RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.cfact.org/2023/02/01/everything-that-needs-electricity-is-made-with-oil/

The few wealthy countries pursuing the generation of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels while simultaneously moving to rid the world of fossil fuels have short memories of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years.

Renewables may be able to generate intermittent electricity form breezes and sunshine, but they cannot replace what is manufactured from fossil fuels, that are demanded by lifestyles and economies around the world.

Efforts to cease the use of crude oil will be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change, and lead the world to an era of guaranteed extreme shortages like we had in the decarbonized world in the 1800’s without fossil fuel products. This pursuit of renewables without fossil fuels can only lead us back to shorter life spans, diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths resulting from the elimination of the products from fossil fuels that are now benefiting society.

If the zero-emission cult succeeds in ridding the world of fossil fuels, wind turbines and solar panels may be able to generate intermittent electricity, but they cannot manufacture anything. Electricity from breezes and sunshine may be renewable, but it’s not reliable. Again, short memories about the zero-emission society that we already had in the 1800’s.

Everything that needs electricity is made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Let’s take a look at a few infrastructures, and products, that did not exist before the 1800’s, that now need electricity to operate:

Transportation

Hospitals

Medical equipment

Appliances

Electronics

Telecommunications

Communications systems

Space programs

Heating and ventilating

Military

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-mining-duluth-complex-minnesota-superior-national-forest-deb-haaland-electric-vehicles-11674860178?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Biden Administration is heavily subsidizing electric vehicles, but at the same time it is blocking mineral projects needed to produce them. Another example of this head-scratching contradiction came Thursday when Interior Secretary Deb Haaland walled off much of Minnesota’s Superior National Forest from mining.

Minnesota’s Duluth Complex has one of the world’s largest undeveloped mineral deposits, including copper, nickel and cobalt that are needed in vast quantities for EV batteries. Ms. Haaland is assuring the deposit stays undeveloped by signing an order withdrawing more than 225,000 acres in the Superior National Forest from mining for two decades.

The order says the withdrawal is necessary to protect “fragile and vital social and natural resources” as well as the “traditional cultural values” and “subsistence-based lifestyles” of Native American tribes. But mining needn’t compromise these other interests, and individual mining projects must undergo rigorous federal environmental reviews.

Ms. Haaland is dancing to the tune of green lobbyists who want to keep minerals in the ground as they do fossil fuels. She’s making their job easier by pre-emptively vetoing projects. Now federal agencies won’t have to conduct laborious environmental reviews for proposed mines, and greens won’t have to sue to block them. How politically efficient.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2023/01/27/its-now-cheaper-to-drive-100-miles-in-a-gas-powered-car-than-in-an-ev-n1665848

The Biden administration is always telling us that the best thing we can do is buy an electric vehicle. In fact, various members of the administration treat it almost flippantly — it’s a no-brainer that you should buy an expensive electric car or two. Doing so will rescue the planet from certain environmental collapse and will save you loads of money, even though the average cost of an electric vehicle was $66,000 as of August of last year.

Plenty of people are falling for it, and it’s easy to see why. The siren song of the tax credit is hard to ignore, and the idea of not having to contend with rising prices at the gas pump is attractive. But is it all true?

To quote Kissy Suzuki in You Only Live Twice, “Think again, please.” It just so happens that, for now, it’s actually cheaper to drive 100 miles in a gas-powered vehicle, also known as an internal combustion engine (ICE), than in an electric vehicle.

Ryan Erik King at Jalopnik reports that “a recent report from the Anderson Economic Group (AEG) found that fueling costs from mid-priced ICE-powered vehicles are lower than similarly priced electric vehicles. Combustion drivers pay about $11.29 per 100 miles on the road. EV drivers who charge up at home spend about $11.60 per 100 miles.”

It gets even more delicious when you take into account those commercial chargers that pop up in a lot of places.

“The price difference is more dramatic for those who mainly recharge at stations,” King writes. “Frequent charging station users pay $14.40 per 100 miles.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/24/the-environmentalist-assault-on-civilization/

No reasonable person would deny the importance of protecting the environment. The accomplishments of the environmental movement over the past 50 years are undeniable: cleaner air and water, protected wildernesses, and more efficient use of resources. The list is endless and illustrious. Environmentalist values are an integral part of any responsible public policy agenda. But the pendulum has swung too far.

Environmentalism, which once challenged corporate power, is now its useful puppet. And “climate change,” once a peripheral concern, is now a “climate crisis”—the self-proclaimed unassailable foundation of all environmentalism. Put another way, 60 years ago, environmentalism was a mostly good and courageous movement, but slowly transitioned to the point where today it serves as a front for plutocrats, relying on a big lie to sustain its momentum.

In an illuminating video posted earlier this month, Jordan Peterson interviewed Dr. Richard Lindzen on the topic of climate science. Lindzen, whose credentials are almost ridiculously germane and comprehensive, offered a withering perspective on contemporary environmentalism. He explained that in the 1960s, there was a lot of hunting around for an issue that would give environmentalists power over the energy industry. In the 1960s, environmentalists started tracking atmospheric carbon dioxide and determined it was increasing.

These CO2 measurements, initially begun out of mere scientific curiosity, gave environmentalists the issue they’d been looking for. As Lindzen put it, “If you wanted to control the energy sector, CO2 was the one pollutant that no matter how clean you make it, there will still be CO2. You can’t get rid of that if you burn fossil fuel.”

The essence of environmentalism today is to control and ration the energy supply on which human civilization depends. Since every amenity of civilization uses energy, this control and rationing extends to every human activity. It is a recipe for total control over every individual, every business, and every nation in the world. Which is the point.

It’s easy enough to speculate as to the identity of these ultimate puppeteers who have unleashed this grandiose plot on the world. We were just treated to a host of them flocking to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum. It’s even easier to identify the hidden agenda; power and profit. Micromanage the world, and only the biggest or the most anointed players survive. It’s a gigantic trickle-up economic scheme, robbing the poor and giving to the rich.

Regardless of who pulls the strings behind the scenes, however, the marionettes are in plain sight. The entire state legislature in California, where nearly every “representative” is wholly owned by an alliance of public sector unions and tech billionaires, offers a perfect example. With every regulation, another unionized public bureaucracy is created, and another tech company finds new captive consumers.

The result is a soft fascism, a soul-destroying tyranny masquerading as an enlightened green utopia. California, sprawling across 164,000 square miles, has vast resources of farmland, timber, oil and gas, direct access to ocean fisheries, and valuable mineral resources. With barely 40 million people, the state is sparsely populated compared with most developed nations and should be delivering the most affordable cost of living in the world to its residents. The opposite is true.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftist-naked-bike-rides-and-the-pornographic-imagination/

Years ago, when I was assigned to cover a nudist summer camp in Maryland for a leftist magazine, I braced myself for the unexpected.

In that bright Maryland summer sunlight, I saw unwieldy operation scars, bruises the size of Bulgaria, kneecaps shaped like hard volcanic ash, butts the size of South America, and excess arm skin that recalled the bloated iguanas of Puerto Rico. Stripped humanity up close is often not very pretty, and that’s why clothing (and some modesty) is needed to make it pretty.

As Mae West once observed, “My advice to those who think they have to take off their clothes to be a star is, ‘once you’re boned, what’s left to create the illusion?’ Let ‘em wonder. I never believed in giving them too much of me.”

The motley crew of blue-haired females and often heavily-tattooed cyclists in Philadelphia’s annual Naked Bike Ride makes it plainly obvious that many of the participants can’t quite live up to the ‘naked’ claims of the event. This fact becomes obvious when one notices how many riders opt for some kind of modest body covering, as if driven by a repressed morality that’s at serious odds with the leftist street theater narrative.

Body coverings take many forms — a vest, cape, loin cloth, etc. — but it can also be done by painting your body.  Many of the riders in Philadelphia’s Naked Bike Ride paint their bodies as a way to cover their nakedness; in many ways the body paint acts as a woke version of the Adam and Eve fig leaf.

Paint your naked body all over in colorful configurations and the result, really, is a suit of clothes, the opposite of naked.

The world’s first naked bike ride took place in 2004 in Canada. The philosophy behind riding naked was, and continues to be, to draw attention to anti-fossil fuel causes and as a protest against body-shaming.

Body-shaming  is a leftist concept meaning that one must be blind to the dangers of being overweight and to agree to pretend that massively overweight bodies are just as beautiful as those depicted in Renaissance paintings. To say otherwise is risking being called a heretic.

Naked bike rides are most popular in Left-oriented cities like Chicago, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia.

https://www.thefp.com/p/climate-activism-has-a-cult-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Maybe you saw Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” smeared with two cans of tomato soup. Or the 20-year-old man who set fire to his arm at a tennis tournament, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “End UK Private Jets.” Or the traffic on London’s M25 highway blocked by protesters for days. One 24-year-old girl, Louise, climbed atop a crane on the highway. “I’m here because I don’t have a future,” she exclaimed between sobs.

All these stories feature young members of a movement that claims to fight climate change by demanding their governments stop using and producing fossil fuels immediately.  

Their methods seem unorthodox, and you’re probably wondering how defacing artwork or gluing your hand to the floor of a Volkswagen showroom reduces carbon emissions. I don’t blame you. 

The difference between me and you is I used to be one of them.  

For the past 16 years, I was part of one environmental organization or another as an activist or paid employee. First it was Camp for Climate Action, where we protested a different corporation every year. Once, in a demonstration outside a bank in Edinburgh, we wore garbage bags and painted ourselves in molasses—a nod to the tar sands that the bank was investing in—and stormed the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters, where I was arrested.

