Headlines: Which Retailer Is Getting Rid Of Food Products With Synthetic Dyes, What You Need To Know About AI Scams….and more

Health

Major American Retailer To Rid Food Products Of Synthetic Dyes

Canada’s Birth Rate Plunges to Lowest Level in History – The Covid-19 jab worked as planned

Economy

“Big Losses”: Study Confirms Gavin Newscum’s $20-an-Hour Minimum Wage Decimated Industry

Ranked: The Biggest Buyers of U.S. Debt

U.S. Housing Heat Map Signals Ongoing Deceleration As Buyers Wait For Lower Rates

Technology

What You Need to Know About AI Scams – kinda scary

AOL Finally Ends A Painfully Slow Chapter Of Internet History

Human Capabilities

Lady Wins the Biggest Prize in Wheel of Fortune History [VIDEO]

MMA Fighter Knocks Opponent Out Cold Then Gets Suplexed by the Referee for Putting His Junk in Opponent’s Face

Climate

California Pulls Plug on its Delusional Electric Truck Mandate

Illegals

ICE Nabs 16 More ‘Worst of the Worst’ in Ill. Operation

Rep. Ro Khanna Says the Quiet Part Out Loud — Admits Democrats Want YOUR Tax Dollars to Fund Illegal Aliens

Europe

The French protest over raised retirement age…they never want to work

Entertainment

‘A Fistful of Dollars’ to ‘Rambo’: the late Renato Casaro’s movie posters – in pictures…

2025 Ryder Cup Ratings Historically Bad: REPORT – I guess they watched football or played Golf instead of watching New Yorkers being assholes to the European team.

WNBA Players Speak Out About League’s Pathetic Leadership Under Commissioner Cathy Engelbert – The league is pathetic without Caitlin Clark

Different Headlines: Buttigieg Too Much Of A Fag For Kamala, Baby Found In Dumpster Is Alive, The Hidded Risk In 90% Of Our Drinking Water And More

Gunman who shot up lobby of ABC affiliate was “politically motivated”

“He Never Took The $50,000” – White House Spox Says Biden’s Weaponized FBI Tried To Entrap Tom Homan With Bribe

‘ABC Is Committed to a Disaster, and We Get to Watch It’: Conservative Podcaster Calls Kimmel’s Return ‘Beautiful’

Kamala Harris Admits She Snubbed Pete Buttigieg as VP Pick Because He’s Gay – “Too Big of a Risk” – so being a homosexual is still looked down upon by the elites, or anyone else

Governor Healey’s Energy Crisis: Outrage Theater for the Freeze-and-Pay Crowd – 20% higher energy because of Green Policies that didn’t work

Health

The Hidden Risk In 90 Percent Of America’s Drinking Water – And How To Reduce It

Baby Found Abandoned in a Dumpster: “She Was Covered in Blood” – Still Alive!

Two Ignoramuses Are Dumb Enough To Fight Cops At Falcons-Panthers Game, And Of Course, They Lose

Weird: Kamala Accuses Trump of Being Communist Dictator – Forgets to Mention Her Father Was a Marxist Economist (VIDEO)

World

Muslim woman delivers some harsh truth to a ‘queer for Palestine’ activist…

An Impending Population Crisis? World Fertility Rate Hits 60-Year Low – Bill Gates got his wish.

Economy

Why Our Systems Collapse

Tech

Google: Biden Pressure ‘Wrong,’ Banned Voices Coming Back

Trump: No More “Bullshit” Windmills

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.”

rest of the story here

The Beginning Of The End Of Solar Farms

The minute I saw this, I said it’s just a bird killing project that will never pay for itself. Right on both points.

I didn’t stop to think about the tortoises and other land creatures and how much they are affected.

Thank you Obama for this boondoggle and waste of my and others taxes. It’s your legacy now, own it.

They’re hiding something: All of Europe was ‘seconds’ away from total blackout…

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.

We’ll get into that shortly…

READ MORE: Female pilot killed nearly 70 people seconds after ignoring a direct warning…

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.

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:

This incident shines a light on the growing debate over renewable energy sources and not having proper backup systems.

Think about it: this small little change instantly impacted four countries and nearly brought down two of them.

Take a look:

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…

ImageRenewables 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.

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Why The Weather Warming Is Good For Humans

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.

One of America’s priciest green boondoggles likely going offline after sucking up subsidies and incinerating birds

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).

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EV And Sustainability Hypocrisy: Amazon uses huge diesel generator to charge electric delivery van fleet

Amazon closed out 2024 with more than 20,000 electric delivery vans manufactured by Rivian in its fleet nationwide. The e-commerce giant highlights on its website that the electric vans are part of its “urgent” climate change initiative to “remove carbon emissions from transportation systems.”

However, Amazon faces mounting criticism for gaslighting the public about its net zero goals and actual operational fleet practices.

Take, for instance, Amazon’s website. Within the Sustainability section, the company laid out its approach to fight so-called global warming: “To reach this target, we’re also expanding the use of zero-emission transportation such as electric delivery vans, cargo e-bikes, and on-foot deliveries, and we engage in industry initiatives to remove carbon emissions from transportation systems like ocean shipping, aviation, and trucking. We’re also using innovative construction techniques and building materials to make our fulfillment centers, data centers, offices, and physical retail locations more sustainable.”

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What Did $750,000 a Year Deliver At The Los Angeles Department Of Water And Power? Bud Light Competency At The Top

They might as well have Dylan Mulvaney drinking a beer with this girl. Get this. I’ve never seen a bigger waste of $750 K in my life…. so far.

