Environment Archives - Page 56 of 60

Greens Invade Exxon Mobile: Foment Shareholder Fiasco

May 29, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment, News, Science /by Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

ExxonMobil took it on the chin as it suffered stinging defeats at the hands of radical climate activists during its annual shareholders meeting yesterday.

Efforts by the green hedge fund “Engine No. 1” to infiltrate Exxon’s Board of Directors succeeded when two of the outfit’s activist candidates, Gregory Goff and Kaisa Hietala, defeated standing Exxon board members. The hedge has been haranguing Exxon to get on board the “green energy” bandwagon and away from fossil fuels to fight global warming.

Of the 10 resolutions put forward at the meeting, nearly half had at least tangentially to do with climate, including ones to force the company to report on lobbying, and on “environmental lobbying” in particular. Most of these passed despite leadership opposition.

For its part, CFACT had a front row seat to the Exxon theatrics. Committee representatives participated in the annual shareholders meeting along with its allies from the National Center for Public Policy Research and JunkScience.com. These three free market allies banded together to attempt to inject a point of view that contrasted sharply with those seeking to pull the corporate giant further to the Left.

Steve Milloy, a close ally and good friend of CFACT who heads Junkscience.com, delivered a passionate and well-reasoned comment to the board urging passage of a resolution he authored calling for the disclosure the true costs of emissions cuts and climate hysteria. Said Milloy:

This year I proposed that Exxon push back on climate idiocy by disclosing the actual costs and benefits of cutting emissions. The costs of emissions cuts, you see, are very high and the benefits are zero. But the ever-obtuse [Exxon Chairman] Mr. Woods refuses to acknowledge these realities. Instead, he fantasizes about appeasing the crazed political radicals who are the mortal enemies of us genuine shareholders.

Despite support from CFACT and NCPPR, Milloy’s proposal unfortunately did not pass.

Just prior to the meeting, Exxon leadership sought to assuage Green activists by promising to put a “climate expert” on its Board, no doubt hoping this gesture would help fend off the “Engine No. 1” infiltrators.

It didn’t work.

The pathetic overture did, however, prompt CFACT to challenge their appeasement-minded approach. I submitted a question during the Q&A session asking to know, “Why is ExxonMobil choosing to put a climate activist on the Board to appease green activists who want to see the company’s long-term profitability diminish?”

With at least two new members on its board certain to champion the Green cause, Exxon will almost certainly have tough times ahead. The company lost a record $22 billion last year, and likely will lose more unless it decides to fight back.

CFACT of course will be there, along with its allies, pressuring the company to take a stand. At some point, Exxon leaders need to understand there is no achieving “Peace in our Time” with a Green adversary so vicious. The question is, will the company’s top brass find it in them to toss its Chamberlains and put in some Churchill’s?

Craig Rucker

Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president.

Social Justice Warriors Have A Beef With Meat

May 26, 2021/in Culture Wars, Environment, News, Politics /by Duggan Flanakin

It seems like only yesterday that mainstream media sources like Forbes were condemning Fox Business News economist Larry Kudlow and other Republicans for “falsely claiming” that President Biden’s Green New Deal would force people to stop eating meat. The condemnation ranged from Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC lamenting “the Right’s foolish lie” to a Media Mattersgrenade, “Right-wing media invented a Biden ban on meat because they’re incentivized to lie.”

Turns out the liars are those who “falsely accused” Kudlow. As the show transcript shows, Kudlow did not say Biden had imposed a meat ban. He merely quoted a University of Michigan research study which he says found that, to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, “America has to, get this, America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats.”

What is true is that there has been a growing campaign to force-feed massive reductions in meat consumption “to save the planet.” As Bustle reported in 2019, the Green New Deal “explicitly mentions the importance of dealing with a very specific [and, as Bustle adds, ‘long-documented’] environmental issue: cow farts.”

The Bustle article also notes that, not only does the Green New Deal target cow farts, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual letter also stated that stopping climate change will be easier if media coverage focused on “trucks, cement, and cow farts too.”

Detractors also claimed that Biden lacks authority to impose restrictions on meat. But Michelle Obama rewrote the dietary rules for public schools with even less of an imprimatur.

Whether or not any current or future Biden climate policy will seek to diminish meat consumption (for example, via taxation or regulation), yesterday’s radical kooks are now in power and are already imposing their will on mainstream media.

There are plenty of people who want to take away your automobile, gas stove, and gas furnace. Now many of the same people are coming for your steaks and hamburgers, bratwursts, bacon, and ham, even your fried (or grilled) chicken and Thanksgiving turkey.

Take the recipe website Epicurious, which recently announced that, “Beef won’t appear in new Epicurious recipes, articles, or newsletters. It will not show up on our homepage. It will be absent from our Instagram feed.” The webzine urged its readers to think of the move “not as anti-beef, but ‘pro-planet’.”

Spokespeople David Tamarkin and Maggie Hoffman asserted that cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans and roughly three times less efficient than poultry and pork. Worse, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, 9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally come from livestock (and everything involved in raising it).

According to Tamarkin and Hoffman, “We know that some people might assume that this decision signals some sort of vendetta against cows—or the people who eat them. But this decision was not made because we hate hamburgers (we don’t!).” Except, of course, that they then call the beef industry “one of the world’s worst climate offenders.”

The authors, fearing that failure to march in lockstep with the Green Empire will leave us “with no planet at all,” instruct their readers that, “Addressing climate change requires legislation, international cooperation, and buy-in from the corporate sector.”

And what can each individual do, perchance? They recommend: Just don’t buy beef. “Every time you abstain from beef at the grocery store or a restaurant, you send a signal” that reverberates.

Nextar reported that reactions to the Epicurious decision were “highly mixed, with some applauding the recipe platform and others accusing it of vilifying the meat.”

Renowned food critic Mark Bittman, in an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin in a program entitled “Food World Ramps Up The War On Meat,” asserted that the amount of meat the U.S. is producing is “unsustainable.” He asserted that, for everybody to eat as much meat as Americans eat, we would need four times the resources – petroleum, land, water, waste disposal – that the world has now. “There just isn’t the room or the resources for all of this to happen.”

Much of this turning against meat is fueled by climate catatonia, the fear of coming world food shortages and a return to Malthusian scarcity. Or to 1970s “smallness.” [Diet for a Small Planet and Small Is Beautiful hail from that era.]

A 2019 NBC report quotes James Gerber, co-director and lead scientist of the Global Landscapes Initiative at the University of Minnesota. Gerber said that we must reduce total food waste because it releases the potent greenhouse gas methane as it rots. Gerber also said, “If people just eat a little bit less red meat, it can lead to a big reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”

A follow-up NBC report focused on the 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which encouraged as a way to mitigate global warming’s impacts the widespread adoption of veganism or vegetarianism, which “could reduce the equivalent of up to 8 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year.”

The Economist a while back announced that, “Going vegan for two-thirds of meals could cut food-related carbon emissions by 60 percent.” The article cites a joint University of Minnesota-Oxford University study that a 50-gram chunk of red meat is associated with at least 20 times as much greenhouse-gas emitted and 100 times as much land use than a 100-gram portion of vegetables.

The report also claimed that, averaged across all the ecological indicators “the authors used,” red meat was about 35 times as “damaging” (to the environment?) as a bowl of greens. Clearly, there is a drumbeat against meat. Last fall the popular ‘zine Vox posted an article by Lili Pike entitled, “Why we need policies to reduce meat consumption now.”

Pike cites a recent study, reported on in Science, that claimed that, under a business-as-usual model, food systems emissions alone would cause the plant to cross the sainted 1.5-degree Celsius Deathstar Point. Pike further claimed that the food system is responsible for about 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and growing.

What this means, she posited, is that the food system will have to share the “world’s remaining carbon budget” with the biggest source of emissions: the energy sector. Much more importantly, of course, both the non-food and food sectors will have to decarbonize to stay within the highly contrived Paris targets.

Even “skeptical environmentalist” (and self-confessed vegetarian) Bjorn Lomborg has joined the discussion with the “practical solution.” “We should focus on research to develop cleaner, maybe artificial, meat. And cleaner energy.”

He added, chiding anti-meat crusaders, suggesting that, “It would be a better use of their time to push for more spending on development of artificial meat, which is showing much greater promise than the idea that all the planet’s meat-eaters will develop a taste for vegan alternatives.”

That … might not go over. At least, not in Texas.

The Texas House, over objections from Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and vegan advocates, has voted to approve a bill intending to prohibit the makers of plant-based meat alternatives from using the words “meat,” “beef,” “chicken,” or “pork” on product packaging. These stipulations would also apply to the manufacturers of insect-based alternatives or cell-cultured alternatives.

Texans are not, however, demanding a ban on veganism. Heck, we even let people call bean stew chili.

*****

This article was published on May 20, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.

Fossil Fuels and Fossilized Thinking

May 25, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment /by MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities

An expert in linguistics takes aim at the coloured language of the climate change debate.

Eighty-one years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article by Benjamin Lee Worf that initiated one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.

The author was a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University; the idea concerned the power of language over the mind and the claim that our mother tongue places restrictions on the things that we are able to think.

Whorf argued that Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, in such a way that their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects and actions.

Whorf’s theory led to a whole range of fanciful claims about the supposed power of language over thought, from the assertion that Native American languages give their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension, to the speculation that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

We now know that Whorf was mistaken in assuming that our mother tongue constrains our minds to the point of preventing us from being able to think certain thoughts. This would entail, for example, that if a language had no future tense, its speakers would not be able to grasp the notion of future time. But even in English we sometimes use the present tense to refer to the future, as in “They are arriving this evening.” Would a language that did this habitually prevent its speakers from having any grasp of the future at all?

Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it impossible to understand the concept of relishing in someone else’s misfortunes? More fundamentally, if the vocabulary of words in our language determined which concepts we were able to understand, how could we ever learn anything new?

How language channels our expression

In spite of these caveats, however, recent linguistic research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue we do indeed acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Guy Deutscher’s 2010 book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages develops the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson’s insight that languages differ not so much in what they allow speakers to express but rather in what they oblige them to convey. Deutscher argues that this principle offers the key to understanding the real impact of the mother tongue on our thinking: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think about, but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think.

To illustrate this, he gives the example of someone saying in English “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbour.” As a hearer, you might wonder whether my companion was male or female, but you have no way of knowing that from what I said.

However, if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the possibility of equivocating in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of the language to choose between voisin or voisine, Nachbar or Nachbarin. French and German compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether I feel it is of any concern to you or not.

Language habits

I would like to develop a corollary of this principle going back to another article by Whorf entitled ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language’. In it he explores the ramifications of the impact on human behaviour of “language’s constant ways of arranging data and its most ordinary everyday analysis of phenomena,” based on the idea put forward by Whorf’s mentor Edward Sapir, an anthropology professor at Yale, that “the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”

In support of this idea, Whorf cites his experience as a fire insurance evaluator, in which he discovered that it was often not a physical situation per se, but rather the meaning of that situation to people that was the crucial factor in the start of a fire. Thus, for example, around a storage area for ‘gasoline drums’ great care will be exercised by people, whereas around a storage area for ‘empty gasoline drums’ behaviour may be different, with people sometimes smoking and tossing cigarette stubs around, even though ‘empty’ drums are more dangerous than full ones as they contain explosive vapour.

