Category: Econut O’ The Day

Six Facts the Left Doesn’t Want You To Know About Global Warming

President Biden implores us that climate change is an “existential threat” to humanity. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry preaches to us that “[t]he climate crisis as a whole is a national security threat because it is disruptive to the daily lives of human beings all over the world.” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns us that in 2030, “the world is going to end … if we don’t address climate change.”

Hold on to your wallet. The Left’s global warming Chicken Littles insist that the sky is falling but don’t want you to know six key facts.

First, in his new book “Unsettled,” Obama Administration Department of Energy chief scientist Steven Koonin shows that the models relied upon by the Left to predict future global warming are so poor that they cannot even reproduce the temperature changes in the 20th century.

If these models cannot reproduce past temperatures already known when the models were developed, how can they possibly reliably predict temperatures decades into the future?

Second, Koonin’s book also documents that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own analysis indicates that any negative economic impact that global warming eventually may have will be so modest that it warrants no action.

Third, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UN IPPC do not claim that a link has been established between global warming and natural disasters.

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In 2020, the NOAA stated: “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity,” and “changes in tropical cyclone activity … are not yet detectable.”

The UN IPPC, the Wall Street Journal reported, “says that it too lacks evidence to show that warming is making storms and flooding worse.”

Fourth, as the earth’s temperature has risen, natural disasters have become far less deadly.

Since 1920, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1.29 degrees Celsius and world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion – yet EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, reports that the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent, from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.

Fifth, some of the world’s best scientists believe that global warming will be beneficial rather than harmful.

In 2017, a group of eminent scientists – such as Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Judith Curry of Georgia Tech – wrote that “[o]bservations [over the last] 25 years … show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign.”

Carbon dioxide, they noted, “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth.”

Sixth, global warming saves lives. A study published in 2015 by the British medical journal The Lancet found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat.

This study by 22 scientists from around the world – which examined over 74 million deaths in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1985-2012, “the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature-health associations”– reported that cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent.

And small changes in the temperature matter: “moderately hot and cold temperatures” caused 88.85 percent of the temperature-related deaths, while “extreme” temperatures caused only 11.15 percent.

We must not let the Left bully us into draconian action with unfounded claims of a looming climate catastrophe. Know the facts. Global warming is not a problem.

 Civilian Climate Corps: AOC’s New Plan to Force Unions on Kids.

A “civilian climate corps” is exactly what’s needed in a time of rising inflation, declining productivity, and when we have a military that can’t even put on its combat boots without first getting a lecture on the systemic racism underlying bootlaces.

We’re saved!

That’s according to Congresscritter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Planet Wambino), at a congressional hearing last week in which she complained about everything from college debt to economic decline.

AOC sees a future when a unionized “civilian climate corps” will put people to work ” with “no age limit to participation” on “the externalities of climate change, in reforesting land, in carbon mitigation.”

Ocasio-Cortez went on (and on):

“We have a student loan crisis, a housing crisis, a climate crisis … how on earth can we possibly overcome this? I think one of the ways that we overcome it is by being one of the most unionized workforces and unionized generations in American history. By collecting our power as workers in the economy, we can take our futures back.”

The tricky part? The work done by her civilian climate corps is “not profitable.”

Exactly how we’re supposed to get back to the “thriving economy” the U.S. had “when we were kids,” according to AOC, while indulging in multibillion-dollar money-losing boondoggles, is a question best left to a Boston University-trained economics major.

Despite the easy-to-mock dumbskullery behind Ocasio-Cortez’s initiative, as always, there is a method to her seeming madness.

She tacitly admitted in that same hearing that her civilian climate corps is less about saving the environment than it is about indoctrinating young people and forcing unionization.

In addition to basically drafting young people (in violation of child labor laws) to plant trees, “What’s important about the civilian climate corps is that it is an on-ramp, and it can function as an on-ramp to unionization, when we plug this in with union labor,” she said.

When progressives say that they want to put children to work to further progressive pet causes, believe them.

With Its Power Grid Under Pressure, California Asks Residents to Avoid Charging Electric Vehicles.

Amid a West Coast heat wave that includes triple-digit temperatures, California’s power grid operators have called on residents to not use as much electricity so as to put less strain on the state’s beleaguered grid.

