RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/02/black-gold/

“So let’s be clear: Biden didn’t guarantee to only end fossil fuels, he promised to end life as we know it, and giving him another four years would move us closer to that disaster. Remember this when voting in November.”

In 2019, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Joe Biden promised to “end fossil fuel.” Not only has he failed to keep his promise, oil consumption has reached a new all-time high. For this we should all be thankful.

When a climate activist challenged him on that September day about his connections to the co-founder of a liquified natural gas company, Biden, as he has done throughout his career of “public service,” became Joe the Clown. Calling her “kiddo,” he told her to look into his eyes, then said “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

The ever-fawning-for-Democrats media called it an “intimate moment.”

But it was nothing more than a typical “Biden moment” on the campaign trail.

As noted, Biden has not ended fossil fuels nor has he set the country on a path in that direction. Domestic oil consumption hit 20.5 million barrels in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, after falling off in 2020, when the authoritarians demanded that we hide under our beds.

Global consumption has grown, too, reaching 99.6 million barrels a day. And it will continue to swell.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-3-30-another-candidate-for-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time

I have written a long series of posts, now 32 in number, titled “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Go to this link if you want to read some or all of those posts. The fraud in question in those posts is the intentional alteration of pre-existing temperature (or, in one case, sea level) records to create a narrative of dangerous climate change that, without the alterations, lacks support in the raw data. In the most recent post in this series, number 32, I remarked, “No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance.”

The climate-data-alteration fraud is hugely significant because the altered data provide the fundamental support for the ongoing multi-trillion-dollar effort of the Left to transform the world energy system, and ultimately the entire world economy. As the least expensive and most reliable forms of energy production get restricted, billions of people stand to see their lives impoverished to the extent of tens of thousands of dollars per year each. Is it remotely possible for any other fraud to come anywhere close to this one in significance?

As unlikely as it may seem, now along comes a second plausible candidate for the title. This fraud goes by the common acronym of “LNT,” which stands for the “linear no threshold” hypothesis of causation of diseases, particularly cancer, from environmental factors. The LNT hypothesis is the basis for huge swaths of enormously costly regulation, probably the large majority of environmental regulatory cost outside the sphere of “climate.” In a March 7 article in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, a guy named Edward Calabrese makes the case that the LNT hypothesis has been advanced by means of intentional fraud since its inception nearly 100 years ago. The title of the article is “Cancer risk assessment, its wretched history and what it means for public health.”

The LNT hypothesis theorizes that if a chemical or phenomenon (e.g., radiation) is established as dangerous at some dosage, no matter how high, then it must also be dangerous at small dosages, no matter how tiny. That conclusion follows if the relation of dose to danger is linear, with no threshold below which the danger goes away. A tiny dose may have a tiny danger, but as long as the dose/danger relationship is linear without threshold, then there is no safe dose.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/28/have-we-reached-peak-climate-nuttery/

A new report tells us that man-made global warming is driving up prices. Please tell us this is parody. It’s far too risible not to be.

Oh, but no. We’ve been assured that it’s a serious paper. “Global warming and heat extremes to enhance inflationary pressures,” was published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Communications: Earth and Environment. Axios tells us the study “​​incorporated more than 27,000 observations of monthly price indices across 121 countries in the developed and developing worlds during the 1996 to 2021 period, along with high-resolution weather observations.”

From that, the authors were able to determine that “human-caused climate change” is likely to worsening inflation. But it seems as if they had one eye closed as they reached that conclusion. Had they had both open throughout, they’d have to agree with H. Sterling Burnett, director of climate and environmental policy at the Heartland Institute, who said “climate change has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t print money, nor create new programs and policies spending it.”

Our friends at the Committee To Unleash Prosperity noted that “what’s especially pathetic about this story is first you have a bunch of nitwit academics writing the study.” It’s a fair point. But we also wonder just who were the peers who reviewed it.

Scientist-activist James Hansen, who is more the latter than the former? Insufferable hypocrite John Kerry? Maybe King Charles III, who told us 56 months ago that we had only 18 months to “decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels“? Or maybe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who must wonder why Miami isn’t under water and wants to weaponize the global warming scare to change the entire economy.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/03/climate-change-on-trial/

On February 9, 2024, when a Washington DC jury found writers Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg guilty of defaming climate scientist Michael Mann (above) in articles and blogs about his work on climate change, the world’s reactions seemed to divide neatly into two distinct camps. 

Much the larger group that knew about the trial from its sparse and occasional coverage in the mainstream media could hardly be either surprised, let alone disturbed, that Steyn and Simberg had lost and received punitive damages for launching attacks on climate scientists and climate science with, as the New York Times reported, “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm”.

That morning’s AP media trailer for the trial’s climax, widely republished and copied, had been headlined as follows: “Jury to Decide on Climate Scientist Michael Mann’s Defamation Suit Over Comparison to Molester”. The story went on: “It’s been 12 years since a pair of conservative writers compared a prominent climate scientist to a convicted child molester for his depiction of global warming.” 

Scientist defamed as molester by conservatives, eh? That framing doesn’t quite do justice to both sides. Michael Mann is indeed a climate scientist of some reputation, and though Rand Simberg presented himself in court modestly as a simple researcher, Mark Steyn is a formidable commentator in leading newspapers throughout the Anglosphere on—inter alia—climate change, demography and popular culture. 

