RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americans-have-never-been-less-threatened-by-extreme-weather/

“Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather hazard” is the first claim in this Washington Post piece warning about the deadly summer heat — and it is almost certainly false. Similar warnings about the deadly weather appear in virtually every mainstream media outlet.

First off, the only reason “extreme” temperature kills more people than other weather hazards is that deaths from weather have plummeted over the century — even as doomsday climate warnings about heat, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts have spiked. All extreme weather accounts for only about 0.1 death for every 100,000 people in the United States each year. That is a massive drop from the time of your grandparents. The Post and others should be celebrating the fact that humans have never been less threatened by the climate in history.

The Post also warns that 62 million people in the U.S. may be “exposed” to dangerous heat “today.” That’s a lot of people, even considering nearly all of them live in the southernmost spots in the country, and it’s summer. The Post counts anyone exposed to heat over 90 F as being in some level of danger. Fortunately, most Americans enjoy the luxury and health benefits of air conditioning, one of the great innovations of the past century.

Nowhere in the piece, however, do the authors tell us exactly how many Americans have perished from the oppressive heat. Anyway, it’s around 700 people a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — if you liberally count heat as both the “underlying” and/or “contributing” causes. It is about 400 people when heat is the underlying cause. And that’s terrible. But, also, it’s around 3,600 fewer people than those who drown every year.

Though there has been an uptick in recent years — as Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, this is almost surely due to an increasingly aging population that is more susceptible to heat — both numbers are still near-historic lows.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/11/an-infinite-number-of-days-to-flatten-the-co2-curve/

“What we should have learned from the COVID lockdowns is that tolerating petty tyranny leads to absolute tyranny. We’re not there yet, but we’re well on the road to it and it has been paved with malicious intent.”

When three years ago we were told that if we stayed inside for 15 days we could flatten the curve of COVID-19 cases, there was no real effort to respond with civil disobedience. It was a profound mistake, one we paid dearly for and will again, if we don’t stand up to the tyranny.

Yes, we know it was President Donald Trump who issued in March 2020 a set of guidelines that called for 15 days to slow the spread by limiting our travel and staying away from social settings. At the end of March, under more pressure from “experts” he should have fired, he extended the guidelines for another month.

Trump eventually, though tacitly, acknowledged that he made a mistake, when during the summer he said, to great caterwauling from the “closers” on the left, that it was “important for all Americans to recognize that a permanent lockdown is not a viable path forward and would ultimately inflict more harm than it would prevent.”

It was an admission no single Democrat ever made. Indeed, the Democrats wanted the lockdowns to be open-ended. They not only enjoyed taking captive society and commerce in the way that true authoritarians amuse themselves by being in control of others, they took notes so that the next time they will be able to more easily bump restrictions to the next level.

And when might that be? Impossible to say. All we can know is that attempts will be made.

In what other way can we read proposals such as the ​​“climate emergency” initiative referred to by Joseph Goffman, who holds an appointed position at the Environmental Protection Agency? How would the government deal with a climate emergency outside of placing limits on our movements as a free people?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hottest-days-ever-dont-believe-it-global-temperature-north-sole-poles-6e64a991?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. The claimed temperature was derived from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.

One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.

A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July.

Moreover, the notion of “average global temperature” is meaningless. Average global temperature is a concept invented by and for the global-warming hypothesis. It is more a political concept than a scientific one. The Earth and its atmosphere is large and diverse, and no place is meaningfully average.

Average global temperature also changes on seasonal basis: Temperatures are higher globally during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer because of more sunlight-trapping land. In this case, the Climate Reanalyzer’s estimated temperatures in early July were skewed by a heat wave in the Antarctic, where areas may have warmed some Antarctic temperatures by as much as 43 degrees. This is likely the explanation for the difference between the 62.6-degree and 57.5-degree estimates.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/07/the-folly-of-wind.php

The U.S., like much of Europe, has supposedly committed itself to replacing fossil fuels with “green” energy, which mostly means wind. This will never happen, and the effort to make it happen will collapse in ignominy and economic and social chaos. The reason is simple: wind turbines, and even more so solar panels, fail to produce electricity a large majority of the time. Just as bad, their failures are unpredictable and often ill-timed.

