Monday, January 08, 2024
Biden Slammed for Pushing 'Energy Colonialism' on Africa
President Joe Biden's "green" energy crusade has done lasting damage to the United States. His often unconstitutional attempts to force a "transition" as part of his plan to "end" fossil fuels gutted American energy independence, drove gas prices to their all-time highs, and sent energy costs skyrocketing — causing the president to drain the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lows not seen since the 1980s.
It's all part of Biden and his administration's attempts to earn proverbial gold stars from woke ESG types who've convinced the Biden White House to consider "climate change" an existential threat. The costly damage done by Biden's energy transition continues even as congressional testimony explains that there's no dollar amount the federal government could spend that would lower global temperatures. And the damage being done by Biden's energy crusade has expanded beyond our own borders.
In a recent New York Post op-ed, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL), slammed the Biden administration’s decision to export (and force) his "green" agenda on African nations. Explaining that "[e]nergy poverty is at the heart of Africa's development challenges," the Republican lawmakers say that Biden's "decision to impose oppressive, burdensome restrictions on developing African countries attempting to advance and lift themselves from destitution and dependence is profoundly concerning."
Calling Biden's policy in Africa "simply energy colonialism," McCaul and Diaz-Balart noted that the administration "only allows so-called 'green-energy projects' to receive funding and support" from the U.S., rather than "leveraging all available tools to pull Africa out of energy poverty."
As is on-brand for the Biden administration, the lawmakers call the president's Africa policy "hypocritical and a huge waste of money and opportunities."
President Biden’s unauthorized climate envoy, John Kerry, is flying around the world in jet planes while abandoning the African people to the impossible task of solving their serious energy crises with ineffective and counterproductive solutions: solar panels filled with parts made by forced labor in Communist China.
Most recently he and other administration officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, attended COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, where they pledged billions in taxpayer money to the Green Climate Fund — a slush fund for special-interest projects with no real oversight that has funded projects in China, the world’s second-largest economy.
These pledges of billions in taxpayer money invested only in perceived ‘green’ projects will do nothing to address the true drivers of pollution — like China — or empower the African continent.
[...]
Instead of confronting the world’s second-largest economy, responsible for 27% of global emissions — more than six times the emissions of the entire continent of Africa — the Biden administration is holding undeveloped countries to an unfair standard.
Much like his attempts to crush the U.S. economy and energy sector to appease climate alarmists with actions that won't actually fix the problems they say exist, Biden's policy in Africa won't do anything but harm residents. As McCaul and Diaz-Balart rightly note: "if Africa were to reduce its emissions to zero, the enormous sacrifice that would entail would still have almost no effect on a global scale."
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New York City’s Climate Policies Could Make Life Even More ‘Unaffordable’ For The Middle Class
New York City is moving forward with several climate policies which are likely to make everyday life even more costly for the middle class in one of the country’s most expensive cities.
The city is aiming to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% come 2050, push a sweeping building electrification mandate known as Local Law 97 and impose an automobile traffic congestion fee, each of which will increase the costs of living or working in the nation’s largest city, especially for the middle class, energy and New York policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan each already rank within the 15 most expensive places to live in the U.S., according to an analysis conducted by CNBC.
“The city is wealthy because, somewhere out there, people are producing energy, food, clothing and so on, and people are trading all of that in New York,” Dan Kish, a senior fellow for the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF. The city’s emissions target “will make things more expensive and drive people away to places like Florida,” he added.
That flight of capital would shrink the tax base, thereby straining the city’s finances further, Kish told the DCNF. “People without the means, working people, do not have the opportunity to just pack up and leave,” Kish told the DCNF. “But it’s easy if you’re Mike Bloomberg.”
Local Law 97, meanwhile, is poised to impose emissions standards that approximately 50,000 buildings in New York City will have to meet starting in 2024, with additional restrictions imposed starting in 2030, according to The New York Times.
Some buildings are easier to retrofit with the appropriate wiring and equipment necessary to comply than others, and a large share of the high costs incurred by landlords and building owners for coming into compliance will almost certainly be passed on to residents, Jane Menton, a mother who lives in a Queens co-op and has led a grassroots effort to fight against Local Law 97, told the DCNF.
“Progressives in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn are so afraid to go against the narrative that this rule is a climate solution… but it’s unaffordable to convert buildings to electric so they won’t convert to comply with the rule, they will just pay fines which will then allow the city to use the money to plug gaps in the budget,” Menton told the DCNF. “The same politicians and advocates who claim to care about the city’s working class wrote a law that will push them out of their homes… functionally, this law is just a carbon tax on the middle class.”
