RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-a-green-no-deal-11555021957

The Senate rejected the Green New Deal on a 57-0 procedural vote last month. Not a single senator voted to bring the proposal to the floor, including its chief sponsor, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey. Climate alarmists demanded that Republicans come up with a plan of their own. But the best plan may be no plan at all, for at least four reasons.

First, cutting U.S. emissions won’t have much of an effect on the climate. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, total man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were an estimated 53.5 billion metric tons in 2017. If the U.S. went dark and magically stopped emitting CO2 today, the rest of the world would continue to emit on the order of 45 billion tons of CO2 annually, an amount far in excess of the Kyoto Protocol’s goal of reducing annual emissions below the 1990 level of 35 billion tons. Supposing the U.S. could go carbonless, the difference in atmospheric CO2 levels by 2100 would be only about 29 parts per million. Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change modeling, this would make no discernible difference in mean global temperature.

Second, claims of reductions in national emissions should be taken with a grain of salt. According to an August 2018 report from the ClimateWorks Foundation, Western industrial nations have simply outsourced as much as 25% of their emissions to Asia, where labor is cheaper and environmental and workplace regulation is less expensive. Local emissions may be “cut,” but global emissions aren’t. Despite decades of climate alarmism, the world is burning more coal, oil and natural gas than ever. Still, a billion people around the world live in homes without electricity. The U.N. projects that global population will grow from 7.6 billion today to 11.2 billion by 2100. So long as people who are living in poverty seek a way out of it, CO2 emissions will rise.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/04/climates

“The bottom line of politically correct thought on the matter—the thought that we must collectively do something drastic now to prevent climate change in the future—is so full of holes that it brings the overall sanity of mankind into question. For what it is worth, one possible theory is that mankind (or at least that fraction of it that has become both over-educated and more delicate as a result of a massive increase of its wealth in recent times) has managed to remove the beliefs of existing religions from its consideration—and now it misses them. As a replacement, it has manufactured a set of beliefs about climate change that can be used to guide and ultimately to control human behaviour. The beliefs are similar to those of the established religions in that they are more or less unprovable in any strict scientific sense.”

Whether we should do anything now to limit our impact on future climate boils down to an assessment of a relevant cost-benefit ratio. That is, we need to put a dollar number to the cost of doing something now, a dollar number to the benefit thus obtained by the future generations, and a number to a thing called “discount for the future”—this last being the rate at which our concern for the welfare of future generations falls away as we look further and further ahead. Only the first of these numbers can be estimated with any degree of reliability. Suffice it to say, if the climate-change establishment were to have its way with its proposed conversion of the global usage of energy to a usage based solely on renewable energy, the costs of the conversion would be horrifically large. It is extraordinary that such costs can even be contemplated when the numbers for both the future benefit and the discount for the future are little more than abstract guesses.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chevron-keeps-winning-its-leftist-foes-keep-losing/

There is always a latest chapter in the Legal Fraud of the Century, which is the story of a determined leftist environmentalist cabal’s attempt to shake down of Chevron for many billions over bogus claims – adjudicated in a bribed and perjury-ridden Ecuador courtroom — that the energy company (via Texaco, which it purchased in 2001) had devastated rainforests and forced cancer upon the locals when drilling for oil in the South American country in previous decades.

American courts have ruled that the shakedown – masterminded by Steven Donziger – was a criminal RICO operation. The subsequent wreckage of his cabal (an excellent description of such is Kevin Williamson’s 2014 NR piece on how its nefarious role in the case crushed Patton Boggs) is vast, but like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the disbarred attorney continues to hop the globe seeking a court or international tribunals that will order Chevron or a local subsidiary to fork over the penalty determined by the corrupt Ecuador court.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dem-rep-bashes-green-new-deal-theres-no-need-to-lie-to-voters/

Representative Max Rose (D., N.Y.) lambasted fellow New York freshman Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday for using the threat of climate change to advance a “massive socialist economic-policy platform” via the Green New Deal plan she introduced earlier this year.

Rose, during a Wednesday interview on New York’s local Metro Focus program, agreed with Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow progressives that climate change is an existential threat that requires a commensurate response, but argued that the federal-jobs and housing guarantees included in the plan are not necessary to combat climate change.

“This is not the time for milquetoast incrementalism,” Rose said. “It just isn’t. But with that being said, nothing about what I just said would provide a justification for a massive socialist economic-policy platform. [It’s] just not needed.”

