Navajo Nation Leader Says Biden, AOC Energy Policies Cripple Tribe’s Economy

/in , , , , /by

By J.J. Brannock

Members of the Navajo Nation in the southwestern U.S. say the federal government is leaving their people behind with its energy policies, crippling their economy and leaving more people in poverty.

Republicans on the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources are attempting to overturn such Biden administration policies, including the Department of Interior’s land withdrawal and ban on oil and gas leasing outside of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, where members of the Navajo tribe reside.

The DOI issued a Public Land Order in June imposing a 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park for the next 20 years. The prevention of oil and natural gas leasing within the zone would cause Navajo mineral owners to lose an estimated $194.3 million in revenue over the next 20 years.

More than 5,000 Navajo mineral owners rely on income from energy development. The individuals are called Navajo allottees, as the minerals they own were allotted to their ancestors many years ago.

Delora Hesuse, a Nageezi Chapter Navajo who lives within the 10-mile buffer, said in a hearing last week that “this is hugely important because our area is very poor and families still do not have electricity or running water. Our elderly rely on this money to feed their children and livestock.”

Committee Republicans said the land order also would further harm domestic energy efforts.

“The Department of Interior’s decision […] represents Mr. Biden’s latest effort to impose his radical agenda by locking up our nation’s land and water while further crippling domestic energy production and pushing the United States into greater dependence on foreign sources for energy,” Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairman Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., said in the hearing.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said that the Navajo were placed in an “economic hostage situation,” with the tribe believing that continuing to mine oil and gas is the only source of possible income.

“The answer to that, in my view, is not to revert back to that [oil and gas mining],” Ocasio-Cortez said, “but to invest and reinvest in these communities, particularly where there is harm being done.”

She asked if there were other steps the federal government could take to better support the Navajo people through an energy transition.

Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, responded that such a discussion should have happened before the decision to restrict oil and gas leasing within the buffer zone was made.

“I did not even know about the announcement or anything from the secretary,” Nygren said, “but my hope was that we were going to have these discussions to come up with a collective solution.”

Western Energy Alliance, a group that represents 200 companies centered on exploration and production of oil and natural gas in the West, said the Biden administration’s policies, with no plan to address the obvious fallout, will lead to more poverty among the Navajo tribe.

Aaron Johnson, vice president of Public and Legislative Affairs for the alliance, said, “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez assumes an energy transition for the Navajo Nation that doesn’t exist. As President Buu Nygren said, such a transition isn’t happening now nor will it in the foreseeable future. The Interior Secretary’s ten-mile buffer around Chaco Canyon will lead to more poverty in a disadvantaged community by denying nearly $200 million in oil and natural gas revenue for Navajo members. Meanwhile, tribal wind and solar royalties are nonexistent.”

“According to Interior’s own data, under the Biden Administration tribal oil production is down 21% and natural gas is down 11%,” Johnson continued. “They’re working to reduce sustained energy income to tribes into the future by choking new permits back 60%. Congress should reverse Interior’s withdrawal and allow Navajos to earn an income and support their families by developing their energy resources.”

Nygren also spoke on one of the tribe’s biggest and cleanest coal plants, the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, being decommissioned in December 2019.

“The promise was solar fields down the road,” Nygren said, “but now nothing exists. People are out of jobs. There’s no royalties, no taxes, so I truly agree with having a transition plan that’s equitable, and that plan was never presented to me, it was just a decision that was made.”

Nygren said the lack of compromise and communication from the federal government led to the opposition to the DOI’s land order.

“The withdrawal was done without meaningful consultation and fails to honor the Navajo Nation sovereignty,” he said. “Respect for tribal sovereignty must be consistent, even when it is not convenient. The nation offered a compromise that honored Navajo sovereignty and the rights of our allottees, but that was rejected with inadequate explanation from the administration.”

The tribe had previously offered a five-mile buffer zone compromise that helped protect the park and enable Navajo mineral owners to develop most of their resources but revoked it after DOI Secretary Deb Haaland failed to conduct “sufficient tribal consultation.”

“I feel like as the Navajo Nation president I’m the one that has to figure out that solution,” Nygren said about the recent federal actions. “I feel like I’ve inherited the issue and the only way to get it done is through Congress or the secretary, but in the meantime, it’s a problem of the Navajo Nation president and the Navajo Nation council.”

In response to the DOI’s order, the Congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources discharged the Energy Opportunities for All Act last week, which would nullify the Interior Department’s decision. The discharge essentially means that the bill is now ready to begin floor proceedings.

“The House Committee on Natural Resources is keeping our commitment to the American people by working to lower energy costs and support tribal rights by promoting access to our nation’s natural resources,” Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., said in a statement.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., has not yet announced an official floor time for consideration of the bill.

*****

This article was published by Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

Nobel Prize Winner Canceled By IMF After Announcing There Is No Climate Crisis thumbnail

Nobel Prize Winner Canceled By IMF After Announcing There Is No Climate Crisis

/in , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

Clauser, who won the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022, “was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF on Thursday and now his talk has been summarily canceled. “This is why no one speaks up and out against the greatest political fraud of the modern age. The immense power and machinery of the left will destroy you.

Dr. John Francis Clauser, PhD is an American experimental and theoretical physicist. He is best known for his contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular for the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality, for the first experimental proof that non-local quantum entanglement is real (Freedman-Clauser), and for the formulation of the theory of Local Realism (Clauser-Horne).

Nobel Prize winner canceled by IMF after denouncing ‘climate change’ alarmism

The UN’s International Monetary Fund canceled a talk by Dr. John Clauser shortly after he declared that he does not ‘believe there is a climate crisis.’

By: Lifesite News, Jul 25, 2023:

Nobel Prize laureate Dr. John Clauser’s talk at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been canceled following his outspoken criticism of the “climate change” agenda.

Clauser, who won the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022, “was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF on Thursday and now his talk has been summarily canceled,” according to a press release by the CO2 Coalition, an organization critical of the mainstream climate narrative that Clauser joined in May 2023.

“According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk,” the press release continues, adding that “Technically, it was ‘postponed.’”

Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace activist and now a member of the CO2 Coalition, also insinuated in a tweet that “postponed” means that Clauser’s talk is effectively canceled.

Clauser made headlines recently when he said during a speech at the “Quantum Korea 2023” event that he does not “believe there is a climate crisis.”

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

Hillary Blames MAGA Republicans for Making it Hot in Summer thumbnail

Hillary Blames MAGA Republicans for Making it Hot in Summer

/in , , , , , /by

By Discover The Networks

Twice-failed presidential candidate and corrupt, power-mad harpy Hillary Clinton took to Twitter on Tuesday to blame “MAGA Republicans” for the recent nationwide summer heat wave.

Clinton’s social media post came in response to a tweet from left-wing think tank Center for American Progress which stated, “MAGA Republicans are pouring fuel on the climate crisis fire.” The post included an image of recent media stories highlighting the recent spate of high temperatures in the U.S. and noted Republicans voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ $739 billion climate package — which President Biden signed into law in 2022.

“Hot enough for you? Thank a MAGA Republican. Or better yet, vote them out of office,” Hillary tweeted insanely.

Climate expert Ryan Maue, the former top climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, notes that heat waves aren’t new: “Without climate change, July’s summer heat in the U.S. Southwest would have been ‘virtually impossible,’” Maue tweeted Tuesday. “I guess that’s true if you memory hole 1925, 1930s, 1950s, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2012, 2020, etc. and the rest of the almanac.”

In a separate post, Maue noted that vindictive Hillary’s tweet was made just eight days after a New York Times editorial calling on leaders to “politicize the weather.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton

298 Known Connections

Clinton Says “You Cannot Be Civil” With Republicans

In the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s failed attempt, in the fall of 2018, to use specious sexual assault charges to block the confirmation of President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Mrs. Clinton to comment on various recent instances where leftist protesters had disrupted the Senate’s Kavanaugh hearings, had tried to intimidate Republican senators, and had engaged in acts of lawlessness to vent their rage. Mrs. Clinton replied: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”

To learn more about Hillary Clinton, click here.

RELATED ARTICLES:

FL Scholar: Kamala Lying About State Curriculum on Slavery

‘F*** Eric Adams!’: NYC Mayor’s Bizarre Response to Protester

LOL: Jeffries’ Claim of Outraising GOP Rival McCarthy Debunked

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

How Green Energy Helps Fund Taliban Islamic Terrorists thumbnail

How Green Energy Helps Fund Taliban Islamic Terrorists

/in , , , /by

By Dr. Rich Swier

We have been reporting on how green energy is being used to fund the Communist Chinese.

There is one primary reason and its named is — lithium.

Lithium is a key mineral used to creating green energy and powers all electric vehicles.

The BBC’s Catherine Early who in a November 24th, 2020 article titled The new ‘gold rush’ for green lithium wrote,

Lithium is crucial for the transition to renewables, but mining it has been environmentally costly. Now a more sustainable source of lithium has been found deep beneath our feet.

[ … ]

The commercial use for lithium in the 21st Century could not be clearer. It is found not only inside smart phones and laptops, but is now vital to the clean energy transition, for the batteries that power electric vehicles and store energy so renewable power can be released steadily and reliably.

Demand has soared in recent years as carmakers move toward electric vehicles, as many countries including the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Norway and Canada announce a phase-out of combustion-engine cars. In fact, five times more lithium than is mined currently is going to be necessary to meet global climate targets by 2050, according to the World Bank.

Read more.

Visual Capitalist’s  did a series of infographics on lithium and predicted that by 2025 the battery market alone will be almost 2x bigger than the entire lithium market today.

The largest producers of lithium products in 2015 were Chile 37.0%, Australia 33.0%, Argentina 11.0%, China 10.0%, Zimbabwe 3.1%, other 3.3% and the USA 2.6%.

According to the World Economic Forum in January 2023 the largest producers of lithium are: #1 Australia 52%, #2 Chile 25%, #3 China 13%, #4 Argentina 6%, #5 Brazil 1%, #6 Zimbabwe 1%, #7 Portugal 1%, #8 The United States 1% and lastly the rest of the world with 0.1%

Lithium Funding Islamic Terrorists

In a July 21, 2023 FrontPage article titled “‘Green Energy’ Will Be Powered by Taliban Lithium” reports,

One of the sales pitches for electric cars and assorted green energy projects was that we’d at least be able to unplug from Middle Eastern oil. But instead, we’ve become dependent on the Saudis anyway (the Saudis own 5% of Tesla) and, more crucially on China which sells us the junk solar panels and the rare earth metals (obtained through incredibly dirty mining processes that have devastated lakes and poisoned entire villages) to power the ‘clean’ revolution of ‘green energy’.

Now, topping all that, since the United States failed to develop the lithium mines in Afghanistan and since Biden refuses to mine any at home, the Taliban and Communist China will profit from every garbage electric car that the lefties force down our throats in the name of their hoax environmental crisis.

Save the planet, fund Islamic terrorism.

In a 2010 memo, the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which examined Afghanistan’s development potential, dubbed the country the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” A year later, the U.S. Geological Survey published a map showing the location of major deposits and highlighted the magnitude of the underground wealth, saying Afghanistan “could be considered as the world’s recognized future principal source of lithium.”

“In an alternate universe, our projects could’ve been generating meaningful employment and tax revenue within years that would provide an economic base and empower the Afghan people to govern themselves,” said Paul A. Brinkley, the former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense who oversaw the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations until he left in 2011 and the office disbanded.

Instead, Brinkley said, “we’ll have Chinese companies mining lithium to feed a supply chain that will ultimately sell it back to the West, all in a world where there’s simply not enough lithium.”

“Afghanistan lacks an industrial base, [but] they have great mineral resources, and no Westerners can compete with the Chinese when it comes to building infrastructure and tolerating hardship,” said Zhou Bo, a retired People’s Liberation Army senior colonel who is now an international security expert at Tsinghua University.

In a rare interview, Shahabuddin Delawar, Afghanistan’s minister of mines and a senior Taliban leader, told Washington Post journalists that just 24 hours earlier, representatives of a Chinese company had been in his office presenting the details of a $10 billion bid that included pledges to build a lithium ore processing plant and battery factories in Afghanistan, upgrade long-neglected mountain roads and create tens of thousands of local jobs.

A commission of senior Taliban officials led by Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy prime minister for economic affairs, “will weigh whatever good proposals we receive,” adding that the government would welcome Western and even U.S. bidders if sanctions were dropped. U.S. sanctions currently prohibit all transactions with the Taliban, with exceptions for humanitarian aid.

“We always said if the United States takes its soldiers and killing machines out of Afghanistan, it too could invest here,” he said. “The demand for oil is decreasing, but the demand for lithium is only going up. We have 2.5 million tons in Nurestan alone. Extract it, and Afghanistan can be one of the richest countries in the world.”

