energy firm that became a darling of the Obama Administration, shut the doors of its California headquarters Wednesday, raising fresh questions from critics about political favoritism and wasted money in the federal loan program.
The manufacturer of rooftop solar panels opened its doors in 2005, and in 2009 became the first recipient of an Obama administration energy loan guarantee – a $535 million federal commitment that helped minimize the risk to venture capital firms backing the solar start-up. Obama visited the factory last year to herald its future.
“The promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith — not anymore,” Obama told Solyndra workers then. “The future is here.”
The government loan guarantee was supposed to spur 1,000 fulltime jobs once Solyndra’s solar plant was fully operating. Instead, the company announced Wednesday it intends to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that 1,100 full and part time employees had been laid off “effective immediately,” without severance. Some said they no longer have health insurance, either.
Now, the company’s collapse is sure to rekindle questions about how well the Energy Department vetted the deal before putting taxpayer dollars on the table – and about whether the public will have to pick up the $535 million tab. The full bill may not be clear until bankruptcy proceedings. How much taxpayers and other creditors recover could depend on the total value of the company’s assets.
Why are Democrat politicians much more prone than Republicans to policies that undermine the strength and integrity of the Republic, damage the safety and prosperity of American citizens, destroy essential infrastructure, and bring crime and suffering to the people they are supposed to serve?
Decades of progressive moral, ideological, and psychological corruption have destroyed the Democrat party and delivered its leaders to mental and emotional regression in which their public behaviors and statements resemble the pre-rationality, helplessness, narcissism, and prevarication typical of small children. Developmental psychology labels the cognitive processes of two- to seven-year-old children “preoperational.” Leading Democrats have regressed to preoperational infantilism and now resemble three-year-olds.
Across at least the last 70 years, the ideals and principles of Democrats have been burned away through three self-reinforcing forms of corruption. The first corruption is ancient and universal. It is corruption of greed and power-seeking. Greed and power-seeking energize all political corruption, but they have especially infected Democrats because their hold on God-given moral conviction and the rule of law has weakened more than Republicans’. The second corruption is the modern, ideological fraud of creeds of disloyalty that blame America first and justify elected officials undermining and trading away the safety and well-being of the citizens who elected them. This is the corruption of the big lie.
The Democrat fabrication that there was an armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 01/06/21 is the most grievous political lie in U.S. history. End-stage corruption is postmodern, anti-rational subjectivism. It is indoctrination into cults of resentment and fear, with vague, propagandistic labels like climate change, LGBTQ, diversity, eco-justice. Decades of “blame America first” ideology and cults of fear and resentment created a vast playground for financial exploitation of public funds. Every single dollar spent on a non-problem such as DIE, climate change, or LGBTQ is a dollar of corruption.
It isn’t bad enough that they are pumping enough fentanyl into America to numb the population and support groups like BLM and liberals, now this. China pollutes more than the rest of the world combined (except India), yet scoffs at stupid human tricks like the Paris Climate Accord, meant to penalize the USA most of all.
American energy independence is under attack from a shadowy alliance that threatens the foundation of our national security and economic prosperity. On the surface, we see radical environmental activists interrupting corporate shareholder meetings,blocking traffic, and vandalizing artwork. But behind these increasingly aggressive protests lies a more insidious threat: the Chinese Communist Party, which quietly bankrolls these same activists through a complex web of foundations and activist networks. Through dark money, China exploits environmental activism to undermine America’s energy sector. This dangerous partnership between foreign adversaries and domestic extremists demands immediate Congressional action – including comprehensive investigations into Chinese funding of domestic American nonprofits and new laws protecting American energy infrastructure. The security of America’s energy future hangs in the balance, and we can no longer afford to ignore this coordinated assault on our nation’s vital interests.
The evidence of Beijing’s strategic manipulation of American environmental groups has been mounting for years, butrecent investigations have exposed the actual depth of these connections. Through a sophisticated network of foundations, consulting firms, and environmental organizations, the Chinese Communist Party has established multiple channels to funnel money and influence into groups working to obstruct American energy development. Beijing’s influence becomes clear when following the money. For example, Climate Defiance is one of the most aggressive new environmental groups making headlines nationwide.More than half of their 2023 funding flowed through theOil and Gas Action Network – an organization supported by the Energy Foundation, whose Chinese office maintains deep ties to the Chinese Communist nation and Chinese nationals with direct links to the regime. Similarly, investigations reveal several other prominent environmental groups receive substantial funding through organizations with documented connections to Beijing, including research institutes that coordinate with Chinese state entities and foundations that partner with CCP-controlled ecological agencies.
China’s financial support of American environmental groups raises a crucial question that cuts to the heart of Beijing’s strategy: Why would the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and most prominent financier of fossil fuel projects globally invest in funding American environmental protesters? The answer reveals a calculated effort to weaken American energy independence: these radical groups are unknowingly doing China’s dirty work by targeting and disrupting America’s vital energy infrastructure projects.
These aren’t random acts of civil disobedience – they’re part of a coordinated strategy to weaken American energy infrastructure and drive-up consumer costs. The groups behind these actions openly admit their radical aims. The Climate Emergency Fund’s executive director recently told The New Republic that movements “need to have a radical flank that is disrupting normalcy.”
In 2006 the State of California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act mandating an unattainable and massive reduction of greenhouse gasses within the state by 2020. This bill, and mindless near-religious allegiance to the “green” movement, set in motion the recent catastrophic events in Los Angeles and previously throughout much of California, a state that for the past twenty-five years has been increasingly controlled by a Marxist-inspired Democrat Party.
It is not a coincidence that the current environmental or “green” movement is the driving philosophical force animating the Democrat Party not only in California but on national basis as this movement has its roots in Marxism.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848. The general consensus on the Left is that Marx and Engels were in fact very conscious of and promoted the concept of what is considered to be the modern environmental movement. The current “green” movement is in reality a major facet of Marxist philosophy.
Among those who champion Marx’s environmentalism is Professor John Bellamy Foster of the University of Oregon. In 1997 he published The Crisis of the Earth, Marx’s Theory of Ecological Sustainability as a Nature-Imposed Necessity for Human Production.
Foster wrote, “Marx’s analysis of the crisis of the earth in the mid-nineteenth century led him to a concept of sustainability that was central to his vision of a communist society. Because this concept of sustainability was rooted in both a critique of capitalism and a vision of a future society, it has a richness and complexity all its own. A close examination of Marx’s concept of sustainability therefore offers important insight into the possibilities for the creation of a more just and sustainable world order.”
Per Raju J. Das of York University, Toronto, “Sustainability (or a healthy environment)… has to be fought for as part of a larger fight against the logistics of capitalism, such as endless accumulation, and against the system as a whole. Therefore, ecological sustainability is fundamentally a class issue.”
During the 1980s the global Communist Movement, due to setbacks in Russia and elsewhere, began to exploit and take over the fledging Marxist environmental movements in Europe and the United States. They saw the potential of the movement as a weapon to foment “peaceful” revolutions in democratic western nations.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not the end of communism but a metamorphosis of the means of revolution as environmentalism became the socialists/communists’ primary weapon in undermining capitalism and Western societies.
This tactic was quickly recognized by those who had suffered under the oppression of communism for decades. In his book Blue Planet in Green Shackles, Vaclav Klaus, the first president of the Czech Republic after the end of nearly four decades of Soviet dictatorship, warned the nations of Europe and the United States, “As someone who lived under communism for most of my life, I feel obligated to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century, is not communism or its various softer versions. It was replaced by ambitious environmentalism.”
One of the great deceptions used by the Soviet Union was the incessant propagandizing of a fictitious hypothesis — that humans are responsible for any change in the climate and the only means of saving the earth is by adopting Marxian socialism. A scientifically-proven false premise but a tactic fully embraced and exploited by the current environmentalist movement.
This propaganda campaign has successfully convinced over 54% of the American citizenry to believe in human-driven climate change and the unquestioned need for drastic action to combat the impact of human activity on the environment.
Among the hallmarks of Marxism/Communism is universal disregard for human life as mankind is viewed as a mere cog in a wheel and therefore whatever so-called rights he or she may be granted is solely at the whim of the state. An omnipotent entity that supposedly looks out for the best interest of the people. Yet, as history has amply chronicled, the advocates of communism have had no problem eliminating millions of lives in order to achieve a Marxist utopia.
Which neatly dovetails with the primary tenet of the green movement. Human activity causes climate change; therefore, human overpopulation is the cause of virtually all environmental and economic catastrophe. Consequently, any means of reducing the population is therefore acceptable, whether it is a negligently uncontrolled wildfire in Los Angeles, a green-agenda- induced drought or famine, an untested vaccine forcefully administered to untold millions around the globe, or the cataclysmic collapse of societies by accelerating the elimination of fossil fuels.
more here, if you dare, but it has nothing to do with caring for the environment. It’s using that as a tool to control the masses, just like Marxism
And by not attending the Davos conference, Trump now leads other international leaders in “quiet quitting” globalist environmental rules that have only strangled their economies and hurt their peoples.
Even more tax dollars saved that don’t to the pockets of non-Americans
JERUSALEM – U.S. President Donald Trump kept his campaign promises in the first hours of his second term, signing dozens of executive orders to undo the damage of the previous four years of the Biden presidency.
One of those involved – with immediate effect – the defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, as the Trump team has decided to suspend any foreign assistance for 90 days pending reviews.
UNRWA, which is the only U.N. agency that has responsibility for one people – namely the Palestinians – has been in Trump’s crosshairs before.
They hate the Jews worse than the Germans in the 30’s and don’t deserve our money.
Among the actions President Donald Trump took Monday to overturn much of the previous administration’s agenda, Trump signed an executive order requiring that the U.S. recognize only two genders.
“The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system,” the order states.
The order provides a definition of “woman” as being an adult human female, and “girls” as a juvenile human female. Likewise, under Trump’s order, “man” is defined as adult human males and “boy” as juvenile human males.
Again, just money sent into the pockets of non-Americans over a lie. No amount of money will move the thermometer tenths of a degree. All the while China and India are pumping tons of smog and carbon from their power generators fueled by coal. It’s discrimination against the US
There were reports that the Trump administration was mulling a ‘warrior panel’ to purge the military of the woke brass. The president signed a slate of executive orders to rid the government of federal DEI programs, secure the border, and get America back on track to greatness. We’re not even two days into the Trump presidency, and he’s already firing people.
Adm. Linda Lee Fagan, 61, has been terminated by the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman, the official said.
Fagan has demonstrated leadership deficiencies, operational failures and an inability to advance the strategic objectives of the Coast Guard.
These include the failure to address border security threats, insufficient leadership in recruitment and retention, mismanagement in acquiring key acquisitions such as icebreakers and helicopters, excessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and an “erosion of trust” over the mishandling and cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor, which was the Coast Guard’s internal investigation into sexual assault cases at the Coast Guard Academy.
As if there weren’t enough outrages coming out of California to keep most keen observers livid, consider this: A fire prevention project at a state park currently in the midst of the Palisades blaze was stopped due to environmental concerns about a shrub.
According to reports from 2019 and 2020, not only was the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power precluded from undertaking a bulldozing project in Topanga State Park due to danger toward the Braunton’s milk vetch, but the city also had to pay nearly $2 million in fines for even starting the project.
In an August 2019 article, the Los Angeles Times reported that the LADWP had intended to bulldoze an area in the park and replace flammable wooden poles with steel ones.
Pick one for yourself. It was a disaster for everyone in America, except the Biden family, right up to the end.
Since seizing office in 2021 following a presidential election that was tainted by widespread voter fraud, Joe Biden has overseen rampant inflation, disastrous foreign policy, a rise in poverty, the invasion of over ten million illegal aliens, the persecution and torture of political opponents and an obsession with identity politics, among many other failings.
In addition to his political failings, Biden has also been in a state of constant mental and physical decline that eventually culminated with him being forced to drop out the presidential race and make way for his vice-president Kamala Harris.
Thankfully, the American people recognized Harris’s role in Biden’s disastrous leadership and delivered a landslide election victory to Donald Trump that was too big to rig.
And not much will happen. C02 isn’t the real reason behind the minor climate change that occurs just like it has throughout the history of the earth. It just goes to show you what a farce the media, Al Gore, Greta, John Kerry, the UN, the WEF, and the rest of the Woke climate disaster forces are lying about.
Climate change as they define it is claiming a disaster will come and we have to spend money now to change something no amount of money can affect. It just shifts the money into the pockets of the climate carnival barkers and allows them to control the narrative, in their favor.
A fire at the world’s largest battery storage plant in Northern California smoldered Friday after sending plumes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere, leading to the evacuation of up to 1,500 people. The blaze also shook up the young battery storage industry.
The fire at the Vistra Energy lithium battery plant in Moss Landing generated huge flames and significant amounts of smoke Thursday but had diminished significantly by Friday, Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire Protection District of Monterey County said. Vistra is based in Texas.
“There’s very little, if any, of a plume emitting from that building,” Mendoza said. Crews are not engaging with the fire and are waiting for it to burn out, he said. Letting lithium ion battery fires burn out is not unusual because they burn very hot and are hard to put out.
No injuries have been reported but residents raised concerns about hazardous gases being released into the air.
The state’s record-breaking 2020 fire season, which saw more than 4 million acres burn, spewed almost twice the tonnage of greenhouse gases as the total amount of carbon dioxide reductions made since 2003, according to a study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution.
Researchers estimated that about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were released by the fires, compared with about 65 million metric tons of reductions achieved in the previous 18 years.
“When we look at the contribution of the 2020 wildfires, it becomes almost like a new sector of emissions in the economy,” said Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and a lead author of the research. “Really, we’re about double the reductions.”
Los Angeles was forced to slash funding for the fire department after Mayor Karen Bass awarded gilded contracts to city workers, a review of public records shows.
The trouble began early last year after Bass settled contract negotiations with public sector unions. In dozens of agreements, the city’s civilian employees pocketed 20 to 25 percent wage hikes over five years and other goodies that cost the city $4.5 billion over the life of the contracts, according to an analysis by the city’s administrative officer, the City Journal reported.
A series of unintended payouts stemming from judgments against the city in personal injury lawsuits brought Los Angeles to the brink.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom received a briefing about the area damaged by the Palisades wildfire, with others present in a parking lot.
This is the fish that California justified ruining the water supply for farmers and firefighters years ago.
The tiny Delta Smelt fish have not been seen in the wild in California in over a decade.
And yet, California Democrats flushed annual water flow into the ocean to save this little fish that they can’t even find in its natural habitat. Now several cities are burnt to the ground.
