Category: Econut O’ The Day

A CBS News Report From Over 40 Years Ago Proves Global Warming Is the Ultimate Hoax.

As loyal Townhall readers, you already know about the media hysterics over global warming. Still, digging up old clips proving how wrong the experts were about this subject is constantly refreshing. Based on their timelines, we’re supposed to be dead. Based on their advice, the only way for us to survive is to be poorer and let more people from third-world nations die from preventable diseases. That’s the nasty undercurrent within the population control folks. If it’s not that, these so-called activists are obsessed with controlling the means of production in the industrialized world to save Mother Earth. It’s backdoor communism when you boil it all down.

The green folks want us to sacrifice trillions in economic activity to save the planet. That’s the byproduct of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which aims to ban the internal combustion engine. Anyways, here’s a 1982 CBS News segment on the subject, where the godfather of fake news, Dan Rather, anchors the end times projections from these environmental clowns, who predicted that 25 percent of Florida would be underwater. Also, our agriculture centers would have to relocate to Canada. Look out for an appearance by a young Al Gore:

In 1975, Newsweek published an article about global cooling, in which re-glaciation was projected to hit the North American continent. Massive granaries holding seedlings were advised to be built since food shortages could be rampant. This event never happened. The same folks warned that the Arctic Ice Cap could melt by 2013. It didn’t.

So, when the same people warn about how we’re all going to die in 12 years, just replay this 1982 segment. They said that same nonsense over 40 years ago. None of it came true.

Ahhhhh hahahahah. Ahhhhhh HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Gas fracking for lithium production?
In order for the US to meet its domestic lithium demand to power all of the electric vehicles we are going to be compelled to buy, we have to engage in natural gas fracking?
YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS IRONY UP.

A Vast, Untapped Source of Lithium Has Just Been Found in The US

Almost two centuries after California’s gold rush, the United States is on the brink of a lithium rush. As demand for the material skyrockets, government geologists are rushing to figure out where the precious element is hiding.

In September 2023, scientists funded by a mining company reported finding what could be the largest deposit of lithium in an ancient US supervolcano. Now public researchers on the other side of the country have uncovered another untapped reservoir – one that could cover nearly half the nation’s lithium demands.

It’s hiding in wastewater from Pennsylvania’s gas fracking industry.

Lithium is arguably the most important element in the nation’s renewable energy transition – the material of choice for electric vehicle batteries. And yet, there is but one large-scale lithium mine in the US, meaning for the moment the country has to import what it needs.

Officials at the US Department of Energy are desperate to change that. By 2030, they want all lithium produced domestically.

Expanding America’s lithium industry, however, is highly controversial, as mining can destroy natural environments, leach toxic chemicals, and intrude on sacred Indigenous land.

At the same time, however, lithium-ion batteries are considered a crucial technology in the world’s transition to renewable energy, storing electricity generated by the wind and the Sun. Finding a source of lithium that doesn’t cause more environmental destruction than necessary is key, but a clean solution is complicated.

Pennsylvania sits on a vein of sedimentary rock known as the Marcellus Shale, which is rich in natural gas. The geological foundation was deposited almost 400 million years ago by volcanic activity, and it contains lithium from volcanic ash.

Over vast stretches of time, deep groundwater has dissolved the lithium in these rocks, essentially “mining the subsurface”, according to Justin Mackey, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania.

“We just didn’t know how much was in there,” says Mackey.

Because of its location, Pennsylvania is a leading state in controversial fracking activities, which have spurred numerous environmental and health concerns.

Such practices could squander precious lithium. As this new study shows, in properly measuring lithium reserves in fracking wastewater, there could be another way to put the waste to good use.

The regional analysis is based on data from oil and gas companies, which report the elements found in their wastewater to government officials. Mackey and his colleagues considered data collected from 2012 to 2023 from the wastewater of 515 wells in Pennsylvania.

Their results suggest that the Marcellus Shale “has the capacity to provide significant lithium yields for the foreseeable future” – as long as fracking continues, that is.

If scientists can extract even a conservative amount of lithium from fracking wastewater in the state, they calculate it could meet more than 30 percent of the current US demand.

To fulfill our climate goals, global demand for lithium is expected to increase by 400 percent in the coming decades. It remains to be seen how lithium requirements will be met and what new environmental crises those solutions might wreak.

The study was published in Scientific Reports.

