Leftist hypocrisy:  It never stops

Democrat Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said a lot of things about “climate change” while promoting her “Green New Deal.” For example, via Federalist Papers:

“We’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’” Cortez said in January, The Post reported.

“And, like, this is the war; this is our World War II,” she said, talking more like a teenager than a Congresswoman.

“It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult” she said last week.

“And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?” she said.

Enter the “New York Post,” which establishes that AOC is a hypocrite and a fraud…

Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to save the planet with her Green New Deal, but she keeps tripping over her own giant carbon footprint.

But the woman who boasts of a “razor-sharp BS detector” seems to have trouble sniffing out her own.

Since declaring her candidacy in May 2017, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign heavily relied on those combustible-engine cars — even though a subway station was just 138 feet from her Elmhurst campaign office.

She listed 1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses alone.

In all, Ocasio-Cortez spent $29,365.70 on those emissions-spewing vehicles, along with car and van rentals — even though her Queens HQ was a one-minute walk to the 7 train.

The campaign shelled out only $8,335.41 on 52 MetroCard transactions.

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Greenpeace Co-Founder: AOC Is a ‘Pompous Little Twit,’ Green New Deal Would Be ‘Worse Than WWII’

Patrick Moore, who said he left Greenpeace 33 years ago “because they were hijacked by eco-fascists,” tweeted Saturday, “@AOC Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death.”

Furthermore, he blasted Ocasio-Cortez for calling climate change “our World War II,” saying instead the Green New Deal would be “worse than WWII.”

“Isn't @AOC a bit young to talk about WW2? It was Hell & more than 60 million died. It's her @GND that would be worse than WW2. Imagine no fuel for cars, trucks, tractors, combines, harvesters, power-plants, ships, aircraft, etc. Transport of people & goods would grind to a halt,” Moore tweeted Sunday.

"I suspect @AOC is a flash in the pan. Her @GND is so completely crazy it is bound to be rejected in the end. But she does have wind in her sales due to the political situation. 2020 will be even more interesting now,” he tweeted.

Moore also criticized Ocasio-Cortez’s use of ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft while campaigning, instead of using the subway near her campaign office.

The "world as it is" has the option of taking the subway rather than a taxi. option of Amtrak rather than plane, option of opening windows rather than A/C. You're just a garden-variety hypocrite like the others. And you have ZERO expertise at any of the things you pretend to know,” Moore said.

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Socialist Green New Deal Rejects Nuclear Energy

The goal isn't "saving the planet." It's more power for government brokers.

The Left’s obsession with environmentalism and more specifically climate change has little to do with protecting the environment. Instead, as we have repeatedly noted, the real motive behind the Left’s “green” agenda is red socialism — increasing government control over the economy.

This reality was made patently clear with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND). Using apocalyptic warnings of the world ending in 12 years should the country not embrace her radical and absurd agenda — which would effectively destroy America’s entire economic system as we know it — AOC and her fellow travelers claim their cause to be a just one because they are simply trying to save the planet. But, as National Review’s David French astutely points out, “When you read the [GND] you quickly realize that progressivism is the priority, not the environment. In other words, environmentalism and progressivism are wrongly treated as fundamentally inseparable.”

As for supposedly working to “save” the environment, the GND offers no practical real-world solutions. Where this may be most glaringly evident is in the GND’s rejection of nuclear energy. The resolution proposes that “100 percent of the power demand in the United States” would be met “through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” But these energy sources “would not include creating new nuclear plants” and, in fact, “the plan is to transition off of nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible.”

Yet, as Time magazine “Hero of the Environment” Michael Shellenberger argues, the only truly “green energy” is nuclear power. “When it comes to generating power for billions of people, it turns out that producing solar and wind collectors, and spreading them over large areas, has vastly worse impacts on humans and wildlife alike,” he says. “I think it’s natural that those of us who became active on climate change gravitated toward renewables. They seemed like a way to harmonize human society with the natural world. Collectively, we have been suffering from an appeal-to-nature fallacy no different from the one that leads us to buy products at the supermarket labeled ‘all natural.’ But it’s high time that those of us who appointed ourselves Earth’s guardians should take a second look at the science, and start questioning the impacts of our actions.”

So why the Left’s aversion to nuclear energy? Maybe because it’s a proven, reliable, and cost-effective source of green energy that doesn’t necessitate a socialist takeover of the American economy. The fact is, nuclear power offers a more realistic means of meeting the Left’s loudly proclaimed environmental goals, but it does so via capitalism — and there’s the rub.

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New EPA Chief Implementing Trump’s Energy-Dominant, Environmentally Friendly Agenda

Andrew Wheeler was confirmed by the Senate last week as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler previously served as deputy administrator before stepping into the role of acting administrator in July 2018. He visited the Conservative Political Action Conference last week and spoke to The Daily Signal. A lightly edited transcript is below.

Rob Bluey: Although you were just confirmed by the Senate, you’ve been in the job as acting EPA administrator for several months. Can you share what it’s been like to have that experience to work in the Trump administration?

