Trump Sounds Off on How Biden's Environmental Extremism Will Wreck Michigan's Auto Industry
Former President Trump blasted President Biden’s push to rapidly transition the U.S. auto market to electric vehicles, saying his environmental extremism is “killing Michigan.”
“Biden is a catastrophe for Michigan and his environmental extremism is heartless and disloyal and horrible for the American worker and you’re starting to see it,” Trump told Oakland County Republicans on Sunday.
“Driven by his ridiculous regulations, electric cars will kill more than half of U.S. auto jobs and decimate the suppliers that they decimated already — decimate the suppliers and it’s going to decimate your jobs and it’s going to decimate more than anybody else, the state of Michigan,” he continued. “It’s going to be decimation, it’s going to be at a level that the people can’t even imagine.”
In April, the Biden administration's Environmental Protection Agency released draft federal emission standards that would aim for about 67 percent of new U.S. passenger vehicle sales to be electric vehicles by 2032.
“These actions will accelerate the ongoing transition to a clean-vehicle future, tackle the climate crisis and improve our air quality for communities across the country,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said during a press conference in April.
Trump said the country that stands to gain the most from such a rapid transformation of the U.S. auto industry is China.
“The push for all electric cars, it’s killing the United States, it’s killing Michigan and it’s a total vote for China,” Trump said during his hour-long address.
He also took a shot at Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s approval of more than $700 million in economic development incentives for a battery plant near Big Rapids.
“The governor of your state is now giving away hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Michigan taxpayer dollars to Chinese companies and one in particular, Gotion, to build batteries in Michigan,” Trump said. “That sounds good, but the money’s going to Chinese companies, and then they’re gonna leave, they’re planning to take our money and then they say ‘bye bye, you stupid fools.’”
***********************************************
Even Environmentalists Furious About Biden's Intrusive New Green Initiative: 'Do It Where You Live'
Americans’ general frustrations with President Joe Biden continue to mount — and now the incumbent president seeking re-election is facing heat from some of the very same groups he so often champions.
Biden and his beleaguered administration have long pushed “green” initiatives no matter how polarizing those policies may be.
This time, however, it seems that polarization is hitting groups of environmentalists who are typically all aboard all things “green.”
The policy in question this time, per The Washington Post, is the method of “carbon capturing.”
“Carbon capturing” is exactly what it sounds like — taking those carbon emissions from various high-emission sources, “capturing” them and then storing them underground.
The entire process is a direct response to carbon dioxide being pumped into the air.
The problem: If these carbon emissions are as dangerous as they are being touted, is storing them right below people’s feet a better answer?
Many environmentalists are arguing, “No.”
The Post reported that “environmental justice advocates” in Louisiana are opposing carbon capture techniques there because of the close proximity of these emissions to black communities as well as the already higher-than-normal cancer rates found in the region — earning one stretch of the state the nickname of “Cancer Alley.”
Additionally, others fear that carbon capturing will embolden the very same fossil fuel titans they want to kneecap.
If your emissions can just be stored underground, what’s to stop you from maximizing those emissions?
There are also those with more pragmatic concerns — namely, how these underground gas bunkers will affect any planned infrastructure renovations or plans.
“What they’re trying to do to Louisiana now is I think the worst of anything we’ve been exposed to, because of all the uncertainty,” Beverly Wright, the executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, told the Post.
Wright didn’t mince words about what she thought of carbon capturing: “In the real world, this is an experiment.”
Chad Ross, who lives in the Donaldsonville area, told the Post he doesn’t trust any of what is being peddled.
“It is called Cancer Alley, and that’s part of the reason we don’t trust them,” Ross said. “It’s still not so good to have all these plants, so many of them, all around us. Anything could happen.”
According to the Post, the “world’s largest ammonia and nitrogen plant” is just south of Donaldsonville.
Ashley Gaignard, a part-time secretary for the city council, offered a counter-solution to the Biden administration.
“Don’t do it in my neighborhood. Do it where you live,” Gaignard said. “Right about now it’s politics over people. And I don’t think they give a damn about people.”
Of particular concern for the president is the fact she voted for him in the 2020 general election and seems positively nonplussed by this.
Biden can seldom afford to lose support from anyone. A recent CNN poll had his favorability at 32 percent — the lowest of his presidency — heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.
And yet, as the drive toward “green” initiatives plows forward, it seems as though it will only get more divisive and polarizing — even among those who consider themselves environmental activists.