Notably, other cities, such as Boston, have pushed for similar building electrification policies to fight climate change, and the Biden administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help state and municipal governments pursue policies that “decarbonize” buildings as well.
The New York City congestion pricing tax is promulgated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which is technically not an agency operating under the auspices of the municipal government.
Congestion pricing is meant to reduce emissions and air pollution by charging drivers fees to enter certain sections of the city. Specifically, the MTA has proposed to charge passenger cars $15 and trucks as much as $36 to be able to enter a large swath of Manhattan, according to local outlet NBC 4.
However, the proposal may not significantly reduce the amount of traffic that piles up on the city’s roadways, potentially even increasing the amount of congestion in areas like the Bronx, according to the New York Post. Qualifying low-income drivers who register with the appropriate authorities could also receive a 50% discount on the charges after their first ten trips into the relevant area of Manhattan, according to local digital news outlet northjersey.com
“Congestion pricing should be viewed primarily as a revenue action to cover the MTA’s indefensibly high capital costs,” Ken Girardin, director of research for the Empire Center, a New York-focused think tank, told the DCNF. “As to congestion itself, policymakers have declined to do basic things like enforce parking rules or dial back the parking permits given to public employees or other policy changes that would take cars off lower Manhattan roads because those aren’t things you can borrow money against.”
The policy would also make life more expensive for people who do not live in the city but make the commute each day to go to work, according to Politico. Notably, politicians in London, the U.K’s largest metropolis, have attempted a similar scheme, which Republican New York City Councilman Joseph Borelli of Staten Island described as “a complete disaster” and an “abject failure” when discussing New York’s forthcoming version of the scheme in January.
“If all of New York state went ‘net-zero’ today, United Nations climate modeling indicates that a mere 0.0023° F of global warming would be avoided by 2050. That is far from measurable, much less significant. So nothing would be accomplished,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, told the DCNF. Businesses will stay in NYC and play along with the climate agenda, including high taxes, as long as costs can be passed on to locals. When profitability stops, businesses will leave… The costs of the climate agenda are regressive. Poorer people will feel them first.”
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Data Falsifies ABC News’ Claim that 2023 Displayed Dangerous Heat Trends
A recent article at ABC News titled, “2023 was the year of record heat temperatures,” makes a slew of claims about global warming in 2023, including that extreme heat is becoming more common and more disastrous. These claims are misleading. While the planet has modestly warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, and high temperatures were recorded this year in various locations, there is no evidence that recent temperature trends constitute an emergency or signify global change. New local records for both heat and cold are set almost every year. Many of the examples cited by ABC News are misattributed to greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to other human causes and a variety of natural influences that climate scientists acknowledge contributed to this year’s warmth.
A team of four contributors write that “record-eclipsing temperatures will no longer be an anomaly if greenhouse gas emissions that fuel global warming continue at the current pace,” and that “hotter-than-normal temperatures could soon become the norm if fossil fuel extraction does not significantly decrease before 2030.”
ABC also mentions the goal of keeping warming to no more than 1.5 °C – but this value is arbitrary, as admitted by climate scientists and discussed very recently at Climate Realism in “Reason is Right, There is No ‘Climate Cliff’.” ABC neglects to mention that this threshold is not a scientifically established one, but rather a political talking point.
ABC spends the bulk of the article citing the “most consequential” stories about extreme heat this year, including two sections that deal with “warmest month on record” claims and “record stretches of triple-digit temperatures” describing heat records in El Paso, Phoenix, Death Valley National Park, and one four day stretch of allegedly “hottest day ever recorded” worldwide.
While it is true that average temperatures are rising (unevenly), and that the American southern states had some above-average temperatures this year, ABC’s claims are misleading and problematic.
It is notable that most of the temperature records that were broken were exceeded by a tenth of a degree or less, which is hardly alarming. In addition, the claims about record temperatures in cities in the United States are misleading since they are based on measurements from urban temperature stations, which Climate Realism and The Heartland Institute have repeatedly shown are woefully biased by the Urban Heat Island effect. For example, Phoenix, Arizona’s “record-breaking heatwave,” was clearly the result of the urban heat island effect is at work.
Climate Realism discussed this fact in “OilPrice.com Contributor Misses the UHI Influence on Phoenix Warming Trend,” and “Record Phoenix Warmth Not Reflected in Surrounding Weather Station Data.” The summer record high lows at night came from a single station located at major airport. It is widely recognized by researchers that there can be a massive temperature difference between desert cities like Phoenix and the surrounding rural areas at night– up to 20 degrees.
