I had to work in the sustainability industry for IBM. It opened my eyes to the lie that was Global Warming. The Analysts I worked for worshipped at the alter of carbon and climate scares, but always came open handed at budget time. I saw the whole sham first hand.
Now This:
The End Of The Gaia Worship Climate Religion
It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best-sellers and research grants. Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in the law or practice.
But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom-laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realized the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, canceled, blacklisted, called a “denier” and generally deemed evil. In 2010, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe – so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.
The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future global warming. They changed the name to “climate change” so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heat waves. Then they inflated the language to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” even as projections of future warming came down.
“I’m talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century. That’s what the science predicts,” said Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion in 2019, though the science says no such thing. “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,” tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after that decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.
Scientists knew that pronouncements like this were nonsense but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming. Journalists always love exaggeration.
We may be reaching peak Blair’s Law here: “Coined by Australian journalist, Tim Blair as ‘the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.’” QED:
Still worried about the seas rising there Timbo? Read this:
It’s all too predictable: A jet-setting celebrity or politician wades ceremoniously into hip-deep surf for a carefully choreographed photo op, while proclaiming that human-driven sea-level rise will soon swallow an island nation. Of course, the water is deeper than the video’s pseudoscience, which is as shallow as the theatrics.
The scientific truth is simple: Sea levels are rising, but the rate of rise has not accelerated. A new peer-reviewed study confirms what many other studies have already shown – that the steady rise of oceans is a centuries-long process, not a runaway crisis triggered by modern emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).
For the past 12,000 years, during our current warm epoch known as the Holocene, sea levels have risen and fallen dramatically.
For instance, during the 600-year Little Ice Age, which ended in the mid-19th century, sea levels dropped quite significantly. The natural warming that began in the late 1600s got to a point around 1800 where loss of glacial ice in the summer began to exceed winter accumulation and glaciers began to shrink and seas to rise. By 1850, full-on glacial retreat was underway.
Thus, the current period of gradual sea-level increase began between 1800-1860, preceding any significant anthropogenic CO2 emissions by many decades. The U.S. Department of Energy’s 2025 critical review on carbon dioxide and climate change confirms this historical perspective.
“There is no good, sufficient or convincing evidence that global sea level rise is accelerating –there is only hypothesis and speculation. Computation is not evidence and unless the results can be practically viewed and measured in the physical world, such results must not be presented as such,” notes Kip Hansen, researcher and former U.S. Coast Guard captain.
I caught grief online by this jerk by saying that the seas aren’t rising and that his Global Warming religion was a lie. He was a pompous dick about it. I took grief from his pals, the now defunct Greenmonk and other like Analyst groups.
Fortunately, the truth wins out. He’s still a book publisher or whatever he does, but is still a troll. The tide comes in twice a day, that’s the only rising it’s done in a long time
The Independent posted an article claiming multiple small island nations are sinking into the sea, threatening the cease existing as nations, leaving their populations adrift. Data shows this is simply false. Amid modest sea level rise, the island nations that The Independent discusses have increased in size, population, and prosperity amid modest climate change. No real data shows that the oceans are about to swamp these countries.
“Small island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Maldives and Marshall Islands are particularly vulnerable to climate change,” claims The Independent in its story, “These countries are sinking into the sea. What happens when they disappear forever?” “Rising seas, stronger storms, freshwater shortages and damaged infrastructure all threaten their ability to support life.
“Some islands even face the grim possibility of being abandoned or sinking beneath the ocean,” continues The Independent. “This raises an unprecedented legal question: can these small island nations still be considered states if their land disappears?”
While questions of international law with regard to the status of nations and their peoples should a country cease to exist are beyond the ken of Climate Realism, data indicates that the populations of these nations need not fear for their islands’ continued existence or, as result, the dissolution of their nation and national identity.
It was always a lie. Those of us who are critical thinkers saw it from the beginning, but then we’re the ones who wouldn’t get jabbed by the Covid clot shot. I bet Tim is fully boosted.
When you buy into a theory so obviously ludicrous without applying logic or pattern recognition to it, you’re going to come up looking like a fool, like Tim
He turned out to be a troll in my timeline. The post was how the sea was rising and would swallow up miles of land around the world. The only thing that got swallowed were the global warming lies by the enviroweenies. My response was that history will prove that AGW and the Climate hoax they worship was wrong.
Here goes:
What the globalist corporate media once smeared as “conspiracy theory” and branded “misinformation” has turned out to be true: the climate crisis was merely an imaginary problem and an informational war on the minds of the taxpayer.
Why all the propaganda? Give Democrats cover for a massive heist of the U.S. Treasury, laundering taxpayer dollars through mysterious NGOs via the Green New Deal Inflation Reduction Act into radical leftist NGOs and politically connected green companies. It was never about saving the planet, as it turns out.
Between 2019, when socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal (which ultimately failed), and President Biden’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, the globalists, their corporate media outlets, and dark-money-funded NGOs unleashed a propaganda blitz by flooding the airwaves with record levels of “climate crisis” stories and left millions of folks with climate anxieties.
As soon as the heist was over … those climate crisis headlines, according to Bloomberg data this month, quite literally evaporated.
AI took us from micromanaging light bulbs to Microsoft re-starting 3 Mile Island because they need the power to run their engine. It’s like the made up climate crisis never happened.
Now, companies (and China) are racing to get their hands on as much power-generating capacity.
Data center demand is rising at a break neck speed, with little signs of slowing.
As the electricity consumption of AI rises, by 2028, a projected 12% of U.S. electricity demand could be driven from data centers. Beyond America, countries are pouring billions into AI sovereignty efforts which require data center facilities running 24/7 to power them.
Here is the share of each region’s total power demand that is driven by center centers:
As we can see, America’s data center demand leads globally, at 8.9% of total power consumption.
In Virginia, data centers account for 26% of the state’s total power consumption—or nearly triple the national average. This year, the state’s leading utility firm expects to connect 15 new data centers given surging demand.
As big tech ramps up AI spending, a significant share is being funnelled into massive data centers along with the energy sources that power them. In particular, demand for nuclear is expanding at the fastest rate in decades.
By comparison, data centers comprise 4.8% of the total power share in the European Union and 2.3% in China.
Oh for Pete’s sake, can’t you just leave us alone? These people couldn’t pour water out of a boot if there were instructions on the sole.
A team of researchers in California drew notoriety last year with an aborted experiment on a retired aircraft carrier that sought to test a machine for creating clouds.
But behind the scenes, they were planning a much larger and potentially riskier study of salt-water-spraying equipment that could eventually be used to dim the sun’s rays — a multimillion-dollar project aimed at producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.
The details outlined in funding requests, emails, texts and other records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News raise new questions about a secretive billionaire-backed initiative that oversaw last year’s brief solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay.
They also offer a rare glimpse into the vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth’s warming, work that has often occurred outside public view. Such research is drawing increased interest at a time when efforts to address the root cause of climate change — burning fossil fuels — are facing setbacks in the U.S. and Europe. But the notion of human tinkering with the weather and climate has drawn a political backlash and generated conspiracy theories, adding to the challenges of mounting even small-scale tests.
n brief, the Trump administration is seeking to free the American people from the shackles of the cult of climate alarmism. Zeldin’s tactic is not to argue the science, which is unsettled, but to challenge the EPA’s authority to classify GHGs as “pollutants” and then, in turn, regulate them as such.
Is climate change primarily caused by mankind? According to much of the scientific establishment, the answer to that question is an unequivocal, yes. Indeed, this view that mankind is responsible for climate change, or as it was previously called, global warming, has become climate dogma.
But as much as politicians, activists, and others claim it is “settled science,” the fact is that it is anything but settled. There remain critical questions and unknowns regarding climate science, as evidenced by repeated instances of climate change projections being proven erroneous.
Climate change has been a constant reality on planet Earth since its beginning, and its causes are not fully known or understood, despite the hubris surrounding the issue. The Earth’s climate is a complex system that scientists are still trying to understand.
Therefore, when a substance such as carbon dioxide — a naturally occurring gas that is an essential component for life on this planet — is labeled a “pollutant,” it’s understandable that some would object.
Of course, the reason carbon dioxide has been classified as such is that the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased as a result of mankind’s burning of fossil fuels. Scientists link higher saturation levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with greater heat-trapping effects, concluding that mankind is responsible for global warming, which they warn will have massive negative impacts on the planet should it continue unchecked. That, in a nutshell, is the “science” of anthropogenic climate change.