They sacrificed entire communities for a fish that doesn’t exist.
A 2021 report by Dan Bacher in the Sacramento News revealed that there have been NO DELTA SMELT seen in the wild since 2012. They’re extinct.
For the seventh September in a row, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has caught zero Delta smelt during its Fall Midwater Trawl Survey of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The last time Delta smelt – an indicator species for the broader ecological health estuary – were found in CDFW’s September survey was in 2015. Only 5 were caught by state biologists at the time.
After that, the only year that Delta smelt were caught during the entire four-month survey was in 2016, when a total of 8 smelt were reported.
The final results of Fish and Wildlife’s four-month survey of pelagic (open water) fish species, conducted from September through mid-December, won’t be available until around the start of next year. The current September 2022 data is available here on the annual state surveys webpage.
They might as well have Dylan Mulvaney drinking a beer with this girl. Get this. I’ve never seen a bigger waste of $750 K in my life…. so far.
The firestorm is still in progress in Los Angeles, priorities first and foremost are saving of lives and property. The calamity in Los Angeles is still early in the situation, ongoing, and not yet under control, but some basic facts can be established at this point in time.
Janisse Quiñones was hired with a $750,000 Salary, nearly twice that of her predecessor.
LADWP operates ten major active reservoirs and over 107 smaller storage facilities, all of which create operational flexibility to balance water supplies and customer demands.
73% is purchased water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) which is both an aqueduct to State Water Projects in upper California and the Colorado River Aqueduct.
15% is water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct which is fed from water close to the Nevada Border.
10% is local groundwater.
2% is recycled water.
LADWP Strategic Initiatives reflect Religion of Woke-ism
Now that some of the basic facts are established, the reality is that one of the largest urban fires ever experienced in the U.S is in progress. It looks like World War II-era firebombing in progress. The severe water shortages, War on Dams, and ideological virtue signaling are well known in Governor Newsom’s California. But Water and Power are essentially apolitical and based on science, fact, and best practices of civil engineering, correct? A peek at the LADWP Strategic Initiatives refutes that luddite view. Here are the four, strategic imperatives for LADWP:
Leading with Equity
Clean Energy Future
Resiliency and Reliability
Our Sustainable Water Future
What do these pithy titles mean? They are abstract, street theater platitudes that disguise hard-core leftist retribution intended to collapse and destroy existing society. People are dead and dying, and large swaths of Los Angeles are being destroyed because of this Religion of Woke-ism. This Religion could not care less about facts, science, efficient delivery of public services, or reality. Earlier this year, Janisse appeared on a podcast with a title, “Why Equity is Key to Solving the Climate Emergency w/ DWP CEO & Chief Engineer Janisse Quinones.” DEI hires are not focused on efficient delivery of effective services to all the Citizens. Controlling these positions is another opportunity to weaponize government against the Citizen for angry retribution clothed in George Takai happy talk.
As Scott Adams has pointed out, “Having the wrong leaders with the wrong priorities gets you everything we are witnessing this week”.
Pervasive Public Service Corruption in Los Angeles and California
I’m all for highly paid Civil Servants. But, I believe in the Singapore Model, in which Civil Servants are highly paid, but in return are expected to perform with absolute fidelity, deliver outstanding results, and will be held to account for their performance.
And if they don’t meet these requirements, they get shown the door, or worse. Quiñones has had a meteoric rise. Now there is a Biblical level disaster under her watch. I’m not upset that Quiñones was able to negotiate such a healthy salary, but she should be held accountable, which also means a return of salary, fines, and possible prosecution.
If one has not been paying attention, the Los Angeles region, under a Blue monoculture, has been a cesspool of Public Sector Corruption for decades. Even the New York Times gets it right occasionally and says, “Prosecutors say that corruption is rising in California cities as one-party rule, inattentive voters and weakened news media have reduced the traditional checks on power”. Chinese malign influence has been front and center in the pervasive corruption of California:
“A Chinese real estate company was fined $4 million and placed on five years probation (sic) Friday for bribing former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar with more than $1.5 million in cash, gambling trips and escorts in exchange for the then-councilman’s support of a planned downtown hotel project.
Although he was also charged, Shen Zhen New World I’s billionaire owner Wei Huang fled to China after the charges were announced and has never appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom in connection with the case.”
The DEI Cult brings equal misery, death, and destruction for all
Woke-ism and DEI are not about reconciliation, they are about retribution and intentional collapse of society – Marxist and Maoist core tenets. Hosea 8:7 (KJV) is timeless in its guidance, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.
That’s exactly what is happening as Newsom was shifting into “Trump Proofing” California, whatever that meant. The results of years of Blue, One Party is coming together in a cataclysm. When everything is virtue signaling and the basics of math, planning, civil engineering, and agnostic, non-politicized science-based decision making is considered a manifestation of privileged culture, anything goes. And when anything goes, anything goes and society collapses.
If Janisse Quiñones was able to negotiate a $750,000 salary, good on her. But her focus has not been on the best delivery of services to the Citizens. With her own words, she is focused on the wrong things. Pay can be great for great leaders, but one has to take responsibility for the bad as well as the good. $750,000 a year brought mediocrity and failure, and Janisse was the one holding the bag when the lights came on and exposed the corrupt nature of the Religion of Wokeness. Time for her, and others in California, to pay up.
As relentless fires burn in Los Angeles, thousands of residents who fled their homes are just learning how poorly public officials prepared for such an event. Emergency response leaders following bad public policy have been too focused on sending firefighting equipment to Ukraine, keeping the homeless safe, protecting fish, and adopting green policies to focus on things like making sure there is enough water to feed fire hydrants and guaranteeing that the strongest, best-trained, most-skilled firefighters are leading operations.
Officials seem to believe that when fire forces you to flee your home, there is just one thing on your mind: the skin color and cultural experience of the firefighters who will bring you to safety. Will they be diverse enough to rescue you? Never mind if they are the best for the job, are they anything but straight white men?
That has been a major priority of the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), which, in 2022, launched its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bureau (DEI), purportedly “focused on ensuring a safe, diverse and inclusive workplace for all.”
In January 2022, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti checked multiple DEI boxes by appointing Kristin Crowley as fire chief, the first female, LGBT chief in Los Angeles. That year, according to LAFD data, “of the more than 6,500 applicants to LAFD, 70% were people of color and nearly 8% … were female,” which was “double the … percentage of female firefighters within the Department” at the time.
The LAFD Girls Camp is one avenue for recruitment for female firefighters, hosting girls between 14 and 18 to explore career opportunities in the department.
If there ever was a lesson for being energy independent and ditching the climate scam, read this.
The effect of the green agenda can be summed up as a long path to the gradual degradation of Europe’s energy security and a resulting path to de-industrialization. The Ukraine conflict only exacerbated it…
Germany’s once-envied efficient economy is in freefall, and the climate change cult and European Green Deal are directly to blame. State policies subsidizing EVs and other products, shutting down coal and nuclear plants, and mandating forced conversion to untested, unimplemented “renewables” resources for energy have decimated industrial efficiency. Industries and blue-collar jobs are fleeing Germany for polluting, profitable operations in China, India, and elsewhere abroad. Will the United States follow suit?
As natural gases skyrocket during a European cold snap, and Russian gas pipelines through Ukraine are shut down for the first time since 1991, Germany has transitioned from Europe’s economic darling to its leading economic anchor. Followed closely by France and the UK, similarly weighted by economically destructive climate fantasies that are crashing to Earth like ideological meteors, the latest blow to gas supplies compounds the crisis occasioned by the mysterious sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2.
The results of this disastrous state-controlled economic carbon dioxide experiment continue to be as evident as explosives in a controlled demolition. Germany terminated massive EV subsidies at the end of 2023; EV sales promptly fell 69%. Despite gushing economic promises of “high-paying jobs” in the renewables industry, Germany announces more layoffs almost daily. Chinese companies, unhindered by escalating energy and regulatory costs, are leading in EV and other manufacturing technologies while spewing more chemicals into the ecosystem than German manufacturing industries.
The climate cult is pushing jobs and pollution out of Europe, amplifying both for nations like India. German icon Volkswagen has threatened to close factories for the first time in its history, and recent layoffs of 35,000 (and wage reductions for 120,000) employees are harbingers of more to follow. Consumers are burdened by high energy prices for heat and travel. Fund managers and NGOs may be profiting from renewables manufacturing policies, but workers, consumers, and the ecosystem are all being systematically eviscerated in the boondoggle pursuit.
Will the U.S. continue to follow Germany’s demonstrable folly? If the legendary German industrial model is being crippled by destructive climate change policies, the anemic American one (with unpredictable tariffs looming) is similarly threatened.
However, there is hope stateside — the United States possesses precious natural gas supplies that Germany now lacks and has not shuttered its fossil fuel production. Renewables manufacturing, as well as the production of plastics, cement, steel, and fertilizers, all depend on high-temperature processes only available through fossil fuels or nuclear power. They cannot be replaced with solar, wind, or other energy sources, as Germany is proving despite big plans to convert its entire economy to renewables overnight. (Indeed, cutting traditional energy production in Germany fueled a vicious economic cycle by inflating natural gas prices.)
There is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that our world is facing today. Many of them are completely convinced that humans are literally a “plague” upon the Earth and that extreme measures are required to prevent us from destroying the entire planet. To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to a lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about our exploding population, humanity will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet. They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote “family planning” in developing nations as a way to combat population growth. Of course just about anything that reduces the human population in any way is a positive thing for those that believe in this philosophy.
This very twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of our most prominent websites, and it is being taught at top colleges and universities all over the world. The people who are promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by controlling the growth of the human population. In fact, many of them truly believe that they are engaged in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet.
From the time of Charles Darwin all the way to today, we have been relentlessly warned about what would happen if something was not done to reduce population growth.
Of course, the dire consequences that we were warned about have never actually come to fruition.
But that hasn’t stopped the elite from continuing to issue even more warnings.
The following are 47 shocking population control quotes from the global elite that will make you want to lose your lunch…
As always, the globalists are wrong. They want eath to be their playground and to get rid of others (Margaret Sanger is the mother of abortion and eugenics against blacks)
But 2025 will not be an easy year for dissenters and critics of the government, as this is increasingly being criminalized in Germany thanks to recently passed laws and acts that aim to suppress free speech.
The former head Germany’s Constitution Protection Authority (Bundesverfassungsschutz), Thomas Haldenwang (CDU Party), suggested last February when presenting measures to fight right-wing extremism, that human thoughts and speech patterns need to be under surveillance and become the business of the government: “It’s also about shifting verbal and mental boundaries. We have to be careful that thought and language patterns don’t become embedded in our language.”
In a nutshell, the German government aims to regulate human thoughts.
Just for the record, the Green New Deal is a Communist inspired strategy to spend money we don’t have until banrupt. Reagan did this to bring down the USSR. Learn from history. They only thing it would have helped would have been the bank accounts of the people supporting it.
Coming with the new year is a new president with a very different vision on energy than President Joe Biden, who campaigned on a promise to “end fossil fuel.”
President-elect Donald Trump is dismissive of the immediate “climate crisis” narrative that drove much of Biden’s energy policies. He promises to establish American “energy dominance” and focus policy on bringing down the cost of energy.
While Trump can overturn Biden’s industry-punishing executive orders and create a friendlier regulatory environment for the oil, gas, coal and mining industries, experts say there are economic and technical limits to what the outcomes of his policies will be. Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, here’s what we might expect for energy and industry in the second Trump administration.
Market forces
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York luncheon in September, Trump said he would end the Biden-Harris administration’s “anti-energy crusade and implement a policy of energy abundance, energy independence, and even energy dominance.” This would include, he said, getting the price of gasoline down below $2 per gallon, which would decrease the cost of all goods and services.
President-elect Donald Trump is poised to reignite global controversy by pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization (WHO) on his first day in office, January 20, 2025. According to a report from the Financial Times, Trump’s transition team is finalizing plans to sever ties with the global health agency, a move that would eliminate its largest single source of funding and reshape U.S. engagement in international health policy.
The decision, if executed, would fulfill a promise Trump made during his first presidency, where he accused the WHO of aligning too closely with China and failing in its global health leadership, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S. contributes roughly 16% of the WHO’s $6.83 billion budget, a figure that underscores its importance as the organization’s top financial backer. Despite this, Trump has been one of the WHO’s most vocal critics, accusing it of failing to hold China accountable for the spread of COVID-19 and of being “China-centric.”
The WHO hates the US and was behind forcing the Jab on us when Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine would have worked better and more safely. Save the money and spend it on paying down the debt instead of these blood sucking ticks.
I hope he pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords also, another farce imposed on the world by the WEF.
The season finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks delivered its series finale this week, and in doing so, addressed one of the most controversial issues in the Star Trek franchise. The issue in question revolves around Star Trek: Discovery, which has now been officially removed from the prime timeline canon, much to the relief of many fans, who are sick of wokeness in the storied franchise.
Discovery was infamous among Star Trek fandom for altering the appearance of Klingons and injecting identity politics into the universe.
Giant Freakin Robot reports that: “In the show’s finale, a group of Klingon ships encounters a phenomenon that transforms things into alternate-reality versions of themselves. When a Klingon ship hits one of those transformation rays, it transforms into a big, ugly Discovery-style Klingon ship. Then one of the crewmembers transforms into a Discovery-style Klingon.
“This couldn’t have happened if those weird Discovery Klingons had ever existed in the prime Star Trek timeline. It means that Discovery and its Klingons, just like the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies, happened in an alternate universe. One that has nothing to do with the rest of Star Trek.”
Fans across the internet rejoiced at the revelation.
Fan site That Park Place put it thusly: “Star Trek: Discovery debuted with high expectations, but over its run, it faced significant backlash from segments of the fanbase. Criticisms ranged from drastic changes in the portrayal of iconic species, such as the Klingons, to deviations from established timelines and character arcs. The early seasons set the series in the past, but inconsistencies soon emerged, leading to widespread dissatisfaction,” explaining further, “There’s a rift surrounded by a Schrödinger possibility field that remaps matter into alternate-reality versions from the multiverse. This event transforms the main timeline Klingons into those seen in Discovery, clearly delineating between the two universes. Consequently, while Lower Decks remains canon and part of the prime timeline, Discovery is relegated to an alternate reality, mitigating its previous inconsistencies.”
A lot of people gave up on Star Trek when they went woke, kind of like Star Wars.
Let’s stay true to the original story and heroes. Cut the woke crap.