In the past week, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) told residents several times to voluntarily conserve energy, including asking them on social media to stop charging their electric vehicles (EVs) during peak usage times. The operator also warned users to “[avoid] use of large appliances and turning off extra lights.”

“This usually happens in the evening hours when solar generation is going offline and consumers are returning home and switching on air conditioners, lights, and appliances,” wrote the ISO.

And on June 18, the California Flex Alert Twitter page wrote that “now is the perfect time to do a load of laundry,” and urged residents to “remember to use major appliances, charge cars and devices before #FlexAlert begins at 6 p.m. today.”

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15 Years After Lauer’s BOTCHED Apocalypse Prediction: ‘Countdown to Doomsday’

One way in which journalists try and terrify viewers into endorsing every expensive environmental prescription is to constantly – and wrongly – predict the apocalypse is just around the corner. Fifteen years ago this week, the not-yet-disgraced Matt Lauer did exactly that with a two hour special outsourced to the SyFy Channel: Countdown to Doomsday. (We’re still here so the countdown must be continuing.)

On June 14, 2006, the then-NBC host declared, “We are the problem.” Demanding fast action, Lauer warned that anything less would mean the end of humanity:

Today, life on Earth is disappearing faster than the days when dinosaurs breathed their last, but for a very different reason….Us homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid. Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives….The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home….It will take a massive global effort to make things right, but the solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption, develop green technologies.

As Media Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor pointed out when the special aired, Lauer adopted the tired (and always wrong) trope about over population:

Had this been the History Channel instead of the SciFi Channel, someone might have pointed out to Lauer that claim has been around for more than 200 years. It traces back to 1798 and Thomas Malthus whose work “An Essay on the Principle of Population” has been proven wrong as the world population has grown.

In 2008, ABC aired a paranoid special called Earth 2100 and declared that New York City would be under water by 2015. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.) In a flashback to that special’s wrong predictions, I wrote:

The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.” (In reality, gas costs an average of $2.75.)

But don’t worry, journalist will keep predicting environmental doom. And they’ll likely keep being wrong.

Liz Peek: Joe Biden, after 100 days, finally talks truth — cutting US carbon emissions won’t matter

President Joe Biden, contrary to expectations, said something consequential in his first address to members of Congress…by mistake.

It was a whopper that went unnoticed on Wednesday night; with just a few ill-chosen words Biden utterly toppled any justification for the Green New Deal, which plays a central role in his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and which, without a doubt, puts our economy at risk.

This is what he said, according to a New York Times transcript of the president’s remarks: “The United States accounts, as all of you know, for less than 15 percent of carbon emissions. The rest of the world accounts for 85 percent. That’s why I kept my commitment to rejoin the Paris Accord, because if we do everything perfectly, it’s not going to matter.”

That was not in the version of the speech the White House handed out ahead of time.

No wonder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris looked visibly anxious throughout the president’s remarks: they were petrified he could make just exactly this kind of goof.

This is not a “gotcha moment”, where a politician is caught embellishing his life story or fabricating excuses for some misdeed. On the contrary, Joe Biden was being honest.

And, for once in his life, Joe Biden was completely correct. Even if the Biden White House clobbers our economy, puts every last coal miner and oil driller out of work and drives down U.S. fossil fuel production and consumption, it will barely bend the curve on rising global emissions.

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When Bill Gates says “you can get used to the taste” of beef substitutes, the proper reply is, “No, you can get used to the taste.”

Does Biden’s Climate Agenda Mean ‘Red Meat Passports’ Are Coming?

Joe Biden’s climate agenda, which he announced this week, is such a violation of everything it means to live in a free country that it actually is hard to understand how he thinks he can get away with it.

The plan, announced during a two-day climate summit that began on Earth Day, calls for the slashing of carbon emissions by over half in less than ten years, and the United States becoming a zero-emissions economy by 2050.

While Biden hasn’t released the details of this plan yet, experts say that it will take huge changes to accomplish Biden’s climate objectives. While electric cars currently only make up about 2 percent of new passenger vehicle sales, Biden’s insane objectives would require electric vehicles to make up 65 percent of new cars and SUVs, along with 10 percent of new truck sales.

