Climate change: Water shortages in England 'within 25 years'

Dropping a retired diplomat into the job of heading an environment agency was bound to have amusing results.  And so it has.  Sir James knows not even the basics of science.  The idea of England running out of water, for a start, could pass as a joke.  Visitors to England get the impression that it never stops raining there.

Greenies have however been doing their usual tricks in obstructing water infrastructure improvements such as dam building.  So reticulating the water to Britain's immigrant-swollen population could be problematical.  But that is on the head of the Greenies, nobody else.

And global warming has absolutely nothing to do with it.  A warmer world would evaporate more water off the oceans and that would come down as INCREASED rainfall.  Sir James must not have done even High School physics to be unaware of that


Within 25 years England will not have enough water to meet demand, the head of the Environment Agency is warning.

The impact of climate change, combined with population growth, means the country is facing an "existential threat", Sir James Bevan told the Waterwise Conference in London.

He wants to see wasting water become "as socially unacceptable as blowing smoke in the face of a baby".

"We all need to use less water and use it more efficiently," he said.

Sir James Bevan was appointed chief executive of the Environment Agency - the public body responsible for protecting the environment and wildlife in England - in 2015 after a career as a diplomat.

He told his audience that, in around 20 to 25 years, England would reach the "jaws of death - the point at which, unless we take action to change things, we will not have enough water to supply our needs".

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Populist Party That Ran Against Climate Hysteria Wins Largest Bloc In Dutch Election

A new populist Eurosceptic party has achieved the remarkable feat of going from zero seats to becoming the largest single party in the Dutch Senate in a single election, as a young politician likened to a “Dutch Donald Trump” beat seasoned professionals in Wednesday’s poll.

Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy party, which has gained attention for its Euroscepticism, campaigned against open borders politics and against what he calls “climate-change hysteria,” winning 86 seats across the Dutch regions.

The victory put his party ahead of even the ruling mainstream conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which achieved 80 seats.

The Forum was founded in 2016, and this is the first regional election the party has contested.

Remarkably, in some Dutch regions Forum was so unexpectedly successful it won the right to appoint more elected members than they actually have registered candidates living in those areas.

The regional seats translate through the Dutch constitutional system into seats in the appointed upper house Senate. The party will have 13 seats, making them the largest group — and robbing the governing VVD of their majority.

Speaking to Dutch media, leader Thierry Baudet said he was willing to support the establishment parties in government but would demand a “change of course” in certain policy areas, specifically mass migration and government spending on climate change policies.

Showing the party’s newfound power, Baudet even demanded the resignation of several key cabinet ministers, including those responsible for home affairs and immigration, in return for support.

Unlike other countries where establishment parties have totally ruled out working with populist insurgents, even when they hold seats key to establishing a working government, the Netherlands’ centrist-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Thursday he would be willing to consider working with Forum to keep the government in power.

Wednesday’s election came just two days after what is now understood to have been a terror attack in the Dutch city of Utrecht, which some media commentators both inside the Netherlands and without have said may have influenced the way people chose to vote.

Baudet himself was criticized after the attack for continuing his election campaigning, while others called off rallies.

Speaking on the campaign trail, Baudet attacked the governing parties for their role in contributing to the circumstances surrounding the attack, including “naive and lax” policies on open borders and criminal justice.

Arguing that despite decades of warnings about the impact of mass migration, “nothing has changed on this road we are following, with hundreds of thousands of people still coming here,” Baudet warned Dutch voters. “If we don’t choose a different course on Wednesday, [events like this week’s shooting] will happen much more often.”

Criticizing the Prime Minister, he said: “We are being destroyed by the people who are supposed to be protecting us… Successive Rutte governments have left our borders wide open, letting in hundreds of thousands of people with cultures completely different to ours.”

Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reports several news sources have likened the “television genius” Baudet to U.S. President Donald Trump, who connected directly with voters through social media, bypassing the legacy mainstream media.

The unexpected degree of success for Forum reflects and reinforces a broader trend across Europe which sees populist parties giving an authentic voice to concerns held by voters at the expense of traditional, established parties.

This trend is broadly anticipated to continue in the European Union’s parliament elections, with as many as one in four voters across the continent expected to vote populist.

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The Consequences Of Andrew Cuomo’s Climate Agenda Hit Close To Home. His Home

The unintended consequences of Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s global warming crusade are hitting close to home — literally.

Utility Consolidated Edison put a moratorium on new natural gas hookups across parts of Westchester County, which includes Mount Kisco where Cuomo’s residence is located, according to The New York Times.

