Category: Econut O’ The Day

Vanderbilt professor: Climate change stories ‘cater to the white consciousness.’

A professor of English at Vanderbilt University recently gave a talk about how the genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has a problem with “its intersection [of] race and genre.”

Teresa Goddu  whose advocacy led to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor, told an audience at the Novel Seminar Series that climate fiction in the United States “depicts the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis,” The Hustler reports.

Such stories “often represent white, mostly privileged characters in communities becoming destabilized if not undone by climate catastrophe,” Goddu said. “Climate punctures the bubble of safety and security that cocoons the white psyche.”

Goddu added that she is “tired” of the focus on whiteness in climate stories, or “texts that actually just reify whiteness.” As a result, she’s working on “encompassing slave and neo-slave narratives” into such tales to “expand the canon.”

“I really think a lot of climate fiction is being written, but not recognized as such, especially African American literature,” Goddu said. “I want to expand […] what is considered climate fiction and [redefine] what we are actually reading and paying attention to.”

Looking ahead, Goddu said she hopes her work will expand the genre and leverage optimism, satire and new tropes to innovate the body of work and reimagine a better, more sustainable future.

“I am more interested in reading stories that reimagine possible futures or teach me about the structures, historically and currently, that I live within,” Goddu said. “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”

According to her faculty bio, Goddu’s research deals with “slavery and antislavery, race and American culture [and] genre studies.” In a 2021 interview, Goddu said she began “noticing how the antislavery movement was being invoked by climate activists as a model.”

“This led me to consider what social change my own moment demanded of me and how I might bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,” she said. “It made sense to connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”

Seven years ago another Vanderbilt academic, Ed Rubin, offered a pair of courses on cli-fi: “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi” and “Climate Change Literature: A New Fictional Genre about a Real Problem.” Many of the titles on his reading list (“Earth Abides,” “The Postman,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) are Euro/white-centric.

Earth’s atmosphere can clean itself, breakthrough study finds.

Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery that could change the way we think about air pollution. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that a strong electric field between airborne water droplets and surrounding air can create a molecule called hydroxide (OH) by a previously unknown mechanism.

This molecule is crucial in helping to clear the air of pollutants, including greenhouse gases and other chemicals.

The discovery is outlined in a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the traditional thinking around the formation of OH in the atmosphere is incomplete. Until now, it was thought that sunlight was the primary driver of OH formation, but this new research shows that OH can be created spontaneously by the special conditions on the surface of water droplets.

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Tree Euthanasia? Climate Alarmists Now Warn That Our Forests Will Worsen Global Warming

Back in the 1970s, when trees became almost a protected class, we heard that we had to ditch paper supermarket bags (and move to plastic) because we were decimating too many forests. Now, 50 years later, with more tree cover in the U.S. than a century ago, the greentopians have another complaint:

American forests will become CO2 emitters by 2070, they aver, joining 10 protected forests worldwide that already are net spewers of the gas.

Reflecting the complaints many misanthropic leftists have about people, the issue is that as trees age they become takers: Their growth slows and they use less CO2. In fact, the amount metabolized is lower than that produced by wildfires and dead-tree decomposition.

True to form, some scientists have suggested as a “remedy” what is already applied to people: euthanasia — with the arboreal version involving destroying senior-citizen trees and replacing them with young whippersnapper ones. Whether such a great replacement would involve foreign-tree imports was not revealed.

(Thankfully, U.S. Department of Agriculture experts dismiss this idea as being based on poor science.)

As for the tree-villain story, ScienceAlert informs:

An alarming report from the US Department of Agriculture predicts that by 2070, the nation’s forests will release substantially more carbon than they store.

Forests in the US – bar those in Alaska – will no longer absorb 150 million metric tons of carbon a year within five decades, experts say.

That carbon is equivalent to the emissions of roughly 40 coal power plants.

To understand how a carbon sink can become a carbon tap, we have to consider the lifecycle of a healthy forest, where new growth matures into old growth and old growth dies and makes room for new growth.

But today, in North America, not enough young trees are being planted and allowed to grow up.

