RUTHFULLY YOURS

Freezing temperatures in the U.S. Northeast have pushed up heating costs, creating serious stress for many Americans. Although the rich world’s energy poor are largely forgotten in discussions about climate policies, they bear an unfair burden for well-meaning proposals. That reality is being laid bare this icy winter as energy and electricity prices surge.

When we think about energy poverty, we imagine a lack of light in the world’s worst-off nations, where more than one billion people still lack electricity. This is a huge challenge that the world can hope to address as it reduces poverty and expands access to grid electricity, largely powered by fossil fuels.

But there is a less visible form of energy poverty that affects even the world’s richest country. Economists consider households energy poor if they spend 10% of their income to cover energy costs. A recent report from the International Energy Agency shows that more than 30 million Americans live in households that are energy poor—a number that is significantly increased by climate policies that require Americans to consume expensive green energy from subsidized solar panels and wind turbines.

Last year, for the first time, the International Energy Agency tried to calculate the global scale of this problem. The IEA estimates that in the world’s rich countries—those that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—200 million people are in energy poverty. That includes 1 in 10 Americans, although the IEA notes that the highest estimates for the U.S. approach 1 in 4.

People of modest means spend a significantly higher share of their income paying for their energy needs. One careful study of energy usage in North Carolina found that a lower-income family might spend more than 20% of its income on energy. Among people with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty line, energy costs regularly consumed more than a third of their budgets.

Europe, where renewable subsidies are about three times as high as in the U.S., provides a window into America’s possible energy future. Higher costs from policies like stringent emissions caps and onerous renewable-energy targets make it even harder for the poorest citizens to afford gas and electricity. In Germany, more than 30% of the population spends at least one-tenth of income on energy. Some estimates show that half of Greeks are in energy poverty, according to the IEA.

Calls for government to take ever stronger action on climate change can seem like selfless appeals to democracy and shared responsibility: The gist is that everyone should carry the burden and pay more. But that isn’t what happens. Policies aimed at addressing climate change can easily end up punishing the poor. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s been a bad year for global warming propagandists, but fear not: Here comes a polar vortex to make it worse for them.

The unrelenting Arctic blast arrived on Christmas Eve and it remains the holiday houseguest from Hell that won’t leave: Record-breaking cold and snowfall are tormenting the eastern half of the country, and it’s only going to get worse. Weather models predict Americans will ring in the New Year while shivering under the lowest temperatures in 70 years, and the first day of 2018 could set record lows everywhere east of the Rockies.

Folks are being warned about the health risks associated with sub-zero temperatures, which could last beyond the first week of the year and stretch as far south as east Texas. It’s even too cold for the most intrepid thrill-seekers: Cities are canceling the Polar Bear Plunge on New Year’s Day due to inhumane air and water temperatures.

It marks a frustrating end to a dreadful year for climate-change activists, who have been frozen out of the Trump Administration. After Trump’s election, environmentalists prophesied the end times, labeling the president and his advisors “anti-science” and bracing for catastrophe. Climate scientists and bureaucrats at scientific agencies reached out for counseling, seeking ways to cope with life under the Trump regime; many have resigned “in disgust.”

But for once, the climate crowd’s “dire” predictions came true. Our “Denier-in-Chief” wasted no time dismantling Obama’s climate change legacy by appointing climate skeptics to fill top cabinet posts, exiting the Paris Climate Accord, repealing the Clean Power Plan, scrubbing government websites of climate change references, and promoting American fossil-fuel use abroad. If this wasn’t bad enough for them, now the climate crowd is trying incoherently to explain to frigid Americans—who are muttering “global warming, my ass” under their double-wrapped scarves—how this frigid weather is actually caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Never one to miss an opportunity to incite his foes, President Trump sent out this tweet Thursday night:
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!

Animal spirits revived this year after the Trump Administration halted its predecessor’s regulatory predations. Consider the Interior Department’s legal memo last week that rescinds an Obama Administration policy of criminalizing citizens who accidentally kill migratory birds.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 makes it a federal crime to “pursue, hunt, take, capture or kill” migratory birds. Offenders can be punished with up to six months in prison and fined $15,000 per violation. The law was originally intended to protect birds migrating between Canada, Mexico, Japan, Russia and the U.S. from poachers who sold their feathers for a profit.

Over the last 100 years, the list of protected birds has grown to more than a thousand species including crows, ducks and finches. President Obama added nearly 200 bird species to the list while calling open season on energy companies whose activities “incidentally” harm birds. In 2011 federal prosectors charged seven oil companies in North Dakota after more than two dozen birds flew into their tar pits.

An equal opportunity business harasser, the Obama Administration targeted wind farms operated by Duke Energy and PacifiCorp Energy that were found to have maimed hundreds of birds. Individuals also wound up in the government’s crosshairs—for instance, a tree-trimmer in Oakland was investigated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 after accidentally injuring five black-crowned night herons.