By 2030, when about 60 percent of all cars in China, Europe and the United States will be electric, the world is expected to face a lithium shortfall, said Henry Sanderson, executive editor of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the author of “Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green.”

“China’s lithium sector is in a really enviable position: They dominate the processing, they’ve got the battery materials and factories, but that whole supply chain goes defunct if you don’t have raw material to feed the industrial machine,” Sanderson said. “That’s why they’re going to Afghanistan. They need to secure as much as they can.”

I could count how many ways Biden has screwed us in Afghanistan, but I’d run out of time.

I’ll just note that Al Qaeda is actually in charge of Nurestan.

The Taliban have appointed Al Qaeda leaders to key positions including as governors of entire provinces. Nuristan, where 53 American soldiers held off hundreds of Jihadis during the assault on Combat Outpost Keating, resulting in the awarding of two Medals of Honor and nine Silver Stars for the second deadliest battle of the war, is now under Al Qaeda governance.

Those electric cars that Biden wants to force on all of us, by banning actual cars, every one you buy will fund Al Qaeda.

Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Go green, fund our enemies. It’s as simple as that.

Maybe this has been the plan all along?

©2023. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

The Lifestyle Of Climate Radicals Tells You All You Need To Know About Their Sincerity thumbnail

The Lifestyle Of Climate Radicals Tells You All You Need To Know About Their Sincerity

/in , , , , /by

By B.L. Hahn

Either climate alarmists don’t actually believe the planet is doomed, or they aren’t as confident in that belief as they claim to be.

A panel of scientists recently claimed that humans’ effect on the planet is so significant it should be memorialized through the creation of a new geological epoch that began sometime in the middle of the 20th century. As we speak, climate activists are preparing to do what any well-adjusted, functioning adult would do on the heels of such news: glue themselves to a building or throw tomato soup at great works of art.

The latest breaking climate story always provides new opportunities for the left to sermonize, identify heretics, and reassert their moral and intellectual superiority while making no changes to their own lifestyles that would demonstrate even a modicum of sincerity. The oft-discussed hypocrisy of elites who charter private jets to attend climate summits is no secret, but less discussed is the day-to-day hypocrisy of the rank-and-file voters who comprise the broader Democratic Party.

Democrats describe global warming as an existential threat with only X number of years to act before the planet is on an irreversible course to becoming uninhabitable. It stands to reason that anyone who genuinely believes this would take dramatic steps to prevent our imminent annihilation. These measures would include self-imposed lifestyle changes far beyond driving an electric vehicle, yet when it comes to climate alarmists, so often we cannot pick their lifestyle out of a lineup.

The lifestyle of voters who believe humans are destroying the planet is often indistinguishable from that of those who believe manmade climate change is a hoax. This suggests one of two things: Either climate alarmists don’t actually believe the planet is doomed (or at the very least they aren’t nearly as confident in that belief as they claim to be), or they truly believe the planet is doomed but aren’t willing to inconvenience themselves in any meaningful way.

Neither explanation presents climate hysterics in a positive light. Living in a manner consistent with one’s proclamations requires sacrifice, and who needs that when you can sport beliefs like fashion accessories and enjoy the perks of trendy moralism without the hefty price tag? This window-dressing approach to morality offers Gucci fashion at Goodwill prices.

Activists will suggest that voting for the Democratic party is more than enough to demonstrate a genuine belief in the claim that we are on the brink of permanently destroying human civilization, but this fails to stand up to scrutiny. Anyone convinced that our extinction is imminent would certainly take it upon himself to enact radical change in his own life, even in the absence of laws requiring him to do so. Abdicating one’s duty by virtue of voting for politicians who claim to care about the planet is not an acceptable stand-in for personal responsibility — not when the stakes are that high.

Similarly, activists supposedly on a mission to thwart the destruction of the planet would not spend their time gluing themselves to artwork but instead would launch aggressive sabotage campaigns up to and including domestic terrorism. Unfortunately, given the increasingly violent nature of the left’s activism and their tendency to use just about anything as an excuse to tear down the society they despise, this is one area where their actions might eventually match their hysteria.

At this stage, it would be beneficial to properly characterize the left’s position on climate change, which is like a Jenga tower. It starts off relatively stable, but as things progress it begins to teeter:

  1. The earth is warming.
  2. Humans are contributing to this warming effect.
  3. Humans are significantly contributing to this warming effect.
  4. Humans are the primary cause of this warming effect.
  5. The data and modeling used to arrive at this conclusion are immune to human error and bias.
  6. This warming effect is mostly preventable.
  7. It is preventable only by implementing a centrally planned economy.
  8. Other countries will join our efforts, including our enemies, even though it would benefit them not to do so.
  9. There will be no unintended consequences to our plan.
  10. Anyone unwilling to accept this list from top to bottom is a “climate denier.”

It is not difficult to understand why Republicans are skeptical. Democrats present their argument with the credibility and trustworthiness of a flea market fortune teller, not only because their palm reading has proven to be wildly inaccurate in the past, but because their solutions have a striking resemblance to the agenda they’ve been trying to implement long before climate change was a thing. As if incrementally destroying the economy by transforming it into a centrally planned bureaucratic hellscape is not enough, the left has managed to work race into this issue— because of course they have.

Regular Americans are mocked for offering opinions on climate change because they are not experts, but one need not be a climate scientist to understand the fatal flaw in the left’s strategy. If we are to collectively address any problem, whatever the cause might be, solutions and teamwork become impossible when the left’s approach is nothing more than the shoddy work of rigid ideologues. Republicans have suggested that perhaps there are ways to address the effects of a changing climate without destroying the U.S. economy and compromising national security, but because their ideas do not exponentially grow the federal government and usher in a socialist utopia, they are ignored by the Democratic Party.

It would be disingenuous to claim there are zero climate alarmists living a lifestyle consistent with their beliefs. They do exist, I’m quite certain. I’ve just never met one. There is another explanation — perhaps every climate alarmist I’ve met has cleverly disguised himself as a “climate denier” to gain access to the seedy world of repugnant moral lepers who drive SUVs and eat meat — a secret mission to convert heretics from the inside. That must be it.

The parties will probably never agree on an approach, but I eagerly await the day when every climate alarmist practices what he preaches. If the leftists next door have one of those yard signs proudly staked on their front lawn that lists a variety of hollow political slogans including “we believe science is real,” at the very least they should downsize, get rid of their air conditioning, and use valuable lawn space not for bragging about the supposed moral character of their household, but for growing all their own food.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist 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.

We are in this together: United we stand, Divided we fall. thumbnail

We are in this together: United we stand, Divided we fall.

/in , , , , /by

By John Droz, Jr.

Why am I taking the time out of my VERY busy life, to periodically write this column? As you know, unlike many other Substack authors, my column is FREE — so I’m not doing this for the money. (BTW, a LARGE number of subscribers have formally offered to pay for my insights, but I have politely declined them all.)

It’s not for notoriety either, as I’m already notorious. For example, about ten years ago I was put in this esteemed collection of nationally well-known individuals who were not buying into the politically correct position regarding global warming.

(The fact that I’ve never smoked, and only drink beer should give you a good indication of the accuracy involved here.)

Another example is this national Sierra Club Report. On page 16 it essentially says that I have as much influence over US energy policies as the Koch brothers! As billionaires, their influence is from funding organizations, etc, while I fund no one. Instead, my “influence” comes from educating the public (like this Substack).

Another (and thankfully last) example is this strong story that appeared in the Scientific American. The over-the-top title tells you all you need to know.

Furthermore, I don’t really have the time to write anything here. In addition to being the primary caregiver for my very sick wife, I have numerous other obligations.

So none of this is about me.

The simple fact is that I’m a Christian scientist and an appreciative patriot. I find it more than disturbing that:

1) most mainstream media “journalists” are actually promoters of undeclared agendas,

2) most politicians pay more attention to lobbyists than what’s in the best interest of their constituents,

3) most government agencies do not adhere to their own publicly-posted mission statements,

4) Left-wing propaganda is spreading in our schools, 5) Woke ideology is being bought into not only by major corporations, but our military, etc., etc.

I’m taking the time out of my life to educate the many good citizens that we do have, and to encourage them to speak up. As this MAJOR improvement that recently happened in NC proves, one person CAN make a difference!

Anyways, I’m asking for YOUR HELP. I’m willing to keep doing this for free, but we need to get more subscribers. PLEASE connect with your associates and ask them to subscribe. PLEASE share this article on social media, and ask readers to subscribe. FYI, here is the chart for the subscriber growth to date. Thank you for your help with that. Getting more people educated about what is going on is in ALL of our interests!

Lastly, since I’d like to leave you with some help, I’ll try to answer any question you have on any of the topics I cover: COVID to Climate, Education to Elections, and Renewables to Religion. Click on the “Leave a Comment” button and I’ll reply. THANK YOU for your support!

©2023. John Droz Jr. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Climategate: Whistleblower’s Huge Cache Of Emails Prove Climate Change Fraud

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2023 Archives. Send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?)

Electric Vehicles: Costly Virtue Signaling Forced on America by Left thumbnail

Electric Vehicles: Costly Virtue Signaling Forced on America by Left

/in , , , , , /by

By David Harsanyi

The Left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient, but more expensive, doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.

Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.

This is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.

And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that the government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.

In August 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emission. California claims it is banning combustion engines in all new cars in about 10 years. So, carmakers adopt business models to deal with these distorted incentives and contrived theoretical markets of the future.

In today’s real-world economy, Ford projects it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year, it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it.

Remember that next time we need to bail out Detroit.

Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford — again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells — another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.

Ford says these upfront losses are part of a “start-up mentality.” We’re still pretending EVs are a new idea, rather than an inferior one. But scaremongering about climate and a misplaced romanticizing of “manufacturing” jobs have softened up the public for this kind of waste.

In the real world, there is Lordstown. In 2019, after General Motors — which also loses money on every EV sold — shut down a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, then-President Donald Trump made a big deal of publicly pressuring the auto giant to rectify the situation. CEO Mary Barra lent Lordstown Motors, a new EV outfit, $40 million to retrofit the plant. Ohio also gave GM an additional $60 million.

You may remember the widespread glowing coverage of Lordstown. After Biden signed his “Buy American” executive order, promising to replace the entire U.S. federal fleet with EVs, Lordstown’s stock shot up.

By the start of this year, Lordstown had manufactured 31 vehicles in total. Six had been sold to actual consumers. (Most of them would be recalled.) The stock was trading at barely a dollar. Tech-funding giant Foxconn was pulling its $170 million. And this week, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue-signalers. And, come to think of it, that’s sort of what they are now, even with the help. A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that 90% of tax credits for EVs go to people in the top income strata. Most EVs are bought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that’s fine. I don’t want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don’t want to help pay for it.

Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don’t need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries’ worth of it waiting in the ground.

Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That’s fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable. Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.

And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn’t have to be compelled into using them and companies wouldn’t have to be bribed into producing them.

*****

This article was published by 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.

Electric Cars Are A Scam thumbnail

Electric Cars Are A Scam

/in , , , , /by

By Royal A. Brown III

From Joe, a retired Navy Seabee friend of mine. After his introduction comments, please scroll down to read the article by David Harsanyi.

Dear Friends:

Any person who’s considering buying an electric vehicle (EV) should read this Epoch Times opinion piece first. Besides the title of the piece, part of the first paragraph rather sums it up nicely, “….making an existing product less efficient but more expensive doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.”

But, read the rest of the story below…a story that looks at the false market the government has created at taxpayers and car companies expense. The truth is few middle class and below folks want EVs or can afford them.

Actually, most of the buyers are high earners looking for tax breaks (90% of tax credits for EVs go to top income strata people). Many of the folks that buy EVs also turn out to be virtue buyers (oh, look at me, I own an EV, I want to do something about climate change). As the Word of God says, in context, “they have their reward” (Matt. 6:2).

It offends me that the government is using those of us that aren’t interested in buying a pig in a poke (an EV) or throwing good money after bad in search of a market that really doesn’t exist. Yes, a false market being propped up in enormous ways by our tax dollars and outright propaganda from the federal government.

Buyer beware…caveat emptor.

Best regards,

Joe

Electric Cars Are a Scam

By David Harsanyi

Commentary

The left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars (EV) as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient but more expensive doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.

Even the purported amenities and technological advances that EV makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.

Which is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.

And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.

In August 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emission. California claims that it is banning combustion engines in all new cars in about 10 years. So carmakers adopt business models to deal with these distorted incentives and contrived theoretical markets of the future.

In today’s real-world economy, Ford projects that it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year, it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it. Remember that the next time we need to bail out Detroit.

Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose. Recently, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford—again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells—another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.

Ford says these upfront losses are part of a “start-up mentality.” We’re still pretending EVs are a new idea rather than an inferior one. But scaremongering about climate and a misplaced romanticizing of “manufacturing” jobs have softened up the public for this kind of waste.

In the real world, there’s Lordstown. In 2019, after General Motors—which also loses money on every EV sold—shut down a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, then-President Donald Trump made a big deal of publicly pressuring the auto giant to rectify the situation. CEO Mary Barra lent Lordstown Motors, a new EV outfit, $40 million to retrofit the plant. Ohio also gave GM another $60 million.

You may remember the widespread glowing coverage of Lordstown. After Biden signed his “Buy American” executive order, promising to replace the entire U.S. federal fleet with EVs, Lordstown’s stock shot up.

By the start of this year, Lordstown had manufactured 31 vehicles in total. Six had been sold to actual consumers. (Most of them would be recalled.) The stock was trading at barely $1. Tech-funding giant Foxconn was pulling its $170 million. And last week, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue signalers. And, come to think of it, that’s sort of what they are now, even with the help. A recent University of California–Berkeley study found that 90 percent of tax credits for EVs go to people in the top income strata. Most EVs are bought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that’s fine. I don’t want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don’t want to help pay for it.

Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don’t need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries’ worth of it waiting in the ground.

Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That’s fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Because even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable. Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.

And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn’t have to be compelled into using them and companies wouldn’t have to be bribed into producing them.

©2023. Royal A. Brown III. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: DAVID BLACKMON: Here’s What Our Climate Overlords Fail To Understand About Fossil Fuels

AWED MEDIA BALANCES NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections. thumbnail

AWED MEDIA BALANCES NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

/in , , , , , , /by

By John Droz, Jr.

Welcome! We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

Here is the link for this issue, so please share it on social media.

Checkout the 2023, 2022, 2021 & 2020 archives, plus ***asterisked*** items below.

If you like the Newsletter, signup for my free Critical Thinking substack…

— This Newsletter’s Articles, by Topic —

If You Only Have Time to Read a Few Select Articles:

*** An Education Game-Changer

*** The truth about social-emotional learning

*** Report: Solar Panels Are More Carbon-Intensive Than Experts Admit

*** There Is NO Transition

*** Rural electrification is America’s greatest infrastructure achievement

*** Nuclear power capacity is growing globally. Where, how and why

*** Offshore Wind Promoters Paving the Road to Energy Hell

*** The Rising Cost of Offshore Wind

*** Big Ethanol vs. Electric Vehicles

*** Life Cycle Emissions: EVs vs Combustion Engine Vehicles

*** Model T Lessons on Value Tell Us Why EVs Aren’t Selling

*** The fake end of the world

*** (in)Dependence Day 2023

*** Hottest Days Ever? don’t Believe It

*** How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Carbon Dioxide

*** Short video: Drawing parallels between the COVID and climate narratives

*** Short Video: No Past, No Future

*** Short Video: What My Free Speech Means to Me

*** The Infantilism Of Totalitarianism

*** Court Order Blocks the Biden Administration from Violating First Amendment

*** Don’t Get The Idea That Internet Censorship Is Diminishing

*** You Cannot Break Us

*** America, Seen from the Eyes of a Child

*** All Immigrants Are Born on the Fourth of July

*** Blather Here, Blather There, Nothing Between

*** Why Are Churches Celebrating Sin?

*** RFK Jr on his drug addiction

*** COVID-Vaccinated More Likely to Be Hospitalized: CDC Data

*** COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection

Secondary Education Related:

*** Report: The Key to Fixing the US Education System

*** An Education Game-Changer

*** New California math framework leaves behind rigor to focus on ‘meaning’ and ‘equity’

*** The truth about social-emotional learning

*** Texas school district bans transgender bathroom and pronoun policies to ‘protect kids and educators’

Moms for Liberty righteous fire is spreading fast

At High School Debates, Watch What You Say

California’s Very Flawed K-12 Math Framework

Higher Education Related:

*** The Education of a Classically Liberal Educator

*** Why I’ll Never Be Allowed to Teach at USC Again

*** DEI: Death of Merit and Excellence in STEM and Medical Education

A “Progressive” Analysis of Higher Education’s Problems

40% of Brown University Students say they are LGBT, suggesting social contagion

Greed Energy Economics:

*** Gone with the wind: A perfect storm of costs

Wind Industry Blackmails U.K. Demanding Huge Ramp-Up of Subsidies

Unreliables (General):

*** There Is NO Transition

*** Myth: Solar and wind are helping save our grid from extreme heat

Wind Energy — Offshore:

*** Offshore Wind Promoters Paving the Road to Energy Hell

*** The Rising Cost of Offshore Wind

*** Offshore Wind Is Outrageous Spending that Makes Zero Sense

No Texas welcome wagon for offshore wind

Biden 30,000 MW of Offshore Wind by 2030: an Expensive Fantasy

Short video: Wind And Sea – Offshore Wind Documentary

The whale killing study the Feds are afraid to do

Wind Energy — Other:

*** Taking the Wind Out of Climate Change (referencing 60± studies)

Eight Days Straight and Climbing with Meagre Wind Generation

Solar Energy:

*** Report: Solar Panels Are More Carbon-Intensive Than Experts Admit

Large Proposed Upstate NY Solar Project Scrapped

Nuclear Energy:

*** A Critical Disconnect: Relying on Nuclear Energy in Decarbonization Models While Excluding It from Climate Finance Taxonomies

*** Nuclear power capacity is growing globally. Where, how and why

Ontario plans more nuclear reactors to meet rising electricity demand

Mini Reactor Cost Surge Threatens Nuclear’s Next Big Thing

Fossil Fuel Energy:

China seeks military dominance through fossil fuels

Air Conditioning: The Modern Marvel Wrought by Fossil Fuels

Matt Ridley: I’ll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban

Electric Vehicles (EVs):

*** Big Ethanol vs. Electric Vehicles

*** Life Cycle Emissions: EVs vs Combustion Engine Vehicles

*** Model T Lessons on Value Tell Us Why EVs Aren’t Selling

Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots

How E-Bike Battery Fires Became a Deadly Crisis in New York City

Finally, the Europeans May Be Rejecting the EV Kool-Aid

Misc Energy:

*** Countering the world’s rigged conversation about energy and climate

*** Rural electrification is America’s greatest infrastructure achievement

Robert Bryce on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, discussing energy

Questions Around IRA Tax Credit Blocking Clean Hydrogen Development

Biden Admin Targets Air Conditioning Refrigerants as Climate Concerns

A Closer Look at EPA’s Power Plant Rule

New paper reveals Government’s heat pump plan to be uneconomic

The Stupidity of Ethanol as “Green” Energy

Manmade Global Warming — Some Deceptions:

*** The fake end of the world

*** (in)Dependence Day 2023

*** Hottest Days Ever? don’t Believe It

Data Shows We’re NOT Seeing Record Heat

Climate Fear Mongering Reaches Stratospheric Heights

Is this Latest Ploy by Green Movement More Insane than Their Plan to Screw with the Atmosphere?

EPA: Few US Weather Stations Show Increase in Hot Days since 1948

Fighting extreme climate policies must happen now

New Book: Climate Catastrophism and the Grip of Culture

Manmade Global Warming — Misc:

*** How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Carbon Dioxide

*** Short video: Drawing parallels between the COVID and climate narratives

*** My table: Parallels between COVID and Climate narratives

*** House OKs defense bill blocking Biden climate action

Dr. Judith Curry and the Montana Climate Trial

Plans to Stop Global Warming by Blocking Sunlight Would ‘Destroy Agriculture’

The 15-Minute City

Carbon Myopia

Study: A Triperspectival Christian Ethic for Earth Stewardship

UN climate alliance scraps emissions rules for insurers after exodus

US Election:

Election-Integrity.info (10 major election reports by our team of experts, plus much more!)

*** A Shocking Analysis of 2020 Election Night Reporting and the Companies that Manufacture Election Results

*** Republicans roll out new national voting law

*** American Confidence in Elections Act Introduced

Initial Hearing results against Rudy Giuliani re DC Disbarment

Mike Pence Gets Huffy When Voters Confront Him about the 2020 Election

US Election — State Issues:

At a time when NC Legislators have a veto proof majority, Republicans should be passing the strongest election integrity bill possible

New voter initiative to scrap partisan primaries in Arizona? Heck, yeah

Why Are Republicans Greenhorns at Rounding Up Them Absentee Votes?

One Illegal Vote Can Change the Outcome of an Election

Misc US Politics:

*** Slavery, Socialists, and Subversion, the Real History of the Democrat Party

Missing’ Biden corruption case witness Dr. Gal Luft details allegations

The Biden Family Scandals, a Basic Primer

The Myth of the GOP Puppet Master

Censorship US:

*** Court Order Blocks the Biden Administration from Violating First Amendment

*** Short Video: What My Free Speech Means to Me

*** Don’t Get The Idea That Internet Censorship Is Diminishing

*** Judge Delivers Major Blow to Biden Admin in Social Media Censorship Case

We Shall Overcome… By Censoring Our Enemies!

Societally US:

*** You Cannot Break Us

*** America, Seen from the Eyes of a Child

*** All Immigrants Are Born on the Fourth of July

*** Blather Here, Blather There, Nothing Between

Thank Media’s Toxic Culture Wars for Today’s Universal Unhappiness

It’s Impossible to Keep Special Interests Happy, But Politicians Keep Trying

After Supreme Court Ruling, Reparations Fight Lives on as ‘Not Race-Based’

Why Won’t the Media Admit When Mass Murderers Are Environmentalists?

‘Sound of Freedom’ Dethrones Disney, Beats Out ‘Indiana Jones’ on its Opening Day

Is Zuckerberg’s Threads Already Threadbare?

US Politics and Socialism:

*** Short video: No Past, No Future

*** The Infantilism Of Totalitarianism

Are We Finally Heading Toward ESG Sanity?

How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice — Part II

The Personal Security System – Fundamental Social Security Reform

Globalism:

*** Cancel Globalism – Embrace Peace, Prosperity & Sovereignty

The Left Is the Enemy, But the Real Threat Is Corporatism

Global Censorship Machine Accelerates to Silence Climate ‘Solutions’ Debate

Religion Related:

*** Why Are Churches Celebrating Sin?

*** RFK Jr on his drug addiction

*** Short video: Parent Victory — The Bible Is Back in Schools

The one key thing my wife taught me to do after her death

Senator Lankford claims Biden administration ‘not going to protect the religious liberty’ of citizens

A 15-Year Old Boy Wrote a Poem: Lord’s Prayer

Science:

Fight Wildfires With Fire (if EPA Allows)

China Restricts Exports of Two Minerals Used in High-Performance Chips

Scientists Silencing Scientists

GWPF moves to open peer review

Artificial Intelligence:

*** Your ChatGPT account and conversations could be for sale on the dark web

*** Open AI And ChatGPT: The Shepherds of the Singularity or Highway to Doom?

An EU landmark for AI governance

The Science of Censorship: AI Censorship Models and Musk’s Counter Move

Ukraine gained advantage in war against Putin with custom-built AI: ‘unprecedented testing ground’

UN Summit: AI Robots Could Run The World Better Than Humans

Ukraine:

*** Pray for the safety of the Ukrainian people

*** A well-rated source to make a Ukraine donation

*** Latest Developments in Ukraine: June 17th

US sends controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine in fight against Russia

Pentagon’s Ukraine Accounting Error Grows to $6.2 Billion

COVID-19 — Misc:

*** COVID-Vaccinated More Likely to Be Hospitalized: CDC Data

*** COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection

Ex-State Dept COVID investigator calls newly-unredacted Fauci communications ‘an extensive cover-up’

Propaganda-In-Action: How The Media Minimizes mRNA Vaccine Injuries

COVID-19 — Repeated Important Information:

My webpage (C19Science.info) with dozens of Science-based COVID-19 reports

*** Study: Measuring the COVID Mandates

*** World Council of Health: Early COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines

*** FLCCC Long COVID Treatment Protocol

*** COVID-19: What You Need To Know (Physicians for Informed Consent)

*** If you have received a COVID-19 injection, here’s how to Detox

*** Place Your US Order for Free At-Home COVID-19 Tests

Please use social media, etc. to pass on this Newsletter to other open-minded citizens…If you’d like to be added to the distribution of our popular, free, worldwide Media Balance Newsletter, simply send me an email saying that.

Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone, as some documents (e.g., PDFs) are much easier to read on a large computer screen… We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize display issues.

Note 2: For past Newsletter issues see the archives from: 2020 & 2021 & 2022 & 2023. To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles over all thirteen plus years of the Newsletter, we’ve put this together — where you can search ALL prior issues, by year. For a background about how the Newsletter is put together, etc., please read this.

Note 3: See this extensive list of reasonable books on climate change. As a parallel effort, we have also put together a list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. Both topics are also extensively covered on my website: WiseEnergy.org.

Note 4: I am not an attorney or a physician, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or any of my websites) should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent, licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues, and consult a competent physician regarding medical matters.

Copyright © 2023; Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (see WiseEnergy.org).

The Homeless Crisis Is Destroying The Once-Great Cities Of The West Coast

/in , , , /by

By Suzanne Downing

In 2019, the Seattle news channel KOMO produced “Seattle is Dying,” a documentary by Eric Johnson that has been seen by more than 15 million people on YouTube.

The homeless industrial complex and liberal apologists lost their minds, and said the production was irresponsible and inaccurate “propaganda.”

“‘Seattle is Dying’ is something else. It’s propaganda stuffed with overblown and florid rhetoric designed to propose simple answers to complex problems while simultaneously generating fear and pointing fingers,” wrote one liberal-leaning columnist out of Oregon.

It wasn’t, however. “Seattle is Dying” was prophetic, not just for Seattle, but for cities up and down the West Coast.

Once known as the Emerald City, Washington’s biggest city was, when the documentary was made in 2019 and is today facing a crisis of confidence, as rising crime and a deteriorating quality of life leave residents frustrated and contemplating the exits.

Some are, in fact, leaving. King County, home to Seattle, saw a net domestic outmigration of -16,035 in 2022, on top of outmigration of net -37,655 in 2021.

Eric Johnson didn’t make up the terrible conditions in the city; he simply pulled back the curtain and called it like he saw it.

Now, a recent poll conducted by Suffolk University for the Seattle Times shows that fully one-third of Seattle residents are considering abandoning the community they once loved. The downtown streets are overrun with lawless vagrants and addicts, leading to a reversal in the city’s reputation as a thriving metropolis.

“Freattle,” as it’s become known by some, is a place where deadbeats and druggies can exploit the city’s generosity.

Yet, the city is not as liberal as many might think. Pew Research Center report reveals that 41 percent of Seattleites lean Republican, while 42 percent lean Democrat, and 17 percent remain undecided. Despite the political diversity, the people elect liberal, and even socialist officials. Between public policy and the homeless industrial complex, families are being driven away. The Seattle Times poll shows that over 50% of the Republicans polled in King County are contemplating leaving.

Among those who are looking for another community than Seattle, 34 percent cite increasing crime as the primary reason. It doesn’t help that Gov. Jay Inslee and the liberal legislature have also created a statewide environment that is unfriendly to families and accommodating to petty thieves, drug pushers, and hardened felons.

The situation in Seattle is also found Portland, Ore. The most recent U.S. Census reveals that after 15 years of continuous growth, Portland’s population started to decline as people left during the pandemic and working families never came back.

Further down the coast, the Bay Area has seen population decline across all its counties. Some attribute this decline to the trend of those in the Bay Area choosing not to have children, coupled with insufficient in-migration.

The shrinkage in the Bay Area gained momentum in 2020, partially due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which allowed people to work remotely. With the freedom to choose, many decided to leave for places like Bend, Ore., where the population has been growing at an annual rate of 2.54 percent. Meanwhile, the Bay Area lost 93,000 residents between April 2020 and January 2021.

In 2022, Los Angeles County experienced the largest population decline in the entire state of California, with a decrease of 90,704 residents, continuing its downward trajectory.

Between 2021 and 2022, the county shedded 271,098 residents. That’s equivalent to the population of Anchorage, Alaska.

Even red-state Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage, is not immune to the exodus from liberal-run cities.

Anchorage’s population fell below 290,000 during the last U.S. Census, as people who can afford to move are seeking refuge in the conservative Mat-Su Valley.

While z, further alienating middle-class families, the Mat-Su Valley offers more abundant housing options, fewer burdensome housing regulations, superior schools, and a sense of safety.

People vote in the politicians who promulgate the policies. And when those policies turn out to make communities into dystopian nightmares, people vote with their feet. Sometimes, those fleeing the ruins end up packing up their liberal leanings and bringing them along, without realizing they’ve created the very problems they are leaving.

The common thread in these dying cities is the liberal value of making life “painless.” The compassionate Left believes that legalizing painkillers makes life more painless. That’s why the Left also pushes universal basic income, universal health care, and SNAP benefits.

Pain has always been a warning signal and the right to a pain-free life allows people to escape the feedback on their behaviors. Rather than allowing people to get the warning signals to stop whatever it is they are doing, cities are making entire industries that are codependent on enabling and growing bad behaviors.

In 2019, one brave reporter – KOMO’s Eric Johnson – was right all along. Even though he was pilloried by many of the news pundits and the defenders of big government, Seattle is still dying. And so are Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Anchorage.

*****

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

The ‘Hottest Ever’ Media Hype thumbnail

The ‘Hottest Ever’ Media Hype

/in , , , , /by

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Global warming campaigners are pushing the notion that we just had the “hottest ever” three days in recorded history.

The warming-compliant media picked up the “hottest ever” line and ran with it.

We posted a serious debunking at CFACT.org.  The Daily Caller’s Nick Pope explains that in order to come up with their “hottest ever” hype, warming campaigners turned to “a data tool from the University of Maine which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has warned is not as dependable as traditional observational data.”

Reality not hot enough for ya? You can always scare everyone with an agenda-driven computer analysis!

CFACT’s Marc Morano called it “weaponizing weather” on Fox and posted that “Biden’s EPA reveals the 1930’s had more severe heatwaves in USA than present day.”

July Average Maximum Temperature vs Year 1895-2023 infographic

Climate data expert Tony Heller posted the graph above and tweeted, “the five hottest July’s in the U.S. were 1936, 1901, 1934, 1930 and 1931.”

Do you think Team Warming will be able to airbrush the searing heat of the 1930s and “the great dust bowl” that resulted out of our collective consciousness?

Geological Timescale: Concentration of CO2 and Temperature Fluctuations infographic.

Greenpeace co-founder, and close CFACT friend, Patrick Moore shared the graph above, which reminds us that on a geological time scale we’re actually living in a “coldest ever” period for the Earth.

Reporters should start doing their jobs, fully vet these “hottest ever” claims, and ask those who made them the tough questions that will cool down the hype.

The media keeps right on publishing unvetted, easily disproven, climate propaganda.

Read the latest climate fact check now.

For nature and people too.

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

China Seek Military Dominance Through Fossil Fuels thumbnail

China Seek Military Dominance Through Fossil Fuels

/in , , , , , /by

By Ronald Stein

As the world watches, China has been aggressively building its fleet of ships and aircraft in anticipation of a potential attack on Taiwan.

To support that military domination, China is also aggressively building its fossil fuel refining capabilities to power those ships and aircraft. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is aggressively campaigning to rid America of fossil fuels, inclusive of in-America oil production and oil refining!

For all Americans, the 42-minute CBS 60 Minutes presentation video is a must viewing of The state of the U.S. Navy as China builds up its naval force and threatens Taiwan. CBS also provided a transcript of the July 2nd presentation for reading at your leisure.

Probably due to time constraints for the excellent 60 Minutes broadcast was CBS’s lack of coverage of China’s expansion of its refining capabilities to manufacture OPEC and Russian oil into the fuels needed by China’s growing fleet of ships and aircraft.

Asia is the region with the greatest number of future petroleum refineries. The amount of oil fed through refineries in Asia has significantly increased in the past three decades as demand for manufactured fuels and petroleum products surged in developing countries such as China and India, with significantly less stringent environmental regulations than those in America. As reported by Reuters, China’s oil refining capacity overtook the United States as the world’s largest in 2022.

Unbeknownst to President Joe Biden is that China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are great War historians. As World War I and II historians, Russia, China, and OPEC know, the country that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world!

Biden has a short memory of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years. Ridding America of oil before identifying a replacement is immoral and evil, as extreme shortages of the products and fuels now manufactured from fossil fuels will result in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths and will have overwhelmingly negative impacts on GDP, national security, and development.

With China pursuing military domination, President Joe Biden continues moving to rid America of fossil fuels while simultaneously pursuing the generation of occasional electricity from wind turbines and solar panels. Thus, Biden is doing an excellent job of actively relinquishing “CONTROL” of the crude oil supply to OPEC and Russia and refining capacity to China!

In January 2019, there were 135 operating refineries in America. As of January 1, 2023, there were 129 operable petroleum refineries in the United States. The recent closures have resulted in the United States losing nearly 1 million barrels per day of oil refining capacity, with more set to be shuttered in the next few years.

The future does not bode well as 20 percent of the 700 worldwide aging refineries are projected to close in the next five years, which will result in less manufacturing with the loss of 140 sites to meet the ever-growing demands of ships, aircraft, and the derivatives needed for all the products demanded by society. With less manufacturing in wealthy countries in the days ahead, further shortages and inflation of both fuels and products in perpetuity are guaranteed.

In the years ahead, as Biden focuses on ridding the USA of fossil fuels, America’s powerful and elite military fleet of ships and aircraft will become more dependent on the fuels and oil-based products manufactured in China’s refineries!

*****

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.

The Rampant Greenwashing Destroying Our Planet thumbnail

The Rampant Greenwashing Destroying Our Planet

/in , , , , , /by

By MERCOLA Take Control of Your Health

The Stupidity of Ethanol as Green Energy

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Carbon neutrality refers to a product that has net zero carbon emissions. The manufacture and use of corn-based ethanol has expanded based on the assumption that it’s carbon neutral and therefore far better for the environment than gasoline. However, several studies have shown that such assumptions are categorically false
  • A 2016 study found corn grown for ethanol only offset 37% of carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning biofuels, resulting in net-positive carbon dioxide emissions that are greater than gasoline
  • One of the primary reasons why growing corn for ethanol has a net-positive CO2 impact is because farmers are plowing up native grasslands to make more room for corn; 60 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the environment per acre of grassland plowed
  • Ignoring water consumption further underestimates CO2 emissions from land-use change by 28%. When corn plants’ water needs are considered, corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline
  • A five-year study published in 2022 concluded the CO2 emissions from corn-based ethanol are at least 24% greater than that of gasoline. On top of that, it has led to increased fertilizer use, resulting in greater water pollution and a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico

Carbon neutrality is the holy grail of the biofuel industry. It refers to a product that has net zero carbon emissions. In the case of ethanol, the corn or soybeans grown to produce it would have to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as is given off when the ethanol is burned.

The manufacture and use of ethanol in the U.S. has been allowed to expand based on the assumption that it’s carbon neutral and therefore far better for the environment than gasoline. However, a 2016 study1 by professor John DeCicco, Ph.D., at the University of Michigan, showed that such assumptions were categorically false.

Ethanol Is Far From Carbon Neutral

What DeCicco and his team discovered was that biofuels such as corn ethanol are associated with a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions — even more so than gasoline. It turns out that the crops only offset 37% of carbon dioxide emissions produced by burning biofuels. At the time, DeCicco explained:2

“The name of the game is to speed up how much CO2 [carbon dioxide] you remove from the air … The best way to begin removing more CO2 from the air is to grow more trees and leave them. Prior to settlement, Michigan was heavily forested.

A state like Michigan could do much more to balance out the tailpipe emissions of CO2 by reforesting than by repurposing the corn and soybeans grown in the state into biofuels. That is just a kind of shell game that’s not working.”

Granted, DeCicco’s study was funded by the American Petroleum Institute, which obviously has reason to want to discredit the sustainability of biofuels. However, the research reiterates what other, more independent researchers have found before.

Ethanol Raises Net Carbon Emissions

For example, in 2014, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report titled “Ethanol’s Broken Promise,”3 which reached similar conclusions as DeCicco’s study. It too concluded that corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline.

One of the primary reasons why growing corn for ethanol has a net-positive carbon impact is because farmers are plowing up native grasslands to make more room for corn. The failure to take this change in land use into account is how proponents of biofuels have been able to perpetuate the myth that it’s carbon neutral.

According to EWG, more than 8 million acres of grassland and wetlands were converted to corn between 2008 and 2011 alone, and every time an acre of grassland is plowed, 60 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the environment.4

So, while the ethanol fuel program was designed to reduce carbon emissions, the loss of grasslands does just the opposite. Estimates showing corn ethanol’s positive influence on the environment have also failed to consider the water needed to grow the corn.

