RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/16/the-climate-of-lies-keeps-getting-hotter/

The New York Times recently published a long story warning that the planet’s climate tipping points are frighteningly near. The “great systems in the natural world,” the reporters say, “might be pushing toward collapse” due to man’s use of fossil fuel. Maybe so. Or the changes we’re seeing in the climate might be entirely natural.

But that won’t sell papers to a readership that suffers from a chronic and intellectually stunting case of confirmation bias.

The Times wants us to worry about the mass death of coral reefs, the abrupt thawing of permafrost, the collapse of Greenland ice, the breakup of West Antarctic ice, a sudden shift in the West African monsoon, loss of the Amazon rainforest and the shutdown of Atlantic currents.

And ​​when might disaster be visited on all these hot spots? Well, says the Times, it depends on a number of variables and in some cases the timeline is just “hard to predict.”

Or maybe impossible. But again, a story with that angle won’t stir up the true believers who beg to be stirred up. Only alarmist articles will do that.

We pick on the mighty New York Times here, but it’s the legacy media’s great pleasure to spread misleading information and conjecture about the climate. 

About the only truth we can know about the claims surrounding anthropogenic global warming is that it’s “political, not physical, science.”

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=fc702f390e

Even as I regularly repeat my calls for a Zero Emissions Grid Demonstration Project, I’m ready for the next move in the back and forth. Suppose someone claims that a steady zero emissions electricity supply has been achieved? How can we determine and verify whether that is true? The facts can be sufficiently complex, and the incentives sufficiently perverse, that fraudulent claims are to be expected.

Consider the simple case of El Hierro Island. They set out in 2008 with the objective of building a wind/storage electricity system that would provide the island with zero-emissions electricity. To this day, the website of the wind/storage electricity company, Gorona del Viento, proclaims on its opening page “An island 100% renewable energy.” Proceed through the website, and you will find lots of happy talk about tons of carbon emissions saved, and about hours of 100% renewable generation. But if you are persistent, and finally get to the detailed charts of the latest statistics, you find that the percent of electricity from the wind/storage system for the most recent full year (2023) was only 35%. Because El Hierro is an island, it lacks the ability to cheat by sneaking in some electricity from gas or coal from a neighboring state or country and not counting it.

But now consider the case Switch Inc., which is one of the largest (maybe the very largest) companies that specialize in operating data centers. Like its colleagues in Big Tech, Switch is obsessed with the desire to show its virtue by claiming to have “emissions” as low as possible, preferably zero. As I discussed previously in posts here and here, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon all have the same obsession, and they all put out annual “sustainability” reports that loudly proclaim their virtue in the headlines and introductions; but then, all of them ultimately admit in the fine print that their emissions are actually increasing with the voracious energy demands of data centers and AI.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=f26d0984d8

As mentioned in my recent post from July 20, there are many data points gradually accumulating as to the lack of progress toward the so-called “green” economy. It has long been clear to people who think about it that the energy transition to “net zero” is a fantasy that will not occur. But the question remains of exactly how the mania will come to an end. Will the net zero fantasies of the climate cultists proceed at full speed until they crash into a wall of physical reality (e.g., blackouts)? Or instead will these fantasies gradually retreat as governments respond to voter pressure over costs and convenience, and as investors pull back as it becomes clear that projects cannot succeed financially?

A July 30 piece from John Miltimore of the American Institute for Economic Research supports the second alternative. The title is “Why the ‘Green Economy’ Is Suddenly in Retreat—in EU, US, and on Wall Street.” Meanwhile New York, at least for the moment, remains hell-bent on moving toward a full-on crash.

Miltimore’s piece collects data from multiple sources — notably the recent EU elections, EU regulatory changes, and actions of major U.S. investors. The most significant item in the piece relates to the withdrawal of several of the largest U.S. fund managers from something called Climate Action 100+. Climate Action 100+ describes itself as “an investor-led initiative to ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take appropriate action on climate change in order to mitigate financial risk and to maximize the long-term value of assets.” But it seems that in recent months some of the biggest investors have decided to change strategy. J.P. Morgan Chase and State Street have “pulled all funds” from Climate Action 100+ commitments, while their even larger colleague Black Rock “reduced its holdings and scaled back its ties to the group.” Miltimore cites a New York Times article from February quantifying the various withdrawals: “All told, the moves amount to a nearly $14 trillion exit from an organization meant to marshal Wall Street’s clout to expand the climate agenda.” $14 trillion is a big number in anybody’s book.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/26/never-underestimate-joes-ability-to-foul-things-up/

He just poured billions into climate grants that have no reason to exist.

Not long after the global temperature, which doesn’t actually exist in any statistically meaningful way, blew through the mark at which we are supposed to start burning, and days after a new paper showed that the global warming narrative is exactly backward, the Biden administration awarded $4.3 billion in climate grants. It’s the work of an incompetent.

As well as that of an ideologue, which is equally as dangerous, since ideologues tend to refuse to listen to reason.

In 2020, when Joe Biden was running for office, he was thoroughly sullied when Barack Obama, his boss of eight years, said “​​don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.” Over his three years and six months as president, Joe has amply demonstrated that Obama was correct. And he did it again this week, when his Environmental Protection Agency announced its “selected recipients of over $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants to implement community-driven solutions that tackle the climate crisis, reduce air pollution, advance environmental justice, and accelerate America’s clean energy transition.”

