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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Elizabeth Warren’s Daft Fracking Scheme

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/elizabeth-warren-democrats-fracking-bans-bad-for-economy-bad-for-environment/

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts promises that if she is elected president, she will issue an immediate unilateral prohibition — based on some presidential power that she’ll invent as soon as she gets around to it — on the method of natural-gas production known colloquially as “fracking.” Other Democratic contenders, including Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris of California, have made similar promises.

Another way of saying this is that the Democrats promise to induce artificial scarcity in the energy market. Yet another way of saying this is that the Democrats promise to create effective subsidies for such relatively high-pollution energy sources as coal and diesel at the expense of a relatively low-pollution energy source in the form of natural gas. And yet another way of saying this is that the Democrats propose to subsidize petroleum producers from Russia to Iran at the expense of small to midsize businesses in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Texas, and other energy-producing states.

Why?

What we call “fracking” relies on two relatively old technologies: hydraulic fracturing, which is used to break up underground shale formations to release oil and gas trapped therein, and horizontal drilling, which allows for the efficient recovery of that released oil and/or gas. Combining those two technologies with recent advances in everything from materials development to seismic imaging has revolutionized energy production in the United States — and that gets up the noses of certain people, prominent among them so-called environmentalists who are categorically opposed to all new development of conventional energy sources — even when that development comes with important environmental benefits. Their opposition is ideological and quasi-religious. It is based only very loosely on genuine environmental concerns.

If “You Believe in Science” You Must Believe This Scientist Who Talks to Plants Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274884/if-you-believe-science-you-must-believe-scientist-daniel-greenfield

When George III talked to plants, he was mad. But in our post-religious society, pseudoscience is king and reigns surrounded by any pagan lunacy that would have embarrassed an actual madman. Lefties insist that they are rational because they believe in science. But science isn’t a belief system. That’s scientism. When you believe in things, well you can start believing in talking trees.

Monica Gagliano says that she has received Yoda-like advice from trees and shrubbery. She recalls being rocked like a baby by the spirit of a fern. She has ridden on the back of an invisible bear conjured by an osha root. She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina, an ancient wind instrument, in a redwood forest. “Oryngham,” she says, means “thank you” in plant language. These interactions have taken place in dreams, visions, songs and telekinetic interactions, sometimes with the help of shamans or ayahuasca.

This has all gone on around the same time as Dr. Gagliano’s scientific research, which has broken boundaries in the field of plant behavior and signaling

Why don’t you believe in science?

That comes to us from fringe lefty nutter outlet, the New York Times.

Save California, Ban Environmentalists Hold the straws, legalize the rats. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274841/save-california-ban-environmentalists-daniel-greenfield

The 6-foot-tall man dressed as a giant receipt stood on a stool next to the emblem of the State Capitol in Sacramento. He was there because Assemblyman Phil Ting of San Fran wanted to ban receipts.

California had a great ban streak going. It had already banned plastic bags, straws and dog breeders. Assemblyman Ting, who had only been known for wearing bow ties, had declared war on receipts.

And Ting had his aide wear a giant receipt to show how bad receipts were for the environment. And how better to crusade for the environment than by printing up a receipt 100,000 times normal size?

According to Ting’s people, receipts not only wasted trees and water, but were actually toxic. The San Francisco Democrat explained that receipts were coated in chemicals that weren’t allowed in baby bottles. It’s probably a good thing then that receipts don’t go inside baby bottles. Or inside babies.

There was even a hashtag, #SkiptheSlip.

In an extraordinary setback for stupid bans, Ting’s receipt ban bill never made it to the floor. But Ting tweeted that he was “glad to have raised awareness about the health & environmental harm receipts can cause. Change often takes time.” Next time around, the receipt bill ban will succeed.

Perhaps Ting ought to consider raising awareness about the 16,000 complaints of filth and waste in his own city. The human waste spread by his constituents is a lot more toxic than paper receipts.

The same Democrats who shrug at a hepatitis outbreak gasp at the toxicity of store receipts.

Grandiose, Coercive, and Expensive Democratic presidential candidates’ all-encompassing climate-change plans would remake American life—without even solving the problem they want to solve. James B. Meigs

https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-presidential-candidates-climate-change-plans

Watching the Democratic presidential candidates on CNN’s seven-hour town hall on climate change was like attending the shot-put competition at a track meet. It wasn’t even a debate because the candidates agreed on most major points. Any sense of competition came in seeing which would offer the most grandiose plans. One after another, each candidate strained to hurl the biggest, most expensive wad of policy proposals as far as humanly possible.

