RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s the middle of a summer heat wave and temperatures are rising. Suddenly your air conditioning turns off. It’s not a blackout or a brownout: it’s the new government plan.

Mass government subsidies for inefficient and expensive ‘green energy’ wind turbines and solar panels combined with bans on efficient and cheap oil, coal and gas, have made energy grids unreliable and costly. States that have aimed for widespread use of green energy like California and Texas are suffering blackouts and brownouts at growing rates.

Instead of building reliable energy resources, federal and state governments, along with monopolistic energy companies, are making up for green energy with energy rationing.

Or ‘smart rationing’.

Virtual power plants were a green energy buzzword that promised to harness local battery capacity to distribute energy to the grid, but the diminishing promise of solar panels and the power hunger of electric cars has poured cold water on the idea that the ‘green’ battery devices and useless solar panels will ever reliably give more to the grid than they take from it.

Virtual power plants, like all things virtual, have come to mean power that isn’t really there. Instead virtual power plants have become another euphemism for rationing power.

Unable to get meaningful savings from so-called battery ‘distributed energy resources’, virtual power plants now mean using smart thermostats to seize control over homeowner power usage with bureaucrats or AI software deciding how much power people should be using and turning off their heat or air conditioning. Government agencies and monopolistic utilities insist on calling this ‘efficiency’ rather than what it actually is which is rationing customer power usage.

State utilities have taken to bribing consumers with discounts on skyrocket energy rates and ‘free’ smart thermostats like Google Nest in order to induce them to turn over control of their thermostats. Once they give up control, they may be allowed only limited manual overrides a month to be able to turn on the heat or air in even the most miserable weather.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/24/the-ev-graveyard/

Last week, the House approved a resolution to block the Biden administration’s emissions rule that would require more than half of the automobiles sold in the new-car market to be electric by 2032. The 215 representatives who voted for the bill, including eight Democrats, are far more in tune with most of the country than the White House. The “deplorables” and “bitter” clingers of the industrialized world are rejecting electric vehicles.

Nationwide, the inventory of unsold EVs had grown by nearly 350% over the first half of 2024, creating “a 92-day supply — roughly three months’ worth of EVs, and nearly twice the industry average,” says Axios, which is 54 days for gasoline-powered vehicles.

Ford, which lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023, continues to yield to reality, now ditching its plans to build a large electric SUV. This “course change,” says Just the News, “comes amid lower-than-expected demand for electric vehicles.”

The company has also “pushed back to 2027” plans for “another electric vehicle project for a pickup truck.”

“Based on where the market is and where the customer is, we will pivot and adjust and make those tough decisions,” said John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer.

And here’s the market’s message:

“Of the U.S. consumers planning on purchasing a new vehicle in the next 24 months, only 34% intend to purchase an EV, down 14% from 48% in the 2023,” says Ernst & Young’s Mobility Consumer Index, “a global survey of almost 20,000 consumers from 28 countries.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-hysteria-and-the-end-of-hope/

Recently the reliably Left-wing rag The Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece that wrestled with a question no one in history ever thought to ask themselves until our own time, when it has become a common refrain among young generations: Is it morally right to bring children into a world so fraught with dangerous uncertainty?

“Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question” is an excerpt from a new book by Jade S. Sasser, an associate professor in the – wait for it – Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. The book is called Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future.

Yes, climate anxiety is a thing. Psychotherapist Natacha Duke describes it thusly: “Also known as ‘eco-anxiety,’ ‘eco-guilt’ and ‘eco-grief,’ climate anxiety is characterized by a chronic fear of environmental doom that’s often paralyzing and debilitating.” It is one of the most effective and widespread psyops of our time, having traumatized an entire couple of generations into believing that we must take immediate, radical action to completely dismantle the capitalist, systemically racist, heteronormative, fossil-fueled power structures and exploitative mentality that purportedly have driven us to the brink of planetary annihilation.

The Times excerpt centers on a series of interviews Sasser conducted in 2021 and 2022 with millennials and members of Generation Z, “all of them people of color. Some of them identify as queer… which shapes their sensitivity to discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.” All were college-educated, most having taken environmental studies classes. At least two of them have degrees in sustainability, whatever that means.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-green-agenda-would-punish-lower-income-households-the-most-experts-say/

The costs of rapidly transitioning the world economy from natural gas to green energy sources over the coming decades will fall onto lower-income households the most, a reality that even proponents of many of those environmental policies now acknowledge.

The governor of the Bank of Italy, Fabio Panetta, acknowledged the potential negative impacts of a transition to “net-zero” carbon emissions while addressing an international energy conference on Monday.

“In fact, most climate change mitigation policies, such as carbon pricing, put pressure on the energy bills of businesses and households,” said Panetta, a former member of the European Central Bank governing council. “The consumption baskets of less affluent households are heavily weighted toward energy goods. They will therefore be disproportionately affected by the gradual increase in energy costs required for the transition.”