“Ignoring water constraints underestimates emissions from land-use change by 28%,” EWG reported.5 According to agricultural economists at Purdue University, when corn plants’ water needs are considered, corn ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline.6

The EWG also cited data debunking the false claim that ethanol has no impact on the price of corn and other agricultural commodities. According to scientists with the National Academies, the radical change in the proportion of corn used for ethanol resulted in the price of corn rising by 20% and 40% between 2007 and 2009 alone. This is partly why anti-hunger organizations have been so against corn-based ethanol.

The Many Downsides of Biofuels

A five-year study7,8 published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) in February 2022 also came down hard on corn-based ethanol, concluding its CO2 emissions are at least 24% greater than that of gasoline. On top of that, it has led to increased fertilizer use, resulting in greater water pollution and a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. As reported by Civil Eats:9

“Despite the promise that the RFS [renewable fuel standard] would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a new study … finds that expansion of U.S. corn cultivation has come at eye-popping environmental costs.

Corn production expanded by 8.7%, or 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres), between 2008 and 2016. As a result, the researchers found that nationwide annual fertilizer use surged by 3 to 8% and water pollutants rose by 3 to 5%.

The sheer extent of domestic land use change, however, generated greenhouse gas emissions that are, at best, equivalent to those caused by gasoline use — and likely at least 24% higher.

That’s because the RFS caused corn prices to spike by 30% and soybean and other crops by 20%. As a result, farmers planted corn everywhere they could, replacing other crops and pastureland, and plowing up land that had previously been reserved for conservation purposes. They also often skipped the soybeans in their rotations, despite the potential impacts on their soil …

Previous studies … dramatically underestimated the impacts those land use changes had on carbon emissions; in fact, the models treated the land that was converted from conservation or pasture as if there was little change in the amount of carbon stored once it was planted with corn — which runs counter to existing empirical evidence10 …

In 2008 … Timothy Searchinger, a senior researcher at Princeton University’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, was one of several who predicted11 that using U.S. croplands for biofuels would increase greenhouse gas emissions through land use change.

Now, his assessment has been validated by the new study. Searchinger says the new study boils down to a simple, inescapable truth: Using land has a cost. And some uses simply don’t make sense because the cost is too high.

‘It’s crazy to use this very limited resource — highly productive land — for energy,’ he said. ‘It’s almost spectacularly inefficient.’ Corn ethanol converts 0.15% of solar energy into usable energy, while a solar cell today converts 15 to 20% of sunlight to energy. ‘And the good news is you don’t need to put a solar cell on the best available farmland.’”

Will Large-Scale Carbon Capture Worsen the Situation?

Fertile farmland may soon also be sacrificed for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration projects that are being implemented in South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska.

In a March 4, 2022, interview with SDPB Radio, Chris Hill, director of permitting for the Summit Carbon Solutions project, explained how they intend to capture and sequester the carbon emitted during the ethanol fermentation process:

“The science behind it is relatively straightforward … fermentation is not a new process … The bugs eat the sugars or the starches that are from the corn. They ultimately produce alcohols. They release CO2 in that process. That CO2 bubbles up through the fermentation tanks and ultimately leaves the tanks and it’s currently being emitted to the atmosphere. So that’s the science and where the CO2 is coming from.

We’ll be pulling the CO2 off its current emission point, which is the stack. And what we’re doing with that is, we’re going to use multistage compression to pressurize the CO2 into a dense phase …

After the CO2 is compressed into a dense phase … where it behaves similar to a liquid, it’s going to be injected into a pipeline that will range between 4 inches and 24 inches depending on where you’re at in the system, ultimately to transport that CO2 up to North Dakota, just west of Bismarck in the Oliver/Mercer county area, where it will be injected for safe and permanent sequestration …

The USGS’s study estimates that the state of North Dakota has a capacity to store approximately 250 billion metric tons of CO2 … And our annual capacity of 12 million metric tons. You can easily calculate … that there’s … over 100 years of capacity in that area …”

Summit Carbon Solutions is the largest of three companies seeking to pipe CO2 from ethanol-producing plants into porous rock, deep underground. The two others are Archer-Daniels-Midland and Navigator CO2 Ventures.12

What Can Go Wrong?

According to Hill, the science behind this ridiculous plan has been carefully analyzed and the process deemed 100% safe. Does that mean nothing can go wrong? Hardly. If history tells us anything, it’s that anything that can go wrong probably will, sooner or later, and when it comes to liquefied CO2 gas under pressure, it just so happens to be explosive when exposed to heat above 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius).13

Could liquefied CO2, under pressure, deep down in a rock formation, possibly get heated to combustible temperatures under extreme conditions? Something to ponder. Exposure to this CO2, say if a pipe were to bust a leak, also has severe health impacts, ranging from dizziness and increased heart rate to nervous system damage, frostbite and rapid suffocation.14

Aside from that, there’s the direct and immediate threat to farmers — and anyone who needs food — as usable farmland may be seized through eminent domain for these pipelines.15 Seizing the land of small farmers to install CO2 sequestration pipelines hardly seems to be a wise move, seeing how all the signs point to severe food shortages and, potentially, worldwide famine in coming years.

ESG Is a Complete Fraud

In late April 2023, Summit Carbon Solutions signed a multiyear agreement to sell Carbon Dioxide Removal credits (CDRs) to the NextGen, a joint venture between South Pole and the Mitsubishi Corporation.

According to PR Newswire,16 NextGen is seeking to create “one of the world’s largest diversified portfolios of CDRs, with plans to purchase over 1 million tons of CDRs by 2025.” While this may thrill investors, it won’t do a thing for our environment.

In fact, ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing is a complete scam, designed to inflate profits, not save the planet. As reported by the Harvard Business Review in August 2022,17 the trillions of dollars currently being pumped into ESG assets are “dedicated to assuring returns for shareholders, not delivering positive planetary impact”:

“The separation of profit and planet is by design. ESG ratings which underlie ESG fund selection are based on ‘single materiality’ — the impact of the changing world on a company’s profits and losses, not the reverse.

They also bear no connection to natural boundaries. According to Bloomberg,18 ‘[ESG] ratings don’t measure a company’s impact on the Earth and society. In fact, they gauge the opposite: the potential impact of the world on the company and its shareholders.’

Yet it’s hard to blame casual observers for believing that investing in an ESG investment fund is helping to save the planet. Marketing materials of ESG funds often make lofty statements about social or environmental aspirations, but the fine print reveals that the real goal is to assure shareholder profits.

For example, a prior statement from State Street’s ESG Investment Statement mentions the need to encourage a ‘transition to a low-carbon, more sustainable, resource-efficient and circular economy,’ but later it defines ESG issues as ‘events or conditions that, should they occur, could cause a negative impact on the value of an investment.’

According to Henry Fernandez, CEO of the leading ESG ratings provider MSCI, ESG doublespeak has confused most individuals, many institutional investors, and even some portfolio managers.”

In 2020, Social Capital founder and CEO Chamath Palihapitiya went even further, telling CNBC that ESG investing is a “complete fraud.”19 According to Palihapitiya, ESG “does not necessarily encourage best practices, nor does it move the ball forward on things like the climate crisis.”

Rather, it’s primarily a marketing ploy to sell potentially questionable investments and “a way for companies to get free money,” as having a high ESG means you can get negative-interest loans.

Rampant Greenwashing

Similarly, a March 2022 post titled “The False Promise of ESG” on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance20 noted that highly-ranked ESG businesses oftentimes are LESS socially responsible than companies with far lower scores. Indeed, several investigations have revealed rampant greenwashing, with many ESG-labeled funds being far from “sustainable.”

Take FTX, for example. FTX — the cryptocurrency exchange that went belly up overnight while its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried absconded with up to $2 billion of client funds — had a higher governance score than Exxon Mobil,21 despite having almost no corporate governance whatsoever.

It had no board of directors, an “irregular ownership structure,” was rife with conflicts of interest and self-dealing and had no financial controls. Bankman-Fried didn’t even keep an accurate list of accounts. If this doesn’t tell you that ESG is flawed at best, and a complete fraud at worst, I don’t know what will.

FTX isn’t alone in falling short of expectations, though. According to a September 2021 report by climate change think tank InfluenceMap, more than half the 723 funds marketed using ESG claims failed to meet the Paris Accord rules on carbon emissions and clean energy, and more than 70% of funds with broad ESG goals failed to meet global climate targets.22

ESG Is Another Globalist Takeover Tool

One glaring problem with ESG is the lack of regulations that define what qualifies a company as environmentally or socially responsible. It is this very lack of definition that allows the globalist cabal to use ESG to push their own self-serving ideologies on companies and consumers.

In a November 2022 Newsweek opinion piece,23 Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Kathy Barnette, called ESG “a woke scam” that is changing our nation by forcing companies to embrace ideologies that most people would otherwise reject:

“ESG is the latest trendy acronym designed to empower the elites at the expense of us non-elites,” Barnette wrote. “It’s a wokeness scorecard for investors.

Think of the E in ESG as code for climate change activism. Think of the S in ESG as code for social justice — how open a company is to critical race theory, diversity mandates, and drag queen story hour in public libraries. And the G is all about how much power employees have to shake things up at a company …

Altogether, ESG investing insidiously changes traditional American values, all while never by having to stand before the American people and ask for their permission.

But the real danger is to society. ESG is a win-win for climate change activists and social justice warriors who can bypass the ballot box — and thus the will of the people — to implement policy that would have a very hard time getting passed in Congress.”

ESG Drives the Financial Great Reset

F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and lecturer who holds a degree in politics from Princeton University,24 has discussed how ESG investing fits into the globalists’ Great Reset more directly:25

“[BlackRock founder and CEO Larry] Fink … now stands positioned to use the huge weight of BlackRock to create what is potentially … the world’s largest Ponzi scam … Fink with $9 trillion to leverage is pushing the greatest shift of capital in history into a scam known as ESG Investing.

The UN ‘sustainable economy’ agenda is being realized quietly by the very same global banks which have created the financial crises in 2008.

This time they are preparing the Klaus Schwab WEF Great Reset by steering hundreds of billions and soon trillions in investment to their hand-picked ‘woke’ companies, and away from the ‘not woke’ … Oil companies like ExxonMobil or coal companies … are doomed as Fink and friends now promote their financial Great Reset or Green New Deal.”

The case of Tesla also shows how ESG can be, and is, used as a weapon. Elon Musk initiated his acquisition of Twitter in mid-April 2022. One month later, his company Tesla was removed from the ESG Index, despite its focus on creating environmentally conscious vehicles. Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil remained in the S&P 500 ESG Index top 10.26 Musk tweeted,27 “… ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

Control by Allocation of Resources

In summary, the ESG system is an early phase of the new financial system envisioned by the World Economic Forum (WEF). Basically, a company’s ESG score decides its ability to obtain loans and investment opportunities, and in the future, the same “social conscience”-type scoring will apply to private individuals as well.

ESG is also a specific tactic to push the “green” agenda forward, and it too is part and parcel of the WEF’s Great Reset. While the notion of a pollution-free world is an attractive one, ESG investing isn’t about the environment, or social justice, or anything else it claims to stand for.

It’s all about creating a control system in which the world’s resources are owned by the richest of the rich, while the rest of the population can be controlled through the allocation of those resources, including energy. As explained in an anonymous Winter Oak article:28

“Under such an economic construct, asset holding conglomerates can redirect the flow of global capital by aligning investments with the UN’s SDGs [sustainable development goals] and configuring them as Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) compliant so that new international markets can be built … and eventually move populations towards a cap-and-trade system, otherwise known as a carbon credit economy.

This will centralize power in the hands of stakeholder capitalists under the benevolent guise of reinventing capitalism through fairer and greener means, using deceptive slogans like ‘Build Back Better’ without sacrificing the perpetual growth imperative of capitalism.”

The WEF itself also describes ESG as being part of its resource-based economic system:29

“Digital finance refers to the integration of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile platforms, blockchain and the Internet of things (IoT) in the provision of financial services. Sustainable finance refers to financial services integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria into the business or investment decisions.

When combined, sustainable digital finance can take advantage of emerging technologies to analyze data, power investment decisions and grow jobs in sectors supporting a transition to a low-carbon economy.”

So, in closing, it’s important to be aware of the downsides of relying on suspect labels like ESG, which could ultimately tie the global population to a new form of data slavery.30

RELATED ARTICLE: Former Biden Climate Czar Works For ‘Green’ Private Equity Firms

Sources and References

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

ABSURED! Biden Regime Supports ‘Blocking out the Sun’ thumbnail

ABSURED! Biden Regime Supports ‘Blocking out the Sun’

/in , , , , , , /by

By The Geller Report

“The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.” — Ayn Rand.

These lunatics are truly evil. They will be the death of us all. What about all those solar panels the government mandated? Not to mention the unintended consequences on how this will affect crops, farming, food supply, vitamin D etc. or the mental health crisis in this country.

White House Floats the Idea of Blocking Out the Sun

BY: TNR, July 6, 2023:

For years, advocates have refused to consider the possibility that geoengineering to slow climate change could be an option on the table. But we may be at a point where its use is inevitable.

Last week, the United States government tiptoed a little closer to the world of science fiction. In a 44-page report it seemed at pains to say was not its own idea, the White House laid out a five-year research plan to explore the development and eventual deployment of solar radiation management (SRM) technology—the idea of blocking out the sun to slow down climate change.

Skeptics say SRM is dangerous and untested, and has a laundry list of potential impacts that, similarly, seem straight out of a disaster movie: worsened winters, disappearing monsoons, damage to the ozone layer, and droughts that could devastate already dry regions. In recent years, prominent climate scientists have organized to call for a total moratorium on researching and testing the technology. But others say its deployment is becoming virtually inevitable as the world’s biggest polluters—the U.S. among them—appear incapable of making the large-scale adjustments necessary to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

“The question becomes, what should we do, given that we’re not doing what we should be doing?” said Toby Svoboda, an environmental ethicist at Colgate University and the author of a book on the ethics of climate engineering. “Politically, this is pretty significant, that the Biden administration would signal their openness to this.”

For the uninitiated, SRM encompasses an array of highly controversial geoengineering techniques that minimize the warming impact of the sun—and thus the worsening impacts of human-caused climate change—primarily by injecting reflective chemical compounds into the earth’s atmosphere.

Ordered by Congress as part of a 2022 appropriations bill, the new White House report stops short of issuing a new policy directive on the technology or its use. But it does suggest developing scenarios in which SRM might be used, and even supports testing the technology in small-scale, real-world deployments.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Insane California green energy rules could wreck trucking industry

A Systematic Review of Autopsy Findings in Deaths after COVID-19 Vaccination, Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection

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

AWED BALANCED MEDIA NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections. thumbnail

AWED BALANCED MEDIA NEWS: We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

/in , , , , , , /by

By John Droz, Jr.

Welcome! We cover COVID to Climate, as well as Energy to Elections.

Here is the link for this issue, so please share it on social media.

Bookmark or make Favorite the 2023, 2022, 2021 & 2020 Newsletter Archives.

Particularly note the ***asterisked*** items below…

— This Newsletter’s Articles, by Topic —

If You Only Have Time to Read a Few Select Articles:

*** Largest drop ever: Math scores see biggest plunge in 50 years of records

*** America’s Catholic schools defied the sobering trends regarding learning loss

*** George Will: K-12 education’s alarming decline could be a dominant 2024 issue

*** K-12: The War against Children

*** The Indoctrination of the American Mind

*** Sweden Dumps Climate Agenda, Scraps Green Energy Targets

*** How to answer loaded climate questions

*** Wrong Again: James Hansen 1988 Senate Testimony Edition

*** UN Chief claims fossil fuels are ‘incompatible with human survival’

*** New Book (Dr. Judith Curry): Climate Uncertainty and Risk

*** As usual, the media’s knee-jerk take on the Canadian wildfires was all wrong

*** Exposure to Smoke from Fires

*** Sweden Shocks Europe: Abandons ‘Unstable’ Green Energy Agenda, Returns to Nuclear Power

*** Fueling a Freer Future: Three good short energy videos

*** Replacing Coal Power with Wind and Solar Increases Net CO2 Emissions

*** The Energy Transition Isn’t

*** Wind costs will remain high

*** Why Big Oil loves the renewable energy industry

*** Offshore Wind Electrical Substations; The Secret, Silent Killers

*** Italy Returns to Nuclear Sanity. Shouldn’t We?

*** NASA shelves electric aircraft experiment

*** Flood at the Border Sinks Biden

*** America Loves Winning!

*** China’s Saboteurs Are Coming to America

*** Is the Tide Beginning to Turn? Reclaiming of our sanity around sex and gender

*** RFK Jr.: Saying I’m anti-vaccine is ‘way of silencing me’

*** The World Economy is Becoming Unglued; Models Miss Real-World Behavior

*** Jordan Peterson & James Lindsay Just Exposed the Global Elite’s Agenda

*** Science leadership has forgotten … science

*** Minding the Sciences — In Defense of Merit: Is it too late?

*** Critically Thinking about Artificial Intelligence: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

*** Lawsuit: Open AI Stole ‘Massive Amounts of Personal Data’ to Train ChatGPT

Higher Education Related:

*** SCOTUS Rules on Student Debt Relief Plan (Biden v. Nebraska)

*** Medical Education Is Infected with DEI

*** The Decline (and Fall?) of College

Supreme Court Bans Racial Preferences in College Admissions

Fewer racial minorities in college will help racial minorities

Chapel Hill’s Latest DEI Push

Secondary Education Related:

*** Report: The Key to Fixing the US Education System

*** George Will: K-12 education’s alarming decline could be a dominant 2024 issue

*** K-12: The War against Children

*** The Indoctrination of the American Mind

*** Largest drop ever: Math scores see biggest plunge in 50 years of records

*** America’s Catholic schools defied the sobering trends regarding learning loss

Ohio moms react to school reporting them to FBI after exposing critical race theory

Support K-12 Education Reform

Suddenly, School Choice: Its Rapid Post-Pandemic Expansion Sets Up a Big Pass/Fail Test for Education

Greed Energy Economics:

*** Time to accept that wind turbine costs are not falling

*** Wind costs will remain high

*** Still Waiting for the Magical Future of Free Wind Power

Siemens Energy shares plunge more than 37% as wind turbine worries deepen

Renewable Corporate Welfare for Renewables Keeps On A-Coming

Unreliables (General):

*** Replacing Coal Power with Wind and Solar Increases Net CO2 Emissions

*** Why Big Oil loves the renewable energy industry

*** The Energy Transition Isn’t

How Co-ops are Impacted by Threats to Reliability

Alberta wind power production fell to 0.4% capacity at same time solar was zero

Aussie Farmers Reject Massive Wind & Solar Transmission Grid Rollout

Europe’s Crisis:  Blame Green Energy Policy

Wind Energy — Offshore:

*** Is Dominion’s Offshore Wind Project ‘Arbitrary and Capricious’? NOAA Says Yes!

*** Offshore Wind Electrical Substations; The Secret, Silent Killers

*** Offshore wind only delivers about one tenth of jobs promised

*** Whales Die, While Officials, Media, and Environmentalists Lie

*** Biden admin under fire for offshore wind impacts on military operations

Federal Agency Agrees to GOA Probe of Offshore Wind Impacts

Commissioners approve hiring additional law firms to fight turbines off NJ coast

Survey Says: Most Local Taxpayers Don’t Like Current Offshore Wind Plan

Offshore wind foes in New Jersey gathering force legally and politically

Big decisions looming on offshore wind

Wind Energy — Other:

*** Taking the Wind Out of Climate Change (referencing 60± studies)

Years after saving the bald eagle, 82 of them could be killed in NY wind projects

USGS Map of US wind turbines

Solar Energy:

Solar industry facing bankruptcies, leaving many with roof panels that don’t work

Five Reasons New Yorkers Should Not Embrace a Solar Energy Future

Solar panels destroyed by hail in Nebraska

Solar sprawl is tearing up the Mojave Desert. Is there a better way?

Let Them Eat Solar Panels

Nuclear Energy:

*** Sweden Shocks Europe: Abandons ‘Unstable’ Green Energy Agenda, Returns to Nuclear Power

*** Italy Returns to Nuclear Sanity. Shouldn’t We?

Coalition urges Senate to oppose renomination of NRC commissioner Baran

Energy Future Unveiled! THORIUM Molten Salt Reactors

NYS passing a bill to ban the release of wastewater from the Indian Point nuclear plant into the Hudson

Dow Chemical CEO Gives Wall Street Lesson on New Nuclear

Study: Thresholds for radiation induced mutation? The Muller-Evans debate: A turning point for cancer risk assessment

Fossil Fuel Energy:

*** Fueling a Freer Future: Three good short videos

*** Alex Epstein: My fireside chat at Fossil Fueled, the Concert

*** The IEA’s ‘Net Zero’ Roadmap Analyzed

EPA Proposes New Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants to supposedly “Tackle the Climate Crisis and Protect Public Health”

Shell defies climate critics to ramp up fossil fuel production

Israel’s natural gas saved the economy over $87 billion in past decade

Report: Renewables growth did not dent fossil fuel dominance in 2022

The tide may finally be turning against the demented drivel of Just Stop Oil fanatics

Norway Approves More Than $18 Billion of Oil and Gas Projects

Electric Vehicles (EVs):

*** NASA shelves electric aircraft experiment

Pothole damage from electric cars is double that of gas vehicles

Misc Energy:

Rural households switching to heat pump face 70% rise in bills

Manmade Global Warming — Some Deceptions:

*** Wrong Again: James Hansen 1988 Senate Testimony Edition

*** UN Chief claims fossil fuels are ‘incompatible with human survival’

*** New Book (Dr. Judith Curry): Climate Uncertainty and Risk

*** Epic Fail: Climate Models Greatly Overestimate Corn Belt Warming

*** Report: Climate Models and Climate Muddles

*** CLINTEL open letter (4) to UN Guterres on plans to stop climate change

North Atlantic Heatwave

Climate Changes Emerges as Single Biggest Issue Facing Jewelry Industry at Harvard Summit

France Shows Climate Change Politics are But an Obvious Scam

Myth of Big Oil’s Funding of Climate Skepticism vs Reality of Big Green’s Billions Driving Climate Alarmism

Manmade Global Warming — Misc:

*** Sweden Dumps Climate Agenda, Scraps Green Energy Targets

*** How to answer loaded climate questions

*** Can the Climate Heal Itself?

*** Al Gore’s Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds

Study: The Verdict of Instrumental Methods

Study: Empirical assessment of the role of the Sun in climate change using balanced multi-proxy solar records

Study: The Earth’s Decadal Rotation and Climate Dynamics

Climate Change Alarmism Is All Pain for No Gain – Enough!

Video: The Mad, Mad World of Climatism

Montana’s AG censored the science he needed to defeat Held v Montana

Nobel Laureate Dr. John Clauser: “I Don’t Believe There is a Climate Crisis”

Manmade Global Warming — Fires:

*** As usual, the media’s knee-jerk take on the Canadian wildfires was all wrong

*** Exposure to Smoke from Fires

Man charged with setting massive Yosemite park fire initially blamed on climate change

Suing Fossil Fuel Firms for Wildfires?

Ross McKitrick: The truth about forest fires goes up in climate-change smoke

US Election:

Election-Integrity.info (10 major election reports by our team of experts, plus much more!)

*** What Ranked-Choice Voting is really about

*** Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises

How This Legal Group Plans To Halt Democrats’ Jihad Against Election Integrity Laws Ahead Of 2024

NC Court Corrects Flawed Ruling on Voter ID Law Driven by Ideology, Not Law

US Election — State Issues:

*** Supreme Court Fails to Uphold Constitutional Provision Protecting State Legislatures

In key decision, Supreme Court rules state lawmakers do not have exclusive control over elections

Veto-Proof NC Republicans Are Advancing Half-Baked Election Integrity Measures

Virginia Democratic County Supervisor Indicted on Dozens of Election Fraud Felonies, Embezzlement

GOP Lawmakers In Wisconsin Want To Make Elections Honest Again

1,400 Voters Flagged as Foreign Nationals in North Carolina

Whistleblower Transcripts Show Deep-State Election Rigging For Biden Was Way Bigger Than A Laptop

Misc US Politics:

*** America Loves Winning!

*** Flood at the Border Sinks Biden

*** Illegal Border Crossers So Far This Year Outnumber The Population of 8 States

*** RFK Jr.: Saying I’m anti-vaccine is ‘way of silencing me’

Bureaucrats Completely Incapable Of Making Reasonable Trade-Offs

The FBI Finally Admits The Shocking Truth About January 6

The Strange Idea That a Cabinet Officer Should Report to the President

House formally censures Rep Adam Schiff

Societally US:

*** China’s Saboteurs Are Coming to America

*** And They Wonder Why No One Trusts the Media Anymore

A Tax Case: Charles and Kathleen Moore v. United States

US Politics and Socialism:

*** Here’s How ESG Affects You, The Average American

*** Why Woke Businesses Sell Out Their Customers

*** Is the Tide Beginning to Turn? Reclaiming of our sanity around sex and gender

Universal Basic Income And The Anti-Human Agenda

Transhumanism: Elitists And Their Detractors

Globalism:

*** The World Economy is Becoming Unglued; Models Miss Real-World Behavior

*** Jordan Peterson & James Lindsay Just Exposed the Global Elite’s Agenda

*** Marxism, Religion & Everything In Between | Peterson & Lindsay

Great Reset: Macron Suggests International Tax System to Subsidize Green Agenda

World Health Organization Pushes Sweeping Censorship Treaty

How The WHO Plans To Increase Its Power, “Restrict Individual Liberties,” Curb “Disinformation”

Religion Related:

John Rosemond: And the Eyes of Both of Them Were Opened

Closer to God Through Prayer

Portland (OR) area Catholic schools are at a crossroads over transgender issues

UN Certified ‘Expert’: Religious Communities Must Yield to LGBT Demands

Science:

*** Science leadership has forgotten … science

*** Minding the Sciences — In Defense of Merit: Is it too late?

Time for another look at Einstein?

