Biden’s EPA Frontrunner Worked to Ban Gas-Powered Cars

President-elect Joe Biden may tap a California bureaucrat who worked to ban gas-powered cars to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, fueling opposition from some activists.

Mary Nichols has been touted as a leading candidate to head the EPA thanks to her record as chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board. In 2019, Nichols threatened to ban gasoline-powered vehicles in the state after President Trump rolled back vehicle emissions standards. In September, Nichols made headlines for her plan to transition to zero-emission vehicles in California by 2035, weaning the state off of gas-powered vehicles. As of 2018, electric-powered cars comprised only 1 percent of all vehicles.

Some activists said Biden should avoid a radical environmentalist agenda that ignores social and economic costs when addressing climate change. Robert Dillon, an adviser to the free-market environmentalist organization ConservAmerica, told the Washington Free Beacon that Nichols's record should draw bipartisan concern.

"Nichols may very likely fall into that category of exceptions, where you're going to see the majority stand together to oppose them," Dillon said. "What's your priority: virtue signaling or accomplishing sustainable policy to address climate change, even if it's incremental."

The Biden transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Nichols has already attracted bipartisan opposition to her actions in California, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic. In March, she went forward with emissions requirements on the trucking industry despite dire economic straits brought on by shutdowns. Nichols also used George Floyd's death to push her environmental agenda. In a now-deleted tweet posted the week following Floyd's death, Nichols called for climate action in supposed solidarity with protests over law enforcement.

"‘I can't breathe' speaks to police violence, but it also applies to the struggle for clean air," Nichols wrote. "Environmental racism is just one form of racism. It's all toxic. Government needs to clean it up in word and deed."

California Democratic assemblyman Jim Cooper, who is black, called Nichols, who is white, shameless for attempting to exploit Floyd's death to advance "crooked enviro policies."

Steve Milloy, who served as a Trump transition team member for the EPA, said the episode is indicative of Nichols's approach to pushing an unpopular agenda.

"She knows how to use the environment as a political weapon to advance the environmental agenda, and she will say or do anything to do that," Milloy told the Free Beacon. "If you're looking for someone to execute that left-wing agenda, Mary Nichols is a good person to do that."

Milloy said that Nichols's political instincts are not as alarming as her past interactions with China. In 2013 and 2017, Nichols met with officials from the city of Shenzhen and several Chinese state-owned auto enterprises to work together on climate change initiatives. While Nichols has hampered American industries with increasingly onerous and costly environmental regulations, China remains the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. China could use that to its advantage, according to Milloy.

"The Chinese and Russians are going to try to use our fixation on climate to their advantage," Milloy said. "If they can trick us into harming our economy by reducing emissions and giving up fracking, they are happy to go along with that and promise to be emissions-free 100 years from now."

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/bidens-epa-frontrunner-worked-to-ban-gas-powered-cars/

Electric Vehicle Shock Treatment

Joe Biden, his fellow Democrats, and apparently big U.S. automakers, have joined the rush to transform America’s transportation to 100 percent electric vehicles (EV) whether We the People want it or not. During an October town hall, Biden asserted that his plan would save “billions of gallons of oil” and help create a million auto industry jobs, in part bybanningthe sale or manufacture of new internal combustion (IC) engine vehicles by 2030. How this will happen in the Real World, he didn’t say.

Biden’s California-inspired vision excludes hybrid vehicles, includes installing 500,000 EV charging stations, and provides “cash for clunkers” style rebates for new EV buyers. But as of 2018, nearly half of EV registrations (256,800 out of 543,600) were in California, with Hawaii, Washington and Oregon not far behind. Yet as of 2018, EVs comprised less than 2% of California’s 15 million total vehicles – despite huge tax credits, free charging stations, free access to HOV lanes, and other subsidies and incentives.

Only 727,000 electric vehicles were sold in the USA in 2019, and nearly half were plug-in hybrids.Hybrid sales peaked in 2013, but by 2019 had fallen to 2.3% (about 400,000 vehicles) of all light-duty vehicle sales, largely due to shunning by EV purists. Compare those numbers with the 6.3 million total vehicles sold in 2016, or to the 273,600,000 passenger cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses and other vehicles on U.S. roads in 2018.

Following China’s lead, U.S. automakers – not just Tesla – are all aboard for this big switchover. As IC vehicles are replaced and gasoline stations are transformed into EV charging stations, the pressure will rise to ditch remaining IC vehicles and buy more EVs.China-friendlyGeneral Motors plans to spend $20 billion on EV and self-driving vehicle technology through 2025, including 23 different EVs by 2023. Ford Motor Company has pledged to invest $11 billion by 2022 on EV development.

Biden is following in the footsteps of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose new climate plan includes banning sales of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2030, and hybrids by 2035. But, as economist and Global Britain think tank director Ewen Stewart argued, this is “frankly one of the most illiberal and economically destructive policies ever to come from Whitehall. It risks hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and much-needed exports for the most marginal benefit.”

“The implications of this ban [in a country with only 1 percent EVs] are immense in terms of manufacture, supply chains, investment, sunk capital, employment, infrastructure, consumer choice, value of existing stock, and so much more,” Stewart explained.“Never before has a government dared to close down an entire and critical industry almost overnight, by diktat.”

It is delusional, he continued, to believe that destroying a successful British industry by banning IC engines – rather than letting consumer choice determine the market – will be good for the economy. Today’s British automotive sector comprises a fifth of the nation’s manufacturing base, with over 80 percent of the 1.3 million cars it manufactures being exported. That’s 13 percent of the UK’s entire export market.

The UK automotive industry employs over 180,000 Britons directly and many hundreds of thousands more indirectly. But the United Kingdom cannot compete with China for the global EV market, because UK labor costs are far higher, and its energy is increasingly far more expensive and unreliable.

Worse, Stewart pointed out, this virtue signaling will have at best a miniscule benefits for the UK and global environment, but will be devastating for automobile owners. The British government already vastly diminished the value of the nation’s 12 million diesel vehicles with surcharges that cost owners of pre-2015 diesel vehicles up to $67 per week just to drive in “ultra-low-emission zones.” Other costs included doubling parking permit rates and higher taxes for diesel vehicles.

The new initiatives will do the same to gasoline-powered vehicles. They will phase out gasoline pumps, cause resale value to plummet, and devastate the nation’s export market.

Andrew Montford, deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, says the misguided British plan could cost motorists £700 billion (US$938 billion). Several aspects of EVs, Montford contended, make them more costly than petrol cars: replacing expensive batteries, installing home charging stations (often requiring upgrading household wiring), time and inconvenience during battery recharges, and more.

Montford estimated that by 2050 the average household might have spent an extra £19,000 (US$25,460) –if they can still afford to own a vehicle. Moreover, with other government mandates driving up the cost of electricity, the cost of motoring could double, driving working classes entirely off the roads.

The absurdity of this British assault on its own existing auto industry is made even more ridiculous by the fact that wide-scale electrification doesn’t change current mobility patterns – and only manages to reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2050, Spanish systems engineering expertMargarita Mediaville explained. To call EVs “green” or “sustainable” is patently absurd.

Ms. Mediaville’s company also found that manufacturing all those new EV batteries would deplete proven global reserves of copper, lithium, nickel and manganese, unless mining and/or recycling rates grow enormously by 2050. But opening new mines, mostly in other countries, as the European Union proposes, would have “devastating repercussions on water, biodiversity and the human rights of local communities.”

Mining and processing ores, and manufacturing batteries, would also require enormous amounts of fossil fuels, involve hundreds or thousands of tons of ore and overburden for every ton of finished metals, and result in prodigious emissions of pollutants and carbon dioxide. Indeed, a new report by Competitive Enterprise Institute analyst Ben Lieberman concludes that replacing gasoline with electricity as the energy source for vehicles does not eliminate those emissions, but only changes where they are emitted.

Yet another downside of vastly increasing the number of EVs is that the metals and minerals increasingly come from countries like China, Chile and Congo – where fair wage, child labor, workplace safety and environmental standards are far below anything the US or EU would tolerate. EV batteries also require more energy to manufacture than batteries and engines for IC vehicles. Recycling them is likewise complicated, expensive, and fraught with pollution and public health risks.

The financial firm UBS found that replacing global sales of conventional IC vehicles with electric versions would require a 2,898 percent increase in lithium production; a 1,928 percent increase in cobalt; a 524 percent increase in graphite; a 105 percent increase in nickel; a 655 percent increase in rare-earth minerals; and at least a tripling of copper production. Coal, diesel and gasoline burning would also skyrocket, to fuel the work.

A separate report from Securing America’s Future Energy indicates China controls nearly 70 percent of electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity, compared to just 10 percent by the USA. The report projects that 107 of the 142 EV battery manufacturing projects scheduled by 2021 will be in China, with only nine in the U.S. Moving toward mandatory EVs will clearly enrich China at America’s expense.

Before taking any steps toward converting America to EVs and non-fossil fuel electricity generation, U.S. policymakers must carefully examine the human and environmental costs – in precise numbers, including rising lung disease, cancer, injury and death rates in foreign mines, processing plants and factories.

They must also consider the impact on American workers and communities from outsourcing battery manufacturing to Chinese companies. The Chinese, with assistance from a President Biden, will happily take most of those manufacturing jobs back to the Middle Kingdom, while saddling American families with soaring costs for unreliable electricity, short-range driving and collapsing industries. Incredibly, our dependence on China for minerals and component parts for high-tech military equipment will also soar!

