Those evil banks that finance pipelines



At a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, Congress freshman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) once again managed to turn herself into the center of attention by focusing on the ludicrous by castigating Wells Fargo for doing its primary job of lending. During a four-hour grilling of Wells Fargo’s CEO, Tim Sloan, the New York Democrat slammed Wells Fargo for lending to private prisons and a pipeline.

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Texas Power Prices Surge 700% on a Chilly Morning in Dallas

Windmills useless

A chilly morning in Dallas combined with calm winds and idle power plants sent wholesale electricity prices in Texas to the highest level in more than a year.

Spot electricity at a northern hub in Texas surged about 700 percent to average $383.71 a megawatt-hour for the hour ended 8 a.m. local time, the most since January 2018, according to Genscape. It came as Dallas temperatures dipped to 42 degrees Fahrenheit (6 Celsius) early Monday. At the same time, power plants representing about 37 percent of the state’s generating capacity were shut for spring maintenance, according to Jeffrey Thibodeau, Genscape’s regional director for Texas.

Wind was little help, as with output from turbine farms fell to about 1.6 gigawatts for that period, compared with around 10 gigawatts most days last week, Thibodeau said.

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The End of the World ... Because Leftists Say So

Kids are always pawns for leftist indoctrination, this time walking out over climate.

“Climate change could trigger a civilization breakdown…”
“The planet will face a disaster if people don’t turn this ship around…”

“Even with drastic, draconian, eugenic policies of population reduction — which are completely immoral — we wouldn’t save ourselves. We have to change the way we live…”

“Climate change may wipe out humanity.”

Media around the globe reported these breathless, panicked statements from young adults and students called to walk out of class this past Friday. Any excuse to dodge class will do, but these students aimed to warn of the predicted apocalypse caused by the sin of fossil fuels and combustible engines — a fear driven by the belief that man-made global warming will soon, even within two decades according to some, end civilization as we know it.

The media originally heralded that more than one million students would skip class Friday. Reports of the actual walkouts are vague on the numbers of participants, however, citing thousands across the U.S. These students lent their presence to the Global Climate Strike inspired by a Swedish 16-year-old, Greta Thunberg, who spoke at the United Nations in December 2018 and was joined by Al Gore and his Climate Vanity Reality Project, in decrying the soon-to-be-heard death rattle of Mother Earth.

What exactly are these town criers declaring as truth?

First, all these “progressive” advocacy groups are parroting the mathematic equation that people plus fossil fuels equal the end of all life on this planet. The fact that solar cycles and sunspots are known to be the largest contributors to the earth’s temperature — with measurable data demonstrating that temperature changes coincide more with solar changes and not CO2 concentration — doesn’t fit the talking points of those desperately wanting to implement the ecofascist Green New Deal.

Second, the renewed belief in population control is critical — remember all Democrat roads lead back to the need for free birth control and abortion on demand. The evil Neanderthals-of-now are capable of downloading any smart-phone app but are somehow incapable of raising children that could possibly be good stewards of creation and its resources. The Left essentially acknowledges how stupid they believe humanity to be, hence, the “need” for socialism to confiscate all wealth, redistribute it, declare that which is and isn’t permitted for the good of the State, and ensure that the unwashed masses are controlled by “reproductive health services” and live as some universal population of the monitored and contained.

Not only has this doctrine of doom generated a militant group of environmentalists armed with radical legislative proposals that will cheer scarcity and state-sponsored oppression in some unproven theory with no sustainable energy and grazing, rather than consuming meat, but it’s yielded a movement devoted to remaining childless.

Blythe Pepino attended an Extinction Rebellion lecture a few years back and began her own advocacy group, BirthStrike, to voluntarily fight “climate breakdown and civilization collapse.” Her gospel is “about saying: ‘It is OK to make this choice, but it’s not OK to have to make this choice.’ We should never be in a situation where we are genuinely scared to bring life into the world.”

So, back to the math of these progressive prognosticators of peril, having no children is virtuous and clearly superior in the effort to save the planet — a space rock that, by the way, has already gone through catastrophic eras of epic change. But don’t confuse them with facts.

Applying the phrase of former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had an intense conflict with the media of his day, to these deceived young adults who are foregoing a life of opportunity and authentic progress due to conjured up fear, these “nattering nabobs of negativism” have fallen victim to the tactic of their own movement. Don’t forget political theorist Saul Alinsky.

Of the 13 rules Alinsky authored and indoctrinated, number nine captures this entire philosophical approach to life rooted in fear: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” In plain talk, living life flooded with worst-case scenarios as your belief of the future fueled by an imagination running wild full of consequences of doom, death, and destruction, leads adherents to adopt a life of desperation.

Not only are the youth and students who’ve been indoctrinated by these leftists of the faculty lounges of America preaching the apocalypse of our very existence, but they’ve fallen victim to their own contrived reality to the extent that they will make themselves extinct unless they successfully convert the masses to their idiocy. Remember, the Left must always have a permanent underclass dependent upon some greater power — which cannot possibly be God working through His created humanity to be self-reliant and free — that they will identify as the government run by their hardcore militants.

