Mark C. Ross explains the syndrome in his American Thinker article Fear plus ignorance equals climate change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Weather is inherently mysterious. Multiple forces, such as wind, clouds, seasonal and day-night cycles, and air pressure are constantly interacting and causing continuous chaos. In the aftermath of two particularly destructive hurricanes, the fear-mongers are bloviating to the max over the catastrophic effects on the climate caused by human existence.
And yet there is no discernible trend toward either more storms or more intense hurricanes compiled over more than beyond the last century. (This chart by NOAA was especially easy to find.) Thus far, the decade of the 1940s saw the most seriously intense storms. Being historical data, this brings to mind a modification of Santayana’s famous adage: when people are ignorant of their history, they make it really easy for demagogues to lie to them about it.
Rather than human consumption of fossil fuels, two other factors are mostly relevant when it comes to the damage wrought by hurricanes: the path they take and the development of infrastructure within that path. Out on the open sea, a hurricane may damage a few ships, but when one goes over a population center…well, you know, it just happened.
What determines the path is largely chaotic. Go figure. There’s this weird thing called the jet stream, which is sort of the result of the Earth’s continuous rotation within a tenuous atmospheric envelope. Becoming known to American aviators during World War 2, the particular details of the jet stream were kept as a military secret well into the mid-twentieth century. Ocean currents and surface temperatures are also involved. Early forecasts of hurricane paths are typically all over the map. As the time frame compresses, they tend to become more accurate, but not always.
Then there’s the “atypically” warm weather that sometimes happens in early autumn. We just had some of that, along with offshore winds and seriously elevated fire danger. In the olden days, this was called “Indian summer.” Back in 1919, Victor Herbert even wrote a song by that name. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I’m expecting the fear-mongers to start pandering to the general public’s pervasive ignorance of earth science to cause panic over yet another routine weather event.
There are three scientific disciplines that are especially useful when looking at weather and climate of the distant past: geology; paleontology; and tree ring analysis, known as dendrochronology. Geology shows us the impact glaciers have had on the Earth’s surface. Paleontology shows us the now extinct life forms that thrived under previous environmental conditions. Dendrochronology shows us a preserved record of ancient weather conditions such as year-to-year rainfall and temperature.
How warm would the weather have to be for giant reptiles to flourish all over the Earth? Pretty warm, it seems. There is some work afoot to show that dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded. Good luck with that. Birds are the first known warm-blooded animals, and they evolved from reptiles and still tend to have scales on their legs. Mammals are also warm-blooded. Enormously large mammals such as wooly mammoths were common during the last ice age, the Pleistocene. Having a large size is especially beneficial for warm-blooded animals in cold climates, since surface area of the outer skin increases much more slowly than the actual body mass, making the large animal significantly more thermally efficient than a smaller one.
But why is the blatant climate change hoax still being promoted? There are two different reasons. The first is held among the true believers: humans are evil. They recklessly continue to damage the Earth’s biosphere, just for trivial benefits and without the slightest concern for the consequences of their actions. The other is political: fear can be a terrific motivator but is not all that conducive to good decision-making. That’s fine, too. The wannabe mega-state tyrants l-o-v-e to deal with fear and poor decision-making. How else can they effectively enslave the masses so as to fulfill their objectives?
And what are these objectives? Taking control of everything comes to mind. The evil players in politics are mostly after control. The rest of us just want to have the streets swept and the criminals pulled away from the rest of us. The term Statist should replace Marxist in this dialogue. Absolute government authority should overcome the self-direction of the individual — since so many among us are not really attuned to proper functionality in the modern world.
Socialism was already in the works when Karl Marx got involved. I like to say that a communist is an angry socialist. Marx injected class struggle into the quest for ownership of the means of production. Thus, the USA was a tough sell for Marxism since we are a particularly socially mobile society. The late, great Walter E. Williams would often say that the ranks of the one-percenters were constantly changing — since new ones would rise up, while others would blow it and fall away. The “Old World,” by contrast, is littered with caste systems and other forms of enforced social order.
Back to Caddell’s “elite gentry” — their desires are in mortal conflict with the aspirations of just plain folks. Or as Lincoln said, “God must love the common man, for he made so many of them.” To some, populism is a dirty word. To others, it is a path into the future. It can mean different things to different people. I like to use the term personal freedom. We can do what we want — as long as we don’t interfere with the freedom of others. But to others, “freedom” is a dirty word.
See Also: Help For Those Alarmed About the Climate
This is your brain on climate alarm. Just say No!
Commentary from Anthony Watts and Friends:
Our second climate news item is from a wonderfully titled media outlet called motor biscuit: Electric truck fire burns down brand new German fire station. The fire station in Stadtallendorf is really new, in fact they opened its bay doors less than one year ago to accommodate 10 fire engines and many firefighters. However a tragic fire destroyed the the fire station despite its fire fighting purposes. According to Euro News the fire originated with quote an emergency vehicle belonging to the fire department which contained lithium ion batteries and an external power connection. Unfortunately the electric emergencies vehicle blaze destroyed at least 10 fire truck models and caused around 25 million euros in damage.
Now firefighters’ woes and electric vehicles aren’t a new phenomenon. Departments in the United States have different tactics for battling EV battery fires. Ideally First Responders can suppress EV fires with mass quantities of water. However some firefighters claim that depending on the circumstances it’s best to cordon off the area and allow the EV to burn and eventually burn itself out.
Well, allowing a fire to burn itself out in this case took out 10 useful life-saving fire trucks and caused 25 million Euros in damage. Where where to start really with the idiocy of this particular story? For one thing, with all we know about fires from these things, having an EV fire truck and having it plugged into your station. And then I guess firefighters just think, well we’re firefighters so we’re immune, so no fire alarms, no fire suppression system. We don’t need fire alarms, we have fire experts right there exactly with badges. So the first truck goes up in flames. Are the other trucks all just sort of compacted around it? Were none of them far enough away to go over and drive them out of the garage as a as a brave firefighter? Was nobody in the firehouse despite the fact that all the trucks were there?
