Former VP Al Gore gives 'unhinged' rant about environmental threats including 'rain bombs' and 'boiling oceans' during speech at World Economic Forum
Former Vice President Al Gore gave an 'impassioned' and 'unhinged' speech about climate change while on stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The eco-warrior warned the crowd of 'rain bombs' and boiling oceans while discussing the concerns facing Earth if drastic changes aren't made to address the environmental concerns.
Gore, who also voiced support for climate activist Greta Thunberg after her recent arrest for protesting a coal mine in Germany, said the world would soon fall into peril if citizens continue to treat the atmosphere as an 'open-air sewer.'
The video of his speech has ignited criticism online from those claiming the former politician has been 'wrong about everything' and calling him a 'shill.'
The World Economic Forum guest said the situation is more dire than people realize and claimed the current output of greenhouse gases is sending heat into the atmosphere that is equivalent to '600,000 Hiroshima' bombs ever day.
Gore also pointed to 'xenophobia' and 'political authoritarian trends' as contributors to the ongoing climate issues and increase in refugees.
'Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees,' the activist said.
'What about a billion?! We would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world! We have to act,' he yelled out, referencing how it's predicted the world will see one billion refugees 'in this century.'
Gore has spent the better half of the last two decades 'sounding the alarm' on how humanity is 'failing' when it comes to climate change.
He says the heat created from greenhouse gases is responsible for the climate disasters the world has seen in recent years.
'That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees,' Gore exclaimed during the forum.
The environmental activist also mentioned the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere, which he calls a 'thin blue line.'
'People are familiar with that thin blue line that the astronauts bring back in their pictures from space? That's the part of the atmosphere that has oxygen, the troposphere, and it's only five to seven kilometers thick,' he says.
'That's what we're using as an open sewer,' Gore continued.
That's the moment when the former vice president shared his a dire warning about the heat created by humans being pumped into the troposphere.
'We're still putting 162 million tons [of greenhouse gas] into it every single day,' he said.
'The accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth,' Gore claimed.
Twitter users were quick to jump on Gore's speech, calling the eco-warrior 'unhinged' and asking 'how does anyone take this stuff seriously?'
'Al Gore goes on unhinged rant, claims we're "boiling the oceans" and creating "rain bombs" and "sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level,"' wrote Tom Elliot in a tweet.
'He's been wrong about everything. Every prediction wrong. He's a shill and doesn't offer anything worthy of consideration regarding our climate,' claimed one Twitter user.
'How does anyone take this stuff seriously?' asked National Review editor Claude Thompson.
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Russian-British comedian mocks wokeness in Oxford Union speech: 'Trained young minds to forget'
Satirist and podcast host Konstantin Kisin slammed woke culture and argued that it has caused young people to "forget" that the way to "improve the world" and fight climate change is to work, build and create.
During a debate at the Oxford Union Society, Kisin argued that woke culture has gone "too far" and noted at the beginning of his argument that he was attempting to speak to those "who are woke" and "open to rationale argument." He started by saying that the younger generation cares more about climate change than any other generation.
Kisin argued the future of the climate would be decided by "poor people in Asia and Latin America," because "they're poor."
"There is only one thing we can do in this country to stop climate change and that is to make scientific and technological breakthroughs that will create the clean energy that is not only clean but also cheap," Kisin said. "The only thing wokeness has to offer in exchange is to brainwash bright young minds like you to believe that you are victims, to believe that you have no agency, to believe that what you must do to improve the world is to complain, is to protest, is to throw soup on paintings."
Kisin referenced anti-oil protesters who hurled tomato soup at a Vincent van Gogh painting in London's National Gallery.
He argued that those on his side of the debate were "not on this side of the house because we do not wish to improve the world."
"We know that the way to improve the world is to work, is to create, is to build and the problem with woke culture is that it has trained to many young minds like yours to forget about that," he concluded.
Several climate activists across the world have sought to protest climate change by defacing famous works of art. A pair of German climate activists smashed mashed potatoes across Claude Monet’s "Les Meules" at Potsdam’s Barberini Museum in October.
Kisin posted on Twitter that he "didn't hold back."
His speech received plenty of praise on Twitter, including from former Mumford & Sons banjoist Winston Marshall.
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NYC’s looming, self-inflicted housing-affordability crisis — thanks to the climate zealots
Happy “State of the. . .” season! That time of year when elected leaders give optimistic enumerations of their plans for the state, city, district or whichever fiefdom they govern. This year, as in the recent past, New York’s housing-affordability crisis will take center stage. Yet despite that, the city is on pace to implement the costliest and most punishing mandates on residents in modern history.
No, I am not talking about the gas-stove ban — but close.
This seldom-discussed policy is Local Law 97, or the Climate Mobilization Act, set to start phasing in next year. When that happens, the only New Yorkers mobilized by this act will be those continuing the flight to lower-cost states down south.
The law demands an unattainable greenhouse-emission standard in existing buildings more than 25,000 square feet, condo and co-op developments more than 50,000 square feet and buildings with up to one-third of units rent-stabilized.
If you’re a New York City apartment dweller, the odds are overwhelming that you’re living in a building targeted by eco-woke zealotry. A 2019 Wall Street Journal survey found that 20% of all buildings would face fines in the law’s first year, a figure that jumps to 80% by 2030.
And the penalties that eventually will be passed down to you are massive.
Failure to comply with Local Law 97 in its first year will result in fines of $268 per metric ton of carbon dioxide over the limit. Within five years, it more than doubles to $583.
What does that mean in practical terms? The Cotocon Group, a noted sustainability consulting firm, published an alarming case study on the law’s fine structure. A sample 150,000-square-foot residential building with a mid-range Energy Star score of 43 will face an annual fine of $167,000 by 2029. Thus if this hypothetical building has 100 condo units, each owner would be responsible for about $1,670 per year.
So much for any promise of alleviating our affordability crisis.
You should also cast aside any hope your building might just squeak by in compliance.
Consider this example. In 2010, One Bryant Park opened its doors as one of the first buildings in the world to earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum status. It was widely feted as the city’s greenest. Al Gore, the godfather of climate alarmism himself, not only cut the inaugural ribbon but leased space in the building to house his eco-friendly investment firm.
Yet despite its accolades and next-generation efficiency, it will be slapped with an estimated $2.5 million annual fine.
That is surely “An Inconvenient Truth” for Local Law 97’s proponents.
The crippling cost of compliance is so severe, the city saw fit to exempt its own buildings, meaning some of the Big Apple’s oldest carbon-challenged structures, including those the New York City Housing Authority owns, are spared. Perhaps the issue is not so urgently existential after all.
But if your building attempts to comply, we aren’t just talking about cutting the pipes to those gas stoves. This law requires massive overhauls of existing structures and HVAC systems.
The board president of Glen Oaks Village, a middle-class Queens co-op with 2,900 units, testified at a City Council hearing last year that the cost to convert their 47 boilers will amount to more than $20 million, or $7,000 per apartment, plus a 5% increase in maintenance costs. Yet even after the change, the law’s emission algorithm would still bang them out for an $800,000-per-year fine.
To make matters worse, many building managers and owners recently incurred massive costs to convert heating units from oil to gas to comply with the previous round of climate mandates. Now those will be noncompliant, even if the boilers aren’t yet paid off.
This is the sort of “Let them eat cake” or “Ban gas stoves” policy that rarely works its way into the “State of” speeches each January, despite affordability and climate resiliency being the topics du jour. And policies like this, once handed over to woke technocrats, only get worse.
The Buildings Department, for example, has so far refused to recognize carbon-capture technology — good enough for submarines and spaceships, mind you — as a valid method to lower building emissions as well as the cost of compliance. If the goal is truly to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, this technology should be celebrated. But I suspect punishing us bourgeois fossil-fuel users is the real impetus.
