Wash Post: 'Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather hazard'
This opening assertion is not backed up by any shred of data and is plainly false. Blind Freddy knows that winter is the big time of dying, not summer. Cold is the big killer, not warmth. See the facts below:
https://alarmistclaimresearch.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/cold-is-the-threat-not-heat-final.pdf
Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather hazard, and the risk of longer and more frequent heat waves is only expected to increase as climate change worsens.The Post is tracking the potential for dangerous heat this summer using the heat index, which accounts for the combined impact of temperature and humidity — the higher the humidity, the more difficult it is for the body to cool itself off through sweating. Heat disorders such as heat stroke, heat cramps and heat exhaustion are possible with any extended exposure to a heat index at or above 90 degrees.
Heat illness can set in quickly — in as little as 10 to 15 minutes — when your body overheats and can’t properly cool itself off. This can lead to muscle cramps or spasms, heavy sweating, weakness or tiredness, abnormal pulse rate, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, headache, confusion, fainting, loss of consciousness or death.
Multiple days of extreme heat, including warm nights that don’t allow our bodies to cool down, are especially dangerous. A Washington Post analysis of data provided by the nonprofit First Street Foundation estimated that the average number of Americans experiencing at least three consecutive days of temperatures 100 degrees or higher each year will climb from 46 percent today to 63 percent over the next 30 years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/interactive/2023/heat-waves-map-us-tracker/ ?
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Real Legal Scandal: Billionaire-Backed Climate Activists Infiltrate the Courts
It’s safe to assume that few readers of this page will have heard of the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) or the Climate Judiciary Project. But many will be aware of the story “broken” last week by the left-wing activist group ProPublica about a fishing trip Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito took with a hedge fund manager.
Why is that?
The latter story has benefitted from widespread pickup by the mainstream media and commentariat, part of what Dan McLaughlin of National Review called an “obviously coordinated progressive assault on the Supreme Court’s public legitimacy.” And it will no doubt have a long shelf life with conspiracy-mongering senators like Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin, whose pinboard-aided ramblings on the Senate floor have decried the alleged influence of "dark money" on conservative judges for years.
Yet similar networks of spending and influence exist on the judiciary's left. But their overtly ideological spending is treated as entirely unremarkable, even salutary, when it is mentioned at all.
The ELI and Climate Judiciary Project examples are illustrative. They’re part of a story about a handful of unaccountable billionaires who have for years quietly funneled massive sums to activist groups, law firms and even news outlets—all working to push unpopular leftist climate policy through the courts.
Hawaii’s activist Chief Justice
In May, Fox News reported that Hawaii State Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Rectenwald participated in a course with an obscure legal nonprofit called the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), as part of its Climate Judiciary Project. The project is ostensibly designed to educate judges around the country about climate change litigation; its real purpose seems to be biasing judges who preside over lawsuits against oil companies.
During the institute’s training sessions, "judges can ask questions and discuss topics openly without maintaining the neutrality required in court,” ELI’s Robin Craig said of the Climate Judiciary Project. Rectenwald’s presentation for one such session was titled "Rising Seas and Litigation: What Judges Need to Know About Warming-Driven Sea Level Rise."
The problem? Chief Justice Rectenwald is currently presiding over a significant climate lawsuit between the City of Honolulu and several energy companies. Meanwhile, as Fox News reports, ELI has worked closely and shared personnel with the law firm Sher Edling, which represents the City of Honolulu in climate litigation. Put another way, the plaintiff's lawyers are training the judges tasked with adjudicating their cases.
A “non-partisan” program
ELI paints the Climate Judiciary Project as “neutral, objective” and “non-partisan,” but this is clearly false. ELI belongs to the vast network of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) that litigate climate lawsuits and advocate for harsh environmental rules and progressive court reforms.
EarthJustice, a pro bono law firm that has been involved in numerous climate lawsuits, is a member of ELI’s Public Interest Program. Its past clients include hundreds of ENGOs: the Sierra Club, NRDC, Greenpeace, and League of Conservation Voters (LCV) being the most prominent.
