Freedom Advocates Are the Right Whale’s Best Hope

Some whales do need saving

Who would have guessed that we would be the saviors of the desperately endangered North Atlantic Right Whales? If it can be saved from extinction, which remains to be seen. But when the green left goes uselessly industrial in the name of better weather, it starts to make sense. This seeming paradox is briefly explained below.

The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium (NARWC) has long been the leading advocate for their namesake whales. They do lots of research and have promoted both reduced ship speeds and so-called “ropeless” fishing as ways to save the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. Sadly. when it come to offshore wind they look to have abandoned the whales in favor of green nirvana.

The tip-off came with the email announcement of their annual meeting in October. It included a number of so-called news links, two being about offshore wind, and neither was good news for the whales.

The most important was a direct attack on us for daring to try to protect the right whales. This hit-piece is from Science Friday, a radio show I used to like. It labels us as “anti-wind”, which is true enough, but they are clearly pro-wind, hence anti-whale. They say the whales are a pawns in the game, so to push the chess metaphor, it is a pawn we are trying to protect.

It is the usual Bidenesque stuff claiming there is no evidence or even reason to believe offshore wind development harms Right Whales. No mention of the thousands of federally authorized harassment takings and their potentially deadly consequences, or the strong statistical evidence, etc.

There is one interesting bit, however, namely a link to a map of some of the alleged Right Whale protection groups and people put together by students at Brown University. In addition to many friends, there are folks on there that I was not aware of and hope to contact. But it is incomplete as I am not on it.

The extreme rhetoric that comes with the map is itself revealing. They really do not like us and here is an example: “As public relations and obstruction specialists actively engage local groups to block offshore wind projects, the climate and environmental justice consequences are dire. Offshore wind projects may struggle to get off the ground, locking us into catastrophic climate consequences experienced disproportionately by Black, Indigenous, Latino, and low-income communities.”

Anyone who believes this nonsense is likely willing to sacrifice a whale species or two. This is the fanaticism we are fighting.

The second so-called news link from the Right Whale Consortium is also revealing. It is an article from NRDC about the newly announced offshore wind lease areas in the Gulf of Maine.

They say the entire Gulf is designated as critical habitat for the Right Whales under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), but we should be happy because the lease areas avoid the most sensitive parts. NRDC is another pro-wind green group that used to be environmentalists.

We are talking about a huge projected 15,000 MW of development, so I am not comforted by this news. How does ESA allow this massive development within the critical habitat of a desperately endangered critter like the North American Right Whale? I doubt it does.

Ironically, the Consortium website says these are necessary actions:

“Eliminate human-caused mortality to right whales in critical habitats and migration corridors

Assess patterns of known critical habitat use by right whales and humans and eliminate conflict.”

Apparently, they do not regard building and operating a thousand gigantic 15 MW wind turbines within designated critical habitat as a conflict.

The Consortium itself looks like a secret society. There is no information about the organization, no staff listing, no way to join. There is a list of “Partners”, including several Biden Federal agencies, but no explanation of what that means or how to become one. The only contact information is to an unnamed person at the New England Aquarium. I doubt they would have me or CFACT as members.

So there it is. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium has abandoned the North Atlantic Right Whale to offshore wind. Only we who value freedom are left to defend the whale. We are its best hope for survival.

https://heartland.org/opinion/freedom-advocates-are-the-right-whales-best-hope/

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UN Chief Calls For Governments To Censor Fossil Fuel Advertisements

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for governments to ban fossil fuel advertising during a Wednesday speech at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Guterres, who has served as Secretary-General of the UN since 2017, compared the fossil fuel industry to Big Tobacco and claimed a ban on advertising for fossil fuel companies is necessary to curb climate change and end corporate “greenwashing” during his remarks. Guterres also called for “windfall” taxes on energy producers worldwide during his Wednesday comments.

“We must directly confront those in the fossil fuel industry who have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress,” Guterres said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.” (RELATED: Wagyu Burgers, Asian-French Fusion And More: Here’s What’s On The Menu At The UN Climate Confab)

“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet — they’re toxic for your brand,” Guterres added. “Your sector is full of creative minds who are already mobilizing around this cause. They are gravitating towards companies that are fighting for our planet — not trashing it.”

Beyond concerns about climate change, Guterres’s comments referenced “greenwashing,” a term that describes instances when corporations embellish their work on climate or the environmental benefits of their products, services and operations, according to the UN’s definition.

