RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-6-12-on-the-promise-of-green-jobs

Sometimes it seems like the biggest selling point advanced in favor of “renewable energy” is the promise of what are called “green jobs.” What are those? Proponents are often vague, but I suppose that the green jobs largely consist of the work of building, installing, and maintaining the vast future farms of windmills and solar panels, and related infrastructure like transmission lines. Since most of these jobs involve some combination of strenuous labor in remote areas and/or a high level of skill, of course they will be very high-paying jobs. Millions of them. What’s not to like about that?

President Obama was an early arrival at the “green jobs” party, tossing out a “plan to create 5 million new green jobs” as part of his 2008 presidential campaign. (Politifact in November 2016 struggles to figure out how many of those jobs ever got created, and if so, where they may be.) You won’t be surprised to learn that Obama’s ideas pretty much all consisted of some variety of government subsidies, programs, mandates, tax credits, “investments,” expenditures, and the like, e.g., a new “job training program for clean technologies,” a new federal “renewable portfolio standard” to force utilities to switch to wind and/or solar generation, extension of the “production tax credit” for wind and solar, and so on and on.

More recently “green jobs” promoters have further upped the ante. In January of this year, Francie Diep of Pacific Standard quoted the Center for American Progress as predicting that a federal “investment” of just $800 billion per year (!) toward cutting carbon emissions to zero would create 6.8 million net new jobs. Meanwhile, the International Labor Organization (part of the UN) put out a study in 2018 predicting that implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement would create some 24 million “net” green new jobs worldwide by 2030. It all sounds like a near-infinite bounty of new wealth.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/09/great-lakes-reveal-the-fatal-flaw-in-global-warming-science/

ake Erie and Lake Superior — two of the five that make up the Great Lakes — broke records for water levels this May. Lakes Michigan and Huron could follow suit.

Naturally, climate change is getting the blame. “We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” says Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist. 

But just a few years ago, climate scientists were insisting that a warming climate would cause water levels to decline. 

In 2008, Science Daily reported on a study that attributed the decline in Great Lakes water levels to global warming. The researchers who conducted the study said that the drop “raised concern because the declines are consistent with many climate change predictions.”

In 2009, Columbia University’s Earth Institute informed us that “most climate models suggest that we may see declines in lake levels over the next 100 years; one suggests that we may see declines of up to 8.2 feet.”

In 2011, the Union of Concern Scientists said that “scientists expect water levels in the Great Lakes to drop in both summer and winter, with the greatest declines occurring in Lakes Huron and Michigan.”

In 2013, the Natural Resources Defense Council said that “it’s no secret that, partially due to climate change, the water levels in the Great Lakes are getting very low.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/8/climate-change-bring-25-holocausts-and-other-stupi/

Climate change, as the Natural Resources Defense Council has written, “is getting unprecedented attention from the growing field of 2020 presidential candidates” — which means the empty-headed bobble bouncers of the left’s echo chamber have ample opportunity to prove how very sheeplike they can be in their thinking.

Indeed. Talk about a competition. 

We may have found a winner.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one creator of the Green New Deal, just weighed in on the reasons behind her regulatory pressings for climate controls, saying it’s not just life or death — it’s death times 25.

As Fox News reported, Gunn-Wright, in an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi made clear her insistence on Democrats pushing global warming even more so than health care as a top issue for 2020 because, “climate change is one of the main drivers of our public health.”

“So the difference between, say, 1.5 degrees of warming — which is the least that folks think that we can get — to 2, you are talking about 150 million deaths. That’s 25 Holocausts, right? So how is that not a health issue? How is that not about health care?”

Or, as the other brainiacs of the left might wonder, how is that, like, oh my God, not really bad?

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/05/recycling-americas-false-religion/

Before climate change became a belief system in which humans are expected to perform penance for their sins against Gaia, recycling was the religion of many in the modern world. Those who didn’t reduce, reuse, and recycle were, and still are, considered heretics.

Nearly a quarter century ago, John Tierney wrote in the New York Times Magazine that “Recycling Is Garbage.” In an article that produced the greatest volume of hate mail in the magazine’s history, Tierney said that rather than recycling, “the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill.” With the exception of a few items — aluminum cans, cardboard, office paper — the cost of the recycling equipment plus the process itself exceeded the value of the products created by recycling.

Though recycling rarely makes economic sense and often burns up more fresh resources than would have been used in making new items, Americans recycled. And recycled. And recycle still.

