RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/g-7-meeting-climate-action-no-agreement/

Countries put their own economic growth first.

Despite President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to push climate change to the front of the discussion during the recently concluded G-7 meeting in France, the confab ended without a concrete agreement to take action on the issue.

Some of the blame was laid at the feet of President Donald Trump, who was “a no-show at a crucial session on climate change” today. While blaming Trump for the lack of progress on climate change might make for a good headline, the broader story is more complex. Indeed, a look at the numbers shows that the U.S. has slashed its coal use and cut its total greenhouse emissions more than any country in the G-7. It has also become a major supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) — which emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal during combustion — to other members of the G-7.

Before turning to those issues, it must be noted that international efforts to achieve major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions have largely failed. While it’s true that more than 170 countries signed on to the Paris Agreement, that accord’s CO2 targets are not legally enforceable. (Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017.)

Why, despite the urgency of dealing with climate change, aren’t more countries making big cuts to their emissions? The most succinct explanation can be had by understanding what Roger Pielke Jr. has dubbed the Iron Law of Climate Policy: “When policies on emissions reductions collide with policies focused on economic growth, economic growth will win out every time.”

https://spectator.us/emmanuel-macron-climate-change-virtue/

“The outcry over ‘climate change’ (what we used to call ‘global warming,’ until the evidence that the globe was not, in fact, warming became incontrovertible) has very little to do with any genuine concern about the environment and everything to do with 1) the ecstasy of gratuitous self-righteousness that comes from repeating, mantra-like, clichés dear to one’s own tribe and 2) the weaponization of those sentiments in a program of anti-Western economic redistribution.  It’s a tactic that is repellent for its moralizing sanctimoniousness, and evil for its economic implications.”

It is also part of a larger war against Western, and especially American, thriving, but that may be taken as given whenever the subject is the preening exhibitionism of liberal elites.

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the ’emergency’, the ‘international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) ‘the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ ‘Our house is burning. Literally,’ Macron squeaked in a tweet Thursday, even as he elsewhere accused Bolsonaro of lying to him about Brazil’s effort to combat the great green phantom, ‘Climate Change.’

This took everyone, including Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, who was not present in Biarritz, by surprise. Bolsonaro swiftly fired back an angry, articulate response pointing out that 1) the Amazon was a treasured part of Brazil’s national identity (read: none of your business, Frenchie), 2) Brazil was devoting great resources, including military resources, to battling the fires, and 3) there were fires every year in the Amazon, fewer in wet years, more in drier years, which this was.

President Bolsonaro might have also pointed out that, far from there being a ‘record number’ of fires in the Amazon this year, there were actually far fewer this year than in many recent years as this chart shows.

Being of a more charitable disposition than I am, President Bolsonaro also forbore to point out that the picture Macron featured in his horror story depicted not a fire in 2019 but was in fact snapped by the American photojournalist Loren McIntyre in 1989.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/26/donald-trump-nations-wealth-wont-traded-dreams-and-windmills/2118191001/

BIARRITZ, France – President Donald Trump said Monday that his first priority is to maintain the nation’s wealth, not trade away that prosperity for climate initiatives that he described as amounting to “dreams and windmills.”

“It’s tremendous wealth,” Trump told reporters gathered at the G-7 summit in France. “I’m not going to lose that wealth. I’m not going to lose it on dreams and windmills, which, frankly, aren’t working too well.”

Trump’s remarks came after White House aides acknowledged he skipped a session of the G-7 meeting focused on climate, biodiversity and the health of oceans. The White House said the president was taking part in other meetings during that session. 

The president did not answer two specifics questions: Whether he still harbored skepticism about climate change and what he felt the U.S. and other countries should do about it. Before his election, Trump had described climate change a Chinese hoax. 

Trump has reportedly told aides that the meeting of world leaders has focused too intensely on climate and other environmental issues. White House officials have said the president wants the meeting to deal more with economic issues, and Trump pushed for and secured a session on Saturday focused on the global economy. 

“The United States has tremendous wealth,” Trump said, referring to the nation’s preponderance of natural gas. “I’ve made that wealth come alive.

Trump has been at odds with other members of the G-7, especially host France, after he announced in 2017 that the U.S. would formally withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Then-candidate Trump promised to withdraw the U.S. from the accord.

But Trump defended his environmental record on Monday, telling reporters that he was an “environmentalist.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/climate-crazies-now-want-you-to-feel-guilty-about-your-vacation/

The scolds who buy into the notion that we’re all killing dear old Mother Earth have a seemingly endless list of joys they want to remove from our lives, and have now set their sights on one of the greatest: your annual vacation.

The New York Times has an opinion piece this weekend titled “How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?” The article was written by a travel writer named Seth Kugel.

In a halfhearted attempt to seek absolution, Kugel immediately dons his journalistic hair shirt:

I’ve often wondered how it would feel to work in an industry blamed for its outsize impact on global warming — say, oil drilling or cattle ranching. But it recently struck me that the question is not hypothetical. I’m a travel writer.

