RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/plastic-straw-bans-posturing-scientifically-informed-global-effort-needed/

What’s needed is a proportionate, scientific approach — not mere posturing.

I suppose this is what they call a “First World problem,” so humor me. It’s 8.30 a.m. I’ve just finished at the gym. I’m in line to get my breakfast smoothie. I wait, as patient people ought, till the voice crieth “Order for Muh-dy,” and I think, as a kind person should, Close enough. I smile as my change is handed to me. I pout. I sip . . . then:

*$&*%#%! This straw is made of paper. And now — owing to an entirely foreseeable combination of suction and saliva — it is disintegrating in my mouth. Whose idea was this?!

Please don’t pretend. I know you know what I’m talking about . . .

Recall the following science from the 1967 hit movie The Graduate:

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/22/resist-being-brainwashed-on

Whether it’s the Green New Deal, in which climate change abatement is only one of several radical proposals, or the general brainwashing of the younger generations about the impending end of the world, the absence of rational analysis and the willful ignorance of facts is counterproductive. Rather than promoting a feasible approach to dealing with climate change, the magnitude of which remains uncertain, the focus is on unfeasible approaches and unachievable goals. Leaders from around the world will be at it in earnest this week during the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019.

Many approaches to climate change are analogous to saying that the best way to produce energy is to build perpetual-motion machines, which perform work indefinitely without an energy source — a concept that violates the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the goal is laudable, but the means to achieve it is, literally, fantastic. In the case of climate change, the anti-hydrocarbon contingent seeks to violate basic tenets of science and economics.

The reality is that there are insurmountable or cost-prohibitive obstacles to the scale-up of renewable energy and to creating the necessary infrastructure for it. Here are some facts that provide a reality check:

Solar conversion to electricity is already more than 75% toward the maximum possible efficiency, according to the laws of physics. There are no possible breakthroughs that will reduce significantly the sheer numbers of solar panels needed to increase the overall power derived from the sun.
Likewise, with respect to efficiency, wind conversion to electricity is already approximately two-thirds of the way to the maximum physical limit. The number of wind turbines would need to increase massively.
A single wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic (produced from hydrocarbons and not recyclable). Solar is even more resource consumptive.
The mining of silver, indium, and rare earths would have to soar by up to 20-fold over today’s yields just to meet the Paris climate accord’s goals. The mining process (for both those minerals and for battery materials) itself is dirty, ecologically destructive, and consumes significant amounts of hydrocarbon energy; and the plastic needed for solar and wind requires hydrocarbons.
No step-function improvement in batteries has been attained in spite of 25-plus years of huge investment, including that from dozens of innovative startup companies. Counting on a breakthrough at this point is probably wishful thinking.
To store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil, which can be stored in a $20 container at minimal cost, requires $200,000 and 10 tons of Tesla batteries.
Tesla’s “Gigafactory” produces only enough batteries in an entire year to store three minutes of U.S. power demand. That is not enough to handle a cloudy or calm day for the renewables, let alone provide the needed two months of backup. Proper backup would require the equivalent of almost 30,000 production-years of similar factories.
A single car requires 1,000 pounds of batteries. This, in turn, requires mining, moving, and processing some 500,000 pounds of raw materials. So, imagine scaling that up to provide batteries for a public utility the size of ConEd or Pacific Gas & Electric.
Neither batteries nor wind nor solar equipment lasts forever. Currently available, state-of-the-art batteries have a useful life of just seven years, leading to massive disposal and pollution issues. And all the steel and other elements of retired equipment need to go somewhere.
A shale-oil rig produces almost 15 times as much energy per hour/day/year as two 500-foot turbines turning in the wind. Putting it another way, one producing rig is the equivalent of 30 wind turbines.
Wind turbine farms are unsightly and kill huge numbers of birds.
The intermittent nature of wind and solar imposes huge infrastructure and operating costs due to the necessary continual re-balancing of the electrical grid. Extensive reliable backup sources are needed in the absence of massive batteries at every wind or solar site, which inevitably will consume hydrocarbons.

https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2019/09/21/only-monster-afflict-children-eco-anxiety/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=todays_hottest_stories&utm_campaign=20190921

What kind of monster afflicts children with eco-anxiety by telling them they will be dead in 12 years? I’ll tell you who: the child abusers in the establishment media, the environmental movement, and the Democrat Party — that’s who.

