What Trump's new ethanol rules mean for you

Trump has just been on a tour in Iowa in which he takes credit for loosening restrictions on the use of ethanol in gasoline.  The move will be of huge benefit to Iowa corn farmers so will undoubtedly shore up Trump's vote in the next election. And putting more ethanol in your tank will cost you slightly less than using pure gasoline. But you will also get less mileage out of a fill-up.

So who loses from the new rules? All Americans.  America should not be growing corn at all, other than for inclusion in dinners.  Import restrictions, tariffs, are the only thing keeping corn farming alive in America. Corn is the principal feedstock for making sugar in America. And sugar is the main feedstock for making ethanol.  And making sugar out of corn is absurd.  You can make it for half the price out of sugarcane -- which is a very widely distributed tropical crop.

Americans would have sugar at half the price if imports of it were allowed from Brazil, the Caribbean and many other places around the world. Ethanol would be REALLY cheap if you made it from Brazilian sugar or imported it directly from the very efficient Brazilian distilleries.

And there is no strategic argument for America to be self-sufficient in sugar production.  There are major supliers close by and all are well protected by  American military power. You can grow sugarcane in almost the whole of central and South America, rainfall permitting. Australia too is a major sugar from sugarcane producer.

It is a considerable irony that Trump is being a Greenie in all this.  He justifies his facilitating of domestic ethanol production as  the use of a "renewable" resource, which it certainly is.  You grow it. And Greenies never care about the cost of anything.

But there is no conceivable chance of anything changing.  No politician would risk alienating all those Iowa votes


At the end of May, the Trump administration announced it would allow for the year-round sale of gasoline with higher concentrations of ethanol.

That action addressed a rule the Environmental Protection Agency had in place preventing the sale of so-called E15 fuel, which contains 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline, between June 1 and Sept. 15. The purpose was to prevent air pollution and curb dependence on foreign petroleum, but the ban has stopped some retailers from selling E15 at all because of the need to change out pumps.

One benefit is that gas prices could come down. As previously reported by FOX Business, E15 is typically priced about 5 to 10 cents cheaper than regular gasoline.

“Now in the summer months when consumers are driving more and oil companies usually jack up their prices,” Iowa Renewable Fuels Association executive director Monte Shaw said in a statement to FOX Business, adding that the new statute will allow drivers to save money at the pump.

According to the Renewable Fuels Association, E15 was approved for use in model year 2001 and newer vehicles by the EPA in 2012. The group says 90 percent of cars on the road are approved to run on E15.

Shaw previously noted that E15 has been in high demand where it is offered. E10, however, is still the default regular fuel sold across most of the country.

The move is also a boon to corn farmers, since corn is widely used to make ethanol domestically. Allowing for the year-round sale of E15 will give farmers more avenues to sell corn, which could bolster revenue especially when prices are low.

SOURCE




Canada is poised to join a growing list of places where single-use plastic items have been banned

Canada, following precedent set by the European Union, is poised to join a growing list of places where single-use plastic items have been banned. Though the government hasn’t specified which items will actually be outlawed in 2021, according to The Guardian, “bottles, plastic bags, and straws” are being considered.

First, they came for the bags. Then, they came for the straws, but perhaps instead of looking for other common products to ban, we should look at what these regulations actually do.

Of course, plastic bans aren’t just restricted to Europe and Canada.

Plastic bag bans have come to California and New York, and to a number of cities in the United States. The bans are typically aimed at grocery stores and other businesses that give out the bags to customers to carry out purchased items.

The bag bans are billed as a means to reduce waste and pollution by forcing Americans to bring reusable bags to stores.

However, it turns out that not only are those bans an inconvenience, they also have questionable positive benefits for the environment—and may actually be making things worse.

A recent study by University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor in Australia established that bans on plastic shopping bags change behavior; namely, people used fewer plastic shopping bags as the sources dried up.

However, people didn’t stop using plastic bags as a whole. Instead of reusing plastic bags as trash can liners, for example, customers purchased garbage bags to make up for the lost supply.

In areas with the shopping bag bans, there was a huge upsurge in the purchase of 4-gallon bags. These bags are typically thicker than the thin plastic shopping bags and use more plastic.

“What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned,” Taylor said in an interview with National Public Radio. “ … so, about 30% of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags.”

