RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=f26d0984d8

As mentioned in my recent post from July 20, there are many data points gradually accumulating as to the lack of progress toward the so-called “green” economy. It has long been clear to people who think about it that the energy transition to “net zero” is a fantasy that will not occur. But the question remains of exactly how the mania will come to an end. Will the net zero fantasies of the climate cultists proceed at full speed until they crash into a wall of physical reality (e.g., blackouts)? Or instead will these fantasies gradually retreat as governments respond to voter pressure over costs and convenience, and as investors pull back as it becomes clear that projects cannot succeed financially?

A July 30 piece from John Miltimore of the American Institute for Economic Research supports the second alternative. The title is “Why the ‘Green Economy’ Is Suddenly in Retreat—in EU, US, and on Wall Street.” Meanwhile New York, at least for the moment, remains hell-bent on moving toward a full-on crash.

Miltimore’s piece collects data from multiple sources — notably the recent EU elections, EU regulatory changes, and actions of major U.S. investors. The most significant item in the piece relates to the withdrawal of several of the largest U.S. fund managers from something called Climate Action 100+. Climate Action 100+ describes itself as “an investor-led initiative to ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take appropriate action on climate change in order to mitigate financial risk and to maximize the long-term value of assets.” But it seems that in recent months some of the biggest investors have decided to change strategy. J.P. Morgan Chase and State Street have “pulled all funds” from Climate Action 100+ commitments, while their even larger colleague Black Rock “reduced its holdings and scaled back its ties to the group.” Miltimore cites a New York Times article from February quantifying the various withdrawals: “All told, the moves amount to a nearly $14 trillion exit from an organization meant to marshal Wall Street’s clout to expand the climate agenda.” $14 trillion is a big number in anybody’s book.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/26/never-underestimate-joes-ability-to-foul-things-up/

He just poured billions into climate grants that have no reason to exist.

Not long after the global temperature, which doesn’t actually exist in any statistically meaningful way, blew through the mark at which we are supposed to start burning, and days after a new paper showed that the global warming narrative is exactly backward, the Biden administration awarded $4.3 billion in climate grants. It’s the work of an incompetent.

As well as that of an ideologue, which is equally as dangerous, since ideologues tend to refuse to listen to reason.

In 2020, when Joe Biden was running for office, he was thoroughly sullied when Barack Obama, his boss of eight years, said “​​don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.” Over his three years and six months as president, Joe has amply demonstrated that Obama was correct. And he did it again this week, when his Environmental Protection Agency announced its “selected recipients of over $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants to implement community-driven solutions that tackle the climate crisis, reduce air pollution, advance environmental justice, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition.”

We predict the funds will do none of those things. The entire “initiative is just one small piece of the vast economic waste of the falsely named Inflation Reduction Act, with its multi-trillion dollars of subsidies for uneconomic projects,” says blogger Manhattan Contrarian, who incisively likens it to Mao’s “Great Leap Foward.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/the-biden-harris-green-crown-jewel-just-shattered-literally/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=header&utm_content=popular&utm_term=fifth

Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been enthusiastic about the kind of wind-power project that just failed catastrophically in the Northeast.

A major offshore-wind-power project approved by the Biden-Harris administration was shuttered last week after a turbine dramatically shattered, spewing sharp fiberglass shards onto nearby beaches and into the Atlantic Ocean.

Lifeguards now patrol the beaches in full body personal protective equipment and thick gloves while participating in cleanup to protect from the severe dangers of shattered fiberglass shards, which can cause serious health problems. Six beaches in Nantucket, Mass., and the surrounding area are closed because of the risks involved in cleanup. Dangerous shards of the turbine from Vineyard Wind are still washing up on the beach. The turbines were about 13 nautical miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and were part of the country’s second-largest offshore wind farm.

The controversial offshore wind turbines were approved in 2021 after the Biden-Harris administration aggressively pushed them as a solution to global warming. Many more turbines are on the way. Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, told National Review that the Biden-Harris administration claimed this project was a “major milestone,” leading to “rapid fire” development. “There’s nine leases within the Rhode Island-Massachusetts area alone,” Brady said.

The Biden-Harris administration rushed the approval due to blind faith in wind power’s superiority. Kamala Harris in particular has been adamant about wind energy’s safety.

“America is at the start of a historic transition away from fossil fuel plants that pollute our communities and toward cleaner and safer energy sources,” Harris once claimed [emphasis added].

The turbine operator allegedly took two days to notify nearby towns of the disaster, directly violating agreements between the wind operator and the town.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/07/the-road-to-climate-atheism/

The Hon. John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007

I have customarily invoked the word agnostic to describe someone who is uncertain about whether God exists, and the word atheist to someone who denies any such existence. In contemporary times, as the use of the two descriptions has broadened to more than labels about religious belief, I have embraced that trend.

