RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/21/trump-takes-on-the-climatecrats/

Donald Trump has pulled America out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement for the second time. The new US president signed an executive order following his inauguration yesterday, reversing the decision of his predecessor, Joe Biden, to drag the US back into the agreement in 2021. Bizarrely, like some dodgy insurance scam, the rules of the climatocracy say it takes a year to withdraw from the deal, so not until next winter will America be free of its obligations to reduce its emissions.

In truth, those ‘obligations’ are more like empty promises. The scandalous, nonsensical truth about the Paris Agreement is that it obliges literally nothing. It requires governments to, every five years, submit pieces of paper called ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCs), which can consist of saying you plan to go on doing what you are doing to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Or even to do less than you were doing before. Most countries can then ignore the INDCs and do whatever they feel like anyway. There is almost no monitoring involved, let alone reprimanding, indicting or punishing. Only Britain has made its INDCs legally binding.

India’s latest Paris promise, made in 2023, consists of slightly relaxing, rather than tightening, its previous target for decarbonising. China has promised to continue to increase its emissions until 2030. Even if all the INDCs made under the Paris Agreement were kept to, climate economist Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that the global impact would be to reduce temperatures by less than 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2100. That is so minuscule it would be impossible to measure. Can you honestly say that, 75 years hence, your grandchildren could tell the difference between a day that’s 15.21 degrees and one that’s 15.26 degrees?

The Paris Agreement grew out of the chaos of COP15, the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, when the climatecrats decided that empty promises were not enough. They felt they must instead have the power to impose enforceable, mandatory emissions targets for all nations. Again and again, in the years leading up to the Paris meeting, the UN, the EU and US used the words ‘legally binding’ to describe what they planned. Nothing less would do.

At COP17 in Durban, South Africa in 2011, world leaders signed up to a promise to have a legally binding treaty in force by 2020. Greenpeace repeatedly insisted it must be a binding rather than a ‘voluntary approach’. The EU agreed. Ahead of the conference, its spokesman said: ‘The Paris Agreement must be an international legally binding agreement.’ Then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said that John Kerry, then US secretary of state, was simply ‘confused’ when he worried whether a legally binding treaty was possible.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/20/more-cold-truth-about-global-warming/

Donald Trump’s inauguration was moved inside due to the bitter cold weather in Washington. Of course the same people who swear the Arctic blast was caused by global warming are part of the axis of fanatics that claims that humans’ fossil fuel habits caused 2024 to be the hottest year or record. There’s so much wrong with the klimate klowns’ klaims.

The temperature in the capital at today’s swearing-in at noon is predicted to be 22 degrees, cold but far from the coldest ever, which was 5 degrees when Ronald Regan took office in 1985 – four years after the warmest day in inauguration history reached 55 degrees – and the same temperature as John F. Kennedy’s 1961 ceremony, which was preceded by 8 inches of snow the evening before.

As expected, the “experts” who are reverently quoted by Democratic politicians and their comrades in the media are blaming “human-caused climate change” for today’s conditions.

Apparently those other frigid Inauguration Days and the related cold snaps were natural occurrences – as were Inauguration Days of 16, 25 and 26 degrees when the ceremony was held in March, and maybe even the coldest day ever recorded in the continental U.S., when the temperature hit 70 below in Montana on Jan. 20, 1954 – but this time, by golly, it’s man’s fault.

We don’t need to get into the science that debunks the man-made global warming assertions because any cool-headed observation of the facts we just listed makes it wholly unnecessary.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/the_environmentalist_war_on_california.html

Misguided environmentalist policies were major contributors to the California fires. The first policy led to a self-inflicted shortage of water, the second policy led to the buildup of tinder in California’s forest, the third to the large number of EVs that exploded. Additional environmental policies were indirectly responsible for the self-inflicted shortage of firemen, fire equipment, and powerlines that desperately needed to be fireproofed.

The first major factor that contributed to the massive fires was lack of water. Southern California has more than enough rainfall to put out fires. However, the majority of rainfall occurs during the rainy season. In order to avoid out-of-control conflagration during the dry season, such as the one that just took place, that water should be stored in reservoirs.

Why hasn’t this been done? In the last century California built dozens of dams creating the reservoir system that supplies the bulk of the state’s drinking and irrigation water. This century California has been unable to complete even one. The Sites reservoir was planned in a remote corner of the Sacramento valley for at least 40 years. One reason is that environmentalists blocked it with lawsuits and another is the difficulty in getting permission from the environmentalist state water board to use Sacramento River water to fill the reservoir.

Another reason more reservoirs have not been built is that nearly half of California is protected land and so is off limits for reservoir building. One of the objections to the Sites reservoir was that it might increase greenhouse gas emissions due to the breakdown of submerged organic matter. The environmentalists ignore the fact that algae that grow on lakes and sink to the bottom when they die capture the carbon that environmentalists are so worried about. In addition, any such possible increase in greenhouse emissions is dwarfed by the emissions of fires that water in reservoirs could put out.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/14/biden-ev-road-trip-stunt-was-worse-than-first-thought/

When Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her staff of clowns bungled a four-day ramble in 2023 to show off the wonder of electric vehicles, the lasting impression would be the report of her advance team blocking an open charger so she wouldn’t have to wait for one. A federal report, however, reveals details that cast the entire charade in an even worse light.

