RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

If you get most of your news passively by just reading what comes up in some kind of Facebook or Google feed or equivalent, you probably have the impression that the Climate Wars are over and the Climate Campaigners have swept the field of battle. In my case, I certainly don’t rely on those kinds of toxic sources of information, but I do regularly monitor many of the media sources in the “mainstream” category — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Economist, Politico, and several of the television networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. All of those (and plenty more) have clearly put an absolute ban on any news or information that would cast even the slightest negative light on the proposition that there is an imminent “climate crisis” that must be solved by government transformation of the world economy.

I’ll give a couple of examples of the lengths to which this has gone. Back in September, mentally unstable Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose only qualification was her ignorant passion for climate extremism, got the platform of the UN “Climate Action Summit” for a big speech. Excerpt:

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

You would think that sane people would want to stay as far from Greta as possible lest they get accused of child abuse. But instead, Greta is feted as a heroine. In October something called the Nordic Council awarded young Greta its 2019 Environmental Award. (It seems that she has rejected the award, thus claiming for herself an even higher level of holiness among true believers.)

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/22/climate-emergency-is-oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year/

Oxford Dictionaries has declared the phrase “climate emergency” as its Word of the Year, after a 10,000 percent spike in usage.

Since 2004, Oxford has selected a Word of the Year from a word or phrase that has seen an upsurge of interest and reflects the ethos, mood, or preoccupations over the past year, with lasting potential for long term cultural significance.

Oxford defines “climate emergency” as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.”

The phrase“climate emergency” was once relatively obscure, but after a huge spike in its usage this year, it has become one of the most prominent expressions among English speakers. According to a statement published by their panel, “In 2018, climate did not feature in the top words typically used to modify emergency, instead the top types of emergencies people wrote about were health, hospital, and family emergencies. But with climate emergency, we see something new, an extension of emergency to the global level.”

This existential threat surpassed all other “emergencies” in writing by a “huge margin” despite not even making the list in 2018. Even other variations of the same concept, exhorting attention to the health of our native planet, were eclipsed by the relative urgency of the phrase.

The phrases “climate crisis” and “climate action” also made Oxford’s Word of the Year 2019 shortlist.

https://spectator.org/author/rael-jean-isaac/

It comes in waves, and it’s impossible to predict what will happen after the current wave of increasingly unhinged climate change activism breaks.

Global warming has been characterized by its critics (and occasionally by followers like Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono) as a religious movement. While this is correct, it is a religious movement of a special kind, that is, an apocalyptic movement. And although it is widely known that apocalyptic movements foretell an end of days, demand huge sacrifices by followers, and demonize dissent, what is less known is that these movements follow predictable patterns. The general “laws” that an apocalyptic movement follows over time explain both its short-term strength and, fortunately, its longer-term vulnerability.

In Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), Richard Landes chronicles recurring apocalyptic eruptions over the last 3,000 years. Typically there is belief in an imminent cataclysmic destruction that can only be averted by a total transformation of society. Precisely because the stakes are so high, a successful apocalyptic movement has extraordinary initial power. Believers are committed, zealous, and passionate, the urgent need for prompt action putting them at a high pitch of emotional intensity.

Landes describes the four-part life cycle of such movements. First comes the waxing wave, as those whom Landes calls the “roosters” (they crow the exciting new message) gain adherents and spread their stirring news. Second is the breaking wave, when the message reaches its peak of power, provokes the greatest turmoil, and roosters briefly dominate public life. Third is the churning wave, when roosters have lost a major element of their credibility, must confront the failure of their expectations, and mutate to survive. Last is the receding wave, as the “owls” — those who have all along warned against the roosters’ prophecies — regain ascendancy.

While Landes does not apply his apocalyptic model to global warming, the fit is obvious. In the 1980s and ’90s, a series of UN conferences on climate launched the waxing wave. This was followed at the beginning of this century by the breaking wave. In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (which later became a classroom staple) persuaded a broad public that man-made global warming threatened doomsday. That same year Sir Nicholas Stern, appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to lead a team of economists to study climate change, prophesied it would bring “extended world war” and the need to move “hundreds of millions, probably billions of people.” In 2009, then–UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon told the Global Economic Forum, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/21/sycophants-who-flatter-child-climate-oracles-deserve-unrelenting-ridicule/

Following the Greta Thunberg path to fame is an Australian boy who gained notoriety for fuming about “narrow-minded” politicians. While the pair’s excesses can be attributed to their youth, the behavior of the shallow adults insisting the two are prophets who must be listened to cannot be excused. The proper response to these “grownups” behaving as high schoolers is harsh ridicule.

