RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/alarm-on-energy/

The Second October War should wake America up to crucial geopolitical realities.

Fifty years ago, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of OPEC initiated an oil embargo against the United States. The boycott was retribution for America’s support of Israel during its brief war against Egypt and Syria.

What was true in 1973 remains true in the wake of Hamas’s brutal terror attack on Israel on October 7: America’s national strength depends on the availability of cheap, abundant, reliable energy.

Our national security, and that of our allies, depends on energy security. Energy is the economy. We forget these realities at our extreme peril.

Fortunately, some things that were true a half-century ago are no longer so. Over the past decade or so, the geopolitics of energy have shifted dramatically in favor of the U.S., due mainly to the shale revolution. Instead of relying on oil imports, the U.S. has become a huge exporter of both oil and natural gas. We are now exporting about four million barrels of crude oil per day and record amounts of natural gas (about 20 billion cubic feet per day).

Even more remarkably, the U.S. is leading the world in energy efficiency and CO2 reductions. According to the latest Statistical Review of World Energy, per-capita energy consumption in the U.S. fell by about 20 percent between 1973 and 2022. In addition, U.S. CO2 emissions have dropped by about 915 million tons since 2000, the biggest reduction of any country on the planet.

But this progress is being threatened by climate-focused NGOs who are relentlessly promoting “net-zero” schemes that will bankrupt our economy and spell disaster for low- and middle-income Americans, as author Ruy Texeira explains in a trenchant essay, “The working class Isn’t Down with the Green Transition.” Indeed, the grassroots opposition of farmers, factory workers, truck drivers, and construction workers in North America, Europe, and Oceania is already leading to a reassessment of alt-energy policies, most notably in the United Kingdom and Germany.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/25/the-latest-on-global-warming-is-there-is-no-global-warming/

A new study out of Norway is exactly what was needed to shut down the climate alarmists. Its findings show that man has not set fire to his home planet.

Right from the top, in the abstract not 10 lines into the study, the authors get to the point.

“Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find,” the researchers say, “that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.”

In other words, our words, the greenhouse effect is so weak that it should be sidelined as an argument.

From there, the bad news only gets worse for priests of the climate religion.

“​​Even if recent recorded temperature variations should turn out to deviate from previous variation patterns in a systematic way it is still a difficult challenge to establish how much of this change is due to increasing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.”

The researchers, from Statistics Norway, the government’s official data agency, also address the apparent “high degree of consensus among many climate researchers that the temperature increase of the last decades is systematic (and partly man-made),” while noting that “is certainly the impression conveyed by the mass media.”

https://freebeacon.com/culture/climate-of-hate-greta-thunberg-joins-pro-hamas-resistance/

Greta Thunberg, the 20-year-old child activist best known for skipping school to protest so-called climate change, dabbled in anti-Semitism on Friday.

• The celebrity truant held a “Stand with Gaza” sign in a photo posted on social media, the initial version of which also included a blue octopus plush toy resembling the anti-Semitic imagery in Nazi propaganda.

• Thunberg deleted the original photo, claiming to be “completely unaware” of the common anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless, her revised post included links to a number of so-called Palestinian activist groups that defended the Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians earlier this month.

What they’re saying: One of the groups Thunberg promoted, the Palestinian Youth Movement, described the mass-murder of Israeli civilians, including children, as “the active decolonization of Palestinian land led by the Palestinian resistance” and repeated the false claim that “over 500 Palestinians were martyred after Israeli forces bombed Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/20/they-call-the-wind-pariah/

How many times have we heard that wind power, coupled with the sun’s energy, is going to save us from our fossil-fuel burning ways? Maybe one day it will. But at no time soon will it happen. And by soon, we mean in most of our lifetimes.

How can we say this? Look around at what’s happening with wind energy:

“California’s Central Coast residents work to stop — or at least slow down — offshore wind.” California believes that by 2045 it can operate its electrical grid without contributions from fossil fuels and nuclear energy. To get there, one-fourth of the power must be generated by offshore wind. This CalMatters report, which summarizes the resistance to offshore wind projects, should set off alarms not just in Sacramento but in other blue state capitals as well as Washington, D.C. (unless Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman gets there first).

“​​Orsted Threatens To Abandon U.S. Offshore Wind Projects.” Here we learn that “the world’s largest offshore wind farm developer is preparing to walk away from U.S. projects unless the Biden administration guarantees more support.” In other words, offshore wind is so uneconomical that unless the taxpayers “pitch in,” it’s not worth the trouble for private companies to stay in the game. Furthermore, “Europe’s ‘green tech’ future has been threatened due to waning investment flows.”