Senator Bernie Sanders set the bar high. “We are proposing the largest, most comprehensive program ever presented by any candidate in the history of the United States,” he declared. Other candidates didn’t want to come up short, offering plans to transform radically fundamental elements of American life—not just energy, but farming, housing, transportation, and more. No detail was too small. Yes, Senator Kamala Harris admitted, it will be necessary to ban plastic drinking straws to avert climate change.

There were quibbles over some particulars, but, as the New York Times noted, “One thing is certain: All of the candidates want to spend money, and lots of it.” Former Vice President Joe Biden’s plan alone clocks in at a relatively modest $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Senator Cory Booker, meantime, wants to spend $3 trillion. Harris ups the ante to $10 trillion, but Sanders prevails in the spending contest with a $16 trillion plan.

Long Live the Incandescent Bulb The Energy Department will now allow you to choose your lighting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/long-live-the-incandescent-bulb-11567810793

Good news, Americans. If you like old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, you can keep buying them. The Energy Department on Wednesday extended the lifespan of incandescents, which the Obama Administration in its twilight sought to extinguish.

Among Congress’s dimmer ideas was to create lighting efficiency standards in 2007 that effectively mandated the phase-out of incandescent bulbs. Americans were told higher-efficiency bulbs would save them thousands of dollars and reduce the nation’s carbon emissions. Where have you heard this before?

Conventional incandescents have already been supplanted by higher efficiency “halogen” bulbs that are virtually indistinguishable. But the Obama Administration in its waning days sought to ban halogens too and extend efficiency standards to certain incandescent lamps that were exempted by Congress.

The Trump Administration is proposing to rescind the Obama regulations. “More stringent standards are not economically justified,” the Energy Department concludes.

An overblown hypothesis by James Piereson On hurricanes and climate change.

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/an-overblown-hypothesis

We are well into hurricane season with a dangerous storm lurking off the coast of Florida and now poised to make a run up the east coast of the United States. As happens every year at this time, the appearance of hurricanes provokes speculation about the role of climate change in the formation of these destructive storms.

Climate change theorists assert that warming ocean temperatures are increasing the number and strength of hurricanes that form and make landfall in the United States. As David Leonhardt writes this week in the New York Times, “The frequency of severe hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean has roughly doubled over the last two decades, and climate change appears to be the reason.” He cites some statistics to support this conclusion, though his review of the facts is far from thorough.

As he notes, the underlying science holds that hurricanes develop in warm ocean waters in late summer, so that over time rising ocean temperatures will generate rising numbers of hurricanes, and stronger ones as well. According to scientists, average ocean temperatures have increased by about one degree Fahrenheit over the past one hundred to a hundred and fifty years, a finding that provides a foundation for the “hurricane hypothesis.” Thus, we hear the refrain that global warming is causing more storms with higher wind speeds, and that these storms last longer, are more destructive, and make landfall more often than in the past.

The ABC’s Bended-Knee Adoration of Al Gore Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/the-abcs-b

“Gore is a hypocritical money-grabbing driver of the climate-apocalypse bandwagon.”

What delusionary world do ABC people inhabit?  The national broadcaster’s editorial director, Alan Sunderland, last year fulminated against “liars and cheats and deceivers” generating fake news for the gullible. He wrote, “All responsible media organisations promise to aim for accuracy, to tell all sides of a story… Some, like the ABC, promise never to take an editorial stand or express an opinion, while others promise to make clear the distinction between their reporting and their commentary…” (My emphasis)

Oh, I see. There’s no ABC green-left narratives on lovely wind and solar energy, or ABC tear-jerking for discredited Sri Lankan “refugees”, or for stacking panels with ‘progressives’ and blackballing the Institute of Public Affairs…

My incredulity accelerated when I came across Sunderland’s 11-page audit of the ABC’s coverage of Al Gore’s Melbourne-Sydney visit in mid-July 2017. Gore came to push his new climate-horror film “An Inconvenient Sequel”.

