RUTHFULLY YOURS

A foreign wind-energy company is in such a hurry to collect the maximum possible amount of subsidies from the U.S. Treasury that it has taken an unprecedented step: It has promised to share the federal gravy with individual voters in two Vermont towns, Grafton and Windham. Earlier this month, Spanish energy company Iberdrola announced that it plans to distribute about $565,000 per year among 815 registered voters in the two towns. The payments would continue for 25 years.

But here’s the catch: On November 8, the towns of Grafton and Windham are holding referenda to decide the fate of Iberdrola’s 82-megawatt Stiles Brook wind project. If voters reject the project, Iberdrola will pay them nothing.

The climate-change carpetbaggers — both foreign and domestic — are in a hurry to get their wind projects approved and underway before the end of the year. If they can get started before December 31, they will get a $23-per-megawatt-hour production tax credit on the electricity produced by their projects. On January 1, that subsidy falls to about $18 per megawatt-hour. It decreases another 20 percent per year until it expires in 2019.

Iberdrola and other wind promoters may be eager to collect more federal subsidies, but they are facing lots of angry voters in Vermont. As I reported on NRO in August, the battle over renewable-energy siting has been raging in the state for years, and wind-project siting has become a defining issue in Vermont’s gubernatorial race.

Sue Minter, a Democrat, favors state control over siting. She’s being supported by fellow Vermonter Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and an ardent proponent of schemes that claim that the world can be run solely on renewable energy. Minter’s opponent on the November 8 ballot is Phil Scott, a Republican, who has vowed to protect Vermont’s ridgelines from wind-energy development. While the race is close, Scott can likely count on support from most or all of the voters who supported Peter Galbraith in the Democratic primary. Galbraith made opposition to wind energy the primary focus of his campaign.

Perhaps President Obama can explain exactly how his climate accord will prevent hurricanes.

Hurricanes, similar to tornados, volcanos, and earthquakes, are natural disasters which have plagued the planet long before humans drove gas guzzling SUVs or used air conditioning. The earliest recorded hurricane in Florida occurred in 1523. Note the word “recorded”, as 16th-century Florida was a bit less populated compared to today with accurate weather recording still centuries in the future.

Flash forward to 1900 when Floridians were more adept at recording their weather. By that time there had been 159 Florida hurricanes with 6500 fatalities. In 1900, William McKinley was president and not using his bully pulpit to fight climate change as is our current president. Did President McKinley ever utter these words? “No challenge poses a greater threat to our children, our planet, and future generations than climate change.”

As the 11-year-long Florida hurricane drought comes to an end, it seems newsworthy to ask why no hurricane has made landfall in Florida for over a decade. Until this week. What happened to the dire predictions of Al Gore and other global warming alarmists? Ten years ago we were facing a “true planetary emergency” requiring “drastic measures” to avoid a “point of no return.” Why aren’t intrepid reports asking the climate doomsday gang to explain themselves?

Instead, as predictable as sunrise and sunset — but not hurricanes — one such reporter, NBC’s Ron Allen has conveniently forgotten the last decade as if it never happened, resurrecting the global warming bogeyman in the face of Hurricane Matthew. Allen attempts to tie the current hurricane into the UN Climate Accord by saying that the hurricane threat is what, “this whole climate agreement signed by 190 nations and now ratified by 60 or so is designed to stop.”

Wow! So easy! Countries agreeing to a UN proposal can stop a hurricane. If I was living along the Florida coast, I would have wanted this agreement signed decades ago, avoiding hurricanes Camille, Katrina, and Andrew, and the death and destruction they brought.

If only it was that simple. Hurricanes, like weather and climate, are predicted based on computer models. How accurate are the models? Look at the models of Hurricane Matthew’s path. Some tracks have the hurricane heading harmlessly out into the Atlantic. Others have it crossing the state heading into the Gulf of Mexico. Most have it heading up the U.S. coast in some fashion, possibly making landfall anywhere between Florida and the Carolinas. Each of the myriad lines is generated by a computer model.

The New York Times had an article stating that vehicular deaths jumped 10% in the first half of 2016. The Times was very careful, however, not to speculate on the cause.