At least we don’t have to include any of the Discovery rubbish in future series if they can make one that is watchable. We’ll always have Captain Kirk, the Borg, the real Klingon’s and Romulans to watch if not.
“may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy”
See the post below about Germany being dumbasses about the same thing. Use gas. It’s cheap and it isn’t killing whales or the environment. Those are lies made up by hypocritical zealots whose religion is green (money, not sustainability like Al Gore and John Kerry).
Drill baby drill and bring down the cost of energy, bringing down the cost of everything else. For those who worship the planet, watch and see that it won’t harm a thing. It will actually be better for everything except their wallets
Everyone knows this has been a boondoggle, even the left, but they’re so committed to supposed ‘green’ energy that they can’t let go.
A government regulator recognizing offshore wind’s destructive environmental effects is as rare as a North Atlantic right whale. But a recent, 600-plus page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) admits that the offshore wind development planned for the New York Bight—the triangular area bordered by the New Jersey and Long Island coastlines—may irreversibly harm whales, commercial and recreational fisheries, and seabirds.
The BOEM report is the agency’s first to evaluate the cumulative impacts of offshore wind development. Its authors cite a wide range of potential effects, from negligible (or even beneficial) to major. Acknowledging potentially “major” harms is a radical departure from the agency’s previously accepted Environmental Impact Statements for offshore wind projects, which have always focused on the impacts of individual projects, rather than the cumulative impacts of multiple projects.
The report, which BOEM bills as a “programmatic environmental impact statement,” admits that the proposed offshore wind projects on the New York Bight may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy. The authors note, for example, that the effect on the North Atlantic right whale could be “major,” defined as having “severe population-level effects” that would “compromise the viability of the species”—in other words, potential extinction. The report also concedes that the projects could have major effects (“substantial disruptions”) on commercial and recreational fishing, which contribute billions of dollars to the New Jersey and New York economies.
While the report discusses the consequences of these wind turbines on ocean views and even on local housing prices, it makes no mention of these projects’ adverse effects on electric ratepayers and economic growth. These effects are substantial, as New Jersey’s experience reveals. The state’s Board of Public Utilities estimated that its two approved offshore wind projects in 2024, with a total capacity of 2,400 MW, would raise the monthly electric bills of a typical residential customer by about $7, a commercial customer by about $59, and an industrial customer by over $500. Those estimated costs, which don’t include what those customers will pay for new transmission lines and the backup generation needed to offset wind’s inherent intermittency, cumulatively amount to more than a $750 million annual increase in electric bills for the state’s 8.5 million electric ratepayers. , based on the numbers of these customers. If the Garden State succeeds in its goal of developing 11,000 megawatts of offshore wind electricity, despite mounting costs and the cancellations of two major in-state projects, ratepayers alone will end up paying an additional $3 billion to $5 billion more each year for their electricity.
What is it with Europe right now. The UK has gone Bats**t crazy and is converting to Islam faster than Iran, not this.
Another wind drought has led to soaring electricity prices across Europe. Norway, which exports power to its European neighbors, has seen enough.
Europe’s electricity prices soared on Thursday amid a wind drought. Source: Alexander Stahel on X.
For the second time in a month, Germany’s electric grid has been hit by a wind drought, known in German as a Dunkelflaute. The lack of wind sent Europe’s electricity prices soaring to their highest levels since the end of 2022, when Europe was in the midst of an energy crisis due to concerns about supplies of Russian gas. That’s saying something since Europe — and Germany in particular — now appears to be amid a permanent energy crisis.
Yesterday, German consumers paid an average of $400 per megawatt-hour for electricity. During peak times, prices in Germany’s wholesale power market came close to $1,000 per MWh, the highest level in 18 years. Here’s how a reporter with Spain’s El Pais newspaper explained the situation:
Dunkelflaute is a cursed word in the German electricity sector. The combination, typical of cold anticyclones, of low temperatures (which increase demand) and the almost total absence of wind (which hinders wind generation) configures one of the worst possible scenarios for the price of electricity: it forces the burning of more gas in combined cycle plants, which are much more expensive, and that substantially increases the bill…The main factor behind this escalation is the lack of wind. While at this time of year Germany’s powerful wind power sector (onshore and offshore) usually averages almost 20 gigawatts (GW) of power, according to data from the specialist portal Montel, thus becoming the country’s main source of electricity, on Wednesday it will just exceed 3 GW. With the cloudy skies, solar photovoltaic power is also operating well below its potential and forces combined cycle plants — in which gas is burned to obtain electricity — to operate at a higher rate than usual, driving up prices.
The wind drought isn’t just hitting Germany. As shown in the graphic at the top of this article, electricity prices across Europe soared amid the wind drought. In response, Norwegian politicians are promising to dismantle the undersea power cables that connect Norway’s grid to mainland Europe to protect Norwegians from Europe’s tumultuous electricity market. Electricity prices in Norway, which gets 90% of its power from hydro, hit record prices this week despite having full hydro reservoirs.
According to the X account of Visegrád 24, a Norwegian news outlet, the two links that connect Norway to Europe will reach their technical lifetimes in 2026 and 2027. The two cables have 9 GW of exchange capacity, of which 5.1 GW connects to Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK.
“Electricity bills in New England are poised to experience a sharp increase driven by the clean energy mandates in five of the six states, which require duplicative, overbuilt renewable energy.”
Connecticut ratepayers suffered sticker shock this summer when they opened their July electric bills. While their energy consumption was relatively flat, the “public benefits” component doubled for some and tripled for others. The culprit was not hard to find given a legislative requirement for utilities to itemize the cost components of monthly bills.
“Public benefits” cover the cost of subsidies the state provides for low-income electricity customers and energy-efficiency programs. They also include solar, electric vehicle, and other renewable energy incentives.
The wide array of renewable energy subsidies and aid to low-income residents who cannot afford high-cost electricity, growing everywhere, is an increasing cost burden for power users in the Northeast.
Connecticut: Worst of the Worst
The Northeast has become the most expensive region in the continental United States for electricity. Connecticut has the most expensive electricity in the 50 states outside of Hawaii. Connecticut’s overall electricity price for this September, according to the Energy Information Administration, was 27.08 cents per kilowatt-hour (ȼ/kWh), compared to Hawaii’s 35.46 ȼ/kWh.
When I worked in sustainability at IBM (a joke in itself there), the Northeast was the most smug and misguided about the whole energy/carbon/climate issue. Never have I seen so many smart people (inside and analysts paid by IBM) get an issue so wrong because of ideology.
Well, take your smugness to the electric company and out of your bank account.
Gas is cheap and efficient. It’s not the bogeyman that you made it out to be. You picked your poison, now drink it.
We are told to fret that climate change is a threat not only to all life on Earth, but also to our mental health:
As temperatures rise, extreme weather events become more frequent, and natural disasters intensify, the psychological well-being of populations worldwide is increasingly at risk.
This mostly effects politically sacred “vulnerable populations” — for example, those who are already have mental issues and of course nonwhites:
For Indigenous communities, climate change-induced displacement from ancestral lands can cause profound psychological distress, as these communities often have deep cultural and spiritual connections to their environment.
Only “indigenous communities” are capable of appreciating God’s creation. That’s why you never see any garbage or pollution in Third World countries.
The global warming hoax really does damage not only the economy but also sanity:
[T]he Daily Telegraph reported on an epidemic of “eco-anxiety” among the children who are being treated for an overwhelming terror of “environmental doom” as climate alarmists spread fears of an impending climate disaster.
Creating hysteria as a means of manipulation is a deliberate tactic:
As Breitbart News has reported, activists have studied people’s emotional response to climate expressions and purposefully selected the terminology that elicits the strongest reaction.
The Guardian rejects “climate change” in favor of “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown.” Salon has explicitly proclaimed that we should “start panicking” because the weather continues to fluctuate like it always has. Every summer heatwave is portrayed as apocalyptic, with predictable effects on the mental health of the gullible. Alicia Finley calls it “climate hypochondria.”
Given that it helps to be a little nuts to buy into woke ideology in the first place, climate change has created a vicious cycle of insanity whereby the more moonbats believe liberal establishment lies about the weather, the crazier they become, the more likely they are to believe the lies.
Global warming lies are finally running out of steam. None of the crisis scares ever came true. The climate is fine, the seas didn’t rise, the ice sheets are just fine and the only thing that really happened is the theft and laundering of a lot of money.
The fun has started at COP29!
For years successive COPs have papered over the cracks, but the cracks have now become unbridgeable chasms.
The West wants the world to give up fossil fuels. The developing countries want money, lots of it that the West can’t afford.
Meanwhile, China and the rest of Asia want a free pass both from cutting emissions and paying money out. And the major oil producing countries have said “On your bike!”
So far at Baku, the West has promised to pony up $250bn a year by 2035 in climate aid. But when inflation is taken into account, this is barely more than the $100bn agreed at Copenhagen in 2008. The third world wanted $1.3 trillion.
China still refuses to pay a cent, and Azerbaijan has made it clear that it will not abandon its God-given gift of oil and gas.
As for cutting emissions, the whole idea has had to take a back seat to this unseemly scrabble for money.
Meanwhile everybody knows the whole thing is a charade, because Trump won’t merely pull out of the Paris Agreement next year, he will take his money with him.
The whole thing is, of course, hilarious. All we need now is for Ed Miliband to try eating a bacon buttie again!
Screw the old people who need help. Kick the Medicare can down the road, but make sure to fund a climate scam that launders money to politicians.
When Democrats rammed through the Inflation Reduction Act during the days they controlled all of Washington, D.C., it ignited a chain reaction that led to higher Medicare costs for America’s senior citizens.
“Nearly two years after its passage, the IRA has diverted nearly $260 billion from the projected Medicare ‘savings’ to pay for special interest handouts like large tax credits for costly electric vehicles, enormous subsidies paid to big health insurer-PBM corporations, and funding health care programs for illegal immigrants,” Ron Fitzwater, Chief Executive Officer of the Missouri Pharmacy Association, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Missouri Times.
“The Biden-Harris administration is not protecting Medicare; they’re stealing from it,” he wrote.
According to Politico, the chain reaction began when the act shifted the burden of paying for prescription medicine from seniors to insurance companies.
Then came what could have been predicted: Insurance companies hiked their premiums for 2025.
Fitwater, in his Op-Ed, said increases were coming in at 179 percent.
But since that was going to hit right before the election, there was one more step – a federal bailout that has the taxpayer-funded federal treasury taking the hit for what the IRA caused.
A few days before last week’s election, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a dire warning to voters. If Trump won, “the struggle against climate change will be over.”
He had that right.
Climate change fanaticism was effectively on the ballot last week. That green energy agenda was decisively defeated.
It turns out the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who voted for Trump weren’t much interested in the temperature of the planet 50 years from now. They were too busy trying to pay the bills.
The result shouldn’t be too surprising. Polls have shown climate change ranks near the bottom of voters’ concerns. Jobs, inflation and illegal immigration register much higher on the scale of concerns.
But if you asked the elite of America in the top one percent of income, climate change is seen as an immediate and existential threat to the planet. Our poll at Unleash Prosperity earlier this year found that the cultural elites were so hyper-obsessed with climate issues, they were in favor of banning air conditioning, nonessential air travel and many modern home appliances to stop global warming. Our study showed that not many of the other 99 percent agree.
Wake up, Bernie and Al Gore.
Climate change has become the ultimate luxury good: the richer you are, the more you fret about it.
It’s no secret that the vast majority of the so-called elites are advocates of climate alarmism and are taken in by the Green New Scam.
Whether this preference is based on ignorance of the science, ideological zeal, a willful desire to hurt American growth or simple greed because of their investments in Green New Scam infrastructure varies case by case.
The typical upper-income supporter of the climate cult including academics, media figures and celebrities is probably ignorant of the fact that there is no evidence that CO2 emissions cause climate change and that the real causes are solar cycles, volcanoes, ocean currents and atmospheric moisture not caused by humans.
Climate Alarmists Have It Backward
The historical record actually demonstrates that warming periods produce higher CO2 levels — not the other way around. CO2 doesn’t cause warming. It’s caused by natural warming.
In other words, climate alarmists have causation completely backward.
Climate alarmism is based almost entirely on computer models, which depend on the inputs the modelers themselves build into them. A model is only as good as the inputs and assumptions programmed into it.
Virtually every one of these models has overestimated warming, sometimes by orders of magnitude, because it’s based on faulty assumptions that overestimate the impact of CO2 on climate.
In other words, it’s junk science. But they keep relying on these models because their political agenda requires it.
Climate: The New Communism
There’s no doubt that a fair number of neo-Marxists embrace the climate scam because they know it damages U.S. industry, raises costs to U.S. consumers and helps to undermine the U.S. economy.
Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, anti-capitalistic collectivists admitted that they needed to promote the climate agenda because the only way to combat global warming is through collective action. It requires a coordinated global effort that limits national sovereignty.
The neo-Marxists are impervious to evidence; they just want to hurt America and wasting money on windmills instead of building new refineries is a good way to do it. That leaves the greed crowd.
Here are 10 fundamental questions that climate alarmists never answer.
➊ You claim that the Earth is overheating. That it’s “too hot.” So, what is the correct global mean surface temperature (GMST) for life on Earth and why?
Please provide a numerical answer. Use units and round it to the nearest tenth of a degree Celsius. Then, explain why that value is ideal and cite evidence to justify your answer.
➋ What is the correct atmospheric CO₂ level for life on Earth?
What is best to optimize our agricultural productivity?
What CO₂ level will make da weatha less scary?
Give your answer as an exact value as a mole fraction or volume percentage, and then explain why that value is ideal.
➌ What exactly makes CO₂ “pollution”?
The EPA considers CO₂ to be a pollutant, legally speaking, under the Clean Air Act, and their scientific justification is simply that, it “…𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑔𝑎𝑠 𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑠 𝑝𝑢𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑐 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑓𝑎𝑟𝑒.”
Because by that measure, water vapor should also be classified as a “pollutant” because it’s also a “greenhouse gas” (GHG) — it’s also the most abundant and potent GHG; it absorbs a wider spectrum of IR wavelengths than CO₂.
So, what actually makes CO₂ pollution?
➍ Why are temperature departures from 1850-1900 climate conditions deemed as the human welfare control knob given that the overall human condition has never been better than it is today? How is was climate during the end of the Little Ice Age — the coldest period in the last 10,000-years — preferable to today’s? On what account was the weather more benign? By what measure? Be specific. Tell me how the climate was supposedly less dangerous in the 17-19th centuries.
