RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/11/21/hot_talk_cold_science_and_the_dangers_of_centralized_planning_in_the_name_of_climate_change_804467.html

When former President Barack Obama says “We are nowhere near where we need to be” in terms of climate change, he’s not  talking about reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The stated goals of the U.N. Paris Agreement that Obama, and other world leaders, embrace are properly viewed as a proxy for a larger agenda aimed at dismantling American independence and freedom.

After all, the U.S. already leads the world in reducing Co2 emissions thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing that accelerated during Donald Trump’s presidency. Forbes reports on the emissions reductions that occurred much to the consternation of the news media and its cheerleading for U.N. directives that raise energy costs without impacting climate.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has collected data that shows how innovative drilling techniques has unleashed natural gas, which in turn has been driving down emissions. This trendline has continued into the Biden presidency in part because natural gas has replaced coal and in part because of COVID-19 restrictions on travel and other activities.

So, if Obama isn’t talking about emissions, what did he actually mean while addressing the U.N’s latest climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland earlier this month? The answer comes in the form of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that President Biden signed into law on Monday, and other anti-energy initiatives, ostensibly advanced in the name of climate change. The directives and mandates included in the legislation make it evident that what Obama really meant during his talk at the U.N. is that centralized planners in Europe and America are “nowhere near” where they would like to be as it relates to implementing coercive policy measures.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=7336059e81

As noted in my post this past Sunday, no amount of fake happy talk in the so-called “Glasgow Climate Pact” can obscure the obvious fact that nobody agreed to anything. To read the text of the “pact,” everybody claims to think that this whole “decarbonization” thing to “save the planet” is real. We’re all going to do something really, really significant, but it will be next year, or maybe the year after that. And meanwhile, nobody has made any remotely serious effort to cost this thing out. Are we talking about a ten percent increase in the cost of energy for this decarbonization project, or will it be a doubling, or maybe a tripling — or maybe even a multiplication by ten?

With tens of trillions of dollars at stake in the world economy, let alone the majority of humanity at risk of energy poverty, you would think that we would be far down the road toward detailed engineering studies of what the decarbonized energy world will look like and exactly how much it will cost. But it is exactly the opposite. Everywhere — or at least everywhere in the Western countries — government functionaries with degrees in English or Political Science (or maybe Gender Studies) issue edicts that carbon emissions will be reduced “50% by 2030” or “90% by 2050,” without any knowledge or understanding of how that may be accomplished.

So, as the costs of attempting to “transition” away from fossil fuels start to hit home, will anybody actually go through with the project? I think that the chance of that is about zero. China and India show how it works. To judge by their actions (rather than their words), they have long since figured out that solar and wind energy can’t succeed in running a modern economy, so they mouth empty platitudes to placate the Western zealots, make unenforceable promises that only come due after everyone is dead, and forge ahead with massive development of coal power. And even more telling are recent developments in Western jurisdictions. When the first hint arrives that fossil fuel restrictions are going to impose cost increases large enough for meaningful numbers of voters to notice, even the bluest of blue U.S. states take about three minutes to abandon their “decarbonization” promises.

For the latest from India, check out this piece from Reuters today headlined “India’s Jindal plans to start building Botswana coal mine in 2022.” Recall first that at the just-ended COP26 in Glasgow, India supposedly “pledged” to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2070. You would not be wrong to infer that the year 2070 was selected to be safely after all current world leaders are long since at least retired, and most likely dead. Today’s Reuters piece, on the other hand, gives the here and now:

India’s Jindal Steel & Power Limited . . . will start building a coal mine in Botswana’s southeastern Mmamabula coalfields in 2022, aiming to supply the export market and a planned coal power plant, a company official said. The Indian industrial giant aims for the mine to produce 4.5 million tonnes of coal per year.

It’s a big project, but a tiny part of the proven coal resources of the African country of Botswana:

Despite the global shift from coal, Botswana is pushing ahead with developing its estimated 212 billion tonnes of coal resources.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/11/cop-plop-and-flop/

At least some of the media are making hay over the hypocrisy of the global elite arriving at Glasgow via 400 private jets to lecture us about CO2 emissions. The jets created such a shortage of parking slots that some were obliged to fly the extra 50-70km to Prestwick and Edinburgh just to park.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s $US180 billion man, flew in with his $US65 million Gulfstream to rendezvous with Prince Charles, who also arrived by private jet. Bezos had been partying in Turkey with Bill Gates on a rented super yacht, the Lana ($A3 million a week hire), with a few 150km side trips by helicopter. 

Within several hours last Sunday week leaders from Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Mauritania and Kenya came in by private jets. World leaders do need secure transport, but as one blogger commented, “The fools could just stay home and shut up.”

The best one-liner about Glasgow to date is from an ex-No 10 Downing special adviser Steve Hilton writing in the Daily Mail: “A gigantic flatulent mess of incoherence and sanctimony”. One such specimen: ex-President Obama jetting in to tell teen demonstrators, “You need to help educate your parents and grandparents, your uncles and aunts, your teachers, your employers.” Sure, Barack, that makes sense.

