RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-censorship-campaign-big-tech-social-media-environmental-groups-letter-elon-musk-twitter-11665006072?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Elon Musk said this week he’ll buy Twitter after all, and the hopeful view for online speech is that his rockets-and-flamethrowers heterodoxy might be an answer for what ails social media. He won’t have it easy. On Tuesday more than a dozen environmental outfits, including Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote to the big tech companies to blame them for “amplifying and perpetuating climate disinformation.”

What the letter asks for sounds modest, but the implication is clear. The Digital Services Act recently enacted by the European Union includes transparency rules, and the green groups want Silicon Valley “to commit to including climate disinformation as a separately-acknowledged category in its reporting and content moderation policies in and outside of the EU.” Then they could proceed to complain that the tech giants aren’t doing enough censoring.

The letter was directed to Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. At least the public can read it. How much of this lobbying goes on behind the scenes?

“We partnered with Google,” Melissa Fleming, the communications undersecretary for the United Nations, told a panel last month. “If you Google ‘climate change,’ at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.”

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/10/03/joe_bidens_energy_crisis_856943.html

The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses—the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion. The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply. In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in his powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that. As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own EPA tried to strangle at birth.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/04/the-globalist-climate-agenda-is-a-crime-against-humanity/

“This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash, is incredibly dangerous for the world.”
— Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative

It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably one of the most inverted takes on what is “dangerous” in the history of civilization. Not because anyone is against the concept of sustainability, but because sustainability as defined by Alan Jope is incredibly unsustainable. If he gets his way, he will destroy the world.

Jope, Clinton, the infamous Karl Schwab who heads the World Economic Forum, the ESG movement informally headed by Larry Fink of BlackRock (with over $10 trillion in investments), and all the rest who champion today’s prevailing globalist climate agenda are coercing nearly 8 billion people into an era of poverty and servitude.

The primary target of the “sustainability” movement is fossil fuel, the burning of which allegedly is causing catastrophic climate change. Heedless of the fact that fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors throughout the Western world are using ESG criteria (environment, social, governance), to deny the financing necessary to maintain or build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s working. Pressure from governments, international NGOs, and global finance is now delivering unprecedented shifts in policies around the world, creating needless scarcity and turmoil. In just the last month, new emissions rules have triggered protests by farmers in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in the process of earning a near perfect ESG score, lost its ability to feed its people. In the ensuing fury, the president was forced to flee the country. Undaunted, globalist climate activists are discouraging African nations from developing natural gas.

It should be easy to see the hidden agenda behind this repression. If you control energy and food, you control the world. The biggest multinational corporations on Earth are empowered by ESG mandates, because marginal or emerging competitors lack the financial resiliency to comply. From small independent private farmers and ranchers to small independent nations, once their ability to produce is broken, the big players pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not what you read in the Washington Post.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/never-let-a-devastating-natural-disaster-go-to-waste/

Be prepared for Democrats to exploit the devastation of Hurricane Ian to peddle de-modernization. And because there is no conclusive way for anyone to prove that global warming isn’t triggering every natural disaster — and because nature offers a continuous flow of these terrifying events and always will — the exploitation will never stop.

The effort began in earnest after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 hurricane that devastated an unprepared New Orleans. There was Al Gore, with his grade-school “science” charts and cartoonish satellite images (water, the color of fire!), emotionally manipulating audiences with images of destruction and suffering. The problem was that “An Inconvenient Truth” suggested — among numerous other dire predictions that would never come to pass — that climate change had not only caused Katrina, despite negligible warming, but that it portended the dawn of an age of shocking and intense hurricanes.

After 2005, Florida didn’t get hit with another hurricane until 2016 and Louisiana didn’t see a major one until 2020 (also the fault of climate change.) It is debatable that storms that do make landfall do so with more intensity or that Category 3-plus hurricanes are increasing. Overall, the frequency of hurricanes has slightly declined since 1900. From 1851-1860, 19 hurricanes made landfall in the United States. From 2011-2020, 19 hurricanes made landfall in the United States. The average per decade between 1860-2011 is about 18. In the decade of 1941-1950, 10 major hurricanes hit the United States.