A smaller and more interested group was following the proceedings closely either in court or through the intensive internet coverage of news and commentary websites, including Steyn’s own website, but in particular Ann McElhinney’s and Phelim McAleer’s hour-long daily reconstruction of the trial with actors reading out court transcripts as a play—and an exciting one at that.

That group was amazed that the course of the trial they had been following (which certainly revealed lots of maliciousness, spite, ill-will and vengeance, not wholly or even mainly from the defendants) contrasted so markedly with its result. Instead of a verdict on defamation, they thought, the jury had delivered a public policy decision to protect climate science and scientists from criticism. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/22/grid-draining-electron-guzzlers-and-the-end-of-driving/

Supposedly, there is a big energy transition going on. Throughout the West, countries have made ambitious pledges to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by specific percentages and by specific dates. Many such pledges were notably made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Some countries — for example, the U.S. and UK — have even gone beyond the Paris Agreement and made still more ambitious pledges in the years since then. But is any of it real?

No, none of it is real. The failure to make the progress that would be necessary to achieve the alleged pledges and mandates is obvious and easily tracked. But a code of silence has enveloped the progressive media, commanding that no one is allowed to notice.

A small crack in the wall of silence suddenly happened in the New York Times on March 14. The front page article had the headline “A New Surge in Power Use Is Threatening U.S. Climate Goals.” The gist is that various sources of new electricity demand are rapidly emerging, from data centers to EVs to AI. Demand for electricity is starting to rise, but wind and solar generators can’t be added to the grid fast enough to fulfill this demand. And thus utilities are starting to add large numbers of new natural gas plants.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/22/grid-draining-electron-guzzlers-and-the-end-of-driving/

In perfect Democratic Party form, the Biden administration has dropped another government burden on the private sector. Two days ago, the White House rolled out “the toughest-ever” automobile emissions standards. The objective, of course, is to force Americans to buy the cars that the ruling class wants them to drive. There’s a big problem here, though – the grid won’t be up to the task of keeping tens of millions of electric vehicles charged.

The headline from a Bloomberg story last week summed up the plan: “​​Biden Set to Crack Down on Auto Emissions to Accelerate EV Sales.”

Rules decreed by the Environmental Protection Agency are intended to “propel electric vehicle sales well beyond current levels,” says Bloomberg. “The EPA has projected that to meet proposed mandates, electric models would need to make up roughly two-thirds of car and light truck sales in 2032 — up from less than a tenth last year.”

This is no noble effort to prevent a climate catastrophe. Democrats, eco-activists and the thoroughly compromised media continually argue that we have to move to EVs to save the sky, but the federal rules and state mandates they propose and issue are part of a larger plan to drive Americans out of cars and into public transit, which is failing across the country.

There are a number of problems with the march to EV-topia. They’re not zero-emission vehicles, they’re an extravagant purchase, costly to repair, expensive to insure, hazardous to own, and they create a new class of hazmat problems.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-3-18-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxxii-sea-level-rise-edition

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which government functionaries alter data collected and previously reported in official data bases in order to support a narrative of impending catastrophic global warming. No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance. While prior frauds may have scored a crooked scientist some funding or maybe some temporary fame, this one drives trillions of dollars of worldwide government spending and seeks to transform the entire world economy. The prior 31 posts in this series are all collected for your reading enjoyment at this link. (They are in groups of six posts each, beginning with the most recent. After each six, you must go to the bottom and click the “NEXT” button to get the next six posts.)

Those prior 31 posts have all concerned alteration of one particular sort of data, namely temperature records. The posts document how, at station after station, previously-reported data have been altered to make earlier temperatures cooler and later ones warmer, and thus to show an enhanced warming trend (or in many cases to replace a cooling trend with a warming trend). The altered temperatures then form the basis for hockey-stick shaped charts of world temperatures, showing rapid recent warming, and for claims from NASA and NOAA and the media that the most recent year or month was the “warmest ever.”

But why should we really care that the earth’s atmosphere is getting a little warmer? The UN has supposedly set some kind of Maginot Line at a 1.5 deg C temperature increase from 20th century levels — an amount so small that you can barely feel it when it occurs each day. The 1.5 deg mark is just not that all that scary. So the bureaucrats and leftists need a Plan B to scare the bejeezus out of the people. Plan B is sea level rise.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/08/lesson-america-green-policies-crush-german-economy/

Germany’s gross domestic product has been falling since the third quarter of 2022, causing fears of the first 2-yearlong recession since the early 2000s. German farmers are openly protesting new climate regulations that would raise the price of diesel fuel, vital for tractors and farm machinery. This discontent is mirrored by the general public, which is opposed to higher energy costs that drag down the economy. Recent polls show a significant shift in public opinion that’s increasingly opposed to the coalition government.

Unlike the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate, where invariably one party secures a ruling majority, multiple German parties must form a coalition to reach the required 50%+1 majority threshold.

Currently, the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Free Democratic Party comprise this coalition. The latest polls show all these parties polling far below their 2021 election results while the more right-leaning parties, such as the Christian Democratic Union and the Alternative for Germany, are surging in popularity.

The recent economic slowdown has resulted in widespread political discontent, and the core of the slowdown has been disastrous energy policy.