European and American consumers felt the burden of higher energy costs when oil prices spiked two years ago during the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine and inflation reached levels not seen since the 1970s. Inflation remains a top issue for American and European voters, as incumbent parties across Europe face difficult election prospects because of populist backlash.

“It is quite telling that a [former] member of the European Central Bank Governing Council who believes all of the fictitious asserted benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions feels compelled to warn just how expensive and devastating to consumers — and especially lower income consumers — carbon dioxide reductions will be,” said James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/13/warming-alarmists-again-give-away-their-objective/

What do the climate activists really want? Do they have nothing more in mind than a noble crusade to prevent the burning sky from falling on us? Or is the global warming scare just another piece of the revolution? It’s of course the latter. We know this because they’re constantly telling us it is.

The most recent admission comes from Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia, whose exhausting essay under the headline “To fix climate anxiety (and also climate change), we first have to fix individualism” was posted on Wednesday – yes, Sept. 11.

Xia dwells a great deal on “climate anxiety” caused by environmental events that have afflicted the planet since its creation but are now blamed on human progress through the combustion of fossil fuels. She worries “we’ll never go back to normal” without defining sufficiently “normal” – maybe because in a world that has never stopped changing there is no normal. She is angry, frustrated, helpless and exhausted. Earth is so doomed that she questions “whether I could ever justify bringing my own children into this world.”

And the answer to all this? Diminish individualism and elevate the collective.

Xia approvingly quotes Sarah Jaquette Ray, whom she identifies as a “an environmental humanist who chairs the environmental studies program at Cal Poly Humboldt,” which tells us a lot about the state of academia.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-political-cost-of-the-energy-transition

For physicists, energy is about the laws of nature; for engineers, it’s about manufacturing prowess. For citizens, however, energy is generally about money. Energy purchases are unavoidable—whether directly, by paying our electric bills or for gas in our cars, or indirectly, by paying for the energy costs embedded in food, vacations, and everything else. Politicians often use “pocketbook” language when talking to voters because they know how important lowering everyday costs are for most Americans. But does anyone believe that there won’t be a political cost from the embrace of “bold” energy policies that are sharply raising citizens’ energy bills?

To understand where current federal energy policies are taking the nation, we can look to the states, the “laboratories of democracy,” and especially to a group of them eagerly following California’s lead, putting into effect massive changes to energy policies.

Consider New Jersey. As its website brags, it has “one of the most ambitious Renewable Portfolio Standards in the country.” Earlier this summer, headlines featured news about citizens shocked at soaring electric bills, thanks to a state-approved price hike. And that’s just for starters. Early in August, PJM, the grid administrator that manages electricity for a 13-state region that includes New Jersey, reported the results of its auction for supplying next year’s wholesale power: the bids came in nearly ten times as high as last year.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/06/climate-indoctrination-accelerates-as-the-narrative-breaks-down/

The global warming alarmist cabal continues to spin its many yarns and press forward with its propaganda program. Maybe the zealots are becoming desperate because they see the facts aren’t lining up with their hyperbole.

Following the get-’em-while-they’re-young school of thought, the climate agitators are targeting kindergarteners. NASA’s Climate Kids webpage, for instance, says “global warming will affect everyone on Earth.” While admitting that “fossil fuels have changed the course of human history,” NASA also says “these good things come at a cost. The cost is pollution, the destruction of landscapes and natural habitats, oil spills in the ocean, and nasty fracking chemicals in the ground. Global warming will be the biggest problem of all.”

On another of the “Kids” pages, NASA claims that in an era of “rising” global temperatures, “almost all climate scientists agree that a big cause of that is the burning of fossil fuels. The warming could lead to rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, and more severe weather. It is a challenge that we will have to deal with in the coming years.”

Remember, this proselytizing is intended to program kindergarteners. And it’s only the beginning. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is also dedicated to “educating” kids about “human-induced climate change” and making sure that they are afraid to burn fossil fuels.

This is the same NOAA that, according to the Daily Caller, “House Republicans are pressing … for answers about a signature dataset frequently cited as evidence that climate change is intensifying.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-9-2-economic-policy-is-the-key-to-growth-or-decline

What is Kamala Harris’s position on any important policy issue? It’s not so easy to figure out. She studiously avoids interviews and reporters’ questions. Go to Harris’s official campaign website, and it’s almost entirely about raising money, without a word about what she stands for. Back when she was in the Senate (January 2017-January 2021), and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2019-20, she made many definitive statements on various subjects (all in accord with the radical left wing of the Democratic Party). Now, it’s silence. Unidentified campaign spokespeople imply that her previous positions are no longer operative; but what is the new position?