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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

The Climate Cons

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/21/why-should-u-s-pay-reparations-to-u-n-climate-shakedown-artists/

The world’s climate criminals aren’t the energy companies selling the fossil fuels needed to power a modern economy, nor those that make the products that burn those fuels. The real offenders are the global warming alarmists who have once again revealed what the game is, and it has nothing to do with protecting the environment.

This year’s United Nations climate hootenanny, the 27th Congress of Parties, produced an agreement in which rich nations will pay reparations to poorer ones for the damage that their energy consumption has supposedly caused. Our own country, at the insistence of its increasingly impaired, ever-pandering-to-eco-cranks president, will even participate in the scam. The amount is not much relative to our economy – $1 billion – but it sets a precedent and tells the world that we’re willing dupes.

After all, 81 million Americans voted to put a mentally infirm man in the White House. So we must be in favor of atoning for our environmental sins by taking part in a U.N.-controlled slush fund.

But some of us see the shakedown for what it is: Part of a ruse to use a manufactured climate crisis as a way to punish prosperous nations for being rich (putting the greedy West in its place through wealth redistribution), and to replace capitalism with a collectivist economic system wherever and whenever possible.

Naturally the international highwaymen congratulated themselves on a job well done.

Biden Signs Up for Climate Reparations The latest shakedown is a new fund to pay poor countries for supposed damage caused by Western use of fossil fuels.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-signs-up-for-climate-change-reparations-europe-fund-un-john-kerry-poor-countries-bank-capitalism-11668974219?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The use of climate policy to soak Americans keeps getting worse, and the United Nation’s climate conference in Egypt ended this weekend with agreement on a new fund to pay reparations to poor countries. Welcome to the latest climate shakedown.

Poor countries have long sought to force wealthy countries to pay for the “loss and damage” they suffer from natural disasters that are supposedly climate-related. This is separate from the $100 billion a year that rich countries have promised to help poor countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate change.

The 2015 Paris accord suggested rich countries compensate poor countries for climate damage—the rationale being that industrialization has increased temperatures and led to natural disasters. Poor countries finally forced discussion of a formal mechanism to pay climate reparations onto this year’s U.N. conference agenda.

John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, dismissed the idea earlier this month: “It’s a well-known fact that the United States and many other countries will not establish . . . some sort of legal structure that is tied to compensation or liability. That’s just not happening.” But on Thursday Europe abandoned the U.S. by proposing a deal, and Mr. Kerry rolled over.

Wealthy countries will now set up a fund to cover climate damage for the least developed countries—i.e., not China or middle-income nations. This will be financed from “a broad donor base” and “mosaic of solutions,” such as international development banks and taxes on aviation, shipping and fossil fuels.

There Will Be No Climate Amnesty What the globalist elite’s climate cult is actually really about. by Jason Isaac

https://www.frontpagemag.com/there-will-be-no-climate-amnesty/

“Let them eat cake,” famously attributed to Marie Antoinette by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has become universal shorthand for a monarch’s total disregard for her famished citizens stealing and wreaking havoc in the streets to survive. World leaders are making the same faux pas this week at their opulent stay in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, for COP27, the United Nations’ climate change conference.

While they eat the best food in the world and enjoy luxurious tourism opportunities, they will leave the conference telling billions of people that the only way to combat the “climate crisis” is to stop eating meat, stop production of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, and, well, stop eating entirely. The Malthusian climate cult isn’t about saving the world — it’s all about depopulation.

When the world gets tired of the lies and energy poverty, will those leaders want a “climate amnesty,” like the pandemic amnesty now desperately sought by U.S. leaders who shut down schools? Probably. But they don’t deserve it.

There are nearly eight billion people who will be affected by the COP27 convention. Of those, 800 million people still live in dire poverty without access to any electricity. 3.3 billion people have access to less electricity than the average American refrigerator. While the 30,000 globalist elites bend the knee to the false god of the net-zero agenda, billions face hunger and lack of fuel needed to keep warm this winter. This scarcity is driven by the decarbonization agenda that has permeated the political elite class around the world.

A True Progressive Top Court Takes On Climate Change: The Case Of Germany Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-14-how-a-true-progressive-top-court-handles-climate-change-the-case-of-germany

Two of my recent posts have looked at critiques from the left of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA — the June 30 decision that held that the Clean Air Act did not clearly give EPA authority to order the phase-out of all fossil-fuel generated electricity in the U.S. My July 5 post, “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice,” summarized Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in the West Virginia case. My September 12 post, “How The Left Views Administrative Law,” discussed the presentation at the Federalist Society convention by Professor Sally Katzen of NYU Law School, where she stated her belief that EPA did have the authority in question, and criticized the Court for having taken “an extreme action to shut down rule-making.”

But the Kagan dissent and Katzen presentation are just critiques of the approach to this matter taken by our constitutionalist-dominated Supreme Court. A separate question is, what would the liberals do if they suddenly found themselves in control of the top court — say, if a new Democrat-controlled Congress decides to create six new justices to be appointed by President Biden?

At the lunch following the panel where Professor Katzen spoke, I found myself sitting next to two lawyers who had come from Germany to attend the convention. One of them said to me, in essence, you have no idea what a country’s top court might do when it feels that its powers are unconstrained. He then referred me, on the subject of climate change, to a Decision from the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) from March 2021; and he gave me sufficient pointers to find information about the Decision in English.

