The old food scare again
Malthus call your office! The real-life problem with food production is glut. But the Greenies "created a model" so there!
While the global population continues to rise, a new study indicates agricultural productivity has plummeted due to the effects of climate change.
Worldwide, farmers are growing 20 percent less food than they would be if environmental conditions were the same as they were in the 1960s.
The primary is changing weather patterns, researchers say, including increased flooding and droughts in different areas.
The drastic and unexpected shifts associated with climate change make it harder for harmers to plan productive strategies to yield the most successful harvest.
Topical regions like Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa have been hit the worst, with agricultural growth a third of what it could be.
Total factor productivity is a measure of economic efficiency commonly used to determine how industries are growing, typically by comparing the ratio of input to results.
But, in agriculture, farmers aren't in control of all the factors affecting their output, making productivity tricky to calculate.
'When a farmer makes an economic decision like what to plant in June, we won't necessarily know the outcome of that decision until six months later,' said Robert Chambers, a professor of agriculture at the University of Maryland.
'So there is a distinct break between input and output, and random events like weather can severely affect that,' added Chambers, co-author of a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change.
'Productivity calculations for agriculture haven't historically incorporated weather data, he said, 'but we want to see the trends for these inputs that are out of the farmer's control.'
Chambers and Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an economist at Cornell University, created a model to calculate productivity both as it is now and where it would be if weather patterns had stayed where they were decades ago.
They found a 21 percent reduction in global agricultural productivity since 1961, the equivalent of losing the last seven years of growth.
With a world population of nearly 10 billion expected by 2050, scientists warn that it's essential agricultural productivity doesn't just stabilize, but grows faster than ever before +3
With a world population of nearly 10 billion expected by 2050, scientists warn that it's essential agricultural productivity doesn't just stabilize, but grows faster than ever before
The effects, however, are not uniform: Warmer regions like Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced slows in growth of between 26 percent and 34 percent, the study concluded.
The US only saw declines in growth of approximately 5 percent to 15 percent.
'Some people think about climate change as a distant problem, something that should concern primarily future generations,' said Ortiz-Bobea. 'Our study finds that [man-made] climate change is already having a disproportionate impact on poorer countries that depend primarily on agriculture,' he added.
The technological progress that's led to better pesticides and hybrid crops 'has not yet translated into more climate resilience,' he added.
With a world population of nearly 10 billion expected by 2050, Chambers warned that it's essential agricultural productivity doesn't just stabilize, but grows faster than ever before.
'This gives us an idea of trends to help see what to do in the future with new changes in the climate that are beyond what we've previously seen,' he said.
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Biden opens global summit with ambitious new US climate pledge
Declaring that the United States and other big economies must “get this done”, President Joe Biden has opened a global climate summit aimed at getting world leaders to dig deeper on emissions cuts.
The US pledged to cut in half the amount of climate-wrecking coal and petroleum fumes it is pumping out.
“Meeting this moment is about more than preserving our planet,” Biden said on Thursday, local time, speaking from a TV-style set for a virtual summit of 40 world leaders. “It’s about providing a better future for all of us,” he said, calling it “a moment of peril but a moment of opportunity.”
“The signs are unmistakable. the science is undeniable. the cost of inaction keeps mounting,” he said.
His new commitment to cut US fossil fuel emissions up to 52 per cent by 2030 marks a return by the US to global climate efforts after four years of withdrawal under former president Donald Trump. Biden’s administration is sketching out a vision of a prosperous, clean-energy US where factories churn out cutting-edge batteries for export, line workers re-lay an efficient national electrical grid and crews cap abandoned oil and gas rigs and coal mines.
Japan, a heavy user of coal, announced its own new 46 per cent emissions reduction target on Thursday as the US and its allies sought to build momentum through the summit.
The coronavirus pandemic compelled the summit to play out as a climate telethon-style livestream, limiting opportunities for spontaneous interaction and negotiation. The opening was rife with small technological glitches, including echoes and random beeps and voices.