It is based upon this understanding, this doctrinaire belief, that lawmakers have established laws and regulations to limit fossil fuel-based carbon dioxide emissions. This has been expanded to other human activity that contributes to “greenhouse gases” (GHGs), which include methane gas (also a naturally occurring substance) and other gases.
In the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court considered the issue of whether the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act. The Court ruled 5-4 that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant,’” meaning the “EPA has statutory authority to regulate emission of such gases.” Tellingly, the Court noted that “policy judgments have nothing to do with whether greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change and do not amount to a reasoned justification for declining to form a scientific judgment.” Instead, the Court said that the EPA had the authority to determine whether GHGs “cause or contribute to air pollution which may be reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare, or whether the science is too uncertain to make a reasoned decision.” This has been referred to as the EPA’s endangerment finding.
The focus in the case was the EPA’s authority to regulate vehicle emissions, but the ruling has been applied much more broadly to effectively encompass any industry that produces GHG emissions.
Of course, the auto industry has been most directly impacted by the Court’s ruling, as the EPA introduced a slew of regulations that have significantly increased the cost of cars. Furthermore, the Biden administration sought to use the EPA’s GHG regulatory power to effectively force automakers into adopting and scaling up production of electric vehicles with the eventual goal of eliminating gas-powered cars entirely. Included in Joe Biden’s erroneously named Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022, was a clause that specifically classified carbon dioxide and other GHGs as “pollutants” regulated by the EPA.
Now, President Donald Trump is pursuing a pro-growth, pro-energy agenda, and his administration has been working to eliminate many of the hurdles to economic growth that the Democrat administrations of both Barack Obama and Biden put in place.
With Trump successfully securing favorable trade deals across the globe, one of the biggest industries that will benefit from these deals is the American auto industry. And the last thing the auto industry needs is GHG emission regulations that hamper growth.
Thus, in March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled out a deregulation agenda wherein he promised to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”
Earlier this year, the usual suspects were putting out horror scenarios of a summer of heat and drought across Europe in 2025. The most extreme model runs, with temperatures soaring to 45°C, were presented as serious forecasts and as being worrying evidence of runaway climate change.
But now the opposite has occurred and the fear-mongers are now either quiet or simply distorting the facts.
Especially in Central Europe, like across Germany, the weather has turned cool and rainy.
Germany’s Das Wetter.com here recently has since warned of 30 com of snowfall in the Alps – in July!:
Anyone who thought the last few weeks had been cool and changeable should dress warmly. Because from Monday, temperatures across Germany will continue to plummet. This is due to a wave of cold Arctic air rushing in from the far north. Highs of under 20 degrees will then be the reality in many places – in July!”
Heavy snow in the Alps in July
In his article, meteorologist Johannes Habermehl then adds that the snow line in the Alps will be dropping “to just 2500 meters – in some places even lower”, with some forecasting “up to 30 centimetres of fresh snow” at higher altitudes.
Lowest Six-Month Human Death Toll From Bad Weather Since Records Began
Something rather odd is happening to the weather. Millions, nay billions, are on the move fleeing droughts, floods, wildfires, runaway temperatures, rising sea levels (see any mainstream media page climate page to fill in rest of sentence). Armageddon will only be put on pause when hard-Left elites take control of the climate and corral us all into their fantasy world of Net Zero. But hold on a minute – news just in. The first half of 2025 has seen the smallest number of deaths related to extreme weather since records began. And more weird weather news – despite boiling seas, all four northern hemisphere ocean basins in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific are running below average on accumulated cyclone energy. The North Atlantic has seen very little activity with the ACE energy measurement from January 1st to July 21st running at only 41% of the 1991-2020 average.
The cyclone news is natural variation of course, but don’t let on to climate fanatics. The news on deaths from extreme weather is not. It is a long-term trend that has seen weather fatalities plunge by over 99% during the last 100 years. As hydrocarbon use pulls billions out of grinding poverty, so fortunate humans can use the extra wealth to protect themselves against all that Nature throws at life on Earth.
So for people I had to work with like Tom Raftery, Tim O’Reilly and James Governor, the gig is up and so are the lies, but go on believing your religion.
And this gem:
By the numbers the scam is almost comical: 384 individual charging ports, $7.5 billion burned, $19.5 million per plug. That’s enough to buy every Tesla owner in America a home charger—twice—yet all taxpayers got was a handful of glorified parking spots.
WHO POCKETED THE CASH? • EVgo, ChargePoint, and Electrify America—all heavy Democratic donors—walked away with the biggest CFI grants. • The Greenlining Institute, NAACP Climate Initiative, and West Harlem Environmental Action were hired as “equity consultants” at $1,200 an hour to ensure 40 % of funds flowed to “underserved communities” per Biden’s 2021 “Justice40” diktat. • BlueGreen Alliance (a coalition of the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers) lobbied for set-asides that require every single station to use union-only labor—driving costs up another 30 %. • BlackRock’s Climate Finance Partnership skimmed management fees on green bonds floated to finance the program.
I thought it was another kooky celebrity uninformed weather story. When thinking through it, though, no one wants to hear an 81 year old singer that was famous 40-50 years ago
Abracadabra! Just like that, the Steve Miller Band canceled its entire 2025 North American tour.
The band has canceled all 31 scheduled dates of its American tour, which was slated to begin Aug. 15 in Bethel, NY and traverse the entire country before concluding in Anaheim, Calif. on Nov. 8.
The band made the announcement in a straightforward tone familiar to fans of the 81-year-old veteran singer, songwriter and guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, whose career stretches back to the mid-1960s and has released such classic rock anthems as “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Take the Money and Run” and many more.
Fans needn’t worry that the 81-year-old is suddenly facing health issues. He called off the tour due to the unacceptable risks to his audience, the band, and the crew, posed by climate change-induced extreme weather events. Here’s what Miller told fans in his announcement on X:
The combination of extreme heat, unpredictable flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and massive forest fires make these risks for you our audience, the band and the crew unacceptable. So …
You can blame it on the weather… The tour is cancelled.
look at the X posts at the link below. It calls out the truth
The Trump administration just dealt another blow to the anti-energy, anti-prosperity agenda pursued by the Biden administration underpinned by the man-made “climate change” hypothesis. Under the proposed repeal of previous “climate” regulations on energy production announced this month, many of the power plants targeted for destruction could remain open, and CO2 would no longer be considered dangerous “pollution.” Naturally, that has the “climate” movement screaming bloody murder.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the effect of the so-called greenhouse gases coming from U.S. energy production using hydrocarbons (or “fossil fuels”) is so small as to be negligible. The agency also pointed out that the CO2 from power plants is not actually hurting people’s health, contrary to the demonstrably false claims of previous administrations. The latest announcement is part of a suite of two dozen “climate” decrees being eliminated by the administration.
Under the plan, coal and hydrocarbons could continue to provide power for U.S. consumers and businesses. “Rest assured President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal,” EPA chief Lee Zeldin announced at the agency’s headquarters. “EPA is helping pave the way for American energy dominance because energy development underpins economic development, which in turn strengthens national security.”
The EPA regulatory changes, explained in a proposed rule released this month, would “repeal all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants,” the agency explained. “The EPA is further proposing to make a finding that GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.”
CNN data analyst Harry Enten recently did a segment on the issue of climate change and almost lost his mind as he reported that a majority of Americans – including Democrats – are not worried about climate change.
He cited data going back to the 1980s and pointed out that concern about this has become stagnant.
Of course, Democrats running for office will continue to push this issue. They have decades invested in climate change and it has become an industry in itself with lots of people making ridiculous amounts of money from it.
“Americans AREN’T afraid of climate change!” Enten said with shock in his voice. “Climate activists have not successfully made the case to the American people!”
The data showed that in 1989, 35 percent of those polled admitted they were greatly afraid, and those numbers have basically stayed the same, with 39 percent feeling that way in 2000, and five years later, that number sits at 40 percent.
“We went back all the way to 1989, look at that, it was 35 percent,” Enten said. “2000, 40 percent. 2020, 46 percent. And in 2025, 40 percent. Which is the exact same percentage as back in 2000.”
“Despite all of these horrible weather events, the percentage of Americans who are greatly worried about climate change has stayed pretty gosh darn consistent,” he added, sounding genuinely flabbergasted. “Which kind of boggles the mind a little bit, granted everything that we see on our television screens, our computer screens.”