This means that mature forests are outpacing young forests, which are also more likely to be harvested or killed due to climate effects like wildfires, drought, or storms.

The overall shift to an older age cohort of trees means that in the future, forests in the US could be dying more than they are growing.

Practically, this turns forests from carbon absorbers to carbon emitters.

Old growth trees hold the most carbon in total, but after reaching a certain size, their growth seems to slow. Young trees, on the other hand, rapidly take up carbon for growth.

My, not since Babes in Toyland have big old trees seemed so frightful. What’s really supposed to terrify us, though, is the big bad gaseous “threat” CO2. Yet this fear is as irrational as worrying about walking, talking trees.

The first suspicious thing about the climate-alarmist appeal is the terminology: Calling CO2 “carbon” is like calling H2O “hydrogen.” “Man, am I thirsty. I gotta get me a big glass of hydrogen.”

Then there’s, “The lawn’s lookin’ a bit brown. Tell Timmy to get the hose and hydrogen the grass.”

Yeah, it’s that ridiculous.

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GloBull Warming………..

Greenland’s 2022-’23 Ice Coverage Well Above 1981-2010 Average Despite ‘Global Boiling’ Rhetoric.

Since the early 2000s there has been no net change in the Greenland ice sheet mean annual surface temperature, as well as no net change in melt extent percentage.

Greenland’s ice coverage was, for most of this year (September 1, 2022 to August 31, 2023), observed to be significantly above the long-term (1981-2010) climate average. The Greenland ice sheet didn’t even cooperate with the narrative during the “global boiling” melt months of July and August.

Image Source: PolarPortal

Greenland has been defying the narrative for decades now. After a brief, sharp warming from 1994 to the early 2000s, the mean annual land surface temperatures (LST) have been trendless since about 2003. Since 2012, Greenland has been cooling (Fang et al., 2023). Compare the colorized Greenland temperature trends lineup for 2007-2012 to the 2013-2020 period (bottom).

Image Source: Fang et al., 2023

A trendless temperature record also manifests as non-significant change in melt extent as a percentage of surface area as well as the the mass balance for the whole ice sheet, especially from about 2005 onwards.

Image Source: Fang et al., 2023

Other scientists have also reported Greenland warming “is not evident” (Matsumura et al., 2022) in recent decades. Instead, temperature stations document net cooling trends from 2001-2019 (Hanna et al., 2021).

Image Source: Matsumura et al., 2022
Image Source: Hanna et al., 2021

EVs Are Supposed to Be Cheap to Maintain—Our Kia EV6 Isn’t So Far
The EV6’s first service visit left us scratching our heads and $200 poorer.

Our 2022 Kia EV6 recently went in for its first scheduled service, something we initially assumed would be an easy, mundane task. Electric vehicles, after all, have simple powertrains with fewer moving parts than their gas-powered counterparts—and no oil changes! This is supposed to make EVs cheaper to maintain. So you can imagine my surprise when it came time to pick up our EV6 and I was slapped with a $230 invoice. Thank goodness for company credit cards.

The shocking bill capped off what began as a crummy Sunday morning. While I was loading the EV6 for a day at the beach with my pup, I noticed a completely flat driver’s side rear tire thanks to a screw. It was in a spot on the tread that looked patchable, but since the EV6 doesn’t have a spare tire (only a liquid seal kit that would’ve ruined the tire), I decided to take advantage of Kia’s free roadside assistance and have it towed to my local dealership with a service department that was open on Sundays. Big kudos to them for that.

Requesting roadside service was easy and quick, with the tow truck arriving at my house within 30 minutes. Once we arrived at the dealership, it was quickly determined the tire was not patchable and needed to be replaced. Thankfully, they had one in stock. Our EV6 was just a few hundred miles away from needing its first service, so I requested to have that done while I was there.

According to the owner’s manual, the 8,000-mile service includes a tire rotation and inspection. The list of items to inspect includes brakes, suspension, drive shafts, the 12-volt battery, in-cabin air filter, and more. Nothing out of the ordinary. Which is why we left scratching our heads at the $230 bill, including an “EV service port cleaner” procedure that I didn’t request but was performed nonetheless for $51. If we subtract that interesting port cleaning service, the total for this routine service visit was $179. Still a pretty penny for what amounted to a peek under the frunk and shuffling around a few tires (one of which was getting worked on anyway).