Con Edison’s decision is no surprise to energy experts critical of Cuomo’s blocking of major gas pipelines and the banning of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in New York.

“Governor Cuomo has been mandating the Green New Deal Dream in New York, and now it’s turning into a nightmare for people forced to pay twice as much for oil heat instead of natural gas,” Daniel Kish, a distinguished senior fellow at the free-market Institute for Energy Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Local officials and businesses worry the utility’s decision will derail major development projects that will rely on natural gas for heating. It also means homes looking to get off relatively expensive heating oil will have to wait.

“It’s just a question of how people are going to be able to heat their homes and cook their food with the energy that’s available right now,” Con Edison spokesman Michael Clendenin told The Times Thursday.

The natural gas moratorium was announced in January and went into effect March 15, sparking a rush to get applications for natural gas hookups filed before it was too late.

Cuomo banned fracking in 2014 after years of study and delay. Cuomo said the risks to New York’s groundwater and public health were too great, despite Pennsylvania moving ahead with extracting oil and gas from shale.

In the years since, Cuomo’s administration has blocked major natural gas pipeline projects. At the same time, however, natural gas was becoming an increasingly important part of New York’s electricity and heating mix.

Cuomo’s policies have made environmental activists happy, and he’s not done yet. Cuomo’s in the midst of pushing his own “Green New Deal” plan to push more solar and wind power onto the grid.

Cuomo’s goal is 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040. Current state law mandates 50 percent renewable electricity — hydropower, solar and wind — by 2030. About 28 percent of the state’s electricity comes from renewables, mostly hydroelectric dams.

However, most of New York’s electricity comes from natural gas and nuclear power. Also, millions of households rely on natural gas for heating during winter.

Pipelines are needed to get natural gas to customers, energy companies say, and there currently aren’t enough to reliably meet demand, especially during harsh winters.

Con Edison said Cuomo’s policies have chilled construction of new pipelines in the region. Two counties in Massachusetts have also had moratoriums on natural gas hookups since 2014 due to a lack of pipelines.

“The market changed,” Clendenin told The Times. “Investors were no longer willing to take the risk.”

The pipeline bottleneck in New York has also put pressure on New England states that heavily rely on natural gas. Harsh winter conditions in recent years have brought the region’s grid to the brink, including during winter 2017/2018.

“The Northeastern States are cutting their own throats and their leaders are doing it with a green knife,” Kish said.

In response to Con Edison’s moratorium, New York state offered roughly $250 million in incentives to reduce energy use and install green energy heating equipment. Public utility regulators are also looking into Con Edison’s decision and could overturn the moratorium.

However, Cuomo’s office blamed Con Edison’s poor planning for the natural gas shortfall.

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ABC's ‘World News Tonight’ Covers Superbloom, Ignores End of California Drought
 
California’s “Mediterranean climate” gets attention when it can be used to leverage panic over climate change and when people’s lives and properties are at risk. But the broadcast networks have proved that when it cycles back around thanks to a wet winter, they won’t always report it.

If a wildflower superbloom hadn’t sprouted in California and drawn thousands of visitors, it’s doubtful any of the three evening news shows would have actually announced California was finally out of its long drought. None of the three did a standalone drought story, and ABC failed to report the end of the drought in spite of covering the wildflower bloom.

USA Today reported on March 15, that the entire, enormous state of California is now officially out of drought for the first time since 2011. That was the word from the U.S. Drought Monitor on March 14. But on the six nights after the Drought Monitor announced that good news for California, ABC's World News Tonight skipped the drought altogether — even when it covered the “superbloom mania” on March 18.

CBS Evening News took until March 19, to mention the state was drought-free, saying in its tease: “The drought is over and the desert comes alive.”

CBS correspondent Jamie Yuccas opened the story saying, “Seven years, California is drought-free and the earth is celebrating,” before going on to report record crowds and Instagrammers getting too close to the flowers for their pictures.

NBC Nightly News was the earliest evening newscast to announce the end of the drought.

Sunday anchor Kate Snow said, “A sign of spring now with truly stunning pictures from southern California. It’s called the superbloom, following weeks of rain, California has finally emerged from its drought and wildflowers have begun to blossom. These poppies are drawing crowds of thousands of people.”

The end of the drought is good news for California, at least for now.

“If we have a few more years of this, then maybe our groundwater conditions will be in much better shape and we might be in a better shape to deal with another potential drought, which will come, Stanford University’s director of urban water policy Newsha Ajami told USA Today. “California has a Mediterranean climate so we do experience a lot of ups and downs in our weather conditions.”

