RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-4-26-updates-on-the-collapse-of-the-climate-scam

On April 14 I recorded a podcast with Tom Nelson. He has since posted a slightly edited version on his YouTube site. Go to this link if you would like to watch it — about an hour long. The main subject is the sordid history of EPA’s Endangerment Finding and efforts of people including myself to get it rescinded.

The good news on the Endangerment Finding front is that EPA under new Administrator Lee Zeldin is very much on the job of eliminating the EF. Of course, once it has been rescinded it will face a blizzard of legal challenges. I hope and expect that Zeldin and his team are up to the job of carrying out a rescission that will stick. I offered my suggestions for how to do a rescission that will stand up to challenge in this post from January 26.

Separately, Nelson has made a thing out of compiling a growing list of “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.” That list is now up to some 33 items and counting. The current version can be found here. Readers of this blog are likely already familiar with many of the items on Tom’s list. However, today I would like to feature a couple of items from Tom’s list that are important but may be less well known.

Item 3 on Tom’s list is that the funding of something called “NASA GISS” is likely to be terminated as part of the DOGE cost-cutting efforts. GISS is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. For some unknown reason, GISS is part of NASA, and is located, of all place, in Manhattan, in an office building on upper Broadway near Columbia University. GISS is mainly known for producing a world temperature time series known as GISTEMP, which is systematically massaged and altered in ways to enhance the narrative of climate alarm. For more details than you will ever want to know about the data tampering, go to my 30+ part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-offshore-wind-project-empire-wind

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered construction halted on Empire Wind, the planned array of roughly 150 wind turbines off the coast of Long Island. In doing so, he may have sunk the centerpiece of New York State’s energy policy—thank goodness.

The agency that, among other things, oversees the National Park Service shouldn’t have been the first line of defense for electricity customers. But Burgum said his team spotted “serious deficiencies” in federal approvals granted to the offshore windfarm—necessary because the feds have jurisdiction over the nation’s continental shelf. The Biden administration had signed off on myriad permits and consultations with other federal agencies, deeming the years-long process (which began in President Trump’s first term) “complete” in March 2024. Objections lingered though: they ran the gamut from concerns about marine life and viewsheds to local fishermen facing significant economic harm.

The major beneficiaries of Empire Wind’s potential cancellation aren’t whales and fish—they’re New York electricity customers, who would have paid billions in subsidies for a less reliable grid.

Consider the poor governmental choices that brought us here. Over the past decade, Albany’s energy policy has been a tangle of unreachable goals, double standards, and labor-union giveaways—all hidden behind rules that prevent utilities from itemizing costs on customer bills.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/24/historys-biggest-liars/
The global warming conspirators are world class fabricators and truth suppressors.

The “experts” who have told us that man-made climate change is a grave threat must have stumbled across the Winston Churchill comment about duplicity, because they know the truth has a hard time catching up to lies. They’ve also relied on lying by omission, an offense that can’t be blamed on innocent oversight.

One of Churchill’s greatest quips warns us that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Propagandists know this is true.

Fabulists also lie by leaving out important facts. Such as burying the medieval warm period. Former University of Alabama assistant geological sciences professor Matthew Wielicki explained in a Substack post the day before Earth Day how “the deliberate erasure of past climatic states” is used “to support alarmist conclusions.”

“Every year, new temperature records are breathlessly announced as though the planet is plunging into uncharted climate chaos. Mainstream headlines proclaim things like ‘Humanity just lived through the hottest 12 months in at least 125,000 years’ or ‘This year virtually certain to be warmest in 125,000 years, EU scientists say.’ We’re told, often without context or qualification, that the warming we’re experiencing is unlike anything seen in hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/21/no-due-process-for-illegal-regulations/

As other opponents of the climate hoax do, I eagerly await the Trump administration’s termination of the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called endangerment finding (EF). I had imagined that the reversal would be accomplished over the course of at least a year and probably more through the conventional administrative process of notice-and-public-comment. But things may get much more exciting, much more quickly. 

Some brief history is in order. The EF is a December 2009 determination by the Obama EPA that emissions of greenhouse gases harm the public health and welfare. Since that time, the EF has been the factual and scientific foundation of virtually all climate activity undertaken by the federal government.  

