Category: Econuts

In other words, these crap-for-brains econutz want the world economy to continue going backwards as much as it has so far this year, each year, for at least the next ten years.

The Coronavirus Economy Is a Preview of the Green New Deal Economy

Eric Holthaus, a popular online climate-change activist, points out that the allegedly positive environmental effects of the coronavirus crisis are on “roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals.”

“We’re doing it. It’s possible!” he adds.

It’s nice to see an environmentalist finally acknowledging the inherent economic tradeoff of their vision. Holthaus is absolutely correct that implementing a plan like the Green New Deal would hold approximately the same gruesome economic consequences as the coronavirus crisis — except, of course, forever. The point of modern environmentalism, as Greta Thunberg has hinted, is the destruction of wealth. This process is what Holthaus, and others, euphemistically call “degrowth.”

Holthaus, who doesn’t celebrate coronavirus, reminds us that merely to keep pace with the IPCC recommendations on carbon emissions, Americans would be compelled to shut down virtually the entire economy. They would need to restrict air travel, place most Americans under virtual house arrest (or raze all the suburbs), halt international and interstate trade, destroy millions of jobs, shut down large swaths of manufacturing, and stop people from using their cars — or buying gas.

How would it work? The only “Green New Deal” that we’ve ever actually seen was authored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her plan, one supported by the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, calls for the banning of all fossil fuels, 99 percent of cars and planes, and meat-eating, among many other nonsensical regulations, within the next decade.

Also, you’d have to compel people to participate. I feel confident that Americans won’t voluntarily relive the 19th century because, whether intuitively or not, they comprehend that by nearly every quantifiable measure their lives are better because of the affordability and reliability of fossil fuels. One day that reality might change. Today is not that day.

It took a deadly worldwide pandemic to get Americans to suspend modernity, so you can assume it would take authoritarian measures to shut down the free movement of people. But Holthaus reminds us that the fight to stop climate change is often about more than separating your plastics and papers or installing some state-subsidized solar panels, it’s about a fundamental, societal economic upheaval that would throw millions into poverty.

Moreover, the Green New Deal would necessitate that capitalistic society be displaced by a technocratic regime that dictates what you consume, sell, drive, eat, and where you work. This, says Holthaus, “is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ looks like.”

Indeed.

And why you shouldn’t believe Earth Day Predictions of 2020 either.

EARTH DAY PREDICTIONS OF 1970. THE REASON YOU SHOULDN’T BELIEVE EARTH DAY PREDICTIONS OF 2009.

For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford's Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 [now 50] years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 [50] years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

Goodbye, Green New Deal

After a couple of weeks of great economic sacrifice, it’s already proving hard for Americans to take. No one will sign up for a lifetime of it.

What will happen next with the coronavirus epidemic is unknown, but it seems certain to claim one very high-profile victim: the so-called Green New Deal.

Good riddance.

The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing.

What is under way right now in response to the epidemic is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.

But the characters of the two crises are basically different.

Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?

For years, we’ve been hearing, “This is climate change” and “That is climate change,” every time there’s a flood or a storm. If that’s the fact, then climate change is, relatively speaking, manageable. There is no way Americans—or people around the world—are going to agree to endure anything like the current economic downturn in order to prevent problems of that nature.

“Oh, but we’ll find them jobs in the new green economy!” comes the response. “It’ll be a net positive!” As though petroleum engineers were lumps of labor that could be reshaped at will by a committee of lawyers in Washington, if only we gave them the power. Nobody is buying that. Not many people are that stupid.

Those spring-break clowns down in Florida and the “coronavirus party” doofuses in Kentucky are We the People, too, and if they are not willing to spend a couple of weeks watching Netflix to save grandma’s life — or their own lives — then do you really think they’re going to take an economic bullet over the prospect of losing 3 percent of world economic output a century from now to global-warming-mitigation costs?

What we are seeing right now is what it looks like when Washington tries to steer the economy. There are times when that is necessary, and this is one of those times. But emergencies do not last forever, and emergency measures should be, by nature, temporary. The attraction of the climate-change crusade is that it creates a permanent state of emergency. The Left wants very much to convince Americans that climate change presents an emergency of the same kind requiring the same “moral equivalent of war” worldwide mobilization.

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

2.2 trillion is 2 thousand 2 hundred billion

See the source image

Imagine 2200 times this in $100 bills.

