RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/16/banning-straw-emojis-will-relieve-much-pollution-banning-straws/

Activist-peddled environmental hysterics are leading to nonsensical calls for plastic straw emojis to be banned. Prosecute the emoji thought crimes!

California lawmakers believed they were saving the planet by banning plastic straws, so they passed laws that criminalized waiters handing out the fluid vacuum tubes. Starbucks tried to one-up California with some corporate virtue signaling by ending their use of straws in drinks, but the company foolishly replaced them with sippy cup-type lids that actually use more plastic.

Now an environmental outfit is being even more ridiculous about the accursed cylindrical inhalation apparatus. The plan: to remove digital representations of the demonized drink devices. The multinational spirits conglomerate Bacardi is teaming with the environmental nonprofit Lonely Whale to implore the Unicode Consortium (the global authority on uniform programming language) to assist their efforts.

In an open missive they dubbed a “Cease And De-sip Letter,” in an effort to be cute, as well as a PSA video featuring actor Daniel Franzese of “Mean Girls” fame, the partners declared how important their efforts were. “Marine life is badly affected by plastic waste in our waterways, and refusing disposable plastics, such as the single use plastic straw, is a simple way that each of us can take action,” stated the press release.

Why are they reaching out to Unicode, specifically? Because of their noble goal: They want to remove plastic straws from emojis featuring soft drinks and cocktails. They also, by all appearances, want to be taken somewhat seriously.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-15-what-will-it-take-to-end-anti-greenhouse-gas-insanity

It was nearly six years ago, in one of the very early posts on this blog, that I wrote as to the global warming scam, “[E]ven as the cause becomes more and more ridiculous, the advocates just double down again and again.” At the time, world temperatures had failed to rise in accordance with alarmist predictions for about 15 years running, and I still had the naive idea that the politics of this issue ultimately would follow the scientific method; in other words, that the hypothesis of catastrophic human-caused warming would inevitably be forced to face the test of empirical evidence. Over time, empirical evidence would accumulate. As it became more and more clear that the evidence failed to support the hypothesis, the whole thing would gradually fade away. But up to that point, as I reported in that April 2013 post, what was happening was closer to the opposite. Extremely weak or completely negative empirical evidence for the hypothesis only made the advocates more and more extreme in their demands for immediate transformation of the world economy to “save the planet.”

The intervening six years have seen the ongoing accumulation of considerably more evidence, essentially all of it negative to the catastrophic global warming hypothesis, but my faith that actual evidence could resolve the issue has been almost completely shattered. Massive alterations have been made to the world thermometer temperature records by US and UK bureaucrats — almost entirely to reduce early-year temperatures and thereby create an apparent warming trend far greater than exists in the raw data. I have covered this issue extensively in a now-twenty-two part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Meanwhile, every hurricane, tornado, drought, flood, or other damaging act of nature is presented by the progressive press as evidence of human-caused “climate change” — even as the actual occurrences of such events have been definitively shown to have no increasing trend over time. Actual evidence gets massively altered, buried and/or ignored.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/huge_victory_for_genuine_scientific_inquiry_on_global_warming.htmlThe greatest “tell” for non-scientists evaluating the likelihood that the anthropogenic global warming theory is a fraud is that instead of critically examining the facts, warmists try to silence skeptics, with some of them even demanding jail for the thought-crime of questioning their unproven theory. So thorough has been the pressure to keep the fraud going and keep the billions of dollars a year in research funds flowing to universities and other research institutions pushing the party line that skeptics are under threat of firing — and some have been fired.

That’s why this news from Australia is so important. Via the Guardian:

James Cook University is considering its legal options after the federal circuit court ruled it had unlawfully sacked a professor who had criticised scientific research about the climate change impact on the Great Barrier Reef.

Peter Ridd, who was the head of the physics department at the institution from 2009 until 2016, took legal action against his dismissal.

Judge Salvatore Vasta ruled on Tuesday the 17 findings made by the university, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure, the final censure and the termination of Ridd’s employment were all unlawful.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/the_european_lefts_extinction_rebellion_is_more_radical_than_even_the_green_new_deal.html

The Dems’ Green New Deal is simply an adaptation of the recent sustainability movement, but another movement with European origins is even more radical. Both use climate activism to disguise its core intentions of socialist indoctrination.

A review of a Finnish-to-English translation from “The Ilmastotiede blog” in “Watts Up With That?,” titled “The New Green Threat: Extinction Rebellion,” exposed the spinoff of the sustainability movement. Wikipedia describes it:

Extinction Rebellion (abbreviated as XR) is a socio-political movement intending to utilise nonviolent resistance in order to avert climate breakdown, halt biodiversity loss, and minimise the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.

Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in May 2018 with about one hundred academics… and launched at the end of October by Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and other activists from the campaign group Rising Up!… The movement is unusual in that a large number of activists have pledged to be arrested and go to prison…

Participation appears confined to Western democracies (China and Russia are notably absent), and the tactics emulate hardcore leftist organizations such as Occupy. XR is much more aggressive than the Dems’ Green New Deal. Worldwide protests for climate change action are scheduled to start this week (we shall soon see if that happens). Notably, Stuart Basden, another founder, readily admits that XR is not really about climate change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-a-green-no-deal-11555021957

The Senate rejected the Green New Deal on a 57-0 procedural vote last month. Not a single senator voted to bring the proposal to the floor, including its chief sponsor, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey. Climate alarmists demanded that Republicans come up with a plan of their own. But the best plan may be no plan at all, for at least four reasons.

