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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

It Pays To Be ‘Green’ – If You’re A Wall Street Fat Cat, That Is Craig Rucker

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/16/it-pays-to-be-green-if-youre-a-wall-street-fat-cat-that-is/

America’s business community has always liked the color “green.” Traditionally, it was about earning U.S. dollars.  Today, it’s about brandishing a woke environmental image.

Perhaps nothing showcases this better than the trend toward “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) investments by those on Wall Street.  Particularly attractive to millennials, the pitch for investing in ESG’s is to not just “make money,” but “make the world a better place” while doing it.

A noble-sounding idea?  Perhaps.  But as Rupert Darwall points out in a newly released study “Capitalism, Socialism and ESG,” there’s more to this racket than meets the eye.

That notion of a “better” world from ESG investments applies only if you agree with progressive climate and social agendas. For those who identify as anything other than “liberal,” backing investment strategies to kill fracking jobs, attack red meat, and help promote a Green New Deal economy may prove a bit hard to swallow.

What about all that money to be made? Turns out it is less for your portfolio and more for the bottom line of Wall Street companies.

For example, BlackRock charges 46 cents annually for every $100 invested in its iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, while it charges just 4 cents for iShares linked to the S&P 500 in comparison.

It pays to be woke – if you’re a Wall Street fat cat, that is.

As for average Joe investors buying into these ESG stocks, their bottom lines aren’t as lucky.

The More Alarmists Talk, The More We Know Global Warming Is A Scam

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/08/the-more-alarmists-talk-the-more-we-know-global-warming-is-a-scam/

It’s said that conspiracies can’t remain secret forever because someone eventually talks. This is certainly true of the global warming swindle. The climate fanatics have a habit of regularly revealing that they’re running a racket.

The most recent example occurred last month during a “Critical Climate Moment?” segment on CBS that featured its global warming “expert.” When asked why an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius in global temperature has been determined to be a tipping point, the network’s “climate specialist” admitted it’s a “symbolic” figure. 

“Because, I mean, humans chose it, we chose 1.5, we chose 2 degrees,” said meteorologist Jeff Berardelli, whose entire on-camera spiel was an exercise in fearmongering based on speculation.

So there it is. A number pulled out of the ether. No (real) science behind it. A benchmark used to do nothing more than frighten the public – a Menckenian hobgoblin.

It’s almost routine for the alarmists to give up the game. We’ve seen them inadvertently admit that the objective of the global warming scare is an opportunity to:

Abolish capitalism, “change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” and install a command-and-control economy. 
Change our political system.
Redistribute wealth.
“Build a better world” that will surely be based on economic and social central planning.
“Bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development.”
Pursue personal and religious ambitions – at the expense of others.

California May Be Crazy In Its “Climate” Initiatives, But New York Wants To Be Even Crazier Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-6-3-california-may-be-crazy-in-its-climate-initiatives-but-new-york-wants-to-be-even-crazier

In the competition among the states to establish progressive and “woke” bona fides, California and New York run neck and neck for the lead positions. In no field is this more true than in the area of “climate change,” which as progressive public policy turns into a program to drive up the cost of energy, suppress fossil fuels and anything else that works (nuclear), and demand creation of a new fantasy energy system based on the wind and the sun.

In recent years, California has seemed to pull well ahead of New York in the accumulation of climate virtue. California has had a so-called “renewable portfolio standard” for its generation of electricity since way back in 2002, and has been aggressively building wind and solar generation facilities ever since. In 2018, thinking that the way to achieving lower carbon emissions is to cover the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, California upped its game with a bill known as SB 100, having the official title “The 100 Percent Clean Energy Act of 2018.” Among other things, SB 100 called for a 100% carbon-emissions-free electricity sector by 2045. As reported here a few weeks ago, in March the California energy regulatory agencies jointly came out with plans to reach the 100% by 2045 goal. Meanwhile, the California Energy Commission reports that in 2020 California achieved a level of 36% of its electricity generation from renewables.

So are we here in New York just going to stand around and let our butts get kicked by these upstarts? No! But we have some serious catching up to do. New York wasn’t nearly so ambitious as California in building wind and solar facilities in the first two decades of the 21st century. By 2019 New York got some 29% of its electricity from “renewable” sources. But the large majority of that came from the gigantic hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls, which somehow is seen by environmental moralists as lacking in climate virtue; and in any event there isn’t another Niagara Falls waiting to have a big hydro plant attached. Time to get serious! So in July 2019 New York enacted something called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), our own version of California’s SB 100.

The Dirty Secret of ‘Clean’ Energy By Helen Raleigh

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-dirty-secret-of-clean-energy/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

Many solar-energy panels and components from China, the world’s largest supplier, are built with forced labor.