In addition, a plastic bag ban causes a jump in the use of paper bags—creating, according to the study, about 80 million pounds of additional paper bag trash a year.

That may seem like a reasonable trade-off. After all, paper bags are biodegradable, right?

Yes, but the process of manufacturing those bags is still quite intensive, and there’s evidence that paper bags are actually worse for the environment, according to some studies.

Not surprisingly, some big-government nannies want to ban, or at least curtail, the use of paper bags also, for good measure.

As for the environmentally-friendly reusable bags, studies have found that they create few “green” benefits. Worse, they are often highly unsanitary.

Plastic bags are, of course, not the only plastic items that cities are trying to do away with. An even less useful crusade, this one against plastic straws, has been gaining steam as well.

The straw ban, which started in Seattle and has moved on to other cities, has largely been fueled by an informal survey by a 9-year-old activist and the mistaken notion the U.S. is causing plastic buildup in the oceans.

Again, the ban is ineffective or useless at best. It ends up being little more than an inconvenience for those who now have to suffer through soggy, melting paper straws that taste like a used paper towel halfway through a drink.

There are certainly worse laws and petty tyrannies to suffer under than bans on plastic bags. Nevertheless, it’s ironic that a progressive “utopia” such as San Francisco is waging war on plastic grocery bags, with a total ban looming in the near future, even as it is literally covered in trash, hypodermic needles, and human waste.

Our zeal to fix First World problems is also coming at the expense of not stopping re-emerging Third World problems.

That said, Americans live in a wealthy society, in which we have the luxury of making economic sacrifices to improve our environment. Local polities are free to eliminate plastic bags and straws—or other such things—as they see fit.

However, it’s telling that so many of these movements are based on little more than environmentalist virtue-signaling, and create additional hassles, rather than effective measures to make our communities better or cleaner.

SOURCE





Warmists believe in the tooth fairy

Bjorn Lomborg

What will be the solution to climate change? It would be very nice to be able to point confidently to a single technology. In fact, many people do. They say the answer to climate change has already arrived in the form of, say, wind turbines or solar panels, and we just need to build more of their favoured technology to achieve a so-called “energy transition” from fossil fuels to renewables.

This idea that we already have the needed technology is so pervasive that before we can establish what the solution to climate change really looks like, we first need to dismantle the faulty idea that we have the solution already.

The reality is, today, solar and wind energy together deliver only about 1 per cent of global energy. The International Energy Agency estimates that even by 2040 these will cover a little more than 4 per cent of global energy.

One of the world’s leading energy researchers, Czech-Canadian Vaclav Smil, has said: “The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking.”

Former US vice-president Al Gore’s chief scientific adviser, Jim Hansen, who put global warming on the agenda back in 1988, agreed, saying: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

How has such a fundamental misunderstanding become so firmly entrenched at the centre of climate policy debate? Partly through self-interest. Many private companies — from Vestas to Tesla — have an interest in making us believe the solution is simply to buy lots of their products.

And partly because, as any good political strategist will tell you, it’s impossible to get people engaged in a problem without offering a solution.

There are a lot of political and activist groups that coalesce support around the idea that climate change can be solved with more green energy and less fossil fuels. But we need to remember that we don’t emit CO2 to annoy environmentalists. It is the by-product of today’s immense availability of power, which provides everything we need and demand from modern society: heat, cold, transport, electricity and food.

The link is strong and clear: if you have access to lots of cheap energy, this typically means you’ve escaped poverty, you will live a long life, you have access to a good education and healthcare, you won’t starve to death or die from easily curable diseases. These are manifestly good things, which is why the world has spent the past two centuries ensuring more and more people can access lots of energy.

In 1800, almost all energy was renewable. Humanity used energy from draught animals ploughing fields and pulling carts and from firewood heating hearths and homes. And almost everyone put in long hours of harsh, backbreaking labour. Studies from Sweden suggest that 80 per cent of energy came from wood, with animals and humans each providing about half of the rest. Wind and water provided crucial ship transport and flour milling but rarely much more — in Germany, this provided only 1.5 per cent of all energy.

After this, coal, then oil, gas and finally nuclear power were transformative in helping humanity. These gave us the ability to achieve much more with much less labour. At the end of the 19th century, human labour made up 94 per cent of all industrial work in the US. Today, it constitutes only 8 per cent.

Yet humanity has actually never experienced an “energy transition” — a shift from one set of energy sources to another set. Rather, we have added more and more. When the world first discovered coal, we didn’t stop using wood. In fact, global wood consumption has kept increasing during the past two centuries, and since 1850 coal has kept increasing, too. The same is true with oil, gas, hydropower and nuclear.

The only consistent development shift during the past centuries is the relative move away from ­renewables: in 1800 they provided about 94 per cent of all energy in the world, dropping to about 14 per cent by 1971 and flattening out from there. In 2017, after almost three decades of intense climate policies, the world still received 14.2 per cent of its energy from ­renewables (not only wind and solar but also hydro and biomass). This is not surprising: renewables have two big ­problems.

First, they take up an amazing amount of space that often rep­laces nature. To replace a 1ha gas-fired power plant, society needs 73ha of solar panels, 239ha of onshore wind turbines or an unbelievable 6000ha of biomass.

Second — and most important — solar and wind power are intermittent or unreliable. Solar energy isn’t produced when it is overcast or at night. Wind energy isn’t produced when there is little or no wind. We often hear that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels, but at best that is true only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. It is deeply misleading to compare the energy cost of wind or solar to fossil fuels only when it is windy and sunny.

What’s more, because modern society requires 24-hour power, even when solar or wind is introduced, it’s still necessary to pay for back-up service from fossil fuels (for when there’s no wind or sun), only these are now more expensive because fossil fuels have fewer hours to back the capital investment. And batteries are nowhere near ready to help solar and wind energy last longer. In the US, total battery storage could power the nation for only 14 seconds.

But fixing global warming is not mostly about cutting Australian emissions. It is about finding a way to cut global emissions: from China, India, the US, all of Europe and the rest of the world. Furthermore, it is not only about fixing where we get our electricity from as electricity constitutes about only a quarter of global emissions.

There is a focus on emissions from electricity because although it is very hard to end our reliance on fossil fuels and solutions are far from effective, it’s actually easier and further ahead than the other sectors: agriculture (24 per cent of emissions), manufacturing (21 per cent), transport (14 per cent), buildings (6 per cent) and other (10 per cent).

Right now, our solutions to ­climate change are failing. We may feel as if we’re doing a lot, but the ­reality is we are mostly tinkering at the margins, often with incredibly ineffective policies.

The EU has already set up an emissions trading system, putting caps on how much CO2 the electricity sector emits. This means that when Germany or Denmark puts up solar panels or wind turbines with expensive subsidies, it doesn’t cut one single tonne of CO2. Every tonne of CO2 avoided there simply means the price on the ETS declines slightly, making it cheaper for, say, Polish coal to emit that much more CO2. While the EU likes to point to its green achievements, more than two-thirds of its energy still comes from fossil fuels. Nuclear energy contributes 13 per cent of CO2-free energy and renewables 15 per cent. And even this figure of 15 per cent is dubious.

Most people think renewables are overwhelmingly made up of solar and wind. Nothing could be further from the truth. Solar and wind contributed only 2.4 per cent of the EU total energy demand in 2017, according to the latest numbers from the International Energy Agency. Another 1.7 per cent came from hydro and 0.4 per cent from geothermal energy.

In comparison, 10 per cent — more than two-thirds of all the ­renewable energy in the EU — comes from the world’s oldest ­energy source: wood.

The EU adopts the fictitious position that biomass such as wood pellets produce no CO2 at all. The truth is wood emits more CO2 per kilowatt hour than even coal, mostly because its combustion is less ­effective. The EU position assumes that felled forests will be replanted, with each new sapling eventually soaking up all the burned CO2. But forests often are not replaced, in which case CO2 emissions are permanent and large, and even under optimal conditions the wood burned today will become CO2-neutral only towards or after the end of the century.

Moreover, reliance on burning American forests in EU stoves leads to “biodiversity loss, deforestation and forest degradation”, ­according to a European Commission report. This shows the EU’s climate “achievement” — of ­increasing its use of renewables — is mostly deceptive, and the vast part of it is unsustainable.