Sunderland’s “Editorial review of ABC interviews with Al Gore, July 2017” checked if the ABC’s coverage of Gore was biased and/or excessive, and whether Gore suckered the ABC into unduly promoting his film. Sunderland also checked whether the ABC, as per charter, was “present(ing) a diversity of perspectives so that, over time, no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented.”

Actually Gore was here again only last June, when the Queensland government spent $320,000 for his Climate Week appearance. (His regular fee is $100,000). My partial list of some Gore visits is 2003, 2005, 2006 (twice), 2007, 2009, 2014 (rostrum-sharing with Clive Palmer), 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019. He’s about as newsworthy as a Collins Street tram.

Buttigieg: ‘Eating a Burger, Am I Part of the Problem? In a Certain Way, Yes.’ By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pete-buttigieg-earting-hamburgers-climate-change/

Pete Buttigieg, this morning: “Right now, we’re in a mode I think we’re thinking about [climate change] mostly through the perspective of guilt. You know, from using a straw, to eating a burger, am I part of the problem? In a certain way, yes, but the most exciting thing is that we can all be part of the solution.”

Is Buttigieg pledging to not eat burgers anymore? No. Is he proposing banning burgers? No. But he’s declaring that people eating burgers is part of the climate change problem. Because every Democrat agrees that climate change is such a pressing problem that it has to be addressed through public policy, it’s fair to wonder if someday a Buttigieg administration might start looking at policies designed to reduce the public’s consumption of meat. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio instituted “meatless Mondays” in all of the public schools — not that he bothered to ask the kids what they thought. A 2018 study proposed a new “meat tax” designed to reduce consumption. And another National Institutes of Health study concluded, “The public and environmental health benefits of reducing meat consumption create a need for campaigns to raise awareness and contribute to motivation for change.” Hearing a presidential candidate declare that eating burgers is “part of the problem,” it’s fair to ask whether he’ll ever be tempted to try to remedy this perceived problem through federal policy or law.

10 Craziest Things CNN Town Hall Revealed About Democrats’ Economy-Wrecking Climate Extremism By Chrissy Clark

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/05/10-craziest-things-cnn-town-hall-revealed-democrats-economy-wrecking-climate-extremism/

Despite seven hours of conversations, there was no substantive talk. The majority of questions were asked by climate change activists tossing softball questions.

On Wednesday CNN hosted a town hall focused on environmentalism with the 10 Democratic presidential candidates qualified to stand on the September debate stage in Houston. These candidates are Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Elizabeth Warren.

Despite seven hours of conversations, there was no substantive talk. The majority of questions were asked by climate change activists tossing softball questions at the candidates, or Sanders supporters who wanted to attack other candidates — cough, cough Joe Biden — and their climate platforms.

Among the dull questions and lackluster answers, several moments highlighted Democrats’ full-fledged dive into extremist policies that will wreck the American economy and scientific advancement.

Trump Admin Overturns Lefty Light Bulb Tyranny Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274847/trump-admin-overturns-lefty-light-bulb-tyranny-daniel-greenfield

Forget, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

In the miserable Obama years, you didn’t even have the right to choose your own light bulb. Light bulb experts from organizations dedicated to sending human beings back to the caves to save the planet from the threat of light bulbs determined which light bulbs you could use.

But, in the latest resistance to the ecocracy, the light is back and light bulbs were liberated from the latest set of “standards”.

That’s right.

If you like your decorative globes, candle-shaped lights, three-way light bulbs and reflector bulbs, you can keep them.

The usual ecocratic suspects are fuming over the threat of light bulb freedom.

“The Energy Department flat out got it wrong today. Instead of moving us forward, this rule will keep more energy-wasting bulbs on store shelves,” Jason Hartke, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, said in a statement. “If you wanted folks to pay a lot more than they should on electric bills, this rollback would be a pretty good way of doing it.”

That’s a decision that people get to make. This is America.

People can choose between cheaper light bulbs and lower electricity bills without bureaucrats forcing them to do it. They can also choose life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Even if that involves non-energy efficient light bulbs.

This rule does not prevent consumers from buying the lamps they desire, including efficient options,” the agency wrote in the rule. “The market is successfully transitioning to LEDs regardless of government regulation. Consumers are clearly taking advantage of the energy savings provided by LEDs.”

But it’s not a success unless a lefty regime forces people to do it.

But Noah Horowitz, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency Standards at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said incandescent bulbs still make up about 45 percent of the market.