RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-war-on-nitrous-oxide-threatens-global-food-supply/

An extremely dangerous trend in public policy is growing around the world: demanding reduced emissions, mainly from agriculture, of nitrous oxide (N2O) because it contributes to global warming. Indeed, we’re told, every molecule of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere has 230 times the warming potential of every molecule of carbon dioxide-and governments all over the world concluded long ago, rightly or wrongly, that we must cut carbon dioxide emissions to reduce global warming. Clearly, then, it is even more important that we cut nitrous oxide emissions.

What’s dangerous about this? Nitrous oxide is a critical input of agricultural production. Reducing its use will seriously reduce food production, harming the world’s poor. But, if global warming is even more dangerous than reduced food production (which it is not, but for the moment we’ll assume it is for the sake of argument), surely, we must go ahead and take this step. Life is full of tradeoffs, after all.

Not so fast. Things aren’t quite that simple.

I want to begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that you have two cans of paint, A and B. Like all paint, their content is a mixture of clear liquid, through which light passes unimpeded, plus some color pigment. The concentration of the pigment determines how intense the color is, that is, how much light it absorbs so it doesn’t pass through the clear liquid. In can A, 230 out of every 1,000 molecules of paint are pigment. In can B, 1 out of every 1,000 molecules is pigment. It follows obviously that a coating of paint from can A will absorb 230 times as much light as a coating of the same thickness of paint from can B.

Now imagine that you apply 10 coats of paint from can A to a sheet of clear glass, and 23 coats of paint from can B to another sheet of clear glass. Which will block more sunlight? The sheet with paint from can A, because 230 times 10 is more than 23 times 1. Now imagine that instead you apply 10 coats of paint from can A to a sheet of glass, and 30,000 coats of paint from can B to another sheet. Now which will block more sunlight? Obviously, the sheet with paint from can B, because 30,000 times 1-30,000-is 13 times more than 230 times 10-2,300.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/14/the-abcs-of-g-r-e-e-n/

The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) is currently underway in Egypt. With American visionaries such as Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, and John Kerry featured speakers, how could anything go wrong?

Once again, it is frustrating to hear politicians and activists advocating astoundingly wasteful, mostly ineffective, and sometimes destructive “green” policies and programs. Thereby, we lose the opportunity to fund initiatives that could make a difference, as resources are squandered on you-can’t-get-there-from-here virtue-signaling.

The Basics

Unlike most other greenhouse gases (GHGs), once emitted, carbon dioxide (CO2) remains in the atmosphere for 300-1,000 years, because the sun does not break down CO2 as it does more complex molecules. The concentration of the gas in the atmosphere thus steadily increases because emissions are greater now than what is finally dissipating from the pre-industrial periods. By cherry picking arguments or models or citing predictions that did or did not come to pass, we can debate endlessly the impact of the accumulation of CO2 on today’s climate, but it is undeniable that humans are a major contributor to the buildup. That leaves us with two feasible options to slow the accumulation: limiting emissions or capturing and sequestering the gas (more on that later).  

It is irrelevant where the CO2 originates, because there is plenty of time for it to disperse widely. The U.S. emits about 13% and the European Union about 7% of the world’s total – and overall, “the West” accounts for 25% – so any globally effective mitigation policies must be economically sensible for the other 75%. Until such measures are found, we are fighting a losing battle. A September Wall Street Journal editorial put it succinctly:

“Anything the U.S. does to reduce emissions won’t matter much to global temperatures. U.S. cuts will be swamped by the increases in India, Africa and especially China. Look no further than China’s boom in new coal-fired electricity.”

Focusing self-destructive restrictions and initiatives only on the West is, therefore, an exercise in masochism and undermining its nations’ geopolitical security, by depriving them of plentiful energy and economic prosperity.

The Fallacy Of Electric Vehicles

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/11/12/global-emissions-set-record-as-attendees-at-climate-summit-party-on-n1645303

The climate hysterics chose the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh to hold their annual Conference of Parties meeting. They could have picked a city that didn’t have raw sewage flowing in the streets or that featured decent food and clean water.

I guess they’re giving us a preview of a world without fossil fuels.

As you might expect, even in a repressive Muslim country, there are pretty much non-stop parties with a record 600 registered fossil fuel lobbyists. I doubt that many attendees could give a damn what the Koran says about strong spirits when representatives from oil, gas, and coal companies are pouring.

USA Today:

The world is increasingly in agreement that climate change is real, dangerous and happening now – but that hasn’t yet translated into a global decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

Total fossil carbon dioxide emissions are expected to grow about 1% in 2022, a November report by Global Carbon Project published in the journal Earth System Science Data found. It’s being released in Egypt at the COP27 global climate change meeting.

The report projects a record amount of carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere this year: 36.6 billion tons from burning coal, oil and natural gas.

At the rate we’re burning carbon, the world is on track to blow by the maximum amount of CO2 the world can burn to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, very soon.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/07/plastics-and-such-the-labor-of-the-virtuous-n1643700

EXCERPT:

Some time back, I had an interesting conversation with the friendly manager of our village garbage dump, who confided that the ordinances requiring the separation of the various kinds of refuse into separate bins and pits were nothing but bureaucratic nonsense coupled with public virtue-signalling. It made no ultimate difference to the disposal process, which I had long suspected to be the case. Though I knew that my efforts to relieve Janice of superfluous labor were likely non-starters, I had thought the words of an authority, a veritable scholar of waste management, on the question might have an effect. It was not to be. Tins, milk cartons, wine bottles and plastic containers of every conceivable stripe continued to be scrubbed to a high polish, and placed into the appropriate Tuff-Guy kitchen bags before ending their now immaculate existence in one of six different dumpsters. My argument was dismissed as typically male indifference to the niceties of household maintenance. Women always know better.