All these issues demand the attention of our legislators and regulators, environmentalists and journalists. Unless of course they’re just engaging in cheap virtue-signaling, and actually don’t give a hoot about American workers and energy consumers, the U.S. and global environment, or global adult and child workers who will put their health and lives at risk providing EV and other technologies.

https://townhall.com/columnists/dugganflanakin/2020/12/10/electric-vehicle-shock-treatment-n2581313

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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Archaeologists find remnants of a vast network of roads and villages in the Amazon

Warmists always picture the Amazon region as an untouched pristine forest that is only now being "raped" by man, thus destroying the "lungs of the planet?".

That is far from the truth, The reality is that the Amazon region was much like the Inca and Aztec regions -- it had a flourishing native population with a city-based civilization.  Specialists have long known that but it has never penetrated the popular awareness. 

The jungle cover over the Amazon, far from being pristine, dates back only to about 400 years ago -- when the Amazonians, like the Incas and Aztecs, were overwhelmed by gold-seeking Spanish explorers and conquistadores.  

The Meso-American populations of what is now the Southern USA were almost entirely wiped out by the European diseases brought by conquerors such as DeSoto, leaving only a few Hopi, Navajo  and other people surviving.  Something similar seems to have happened in the Anazon, with the few survivors driven back to a primitive lifestyle by the collapse of their civilizations

But the archaeologists noted below have found many remains of the civilization that was.  So far from being a destruction of a primitive forest by man, present economic developments in the Amazon are not at all unprecedented.  They simply represent mankind returning to one of its old stamping grounds

I have written as greater length on this previously

Billions of lasers shot from a helicopter flying over the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest have detected a vast network of long-abandoned circular and rectangular-shaped villages dating from 1300 to 1700, a new study finds. 

The round villages all had remarkably similar layouts, with elongated mounds circling a central plaza, like marks on a clock. 

"These latter elongated mounds, when seen from above, look like the rays of the sun, which gives them the common name of 'Sóis,'" the Portuguese word for "suns," the researchers wrote in the study.

The discovery is part of a new archaeological focus on the pre-Columbian Amazon. Within the past 20 years, researchers have learned that the rainforest's southern rim was home to a great diversity of soil-sculpting cultures that engineered the landscape before the Europeans arrived. Within the past decade, scientists have uncovered the remnants of so-called "mound villages," which are shaped as circles or rectangles, and connected by road networks. 

Archaeologists, however, had yet to look for mound villages in the Brazilian state of Acre, so an international group of researchers teamed up to survey the area with lidar — or light detection and ranging. With this technique, billions of lasers shot from overhead (in this case, from a helicopter) penetrate the rainforest's canopy and map the landscape below. 

The lidar survey, combined with satellite data, revealed a remarkable 25 circular mound villages and 11 rectangular mound villages, the researchers said. Another 15 mound villages were so poorly preserved, they could not be categorized as either circular or rectangular, the team added. 

The circular mound villages had an average diameter of 282 feet (86 meters), while the rectangular villages tended to be smaller, with an average length of 148 feet (45 m). Further analysis of the "sun" villages revealed they had carefully planned roads; each circular mound village had two "principal roads" that were wide and deep (up to 20 feet, or 6 m, across) with high banks, and smaller "minor roads" that led to nearby streams.

Most of the villages were close to each other — just about 3 miles (4.4 km) apart, the researchers found. The principal roads often connected one village to another, creating a vast community network in the rainforest, the researchers said.

The distinctive and consistent way Indigenous people arranged these villages suggests that they had specific social models for the way they organized their communities, the researchers said. It's even possible that this configuration was meant to represent the cosmos, they noted.

The intricate road system, however, "is hardly a surprise for Amazonian archaeologists," the researchers wrote in the study. "Early historical accounts attest to the ubiquity of road networks across the Amazon. They are mentioned since the 16th-century account of [the Spanish Dominican missionary] Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who observed wide roads leading from the riverine villages to the interior." Later, in the 18th century, Col. Antonio Pires de Campos, "described a vast population inhabiting the region, with villages connected by straight, wide roads that were constantly kept clean," the researchers added. 

Little is known about the culture practiced by the people in these mound villages. But preliminary research suggests that this culture's ceramics were "cruder" than those of the culture that preceded them, known as the Geoglyphs, who lived in that region from about 400 B.C. to A.D. 950. 

The study was published in April in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, and was just featured on Channel 4's "Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon," in the U.K., which also featured other ancient findings from the Amazon, including a sprawling, 8-mile-long 'canvas' of rock art in Colombia dating to the last ice age.

https://www.livescience.com/clock-face-shaped-villages-amazon-rainforest.html

The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record. How it works and why it is misleading

The CO2 Coalition is honored to present The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record - How it works and why it is misleading, a new Climate Issues in Depth paper by two of                America's most respected and prolific atmospheric physicists, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen, who is a longtime member of the Coalition, and University of Alabama in Huntsville professor John Christy.

 

Professor Lindzen has published over 200 scientific articles and books over a five-decade career. He has held professorships at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. He is a fellow and award recipient of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science and was a lead author of the UN IPCC's third assessment report's scientific volume. His research has highlighted the scientific uncertainties about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on temperature and climate more generally.

 

Professor Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, began studying global climate issues in 1987. He has been Alabama's State Climatologist since 2000 and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society since 2002. He and CO2 Coalition member Dr. Roy W. Spencer developed and have maintained one of the key global temperature data sets relied on by scientists and government bodies, using microwave data observed in the troposphere from satellites since 1979. For this achievement, they were awarded NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.

 

The purpose of this paper is to explain how the data set that is referred to by policy-makers and the media as the global surface temperature record is actually obtained, and where it fits into the popular narrative associated with climate alarm.

 

Executive Summary

 

At the center of most discussions of global warming is the record of the global mean surface temperature anomaly-often somewhat misleadingly referred to as the global mean temperature record. This paper addresses two aspects of this record. First, we note that this record is only one link in a fairly long chain of inference leading to the claimed need for worldwide reduction in CO2 emissions. Second, we explore the implications of the way the record is constructed and presented, and show why the record is misleading.

 

This is because the record is often treated as a kind of single, direct instrumental measurement. However, as the late Stan Grotch of the Laurence Livermore Laboratory pointed out 30 years ago, it is really the average of widely scattered station data, where the actual data points are almost evenly spread between large positive and negative values.

 

The average is simply the small difference of these positive and negative excursions, with the usual problem associated with small differences of large numbers: at least thus far, the one degree Celsius increase in the global mean since 1900 is swamped by the normal variations at individual stations, and so bears little relation to what is actually going on at a particular one.

 

The changes at the stations are distributed around the one-degree global average increase. Even if a single station had recorded this increase itself, this would take a typical annual range of temperature there, for example, from -10 to 40 degrees in 1900, and replace it with a range today from -9 to 41. People, crops, and weather at that station would find it hard to tell this difference.

  

However, the increase looks significant on the charts used in almost all presentations, because they omit the range of the original data points and expand the scale in order to make the mean change look large.

 

The record does display certain consistent trends, but it is also quite noisy, and fluctuations of a tenth or two of a degree are unlikely to be significant. In the public discourse, little attention is paid to magnitudes; the focus is rather on whether this anomaly is increasing or decreasing. Given the noise and sampling errors, it is rather easy to "adjust" such averaging, and even change the sign of a trend from positive to negative.

 

The common presentations often suppress the noise by using running averages over periods from 5 to 11 years. However, such processing can also suppress meaningful features such as the wide variations that are always being experienced at individual stations. Finally, we show the large natural temperature changes that Americans in 14 major cities must cope with every year. For example, the average difference between the coldest and warmest moments each year ranges from about 25 degrees Celsius in Miami (a 45 degree Fahrenheit change) to 55 degrees in Denver (a 99 degree Fahrenheit change). We contrast this with the easily manageable 1.2 degree Celsius increase in the global mean temperature anomaly in the past 120 years, which has caused so much alarm in the media and in policy circles.

 

Download the paper at this link: The Global MeanTemperature Anomaly Record - How it works and why it is misleading

 

<i>Email from info@co2coalition.org </i>

 

Are Temperatures and Ocean Levels Rising Dangerously? Not Really

There are two widely held climate-change beliefs that are simply not accurate. The first is that there has been a statistically significant warming trend in the U.S. over the last 20 years. The second is that average ocean levels are rising alarmingly due to man-made global warming. Neither of these perspectives is true; yet both remain important, nonetheless, since both are loaded with very expensive public policy implications.

To refute the first view, we turn to data generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for the relevant years under discussion. The table below reports the average mean temperature in the continental U.S. for the years 1998 through 2019*:

1998 54.6 degrees
1999 54.5 degrees
2000 54.0 degrees
2001 54.3 degrees
2002 53.9 degrees
2003 53.7 degrees
2004 53.5 degrees
2005 54 degrees
2006 54.9 degrees
2007 54.2 degrees
2008 53.0 degrees
2009 53.1 degrees
2010 53.8 degrees
2011 53.8 degrees
2012 55.3 degrees
2013 52.4 degrees
2014 52.6 degrees
2015 54.4 degrees
2016 54.9 degrees
2017 54.6 degrees
2018 53.5 degrees
2019 52.7 degrees

*National Climate Report – Annual 2019

It is apparent from the data that there has been no consistent warming trend in the U.S. over the last 2 decades; average mean temperatures (daytime and nighttime) have been slightly higher in some years and slightly lower in other years. On balance–and contrary to mountains of uninformed social and political commentary—annual temperatures on average in the U.S. were no higher in 2019 than they were in 1998.