Trump signs $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill into law

U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a more than $2 trillion stimulus bill that attempts to blunt the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The signing comes days after Senate leaders and representatives from the White House reached an accord on the stimulus bill tied to the coronavirus. In that time, the House of Representatives also approved the measure (though not without some 11th-hour drama over the nature of the vote itself).

The bill, weighing in at approximately $2.2 trillion, is the largest piece of stimulus legislation in modern American history.

Econuts get the cluebat upside the head….again.

Plastic Bag Bans Are the Latest Regulations to Get Tossed During Coronavirus Pandemic

As states rush to lift, waive, or delay regulations that might impede their ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, plastic bag bans are being tossed aside.

On Tuesday, Maine’s legislature voted to put off enforcement of their state’s plastic bag prohibition—which was set to go into effect April 22—until next year. The day before, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation agreed to delay any enforcement of that state’s bag ban until May 15.

The New York ban was supposed to go into effect on March 1. But because a lawsuit challenging the bag ban has been delayed over coronavirus, the state was forced to pull back until that case can resume.

The reusable bags these bans are supposed to encourage—and which were considered an unmitigated social good just a few weeks ago—have come under fresh scrutiny from a newly germophobic nation that fears they might aid the spread of COVID-19.

Businesses have been leading the way on this front. Starbucks suspended its policy of filling up customers’ reusable mugs in early March, and Dunkin Donuts and Tim Hortons (a Canadian coffee chain) have done the same.

“Until this pandemic passes, state and local officials should discourage shoppers from bringing their potentially virus-laden reusable bags out in public. Restore single-use bags, including the plastic kind,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on Monday.

The mayor of a town in Maine has actually called for a ban on reusable bags.

How likely is it that reusable bags will give you Covid-19? That’s still something of an open question. John Tierney, writing in City Journal, notes that numerous studies have shown reusable bags’ potential to transmit bacteria and viruses. And recent research has shown that the virus can live on plastic surfaces for up to three days. So single-use bags might be better for avoiding the spread of the disease, as they will be tossed immediately and not left lying around the house where multiple people migh come into repeat contact with it.

That said, the Centers for Disease Control downplay the risk of surface transmission on their website, saying that while it is possible to catch COVID-19 from touching objects and then touching your face, “this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”

Two epidemiologists interviewed by Slate about grocery store best practices also said reusable bags did not pose much of added risk. “I doubt it’s going to be a problem,” said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Center. “If you’re really worried, you can always wipe down the bag with mild detergent or a disinfecting wipe, but that shouldn’t be necessary unless the bag gets some unexpected exposure to contaminated material.”

The reproducibility crisis

Watts Up With That? does a good job covering the climate scam, the only flaw being that they post so much good data that one is apt to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

They have recently posted an excellent post on the reproducibility crisis. The short of it is that nineteen out twenty science papers seem to be making up their data.

I would say that this reflects incentives. If you actually make observations, you are bound to run into some land mine of an ever growing and ever holier orthodoxy enforced by peer review, while if you simply make stuff up, you will be fine. So any scientist who believes in actual observation eventually finds himself in some other career.

The influx of priestly types into science was bound to result in an exodus of scientist types, in the same way we are seeing an exodus of engineering types from open source, and it appears that this transformation is now complete. Science is now about one third global warming, one third the neglected role of women, and one third making stuff up in the style and subject matter of famous science papers from back in the day when scientists actually did science. Soon scientist will stop bothering with those postmodern pastiches on old fashioned science topics, and it will all be about the oppression of drag queens.

And, since I am covering WattsUpWithThat, here is the short on global warming science. So I am going to give you the view from twenty thousand feet, and suggest you spend a week reading Watts Up with That to get a glimpse of a small part of the trees.

For the full sordid tale, search their site for references to the Climategate files.

The climategate files, most of which I myself read, are the internal emails of the climate conspiracy. It is obvious from their internal emails that the official climate scientists do no know and do not care whether the world is warming or cooling, whether humans are causing it or not, and whether it would be bad or good.

Their objective is to indict humans in general, whites and western civilization in particular, and anglos specifically, for crimes against Gaia.

In the climategate files, one encounters a few low status scientists who are worried about actual facts. They did not doubt holy global warming, they just wanted the data proving the sins of mankind to be genuine data. They all swiftly ceased to have careers in science.