But climate policy is non-existent or failing even more markedly in the rest of the world for a very simple reason: more energy means more income, longer lives, less disease and more education. Typically, the cheapest way to achieve this is through coal. The International Energy Agency’s newest report finds that when adjusting for the unreliability of solar and wind, existing coal will be cheaper than new solar and wind everywhere at least until 2040, and dramatically so in the EU. This simple fact is the reason we do not yet have a solution to global warming: green energy mostly can’t yet compete globally with fossil fuels. Campaigners casually suggest we can capture CO2 and store it underground, disregarding the reality that even capturing a slim 15 per cent of emissions would require infrastructure larger than the world’s biggest $US2 trillion industry, the oil industry, which took 100 years and an incredibly profitable product to create.

Promises to populate the world with electric cars have failed just as spectacularly, despite unpreced­ented subsidies. Today, fewer than 0.3 per cent of all cars are electric, and even if we could reach 200 million electric cars in 2040, the IEA estimates this would ­reduce emissions by less than 1 per cent. That is why, in the face of years of failure, politicians have continued doing one thing: making ever bigger promises.

The promises made in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in the Kyoto Treaty in 1997 fell apart. A new study of the promises made under the Paris Agreement finds that of almost 200 signatories, only 17 countries — the likes of Samoa and Algeria — are living up to them, and these are succeeding mostly because they promised so little. But even if every country did everything promised in the Paris Agreement, the emission cuts by 2030 would add up to only 1 per cent of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2C.

Failure has not made politicians more careful. If anything, they have doubled down on making nice-sounding promises, even ones that are objectively ludicrous with zero chance of happening. The German promise to phase out coal in 2038, for example, is ­described by Smil as “completely unrealistic”.

Politicians across the world happily promise to emit net zero CO2 by 2050, knowing they will be long retired from politics when those vows are broken. Achieving this will be almost impossibly expensive, likely provoking “yellow vest” street riots long before their conclusion. After New Zealand made its 2050 zero emissions promise, the government commissioned a report on the costs. This found that achieving this goal in the most cost-effective manner (which strains credulity because policy seldom if ever manages to be cost efficient) would cost more than last year’s entire national budget on social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defence, environment and every other part of government combined. Each and every year.

UN secretary-general ­Antonio Guterres is inviting all heads of state to New York next September to promise jointly to cut global emissions to zero by 2050. To see exactly how unrealistic this is, look at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s five policy scenarios for the 21st century. The most optimistic “sustainable” scenario puts on green-tinted glasses to envisage a world in which the rich countries happily accept having their energy availability cut in half and people in the poor world accept they will never catch up even to half of rich-world energy availability.

Despite such heroic and far-fetched assumptions, this scenario expects the world to get only one-fifth of its energy from renewables by 2050. In this wonder-scenario, global emissions will be 10 per cent above what they are today. And of course all other, more realistic scenarios find 2050 emissions much higher.

The belief that we already have the solutions is a delusion on a planetary scale. It may be comforting to tell ourselves that global warming is effectively solved. It’s dangerous because it leads to us taking at face value promises and vows that have no chance of being enacted. And it is reckless because it stops us from focusing on what we need to do instead.

If we do care to fix climate, we need to change course. This was clearly shown by 27 of the world’s top climate economists and three Nobel laureates who looked at the whole gamut of climate solutions for Copenhagen Consensus.

If we keep doing what we’ve done so far and make more promises to cut carbon in ineffective ways such as subsidising wind and solar, each dollar spent will avoid only 3c of climate damage.

The Nobel laureates and ­climate economists found ­investing in green innovation is the best investment. To see why, think back to the 1960s and 70s when the world worried about mass starvation, epitomised by ­recurrent famines. If we had adopted today’s approach to climate, we’d have asked everyone (especially the rich) just to eat less while we sent small amounts of food from rich countries to poor. It didn’t succeed.

What did work was the Green Revolution. Through practical innovation — irrigation, fertiliser, pesticides and plant breeding — the Green Revolution increased world grain production by an ­astonishing 250 per cent between 1950 and 1984, raising the calorie intake of the world’s poorest people and reducing the incidence of serious famines.

Instead of tinkering around the edges, innovation tackled the problem head-on. Instead of asking people to do less with less, innovation offered the ability to produce more with less. Would-be catastrophes have regularly been pushed aside throughout human history because of innovation and technological development.

In general, investment in long-term innovation is woefully underfunded because it is hard for private investors to capture the full benefits of their innovations. If you discover a new technology that during the next 40 years becomes the foundation for a new, cheap green energy source, that is great for the world but your patent will have run out long before that happens. Therefore we can’t rely solely on private innovation. (This is true in medicine and many other areas where governments regularly invest huge sums into basic research, some of which eventually results in amazing breakthroughs.)

