Italian activists now face huge fines
Climate protestors could face fines of up to €60,000 for damaging monuments or cultural sites in Italy.
Under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Italy is cracking down on everything from English language to raves and synthetic meat to ChatGPT.
The right-wing PM’s latest bugbear is climate protestors.
On Tuesday (11 April) the Italian government announced plans to bring in hefty fines for people who damage monuments or cultural sites.
The penalties are aimed at activists who in recent weeks have made headlines for their public stunts highlighting the climate crisis.
Two environmental activists from the Last Generation protest group are the latest to receive a large fine as well as a suspended jail sentence.
Why is Italy ramping up fines for criminal damage?
At the start of April, members of climate activism organisation Last Generation turned the waters in Rome’s La Barcaccia fountain black to draw attention to the country’s water crisis.
This is the latest in a long line of eye-catching protests, ranging from activists glueing themselves to a famous painting in Florence to hurling paint at Milan's La Scala opera house.
Under the new law, actions like this would be punishable with fines of between €10,000 and €60,000. This will be additional to existing fines and prison sentences for criminal damage.
This week, two members of the Last Generation climate protest group were fined €30,000 and given a suspended prison sentence for damages during a stunt last year. The activists glued themselves to the base of the ancient Laocoon statue housed in the Vatican museums.
Italy’s Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano says the fines will be used to cover the cleanup costs of such actions.
The bill also targets vandalism and antisocial activity carried out by tourists in Italy - such as last year’s incident of an Australian riding a moped through Pompeii. It is yet to pass through parliament.
Laws like this one have been criticised as a ‘weapon of mass distraction’ from more urgent issues like the energy and cost of living crisis.
The UK is also cracking down on climate protest tactics
Across Europe, activists have been blocking roads and runways, targeting monuments and disrupting oil refineries to draw public attention to the climate crisis.
The legal response has been most severe in the UK, which ramped up fines and prison sentences last summer for those defacing public monuments.
Damage of less than £5,000 (€5,675) was previously subject to a maximum three-month prison sentence. This has now been raised to 10 years.
This was partly in response to widespread targeting of statues in 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests but also targets an ongoing wave of climate actions.
The UK has also cracked down on ‘disruptive’ protests, giving police wider powers to shut them down and arrest participants. In some incidents, protestors have been detained for six months before trial due to a backlog of cases.
The recently announced Public Order Bill criminalises the protest tactic of individuals attaching themselves to others, objects or buildings to cause serious disruption. The offence will carry a maximum penalty of six months' imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both
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Are kids starting to see through the climate cult?
Should it really be any surprise that not all teenagers are on the same page as Greta Thunberg? According to a poll by Survation, 31 per cent of Britons between the ages of 13 and 17 agree with the statement ‘climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated.’
It does rather restore faith in the current generation of teenagers to realise that a third of them can see through this guff
I am not entirely sure what is meant by the now commonplace concept of ‘overexaggeration’ – which presumably means something beyond the optimum level of exaggeration – but never mind. I’ll take it as the teenagers themselves presumably interpreted it: that they are not entirely convinced by the rhetoric thrown at them daily, such as ‘the world is on fire’ (Greta Thunberg) or ‘there will be the slaughter, death, and starvation of six billion people’ (Rogar Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion) or ‘we have five years to save the planet’ (the World Wildlife Fund in, er, 2007) and think that the reality is quite likely a lot more modest than that.
But, no, this can’t possibly be a sign of teenagers thinking for themselves and working out that climate activists are spinning apocalyptical visions to promote their cause. Rather it is a sign that our youth have fallen victim to a dark conspiracy to poison their minds with shameless lies. Or so the Center for Countering Digital Hate (‘hate’ in this case seeming to mean anything which diverges from its own left-wing views) seems to think. It says it has analysed 96 YouTube channels which it thinks might be responsible, including ones which have spread such blatant untruths as ‘climate policies are ineffective or flawed’ (they are, as we all know, fully-baked and 100 per cent effective) or that ‘Clean energy technology or biofuels won’t work’ (it is wrong to single out wind and solar energy sources as being intermittent, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, because gas and coal powered stations sometimes need to be taken offline, too). It also seems to think it is a lie to deny that the world is suffering from more storms – even though that assertion is flatly contradicted by the observational evidence presented by the IPCC.
