Terrifying moment firefighters rescue a claustrophobic man after he gets TRAPPED inside his electric Corvette when the power doors stop working
I am glad that electricity goes nowhere near the door handles in my car
A TikTok video showed the scary moment firefighters had to rescue a man who was trapped inside his Corvette when the vehicle's electric doors stopped working.
The video, posted by user 'BigBroQuan95,' shows the claustrophobic man sweating in the Florida heat on a summer day as first responders surround the car.
The man, who says in the video that he is having 'an anxiety attack,' begs the firefighters to break the window, saying he doesn't care about the cost.
'Break the window. Y'all sitting here trying to Goddamn jump it, get me out of this motherf**ker,' the man says as he laughs nervously while sweat drips down his face.
In 2015, a man and his dog died in Texas after his electric-powered Corvette stopped working and they became trapped inside. His family later filed a lawsuit against GM.
The terrifying video begins with the man - who was sitting at a gas station when his car 'went dead' showing off the vehicle and the firefighters outside.
Quan - wearing a shirt embossed with the words 'determination over negativity' - says the firefighters have been working to jump the car as the temperatures soared.
'I'm sweating,' he says. 'It's hot, like 100 degrees outside. I can't get out.'
He continues, stating that he even was in fear that he was 'about to die' before the firefighters arrived to assist in his rescue.
Throughout the 90-second video, the man repeats that he is not worried about the cost of the repairs on the expensive, luxury vehicle. 'Break the window,' he screams at the first responder as they check out the car to look for alternative ways to save him. 'I'll pay for the Goddamn damage,' Quan shouts before giving one firefighter the thumbs up to shatter the glass.
A firefighter eventually comes to the passenger-side window and smashes it with a long and heavy item, immediately shattering the glass.
The first responder then has to pry the glass off car window as tiny slivers of the window fall onto the seat next to the driver.
'Get me out of this motherf**ker,' he says while laughing after the glass shattered.
The one and a half minute video eventually ends with Quan showing off his sweaty forehead and face and laughing off the stress.
In a follow-up TikTok, the Corvette owner explained that the car's door handles are electrical and require power to be able to exit the vehicle.
He told his 17,000 followers that despite 'freaking the f**k out' and 'hyperventilating' he had to calm himself down and call the police.
Quan also said he was banging on the windows trying to get people at the gas station around him to help as he was struggling inside the vehicle.
In total, Quan's original video has been liked more than 500,000 times and has surpassed more than five million views as of Monday afternoon.
Additionally, nearly 12,000 comments have been left on the clip with the general consensus being that the experience would have scared anyone.
'The way my claustrophobia is set up I woulda been kicking that window like I was in a self defense class!'
'The way my claustrophobia is set up I woulda been kicking that window like I was in a self defense class!'
'I keep a window breaking device in any car I drive because I have a fear of being trapped in a car under water. Everyone should have one.'
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Even Bill Gates is backtracking — the air’s gone out of the climate-crisis balloon
By Glenn H. Reynolds
Has the air gone out of the “climate crisis” balloon? It’s starting to look like it. Some other causes du jour are looking limp lately, too.
Oh, hysteria is still out there. In Boston this month, I passed a church whose door bore a lurid poster reading “DUE TO GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS, WORSHIP IN SANCTUARY 9-17-23 CANCELED.”
If it were really a global crisis, wouldn’t you want to be praying?
I first thought it was referring to Hurricane Lee, which had been predicted to bring apocalyptic storm conditions to Beantown. Lee, though, veered out to sea, and that Sunday was sunny, warm and delightful.
(While the soldiers of God had fled the scene in advance, the armies of Mammon were out in force on the Boston Common, in the form of a massive cannabis fair. Say what you will about the stoners, they’re not prone to panic or overthinking.)
But this seems actually a case of closing church so parishioners could go to New York to “Join us in the March to End Fossil Fuels,” which is even more amusing, since traveling uses a lot more fossil fuels than staying in Boston and praying for an end to fossil fuels, which would be at least as effective.
Bill Gates, however, is pumping the brakes on climate panic.
Speaking at a New York Times event, he observed heavy-handed policies won’t work: “If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’”
As Gates noted, many of these people are in middle-income countries, like China and India, that are the biggest contributors to carbon emissions today and whose emissions (unlike those of the United States) have been growing.
He also rained on the greens’ apocalyptic parade, saying “no temperate country is going to become uninhabitable.”
And he cautioned against untested approaches like massive tree planting: “Are we the science people or are we the idiots? Which one do we want to be?”
Well, the climate policies the political system supports are mostly the ones likely to yield the most graft, and those the corporate world supports are mostly the ones involving massive government subsidies.
But it’s interesting to see Gates softening his tone; it feels as if climate outrage has passed its sell-by date.
Oh, sure, there are still kooks in Europe gluing themselves to roadways and the occasional nut throwing oil on famous works of art, but it’s all started to seem rather forced.
When you see a shift in a social trend like this, it’s almost always happening for the same reason: The people behind it have figured out it’s doing the left more harm than good.
It’s of a piece with the sudden de-emphasis of ESG (environmental, social, governance) as a tool of corporate management.
In both cases, the detached, well-off white people who mostly run the left dreamed up causes and slogans, which their follow-the-herd peers uncritically adopted until they ran into reality and the rest of the world noticed.
The reality, as Gates is reminding us, is there’s not actually a climate “crisis” calling for drastic action tomorrow, and running businesses and institutions as if there is one is counterproductive and even outright destructive.
Another reality is the great mass of people around the globe knows this and has lost patience with it.
Likewise, investors have figured out ESG is just a way for managers to substitute fuzzy, hard-to-assess performance metrics — basically a “net wokeness” calculus — for clear and well-defined metrics like, you know, how much profit managers produce for shareholders.
It’s not really surprising that, on reflection, shareholders would rather have profit than trendy causes, and voters would rather have jobs and functioning societies than nonstop apocalyptic rhetoric.
Even Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracism center is falling apart, having produced nothing of substance.
I hope this trend continues. It would be nice to see the New York City government emphasize crime control, subway maintenance and pothole-fixing instead of trendy (and grift-filled) social-justice projects.
It would be nice to see the Department of Defense — which hasn’t won a war since Desert Storm more than 30 years ago — emphasize defeating our country’s enemies over training commanders to avoid “whiteness” and get their soldiers’ pronouns right.
Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings” are always waiting for civilizations that lose sight of fundamentals in favor of glittering fictions.
Let’s pray ours is returning to good sense before it’s too late.
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Biden State Dept. Launches New Attack on Fossil Fuels
The Biden State Department announced the release of a new guidebook for the U.S. and other countries on Tuesday and — rather than being focused on diplomatic efforts to allow human flourishing or defeating terrorists and those who give them safe harbor — it's all about cutting greenhouse gases, specifically methane, within the oil and gas industry.
Titled "Methane Abatement for Oil and Gas – Handbook for Policymakers," the new result of taxpayer funded work at the Departments of State and Commerce to advance the "Global Methane Pledge and Clean EDGE (Enhancing Development and Growth through Energy)" is little more than the Biden administration's latest attempt to go after oil and gas companies who've already been dealt a series of blows courtesy of the president's crusade to "end" fossil fuels.
A letter from Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in the guidebook repeats the same blather that's become customary for the Biden administration. "Methane emissions are a major contributor to climate change," her letter states. "Abating methane emissions are also a unique opportunity. For that reason, in 2021, the United States and its international partners established the Global Methane Pledge," another worldwide climate-related pact that includes goals and policies not assented to by Congress.
"Under the Pledge, countries commit to collectively reduce methane by 30% by 2030 from 2020 levels," Raimondo explains. "The U.S. and its partners are working now to help countries adopt methane abatement policies, mobilize methane financing, deploy abatement technologies and practices, and reform laws and regulations."
