RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/09/so-hows-that-historic-investment-in-clean-energy-paying-off/

Anyone following the news might be confused by recent talk of offshore wind projects in trouble, automakers pulling back on EV production, and now multi-billion-dollar bailouts for the green-energy industry. How could that be, since President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats rammed through $370 billion in “clean” energy subsidies a little more than a year ago?

When Biden signed the criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” in August 2022, he boasted that it was “the most aggressive action ever — ever, ever, ever — in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening our economic — our energy security.”

So-called green-energy companies, not surprisingly, were ecstatic.

“Americans can now rest assured that our leaders have acted to lower costs, strengthen American energy independence, and create hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs, all while combatting the damaging impacts of climate change,” George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy, a solar developer, said at the time.

Has anyone checked up on those promises recently? Well, let’s see:

Lower costs? Electricity prices are up 3% since Biden signed that bill into law, and up 24% since he took office. Overall energy prices are unchanged compared with August 2022 and are up 44% since January 2021.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/climate-activists-attack-400-year-old-painting-with-hammers/

Climate activists attacked a 400-year-old painting in a famous London art museum with hammers on Monday, breaking the glass barrier protecting the painting.

The vandals targeted the painting Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez, which hangs in the London National Gallery. Painted in 1651, the work depicts the love goddess Venus lounging and peering into a mirror held by her son Cupid, the god of desire.

“Women did not get the vote by voting,” a female protester can be heard shouting in a video of the incident posted to social media. “It is time for deeds and not words. It is time to just stop oil.”

“Politics is failing us,” a male protester adds. “Politics failed we in 1914. If millions will die due to new oil and gas licenses, BILLIONS! If we love history, if we love art, and if we love our families, we must just stop oil.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/02/say-they-want-a-revolution/

In his book “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution,” David Horowitz, a New Left movement founder in the 1960s, refers to a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society who “once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Now apply that to the tussle over man’s impact on the climate and things become much clearer.

In the minds of the climate alarmists, the revolution looks like tearing down “the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.” Their objective is to force “major structural changes in economic growth and development,” and the “fight” against climate change “is just a part of it.”

That great revolutionary of the U.S. House, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dreamed up a way to use the global warming scare through the Green New Deal, which was less of an environmental bill than a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.” In other words, a back door for more Marxist revolutionaries to enter.

It doesn’t matter that free-market capitalism is the only economic system in recorded history that has allowed the masses to escape from grinding poverty. All that matters to revolutionaries is the revolution.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/10/26/analysis-reduction-in-us-oil-output-under-biden-from-the-trump-trend-has-cost-the-u-s-roughly-500-million-a-day/

We’ve been warning regularly on these pages that the Biden war on American fossil fuels is not just an economic calamity, but a national security threat as well. We have known for fifty years that terrorist organizations like Hamas are primarily financed with petro-dollars.

Just as Biden has aided and abetted the Russian war machine in Ukraine, he has enriched Middle East oil-producing nations like Iran as well.

Our latest CTUP analysis finds that the reduction in US oil output under Biden from the Trump trend has cost the U.S. roughly $500 million a day. Much of that money has been transferred week after week from American producers to nations hostile to the U.S. and Israel.

Missing Under Biden:

This has helped fund the very missiles being fired on Israel.

Biden’s “green” energy policy is weakening America and strengthening our enemies making the world a much more dangerous place.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/27/has-ev-boom-jumped-the-shark/

Many people have climbed aboard the electric-vehicle bandwagon, lured by promises of pristine air and cheap, easy-to-use electricity that make EVs seem inevitable. But now, after years of spending billions on subsidies and shaming people into buying into our inevitable all-electric future, some are slamming on the brakes — surprisingly, including many of the biggest companies in the industry.

The global companies, recipients of massive subsidies to support fossil-fuel abolition, are backing away from their support.

General Motors, faced with a strike, just abandoned its EV strategy,  while the AutoBlog points out that Mercedes “is finding that customers aren’t as excited about new EVs as it is.”