But my tale today is not about the presidents and billionaires but the 40,000 bureaucrats, activists, grifters and useful idiots now jamming Glasgow accommodation and gabfests. They’re being told by the ridiculous Prince Charles that this is the “last chance saloon” to save the planet and humanity, as they were told at the first Conference of Parties at Berlin in 1995 and every other one of the annual gabfests since.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/people_dont_want_to_be_cold.htm

The climate summit was expensive, energy-burning theater. One hundred eighteen private jets flew into the airport, President Joe Biden’s motorcade had 24 vehicles, including SUVs and vans, and Greta Thunberg was angry. Demonstrators denounced Israel, which recycles and reuses 90 percent of its waste water, while ignoring the Palestinian pastime of burning tires containing multiple carcinogens.

Sustainability, less, new technologies, clean technologies, and more less (yes, more less) were the watchwords. Use less, do with less. The President should have touted America’s successes in reducing emissions: From 2005 to 2018, total U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions fell 12% while global energy-related emissions increased nearly 24%. Since 2005, national greenhouse gas emissions fell by 10%, and power sector emissions by 27% — as the US economy grew by 25%. He should have compared that to China’s announcement of 30 new, polluting coal-fired power plants and China being the world’s biggest polluter. Xi Jinping, naturally enough, was a no-show.

The president should have stood up for his people. Our people.

Vladimir Putin of energy exporting Russia and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) of energy exporting Saudi Arabia were also no shows, but for different reasons.

It is November and Europe is getting cold. Low energy supplies, mortgaged to Russian control of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline (given the go-ahead by Biden), and shortages of wind power are jacking up energy prices and making leaders there nervous.

It is November in the United States as well. Gasoline prices have been rising steadily and they are about to be joined by heating oil and gas heat. President Biden should be rethinking permits for the Keystone Pipeline and his decisions on fracking. Instead, the president asked – demanded – that OPEC pump more oil. Yes, dirty, polluting oil. And shipping it halfway around the world in diesel or coal powered ships to American ports with offloading problems. OPEC has said no.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/09/our-world-gone-climate-mad/

Each day the media are filled with “news” stories blaming various events and conditions on “climate change,” which are of course code words for “humans are overheating their planet.” Never do these reports offer evidence that mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions are to blame. That the press feels there’s no reason to back its claims with facts indicates that a large segment of the West has bought fully and uncritically into the narrative.

Some days it seems as if it’s useless to continue to fight the fight against global warming. Politicians, “journalists,” activists, activist scientists, celebrities, and a substantial portion of the public tell us that human activity is causing Earth to warm and there’s no more to the story than that. Skepticism is equated with denial. Questions are verboten. Aligning with the alarmists’ account is the only acceptable response.

This is how batty our world has become: According to a local newspaper, a British Columbia doctor diagnosed a patient to be suffering from “climate change.” Which might be the case, since the global and local climates are always in a state of change, and can at times be severe enough to cause injuries and death, though risk of climate-related fatalities has fallen 99% over the last 100 years.

But was the good doctor referring to natural climate cycles? Or was his diagnosis intended as a complaint about modern living that requires the consumption of fossil fuels? No one would go wrong by guessing the latter.

While much of the First World is suffering from climate derangement syndrome, the global warming scare offers great opportunities for graft, corruption, and greater political power to “leaders” who know better but use the ginned-up crisis to harden the bubbles they live in.

Leave it to Greta Thunberg, maybe the most well-known victim of CDS, to expose the charade. The perpetual protester noticed that the still-in-progress United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, “has turned into a (public relations) event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the global north countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The moral of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that false cries for help mean real calls for help will be ignored. A climate apocalypse has been forecast for years, sometimes by the well-intentioned but naïve looking to do good, but often by the cynical seeking political or personal advantage.

Two years ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recognizing that global temperatures are indeed rising, compiled a list of dire climate predictions that did not happen. Here is a sample: In 1969, the Nobel winning German scientist, Paul Ehrlich predicted that everybody would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam.” In 1974 Time Magazine warned that “space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.” The New York Times in 1978 reported that an “international team of specialists” feared the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” Over the next ten years, Cassandras changed their forecasts from cooling to warming: An Associated Press headline from 1989 read, quoting UN officials: “Rising seas could obliterate nations.” And who could forget Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he predicted that Artic ice would be gone in seven years. Today, doomsayers blame every forest fire, drought and hurricane on anthropological-caused climate change.

I am not a climate change denier. In fact, I know of no one who is. The term is used by climate disciples to belittle heretics who dare question the dogma that man alone is at fault for a warming planet. They are ruthless in their treatment of those skeptical of their professed causes of a changing climate. In National Geographic’s film Before the Flood, Bjørn Lomborg is listed as one of the ten most prominent “climate deniers.” Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and, in my opinion, the most reasonable voice on the subject. He begins every interview by repeating that he believes the Earth is warming. His sin is that he uses empirical evidence, logic and common sense to demonstrate that claimed apocalyptic consequences are more hyperbole than factual, which he explains in his 2020 book False Alarm. Fostering panic over climate change gets Progressives elected, sells books and movies and abets corporate welfare for renewable sources of energy. But for the rest of us, it does more harm than good.