RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3688593-proposed-climate-rule-is-bigger-badder-deal-than-manchin-schumer-climate-bill%ef%bf%bc/

In his Florida v. Davos speech at last month’s National Conservatism conference, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) made important observations about the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing movement. He called it out as an attempt to use corporate and economic power to impose on society an ideological agenda that could not win at the ballot box. 

“Corporatism is not the same as free enterprise,” DeSantis argued. 

He warned of the danger from the growth of the administrative state, which he called the logical outcome of Congress abdicating its responsibility to hold the bureaucracy to account and letting it do much of the heavy legislating. 

In an opinion piece five days earlier, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lambasted such Republican critics of ESG. “Critics call it ‘woke capitalism,’” he wrote. “There’s just one problem. They don’t seem to understand capitalism. And flogging ESG is not only a terrible economic mistake. It will be a political loser too.” 

Bloomberg’s forecast will be tested when Florida voters decide whether to reelect DeSantis on Nov. 8. 

The battle has been joined and that is good news, because it signals a much-needed debate on ESG and its climate-policy component. 

Although Democrats hail passage of the Schumer-Manchin Inflation Reduction Act, far more consequential is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate-risk disclosure rule, currently being finalized. It will operate at the nexus of the administrative state, Wall Street and politically motivated institutional investors. The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, part of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), has 273 signatories with $61.3 trillion in assets under management.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/14/were-in-the-climate-army-now/

During the Global War on Terror, when the United States was engaged battling terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Left routinely lied to young voters that President George W. Bush in particular, and Republicans in general, were going to reinstitute the draft and send them to these active military theaters. The Left’s message was less than subtle: vote for Democrats or else the GOP will make sure you’re drafted and/or dead.

I was reminded of this in the heat of the 2020 election, when one of the Democrats’ smears was that an unstable President Trump was going to involve us in a war—likely a nuclear one. As during the Bush Administration, the scurrilous charge targeted young voters. What was different was that Trump was far less interventionist, and utilized American military power with significantly less frequency than did his predecessors. If one understands the Left’s tactics, Trump’s disinclination to use military power was not only insufficient to stop their “he’ll get us in a war” lie; it was, in fact, their reason for spreading it. (To those who contest this assessment of the Left’s tactics, does “Russiagate” ring a bell?)

Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats and their media cohorts are now using the prospect of nuclear war to try and prop up Joe Biden’s sagging poll numbers, which threaten to drag his party’s federal and state candidates down to defeat. To wit, Biden opined to a gaggle of fat cat Democrats:

[For the] first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of a] nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going. We’ve got a guy [Putin] I know fairly well. He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.

Yes, if the Democrats’ stoking of “civil war” rhetoric isn’t enough to get their voters to the polls for the 2022 midterm elections, why not toss in the prospect of nuclear annihilation—along a path they and their minions have helped cement—even as they taunt the enemy to try to look like a tough guy? 

What could possibly go wrong?

Eco-vandals threw tomato soup on one of Van Gogh’s priceless “Sunflowers” paintings at Britain’s National Museum on Thursday, the latest in a long string of attacks on Western Civilization’s treasures.

The reason for the Van Gogh attack? Two members of Just Stop Oil attempted to destroy the artwork and glued themselves to the wall because they’re anti-oil and “Sunflowers” is an oil painting.

Get it?

Yeah, me neither.

The enemies of civilization are idiot vandal-savants with moral pretentious, dressed up like dues collectors from 1984′s Junior Anti-Sex League.

Here’s what passes for their thinking:

Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” had nothing to do with climate change, [Just Stop Oil spokesweasel Mel Carrington] said. It was simply “an iconic painting, by an iconic painter” and an attack on it would generate headlines. But the choice of soup was more symbolic, Carrington said: In Britain, many householders were struggling to pay fuel and food bills because of soaring inflation, and some could not even afford to heat up a can of soup. The government should be helping ordinary people deal with “the cost of living crisis,” rather than enabling fossil fuel extraction, she added.

Fortunately, the only damage done was “some minor damage to the frame,” according to an email released by the National Gallery. The painting itself sits safely behind glass.

I’ve been to the National Museum. I’ve seen “Sunflowers.” I’ve seen the protective glass. I’d rather have seen Van Gogh unencumbered, but I understand that the West’s treasures must be protected from the two-legged animals behind groups like Just Stop Oil.

Witness now your so-called moral betters, overgrown children still in need of a spanking:

Unavoidably, our “protestors” got what they wanted — the world talking about them.

But maybe not in the way they intended, if these selections from my Twitter timeline are any indication.

Enjoy.

Commander Salamander is one of my favorite milbloggers — one of my favorite bloggers, period. His suggestion is exactly what we ought to do, with the glued-down protestors as much on display as the art for visitors to the National Gallery.

I have to get a little more serious with this next one.

Please burn this line into your brain: “The vandalism or destruction of art is always an authoritarian act.”