In 2017, when winter storms also helped California pull out of the most severe drought category — “exceptional drought” — the broadcast networks barely acknowledged the change. Only NBC’s Today mentioned it between Jan. 24, and Jan. 31, of that year.

The liberal media claimed for many years that droughts like the recent, protracted drought in California was due to man-made climate change. They also portrayed it as unusual, labeling it “historic” in more than 60 percent of their California drought stories in early 2014. But according to some experts, they were wrong about claiming it was “historic” and unprecedented that year.

NOAA scientist Martin Hoerling disputed the assessment in a 2014 New York Times op-ed, saying California’s drought “resembles the droughts that afflicted the state in 1976 and 1977. Those years were at least as dry as the last two years have been.”

Although he accepted that global warming occurred, he argued in that op-ed that “scientific evidence does not support an argument that the drought there is appreciably linked to human-induced climate change.”

ABC, CBS and NBC also connected “hundred-year forest fires” and “periods of severe drought” to climate change in many morning and evening shows in the spring of 2014, without questioning that supposed link. Some other media even claimed it would go on getting worse for a very, long time. Wired magazine warned in May 2016, “California’s Drought is Probably Forever.”

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Most 2020 Dems Blow Off Carbon Offsets: ‘No One Is Ready To Walk The Walk’

They are not even pretending to believe in oncoming castastrophe

Sen. Bernard Sanders suffered criticism last year after he flew on a greenhouse-gas-spewing private jet to campaign during the midterm elections. …

On Thursday, Mr. Sanders said he’ll keep going, pledging to offset his carbon emissions for his 2020 presidential campaign. […]

But the other 2020 Democratic hopefuls, who like Mr. Sanders call global warming an existential crisis, have been slower to put their money where their mouth is.

After inquiries from The Washington Times, only one — the campaign of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg — said it would consider proactive steps to make up for the dirty business, carbon-speaking, of a campaign.

“He’s pledged not to take contributions from the fossil fuel industry, and we’re looking into ways to reduce the carbon footprint,” said Buttigieg spokeswoman Lis Smith.

Every other campaign contacted by The Times ignored the inquiries, making it anyone’s guess how seriously they will take their emissions.

Even Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is making climate change the centerpiece of his campaign, wouldn’t say whether he will offset his carbon.

Carbon offsets are projects such as planting trees to suck carbon from the atmosphere, converting dirty power sources to cleaner ones, or capturing methane emissions from landfills.

Companies seek payments from those spewing carbon, promising to use the money to fund offset projects.

Native Energy, the company Mr. Sanders uses, says it can offset the half-ton of carbon emissions from 1,000 miles of short-haul airplane travel for $8.55.

Offsets were the rage a decade ago, with several high-profile presidential campaigns promising to pay for their emissions during the 2008 race, including Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

Combined, federal campaigns in 2008 paid major offset providers, including Native Energy and Climate Trust, a total of $230,917, according to federal records.

In the 2012 presidential cycle, when there was no Democratic presidential primary race, expenditures on carbon offsets ran slightly more than $2,000.

The payments to major offset companies increased in the 2016 cycle but at $14,347 remained dramatically below the 2008 level.

After being spotted flying a private jet to campaign events in 2016, Mrs. Clinton promised to offset her emissions, but no record of payments can be found. Her campaign repeatedly ignored questions about the failure in 2016.

Ironically, the Clinton Global Initiative has funded a carbon offset operation.

Only Mr. Sanders and fellow Vermonter Rep. Peter Welch consistently make large expenditures on carbon offsets.

The lack of personal action has not stopped other candidates from complaining about the looming catastrophe.

“Climate change is the most serious threat to humanity today, and we need immediate and bold action to address it,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman, said Americans have a “final chance” to act or face a climate apocalypse in 12 years.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts proposed rebuilding all of the country’s infrastructure in a way that deals with climate change.

“The urgency of the moment on climate change cannot be overstated. It’s upon us and we need to make a change and make change fast. And that means in part rebuilding our power grids, our entire infrastructure system. We need to harden against the coming storms. Underpasses and overpasses and bridges. We need a 21st-century infrastructure that accounts for coming changes in climate, and we need it fast,” she told National Public Radio.

Mr. Inslee called for an “all-out national climate mobilization” to defeat climate change.

“Sounds like most Democratic candidates want to talk the talk of the Green New Deal, but no one is ready to walk the walk,” said Michael McKenna, an energy lobbyist and Republican Party strategist.

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