*************************************************
UK: It’s becoming ever clearer that climate change is a class issue
Julie Burchill
It’s not news that we live in a New Medieval age of Magical Thinking, when the Enlightenment is seen as the start of hate-speech, feelings must always overrule facts and ‘transubstantiation’ has taken on a whole new meaning.
Men can become women simply by wishing it so, the BBC instructs its staff that there are 150 genders and teachers call students ‘despicable’ and ‘homophobic’ when they understandably ask a fellow classmate ‘How can you identify as a cat, when you are a girl?’
Deranged posh girls who would have happily been curtseying to a cake a few generations back now throw excrement and soup around in order to get attention
Those who identify as young while having one foot in the grave have not yet benefitted from this strange new belief system – but give it time. We may look back with incomprehension that in 2018 the Dutchman Emile Ratelband had his attempt to make himself legally younger by 20 years quashed, even though his plea was easily as sensible as that of navvies who call themselves Nina and thus must use the female restrooms: ‘When I’m 69 – I am limited. If I’m 49, then I can buy a new house, I can take up more work. When I’m on Tinder and it says I’m 69, I don’t get an answer’.
That doesn’t stop the great and the good from attempting to bathe in the funky fountain of youth, though – grumpy old woke bros such as Alexei Sayle, Billy Bragg and their pin-up Jeremy ‘The Absolute Boy’ Corbyn are forever standing alongside blue-haired students and telling old feminists not to horde rights. (As Victoria Smith points out in her brilliant book Hags, identifying as young will bring women only mutton/lamb mockery.)
The then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttered at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017: ‘A gang of angry old men… are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth… By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves’. I had a social-media scrap with a Remoaner who told me that my generation was done and his was about to take over; when I checked his age, he was two years older than me.
But even more than Remnants, if any group likes to identify as young, it’s the climate-change hysterics. Deranged posh girls who would have happily been curtseying to a cake a few generations back now throw excrement and soup around in order to get attention. More than any other issue this one has been seen to divide the generations, symbolised by Extinction Rebellion choosing the witless schoolgirl Greta Thunberg as their leader when she was only 15. But now some actual young people appear to have had enough of these giant toddlers who to have nothing to do with their time apart from obstruct those who have places to be and livings to earn.
This week in Stratford, East London, schoolchildren were seen remonstrating with the overgrown tantrum-havers of Just Stop Oil – staging a ‘slow march’ during rush-hour – for making them late to lessons, in some cases ripping their banners from their hands. A refuse collector nearby summed it up nicely – ‘Get to work, you lazy ****s’.
It’s becoming ever more evident that climate change is a class issue. These East End schoolkids understand – where adults have tried to skate around the issue, not wanting to be seen as Enemies of the Earth – that the climate change mob were born into privilege and thus are able to treat learning lightly. No matter how they waste their days, they’ll never be forced to choose between heating and eating.
It was telling that the children who tackled them were a multi-racial group – like the East London workers who in 2019 pulled an XR protester from the roof of a rush-hour tube train, leading a spokesperson to admit that the move had been a ‘huge own goal’. A subsequent hastily deleted tweet comparing themselves to Rosa Parks probably wasn’t the cleverest move, considering that climate-change protestors are – as an ex-director-general of the BBC once put it of his own corporation – ‘hideously white’.
I’d like Jon Snow – who said of a Brexit rally that he’d ‘never seen so many white people in one place’ – to cover the next climate protest. They’re so white they make the Lib Dem conference look like the Notting Hill Carnival.
They’re white because they’re posh. Even their monikers give the game away; the first tranche of XR leaders gloried in such names as Robin Ellis-Cockcroft and Robin Boardman-Pattison (more hyphens than Debrett’s) the latter of whom opined ‘Air travel should only be used in emergencies’ – despite having been on a number of recent skiing trips. Another comrade, Zoe Jones, was shown on social media enjoying safari holidays in Uganda, boozing on the beach in New Zealand and bungee jumping over the Nile; that’s not a simple carbon footprint – that’s a carbon clown-shoe footprint.
It’s not that the climate change mob are against flying per se – they’re very much in favour of ‘travel’ for themselves and their mates from ‘uni’ – they just don’t like it when the great unwashed follow the herd down to Greece on holiday. Like the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey asking ‘What is a weekend?’ it’s hard for people who do what they enjoy (or do nothing) to understand what holidays mean to those who do essential jobs, or jobs they don’t particularly enjoy, just to make a living.
