RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/scalise-those-who-call-fossil-fuels-immoral-should-stop-using-them-today/

WASHINGTON — House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) called on lawmakers and activists who argue that fossil fuels are “immoral” to “stop using them today.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, proposed a bill in 2017 that would outlaw the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles within the U.S. beginning in 2035. Members of Congress such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have called for the end of fossil fuel production in America.

Scalise was asked if he would support banning the sale of gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles in the U.S. by a certain date.”No, and in fact, I would suggest that people who say fossil fuels are immoral, I disagree with them, first of all. I think fossil fuels help save lives, help lower costs, help create jobs and help people have a higher standard of living in America.

But if they truly think fossil fuels are immoral, then stop using them today,” Scalise said on Wednesday during a press conference on Capitol Hill about the House Energy Action Team, which was formed in response to the Green New Deal.

https://spectator.org/this-opinion-just-in-baby-its-cold-outside/

New York

I might be slightly less hostile to the Green New Deal, had I not walked home the other Sunday in a hail storm. Even before the BB-sized bits of ice came shooting down from the heavens that morning, this winter has been brutal, from Gotham to the Golden Gate.

Our Lady of Perpetual Limelight, Saint Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, demands that America battle so-called “deadly, manmade global warming” as if it were Nazi Germany. Ten-year cost: $93 trillion. But this supposed threat somehow seems less menacing than Adolf Hitler and the Wehrmacht.

Any given winter does not equal “climate.” Still, if mounting concentrations of carbon dioxide are the broth in which we homo sapiens are poaching ourselves like so many salmon cutlets, then we should not be enduring the entirely contrary scenarios that have unfolded so vividly from coast to coast:

• A “bomb cyclone” last week slammed the Rockies and Midwest with hurricane-speed winds and abundant snowfall. As 97-MPH gusts struck Colorado Springs, marooned passengers huddled in horror inside a shuttered Denver International Airport.

• At this point in 2017, Lake Superior was just 7.3 percent covered in ice; 2018’s figure: 49 percent. Lake Superior was 94 percent iced over on March 8. This was the first time in four years that the largest Great Lake’s ice coverage exceeded 90 percent, the Detroit Free Press reported. Not so far away, Lake Erie was 20 percent ice a year ago. Today: 94.1 percent. Overall, the Great Lakes have gone from 27.8 percent ice in 2018 to 74.6 percent in 2019.

• Lake Erie recently experienced a sort of frozen tsunami, as huge chunks of wind-blown ice washed onto the shore at Hamburg,New York. Footage of this phenomenon is fascinating and terrifying, especially as the solid water violates homes, marinas, and other structures in and around the lake.

• Several polar vortexes pumped Arctic air into the Midwest and parked it there for days. This drove air temperatures to 22 degrees below zero in Chicago and minus-28 Fahrenheit in Minneapolis on January 30.

• Snow hit Las Vegas on February 17 and 19, with some 5.5 inches of the white stuff fluffing the peaks of Sin City’s western suburbs. Some 100 flights were canceled at McCarran Airport on only the second day in two decades that it received measurable snow.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-3-14-how-much-do-the-climate-crusaders-plan-to-increase-your-costs-of-electricity-part-iv

Over the past few years, I seem to have developed something of a specialty in tracking the costs of trying to run an electrical grid using more and more power sourced from the intermittent renewables, wind and solar. I started looking into this subject because it appeared to me to be obviously a huge issue that must be addressed if one is going to attempt to replace fossil fuels with these renewables; but hardly anyone else seemed to be paying attention to this. On the side of the climate crusaders, you just get one unbelievably naive piece after another. For example, here is one of my favorites from the New York Times of February 6, 2018, “Why a Big Utility Is Embracing Wind and Solar,” by Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey, taking the position that a utility “will be able to build and operate the new [wind and solar] plants for less money than it would have to pay just to keep running its old, coal-burning power plants.” So, just knock down the old coal plants and put up some new, cheaper wind turbines and solar panels! Your electricity will come from clean and green sources, and the planet will be saved. What could be easier?

The missing piece is that the wind and sun provide power only intermittently, and cannot on their own keep a grid for millions of people up and running and functioning continuously. They need either some kind of 100% backup which is idle much of the time but ready to go at all times, or alternatively storage for what could be many days — or even a month or more — of power. Does that add a little or a lot to the costs? How would you know? Believe me, Gillis and Harvey — and many others of their ilk — do not and will not address this issue.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/13/what-are-the-opponents-of-donald-trumps-climate-re/

On March 5, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to President Trump denouncing his plan to form a National Security Council panel to take a critical look at the science underpinning climate change claims. Their objections to such a Red Team effort were basically that the “science is settled.”

