RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nobodys-coming-to-the-big-global-warming-conference/

What if you threw a big green party and nobody came?

The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties or COP29 is happening in glorious Azerbaijan but the usual folks flying huge jets to warn us about the danger of using fossil fuels are mostly staying home.

Except for the Taliban who showed up to demand money. (Not a joke.)

Biden has trouble walking across sand. Xi has better things to do with his time. About the only G7 leader to show up is UK PM Keir Starmer (unless you want to pretend that Italy’s Meloni is a world leader) who waddled around like a ridiculous dark and mumbled something about the importance of being green so all the old white British pensioners freeze to death over the winter.

‘I have repeatedly emphasised the importance of global leadership when it comes to the climate challenge, and therefore it is very important for me to come to Cop,” PM Starmer whined. He said there was ‘a global race’ to be the leader on renewable energy, adding: ‘I want us to win the race.’

That’s like wanting to win the world curling championship. Nobody else is even showing for this one.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_case_of_the_florida_scrub_jay_challenges_the_esa_s_tyranny.html

As the name suggests, the Florida scrub jay lives exclusively in the scrublands of the Sunshine State. A medium-sized, long-tailed, blue-and-gray songbird, its call when perched on scrubs is a screechy scold that sends its tail up like a Roman catapult launching a rock. One of 15 bird species native to the continental U.S.—and allegedly threatened by loss of habitat—it is protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973.

But should protecting the bird take precedence over a citizen’s property rights when his land isn’t habitat suited to the bird? And doesn’t the arbitrary development fee that Florida counties imposed—a scrub jay fee, supposedly for offsetting the environmental impact of building on a property—amount to an exorbitant ransom?

These are among the questions raised in a federal lawsuit filed by Michael Colosi, a tech entrepreneur who hopes to build a house on a five-acre plot he recently bought in Punta Gorda, Charlotte County, Florida. Though he believes that his land, thick with pine and saw palmetto, is unsuited to the scrub jay, he is happy to adhere to the county’s habitat conservation plan (HCP) requirements, such as planting scrub oaks to encourage bird visits and avoiding land clearance during nesting season. But he refuses to pay the hefty $120,000 scrub jay fee for allowing him to build on his plot, for he plans to use only an acre or so for a house and garage, leaving the rest in its natural state.

The lawsuit—in which Charlotte County, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the U.S. Department of the Interior are defendants—is in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (Fort Myers Division). The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) is representing Colosi pro bono in a suit challenging the fee as an unconstitutional infringement of Colosi’s right to develop and use his property. It also challenges the unconstitutional regulation under federal law—in this case, the ESA—of an intrastate species of no commercial or economic value, and hence not under the Commerce Clause’s purview.

Before discussing the precedents that the PLF cites in the lawsuit, some background on the ESA is in order. The act, which the FWS and U.S. NOAA Fisheries Services administer, is not only the most wide-ranging in the U.S. but is one that unaccountable bureaucrats in the administrative state rampantly abuse through overreach.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/23/what-investors-are-telling-us-about-green-energy/

A little more than a year ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed what so many have said is absolutely, undeniably so: “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” Despite the story’s examples that were supposed to buttress the claims, reality tells a different story.

A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that “the fast money on Wall Street has taken a close look at key sectors in the green economy and decided to bet against them.”

“Despite vast green stimulus packages in the U.S., Europe, and China, more hedge funds are on average net short batteries, solar, electric vehicles, and hydrogen than are long those sectors; and more funds are net long fossil fuels than are shorting oil, gas, and coal.”

Hedge fund institutions have concluded, says Bloomberg, that “many climate investments” haven’t posted returns as quickly nor as profitably as they had expected.

Bloomberg’s sources blamed politics, both in the U.S. and abroad.

If so, we say good, because the green energy crusade has been driven solely by Democratic and progressive politics rather than rigorous research and compelling arguments. It’s about time that the skeptical side posted a few victories in trying to stop the wholly unnecessary climate agenda of the left.

It’s the middle of a summer heat wave and temperatures are rising. Suddenly your air conditioning turns off. It’s not a blackout or a brownout: it’s the new government plan.

Mass government subsidies for inefficient and expensive ‘green energy’ wind turbines and solar panels combined with bans on efficient and cheap oil, coal and gas, have made energy grids unreliable and costly. States that have aimed for widespread use of green energy like California and Texas are suffering blackouts and brownouts at growing rates.

Instead of building reliable energy resources, federal and state governments, along with monopolistic energy companies, are making up for green energy with energy rationing.

Or ‘smart rationing’.

Virtual power plants were a green energy buzzword that promised to harness local battery capacity to distribute energy to the grid, but the diminishing promise of solar panels and the power hunger of electric cars has poured cold water on the idea that the ‘green’ battery devices and useless solar panels will ever reliably give more to the grid than they take from it.

