RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/do-greens-want-the-world-to-be-like-the-blackout-state/?utm_source=

Electricity is essential to modernity. Prosperity depends on it. So does longevity and health. If you doubt that, ask those in impoverished nations who still don’t have access to reliable electrical power! Indeed, if we could create a continental power grid in Africa — regardless of the means — it would ameliorate so much human misery.

So, why are the world’s cities turning their lights off this weekend — as if electrification is a bad thing? To mark “Earth Hour,” of course. From the Yahoo News story:

Cities around the world were turning off their lights Saturday for Earth Hour, with this year’s event highlighting the link between the destruction of nature and increasing outbreaks of diseases like Covid-19.

Starting off the event, at 8:30 pm the skylines of Asian metropolises from Singapore to Hong Kong went dark, as did landmarks including Sydney Opera House.

The annual event calls for action on climate change and the environment, and this year, organisers said they want to highlight the link between the destruction of the natural world and the increasing incidence of diseases — such as Covid-19 — making the leap from animals to humans.

Good grief, what nonsense. Last year, California went through the wrenching experience of enforced blackouts, in part, because of the formerly Golden State’s stupid environmental policies. Do we really want more of that? Moreover, there is no proof that climate change had anything whatsoever to do with COVID.

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/03/21/nuclear_energy_is_a_reliable_source_that_also_shrinks_emissions_769131.html

If the near total collapse of the Texas energy grid on the morning of February 15th demonstrates anything, it proves the importance of reliable energy production. In short, federal and statepolicies that pick winners and losers among clean energy sources steered both public funding and private investment away from reliable sources. Hopefully, policymakers will learn their lesson from the events in Texas and wake up to the reality that energy security requires a diversity of reliable sources; chief among them is nuclear power.

While the cold snap froze wind turbines and forced many thermal plants offline, nuclear energy production remained remarkably reliable. In fact, reports show that only one half of a single two-reactor facility was forced offline by the cold. What’s more, this outage was an oddity among nuclear plants and was the direct result of bad management and lack of preparation. The outage at the South Texas Nuclear Power Station — one of Texas’ four nuclear plants — accounted for a mere 1,280 of the nearly 30,000 lost megawatts of production that left the state less than five minutes from a catastrophic failure.

While issues of management, preparation, and weatherization are ultimately to blame for the disaster, had the State of Texas invested more heavily in nuclear energy, the impact of the freezing temperatures may very well have been less devastating. 

Nuclear power is particularly well situated to become even more important in the coming decades. The Biden administration’s push for a “carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035,” practically necessitates increased investment in nuclear energy if we are to maintain a secure, reliable energy grid. The International Atomic Energy Agency explained it best:

“As they can operate at full capacity nearly uninterrupted, nuclear power plants can provide a continuous and reliable supply of energy. This is in contrast to variable renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, which require back-up power during their output gaps, such as when the sun sets or the wind stops blowing. Nuclear power plants can also operate flexibly to meet fluctuations in energy demand and provide stability to electrical grids, particularly those with high shares of variable renewable sources.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/24/the-climate-headline-the-legacy-media-wouldnt-dare-write/

Barack Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science has shattered the popular global warming narrative. If he had worked in the Trump administration, he’d be labeled a “denier” and hounded like a suspected witch in 17th century Massachusetts. But because he was an Obama appointee, the press simply ignores him. 

Steve Koonin, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology- and CalTech-educated physicist, said last week that “discussions of existential threat, climate crisis, climate disaster are really at odds with what the official science says in reports that are issued by the U.N. and the U.S. government.” Shouldn’t the press have picked up on this?

Koonin, in an interview on Fox Business with Larry Kudlow, busted the tale that humans are wrecking the planet and endangering themselves through their fossil-fuel burning habits.

“This is not Steve talking, this is what’s in those reports, often explicitly but sometimes a little but obscured, and you’ve got to read closely to find it.”

Koonin said there has been a single degree of warming over the last century, caused partly by man, partly by nature. He sees nothing menacing about it. He also admitted that science has a “very poor understanding” of natural long-term climate cycles, something the global warming alarmists are unwilling to acknowledge.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/03/22/democrats-introduce-new-green-new-deal-bill-calling-fossil-fuels-racist-n1434177

The Hill reports that Rep. Always On-Camera (D-New York) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Not An Actual Cherokee) have introduced a new bill that would “invest” $500 billion to “create” “green jobs.”

Use of multiple scare quotes is intentional. Neither the race-hustling professor nor AOC know much about job creation, having never created any meaningful number of non-government jobs.

Government “investing” necessarily entails government taxing, or government just printing more money, which neither the Democrats nor The Hill note. Those green jobs supposedly already exist anyway; why else would John Kerry tell the Keystone XL pipeline workers whose jobs his boss destroyed to go build solar panels?

The so-called green economy also relies extensively on mining and minerals processing, which aren’t very clean processes. In fact, those technologies depend on rare earth minerals, which mostly cannot be mined in the United States due to environmental regulations. They’re mined extensively in China, which doesn’t regulate as heavily, leaving the mining operations dirtier.

Buried in the two leftists’ announcement is this little gem.

“The BUILD GREEN Infrastructure and Jobs Act will make the big federal investments necessary to transform our country’s transportation system, confront the racial and economic inequality embedded in our fossil fuel economy, and achieve the ambitious targets for 100% clean energy in America.”

“…confront the racial and economic inequality embedded in our fossil fuel economy…”

I’m sorry, but that’s insane. It’s so illogical it’s barely possible to critique it, but here’s a try.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/fauci-blames-coronavirus-our-failure-live-harmony-daniel-greenfield/

“There’s a lot of folks who think that, due to climate change and due to the globalization in general, it is inevitable that we’ll deal with more and more viruses like this,” Dr. Fauci told Meet the Press.

