RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-green-ballot-trouncing-1541719310?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=2&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Tuesday’s election highlighted that more voters like Donald Trump’s policies than like him. Consider this week’s voter embrace of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth energy positions, via nationwide rejection of initiatives to raise energy costs.

Most notable was Washington State’s defeat of a carbon tax for the second time in two years. Climate activists designed the 2016 measure to be “revenue neutral” in hopes of masking the costs but still lost big. This time they aimed to win over progressives by promising to earmark carbon tax revenue for green subsidies and other spending.

The tax would have raised gas prices by 13 cents a gallon in 2020 and 59 cents a gallon by 2035—in a state that already has some of the highest gas prices in the country. While Seattle residents bought it, suburban and rural voters killed the measure 56%-44%.

Colorado voters rejected (57%-43%) a ballot measure that would have shut down most new oil and gas exploration. Proposition 112 would have banned such exploration within 2,500 feet of any structure deemed a “vulnerable area” by the state or local government—which would have meant most of the state.

A Common Sense Policy Roundtable analysis estimated a $218 billion hit to Colorado’s GDP from 2018-2030, and Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper warned that strangling an industry that accounts for 15% to 20% of the state economy could trigger a recession. Democratic Gov.-elect Jared Polis has supported drilling limits in the past, though even he opposed Prop 112. We’ll see if he and the all-Democratic state Legislature continue to heed voters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/global_warming_and_fake_science.html

About 10 years ago the brand name global warming was changed to climate change. The reason was simple. The Earth was failing to warm. An additional benefit of the climate change slogan was that everything that goes wrong with the weather can be blamed on climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels. The 2012 hurricane Sandy, that flooded parts of New York and New Jersey, is routinely blamed on climate change. The great New England hurricane of 1938 struck the same area and was vastly worse, killing more than 600 persons. That could not be blamed on climate change caused by CO2, because CO2 was not an issue in 1938. Blaming Sandy on CO2-caused climate change is simply a made-up story without scientific foundation. Just because there are plenty of scientists making a connection between climate change and Sandy does not mean that a scientific foundation exists. It does mean that plenty of scientists are eager to benefit from natural disasters.

The idea that scientists are neutral observers resistant to political influence and money is naïve. Scientists are bought and sold every day in the courtrooms of America as paid witnesses. Scientific organizations lobby relentlessly and effectively in Washington. The National Academy of Science pretends to be the government’s advisor on scientific matters. Somehow their recommendations always suggest that more money should be spent on science. Global warming, a.k.a. climate change, has been a bonanza for a large segment of the scientific community. Just as with other special interest groups, the policy recommendations of the science community are heavily influenced by the prospects of getting money from the government. We need science, but science cannot be allowed to run wild.

Computer modeling is the basis for the predictions of climate doom. Computer modeling is hard to do properly, but easy to manipulate to produce the results that are most beneficial to the scientific community. Computer models are excellent vehicles for weaponizing confirmation bias – searching for, or manufacturing, data that confirms one’s biases. Scientists that see the massive holes in the global warming theory are reluctant to speak up because they will be attacked if they do. Getting in the way of money from Washington is not allowed. Yet, there are hundreds of prominent scientists that do speak up. Suppression of global warming skeptics by means of fear and intimidation is not the practice of science. It is the practice of totalitarian politics.

There are forces, known and unknown, that can change the climate. From 1910 to 1940 the Earth warmed strongly. That warming cannot be blamed on CO2. Nobody knows what caused that warming. Yet the warming from 1970 to 2000 is confidently blamed on CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That is a leap of faith, because we don’t know if the recent warming was really caused in part or totally, by the same unknown force that caused the early century warming. The global warming computer models are not remotely good enough to resolve this question.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/twilight_of_the_green_follies.html

For more than two and a half centuries, human kind has lived under an irreconcilable dichotomy – the benevolent revolution we call the enlightenment, and the inevitable reactionary counter-revolution that followed it – a dichotomy that has continued to our days.