The world, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, is engaged in an ‘enlightenment battle of truth and science versus lies and greed’. And YouTube and other social media platforms are disgracefully giving airtime to the latter when of course they should only be hosting videos informing us that we are all going to die.
It does rather restore faith in the current generation of teenagers to realise that a third of them can see this guff for what it is: left-wing activism trying to erect a false divide between ‘science’ and unreason. When today’s teenagers reach adulthood and start witnessing predicted doomsdays pass without incident I dare say a few more of them will move into the camp which believes there is quite a bit of exaggeration over climate change.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/are-kids-starting-to-see-through-the-climate-cult/
*************************************************Right, Wall Street Journal, John Kerry Did Fail to Persuade China to Give Up Reliable Energy
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran an article noting that despite John Kerry’s failure as President Joe Biden’s climate envoy to get China to curb its coal use in order to save the world from climate change, Kerry is now being brought over to Biden’s reelection campaign. If Kerry does as good a job with Biden’s campaign as he did in changing the course of the world’s fossil fuel use, Biden’s reelection efforts are in trouble. The WSJ is right, Kerry failed in his biggest mission as the U.S. climate czar, curbing greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries, especially China.
Describing Kerry’s lack of success, the WSJ wrote:
For three years Mr. Kerry has been preoccupied with getting China to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. But excluding emissions from land use and forestry, China’s emissions rose 13% between 2015 and 2023, according to Climate Action Tracker estimates. U.S. emissions fell by some 9% over the same period.
You can’t say Mr. Kerry hasn’t tried to persuade China, including the use of green flattery. “China has produced more renewable energy, more solar and wind than any other country,” he said last year.
But China’s CO2 emissions have still soared as demand for electricity surged. In 2022 China accounted for 53% of the world’s coal generation, the Ember think tank says, and new permits for coal power plants in 2022 reached “the highest level since 2015.” That’s the year Beijing signed the Paris climate accord Mr. Kerry negotiated, promising to reduce its emissions starting in 2030.
China also expanded it coal mining, despite Kerry’s efforts, setting a new record for production in 2023.
In September 2023, Kerry’s counterpart, Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said, “It is unrealistic to completely phase out fossil fuel energy,” echoing statement made by China’s President Xi Jinping 2022 that the country’s carbon dioxide policies, “can’t be detached from reality.”
Looking at some of those realities, one can see that regardless of what one believes about humanity’s role (or lack thereof) in climate change. Kerry’s climate outreach to China and elsewhere was largely an expensive fool’s errand.
An article on Turning Point USA points out that the salary for Kerry’s small staff cost U.S. taxpayers $4.3 million each year, with all but one of the 27 employees with the office of Special Presidential Envoy for Climate making more than $100,000 per year. This doesn’t include the costs of office space and equipment, travel, and other associated costs with running Kerry’s independent office. I say independent because Kerry’s position was created by President Biden, reporting only to him. Despite being charged with negotiating international climate agreements, Kerry’s office was outside the normal chain of command. It was not part of the State Department, and Kerry did not report to the Secretary of State.
All that money bought no climate progress. During Kerry’s time as Special Climate Envoy, coal use set new records. In 2023, the International Energy Agency reported:
“The demand for coal is seen rising 1.4 percent in 2023, surpassing 8.5 billion tonnes for the first time as usage in India is expected to grow 8 percent and that in China up 5 percent due to rising electricity demand and weak hydropower output, IEA said in a report released on Friday,” writes Al Jazeera, reporting io the IEA’s findings.
Indeed, data from Statista shows that the capacity of the coal plants announced, permitted, and under construction have risen each year since Kerry was on the job, reversing a declining trend global trend in coal power construction that existed under the Trump administration.
To be fair, John Kerry does not run China, India, or any of the other developing countries where coal use for electric power generation and industrial uses is rising, but his main job was to persuade the leaders of those countries to shift to alternative, less reliable, more expensive forms of energy, as Western Europe and the United States are largely doing. In that task, he abjectly failed. And the reason for the failure is clear, the Biden administration with Kerry as its point man, put climate pipe dreams above economic realities of the developing world.
