RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.pacificresearch.org/biden-greenlights-californias-unworkable-green-car-mandates-on-way-out-the-door/

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the executive order, the unelected California Air Resources Board “codified” it, and now the Biden administration, on its way out, has gone along with the plan.

As expected, the Environmental Protection Agency granted on Dec. 17 permission for California to go outside of federal law. California and other states need exemptions from the EPA to enact stricter air quality standards than those set by the 1970 Clean Air Act. And the Biden White House is clearly eager to let the states do as they wish.

“The EPA plan underscores how President Joe Biden is racing to Trump-proof his climate legacy before leaving office next month,” the Washington Post said.

So, the decision is more about how Biden is remembered in his party and among the true believers that the sky is falling because we drive cars with internal-combustion engines than it is about a practical matter of policy?

All is not lost for those concerned with the weight of the government dictating their choices, though. Donald Trump is likely to reverse the EPA’s action after taking office next month. His incoming press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, promised Trump “will support the auto industry, allowing space for both gas-powered cars” as well as electric vehicles.

So maybe we aren’t staring into “a future in which the government tries to arrest you for driving a vintage Ferrari – or any car you like,” say the Cato Institute’s Travis Fisher and Joshua Loucks of the Mercatus Center. Any such restriction is of course “awful and should be relegated to science fiction.”

“If you love driving a gasoline-powered vehicle” no matter the reason, well, “this is America,” they continue, “and no one at the EPA should tell you what kind of car to love.”

But limiting consumer choice and dictating how people live is a California value. At least that’s the way Newsom and millions of others across the state see it.

Others have values, too, including the U.S. Supreme Court, which has said it will hear arguments that could threaten the waiver that California has received for decades, going back to the Nixon administration. The Court “will review whether the oil industry has the standing to try to overturn a decision that allowed California to set its own limits on pollution emitted by automobiles,” says CalMatters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/why_is_the_dod_focused_on_fighting_climate_change.html

Given the state of affairs in Ukraine and the Middle East and the rise of China as a chief U.S. adversary, one would assume that the Department of Defense has its hands full combating real threats to U.S. national security. One would also assume that under the fraught geopolitics of the current world, the Department of Defense (DoD) would be harnessing its precious resources toward identifying future menaces that literally pose an existential threat to the security of the United States.

Climate change does not constitute a current threat to U.S. national security. However, the leaders of the DoD think otherwise. In fact, the DoD believes that the climate crisis is a “national security priority.”

On December 11, the DoD announced it is very concerned with climate change in Africa because “climate-stressed areas are a recruiting opportunity for terrorist groups.” Accordingly, the DoD declared, “The consequences of inaction on climate will be severe, and our allies and partners will face growing security challenges as a result.”

Tragically, this is only the latest example of the DoD being sidetracked fighting climate change.

More concerning, this is part of a much larger effort to reorient the primary focus of the nation’s military from preventing real-world threats to abating the nonexistent threat of climate change.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/11/has-trump-already-solved-global-warming/

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A report from a group of international researchers shows that temperatures in Greenland aren’t cooperating with the alarmists’ doomsday predictions. In fact, “most areas are cooling.” This is inconvenient for the climate harpies who have designated Greenland as an indicator of what man-made carbon dioxide emissions are doing to the planet.

Not three months ago, the World Economic Forum eagerly mentioned a study that predicted that a “total collapse” of Greenland’s ice sheet “could happen by 2025.” Last year, a Washington Post scare-’em-all headline declared “Greenland glacier’s rapid melting may signal faster sea level rise.” In another of the many examples we could cite, AZoCleantech.com has claimed that Greenland’s changing landscape signals a global threat.

Now back to the researchers: Using satellite readings, they determined that “the ice-free sub-regions of Greenland are warmer than the ice-covered sub-regions,” which they attribute “to population density.” Overall, though, there was no significant change in Greenland’s temperature for the period studied, 2000 to 2019. They further noted that “in coastal southern Greenland, the temperature during 1958-2001 showed a significant cooling.”

And those ice-covered sub-regions they studied? They found “no evidence of warming over” ice-covered areas. Yes, this thrusts another deep gash into the politically spun global warming yarn.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/rescuing-california-requires-challenging-crony-environmentalism/

The Speaker of the Assembly in the California state legislature, Robert Rivas, recently said, “California must not fixate on Trump and forget about affordability.”

Fat chance. California has been under the absolute control of Democrats for a generation. It’s their policies that have made the state unaffordable.