Andrew Wheeler: It’s been great. You know, I started my career as an employee at EPA in 1991 during the first Bush administration. It’s great to be back. When President Trump called me and asked me to take over at EPA, he said, “Continue to clean up the air. Continue to clean up the water, and continue to deregulate in order to create more jobs for the American public.” We can do all three. The president knows we can do all three, and I think we’re proving it.

Bluey: You’ve had success in all three of those areas. What would you say over the past several months stands out in your mind as one of your biggest accomplishments?

Wheeler: We just released our new Waters of the United States regulations with the Federal Register. This is something that the administration has been going back and forth with. There have been three Supreme Court cases. The Obama regulation was stayed by a number of different courts.

We did this with a very unique approach: One, we put it out there, and we said we’re distinguishing between what is a federal waterway and what is a state waterway. Second, and this is the overarching theme of the whole regulation, is that a property owner should be able to stand on his or her property and be able to tell for themselves whether or not they have federal waters without having to hire an outside attorney or a consultant. That’s really important to provide that certainty to the American public.

Bluey: Can you explain what exactly a water of the United States is, because as you just described, in many cases, it’s unclear for property owners.

Wheeler: The Clean Water Act, back in the 1970s, defined it as navigable waters, but it’s been expanded over the years by regulation and then by also some Supreme Court decisions. There have been three Supreme Court decisions in the last 12 years. And so it goes a little beyond navigable. We include wetlands that are adjacent to those waterways.

We have a whole list. For the first time, we are defining what is a water, and we’re also defining, just as important, what is not a waterway. For example, if something retains water just because of rain, that’s not a water of the United States anymore.

Farm ditches will no longer be considered a water of the U.S. That might surprise people, but both of those have been declared wetlands or waterways in the past. So we are defining what is in, and also, just as importantly, what’s out.

Bluey: As you craft the rules and regulations at your agency, one of the important things is getting feedback from the American people. I know it’s been a priority under the Trump administration to get out of Washington and hear from Americans. Tell us about the experiences that you’ve had and some of the places you’ve been able to go.

Wheeler: It’s been great. When we announced the Waters of the U.S., we did have an announcement in Washington, D.C., but the very next day I got on a plane with Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and we went to Tennessee. We had a meeting with farmers from three different states. And to hear the feedback from those farmers was very important.

When I went to California, I met with a lot of farmers there. When I went to Pennsylvania, I sat down with some state environmental organizations. Those are the environmental organizations that are really trying to clean up the environment. I heard what their problems were in trying to clean up some of the old abandoned mines in the state of Pennsylvania.

I go out and I try to meet with local people who live around the Superfund sites. When I was in Montana at a Superfund site, I sat down with the Moms for Clean Air, who actually opposed me. But I sat down with them in Montana to hear what their concerns were about living around the Superfund site. And that was the Anaconda and the Butte, Montana, Superfund sites.

It’s important for me to hear what people think about what we’re doing and what their problems are, so we can better respond and be more responsive to the American public.

Bluey: One of the things that Vice President Mike Pence touted at CPAC is the success that the Trump administration has had when it comes to regulations and reducing the red tape. What does that mean in terms of the constituencies you deal with?

Wheeler: One of the things that I’m trying to talk about more is energy production. President Trump wants us to be energy dominant. And we are. We are energy dominant. But along with that, we produce our fossil fuels here in the United States in a much more environmentally conscious manner than fossil fuels produced anywhere else in the world.

If you’re Europe, and you want to buy natural gas, you can buy it from Russia or you can buy it from the United States. Our natural gas is more environmentally conscious, more environmentally friendly the way we produce it because of our regulations here. Same with our coal. Same with our oil. That’s really important for the American public to understand as well.

We have a lot of politicians and people here in the United States saying we shouldn’t have any fossil fuels in the United States. Well, that means that the rest of the world will be buying much more environmentally damaging fossil fuels that are produced in a much more damaging fashion than we produce them here.

Bluey: EPA adopted a lean management approach that has been important in terms of improving the time that it takes to get permits done and some of the day-to-day functions at the agency. How’s it going under your watch?

Wheeler: It’s going really well. The lean management’s also known as the Toyota system. We’re using it to address our longstanding systems in the EPA. For example, how long it takes us to process a permit. When we came in, President Trump said, “I want to do all federal permits within two years.” And we took a look at the EPA, and we said, “How long is it taking you to process permits?” And they weren’t tracking it.

It’s impossible to improve a system if you aren’t tracking how long it takes. So the first thing we did was start tracking how long it takes. And we have a goal of trying to get all of our permits done within six months.

Bluey: Looking ahead, what are some of the things that you hope to accomplish over the next several months?

Wheeler: We certainly want to move forward and finalize some of the regulations we have out there. The Waters of the U.S. [rule] that I mentioned, we put it out for public comment. I encourage people to please comment on it. You can find it in the Federal Register. Take a look at it. Let us know whether you like it or don’t like it, what room for improvement.