“Electricity from wind isn’t cheap and it never will be.” In this London Telegraph column, science writer Matt Ridley writes that “The latest auction of rights to build offshore wind farms failed to attract any bids, despite offering higher subsidized prices. That alone indicates that wind is not cheap or getting cheaper.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/are-you-sure-a-changing-climate-causes-severe-weather/

If you can’t convince all the people with straight-forward advocacy, then conduct a poll and use the results to convince anyone who will listen. Lately, this tactic would seem to be AP’s preferred mode of operation. Abe Lincoln said it somewhat differently.

This time AP thought better of running out its climate guru Seth Borentein to unveil another of his well-worn stories regarding who’s more at fault for weather-related disasters—mankind or Mother Nature—and assessing the blame for “man-made” climate change.

It should be realized (but generally is not) that AP, Reuters, and certain other MSM outlets have been gifted several million in grants from one or another of the George Soros-connected charitable foundations. The grants are intended to nudge public opinion in the direction of accepting the scientifically (unsupportable) position that man-made climate change is the principal underlying cause of adverse weather events in recent decades.

Detailed re-analyses of weather data going back to 1950 and earlier show that assertion is not true, but the fact does not deter alarmists from spreading their message of doom and gloom.

But if an AP survey is to be given due credence, then the propaganda campaign in the MSM may in fact be doing exactly what its purveyors intend. The MSM invests considerable time and effort to spread alarmist narratives, so that the casual reader should not be surprised to learn that the AP’s interviewees harbored the opinions they expressed.

Most of us tend to have short memories. Very few present-day Americans even recall hearing about the desperate period of the 1930s, when the Great Depression and “Dust Bowl” with its prolonged heat waves and continent-wide drought became routine across the United States.

Today’s weather announcers often do not report true temperature readings but a calculated “heat index” that factors in the effect of humidity and lack of wind, to come up with a subjective temperature referred to as “real-feel.” It is the number most of us will hear or see tonight on TV.

It should also come as no surprise that the AP pollsters were able to get the kind of public responses they quote. AP reporters also took trouble to include some candid musings of a “Republican”, whom they portrayed as poster-child for those abominable “climate deniers.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/10/13/exclusive-climate-expert-calls-three-strikes-against-climate-alarmism-n1734824

Facts and data show “three strikes and climate alarmism should be out,” climate truth-teller Steve Milloy told PJ Media. “But it’s still at bat and swinging,” propped up by the “fake news media.”

Junk Science’s Milloy explained the three biggest truths undermining the mainstream narrative in exclusive comments to PJ Media. “We are 35 years into climate alarmism, and we’ve had no global warming since 2015 despite 450 billion tons of emissions; no type of natural disaster correlates with emissions or warming; and no apocalyptic climate prediction has ever come true,” Milloy stated.

It’s time to admit the fraud. “That’s three strikes and climate alarmism should be out. But it’s still at bat and swinging because the fake news media shares its leftist agenda and will not call it out,” Milloy added. After all, governments can use climate change as a convenient excuse for increasing their power and control.

Milloy’s comments followed the publication of a new report. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), The Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental (E&E) Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate issued their “Climate Fact Check: September 2023 Edition.” Milloy posted the report at ClimateRealism.com.

The first myth the groups attacked was the media apocalypse prophesying on “global warming.” They looked at data to determine if September really did have record heat.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/11/offshore-wind-is-an-economic-and-environmental-catastrophe/

When it comes to “renewables” wreaking havoc on the environment, wind turbines have stiff competition. For example, over 500,000 square miles of biofuel plantations have already replaced farms and forests to replace a mere 4 percent of transportation fuel. To source raw materials to build “sustainable” batteries, mining operations are scaling up, with no end in sight, in nations with appalling labor conditions and nonexistent environmental regulations. But the worst offender is the wind industry.

America’s wind power industry somehow manages to attract almost no negative coverage in the press, or litigation from environmentalists, despite causing some of the most obvious and tragic environmental catastrophes so far this century. Last August I wrote about the ongoing slaughter of whales off America’s northeast coast thanks to construction of offshore wind turbines:

“When you detonate massive explosives, repeatedly drive steel piles into the ocean floor with a hydraulic hammer, and blast high decibel sonar mapping signals underwater, you’re going to harm animals that rely on sound to orient themselves in the ocean. To say it is mere coincidence that hundreds of these creatures have washed ashore, dead, all of a sudden, during precisely the same months when the blasting and pounding began, is brazen deception.”

Nonetheless, when the story can’t be buried, deception is the strategy. Not one major environmental organization, government watchdog agency, or media outlet has called for a slowdown in industrial offshore wind projects. Instead, they repeatedly claim these allegations are misinformation. And from that paragon of truth, FactCheck.org, we get this: “No Evidence Offshore Wind Development Killing Whales.”