➎ The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that President Biden signed into law in 2022 was popularized as the “biggest climate bill in history,” but ever since the bill was signed, climate alarmists insist climate change has only gotten worse.
➏ If we spend $75 trillion to decarbonize the economy by 2050, by how much will it reduce the GMST by the end of the century? Please provide your answer to the nearest tenth of a degree Celsius and show your calculations.
What does the perfect climate look like? How will we know when we get there? By what measure?
➐ The estimated cost of net zero by the year 2050 in the U.S. is $75 trillion ($3 trillion per year), according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
That’s a hefty price tag.
And with ~260 million adult taxpayers, it would cost each of us $288,461.54 to get to “net zero emissions” by the target date. That’s 3-6-years’ worth of peoples’ salaries.
Are you willing to shell out that money, or do you just expect that everyone else will foot the bill for you?
Secondly, if you don’t know the answer to question six, then are we supposed to just spend that $75 trillion and see what happens?
➑ If “combating climate change” is a global concerted effort, why do China and India get a free pass to continue emitting carbon dioxide without bound?
➒ Why are you so vehemently opposed to the deployment of nuclear power? It is the safest, most sustainable “carbon-free” energy technology and without the compliance regulations, isn’t expensive when compared to solar PV and wind, which are inefficient, intermittent, costly add-ons to existing electricity generation sources.
➓ If humans are a parasite to the Earth since we are destroying it, why then are you worried that climate change could wipe us all out? Wouldn’t that be better for Earth? Why don’t you be the change you want to see and “net zero” yourself?
They are killing whales. It’s not that hard to figure out. There are so many better ways to generate energy. Hell, AI has gone nuclear, which is as clean as you can get when done right.
In a surprising yet overdue move, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has released its Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for the New York Bight. This document, despite its extensive layers of technical jargon and cautious language, marks a pivotal shift. It appears to be a rare admission from BOEM that offshore wind farms are indeed capable of causing harm—biologically, socioeconomically, physically, and culturally.
The PEIS covers six commercial wind energy leases off the shores of New Jersey and New York, totaling over 488,000 acres. While its primary focus is to outline measures to “avoid, minimize, mitigate, and monitor” impacts, the fact that BOEM is even considering these measures implies a long-overdue acknowledgment of offshore wind’s potential to harm marine ecosystems and coastal communities. The language in the document hints that these developments are not entirely benign, despite being repeatedly framed as environmentally friendly solutions to the climate crisis.
Impacts Revealed
While BOEM insists that the PEIS is “programmatic” and not the final say on the matter, the document does provide insight into some of the broader consequences of wind energy development. The PEIS details potential adverse impacts across various categories:
Biological Impacts: Marine mammals, sea turtles, birds, and fish could suffer due to noise, habitat displacement, and changes in migration patterns. Even bats, which are not typically associated with offshore environments, could be affected.
In early 2022, Porsche said electric vehicles would account for more than 80% of total annual sales by the decade’s end. That goal is still in place, although the company added an asterisk next to 2030, saying it will depend on how customers react to EVs. In a Q&A session with the press during the conference call pretraining to Q3 2024 sales, the German brand admitted things aren’t going as planned.
Chief Financial Officer Lutz Meschke said the situation in China is “challenging” for Porsche and all the European luxury brands. In the United States and Europe, Porsche sees a “slowdown in the BEV transition and the customer demand is not satisfying overall.” He mentioned that “a lot of customers in the premium/luxury segment are looking in the direction of combustion engine cars. There’s a clear trend in this direction.”
This is beyond ridiculous for stupidity on many levels. Besides the fact that it’s a tax based on a climate lie, it adds to the tax base of a group of socialists who pay one of the highest tax rates in the free world.
Of course, they tell you that education and medical care are free, but they just pay upfront, out of their paychecks. Nothing is free. Also, the medical care sucks. My wife’s relatives live there and I hear the stories directly from them about waiting six weeks for crummy care. It’s a schadenboner for me when I hear about Denmark doing another brainless move like this.
Here we go:
Dairy farmers in Denmark have to pay the world’s first carbon tax on their livestock, all in the name of a climate crisis that does not exist.
The country’s coalition government agreed this week to introduce the world’s first carbon emissions tax on agriculture. It will mean new levies on livestock starting in 2030.
Denmark is a major dairy and pork exporter, and agriculture is the country’s biggest source of emissions. The coalition agreement — which also entails investing 40 billion krone ($3.7 billion) in measures such as reforestation and establishing wetlands — is aimed at helping the country meet its climate goals.
“With today’s agreement, we are investing billions in the biggest transformation of the Danish landscape in recent times,” Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said in a statement Tuesday. “At the same time, we will be the first country in the world with a (carbon) tax on agriculture.”
Estimated cost per cow: 672 kroner ($96) annually, based on average emissions of 5.6 tons of CO2 equivalent per cow.
Implementation date: 2030
Initial tax rate: 300 kroner ($43) per ton of CO2 equivalent
Tax rate by 2035: 750 kroner ($108) per ton of CO2 equivalent
Effective tax after 60% tax break: 120 kroner ($17) per ton in 2030, rising to 300 kroner ($43) by 2035
Dairy is one of their country’s largest industries and they are going to help make it more expensive, thus killing the golden goose.
Her relatives love to think how smart they are and tell me how bad the USA is. It’s gems like this that let me chuckle at the chuckleheads. That they both buy the climate lies and self-penalize their economy tells me who’s not really that smart. I don’t even have to say anything when stuff like this comes out.
A recent report in the Daily Mail shows that while electric vehicle owners may virtue-signal by crowing about their green credentials, especially wealthy elites and celebrities, their carbon dioxide footprints are larger than those of most average folks who still drive vehicles that use gasoline and diesel for fuel. The Daily Mail reports:
Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, found that on average EV drivers actually have a bigger carbon footprint than drivers who own petrol or diesel cars.
While their cars might cut down on emissions, the researchers say that EV owners’ glitzier lifestyles mean they contribute more to climate change overall.
The average EV owner churns out half a tonne more CO2 per year with owners of the sportiest models producing almost two tonnes more pollution.
The researchers surveyed almost 4,000 Finnish people about their car ownership, background and lifestyle.
The participants also provided answers about their housing, transport, and purchasing habits to estimate their carbon footprint.
Overall, someone who owned an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) which runs on petrol or diesel created 8.05 tonnes of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gases per year.
Considering that environmental concerns are a major reason for purchasing an electric vehicle you might expect EV owners’ emissions to be lower.
However, the average EV driver actually has a slightly larger carbon footprint than those who opt for cars powered by fossil fuels, producing 8.66 tonnes of emissions per year.
Back in 2022, I reported that Toyota Motor chief Akio Toyoda remains skeptical of moving to only producing electric vehicles (EVs). Toyoda also indicated that most people who work in the auto industry agree with him.
“People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Toyoda said. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”
BMW wants Europe to relax its plan to ban new petrol and diesel-powered cars from 2035 onward, in an effort to reduce the region’s reliance on batteries from China. While many automakers have fully embraced electrification, BMW is opting for a more diversified strategy.
In addition to battery electric vehicles (BEVs), the company is investing in alternative technologies such as e-fuels and hydrogen fuel cells, betting that the future of mobility won’t be driven by batteries alone.
They just want to force their climate nonsense on us when in fact it’s a control issue by the Climate wienees. They tried making us act like sheep during Covid and we’re not going to do it again. This level of technology of battery-powered cars is not the answer, especially when they can turn them off for social non-compliance.
Wrong on just about everything in life and an American traitor, Jane Fonda pulls this.
You might think that a self-proclaimed climate advocate would be thrilled to see an announcement of more clean, reliable energy on the grid. But, you’d be wrong.
Last month, Constellation Energy announced a deal with Microsoft to reopen a reactor at Three Mile Island, now called the Crane Clean Energy Center. Expected to open by 2028 and operate for at least 20 years, the reactor is a promise of not only energy security amidst exploding energy demand, but an economic boon for Pennsylvania as well. According to a report completed by the Brattle Group, reopening the reactor is expected to create more than 3,000 jobs and add $16 billion to Pennsylvania’s GDP.
Yet, actor and activist Jane Fonda took to the pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer to proclaim that “Nuclear power at Three Mile Island is no climate solution.” Fueled by her decades-long hatred of the energy source, Fonda makes a bizarre and convoluted argument that America’s single largest source of clean energy is not what we need to tackle climate change.
Even worse, she misleads readers by conflating the two reactors at TMI. Unit 2, owned by Energy Solutions, was the site of the partial meltdown in 1979 and has not operated since. Unit 1 is owned by Constellation and was one of the most reliable nuclear power plants in the country until it closed in 2019 for economic reasons. Having grown up just an hour south of the facility in southern York County, I remember hearing about the ramifications of the accident. Nuclear power was seen as “scary” and “dangerous” by Pennsylvanians who simply cared about their family’s health and safety.
Also known as lying or bullshit. I worked in the industry and saw just how much it was just that.
“’I’m a businessman. I’ll take the [government green] money, that’s all I care about… I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here’.” – James Quigley, quoted in Politico ‘s “Power Switch” (below)
Government is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. Every one is, more or less, for profiting by the labors of others. No one would dare to express such a sentiment; he even hides it from himself.
The Frenchman added:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Correct. Government does not create wealth; it redistributes it (after a large cut). Who wins and loses? The winners are government, the lobbyists, and the rent-seekers, with concentrated benefits to them and diffused costs for the rest of us. Plunder, Bastiat would say.
—————-
I was reminded of this by a news item reported in Politico‘s “Power Switch” newsletter (August 16, 2023).
“Not all Republicans want to repeal the climate law that turns 1 today,” reported Josh Siegel. “In fact, my colleague Kelsey Tamborrino and I spoke to dozens of people from all corners of the country and discovered that many GOP officials in rural areas are welcoming the billions of dollars in clean energy incentives coming from President Joe Biden’s signature legislation.”
So do you think they found Republicans that feared “climate change” and welcomed “green” energy as cheaper and better? No, the interviewed were financially captured rent-seekers, enjoying a wealth transfer from taxpayers (via Biden) to their pockets. Here is the rest of the story.
In Rogers County, Okla., Republican Commissioner Ron Burrows looks at the Inflation Reduction Act and sees jobs — 1,000 of them to be exact. At least once the Italian giant Enel opens its $1 billion solar manufacturing plant there in 2025.
Burrows is not alone. Other political and economic leaders in Oklahoma, including Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, are glad to receive the major investments they say they’d never have attracted without the climate law.
“You can imagine being in a small rural community and trying to get economic development to come — it’s a challenge,” said Rosalie Griffith, a board member of the Rural Economic Development of Inola. “But unless you develop, you’re going to die.”
Burrows said Enel’s decision to locate in his tiny town east of Tulsa — population 1,500 — would not have happened without local buy-in. “I just don’t see a company making that sort of investment without some level of comfort that it’s not adversarial, it’s not split,” he said.
By contrast, his local member of Congress — GOP Rep. Josh Brecheen — views the Inflation Reduction Act through the prism of most national Republicans. Brecheen told me he opposes the use of “taxpayer subsidization” to bolster Democrats’ favored green industries and is seeking to repeal the law.
Kelsey and I found that same disconnect between state and local GOP officials in rural areas and their federal representatives across the country.
There’s even a similar, but less dramatic, dynamic unfolding in upstate New York. GOP Rep. Marc Molinaro voted to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives, and that’s made him a top target of Democrats in the 2024 election. His district is one of 18 that voted for Biden but are held by Republicans.
Inflation Reduction Act money catalyzed Canadian company Zinc8 Energy Solutions’ decision to locate a planned battery factory in Molinaro’s purple district. The project is expected to bring up to 500 new jobs to a Hudson Valley region still suffering from the loss of its manufacturing base in the 1990s. That’s exciting James Quigley, a Republican who drives a Tesla and is the supervisor for the town of Ulster, where Zinc8 plans to locate.
“I’m a businessman. I’ll take the money, that’s all I care about,” Quigley said. “I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here.”
Final Comment
Gosh Josh, what did you really find our here? Are you proud of this? Did you and Kelsey Tamborrino ask the same parties if they liked the federal deficit and inflation? The present level of taxation? The wisdom of the few over the energy verdicts of the masses?
Money for these subsidies has to come from somewhere, and that means the private economy in higher taxes and more government borrowing…. The IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] is the heart of Bidenomics, which is about creating a new political-subsidy economy. Perhaps all of this will effloresce into a brilliant green future. More likely hundreds of billions in misallocated investment will reduce future productivity gains and translate into slower economic and income growth. Let’s hope President Biden’s subsidies don’t boomerang like pandemic transfer payments, leaving all Americans poorer.
What a waste, what a shame. The next President needs to issue an emergency declaration that the U.S. is out of money and cease all subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act in order to pause wind, solar, and battery subsidies. Ratepayers and taxpayers will be thankful.
The electric vehicle (EV) is heralded as a cornerstone of the fight against climate change, with promises of a cleaner, greener future. As recently as July, the Biden-Harris administration announced billions of dollars of government support for EV manufacturing.
However, a growing concern lies beneath the shiny surface of electric cars and bikes: the safety risks of lithium-ion batteries, particularly their propensity to catch fire.
The rosy image of EVs as environmental saviors doesn’t align with their increasing reputation as flammable hazards.
Lithium batteries are designed to store a significant amount of energy in a compact space, which increases not only their efficiency but also their risk profile. When these batteries overheat, short-circuit or suffer physical damage, they can ignite and burn with alarming intensity.
New York is particularly notorious for the large number of E-bike fires. Entire shipments of cars on cargo ships have been burnt up in the middle of the ocean due to fires from EV batteries.
Recently, containers holding 33,000 pounds of lithium batteries at Canada’s port of Montreal caught fire, prompting city authorities to warn residents to remain indoors. The fire, which occurred around 2:45 p.m. on September 23, was not extinguished until 3 a.m. the next day!
“Due to the amount of energy that these batteries store, it took us quite a while to extinguish the fire,” said the fire department chief.
As soon as money became the issue, see how little the climate scam mattered?
I got to work with Schmidt when I was with IBM. He told me that the do no evil was a lie back when Google stood behind it as a corporate mission. He basically said don’t trust him or Google and I don’t. This is more evidence that they (the climatards) were lying the whole time about the climate scam. They were just trying to get people to act the way they wanted to, also known as socialism. See the recycling story below on that.
… any moves to curtail the expanding amounts of energy consumed in developing … ever more advanced AI models are futile…
Google’s former chief Eric Schmidt thinks we shouldn’t let AI’s ballooning power consumption worry us, because putting AI to work on climate change issues will be our best shot at solving them.
