Category: Econut O’ The Day

The Climate Faithful Have Developed Religious Dietary Restrictions (and You Guessed It — We’ll All Be Expected to Eat This Way).

Jews eat kosher, Muslims have halal, Hindus eschew meat, and many Christians fast during Lent. So naturally, the fastest-growing religion today — earth and climate worship — is developing its own faith-based dietary restrictions.

“Climatarians” (also called “reducitarians” or “climavores”) are people who make their food choices based on how what they eat will impact the earth, with the aim of reducing their carbon “foodprint.” The Earthist version of original sin is that, simply by living, people commit climate sin every time they eat, breathe, travel, and heat or cool their homes. Naturally, the younger generations are the most pious Earthists, having been recently exposed to the most evangelical Earthist education system yet.

“Climavores, as you might expect, follow a diet less defined by ingredients—unlike veganism, for example,” global consulting firm Kearney informs us. “Instead, Climavores actively make food choices based on climate impacts, practicing climate-conscious eating based on a series of dietary trade-offs intended to benefit the planet.”

Climavores see beef, lamb, and cheese at the very top of the environmental damage scale; pork is in the middle, followed by chicken and eggs. Plants of all kinds typically have the lowest impact. …

Most Climavores eschew labels, viewing climate-conscious food choices paired with their efforts to “live and shop green” beyond food as a meaningful way to personally impact environmental outcomes. Our survey found this is especially true among younger consumers. Respondents 18 to 44 years old were up to twice as likely to consider the environmental impact of their food choices.

And as the older faiths are gradually supplanted by the Church of the Climate, societal changes are in the works that reflect and support the new religion. Axios reports:

Food manufacturers, restaurants, and supermarkets are racing to cater to the zeal for lower-carbon eating choices, which has people eschewing plastic packaging, ingredients flown in from afar, and foods that are environmentally damaging to produce. …

Terms like “climatarian” are getting newfound attention from corporate America as young consumers gravitate toward what they perceive as “green” diets.

  • “By 2030, our routine food choices will be climate-directed,” advises a report from consulting firm Kearney. “The companies that mobilize now will win the future of food.”
  • Restaurant chains like Just Salad, Chipotle, and Panera Bread are putting “carbon labels” on their foods — and, in the case of Just Salad, adding a “climatarian” filter on its app.
  • Supermarket chain Fresh Market is among the many food prognosticators that declared “climatarian eating” a top trend for 2023.

Back in the bad old days, righteous folk censured people who lived outside Christian proscriptions, and with good reason — things like theft, adultery, sloth, and single parenthood lead to issues that hurt all of society. Under the same reckoning, prepare to be judged for your apostate food choices. Ordering a big, fat steak in a restaurant may earn you glares from fellow diners who have been taught that your dinner hurts them by causing droughts and heatwaves or something.

But Leftists are nothing if not authoritarian, and soon the choices will be made for you. More from Kearney:

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The greenie left is coming for your coffee

It wasn’t enough that the greenie left came for our light bulbs, our flush toilets, our guns, our plastic straws, our gas stoves, or our hamburgers.

Now they’re coming for our coffee.

According to the New York Post:

Canadian researchers analyzed coffee’s “contribution to climate change” in a piece published in early January and suggested people moderate their consumption of the popular drink as a part of the solution.

Researchers Luciano Rodrigues Viana, Charles Marty, Jean-François Boucher and Pierre-Luc Dessureault wrote in an analysis published in The Conversation that pollution from preparing coffee was “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Limiting your contribution to climate change requires an adapted diet, and coffee is no exception. Choosing a mode of coffee preparation that emits less GHGs (greenhouse gases) and moderating your consumption are part of the solution,” the researchers at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi wrote.

They even had recommendations about what kinds of coffee to drink, and no, it’s not that nice fancy cup of Starbucks cappuccino you’re enjoying, let alone that hearty cup of Dunkin’ Donuts brewed coffee you like to have in your hand.

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Climate Activism Isn’t About the Planet. It’s About the Boredom of the Bourgeoisie.

The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.

Nothing makes me think Schumpeter was right like the contemporary climate movement and its acolytes. The Green movement is not a reflection of planetary crisis as so many in media and culture like to depict it, but rather, a crisis of meaning for the affluent.