The enlightenment introduced a number of revolutionary concepts that demolished the church dogma that had dominated the Middle Ages. It established reason and empirical knowledge as the source of authority leading to the scientific revolution beginning with Copernicus and the heliocentric theory of the universe. In government, the enlightenment brought about the radical idea of individual liberty with John Locke’s call for “life, liberty and property.“ The revolution reached its apotheosis in the late 18th century with the American Constitution and its idea of “inalienable rights” given to us by our Creator and of a government based on the consent of the governed. All of this was based on the unshakeable belief in progress driven by man and the Judeo-Christian civilization’s fundamental belief in the primacy of man over nature.

Yet no sooner did these radical ideas gain wide currency in the West than the reactionary counter-assault materialized. It started with Jean-Jacque Rousseau, considered by many the father of the totalitarian temptation, and his idea of an all powerful state using coercion as means of imposing an imaginable “general will.” Since then, humanity has struggled to reconcile two ideologies that are fundamentally at odds: one based on the rights of the individual, the other espousing the unlimited power of the state. The latter one found its culmination in the bloody totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, best expressed in Mussolini’s dictum “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” And it is this veneration of the coercive powers of the state that fundamentally unites Nazism, fascism and communism despite other marginal differences.

https://www.city-journal.org/wind-power-is-not-the-answer

On October 8, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that nations around the world must cut their greenhouse-gas emissions drastically to reduce the possibility of catastrophic climate change. The report emphasizes “fast deployment of renewables like solar and wind” and largely ignores the essential role nuclear energy must play in any decarbonization effort.

Four days earlier, to much less fanfare, two Harvard researchers published a paper showing that trying to fuel our energy-intensive society solely with renewables would require cartoonish amounts of land. How cartoonish? Consider: meeting America’s current demand for electricity alone—not including gasoline or jet fuel, or the natural gas required for things like space heating and fertilizer production—would require covering a territory twice the size of California with wind turbines.

The IPCC and climate-change activists love solar and wind energy, and far-left politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a wartime-style national mobilization to convert to 100 percent renewable-energy usage. But this credo ignores a fundamental truth: energy policy and land-use policy are inextricable.

The renewables-only proponents have no trouble mobilizing against land use for the extraction of hydrocarbons. Consider the battle in Colorado over Proposition 112, which will prohibit oil- and gas-drilling activities within 2,500 feet of homes, hospitals, schools and “vulnerable areas.” Environmental groups including 350.org, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace have endorsed the initiative, which will appear on the November 6 ballot. If it passes, Proposition 112 would effectively ban new oil and gas production in Colorado, the nation’s fifth-largest natural gas producer. Or consider the months-long demonstrations that ended last year in South Dakota over the Dakota Access pipeline. More than 700 climate-change activists and others were arrested during protests claiming that Dakota Access, by crossing the traditional lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, was violating the tribe’s cultural and spiritual rights. These energy- and land-use battles are waged by climate activists and environmental groups whose goal is to shutter the hydrocarbon industry. Most of these groups, including 350.org and Sierra Club, routinely claim that the American economy can run solely on renewables. Further, the Sierra Club has tallied 74 U.S. cities that have pledged to get all of their electricity from renewable energy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-greens-humiliate-themselves-1540939433

Despite its general lack of merit, a lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office is an entertaining symbol of all that has gone wrong with the green movement in the era of climate-change politics.

Exxon is accused of failing to adopt sufficiently penitential accounting for its oil and gas projects in light of climate regulations that, ahem, don’t exist. Indeed, politicians around the world have declined to enact the green wish list even when given the chance, notwithstanding their endless verbal opposition to climate change.

Presume for a moment the accusations against Exxon are accurate. Then greens should actually be glad because Exxon has spared them future embarrassment when the company is forced to increase the recorded value of its assets to account for the failure of green politics to deliver the expected carbon regulations.