The second widely accepted climate view—based on wild speculations from some op/ed writers and partisan politicians–is that average sea levels are increasing dangerously and rationalize an immediate governmental response. But as we shall demonstrate below, this perspective is simply not accurate.

There is a wide scientific consensus (based on satellite laser altimeter readings since 1993) that the rate of increase in overall sea levels has been approximately .12 inches per year.

To put that increase in perspective, the average sea level nine years from now (in 2029) is likely to be approximately one inch higher than it is now (2020). One inch is roughly the distance from the tip of your finger to the first knuckle. Even by the turn of the next century (in 2100), average ocean levels (at that rate of increase) should be only a foot or so higher than they are at present.

None of this sounds particularly alarming for the general society and little of it can justify any draconian regulations or costly infrastructure investments. The exception might be for very low- lying ocean communities or for properties (nuclear power plants) that, if flooded, would present a wide-ranging risk to the general population. But even here there is no reason for immediate panic. Since ocean levels are rising in small, discrete marginal increments, private and public decision makers would have reasonable amounts of time to prepare, adjust and invest (in flood abatement measures, etc.) if required.

But are sea levels actually rising at all? Empirical evidence of any substantial increases taken from land-based measurements has been ambiguous. This suggests to some scientists that laser and tidal-based measurements of ocean levels over time have not been particularly accurate.

For example, Professor Niles-Axel Morner (Stockholm University) is infamous in climate circles for arguing–based on his actual study of sea levels in the Fiji Islands–that “there are no traces of any present rise in sea levels; on the contrary, full stability.” And while Morner’s views are controversial, he has at least supplied peer reviewed empirical evidence to substantiate his nihilist position on the sea-level increase hypothesis.

The world has many important societal problems and only a limited amount of resources to address them. What we don’t need are overly dramatic climate-change claims that are unsubstantiated and arrive attached to expensive public policies that, if enacted, would fundamentally alter the foundations of the U.S. economic system.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13333


Biden’s ‘Climate Czar’ Says under Biden, Great Reset ‘Will Happen’ and with ‘Greater Intensity’ Than People Think

Joe Biden has officially announced that John Kerry, a failed presidential candidate and longtime DC swamp creature, will be his “climate czar,” assuming President Trump’s legal challenges fail to overturn the 2020 election.

Just a reminder: Kerry, who constantly lectures the hoi polloi about the “existential threat of climate change,” was an abysmal failure as President Obama’s second secretary of state. (This is the man who brought us the ill-fated Paris Climate Accords and the hapless Iran nuclear deal.)

It’s also worth noting Kerry is one of the biggest hypocrites in the world when it comes to climate change. If Kerry were so worried about the dire threats of climate change, including rising sea levels, why did he purchase an $11.75 million waterfront estate on the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 2017? Moreover, why does Kerry continually globetrot aboard on carbon-dioxide-spewing private jets and yachts?

Oh, right, like most global warming fearmongers, including his buddy Al Gore, the rules don’t apply for them–only for those of us regular folks, people like you and me.

If Kerry’s hypocrisy weren’t bad enough, consider that Kerry is one of the foremost advocates of the radical, globalist sham known as the “Great Reset.”

Kerry, while speaking at Great Reset virtual event hosted by the World Economic Forum, said, “We can’t push a button and go back to the way things were. … We are a long way off from being able to go back to any kind of normal. … And the normal was a crisis. The normal itself was not working. What has happened is COVID has accelerated everything, so all the forces and pressures that were pushing into crisis over the social contract are now exacerbated and exacerbated at a time when the world is in many ways coming apart. ”

He added, “I can’t think of a moment where it has been more critical for governments that have leadership that brings and convenes people, government isn’t going to make all the decisions that we have to make. But government is the great convener.”

With Kerry at the helm, the Paris Climate Agreement, which the United States left under President Trump, is the just the beginning.

Kerry elaborated on his grand plans, “This is a big moment, and the World Economic Forum, the CEO capacity of the World Economic Forum is going to have to really play a front and center role in defining the reset in a way nobody misinterprets as just taking us back to the way things were. But in having to prepare us for dealing with global climate change, with this massive inequity from globalization, through the failure of this contract to protect disenfranchised people, all of which is being laid bare as a consequence of COVID. And in addition, in our country as a consequence of some police actions that lit a fuse in the younger generation and I think will produce massive social change in our country.”

While speaking on another WEF panel, Kerry again expressed his support for the Great Reset and even acknowledged that Joe Biden would also help to make it happen.

After being asked by the panel host whether Great Reseters expect too much from Joe Biden, Kerry said, “It [the Great Reset] will happen. And I think it will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.”

He then elaborated, “In effect, the citizens of the United States have just done a Great Reset. We’ve done a Great Reset. And it was a record level of voting.”

Kerry later added, “Government just has to find a way to move faster, and to address more of the real concerns of its citizens. Or there will be an increasing backlash. What I think we’ve won is a reprieve. And I think, therefore, that the notion of a ‘reset’ is more important than ever before. I personally believe, Borge, that we’re at the dawn of an extremely exciting time.”

This is scary stuff. The Great Reset would upend capitalism and install socialistic policies on a worldwide level, as well as put the ruling class in charge of most economic activity.

Under the guise of fighting against climate change and COVID-19, the Great Reset, which is gaining increasingly more traction every day, would usher in a new world, one focused on wealth redistribution and giving massive amounts of power to the global ruling class. We must do everything in our power to stop it. If we fail, America might never be the same.

https://stoppingsocialism.com/2020/12/great-reset-will-happen-john-kerry-joe-biden/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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Send the Paris Climate Treaty to the Senate

The most far-reaching international agreement ever must get Senate advice, consent and vote

Paul Driessen

Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution is simple and direct: “The President ... shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” It served America well for 225 years.

Then, in 2015, the UN’s “international community” of climate activists gathered in Paris to hammer out language requiring that developed nations slash their fossil fuel use, tighten greenhouse gas emission targets every five years, and become “carbon neutral” within a few decades – to prevent a manmade climate chaos forecast by computer models but not supported by Earth history or real-world evidence.

Developing countries would be under no such obligations. Most incredibly, economic, military and tech powerhouse China was included among the developing countries, and thus is under no such obligations.

In short, the Paris accords would force the United States to engage in a massive, painful transformation of its entire economy – electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and much more – under the aegis of the United Nations and UN and foreign country activists, politicians and bureaucrats.

Aside from ending major wars, what was concocted in Paris is probably the most far-reaching, impactful agreement this country was ever asked to sign. It is the very embodiment of what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the language requiring Senate debate, advice and consent for all treaties.

However, President Obama unilaterally decreed that Paris was not a “treaty,” but merely an agreement, an accord – some lesser document that he could personally sign, committing the US to it, making an end-run around our constitutional and democratic process, and giving Congress and America no opportunity to examine, discuss and agree to or reject this intrusive, destructive treaty. In so doing, Mr. Obama set the stage for coordinated efforts by liberal politicians, activists, bureaucrats, state attorneys general, forum-shopped judges and corporate CEOs to make the Paris language binding on every American.

President Trump recognized how unfair and disastrous the Paris Climate Treaty would be. In 2017, he announced that the United States was withdrawing; the withdrawal became effective November 4, 2020.

Joe Biden has made it clear that he will recommit our nation to the Paris not-a-treaty, possibly within hours of being sworn in as president, if lingering vote issues are resolved in his favor. Fortunately, President Trump can easily prevent this disaster. As Paris Treaty experts have suggested, 

Mr. Trump could and should submit the treaty to the Senate for its advice and consent – and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should quickly schedule a debate and vote. Every Senator will have an opportunity to go on record: for or against a treaty that would make the United States, and every individual state and family, subjects of unelected, unaccountable UN and foreign powers.

President Trump should do this posthaste – thereby preventing another unilateral executive action and what Government Accountability & Oversight lawyer Chris Horner has described as a well-coordinated “climate litigation industry” plan to commandeer our courts in an endless series of lawsuits to make every Paris Climate Treaty provision legally binding on every US state, industry, business and family.

For example, Massachusetts AG Maura Healey promised Michael Bloomberg’s State Energy & Environmental Impact Center that, if its deep coffers provided her office with privately hired lawyers whom she could utilize as “Special Assistant Attorneys General,” she would put them to work “ensuring that Massachusetts and neighboring states meet the long-term commitments set forth ... in the Paris Agreement” – whatever those might be or could be creatively interpreted to be. She’s already doing it.

Another scheme involves reviving the reviled Obama era practice of sue-and-settle lawsuits, under which environmentalist groups sue government agencies to implement and impose rules that the litigators and regulators both want but aren’t clearly supported by law or would face strong public opposition if they went through a normal rulemaking process. The parties select a usually cooperative court and, instead of fighting the lawsuit, the government agency caves in, agrees to settle the case, and consents to whatever demands were made by the agency’s handpicked pseudo-adversary. The citizenry and parties impacted by the new rules never get their day in court, and rarely find out about the rule until it is imposed on them. 

The schemes are audacious, outrageous, an abuse of law and authority, and in many minds treasonous. Activists will employ them and the Paris Climate Treaty as weapons of mass destruction against America’s energy, economy, living standards and freedoms.