Take for example a recent interview with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich on CBS‘s 60 Minutes. Ehrlich is most famous for his career as a professional doom monger. His first major book, The Population Bomb, gave us timelessly wrong predictions, including that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death and it went downhill from there. Ehrlich assured us that England would no longer exist in the year 2000, that even modern fertilizers would not enable us to feed the world, and that thermonuclear power was just around the corner.

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To End Climate Lunacy, Stop Treating Warming & C02 Hysterically

Those who oppose economically destructive “climate” policies – like those promoted by the Biden administration and at the recent United Nations COP27 conference – will continue to fail to stop the advance of these policies so long as they continue to accept the false claim that warming of the planet and carbon dioxide emissions are harmful.

They are not. On balance, global warming and CO2 emission are beneficial.

Before getting to why that is, however, it is crucial to understand why accepting the false climate claim is so harmful.

When the destructiveness of climate policies is shown, the response is that the policies nevertheless are necessary to address what President Biden refers to as the “existential threat” of global warming and increased CO2 emissions.

When it is noted that these climate policies will at most microscopically and insignificantly reduce temperatures and CO2 emissions, climate policy mandarins push for even more draconian policies.

The result has been that since the 1990s, climate policies have become increasingly destructive and wasteful. Even worse, their continued intensification appears unlikely to be stopped until the public and policymakers are persuaded that global warming and CO2 emissions are not harmful. As Margaret Thatcher famously said: “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.”

To win this argument, it is necessary to focus on the scientific facts.

A warming planet saves lives. Analyses of millions of deaths in recent decades in numerous countries, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, show that cooler temperatures killed nine times (July 2021 study) to seventeen times (In May 2015 study) more people than warmer temperatures. The planet’s recent modest warming (by 1.00 degree Celsius on average since 1880, as calculated by NASA) thus has been saving millions of lives.

CO2 emissions do not pollute and instead are environmentally beneficial. In 2017, over 300 scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT and William Happer of Princeton, signed a statement that made this point: “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison.” Every one of us, indeed, also exhales carbon dioxide with every breath.

Since 1920, deaths each year from natural disasters have decreased by over 90 percent. And this happened, data from EM-DAT – The International Disaster Database presented by The University of Oxford show, not only as the planet has warmed, but as world population has quadrupled.

Global warming has not increased hurricanes. A NOAA report, updated on November 28, 2022, states that “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.”

The same report sums it up in bold: “We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.”

Global warming also does not increase land burned by fires. As environmental statistician Bjorn Lomberg has shown using data from the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, Remote Sensing of Environment, and Earth’s Future, the percentage of global land burned per year in 1905-2021 has been declining.

Sea levels are rising – but only by a small fraction of an inch each year. An EPA report updated on August 1, 2022, states: “When averaged over all of the world’s oceans, absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.06 inches per year from 1880 to 2013,” including a slightly increased rate since 1993 of “0.12 to 0.14 inches per year.”

The UN climate models that President Biden, John Kerry, and other climate doomsters use to predict future global temperatures are so speculative and unreliable that they have been unable even to reproduce the 20th century’s temperature changes. This is a key point in the must-read book by Obama Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Steven Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

These kinds of facts should persuade the public and policymakers to stop accepting the false claim that global warming and CO2 emissions are harmful.

When this false claim is no longer widely accepted, policymakers will stop imposing climate policies that particularly impoverish the world’s poor.

They will stop holding international boondoggles like COP27 and that demand vast climate-related foreign aid programs.

They will stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars on domestic climate sinkholes.

And they will stop using purported “social cost of carbon” factors (even though the true social cost of carbon is zero) to regulatorily restrict domestic fossil fuel production, transportation, and use.

Global Warming? Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover At 56-Year High

The COP27 climate change conference wrapped up last month. World leaders flew in private jets to Egypt to discuss how fossil fuels were quickly heating the planet to the point of no return, as humanity was doomed if crucial climate change policies weren’t implemented. But while the climate alarmist leaders met in the desert, November’s snowfall across the Northern Hemisphere was running at rates exceeding a half-a-century average. NOAA and Rutgers University released new data that showed snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere reached the highest level since measurements began in 1967 and are currently above the 56-year mean.

