Trump's climate stance galvanises world

In a childish display of petulance, the global elite use climate nonsense to show their hatred of Trump

If the Paris accord was the spark igniting the global fight against climate change, then the latest round of talks, held in Bonn, served to fan the flames.

These were not talks intending to deliver bombshell moments for the 10,000 government delegates, 8000 business and policy leaders or the 2000 members of the media who gathered near the Rhine. These talks were about tightening the bolts on the Paris Agreement to drive momentum behind the global climate juggernaut.

It has been two years since 194 countries agreed to limit global warming to less than 2C above the Earth's pre-industrial average. In an act of almost audacious ambition, the Paris accord aims to keep temperatures within 1.5C by reducing net carbon emissions to zero.

But this was two years ago. Since then the US, the world's second greatest polluter, elected Donald Trump as president on soaring campaign rhetoric over a coal renaissance for the forgotten pockets of the US.

Trump duly followed through on threats to withdraw from the accord, pull research funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and loosen federal regulation on coal use.

But in an intriguing diplomatic twist Trump's unilateral U-turn has proved to be the kindling for a fired-up climate agenda. Christiana Figueres, the UN's chief climate negotiator, went as far as to say she thanks him.

"Trump's announcement provoked an unparalleled wave of support for the treaty. He shored up the world's resolve on climate action, and for that we can all be grateful," she says.

Tom Delay, once an executive at Royal Dutch Shell, is now the chief executive of the Carbon Trust, a UK climate advisory group. Not so long ago, he says the common riposte of chief executives was to "be realistic" about the potential of clean technologies.

This is an argument fast being unwound. The falling cost of renewable energy and growing pool of investment waiting to flood into green growth has bolstered the confidence of business and finance leaders representing trillions of pounds.

"This is not about taking the moral high ground. There's very little 'morality' in what is being argued. Quite simply, there's now a business case to do something different and do it better," he says.

The heavily heckled members of the US delegation felt the full brunt of the "enormous pushback" against their president's policies. Few others there supported the views, meaning that instead of polarising the conference, the US stance served as a warning beacon for which side of the debate was safest.

Opposition to Trump was perhaps fiercest from with his own country. Billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg is leading the charge, delivering a staggering broadside against the president via a climate action report, billed as the "first communication to the international community" of US climate goals, on a non-federal level, since Trump's rejection of the Paris Agreement.

Bloomberg calls it the American Pledge, neatly reclaiming a commitment to tackling climate change as a national endeavour while alienating Trump as somehow "un-American" in this context.

The report finds that 20 US states, 110 US cities and some 1400 businesses worth more than $US25 trillion have adopted quantified emissions reduction targets despite the administration's views. The most ambitious of these targets, such as those adopted by California, mirror similar emissions-cutting goals as national governments.

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Overpopulation Is Not Killing the Planet

And yet ecofascists keep arguing that the "moral" thing to do is have fewer children

Population control to save the planet is hardly a new idea. It goes back at least 50 years. Indeed, we’ve written about it many times before.

The latest entry in this man-hating earth-worship genre is from NBC News in a “think” piece entitled “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them.” The author, Travis Rieder of the Berman Institute of Bioethics, begins, “A startling and honestly distressing view is beginning to receive serious consideration in both academic and popular discussions of climate change ethics.”

Um, “beginning to”? Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published in 1968 and received a lot of attention from lefty environmentalists. Ehrlich predicted a “substantial increase in the world death rate” within a decade because of the difficulty in feeding so many people. Of course, Ehrlich’s dire prediction didn’t happen — on the contrary, there’s more food now than ever. But when have, er, inconvenient truths ever stopped leftists from hollering the same apocalyptic climate warnings even louder? In fact, despite being a false prophet, Ehrlich wrote two more books on population control in the 1990s.

Note the irony here: Totalitarian regimes are responsible for the only real famines since Ehrlich first warned of food shortages, yet his and other ecofascists’ solution is … totalitarian population control. What could go wrong?