The firestorm is still in progress in Los Angeles, priorities first and foremost are saving of lives and property.  The calamity in Los Angeles is still early in the situation, ongoing, and not yet under control, but some basic facts can be established at this point in time.

  • Janisse Quiñones PE (She/Her) is the CEO and Chief Engineer at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).
  • Janisse Quiñones was hired with a $750,000 Salary, nearly twice that of her predecessor.
  • LADWP operates ten major active reservoirs and over 107 smaller storage facilities, all of which create operational flexibility to balance water supplies and customer demands.
  • A key reservoir in the Pacific Palisades fire was inoperable.
  • Multiple locations of the service area that Quinones oversees are a raging inferno and short on water for firefighters.

Water for the LADWP Service Area comes from the following sources:

  • 73% is purchased water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) which is both an aqueduct to State Water Projects in upper California and the Colorado River Aqueduct.
  • 15% is water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct which is fed from water close to the Nevada Border.
  • 10% is local groundwater.
  • 2% is recycled water.

LADWP Strategic Initiatives reflect Religion of Woke-ism

Now that some of the basic facts are established, the reality is that one of the largest urban fires ever experienced in the U.S is in progress.  It looks like World War II-era firebombing in progress.  The severe water shortages, War on Dams, and ideological virtue signaling are well known in Governor Newsom’s California.  But Water and Power are essentially apolitical and based on science, fact, and best practices of civil engineering, correct?  A peek at the LADWP Strategic Initiatives refutes that luddite view.  Here are the four, strategic imperatives for LADWP:

  • Leading with Equity
  • Clean Energy Future
  • Resiliency and Reliability
  • Our Sustainable Water Future

What do these pithy titles mean?  They are abstract, street theater platitudes that disguise hard-core leftist retribution intended to collapse and destroy existing society.  People are dead and dying, and large swaths of Los Angeles are being destroyed because of this Religion of Woke-ism.  This Religion could not care less about facts, science, efficient delivery of public services, or reality. Earlier this year, Janisse appeared on a podcast with a title, “Why Equity is Key to Solving the Climate Emergency w/ DWP CEO & Chief Engineer Janisse Quinones.”  DEI hires are not focused on efficient delivery of effective services to all the Citizens.  Controlling these positions is another opportunity to weaponize government against the Citizen for angry retribution clothed in George Takai happy talk.

As Scott Adams has pointed out, “Having the wrong leaders with the wrong priorities gets you everything we are witnessing this week”.

Pervasive Public Service Corruption in Los Angeles and California

I’m all for highly paid Civil Servants. But, I believe in the Singapore Model, in which Civil Servants are highly paid, but in return are expected to perform with absolute fidelity, deliver outstanding results, and will be held to account for their performance.

And if they don’t meet these requirements, they get shown the door, or worse.  Quiñones has had a meteoric rise. Now there is a Biblical level disaster under her watch.  I’m not upset that Quiñones was able to negotiate such a healthy salary, but she should be held accountable, which also means a return of salary, fines, and possible prosecution.

If one has not been paying attention, the Los Angeles region, under a Blue monoculture, has been a cesspool of Public Sector Corruption for decades. Even the New York Times gets it right occasionally and says, “Prosecutors say that corruption is rising in California cities as one-party rule, inattentive voters and weakened news media have reduced the traditional checks on power”.  Chinese malign influence has been front and center in the pervasive corruption of California:

“A Chinese real estate company was fined $4 million and placed on five years probation (sic) Friday for bribing former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar with more than $1.5 million in cash, gambling trips and escorts in exchange for the then-councilman’s support of a planned downtown hotel project.

Although he was also charged, Shen Zhen New World I’s billionaire owner Wei Huang fled to China after the charges were announced and has never appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom in connection with the case.”

The DEI Cult brings equal misery, death, and destruction for all

Woke-ism and DEI are not about reconciliation, they are about retribution and intentional collapse of society – Marxist and Maoist core tenets.  Hosea 8:7 (KJV) is timeless in its guidance, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.

That’s exactly what is happening as Newsom was shifting into “Trump Proofing” California, whatever that meant.  The results of years of Blue, One Party is coming together in a cataclysm.  When everything is virtue signaling and the basics of math, planning, civil engineering, and agnostic, non-politicized science-based decision making is considered a manifestation of privileged culture, anything goes.  And when anything goes, anything goes and society collapses.

If Janisse Quiñones was able to negotiate a $750,000 salary, good on her.  But her focus has not been on the best delivery of services to the Citizens.  With her own words, she is focused on the wrong things.  Pay can be great for great leaders, but one has to take responsibility for the bad as well as the good.  $750,000 a year brought mediocrity and failure, and Janisse was the one holding the bag when the lights came on and exposed the corrupt nature of the Religion of Wokeness.  Time for her, and others in California, to pay up.

Offshore Wind is Bad News for New York and New Jersey

“may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy”

See the post below about Germany being dumbasses about the same thing. Use gas. It’s cheap and it isn’t killing whales or the environment. Those are lies made up by hypocritical zealots whose religion is green (money, not sustainability like Al Gore and John Kerry).

Drill baby drill and bring down the cost of energy, bringing down the cost of everything else. For those who worship the planet, watch and see that it won’t harm a thing. It will actually be better for everything except their wallets

Everyone knows this has been a boondoggle, even the left, but they’re so committed to supposed ‘green’ energy that they can’t let go.