But if the science is settled, what are they afraid of? Wouldn’t a review of the science come to the same conclusion as the supposed consensus of climate scientists?The letter claimed, “Climate change is real, it is happening now, it is driven by humans, and it is accelerating.”While climate change is indeed real, it is not at all obvious how much humans have to do with it. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits this, saying only that over half of warming since the 1950s is believed to be human-caused. So, “driven by humans” is an exaggeration, even by the IPCC’s rather alarmist standards.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/03/a-carefully-miseducated-generation-of-climate-warriors/

School students are being recruited and organised to strike from school tomorrow, 15 March. The website, schoolstrike4climate.com claims the purpose is “to tell our politicians to take our futures seriously and treat climate change for what it is – a crisis.”

After careful analysis of historical trends and with far more reliability than a United Nations’ “scientific consensus”, I’m prepared to boldly predict the political climate will not be warmed or cooled one-tenth of a degree by kids striking. Like all prophets of the apocalypse, the stamping and tramping of their furious little feet will have little impact in and on the real world. The Labor-Greens coalition will still be environmental extremists denying developing nations cheap, reliable electricity and aspiring to deliver Australians intermittent electricity at any cost. The Coalition will still present as lukewarm environmental realists while wooing voters from the centre-left with half measures of the Greens’ full-strength moonbattery.

Real grownups will observe there’s a reason schoolkids aren’t allowed to get married, sign contracts, fight for their nation, get a driver’s licence, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or vote on matters of national importance. Their developing brains aren’t mature enough to weigh the balance of evidence, consider all the consequences and make objectively rational decisions. They can barely cross the road safely or wear clothes properly. They are important, but they are children – undeveloped clumps of cells, if you prefer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-climate-the-kids-are-all-wrong-11552430379

In the summer of 1212, thousands of divinely inspired young people from across Catholic France and Germany took off to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. None made it to the Holy Land. Many died along the way or were sold into slavery. As military campaigns go, the Children’s Crusade was a disaster. Yet environmental activists and politicians are adopting the same “a child shall lead them” strategy to push their climate change agenda and its latest incarnation, the Green New Deal.

Youth-oriented climate groups have proliferated in the past few years, helped by logistical support from the United Nations. With earnest names such as iMatter Youth Movement, Zero Hour and Youth vs. Apocalypse, these outfits publicly lecture world leaders and march for the cause. This Friday has been designated “a global day of action” on which thousands of students world-wide are expected to strike—otherwise known as cutting class.

A few of these youth groups are highly litigious, bringing lawsuits on the novel theory of “intergenerational equity.” Most cases have been dismissed, although some continue to work their way through the courts, including Juliana v. U.S., filed in 2015 by Our Children’s Trust.

https://pjmedia.com/video/greenpeace-co-founder-the-whole-climate-crisis-is-not-only-fake-news-its-fake-science/

On Tuesday morning, Patrick Moore, a founding member of the environmentalist organization Greenpeace, slammed climate alarmists for promoting a fake emergency. President Donald Trump tweeted his remarks shortly after he made them.

“In fact, the whole climate crisis as they call it is not only fake news, it’s fake science. There is no climate crisis,” Moore, author of the book Confessions of a Greenpeace Drop-Out: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning.

“There is weather and climate all around the world. And, in fact, carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life,” Moore said. “That’s where the carbon comes from in carbon-based life, which is all life on land and in the sea. And not only that, a little bit of warming would not be a bad thing for myself being a Canadian and the people in Russia wouldn’t mind a little couple of degrees warmer either.”

The Greenpeace founding member did not deny that climate change is real, but he insisted that it is not a crisis.

“Yes, of course, climate change is real. It’s been happening since the beginning of time. But it’s not dangerous and it’s not made by people,” Moore insisted. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-3-8-why-do-renewable-energy-sourc

If you read the progressive press, or even a little of it, with an interest in matters of energy policy, then surely you know by now that it has become cheaper to produce electricity using the wind and sun than using fossil fuels. You know that because you have read it over and over again, in authoritative articles written by, and quoting, people who seem to know what they are talking about, and with no one ever raising any skeptical questions.

Here are some of the articles that may be among what you have read on this subject:

There was the Financial Times on November 8, 2018, in a piece titled “New wind and solar generation costs fall below existing coal plants.” The Financial Times — now there are people who really know what they are talking about. The article mainly relies on a study then just out from investment bank Lazard, reporting on what is called the “Levelized Cost of Energy” for various sources of generation: “The cost of new wind and solar power generation has fallen below the cost of running existing coal-fired plants in many parts of the US . . . New estimates published on Thursday by Lazard, the investment bank, show that it can often be profitable for US generation companies to shut working coal plants and replace their output with wind and solar power.”

Or perhaps you read the piece from CBS News on November 16, mostly relying on the same Lazard study, and titled “It’s now cheaper to build a new wind farm than to keep a coal plant running.” “The cost of building a new utility-scale solar or wind farm has now dropped below the cost of operating an existing coal plant, according to an analysis by the investment bank Lazard. . . . ‘There are some scenarios, in some parts of the U.S., where it is cheaper to build and operate wind and solar than keep a coal plant running,’ said a Lazard banker who was involved in the report.”