RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/rescuing-california-requires-challenging-crony-environmentalism/

The Speaker of the Assembly in the California state legislature, Robert Rivas, recently said, “California must not fixate on Trump and forget about affordability.”

Fat chance. California has been under the absolute control of Democrats for a generation. It’s their policies that have made the state unaffordable.

By now, the only people who deny that California’s state government policies are hostile toward working families and businesses, small and large, are the people running the state government. California is run by activist state bureaucrats, the unions that are funded by their membership dues, and the politicians that are elected and controlled by these unions. This is a racket. An entirely legal, yet entirely corrupt and self-serving system that is designed to grow government, harass businesses, kill good jobs, assess punitively high taxes, and elevate the cost of living to the point where people either become dependent on government assistance, flee to friendlier states, or are so rich they don’t care.

Democrats did this. Democrats own it.

The reason this system isn’t successfully challenged and broken is because surrounding this core coalition are commercial and nonprofit special interests that benefit from the status quo. A prime example of this is the homeless industrial complex, a network of state and local bureaucracies, subsidized developers of “supportive housing,” and “nonprofit” providers of services to the homeless. They have collected tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers to implement demonstrably failed policies, and as California’s homeless population continues to grow, they collect additional billions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21182/race-for-nuclear-fusion-energy

The clean energy breakthrough everyone has been wishing for finally is here! It may not be quite ready for prime time, but a quiet nuclear-fusion energy race is underway and cannot come soon enough.

The problem is that China seems to be winning it, not the United States or the West.

It is nuclear fusion — making atoms collide, rather than splitting them, or fission — when two atoms are forced to combine into one new atom at extremely hot temperatures. “In order for fusion to occur on the very hot gas — or plasma,” notes euro-fusion.org, “the plasma must be heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius [320 million degrees F]. ” The sun does it without a container — their combined new weight comes to less than each atom had separately.

This differential becomes a burst of energy that leaves no nuclear residue while functioning as if one had in one’s car a gallon of gas which could run it for 20 years. Fusion energy produced four times the power of fission energy, and when harnessed could be used as fuel for expeditions into outer space. Soon we shall presumably be able to say goodbye to expensive, combustible, warm-weather-only and not-very-far lithium batteries, and instead travel unpollutingly along on tiny bundles of captured energy.

The good news is that nuclear fusion, which is produced through nuclear reactors, tokamaks, leaves absolutely no residue.

The bad news is that — apart from needing further development and affordability — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems already to be working at warp-speed to develop this new form of energy for commercial and other use. China’s regime has reportedly allocated $1.5 billion annually to this effort, which would appear hardly enough, but is still nearly twice as much as the US is investing.

The CCP, moreover, has also reportedly been able to remove the most major drawback: a troublesome resin that impeded the fusion by lowering the temperature needed in the reactor, an impediment that was possibly overcome last month by changing the fuels and using the magnetic fields inside the tokamak — “the device that uses magnetic fields to confine a plasma” — to divert the plasma into a chamber the shape of a “cored apple.”

In the US, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk at Tesla and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT), have also been in this race to harness nuclear-fusion energy. Tesla bought SolarCity in 2006, originally to explore energy storage, but apparently also produce nuclear fusion energy. Altman took a nuclear energy company public for $500 million. One of his companies reportedly “has already secured a permit from the Department of Energy to build its first microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory.”

Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs have been exploring hydrogen-generated energy. At least for now, however, it seems that the method is carbon-intensive and converting the hydrogen into energy might still require more energy than it can produce.

Meanwhile, China, with at least three tokamak reactors, is speeding along to win the clean nuclear energy race – and its lucrative markets:

“China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor on 28 May achieved another world record by maintaining a plasma temperature at 120 million decrees Celsius for 101 seconds and at 160 million Celsius for 20 seconds, a major step toward the test run of the fusion reactor. EAST is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Science (ASIPP) in Hefei. It is one of three major domestic tokamaks now in operation in China.”

It is intensely to be hoped that the incoming administration will not allow China to eat America’s lunch.

Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-energy-apocalypse/

Someday our descendants will look back on the Age of Climate Change and marvel how a civilization with so much wealth, scientific knowledge, and sophisticated technologies could have willfully wrecked their economies and plunged themselves into poverty or extinction.

