RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-west-is-on-the-road-to-energy-ruin/

Since the beginning of the Ukraine war and the sanctions it triggered, energy prices have skyrocketed. President Joe Biden has called this year’s high energy prices “Putin’s price hike.” British prime minister Liz Truss told households that their high energy bills were a fair price to pay for solidarity with Ukraine. Margrethe Vestager, vice president of the European Commission, has encouraged Europeans to take short, cold showers to conserve energy. “When you turn off the water, say ‘Take that, Putin!’” she urged.

But are the high prices really Putin’s fault? He didn’t sanction himself, after all. It’s the West that chose to cut itself off from the Russian fossil fuels upon which it had come to rely. Moreover, the sanctions have failed — Russia’s corporate profits leapt 25 percent between the imposition of the sanctions and the end of August.

So what are the origins of the current energy crisis? When did it really begin?

Let’s play a game. Guess which year these headlines are from: “Curtailed ammonia production in Antwerp and Ludwigshafen.” “High natural gas prices lead to a shutdown of British fertilizer plants.” “Diesel Shortage Amid Soaring Prices: Truck Stops Resort To Rationing.” If you guessed 2022, you’d be wrong. Those are all from September 2021.

The truth is that the energy crisis began to take effect late last year. A combination of post-Covid demand rebound, a wind drought in Europe and depleted fossil fuel storage on the continent all collided to put serious pressure on the world’s industrial systems. Add the longstanding overinvestment in unreliable renewables, nuclear plant closures across the world in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and a global drop of more than 50 percent in oil and gas investment — from $700 billion to $300 billion — between 2014 and last year, and you have everything you need to kick off a global energy crunch. Russian tank treads running from the Donbas to Kyiv just made it all worse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/hurricane_ian_reveals_another_problem_with_electric_vehicles_they_explode_after_hurricanes.html

Joe Biden and all his minions have allowed gas prices to go sky high in a fanatic quest to force Americans into electric vehicles.

One problem: They tend to explode after hurricanes.

That’s what Fox News found, citing warnings from local authorities about this latest health hazard from the purveyors of those who vow to make America “go green”:

A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state’s top financial officer and fire marshal. 

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis tweeted Thursday. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”

Which isn’t much of an enticement to purchase an electric car. How many gas-powered vehicles put on that kind of a show after a hurricane?

It goes to show more of the unintended consequences on the road to green Utopia — and why it’s impractical to force such changes without ever considering all the things a consumer might consider. Being able to get out of a disaster zone in a hurry is pretty important to a lot of people who buy cars.

https://www.city-journal.org/cities-hire-chief-heat-officers-to-address-climate-concerns

As the size and scope of government in America grows, cities are rapidly inventing new job titles. Recent examples: the algorithms management and policy officer, the director of digital equity, and the building decarbonization incentives manager—all real jobs. Now add to that list what is likely to be the hottest (pun intended) new job title at city hall: chief heat officer (CHO), also variously known as the extreme-weather coordinator or chief weather-resilience officer. If you’re surprised by these seemingly ludicrous titles, you haven’t been paying attention to the extent to which mainstream media run alarmist stories of soaring temperatures and their impact on urban life. They’ve helped turn the CHO, a job barely a year old, into a new staple of local government. These newly minted bureaucrats will make it their business to enumerate the impact of heat on the local population—an effect certain to increase now that government is counting it—and seek ways to mitigate it.

One phrase that you’re unlikely to hear much from these new bureaucrats: “air conditioning.” Warm-weather-related deaths dropped precipitously over the last century around much of the industrialized world largely because what we fondly term AC became widely available. But air conditioning demands electricity, most often powered by fossil fuels or nuclear energy, two increasingly unseemly phrases within government circles in places like California, where cities are rushing to hire CHOs. So instead, it seems, the job of these new bureaucrats will be to find carbon-neutral solutions to summer in the city.

