‘A Conversation About Flip-Flopping’: Harris Faulkner Grills Dem Guest Over Kamala Backing Away From Plastic Straw Ban
Fox News host Harris Faulkner pressed a Democratic guest Friday who attempted to duck a question about Vice President Kamala Harris’ change of position on whether plastic straws should be banned.
A video from 2019 shows Harris, then a Democratic senator from California, calling for a plastic straw ban during her campaign for the Democratic nomination to run against then-President Donald Trump in 2020, although her campaign told Axios that she no longer supports such a ban. Faulkner questioned Democratic strategist Richard Fowler about Harris’ latest change in position. (RELATED: ‘Are Things Cheaper For You?’: Harris Faulkner Presses Dem Guest Who Dodges Inflation Question To Talk About Race)
“I don’t know why we’re having a conversation about plastic straws,” Fowler said after Faulkner asked him about Harris’ change of position on multiple issues from views she held during her previous campaign for president.
“No, we’re having a conversation about flip-flopping, and one of the examples happens to be something so basic. We can just do basic. We don’t have to do difficult,” Faulkner told Fowler.
In addition to the ban on plastic straws, Harris previously supported a ban on fracking during the 2020 campaign before she reversed the position. She has also apparently backed away from left-wing policy positions she held on illegal immigration and gun control during her 2020 presidential campaign.
“Both things cannot be true, she cannot be not laying out policy, and we’re having a conversation about her evolution on policy.” Fowler claimed, “Those two things cannot be mutually exclusive.”
“How is it evolutionary for her to not be able to articulate something as simple as a straw?” Faulkner asked. “Which is why we showed it to you, the campaign had to clean it up. She didn’t clean it up.”
Fowler claimed that Harris’ positions changed due to her time as vice president under President Joe Biden, specifically mentioning fracking, in a continued back-and-forth with Faulkner. (RELATED: ‘That Moment Was Not Fair’: Harris Faulkner Warns Media Is Using Race To ‘Divide’ Country After Trump’s NABJ Interview)
“That’s a minor issue,” Fowler said about Harris’ position change on plastic straws. “But we’ve also seen her move on fracking, to say that there are parts of the country fracking can work, and not only that, fracking has become more safer over the past couple of years.”
“Well, it’s all a flip-flop, and the videos are not that far apart,” Faulker said. “One man’s evolution is this woman’s flip-flop.”
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/06/harris-faulkner-grills-dem-guest-kamala-harris-plastic-straw-ban/
****************************************************Biden Celebrates Offshore Wind ‘Progress’ Despite Industry’s Major Struggles, Cancellations
President Joe Biden touted offshore wind’s “progress” on his watch on Thursday despite the fact that the industry has struggled considerably with elevated inflation and interest rates.
Biden released an official statement Thursday celebrating his administration’s 10th approval of an offshore wind development and touting signature policies that have incentivized developers to build new projects.
However, Biden neglected to mention that the industry writ large has been plagued by high inflation, elevated interest rates, logistical snares, and supply chain snags, all of which have combined to help force developers to postpone or cancel projects or attempt to renegotiate key contracts.
“When I came into office, the United States had zero approved offshore wind projects in federal waters, and the industry was struggling to gain a foothold,” Biden’s statement reads. “But now, following my Administration’s investments in our clean energy future, the private sector has mobilized and the federal government has approved ten offshore wind projects—enough to power more than five million homes and equivalent to half of the capacity needed to achieve our goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.”
“From manufacturing and shipbuilding to port operations and construction, this industry will support tens of thousands of good-paying and union jobs, provide reliable clean power to homes and businesses, strengthen our power grid against outages, and help reduce pollution—all while protecting biodiversity and marine ecosystems,” the president’s statement continues. “We will continue to partner with industry, Tribes, ocean users, and other stakeholders to support supply chains that are Made in America, incentivize union-built projects, and continue seizing opportunities for additional clean energy technologies.”
The Biden administration has opened up billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the industry in pursuit of its 2030 goal for the offshore wind industry, with the Inflation Reduction Act—Biden’s signature climate bill—providing lucrative tax credit subsidies to qualifying developers.
However, more offshore wind capacity has been cancelled or postponed than is currently online or pending, according to data analysis by Ed O’Donnell, formerly a nuclear engineer and now a principal at a New Jersey-based consultancy called Whitestrand Consulting.
Moreover, the American Clean Power Association stated in a July report that there will only actually be 14 gigawatts of operational offshore wind capacity online by 2030, and that the 30-gigawatt threshold may not be met until 2033.
Orsted, a major offshore wind developer, pulled the plug on two major projects off the New Jersey coast in October 2023, and similar delays or cancellations have affected projects that were slated for operation off the coasts of Maryland and New York.
In July, a defective blade on one of Vineyard Wind’s turbines broke and released considerable amounts of debris into the Atlantic Ocean, forcing the temporary closure of several beaches on nearby Nantucket, Massachusetts, when fiberglass shards began washing up on the shore.