But there’s a shining light at the end of the dimly lit eco-bulb tunnel. Kids of the kind who told Just Stop Oil to get a move on aren’t an exception, but a sign of brighter times ahead. A 2021 survey in the USA inspired the journalist Daniel Roman to write a piece called ‘Has the woke wave peaked? Shock poll reveals Generation Z rejects cancel culture.’ The findings were very encouraging. Overall, no one admitted caring much for cancel culture; the only group in which more respondents viewed it positively or neutrally than negatively were the notoriously miserable Millennials. More members of Gen X (1965-1980) and Boomers (1946-64) viewed it negatively (46 per cent for Gen X, 50 per cent for Boomers) than positively or neutrally (29 per cent for Gen X, 27 per cent for Boomers). But the real shock came from those born between 1997 and 2008, only 8 per cent of whom viewed cancel culture favourably, while 55 per cent had a negative view – higher than Gen X or Boomers.
I’ve never felt comfortable disapproving of youngsters, so I’m happy to discover that it was just the wrong sort of young people that I disapproved of all along; the mouthy posh ones who always push their way to the front. These East End schoolkids are far more the ticket – and politicians should take notice. The thing about pandering to the youth vote is that young people who have anything about them don’t identify as young, but as what they’d like their adult lives to be like. And I’d bet they’re no keener on living in a censorious, narrow-minded cancel-culture than we old folk. It’s time for those who identify as young to grow up – and learn from the mouths of babes what actually matters to everyday people of all generations.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/its-becoming-ever-clearer-that-climate-change-is-a-class-issue
************************************************Dirty little secrets of Australia’s dangerous EV rollout
The electric vehicle take-up among Australian consumers may provide a warm and fuzzy feeling for the environmentally conscious, but as machines, EVs are significantly heavier than the traditional motor car and a challenge more likely to weigh on Australian roads.
According to data provided by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, electric vehicles accounted for 6.8 per cent (17,396) of light vehicle sales (257,094) in the 12 months to March this year.
It is important to note there are more than 20 million registered cars nationally.
Electric vehicles such as the Tesla 3 which dot the more fashionable areas of Australia are also very heavy, due primarily to the weight of the battery required to power such vehicles.
A Tesla Model 3 weighs 1844kg (1.84 tonnes) at the higher end while the fuel-efficient Mazda 3, for example, tips the scales at 1.4 tonnes.
Considering the popularity of sports utility vehicles, the weight difference would be even greater than the 400kg gap between the Tesla Model 3 and the Mazda sedan.
If hydrogen-powered or battery-powered trucks ever make the leap from concept vehicle to commercial reality, then Australia’s road network would require far greater levels of maintenance and construction than exist currently.
In the United States, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported earlier this year that the safety aspect around collisions (a heavier vehicle tends to keep going when it collides with a lighter vehicle) as well as braking performance were increasingly major areas of concern.
It appears that environmental posturing requires a reality check.
While EVs are popular, the question of whether such vehicles should be subsidised is debatable.
To be exact, more than 85 per cent of the driving public through their registration fees have enabled the Queensland government to provide a $3000 rebate for zero-emission vehicles, (this of course does not consider the dirty offshore refining practices to acquire the specific minerals for these cars).
For fans of the George Orwell novel Animal Farm, the idea that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” rings true as the 85 per cent represent the horse.
With a market share of 6.8 per cent and growing, electrical vehicle owners should be coming under the purview of policy makers in terms of a timeline to legislate a road usage fee as opposed to being given a $3000 kicker.
As it stands, most car owners subsidise would-be Tesla owners the equivalent of a year’s fuel as the batteries EVs use are included, meaning those same EV drivers pay nothing in fuel excise which, of course, helps fund the nation’s roads.
Fuel excise receipts from petrol is expected to hit $60bn over the next four years according to federal budget papers, although is likely to decline given the incentives to the more
well-heeled to buy an EV.
Well-paid politicians such as Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, an electrical vehicle evangelist, in a YouTube video where she test-drove a Tesla told her adoring fans afterwards, “Wow, I’m hooked!” If only the good senator took an interest in the minerals used for such cars, the emission intensity of the mining effort to create that same vehicle and the industrial resources required to upgrade the transport network so it can cope with the extra load.
While noting Tesla’s desire to be free of cobalt, the mineral mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the raw material that powers the rechargeable batteries used in modern-day computers, phones, and electric vehicles as well as being a standout in human rights abuses.
Children as young as seven, according to Human Rights Watch, are working in cobalt mines, all in the name of the great green leap forward.
While foodies are proud of the “paddock to plate” mantra around its clean supply chain practices, the same cannot be said for the “resources to road” moniker for Australia’s electric vehicle enthusiasts where questions around a sustainable transport future remain murky.
***************************************
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
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment