RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/latest_warmist_scheme_record_climate_change_as_cause_of_death_on_death_certificates_.html

Perhaps inspired by the success of Coronavirus fearmongering in impoverishing the formerly prosperous West, global warming enthusiasts are beginning to agitate to list “climate change” as the cause of death on death certificates. The widely observed practice of listing Coronavirus as the cause of death for anyone who died with it, not necessarily of it, has worked wonders in scaring people into accepting previously unheard-of abrogation of constitutionally guaranteed rights.  

The seed for this propaganda offensive was just planted in a spinoff publication of The Lancet, the formerly prestigious British medical journal that has fallen to the forces of political correctness. In a letter appearing the The Lancet Planetary Health (hat tip: Breitbart), researchers at The Australian National University write:

National mortality records in Australia suggest substantial under-reporting of heat-related mortality. Less than 0·1% of 1·7 million deaths between 2006 and 2017 were attributed directly or indirectly to excessive natural heat (table). However, recent research indicates that official records underestimate the association at least 50-fold.

Understanding the degree to which environmental factors affect human health is important if the impact of climate change is to be fully appreciated. As severe environmental events become more common, correct reporting and attribution is needed for effective evidence-based responses and to guide local, national, and global adaptation.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/green_electricity_delusions.html

With global warming the alleged science is so complicated that nobody, including the global warming scientists, can really understand what is going on. Green electricity, mostly solar and wind, is different. It’s relatively clear cut. No supercomputers spewing out terabytes of confusing data are needed.

Green electricity is quite useless. The latest trend in green electricity is wind or solar with battery backup. This green electricity costs about nine times more than the fossil fuel electricity it displaces. The true cost is hidden from the public by hidden subsidies and fake accounting. (My book, Dumb Energy, goes into great analytical detail.)

Green electricity is ineffective for preventing climate change. The climate change alarmists James Hansen and Michael Shellenberger make the case forcefully in this video. Hansen is the most important and most famous scientist warning against climate change. His followers consider him to be the greatest authority on the dangers of climate change. He calls wind and solar energy a “grotesque idea” and a “fantasy.”

It’s true that we won’t run out of wind or sunshine. That doesn’t mean that wind and sunshine are effective tools for making electricity. They aren’t. The exhaustion of fossil fuels has been predicted many times. The current situation is that fossil fuels are in great over supply and the prices have crashed to low levels. Natural gas, currently the most economical fossil fuel for generating electricity, is painfully cheap and is being extensively exported from the United States to other countries. Natural gas from wells, not served by pipelines to take it to market, is burned or flared to get rid of it. Only the more valuable oil is kept. Thanks to fracking, we have plenty of natural gas for the next 100-years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/activist-investors-pressuring-asset-managers-to-vote-green/

Activist investors are pressuring asset managers to vote green, even if it harms the poor.

 B lackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is holding its annual general meeting this week. To help give itself a smooth ride, BlackRock’s leadership has struck a Faustian bargain with the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activists on its share register. But a smoother ride for BlackRock may mean a rougher ride for many of the companies in which it invests. In coronavirus-speak, in order to acquire immunity for itself, BlackRock opted to become an ESG super-spreader.

At the end of February, a pair of activist investors, Boston Trust Walden and Mercy Investment Services, announced that their “dialogue” with BlackRock had led to agreement, with BlackRock confirming that it would vote against boards with “unacceptable” positions on climate change. As a result, the two activist investors declared that they had withdrawn their shareholder resolution directed at BlackRock on climate change for this year.