What is the motive for this conspiracy?

Lots of motives, but the motive we saw on display with South Australia’s Green Energy program was to shakedown the electricity grid for a few bucks in the course of destroying South Australia. Instead of turning wind and solar power into electric power, and electric power into money, they turned wind and solar into superior holiness, superior holiness into status, and status into money.

South Australia wound up with blackouts, brown outs, sky high electricity prices, and massive imports of electric power from coal mining states.

I think most of them are in it for the shakedown. Global Warming resembles the Aztec religion, in that human sacrifices are required to ensure that the sun rises tomorrow. And then the priesthood get something in return for their influence over who gets sacrificed.

Of course there are some, the Greta Thunberg Bernie Sanders crowd, who just like human sacrifice. If not global warming, they would find some other justification, as Trump told us at the Davos conference.

‘We’re All Going to Die of Climate Change!’, Warns Shock JP Morgan Report

Yeah, when the econuts go with the usual ‘carbon tax’ you know you’re simply looking at another method for graft.

Human life ‘as we know it’ is threatened by climate change and there may be ‘catastrophic outcomes’ unless urgent action is taken, two house economists at JP Morgan have warned in an explosive report ‘Risky Business – the Climate and the Macroeconomy’.

The report’s authors, David Mackie and Jessica Murray, warn that ‘climate change would not only impact GDP and welfare directly but would also have indirect effects via morbidity, mortality, famine, water stress, conflict, and migration.’

“We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened”, they add darkly, urging the immediate introduction of a global carbon tax to avert potential disaster.

Then again, they say, covering their bets, it may do none of those things because climate change is very unpredictable.

Their report has been greeted with undisguised rapture by the leftist media – including the BBC and the Guardian – delighted to have all its prejudices confirmed by an apparently rigorous study produced by a bank which it has previously criticised because of its investments in fossil fuels.

Wiser heads, however, recognise that the report is yet another climatological nothingburger cobbled together from the usual, compromised, dubious alarmist studies by a pair of economists with no special knowledge to bring to the party.

The report is not merely wrong but culpably misleading – the kind of false prospectus which would normally get any financial organisation promoting it into heaps of legal trouble.

Where it particularly falls down is in its reliance on RCP8.5. This is the so-called ‘business as usual’ (BAU) scenario which climate alarmists have for years being using on their computer models to predict potentially catastrophic temperature rises of the kind mentioned in the JP Morgan report.

The problem with RCP8.5 is that as Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr and others have pointed out, there is no real world evidence to support its hysterical predictions. On the contrary, as time goes by, the doomsday predictions of the RCP8.5 models look like a risible fantasy of no scientific value whatsoever.

As Jaime Jessop writes:

In the absence also of any observably catastrophic global rise in temperature throughout the 21st century (which not even ‘pause-busting’ adjustments to temperature data could conjure up), alarmists have turned to inventing imminent future catastrophes via the invocation of highly speculative ‘tipping points’ which supposedly will be ‘triggered’ at imaginary and entirely ad hoc global warming thresholds (1.5C, 2C, 3C etc. relative to pre-industrial baseline). They have also increasingly employed the highly unrealistic ‘business as usual’ scenario RCP8.5 to supercharge their global warming projections in order to manufacture climate alarmist narratives in the media, a strategy which only in the last couple of months has started to be seriously questioned. Roger Pielke Jr has recently been at the vanguard of the movement to expose the misuse of this nightmarishly unrealistic scenario as ‘business as usual’.

Apart from being alarmist propaganda bilge, the report’s other most dishonest feature is the way that it is being spun as something uncharacteristic of the financial industry.

In fact, the financial sector has long since capitulated to climate alarmism, not least because its dodgier operators – see Al Gore as an early example of this – have recognised the green scam as a route to easy profit.

It is, in fact, probably the single most alarming thing about the great global warming con: that big money is now so heavily involved in promoting it that it may be impossible for honest science or economic and political integrity to win the battle against all the mendacious and cynical vested interests seeking to profit from it (at the expense, of course, of all the little people).

This is what Terence Corcoran warns of here:

New plans to overthrow market-driven investment systems are a constant feature of today’s global financial scene. The recent appointment of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney as the UN’s special envoy for climate action and finance signals a renewed international effort to turn the world’s energy investors into pawns of state climate activists and agitators for market-distorting policies.

The movement to subvert markets, however, is much bigger than Carney. It is now accepted dogma globally that the financial markets are unreliable, twisted by greed and even corrupt. In Carney’s words, markets are based on “selective information, spin, misdirection.” That’s a mild criticism compared with the views of others. “Capitalism as we know it is dead,” said Salesforce chief Marc Benioff, one of many business leaders who have joined the anti-corporate left in claiming the financial and capital markets are destroying the planet.

In short, there is nothing surprising about JP Morgan throwing its weight behind the $1.5 trillion plus climate industrial complex because this is what all the world’s crony capitalists and rent-seekers are doing right now, so why should JP Morgan miss out on the party?

But the report needs to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. And if there’s anyone who doubts this, I’ve got an amazing deal just for you: a huge bridge, going cheap; and my vast and potentially hugely profitable portfolio of Enron and Solyndra shares.

An Academic’s Proposal For Ending Climate Change: Human Extinction

Human extinction? Okay, see what she says when she’s told she goes first.

I came across this on Twitter today and at first suspected it was satire but so far as I can tell it’s not. An Australian academic named Patricia MacCormack
has  a new book out titled, “The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene.” The idea is that the earth would be better off without us and, therefore, it’s time to start an activism whose goal is our own extinction.

“The basic premise of the book is that we’re in the age of the Anthropocene, humanity has caused mass problems and one of them is creating this hierarchal world where white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied people are succeeding, and people of different races, genders, sexualities and those with disabilities are struggling to get that.”

“This is where the idea of dismantling identity politics comes in – they deserve rights not because of what they are, but because they are.

“The book also argues that we need to dismantle religion, and other overriding powers like the church of capitalism or the cult of self, as it makes people act upon enforced rules rather than respond thoughtfully to the situations in front of them.”

The central argument in The Ahuman Manifesto can be boiled down to this: mankind is already enslaved to the point of “zombiedom” by capitalism, and because of the damage this has caused, phasing out reproduction is the only way to repair the damage done to the world.

Here’s a further description of the book:

We are in the midst of a growing ecological crisis. Developing technologies and cultural interventions are throwing the status of “human” into question.

It is against this context that Patricia McCormack delivers her expert justification for the “ahuman”. An alternative to “posthuman” thought, the term paves the way for thinking that doesn’t dissolve into nihilism and despair, but actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning.

Some of this seems familiar. AOC has discussed whether it’s best that people stop having children in light of climate change and her view of capitalism probably isn’t all that different from MacCormack’s. But I do find it interesting that MacCormack seems interested in doing away with identity politics. From what I can tell, she sees this kind of hierarchy as inherently destructive because hierarchies of humans also extend to other living things. Her goal seems to be to flatten those hierarchies among humans and then between humans and animals.

That’s pretty extreme, obviously, but extreme is interesting in small doses. I do wonder what kind of mischief adherents to this new view of humanity might get up to at some point. The combination of human extinction as an end goal and a push toward real-world activism seems like a potentially combustible mix when it trickles down from academia to the streets.

We saw some pretty extreme behavior (blocking traffic and climbing on top of commuter trains) from the “Extinction Rebellion” crowd last fall. But MacCormack apparently sees the group as too tame because their activism is basically focused on saving the plant for people while she wants to save the planet from people. MacCormack told Cambridge News, “Everyone’s okay with the ideas in the book until they’re told they’d have to act on it. There is a lot of agreement that these changes might work for the world, but when it imposes on people, it becomes proactive.” I’d call that a hint, but what do I know.

MacCormack seems like a bit of a character. Her previous work has to do with sex, cinema, and occultism and she dresses like someone who’d fit in at a Cure concert more than an academic. To each his own. As I said, I find it interesting in small doses, but fringe academic ideas have a long history of spreading and having an impact on culture at large. Part of me does worry about what becomes of ideas like this if they start to catch on.

Climate Hypocrite: Bernie Leads 2020 Field in Private Jet Spending

The Bernie Sanders campaign spent just under $1.2 million on private jet travel last quarter, outpacing the entire 2020 Democratic presidential primary field.

The most recent filing from Sanders reveals $1,199,579 in spending during the final three months of 2019 to Apollo Jets, LLC, a “luxury private jet charter service.”

The campaign spent an additional $23,941 for transportation to Virginia-based Advanced Aviation Team.

The candidate who comes closest to matching Sanders in private jet spending was former vice president Joe Biden, whose campaign spent $1,040,698 to Advanced Aviation Team last quarter.

Baltimore County hasn’t recycled glass in 7 years. But officials say residents still shouldn’t throw it out.

When ritual becomes more important than what you started out to accomplish, you’ve become religious which is man’s attempt at doing something on his own to tie himself back to God.

Baltimore County officials revealed this week that the county has not recycled glass materials for about seven years, though they are strongly urging residents to continue placing the items in their recycling bins.

The revelation was first circulated Friday on the Facebook page The Towson Flyer, shocking some residents who demanded answers about why the county has continued to collect glass for recycling. Glass bottles and jars of all colors were listed as acceptable materials on the county website’s recycling collection page Saturday morning.

Steve Lafferty, county sustainability officer, said it’s true the county has not recycled the material since 2013, the year it also opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility in Cockeysville. Lafferty was hired to the newly created sustainability position in September 2019.

This problem of recyclable glass being thrown out was “inherited” from a previous administration, according to Sean Naron, spokesman for County Executive Johnny Olszewski.

Over the years, the county’s Department of Public Works encountered technical and financial limitations that meant it could no longer recycle glass at county municipal facilities.

The economics of recycling are changing, meaning there are fewer private waste management companies in the marketplace willing to take glass.

“It has become harder and harder to find a market” for glass recycling, Lafferty said.

The county is in preliminary discussions with an independent vendor about recycling glass materials, Naron said.

In the meantime, county officials have been reluctant to tell residents not to recycle their glass for fear of derailing a good habit.

“It’s unfortunate that we can’t tell people we have a better solution right now,” Lafferty said. “We know it’s an important issue.”

Students demanded divestment from fossil fuels, a professor offered to turn off the gas heating.

When consequences become personal, clotheads usually start backing up.
This is a primary principle of asymmetrical, 4th generation warfare.
A word to the wise should be sufficient for political and other purposes.

Professor Andrew Parker of St John’s College at Oxford University is my new favorite person. The Times of London reports that a group of students wrote to Professor Parker to discuss demands being made by student protesters about fossil fuel divestment. His response wasn’t what they were expecting:

Two students at St John’s College wrote to Andrew Parker, the principal bursar, this week requesting a meeting to discuss the protesters’ demands, which are that the college “declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels”. They say that the college, the richest in Oxford, has £8 million of its £551 million endowment fund invested in BP and Shell.

Professor Parker responded with a provocative offer. “I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he wrote. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal.”

One of the students wrote back and said he would present the proposal but he didn’t think Parker was being appropriately serious. Professor Parker responded to that note saying, “You are right that I am being provocative but I am provoking some clear thinking, I hope. It is all too easy to request others to do things that carry no personal cost to yourself. The question is whether you and others are prepared to make personal sacrifices to achieve the goals of environmental improvement (which I support as a goal).” The best part of the story is the response from the organizer of the protest:

Fergus Green, the organiser of the wider protest, who is studying for a master’s degree in physics and philosophy at Balliol College, said: “This is an inappropriate and flippant response by the bursar to what we were hoping would be a mature discussion. It’s January and it would be borderline dangerous to switch off the central heating.”

Yes, it would be rash and “borderline dangerous” to do something like that.

Now step back and take notice how closely this small debate at one college is a microcosm of the larger debate taking place around the globe. The teenage face of the anti-fossil fuel movement, Greta Thunberg, recently demanded “real zero” emissions starting right now. Following her advice would be the equivalent of cutting off the gas that heats the campus in the middle of winter. It wouldn’t just be “borderline dangerous” it would almost certainly be catastrophic for millions of people. Despite this, I bet protest organizer Fergus Green thinks she’s part of a “mature discussion.” In any case, a lot of people like him seem to think so.

Professor Parker’s response focuses the mind on the fact that this isn’t a game. There are significant costs to real people associated with eliminating fossil fuels. Natural gas, for instance, isn’t something we can simply cease using overnight or even in ten years. If we’re not careful about how we proceed, a lot of people could get hurt. So a fair response to people demanding an end to the use of fossil fuels is the one the professor put to these protesters: You first.

Democrats Demand YouTube Censor “Climate Misinformation” Videos

Tyrants gotta tyrant, you know

A Democrat Congressional committee is demanding YouTube censor videos that contain “climate misinformation” as part of a new purge that would basically eliminate skepticism about man-made global warming from the platform.

