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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Children Die When ‘Eco-Lies’ Disrupt the War Against Mosquitoes The devastating legacy of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”Vijay Jayaraj

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/children-die-when-eco-lies-disrupt-war-against-vijay-jayaraj/

I am glad to be alive after a bout with dengue fever. But many across the world are not so fortunate. More than 4000 die each year due to dengue, a severe mosquito-borne disease.

It all began 10 days ago with intense fever. My body consistently clocked above 102 degrees Fahrenheit for 48 hours. Then followed severe pain in every part of the body. Once the fever and aching subsided, the second phase of the struggle began, with the blood platelet count falling dramatically.

Often, as in my case, the blood platelet count recovers on its own slowly. But in case of mismanagement, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reports, some people develop “complications associated with severe bleeding, organ impairment and/or plasma leakage.” In the worst cases, it results in death.

Contrary to expectation, the prevalence and incidence of Dengue has increased in recent decades.

WHO says, “the number of dengue cases reported to WHO increased over 8 fold over the last two decades, from 505,430 cases in 2000, to over 2.4 million in 2010, and 5.2 million in 2019. Reported deaths between the year 2000 and 2015 increased from 960 to 4032, affecting mostly younger age group.”

“Before 1970,” the report went on, “only 9 countries had experienced severe dengue epidemics. The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries in the WHO regions of Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, South-East Asia and the Western Pacific.”

Stephen Moore: How Angela Merkel’s Green Agenda Caused the Economic Collapse of Germany It turns out that peace through weakness is a failed national and economic security strategy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/how-angela-merkels-green-agenda-caused-economic-stephen-moore/

Remember how the world, especially the American media, fawned over former German Chancellor Angela Merkel?

The adoration was so over the top that in 2015 Time magazine named Merkel its “Person of the Year.” It described her as the “Chancellor of the Free World.”

Time owes whatever readers it has left a solemn apology. Today, Germans are suffering the bitter fruits of nearly every major economic and geopolitical decision Merkel made as chancellor.

Start with the German economy that she attempted to reset for the 21st century, which is reminiscent of how President Joe Biden explains to inflation-weary voters that we are going through “an incredible transition.”

But Merkel’s Germany was ahead of us in its “transition.” Today, the German economy is in tatters. A recent headline from Business Insider summarized the chaos: “German Industries Could Collapse Due to Russia Natural Gas Supply Cutbacks.” The Daily Telegraph recently described Germany as “the sick man of Europe.” Things are getting so desperate that the Germans are now considering rationing gas for their major industries to keep the lights on.

Sri Lanka’s Green New Deal Was a Human Disaster An ill-advised national experiment in organic farming yielded starvation, poverty and political chaos. By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sri-lankas-green-new-deal-was-a-human-disaster-gotabaya-rajapaksa-borlaug-synthetic-fertilizers-hunger-organic-agriculture-11657832186?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The Green Revolution of Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist who did more to feed the world than any man before or since, set Sri Lanka on the path to agricultural abundance in 1970. It was built around chemical fertilizers and crops bred to be disease-resistant. Fifty-two years later, Sri Lanka has pulled off a revolution that is “antigreen” in the modern sense, toppling its president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. In an uprising that has its roots in Mr. Rajapaksa’s imperious decision to impose organic farming on the entire country—which led to widespread hunger after the agricultural economy collapsed—Sri Lanka’s people have wrought the first contra-organic national uprising in history.

Footage of protesters swarming the presidential palace—splashing in the swimming pool, watching cricket on television in the bedroom, making tea in the lavish kitchen—resembled the mass break-in at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but with none of the menace of the American trespass. Mr. Rajapaksa was in fact an American citizen until 2019, the year he was elected Sri Lanka’s president. He has now fled the country.

Will this environmental visionary be offered refuge at Berkeley? At the headquarters of the Sierra Club? Or even by the Biden administration? Perhaps not, for he bears on his head some serious accusations of war crimes that would make housing him inconvenient. But the truth is, Mr. Rajapaksa was driven from office in part because he was an overzealous green warrior, who imposed on his countrymen a policy that the American environmental left holds sacred.

Sri Lanka came to detest Mr. Rajapaksa for other reasons too. He was an autocrat, the latest in the Rajapaksa political dynasty to be president after his elder brother Mahinda, who held the office from 2005-15. Mahinda was a ruthless president, waging a scorched-earth war against Tamil separatists in the country’s north that resulted in a resounding victory for the Sri Lankan army in 2009. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was defense secretary during the war and is accused of signing off on tactics that resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians.