This is where policy must meet politics. Local Law 97 will take effect right around the time Mayor Eric Adams is seeking re-election. Let’s make sure the voices of the climate-change cultists aren’t the only ones he hears. Affordability is the first crisis he must resolve.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/nycs-looming-self-inflicted-housing-affordability-crisis/
******************************************************The Australian Labor Party’s new tax on those that wear hi-vis to work
In the past week Greta Thunberg was “arrested” for trying to stop the expansion of a coal mine that would bulldoze the abandoned German town of Luetzerath. While a German Greens Government is desperately trying to increase the supply of reliable energy, even against the wishes of St Greta, our Labor-Greens government announced a $15 billion tax hit on our energy producing and consuming businesses.
The Labor Party does not call it a tax, instead preferring the Orwellian moniker of a “safeguard mechanism”. The safeguard mechanism would make 215 Australian businesses reduce their carbon emissions by 5 per cent a year. They will have to pay a capped price of $75 per tonne to do this.
Over the next 7 years until 2030 these businesses will have to reduce their emissions by 205 million tonnes. At $75 a tonne, which is three times the cost of Gillard’s carbon tax, this amounts to a $15 billion new tax to do business in Australia. (The $75 capped price will probably prevail because in Europe carbon credits trade at over $100 per tonne and in New Zealand the price is already at $70 a tonne.)
Former Labor MP, Joel Fitzgibbon, admitted that Labor’s policy was a carbon tax. Like all carbon taxes it will increase the cost of living. Airlines will be made to pay the tax. You will be made to tick the green box on your plane ticket under Labor.
But this new carbon tax will be paid mostly by the mines and factories in regional Australia. The tax will hit 63 coal mines, 22 iron ore mines, 35 gas production facilities and what is left of our manufacturing of steel, aluminium and fertilisers. It is not a good idea to tax the industries that make our nation prosperous.
Over 84 per cent of the carbon emissions covered by Labor’s carbon tax come from businesses in the regions even though only 30 per cent of Australians live in the regions.
Labor’s new carbon tax is a tax on those that wear hi-vis to work.
Queensland is hit hard by Labor’s new carbon tax. A third of the 215 businesses are in Queensland despite the fact we only have 20 per cent of Australia’s population. Queensland businesses are set to pay an extra $4 billion in tax, a much higher burden than the just $700 million that will be paid by Victorian businesses.
It is Queensland’s mining industry that is keeping our nation afloat. Coal is once again Australia’s largest export but the thanks it gets is to pay more tax to prop up a bloated Canberra bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, Labor’s policy lets the banks off scot-free. Banks are large emitters themselves due to the energy use of their data centres.
However, under Labor’s policy, emissions from the use of electricity is inexplicably ignored. If Labor had included emissions from electricity use, three of the four big banks would have carbon emissions over the 100,000-tonne threshold and have to pay the tax.
So Labor’s climate policy taxes the jobs in the hi-vis industries of mining and manufacturing, while turning a blind eye to the emissions created by jobs in suits.
And those hi-vis industries, guess who they will have to buy the carbon credits from? That’s right, the banks. No wonder the banking industry is one of the loudest supporters of Labor’s climate plan.
Labor has tried to claim that this new tax will not hurt business or jobs because other countries want us to reduce carbon emissions and if we do not we will lose their custom. However, this argument is completely undermined by Labor’s own suggestion that we will now need to introduce carbon tariffs on imported products to offset the costs of their carbon tax on Australian businesses.
If Labor’s new carbon tax actually helps Australian businesses sell products to climate conscious customers, why would we need a tariff to provide them protection against low cost goods from countries that do not impose a carbon tax?
This just proves that this new tax is another blow to Australia’s manufacturing industries. The biggest winner of Labor’s carbon tax will be China, who will take more of our manufacturing jobs as they continue to build coal fired power plants like they are going out of fashion.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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