Elon Musk’s Tesla lost an estimated $28 billion in value after reporting what were called “disastrous third-quarter earnings.” Ford, faced with dramatically slowing sales, just announced it will delay $12 billion in EV investments.

With companies providing far more electric vehicles than consumers want, Toyota’s Chairman Akio Toyoda this week claimed “people are finally seeing (the) reality” of EVs.

There are many reasons for this sudden slump. But a few stick out.

For one, even after all the subsidies, EVs are still pricey, especially at current interest rates, which have nearly doubled from an average of 3.9% at the end of 2021 to around 7.4% today.

Meanwhile, anywhere from a quarter to a third of EV charging stations is out or disabled at any given time. There are an estimated 150,000 gas stations in the U.S., but just 10,000 fast-charging outlets. And even if you find a working charger, it’s expensive: Roadside chargers can be five to 10 times more costly than home chargers.

What happens if you’re in the middle of nowhere and you can’t find a working charger? Sorry, your “car” is no longer a car. It’s now dead metal.

A just-released report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation finds that Americans don’t fully understand the real costs of EVs due to the government’s massive involvement in the market. The numbers are shocking: “The average model year 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners,” the report notes.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/alarm-on-energy/

The Second October War should wake America up to crucial geopolitical realities.

Fifty years ago, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of OPEC initiated an oil embargo against the United States. The boycott was retribution for America’s support of Israel during its brief war against Egypt and Syria.

What was true in 1973 remains true in the wake of Hamas’s brutal terror attack on Israel on October 7: America’s national strength depends on the availability of cheap, abundant, reliable energy.

Our national security, and that of our allies, depends on energy security. Energy is the economy. We forget these realities at our extreme peril.

Fortunately, some things that were true a half-century ago are no longer so. Over the past decade or so, the geopolitics of energy have shifted dramatically in favor of the U.S., due mainly to the shale revolution. Instead of relying on oil imports, the U.S. has become a huge exporter of both oil and natural gas. We are now exporting about four million barrels of crude oil per day and record amounts of natural gas (about 20 billion cubic feet per day).

Even more remarkably, the U.S. is leading the world in energy efficiency and CO2 reductions. According to the latest Statistical Review of World Energy, per-capita energy consumption in the U.S. fell by about 20 percent between 1973 and 2022. In addition, U.S. CO2 emissions have dropped by about 915 million tons since 2000, the biggest reduction of any country on the planet.

But this progress is being threatened by climate-focused NGOs who are relentlessly promoting “net-zero” schemes that will bankrupt our economy and spell disaster for low- and middle-income Americans, as author Ruy Texeira explains in a trenchant essay, “The working class Isn’t Down with the Green Transition.” Indeed, the grassroots opposition of farmers, factory workers, truck drivers, and construction workers in North America, Europe, and Oceania is already leading to a reassessment of alt-energy policies, most notably in the United Kingdom and Germany.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/25/the-latest-on-global-warming-is-there-is-no-global-warming/

A new study out of Norway is exactly what was needed to shut down the climate alarmists. Its findings show that man has not set fire to his home planet.

Right from the top, in the abstract not 10 lines into the study, the authors get to the point.

“Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find,” the researchers say, “that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.”

In other words, our words, the greenhouse effect is so weak that it should be sidelined as an argument.

From there, the bad news only gets worse for priests of the climate religion.

“​​Even if recent recorded temperature variations should turn out to deviate from previous variation patterns in a systematic way it is still a difficult challenge to establish how much of this change is due to increasing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.”

The researchers, from Statistics Norway, the government’s official data agency, also address the apparent “high degree of consensus among many climate researchers that the temperature increase of the last decades is systematic (and partly man-made),” while noting that “is certainly the impression conveyed by the mass media.”

https://freebeacon.com/culture/climate-of-hate-greta-thunberg-joins-pro-hamas-resistance/

Greta Thunberg, the 20-year-old child activist best known for skipping school to protest so-called climate change, dabbled in anti-Semitism on Friday.

