RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ecocide-would-criminalize-resource-

I have written often here of the threat posed by the “nature rights” movement, designed by radical environmentalists to thwart large scale development and extraction of natural resources by allowing anyone to sue to uphold nature’s “rights” to “exist and persist.” The movement has been gaining ground for the last several years, most recently with voters in Toledo granting “rights” to Lake Erie.

Think of “nature rights” as a metaphorical shield against human thriving from the bounties of the earth. But radical environmentalists also have a spear — the “ecocide” movement. Ecocide activists are striving to enact international laws that would punish those who make large-scale uses of nature as criminals, equivalently odious as perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, oil-industry executives and the like could find themselves in the dock at the Hague facing years in prison.

Ecocide, like “nature rights,” was once fringe within environmentalism. But like its “nature rights” cousin, that is no longer true. Over the last several years the movement’s primary spokeswoman, Polly Higgins, traveled the world proselytizing to much fanfare and increasing acceptance. She even presented at the UN.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jackpot-junk-science-11554061976

The vagaries of American tort law were on display in San Francisco last week as six jurors decided that Bayer AG is liable for $80.3 million in damages for allegedly causing a Sonoma man’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The scientific consensus is that Bayer’s Roundup herbicide is safe, but the company is now open for looting as it faces lawsuits from some 11,200 similar plaintiffs.

Edwin Hardeman, who used the herbicide to ward off poison oak and other weeds, testified about his grim day in 2015 when “the phone rang and my wife Mary was with me, we put it on the speakerphone, and [my doctor] said, ‘I’m sorry to inform you that you have cancer.’ And we were just shocked.” He spoke of his anguish as he endured nausea, bone pain and other side-effects of chemotherapy. No one can listen to that testimony and not be moved.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/436509-trump-signs-permit-to-jumpstart-delayed-construction-of-keystone-xl

President Trump on Friday signed a presidential permit to jump-start construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline with a facility in Montana, a move seen as a way to circumvent previous court orders halting development.

The permit authorizes energy company TransCanada Corp. to “construct, connect, operate, and maintain” pipeline facilities between the U.S. and Canada.

The permit also allows for the maintenance of a pipeline facility at Phillips County, Montana, for importation of the oil to the U.S.

The order supersedes a March 2017 order. That permit was invalidated by a Montana federal judge in November. The ruling is being appealed in the 9th Circuit. Separately, a December lawsuit placed an injunction on most pre-construction activities.

“For the avoidance of doubt, I hereby revoke that March 23, 2017, permit,” Trump wrote in Friday’s order.

A White House spokesperson told The Hill that the new permit “dispels any uncertainty.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/scalise-those-who-call-fossil-fuels-immoral-should-stop-using-them-today/

WASHINGTON — House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) called on lawmakers and activists who argue that fossil fuels are “immoral” to “stop using them today.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, proposed a bill in 2017 that would outlaw the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles within the U.S. beginning in 2035. Members of Congress such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have called for the end of fossil fuel production in America.

Scalise was asked if he would support banning the sale of gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles in the U.S. by a certain date.”No, and in fact, I would suggest that people who say fossil fuels are immoral, I disagree with them, first of all. I think fossil fuels help save lives, help lower costs, help create jobs and help people have a higher standard of living in America.

But if they truly think fossil fuels are immoral, then stop using them today,” Scalise said on Wednesday during a press conference on Capitol Hill about the House Energy Action Team, which was formed in response to the Green New Deal.

https://spectator.org/this-opinion-just-in-baby-its-cold-outside/

New York

I might be slightly less hostile to the Green New Deal, had I not walked home the other Sunday in a hail storm. Even before the BB-sized bits of ice came shooting down from the heavens that morning, this winter has been brutal, from Gotham to the Golden Gate.

Our Lady of Perpetual Limelight, Saint Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, demands that America battle so-called “deadly, manmade global warming” as if it were Nazi Germany. Ten-year cost: $93 trillion. But this supposed threat somehow seems less menacing than Adolf Hitler and the Wehrmacht.

Any given winter does not equal “climate.” Still, if mounting concentrations of carbon dioxide are the broth in which we homo sapiens are poaching ourselves like so many salmon cutlets, then we should not be enduring the entirely contrary scenarios that have unfolded so vividly from coast to coast:

• A “bomb cyclone” last week slammed the Rockies and Midwest with hurricane-speed winds and abundant snowfall. As 97-MPH gusts struck Colorado Springs, marooned passengers huddled in horror inside a shuttered Denver International Airport.

