RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/pete_buttigieg_smirks_to_americans_to_go_green_or_get_used_to_soaring_gas_prices.html

Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has a smarmy, smiling message for all of us pudknocker Americans who don’t quite buy into the ‘going green’ agenda of the Bidenites:

Here’s what he actually said:

…so, less dependent on foreign oil, and that protects us from shortages at fuel stations, but here’s the thing  to remember, even if all of the oil we use in the U.S.A. were made in the U.S.A., the price of it is still subject to powers and dynamics outside of the U.S.A. Which means that until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy created here at home, American citizens will still be vulnerable to wild price hikes like we are seeing right now..

..which is smug, certain, smiling, and … and a very odd message to shill out to the American public as gas prices hit $5.85 a gallon on average in California and $4.26 nationally, and midterms beckon.

It’s an astonishingly ignorant and charlatan-like statement.

Buttigieg argues that domestically produced green energy is somehow not subject to global price swings, while only oil and natural gas somehow are.

How do we unpack this?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_religiofication_of_climate_change.html

Climate change is the unofficial state religion of the Biden administration.  In his commentaries on mass movements, Eric Hoffer warned of the “religiofication” of practical purposes into holy causes and noted, “Blind devotion and religiosity leads to belief that the movement is virtuous and a source of strength.  The adherent identifies as a supporter and defender of a holy cause.”  

The Supreme Court has not established a formal definition of religion.  Standards differentiating religious and similar non-religious beliefs remain elusive.  The Second Circuit Court noted that for the purposes of the First Amendment, beliefs that constitute a religion are evaluated on whether the beliefs are sincerely held.  The 10th Circuit Court quoted philosopher William James’s definition of religion: “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.” 

Barbara Burnett attempted to define religion from a twentieth-century perspective, drawing on Clifford Geertz’s thesis of applying five tests based on symbolic anthropology.  Judge Adams of the Third Circuit Court distilled the definition to three points, honoring Supreme Court precedent and the practical needs of the courts.

Climate change fulfills both Geertz’s anthropological and Judge Adams’s legal tests to qualify as a religion.  The movement deals with fundamental questions dealing with the sacred planet.  The believer’s passions are deeply held, comprehensive, and nurtured and promulgated by an array of organizations representing all aspects of worldwide society.  The true believer views climate change as a good vs. evil phenomenon.  The threats to the planet are not theoretical, but realistic and personal.  The liturgy of the religion is promoted by a network of teachers who disseminate its beliefs, practices, ceremony, and rites.

Climate czar John Kerry stated that walking away from global warming at Kyoto sent a message of duplicity and hypocrisy and that ignoring the twelve-year doomsday forecast issued in 2019 spelled certain disaster for the planet.  When criticized for using a personal jet to accept a climate award in Iceland, he placed the onus on others and replied, “If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.” 

https://spectator.org/can-ukraine-kill-climate-change/

All apocalyptic movements end in failure, but often only after they have wreaked untold damage on the societies that believe in them. That’s the takeaway from Richard Landes’s Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, which explores the appeal of these movements over the centuries, their chief characteristics, and how they take over societies and eventually run out of steam.

Global warming, for all its scientific veneer, has the basic characteristics of an apocalyptic movement: there is a prophecy of impending doom, a demand for repentance and societal self-sacrifice (in this case, giving up the fossil fuels upon which industrial society depends), and a sense of urgency that if action is not taken immediately, it will be too late. In the end, if the required sacrifices are made, there is an idyllic future. In this case, it’s a green new world, powered by sun and wind. Since its emergence in the 1980s, the global warming apocalypse has shown remarkable resilience, emerging stronger than ever from a near-death experience in November 2009 when leaked emails between top climate scientists exposed their shenanigans in suppressing scientific dissent and deleting data.

What probably saved the movement was that the West’s political elite had by then committed themselves. At the beginning of 2009, global warming had scored its most important convert: President Barack Obama. The hacked emails became news just before 40,000 delegates, including over 100 heads of state, Obama among them, converged on Copenhagen for the 15th annual UN climate conference.