In a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis claims that YouTube has “been driving millions of viewers to climate misinformation videos every single day.”

Elizabeth Warren Suggests Making it a Crime to Spread ‘Disinformation’ Online

From Lieawatha herownslef. BTW, this is the definition of ‘irony’.

Presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has declared her intentions to see the spread of ‘disinformation’ online become a crime if she is elected president, CNBC reports.

In a campaign statement, Warren said that she will “push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information,” which she claims “undermines the basic right to vote.”

Her statement is largely directed at the Big Tech companies themselves, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google, but she did not differentiate between punishing the companies and punishing individual users as well. She also gave no specifics about what exactly would account for “disinformation” in her definition.

Greta Thunberg: ‘Immediately Halt All Investments In Fossil Fuel Exploration And Extraction’

What’s she gonna do next? This Little Miss Stampy Foot routine is wearing thin.

Yesterday, Karen wrote about the contrast between the statements made by President Trump and Greta Thunberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The NY Times has published Thunberg’s full remarks at the forum and they are pretty striking. In addition to her usual tone of condescension toward world leaders, Thunberg explained that the only solution was to completely abandon fossil fuels immediately. She doesn’t want to talk about “net zero” emissions she wants to see “real zero” right now.

One year ago I came to Davos and told you that our house is on fire. I said I wanted you to panic. I’ve been warned that telling people to panic about the climate crisis is a very dangerous thing to do. But don’t worry. It’s fine. Trust me, I’ve done this before and I can assure you it doesn’t lead to anything…

We are not telling you to keep talking about reaching “net zero emissions” or “carbon neutrality” by cheating and fiddling around with numbers. We are not telling you to “offset your emissions” by just paying someone else to plant trees in places like Africa while at the same time forests like the Amazon are being slaughtered at an infinitely higher rate…

Let’s be clear. We don’t need a “low carbon economy.” We don’t need to “lower emissions.” Our emissions have to stop if we are to have a chance to stay below the 1.5-degree target. And, until we have the technologies that at scale can put our emissions to minus, then we must forget about net zero. We need real zero.

A bit later she spells it out:

We demand at this year’s World Economic Forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions and governments:

Immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction.

Immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies.

And immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels.

We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even 2021. We want this done now.

Swedish Child-Priestess Greta Thunberg Goes to Davos and Scolds Us All Some More.

It’s a new decade, so it’s time for a new round of panic about the weather killing us all. Swedish child-priestess and chronic truant Greta Thunberg is at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, because that’s where the spotlight is. And she’s scolding all the grown-ups for not doing what she wants when she wants it, because Veruca Salt wasn’t fictional.

I was scared of the Boogeyman when I was little too. I just didn’t have crowds of adults applauding my cries of fear……

This kid is in for a shock when she grows up. Because she’s going to grow up. The adults who stole her childhood will have died off, but the planet will still be here. How will she reconcile the resulting cognitive dissonance? Will she acknowledge the truth, or will she find more excuses to believe the lie? That’ll be up to her, once she’s no longer being exploited for political purposes.

Appeals Court Throws Out Climate Change Lawsuit

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did no favors for the climate alarmism movement this afternoon, after the panel of judges in San Francisco threw out a lawsuit against the government based on climate change.

The suit was filed in 2015 by a group of young climate alarmists, insisting that the government is solely responsible for creating climate change via cooperating with the fossil fuel industry. The suit claims that the government turned a blind eye to the potential for damage via carbon emissions. Lawyers serving both Presidents Obama and Trump asserted that the government is not at fault because a livable climate is not guaranteed in the Constitution.

Circuit court judges Mary H. Murguia and Andrew D. Hurwitz and District Judge Josephine L. Staton heard the case. In a rare moment of constitutional textualism by the Ninth Circuit, the trio of Obama nominees affirmed in a 2-1 vote that it was not the duty of the court to craft climate change policy, or to tell the legislative branch how to go about making laws.

“The plaintiffs claim that the government has violated their constitutional rights, including a claimed right under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to a ‘climate system capable of sustaining human life.’ The central issue before us is whether, even assuming such a broad constitutional right exists, an Article III court can provide the plaintiffs the redress they seek—an order requiring the government to develop a plan to ‘phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO2.’ Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power. Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government,” Judge Hurwitz wrote in the majority opinion.

Dissenting in the decision is District Judge Josephine L. Staton, who claims that this case could be in the scope of the judiciary:

“My colleagues throw up their hands, concluding that this case presents nothing fit for the Judiciary. Plaintiffs bring suit to enforce the most basic structural principle embedded in our system of ordered liberty: that the Constitution does not condone the Nation’s willful destruction. So viewed, plaintiffs’ claims adhere to a judicially administrable standard. And considering plaintiffs seek no less than to forestall the Nation’s demise, even a partial and temporary reprieve would constitute meaningful redress. Such relief, much like the desegregation orders and statewide prison injunctions the Supreme Court has sanctioned, would vindicate plaintiffs’ constitutional rights without exceeding the Judiciary’s province,” Staton wrote.

Now there’s a perfect example of a crap-for-brains ‘activist judge’ for ya, if there ever was one.

The Ninth Circuit correctly decided this case; indeed, it is not the role of the judiciary to legislate or to instruct the legislative branch how to do so. Ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in this case would have set a dangerous precedent, and today is a good day for the adherence to one of our most fundamental principles: separation of powers.

PRESS RELEASE: HEARTLAND INSTITUTE REACTS TO NOAA’S CLAIM 2019 ‘SECOND-WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD’

Agency’s own data actually shows 2019 was cooler than 2005 in the United States; global temp claims riddled with problems

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (January 15, 2020) – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today

released a new report claiming 2019 was “the second warmest [year] since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. NOAA says this past year was 0.98 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, making the 2010s “clearly the warmest decade on record.”

Climate experts at The Heartland Institute dispute this claim, pointing to a cherry-picked period for the “mean” comparison and data that has been consistently adjusted to artificially make recent years appear significantly warmer than in decades past. In fact, NOAA’s state-of-the-art land-based temperature stations in the United States, placed by design to minimize the urban heat-island effect and other factors that corrupt the data, show that the U.S. was cooler in 2019 than in 2005. See the chart below from the U.S. Climate Reference Network via the NOAA website.

Trulli
 The following statements from climate and environment experts at The Heartland Institute—a free-market think tank—may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Media Specialist Billy Aouste at media@heartland.org.“The NOAA/NASA press release is inconsistently presented. For example, they can’t even agree on a common base period for comparisons. Some graphs use 1951-1980 while others compare to 1981-2010 averages to create anomaly plots. NOAA and NASA owe it to the public to present climate data with a consistent climate period for comparison, otherwise it’s just sloppy science.

“NOAA’s U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) has the best quality climate data on the planet, yet it never gets mentioned in their press releases. While the U.S. isn’t the world, the lack of a warming signal in the contiguous United States since 2005 suggests that the data NOAA and NASA use from the antiquated Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) reflects warmer biases due to urbanization and adjustments to the data. The USCRN has no biases, and no need for adjustments, and in my opinion represents a ground truth for climate change.”

Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow
The Heartland Institute
awatts@heartland.org

“Modest warming has, thankfully, been occurring since we slipped out of the Little Ice Age a little more than a century ago. That was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years and brought horrible human misery. The modest warming that is lately occurring should naturally lead to subsequent years being a little warmer than previous years, which is the case. This is a good thing and just brought tremendous human health and welfare benefits, along with substantial environmental benefits.”

James Taylor
Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
jtaylor@heartland.org

“Once again, NASA and NOAA are throwing gasoline on a fire they largely created by ignoring the best data on temperature, and instead using compromised or adjusted temperature readings to reinforce their claim humans are causing a climate crisis. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), the gold standard of surface temperature data, plus data from global satellites and weather balloons, all record minimal or almost no warming over the past 40 years, yet NASA and NOAA ignore these sources of unbiased data, because it undermines their dogmatic belief in human caused climate catastrophe.”

“NASA and NOAA are like toddlers trying to fit round toys into square holes, and just as likely as toddlers to throw fits when their efforts are stymied by reality.”

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Environment & Energy Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
hburnett@heartland.org

Fight fire with fire: controlled burning could have protected Australia
A kind of ecological fundamentalism has taken the place of common sense

It could also protect California, which has so many wildfires each year. And the same crap-for-brain econuts are the reason is the cause for both.