We predict the funds will do none of those things. The entire “initiative is just one small piece of the vast economic waste of the falsely named Inflation Reduction Act, with its multi-trillion dollars of subsidies for uneconomic projects,” says blogger Manhattan Contrarian, who incisively likens it to Mao’s “Great Leap Foward.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/the-biden-harris-green-crown-jewel-just-shattered-literally/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=header&utm_content=popular&utm_term=fifth

Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been enthusiastic about the kind of wind-power project that just failed catastrophically in the Northeast.

A major offshore-wind-power project approved by the Biden-Harris administration was shuttered last week after a turbine dramatically shattered, spewing sharp fiberglass shards onto nearby beaches and into the Atlantic Ocean.

Lifeguards now patrol the beaches in full body personal protective equipment and thick gloves while participating in cleanup to protect from the severe dangers of shattered fiberglass shards, which can cause serious health problems. Six beaches in Nantucket, Mass., and the surrounding area are closed because of the risks involved in cleanup. Dangerous shards of the turbine from Vineyard Wind are still washing up on the beach. The turbines were about 13 nautical miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and were part of the country’s second-largest offshore wind farm.

The controversial offshore wind turbines were approved in 2021 after the Biden-Harris administration aggressively pushed them as a solution to global warming. Many more turbines are on the way. Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, told National Review that the Biden-Harris administration claimed this project was a “major milestone,” leading to “rapid fire” development. “There’s nine leases within the Rhode Island-Massachusetts area alone,” Brady said.

The Biden-Harris administration rushed the approval due to blind faith in wind power’s superiority. Kamala Harris in particular has been adamant about wind energy’s safety.

“America is at the start of a historic transition away from fossil fuel plants that pollute our communities and toward cleaner and safer energy sources,” Harris once claimed [emphasis added].

The turbine operator allegedly took two days to notify nearby towns of the disaster, directly violating agreements between the wind operator and the town.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/07/the-road-to-climate-atheism/

The Hon. John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007

I have customarily invoked the word agnostic to describe someone who is uncertain about whether God exists, and the word atheist to someone who denies any such existence. In contemporary times, as the use of the two descriptions has broadened to more than labels about religious belief, I have embraced that trend.

Thus, on the issue of climate change I have described myself as being an agnostic with growing temptations to becoming an atheist. My walk along the road to atheism has gathered pace. The bullying and dismissive tactics of the climate alarmists have played no small part in this process.

The overwhelming bulk of commentators, scientists and others who assert a special understanding of the subject sweep aside dissent with dismissive descriptions such as “denier”. There is mounting impatience with any who dare to challenge what has clearly become the conventional wisdom. Use of the term “denier” is particularly pernicious. For decades that term has been normally understood to describe someone who asserted that the Holocaust has been either grossly exaggerated or, even worse, never occurred.

Academics and others who dare to question the majority view are brutally told that the science has been settled. A growing number have either lost their jobs, been denied promotion, or been subjected to constant harassment and ridicule. Time-honoured notions such as freedom of inquiry and the need to regularly question seemingly settled assumptions have gone by the board.

Climate change zealotry now manifests itself in growing numbers of demonstrations which interrupt citizens going about their lawful business. We are regularly told that we face an existential crisis. Indeed, just about everything in our society is now at a “crisis” point. In the process, we are rapidly losing a sense of proportion. 

If ever an issue in mankind’s existence required rational analysis and cool heads it is climate change.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/07/they_shrieked_about_global_warming_but_now_they_admit_we_were_accidentally_cooling.html

When it comes to climate science, basically, researchers, mainstream media outlets, the UN, and the Democrats simply make things up as they go along to fit the narrative. 

When the earth didn’t warm up as much as they predicted, they changed the terminology from global warming to climate change.

When hundreds of dire predictions never came true, and they had no scientific data to support their policies to destroy industries and our quality and way of life, they just made things up, just like they did with COVID.

Now, take a look at this, from The Washington Post, via Yahoo News:

We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop

It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming – it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.

https://www.pacificresearch.org/latest-effort-to-ban-plastic-bags-also-doomed-to-fail/

California’s long statewide nightmare might soon be over. The current generation of plastic bags are in line to be banned just as their predecessors were.

Ten years after Sacramento outlawed single-use plastic bags (with the help of a majority of voters two years later in a referendum), legislators have approved a ban on the multi-use bags that took their place, with each chamber passing a bill that, in identical language, prohibits “a reusable grocery bag sold by a store to a customer at the point of sale” from being “made from plastic film material.”

Stores would be allowed to provide customers who forget to bring their reusable bags – and those who refuse on principle to use them – with paper sacks. But they will have to be, beginning on Jan. 1, 2028, made “from a minimum of 50% postconsumer recycled materials.” The paper bags will have to cost at least 10 cents each.

Neither bill is law yet. But the ban will be in effect after the formalities of the legislative process are completed.

Sen. Catherine Blakespear, the Encinitas Democrat who authored Senate Bill 1053, said the state’s “original ban on plastic bags hasn’t worked out as planned, and sadly, the state’s plastic bag waste has increased dramatically since it went into effect.”

Maybe the volume “increased dramatically” because the thin single-use bags were replaced by heavier multi-use bags, which are at least four times thicker.

“The amount of plastic bag waste discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years following the law’s implementation to the highest level on record – proving the ban ineffective at reducing the total amount of plastic waste,” says a report compiled by multiple organizations, one of them the Naderite U.S. Public Interest Group.

Nevertheless, Blakespear said “we need to do better,” because “shockingly, some 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year from coastal regions alone. California must do its part to eliminate this scourge that is contaminating our environment.”