Here’s the Rutgers Global Snow Lab snow coverage map across the Northern Hemisphere.

And another from NOAA with more resolution.

“Extensive snow extent early in the season is an indicator of persistent cold as we head into winter proper,” weather blog Severe Weather Europe said.

Most mainstream media outlets overlooked this data because it is an inconvenient truth for the climate change narrative they’re pushing.

A severe winter for the Northern Hemisphere might complicate power grids for western countries that are hellbent on disrupting energy flows by sanctioning Russia, forcing the world into the worst energy crisis in a generation. Since the US and Europe’s natural gas storage facilities have flipped into withdrawal season, the clock starts as storage levels could quickly wind down if temperatures stay below average, which would continue to boost energy prices.

Climate Change Motivates a Reevaluation of Nuclear Energy.

Ironically, the people who profess to care most about climate change have been those who most vociferously reject the technology that can solve it. But this is changing

As world leaders and activists gather in Egypt this week to ruminate about global warming, there are signs that many are willing to look beyond doctrinaire—and heretofore less than fruitful—policies founded on renewable generation sources, such as wind and solar. Whatever the merits of climate change arguments, it is clear that the issue is causing many inveterate opponents of nuclear energy to embrace the technology as the one available that can do something about it.

The influential American Climate Perspectives survey, published in 2021 with addenda out this year by environmental nonprofit ecoAmerica, pointed out that American attitudes about nuclear power are shifting decidedly into the positive column, with the movement most profound on the left. A summary released by the organization along with the report noted that support for nuclear power among Americans grew by 10 points between 2018 and 2021, from 49% to 59%. And while support among Republicans held steady during that time (hovering around 65%), support among Democrats increased sizably over the same period—from 37% in 2018 to 60% in 2021. And this shift seems to be indicative of a worldwide movement of opinion.

Renewables Flicker

Renewable energy sources are perfectly fine technologies for generating electricity at certain scales under particular weather conditions and in localities close to the point of consumption, and they are widely regarded as an essential part of achieving a carbon-free future. But experience shows that there is no way solar and wind power and the attendant battery storage technologies will be able to sustain a modern economy on their own.

According to Frank Hiroshi Ling, chief scientist at the Anthropocene Institute, a clean power and climate technology incubator that cooperated with ecoAmerica on its report, a growing realization that renewables are not up to the task may be spurring a corresponding interest in nuclear energy. “The Democrats traditionally have been the early advocates for renewables,” Ling said. “Yet renewables have not scaled up as quickly as many had hoped. People are learning that there are a lot of limitations to increasing capacity through renewables.”

The challenges of implementing a purely renewable electric grid have been well documented. From a technology standpoint, the key limitation is the intermittency of solar and wind power generation when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, respectively. On the manufacturing and supply chain side, renewable generation technologies and batteries to support them require a lot of resources, such as rare earth metals, that are not processed in the U.S. and have a train of environmental baggage all their own.

“I would not necessarily call myself pro-nuclear,” Ling said. “But I am looking at all the technologies that we need to achieve stabilization of the planet’s climate. That means we should look at energy systems from the perspective of resiliency, and that means looking at a diversity of mixes. I am also in favor of renewables. But every energy source out there has its drawbacks. Nuclear would address many concerns, but we still have that problem with the public perception.”

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The Dirty Secrets inside the Black Box Climate Models

The world has less than a decade to change course to avoid irreversible ecological catastrophe, the UN warned today.” The Guardian Nov 28 2007

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Yogi Berra

Introduction

Global extinction due to global warming has been predicted more times than climate activist, Leo DiCaprio, has traveled by private jet.  But where do these predictions come from? If you thought it was just calculated from the simple, well known relationship between CO2 and solar energy spectrum absorption, you would only expect to see about 0.5o C increase from pre-industrial temperatures as a result of CO2 doubling, due to the logarithmic nature of the relationship.

Figure 1: Incremental warming effect of CO2 alone [1]

The runaway 3-6o C and higher temperature increase model predictions depend on coupled feedbacks from many other factors, including water vapour (the most important greenhouse gas), albedo (the proportion of energy reflected from the surface – e.g. more/less ice or clouds, more/less reflection) and aerosols, just to mention a few, which theoretically may amplify the small incremental CO2 heating effect. Because of the complexity of these interrelationships, the only way to make predictions is with climate models because they can’t be directly calculated.