We appreciate this dealership taking us in on a Sunday and Kia’s quick and free roadside tow, but the excessive service cost soured the experience. Thankfully, our encounter appears to be an anomaly. For starters, the same service performed on our otherwise identical long-term Hyundai Ioniq 5 only set us back about $50. And numerous EV6 forums show other owners paying anywhere between $20 and $50 for the first service. We found none over $100, and some were complimentary. Which is what it should be. What better way to build rapport and loyalty than providing free inspections? If such a dealership exists in the L.A. area, we’ll be sure to go there for our next service visit.

Do Gun-Control Groups Care What Really Causes Mass Shootings? Everytown Lawsuit Says No

The Biden administration has already put nearly 2,000 gun sellers out of business in just two years. Just a few years ago, a lawsuit helped drive the 200-year-old Remington Arms into bankruptcy. But activists won’t stop suing gun shops and anyone else that comes close to the industry.

Last week, attorneys from Everytown Law, the legal arm of Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, filed a lawsuit against a shop that sold the gun used in the fatal shooting of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022. The murderer is a racist who specifically targeted racial minorities. Everytown claims the attack “could have been prevented,” but in fact, the gun seller performed all of the proper background checks.

Others are also being sued, including the 18-year-old murderer’s parents and social media companies that allegedly “transformed and addicted” the murderer by allowing extremist content on their sites.

But the lessons from this shooting, like many other mass public shootings, are hiding in plain sight. One needs only to read the killer’s manifesto.

“Areas where CCW [carrying a concealed weapon] are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack,” wrote the shooter. “Areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack.”

But Everytown ignores those quotes. Nor does the organization mention that the Buffalo mass murderer self-identified as an “eco-fascist national socialist” and a member of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.” The shooter expressed concern that minority immigrants have too many children and will damage the environment. “The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world,” he wrote. “Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

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Evergrande.

The news was all over the media. The default wasn’t yesterday; they got in trouble in 2021 and had sought a “moratorium” in the first week of 2022!

So how is it that nobody gave a crap for the last two years? You’d be carried out on your shield by now and long-ago eaten by worms if you shorted the US market into the original default 2 years ago.

Witness Lahaina. HE, the power company, spent basically all of their money on “green” initiatives rather than basic maintenance and hardening to reduce wildfire risk. They were trading close to $40 before the fires and yesterday touched close to $10; a wild-eyed 75% collapse. That’s a utility and of course now there is a serious financial risk from lawsuits — richly-deserved, if the article in the WSJ is all factual.

But that’s a microcosm of all the distortions that have been embedded in the so-called “green economy”; the virus was also part of it, and the government had their foot on the scale in the “rah-rah” side of it because everyone loves a higher stock market.

The problem is that how you got it matters.

If you got it because the company expanded its business organically, it beat others in the market because they were at least two of “better, faster, cheaper” then you’ve got a sustainable and reasonable price.

If you got it because the government subsidized bad behavior — uneconomic things that cannot work over time because they violate the laws of thermodynamics and are predicated on feelings and political promises then you get a crash because there is nothing under any of the so-called “improvement” beyond hot air.

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‘Man-made climate change’ is ‘manufactured nonsense’ driven by profit motive: climate change scientist

A once darling of the climate alarmism community-turned skeptic climate scientist Judith Curry told John Stossel that the “man-made climate change” narrative is a “manufactured consensus” because researchers found that they could make money pushing it.

The video released on Tuesday pointed out how some scientists take aggressive attempts to hide data that shows that climate change isn’t a crisis. She said they do “Ugly things” such as “Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired.”

“The origins go back to the…U.N. environmental program,” Curry said about the “climate changed industry.” She noted that some UN officials were motivated by “anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.”

She pointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was set up “to look for dangerous human-caused climate change” and “not focus on any benefits of warming.”

