RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/18/the-tide-is-turning-against-the-green-elites/

It is the global climate-change conference that no one cares about. The latest United Nations (UN) ‘conference of the parties’, otherwise known as COP29, is currently being hosted in oil-rich, authoritarian Azerbaijan. Not many political heavy-hitters have decided to attend but assorted elites, grifters and media have attended hoping it will bring them more financial manna from heaven.

The late-19th-century US political wire-puller Mark Hanna once quipped: ‘There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ Billions, potentially trillions, have been sunk into green projects enriching the already wealthy and their nonprofits, in what outgoing US treasury secretary Janet Yellen has proclaimed the greatest business opportunity of the 21st century.

Hopefully, Yellen didn’t put all her financial eggs in the green basket. The election of Donald Trump as US president only adds to the current woes of the climate industry. The wind-energy sector is increasingly beleaguered and huge numbers of climate start-ups are failing. Despite receiving billions in subsidies, green companies are recording big losses, declaring bankruptcy or avoiding new projects – even in China. Yellen’s opportunity of the century is becoming its most obvious bust, with little apparent impact on the climate.

Of course, the green industry will keep going, as long as there are funds to subsidise it. The alliance between big corporate interests and activist bureaucracies has created what political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has labelled the ‘climate-industrial complex’. As energy analyst Robert Bryce points out, parts of Wall Street have been ‘feeding at the trough’ and will lobby Trump and Congress to keep some of their goodies. At the same time, some deep-blue states, like California and New York, are girding themselves by issuing their own green regulations to replace those that might have come from DC.

The only major country set to benefit from the ‘energy transition’ is China, which continues to spew more greenhouse gases than all advanced countries combined. It is using efficient, cheaper fossil fuels to dominate the solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times the size of America’s while exercising effective control of rare-earth minerals and the technology for processing them.

All this leaves the rest of the world, notably Europe and the UK, embracing a Net Zero strategy that is fundamentally unfeasible without imposing massive costs on the middle and working classes. One particularly dubious aspect of Europe’s all-electric policy lies in the energy grid. According to the Financial Times, UK businesses are already having problems getting extra juice. EVs, which are projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, will only increase the pressure on the UK’s grid. The Labour government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours.

The working classes in Western nations have particular reason for concern. In the UK, the path to lower emissions has been driven by deindustrialisation. The manufacturing sectors’ share of GDP has dropped by 50 per cent since 1990, at the cost of several million jobs. This parallels a two-thirds drop in the UK’s domestic energy production. It now increasingly depends on energy imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

Arguably, the most traumatic change is taking place in Germany, the last redoubt of European manufacturing and engineering prowess. Overall, Germany’s entire industrial structure is in decline. It is estimated that it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,00 car-manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Given the damage being done to Europe’s industrial base, the political tide is unsurprisingly turning against the greens. The gilets jaunes demonstrations in France in the late 2010s have been followed by large-scale farmers protests in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This year, voters gave the greens a ballot-box kicking at the European Parliament elections. Even as the technocracy sticks to its green religion, voters are headed in the opposite direction.

The election of Donald Trump, one of whose campaign slogans is ‘drill, baby, drill’, all but guarantees that the war on fossil fuels waged by the Obama-Biden administrations is dead. Whereas his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, was strongly backed by ‘green tech billionaires’, Trump received strong support from oil and gas interests, who may enjoy at least a temporary boom. Delays on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities will be lifted, and the tacit mandate for electrical vehicles is also likely to disappear. This shift represents an alternative to the expensive, economy-sapping, ultra-green policies being adopted by Britain’s Labour government and throughout the EU.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/green-grifters

The latest global climate conference opened Monday in Azerbaijan. The timing is excellent. Any doubt regarding the wisdom of the next Trump administration’s likely pullout from such meetings should be dispelled by the conference photos alone. Here are tens of thousands of well fed, well-dressed members of the global elite—activists, employees of lavishly funded NGOs, armies of government bureaucrats, hundreds of heads of state—who have all travelled via jet and private plane to this remote corner of the Earth and who expect that every minute of their day will be supported by abundant, magically available energy. None has sacrificed a single personal comfort to save the planet. They assume that their smartphones will draw on an invisible web of transmitters and that they will be able to search the Internet and run AI queries at will, notwithstanding that doing so requires voracious energy use from a growing archipelago of server farms. They expect their PowerPoints to be well lit and their conference and hotel rooms to be heated or air conditioned as needed. They’re never without their bottled water, which is carried thousands of miles by carbon-emitting trucks and planes and kept sterile by plastic containers whose manufacture requires petrochemicals and plenty of energy. They do not wait on the sun to shine or the wind to blow to light their rooms, run their elevators, or power up their devices; they want energy now and without interruption.

