That ‘Obama Scientist’ Climate Skeptic You’ve Been Hearing About
There is an article under the above heading just out by the 12 apostles of climate change. Are we getting through to them? Heavy weight argumentation is being used in an attempt to shoot down just one climate skeptic
But it is a pathetic attempt. Like almost all Green/Left argumentation, it consists a of a few potshots that make no attempt to tell both sides of the argument. They assume what they have to prove. Their idea of proving their basic point is to say baldly: "But unfortunately, climate change is real". That's the full extent of their argument for global warming. No statistics and an assertion built on sand. A six-year old could make a better argument.
The entire argument is unmoored assertion and would persuade nobody who knows anything about the relevant facts.
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Fifteen Republican State Treasurers sent a warning that they will pull assets from financial institutions if they give in to Federal pressure to de-carbonize and “refuse to lend to or invest in” the fossil fuel and coal industry.
The letter (pdf), led by West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore, is directed at Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. It expresses concerns over reports that Kerry and other members of the Biden administration have been “privately pressuring” U.S. banks to stifle the fossil fuel industry.
“We are writing today to express our deep concern with recent reports that you, and other members of the Biden Administration, are privately pressuring U.S. banks and financial institutions to refuse to lend to or invest in coal, oil, and natural gas companies, as part of a misguided strategy to eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country,” the letter reads.
The State Treasurers sent a plain message to financial institutions, telling them not to submit to the present administration’s coercion to deny investment and lending for the natural resources.
Furthermore, they assert that the approaches will “discriminate against law-abiding U.S. energy companies and their employees, impede economic growth, and drive up consumer costs,” adding that the strategy in question would make the free market submit to the will of politicians.
The signees of the letter are representing collectively more than $600 billion in assets, according to Axios.
They are backing some of the largest fossil fuel producers in the country.
“As a collective, we strongly oppose command-and-control economic policies that attempt to bend the free market to the political will of government officials,” they write. “It is simply antithetical to our nation’s position as a democracy and a capitalist economy for the Executive Branch to bully corporations into curtailing legal activities. The Biden Administration’s top-down tactics of picking economic winners and losers deprives the real determinate group in our society—the people—of essential choice and agency. We refuse to allow the federal government to pick our critical industries as losers, based purely on President Biden’s own radical political preferences and ideologies.”
The Obama administration’s previous conflict with American coal and natural gas industries is mentioned as an attack on jobs, tax revenue, and health insurance provided to families across the country, specifically hard-working middle-class families.
“As the chief financial officers of our respective states, we entrust banks and financial institutions with billions of our taxpayers’ dollars. It is only logical that we will give significant weight to the fact that an institution engaged in tactics that will harm the people whose money they are handling before entering into or extending any contract,” they warned.
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Is Having Children in 2021 ‘Environmental Vandalism’?
Not this old chestnut agin!
Concerns about population growth are nothing new. And a recent article in British Vogue is based on the same flawed assumptions
A recent British Vogue article shocked many with the title, “Is Having A Baby In 2021 Pure Environmental Vandalism?” In this piece, writer Nell Frizzell ponders whether having children is irresponsible due to the effects additional people have on the climate.
“For the scientifically-engaged person, there are few questions more troubling when looking at the current climate emergency than that of having a baby,” writes Frizzell. “Whether your body throbs to reproduce, you passively believe that it is on the cards for you one day, or you actively seek to remain child-free, the declining health of the planet cannot help but factor in your thinking.”
Frizzell offers many concerns about the future of the planet, including the idea that humans will run out of drinking water and that air pollution now kills more people than tobacco use. All of this is combined with the worry that children in rich countries will contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.
Concerns about population growth are nothing new. In 1968, ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich echoed 18th-century economist Thomas Malthus when they predicted mass starvation and widespread upheavals due to overpopulation.
“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” Paul Ehrlich told CBS News following publication of the book. “And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
The problem? These predictions never came true. In spite of all the worry, access to food and resources increased as population rose. People have to spend less time working today for these resources, than at any other time in history.
