Tuesday, April 26, 2022



John Deere electric tractors

The radical lefties are now going after diesel-powered farm equipment and want all farmers to use electric tractors and combines.

A farmer has over 10,000 acres of corn in the Midwest. The property is spread out over 3 counties. His operation is a "partnership farm" with John Deere. They use the larger farm operations as demonstration projects for the promotion and development of new equipment. He recently received a phone call from his John Deere representative, and they want the farm to go to electric tractors and combines in 2023.

He currently has 5 diesel combines that cost $900,000 each that are traded in every 3 years. He also owns over 10 really BIG tractors. John Deere wants him to go all-electric to satisfy the "Go Green" liberals. He said: "Ok, I have some questions.

1. How do I charge these combines when they are 3 counties away from the shop in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?

2. How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the weather is coming in?

3.How do I get a 50,000+ lb a combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to the shop 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone. When the corn is ready to harvest, it has to have the proper sugar and moisture content. If it is too wet, it has to be put in giant dryers that burn natural or propane gas, and lots of it.

Harvest time is critical because if it degrades in sugar content or quality, it can drop the value of his crop by half a million dollars or more. It is analyzed at time of sale.

It is standard procedure to run these machines 10 to 12 days straight, 24 hours a day at peak harvest time. When they need fuel, a tanker truck delivers it, and the machines keep going. John Deere's only answer is "we're working on it.”

They are being pushed by the radical Dems in the government to force these electric machines on the American farmer. These politicians are out of control. They are messing with the production of food crops that feed people and livestock... all in the name of their "green dream" with no thought about how to achieve their objective.

Via email

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Climate nut dies after lighting himself on fire outside Supreme Court

A climate activist who lit himself on fire on Earth Day outside the United States Supreme Court Building has died, according to reports.

Wynn Bruce, 50, of Boulder, Colorado, died Saturday, a day after he set himself ablaze in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Police Department told Fox News.

The incident happened around 6:30 p.m. on the plaza in front of the court building.

He was airlifted to a local hospital, where he died.

A Facebook page belonging to a person named Wynn Bruce said he was a Buddhist and a climate activist.

In 2020, Bruce left a cryptic Facebook comment that included a fire emoji and the date of his death, 4/22/2022.

A Buddhist priest from Boulder said she knew Bruce and called his death “an act of compassion.”

“This guy was my friend. He meditated with our sangha [Buddhist community],” Dr. K. Kritee wrote. “This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis. We are piecing together info but he had been planning it for at least one year.”

Supreme Court Police said that they were still investigating the man’s motive for self-immolation. No one else was injured in the incident.

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NY Gov. Kathy Hochul’s insane, impossible carbon-free plan

Gov. Kathy Hochul has fully embraced one of the very worst obsessions of her disgraced predecessor: a war on carbon emissions.

The centerpiece is the Climate Leadership and Climate Protection Act that then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo got passed in 2019 in a blatant bid to boost his chances of winning some future Democratic presidential nomination. This travesty required New York to cut economy-wide greenhouse-gas emissions (from 1990 levels) by 40% by 2030 and 100% by 2040.

Worse, it gives unelected state bureaucrats massive power to cripple fossil-fuel companies and ram through pricy alternative-energy projects over any and all opposition — which allows massive amounts of pay-to-play favoritism.

Worst, the green advocates who favor the CLCP plan estimate the taxpayer cost of implementing it to be north of $300 billion, which guarantees that it will cost even more — or would, if it weren’t inevitably going to eventually fall victim to reality.

Consider: The plan centers on a mandate on ConEd and other utilities that 70% of all power come from renewables by 2030, and 100% by 2040. The 2030 goal alone is impossible, since it requires roughly tripling the amount of electricity generated by renewables — which means vast increases in wind and solar power, since 80% of the state’s current renewable power is hydropower, which reached its maximum decades ago.

That is, the plan pretends that sources that now account for less than 6% of the state’s electricity will somehow produce much more than half of it within eight years.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

But New York is going to try, forcing local communities to accept vast wind and solar farms and sending electric bills soaring to pay for it all, including billions for new transmission lines to carry power into the city.

Hochul, of course, prefers to talk about fuzzy-sounding stuff like her new plan to make high-rises in New York carbon-neutral within the next 15 years. The claim is that more than 70% of the city’s carbon emissions now comes from buildings, though that’s mainly because 1) the city has no manufacturing left, and 2) most of its power is generated outside the five boroughs.

