RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/28/new-age-idols-no-not-taylor-swift/

First in a series.

From ancient times, the worship of people or objects other than a Supreme Being was viewed as apostasy, most vividly depicted in the Old Testament by the Golden Calf in Exodus. While idolatry is instigated primarily to control obedient followers, religion has typically had its roots in the notion of deliverance from suffering, salvation, a code of righteous conduct, and a sense of comfort. However, fervent religious belief has also entrenched powerful overlords and been responsible for the persecution and death of millions in the name of holy righteousness. Idolatry and activist religion thus have a great deal in common.

Call it whatever you like, but the United States today is in the grip of several manifestations of a kind of idol worship. This article is the first of a series examining these modern golden calves. We ascribe this disturbing development to educational institutions abandoning a focus on critical thinking and instead nurturing a “clergy” who preach reverence to their conceptual idols. This produces students who lack adequate reasoning skills and instead parrot supposedly enlightened narratives fed to them, much to society’s detriment by crowding out beneficial debate.

The first and most pervasive example of today’s transition from reason to idolatry is the Church of Climate Change. Not only is the U.S. in thrall to this, but most of the West has also genuflected. The cause even has its own Joan of Arc in unhappy, deluded Greta Thunberg. At this point, the theology is centered on the belief that climate change is such an existential near-term threat to humanity that no attempts at mitigation should be off limits, regardless of their futility or collateral damage.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-christmas-electric-grid-emergency-11672091317?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

As temperatures plunged this weekend, Americans in much of the country were told to turn down their thermostats and avoid using large appliances to prevent rolling blackouts. The cascading grid stress came at an awful time but was all too predictable to anyone paying attention.

The interconnected U.S. grid is supposed to be a source of resilience, but the government’s force-fed green energy transition is creating systemic vulnerabilities that politicians don’t want to acknowledge. Utilities and grid operators weren’t prepared for the surge in demand for natural gas and electricity to heat homes, which occurred as gas supply shortages and icy temperatures forced many power plants off-line.

The PJM Interconnection, which provides electricity to 65 million people across 13 eastern states, usually has surplus power that it exports to neighboring grids experiencing shortages, but this time it was caught short. Gas plants in the region couldn’t get enough fuel, which for public-health reasons is prioritized for heating.

Coal and nuclear plants can’t ramp up like gas-fired plants to meet surges in demand, so PJM ordered some businesses to curtail power usage and urged households to do the same through Christmas morning. Rolling blackouts were narrowly averted as some generators switched to burning oil. Americans in the southeast weren’t so lucky.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

Today was a big day on the way to New York’s energy future: Our “Climate Action Council” voted to approve the final “Scoping Plan,” telling us all how we are going to achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 and a zero-emission electricity system by 2040. The press release has the headline “New York State Climate Action Council Finalizes Scoping Plan to Advance Nation-Leading Climate Law.” Here also is a link to the Scoping Plan itself.

Taking a look at the Scoping Plan and its Executive Summary, I find that the two biggest elements in getting to this zero-emissions electricity system are supposedly going to be offshore wind turbines and energy storage. I’ve covered the energy storage issues extensively in other posts. But how about this offshore wind thing? Surely, to commit New York to transitioning to using offshore wind as the primary source of electricity only seven years from now, they must have a very solid game plan for how it is going to happen.

Actually, as with everything else here, they have no idea. As of today, there isn’t a single functioning offshore wind turbine in New York State, nor is there a single offshore wind turbine under construction. The climate cultists on the Climate Action Council think that they can just order this up, and then it will happen.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-perpetually-endangered-polar-bears-are-doing-great/

My daughter loves polar bears. All bears really, but especially polar bears. If it’s white and covered in fur, she’s likely to mistake it for a polar bear. There’s something about bears that kids love. In real life, polar bears are one of the few bears that will prey aggressively on human beings.

And environmentalists love scaring little kids by telling them that all the polar bears are about to die off because people insist on heating their homes and driving to work.

Every December and July brings another edition of the same warmunist nonsense.

Canada’s polar-bear capital Churchill warms too fast for bears – BBC

Churchill embodies the inextricable link between preserving the natural world and fighting global warming. The polar-bear capital of the world is simply getting too warm for polar bears.

As Bjorrn Lomborg recently demonstrated, there are more polar bears than at any time in 60 years.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/16/the-elites-war-on-cars/

No human invention has expanded liberty like the automobile. That’s one of the reasons that the Western ruling class wants to end private ownership of cars. The other reason is just as insidious.

The main theater in the war on cars being waged by the elites is in California – of course. There, Gov. Gavin Newsom, with the support of the unelected state Air Resources Board, has outlawed the sale of new cars that run on fossil fuel. Beginning in 2035, all new automobile sales in the state will have to be powered by batteries.

This is unsustainable for a number of reasons, including the likelihood that there will not be enough energy for all the charging that will be needed, particularly as the state makes a foolish transition to an all-renewables electric grid. EVs are expensive, as well, out of the reach of many.

California has also put its drivers on a “road diet,” a shameleess and “aggressive push to herd as many Californians as possible into mass transit,” and continues to move forward with its “vanity high-speed rail project” that is hopelessly behind schedule, far over budget, and quickly becoming a monument to the state’s can’t-do-won’t-do backward-looking mindset. 

California policymakers have not been shy about trying to “make it easier and faster to build sustainable transportation projects that help get people out of their cars,” even though there has been no upswell of pleas from drivers asking for the government for any such help. Street parking is being reduced, lanes closed and entire streets have been shut down, and fuel tax revenues are routinely diverted to projects with no relation to car travel.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/09/are-we-finally-reaching-peak-climate-hysteria/

The madness of the greens is peaking. This week a leading eco-politician in the UK, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, referred to the building of a new coalmine as a ‘crime against humanity’. Take that in. Once upon a time it was mass murder, extermination, enslavement and the forced deportation of a people that were considered crimes against humanity. Now the building of a mine in Cumbria in north-west England that will create 500 new jobs and produce 2.8million tonnes of coal a year is referred to in such terms. Perhaps the coalmine bosses should be packed off to The Hague. Maybe the men who’ll dig the coal should be forced alongside the likes of ISIS to account for their genocidal behaviour.

We cannot let Ms Lucas’s crazed comments just slide by. We need to reflect on how we arrived at a situation where a mainstream politician, one feted by the media establishment, can liken digging for coal to crimes of extermination. It was in the Guardian – where else? – that Ms Lucas made her feverish claims. On Wednesday, when the government gave the go-ahead to the Cumbria mine, the first new coalmine in Britain for 30 years, Lucas wrote that the whole thing is ‘truly terrible’. This ‘climate-busting, backward-looking coalmine’ is nothing short of a ‘climate crime against humanity’, she said.

It isn’t though, is it? Sorry to be pedantic but it is not a crime to extract coal from the earth. If it were, the leaders of China – where they produce 13million tonnes of coal a day , rather putting into perspective the Cumbria mine’s 2.8million tonnes a year – would be languishing in the clink. I look forward to Ms Lucas performing a citizen’s arrest on Xi Jinping. It certainly is not a crime against humanity. That term entered popular usage during the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. It refers to an act of evil of such enormity that it can be seen as an assault on all of humankind. Earth to Ms Lucas: extracting coal to make steel – what the Cumbria coal will mostly be used for – is not an affront to humankind. I’ll tell you what is an affront, though: speaking about the burning of coal in the same language that is used to refer to the burning of human beings. That, Caroline, is despicable.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/12/12/this_winter_we_will_see_the_dangerous_results_of_climate_alarmism_869598.html

Despite alarmist media claims, there is no evidence that a climate “crisis” looms in our future, let alone imminent danger of a climate catastrophe. Nevertheless, we are now witnessing decisions by the Biden administration and other countries that could endanger lives around the world this winter.

In an effort to reduce GHG emissions, the administration has taken actions resulting in a sharp decline in current and prospective investment in U.S. oil and natural gas production, raising prices for fossil fuels both in the U.S. and globally. This means that U.S. policies alone will cause severe increases in the price of fossil fuels used for heating homes, schools and businesses in Europe and elsewhere, risking serious illness and death for large portions of the world’s population, especially the poor. The Russian cut in deliveries of natural gas to Europe have exacerbated that effect. The New York Times (NYT) recently reported that people were cutting Europe’s forests for firewood because fossil fuels were too costly or unavailable. This reflects the desperation that unnecessary and shortsighted U.S. and European policies have created.

Yet, ignoring this reality and looking for alarming headlines, most daily media reports about climate change repeat the false claim that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) will cause a climate catastrophe in the near future. With this as a foundation, it seems that every policy must be directed to preventing this “disaster.”