That is, the Biden administration is working to make both the U.S. and other countries around the world as strict and inhospitable to the fossil fuel industry as possible.
Within the more than 200-page "handbook," the Biden administration's guide proposes strict standards for developing countries — standards that require significantly more capital to construct and bring online, making them unreasonable for emerging markets. It also advocates for countries of the world to enact regulatory regimes across the board for existing and mid-level producers.
These regulations, according to the guide, include "prescriptive measures" to "directly require entities to undertake or not undertake specific actions or procedures" including requirements, equipment standards, and bans or moratoriums" along with "performance" requirements to "establish a mandatory performance standard for regulated entities" and economic penalties to "induce action by applying fees or introducing financial incentives for certain behaviors." In addition, the guidebook suggests information requirements under which "regulated entities estimate, measure, and report their emissions to public bodies."
Not only is the Biden administration's latest (yet rather quietly announced) attack on the fossil fuel industry at home and abroad another prescription for suffocating regulations aimed at the ultimate goal of ending oil and gas production, it's also entirely hypocritical.
Despite the handbook being produced, in part, by State Department bureaucrats, the agency isn't living up to existing climate-related pledges, let alone the regulations and requirements being prescribed for the oil and gas industry.
As Townhall noted in previous coverage of the Biden administration's climate hypocrisy, the State Department is supposed to — per a 2021 executive order signed by President Biden — report annually all greenhouse gas emissions from sources owned or controlled by a federal agency such as government vehicles and aircraft, sources that generate electricity used to keep the lights on at federal buildings, and sources not owned by but related to an agency's activities such as business travel.
Despite this requirement for the State Department, an attempt by Senators Joni Ernst (R-IA), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) to find reported emissions data from the State Department — as they're required to do — turned up nothing. According to the Government Accountability Office, the State Department still does "not have a systematic way to calculate greenhouse gas emissions from," among other means, "U.S. delegation travel."
It's another case of "do as I say, not as I do" from the climate wokescolds within the Biden administration — all for the greater goal of forcing the "green" energy transition that's anything but and ending the use of fossil fuels in the process.
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Australia's Green shoe brigade: Red carpet for renewable koala killers
Mount Morgan, less than 40 kilometres from Rockhampton, was once the largest gold mine in the world. It closed in 1990 but there’s still gold in them thar hills. These days however it comes from Renewable Energy Certificates or RECs, pronounced wrecks, which is what renewable projects are doing to grid security and the environment.
The RECs have been so lucrative that companies from all over the world have poured into Queensland lured not just by the generous REC subsidies but by a lax regulatory environment in which ministers have the discretion to override, for ‘relevant infrastructure activities’, environmental regulations regarding tree clearing, ground cover, and the amount of run-off allowed to flow into the Great Barrier Reef.
When Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was premier in the 1980s, deals were done for the ‘white shoe brigade’ that ignored regulations and delivered rapid rezoning, government loans, and subsidies for controversial developments on the basis of a nod and a wink and sometimes a rumoured brown paper bag of cash.
Under Premier Palaszczuk, Queensland is rolling out the red carpet for the Green Shoe Brigade, not so much carpetbaggers as sun and windbaggers. There’s no need for a brown paper bag. The ‘climate crisis’ justifies the immediate rezoning of pastoral and forested land to allow for industrial-scale renewable utilities.
There is an ‘anything goes’ atmosphere of the Wild West or the Wild North making Queensland’s Renewable Energy Rush every bit as feverish as the gold rush that preceded it.
The scale of what Palaszczuk is planning is Bowen-esque. The Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan launched this month has set a 50-per-cent Renewable Energy Target by 2030 and a 2032 target of up to 2,000 turbines generating 8GW of electricity, 14 million solar panels generating 4GW of electricity, and 5GW of pumped hydro and battery storage.