The Granholm tour was to take her from Charlotte, N.C., to Memphis, Tenn., and was intended to justify the billions of taxpayers’ dollars the Biden administration was pouring into green energy initiatives. The message was lost when it was learned, two months after the incident, that “an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle” by a charger “to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary,” according to National Public Radio reporter Camila Domonoske, who was along for the ride.

Granholm’s “caravan of EVs — including a luxury Cadillac Lyriq, a hefty Ford F-150, and an affordable Bolt electric utility vehicle — was planning to fast-charge in Grovetown, a suburb of Augusta, Ga.,” said Domonoske. But “one of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied.”

It wouldn’t look good for the troupe to have to wait for a charge. After all, the entire purpose of the junket was to show the public that EVs are the way to travel. The optics became worse, though, when Granholm’s team “boxed out — on a sweltering day” a family “with a baby in the vehicle” using a car with an internal-combustion engine, Domonoske reported. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/13/blaming-climate-change-for-la-fires-only-makes-newsom-look-even-more-incompetent/

“All these things are connected. This is a challenging time. But we’re up to this challenge.”

That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom back in 2020 when he was busy blaming “climate change” for the wildfires that erupted that year. “I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” he said.

Four years later, Newsom is again blaming “climate change” for the fires ravaging Los Angeles.

But wait. If climate change really is to blame, why was California so obviously, so woefully, so inexcusably unprepared?

Someone needs to ask Newsom why the state didn’t spend the last four years aggressively clearing out underbrush to minimize the chances of a catastrophic wildfire. Why didn’t it carve out large and effective buffer zones to keep fires from reaching populated areas? Why wasn’t there a Marshall Plan-scale effort to build reservoirs so firefighters could get water from hydrants?

It’s not as though the state didn’t have plenty of warning. For decades, environmentalists have been screaming about how “climate change” was going to make wildfires more frequent, more all-consuming, and more deadly.

Yet in the very state where environmentalists hold all the levers of power, they dawdled and delayed, let bureaucratic red tape and environmental groups stall efforts to prepare for the worst, and put other ridiculous and massively expensive projects (such as the “bullet” train) at the front of the line.

And in the process, California has wasted fantastic sums of money.

In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a $1 billion bill that was supposed to “prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect Californians.” Where did that money go?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-1-11-the-global-net-zero-financial-cartel-falling-apart

Less than three weeks ago, on December 23, in a post on optimism about the potential demise of the green energy fantasy, I took note that two of the largest U.S. banks had just quit something called the “Net Zero Banking Alliance.” The two were Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. These two banks, along with many others, including all of the biggest ones, had joined the NZBA as it was getting organized under auspices of the UN back in 2021. NZBA, together with other related groups organized around the same time, aspired to be cartels of financial institutions that would save the planet by starving hydrocarbon fuels of all investment capital, while re-directing the money to the “green” energy transition. Now, shortly after the re-election of Donald Trump, two of the biggest banking giants had decided to exit. Could this be a sign that the zero-carbon green energy fantasy was losing its grip?

In the short 19 days since that post, the trickle of resignations from the NZBA and related groups has turned into an avalanche. In the blink of an eye, what once seemed a serious threat that hydrocarbon fuels could be snuffed out by a group boycott of investors has almost entirely gone away.

More on the latest developments later in this post. But first, some history of NZBA and the related alphabet soup of do-gooders.

2021 was the year that the UN’s big climate confab, known as the “Conference of Parties” or “COP,” was to be held in Glasgow, Scotland. Although the COPs are normally held every year, there had not been one in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic. After the year hiatus, COP-26 was ultimately held from October 31 to November 13, 2021. Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the UK, who had converted from one-time climate skeptic to all-in alarmist, was determined to make this COP-26 the be-all and end-all of all COPs. The swarms of little aspiring tyrants in UN bureaucracies, just off their hugely successful Covid power grabs, were ready to flex their new muscles in the climate arena.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/10/fire-snow-and-a-storm-of-climate-nonsense/

Los Angeles is burning and the East Coast and Midwest have been walloped by cold and snow. Naturally, the global warming alarmists screech and honk about human reliance of fossil fuels. It a gross and irresponsible assumption.

It never takes long for the foolish to break out and Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t disappoint on Wednesday when he tweeted: “80,000 people told to evacuate. Blazes 0% contained. Eight months since the area has seen rain. The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.”

Unfortunately, he speaks for the many who are uninformed and naive, as well as those who want to use the man-made global warming narrative as a means to fundamentally change this country – and the West – into a political society run by leftists who, to borrow an applicable phrase, have difficulty resisting their authoritarian impulses.

Overshadowed by the tragic Los Angeles fires is the Arctic blast that dropped temperatures and snow in much of the country. This too, is man’s fault. But then when it doesn’t snow, well, man is to blame for that, as well.

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering.

It’s a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world. Such cold air blasts have become known as the polar vortex. It’s a long-established weather term that’s become mainstream as its technical meaning changed a bit on the way.