RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/californians-learning-that-solar-panels-dont-work-in-blackouts

Rooftop systems need batteries to operate when grid is down
Millions have lost power in outage to prevent more wildfires

Californians have embraced rooftop solar panels more than anyone in the U.S., but many are learning the hard way the systems won’t keep the lights on during blackouts.

That’s because most panels are designed to supply power to the grid — not directly to houses. During the heat of the day, solar systems can crank out more juice than a home can handle. Conversely, they don’t produce power at all at night.

So systems are tied into the grid, and the vast majority aren’t working this week as PG&E Corp. cuts power to much of Northern California to prevent wildfires.

The only way for most solar panels to work during a blackout is pairing them with batteries. That market is just starting to take off. Sunrun Inc., the largest U.S. rooftop solar company, said hundreds of its customers are making it through the blackouts with batteries.

“It’s the perfect combination for getting through these shutdowns,” Sunrun Chairman Ed Fenster said in an interview. He expects battery sales to boom in the wake of the outages.

And no, trying to run appliances off the power in a Tesla Inc. electric car won’t work, at least without special equipment.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/14/scientists-gone-mad/

The men and women of science are supposed to be rational, sober professionals. Yet a few hundred have decided to behave as rabble, having been overtaken by global warming hysteria.

Reuters reported Saturday that “almost 400 scientists have endorsed a civil disobedience campaign aimed at forcing governments to take rapid action to tackle climate change.” The objective is to warn the rest of us “that failure could inflict ‘incalculable human suffering.’”

To say these activist-researchers have broken “with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest” is almost an understatement. They have chosen to align themselves with the Extinction Rebellion, an organization that’s been described as a “loopy middle-class doomsday cult.”

That description by Sky News reporter Carol Malone is overly generous. The Extinction Rebellion is a criminal enterprise made up of quite clearly disturbed people. Members have been arrested for blocking the entrance of a London airport, and claiming ownership of it for the mob, while dancing in what appears to be a restricted area behind razor wire. One particularly childish and self-indulgent “protester” climbed atop a passenger jet to make his point. Firemen had to remove him with a cherry-picker.

These “rebels” have also used a fire truck to spray fake blood, at one point losing “control of the hose, drenching a bystander and spraying several fellow activists” at the British Treasury building, “as 1,800 liters of an organic liquid containing beetroot spurted out wildly across the street,” the Guardian has reported.

Admittedly these are rather petty crimes, but they’re gateways to the harder stuff.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-10-elizabeth-warrens-cruel-plan-for-environmental-justice

Elizabeth Warren wants to be known as the Democratic presidential candidate who has a “Plan” for everything. I count some 50 of these Plans here on her website. They cover everything from “health care is a basic human right,” to “a new farm economy,” to “fighting for an accessible and inclusive America,” to “addressing our maternal mortality epidemic,” to “how we can break up big tech,” to “universal child care,” and on and on and on — and obviously, I was just getting started. Every one of these things is some form of centrally-directed, bureaucrat-run, taxpayer-funded boondoggle of massive government expansion.

Well, now we can make that 51 Plans, because yesterday Warren came out with the latest and greatest of them all, titled “FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE AS WE COMBAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”

I know what you are thinking: How could she possibly have missed that one in the first 50? I can’t answer that, but you really need to look at this one if you want to get an appreciation of the levels of utopia that an uber-progressive like Warren thinks can be quickly achieved by government fiat backed by infinite amounts of government money and equally infinite numbers of bureaucrats. And while we’re at it, let’s make it explicit that anyone who opposes any part of this is an evil racist:

From predominantly black neighborhoods in Detroit to Navajo communities in the southwest to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, industrial pollution has been concentrated in low-income communities for decades – communities that the federal government has tacitly written off as so-called “sacrifice zones.” But it’s not just about poverty, it’s also about race. . . . We didn’t get here by accident. Our crisis of environmental injustice is the result of decades of discrimination and environmental racism compounding in communities that have been overlooked for too long. It is the result of multiple choices that put corporate profits before people, while our government looked the other way.

This week has seen globally co-ordinated protests by self-absorbed members of the privileged middle class, who have been by gluing themselves to pavements, trains, planes and automobiles when not splashing public buildings with faux blood, dangling from bridges and making general pests of themselves under the banner of Extinction Rebellion and its mendacious claims of imminent planetary doom. That’s the public face of this latest apocalyptic movement, of which over the centuries there have been many. Perhaps more interesting is the underlying inability of the protesters’ rational selves to examine and critique their emotive selves, to see in their collective antics what amounts to a mass escape from the prison of reason. With such a societal pathology now rampant, it is both timely and instructive to revisit one of the pioneers, and the casualties, of the naïve neo-romanticism whose disruptive rejection of modern life, its power sources and convenience, is the flame burning bright in so many preening hearts.