If your home is heated by oil  or natural gas, you’ll have to get an electric heat pump installed.

Experts say the economic shifts of Biden’s plan will cost Americans trillions of dollars.

But, worse yet, in addition to changing the kind of cars we drive and how we heat our homes, Biden’s plan may force Americans to limit our consumption of red meat.

That’s right, in Biden’s version of America, you might have to cut your consumption of red by a whopping 90 percent. According to a study from Michigan University’s Center for Sustainable Systems, to meet the changes proposed by Joe Biden, Americans would only be allowed to consume four pounds of red meat annually.

To put that in perspective, your red meat consumption would be limited to one typical hamburger per month.

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John Kerry Wants To Kill All The Plants.

Kill the plants! That’s what John Kerry advocated for during today’s global climate summit lecture fest.

Joe Biden declared this morning that SCIENCE IS BACK!

Uh huh. Let’s have the U.S. cut MORE emissions while China laughs in the background. Let’s have the U.S. host a global climate summit that end up resembling a gong show due to all the technical difficulties.

But science baby! It’s back! Never mind that screeching harpy Greta Thunberg blames the U.S. for its role in emissions when India, China, and Russia are the world’s leading culprits, the SCIENCE is clear!!

If we don’t achieve 50% emissions decrease within the next few years, we are all doomed. So, how do we get there?

“By 2030, half the country’s electricity would come from renewable sources such as wind, solar or hydropower, up from one-fifth today.

New natural gas plants would largely be built with technology that can capture carbon dioxide, instead of releasing it into the atmosphere — technology that is still in its infancy.

Virtually all of the 200 remaining coal plants would shut down unless they, too, can capture their emissions and bury them underground.

By 2030, two-thirds of new cars and S.U.V.s sold would be battery-powered, up from roughly 2 percent today.

All new buildings would be heated by electricity rather than natural gas.

The nation’s cement, steel and chemical industries would adopt stringent new energy-efficiency targets.

Oil and gas producers would slash emissions of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, by 60 percent.

The nation’s forests would expand, and farming practices would be reworked, so that they pull 20 percent more carbon dioxide out of the air than they do today.”

Oh. Is that all? Read item two again. Then read the last item. Now let’s listen to John Kerry. Don’t whine, it’ll be over quick.

I’ll admit it, I laughed so hard at this. First of all, what Kerry said is the very epitome of junk science. Secondly, he did so with all the lemmings nodding their head while he sits in front of a …PLANT display!

Refer again to the “ideas” list above, then listen to John Kerry again. Add more forests, but get rid of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere! The dude needs a refresher in biology!

 

Exactly! To be exact:

“Carbon dioxide is a gas consisting of one part carbon and two parts oxygen. It is one of the most important gases on the earth because plants use it to produce carbohydrates in a process called photosynthesis. Since humans and animals depend on plants for food, photosynthesis is necessary for the survival of life on earth. [Emphasis Added]”

Fresh air, air that helps plants GROW so that we can use them for food, warmth, and shelter is necessary to the Earth’s survival. It’s hugely necessary for OUR survival. To be sure, as the push grows for more air tight energy efficient buildings (which take fresh air away from us), carbon dioxide INSIDE our homes, hospitals, and businesses is and should be a real concern.

Yet Kerry is advocating for killing all the plants by taking CO2 out of our atmosphere.

Does he want this plant to freeze? Evidently so. But hey! Once all the plant, animal, and human life is gone, we won’t have to deal with climate activists wheeling cute pink wheelbarrows loaded with cow manure around will we?

Happy Groundhog Day!

Happy Groundhog Day Earth Day everybody! You can see how it is possible to confuse the two, since Earth Day is the same every year—we’re doomed unless you hand over complete power to the government to manage people and resources.

QED: On Earth Day 1970, CBS’s Walter Cronkite Panicked: ‘Act or Die!’

15 spectacularly stupid predictions from the first Earth Day 

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 51 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever, or  until people finally get fed up enough with them and get out the tar and feathers, if not something more ‘permanent’.

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AOC Introduces a New and Improved Green New Deal.

With Representative Ocasio-Cortez reintroducing her Green New Deal bill and Joe Biden pledging to halve carbon emissions in the U.S. in less than 10 years, and after the “Climate Summit” goes virtual on April 22, America is going to be so green we’ll be mistaken for an artichoke.

There’s no time to lose. The earth is doomed unless we stop poisoning our atmosphere with the exhalation of so many politicians and world leaders. If they stopped and held their breath for a day or two, we’d be carbon neutral in a jiffy.

It’s too bad that’s not a real solution, but we’d at least be spared the ministrations of AOC and her climate police who are chomping at the bit to upend the lives of 300 million people.

“We’re going to transition to a 100 percent carbon free-economy, that is more unionized, more just, more dignified and guarantees more health care and housing than we ever have before,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference overlooking the National Mall. “Do we intend on sending a message to the Biden administration that we need to go bigger and bolder? The answer is absolutely yes.”

If we’re more “dignified,” does that mean I have to wear a shirt around the house?

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This is an alternate tactic the gun grabbers have been trying for decades. Getting their econutz shills to sue to ban lead bullets and shot.

Judge Affirms Hunters Can Use Traditional Ammo in NRA Case

On April 1st, a federal judge in Arizona sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club International and held that hunters’ use of traditional ammo does not violate federal environmental law.

The case dates back to 2012, when a group sued the U.S. Forest Service. The group alleged that by allowing hunters to hunt with traditional lead ammo in the 1.6-million-acre Kaibab National Forest—which is authorized by Arizona state law—the Forest Service was violating the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. That Act was originally passed in 1976, to address the increasing amount of municipal and industrial waste that was being disposed of at the time. But over time, it has been used to attack gun owners and shooting ranges.

On April 1st, the judge held that the Forest Service is not disposing any waste by allowing hunters to hunt in accordance with state laws. But the case had even bigger implications. The Plaintiff was asking the court to order the Forest Service regulate hunting. But the states own the wildlife, even while it is on federal lands. “Each national forest,” the judge said, “is required to cooperate with state wildlife agencies to allow hunting in ‘accordance with the requirements of State laws.”’ A ruling to the contrary would have given the federal government the authority to enter a field of regulation that belongs to the states on lands where hunting takes place. Those implications would be huge because 640-million acres (about twenty-eight percent of the country) is owned and managed by the federal government. Thankfully, the judge sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club.

NRA-ILA will continue to protect the rights of hunters everywhere to use commonly owned and affordable ammunition to hunt and enjoy public lands.

The case is called Center for Biological Diversity v. United States Forest Service. The National Shooting Sports Foundation also intervened as a defendant in the case.

HOW MUCH HAS THE EARTH ACTUALLY WARMED?

Maybe the only good thing about covid hysteria is that it has, for a while, drowned out global warming hysteria. Still, many people have the impression that global temperatures have warmed alarmingly in recent decades. Unfortunately, there is no reliable record of surface temperatures for a number of reasons, including the fact that the activists who are in charge of the records keep changing them to promote the alarmist position.

But that is all right, since warming due to carbon dioxide doesn’t occur at the surface, it occurs in the atmosphere. The only reliable, unfudged record we have of global temperatures is the satellite record in the lower troposphere, which only goes back to 1979. This is the global temperature trend from then until now:

This means that “[t]he linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).” In other words, at the warming rate that has prevailed since 1979–assuming it continues–the Earth’s average temperature would rise by one degree in 70 years.

How much of that is due to human activity, as opposed to natural variation (e.g., rebounding to normal temperatures after the Little Ice Age), no one knows.

Biden sued by 12 states over climate executive order: ‘Enormous expansion of federal regulatory power’
Lawsuit argues that Biden does not have the authority to set a ‘social cost’ for greenhouse gases

A coalition of 12 states is suing President Biden’s administration over a climate executive order that they claim has the potential to have a serious economic impact across the country through the expansion of federal regulatory power.

The suit, which is being led by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, was filed on Monday. State attorneys general from Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah also joined the action.

It alleges that Biden’s Executive Order 13990, titled “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis,” does not have the authority to issue binding numbers for the “social cost” of greenhouse gases to be used in federal regulations.

The breakdown of the social costs shows $269 billion for carbon dioxide, $990 billion for methane, and $8.24 trillion for nitrous oxide – totaling approximately $9.5 trillion, according to the lawsuit, which cited interim values determined by an interagency working group that was created by Biden’s order.