Schmidt was speaking at a recent AI summit in Washington DC, and his comments echo those of Microsoft founder Bill Gates who expressed very similar sentiments at an event in London earlier this year.
…
“All of that will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology,” he said, adding that “we may make mistakes with respect to how it’s used, but I can assure you that we’re not going to get there through conservation.”
Schmidt further stated that he believes that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it,” and that he would rather bet on AI solving the problems than constraining the development of the tech and still having the problems anyway.
This rather optimistic view of the Earth-saving potential of AI can perhaps be explained by the fact that Schmidt has his own investments in the technology. According to Business Insider, he is the founder of White Stork, a defense company that develops AI-powered drones.
On March 22, 1987, the barge Mobro 4000, loaded with six million pounds of garbage and towed by tugboat Break of Dawn, departed Islip, New York. It was bound for Morehead City, North Carolina — but never did dock there. Instead, it spent the next five months at sea, turned away by multiple states and three foreign countries. It became big news when journalist Dan Rather called it “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.” But another load of garbage was the story the media spun about it. In reality, no one would accept the Mobro because of a rumor that it was carrying medical waste. But that’s not the narrative the media pushed.
It advanced the notion that the Mobro’s fate was a result of a lack of dump space.
The “solution,” of course, was recycling. The timing was perfect, too, as there already was increasing public concern about waste. Oh, never mind that, as Reader’s Digest reported decades ago, 1,000 years of America’s trash could fit in an area 50 miles square (one m2 per state) and 200 feet high — the average modern dump’s height. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” and this one wasn’t wasted: The story helped catalyze the recycling movement. The Mobro 4000 might have been adrift, but recycling proponents’ ship had come in.
Of particular concern, too, is plastic, with stories of the material polluting our oceans. But what if plastic recycling is a myth, if not a scam, that is not only wasteful but environmentally damaging?
Yes, it is one of the biggest scams in history and you can read about how little it really matters at the link above.
Don’t forget that getting the guilty to recycle is no different than lining up the sheep for a jab. It is to get a group to behave the way the government wants them to act. In other words, it’s just another step toward socialism through behavioral acts of perceived service. Socialism is just one step away from communism, what the assholes in DC want anyway.
Don’t be a sheep. Throw it away, just not on the street. It’s cheaper to treat it as garbage than as recycling as you can read and you are not helping the environment by recycling.
The moonbats at Phys.org had almost caught up to Scientific American when it comes to subordinating science to wokeness. Then they went and admitted that EV owners sin against their own godless religion by having larger carbon footprints:
A pair of psychologists and an economist at the University of Turku, in Finland, have found that because the average electric vehicle (EV) owner is wealthier than the average person, they still have a bigger than average carbon footprint.
So it is not transportation that offends the weather but wealth. Don’t worry, leftist politicians have a cure for that.
Despite EV owners being wealthy enough to waste money on expensive green posturing, their playthings are heavily subsidized by those of us who do not. EV manufacturers naturally raise their prices to match the subsidies.
I got hit pretty hard by the storm. The power went out last night and we made it through the mid-day until it came back on.
We easily made breakfast and coffee because our stove is natural gas. Biden wants to ban them, but why? They can cut the electricity off if you do not obey. The gas worked just fine without any power.
There is going to be a lot of clean up and the water continues to rise on the 3 rivers near my house, but at least it’s passed through now.
This is the happiest I’ve been with my gas stove since I’ve owned it.
Don’t let the government run our lives. This is communistic behavior. They are just dicking us around for no reason other than more power and control so that people have to obey. FOAD. ESAD. BIOYA. FJB
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that in 2019. I covered a book entitled “The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened” by Dr. Susan Crockford. The University of Victoria professor analyzes the latest data and reviews the questionable values in official estimates, concluding that polar bears are thriving.
However, it didn’t stop what she wrote from being true.
The polar bear, the iconic image of the climate crisis, has entirely lost its eco-activist mascot status. Climate expert Bjorn Lomborg (President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution) recently examined the numbers in a New York Post piece and came to the same conclusion.
Protesters dressed as polar bears, while Al Gore’s hit 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” showed us a sad, animated polar bear floating away to its death.
The Washington Post warned that polar bears faced extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund’s chief scientist even claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.
And then in the 2010s, campaigners just stopped talking about polar bears.
more at the link above, but Al Gore forgot that Polar Bears can swim, dumbass
First, we have this: EV Dealers Are So Desperate to Offload Stock That They’re Offering Lease Deals For $20 a Month.
How soft is the new EV car market? Some EV vehicles have been on their lots for so long that they’re offering lease terms so generous, they may as well be giving them away.
A Kia dealer in Virginia only gets a couple of inquiries a month for EVs. The price tag of new vehicles scares them off, says Finance Director Ramon Nawabi. He’s got a few EV 6 SUVs that have been on the lot for six months that Kia is now offering discounted leases on top of the $7,500 EV tax credit “just to move the car,” he says. “In a sense, we’re giving them away.”
That $7500 tax credit helped dealers sell a million EVs in 2022. However, the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act severely limited how that $7500 tax credit could be applied. There are now price caps for EVs ($80,000 for SUVs and trucks; $55,000 for cars), and the batteries must be American-made. Also, the vehicles must be assembled in the U.S. There’s also a cap on the net income of the potential buyer.
“The EU is in a crisis caused by low consumer demand for EVs and unfair competition from third country EV manufacturers, meaning that the EU industry will not be able to meet these reduction targets. EU industry will have little choice but to significantly cut production, which threatens millions of jobs in the EU, harms consumers, and adversely impacts the EU’s competitiveness and economic security.”
The quote above is an excerpt from a draft European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association (EAMA) document made public this week in a story by Bloomberg. The report was prepared by EAMA in preparation for formally requesting a 2-year delay in EU emissions goals set to take effect in 2025. EU EV makers say they will not be able to meet the idiotic mandate set by the EU’s authoritarian central planners, citing low consumer desire to buy the damn things and “unfair” competition from China.
It’s a reality that should come as no real surprise to anyone, especially since critics of the EU’s central planning literally predicted this very outcome a thousand times.
It’s because people bought them because there was a subsidy. Then they found out that the current technology of an EV is flashy, but not good. It sucks in hot or cold weather and takes too long to charge.
It’s not the panacea that was promised, just another government program, nee mandate that is a failure.
There is not enough electricity nor the grid to support people driving EV’s. They are 3-5 iterations of technology away from being efficient and desirable. They are wealthy peoples salve at feeling good about themselves for the made-up environmental crisis going on.
Let’s also not ignore the fires that they cause and the inability to put them out. They just burn to the ground (or 57,000 gallons of water for the enviro-weenies trying to save the planet – irony and sarcasm there).
So unless they bribe the buyers to get a technology worse than a petroleum powered car, people don’t want them.
Let’s not ignore that the manufacturers lose 10’s of thousands on every car they build (to the tune of a billion and a half loss for Ford alone this year).
So other than to make someone feel good because they are a greentard, there is no reason to buy one, yet. There may be a better iteration in the future, but it isn’t now.
For the record, I drove last weekend for 4 hours in my diesel truck and got 36 MPG. I didn’t hurt a plant or a tree.
Economics and technology say it’s a loser. It’s just another idea by the Enviro-nuts to try and make us do something because they hate petroleum.
EU Mandate here:
The mandate is so utterly unattainable that EAMA makes this projection as part of its application for a delay:
EU rules targeting a CO2 fleet emission of about 95 grams of CO2 per kilometer per vehicle would require automakers to either halt production of about 2 million cars or be exposed to fines that could reach €13 billion ($14.3 billion) for passenger cars, according to estimates by the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association contained in the draft and seen by Bloomberg.
Van manufacturers could also face paying an additional €3 billion for falling short of targets, said the group that’s currently headed by Renault SA Chief Executive Officer Luca de Meo.
“The EU is in a crisis caused by low consumer demand for EVs and unfair competition from third country EV manufacturers, meaning that the EU industry
The planet is sick, so says the environmentalists, but here comes Harvard University heal it.
The Ivy League university, where freshmen need refresher courses on algebra, will now offer a concentration (fancy word for “major”) in “Climate Change and Planetary Health.”
“The idea is that we move from an understanding of planetary health to training planetary healers,” Professor Christopher Golden told The Crimson.
“We see climate change as one of the most important existential threats that is affecting public health,” the faculty co-director also told the student newspaper.
Healing the planet includes confronting “structural racism,” too.
story
Tick all the boxes, global warming, Gaia Worship, racism, and the Ivy League. The full complement of woke.
Planetary helath is a new one for me, like they can do something about it other than use it to beg for money, the real cause of climate change worry.
I post this as I listen to Ford losing $5.5 billion on EV’s as they transition to hybrid because no one wants them. They’d rather have a ground shaking V-8 with a straight exhaust in their truck or a real Mustang, but no. Ford Loses $44,000 On Every EV Sells As It Switches To Hybrids
Now this:
We are often told that wind and solar, if not cheaper, are at least cost competitive with fossil fuels. Dead wrong! Wind or solar costs around five times more per megawatt hour compared to, for example, natural gas.
We are told that wind and solar will save us from a climate catastrophe. If there is a looming climate catastrophe, the only thing that will save us is nuclear power. Wind and solar are incredibly expensive methods of reducing CO2 emissions. The more wind and solar you build, the cost of removing CO2 increases disproportionately.
The U.S. has wasted $1.5 trillion on wind and solar and for that money only a little more than 10% of our electricity comes from wind and solar.
Fossil fuels are not dirty. Modern natural gas or coal plants are environmentally pristine. CO2 is not a pollutant, but an aerial plant food that is greening the Earth. CO2 makes plants grow faster with less water.
Wind or solar electricity is not worth what it costs to create it. It is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. That is a generally accepted economic principle.
If the government requires a utility to purchase some amount of electricity at some price, that is not a free market. That is central planning. Central planning has a role, but it rarely works as well as the voluntary exchange of goods and services. Central planning creates unexpected twists and turns and often results in low productivity.
More on the lies they’ve been telling us about Green energy and the Green New Deal nonsense
As Steely Dan might say, the things that pass for knowledge today, I can’t understand. It’s all lies, falsehoods, and misdirection on tap, served fresh 24/7/365.
Lie #1:Joe Biden was a great president, a dedicated public servant who put country first and stepped aside so that Kamala Harris’s brilliance could save our democracy.
Well, that’s five lies all tied up in one bundle! Joe Biden is easily the worst president in my lifetime, possibly ever. He and his family got rich, not by serving anyone, but by grifting on his various political offices. Slow Joe also didn’t step aside; he was kicked to the curb by his Democrat comrades after it became clear he was going to lose in November. And so now we have Kamala Harris, who was chosen as V.P. simply because she possesses ovaries and dark pigmentation. And for the one millionth time, America is a republic — if we can keep it — not a democracy.
Lie #2:Man-made climate change will make the Earth unlivable for humans in (pick one) 5, 10, 39, or 5,000 years.
Ha, ha! If you think our Creator would allow us, His/Her/Zey’s most ambitious, creative, and intelligent organism, to destroy our beautiful terrarium, then you’re either a fool or an atheist, possibly both. Our most brilliant minds can’t predict tomorrow’s weather with precision, our weather records extend a mere blip into the nearly five billion years of the planet’s estimated existence, and the only reason the scam’s called “climate change” is because leftists gave up on “global warming” when the Earth inconsiderately stopped warming.
Lie #3:Democrats love black people.
Where to start with this one? The president who ended slavery in America was a Republican. It was the Democrat party who championed Jim Crow laws. It’s Democrats who’ve historically come up with all kinds of handouts and special programs for blacks, not because they love them, but because they think African-Americans simply can’t cut it on a level playing field. Folks, that’s racism of the highest order.
And Democrats just love killing unborn babies, a statistically telling percentage of whom are black.
Lie #4:Diversity is our strength.
Nope, sorry, uniformity is our strength. A team that’s chosen based on merit alone, and who plays according to one set of values and with a single goal in mind, always wins. But don’t take my word for it; ask any recent champions of the almost three-quarters African-American NBA. If diversity is strength, then the NBA is arguably one of the weakest b-ball leagues on the planet.
As usual, any climate talk is just alarmism based on models that will never budge the thermometer, but will open the wallets of the under educated.
Here goes:
The science of climate change often is presented in complicated language that speaks of computer models and the theoretical inputs and outputs thereof and concludes that the globe is on the verge of “boiling.” Well, leave it to three physicists — steeped in calculus and such arcane matters as the behavior of molecules and the nuclear charge of atoms — to simplify the analysis and arrive at a much less alarming determination.
“Straightforward calculations … show that eliminating U.S. CO2 emissions by the year 2050 would avoid a temperature increase of 0.0084 degrees Celsius,” states a brief paper authored by Drs. Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; William Happer, Princeton University; and William A. van Wijngaarden, York University, Toronto. On the Fahrenheit scale, the value of averted warming is 0.015 degrees.
In short, the amount of warming averted by eliminating CO2 emissions in the United States would be too small to measure. The paper bolsters the position of those who argue that a changing climate is the product of natural forces, that human-induced carbon dioxide emissions can have only a minuscule effect on global temperature, and that CO2 is a valuable plant food and not a pollutant.
Rather than using theoretical assumptions about various factors that are fed into computers, the paper’s calculation relies almost exclusively on “observable data” that are widely accepted and publicly available, says Dr. Happer.
“This is something anybody with a calculator can figure out,” said the scientist, who may be best known for his contribution to a laser-based technology for destroying incoming ballistic missiles as part of the so-called Star Wars program of the 1980s.
The data needed for the math are the number of years until 2050, the amount of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere, which scientists regularly measure, and the current concentration of atmospheric CO2, which is approximately 427 parts per million as of June 2024.
The only assumed datapoint is the sensitivity of the atmosphere to CO2 increases. The paper uses a value almost the same as one commonly used “before global-warming alarmism became fashionable.” Even if the value is quadrupled to a number favored by the politically driven Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the amount of warming averted still is only 0.034 degrees Celsius.
Yet they waste billions on “renewable energy” that hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of supplying us with what we need.
Among the great mythologies of recent years, one stands out above the rest, is that the world is in a “great energy transition.” Actually, the world IS in a dramatic energy transition. But it isn’t the one the Left wants it to be.
Despite hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars thrown at wind and solar power, we still get less than 10% of our energy from green sources. The needle really hasn’t moved at all over the past two decades. The more the government spends, the less we get per taxpayer dollar thrown at it. That’s the very definition of a falling stock.
