RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/09/environmentalists-destroyed-californias-

The catastrophic fires that have immolated millions of acres of forests in the Golden State were preventable, and for decades, everyone knew what had to be done.

Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/09/will-americas-return-to-nuclear-power-kill-the-dems-green-new-deal-lets-hope-so/

While the media focus on the chaos in American cities and the COVID-19 shutdowns, you might have missed this good news on the energy front: The federal government just approved a new, smaller, safer nuclear power plant design, putting nuclear back on the nation’s menu of energy choices.

It might not seem like much, but until this decade, the last nuclear power plant built in the U.S. was 1977. Today, there are an estimated 96 nuclear power plants producing 20% of all our electricity and half of our non-carbon-based power.

If that sounds impressive, consider this: As recently as the 1990s, we had 116 nuclear plants. Utilities, tired of the non-stop trouble of justifying a perpetual source of clean, CO2-free energy to radical green groups and burdened by enormous regulatory costs, have been decommissioning older plants.

But late last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a new plan for what’s called a “small modular reactor,” or SMR, designed by Portland-based NuScale Power.

Small, yes, but cheaper and safer, too. And it may be an avatar for an avalanche of new nuclear technologies in the works, including thorium and molten-salt reactors that use spent fuel, which will further cut costs and decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

Some of these are well beyond the drafting board stage.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/while_california_chases_climate_change_chimeras_danger_looms.html

California has been in the headlines a lot lately. In the first half of the year, it hogged headlines because Governor Newsom imposed some of America’s most draconian lockdown rules on Californians (although they naturally didn’t apply to protests). While these headlines applied equally to other Democrat-run states, California blazed a new trail in August, when a heatwave caused the state to have rolling blackouts, followed by raging fires.

What was significant about both the blackouts and the fires was that they could have been prevented. Both resulted from California’s obsession with climate change and mindless environmentalism. Now, though, it appears that California is also due for an imminent apocalyptic flood. California can work to save itself, but it’s spending money in all the wrong places.

Although the media were excited about an allegedly record-breaking heatwave this August, the reality is that California has meltingly-hot heatwaves at least twice a year. To the extent some years are hotter than others, the temperatures differ by the single digits.

What made this year different was that the power grid failed over large parts of California. The grid didn’t fail, though, because the heat was too great. It failed because Pacific Gas & Electric company, a California public utility, has bowed to the climate change fanatics and put all of its energies into renewables. Even Governor Newsom had to concede that, when people needed A/C, solar energy failed.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/24/that-dirty-green-energy/

We argued last week that California’s blackouts offered a grim preview of the left’s energy agenda. But that’s only part of the carefully concealed truth about renewables. Those solar panels so precious to the you-must-conform greenshirts are a particularly nasty environmental menace.

“The state, once known for its plentiful, cheap and reliable energy supplies, is now dealing with rolling blackouts as its green energy infrastructure buckles under the strain of summer heat,” we said Thursday, because the wind sometimes refuses to blow and the sun isn’t always shining, not even in California.

Of course a few virtue-signaling commenters charged to the table in their electric vehicles to praise the virtues of renewable energy, which in California will be limited primarily to wind and solar. Hydro sources, responsible for more than 12% of the state’s electricity, won’t be included in the portfolio in 2045, the year power is to be by decree generated by renewables only. Other renewables, such as geothermal, maybe 5%, and biomass, not much more than 2%, provide such minute portions of California electricity they are hardly worth mentioning.

Left out of the often mistaken, never in doubt assertions of renewables’ unalloyed goodness is the fact that the hardware used is hardly renewable. It wears out and needs to be replaced. Then what?

“The problem of solar panel disposal ‘will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment’ because it ‘is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle,’” writes energy analyst Michael Shellenberger, quoting a Chinese recycling official.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/21/greenlands-melting-ice-sheet-nothing-to-worry-about/

Even with a pandemic to exploit, the political left and its communications department, which most know as the mainstream media, still have time to sow fear about global warming. Now, they tell us, we have to worry about Greenland’s ice sheet because it’s reached the “point of no return.” Which makes a potent fear factor but fails to tell all of the story, which isn’t quite like the one the press wants to sell.

“The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass at accelerated rates in the 21st century,” says a new research paper published in Nature’s Research Communications Earth & Environment, “making it the largest single contributor to rising sea levels.”

In a separate statement, we’re told that “nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.”

The report inspired such headlines as:

“The Greenland ice sheet is melting to a point of no return: study” — The Hill
“Greenland ice sheet lost a record 1m tonnes of ice per minute in 2019” — The Guardian

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/nuclear_to_replace_wind_and_solar.html

If you still believe in the global warming hysteria movement, you should face reality and dump wind and solar for nuclear.

In the words of James Hansen, the scientist most responsible for promoting global warming, wind and solar are “grotesque” solutions for reducing CO2 emissions. Michael Shellenberger, a prominent activist, has the same opinion. Hansen and Shellenberger, as well as many other global warming activists, have come to the conclusion that nuclear energy is the only viable method of reducing CO2 emissions from the generation of electricity. Nuclear reactors don’t emit CO2. Coal and natural gas do.  Hydroelectric electricity does not emit CO2 either, but opportunities for expansion are limited. In the United States most of the good sites have already been developed.

Wind and solar are grotesque because there are many problems. Promoters of wind and solar simply lie about the problems. Reducing emissions of CO2 by one metric tonne, 1000 kilograms or 2204 pounds, is called a carbon offset. Carbon offsets are bought and sold, usually for less than $10 each.  If you build wind or solar plants to displace electricity from natural gas or coal plants, you will generate carbon offsets. Each carbon offset generated will cost about $60 if electricity from a coal plant is displaced. If electricity from a natural gas plant is displaced the cost per carbon offset will be about $160.  Wind and solar are expensive methods of generating carbon offsets.