The Numbers Are In on How Biden-Era Funding Is Skewing Scientific Research Ever-Wokeward

Harvard professor who studies honesty accused of falsifying data in studies

NAS: Advancing Antiracism, DEI in STEMM Organizations

Politicized Scientists Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

Health:

*** RFK Jr.: Saying I’m anti-vaccine is ‘way of silencing me’

Report: Recycling & Micro-plastics: the Environmental Harms of the Circular Economy

Podcast: Why bother getting up in the morning?

U.S. House Floats Bill to Defund WHO, WEF and ‘Misinformation’ Programs

Artificial Intelligence:

*** Critically Thinking about Artificial Intelligence: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

*** Lawsuit: Open AI Stole ‘Massive Amounts of Personal Data’ to Train ChatGPT

NCAA athlete was scolded by AI over message about women’s sports

Google Bard Plagiarized Our Article, Then Apologized When Caught

Samsung bans employees from using ChatGPT and Google Bard — here’s why

Study: Causal reasoning about epidemiological associations in conversational AI

Ukraine:

*** Latest Developments in Ukraine: July 2nd

*** War is really good for business, Ukraine is good for business

*** The Darkness Ahead: Where The Ukraine War Is Headed

Is Nuclear War Inevitable?

Putin vows to defend Russia against armed rebellion led by mercenary chief

Pray for the safety of the Ukrainian people

A well-rated source to make a Ukraine donation

COVID-19 — Injections:

*** CDC confirms heart disease risk soars 13,200% among vaccinated

*** Study shows: Fully Vaxxed Lose 25 Years of Life Expectancy

*** Top Canadian politician apologizes to unvaccinated, “we were wrong…”

*** New emails show COVID vaccine mandates were based on a lie

Debunking the COVID Injection Narrative, Once And For All

Laid Low by the COVID Vaccine, Now They’ve Got a Bad Case of Federal Unresponsiveness

The COVID-19 Vaccines Could Never Prevent Transmission

COVID-19 — Misc:

Biden Is Breaking The Law By Not Publishing Covid Origins Intelligence

Dr David E. Martin – Covid Summit – European Union Parliament

COVID-19 — Repeated Important Information:

My webpage (C19Science.info) with dozens of Science-based COVID-19 reports

*** Study: Measuring the COVID Mandates

*** World Council of Health: Early COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines

*** FLCCC Long COVID Treatment Protocol

*** COVID-19: What You Need To Know (Physicians for Informed Consent)

*** If you have received a COVID-19 injection, here’s how to Detox

*** Place Your US Order for Free At-Home COVID-19 Tests

Please use social media, etc. to pass on this Newsletter to other open-minded citizens…If you’d like to be added to (or unsubscribe from) the distribution of our popular, free, worldwide Media Balance Newsletter, simply send me an email saying that.

Note 1: We recommend reading the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone, as some documents (e.g., PDFs) are much easier to read on a large computer screen… We’ve tried to use common fonts, etc. to minimize display issues.

Note 2: For past Newsletter issues see the archives from: 2020 & 2021 & 2022 & 2023. To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles over all thirteen plus years of the Newsletter, we’ve put this together — where you can search ALL prior issues, by year. For a background about how the Newsletter is put together, etc., please read this.

Note 3: See this extensive list of reasonable books on climate change. As a parallel effort, we have also put together a list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. Both topics are also extensively covered on my website: WiseEnergy.org.

Note 4: I am not an attorney or a physician, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or any of my websites) should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent, licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues, and consult a competent physician regarding medical matters.

Copyright © 2023; Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (see WiseEnergy.org).

Fonda Leads Push for Climate Change Content in Movies and TV thumbnail

Fonda Leads Push for Climate Change Content in Movies and TV

/in , , , , , /by

By Discover The Networks

Planet-saving Hollywood egos including Vietnam-era traitor Jane Fonda met in Los Angeles from June 21 to 24 for a special summit designed to show how the entertainment industry can influence the world in tackling “climate change.”

The Hollywood Climate Summit claimed to unite “thousands” of filmmakers with scientists and activists in a bid to “change the industry’s culture and to encourage movies and TV shows to use their outsized influence on audiences around the world.” That influence will come through increased efforts to subtly insert climate-related words, messages and phrases in TV and film scripts.

Fonda was seen as playing a key role at the summit, continuing her past efforts to push for climate hysteria.

The gathering followed a recent study by the Norman Lear Center and Good Energy which found that the climate crisis was — horrors! — “virtually nonexistent” in scripted entertainment. It noted that fewer than three percent of around 37,000 TV and film scripts made since 2016 mentioned “any climate-related keywords,” and only 0.6 percent used the words “climate change.”

They’re actually scanning every script for words that mention “climate.”

“We see this as a huge problem because, for the most part, people on average spend more time with television and film characters than they do with their own families,” summit co-founder Heather Fipps said. “It is really important for us to steep our fictional worlds in our reality.”

Translation: it’s really important for us to exploit our insidious, family-destroying influence to propagandize for the Progressive agenda.

This virtue-signaling summit comes after a study in 2019 showed private jet-setting Hollywood celebs have carbon footprints up to 300 times bigger than the rest of us.

Jane Fonda

148 Known Connections

Fonda Blames “Climate Crisis” on “Racism” & “Misogyny”

During the December 2, 2022 broadcast of MSNBC’s The Beat, anchor Ari Melber said to Fonda: “I mention women’s rights because so much we know came out of some of what you were doing, where you start out at the Vietnam protest, and then it is all of the guys, and all of the speakers are guys, and you start to say, wait, there is a lot more change even within the protest movement. You were part of that. What do you think about the progress made, and the progress being unwound, when you look at the [Supreme] [C]ourt’s [June 2022] decision [to strike down Roe v. Wade], which we know turned out a lot of voters in the midterms?”

Fonda replied:

“Yeah, it did. We’ve experienced having the right to control our bodies. That is not going to go away. We’re not going to give that up. So while it is absolutely unconscionable what the Supreme Court did, I believe that we’re going to fight and win to get those rights back. But, you know, as I learn more about climate, and as I dig deep, as I have for the last four or five years, what you realize is if there were no racism, there would be no climate crisis. If there was no misogyny, there would be to the climate crisis. It is a part of a mindset. It is the mindset that looks at a woman and says, ‘nice tits,’ or she could work in the fields. It is the same mindset as the person who looks at the tree and said floors, that could make good flooring. Everything is transactional and hierarchy, and certain things matter more than other things. So what has to happen is we not only have to stop new fossil fuel development, we have to change our mindsets.”

To learn more about Jane Fonda, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Climate Change Agenda Is All About Destroying Capitalism thumbnail

The Climate Change Agenda Is All About Destroying Capitalism

/in , , , , /by

By Dr. Rich Swier

“We — the youth, students, and workers of the anti-capitalist, socialist, and revolutionary groups associated with the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International (FT-CI) in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Chile, Mexico, France, the Spanish State, Germany, Italy, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Costa Rica, and Uruguay — joined last year’s Global Climate Strike on September 24. In seven different languages, we proclaimed the same message: Capitalism is destroying the planet; let’s destroy capitalism!” — Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International, September 23, 2021

On February 3rd, 2017 United Nations official Christiana Figueres at a news conference in Brussels admitted that the Global Warming conspiracy set by the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, of which she is the executive secretary, has a goal not of environmental activists to save the world from ecological calamity, but to destroy capitalism.

She said very casually:

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

She even restated that goal ensuring it was not a mistake:

“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

All of these movements seem to have a hidden agenda that the press helps to misrepresent all the time. One must wonder, at what point will the press realize they are destroying their own future?…”

The Myth of Climate Change—86 Quotes from the True Believers

To understand how deeply the myth of climate change has been used to destroy capitalism and with it Western civilization just read the following statements compiled by Karen Schoen from the Florida Citizens Alliance.

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” – Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination…So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts…Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” – Prof. Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” – Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment

“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” – Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

“The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” – Dr David Frame, climate modeler, Oxford University

“I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.” – Al Gore, Climate Change activist

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace

“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.” – emeritus professor Daniel Botkin

“The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level.” – Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis…” – David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive member

“Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced – a catastrophe of our own making.” – Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

“We are getting close to catastrophic tipping points, despite the fact that most people barely notice the warming yet.” – Dr. James Hansen, NASA researcher

“By the end of this century climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.” – Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia

“Climate Change will result in a catastrophic global sea level rise of seven meters. That’s bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis.” – Greenpeace International

“This planet is on course for a catastrophe. The existence of Life itself is at stake.” – Dr Tim Flannery, Principal Research Scientist

“Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.” – Harry Reid, U.S. Senate majority leader

“Climate Change is the greatest threat that human civilization has ever faced.” – Angela Merkel, German Chancellor

“Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.” – Barack Obama, US President

“We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California

“Climate change should be seen as the greatest challenge to ever face mankind.” – Prince Charles

“Climate change makes us all global citizens, we are truly all in this together.” – Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister

“We have reached the critical moment of decision on climate change. Failure to act to now would be deeply and unforgivably irresponsible. We urgently require a global environmental revolution.” – Tony Blair, former British PM

“We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.” – Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a ‘master plan’ is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years form today it will probably be too late.” – Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

“We need a new paradigm of development in which the environment will be a priority. World civilization as we know it will soon end. We have very little time and we must act. If we can address the environmental problem, it will have to be done within a new system, a new paradigm. We have to change our mindset, the way humankind views the world.” – Mikhail Gorbachev, founder of Green Cross International

“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.” – UN Commission on Global Governance report

“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.” – Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

“The emerging ‘environmentalization’ of our civilization and the need for vigorous action in the interest of the entire global community will inevitably have multiple political consequences. Perhaps the most important of them will be a gradual change in the status of the United Nations. Inevitably, it must assume some aspects of a world government.” – Mikhail Gorbachev, State of the World Forum

“I envisage the principles of the Earth Charter to be a new form of the ten commandments. They lay the foundation for a sustainable global earth community.” – Mikhail Gorbachev, co-author of The Earth Charter 

“In my view, after fifty years of service in the United Nations system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.” – Dr Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General,

“Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises.” – Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute

“Regionalism must precede globalism. We foresee a seamless system of governance from local communities, individual states, regional unions and up through to the United Nations itself.” – UN Commission on Global Governance

“A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income. Perhaps only a new and enlightened humanism can permit mankind to negotiate this transition.” – Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

“The alternative to the existing world order can only emerge as a result of a new human dimension of progress. We envision a revolution of the mind, a new way of thinking.” – Mikhail Gorbachev, State of the World Forum

“We require a central organizing principle – one agreed to voluntarily. Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvement in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change – these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.” – Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“Adopting a central organizing principle… means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution… to halt the destruction of the environment.” – Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.” – UN Agenda 21

“The current course of development is thus clearly unsustainable. Current problems cannot be solved by piecemeal measures. More of the same is not enough. Radical change from the current trajectory is not an option, but an absolute necessity. Fundamental economic, social and cultural changes that address the root causes of poverty and environmental degradation are required and they are required now.” – from the Earth Charter website

“The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.” – David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” – Judi Bari, principal organizer of Earth First!

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse?

Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” – Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” – Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.” – Professor Maurice King

“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.” – David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to

discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” – Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” – Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” – Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.” – Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.” – Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” –Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.” – Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit

“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.” – Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society

“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” – John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.” – Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia

“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” – Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” – Prof Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

“I don’t claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population.” – Prince Philip, preface of Down to Earth

“A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.” – United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” – Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor

“… [T]he resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.” – Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind

“One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.” – Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” – Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” – John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.” – Christopher Manes, Earth First!