Despite the many summertime heat records, the summer of 2023 was only the 13th warmest summer on record since measurements began in 1895. Climate Realism has likewise repeatedly refuted claims about particular days, months or the whole summer being the hottest ever here, here, and here, for example.
Another section for ABC News’ story, “extraordinary marine temperatures,” correctly states that Atlantic Ocean temperatures were above-average. Unfortunately, rather than soberly discussing the larger trend and possible causes, ABC News cites absurd claim that ocean temperatures off the Florida coast were 101 degrees as proof of the danger. This is particularly egregious fearmongering, as this temperature was recorded by a single buoy located partially inland in the Everglades. No other device recorded this high of a temperature. As discussed at Climate Realism, the buoy was in very shallow water, and may have even been beached at the time of the recorded temperature. Publicly available data from the buoy shows that the record temperature was set at low tide during the hottest part of the day. It is also not the hottest temperature recorded by this buoy, which was in 2017 at 102°F.
ABC claimed Florida’s ocean temperatures caused a mass bleaching event, and worked as “super fuel for hurricanes.” Neither of these claims is accurate. Some coral did bleach this summer, but it is unclear that temperatures were the sole or even primary cause. In addition, coral bleaching is not the same thing as coral death. Most corals are evolved to prefer warmer equatorial waters. The worst disaster for corals and other marine life in the past has been when the Florida Keys suffered freezing cold temperatures. Even after the 2010 die-offs, the reefs bounced back, and there is no reason for believing this won’t be the case this year as well. More importantly, there is no reason to believe that modest warming will cause permanent disappearance of corals in Florida.
Similarly, while warmer waters can fuel strong hurricanes, it’s more complicated than that. Climate Realism has shown the actual data on hurricanes amid global warming dozens of times, there has been no increase in strong cyclones. Also, contrary to the impression left by the ABC News story, there were no record setting hurricanes in Florida this year.
In the section titled “Record melting at the poles” ABC references the usual fearmongering about Antarctica, particularly the so-called “doomsday glacier.” Antarctica is a poor case study for climate alarm, as the continent’s ice refuses to behave the way alarmists claim it should. Antarctica has not displayed any sign of the warming seen other places on the planet, with the exception of some ocean temperatures that have led to melting in the Peninsula region.
However, overall there has been an expansion of ice in Antarctica, as discussed in “Thanks, Frontline News, For Debunking Alarming Claims Made About Antarctica’s Temperature and Ice Trends.” In the areas that have seen melting, the total ice loss per year is around 0.0003 percent of the total ice mass, and the melt is being driven by subsurface geothermal activity and shifting ocean currents.
ABC also makes alarming claims about Arctic warming, claiming that sea ice and snow extent are well below the long-term average. While it’s true that the Arctic has seen sea ice mass loss over time, recent years have seen a decline in the rate of loss, not acceleration.
Most telling is that ABC News makes no mention whatsoever of some of the natural factors that gave 2023’s heat a boost.
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Insect apocalypse: Call to restrict pesticide ‘more toxic than DDT’
For a start, the toxicity of DDT has been greatly exaggerated. In large concentrations it causes adverse effects such as eggshell thinning in some birds but it is completely NON-toxic to people. Populations of many birds allegedly affected by DDT continue to decline depite the banning of DDT so that suggests that the "guilt" of DDT has been exaggerated
And the harm caused to birds has to be balanced by the benefits it has conferred on people. By destroying moquitoes, for instance, it has saved many lives that would have otherwise been lost to malaria.
In September 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared its support for the indoor use of DDT in African countries where malaria remains a major health problem, citing that benefits of the pesticide outweigh the health and environmental risks.
And DDT remains the one really effective eradicator of bedbugs
The studies below which find a diminution in some insect populations completely ignore two causes of the decline which are NOT attributable to agricultural pesticides:
1). Habitat loss. As more and more land is taken over for farming and urban use there is inevitably a loss of habitat for species previously present on that land.
2). People exert considerable effort to eradicate pest insects such as mosquitoes and flies. Other species could get caught up in that. And people are NOT going to become suddenly tolerant of mosquito bites etc
So the alleged link to neonic use is simply not established by the frequency studies set out below
Noticed fewer moths fluttering around outside lights in the evening or that butterflies seem less frequent visitors? Or that your car’s windscreen remains clearer of the haze of dead flies after a long journey than it used to? Part of the problem appears to point towards the use of a range of pesticides called neonicotinoids which Australian authorities are accused of being slow to regulate.