Are we better off for it? It can easily be argued we are worse off. Our recycling obsessions have instigated a war on plastic that’s inconvenienced consumers and cost them billions. Recycling has also helped create an environmental mess. Roughly 90 percent of all plastic found in the oceans, says the Hemholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, is carried there by “the top 10 rivers with the highest loads” of plastic debris. Eight of those rivers are in Asia, two are in Africa. None are in the U.S.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet

Shakespeare’s monster, Caliban, dreamed of clouds opening to  show riches ready to drop upon him. Climate scientists don’t have to dream about it – honors, awards and cash prizes rain down in torrents. Other scientists try to help humanity, but while climate scientists may kid themselves and others that they share that goal, their practical intent is to raise energy costs and harm nations’ energy efficiency via renewables. While they posture as planet-savers in white coats, some of them pocket awards of half-million dollars, even a million, and notch up more career-enhancing medals than a North Korean general.

A couple of local prizes are the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science ($A250,000) for ex-President of the Australian Academy of Science Kurt Lambeck last October, and in January UNSW Professor John Church pocketed a $A320,000 half-share of the 400,000 Euro BBVA Prize.

Both have done science work of international repute and their reputations in their specialist fields are deservedly high. However, Lambeck is a long-standing smiter of “deniers” and Church propagates via the ABC such lurid scenarios as  this: “… if the world’s carbon emissions continue unmitigated, a threshold will be crossed which will lead to the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This, with melts from glaciers and ice in Antarctica will lead to a sea level rise in the order of seven metres.” 

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-6-2-global-warming-is-there-anything-it-cant-d

The general interest newsmagazines of the world have been in serious decline for years. Time, Newsweek, U.S. New and World Report — what ever happened to them? Although all of them still exist in some form, they are all shadows of their former selves.

But then there is The Economist of London. These people put out what at least looks on the surface to be a serious print edition every week. They devote real resources to gathering news from around the world. If you want to find out what’s going on in, say, Argentina or the Congo or Uganda, this is one of the few places that you can find it. But can you trust anything they say?

I’ve been a long-time subscriber to The Economist, and had long regarded them as relatively sensible, generally less infected by leftist groupthink than most mainstream sources. But then, a few years ago — I can’t pinpoint the exact date — they made what appears to be a corporate-level decision to go all in for global warming alarm. Henceforth, every issue would contain one or several global warming stories, always with the slant of trying to scare the readership about the allegedly terrible crisis at hand.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/gmo-fungus-mass-kills-malaria-mosquitoes/

The late Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug worked tirelessly on GMO to prevent famines and cultivate crops on poor soil….but the junk science purveyors thwarted all his efforts….rsk

Genetically modified organisms offer so much potential to save lives, improve the environment, and generally promote a more prosperous and healthier future. For example, “golden rice”–genetically modified to contain vitamin A — promises to be a great preventative of blindness and death for destitute children in the developing world.

In the latest example, scientists have genetically modified a fungus that infects malaria mosquitoes to contain lethal spider venom. In a controlled test, the population of these dangerous insects collapsed once the GMO fungus was introduced into the population. From the BBC report:

A 6,500-sq-ft fake village – complete with plants, huts, water sources and food for the mosquitoes – was set up in Burkina Faso. It was surrounded by a double layer of mosquito netting to prevent anything escaping. A so-called “mosquitosphere” tests the fungus in real-world conditions, without releasing it into the wild

The fungal spores were mixed with sesame oil and wiped on to black cotton sheets. The mosquitoes had to land on the sheets to be exposed to the deadly fungus. The researchers started the experiments with 1,500 mosquitoes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/democrats-curious-disdain-for-nuclear-power/

Until they embrace nuclear energy as a key to reducing emissions, the party’s many presidential candidates will be hard to take seriously on climate change.

Climate change is the No. 1 issue for Democrats, with a recent poll showing 82 percent of Democratic voters listed it as their top priority. To appeal to those voters, contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination routinely call climate change an “existential threat” to the nation and the world. But amid all their rhetoric and promises of massively expensive plans to tackle the problem, these same Democrats — with the notable exception of Senator Cory Booker — steadfastly refuse to utter two critical words: nuclear power.

The Democrats’ disdain for nuclear energy deserves attention, because there is no credible pathway toward large-scale decarbonization that doesn’t include lots of it. That fact was reinforced Tuesday, when the International Energy Agency published a report declaring that without more nuclear energy, global carbon dioxide emissions will surge and “efforts to transition to a cleaner energy system will become drastically harder and more costly.”

How costly? The IEA estimates that “$1.6 trillion in additional investment would be required in the electricity sector in advanced economies from 2018 to 2040” if the use of nuclear energy continued to decline. That, in turn, would mean higher prices, as “electricity supply costs would be close to $80 billion higher per year on average for advanced economies as a whole.”