RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-11-even-stupider-than-the-stupidest-litigation-in-the-country

I have had several posts on a collection of related cases that I have called “The Stupidest Litigations In The Country.” These are cases where climate hysterics have sued oil and gas producing companies, or the federal government, or both, seeking various extreme punishments ranging from massive damages up to and including an order to end all production of fossil fuels. The asserted grounds vary somewhat from case to case, but a central theme is a claimed constitutional right to a “clean and healthy environment.”

My last update on these cases was a post on April 9. A main subject there was the lawsuit of Juliana v. United States, which is one of the cases where the federal government is the defendant and the goal is to require it to force an end to the production of fossil fuels. The occasion for the post was that, nine years into the litigation, the federal defendant had just launched its third effort to get the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to end the case on the ground of “non-justiciability” — that is, to get the court to rule that such an issue of society-wide energy policy is not a proper subject to be decided by a court. Instead, the Department of Justice was arguing, this sort of question must be left to the political branches of government, that is, legislatures and executives. (On May 1, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit in fact ordered that the Juliana case be dismissed. We’ll see if that sticks. The plaintiffs still have a few litigation options left, including seeking “en banc” review from the full Ninth Circuit, and seeking review from the Supreme Court.)

Meanwhile, be careful what you wish for. If the decision to blame energy-producing companies for everything wrong with the environment is to be left to the political branches, what’s to stop those political branches from jumping into this act?

In the last few days, the legislature in the state of Vermont has done just that. NBC News has the story on May 7, with the headline “Vermont passes bill to charge fossil fuel companies for damage from climate change.”

It looks like little Vermont (population about 650,000) is going to step up to save the planet where all the big players like the federal government and California have failed. The idea here is that the state will force the fossil fuel producers to pay damages to compensate for any losses attributable to “climate change.” If you believe that all extreme weather is the fault of “climate change” (and it appears that they do believe that), then this could add up to some enormous sums. From NBC:

Vermont lawmakers passed a bill this week that is designed to make big fossil fuel companies pay for damage from weather disasters fueled by climate change.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/11/greta-thunberg-and-the-greatest-of-all-heresies/

The other day, as environmental hero/prophetess Greta Thunberg donned a keffiyeh and joined the pro-Hamas protests in Malmo, Sweden, social media blew up with its usual mix of angry condemnation and fierce support. “How could she?” countless posters tetchily demanded, only to be met, in response, with the equally peevish “How could you?” With a few notable exceptions, most observers missed the obvious point that of course the erstwhile environmental activist was protesting the Jewish “oppressors” and supporting their poor, Palestinian victims; of course she took to the streets with neo-Marxist identitarians to demand “justice” and an end to “colonialism;” of course she has and will continue to embrace every subversive left-wing liberationist cause. How could do otherwise? After all, these causes are all interconnected, if not wholly identical.

Interestingly, some otherwise keen political observers are only now coming to the conclusion that Marxism is not economic in nature but religious and that it does not stand on its own as a unique and discrete phenomenon but is interconnected with all of the other anti-realist, quasi-religious utopian endeavors that have accompanied its rise over the last nearly two centuries. Marxism, for all its destructive murderousness, is but one component—albeit the dominant component—of the enduring effort to update and replace the moral system that was undermined and largely abandoned in the West with the Enlightenment.

Perhaps the greatest and least appreciated analysis of what we would broadly call “the left” is that which appears in Chapter 6 (or 7, depending on the edition) of Hilaire Belloc’s 1938 classic The Great Heresies. It is “The Modern Phase.”

Belloc is careful in his presentation of this heresy to clarify that it is not merely Communism or “Bolshevism” that constitutes this perversion of Catholicism but the broader “Modern Attack.”  Nevertheless, it is clear that he has in mind what we know today as “the left.”  Moreover, it is clear that he sees this “religion of man” and its ill-defined “spiritualism” as both an obvious Catholic heresy and the greatest and deadliest of them all.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/03/heres-how-we-know-the-climate-crisis-is-not-about-the-climate/

Carbon dioxide is a pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency says. It’s been drilled into us for more than 30 years that we have to cut our CO2 emissions if we don’t want the world to end too soon. But we know that the climate scare is in no way related to protecting the sky. The data tell us so.