Yes, I’ve long known that jet fuel emits a ghastly amount of greenhouse gases, but I pinned that on the fossil fuel and aviation industries. Now the flight shaming movement, which emerged recently in Sweden and spread into Europe, has attempted to shift blame onto travelers.

The “flight shaming movement” mentioned has been championed by that teenage brat who got a week’s worth of publicity by refusing to meet with President Trump, even though no such meeting was ever discussed.

Those of us not members of the climate hysteria cult have long marveled at the disconnect exhibited by those who are as they wag their fingers at us from private jets and commercial airliners. It’s nice to see that they are at least beginning to realize that they are full of it.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-great-failure-of-the-climate-models

Computer models of the climate are at the heart of calls to ban the cheap, reliable energy that powers our thriving economy and promotes healthier, longer lives. For decades, these models have projected dramatic warming from small, fossil-fueled increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet, the real-world data aren’t cooperating. They show only slight warming, mostly at night and in winter. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there has been no systematic increase in the frequency of extreme weather events, and the ongoing rise in sea level that began with the end of the ice age continues with no great increase in magnitude. The constancy of land-based records is obvious in data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Should we trust these computer models of doom? Let’s find out by comparing the actual temperatures since 1979 with what the 32 families of climate models used in the latest U.N. report on climate science predicted they would be.

Atmospheric scientist John Christy developed a global temperature record of the lower atmosphere using highly accurate satellite soundings. NASA honored him for this achievement, and he was an author for a previous edition of the U.N. report. He told a House Science Committee hearing in March 2017 that the U.N. climate models have failed badly.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/michael_mann_c

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that appears to show global temperatures taking a noticeable swing upward in the era when humanity has been burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The graph was first published in 1998, prominently featured in the 2001 UN Climate Report, and formed part of Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The graph’s methodology and accuracy have been and continue to be hotly contested, but Mann has taken the tack of suing two of his most prominent critics for defamation or libel. One case, against Mark Steyn, is called by Steyn likely to end up in the Supreme Court. But another case, against Dr. Tim Ball was decided by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, with Mann’s case thrown out, and him ordered to pay the defendant’s legal costs, no doubt a tidy sum of money. News first broke in Wattsupwiththat, via an email Ball sent to Anthony Watt. Later, Principia-Scientific offered extensive details, including much background on the hockey stick.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/keystone-xl-pipeline-approved-by-nebraska-supreme-court/

The Keystone XL Pipeline’s passage through Nebraska was approved Friday by the state Supreme Court, to the dismay of several Indian tribes and environmental groups.

Nebraska’s high court upheld the state Public Service Commission’s approval of the project despite pushback from landowners, the Sierra Club, and Native American tribes who have promised to protest construction. Opponents at one point were arrested after chaining themselves to a truck transporting a pipe.

President Trump pushed for the controversial project, which would transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada through Nebraska to the Gulf Coast, after it was shelved by President Obama. Trump signed a permit in March giving TC Energy, the company behind the project, permission to “construct, connect, operate and maintain” the pipeline in the U.S.

The 36-inch pipe would cover 875 miles in Nebraska, Montana, and South Dakota.

The ruling brings a more than decade-long battle between the energy industry and environmental advocates, landowners, and Native American tribes one step closer to a conclusion. But the project still faces a federal lawsuit in Montana that seeks to block construction. Critics hope they can stall it until after the 2020 election, when a Democratic president could take their side and oppose it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/20/the-truth-about-solar-power-good-for-virtue-signaling-and-not-much-else/

There’s a great future in solar, the fossil-fuel haters have been telling us for some time. They might be right. One day. But they’ve been saying that for quite a while, and the future continues to be out there … somewhere.

Not so long ago, the French even thought paving their highways with solar panels was a good idea. But “Three Years Later,” says a Popular Mechanics headline from late last week, “the French Solar Road Is a Total Flop.”

How can this be? Solar, we’ve long been told, will save us all.

“It’s too noisy, falling apart, and doesn’t even collect enough solar energy,” says PM.

France’s Sun Road, known locally as the Wattway — what, nobody thought of Voltabahn or Wattastrada? — was an “experiment that seemed ingenious in its simplicity: fill a road with photovoltaic panels and let them passively soak up the rays as cars drive harmlessly above.”

However, its “most optimistic supporters have deemed” it a “failure,” says PM. It couldn’t handle the weight of heavy trucks, the surface made so much racket that the speed limit had to be lowered to 43 mph, and it’s failed to deliver the power that had been promised.

Flaws include poor location (“Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area,” says Popular Mechanics, to which we add, no area is sunny at night); storms (the climate alarmists will blame global warming for their existence); and questionable design (solar panels work when best directed toward the sun, not arranged flat on the ground as a road bed).