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December 2023

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Liz Peek: COP28 climate conference is not just the Super Bowl of virtue signaling. It’s doing real damage

By on December 6th, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/cop28-climate-conference-just-super-bowl-virtue-signaling-real-damage

It is tempting to dismiss COP28 as the Super Bowl of virtue signaling. But that would be to ignore the massive damage being done to our country by the unrealistic and costly climate policies of the Biden White House. The administration’s wrong-headed “leadership” on phasing out fossil fuels, which currently provide nearly 80% of U.S. energy, is a highlight of COP28; their policies are making Americans poorer and less secure.   

To wit: since Joe Biden took office, electricity prices have soared 24%; during President Trump’s four years in office, average electricity prices actually declined. 

COP 28, the annual climate talkathon, has had its light moments. Some 80,000 attendees are participating, a large number of whom are traveling by emissions-spewing private jets. Over the weekend, some of those planes were frozen to icy runways in Munich as global warming was trumped by unseasonal cold and blizzards which blanketed much of Europe.   

Moreover, the event is being held in Abu Dhabi, a major oil producing nation, and hosted by Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). In the lead-up to the meeting, leaked briefing documents revealed Jaber was plotting to use his position as host to negotiate new oil and gas deals with foreign governments, even as a central theme of COP28 was the phase-out fossil fuels.  

Worse, a video from two weeks ago surfaced on Monday in which Jaber questioned the entire premise behind ditching oil, gas and coal.  “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,” Al Jaber said. He was also critical of the questioner, saying he had anticipated a “sober and mature conversation” not an “alarmist” one. 

The Biden White House embraces extreme climate alarmism, and is sending scores of officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Climate Czar John Kerry to COP 28. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vivek is right: America is devolving into tyranny We can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn: Roger Kimball

By on December 6th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/vivek-ramaswamy-right-america-devolving-into-tyranny/

Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case. 

That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.”

Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn. 

On one side are those who believe in the founding ideals of America, the ideals summed up in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, at the center of which are the ideals of individual liberty, freedom of speech and the rule of law. 

On the other side are the “woke” haters of America as traditionally defined. These are the people who seek to tear the blindfold off the statues of justice at our court houses because, they assert, impartial justice is racist. What they want is not individual liberty, but group prerogatives based on sex, race or some other badge of supposed victimhood. 

Pace well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats, compromise between these two groups is not possible because the “wokerati” regards those who dissent not as people with different opinions but as heretics. And heretics — whether the issue be race, the climate, Covid, Hamas or this week’s preferred species of sexual exotica — cannot only be met with utter suppression. “You know you are in a war,” Ramaswamy notes, “when there is no middle ground, no room to compromise.” That’s where we are now. 

I think it very unlikely that Ramaswamy will be moving into 1600 Pennsylvania come January 2025. But he is telling the world some hard and vital truths. I hope the political class, as well as ordinary Americans, will pay him heed. Noting the many ways the financial sector, the law and the corporate and academic worlds have been “weaponized” against traditional American values, he warns that “if we lose this war, we will have full-fledged tyranny. You see, if people are free, then there will be group differences in outcomes because often groups have different preferences and talents. The only way you can make groups equal in terms of outcome is by force.” 

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