The best example in climate is the 10-year $US10 billion public investment into shale gas in the US. While it wasn’t intended as ­climate policy, it led the way for a surge in production of cheap gas, which outcompeted a significant part of US coal consumption. Because gas emits about half the CO2 of coal, the US has reduced emissions more than any other country in the past 10 years.

The evidence created by specialist climate economists for Copenhagen Consensus showed that a substantial increase in green R&D could do much more than any carbon-cutting promises. If we could help innovate the price of low or zero CO2 energy down below fossil fuels, not only rich Australians but also Indians, Chinese and everyone else would switch. Right now, unfortunately, the world is spending ever less on low-carbon research and development. Since the 80s, spending has slid from 0.06 per cent to less than 0.03 per cent of gross domestic product in the OECD.

There is a compelling case to do a lot more. The Nobel laureates looking at all the evidence for ­Copenhagen Consensus concluded that we should aim to reach about 0.2 per cent of global GDP — or about six times more than today. This could be funded by a low and moderately rising carbon tax (giving businesses an incentive to cut emissions but not telling them how to do it) and would set us on a pathway to resolving climate change.

On the sidelines of Paris in 2015, Tony Abbott, the prime minister at the time, US president Barack Obama and philanthropist Bill Gates promised to double green energy R&D by 2020 — much less than what the Nobel laureates suggest but at least a start. The government is not living up to this promise: since 2015, Australian investment has fallen from 0.02 per cent of GDP to 0.01 per cent in 2016 and 2017, the latest years for which the International Energy Agency has data.

Investing dramatically more into green energy R&D means we can start looking for lots of solutions. It could mean better solar and wind, combined with batteries. We certainly should research those areas further (rather than erecting masses more inefficient solar panels and wind turbines today). But we also need to focus on exploring fusion, fission, water splitting and many other ideas.

Craig Venter, the biotechnologist and geneticist who led the first draft sequence of the human ­genome, argues for research into an algae, grown on the ocean surface, that produces oil. Because it simply converts sunlight and CO2 to oil, burning it will be CO2-free. It is far from cost-effective now, but researching this and many other solutions is not only cheap but ­offers our best opportunity to find real breakthrough technologies.

If we could make alternative technologies cheaper than fossil fuels, we wouldn’t have to force (or subsidise) anyone to stop burning coal and oil. Everyone would shift to the cheaper and cleaner alternatives.

Nobody can predict with certainty whether the breakthrough technology will be algae, solar and batteries, fusion or something else altogether. Finding the solution could take a decade or it could take four. But we do know that we ­certainly won’t solve climate change with the current approach of making big promises and investing in inefficiency.

Climate economists for Copenhagen Consensus calculated the returns to society from investing in green energy R&D as $11 for every dollar invested — more than 500 times more effective than current EU climate policies.

Those who claim we already have a solution to climate change are right in only one sense: ­humanity has no shortage of ­capacity for innovation. It needs to be unleashed.

SOURCE




Outgoing British PM pledges to pass law to eliminate UK greenhouse gas emissions by 2050

A lot of silliness.  Passing a law will not make anything happen.  Unless concrete actions are taken to reduce carbon, the law will be a dead letter.  Passing laws that actually do something will be a lot harder and may never be seen

In one of her final acts as British prime minister, Theresa May pledged Wednesday to pass legislation that will commit the United Kingdom to eliminating its contribution to climate change by 2050, the first country in the Group of Seven advanced economies to do so.

May said that Britain will enact in law a commitment to produce net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, one of the most ambitious targets in the world.

"This country led the world in innovation during the Industrial Revolution, and now we must lead the world to a cleaner, greener form of growth," May said.

Environmental groups welcomed the announcement but raised concerns about how, exactly, Britain plans to meet these targets.

Major protests in the United Kingdom, including by children skipping school to march through cities, have helped push the issue of climate change to the top of the political agenda.

A campaign group called Extinction Rebellion has also organized several high-profile protests, leading to more than 1,000 arrests. One of its demonstrations included a "die in" at the Natural History Museum, where hundreds of demonstrators lay down in a big hall below a skeleton of a blue whale to raise awareness of predicted mass-extinction events caused by humans.