Subsequently BlackRock appeared to have recognized the growing gravity of the current economic catastrophe and had second thoughts, at least for now. According to Reuters, last month BlackRock said it would ease up and allow companies to give a lower priority to environmental-sustainability reporting. “We recognize that in the near-term companies may need to reallocate resources to address immediate priorities in these uncertain times,” BlackRock said in a new stewardship document.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/clean_energy_via_legislative_diktat_.html

For those enamored by the clean electric-car,  smoke-and-mirrors “emission elsewhere scheme” comes  the recently enacted “Virginia Clean Economy Act”, which includes one of the largest energy storage targets in the country at 2.4 GW by 2035, and prompts state regulators to craft a carbon dioxide cap and trade program that meets the objectives of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

The act, which requires Virginia’s electric utilities and competitive suppliers to generate electricity from 100% renewable energy by 2050, passed on the same day that Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, announced its goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

Carbon dioxide has been deemed a pollutant via legislative diktat.  Accordingly,  embedded in this legislation is language which prevents the Virginia State Corporation Commission from approving “any investor-owned utility to own, operate, or construct any electric generating unit that emits carbon as a byproduct of combusting fuel to generate electricity” until the state legislature has had a chance to review a report from the Air Pollution Control Board. Also embedded are escape clauses allowing fossil-fuel energy just in case the 100 per cent carbon-free dream mandate fails in the real world. In keeping with current virtuous political correctness and emotional zeitgeist, the bill also requires utilities and the commission to consider the social cost of carbon when reviewing the need for a new generation facility.

However, Dominion Virginia Power now says it may need to import energy from pollution-intensive sources out of state, even though nuclear power is part of the permitted energy mix.  The price tag for this legislated decree wrought via politically virtuous green posturing, environmental sloganeering, and pandering to climate activists now comes to light.  Get ready for acres of environmentally destructive solar panel installations which will fail to meet energy demand in the midst of winter, while decimating native habitat and leaching toxic chemicals into the soil.   Look to the new Warren Buffet  solar project in Arizona as the template for  yet another taxpayer billion dollar boondoggle promising pollution free energy (when the sun shines), and reliance on giga-battery installations when it does not.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/12/flummoxed-feds-freeze-out-frost-fix/

Courtesy of the polar vortex, unseasonably cold temperatures came to a broad swath of the country, from Texas to Maine, last week, causing frost damage to crops and ornamental plants. (And snow in New York City’s Central Park on May 9). Cherry and other fruit trees are particularly susceptible, and losses could be substantial.   

Frost damage to crops is not unusual; it causes American farmers to lose billions of dollars annually. Peaches, plums, citrus, and other crops are regularly threatened by frost in the Southeast, but California is also susceptible: A freeze there in January 2007 cost farmers more than $1 billion in losses of citrus, avocados, and strawberries, and a 1990 freeze that caused about $800 million in damage to agriculture resulted in the layoff of 12,000 citrus industry workers, including pickers, packers, harvesters, and salespeople. In 2002, lettuce prices around the country spiked after an unseasonable frost struck the Arizona and California deserts.

Technology could mitigate much of the damage, but government regulation has placed obstacles in the way of innovative solutions. Those obstacles illustrate what innovators are up against, and how flawed, unscientific public policy prevents science and technology from realizing their potential.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/blinded_by_doomsday_predictions_masquerading_as_science.html

Conservatives?  Anti-science?  No way!  Science created fuel-burning engines, harnessed electricity, and ushered in an industrial revolution that transformed the world.  Science found cures for malaria, tuberculosis, and polio; expanded the world’s food supply many times over; significantly lengthened life expectancy; and put men on the moon.  And then, just when it seemed nothing more was even possible, science — specifically computer technology — transformed the world yet again.  Cyber-wonders emerge on an almost daily basis, enhancing our lives in ways we could only have imagined a generation ago.

No, folks, we have no quarrel with science.  But we have a serious problem with something masquerading as science: the manipulation of facts and data to create fearful predictive models.  These “scientific” statistical models often tend to cast the freedom we enjoy in a negative light, and they almost always end up being wrong.  Let us amble down the Memory Lane of five decades and revisit some of the terrifying events the learned practitioners of this branch of science once assured us would occur.  No doubt, you will recall many of them:

By 1980, city-dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.

By 1985, air pollution will block 50% of the sunlight reaching Earth, causing global cooling.

By 1989, the population explosion and resulting food shortages will result in mass starvation (“The Great Die-Off”), in which 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, will perish.

By 1990, all lead, zinc, tin, silver, and gold reserves will be gone.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/climate-change-politics-net-zero-greenhouse-gas-emissions-extinction-capitalism/

To climate-shame corporations is to hobble economic dynamism.

Shutting down the whole global economy is the only way of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Centigrade, Yvo de Boer, the former United Nations climate chief, warned in the runup to the 2015 Paris climate conference. Thanks to COVID-19 we now have an inkling what that looks like. The conference went further and chose to write into the Paris agreement an aspiration to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. The 1.5°C backstory reveals much about the quality of what passes for science and gets enshrined in U.N. climate treaties — and is directly relevant to American corporations that now find themselves on the front line of the climate wars.

Nine weeks before the Copenhagen climate conference, the one where Barack Obama was going to slow the rise of the oceans, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting. “We are trying to send our message to let the world know what is happening and what will happen to the Maldives if climate change isn’t checked,” Nasheed told reporters after resurfacing. It was part of a campaign by the Alliance of Small Island States claiming that climate change magnified the risk that their islands would drown.

The sinking-islands trope has been endlessly recycled by the U.N. for decades. In 1989, a U.N. official stated that entire nations could disappear by 2000 if global warming was not reversed. Like so many others, that prediction of climate catastrophe came and went. The failed prediction didn’t prevent the current U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres, from declaring last year, “We must stop Tuvalu from sinking.” There was no science behind 1.5°C and the sinking-island hypothesis. Studies show, here and here, that the Maldives and Tuvalu have increased in size. As the 25-year-old Charles Darwin might have told the U.N., coral atolls are formed by the slow subsidence of the ocean bed.

Having incorporated 1.5°C into the sacred texts of the U.N. climate process, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was charged with coming up with a scientific justification for it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/earth-day-year-plague-bruce-thornton/

Last week’s Earth Day came in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. At a time of sickness, death, and an economy stunned into recession, the incoherence of the romantic idealization of the natural world that Earth Day epitomizes is more obvious than usual. As the current crisis shows, nature is not a benevolent mother from whom we have alienated ourselves, and against whom our ravages have sown existential consequences. It is, as Keats put it, “a fierce, eternal destruction.”

Because of that misguided idealization, modern environmentalism has morphed into a “black market” religion, as Chantal Delsol describes the various substitutes for the decline of traditional faiths. Like similar belief systems such as Marxism, romantic environmentalism drapes itself in the jargon and quantitative data of real science. This makes the cult even more dangerous, for it uses the prestige and authority of science as the realm of objective truth, to create and promote policies that are dangerous, if not deadly.

Anthropogenic Global Warming is exhibit number one. A century-old hypothesis about temperature increases created by elevating levels of atmospheric CO2 has become a scientific “fact,” even though our understanding of global climate is nowhere near adequate for such claims. Yet billions of dollars a year go to “research” based on computer models that––as we’ve seen with the shifting models of the coronavirus’s lethality––rely on filling the gaps left by our ignorance, a process rife with moral and cognitive hazard. Billions more have been spent on subsidies for “green energy” like wind-farms or solar panels, which are nowhere near to replacing the cheap, efficient energy that comes from fossil fuels and coal. Worse, warmists promote policies like the Green New Deal that have multi-trillion-dollar price tags with no chance of achieving its promised boons.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/22/earth-day-overshadowed-this-year-by-an-actual-crisis/

April 22 is Earth Day, a celebration conceived by then-U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and first held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience. Most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

In recent years, however, Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for professional environmental activists and alarmists to warn of apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize.

However, if there was ever a time that Earth Day’s hysteria was completely overshadowed by genuine apocalyptic scenarios, the COVID-19 pandemic is providing it.

Passion and zeal now trump science on Earth Days, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility. The Earth Day Network, which organizes events and advocacy, regularly distorts science and exaggerates fears in order to advance its Big Government agenda.

With a theme of “Climate Change,” this year’s event is no exception. In the United States, the prototype of climate activism is the Green New Deal (GND), which is impractical, unworkable, monumentally expensive – and lethal.

Its price tag – tens of trillions of dollars – means that, were it to be implemented, the GND would lead to what has been dubbed “statistical murder,” because the diversion of resources to fund it would exert a so-called “income effect” on health and longevity that reflects the correlation between wealth and health.