A recent article in the NYT, quoting a UN report, could be labelled Exhibit A. Titled “Climate Pledges Fizzle as Havoc Looms for Globe,” the opening paragraph, “Countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pointing the Earth toward a future with more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heatwaves and species extinction,” uncritically accepts the UN’s unfounded alarmism. By ignoring the readily available relevant science summarized below, the NYT and others seem to be trying to scare the public into supporting desperate actions in America and abroad that ostensibly will prevent catastrophic global climate change.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/junk_science_lingers_one_warm_day_cited_as_reason_for_an_imminent_climate_catastrophe.html

The revelations from Twitter might be shocking, but it’s not much different from what the media has been doing for decades — picking and choosing what information to share in an effort to create a desired (leftist) narrative.

Just last week, The Washington Post used one warm day as evidence that mankind’s use of natural resources are causing Alaska to rapidly warm:

At the northern tip of Alaska, the city of Utqiagvik on Monday reached its warmest temperature ever observed between November and March, when the mercury shot up to 40 degrees — 36 degrees above the norm.

Since people pretending to be journalists won’t do research, I will. 

The highest daytime temperature in Utqiagvik in the next 15 days is 3 degrees. Temperatures are normal.

Basically, propagandists cherry picked one warm day to push an agenda that our use of natural resources caused the extra warm day. If the use of coal and oil caused the warm temperatures, they would have stayed elevated instead of immediately returning to normal.

https://quillette.com/2022/12/10/ts-time-the-green-movement-stopped-demonizing-nuclear/

During the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt (also known as COP27), ELLE UK Contributing Editor Aja Barber couldn’t contain her exasperation at news that pro-nuclear-power demonstrators were in attendance.

“They do this every COP,” she tweeted. “It’s mortifying every time! Nuclear power remains an environment[al] justice issue for me because only the poor end up with the plant and the waste within spitting distance of their neighbourhoods.”

Barber also claimed (falsely) that people living near nuclear power plants were suffering from “real unexplained cancers,” and that those who doubted this fact were racist whites who doubted the perspective of “brown and Black people.” (Barber ignored the fact that I’m brown myself.)

As the founder of Emergency Reactor, a UK-based group of pro-nuclear activists concerned about climate change, I felt the need to call Barber out for spreading misinformation. The people I’ve met who live near nuclear power stations are generally happy to have the jobs and other benefits that these facilities bring. Nuclear energy generation doesn’t emit greenhouse gases or any of the smog we commonly associate with fossil-fuel-based power plants. Modern construction and operating methods ensure that nuclear-power facilities are quiet and safe.

Yet to Barber, anyone who makes the case for nuclear power—including me—must be a “lobbyist.” Nicolas Haeringer of the anti-fossil-fuel group 350.org similarly accuses COP activists of being part of “an industrial lobby pretending to be a movement.” It’s as if these anti-nuclear environmentalists will only take others’ concern for the planet at face value if they’ve superglued themselves to a museum, blocked traffic, or spray-painted someone’s business.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

As my last post reported, the Official Party Line from our government holds that we have this “100% Clean Electricity” thing about 90% solved. As the government-funded NREL put it in their August 30, 2022 press release, “[a] growing body of research has demonstrated that cost-effective high-renewable power systems are possible.” But then they admit that that statement does not cover what they call the “last 10% challenge” — providing for the worst seasonal droughts of sun and wind, that result in periods when there is no renewable power to meet around 10% of annual electricity demand. That last 10%, says NREL, will require one or more “technologies that have not yet been deployed at scale.”

But hey, we’ve got 90% of this renewable transition thing solved. How hard could figuring out that last 10% really be?

And on that basis the government has embarked upon forcing the closure of large numbers of power plants that use fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, as well as on suppressing exploration for fossil fuels and other things like pipelines and refineries. After all, if we’re transitioning at least 90% to renewables, we won’t need 90% of the fossil fuel infrastructure any more, will we?

Actually, that’s completely wrong. Until the full solution to the so-called “last 10% challenge” is in place, we need 100% of our fossil fuel backup infrastructure to remain in place, fully maintained, and ready to step in when the wind and sun fail.

Let’s take a brief look at what bridging the last piece of the renewable transition actually looks like.

NREL’s August 2022 Report titled “Examining Supply-Side Options to Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035” lays out several scenarios for supposedly achieving that goal. For all the scenarios, the most important piece is the same: building and deploying lots more wind turbines and solar panels. (The scenarios differ in the degree of deployment of other elements like transmission lines, battery storage, carbon capture technology, and additional nuclear.). As foreseen by NREL, by 2035, total electricity generation capacity in the U.S. has more than tripled, with the large majority of the additions being wind and solar. There is substantial overbuilding of the wind and solar facilities, presumably to provide enough electricity on days of light wind or some clouds, while having large surpluses to discard on days of full wind and sun. Some storage has been provided, but mostly “diurnal” (intra-day) and not seasonal.