Words are challenged to express how laughable this case is. Before getting lost in distinctions that Exxon internally draws (and the attorney general muddles) between project-specific costs and policies that would suppress demand for fossil fuels generally, let’s remember a few things.

Like all businesses, Exxon seeks to take only those risks that will pay off, and has every incentive to anticipate future regulatory costs correctly. The attorney general’s office and its green backers have an entirely different purpose: They want Exxon to use its internal disciplines to prevent oil and gas development even if it would pay off.

https://quillette.com/2018/10/29/if-you-want-to

This month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report concluding that it is all but inevitable that overall global warming will exceed the 1.5 degree Celsius limit dictated in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The report also discusses the potentially catastrophic consequences of this warming, which include extreme weather events, an accelerated rise in sea levels, and shrinking Arctic sea ice.

In keeping with the well-established trend, political conservatives generally have exhibited skepticism of these newly published IPCC conclusions. That includes U.S. President Donald Trump, who told 60 Minutes, “We have scientists that disagree with [anthropogenic global warming]. You’d have to show me the [mainstream] scientists because they have a very big political agenda.” On Fox News, a commentator argued that “the planet has largely stopped warming over the past 15 years, data shows—and [the IPCC report] could not explain why the Mercury had stopped rising.” Conservative YouTuber Ian Miles Cheong declared flatly that:
Ian Miles Cheong

✔ @stillgray I’m gonna get shit for this, but here goes.Climate change is a hoax invented by neo-Marxists within the scientific community to destabilize the world economy and dismantle what they call “systems of oppression” and what the rest of us call capitalism.

This pattern of conservative skepticism on climate change is so well-established that many of us now take it for granted. But given conservatism’s natural impulse toward protecting our heritage, one might think that conservatives would be just as concerned with preserving order in the natural environment as they are with preserving order in our social and political environments. Ensuring that subsequent generations can live well is ordinarily a core concern for conservatives.

To this, conservatives might (and do) counter that they are merely pushing back against environmental extremists who seek to leverage the cause of global warming as a means to expand government, eliminate hierarchies of wealth, and reorganize society along social lines. And while most environmentally conscious citizens harbor no such ambitions, there is a substantial basis for this claim. Indeed, some environmentalists are forthright in seeking to implement the principles of “ecosocialism.” Meteorologist and self-described ecosocialist Eric Holthaus, for instance, responded to the IPCC report by declaring that:
Eric Holthaus ✔ @EricHolthaus
If you are wondering what you can do about climate change:The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/22/swamp-swallowing-energy-climate-reporting-washington-examiner/

Energy, environment, and climate reporting at the usually solid Washington Examiner are increasingly taking on the left’s language and agenda. Why are the Examiner’s two lead energy and climate reporters advancing leftist politics rather than straight reporting, and why is the paper allowing this to happen?

In June 2017, the Examiner hired Josh Siegel to join John Siciliano covering energy, environment, and climate news. Siciliano had a solid track record of just-the-facts reporting and had worked as a reporter for The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation.

Two months after bringing Siegel on board, the Examiner launched Siegel and Siciliano’s “Daily on Energy” report, with each day’s edition containing several short write-ups of energy, environment, and climate issues. Lengthier versions of many of the short write-ups later appeared in the Examiner as stand-alone articles.
Shifting Toward Politicized Language

Since launching the report, Siegel and Siciliano have taken a significant turn toward the political left. Its substance, tone, word choice, and quoted sources consistently advance leftist messaging on energy, environment, and climate issues.

For example, in news articles regarding the Trump administration’s proposal to enhance energy grid reliability by crediting coal and nuclear power for being on-demand power sources with on-site fuel storage, Siegel and Siciliano consistently refer to the proposal as “the coal bailout.” While anti-coal activists can make a shaky argument that assigning monetary value to electric grid security is a “bailout” for the energy sources that provide that security, the argument is exactly that–a political argument.