“Hurricanes, tornadoes, the flooding,” Enten continued. “But yet, greatly worried about climate change, 40 percent, the exact same percentage as in 2000.”
British solar farms have been paid to switch off for the first time as sunny days prompt a surge of clean power that could overwhelm the grid.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the UK’s power grids and is overseen by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has issued switch-off orders to solar facilities this year, new research reveals.
Operators are paid to switch off when these orders are issued, with the extra cost added to consumer and business energy bills.
The solar operators claiming compensation are understood to include some of the UK’s biggest energy suppliers, such as EDF Renewables and Octopus Energy.
Such “constraint payments” are already common with wind farms because so many have been built in areas such as northern Scotland or offshore, areas without grid capacity to carry the power they generate.
So far this year, constraint payments have cost consumers £650m, according to the Wasted Wind website. The cost is added to energy bills.
Overall “balancing payments” could hit £8bn a year by 2030 without massive grid upgrades, according to Neso estimates. Such upgrades would also be extremely costly, with consumers liable.
President Trump has vowed that there will be no more development of wind energy infrastructure under his administration, calling huge windmills blighting the landscape “garbage” and “bullshit.”
“We’re not going to let windmills get built because we’re not going to destroy our country any further than it’s already been destroyed,” Trump said.
He continued, “You go and look at these beautiful plains and valleys and they’re loaded up with this garbage that gets worse and worse looking with time…What bullshit this is.”
Millions of people worldwide are concerned about climate change and believe there is a climate emergency. For decades we have been told by the United Nations that Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activity are causing disastrous climate change. In 2018, a UN IPCC report even warned that ‘we have 12 years to save the Earth’, thus sending millions of people worldwide into a frenzy.
Thirty-five years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the (World Meteorological Organization) WMO established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide scientific advice on the complex topic of climate change. The panel was asked to prepare, based on available scientific information, a report on all aspects relevant to climate change and its impacts and to formulate realistic response strategies. The first assessment report of the IPCC served as the basis for negotiating the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Governments worldwide have signed this convention, thereby, significantly impacting the lives of the people of the world.
As well it should. I don’t know if Covid and the jab or the Climate scam was the biggest hoax of our lifetime. Both will prove them to be Government lies to launder money (most likely).
From New York to California, state renewable electrical power dreams are collapsing. Power demands soar, while the federal government cuts funding and support for wind, solar, and grid batteries. Renewables cannot provide enough power to support the artificial intelligence revolution. The Net Zero electricity transition is failing in the United States.
For the last two decades, state governments have embraced policies aimed at replacing coal and natural gas power plants with renewable sources. Twenty-three states enacted laws or executive orders to move to 100% Net Zero electricity by 2050. Onshore and offshore wind, utility-scale and rooftop solar, and grid-scale batteries were heavily promoted by states and most federal administrations.
The New York State Climate Action Scoping Plan of 2022 called for 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2040. But 49.7% of the state’s electricity came from gas in 2024, up from 47.7% in 2023. A January executive order issued by President Trump halted federal leases for construction of offshore wind systems. New York, nine other east coast states, and California were counting on offshore wind in efforts to get to 100% renewable electricity, but new offshore wind projects are now halted.
I should (can’t) overlook their Muslim problem and that they are being invaded and don’t know it, but to buy into this climate nonsense and spend waste that much money on it baffles one with an IQ of 3 digits.
We looked at the new Spending Review, which has allocated £45.1 billion to Mad Miliband’s DESNZ to spend in the next four years.
I thought I would also try to put some costings on other Government expenditure which is devoted to the pursuit of Net Zero.
£2.6 billion over Phase 2 (2026/27 to 2029/30) for decarbonising transport
£2.3 billion for local transport “improvements”, including cycle lanes and bus lanes, again over Phase 2
£2.7 billion a year for sustainable farming and nature recovery.
The Renewable Heat Incentive at £1.3 billion a year.
In addition there is international climate aid, which will be funded out of the Official Development Assistance budget. This has been running at over £3 billion a year for this year and last.
Then there is revenue foregone by the refusal to make EV drivers pay their proper share of car tax. Fuel duties currently bring around £24 billion a year. Currently there are about 1.5 million BEVs on the road, 5% of the total; so the Treasury is already losing about £1 billion in revenue. By 2030, the number of electric cars could potentially rise to 7 million, leaving a blackhole of £5 million a year.
There are many other costs incurred which are simply impossible to quantify or remain hidden from public view. For instance:
The Affordable Homes Programme, which includes funding for energy efficient homes
Local Government Funding, some of which is channelled to decarbonisation initiative
Electric ambulances
£15.6 billion for local transport in cities
Decarbonisation of public buildings, paid for through the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme
General Motors has abandoned a plan to pump $300 million into electric-vehicle motor production at its upstate New York plant and will instead invest $888 million to make the latest V-8 engines https://t.co/A2yg4NWRow
The REF’s new report on green energy subsidies noted that renewables subsidies are now costing £25.8 bn per year – or over £900 per household annually – about one third of which, £280, will hit the average domestic electricity bill directly.
For a long time, part of the gaslighting around the cost of Net Zero has been focus people’s attention over the impact on their energy bills.
However, as John Constable pointed out, only about a third of the cost hits the public directly via their electricity bills, because only a third of electricity is consumed by domestic users.
The other two thirds is used by industry and commerce, transport and the public sector.
But that does not mean that the public at large don’t end up footing the entire bill one way or another.
Higher electricity costs for industry and commerce mean higher prices in the shops. And higher electricity costs in the public sector mean higher taxes or poorer public services.
At the worst, businesses may shut or move their production abroad, leaving us all worse off.
Miliband and co would love you to think you are only paying a hundred quid or so for Net Zero. People would be horrified to learn that the price is nearer a thousand quid a year.
And that cost is of course just for starters. When we all have to buy expensive EVs and heat pumps we don’t want, we will be much worse off.
The recent massive blackout across Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium has sparked new debates about the state of Europe’s energy infrastructure, especially as these countries have moved toward renewable energy.
On Monday, Spain and Portugal experienced a massive power outage. Spain lost about 60 percent of its electricity within about five seconds. France and Belgium were also hit, and everybody experienced some level of disruption to their transportation, communication, and overall daily life.
At first, rumors spread that the blackout was caused by some “rare cosmic phenomenon.” But that was quickly ruled out.
The rare atmospheric phenomena causing power outages across Europe has a name
Investigations have also ruled out cyberattacks and weather-related events. The early findings suggest that a sudden loss in solar power in southwestern Spain is what triggered everything.
Watch:
MASSIVE BLACKOUT IN EUROPE ⚡
Major outages hit Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium.
Airports, subways, and communication networks down.
Spain is one of Europe’s leaders in renewable energy, with over 75% of its electricity coming from renewable sources at the time of the outage.
Net Zero isn’t reality, but that’s exactly what Spain is pushing.
This is truly bananas: all of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout.
The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold.
The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid is 50.00 Hz, kept with an extremely tight margin of ±0.1 Hz. Anything outside ±0.2 Hz triggers major emergency actions.
If the frequency had fallen just another 0.3 Hz — below 49.5 Hz — Europe could have suffered a system-wide cascading blackout.
At that threshold, automatic protective relays disconnect major power plants, and collapse accelerates.
And it’s disturbingly easy to imagine multiple scenarios where that could have occurred…
Renewables don’t risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it’s clear that too little “inertia” due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.
Notice I didn’t say climate because global warming is a lie, a money laundering tool that is losing steam (see what I did there?)
Anyway, from Watts Up With That, why warming up is better than cooling.
Here in England this spring, there was dry, sunny weather through most of March, followed by gentle showers in April. And here is the opening couplet of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tales of Caunterbury, written more than six centuries ago in 1387:
From the medieval climate optimum to the modern climate optimum, the weather in these islands has changed scarcely at all. The drought of March, the sweet April showers, the birdsong day and night, the bursting forth of primroses, bluebells, daffodils and other spring flowers, all are today just as Chaucer described them in the Middle Ages.
The wine-dark sea
One can even go back to Homer, in the 8th Century BC, who talked of the Mediterranean as “the wine-dark sea”. And here am I, almost three millennia later, recently recovered from a long illness caused by defective medication with no active ingredient in it, having climbed to the 1230ft summit of the Akamas peninsula in Cyprus, doing a Canute and challenging the wine-dark sea not to rise. The sea was wine-dark in Homer’s time. It is still wine-dark today.
