RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/climate-change-is-not-an-existential-threat

The Biden administration’s climate change policies have sharply increased oil prices, damaging the domestic economy and increasing the cost of nearly everything consumers buy. By increasing revenues for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, they also made Russia stronger and more dangerous at a critical time, thus damaging national security. It is worth noting that Russia’s invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again this year each happened after an oil price spike.

But worst of all, the Biden administration’s basis for these policies, the claim that global warming presents an “existential threat,” is fraudulent. It is not based on any scientific consensus, and in fact, it ignores evidence of environmental benefits of global warming that offset its harm.

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Studies published in May 2015, July 2021, and August 2021 analyzed millions of deaths in numerous countries over recent decades and found that cooler temperatures kill several times more people than warmer temperatures. “Global warming,” environmental statistician Bjørn Lomborg wrote in September 2021, “now prevents more than 166,000 temperature-related fatalities annually.”

Matt Ridley’s February 2022 essay explained that global warming has increased both agricultural yields and growth of forests, grasslands, and tree leaves.

The facts regarding natural disasters also do not support the “existential threat” claim. The number of hurricanes per year, a 2021 EPA report shows, has not increased since the late 19th century. Moreover, although you wouldn’t know it from the panicky, sensationalized news coverage, the total acreage burnt by forest fires annually has decreased, and most rivers flood less today than they used to.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/ipcc-there-is-no-climate-crisis/

“No climate crisis” is, of course, not the spin the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is putting on its new 3,676-page report released last month. “The choices we make in the next decade will determine our future,” the IPCC says. “Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

It could hardly be plainer. The report is political advocacy barely masquerading as science.

The IPCC Working Group II report is not meant to be about policy; that’s the job of Working Group III, which has yet to produce its contribution to the sixth assessment report. “The focus of our new report is on solutions,” the IPCC says of the Working Group II report. “It highlights the importance of fundamental changes in society.” The solution to climate change, the IPCC claims, is renewable energy, circular economies, healthy diets, universal health coverage and social protection. The only surprise is that the IPCC didn’t include abolishing the Second Amendment in its climate catechism.

“Scientific evidence shows that addressing the risks and impacts of climate change successfully involves a more a diverse set of actors than previously thought” and involves partnerships with “traditionally marginalized groups, including women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, local communities and ethnic minorities (high confidence).” How on earth did the IPCC exclude the LBGTQ+ community? “Different interests, values and worldviews can be reconciled if everyone works together,” the IPCC says. This isn’t science. It’s climate kumbaya.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/03/12/bidens_america-wrecking_climate_agenda_147323.html

President Biden is driving fossil fuel-powered America into a wall so that he can replace it with a “green energy”-powered America. The Biden administration euphemizes this as a “transition.” It is not. It’s just a collision that will result in America being totaled.

Since Joe Biden became president, he has done everything in his power to de-power America. On Day 1, he killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, halted new oil and gas drilling on public lands, and rejoined the Paris climate agreement, which commits America to cutting our greenhouse gas emissions but not China’s.

Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency reinstated Obama-era rules to make it more expensive to produce oil and gas, issued rules to make internal combustion engine-powered cars more expensive, and gave “green” California the unprecedented (and probably unconstitutional) authority to dictate what kind of cars all Americans can drive. Biden has empowered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with the authority to block new oil and gas pipelines on the basis of climate concerns, and is continuing to halt new oil and gas drilling on federal lands in defiance of a federal court order.

These and many other anti-fossil fuel actions have raised gasoline prices roughly one dollar per gallon since Biden took office. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, exacerbating an ongoing global energy crisis (worsened by European climate policies). Gasoline prices have increased another 60 cents since the Ukraine invasion, and are not likely to stop rising any time soon.

Normally in response to such an energy crisis, a U.S. president might at least temporarily put aside an unpopular political agenda to ease supply issues and alleviate pain at the pump. Not Joe Biden. He is doing anything but that. Biden first announced during his State of the Union address that he and other allied nations were going to release 60 million barrels of oil from national strategic petroleum reserves around the world, including 30 million from the United States.

https://www.city-journal.org/states-waging-war-on-fossil-fuels

The war in Ukraine has sent world oil prices soaring and the Biden administration scrambling to find new energy supplies. Even Tesla founder Elon Musk, whose business model is built on supplying Americans with luxury electric-powered vehicles, has said that the United States needs to increase oil and gas production. “Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures,” Musk recently tweeted.

But apparently the times haven’t been extraordinary enough to deter some states from their war on fossil fuels. Governors and legislators in several states are plunging ahead with a pipeline ban, new taxes, and added regulatory oversight—all aimed at raising prices further and weaning Americans off natural gas and oil.

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer is pursuing closure of a major oil and gas pipeline, the Enbridge Line 5, which carries supplies from Western Canada to energy users in five midwestern states. Whitmer says the line, in operation since 1953, would present an environmental problem if it were to rupture in the portion that runs underwater beneath the Straits of Mackinac connecting Lakes Michigan and Huron—though that hasn’t happened in nearly 70 years. To allay fears, the pipeline owner, Enbridge, wants to move it into a tunnel dug below the straits, but Whitmer has decreed instead that the line be shut. A new study estimates that individuals and businesses in the five affected states would spend $23 billion more on energy costs over the next five years if the line closes, on top of any additional energy costs resulting from a sustained war in Ukraine. Hardest hit would be users in Michigan and Ohio, who would each sustain about $2 billion a year in new costs.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/11/gasoline-prices-headed-right-where-the-democrats-want-them/

While running for president, Barack Obama said electricity prices will “necessarily skyrocket” under his energy plan. As gasoline reaches unaffordable heights for many Americans, never forget that the Democratic Party wants to inflict painful energy costs on the country. It’s in its political DNA.