Do Frizzell’s worries hold up any better? Not really. The organization HumanProgress tweeted in response that air pollution deaths are actually falling. The only reason they’ve overtaken tobacco deaths is they’re falling more slowly.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/05/25/children-2021-environmental-vandalism/?omhide=true
****************************Why Taiwan’s drought means you can’t have a new smart TV
The chips that drive your smartphones, laptops and cars need water - lots of water.
This might sound curious - given their propensity to fail after water damage - but this is not your average water. It’s 1000 times purer than regular water. It is used to cleanse these technical marvels of any impurities before they land in your Tesla, iPhone or Samsung Galaxy.
Right now, the world’s largest manufacturer of these chips, Taiwan’s TSMC, is about to hit a deadline. On Tuesday, if Taiwan has not received more than 100 millimetres of rain in its reservoir catchment, some of the world’s largest semiconductor factories will have to scale back water consumption.
Taiwan’s crippling drought is hitting the world’s electronics supply, just as COVID-19 lockdowns send the demand for gadgets to record heights. “The rain is simply not enough to support the ongoing growth of the industry,” said Natixis Asia Pacific economist Gary Ng.
“If this situation continues, and if it reaches a stage where the water supply is actually affecting TSMC’s production, I think it will have a spillover effect in the world.”
Taiwan’s worst drought in more than half a century began last year. The mostly subtropical island expects typhoons between June and October, but in 2020 they didn’t come. It relies on its wet season to fill its water reservoirs. Usually, it gets 2500 mm a year. Last year, some parts of the island only got 20 per cent of their usual fill.
To purify its chips, TSMC needs 156 million litres of water a day. It has established water recycling methods to manage supply risk but, as Ng says, it is limited in its ability to expand production at an unprecedented time of demand. TSMC was contacted for comment.
There were more than 1 trillion semiconductor chips delivered around the world last year. Relative to the proportion of the population that buys consumer electronics, that’s more than 300 chips produced per person each year.
These tiny chips, made from silicon, refined by robots, purified in water and locked in filtered air, are essentially networks of switches that allow different parts of everyday devices to communicate. They are made in factories that are so brutally competitive and with capital costs so high that they must run 24 hours a day.
Few companies have the appetite to stump up the estimated $25 billion it costs to build one of the world’s top chip factories. Fewer still are ready to wear the costs of being superseded by competitors.
The result is one of the most highly concentrated industries in the world. Right now that $645 billion industry is centred on Taiwan - a place threatened not only by drought and climate change but also by its superpower neighbour China. To make matters more complicated, supply chains have been severely disrupted by a COVID-19 pandemic that has kept people in lockdown and driven demand for consumer electronics.
JP Morgan’s Bruce Kasman said “the bottlenecks are real”. “Extreme shortages in semiconductors have weighed on global auto output,” he added.
JB Hi-Fi warned consumers in February that there would be stock shortages of TVs for the foreseeable future, while Sony and Microsoft have scaled back production of gaming consoles.
Ng said in the short term, the industry faces a perfect storm of threats. “This chip shortage could basically derail the global recovery path,” he said.
Ben May, the director of global research at Oxford Economics, said COVID-19 had largely kept consumer prices low.
“But the big fear is, of course, that a range of factors related to the pandemic will eventually trigger broad-based price rises,” he said. “These include higher input costs as a result of surging commodity prices, sky-high shipping costs and shortages of key supplies such as semiconductors.”
If Taiwan can manage to sustain its production, get through the drought and get its current COVID-19 outbreak under control, then its post-COVID economic outlook is strong. The demand for its key export shows no signs of abating, driven by strong global demand for those precious chips fuelled by remote working, 5G deployment and high-performance computing. Exports rose by almost 40 per cent in April.
“We remain optimistic on Taiwan’s export growth amid a global recovery, and forecast it to rise more than 20 per cent in 2021,” said Lloyd Chan from Oxford Economics. “We have also raised our 2021 GDP growth forecast once again to 7 per cent, from 5 per cent previously.”
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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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Jim Hansen and his twin
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