RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/ideological_science_is_real.html

The supposedly rationalist mantra of the secular Left, displayed on yard signs and media posts, that “science is real” begs the question.  Science itself is morphing into an ideological magic show, where facts are twisted (or simply ignored) in favor of preconceived conclusions themselves embraced very unscientifically.  Real science is valid — but fake ideological claims feigning scientific bona fides are now all too real.

The bizarre politicization of COVID offers the most recent example.  Condemning the naming of the virus based upon its geographic origin was a boldly partisan move — “real science” has done this routinely for years.  Instantly, America was split politically over a disease — where was the real science to bind us?  Where was the real science behind shutdowns, restrictions on speech and worship liberties, providing vaccines to young blacks (low risk, scientifically) in priority to old whites (scientifically at very high risk)? And what in this surreal world is the “scientific” justification to divide Americans into the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated for travel and other rights? — both groups can spread the virus with equal ease.  Or so the science tells us.

Where is the “science” in renewable energy programs?  How is it scientific to estimate future reductions in CO2 emissions by excluding the costs of CO2 and ancillary pollutants generated in the manufacturing, transport, installation, and disposal of solar panels?  Scientifically, rooftop solar applications are the most expensive (financially and environmentally), and do not eliminate the need for a grid. Scientifically, Vermont is one of the worst states in the nation to go solar, it has so little sun — but it leads the renewable energy charge, in the name of “real science.”

Similar avoidance of real science obtains to the EV Car program.  However, what both of these “programs” offer is huge expansion of government, real suffering for the poor due to regressive regulatory structures, gargantuan profits for the renewables industry, and a false sense of moral accomplishment in proponents.  These are ideological, political goals being achieved at the expense of (while in the name of) “real science.”  This makes them triply scientifically suspect.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-come-climate-reparations-11615506577?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Believe it or not, some Western Democrats are starting to push back against the Biden Administration’s climate assault on their constituents.

“We write to follow up on President Biden’s Executive Order 14008 addressing the climate crisis,” New Mexico Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján wrote last week to White House climate czar Gina McCarthy. That’s Mr. Biden’s order in January suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands.

Although a short-term leasing “pause is fully appropriate in the new Biden administration, an extended and indefinite suspension would have significant impacts on our workforce and state funding for education,” the Senators explain, noting that oil and gas generate over $3 billon annually in revenue for their state and 40% of its budget.

The Democratic Senators urged the Biden Administration to resume leasing and, in a separate letter to Interior Acting Secretary Scott de la Vega, for career officials to be allowed to continue approving routine permits. They also asked that “states like New Mexico receive robust federal assistance in the ongoing transition to a zero-carbon economy.”

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/03/09/climate_policy_covid_on_steroids_767399.html

For most people around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic seems a great human tragedy, with deaths, bankruptcies, and fractured mental states. Yet for some, especially among the green Twitterati and in some policy shops, the pandemic presents a grand opportunity to enact permanent lockdowns on economic growth, population growth, and upward mobility.

Pointing to reductions in greenhouse gases due to the lockdowns, some see the pandemic’s wreckage of much of the economy – including the mass destruction of businesses and family budgets – not as a plague of its own, but, as a British Climate Assembly put it, as a “test run” for a new climate-driven economy.

“We have an “incredible responsibility” to “actually converge the solutions – at least the financial solutions – to coronavirus to the financial solutions for climate,” hyperbolized former UN Climate Chief and UN Paris pact architect Christiana Figueres, “because what we cannot afford to do is to jump out of the frying pan of Covid and into the raging fire of climate change.”

President Donald Trump may have been responsible for the vaccine success of Operation Warp Speed, but now his fast-track approach, ironically, is being adopted by climate campaigners in a drive to change our entire economy in short order. After all, they argue, the lockdowns demonstrated that governments can impose without constitutional constraint virtually any restrictions to address a perceived crisis. And the pandemic, by killing much of the economy – particularly travel – temporarily succeeded in reducing greenhouse gases by as much as 7 percent worldwide and 12 percent in the U.S.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/03/04/climate_policy_is_a_money-making_opportunity_for_the_elite_766755.html

“The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,” says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. “What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,” chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry. Fink concedes that the economy remains “highly dependent” on fossil fuels. He also asserts that BlackRock is “carbon neutral today in our own operations.” It’s a claim open to challenge. “If a company or individual says to me they are net-zero, I know it is complete crap,” tweeted Glen Peters, research director of the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research.

Peters was taking to task former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who had claimed that investments in renewable energy offset emissions from fossil-fuel investments. Carney quickly backed down, but the spat reveals the fissure in the climate movement that first became visible with Michael Moore’s 2020 movie Planet of the Humans, which pitted true believers on one side against those positioning themselves to reap profits from the climate money pouring into decarbonization.

Carney is a leading light of the climate-finance oligarchy, positioned at the nexus of politics and finance. He is a climate adviser to British prime minister Boris Johnson and serves as UN secretary-general António Guterres’s special envoy on finance and climate action. He is also vice-chair of Canadian alternative asset manager Brookfield, heading its ESG and impact-investing business. One privilege of being a climate savior: any concerns over conflicts of interest don’t apply when the interests of the planet are at stake.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/why-texas-blackout-has-greens-so-scared-rael-jean-isaac/

Last month, President Biden signed a series of executive orders undermining fossil fuels, on the grounds the “climate crisis” forced his hand. “We can’t wait any longer.  We see with our own eyes.  We know it in our bones. It is time to act.”

Within days, most of the country was seeing “with our own eyes” and feeling “in our bones” a cold wave so severe that five million people lost electricity and, in a special irony, nearly half of the ballyhooed wind turbines in Texas, which had risen to supply 23% of her energy, were  left frozen (and inoperable). 

This constituted a double whammy to the huge global warming establishment. First was the cold, when the “science” had confidently predicted a steadily warming Texas.  Second was the failure of renewables, vastly exacerbating the problems for the energy grid. 

Within hours the mainstream media had risen to the challenge.  Journalists employed their familiar word games, quickly substituting “climate change” for global warming.  Readers might be a tad confused if they read “The brutal cold striking Texas is emblematic of a world facing more unpredictable weather due to the rising impact of global warming” but substitute “climate change” for the last two words and presto, the sentence works.  To be sure, that’s only because “climate change” is a meaningless term. 

While the belief in man-made global warming rests on a scientific theory (rising carbon dioxide levels from burning fossil fuels will produce a large increase in water vapor, a greenhouse gas, raising the earth’s temperature),  no scientific theory underpins “climate change.” The climate has shifted dramatically over time, clearly without benefit of human activity.  Twenty thousand years ago, a mere moment in geologic time, what is now Chicago was buried under ice a mile thick. To pontificate about “climate change” is to give fake profundity to a silly statement of the obvious.

https://nypost.com/2021/02/20/texas-reliance-on-renewable-energy-has-led-to-this-winter-mess/

I’m writing from Texas, so I’ll try to finish this column before the electricity goes out. 

As you may have heard, we’ve had an unusually powerful winter storm down here and, in spite of the fact that every third household has a four-wheel-drive super-duty pickup truck, Texas has come to a standstill. When a little bit of ice settled on the freeway, a half a dozen people lost their lives in the ensuing 135-car pileup. 

Meanwhile, after years of mocking Californians for their self-imposed energy troubles, Texans are experiencing rolling blackouts — and a whole lot of blackouts that refuse to roll on but instead sit obstinately in place — because our power grid cannot keep up with the spike in demand. 

As in California, Texas’s energy scarcity is largely artificial: The state produces an extraordinary amount of natural gas, but there has been a woeful underinvestment in infrastructure ranging from pipelines to winterizing equipment at utilities. You may as well not have the fuel at all if you can’t get it to where it’s needed or use it once it’s there.

What Texas has invested in is renewables, especially wind. These have performed especially poorly: The state’s electric-grid regulator reports that though wind and solar still make up a relatively small share of the state’s overall energy mix, they accounted for 40 percent of the capacity shut down by the storm: Out of the 45 gigawatts that went dark, 18 gigawatts were from wind and solar. 

Wind is in many ways a good bet for Texas, especially in the western and northern parts of the state, the Saudi Arabia of gales. The sunny parts of the state also generate a fair bit of solar power, which also is welcome. The problem is that these power sources are unreliable. Solar panels don’t work with a couple of inches of snow on top of them, and an icy storm can cause those massive wind turbines to freeze up and stop working. As of right now, most of those Texas turbines are not functioning power sources — they are modern art. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/02/20/climate-hysterics-urging-biden-to-go-well-beyond-paris-climate-deal-limits-n1427096

The once-in-a-century storm and cold snap that hit the South this past week has given the climate hysterics a “told ya so” moment, which is made even more annoying by Joe Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Accords on Friday.

“The extreme weather events that we’re experiencing this week across the central, southern, and now the eastern United States do yet again demonstrate to us that climate change is real and it’s happening now, and we’re not adequately prepared for it,” Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall said.

She said it herself: this was a “weather event,  proving nothing about climate change at all. But don’t stop the hysterics now. They’re on a roll.

CNBC:

“We have to ratchet up the commitments now if we are to stay on course to averting a catastrophic three degree Fahrenheit warming,” said [climate scientist Michael] Mann, the author of “The New Climate War,” during a Friday evening interview on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith.” “We have to increase our commitments and the other countries of the world have to do that.”

Climate change was not at the top of Joe Biden’s agenda that he ran for president on, and it certainly wasn’t one of the top issues of concern to Americans. But in our rush to save the planet from…something, we’re likely to destroy several industries and cost perhaps millions of Americans their jobs. That’s what increasing our commitments truly means.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/02/19/its-official-the-us-has-rejoined-the-pairs-climate-accords-n2585004

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced Friday that the United States is officially back in the Paris Climate Accords. 

“On January 20, on his first day in office, President Biden signed the instrument to bring the United States back into the Paris Agreement. Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States officially becomes a Party again today,” Blinken released in a statement. “The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented framework for global action. We know because we helped design it and make it a reality. Its purpose is both simple and expansive: to help us all avoid catastrophic planetary warming and to build resilience around the world to the impacts from climate change we already see.”

“Now, as momentous as our joining the Agreement was in 2016 — and as momentous as our rejoining is today — what we do in the coming weeks, months, and years is even more important. You have seen and will continue to see us weaving climate change into our most important bilateral and multilateral conversations at all levels. In these conversations, we’re asking other leaders: how can we do more together?” he continued. 

President Donald Trump took the U.S. out of the agreement in 2017, saving taxpayers $3 billion, and still continued to cut emissions at rates higher than European countries who stayed in the accords. From Forbes: 

Yesterday, The United Nations released its Emissions Gap Report 2020, an annual assessment of contributions to greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. The report has some notable information amid an array of complicated projections that may or may not come true. It claims, for instance, that “despite a brief dip in carbon dioxide emissions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise.” 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-usa/it-is-official-u-s-back-in-the-paris-climate-club-idUSKBN2AJ16T

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement on Friday, reinvigorating the global fight against climate change as the Biden administration plans drastic emissions cuts over the next three decades.

Scientists and foreign diplomats have welcomed the U.S. return to the treaty, which became official here 30 days after President Joe Biden ordered the move on his first day in office.

Since nearly 200 countries signed the 2015 pact to prevent catastrophic climate change, the United States has been the only country to exit. Then-President Donald Trump took the step, claiming climate action would cost too much.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry took part in virtual events on Friday to mark the U.S. re-entry, including appearances with the ambassadors of the UK and Italy and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, saying the United States will try to make up for lost time due to Trump’s withdrawal.

“We feel an obligation to work overtime to try to make up the difference. We have a lot to do,” Kerry said at the event with the UK and Italian ambassadors.

Biden has promised to chart a path toward net-zero U.S. emissions by 2050. Scientists have said that goal is in line with what is needed, while also stressing that global emissions need to drop by half by 2030 to prevent the most devastating impacts of global warming.