First, cutting U.S. emissions won’t have much of an effect on the climate. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, total man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were an estimated 53.5 billion metric tons in 2017. If the U.S. went dark and magically stopped emitting CO2 today, the rest of the world would continue to emit on the order of 45 billion tons of CO2 annually, an amount far in excess of the Kyoto Protocol’s goal of reducing annual emissions below the 1990 level of 35 billion tons. Supposing the U.S. could go carbonless, the difference in atmospheric CO2 levels by 2100 would be only about 29 parts per million. Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modeling, this would make no discernible difference in mean global temperature.

Second, claims of reductions in national emissions should be taken with a grain of salt. According to an August 2018 report from the ClimateWorks Foundation, Western industrial nations have simply outsourced as much as 25% of their emissions to Asia, where labor is cheaper and environmental and workplace regulation is less expensive. Local emissions may be “cut,” but global emissions aren’t. Despite decades of climate alarmism, the world is burning more coal, oil and natural gas than ever. Still, a billion people around the world live in homes without electricity. The U.N. projects that global population will grow from 7.6 billion today to 11.2 billion by 2100. So long as people who are living in poverty seek a way out of it, CO2 emissions will rise.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/04/climates

“The bottom line of politically correct thought on the matter—the thought that we must collectively do something drastic now to prevent climate change in the future—is so full of holes that it brings the overall sanity of mankind into question. For what it is worth, one possible theory is that mankind (or at least that fraction of it that has become both over-educated and more delicate as a result of a massive increase of its wealth in recent times) has managed to remove the beliefs of existing religions from its consideration—and now it misses them. As a replacement, it has manufactured a set of beliefs about climate change that can be used to guide and ultimately to control human behaviour. The beliefs are similar to those of the established religions in that they are more or less unprovable in any strict scientific sense.”

Whether we should do anything now to limit our impact on future climate boils down to an assessment of a relevant cost-benefit ratio. That is, we need to put a dollar number to the cost of doing something now, a dollar number to the benefit thus obtained by the future generations, and a number to a thing called “discount for the future”—this last being the rate at which our concern for the welfare of future generations falls away as we look further and further ahead. Only the first of these numbers can be estimated with any degree of reliability. Suffice it to say, if the climate-change establishment were to have its way with its proposed conversion of the global usage of energy to a usage based solely on renewable energy, the costs of the conversion would be horrifically large. It is extraordinary that such costs can even be contemplated when the numbers for both the future benefit and the discount for the future are little more than abstract guesses.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chevron-keeps-winning-its-leftist-foes-keep-losing/

There is always a latest chapter in the Legal Fraud of the Century, which is the story of a determined leftist environmentalist cabal’s attempt to shake down of Chevron for many billions over bogus claims – adjudicated in a bribed and perjury-ridden Ecuador courtroom — that the energy company (via Texaco, which it purchased in 2001) had devastated rainforests and forced cancer upon the locals when drilling for oil in the South American country in previous decades.

American courts have ruled that the shakedown – masterminded by Steven Donziger – was a criminal RICO operation. The subsequent wreckage of his cabal (an excellent description of such is Kevin Williamson’s 2014 NR piece on how its nefarious role in the case crushed Patton Boggs) is vast, but like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the disbarred attorney continues to hop the globe seeking a court or international tribunals that will order Chevron or a local subsidiary to fork over the penalty determined by the corrupt Ecuador court.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dem-rep-bashes-green-new-deal-theres-no-need-to-lie-to-voters/

Representative Max Rose (D., N.Y.) lambasted fellow New York freshman Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday for using the threat of climate change to advance a “massive socialist economic-policy platform” via the Green New Deal plan she introduced earlier this year.

Rose, during a Wednesday interview on New York’s local Metro Focus program, agreed with Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow progressives that climate change is an existential threat that requires a commensurate response, but argued that the federal-jobs and housing guarantees included in the plan are not necessary to combat climate change.

“This is not the time for milquetoast incrementalism,” Rose said. “It just isn’t. But with that being said, nothing about what I just said would provide a justification for a massive socialist economic-policy platform. [It’s] just not needed.”

“There’s no need to lie to voters right now,” he added. “We don’t need the Democratic version of ‘repeal and replace.’”Rose, who earned a Purple Heart and a bronze star for his Army service in Afghanistan, dared Ocasio-Cortez to back a primary challenger against him when asked about her threat to unseat any Democrat who refused to back her progressive vision.

“She’s going to keep a list,” Rose said, referring to reports that Ocasio-Cortez threatened to make a list of uncooperative Democrats to provide to liberal activists. “This is very simple because I’m not one to deal in subtleties. I think it’s best not to be passive-aggressive. If she wants to primary me, if the Justice Democrats want to primary me, I’ll lay out the red carpet. We can settle this at the polls.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/12/people_for_the_ethical_treatme.html#ixzz5jyKZxqe2 

In what they deem a natural progression of age-old struggles for social justice, environmentalists gleefully predict that the 21st century will be an era of environmental justice. The freeing of nature from enslavement by man is their main objective for this period. Other goals include upholding the right of rivers to flow unimpeded, safeguarding the dignity of plants and consideration for the sensitivities of animals. According to environmentalists, social justice struggles have evolved from emancipation of slaves, suffrage for women and civil rights for minorities to, now, the fight for the inalienable, legal right of nature to exist and prosper.

If this sounds far-fetched, recent developments indicate that this phenomenon is clearly on the horizon. Wild Law – a concept that acknowledges that the elements of nature have rights and that humans exist on an equal plane with other members of the “Earth Community” – is gaining acceptance. Wild Law recognizes the rights of forests to remain unlogged, mountains to remain intact, a bog to resist a drainage project and polar bears to sue for air degradation. Recent laws in Switzerland, Ecuador and the State of Pennsylvania form the vanguard of this emerging crusade, as detailed below. Such a movement away from a human-centered world toward an earth-centered planet is a paradigm shift that could have serious consequences.