Traffic deaths in the United States rose 10.4 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2015, maintaining a steady climb … to 17,775 in the first six months of 2016 from 16,100 in the same period in 2015

The dire statistics were the latest bad news from the traffic safety administration. Beginning in the final months of 2014, the rate of fatalities has increased for seven consecutive quarters compared with the corresponding quarters of previous years.

Officials have not identified a specific cause for the most recent increase.

“It is too soon to attribute contributing factors or potential implications of any changes in deaths on our roadways,” the agency said.

No, it isn’t. It’s called CAFE standards. Automakers are under obligations to make cars more and more fuel-efficient. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Everyone wants his car to be more fuel-efficient – until he realizes that fuel-efficiency is achieved not with some kind of engine out of Star Trek, but simply by making cars lighter and lighter. Every year there are tighter and tighter targets, and cars have to become lighter and lighter.

When you are in a car crash, the less your car weighs, the less protection you have and the more likely you are to be injured or killed. Obama bullied car companies into agreeing to make cars less and less safe. Why?

Partially out of the erroneous fear that gasoline is a non-renewable resource, and we will run out of it. We actually have enough proven reserves of gasoline for several hundred more years, longer than we have been using gasoline as a source of fuel.

The other reason for fuel efficiency mandates is fear of imaginary global warming. The high priests of the imaginary global warming religion fear that car exhaust causes global warming. Even though it hasn’t been getting warmer in recent years. Even though most carbon dioxide emissions are produced naturally, not by cars or manufacturing.

I am a Conservationist. I am not an Environmentalist. What? Aren’t the two the same thing? No, they are not. In fact the two movements are diametrically opposed.

John Muir was a Conservationist, not an Environmentalist. He saw the wilderness as a “primary source for understanding God: The Book of Nature.” Muir did not worship Nature, as modern environmentalists do. Muir worshiped God, the Judeo-Christian God. So, here is the difference: Conservation derives from the Hebrew Bible. Mankind is to be Stewards of the Land. We are charged to husband God’s creation.

Environmentalists, for the most part, believe that the Earth’s biosphere is God. And, that human beings are destructive parasites, eating away at the life of their deity. In effect, most environmentalists are atheists searching for something larger than themselves to worship. But environmentalists see themselves as not being the riff-raff parasites that the rest of mankind are. Environmentalists believe they are the elect, the knowing, the superior beings, the priests, the Gnostics.

This notion that people are parasites really got started in the 1960’s. A couple of highly promoted bad actors started this environmental heresy. The first was Rachel Carson with her hysterical polemic about DDT and its purported harm to birds and other wild life. Her ideas proved to be, at best, problematic, but millions of people have died as a consequence of the resulting international banning of DDT. The second, and even more dangerous, problem child was Paul Ehrlich. This curmudgeon has even greater responsibility by amplifying environmental hysteria. Ehrlich should have known better. After all, he is a biology professional. But his mistakes suggest that he may not be all that professionally gifted.

Ehrlich predicted the death of the oceans due to insecticides and other chemicals washing into the sea. He did not account, as he ought to have, for the rapid evolution of plankton to adapt to these foreign substances. (The smaller the organism the faster its evolution – witness antibiotic resistance.) It was a bonehead mistake that no competent evolutionary biologist should make. More famously, Ehrlich predicted mass famine and hundreds of millions of deaths within a few years because of the so-called “population bomb.” He completely ignored the 1960’s technological “Green Revolution” which today has China and India exporting food. And, he completely missed the natural reduction in birth rates, and the consequent leveling of population, as the standard of living of Third World countries increased. Again, that process was something that population experts already knew and understood.

And then came James Lovelock with his “Gaia Hypothesis.” This is the notion that the biosphere is an environment-regulating ensemble of living organisms. In the large, the biosphere, together with its non-organic matrix, could be considered an organism, itself. The idea is interesting. Indeed, it has proven to be scientifically fruitful.

But other people latched onto the biosphere and made Gaia a god. And, with it, made environmentalism a religion. A religion, which Lovelock himself rejects as misinformed – if not dangerous. Lovelock went through his hysteric period in the early years of the ecology mania, but he has since moderated his outlook now that his predictions of imminent environmental doom have proved unfounded.

Why do people do it? Why do they fall into these overblown quasi-religious enthusiasms? I speculate that there are three complementary reasons: Ignorance, Insecurity and Hubris.