Whorf observed: “Physically the situation is hazardous, but the linguistic analysis according to regular analogy must employ the word empty, which inevitably suggests lack of hazard.”

The aura surrounding the adjective “fossil”

In the light of this principle, it is interesting to consider the customary use in contemporary discourse of the modifier fossil to describe hydrocarbon-based energy, as instantiated in these phrases gleaned from the international Greenpeace website: fossil fuels, fossil energy, fossil gas, fossil capital, fossil-free politics, fossil-free economy, fossil-free revolution.

Two of these expressions might not be self-explanatory: fossil gas is a way of referring to natural gas; fossil capital is “an economic system that prioritises never-ending growth over the welfare of people and the planet. This system plunders our planet’s resources while oppressing our most vulnerable. It perpetuates structural inequalities and deepens the climate crisis.”

The choice of this modifier for the noun fuel is anything but chance. As illustrated in the Google Ngram below, it became frequent around 1970 at the time of a conjunction of the rise of the environmental movement and media focus on the escalation of gasoline prices due to the OPEC decision to drastically cut down oil production:

Symbolically, the expression fossil fuels associates hydrocarbon energy with a number of underlying notions that present it in a highly unfavourable light. Not only are fossils dug out of the ground, which links them to dirt and mud (viz. the expression dirty energy), but they are also artefacts from a very remote past, which connotes the idea that hydrocarbons are utterly outdated and should be extinct like the species whose skeletons we display in museum exhibits.

And so it comes as no surprise to see the companies producing hydrocarbon energy portrayed as dinosaurs who must give way to the new generation of mammals in an article titled “The era of energy dinosaurs is coming to an end,” which maintains that “the big, slow-moving dinosaurs of the energy world face increasing competition from a swarm of smaller, fast-moving mammals.”

Habits of thought about carbon

It is perhaps salutary to realize that every time we use the phrase fossil fuels, we are entrenching a habit of thought that is beholden to a certain view of this type of energy. And so, even though this phrase slips smoothly off the tip of the tongue because of the alliteration of the initial labiodental fricatives, we should perhaps think twice before using it too casually.

The same thing goes for the phrase carbon footprint, in which an odorless and colourless gas is treated as a hard metal capable of leaving an indelible mark on the environment. Indeed, the reduction of the longer term carbon dioxide to the noun carbon in current discourse concerning energy is far from innocent. Not only does it present the purported environmental threat as a solid rather than a gas, but it also constitutes a concealed attack on the very foundation of life on the planet.

If one does an Internet search for “carbon is”, the top three suggestions proposed by the Google search engine are “carbon is the building block of life/carbon is the foundation of life/carbon is the basis of life,” amounting to a total of 907,000,000 hits on the web.

And indeed, the higher levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere in the industrial era are making the earth greener and increasing crop yields: in its forecast of world cereal grain production for 2020/2021, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization foresees a 4.4 percent increase, up 2.6 percent from the record set in 2019/2020.

In 2016 a paper titled “The greening of the Earth and its drivers” was published in the journal Nature Climate Change by 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries that analysed satellite data and concluded that there had been a 14 percent increase in green vegetation over the previous 30 years, attributing 70 percent of this increase to the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The lead author of the study, Zaichun Zhu of Beijing University, says this was equivalent to adding a new continent of green vegetation twice the size of the mainland United States.

In the phrase carbon emissions, however, carbon is associated with a noun reserved for reference to pollution, thereby debasing the basis of life to the status of toxic waste.

If Sapir and Whorf are right that the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation, every time we hear or use such expressions, we are being conditioned to adopt a certain point of view on their referent. Caveat locutor et auditor!

COLUMN BY

Patrick Duffley

Patrick Duffley is Professor of English Linguistics at Université Laval, in Canada. More by Patrick Duffley

Are You “Wasting” Paper?

May 25, 2021/in Economy, Environment, Politics /by Art Carden

I’m a heretic in a world where environmentalism is a leading religion. I think it’s okay to use a lot of paper, and I generally ignore the little exhortation at the bottom of so many emails saying “Think about the environment before printing this.” This isn’t to say I do use a lot of paper: most of what I read, write, and assign to students is digital now. You’re not “wasting” paper by using it and throwing it away any more than you’re “wasting” corn by eating tortilla chips. There’s a good case to be made that you probably should eat fewer tortilla chips—I certainly need to—but “Eating tortilla chips wastes corn” is not one of them.

Contrary to popular belief, economic progress is not the enemy of the environment. In a 2015 episode of EconTalk, Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel explains “the return of nature” as we get more and more output with less and less land. Andrew McAfee has done some very interesting work in recent years suggesting that we’re reaching “peak stuff.” I haven’t yet read his book More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources–and What Happens Next, but I’ve listened to a few podcasts in which he discusses what he calls “dematerialization” (like this episode of EconTalk). We are using less material and less energy to produce every dollar of GDP, but perhaps more importantly, we are using “less energy in total as economic growth progresses.” McAfee argues that our consumption of a lot of different kinds of stuff has likely peaked.

Why? Don’t people consume voraciously? Wouldn’t we need something like three earths to support everyone at an American standard of living? I doubt it. As people get richer, they stop spending their incomes on more burgers but on better burgers. In other words, they substitute quality for quantity. When we go to a very nice restaurant, we spend three times as much as we might spend at McDonald’s. We are not, however, getting three times as many french fries and three times as much beef. We are getting better fries and better beef.

But isn’t it wasteful to throw away food or use a lot of paper? Probably not: paper is cheap, and your time is expensive. Holding everything else constant, it’s probably a good trade-off to “waste” paper if it means saving your time for something more important. As Thomas Sowell points out in his book Basic Economics, it is actually wasteful for someone with a very high opportunity cost of their time to spend a lot of that time fixing broken things–or salvaging paper that is probably “reusable.” That so much goes into landfills in the United States and Europe may be the product of prices that don’t fully reflect all the relevant costs and benefits, but it is not a moral failing on our part. It’s a failure to let labor move to where it is most valuable. If you’re “thinking about the environment” before you print something, you’re probably economizing on what is abundant (paper) and wasting what is most scarce (your time).

Of course, participating in rituals that appear to be wasteful, at least on the surface, is part of participating in a complex society. There might be a kind of ritual value to saving paper and turning the lights off when you leave a room, just like there’s a kind of ritual value in singing the school fight song at a football game or taking communion at church. You’re the kind of person who doesn’t use “too much” paper and doesn’t waste electricity. That’s cool, and as a father who embraces all the Dad stereotypes, I’m right there with you. While writing the first draft of this article, I switched off a lamp thinking “I’m sitting next to a window; I don’t need the extra light.” I’d still rather cut off a finger than leave a room without turning off the lights, and I think I would rather watch people burn money than watch them throw food away. However, you’re not really “saving the earth” by using less paper. We should take seriously the possibility that our endeavors could backfire: by spending my “environmental consciousness budget” on basically trivial things like saving paper, then perhaps I end up with less energy for higher-impact environmental endeavors, like understanding how going “anti-nuclear” actually increases pollution or helping with a local park cleanup.

Am I encouraging prodigality and profligacy? No. I’m counseling regularly measured, well-thought-out prudence. Maybe the prices really are wrong, and the by-now-well-developed norms against using paper are an efficient response to that. I would rather see the energy directed toward rooting out and eliminating the sources of the distortion.

Consider too the constant additional cognitive burdens both large and small that people are expected to bear. Do we really want already-stressed out people adding to their cognitive load by thinking they might be sinning against Gaia or Greta Thunberg by printing or discarding a sheet of paper? As Bryan Caplan has pointed out, “Recycling is the philosophy that everything is worth saving except your time.”

Think for a moment about aluminum cans. A quick Google search turns up a scrap metal price of about 48 cents a pound. That’s hardly enough to make it worth my time, of course, but it may very well be worth the time of people who might have a comparative advantage in sorting recyclables. It’s also not like aluminum decays quickly. Another quick Google search suggested that aluminum cans won’t decompose for a century or more. This means that if we start running low on aluminum, we can probably start expecting people to mine landfills for the cans we’re discarding today.

Yet a third quick Google search suggests paper takes about 2-6 weeks in a landfill to decompose (another site said 5-15 years). But that’s beside the point. If we start really straining our ability to produce new paper or if we start running out of landfill space (and, therefore, the price of discarding stuff rises), we can expect again for people to start paying for and reclaiming the stuff we throw away. The world is an enormous place, and there are enormous tracts of land to be had at pretty low prices. Yet another Google search suggests that a landfill of 250 square miles, 400 feet deep would hold a century’s worth of American garbage (assuming the population doubles and we all keep producing about 3.5 pounds of trash a day). That sounds absolutely enormous—but Jefferson County, Alabama, where I live is just over 1,100 square miles. The United States is about 3.8 million square miles, which means our 400-foot century-long landfill would cover less than 0.007% of the US’s land area. Assume we produce the same amount of trash every century (a not-unreasonable assumption) and assume none of it ever goes away, and after a thousand years you’re still at less than one-tenth of one percent of US land area taken up by landfill space. Global land area is about 57.5 million square miles. It’s staggering when we think about just how much land is out there, even if these numbers are off by an order of magnitude. Idiocracy was funny and all, but the idea that we’ll all be living under mountains and mountains of garbage doesn’t really seem to hold up.

This claim, of course, basically assumes there is no technological change that continues the “dematerialization.” As more and more value comes from things other than the narrowly material, we can expect to get not just more and better silk stockings for steadily-decreasing amounts of effort, we can expect to get more and better silk stockings for steadily decreasing amounts of silk.

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This article was published May 19, 2021 and reproduced with permission by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

Arizona Utilities Warn California Change Could Result In Power Losses

May 24, 2021/in Economy, Environment, News /by Elizabeth Troutman

A group of power providers say a change prioritizing electrical demand in California would leave Arizona and other states with power shortages that could lead to blackouts amid the state’s oppressing heat.

Southwest utilities including Tucson Electric Power, Arizona Public Service and others say they’re opposed to the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) plan to ensure local power delivery gets first consideration over “wheel-through” power that is sent to other states.

Specifically, the summer readiness plan approved by California’s primary grid operator puts a lower priority on the electrical wattage sent elsewhere when the power demand is high.

Electrical utilities in Arizona, California, and elsewhere secure the massive amounts of power needed to meet local demand by winning bids for wattage on wholesale energy auctions. Nuclear power generators, natural gas, renewable resources and others all offer up expected wattage for sale and then deliver on those contracts via interstate power line infrastructure.

In March, the CAISO board approved the first 2021 summer readiness enhancements and the “load, export and wheeling priorities proposal” on April 21.