Thus it’s no surprise that an academic like Rieder would smugly assert, “Moral responsibility simply isn’t mathematical. If you buy this view of responsibility, you might eventually admit that having many children is wrong, or at least morally suspect, for standard environmental reasons: Having a child imposes high emissions on the world, while the parents get the benefit. So like with any high-cost luxury, we should limit our indulgence.”

He tries to back off some, adding, “I am certainly not arguing that we should shame parents, or even that we’re obligated to have a certain number of children. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think there is a tidy answer to the challenging questions of procreative ethics. But that does not mean we’re off the moral hook.”

Yet the implication of such morality remains that if you can’t limit your own “indulgence,” government might just have to step in. The only recipe leftists ever offer is to eliminate choice by way of ever more powerful government — even if it means violating another of their long-held tenets: “Get your laws out of my bedroom/off my body.”

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False promises in Canadian climate change goals

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau agreed to the United Nations’ Paris climate accord in 2015, he repeated exactly what his predecessor, Jean Chretien, did when he signed the UN’s Kyoto climate accord in 1997.

Both Liberal prime ministers committed Canadians to achieving industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions they knew they couldn’t deliver.

In 2007, a decade after Chretien signed Kyoto, and a year after the Liberals lost power to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in 2006, Chretien’s principal secretary, Eddie Goldenberg, acknowledged that Chretien knew when he signed Kyoto that Canada had very little chance of achieving the emission cuts he promised.

But he said Chretien believed it was necessary to prepare Canadians for future actions needed to reduce emissions.

Except that never happened.

When Trudeau agreed in 2015 to less onerous emission cuts for Canada under the Paris climate accord, the Liberals again knew they couldn’t achieve them.

The Trudeau Liberals, unlike the Chretien Liberals after the fact, haven’t admitted they can’t achieve Trudeau’s Paris accord emission reduction commitments for 2020 and 2030. But it’s inconceivable they do not know they cannot achieve them.

The UN itself said last month Canada is very likely to miss its 2020 and 2030 commitments unless it buys billions of dollars worth of carbon offsets annually on international carbon markets.

But these markets are riddled with fraud, so there’s no guarantee any offsets Canada buys will actually reduce global emissions.

Basic math tells us the Trudeau Liberals today, as did the Chretien Liberals in 1997, know they cannot meet the commitments they’ve made to the UN.

In 1997, Chretien committed Canada to reducing its GHG emissions to an annual average of 6% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

Since Canada’s emissions in 1990 were 611 megatonnes annually (a megatonne, or MT, equals one million tonnes), Chretien would have had to reduce emissions to an average of 574 Mt annually between 2008 and 2012.

When the Liberals, now led by Paul Martin, lost power to the Harper Conservatives in 2006, Canada’s emissions were 729 Mt annually, 155 Mts above Chretien’s Kyoto commitment, which would have started in 2008.

Using 2006 figures, that means the Liberals, had they remained in power, would have had to shut down the equivalent of Canada’s entire oil and gas sector (161.6 Mt annually in 2006) starting within two years.

The Trudeau government faces the same dilemma.

The UN reported last month that for Trudeau to fulfill his 2015 Paris accord commitments to lower Canada’s emissions to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and to 30% by 2030, Canada will have to cut its emissions by 111 Mt annually by 2020 and 219 Mt annually by 2030.

To meet his 2020 commitment, Trudeau will have to shut down the equivalent of Canada’s entire electricity sector (79 Mt annually) and 44% of its agricultural sector (73 Mt annually) within three years.

To meet his 2030 commitment, Trudeau will have to shut down the equivalent of Canada’s entire transportation sector (173 Mt annually), plus its entire waste disposal sector (48 Mt annually) in 13 years.

Given that this is impossible, the last thing Trudeau, and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna want to talk about — as we saw last week at the UN’s Bonn climate summit — is their plan to reduce Canada’s emissions to the levels Trudeau promised the UN for 2020 and 2030.