You don’t have to be a “climate denier” to see that climate-change politics have become the largest global grift in history, one that grows in proportion with each new conference. It was just a matter of time before Third World basket-case countries exploited the First World’s virtue signaling. This year’s UNFCC COP 29 conference in Azerbaijan (COP stands for Conference of the Parties) features the demand that developed countries fork over billions, if not trillions, more dollars to the Global South, ostensibly to help it adjust to climate change. Those billions will follow all previous foreign aid into the same sinkhole of corruption and incompetence.

‘https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/14/how-can-we-trust-the-science-when-we-cant-trust-the-data/

Climate change is the challenge of our lifetimes,” we in the energy-hungry West often hear when lectured by leftist government officials and their allies pushing the “Net-Zero” religion. But what happens if much of the vital data behind the climate-change threat are made up?

Turns out, quite a lot of it is. At least that’s what the Daily Sceptic, a British-based science watchdog, claims. It recently detailed the allegations made by an independent journalist showing that 103 of the 302 supposed “weather stations” that provide data for both the United Kingdom government’s and academic scientists’ climate change forecasts don’t exist or produce actual data.

That’s right. Instead of data, the government manufactures “estimates,” as journalist Ray Sanders found.

If so, that means all of the science based on the falsified data is null and void. That includes the British government’s frequent dire predictions of massive global heating that will soon make life on planet Earth unbearable.

Still, that’s just the UK, right? Wrong.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=9ffbb491bc

The arena of climate and energy is sufficiently large that it deserves its own post of ideas for the incoming Trump administration. The Biden people went so far off the rails in this area that there are far more topics than I can cover. I’ll have to stick to some highlights.

Communications.

As I noted in the previous post, changing the communications of the prior administration should be an easy and obvious first priority. However, the Trump people notably did a poor job on this subject the first time out.

The subject of climate and energy is pervasive through the websites of dozens of federal agencies. Let’s just note a few examples:

At the Department of Energy, a big section is devoted to “Combating the Climate Crisis.” From the intro:

There is no greater challenge facing our nation and our planet than the climate crisis. That’s why President Biden has laid out the boldest climate agenda in our nation’s history—one that will spur an equitable clean energy economy and cement America on a path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. . . . DOE has long been the nation’s powerhouse for scientific and innovative solutions to the challenges we face, including the climate emergency. Our program offices and 17 National Laboratories are working every single day to research, develop, and deploy the clean energy technologies of the future, including battery storage, renewable power, electric vehicles, carbon capture, and resilient grid infrastructure.

And don’t forget the subject of “Energy Justice,” otherwise known as the scam of justifying vast wasteful subsidies to useless energy sources as some kind of quasi-reparations to minority communities:

For far too long, communities of color and low-income communities have borne the brunt of pollution to the air, water, and soil they rely on to live and raise their families. The clean energy revolution must lift up these communities that have been left behind, and make sure those who have suffered the most are the first to benefit.

Over at EPA, the huge “Climate Change” section of the website pretends that the regulatory onslaught attacking hydrocarbon fuels has something to do with “human health.” Example:

Understanding and addressing climate change is critical to EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nobodys-coming-to-the-big-global-warming-conference/

What if you threw a big green party and nobody came?

The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties or COP29 is happening in glorious Azerbaijan but the usual folks flying huge jets to warn us about the danger of using fossil fuels are mostly staying home.

Except for the Taliban who showed up to demand money. (Not a joke.)

Biden has trouble walking across sand. Xi has better things to do with his time. About the only G7 leader to show up is UK PM Keir Starmer (unless you want to pretend that Italy’s Meloni is a world leader) who waddled around like a ridiculous dark and mumbled something about the importance of being green so all the old white British pensioners freeze to death over the winter.

‘I have repeatedly emphasised the importance of global leadership when it comes to the climate challenge, and therefore it is very important for me to come to Cop,” PM Starmer whined. He said there was ‘a global race’ to be the leader on renewable energy, adding: ‘I want us to win the race.’

That’s like wanting to win the world curling championship. Nobody else is even showing for this one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_case_of_the_florida_scrub_jay_challenges_the_esa_s_tyranny.html

As the name suggests, the Florida scrub jay lives exclusively in the scrublands of the Sunshine State. A medium-sized, long-tailed, blue-and-gray songbird, its call when perched on scrubs is a screechy scold that sends its tail up like a Roman catapult launching a rock. One of 15 bird species native to the continental U.S.—and allegedly threatened by loss of habitat—it is protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973.

But should protecting the bird take precedence over a citizen’s property rights when his land isn’t habitat suited to the bird? And doesn’t the arbitrary development fee that Florida counties imposed—a scrub jay fee, supposedly for offsetting the environmental impact of building on a property—amount to an exorbitant ransom?

These are among the questions raised in a federal lawsuit filed by Michael Colosi, a tech entrepreneur who hopes to build a house on a five-acre plot he recently bought in Punta Gorda, Charlotte County, Florida. Though he believes that his land, thick with pine and saw palmetto, is unsuited to the scrub jay, he is happy to adhere to the county’s habitat conservation plan (HCP) requirements, such as planting scrub oaks to encourage bird visits and avoiding land clearance during nesting season. But he refuses to pay the hefty $120,000 scrub jay fee for allowing him to build on his plot, for he plans to use only an acre or so for a house and garage, leaving the rest in its natural state.

The lawsuit—in which Charlotte County, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the U.S. Department of the Interior are defendants—is in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (Fort Myers Division). The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) is representing Colosi pro bono in a suit challenging the fee as an unconstitutional infringement of Colosi’s right to develop and use his property. It also challenges the unconstitutional regulation under federal law—in this case, the ESA—of an intrastate species of no commercial or economic value, and hence not under the Commerce Clause’s purview.

Before discussing the precedents that the PLF cites in the lawsuit, some background on the ESA is in order. The act, which the FWS and U.S. NOAA Fisheries Services administer, is not only the most wide-ranging in the U.S. but is one that unaccountable bureaucrats in the administrative state rampantly abuse through overreach.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/23/what-investors-are-telling-us-about-green-energy/

A little more than a year ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed what so many have said is absolutely, undeniably so: “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” Despite the story’s examples that were supposed to buttress the claims, reality tells a different story.

A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that “the fast money on Wall Street has taken a close look at key sectors in the green economy and decided to bet against them.”

“Despite vast green stimulus packages in the U.S., Europe, and China, more hedge funds are on average net short batteries, solar, electric vehicles, and hydrogen than are long those sectors; and more funds are net long fossil fuels than are shorting oil, gas, and coal.”

Hedge fund institutions have concluded, says Bloomberg, that “many climate investments” haven’t posted returns as quickly nor as profitably as they had expected.

Bloomberg’s sources blamed politics, both in the U.S. and abroad.

If so, we say good, because the green energy crusade has been driven solely by Democratic and progressive politics rather than rigorous research and compelling arguments. It’s about time that the skeptical side posted a few victories in trying to stop the wholly unnecessary climate agenda of the left.

It’s the middle of a summer heat wave and temperatures are rising. Suddenly your air conditioning turns off. It’s not a blackout or a brownout: it’s the new government plan.

Mass government subsidies for inefficient and expensive ‘green energy’ wind turbines and solar panels combined with bans on efficient and cheap oil, coal and gas, have made energy grids unreliable and costly. States that have aimed for widespread use of green energy like California and Texas are suffering blackouts and brownouts at growing rates.

Instead of building reliable energy resources, federal and state governments, along with monopolistic energy companies, are making up for green energy with energy rationing.

Or ‘smart rationing’.

Virtual power plants were a green energy buzzword that promised to harness local battery capacity to distribute energy to the grid, but the diminishing promise of solar panels and the power hunger of electric cars has poured cold water on the idea that the ‘green’ battery devices and useless solar panels will ever reliably give more to the grid than they take from it.

Virtual power plants, like all things virtual, have come to mean power that isn’t really there. Instead virtual power plants have become another euphemism for rationing power.

Unable to get meaningful savings from so-called battery ‘distributed energy resources’, virtual power plants now mean using smart thermostats to seize control over homeowner power usage with bureaucrats or AI software deciding how much power people should be using and turning off their heat or air conditioning. Government agencies and monopolistic utilities insist on calling this ‘efficiency’ rather than what it actually is which is rationing customer power usage.

State utilities have taken to bribing consumers with discounts on skyrocket energy rates and ‘free’ smart thermostats like Google Nest in order to induce them to turn over control of their thermostats. Once they give up control, they may be allowed only limited manual overrides a month to be able to turn on the heat or air in even the most miserable weather.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/24/the-ev-graveyard/

Last week, the House approved a resolution to block the Biden administration’s emissions rule that would require more than half of the automobiles sold in the new-car market to be electric by 2032. The 215 representatives who voted for the bill, including eight Democrats, are far more in tune with most of the country than the White House. The “deplorables” and “bitter” clingers of the industrialized world are rejecting electric vehicles.

Nationwide, the inventory of unsold EVs had grown by nearly 350% over the first half of 2024, creating “a 92-day supply — roughly three months’ worth of EVs, and nearly twice the industry average,” says Axios, which is 54 days for gasoline-powered vehicles.

Ford, which lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023, continues to yield to reality, now ditching its plans to build a large electric SUV. This “course change,” says Just the News, “comes amid lower-than-expected demand for electric vehicles.”

The company has also “pushed back to 2027” plans for “another electric vehicle project for a pickup truck.”

“Based on where the market is and where the customer is, we will pivot and adjust and make those tough decisions,” said John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer.

And here’s the market’s message:

“Of the U.S. consumers planning on purchasing a new vehicle in the next 24 months, only 34% intend to purchase an EV, down 14% from 48% in the 2023,” says Ernst & Young’s Mobility Consumer Index, “a global survey of almost 20,000 consumers from 28 countries.”