RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/activists-attacking-art-44b29637?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

We’re still waiting for an example of a great civilization built by progressive leftists. Now there’s still another reason to doubt whether the contemporary mania to attack society’s traditions has any value at all. How can one take seriously warnings that climate change threatens civilization from people whose vandalism targets civilization itself?

“Ruining the most beautiful art in the world is probably not going to win people over to your cause,” observes RealClearPolitics President Tom Bevan on Twitter as he links to an Associated Press story about the latest attack by global warmists on a cultural treasure.

AP reports:

Two women were detained in Stockholm after they threw “some kind of paint” at a painting by French artist Claude Monet and then glued themselves to the frame, Sweden’s National Museum said Wednesday.
The painting, “The Artist’s Garden at Giverny,” was on display as part of an exhibition at the museum. Spokesperson Hanna Tottmar said artwork was encased in glass and “is now being examined by the museum’s conservators to see if any damage has occurred.”
The exhibit, titled “The Garden,” was closed but expected to reopen to visitors on Thursday. ”We naturally distance ourselves from actions where art or cultural heritage risks being damaged … regardless of the purpose,” Per Hedström, the museum’s acting director, said.

Yes, let’s all distance ourselves from this destructive zealotry, which has sadly become popular on the radical left. “Why Are Climate Activists Throwing Food at Million-Dollar Paintings?,” asked a headline last year in Smithsonian magazine. Margaret Osborne reported:

Wearing neon orange vests, two climate activists splattered mashed potatoes on the protective glass that covers Monet’s Grainstacks at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany. They then glued their hands to the wall below the painting and began to speak.

But who would want to listen when the speakers have just self-identified as unreasonable and untethered to any standard of decent behavior?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/14/california-can-either-charge-its-ev-fleet-or-keep-the-lights-on/

Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To read the entire report, click here.

Can California transition to a portfolio of 100% renewable energy sources and still generate enough electricity to meet the state’s future needs, including the addition of millions of electric cars on the road? Using the state’s historical trends to project forward, the answer to these questions is no. Californians will face acute electricity shortages soon if policymakers insist on implementing its current suite of policies.

California is already incapable of generating enough electricity, importing 30% of its current electricity needs from other states. With respect to current generation sources, nearly 60% of California’s in-state electricity generation is produced by natural gas and nuclear power plants. Including conventional hydroelectric generation, which does not count as a renewable source for purposes of California’s policies, nearly two-thirds of the state’s current electricity comes from disfavored generation sources.

It is doubtful that California will be able to generate sufficient electricity to meet future energy needs using only the favored generation sources; and it is not even close.

Overall, total electricity generated will be 21.1% below the amount of electricity demanded — and this does not even account for the impacts from all the likely future mandates. Beyond the electric vehicle mandates evaluated above, officials are rapidly prohibiting connections for stoves, furnaces, hot water heaters, and dryers in new construction projects.

There are reasons to be exceptionally skeptical that California’s current energy policy environment is achievable. Either the policies will cause extreme energy shortages and jeopardize quality of life or the state’s political leaders will need to repeal the current suite of mandates.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/socialism-versus-nature/

“Greed of the fossil fuel industry” is “destroying our planet,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders. Young people agree. Their solution? Socialism.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says socialism creates “an environment that provides for all people, not just the privileged few.”

“Nonsense,” says Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network in my new video.

Palmer, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and most of us, spent lots of time in socialist countries. He once smuggled books into the Soviet Union.

What he’s seen convinces him that environmental-movement socialists are wrong about what’s “green.”

“We tried socialism,” says Palmer. “We ran the experiment. It was a catastrophe. Worst environmental record on the planet.”

In China, when socialist leaders noticed that sparrows ate valuable grain, they encouraged people to kill sparrows.

“Billions of birds were killed,” says Palmer.

Government officials shot birds. People without guns banged pans and blew horns, scaring sparrows into staying aloft for longer than they could tolerate.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thats-smoke-not-climate-change-canada-fire-forest-management-new-york-d8dcdb65?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Around 1 p.m. on Wednesday the sky began to darken, and an orange haze descended on Manhattan. I watched in amazement from my Midtown office as Mother Nature dimmed the lights and quietly reminded Gotham City of her awesome power.

What made New Yorkers feel as if they were on Mars was smoke from forest fires that wafted south from the Canadian province of Quebec and hung around amid a stalled weather pattern. People in New York tend to be outside more than most Americans because their commutes involve traveling on foot rather than going from door to door in a car. Residents were told to avoid exposure to the bad air. The Yankees postponed their game with the White Sox. Exceedingly low visibility forced LaGuardia Airport to ground planes for a time. By evening the worst had passed, though the smell of something burning lingered.

If only the effects on public policy were equally fleeting.

Evaluating the causes of this complex event calls for humility, curiosity and thoughtfulness. But politicians are in charge. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer jumped in front of a camera on Wednesday to proclaim that “we cannot ignore that climate change continues to make these disasters worse.” President Biden called the Canada burn “another stark reminder of the impacts of climate change.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined the chorus.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/co2_is_a_climate_red_herring.html

CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) such as methane have been suspected for more than a century of being potentially harmful atmospheric warming agents.  The climate movement began more recently with the advent of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1989 and the release of Al Gore’s prize-winning film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006.  Climate alarm began as “man-made global warming” and, when cooling was observed even as CO2 levels continued to rise, morphed into “climate change.”

Those of us who can look behind the virtue-signaling mantra of climate change understand the theory that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from burning oil and gas are dangerously warming the planet.  We can also appreciate the idea that marginal warming may be amplified by increased water vapor and clouds as a result of elevated CO2.  A large number of computer models are built on the presumptions of this theory.

But are our CO2 inputs to the atmosphere a real threat to our magnificent planet?  The evidence tells us no.  Although we are in the midst of a broadly warming period following the end of the most recent ice age, satellite and weather balloon data suggest that the models (and theory) are off by quite a bit.  The models project much more warming than observed in back casts.  That is interesting but perhaps not definitive.  There is also evidence that the atmosphere has slipped into a new cooling period that could lead to the next ice age.

A seminal review paper by Wijngaarden and Happer (here) illustrates a critical limitation of CO2 radiation transfer that makes it impossible for this trace molecule to cause runaway global temperature.  The limitation is known as saturation.  The key figure from the Wijngaarden-Happer paper diagrams the inhibiting effect of various greenhouse gases on infrared radiation to space.  GHGs reduce Earth’s reradiation of incoming shortwave solar radiation to space as longwave heat radiation.  Reduced reradiation of heat means air and surface warming.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-newrange-mine-duluth-minnesota-natural-resources-ac88ff1d?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Americans hoping that President Biden’s agreement to sign permitting reforms as part of the debt-ceiling compromise signaled a policy change are going to be disappointed. His Administration’s hostility to natural-resource development continues apace.

On Tuesday the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers revoked a Clean Water Act permit granted by the Trump Administration for the NewRange copper and nickel mine in Minnesota’s Duluth Complex. The area isn’t virgin land. The Duluth site is part of the fabled Iron Range, which provided 70% of the iron ore that America used during World War II.

“Minnesota’s Iron Range has played a vital role in helping build America,” candidate Biden proclaimed in September 2020. “U.S. manufacturing and mining was the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II. It must be part of the Arsenal of American Prosperity today, helping power an economic recovery for working families.” Apparently not.

His Administration picked the anniversary of D-Day to deep-six the NewRange mine, which would provide minerals to power electric vehicles and his green-energy transition. The U.S. will have to import the minerals from arsenals of autocracy like Russia and China.

In other acts of economic masochism, the Interior Department last month delayed a decision on whether to let Alaska build a 211-mile road to a critical minerals mining area. The project was initially approved by Trump regulators, but Biden officials agreed to conduct a second review after green groups sued. The Administration also recently put on ice a copper mine in Arizona.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hanoi-jane-blames-white-men-for-the-climate-crisis/

Jane Fonda used her appearance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to charge that racism and patriarchy are the causes of climate change. Jane Fonda is still the left-wing extremist she was during the Vietnam War when she was photographed on a North Vietnamese 37mm gun mount and served as a shill for the enemy back then.

“It’s good for us all to realize, there would be no climate crisis if there was no racism,” Hanoi Jane proclaimed at the film festival. “There would be no climate crisis if there was no patriarchy. A mindset that sees things in a hierarchical way. White men are the things that matter and then everything else [is] at the bottom.”

“We have to arrest and jail those men,” Fonda demanded.

What about the women (biological and trans) and people of color who drive or take public transportation, fly, use electricity, and heat their homes – all with fossil fuels? Do they have immunity from punishment under Hanoi Jane’s rules because they belong to politically correct identity groups? And how do the cows that produce methane gas emitted into the atmosphere fit in with her racism-patriarchy paradigm?

How does Jane Fonda justify her own large carbon footprints left from maintaining her former Beverly Hills mansion and the 6,679-square-foot townhouse that she reportedly bought recently for $5.45 million? Or the carbon footprints left from all the flights that Fonda has taken to attend climate change protests and get herself arrested while acting the part of a revolutionary with her celebrity friends? This hypocrite even agreed to accept, in her words, “quite a bit of money” from 90-year-old Austrian building tycoon Richard Lugner for accompanying him to the Vienna Opera Ball sponsored by Austrian oil and gas company OMV.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/06/01/climate-lockdowns-begin-france-bans-short-haul-flights-in-favor-of-train-travel-to-cut-carbon-emissions/?mc_cid=f104f256f4&mc_eid=262379acc3

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

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

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-clean-green-blackouts-bankruptcy-america

Rick Perry is the former governor of Texas and 14th secretary of energy.

From the beginning, President Joe Biden has made it clear his administration will focus on a “clean” and “green” future, including an aggressive move toward electric vehicles (EVs).

Unfortunately, his administration continues to overestimate electric vehicle market trends and force a massive volume of EVs into a power grid that simply isn’t prepared. Their latest move comes from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose proposed new tailpipe emissions standards for light- and heavy-duty vehicles are so strict the administration predicts a shocking two-thirds of new vehicles sold in 2032 would be electric vehicles.

The goal of this proposal is not just about cleaner cars, but a broader plan by Biden and the environmental lobby to force the extinction of internal combustion engine vehicles and reach zero emissions by 2050. While decreasing emissions is certainly a laudable goal, the path the administration and its agencies are using to get us there is not a realistic one and will create problems and huge costs for the American public.

As one outlet noted, “The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry, a moment in some ways as significant as the June morning in 1896 when Henry Ford took his ‘horseless carriage’ for a test run and changed American life and industry.”

The rule will certainly change the auto industry, but in this instance, the revolutionary change will only exacerbate serious challenges we face, not conquer them.

First take our nation’s power grid. Where do you think that electricity is coming from when you plug your car into a charger? Growing demand for electricity is already straining our aging power grid and a flood of new demand from EVs will only strain it more. 

The Electric Power Supply Association recently pointed to National Renewable Energy Laboratory calculations in 2021 finding that electrifying the economy could increase electric demand by as much as 81% in 2050 – a calculation made without the EPA’s new rule. Heading into the summer, The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) warned our nation’s power grid is already in precarious shape with renewed risks for outages due to rising temperatures and intense storms. The EPA should heed this warning before moving forward with their proposed rule.