The rise of the CHO has just reached a notable milestone: heat officers from cities around the world recently gathered for an Extreme Heat Resilience Conference in Washington, D.C.—a place that, before the invention of air conditioning, was so uncomfortable in the summer that British diplomats assigned there could draw tropical-assignment bonus pay. Much on the minds of the CHOs assembled in Washington was a new alarmist report on the impact of heat on cities, which begins, “The world is burning. Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration.” (Actually, it is.) Consumed by the report’s warnings, CHOs plan a series of initiatives, one of which revolves around a popular new phrase in urbanism: “tree canopy,” referring to how much tree shade exists in a neighborhood. CHOs are looking to expand their cities’ tree canopies, though they will have to do so judiciously—studies show that tree shade is not evenly distributed in many municipalities, where poorer neighborhoods have apparently been shortchanged. In fact, Syracuse is spending $2 million in federal grant money to survey its tree canopy and increase natural shade in underserved neighborhoods, with the apparent intent of righting past shading wrongs.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-5-a-comprehensive-roundup-of-official-energy-madness

“Meanwhile, the Biden people have spent the last several days begging OPEC for more production, only to have OPEC announce that it is cutting production instead. And this morning, the Wall Street Journal reports that Biden is planning loosening sanctions on Venezuela to permit the importation of more crude from there. If our country were in the hands of its worst enemies, it is hard to imagine what they would do differently.”

At this website, I try to give readers a steady flow of the latest instances of official energy madness, the ongoing efforts of our politicians, bureaucrats, academics and journalists to undermine and destroy the energy infrastructure that is the basis for our prosperity and our comfortable lives. But if you just read these examples one by one, however outrageous they may be individually, you can lose track of the overall picture. In the big picture, our government, aided and abetted by academics and journalists, is conducting a full scale war on the energy sector of the economy.

Now comes along a guy named Joseph Toomey, who has published a relatively long piece at RealClearEnergy with the title “Energy Inflation Was By Design.” Toomey is identified as a “career management consultant” in the energy field, and author of a 2014 book with the title “An Unworthy Future,” that critiqued the Obama administration’s energy policies. Other than that, Toomey has not been a regular contributor to the energy policy debates. But he makes up for an extended absence with this comprehensive roundup.

At 35 pages in length, Toomey’s piece is a seemingly endless litany of one intentionally destructive policy after another. Even if you follow this issue regularly, as I do, you can’t help but be astounded when you see the full extent of the destruction organized into one piece. An energy infrastructure built up over a century and more that actually provides reliable and affordable energy to millions of people — a true miracle of human ingenuity! — is being systematically and intentionally attacked and wrecked by ignorant fools who have no idea how difficult the existing system was to create, and equally have no idea how to make something to replace it that might actually work.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-censorship-campaign-big-tech-social-media-environmental-groups-letter-elon-musk-twitter-11665006072?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Elon Musk said this week he’ll buy Twitter after all, and the hopeful view for online speech is that his rockets-and-flamethrowers heterodoxy might be an answer for what ails social media. He won’t have it easy. On Tuesday more than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.”

What the letter asks for sounds modest, but the implication is clear. The Digital Services Act recently enacted by the European Union includes transparency rules, and the green groups want Silicon Valley “to commit to including climate disinformation as a separately-acknowledged category in its reporting and content moderation policies in and outside of the EU.” Then they could proceed to complain that the tech giants aren’t doing enough censoring.

The letter was directed to Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. At least the public can read it. How much of this lobbying goes on behind the scenes?

“We partnered with Google,” Melissa Fleming, the communications undersecretary for the United Nations, told a panel last month. “If you Google ‘climate change,’ at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.”

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/10/03/joe_bidens_energy_crisis_856943.html

The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses—the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion. The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply. In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in his powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that. As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own EPA tried to strangle at birth.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/04/the-globalist-climate-agenda-is-a-crime-against-humanity/

“This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash, is incredibly dangerous for the world.”
— Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative

It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably one of the most inverted takes on what is “dangerous” in the history of civilization. Not because anyone is against the concept of sustainability, but because sustainability as defined by Alan Jope is incredibly unsustainable. If he gets his way, he will destroy the world.

Jope, Clinton, the infamous Karl Schwab who heads the World Economic Forum, the ESG movement informally headed by Larry Fink of BlackRock (with over $10 trillion in investments), and all the rest who champion today’s prevailing globalist climate agenda are coercing nearly 8 billion people into an era of poverty and servitude.

The primary target of the “sustainability” movement is fossil fuel, the burning of which allegedly is causing catastrophic climate change. Heedless of the fact that fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors throughout the Western world are using ESG criteria (environment, social, governance), to deny the financing necessary to maintain or build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s working. Pressure from governments, international NGOs, and global finance is now delivering unprecedented shifts in policies around the world, creating needless scarcity and turmoil. In just the last month, new emissions rules have triggered protests by farmers in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in the process of earning a near perfect ESG score, lost its ability to feed its people. In the ensuing fury, the president was forced to flee the country. Undaunted, globalist climate activists are discouraging African nations from developing natural gas.