“Hurricane Ian gets nasty quickly, turbocharged by warm water,” explains the Associated Press, which has been true since the first hurricane formed. More “climate havoc,” says The New York Times, as Ian threatens to hit the same exact places that storms have always hit. Today’s media simply can’t report on any flood or tornado or hurricane or brain-eating amoeba without making it about their favorite policy hobby horse. It just feels like things are worse, you know?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/04/the-climate-crisis-of-536-ad/

Earth’s climate is always changing. But despite the warming hysterics’ wild claims, it’s not changing at an alarming rate. Remember, when they cite United Nations reports warning of soaring temperatures and rising sea levels, the projections cover many decades, not just a few years. Of course there was a moment when the climate did change rapidly. It was so long ago, though, none of us can remember it.

Yet it happened. Many centuries before the first oil well was drilled. Almost 1,500 years ago. 

The foundation of the global warming obsession on the left is largely based on U.N. predictions that assign significant but unrealistic increases in global temperatures and sea level due to increasing levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.

For instance, the U.N. has said the global temperature could increase over a range from 4.5 degrees Celsius to 6 degrees Celsius some time between 2081 to 2100. It has also said sea levels could rise 2 meters by 2100. Neither is possible, says H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Heartland Institute’s climate and environment center. Both would require us “to burn every molecule of fossil fuel and more” than can be found on Earth.

Not only are these worst-case-scenario estimates that will never unfold, the disasters predicted are far into the future, meaning the numbers so easily tossed around are useful for only one thing: scaring the public and ramming through expensive and worthless green legislation.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-2-without-a-demonstration-project-or-feasibility-study

Essentially the entire developed part of the world is currently embarked on a crash program to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy system of the economy. The program has two main parts: first the suppression of the production and distribution of fossil fuels; and second the construction of large numbers of wind and solar generation facilities to replace them. Both parts of the program are currently underway simultaneously in all advanced countries, as a matter of what we are told is the highest moral urgency.

But will the coming fossil-fuel-free system actually work to provide the energy we need to run our modern economies? There are very substantial reasons to think that big problems are inevitable, the main one being that wind and solar generators don’t produce anything most of the time, and can’t be ramped up on demand at a time of need.

So surely, there must be multiple small to medium-scale demonstration projects around the world showing exactly how this fossil-fuel-free future system can be accomplished, and how much it will cost.

Actually, and incredibly, no. There is no such thing anywhere in the world as a functioning demonstration project that provides full energy to an economy of any size without reliance on fossil fuels, and using only carbon-emissions-free sources like wind, solar, hydro and/or storage. There isn’t even a demonstration project that supplies just the electricity sector of any economy (typically about 25-35% of final energy usage) with the energy it needs free of fossil fuels. Indeed, there isn’t anything remotely close.

It is very instructive to compare how important technological advances happen in the real world to how the advance to a fossil-fuel-free future energy system is supposed to occur in the fantasy world of the climate cult.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/california_to_ban_natural_gas_appliances.html

“Leftists may not like natural gas.  They may not like gas lighting.  But they sure love gaslighting…the rest of us.”

The hits just keep on coming for residents of the formerly Golden State.  Already besieged by high inflation and severe energy shortages, citizens of the erstwhile Land of Milk and Honey will soon face a ban on natural gas (except for Eric Swalwell’s).  The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, is planning to rid the state of natural gas heaters, stoves, and furnaces.  The Hill recently reported that the CARB passed a proposal that will lay the groundwork for phasing out gas-powered space and water heaters, and other such appliances, by 2030.  (I guess CARBs really are bad for you.)

But that’s not all.  If certain leftists get their way, and they often do, entire kitchens may be outlawed in the future.  If this is the case, the first state in the Union to ban them will undoubtedly be California.

Families may be abolished as well.  Erin Maglaque recently penned a positively glowing review of Sophie Lewis’s new communist manifesto screed, Abolish the Family, in which she pleaded, “Let us begin by abolishing our kitchens.”  She added, “If we begin by abolishing our kitchens, what else might we get a taste for destroying, and for creating?”  Let’s not find out.

Lewis, a “feminist thinker,” has stated that “[f]amily is a terrible way to satisfy our desire for love and care.”  Yes, it’s much better to be “loved” and cared for by the government.  Lewis doesn’t much care for heterosexual culture.  She believes that there can be no feminist future until the family — particularly the nuclear family — is abolished.  And she says, “It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us.”  (Memo to “feminists” like Lewis: If you don’t want a fetus inside you, you shouldn’t let a phallus inside you.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18943/john-podesta-green-investment

In the Biden administration’s uncanny ability to put the wrong people in the wrong jobs, naming John Podesta to be the new “climate czar” might be its masterstroke.

With so much money at stake, you might have expected the administration to choose someone with a strong background in energy technologies or perhaps someone possessing deep experience in the energy business who can spot the good (and bad) uses for all that money.

