RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/12/12/the_business_of_climate_change.html

MADRID

Saving the planet takes money, and lots of it. Money is both the theme and the subtext of the latest round of UN climate talks being held here—a vast river of cash flows through the UN climate process. Formally, the meeting is about nailing down one of the more obscure provisions of the Paris Agreement: Article 6, which provides for market-based instruments so that countries can trade their way out of their decarbonization commitments. Billions of cross-border dollars and transaction fees hang on the outcome.

With the negotiations concerning mind-paralyzing definitions of interest only to the most intrepid climate geeks, business and finance leaders could wind up taking center stage. When they first started coming to climate conferences, it was to observe and advise. Now it’s to show-and-tell their green virtue. “Momentum is there,” declared Paul Polman, the former Uniliver CEO. “Climate change is the biggest business opportunity of all time.” We’re close to several policy tipping points, he suggested.

The EU is about to approve a massive Green New Deal. Michael Bloomberg’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD) encourages companies to make voluntary climate-related risk disclosures. Draft EU regulations, meantime, could pave the way for mandatory climate disclosures that would force investment managers to justify their investments against climate and environmental benchmarks. Businesses are transitioning to “net zero,” Polman claims—meaning zero carbon emissions. They’re so far advanced that at this point, it’s only governments holding them back.

Peeling away the hype reveals a very different picture. Companies promising to cut their carbon emissions rely on offsetting—that is, paying for their consumption of hydrocarbon energy by supporting projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as renewable energy. If companies were genuine in their commitment to tackle climate change, though, they would develop zero-carbon baselines for their own activities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-nuclear-milestone-for-climate-11576196316?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

You probably haven’t heard about a recent regulatory decision that will reduce carbon emissions because it doesn’t follow the green template of controlling private industry and suppressing economic growth.

Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the first time extended a nuclear plant’s license so it can operate for 80 years. The decision for the Turkey Point reactors in south Florida could encourage other plant owners to apply for renewals and extend the viability of the leading carbon-free energy source.

A majority of the 58 nuclear plants now supplying power to U.S. homes and businesses were built in the 1970s and 1980s, when they were licensed for 40 years. Most plants have applied for and received 20-year extensions to bring their life spans to 60 years. Yet antinuclear activists use the license renewal periods to pressure plants to close, and until the Turkey Point decision it was an open question whether the NRC would approve second 20-year extensions.

The federal go-ahead for Turkey Point comes at an important time for America’s maturing nuclear fleet. The 2010s saw a wave of plant closures, and according to the Nuclear Energy Institute half of U.S. plants would shut down by 2040 without a second extension. Nine are seeking one so far.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/greta-thunberg-is-the-perfect-hero-for-an-unserious-time/

Histrionic, beset by apocalyptic fantasies, and easily exploitable

Who better than a finger-wagging teen bereft of accomplishment, or any comprehension of basic economics or history, to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019? Greta Thunberg’s canonization is a perfect expression of media activism in a deeply unserious time.

Has there ever been a less consequential person picked to be Person of the Year? I doubt it. I mean, Wallis Simpson, 1936’s Person of the Year, got King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. Thunberg can’t even get you to abdicate your air-conditioning.

These days we celebrate vacuous fire and brimstone. “Greta Thunberg” — the idea, not the girl — is concoction of activists who have increasingly taken to using children as a shield from critical analysis or debate. She’s the vessel of the environmentalist’s fraudulent apocalypticism-as-argument. Her style is emotion and indignation, histrionics and fantasy. She is a teenager, after all.

How dare you attack a poor defenseless child who suffers from Asperger syndrome!

You’ll notice that, on one hand, Thunberg’s champions demand that the world take her Malthusian crusade seriously, and on the other, they feign indignation when you actually do. The argument that young people, because they will inherit the future, are also best equipped to comprehend it is as puerile as any of Greta’s positions.