Curry discussed how science journals aided in promoting one side of the narrative. She pointed to an instance of an editor of the journal “Science” who once wrote, “The time for debate has ended” in a political rant.

“What kind of message does that give?” she asked. Then said it promotes “the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.”

Curry was highly promoted after she published a study that showed an increase in hurricane intensity. She said, “We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled.”

“This was picked up by the media, alarmists said ‘Oh, here is the way to do it.’ Tie extreme weather events to global warming!” she added.

Curry said after that she was “treated like a rockstar.” She added that she was “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”

However, it was after seeing critics of her work point to other periods with lower levels of hurricanes that she went back to investigate. She said it turns out “Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability.”

The man-made climate change narrative has shifted public policy on a global level. The Biden administration has a goal to reduce greenhouse admissions by 50 percent by 2030. A goal that has cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to meet it. The administration gave the Environmental protection agency $576 billion in the 2022 omnibus spending bill.

Climate czar John Kerry recently claimed that their climate policies were not rooted in ideology but “math, mathematics, and science, about physics.” In June, Multnomah County in Oregon filed a lawsuit against oil companies, alleging that they caused a heat wave in 2021.

There’s too much money in geoengineering for “climate change” not to turn into a business. The Biden administration is already studying blocking the sunlight. Now Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement joins Solar Radiation Modification.
-Richard Fernandez

Meta’s former CTO has a new $50 million project: ocean-based carbon removal

A nonprofit formed by Mike Schroepfer, Meta’s former chief technology officer, has spun out a new organization dedicated to accelerating research into ocean alkalinity enhancement—one potential means of using the seas to suck up and store away even more carbon dioxide.

Additional Ventures, cofounded by Schroepfer, and a group of other foundations have committed $50 million over five years to the nonprofit research program, dubbed the Carbon to Sea Initiative. The goals of the effort include evaluating potential approaches; eventually conducting small-scale field trials in the ocean; advancing policies that could streamline permitting for those experiments and provide more public funding for research; and developing the technology necessary to carry out and assess these interventions if they prove to work well and safely.

The seas already act as a powerful buffer against the worst dangers of climate change, drawing down about a quarter of human-driven carbon dioxide emissions and absorbing the vast majority of global warming. Carbon dioxide dissolves naturally into seawater where the air and ocean meet.

But scientists and startups are exploring whether these global commons can do even more to ease climate change, as a growing body of research finds that nations now need to both slash emissions and pull vast amounts of additional greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to keep warming in check.

Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) refers to various ways of adding alkaline substances, like olivine, basalt, or lime, into seawater. These basic materials bind with dissolved inorganic carbon dioxide in the water to form bicarbonates and carbonates, ions that can persist for tens of thousands of years in the ocean. As those CO2-depleted waters reach the surface, they can pull down additional carbon dioxide from the air to return to a state of equilibrium.

The ground-up materials could be added directly to ocean waters from vessels, placed along the coastline, or used in onshore devices that help trigger reactions with seawater.

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Biden Admin Blasted As Nationwide Lightbulb Ban Begins: ‘Impossible For Democrats To Leave Us Alone.’

It seems like only yesterday that Democrats were openly mocking Americans for worrying that the Joe Biden administration was coming for their gas stoves.

“Nobody is taking away your gas stove,” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) scoffed.

Since then, it’s been proven that the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) has said that a potential ban “is on the table amid rising concern about harmful indoor air pollutants emitted by the appliances.”

Like any conspiracy theory Democrats deny, it eventually came true.

And likewise, anything liberals can get their grubby little paws on, they will.

Enter a nationwide lightbulb ban set to begin Tuesday. The ban, which General Electric warned consumers about last year as being “inconvenient,” will prohibit manufacturers from making, and retailers from selling, incandescent and similar halogen light bulbs.

 

Lightbulb Ban Blasted

Several lawmakers lashed out at the Biden administration’s pending nationwide ban on lightbulbs, with Representative Bob Good (R-VA) leading the way by conveying a succinct yet important point.

“It’s impossible for Democrats to leave us alone,” he tweeted. “States must fight back.”

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