Virtual power plants, like all things virtual, have come to mean power that isn’t really there. Instead virtual power plants have become another euphemism for rationing power.

Unable to get meaningful savings from so-called battery ‘distributed energy resources’, virtual power plants now mean using smart thermostats to seize control over homeowner power usage with bureaucrats or AI software deciding how much power people should be using and turning off their heat or air conditioning. Government agencies and monopolistic utilities insist on calling this ‘efficiency’ rather than what it actually is which is rationing customer power usage.

State utilities have taken to bribing consumers with discounts on skyrocket energy rates and ‘free’ smart thermostats like Google Nest in order to induce them to turn over control of their thermostats. Once they give up control, they may be allowed only limited manual overrides a month to be able to turn on the heat or air in even the most miserable weather.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/24/the-ev-graveyard/

Last week, the House approved a resolution to block the Biden administration’s emissions rule that would require more than half of the automobiles sold in the new-car market to be electric by 2032. The 215 representatives who voted for the bill, including eight Democrats, are far more in tune with most of the country than the White House. The “deplorables” and “bitter” clingers of the industrialized world are rejecting electric vehicles.

Nationwide, the inventory of unsold EVs had grown by nearly 350% over the first half of 2024, creating “a 92-day supply — roughly three months’ worth of EVs, and nearly twice the industry average,” says Axios, which is 54 days for gasoline-powered vehicles.

Ford, which lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023, continues to yield to reality, now ditching its plans to build a large electric SUV. This “course change,” says Just the News, “comes amid lower-than-expected demand for electric vehicles.”

The company has also “pushed back to 2027” plans for “another electric vehicle project for a pickup truck.”

“Based on where the market is and where the customer is, we will pivot and adjust and make those tough decisions,” said John Lawler, Ford’s chief financial officer.

And here’s the market’s message:

“Of the U.S. consumers planning on purchasing a new vehicle in the next 24 months, only 34% intend to purchase an EV, down 14% from 48% in the 2023,” says Ernst & Young’s Mobility Consumer Index, “a global survey of almost 20,000 consumers from 28 countries.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-hysteria-and-the-end-of-hope/

Recently the reliably Left-wing rag The Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece that wrestled with a question no one in history ever thought to ask themselves until our own time, when it has become a common refrain among young generations: Is it morally right to bring children into a world so fraught with dangerous uncertainty?

“Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question” is an excerpt from a new book by Jade S. Sasser, an associate professor in the – wait for it – Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. The book is called Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future.

Yes, climate anxiety is a thing. Psychotherapist Natacha Duke describes it thusly: “Also known as ‘eco-anxiety,’ ‘eco-guilt’ and ‘eco-grief,’ climate anxiety is characterized by a chronic fear of environmental doom that’s often paralyzing and debilitating.” It is one of the most effective and widespread psyops of our time, having traumatized an entire couple of generations into believing that we must take immediate, radical action to completely dismantle the capitalist, systemically racist, heteronormative, fossil-fueled power structures and exploitative mentality that purportedly have driven us to the brink of planetary annihilation.

The Times excerpt centers on a series of interviews Sasser conducted in 2021 and 2022 with millennials and members of Generation Z, “all of them people of color. Some of them identify as queer… which shapes their sensitivity to discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.” All were college-educated, most having taken environmental studies classes. At least two of them have degrees in sustainability, whatever that means.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-green-agenda-would-punish-lower-income-households-the-most-experts-say/

The costs of rapidly transitioning the world economy from natural gas to green energy sources over the coming decades will fall onto lower-income households the most, a reality that even proponents of many of those environmental policies now acknowledge.

The governor of the Bank of Italy, Fabio Panetta, acknowledged the potential negative impacts of a transition to “net-zero” carbon emissions while addressing an international energy conference on Monday.

“In fact, most climate change mitigation policies, such as carbon pricing, put pressure on the energy bills of businesses and households,” said Panetta, a former member of the European Central Bank governing council. “The consumption baskets of less affluent households are heavily weighted toward energy goods. They will therefore be disproportionately affected by the gradual increase in energy costs required for the transition.”

European and American consumers felt the burden of higher energy costs when oil prices spiked two years ago during the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine and inflation reached levels not seen since the 1970s. Inflation remains a top issue for American and European voters, as incumbent parties across Europe face difficult election prospects because of populist backlash.

“It is quite telling that a [former] member of the European Central Bank Governing Council who believes all of the fictitious asserted benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions feels compelled to warn just how expensive and devastating to consumers — and especially lower income consumers — carbon dioxide reductions will be,” said James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank.