Plans to Slaughter 200,000 Farting Cows to Save Planet from ‘Global Warming’ Inbox thumbnail

Plans to Slaughter 200,000 Farting Cows to Save Planet from ‘Global Warming’ Inbox

/in , , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

It starts with cows..

if this kind of inhumanity and carnage is heralded as some kind of ‘benefit to planet’, their is a madness afoot. The ruling class has lost its collective mind and they mean to take us down.

In the latest effort to reduce emissions from agriculture, Ireland said it may kill 200,000 cows. Meanwhile, climate activists have American farms and ranches in the crosshairs.

By: Kevin Killough, Cowboy State Daily, June 02, 2023:

Climate activists are coming for livestock producers and farmers.

European governments have been targeting the agriculture industry for several years. The Telegraph reports that Ireland’s government may need to reduce that country’s cattle herds by 200,000 cows over the next three years to meet climate targets.

In an effort to reduce nitrogen pollution, Reuters reported the European Union last month approved a $1.6 billion Dutch plan to buy out livestock farmers.

Front And Center

Now the Biden administration is targeting American agriculture.

Special President Envoy For Climate John Kerry recently warned at a climate summit for the U.S. Department of Agriculture that the human race’s need to produce food to survive creates 33% of the world’s total greenhouse gasses.

“We can’t get to net-zero. We don’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution,” Kerry said.

Microsoft Billionaire Bill Gates also is obsessing about cattle emissions, providing financial support to companies that are developing seaweed supplements and gas masks for cows.

It’s ‘Groupthink’

Katy Atkinson, an agricultural advocate who raises cattle in Albany County, told Cowboy State Daily that this conversation on emissions from the industry isn’t considering the beneficial impacts of cattle to the environment and the climate.

“Groupthink happens a lot around the climate change conversation. We get tunnel visioned on one piece of it without considering the full ramifications of what’s going to happen if we remove cattle from the land,” Atkinson said.

She said cattle contribute to drought resistance, soil health and wildfire reduction. Just before cattle were introduced to North America and the industry began raising them, Atkinson said there were thousands of buffalo roaming the plains.

Cows and buffalo are both ruminants, which is a type of animal that brings back food from its stomach and chews it again. These animals’ digestive systems produce methane emissions. Today’s cattle population is similar in numbers to that of the buffalo herds.

“So, the methane emissions from ruminant animals aren’t anything new,” Atkinson said.

Trapping Carbon

Cattle also benefit plant life, Atkinson said.

“You need ruminant animals to forage grasses, because they’re the only things that can,” she explained.

Pigs, for example, are monogastric and can’t break down high fiber content in grasses. Cow’s digestive system can break the grasses down, and then they fertilize the ground.

So, through proper cattle grazing management, Atkinson said the cattle she’s raising are helping plants to grow.

In the atmosphere, the methane they burp out — most of it is released through the mouth of the animal — breaks down in 10 to 15 years into carbon dioxide and water. The plants that cattle help to grow use that carbon dioxide. The carbon then gets put back into the soil through the grasses’ roots.

“So the cattle are essential in helping to keep that carbon trapped in the ground,” Atkinson said.

Atkinson said cattle have other benefits to the climate that are being ignored in the focus on just their emissions. Whenever soil cracks or fissures, it releases carbon into the air.

The animals walking upon the soil compacts it and helps keep the carbon trapped in the soil.

She said one study done by the University of Florida found that between 10% and 30% of the world’s carbon storage is found under the feet of U.S. cattle.

Keep reading.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Lab-grown ‘meat’ worse for environment than retail beef: Study thumbnail

Lab-grown ‘meat’ worse for environment than retail beef: Study

/in , , , , /by

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

The lab-grown meat industry is propped up more by hopeful modelling than favourable data.

The high-tech utopia we keep hearing about will have to wait, if a recent pre-print study on laboratory-cultured meat products is to be believed.

According to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Holtville, “sustainable” meat alternatives have a carbon footprint that is likely “orders of magnitude” higher than retail beef based on current and near-term production methods.

Cultured meat production may be pumping out between four and 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef, according to the new research, which assessed energy use and greenhouse gas emissions through all stages of production.

If the study passes peer review, its conclusion would be damning: lab-grown meat, long touted as a clean, green alternative to the traditional butcher process, could be harming the planet more than the industry it’s trying to displace.

Truly, who could have guessed that growing meat in giant steel bioreactors using highly-processed pharmaceutical products would be worse for the environment than a herd of cows chewing grass?

The researchers did not rule out the possibility that technological advances that enable a move from using pharmaceutical-grade ingredients to their food-grade equivalents could eventually tip the scales in favour of artificially grown meat.

“It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media,” according to UCD food scientist Edward Spang.

However, the team’s findings suggest that in its current state, the lab-grown meat sector is propped up more by hopeful modelling (read: wishful thinking) than favourable present-day data.

Derrick Risner is another of the UCD food scientists who worked on the study. He wrote that their findings were important “given that investment dollars have specifically been allocated to this sector with the thesis that this product will be more environmentally friendly than beef,” adding, “my concern would just be scaling this up too quickly and doing something harmful for the environment”.

According to Science Alert, which reported on the pre-print study:

While cultured meat uses less land than herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, not to mention less water and antibiotics, environmental costs of the highly specific nutrients required to grow the product rapidly add up.

These include running laboratories to extract growth factors from animal serums, as well as growing crops for sugars and vitamins.

Then there’s the energy required to purify all of these broth ingredients to a high standard before they can be fed to the growing meat lumps. This energy-intensive, extreme level of purification is needed to prevent introducing microbes to the culture.

In their research, the California-based team also reviewed the most climate-friendly beef production systems already in operation today. They found that these outperformed even the best synthetic meat processes available.

The California researchers are not the first to have reached the conclusion that real beef is better for the planet than artificial alternatives.

A 2019 University of Oxford study published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems likewise found that the energy used to make cultivated meat could release more greenhouse gases than traditional farming.

Modelling traditional versus lab-grown meat options 1,000 years into the future, the team in Oxford concluded that synthetic meat would only be “climactically superior” depending on “the availability of decarbonized energy generation and the specific production systems that are realized”.

Reporting on the 2019 research, Vox summarised: “Yes, cows produce a lot of methane, and methane is very bad for global warming. Yet it only lasts in the atmosphere for a dozen years. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, lasts more than a century. And you know what releases a lot of CO2? Labs — including those that make cultured meat.”

So while start-ups in Silicon Valley continue to pour millions of investment capital into poor substitutes with a bigger carbon footprint than Betsy, do your part for the environment and order your favourite fillet next time you dine out.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Climate Czar Kerry: Emissions From Agriculture Must be “Front and Center” thumbnail

Climate Czar Kerry: Emissions From Agriculture Must be “Front and Center”

/in , , , , /by

By Bonner Cohen

Farmers and ranchers who assume that their main job is to produce food to feed hungry people stand corrected. John Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy on climate, wants to enlist them in the global struggle to combat the “climate crisis.”

“A lot of people have no clue that agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions in the world,” Kerry said during his May 17 keynote address at the Department of Agriculture’s AIM Climate Summit. “We can’t get to net zero, we can’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution. So all of us here understand the depths of this mission.”

“Food systems themselves contribute a significant amount of emissions just in the way we do the things we’ve been doing,” he continued. “With a growing population on the planet – we’ve just crossed the threshold of 8 billion fellow citizens around the world – emissions from the food system alone are expected to cause another half a degree of warming by mid-century.”

“Needs Innovation More Than Ever”

“This sector needs innovation now more than ever,” Kerry went on. “We’re facing record malnutrition at a time when agriculture, more than any other sector, is suffering more than ever from the impacts of the climate crisis. And I refuse to call it climate change anymore. It’s not change. It’s a crisis.”

“We need economic, social, and policy innovation in order to scale adaptation of these technical solutions and get them into the hands of the folks in the fields of small farmers on a global basis. This is the promise of AIM for Climate Summit.”

Farmers won’t have to wait long for the “innovations” Kerry mentioned to come their way. The Biden administration has already pledged to take an “all of government” approach to address the “climate crisis,” and they mean business. Every agency of the federal government – from the Pentagon and HUD to the energy and agriculture departments – are pouring taxpayer-supplied resources into ever-expanding climate programs. The Department of Agriculture is already exhorting farmers to adopt “climate-smart” policies when it comes to producing food. It is even dangling “climate-smart” grants before agricultural groups to get them to change their ways and grow food the way John Kerry and his ilk want them to do.

Though the Department of Agriculture has yet to elaborate on what it means by “climate-smart,” it most certainly entails the agricultural sector severing ties to fossil fuels, either “voluntarily” or through coercion in the form of regulations. But because of natural gas’s role in making fertilizer, the government-forced transition will be a messy one. Farmers in places as far apart as Sri Lanka and the Netherlands were ordered by their respective governments to shrink their carbon footprint by reducing their nitrogen emissions. Protests in the Netherlands have been widespread, and in Sri Lanka, the government was overthrown, with the president forced to flee the country.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

South Dakota Farmers Face Land Theft By Climate Hoaxers thumbnail

South Dakota Farmers Face Land Theft By Climate Hoaxers

/in , , , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

Appalling and terrifying. When John Kerry said US farm confiscations were not off the table, he meant it.

Read through this thread.

South Dakota Farmers Face Carbon-capture Land Theft

By: Rebecca Terrell June 1, 2023

Farmers in South Dakota are facing egregious intimidation tactics by a private company that wants to use eminent domain to confiscate valuable farmland for carbon-capture pipelines.

Summit Carbon Solutions requested a restraining order against Brown County farmer Jerad Bossly.

The company claims he threatened the lives of its representatives who showed up unannounced to survey his property, a farm that has been in his family for four generations.

He told The New American that when they arrived, he was about 12 miles away, working in a field. His wife was home, recovering from gallbladder surgery, and was taking a shower when the Summit surveyors knocked at her door. They entered the house, but finding no one there, they proceeded to an outbuilding where one of them walked in. In the tweet below you can see footage from one of Bossly’s security cameras, which captured all of this movement.

Next, the Summit staff walked out onto the Bossly’s property and started setting up a tripod. By that time, Mrs. Bossly, with Jerad on the phone, confronted them and asked them to leave. Jerad said that the sheriff should be present if the company wanted access to his land. So the surveyors left.

His wife called Jerad back later that day to say a detective had just left the farm. Summit had reported Bossly for threatening to kill the surveyors. They also charged him with contempt of court for interfering with their survey activities.

Keep reading.

It’s crazy to me because sinking CO2 into the ground is the opposite of basic science.

CO2 + Trees + Sun = Wood

How does anyone not know this?

— Phantom Shadow (@Fuknutz) May 31, 2023

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: DAVID BLACKMON: Is Texas Turning Its Back On Renewable Energy?

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Debunking Another Misleading Green Energy Study thumbnail

Debunking Another Misleading Green Energy Study

/in , , , , /by

By Jack Spencer

A popular talking point among green energy evangelists is that gas, oil, and coal are, in large part, successful because they are highly subsidized. Wind and solar, so the argument goes, would win in a fair fight, but, alas, the playing field is far from fair. But the supposed data they are drawing on to come to such a conclusion is misleading and geared more toward generating headlines than good policy.

A primary source used to back this claim up is a working paper presented by a group of International Monetary Fund authors titled “Still Not Getting Energy Prices Right: A Global and Country Update of Fossil Fuel Subsidies.”

The paper claims that hydrocarbon-based fuels—like gas, oil, and coal—enjoy $5.9 trillion in subsidies annually. Though often presented in the media as an IMF paper, it is specifically not an official publication of the organization but rather a working paper that is meant to, according to the IMF, “elicit comments and to encourage debate.”

Well, here is your debate, IMF.

As is often the case with so-called academic studies, the top-line number here makes for a much better headline than it does a basis for public policy. Indeed, even a cursory look into how the study came to its fanciful conclusions shows how misleading it ultimately is in general and how trivial it is for the United States.

There are three basic problems with the study.

First, it so broadly defines “subsidy” as to be completely meaningless. In fact, the study states that only 8% of its reported costs reflect actual, direct subsidies. The rest predominantly comes from the amorphous “undercharging for environmental costs” that supposedly occur from the extraction, refining, transportation, and use of fossil fuels. Such environmental costs include “underpricing for local air pollution” (42%) and “global warming costs” (29%). What’s left goes to the equally tenuous congestion and road accidents costs (15%) and forgone tax revenues (6%).

Though characterizing any of these so-called indirect subsidies as a pro-hydrocarbon bias is problematic, we will focus on the undercharging environmental costs, which are divided between global warming and local air pollution, because they represent the preponderance of their calculations.

The problems with the global warming number are many. For example, there is virtually no evidence that man-made global warming is having any costly impact on today’s world. The real costs, if one buys into global warming alarmism, come in the future—thus the study relies on the extremely tenuous and theoretical social cost of carbon calculations.

As my Heritage Foundation colleague Kevin Dayaratna has pointed out, the use of the social cost of carbon is so unreliable that it is virtually useless as a basis for public policy.

Second, the study presents its overall findings in global terms when the numbers only have meaning at local and regional levels. For example, the largest contributor to its bottom-line number is local air pollution. Putting aside the fact, as my colleague Travis Fisher points out, how easy it is to cook the books and exaggerate the assumed costs of things like small particulate matter in the air, the other problem is that regional variances for local air pollution are so immense that any broad policy conclusion, such as “tighten local air pollution standards,” would be irrelevant.

It would make no sense to apply the same policy response in the U.S.—where local air pollution levels are very low and getting lower—that you would apply to countries in the East Asia and Pacific region, where, according to the study, local air pollution levels are high. The study undermines its own credibility by presenting a cumulative, global number that serves no purpose other than to inflate its bottom line.

And third, the study provides no accounting for the massive contribution to human flourishing that has resulted directly from the use of hydrocarbons. This is perhaps the biggest problem with this study specifically, and the modern environmental movement more broadly.

The truth is that human well-being has skyrocketed in terms of wealth, health, and life expectancy since the Industrial Revolution, which was fueled by hydrocarbons. No statistic demonstrates this more clearly than the fact that climate-related deaths are down a staggering 92% since the 1920s, when the statistic was first recorded.

Nonetheless, the IMF authors took the time to give us their number on the alleged subsidy costs associated with gas, oil, and coal; so, in the spirit of fairness, a look at the benefits associated with fossil fuels seems appropriate.

Let’s break it down, and for the sake of consistency, all numbers will be adjusted to 2019 dollars. Prior to 1700, per capita gross domestic product (the sum value of all goods and services produced within a nation’s borders) in the West stagnated at around $955 per year. Today, the average North American can expect a per capita GDP of around $66,935.

While historians and economists may debate at the margins, most can agree that two things were key to this astronomical rise in economic production. First was the spread of free enterprise (thank you, Adam Smith), and second was the broad availability of affordable, scalable, and efficient energy (thank you, hydrocarbons).

For hundreds of years, people in Western nations made around $955. Then they started using coal, then oil, and then natural gas. Now, Americans make around $66,935. So, the average income, one could argue, has increased nearly $66,0000 as a direct and indirect result of hydrocarbons (using the same rationale as the study authors). That’s a big number, for sure.

Of course, the study authors took their localized numbers and globalized them. For the sake of comparing apples to apples, let’s do that for the United States.

There are approximately 331,900,000 Americans today. Had we stayed on the same GDP trajectory that we had been on for hundreds of years prior to the use of hydrocarbons, we would have a GDP today of around $316,964,500,000. Subtract that from 2022’s GDP of approximately $22.24 trillion and you get $21,926,692,686,448! That’s nearly $22 trillion in a single year in increased economic output and wealth due to free enterprise and the use of hydrocarbons.

Now, to be fair, let’s subtract the $5.9 trillion ($5.5 trillion in 2019 dollars) in alleged direct and indirect government subsidies for so-called fossil fuels that the working paper cites, which, remember, is a global number; it’s not just limited to the United States. When you subtract those alleged subsidies from the increased economic output, you still get over $16 trillion in direct and indirect benefits from hydrocarbon use. And that’s just for the United States—globally, the benefits would be immensely more!

Oh, and by the way, the environment—despite what the authors suggest—is getting better and better all the time, even with those pesky local pollutants that they pin 42% of their costs on. While some regions of the world do have work to do, the United States shows that gas, oil, and coal use and economic growth do not dictate poor air and environmental quality; and, indeed, Americans have enjoyed ever increasingly clean air for decades.

On its face, my benefits of hydrocarbons calculation could look like a version of the same screwy math used by the IMF working paper. That would be a fair critique. The point is, however, any broad assessment of the alleged costs of using coal, oil, and gas must also be paired with the immense benefits those fuels have brought all of society. When that is done, the only logical conclusion is that these fuels have made the world a better place for all of us, and any contention otherwise is about as valuable as a solar panel at midnight.

*****

This article was published at The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

Climate Lockdowns Begin: France bans short-haul flights ‘to cut carbon emissions’ thumbnail

Climate Lockdowns Begin: France bans short-haul flights ‘to cut carbon emissions’

/in , , , /by

By Marc Morano


Marc Morano comment on banning short airline flights:

“You were warned! This is what a climate lockdown looks like. This is what the Great Reset looks like. The climate agenda demands you give up airline travel, car travel, cheap reliable energy, and plentiful food. Net Zero goals are now dictating vehicle shortages to force more people into mass transit.

They’re going after your freedom of movement; they’re going after private car ownership, they’re going after everything it means to be a free person and turning it over to the administrative state.” 

By: Marc Morano – Climate Depot – June 1, 2023 7:33 AM

France Bans Short-Haul Flights to Tackle Climate Change

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65687665

France has banned domestic short-haul flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to cut carbon emissions.

The law came into force two years after lawmakers had voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours.

The ban all but rules out air travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, while connecting flights are unaffected.

Critics have described the latest measures as “symbolic bans”.

Laurent Donceel, interim head of industry group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told the AFP news agency that “banning these trips will only have minimal effects” on CO2 output.

He added that governments should instead support “real and significant solutions” to the issue.

Airlines around the world have been severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with website Flightradar24 reporting that the number of flights last year was down almost 42% from 2019.

The French government had faced calls to introduce even stricter rules.

France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.

But this was reduced to two-and-a-half hours after objections from some regions, as well as the airline Air France-KLM.

French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir had earlier called on lawmakers to retain the four-hour limit.

“On average, the plane emits 77 times more CO2 per passenger than the train on these routes, even though the train is cheaper and the time lost is limited to 40 minutes,” it said.

It also called for “safeguards that [French national railway] SNCF will not seize the opportunity to artificially inflate its prices or degrade the quality of rail service”.

France’s Ban on Short-Haul Flights Will Kill People – ‘You’re 2,200 times more likely to die when traveling by car as opposed to by airplane’

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/12/02/is-france-banning-private-jets-everything-we-know-from-a-week-of-green-transport-proposals

By Lottie Limb  with AFP  •  Updated: 23/05/2023

The idea for the ban originally came from a Citizens’ Assembly.

France’s ban on short-haul domestic flights comes into force 23 May.

Under a government decree, any journeys that are possible in less than two-and-a-half hours by train cannot be taken as a flight.

France is also cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys in a bid to make transport greener and fairer for the population.

Transport minister Clément Beaune said the country could no longer tolerate the super rich using private planes while the public are making cutbacks to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.

Which flights are now banned in France?

The law will mostly rule out air trips between Paris Orly airport and regional hubs such as Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux.

Critics have noted that the cutoff point is shy of the roughly three hours it takes to travel from Paris to the Mediterranean port city Marseille by high-speed rail.

As rail services improve, more routes could be added such as those between Paris Charles de Gaulle and Lyon and Rennes as well as journeys between Lyon and Marseille. They currently don’t meet the criteria for the ban because trains to airports in Paris and Lyon don’t allow passengers to arrive early in the morning or late in the evening.

Connecting flights are unaffected by the new law.

Train services must meet certain conditions to replace flights

The new law specifies that train services on the same route must be frequent, timely and well-connected enough to meet the needs of passengers who would otherwise travel by air – and able to absorb the increase in passenger numbers.

Could short-haul flights soon be banned in Europe? – In October 2021, Greenpeace demanded an EU-wide ban on any flights where the rail journey would take under six hours.  … Germany also has short-haul flights in its sights. While not banning or cutting back on them, the German government recently doubled the amount of tax levied on short flight tickets. Spain, meanwhile, has said it wants to eliminate all short-haul flights by 2050. …Austria has taken a similar tack: when the government bailed out Austrian Airlines during the pandemic, the carrier was ordered to stop operating its Vienna-Salzburg route so that customers could prioritise train travel instead.

In October 2021, Greenpeace demanded an EU-wide ban on any flights where the rail journey would take under six hours.

So how do you persuade people to take trains and coaches over planes? Well, one way is through banning short-haul flights outright, especially when there are valid bus or train alternatives. And that’s a route that several European countries have already taken – but could more follow suit?

A couple of years ago, a poll found that 62 percent of Europeans would support a ban on short-haul flights. In other words, banning them might not just be a good, environmentally-friendly policy. It could also be pretty popular.

France bans short-haul domestic flights despite widespread criticism – Travelers will now be forced to use rail alternatives as France seeks to reduce its carbon footprint.

Related: 

Bloomberg News: ‘No More Cheap Flights Is the New Reality for Air Travel’ – ‘As Climate Compliance Laws Get Stricter’

Bloomberg News: Airlines must have enough emissions allowances to cover every metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere on flights starting and ending in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland. … That is effectively going to double their carbon costs over just three years. … Over the next three decades, aviation has to transform itself from a polluting industry — planes are responsible for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions — to a net-zero one. …

The Great Travel Reset: No more cheap flights is new reality for Europeans – Net Zero holidays for the well-off only as ‘climate compliance laws’ get stricter for airlines

Meanwhile, China is still planning to expand its network of airports from 241 (at the end of 2020) to 450 by 2035.

Via Net Zero Watch: “Airlines face an expensive and challenging few decades ahead as climate compliance laws get stricter. … It’s the new reality for flying as airlines face a huge decarbonization challenge and tightening climate-compliance laws… Airlines must have enough emissions allowances to cover every metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere on flights starting and ending in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland.”

“Are we going to have to give up flying to save the planet? Many climate campaigners have been saying so for years, but now Sustainable Aviation – a trade body which represents the UK aviation industry – seems to agree, at least in the case of less well-off passengers.” 

The UK aviation industry seems to have nodded along with the idea that some passengers are going to be priced out of the air…Today, it has published a ‘road map’ showing how the industry intends to decarbonise, in order to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – in line with the government’s self-imposed, legally-binding target. It proposes that 14 per cent of emissions cuts will come from ‘demand reduction’ – i.e. potential passengers being put off flying by a rise in the price of airline tickets…The UK aviation industry seems to have nodded along with the idea that some passengers are going to be priced out of the air in order for Britain to reach its net zero target.

‘Puritans of the Green Deal’ promote ‘unworkable utopia’ – ‘For the first time since it began, the EU’s agenda is to impoverish Europeans’– ‘If their crusade succeeds, cars, meat, and seaside holidays will be for the rich, just as they were a hundred years ago’ … The Puritans of the Green Deal intend above all to reduce the consumption, rampant consumerism, and free lifestyle of Europeans. If they really believed we would be baked in twenty years’ time, they would be promoting nuclear power stations.

Get ready: In a declared ‘climate emergency,’ you can’t fly commercial unless it is ‘morally justifiable’ – Activist Holthaus sets rules for the ‘use for luxury aviation emissions in a climate emergency’

COVID lockdown: People ‘must make a declaration as to why they need to travel’ – Proposed Climate lockdown: ‘You can’t fly commercial unless it is ‘morally justifiable’

2021: Watch: COVID lockdowns morphing into climate lockdowns – Morano on Tucker Carlson

Watch: Morano on Tucker Carlson: We Will Go From COVID Lockdowns To ‘Climate Lockdowns’ 

Collapse of energy, food, transportation systems prompt calls for government nationalization of industries – Echoes 1930s push for Great Reset style reforms

WaPo touts report calling for ‘global tax’ on commercial flying (but not private jets) – ‘Would require’ global ‘centralized system to track passports’

WaPo: A report suggests a novel way of curbing climate pollution from air travel: A global tax on people who fly the most, with the proceeds going toward research and development into sustainable aviation fuels…The report from the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation recommends a frequent flier tax that starts on the second flight each person takes per year, at a rate of $9. It would then steadily increase, reaching $177 for the 20th flight in a single year.  … Although the authors didn’t attempt to include private jet travel, due to a lack of data, Zheng said that including a similar tax for those using private jets could further shift the burden to the world’s wealthiest consumers.

‘Rationing could save the planet’: UK celebrity Joanna Lumley calls for a return of war time restrictions in bid to tackle climate change – Rationing airline travel & meat

May 2021: Climate lockdowns!? New International Energy Agency’s ‘Net-Zero’ report urges ‘behavioral changes’ to fight climate: ‘A shift away from private car use…. upper speed limits’ & thermostat controls; limits on hot water & more!

Great Reset: WEF Demands Fewer Private Cars, Increase in Public Transport thumbnail

Great Reset: WEF Demands Fewer Private Cars, Increase in Public Transport

/in , , , , , /by

By Catherine Salgado

The insidious World Economic Forum (WEF) of the “Great Reset” is now pushing cities, countries, and companies around the world to adopt a new “scorecard” to encourage the expansion of supposedly “green” energy and public transportation, and fewer private cars. You will own nothing, you will ride public transport, and you have no say in the matter. You’re welcome.

WEF’s May 2023 briefing paper, “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility,” produced in collaboration with Visa, specifically states the goal to “reduce the number of vehicles on the road.” Why? People dependent on public transport are also dependent on those who control public transport. It’s all about reducing independence and freedom and increasing top-down control.

Recall that WEF is also working with at least two governments to roll out a digital ID required to do or buy anything. In China, the way a similar digital ID works is, if you say or do something the government doesn’t like, you are not able to travel anywhere or do anything. That’s exactly what WEF has planned for your future.

Indeed, public transport and a total absence of private cars for ordinary citizens are essential parts of WEF’s plan for how it wants the world to be in 2030. “It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car,” WEF wrote. Ah, paradise, where a single tweet critiquing the government leaves you transportation-less! In that same piece, WEF let the cat out of the bag about the stark reality of this supposed future utopia:

“Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”

Meanwhile, in its recent briefing paper, WEF says, “By 2050, almost 70% of people will live in urban areas.” The globalist push to make the vast majority of people live in cities, particularly “15 minute cities,” is all part of the vision I just quoted from above where everything is owned by the government. Control is easier in a city. In fact, WEF specifically demanded “more compact cities” in the briefing paper. Yes! 15-minute cities with an insane amount of surveillance and complete dictatorial control! All to save the planet, of course.

WEF went on, “electrifying private vehicles is not enough to achieve the emissions reduction targets agreed in the Paris Agreement on climate.” Of course, climate change alarmists have been wildly and consistently wrong in their predictions for 50 years now, but we should definitely trust them this time, right? I have noted many times how supposedly “green” energy is actually worse for the environment, and how it is impossible to produce enough electricity for modern societies using green energy, which involves destructive and toxic sources like windmills, solar panels, and toxic batteries. Yet WEF pontificated:

“Electrification needs to be accelerated in sync with a powerful push towards more efficient, accessible and connected public transport, improved infrastructure and priority for cycling and walking…It is only with a combination of these solutions that we can cut emissions to address the urgent climate emergency, reduce the number of vehicles on the road to make our streets safer and more accessible, all while transporting a growing urban population.”

That section was written by Visa’s “Chief Sustainability Officer” and WEF’s “Head of Urban Transformation.”

To ensure this utopian future happens, WEF is pushing a “user-friendly scorecard tool, trialled with cities and backed by the private sector, to help cities track progress towards shared, electric and connected mobility.”

Don’t be fooled—the climate alarmist movement is merely the tool for achieving a one world dictatorship, with your housing, transportation, everything dependent on the whims of the elites. That’s all WEF’s “scorecard” is about.

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

The Leftist Climate Hoax Agenda Is Buying Its Way Into The News thumbnail

The Leftist Climate Hoax Agenda Is Buying Its Way Into The News

/in , , , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

The news is a fiction much like your favorite episodic TV series. They manufacture a story, frame it, bring in the actors to sell it. Until America understands this, we are susceptible to manipulation and thought control.

By: Larry Behrens, The Federalist, May 30, 2023

Take a moment to consider the phrase “Joe Biden’s hard-hat environmentalism” that appeared in a recent Associated Press article. Examining Biden’s controversial energy policy and assigning it the positive spin of “hard-hat environmentalism” is something that makes sense as a White House press release or something from the Biden campaign, but not the AP, a purported objective carrier of the news.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.

One recent analysis found AP stories mentioned the phrases “climate change,” “global warming,” and “Climate disaster” hundreds of times since receiving grants totaling $8 million in early 2022. The stated purpose of the money is to fund the AP’s “Climate Journalism Initiative,” which would employ 20 new reporters to “transform how the AP covers the climate story.”

Perhaps it also funded the story that gave us Biden’s hard-hat environmentalism?

In another example from the story, former top Clinton adviser John Podesta is heavily quoted in his role as overseer of the $369 billion for green energy from Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act. The story fails to mention Podesta’s political operative past, including his unofficial title of “White House clean-up chief” during the Clinton years. Also quoted are the extreme eco-groups the Natural Resources Defense Council and Center for Biological Diversity. They are all given a lot of space in a story with a lot of reach.

As a wire service, the hard-hat rebranding from the AP will appear in thousands of newspapers across the world as news. We don’t know if the millions the AP received for climate coverage played a role in helping Biden rebrand his energy policy, and that’s precisely the point.

It is no secret that across the country, particularly in rural areas, newspapers are struggling to survive. It’s not unusual to walk into a small-town newspaper and find one person covering what used to be two or even three different full-time positions. The environmental left recognized this struggle and is now providing money and reporter reeducation to fill the void with its own version of the news.

It’s an ethically questionable but smart strategy that is paying immediate dividends.

As just one of many examples, the nationally recognized Poynter Institute recently offered $15,000 grants to reporters or newsrooms willing to cover the Great Lakes area with some eco-strings attached. Any reporter wanting in on the money will have to tell Poynter “A brief description of what they will probe, why they believe there is a story to be told, and how they plan to report the story.” Put another way, reporters must disclose what they cover and how they will cover it before the money flows.

The program receives “funding support” from the Joyce Foundation, and it didn’t take long to see who provides their support. According to documents filed with the IRS, none other than Bloomberg Philanthropies provided millions to Joyce — yes, as in billionaire and climate darling Michael Bloomberg.

By following the bouncing ball of eco-money, there’s a troubling pattern of a frontline journalism association offering grants to reporters, provided they disclose how they will report their stories, by using money that can be traced back to a billionaire with a big green agenda. If it all seems confusing, that’s because it was designed that way.

Proponents of the green movement are putting millions into grants to sneak content supportive of their agenda under the umbrella of news outlets. Sure, the first story or two may include a small disclaimer at the end noting how the story is part of a project funded by an organization. However, green funders put many layers between themselves and the final project to ensure their fingerprints are nowhere to be found.

Keep reading.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Without Economic Freedom, None of the Others Matter thumbnail

Without Economic Freedom, None of the Others Matter

/in , , , , , /by

By Paul Schwennesen

[One Fine Spring Day, Over the Phone…]

“Oh, and by the way, your background check says there’s a warrant out for your arrest.”

This is not, mind you, the kind of thing one expects to hear updating teaching credentials in a very staid University bureaucracy. Nevertheless, there it was.

“Oh?,” I retorted, a bit stunned. “Anything indicating why?”

“It says something about a zoning infraction?” the all-too-chipper HR Department lady replied.

“I’m sure it will be fine—it’s no issue for us, but we thought you might like to know.”

Why yes, yes I would.

It turns out that my little experiment in entrepreneurial civics had gone horribly wrong, and I was one short step away from spending time in the clink. I had, you see, committed the jailable offense of putting up a tent.  On my own land.  Without permission from the State. I won’t rehash the details but feel free to get the skinny here.

The long and short of it is this: our county sent us a nastygram some time back informing us that our AirBnB platform tent was strictly verboten without first going through the labyrinthian protocols of special use exemptions, business licensing, and building permits. We dutifully took the listing down and began the unconscionably dumb process of doing it the “right” way — Site Plan Reviews, public meetings, fights with a water district that wanted us to buy a water meter for a tent with no plumbing, the whole deal.

That all was bad enough, but somewhere along the line, a local county zoning official acting on the basis of an “anonymous tip” referred our case to the prosecutor’s office because she had been “told” we were still operating in contravention to guidelines.

I called her up.

“Can you confirm that there is an open arrest warrant in my name, on the basis of a zoning violation?”

“That is correct sir.”

“Are you telling me that I could be stopped at any moment and incarcerated, that I would be arraigned for a tent infraction?”

“Yes, sir, we have policies which you have not conformed to.”

“But didn’t I tell your office personally that we have taken the listing down, and haven’t we been working diligently with your own staff to get this thing resolved? Aren’t you even now reviewing the oodles of forms, maps, and requests we sent you?”

“Yes sir, but we were told you were still operating the tent as a rental, which means you are still in noncompliance.”

“Told by whom?”

“I can’t relay that information, sir.”

Ah. I see.

**Spoiler Alert**

I’m not writing this from a Platte County prison cell. It turns out that petty official X just needed to hear me say that I wasn’t breaking their rules, and she would call the prosecutor’s office and have the warrant rescinded based on “proof of compliance” or some such.

Everything, just as University Human Relations predicted, is “fine.”

Except that it isn’t.

There are two issues at stake here.  The first, of course, is a flagrant yet ultimately trivial matter of basic professionalism and due process — Platte County clearly has some deep house cleaning to do. But it is tangential to the much larger matter, which is that the bureaucratic indiscretions on display here can only occur in an administrative system that weaponizes regulations to consolidate power. This overregulation, in turn, is the inevitable outcome of our collective giveaway of rights to the forces of “planning,” “safety,” and “zoning.”

We have a real crisis on our hands in the form of basic property rights arrogation. In an age of “epic crisis,” it’s difficult to know which looming threats are real and which are hyped fantasy, but this one surely tops the list, if for no other reason than that it is so subtly devious: zoning rules have been quietly adopted nationwide and have led inexorably to administrative despotism and bureaucratic sclerosis. This isn’t just irritating red tape, it is a reflection of basic freedom lost.

Ludwig von Mises properly noted that economic freedom undergirds the rest of them:

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of what is called economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

And indeed, economic freedom has been dragged into the deep end by the dead hand of zoning restrictions. For a citizen to be forbidden from such a simple economic act as offering a tent for rent on his own land means that state administration has metastasized into an all-encompassing prohibition on economic activity more generally. Forbidding entrepreneurial ventures that have not been granted prior approval and design review by unelected officials is, practically speaking, state ownership of the means of production. This has enormous implications not only for the economic outlook of our nation, but for the broader freedoms it prides itself on.

The United States is on a precipitous plunge into the inky waters of a command economy. We have fallen from the top-tier of economic freedom indexes to 25th in just a few short years and the trend is getting worse. To fix this, it is high time to repeal vast swaths of local zoning laws and recover our rich heritage of Life, Liberty, and Property.

*****

This article was published by AIER,  American Institute for Economic Research and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

Biden’s ‘Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde Approach’ To Mining Critical Minerals Could Derail His Own Green Dreams, Critics Say thumbnail

Biden’s ‘Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde Approach’ To Mining Critical Minerals Could Derail His Own Green Dreams, Critics Say

/in , , , , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

  • The Biden administration’s policies limiting domestic mining of key minerals are hindering its effort to transition the U.S. economy to green technologies while increasing America’s dependence on China, industry experts and lawmakers told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
  • The administration has taken steps to block major mining projects in Arizona, Alaska and Minnesota, and has been increasingly securing supplies for critical minerals from foreign partners, according to Axios.
  • “I cannot understand why this administration wants to lock in Chinese dominance of mineral supplies instead of investing in a secure, domestic supply chain,” Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia told the DCNF.

President Joe Biden’s mining policies run counter to his efforts to transition the U.S. economy to green technologies while increasing the industry’s dependence on China, industry experts and lawmakers told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Although the White House in 2022 called for “responsible mining” in the U.S. to reduce reliance on Chinese minerals, the administration has taken steps to block major mining projects in Arizona, Alaska and Minnesota, often citing environmental impacts. China currently dominates the supply chain for most minerals necessary for electric vehicles and other green technologies like solar panels, holding a near-monopoly on processing of cobalt, lithium, graphite, manganese and nickel, according to a report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), an energy think tank.

Despite pressure from a bipartisan group of senators, the U.S. Geological Survey recently declined to name copper a critical mineral — a designation that would prioritize permits for mining projects — a move that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said would have significant negative consequences for national security and run counter to the administration’s interests, in a statement to the DCNF.

“I cannot understand why this Administration wants to lock in Chinese dominance of mineral supplies instead of investing in a secure, domestic supply chain,” Manchin — a frequent sparring partner with the administration over climate issues — said. “Copper remains vital to our energy security and economic growth, and the United States cannot remain the superpower of the world without a strong domestic supply chain. … If a mineral isn’t listed until after we are already dependent on foreign suppliers, it will be too late — as illustrated by our current dependence on China for many of the minerals in electric vehicles.”

President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, will support the green manufacturing and energy industries with an estimated $1.2 trillion in government funding — more than three times the government’s initial estimates — and incentivize some $3 trillion in private investments, according to analysts from Goldman Sachs. To support this massive spending spree, the Biden administration has secured deals with more than a half dozen foreign countries to develop a mineral supply chain, a strategy that the National Mining Association — a trade group representing U.S. mining companies — criticized for using “short-term band-aids” while ignoring “long-term, systemic supply chain problems,” in a statement to the DCNF.

The Biden Administration continues to stop U.S. mining and U.S. jobs. Instead, Biden wants more reliance on Chinese critical minerals and materials. This is un-American.https://t.co/7OaONq2ePY

— Congresswoman Debbie Lesko (@RepDLesko) May 23, 2023

“Unfortunately, we are hearing more about U.S. deals to source minerals overseas than we are about mining projects being approved here at home,” NMA spokeswoman Ashley Burke told the DCNF. “America’s growing domestic mineral needs have led us to the highest mineral reliance in our country’s history, yet the administration seems to be doubling down on this glaring and growing vulnerability and placing obstacles in the way of domestic production instead of removing them.”

Dan Kish, a senior fellow at the IER, described the administration as having a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde approach” to mining, simultaneously pushing to “electrify everything … driving demand up” while making it “harder and harder” to develop minerals in the U.S., in a statement to the DCNF. He estimated that electric vehicles require roughly six times as much critical minerals compared to their traditional gas-powered counterparts, and anticipates that the increased demand amid limited supply would likely push up mineral prices.

“As mineral demand is skyrocketing, the Biden Administration has banned mining in my northern Minnesota district as well as in Alaska and Arizona,” said Republican Rep. Pete Stauber of Minnesota, referencing the administration’s efforts to effectively kill  the Twin Metals mine in the state. “Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is insistent on making America reliant on global supply chains controlled by unfriendly actors and continues to look abroad for minerals which threatens our national security. This Administration signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Congo where child slave labor is used and the Chinese Communist Party controls 15 of 19 major mines. This is immoral and insulting.”

Chinese Communist Party-linked Ganfeng Lithium is the largest shareholder of the Canadian firm Lithium Americas, which received approval by the Trump administration to operate the Thacker Pass mine, the largest known source of lithium in the U.S. and third largest in the world. The company began construction on the Nevada mine in March after its approval was upheld by a federal judge in February, pending a final environmental review by the Biden administration.

In an early May Senate hearing, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland defended the administration’s efforts to block domestic mining projects because it was protecting “valuable” ecological resources and appeared to be on the verge of tears over climate change in late April when defending the administration’s push for green energy. Haaland had previously refused to say whether she believed it was better for the U.S. to produce oil domestically, or import it from foreign sources.

Beyond supply chain concerns, President Biden’s push to transition the nation to primarily use green manufacturing and energy sources is running headlong into real estate concerns, as states hurry to prepare the massive sites necessary to sustain such projects. Despite this, the Environmental Protection Agency in recent months has proposed a series of aggressive emissions standards that will push the electrification of America’s passenger car and trucking fleets and lead to the shutdown of noncompliant coal and gas-fired power plants by 2040.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan at the time praised the administration’s vehicle standards for being “readily achievable” thanks to the president’s “Investing in America agenda” that will “secure America’s global competitiveness.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a DCNF request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘We’re Not Expecting Anything Good’: Oil Drillers Brace For Biden’s New Rules

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The Great American Electric School Bus Boondoggle thumbnail

The Great American Electric School Bus Boondoggle

/in , , , , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

Washington, D.C. could use another fiscal hawk like the late Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin.

During his Senate career from 1957 to 1988, Proxmire instituted a regular Golden Fleece Award, with which he mocked “the biggest, most ridiculous or most ironic example of government spending.”

Among his infamous recipients was the Department of Justice, receiving the award for conducting a study on why prisoners desire to escape.

Another honoree was the U.S. Postal Service, spending $4 million on an ad campaign urging Americans to write more letters.

In today’s government borrow-and-spend climate, Proxmire would find an embarrassment of riches for his satirical accolades. Here’s one that would surely join the ranks:

In the hardy fishing, timber, and tourism town of Wrangell, Alaska, the school district had the idea to apply for a federal grant for a new electric school bus. With the Environmental Protection Agency distributing nearly $1 billion in these electric school bus grants last year, it was raining money.

In October, the Biden Administration awarded $395,000 to Wrangell for the purchase of the electric bus, intended to expedite the transition to zero-emission vehicles and foster “cleaner air in schools and neighboring communities.”

Here’s the rub: Most students in this Alaska town can walk to school or catch a ride with an older sibling or parent who works at the school. Wrangell, with its 2,100 souls and only about 25 miles of road, has a school system serving 263 students and two school buses. And there are no neighboring communities in Wrangell, unless you get on a ferry or a plane.

As for the clean air aspect, Wrangell boasts some of the cleanest air in America. It’s situated in the middle of the nation’s largest national forest, the Tongass, which is the size of Virginia yet has a population of only 70,000 across its numerous islands and archipelagos. Between the millions of carbon-capturing trees and millions of acres of carbon-absorbing ocean, Wrangell is in a rainforest that is already on hydro power. It’s not belching much of anything into the air, which is swept clean by ocean breezes.

But somehow Wrangell, in spite of its voters’ overwhelming preference for President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, won a grant from the Biden Administration.

Its success was due to the fact that more northern communities in Alaska can’t use electric buses, as their batteries just don’t last in the cold winters, and the last thing communities need is to have a bus full of children break down in sub-zero blizzards. For most of Alaska, electric vehicles don’t make sense.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski was euphoric. After all, Wrangell is where her father, former Sen. Frank Murkowski, and his wife, Nancy, live. She brought home the bacon.

“Congratulations to the Wrangell School District for being a recipient of the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Wrangell’s new electric school bus will enhance the district’s ability to operate efficient and safe bus routes. I am thrilled to witness Alaskan communities reaping the benefits of my bipartisan infrastructure law,” she said in a statement.

The projected cost of the new electric bus is $375,000, with an additional $20,000 designated for a charging station.

Thus, the nearly $400,000 to transport even half of those 263 students pencils out to $1,500 per student. That $400,000 amounts to 8% of the district’s annual $5 million operating budget.

This alone would qualify it for Proximire’s Golden Fleece Award, although “Golden Fleet” would also be appropriate.

But then, an unexpected hurdle arose: The EPA grant stipulates that the bus company must dispose of one of its diesel-fueled buses. Not a mere sale or decommissioning of the bus, but complete destruction was required.

Taylor Transportation, the company that has the bus contract in Wrangell, questioned the wisdom of destroying a perfectly functional school bus from its fleet.

With the clock ticking, the district approached the EPA with a proposal: Could Wrangell purchase a bus in another jurisdiction, destroy it, present evidence of its destruction to the federal agency, and subsequently qualify for the grant for the new electric bus?

The EPA saw no apparent obstacles to this unconventional workaround.

For the past few weeks, Wrangell scoured other states for a bus that fit EPA’s criteria, which includes that the bus must have served as a functional student transporter for the last two years.

In other words, the bus Wrangell buys and destroys cannot be the dilapidated remnants of a Burning Man excursion.

In addition, not just any method of destruction will suffice. The EPA has regulations governing the disabling of a diesel school bus—no cliffs can be involved, for instance.

Sen. Proxmire would revel in the circus that is this wasteful endeavor.

Within the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, bizarre trinkets like this abound for every community across America, enough to keep Golden Fleece Awards going for years.

Regardless of party, we need more fiscal hawks like Proxmires and fewer spendthrift Murkowskis in the Senate.

We need senators who will put their foot down on wasteful spending, not put their foot on the gas for borrowing against the futures of our children.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

SUZANNE DOWNING

Suzanne Downing is publisher of Must Read Alaska.

RELATED ARTICLES:

STAR PARKER: The Do-Nothing Democrats Want To Pay You To Not Work

DAVID BLACKMON: The Supreme Court Just Voted Unanimously To Rein In Biden’s EPA

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Does ‘Net Zero’ make sense? thumbnail

Does ‘Net Zero’ make sense?

/in , , , , /by

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Do the maths. The figures don’t add up.

A lot of people are worried about climate change and global warming. Who can blame them? We are constantly told that global climate catastrophe is only a few years away or that “time has quite literally run out” as then Prince Charles did at COP26 in 2021. “Our world is burning” warnings by prominent leaders such as UN Secretary General Guterres are giving high school students a new kind of mental health trauma – eco-anxiety.

Politicians have responded by promising to stop climate change by reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Their goal is to cap global warming at a 1.5°C increase over temperatures in pre-industrial times (1850-1900).

Spoiler alert! They are going to fail.

Why? There are two powerful reasons. (1) CO2 has not been the primary driver of temperature through time. (2) Natural forces such as Milankovitch Cycles have much more influence than the contribution of CO2. The solar forcing above 65º N latitude, the usual measure of the Milankovitch influence, can swing back and forth by as much as 100 W/m2 (see here and graph a here). This is significantly more than a 3 W/m2 increase that would result from doubling today’s CO2 level of 420 ppm, which would “have an inconsequential effect on global temperature.”

Thinking that we can stop climate change which has been going on for millions of years is like thinking that we can stop the movement of tectonic plates. And, by the way, these also contribute to climate change.

Net Zero is the proposed solution. Here’s how the United Nations explains the concept:

Put simply, Net Zero means cutting greenhouse gas emissions to as close to zero as possible, with any remaining emissions re-absorbed from the atmosphere, by oceans and forests for instance …

To keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement – emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach Net Zero by 2050.

Transitioning to a net-zero world is one of the greatest challenges humankind has faced. It calls for nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, consume, and move about. The energy sector is the source of around three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions today and holds the key to averting the worst effects of climate change. Replacing polluting coal, gas and oil-fired power with energy from renewable sources, such as wind or solar, would dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

But upon close inspection, Net Zero makes little sense.

Let’s look at the second largest emitter of GHGs, the USA, and one of the smallest, the City of Toronto, Canada where I live.

Net Zero for the United States

US Senator for Louisiana John Kennedy recently questioned Department of Energy Deputy Secretary David Turk about Net Zero. The exchange is highly revealing. Astonishingly, Mr Turk was unprepared for basic questions and kept talking about “orders of magnitude” and “getting our act together”. Senator Kennedy said that some of Mr Turk’s colleagues had mentioned US$50 trillion as the cost of fighting climate change.

Global warming is the largest scam in human history. pic.twitter.com/NDxwVbBPMG

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) May 5, 2023

With a bit of math and science, you can figure out for yourself whether American taxpayers are going to get bang for their bucks. Sharpen your pencil. It’s not hard.

There are three sources of temperature data: ground stations, weather balloons, and satellites.

Satellite data tell us that our atmosphere is warming at 0.13 ℃ / decade or 0.013 ℃ / year. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated, “For the decade 2011–2020, the increase in global surface temperature since 1850–1900 is assessed to be 1.09 [0.95 to 1.20] °C” (p. 41 here). Therefore, the IPCC range of warming is 0.0056 ℃ / year to 0.011 ℃ / year.

Let’s take the high end of the warming — 0.01 ℃ / year. Warming is due to natural causes and to GHGs; from 1850 to 2020 natural causes and GHGs have accounted for about 58% and 42% of warming respectively (footnote 4 here); let’s assume it’s 50/50. The US produces 13% of global GHGs. The human contribution to global warming will decrease every year until we hit Net Zero; the correction factor for that is ½. Lastly, there are only 27 years to go until 2050, the date for global Net Zero.

Multiply those numbers and you’ll get 0.009 ℃ (.01 x 0.5 x 0.13 x 0.5 x 27 ≃0.009). That’s the number that Senator Kennedy was asking for. In other words, American taxpayers will spend $50 trillion (about $150,000 per person) to avoid 0.009 ℃ of warming.

A high school student could tell you that this makes no sense.

When the New York State Legislature became the first US state to ban gas stoves and furnaces in most new buildings to reduce global warming, were its members aware of these facts?

And bear in mind that China, the world’s largest contributor to GHGs, could make America’s Net Zero target irrelevant. Premier Xi Jinping has promised that China will reach Net Zero by 2060. Given the unpredictability of China’s politics and economy, that seems impossibly ambitious. The Climate Action Tracker rates China’s Net Zero efforts as “highly insufficient”. It doesn’t have a great track record. While the US reduced its share of global GHG emissions from 2005 to 2019 from 17.3% to 12.5%, China’s share rose from 18.7% to 26.4%.

Toronto’s Net Zero

In 2019, City of Toronto Council voted unanimously to declare a climate emergency and committed to achieving Net Zero by 2040, one of the most ambitious Net Zero targets in North America. A news release stated:

“Toronto is joining more than 800 cities around the world in acknowledging the scale of the climate crisis including Amsterdam, Auckland, Barcelona, Edmonton, London, Los Angeles, Montréal, New York City, Ottawa, Paris, San Francisco, Sydney and Vancouver.”

As of today, 2,335 jurisdictions around the world have declared a climate emergency. Could the governments of so many big cities spanning the globe all be wrong? Yes, it is possible, especially if their politicians didn’t ask probing questions like Senator Kennedy did. Groupthink can lead to bad decisions.

To illustrate how sweeping this policy is, Toronto will use “a climate lens that evaluates and considers the climate impacts of all major City of Toronto decisions, including financial decisions” (see para 6.e here). This means in effect that reducing GHGs will outweigh all other criteria and considerations during the budget preparation process.

In December 2021, Toronto City Council adopted the ambitious TransformTO Net Zero Strategy cementing its commitment to GHG reduction. An April 2023 TransformTO update stated, “The Carbon Accountability Report also establishes a science-based corporate policy on offset credits aligned with Net Zero governance best practices, which will continue Toronto’s leadership in this rapidly developing space.”

Got that? Let’s take a closer look at this so-called “science-based” leadership.

Since Canada emits 1.5% of global GHG emissions, and Toronto has approximately 7.6% of Canada’s total population, we know that Toronto emits about 0.11% of global GHG emissions (.015 x .076 = .0011). Do the math as described above, and you’ll see that Toronto’s GHG emissions contribute about 0.000006 ℃ / year to global warming (.01 x .5 x .0011 ≃ 0.000006).

Toronto’s Net Zero Cost

Let’s now look at how much TransformTO Net Zero costs and bring it all together. For some perspective, Toronto’s 2023 operating budget is C$16.16 billion, and its capital budget is C$49.26 billion. TransformTO 2022 Annual Report: Laying the Foundation for Net Zero states: “the total investment required by the entire community, that is, the City corporation, the business community, other levels of government, and individual residents, is $145 billion.” Some of that will be spent on “climate resilience” measures that will not reduce GHGs.

Think about this for a minute. C$145 billion will be spent to avoid 0.00005 ℃ of global warming (0.000006 x 0.5 x 17 ≃ 0.00005).

The impact to Earth’s climate will be negligible, but the cost to Toronto and other levels of government will be huge, because money spent on Net Zero is money that could have been spent solving real problems related to health care, homelessness (declared an emergency in Toronto), education, etc.

This is not to say that we should never pursue green energy solutions. For example, the Toronto Transit Commission studied the deployment of e-buses. In comparison to a diesel fleet, the study concluded, “In 2040, when the capital costs and operating savings have normalized, the annual savings is projected to be $253.6 million.”

These significant savings would be in addition to reduced noise and cleaner air. Who could argue with that?

It’s likely, however, that the anticipated benefits of a successful deployment of an e-bus fleet will be conflated with the GHG reduction that will come from phasing out a diesel fleet, but those are two different things. The former is beneficial and consequential whereas the latter is not. Perhaps astonishingly, according to the CO2 Coalition, “People should be celebrating, not demonizing, modern increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). We cannot overstate the importance of the gas. Without it, life doesn’t exist.”

Politicians will try to present themselves as having accomplished something important with the reduction of GHGs, especially CO2, but they are setting themselves up for failure. The green energy sector will make megabucks, but not the rest of us. As they say, “Follow the money.”

We need to look after our environment and respond to climate change in more sensible ways, keeping in mind that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not involved in the production of smog.

Does your country, state, or city have a Net Zero program? If so, do the math and write to your elected representative with your concerns. Those numbers will communicate a powerful story.

AUTHOR

Fabiano Micoli first learned about A.P. Coleman’s contribution to climate science during a bicycle ride that took him through the Don Valley Brickworks. Fabiano has a B.Eng. (mechanical), MBA, and B.Ed…. More by Fabiano Micoli

RELATED ARTICLES:

STUDY: Only 12% of Atmospheric CO2 Added Since 1750 Is Man-Made, ‘Too low to be the cause of global warming’

DAVID BLACKMON: The Supreme Court Just Voted Unanimously To Rein In Biden’s EPA

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Yes, climate change is making people depressed and angry – but not for the reasons you might think thumbnail

Yes, climate change is making people depressed and angry – but not for the reasons you might think

/in , , , , /by

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Scaring readers out of their wits is not part of the job description of the American Geophysical Union.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), founded in 1919, is possibly the world’s premier association of earth scientists, and numbers among its members many leading climate experts. I had the privilege of attending its annual Fall Meeting last December, held in Chicago, and I have never seen such a large concentration of scientific expertise in one place before.

The AGU publishes a science-newsmagazine called EOS, which summarizes technical and political developments of interest to the 65,000 or so members of the organization. I mention “political” because of the many scholarly publications I receive, EOS seems to be one of the most “woke.”

A good case in point is the article in the May 2023 issue of EOS with the title “The Mental Toll of Climate Change.” A notice at the head of the article reads, “Content Warning: This article discusses suicide and potential risk factors of suicide.” The author, Katherine Kornei, a science writer, interviewed mental-health providers and an “environmental psychologist” to explore the stresses brought on by both acute weather events (such as floods, tornadoes, and wildfires) and chronic issues (such as droughts and heat waves). And all these things are directly linked by the author to climate change. The few hard-science citations in the article referred to reports and papers that reinforce the notion that basically, anything that happens weather-wise that we don’t like is due to climate change.

Lest you think that an exaggeration, consider the first such citation. “In July 2018, an unprecedented heat wave in Japan killed more than a thousand people; researchers later showed that the event could not have happened without climate change.” This is a bold assertion, so I looked up the paper in question. It was authored by several meteorological researchers in Japan, who used statistical distributions based on a climate model which they admit (in another paper, which I had to track down) ignores atmosphere-ocean interactions and is useful only for modelling periods of up to a few years.

But to a science writer, their paper title (“The July 2018 High Temperature Event in Japan Could Not Have Happened without Human-Induced Global Warming“) was too tempting to resist. Here are a bunch of credentialed scientists saying that this deadly heat wave was the direct result of human activity. Only when one digs down into the details, as I did, does one find that the model they use leaves out essential features. Pretending the atmosphere doesn’t interact with the ocean may simplify a model, but it ignores well-known phenomena that can completely transform a model’s behaviour. And as Steven Koonin pointed out in a book I mentioned recently (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters), to say anything meaningful about climate means that you need to take at least 30-year averages of data. A program that can only look at five years’ worth of data is useless for predicting climate events, although I’m sure it has enough free parameters to allow the researchers to obtain the results they wanted, namely, that the heat wave couldn’t have happened without climate change.

The rest of Kornei’s mental-health piece describes how “angry, baffled, and horrified” many people are when they hear that (a) climate change is soon going to bring civilization to a horrible end as we bake, freeze, drown, and/or blow away, and (b) there’s nothing we can do about it, or if we do we’ll have to go back to subsistence farming with mules and give up electricity and driving.

Well, if I really believed both of those statements, I’d be angry, baffled, and horrified too. Unfortunately, as Koonin points out in his book, climate scientists have joined forces with government leaders, commercial interests, and science journalists to paint this dismal picture, which Koonin, as an insider, says is highly distorted, to say the least.

Tackling the worst problem first, there is no logical way that any statistical model, even a good one (which the Japanese model is not) can “prove” a given weather event would not have happened without global warming. The only way you can do that is to have two identical Earths going exactly the same way till about 1800 AD and then let one exploit fossil fuels and keep the other one from doing so, and see what differences arise in the weather patterns. This experiment is impossible to do, and while essentially perfect climate and weather models could simulate such a thing, we are probably decades away from having such models, if indeed they can ever be made.

This leads to the second and more serious problem, which is that experts have irresponsibly given in to the temptation to go with the politically favourable climate-catastrophe narrative in flagrant violation of the principle of not venturing beyond your data. The Japanese report is a case in point, but there are hundreds of similar publications from all over the world that join the doom-crying chorus.

The members of the AGU who have encouraged this sort of thing bear the most responsibility for average citizens who are depressed because of climate change. Causing the problem, and then hiring a science writer to write about the problem, is the height of something—hypocrisy, irony, stupidity, take your choice.

The AGU should first clean up its own act by not exaggerating and fabricating claims of certain disaster that awaits us unless we voluntarily throw ourselves back to the Stone Age by giving up industrialized energy use. If as much effort was expended on adapting and mitigating whatever climate-change effects come our way, as there is now on showing how bad it’s going to be and developing punitive policies that thwart human flourishing, we’d be a lot better off.

And the AGU wouldn’t have to run articles on how depressed people are about the climate-change crisis that the AGU has played a large role in creating.

This article has been republished from the author’s blog, Engineering Ethics.

AUTHOR

Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan

RELATED ARTICLE: And the inaugural Montgolfier Award for Sustained Stratospheric Virtue Signaling goes to…

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Here Are 7 Major Cases The Supreme Court Has Yet To Decide This Term thumbnail

Here Are 7 Major Cases The Supreme Court Has Yet To Decide This Term

/in , , , /by

By Katelynn Richardson

Among the dozens of opinions yet to be released by the Supreme Court this term are cases on affirmative action, compelled speech and social media companies’ liability for content posted on their platforms.

To date, the Court has released 18 opinions, issuing rulings that enabled those facing complaints from administrative agencies to press constitutional challenges in federal court and allowed a death row inmate’s request for a DNA test to proceed. But opinions in 40 more cases are expected to be released before the end of June, including some of the most consequential cases on this term’s docket.

Affirmative Action

Two cases heard in November, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina (UNC), and Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard, weighed whether universities’ use of racial preferences in the admissions process is constitutional.

After five hours of oral arguments on the two cases, experts noted several justices appeared to be leaning towards ruling against affirmative action, which would force many institutions of higher education to reevaluate their policies.

Some colleges are already taking a second look at their admissions process in anticipation of the decision. The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers advised its members in January to “begin to examine any admissions or recruitment practices that target populations of a specific race” in preparation for “possible major change.”

Compelled Speech

Lorie Smith, the plaintiff in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, challenged the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) because she wants to create wedding websites that reflect her belief that marriage is between one man and one woman. But Colorado’s law, which bans companies deemed public accommodations from restricting services based on sexual orientation, would compel her to also create websites for same-sex couples.

The Supreme Court’s decision in her case will impact creative professionals in 22 states with similar laws, including multiple states with pending lawsuits in the lower courts, clarifying whether the government can compel artists to express a message with which they disagree.

It could also finally put an end to years of legal troubles for Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips. Despite the Supreme Court’s narrow 2018 decision vindicating his refusal to create a custom cake celebrating a same-sex wedding, Phillips is still fighting activist lawsuits—in April, he appealed his latest case, which stems from his decision to decline a request for a custom cake symbolizing gender transition, to the Colorado Supreme Court.

“We’re hopeful the Supreme Court affirms that artists are free to create consistent with their beliefs,” Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Bryan Neihart previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan

Biden’s plan to grant loan forgiveness to nearly 40 million Americans could be undone, depending on how the Supreme Court’s decisions comes down in Biden v. Nebraska, and Department of Education v. Brown, two cases it heard on February 28.