• At this point in 2017, Lake Superior was just 7.3 percent covered in ice; 2018’s figure: 49 percent. Lake Superior was 94 percent iced over on March 8. This was the first time in four years that the largest Great Lake’s ice coverage exceeded 90 percent, the Detroit Free Press reported. Not so far away, Lake Erie was 20 percent ice a year ago. Today: 94.1 percent. Overall, the Great Lakes have gone from 27.8 percent ice in 2018 to 74.6 percent in 2019.

• Lake Erie recently experienced a sort of frozen tsunami, as huge chunks of wind-blown ice washed onto the shore at Hamburg,New York. Footage of this phenomenon is fascinating and terrifying, especially as the solid water violates homes, marinas, and other structures in and around the lake.

• Several polar vortexes pumped Arctic air into the Midwest and parked it there for days. This drove air temperatures to 22 degrees below zero in Chicago and minus-28 Fahrenheit in Minneapolis on January 30.

• Snow hit Las Vegas on February 17 and 19, with some 5.5 inches of the white stuff fluffing the peaks of Sin City’s western suburbs. Some 100 flights were canceled at McCarran Airport on only the second day in two decades that it received measurable snow.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-3-14-how-much-do-the-climate-crusaders-plan-to-increase-your-costs-of-electricity-part-iv

Over the past few years, I seem to have developed something of a specialty in tracking the costs of trying to run an electrical grid using more and more power sourced from the intermittent renewables, wind and solar. I started looking into this subject because it appeared to me to be obviously a huge issue that must be addressed if one is going to attempt to replace fossil fuels with these renewables; but hardly anyone else seemed to be paying attention to this. On the side of the climate crusaders, you just get one unbelievably naive piece after another. For example, here is one of my favorites from the New York Times of February 6, 2018, “Why a Big Utility Is Embracing Wind and Solar,” by Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey, taking the position that a utility “will be able to build and operate the new [wind and solar] plants for less money than it would have to pay just to keep running its old, coal-burning power plants.” So, just knock down the old coal plants and put up some new, cheaper wind turbines and solar panels! Your electricity will come from clean and green sources, and the planet will be saved. What could be easier?

The missing piece is that the wind and sun provide power only intermittently, and cannot on their own keep a grid for millions of people up and running and functioning continuously. They need either some kind of 100% backup which is idle much of the time but ready to go at all times, or alternatively storage for what could be many days — or even a month or more — of power. Does that add a little or a lot to the costs? How would you know? Believe me, Gillis and Harvey — and many others of their ilk — do not and will not address this issue.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/13/what-are-the-opponents-of-donald-trumps-climate-re/

On March 5, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to President Trump denouncing his plan to form a National Security Council panel to take a critical look at the science underpinning climate change claims. Their objections to such a Red Team effort were basically that the “science is settled.”

But if the science is settled, what are they afraid of? Wouldn’t a review of the science come to the same conclusion as the supposed consensus of climate scientists?The letter claimed, “Climate change is real, it is happening now, it is driven by humans, and it is accelerating.”While climate change is indeed real, it is not at all obvious how much humans have to do with it. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits this, saying only that over half of warming since the 1950s is believed to be human-caused. So, “driven by humans” is an exaggeration, even by the IPCC’s rather alarmist standards.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/03/a-carefully-miseducated-generation-of-climate-warriors/

School students are being recruited and organised to strike from school tomorrow, 15 March. The website, schoolstrike4climate.com claims the purpose is “to tell our politicians to take our futures seriously and treat climate change for what it is – a crisis.”

After careful analysis of historical trends and with far more reliability than a United Nations’ “scientific consensus”, I’m prepared to boldly predict the political climate will not be warmed or cooled one-tenth of a degree by kids striking. Like all prophets of the apocalypse, the stamping and tramping of their furious little feet will have little impact in and on the real world. The Labor-Greens coalition will still be environmental extremists denying developing nations cheap, reliable electricity and aspiring to deliver Australians intermittent electricity at any cost. The Coalition will still present as lukewarm environmental realists while wooing voters from the centre-left with half measures of the Greens’ full-strength moonbattery.

Real grownups will observe there’s a reason schoolkids aren’t allowed to get married, sign contracts, fight for their nation, get a driver’s licence, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or vote on matters of national importance. Their developing brains aren’t mature enough to weigh the balance of evidence, consider all the consequences and make objectively rational decisions. They can barely cross the road safely or wear clothes properly. They are important, but they are children – undeveloped clumps of cells, if you prefer.