First, They Targeted Your Gas Stove - Now, the Left Wants to Ban Air Conditioners
When the heat waves of 2023 baked many parts of the United States with oven-dry drought conditions, the Biden administration’s newly formed Office of Climate Change and Health Equity (OCCHE) sounded the apocalyptic warning sirens. Admiral Rachel Levine, a pediatrician, leads the bureau with a charge of finding ways to right the wrongs of climate change, particularly when they are believed to disproportionately impact people of color.
The lack of air conditioning in low-income homes seems like a battle perfectly suited for Admiral Levine. An “all-of-government” response to outfit low-income homes with air conditioners seems like the first obvious attack. But, when it comes to household appliances, the fog of political war on the left makes those battle lines far from clear. Health equity never happens when practicalities of achieving it conflict with just about any other cause of the political left.
The pandemic lockdowns highlighted the need for Americans who struggle with poverty to get the air conditioning they need. The solution was obvious. Even the unpopular and politically tone-deaf former mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, responded compassionately by delivering 74,000 air conditioners to low-income New Yorkers.
One would think that as the left moves from the coronavirus to climate change as their driving political force, Levine would follow suit and load trucks with window air conditioning units. After all, asthma affects non-white kids the hardest. Moreover, African American children are more than twice as likely as white kids to visit an emergency room for asthma. And studies have concluded that kids who live in urban areas benefit from air conditioning as a means of preventing and treating asthma.
Last year, Richard Trumka, commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), warned Americans about a killer hiding in plain sight within the kitchens of many American homes. “Spread the word about this hidden hazard before you gather with family and friends for the holidays,” he said of gas stoves, before infamously threatening a ban by 2024. Several groups pointed to a study showing a stove-related increase of 12 percent in childhood asthma as their reason for banning gas stoves. Given the consensus among the administration that gas stoves are bad for asthma and air conditioning good for it, you would think the good folks at CPSC or OCCHE would have a do-gooder plan to trade your gas stove for an electric AC unit. But, of course, things are more complicated than that.
Our betters believe that while asthma is bad for kids, climate change that causes the need for more air conditioners is far worse. In fact, the Biden administration just slapped the industry with new regulations that will make air conditioning units more expensive for low-income Americans to buy, and existing units nearly impossible to fix.
As energy prices soar and low-income Americans struggle to pay their utility bills, the only thing they have to look forward to is the cool fall weather and a momentary break before winter brings its coming heating bills. A recent article from The Lancet explains why (presumably people other than the authors) should not expect air conditioning as a sustainable solution for the heat, promising “a more holistic understanding of the thermal environment at the landscape and urban, building, and individual scales supports the identification of numerous sustainable opportunities to keep people cooler.”
Next spring, that means when poor and asthmatic kids come home from school, they will have to open the windows and grab their inhalers.
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Eco-technocrats in Brussels risk posing a threat to democracy
Any serious politician knows perfectly well by now that net zero 2050 won’t fly democratically. There was an inevitability about Rishi Sunak graciously allowing us longer to keep buying our petrol cars and using our gas boilers, not to mention Emmanuel Macron’s own subsequent climbdown on the gas boiler issue in France earlier this week. Their voters would not have stood for anything else.
But where does this now leave the serious climate activist? Effectively they have two choices: make the best of a democratic process which has turned against them, or move to take such decisions out of the hands of the voters.
What is being demanded here is that future environmental policy be determined in a technocratic way
There are ominous signs that they are increasingly inclined towards the latter, much more dangerous, course. One such straw in the wind is a high-profile case starting today in the European Court of Human Rights.
The nominal claimants are six Portuguese citizens aged between 11 and 24. They are suing 32 European states, including the UK, seeking what is effectively an order from the Strasbourg judges to keep strictly to the Paris accords and immediately act to keep warming below 1.5 degrees centigrade. Anything short of this, they say, threatens their human rights to life, to freedom from torture or degrading treatment, and to privacy, and unduly disadvantages them as against earlier generations.
The public relations accompanying this claim deserve full marks. Graceful pictures of winsome teenagers combine nicely with evocations of David and Goliath, not to mention idealistic youth pitched against selfish middle age. And, it must be admitted, at least some of the money behind the campaign has been crowdfunded rather than handed out by well-heeled foundations. Nevertheless, this is still a development that should give us considerable pause.
For one thing, the claimants, while utterly sincere, are bit players. In reality, this is a fairly ordinary case of pressure groups engaging in lawfare as politics by other means. The whole thing is apparently co-ordinated by something called the Global Legal Action Network, or GLAN, and it has the overt backing of organisations such as Amnesty, Greenpeace and a number of other activist groups.
Secondly, behind all this lies an important bid by human rights lawyers (many of those instructed, incidentally, being English barristers) to stake a claim over what is for human rights law a pretty untouched field. Admittedly, their arguments are not quite as outlandish as you might think if armed merely with the words of the Human Rights Convention.
True, you might be forgiven for reading the right to life as something aimed at state death squads rather than freak weather fatalities, for interpreting torture or degrading treatment as meaning deliberate brutalisation rather than failing to control heatwaves and the duty not to discriminate in respecting human rights as having nothing to do with promoting intergenerational justice. But however correct in 1951 when we ratified the convention, such a view now puts you very firmly on the wrong side of history. All these rights have been creatively extended almost out of recognition, so as to cover not simply deliberate state atrocities but all sorts of activities and omissions that might shorten, blight or unequalise the life of people generally.