Long before Greta Thunberg denounced growth, modernity and the pursuit of wealth, there was Christopher Johnston McCandless, whose tragedy plumbs a central human struggle as visceral as it is cerebral. Captured in the considerate and compelling account by mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild (1996) and the extraordinary film adaption of the same name by Sean Penn (2007), McCandless’s short life may be witnessed as an allegory for a quintessential malaise affecting the contemporary Western world. The book is now taught widely across US secondary schools, although his life and demise is likely to be approached through a romanticised prism that echoes Krakauer’s account and McCandless’s own personality.

Briefly, for those unfamiliar with the story, McCandless abandoned his car, burnt his money, rejected society and made his way by hitchhiker’s thumb and boxcar to the wilds of Alaska, where he died slowly and painfully. Encompassed within the sweeping trajectory of McCandless’s twenty-four years is the human story of a young, disaffected Anglo-America and introverted ideologue. It is within this narrative that we encounter him as the unwitting flag-bearer for much of contemporary progressives’ — more accurately regressives — war on the very cradle of their nurtured existence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDk0CAfdALw

The whole construction of the Greta phenomenon is to make her impossible to oppose. Clearly it’s a way to smuggle a particular type of extreme green ideology in most successfully.

It’s something like ‘I dare you’ — I dare you to oppose a 16-year-old autistic girl

What exactly are the rules here?

Let’s say I find a 14-year-old badly disabled Danish boy who loves fossil fuels, does he win?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/11/you-dont-need-to-be-a-scientist-to-be-legitimately-skeptical-of-climate-alarmism/

An ambiguous, unverifiable crisis that only the state has the means or authority to combat is a blank check to power.

I am not a scientist. I have no scientific background beyond what I’ve picked up from reading things written by and about actual scientists. So I am, therefore, in no position to critique any scientific theory as a theory.

That said, I am a skeptic when it comes to climate change. To be clear, I don’t doubt that the climate changes — obviously it does. I don’t doubt that human activity has an effect on this change. What that effect is, and to what extent it influences the entire system, I don’t know. As a scientific concept, I have no opinion on climate change.

But it isn’t just a scientific concept. It is a political issue, and that is what I am skeptical of.

You see, I can’t judge from what I don’t know (e.g., climate science), but I can judge from what I do know. I know something of history, something of philosophy, and something of human nature. I can observe what people are doing at the moment and listen to what they actually say.

Doing so, I note that the vast majority of people, including the cause’s most vehement advocates, are no more qualified to judge it scientifically than I am. Does anyone really believe that any of those people marching in Washington have the knowledge and ability to interpret data from a global climate survey? Have they sunk the necessary hours of study and objective research into this subject to be able to say what they say with any certainty, assuming they could ever be certain?

Of course they haven’t. They are going entirely off of what certain experts have told them — namely, a specific selection of experts who have come to their attention because the media has elevated them and political groups have championed and funded them. These climate change apologists are in no position to critically examine these expert claims.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/there-is-no-climate-emergency-scientists-call-for-reasoned-debate-2_3100870.html

The message was clear: “There is no climate emergency.”

With those five simple words, a global network of scientistsand professionals attempted to inject reasonableness and decorum into what should be a robust discussion about a complex scientific and public policy issue, but has instead degenerated into an ever more intense mud-slinging contest over the years.

People on one side of the argument dismiss their opponents as wild-eyed socialists attempting to leverage public fear and ignorance to further their political agenda. On the opposite side, people dismiss those who disagree with their supposedly settled scientific conclusions as nothing more than knowing shills or ignorant dupes of evil energy interests.

In between those extremes that are so popular with armies of public relations professionals, who shape the messages of public interest groups and professional politicians to maximum effect, are a not-so-quiet silent majority of scientists and professionals who take a more measured, reasoned view of the science when considering the supposed climate emergency some say we’re facing.

A group of 500-some scientists and professionals signed on to the “European Climate Declaration” that was released last week. This simple, short, and understandable statement proposed how analysis of any public policy issue involving complex science should be approached from a reasoned, fact-based perspective.

Statements such as “97 percent of climatologists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring” isn’t a statement of fact, it’s an opinion twice removed. It’s an opinion that involves evaluation of the legitimacy of how the results of the poll in question were sorted to dismiss some answers and allow others, and it’s an opinion in terms of how representative the sample size is with respect to all climate professionals.