Writing in City Journal, John Tierney points out that even Greenpeace now claims that recycling is a dead end. Recycling plastic waste is environmentally harmful to reprocess, is contaminated by toxic materials, and is not economical, apart from being hopelessly impractical and labor-intensive. Sending such waste materials to landfill is both cheaper and provably less harmful to the environment, though it will inconvenience those who “perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement, a sacrament of the green religion.” Tierney does not mention the scandal of polypropylene Covid masks, which not only do not prevent virion transmission and lead to hypoxia and fungoid diseases, but will eventually find their way to marine waters and can take centuries to degrade. They cannot be recycled.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-closing-argument-higher-energy-prices-11667845918

It’s midterm campaign season and U.S. voters are clearly upset about the cost of energy. So it’s especially odd that just before Election Day President Joe Biden is emphasizing his opposition to cheap fuel. Perhaps voters can find cause for some modest hope in a CNN finding that many of Mr. Biden’s recent public statements are false.

As for the president’s promotion of energy scarcity, Haley Brown and Ben Kesslen report for the New York Post:

President Biden repeatedly said “no more drilling” and tripped onstage when he joined Gov. Kathy Hochul in Yonkers on Sunday in a last-ditch effort to help her try to stave off GOP challenger Lee Zeldin…
“No more drilling,” Biden snapped at a climate protester who was heckling him.
“There is no more drilling. I haven’t formed any new drilling,” Biden said.
A confused-sounding Biden tried to assuage the protester and return to his speech.

Whether he was confused or not, it wasn’t Mr. Biden’s only recent message of energy paucity. A Journal editorial notes:

Every so often President Biden blurts out what he really thinks, even if it’s politically or diplomatically embarrassing. He did it again Friday when he said his Administration will shut down coal plants across America…
Mr. Biden’s campaign remarks in Carlsbad, Calif., were supposed to be about the semiconductor bill and his “unity agenda.” But during a riff on Democrats’ tax and climate spending bill, he let slip that “we’re going to be shutting [coal] plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”

Those worried about the possibility of limited energy supply and therefore an expensive winter may cling to the hope that the President was speaking untruthfully, a not infrequent occurrence. Recently this column noted the valiant effort by the New York Times to frame numerous presidential falsehoods as an element of Mr. Biden’s grandfatherly charm.

Now from CNN of all places comes an acknowledgment that the President’s false claims are hardly confined to self-aggrandizing whoppers about his biography. It seems the fibs are embedded throughout his policy message as he seeks to help Democrats hold on to their congressional majorities. A CNN headline announces: “Fact check: Biden’s midterms message includes false and misleading claims.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-6-understanding-biden-administration-energy-policy

Politicians have long been known for having a loose relationship with the truth. Generally, that takes the form of exaggeration or hyperbole. But the latest craze among Democrats is just making flatly contradictory statements.

In this category, it’s hard to top the performance of Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman on Saturday night, when he uttered this immortal quote:

I run on Roe v Wade. I celebrate the demise of Roe v. Wade. That’s the choice that we have between us, in front of us.”

Video at the link if you don’t believe it. Clearly, Fetterman is not all there mentally.

But how different is that, really, from Joe Biden on energy policy? The main difference that I can find is that there does not appear to be an example where Biden has so clearly contradicted himself in consecutive sentences uttered to the same audience on the same night. But his various statements on energy policy are at least as contradictory as Fetterman’s on abortion. Consider a few from Category A and Category B.

Category A.

Biden at a February 2020 rally: “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels. . . . That’s okay. These guys are okay. They want to do the same thing I want to do. They want to phase out fossil fuels, and we’re going to phase out fossil fuels.”

Biden at a March 15, 2020 CNN debate with Bernie Sanders: “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. [It] ends.”

Biden Executive Order, January 27, 2021: “The United States and the world face a profound climate crisis. We have a narrow moment to pursue action at home and abroad in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of that crisis and to seize the opportunity that tackling climate change presents.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lancets-heat-death-deception-united-nations-cop-27-cold-study-population-growth-technology-energy-climate-11667580996?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

As the United Nations’ annual global climate summit, COP27, nears, it’s important to look with skepticism at the academic reports many news outlets cite as evidence supporting radical climate policies. Too often, they use highly skewed data that seem to have been carefully selected to support aggressive environmental regulations. One recent and much-cited Lancet report appears deliberately deceptive.

The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades. That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicized the report, tweeting a link with a grave statement of his own, “The climate crisis is killing us. #COP27 must deliver a down-payment on climate solutions that match the scale of the problem.”

But while their model for heat deaths is based on solid academic research, the report commits an amateur statistical fallacy by blaming the increase in heat deaths on “rapidly increasing temperatures.”

Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide. The average deaths per year increased 68% from the early 2000s to the late 2010s. But that is almost entirely because there are so many more older people today than there were 20 years ago, in no small part thanks to medical innovations that keep us alive longer. Measured across the same time span the Lancet maps heat deaths, the number of people 65 and older has risen by 60%, or almost as much as heat deaths. When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/where-does-an-electric-cars-electricity-come-from/

Electric cars sales are up 66% this year.

President Joe Biden promotes them, saying things like, “The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified” and, “There’s no turning back.”

To make sure we have no choice in the matter, some left-leaning states have moved to ban gas-powered cars altogether.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning them by 2035. Oregon, Massachusetts and New York copied California. Washington state’s politicians said they’d make it happen even faster, by 2030.

Thirty countries also say they’ll phase out gas-powered cars.

But this is just dumb. It will not happen. It’s magical thinking.

In my new video, I point out some “inconvenient” facts about electric cars, simple truths that politicians and green activists just don’t seem to understand.