That’s because they don’t have one.

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Delusions of grandeur: Catherine McKenna Calls Herself “Minister Responsible For Weather”

If Catherine McKenna’s goal is to use Twitter to get attention, she’s doing quite well. But if her goal is to exude an image of competence, there’s definitely some room for improvement.

McKenna’s latest “interesting” tweet can be seen below:



That’s not how it works.

McKenna’s foolish tweets would be funny, if not for the fact that the terrible policies she and Trudeau are implementing are destroying real jobs and hurting Canadian workers.

It’s easy for people like McKenna and Trudeau to feel relaxed and have a fun time when they’re getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the taxpayers and have job security for 4 years.

Meanwhile, they’re destroying Canada’s coal industry, and imposing restrictions and adding to a bureaucracy that takes wealth and opportunity from Canadians. So, it’s even more disturbing when the Minister of the Environment doesn’t even seem to know what her job is.

Canadians deserve far better.

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Renewables Battery ‘Boom’: Exploding Mega-Storage System Generates Fireball & Toxic Lithium Plume

There’s nothing ‘stable and secure’ about lithium batteries. As Samsung mobile phone owners are painfully aware, lithium batteries have a horrifying habit of spontaneous ignition. And there have been plenty of incidents where the lithium batteries in Tesla’s electric cars have suddenly exploded in flames

A wind power storage battery has exploded into flames at a power station located near the city of Brussels. The fire resulted in a cloud of toxic fumes that flew over the city and forced thousands of people to stay at home.

The battery was part of the first real live testing of power batteries being used to store wind power in Belgium. After less than one month, the test miserably failed with the battery being destroyed by fire and residents hiding in their houses to escape the polluted cloud. Here is the story.

On Saturday the 11th of November 2017, around noon, people in some western areas of the city of Brussels (Belgium) could smell a strong and irritating odour that some described as being similar to the smell of “burning plastic”.

A little later, the population was informed of a fire going on in the Electrabel-Engie power plant located at Drogenbos.

Electrabel-Engie is the main electricity producer in Belgium, and operates a gas turbine power plant in Drogenbos, a village located at the western limit of the city of Brussels – where the wind came from at the time of the accident.

An official alert was broadcast by the Belgian authorities

Still a bit later, some local newspapers explained that “a container-size lithium battery has blown up in flames. The fire has produced a cloud of potentially toxic smoke”. The message circulating on the social networks was that “a cloud full of toxic lithium was blowing over the city”.

It took several hours for firemen to control the fire. The alert was lifted around 4pm local time. No injuries were reported, although some people did complain of respiratory irritation.

At that time the population was informed that “Measures of air pollution were normal and they were no more risks for health or the environment”. However they didn’t say what were the pollutants found in previous measurements and in what quantities they were present in the air.

So, apparently, they did indeed start up full-scale testing of their carefully selected batteries. But it took less than one month for the first of them to blow up in flames and force tens of thousands of inhabitants to stay hidden indoors to avoid the toxic cloud that resulted from this experiment.

One of the mainstream newspapers has reported a press release of the Electrabel-Engie group saying that the “battery that has burned was not in operation at the time the fire broke out”. Let’s hope that at least this one is fake news, otherwise it would mean that these batteries are just chemical bombs ready to explode at any time.

If the dream of wind proponents is to materialize, our landscapes will be scattered with such container-size batteries. In the light of what occurred this weekend in Drogenbos, authorities everywhere should take note and impose on the industry safety measures to protect the public and avoid the possibility of another such accident.

Not a single article in the local media mentioned the link between the battery that has polluted the city of Brussels and wind power backup and storage requirements.

For the uninformed reader, the message was that “the villain Electrabel that operates nuclear power plants has once again polluted the environment”. But this accident was really due to the presence of wind turbines in the power production system.
We should see it as chemical pollution directly related to supposedly ‘clean’ wind power.

Welcome to your exciting wind, sun and battery ‘powered’ future!

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