I suggest he provide the example

Climate Professor Thinks We Should ‘Cull’ the Human Population to Reach Emissions Targets

Professor Bill McGuire is a well-known vulcanologist and climate scientist who doesn’t care much for humanity. He tweeted out a scathingly brilliant idea if you’re in the mortuary business or work as a grave digger.

“If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic #climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.” https://t.co/hzga69EhV3
— Bill McGuire (@ProfBillMcGuire) May 11, 2024

Ooopsie. McGuire deleted the tweet a few hours later but had no regrets. The trouble is, we just don’t understand how brilliant he is.

Really? Many would beg to differ.

Even his peers were aghast at his suggestion.

“Eco-fascism,” indeed.

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Queen Greta has exposed the truth about the green movement.

So, Greta Thunberg has a new cause. She’s found a new crusade to throw her weight behind. Forget saving the planet – now she wants to save Palestine.

Yes, the pint-sized prophetess of doom has swapped raging against industrialism for raging against Israel. Mother Nature will just have to wait – her erstwhile valiant defender is busy fixing the Middle East now.

Yesterday, Greta was snapped at the protest in Malmo, Sweden against Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.

She looked the part. She had a keffiyeh draped over her shoulders and a smug look on her face: the two must-haves of every puffed-up bourgeois activist who gets off on fuming against Israel.

The keffiyeh really has become the uniform of the self-righteous. Go into a hip coffee shop or overpriced Soho burger joint and I guarantee you’ll see a Gen Z’er decked out in the Palestinian scarf.

Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? Not long ago, the right-on raged against white dudes who wear their hair in dreadlocks and white women who don kominos. “Stop stealing other people’s culture!”, they’d yell. Yet now they themselves spend their days in Arab attire.

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No Cars For The Working Class

The electric streets of La La Land are full of Teslas, Rivians, Mercedes EQS’ and even pricier offerings from the rare earth mines of China. Here a Tesla Cybertruck, looking like a ramp some sportier vehicle will jump, passes Bentleys, canary yellow Lamborghinis and ice blue McLarens.

In the posher parts of California, from Beverly Hills to the Bay Area, the green revolution has come. The ubiquitous EVs charging in the driveways of seven figure mansions are shadowed by solar panels on the roof and sit side by side with signs declaring, “Hate has no home here.”

Neither does affordability.

The vast majority of electric cars, approaching 1 million, can be found in California. Compare that to the paltry 5,000 EVs in Arkansas or even the under 50,000 in a sizable wealthy blue state like Massachusetts. The entire industry of sleek shiny cars that run on batteries only exists because California taxed other car buyers to subsidize Tesla and its emerging counterparts.

California’s heavy subsidies and mild weather, its wealthy cities and conspicuously virtue signaling elites, made EVs possible, and made it impossible for them to evolve outside its warm leftist ecosystem. The vast majority of Californians (like most Americans) can’t afford, can’t use and won’t drive electric cars, but like so much else, the Newsom elites don’t tend to notice.

Electric car owners in California live in “communities with mostly white and Asian, college-educated and high-income residents” who are mostly “concentrated in Silicon Valley cities and affluent coastal areas of Los Angeles and Orange counties.” That’s why most electric cars are luxury SUVs marketed to very exclusive groups in very exclusive areas.

Outside of these enclaves, there isn’t much of an EV industry and there never will be one. Electric cars are not an emerging product, but a niche one as subsidized toys for the rich.

That’s a problem because the Biden administration, like a lot of Democrat states, is moving to ban cars by 2035. It’s one thing for California’s elites to once again disregard over 90% of the state on the assumption that a one-party system and aggressive ballot harvesting can overcome most obstacles, but the car bans have also extended to Maryland (46,060 EVs with 0.91%), Massachusetts (49,440 EVs and 0.91%), Connecticut (22,030 EVs and 0.75%), Oregon (46,980 EVs and 1.24%) and New York (84,670 EVs and 0.75%) among other blue states.

How do you get from those numbers to total adoption in a little over a decade? You don’t.

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Pete Buttigieg Hates Your Car, but Mostly He Thinks You’re an Idiot.

America’s eminently mockable Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, went on national TV on Tuesday to mock Americans who find that electric cars don’t suit their transportation needs.

“Sometimes, when these debates happen,” the failed former mayor of South Bend, Ind. told Fox News, “I feel like it’s the early 2000s and I’m talking to some people who think that we can just have landline phones forever.”

Spoiler: Nobody was saying that in the early 2000s. Even before the iPhone came out in 2007 and changed phones forever, Americans were snapping up Nokias and Blackberries and wondering if we still needed our landlines at all. As early as 2005, 69% of Americans already owned cell phones, which was pretty much the entire adult population. Six percent of households had even given up their landlines.

But back to SecTrans Buttigieg, who insisted, “Let’s be clear, the automotive sector is moving toward EVs and we can’t pretend otherwise.” This is like telling a death row prisoner that he’s moving towards the electric chair and can’t pretend otherwise. The prisoner might not want to make the “transition” to the next life, but the government has set a date for him — just like the Biden administration is trying to transition the entire country to EVs.

Even though Americans have to be bribed, browbeaten, and mandated into buying EVs, Buttigieg insisted that Big Government knows best — even when that Big Government is the one in Beijing. EVs are “the economically smart play,” he said. “We’ve been working to make sure that advantage comes back on American soil.” China has the opportunity to undercut more established players like Tesla precisely because Washington is trying to force a massive EV market into existence.

Tesla is the most successful electric vehicle company in the West, and its stock was sent plunging on Tuesday after reporting its first-ever year-on-year sales decline last quarter. “Tesla’s deliveries for the quarter fell far below even the most bearish of analysts’ expectations,” CNBC reported.

Overall, EV sales growth has slowed since 2022, despite billions spent on incentives and record-high prices for gas-powered cars.

Presidentish Joe Biden can’t even bribe people into building EV charging stations. Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act — really the Green New Deal in drag — set aside a massive $7.5 billion in your tax dollars for fulfilling Biden’s dream of building 500,000 new charging stations over the next few years. But just seven have been built in two years.

Seven. Even with all those government billions just waiting to be taken.

Maybe that’s because, while EV sales hit a record 1.2 million in the U.S. last year, they still represented just 7.6% of the vehicle market. While EV sales are expected to take maybe 10% of the market in 2024, there are so many locations, needs, and situations where EVs make no sense at all. Virtually mandating that they make up two-thirds or more of all sales by 2032, as the EPA did last month, is a quasi-religious crusade courtesy of the most anti-religious White House in history.

Still, at least we’ll always have Pete Buttigieg’s smug ignorance to mock.

Maine rejects sweeping electric vehicle mandate in blow to governor’s climate agenda.

Maine’s top environmental regulator rejected a proposed state electric vehicle (EV) mandate in a surprise vote, bucking climate concerns voiced by eco groups and Democrats.

The Maine Board of Environmental Protection (BEP) turned down the so-called Advanced Clean Cars program after receiving overwhelming opposition from stakeholders and citizens. The proposed program would have closely mirrored regulations approved in California, mandating that at least 51% of new car purchases in the state be electric by 2028 and 82% be electric by 2032.

“The Maine Board of Environmental Protection received nearly 1,800 comments from the people of Maine and nearly 84% were not in favor of this EV mandate,” Maine Senate Republican Leader Trey Stewart told Fox News Digital. “Maine is far too rural with far too few charging stations, and many Mainers are also concerned about the reliability of these vehicles in our extreme cold-weather months.”

Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills is pursuing a sweeping climate agenda, pushing both vehicle electrification and green energy development.
Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills is pursuing a sweeping climate agenda, pushing both vehicle electrification and green energy development. (Getty Images)

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Coast Guard Refuses to Enforce California’s New Environmental Regulation

The state of California is once again proving that it is a far-left outlier, and now even the U.S. Coast Guard won’t enforce one of the state’s outrageous new regulations because of “safety concerns” waiting to befall ships at sea.

The Coast Guard sent an official letter dated Feb. 21 to the California Air Resources Board to inform state officials that the branch will not penalize ships for lacking a new diesel exhaust particulate filter on their engines as required by a new state regulation.

In his letter, Rear Admiral Andrew M. Sugimoto, commander of the Eleventh District, told state officials that the new state regulation is dangerous because the devices that the state is demanding that ships install are prone to failure and have caused dangerous fires.

Adm. Sugimoto also pointed out that the diesel particulate filters (DPFs) called for by the CARB have not been approved for use by the Coast Guard or the federal government.

The admiral said that the Guard has concerns about “the potential safety issues over DPF operating temperatures” and that “DPFs verified by CARB may not necessarily be accepted by the Coast Guard for installation on inspected commercial vessels.”

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Klamath Dam Removal: ‘It’s an Environmental Disaster.’

‘They purposefully made a disaster and are leaving taxpayers and the locals to clean up their mess’
This is the first article in a series about the Klamath Dam Removal project in Siskiyou County. 

The removal of dams along the Klamath River in Siskiyou County, Northern California was sold as necessary to save salmon – specifically, “to restore habitat for endangered fish.”

The dams are part of the Klamath project, a series of seven dams built in the 1910’s and 1920’s in the Klamath Basin to bring electricity and agricultural water mitigation for Southern Oregon and Northern California, the Globe reported in 2020. However, in recent years, concerns over the dams’ effect on the wildlife and fishing industry have been raised, especially regarding claims of fish facing extinction because the dams.

Klamath Dam Removal Project. (Photo: KlamathRenewal.org)

In 2018, plans were released to destroy the dam system. However, those plans halted in 2019 because of data errors and issues over who owns the dams. The Bureau of Reclamation swiftly issued a study on the dams’ effects through 2024, leading to California to again push for destruction of the dams.

In June 2020, the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee halted plans again, ruling that PacificCorp, an Oregon utility company owned by Warren Buffett’s Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, would have to transfer it’s hydroelectric license and co-licensee with the Klamath River Renewal Corp., as well as pay $250 million toward getting out of the demolition project to avoid any liabilities around the demolition.

Governor Newsom implored Buffett to back the demolition project to save the salmon populations that Native American tribes in the area rely on. “The river is sick, and the Klamath Basin tribes are suffering,” said Newsom in his letter. “The Klamath dam removals are a shining example of what we can accomplish when we act according to our values.”

Many tribes also issued a joint letter with Governor Newsom in support of the dams destruction.

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The age of glorifying Greta Thunberg is over
‘We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project,’ said Thunberg with her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; twenty-four hours earlier the twenty-one-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. “We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project and this madness,” said Thunberg in English, her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck.

Some French media described Thunberg as an “anti-global warming icon” and the “figurehead in the fight to protect the planet.” She might have been once.

Now, however, in her ubiquitous keffiyeh, appearing to chant “Crush Zionism” or endorsing slogans such as “Palestine will be free” she has become — perhaps unwittingly — the figurehead for what conservative commentators in France call “the green alliance.”

Three years ago Jean Messiha, the spokesman for Éric Zemmour during his 2022 presidential campaign, wrote of this strange coalition between Islamists and ecologists: “They share one color: green. But not only that. They also share a totalitarian approach to society.”

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Victory to the French farmers

Europeans are right to rise up against our eco-obsessed elites.

A ‘siege of Paris’ is underway. Since Monday, thousands of tractors, trailers and combine harvesters have encircled the French capital, blocking key motorways in and out of the city. Roads around Lyon, Limoges and Toulouse have also been brought to a standstill by furious farmers.

French farmers have joined the Europe-wide fightback against the green agenda. In the Netherlands, farmers have been revolting for several years against their governments’ stringent restrictions on nitrogen emissions. A policy which, according to the Dutch government’s own figures, could lead to the closure of around 3,000 farms. In Ireland, farmers have risen up over green proposals to cull over 200,000 cows. In Germany, thousands of tractors descended on Berlin earlier this month, protesting against cuts to farm subsidies, tax hikes on diesel fuel and a raft of green rules that have made farmers’ lives intolerable.

Certainly, farmers in each of these countries have their own specific grievances. Every European government has proposed its own intrusive regulations or onerous tax hikes. But these are overwhelmingly driven by a common goal: to turn agriculture into a ‘Net Zero’ industry. And for EU member states, this lofty green goal is not a choice – it is a requirement of the EU’s so-called Green Deal.

These protests have quickly forced governments to sit up and listen. After just one day of the siege of Paris, the French government offered an array of concessions to the farming sector. New prime minister Gabriel Attal has abandoned a planned hike in diesel-fuel taxes for agricultural vehicles and has pledged millions of euros in grants for organic farms. He has promised to cut some red tape. And he has threatened to fine supermarkets that fail to offer producers a fair price for their wares. But none of this has been enough. Because as every farmer now knows, no amount of subsidies or tax breaks can disguise the coming catastrophe of Net Zero. A demented goal that no government seems prepared to abandon.

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