So you’ve got the error with no smoke alarms evidently no fire suppression system or at least not one geared to fight electric vehicle fires, which should tell you something right there. You have plugged an EV vehicle indoors in closed space next to vehicles that I presume have diesel in them. It’s a Murphy’s disaster waiting to happen. As I’m fond of saying, and it’s very apt in this case: the stupid it really burns.
I would like to think that the first time someone dies because of an electric vehicle fire and it happens multiple times again, the consumer product safety commission gets involved and says: you know what these aren’t safe on the roads these aren’t safe in your house. It’s time to withdraw them until we fix this problem.
But I would be wrong about that. Either people are that stupid or they’re just into the climate scare narrative and the need to do something even if it kills your neighbors or yourself. You know in the 1980s, the consumer product safety commission banned lawn darts pretty quickly because throwing lawn darts had killed a few people. But ebikes for example have killed a lot more, just in New York City alone killed a bunch and they’re still on the market.
Joel Kotkin explains in his National Post article Western nations cripple their economies with green initiatives while China and others laugh. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Despite massive subsidies and world forums,
green power still only represents one-fifth of global energy
North America, with its vast resources, may be in a position to save the economies of the west. But governments on both sides of the border seem more concerned with green virtue signaling than actually finding a workable approach to carbon emissions that does not undermine our economies and ability to defend ourselves.
The prevailing notion, both in Ottawa and D.C., is that our countries should ignore our resources, and how best to use them, in order to fulfill a messianic vision of massive, rapid emissions reduction.
However, as much this appeals to academics and wealth
pearl-clutchers in cities, it translates into higher prices than normal.
As the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh suggested, it places unfair “burdens” on the working class, one reason for his opposition to the tax. Worse still, the biggest green targets of what climatistas label as “industrial carbon” could devastate those same NDP voters — blue collar workers in mining, like manufacturing, logistics and agriculture.
Canada does not need another way to slow its economy. One recent estimate suggests that the proposed $170 a ton proposal would slice 1.8 per cent from the country’s already anemic GDP and cost upwards of 185,000 net jobs. Even Liberals admit something close to a 1 per cent decline. Some may see these draconian attempts to wipe out fossil fuels as the Lord’s work, but on the ground level it seems closer to class warfare.
Trudeau and his supports insist these policies are critical for saving the planet. Yet, attempts to follow such approaches elsewhere have not ended well. In Europe, most obviously Germany, as well as California, the shift to “renewable energy” has led, as it usually does, to high prices that already are driving German industry off the continent. Although not nearly as well-endowed with energy as North America, the climate lobby in Europe makes sure to throttle anything, such as offshore oil in the UK — in pursuit of green puritanism.
There’s something delusional in many of these initiatives. A key mistake is the common green assertion that fossil fuels are becoming obsolete and should be wiped out for the benefit of fitting a new economy. Yet, in the real world, despite billions in subsidies for “green power,” fossil fuels still represent roughly four fifths of global energy generation, just as it did twenty years ago. This is after expenditures of over one trillion were spent on solar and wind. The West has been reducing per capita emissions for years, but this is utterly subsumed by growth in developing countries, notably China, which not only buys huge amounts of natural gas but continues to open new coal-fired plants at a rapid rate.
North Americans be forewarned that in imposing burdens on themselves, but not competitors, green governments are essentially guaranteeing their own decline. Already in the EU, nearly a million industrial jobs have been lost over the past few years, with investment shifting to countries like China and India, which freely use coal and fossil fuels to keep costs down.
Britain’s path may give the starkest preview of the future Biden and Trudeau have in mind for us. Since 1990 the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP has dropped roughly 50 per cent along with several million jobs. This parallels a two thirds drop in UK energy production, while consumption has fallen by only one third. Three decades ago, a net energy exporter, the UK now increasingly depends on imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.
The winner here is clearly China, a country that emits more GHG than all developed countries put together. Ironically, carbon reduction policies fit brilliantly into its strategy to use its coal and other fossil fuel energy to power their takeover of the “green economy.” China has placed itself in the catbird’s seat on renewable energy, including utter domination of solar panels and electric vehicles. China already produces twice as many EVs as the US and the EU combined, and seeks to leverage its total domination of the solar-panel industry — its battery capacity is now roughly four times ours. China also exercises effective control of the requisite rare earth minerals and the technologies used to process them.
As the west’s own overpriced EVs sit on lots, China plays us for utter fools as we undermine our own industrial economy. The forced march to EV will be particularly tough on the 125,000 who work in Canada’s car factories. Manufacturing and mining, much of it energy-related, represent, along with real estate, two of the country’s largest industries. Under the current circumstances, they are heading for a spectacular fall. Overall, the EV industry in the U.S. uses 30 per cent less domestic labor than traditional gasoline car manufacturing, and under current circumstances can only hope for some basic assembly work using Chinese components.
These policies will affect every industry and consumer as cars and things like heaters are all forced to electrify. Britain’s shift to EVs is projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, and its government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours. By 2050 in California, state consultants estimate total energy demand will skyrocket, by some estimates rising 60 to 90 per cent. Not surprisingly, the state will face “acute electricity shortages” over the coming decade, according to one recent analysis.
Rising demands for electricity for artificial intelligence seems likely to add to this burden. Microsoft alone is opening a new data centre globally every three days. These power-hungry operations are expected to grow from 4.5 per cent of energy demand to 10 per cent by 2035. Artificial intelligence and data center demand are leading to massive expansions in projected energy use around the world at a time of restricted supply. Google, renowned for its green virtue signaling, has boosted its own emissions by 50 per cent since 2019.