Horner also notes that rejoining the Paris Treaty would subject America’s energy and economic policy to a UN climate “conciliation commission” that could allow “antagonistic” nations and parties to file complaints about alleged US non-compliance with Paris, block infrastructure development, and impose carbon taxes. He and Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Marlo Lewis also point out that:

* allowing the Obama “climate coup” to stand would allow future presidents to adopt any treaties they and foreign elites want, without Senate review and ratification, simply by deeming them “not a treaty.”

* the Paris Treaty would imperil American self-government – by empowering administrations to make long-term commitments without congressional authorization, and by making US energy and economic policies beholden to the demands of foreign leaders, UN bureaucrats and international pressure groups.

If We the People ultimately decide we do want to transform our energy and economic system, reduce our living standard, curtail our liberties, and subject ourselves to international governance, we can do so through proper nationwide debates and legislative processes. We should not have these decisions imposed on us via collusion, corruption, chicanery and unconstitutional power grabs.

Too many of our ruling elites disdain business, industry and working classes; rarely if ever did serious manual work; and most often belong to a Democrat Party that once stood up for workers, but now has turned its back on working men and women. These elites would help ensure that same families pummeled hardest and longest by Covid lockdowns will be punished in perpetuity by Paris Climate Treaty edicts.

All that red on county-by-county 2020 voting maps is where jobs, economies and living standards will hammered hardest. Many of these counties have manufacturing jobs ... farmlands, forests, scenic and open spaces, habitats where birds, bats and wildlife flourish ... and the best wind and solar sites.

This is where land will be blanketed with millions of wind turbines, solar panels, battery complexes and transmission lines, to “replace” billions of megawatt-hours of reliable electricity with intermittent power – decimating many rare, threatened, endangered and just plain magnificent species.

It’s where new dust bowls will arise, as biofuel crops replace today’s grasslands. It’s where factories will close, because the Paris Treaty will make electricity intermittent and expensive, and petrochemical raw materials too costly or simply unavailable.

Will President Trump and Senator McConnell let a Biden-Harris Administration – in league with squads of America-denigrating politicians and Deep State activists – do this to our country?

Or will they preserve the Constitution, the Trump energy, economic, employment and military legacy – the livelihoods, living standards and liberties, not only of MAGA Trump voters, but of all Americans?

This may be their last opportunity to do so. I therefore urge them – and I’m certain I’m joined by tens of millions of my fellow Americans in urging the President and Senate Majority Leader:

Present this defective, destructive Paris Climate Treaty to the Senate. Let the assembled Senators debate it, vote on it – and send it to history’s dustbin, where it belongs.

<i>Via email</i>

 

Biden’s Socialism Will Be Green, Not Red

‘Red’ socialism may have been vanquished at the ballot box, but Americans need to be aware that its green successor is just as much of a threat to their freedoms.

One of the most interesting results of our recent elections was that Americans rejected socialism — or at least its close American equivalent — despite its seemingly growing popularity. Successfully labeling their opponents as socialists propelled many Republican candidates to victories in down-ballot races, particularly in areas with immigrants who had fled avowedly socialist regimes. Socialist-style policies were also defeated in ballot-measure votes, even in progressive states such as California.

Many commentators have noted that Joe Biden’s record of moderation in the Senate made it difficult to paint him as socialist. That does not mean, however, that socialism in all its variations has been defeated outright. As we are seeing in other parts of the world, what we once would have called socialism has evolved: Its future is green, not red.

This is most apparent in Europe. Across the western half of the continent, old-style socialist and social-democratic parties have seen their vote shares plunge in recent years. Green parties have risen in their place. Indeed, the Guardian characterized their successes in the 2019 European Parliament elections as a “quiet revolution.”

Yet the Greens are no less radical than their red predecessors. As the Guardian put it, “they have consolidated a manifesto that puts social justice and human rights at the heart of the fight for the planet, drawing in voters disillusioned with mainstream centre-left parties.”

We can discuss what the Greens mean by “human rights” on another occasion.

Meanwhile, the British Green Party is touting not just a Green New Deal for energy, but ones for housing (building 100,000 new state-owned homes) and income (introducing a universal basic income of $120 per week), among many others.

Climate change is at the heart of this radicalism. It represents the perfect excuse for socialist central planning. Industry and individual choices such as automobile driving, the argument goes, are wrecking the planet, and therefore must be centrally controlled and regulated so that emissions are reduced to a level that constrains climate change.

The regulations to achieve this end must be introduced now on an emergency basis and exist in perpetuity. According to the climate warriors, there is virtually no aspect of American economic life that does not have some effect on climate. It’s misbegotten, of course, but to be expected: If climate is at the heart of your policy, you will need to control all the myriad human actions and interactions that might affect it.

Since the early days of the Biden campaign, climate activists have happily proclaimed that his climate agenda is “a Green New Deal in all but name.” The Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force document on environmental policy, coauthored by the newly named special envoy for climate, John Kerry, is entitled “Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environmental Justice.”

The transition team’s summary memo on how to approach climate aspects of the transition includes policies not just for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, and the Departments of the Interior, Energy, and Transportation, but for the Departments of Agriculture, State, Justice, and Treasury, as well as the Office of Management and Budget. Personnel is policy, goes the saying in Washington, and, evidently, the Biden transition team’s plan to staff all these departments with climate activists.

The memo envisages “new authorities that allow for structural and systemic changes.” Without control of the Senate, the new administration will find it difficult to set these up. However, thanks to excessive delegations of power from Congress to the executive over the years, President Biden will be able to do a lot through regulation via executive order — with the power of the “pen and phone,” as President Obama put it.

We can expect significant restrictions on the use of fossil fuels and machines that use them. Massive amounts of public funds will be spent on promoting “green jobs” — and the administration will use its powers under labor law to ensure that these are union jobs. Non-union jobs such as independent contracting will come under increased fire, with emissions-heavy delivery services probably in the crosshairs once the COVID crisis eases. Trade tariffs will be raised on the basis of emission levels in the trading partner’s country — which will hit the developing world hard.

Even financial regulation will likely play a role in this bout of central planning. Regulators can use an array of supervisory powers to intimidate bankers into not lending — or denying other banking services — to fossil fuel-related businesses. This was the model the Obama administration used to try to drive the payday loan industry out of business, in something called Operation Choke Point. We can expect the new administration to try again, with a wider array of targets this time.

The tech industry is likely to be another target. We have already seen how tech companies have used the power of moderation to target sources of “disinformation” regarding the election and the pandemic. The threat of antitrust action by the new administration is likely to make them take more action against climate-change skeptics. The chances of an article like this being shared over social media will diminish.

“Red” socialism may have been vanquished at the ballot box, but Americans need to be aware that its green successor is just as much of a threat to their freedoms.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/bidens-socialism-will-be-green-not-red/

Get ready for NATION- wide blackouts under Biden

California’s climate and energy policies will bring thousands of blackouts to entire country

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

The power disaster unfolding in California will soon occur across the country, if Joe Biden gets his way. The Golden State has been sweeping away the forms of energy that have provided reliable electricity for decades, under the same agenda the former Vice-President is planning for America as a whole.

Power outages are now commonplace in California. Last summer, the state suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years. Imagine if this happened in Chicago in the middle of winter.

California’s trouble is explained by officials who now openly admit to an over-reliance on wind and solar power. The governor said there was not enough wind to keep the turbines going, while cloud cover and nightfall restricted solar power. The Los Angeles Times recognized the root of the problem:

“… gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them …”

Consequently, the state has fallen thousands of megawatts behind its needs. Governor Gavin Newsom admitted, “we failed to predict and plan for these shortages” and took (nominal) responsibility for the rolling blackouts. Now he wants everyone to conserve power, while the state looks for new sources of energy, most likely fossil fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

All this is happening while California continues its intention to transition to 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% “climate-friendly energy” by 2045, as required by state law.

Indeed, in their October 6 open letter to Newsom, the heads of the California’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission wrote: “We are unwavering in our commitment to meeting California’s clean energy and climate goals.”

Team Biden plans to go even further, committing to making the entire nation 100% renewable within 15 years. The United States would fall tens of millions of megawatts behind on its electricity needs.

Like the California government, the incoming Biden-Harris administration is acting entirely under the unfounded belief that climate change is a manmade calamity that can be stopped by eliminating fossil fuel use. They are clearly unaware of the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

These documents summarize thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that either refute or cast serious doubt on the climate scare. They conclude that we are not causing a climate crisis.

Yet, in their October 6 report, Preliminary Root Cause Analysis – Mid-August 2020 Heat Storm, the same heads of California’s Energy Commission, Independent System Operator and Public Utilities Commission highlighted the “climate change-induced extreme heat storm across the western United States” as the first cause of the blackout.

In their view, apparently, shutting down coal, gas and nuclear power plants in California and in states from which California imports electricity played only minor roles.

California’s determination to shift to so-called “green” energy – which is actually anything but clean, green, renewable and sustainable – is being echoed by politicians across the nation. The result, especially in states that don’t enjoy California’s mostly benign weather, is going to be that those in the poorest neighborhoods and those on fixed incomes may be forced to choose between heating and eating.

It also means people trying to run their homes, offices, factories, hospitals and schools on intermittent, weather-dependent, much more expensive wind and solar power will have to get used to never knowing when or for how long their electricity will be on or off. Now in California; soon in the entire USA.

Coherent energy systems are designed with the understanding that portions of the system will be offline from time to time. Power companies compensate for this with reserve power at the ready. However, California has closed its margin for error in response to anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel sentiments and climate change concerns. Team Biden intends to do this for the entire United States.

Power outages cannot always be avoided and are more common than one may think. For example, between 2008 and 2017, Illinois had 871 outages, the tenth most by state. Texas had nearly twice as many, giving it the dubious distinction of ranking number two in the list.

But these pale in comparison to California which has the least reliable electrical power system in the nation. It leads in power outages every year. Between 2008 and 2017, it had 4,297 power outages!

The origin of the problem is partly California’s Senate Bill 1368, which in 2006 established the state’s emission standards to reduce greenhouse gases from power plants. Following that year, eleven coal-fired power plants were closed and three were converted to biomass. Only one coal-fired plant remains.

The state also reduced its normal reliance on energy from out of state coal plants.

Yielding to anti-nuclear activists, the state also closed all but one nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon. That plant generates about 18,000 Gigawatt-hours of reliable electricity every year, fully 8.6% of California’s total generation.

But Diablo Canyon will soon be closed too. Not surprisingly, during its construction and operation, anti-nuclear protests were common; nearly two thousand people were arrested for civil disobedience during a two-week period in 1981. In response, in 2016, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a Pacific Gas & Electric Joint Proposal to phase out the state’s remaining nuclear power. That means the operating licenses for Diablo Canyon’s two units will not be renewed when they expire in 2024 and 2025.

Ironically, the Commission did not approve Pacific Gas & Electric’s proposal for resources to replace the station’s output. It does not appear to matter that nuclear reactors produce no greenhouse gas emissions during operation. They are hated by the enviro-radicals who drive California’s energy policy and are steadily putting the state even further behind the 8-ball.

It gets worse. California now requires that all new homes be nearly entirely electric. It wants citizens to switch their natural gas stoves to electric, as part of their global warming initiatives. More than 30 cities have already enacted bans on gas appliances, including San Francisco. The state also hopes to eliminate all gasoline and diesel cars in favor of plug-in electric automobiles.

This means demand for reliable, affordable electricity will rise by leaps and bounds, just as supplies are steadily reduced, and partially replaced by expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent power.

Just as Mr. Biden promises for the nation as a whole, California is sacrificing reliable electrical power as part of its impossible crusade to “stop climate change.” Of course, this will have no impact on our planet’s climate, because (a) climate change is mostly natural and not driven by carbon dioxide, and (b) all those wind turbines, solar panels and backup batteries will be manufactured overseas, mostly in China, using fossil fuels and simply moving the source of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

However, it will certainly spur sales of candles, flashlights, propane heaters, and natural gas, gasoline and diesel generators.

Via email


Stunning satellite photos show Pacific Islands that are GROWING despite sea level rises

They rise and fall naturally

An island in the Pacific Ocean has grown dramatically in size despite rising sea levels, which has been blamed for sinking many others over the last four years.

New Zealand and Canadian researchers have been studying a chain of volcanic islands, known as the Marshall Islands, located between Hawaii and the Philippines, over the last 70 years.

Satellite images, aerial photographs and radio carbon dating have shown an island that sits on top of Ailinglaplap Atoll​ has grown by a staggering 13 per cent.

The island measured just 2.02 square kilometres in 1943, and is now 2.26 square kilometres in size.

The discovery comes despite rising sea levels around the world which has caused a number of islands to disappear in the Pacific region since 2016.

Sea level rises have been linked to thermal expansion caused by warming of the ocean and increased melting of land-based ice.

In the South Pacific, the sea has risen almost three times the global average, rising around seven to 10 millimetres every year since 1993.

Five reef islands in the Solomon Islands disappeared in 2016 while another three islands in the central Pacific vanished in 2019.

Despite their disappearances researchers have discovered some islands are still continuing to grow.

The New Zealand and Canadian scientists have provided a simple explanation for the growth at the Ailinglaplap Atoll​.

An atoll is a ring shaped coral reef that produces sediment, like sand and gravel, to help build the island on top of it.

As the reef flourishes, more sediment is produced, increasing the build-up and size of the island.

The Ailinglaplap Atoll​ began as two separate islands, but they merged because of sediment build-up over the decades.

A spit at the western end of the island has also been gathering more sediment, growing bigger in size.

University of Auckland senior lecturer Dr Murray Ford told Stuff radiocarbon dating showed the sediment had been building up since as early as 1950.

'The big picture with this is the modern day coral reef can build an island even though the sea level is rising,' he said.

'The nice thing about these islands is everything that builds the island comes from the reef.'

Professor Ford said it was important coral reefs remained healthy so islands could continue to grow.

'It's all about the reef health, being able to produce sand and gravel to help make these islands and maintain them.'

At the moment, many coral reefs are at threat of ocean acidification, reef bleaching and pollution.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9016505/Pacific-Ocean-islands-grow-despite-rising-sea-levels.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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Autocrats Coming After Autos

Self-anointed saviors of the planet are bringing tyranny to your driveway.

In his third autobiography, former President Barack Obama took Americans to task for liking “cheap gas and big cars” more than “the environment.” That a man with an 8,000-square-foot home in Washington, DC, and a nearly 7,000-square-foot mansion on 29 acres in Martha’s Vineyard would criticize ordinary Americans for the size of their “carbon footprints” epitomizes the gargantuan disconnect between increasingly arrogant American oligarchs and the “bitter clingers” they clearly disdain. It is that arrogance that drives their plans to eliminate personal transportation as American have come to know it — even if it means suspending reality to do so.

Thus, we have imperious fops like UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and California Governor Gavin Newsom promising to phase out gasoline- and diesel-powered cars in the next 10 to 15 years as part of the “green revolution” they wish to impose on their respective “subjects,” whether they like it or not. “Our green industrial revolution will be powered by the wind turbines of Scotland and the North East, propelled by the electric vehicles made in the Midlands and advanced by the latest technologies developed in Wales, so we can look ahead to a more prosperous, greener future,” opined Johnson. Newsom declared, “We just want to fundamentally reconcile the fact we’re no longer living in 19th century, and we don’t need to drill things or extract things in order to advance our economic goals and advance our mobility needs.”

That neither man is remotely acquainted with reality should surprise no one. Of all the zealots who wish to impose their worldview on the benighted masses, none are quite as fervent as the eco-warriors who insist technological advances can simply be willed into existence within an arbitrary timeframe.

Unfortunately for them, reality intrudes. Last year, Professor Richard Herrington of the Natural History Museum in London sent a letter to the British government after he and his colleagues analyzed what it would take to convert that nation’s cars to electric vehicles (EVs) by 2050, not 2035. They concluded that such a conversion would require, based on 2018 mining levels, the entire world’s production of neodymium, three-quarters of its lithium production, and at least half of its copper production to produce the required number of EVs — just for the UK.

America? “The U.S. has about 276 million registered motor vehicles, or roughly nine times as many vehicles as the U.K.,” explains columnist Robert Bryce. “Thus, if Herrington’s numbers are right, electrifying all U.S. motor vehicles would require roughly 18 times the world’s current cobalt production, about nine times global neodymium output, nearly seven times global lithium production, and about four times world copper production.”

Professor Herrington is hardly an outlier. A 2015 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that manufacturing a midsize EV would produce about 15% more emissions than the process of building an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. For larger EVs with larger batteries, that gap could grow to 68% or more.

Besides, does anyone with even a modicum of common sense consider mining to be a “green” activity? Moreover, as Bryce also points out, internal combustion engines are more efficient than batteries in terms of “gravimetric energy density,” or the amount of energy contained per kilogram; the engines themselves are getting more efficient; and ICE vehicles are far easier to refuel — as in the five minutes it takes to fill a gas tank compared with hours it takes to recharge an EV.

Yet Bryce is also somewhat naive, noting that “EVs are still too expensive for low- and middle-income consumers.” For the self-anointed power-mongers and their totalitarian ambitions, vehicles priced beyond the reach of ordinary citizens is a feature, not a bug, in a brave new world where they promise “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

Automotive expert Eric Peters sees the proverbial writing on the wall, noting that “by 2030 not much else that isn’t electric will be built,” and the few cars that aren’t “will have been driven off the roads entirely by regulatory fiat and extortionate/punitive gas and registration fees” by 2040.

In short, he sees a world where government-imposed “polluter taxes” raise gas prices to $10 per gallon, and/or ICE vehicle registration fees to $5,000 per year, making such a vehicle unaffordable for the vast majority of car owners.

Yet that extortionist agenda of government-mandated ICE vehicle obsolescence is only part of the equation. Because consumers will be trapped between the artificially inflated expenses of an ICE vehicle and an equally unaffordable EV, the economic “solution” will be the elimination of car ownership itself. It will be replaced, Peters warns, by a rental system producing “serial debt in exchange for access to transportation as defined, delimited and controlled by the owner thereof, which probably won’t be you.”

An added “bonus”? Because an EV is “electronic as well as electric,” it can be controlled by someone “other-than-the-owner,” he adds.

Virtue-signaling auto manufacturers are more than happy to accommodate the oligarchs. Volkswagen, Honda, GM, Ford, Daimler, Toyota, and Tesla are all jumping on the EV bandwagon in a big way.

Coordinated subterfuge is also part of the mix. The move to EVs is being framed as an effort to prevent China from dominating the market. “In a future driven by electric vehicles, China is poised to dominate if the U.S. does not transform its automobile industry in coming years,” asserts CNBC columnist Evelyn Cheng.