The REAL energy transition is toward natural gas. A few weeks ago, the price of natural gas fell below $2 per MMBTU, the lowest price level for energy, after adjusting for inflation, in 20 years and probably ever in the history of mankind. Just a few years ago, the price in real dollars was four times higher.
More
It’s a shell game to move money into the pockets of the insiders. It will never work and economically it isn’t feasible. Natural gas makes us energy independent, but we can’t have that now can we (with liberals in charge)
By now, almost everyone knows that “the world is warming”, and has been told over and over by the mainstream media that it is due to man’s emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), principally but not limited to carbon dioxide (CO2). This claim is largely due to the efforts of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
I quote extensively from this reference below, in brackets […]:
[The Club of Rome was a group of mainly European scientists and academics, who used computer modelling to warn that the world would run out of finite resources if population growth were left unchecked. The Club of Rome’s 1972 environmental best-seller “The Limits To Growth”, examined five variables in the original model: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. They noted that “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that…the threat of global warming…would fit the bill…the real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Not surprisingly, their study predicted a dire future for mankind unless we ‘act now’: “We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the present unbalanced and dangerously deteriorating world situation is the primary task facing mankind…Concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent…This supreme effort is…founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national, and world levels…”(Arvid’s bold italics)
Fires in EVs are particularly dangerous because they burn at very high temperatures, usually emit toxic gases and are difficult to extinguish. EV drivers and passengers have been killed in such fires. [Sources: multiple media reports and video recordings of incidents]
Most instrumentation in EVs is via large touch-screen systems that are not in the driver’s eye line (i.e. they must look sideways). Many are also touchscreens, which means that certain information must be read and then a hand taken off the steering wheel to select some option. These are a serious distraction for drivers. [Source: Advertising for certain EVs]
Driver stress in EVs is far higher than ICE cars. Will they reach their target recharging station? Will it be operating when they arrive? Maybe they’ll even put themselves in discomfort by turning off the air-conditioning to try to get to the recharge point, but that might threaten their health on very cold or very hot days. [Source: Logical consequence of other points mentioned below.]
Public recharging stations are often not manned and even a fast charge typically takes around 40 minutes. This situation can put personal safety at risk, especially if recharging late at night. [Source: personal experience provides anecdotal evidence]
EV owners can have little confidence that their vehicle will be available to respond to an emergency at any time of day even over a relatively short distance. [Source: logical consequence of battery drainage and patterns of recharging.]
Most EVs can accelerate much faster than ICE cars. This is a threat to the safety of drivers and the public. [Source: data on EV performance]
The greater acceleration and greater mass mean greater tyre wear. EVs don’t emit CO2 but they cause much greater emission of rubber particulates, which are dangerous to human health. [Source: anecdotal evidence of tyre degradation]
The greater mass of EVs compared to ICE vehicles means that in a collision between the two types of vehicles, the ICE vehicle is going to suffer more damage, which means an increased safety risk for ICE drivers. [Source: Logical consequence based on physics]
The cars are very quiet, which poses a problem for the blind or visually impaired who rely on vehicle noise, or more correctly its absence, to indicate when it’s safe to cross a road. [Source: Logical consequence of cars being very quiet.]
Tests in the USA have shown that conventional guard rails along road sides will not stop an EV because these cars have greater mass than ICE cars and therefore greater momentum. EVs with batteries position very low tend to spear under the guard rail while EVs with higher batteries just push through the rail.
Financial, Fire, Weight, Insurance, and a bunch of other issues for Owners
We still have some cows in Cowhampshire, so this will be of interest to farmers, farm advocates, livestock enthusiasts, food security folks, and anyone looking for another opportunity to debunk climate cultists about emissions from tasty animals. And the best part is that you can be cultists, and this might actually make sense to you. Circle of life, closed system, and all of that.
German manufacturing firms are considering scaling back production or relocating operations as the high cost of energy in the renewable-committed nation cuts into their profits, according to a new survey.
The German “2024 Energy Transition Barometer,” which was published by the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce, surveyed firms employing 500 people or more.
“The trust of the German economy in energy policy has been severely damaged. Policy makers have failed to show companies that they can have reliable and affordable energy supply,” said Achim Dercks, the association’s deputy managing director, according to OilPrice.com.
A report in May from the Federation of German Industries concluded that Germany had lost a decade’s worth of growth in production since before the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019.
Chinese Rocket Falls on Village While SpaceX Is Ordered to Study Launch ‘Stress’ of Seals
China doesn’t care about it’s people. Mao murdered 49 million of them for those who are fans of communism and dictators.
And then there is space and Chinese use of rocket technology to put war-capable vehicles into orbit. Three years ago, the Chinese launched a “Hypersonic glider,” but US officials were gobsmacked. What was a “hypersonic glider?” they asked:
According to the Financial Times, which first reported the news, this was a test of a new, nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle. China has insisted that it merely conducted a “routine test of a space vehicle to verify technology of spacecraft reusability”. Yet the demonstration reportedly stunned American officials. “We have no idea how they did this,” one of them told the newspaper. What are hypersonic gliders and why do they matter?
When it comes to space and space vehicle launch technology, the Chinese do not care about the “environment.” What China cares about is catching up to America. I assume that America is paying attention to what China launches or attempts to launch into space. China is not a “hermit” kingdom like North Korea, so when a launch of payload goes wrong and falls out of space and into a sleepy village, there is a good chance that someone with a smartphone might video the “mistake.”
Annnnd China dropped another booster stage full of hypergolics on a local village pic.twitter.com/kxpk37rWhP
— Chris Combs (iterative design enjoyer) (@DrChrisCombs) June 22, 2024
In a statement published on the OPEC website Thursday, Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais said the concept of “peak oil demand” is nowhere to be seen in the cartel’s projections for future global crude oil demand.
“[A]s we look to the future it is the very versatility of oil that ensures that we do not see peak oil demand on the horizon,” Al Ghais said.
“Just as peak oil supply has never transpired, predictions of peak oil demand are following a similar trend.”
In my own research, I have been able to trace predictions for the world reaching so-called “peak oil” all the way back to the 1880s.
From that distant beginning through around 2010, peak oil theory was always about the world having somehow reached a peak in crude oil supply as all the big reserves had supposedly already been discovered.
For about 125 years, constant advances in technology and a creative and innovative industry invariably proved such pronouncements wrong, often laughably so.
With the ramping-up of the climate alarmist movement in the first decade of this century, narratives surrounding this always-wrong theory began to shift over to the demand side of the equation. Some anti-oil-and-gas activist groups even adopted the theory as a means of promoting the equally silly notion that the world’s remaining oil resources could simply be left in the ground as demand for them would soon be overwhelmed by rising demand for alternatives.
A decade later, that theory has also been proven laughably wrong, despite the “investment” of many trillions of dollars in debt-funded subsidies.
OPEC’s statement stands in stark contrast to the projection by the International Energy Agency that the world will somehow achieve peak oil demand by 2030. Al Ghais alludes to this preposterous notion, calling it a “dangerous commentary, especially for consumers,” that “will only lead to energy volatility on a potentially unprecedented scale.”
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Al Ghais’ statement comes in the wake of revised oil-demand growth projections from the IEA and OPEC, along with Goldman Sachs and the US Energy Information Administration for the remainder of 2024 and into 2025. Where the IEA revised its 2024 projection downward to 1 million barrels per day for 2024, even it projects a more robust 1.5 million bpd in growth for 2025.
The EIA raised its own growth estimate for 2024 from a very conservative 900,000 bpd to 1.1 million bpd.
Goldman Sachs comes in at a stronger 2024 estimate of 1.25 million bpd, based on strong global economic growth. The bank cites robust growth in jet fuel, petrochemical-driven LPG and naphtha, and gasoline and diesel demand as key drivers of this growth.
America’s dirtiest beach revealed: Beautiful coast is making dozens sick due to river pumping in raw sewage in what’s been branded a ‘portable toilet’
California is home to three of the most polluted beaches in the country, according to a new report.
The Surfrider Foundation tested thousands of water samples across the nation, with Imperial Beach in San Diego coming out as the worst.
As part of the group’s survey, they also found that 64 percent of the 567 sites tested had at least one sample with unsafe bacteria levels.
A quarter of the samples came from sites in California, with three beaches in The Golden State among the ten most polluted.
Every sample recovered from Imperial Beach turned up bacteria counts that exceeded the state’s health standard for recreational waters.
More than 100 billion gallons of untreated wastewater have flowed through Mexico ‘s Tijuana River and into the Pacific Ocean, eventually reaching the coastal town
I find this hilarious that the green washing of everything gets exposed for it’s triviality compared to creature comforts. If it was real, they’d actually do something effective.
More than three thousand Olympians are expected to bring portable air-conditioning units to the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris this summer, derailing France’s efforts to go green by not providing AC in the Athletes’ Village, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
The International Olympic Committee’s decision to substitute air-conditioning for a less reliable but more environmentally friendly geothermal cooling system is central to their strategy to cut the carbon footprint of the Paris Games by half, Reuters reported. However, many visiting nations, concerned lack of AC will result in reduced sleep and poor athletic performance, are opting to import portable AC units, according to the Washington Post.
Looking back through history, there have always been doomsday prophets, folk who say the world is coming to an end. Are modern-day activists not just the current version of this?
I look at some of the facts – CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere; humans are responsible for just 3% of CO2; Britain is responsible for just 1% of the world’s CO2 output – and I think “really“? Will us de-carbonising really make a difference to the Earth’s climate?
I have listened to some top scientists who say CO2 does not drive global warming; that CO2 in the atmosphere is a good or vital thing; that many other things, like the Sun and the clouds and the oceans, are more responsible for the Earth’s temperature.
I note that most of the loudest climate activists are socialists and on the Left. Are they not just using this movement to push their dreams of a deindustrialised socialist utopia? And I also note the crossover between green activists and BLM ones, gender ones, pro-Hamas ones, none of whom I like or agree with.
As an amateur psychologist, I know that humans are susceptible to manias. I also know that humans tend to focus on tiny slivers of time and on tiny slivers of geographical place when forming ideas and opinions. We are also extremely malleable and easily fooled, as was demonstrated in 2020 and 2021.
I have looked into the implications of Net Zero. It is incredibly expensive. It will vastly reduce living standards and hinder economic growth. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I know that economic growth has led to higher living standards, which has made people both safer and more environmentally aware.
Net Zero will also lead to significant diminishment of personal freedom, and it even threatens democracy, as people are told they must do certain things and they must not do other things, and they may even be restricted in speaking out on climate matters.
What will be the worst things that will happen if the doomsayers are correct? A rise in temperature? Where? Siberia? Singapore? Stockholm? What is the ideal temperature? For how long? Will this utopia be forever maintained? I’m suspicious of utopias; the communists sought utopias.
If one consequence of climate change is rising sea levels, would it not be better to spend money building more sea defences to protect our land? Like the Dutch did.
It’s a narrative heavily pushed by the Guardian. I dislike the Guardian. I believe it’s been wrong on most issues through my life – socialism, immigration, race, the EU, gender, lockdowns and so on. Probably it’s wrong about climate issues too?
I am suspicious of the amount of money that green activists and subsidised green industries make. And 40 years ago the greenies were saying the Earth was going to get too cold. Much of what they said would happen by now has not happened. Also, I trust ‘experts’ much less now, after they lied about the efficacy of lockdowns, masks and the ‘vaccines’.
I like sunshine. I prefer being warm to being cold. It makes me feel better. It’s more fun. It saves on heating bills. It saves on clothes. It makes people happier. Far few people die of the heat than they do the cold.
The reason “the experts” are always “baffled” is because the narratives they are paid to push—from “Covid”, to “safe and effective”, to “anthropogenic climate change”—are not only wrong, but outright lies.
The reason "the experts" are always "baffled" is because the narratives they are paid to push—from "Covid", to "safe and effective", to "anthropogenic climate change"—are not only wrong, but outright lies. pic.twitter.com/prEpKcJEv5
— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) May 21, 2024
The German automaker’s limousine customers care as much about comfort and status as saving the planet
Bloomberg reports on how Volkswagen’s EV fantasy has just collided with reality. Volkswagen walks back EV or bus strategy that rankled rivals. CEO Oliver Blumer is turning to hybrids and striking partnerships as EV sales slow. Volkswagen AG’s all-in on electric vehicle plan is no more. The namesake VW brand, which pitched its ID family of electric cars as central to its future, admitted last week it will need more plug-in hybrids as EV sales decelerate. This marks just the latest adjustment VW has made to its electrification strategy after the company botched several model releases and fell behind in China, where local brands now dominate. The manufacturer has also shelved efforts to seek outside investors for its battery unit and scrapped plans for a 2 billion Euro ($2.2 billion) EV factory in Germany. In fact, the automaker is selling so many cars still running on combustion engines that it’s on track to overshoot its emissions allowance next year, leading Chief Executive Officer Oliver Blumer to ask European regulators for leniency.
And Mercedes has dumped an entire EV platform after a woeful sale of its larger EV models. As Top Gear reports, Mercedes has reportedly cancelled an entire EV platform, and apparently, slow EV sales are to blame. Farewell, MBEA; we hardly knew you. Mercedes is putting the kibosh on the development of its MBEA large electric vehicle platform, having apparently been put off by the EQE and EQS’s slower than expected sales. OD Deia first reported by Handelsblut, the move will supposedly save billions in development costs as Mercedes rethinks its future luxury car strategy.
The audacity of this guy is endless. They are pretty much saying they are going to waste the cash and solve nothing other than lining their pockets with taxpayers money.
Squeezing the global economy dry to solve a fake problem.
The $13.6 trillion question: how do we pay for the green transition?
The public sector will have to provide about 30 per cent of climate finance globally, and the heat is building on governments to come up with ways of doing that.
…
The bill will be immense. If average global temperature rises are to be limited in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate finance globally will need to increase to about $US9 trillion ($13.6 trillion) a year globally by 2030, up from just under $US1.3 trillion in 2021-22, according to a report last year from the Climate Policy Initiative.
…
Former US presidential candidate John Kerry, who stepped down from his role as the US special climate envoy in March, puts the challenge of meeting this bluntly: “We don’t have the money.”
The 80-year-old is now planning to turn his attention to climate finance to prepare for the phaseout of fossil fuels. “We have to put in place more rapidly the funding mechanisms that are going to actually fuel this transition at the pace it needs to be,” he says.
