Critically Thinking about Wind and Solar thumbnail

Critically Thinking about Wind and Solar

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By John Droz, Jr.

Are there any scientifically proven NET benefits from either?

This will be brief, as I’ll cut to the chase.

A journalist recently asked me the following thoughtful question:

“I’m working on an article that looks at the climate impacts of wind energy. There are some studies linked below (and you likely know others), that show that drawing kinetic energy from the wind at large scale will have an adverse impact on climate.

“Proponents of wind energy insist that human impacts on the climate are so catastrophic that we need to spend trillions to convert electrical generation to wind and solar. So, why are these (and other) negative impacts on the climate from wind being mostly ignored or dismissed as trivial? As wind energy spreads further and wider, these liabilities will get substantially worse.”

My answer:

You are asking a legitimate question — which has only one answer:

Wind and solar energy are NOT being promoted for any NET BENEFITS to ratepayers, taxpayers, citizens, businesses, the environment, or the climate!

The proof of that is that there are NO scientifically-proven wind or solar energy NET BENEFITS to ratepayers, taxpayers, citizens, businesses, the environment, or the climate!

For example, please read my powerful, short Report regarding the wind energy part, which includes the studies you cited, plus MANY more! Regarding Solar there are multiple major concerns that are almost never properly addressed in state regulations or local ordinances.

I’ll repeat the key part:

Wind and solar energy are NOT being promoted for any NET BENEFITS to ratepayers, taxpayers, citizens, businesses, the environment, or the climate!

The proof of that is that there are NO scientifically-proven wind or solar energy NET BENEFITS to ratepayers, taxpayers, citizens, businesses, the environment, or the climate!

Instead, wind and solar promotion is:

  1. about virtue signaling,
  2. taking advantage of the public’s technical illiteracy,
  3. exploiting the weakness that many local communities are blinded by the money,
  4. optimizing the reality that many citizens defer to authority,
  5. leveraging the fact that critical thinking has become a lost skill,
  6. evidence of the powerful influence of special-interest lobbyists on our legislators,
  7. etc.

‘Nuff said.

©2023. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

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?

The Climate Lobby Is Openly Plotting To Steal Our Freedom thumbnail

The Climate Lobby Is Openly Plotting To Steal Our Freedom

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By The Daily Caller

During her May 15 speech to The Beyond Growth Conference held by the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, citing a 1970s de-growth plan published by the Club of Rome, made reference to the European Union’s “social market economy” five times in a span of less than 150 words.

A “social market economy,” of course, is a reference to the sort of central economic planning engaged in by authoritarian socialist governments throughout history. “And this is exactly why we put forward our European Green Deal,” Von Der Leyen told the conference. “Building a 21st century clean-energy circular economy is one of the most significant economic challenges of our times.”

The agenda of the Beyond Growth Conference focused on devising plans to manage the destruction of economic growth that is a centerpiece of the real agenda of the energy transition. Limitations on energy minerals and other resources required by wind, solar and electric vehicles, and on the ability to continue printing trillions of debt-funded dollars and Euros in a vain attempt to subsidize them to the scale required to displace fossil fuels inevitably means the forcing of common citizens in the Western world to scale down their standards of living and limit their mobility to meet the net-zero by 2050 goals being dictated at the global level. Thus, the need for the EU to move “beyond growth” and back to a more primitive mode of living.

Rising recognition and acceptance of these limitations, along with the success by Western governments in enforcing authoritarian edicts on their populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, is now leading to a rapid evolution in the overarching narrative and talking points related to the energy transition. The former energy transition narrative of “we will scale up renewables and EVs and you won’t even notice the difference in your daily lives” has been transformed to “we will scale everything down and you will just have to live with it” with stunning speed during 2023.

A report titled “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility” issued by the World Economic Forum in May is another great example. Based largely upon a 2017 UC Davis report titled “3 Revolutions in Urban Transportation,” the WEF report advocates for authoritarian governments to force the reduction of the numbers of vehicles on the road from the current global estimate of 1.45 billion to just 500 million. The UC Davis report went largely unnoticed in 2017 because the climate alarmist lobby had not been sufficiently emboldened at that time to publicly discuss its real goals. But that mask is now coming off.

The authors of the WEF report claim citizens who can no longer own cars would still be allowed to move away from their planned cities of the future, but only via “shared transport,” i.e. electric buses and a new network of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. But California has clearly shown that thoughts of building a huge network of tens of thousands of miles of new high-speed rail in the western world in the next 27 years is a complete fantasy. California’s own high-speed rail boondoggle, originally proposed 27 years ago in 1996, has seen its budget blossom from $8 billion to over $130 billion, and still hasn’t managed to lay a single mile of rail.

The real world simply does not conform itself to fantasies like this plan, and everyone at the WEF is fully aware of that reality. Thus, what this plan really amounts to is a scheme to enable the speeding-up of implementation of socialist/authoritarian governments in the West to enforce the new restrictions on the lives of common citizens, an effort that began to accelerate during the COVID pandemic. Authoritarian governments always endeavor to restrict the free flow of information outside of approved propaganda, and restricting mobility is a key means of achieving that goal.

As we see the EU and the WEF now freely admitting, economic de-growth and forcing citizens of Western nations to live smaller, less prosperous lives are the real end goals of this energy transition. The narrative has officially shifted, and we would do well to take them at their word.

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

AUTHOR

DAVID BLACKMON

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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DAVID BLACKMON: Dems Roar Right Past Gas Stove Ban For Even Bigger Goals

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.

Green industrialization greatly increases CO2 emissions thumbnail

Green industrialization greatly increases CO2 emissions

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Despite calling for rapid reduction in CO2 emissions, the left is rushing green industrialization which will dramatically increase emissions for the foreseeable future. This obvious absurdity has yet to be admitted.

On the one hand, there is growing literature on the enormous material requirements required for building huge numbers of wind and solar power generating systems. Then the growing realization that gas-fired backup will keep renewable power generation CO2 emissions high. See my article Offshore wind may not reduce CO2 emissions.

Combining these two factors means CO2 emissions should rise, not fall, as green industrialization proceeds. Both factors are ignored, but both are big. The energy transition increases emissions. It is that simple.

On the material side, we are talking about what I call “supply chain emissions.” It should be obvious that rebuilding the electric power system is hugely emission intensive. We are talking about a tremendous amount of mining, processing, and construction, with lots of transportation at each step.

By way of example, let’s take one of my favorites — the huge monopiles that hold up offshore wind-generating towers. In this case, we focus on New Jersey’s ridiculous goal of adding 11,000 MW of offshore wind, up from its present level of zero wind. It is ridiculous because New Jersey already has all the generating capacity it needs. Supposedly this wind power is going to make the weather better or keep it from worsening, but that is another silly topic.

These monopiles are very big. For simplicity, let’s say a steel cylinder is 30′ in diameter and 300′ long, although some are bigger. Each weighs something like 2,500 tons. It is first driven into the seafloor, then hollowed out and backfilled with concrete.

Steel and cement-making both create a lot of CO2 emissions, and there are so-called emission factors for both. Steelmaking creates about 2 tons of CO2 per ton of steel, so just producing the raw steel in one monopile puts out 5,000 tons of CO2. This does not include making the monopile, which involves a lot of shaping, cutting, welding, etc.

There is something like 15,000 tons of concrete in a finished monopile, and the chemical emission factor is about 1,250 pounds of CO2, giving around 9,000 tons of CO2 per pile. This does not include the energy required for cooking the limestone to make cement, which requires a great deal of heat.

So, simply producing the basic materials causes about 14,000 tons of CO2 per monopile. Assuming for simplicity that the average turbine is 11 MW we need 1,000 monopiles, which works out to a whopping 14,000,000 tons of CO2 just to make the steel and concrete.

This huge number does not include energy-intensive activities like mining the iron ore and limestone or cooking the latter or the numerous transportation steps along the way from mine to final erection.

For now, the steel piles are made in Europe, most likely Spain, so they must be shipped something like 5,000 miles. Many of the giant substations, each filling a flatbed ship, come from as far away as Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore. Iron ore is itself a major ocean shipping commodity. So there will be a lot of transport emissions.

And this is just the monopiles. On top of these come the huge towers, turbines, and blade sets. The turbine assemblies alone are now up to 850 tons, including many tons of copper. Then too, there are thousands of miles of undersea power cables. Every generator is wired to a substation, which is then tied to massive power lines running back to shore. Plus, there will be a great deal of onshore grid development in order to handle all this new juice coming from new places.

This is emission-intensive industrialization on a grand scale. There will certainly be huge CO2 emissions for the next decade or more. What we need is supply chain emission analysis.

There is no way green industrialization of electric power can reduce emissions in the foreseeable future.

VIDEO: 96% of U.S. Climate Data is Corrupted, New Report Finds thumbnail

VIDEO: 96% of U.S. Climate Data is Corrupted, New Report Finds

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By The Geller Report

The report neglected to mention “deliberately” corrupted — a means to a malevolent end.

96% of U.S. climate data is corrupted

By: Jazz Shaw,  June 11, 2023

This seems like an appropriate time for a story like this to pop up since it involves both smoke clouds and climate change. You probably heard how AOC was quick to blame the clouds of smoke wafting down from the Canadian wildfires last week on climate change. As you likely expected without even needing to check, that turns out to be nonsense. But the underlying facts that prove its nonsensical nature turn out to be well rooted in science. And researching this question turns up something even more interesting, which we’ll get to in a moment.

You should check out the work of veteran meteorologist Anthony Watts of the Heartland Institute. He’s been studying the weather and the climate in general for a very long time. He travels around the country inspecting meteorological equipment and studies historical weather data from around the world. One of the first findings he would like the public to be aware of is that not only are wildfires common in many parts of North America, but the reality is that in the 21st century, they have actually been less numerous than they were in the past. They’re just getting more attention from the press and on social media.

Rather than focusing discussion on what the real or imagined harms may be, how to mitigate them, and how to help people, climate activists are taking the opportunity to blame “climate change” for the smoke. The reality is wildfires are becoming less frequent and severe as the planet modestly warms. As wildfires become less frequent, it is nonsensical to blame the few wildfires that remain on climate change…

“Peer-reviewed studies and verified satellite observations show beyond a shadow of a doubt that wildfires in the long term, mid-term, and short term have become less frequent and less severe as the Earth modestly warms. The likely reason is the measured increase in evaporation from the world’s oceans, which has resulted in more frequent global precipitation.”

That’s not the shocking part of the story, however. When discussing the “modest warming” that the planet has exhibited, there is a need to have solid data. But as Dr. Watts has examined weather stations around the country, he has discovered that the available data may be nearly useless when attempting to quantify very slight changes in average temperatures. That’s because more than 90% of the data is “corrupted.” And the reason for that is the reality that the vast majority of thermometers that NOAA relies on are improperly installed and maintained, leading to the recording of artificially higher temperatures.

A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.

The report, published by The Heartland Institute, was compiled via satellite and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations that contribute to the “official” land temperature data in the United States. The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

Why is Bill Gates releasing 30 million genetically modified mosquitoes into 11 countries including the U.S.? thumbnail

Why is Bill Gates releasing 30 million genetically modified mosquitoes into 11 countries including the U.S.?

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By Dr. Rich Swier

Well this is interesting. Presidential Democrat primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. posted a tweet that asks why Bill Gates’ Columbian mosquito factory is releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into 11 different countries including the state of Florida.

Should Bill Gates be releasing 30 million genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild? Part of the mentality of earth-as-engineering-object. What could possibly go wrong?https://t.co/o4AdfFJ4NO

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 10, 2023

In August of 2022  Bill Gates wrote on his blog an article titled “This factory breeds 30 million mosquitoes per week. Here’s why.“,

These mosquitoes are allies in the fight against dengue and other deadly viruses.

Bill Gates | August 15, 2022

Inside a two-story brick building in Medellín, Colombia, scientists work long hours in muggy labs breeding millions and millions of mosquitoes. They tend to the insects’ every need as they grow from larvae to pupae to adults, keeping the temperature just right and feeding them generous helpings of fishmeal, sugar, and, of course, blood.

Then, they release them across the country to breed with wild mosquitoes that can carry dengue and other viruses threatening to sicken and kill the population of Colombia.

This might sound the beginnings of a Hollywood writer’s horror film plot.

But it’s not.

This factory is real.

And the mosquitoes being released don’t terrorize the local population. Far from it. They’re actually helping to save and improve millions of lives.

Read more.

Futurism in an article titled “Bill Gates Funded the Company Releasing Gene-Hacked Mosquitoes” reported,

The Gates foundation funded Oxitec’s work to design gene-edited mosquitoes

by DAN ROBITZSKI

The British biotech company Oxitec is moving ahead with its controversial plan to release hundreds of millions of gene-hacked mosquitoes, an experimental new form of targeted pest control, in the Florida Keys.

The goal is essentially to introduce a new genetically altered version of the Aedes aegypti mosquito — which can spread diseases like dengue and malaria — that can only hatch male, non-biting offspring, in order to gradually reduce the population.

A connection that has gone mostly unremarked during the experiment’s rollout is the involvement of Microsoft co-founder and public health philanthropist Bill Gates in the funding of the company, confirmed by Oxitec back in 2018, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Based on past reports, it seems that the Gates Foundation pledged about $4.1 million to Oxitec in 2018 to develop a new mosquito that would target malaria in the Americas, South Asia, and eastern Africa. Oxitec was also reportedly awarded $5 million for its Aedes mosquitoes — the kind set for release in Florida — through the Gates Foundation’s Global Grand Challenges initiative in 2010. Meanwhile, Science Magazine reported in 2010 that the Gates Foundation had dished out $19.7 million for a project in which Oxitec took part.

We’ve reached out to both Oxitec and the Gates Foundation for clarification about the relationship.

Gates’ involvement complicates the already much-criticized initiative. On the one hand, the experiment could lead to an extraordinary way to control disease, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives per year. But critics say it could fail, backfire, or open up the doors to more troubling applications of the technology. And the idea that one of the world’s wealthiest people can help push through gene-editing experiments that are unleashed on the open ecosystem is, to say the least, a touchy subject.

[ … ]

READ MORE: Gates Foundation and Oxitec Fight Malaria with Genetically-Modified Mosquitoes [Labiotech]

More on Oxitec: Residents Furious at Release of 500 Million Gene-Hacked Mosquitoes

Read more. [Emphasis added]

We agree with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s questioning why? As RFK, Jr. stated, “Should Bill Gates be releasing 30 million genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild? Part of the mentality of earth-as-engineering-object. What could possibly go wrong?”

A lot can go wrong and may already have!

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

Who’s to blame for the massive wildfires in the Northeast? Canada! thumbnail

Who’s to blame for the massive wildfires in the Northeast? Canada!

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By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Who’s to blame for the massive wildfires festooning the Northeast in smoke?

CFACT’s Marc Morano puffed a cigar on Jesse Watters to illustrate the point that the fault lies not with your energy use, but with bad Canadian government policy!

“This is Canadian natural disaster mismanagement,” Marc said, “and now they’re trying to blame global warming, which makes it what? Our fault! It’s our SUVs, it’s our gas stoves!”

Marc Morano released a report on wildfires today, saying, “The media and climate activists are again weaponizing wildfires and linking them to climate change. Wildfires, both globally and in Canada, have been declining significantly. Better forest management, cracking down on arson, and improved fire impression practices are what is needed, not the Green New Deal.”

The WSJ summed up the fundamental disconnect between left-wing energy policy and informed forest and climate management perfectly, writing:

“A study this spring in the journal Science estimated that burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021 released 1.76 billion tons of CO2, nearly twice as much as global aviation that year… Government land management policies that prevent wildfires from spreading out of control, such as prescribed burns, would reduce CO2 emissions more than offshore wind or electric-vehicle mandates. Alas, this doesn’t fit with the climate left’s book of Revelation.”

The Greens decreed decades ago that forests should be left uncleared and fires allowed to burn.  Fires are an important part of the life cycle of the forest, but in today’s world fires can be controlled and managed.  Yet for the misanthropic left, better a tree burn than be harvested.

Frank Lasee posted some key facts, including some good news at CFACT.org.  Despite the worst Green efforts to turn back the clock, wildfires overall are in decline worldwide.  The United States saw it’s worst wildfire in 1871.  Frank points out that the worst fires occur where Green ideologues leave forest brush uncleared.  That would be California and the federal government for starters.

There is nothing natural the warming-Left won’t seize upon to advance their narrative.  However, in the case of wildfires, there is a man-made element to blame.

In this case, blame poor Canadian government policy which means, blame the left.

For nature and people too.

AUTHOR

Craig Rucker

President and co-Founder, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

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

Biden Regime Now Targeting Your Furnace thumbnail

Biden Regime Now Targeting Your Furnace

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By The Geller Report

“They’re going to have to, in many cases, install new equipment to exhaust gas out of their home….this rule would require additional retrofits for a lot of consumers. And those retrofits can be extremely cost prohibitive.” — Richard Meyer, American Gas Association 

Democrats hate you.

Between 40%-60% of the current residential furnaces on the market currently would be prohibited under the proposed regulation

By Thomas Catenacci | Fox News June8, 2023:

Biden’s green energy agenda targeting appliances, household items

Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner joined ‘Fox & Friends’ to discuss how the policies are ‘taking a toll’ on Americans and the broader concerns surrounding the push.

The Biden administration is expected to soon finalize regulations restricting which home gas-powered furnaces consumers are able to purchase in the future.

According to experts, the regulations — proposed in June 2022 by the Department of Energy (DOE) — would restrict consumer choice, drive prices higher and likely have a low impact on greenhouse gas emissions. The agency could finalize the rules targeting residential gas furnaces, which more than 50% of American households rely on for space heating, at any point over the upcoming weeks.

“This is a classic example of one size not fitting all,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “Every home is different, every homeowner is different and people are best off having a wide range of choices. They can work with their contractor to make the best decision for their home and their circumstances.”

“The efficiency standard would effectively outlaw non-condensing furnaces and condensing alternatives would be the only ones available,” Lieberman said. “Those are more efficient, but they cost more. And installation costs could be a big problem for some houses that are not compatible with condensing furnaces.”

“These efficiency measures not only reduce carbon and methane emissions, but also provide huge material benefits to American households in the form of cleaner air, modernized technology, and cheaper energy,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said after proposing the furnace standards last year.

Under the proposed regulations, DOE would require furnaces to achieve an annual fuel utilization efficiency (AFUE) of 95% by 2029, meaning manufacturers would only be allowed to sell furnaces that convert at least 95% of fuel into heat within six years. The current market standard AFUE for a residential furnace is 80%.

Because of the stringent AFUE requirements, the regulations would largely take non-condensing gas furnaces — which are generally less efficient, but cheaper — off the market. But consumers who replace their non-condensing furnace with a condensing furnace after the rule is implemented face hefty installation costs.

“There are some really technical reasons why this is such a concerning rule,” Richard Meyer, the vice president of energy markets, analysis and standards at the American Gas Association (AGA), told Fox News Digital in an interview. “It has to do with the ability for consumers to be in compliance with this new efficiency standard.”

“They’re going to have to, in many cases, install new equipment to exhaust gas out of their home. These higher efficiency units, or so-called condensing units — a lot of consumers have them in their home, but a lot of consumers don’t. So, this rule would require additional retrofits for a lot of consumers. And those retrofits can be extremely cost prohibitive.”

Keep reading.

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

How Much Wind Killing Do We Want? thumbnail

How Much Wind Killing Do We Want?

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By David Wojick

That rapidly growing wind power development kills birds in ever increasing numbers is clear. That it also kills whales and other marine mammals is becoming clear. So the policy question is how much killing is enough, before we stop killing more? This question seems not to be asked.

The stampede to build huge amounts of wind power, on land and at sea, is potentially devastating to a great many species. Our focus has been on the growing threat to whales and other marine mammals from offshore industrial wind.

But this is just part of a much deeper pattern of runaway wind killing. For now let’s consider the indifference of the Biden Administration to land based killing of birds.

To begin with there is the golden eagle. This majestic species is the largest bird of prey in western North America, where wind development is growing rapidly. Its population is much smaller than the familiar bald eagle and may be diminishing.

The golden eagle is protected under the Eagle Act, just as the whales are under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Wind facilities require so-called “incidental take permits” for killing golden eagles issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

Turns out there is a problem, namely the wind industry is ignoring the Eagle Law and not getting the required permits. I am not making this up. Here is how the FWS puts it:

“For golden eagles, a goal of the 2016 Eagle Rule was to increase compliance and improve consistency and efficiency relating to permitting golden eagle take at wind-energy projects. However, those goals have not been realized. While participation in the permit program by wind energy projects has increased since 2016, it still remains well below our expectations. Low application rates and permit-processing requirements that some have perceived as burdensome have resulted in few permits being issued for wind projects as compared to the number of operational wind projects in areas where golden eagles occur. As a result, golden eagles continue to be taken without implementation of conservation actions to offset that take.”

So few permits are being issued to wind projects that threaten golden eagles and there are a lot of those.

Is the Biden FWS threatening a crackdown on this wanton lawlessness? Not at all. Instead they propose to make permitting easier by making it less effective. Endless billions of dollars worth of wind projects think eagle kill permitting is too “burdensome” so the Biden bunch propose to ease up on them. Damn the eagles, full speed ahead.

In fact the FWS proposal is to do away with site specific permits and instead create a “general permit” that covers all normal wind projects. All a billion dollar project has to do is sign up and pay a tiny fee, which supposedly somehow mitigates the upcoming eagle deaths.

As part of this general permit the eagle killing is exempt from NEPA, or rather the entire project is as long as eagle killing is all they are doing. No EIS certainly speeds things up, but not in a good way for the eagles.

Also the requirement that an independent observer count the dead eagles is gone in the general permit. We will just depend on the wind facility operators (who have not been getting permits) to tell us when they have killed too many birds.

Clearly this is a huge policy move that favors wind development at the expense of the eagles. Biden said that every federal agency should do whatever it can to promote renewables and this proposal meets that test.

Beyond the eagles, which are relatively small in number, there lie the rest of the dead birds. Wind turbines are called “bird choppers” for good reason. How many birds are we talking about killing?

Interestingly there was a lot of research on this question a decade ago, when wind just started winding up, but very little today. A good example is a 2013 paper titled “Estimates of bird collision mortality at wind facilities in the contiguous United States”, Biological Conservation, Volume 168, December 2013, Pages 201-209.

They estimated about 250,000 bird deaths a year. With around 50,000 MW of installed capacity, that is roughly 5 deaths per MW per year. That is already a lot if dead birds, but it gets much worse when we look ahead at the Biden Administration’s goal of “net zero” emissions.

I recently wrote about a new Tesla analysis of the renewable power requirements for net zero. These are enormous because in addition to providing power when the sun shines and the wind blows hard, they have to make enough hydrogen to generate our juice when it doesn’t.

Tesla says we will need a whopping 2 million MW of wind capacity for net zero. At five bird deaths per MW that is an incredible 10 million deaths a year. This would be something like 300 million dead birds over the combined 30 year lives of the FWS proposed general permits.

It could be many more when the endless forest of bird choppers makes avoidance impossible. We really need some research into this horrendous prospect.

The vast majority of these dead birds will be songbirds. It is ironic that the environmental movement first took off with Carson’s “Silent Spring”, which warned about the potential extermination of songbirds. Now that we are rushing headlong into environmental industrialization it appears we have come full circle.

It is time to ask the policy question: How much wind killing do we want? Or put another way, how much is too much?

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

TAKE ACTION

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

Facebook’s ESG Agenda Went Down to Georgia and Trashed a Trophy Fishing Lake thumbnail

Facebook’s ESG Agenda Went Down to Georgia and Trashed a Trophy Fishing Lake

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By Ken Braun

Meta, the parent firm of Facebook, was in the media promoting its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) virtues in December 2021. That preening didn’t end well for the company this month after a decision was handed down in a lawsuit dealing with the destruction of a trophy fishing lake in Lumpkin, Georgia.

“We thank Silicon Ranch . . . for their dedication to successful execution and for sharing our commitment to have a positive impact on the communities where we locate,” said Meta’s renewable energy chief after the firm had agreed to use Silicon’s Lumpkin Solar Farm and two others to power its Georgia data center.

But by that point, Silicon and its construction partner, Infrastructure and Energy Alternatives (IEA), were already five months deep into being sued over environmental damage done at Lumpkin.

U.S. District Judge Clay D. Land later ruled the Lumpkin project creators had instead “created, operated and maintained a nuisance” where “pollution poured downhill and downstream onto the neighbors’ property” for nearly two years, “inundating wetlands with silt and sediment” and turning a “21-acre trophy fishing lake” into a “mud hole.”

The neighbors won their case. This month, a jury assigned by Judge Land to assess a penalty returned a $135.5 million verdict against IEA and Silicon Ranch, $100 million of it against IEA. Silicon promised to appeal and blamed IEA for the damage.

Whoever ultimately pays up, this certainly wasn’t a “positive impact on the communities” where Meta chooses to locate.”

Solar Land Use

To be fair, Meta didn’t befoul the lake. But the ESG agenda it embraced makes environmental abuses inevitable. The land use of solar farms is brutal.

Silicon Ranch claims 100 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity for Lumpkin, on a footprint of 850 acres—or 1.2 square miles. Ideally, that works out to 0.11 MW of power capacity per acre.

But according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the capacity factor of solar farms is just 24.9 percent. Capacity factor is a measure of how much of that 100 MW Lumpkin will really crank out. As with any solar farm, it is restricted by unpredictable weather and entirely predictable sunsets.

On the other side of the state from Lumpkin sits Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear station, soon to be a minimum 4400 MW facility taking up about 2/3 of a 3100-acre (4.8 square miles) a chunk of real estate.

That works out to 2.2 MW per acre, or land use that is at least 20 times friendlier than Lumpkin.

The actual disparity is much larger because nuclear has a 92.5 percent capacity factor. It works in the dark, in heavy rain, and in everything else. A Bloomberg analysis reported that solar chews up 47 times more land to do the same job as a nuclear plant. Environmental journalist Michael Shellenberger has calculated the disparity at 180-1 and much worse, depending on location of the solar farm.

Politicians professing love of the land use your taxes to purchase the opposite.

Energy journalist Robert Bryce reported in 2020 that federal subsidies for solar were 250 times more than nuclear per unit of energy produced.

And the lake in Lumpkin wasn’t an isolated problem.

“Runoff from a growing number of giant solar farms polluting rivers and streams in rural South Georgia is becoming a major concern,” reported Georgia Public Broadcasting in October 2022, citing the opinion of the state’s environmental regulators.

The ESG Agenda

Nuclear provides 20 percent of American electricity; solar less than three percent. There’s no good reason why Meta and many other big corporations deliberately purchase solar energy.

There is, however, a bad reason.

“Our climate program is aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and guided by the latest science on what is necessary to transition to a zero-carbon future,” claims Meta on its corporate website.

Along with the United Nations, SBTi is a collaboration with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Both CDP and WWF stridently opposed a 2022 decision by the European Union to include nuclear as an acceptable zero-carbon fuel. In 2018, WRI hosted an event to honor a South African activist for her effort to block the construction of ten nuclear power stations.

These nonprofits, along with the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, and hundreds of others are the “E” in ESG. They form a web of anti-nuclear climate groups that promote instead of environment-gobbling wind and solar energy. Collectively, they spend more than a billion dollars per year.

Corporate America can’t appease this mob by doing the right thing on nuclear energy. Should Meta have done any different?

From January 2021 through the first quarter of 2023, Meta reported total net profits of $68.3 billion. Facebook’s parent could easily afford to move its operations to places powered by nuclear energy. That leadership would encourage more nuclear energy development. Indeed, Meta is so rich that just its profits since 2021 could build another four-reactor Vogtle facility, which is enough to power one million homes and businesses.

Meta is one of those rare firms so economically enormous it could unilaterally lead a revolution toward carbon-free power. Instead, it has a “mud hole” in Lumpkin because the real “climate” agenda was just to keep the ESG hypocrites off its back.

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

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Biden Wants To Give Power Over Defense Contracts To Climate Activist ‘Cabal’ Bent On Curtailing Economic Growth thumbnail

Biden Wants To Give Power Over Defense Contracts To Climate Activist ‘Cabal’ Bent On Curtailing Economic Growth

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By The Daily Caller

The Biden administration is pushing to give veto power over major Pentagon contracts to a group of climate activist groups that advocate for establishing “guardrails” on economic growth, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.

The administration proposed a rule in November that requires major contractors for the Department of Defense (DOD), NASA and Government Services Agency (GSA) to submit climate-related goals to a consortium of activist organizations, called the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), for validation. If the SBTi rejects the contractor’s plan to reduce emissions, the company would no longer be eligible to compete.

However, the groups behind the SBTi are part of the Global Commons Alliance, a climate activist network that seeks to limit economic development and set up international watchdogs to monitor climate pledges of governments and private companies, according to a DCNF review of the network’s activities. The Alliance’s components advocate for limits on consumption, redistribution of resources between rich and poor people and a more ambitious set of goals to mitigate perceived changes to the climate.

Additionally, scientists involved in the Alliance have argued for the need to limit Earth’s population to preserve the climate.

The Biden administration is “placing our defense needs in the hands of these people whose interests may not be in defense,” Dan Kish, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF.

“These seem to be offshoots of the interests of the World Economic Forum — people who consider themselves smarter and better and wealthier and more powerful than the rest of the subjects of the world, and seek to impose their will,” he added.

‘Playing God’: The Coalition Of Climate Orgs Behind The SBTi

In 2015, sustainability professionals from the World Resources Institute (WRI), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) and UN Global Compact came together after the Paris Climate Accords to find ways for corporations to set benchmarks and devise plans to meet the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, according to Technology Review. The SBTi emerged from the coalition, and is working on developing guidance for so-called science-based emissions reduction goals for various industries.

The groups behind the SBTi also created the Science Based Targets Network, or SBTN, to “[build] on the momentum of the [SBTi],” according to the group’s website, which lists the SBTi’s constitutive organizations as “among our core founding partners.” The SBTN helps companies and cities create and monitor targets, which it calls Science Based Targets for Nature, in a bid to preserve nature “in line with scientifically defined limits and on a socially equitable basis,” according to the group’s website.

However, the SBTN relies on research from the Earth Commission, an organization seeking to establish “guardrails” on human activity to protect the climate; both organizations operate under the umbrella of the Global Commons Alliance.

“The goal is to translate the scientific guardrails defined by the Earth Commission, into tangible science-based targets for nature, specifically tailored to cities and companies by the Science Based Targets Network,” the Earth Commission’s website reads.

In a February 2023 journal article, scientists from the Earth Commission stressed the importance of reducing “indirect drivers” of climate change, such as human population size and growth.

“Many of the factors causing global biodiversity decline are associated with economic growth and speculation,” the researchers wrote in the journal article. Achieving “justice” and a “nature-positive” society requires “reducing over-accumulation of capital” and associated excess production and consumption among wealthy countries.

Additionally, a November 2022 paper sponsored by the Earth Commission, which called for a “radical redistribution” of resources, found that if everyone on the planet had minimum access to life necessities, the planet’s climate disaster triggers would be violated by up to 26%. “Having ‘too little’ therefore results from others having ‘too much,’” the authors conclude.

In practical terms, states can even-out resources between rich and poor countries through “taxation, internalizing costs, overseas aid, universal basic incomes, voluntary limits on consumption, and education,” according to the scientists.

In May, the SBTN introduced new environmental targets, broadening their scope to include not only reducing greenhouse gas emissions but updating so-called “planetary boundaries” meant to restrain the scope of human economic activity to protect human, animal and plant habitats.

Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, explained the concept of planetary boundaries to the DCNF: “We have far exceeded the ‘carrying capacity’ of the Earth.”

“So first, let’s figure out exactly what it is (for example, no more than one billion people), which can then be the basis for imposing ‘science-based’ policies to make people less numerous and a lot poorer.” Such policies would send the earth “back to the Stone Age,” he said.

“These people are basically playing God,” said Kish.

The Earth Commission and the SBTN overlap in terms of shared resources, founding partners and aims under the umbrella of the Global Commons Alliance, while the groups that founded both the SBTi and the SBTN are partners of the Alliance, their websites show. While the Biden administration’s rule only mentions the SBTi, experts suggest it opens channels for the other groups to influence how the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies decide which companies should receive government contracts.

“SBTN is a separate but related organization [to SBTi] focusing on SBTs beyond climate,” SBTN spokesperson Arabella Stickels told the DCNF.

“We shouldn’t be delegating the authority for what’s important for our national defense and our national defense contractors to some third party groups,” Kish told the DCNF.

‘Less Bang For Our Buck’

Under the Biden administration’s proposed rule, the SBTi will effectively have veto power over key Pentagon contracts.

According to the proposal, any company holding $50 million or more in contracts with the DOD, NASA or GSA must report all second and third-order greenhouse gas emissions generated by its operations. Two years after the rule goes into effect, they’ll also be required to submit a “science-based target” to the SBTi for validation.

If they fail their inspection, the SBTi will return the target and offer the company a second chance to submit a more appropriate emissions reduction target.

In practical terms, that means groups involved in the SBTi are “establishing not only industrial policy, but military policy,” Kish told the DCNF. “And that means that we’ll get less bang for our buck.”

The SBTi “appears to be a cabal and is certainly a racket,” Ebell said.

The DOD awarded roughly $383 billion in contract spending in 2021, according to analysis firm Deltek; however, the Pentagon’s largest defense contractors aren’t featured in the SBTi dashboard yet, meaning they haven’t yet committed to the initiative.

The #SafeAndJust #EarthSystemBoundaries are finally live, in @Nature: https://t.co/6D4yEjMGj1

For 4+ years, the Earth Commission @SafeJustPlanet has worked to quantify the conditions needed for the Earth and everything that lives on it to thrive.

Read on 🧵👇

— Global Commons Alliance (@globalcommonshq) May 31, 2023

The Pentagon did not say whether or how the department would work with the SBTN, though it maintains that combating climate change is a top priority.

“All requirements are pre-decisional as the rule proposal is pending,” Kelly Flynn, a DOD spokesperson, told the DCNF. “We have nothing further to provide at this time beyond what is stated in the proposed rule.”

Empowering the SBTi to make decisions regarding key Pentagon contracts could undermine Congress’ authority to allocate funds for national defense, according to Kish.

“Congress is one that appropriates and allocates the money for the defense of the nation, which is one of our premier reasons for being in the social contract that we have under the Constitution,” said Kish. Yet, the Biden administration is seeking “to offshore this to some people who have some grand ideas who are then going to impose their will on our defense contractors,” Kish said.

The White House did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

MICAELA BURROW

Investigative reporter and Pentagon correspondent.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Complete Collapse’: Here’s How ESG Destroyed One Nation’s Economy

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.

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Biden Interior Department Cuts Off Navajo Nation From Oil And Gas Development

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By Tristan Justice

In May, the Navajo Nation rejected the Biden administration’s plan to withdraw 351,000 acres from consideration for oil and gas leases.

President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior took another step this week to lock up 30 percent of the nation’s land and waterways by 2030.

On Friday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a 10-mile radius around the Chaco Cultural National Historical Park now cut off from new oil and gas leases despite local opposition to the new regulations. The 10-mile buffer around the American Indian historical site offers protections for existing leases but eliminates opportunities for new drilling for the next 20 years.

“Efforts to protect the Chaco landscape have been ongoing for decades, as Tribal communities have raised concerns about the impacts that new development would have on areas of deep cultural connection,” Haaland said in an agency press release. “I value and appreciate the many Tribal leaders, elected officials, and stakeholders who have persisted in their work to conserve this special area.”

Local Indian tribes, however, welcomed more oil and gas exploration in the area as a primary source of economic development. In May, the Navajo Nation voted to reject the administration’s plans to withdraw 351,000 acres from consideration for oil and gas leases. The Interior Department’s decision is estimated to cost the tribe more than $194 million over the next two decades, according to the Western Energy Alliance, an industry group for independent oil and gas producers.

The Alliance published a press release Friday afternoon denouncing Haaland’s decision and the secretary’s “clear conflicts of interest.” Haaland’s daughter, Somah, lobbied for the decision on behalf of the Pueblo Action Alliance (PAA), an Albuquerque-based climate group demanding protections for Chaco Canyon that extend beyond the 10-mile barrier announced Friday. Pueblo tribes oppose oil and gas activity in the region claiming risks to the UNESCO World Heritage site with archaeological ruins dating back to the pre-Columbian period thousands of years ago. Secretary Haaland, the first American Indian to lead the Department of the Interior, is a member of the Pueblo Laguna.

Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the Western Energy Alliance, charged Secretary Haaland with playing to tribal loyalty.

“She completely ignored the democratic resolutions of the sovereign Navajo Nation whose lands surround the park to put the interests of her tribe, based a hundred miles away, and obstructionist groups first,” Sgamma said. “The decision prevents Navajo property owners from accessing the oil and natural gas resources they own which provide them with their sustenance.”

Readers of the New York Times would have no clue Secretary Haaland’s daughter worked for the primary group spearheading efforts to choke off lands near Chaco Canyon from oil and gas extraction. The paper’s coverage of Friday’s announcement made no reference to the conflicts of interest surrounding the decision. Emails obtained by The Federalist last year revealed Coral Davenport, who reported on the new restrictions Friday, taking orders from Biden’s Interior Department.

[READ: Emails Show New York Times Doing PR For Biden’s Interior Department After Harassing Trump’s]

“For several months, people have been warning about Secretary Haaland’s conflict of interest involving issues that her daughter’s organization lobbied on,” Michael Chamberlain, the director of Protect the Public’s Trust told The Federalist. “Adding fuel to the fire, the Secretary participated in a documentary about Chaco Canyon, which was narrated by her daughter, Somah Haaland, and left no doubt about the position the younger Haaland’s organization preferred. This appears to be the Secretary and Department of the Interior continuing to place policy goals ahead of their [ethical] obligations.”

In February, emails from Protect the Public’s Trust revealed Somah Haaland’s group was also part of a coalition behind the insurrection at the Interior Department two years ago.

Larry Behrens, the communications director for the energy non-profit Power the Future, called Friday’s decision from the department the “latest slap in the face” to oil and gas producers.

“Given the common-sense precautions already in place, this decision has nothing to do with protecting the land and everything to do with protecting Joe Biden’s green campaign donors,” Behrens told The Federalist.

Oil and gas in New Mexico is the state’s primary engine for revenue, generating more than $2 billion per year in direct payments from industry operations. New Mexico depends on oil and gas revenue for about a third of the state budget.

*****

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

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

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

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By The Geller Report

It starts with cows..

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

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

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

Climate activists are coming for livestock producers and farmers.

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

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

Front And Center

Now the Biden administration is targeting American agriculture.

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

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

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

It’s ‘Groupthink’

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

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

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

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

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

Trapping Carbon

Cattle also benefit plant life, Atkinson said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading.

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

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

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

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHOR

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

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

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

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

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By Bonner Cohen

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

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

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

“Needs Innovation More Than Ever”

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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South Dakota Farmers Face Land Theft By Climate Hoaxers thumbnail

South Dakota Farmers Face Land Theft By Climate Hoaxers

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By The Geller Report

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

Read through this thread.

South Dakota Farmers Face Carbon-capture Land Theft

By: Rebecca Terrell June 1, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading.

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

CO2 + Trees + Sun = Wood

How does anyone not know this?

— Phantom Shadow (@Fuknutz) May 31, 2023

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

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

Debunking Another Misleading Green Energy Study thumbnail

Debunking Another Misleading Green Energy Study

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By Jack Spencer

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

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

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

Well, here is your debate, IMF.

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

There are three basic problems with the study.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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By Marc Morano


Marc Morano comment on banning short airline flights:

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

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

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

France Bans Short-Haul Flights to Tackle Climate Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which flights are now banned in France?

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

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

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

Connecting flights are unaffected by the new law.

Train services must meet certain conditions to replace flights

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Catherine Salgado

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By The Geller Report

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

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

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

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading.

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

Without Economic Freedom, None of the Others Matter thumbnail

Without Economic Freedom, None of the Others Matter

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By Paul Schwennesen

[One Fine Spring Day, Over the Phone…]

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

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

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

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

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

Why yes, yes I would.

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

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

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

I called her up.

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

“That is correct sir.”

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

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

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

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

“Told by whom?”

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

Ah. I see.

**Spoiler Alert**

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

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

Except that it isn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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