“There’s no need to lie to voters right now,” he added. “We don’t need the Democratic version of ‘repeal and replace.’”Rose, who earned a Purple Heart and a bronze star for his Army service in Afghanistan, dared Ocasio-Cortez to back a primary challenger against him when asked about her threat to unseat any Democrat who refused to back her progressive vision.

“She’s going to keep a list,” Rose said, referring to reports that Ocasio-Cortez threatened to make a list of uncooperative Democrats to provide to liberal activists. “This is very simple because I’m not one to deal in subtleties. I think it’s best not to be passive-aggressive. If she wants to primary me, if the Justice Democrats want to primary me, I’ll lay out the red carpet. We can settle this at the polls.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/12/people_for_the_ethical_treatme.html#ixzz5jyKZxqe2 

In what they deem a natural progression of age-old struggles for social justice, environmentalists gleefully predict that the 21st century will be an era of environmental justice. The freeing of nature from enslavement by man is their main objective for this period. Other goals include upholding the right of rivers to flow unimpeded, safeguarding the dignity of plants and consideration for the sensitivities of animals. According to environmentalists, social justice struggles have evolved from emancipation of slaves, suffrage for women and civil rights for minorities to, now, the fight for the inalienable, legal right of nature to exist and prosper.

If this sounds far-fetched, recent developments indicate that this phenomenon is clearly on the horizon. Wild Law – a concept that acknowledges that the elements of nature have rights and that humans exist on an equal plane with other members of the “Earth Community” – is gaining acceptance. Wild Law recognizes the rights of forests to remain unlogged, mountains to remain intact, a bog to resist a drainage project and polar bears to sue for air degradation. Recent laws in Switzerland, Ecuador and the State of Pennsylvania form the vanguard of this emerging crusade, as detailed below. Such a movement away from a human-centered world toward an earth-centered planet is a paradigm shift that could have serious consequences.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ecocide-would-criminalize-resource-

I have written often here of the threat posed by the “nature rights” movement, designed by radical environmentalists to thwart large scale development and extraction of natural resources by allowing anyone to sue to uphold nature’s “rights” to “exist and persist.” The movement has been gaining ground for the last several years, most recently with voters in Toledo granting “rights” to Lake Erie.

Think of “nature rights” as a metaphorical shield against human thriving from the bounties of the earth. But radical environmentalists also have a spear — the “ecocide” movement. Ecocide activists are striving to enact international laws that would punish those who make large-scale uses of nature as criminals, equivalently odious as perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, oil-industry executives and the like could find themselves in the dock at the Hague facing years in prison.

Ecocide, like “nature rights,” was once fringe within environmentalism. But like its “nature rights” cousin, that is no longer true. Over the last several years the movement’s primary spokeswoman, Polly Higgins, traveled the world proselytizing to much fanfare and increasing acceptance. She even presented at the UN.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jackpot-junk-science-11554061976

The vagaries of American tort law were on display in San Francisco last week as six jurors decided that Bayer AG is liable for $80.3 million in damages for allegedly causing a Sonoma man’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The scientific consensus is that Bayer’s Roundup herbicide is safe, but the company is now open for looting as it faces lawsuits from some 11,200 similar plaintiffs.

Edwin Hardeman, who used the herbicide to ward off poison oak and other weeds, testified about his grim day in 2015 when “the phone rang and my wife Mary was with me, we put it on the speakerphone, and [my doctor] said, ‘I’m sorry to inform you that you have cancer.’ And we were just shocked.” He spoke of his anguish as he endured nausea, bone pain and other side-effects of chemotherapy. No one can listen to that testimony and not be moved.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/436509-trump-signs-permit-to-jumpstart-delayed-construction-of-keystone-xl

President Trump on Friday signed a presidential permit to jump-start construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline with a facility in Montana, a move seen as a way to circumvent previous court orders halting development.

The permit authorizes energy company TransCanada Corp. to “construct, connect, operate, and maintain” pipeline facilities between the U.S. and Canada.

The permit also allows for the maintenance of a pipeline facility at Phillips County, Montana, for importation of the oil to the U.S.

The order supersedes a March 2017 order. That permit was invalidated by a Montana federal judge in November. The ruling is being appealed in the 9th Circuit. Separately, a December lawsuit placed an injunction on most pre-construction activities.

“For the avoidance of doubt, I hereby revoke that March 23, 2017, permit,” Trump wrote in Friday’s order.

A White House spokesperson told The Hill that the new permit “dispels any uncertainty.”