RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-crusaders-are-coming-for-electric-cars-too-global-warming-energy-power-fossil-fuels-environment-31a692ca?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

“Progressives’ ultimate goal is to reduce consumption—and living standards—because they believe humans are a menace to the Earth.”

Replacing all gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles won’t be enough to prevent the world from overheating. So people will have to give up their cars. That’s the alarming conclusion of a new report from the University of California, Davis and “a network of academics and policy experts” called the Climate and Community Project.

The report offers an honest look at the vast personal, environmental and economic sacrifices needed to meet the left’s net-zero climate goals. Progressives’ dirty little secret is that everyone will have to make do with much less—fewer cars, smaller houses and yards, and a significantly lower standard of living.

Problem No. 1: Electric-vehicle batteries require loads of minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, which must be extracted from the ground like fossil fuels. “If today’s demand for EVs is projected to 2050, the lithium requirements of the US EV market alone would require triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market,” the report notes.

Unlike fossil fuels, these minerals are mostly found in undeveloped areas that have abundant natural fauna and are often inhabited by indigenous people. “Large-scale mining entails social and environmental harm, in many cases irreversibly damaging landscapes without the consent of affected communities,” the report says. Mining can be done safely, but in poor countries it often isn’t.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/new_geological_study_proves_that_the_green_energy_movement_is_impossible_to_achieve.html

The renewable energy fantasy goal is achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Carpet-bombing propaganda has convinced the public to accept the extravagant claim that technology currently exists to reach net zero carbon emissions. Like carnival barkers, the net-zero fanatics say renewable energy is affordable, sustainable, scalable, and not an economy wrecker. 

The goal is to create a first-generation green power grid relying on wind turbine farms, solar array farms, and power storage battery banks replacing fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. In addition, the new power grid would power a global fleet of electric vehicles that would replace the internal combustion engine. 

Western society has taken one hundred fifty years of progress to achieve a fantastically complex energy system using the dense source of cheap hydrocarbon energy, the master resource. Yet, the net-zero devotees believe the complex energy system can be dismantled with minimal disruption and replaced with a low-density renewable energy grid that is intermittent and nonscalable, in less than thirty years. 

Well, I have horrible news for the devotees; the green energy fantasy collides with the laws of thermodynamics. The Greenies never researched whether or not there are sufficient base and rare earth metals and adequate time to mine and build out the technologies to accomplish the net-zero carbon 2050 target date. 

Simon P. Michaux of the Geological Survey of Finland has compiled an exhaustive study dismantling the overly ambitious task of phasing out fossil fuels. His comprehensive analysis focuses on the required physical material resources and the extraction timeframe to create renewable energy generation systems. A PowerPoint summary of his thousand-page study can be downloaded HERE.

The comprehensive study found the current estimated metal reserves are woefully deficient in almost every category. The table below lists base and rare earth metals requirements to build the new grid and EVs. Deficits are yellow highlighted. For example, copper is an integral part of a high-voltage grid system, coming up short by a shocking 3.7 billion tons. Can we dig enough open mile-deep ore pits to meet that shortfall? Improbable.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/02/04/hot-air-no-global-warming-for-eight-years-n1667955

Recently published data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that there has not been global warming for the past eight years. And NASA satellite data reportedly confirms that evidence, showing no global warming for eight years and five months, according to JunkScience’s Steve Milloy. But leftists are quick to warn people against drawing the obvious conclusion that the world isn’t about to become a burning ball of fire.

Recently published evidence also showed that there was actually a near-record low of major hurricanes in 2022, indicating that weather isn’t getting progressively and exponentially worse globally, despite the climate frenzy of the media and governments. And the Northeast is currently experiencing record cold in a harsh winter, with Mt. Washington, N.H., yesterday dropping to -45.5 degrees Fahrenheit and -107 degree wind chill.

Axios, which normally loves to scare-monger about global warming, reported today, “Arctic outbreak shatters records in Northeast.” I’m going to go out on a limb — or a glacier — and say that the Northeastern U.S. is definitely not about to suffer devastating effects from “global warming.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/an-inconvenient-truth-for-environmentalists/

Democracy, for once, isn’t dying in darkness.

The Washington Post, an outlet all-in for net-zero energy, conceded recent whale deaths off the Atlantic Coast spell doom for the Biden administration’s offshore wind prospects.

“The humpback was one of nine large whales to get stranded over six weeks on or near beaches in the Northeast, not far from where developers of hundreds of offshore wind turbines are engaged in a flurry of preconstruction activity,” the publication noted.

The article added, “It’s the latest in a string of threats to a fledgling offshore wind industry that climate advocates say is central to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Surging costs from inflation and labor shortages have developers saying their projects may not be profitable. A raft of lawsuits and pending federal restrictions to protect sensitive wildlife could further add to costs.”

The Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, two influential radical preservationist organizations, haven’t questioned its potential harmful effects on whales. Instead, they are quick to assign blame to vessel strikes and fishermen. But one unlikely skeptic is Center for Biological Diversity—a group that actively targets and works to displace conservationists like lobstermen, hunters, and anglers.

“I’m skeptical that either side is correct,” Brett Hartl, the government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told Fox News. “I saw environmental groups saying wind definitely isn’t the cause of this and then others are saying wind is definitely the cause of this. These things take a lot of time – they’re going to do autopsies and necropsies to figure it out.”

https://www.cfact.org/2023/02/01/everything-that-needs-electricity-is-made-with-oil/

The few wealthy countries pursuing the generation of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels while simultaneously moving to rid the world of fossil fuels have short memories of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years.

Renewables may be able to generate intermittent electricity form breezes and sunshine, but they cannot replace what is manufactured from fossil fuels, that are demanded by lifestyles and economies around the world.

Efforts to cease the use of crude oil will be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change, and lead the world to an era of guaranteed extreme shortages like we had in the decarbonized world in the 1800’s without fossil fuel products. This pursuit of renewables without fossil fuels can only lead us back to shorter life spans, diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths resulting from the elimination of the products from fossil fuels that are now benefiting society.

If the zero-emission cult succeeds in ridding the world of fossil fuels, wind turbines and solar panels may be able to generate intermittent electricity, but they cannot manufacture anything. Electricity from breezes and sunshine may be renewable, but it’s not reliable. Again, short memories about the zero-emission society that we already had in the 1800’s.

Everything that needs electricity is made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Let’s take a look at a few infrastructures, and products, that did not exist before the 1800’s, that now need electricity to operate:

Transportation

Hospitals

Medical equipment

Appliances

Electronics

Telecommunications

Communications systems

Space programs

Heating and ventilating

Military

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2023/01/27/its-now-cheaper-to-drive-100-miles-in-a-gas-powered-car-than-in-an-ev-n1665848

The Biden administration is always telling us that the best thing we can do is buy an electric vehicle. In fact, various members of the administration treat it almost flippantly — it’s a no-brainer that you should buy an expensive electric car or two. Doing so will rescue the planet from certain environmental collapse and will save you loads of money, even though the average cost of an electric vehicle was $66,000 as of August of last year.

Plenty of people are falling for it, and it’s easy to see why. The siren song of the tax credit is hard to ignore, and the idea of not having to contend with rising prices at the gas pump is attractive. But is it all true?

To quote Kissy Suzuki in You Only Live Twice, “Think again, please.” It just so happens that, for now, it’s actually cheaper to drive 100 miles in a gas-powered vehicle, also known as an internal combustion engine (ICE), than in an electric vehicle.

Ryan Erik King at Jalopnik reports that “a recent report from the Anderson Economic Group (AEG) found that fueling costs from mid-priced ICE-powered vehicles are lower than similarly priced electric vehicles. Combustion drivers pay about $11.29 per 100 miles on the road. EV drivers who charge up at home spend about $11.60 per 100 miles.”

It gets even more delicious when you take into account those commercial chargers that pop up in a lot of places.

“The price difference is more dramatic for those who mainly recharge at stations,” King writes. “Frequent charging station users pay $14.40 per 100 miles.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/24/the-environmentalist-assault-on-civilization/

No reasonable person would deny the importance of protecting the environment. The accomplishments of the environmental movement over the past 50 years are undeniable: cleaner air and water, protected wildernesses, and more efficient use of resources. The list is endless and illustrious. Environmentalist values are an integral part of any responsible public policy agenda. But the pendulum has swung too far.

Environmentalism, which once challenged corporate power, is now its useful puppet. And “climate change,” once a peripheral concern, is now a “climate crisis”—the self-proclaimed unassailable foundation of all environmentalism. Put another way, 60 years ago, environmentalism was a mostly good and courageous movement, but slowly transitioned to the point where today it serves as a front for plutocrats, relying on a big lie to sustain its momentum.

In an illuminating video posted earlier this month, Jordan Peterson interviewed Dr. Richard Lindzen on the topic of climate science. Lindzen, whose credentials are almost ridiculously germane and comprehensive, offered a withering perspective on contemporary environmentalism. He explained that in the 1960s, there was a lot of hunting around for an issue that would give environmentalists power over the energy industry. In the 1960s, environmentalists started tracking atmospheric carbon dioxide and determined it was increasing.

These CO2 measurements, initially begun out of mere scientific curiosity, gave environmentalists the issue they’d been looking for. As Lindzen put it, “If you wanted to control the energy sector, CO2 was the one pollutant that no matter how clean you make it, there will still be CO2. You can’t get rid of that if you burn fossil fuel.”

The essence of environmentalism today is to control and ration the energy supply on which human civilization depends. Since every amenity of civilization uses energy, this control and rationing extends to every human activity. It is a recipe for total control over every individual, every business, and every nation in the world. Which is the point.

It’s easy enough to speculate as to the identity of these ultimate puppeteers who have unleashed this grandiose plot on the world. We were just treated to a host of them flocking to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum. It’s even easier to identify the hidden agenda; power and profit. Micromanage the world, and only the biggest or the most anointed players survive. It’s a gigantic trickle-up economic scheme, robbing the poor and giving to the rich.

Regardless of who pulls the strings behind the scenes, however, the marionettes are in plain sight. The entire state legislature in California, where nearly every “representative” is wholly owned by an alliance of public sector unions and tech billionaires, offers a perfect example. With every regulation, another unionized public bureaucracy is created, and another tech company finds new captive consumers.

The result is a soft fascism, a soul-destroying tyranny masquerading as an enlightened green utopia. California, sprawling across 164,000 square miles, has vast resources of farmland, timber, oil and gas, direct access to ocean fisheries, and valuable mineral resources. With barely 40 million people, the state is sparsely populated compared with most developed nations and should be delivering the most affordable cost of living in the world to its residents. The opposite is true.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftist-naked-bike-rides-and-the-pornographic-imagination/

Years ago, when I was assigned to cover a nudist summer camp in Maryland for a leftist magazine, I braced myself for the unexpected.

In that bright Maryland summer sunlight, I saw unwieldy operation scars, bruises the size of Bulgaria, kneecaps shaped like hard volcanic ash, butts the size of South America, and excess arm skin that recalled the bloated iguanas of Puerto Rico. Stripped humanity up close is often not very pretty, and that’s why clothing (and some modesty) is needed to make it pretty.

As Mae West once observed, “My advice to those who think they have to take off their clothes to be a star is, ‘once you’re boned, what’s left to create the illusion?’ Let ‘em wonder. I never believed in giving them too much of me.”

The motley crew of blue-haired females and often heavily-tattooed cyclists in Philadelphia’s annual Naked Bike Ride makes it plainly obvious that many of the participants can’t quite live up to the ‘naked’ claims of the event. This fact becomes obvious when one notices how many riders opt for some kind of modest body covering, as if driven by a repressed morality that’s at serious odds with the leftist street theater narrative.

Body coverings take many forms — a vest, cape, loin cloth, etc. — but it can also be done by painting your body.  Many of the riders in Philadelphia’s Naked Bike Ride paint their bodies as a way to cover their nakedness; in many ways the body paint acts as a woke version of the Adam and Eve fig leaf.

Paint your naked body all over in colorful configurations and the result, really, is a suit of clothes, the opposite of naked.

The world’s first naked bike ride took place in 2004 in Canada. The philosophy behind riding naked was, and continues to be, to draw attention to anti-fossil fuel causes and as a protest against body-shaming.

Body-shaming  is a leftist concept meaning that one must be blind to the dangers of being overweight and to agree to pretend that massively overweight bodies are just as beautiful as those depicted in Renaissance paintings. To say otherwise is risking being called a heretic.

Naked bike rides are most popular in Left-oriented cities like Chicago, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia.

https://www.thefp.com/p/climate-activism-has-a-cult-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Maybe you saw Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” smeared with two cans of tomato soup. Or the 20-year-old man who set fire to his arm at a tennis tournament, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “End UK Private Jets.” Or the traffic on London’s M25 highway blocked by protesters for days. One 24-year-old girl, Louise, climbed atop a crane on the highway. “I’m here because I don’t have a future,” she exclaimed between sobs.

All these stories feature young members of a movement that claims to fight climate change by demanding their governments stop using and producing fossil fuels immediately.  

Their methods seem unorthodox, and you’re probably wondering how defacing artwork or gluing your hand to the floor of a Volkswagen showroom reduces carbon emissions. I don’t blame you. 

The difference between me and you is I used to be one of them.  

For the past 16 years, I was part of one environmental organization or another as an activist or paid employee. First it was Camp for Climate Action, where we protested a different corporation every year. Once, in a demonstration outside a bank in Edinburgh, we wore garbage bags and painted ourselves in molasses—a nod to the tar sands that the bank was investing in—and stormed the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters, where I was arrested.

I became a mother in 2011, and swore off putting myself in danger, but I doubled down on my commitment to the movement. I wrote a book on ecologically minded parenting. I was the co-editor of a magazine, Juno, on the same subject. I gave talks, made television appearances, and wrote articles about the threat posed by unlivable temperatures that come from our reliance on fossil fuels.