Ultimately, the oligarchs will likely get their juice from sources like decommissioned nuclear energy, while the average family will take the economic hit in order to fulfill the agenda pushed by the likes of Steve Jobs’ widow, Lauren, Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefellers, Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist John Doerr. These, and other oligarchic allies, are waging a sophisticated and well-financed media and institutional campaign to catastrophize the climate issue as a way to ban gas stoves, stop new LNG facilities, and crack down on plastics.
Finally, there is the issue of security, particularly relevant in an age of declining western power. The new green mandates, if adopted, presage yet another force to further reduce the industrial prowess of western countries, while driving more industries to China, India, and other countries who produce their goods with dirtier fuels and develop resources with less environmental care. At the same time, third world countries, for the most part, are not embracing “net zero,” as it is totally infeasible for them and will likely resist western lectures on climate policy.
All of this is occurring as a concert of ugly energy producers — Russia, Iran, and Venezuela — press their advantage on western countries. They stand to benefit from continued de-industrialization as one way to further weaken the military capacity of the west. Taking away North American liquified natural gas from Europe simply makes the continent more dependent on such malefactors as Qatar, a primary backer of terrorists and their supporters, and may lead the west, hat in hand, to beg from even worse regimes, like Russia and Iran.
The good news — while green virtue-signaling may appeal to Trudeau, Biden, and Harris — these policies could be impacted by political realities. Worried about voters in industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, Harris, even as she embraces environmental bromides, has backed away from EV mandates and opposition to fracking, albeit with dubious credibility. Yet, perhaps she realizes, or those around her do, that these policies do not sell well compared to promoting more affordable and reliable energy. Trudeau, if he wants to remain relevant, may similarly need to flip the script if he hopes to forestall an utter political defeat.
Update on ominous overreach by Biden/Harris regime comes from Just the News While the SCOTUS denies request to block EPA power plant rule, challengers vow to continue fight. As explained below, EPA intends to require expensive and impractical CO2 Capture and Storage on all power plants using carbon fuels, thereby forcing shutdowns. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images,
Analysts say that if the rule is implemented, more than 5 million
people could experience blackouts, some lasting for 41 hours.
The Supreme Court ruled against a bid to block the EPA’s power plant rule while legal challenges make their way through the courts, but West Virginia, which is leading the coalition of states challenging the rule, vows the fight isn’t over.
In a brief order, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch said that the applicants “have shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits as to at least some of the challenges to the” EPA’s rule.
However, the justices explained, the stay wasn’t needed because compliance requirements wouldn’t begin until June 2025, which means the applicants wouldn’t “suffer irreparable harm” before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decides the merits of the case. Injunctive relief, such as sought here, requires clear and convincing proof that the harm be immediate and irreparable.
The lower court is expediting the case, the justices noted, meaning it would be resolved in the court’s current term. Afterward, the case would still have time to return to the Supreme Court, if it’s warranted.
The EPA rule, which was finalized in April, requires that coal-fired power plants be fitted with carbon capture technology controlling 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2039, and new gas-fired power plants will need to do the same starting in 2035, depending on the amount of runtime they have.
Energy analysts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling revealed that the EPA failed to do a proper analysis of the impacts of the rule, and if implemented, over 5 million people will experience blackouts, some lasting for 41 hours. While the EPA has defended the rule and argues that carbon capture is “well proven,” its own modeling showed it expected only one coal plant and no gas plants to be fitted with the technology as far out as 2055.
Two dozen states led by West Virginia filed a lawsuit against the EPA in May, arguing that the agency exceeded its authority with the rule. Utilities and industry groups also filed legal challenges to the rule. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the parties’ requests to block the rules while the courts considered the challenges, and the court ruled the applicants wouldn’t succeed on the merits of their case.
In court filings, the EPA noted that the lower court ruled the applicants are unlikely to succeed in arguing the agency exceeded its authority, and it stood by the rule and its carbon capture requirements, arguing that the technology has been “adequately demonstrated.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a
statement on the high court’s ruling that the fight isn’t over.
“This is not the end of this case: we will continue to fight through the merits phase and prove this rule strips the states of important discretion while forcing plants to use technologies that don’t work in the real world,” Morrisey said.
In 2022, the Supreme Court had sided with West Virginia and other states in a challenge to the Obama-era “Clean Power Plan.” Morrisey said that the high court had made clear limits to what the EPA can do, and the Biden administration’s “green new deal agenda” is ignoring those limits.
“This rule is yet another attempt of unelected bureaucrats to push something the law doesn’t allow,” Morrisey said.
Indiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming joined the application to the Supreme Court.
Kamala Harris wants to deprive Americans of the right to choose cars and household appliances. When she claims, as she did at a rally last week in Michigan, that “I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive” she is guilty of two of the Democrats’ most reviled offenses, malinformation (failure to contextualize a statement) and misinformation (lying).
Combating climate by changing infrastructure, consumer goods,
and lifestyle is one of Harris’s core values.
As recently as this year, the Biden-Harris administration continued to issue regulations and battle in court for the right to reduce consumer options for automobiles and home appliances. Harris favors consumers having choices, just so long as those choices are limited to those she pre-approves.
Then Senator Harris co-sponsored the Senate version of Alexandira Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal. Harris believed that mandating priorities and choices to limit emissions was so important that she advocated ending the filibuster to do so. Harris also co-sponsored the Zero Admissions Vehicles Act to require that all cars be EVs, or otherwise zero-emissions, by 2040. When she ran for president in 2019, she issued a plan to phase out new gas-powered cars even sooner – by 2035.
In April 2023, the Biden-Harris administration proposed rules that would ensure that EVs accounted for about 67 percent of all new car sales by 2032 (just eight years from now). After objections from nearly every sector and region of the country, the EPA issued final rules on March 20 of this year that require from 31 percent to 44 percent of new cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks manufactured in 2027 be EVs, with the final percentage to be based on emissions from other vehicles. The EPA rules require that by 2032, EVs account for at least 56 percent of new car sales, and at least another 13 percent be hybrids, leaving not more than 31% as gas powered.