It turns out that the Constitutional Court has an English-language portion of its website, where can be found both a press release of April 29, 2021, summarizing the Decision, as well as a full translation of the Decision itself. The full Decision has some 270 “paragraphs,” some quite long, and would likely be around 200 pages if typed out in the format used by our courts. It is unanimous, and there are no concurrences or dissents. Unlike cases from our Supreme Court, the Decision does not have a caption naming plaintiffs and defendants. They suggest referring to the Decision as the “Order of the First Senate of 24 March 2021.” (The Constitutional Court is divided into two halves, called “Senates,” of eight judges each. They divide the cases between themselves based on subject matter.)

Democracy Dies in Climate Panic Democracy and climate are at odds. by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democracy-dies-in-climate-panic/

The United Nations is one of the most sacred political cows in the liberal media. This is especially true when they convene the global elites on the perils of “climate change.” The latest confab in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, began with the usual appeal to fear and panic from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, formerly known as the Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal.

“Our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” Guterres warned. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.” If that AC/DC song echo wasn’t strong enough, he added, “It is either a climate solidarity pact, or a collective suicide pact.”

Journalists consider anyone who questions this my-way-or-hell viewpoint as not only a “denier” of science but an enemy of the people. Their standard practice is to sound like U.N. publicists.

NPR’s comically titled newscast “All Things Considered” ran a U.N.-boosting story on Nov. 7 that they headlined “U.N. climate conference opens with alarming warnings about the global climate.” There was no dissent allowed from the “highway to climate hell” talk.

Anchor Elissa Nadworny helpfully asked reporter Ruth Sherlock what the U.N. hoped to accomplish. Sherlock touted “developing” countries demanding “loss and damage” money, insisting “wealthier countries that are responsible for most of the carbon dioxide emissions should pay reparations to emerge economies.”

Conservatives are calling this the “Sharm el-Sheikh-down.”

How the War on Nitrous Oxide Threatens Global Food Supply But stopping global warming’s more important, right? Right? by Calvin Beisner

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.

The ABC’s Of G-R-E-E-N Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

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

Global Emissions Set Record as Attendees at Climate Summit Party On By Rick Moran

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.

In Egypt, Climate Catastrophism as Usual Michael Kile

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/11/climate-business-as-usual-in-egypt/

Another year, another United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) on how to persuade the bogeyman of our age, climate change (CC), to cease misbehaving. Time – and money – is running out yet again.

With more than 30,000 delegates attending this “watershed moment” – yes, over 30,000 — COP27 will be full of sound and fury, dire warnings, purveyors of dodgy carbon credits (including the UN’s own carbon offset platform), utopian fantasists and the usual crowd of jeremiahs, politicians and bureaucrats preaching “climate chaos”. Many will have form too, having spent years hyping the issue at every opportunity.

The event is being held in Sharm El Sheikh, a resort city located at the southern tip of Egypt’s South Sinai Protectorate. There has not been as much excitement there since the 1967 Six-Day War. The discovery of the Great Green Pyramid of Gaia a decade ago in the Ruba’ el-Khali (Empty Abode) also drew world attention to the region.

As the days turn into weeks, around midnight on the final day “transformative climate solutions”  could emerge from COP27’s so-called “innovation hubs”. If so, they will include demands for more climate finance. Yet many developed countries are themselves moving closer to recession (or worse) after joining the UN’s Race to Zero. Aptly named, given its ultimate destination is surely the Valley of the Jackals or the Tomb of Anubis.

That said, the Race to Zero is promising to deliver virtually everything on a green activist’s wish list: “A healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery that prevents future threats, creates decent jobs, and unlocks inclusive, sustainable growth.” Led by “high-level champions” Mahmoud Mohieldin and Nigel Topping, it strives to “mobilize actors outside of national governments to join the Climate Ambition Alliance.”

Israeli president calls for ‘renewable Middle East’ at COP27, but some call it a pipe dream David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/israeli-president-calls-for-renewable-middle-east-at-cop27-but-some-call-it-a-pipedream/

Israeli President Isaac Herzog went beyond reaffirming his country’s 2021 commitment to fight climate change at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt at Sharm el-Sheikh.

On Nov. 7, Herzog presented a far-reaching vision of a sustainable energy infrastructure serving as the foundation for Middle East Peace. In a spin on Shimon Peres’s New Middle East, he termed it a “Renewable Middle East.”

“I intend to spearhead the development of what I term a Renewable Middle East—a regional ecosystem of sustainable peace,” Herzog said.

“I envision that in the foreseeable future the solar energy produced in the deserts of the Middle East will be available for export to Europe, Asia, and Africa,” he said. “I believe that the entire Middle East, all Middle Eastern nations, abundant with sun and technology, will have the ability to connect the rest of the world to a magnificent source of renewable energy.”

Ambassador Gideon Bachar, special envoy for climate change and sustainability at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told JNS that it’s not just rhetoric. “Creating regional resilience to climate change, working together, collaborating, finding solutions between Israel and its neighbors in the region in general is Israel’s policy,” he said. He offered the water-for-energy agreement signed between Jordan and Israel at the conference as an example.

Israel is a relative newcomer to climate change. In June 2021, then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that Israel would cut 85% of its carbon emissions from 2015 levels by 2050. At last year’s COP26 in Glasgow, Bennett upped the ante, pledging net zero emissions.

Israel debuted its first pavilion this year at the annual climate change conference, pushing various innovations. On Wednesday, the pavilion focused on Israeli space technologies that could address the climate crisis.