We want to hear back from people. I know we’re going to hear back from a lot of people who don’t like what we’re doing. And if you like what we’re doing, tell us. We want to hear from everyone, and we want to have input from everybody about what we’re doing.

Bluey: Administrator Wheeler, thanks for joining The Daily Signal.

Wheeler: Thank you very much.

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Bill Gates, defying the Climate Barons, tells the ugly truth about renewables

A remarkable change has come over the view of the left in recent decades. With the collapse of socialism (in fact, if not in theory), big business was no longer an automatic enemy. Indeed it was to be co-opted as a partner in “social responsibility” and “sustainable development.” Some of the world’s wealthiest business people eagerly sought to start knitting the rope of Global Salvationism.

The bizarro modern counterparts of the Robber Barons might be called the Climate Barons, those billionaires and capitalist foundations that seek to kill the fossil-fuelled industrial age in order to save mankind from manmade environmental catastrophe.

While America’s Koch brothers are ritually condemned as funding “denialism,” a far more substantial group is supporting NGO thuggery and misinformation, promoting lawsuits and other pressure tactics to euthanize fossil fuels. They also seek to hide the huge economic and social costs of the allegedly essential “transition to a low-carbon economy.”

This group includes U.S. billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg and the British hedge-fund billionaires Jeremy Grantham and Chris Hohn. It includes a raft of multi-billion-dollar foundations bearing names such as Rockefeller, Hewlett and Packard.

The Climate Barons present themselves as promoters of “Climate Philanthropy,” but insofar as their promised low-carbon transition involves forcing the adoption of expensive and unreliable energy, they are both responsible for destroying jobs (Alberta being perhaps the most prominent victim), and exacerbating poverty in poor countries. Their activities might more accurately be described as Climate Malanthropy.

Here’s the good news: Bill Gates, the world’s most prominent philanthropist, has broken ranks. Although the Microsoft co-founder still outsources his thinking on catastrophist science, he has acknowledged that intermittent renewables are the last thing to be forced on poor countries. He has also castigated the Climate Barons’ strategy of killing fossil fuels via financial pressure.

During a recent onstage Q&A at Stanford University, when interviewer Arun Majumdar, a “Google Scholar,” suggested breezily that people were “optimistic” that the costs of renewables and battery storage were coming down, Gates got visibly agitated. “That is so disappointing,” he said, tearing into the misplaced priorities of such feeble optimism. While he supported nuclear, he said battery technology was woefully deficient and renewables needed “a miracle.” They certainly weren’t the solution for India or Africa right now.

Gates revealed that he had recently been at a New York conference of financiers backing the fashionable demand of “climate disclosure,” whereby corporations are required to offer up highly unlikely climate-risk scenarios so as to unnecessarily worry investors and increase their cost of capital. Gates claimed that the idea that finance or investor pressure could provide a solution was “madness.” So was, he said, the demonization of electrical utilities. And in this low-carbon transition, he asked, where would steel and plastic come from? What would power the airplanes? Most dramatically, he claimed that those who suggested that the climate problem was easy to solve were a bigger problem than the climate deniers are.

It is intriguing to compare the Gates interview with another video, made around the same time, in which Majumdar also appears. It was touted as a “Giving Pledge Learning Session” designed to boost “Climate Philanthropy.” One especially intriguing aspect was that Gates and his wife founded the Giving Pledge, in the vain hope of convincing people billionaires aren’t evil. This video suggests that some just might be.

The video features hedge-fund billionaire Jeremy Grantham, who has established several climate foundations that spread alarmism and seek to silence deniers. The chair of Grantham’s main climate foundation is Lord Nicholas Stern, author of 2006’s outrageously perverted Stern Review (officially titled: The Economics of Climate Change). Grantham also employs Bob Ward, perhaps the U.K.’s main attack dog when it comes to trying to silence media skepticism. “Everybody needs to be in on this (transition)” said Grantham. Meaning everyone needs to agree with him.

Another Climate Baron making an appearance was Julie Packard, vice-chairman of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which has committed US$1 billion to climate over the past 10 years. And there was Larry Kramer, head of the Hewlett Foundation, which has also devoted massive amounts to the climate-alarm crusade.

Chris Hohn, another British hedge-fund billionaire, asserts in the video that “solar and wind are cheaper than coal.” He might try running that past Gates. Hohn also claimed that there was need for a “massive step up” in climate philanthropy — but we might note that spending is pretty stepped up already. Hohn funds a charity called the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, CIFF. CIFF oversees a portfolio of multi-year grant commitments worth more than US$800 million. Of that total, almost US$300 million is dedicated to climate change, more than 10 times the amount committed to “child protection.” CIFF is also a big supporter of “carbon disclosure.” It’s hard to see what that has to do with children who are suffering poverty, malnutrition or abuse right now.

CIFF’s website maintains that “A low carbon world will help secure a healthy and prosperous future for children.” Again, Bill Gates — or indeed any objective observer — would mostly disagree.

Now that Bill has seen the light on the “transition,” maybe there’s hope he’ll turn his analytical mind to just how “settled” climate science really is.

SOURCE 

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