Tucker Carlson’s latest on ‘green’ energy is mandatory viewing By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/tucker_carlsons_latest_on_green_energy_is_mandatory_viewing.html

When Congress — the people’s representatives — had the chance to vote on the Green New Deal, it emphatically said “no.”  Were we still a functioning representative democracy, that would be the end of the Green New Deal until such time as We the People elect (God forbid) a majority of senators and House members who want that legislation.  The unconstitutional leftist model since FDR, though, has been for the Executive Branch to do what Congress refuses to do, and, sadly, Chief Justice Roberts’s spineless opinion in West Virginia v. EPA has done nothing to limit that lawless power.

We now have a situation in which Biden has unchallenged and outsized executive powers and the EPA has unlimited regulatory power (both of which, I can assure you, were never meant to control America’s entire energy supply).  The result is that the Democrats are relentlessly clamping down on our available energy supplies.

In a pre-modern era, energy came from four sources: primitive wind and water power, animal abuse, and slavery (the last of which was not, although I’m sure leftists will deny it, a uniquely American phenomenon).  In the modern era, fossil fuel has allowed humans to break free from these limited and abusive energy systems.  Farms produce a surplus, water is cleaned, medical care is readily available, homes are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and so much more.  Rather than listing everything that undergirds our world thanks to fossil fuel, I challenge you to list a single thing in your life that does not rely on fossil fuel for its functionality, manufacture, or transport.

Federalism Is The Key To Demonstrating The Disaster Of Green Central Planning July 11, 2022/ Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-7-11-federalism-is-the-way-to-demonstrate-the-disaster-of-green-central-planning

Central planning always fails, but the utopian visionaries implementing the plans cannot admit that they are at fault. A scapegoat must be found. As a leading example, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture led to mass starvation, the official blame was placed on “saboteurs” and “wreckers.”

Our current-day analog is the centrally-planned replacement of our very large, inexpensive and highly functional energy system, mostly based on fossil fuels, with the alternatives of intermittent wind and sun-based generation, as favored by incompetent government regulators who don’t understand how these things work or how much they will cost. Prices of energy to the consumer — from electricity to gasoline — are soaring; and reliability of supply is widely threatened.

All of which brings our President forth to blame the current price and supply issues in the energy markets on anything but his own administration’s intentional efforts to suppress the functional fossil fuel energy. One day the scapegoat is Vladimir Putin; another it is “companies running gas stations,” who stand accused of price gouging.

Unfortunately, a wide swath of the electorate is only too ready to believe that the failure of central planning is correctly blamed on the saboteurs or the wreckers or the price gougers or the Rooskies or whoever, rather than on the incompetent central planners. And the central planners can generally maintain their narrative, as long as they can impose their control widely enough to keep their subjects from becoming aware of successful alternatives.

The Global Warming Golden Goose By Norman Rogers

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/07/the_global_warming_golden_goose_.html

Climate science was an obscure and unimportant corner of academia until the professors lucked out with global warming.  The global warming idea apparently struck a spark with the government and media establishments and caught fire.  Money and influence flooded from Washington to academia. 

In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the scientific-technological elite being dependent upon government grants. Eisenhower feared that the elite would use their influence and expertise to warp public policy for their own benefit. That is exactly what is happening. Global warming is only one of many current scientific frauds that enhance the welfare of the scientists and bureaucrats promoting the frauds.

Since World War II, the increasing flow of big money from Washington has contributed to a gradual change in the character of research universities. Money became more important than science. Administrators who were focused on money and power grew in number and became dominant. This change in character was documented in an important essay by the MIT scientist Richard Lindzen.

Global warming provided the professors and academic administrators with a junk science golden goose. They were determined to stop anyone from killing the goose. 

The global warming fraud revealed in one graph By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/the_global_warming_fraud_revealed_in_one_graph.html

““Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence marshalled in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.”

Two highly distinguished emeritus professors – William Happer, Professor of Physics, Emeritus of Princeton and Richard Lindzen, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus of MIT – have called out the corruption of science in the global warming/climate change fraud.

Their emeritus status is vital in giving them the freedom to speak frankly, because they are not dependent on a continuing flow of research grants to fund their work. Ever since the alarm was raised that global warming was an existential threat, billions of dollars a year has flowed to scientists willing to support the alarmist position, and thereby keep the money flowing. Were the threat to be acknowledged to be illusory, that money flow would stop and there would be a lot of unemployed climate scientists.