Where, then, are the drastic changes in climate and consequent catastrophes and cataclysms so luridly predicted by the climate Communists? Where are the mass extinctions? Why is the climate much as it was in the Middle Ages? Why are ten times as many dying of cold as of heat? Why are crop yields at record highs? Why is the planet greening so fast?
Cold, not heat, is the real killer
Silvio Canto Jr., at the splendid American Thinker blog, reminds us that “Earth Day” began on Lenin’s birthday, 22 April. He sets out some examples of the half-witted predictions made by the totalitarian far Left in the early 1970s, when the “green holy day” started:
Paul Ehrlich, in a 1969 essay entitled Eco-Catastrophe!, wrote: “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. By [1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
In April 1970 he wrote in Mademoiselle: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years”.
In the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, he sketched out his most alarmist scenario, telling readers that between 1980 and 1989 some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in what he called the “Great Die-Off.”
In the May 1970 issue of Audubon, he wrote that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” He said that Americans born since 1946 now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years.
That year he predicted that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone”. He predicted that 200,000 Americans would die by 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
Five years later he predicted that “Since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [i.e., by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
Kenneth Watt, an ecologist, said: “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate … that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ’er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I’m very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Global oil production in 2024, at about 95 million barrels per day, was double the global oil output of 48 million barrels per day at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970.
He gave a speech predicting a pending Ice Age: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”
He also told Time that “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
Barry Commoner, a Washington University biologist, wrote in the Earth Day issue of Environment: “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
He also predicted that decaying organic pollutants would consume all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, suffocating freshwater fish.
George Wald, a Harvard biologist, estimated that “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
The New York Times, on its editorial page the day after the first Earth Day, wrote: “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, wrote in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness: “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, wrote in 1970: “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, the Near East and Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions… By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” The prediction of famine in South America has come to pass only in Venezuela and only due to socialism, not due to environmental reasons.
Life Magazine reported in January 1970: “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.”
Harrison Brown, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000, while lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
Senator Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
None of these lurid fantasies, mere pretexts for totalitarian control measures, has materialized.
While I have been ill, I have been quietly working on our team’s climatological research. For an update on our result, now published as an extended abstract after peer review, search YouTube for “Tom Nelson Monckton”.
I have also had long and detailed conversations with two Fellows of the Royal Society, who are justifiably concerned at the Society’s propensity to promulgate only the official narrative on questions such as global warming and are preparing to do something about it.
We have already notched up a useful initial victory. Several Communist Fellows had decided that now that Elon Musk is for some reason no longer a hero of the Left they should call a meeting of the Royal Society to strip him of his Fellowship.
Nuclear scientist Digby Macdonald said that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not the primary driver of global temperature changes.
In a recent episode of EpochTV’s Bay Area Innovators program, Macdonald said that temperature rises first, followed by CO2.
He pointed to the example of a carbonated drink and how a rise in temperature will cause the drink to release its CO2 faster, causing it to go flat.
“That’s the very reason why you put your beer in a refrigerator,” he said. “If you want the fizzy drink to be tangy … you put it in the refrigerator so the CO2 remains in the drink.”
Macdonald said one of the reasons for the change in climate is the Milankovitch cycle—the regular variations in the elliptical path the earth travels around the sun.
He said that cycle changes every 100,000 years and an ice age occurs when it’s the most elliptical because the earth is receiving a lot less solar radiation and heat.
This cycle, combined with the earth’s wobble and sunspot activity, are the drivers of climate, he said.
“There’s nothing that you and I can do about that,” Macdonald said. “That’s okay, because if we rely upon the historical record, we go through these maxima and minima.”
He said during the Roman period it was one of the maxima, in which temperatures were about two to four degrees higher than now, and there was a large advance in civilization.
Here we go again, exposing the truth about one of the biggest scams the government has come up with to launder money since war.
(1) We are in a climate crisis
We may as well begin with the most controversial environmentalist claim, that our planet is at imminent risk of catastrophic climate change. The problem with this claim is two-fold. First, there remains vigorous—if suppressed—debate over whether the data actually supports this claim. There is ample evidence that average global temperatures are not rapidly increasing, if they are even increasing at all. There is also strong evidence that extreme weather events are not increasing but rather that our ability to detect them has improved and that population increases have led more people to live in places that are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather. Second, even if there is some truth to the claims of climate catastrophists, it is not possible to precipitously transform our entire energy infrastructure. The technology isn’t ready, the funding isn’t available, and most nations will not participate. Adaptation is our only rational course of action.
(2) There are too many people
Based on extrapolations back in 1970, this may have appeared to be the case because populations worldwide at that time were rapidly growing. But today, in almost every nation, the inverse is now true: birthrates are well below replacement levels. Even in those nations that continue to experience rapid population growth, the rate of growth is following the same pattern of decline. The United Nations now estimates the total global population to top out at around 10 billion people, after which it is projected to decline. This means the rapid population growth we’ve seen over the past two centuries, where the global population octupled from 1 billion in 1804 to over 8 billion by 2024, is over. There is not one trend anywhere on earth that contradicts this pattern. Humanity faces a future of too few people, not too many.
(3) We are running out of “fossil” fuel
While this is technically correct, the situation is nowhere close to what was famously predicted in 1956 by American geologist M. Hubbert, who claimed oil production in the U.S. would peak by 1970 and then slide into permanent decline. In the U.S. and around the world, new technologies and new discoveries have put total reserves of oil, along with natural gas and coal, at record highs despite increasing demand. According to the authoritative Statistical Review on Global Energy, based on current consumption, proven reserves could supply oil for 61 years, natural gas for 50, and coal for 208. This grossly understates the big picture, however, because proven and recoverable reserves are being expanded all the time. “Unproven” reserves, waiting to be discovered, will easily double the amount of time left. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to research new sources of energy. But we have a century or more to sort this out.
(4) Biofuel is renewable and sustainable
Nothing could be further from the truth. Biofuel will never supply more than a small fraction of our energy requirements, and attempts to scale it beyond a niche product have produced catastrophic results. Just to use California as an example, the current yield of ethanol from a corn crop stands at not quite 500 gallons per acre. Californians consumed 13.6 billion gallons of gasoline in 2023. Since ethanol has 33 percent less energy per gallon than conventional gasoline, that means replacing gasoline with carbon-neutral ethanol would require 20.3 billion gallons of ethanol production, which in turn would require 63,400 square miles of irrigated farmland and over 120 million acre-feet of water per crop. To put this in perspective, California’s entire expanse of irrigated farmland only totals around 14,000 square miles, and California’s entire agricultural sector only consumes around 30 million acre-feet of water per year. Worldwide, biofuel crops already consume an estimated 500,000 square miles while only offsetting 2 percent of the global consumption of transportation fuel.
(5) Offshore wind energy is renewable and sustainable
Absolutely not. Wind turbine blades, on land or offshore, routinely kill raptors, condors, and other magnificent endangered birds, along with bats and insects. Offshore, there are additional harmful impacts. Electromagnetic fields from undersea cables produce birth deformities in marine life and produce magnetic fields that disrupt the orientation abilities of some fish. Their low-frequency operational noise disrupts sounds made by fish for mating, spawning, and navigating. The turbines “increase sea surface temperatures and alter upper-ocean hydrodynamics in ways scientists do not yet understand” and “whip up sea sediment and generate highly turbid wakes that are 30-150 meters wide and several kilometers in length, having a major impact on primary production by phytoplankton, which are the base of marine food chains.” California’s official plan is to install 25,000 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity in floating wind farms 20 miles offshore. At 10 megawatts each, California’s treasured marine ecosystem will be disrupted by the presence of somewhere between 2,500 floating wind turbines, each one nearly 1,000 feet high. They will need 7,500 tethering cables descending 4,000 feet to the seafloor, along with 2,500 high-voltage cables. Expect ratepayers and taxpayers to subsidize a project that could cost $300 billion or more to build systems that may only have a lifespan of 10-20 years.