The purpose of this article is to explain to the non-expert, how climate models work, rather than a focus on the issues underlying the actual climate science, since the models are the primary ‘evidence’ used by those claiming a climate crisis. The first problem, of course, is no model forecast is evidence of anything. It’s just a forecast, so it’s important to understand how the forecasts are made, the assumptions behind them and their reliability.

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You can’t make this up #2954
“As an important step in solving climate change, we must address the gender inequalities that persist in climate finance … “

Biden Launches ‘Climate Gender Equity Fund’ To Advance ‘Women-Led Climate Solutions’

The Biden administration unveiled a public-private partnership to help advance female leadership in searching for climate change solutions during the COP27 climate conference in Egypt.

Among other programs President Joe Biden announced during the conference was the “Climate Gender Equity Fund,” which will “leverage private sector contributions to help provide women climate leaders with technical skills, networks, and capital to develop and scale climate solutions,” according to a statement from the White House. The program was seeded by $3 million from USAID and $3 million from Amazon.

“As an important step in solving climate change, we must address the gender inequalities that persist in climate finance, and ensure female entrepreneurs have an equal seat at the table and access to the funding, networks, and technical support they need to scale climate solutions,” Amazon Worldwide Sustainability Vice President Kara Hurst said in a statement. “We’re proud to collaborate with USAID and the Biden administration to help scale women-led climate solutions globally.”

The e-commerce company argued that female entrepreneurs are “more likely than their male counterparts” to address social needs, lamenting that only a fraction of global venture capital is devoted toward female-founded companies. Amazon will commit an additional $50 million toward climate technology companies led by women.

The White House also launched the “Indigenous Peoples Finance Access Facility,” a $2 million program that will enable “continued climate stewardship by Indigenous peoples and local communities improving their access to climate finance.”

Biden attended the conference to “galvanize global action and commitments” with respect to climate change. Among other programs, the administration will also devote $150 million toward the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience in Africa and launch a new initiative to promote wind and solar development in Egypt. The commander-in-chief similarly announced efforts to limit methane emissions from natural gas production among American energy companies, thereby rendering America the “first national government” requiring that suppliers abide by the Paris Agreement.

The Biden administration recently enacted the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains $369 billion for climate initiatives, including tax credits for new electric vehicles. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which passed at the end of last year, also includes provisions for electric vehicles and other renewable energy projects.

Disruptions from lockdown policies across the globe and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have led to constrained energy supplies, particularly in developing countries and the European continent. World leaders assembled at COP27, which is sponsored by the United Nations, nevertheless called for large and small economies to reconsider their “addiction” to fossil fuels.

“Today’s crises cannot be an excuse for backsliding or greenwashing. If anything, they are a reason for greater urgency, stronger action and effective accountability,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said. “Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

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I’ll consider that ‘global warming’ may be a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves

Four hundred private jets arrived in Egypt during COP27 as climate delegates are accused of ‘hypocrisy.’

Climate delegates were accused of hypocrisy after 400 private jets arrived in Egypt for COP27.

Numerous posts on social media criticised delegates for travelling by private jet to the UN climate summit.

Posts and reports included various estimates for the number of such planes bringing delegates to the gathering in the beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Climate delegates were accused of hypocrisy after 400 private jets arrived in Egypt for COP27 (File image)

Egyptian sources corroborated widespread claims that some 400 private jets landed during COP27.

Some media cited lower estimates by flight-trackers, though there may have been private flights that were not logged by monitoring services.

One misleading post in Spanish claimed there were as many as 1,500 private jets. It was accompanied by an old photograph of planes from an aviation forum in Las Vegas.

‘More than 400 private jets landed in the past few days in Egypt,’ a source close to the Egyptian aviation authorities, who asked not to be named, told AFP on Thursday.

‘There was a meeting ahead of COP27, and officials were expecting those jets and made some arrangements in Sharm el-Sheikh airport to welcome those planes.’

