RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/06/the-green-energy-subsidy-lie/

Environmentalists have long complained about oil and gas industry subsidies. But we don’t hear from them regarding the subsidies paid out for politically favored renewable energy programs, even though the supposedly green sources are dining sumptuously on taxpayers’ dollars. In fact, renewables are more heavily subsidized than the fossil fuels, and it would be difficult if not impossible for them to exist without the support.

From 2016 to 2022, “energy-specific subsidies and support” totaled $183.3 billion, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration report. While “wind and solar power account for about 21% of domestic electricity production,” they nevertheless took in “a staggering $83.8 billion in subsidies, by far the largest share compared to any other category,” says Fox News.

The EIA says that over that period, “nearly half (46%) of federal energy subsidies were associated with renewable energy,” with “federal support for renewable energy of all types” more than doubling, from $7.4 billion in fiscal 2016 to $15.6 billion in fiscal 2022.

Meanwhile, “natural gas and petroleum-related tax expenditures” – which are not direct government spending nor tax loopholes – were $2.1 billion in fiscal 2022.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-war-is-coming-for-your-car-climate-electric-vehicle-britain-5a4cc7aa?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Forget race. Forget sex. Forget immigration. The mother of all culture wars is breaking out, and its subject is the car.

The automobile has long been a policy flashpoint, with the paramount issue being where it should be able to roam. This was the heart of the brutal urban-planning battles of the mid-20th century, which were fought over the need for and placement of new highways.

Yet it’s hard to describe those earlier policy fights as a culture war. Liberal urban activists such as Jane Jacobs—who famously fought off Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway interchange over Washington Square Park in New York City—didn’t hate cars or the people who drove them. In her magisterial “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Jacobs repeatedly observed that resorting to the personal car was an entirely rational response to the failures of government urban planners to encourage smarter development.

Such humane common sense seems quaint in the context of today’s car wars. For a growing portion of the left, the automobile has become a moral ill in its own right rather than the symptomatic inconvenience of Jacobs’s telling. Partly this has to do with pollution, which was barely emerging as an issue when Jacobs was at her peak in the early 1960s but has also improved dramatically since. Much more so it has to do with carbon emissions—which are distinct from the smoggy pollution of the 20th century, despite constant efforts to conflate the two.

When I say “carbon emissions,” note that I mean it in a general sense. The problem with the personal car isn’t its direct climate impact. Road transport, including trucking, accounts for 12% of global carbon emissions. Electric vehicles aren’t an obvious means of reducing overall emissions, especially once you factor in their dirty supply chains and the coal-fired power that often charges them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/prophetess-of-climate-propaganda/

Her name is Agnes Walton, and in her environmental fanaticism she makes Greta Thunberg look half-hearted and Al Gore look irresolute. Let’s start with her 2017 video for HBO’s VICE News Tonight, in which she noted that “more than half of all consumer goods” contain palm oil – often labeled on packaging as “vegetable oil” or “vegetable fat” – and, over images of trees being felled and cute animals running for their lives, claimed that the growth of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia was causing “massive deforestation,” “killing the rainforest,” and “driving forest species to the brink of extinction.”

Only one country, Walton said, had “taken on the industry.” That country would be Norway, where, she explained, the entire population boycotted palm oil products; consequently, the substance was removed from all Norwegian food products. (I live in Norway, but somehow I entirely missed this people’s crusade.) Since Norway’s population is so small, alas, this glorious local success “didn’t put a dent in the global market.” The only answer, then, instructed Walton, is for the rest of the world to follow Norway’s example prontissimo – or consider itself responsible for a genocide of both flora and fauna.

