Tuesday, May 07, 2019



Emma Thompson the first-class hypocrite! Actress is pictured dining on champagne and beef in £18,000 personal booth on carbon-spewing BA plane jetting to New York days after lecturing us all to stop flying

It's only we little people who have to change.  The Leftist elite can do anything

Left-wing actress Dame Emma Thompson was branded a ‘first-class hypocrite’ last night after jetting to New York just days after backing climate protests that brought chaos to London.

The Jeremy Corbyn supporter took her personal booth in the luxury cabin of a British Airways flight from Heathrow to JFK on Friday morning after earlier demanding: ‘We should all fly less.’

First-class BA flights to New York cost up to £18,000 and generate nearly two tons of carbon dioxide – the main driver of climate change – for each passenger in the elite cabin.

Onlookers claim the multi-millionaire activist also drank Laurent-Perrier champagne and dined on beef carpaccio – even though cattle farming is also a major contributor to greenhouse gasses.

Dame Emma has also previously called on people to eat less meat in the name of ‘preserving the planet’.

Cows produce methane – which is 23 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – while clearing forests for pasture and to grow feed for livestock also drives global warming.

Just two weeks before her 3,400-mile flight, lifelong Labour supporter Dame Emma, 60, joined the Extinction Rebellion protests that shut down swathes of Central London, climbing aboard a pink boat the activists had used to blockade Oxford Circus.

The group wants to curb air travel and even made an abortive attempt to close Heathrow Airport, from where she departed at 11.20am on Friday for the eight-hour journey. Her share of the carbon dioxide generated by the flight was the same as that emitted by heating an average house for nine months.

Dame Emma was spotted in 2F – one of the most exclusive seats on board the Boeing 777-200, which accommodates just 14 wealthy passengers in the first-class cabin.

An onlooker said Dame Emma – who has previously championed the Meat Free Monday movement which aims to raise awareness of the environmental damage caused by eating meat – was ‘tucking into those bovines who produce all that methane’.

Extinction Rebellion believes that there is now a ‘climate crisis’ and has suggested that flights be used only in an emergency.

Dame Emma was previously criticised after flying 5,400 miles from her 60th birthday party in Los Angeles to join their protests over the Easter weekend. On Good Friday, the Hollywood star, who lives in Hampstead, North London, but regularly flies to and from the US, addressed protesters at their makeshift camp off Oxford Street.

She told them: ‘I am so proud and thrilled to be part of Extinction Rebellion. ‘We have to be here, we have to do this. It’s inconvenient for people sometimes but it’s much more inconvenient to leave a planet that’s so completely destroyed.’

At the time, the group defended its celebrity backer. It insisted that the tons of carbon her flight produced for her to be at their protest was an ‘unfortunate cost in our bigger battle to save the planet’.

And addressing the charge of hypocrisy, Dame Emma added: ‘It’s very difficult to do my job without occasionally flying, although I do fly a lot less than I did.

‘Yes, it’s unhappy and an inconvenience and we’re often involved in situations where we will be hypocritical, but if we don’t address this we are failing our children and our grandchildren.’

But she insisted: ‘We should all fly less, the future of this planet is at stake and that’s perhaps more important than our own reputations.’

Dame Emma says she plants trees to make amends for her globe-trotting, claiming: ‘I’m in the very fortunate position of being able to offset my carbon footprint, but most people can’t.’

An Extinction Rebellion spokesman said: ‘If Emma Thompson wants to come and help out, that’s great – she’s using her platform which is incredibly valuable to anyone. If she has to fly around the world like a climate lawyer might have to fly around the world, it seems counter-productive in the short term but we are looking at the bigger picture.’

But last night critics branded the excuses nonsense. Tory MP David Morris said: ‘This is typical Left-wing “Do as I say, not as I do”. Dame Emma Thompson is clearly a first-class hypocrite and a champagne socialist.’

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Most Brits Unwilling To Make Lifestyle Changes To Fight Global Warming, Poll Finds

The majority of Britons are unwilling to significantly reduce the amount they drive, fly and eat meat in order to combat climate change, a Sky Data poll reveals.

Just over half – 53% – say they would be unwilling even in principle to significantly reduce the amount they fly, while 28% say they would be willing to give up traveling by plane or reduce the amount they do so significantly (19% say they never fly anyway).

People responding to polls often overclaim their willingness to change their behavior in ways considered socially desirable – but despite this, some 52% say they would be unwilling to reduce the amount of meat they eat much (31%) or at all (21%) to help reduce global warming.

Four in ten say they would be willing to either reduce their meat consumption significantly (35%) or give it up entirely (five percent). A further eight percent do not eat meat.

A report from the Committee on Climate Change called for people to reduce how much meat they eat and how often they fly.

It also called for the government to bring forward the planned ban on conventional car sales by ten years to 2030, encouraging people to switch to driving electric cars.

Some 56% say they would be unwilling to drive significantly less to protect the environment, with 28% saying they would be willing to reduce the amount they drive significantly or give it up entirely (17% already do not drive).