The EF was made possible by a combination of scheming by the Clinton EPA, bungling by the Bush EPA, and judicial activism resulting in the 5-4 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. The Court ruled that EPA may, but was not required to, regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This decision was and remains controversial because Congress had never authorized EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.  

The legendary late Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., a believer in global warming but a harsh critic of EPA, thought that he and his fellow Clean Air Act co-authors had made it clear that EPA was not authorized to regulate greenhouse gases. Dingell said that they never imagined the Court would be so “stupid” as to imagine otherwise. But it was and so here we are. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-composting-recycling

After forcing New Yorkers to spend billions of dollars for the privilege of sorting their garbage into recycling bins, municipal officials have found an even costlier—and grubbier—way for residents to spend their time in the kitchen. They must now separate food waste into compost bins or face new fines imposed by the city’s garbage police, who will be digging through trash looking for verboten coffee grounds and onion peels.

Composting is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling: it delivers little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost. In addition to wasting people’s time, it attracts rats to compost facilities, puts more fuel-burning trucks on the road, and diverts tax dollars from what was once a core priority of the Department of Sanitation—keeping the streets clean. Whatever its appeal to suburbanites with yards and gardens, composting is absurdly impractical in a city—especially one facing a massive budget deficit.

Where are New York apartment dwellers supposed to find space in their tiny kitchens for yet another waste bin? It’s bad enough that elderly residents must schlep their newspapers and bottles to basement recycling bins instead of simply using the trash chute—now they’re expected to haul bags of rotting food, too. (New Yorkers have long been denied another convenient option, garbage disposals, because the city’s onerous plumbing regulations have prevented most buildings from installing them in kitchen sinks.) Under the new rules, landlords are on the hook: fines of up to $300 will be imposed if their buildings don’t comply with composting requirements. But how are they and the superintendents of large buildings supposed to enforce the law? Unlike the city’s inspectors, they never signed up to be trash detectives, much less dumpster divers.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/16/sanity-returns-to-the-appliance-aisle/

Acting to please a constituency that prefers scarcity over abundance, Joe Biden ordered up a list of federal rules that restricted consumer choice. Given the exhaustive White House agenda that began when Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, it would have been unsurprising had he waited to unwind the Biden regulatory knot. But to his credit, Trump has been moving on that, too.

Ignoring the left’s constant “we’re running out of everything” screeching, Trump restored “shower freedom” earlier this month with an executive order “to end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure.” The new rule rescinds “the overly complicated federal rule that redefined ‘showerhead’ under Obama and Biden,” says the administration.

The previous rule, which burned through 13,000 words to define “showerhead,” restricted multi-nozzle showerheads to 2.5 gallons of water per minute. The new rule allows each nozzle in a showerhead to pump out 2.5 gallons of water per minute.

It’s the second time Trump changed the rule. The first time was in 2020. Of course Biden dropped that order after he took office and the government reverted to the Obama restrictions.

Trump’s change make sense. The Democrats’ limitations don’t. It should be obvious that people would have to take longer showers when the water flow is restricted, same as they also have to often flush multiple times to get the job done when per-flush water flow in toilets is capped. In the end, nothing is saved.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/14/if-we-stopped-using-fossil-fuels-today-billions-would-die/

The belief that climate change is the most pressing issue of our time isn’t only ill-informed, it’s dangerous. So says climate economist Bjorn Lomborg, author of Best Things First and False Alarm. Lomborg sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to discuss the disastrous economic impact of climate alarmism, particularly in the UK and Europe, and whether we are at the dawn of a better way forward. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Fraser Myers: Scepticism towards Net Zero seems to be going mainstream. Presumably, you see this as a welcome development?

Bjorn Lomborg: It’s certainly a good thing that we’re more realistic. Remember, climate change is a real problem. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s not as though there is a meteor hurtling towards Earth, and nothing else matters, which is how the conversation has been going for the past 10-15 years. This view has led to a lot of really bad policies.

Now, it’s still a problem. I don’t want to go all the way to the other side of the argument and just say ‘drill, baby, drill’, and stop caring about the climate. The important thing is to stop doing all of the stupid stuff that is costing us trillions of dollars, but isn’t helping to fix climate change. Let’s fix climate change, but let’s do it in a cheaper, more effective and smarter way.

Myers: Can you explain why Net Zero has had such a terrible impact on the economy, particularly in Europe?

Lomborg: Fundamentally, if you’re speaking about Net Zero, you very easily end up with a renewables-only approach. Solar and wind are the favourite policies at the moment. The problem is, of course, that you can’t run an economy on something that only works sometimes.

Wind and solar are great when the Sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but at other times the cost is tremendous. Most countries have storage capacity for 10 or 20 minutes of renewable power. But you need capacity for two or three months.

The more wind and solar you have, the higher the cost of energy. No country on Earth has lots of solar and wind and cheap energy. That’s why heavy industry has left Germany, because businesses can’t afford the cost of solar and wind. Instead, they move to the US or China, where energy is cheap.

By aggressively pursuing Net Zero, Germans have done something to make themselves feel good. But unless you have China, India and Africa onboard, you’re missing out on most of the emissions in the 21st century. The reality is that you’re not going to show the way by impoverishing yourself. They will look at Germany and see it as an example of what to avoid.

Myers: Is nuclear energy a viable solution here?

Lomborg: Absolutely. And the fundamental point is that, if you have paid for and built nuclear power plants, you should definitely not decommission them. Unfortunately, that is the mistake that Germany, the US and many other countries around the world have made. That’s just stupid, because you have a free, green energy supply that could last you up to 30 years.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/13/its-not-easy-being-green/

Writing recently in The Spectator World, Joel Kotkin noted, “The crux of the green dilemma lies in part with the realities of physics as well as geopolitics.” You can say that again. The physics part has to do with “energy density.” Fossil fuels have a very high energy density; solar and wind power, not so much. Kotkin quotes Christian Bruch, the CEO of Siemens Energy, who estimates that green energy “requires ten times as much material to work effectively, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.” The ineluctable pressure of that physical fact leads to subterfuge, fantasy, and outright lying. Kotkin also quotes John F. Clauser, a Nobel Laureate in physics, who tartly observed that “Climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”

Indeed. In 2019, the commentator Rob Henderson coined the phrase “luxury beliefs,” beliefs that confer social status because only the well-off can afford to entertain them. “In the past,” Henderson wrote, “upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.” A belief that we are in the midst of a “climate emergency” is one such belief. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, can pretend that the sky is falling and promise to lead Britain into the promised land of “net-zero” emissions by 2050. But he won’t have to worry about heating his house or the cost of petrol for his car.

Al Gore can lecture the world about “inconvenient truths,” but cynics note that one major effect of his proselytizing on behalf of climate extremism has been to line his own pockets with that other green stuff, US dollars, and plenty of them. In 2000, Gore had a net worth of about $1.7 million. By 2012, he had amassed a fortune of some $250 million. Nice work if you can get it.

Regular readers may recall my fondness for the philosopher Harvey Mansfield’s observation that “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Professor Mansfield delivered that mot more than thirty years ago. It seemed almost quaint at the time. It was, I thought, a comparison that had the advantage of being both true (environmentalism really did seem like a religion for certain leftists) and amusing (how deliciously wicked to put a bunch of white, elite, college-educated leftists under the same rhetorical light as the Bible-thumpers they abominated). Ha, I mean to say, ha!

Well, I am not laughing now. In the intervening years, the eco-nuts went from being a lunatic fringe to being lunatics at the center of power. Forget about Al Gore (if only we could): sure, he was vice president, but that was in another country (or so it seems) and besides . . . I trust that many readers will catch the allusion to Marlowe via T. S. Eliot. Despite his former proximity to the seat of power, Al Gore is relevant these days partly as comic relief, partly as an object lesson in the cynical manipulation of public credulity for the sake of personal enrichment. The collections come early and often in the Church of Gore. Who knew that pseudoscience, wrapped in the mantle of anti-capitalist moral self-regard, could pay so well?