In 2018, the movement obtained a major public relations boost when Greta Thunberg launched an international children’s crusade. President Donald Trump took the United States on a brief time out, but even while still on the campaign trail, now-President Joe Biden promised, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.” At the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Biden showed up from Rome in an 85-car emissions-spewing cavalcade. This time, along with the unusually huge number of delegates — including 27 from Palau (total population: 18,000) — he was one of 120 heads of state. Today, the movement would seem by most measures to be at its peak, riding what Landes would call its “cresting wave.” Yet, it is possible that the crisis in Ukraine may mark the beginning of its end.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/600203-the-sec-tries-its-hand-at-climate-policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) remit includes ensuring candor, honesty and transparency in what public companies tell investors. Yet it will spend the next few weeks and months trying to fool us into believing that its new 510-page proposal on mandatory climate disclosure is solely about protecting investors and has nothing to do with climate policy or achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

No one should be fooled.

Materiality is the governing principle of corporate disclosure requirements. In 2010, the SEC issued 29 pages of guidance on climate-change disclosures. With respect to what is now called climate-transition risk, the guidance requires that companies “should consider specific risks they may face as a result of climate change legislation or regulations and avoid generic risk factor disclosure that could apply to any company.”

This common-sense approach is now being superseded by an SEC-specified climate-risk reporting and accounting framework that will run in parallel with traditional financial reporting requirements, with its own verification and attestation regime necessitating the employment of legions of climate consultants.

At the heart of the SEC’s new climate-disclosure regime is quantification of a company’s greenhouse gas emissions, at three levels: those emitted directly as a result of its own operations (Scope 1); those emitted from generating the electricity it consumes (Scope 2); and those emitted by its suppliers and customers (Scope 3). “Greenhouse gas emissions in many respects resemble financial statement disclosures,” writes Commissioner Allison Herren Lee, who, as the SEC’s acting chair in March 2021, initiated the process that led to the current proposal. Such disclosures, she claims, provide “critically important insights into a company’s operations.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/oscar-nights-to-forget-11648502654?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

In the aftermath of an ugly spectacle on Sunday night, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may be tempted to count this year’s Oscar awards ceremony as their most embarrassing yet. But there is plenty of competition in this category, even if it’s not an honor just to be nominated.

Some may immediately think of the time in 2017 when presenters announced the wrong movie as the winner of the best picture award, but with the passage of time the smoother presentation of Oscars night in 2007 is looking harder to defend.

That was the year the film industry claimed that the best documentary of the year was Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” a frightening forecast of environmental doom. Conveniently for the world but inconveniently for the Academy’s reputation, some of the most hysterical predictions Mr. Gore has documented have not turned out to be true.

When Mr. Gore released a sequel in 2017, Bjorn Lomborg wrote in the Journal:

They say the sequel is always worse than the original, but Al Gore’s first film set the bar pretty low. Eleven years ago, “An Inconvenient Truth” hyped global warming by relying more on scare tactics than science. This weekend Mr. Gore is back with “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” If the trailer is any indication, it promises to be more of the same.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=e79d572f7c

If you are even a semi-regular reader of this blog, you know about the energy storage problem that is inherent in the effort to eliminate dispatchable fossil fuels from the electricity generation system and replace them with wind and solar. As discussed here many times, other than with nuclear power, the storage problem is the critical issue that must be addressed if there is ever going to be “net zero” electricity generation, let alone a “net zero” economy based on all energy usage having been electrified. For a sample of my prior posts on this subject just in the last few months, go here, here and here.

The problems of trying to provide enough storage to back up a fully wind and solar system without fossil fuels are so huge and so costly that you would think that everyone pushing the “net zero” agenda would be completely focused on these issues. And given that the issues are quite obvious, you would think that such people would be well down the curve with feasibility studies, cost studies, and demonstration projects to make their case on how their plans could be accomplished. Remarkably, that is not the case at all. Instead, if you read about the plans and proposals in various quarters for “net zero” in some short period of years, you quickly realize that the people pushing this agenda have no clue. No clue whatsoever.