SOURCE





Academic Elites Shouldn’t Be Deciding America’s Energy Policy:  The case of Naomi Oreskes

In the foreseeable future, the House of Representatives will hold more hearings on climate change as some promote the so-called Green New Deal. One of the witnesses who could testify is Professor Naomi Oreskes, a self-styled science historian.

While mislabeled as an “internationally renowned” climate change scholar, Oreskes’ true background is troubling.

For years, her goal has been attacking the American oil industry by advocating a legal assault modeled after the anti-tobacco crusade. Her claim, boiled down, is that oil and gas companies long ago knew they were allegedly harming the planet but failed to warn people. Therefore, they owe everybody huge gobs of money and the government should control the distribution.

Oreskes’ official bio at Harvard lists her as a professor of the History of Science. She has no degrees in climatology, meteorology, or atmospheric sciences, but only in mining geology.

Her “expertise” is searching through documents to find things she can twist or use out of context to further her political agenda. Since big companies have mega-millions of documents, it’s child play to find discrepancies and loose language. And Oreskes’ own writings contain the very types of flaws which she considers sinister in anybody else’s paperwork.

To her, fossil fuels are an inherently dangerous product and the world should ignore how abundant affordable energy has given us such a high quality of life. Playing fast and loose with facts is justified in pursuit of a greater good. Inspired by the massive settlements paid by Big Tobacco, she sees far-bigger dollar signs from attacking energy companies with big lawsuits.

But what about her own history?

Oreskes was an early promoter of the theory that “scientists all agree” about global warming, basing that conclusion on reviewing just the abstracts (short summaries) of articles written by others. She then co-authored the conspiracy theory book, “Merchants of Doubt” to claim that we’ve been duped by slick advertising telling us that oil and gas are good.

That’s an automatic guarantee for adulation by the left and by Hollywood. Her book climbed to its current rank of #21,300 on Amazon’s best-seller list. The movie version grossed a whopping $308,156 — so instead they made it free on the internet.

Fair presentations are not her strength. She told one interviewer that it’s not right to give equal weight to both sides of an issue.

How has she launched her attack in the courts? In 2012 Oreskes coordinated the La Jolla conference of left-wing activists and developed a strategy of nationwide lawsuits against oil and gas.

In 2015, Oreskes directly petitioned the New York State Attorney General to consider state action against the oil industry. She followed with a training workshop involving attorney generals’ offices from more than a dozen states (similar to her hosting countless media figures to indoctrinate them also).

The legal strategy is that if anyone within a giant energy company ever expressed concerns or disagreements about anything then the company is engaged in a conspiracy (and securities fraud) if it fails to adopt or publicize these different conclusions.

Obligingly, lawsuits and investigations have been brought by Democrat attorney generals, such as those in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But the actual legal work is often supplied by wealthy environmentalists — something which they tried to conceal from the public.

Oreskes’ conspiracy theory approach also contends that statements by one company (before the 1999 merging of Mobil with Exxon) prove misconduct by the other company. That’s like blaming Chrysler for the business decisions made by FIAT before they merged.

But we cannot forget that the entire conspiracy claim is based on “scholarly” analysis of some selected articles and of ExxonMobil’s public communications.

So what if another prominent scholar disagrees? Turns out there are disputes about Oreskes’ approach. Oreskes’ work is fundamentally flawed, according to analysis by Professor Kimberly Neuendorf, a communications content expert at Cleveland State University. Her conclusion was that Oreske’s work “lacks reliability, validity, objectivity, generalizability, and replicability.”

How sad and scary it would be if our essential energy industry were to have its fate decided by competing opinions among scholars? And how terrible for consumers if conspiracy theories like Oreskes keep spreading.

Or maybe this is a conspiracy by wealthy donors who have bet their fortunes on replacing oil and gas with their Green New Deal?

We elect people to make more common-sense decisions rather than relying on ivory tower studies. The politicians should take note of that and be skeptical if and when Oreskes testifies on Capitol Hill or in the media.

SOURCE




Get Ready for Hot Dogs Made with Insect Parts Thanks to Liberals Worried About Overpopulation

The stupid old food shortage scam again.  Food is getting more plentiful, not less.  Most crops are in glut and the Western world population is DECLINING

“Meat Science Professor Dr. Louwrens Hoffman said conventional livestock industries would not be able to meet worldwide demand for meat, and alternatives were needed to replace or complement traditional protein sources,” Geek.com reported.

So, Hoffman’s answer? “[M]aggots, locusts and other alternative proteins.”

“An overpopulated world is going to struggle to find enough protein unless people are willing to open their minds, and stomachs, to a much broader notion of food,” Hoffman told Australia’s What’s New in Food.

“Would you eat a commercial sausage made from maggots? What about other insect larvae and even whole insects like locusts? The biggest potential for sustainable protein production lies with insects and new plant sources.”

However, Hoffman understands, not incorrectly, that consumers in the West aren’t really big on eating whole insects.

“In other words, insect protein needs to be incorporated into existing food products as an ingredient,” Hoffman said. “For example, one of my students has created a very tasty insect ice cream.”

Oh, so that’s why Ferris Bueller passed out at 31 Flavors that one night: pesticide bioaccumulation!

In addition to feeding you maggots, Hoffman would also like to feed your chicken maggots, too, by incorporating black soldier fly larvae into chicken feed.

“Poultry is a massive industry worldwide and the industry is under pressure to find alternative proteins that are more sustainable, ethical and green than the grain crops currently being used,” Hoffman said.

Well, I’ll say this much: Hoffman is more famous now than he was 15 minutes ago. Otherwise, this is the exact same nonsense we’ve been hearing since Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” roughly a half-century ago.

Ehrlich, for those of you who are too young to remember the soi-disant Cassandra of the environmentalist movement, predicted that food production wouldn’t rise at a clip commensurate with population growth, a disaster which would be exacerbated by environmental changes. The result would be mass famine which would kill hundreds of millions of people a year.

This didn’t happen, of course, but it didn’t stop Ehrlich from appearing on Johnny Carson about as often as Michael Avenatti appeared on CNN before he got arrested. Food producers and farmers got more creative and were able to feed more people using less resources. We have less famine now than we did when Paul Ehrlich was preaching about the eschatology of scarcity.

As for the modern insect-eating movement, I understand that hundreds of millions of people around the world eat insects as part of their diet.

However, none of what Hoffman is saying is going to avert a food crisis. It’s unlikely to help the environment to any great extent. And, perhaps most importantly, none of his environmental fatalism is at all new.

Heck, just six months ago, we were being told that eating mealworms with our pasta was another great way to save the environment. I understand adoption of new habits may be a slow process, but somehow I don’t see any movement in that direction happening anytime soon.

SOURCE





Contradictions aplenty among top-end-of-town Greens

If the Australian Greens were called the Australian Browns, or the Australian Purples, would so many people vote for them? I doubt it, and I reckon a lot of people vote “green” because they don’t like to think about politics — who can blame them? — and, well, the word green sounds nice. Grass is green, trees are green. It’s the colour of nature, growth and life.

But most Greens voters don’t live anywhere near greenery. They are surrounded by brown, and grey, in the hum of traffic congestion, as far removed from ­nature as possible, in the centres of our large and crowded cities.

The typical Greens voter worries about climate change but lives in a concrete jungle where the evidence of damage to the environment is all around.

The typical Greens voter is happy to limit enterprise and growth to allegedly save the ­planet. But through an app on their smartphone, they are likely to pay someone on a motorbike to bring them a vegan burger.

Your typical Greens voter likes to echo feel-good theories and support the introduction of rules that other people should pay for and live by. But just how far will they go when it comes time to vote? When it comes down to it, at this election, will Greens voters cut into their own incomes and ­assets by voting to increase their own tax bills?

The Greens party is not doing as well as it used to. The latest Roy Morgan Poll (of 1533 electors Australia-wide) shows Greens support at 9.5 per cent. At the 2010 federal election, Greens support reached a peak of 11.8 per cent. Roy Morgan research shows that Greens supporters are increasingly female (60 per cent). Eight years ago polling showed ­female support at 55 per cent. In 2010 under two-thirds of Greens supporters lived in capital cities but now more than 70 per cent of supporters live in them. In the past decade the share of Greens support coming from NSW, South Australia and Tasmania has dropped.

Now nearly a third of Greens supporters reside in Victoria; their numbers have swelled from just over a quarter in 2010. Greens leader Richard Di Natale has ­focused on inner-urban seats in Victoria’s capital, including Melbourne, Batman/Cooper, Melbourne Ports/Macnamara, Koo­yong, Higgins and Wills.

Roy Morgan data gathered from more than 4000 Greens ­voters in 2010 and last year shows that the party’s supporters are quite well off. Greens voters are pushing increasingly into higher income brackets at a faster rate than everyone else.

Roy Morgan figures on household income show that in 2010, while the median household ­income of all electors was $88,540, the median household income of Greens voters was $93,910.

Last year the figures show the median household income of all electors is $106,930. This is an ­increase of $18,390, or 21 per cent. However, the median household income of Greens voters is $120,880, representing a rise of $26,970, or 29 per cent.

So Greens voters earn more than everyone else and their ­incomes are rising at a higher rate. Greens voters are the dreaded “top end of town” and they are contributing to, and benefiting from, the terrible widening inequality that their chosen party keeps going on about.

Green, the colour of nature, is the colour of American money, too.

SOURCE 

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1 comment:

C. S. P. Schofield said...

Someone I respect recently pointed out that the population numbers touted by the Progressive Left are highly suspect. For decades the majority of the biggest population growth claims have come from parts of Africa and Asia that depend in large part on foreign aid...which is apportioned by population. The governments involved are often staggering dishonest, and there is no reason to believe their self-reported population numbers, and many reasons to doubt them.

If the populations of various third world pestholes are actually static, or even in decline, then one of the major talking points of the Progressive Left collapses.

Worth keeping in mind.