Thus, on the issue of climate change I have described myself as being an agnostic with growing temptations to becoming an atheist. My walk along the road to atheism has gathered pace. The bullying and dismissive tactics of the climate alarmists have played no small part in this process.

The overwhelming bulk of commentators, scientists and others who assert a special understanding of the subject sweep aside dissent with dismissive descriptions such as “denier”. There is mounting impatience with any who dare to challenge what has clearly become the conventional wisdom. Use of the term “denier” is particularly pernicious. For decades that term has been normally understood to describe someone who asserted that the Holocaust has been either grossly exaggerated or, even worse, never occurred.

Academics and others who dare to question the majority view are brutally told that the science has been settled. A growing number have either lost their jobs, been denied promotion, or been subjected to constant harassment and ridicule. Time-honoured notions such as freedom of inquiry and the need to regularly question seemingly settled assumptions have gone by the board.

Climate change zealotry now manifests itself in growing numbers of demonstrations which interrupt citizens going about their lawful business. We are regularly told that we face an existential crisis. Indeed, just about everything in our society is now at a “crisis” point. In the process, we are rapidly losing a sense of proportion. 

If ever an issue in mankind’s existence required rational analysis and cool heads it is climate change.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/07/they_shrieked_about_global_warming_but_now_they_admit_we_were_accidentally_cooling.html

When it comes to climate science, basically, researchers, mainstream media outlets, the UN, and the Democrats simply make things up as they go along to fit the narrative. 

When the earth didn’t warm up as much as they predicted, they changed the terminology from global warming to climate change.

When hundreds of dire predictions never came true, and they had no scientific data to support their policies to destroy industries and our quality and way of life, they just made things up, just like they did with COVID.

Now, take a look at this, from The Washington Post, via Yahoo News:

We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop

It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming – it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/latest-effort-to-ban-plastic-bags-also-doomed-to-fail/

California’s long statewide nightmare might soon be over. The current generation of plastic bags are in line to be banned just as their predecessors were.

Ten years after Sacramento outlawed single-use plastic bags (with the help of a majority of voters two years later in a referendum), legislators have approved a ban on the multi-use bags that took their place, with each chamber passing a bill that, in identical language, prohibits “a reusable grocery bag sold by a store to a customer at the point of sale” from being “made from plastic film material.”

Stores would be allowed to provide customers who forget to bring their reusable bags – and those who refuse on principle to use them – with paper sacks. But they will have to be, beginning on Jan. 1, 2028, made “from a minimum of 50% postconsumer recycled materials.” The paper bags will have to cost at least 10 cents each.

Neither bill is law yet. But the ban will be in effect after the formalities of the legislative process are completed.

Sen. Catherine Blakespear, the Encinitas Democrat who authored Senate Bill 1053, said the state’s “original ban on plastic bags hasn’t worked out as planned, and sadly, the state’s plastic bag waste has increased dramatically since it went into effect.”

Maybe the volume “increased dramatically” because the thin single-use bags were replaced by heavier multi-use bags, which are at least four times thicker.

“The amount of plastic bag waste discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years following the law’s implementation to the highest level on record – proving the ban ineffective at reducing the total amount of plastic waste,” says a report compiled by multiple organizations, one of them the Naderite U.S. Public Interest Group.

Nevertheless, Blakespear said “we need to do better,” because “shockingly, some 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year from coastal regions alone. California must do its part to eliminate this scourge that is contaminating our environment.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/viv_forbes.html

How low Australia has fallen — our once-great BHP now has a “Vice President for Climate,” the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: “No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear” while Our ABC, Our CSIRO and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy plus a bit of standby gas, heaps of batteries, and new power lines can power our homes, industries, and the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards.

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions — the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

Magical things are also expected from more rooftop solar. AEMO says we need to quadruple rooftop solar by 2050. But panel-power has four huge problems:

Zero solar energy is generated to meet peak demand at breakfast and dinner times.

Piddling solar power is produced from many poorly oriented roof panels or from the weak sunshine anywhere south of Sydney.
If too much solar energy pours into the network (say at noon on a quiet sunny Sunday), the grid becomes unstable. Our green engineers have the solution — be ready to charge people for unwanted power they export to the grid, or just use “smart meters” to turn them off.
More rooftop solar means less income and more instability for power utilities so they have to raise electricity charges. This cost falls heaviest on those with no solar panels, or no homes.

Magical things are also expected from batteries.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-25-this-energy-transition-thing-really-is-not-happening

From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.

For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”

Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.

But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.

That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story. Several years ago I discovered an annual book of energy data called the Statistical Review of World Energy. At the time, the Statistical Review was produced by the international oil company BP. I first covered one of these Reviews in this post from July 2019. A couple of years ago BP apparently decided to get out of this business, and turned the product over to something called the Energy Institute. EI then produced a Statistical Review in June 2023 (covering 2022), and now is just out on June 20, 2024 with a Statistical Review covering 2023.