(6) Renewables are renewable
No. They’re not. Renewables most in favor with environmentalists are solar and wind farms with battery farms to store the intermittently generated electricity. Just the consumption of natural resources to build these renewables is hardly sustainable. For example, using data from the International Energy Agency, geopolitical writer Peter Ziehan calculated the mineral requirements for power generation, comparing renewables to natural gas in terms of kilograms of minerals per megawatt of capacity. Offshore wind: 16,000 kg/MW, onshore wind: 10,000 kg/MW, solar photovoltaic: 7,000 kg/MW, and natural gas: 2,000 kg/MW. Compounding this disparity is the fact that natural gas power plants can operate for 60 years or more, whereas solar installations are operable for 30 years at most, and wind turbines substantially less than that, depending on where they’re situated. As for EVs, Ziehan calculated kilograms of minerals per vehicle, with EVs requiring over 200 kg/vehicle, compared to conventional cars at only 35 kg/vehicle. It’s easy enough to see what this means. Replacing conventional energy with “renewables” has ignited an expansion of worldwide mining in nations with minimal environmental protections.
(7) Renewables can replace fossil fuels
Not anytime soon. Worldwide, in 2022, 82 percent of global energy was still derived from fossil fuels. For everyone on earth to consume half as much energy per capita as Americans, global energy production will have to double. Based on those two cold facts, fossil fuels are going to be around for a very long time. Even these statistics understate the challenge. In 2023, most of the non-fossil fuel energy produced was from either nuclear (4.0 percent) or hydroelectric (6.8 percent) sources, leaving only 7.5 percent from allegedly renewable sources. And of the remaining 7.5 percent “renewables,” two-thirds of it was biofuel production, which should not be considered renewable or, at the very least, must be considered already at maximum capacity. That leaves only about 2.5 percent of worldwide energy production coming from renewables, if you want to call them that, primarily wind, solar, and geothermal sources.
(8) New housing must be confined to the footprint of existing cities
This is not true for California, nor for the United States, and not even worldwide. Nonetheless, urban containment has been enforced in California ever since we stopped investing in expanding our energy, water, and transportation infrastructure, resulting in 94 percent of the population living on only 5 percent of the land. But urban containment isn’t necessary to ensure enough farm production. Even India, the most densely populated large nation on earth, where there are 2,700 people per square mile of farmland, is a net food exporter. In California, the alleged need for urban containment is truly ridiculous. Building new homes for ten million new California residents on quarter-acre lots, with four-person households, and allocating an equivalent amount for schools, parks, roads, and retail and commercial areas would only consume 1,953 square miles. This would only increase California’s urban footprint from 7,800 to 9,700 square miles, i.e., from 5.0 percent to 6.2 percent of all land in the state. The global trend is people voluntarily migrating to cities at the same time as the global population is expected to begin to decline within a few decades. There will be plenty of room for farms and wilderness even if cities are permitted to expand. Keeping cities bottled up is misanthropic and misguided, creating artificially high home prices and unwanted overcrowding.
(9) Mass transit is necessary to achieve sustainability
It’s hard to imagine a claim more at odds with reality. Mass transit works in extremely dense urban areas where most jobs are located in a central core. With rare exceptions, such as Manhattan, most metropolitan areas no longer have this hub-and-spoke model, which renders economically viable mass transit extremely difficult. Then there are the challenges introduced during the COVID pandemic, which drove millions of riders out of mass transit to either commute in private cars or work from home. Ridership never recovered. An additional barrier to the readoption of mass transit is the fact that most cities are unwilling to police and remove disruptive individuals from the buses and trains, rendering their systems too dangerous for potential passengers to consider. Finally, along with now-mature work-from-home technology that is only going to improve, we have innovations just around the corner that will enable smart cars to convoy at higher speeds, increasing the capacity of existing roads, as well as a revolution in passenger drones that will take additional pressure off roads. Why would someone ride mass transit when they can relax while their own smart vehicle drives them point-to-point with no interruptions? And why should taxpayers subsidize mass transit?
(10) Wilderness areas are sacred
This mantra has caused more harm than good to the wilderness. Litigation pursuant to the Endangered Species Act has severely restricted, if not put a complete stop to, logging on public land, although the current White House administration is trying to change that. Since then, over the past 40 years, because fires were suppressed and logging didn’t remove new growth, our forests have become overgrown, resulting in catastrophic fires. Similarly, ESA litigation and environmentalist-inspired regulations put a stop to dredging in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which was the only way to maintain deep, cool channels favored by salmon ever since the construction of levees in the 1800s caused silt deposits to accumulate in what remained of their migration routes. It is important to protect truly endangered species, but environmentalists often create bigger problems. Poverty in Africa could be alleviated if environmental restrictions on energy development were lifted. But as it is, in desperate poverty, Africans are cutting down their forests for firewood, hunting wild game for food, and poaching dwindling herds of elephants, rhinos, lions, and other precious and endangered species for sale to international smugglers. How we manage our wilderness must be revisited with a reality-based emphasis on results, not ideology. Moreover, an encouraging fact is that while total forest cover in the world was in decline for many centuries, over the past 40 years, it has been increasing. This is the result of several factors: reforestation efforts, migration to urban areas, which depopulates forest regions; huge improvements in agricultural productivity, which takes farmland out of production, allowing for forests to reclaim the land; and maybe even slightly elevated atmospheric CO₂, which is plant food.
The ideals of environmentalism ought to inspire everyone, but the policies promulgated in the name of environmentalism are all too often actually hurting the environment. Examples are the mad rush to develop renewables and the power of the “climate crisis” narrative to deter rational cost/benefit analysis of environmentalist policies. The impact of misguided environmentalism is not merely the fate of wildlife and wilderness or the health of global ecosystems. It is also economic and, in practice, has led to profound transfers of wealth as entrenched special interests thrive on escalating regulations that only the biggest corporations and wealthiest individuals can navigate. Worldwide, entire industrial sectors are consolidated, costing nations the resilience and affordability that a diverse and competitive economy can deliver. Environmentalism, as it is practiced in the 21st century, is an arm of globalism, with shades of paternalism and colonialism that often overshadow its virtues.
I’d argue that the Covid jab is close, as was the Covid cover story, but nevertheless
I had to work in sustainability at IBM. I knew it was a load of shit from premise to people. It was a money laundering scheme from the getgo as well as a religion for those who don’t want to believe in God.
The Paris Climate Accord is not much of a deal anymore, in large part because it’s hard to fix the climate if nothing stops China. In other words, we finally came to terms with the reality that China and India are polluting the air a lot more than the Western countries who couldn’t wait to sign it.
The language has changed, too. You may remember when we called it global warming. Everything now is “climate change,” a convenient way of blaming everything on the climate.
Last, but not least, what killed the climate change cult is all of those predictions that turned out to be false. How many times can you get it wrong? I guess a million if you are making predictions about warming and cooling. Let’s remember some of the biggest hits:
1) In 1970, S. Dillon Ripley, a wildlife conservationist who served as secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, warned that 75 percent to 80 percent of species would be extinct by 1995. Wrong.
2) In 1970, Kenneth Watt, an ecologist and professor at the University of California, Davis, warned that “there won’t be any more crude oil,” that “none of our land will be usable” for agriculture, and the world would be 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. False.
3) In 1970, biologist Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University warned that by the end of the decade up to 200 million people would die each year from starvation due to overpopulation, life expectancy would plummet to 42 years, and all ocean life would perish. Extremely false.
4) In 1970, Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, predicted that “world population will outrun food supplies” and “the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine” by the year 2000. Didn’t happen.
5) In 1971, Dr. S. I. Rasool, an atmospheric scientist at NASA, predicted the coming of a “new ice age” within 50 years. Incorrect.
As I recall, the one about the coming ice age made the cover of Newsweek or Time. It had me wondering if they would have to cancel baseball or force every city to build a dome stadium.
Check out more hits:
6) In 1975, Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, warned that 90 percent of tropical rainforests and 50 percent of species would disappear within 30 years. Erroneous.
7) In 1988, Hussein Shihab, environmental affairs director of the Maldives, warned that his island nation would be completely underwater within 30 years, which wouldn’t even matter because experts also predicted the Maldives would run out of drinking water by 1992. False.
8) In 2004, a Pentagon analysis warned of global anarchy due to climate change. Major European cities would be underwater by 2020, at which point Britain would suffer from a “Siberian” climate. Extremely false.
As it turned out, Britain never got a Siberian winter, but they do have a lot of immigrants who hate everything about the country. They didn’t run out of water in the Maldives, either, but a lot of people are going there for vacation. Maybe they drink bottled water in all of those fancy resorts.
And we round out the list with two more:
9) In 2008, Bob Woodruff of ABC News hosted a two-hour climate change special warning that New York City could be underwater by 2015, among other apocalyptic predictions. Didn’t happen.