I’ve written about the descent of the formerly prestigious Scientific American into social justice blogging before. But this jumps the shark. And all the starving polar bears on the ice floes. And Al Gore’s mansion and private jet.

Men Resist Green Behavior as Un-Manly

Please, tell us more.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity.

Like caring more about brand virtue signaling than doing anything useful?

But surely this is based on solid research. After all, research was clearly mentioned.

In one study, we threatened the masculinity of male participants by showing them a pink gift card with a floral design and asking them to imagine using the card to purchase three products (lamp, backpack, and batteries). Compared to men shown a standard gift card, threatened men were more likely to choose the non-green rather than green version of each item. The idea that emasculated men try to reassert their masculinity through non-environmentally-friendly choices suggests that in addition to littering, wasting water, or using too much electricity, one could harm the environment merely by making men feel feminine.

This comes from two associate professors of marketing. Their solution is to put more wolves on eco-friendly products. That will be less threatening.

At the end of the article, there’s this notice. “Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about?”

If you’re a marketing scientist who specializes in putting wolf virtue signaling, please send your peer-reviewed paper to the Scientific American.

Wildfires continue to ravage California, and the bravery of firefighters trying to prevent damage to homes and property has been inspiring. But this being 2017 in America, the state’s progressive politicians are blaming the fires on humanity’s sins of carbon emission. To the contrary, the conflagrations should be a wake-up call to regulators and politicians who have emphasized acts of climate piety over fire prevention.

This year’s wildfires have consumed about 1.2 million acres in the Golden State—more than the state of Rhode Island—and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. Some four dozen people were killed amid the blazes through Northern California in October. Large sections of coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties have been charred this month while a Los Angeles brushfire threatened the Getty Center and the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The fires are burning in California. They’ll be burning in France, burning all around the world,” fire-and-brimstone Governor Jerry Brown proclaimed recently in Paris. The world is “on the road to hell.”

Yet this fire season appears to be a black swan. One of the wettest winters on record followed a five-year drought and a bark-beetle forest infestation. The result has been a buildup of deadwood and dry brush. The U.S. Forest Service this month said it had found 129 million dead trees in California. Santa Ana and Diablo winds have been particularly persistent, strong and erratic this year, making the fires spread faster and harder to contain.

Loath to let a natural disaster go to political waste, the California Air Resources Board used the fires to promote a new climate-change “scoping plan” aimed at doubling the rate at which it cuts carbon emissions. The irony is that the emissions from wildfires could negate all of the state’s anticarbon policies.

Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times.

More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.

What marvellous news to ease us all into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?

Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”

Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it. It wants us to believe that this is an attack on both science and the environment.

Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.

Actually, though, what it really is is #winning.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released on December 18th, is premised on the belief that America’s economic security is national security. In reordering the skewed priorities of the Obama administration, “climate change” is no longer listed as a national security threat. Instead, the new National Security Strategy document emphasizes the importance of “energy dominance—America’s central position in the global energy system as a leading producer, consumer, and innovator.” The document goes on to state that our nation’s “abundant energy resources—coal, natural gas, petroleum, renewables, and nuclear—stimulates the economy and builds a foundation for future growth.” Climate policies cannot be so extreme that they risk undermining America’s strengths in energy, thus endangering America’s current and future economic security.

“The United States will continue to advance an approach that balances energy security, economic development, and environmental protection,” according to the National Security Strategy document. An anti-fossil fuel agenda not only is injurious to U.S. economic security. It fails to recognize the important role that fossil fuels must play for the foreseeable future, along with alternative forms of energy, in helping the developing world “power their economies and lift their people out of poverty.”

What a refreshing change from the last administration’s obsession with climate change, which former President Barack Obama had made the centerpiece of his national security agenda. “Today, there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change,” Obama declared during one of his weekly video addresses in 2015. At the climate change conference in Paris, which led to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change from which the United States is now withdrawing thanks to President Trump, Obama claimed that climate change is “akin to the problem of terrorism.” In September 2016, Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum on Climate Change and National Security, establishing a policy that the impacts of climate change must be considered in the development of national security-related doctrine, policies, and plans.

In his single-minded preoccupation with climate change, Obama kicked the can down the road when it came to dealing with more pressing national security issues, including the looming existential crisis posed by North Korea’s rapid development of nuclear arms and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland. The Obama administration also facilitated the path for Iran to become a full-fledged nuclear power within a decade or so, by agreeing to the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry made the delusional claim that the Iran deal and the Paris climate change agreement he negotiated were vital to global security, during a speech he delivered on June 5, 2017 at Ploughshares Fund’s annual Chain Reaction event. In both cases, all that his deals managed to do was to undermine U.S. national security.