More astonishing to them, this civilizational suicide had been based on an unproven hypothesis like Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming––the idea that human-produced atmospheric CO2 emissions would destroy their civilization unless fossil fuels, the cheap, abundant energy that created the modern world, were abandoned.

Moreover, the portents of that future apocalypse are relentlessly multiplying across the rich Western nations, despite the ever-growing evidence that the hypothesis radically simplifies how a complex global climate works over space and time. More troubling, the proposed solution for lowering emissions enough to stave off the alleged disaster cannot be realized by eliminating fossil-fuels.

Thankfully, the election of Donald Trump offers hope that the suicidal “renewable” energy programs and policies will be rolled back.

For now, resistance to the zero net carbon narrative is growing. Even at the U.N.’s grand climate powwow held in Dubai in January, the UAE’s Minister of Industry, Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, made the classic gaffe of speaking that truth out loud in front of the conclave of true believers. The Paris Accords’ goal to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 was a chimera: “‘There is no science out there, or no scenario out there that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,’ Al-Jaber said at an online event on Nov. 21, “adding a pointed barb to the hosts that it would be impossible to stop burning fossil fuels and sustain economic development, ‘unless you want to take the world back into caves.’”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dirty-green-money/

“I’m also listening to ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ by Rihanna nonstop,” Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, the vice chair for the implementation of the UN Climate Convention, told reporters.

The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Baku was all about money.

It wasn’t the planet, but the scent of money that had drawn everyone from Gomez, the negotiator for Panama, one of the most corrupt countries in the world, to the Taliban, to the UN climate conference in Azerbaijan, a post-Soviet Muslim oil and gas country.

Officially everyone was in a country whose only real export was oil and gas to save the planet, but as the favorite song of the UN Climate Convention vice chair says, “Hold up, My money, Yo, my money.” Everyone in Baku wanted to save the planet. But only for the right price.

Even the Taliban who came asking for money to fix Afghanistan’s ‘climate change’ problems.

President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan kicked off the UN conference to end oil and gas by praising them as a “gift from Allah” and blamed America for polluting the world with ‘carbon emissions’.

Aliyev’s speech was representative of third world countries which had only shown up to trade votes for cash. UN climate conferences require a consensus. And that means bribing every third world dictatorship to get on board with whatever fictional climate target is being discussed now.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/destructive-environmentalists/

People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.

It claims it uses law “to confront the climate crisis.”

What it really does is pay lawyers to torture people who try to do useful things.

Example: America needs minerals like copper and silver to make things. Even President Joe Biden made a speech saying America will need 400-600% more such minerals to make “solar panels, wind turbines and so much more!”

An iPhone alone requires aluminum, iron, lithium, gold, copper …

But when investors dare try to dig up such minerals in America, the NRDC objects and uses political connections to stop them.

Twenty years ago, entrepreneurs tried to open a mine in Alaska. Before they even got the application in, the EPA vetoed it.

Why? Because groups like the NRDC say the mine “would be a catastrophic threat to the wildlife and … fragile ecosystem.”

They get their way because when Democrats run the EPA, they not only support NRDC’s positions, they even hire NRDC employees.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/26/day-2-dump-the-paris-climate-agreement/

During Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign, he promised to pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. He was unable to do so until the day after the 2020 election he lost, and the reprieve lasted only a little more than two months because Joe Biden rejoined the pact the day he was inaugurated. It’s another one of the many of Biden’s messes that Trump has to clean up.

The U.S. should have never been a part of the Paris Agreement. Committing our country to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which means reductions in fossil fuel use, is foolish. Reaching the made-from-thin-air global temperature target: requires government mandates, restrictions and increased spending on politically trendy but expensive and unreliable renewable energy; stunts economic growth; limits our choices, leaving many of them to be made by globalist elites; and is an abdication of our national sovereignty.

It is simultaneously meaningless and dishonest, a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

“The Paris Agreement has always been an expensive farce, a symbolic gesture masquerading as a global solution,” writes Charles Rotter in the Watts Up With That? blog. “Its main purpose? To transfer wealth from productive nations to the politically corrupt under the guise of ‘climate justice.’ Of course, China — the world’s largest emitter — sits pretty with vague promises and no actual obligations. Trump’s exit from this scam is as much common sense as it is a necessity.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/local-option

The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden change of heart.