They recently filed a 28-page statement with the SEC, which is contemplating a proposed rule “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors,” laying out the reasons why the warmist alarm is unjustified.

There’s No Despot So Tyrannical As A Green Politician

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/12/theres-no-despot-so-tyrannical-as-a-green-politician/

“Of course petty tyrannies can quickly and easily grow into totalitarianism. The step from “public servant” to green tyrant is shorter than most of us would think.”

Reports of unrest over environmental policies from the Netherlands and Sri Lanka are much more than novelty news. What is happening in both spots is a lesson that has to be learned quickly. If not, there’s deep trouble ahead.

Dutch farmers, whose history of crop yields puts them among the most productive in the world, continue to protest rules that limit their use of nitrogen, a nutrient in commercial fertilizers that converts to nitrous oxide, which is feared as a greenhouse gas. Officials expected them to cut use 50% nationally, which means in some regions, the reductions will be as high as 95%.

The crippled farmers, their survival under attack, are, as they should be, revolting.

“Imagine if you’re a fifth-generation farmer, living on your land, making a living, being part of the local community” and suddenly there is “basically no future, no future for farming, but also no future for the economic, social, cultural fabric of the countryside,” ​​Wytse Sonnema of the Netherlands Agriculture and Horticulture Organization told the Australian media.

“There’s a broad sense of frustration, of anger, even despair amongst farmers at the moment.” 

But political officials don’t care about the effects of their tyranny. They’re too dedicated to demonstrating before the world their great green cred.

The Administrative State Moves To Show Who’s Boss On Energy Policy  Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=879099a3d6

Last Thursday, June 30, the Supreme Court issued its decision in West Virginia v. EPA, holding that, absent a further explicit statute from the Congress, the EPA did not have the authority to orchestrate its planned fundamental restructuring of the electric power generation sector of the economy. More generally, the Supreme Court stated that in cases involving “major questions,” including regulations that affect large portions of the economy, the government must demonstrate “clear congressional authorization” to support a sweeping effort to regulate.

Do you think that such a Supreme Court decision might cause the various regulatory bureaucracies to slow down and reconsider a little before plowing ahead with other dubious plans for fundamental economic restructurings? That’s not how these bureaucracies work. And such is most particularly the case with regard to regulators of the energy sector, sometimes known as “climate change” arena, where the bureaucrats are burning with a righteous religious fervor that they believe entitles them to cast the evil sinners into the fires of hell.

And thus, contemporaneous with the Supreme Court’s decision, several agencies promptly doubled down on efforts to strangle the oil and gas industries with regulatory restrictions, essentially daring the courts or anyone else to stop them. Thousands of pages of statutes give them thousands of arguments to claim they have the “clear congressional authorization,” any one of which arguments might stick. They are now out to show who’s boss.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan wasted no time in getting a statement out on the afternoon of June 30. Excerpt:

[W]e are committed to using the full scope of EPA’s authorities to protect communities and reduce the pollution that is driving climate change. . . . EPA will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.

Where Science Ends and Morality Begins By Tom McCaffrey

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/07/where_science_ends_and_morality_begins.html

“[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.”  So said President Biden on May 23.

We are left to assume that today’s astronomical prices at the pump ($6.78 for hi-test in California town yesterday) are only temporary and that prices will return to lower levels after the transition to wind and solar is completed.  But this is pure fantasy.  Wind and solar power are far more expensive sources of energy than fossil fuels.  That’s why coal, oil, and gas became our predominant sources of energy in the first place.  The only reason there are wind and solar to speak of is that the government has subsidized their development with taxpayer dollars.

But why would environmentalists want Americans to spend more on energy?  Because they believe that wealth is the great enemy of the environment.  People in poor countries don’t mar the natural landscape with superhighways and factories and shopping malls and skyscrapers.  “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun,” wrote Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich in 1975.1

Environmentalists’ desire to halt development of the natural landscape is plainly visible in their restricting of the water supply in California.  Since 1970, the population of California has increased 100 percent, but the volume of water in her reservoirs has increased only 26 percent.2  The last major dam in California was built 42 years ago.  Environmentalists fight the construction of every new water project, including even desalination plants, which could be a source of virtually unlimited water for Californians.  But more water would mean more people, more wealth, and more transformation of the landscape.  (It would be a mistake to attribute California’s water shortage to radical environmentalists; in California, garden-variety environmentalists have simply enjoyed more power to enact the standard green agenda than their comrades elsewhere.)