RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bring-the-global-climate-action-summit-back-to-earth/

If there was ever a time when a realistic counter to the climate scare was desperately needed, it was last month in San Francisco. Thousands of climate catastrophists invaded the city to attend the September 12-14 Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS), a massive event designed to drum up support for the Paris Agreement on climate change and to push the world to quickly end our use of fossil fuels.

In his video promoting the Summit, California Governor Jerry Brown said:

It’s up to you and it’s up to me, and tens of millions of other people to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat the existential threat of climate change.

Let us be clear: Brown and his cohorts are not talking about “carbon.” They are talking about carbon dioxide (CO2) which is the opposite of pollution. Indeed, all vegetation thrives on CO2. But that honesty would not conjure up dark thoughts of soot, coal dust, and lamp black.

The “carbon” misnomer appears everywhere in climate change pronouncements. The Summit website even claimed “decarbonization of the global economy is in sight.”

Decarbonization actually means phasing out the fossil fuels that now provide over 80% of all the energy we use in favor of wind, solar, and other supposedly clean energy sources (which cannot conceivably power the world).

To contest the Summit, the Heartland Institute — labeled by The Economist magazine as “the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change” — livestreamed two panel discussions of scientists and climate policy experts meeting at the conference center of The Independent Institute in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco.

Chaired by Heartland senior fellow James Taylor, the panel participants included Dr. Jay Lehr, Heartland’s science director; Dr. Terry L. Gannon of The Independent Institute; Dr. Richard Keen, meteorology instructor (emeritus), University of Colorado, Boulder; Miami, Florida-based hurricane meteorologist Stanley Goldenberg; and Tom Harris, Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/the_hidden_agenda_behind_climate_change.html

In comments that laid bare the hidden agenda behind global warming alarmism, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, let slip during a February 2015 press conference in Brussels that the U.N.’s real purpose in pushing climate hysteria is to end capitalism throughout the world:

This is the first time in human history that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally changing [getting rid of] the economic development model that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.

The economic model to which she referred is free-market capitalism. A year earlier, Figueres revealed what capitalism must be replaced with when she complained that America’s two-party constitutional system is hampering the U.N.’s climate objectives. She went on to cite China’s communist system as the kind of government America must have if the U.N. is to impose its environmental will on the world’s most free and prosperous capitalist nation. In other words, for the U.N. to have its way, America must somehow be transformed into a communist nation.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Figueres is not alone. Another senior U.N. official had comments of his own about the true agenda behind “climate change.” If you’re among those who still believe climate alarmists when they say all they’re trying to do is save the planet, what Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer had to say will leave your jaw on the floor.

In a Nov. 14, 2010 interview with the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Edenhofer, co-chair of the U.N. IPCC’s Working Group III, made this shocking admission:

One must free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. [What we’re doing] has almost nothing to do with the climate. We must state clearly that we use climate policy to redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/un-secretary-general-tobacco-use-causing-climate-change/
I think all the hot air coming from the UN is the real contributor to climate change….rsk
Using tobacco contributes to climate change and human-rights abuses, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a message to the Conference of the Parties to the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in Geneva today.

The treaty was adopted in 2003, and the United States is one of six countries that signed it but never ratified the pact. Another nine nations never signed the FCTC.

The agreement put forth minimum regulations for the sale and distribution of tobacco products, as well as production and taxation. Member states are encouraged to make their own tobacco rules even tougher than the base standards in the treaty.

Guterres noted that with “7 million people dying annually due to tobacco, this treaty is central to improving global health.”

“It is also essential for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 3, which calls on us to ensure healthy lives and promote well‑being for all,” he said. “Significant achievements have been made in implementing the Convention. The new Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products has also advanced tobacco control globally.”

“But tobacco use harms much more than our health. It contributes to climate change and deforestation, and to human rights abuses across the supply chain. The Convention Framework provides tools to tackle these problems, contributing to sustainable development more broadly.”

The secretary-general said the work of the convention “requires a holistic approach that goes beyond health and embraces all areas in which tobacco has an impact.”

Dr. Vera Luiza da Costa e Silva, head said at the conference that the body had “stimulated the establishment of observatories to monitor the deceiving strategies of the tobacco industry in a number of countries with the aim to have a global platform containing real-time information.” CONTINUE AT SITE