In the coming years? As Americans discovered during the pandemic, the same “citizens of the world” who made our nation beholden to medical supply chains controlled by communist thugs are facing the same reality with regard to EVs. Two Chinese companies, Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and BYD, account for a third of the market in the electric batteries that power EVs, and all six of the major battery manufacturers are Asian companies.

It gets worse. According to a report titled “The Commanding Heights of Global Transportation” released in September by Washington, DC-based advocacy group Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), there are 142 lithium-ion battery megafactories under construction globally. Of those, 107 are being built for China — versus just nine for the U.S.

Do any of our elites remember how government-subsidized Chinese steel devastated our domestic steel industry? Do they care that the same thing could happen to the EV market?

The answer is no. Our elitist class has made it clear that patriotism and national security take a back seat to self-enrichment and oligarchic control. Self-enrichment and control they self-aggrandizingly frame as “saving the planet.”

“Transportation control [is] one of the cogs in their new world construct,” columnist Peter Skurkiss explains. “The end game of EVs, the Green New Deal, the Paris Climate Accord, facial recognition AI, and possibly things like vaccination permits for travel is more control and power for the elite and less freedom for the rest of us. This highway to the future is leading us straight back to serfdom.”

Highway to the future? Highway to hell is more like it.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/76169-autocrats-coming-after-autos-2020-12-03

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM) 

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)  

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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2 December, 2020

Sheldon Whitehouse’s Climate Inquisition continues

Senator Torquemada wants to jail those who dissent from his alarmist views on climate

Paul Driessen

Five years ago, I said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) behaves like Torquemada, using Inquisition-like tactics to harass “manmade climate crisis” skeptics, and threatening to prosecute them for racketeering. Tomas de Torquemada was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition that interrogated, tortured, imprisoned and executed thousands for religious heresy.

The senator took great umbrage, and denounced me in Senate chambers where I once worked. But he didn’t change his ways. If anything, he has become more intolerant and vindictive.

He recently said Democrat control of the Senate would enable him and his colleagues to launch investigations, haul climate realists before committees (for star-chamber show trials), and even employ grand juries and criminal prosecutions – to intimidate, silence and punish climate crisis nonbelievers.

People could certainly conclude that the thin-skinned senator would feel right at home in Inquisition Spain, Stalinist Russia, Red Guard and Xi Jinping China, or book-burning pre-Holocaust fascist Europe. Their history of silencing dissenters, erasing them from history, and sending them off to gulags and salt mines (or worse) is legendary. Their economic and governing ideology is classic fascism:

an extreme, intolerant system, under which an authoritarian government does not own businesses and industries outright, but does dictate what they can make, do, sell and say – while controlling citizens’ thoughts, speech and choices – through intimidation, silencing, arrest, prosecution, and fear of being fined, jailed, fired, sent to penal or reeducation colonies, and being beaten or executed.

These tactics are reprehensible and dictatorial. They are un-American and anti-science. Indeed, science achieves no progress without dissent, discussion and debate. It requires not just hypotheses, theories and computer models, but solid, empirical evidence to confirm or disprove hypotheses, models and predictions.

Discussion, debate, dissent and evidence are especially vital in addressing the assertion that humanity faces an unprecedented manmade climate crisis. That assertion is being used to justify demands that the United States, Europe and developed world eliminate the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of our energy, petrochemical and pharmaceutical raw materials, fertilizers and countless other benefits.

It is being used to justify demands that we replace this reliable, affordable energy and raw material base with wind, solar, battery and biofuel power. Not only are these alternatives intermittent, weather-dependent and far more expensive. They involve extensive mining, land use, wildlife, pollution and other environmental impacts. They are not renewable, sustainable, environment-friendly or climate-safe.

In the United States alone, we would have to replace some 7.5 billion megawatt-hours of electricity and electricity-equivalent fossil fuel use per year; replace enormous amounts of oil and natural gas raw materials; and overhaul our transportation, home heating and other systems. That would require millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of 1000-pound battery modules, tens of millions of acres of corn, canola, soybean and other biofuel crops – and tens of trillions of dollars.

Democrat urban population and voter centers will likely oppose those industrial-scale installations in their backyards. They would have little objection to locating them in what many ruling, media and Hollywood elites imperiously and derisively refer to “flyover country” – western, Midwestern and southern states.

This “transformation” – under the Paris climate treaty, a Green New Deal or a Biden-Harris regulatory program – would massively disrupt America’s economy, jobs, living standards, health and wellbeing, especially for poor, minority, blue-collar, fixed-income and flyover country families and communities.

Climate alarmists insist that any lost jobs would be replaced with “green” jobs. But those would be mostly minimum-wage positions: hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling, removing and landfilling turbines, panels and batteries. Moreover, most of those green technologies would be manufactured overseas, especially in China, because environmentalists battle any mining in the USA, and a climate-focused energy system would provide insufficient reliable, affordable power for factories.

Those huge and unprecedented amounts of mining and manufacturing would require fossil fuels. So the only thing that would change is where the fossil fuel use and emissions occur.

It would be mostly in Asia and Africa, in countries that are not obligated under the Paris climate treaty to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; countries that will build as many hundreds or thousands of coal and gas-fired power plants as needed to lift their people out of poverty ... and make “green energy” technologies they will happily sell to America, Australia, Canada and Europe.

That means, even if the US went cold-turkey on fossil fuels, it would make no difference to global GHG emissions or global atmospheric concentrations. And that means, even if carbon dioxide is the primary factor in climate change, destroying US and other modern economies would bring no climate benefits.

The EU’s and UK’s unwavering belief in human-caused climate cataclysms is already hammering its industries, workers and families, as numerous articles attest: here, here, here and here, for instance.

Thankfully, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that assertions of Climate Armageddon have been miscalculated, exaggerated or fabricated. Average global temperatures are rising far less rapidly than predicted by climate models: by at least a half-degree F.

Violent (F4-F5) US tornadoes have actually declined in number the past 35 years (1985-2020) versus the previous 35 years (1950-1984); and in 2018 not one F5 tornado touched down in the United States. For a record twelve years, from Wilma in 2005 until Harvey and Irma in 2017, no Category 3 to 5 hurricane struck the US mainland. Overall, there is little or no trend in tropical cyclone activity or intensity.

All that is not surprising in light of new research by Drs. William Happer and Willem van Wijngaarden that strongly indicates even doubling carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in Earth’s atmosphere would have minuscule effects on global temperatures and climate (but would benefit plant growth).

Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish human influences from natural factors, fluctuations and cycles regarding temperatures, polar ice, storms and droughts. Some scientists certainly claim otherwise – and generally just blame humans. But they have little or no actual, empirical evidence to support their claims, predictions and models. They simply say the science is settled, and we must ban fossil fuels, so shut up.

With so much at stake for America and the world, this is completely intolerable. At the very least, those claiming we face a climate calamity must be required to present solid empirical evidence to support their assertions – and engage in in robust, transparent debates with manmade climate change skeptics.

That is precisely what Senator Torquemada seems determined to prevent and punish, while transforming “the world’s greatest deliberative body” into a Russian Politburo or Chinese National People’s Congress – and an integral part of the $multi-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex.

In that quest he would certainly be aided by the Big Media and Big Tech moguls who share his views on climate change, silencing scientists and evidence that contradicts climate cataclysm catechism, and blacklisting “climate heretics” in government, academic and corporate circles.

People have been conditioned to kowtow to government lockdown edicts, to save humanity from Covid. Climate alarmists assume we will now be sufficiently compliant about banning fossil fuels to “save the planet,” when we’re trying to recover from Covid. Or their Torquemadas will make us compliant.

It’s time to reject politicized junk science, demand debate, and resist green climate and energy edicts. Perhaps most of all, the US Senate must assert its Advice and Consent responsibilities on the Paris climate treaty, the most far-reaching international agreement Americans were ever asked to ratify.

Via email



This green fantasy will bankrupt us

It’s 2050. You wake in your cosy, insulated house, turn on the windfarm-powered lights, cook up a breakfast coffee on the hydrogen stove before jumping into your electric car. You whizz silently along roads with air as fresh as a mountain stream past happy e-bikers and carbon-neutral schools to your heat-pump powered office.

So, viewed from Britain in 2020, can you spot the odd one out? Here’s a clue: the e-bikers get no subsidy. Everything else on this list loses money, and needs state support on a massive scale to get even halfway to the nirvana glimpsed by the prime minister this week. Today’s subsidy, of course, is tomorrow’s tax rise.

Home insulation? £2bn is barely enough to get some sort of programme started. The disruption from insulating your home will be enough to discourage us from taking up this offer, almost regardless of the accompanying bribe. As we saw with double glazing and solar panels, the cowboy installers and fraudsters will be the principal beneficiaries.

WIndfarms? The easier sites are already filled up, driving development further offshore to have any chance of quadrupling today’s contribution. The bulk of new contracts are going to overseas manufacturers, while evidence of catastrophic damage to seabirds is growing, and nobody knows the long-term cost of maintaining this hi-tech engineering in a hostile environment.

Hydrogen home cooking? Hydrogen is much harder to handle than natural gas, and a compulsory conversion programme – the only practical way to exploit the existing pipework – would meet stiff resistance. Besides, like electricity, hydrogen is not a fuel but an energy transmission mechanism. Making it from actual fuel is like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Heat pumps? The capital cost typically runs into tens of thousands of pounds per dwelling, even where your garden is big enough to take one. They are also likely to be rather more expensive to maintain than your ‘fridge.

As for the electric car, despite subsidies of thousands of pounds per vehicle, with promises to spend billions more on sockets to charge them, motorists remain suspicious. After all, it is only a few short years since we were being urged to buy a diesel car, to make each barrel of oil go further. Now diesel is officially an evil producer of particulates that kill children.

Reconfiguring the electricity grid for electric vehicles will cost much more than the £2.5bn allocated in the government’s plan. Then there is the £40bn a year raised from fuel duties which will disappear if electricity takes over. It is almost a rounding error in the context of the hundreds of billions which the UK is going to waste with this week’s fashionable projects. They may indeed create thousands of jobs, but then so would digging large holes and filling them in again. Jobs that destroy wealth rather than creating it make us all poorer.

The government’s cheerleaders may argue that no price is too high to pay for “saving the planet”, but this week’s programme, if it is really implemented, will be ruinously expensive. After a year when the UK economy has shrunk by a tenth, we cannot afford more government repression, even cloaked in greenery. A smaller economy makes paying for the NHS, for example, much harder. Worse still, Britain’s self-harm makes almost no difference to global CO2 emissions, when China makes meaningless pledges of good behaviour while building two coal-fired power stations a week. How they must be laughing at us.

This is what a bear market looks like

The chart from commercial estate agents CBRE looks reassuring. Its Property Values Index has recovered splendidly from the depths of March and is almost unchanged on the year. Industrials have forged ahead, and even retail is only marginally down.

Does anyone seriously believe this can be right? The idea that a bog-standard office block is worth 99 per cent of what it was in January is laughable. City centres are struggling, shops everywhere are closing, and the upwards-only rent review is being destroyed under the hammer-blows of the Creditors Voluntary Arrangement. Nobody seriously expects that work and spending patterns in 2022 will look anything like those in 2019.

The pandemic has exposed the cosy relationship between property businesses and those paid to value the assets. It has been most acute in the £12bn of open-ended property funds, most of which were forced to close in March to prevent a rush of investors to the exit. The standard excuse was the difficulty of valuing things during the first Covid wave, although the real reason was that the prices offered would be just too horrible to contemplate.

Most funds have now re-opened, although the values often seem to owe more to estate agents’ relentless optimism than to real life. Units in Legal & General UK Property, one of the biggest, are only 3.2 per cent cheaper today than on 18 March, when the doors were closed.

Last week Land Securities, the UK’s biggest listed property company, reported a 9.5 per cent fall in net asset value, to £10.79 a share. The shares stand at a 35 per cent discount to that new valuation. There are significant differences between a fund and a share, but the most important is that share prices look forward, while fund prices look back.

Land’s shares started falling in mid-February, when Covid seemed like someone else’s problem far, far away. In today’s changed world, the share prices of commercial property companies are signalling the start of a long and disruptive bear market for offices, shopping malls and non-food shops, as rents fall and yields rise. Those with capital in property funds should take note.

The popularity of these funds is an enduring mystery, probably owing more to the commissions they generate for intermediaries than to any fondness for office blocks. For supposedly liquid investments, property funds could hardly be less well suited. If you really want to double down on property after buying your house, buy the shares, not the funds.

https://neilcollinsxxx.wordpress.com/2020/11/20/this-green-fantasy-will-bankrupt-us/

Business groups clash over EU’s 2030 climate goal

Europe’s largest employer’s association, BusinessEurope, has questioned “the value and credibility” of the economic analysis underpinning the EU’s proposed climate target plan for 2030, triggering an immediate backlash from pro-climate corporate groups.

The European Commission was over-optimistic when analysing the costs and benefits of raising the EU’s 2030 climate goals, BusinessEurope argues in a document criticising the EU executive’s climate policy.

The document questions Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s assertion that tougher climate policies are the bloc’s new “growth strategy”, saying there are too many uncertainties in the Commission’s own impact assessment to make such a claim.

“Every core scenario” in the cost-benefit analysis accompanying the Commission’s 2030 climate target plan, “is conducted with pre-COVID-19 data and does not take (the pandemic’s) economic impacts into account,” the group argues.

“The sensitivity analysis is based on the assumption of a quick recovery, but what if the expected economic recovery takes longer than anticipated?” BusinessEurope asks. It points to the International Energy Agency’s latest world energy outlook, which explores the scenario of delayed recovery, finding that by 2030, the global economy is nearly 10% smaller than in a fast recovery scenario.

Moreover, models used in the analysis “have not been developed or discussed in any detail” and were not open for public scrutiny, BusinessEurope points out, saying this “weakens the value and credibility of the presented results for an informed decision making.”

“In our view, there needs to be a broader approach when implementing Europe’s recovery plan and to focus much more on how to turn the Green Deal into a real growth driver.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced plans on Wednesday (16 September) to target a 55% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 as part of a broader European Green Deal programme aimed at reaching “climate neutrality” by mid-century.

BusinessEurope’s comments triggered immediate reactions from pro-climate corporations, which stepped forward in defence of the European Green Deal and denounced an attack on the EU’s climate policies.

In a statement, the CEO of Unilever, Alan Jope, said: “One of the most dangerous mindsets in the world is to set up a false dichotomy between sustainability and economic growth. The low carbon revolution will be a booming space for jobs. We strongly support the EU 2030 target – good for the environment, good for livelihoods, good for growth.”

The European Corporate Leaders Group, a pro-climate business lobby managed by the University of Cambridge, led the charge against BusinessEurope, saying: “There is a groundswell of opinion crossing business sectors and EU member states that identifies the Green Deal as Europe’s growth strategy and wants to see it implemented swiftly and effectively”.

“The evidence is clear that taking an ambitious approach to the climate transition and unlocking green investments can lead to better outcomes in terms of economic growth and jobs while managing the huge risks associated with climate change,” said Eliot Whittington, Europe director at CLG Europe.

The clash between rival corporate factions highlights divisions in the business community about the urgency to act on climate change.

Two years ago, a leaked internal memo from BusinessEurope revealed the association’s plans to “oppose” any increase in the EU’s climate ambition for 2030, by “using the usual arguments” that Europe cannot take action on its own. The European Corporate Leaders Group reacted by denouncing an “extreme lowest common denominator” that does not represent their views.

Leaked memo exposes business rift on climate change
BusinessEurope, the EU employer organisation, was urged to reconsider its stance on climate change after a leaked internal memo exposed what others in the business community have now rebuked as an “extreme lowest common denominator” that does not represent their view.

Yet, BusinessEurope is far more influential and representative. Through its member trade associations in 35 European countries, it represents 20 million companies. The European Corporate Leaders Group, by contrast, has only 16 full members.

Still, Lucie Mattera from climate think tank E3G said there was growing support from business groups for ambitious climate action, pointing to a letter from more than 170 European CEOs calling for a “clearly defined target to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030”.

“It seems that BusinessEurope is trying to poke holes in the impact assessment because they do not have a robust case against the inevitability of the overall direction of travel,” Mattera said, urging businesses to look at the big picture instead.

“The big picture is that Europe needs a strategy to transform its economy to deal with the existential threat of climate change, turn that transformation into an opportunity, and design the right set of tools and policies to make it socially fair. We can argue about digits after the comma, but is it what is at stake?”

“It would be more constructive if Business Europe engaged on what’s needed to shape and manage the green transition,” Mattera said.

Business leaders back EU’s draft 55% carbon target for 2030
More than 150 business leaders and investors have urged EU countries to set higher climate goals for 2030, backing a draft European Commission plan to aim for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade.

Ecopreneur.eu, the European Sustainable Business Federation representing 3000 companies (mostly SMEs) in the EU committed to sustainability, supports the Commission’s initiative to raise the EU’s emissions reduction target for 2030.

We therefore strongly disagree with this attack from BusinessEurope on the Commission’s target of 55% emission reduction in 2030. It does not at all reflect the opinion of sustainable frontrunners. Our members confirm that the importance of issues of climate and sustainability have only increased since Covid-19. And as Vice President Timmermans has repeatedly stated, the costs of inaction outweigh the costs of climate action by far. We hope that the Council will finally reach a decision on the target in December 2020.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/business-groups-clash-over-eus-2030-climate-goal/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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The angry Belgian writes again

Morano offered a mild reply to the abuse levelled at him by Jean-Luc Mélice [jlmelice@hotmail.fr]. Morano wrote:

"Haha. You once called me fat but I lost a lot of weight. Now you call me bald and I can get hair transplant or do a comb over, so you're probably wrong about that too"

He got a rejoinder from Mélice as follows:

Too funny, Morano the Moron has a thin skin. The Moron reacts sooo quickly!!!

The origin of your name comes from Calabria in Italy...lots of mafiosi over there!!!

Morano in Spanish means north African nigger. I now understand your complex of inferiority, and your ugly face. Indeed, you are not of WASP origin.

So you are now a weight watcher...how ridiculous. And you need a hair transplant, exactly like Donnie the con, the orange agent who lost the election, and will be in an orange suit in prison soon. And you are still licking his ugly fat ass... disgusting!

Note that I was living in the USA during the Kennedy time. I remember very well the 3 dark days after he was shot by a fucking moron as yourself. At that time, I was in an american high school and the Americans were not anti-science as they are now.

Besides a South African nationality, I have also an US passport.

Please also that I have worked as a diplomat, besides being a super top scientist.

I would love to be in front of you during a Fox News interview. I would destroy you in a few seconds...

Remember, we are following you, and are very keen to smash your ugly mafiosi obese face with a baseball bat.