But the US summit also marshalled an impressive display of the world’s most powerful leaders speaking on the single cause of climate change.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country is the world’s biggest emissions culprit, followed by the US, spoke first among the other global figures. He made no reference to non-climate disputes that had made it uncertain until Wednesday that he would even take part in the US summit, and said China would work with America in cutting emissions.
“To protect the environment is to protect productivity, and to boost the environment is to boost productivity. It’s as simple as that,” Xi said.
India, the world’s third-biggest emitter of fossil fuel fumes, has been pressing the United States and other wealthier nations to come through on billions of dollars they’ve promised to help poorer nations build alternatives to coal plants and energy-sucking power grids. “We in India are doing our part,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told participants. “We have taken many bold steps.”
The pandemic made gathering world leaders for the climate summit too risky. That didn’t keep the White House from sparing no effort on production quality. The President’s staff built a small set in the East Room that looked like it was ripped from a daytime talk show. Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris addressed the summit from separate lecterns before joining Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and White House climate envoy John Kerry at a horseshoe-shaped table set up around a giant potted plant to watch fellow leaders’ livestreamed speeches.
The format meant a cavalcade of short speeches by world leaders, some scripted, some apparently more impromptu. “This is not bunny-hugging,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said of the climate efforts. “This is about growth and jobs.”
The Biden administration’s pledge would require by far the most ambitious US climate effort ever, nearly doubling the reductions that the Obama administration had committed to in the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord.
The new urgency comes as scientists say that climate change caused by coal plants, car engines and other fossil fuel use is already worsening droughts, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters and that humans are running out of time to stave off most catastrophic extremes of global warming.
But administration officials, in previewing the new target, disclosed aspirations and vignettes rather than specific plans, budget lines or legislative proposals for getting there.
Biden planned to join a second session of the livestreamed summit later in the morning on financing poorer countries’ efforts to remake and protect their economies against global warming.
With the pledge from the US and other emissions-cutting announcements from Japan, Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom, countries representing more than half the world’s economy will have now committed to cutting fossil fuel fumes enough to keep the earth’s climate from warming, disastrously, more than 1.5 degrees celsius, the administration said.
As of 2019, the last year before the pandemic, the US had reduced 13 per cent of its greenhouse gases compared with 2005 levels, which is about half way to the Obama administration goals of 26 to 28 per cent, said climate scientist Niklas Hohne of Climate Action Tracker. That’s owing largely to market forces that have made solar and wind, and natural gas, much cheaper
Biden, a Democrat, campaigned partly on a pledge to confront climate change. He has sketched out some elements of his $US2 trillion ($2.6 trillion) approach for transforming US transportation systems and electrical grids in his campaign climate plan and in his infrastructure proposals for Congress.
His administration insists the transformation will mean millions of well-paying jobs. Republicans say the effort will throw oil, gas and coal workers off the job. They call his infrastructure proposal too costly.
“The summit is not necessarily about everyone else bringing something new to the table – it’s really about the US bringing their target to the world,” said Joanna Lewis, an expert in China energy and environment at Georgetown University.
Political divisions in America that were exposed by Trump’s presidency have left the nation weaker than it was at the 2015 Paris accord. Unable to guarantee that a different president in 2024 won’t undo Biden’s climate work, the Biden administration has argued that market forces – with a boost to get started – will soon make cleaner fuels and energy efficiency too cheap and consumer-friendly to trash.
Having the US, with its influence and status, back in the climate game is important, said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Helsinki.
But hoping the world will forget about the last four years seems like wishful thinking, he said.
“There is too much of an impulse in the US to just wish away Trump’s legacy and the fact that every election is now basically a coin toss between complete climate denial and whatever actions the Democrats can bring to the table,” he said.
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Kerry Returns to the White House to Promise 'Green Jobs' That Don't Exist
Former Secretary of State and Biden Climate Czar John Kerry returned to the White House briefing room Thursday afternoon and promised blue collar workers a transition into green jobs...that don't exist.
"The jobs are growing there [green energy]. I'm not offering that job to somebody who may feel, 'oh my god I have a better job, I don't want to lose that job,' etc. But the job market here is going to be gigantic for electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, steel workers, heavy equipment operators, all of these people, building out America's grid and transitioning us to this new future is going to happen in countries all over the world and we need to make sure we aren't left behind," Kerry said, citing predictions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than open and existing positions.
Last time Kerry was in the briefing room he told oil workers who have lost their jobs as a result of President Joe Biden's so-called "green" energy agenda, which includes killing thousands of Keystone XL pipeline jobs, to "build solar panels."
"What President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people to go to work to make the solar panels,” Kerry said earlier this year.
As a reminder, the majority of solar panels are made in China.
“The recent wave of investment and capacity expansion announcements by China’s largest solar manufacturers threatens the (U.S. solar) recovery with massive overcapacity that will drive producers out of the business, and establish Chinese domination of the entire solar power manufacturing supply chain,” says Jeff Ferry, chief economist with the Coalition for a Prosperous America in a report published on January 28.
China’s big solar multinationals, like Jinko and JA Solar, have announced new expansion projects throughout southeast Asia as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s industrial strategy to dominate key Western supply chains.
While Kerry advocates for blue collar workers to give up high paying jobs in the oil industry, he continues to fly around the world on his family's private jet.
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Earth Day is Killing Us
Earth Day destroyed more of America than any environmental catastrophe ever could.
Grouches complain that a lot of fake holidays are created by companies, but Earth Day is actually a fake holiday created by a sharp Madison Avenue ad agency, and the name comes to us from the same guy who coined, “Timex: It takes a licking and keeps on ticking".
The Earth takes a licking much better than Timex watches, but it’s the job of ad agencies to convince us that consumer products are permanent, while the world is ephemeral.
Madison Avenue supplied the name, but Senator Gaylord Nelson, the eugenicist Democrat, had come up with the idea for the event. Gaylord’s Earth Day kickoff hit a bump when Indians showed up and threw garbage on the stage to protest his environmental plan to seize their land for a national park. But the media excised this inconvenient truth from Earth Day history.
Real inconvenient truths don’t appear in Al Gore’s documentaries.
It was 1970. Nixon’s Vietnamization was underway and the Left, sensing that its antiwar protests had a limited future, was looking to build a new movement. The idea came from Gaylord, the name came from Madison Avenue, but the culture war needed young radicals to organize, show up, protest, and tell their parents that they wanted Democrats running America forever.
That’s where Ira Einhorn, a young radical, who co-founded Earth Day and acted as the master of ceremonies at its first rally, came in. Einhorn had started out as an anti-war activist, but like Gaylord and other Democrats, he could see that the anti-war publicity machine was going away.
Everyone from politicians to ad agencies to aspiring gurus like Einhorn was looking for the next big cultural phenomenon that would speak to the narcissism of the luckiest generation in history. Einhorn realized that civil rights and anti-war rallies were getting old. The future was a new environmentalism that would make the old environmentalist eugenics look cool and hip.
Einhorn ended up committing totally by killing his girlfriend and composting her body. Then he fled to Europe where the same lefty activist network went on protecting him from prison.
Happy Earth Day.
Earth Day didn’t do anything for the environment except make a huge mess. Parade floats filled with garbage were used to warn about pollution. Students chalked messages on the street. Everyone drove out in cars for Earth Day to warn about the dangers of driving cars.
Gaylord’s Earth Day speech was revealing of what environmentalism was and wasn’t.
"Environment is all of America and its problems. It is rats in the ghetto. It is a hungry child in a land of affluence. It is housing that is not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not fit to inhabit. Environment is a problem perpetuated by the expenditure of billions a year on the Vietnam War," Gaylord rambled.
Environmentalism was everything and nothing. It was every Democrat agenda rolled into one. It was the welfare state and the anti-war movement.
If the Democrats were going to run on it, then it was environmentalism. And if they weren’t, then it wasn’t.
