Climate child labor- Who cares?
The ruling class, powerful elite, and the media lack some energy literacy which may be the reasons they avoid conversations about the ugly side of “green” mandates and subsidies. Before anyone in Washington decides to procure wind turbines, solar panels, or an EV, they should read the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations”, and decide for themselves if they wish to financially support the humanity atrocities and environmental degradation among folks in developing countries with yellow, brown, and black skin, so that the wealthy countries can go green.
The few wealthy countries pursuing the generation of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels while simultaneously moving to rid the world of fossil fuels have short memories of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years.
Wealth, with no ethical or moral standards for those of lesser means, can be dangerous and fatal to the cheap labor of disposable workforces. We have seen the effects on the disposable workforce when Qatar “needed” to build seven new stadiums in a decade to be ready for the 2022 World Cup. The World Cup in Qatar kicked off on Sunday November 20 at the Al Bayt Stadium, but the “acceptable” toll of more than 6,500 migrant laborers who died between 2011 and 2020, helping to build World Cup infrastructure with cheap disposable workforce will provide viewers and participants with many lingering questions about our ethical and moral beliefs resulting from the grim toll.
The transition to electricity generation from breezes and sunshine has proven to be ultra-expensive for the wealthy countries of Germany, Australia, Great Britain, and the USA representing 6 percent of the world’s population (508 million vs 8 billion). Those wealthy countries now have among the highest cost for their electricity, while the poorer developing countries, currently without the usage of the 20th century products manufactured from crude oil, are experiencing about 11,000,000 child deaths every year due to the unavailability of the fossil fuel products used in wealthy countries.
When we look outside the few wealthy countries, we see that at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than six billion in this world are living on less than $10 a day, and billions living with little to no access to electricity, politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity. Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21st century. We should not take energy for granted. Wealthy countries may be able to bear expensive electricity and fuels, but not by those that can least afford living in “energy poverty.”
Decades ago, it was sweat shops in the textile industry that grabbed everyone’s humanity interests, but today it is the “green” movement that is dominated by poorer developing countries mining for the exotic minerals and metals that support the wealthy countries that are going green at any cost to humanity, remains out of the spotlight.
Today, the wealthy countries understand developing countries have virtually no environmental laws nor labor laws, which allows those locations unlimited opportunities to exploit folks with yellow, brown, and black skin, and inflict environmental degradation to their local landscapes.
A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes: “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant”.
Lithium: Over half of the world’s Lithium reserves are found in three South American countries that border the Andes Mountains: Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. These countries are collectively known as the “Lithium Triangle”.
Cobalt: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) produces 70 percent of the world’s Cobalt. While there is no shortage of environmental issues with its Cobalt mining, the overriding problem here is human rights: dangerous working conditions and the use of child labor. Cobalt is a toxic metal. Prolonged exposure and inhalation of Cobalt dust can lead to health issues of the eyes, skin, and lungs.
Nickel: A major component of the EV batteries, is found just below the topsoil in the Rainforests of Indonesia and the Philippines. As a result, the nickel is extracted using horizontal surface mining that results in extensive environmental degradation: deforestation and removal of the top layer of soil.
Copper: Chile is the leading producer of the world’s Copper. Most of the Chile’s Copper comes from open pit/strip mines. This type of mining negatively affects vegetation, topsoil, wildlife habitats, and groundwater. The next three largest producers of copper are Peru, China, and the infamous Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Showing no moral or ethical concerns for the disposable workforce, wealthy countries continue to encourage subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar. Those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials to continue their exploitations of poor people, and environmental degradation to their local landscapes. Are those subsidies ethical, moral, and socially responsible to those being exploited?
Many of us had a chance to view the 2006 movie “Blood Diamonds” starring Leonardo DiCaprio that portrays many of the similar atrocities now occurring in pursuit of the “Blood Minerals” i.e., those exotic minerals and metals to support the “green” movement within wealthy countries that continue promoting environmental degradation to landscapes in developing countries, and imposes humanity atrocities to citizens with yellow, brown, and black skinned workers being exploited for the green movement of the few wealthy nations.
A few years ago in 2021, Ronald Stein co-authored the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy. The book does an excellent job of discussing the lack of transparency to the world of the green movement’s impact upon humanity exploitations in the developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy”. In these developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor, and are responsible for the most egregious human rights’ violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Every individual should enhance their energy literacy and know where and how the lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, etc. are being mined and the worldwide humanity atrocities and environmental degradation that is occurring in the developing countries with yellow, brown, and black skinned people. Then, with that knowledge in hand about the supply chain of those “blood minerals” required to support the wealthy countries mandates and subsidies toward green electricity, they can make their own decision to financially support, or not support, those exploitation atrocities.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/03/03/climate-child-labor-who-cares/
************************************************Don't buy the hype: Malaria is actually declining, not expanding
The New York Times and the Washington Post each published Feb. 14 articles claiming climate change is accelerating the spread of malaria. The title of the New York Times article claimed, “Climate change is spreading malaria in Africa.” The Washington Post title claimed, “Climate change may make it easier for mosquitoes to spread malaria.”
