RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration-to-cancel-oil-and-gas-leases-in-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge/ar-AAKBBzA

The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, targeting one of President Donald Trump’s most significant environmental acts during his last days in office.

The move by the Interior Department, which could spark a major legal battle, dims the prospect of oil drilling in a pristine and politically charged expanse of Alaskan wilderness that Republicans and Democrats have fought over for four decades. The Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears — just two weeks before President Biden was inaugurated.

Now the Biden administration is taking steps to block those leases, citing problems with the environmental review process. In Tuesday’s Interior Department order, Secretary Deb Haaland said that a review of the Trump administration’s leasing program in the wildlife refuge found “multiple legal deficiencies” including “insufficient analysis” required by environmental laws and a failure to assess other alternatives. Haaland’s order calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to those leases in order to conduct “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.”

The step, coming just days after the Justice Department defended another drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, underscores the balancing act the new administration aims to strike as it slows fossil fuel development on public lands. While Biden has paused new federal oil and gas leasing and pledged to drastically cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, he has taken a much more cautious approach toward most oil and gas operations approved under his predecessor.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/26/those-dirty-electric-vehicles-and-green-hypocrisy/

There is much more to the electric vehicle story than the “EVs good, gasoline- and diesel-powered automobiles bad” narrative we’ve been fed. Truth in advertising would require electric cars to be shown surrounded by the Pig Pen-esque dirty cloud that they kick up.

The birthplace of most electric cars is the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country where the diamond trade has helped finance civil war. There, reports the Deseret News, “slave labor” is feeding “big tech’s quest for cobalt,” an element used in the batteries that drive EVs.

“Our children are dying like dogs,” a Congolese mother whose son and cousin died while working in the Congo’s cobalt mines, says the Deseret News. She and others have filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court that “insists companies are simply turning a blind eye to the egregious abuses that include children killed in tunnel collapses or losing limbs or suffering from other horrific injuries caused by mining accidents.”

The United Nations says that “nearly 50% of world cobalt reserves” are found in the Congo. The Deseret News says the figure is more than 60%. But it’s not the only element needed to build “green” batteries. They require lithium, natural graphite, and manganese, raw materials that are “highly concentrated,” according to the U.N., “in a few countries.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/us_army_to_prioritize_fight_against_climate_change.html

The U.S. Army recently released a bulletin stating that it will henceforth be “prioritizing climate change“ in its strategic defense planning. The Defense Department has already established the “Department of Defense Climate Working Group,” a new office that will coordinate the DOD’s ongoing response to the allegedly grave threat that climate change poses to the national security of the United States. I wonder if Greta Thunberg will be heading up the DDCWG.

The Army’s laser focus on climate change appears to be in response to President Biden’s stated agenda of aggressively addressing climate change across governmental bodies and is occurring simultaneously with the culture change being imposed on the U.S. military from the top down. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for example, fully supports Biden’s emphasis on climate change…as long as it doesn’t take time away from the troops’ mandatory “Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Training,” or their indoctrination into Marxist theory.

This past April, Austin asserted that “climate change is making the world more unsafe and we need to act.” He added, “Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Am I the only one concerned that the most important military in the world is frightened by climate change?

Austin also noted that his military is committed to electrifying its vehicle fleets and operating more sustainably. What about the cost to build/retrofit, as well as issues with performance and charging time, etc.? All things considered, will these vehicles really be better for the environment? And is that the point of a military?

https://townhall.com/columnists/katiepavlich/2021/05/20/facebook-fact-checkers-punish-and-censor-debate-on-climate-science-n2589647

Steven Koonin is one of the country’s top physicists. He worked for President Barack Obama, a Democrat, as Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Science Feedback, one of Facebook’s “independent fact-checkers,” is barring reviews about his book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” and classifying its content as false. 

“Mr. Koonin is no ‘climate denier,’ to use the concocted phrase used to shut down debate,” The Wall Street Journal writes in a review of the book. “The word ‘denier’ is of course meant to associate skeptics of climate alarmism with Holocaust deniers. Mr. Koonin finds this label particularly abhorrent, since ‘the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.’ As for ‘denying,’ Mr. Koonin makes it clear, on the book’s first page, that ‘it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it.'”

“The heart of the science debate, however, isn’t about whether the globe is warmer or whether humanity contributed,” The Wall Street Journal continues. “The important questions are about the magnitude of civilization’s contribution and the speed of changes; and, derivatively, about the urgency and scale of governmental response. Mr. Koonin thinks most readers will be surprised at what the data show. I dare say they will.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/army-prioritizes-climate-change-as-serious-threat-to-national-security/

In a memo released Friday, the U.S. Army announced that it now classifies climate change as a “serious threat to U.S. national security interests and defense objectives.” The statement subsequently signaled the military’s intention to prioritize combatting climate change with new risk analyses, threat projections, installation and natural-resource planning, supply-chain procurement considerations, and general strategy.

The statement added that the effects of climate change can induce “humanitarian disasters, undermine weak governments and contribute to long-term social and economic disruptions.”

“The Army has a lot to be proud of, yet there is a lot of work to continue to operate efficiently across extreme weather and climate conditions,” the memo read.

To prepare for and mitigate the fallout from the Earth’s warming, the Army plans to conduct “in-depth assessments of likely climate change effects on the Army’s worldwide missions,” while also working to “lead the way in technology development for tactical vehicles that balances increased capability with decreased climate impacts.”

The Army’s policy change comes after the Biden administration signaled its commitment to fighting the climate crisis as a national-security threat. In April, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III called climate change an “existential threat.”