Power operators in neighboring states say the CAISO is “exporting to the rest of the West its reliability issues that have arisen due to a number of dynamics occurring” within California.

California experienced rolling blackouts in Aug. 2020 due to supply shortages that saw hundreds of thousands of residents without power in the sweltering heat.

In a statement, Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District (SRP), Arizona Public Service (APS), Tucson Electric Power (TEP) and NV Energy (NVE) expressed their concerns with CAISO’s efforts to address their local power shortages, saying it’s unfair to market participants outside of the state.

They said the proposal is the equivalent of CAISO “exporting its reliability issues which are the result of dynamics within the CAISO BAA to the rest of the West.”

The companies added that the proposal violates regional market principles, calling it “unjust, unreasonable, and unduly discriminatory.”

Though California’s electric system is in a better position than it was in 2020, CAISO officials warned in their May 12 assessment they could still struggle to meet demand this summer due to low supply and a high likelihood of extreme weather.

The change would sunset on May 31, 2022. CAISO said they would work on a longer-term solution at an earlier meeting.

*****

This article was published on May 19, 2021 and is reprinted with permission from The Center Square.

Biden Raves Over Expensive Inefficient, Electric Ford F-150 Truck

May 20, 2021/1 Comment/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment /by Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

If inefficiency were a virtue, President Biden is its champion.

Yesterday, President Biden test drove the new electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck which Ford will formally unveil at midnight tonight.

The F-150 is the best selling vehicle in America, but is the American Everyman prepared to shell out $70,000 for an electric base model and over six figures at the top of the line? Those are the prices Car and Driver predicts.

Today’s pickup trucks are affordable. “The F-150 carries a base price of $28,940, which is one of the lower starting prices in the class. SuperCab models start at $33,025, and SuperCrew models start at $36,650.

Pickup trucks combine power with rugged hauling capacity that appeal to sports and tradesmen. A pickup truck enables individuals to start a business with minimal capital. Buy a pickup, maybe add a trailer, and you’ve acquired much of the gear you need to start a business as a landscaper, handyman, repairman, mechanic, or carpenter. Add some skills and a lucrative career as a plumber, electrician or tech specialist beckons.

Pickup trucks and vans are essential elements for many workers’ American dream.

Electric vehicles’ short ranges and long charging times are significant impediments to that dream.

The already announced Ford E-Transit van “delivers an estimated driving range of 126 miles in the low-roof cargo van variant.” That’s assuming warm weather and driving maximized to fit the EV power curve.

We’ll learn tonight whether some models of the F-150 lightning might make 300 miles, but if they do, we know that will mean a substantial increase in cost and particularly weight.

Motor Trend wrote, “expect the electric F-150 to therefore fall on the heavy end of Ford’s light-duty pickup lineup when all is said and done.”

Ford told President Biden that the F-150 Lightning’s batteries will weigh over 1,800 pounds. That’s a lot of lithium.

Biden raved over one of the best features of electric vehicles: their quick acceleration.

“This sucker’s quick.” Biden remarked behind the wheel, “I think it’s going from zero to sixty in about 4.3… 4.4.” The Ford spokesman confirmed, saying, “right.”

EVs boast near instant torque. However, that’s been true since the birth of the automobile at the end of the nineteenth century. Instant torque may be a cool feature for drag racing, but hauling capacity and range are what Americans demand in a pickup.

Ford partnered with Thomas Edison to develop an electric vehicle in 1914, but shelved the project due to limitations which though improved, persist today.

Lithium-ion batteries may be more efficient than the lead-acid batteries Henry Ford and Thomas Edison used, and technologies such as recombinant braking offer efficiency boosts with a cost in mechanical complexity, but the essential reasons electric vehicles never caught on remain.

Electric vehicles are costly to make, require massive batteries that don’t last, and are limited by short ranges and long charging times. They require exotic materials, sourced overseas, often mined under appalling conditions.

It remains to be seen whether pickup truck entrepreneurs will overcome sticker shock and range anxiety and embrace electric vehicles.

Will they adopt electric pickup trucks voluntarily, or only through government coercion?

Climate Change: Last Bastion Of The Royalists

May 20, 2021/in Culture Wars, Economy, Environment, Liberty, Politics /by Duggan Flanakin

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. — C. S. Lewis

Is it mere coincidence that the European nations leading the march toward all- electric vehicle fleets are still (at least symbolically) – or were for centuries – ruled by monarchies?

Three decades ago, in his seminal book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, the princely Albert Gore declared, “We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.” But at a “climate change festival” in San Francisco in September 2018, Gore narrowed his worldview to declare that “decarbonization” must become “the central organizing principle of human civilization.”

The royalist, or colonialist, mentality pervades the “climate change” movement – the idea that wealthy elites have effectively a “divine right” to decide the future for the rest of civilization.

Compare Gore’s priority with that of the Copenhagen Consensus, which found that spending a measly $3 billion over four years on a bundle of micronutrients could reduce chronic malnutrition by 36 percent in developing countries, helping 100 million children to start their lives without stunted growth.

“Skeptical” environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg’s group found that each dollar spent addressing chronic under-nutrition has a $30 payoff in economic terms, and that the overall benefit from such an investment could reach $63 worth of global good. [Just through 2018, the U.S. had spent $154 billion on “climate change.”]

The Copenhagen group also touted malaria treatment (generating $35 in benefits for every dollar spent), immunization for children, and deworming – actions that bring real benefit to human lives. Actions that the climate royalists, whose families have profited immensely from exploiting human and natural resources in areas plagued by poverty and disease, found not to be a high priority.

Prince Albert, like most of his climate allies, is not known for a modest lifestyle. Examples of extravagance by those demanding the rest of us sacrifice are numerous. For example, the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives, at a 2012 “World Congress” in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, celebrated their demand for economic “contraction” in the developed world with a lavish affair “replete with rich food, champagne, and opulence,” including a high-fashion show.

Indeed, Biden “climate czar” John Kerry justified his own use of a private jet to fly to Iceland in 2019 for to receive a climate award by stating, “I can’t sail across the ocean – I have to fly, meet with people and get things done.” [I am VERY IMPORTANT! And you’d best not forget it!]

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich “defended” Kerry in a tweet: “Do you really expect a political Prince like Kerry to sit in an Icelandair seat with mere citizens (Callista and I found the salmon they serve was superb)? Of course not.”

In recent articles I pointed out that China, India, and even Africans emerging out of colonialism are not buying into the royalist decarbonization demands. Neither are many Americans, largely because they do not buy into the climate crisis mentality.

Rupert Darwall, a senior fellow at the RealClear Foundation, called out the Biden diktat that Americans reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions no later than 2050 “to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” declaring it his “first deception.” Why? Because the 1.5-degree limit “has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics and green ideology.”

Darwall explained that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “offered no scientific, economic, or ethical justification for its adoption of the 1.5-degree target.” The sole justification (other than “climate change is BAD!”) is that climate change provides an opportunity to impose “transformative systemic change” to accomplish “intentional societal transformation.” And the serfs must submit.

Is there any wonder, then, that Hillary Clinton called those who rejected her coronation “irredeemable deplorables”? Gore, Kerry, and their fellows see themselves as the rightful rulers of a neo-Platonist “republic” in which citizens are “craftsmen” who perform duties the elites deem appropriate. Chinese-style “social credit” is thus an attractive tool for ensuring that the hoi polloi stay in their place and exhibit sufficient reverence for the ruling class.

That this worldview clashes with the Declaration of Independence is further evidence that today’s climate elites long for the good old days of feudalism, so long as their fiefdoms are well fortified. The Founders affirmed that governments were “instituted” to secure individual rights – because “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Today’s royalists conspire to take away individual rights, to demand conformity and obeisance, and to take the lion’s share for themselves.

Further evidence of this royalist psyche among the climate conscious stems from the way that some governors, mayors, and other authority figures used “emergency powers” to destroy small businesses and increase dependency during the recent corona virus pandemic. Even more comes from the royalist-sanctioned “cancel culture” that redefines words and verbally, even physically, assaults anyone who even accidentally (or unknowingly) violates their Newspeak.

But these two examples also demonstrate that “climate change” or “decarbonization” as an organizing principle has been a total failure outside royalist circles. Indeed, some climate “scientists” are calling for biennial COVID-style “lockdowns” as a necessary component of the net zero strategy. Already Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has urged President Biden to declare a “climate emergency” and further restrict our freedoms.

The Founders recognized that human governments are imperfect and that people are “more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” But they also recognized that there is a tipping point beyond which abuses of human freedoms can no longer be tolerated.

Does anyone actually believe that the owners of 280 million gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles in the United States (not to mention the millions of lawnmowers, boats, power tools, etc.) are going to quietly surrender every one of their vehicles to a government buyback program? Does anyone actually believe that people are willingly going to give up their gas stoves, gas hot water heaters, gas furnaces, and other natural gas-powered appliances?

The government is not simply exchanging your old toys with new ones at no cost to anyone, even if the royalists “pay” for this largesse with tens of trillions of new national debt. The citizenry will pay dearly for such a forced transition, while the benefits will go to the few who control the manufacture and distribution of the new tools.

Both privacy and private property ownership by ordinary citizens are headed for the ash heap if the royalist World Economic Forum gets its wish. As German economist Dr. Antony Mueller explained, the plan is that government will be the sole proprietor of all goods. In such a society there will be no “individualism, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Of course, the royals will keep their properties, because, well, they are important.

The sole question that remains, then, is not whether, but when “in the course of human events” the people will say to the royalists, “no más,” and what they will do about it.

*****

This article was published on May , 2021 and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.

Media Balance Newsletter

May 18, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment /by John Droz, Jr.

Welcome to the latest issue of our Media Balance Newsletter, which covers a wide range of nation interest topics: from COVID to Climate.

(For all 2020 Newsletters, go here. For all 2021 Newsletters, go here.)

(FYI, Our Election Integrity Reports have a new url: Election-Integrity.info. Please pass that onto your social media contacts…)

Please use social media, etc. to pass on this Newsletter to other open-minded citizens…

Note 1: It’s recommended to read the Newsletter on your computer, not your phone, as some documents (e.g. PDFs) are much easier to read on a large computer screen… Common fonts, etc. have been used to minimize display issues.

Note 2: To accommodate numerous requests received about prior articles, we’ve put together detailed archives — where you can search by year, or over the ten+ years of the Newsletter. For a detailed background about the Newsletter, please read this.

Note 3: See this extensive list of reasonable books on climate change that complements the Newsletter. As a parallel effort, there is also a list of some good books related to industrial wind energy. Both topics are also extensively covered on our WiseEnergy.org website.

Note 4: If you’d like to join the 10,000+ worldwide readers and get your own free copy of this periodic Newsletter, simply send John an email saying that.

Note 5: John is not an attorney or a physician, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or the WiseEnergy.org website) should be construed as giving legal or medical advice. His recommendation has always been: consult a competent, licensed attorney when you are involved with legal issues, and consult a competent physician regarding medical issues.