By now, the only people who deny that California’s state government policies are hostile toward working families and businesses, small and large, are the people running the state government. California is run by activist state bureaucrats, the unions that are funded by their membership dues, and the politicians that are elected and controlled by these unions. This is a racket. An entirely legal, yet entirely corrupt and self-serving system that is designed to grow government, harass businesses, kill good jobs, assess punitively high taxes, and elevate the cost of living to the point where people either become dependent on government assistance, flee to friendlier states, or are so rich they don’t care.

Democrats did this. Democrats own it.

The reason this system isn’t successfully challenged and broken is because surrounding this core coalition are commercial and nonprofit special interests that benefit from the status quo. A prime example of this is the homeless industrial complex, a network of state and local bureaucracies, subsidized developers of “supportive housing,” and “nonprofit” providers of services to the homeless. They have collected tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers to implement demonstrably failed policies, and as California’s homeless population continues to grow, they collect additional billions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21182/race-for-nuclear-fusion-energy

The clean energy breakthrough everyone has been wishing for finally is here! It may not be quite ready for prime time, but a quiet nuclear-fusion energy race is underway and cannot come soon enough.

The problem is that China seems to be winning it, not the United States or the West.

It is nuclear fusion — making atoms collide, rather than splitting them, or fission — when two atoms are forced to combine into one new atom at extremely hot temperatures. “In order for fusion to occur on the very hot gas — or plasma,” notes euro-fusion.org, “the plasma must be heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius [320 million degrees F]. ” The sun does it without a container — their combined new weight comes to less than each atom had separately.

This differential becomes a burst of energy that leaves no nuclear residue while functioning as if one had in one’s car a gallon of gas which could run it for 20 years. Fusion energy produced four times the power of fission energy, and when harnessed could be used as fuel for expeditions into outer space. Soon we shall presumably be able to say goodbye to expensive, combustible, warm-weather-only and not-very-far lithium batteries, and instead travel unpollutingly along on tiny bundles of captured energy.

The good news is that nuclear fusion, which is produced through nuclear reactors, tokamaks, leaves absolutely no residue.

The bad news is that — apart from needing further development and affordability — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems already to be working at warp-speed to develop this new form of energy for commercial and other use. China’s regime has reportedly allocated $1.5 billion annually to this effort, which would appear hardly enough, but is still nearly twice as much as the US is investing.

The CCP, moreover, has also reportedly been able to remove the most major drawback: a troublesome resin that impeded the fusion by lowering the temperature needed in the reactor, an impediment that was possibly overcome last month by changing the fuels and using the magnetic fields inside the tokamak — “the device that uses magnetic fields to confine a plasma” — to divert the plasma into a chamber the shape of a “cored apple.”

In the US, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk at Tesla and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT), have also been in this race to harness nuclear-fusion energy. Tesla bought SolarCity in 2006, originally to explore energy storage, but apparently also produce nuclear fusion energy. Altman took a nuclear energy company public for $500 million. One of his companies reportedly “has already secured a permit from the Department of Energy to build its first microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory.”

Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs have been exploring hydrogen-generated energy. At least for now, however, it seems that the method is carbon-intensive and converting the hydrogen into energy might still require more energy than it can produce.

Meanwhile, China, with at least three tokamak reactors, is speeding along to win the clean nuclear energy race – and its lucrative markets:

“China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor on 28 May achieved another world record by maintaining a plasma temperature at 120 million decrees Celsius for 101 seconds and at 160 million Celsius for 20 seconds, a major step toward the test run of the fusion reactor. EAST is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Science (ASIPP) in Hefei. It is one of three major domestic tokamaks now in operation in China.”

It is intensely to be hoped that the incoming administration will not allow China to eat America’s lunch.

Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-energy-apocalypse/

Someday our descendants will look back on the Age of Climate Change and marvel how a civilization with so much wealth, scientific knowledge, and sophisticated technologies could have willfully wrecked their economies and plunged themselves into poverty or extinction.

More astonishing to them, this civilizational suicide had been based on an unproven hypothesis like Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming––the idea that human-produced atmospheric CO2 emissions would destroy their civilization unless fossil fuels, the cheap, abundant energy that created the modern world, were abandoned.

Moreover, the portents of that future apocalypse are relentlessly multiplying across the rich Western nations, despite the ever-growing evidence that the hypothesis radically simplifies how a complex global climate works over space and time. More troubling, the proposed solution for lowering emissions enough to stave off the alleged disaster cannot be realized by eliminating fossil-fuels.

Thankfully, the election of Donald Trump offers hope that the suicidal “renewable” energy programs and policies will be rolled back.