And forcing expensive retrofitting to turn old buildings “green” is all too likely to just force them to close, especially since commercial real-estate faces a dire shortage of demand thanks to the rise of work-from-home in the wake of the pandemic.

Other parts of Hochul’s CLCP agenda will add more trouble in coming years:

No natural gas connections in newly constructed buildings after next year.

No new gas service to existing buildings, also starting 2024.

No sales of gasoline-powered landscaping equipment (lawnmowers, chain saws, wood chippers etc.) by 2027.

No new natural gas appliances for home heating, cooking, water heating or clothes drying after 2029.

Banning gasoline-automobile sales by 2035.

Meanwhile, Hochul (like Cuomo before her) has already vetoed carbon-energy projects and pipelines on the theory that giving New York other options would imperil the great green dream.

All this, when the state accounts for roughly 0.4% of global carbon emissions, while the countries that spew the most (China and India) won’t even pretend to do more than start reducing their own emissions sometime after 2030. This is vast pain for trivial gain.

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Cancel Earth Day, celebrate Earth

As a fourteen-year-old student in south-central Pennsylvania at the time of the first Earth Day in April 1970, I recognized the need for a real cleanup of what was a horribly abused environment. When I went off to study geology at college, I embraced the environmentalist movement as my own. In my early years at university, I subscribed to Mother Jones and the Militant. For a short time, I was even a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party.

Along with millions of other young and not-so-young people, I recognized the urgent need to improve our industrial processes and behaviors in a way that was more mindful of our air, water, and land. It may be difficult for a present-day adolescent to realize just how badly we were treating Mother Earth back then. It was common practice for people to throw trash and empty cans out of the windows of their Chevys and Fords. Industrial waste in the Cuyahoga River caught fire, a giant oil rig blowout offshore of Santa Barbara despoiled much of the western coast, Lake Erie was declared “dead,” and air pollution was so bad in Los Angeles that “smog” was coined.

Accompanying that first Earth Day were dozens of apocalyptic predictions of doom not too dissimilar to those of today. Among the most alarming were from Paul Ehrlich that “100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years” and that some “65 million Americans would perish in the Great Die-Off between 1980 and 1989.” Kenneth Watt claimed that “we have about five more years at the outside to do something.” Even the New York Times warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

Well, here we are 52 years later, with nearly all of the objectives of the inaugural Earth Day in the rearview mirror. The quality of our air and water has improved tremendously and likely has not been this clean since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there has been approximately a 50% decline in emissions of key air pollutants just since 1990 — sulfur dioxide by a whopping 90% (Figure 1). This improvement in air quality occurred during a period of increasing prosperity and growth of the U.S. economy. People drove more miles, and population and energy use increased.

Commensurate improvements have occurred to our nation’s water resources as well. Cleveland’s waterway, aflame in 1969, was named “River of the Year” in 2019. The once “dead” Lake Erie is now a mecca for sport fishing, and the formerly polluted waters of Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers are now known as the site of a major bass fishing tournament. In the coalfields of the northeast, thousands of miles of streams once left lifeless by mine-acid drainage now support fish and bald eagles. Industries often return water to streams cleaner than it was at the plant intake.

Despite unsupported allegations of increasing doom and disaster due to dangerous human-made warming, just the opposite is occurring. A dispassionate review of Earth’s ecosystems and the human condition reveals that both are prospering — and not by a little but by a lot.

NASA reports a significant increase in worldwide vegetation over the last 35 years is “largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.” This CO2-driven plant enhancement is also fueling crop growth from the hottest to the coolest climates that are turbocharged by a modest rise in temperature that is extending growing seasons.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the United States has seen a 50% increase in forested acres and an astounding increase in Pennsylvania alone of more than 500%. The area burned by forest fires globally is in significant decline. The number of acres burned in the United States is 20% of that burned 80 and 90 years ago.

By nearly every metric, Earth’s ecosystems and the human condition are thriving. Much of the improvement is the result of a modest one degree of warming since the middle of the 19th century and an increase in CO2, likely the result of the burning of fossil fuels that have provided prosperity unknown to any previous generation.

We have done a very good job in protecting our ecosystems, cleaning our air and water, and protecting endangered species. That should be celebrated. But Earth Day is no celebration. The observance has been hijacked by extremists who have made a bogeyman of the harmless gas carbon dioxide, ignoring its benefits as plant food.

With no purpose other than to serve as a fundraiser for climate cultists, Earth Day should be canceled.

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My other blogs. Main ones below

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

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

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

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

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

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