• The celebrity truant held a “Stand with Gaza” sign in a photo posted on social media, the initial version of which also included a blue octopus plush toy resembling the anti-Semitic imagery in Nazi propaganda.

• Thunberg deleted the original photo, claiming to be “completely unaware” of the common anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless, her revised post included links to a number of so-called Palestinian activist groups that defended the Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians earlier this month.

What they’re saying: One of the groups Thunberg promoted, the Palestinian Youth Movement, described the mass-murder of Israeli civilians, including children, as “the active decolonization of Palestinian land led by the Palestinian resistance” and repeated the false claim that “over 500 Palestinians were martyred after Israeli forces bombed Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/20/they-call-the-wind-pariah/

How many times have we heard that wind power, coupled with the sun’s energy, is going to save us from our fossil-fuel burning ways? Maybe one day it will. But at no time soon will it happen. And by soon, we mean in most of our lifetimes.

How can we say this? Look around at what’s happening with wind energy:

“California’s Central Coast residents work to stop — or at least slow down — offshore wind.” California believes that by 2045 it can operate its electrical grid without contributions from fossil fuels and nuclear energy. To get there, one-fourth of the power must be generated by offshore wind. This CalMatters report, which summarizes the resistance to offshore wind projects, should set off alarms not just in Sacramento but in other blue state capitals as well as Washington, D.C. (unless Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman gets there first).

“​​Orsted Threatens To Abandon U.S. Offshore Wind Projects.” Here we learn that “the world’s largest offshore wind farm developer is preparing to walk away from U.S. projects unless the Biden administration guarantees more support.” In other words, offshore wind is so uneconomical that unless the taxpayers “pitch in,” it’s not worth the trouble for private companies to stay in the game. Furthermore, “Europe’s ‘green tech’ future has been threatened due to waning investment flows.”

“Electricity from wind isn’t cheap and it never will be.” In this London Telegraph column, science writer Matt Ridley writes that “The latest auction of rights to build offshore wind farms failed to attract any bids, despite offering higher subsidized prices. That alone indicates that wind is not cheap or getting cheaper.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/are-you-sure-a-changing-climate-causes-severe-weather/

If you can’t convince all the people with straight-forward advocacy, then conduct a poll and use the results to convince anyone who will listen. Lately, this tactic would seem to be AP’s preferred mode of operation. Abe Lincoln said it somewhat differently.

This time AP thought better of running out its climate guru Seth Borentein to unveil another of his well-worn stories regarding who’s more at fault for weather-related disasters—mankind or Mother Nature—and assessing the blame for “man-made” climate change.

It should be realized (but generally is not) that AP, Reuters, and certain other MSM outlets have been gifted several million in grants from one or another of the George Soros-connected charitable foundations. The grants are intended to nudge public opinion in the direction of accepting the scientifically (unsupportable) position that man-made climate change is the principal underlying cause of adverse weather events in recent decades.

Detailed re-analyses of weather data going back to 1950 and earlier show that assertion is not true, but the fact does not deter alarmists from spreading their message of doom and gloom.

But if an AP survey is to be given due credence, then the propaganda campaign in the MSM may in fact be doing exactly what its purveyors intend. The MSM invests considerable time and effort to spread alarmist narratives, so that the casual reader should not be surprised to learn that the AP’s interviewees harbored the opinions they expressed.

Most of us tend to have short memories. Very few present-day Americans even recall hearing about the desperate period of the 1930s, when the Great Depression and “Dust Bowl” with its prolonged heat waves and continent-wide drought became routine across the United States.

Today’s weather announcers often do not report true temperature readings but a calculated “heat index” that factors in the effect of humidity and lack of wind, to come up with a subjective temperature referred to as “real-feel.” It is the number most of us will hear or see tonight on TV.

It should also come as no surprise that the AP pollsters were able to get the kind of public responses they quote. AP reporters also took trouble to include some candid musings of a “Republican”, whom they portrayed as poster-child for those abominable “climate deniers.”