In 2023, EVs accounted for only 7.6 percent of new car sales. That is because, despite subsidies and massive pressure from government and the Left, consumers dislike EVs. EVs have limited range, particularly in the cold. They take a long time to charge, and it is difficult for those who live in apartments to do so. They are costly. EVs maynot even be particularly good for the environment once the electrical grid and generating capacity are expanded to support mandates, and disposal of lithium ion batteries is considered. It also is unlikely the U.S. could have sufficient generating capacity without brownouts, blackouts, and other conservation measures.
EV mandates imperil national security by replacing fossil fuels, in which the U.S. is the world leader, with minerals found in China. China also is the low cost manufacturer of EVs, meaning that EV mandates will send American jobs and profits to China.
Energy expert Mark P. Mills warns that “All the world’s mines, both currently operating and planned, can supply only a small fraction of the… increase in various minerals that will be needed to meet the wildly ambitious EV goals,” while the UN Trade Development Agency advises there will be considerable shortages in lithium, cobalt, and copper if EV requirements are not slowed.
The strong disfavor in which consumers hold EVs is seen in two numbers. As Fortune observed, “no one wants to buy used EVs,” destroying resale value, and second, EVs are the least likely cars to be stolen. Numerous major automobile manufacturers are cutting EV production targets, and earlier this year Hertz announced that it was disposing of a third of its almost new EV fleet. The 2024 Deloitte Global Automotive Consumer Study found that EVs were never very popular among consumers, and familiarity is breeding contempt, with a 9% increase in the popularity of gas powered cars. A Gallup survey in April found that among Democrats who don’t yet own an EV, the percent saying they would never purchase an EV rose 10 points, compared to a year ago.
Harris not only wants to deprive Americans of the opportunity to choose gas-powered cars and most hybrids, but she also supports the Green New Deal’s goal of prohibiting sales of home appliances that do not meet draconian emissions standards. To date, the Biden-Harris administration has sought to take off the market most home dishwashers, heaters, air conditioners, and gas stoves. A federal appeals court struck down the Department of Energy’s action targeting dishwashers.
In May, the House passed the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act on a bipartisan basis. That bill is intended to restrain the administration from banning home appliances that run on natural gas.
Next time Kamala Harris claims that she won’t tell you what to buy,
just keep in mind that she intends to eliminate most options,
leaving you with a Hobson’s choice of poorly performing alternatives.
White privilege gave us Western civilization, the middle class,
and the nuclear family—you’re welcome! This book is dedicated
to the very fine people that made it all happen.
I just became aware of A.J. Rice from this American Greatness article Rice: Woke initiatives were ‘one uppercut to the face after another’ for Gen Z. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
A J Rice said Gen Z is a generation that struggles with human connection because of the mass social justice movements they grew up with. He made the comments on a recent episode of The Greatness Conversation.
“You had one uppercut to the face after another here for Gen Z where, first, it’s the Me Too movement, males are told to take it down a notch, toxic masculinity,” Rice said on a recent episode of The Greatness Conversation. “You might be a predator, you might be a rapist. And then, and then all of a sudden, George Floyd dies. You’re now a racist. All of your history stinks.”
“And then when that’s all over, they’re going to drop on you that there are 72 genders and Gary and Tim and Bill are coming into the women’s locker room and the girl’s bathroom,” Rice said. “So, you know, if you wonder why Gen Z has a hard time being authentically human.”
Rice joined the podcast to discuss his new book, “The White Privilege Album,” the use of comedy to talk about progressive “wokeness,” and the future of what society looks like for younger generations.
Who’s A. J. Rice? More from American Spectator A.J. Rice’s White Privilege Album Is a Vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Rice exposes what actual white privilege looks like
and why you don’t have it.
You already know this, but we live in deeply stuffy, oppressive times. You can get canceled for saying the wrong thing, not saying the right thing, or even looking at someone in a way they don’t like. Don’t believe me? Go to the gym and glance for more than three seconds at that 20-something girl in the bralette and bike shorts; woe betide you if you’re not in better shape than she is.
One minute you’re on top of the world — the next minute, you’re canceled and your whole world is turned upside down. It would be no small thing to just say forget all this and say and do whatever you want without fear. A younger Mel Brooks or Woody Allen might relish taking the fight to wokeness, but few others around would.
The digital gulag awaits us all, it seems. A hunger for thus imprisoning one’s fellow man is what the woke mind virus instills in its victims.
Into this climate of fear and loathing comes a writer, an entrepreneur, a madcap thinker with the sand to call the entire woke-industrial complex “zombies” and then follow that up with a book that quotes from Blazing Saddles on its opening page.
You remember Blazing Saddles, don’t you? It’s one of the funniest and most controversial movies ever made, a cultural sacrament for Generation X if ever there was one. It uses racism to mock racism, stupidity to rip stupidity, and comedy to take a sledgehammer to anyone who takes themselves too seriously — and in ways and from angles that make it an impossible movie to get produced today.
But back to the book. Its title is — mischievously —The White Privilege Album, and it’s A.J. Rice’s newest exploration of the insanity of our times.
According to Rice, we live in the worst of times, and, well, also the worse of times. Sure, we have all the technology we’ll probably ever need and the whole world’s knowledge at our fingertips at any given moment. You can explore the finest works of art, delve into the achievements of the Maya, study the miraculous founding of America — anything you want.
But millions merely use all this technology and knowledge we’re privileged to have to attack America relentlessly every hour of the day. We pay for public schools through our taxes, and those schools are filled with woke activists masquerading as teachers, indoctrinating our kids with ESG, DEI, and transgenderist trash and telling them that every generation before them was hopelessly racist and evil.