Nevertheless, no-one has seriously suggested so far that the convention gives the court the kind of remit that these human rights lawyers are now pressing for: a kind of roving commission to keep governments on their toes on all matters climate, and, whatever voters may think, to intervene in any case where it sees that lives, comfort and the interests of future generations are being hazarded to a greater extent than it regards as acceptable. As a lawyer for GLAN candidly admitted, if he gets what he is asking for – an order from the court to 32 states to ‘rapidly accelerate their climate mitigation efforts’ – this would be a ‘game changer’.
Politics being in the end about the good of human institutions, one must of course still ask: would this be a good thing? Here again, however, there is room for serious doubt.
Backers of this move have pointed out that the involvement of lawyers in climate change is nothing new. This is true: only last month, for example, a group of children in the US state of Montana successfully sued its government for failing to mitigate the effects of fossil fuel use.
But there is an important difference. In Montana the suit was before state judges, and was based on a democratically approved constitution, which explicitly enacted a right to a ‘clean and healthful environment’. In the present case, none of those applies. What is being demanded here is, in effect, that future environmental policy be determined in a technocratic way, by judges owing allegiance to no society or political unit, applying an instrument that is essentially beyond democratic change, and which in addition has never said anything explicit about the environment at all.
What the court will decide is anyone’s guess, though it clearly takes the claim seriously, having assigned it to its highest and most solemn forum, the Grand Chamber. For anyone who believes in democracy, however, such a massive takeover of power needs to be seen as a very big deal indeed.
Voters must be allowed to make up their own minds, which means occasionally getting things wrong. The more an establishment tells them that matters of vital social policy, and of enormous consequence to individuals and their prosperity, are simply too important to be entrusted to them, the more the danger that ordinary people will think democracy itself is not worth the candle.
Whatever your views on climate change, even if you are a firm believer in the enormous reduction in our standard of living that punctilious adherence to net zero would involve, here you must be especially careful what you wish for.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/eco-technocrats-in-brussels-risk-posing-a-threat-to-democracy
**************************************************Biodegradable carrier bags are MORE toxic than conventional plastic versions, study claims
Researchers analysed three types of bags – a compostable bag made of vegetable starch, a recycled plastic bag and a conventional plastic bag.
They exposed them to sunlight to make them break down, and then exposed them to fish cells.
They also then composted them and tested the resulting compost for toxicity.
A 'high level of toxicity' was produced by the biodegradable bags, harming the fish cells, according to the authors from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC),
Cinta Porte, lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, said: 'We were surprised that cells exposed to conventional plastic bags showed no trace of toxicity.
'However, we did detect it in biodegradable ones, which decreased cell viability.
'Our hypothesis is that manufacturers add chemical additives to make biodegradable bags that could be particularly toxic.
'In addition, recycled plastic bags also showed higher levels of toxicity than conventional ones, as plastic additives would also be added for reuse.'
In the experiment, the aging process of the bags was simulated with ultraviolet rays (photodegradation).
The small fragments of bags remaining after composting and the compost resulting from the bag breaking down was analysed.
The study found that toxins 'which results in the accumulation of pollutants that can affect the environment and negatively impact the health of the population'.
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‘Trust the Experts’: 1,600 Scientists Sign Declaration Denouncing Climate Change Hoax
“Trust the experts,” we the peasants are exhorted by the governing authorities in all matters at all times – common sense, intuition, individual judgment be damned.
They never bother to explain why some experts are to be mindlessly obeyed while others are to be dismissed.
For instance, I don’t suppose MSNBC or The New York Times will be running articles beseeching us to listen to these 1,600 scientists who recently signed a declaration contradicting the official narrative surrounding something called “climate change.”
Via The College Fix:
“A total of 1,609 scientists, professors and other scholars have signed on to a new declaration that argues there is no climate change crisis.
“There is no climate emergency” is the title of the declaration that consists of 53 pages’ worth of signatories from across the globe, including some Nobel Laureates and other researchers from prestigious universities. Other signers include engineers, attorneys and other professionals.
The declaration, published with its endorsers in mid-August, lists six main arguments against the alleged climate crisis, including that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is actually “plant food” and “the basis of all life on Earth.”*
*This is the single most important aspect of the “climate change” hoax to grasp: it is a war on carbon, on its face, but, at the core, it is a war on life on Earth, which is comprised primarily of carbon. 18.5% of the human body mass is carbon, which has often been described as the “backbone” element due to its inclusion in many organic molecules.
From the declaration, titled “There Is no Climate Emergency,” signed by 1,600 credentialed scientists, many of whom may coincidentally find their grants dried up in the near future:
“The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming…
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly…
To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in*. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. Should not we free ourselves from the naive belief in immature climate models?”
Related to the point made that the climate is naturally evolving, let us not forget that “climate change” was once called “global warming,” but was amended so as to make the term as open-ended and therefore versatile in its social engineering applications as possible. Even the proponents of unprecedented social and economic upheaval in its name can no longer say exactly what “climate change” refers to because it refers to nothing and everything all at once. It’s a cliché, a buzzword, a banal platitude.
https://armageddonprose.substack.com/p/trust-the-experts-1600-scientists
***************************************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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