Vickie Patton, General Counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), sits on ELI’s Leadership Counsel. Harvard Professor Richard Lazarus sits on EDF’s board and chairs its Litigation Review Committee, “which oversees all proposals for engaging in litigation, including on climate change.” He also recently gave a keynote address at a conference sponsored by ELI on pending Supreme Court climate change litigation.
Several left-wing donors provide the bulk of ELI’s funding, including the Hewlett, MacArthur, Walton Family, Robert Wood Johnson (RWJF) and Sloan Foundations. Since 2016, these organizations have given ELI nearly $2 million, and their IRS filings reveal overlapping funding for prominent ENGOs such as EDF and EarthJustice.
Even Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senate’s supposed judiciary watchdog, is a beneficiary of this largesse: one of his top donorsis the League of Conservation Voters. Several ELI donors, including MacArthur, RWJF and Hewlett, contribute to LCV. In turn, the League has supported the campaigns of Democratic attorneys general, many of whom are involved in active climate lawsuits. The Hewlett Foundation also gives to progressive groups that push for judicial reforms like court-packing, including Alliance for Justice and Fix the Court.
The real dark-money scandal
Several of ELI’s donors also contribute to the nonprofits managed by the dark-money Arabella Advisors group, described by the Wall Street Journal as “a for-profit consulting firm founded by a Clinton administration alumnus who previously worked at the League of Conservation Voters.”
Arabella Advisors receives consulting fees to manage five left-wing nonprofits, including 501(c)3s and 501(c)4s that support a myriad of progressive organizations. These include the New Venture Fund, Hopewell Fund, and Windward Fund, all of which receive significant contributions from several of ELI’s donors.
And, as Capital Research Center has shown, Arabella Advisors plays a shell game to pass money around from the 501(c)3s to the (c)4s to lobby for “ambitious” climate action. Arabella-backed groups contribute to many of the same activist outfits, including EDF, LCV and Union of Concerned Scientists.
So while reporters obsess over a 15-year-old fishing trip, there is a real scandal in progress that has grave implications for environmental policy and our legal system. Billionaire-backed activist groups are trying to force their fringe climate agenda through the courts, because voters have already rejected their scaremongering. If the media really want to expose judicial corruption, they should start there.
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Look What a Few Minutes of Baseball-Sized Hail Did to Massive Nebraska Solar Farm
Renewable energy is the alternative that Democrats and other environmental nuts want to replace reliable oil, gas and coal.
But time and time again, people who rely on wind and solar power have had to learn the tough lesson that such alternatives are both undependable and susceptible to the same elements they are supposed to harness.
Nowhere was that more true than in Nebraska, where a thunderstorm dumped baseball-sized hail on a solar farm on Friday at a speed of 150 mph — destroying the facility in just a few minutes.
Cowboy State Daily reported a storm moved east out of Wyoming where it wreaked havoc just across the state line on a solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
The facility previously touted its benefits for the area on its website.
“Scottsbluff, Nebraska’s 5.2 MW Community Solar project is a part of NPPD’s Sunwise program,” the facility states. “The solar array has over 14,000 solar panels, which are installed on trackers that will follow the sun throughout the day.”
It doesn’t look like the panels will be tracking anything for the foreseeable future. The facility appears to be a total loss:
Scottsbluff City Manager Kevin Spencer told Cowboy State Daily, “Just by looking at it, it looks destroyed to me.”
Writing for the outlet, Kevin Killough reported, “The hail shattered most of the panels on the 5.2-megawatt solar project, sparing an odd panel like missing teeth in a white smile.”
He added, “The Federal Emergency Management Agency ranks this area in its highest category for hail risk on the national index.”
Given that information, it is confusing as to why the Scottsbluff facility was ever constructed in the first place.
Of course, government-encouraged green energy projects with today’s lack of reliable technology often deny logic while they also decimate wildlife.
The region of the country in question is not a proper place for a solar farm by any objective metric, and yet there are plans to build another one of these eyesores.
Killough reported, “Wyoming has only one commercial-scale solar farm, but a second project is under construction south of Cheyenne.”
Brilliant!
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/look-minutes-baseball-sized-hail-massive-nebraska-solar-farm-pictures ?
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Ford’s Bad Battery Bet
What the heck is Ford thinking? Or perhaps a better question is: What does Ford know about our automobile future that the rest of us don’t?
And the answer is: Buckle up, because the fix is in for battery-powered vehicles, and that means the century-old American love affair with the gasoline-powered automobile is headed for heartbreak.
Oh, and you’ll be less free because of it. More on that in a moment.
At issue is a jaw-slackening $9.2 billion loan that Ford is taking out from Joe Biden’s Department of Energy, which the iconic automaker will use to finance electric-vehicle battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky.
We’re not exactly sure where our broke federal government got all this money to throw around. Nor are we able to lay our finger upon that article of the Constitution that gives Scranton Joe Biden the authority to loan-shark the money of his constituents in pursuance of a ruinous and idiotic “green” energy agenda. Nor do we have any idea why an agency that was founded by Jimmy Carter in 1977 to oversee our national energy policy and manage the development of the nation’s nuclear power and nuclear weapons is meddling in the transportation business.
But all that stuff is neither here nor there. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “The commitment adds to a clean-energy spending spree that has been accelerated by last year’s climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which gave the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office more firepower to dole out money to critical infrastructure projects.”
Not surprisingly, this is the biggest “investment” in the loan program’s checkered history, which spans nearly 20 years. And it could well end up being the worst if the American people continue to jam on the brakes in resistance to our headlong march toward EV nirvana.
But in terms of bad loans, let’s just say the bar has been set pretty low. Indeed, as our fellow skeptics from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page note, “This is the same shop that under Barack Obama doled out billions to Solyndra, Fisker Automotive, and A123 Systems, among other green businesses that went bust.”
Nothing says “left-wing government graft” like Solyndra.
Ultimately, the future of the American automobile will hinge on whether the other 49 states will follow the lead of Gavin Newsom’s California, whose Air Resources Board voted last August to phase out sales of gas-powered cars in the state by 2035.
Knock yourselves out, we said at the time, given the state’s already notoriously overburdened electrical grid, and given that experts say significant investments in grid infrastructure will need to happen to make Cali’s pipe dream a reality.
But since that time, plenty of other lemming-states have fallen in line behind the one that brought us tent cities, poop patrols, and free shoplifting.
“Why would these other states surrender their sovereignty like that?” asked one unionized Ford employee from the Ford truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
We wish we had an answer. Unfortunately, the writing may be on the wall. All the major car manufacturers are investing heavily in EVs, even though the American people have made it clear that they don’t want them.
Don’t want their ungodly expense. Don’t want their limited range. Don’t want their dependence on an unreliable energy grid. Don’t want their subordinance to the whims of Big Government.
EVs certainly are too expensive — which is why the federal government insists on taking your money to artificially prop them up. As the Journal’s editors note: “The Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) $7,500 consumer tax credits are merely a down payment.” They aren’t kidding. As the Mercatus Center’s Christine McDaniel points out Biden’s battery production tax credit will cost up to $152.8 billion before it’s done.
No matter. Joe Biden has already declared war on gas cars. And in doing so, he’s declared war on our fundamental freedom to move around as we please.
“Remember when Ford’s slogan was ‘Quality is Job One’?” asked the editors of The Wall Street Journal. “Those were the days. Now pleasing the government is job one as the Detroit auto maker shovels up taxpayer subsidies to fuel its government-mandated electric-vehicle transition.”
As the editors continue: “Ford isn’t in financial danger now, but its EV investments are squeezing profits and forcing layoffs. The auto maker last year lost $3 billion on EV sales. In the first three months of this year, its EVs posted a negative 102% operating margin, meaning losses exceeded sales revenue.”
We can practically hear the Ford execs now: Keep ‘em coming, boys! We’re losing money with every EV we produce, but we’ll make it up on volume!
https://patriotpost.us/articles/98414
***************************************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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