RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-feckless-nature-fakery/

Recently, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced that the Trump administration is documenting the value of what we the people own: “enormous stores of oil, coal, minerals, timber, and geothermal power, all held within a vast property portfolio,” Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal writes, including “480 million surface acres, more than 2 billion offshore acres, and 750 million acres of subsurface minerals.”

These abundant assets potentially can create revenue for the federal government that could obviate the need to borrow trillions of dollars, and to extract billions more from our most productive citizens, in order to “rob selected Peter to pay collective Paul,” as Rudyard Kipling in 1919 described redistribution schemes. But as Strassel understates, such common-sense action will require “hard political choices.”

That’s because for two centuries, the West has practiced what Theodore Roosevelt called “nature fakery.” In a 1907 article, Roosevelt attacked Jack London and other romantic writers for practicing what TR called “nature fakery,” which made them “an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover.”

Roosevelt was alluding to the Western transformation of how we think about the natural world and our relationship to it. Rather than recognizing nature’s “fierce eternal destruction,” as John Keats put it, we have idealized and romanticized nature, and indulged what Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy.” This is the idealization of nature by attributing to it and animals the conduct and emotions of human beings. Thinking your dog “loves” you, for example, is wish-fulfillment, not a statement of reality. Stop feeding it and see how much it loves you.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/20/more-truth-about-global-warming/

Editor’s note: In its ongoing effort to silence dissent about “climate change,” Google’s AdSense immediately stripped its network ads from this page, saying this editorial contains “unreliable and harmful claims” (see below). Because, you know, the truth is unreliable and harmful. You can tell Google where to stuff its policy violations by donating directly to I&I. Just click here.

Media reports are laced with unsubstantiated claims that man is overheating his planet. Every time climate change is mentioned in a story, even features in a newspaper’s food or fashion pages, it is understood that humans are turning Earth into a muggy greenhouse by burning fossil fuel. No evidence is provided to corroborate the claim. Man-made global warming just is and skeptics are deplorables.

But the facts tell a different story.

Roy Spencer, a University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientist, has determined that “65% of the U.S. linear warming trend between 1895 and 2023 was due to increasing population density at the suburban and urban stations; 8% of the warming was due to urbanization at rural stations. Most of that (urban heat island) effect warming occurred before 1970.”

In other words, man has built heat sinks, which skew the temperature data upward.

Researchers have known about the urban island effect for almost two centuries. It “is mostly due to the replacement of vegetation and aerated soils with buildings and impervious pavement.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/05/15/wasting_away_in_wind-and-solarville_1110296.html

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills. 

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals – not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines – pose no threat current to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.

“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar E Waste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The rise of solar farms, including the 8,488 panel facility in Denton, TX., presents new environmental issues. 
Business Wire

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in Net Zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

“They’ve been either silent, or incoherent – or just hand-wave that we should recycle all this stuff without telling us how,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. In the headlong effort to make solar and wind seem as inexpensive as possible, they have not included fees that address the eventual cost of disposal, which could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Some renewable supporters acknowledge Mills’ point. The Alliance for Affordable Energy, which supports government-funded research on recycling panels and turbines, said the “circular economy” Mills referred to has yet to materialize.