From City Journal:

The Dark Side of Offshore Wind

A government regulator recognizing offshore wind’s destructive environmental effects is as rare as a North Atlantic right whale. But a recent, 600-plus page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) admits that the offshore wind development planned for the New York Bight—the triangular area bordered by the New Jersey and Long Island coastlines—may irreversibly harm whales, commercial and recreational fisheries, and seabirds.

The BOEM report is the agency’s first to evaluate the cumulative impacts of offshore wind development. Its authors cite a wide range of potential effects, from negligible (or even beneficial) to major. Acknowledging potentially “major” harms is a radical departure from the agency’s previously accepted Environmental Impact Statements for offshore wind projects, which have always focused on the impacts of individual projects, rather than the cumulative impacts of multiple projects.

The report, which BOEM bills as a “programmatic environmental impact statement,” admits that the proposed offshore wind projects on the New York Bight may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy. The authors note, for example, that the effect on the North Atlantic right whale could be “major,” defined as having “severe population-level effects” that would “compromise the viability of the species”—in other words, potential extinction. The report also concedes that the projects could have major effects (“substantial disruptions”) on commercial and recreational fishing, which contribute billions of dollars to the New Jersey and New York economies.

While the report discusses the consequences of these wind turbines on ocean views and even on local housing prices, it makes no mention of these projects’ adverse effects on electric ratepayers and economic growth. These effects are substantial, as New Jersey’s experience reveals. The state’s Board of Public Utilities estimated that its two approved offshore wind projects in 2024, with a total capacity of 2,400 MW, would raise the monthly electric bills of a typical residential customer by about $7, a commercial customer by about $59, and an industrial customer by over $500. Those estimated costs, which don’t include what those customers will pay for new transmission lines and the backup generation needed to offset wind’s inherent intermittency, cumulatively amount to more than a $750 million annual increase in electric bills for the state’s 8.5 million electric ratepayers. , based on the numbers of these customers. If the Garden State succeeds in its goal of developing 11,000 megawatts of offshore wind electricity, despite mounting costs and the cancellations of two major in-state projects, ratepayers alone will end up paying an additional $3 billion to $5 billion more each year for their electricity.

source

Germany Gets Dunkelf**ked Again, Norway to Dismantle Power Cables To Europe

What is it with Europe right now. The UK has gone Bats**t crazy and is converting to Islam faster than Iran, not this.

Another wind drought has led to soaring electricity prices across Europe. Norway, which exports power to its European neighbors, has seen enough.

Europe’s electricity prices soared on Thursday amid a wind drought.
Source: Alexander Stahel on X.

For the second time in a month, Germany’s electric grid has been hit by a wind drought, known in German as a Dunkelflaute. The lack of wind sent Europe’s electricity prices soaring to their highest levels since the end of 2022, when Europe was in the midst of an energy crisis due to concerns about supplies of Russian gas. That’s saying something since Europe — and Germany in particular — now appears to be amid a permanent energy crisis.

Yesterday, German consumers paid an average of $400 per megawatt-hour for electricity. During peak times, prices in Germany’s wholesale power market came close to $1,000 per MWh, the highest level in 18 years. Here’s how a reporter with Spain’s El Pais newspaper explained the situation:

Dunkelflaute is a cursed word in the German electricity sector. The combination, typical of cold anticyclones, of low temperatures (which increase demand) and the almost total absence of wind (which hinders wind generation) configures one of the worst possible scenarios for the price of electricity: it forces the burning of more gas in combined cycle plants, which are much more expensive, and that substantially increases the bill…The main factor behind this escalation is the lack of wind. While at this time of year Germany’s powerful wind power sector (onshore and offshore) usually averages almost 20 gigawatts (GW) of power, according to data from the specialist portal Montel, thus becoming the country’s main source of electricity, on Wednesday it will just exceed 3 GW. With the cloudy skies, solar photovoltaic power is also operating well below its potential and forces combined cycle plants — in which gas is burned to obtain electricity — to operate at a higher rate than usual, driving up prices.

The wind drought isn’t just hitting Germany. As shown in the graphic at the top of this article, electricity prices across Europe soared amid the wind drought. In response, Norwegian politicians are promising to dismantle the undersea power cables that connect Norway’s grid to mainland Europe to protect Norwegians from Europe’s tumultuous electricity market. Electricity prices in Norway, which gets 90% of its power from hydro, hit record prices this week despite having full hydro reservoirs.

According to the X account of Visegrád 24, a Norwegian news outlet, the two links that connect Norway to Europe will reach their technical lifetimes in 2026 and 2027. The two cables have 9 GW of exchange capacity, of which 5.1 GW connects to Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK.

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Hey dumbasses, gas is cheap and efficient. You bought the global warming lies and look what it is costing you.

Should Have Just Used Gas Or Coal – Now Pay The Piper

“Electricity bills in New England are poised to experience a sharp increase driven by the clean energy mandates in five of the six states, which require duplicative, overbuilt renewable energy.”

Connecticut ratepayers suffered sticker shock this summer when they opened their July electric bills. While their energy consumption was relatively flat, the “public benefits” component doubled for some and tripled for others. The culprit was not hard to find given a legislative requirement for utilities to itemize the cost components of monthly bills.

“Public benefits” cover the cost of subsidies the state provides for low-income electricity customers and energy-efficiency programs. They also include solar, electric vehicle, and other renewable energy incentives.