It should be easy to see the hidden agenda behind this repression. If you control energy and food, you control the world. The biggest multinational corporations on Earth are empowered by ESG mandates, because marginal or emerging competitors lack the financial resiliency to comply. From small independent private farmers and ranchers to small independent nations, once their ability to produce is broken, the big players pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not what you read in the Washington Post.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/never-let-a-devastating-natural-disaster-go-to-waste/

Be prepared for Democrats to exploit the devastation of Hurricane Ian to peddle de-modernization. And because there is no conclusive way for anyone to prove that global warming isn’t triggering every natural disaster — and because nature offers a continuous flow of these terrifying events and always will — the exploitation will never stop.

The effort began in earnest after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 hurricane that devastated an unprepared New Orleans. There was Al Gore, with his grade-school “science” charts and cartoonish satellite images (water, the color of fire!), emotionally manipulating audiences with images of destruction and suffering. The problem was that “An Inconvenient Truth” suggested — among numerous other dire predictions that would never come to pass — that climate change had not only caused Katrina, despite negligible warming, but that it portended the dawn of an age of shocking and intense hurricanes.

After 2005, Florida didn’t get hit with another hurricane until 2016 and Louisiana didn’t see a major one until 2020 (also the fault of climate change.) It is debatable that storms that do make landfall do so with more intensity or that Category 3-plus hurricanes are increasing. Overall, the frequency of hurricanes has slightly declined since 1900. From 1851-1860, 19 hurricanes made landfall in the United States. From 2011-2020, 19 hurricanes made landfall in the United States. The average per decade between 1860-2011 is about 18. In the decade of 1941-1950, 10 major hurricanes hit the United States.

“Hurricane Ian gets nasty quickly, turbocharged by warm water,” explains the Associated Press, which has been true since the first hurricane formed. More “climate havoc,” says The New York Times, as Ian threatens to hit the same exact places that storms have always hit. Today’s media simply can’t report on any flood or tornado or hurricane or brain-eating amoeba without making it about their favorite policy hobby horse. It just feels like things are worse, you know?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/04/the-climate-crisis-of-536-ad/

Earth’s climate is always changing. But despite the warming hysterics’ wild claims, it’s not changing at an alarming rate. Remember, when they cite United Nations reports warning of soaring temperatures and rising sea levels, the projections cover many decades, not just a few years. Of course there was a moment when the climate did change rapidly. It was so long ago, though, none of us can remember it.

Yet it happened. Many centuries before the first oil well was drilled. Almost 1,500 years ago. 

The foundation of the global warming obsession on the left is largely based on U.N. predictions that assign significant but unrealistic increases in global temperatures and sea level due to increasing levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.

For instance, the U.N. has said the global temperature could increase over a range from 4.5 degrees Celsius to 6 degrees Celsius some time between 2081 to 2100. It has also said sea levels could rise 2 meters by 2100. Neither is possible, says H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Heartland Institute’s climate and environment center. Both would require us “to burn every molecule of fossil fuel and more” than can be found on Earth.

Not only are these worst-case-scenario estimates that will never unfold, the disasters predicted are far into the future, meaning the numbers so easily tossed around are useful for only one thing: scaring the public and ramming through expensive and worthless green legislation.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-2-without-a-demonstration-project-or-feasibility-study

Essentially the entire developed part of the world is currently embarked on a crash program to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy system of the economy. The program has two main parts: first the suppression of the production and distribution of fossil fuels; and second the construction of large numbers of wind and solar generation facilities to replace them. Both parts of the program are currently underway simultaneously in all advanced countries, as a matter of what we are told is the highest moral urgency.

But will the coming fossil-fuel-free system actually work to provide the energy we need to run our modern economies? There are very substantial reasons to think that big problems are inevitable, the main one being that wind and solar generators don’t produce anything most of the time, and can’t be ramped up on demand at a time of need.

So surely, there must be multiple small to medium-scale demonstration projects around the world showing exactly how this fossil-fuel-free future system can be accomplished, and how much it will cost.

Actually, and incredibly, no. There is no such thing anywhere in the world as a functioning demonstration project that provides full energy to an economy of any size without reliance on fossil fuels, and using only carbon-emissions-free sources like wind, solar, hydro and/or storage. There isn’t even a demonstration project that supplies just the electricity sector of any economy (typically about 25-35% of final energy usage) with the energy it needs free of fossil fuels. Indeed, there isn’t anything remotely close.

It is very instructive to compare how important technological advances happen in the real world to how the advance to a fossil-fuel-free future energy system is supposed to occur in the fantasy world of the climate cult.