By modern standards, my grandfather would probably be considered an environmental criminal. To clear land for his farmhouse in north-eastern Victoria — and for his milking sheds, pig pens, chicken sheds, blacksmith shop and other outbuildings — he cleared hundreds of trees. And he cleared thousands more for his wheat fields, cattle paddocks and shearing sheds……….

This was once standard practice throughout rural Australia, where the pre-settlement indigenous population had long conducted controlled burns of overgrown flora — known as ‘fuel’ in current fire-management talk. They knew an absence of controlled burns would invite uncontrolled burns — such as the gigantic wildfires that have ravaged much of this drought-hit nation since September…..

[but today.ed.]Even minor attempts to reduce that fuel load are punished. Let’s suppose, for example, you have a wood fireplace at your rural house. Doing the right thing by the law and the environment, you do not cut down any trees to use as firewood. Instead, you simply collect dead branches and fallen trees lying around in the bushland dirt. This also reduces the amount of fuel available for potential bushfires, so you’re on the side of the angels……..

….Heed the warning from NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service Central West area manager Fiona Buchanan, in April last year: ‘We are getting the message out there that removing firewood, including deadwood and fallen trees, is not permitted in national parks. We want people to know the rules around firewood collection…it’s important people are aware that on-the-spot fines apply but also very large fines can be handed out by the courts.’

She wasn’t bluffing. A man had earlier been fined $30,000 ($20,000 US) for illegally collecting firewood in the Murrumbidgee Valley National Park. Why? Because, as Buchanan explained: ‘Many ground-dwelling animals and threatened species use tree hollows for nesting, so when fallen trees and deadwood is taken illegally, it destroys their habitat. This fallen timber is part of these animals’ natural ecosystem.’

Those natural ecosystems are now, across thousands of hectares of national parks in New South Wales, nothing but cinders and ash. Enjoy your protected habitat, little ground-dwellers.

Dr. John Robson looks back on the 10th anniversary of the exposure of the scandalous “Climategate” decision to delete awkward data that contradicted the idea that settled science said we face a man-made global warming crisis.

Greta Snaps Over Demands: ‘We Want This Done Now – As In Right Now.’

Far-left climate extremist Greta Thunberg demanded in a new op-ed that world leaders cave to her anti-capitalist agenda “right now” as they prepare to meet in Davos for the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum.

“We demand that at this year’s forum, participants from all companies, banks, institutions and governments immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels,” Thunberg wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian. “We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even 2021, we want this done now – as in right now.”

The Martyrdom of Saint Greta of Sweden

So Meat Loaf caused a little kerfuffle this weekend by saying he thought Greta Thunberg had been “brainwashed.”

I don’t know that should be a surprise, but it got me thinking about her again. I have a lot of sympathy for the kid.

For me, it started with seeing her picture. She’s small, slight, even scrawny; her head looks out of proportion to her body. She’s now 17 (as of 3 January) but she still looks childlike, prepubertal, younger than her 14-year-old sister. Frankly, she looks like she’s been in a concentration camp: malnourished over the long term

Sure enough, reading a little about her, we find that she’s an Asperger’s child (I guess this month that’s now called “high-functioning autism”), she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, she stopped eating for months and still refuses to eat anything but certain specific things, in particular, a dish of pancakes filled with rice — but her OCD keeps her from eating if there’s a sticker or label on the package. She suffers from “selective mutism”, which means basically that there are situations in which she’s unable to speak……..

Her public career started when she took Fridays off from school to hold up a sign outside the Swedish Parliament; this grew into a movement that spread throughout Europe.

Through it all, things keep striking me as odd. I don’t know what it’s like in Sweden, but cutting classes one day a week isn’t normally feted as heroic in the US. And she hasn’t been attending school for months as she traveled. In the US, that’s called “dropping out”.

So, this is what we’re being asked to believe: that an autistic kid with OCD who often can’t speak on her own has

  • organized a worldwide movement
  • given TED talks, spoken to the UN General Assembly, and been named Person of the Year by Time Magazine
  • managed to get a ride on a multimillion-dollar racing yacht so she wouldn’t have to fly (and bragged on how she wasn’t releasing CO2 on the trip, although it required seven plane tickets for the crew for the boat).

There’s a bucolic barnyard term for that — actually, several, depending on your choice of equine, bovine, or galline.

This isn’t a neurologically atypical high school kid arranging this: there are adults, and probably a lot of adults, using her as a front.