The wide array of renewable energy subsidies and aid to low-income residents who cannot afford high-cost electricity, growing everywhere, is an increasing cost burden for power users in the Northeast.

Connecticut: Worst of the Worst

The Northeast has become the most expensive region in the continental United States for electricity. Connecticut has the most expensive electricity in the 50 states outside of Hawaii. Connecticut’s overall electricity price for this September, according to the Energy Information Administration, was 27.08 cents per kilowatt-hour (ȼ/kWh), compared to Hawaii’s 35.46 ȼ/kWh.

When I worked in sustainability at IBM (a joke in itself there), the Northeast was the most smug and misguided about the whole energy/carbon/climate issue. Never have I seen so many smart people (inside and analysts paid by IBM) get an issue so wrong because of ideology.

Well, take your smugness to the electric company and out of your bank account.

Gas is cheap and efficient. It’s not the bogeyman that you made it out to be. You picked your poison, now drink it.

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Danes Add Cow Farting Carbon Tax To Their Already Highest Tax Rate In The World

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.”

The key details of Denmark’s plan include:

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.

Danish Dairy Farmers Forced to Pay World’s First Carbon Tax on Livestock

Is the Myth of Plastic Recycling Finally Being Exposed?

It would become historic.

On March 22, 1987, the barge Mobro 4000, loaded with six million pounds of garbage and towed by tugboat Break of Dawn, departed Islip, New York. It was bound for Morehead City, North Carolina — but never did dock there. Instead, it spent the next five months at sea, turned away by multiple states and three foreign countries. It became big news when journalist Dan Rather called it “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.” But another load of garbage was the story the media spun about it. In reality, no one would accept the Mobro because of a rumor that it was carrying medical waste. But that’s not the narrative the media pushed.

It advanced the notion that the Mobro’s fate was a result of a lack of dump space.

The “solution,” of course, was recycling. The timing was perfect, too, as there already was increasing public concern about waste. Oh, never mind that, as Reader’s Digest reported decades ago, 1,000 years of America’s trash could fit in an area 50 miles square (one m2 per state) and 200 feet high — the average modern dump’s height. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” and this one wasn’t wasted: The story helped catalyze the recycling movement. The Mobro 4000 might have been adrift, but recycling proponents’ ship had come in.

Of particular concern, too, is plastic, with stories of the material polluting our oceans. But what if plastic recycling is a myth, if not a scam, that is not only wasteful but environmentally damaging?

source

Yes, it is one of the biggest scams in history and you can read about how little it really matters at the link above.

Don’t forget that getting the guilty to recycle is no different than lining up the sheep for a jab. It is to get a group to behave the way the government wants them to act. In other words, it’s just another step toward socialism through behavioral acts of perceived service. Socialism is just one step away from communism, what the assholes in DC want anyway.

Don’t be a sheep. Throw it away, just not on the street. It’s cheaper to treat it as garbage than as recycling as you can read and you are not helping the environment by recycling.

The energy ideology on which the U.S. has ‘wasted’ $1.5 TRILLION

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

Exploding the Myths of “Green” Energy (Renewables Can’t Survive On Their Own And Increase The Cost Of Electricity)

As you read the proof that renewables is a farce, make sure to keep in mind the cost of EV’s.

American Experiment’s Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling tell you what you need to know to respond to ill-informed advocates for “green” energy. There is much more at the link, but here is an overview:

1. Renewables can’t survive on their own

The renewable energy industry is a subsidy-based industry, as wind and solar are largely dependent on lucrative state and federal subsidies. However, renewable advocates justify these perpetual subsidies by claiming thermal generators receive more subsidies than wind and solar. This assertion is not based on reality….
***
In 2022, wind and solar generators received three and eighteen times more subsidies per MWh, respectively, than natural gas, coal, and nuclear generators combined. Solar is the clear leader, receiving anywhere from $50 to $80 per MWh over the last five years, whereas wind is a distant second at $8 to $10 per MWh.

Poor solar energy! No matter how many billions the government pours down the solar rathole, no one has figured out a way to generate solar power after the sun goes down.

2. Renewables increase the cost of electricity

Renewable advocates often claim that the adoption of more wind and solar will lead to lower electricity costs, but the opposite is true. In a previous Substack, we wrote in detail about how utility companies with the largest rate increase requests in the country admit the energy transition is a major reason behind increasing electricity prices for families and businesses.

“Green” advocates fake the numbers for wind and solar by the simple expedient of only counting a fraction of their costs. This chart shows the actual cost of the various energy systems if all costs are included:

More

Electric cars pollute 1,850 times more than fuel-based vehicles, study finds

A 2022 study found that electric vehicles (EVs) which left-leaning governments in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere are pushing on the population, pollute at a rate far higher than their gasoline or diesel-powered counterparts. 

The 2022 study from the U.K.-based Emissions Analytics group found that during a 1,000 mile journey, EVs release 1,850 times more pollutants into the surrounding environment than gas-powered vehicles, due to the heavier weight which eats through tires.

While many think of emissions from exhaust, tire wear plays a significant role in emitting pollutants. The synthetic rubber used to create tires include certain chemicals that get released into the air, and because EVs are significantly heavier than conventional cars due to massive lithium batteries. 

Overall, EVs weigh about 30 percent more than gas-powered vehicles, and cost thousands more to make and buy. These issues are in addition to the fact that they are not suitable in colder climates (such as Canada and the northern U.S.), offer poor range and long charging times (especially in cold weather), and have batteries that take tremendous resources to make and are hard to recycle.  