Well, only if they were white. Everyone else gets a free pass even if their ancestors owned slaves, committed genocide, or did other terrible things. Only white people need apply for the re-education camps Hillary Clinton wants, and only white people would be subject to the censorship regime that the entire Democratic Party so openly wants.
There’s your white privilege, Rice says. You’ll be subject to the whims of woke wackos and their digital shock troops. Your leaders will be cast as villains. You’ll be lied to, hoaxed, and perhaps doxxed and canceled. And you’ll like it or they’ll call you a racist and cancel you again.
As Rice documents and exposes in this extremely well-researched and written book, the major movements of our time are based on hoaxes, lies, smears, and bullying. Wokeness incorporates all of that — it’s a hoax against America and Western values, based on lies and half-truths taken out of context, aimed at smearing and undermining our history and culture, and weaponizes organized bullying to intimidate the weak-minded into submission.
Likewise, Joe Biden’s very reason for running for president was, according to him, based on the Trump “very fine people” quote — which was torn out of context and twisted into a hoax in which he is said to have praised neo-Nazis.Spoiler: He didn’t. Biden lied. A lot.
These hoaxes and lies are the foundation of the entire left now, Rice writes. Chapter by chapter, Rice takes on and tears apart the woke NBA, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Marxist racism, Barack Obama’s stealth wokeness, Ibrahim X. Kendi’s lucrative race-hustling grift, and so much more. Along the way, you will see actual white privilege, in the form of a ne’er-do-well crackhead who suspiciously stays out of jail no matter what while black and brown offenders end up in prison for years on similar offenses. You’ll also learn why Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were really fired. In fact, you’ll get 12 months of “white privilege” in this amazing book.
But The White Privilege Album isn’t just about mowing down woke zombies. There’s plenty of that, but it’s also about lifting up heroes who deserve it and rebuilding the sense that America is great and good and always has been. A.J. Rice delivers the triumphs amid the seemingly overwhelming evil, through chapter after chapter that you won’t be able to put down.
“Here’s the takeaway,” he said. “I’m abducting their language and using it against them.”
It started with so-called “white privilege,” he said.
“When you hear these terms, ‘white privilege,’ ‘intersectionality,’ or ‘check your privilege,’ or these constructs of white privilege, when you hear the left, do that what they’re really talking about is three things,” he said.
“One, Western civilization, and I mean Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian civilization, which has to go, they want it to go away,” the author said. “That’s why it’s not just about tearing down statues. It’s everything from Columbus to Winston Churchill — it has to go.”
The second thing is the middle class, Rice said. “The left cultural Marxists and economic Marxists have been trying to destroy the middle class for 100 years,” he said.
“They know to do that because they want a peasant class because Marxism has never thrived,” he said. “Not in Venezuela, not North Korea, none of these places when there’s been a healthy middle class — so middle class has to go.”
The third thing is children, he said. “I believe happy people have more children; of course, more children mean more global warming, so the third thing that they have to destroy is the nuclear family,” he said.
“We know they have to destroy it because Black Lives Matter told us that they wanted to destroy it on their website.”
Rice said he is trying to untangle Americans from the labels that the left uses to confuse us.
“Let me just say, we are not a multicultural country,” he said.
“We are a multi-ethnic country, and the middle class and Western civilization in the nuclear family are colorblind,” he said.
“They’re not white, black, or anything else, and if you want to come here and you do it legally, you can come here and participate in this great experiment,” Rice said.
“As long as the cultural Marxists don’t destroy it.”
David Blackmon provides the background in his Daily Caller article Bureaucrats Worry Democracy Will Get In The Way Of Their Climate Agenda. As the above image suggests some of those in power have not shied away from acting in defiance of democratic norms. By imposing climate policies and regulations they have diminished the livelihoods and freedoms of the public they supposedly serve. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
I have frequently written over the last several years that the agenda of the climate-alarm lobby in the western world is not consistent with the maintenance of democratic forms of government.
Governments maintained by free elections, the free flow of communications and other democratic institutions are not able to engage in the kinds of long-term central planning exercises required to force a transition from one form of energy and transportation systems to completely different ones.
Why? Because once the negative impacts of vastly higher prices for all forms of energy begin to impact the masses, the masses in such democratic societies are going to rebel, first at the ballot box and if that is not allowed by the elites to work, then by more aggressive means.
This is not a problem for authoritarian or totalitarian forms of government, like those in Saudi Arabia, China and Russia, where long-term central planning projects invoking government control of the means of production is a long-ingrained way of life. If the people revolt, then the crackdowns are bound to come.
This societal dynamic is a simple reality of life that the pushers of the climate alarm narrative and forced energy transition in western societies have been loath to admit. But, in recent days, two key figures who have pushed the climate alarm narrative in both the United States and Canada have agreed with my thesis in public remarks.
In so doing, they are uttering the quiet part about
the real agenda of climate alarmism out loud.
Last week, former Obama Secretary of State and Biden climate czar John Kerry made remarks about the “problem” posed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that should make every American’s skin crawl. Speaking about the inability of the federal government to stamp out what it believes to be misinformation on big social media platforms, Kerry said: “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” adding, “I think democracies are, are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing.”
Never mind that the U.S. government has long been the most focused purveyor of disinformation and misinformation in our society, Kerry wants to stop the free flow of information on the Internet.
The most obvious targets are Elon Musk and X, which is essentially the only big social media platform that does not willingly submit to the government’s demands for censoring speech.
Kerry’s desired solution is for Democrats to “win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know, winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to, to, implement change.” The change desired by Kerry and Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats is to obtain enough power in Congress and the presidency to revoke the Senate filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, enact the economically ruinous Green New Deal, and do it all before the public has any opportunity to rebel.
Not to be outdone by Kerry, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland of Canada, who is a longtime member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum, was quoted Monday as saying: “Our shrinking glaciers, and our warming oceans, are asking us wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change.”
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the central governments of both Canada and the United States have moved in increasingly authoritarian directions under their current leadership, both of which have used the climate-alarm narrative as justification. This move was widely predicted once the utility of the COVID-19 pandemic to rationalize government censorship and restrictions of individual liberties began to fade in 2021.
Two sides of the same coin.
Frustrated by their perceived need to move even faster to restrict freedoms and destroy democratic levers of public response to their actions, these zealots are now discarding their soft talking points in favor of more aggressive messaging.
This new willingness to say the quiet part out loud
should truly alarm anyone who values their freedoms.
Chris Morrison reports on the flap over Climate Crisis™ media tactics in his Daily Sceptic article Climate Activists Frustrated by IPCC’s Refusal to Link Extreme Weather With Carbon Emissions. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Last June, the state-reliant BBC reported that human-caused climate change had made U.S. and Mexico heatwaves “35 times more likely”. Nothing out of the ordinary here in mainstream media with everyone from climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale to UN chief Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres making these types of bizarre attributions. But for those who closely follow climate science and the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “such headlines can be difficult to make sense of”, observes the distinguished science writer Roger Pielke. In a hard-hitting attack on the pseudo-scientific industry of weather attribution, he states:
“neither the IPCC nor the underlying scientific literature comes anywhere close to making such strong and“ certain claims of attribution”.
Pielke argues that the extreme position of attributing individual bad weather events is “roughly aligned” with the far Left. “Climate science is not, or at least should not serve as a proxy for political tribes,” he cautions. But of course it is. The Net Zero fantasy is a collectivist national and supra-national agenda that increasingly relies on demonising bad weather. With global temperatures rising at most only 0.1°C a decade, laughter can only be general and side-splitting when IPCC boss Jim Skea claims that British summers will be 6°C hotter in less than 50 years. Two extended temperature pauses since 2000 have not helped the cause of global boiling. In addition there are increasing doubts about the reliability of temperature recordings by many meteorological organisations that seem unable to properly account for massive urban heat corruptions.
The big problem for ‘far Left’ climate extremists is that event attribution is a form, in Pielke’s words, of “tactical science”. Such science serves legal and political ends and is not always subject to peer review. As the BBC and other media outlets can attest, the work is “generally promoted via press release”. It has been developed in response to the failure of the IPCC to detect and attribute most types of extreme weather including drought, flooding, storms and wildfires to human involvement, notes Pielke. Worse, the IPCC can find little sign of human involvement going forward to 2100.
Scientists cannot answer directly whether particular events are
caused by climate change since extremes occur naturally.
Meanwhile the IPCC is somewhat dismissive about weather attribution, or as Pielke terms it, “weather attribution alchemy”. It notes: “The usefulness or applicability of available extreme event attribution methods for assessing climate-related risks remains subject to debate.” The IPCC is a biased body full of climate alarmists, but its inability to attribute single events to humans is obviously highly irritating and somewhat inconvenient for activists and their media counterparts.
Dr. Friederike Otto speaking with reporter at Oxford.
Dr. Friederike Otto runs World Weather Attribution (WWA) out of Imperial College London and is a frequent presence on the BBC. WWA is behind many of the immediate attributions of bad weather to human causes and its motives are clear. As Dr. Otto has noted: “Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.” Otto is clear that the main function of such studies, part-funded by Net Zero-supporting billionaires and heavily pushed by aligned mainstream media, is to support lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. She explains this strategy in detail in the interview, ‘From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation‘.
The inability of the IPCC to attribute bad weather to humans has been viewed by climate advocates as “politically problematic”, continues Pielke. He notes the work of climate activists Elizabeth Lloyd and Naomi Oreskes who are worried that the lack of attribution “conveys the impression that we just do not know, which feeds into uncertainty, doubt or incompleteness, and the general tendency of humans to discount threats that are not imminent”.
Perish the thought that there should be uncertainty, doubt
or incompleteness in the settled world of climate science.
It is of course different from all other branches of science in that all its opinions are right and consequently there is no need for the unhelpful process of constant inquiry and experiment. It need hardly be added that no doubt exists at the BBC, where former Radio 4 Today Editor Sarah Sands wrote the foreword to a WWA guide for journalists. Recalling when the late Nigel Lawson suggested there had been no increase in extreme weather, Sands noted: “I wish we had this guide for journalists to help us mount a more effective challenge to his claim.” These days, Sands enthused, attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse”.
For her part, Otto is keen to crack down on the heretics. She was at the forefront of the recent notorious retraction of a paper in a Springer Nature journal that stated there was no evidence that the climate was breaking down. Written by four Italian scientists and led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti, they argued that a climate emergency was not supported by the data. Otto, who had previously worked in the Oxford School of Geography for 10 years, claimed the scientists were not writing in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly saying it should never have been published,” she demanded.
A recent scientific study has confirmed that natural and climate-related disasters are declining during the 21st century. Getty Images/iStcokphoto
Benny Peiser makes the case in his NY Post article Despite climate-change hysterics, weather disasters have decreased. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
A recent scientific study has confirmed what climate realists have been highlighting for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century.
In a paper published this year in one of the world’s leading journals on environmental hazards, Italian scientists Gianluca Alimonti and Luigi Mariani analyzed the number and temporal trends of natural disasters reported since 1900.
A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Thus the planet’s recent modest warming has been saving millions of lives.
Based on the best available data, the two scientists concluded the 21st century has seen “a decreasing trend [of natural disasters] to 2022” which is “characterized by a significant decline in number of events.”
The researchers emphasized that their conclusion “sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by UN bodies which predict an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming.”
“Our analyses strongly refute this assertion,” they wrote.
For years, international agencies such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Red Cross have claimed that climate-related disasters are escalating.
Floods lead a near doubling of disaster events from 1980 to 1999 compared to 2000 to 2019, according to a report by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
“Weather disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s,” the WMO reported in 2021.
Disaster and weather officials affiliated with the UN claim this dramatic rise is due to global warming: The changing climate, they say, is making weather disasters stronger and more frequent.
Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States.
The increased frequency of heat waves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events prove the negative impact of a warming world, according to various UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations.
Yet, as the actual data used by these organizations reveals, the last 20 years have in fact seen a significant decline in such events.
It turns out that climate alarmists have based their claims on a highly misleading comparison of disaster data of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries.
By their tally, the period from 1980 to 2000 saw about 4,200 natural disasters —with the number increasing sharply, to more than 8,000, during the first 20 years of this century.
This conclusion, however, is fatally flawed: It fails to take into account the huge increase in the global reporting of disasters engendered by the invention and rapid global dissemination of new communication technologies since the 1980s.
The arrival of the internet and other new communication tools has undoubtedly accelerated the reporting of disasters from all corners of the world — events that were significantly underreported in earlier decades.
As well, the number of people killed by natural and climate-related disasters has fallen steadily over the past 120 years — from 500,000 deaths per decade in the early 20th century down to less than 50,000 per decade in the last ten years.
And, contrary to claims by NGOs and government officials, climate-related disaster losses have also declined as a percentage of global GDP during the last 30 years — from about 0.25% of GDP in 1990 to less than 0.20% in 2023.
The study by Alimonti and Mariani vindicates what we at the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been pointing out for a long time: Climate-related disasters are not on the rise, despite warming temperatures.
International agencies and the news media have hyped climate disasters for far too long, while ignoring the factual downward trend.
”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” as the saying goes. UN agencies and NGOs have been misleading the public for years. It’s past time for the truth to win out.
Benny Peiser is the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.
See also
Our Weather Extremes Are Customary in History
Figure27: Annual count of EF3 and above tornadoes in the US, 1950–2021. Source: Source: NOAA/NCEI.106, 107
Chris Morrison provides the analysis in his Daily Sceptic article ONS Reveals the Pitiful Number of New Green Jobs Being Created in the U.K. Economy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The problem with the green U.K. economy, and its associated destruction of the hydrocarbon environment, is that there are very few jobs being created. The few remaining ‘workers’ in the ruling Labour party are starting to rumble all the luxury boondoggles that are set to further decimate well-paid jobs in their communities. The figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), trying to estimate the actual number of green jobs, are always a highly creative hoot, and the latest batch are no exception. Many jobs identified are simply displacement activity, with one repair or maintenance occupation taking over from another. Around 6% of the total are to be found in ‘environmental charities’, an interesting way to describe elite billionaire political funding to push the Net Zero fantasy. Such is the seeming desperation to rustle up a green job, the ONS even includes repairing home appliances, controlling forest fires and separating hydrogen by carbon dioxide-producing electrolysis.
The latest ‘estimates’ from the ONS cover 2021 and 2022, and they are said to show an increase in both years. But as the graph below reveals, the rises are pitiful over a decade, and the 2022 estimate of 639,000 is less than 2% of jobs in the economy as a whole.
As can be seen, environmental charities employ 40,000 people, almost as many as the 47,000 that work in renewable energy. But the charities figure does not include all those make-work jobs in environmental consultancy and education or what is described as in-house environmental activities. If all the displacement, invented or re-badged jobs in repair, electric vehicles, waste disposal, water treatment, energy efficiency, Net Zero promotion, teaching and the ubiquitous bureaucracy are rightly ignored, it is unlikely that more than 150,000 new jobs have been created.
Fairly small pickings, it might be thought, from all the cash sprayed at subsidy-hunting chancers over at least two decades. Even worse, any new jobs are easily offset by the occupations being destroyed in steel making, refining hydrocarbons, coal mining and oil and gas exploration. Fracking for gas would transform a number of deprived areas in the U.K. at little environmental cost, as it has done in the U.S. Energy security would likely be achieved, and the tax take would be considerable. But fracking is anathema to the major political parties in the U.K., except the emerging Reform party.Last week saw some real push back on the madness of Net Zero and the so-called green economy. The boss of GMB, the third largest trade union in the country, told the annual Labour party conference that its plans to decarbonise the energy network by 2030 will cost up to one million jobs, decimate working communities and push up bills for the poorest. According to Smith, Government’s plans for Net Zero were “bonkers” and “fundamentally dishonest”. In a week when it was revealed that British consumers, both industrial and private, had some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world, he charged that current energy policy amounted to virtue signalling by politicians. He accused them of exporting jobs and importing virtue because the jobs were being created abroad rather than in the U.K.
Meanwhile, a recent paper published in Science came to a damning conclusion that will not surprise sceptics, namely that 96% of climate policies over the last 25 years, ultimately designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, have been a waste of money. “That’s where green spin has got us,” writes George Monbiot, although these days the Guardian’s extremist-in-chief seems to have given up on all life enhancing processes that run the risk of disturbing anything on the planet. “Finally, 15 years and a trillion dollars too late, George Monbiot says what sceptics have been saying all along,” observes the sceptical journalist Jo Nova. “Nearly every single carbon reduction scheme is a useless make-work machination that creates the illusion that the government is doing something,” she says.
As we can see, the ONS survey is full of these make-work schemes providing jobs that can only exist by rigging free markets and providing eye-watering subsidies from consumers and taxpayers. As the more concerned trade unionists can see, much of the cost of these fantasy ventures falls on the poorest members of society forced to pay higher prices for many of the basic essentials of life. In addition, as we have observed, most green schemes make mugs of the wider investing public, with the RENIXX, a stock capitalisation global index of the 30 largest renewable industrial companies, showing near zero growth since it was started in 2006. None of this matters, of course, to the Mad Miliband and his weird wonks at the U.K. Department of Energy, who are ramping up ideological plans to hose cash at daft ideas like carbon capture, battery energy storage and hydrogen production.
Not only is CO2 Capture and Storage wildly impractical, its aim is to deprive the biosphere of plant food.
But all is not lost on the jobs front – opportunities must be taken when they occur. Earlier this year, Gary Smith was able to point to some new employment clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.
Q: What is the difference between Golf and Government?
A: In Government you can always improve your lie.
–Anonymous Source
Kite & Key explains in above video Why the Odds Are Stacked Against Net Zero. For those preferring to read I provide a text from the captions, though the video is entertaining along with great images, some of which are included with the text in italics with my bolds.
Overview
Are we at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels? That’s the theory advanced by an international coalition of politicians who aim to get us to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050. Just one problem: Research from the experts in their own governments suggests it’s a nearly impossible task. Enthusiasts for net zero often say we’re on the cusp of an “energy revolution.”
And that theory has a big problem: Energy revolutions don’t happen — at least not in the way that politicians often describe. While it’s true that technological and economic factors sometimes change the energy mix — countries that get wealthier become less dependent on wood, for example — the broader trend in the history of the world’s energy consumption can be defined by three words: more, more, more.
In a power-hungry world, we keep adding new energy sources. But there’s rarely any subtraction. And, with global energy demand expected to increase by about 35% by 2050, it’s nearly impossible that we can get all the power we need from carbon-free sources. For instance, meeting the net zero goals would require the construction of over 9,000 nuclear plants by 2050. The number currently being built around the world? 59.
So, what will the future of energy really look like? Our video explores.
It doesn’t happen that often. But every once in a while, a single generation witnesses a technological breakthrough that will change the world forever.
The printing press.
The beginning of human flight.
And, for our generation, an inevitable full scale revolution in clean energy…
…that’s running a little behind schedule…
…Ok, way behind schedule.
“The beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” That’s how the United Nations referred to the outcome of a 2023 climate change summit held in…the United Arab Emirates. Which is sort of like having the Prohibition Conference in Vegas. Nevertheless, delegates from throughout the world left the gathering having pledged that the world would transition away from fossil fuels and get the world to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050.
Now, the rationale for this is clear enough. Leaders from around the globe are worried that without a shift over to carbon-free energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear the world will face significant problems as a result of climate change.
But, regardless of why they’re doing this, the more important question is whether they can do it. Because here’s the thing about energy revolutions: they don’t happen. At least not in the way that the UN is imagining. To understand why, it’s worth looking at the history of the world’s energy consumption – which looks like this.
Go back a couple of centuries and the world basically ran on “traditional biomass”– -which is a fancy way of saying … wood. We burned a lot of wood and also … dung. Then in the mid 19th century, coal came into the picture in a big way. By the 20th century, we’re using tons of oil. And natural gas is a big factor too, especially as we cross into the 21st century, and fracking makes it both abundant and more affordable. As the years went by, we added low-carbon sources of energy as well, like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar–though overall, they’re still a pretty small part of the picture.
Now, there are two important things to note about this chart. First, the history of the world’s energy consumption can be defined in three words: more, more, more. Which kind of makes sense. After all, pretty much everything that defines modern life involves a lot of energy. Between 1950 and 2022, for example, the population of the U.S. a little more than doubled. But in that same time period, our electricity use got 14 times larger.
And second, because of that “more and more, more” trend, the only things we’ve ever had that look like energy “revolutions” have been about adding new sources into the mix, not getting rid of existing ones as net zero goals propose.
Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean that nothing ever changes. In wealthier nations, the rise of cheaper natural gas has led to less coal usage, especially in the U.S. And poorer countries usually abandoned traditional biomass as they get wealthier, because no advanced nation powers itself by burning wood. We use it for much more sophisticated purposes…like doing psychedelics in the Nevada desert.
But using a little less coal or wood or relatively modest changes–and importantly are driven by cold, hard economic facts. By contrast, what the net zero goals entail is replacing all of this … with this … in just about 25 years. Based on little more than the fact that politicians just want it to happen.
To understand just how tall a task this is, it’s worth looking at what it would require to make it a reality. It’s estimated that meeting net zero goals would require deploying 2000 new wind turbines…
…every day … for the next 25 years. To give you some context for that, the U.S. builds about 3000 new wind turbines…
…a year.
Alternately, you could open one new nuclear plant every day for the next 25 years. For the record, that’s over 9,000 of them. And, also for the record, as of 2023, the number that were actually being built across the entire world was … 59. And here in the U.S. anyway, it generally takes over a decade to build them.
And those are some of the reasons why what politicians promise about net zero and what the experts in their own governments say…don’t exactly match up. The government’s U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, projects that by the year 2050, far from seeing a revolution in energy, America will be a little less reliant on coal, a little more so on renewables…and the rest of the picture looks pretty much the same as today.
And in fact, this is true for the entire world. The EIA ran seven different scenarios for what the world’s energy consumption could look like in 2050, and while all of them showed a significant increase in renewables … they also all showed a world that continued to get most of its energy from things like coal, oil, and natural gas. Not exactly “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”
The reason for all of this: We simply can’t take enormous quantities of energy offline in a world where it’s predicted that we’re going to need almost 35% more of it by the year 2050. For one thing, there are a lot of poor countries around the world who are going to need dramatically more energy to bring themselves up to even a fraction of our standards of living.
And for another, the technologies of the future require vast amounts of power. By the year 2030, it’s estimated the computer usage around the world will take up as much as five times more of the world’s electricity production as it did even in 2020. The digital cloud we all use to store data already uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan. And with new energy-hungry technologies like AI on the way, things are only gonna move further in that direction.
Which means the real future of energy is probably: everything. Nuclear, natural gas, wind, and solar, oil, hydropower, coal. We’re going to need all of it. Probably not much wood though.
Except for these guys.
Science Matters 