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Pentagon Distributes ‘Climate Literacy’ Questionnaire to Service Members, Civilian Employees

The Defense Department is asking active-duty service members and civilian employees about where they receive their climate news and whether they know enough about climate change to do their jobs properly.

The agency sent out its “2022 Climate Literacy Pulse Check” questionnaire to thousands of people, Fox News reported on Tuesday.

“As we train and educate our service members to fight and prevail against our adversaries, so too must we ensure our service members have the knowledge to ensure mission success in the face of a changing climate,” Pentagon spokesperson Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman said. The department declined to state how many personnel received the questionnaire.

Schwegman said the questionnaire was “not a survey” and it was “fully anonymous” and could be answered “at-will.”

Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said: “The Department of Defense should not be wasting our service members’ time with surveys on climate change. … The military should not be distracted from its mission of maintaining the most lethal and capable force in the world.”

Comment O’ The Day
They’re idiots, and when you put idiots in charge, the result is disaster.

Massachusetts offshore wind project “no longer viable.”

A wind energy company named Avangrid has been in the process of developing a massive offshore wind farm called the Commonwealth Wind project, working with the support of the state of Massachusetts for several years. When completed, it was to be a 1,200-megawatt energy source. A second offshore project from Mayflower Wind was to produce an additional 400 megawatts. But now, the companies behind both of these projects have asked the state to put the plans on hold.

The reason given was that the projects are “no longer viable” under the current conditions and they will be unable to move forward for the time being. But the reason for hitting the brakes has little to do with technology or weather and a great deal to do with the economy. (New Bedford Light)

A major offshore wind project in the Massachusetts pipeline “is no longer viable and would not be able to move forward” under the terms of contracts filed in May. Both developers behind the state’s next two offshore wind projects are asking state regulators to pause review of the contracts for one month amid price increases, supply shortages and interest rate hikes.

Utility executives working with assistance from the Baker administration last year chose Avangrid’s roughly 1,200-megawatt Commonwealth Wind project and a 400 MW project from Mayflower Wind in the third round of offshore wind procurement to continue the state’s pursuit of establishing cleaner offshore wind power. Contracts, or power purchase agreements (PPAs), for the projects were filed with the Department of Public Utilities in May.

As noted above, these wind farms aren’t being put on hold because the wind suddenly stopped blowing offshore. (Though that does happen from time to time.) Nor were the developers running into problems with their turbines, or at least no more than usual. As with so many things in American politics and the industrial sector… it’s the economy, stupid.

The problems being cited by the developers are no doubt familiar to almost all of you by now. They are describing global commodity price increases, sudden increases in interest rates, and supply chain woes that are slowing production and driving up costs. Declining labor force levels are adding additional concerns. All of these factors are combining to make the construction of the project unsustainable.

There’s an obvious bit of irony in seeing the same state and federal government actors who have pushed “green energy” down everyone’s throats sitting on this particular sideline. Those same people whose policies helped drive this collapse in the supply chain and the labor market, along with the spike in the prices of pretty much everything, are now watching as one of their signature “clean energy” achievements falls victim to the conditions they created.

In their brief, the developers suggested possible solutions to get them back on track. These included cost-saving measures and government tax incentives. But the only way these projects ever got off the ground initially was because the government was already massively subsidizing the wind energy industry in general and these proposed wind farms in particular. Wind energy is not profitable in and of itself without huge government subsidies. And now that the economy has largely collapsed over the past two years, those chickens are coming home to roost, assuming they avoid getting chopped up in the blades of a wind turbine like the eagles.

Here’s an exit question for the peanut gallery to consider. Has anyone checked to see how well these turbines would hold up if a category 4 or 5 hurricane blew through? It doesn’t happen often off the coast of the northeast, but I’m sure that the people there still remember Sandy. I did some checking, and the developers claim that those sorts of weather events have been “taken into consideration.” But those towers look rather spindly to be standing tall in 150-mile-per-hour winds. But hey… maybe that’s just me.

When you don’t have facts or reason on your side and don’t care to learn the facts, what’s left?

Infantilization Of The Apocalypse.

Dumping milk onto floors. Hurling food onto walls. Refusing to eat. Gluing body parts. Throwing paint. Refusing to leave. Threatening to pee and poop in your pants. Screaming accusations. Are those the behaviors of a toddler’s temper tantrum? Yes. But they’re also the dominant tactics of today’s climate activists.

Consider the case of Gianluca Grimalda. On October 19, Grimalda, along with 15 other members of a climate activist group called Scientist Rebellion, glued himself to the floor of the visitors center next to a Volkswagon factory in Germany. The VW security guards brought pizza to Grimalda and the other activist scientists, but Grimalda felt disrespected and so he declared a hunger strike in retaliation.

Grimalda immediately expressed outrage at his treatment. “VW told us that they supported our right to protest,” he complained on Twitter, “but they refused our request to provide us with a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued, and have turned off the heating.”

Many were quick to point out the childish nature of the protest. “I’m a serious scientist protesting against fossil fuels,” wrote one user. “Now turn the gas heating on and bring me my potty.”

The activists say that such childish tactics were necessary. Grimalda tweeted that he and his colleagues are protesting “until our demands to decarbonise the German transport sector are met.” On Sunday, after climate activists in Germany threw mashed potatoes on a Monet painting, they screamed at the nearby museum-goers. “We won’t be able to feed our families in 2050” because of climate change, they alleged.

But Volkswagen already agreed last year to end the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035, and the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts rising yields under even very high temperatures so long as farmers keep using fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors. That is, yields will continue under climate change so long as farmers don’t take the advice of climate activists.

The activists who keep degrading precious works of art, and themselves, claim to be concerned about food and energy supplies, but in opposing oil, gas and fertilizer production they are actively reducing both. Over the last several months, I have described the demands of climate activists as fanatical and pointed to a large body of evidence suggesting that nihilism, narcissism, and feelings of personal inadequacy are the primary motives.

But nihilism, narcissism, and personal inadequacy alone do not explain why climate activists have chosen temper tantrum tactics. After all, the greatest protest movements of all time engaged in far more grown-up and dignified tactics. Think of the Salt March led by Gandhi, the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Martin Luther King, and the anti-whaling protests of Greenpeace.

Where protesters in the past asked to be treated like adults, climate protesters today demand to be treated like children. Civil rights activists in the 1950s sat at lunch counters and demanded to be treated like full adults. Notably, it was racist counterprotesters who poured milkshakes over them. Today, it’s the protesters who are spilling milk and throwing food.

Why is that, exactly? Why have Left-wing activists regressed in their tactics?

The people in the protests are themselves apparently dignified people. Grimalda is an economist who works at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. He has published for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Nature Communications, and other prestigious publications. Why, then, are he and his colleagues acting like babies?

Role Reversal

Racist counterprotesters dump milkshakes over a white social science professor and his black students sitting at the “Whites Only” counter in Woolworth’s store lunch counter in May 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi (left). Climate activists dump soup over Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in October 2022 (right).

When the reality of econuttery is finally realized, it gets the boot.

Wind Farm in Germany Is Being Taken Down for Expansion of Coal Mine

In the throes of an energy crisis, a German energy company is moving forward with plans to dismantle a wind farm adjacent to its coal mine in order to expand operations.

The removal of one of the wind farm’s eight wind turbines occurred last week, with two more coming down next year and the rest getting removed by the end of 2023.

Recognizing the “paradoxical” nature of the situation, Germany energy company RWE, which operates the Garzweiler coal mine, said it’s necessary.

“We realize this comes across as paradoxical,” RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen told the Guardian. “But that is as matters stand.”

The expansion comes in tandem with a plan to temporarily return three of RWE’s lignite-fired coal units to the market, a decision that was approved by Germany’s cabinet. The units were previously on standby.

“The three lignite units each have a capacity of 300 megawatts (MW). With their deployment, they contribute to strengthening the security of supply in Germany during the energy crisis and to saving natural gas in electricity generation,” RWE said in September.

“Originally, it was planned that the three reserve power plant units affected would be permanently shut down on September 30, 2022, and September 30, 2023, respectively,” RWE added.

Germany’s cabinet approved the decision to bring back the idled coal units to boost energy supplies, as energy imports remain hindered by the Russia-Ukraine War.  (Fox Business)

The ministry for economic and energy affairs of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, meanwhile, is urging RWE to reconsider its plans.