Even some lefties can’t get behind this particularly stupid and futile act.

girl i’m down with the cause but van gogh was a broke mentally ill painter considered a failure until his death like what does he have to do with this https://t.co/cNpgoBKPd7

— matt (@mattxiv) October 14, 2022

Here’s another.

Kurt Schlichter has had quite enough, as you’ll see below. But it was one of the replies (also below) that really caught my eye.

Tom Clancy did just that to the environmental wackos who tried to wipe out humanity in Rainbow Six, and it’s an admirable solution. I’d also recommend no insect repellent, clothes, or food. Enjoy your nature, kids!

Oh, and ignore that comment from Ian Miles Cheong about the painting being “destroyed.” Ian provides good links and some solid content, but sometimes he plays a little fast and loose with the facts.

That’s enough for today, and I’m going to try not to lose any sleep wondering where Western Civilization’s children-with-daddy-issues will strike next.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-west-is-on-the-road-to-energy-ruin/

Since the beginning of the Ukraine war and the sanctions it triggered, energy prices have skyrocketed. President Joe Biden has called this year’s high energy prices “Putin’s price hike.” British prime minister Liz Truss told households that their high energy bills were a fair price to pay for solidarity with Ukraine. Margrethe Vestager, vice president of the European Commission, has encouraged Europeans to take short, cold showers to conserve energy. “When you turn off the water, say ‘Take that, Putin!’” she urged.

But are the high prices really Putin’s fault? He didn’t sanction himself, after all. It’s the West that chose to cut itself off from the Russian fossil fuels upon which it had come to rely. Moreover, the sanctions have failed — Russia’s corporate profits leapt 25 percent between the imposition of the sanctions and the end of August.

So what are the origins of the current energy crisis? When did it really begin?

Let’s play a game. Guess which year these headlines are from: “Curtailed ammonia production in Antwerp and Ludwigshafen.” “High natural gas prices lead to a shutdown of British fertilizer plants.” “Diesel Shortage Amid Soaring Prices: Truck Stops Resort To Rationing.” If you guessed 2022, you’d be wrong. Those are all from September 2021.

The truth is that the energy crisis began to take effect late last year. A combination of post-Covid demand rebound, a wind drought in Europe and depleted fossil fuel storage on the continent all collided to put serious pressure on the world’s industrial systems. Add the longstanding overinvestment in unreliable renewables, nuclear plant closures across the world in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and a global drop of more than 50 percent in oil and gas investment — from $700 billion to $300 billion — between 2014 and last year, and you have everything you need to kick off a global energy crunch. Russian tank treads running from the Donbas to Kyiv just made it all worse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/hurricane_ian_reveals_another_problem_with_electric_vehicles_they_explode_after_hurricanes.html

Joe Biden and all his minions have allowed gas prices to go sky high in a fanatic quest to force Americans into electric vehicles.

One problem: They tend to explode after hurricanes.

That’s what Fox News found, citing warnings from local authorities about this latest health hazard from the purveyors of those who vow to make America “go green”:

A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state’s top financial officer and fire marshal. 

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis tweeted Thursday. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”

Which isn’t much of an enticement to purchase an electric car. How many gas-powered vehicles put on that kind of a show after a hurricane?

It goes to show more of the unintended consequences on the road to green Utopia — and why it’s impractical to force such changes without ever considering all the things a consumer might consider. Being able to get out of a disaster zone in a hurry is pretty important to a lot of people who buy cars.

https://www.city-journal.org/cities-hire-chief-heat-officers-to-address-climate-concerns

As the size and scope of government in America grows, cities are rapidly inventing new job titles. Recent examples: the algorithms management and policy officer, the director of digital equity, and the building decarbonization incentives manager—all real jobs. Now add to that list what is likely to be the hottest (pun intended) new job title at city hall: chief heat officer (CHO), also variously known as the extreme-weather coordinator or chief weather-resilience officer. If you’re surprised by these seemingly ludicrous titles, you haven’t been paying attention to the extent to which mainstream media run alarmist stories of soaring temperatures and their impact on urban life. They’ve helped turn the CHO, a job barely a year old, into a new staple of local government. These newly minted bureaucrats will make it their business to enumerate the impact of heat on the local population—an effect certain to increase now that government is counting it—and seek ways to mitigate it.

One phrase that you’re unlikely to hear much from these new bureaucrats: “air conditioning.” Warm-weather-related deaths dropped precipitously over the last century around much of the industrialized world largely because what we fondly term AC became widely available. But air conditioning demands electricity, most often powered by fossil fuels or nuclear energy, two increasingly unseemly phrases within government circles in places like California, where cities are rushing to hire CHOs. So instead, it seems, the job of these new bureaucrats will be to find carbon-neutral solutions to summer in the city.