Electric Vehicles And Paying For Our Highways

May 18, 2021/in Economy, Environment, News, Politics /by Geoffrey Pohanka

With anticipated growth in electric vehicle (EV) sales in the United States, the question remains: How are EVs going to pay their fair share of maintaining our nation’s highway infrastructure? The Highway Trust Fund was created in 1956 by Congress to pay for our Interstate Highway System. Currently, the fund receives monies from the federal fuel tax – 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel fuel.

The federal fuel tax has not increased since 1993, and since it is not pegged to inflation, collections are insufficient to maintain our highways without the infusion of additional funds from general revenues. The Highway Trust Fund currently has two accounts – one to fund road construction and surface transportation projects and a second for mass transit. One cent per gallon also is used to fund underground storage-tank removal. Over time, the diversion of money from the fund to pay for “non-highway” projects has been growing, making the shortfall even larger.

This shortfall is worsening as EVs take a larger share of vehicle sales. Since EVs do not use liquid fuels to propel them as do ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles, they are not contributing to the maintenance of our highways. Some observers argue that vehicles, in general, should be charged a miles-driven tax. It might seem to make sense that the more miles one drives the more one should pay to maintain our roads, but there are other considerations.

The current fuel tax is very fair, in that larger and heavier vehicles damage our roads more than smaller, lighter vehicles. They also consume more fuel; thus, they pay more tax. Some estimates suggest that an 80,000 pound truck damages the road as much as 5,000 to 10,000 cars. If someone drives a large, less fuel-efficient pickup truck, the driver pays more fuel tax than someone who drives a subcompact car. But with a charge-per-mile tax, this would not be true – unless the assessment per mile driven is higher for large EVs and lower for smaller EVs.

But who would decide how much drivers would pay? Today, drivers make that decision, based upon what vehicle they choose to drive and how many miles they choose to drive in it. Those who drive smaller, more efficient small cars pay less tax, and those who choose to drive larger vehicles pay more. This is inherently fair.

My suggestion: an electricity tax could be added to public EV fast-charging stations that would be the equivalent of the current fuel tax. I have found that a rule of thumb for many EVs is that they consume about one kilowatt hour of energy for every 3.5 miles of driving. If a comparable ICE car achieved 30 miles per gallon, the 18.4 cents tax per gallon would equal 0.61 cents per mile. Thus, 2.14 cents for each kWh used at public fast-charging stations could be added to help pay for our highways. This is a start, but it would hardly make up for the shortfall in revenue from EVs, since it does not account for the fact that most EVs are charged at home.

Charging vehicles a per-mile fee for using our highways also raises concerns of privacy and security. The privacy issue involves the government knowing where you are and where you have been (though our smartphones are already doing the same thing). More and more of our cars are connected with WiFi hotspots, along with digital updates from the manufacturer (again just like our phones).

But what would happen if a rogue entity were able to hack into our connected cars and make them unable to start, or worse, cause an accident? It reminds us that the IRS, Justice Department, and the Defense Department all experienced recent and harmful electronic intrusions. I hope our auto manufacturers have better technological defenses than our government agencies, but I doubt it.

There are still other concerns. If we stopped using a fuel tax, everyone would have to install a black box in their car to assess the mileage tax. It would certainly be better to continue the fuel tax for ICE cars and then charge a mileage tax on the more modern and technologically capable EV vehicles that are more connected. A percentage of fuel-tax collections also come from non-road uses, such as when I fuel the John Deere tractor I use to cut fields around my home. Every time I fill up my tractor, I am helping pay for our highways, though I never drive my tractor on them. Why stop this extra source of revenue?

I also wonder who would decide what to charge for a miles-driven tax. Ideally, it would be Congress that sets the federal fuel tax, but critics would point out, accurately, that the tax has not been raised since 1993 (and it would not be popular politically to do so). Instead, the bureaucracy might prefer that an unelected regulatory panel decide the amount of the tax. But then what would stop that panel from demanding a higher fee, in the hope that this charge would encourage people to drive less?

Or perhaps it would assess fees to discourage driving at certain locations, similar to New York City’s proposal to charge congestion fees of $11.52 per car and $25.34 per truck that enter the city south of Central Park. London charges about $21 to drive into the city between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. every day except Christmas.

Let’s say Highway 81 has lots of road construction over the next four years. What would prevent the government from charging a triple tax for drivers, to encourage them to find other routes? This could be the kind of nightmare caused by central planners looking to manipulate driving habits.

Conversations I’ve had lead me to believe that consumers would be willing to pay the additional 13 cents per gallon needed to maintain our highways. This would allow for the continued diversion of funds to other non-highway projects such as mass transit and bike paths. We must also find ways to charge EVs the fuel-tax equivalent based upon a yearly assessment, a tax on energy consumption, a miles-driven tax, or some combination of the three.

What we do not have, as far as I can tell, is much discussion on how we are going to do this. Some say that government finds it easier to spend money than to collect it. Others rationalize exempting EVs from such fees as a subsidy to spur acceptance of the new technology, or as a deserved reward in the belief that EVs are beneficial for the environment.

Finally: even if we’re successful in raising the extra 13 cents per gallon of fuel or electricity equivalent, it would require a lock box to prevent those funds from being diverted to purposes other than maintaining our highways. But this is a problem universal to public financing.

*****

This article was published on May 11, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

A Tucsonan’s Take on Mining and Climate Goals

May 18, 2021/in Culture Wars, Environment, Politics /by Craig J. Cantoni

Mentioning the complexities and nuances of environmentalism in today’s partisan divide is a surefire way of being called names.

If you want to start a fight and be typecast as either an ignorant left-winger or a reactionary right-winger, mention that some hot-button issue held dearly by one side or the other is more complex and nuanced than reported.

This is especially so with respect to climate change, fossil fuels, and green energy, all of which have been brought to a boil by the Biden administration’s climate goals.

On a related note, here in my adopted hometown of Tucson, where there is a long history of copper mining in Southeastern Arizona, a raging debate is taking place about plans for a new mine in the drought-stricken region.

A recent report by the International Energy Agency pushes the hot buttons of climate and mining by warning about the massive increase in mining that will be required by the administration’s climate goals—mining that will cause great environmental harm, cancel out a lot of the purported green gains, and take place in countries lacking in human rights and environmental protections.

The foregoing sentence is enough for some readers to shut down their thinking, retreat to their ideological corner, and accuse me of an imaginary bias.

Well, this will flummox them: I’m the former head of an influential environmental group in northern New Jersey, where a major newspaper honored me on its Sunday front page as “Community Service Volunteer of the Year.” Concurrently, I was an executive with a large natural resources company owned by a family of environmentalists, whose holdings included 900,000 acres of timberland—none of which was clear-cut—and mines where silica, calcium carbonate, and kaolin clay were mined.

Was it hypocritical for me to be an environmentalist while working for a natural resources company? I’ll answer with a question: Do you see yourself as green but brush your teeth, use paint, and buy paper products with a gloss on them? If so, those items contain the raw materials mined by my former employer.

Also, of course, the copper in your smart phone comes from mines, as does the lithium in its battery, as well as the lithium in the batteries of your Tesla, should you own one—not counting the iron ore and aluminum ore that were mined to produce the metal in the car.

Then there are your social-media musings, your postings to the cloud, and your other electronic applications and devices—most of which rely on huge server “farms” that use tremendous amounts of energy.

If you’re like me and have solar panels on your house, you might know how much power you generate from the sun, but it’s a good bet that you have no idea how much energy has been expended in providing all of the goods and services you use, including food.

With respect to food, whether you are a carnivore, omnivore, or herbivore—and whether you eat organically or not—a lot of energy and environmental costs go into the production of the food you eat. The use of nitrates alone on farms has created a huge environmental problem. Another problem is the drawing down of aquifers across a large swath of the United States—water that took centuries to accumulate. Likewise, the world’s oceans are being overfished by fleets of huge floating factories.

Reports say that 70% of Americans are overweight, including the 40% who are obese. No doubt, many of them are greens. They could cut their caloric intake by probably a third and thus reduce the associated environmental costs by a third, with no negative effects on their quality of life but with significant improvements to their health.

There are other green actions that are within our control. For example, we can hang our laundry to dry instead of using a dryer, which is one of the biggest energy hogs in our house. We can also stop buying highly-processed foods in single-use packaging.

Such foods now dominate grocery shelves. The typical supermarket has gone from carrying about 6,000 items in 1980 to approximately 33,000 today, most of it processed, over-packaged, and laden with salt, sugar and fat. Nearly half of “groceries” are now bought in convenience stores, and many of the items are packaged to be eaten or drunk while driving.

Much of this ends up as litter and trash along roads, as my wife and I know firsthand from picking up debris on our daily five-mile walks. So much of America has become trashed that Americans seem to have become desensitized to it as they pass by in the cocoons of their expensive luxury cars and behemoth trucks.

Convenience stores and fast-food outlets are the main sources of roadside litter, but try to find one of them in your town that participates in an adopt-a-road program. Or imagine the outcry if a public school were to require students to pick up litter along neighboring streets, as schools do in Japan.

If not picked up, items made of plastic and aluminum will take centuries to decompose, and much of it ends up in riparian areas, in streams, and in oceans. Yet industry keeps developing new products and packaging that exacerbate the problem. Examples are the Styrofoam peanuts and the plastic bubble wrap contained in packages delivered to your door. Inevitably, some of this ends up on roadways, where it is blown about by the wind. If you’re looking for a challenge, try picking up 50 or more Styrofoam peanuts that end up strewn over a mile of roadside.

Another ubiquitous item on roadsides is Swiffer cleaning cloths. Apparently, Americans no longer recycle old towels and clothes to be used as rags in house cleaning. Instead, they buy packaged Swiffer cloths and then throw them into the trash or recycling (although they aren’t recyclable.) From there, they somehow end up on roadsides.

Used face masks and e-cigarettes have also become ubiquitous on roadsides.

Unsurprisingly, liquor bottles and beer bottles and cans continue to litter roads and nature areas. But hypodermic needles are a more recent addition to the litter from mind- and mood-altering substances. The needles are not only a danger to kids who come across them but also a danger to people who pick up litter.

Judging by the amount of litter, Americans have lost their civic pride and love of country. And paradoxically, the more that government and schools have harped about environmentalism, and the more that corporations have advertised about how green they are, the more the proliferation of single-use items and disposable, non-recyclable products. (Only 10% of items purported to be recyclable are actually recyclable.)

Equally if not more hypocritical are the celebrities, business tycoons, and politicians who virtue signal about climate change but own multiple mansions and fly around in private jets. For some inexplicable reason, they escape ridicule and are bypassed by the cancel culture.

Even National Geographic is two-faced. It advertises an around-the-world excursion by ship and plane costing tens of thousands of dollars, where passengers can listen to lectures on nature while being oblivious to the irony.

Then there was a reporter for a national publication who wrote about her “green vacation” to some remote resort in the Amazon that she billed as sustainable. The trip entailed multiple flights, a long bus ride, and a long drive in an off-road vehicle. I emailed her with an estimate of how many tons of carbon were produced by her trip and suggested that the trip wasn’t very green. She didn’t take the feedback well.

Solutions for climate change and environmental degradation are a subject for another day, but two of the top ones are a carbon tax and the building of smaller and safer nuclear power plants.

Anyway, unlike the aforementioned reporter, I’ve become inured to negative feedback. Therefore, feel free to call me names for writing about the complexities, nuances, hypocrisies and double standards of today’s environmentalism.

Coming Attractions: Long Lines At The Pump, High Gas Prices

May 18, 2021/in Economy, Environment, Liberty, Politics /by Bonner Cohen

A brawl broke out at a Raleigh, N.C.-area gas station after the driver of a Honda – desperate to acquire fuel anyway she could — cut in front of another car that had been waiting in a long line of vehicles in need of a fill-up.

This breach of service-station etiquette didn’t occur in the 1970s in the wake of the Arab oil embargo; it unfolded on May 11, as drivers along the eastern Seaboard faced gas shortages reminiscent of the era of the Bee Gees. The culprit this time was a ransomware attack presumably carried out by the Russia-based criminal gang DarkSide that forced the shut-down of the 5,500-mile Colonial Pipeline that transports gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from Texas to New Jersey.

While the pipeline is now back up and running, the inconvenience suffered by drivers coping with a shortage of fuel could be a foretaste of things to come. Only this time, the bad guys aren’t Middle Eastern oil sheiks or Russian gangsters, but Biden administration officials in Washington who are pushing the country down a path that leads to fuel shortages and higher energy prices.

Disrupting Supply

Even before the cyberattack on the pipeline, gas prices in the U.S. had risen above the $3 per-gallon level for the first time since 2014. These higher prices – and those that are yet to come – are by design. In the name of combatting climate change, Biden has already “paused” oil and gas exploration on federal land, and drillers on private land are facing new regulations aimed at reducing their productivity. Biden has also pulled the plug on the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from northeastern Alberta to U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast of Texas. The fate of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline, which transports oil from northwestern North Dakota to a terminal in Paduka, Ill., is also uncertain. It has been in operation since 2017 but could well find itself on the hit list of Biden’s green advisers.

After keeping as much of Michigan under lockdown as she could over the past 15 months, Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) has set her sights on the Line 5 pipeline, which transports oil and natural gas liquids from Superior, Wisconsin through the Great Lakes to refineries in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ontario, and Quebec. Whitmer has revoked a permit for the 645-mile pipeline and ordered its Canadian operator, Embridge Inc., to shut it down effective May 12. Embridge refuses to cease operations and has sued Michigan saying the state lacks the authority to shut down the pipeline. Embridge has been joined in its suit by the State of Ohio. And the Biden administration? It refuses to intervene and will let the dispute play out in court.

Strict enforcement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), along with the forthcoming tightening of the federal “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule will have the desired effect – from the standpoint of the Biden White House and its environmentalist allies – of locking up more land – public and private – from natural resource development.

Troublesome Transition

Biden’s goal of achieving 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035 will entail an energy transition at break-neck speed, and the necks that will be broken are those of ordinary people caught up in the rush to a green Utopia. Switching the nation’s major energy sources from oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydropower to intermittent wind and solar power will result in the rolling blackouts and brownouts that already afflict California, the role model for Biden’s eco-warriors. In addition to the inevitable energy shortages this will bring about, the environmental consequences of this undertaking will be profound, and ugly. The transition is a “shift from a fuel intensive to a material-intensive energy system,” notes a just-released report by the International Energy Agency.

Noting the coming dependency on lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and other minerals needed for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles, the Manhattan Institute’s Mark Mills had this to say in the Wall Street Journal (May 12):

That means a shift away from liquids and gases whose extraction and transport leave a very light footprint on the land and are transported cheaply, easily, and efficiently, and toward big-footprint mines, the energy-intensive transport of massive amounts of rocks and other solid materials, and subsequent chemical processing and refining.

All of this, Mills adds, will result in emissions that will offset whatever emissions are reduced by abandoning fossil fuels. In other words, the sacrifice will have been made for nothing.

*****

This article was published on May 13, 20121 and reprinted with permission from FACT, Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow

Al Gore, Our Melting Planet and the Blizzard of 2018

May 17, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Energy, Environment /by John Eidson

Gore and other high profile climate frauds continue to furiously beat the drums of global warming alarmism.

If not for a complicit and totally corrupt western media, the man-made global warming theory would have been blown out of the water decades ago.

In early January 2018, a powerful blizzard caused severe disruptions along the East Coast of the United States, as snow and bitter cold weather set new records, with Erie, PA shattering its all-time snowfall record. The next month, Chicago tied a long-standing record with nine straight days of snow after chalking up its most frigid New Year’s Day in history. The Plains, Midwest and Northeast were hit with record-setting frigid temperatures, and the Deep South was gripped by sub-zero freezing that dumped snow, even in Florida.

Crying wolf … every decade or so

Halfway around the world, the Winter Olympics in South Korea rivaled the coldest Games ever, and Russia had to call out the army to help Moscow dig out of what was described as “the snowfall of the century.” Elsewhere, 13,000 tourists were stranded as heavy snow blocked all routes from a Swiss ski resort, and the Sahara Desert was blanketed with 15 inches of snow.

Flashback to just four years earlier, 2014, when The New York Times, a charter member of the climate crisis cabal, ran a terrifying article that predicted “the end of snow.” That dire forecast was preceded 14 years earlier, in 2000, by the UK Independent, another charter member of the climate crisis cabal, which reported that “Snowfalls are a thing of the past. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

In attempting to explain away the Blizzard of 2018, Al Gore said, “This is exactly what we should expect from global warming.” In his 2006 climate scaremongering movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he made no mention of exceptionally cold winters as a consequence of global warming. That was a totally new claim, one he pulled out of thin air when multiple frigid winters made a mockery of his prediction that cold winters and snow would disappear.

Dating to the early 1980s, Gore and other alleged experts have told us that the climate battle must be won “in the next decade” or by some future year, with no ifs, ands or buts regarding the contrived deadline. As reported by Climate Depot, citizens of western democracies have been the targets of a continuous barrage of grossly inaccurate climate warnings, each followed by more of the same:

● 1982: UN issues its first climate “tipping point” prediction, says time running out to save planet.
● 1989: UN issues revised tipping point, says only 10 years left to save planet; 19 years later, UN issues ANOTHER tipping point, says only 15 years left to save planet.
● 1989: Senior UN official Dr. Noel Brown: “Entire nations will be wiped from face of Earth” if no action taken by 2000.
● 2006: Al Gore issues doomsday warning: “Less than 10 years to save Earth.”
● 2007: UN IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri says tipping point imminent, planet to perish if no action taken by 2012.
● 2009: NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen: “Obama has only four years to save planet.”
● 2011: Prince Charles: “Only 96 months left to save the world.”
● 2019: UN General Assembly President María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés: “Only 11 years left to save planet.”
● 2019: U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “World will end in 12 years if no action taken.”
● 2020: Presidential candidate Joe Biden: “Only nine years left to save Earth.”

Gore: “I saw fish from the ocean swimming in the streets of Miami”

For four straight decades, a Who’s Who of climate carnival barkers have issued a constant drumbeat of apocalyptic warnings that climate collapse is “imminent” unless voters agree to stratospheric carbon energy taxes that will radically alter the lifestyle of all but the wealthiest Americans.

If these global warming quacks have you trembling in fear, here’s a slice of Earth’s climate history that will give you peace of mind. During the Pliocene Epoch—2.5 million-to-5.3 million years ago—global average temperatures were 2-3 degrees Celsius higher than today, and there were no humans using fossil fuels way back then.

There’s nothing this climate snake oil salesman won’t say to perpetuate the global warming hoax that’s enabled him to stuff his pockets with a staggering $300 million fortune. At the December 2015 New York Times DealBook conference, he said this:

I was in Miami a few weeks ago, and on a sunny day, fish from the ocean were swimming in some of the streets. The melting ice has now raised sea level to the point that quite a few coastal cities are already experiencing this.

Gore was right about one thing. There were fish from the ocean swimming in the streets of Miami. Was the unusual incident the result of rising sea level caused by melting polar ice, as Gore told The New York Times?

Not according to the National Weather Service. As disclosed by RightScoop.com, TV-7 News in Miami reported the following NWS statement:

South Florida has been under a coastal flood advisory since Monday because of high astronomical tides due to the lunar cycle.

In other words, the flooding of Miami’s streets was caused primarily by the moon, not global warming. According to NWS meteorologist Brad Diehl, the temporary flooding gradually receded when the moon entered its waning gibbous phase. And, Diehl said, it wasn’t just the moon that caused flooding—easterly winds pushing water ashore and a slower Gulfstream also contributed.

An attempt to frighten low information voters to think that the flooding in Miami was proof that the much-ballyhooed “tipping point” was at hand, Gore’s dissembling claim was trumpeted as gospel truth throughout the complicit western media.

“Less than 10 years remain blah, blah, blah.”

In a May 24, 2006 appearance on NBC’s Today show, Gore told host Katie Couric that the World Trade Center Memorial would soon be under water. A decade and a half later, and even though its subterranean lower level was flooded in October 2012 by the transient weather event know as Hurricane Sandy, the Memorial is nowhere near being “under water.”

2006 was also the year that Gore terrified the world’s children by declaring a “point of no return” and issuing a doomsday warning that “less than ten years remain to save Earth.” That ten-year window of doom closed five years ago and Earth is still here, no closer to its demise than in the early 1980s, when human-caused global warming hysteria first reared its ugly head.

Not a single one of Gore’s cataclysmic predictions has come even close to happening. Without assistance from a totally corrupt western media, the global warming hoax would have been blown out of the water decades ago.

Yet, Gore and other high profile climate frauds continue to furiously beat the drums of global warming alarmism. Why do they persist? Because they hope that relentlessly repeating the same lie over and over and over again—a voting majority of useful idiots will believe it.

Biden’s Radical 30 X 30 Plan Will Ensure That This Land Will No Longer Be Your Land

May 17, 2021/in Economy, Environment, Liberty, News, Politics /by Bonner Cohen

Moving rapidly to transition the United States away from fossil fuels in the name of combatting climate change, the Biden administration is employing a mix of executive authority and legislative action to force the transformation.

While much attention is focused on which climate-related provisions ultimately make it into the administration’s massive infrastructure bill, a little-noticed White House initiative launched a few days after the Biden Inauguration seeks to restrict the use of lands and waters—both public and private—to activities that serve the administration’s green objectives.

The “30 x 30 Plan” is contained in Executive Order (EO) 14008, “Tackle the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, Create Jobs, and Restore Scientific Integrity Across the Federal Government,” which was issued on Jan. 27. Section 216 of the EO calls on the United States to “achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.”