For now, resistance to the zero net carbon narrative is growing. Even at the U.N.’s grand climate powwow held in Dubai in January, the UAE’s Minister of Industry, Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, made the classic gaffe of speaking that truth out loud in front of the conclave of true believers. The Paris Accords’ goal to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 was a chimera: “‘There is no science out there, or no scenario out there that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,’ Al-Jaber said at an online event on Nov. 21, “adding a pointed barb to the hosts that it would be impossible to stop burning fossil fuels and sustain economic development, ‘unless you want to take the world back into caves.’”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dirty-green-money/

“I’m also listening to ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ by Rihanna nonstop,” Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, the vice chair for the implementation of the UN Climate Convention, told reporters.

The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Baku was all about money.

It wasn’t the planet, but the scent of money that had drawn everyone from Gomez, the negotiator for Panama, one of the most corrupt countries in the world, to the Taliban, to the UN climate conference in Azerbaijan, a post-Soviet Muslim oil and gas country.

Officially everyone was in a country whose only real export was oil and gas to save the planet, but as the favorite song of the UN Climate Convention vice chair says, “Hold up, My money, Yo, my money.” Everyone in Baku wanted to save the planet. But only for the right price.

Even the Taliban who came asking for money to fix Afghanistan’s ‘climate change’ problems.

President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan kicked off the UN conference to end oil and gas by praising them as a “gift from Allah” and blamed America for polluting the world with ‘carbon emissions’.

Aliyev’s speech was representative of third world countries which had only shown up to trade votes for cash. UN climate conferences require a consensus. And that means bribing every third world dictatorship to get on board with whatever fictional climate target is being discussed now.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/destructive-environmentalists/

People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.

It claims it uses law “to confront the climate crisis.”

What it really does is pay lawyers to torture people who try to do useful things.

Example: America needs minerals like copper and silver to make things. Even President Joe Biden made a speech saying America will need 400-600% more such minerals to make “solar panels, wind turbines and so much more!”

An iPhone alone requires aluminum, iron, lithium, gold, copper …

But when investors dare try to dig up such minerals in America, the NRDC objects and uses political connections to stop them.

Twenty years ago, entrepreneurs tried to open a mine in Alaska. Before they even got the application in, the EPA vetoed it.

Why? Because groups like the NRDC say the mine “would be a catastrophic threat to the wildlife and … fragile ecosystem.”

They get their way because when Democrats run the EPA, they not only support NRDC’s positions, they even hire NRDC employees.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/26/day-2-dump-the-paris-climate-agreement/

During Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign, he promised to pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. He was unable to do so until the day after the 2020 election he lost, and the reprieve lasted only a little more than two months because Joe Biden rejoined the pact the day he was inaugurated. It’s another one of the many of Biden’s messes that Trump has to clean up.

The U.S. should have never been a part of the Paris Agreement. Committing our country to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which means reductions in fossil fuel use, is foolish. Reaching the made-from-thin-air global temperature target: requires government mandates, restrictions and increased spending on politically trendy but expensive and unreliable renewable energy; stunts economic growth; limits our choices, leaving many of them to be made by globalist elites; and is an abdication of our national sovereignty.

It is simultaneously meaningless and dishonest, a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

“The Paris Agreement has always been an expensive farce, a symbolic gesture masquerading as a global solution,” writes Charles Rotter in the Watts Up With That? blog. “Its main purpose? To transfer wealth from productive nations to the politically corrupt under the guise of ‘climate justice.’ Of course, China — the world’s largest emitter — sits pretty with vague promises and no actual obligations. Trump’s exit from this scam is as much common sense as it is a necessity.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/local-option

The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden change of heart.

The pro-Trump vote in most counties outside Gotham suggests that pro-fracking sentiment played a role in the election in New York State. Trump won by overwhelming margins in the counties located above portions of the Marcellus Shale formation, which feeds natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Many of these counties are economically distressed and have lost population. The time has come to give them a voice when it comes to permitting natural gas fracking, currently banned statewide.

At least 22 upstate New York counties sit atop Marcellus Shale deposits. These counties typically lag the state’s median household income level. Median income in Broome County, which is located on the Pennsylvania border and which nearly flipped from Biden to Trump (as of current data), is $63,000 compared with the statewide figure of $81,000. The county has lost 2 percent of its population since 2010, and 19 percent of residents live at or below the official poverty line. In western New York, Cattaraugus County, which also borders Pennsylvania, has a similar profile, with a median income of just $56,000. It has lost 5,000 of the 80,000 residents it had in 2010, and 16 percent live in poverty. It, too, voted for Trump in 2024. Indeed, outside of cities like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the entire 2024 upstate county vote map is red.