RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/here-hidden-150-trillion-agenda-behind-crusade-against-climate-change?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=147

We now live in a world, where bizarro headlines such as the ones below, have become a daily if not hourly occurrence:

*TREASURY TO STUDY IMPACT OF CLIMATE ON HOUSEHOLDS, COMMUNITIES
*TREASURY LAUNCHES EFFORT ON CLIMATE-RELATED FINANCIAL RISKS
*BRAINARD: CLIMATE-SCENARIO ANALYSIS WILL HELP IDENTIFY RISKS
*BRAINARD: CLIMATE CHANGE COULD HAVE PROFOUND ECONOMIC EFFECTS
*MESTER: FED LOOKS AT CLIMATE CHANGE FROM VIEW OF RISKS TO BANKS
*FED IS TAKING THE RIGHT COURSE ON MONITORING CLIMATE CHANGE
*FED SHOULD CONSIDER CLIMATE-CHANGE RISK TO FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Now, in case someone is still confused, none of these institutions, and not a single of the erudite officials running them, give a rat’s ass about the climate, about climate change risks, or about the fate of future generations of Americans (and certainly not about the rising water level sweeping away their massive waterfront mansions): if they did, total US debt and underfunded liabilities wouldn’t be just shy of $160 trillion.

So what is going on, and why is it that virtually every topic these days has to do with climate change, “net zero”, green energy and ESG?

The reason – as one would correctly suspect – is money. Some $150 trillion of it.

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress.

Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell. Unless, that is, the world’s self-styled climate leader turns up in Glasgow with nothing to show.

The Biden administration’s NDC is long on rhetoric, starting with climate change as an existential threat. Yet when it comes to the ‘bold action’ the threat demands, the cupboard is bare of bankable action. Interviewed in April, Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, who put together the NDC, was asked what was the one piece of legislation she wanted Congress to pass. ‘To make sure that by 2035 we have a clean energy sector,’ McCarthy answered.

Much of what McCarthy wants is embedded in the gargantuan reconciliation Build Back Better package, including $300 billion of clean tax credits and a Clean Energy Standard to meet Biden’s goal of having a zero-greenhouse gas emitting grid by 2035, items that McCarthy describes as ‘non-negotiables’. There is a reason for this. The White House touts the falling cost of renewables, but its convoluted formulation that clean alternatives ‘may start looking like the cheap alternatives’ suggests cost competitiveness is still years away. Until recently, the rapid transition the White House wants ‘looked anything but cheap’, so it seeks to place the cost of decarbonizing electricity on taxpayers rather than in higher electricity bills. Doing this will require congressional approval.

McCarthy claims the administration has ‘lots of regulatory authority’ should the administration fail to get the reconciliation package through Congress. But she knows as well anyone that regulation is a distant second to legislation. Build Back Better’s Clean Energy Standard is a successor to the Clean Power Plan, which McCarthy oversaw when she was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the second Obama term. Challenged in the courts, the Supreme Court imposed a stay on the EPA implementing the plan. Would the Supreme Court’s decision slow down the transition to a low carbon future? ‘Absolutely not,’ McCarthy responded two weeks later. If so, what was the point of the plan?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-13-useless-green-energy-hitting-the-wall

In the field of litigation settlements, people sometimes talk about a “win, win” scenario — a settlement structure where both sides can get some advantage and simultaneously claim victory. By that criterion, what is “green” energy (aka intermittent wind and solar power)? The public pays hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to get the things built, and in return it gets: sudden shortages and soaring prices for coal, oil, gas and electricity; and dramatically reduced reliability of the electrical grid, leading to periodic blackouts and risks of many more of same; and despite it all fossil fuel use doesn’t go down. It’s a “lose, lose, lose.”

As the world comes out of the pandemic and the international economy returns to attempting to fulfill normal consumer demand, you can see green energy hitting the wall pretty much everywhere you look. It’s just a question of which data points you want to collect for a day’s entertainment.

The current energy crisis in Europe and Asia is of course getting next to no coverage in the U.S. media. But over at Bloomberg News they have a big story on October 4. That’s Bloomberg News as in Mike Bloomberg — the man with four private jets and at least ten houses who devotes his public life to hectoring you to cut your “carbon footprint.” But now suddenly the Bloomberg News people seem to have figured out that periodic energy crises are an inevitable consequence of increasing reliance on the undependable wind and sun. The headline of the article is “Global Energy Crisis Is the First of Many in the Green Power Era.” The Bloomberg piece itself is behind paywall, but extensive excerpts can be found at Climate Depot here, where they call it a “moment of clarity”:

The next several decades could see more periods of energy-driven inflation, fuel shortages and lost economic growth as electricity supplies are left vulnerable to shocks.. . . . The world is living through the first major energy crisis of the clean-power transition. It won’t be the last. . . . Wind and solar power production have soared in the last decade. But both renewable sources are notoriously fickle — available at some times and not at others. And electricity, unlike gas or coal, is difficult to store in meaningful quantities. That’s a problem, because on the electrical grid, supply and demand must be constantly, perfectly balanced. Throw that balance out of whack, and blackouts result.

No kidding.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/thanks_to_bidens_policies_prepare_for_a_cold_expensive_winter.html

One of the wonders of the modern age is that fossil fuel allows us to avoid freezing in the winter or overheating in the summer. Climate change fanatics, however, who ignore that the Earth’s climate has cycled endlessly between hot and cold for billions of years, desperately want to return us to a pre-modern state. Their efforts are paying off, for the U.S. government is warning of a 54% increase in winter heating bills.

Upon entering the Oval Office, Biden immediately shut down the Keystone Pipeline and ended news drilling on federal lands. While Trump had brought America to energy independence and affordable energy, Biden reduced America to a vassal of oil-producing countries.

Thanks to this policy, gasoline prices keep climbing. In my neighborhood, they’ve increased by almost 78% in just nine months. The same is true everywhere.

Like all Biden policies, this is devastating for the middle and working classes for it doesn’t just make commuting more expensive, it increases the price of every single item in America. Fuel is needed for farming, manufacturing, shipping, wholesaling, and retailing. Every aspect of life becomes more expensive when fuel prices rise, with the middle and working classes bearing the ultimate burden.

All of this is in the name of fighting alleged climate change. That, of course, is a faith, not a science. We humans can pollute, and I believe we have a moral obligation to keep our environment clean and healthy, but the whole climate change theory is a joke and a bad one at that.

But around the world, not just in America, energy production has been collapsing thanks to various governments’ misguided anti-fossil-fuel policy. Smart governments would have invested in making fossil fuel cleaner. Stupid governments, which means all of them, decided to focus on renewables that will never be able to replace fossil fuels. (Only nuclear power will but lefties make sure nobody has that either.)

With winter coming, the price we’re paying for this mass stupidity is going to be high. Very high:

With prices surging worldwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said Wednesday it expects households to see their heating bills jump as much as 54% compared to last winter.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-cost-economy-emissions-tax-per-person-net-zero-joe-biden-11634159179?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Politicians across the world routinely promise unprecedented reductions of carbon emissions but make little mention of the cost, often covering with vivid projections of green jobs. Yet the economic damage these policies would do is much greater than what most voters would tolerate, while the climate benefits are smaller than many would imagine.

The annual cost of the promises to which President Obama signed on under the Paris climate agreement would have hit roughly $50 billion in 2030, or about $140 per person. Many studies show Americans are willing to pay a couple of hundred dollars a year to remedy climate change, but this data is highly skewed by a small minority willing to spend thousands of dollars. A recent Washington Post survey found that a majority of Americans would vote against a $24 annual climate tax on their electricity bills. Even if they’d hand over $140, it’d buy them little. If Mr. Obama’s agreement were sustained through 2100, it would reduce global temperatures by a minuscule 0.06 degree Fahrenheit.

President Biden is pushing much stronger climate policies with much higher price tags. Before his election, he promised to spend $2 trillion over four years on climate policies—equivalent to $1,500 per person per year. And Mr. Biden’s current promise—100% carbon emission reduction by 2050—will be even more phenomenally expensive.

A new study in Nature finds that a 95% reduction in American carbon emissions by 2050 will annually cost 11.9% of U.S. gross domestic product. To put that in perspective: Total expenditure on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid came to 11.6% of GDP in 2019. The annual cost of trying to hit Mr. Biden’s target will rise to $4.4 trillion by 2050. That’s more than everything the federal government is projected to take in this year in tax revenue. It breaks down to $11,300 per person per year, or almost 500 times more than what a majority of Americans is willing to pay.

https://www.cfact.org/2021/10/07/harm-from-war-on-hydrocarbons-exceeds-harm-from-climate-change/

We are being told of the world’s forthcoming demise with continued use of fossil fuels, and the need to commit to a reduction in emissions to keeping temperature rise below 1.5C, but we have nothing to compare potential fatalities with or without fossil fuels.

History tells us that four of the last five warming cycles occurred before humans and their kin were even around, suggesting the causes have got to be attributable to the Sun and Mother Nature.