Let’s set aside the obvious negative impact on whale populations of tens of thousands of marine surveying and construction sorties into offshore areas where shipping traffic has never before been concentrated, or the impact of noise and explosions on not one site, such as would be the case with a lone oil rig, but on thousands of sites, each one being prepared for an offshore wind turbine. The destruction wrought by wind turbines extends well beyond what it’s doing to whales.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/06/the-green-energy-subsidy-lie/

Environmentalists have long complained about oil and gas industry subsidies. But we don’t hear from them regarding the subsidies paid out for politically favored renewable energy programs, even though the supposedly green sources are dining sumptuously on taxpayers’ dollars. In fact, renewables are more heavily subsidized than the fossil fuels, and it would be difficult if not impossible for them to exist without the support.

From 2016 to 2022, “energy-specific subsidies and support” totaled $183.3 billion, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration report. While “wind and solar power account for about 21% of domestic electricity production,” they nevertheless took in “a staggering $83.8 billion in subsidies, by far the largest share compared to any other category,” says Fox News.

The EIA says that over that period, “nearly half (46%) of federal energy subsidies were associated with renewable energy,” with “federal support for renewable energy of all types” more than doubling, from $7.4 billion in fiscal 2016 to $15.6 billion in fiscal 2022.

Meanwhile, “natural gas and petroleum-related tax expenditures” – which are not direct government spending nor tax loopholes – were $2.1 billion in fiscal 2022.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-war-is-coming-for-your-car-climate-electric-vehicle-britain-5a4cc7aa?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Forget race. Forget sex. Forget immigration. The mother of all culture wars is breaking out, and its subject is the car.

The automobile has long been a policy flashpoint, with the paramount issue being where it should be able to roam. This was the heart of the brutal urban-planning battles of the mid-20th century, which were fought over the need for and placement of new highways.

Yet it’s hard to describe those earlier policy fights as a culture war. Liberal urban activists such as Jane Jacobs—who famously fought off Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway interchange over Washington Square Park in New York City—didn’t hate cars or the people who drove them. In her magisterial “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Jacobs repeatedly observed that resorting to the personal car was an entirely rational response to the failures of government urban planners to encourage smarter development.

Such humane common sense seems quaint in the context of today’s car wars. For a growing portion of the left, the automobile has become a moral ill in its own right rather than the symptomatic inconvenience of Jacobs’s telling. Partly this has to do with pollution, which was barely emerging as an issue when Jacobs was at her peak in the early 1960s but has also improved dramatically since. Much more so it has to do with carbon emissions—which are distinct from the smoggy pollution of the 20th century, despite constant efforts to conflate the two.

When I say “carbon emissions,” note that I mean it in a general sense. The problem with the personal car isn’t its direct climate impact. Road transport, including trucking, accounts for 12% of global carbon emissions. Electric vehicles aren’t an obvious means of reducing overall emissions, especially once you factor in their dirty supply chains and the coal-fired power that often charges them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/prophetess-of-climate-propaganda/

Her name is Agnes Walton, and in her environmental fanaticism she makes Greta Thunberg look half-hearted and Al Gore look irresolute. Let’s start with her 2017 video for HBO’s VICE News Tonight, in which she noted that “more than half of all consumer goods” contain palm oil – often labeled on packaging as “vegetable oil” or “vegetable fat” – and, over images of trees being felled and cute animals running for their lives, claimed that the growth of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia was causing “massive deforestation,” “killing the rainforest,” and “driving forest species to the brink of extinction.”

Only one country, Walton said, had “taken on the industry.” That country would be Norway, where, she explained, the entire population boycotted palm oil products; consequently, the substance was removed from all Norwegian food products. (I live in Norway, but somehow I entirely missed this people’s crusade.) Since Norway’s population is so small, alas, this glorious local success “didn’t put a dent in the global market.” The only answer, then, instructed Walton, is for the rest of the world to follow Norway’s example prontissimo – or consider itself responsible for a genocide of both flora and fauna.

Or check out Walton’s video editorial from August of last year. In this one, produced for the New York Times, Walton warned of another existential dilemma: American lawns, which, she solemnly asserted, “are damaging our planet, ruining our health, and wasting our time.” Maintaining them depletes precious water and involves the use of dangerous fertilizers. And why should we want lawns, anyway? Walton flashed an image of the Stars and Stripes, and another of a wholesome-looking traditional white family (mom, dad, two sons) standing behind a white picket fence – thereby linking lawns to those two appalling phenomena, the American dream and middle-class suburban life.