The world can’t help but know about Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish scold who seems to have dropped out of school to travel the world and impudently lecture her elders about how they have let her down. Though this girl knows nothing about climate other than it exists around her, and less about the world, adults nod in agreement as she rants, hand her multiple honors and awards, and have sworn they have been inspired as well as properly chastised by her. She was even considered last month as “the one to beat” for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was eventually given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for putting an end to his country’s decades-long conflict with Eritrea.

Now comes Australia’s “Outback schoolboy” Dylan Storer, not as famous as Thunberg, but just as green, and we don’t mean that in an environmental sense. Storer, also 16, “has been praised on social media after slamming ‘narrow-minded’ politicians while weighing in on Australia’s bushfire crisis,” the Daily Mail reports.

“It’s not political opinion to say climate change hasn’t contributed to these horrific bushfires,” he said earlier this week on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” broadcast.

Of course Storer’s words were “met with huge applause from the audience,” because who can’t resist showing just how hip they are by airing their enthusiastic support of a raving child?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomos-carbon-casualties-11574033835

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a proud opponent of fossil fuels. But now that the consequences of his policies are harming people in the real world—those who can’t afford to escape to Florida—the Governor is blaming others.

Mr. Cuomo has blocked shale fracking upstate and several pipelines delivering natural gas from Pennsylvania in the name of protecting waterways. But this is an excuse. Natural-gas production in Pennsylvania has increased 60% since Mr. Cuomo banned fracking five years ago, adding $6 billion to Keystone State GDP and its waterways are fine.

Mr. Cuomo’s real purpose is to eliminate natural gas as part of his political commitment to “carbon neutrality” by 2050, and this isn’t a cost-free promise. Upstate New Yorkers struggle economically and pay among the highest energy costs in the U.S. A quarter still rely on heating oil, which costs about $1,000 a year more than natural gas and emits nearly 40% more CO2. New Yorkers pay about 40% more for electricity than Pennsylvanians and 15% more than in New Jersey.

The utility Con Edison in March halted natural gas hookups north of New York City due to pipeline constraints. National Grid, the gas utility that serves Long Island, this fall imposed a moratorium on new hookups after the Governor vetoed a 23-mile gas pipeline beneath New York Harbor. National Grid said it couldn’t guarantee uninterrupted service without the pipeline. New oil-to-gas conversions could cause future gas shortages and outages.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/15/global-warming-politics-are-dividing-us-because-thats-the-way-the-alarmists-want-it/

A CNN producer recently wrote an opinion piece headlined “Climate politics are tearing the West apart.” He got it about half right. They are tearing us apart but not for the reasons he thinks.

Johan Bader, an associate producer for “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” is in agreement with The Economist, which has declared: “environmentalism is emerging as Europe’s new culture war.” We’re seeing much the same in the U.S.

But the cultural divide is not simply “concerned citizens” who “are pouring into the streets to lambaste feckless politicians for failing to protect the planet” against neighbors who “inveigh against out-of-touch politicians for instituting environmental policies that fail to protect them.”

The schism has been caused by a coalition of anti-capitalists, arrogant academics, authoritarians who have a need to dictate to others, know-it-alls, those who relish the status of their imagined moral superiority, and inveterate virtue-signalers who have “othered” global warming skeptics as well as the agnostics who have legitimate concerns about how the policy solutions forced on them will change their lives.

The first group, the aggressors, believe that anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe is beneath them. These elitist bullies consider a conflicting opinion an indication of low intellect, or criminality, or both. That’s why they can so easily define skeptics as rubes and outlaws who should be caged.

The cultural gap has been made obvious by the Extinction Rebellion. In one of its more infamous tantrums, the “painfully middle-class agitators” went “to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work,” British columnist Brendan O’Neill recently wrote in Spiked.

The tension is not produced so much by one group being more well off than the other as it is one group thinking it is smarter than the other, and is therefore justified in hectoring and obstructing the othered group, and stealing its time. This plays out in the many efforts of true believers to “educate” their inferiors.

There is of course a religious element to the global warming scare, as well.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/liberal-media-scream-jane-fonda-wants-nuremberg-trials-for-energy-executives

This week’s Liberal Media Scream features activist and Hollywood star Jane Fonda, who has been spending a lot of time in Washington recently protesting on climate change and even going to jail for her efforts.

Now, she wants energy executives and their political allies to be treated like Nazis and face a “Nuremberg” style trial similar to German dictator Adolf Hitler’s henchmen, who were often given the death penalty at the post-World War II trials.

She appeared on the debut of The Impeachment Show on the Viceland, where she said that there’s “literally a ticking time bomb over everything” because of climate change. She claimed “our government is being ruled by fossil fuel” and so “democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse.”

Charging that the “fossil fuel industry” has caused wars that have killed many Americans, she also charged oil executives and enabling politicians “should all be tried for crimes against humanity and nature.” Host Michael Moynihan said, “So, you want to see sort of a Nuremberg trial for climate criminals?” to which Fonda responded, “Yeah, I would.”