What’s especially disturbing is that children are being taught the opposite of empathy. Empathy is the most important value an adult can impart to a child. But what these kids are being encouraged to become is nothing less than wild-eyed, religious fanatics where non-believers are fingered as the enemy, as heretics looking to destroy the world and kill everyone. And this is always the result of such things, of the moral certainty of a zealot mixed with intolerance.

Even if Climate Change were not a hoax, even if Global Warming were real (it’s not), burdening children with eco-anxiety would still be indefensible.

You don’t do this to children. You don’t shit all over their childhood… Even if this massive hoax were not a hoax, it is not the child’s responsibility to fix it. That responsibility falls on the adults, and another responsibility that falls on adults is to not only protect children, but to protect their innocence, protect them from the horrors of real life, protect the magic of those wonder years.

Sadly, once you realize Climate Change is a hoax wrapped in a left-wing political movement, this deliberate act of terrorizing children with lies, a lie every bit as audacious as saying a meteor will hit the earth in 12 years, is revealed as something truly insidious.

Unfortunately, though, and we see this in our public schools and popular culture, the happiest place in the world for a leftist is that spot between parent and child, and that influential spot is mercilessly abused to destroy the most precious gift of childhood — innocence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/more-fracking-or-more-war/

It’s our choice.

Here is a news lead that begins with a bang and ends with a whimper: “The strike on the heartland of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including damage to the world’s biggest petroleum-processing facility, has driven oil prices to their highest level in” — here, Reuters should have used some ellipses of irony — “nearly four months.”

Four months!

If the United States declines to go to war against Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia, our increasingly troublesome client state, one of the reasons for that happy development will be: because we do not need to. It is no longer the case that the world sneezes when the Saudis catch a cold. U.S. interests and Saudi interests remain aligned, broadly, but they are severable.

The high-tech method of mining shale formations for oil and gas colloquially known as “fracking” — though hydraulic fracturing is only a part of it — has been a game-changer for more than one game. While countries such as Germany set headline-grabbing, politics-driven carbon-reduction targets only to woefully fail to achieve them (it is very difficult to greenwash 170 million tons of brown coal), the United States has been relatively successful on that front, reducing energy-related carbon emissions by 14 percent from 2005 to 2017, thanks to natural gas; put another way, fracking has helped the United States to what climate activists ought to consider one of its greatest environmental victories.

amgreatness.com/2019/09/20/the-climate-cults-new-theology-is-a-poisonous-proposition/

Gertrude Stein mused, “a rose is a rose is a rose . . . ” Unless, of course, it is your Grand Inquisitor.

In the latest evidence the Left is regressing into a permanent vegetative state, the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City hosted “a beautiful ritual” to help combat climate change: “Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

The UTS unraveled the rationale behind their beautiful ritual in a sacred Twitter thread. In sum, religions that believed God gave humanity dominion over the earth have advanced the climate change crisis by encouraging generations to . . . exercise dominion over the earth. The seminary’s solution is to “birth new theology, new liturgy to heal and sow, replacing ones that reap and destroy.” Ergo, the root of their “new theology” is to place humanity on the level of plants as both peers and penitents. “What’s different (and the source of so much derision) is that we’re treating plants as fully created beings, divine Creation in its own right—not just something to be consumed.”

(As an aside: the Left’s menu of approved items we can consume is getting rather limited, since the climate cult claims the “crisis” is aided and abetted by eating meat—human meat excepted, of course. And now, if plants are my peers—or superior beings—can I have rice as a side dish with my porpoise free tuna? Can I even have a tuna salad sandwich? Perhaps, this is the Malthusian climate cult’s plan all along, because they hold people to be the reason for climate change? Less food; fewer people; less climate change—and with less than 12 years to accomplish all this!)

Here, we see the UTS realizes the beautiful ritual where people confessin’ the blues, sins, or anything else to a plant may, like broccoli, have its detractors. Yet, they remain undeterred: “And here’s the thing: At first, this work will seem weird. It won’t feel normal. It won’t look like how we’re used to worship looking and sounding.”

True enough. I’m not, nor have I ever been, an earth worshipping pagan (despite having listened to Led Zeppelin). Further, I don’t consider making what’s old (an earth-worshipping cult) new again (the climate-change cult) remotely miraculous, except maybe as a matter of marketing and as an indictment of the postmodernist mind. 

Still, in bad news for Ted Turner, the UTS potential to finally turn the term “humanist” into an exclusionary epithet for those who hold people superior to plants and animals in the natural order could constitute a minor miracle within the Left’s abominable cancel culture. Regardless, just because something is new and different doesn’t mean it can’t be stupid and pointless; and sometimes weird is just weird; and some “extractivism” deserves derision and—

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/19/child-hostages-obey-their-climate-captors/

The emotional, physical, and intellectual damage wrought by the climate change movement now is coming into clear view. It’s an outcome that should enrage every parent.

On Friday, schoolchildren around the world will be prompted to walk out of class as part of the “Global Climate Strike.” These young “climate strikers” will protest alleged inaction on climate change and promote an end to fossil fuel use.

“Our house is on fire—let’s act like it. We demand climate justice for everyone,” the event’s website warns.

It is the latest stunt orchestrated by the international climate cabal and yet another example of how the Left shamelessly exploits and manipulates children to propagandize any cause. (Think of the high school students in Parkland, Florida.) But this time, the climate cabal is using a special-needs teenager from Sweden to indoctrinate more children and adults with climate change dogma.

Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old from Stockholm—which is ironic because the teen exhibits many traits associated with a hostage attempting to please her captors.

In a way, Thunberg is not the face of a climate crisis but an alarming example of how the climate cabal has needlessly terrified two generations of young people. The emotional, physical, and intellectual damage wrought by the climate change movement now is coming into clear view and it’s an outcome that should enrage every parent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/climate-change-faith-nbc-solicits-climate-confessions/

We are religious creatures. The desire to worship — something, anything — persists, even as our objects of veneration change. That religious impulse can be led easily astray in an age where traditional religious institutions appear impotent, unwilling to defend their claims against the rising tides of universalism and ecumenism. If you’re not careful, you’ll worship something unfit for your devotion. Worse, you might end up confessing your sins to NBC News.

As a certain type of person found themselves doing yesterday.

The network announced that it is soliciting “climate confessions,” admissions of public and private sins against the natural environment and the climate.  The sacrament, far from the ornate wooden lairs of Catholic lore, occurs on one sordidly animated webpage, where your transgressions against Gaea are plastered for all to see, in a communal ritual of denunciation. Atop the site is a promise to uphold the seal of the confessional, assuring penitents that their “confessions” will be kept anonymous.

“Tell us,” NBC insists with ecclesial verve, “Where do you fall short in preventing climate change?” It even provides an examination of conscience in miniature: “Do you blast the A/C? Throw out half your lunch? Grill a steak every week?”

Contrite sinners were all too happy to admit their faults: “I compost at home, but not at work,” reads the confession of one offender; “I want to install solar panels but am waiting for state/federal incentives to do so!” grieves another. Like any good religion, there were apostates; one heretic nailed this to the digital door: “I run my AC 24/7. I’m not going to sweat to appease this climate religion.” Another wrote, “I eat meat every day. And won’t stop, because it’s good.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-idolatry-of-environmental-extremism/

A bizarre incident at Union Theological Seminary illustrates why many Christians believe that internal forces, not external ones, represent the greatest threat to the church.

Students at this seminary prayed to a collection of plants in its chapel, which triggered a raft of criticism on Twitter. The school defiantly defended its action in a series of tweets.

“Today in chapel, we confessed to plants,” the school tweeted. “Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

Some Twitter respondents observed that the seminary and its students have lost their minds, but I think it’s worse than that. Insanity might mitigate this sacrilege, but deliberately perverting theology is another matter.

Pastor Greg Locke tweeted, “This is utter nonsense. Absolute theological bankruptcy in every way. Your Seminary is a cemetery.” Another Twitter user quipped, “What kind of penance did the plants give after the ‘confession?'”

What possesses this misguided institution to refer to plants as “beings”? What gross theological error leads them to pray to and encourage others to pray to them? Idolatry is no trifling matter, which is underscored by at least two of the Ten Commandments and the entirety of Scripture.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/relax-weve-

“God forbid we have a real global crisis to deal with. Either we won’t believe it after suffering this present hoax or we’ll think that the equivalent of building some windmills will solve it. What global warming / climate change/ climate emergency (choose your favourite) has shown is that large sections of humankind are susceptible to hysterias promoted by elitists; and that governments are singularly incapable of acting resolutely to combat crises to which they say they subscribe. ”

A friend of mine, Geoff Hogbin (Free to Shop, CIS, 1983), made an incisive throwaway comment some time back which has stuck with me. How would the climate models do he said, sceptically, if they were required to perform across data from the end of the Industrial Revolution; from say the mid-nineteenth century. Of course, there is a data problem. Or I imagine that there is.

The official atmospheric concentration of CO2 measured at Mount Mauna Loa in Hawaii goes back only to 1958. HADCRUT temperature data on a global scale goes back to 1850 but you have to ask how consistent are the temperatures recorded in the 1850s with those in the last ten, twenty and fifty years? Satellite temperature data which is probably more reliable than land and ocean-based measures only goes back to the end of 1978.

If it were possible, I would like to see the climate models applied to separate sub-periods, at least back to 1850, to see how they perform. I will guess. They wouldn’t do too well. But my prejudice is showing.

When, four decades ago, I dabbled in econometrics, an important test of a model calculated over a whole data series was to see how it performed using only the first half of the data set and then separately the second half. Was it good for all seasons? Usually it wasn’t. Conclusion: throw it away and begin again.

Almost all of the climate models have over-predicted global temperatures. Or, again, I think that they have. It is easy to find commentaries which say that they have a pretty good record overall, as it is to find the opposite. Hard for us ordinary punters to get a handle on it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/17/the-global-warming-scare-the-perfect-trojan-horse-for-tyranny/

If anyone doubts the reality of that headline, they either didn’t see the Democrats’ climate townhall, or they need to go back and watch it with an open mind. The alarmists’ objective, which fits perfectly with leftist and progressive politics, is to put themselves in charge of the world.

CNN’s climate townhall, a slog that lasted seven grueling hours, was a prohibition-fest. The candidates suggested banning nuclear energy, fracking, offshore drilling, conventional automobiles, all fossil fuels, even red meat, plastic straws, and babies. It devolved into a contest to see which Democratic presidential aspirant could propose the greatest volume of proscriptions.

And for what? Is our ever-changing climate an existential threat? Hardly. A slightly warmer planet “is not going to be the end of the world,” says Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.

“The world is just becoming more challenging,” he told a Finnish magazine earlier this month. “In parts of the globe, living conditions are becoming worse, but people have survived in harsh conditions.”

While he’s neither a denier nor skeptic — he is probably best described as a “lukewarmer” — Taalas says he’s concerned about the fanatic elements that are even attacking the “climate experts” who are promoting the man-made global warming narrative. They, he says, “claim that we should be much more radical.” 

“They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats,” he said.

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore tweeted that Taalas’ statement is “biggest crack in the alarmist narrative for a long time.”

“The meteorologists are real scientists and probably fed up with Gr