In a Department of Interior fact sheet, the administration says “only 12 percent of lands are permanently protected,” adding that the same holds true for 23 percent of the nation’s waters. Exactly how these shares are to be expanded to 30 percent remains a mystery, because the White House has provided scant details.

The EO instructed a slew of federal agencies to develop implementation strategies within 90 days, but when their 22-page report, “America the Beautiful,” was released on May 6, it was largely limited to generalities about restoring biodiversity and tackling climate change.

Some of the language in the Biden plan appears to be taken from a 2019 report by the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP). CAP’s report, “How Much Nature Should America Keep?,” outlines how the United States can “thoughtfully, equitably, and justly protect 30 percent of its land and water.” According to CAP (and now the Biden administration), 12 percent of the land is “currently protected in its natural state,” which includes wilderness areas, National Parks, wildlife refuges, and private land conservation easements.

With the federal government, mostly through the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, owning about 27 percent of the nation’s land, this leaves a lot of federal land “unprotected,” not to mention the remaining over 70 percent of land in private ownership or managed by state, local, and Tribal governments.

A Radical Vision

The origins of the 30 x 30 plan can be traced to the creation of the Wildlands Project in 1991. Dave Foreman, formerly with the Wilderness Society and founder of EarthFirst!, guided the project’s fortunes in its early years, together with conservation biologists Michael Soule and Reed Noss. The Wildlands Project aimed to return 50 percent of the continental United States to a “natural” state.

Rooted in a school of thought known as Deep Ecology, which rejects the idea that some living things have greater value than others, the Wildlands Project called for establishing a system of core wilderness areas where human activity would be prohibited. Biological “corridors” would link the “core areas,” serving as highways allowing nonhumans to pass from one to another. “Our goal is to create new political realities based on the needs of other species,” Foreman told Science News in 1993.

Since renamed the Wildlands Network, the group has remained faithful to its founding agenda. On its website, the Wildlands Network says it seeks to “reconnect, restore, and rewild North America so that life—in all its diversity—can thrive.” As an example of the kind of rewilding it would like to see, the Wildlands Network touts a recent report identifying a large swath of potential habitat for jaguar in the central mountains of Arizona and New Mexico.

What began three decades ago as musings on the outermost fringes of the environmental movement, now serves as a template for federal climate policies contained in a White House executive order. And true to Foreman’s Wildlands vision, Biden’s 30 x 30 would “create new political realities.”

This has not escaped the attention of congressional representatives from districts and governors of states that would bear the brunt of what they fear is a massive federal land grab in the making.

In a March 16 letter to Biden, 64 members of the House Western Caucus expressed their concerns with the initiative. They pointed out that the federal government already manages 640 million acres of land (one million square miles), 90 percent of which is west of the Mississippi River.

“Western states will be disproportionately impacted by policies set in place to achieve the 30 by 30 goal, which we fear will impact revenues-derived and jobs that depend on multiple-use public lands,” they wrote.

“Our lands and our waters must remain open to activities that support our rural economies and help us achieve our agriculture, timber, recreation, energy, and mineral needs,” the lawmakers added.

Lest anyone have any doubts about the land-grabbing character of what the White House is undertaking, on Feb. 11, Scott de la Vega, Biden’s then-acting secretary of the interior, revoked a Trump-era order requiring state and local governments to have a voice in federal land acquisitions within their jurisdictions.

With the consent of state and local officials eliminated, Washington bureaucrats, using money from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, can add to the already enormous federal estate.

Constitutional or Statutory Authority

Alarmed by what they fear is Washington’s interference in state land-use decisions, governors from 15 states stretching from Alabama to Alaska have signed a letter of protest to the White House.

“[We] are not aware of any constitutional or statutory authority for the President, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or any other federal agency to set aside and permanently preserve 30 percent of all land and water in the United States,” they wrote. “Nowhere in the laws of our nation is the authority delegated by Congress to the President or executive branch agencies to unilaterally change the policies governing land use in America.”

“Obtaining the 30 percent goal would require your Administration to condemn or otherwise severely limit the current productive uses of such lands, infringing on the private property rights of our citizens and significantly harming our economies,” they added.

Elsewhere in the executive order, the White House makes it clear that oil and gas development on federal land will be severely restricted. But, as the governors’ letter points out, private lands containing farms, ranches, orchards, and out-of-favor natural resources, are also in the crosshairs, albeit in ways Biden officials have yet to lay out.

Of further concern are the words “at least” in the EO’s goal of “conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” The goalposts can always be moved, and there is nothing to keep the next goal from being 50 by 50.

“As a Wyomingite, I watched with horror the ‘War on the West’ by Carter, Clinton, and Obama, but Biden is outdoing them all with his plans that will destroy the ability of Wyoming, the other 11 western states, and Alaska to survive economically,” says William Perry Pendley, who ran the Bureau of Land Management for President Trump. “But because Biden cannot reach his goal without private property elsewhere, we are all westerners now.”

*****

This article was published on May 8, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

Climate Science Is ‘Unsettled’, Says Obama Science Director

May 15, 2021/in Economy, Environment, Liberty, News, Politics /by H. Sterling Burnett

As I write, in just over 12 hours since its official launch on May 4, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by physicist Steven E. Koonin, Ph.D., is number 15 on Amazon’s list of top-selling nonfiction books, the top-selling book on Amazon Kindle in Weather and Climatology, and the second-bestselling book in 21st Century World History. By the time this review reaches readers, Unsettled might well be the bestselling book in all three subcategories, crack the top 10 in the nonfiction category, and be among the top 100 in sales across all categories.

Of the multiple books and documentaries poking holes in the apocalyptic climate alarm narrative released in the past year, Unsettled may be the most critical of all, because of who its author is.

Koonin was involved in the development of the early computer models used in science and wrote one of the first books describing how computer models were developed, how they function, and their strengths and limits when used in science. The book is still widely used in college classrooms today. Koonin has written more than 200 academic papers and articles, which have been cited more than 14,000 times, according to Google Scholar.

Koonin’s research and writings on climate science and energy led former President Barack Obama to appoint him Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. Koonin’s portfolio included the government’s climate research program, and Koonin was the lead author of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Strategic Plan (2011).

Koonin is the ultimate climate insider. Climate hypers cannot plausibly portray him as fringe scientist working outside the mainstream or legitimately label him a “climate denier.”

Koonin’s research indicates the climate is changing and humans have influenced some of that change. Almost everything else people have been led to believe about climate change is unsettled, reports Koonin.

The author begins by describing what he refers to as “The Science”—you know, the thing everyone is supposed to be following:

‘The Science,’ we’re told, is settled. How many times have you heard it?

Humans have already broken the earth’s climate. Temperatures are rising, sea level is surging, ice is disappearing, and heat waves, storms, droughts, floods, and wildfires are an ever-worsening scourge on the world. Greenhouse gas emissions are causing all of this. And unless they’re eliminated promptly by radical changes to society and its energy systems, “The Science” says Earth is doomed. [Emphasis in original.]

Well . . . not quite. Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that—to paraphrase the classic movie The Princess Bride: “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”

Unsettled is presented in two parts: “The Science” and “The Response.”

“The Science” comprises eleven chapters. The first two discuss what we know about how the climate works (hint: its less than you’ve been led to believe), and the extent to which humans are contributing to climate change (also less than you might think). The third chapter discusses how climate models have been developed and the ways in which their results are “muddled,” in Koonin’s words, instead of being definitive and trustworthy. Koonin shows models often contradict one another and fail to match observed changes in temperature and climate. This chapter also begins the book’s examination of how various interested parties suppress and misrepresent good climate research in order to persuade the public we face a climate crisis. This latter point is a running theme Koonin highlights by citing specific examples throughout the book.

Chapters Five through Nine examine various negative effects purportedly being caused or exacerbated by human-caused climate change. This set of chapters is fairly summed up by the title of Chapter Nine: “Apocalypses That Ain’t.” Among the findings Koonin discloses are:

The late[st] generation of models is actually more uncertain than the earlier one[s].
Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900 and the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.
Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.
Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.
The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.

Regular readers of Climate Change Weekly are likely aware of these facts already, but they will be real eye-openers for most readers of Koonin’s book.

The last two chapters of section one examine who “broke” climate science, and how and why, and then discuss how the science, along with how it is represented and reported, can be improved.

For me personally, these chapters are in many ways the most disturbing and interesting of the book, because they detail the ways by which the scientific enterprise itself is being perverted, to the detriment of both science and political decision making.

Science is a process, a method of discovering new truths and explaining currently unexplained or poorly understood phenomena. As Koonin’s book shows in detail, many of those involved in climate research and reporting have abandoned science—the process of discovering data and evidence and assembling facts—for “The Science,” a massive effort to persuade people to believe something that is not true, for normative or political reasons.

Koonin’s suggestion that the federal government institute a “Red Team/Blue Team” exercise to examine and discuss the weak spots in various government climate reports before they are published has been met with hostility by many politically connected scientists and powerful government leaders.

Prominent Democrat senators such as Edward Markey (MA), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Cory Booker (NJ), Debbie Stabenow (MI), Amy Klobuchar (MN), and Diane Feinstein (CA) have supported legislation to outlaw scientific debate about what is known and unknown about climate change by “prohibit[ing] the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, and for other purposes.”

You read that right. Politicians who regularly demand people “follow the science” on climate change have tried to ban the use of the scientific method to discover what climate science tells us.

Of this, Koonin writes,

I confess to being shocked. … [E]nshrining a certain scientific viewpoint as an inviolable consensus is hardly the role of government (at least in a democracy). And as a student of history, I found the bill uncomfortably reminiscent of a 1546 decree by the Council of Trent that attempted to suppress challenges to Church doctrine.

In section two of Unsettled, “The Response,” Koonin explores why political diktats to curtail fossil fuel use sharply are likely to fail and produce outcomes as bad as or worse than the harms they are meant to prevent. Koonin suggests the wisest response to climate change, the response most likely to mitigate any harms while generating beneficial outcomes, is something societies have historically embraced in response to changing climate and sociopolitical conditions: flexible adaptation.

Koonin definitively shows that much more is unsettled than is settled in climate science, economics, and policy. Koonin’s book deserves the praise it is receiving, and it merits a wide readership. If it gets the audience it deserves, there will be one more thing unsettled: the narrative that we face a climate crisis so certain and so dire that only a radical government-controlled reshaping of the economy, people’s personal lives, and consumption patterns can solve it.

*****

This article was published on May 4, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the Heartland Institute.

CFACT IN ACTION: Land Grabs, Solar Deserts, Turbines Cluttering the Coast

May 12, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment /by Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

We have unfortunately entered a period of destructive public policy.

Joe Biden may have campaigned as a moderate, but the people around him did not get the message. Dangerously counter-productive left-wing ideology are the order of the day.

CFACT spoke out on three looming Biden disasters last week.

CFACT’s Bonner Cohen testified before the Commissioners of Klickitat County, Washington on plans to turn bucolic areas of Washington State into solar deserts blacked out by industrial-scale solar arrays. This ill-conceived plan will rake in huge subsidies for renewable corporate interests while raising the price of electricity for ordinary ratepayers.

Noted Cohen in CFACT’s official response to the plans:

The proposed Lund Hill project, with its 1.8 million large solar panels on 6,000 acres of prime farmland, all surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence, is such a terrible idea. That this monstrosity would be erected in the name of “clean energy” is simply absurd.

Solar arrays are an intermittent, land-intensive source of power that benefits Wall Street investors, out-of-state utilities, and Chinese suppliers to the detriment of ordinary working people.

Additionally,

The Epoch Times published a detailed warning from Cohen about the Biden Administration’s disastrous “30×30” policy, which aims to create 30 gigawatts of so-called “renewable” energy capacity by 2030:

The “30 x 30 Plan” is contained in Executive Order (EO) 14008, “Tackle the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, Create Jobs, and Restore Scientific Integrity Across the Federal Government,” which was issued on Jan. 27. Section 216 of the EO calls on the United States to “achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030…” What began three decades ago as musings on the outermost fringes of the environmental movement, now serves as a template for federal climate policies contained in a White House executive order.

I chimed in as well.

Real Clear Energy published my article which warns of the mistake the Biden Administration is pushing us into with its plans to surround the coasts of the United States with thousands of sky-scraping wind turbines. These 600 foot tall structures would turn unspoiled natural coastal areas into generating facilities that only function when the wind is right, and would supply only a small fraction of our energy needs even if they worked 24 hours a day! Foolishness.

The Biden Administration is prepared to ruin precious natural areas with devastating consequences for the environment with no hope of meaningfully altering the climate or meeting our energy needs.

Too often left wing policies are only repealed after they have been put in place and their harmful consequences make themselves obvious. Our environment is too precious to wait for Biden’s mistakes to reveal themselves.

People need to know, and they need to know now.

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

PODCAST: Why “Green Energy” Isn’t “Clean Energy”

May 12, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment /by Conservative Commandos Radio Show

GUESTS AND TOPICS:

TIM BRYCE

Tim Bryce is a freelance writer residing in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. An avid writer and speaker discussing everything from business and management, to politics and morality, to systems and technology in our ever changing world. In addition to his columns and blog entitled “The Bryce is Right’ which is read by thousands of people worldwide. Tim has also been published in a wide range of publication from the WASHINGTON TIMES to the HUFFINGTON POST.. Tim’s new book, “ “Before You Vote: Know How Your Government Works”, What American youth should know about government”

TOPIC: WHO ARE THE TRUE VICTIMS?

E. CALVIN BEISNER, PH.D.

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, www.CornwallAlliance.org, author of a dozen books and over a thousand articles, former associate professor of historical theology and social ethics at Knox Theological Seminary and of interdisciplinary studies at Covenant College.

TOPIC: Why “Green Energy” Isn’t “Clean Energy”!

We Should Take Them At Their Words

May 9, 2021/in Culture Wars, Economy, Environment, Liberty, News, Politics /by Joe Bastardi

I suppose I should be grateful for people like John Kerry and Gina McCarthy because their very words back up the premise of my book, The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate War. For their words reveal this is not about climate, but about using climate as a means to an end, the end being the transformation of the very system that enabled our country to become the envy of the world.

Its A Phony War when it comes to Climate, but it is not on a system designed for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

First of all, what is baffling to me is the media. In the 70s, the media was “trust nothing, question everything”. Now it’s the opposite. This makes little sense to me, since if everyone says the same thing, eventually only one source will be left. Look at what has happened since Trump left office. Ratings have fallen. Who are they supposed to attack? (although there are signs they will eat their own, inevitable when it becomes apparent its last outlet standing. Here is a hint, the media will be government-controlled if not directly, then indirectly. If you want to mimic Marxism, you will wind up there). The few of us left speaking up are insignificant and are dismissed in general.

When I watched Gina McCarthy when she was EPA director testify in front of the Senate, I thought she had by mistake, let the cat out of the bag. I was not as alarmed as others when she did not know how much co2 was in the air ( though, it does always help to know where you are if you wish to get where you are going.. after all, what if you don’t have to go anywhere in the first place?) To put this in perspective you have to read this:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1117557/pg1

The video is a must-see.

I think the highlight quote, among a slew of them that could be a greatest hits, was this:

“The value of this rule is not measured [by its climate impact]. It is measured by showing strong domestic action…”
-US House Science Committee
-July 9, 2015

But please take your pick when you read them all.

IOW. It is not about climate

Now, this was back under the Obama administration. When I saw all this, read all this, I said okay that’s it, the cats out of the bag. This is all a big US economic suicide pact to set an example for the rest of the world. How does anyone that loves our country, even with its faults, ( note: we never said we are a perfect union, but we would try to form a more perfect union) not pick up on this? It is evidence this is not about science and climate change IN HER OWN WORDS.

Here we are and after 4 years of “Trump-bashing” ( and anyone that agreed with him) for putting a pause on that agenda, and it’s back with a vengeance. And this time John Kerry is taking the lead.

This quote absolutely blew me away from the ignorance of what such a result would mean for life on the planet.

‘Even if we get to net zero, we still need to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,’ Kerry said.

Let’s assume he misspoke. Why did he not walk it back? Why did no one listening to him question him on this inconvenient truth?

At 150 ppm million vegetation dies. ( it doesn’t do so well at higher levels until past 250 ppm and that is why co2 Is pumped into greenhouses, elevating their levels up to 1500 ppm. And no, its not the co2 that makes a greenhouse warm). Given the planet is now greener than ever in the satellite era, it means that whether you want to link the greening to the warming or co2, we are getting a Green New Deal, and that deal is better growing conditions. That feeds more people. At last look, word hunger and poverty was a heck of a lot more pressing problem than “climate change” which we are finding out this is not really about anyway. Ironic isn’t it, he advocates for taking away what is actually greening the planet.

We should take them at their words

The snapshot above from a video found at this link speaks volumes.

http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/climate.html#:~:text=The%20amount%20of%20CO2%20in,of%20150%20ppm%20to%20survive.

So Kerry is advocating for getting Co2 out of the atmosphere, and no one says boo?

Or how about this:

‘The younger generation is today appropriately pretty upset at the adults, the alleged adults, who are not getting their act together,’ Kerry said.

Is he kidding? Life has never been better on planet earth. Kids are upset? About what, having the most comfortable conditions in the history of man in this nation because of the system they want to be torn down? Ironic isn’t it? We saw this age group in the 1980s and 1990s, lead to the downfall of the very system that age group in this country is advocating for, essentially communism, which resulted in a “utopia” that has killed all totaled a hundred million people. Perhaps these people should talk to people from the eastern bloc countries that made it to the U.S. and see what they think about what they are seeing in our country. But it’s about feelings over facts.

And since those kids have been indoctrinated into believing they are owed something, real or not, they are fair game to accept without questioning, statements like Kerry’s.

But the magnitude of the ignorance and arrogance is hard to believe. He apparently does not understand what co2 means to life on the planet. Does not understand that it makes plants more resistant to the very horrors he keeps trying to use to scare people into falling for with this agenda. As far as arrogance, it is that capitalistic way of life that made it possible for him to be who he is. Have the yacht he had. ( sold in 2017).

Fly around in private planes. How about that 12 million dollar house? https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2017/03/09/john-kerry-buys-historic-marthas-vineyard-property

One may say, well it is because of his wife. Fine, but I didn’t see many Heinz ketchup empires in the old Soviet Union.

It is one thing after another. And I do not begrudge him his success. I do call into question a man who has these things, then seeks to destroy the system that made it possible for him, so others cannot attain it. In fact, it’s the same across the board with a lot of the non-science-based spokespeople. They simply use this as an agenda, apparently unaware that what they seek to destroy what actually made it possible for them to be who they are. Can you imagine today’s up and coming Bruce Springsteen trying to write about cars and the freedom to get in that car and drive wherever you want? I don’t think Mary in Thunder Road would want to climb into the smart Car Bruce pulled up in. (In fact it wouldn’t be Thunder Road since Thunderstorms in the climate change world are getting worse and must be canceled)

( I guess that means I will never get the guest DJ Spot on E Street radio I have asked to have)

Finally, this from CFACT’S Marc Morano

Which is my point precisely in writing my book. It’s a phony war. Not a lot of people really care. But that also enables them to run roughshod over it, because not a lot of people really cared. I tried to point that out to some of the leadership last year, that even though its only a small % that agree with the climate change missive, it is enough to tip an election for one and for two, it has always been a small group of committed zealots that have been able to pull off changes. And say what you want, they are committed and are zealots. So it is facts be dammed full speed ahead.

Saving the planet is way above my pay grade. And I have stated numerous times that it takes virtuous and vigilant people to maintain the kind of freedoms we have. So there is nothing I can do to stop this and that is not my aim in pointing it out. It is to simply speak as a free person in a forum I am grateful for, to the issue being raised here. So I am grateful. But in the meantime, let’s take them at their word. For far too long people have been just thinking this less than what it is. But let’s call it what it is. A phony war on climate for a purpose that the words of leaders like John Kerry and Gina McCarthy make perfectly clear.

We Should Take Them At Their Words

*****

This article was published on April 26, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.

Media Balance Newsletter – Topics from Covid to Climate to Energy

May 3, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment /by John Droz, Jr.

Welcome to the latest issue of our Media Balance Newsletter, which covers a wide range of nation interest topics: from COVID to Climate.

(For all 2020 Newsletters, go here. For all 2021 Newsletters, go here.)

(FYI, here is the list of our popular 2020 Election-Related Reports.

COVID-19: Therapy

Ivermectin is effective for COVID-19 when used early: analysis of 52 studies

14 Months Later: A Pathway Forward

New free health book: Rapid Virus Recovery

COVID-19: Vaccines

Vaccine Makers Destroy COVID Vaccine Safety Studies

Pfizer’s CEO Hasn’t Gotten His Vaccine Yet

Do Vaccines Make Us Healthier?

Microbiologist Says Vaccines May Decimate World’s Population

Study: Pfizer’s COVID Vaccine May Trigger Virus That Causes Shingles

Study: COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease

COVID-19: Models & Data

Visualizing the History of Pandemics

Are Covid Fatalities Comparable with the 1918 Spanish Flu?

Locked-Down States Are Where COVID-19 Is Growing Most

Short video: Derek Knauss does not know how to test for COVID

COVID-19: Masks

CDC is not aware of any trials showing that masks are effective against COVID-19

AZ School Board Flees, Parents Elect New Board, Vote To End Mask Mandate

COVID-19: Misc

Short video: Leigh Dundas speech – (Health and Freedom 2021)

Fauci Has Chalked Up 300+ Media Appearances Over Past Year

Adults have failed children in foisting harmful Covid-19 restrictions on them

The Anti-Lockdown Movement Is Large and Growing

Greed Energy Economics

Down on the windfarm, something stinks

NC Legislators introduce a bill to protect electricity consumers

After the Texas Blackouts, Follow the $66 Billion of Wind and Solar Money

Renewable Energy Health and Ecosystem Consequences

Feds Approve “Environmental Disaster” off our Coast for Earth Day

Industrial Wind Health Issues Aren’t Blowing Away Quickly

NY Fast-Track Renewables Regulation Paves Way For High-Risk Wind Project

The Dawn Of The E-Vehicle Battery Eco-Disaster

Wind Energy: Offshore

Hawaii NIMBY fight reveals Biden offshore wind challenge

NY Senate bill S6314: moratorium on Great Lakes offshore wind

Wind Power Giant’s Profit Hit by Rocks on the Seabed

Wind Energy: Other

Short video: How many local people does a wind project hire?