Here in the Upper Midwest, we have experienced a couple of hot weeks, which means that air conditioners have been running. MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, has a nominal 28,572 megawatts of wind energy on its grid. Surely the wind turbines were able to keep the air conditioners running. Right?

Just kidding. Isaac Orr explains:

The graph below shows wind capacity factors in MISO during the same period in blue. A capacity factor is a percentage of how much electricity a power plant generates compared to its theoretical maximum output.

The graph also shows the capacity value that MISO gives to wind turbines, which is intended to measure the reliable capacity that the asset is supposed to contribute during peak electricity demand. In 2023, MISO expects wind turbines to operate at an 18.1 percent capacity factor during times of peak demand, shown in red in the chart.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/just-stop-oil-wimbledon-barclays-climate-protest-3dbfd921?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The activist group Just Stop Oil claimed credit Wednesday for disruptions at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, after two protesters ran into a match and began “throwing environmentally friendly orange confetti glitter and jigsaw pieces,” according to a statement the outfit posted on Twitter. This is the same crew that last year tossed tomato soup on a Vincent van Gogh painting.

Just Stop Oil’s complaint on Twitter is that Wimbledon made a sponsorship deal with Barclays, which the group said has “given £30 billion to oil and gas companies” over the past two years. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, the world will need oil for decades. Natural gas has been a boon for emissions reductions in the U.S., since it has led to fewer power plants burning coal.

The tennis racketeers were arrested, as they should have been. This is a bad mode of protest, and it’s probably counterproductive to the climate cause. Green groups sometimes block highways at rush hour. What is this supposed to accomplish, other than make commuters furious? Disrupting a tennis match and tossing soup at a painting are examples of protest as theater.

Climate as a cause has become the province of too many fanatics willing to break the law. Will their progressive allies bother to call them out? This kind of nonsense on the left too often gets dismissed as some quirky souls who go too far because they care so much. If antiabortion activists were regularly blocking traffic or defacing art, there’d be no end to the handwringing in the press about extreme tactics on the right.

Climate activists who have a quasi-religious viewpoint aren’t interested in listening to facts, but here’s a line from a March article in NPR, a news source they might trust: “China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years.” Maybe they should try going to Beijing and splashing soup around Tiananmen Square. See how that goes.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/03/this-rush-to-electric-cars-is-a-colossal-mistake/

We may soon regret the radical and absolutist embrace of electric vehicles (EVs). Governments across the world are planning to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars, and to take older, gas-guzzling vehicles off the road. The Biden administration is proposing strict new pollution limits, as well as vast state subsidies, to accelerate the US’s transition to EVs.

Replacing the massive $3 trillion global car industry is an extremely high-risk economic gamble, particularly for the West. It could also threaten the mobility of all but the richest among us. And all this is being risked for environmental benefits that may prove far less robust than is often claimed. This is not to say that EVs won’t help us to reduce CO2 emissions or to clean the air. The problem is that, at least in the immediate future, they should not be the only option available to consumers.

Toyota, for instance, has argued that there are other, more affordable and quicker ways to reduce emissions than transitioning exclusively to EVs. While Toyota is investing in electric batteries, it also hopes to continue offering hybrid and hydrogen-powered cars in the coming decades. For stating this openly, it has come under fire from green lobbyists and politicians. New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, has even decided to restrict the city’s pension fund’s investments in the Japanese car company, due to its unwillingness to faithfully follow the green party line.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/03/heres-another-reason-to-hate-evs/

‘As fuel taxes plummet, states weigh charging by the mile instead of the tank.” That was the headline of a recent AP story, which should scare freedom-loving citizens everywhere. And you can place the blame squarely on government-subsidized EVs for this terrible new development.

The background is that state and federal gasoline taxes aren’t raising “enough” money these days to pay for roadway construction and maintenance. And a big reason for the growing shortfall is the increase in electric vehicles.

EVs get massive tax subsidies to convince people to buy them, but their owners don’t pay gasoline taxes, for the obvious reason that they never have to fill up. The more EVs on the road, the less revenue the gas taxes raise.

So the policy geniuses in Washington have a solution: Impose a per-mile tax.