Given such claims, we should see rising numbers of malaria cases and malaria deaths. Yet neither has happened.
The alarming claims made by the New York Times and the Washington Post are in response to a newly published paper written by biologists at Georgetown University, home to the Georgetown Climate Center, a well-funded organization that has predetermined climate change to be a “crisis” and raises money by claiming an urgent need to address it. That doesn’t mean readers should dismiss at face value all claims by Georgetown’s paid staff, but it should raise a warning signal to reputable media not to accept such claims at face value, either. As is the case with any stories and claims, the media should probe whether such claims are true.
The central claim of the newly published paper is that the range of malarial insects is spreading poleward by approximately three miles per year. If true, that is not much range expansion. Nevertheless, it is apparently enough to draw feature stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. The New York Times summarized the paper by claiming that climate change “may explain why malaria’s range has expanded over the past few decades.”
But is it true that malaria’s range is expanding? The answer is clearly no. In fact, just the opposite is happening.
The World Health Organization’s “World Malaria Report 2022” documents that the world malaria map is, in fact, shrinking. Since 2000, 23 nations, home to more than a billion people, have become malaria-free. China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, El Salvador, Belize, Argentina, and Paraguay have all eradicated malaria since 2000. Many of those nations accomplished the feat just in the last three years.
Importantly, many of the nations that have recently eradicated malaria were previously at the poleward limit of malaria’s range. While climate activist "researchers" and their media allies claim that climate change is causing malaria to expand poleward, the objective data show that malaria range is contracting back toward the equator.
It is not just malaria range that is shrinking, either. The number of malaria cases and deaths is also shrinking.
The "World Malaria Report 2022" documents a steady decline in global malaria cases from 245,000 in 2000 to 232,000 cases in 2019. During the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, cases rose back to year 2000 numbers, but the report emphasizes that COVID disruptions and restrictions had much to do with that.
More strikingly, global malaria deaths steadily declined from 897,000 in 2000 to just 568,000 in 2019. Even the COVID bump in 2020 and 2021 saw malaria “peak” at just 625,000 deaths.
Historically, malaria has not been constrained to tropical nations. More than 500 cases of malaria were reported in Finland during the mid-1800s. During the early 20th century, an outbreak of malaria occurred in England. Another outbreak occurred in Archangel, Russia, inside the Arctic Circle. Two thousand years of global warming ago, Alexander the Great died of malaria on the banks of the Euphrates River, where malaria does not exist today.
Whatever the conjecture is by "researchers" funded by global warming activists, the undeniable fact is malaria’s range has been shrinking for decades, and the number of malaria cases and malaria deaths is shrinking along with it. Don’t trust the headlines of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Trust the objective facts instead.
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World News: Coffee Yields Are Growing Amid Climate Change
An article in Nature World News alternately claims climate change has caused or is likely to cause a decline in coffee yields. This is false. Higher carbon dioxide levels do and will continue to act as plant fertilizer and there is no evidence, outside of flawed computer model simulations, that current growing regions will be unable to continue producing coffee.
In the article, “Coffee Farming Yields Down By 50% Due to Rising Temperatures,” author Rich Co can’t get his facts or timeline straight, writing “[a]ccording to experts, rising temperatures are causing a 50% decrease in coffee farming yields.”
Nowhere in the entire story does Co cite or quote a single expert who says climate change has caused a 50 percent decrease in either coffee production or yields. Indeed, since data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) shows a substantial increase in coffee yields and production during the recent period of climate change, it would be surprising if he could find an “expert” who would make such a claim. The FAO’s data shows that between 1991 and 2021:
World coffee production increased by nearly 64 percent, setting new records for production 13 times during that time period, with the most recent record being set in 2020.
World coffee yields display a similar trajectory, having grown by more than 55 percent, setting new records 13 times, once again most recently in 2020. (See the figure, below)
Data prove coffee production has not decreased by 50 percent, or even at all, contrary to Co’s claim. Perhaps what he meant to say is that one set of supposed experts, the increasingly climate obsessed Inter-American Development Bank, claimed: “[b]y 2050, the area suitable for growing coffee will have decreased by up to 50%.”
The projection of a 50 percent decline is based on computer model simulations of future climate trends. Yet, as noted repeatedly at Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, climate models are seriously flawed. The basic projection they make is the global average temperature in response to additional carbon dioxide concentrations, and after more than thirty years and 6 generations of models, the model projections still run too hot.
Modelers then pile their disparate assumptions about how various features of the earth will respond to the flawed temperature projections and assumed CO2 concentrations, referred to as “feedback mechanisms” or “feedback loops,” to produce simulations of what the world will look like 20, 30, 50, and 100 years from now. Model simulations are tested for accuracy against simulations from other models, rather than available data, in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project.
Beginning with bad data, adding untested (in some cases refuted) assumptions about interactions, and testing the output against other models which also use bad data and faulty assumptions is no way to produce trustworthy projections about future climate conditions. It amounts to 30 years of Garbage-In-Garbage-Out or GIGO.
Not only are the Inter-American Development Bank’s claims based on weak computer models, they are refuted by what botany, agronomy, and horticulture tell us about the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and net-plant primary productivity.
Agronomy and Botany explain why crop production and yields have increased amidst global warming, and the same sciences explain why the world should likely expect crop production gains to continue. What’s true for plants in general is equally true for coffee. Modest warming has brought slightly higher rainfall totals, and a modestly longer growing season with fewer crop-killing late-season frosts. In addition, crops are benefitting from higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which any greenhouse operator will tell you is plant fertilizer, contributing to plants growing larger, faster, and using water more efficiently.
Real world data should have informed the claims Co and Nature World News made about links between global warming and current and projected coffee yields, instead of assertions by a few so-called experts at a development bank. Facts refute any claim that climate change is resulting in reduced coffee production or declining yields. Some basic fact checking and copy editing could have resulted in a story that told the good news about coffee production amid modest warming. Nature World News’ readers might have enjoyed that bit of good news as they sipped their first cup of morning joe.
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How Biden's 'Green Energy Economy' is Benefiting Left-Wing Billionaires
President Joe Biden's taxpayer-funded push to build a "clean energy economy" is benefiting the left's most prominent billionaire megadonors, including Bill Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.
Biden's Energy Department has in the last two months announced nearly $3 billion in loans to two electric battery companies, Redwood Materials and Ioneer, which are backed by seed funding from Gates, Jobs, and other left-wing billionaires. Now those billionaires, who have poured millions into the effort to win Democrats power in Washington, are likely set to see a handsome profit from their initial investment. Ioneer, for example, won a $700 million loan from Biden and saw its stock price increase by 33 percent after the announcement.
Biden's Energy Department is funding Redwood and Ioneer through its Loan Programs Office, which is no stranger to controversy. Under former president Barack Obama, the office approved a $529 million loan to electric car manufacturer Fisker, which declared bankruptcy in 2013 and was subsequently sold to China. The office was largely dormant following Fisker's taxpayer-funded failure—until Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act funded it to the tune of more than $300 billion. Congressional Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) warned that the money would create a "green energy slush fund"—predictions that are now proving true.
Biden's green energy grants are going to groups funded by the same people who poured money into dark money groups that helped get Biden elected. In July 2021, Redwood raised $700 million from a "carefully selected group of strategic investors," including Gates and Powell Jobs, who participated in the fundraising round through their investment firms. Ioneer, meanwhile, boasts Texas billionaire John Arnold as a major shareholder, according to an October SEC filing. In 2020, Gates sent $127 million to a liberal dark money network working to elect Democrats, while Powell Jobs gave left-wing candidates and political groups more than $2 million. Arnold is also active in liberal dark money circles—he gave one such group $13.5 million from 2016-2020.
The Energy Department did not return a request for comment. An Ioneer spokesman told the Free Beacon the company is "grateful for the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office's conditional commitment" but did not return questions on whether its influential investors helped it obtain that loan commitment. A Redwood spokeswoman said the company managed the loan application process "internally" but did not elaborate further.
Gates launched his green energy investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, in 2016. A who's who of deep-pocketed Democrats are tied to the fund: Arnold and fellow liberal billionaire John Doerr serve alongside Gates on its board, while failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is an investor. Doerr is a top Obama foundation donor, and Bloomberg contributed more than $152 million to Democratic causes in 2020.
Powell Jobs's investment group, Emerson Collective, is much more secretive. Bloomberg in 2019 described it as a "quiet force in Silicon Valley" that operates "in near-total secrecy" thanks to Powell Jobs's "penchant for anonymous giving." Still, some of the multibillionaire Apple widow's investments make public waves—Powell Jobs used Emerson Collective to become the majority owner of the Atlantic in 2017.
For Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, Redwood and Ioneer's billionaire backers are proof that the companies shouldn't need taxpayer funds to advance their operations.
"It's just remarkable that people who have such enormous wealth, cumulatively in the hundreds of billions of dollars, need the taxpayers to take the financial risk of their ventures," Turner told the Free Beacon. "If these are such good and sound investments, why don't they use their own cash?"
This is far from the first time Biden's efforts to advance green energy have benefited his donors. The Democrat last year awarded thousands of acres of public land to a solar energy company whose top executive helped him raise millions of dollars. The Biden administration has also publicly promoted green energy companies whose investors and board members led Clean Energy for Biden, a political group made up of "clean energy business and policy leaders" that raised Biden millions of dollars. The group went on to push the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act under the name "Clean Energy for America."
https://freebeacon.com/energy/the-winners-of-bidens-clean-energy-economy-emerge-liberal-billionaires
***************************************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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