The “lot of folks” in question include the patron saint of the pandemic.

In addition to appearing on every single news show on the planet, Fauci occasionally co-authors papers. But “Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19” in the journal Cell is less of an academic paper and more of a survey and an advocacy editorial. It might not be all that significant except that its co-authors are David M. Morens, the Senior Scientific Advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Fauci who heads it.

If you didn’t know that its authors are prominent figures in the scientific community, you might mistake its contents for the ravings of hippies at an Earth Day rally a generation ago.

“There are many examples where disease emergencies reflect our increasing inability to live in harmony with nature,” Fauci’s paper insists. “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-backdoor-climate-plan-11616020338?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“To sum up, Democratic AGs, green groups and a top Biden environmental regulator are colluding on a plan to impose the Green New Deal on states through a back regulatory door because they know they can’t pass it through the front in Congress.”

President Biden wants Congress to pass climate legislation, but that faces political obstacles. No worries—state Democratic Attorneys General are conspiring with green groups on a regulatory Plan B.

Climate activists have long sought to force CO2 emissions reductions under the Clean Air Act, but this has been tricky. The Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) ruled that the law’s general definition of “pollutant” covered greenhouse gases. But the Court didn’t tell the EPA how it should regulate CO2 under the law.

Massachusetts v. EPA set the ground for the Obama EPA’s “endangerment finding” in 2009 declaring that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare. Green groups then petitioned the Obama EPA to list CO2 as a “criteria pollutant” and set National Air Ambient Quality Standards (NAAQS).

The EPA dictates air quality standards for six “criteria pollutants” known to directly harm human health: nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, carbon monoxide, ozone and particulate matter. States must craft plans to meet the EPA standards if they are out of compliance.

https://spectator.org/climate-change-global-warming/
With the wave of executive orders and legislation coming from the Biden administration, and the cultural antics of his woke supporters, Biden’s war on fossil fuels has received insufficient attention. Yet energy is the lifeblood of our economy, and making traditional energy sources vastly more expensive is the single most destructive aspect of Biden’s policies. If this country does not successfully mobilize against these policies, the vast majority will experience a dramatic drop in their standard of living.

Supposedly the assault on fossil fuels — via regulation; cancellation of pipelines; concocting a huge, wholly imaginary “social cost of carbon”; taxes; and solar and wind mandates — is necessary to save the planet from imminent catastrophe produced by man-made global warming.

But genuine climate scientists, as we know from those who dare to speak up, are amazed and horrified. Richard Lindzen, long at the top of the field as a former professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, laments that the situation gets sillier and sillier. He told the recent CPAC conference (his message was read by the Heartland Institute’s James Taylor):

One problem with conveying our message is the difficulty people have in recognizing the absurdity of the alarmist climate message. They can’t believe that something so absurd could gain such universal acceptance. Consider the following situation. Your physician declares that your complete physical will consist in simply taking your temperature. This would immediately suggest something wrong with your physician. He further claims that if your temperature is 98.7F rather than 98.6F you must be put on life support. Now you know he is certifiably insane. The same situation for climate is considered “settled science.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/climate-change-fear-guilt-panic-policies-bjorn-lomborg

Across the world, politicians are now promising climate policies costing tens of trillions of dollars – money we don’t have and resources that are desperately needed elsewhere.

Yet, climate campaigners tell us, if we don’t spend everything on climate now, nothing else matters, because climate change threatens our very civilization. As President Biden says: climate change is “an existential threat”.

Yes, climate change is a real problem. However, it is typically vastly exaggerated, and the resulting alarmism is exploited to justify the wasteful spending of trillions.

Pointing this out will get you canceled. I should know, because I have personally been on the receiving end of this climate alarmism enforcement for years. I was recently scheduled to give a public lecture at Duke University when a group of climate-politicized professors – some who write for the UN Climate Panel – publicly asked Duke to cancel my appearance.

One of my presentation points was highlighting the latest full U.N. Climate Panel report that estimates the total cost of climate change. They found that unmitigated climate change in half a century will reduce general welfare equivalent to lowering each person’s income by between 0.2 and 2%.

Given that the U.N. expects each person on the planet to be much better off – 363% as wealthy as today – climate might cause us to only be 356% as rich by then. That is a problem, but certainly not the end of the world.

Why don’t most people know this? Because stories of catastrophe and human guilt garner more clicks and are better for weaponizing political arguments. Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to make good decisions if we’re panicked. 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/12/nolte-ny-times-spread-fake-news-that-east-coast-beaches-would-be-gone-by-2020/

“[M]ost of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years,” the fake New York Times told the world 25 years ago, all the way back in 1995.

Fact check: It’s 2021 and America’s East Coast beaches are doing just fine!

Here’s the relevant portion from the original Times’ article:

A continuing rise in average global sea level, which is likely to amount to more than a foot and a half by the year 2100. This, say the scientists, would inundate parts of many heavily populated river deltas and the cities on them, making them uninhabitable, and would destroy many beaches around the world. At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.

The date of the article is September 18, 1995. The headline reads, “Scientists Say Earth’s Warming Could Set Off Wide Disruptions.”

So here we are 25 full years later, a whole quarter of a century later, and the first prediction from these unnamed “experts” has not even come close to occurring, so why should we believe the dire predictions about the year 2100?

We shouldn’t.

Here’s something else that didn’t happen…

Despite these “expert” predictions, and despite the fact tons of leftists live on the East Coast, and despite the fact leftists claim to believe Global Warming is real, in 1995, there was no panicked exodus by those who live on the East Coast. If you believe Global Warming is real… If you believe the “experts”… Why would you not immediately sell your beach house before the rising tide destroyed your multi-million dollar investment?