10) In 2009, former vice president and climate activist Al Gore predicted the Arctic Ocean would have no ice by 2014, which is the same thing Greta Thunberg said would happen by 2022. Nope.
Well, New York City did not go underwater, but it’s a horrible place to live as more people bail out from high taxes. And V.P. Gore and Greta will likely not live to see the end of ice on the Arctic Ocean. We also have not yet lived to see a Gore presidency, which was the best part of the story.
So yes, there is something in the air, because climate talk is not what it used to be. I guess that’s what shutting down power plants and making bad predictions will do to a movement.
What looked like the Green Movement’s unstoppable momentum has stalled out recently, as Americans rethink the costs of some of the more draconian proposals to rid the world of industrial carbon dioxide. As skepticism grows, the movement to slash CO2 at all costs also may be nearing an end, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.
Americans have become increasingly wary of the “net zero” and other modern-day green movements after so many of their doom-filled prophecies of imminent environmental disaster failed to come true.
In its national online poll taken Mar. 26-28, I&I/TIPP asked 1,452 poll respondents the following opening question: “Which of the following best describes your view of the current climate change movement?”
Those taking the poll, which has a +/-2.6 percentage point margin of error, were asked to choose from six possible answers:
The first answer was that the climate-change movement “is a necessary response to a serious global crisis.” It garnered 39% support, more than any other single response.
However, taken together, the remaining five responses portray a broad range of skepticism of the green movement among the rest of those who took the poll.
Within this group, 16% said “It has gone too far and is driven more by politics than science,” while 20% agreed: “I’m concerned about the environment but skeptical of climate alarmism.” Another 5% said “I used to support it but now question its motives and impact,” and 11% noted “I don’t believe climate change is a significant issue.” The remaining 9% said they were not sure.
Because the real polluters are on the other side of the world
95% of all plastic in the world’s seas and oceans comes from 10 rivers, 2 of which are in Africa and the rest are in Asia. The great lie of modern environmentalism is that anything we do in the West will make a difference as long as Asia and Africa continue to pollute like this. https://t.co/KZOlUMY60Hpic.twitter.com/nr966mEgla
China, India and Africa. They are causing the problem. Stop trashing the US as the only reason we have pollution. They just want to soak the US to pay.
One of the major issues I have had with “climate change” reporting is that articles portray carbon dioxide as “toxic”.
This assertion is a blatant lie, as I have often stated in discussing this issue at Legal Insurrection.
One of the biggest purveyors of this inanity was the Biden administration’s team at the Environmental Protection Agency. Team Biden used a report to justify its update to Obama’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) policy, which was aimed at justifying stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.
Now a study recently published in Nature’s Scientific Reports challenges the Biden administration’s fivefold increase in its SCC estimate, which was partly based on projections of global crop yield declines. The research, conducted by economist Ross McKitrick, re-examines and extends the dataset used in previous studies that influenced the SCC estimate.
The title pretty much sums up the key point: Extended crop yield meta-analysis data do not support upward SCC revision. It reviews the 2014 database set that was used to justify the hefty increase in regulations are carbon dioxide.
The paper makes many key points, including that the original dataset was less than complete.
The original dataset used for the SCC update contained 1,722 records, but only 862 were usable due to missing variables. McKitrick recovered 360 additional records, increasing the sample size to 1,222.
Interestingly, reanalysis of the larger dataset yielded significantly different results from previous studies. While earlier analyses suggested yield declines for all crop types even at low levels of warming, the new and improved information suggests the potential positive global average crop yield changes, even with up to a 5°C temperature increase
The study found that adaptation efforts and CO2 fertilization have beneficial effects on crop yields, which I have noted before. It seems like a good time to share this video of Dr. William Happer, who offers a rational perspective on carbon dioxide.
Big companies and non-profit groups have begun purging or rewriting references to climate change on their websites, mirroring similar action by US government departments in response to the policies of Donald Trump.
Financial Times analysis shows that statements on climate change from leading corporations including Walmart and Kraft Heinz have been deleted or rewritten over the past year at the same time as a Republican backlash against green action has intensified and companies have begun rolling back their net zero targets.
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Areeba Hamid, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, warned companies were at risk of “committing brand self-sabotage by erasing and diluting references to climate on their websites”.
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Charities also told the FT they were rejigging their websites, with one US non-profit group that operates internationally saying they had scrubbed whole pages about climate change online, partly in a bid to help shore up US grants.
The full article is worth reading, it contains a substantial list of companies and charities which have turned their backs on climate action.
Interestingly some of them apparently started purging online climate content before the November election, possibly in anticipation of a Trump victory.
Obviously if a radical climate activist is elected to the White House all the statements of climate commitment will be dusted off and restored. But in my opinion this shows how little corporations and charities genuinely care about climate change, and the fundamental weakness of the climate movement.
story
They’ve gone along with the crowd when they had to. Now, they don’t want to look stupid because the evidence screams that it is just money laundering and a bunch of lies, just like DEI
The latest deadline for countries to submit plans for slashing the greenhouse gas emissions fuelling climate change has passed. Only 15 countries met it – less than 8% of the 194 parties currently signed up to the Paris agreement, which obliges countries to submit new proposals for eliminating emissions every five years.
Known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, these plans outline how each country intends to help limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, or at most 2°C. This might include cutting emissions by generating more energy from wind and solar, or adapting to a heating world by restoring wetlands as protection against more severe floods and wildfires.
Each new NDC should outline more stringent emissions cuts than the last. It should also show how each country seeks to mitigate climate change over the following ten years. This system is designed to progressively strengthen (or “ratchet up”) global efforts to combat climate change.
Bulldozing the Amazon rainforest is a fitting way to mark 30 years of failure, of annual gabfests that have released colossal amounts of carbon dioxide from the mouths of the well-meaning, and burned tonnes of aviation fuel to get them there, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions not one bit.
…
Energy scientist, Vaclav Smil puts the total cost of achieving net zero by 2050 at $US444 trillion, or $US17 trillion a year for 25 years, “requiring affluent economies to spend 20 to 25 per cent of their annual GDP on the transition”.
…
So net zero by 2050 won’t happen and the increase in global temperature will not be limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels that was agreed as preferred at Paris in 2015 – nowhere near it.
It would be a waste of money for something that nobody really wanted, an idea that wouldn’t work, and something that is not necessary except to the globalist Marxists who are trying to run everybody’s business, but should fukc off.
If ever a story perfectly encapsulated the hypocrisy of elitists who want to enslave and impoverish the planet in the name of the global warming hoax, this is it:
A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.
It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people – including world leaders – at the conference in November.
Cutting down rainforest is particularly bad from the viewpoint of the climate ideology that will be espoused at the summit:
The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world and providing biodiversity, and many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.
Not at all. The purpose of a climate summit is to engage in virtue signaling while angling to achieve more power over the Little People. John Kerry never misses one, thanks to private jets always being at hand for him.
What a bunch of hypocrites. I can’t believe they expect us to believe their climate scares to get more money. Go Elon and DOGE, cut their legs out from under them by eliminating their grifting.
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions was going to save the planet at no cost. Turns out it’s an economy wrecker, which is more feature than bug for many a climate alarmist.
Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt, a London-based investment bank, took on the claim of Labour Party British Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who said that pursuing net zero greenhouse gas emissions didn’t require a deceleration of economic growth. What he found was “sad to say,” but he stands by the facts.
“The result of the UK’s decarbonization efforts appears to be weak economic growth, stalling living standards, high energy prices and deindustrialization – without denting rising global emissions,” he wrote last week in the Telegraph.
“Net zero is strangling our economy,” says the headline over Pickering’s column, because “limiting available electricity has stifled productivity.”
On the Peel Hunt website, Pickering explained that data from 189 countries indicated there is “a strong positive correlation between living standards and energy consumption – showing a clear link between falling energy capacity and weak productivity in the UK.” He notes that “the decline in UK electricity supply, which started in 2006, coincided with the start of structural weakness in productivity growth.”
Bluntly put, without cheap and reliable energy, which is what we get from fossil fuels, an economy turns sclerotic. Which is why the political left works so feverishly to end gas and oil. As we have said so many times before, the agenda behind cutting greenhouse gases is in actuality an assault on capitalism, which, as the legendary Milton Friedman famously said, is the only economic system that has enabled the masses to escape from “grinding poverty.”