Some states are already experimenting with “vehicle miles traveled” taxes, and the $1 trillion bi-partisan infrastructure bill includes $125 million for state and local pilot programs to test a national VMT fee.

A VMT sounds reasonable, right? After all, every driver imposes costs on roadways. And a mileage tax would capture all drivers, no matter what fuels their cars.

But look more closely, and the VMT tax is perhaps one of the most insidious tax ideas ever devised.

To start, a VMT tax would be incredibly complicated and costly to impose.

The gas tax is simple. A relatively small number of large fuel suppliers pay the tax, the costs of which are then passed on to retailers. But by definition, a VMT means collecting money directly from hundreds of millions of owners of hundreds of million cars. How?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/27/when-do-we-reach-peak-climate-insanity-it-needs-to-be-soon/

The global warming gasbags and climate catastrophics seem to have an endless amount of energy. Like the posse chasing Butch and Sundance, they don’t get tired, or hungry, or slow down, or even break formation. But unlike that posse, they’ll never catch what they’re chasing.

To listen to the climate alarmists, the casual observer would be convinced that the incineration of Earth due to combustion that produces carbon dioxide is imminent. As in next year … or maybe next week.

Here’s Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Democrat from Michigan:

“We have to be much more aggressive in regard to fossil fuel expansions,” she recently said. The Daily Mail characterized her rant as a “pep talk” for activists who are laying the groundwork for “a campaign of blocking highways and chaotic protests later this summer.”

According to the Mail, “Europe’s top climate activists are planning a ‘large-scale civil disobedience campaign‘ of highway blockages, hunger strikes and disruption at ‘federal properties’ in the U.S. in August.”

One who has already obstructed the free movement of others is of course Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist who is famous for, well, being a sniveling brat feted by the world’s most superficial people even though she’s achieved nothing that would be of benefit to her fellow man. Last week she and others were arrested for spending five days blocking ​​oil tankers in the Malmo, Sweden, harbor. Anyone who thinks this is sane behavior should themselves immediately rush to their local mental health clinic.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/06/21/sorry_greta_humanity_is_still_here_and_stronger_than_ever_942196.html

Hope you don’t have any exciting weekend plans. By the time you read this, humanity has already been wiped out.

Hasn’t it?

On June 21, 2018, Greta Thunberg tweeted that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Five years have come and almost gone, and the tweet has been suspiciously deleted.

Thunberg is claiming her point was misinterpreted, but any way you look at it, the climate cartel is dead wrong — again — about the fate of humanity. In fact, there’s almost nothing about the climate change movement that stands up to science.

Since Thunberg’s fatalist tweet, climate rhetoric has risen to a fever pitch, but fossil fuel usage hasn’t dipped at all. Nationwide oil, natural gas, and coal consumption last year was about equal to annual averages from the 2010s.

It’s not for lack of trying. Even after decades of multibillion-dollar subsidies and seemingly unanimous public support, renewables still only represent 4% of our energy. As nice as wind and solar energy sound, renewable technology just isn’t capable of serving as a primary energy source. It may not be for generations, if ever. If “whole of government” support from Washington, mind-boggling corporate investment, and rabid virtue-signaling from the media and pop culture isn’t enough to move the needle, what will?

No matter how shrill the climate cartel cries that the end is near, the American public just isn’t willing to sacrifice the benefits of affordable, reliable energy — which only fossil fuels can provide.

They see through the disinformation the climate cartel is spreading. Not only is the human race nowhere near the brink of extinction, but our lives and our environment are better than ever before.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/why-our-electric-grid-is-threatened.php

America used to have stable, cheap electricity. This is really the definition of a first-world country; or it used to be, anyway. Now, for the first time in many years, we can’t safely rely on the electric grid, while at the same time the price of electricity is spiraling upward.

This video by Kite & Key Media provides a good, if simple, explanation of why our grid is now under threat and soon will be wholly unreliable. The culprit, of course, is intermittent “green” energy:

I think that over the rest of this century, the world will divide into rich and poor nations. Rich nations will be those that use fossil fuels and nuclear energy to power their economies and their lives. Poor nations will be those that go “green.”