To do that, governments around the world are weighing up options from wealth taxes to levies on shipping. The US is planning to fund the IRA by raising $US300 billion over the decade by requiring large corporations to pay a 15 per cent minimum tax on their profits, as well as through a stock buyback tax, among other measures.
John Kerry Pushes Massive Tax Rises to Meet the $13.6 trillion Climate Finance Challenge
Home prices across the nation are back up near a record high. That makes this a particularly bad time for the Biden administration to have rolled out its new “green” energy mandates, which will add $31,000 to the cost of a new home.
The mandates are being pushed through the Department of Housing and Urban Development and while they technically won’t apply to all homes, all homebuilders will effectively be forced to comply with them.
The Biden administration doesn’t deny this higher upfront cost. It simply claims it’ll pay for itself via lower energy bills. Unfortunately, the break-even point is 90 years.
So if a young couple buys one of these new green energy homes and has a child one year later, the regulatory costs still won’t have paid for themselves in that child’s lifetime, let alone the life of the couple who bought the home.
HUD argues that homebuilders will be able to get tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act to offset some of these costs, with those savings hopefully passed along to homebuyers. However, this is not a real reduction in costs; it’s merely passing the buck to taxpayers. Instead of a homebuyer’s bearing the full freight of these green energy mandates, some of the cost will be passed on to taxpayers, including renters.
This is just the latest example of how failed public policies are creating a two-tiered society in America, where an entire generation of Americans will likely never be able to afford their own homes.
Debunking another lie told by climate scam artists.
The last time carbon dioxide was as low as today was in the Carboniferous, when the vast Karoo Ice Age lasted 95 million years. CO2 sustains life & provides oxygen for all living things on land & sea. The steady loss of CO2 over millennia is the greatest threat to life on earth. pic.twitter.com/FZAcezCggc
I’ve already posted today that EV’s are not a solution to anything. My wife’s relatives in a Scandinavian country have them, but they continue be on the side of wrong for just about anything. I’ve learned to go against what they choose and I’m usually on the right side of most things. They are proud of their decisions and have no idea that they are so far from the truth.
(ZeroHedge)—Ten years ago this week, we posted one of out most viral stories, highlighting the over-capacity in the auto industry: “Where the World’s Unsold Cars Go To Die,” which highlighted the ‘endgame’ of automakers’ ‘channel stuffing’ efforts to disguise the sudden lack of demand for all the exciting new models that they had forecast would boom to the moon…
Due to China’s overcapacity in production – as it aims to capture a quarter of the European electric vehicle market – the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge are inundated.
You probably need to see it to appreciate the challenges the automobile industry faces in transitioning to electricity. You also need to come here to understand how the Chinese industry’s overcapacity has flooded the European market. That morning, as the sun unexpectedly lit up the maze of highways leading to this remote arm of the port of Antwerp, Belgium, a huge cargo ship from the Norwegian company Höegh Autoliners unloaded thousands of cars at one of the terminals of International Car Operators (ICO), a subsidiary of the Japanese group Nippon Yusen Kaisha.
Imported vehicles are seriously piling up at European ports, turning them into “car parks.” Automakers are distributors are struggling with a slowdown in car sales as well as logistical bottlenecks that make it hard to alleviate the buildup of new, unsold vehicles.
Some Chinese brand EVs had been sitting in European ports for up to 18 months, while some ports had asked importers to provide proof of onward transport, according to industry executives. One car logistics expert said many of the unloaded vehicles were simply staying in the ports until they were sold to distributors or end users.
“It’s chaos,” said another person who had been briefed on the situation.
Even before our first surface stations report in 2009, The Heartland Institute led the way in reporting on problems with the surface temperature record.
We have highlighted how the surface station record did not correspond to the temperatures recorded by global satellites and weather balloons, two alternative temperature data sources whose data sets closely track each other. Heartland has repeatedly exposed instances in both the United States and abroad where official agencies tamper with past temperature data at pristine stations, adjusting it to appear cooler than what was actually recorded, while adjusting recent temperatures upward. We were all over the adjustments made by corrupt NOAA scientists in 2015 before the Paris climate treaty negotiations—mixing data from unbiased ocean buoys with heat-biased temperature measurements taken from ships’ engine water intake inlets, which made it appear the ocean was suddenly warming faster than before.
Also, first, foremost, and most forcefully, we independently documented the serious problems with the official surface temperature record arising from the fact that the vast majority of temperature stations are poorly sited. Stations fail NOAA’s own standards for quality, unbiased stations in reporting temperatures skewed by the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.
My colleague, award-winning meteorologist Anthony Watts, in 2009, and then again, as a follow-up, in 2022, detailed with station location data and photographic evidence the problematic surfaces stations. Stations providing official data that were sited in locations where surrounding surfaces, structures, and equipment radiated stored heat or emitted heat directly biasing or driving the recorded temperatures higher than were recorded at stations in the same region, uncompromised by the well-known UHI (that is widely ignored by alarmists and official government agencies).
Of the sampling of hundreds of stations across the country Watts and his volunteer team documented in 2009, Watts wrote:
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations—nearly 9 of every 10—fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements …
Since the 1970s, we’ve been told CO2 is the villain that causes most climate change. NOAA obliterated that with a graph.
“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to around 4.3 million years ago when sea level was about 75 ft higher than today, the average temp was 7 degrees F higher than in pre-industrial times, & large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra,” NOAA reports.
So, there were no people, the sea level was higher, and there were forests on the now-frozen tundra.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.04%, the amount due to humans is 0.0012%.
This amount of CO2 will NEVER heat the Earth, EVER.
According to the geological record, there is no relationship between CO2 levels and the Earth's temperature, even when 15x today's CO2 level: pic.twitter.com/Z9vMDpNlyv
E.V.s – even the best ones – have higher maintenance and insurance costs than regular gasoline-powered vehicles, for a number of reasons: more expensive parts, more accidents, fewer qualified mechanics.
E.V.s – even the best ones – take much longer to recharge than regular gasoline-powered vehicles. A fill-up takes two to five minutes; a charge takes fifteen minutes (if all the stars align), but can take much longer, even hours, and that’s if you can find a working charging station when you need one.
E.V.s — even the best ones — pose a higher risk of being totaled by insurance companies, either after accidents, or after all the odd circumstances that cause spontaneous combustion. E.V. fires have destroyed homes, garages, even cargo ships. The battery is usually irreparable. As a result, insurance companies are increasingly determining that the damage threshold between “repair it” and “scrap it” is a lot lower for E.V.s than for other vehicles.
All this isn’t to say that E.V.s shouldn’t be a part of the mix, but they clearly ought to be viewed as another niche segment, at just a few percent, like luxury cars and convertibles….
Though windmills and solar panels get the headlines, the big energy topic in Washington is electric transmission. Whether it is Congress’s newfound interest in permitting reform, the U.S. Department of Energy’s new Grid Deployment Office, or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) upcoming final rule on transmission planning and cost allocation, how to build and pay for long-range transmission to connect generators to customers is considered the final piece in the quest to meet net-zero goals.
Like so many issues in Washington, the need for more transmission lines is accepted without question and the costs are not considered. But for American consumers, especially low-income and elderly, as well as small businesses and energy intense manufacturers, building new transmission lines could result in much higher monthly bills and leave them on the hook for stranded assets.
Traditionally, high-voltage transmission lines, consisting of 150-foot lattice towers crossing the landscape for hundreds of miles, were planned for by local utilities to meet their customers’ energy needs and subject to approval by state public utility commissions. But public policy goals to promote renewables are changing how the grid is being developed.
Over the past few years, States established renewable energy mandates; Congress enacted over $1 trillion in taxpayer subsidies for renewable energy; and President Biden issued an executive order setting net-zero goals for electricity generation by 2035. To fulfill these policies, the grid needs new high-voltage transmission lines—lots of them—and they will be expensive.
According to the “Net-Zero America” analysis published by Princeton researchers, achieving net zero goals with 100% wind and solar by 2050 will require an additional $3.5 trillion in capital spending for new transmission lines. If net-zero goals are pursued with a mix of renewables, nuclear, and natural gas generation (which may include carbon capture), then a significant portion of this transmission investment would be unnecessary. Furthermore, a balanced resource mix of dispatchable and renewable resources would enhance grid reliability without overbuilding renewables or transmission.
A 2022 study found that electric vehicles (EVs) which left-leaning governments in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere are pushing on the population, pollute at a rate far higher than their gasoline or diesel-powered counterparts.
The 2022 study from the U.K.-based Emissions Analytics group found that during a 1,000 mile journey, EVs release 1,850 times more pollutants into the surrounding environment than gas-powered vehicles, due to the heavier weight which eats through tires.
While many think of emissions from exhaust, tire wear plays a significant role in emitting pollutants. The synthetic rubber used to create tires include certain chemicals that get released into the air, and because EVs are significantly heavier than conventional cars due to massive lithium batteries.
Overall, EVs weigh about 30 percent more than gas-powered vehicles, and cost thousands more to make and buy. These issues are in addition to the fact that they are not suitable in colder climates (such as Canada and the northern U.S.), offer poor range and long charging times (especially in cold weather), and have batteries that take tremendous resources to make and are hard to recycle.
A new Bill Gates-funded scheme has emerged that seeks to pump compressed carbon dioxide (CO2) underground with ferocious force in order to meet “Net Zero” targets.
In the UK, the government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) has approved the plan to “decarbonize” the country’s energy.
The CCC’s plan for “Net Zero” is to shift transport and heating from using fossil fuels to using electricity.
After this shift is complete, the government will then “decarbonize” the electricity grid.
To decarbonize the grid, it is assumed that electricity will be generated using nuclear and renewables.
During periods when nuclear, wind, and solar cannot meet demand, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be deployed to remove CO2 emissions as the electricity must be generated using gas.
CCS is being championed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Every time I get reminded to recycle, I show articles like this and remind the other person that it is socialist behavior and how bad it is for our health. Since I’m related by marriage to a bunch of socialists in Scandinavia, it sort of stops them from their favorite sport, trashing America.
Well, here are the facts, it doesn’t work and it’s been a first class hoax since inception.
The industry knew decades ago that recycling was never viable in the long term, and now we’re all being poisoned by its product.
Hardly any plastics can be recycled. You’d be forgiven for not knowing that, given how much messaging Americans receive about the convenience of recycling old bottles and food containers—from the weekly curbside collections to the “chasing arrows” markings on food and beverage packaging. But here’s the reality: Between 1990 and 2015, some 90 percent of plastics either ended up in a landfill, were burned, or leaked into the environment. Another recent study estimates that just 5 to 6 percent are successfully recycled.
While those numbers may surprise you, these sorts of statistics aren’t news to the companies that produce plastics. For more than 30 years, the industry knew precisely how impractical it is to recycle them, according to a new report from the Center for Climate Integrity. A trade association called the Vinyl Institute concluded in a 1986 report that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution” to plastics, as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of.” Still, facing public backlash over the growing amount of plastics being incinerated and piling up in landfills, manufacturers and their lobbyists sold recycling as an easy solution, warding off potential legislation to ban or limit plastics.
This, of course, has echoes of Big Tobacco and Big Oil, both of which withheld crucial information from the public for decades—causing untold damage to human health and the planet, respectively. Both industries are payingdearly for it. Is Big Plastic due for a similar reckoning?
In some sense, a reckoning is already happening—just not (yet) because of the industry’s decades of alleged deception, disastrous environmental justice record, and mass proliferation of microplastics into human bloodstreams. At the beginning of this year, S&P Global found that the petrochemicals industry—responsible for producing the suite of typically oil- and gas-derived compounds known as plastics, as well as pesticides and industrial chemicals—faces uncertain prospects over the coming years. “Overall, global petrochemicals prices appear to have reached a peak in October and are forecast to grind lower into early-2024 following energy and feedstock prices lower,” the consultancy found, forecasting a “supply-drive surplus” through 2026.
Researchers tested plastic pellets from recycling plants in 13 different plants across the world. They found 491 readily identifiable organic compounds, with a further 170 tentatively identified. As you can see from the table below, they span a wide variety of chemical classes.
Color us not surprised, but another one of the Biden administration’s “visions” for forcing people to own electric vehicles isn’t working out exactly as planned.
This time it deals with supply chain logistics, with Bloomberg reporting this week that in the year and a half since passing the Inflation Reduction Act, automakers are finding out the hard way that the rigorous criteria for manufacturing batteries using materials from the United States and its free-trade allies could render them cost-inefficient compared to global competitors.
Companies like Tesla are instead taking advantage of a temporary shift in the rules to stock up with cheaper batteries from countries like China.
The Biden administration’s new rules will all but cut out China from the supply chain, however, which will make it tougher to find affordable metal suppliers.
This, in turn, will threaten President Biden’s goal to boost the domestic electric vehicle market. Bloomberg writes that mining companies and labor unions insist that without curtailing the influx of cheaper, Chinese-subsidized materials, the U.S. can’t develop a competitive EV market.
Meanwhile, the higher costs are driving automakers away from EVs. And as battery material requirements are set to double by 2027, fulfilling these mandates will be increasingly difficult, putting Biden’s ambitious EV strategy at risk.
Mercedes-Benz on Thursday walked back plans to have an all-electric line-up by 2030 as consumers decline to adopt electric vehicles (EV) at the rate automakers expected.
The company has changed its expectations to have only 50% of its sales be EVs by 2030, announcing that it will be updating its current line-up featuring the internal combustion engine into the next decade, according to Mercedes-Benz in its fourth quarter report. EV sales grew 21% year-over-year in 2023, but total car sales remained relatively the same, bucking hopes that EVs would fuel growth as the automaker pushes electric models.
Give me a deep throated V-8 or the scream of a V-12 ICE any day.
I worked in this industry and it’s been one lie after another since it began
Our net zero lesson of the day is from the U.K. but it applies universally. It’s increasingly difficult for Biden and the EU to hide the true costs of net zero mandates.
Britain Boiler Tax Scandal
In the latest green fiasco, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a quota system that would require manufacturers to sell more heat pumps to households.
Instead of meekly complying with the regulation as happens with Biden administration EPA announcements, manufacturers let consumers know they would have to pay up whether they installed the heat pumps or not.
Manufacturers correctly dubbed the scheme a “boiler tax” and consumer outrage killed the regulation.
Most English households use natural gas to fuel the cabinet-sized boilers that provide central heating and hot water, and forcing them to adopt electric heat pumps (ultimately powered by renewable energy) is part of the government’s net-zero agenda.