Trump’s EPA has started the process to rescind the EPA’s authority to regulate CO2 and other alleged greenhouse gasses. It would remake our nation and shake a Western civilization already being pummeled by green madness. These regulations, both here and abroad, have been stalking horses for socialism and vehicles for fraud. graft, and funding left-wing actors on a scale unseen in human history.
Until 2007, the US resisted the claim that CO2 was a pollutant that could be regulated to adjust the world’s climate. That year, five activist Supreme Court Justices donned white lab coats of climate scientists in Massachusetts v. EPA to hold that the Clean Air Act was written so broadly that it gave the EPA, created simply to clean up pollution, almost unlimited authority to regulate carbon dioxide, an essential, albeit minute, part of our atmosphere.
This judicial overreach mattered because even a super-majority of congressional Democrats had rejected a law that would have authorized the EPA to regulate CO2. Armed with this Supreme Court ruling, Obama’s EPA acted unilaterally in 2009 to declare CO2 a pollutant it could regulate. How’s that for spitting in the face of Art. 1, Section 1 of the Constitution, which holds that the power to legislate is vested solely in Congress?
Climate science is little more than modern Lysenkoism. It has been subject to decades of gatekeeping in universities, grant-making entities, the UN, and science journals, all working together to suppress any challenges to “the anthropogenic climate change consensus.” All too often, “climate modeling has transformed from a scientific tool into a mechanism for manufacturing hysteria.”
Many climate studies rely on questionable peer review as ostensible proof of their reliability rather than reproducing the studies.
Notably, there has been no increase in the number or severity of weather-related disasters for decades. The actual trendline, according to Roger Pielke, Jr., is completely flat.
[T]he completely false notion that global weather and climate disasters have increased and will continue to increase is commonly reported in the legacy media, buoyed by the promotion of false information by organizations that include the United Nations. In 2020 the U.N. claimed falsely of a “staggering rise in climate-related disasters over the last twenty years.”
I still can’t believe people fall for this. They can’t predict the weather next week let alone years from now. They can predict a scare to raise and hustle money thought, what it really is about.
Evidence continues to grow that onshore wind turbines are causing heavy ecological carnage, with increasing concern focused on the removal of a vast tonnage of insect life. For obvious political, Net Zero reasons, insect decimation is not a well-funded research area, but work in Germany in 2016 put the loss across the country at 1,200 tonnes a year. Recently, the Heartland Institute extrapolated the individual annual insect loss worldwide at 13,640,000,000,000 (13.64 quadrillion) insects, and of course it can be noted that the figures are nearly a decade out of date. Other scientific work has reported that flying insects destroyed include bees, flying beetles and butterflies. Curiously, the many institutions apparently concerned with wildlife stay silent on the slaughter. For its part, the UK Natural History Museum (NHM) offers a Build Your Own Wind Turbine kit. Fun for all the family and if the kiddies are lucky they might get to whack a passing fly or a couple of moths.
The German work estimated insect losses at 40 million per turbine during the plant-growing season. Commenting on the findings, the mathematician and evolutionary ecologist Professor Christian Voigt felt it was necessary to evaluate if these fatalities added to the decline of insect populations, “and potentially the extinction of species”. In a 2022 paper, Voigt reported that turbines can change the nearby microclimate, while vibrational noise may reduce earthworm abundance with likely cascading effects on soil quality and vegetation. In addition, he noted findings that wind turbine facilities led to displacement of nesting and wintering birds.
Recent work from researchers at the University of Wyoming suggests that moths, butterflies, beetles, flies and true bugs may be the most vulnerable to the giant revolving blades. Wind turbines create vortices, sucking in wildlife and causing problems for both bats and large birds such as eagles. “The vast amount of avian and insect deaths at the hands of wind turbines is disastrous in and of itself, from a conservation and ecological standpoint,” states Heartland.
Insect loss and extinctions are of course very popular in the Net Zero fear-mongering business. In 2022, the NHM ran with an improbable tale that flying insects in the UK had declined by 60% in just 20 years. Too good of course for national treasure Sir David Attenborough to pass up and he repeated the scare during his BBC Wild Isles series, a green agitprop co-production with the World Wildlife Fund and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The evidence proved to be anecdotal and mostly arose from ‘citizen scientists’ counting bugs on car number plates. Missing from the research was a note that vehicle registrations have tripled in the UK since 1970, while cars have largely changed shape from angular boxes to aerodynamic wedges that sweep insects out of the way.
Despite these obvious flaws in the story, the NHM claimed the astonishing loss was caused by rising temperatures and fragmented habitats. The tiny temperature rises over the last 20 years are hardly likely to affect insects that much, while slightly longer growing seasons in the northern hemisphere and a recent 14% ‘greening’ of the Earth due to higher levels of carbon dioxide are almost certain to have been extremely beneficial.
Here’s something for DOGE to cut funding to. Not much bigger waste or boondoggle than this.
One of the most expensive green energy projects ever undertaken in American history looks like it is now on borrowed time after eating up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of birds.
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) — a major utility company — announced in January that it is terminating power purchase contracts with the owners of Southwestern California’s Ivanpah Solar Power facility, a massive and unique solar project that received hundreds of millions of subsidy dollars as it launched in 2014. Just over a decade after it started operations, the facility appears to be headed toward its demise after killing thousands of birds because it could not provide the utility sufficiently cheap energy.
“PG&E determined that ending the agreements at this time will save customers money,” the company said in its Jan. 17 statement on the plant. The original owners of the plant — which cost about $2.2 billion to build — included Google and NRG Energy, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The Los Angeles Times reported in 2016 that the Ivanpah project killed an average of 6,000 birds each year, with some of the unlucky creatures colliding with the development’s 40-story towers and others being incinerated instantly upon flying through concentrated sunlight while chasing prey. The project received tax breaks, a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama Department of Energy (DOE) and a further $535 million subsidy from the Obama Department of Transportation (DOT), but it failed to reach advertised power output levels, according to analysis by Benjamin Zycher, an energy-focused senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
The Trump Administration not only cut “environmental justice” programs at the Environmental Protection Agency, they put nearly 200 staffers on leave.
According to reports, the staffers were called into a meeting on Thursday afternoon where they were informed that they were being placed on leave.
“Effective immediately, you are being placed on administrative leave with full pay and benefits. This administrative leave is not being done for any disciplinary purpose,” the email stated, according to Politico.
“Career staff made determinations on which Office of Environmental Justice employees had statutory duties or core mission functions,” EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said in a statement. “As such, 168 staffers were placed on administrative leave as their function did not relate to the agency’s statutory duties or grant work. EPA is in the process of evaluating new structure and organization to ensure we are meeting our mission of protecting human health and the environment for all Americans.”
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.”
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.”
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.)
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!
This essay was first published on Daily Pundit in 2017. More applicable now than then, I think.
——
I have one. You have one. We all have a tard in our family circle. If you’re lucky it’s not a blood relative, just a boyfriend or in-law, but they’ll be showing up at the big family get-together for Thanksgiving.
Not just any tard, either. A Progtard.
They’re sort of like the Terminator: They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. And they absolutely will not stop, ever.
Unlike the Terminator, progtards aren’t dangerous except in large groups or if they’re in the position to ambush you from behind or to file a bogus complaint with your employer. Progtards are mostly pathetic, and they’re even more amusingly pathetic when they’re angry and self-righteous.
Herewith, a guide for dealing with the tard at the table. This will be most useful if you have someone to work with, someone contemptuous of sloppy thinking, of feeeewings, and of self-entitlement.
(If you’re the sole hard thinker at the table and you’re surrounded by progtards, you can still use these suggestions, but I wouldn’t bother. I’d just grab the carving knife and lay into everyone at the table. But that’s just me.)
College Mockery
Mocking modern education — indoctrination, rather — is a good place to start. Many progtards are in college or have recently gotten out. (I’m not saying “graduated” because so many don’t, especially not within the old normal of four years.) This is in large part due to many people being soft-headed progs before they grow up and get the stupid knocked out of them. College is for most a prolonged childhood that allows them to avoid growing up. It certainly doesn’t educate them in any meaningful sense. And it costs an arm and a leg.
Thus, our first line of attack.
(Remember, we’re not trying to enlighten the progtards. That’s hopeless. All we’re doing is entertaining ourselves by getting them all riled up.)
“So, how much does your college cost per year? That much? Wow. How can you afford that?”
This can lead to criticism about mooching off of parents or taxpayers. That’s unlikely to impact the progtard directly, on account of an inflated sense of entitlement, but might help to get others on your side.