Over the last three calendar years, 2021, 2022, and 2023, “​​​​no country has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other major nation on a per capita basis,” the Committee to Unleash Prosperity tells us.

“Even though our GDP is about 50% higher than China’s, our per capita emissions are roughly the same,” says the group.

The data also tell us that though China’s emissions grow every year, “ours have come down every year over the last decade.”

Yet the U.S. is continually singled out as the worst greenhouse gas offender, while China – and India – escape the wrath of the klimate kooks, from Greta Thunberg to Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who actually “praised China’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/30/it-would-be-foolish-to-end-fossil-fuel/

Let’s say tomorrow, or in 10 years or even 15, that by some feat of magic that wind and solar could fully power the global economy. We could then stop extracting oil and the natural gas that’s a byproduct of drilling. Right?

No, it wouldn’t work that way – because it can’t.

Even in a world that ran entirely on renewable energy, it would still be necessary to drill for crude. Why? Because of, as Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock was told 1967’s “The Graduate,” plastics.

“There’s a great future in plastics,” Mr. McGuire, a family friend, told Ben at his college graduation party.

More than a half century later, none of us can imagine our lives without plastic and other products made from the oil refining process.

We’ve heard the argument that we should be moving toward an economy in which we drop the fuels for transportation and power plants and drill only enough to make plastics and other products of modernity. It’s made by those who believe they’re always the smartest person in the room but don’t know what they don’t know.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-magical-thinking-behind-the-energy-transition

The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time. For progressive politicians here and in Europe, the “energy transition” has achieved totemic status. But it is fundamentally a claim that depends on assessing the future of technology.

While policies can favor one class of technology over another, neither political rhetoric nor financial largesse can make the impossible possible. Start with some basics. It’s not just that currently over 80 percent of our energy needs are met directly by burning oil, natural gas, and coal—a share that has declined by only a few percentage points over the past several decades; the key fact is that 100 percent of everything in civilized society, including the favored “green energy” machines themselves, depends on using hydrocarbons somewhere in the supply chains and systems. The scale of today’s green policy interventions is unprecedented, targeting the fuels that anchor the affordability and availability of everything.

In the U.S., the energy-transition policies center around the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the most ambitious industrial legislation since World War II. Both critics and enthusiasts note that the budget figure advertised when the legislation was passed—$369 billion—isn’t close to the real cost. A comprehensive Wood MacKenzie analysis shows that the Green New Deal’s price tag is closer to $3 trillion.

And that’s not all. Through regulatory fiat, the Environmental Protection Agency’s newly announced rules effectively mandate that more than half of all cars and trucks sold must be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2032. That will demand, and soon, the complete restructuring of the $100 billion U.S. automobile industry. At the same time, an EV-dominated future will also require hundreds of billions more dollars in utility-sector spending to expand the electric distribution system to fuel EVs. Added to that, among other similar administrative diktats, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s newly released “climate” disclosure rules (temporarily on hold) are intended to induce investors to direct billions of dollars toward energy-transition technologies. This rule will entail tens of billions annually just in compliance costs, never mind the shifts to investments it will create.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/19/could-evs-compete-in-a-true-free-market/

It seems we’ve reached “peak EV,” with sales in trouble and assembly line workers losing their jobs. The hard truth is electric vehicle sales would have never reached the level they have if the government had not trespassed into private matters.

The EV troubles are all around. Sales are slowing. Unsold cars have piled up in lots. Surveys plainly indicate that fewer Americans want them. In response to dramatically slowing sales, Ford announced last fall that it was delaying $12 billion in EV investments. Which should surprise no one, considering that the company lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023.

At roughly the same time, General Motors walked away from its EV strategy. Mercedes was excited about its new EVs just a few months back but learned that customers weren’t thrilled about about them. Earlier this year Hertz decided it would dump as many as 20,000 of its EVs. Now Tesla is laying off 10% of its global workforce, meaning around 14,000 former employees will be looking for new jobs.

Rivian is also dropping one-tenth of its workforce. The company’s share price fell 15% when the announcement was made. Production at Lucid, another EV startup, is expected to be “much lower than Wall Street’s expectations,” Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, BYD, the Chinese EV maker that’s heavily subsidized by Beijing, has seen a sharp fall in sales.

For years EV sales have been propped up like a corpse by public policy. The incentives to buy what are considered zero-emission automobiles but clearly are not come at an obscenely high cost. Research by the Texas Public Policy Foundation found that “nearly $22 billion in federal and state subsidies and regulatory credits suppressed the retail price of EVs” by an average of nearly $50,000. Or put another way, “the average model year 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-4-9-the-latest-on-international-efforts-to-save-the-planet-through-climate-litigation

When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.” In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”

Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon. Surely, no court would take this seriously. But then, one must take account of the powerful religious hold that the claims of the climate cult have over all those on the political left, not the least over many judges. And then there’s the excitement for a lonely small-town judge of potentially getting to run the entire country by decree without having to go through the bother of getting elected to anything.

So just because this litigation was stupid would not mean that it would have no chance of success. Also, keep in mind that the environmental left has near infinite resources, and never gives up.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/10/democrats-evs-and-tyranny/

Why do Democrats insist on forcing consumers to make choices they don’t want? Americans are making it clear they don’t want electric vehicles, yet Democrats won’t give up their mandate zealotry. Are they driven by authoritarian urges?

A poll taken last month shows that 48% of consumers would not consider buying an EV. That’s up seven percentage points from last year. Only 35% of those who responded to the Gallup poll said they might consider buying one, down from 43% just a year ago. A mere 9% said they were seriously considering an EV purchase. That portion was 12% in 2023.

Yes, EV ownership has increased. In 2024, 7% of Americans own a battery-powered car. Last year only 4% owned an EV.

But this combined with a growing resistance is an indicator that the demand is reaching a peak if it hasn’t already. After all, there are only so many consumers willing to buy an expensive, unreliable, grid-draining and destructive automobile merely for the privilege of demonstrating their green street cred and moral superiority. There are quite a few shallow people in this country but not enough apparently to keep the market warm.

Even with the rank of Democrats – whose positions are built on political superficiality – the EV fever has broken, with 27% saying in 2024 they would not buy an EV compared to 17% last year. Among independents, the “would nots” have grown to 47% from 38%. (A thanks to Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell for asking Gallup to break down the responses by party.)

Which is why the Biden administration and nearly half the states have to force EVs on the people.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/08/gretas-class-war/

It was like a case study in indifference. There was privileged Gen Zer Greta Thunberg and other Euro eco-brats smiling and flicking peace signs as they called on the Dutch government to stop subsidising fossil-fuel companies. Meanwhile, the Dutch people, very few of whom are the offspring of opera singers with the ear of the world media, are suffering one of the largest spikes in energy prices in all of Europe. Their bills are through the roof. They’re reeling from the ‘pain of high energy costs’, as some in the media describe it. And yet in sweeps giggling Greta and her barmy eco-army to agitate for less government backing for energy production, which would likely hike the price even more.

Rarely has the blinkered vanity, the sheer social apathy, of the green movement been so starkly illustrated. It was on Saturday that Greta and chums made their haughty demands of the Dutch government. In a protest at The Hague, hundreds of supporters of the upper-class death cult Extinction Rebellion marched behind a banner saying ‘STOP FOSSIL SUBSIDIES’. Some of the more spirited of these marchers against modernity, including Greta, broke away from the protest and headed to the A12 highway with the intention of blocking it. Because apparently it’s not enough to hit the pockets of the good people of the Netherlands – no, you have to ruin their weekend travel plans, too. Cops intervened and Greta and others were arrested for the crime of impeding a highway.

The press is full of gushing reports of Greta’s arrest. The BBC features an image of its favourite prophetess of doom yelling something as ticked-off cops drag her away. Our heroine only wanted to ‘block… a main road’ in protest against the ‘Dutch government’s tax concessions for companies connected to the fossil-fuel industry’, the Beeb says. What a turnaround from its reporting on the revolting Dutch farmers who also blocked highways, though in their case in opposition to lunatic Net Zero policies rather than in favour of them. Back then, the BBC said farmers had ‘clogged up’ roads and ‘snarled up motorways’ and created an ‘unsafe situation’. So when workers hold up highways, it’s horrifying, yet when time-rich right-on youths do it, it’s heroic? We see you, BBC.

The truth is there was nothing admirable about Greta’s latest temper tantrum over fossil fuels.