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Predictably, The Demand For Electric Cars Is Imploding

Electric vehicles are not nearly as popular as their advocates would have had us believe, as sales are now slumping in the face of rising interest rates and a lack of so-called fast chargers. As we begin to bump up against mined mineral constraints and international relations complications, there’s no doubt the cost of making these glorified toys will continue to rise. A recent Consumer Reports publication shows that, over the last 3 model years, electric vehicles are less reliable than normal gasoline and diesel vehicles. So, several states want to ban the sale of reliable, inexpensive gas and diesel cars and force us to buy less reliable electric cars. Note well that the superior reliability of hybrids is likely down to the fact that car makers who are better known for their reliability make more hybrids. There’s nothing inherent to a hybrid that would make it more reliable than a gasoline engine vehicle. 

Even our ability to travel using air travel is under the gun. A CNN op-ed recently floated the idea of limiting air travel through the use of carbon (read: sin) passports. We will be limited to traveling based on the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during the flight. The author wants this applied to cruise ships as well. It’s not hard to see this applied to your car as well. Of course, such rules will not apply to the super-wealthy climate grifters. They’ll be jetting all over the globe for their very important climate conferences.

And it’s not just transportation. In September, Reuters “fact checked” a claim that US cities had agreed to limit meat consumption, finding the claim false. And yet, we are told on a nearly daily basis that eliminating beef consumption is necessary to save the planet. The sin of using coal (but not apparently to create steel) has become the sin of eating a steak. What’s next? Rice? Pork?

Beginning in 2024, the German government will empower local electricity providers to limit the flow of electricity to heat pumps and electric cars. Such limits were the stuff of alleged conspiracy theories mere months ago. Now they’re a reality. Germany’s suicidal attempt to power their grid with nothing but wind and solar, killing off their own nuclear power generation over the last 20 years, has led to energy rationing. It’s not as if this is unpredictable. The unreliability of so-called renewables is common knowledge among energy experts. 

It’s sensible for those who are concerned about their ability to choose where and when they travel, what they eat, and when they turn on their heaters and air conditioners to be skeptical of every single attempt to accrue more power by state and federal governments. That skepticism should turn into activism against these power grabs. Anyone who tells you these power grabs aren’t coming is telling you not to believe your own eyes.

Full story

Climate Hypocrites

Today’s example is Jeff Bezos. An honorable mention to Bill Gates. It’s people like this that makes me question their motives and the whole climate scam. Do as I say, not as I do.

Excerpts:

online critics torpedoed Bezos for reportedly traveling via helicopter to party on Bill Gates’ superyacht — just days before attending the COP26 climate summit in Scotland via private jet.

A spokesperson for Bezos told Observer.com at the time the billionaire used sustainable aviation fuel for his travels and pays for carbon offsets, which fund projects that reduce greenhouse gas pollution and cancel out carbon emissions generated by the trips.

Jeff Bezos — who has pledged to spend billions of dollars to help fight climate change — nonetheless owns a $500 million superyacht that generates thousands of tons of carbon emissions each year, according to a new analysis by Indiana University researchers.

The Amazon founder’s 417-foot sailing yacht “Koru,” produces an astounding minimum of 7,154 tons of greenhouse gasses annually — roughly 447 times the entire annual carbon footprint of your average American, the Indiana researchers found. 

“But because they are so rich and so powerful, they feel like they are entitled [to travel in carbon-producing superyachts], whereas you and I should drive less, should eat less meat,” she said. 

Boating industry experts have fawned over Koru’s “green” ability to travel via wind power, but Barros sniffed that Bezos’ three-masted goliath generates a slew of greenhouse gasses just by heating and cooling the vessel and powering the ship’s various over-the-top luxury amenities such as its sauna, pool and theater.

Bezos’ wealth insulates him from the impact of environmental crises, said Dario Kenner, author of “Carbon Inequality: The Role of the Richest in Climate Change.”

“There is an emotional and physical disconnect from the rich and climate change,” said Kenner. 

“The poorest people live closest to toxic air facilities, refineries, places where pollution is dumped,” he said, explaining land is cheaper in those areas.

Story

Because Who Wants An Electric Porsche 911 Or Ferrari?

I find this interesting because part of the thrill of one of these ultimate driving machines is the sensory overload. The sounds and smells are as much a part of the thrill as is the rush of being pushed back into the seat when you push down the loud pedal (accelerator for the under educated).

I’ve been to races for 6 decades now. You can smell the exhaust, tires and hear it before you get to the track. You don’t get that from a station wagon or an SUV.

Even if I lost my vision, I’d only not be able to see how sleek and fast they look. My other senses would say it’s a real car.

Fortunately, even though it is ridiculous E-Fuels, at least they aren’t going to plug in a 911.

I still open the window of my car just to hear them drive away.

Story:

With many automakers transitioning from petrol-powered vehicles to electrified ones, Porsche and Ferrari are pursuing a new strategy by concentrating on the advancement of eFuels to preserve gas-powered engines. This decision follows the European Commission’s delay last week of the proposed 2035 ban on new internal combustion engine vehicles as the commission prepares to carve out a role for eFuels after 2035.

“Porsche and Ferrari’s status as national icons was enough to move their governments to challenge the EU plan last week just days before a scheduled vote,” Bloomberg wrote. 

Germany’s Transport Minister Volker Wissing told the European Commission that he would withhold support for the approval of the new engine standards to end the sale of new combustion engine cars unless there were a plan for eFuels post-2035. Italy also threatened to fight the reforms.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday, discussing a comprise that would likely involve eFuels. 

Germany and Italy are home to the world’s top sportscar manufacturers. There has been growing opposition against Brussels’ plan to ban petrol-powered engines. That’s because who in their right mind would purchase an all-electric Porsche 911? 

The alternative route, mainly for sportscar brands, is the development of eFuels as a climate-neutral way to preserve combustion engines—just something about the sound of a twin-turbo V-8 or V-6 that captivates motorheads.

While most carmakers are pouring tens of billions into the EV shift, Porsche has also invested in an e-fuel plant in Chile, partly because the manufacturer doesn’t plan to make its 911 sports car with a plug. Operating combustion-engine vehicles in a climate-neutral way could also help speed up the decarbonization of the transport sector, according to a Porsche spokesman. Existing vehicle stock should be included in the push to lower CO2 emissions faster, he added. Ferrari has said it’s pursuing alternative fuels to keep making combustion-engine cars that preserve its heritage.

Proponents of e-fuels, say they’re essentially renewable electricity that’s been converted into a combustible, liquid fuel. To make it, scientists combine captured carbon dioxide with hydrogen that was split from water in a process powered by renewable energy, creating a synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. When burned in a combustion engine, the e-fuels create carbon dioxide. But since it was made from previously captured CO2, they argue it’s climate neutral.

We’ve outlined the growing resistance among vehicle brands and motorsport organizations that are firm in their belief the combustion engine will be sticking around for years to come. 

The World Now Using More Coal, Oil and Fossil Fuels

The gig is up on sustainable energy, even for the staunchest of supporters. Before the discussion begins on those who are having to scramble to get ready for winter, China and India are laughing. They are expanding coal mining and coal power plants and are the worlds largest polluters. Still, the weenies who bought the (money laundering) Global Warming story are going to pay the most this winter.

Update: China building more coal plants

Despite the fanfare surrounding wind and solar, the world’s dependency on fossil fuels is increasing. Last week, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said that the world is now “transitioning to coal.”

Saad al-Kaabi, Energy Minister of Qatar, says, “Many countries particularly in Europe which had been strong advocates of green energy and carbon-free future have made a sudden and sharp U-turn. Today, coal burning is once again on the rise reaching its highest levels since 2014.”

They are right. Global coal demand will reach an historic high in 2022, similar to 2013’s record levels. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Global coal consumption is forecast to rise by 0.7 percent in 2022 to 8 billion tons…. Coal consumption in the European Union is expected to rise by seven percent in 2022 on top of last year’s 14 percent jump.”

Coal will continue to be a sought-after energy source as “rising gas prices after 2030 will make existing coal-fired generation more economic,” the IEA says. Global energy demand will grow by 47 percent from now through 2050, and oil is expected to be the major source of energy.

Analysts are projecting “a huge gas-to-coal fuel transition in power and industrial sectors” of Europe. Yes, not gas to renewables, but gas to coal. In fact, the European Union’s coal consumption grew 16 percent year-on-year for the first half of 2022. European countries imported 7.9 million tons of thermal coal in June, more than doubling year-on-year. Annual coal imports are expected to reach 100 million tons by the end of the year, the highest since 2017.

Even in the most developed economies of the West like Germany and the UK, fossil fuels continue to dominate as the only dependable source of energy. Germany is set to become the third highest importer of Indonesian coal in 2023, ranked just below coal-guzzling China and India.

AP says, “Coal, long treated as a legacy fuel in Europe, is now helping the continent safeguard its power supply and cope with the dramatic rise in natural gas prices caused by the war.” Rather than wind or solar, it is coal that is keeping the lights on in Europe.

Source: WUWT

Germany just found out they’ve been lied to.

So the Greens lied to us about the nuclear power plant issue!

The Greens assured us again and again that it would not make sense to continue operating the nuclear power plants. We would have “no electricity problem,” said Economics Minister Robert Habeck, Environment Minister Steffi Lemke and Green Party leader Ricarda Lang, like a mantra. But that was a lie that was spread against the advice of experts: This is proven by 166 documents from the environment and economics ministries, which environment minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) had to hand over to the Die Welt am Sonntag and the Cicero on application [both are behind a paywall].

Explosive: Robert Habeck and his Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection refused to hand over the documents, which they are legally obliged to do! He wanted to cover up what Welt was able to prove anyway: the Greens lied to us in the nuclear debate — and neutralized experts who wanted to tell the truth.

The files show how Habeck and company put their crude anti-nuclear ideology above the security of supply in Germany: Against the advice of their own experts. Experts in Habeck’s ministry “obviously” considered the continued operation of the remaining nuclear power plants to be the right, sensible decision — Habeck ignored them. Just like the Ministry of the Environment, which apparently let a letter from the BMWK [Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection] experts go straight into the wastepaper basket, ignoring the words of the experts as well. When the head of the “Society for Reactor Safety”, which is close to the ministry, criticized the phase-out of nuclear power, he was quickly muzzled by State Secretary for the Environment Christian Kühn (Green Party) and was no longer allowed to comment.

From The Gates of Vienna

And now a Wind Farm in Germany is Being Dismantled to Expand Coal Mine

Vietnam’s U-Turn on Coal Reflects Inevitable Energy Reality

By Vijay Jayaraj

Ever since signing the Paris climate agreement, Vietnam has shown interest in reducing its dependency on fossil fuels, introducing in recent years a slew of measures to cut consumption.