Or check out Walton’s video editorial from August of last year. In this one, produced for the New York Times, Walton warned of another existential dilemma: American lawns, which, she solemnly asserted, “are damaging our planet, ruining our health, and wasting our time.” Maintaining them depletes precious water and involves the use of dangerous fertilizers. And why should we want lawns, anyway? Walton flashed an image of the Stars and Stripes, and another of a wholesome-looking traditional white family (mom, dad, two sons) standing behind a white picket fence – thereby linking lawns to those two appalling phenomena, the American dream and middle-class suburban life.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/desantis-highlights-danger-electric-vehicles-present-to-u-s-national-security-and-economy

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned in an interview over the weekend that the push from Democratic politicians to make everyone have an electric vehicle presents serious risks to U.S. national security and the economy.

DeSantis made the remarks during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” when asked about President Joe Biden joining the picket line with striking auto workers.

“They are going to really hurt the whole automobile industry. It is going to hurt jobs, forcing EVs,” DeSantis said. “A lot of people don’t want EVs, a lot of Americans can’t afford EVs. It will make our country more dependent on communist China which we definitely don’t need to be doing.”

“What they’re doing in California, Newsom and Biden have partnered up, they are requiring these big rigs to be electric,” he continued. “And so, we’re at the Port of Long Beach, this is very important to be able to move product for the entire country’s economy. These big rigs, they go, like 100 miles on an electric, then they’ve got to do a charge. It is totally, totally ridiculous. So, I’m going to come in as president, we’re going to reverse all of those Biden EV mandates, we’re going to save the American automobile.”

DeSantis said that forcing big rigs to become electric will “impact our supply chain” because they need to be recharged so frequently which will “hurt inflation, that will hurt our economy.”

“It’s putting ideology ahead of anything that’s practical, and I think the truckers were really excited we were there to shine a light on some of the insanity that’s going on out California,” he added.

https://the-pipeline.org/bidens-continuing-war-on-energy-independence/

The Biden administration is terminating the seven remaining oil leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). These seven leases represented the last vestiges of the Trump era of America’s energy dominance. With the termination of these seven leases, the Biden administration has signaled to the world that it’s going to kill affordable energy for Americans along with U.S. energy dominance in the name of “saving our planet.” And just what does president Biden think he’s saving our planet from? “Climate change,” of course.

Thanks to Biden’s short-sighted decision, energy analysts report that the United States will produce 140,000 barrels of oil per day less than previously. This means that American energy consumers can anticipate a concomitant increase in their average fuels costs. Not surprisingly, the ecochondriacs who dominate America’s political, media, and educational sectors today rarely take into account basic economics. In this case, the law of supply and demand. The cut in American energy production will force the U.S. to rely more heavily on unstable foreign sources of fossil fuels, such as those in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela.

In September, the government of Saudi Arabia surprised the world when it chose to cut oil production. This move has spiked the price of oil on the world market. Many energy experts are projecting that the cost of oil could spike to $100 per barrel or more. Meanwhile, Russia, another major fossil fuel producer, has also decided to cut production. Tack on increasing demand from China, the world’s second-largest economy with one of the largest middle-classes in the world, and you’ve got the perfect storm of energy insecurity for an America thanks to the radical Biden administration climate agenda.

Who benefits from the increased price of oil? The very regimes that the United States has problems with. Although the Saudis are a longtime regional partner in the Middle East, the U.S.-Saudi relationship has long been fraught, even before 9/11. The Biden administration has become especially antagonistic toward the Kingdom over their human rights abuses. Yet, by cutting American domestic energy production, Biden is ensuring the U.S. will be even more dependent on this unstable, even distasteful ally.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/10/16/bidens-attack-on-electricity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

Lights out

Marxism had many trappings of a religion. But fortunately, its major claims were of this world and could be falsified. Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, the living conditions of workers deteriorate and that only by seizing the means of production can they improve their lot. After a few generations of communism, nobody in Europe believed that anymore.

The climate-change movement has a similar vulnerability. Its religious trappings are plain enough: the attribution of natural catastrophes to human wickedness, revelations of the apocalypse, persecution of heretics. But at the end of the day its claims are material — and falsifiable.

With climate change, we are told, living conditions will deteriorate, and only by decarbonizing the economy can we avoid those losses. It may take several more generations to convince people one way or the other, but in the meantime there is a quick way to discredit the claim, and that is for government to implement a policy that is so costly and catastrophic in the near term that people generally start wondering whether climate policies might not be considerably more dangerous than climate change.

Such is the thin silver lining on President Biden’s latest round of climate policies, by far the most ambitious yet. In April, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed two rules that, if implemented simultaneously, would wreck America’s electricity grid. The first was vehicle-emissions standards that would require two-thirds of all vehicles made in America to be fully electric by 2032. That’s barely eight years from now. The second would require the large natural-gas and coal plants upon which the nation’s electricity depends for “baseload” power to adopt carbon-capture-and-storage technology (CSS) (in which carbon dioxide is removed from the power-plant exhaust by a chemical process, then transported by pipeline to be injected deep underground) or switch to “green” hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced by renewable sources) by 2038 at the latest.

Both rules rest on thin legal ice. For the vehicles rule, the EPA is defining each “class” of vehicle as including fully electric cars of the same size as the relevant combustion-engine vehicle; then it sets the emission standard so low that no combustion-powered car can possibly meet it. As a result, there is no way for carmakers to comply with the “fleet average” standards by improving emissions in their existing vehicles, as the Clean Air Act contemplates. Rather, carmakers will have to switch to producing fully electric vehicles (EVs), regardless of whether the charging infrastructure is in place and the grid can handle the ballooning demand. The Supreme Court insisted last year in West Virginia v. EPA that the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA power to require utilities to switch to different kinds of power plants; the same principle should apply to the engines in our automobiles.

https://nypost.com/2023/09/25/even-bill-gates-is-backtracking-the-airs-gone-out-of-the-climate-crisis-balloon/

Has the air gone out of the “climate crisis” balloon? 

It’s starting to look like it. Some other causes du jour are looking limp lately, too.

Oh, hysteria is still out there. In Boston this month, I passed a church where the door bore a lurid poster reading “DUE TO GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS, WORSHIP IN SANCTUARY 9-17-23 CANCELED.”

If it were really a global crisis, wouldn’t you want to be praying?

I first thought it was referring to Hurricane Lee, which had been predicted to bring apocalyptic storm conditions to Beantown. 

Lee, though, veered out to sea, and that Sunday was sunny, warm and delightful. 

(While the soldiers of God had fled the scene in advance, the armies of Mammon were out in force on the Boston Common, in the form of a massive cannabis fair. Say what you will about the stoners, they’re not prone to panic or overthinking.)

But this seems actually a case of closing church so parishioners could go to New York to “Join us in the March to End Fossil Fuels,” which is even more amusing, since traveling uses a lot more fossil fuels than staying in Boston and praying for an end to fossil fuels, which would be at least as effective.

Bill Gates, however, is pumping the brakes on climate panic. 

Speaking at a New York Times event, he observed that heavy-handed policies won’t work: “If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/26/10-reasons-not-to-own-an-ev/

From California to New York to Washington, Democrats are using the coercive force of government to herd Americans into electric vehicles. Here are 10 reasons why we should resist both this egregious abuse of power as well as the social pressure that demands we all go electric:

The mandates are an egregious abuse of power. Where do government officials, both elected and unelected, derive the authority to tell Americans what vehicles they cannot own and what vehicles they must own? There is none. Yes, there are laws intended to keep dangerous cars and trucks off the streets for safety reasons. But no automobile is a threat just because it burns gasoline or diesel. Dare we say that those who buy an EV are complicit in securing for the state a power it was never intended to have?

The mandates are an egregious abuse of power Part ll. The federal government oversteps its constitutional limits when it tells manufacturers that two-thirds of the vehicles they build must be electrified.

EVs are not zero-emission vehicles. As one of our contributors wrote in a well-researched, heavily sourced piece, life-cycle assessments show that the “manufacturing, charging, operating, and disposing of electric vehicles produces more of every major category of pollutants than conventional cars.” 

The EV manufacturing chain is an environmental malignancy. That same writer, James D. Agresti, president of Just Facts, has also noted “the ‘environmental implications’ of mining lithium to make batteries for electric cars ‘would directly counter the intent’ of ‘incentivizing electric vehicle adoption.’” He further makes the case by citing a Brookings Institution study, which “found that ‘continued reliance on China’ will ‘increase the risk that sourcing of critical minerals will cause or contribute to serious social or environmental harms.’”

EVs are fire hazards. All automobiles catch fire, but EVs burn hotter, longer, and take far more water to extinguish than a conventional car that’s burning. Firefighters use about 500 gallons of water to put out regular car fires. EV fires can require from 6,000 gallons to 20,000 gallons to get the job done. Oh, yes, the smoke from an EV fire is particularly toxic, not terribly dissimilar to that of Zyklon B.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-militants-disrupt-peoples-lives-as-un-climate-summit-looms/

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has made many fear-mongering declarations about climate change over the last several years. This past July, he raised his decibel level of hysteria by claiming that the “era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.” To underscore his clarion call to action by world leaders gathering in New York City for the UN’s annual General Assembly High-Level Week, the Secretary General decided to convene a Climate Ambition Summit on September 20th. Never mind the huge carbon footprints created by all the foreign dignitaries flying into New York to blow hot air as usual.

The objective of the UN Climate Ambition Summit is to go beyond the commitments that countries made in 2015 as part of the Paris agreement on climate change. UN member state governments and private sector stakeholders are expected to step forward with detailed plans of action to combat climate change with mitigation and adaptation measures, and to deliver commitments for funding the achievement of “climate justice.”

Discussing his climate summit, Secretary General Guterres declared that “the planet can’t wait.” He wants rich countries to take “a quantum leap in their efforts to reduce emissions,” in order to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels. China, however, gets a free pass, despite the fact that it remains the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gasses and continues to build an abundance of coal-fired plants. The UN and other multilateral organizations still treat China as a “developing” country, even though its economy ranks globally as the second largest.

In the lead-up to the climate summit, climate justice warriors are taking to the streets, conducting disruptive protests to demand an end to fossil fuels now. This follows a years-long pattern of actions that have included defacement of works of art at museums, occupation of buildings, deflating tires of SUVs, and blocking traffic for extended periods of time – in capitalist countries, of course. Not in Communist China.

Although these militant tactics have often backfired by antagonizing many people whose lives have been significantly disrupted as a result of the militants’ actions, the climate justice warriors are doubling down.

https://the-pipeline.org/the-column-first-time-tragedy-second-time-farce/

Girl-children and their Pied Pipers took to the streets of Manhattan over the weekend, demanding — demanding! — an end to all traditional sources of energy and the immediate installation of the net-zero, carbon-free, powered-by-unicorn-farts utopian future they believe they’re owed because, well, just because. The “March to End Fossil Fuels” was an orchestrated kickoff to “Climate Week” convened to Save the Planet and featured appearances by the usual suspects, including la Pasionaria herself, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well notable lefty actors such as Susan Sarandon, Kyra Sedgewick, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, and Kevin Bacon, who all have time on their hands since they’re on strike from play-acting in films. (Full disclosure: so are the writers, which includes me.) According to the entirely one-sided story by Seth Borenstein of the AP:

“We have people all across the world in the streets, showing up, demanding a cessation of what is killing us,” Ocasio-Cortez told a cheering crowd. “We have to send a message that some of us are going to be living on, on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now. And we will not take no for an answer.”

This protest was far more focused on fossil fuels and the industry than previous marches. Sunday’s rally attracted a large chunk, 15%, of first-time protesters and was overwhelmingly female, said American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies environmental movements and was surveying march participants.

Of the people Fisher talked to, 86% had experienced extreme heat recently, 21% floods and 18% severe drought, she said. They mostly reported feeling sad and angry… Among the marchers was 8-year-old Athena Wilson from Boca Raton, Florida. She and her mother Maleah, flew from Florida for Sunday’s protest. “Because we care about our planet,” Athena said. “I really want the Earth to feel better.”