An earlier proposal to ban gas-boiler sales after 2035 proved politically toxic as households balked at the cost of replacing their reliable natural-gas boilers with more expensive, untested heat pumps. So politicians resorted to subterfuge, imposing a sales quota on manufacturers. Starting in April, heat pumps would have to replace 4% of annual boiler sales or companies would pay a £3,000 fine for each “excess” natural-gas boiler they sold.
Worcester Bosch, Britain’s leading manufacturer, warned last year that the proposed quota would add up to £300 ($376) to the cost of natural-gas boilers, which retail for £1,000 and up.
A novelty is that industry fought back against the mandate. Manufacturers were transparent about passing the cost of the heat-pump fines to consumers, calling it a “boiler tax.” Mr. Sunak’s government tried to blame the companies for anticompetitive behavior. But when voters realized they’d be stuck paying for heat pumps even if they didn’t buy them, it was game over for the rule.
Biden’s Wind Tax
In the US, manufacturers have yet to stand up to idiotic Biden regulations, mostly because they have received tax incentives that hide the true costs.
Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed ..
Between the federal government, states and municipalities, untold billions in taxpayer dollars have been spent adding electric buses to transit fleets across the U.S. in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.
However, cities from coast-to-coast are grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed, are too expensive to fix, or they have scrapped their electric fleets altogether.
Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, recently expressed frustration that three of the five e-buses the city purchased for millions in 2018 are now sitting idle due to a combination of software issues, mechanical problems and an inability to obtain replacement parts.
Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs’ Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants.
Part of the problem is the manufacturer of the buses, Proterra, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August. The company, founded in 2004, rose to become the largest e-bus company in the U.S., representing nearly 40% of the market prior to going belly-up.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm sat on Proterra’s board until she joined the Biden administration
Interestingly, it turns out Big Government has no interest in the carbon footprint of any of the politically connected. This report about the US State Department not bothering to calculate carbon emissions despite an order to do so was published this summer.
The State Department didn’t keep tabs on the carbon pollution associated with flying hundreds of federal officials to the last two global climate summits, the Government Accountability Office said in a report made public Thursday.
Failing to do so ran afoul of a 2021 executive order by President Joe Biden that directed agencies to track the greenhouse gas emissions their operations produce, including official air travel, GAO said.
The report was requested by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who have all criticized the administration’s climate policies.
“Americans are tired of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. who don’t practice what they preach when it comes to protecting the environment,” Capito said in an email to POLITICO’s E&E News.
It will be interesting to see how many other challengers Kerry and the rest of the billionaire class at Davos experience in this year’s session.
In his speech at Davos, Kerry indicates he is clearly worried about the climate scam being dismantled if former President Donald Trump gets reelected. He assures everyone that “the marketplace” has been so saturated with climate nonsense that Trump won’t be able to hit the reverse button.
If I didn’t need any more proof that the Climate crap we get is a scam, there’s the following. It’s just a scare tactic to grift money out of people dumb enough to give it, in this case Bloomberg, SMH. It’s just another wedge issue from those trying to distract us from the abject failure of the current administration.
As one digests Rupert Darwall’s latest report for the RealClear Foundation, the well-known quote from Spanish philosopher George Santayana might ring through the mind: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Anyone looking to combat the activists pushing a ‘net zero’ agenda here in the U.S. would be wise to read Darwall’s piece, entitled “The Folly of Climate Leadership.”
The analysis tells the story of Great Britain heeding the cries for decarbonization, starting when Parliament wrote an 80% decrease in emissions target into law in 2008. They raised it to 100% – or “net zero” – in 2019. The results have clearly been catastrophic.
Since decarbonization efforts commenced, Britain’s economy has grown at half the rate as it did from 1990-2008. According to a research study from noted British economic historian Nicholas Crafts, that’s the second-worst period of British peacetime growth since 1780.
In addition to the economic malaise, British energy prices have skyrocketed, and Britons are now concerned with how to survive the effect of those costs on their wallets, as they look to heat and power their homes and businesses, travel for work and pleasure and live life as best they can.
The differences between British energy costs and those here in the U.S. are staggering: Britons paid an average of $228 per megawatt hour (MWh) for electricity generated from coal in 2022, whereas Americans paid an average of $27 per MWh. For natural gas, 2022 saw Britons paying $251 per MWh, versus American consumers averaging $61 per MWh for their power.
Darwall’s report also highlights the effects of unchecked and anti-market driven government investment in ‘green’ energy on grid reliability, as intermittent production from wind and solar – coupled with a lack of utility-grade energy storage – dropped electricity generated per gigawatt of capacity falling 28% since 2009.
The same arguments that have crippled Britain’s economy are now being used by the Biden Administration here at home, with zealots in Cabinet-level positions – including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, and EPA Director Michael Regan – pushing the message from their bully pulpits.
The recent – and completely misnamed – Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress provided the zealots with nearly $400 billion to dole out to supportive organizations and start-ups to jump-start our nation’s push for ‘net zero.’ Those dollars – doled out with few oversights or performance metrics attached in many cases – have produced very few wins in the last year, unless a win is measured in keeping political cronies happy and rich.
Consider: wind energy projects in Nebraska, Colorado, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey were scrapped last year, even after untold millions of federal dollars went to their developers. Over 100 solar companies went bankrupt, and solar projects from California to Florida were shuttered in the middle of their development. Battery storage – a key component to offsetting the intermittency of wind and solar – also saw projects stalled, along with at least one lawsuit filed against a storage company when its solution failed.
Despite the perils of ‘green’ energy dependence shown throughout Europe, the eco-left continues to double down on ridding America of traditional energy sources. Supporting those efforts are ideologue billionaires, who continue to fund net-zero initiatives.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has given well over $1 billion of his personal wealth to the Sierra Club to fund its “Beyond Coal” and “Beyond Carbon” campaigns. Designed to rid the U.S. of every coal-fired power plant by 2030, the Sierra Club/Bloomberg partnership has succeeded in shutting down nearly two-thirds of the plants to-date, with most of the remaining in rural locations, including my home state of Alaska, where alternatives to existing coal plants in the state’s interior don’t readily exist. Without coal, countless Alaskans would have their livelihoods – and very lives – threatened during our long, dark and sub-zero-temperature winters.
With activists entrenched in government bureaucracy, zealots running government agencies and rich men (and women) funding these efforts, only those educated in historical failures of decarbonization – and willing to stand up and fight back against the climate warriors – stand a chance of helping stem the attacks. Darwall’s study should be required reading for anyone looking to build a fortress in their state against job-killing, family-harming decarbonization efforts.
First, this de-populationist buys up all the farmland in the country to contaminate or restrict the food supply, then becomes the left hand of the insect as food promoting WEF.
This stuff is not only disgusting, it will help kill you. Only eat grass feed hormone free meat.
An international investigation has exposed the gruesome reality being the globalist push to flood the food supply with biotech products such as Bill Gates’ lab-grown “meats.”
Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen has published a new report to raise the alarm about the “tsunami of fake foods” being rolled out by the biotech industry.
Despite claims from the green agenda elite, fake meats are not about your health or the environment.
Van Hamelen warns that these products are a tool to phase out farmers and ranchers so the agriculture industry can be replaced with ultra-processed food products that can be controlled by patents.
Creating lab-grown meat is “insanely expensive,” van Hamelen notes.
The production of these “foods” is also plagued by bacterial and viral contamination.
Despite the pharmaceutical-style manufacturing, lab-grown meat isn’t considered a pharmaceutical product.
This means that no human testing is required.
Instead of directing your food dollars to corporate supermarket chains or fake food products, van Hamelen recommends supporting small farmers growing real food.
Lab-grown products may one day represent 80 percent or more of the “meat” consumed worldwide.
This shift would be a dramatic departure from the way humans have eaten for centuries.
Of course, this change in the food supply will only impact the general public as the wealthy elite will continue to eat traditional meat products.
Cause of Climate Change? It Isn’t Carbon Dioxide, Expert Says:
The Earth’s rotation around the sun affects the planet’s temperature, says Soon, a visiting fellow on the Science Advisory Committee of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Glaciers, for example, “melted away because the sun started to get … brighter and provided more solar energy to the climate system,” according to Soon.
Throughout his career, Soon, a former researcher with the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, says he has sought to pursue the facts surrounding shifts in the climate because “science is not about belief.”
“Science is about data,” he said.
Many people think that it is “rising carbon dioxide that is the main factor … that affects climate change, and that is wholly untrue,” Soon says. “That is such a distorted view that I think it needs to be corrected.”
Someone should shut up Kerry and Biden also. It would stop the waste of money (laundering) on this, but then it doesn’t fit the climate narrative does it.
The bullshit that is spewed from Washington, the current White House, the MSM, anyone connected to Covid and the upcoming elections, so we need to know how to figure out the truth. If you don’t want to read, the answer is usually the opposite of whatever they are trying.
If they are accusing someone of something, it is what they are doing.
The current status quo on racism for example is that only white, conservative, Christian, republican men are racist and/or can be discriminated against.
For the entire time since the Civil war, it has been the democrats, the MSM and the woke who mostly are responsible for racism and discrimination. We had almost put racial identity politics behind us until Obama and Holder divided the nation.
It makes us cringe when we hear black Americans praise Lyndon B. Johnson and talk about how he passed the Civil Rights Act and signed it into law. He was a known racist. The crazy thing is, some sources also attribute this quote to Johnson: “We will have those n-word’s voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” So while he was signing the Civil Rights Act into law with one hand, he was unapologetically spewing racist words and trying to control the black vote with the other hand.
He didn’t care about blacks.
Now, anything that is not from the left or if they don’t get their way is racist.
Joy Reid, Shiela Jackson Lee, Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Lewis Hamilton, Bubba Wallace, Colin Kaepernick, Don Lemon, MSNBC, CNN, Whoopi Goldberg, Lebron James, Jussie Smollet and the Squad have all cried racism, when in fact they have been the racist ones.
Joe Biden has a list a mile long of racist remarks, yet uses it when he doesn’t get his way, like the recent speech on the voting bill. He quoted Jefferson Davis, George Wallace as what we were if we didn’t support him. Davis was a democrat. Biden was friends with Robert Byrd, Grand Cleagle of the KKK.
On 2/3/2022 Biden made this racist comment:
President Joe Biden referred to blacks as “colored” during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday during Black History Month.
Biden was telling the story of seeing “colored kids” on a bus when he moved from Scranton, Pa., to Claymont, Dela.
In context: Joe Biden, George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis are all Democrats.
both democrats and life long compatriots
Byrd in full uniform
Never forget what Democrats, & notably @JoeBiden, did to Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen – but more… Miguel Estrada. Destroying a good man specifically because he is Hispanic. We know this to be factually true, but the beltway media elites brush it aside. #RacistDCDemocratshttps://t.co/2KKXUUsWlr
The South in the Civil War were democrats. Slave owners were mostly democrats.
I can go on with this, but the pattern is there. It is those who cry racism because is is a cheap threat to get their way. They then make false claims that if said by a white male would be called racist, therefore what they say is racist. It’s logic.
2. It’s not a socialist agenda. The hell it’s not. The current Congress is trying to fix elections so they can stay in power, are making millions on insider stock trades (both parties) and pass laws to keep one class in power to rule the others. They want to take away guns, the start of a communist movement and regulate everything. (that is why they hated Trump so much, he took away their overbearing regulatory powers)
It says right on the BLM website that they are a Marxist organization. Bernie Sanders is a communist.
3. Collusion with Russia and China. After a 3 year circus which cost the taxpayers 30+ million dollars. We found out that Trump didn’t do anything. On the other hand, Hunter Biden is on the board of Burisma and is being bought by the Russians and the Chinese. Hillary sold the rights to much of our uranium to the Russians.
His whoring and drugging is well documented, but the MSM isn’t covering a bit of it. The FBI should be all over this, but they are protecting their own.
So if they say someone else is colluding, it is who is saying it.
4. The vaccine is the only cure to Covid and that it will cure Covid.
If you go to the Danish studies, or look at the vaccine failure in Israel, you can pretty much know that the jab has nothing to do with preventing either getting or spreading Covid. It’s a cover for a power grab.
Ending Covid
They have a plan to end Covid and Donald Trump doesn’t. They campaigned on not to take a trump vax, and claimed they weren’t left with any vaccines or plans when Trump left. Biden had plenty of vaccine supply (when we thought it worked) and a Plan (Operation Warp Speed) to handle it. Fucking it up was the Biden/Harris job.
Harris said she wouldn’t trust a jab that Trump developed. Now we should get 3 shots because it is the B/H vaxx now. Talk about a flip/flop.
3. Global Warming. This is a socialist agenda that is just another scare dreamed up to scam money. The biggest bullshitter was Al Gore.
Right now, countries are shutting off fossil fuels with no back up. Solar and wind energy have failed to provide what is needed and they are closing down nuclear plants. Now, prices are skyrocketing for fuel and that is all that is working.
men and women are equal – sports will be men and co-ed
Military needs to be woke – china laughing at us. military needs to defend country. goal is to kill and protect, not dress up
We need absentee voter pickup boxes,
It’s already been determined, from research by Rodney Doyle at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, that the $419.5 million Mark Zuckerberg of Meta gave the Center for Technology and Civil Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research essentially bought the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
Now there’s evidence that was the strategy all along, that the goal of such election manipulation had been birthed years before and ultimately used by extremists.
The procedure was that Zuckerberg handed over the money and leftist activists distributed it before the election – not in a nonpartisan fashion as some have claimed – but specifically to extremists like themselves who used it for get-out-the-vote efforts specifically aimed at benefiting Biden.
A new analysis at The Federalist, by Doyle, confirms that the money was used “to manipulate the 2020 election in favor of President Joe Biden.”
January 6th was an attack on democracy
Feminists will go all Karen on the USA, white men and discrimination in America, but will ignore women’s rights around the world where the oppression really takes place.
This is somewhat of a predictably tragic outcome all things considered. I remember a previous conversation on these pages when GM moved massive investment into China to build their mid-size SUV brand, Encore.
Continuing the U.S. decline of the brand, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that approximately half of all Buick dealership in the U.S. have opted to take a buyout from GM, as opposed to spending millions in retooling, restructuring and retraining their staff to accommodate the EV influx.
Most of the EV’s shoved onto the dealer lots sit idle without customers to purchase them.
During the 1980s the global Communist Movement, due to setbacks in Russia and elsewhere, began to exploit and take over the fledging Marxist environmental movements in Europe and the United States. They saw the potential of the movement as a weapon to foment “peaceful” revolutions in democratic western nations.
Delusions of Adequacy 