President Biden pledged to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. An estimate shows that to reach this ambitious goal, at least half of the U.S. power supply would have to come from clean energy such as solar and wind. However, one dirty secret that President Biden and his green allies don’t want to talk about is how “clean” solar energy is largely built on forced labor in Xinjiang, China, according to a new investigative report by U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University.

China dominates the global supply chain for solar power and is the leading exporter of solar panels and critical components for making solar panels. For instance, about 95 percent of solar modules rely on one mineral — solar-grade polysilicon, and China produces 80 percent of the world supply of polysilicon. Xinjiang alone is responsible for 45 percent of the world’s supply of polysilicon. Such a high level of production requires a significant supply of labor.

The Sheffield Hallam University report, titled “In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labor and Global Solar Supply Chains,” shows how China’s booming solar industry has been tainted by the forced labor of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

For example, U.K. researchers located an official Chinese government paper published in 2020 that acknowledged that the government had placed about 2.6 million minorities in farms and factories within Xinjiang and across China through state-sponsored “surplus labor” and “labor transfer” programs. Many minorities in these programs ended up working for Xinjiang’s growing solar industry. However, the Chinese government claims these labor-transfer programs comply with China’s laws and regulations, and workers’ participation in these programs is voluntary.

US energy policy and the pursuit of failure…again By Peter Z. Grossman

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/556003-us-energy-policy-and-the-pursuit-of-failureagain

We’ve been here before.  

The development of the Biden administration’s energy and climate policies is following a path set by the energy policies of the 1970s. That is not a good model to follow. Failure followed failure. Essentially U.S. energy policy has been created by a four-step process: 

First, an energy crisis is declared. Presidents and legislators feel the pressure to “do something.” 

Second, policy proposals that supposedly will provide a solution are announced. 

Third, assuming the sense of crisis lingers, extreme measures are passed in Congress or initiated by executive action, or both. 

Fourth, the measures prove ineffective and, although billions are spent, the measures are either repealed or just forgotten. In the meantime, market forces end the “crisis.” 

Presidents Nixon and Ford went through steps one and two. The Arab oil embargo and the subsequent gasoline shortages made it necessary for officials to offer radical ideas. But the end of the lines at gas stations and the fall in oil prices meant the end of the sense of crisis. That made officials reluctant to pursue the radical measures that had been proposed.  

It took the energy crisis of 1979-80 to follow the path to its conclusion. The return of gasoline shortages and sky-high energy prices induced President Carter to devise a comprehensive energy plan.  

Carter and his energy secretary believed that the U.S. and most of rest of the world were rapidly running out of oil and natural gas. All remaining oil and the wealth it entailed would go to the oil exporters (especially the hated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC), while we shivered in the dark.  

So drastic measures were needed. Carter’s policies, if enacted, were supposed to make the U.S. energy independent, but would have other virtues including protecting the American way of life. 

The major component of this plan was to replace two million barrels a day of oil imports with a substitute derived from processing American coal. These “synfuels” would cost $88 billion (inflation-adjusted $320 billion), a number then-Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger later admitted “came from nowhere.” Moreover, five different agencies of the government said that the synfuels goal wasn’t feasible.   

As distress at the pump (especially rising prices) continued, Congress passed most of Carter’s plan, including the creation of the Synfuels Corporation.  

Biden administration suspends oil and gas leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Juliet Eilperin, Josh Partlow

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration-to-cancel-oil-and-gas-leases-in-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge/ar-AAKBBzA

The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, targeting one of President Donald Trump’s most significant environmental acts during his last days in office.

The move by the Interior Department, which could spark a major legal battle, dims the prospect of oil drilling in a pristine and politically charged expanse of Alaskan wilderness that Republicans and Democrats have fought over for four decades. The Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears — just two weeks before President Biden was inaugurated.

Now the Biden administration is taking steps to block those leases, citing problems with the environmental review process. In Tuesday’s Interior Department order, Secretary Deb Haaland said that a review of the Trump administration’s leasing program in the wildlife refuge found “multiple legal deficiencies” including “insufficient analysis” required by environmental laws and a failure to assess other alternatives. Haaland’s order calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to those leases in order to conduct “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.”

The step, coming just days after the Justice Department defended another drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, underscores the balancing act the new administration aims to strike as it slows fossil fuel development on public lands. While Biden has paused new federal oil and gas leasing and pledged to drastically cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, he has taken a much more cautious approach toward most oil and gas operations approved under his predecessor.

Those Dirty Electric Vehicles And A Bolt Of Green Hypocrisy

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/26/those-dirty-electric-vehicles-and-green-hypocrisy/

There is much more to the electric vehicle story than the “EVs good, gasoline- and diesel-powered automobiles bad” narrative we’ve been fed. Truth in advertising would require electric cars to be shown surrounded by the Pig Pen-esque dirty cloud that they kick up.