The result was aptly summed up by the WSJ, writing, “Mr. Kerry’s problem has been a failure to recognize reality, which is typical of America’s climate lobby.”
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Wrong, Harvard, Alarmists’ Media Stories, Not Climate Change, Are to Blame for Mental Trauma
A recent news post at the Harvard School of Public Health “Understanding the mental health consequences of chronic climate change,” claims that climate change, which researchers dub “chronic,” is leading to negative mental health consequences for people around the world. Researchers claim that long-term, gradual changes to the environment are also traumatic. This is false. While natural disasters can traumatize those who survive them, individual weather events can’t be causally linked to climate change, and since environmental changes have always occurred throughout human history, Harvard’s new hypothesis is worthless or empty. In reality, and especially in the Western world, it is frantic and alarmist media coverage that leads to self-reporting of climate change related anxiety.
In answer to a question about gaps in what is known about how climate change impacts mental health, researcher and assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Christy Denckla said that we “already know a lot about the mental health effects of climate-related disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.”
Indeed, Climate Realism has on several occasions, here, here, and here, for instance, refuted claims that suggest climate change itself, through the impact of natural disasters, is causing anxiety and other mental health problems. The reality in those cases is that while suffering through an extreme weather event, during which lives and property may be lost, definitely can be traumatic, no one would blame that trauma on “climate change” had the media not told them the weather event was caused by it.
In one particularly egregious example, several news outlets back in 2023 reported on a study that analyzed individuals who survived the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California, and found widespread diagnoses of PTSD, anxiety, and depression. The researchers blamed those mental health problems on climate change. However climate change did not cause the fire in Paradise, poor maintenance of power lines did. Nor has the modest warming of the past century or so caused any statistically significant change in the number or severity of wildfires on Earth. In fact, data from NASA suggests that the amount of land lost to wildfires each year has declined substantially.
The same goes for hurricanes – there is no statistically significant trend in the number or severity of tropical cyclones and hurricanes.
This new research Harvard is reporting on further expands upon these previously debunked claims into even more nebulous territory. In addition to blaming mental health issues on particular weather events, Denckla goes on to explain that “the most urgent research priority is to understand the mechanisms through which slower-moving aspects of climate change such as temperature variability, ecosystem shifts, and changes in precipitation affect mental health.”
She goes on to say that the effects of climate change disproportionately impact particular populations, like “adolescents and children, indigenous communities, displaced migrants, economically marginalized groups, and nations and regions on the frontline of the climate crisis, such as Africa and countries most vulnerable to climate extremes.”
It is true that the poor and people in the third world are more impacted by natural disasters, in large part because they do not have as storm-resilient infrastructure as wealthier parts of the world do, and have less access to good medical care, and the food abundance delivered by modern agricultural systems built on fossil fuels. Meteorological drought, for example, in a small sub-Saharan tribal community without water storage and transport will produce more severe misery and harm than a similar drought would for the people of a developed city like Phoenix, Arizona.
Denckla seems to suggest that modern warming is a novel situation that uniquely impacts human mental health, however history clearly demonstrates that human civilizations have always suffered from natural disasters and slowly changing ecosystems and landscapes. Nature is never in stasis.
What is certain, however, is that climate change alarmism is the overwhelming narrative consensus pushed by mainstream media and activists. Climate Realism responds to disinformation every day from the media, and despite occasionally acknowledging that the “catastrophe” angle taken on climate-related issues is going too far, they continue to double down. It would be surprising if the constant battering by false and inflammatory climate news did not negatively impact the mental health of media besotted adults and children, alike. The ratcheting up of hysterical coverage, misleadingly linking damage from natural disasters to climate change, while harping on the fact no major climate policies are being passed, is leading to depression and anxiety about the future. It would serve the mental health of the general public better if Harvard devoted some resources to an alternative study, about how fearmongering by the media leads to mental health issues, and better still if its scholars began following and promoting the data which shows that no climate crisis is in the offing.
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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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