RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/07/08/scott_stringer_burdens_new_york_city_taxpayers_with_his_woke_ways_498355.html

New York City comptroller Scott Stringer is at again. Last Wednesday, the man responsible for the New York City Employees’ Retirement System’s (NYCERS) five pension funds wrote to the CEOs of 67 companies demandingthat they disclose the demographics of their employees by race, gender, and ethnicity—including in their leadership and senior management. “Creating a national movement on the green economy. That’s what Sunrise has been all about,” Stringer earlier declared at a virtual People’s Assembly on BlackRock in May. It’s one thing to have Sunrise Movement activists agitating for a far left Green New Deal that Congress is highly unlikely to pass. It’s quite another to have a climate activist running the $150bn of the city’s pension funds—the nation’s fourth largest.

According to a March report by the City’s Independent Budget Office, the Covid market meltdown, causing a 20% decline in asset values, would require an extra $412m in employer contributions for 15 years. The city’s pension funds were already in poor shape. Three years ago, a realistic estimate of NYCERS pension liabilities implied an average funded ratio of 47%, meaning that the NYCERS pension funds had less than half the money needed to pay promised benefits.

Putting a longtime climate activist in charge of running city pension money has turned out to be financially disastrous.

https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2020/07/07/reporting-renewable-ener

Joe Biden has drifted far to the left and made it clear that, if elected president, he would restrict or ban fracking, pipelines, federal onshore and offshore drilling, and use of oil, coal and even natural gas. He’s selected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his climate and energy advisor and is expected to choose an equally “progressive” woman of color as his running mate (and president-in-reality).

He may also employ federal financial regulations to slow or strangle fossil fuel companies’ access to low-cost capital, further preventing them from producing oil, gas and coal. His official climate plan promises to require “public companies to disclose climate risks and the greenhouse gas emissions in their operations and supply chains.” By compelling them to present a litany of climate and weather risks supposedly caused or worsened by fossil fuel emissions, the rules could sharply reduce lender and investor interest in those fuels and hasten the transition to wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies.

Those risks exist primarily in highly unlikely worst-case scenarios generated by computer models that reflect claims that manmade carbon dioxide has replaced the sun and other powerful natural forces that have always driven Earth’s climate (including multiple ice ages) and extreme weather. Actual data are often“homogenized” or otherwise manipulated to make the models appear more accurate than they are.

Models consistently predict average global temperatures0.5 degrees C (0.9 F) higher than measured. The12-year absence of Category 3-5US-landfalling hurricanes is consistently ignored, as are the absence of any increase in tropical cyclones, the unprecedented absence of any violent tornadoes in 2018 – and the fact that violent twisters were far fewer during the last 35 years than during the 35 years before that.

However, pressure group mob politics and the refusal of climate alarmists to discuss model failures and contradictory scientific evidence would likely make these realities irrelevant in a Biden administration. That would have devastating consequences for a US economy struggling to recover from Covid-19 and compete in a world where Asian, African and other countries are not going to stop using fossil fuels to improve living standards, while they mine the raw materials and manufacture the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and biofuel equipment the USA would have to import under a Green New Deal (since no mining and virtually no manufacturing would be permitted or possible under Biden era regulations).

https://spectator.us/an-environmentalists-apology-i-was-guilty-of-alarmism/

This article was originally published on Forbes website, but subsequently taken down. It has been republished on The Spectator’s UK website. Read the UK version here. 

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening, it’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, so I may seem like a strange person to be saying this.

But as an energy expert asked by the US Congress to provide objective expert testimony and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as an Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’
The Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’
Climate change is not definitively making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have declined in Britain, Germany, and France from the mid-1970s
Netherlands is becoming richer, not poorer while adapting to life below sea level
We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are potentially larger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less ‘industrial’ agriculture