Human beings were not present during any of those previous ice ages and warming cycles, but the SUN was here for ALL those worldly climate changes. Are we betting against the Sun? Today, President Biden has called climate change “the number one issue facing humanity”, implying that humanity is more powerful than Mother Nature and the Sun that caused the previous ice ages and warming cycles.

So, what if the earth is warming again? Two questions for the infamous “modelers”:

How many fatalities are projected of the 8 billion in a warmer climate with continued use of fossil fuels?

How many fatalities are projected of the 8 billion without the fossil fuels that were the reason the world populated from 1 to 8 billion in a period of about 200 years?

If we were to follow the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) led efforts to cease oil production, cease fracking, and stop importing crude oil, the supply chain to refineries will be terminated and that manufacturing industry will become history, i.e., no more fuels for transportation infrastructures, and no manufactured derivatives from crude oil to make the thousands of products demanded by worldwide economies and lifestyles.

Interestingly, after the discovery of oil just more than a hundred years ago, we created various modes of transportation, a medical industry, and electronics and communications systems. The oil that reduced infant mortality, extended longevity to more than 80+ and allowed the world to populate to from 1 to 8 billion in about 200 short years, is now required to provide the food, medical, and communications to maintain and grow that population.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-malnutrition-regulation-economic-growth-glasgow-conference-11633551187?mod=opinion_major_pos4

Editor’s note: As November’s global climate conference in Glasgow draws near, important facts about climate change don’t always make it into the dominant media coverage. We’re here to help. Each Thursday contributor Bjorn Lomborg will provide some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.

The World Health Organization estimates that climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths each year in the two decades following 2030, mostly among the world’s poor. The WHO compared the real world with an imaginary one in which there’s no climate change, calculating the difference in deaths from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, dengue fever, flooding and heat. By far the biggest killer at 85,000 additional deaths in 2050 is malnutrition. Understandably, the immediate response to this prediction by many is that we should work to end global warming even if it’s costly. But a less publicized part of the WHO analysis shows why this could hurt the poor more than help: the effect of economic development.

As you can see in the accompanying graph, malnutrition deaths have declined dramatically over the past three decades and will continue to drop rapidly over the next three. This is partly due to increasing crop yields, which would still rise under climate change but slightly slower—resulting in 85,000 deaths in 2050 that might not have been had temperatures held still. Economic growth—which allows families to buy more food regardless of yields—is the primary cause driving down malnutrition deaths. This puts the impact of global warming in context: For nutrition, climate change isn’t a disaster, but something that slightly slows down progress.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/05/why-is-joe-biden-embracing-europes-failed-green-socialism/

These are the worst of times for Europe when it comes to energy. Not only are its green schemes failing to produce enough energy, but because of environmental laws, taxes and regulations, conventional energy prices are shooting through the roof. Inexplicably, President Joe Biden wants to recreate the same failed policies here.

Europe faces a winter of energy discontent, thanks to its absurd green programs that have created sudden extreme shortages and sharply higher prices for natural gas around the world. Officials thought they could cut carbon dioxide emissions to zero simply by building more wind farms and regulating fossil fuels out of existence.

Wrong. Sure, they built wind farms and shut down coal and nuclear plants, but they didn’t think of the simplest question: What if the wind doesn’t blow, or the sun doesn’t shine? As cold weather looms, Europe has had an unusually windless period, triggering severe deficits.

To make up for the shortfalls, Europe has gone back to the natural gas market. But who supplies its natural gas these days? Russia, which has cut supplies to Europe mainly, it seems, just to watch it squirm.

Things are so bad that Germany has returned to evil coal for fuel, only to be told by providers that, sorry, prices are sky high and supplies are tight. After closing all its nuclear power plants, which supplied CO2-free energy, foolish Germany has no choice. Nor does the rest of Europe, suffering the same self-inflicted green maladies.

“Europe’s increasingly expensive gas and electricity prices are sending a strong signal to manufacturers to consider temporary plant closures and to home and office owners to turn down thermostats to conserve fuel this winter,” wrote Reuters last week. “Front-month gas futures are now more than six times more expensive than at this point last year, as the region struggles to import enough gas to refill its depleted storage ahead of the winter peak heating season.”

“Europe’s climate follies created fuel shortages and price spikes rippling through global energy markets,” CFACT, a climate think tank, tweeted in response to Europe’s energy shock. “Demand for natural gas has soared due to waning wind production, the shutdown of coal and nuclear plants, and lower Russian gas deliveries.”