Perhaps a better question is, What kind of parents, editors, producers, or U.N. officials would thrust a vulnerable child with Asperger, no less, into a complex and contentious debate? I have great sympathy for her. It’s her ideological handlers who have stolen her childhood.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/while-snow-falls-california-pelosi-fights-global-daniel-greenfield/

New Jersey is getting hammered with 12 inches of snow with 200 schools shut down. Upstate New York expects to be hit with 2 feet of snow. Most of Michigan may soon be snowed under. North Carolina has winter storm warnings in effect. As does Arizona. In Southern California, Disneyland had to close early to beat a winter storm, and even a fire in Santa Barbara was doused with Thanksgiving snow.

But California’s favorite daughter, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, jetted off to Spain to fight global warming.  

It was easier for her delegation, which included Democrats from New Jersey, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan, to talk global warming in Madrid where temperatures hovered in the mild 50s. The rain in Spain fell lightly on the plains nearMadrid and mainly on the soggy swamps of Pelosi’s brain.

“By coming here we want to say to everyone we are still in, the United States is still in,” Speaker Pelosi told reporters.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/11/ten-years-after-climategate/

It’s the tenth anniversary next week of the 2009 Climategate email dump that exposed top climate scientists’ chicanery and subversion of science – and did so in their own words and out of their own mouths, or keyboards. I’ll list a few emails-of-infamy shortly, but first some background.

For the three years before Climategate, the climate crowd was ascendant with its pseudo-narrative of “settled science”. Al Gore’s error-riddled propaganda movie Inconvenient Truth of 2006 had swept the Western world and its readily-traduced schoolkids. In 2007 Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In late 2008 Barack Obama won the White House, proclaiming in his modest way, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

The Climategate emails hit the blogosphere just a month before the Copenhagen summit was scheduled to lock Western countries into Kyoto Mark 2, a legally-binding commitment to renewables from 2012. Climategate destroyed warmists’ moral high ground and reinforced the natural reluctance of most governments to up-end their economies with emission controls. The  Copenhagen circus fell apart, resolving merely to “take note” of the exhortations to action by Obama and like-minded leaders.

The mainstream media strove to ignore and bury the Climategate  revelations. The climate establishment ran half a dozen inquiries with limited briefs and ludicrous lack of rigour, all of which purported to clear the climate scientists of wrong-doing.[1] But even today, ten years after, scientists faithful to their calling and disciplines can only shudder at what Climategate revealed. Those who subverted the scientific method were not fringe players but at the pinnacle. They were doing the archetypal studies “proving” catastrophic human-caused catastrophic warming (CAGW) and shaping the content and messaging in the six-yearly reports of the IPCC.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/global_warming_global_cooling_climate_change_climate_emergency_climate_catastrophe_climate_collapse_or_existential_threat.html

What wets your whistle? It’s another day and another dire warning from the UN. Of course, almost 100% of the media repeats these dire warnings in order to indoctrinate the public, especially the young, with no questions asked as the media pretends they are fact checkers. 

What is always missing from these articles and warnings is factual historical data. There are no statistics to show how little the temperature has changed the last 140 years, only made up numbers about the future. There are no statistics to show how little the sea levels have changed the last 140 years, only threats about the future. There are also no statistics on hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards or drought the last 149 years, only made up numbers about the supposed threat. 

Somehow, these supposedly educated journalists never point out how wrong previous predictions have been, but the solution is always to transfer freedom and trillions of dollars to bureaucrats and politicians throughout the World. 

Today we only have a few years left and the cost has gone up substantially. Is it any wonder that the birth rate is so low when most of the people pushing the climate catastrophe crap also support abortion on demand at any stage of the pregnancy and we are told that humans are destroying the Earth and they are going to die soon anyway so why bring children into the World?

U.N. Chief Warns “Point of No Return” on Climate Change “Is in Sight”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres isn’t mincing words when it comes to issuing a dire warning about the global climate crisis, saying that the effort to stop climate change has been “utterly inadequate.”

No one should want their children to live in this ‘bleak’ future