Siegel and Siciliano refer to the proposal matter-of-factly as “the coal bailout,” as if such a label was factual and beyond dispute rather than a loaded political argument. Just as strikingly, Siegel and Siciliano never use the term “bailout” to describe wind and solar power or the many government programs, subsidies, and policies that benefit them, even though wind and solar power receive more subsidies than all conventional energy sources combined.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/10/blinded-science/

Reputable scientists start afresh when their theories clash with experience. Not the climate careerists preaching planetary doom, who have just released yet another fires-and-floods prophecy. This lot adhere to Groucho’s maxim: when predictions don’t work out, they have others.

Don’t ask me any questions, but the wavelength of light emanating from an object increases in wavelength if the object is moving away at speed. This is called redshift, I understand. Apparently, it is the observations of this redshift from distant galaxies that has convinced most scientist that the universe is expanding and at an ever-faster rate – thwarting gravity. How to explain it? Well they couldn’t. So, out of thin air, so to speak, to push galaxies apart, they simply invented a mysterious and invisible substance which they call ‘dark energy’. And this ain’t small beer. It is hypothesised to make up almost 70% of all of the energy in the universe.

A group of scientists in Bilboa, Spain, has come up with another explanation of redshift which is that time is slowing down.[i] Now this makes no sense to me personally because my life seems to be running out at an increasing rate. Nevertheless, I will come up with a scientific explanation for time slowing which is that the universe is indeed collapsing on itself as a result of gravity and everyone knows that time slows as the density of matter increases. Or at least I think that’s right because time slows to zero at (or is it just beyond) the event horizon of black holes, which are extremely dense. I don’t expect a Nobel Prize for this brilliant insight, but am quite taken with it and will fly to Sweden if invited.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/10/climate-science-stats-will-doctor/

We now have a whole generation of academics whose careers are steeped in the lucrative notion that catastrophic climate change is a genuine peril. What’s needed is an appropriately resourced science court to police malpractice, of which there is much, and no more grants for the guilty.

Occasional eruptions of mass delusion are a recurrent feature of human social behaviour. It is also characterised by a notable propensity to overstate certainty and reject any possibility of error regardless of conflicting evidence. This pattern prevails across all major areas of endeavour save one. By formally recognising uncertainty and actively seeking to uncover error, science has ironically become the most certain and least error prone of all our understanding.

Development of the internet has facilitated the propagation of delusions to a global scale with the threat of climate change being among the first of such events; and, unlikely to be the last. As a mass delusion climate change has a lot going for it. It claims to be scientifically certain, but only by ignoring or dismissing all opposing science. Regardless of actual academic credentials, it affords an open invitation for any third-rate academic of no distinction to publish something supporting the “threat” and thus be accorded immediate recognition as an expert (with ready access to generous funding for research).

Then, beyond this frontline of academic hustlers, the legions of righteousness have gathered in the form of politicians and self-appointed activists to whom CC provides a prominent platform for no-risk, low-cost virtue signalling. Following these are the ranks of empire building bureaucrats and a vast array of camp followers drawn by the scent of power and profits. It’s a heady mix and hard to resist.

As all this began to develop, the media found it a rich font of dramatic stories and joined in with hype and the lending of an indiscriminate aura of importance and credibility for even the most trivial and uncertain of speculation supporting the threat. As the consummate global bureaucracy, the UN also saw the potential for power, funding and a useful façade for sundry other agendas.

From its founding, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created to promote the idea of climate change as an existential threat that urgently requires generous funding and unprecedented authority for which they will be the peak administrator. For IPCC purposes, science was employed to provide an unquestionable basis for their authority. To assure that it supported their aims their various Summaries for Policymakers were decided line-for-line by their own administrative procedures and preliminary unpublished scientific summaries, inevitably edited to support the policies.