“In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible,” a spokesperson told the Guardian.

Make their behavior more painful than it is rewarding and they will stop.

The Quiet Desperation Of Woke Fanatics.

What’s driving them? And how can they be defeated?

Protesters with “Just Stop Oil” after throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in London, October 14, 2022. (Photo Credit: Just Stop Oil.)

“The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause.” 
— ERIC HOFFER, THE TRUE BELIEVER

Over the last few weeks, climate activists in Britain have blocked highways (because cars emit carbon dioxide), poured milk onto the floors of supermarkets (because livestock emits methane), and thrown tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” (because climate change is more important than art. Or something). The activists are a kind of reboot of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) climate protests in the UK in the fall of 2019.

People in the UK are at risk of dying from natural gas shortages. Still, the climate activists with “Just Stop Oil” think it’s outrageous that their government is desperately trying to produce more natural gas for its people. But without more natural gas, there could be three-hour-long blackouts, which threaten the operation of medical equipment, and thus the lives of vulnerable people.

The various media stunts appeared authentically grassroots but were, in fact, financed by a $1 million grant from a philanthropic group called Climate Emergency Fund, which is funded by their heirs to the Getty and Rockefeller oil fortunes, and founded in 2019. The Board of Directors consists of a who’s-who of climate alarmism including “Don’t Look Up!” film director, Adam McKay, who donated $4 million, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben, and New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.

The Fund and their grantees have been cheered on by the Secretary General of the United Nations and much of the mainstream media.Image

A portion of the web page of Climate Emergency Fund.

In a series of recent articles I have argued that what lies behind climate fanaticism and narcissism is an apocalyptic religion born from nihilism. The power of science to explain humankind’s place in the universe (e.g., the big bang, evolution by natural selection) resulted in a dominant narrative coming out of society’s elite institutions for over 100 years that human life has no inherent meaning or purpose (nihilism). We’re just animals like any other.

This depressing story has led the ostensibly secular elite, which are educated and indoctrinated in universities that teach nihilism as unquestioning scientific gospel, to create a new apocalyptic religion (climate catastrophe), complete with a new victim-god (nature), a new reason for guilt (sins against nature), and a path for redemption (renewables and low-energy living). It, and the broader Woke religion, have found intellectual ballast since World War II from Rousseau, Malthus, and Foucault.

But that account only partly addresses the motivations of the fanatics. It doesn’t answer why some people become fanatics and others don’t. It doesn’t explain the specific role of fanatics, particularly in relation to other actors, such as the intellectual architects of the movement, and the institution-builders. Nor does it address how fanaticism ends and what, if anything, can be done to hasten its expiration date.

As such, we need to ask, who exactly are the climate fanatics? And how can their power over Western cultural and political life be reduced?

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Wife of Top Biden Aide Named Ambassador for Plants and Animals.
Ron Klain’s wife, a supporter of the Green New Deal, gets a plum new gig

The wife of President Joe Biden’s top aide has a fancy new gig at the U.S. State Department.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday announced that Monica Medina, wife of White House chief of staff Ron Klain, will serve as U.S. Special Envoy for Biodiversity and Water Resources.

According to the Washington Post, which initially declined to note that Medina is married to Klain, the decision to promote her to the newly established role of “diplomat for plants and animals” is one that “underscores the Biden’s administration’s desire” to fight climate change.

“There’s a direct connection between biodiversity loss and instability in a lot of parts of the world,” Klain’s wife told the Post. “It’s not just about nature for nature’s sake. I think it is about people.”

Medina currently serves in the State Department as assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs. She is an outspoken proponent of the Green New Deal, a controversial legislative proposal sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) that would cost roughly $9 trillion to implement but would have a negligible effect on global temperatures.

“The Green New Deal is a unifying political message that gets back to the basics of creating an economy that works for all people and protects the planet as a result,” Medina wrote in January 2019. A national poll conducted the following month found that just 29 percent of Americans supported the Green New Deal, while 51 percent of respondents said they would rather the government spend trillions of dollars to build a wall on the U.S. southern border.

Medina is also a prominent advocate for fully integrating women into military combat units, which resulted in the lowering of rigorous physical standards to accommodate female trainees.