Yet of 54 wind plants listed, only five are operational, four are under construction, and 42 proposed. Of 129 solar plants, 40 are operational, three are under construction, and eight proposed. And of four pumped hydro storage plants, one is operational, one is committed, and two proposed.
What makes any of this credible is the speed with which projects have gone ahead in the last year and the ruthless indifference to bulldozing the last remnants of old-growth forests. Too rugged for agriculture or mining, these are the last refuges for dozens of Queensland’s most rare and threatened creatures including koalas and greater gliders.
Conservationist Steven Nowakowski calculates that 14,100 hectares of remnant forest will be cleared for 17 renewable projects in North Queensland, and 4,625 kilometres of new haulage roads will have to be bulldozed through forests to service 88 renewable energy projects in the pipeline throughout Queensland.
If a mining or oil and gas company was committing environmental destruction on this scale and it was being rubber-stamped by a Coalition government every green group and parliamentarian in the country would be up in arms. But state-funded conservation groups have said off the record that they don’t dare criticise the state government for fear of losing their funding.
Almost every renewable energy project in Queensland has triggered the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act passed by the federal government in 1999 to protect our unique plants, animals, habitats, and places.
To date, Minister for the Environment Tanya Plibersek has not covered herself in glory. Her Liberal predecessor Sussan Ley put a stop to a project at Lotus Creek to build 81 wind turbines 230 metres high spread over 48,000 hectares including 632 hectares of koala habitat and 340 hectares of greater glider habitat because it posed a ‘clearly unacceptable’ threat to koalas. The Australian Conservation Foundation welcomed the decision saying, ‘renewable energy projects should not leave biodiversity and threatened species worse off’, but said nothing when Plibersek reinstated the project with increased power generation.
Lotus Creek has a thriving koala community including females with young on their backs in pristine old-growth forests with nesting hollows supporting a flourishing ecosystem of wildlife.
A former Greens candidate, Nowakowski is a voice in the wilderness calling for the state government to turn the area into a national koala park. Horrified by the destruction wreaked by renewable energy’s massive footprint he now supports the Liberals’ nuclear energy policy and the Nationals call for a moratorium on renewables.
‘No one wants to imagine an Australia without the koalas,’ said Plibersek last month, but when it comes to a choice between protecting endangered koalas in native forests and building a wind farm, she opted for the latter.
Bulldozers will arrive any day now at Lotus Creek and if a koala is injured it must, by law, be clubbed to death. Yet unlike Ley, Plibersek hasn’t had to face accusations of being a koala killer.
Glen and Nikki Kelly are the sixth generation to run the family farm near Rockhampton – the essence of sustainable land management. They are horrified that their flourishing property will be ringed with 120 wind turbines 275 metre high which will destroy the habitat of rare and threatened species, create landslides feeding into the Great Barrier Reef, and in summer, firefighters will no longer be assisted by aircraft because the smoke-obscured turbines will make it too dangerous.
Nearby, Cedric and Therese Creed are battling a 36km2 solar plant, bigger than Norfolk Island, to be built on prime agricultural land on the Don river. In extreme weather, toxic leakage from damaged panels and batteries will poison the land and the reef. In a bushfire firefighters can’t even approach it because of toxic fumes and the risk of explosions.
What might save regions from reckless renewable development is the massive uptake of rooftop solar. Queensland’s grid is approaching what energy economist Stephen Wilson calls ‘peak renewables’. When the operator can’t buy any more renewable electricity, companies can’t earn RECs and profits are curtailed. Investment in renewable generation is at its lowest level in five years because of diminishing returns, yet electricity bills are soaring because of renewable subsidies, capital costs and weather-driven shortages.
It was National Threatened Species Day on 7 September but the threat that most concerns Plibersek and Prime Minister Albanese is the vote for the Greens in their adjacent inner-city electorates. So far, it seems their voters care more about closing down coal-fired power plants than whether Big Wind is killing koalas.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/green-shoe-brigade/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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