“How much are you having to borrow every year? Ouch. So you’ll be a hundred grand in debt. Oh, it’s taking you six years to graduate? A hundred fifty grand. Wow. That going to be, what, a grand a month for twenty years?”
“So, how are you going to make a living so you can pay that off and still have a place to live and get a car and stuff?”
“That’s a good goal, but how are you going to get there from here? How do you get your foot in the door to get started? Is your BA in Music History going to get you a job at all? Will it let you pay your school loans? ”
“Wouldn’t you have been better off not going to college? You could have lived at home, interned for minimum wage or even for free for a working musician, gotten some real experience, and not had any debt when you were done.”
“Does anyone really think that degree is worth anything? Why did you even bother getting it?”
“My nephew did two years of electrical tech in community college, lived at home, and worked part time to pay for it. He got a job with the power company straight out of school. He didn’t have any debt and he just bought his first house. He’s twenty-three years old.”
There’s meat left on those bones, but that’s enough to start the poo flying.
Communism, Socialism, and Progressivism
Don’t miss the chance to bring up the repeated failures of socialism and its inbred kin. You can’t quite say that every progtard truly believes that socialism et al would make the world a better place, but if you did say that you’d be off by only a few. Note the comment above about getting the stupid knocked out of you — socialism and such are stupid ideas that sound like they should work, and they sure do appeal to the lazy and untalented and envious, and you don’t realize they don’t work until you’ve had the stupid knocked out of you by the real world. Students, educators, bureaucrats, and some other so-called adults who have lived their lives as hothouse flowers never quite learn that a lot of nice-sounding ideas don’t actually work.
“You know the amazing thing about socialism? It’s so good at destroying wealth that it doesn’t matter if everyone’s equal. They’re poorer than even the poor people in the oh-so-unequal capitalist countries.”
“No, I take that back. The most amazing thing about socialism and communism is the number of people they’ve killed.”
“Tell me, how many more times does socialism need to be tried before it’s ‘real’?”
“Have you ever noticed how often socialist countries have to be bailed out by capitalist countries after natural disasters? Why doesn’t it ever go the other way?”
“Socialized medicine. What a cute idea! Too bad it never works for long. Back in the 1980s, American socialists pointed at England’s national health system as the best example of how nationalized medicine would work for everyone. Then when that started to show problems, they started pointing to Canada. Canada’s socialized medicine had just started and looked good … until rationing and problems became obvious a few years later. Now anyone wanting to show an example of socialized medicine done right has to just lie about all the problems it has everywhere. But next time for sure, right?”
Keeping the Poo Flying
There are a few miscellaneous poo bombs you can throw if the conversation and acrimony are slowing down.
Che really was a cowardly murderer, you know.
Wouldn’t it be neat if the global warming scientists would show their data and algorithms so it could be peer reviewed?
Yes, that short, blue hair does make a statement. It says, I’m going to be a lonely cat lady before I’m forty.
Aw, competition isn’t fair because it means that not everyone will be a winner? Aw, let me call you a wambulance.
You’re right, things are different than when I was young. When I was your age, it was almost impossible to make a living unless you worked for someone. Going into business for yourself took a lot of money to open a store front or you had to be in a big city or be willing to travel all the time. Now you can write software or books or make videos or do odd jobs all over the world for basically no money down. You have it so much easier now.
I wish that women only were paid 79 cents on the dollar. I’d fire all my male employees, hire all women, and save big bucks on payroll.
Why is it cultural appropriation for me to eat tacos, but it’s ok for Mexicans to wear blue jeans and use cell phones?
And lots and lots more, but we’re up to 1200 words, and that’s plenty enough.
I’m stuck at a family dinner that I thought I’d get out of, but no, I have to be there.
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 was always about the money. The Climate trope was just the cover.
It never had any science behind it, only scare tactics and predictions of doom if we don’t spend a lot of money. None of them ever came true, especially the lies of ‘AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH”
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?
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.
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.
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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.
The scientific method is a wonderfully useful tool for understanding our universe. Its socio-benefits are self-apparent. I’m certainly not anti-science; if anything, I’m a big fan. My life is better because of it.
But I’m also aware of its limitations.
For starters, science is not synonymous with truth — and the scientific method is an extremely limited tool. Yes, we’ve used it with great success to understand our universe, but its utility is not universal.
Woe to the man who only understands the universe via the scientific method. You’d miss the most important things in life!
In its purest, axiomatic sense, the scientific method (i.e. attaching a hypothesis to an observation, developing a replicable test, and recording the results) is self-correcting, because future experiments should address any incongruities. As the quality and frequency of experiments improve, better data should arise.
At least that’s the theory.
But in actuality, the problem with “trusting the science” is threefold:
Scientists are just people, and people are biased. The scientific community is not immune to bias, political pressures, the lure of career advancements, or the impact of preconceived agendas.
The scientific method is only as good as the quality of its experiments, and far too many things (climate change, evolution, biological studies, health) are challenging to directly experiment. For example, it would be extraordinarily useful to know what our current temperature would be without any manmade greenhouse emissions whatsoever. (Hey, maybe the Global Warming alarmists are 100% right.) But we don’t know because it’s not something we can directly test. Instead, we’re left with cherry-picking clusters of facts and using them to build various arguments. And that leads to…
Our current usage of “science” has led to a ridiculously large number of false positives. That’s because it’s far too easy for biased scientists to generate media attention (and raise money) by publicizing a conclusion that’s centered on cherry-picked data. It happens all the time, and it’s gotten to the point that it’s practically a cliché: One week, a “scientific study” is announced that says chocolate (or whatever) is the secret to weight loss. Next week, the study is denounced. It’s practically a weekly occurrence.
Too many unethical scientists are wearing the cloak of “science” to lend the veneer of credibility to utterly unscientific conclusions. Chief among them is Scientific American magazine, which announced last month that it was endorsing Kamala Harris for president. In the magazine’s illustrious 179-year history, it has made presidential endorsements exactly twice — in 2020 and 2024 — and both times, they were anti-Trump. (Very odd, eh?)
Scientific American explained its “logic” in an article released today: “The 2024 Presidential Election Will Make or Break U.S. Climate Action.” It’s worth reading because it’s absolutely NOT a scientific piece. It’s an aggressively liberal screed on public policy. And because you can’t test planetary climate cycles via direct experimentations, the Scientific American “scientists” did the next best thing: They used a computer program that spits out whatever data it’s been designed to regurgitate.
To provide a broad look at how potential policies under Harris or Trump would shape future U.S. [greenhouse] emissions, Orvis’s team at EI used its Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model. The researcher compared current policies under the Biden-Harris administration with more ambitious policies that achieve a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and with the policies laid out in Project 2025. The found that the latter scenario ‘basically stops the progress that’s been made’…
How scientific! They relied on Project 2025 — which Trump has repeatedly disavowed — as their sole basis for GOP action. And then they found a computer model that gave them the pro-Harris results they sought.
Presto: Here’s the science!
It’s silly and disingenuous. But it’s also deeply damaging to actual science because it sullies its reputation. By contorting “science” into something it’s not, liberal activists are actually engaging in a very specific form of Climate Denial: Their unabashed dishonesty, political manipulations, and brazen opportunism have created a climate where scientists can no longer be trusted.
It’s too bad. If you’re a true fan of science, this is not at all what you want. But that’s the reality today.
As it turns out, the biggest problems with science are the scientists.
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.
Seriously, most of these tech companies, like most companies, were really just setting goals and saying they were doing “green” stuff but weren’t actually doing much of anything
It’s Climate Week in New York, and dominating the conversation has been the apparently insatiable appetite of artificial intelligence for power.
The subject has been much in the news. Just last week, we learned that the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania will be restarted to supply electricity to Microsoft Corp.’s data centers.
Then Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported that ChatGPT creator OpenAI had pitched the Biden administration on its vision for massive data centers that may each consume enough power to run an entire city.
Alarmingly for climate hawks, it’s become clear there’s not enough low-emission energy — nuclear or otherwise — to satisfy AI, and natural gas will be key.
Indeed, the country’s energy companies already plan a slew of new gas-fired power projects. That could complicate the energy transition and threaten President Joe Biden’s lofty goal of ridding emissions from the grid by 2035.
Full story at the link above, but the key is they weren’t doing anything anyway other than saying they were. This is about money and they would claim anything for EPS and profit.
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 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.
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)
Renewables don’t risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it’s clear that too little “inertia” due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.
Delusions of Adequacy 
