RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/the_environmentalist_war_on_california.html

Misguided environmentalist policies were major contributors to the California fires. The first policy led to a self-inflicted shortage of water, the second policy led to the buildup of tinder in California’s forest, the third to the large number of EVs that exploded. Additional environmental policies were indirectly responsible for the self-inflicted shortage of firemen, fire equipment, and powerlines that desperately needed to be fireproofed.

The first major factor that contributed to the massive fires was lack of water. Southern California has more than enough rainfall to put out fires. However, the majority of rainfall occurs during the rainy season. In order to avoid out-of-control conflagration during the dry season, such as the one that just took place, that water should be stored in reservoirs.

Why hasn’t this been done? In the last century California built dozens of dams creating the reservoir system that supplies the bulk of the state’s drinking and irrigation water. This century California has been unable to complete even one. The Sites reservoir was planned in a remote corner of the Sacramento valley for at least 40 years. One reason is that environmentalists blocked it with lawsuits and another is the difficulty in getting permission from the environmentalist state water board to use Sacramento River water to fill the reservoir.

Another reason more reservoirs have not been built is that nearly half of California is protected land and so is off limits for reservoir building. One of the objections to the Sites reservoir was that it might increase greenhouse gas emissions due to the breakdown of submerged organic matter. The environmentalists ignore the fact that algae that grow on lakes and sink to the bottom when they die capture the carbon that environmentalists are so worried about. In addition, any such possible increase in greenhouse emissions is dwarfed by the emissions of fires that water in reservoirs could put out.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/14/biden-ev-road-trip-stunt-was-worse-than-first-thought/

When Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her staff of clowns bungled a four-day ramble in 2023 to show off the wonder of electric vehicles, the lasting impression would be the report of her advance team blocking an open charger so she wouldn’t have to wait for one. A federal report, however, reveals details that cast the entire charade in an even worse light.

The Granholm tour was to take her from Charlotte, N.C., to Memphis, Tenn., and was intended to justify the billions of taxpayers’ dollars the Biden administration was pouring into green energy initiatives. The message was lost when it was learned, two months after the incident, that “an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle” by a charger “to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary,” according to National Public Radio reporter Camila Domonoske, who was along for the ride.

Granholm’s “caravan of EVs — including a luxury Cadillac Lyriq, a hefty Ford F-150, and an affordable Bolt electric utility vehicle — was planning to fast-charge in Grovetown, a suburb of Augusta, Ga.,” said Domonoske. But “one of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied.”

It wouldn’t look good for the troupe to have to wait for a charge. After all, the entire purpose of the junket was to show the public that EVs are the way to travel. The optics became worse, though, when Granholm’s team “boxed out — on a sweltering day” a family “with a baby in the vehicle” using a car with an internal-combustion engine, Domonoske reported. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/13/blaming-climate-change-for-la-fires-only-makes-newsom-look-even-more-incompetent/

“All these things are connected. This is a challenging time. But we’re up to this challenge.”

That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom back in 2020 when he was busy blaming “climate change” for the wildfires that erupted that year. “I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” he said.

Four years later, Newsom is again blaming “climate change” for the fires ravaging Los Angeles.

But wait. If climate change really is to blame, why was California so obviously, so woefully, so inexcusably unprepared?

Someone needs to ask Newsom why the state didn’t spend the last four years aggressively clearing out underbrush to minimize the chances of a catastrophic wildfire. Why didn’t it carve out large and effective buffer zones to keep fires from reaching populated areas? Why wasn’t there a Marshall Plan-scale effort to build reservoirs so firefighters could get water from hydrants?

It’s not as though the state didn’t have plenty of warning. For decades, environmentalists have been screaming about how “climate change” was going to make wildfires more frequent, more all-consuming, and more deadly.

Yet in the very state where environmentalists hold all the levers of power, they dawdled and delayed, let bureaucratic red tape and environmental groups stall efforts to prepare for the worst, and put other ridiculous and massively expensive projects (such as the “bullet” train) at the front of the line.

And in the process, California has wasted fantastic sums of money.

In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a $1 billion bill that was supposed to “prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect Californians.” Where did that money go?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-1-11-the-global-net-zero-financial-cartel-falling-apart

Less than three weeks ago, on December 23, in a post on optimism about the potential demise of the green energy fantasy, I took note that two of the largest U.S. banks had just quit something called the “Net Zero Banking Alliance.” The two were Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. These two banks, along with many others, including all of the biggest ones, had joined the NZBA as it was getting organized under auspices of the UN back in 2021. NZBA, together with other related groups organized around the same time, aspired to be cartels of financial institutions that would save the planet by starving hydrocarbon fuels of all investment capital, while re-directing the money to the “green” energy transition. Now, shortly after the re-election of Donald Trump, two of the biggest banking giants had decided to exit. Could this be a sign that the zero-carbon green energy fantasy was losing its grip?

In the short 19 days since that post, the trickle of resignations from the NZBA and related groups has turned into an avalanche. In the blink of an eye, what once seemed a serious threat that hydrocarbon fuels could be snuffed out by a group boycott of investors has almost entirely gone away.

More on the latest developments later in this post. But first, some history of NZBA and the related alphabet soup of do-gooders.

2021 was the year that the UN’s big climate confab, known as the “Conference of Parties” or “COP,” was to be held in Glasgow, Scotland. Although the COPs are normally held every year, there had not been one in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic. After the year hiatus, COP-26 was ultimately held from October 31 to November 13, 2021. Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the UK, who had converted from one-time climate skeptic to all-in alarmist, was determined to make this COP-26 the be-all and end-all of all COPs. The swarms of little aspiring tyrants in UN bureaucracies, just off their hugely successful Covid power grabs, were ready to flex their new muscles in the climate arena.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/10/fire-snow-and-a-storm-of-climate-nonsense/

Los Angeles is burning and the East Coast and Midwest have been walloped by cold and snow. Naturally, the global warming alarmists screech and honk about human reliance of fossil fuels. It a gross and irresponsible assumption.

It never takes long for the foolish to break out and Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders didn’t disappoint on Wednesday when he tweeted: “80,000 people told to evacuate. Blazes 0% contained. Eight months since the area has seen rain. The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.”

Unfortunately, he speaks for the many who are uninformed and naive, as well as those who want to use the man-made global warming narrative as a means to fundamentally change this country – and the West – into a political society run by leftists who, to borrow an applicable phrase, have difficulty resisting their authoritarian impulses.

Overshadowed by the tragic Los Angeles fires is the Arctic blast that dropped temperatures and snow in much of the country. This too, is man’s fault. But then when it doesn’t snow, well, man is to blame for that, as well.

Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering.

It’s a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world. Such cold air blasts have become known as the polar vortex. It’s a long-established weather term that’s become mainstream as its technical meaning changed a bit on the way.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/biden-greenlights-californias-unworkable-green-car-mandates-on-way-out-the-door/

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the executive order, the unelected California Air Resources Board “codified” it, and now the Biden administration, on its way out, has gone along with the plan.

As expected, the Environmental Protection Agency granted on Dec. 17 permission for California to go outside of federal law. California and other states need exemptions from the EPA to enact stricter air quality standards than those set by the 1970 Clean Air Act. And the Biden White House is clearly eager to let the states do as they wish.

“The EPA plan underscores how President Joe Biden is racing to Trump-proof his climate legacy before leaving office next month,” the Washington Post said.

So, the decision is more about how Biden is remembered in his party and among the true believers that the sky is falling because we drive cars with internal-combustion engines than it is about a practical matter of policy?

All is not lost for those concerned with the weight of the government dictating their choices, though. Donald Trump is likely to reverse the EPA’s action after taking office next month. His incoming press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, promised Trump “will support the auto industry, allowing space for both gas-powered cars” as well as electric vehicles.

So maybe we aren’t staring into “a future in which the government tries to arrest you for driving a vintage Ferrari – or any car you like,” say the Cato Institute’s Travis Fisher and Joshua Loucks of the Mercatus Center. Any such restriction is of course “awful and should be relegated to science fiction.”

“If you love driving a gasoline-powered vehicle” no matter the reason, well, “this is America,” they continue, “and no one at the EPA should tell you what kind of car to love.”

But limiting consumer choice and dictating how people live is a California value. At least that’s the way Newsom and millions of others across the state see it.

Others have values, too, including the U.S. Supreme Court, which has said it will hear arguments that could threaten the waiver that California has received for decades, going back to the Nixon administration. The Court “will review whether the oil industry has the standing to try to overturn a decision that allowed California to set its own limits on pollution emitted by automobiles,” says CalMatters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/why_is_the_dod_focused_on_fighting_climate_change.html

Given the state of affairs in Ukraine and the Middle East and the rise of China as a chief U.S. adversary, one would assume that the Department of Defense has its hands full combating real threats to U.S. national security. One would also assume that under the fraught geopolitics of the current world, the Department of Defense (DoD) would be harnessing its precious resources toward identifying future menaces that literally pose an existential threat to the security of the United States.

Climate change does not constitute a current threat to U.S. national security. However, the leaders of the DoD think otherwise. In fact, the DoD believes that the climate crisis is a “national security priority.”

On December 11, the DoD announced it is very concerned with climate change in Africa because “climate-stressed areas are a recruiting opportunity for terrorist groups.” Accordingly, the DoD declared, “The consequences of inaction on climate will be severe, and our allies and partners will face growing security challenges as a result.”

Tragically, this is only the latest example of the DoD being sidetracked fighting climate change.

More concerning, this is part of a much larger effort to reorient the primary focus of the nation’s military from preventing real-world threats to abating the nonexistent threat of climate change.