May is keen to cement a legacy beyond Brexit in her final weeks as prime minister. She resigned as party leader Friday and will officially step down as head of government once her successor is found, mostly likely in late July.

"It's clear this is a legacy issue, and it really is a tremendous legacy for her to leave behind," said Bob Ward, policy director for the London-based Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

The UK has demonstrated that it knows how to rapidly decarbonize its energy mix. Ward said that since 1990, Britain's greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by 44 percent while the economy grew by more than 75 percent.

One of the main factors is the phasing out of coal. Last month, Britain went for two weeks without using coal to generate power, the first time it's done so since the late 19th century.

But achieving the new targets will require profound change - the current policy is to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Philip Hammond, the finance secretary, said that meeting the change could cost 1 trillion pounds, leaving less money for public services such as schools and hospitals, according to a letter leaked to the Financial Times.

The new law highlights the stark contrast between the UK and the United States administrations over their approaches to climate change. Speaking alongside President Trump at their joint news conference last week, May said that in talks with Trump, she "set out the UK's approach to tackling climate change and our continued support for the Paris agreement."

Trump has previously called climate change a "hoax" and announced his intention to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

Trump told Britain's ITV broadcaster last week that he was pressed on the issue by Prince Charles, who has long been outspoken about the environment. Trump said he told Charles that "the United States right now has among the cleanest climates."

Analysts said the legislation could go through within a week or so, since it can be done through an amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act.

Greenpeace UK said it was a "big moment" in the fight against climate change, but the group also raised concerns about loopholes that could mean Britain would achieve its goal partly through international carbon credits, which Greenpeace argued could shift the burden to developing nations.

Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, said in a statement: "As the birthplace of the industrial revolution, it is right that the UK is the world's first major economy to commit to completely end its contribution to climate change, but trying to shift the burden to developing nations through International Carbon Credits undermines that commitment. This type of offsetting has a history of failure and is not, according the government's climate advisers, cost efficient."

The decision "fires the starting gun for a fundamental transformation of our economy," Parr said. "The government must immediately upgrade our electricity, construction, heating, agriculture and transport systems. They must cancel the Heathrow 3rd runway and road-building plans, and invest public money and provide significant policy support to protect communities, workers and the planet."

Several of the politicians seeking to replace May as prime minister have come out with strong positions on tackling climate change. Boris Johnson, the current favorite, has written several newspaper articles in support of the environment.

Ward, the climate change expert, said none of the candidates hoping to be the next prime minister are likely to speak out against the target, not least because it's seen as an important issue for younger voters.

"You won't see any of the Tory leadership hopefuls speaking out against this," he said. "That creates a sense of political stability, at least. It's not about whether we should get to the 2050 target, it will be a discussion about the best way of doing it."

SOURCE




Pete Buttigieg: ‘The Time Has Come to Treat Climate Disruption as the Security Issue That It Is’

Clever Pete has loaded the latest jargon: "Climate Disruption".  No evidence that he knows anything more though

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is calling for treating “climate disruption” as a national security issue.

Speaking at the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Sunday, Buttigieg said Republicans don’t own national security.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that they own national security, not when their vision of security goes no further than putting up a wall from sea to shining sea, because that’s not going to help with cyber security. That’s not going to help with election security. That’s not going to help us name and confront the violent white nationalism that presents a clear and present threat to our country,” he said.

“I don’t have to tell Cedar Rapids that the time has come to treat climate disruption as the security issue that it is, which is why we should not only rejoin the Paris Accords, we ought to have a Pittsburgh summit to bring together American cities and communities to do something about the issue with federal support,” Buttigieg added.

He said freedom and patriotism are not conservative-only values.

“Freedom is not a conservative value. It is an American value, and while our Republican friends like to talk about freedom like it’s theirs alone, we know that freedom includes economic freedom, and you’re not free if you don’t have a living wage in this country. The GOP has sacrificed its ability to claim to be the party of freedom, especially when we see an attack on women’s reproductive freedom that all of us, especially men, ought to be standing up to defend,” Buttigieg said.

“And yes, here in Iowa, where you turned heads around the nation 10 years ago, we know that you’re not free if some county clerk gets to tell you who you ought to marry based on their idea of their religion,” he said.

“Freedom’s not a conservative value. Patriotism’s not a conservative only value, and God does not belong to any political party, least of all the one that produced this current president,” Buttigieg said.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************