The birthplace of most electric cars is the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country where the diamond trade has helped finance civil war. There, reports the Deseret News, “slave labor” is feeding “big tech’s quest for cobalt,” an element used in the batteries that drive EVs.

“Our children are dying like dogs,” a Congolese mother whose son and cousin died while working in the Congo’s cobalt mines, says the Deseret News. She and others have filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court that “insists companies are simply turning a blind eye to the egregious abuses that include children killed in tunnel collapses or losing limbs or suffering from other horrific injuries caused by mining accidents.”

The United Nations says that “nearly 50% of world cobalt reserves” are found in the Congo. The Deseret News says the figure is more than 60%. But it’s not the only element needed to build “green” batteries. They require lithium, natural graphite, and manganese, raw materials that are “highly concentrated,” according to the U.N., “in a few countries.”

Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom by Dr. Patrick Moore

Here is Dr. Patrick Moore’s description of his unique thesis as presented in “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom”.

“It dawned on me one day that most of the scare stories in the media today are based on things that are either invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or very remote, like polar bears and coral reefs. Thus, the average person cannot observe and verify the truth of these claims for themselves. They must rely on activists, the media, politicians, and scientists – all of whom have a huge financial and/or political interest in the subject – to tell them the truth. This is my effort, after 50 years as a scientist and environmental activist, to expose the misinformation and outright lies used to scare us and our children about the future of the Earth. Direct observation is the very basis of science. Without verified observation it is not possible to know the truth. That is the sharp focus of this book.”

The book contains 98 color photographs, illustrations, and charts. A key target audience is parents who do not approve of the “progressive” school curriculum and its alarmism about the future of civilization and the natural world. Dr. Moore hopes these parents will read his book and pass it on to their high-school and older children to give them an alternative to the bleak future predicted by the prophets of doom. Many other audiences will also find the book informative and convincing.

In 11 chapters the reader is clearly shown that citizens are being misinformed by many environmental doomsday prophesies, ones they cannot verify for themselves. We are told that nuclear energy is very dangerous when the numbers prove it is one of the safest technologies. We are told polar bears will go extinct soon when their population has been growing steadily for nearly 50 years. We are told that there is something harmful in genetically modified food crops when it is invisible, has no name and no chemical formula. We are told severe forest fires are caused by climate change when they are actually caused by poor management of fuel load (dead wood) in the forest. We are told that all the coral reefs will die by 2100 when in fact the most diverse coral reefs are found in the warmest oceans in the world. And of course, we are told that invisible CO2 from using fossil fuels, accounting for more than 80 percent of our energy supply, will make the Earth too hot for life. All of these scare stories, and many more, are simply not true. And this book will convince you, your family, and your colleagues of that. There is no substitute for the truth.

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters, by Steven E. Koonin By Reviewed by Rupert Darwall

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/05/20/unsettled_what_climate_science_tells_us_what_it_doesnt_and_why_it_matters_by_steven_e_koonin_778065.html

On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science – in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At one point, Koonin read an extract from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report released the previous year. Computer model-simulated responses to forcings – the term used by climate scientists for changes of energy flows into and out of the climate system, such as changes in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and changes in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – “can be scaled up or down.” This scaling included greenhouse gas forcings.

Some forcings in some computer models had to be scaled down to match computer simulations to actual climate observations. But when it came to making centennial projections on which governments rely and drive climate policy, the scaling factors were removed, probably resulting in a 25 to 30 percent over-prediction of the 2100 warming.

U.S. Army to prioritize fight against climate change By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/us_army_to_prioritize_fight_against_climate_change.html

The U.S. Army recently released a bulletin stating that it will henceforth be “prioritizing climate change“ in its strategic defense planning. The Defense Department has already established the “Department of Defense Climate Working Group,” a new office that will coordinate the DOD’s ongoing response to the allegedly grave threat that climate change poses to the national security of the United States. I wonder if Greta Thunberg will be heading up the DDCWG.

The Army’s laser focus on climate change appears to be in response to President Biden’s stated agenda of aggressively addressing climate change across governmental bodies and is occurring simultaneously with the culture change being imposed on the U.S. military from the top down. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for example, fully supports Biden’s emphasis on climate change…as long as it doesn’t take time away from the troops’ mandatory “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Training,” or their indoctrination into Marxist theory.

This past April, Austin asserted that “climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.” He added, “Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Am I the only one concerned that the most important military in the world is frightened by climate change?

Austin also noted that his military is committed to electrifying its vehicle fleets and operating more sustainably. What about the cost to build/retrofit, as well as issues with performance and charging time, etc.? All things considered, will these vehicles really be better for the environment? And is that the point of a military?