Although Podesta is listed on the corporate records, he failed to disclose his membership on the board of Joule Stichting (the holding company) in his federal financial disclosure forms when he officially joined the Obama White House as a senior advisor in 2013.

What is concerning here is the pattern Podesta has established of being involved on both sides of the table, and transiting Washington’s revolving door. When the Biden administration chooses a “power broker” to be its decider over $370 billion worth of federal “investment” money that is intended to make green energy affordable, cost-effective, or competitive with fossil fuels, we should not be surprised if large portions of that money will eventually be traced back to connections those companies have with that aforementioned power broker.

This is why you do not want the federal government to have individuals who are not experts – who are operators and lobbyists – making important decisions like that. They will pass out cash to people who have made them money in the past, and who will make them money in the future, or who have employed their family members. It is corrupt and it is cronyism. When you give people the opportunity to hand out other people’s money, they are going to give it to families and friends. With Podesta, there is certainly a history of doing just that.

In the Biden administration’s uncanny ability to put the wrong people in the wrong jobs, naming John Podesta to be the new “climate czar” might be its masterstroke.

The White House announced recently that John Podesta will oversee $370 billion in clean energy investments included in the Inflation Reduction Act. This makes him the decision-maker for handing out money to make green energy a viable, cost-effective replacement for fossil fuels. Green energy subsidies and other government giveaways have been tried before, and failed, but not at this scale. With so much money at stake, you might have expected the administration to choose someone with a strong background in energy technologies or perhaps someone possessing deep experience in the energy business who can spot the good (and bad) uses for all that money.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/26/climate-week-is-over-but-the-warming-cranks-are-still-out-there/

Doughnut Day makes more sense.

Another Climate Week has come and gone, with Earth no cooler than it was before. But there is plenty to celebrate. Opportunities for virtue signaling, graft, prostituting science, and burning down capitalism have never been so vast.

Launched in New York City in 2009, and now aligned with the execrable United Nations, Climate Week, according to organizers’ telling, is “​​an ambitious platform for our mission to drive climate action,” and “fast.” It’s such a wonderful moment, that a particularly dim fellow set himself on fire Friday at the Laver Cup tennis tournament in London to protest the use of private jets in the United Kingdom. The Sun reported that “​​it’s believed the yob” who was momentarily aflame “was a climate change protester.”

Virtue signaling is generally a “luxury belief” that holds no cost. In this case, it came with some pain, and probably some regret. But virtue signaling is an important activity in the fight against global warming, even if it means that self-flambeing is in order.

The man was eventually dragged off the court. But the cameras got a good look at him, and what was seen, says author Michael Shellenberger, “​​is the face of climate narcissism.”

https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/america-is-successfully-pursuing-esg–extreme-shortages-guaranteed

Everything that needs electricity is made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. In an all-electric world, there will be nothing to power without oil.

Energy growth, electricity AND the products made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil and the fuels to power ships, planes, militaries, and space programs, are directly linked to prosperity and well-being across the globe.

Today, most of the energy the world consumes is from hydrocarbons, with crude oil being the dominant source of transportation fuels. Today, crude oil is the ONLY source for the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil that makes more than 6,000 products for society.

President Biden’s U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projections are that world energy consumption of crude oil, coal, natural gas, electricity from renewables, and nuclear will grow by 56 percent between 2010 and 2040. Without any replacements or clones to what fossil fuels can provide the EIA forecasts that fossil fuels will continue to supply nearly 80 percent of world energy use through 2040

President Biden and Sacramento leaders, from Governor’s Brown, Schwarzenegger, and now Newsom, have supported reductions of in-state oil production. And all remain supportive of Biden’s pledge that “we are going to get rid of fossil fuels”.

Another way to interpret Biden and Newsom’s pledge for an all-electric world:

Biden and Newsom are oblivious to the reality that everything that needs electricity is made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. In an all-electric world with JUST wind and solar electricity from breezes and sunshine, there will be nothing to power.
Biden and Newsom believe that the products and fuels manufactured from fossil fuels, are supporting lifestyles and economies, are dangerous and polluting and is causing dangerous climate change.
Biden and Newsom believe that all the infrastructures developed in less than two centuries, from the products manufactured from crude oil, are not needed by future societies, such as medical, electronics, communications, and the many transportation infrastructures such as airlines, merchant ships, automobiles, trucks, military, the space program.
Biden and Newsom believe that an all-renewable electricity system from unreliable weather conditions, WITHOUT the products and fuels from fossil fuels, can work to support a modern economy.