“The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth – social and environmental.” – Ingrid Newkirk, former President of PETA

“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” – David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club

“The fate of mankind, as well as of religion, depends upon the emergence of a new faith in the future. Armed with such a faith, we might find it possible to resanctify the earth.” – Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“The greatest hope for the Earth lies in religionists and scientists uniting to awaken the world to its near fatal predicament and then leading mankind out of the bewildering maze of international crises into the future Utopia of humanist hope.” – Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind

“What an incredible planet in the universe this will be when we will be one human family living in justice, peace, love and harmony with our divine Earth, with each other and with the heavens.” – Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General

“The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution…. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.” – Rene Dubos, board member, Planetary Citizens

“Each element, plant, insect, fish and animal represents a certain aspect of Gaia’s – and our – being. In a way, we are Gaia’s intelligence and awareness – currently lost in self-destructive madness. We must acknowledge, respect and love her for being the Mother she is to us or we deny our very selves. Nurture the Mother as she nurtures us.” – Prof. Michael J. Cohen, Ecopsychologist

“It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light. We must therefore transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.” – Maurice Strong, first Secretary General of UNEP

“The spirit of our planet is stirring! The Consciousness of Goddess Earth is now rising against all odds, in spite of millennia of suppression, repression and oppression inflicted on Her by a hubristic and misguided humanity. The Earth is a living entity, a biological organism with psychic and spiritual dimensions. With the expansion of the patriarchal religions that focused on a male God majestically stationed in Heaven ruling over the Earth and the Universe, the memory of our planet’s innate Divinity was repressed and banished into the collective unconscious of humanity.” – Envision Earth

“Still more important is the implication that the evolution of homo sapiens, with his technological inventiveness and his increasingly subtle communications network, has vastly increased Gaia’s range of perception. She is now through us awake and aware of herself. She has seen the reflection of her fair face through the eyes of astronauts and the television cameras of orbiting spacecraft. Our sensations of wonder and pleasure, our capacity for conscious thought and speculation, our restless curiosity and drive are hers to share. This new interrelationship of Gaia with man is by no means fully established; we are not yet a truly collective species, corralled and tamed as an integral part of the biosphere, as we are as individual creatures. It may be that the destiny of mankind is to become tamed, so that the fierce, destructive, and greedy forces of tribalism and nationalism are fused into a compulsive urge to belong to the commonwealth of all creatures which constitutes Gaia.” – Sir James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look At Life

“Little by little a planetary prayer book is thus being composed by an increasingly united humanity seeking its oneness. Once again, but this time on a universal scale, humankind is seeking no less than its reunion with ‘divine,’ its transcendence into higher forms of life. Hindus call our earth Brahma, or God, for they rightly see no difference between our earth and the divine. This ancient simple truth is slowly dawning again upon humanity, as we are about to enter our cosmic age and become what we were always meant to be: the planet of god.” – Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General

“What if Mary is another name for Gaia? Then her capacity for virgin birth is no miracle . . . it is a role of Gaia since life began . . . She is of this Universe and, conceivably, a part of God. On Earth, she is the source of life everlasting and is alive now; she gave birth to humankind and we are part of her.” – Sir James Lovelock, Ages of Gaia

“Nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.” – Mikhail Gorbachev, Green Cross International

“The spiritual sense of our place in nature… can be traced to the origins of human civilization….The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity.” – Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian Religious tradition.” – Peter Singer, founder of Animal Rights

“I pledge allegiance to the Earth and all its sacred parts. Its water, land and living things and all its human hearts.” – Global Education Associates, The Earth Pledge

“By fostering a deep sense of connection to others and to the earth in all its dimensions, holistic education encourages a sense of responsibility to self to others and to the planet.” – Global Alliance for Transforming Education

“The earth is not dead matter. She is alive. Now begin to speak to the earth as you walk. You can speak out loud, or just talk to her in your mind. Send your love into her with your exhalation. Feel your heart touching upon the heart of the planet. Say to her whatever words come to you: Mother Earth, I love you. Mother Earth, I bless you. May you be healed. May all your creatures be happy. Peace to you, Mother Earth. On behalf of the human race, I ask forgiveness for having injured you. Forgive us, Mother Earth” – US Student Textbook, “Prayer to the Earth”

©2023. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Global Climate Strike S24: Capitalism Is Destroying the Planet — Let’s Destroy Capitalism!

‘Dead Without Water’: Massive Desert Solar Projects Are Sucking Up Groundwater, Angering Locals thumbnail

‘Dead Without Water’: Massive Desert Solar Projects Are Sucking Up Groundwater, Angering Locals

/in , , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

Massive solar development projects in Southern California have strained local water availability, threatening desert ecosystems and angering residents who have been impacted by the strain on the water supply, according to an Inside Climate News report.

The small communities around Desert Center, California, depend on naturally-occurring underground water reserves, known as groundwater aquifers, but the water-intensive development process for large solar projects has caused groundwater levels to fall, according to Inside Climate News. Crucial local water wells have dried up and land beneath homes has sagged as a result of development activity, while desert ecosystems have been damaged as well, according to Inside Climate News.

Locals complain that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the corporations driving the developments in California’s Colorado Desert have not allowed them to provide sufficient input in the decision-making process for the developments, according to Inside Climate News. Despite the BLM’s assurances that “renewable energy development on BLM-managed public lands will continue to help communities across the country be part of the climate solution, while creating jobs and boosting local economies,” residents say that they have not reaped much benefit from the solar projects while the strain on their groundwater supply has intensified, according to Inside Climate News.

“No one took into consideration a community lived out here,” said Teresa Pierce, a resident of a nearby community who has helped to organize other locals to respond to the resource scarcity and solar developments, according to Inside Climate News.

Developers rely on the groundwater aquifer because there is no other feasible water supply in the area, rendering transport of water from other locations to the development sites prohibitively expensive, according to Inside Climate News. The development has depleted the water reserves for local communities like one trailer park which a property manager said would be “dead without water” if the local scarcity continues to worsen, according to Inside Climate News.

Joe Biden: “We’re gonna be shutting these plants down all across America, and having wind and solar.” pic.twitter.com/dkIu80sqZa

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 4, 2022

Another local who has two palm trees and no house on his property saw his electricity bill go from $15 to $1,800 in just one month, as his electric irrigation pump that keeps the trees alive worked much harder to reach underground water reserves that have fallen due to the development’s extensive use of the groundwater supply, according to Inside Climate News. Drilling new, deeper water wells can cost up to $100,000, according to Inside Climate News.

The BLM was aware that its approved solar projects on public lands may have been using too much water from the area’s underground water reserves by its own standards, but the agency has advanced the projects nonetheless, according to former BLM employees cited by Inside Climate News.

Beyond the problems posed by the strain on the groundwater aquifer for humans, solar developments have overtaken many small bodies of water across the desert which formerly provided critical habitat space to the animals inhabiting the desert region, according to Inside Climate News.

The BLM has approved seven utility-scale developments in the region spanning about 19,000 acres already, with more projects under consideration, according to Inside Climate News. Another 120,000 acres are available for development in the region surrounding Desert Center, according to Inside Climate News.

The Biden administration has publicly touted its spending and regulatory efforts designed to protect 30% of America’s lands and waters from development by 2030. The administration also heavily promotes solar panels as part of its larger “green” energy agenda.

AUTHOR

NICK POPE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Cracks Down On Chinese Solar Panels, Undermining The Green Agenda

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 Climate Pizza Rebellion thumbnail

The Climate Pizza Rebellion

/in , , , , /by

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

On Spring Street, in New York’s Little Italy, sits Lombardi’s, the mother of New York-style pizza.  Lombardi’s coal-fired ovens have been turning out some of the world’s most famous pizzas since 1905.  Lombardi’s is believed to be America’s first pizzeria.

Now NYC politicians are ordering all of their pizzerias with wood and coal burning ovens built before 2016 to install devices to capture 75% of their carbon emissions — threatening to put many of New York’s favorite restaurants out of business.

CFACT’s Marc Morano perfectly summed up the absurdity in The New York Post, writing, “you’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet.”

That’s right, pizza ovens comprise only a tiny proportion of America’s carbon footprint.   Regulating them, or shutting them down completely, will have no meaningful impact on climate.

CFACT tweeted, “Anyone who thinks they can change the temperature of the Earth by regulating pizzerias has no clue. Have they even heard of China?”

Even CNN admits that last year China approved the construction of new coal plants at the equivalent of two per week!

Wired declared that China’s is building an “insane” number of new coal plants.

Will New Yorkers stand idly by while woke politicians take down their favorite food, a world-famous cultural institution?

Staten Island artist Scott Lobaido fired the first doughy shot when he threw 48 slices of pizza over the City Hall fence.  “Give me pizza or give me death!”  The NY Post quoted him shouting.

“As always, it’s the average person who will have to suffer for the religion of the elites,”  Morano’s article concludes.

“To New York City bureaucrats, the message is simple: Lay off the restrictions on pizza, gas stoves, appliances, gas-powered cars, and meat-eating in a silly effort to regulate the climate.

This may sound cheesy, but the secret sauce in this battle to save New York’s iconic pizza traditions is to deliver a loud and clear NO to the city bureaucrats.”

For nature and people too.

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

Biden-Backed Battery Plant Relies On Tech From CCP-Led Chinese Firm thumbnail

Biden-Backed Battery Plant Relies On Tech From CCP-Led Chinese Firm

/in , , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

A U.S. battery maker backed by the Biden administration relies on technology from a Chinese Communist Party-led company, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Chinese media reports.

The Department of Energy (DOE) awarded KORE Power, a U.S.-based battery firm, an $850 million loan in early June to construct its “KOREPlex” battery-cell production facility in Arizona. DOE billed the loan as part of the administration’s efforts to “onshore [electric vehicle] supply chains.” However, KOREPlex will rely on technology from the firm’s long-time Chinese manufacturing partner, Do-Flouride New Materials (DFD), DOE Loan Programs Office (LPO) Director Jigar Shah said in an interview Wednesday.

“In this deal that we most recently announced two weeks ago, KORE, it’s an American company … they’ve been around for a long time, but they are using technology from a Chinese company, DFD, to manufacture battery cells in Arizona,” Shah said. However, Shah did not mention the Chinese company in question has ties to the CCP.

The Central Committee of the CCP honored DFD’s chairman, Li Shijiang, in 2021 as an “Outstanding Communist Party Member,” according to Chinese news outlet Xinhua News Agency. Shijiang had previously been honored in 2019 as one of nineteen “Outstanding Veterans of the Year” of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to Chinese military news outlet PLA Daily.

Xue Xujin, who currently serves in DFD’s executive leadership as a deputy general manager, according to Reuters, is also listed as a member of the CCP in DFD’s 2016 annual report.

DFD’s internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee was named to the “National Advanced Grassroots Party Organization” in July 2016, an honor given to “outstanding” organizations affiliated with the CCP, according to Chinese-language news outlet Henan Daily.

Party committees, also known as cells, have grown in prominence in recent years as a way for the CCP to ensure that corporate governance stays in line with what the government describes as “Chinese characteristics,” according to Nikkei Asia.

DFD’s party secretary Han Shjiun, upon receiving the 2016 award, said that it was necessary to integrate party-building work into the core aspects of the company to ensure optimal performance, Henan Daily reported. DFD republished on its website a December 2022 Henan Daily article praising the company’s innovation and leadership. The article attributes DFD’s success to its embrace of the CCP’s “spirit.”

The company also won the National Science and Technology Progress Award — which the CCP awards to “citizens and organizations” for their “outstanding contributions” to science — in 2017, according to DFD’s website.

DFD grew out of a state-owned company called Jiaozuo Cryolite Factory, according to Henan Daily. The chemical company operates in international markets and primarily manufactures and distributes fluoride products, according to Reuters.

The company serves as the primary manufacturer of KORE’s Mark 1 battery. The “assembly lines and processes for battery manufacturing” DFD uses will form the technological backbone of KORE’s new U.S.-based facility, according to a 2019 press release. Far from replacing the Chinese manufacturer with the U.S. facility, KOREPlex will serve to “augment” the production of the company’s Chinese partner.

The US Department of Energy (@ENERGY) has announced a conditional $850M loan to support @kore_power‘s lithium-ion gigafactory being built in Arizona. Learn more from @energystoragenw below: https://t.co/7fPByGdp0K pic.twitter.com/QLtEPZ5OPB

— Intersolar North America and Energy Storage NA (@ISNAESNA) June 12, 2023

These substantial ties to the Chinese government and CCP seem to conflict with Shah’s assertion that the LPO “rejected outright” any deal with companies that are “tied to an authoritarian state.” Shah even cited the relationship between KORE and DFD as an example of a relationship that did not meet that standard during his RFF interview.

President Joe Biden described Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” just one day prior to Shah’s own comments.

The LPO began issuing increasingly large loans to companies after its lending authority was massively expanded by Biden’s signature climate law. The LPO announced Thursday a record-breaking $9.2 billion loan to a joint electric vehicle venture run by Ford and Korean firm SK On. Shah said the loan was part of the administration’s efforts to bolster U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing.

KORE, DFD and the DOE did not immediately respond to a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Admin Gives Ford, Foreign Company Whopping $9 Billion Loan For EV Plants

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.

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.