Just fokoff ... as we say in afrikaans...

He sounds very lonely and frustrated. A recent picture of him:


He looks rather African

His anger has even led him to use the the N-word. He rather hilariously descibes himself as a "super top scientist" above yet there is no rational debate or reference to any climate facts in his email above. I would think he was deranged except that his level of anger is common on the Left -- JR

Illinois Regulators Approve Dakota Access Pipeline Oil Capacity Expansion

Illinois Regulators Approve Dakota Access Pipeline Oil Capacity Expansion

The Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), the agency charged with regulating utilities in the state, approved a proposal to double the capacity of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP), from 570,000 bpd to 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd). ICC’s October 14 decision made it the last of the four states DAP passes through to approve the expansion.

Expansion to Begin

The ICC determined the equipment and pumping stations it approved were justified, because the additional oil DAP’s expanded capacity could deliver would benefit the public by securing a steady, relatively inexpensive, supply of oil.

Energy Transfer Partners, DAP’s operator, is in the middle of an ongoing legal battle over an approximately one mile-long stretch of the 1,127-mile pipeline beneath South Dakota’s Lake Oahe that could result in the pipeline’s closure. In addition, the industry faces low oil prices, resulting from a drop in demand for oil during the coronavirus pandemic. Despite these complications, Reuters reports Energy Transfer Partners said in an email it looks forward to beginning work on DAP’s capacity right away.

“We are pleased with the decision by the ICC … this now allows us to proceed with the optimization of the pipeline and allows our labor union partners to go to work,” Lisa Coleman, senior public relations and communications specialist with Energy Transfer Partners, said in an email.

Pipeline expansion will benefit consumers, said Chris Ventura, Midwest director of the Consumer Energy Alliance in a statement praising the decision.

“This vital project will bring an additional half a million barrels a day of domestic energy from North Dakota that will be used to fuel our farms, communities and lives in Illinois, and across the Midwest,” Ventura said. “It’s critical we continue to support and expand our nation’s pipeline infrastructure like DAPL to help family budgets and keep our economy moving – especially in this time of recovery from COVID-19.”

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2020/11/illinois-regulators-approve-dakota-access-pipeline-oil-capacity-expansion/

EU’s “Farm to Fork” initiative: A disaster in the making

The European Commission has introduced a “Farm to Fork” initiative for its member states to follow. Though the initiative sounds like something that might help the Europeans access healthy food and help farmers make profit, it is anything but that. A closer look at the tenets of the initiative indicate that it is potentially dangerous to the agricultural sector in Europe.

According the European commission, the initiative’s objective is to assure Europeans access to healthy, affordable and sustainable food, ensure a fair economic return in the supply chain, protect the environment, and preserve biodiversity.

Those are good objectives. But the strategies laid out in the Farm to Fork initiative act antithetical to its objectives. The following are the key strategies recommended to achieve the objectives of the initiative:

Develop Organic farming and help the EU’s organic farming sector to grow, with the goal of 25 % of total farmland being used for organic farming by 2030;

Reduce fertilizer use by at least 20%;

Reduce the use of chemical and more hazardous pesticides by 50%.

Here’s why these strategies antithetical to their praiseworthy objectives.

Organic Farming Means Destruction of More Trees and Loss of Biodiversity

Contrary to popular opinion, Organic farming is not necessarily an environment-friendly practice. When it comes to large scale agriculture where mass produce is needed for the billions of people on this world, Organic farming is not the future.

Growing organic plants for an average person’s organic diet requires 40% more land than that is required to grow plants and raise animals that are part of a conventional diet.

A study based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland, organic yield averaged 67% of conventional yield. It found out that organic farms produce one-third less of wheat and soybean than conventional method and up to 62% lower Potato production.

That is not good news. Going organic would mean utilization of more land, eventually resulting in clearance of more habitat for agriculture and a possible loss of biodiversity.

Reducing Pesticide and Fertilizer Use will Usher in Farmer Loss and Food Poverty

Traditionally, the use of pesticides, including insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides, and others helped famers to protect crops from pests. It significantly reduced the losses and improved the yield of common crops such as corn, maize, potatoes, cotton, and various types of vegetables. It also protected livestocks from diseases and ticks, and humans from vector borne diseases like malaria.

The drawback and the potential harm from pesticide and fertilizer use is only when there is an excessive use, as is the case in some of the developing countries where their use is unregulated and there is an absence of quality monitoring.

When used in an appropriate quantity both pesticides and fertilizers will assure farmers a guaranteed income and keep the demand-supply gap in check in the EU.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nation—which is globally recognized as a forerunner in helping countries with their agricultural sector and food security—the use of Fertilizer is extremely critical in ensuring productivity from the crops. And where fertilizer use is not so prominent, there is a very stark difference in crop productivity.

The FAO says that the lack of Fertilizer use has been one of the foremost reasons why Africa is still behind in crop productivity: “FAO data reveal that the use of productivity enhancing agricultural inputs in Africa in general, and in some sub-regions such as Eastern Africa, in particular, tend to be lower compared to other regions of the world. This extremely low fertilizer use per hectare is one of the most important limiting factors to increase crop productivity and production. In this regard, recent figures show that farmers do not significantly vary fertilizer application rates according to perceived soil fertility.”

Even in regions of the world which have gone 100% organic, farmers are struggling to offset this yield ratio. One such place is the remote Indian state of Sikkim, where farmers have experienced heavy loss due to their transition to organic farming. “When chemicals were allowed, I could grow 280 to 300 kg of pulses and now, after 4 years, I barely manage to grow 80 to 85 kg”, a farmer notes, blaming the low productivity and pest attacks for his monumental loss in yield.

Research has also showed that organic farming results in the depletion of nutrients in the soil. The study showed that besides causing a decrease in crop yield and efficiency, organic farming also caused a decrease in organic matter-related soil quality. Contrary to public perception, organic farming is actually bad for the soil.

One of the other key objectives mentioned in the initiative is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. However, using organic farming to do so is counterproductive. Climate alarmists argue that organic farming results in a 21% increase in emissions as compared to growing conventional farm products.

Even scientists who view organic products as superior varieties have reservations about the increasing use of organic farming. One such person is Alexander Ruane, a research physical scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who says, “the goal of organic farming in developed countries currently is about meeting the needs of those who can afford the luxury to buy the highest quality food. If the needs of this luxury interfere with the need to feed the entire population, then you have the potential for conflicts.”

It is simply impossible to produce organic crops at a mass scale for the population. Even if we do manage to produce, it won’t be possible without a widespread destruction of forests and a destabilizing impact on our agricultural sector, farmer revenues and affordability at markets.

The European Commission’s proposal to reduce pesticide and fertilizer use will usher in a new era of European farmer poverty and imperil the food security of its member countries. It does no good to the soil or to the environment. It is time for Europeans to request their respective governments to resist the Farm to Fork initiative.

https://www.cfact.org/2020/11/23/eus-farm-to-fork-initiative-a-farming-disaster-in-the-making/

Australia: Renewables-loving NSW energy minister takes an extraordinary swipe at mining 'barons' despite 80% of power during 40C heatwave coming from coal

New South Wales energy minister Matt Kean took a swipe at 'coal barons' on Sunday after passing new laws to tackle climate change - even though coal still provides most of the state's power.

Mr Kean boasted that his plan to encourage $32billion of private investment in renewable energy projects by 2030 was a slap in the face for 'vested interests.'

In a tweet on Sunday morning, he wrote: 'Those powerful vested interests - the big energy money, the coal barons, that have decided energy policy in this country for generations - now will have to face policy settings that favour the community not their own self interest.'

Suggesting that coal power has no future, the Liberal energy minster said coal magnates complaining about his plan were like 'Blockbuster complaining about Netflix'.

Just 24 hours earlier coal was providing 80 per cent of the state's electricity as residents fired up their air-conditioning units to tackle sweltering 40C temperatures, reported the Daily Telegraph.

Mr Kean's comments were met with criticism from opponents who say his new laws, supported by Labor and the Greens, may push up power prices.

NSW One Nation leader told Daily Mail Australia that far from being a blow to vested interests, the energy bill which passed on Friday was a huge win for the major players in the renewables sector.

'It certainly represents guaranteed income for renewable energy companies and their lobbyists, paid for by electricity consumers,' he said.

The state government wants wind, pumped hydro and solar projects to replace four coal-fired power stations which are due to shut over the next 15 years.

Mr Kean says the plan - which will create Renewable Energy Zones in Dubbo and the south west - will cut household bills by $130 and small business bills by $430 a year between 2023 and 2040.

The plan will support 12 gigawatts of renewable energy and two gigawatts of storage, such as pumped hydro, and reduce carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes to 2030.

Landholders are expected to pocket $1.5 billion in rent by 2042 for hosting new infrastructure.

More than 10,000 construction and ongoing jobs will be created by 2026, with an estimated 2800 ongoing jobs in 2030, the government says.

Coal-fired power made up 77 per cent of NSW's total electricity generation in 2019 - higher than the national average of 56 per cent - but four of the state's five plants will stop by 2035.

Renewables made up 19 per cent.

The Australian Energy Council warned the government's intervention may encourage too many energy assets to be built in places where they may not be needed.

'This would ultimately mean higher costs for households,' it said in statement.

Tony Wood, energy director at the Grattan Institute, said the plan takes risk away from investors and transfers them to consumers who would potentially foot larger bills.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8999443/NSW-energy-minster-takes-extraordinary-swipe-coal-barons.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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