Today, I am going to look at discussions of the storage situation coming out of three jurisdictions with ambitious “net zero” plans: California, Australia and New York. First a very brief summary of the problem. It is (or certainly should be) obvious that wind and solar generators have substantial periods when they generate nothing (e.g., calm nights), and other times when they generate far less than users demand. Get out a spreadsheet to do some calculations based on actual historical patterns of usage and generation from wind and solar sources, and you will find that to have a fully wind/solar generation system and make it through a year without a catastrophic failure, you will need approximately a three-times overbuild (based on rated capacity) of the wind/solar system, plus storage for something in the range of 24 – 30 days of average usage. For these purposes “usage” at any given moment is measured in gigawatts, but usage for some period of time is measured in gigawatt hours, not gigawatts. California’s average electricity usage for 2020 was about 31 GW; Australia’s was about 26 GW ; and New York’s was about 18 GW.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/renewable-failure-john-stossel/

The “Greens” promise renewables, solar and wind power, will replace fossil fuels. After all, the wind and sun are free, and they don’t pollute!

Oops.

Now countries that embraced renewables are so desperate for power that they eagerly import coal, the worst polluter of all!

Do they apologize? No. Greens never apologize.

Germany was a leader in renewable energy, so confident in solar and wind power that they closed half their nuclear plants.

Oops.

That leaves Germans so short of power that Germans are now desperate to buy fossil fuels from Russia. Even worse, pollution-wise, high pollution coal now tops wind as Germany’s biggest electricity source. That’s really disgusting.

Then, even after putting all that soot in the air, Germans pay more than triple what Americans pay for electricity.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/23/climate-change-is-about-control-stupid-not-the-environment/

The apocalyptic talk about climate change is nothing more than a diversion tactic by the government, the radical Left, and their mainstream press. The many laws, the trillions in federal appropriations and tax credits, and the unworkable proposals to address climate change will not slow the rise of the oceans or heal the planet.

Lobbying for more climate regulation is to enhance the power of the authoritarian state, not protect the environment.

The radical Left has the world obsessing over whether we have 10, 20 or 50 years before the eve of destruction. The hysteria gives the government the excuse it needs for more controls over the energy we use, the products we purchase, the homes we live in, the food we eat, and since the pandemic when we can leave our homes. However, the data supporting the climate studies are rarely made public so that scientists can test the reproducibility of the studies.

Citizens of the United States already live under a legal framework that contains over 3,000 separate criminal offenses in 50 titles of the U.S. Code, 23,000 pages of federal law, over 200,000 regulations, and almost daily Executive Orders that usually limit those actions deemed objectionable to the kakistocracy.

Additionally, the government has in reserve 136 emergency laws allowing it to assume control over industrial production, communications and banking, and most aspects of commerce. Most of these emergency laws are effective when the president declares them effective.

“Predictions of apocalyptic events that would result in the extinction of humanity, a collapse of civilization, or the destruction of the planet have been made since at least the beginning of the Common Era.” So far, the planet still exists. George Orwell noted, “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their wishes, and the grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-alarmism-has-hardly-changed-since-the-60s-climate-change-global-warning-scare-tactics-11647984765?mod=opinion_major_pos7

The Biden administration’s overly ambitious climate-change agenda has gone next to nowhere in Congress, but the war on coal, oil and natural-gas production has continued by other means.

The White House has tried to fill top positions at the Federal Reserve Board with people who want the Fed to restrict capital flowing to fossil fuels, as if Chairman Jerome Powell and company don’t have their hands full fighting four-decade-high inflation rates. The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, wants to force companies to report detailed data on their carbon emissions, which Republican Sen. Pat Toomey correctly describes as “a thinly veiled effort to have unelected financial regulators set climate and energy policy for America.”

To understand the Biden administration’s stubbornness, it helps to appreciate how long environmental alarmism has been capturing the imagination of our intellectual elites. Before global warming, overpopulation was the existential threat du jour. The modern green movement dates to the 1960s and apocalyptic predictions have long been the coin of this realm. In 1967, brothers William and Paul Paddock wrote “Famine 1975!” In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” declared that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death despite any crash programs embarked upon now.”