The Biden administration justifies its plan to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt for non-Pell Grant recipients and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients by citing a section of the 2003 HEROES Act that allows the secretary of education to “waive or modify” provisions of student financial assistance programs during a national emergency. Justices appeared skeptical during oral arguments that Congress intended the emergency authority to extend this far, raising separation of powers concerns.

Yet plaintiffs in both cases, a group of six states in the first, and two individual loan holders in the second, were faced with questions of standing that could allow the Court to sidestep the core issue if it is determined they lack the grounds to sue.

Social Media Companies’ Liability

The Supreme Court is considering a case on the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a hotly-debated law designed to protect online platforms from being held liable as the speaker of third-party content hosted on their website while providing leeway for them to restrict “objectionable” material.

The plaintiff in Gonzalez v. Google, the family of a 23-year old American student killed in a 2015 ISIS terrorist attack in Paris, argues YouTube aided and abetted in the attack through its targeted recommendations of ISIS videos designed to recruit members. The question before the Court is the extent of Google’s liability for content recommended by its algorithms under the law.

During oral arguments on February 21, justices appeared wary of wading into an area of policy Congress has yet to clarify: “We’re not the nine greatest experts on the internet,” Justice Elena Kagan quipped.

Religious Accommodations

In 2019, Gerald Groff sued his former employer, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), for failing to exempt him from working on Sundays, a religious exemption he argues is required under federal law.

His case, which came before the Supreme Court on April 18, will have broad impacts for religious liberty in the workplace—potentially overturning decades-old precedent that found protections for religious employees could be limited if the accommodation would impose more than a trivial burden on the employer.

‘True Threats’ And The First Amendment

Speech ranging from online jokes to religious expression could be impacted by the Court’s definition of “true threats” in Counterman v. Colorado, a variety of groups who filed amicus briefs noted.

Billy Raymond Counterman was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for repeated Facebook messages he sent to a local musician — saying things like “Die” and “Was that you in the white Jeep?” Counterman says he did not intend his words to be threatening and asks the Court to consider his mental state, rather than deferring to Colorado’s test of how a “rational person” would interpret the statement.

Now, the Court is tasked with answering the question: what constitutes a “true threat?” Oral arguments on April 19 revealed at least some justices are concerned that failing to account for the speaker’s intent will chill speech under the First Amendment.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Water Regulations

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on October 3 for Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a case that considers the agency’s “waters of the United States” rule, which defines what waters are federally protected under the Clean Water Act. The case stems from a couple’s 15-year-long legal battle against the EPA, which told them they cannot build a house on land they own near Priest Lake, Idaho, because it contains wetlands.

The decision in Sackett could roll back the extent of the EPA’s authority to regulate under the Clean Water Act and force the Biden administration to reconsider its expansive new WOTUS definition. The administration’s rule has already been blocked in some states by a federal court pending the Supreme Court’s decision.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

Climate Czar Kerry: Emissions from agriculture must be ‘front and center’ thumbnail

Climate Czar Kerry: Emissions from agriculture must be ‘front and center’

/in , , , , , /by

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

The climate war on food—Then they came for our food supply.

Farmers and ranchers who assume that their main job is to produce food to feed hungry people stand corrected. John Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy on climate, wants to enlist them in the global struggle to combat the “climate crisis.”

“A lot of people have no clue that agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emission in the world,” Kerry said during his May 17 keynote address at the Department of Agriculture’s AIM Climate Summit. “We can’t get to net-zero, we can’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution. So all of us here understand the depths of this mission.”

“Food systems themselves contribute a significant amount of emissions just in the way we do the things we’ve been doing,” he continued. “With a growing population on the planet – we’ve just crossed the threshold of 8 billion fellow citizens around the world – emissions from the food system alone are expected to cause another half a degree of warming by mid-century.”

“Needs Innovation More Than Ever”

“This sector need innovation now more than ever,” Kerry went on. “We’re facing record malnutrition at a time when agriculture, more than any other sector, is suffering more than ever from the impacts of the climate crisis. And I refuse to call it climate change anymore. It’s not change. It’s a crisis.”

“We need economic, social, and policy innovation in order to scale adaptation of these technical solutions and get them into the hands of the folks in the fields of small farmers on a global basis. This is the promise of AIM for Climate Summit.”

Farmers won’t have to wait long for the “innovations” Kerry mentioned to come their way. The Biden administration has already pledged to take an “all of government” approach to addressing the “climate crisis,” and they mean business. Every agency of the federal government – from the Pentagon and HUD to the energy and agriculture departments – are pouring taxpayer-supplied resources into ever-expanding climate programs. The Department of Agriculture is already exhorting farmers to adopt “climate smart” policies when it comes to producing food. It is even dangling “climate-smart” grants before agricultural groups to get them to change their ways and grow food they way John Kerry and his ilk want them to do.

Though the Department of Agriculture has yet to elaborate on what it means by “climate smart,” it most certainly entails the agricultural sector severing ties to fossil fuels, either “voluntarily” or through coercion in the form of regulations. But because of natural gas’s role in making fertilizer, the government-forced transition will be a messy one. Farmers in places as far apart as Sri Lanka and the Netherlands were ordered by their respective governments to shrink their carbon footprint by reducing their nitrogen emissions. Protests in the Netherlands have been widespread, and in Sri Lanka, the government was overthrown, with the president forced to flee the country.

Lessons Not Learned

The climate misadventures in the Netherlands and Sri Lanka show what happens when people who know nothing about agriculture — and even less about the climate — impose policies on farmers that are divorced from the realities involved in producing food. When climate zealots mess with the food supply, they’re asking for trouble. Farmers in the U.S. are about to be told by urban elites how to run their farms. It won’t end well.

Author

Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments. Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Busines Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country. He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘I Just Can’t Get Over This Number’: CNN Host Shocked At Poll Showing Biden Cratering Among Key Demographic thumbnail

‘I Just Can’t Get Over This Number’: CNN Host Shocked At Poll Showing Biden Cratering Among Key Demographic

/in , , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

CNN Host Poppy Harlow was shocked Friday about a new poll showing President Joe Biden polling poorly with independent-Democratic-leaning voters and younger voters.

CNN released a poll Thursday showing 66% of Americans say Biden winning in 2024 would be a “disaster” or “setback” for the country, with CNN’s Jake Tapper calling it “horrible news, horrible for Joe Biden.”

“New CNN polling shows 60% of Democratic and Democratic leaning voters backing Biden in 2024,” host Erica Hill said. The CNN poll showed 20% of Democrats support rival candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr and 8% are behind another challenger, author Marianne Williamson.

“When asked specifically about a second term, only a third of Americans feel a 2024 win for Biden would be a win for the country,” Hill continued, before introducing her panelists.

“When we look at this new polling, Ashley, you see the vast majority of Democratic aligned voters, they’re throwing their support behind Biden. But what stood out to me are independent leaning Democrats and younger voters, they’re really not as enthusiastic. There were questions about messaging. There were questions about what is or is not being sold. How significant do you think that hill is for Biden to climb?”

“I am almost certain that Joe Biden will be the democratic nominee by 2024,” former White House Senior Policy Adviser Ashley Allison responded, before saying Biden needs to “explain” to voters what he’s done and his plans for the future.

“I just can’t get over this number,” Harlow exclaimed. “Can we pull it back up? 66% of voters in this poll say Biden’s 2024 win, if he wins, what will that mean for the country? 66% say it will be a disaster or a setback. They’re not hot on Trump either, but how do you counter the numbers?”

“It’s going to be very difficult for him,” Republican strategist Chapin Fay said, arguing that the southern border is a huge issue plaguing the president.

Biden has performed poorly in recent polls, especially when it comes to issues like the border crisis. A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found just 31% of Americans approve Biden’s handling of immigration amid a surge of migrants arriving at the border.

AUTHOR

BRIANNA LYMAN

News and commentary writer.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Harvard Poll Shows One Stat That Could Mean The End Of Biden 2024

GAMA SOSA: Merrick Garland Is Slowly Defining A New Criminal Class, And Soon You’ll Be Part Of It

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Finland Electricity Prices Drops to BELOW ZERO Due to Efficiency of Nuclear Power Plants thumbnail

Finland Electricity Prices Drops to BELOW ZERO Due to Efficiency of Nuclear Power Plants

/in , , , /by

By The Geller Report

This is what common sense looks like.

by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, May 25, 2023 – 02:45 AM

As we detailed in early May, the transition from testing to regular output last month saw Finland’s first nuclear power-plant drive electricity prices dramatically lower.

Asyle reports, the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor in Eurajoki, southwest Finland, started regular electricity production in mid-April, about 14 years behind schedule

Since then prices for power in Finland have continued to plunge as the efficiency of the plant flooded the grid with ‘new’ energy.

So much in fact that early on Wednesday of last week, the market price for electricity dropped below zero cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) and for hours after that the price was only 0.3 cents per kWh at its highest, according to the country’s grid operator, Fingrid.

That was unacceptable and prompted the plant’s owner, Teollisuuden Voima (TVO) to significantly cut back its output…

“Electricity production must also be profitable for nuclear power plants, and when the price is particularly low, there may be situations where output is limited,” TVO communications manager, Johanna Aho, said.

According to Aho, cutting back on nuclear power production due to excessively low electricity prices is very rare, but not unheard of.

Janne Kauppi, an energy markets advisor at Finnish Energy, agreed with that sentiment.

“There haven’t been many situations where nuclear power output has been regulated specifically because of low prices,” Kauppi explained.

“When prices go negative on the electricity market, basically anyone who can adjust their production will do it, so that they don’t have to pay for their own production,” Kauppi noted.

The Finnish example is a testament to how nuclear can play a part in solving the current energy crisis, with consumers still paying sky-high fees for energy in many European countries.

However, the hypocrisy is of course that when power prices were extremely high in 2022, hurting consumers – it was all Russia’s fault; but now that prices are plummeting, operators can’t have that and withdraw supply to hurt consumers.

Do you see a pattern here?

Keep reading.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Supreme Court Rolls Back Biden EPA’s Expansive Water Regulation thumbnail

Supreme Court Rolls Back Biden EPA’s Expansive Water Regulation

/in , , , , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

The Supreme Court rolled back the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate under the Clean Water Act (CWA) in a unanimous decision Thursday.

Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, brought by a couple prevented by the EPA from building a home on their own land near Priest Lake, Idaho because it contained wetlands, considered the scope of the agency’s “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule, which defines what “navigable waters” can be regulated under the CWA. Plaintiffs Chantell and Mike Sackett, who have spent 15 years fighting the agency’s rule in court, allege the EPA has overstepped the authority it was granted when Congress enacted the CWA in 1972—forcing them to stop construction on their land or face fines.

The Supreme Court sided with the Sacketts, determining their land is not covered under the text of the CWA, which gives the EPA authority to regulate “navigable waters.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barett, that the EPA’s interpretation “provides little notice to landowners of their obligations under the CWA.” The Court held that the CWA applies to only wetlands that are “as a practical matter indistinguishable from waters of the United States,” maintaining a “continuous surface connection.”

Though justices were united in their judgement, they maintained disagreements on definitions. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in an opinion concurring in judgement that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, thought the majority went too far in its test for which wetlands are included.

“By narrowing the Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the Court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States,” he wrote.

Kagan similarly said in an opinion joined by Sotomayor and Jackson that the majority has appointed itself as “the national decision-maker on environmental policy” by choosing a test that “prevents the EPA from keeping our country’s waters clean by regulating adjacent wetlands.”

“The eight administrations since 1977 have maintained dramatically different views of how to regulate the environment, including under the Clean Water Act,” she wrote, noting some “promulgated very broad interpretations of adjacent wetlands.”

“Yet all of those eight different administrations have recognized as a matter of law that the Clean Water Act’s coverage of adjacent wetlands means more than adjoining wetlands and also includes wetlands separated from covered waters by man-made dikes or barriers, natural river berms, beach dunes, or the like,” she wrote. “That consistency in interpretation is strong confirmation of the ordinary meaning of adjacent wetlands.”

The decision likely means that the Biden administration will need to go back to the drawing board on its new WOTUS rule issued in January, which Republicans and some Democrats have criticized for placing a burden on landowners, ranchers and farmers while dramatically expanding the EPA’s authority. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it a “radical power grab that would give federal bureaucrats sweeping control over nearly every piece of land that touches a pothole, ditch, or puddle.”

In April, President Joe Biden vetoed a bipartisan bill to limit his administration’s WOTUS rule. Just days later, a federal court blocked the rule for 24 states that sued pending the Supreme Court’s decision.

“The Court’s ruling returns the scope of the Clean Water Act to its original and proper limits,” said Damien Schiff, a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation who argued the case, in a statement. “Courts now have a clear measuring stick for fairness and consistency by federal regulators. Today’s ruling is a profound win for property rights and the constitutional separation of powers.”

AUTHOR

KATELYNN RICHARDSON

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden’s EPA Chief Says ‘Environmental Justice’ Is In Agency’s ‘DNA’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘It’s Criminal’: Central Wisconsin Communities Unite to Stave Off Looming Wind Turbine Industry thumbnail

‘It’s Criminal’: Central Wisconsin Communities Unite to Stave Off Looming Wind Turbine Industry

/in , , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

Power, money,  and fuel. We are really at war with these global idiots.

How many pipelines and energy projects were stopped dead in their tracks over some innocuous environmental concern or obscure fish “endangerment.”

As for “wind”, each wind turbine embodies a whole lot of petrochemicals and fossil-fuel energy in direct contrast to the Democrats war on oil.

‘It’s Criminal’: Central Wisconsin Communities Unite to Stave Off Looming Wind Turbine Industry

By: Epoch Times, May 21, 2023: (hat tip Carla)

Central Wisconsin communities are coordinating efforts to shine a light into the flickering shadow cast by a looming wind turbine industry.

“There is a revolt happening here,” attorney Marti Machtan told The Epoch Times. “I’ve never seen our communities engage like this in my life.”

Machtan is a member of Farmland First, an organization that aims to facilitate discussion among community members concerned about reported coercive, predatory tactics used by industrial wind companies to manipulate landowners into signing their property rights away in the name of green energy.

“These companies are sneaky about it,” Tom Wilcox— also a member of Farmland First and chairman of the Town of Green Grove in Owen, Wisconsin—told The Epoch Times. “They don’t want to come right out and say how this will work. In fact, part of the reason why people don’t know this is happening is farmers have to agree to keep their mouth shut on the details of the contract.”

Wilcox is also on the Clark County Board of Supervisors and chairman of the Clark County Planning and Zoning.

This month, at least 13 central Wisconsin towns have passed health and safety ordinances setting the ground rules for companies seeking to build wind turbines up to 600 feet tall as close as 1,250 feet from their homes.

The resolutions are written to mitigate the harm wind turbines have been reported to cause to people, their land, and their natural environment, including wildlife.

Word spread after some community members openly discussed rejecting alluring offers with payoffs of over $1 million over 30 years to have a wind turbine built on their farm.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Rusting Monuments to Stupidity: Staggering Cost of Cleaning Up the Wind Industry’s Giant Mess

WIND TURBINE SLAUGHTER: Another Dead whale Washes Onto Jersey Shore — 9th One in NY-NJ Area in Just 2 months

Eminent Oxford Scientist Says Wind Power “Fails On Every Count”

Turbines Kill the Sea: “Carpet Bombing the Ocean Floor”

Bald, Golden Eagle Deaths Permitted Under New U.S. Wind Energy, Power Line Rules

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Death of the EV Dream, Er, Nightmare thumbnail

Death of the EV Dream, Er, Nightmare

/in , , , , , /by

By Duggan Flanakin

Now that the American Dream has been turned into a nightmare in part by overspending that has led to the highest interest rates in the 21st Century, it is high time to admit that, as Melanie Mcdonagh writes in The Telegraph, the electric vehicle dream, too, “has turned into a nightmare.”

Mcdonagh, who admits she does not drive, points out many problems, among them the horrific impact when a heavy, quiet-running electric vehicle hits an unsuspecting pedestrian or a cyclist. She also notes that some of these “vehicles” are collecting data on route history and road speed that governments (and corporations) can use for remote surveillance (and marketing gimmickry). Another problem is that the much heavier EVs could collapse bridges and force lengthy detours.

Mcdonagh, however, has barely scratched the surface of the mess created by the hipster culture that believes everything sacred must be sacrificed before the god of carbon (dioxide) reduction. It turns out that manufacturing electric vehicles has to date been a bad investment for automakers, despite all the subsidies.

Ford Motor Co. says it will lose $3 billion on EV sales this year, after losing $900 million in 2021 and $2.1 billion in 2022, when the company sold 96,000 units. Price drops by Ford and Tesla (and doubtless other companies) are not coming because the vehicles are cheaper to manufacture but because demand has slowed despite the new Biden subsidies. As Robert Bryce points out, Ford in the first quarter of this year lost $66,446 on every EV it sold.

One reason for the huge losses is the increasing price of battery materials, reflected in the 7 percent increase in the volume-weighted average for lithium-ion battery packs from 2021 to 2022. The Biden subsidies are supposed to offset such costs, just as the Biden build in America plan (in Michigan, at least, by Chinese companies) has no chance of diminishing China’s huge lead in EV battery and vehicle production.

Senator John Kennedy (R, LA) recently asked, “If electric cars are so swell. why does government have to pay people to drive them?”

A new J.D. Power report points to a number of reasons that American consumers are sticking with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. While the highest objections to EVs are high prices and lack of public charging infrastructure, vehicle range, charging times, and the threat of grid disruptions that render EVs useless are also deterrents. Other concerns are fires, power surges that lead to accidents, towing capacity and range, and performance in bad weather.

Even a third of Gen Z shoppers, who have been bombarded with pro-EV propaganda for most of their lives, admit they are unlikely to buy one.

It is obvious that the EV boom, such as it is, has been powered nearly entirely by heavy subsidies and marketing hype initiated by bureaucrats and politicians, most of whom have no background in auto sales or any service industries. Their M.O. is bribery and thuggery (forcing people into unwanted choices through market manipulation). Automakers are beginning to balk at these techniques, if only because they see their customer base shrinking once people cannot buy the vehicles they have used for decades.

While Ford and other companies are now boasting of the towing capacity of their EVs, the proof is in the pudding, as they say. MotorBiscuit last month reported that the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T can be souped up to tow 10,000 pounds, far short of the gasoline-powered F-150, but with an average range of only 88 miles. That hardly works for multiple tows in a day or for towing a trailer to a campsite 100 or more miles from home.

Imagine putting your family into the truck, hitching up the Airstream, and driving out to the mountains for a weekend at the lake. Finding a charging station where you don’t have to unhitch the trailer to get to the plug-in is a huge challenge, and you have to do this multiple times on a 300-mile trip. With a maximum 90-mile range, you need to recharge every 60 or 70 miles, taking 30 minutes or more for each recharge. You lose an entire day each way. So practical.

Far worse, though, are the risks and challenges to tow truck drivers with an EV that has stopped running. Not only are the vehicles heavy, they are dead weight, locked in park, and potentially suspect to spontaneous fires that ordinary extinguishers cannot put out. A 2021 National Transportation Safety Board report notes that “the energy remaining in a damaged high-voltage lithium-ion battery, known as stranded energy, poses a risk of electric shock and creates the potential for thermal runaway that can result in battery reignition and fire.”

Of course, the bean counters with their glorious visions for an all-electric future (replete with blackouts, price increases, and other tricks to keep the majority of people off the roads entirely) do not take into consideration ANY of the real reasons people drive cars and trucks. Their ONLY consideration appears to be the imaginary reduction in carbon dioxide emissions their computer models insist can only happen by inconveniencing “the little people.”

But should those “little people” elect leaders who will end the inflationary subsidies and dictatorial mandates (including those that ban gas appliances, cripple the performance of dishwashers and HVAC units, etc.), the automakers who have heavily invested in EVs will adjust to real market conditions and continue improving long-cherished technologies.

In today’s increasingly top-down world, Mcdonagh points out that “you can’t even discuss the problems with electric cars without getting jumped on.” That is already beginning to change, especially in a freedom-loving America that has had a century-long love affair with the open road.

Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows is an option that could both reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and keep ICE vehicles on the road. Hydrogen-based synthetic e-fuels may be expensive today, but they can power ICE vehicles today and tomorrow without sacrificing a nation to the whims of China’s maniacal leadership.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

STAY INFORMED

Receive regular news, commentary, and analysis straight to your inbox.

POWERED BY

DrRichSwier.com | ThePricklyPear.org

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.