Guterres has repeatedly railed against the fossil fuel industry in his capacity as the UN’s top official, describing them as “godfathers of climate chaos” during his Wednesday talk after overseeing the commitment reached at De

https://dailycaller.com/2024/06/05/un-chief-calls-governments-censor-fossil-fuel-advertisements/

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Major Questions Raised by EPA’s EV Mandates

In hopes of shoring up its aggressive anti-fossil-fuel agenda against a possible elec­toral loss this November, the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion is rush­ing to finalize as many regu­la­tory man­dates as it can before the start of the Con­gres­sional Review Act’s “look­back win­dow”—the critical period near the end of an admin­is­tra­tion when newly issued agency rules become sub­ject to special legis­lative pro­ce­dures that allow them to be more readily over­turned by the next Con­gress and a new Presi­dent.

In this floodtide of final rules, perhaps the most egregious and far reach­ing are the two tailpipe emissions regu­la­tions recently issued by the Environ­mental Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA)—also known as EPA’s electric vehicle, or EV, man­dates.

With these mandates, EPA claims virtually uncon­strained power to dic­tate the extent and pace of elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of the Nation’s auto­motive sector, with­out any regard for the con­sti­tu­tional struc­tures and demo­cratic processes that are sup­posed to govern policy­making on matters of such vast eco­nomic and political sig­nifi­cance.

This usur­pa­tion of power comes at the expense of America’s families, U.S. pro­sperity, and our Nation’s security.

The first of the tailpipe rules covers all model year 2027 and later light- and medium-duty cars and trucks in the United States, including pas­senger cars, light trucks (pickups, SUVs, cross­overs, mini­vans), and medium-duty trucks (such as larger pickups and panel vans). The second rule covers new heavy-duty com­mer­cial work trucks and buses.

Together, these rules are designed to choke off the U.S. market for gasoline and diesel fuels by coercing auto­makers and truck manu­fac­turers to con­vert more and more of their pro­duc­tion from internal-com­bus­tion-engine (ICE) vehicles to battery-pow­ered cars and trucks and to do so at a far faster rate than cus­to­mer demand could ever sup­port.

How do the rules do this?

First, they ratchet down the tail­pipe emis­sions limits for car­bon diox­ide and for the tradi­tional criteria and other pollu­tants asso­ciated with smog to levels so strin­gent that gas- and diesel-powered vehicles can’t possibly meet them.

EPA then applies the emissions limits to manu­facturers on a fleet­wide average basis and reduces these averages each model year at a rate care­fully mani­pu­lated (surprise, surprise) to achieve the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion’s desired over­all per­centage mix of EVs in the U.S. car and truck fleets.

EPA projects that under these regulations, by model year 2032, 63 per­cent of new pas­senger cars sold in the U.S. will be EVs and another 10 per­cent will be plug-in hybrids; 52 per­cent of new light- and medium-duty trucks will be EVs and 14 per­cent plug-in hybrids; and from 14 to 67 percent of new heavy-duty trucks (depend­ing on size, function, and con­figura­tion) will be zero emis­sion.

For comparison, those percentages today are all in the single digits.

Thus, EPA is out to engineer nothing less than a seismic trans­for­ma­tion of America’s entire auto­mo­tive sector.

The Clean Air Act has never been inter­preted to authorize such a trans­for­ma­tion and hasn’t pre­viously been applied this way.

This arrogant scheme is very similar to the Clean Power Plan struck down by the Supreme Court under “major questions doctrine” analysis in West Vir­ginia v. EPA.

There, EPA was trying to reduce carbon dioxide emis­sions by forcing a shift in the Nation’s elec­tricity pro­duc­tion from coal plants to wind and solar. The Court held that no part of the Clean Air Act gave EPA license to “restruc­ture” the entire electricity market through “trans­for­ma­tive” regulations. In the absence of a clear and specific dele­ga­tion of authority by statute, the Court assumes that Con­gress has reserved the power to decide the “con­se­quential trade­offs” involved in such “vital considerations of national policy.”

The same goes for the EV man­dates, the con­se­quences of which for the American people will be stag­ger­ing.

The price of all new vehicles will rise dramatically because of EPA’s rules, and America’s families will lose many of their favorite options at the dealership. Lower-income and rural Americans will be stuck driving older and older used vehicles, kept on the road with parts scrounged from the junkyard. In other words, we will see the gradual Cuban­iza­tion of the American auto­mobile in many com­mu­nities.