As of Thursday, the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.32, the highest ever recorded in this country. A month ago, it was $3.48. A year ago, about six weeks after Joe Biden took the oath of office, it was $2.82. 

Recent projections that the U.S. average would peak at $4.25 a gallon around Memorial Day weekend now seem quaint. Would anyone be surprised if prices were nearly double that in much of the country before they begin to recede?

Biden has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for soaring prices, and swears his administration is trying to bring down prices. But the truth is, the Democratic Party wants gasoline to be priced as a luxury good, even if it hurts Democratic voters in the middle and lower economic classes:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/on_global_warming_journalists_are_very_consistent_they_never_ask_questions.html

Another week and we get another dire report on the climate from the U.N. and again there is no scientific data showing a direct link between oil use and temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity. What they have are computer models.

Here is what they are putting out now:

UN panel’s grim climate change report: ‘Parts of the planet will become uninhabitable’

Life in some locations on the planet is rapidly reaching the point where it will be too hot for the species that live there to survive, international climate experts said in a report Monday.

“With climate change, some parts of the planet will become uninhabitable,” said German scientist Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of Working Group II for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produced the report released in Berlin.

The report assesses scientific literature documenting the devastating effects of human-caused climate change on society and ecosystems worldwide. 

And, as always, the media just reports these dire reports without asking any questions or doing any research. Five simple questions would be:

Why have your previous predictions been 100% wrong?

Why should we believe these predictions and base policies on these predictions when previous predictions have been completely wrong?

Shouldn’t policies be based on actual scientific data instead of computer models that can easily be manipulated to get the results you want?

Should we ever destroy an industry based on computer models, especially one that has greatly improved the quality and length of life?

Has the UN ever accomplished anything that indicates they have the ability to control the climate?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-only-thing-joe-biden-doesnt-want-made-in-america-is-energy/#slide-1

Look on the bright side: The president is so unpopular that Congress is unlikely to pass any of his green-energy policies.

I n his State of the Union address, among a list of moonshots — curing cancer, stopping drug addiction, and so on — President Joe Biden asked Congress to resuscitate his “environmental justice” agenda, arguing that it is the best way to fight rising energy prices and create jobs.

This isn’t merely fantastical, but suicidal. Even if Americans were willing to retrofit society to accommodate hundreds of thousands of windmills and millions of solar panels, even if we could afford the tens of trillions of dollars necessary to implement such a plan, it would basically end U.S. economic superiority.

And sometimes it seems like this is the goal. Biden’s first act as president was to revoke permits to build the Keystone XL, a now-dead 1,700-mile pipeline from Canada. In the executive order, the president claimed that the pipeline “disserves” our national interest and was inconsistent with Biden’s economic and climate imperatives. A week later, Biden signed a slew of executive orders prioritizing climate change over energy production, stopping new oil and natural-gas leases on all public lands.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/02/reckoning-approaches-obamas-epa-abuses-daniel-greenfield/

The Supreme Court’s willingness to consider West Virginia v. EPA strikes at the original beating heart of the power grab perpetrated by the Obama administration.

The media is vehemently denying that West Virginia v. EPA is still relevant. The Biden administration claims that it has no intention of resurrecting its abuses. Yet in a legal environment and court environment where the abuses of the Obama administration have often been quickly buried, the determination to keep pursuing West Virginia v. EPA is laudable.

And the Left and its enviro-profiteers are understandably worried because West Virginia v. EPA has the potential to bring light into the great darkness of unlimited regulatory power that they have wielded for so long. 

Once the Left got its EPA, the agency has seized unlimited power, asserting control over literarily everything. The manufacture of a global crisis shifted the terms from real pollution issues in identifiable bodies of water to the power to regulate and control every single shred of human activity in the United States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerrys-ukraine-emissions-climate-russia-vladimir-putin-11645736997?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned in an interview this week about “massive emissions consequences” from a Russian war against Ukraine, which he also said would be a distraction from work on climate change. Nevertheless, he added, “I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.”

What’s overheated here is Mr. Kerry’s brain. His comments came before Vladimir Putin began Thursday’s massive assault on Ukraine. But the BBC says the interview was taped this week, and the alarms about Mr. Putin’s impending attack have been ringing loudly. Mr. Kerry was running Foggy Bottom in 2014 when Mr. Putin invaded Crimea. How has he failed to internalize that Mr. Putin is a bad actor motivated by power and Russian revanchism?

Mr. Kerry told the BBC that he hopes Mr. Putin realizes Northern Russia is thawing, “and his infrastructure is at risk, and the people of Russia are at risk.” We’ll wait until you stop laughing. Mr. Putin deserves to be made a pariah. Western leaders like Mr. Kerry shouldn’t be wondering whether a polite tea in Moscow might induce him to slightly lower next year’s oil production when he can enrich the Kremlin by selling it for $100 a barrel.

Mr. Kerry’s defenders—assuming they exist—might say he’s merely fulfilling his role as President Biden’s climate envoy. And Mr. Kerry did express to the BBC his concerns about “the people of Ukraine,” as well as the principle of using force to alter boundaries.

But Mr. Kerry’s comments aren’t a gaffe. They reveal the Biden Administration’s obsession with climate, and with punishing fossil-fuel production, which has made the U.S. and Europe vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s energy blackmail. The climate lobby has made Mr. Putin more powerful. Every time Mr. Kerry visits Moscow, the boys in the Kremlin must think it’s Christmas.