Yes, we must be good stewards of our world, its natural resources, our families, communities and our very own personhood. But, no, the end of the world won’t be due to cow farts or air travel.

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Green/Left agenda stalls in the House

Ambitious proposals to end climate change and provide healthcare for everyone, seen as socialist by Republicans, have failed to win the support of even half of the House Democratic caucus, effectively dooming any chance of floor consideration.

Support appears to have plateaued for both the Green New Deal resolution as well as the Medicare for All national health insurance proposal.

The Green New Deal, introduced Feb. 7 by rising freshman star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., calls for a complete overhaul of the nation’s housing, transportation, businesses, and agriculture to end carbon emissions and to stave off climate change.

But of the 235 Democrats in the House, Ocasio-Cortez's bill has the backing of just 90 of her colleagues, and picked up just one new co-sponsor since Feb. 25. That's a little more than a third of the Democrats and far fewer than the 218 needed to pass it without any GOP support.

The Medicare for All bill, introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., isn’t faring much better.

The bill had 106 co-sponsors when it was introduced on Feb. 27. Two weeks later, no other Democrat has co-sponsored the plan to eliminate all private health insurance and turn the nation’s entire healthcare system over to the government.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a progressive, has criticized both proposals and isn’t taking them seriously, even though several Senate Democrats running for president back the measures.

Pelosi can afford to keep the legislation from ever reaching the floor since the two proposals have won over far fewer than half of the rank and file.

“The new green deal, is it?” Pelosi said when reporters asked about it last week, keeping with her habit of misstating the name of the proposal. She called it the “green dream” in February.

Pelosi told reporters she is “more excited” about a newly created climate change panel chaired by Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., which won’t write legislation but will hold hearings and providing recommendations to other committees that will write bills addressing climate change.

Those proposals, Pelosi said, could incorporate elements of the Green New Deal.

Ocasio-Cortez, who recently told her vast following on social media that the threat of climate change should prompt people to reconsider having children, declined a seat on the special climate change panel.

House Democrats, wary her superstar power, have mostly refrained from directly criticizing the Green New Deal, which was initially introduced with a supporting document that called for making plane travel unnecessary and eliminating methane-emitting cows.

But most Democrats aren’t lining up to put their names on the document. “I appreciate the aspiration, but I won’t be signing on,” Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, told the Washington Examiner.

Democrats are also careful not to criticize Medicare for All. “We get, as a party, that we want to go to a place where everyone has full coverage,” said Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich.

But Stevens, who like other centrist Democrats has not signed on to the Medicare for All bill, believe it is more realistic to pass legislation to reform the struggling Affordable Care Act, which Pelosi passed a decade ago and keeps private health insurance intact.

Meanwhile, Republicans have cited both bills as evidence that Democrats are veering toward socialism.

"Our nation has watched the Democratic Party take a sharp and abrupt left turn toward socialism,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said this week. “A flawed ideology that has been rejected time and again across the world is now driving the marquee policy proposals of the new House Democrat majority.”

McConnell will force Democrats to go on the record at the end of March when he calls up the Green New Deal for a vote. Democrats are trying to turn the tables on the GOP, accusing them of ignoring a looming climate crisis.

“We Democrats are ready to work,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor last week. “Will Leader McConnell bring his own members clean energy legislation to the floor?”

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Australia: Fears Labor's plan to slash carbon emissions could cost 336,000 jobs and cause an 8 per cent plunge in wages

Labor's plan to halve carbon emissions within the next decade could cost 336,000 jobs and cause an eight per cent plunge in lost wages by 2030.

BAEconomics has modelled the climate change policies of both major parties and the effects they could have on the broader economy.

The Canberra-based economics consultancy predicts policies aimed at cutting emissions will result in higher electricity prices, and increased production costs in the mining, transport and manufacturing sectors.

The group's managing director Brian Fisher, who has been an economist since 1976, said tackling climate change involved hip-pocket pain and slower economic growth.

'The reason I've done this work was because a lot of people were running around, particularly from universities, saying, "We can achieve all of these reductions in emissions at no cost to the economy",' he told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday.

'It's just very frustrating for an economist to hear that sort of thing because it's frankly very dishonest.'

BAEconomics analysed Labor's plan to slash carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and see 50 per cent of Australia's energy come from renewable sources by that time.

It concluded that under Labor, average full-time salaries in 2030 would stand at $97,000 instead of $106,000.

Full-time workers would be earning more than eight per cent less than they otherwise would have under Labor's climate change policies.

By comparison, the Coalition's less ambitious plans to reduce the effects of global warming would see average wages hit $104,000 by 2030, which would be two per cent less than they would otherwise have been.

The policies of the Liberal and National parties, to reduce carbon emission by 28 per cent by 2030, would also see 78,000 jobs lost during the next decade. That is four times less than the projected 336,000 jobs lost by 2030 under Labor's climate change policies.

'There's always some cost associated with this sort of transformation,' Dr Fisher said. 'As a consequence of that, you grow more slowly than you otherwise would have done and therefore you generate less jobs and your wage rates are going to grow more slowly.'

SOURCE 

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