And that’s a terrible thing. Statistics confirm that older cars are far less safe in acci­dents than newer models, so high­way deaths and injuries will definitely climb under EPA’s rules.

Countless jobs will be lost in the U.S. auto industry, too, while employ­ment will continue to surge in China, as the U.S. becomes desperately dependent on China for the pro­duc­tion of critical minerals and other inputs needed for EVs—an unacceptable stra­tegic vul­ner­ability for America.

Further, any rapid nation­wide transition to electric cars and trucks will put a tre­men­dous strain on our fragile grid and require a huge increase in electricity pro­duc­tion, just as EPA is attempt­ing to shut down fossil-fuel power plants. Elec­tricity prices, caught in this squeeze, will inevitably spike for all Americans.

And there’s no doubt the U.S. trucking industry will be clobbered. One industry study estimates that around $1 trillion in infra­struc­ture invest­ment will be needed to support the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of com­mercial truck­ing in America. As for the trucks them­selves, zero-emis­sion big rigs are more than twice as expen­sive as new diesel rigs to pur­chase and have much greater oper­ating costs. Inevitably, many truck­ing com­panies will be forced out of business, and the price of shipping for all goods will rise sharply throughout the U.S. economy.

At the same time, EPA’s grand scheme will have no mean­ing­ful effect on glo­bal climate or tem­per­a­tures. That’s because, among other things, China’s pro­duc­tion of energy from coal and its annual carbon dioxide emissions will just keep climb­ing higher and higher.

Indeed, the absence of real climate bene­fits from these hyper-aggressive tail­pipe rules only con­firms that the driving pur­pose behind them is not so much to save the planet as to cripple the fossil-fuel industry and stifle America’s love affair with the auto­mobile.

Of course, it is the American people who will ulti­mately bear the pain of these puni­tive policy choices.

The issues raised by the EV man­dates involve matters of life, liberty, and pro­sperity—issues that are fun­da­men­tally poli­tical in nature. Under our con­sti­tu­tional republic, it is for Con­gress, and Congress alone, to weigh the competing interests at stake in these matters and to make the monu­men­tal deci­sions that EPA now pre­sumes to take upon itself.

A version of this piece originally appeared in The Federalist Societ

https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/commentary/major-questions-raised-epas-ev-mandates

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UK: The Met Office is Gaslighting Us With its Claim that Our Damp and Chilly May Was “Warmest on Record”

Weatherwise, it has been a rubbish May. And it has been an abysmal spring. It has been cold and wet. And everyone knows it. But according to the Meteorological Office, the U.K. has just experienced its hottest ever May, and its hottest ever spring. As news reports and the Met Office’s own press release have correctly indicated, this “may come as a surprise” to many people who actually live here (rather than on the planet that the Met Office’s scientists inhabit).

To those people, many of whom had their heating on for a good part of the month, the Met Office’s statement, as well as the “akshully…” news reports that claim to shed light on the difference between perception and reality, look like actual gaslighting. Even if the claim is true, which remains to be seen, what it reveals is the inadequacy of temperature as a metric on which U.K. climate and energy policy rests.

The Met Office’s charts for May and Spring show mean U.K. temperatures far in excess of what most people would expect. The mean temperature for May was a full degree warmer than the next warmest May in 2017. ‘Mean temperature’ is the average of the minimum and maximum temperatures recorded on one day. And the two extremes is obtained by averaging the highest and lowest temperatures of all stations in the MO’s network of weather stations. But as the following chart shows, while the max temperature is equal highest with 2018, it is the average minimum temperature which really makes May 2024 an outlier at 9°C, which is 1.2°C warmer than the next warmest average minimum, which was in May 2022.

The obvious point to make about this is understated by the Met Office, which explains: “This warmth was especially influenced by high overnight temperatures.” But this speaks to the inadequacy of temperature measurements of this kind to sustain climate change narratives. Whereas fears about global warming are driven by stories of relentless heat driving extreme weather such as heatwaves, wildfires and floods, a slight rise in minimum temperatures is the opposite of extreme: it is mildness. A 9°C average minimum temperature is not going to boil the planet, set the world on fire, or tear civilisation from its foundations.

But alarmists might point to the average maximum for May 2024, which is tied with 2018 as the warmest at 17.2°C. The problem, however, is that this says very little about what people are actually experiencing. Spring and May 2018 were notable for their record-breaking heatwaves. In April 2018, the hottest April temperatures for 70 years were recorded at 29.1°C, according to the Standard, caused by a huge plume of hot air from Portugal. The following month was the “sunniest and warmest on record in U.K.”, according to the Guardian, which began with a heatwave in which temperatures of 28.7°C made it “the hottest early May bank holiday weekend on record”.

Neither Spring nor May 2024 have had any weather events to compare with 2018. Yet max average temperatures do compare, and May 2024 min average temperatures exceed 2018’s. How can temperature therefore be a useful guide to what’s happening to our climate if it can seemingly underpin both extremely hot weather and extremely disappointing weather?

The problem is perhaps caused by these metrics being produced by cascades of averages. Data from weather stations across a nation that spans nearly 600 miles north to south and 300 miles west to east are mashed together as though a single metric of ‘climate’ for such a landmass was meaningful. Twenty four-hour minimum temperatures from all these stations are averaged. Then their maximum temperatures are averaged. And then these averages are averaged again to produce the ‘mean’. But anyone who has spent any time in the northwest of Scotland and the southeast of England know that these are radically different climes – as different in latitude as the south coast of Spain and its central region.

But perhaps the problem is even more radical than that. If the Met Office’s method of working out ‘average temperatures’ makes a dreary May like the one we’ve just had ‘hotter’ than one with a historic heatwave, eg May 2018, why should slight increases in ‘average temperatures’, as per the MO’s definition, concern us at all? The increased average temperature in May was, after all, likely driven by merely milder not extreme weather in a month that most people experienced as colder than average. Average temperature is supposed to be the most important metric of our time. Yet the same metric can mean anything between nearly 30°C heatwaves in April, and people wearing coats, hats and scarves in the week before summer. And a metric that can mean anything means nothing. It is a junk statistic.

None of this would matter if the Met Office and Britain’s news media were not so manifestly intent on gaslighting us into political obedience. But they want us to believe that our lives are deeply affected by such metrics, and use the weather forecast and news items about the weather to sustain the climate change narrative. Constant reminders of ‘danger to life’ herald something more than a breeze, a balmy evening or a scattered shower.

I wanted to see for myself how the raw data had been turned into this kind of zombie climate stat. It has been a long time since I bothered doing a deep dive into meteorological data, because it turns out that you do not need any kind of weather statistics to know, for absolute sure, that there is no ‘climate crisis’, so I haven’t felt the need. However, I was surprised to discover that data from the weather stations that are used in the Met Office’s analysis are not available to the public at higher than monthly resolution.

That’s a problem because in order to build an estimate of how useful minimum and maximum temperature data are, even in one location, never mind across an entire country, it would need to be compared to hourly data at a minimum. But not even daily data are available.

You might have thought that scientists and institutions that are so keen to tell us that their metric is so significant would be just as keen to make all of that data available to us. But you would be mistaken. The data is jealously guarded. It’s not for public consumption. We are supposed to take the good faith of institutional science for granted and are neither welcome nor even permitted to check for ourselves. ‘Follow the science’, means ‘obey’, not ‘try to understand’. And that’s what makes me – and, I hope, you – a sceptic.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/06/06/the-met-office-is-gaslighting-us-with-its-claim-that-damp-and-chilly-may-was-the-hottest-ever/

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Costing the Green Grid

This paper presents a new model of the 2050 grid. In contrast to many other studies in the fields it:

encapsulates four decades of weather, and, uniquely, considers the effects on both supply and demand

considers the costs and efficiencies that pertain today, as well as speculations about those that might pertain in the future.

The results are compared and contrasted with those of the recent Royal Society study on large-scale electricity storage, which concluded that electricity in 2050 would be cheaper than today, and not much more expensive than it has been in the past. The Royal Society findings are criticised for:

using an incorrect demand curve

failing to model weather effects on demand

using highly optimistic assumptions about technology in 2050, and failing to highlight the extent to which these drove its key findings.

The paper finds that with current technology, the cost of the grid would be as high as £250 billion per year, or £8000 per household. That level of expenditure would need to be maintained indefinitely.

It concludes by calling for the withdrawal of the Royal Society paper.

https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-papers/costing-the-green-grid

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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