At no time in his speech did Gaylord address any actual environmental problem. Instead he focused on urban blight, caused by his own party, and shamed Americans for their prosperity.
“Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution,” Gaylord insisted, invoking the faux spirituality already in vogue.
Finally he declared an "environmental war" to save America's cities that would only take "$20 to $25 billion more a year in federal money than we are spending or asking for now."
Joe Biden, who first ran for office that year, wants to spend $174 billion on just electric cars.
The endless war on the environment is starting to cost more than any actual war.
Billions have been spent with little to show for it except more cash in the pockets of environmentalist Democrats like Al Gore who built a $300 million fortune with his advocacy.
The planet is no better and no worse off since 1970. The same isn’t true of America.
In 1970, 62% of aggregate income went to the middle class. Today it's only 29%. The winners of the environmental economic war on Americans were the upper crust Earth Day crowd.
There are more gadgets than ever, but fewer Americans can afford them.
Environmentalist policies helped push jobs out to China while leaving American cities and towns barren. There are more rats in the ghettos and housing not worthy of its name than ever before.
The current big objective of the environmentalist movement and the Biden administration is to crush coal while taking another huge bite out of the remnants of the American middle class.
“Secretary Kerry trying to equate the job of an electrician in a coal mine who makes $110,000 to a solar tech, who might make $35,000 to $40,000, is not a good analogy for our state," Senator Shelley Moore Capito argued.
But it’s a great analogy if you’re trying to turn more of the middle class into the lower class.
Jimmy Carter made Denis Hayes, a key organizer of Earth Day, the director of the Federal Solar Energy Research Institute. Hayes had an undergraduate degree in history from Stanford. Despite never having a degree in anything science related, he became a visiting professor at Stanford's School of Engineering and the CEO of Earth Day. He remains a board member of Earth Day alongside such notables as the President of Finland, the head of the Wells Fargo Foundation, and a woman whose bio lists her as an “internationally renowned chef.”
The Earth Day store offers "premium organic" t-shirts urging "Make Every Day Earth Day" for $28 bucks "Far out, man! This classic tie-dye T-shirt is bringing the 60’s back in style," the ad copy declares. The details mention that the actual fabric is imported. You can guess from where.
The same goes for the rest of the expensive junk in the Earth Day store.
In 1970, there were 18 million manufacturing jobs in the United States. Today there are 12 million and that’s after a period of record growth under President Trump.
China has built a manufacturing empire. It happily celebrates Earth Day because every advent of the fake Madison Avenue headline means more American jobs and dollars headed its way.
Earth Day, according to Senator Gaylord Nelson, was supposed to address poverty in America. Instead Earth Day has been the biggest machine for creating poverty, hunger, and misery in America. Environmentalism didn’t fight poverty, it spread it, trading American jobs and social mobility for the smugness of upper class students seeking a new political fight after Vietnam.
As much as the anti-war movement hurt America, the environmental movement did worse.
Almost as many Americans kill themselves in one year as died in the entire Vietnam War. The suicide rate shot up 35% in the last twenty years.
Losing America was much worse than losing Vietnam.
Every Earth Day comes with the usual recitation of political dogma with which children are indoctrinated before they can even read. On one side are piles of trash and on the other side are whales and polar bears happily dancing arm-in-fluke. The truth is that on one side there are Ivy League colleges and environmentalist think tanks while on the other side there is the Rust Belt, there are millions of Americans without jobs and without hope, and millions more waiting to see if the Biden administration will take away their jobs, their homes, and their futures.
The wages of Earth Day are ‘Love Canals’ all over America with dying towns, workers permanently out of work, dying of meth, committing suicide in unprecedented numbers.
Earth Day is America’s Chernobyl, an environmentalist catastrophe that is killing us. And Earth Day has destroyed more of America than any environmental catastrophe ever could.
It’s time to end the great hoax from Madison Avenue, from a brutal killer and a political hack, before it destroys what’s left of America.
Kill Earth Day before it kills America.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/earth-day-killing-us-daniel-greenfield/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
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 -- daily)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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