However, in what is considered to be a major U-turn, Vietnam’s government announced last month that it will increase coal imports for the next 13 years.

Critics of fossil fuels, including most mainstream media, are out of sync with the world’s energy realities. They are consistently premature in their celebrations of the emission-reduction promises of developing nations like Vietnam only to see commitments yield to the need to meet growing energy demand with coal, oil and natural gas. Even developed economies like Germany and the UK have ditched — or suspended — grandiose plans for “carbon-free” utopias to fend off social unrest or economic collapse.

In a new strategy drafted to develop the coal sector, Vietnam’s Ministry of Industry and Trade says that it will increase annual coal imports to as much as 83 million tons during 2025-35.

This decision is a marked departure from ambitious emission-reduction plans that the country seemed keen to embrace, thus delivering another blow to the international campaign against fossil fuels.

Vietnam’s consumption of coal has increased rapidly in the last decade largely to generate electricity — from 27.8 million tons in 2011 to 38.77 million tons in 2015 and 53.52 million tons in 2021. Demand for coal is projected to peak at 125-127 million tons in 2030, mainly due to growing needs in power generation and in the cement, metallurgy and chemical industries.

For countries like Vietnam, there is no option but to increase fossil fuel consumption in the coming decades. Coal, oil, and gas together represent the most affordable, dependable, and abundant source of energy. In fact, a majority of the world’s primary energy comes from these fuels.

The favored technologies of climate alarmists — wind and solar —  cannot meet energy needs of large populations. What little electricity they do produce is intermittent and expensive. So, developing countries cannot reduce fossil fuel consumption without a significant compromise in power reliability and economic growth. The consequences of energy shortages due to the anti-fossil fuel stance is greater in developing countries where poverty is still rampant.

Coal consumption correlates closely to Vietnam’s growth in gross domestic product (GDP). The doubling of consumption between 2011-21 tracks with a steady increase in the rate of growth over the same period.

#NBADJT

Also, it must suck that Trump said this would happen if they relied on Russian oil.

How Biden Could Bring Down Gas Prices, If He Wanted To

I’ve stayed away from talking about Biden, like I stayed away from Trump. I’m not going to try to change anyone’s opinion of either, nor will I change mine. Politics is poison, so I’ll talk economics instead (OK, I’ll make a few sarcastic points because, that’s why).

I do see how this problem can easily be solved.

Today, the President announced that he’s opening up the strategic oil reserve to bring down the prices. This is little more than a band aid to a problem rather than a solution. That reserve was meant for a crisis, of which we are not in right now. By crisis, I mean an attack, an actual climate disaster like a hurricane or a non man made disruption in fuel production.

When taking office, he shut down production of fossil fuels via the Keystone Pipeline, Fracking and other independent (of other countries) production of oil. All was done in the name of sustainable sources and devices like electric cars. What is not said is that the generators of electricity are fossil fuel based, even for a Tesla. Also not said is we are not ready for decades to leave oil as a base for our energy and electricity needs.

Irony, hypocrisy and sarcasm, all in one.

The cynical me steps back and looks at the executive orders signed and it seems that Biden is just against anything the previous president did. Lots of presidents do that. One of them was energy independence. Recently, he asked the Saudi’s to produce more for us, although we have the ability to be the largest producer and exporter. They thumbed their noses at us.

To me, if you produce more, the price would go down. It seemed to work a couple of years ago and there is no reason not to have it work again. Stop the restrictions on fracking (which helped reduce our carbon footprint btw), get rid of the restrictions on fracking and get rid of the bureaucratic laws against our being energy independent and the price goes back down. It has nothing to do with production anywhere else, other than driving down the price worldwide.

It would be a step in the right direction of inflation reduction.

Tapping the strategic oil reserved leaves us with our pants down in the case of an actual emergency.

I’m pretty sure most who have an IQ above a grain of rice could see this and know I’m stating the obvious.

Do I expect this to happen? Not a chance. I lived through lines during the Carter years and expect the same to happen until production returns. It’s simple economics.

It’s time to put pettiness aside and do what is right for the people of the country. It’s not getting better than it was. Cutting fuel costs would be a good start.

It’s Not Easy Being Green, Or getting the evidence of Global Warming – My Short Tenure at IBM in Sustainability

Note: I’ve edited this to accurately represent what really happened at the Green and Sustainability effort during my tenure at this job.  It has died because once the fury of Green passed by, nobody cared about it.  That accurately reflects the real position by everyone in the company that I worked with except the executive who got paid for running it.  I don’t think he cared either once the assaignment was over because he moved on and it was dropped.

I was given a stretch assignment for Green IT at IBM this year.   A stretch assignment means you get another job without the extra pay, or layoffs just happened and a person now has to do the work of 2 since they don’t want to backfill, or the powers that be don’t feel like you have enough to do so they use this as retribution. In this case it’s mostly the second one because they know I can deliver when others can’t, so they dump stuff on me frequently.

I have a lot ahead of me, thus the title of this blog post.  The hardest thing about this assignment is that I know that IBM doesn’t really believe in it (and there is only a small faction of nuts in the company trying to get buy in). The entire premise is almost 100% hype for corporate responsibility and image rather than any actual product or offering.  I really wasn’t given a choice whether I wanted to do it and I certainly will do my job, but as you can see in the details below, it’s hard to believe in something when it’s based on bullshit.  I see through it and I know that TPTB are just being politically correct to avoid the (very small but politically damaging) social justice warrior hostage taking out there.