Schmitt said that those potential regulations will stifle manufacturing and harm agriculture in Missouri, where state figures show that hundreds of thousands of people work in those industries.

“Under President Biden’s executive order, which he didn’t have the authority to enact, these hard-working Missourians who have lived and worked this land for generations, could be left in the dust,” Schmitt said in a written press release.

But the suit claims that the impact from the $9.5 trillion “social cost” of greenhouse gases will stretch farther than just Missouri.

“In practice, this enormous figure will be used to justify an equally enormous expansion of federal regulatory power that will intrude into every aspect of Americans’ lives— from their cars, to their refrigerators and homes, to their grocery and electric bills,” the suit states.

The lawsuit argues that Biden’s order does not have the authority to set values for the social costs of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide that will be used by regulatory agencies.

“It will be used to inflict untold billions or trillions of dollars of damage to the U.S. economy for decades to come,” the suit states.

In claiming that Biden’s order cannot set these values, the suit claims that the action violates the separation of powers, “the most fundamental bulwark of liberty.”

BLUF:
The constant push for fascism from our corrupt, lickspittle media, such as the Los Angeles Times cited above, only exacerbates the situation. Without the media-driven madness surrounding the Wuhan flu, few ever would have noticed it. Without the airy-fairy theory of “global warming,” most sane people would have gone about their lives completely unaffected by the madness of others.

And, really, who would buy an electric car, except as a virtue-signalling status symbol? Only at gunpoint, I suspect.

On the Left, an Era of Fascist Magical Thinking.

The genius of the Left’s success in achieving their favored policy positions is found in their favorite tactic: first, posit a counter-factual [fancy speak for a bald faced lie ed.] and, second, act on it as if it were true — with maximum governmental force.

Examples abound: that men can transform themselves into biological women by simply wishing it to happen, and then can be protected — nay, favored — by a raft of new laws designed for their “protection.” That the real women are offtimes physically damaged by this malignant fantasy matters not one bit. After all, “rights” are more important that reality.

The mass hysteria over the nearly non-existent threat of Covid-19 to the great mass of humanity is another. Yes, Covid has been hell on morbidly obese people over the age of 85 (just about any illness is), but to shut down the world’s economies and, worse, political freedoms in order to protect “the most vulnerable among us” (in one of the Left’s favorite simpering phrases), was not only insane, it was evil.

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At What Point Do We Realize Bill Gates is Dangerously Insane?

“What this comes down to, though, is that Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong”

This isn’t an overreaction to Gates’ latest foray into the news cycle. It’s an observation based on a long pattern of statements and behavior by the founder of Microsoft and one of the richest men who has ever lived which, were any of us normal people guilty of them, would result in our being institutionalized.

Bill Gates is crazy. And he’s dangerous, because he’s willing to put untold sums of money toward making the insane things he believes a reality – and all of those insane things hurt people.

The most recent idiocy? Impossible Burgers for all the white people.

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Favoring renewable energy over natural gas investment has led to the mess.

I’m writing from Texas, so I’ll try to finish this column before the electricity goes out.

As you may have heard, we’ve had an unusually powerful winter storm down here and, in spite of the fact that every third household has a four-wheel-drive super-duty pickup truck, Texas has come to a standstill. When a little bit of ice settled on the freeway, a half a dozen people lost their lives in the ensuing 135-car pileup.

Meanwhile, after years of mocking Californians for their self-imposed energy troubles, Texans are experiencing rolling blackouts — and a whole lot of blackouts that refuse to roll on but instead sit obstinately in place — because our power grid cannot keep up with the spike in demand.

As in California, Texas’s energy scarcity is largely artificial: The state produces an extraordinary amount of natural gas, but there has been a woeful underinvestment in infrastructure ranging from pipelines to winterizing equipment at utilities. You may as well not have the fuel at all if you can’t get it to where it’s needed or use it once it’s there.

What Texas has invested in is renewables, especially wind. These have performed especially poorly: The state’s electric-grid regulator reports that though wind and solar still make up a relatively small share of the state’s overall energy mix, they accounted for 40 percent of the capacity shut down by the storm: Out of the 45 gigawatts that went dark, 18 gigawatts were from wind and solar.

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