I became a mother in 2011, and swore off putting myself in danger, but I doubled down on my commitment to the movement. I wrote a book on ecologically minded parenting. I was the co-editor of a magazine, Juno, on the same subject. I gave talks, made television appearances, and wrote articles about the threat posed by unlivable temperatures that come from our reliance on fossil fuels.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/let_them_eat_bugs.html

Give up cheeseburgers, and eat bugs instead.  That’s what the Davos elite want you to do, while they dine on $50 burritos and slabs of steak.  They would even have you feel good about being a meat- and diary-free insectivore.  To this end, they have carefully manufactured the cult of environmental alarmism, whose virtue-signaling adherents have been duped into thinking an ecological disaster is at hand.

The cult’s latest scapegoat is agriculture.  The wise global leaders of the World Economic Forum (WEF) have decreed that farming must be restricted to “save the planet.”  By 2030, they dictate, plebs must adopt the ecologically sound practice of entomophagy, or insect-eating.

In sardonic response to this vision — as Orwellian as it’s quixotic — Michael Shellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never and a relentless campaigner against environmental hysterics, says pollution from farming is negligible compared to that from jet-setting around the world promoting bug cuisine.  He calls out the “woke” elite’s “festival of narcissism,” in which brazen hypocrisy is a flaunting of power.  He describes the WEF as a “cult wrapped in a grift wrapped in an enigma” that seeks world domination through business.

The strategy is to create a need (in this case, to protect the environment), through fear-mongering if necessary; make people feel virtuous about having that need; and only then launch products that will upend millennia-old paradigms, and hence earn massive profits.  Not surprisingly, millions of dollars have already been invested in bug farms.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/20/the-world-economic-forum-making-the-world-safe-for-autocracy/

Churning out carbon emissions to fly in on their corporate jets to Davos, Switzerland, for their annual fête to make the world safe for autocracy, the World Economic Forum’s hypocrisy is once again patent:

Greenpeace accused attendees of ‘ecological hypocrisy’ before asking just why the WEF claims it is committed to the global goal of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) when the emissions generated from all the private jets flying in and out of airports serving Davos last year were equivalent to those produced by about 350,000 average cars for a week.

Despite the calumnies by that nest of right-wing loons, Greenpeace, the WEF’s hypocrisy is only exceeded by its elitism. Consider the following from the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change, billionaire John Kerry: “[It is] extraordinary that we select human beings . . . are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”

What makes them “select” and gets them into that room is that they are rich and powerful. How they got that way varies from those who inherited it, married into it (like Kerry), or earned it by providing a good and/or service the masses purchased. Like thinking placing a book under your pillow as you sleep will help you cram for an exam, these elitists believe their ability to acquire money (one way or another) mystically translates into expertise in other fields of human endeavor, ones which must be fertilized by their presumed omnipotence—the climate change apocalypse, disinformation, immigration, etc.

So, too, there are invited attendees who are not necessarily wealthy, such as journalists and politicians (though nowadays many of them qualify for the “one percent”), and sundry courtiers. These invitees leap at the opportunity to attend, hoping to parlay the invite into career and monetary advancement; and relishing the sense of vicarious elitism accorded by their economic betters deigning to acknowledge their existence. It is deemed impolitic to note that the attendance of  these lesser lights is only suffered because they are deemed useful idiots.

What these elitists and their useful idiots are after, unadorned by nicety, is seen in this John Kerry quote: “money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” 

Money from whom, you might ask? You. Again, Kerry:

We don’t have time, folks, to be cobbling together bespoke deals here, there and everywhere. We have to do it on a massive basis and the key to that one is philanthropy. It’s not the only key, we need governments to put Federal public money into it.

You see, the rich are tired of footing the bill to peddle apocalyptic conspiracy theories that can scare the peons senseless enough to throw away their liberty and prosperity to make the world safe for autocracy.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/at_davos_the_rev_john_kerry_signals_his_place_among_the_elect.html

John Kerry at Davos

“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” said Kerry.

Before getting to the sillier part of his homily, allow me to explain what Neo-Puritanism is and why it has surfaced. The concept is implicit in the very word “progressive.” In the last decade or two, that word has replaced “liberal” as self-definition among the Left. On the Right, we shorthand the Left’s shifting semantics into the more useful “woke,” a word that on the Left originally meant someone who had awakened and seen the light.

At the risk of tautology, progressives, by definition, progress. Unlike old-school liberals who could content themselves with a status quo, progressives move forward. They refuse to rest, refuse to reflect. That much said, few among them have any clue as to what their ultimate destination might be. For instance, who ten years ago thought that “trans rights” would be a hill on which the woke would be willing, if not to die, at least to pout.

Like their seventeenth-century New England namesakes, the woke exist in a perpetual state of anxiety. For the original Puritans, the anxiety derived from a Calvinist theology that spared only the “elect” from eternal damnation. The problem was that no amount of good works could assure one’s “elect” status. Only faith could do that, but even the faithful could not be certain that their faith would suffice.