The rise of the CHO has just reached a notable milestone: heat officers from cities around the world recently gathered for an Extreme Heat Resilience Conference in Washington, D.C.—a place that, before the invention of air conditioning, was so uncomfortable in the summer that British diplomats assigned there could draw tropical-assignment bonus pay. Much on the minds of the CHOs assembled in Washington was a new alarmist report on the impact of heat on cities, which begins, “The world is burning. Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration.” (Actually, it is.) Consumed by the report’s warnings, CHOs plan a series of initiatives, one of which revolves around a popular new phrase in urbanism: “tree canopy,” referring to how much tree shade exists in a neighborhood. CHOs are looking to expand their cities’ tree canopies, though they will have to do so judiciously—studies show that tree shade is not evenly distributed in many municipalities, where poorer neighborhoods have apparently been shortchanged. In fact, Syracuse is spending $2 million in federal grant money to survey its tree canopy and increase natural shade in underserved neighborhoods, with the apparent intent of righting past shading wrongs.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-5-a-comprehensive-roundup-of-official-energy-madness

“Meanwhile, the Biden people have spent the last several days begging OPEC for more production, only to have OPEC announce that it is cutting production instead. And this morning, the Wall Street Journal reports that Biden is planning loosening sanctions on Venezuela to permit the importation of more crude from there. If our country were in the hands of its worst enemies, it is hard to imagine what they would do differently.”

At this website, I try to give readers a steady flow of the latest instances of official energy madness, the ongoing efforts of our politicians, bureaucrats, academics and journalists to undermine and destroy the energy infrastructure that is the basis for our prosperity and our comfortable lives. But if you just read these examples one by one, however outrageous they may be individually, you can lose track of the overall picture. In the big picture, our government, aided and abetted by academics and journalists, is conducting a full scale war on the energy sector of the economy.

Now comes along a guy named Joseph Toomey, who has published a relatively long piece at RealClearEnergy with the title “Energy Inflation Was By Design.” Toomey is identified as a “career management consultant” in the energy field, and author of a 2014 book with the title “An Unworthy Future,” that critiqued the Obama administration’s energy policies. Other than that, Toomey has not been a regular contributor to the energy policy debates. But he makes up for an extended absence with this comprehensive roundup.

At 35 pages in length, Toomey’s piece is a seemingly endless litany of one intentionally destructive policy after another. Even if you follow this issue regularly, as I do, you can’t help but be astounded when you see the full extent of the destruction organized into one piece. An energy infrastructure built up over a century and more that actually provides reliable and affordable energy to millions of people — a true miracle of human ingenuity! — is being systematically and intentionally attacked and wrecked by ignorant fools who have no idea how difficult the existing system was to create, and equally have no idea how to make something to replace it that might actually work.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-censorship-campaign-big-tech-social-media-environmental-groups-letter-elon-musk-twitter-11665006072?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Elon Musk said this week he’ll buy Twitter after all, and the hopeful view for online speech is that his rockets-and-flamethrowers heterodoxy might be an answer for what ails social media. He won’t have it easy. On Tuesday more than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.”

What the letter asks for sounds modest, but the implication is clear. The Digital Services Act recently enacted by the European Union includes transparency rules, and the green groups want Silicon Valley “to commit to including climate disinformation as a separately-acknowledged category in its reporting and content moderation policies in and outside of the EU.” Then they could proceed to complain that the tech giants aren’t doing enough censoring.

The letter was directed to Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. At least the public can read it. How much of this lobbying goes on behind the scenes?

“We partnered with Google,” Melissa Fleming, the communications undersecretary for the United Nations, told a panel last month. “If you Google ‘climate change,’ at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.”

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/10/03/joe_bidens_energy_crisis_856943.html

The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses—the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion. The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply. In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in his powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that. As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own EPA tried to strangle at birth.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/04/the-globalist-climate-agenda-is-a-crime-against-humanity/

“This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash, is incredibly dangerous for the world.”
— Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative

It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably one of the most inverted takes on what is “dangerous” in the history of civilization. Not because anyone is against the concept of sustainability, but because sustainability as defined by Alan Jope is incredibly unsustainable. If he gets his way, he will destroy the world.

Jope, Clinton, the infamous Karl Schwab who heads the World Economic Forum, the ESG movement informally headed by Larry Fink of BlackRock (with over $10 trillion in investments), and all the rest who champion today’s prevailing globalist climate agenda are coercing nearly 8 billion people into an era of poverty and servitude.

The primary target of the “sustainability” movement is fossil fuel, the burning of which allegedly is causing catastrophic climate change. Heedless of the fact that fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors throughout the Western world are using ESG criteria (environment, social, governance), to deny the financing necessary to maintain or build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s working. Pressure from governments, international NGOs, and global finance is now delivering unprecedented shifts in policies around the world, creating needless scarcity and turmoil. In just the last month, new emissions rules have triggered protests by farmers in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in the process of earning a near perfect ESG score, lost its ability to feed its people. In the ensuing fury, the president was forced to flee the country. Undaunted, globalist climate activists are discouraging African nations from developing natural gas.

It should be easy to see the hidden agenda behind this repression. If you control energy and food, you control the world. The biggest multinational corporations on Earth are empowered by ESG mandates, because marginal or emerging competitors lack the financial resiliency to comply. From small independent private farmers and ranchers to small independent nations, once their ability to produce is broken, the big players pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not what you read in the Washington Post.