During the Major Analyst Conference we did in November, I had to get this nonsense into all the Smarter Planet materials to show (SJW and PC) compliance (so as to not get the Jessie Jackson-ish extortion treatment by the Al Gore crowd).  It turns out to be a bunch of nonsense that is made up to try to fool the press and analysts into thinking IBM actually does something in the Green space.

It all started out with trying to be politically correct about global warming, since IBM really isn’t and has the carbon footprint of China (or Al Gore’s 2 houses and jet setting around the world).  Now, everyone has started shying away from the words “global warming” once the world saw through that as a lie and ineffective, they renamed it Sustainability.  That means you wrap up all the things that tangentially have something to do with being sustainable, since it is a nebulous name and concept and voila, you claim sustainability.

Once the word sustainability gets found out as a fraud as part of the global warming and money grabbing hoax, you then call it Smarter Planet or roll it up into that campaign and somehow you are politically correct, even if you aren’t really doing anything different (which IBM isn’t).  We had to sell this crock to the press and analysts who wanted so badly to be able to charge extort us for pretending to  buy our baloney of offering something in this space that resembled eco-friendliness.  They were compliant in our scam as long as there was money.

The worst thing is having to deal with the idiots out there who buy into this Gaia religion like Tom Raftery of Greenmonk and James Governor of Redmonk and Greenmonk.  Our executives in a briefing after a different Green Day analyst conference in London actually called James a wanker and Tom a whiner after the event due to their outbursts and views as they interrupted the entire day.  Greenmonk has since gone dormant for lack of money, facts and believable content on climate.  Their credibility was shot when they wanted a carbon tax at a dollar a pound.  James told me the real truth was he wanted to make money while trying pretend that they were doing it to save the planet, making money being the operative words (see the above extortion tactics).  I put the Dilbert cartoon in specifically for O’Reilly, Raftery and Governer – the 3 stooges.

The net of it is that IBM is pretending to be a player in this shell game but is a pseudo player.  Fortunately, the analysts and press who are pushing it are just bully’s, but know as we all do that the evidence is not there, so they make up new stories when the lack of facts expose the wild goose chase de jour.

Too bad it is all a farce and IBM’s offering is equally a load of hogwash.

al-gore-fire-300x222

THE WORLD IS FLATTER, BUT NOT LIKE YOU THINK.

That is right, the real flat earther’s are the one’s who buy into this farce of “sustainability” like Greenmonk whose job was to suck around for money. Another dissembler Tim O’Reilly, who couldn’t defend global warming with anything other than “climate science is hard” (or I have no real facts so I’ll call you names), while condemning those who don’t believe in it wrong without any proof of his position was another nut I had to deal with.  None of either’s positions are based on anything but computer climate predictions of which none have come even close. they based their position on the IPCC report.  It now comes out that The IPCC; Never Has So Much Been Made Out of So Little by So Many at So Great A Cost.  In other words it was a money transaction that had nothing to do with climate other than earth worshipping. Any other “climate facts” are 50 years in the future, which is an even bigger joke since real meteorologists can barely predict the weather next week.  I could be convinced of global warming if there was one little thing called evidence.  What I find unfathomable is the lack of backbone by IBM to stand up to this money grabbing extortion theme by these pseudo experts.

As it turns out, I had tweeted in response to Tim’s crisis about the rising tides that I didn’t believe him, but would accept his facts if he had any.  Like all good climate warriors, he made ad hominem attacks on me and in a more harmless statement, said that I got all my information from Fox News (I don’t watch any news as my career with the media already told me that the press are biased). The only real facts about the state of Climate issues are found at What’s up with That unlike Tim who had no facts like all climate warriors.

As it turns out, the tides are receding Tim and here is the evidence. The waters on the island of Tuvalu (the tidal benchmark) are receding.  This is one of the crisis places of the world that was supposed to be drowned along with the Statue of Liberty.  So Tim, your views are biased and calling people flat-Earther’s because they don’t sign up for the pseudo science you have bought into is ridiculous, like your views.

Epilogue:

I got out of this assignment because I couldn’t lie for the company, nor lie to myself by doing something I didn’t believe in and realized was a lie.  It’s lost its mojo because both the premise of Sustainability and climate change are based on predictive models that aren’t true. The fact that IBM doesn’t really do anything (other that trying to keep up with the Jones) was too much for me to take, and claim any sense of honesty.  My credibility is more important than getting a paycheck for lying.  I’d never make it as a politician.

I left the position right before a green conference where Al Gore was the speaker.  It was the second time in my IBM career that I made a conscious decision to avoid him so as to not listen to his spew about global warming, nor be disappointed in humanity by seeing so many people being fooled by this scam based on redistribution of money to the climate warriors.

I told James that it was good that Gore wasn’t president on 9/11/2001 as he couldn’t lead a lottery winner to any bank (other than his bank account), let alone a nation in a real crisis.  Being a good liberal, he was offended since he knew it was true and couldn’t defend his hero.  He, like Biden and Cheney were only impeachment insurance for their respective presidents.al gore Horses-Ass-Award

So having to lie to defend Climate anything, especially at IBM when I understood the facts makes it hard to be green.  I’ve moved on to something I can be honest about.

The position went away as it became “under the guise of everything is sustainable” – (more lies) that we didn’t need a person babysitting it anymore.  The real truth is that it didn’t develop into an issue like diversity that a company could be blackmailed into payment or bad PR due to non-compliance.  It just went away as did the fake committment to global warming by my employer.