New York’s Wind Power Plans Make No Sense

Rural America is fighting back against wind energy projects

Gone With the Wind Power

CA electric power chief says serious problems lie ahead

Solar

China’s solar dominance presents Biden with an ugly dilemma

Know Your Supplier: Why We Should Not Buy Cheap Chinese Solar Panels

Solar panels manufactured by firms linked to Chinese slave labor

Nuclear Energy

Cuomo: A Dark Prince of Deception or Lost in A Forest of Falsehoods?

Democrats Must Stop Sacrificing Good American Nuclear Jobs For Cheap Chinese Solar Panels

Fossil Fuel Energy

US coal production set to rise, in blow to Biden’s climate goals

Climate bill would tax carbon in New York

Peaking Power Plants and the Truth About Truthout

Junk Science Is the Beating Heart That Never Stops

Biden To Cancel Oil And Gas Lease Sales From Public Lands

Misc Energy

A Forced March to Electrification for New York?

Details about what the House GOP is discussing on energy and climate

Biden’s ‘Green New Deal’: Glitter, nonsense, and deception

Social cost of ‘green’: A loss of fast cars and freedom

Manmade Global Warming: Some Deceptions

The Net-Zero Shell Game and Joe Biden’s Deceptions

US Intelligence agencies challenge Biden’s climate alarmism

China says climate onus on US in John Kerry talks

Ever deeper and deeper into Climate Fantasy

Casualties on the road to Net Zero Emissions

There is no climate emergency

Pompeo: ‘Enormous Mistake’ to Think Climate Change Is Main US Threat

Dr Ian Plimer: ’We are being misled’ on the climate crisis

Climate debate heats up as research shows disparity among models

Revealed: Al Gore’s real climate catastrophe

Climate, CO2 Optimism

Short video: Joe Biden is now a threat to the West

Manmade Global Warming: Misc

The Biden Climate Summit — speeding up to hit the wall harder

The futility of Biden’s climate summit

Kerry: US & China Going to Zero Emissions Will Not Solve Climate Crisis (!)

China’s Strange Endorsement of ‘Net Zero’

The Obamas tackle climate change and wealth inequality

House Republicans held secret climate summit in Utah

Do We Know Earth’s Global Temperature?

Is free choice a thing of the past?

Manmade Global Warming: The Story & The Reality

MI6 to Spy on Nations to Ensure Compliance with Climate Pledges

US Elections:

Restoring Confidence in American Elections

The Save Democracy Act, H.R. 322

Dershowitz Announces $1.6 Billion Lawsuit Against Dominion

The Courts and the Election of 2020

The 2020 Election Results Show that Social Conservatives Won Big

Gunfight for Election Integrity

Docs: state officials colluded with Big Tech to censor Americans’ election posts

Conservative Scholar Dr. John Eastman To Sue Over Freedom of Speech

US Elections, State Issues:

Florida rewrites state’s election laws: ‘Guardrails’ against fraud

Montana Governor Approves Ending Same-Day Voter Registration

Recount of 2020 Votes in Arizona Proceeds After Delay

New Judge in AZ Audit Worked for Firm that Merged with Perkins Coie

AZ Officials Increase the Number of Audit Tables from 20 to 46 Overnight

NC’s First Black Lt. Gov. Triggers Democrats During Hearing on Election Laws

US Elections, Our Latest Report:

U.S. Elections Integrity: Recommendations Report

Sidney Powell Shares US Election Integrity Report!

Election Integrity: The Foundation of Our Freedoms

US Election Integrity Group Releases Report w Excellent Recommendations

Election Integrity: Recommendations Report

How to Improve Election Integrity

U.S. Elections Integrity: Recommendations Report

Sidney Powell Shares US Election Integrity Report!

New Election Integrity Report Offers US Voting System Recommendations

US Politics and Socialism

Costco – Case Study In How To Lose A Customer

Who funds the riotous American Left & why?

Parler Bends the Knee to Big Tech

Critical Race Theory Is About to Face Its Day(s) in Court

Questions to Determine Whether an Associate is a Liberal or a Leftist

China’s social credit program creeps into Canada

Other US Politics and Related

Video: Sen Tim Scott’s Rebuttal to President Biden’s Speech

These Ten Key 2022 Midterm Election Issues Favor the GOP

Red Pills Are Falling Down All Over the Golden State

What’s Energy?

California recall backers have enough valid signatures for election

Social cost of ‘green’: A loss of fast cars and freedom

Left-of-century: Biden’s first 100 days

Short video: Biden’s First 100 Days = 100 Days of American Weakness

Video: LeBron James Deleted Tweet tells you all you need to know!

Religion Related

Atheists Joyfully Celebrate ‘Meaningless Rock Hurtling Through Space’ Day

The Big Sky’s the Limit on Freedom

Education Related

Perpetual Scandal-Mongering as a Political Tool

The Liberal Arts: What We Don’t Know

Biden Set to Push Critical Race Theory on U.S. Schools

New Study Analyzes the High Cost of College

New Book: Really Good Schools

Science and Misc Matters

Playing Fast and Loose with Numbers

Bring Back DDT, and Science With It!

Unfortunately, trains will be a hard sell in the U.S.

Monopoly: An overview of the Great Reset – Follow the Money

Net Zero Plastic Applies Carbon-Offset Model to Plastic Waste Reduction

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VIDEO: Grilling Down on the Left’s “Beef” with Cattle Ranchers

April 30, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Energy, Environment /by Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

America’s farmers and ranchers are under attack.

While they tirelessly work to provide food for millions, the Green Left has demonized them as so-called “Destroyers of the Earth.” The EPA, DOI, and UN repeatedly identify meat producers as devourers of wildlife habitat in an attempt to punish them through regulation. And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has even raised alarm over excessive cattle farts she believes are contributing to a climate apocalypse.

Yet the narrative that the Left is trying to spin is not the real story. In actuality, cattle ranchers and farmers play an important role in both protecting the environment and feeding the world.

CFACT’s Gabriella Hoffman showcases this real story behind cattle ranching and farming in her latest episode of the Conservation Nation series, titled “Cows Keep Florida Green.”

You can watch it in full, here.

Hoffman interviews ranchers from the Sunshine State who explain that cows actually help diverse number of species thrive, by creating paths through dense foliage that critters would otherwise stay away from.

Additionally, the ranchers have an economic incentive to protect the lands and waters that are helping to serve their livelihoods. If the ranchers were not there managing the land, the State would be forced to come in and manage the property at much higher expense and with far less benefit to both the environment and humanity.

It’s time we start celebrating our farmers and ranchers for both feeding the world and helping our environment.

So, the next time you chow down on a juicy steak or burger, remember, there’s a rancher out there working hard who deserves our thanks, not our condemnation!

Check out CFACT’s latest video … and share with a friend!

The Pandemic Changes They Are Denying

April 30, 2021/in Culture Wars, Environment, Healthcare, Liberty, Politics /by Bruce Bialosky

While preparing for my vacation I went to the shelves where the unread books are kept. I dug through the books to pick out the ones that would be best suited for the trip. I came across the book Pale Rider by Laura Spinney which is about the Spanish Flu of 1918. I thought that this would be an excellent time to read this one as I could probably learn something about what we have been going through the last year. It took just 25 pages to become enlightened.

If you listen to our friends, the Democrats, they would have you believe that our current pandemic changed everything, and we should simply adapt to a “new normal” reality. That is their overarching argument for their two humongous spending bills and policy proposals – specifically HR1 which wants to nationalize our election laws – along with chucking the Senate filibuster. The other point they make is we should follow the science as Dr. Fauci makes his continued undefined explanations for further restrictions and more mask-wearing.

Spinney uses the beginning of her book to recount the history of pandemics and influenzas. The story includes historical medical figures like Hippocrates and Galen. Running through the development of the spread of diseases that caused epidemics, it became crystal clear which factors expose human populations to the spread of infection.

The best way for epidemics to spread and become a pandemic such as the one we are currently experiencing is to have people packed into tight quarters. That is a large part of the reason New York City was such a COVID disaster a year ago – it has a lot of people living in very vertical spaces. The public policies you do not want to have are actively seeking more people and then encouraging them to live close together.

Yet, those are the policies that Democrats have had for years. Every indication is they have not spent a second thinking about potentially reorienting their policies to mitigate the chances of another pandemic.

Ever since the 1965 Immigration Act, the United States has had an explosion in population largely from immigrants. Our population swelled from 193 million to 324 million in fifty years from 1965 with about half of that growth coming from immigration. We will soon get an official count from the Census of how many people are living here. That will not include a substantial number of people living here illegally.

The first thing President Biden did when confronted with a surge of people at our Southern border (driven by his loose rhetoric) is eliminate all those policies put in place to halt the flow of the surge. This is the man who while campaigning told an audience we could easily handle another couple million people. That was then and this is now; does that make sense anymore? Should we be reevaluating our immigration policy and follow the science of spreading our population and limiting it to confront the chance of another pandemic?

If Democrats’ intent was not clear before, look at the refugee policy situation. Mr. Biden announces he plans to keep with Trump’s 15,000 refugee policy. His party erupts causing him to immediately back down and increase the limit.

This is not a statement against immigrants. This is just a statement of facts about how pandemics spread, and they spread most easily through large populations living in close quarters. Packing more people into our country needs a much closer look.

The other part of their plans is that they have created policies throughout the country to combat what they refer to as “urban sprawl.” They think this harms the environment and they want people living in tighter quarters.

In Los Angeles, officials want to have ground-floor retail on many commercial streets with residential floors above. Otherwise, everyone living above a Starbucks or nail salon. They are also creating policies in California to have zoning that has high-rise residential near subway stops, particularly around the new Los Angeles subway. That way everyone would stay in their neighborhood with no need for cars.

Biden’s infrastructure bill would fund billions for urban mass transit. They want to cram more people into tight spaces to have them take mass transit and abandon their vehicles. They want to turn other cities into mini–Manhattans and have them vertically stack people on top of each other.

Other than the fact that it is a good bet Americans are not going to go for these policies after what we have endured the last year, one would think it is a good time to take a second and third look at these urban planning policies.

Thinning and spreading the population is the best way to counter another pandemic. Americans have figured this out for themselves. The question is, when will the Democrats wake up to the new reality and adjust their plans before letting millions more into our country and wasting money on urban plans and mass transit no one will use?

*****

This article was published on April 24, 2021 at Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

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