The pro-Trump vote in most counties outside Gotham suggests that pro-fracking sentiment played a role in the election in New York State. Trump won by overwhelming margins in the counties located above portions of the Marcellus Shale formation, which feeds natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Many of these counties are economically distressed and have lost population. The time has come to give them a voice when it comes to permitting natural gas fracking, currently banned statewide.

At least 22 upstate New York counties sit atop Marcellus Shale deposits. These counties typically lag the state’s median household income level. Median income in Broome County, which is located on the Pennsylvania border and which nearly flipped from Biden to Trump (as of current data), is $63,000 compared with the statewide figure of $81,000. The county has lost 2 percent of its population since 2010, and 19 percent of residents live at or below the official poverty line. In western New York, Cattaraugus County, which also borders Pennsylvania, has a similar profile, with a median income of just $56,000. It has lost 5,000 of the 80,000 residents it had in 2010, and 16 percent live in poverty. It, too, voted for Trump in 2024. Indeed, outside of cities like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the entire 2024 upstate county vote map is red.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/were-all-doomed-yawn/

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, but only in My Fair Lady. On October 29 and 30, 2024,  it fell elsewhere with tragic consequences: the loss of over two hundred lives and widespread damage in the Valencia region. Almost as surprising as the downpour’s intensity was the rush by agencies in this space to conclude it was caused by the bogeyman apparently driving most natural disasters today: “climate change”.

An alternative explanation is that the weather gods were up to their old tricks. After all, a so-called extreme weather event (EWE) happens somewhere in the world every day. So the probability was high they might conjure up one just a week before COP29, as indeed they did last year.  Storm Bettina made landfall in Eastern Europe on November 28, 2023, just days before COP28, the annual UN climate conference. It too was attributed promptly to nasty anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

The COP29 Conference of the Parties is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22, 2024. After 28 years of talks, the event is being promoted, optimistically, as a Climate Action Summit. How many people does it take to change the climate of a whole planet to suit everybody everywhere and forever? At least 40,000, judging by the number of delegates this year. Good luck with that exercise of breathtaking hubris, the bureaucratic equivalent of collective hara kiri, at least for the developed world.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres had a familiar message: immediate steps must be taken to cut [carbon dioxide] emissions, “safeguard people from climate chaos”, and “tear down the walls to climate finance”, especially given what he described as this year’s “masterclass in climate destruction”. It was déjà vu all over again.

COP29 is yet another attempt by the developing world to monetize the climate and raise “trillions of dollars to protect lives and livelihoods from the worsening impacts of climate change.” Yet most countries were silent on the irony of China’s chutzpah: the world’s largest coal consumer, biggest solar panel manufacturer and now space explorer, still claiming developing country status and putting its hand out for billions of dollars of free money.

There is, of course, no suggestion here that the agency rush to judgement mentioned above might have been due to activist researchers so dazzled by confirmation bias – and now underwritten by fabulous funding from both governments and private entities – they could not resist making confident claims about climate causation, such as detecting the “fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events”; or that the MSM is happy to provide them with a media megaphone without further scrutiny, or to question the veracity of their claims.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/18/the-tide-is-turning-against-the-green-elites/

It is the global climate-change conference that no one cares about. The latest United Nations (UN) ‘conference of the parties’, otherwise known as COP29, is currently being hosted in oil-rich, authoritarian Azerbaijan. Not many political heavy-hitters have decided to attend but assorted elites, grifters and media have attended hoping it will bring them more financial manna from heaven.

The late-19th-century US political wire-puller Mark Hanna once quipped: ‘There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ Billions, potentially trillions, have been sunk into green projects enriching the already wealthy and their nonprofits, in what outgoing US treasury secretary Janet Yellen has proclaimed the greatest business opportunity of the 21st century.

Hopefully, Yellen didn’t put all her financial eggs in the green basket. The election of Donald Trump as US president only adds to the current woes of the climate industry. The wind-energy sector is increasingly beleaguered and huge numbers of climate start-ups are failing. Despite receiving billions in subsidies, green companies are recording big losses, declaring bankruptcy or avoiding new projects – even in China. Yellen’s opportunity of the century is becoming its most obvious bust, with little apparent impact on the climate.

Of course, the green industry will keep going, as long as there are funds to subsidise it. The alliance between big corporate interests and activist bureaucracies has created what political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has labelled the ‘climate-industrial complex’. As energy analyst Robert Bryce points out, parts of Wall Street have been ‘feeding at the trough’ and will lobby Trump and Congress to keep some of their goodies. At the same time, some deep-blue states, like California and New York, are girding themselves by issuing their own green regulations to replace those that might have come from DC.

The only major country set to benefit from the ‘energy transition’ is China, which continues to spew more greenhouse gases than all advanced countries combined. It is using efficient, cheaper fossil fuels to dominate the solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times the size of America’s while exercising effective control of rare-earth minerals and the technology for processing them.

All this leaves the rest of the world, notably Europe and the UK, embracing a Net Zero strategy that is fundamentally unfeasible without imposing massive costs on the middle and working classes. One particularly dubious aspect of Europe’s all-electric policy lies in the energy grid. According to the Financial Times, UK businesses are already having problems getting extra juice. EVs, which are projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, will only increase the pressure on the UK’s grid. The Labour government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours.

The working classes in Western nations have particular reason for concern. In the UK, the path to lower emissions has been driven by deindustrialisation. The manufacturing sectors’ share of GDP has dropped by 50 per cent since 1990, at the cost of several million jobs. This parallels a two-thirds drop in the UK’s domestic energy production. It now increasingly depends on energy imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

Arguably, the most traumatic change is taking place in Germany, the last redoubt of European manufacturing and engineering prowess. Overall, Germany’s entire industrial structure is in decline. It is estimated that it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,00 car-manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Given the damage being done to Europe’s industrial base, the political tide is unsurprisingly turning against the greens. The gilets jaunes demonstrations in France in the late 2010s have been followed by large-scale farmers protests in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This year, voters gave the greens a ballot-box kicking at the European Parliament elections. Even as the technocracy sticks to its green religion, voters are headed in the opposite direction.

The election of Donald Trump, one of whose campaign slogans is ‘drill, baby, drill’, all but guarantees that the war on fossil fuels waged by the Obama-Biden administrations is dead. Whereas his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, was strongly backed by ‘green tech billionaires’, Trump received strong support from oil and gas interests, who may enjoy at least a temporary boom. Delays on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities will be lifted, and the tacit mandate for electrical vehicles is also likely to disappear. This shift represents an alternative to the expensive, economy-sapping, ultra-green policies being adopted by Britain’s Labour government and throughout the EU.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/green-grifters

The latest global climate conference opened Monday in Azerbaijan. The timing is excellent. Any doubt regarding the wisdom of the next Trump administration’s likely pullout from such meetings should be dispelled by the conference photos alone. Here are tens of thousands of well fed, well-dressed members of the global elite—activists, employees of lavishly funded NGOs, armies of government bureaucrats, hundreds of heads of state—who have all travelled via jet and private plane to this remote corner of the Earth and who expect that every minute of their day will be supported by abundant, magically available energy. None has sacrificed a single personal comfort to save the planet. They assume that their smartphones will draw on an invisible web of transmitters and that they will be able to search the Internet and run AI queries at will, notwithstanding that doing so requires voracious energy use from a growing archipelago of server farms. They expect their PowerPoints to be well lit and their conference and hotel rooms to be heated or air conditioned as needed. They’re never without their bottled water, which is carried thousands of miles by carbon-emitting trucks and planes and kept sterile by plastic containers whose manufacture requires petrochemicals and plenty of energy. They do not wait on the sun to shine or the wind to blow to light their rooms, run their elevators, or power up their devices; they want energy now and without interruption.

You don’t have to be a “climate denier” to see that climate-change politics have become the largest global grift in history, one that grows in proportion with each new conference. It was just a matter of time before Third World basket-case countries exploited the First World’s virtue signaling. This year’s UNFCC COP 29 conference in Azerbaijan (COP stands for Conference of the Parties) features the demand that developed countries fork over billions, if not trillions, more dollars to the Global South, ostensibly to help it adjust to climate change. Those billions will follow all previous foreign aid into the same sinkhole of corruption and incompetence.