“There’s no economic rationale for offshore wind as a market-based supplier of power, there are a lot of issues with it, but it won’t survive,” O’Donnell previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s only surviving through subsidies in the form of massive federal tax credits and offshore rate subsidies from the different states and their ratepayers. So, this is why they’re struggling, because those things have economic consequences, and there’s a limit to how much of this can be passed on to taxpayers and ratepayers.”
*********************************************
Thorium: green renewable nuclear
For some 15 years, I have followed the re-emergence of nuclear Thorium or ‘the green nuclear’ as it is often referred to.
Way back, an experimental Thorium Molten Salt Reactor was built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It critically operated for roughly 15,000 hours from 1965 to 1969. In 1968, it was announced that the Thorium-based reactor had been both successfully developed and tested.
President Nixon defunded Thorium research in the early 1970s. You can’t make bombs out of it, so why bother?!
Up until recently, America would not license a Thorium reactor for construction. However, when China burst ahead with establishing a Thorium reactor a few years ago, America changed tack and is now licensing nuclear Thorium. Abilene Christian University, MIT, and Georgia Tech have all obtained licences for research.
The Wuwei reactor in the Gobi desert, located in the Gansu province, is a two-megawatt liquid-fuelled Thorium molten salt reactor (MSR), operated by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The permit was issued by the National Nuclear Safety Administration. It allows the Shanghai Institute to operate the reactor for 10 years and it will start by testing the facility’s operations. This Chinese prototype probably helped America change its mind on Thorium. Even Canada has got a research reactor up and going.
Beware though… Thorium nuclear is not a loved bedfellow of the Uranium nuclear industry. It is a bit like Rolls Royce vs a mini-minor. The Uranium nuclear lobby will often disregard Thorium, in my experience.
However, Thorium was mentioned in Ziggy Switkowski’s 2006 Nuclear report to government, but only in passing.
A lot has changed since then.
Alan Finkel’s energy report did not mention Thorium at all and instead had a gas focus. (How things have changed since then on gas, although he did recommend that we do not go headlong in decommissioning all coal power stations too soon.) As far as I know, the CSIRO and the Grattan Institute have not mentioned Thorium in the energy mix. Even the Department of the Environment may not be across Thorium. A few years ago I queried their views on Thorium and they admitted that they had never heard of a Thorium reactor.
Germany has commissioned two companies to develop and commercialise modular Thorium reactors by 2030. Naarea and Thorizon are the two companies involved in this project. Also, the Copenhagen Atomics group are at the forefront of promoting Thorium nuclear. They are well worth looking at.
A Thorium reactor can also be used to decontaminate its own nuclear waste. And best of all, Thorium reactors do not melt down, ever! Have our politicians only spoken to the Uranium lobby?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/thorium-green-renewable-nuclear/
******************************************Complex Systems, Simple Solutions, and the Myth of Climate Fixes
Written by Dr. Matthew Wielicki
I was listening to Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan talk and it made me think.
Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist and critical thinker, and who I stole the professor-in-exile moniker, has called attention to a fundamental distinction between complicated and complex systems.
His insights were very enlightening and offered a lens through which we can better understand humanity’s many challenges, including climate change.
Weinstein warns against the dangers of applying complicated thinking to complex systems, a common mistake with profound unintended consequences.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in the climate change debate, where solutions like Solar Radiation Management (SRM) are proposed without fully appreciating the intricacies and uncertainties of the global climate system.
Complicated vs. Complex Systems
Weinstein differentiates between “complicated” and “complex” systems in a way that is crucial for understanding how we should approach modern problems.
A complicated system, such as a car engine, involves many parts, but these parts interact in predictable and controllable ways.
Even though there may be numerous components, if something breaks, we can usually trace the problem and fix it without causing cascading failures. The system operates in a linear, deterministic manner where inputs have predictable outputs.
In contrast, complex systems, like ecosystems or human societies, involve interdependent variables that interact in ways that are often nonlinear, unpredictable, and context-dependent.
In a complex system, an action that works well in one context might have entirely different outcomes in another.
Moreover, the relationships between components can produce emergent properties, behaviors and characteristics that arise from the interactions of the system’s parts but cannot be predicted by studying each part in isolation.
Complex systems are adaptive; they evolve over time, and small changes can lead to disproportionately large consequences.
For example, a minor alteration in the food chain can ripple through an ecosystem, causing unforeseen changes in population dynamics and biodiversity.
Importantly, in complex systems, unintended consequences are often the rule rather than the exception, making it impossible to fully understand or predict all the outcomes of our interventions.
Applying Complicated Thinking to Complex Systems
One of Weinstein’s key concerns is that people often try to apply complicated thinking—appropriate for mechanical, engineered systems—to complex systems.
This mindset assumes that complex systems can be fixed or controlled by making adjustments to individual components, without considering the ripple effects that might emerge.
This mechanistic thinking is deeply flawed when dealing with systems like the environment, human societies, or economies, where interactions between variables are dynamic, multifaceted, and not easily reducible to simple cause-effect relationships.
In the context of climate change, this type of thinking manifests in many ways.
https://principia-scientific.com/complex-systems-simple-solutions-and-the-myth-of-climate-fixes/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
***********************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment