RUTHFULLY YOURS

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?

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.