Ecologist Francisco Sanchez-Bayo from environmental sciences at Sydney University pulled together 100 long-term studies of the global fortunes of insects. He concluded that worldwide an average 37 per cent of species were declining, while populations of 18 per cent were increasing – those were agricultural herbivores and nuisance pests. Aquatic insect communities like mayflies, midges and sedges were even worse off: 42 per cent of species were declining and 29 per cent increasing.
The review threw up some interesting highlights. In northern NSW (Murwillumbah, north of Byron Bay), sampled for butterflies over 23 years, the overall abundance of 21 species declined by 57 per cent due to human disturbance.
Changes among 46 butterfly species in a peripheral urban landscape near Melbourne studied since 1941 found 36 to 48 per cent of species declined since 1981.
In Denmark, a small farmland area was sampled using the “windscreen splash” method between 1997 and 2017. Overall abundance of flying insects that crashed car windscreens declined 97 per cent along a 25 -kilometre road.
Sanchez-Bayo said: “In the 1990s, when I used to go to the Macquarie Marshes [north of Dubbo] to do research, as anyone who drove for a few hours to the countryside at that time would know, you had to stop to clean the windscreen. You don’t have to do that any more.
“In the case of Melbourne, the number of butterflies declined due to urbanisation, they were common years ago, but now they are just disappearing. We are talking about global declines, in Finland, Indonesia and the Amazon, everywhere. There is massive abuse with pesticides and other chemicals, fertilisers and so on which have contaminated the environment affecting mainly aquatic insects.”
One particular branch of pesticides, the neonicotinoids (also known as neonics) are used to treat seeds before planting and are claimed to increase crop yields. Scientists are now comparing neonicotinoids with DDT, of which the devastating effects on wildlife were revealed in the 1960s.
Roger Kitching, on the conservation committee of the Australian Entomological Society, says DDT affected vertebrates, particularly birds, but now, equally, insects deserve to be a major cause for concern due to their part in the food chain.
“The substitution of the range of earlier pesticides for the current generation of neonics and others is particularly bad for insect fauna,” he said. “These pesticides are systemic, that is they act from within plants, they are persistent, water-soluble and are very general in the species they target.
“When insects decline in ecosystems there are knock-on effects because of their roles as bird food, pollination vectors, plant munchers and so on – even though neonics do not impact vertebrates directly they have measurable impacts through these food-chain effects.”
In June, US ecologist Mike Miller, who works for Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources, told a fly-fishing podcast that he had found neonics in randomly selected waterways throughout the state. He said a lethal dose of neonics the size of a sugar grain was enough to kill 125,000 honey bees.
“One of those little paper sachets holds between 3 -4 grams of sugar and the comparable amount of neonics is enough to kill 600 million honey bees,” he said. “Neonics are thought to be 7000 times more toxic than DDT.”
The podcast host, fly-fishing guru Tom Rosenbauer, said: “It seems like in the past 10 years or so you hear so many fly-fishers complaining that the hatches [of insects] aren’t what they used to be. There seems to have been a dramatic decline in insects since neonics became popular.”
Miller’s comments were based on a scientific paper by ecologist Dave Goulson published a decade ago, called An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticide. Goulson, now at Sussex University, said 5 grams was enough to kill half of 1.25 billion bees and leave the other half just alive [known as an LD50 dose].
“While that figure is accurate, the levels of neonics found in the environment are pretty low and a bee would have to consume several CCs [cubic centimetres] of nectar to get a lethal dose, which it might do in its lifetime, but not in a morning,” he said. “The evidence we have is that bees are probably consuming less than a lethal dose, but that doesn’t mean that we can all breathe a sigh of relief that all is well.
“There is evidence that sub-lethal doses can seriously mess up the bees in a whole bunch of different ways – reduce their fertility, their ability to navigate and their resistance to disease. If their disease-resistance is knocked out by exposure to a pesticide, and then they are exposed to a virus transmitted by the Varroa mite, then there are many people who believe it does explain why bee colonies are collapsing.
“For an aquatic insect, you are not drinking the pesticide, you are bathing in it. The evidence is that anything over about 1 part per billion in a stream, which is the level which is commonly exceeded, it is enough to be impacting on aquatic insects when they are exposed to it 24/7.”
Asked if he felt Australia was behind other countries in regulating neonics, he added: “That would seem to be the case, the European regulators are pretty slow to act, but they thought the evidence was sufficiently compelling five years ago to act, and lots of other countries have followed suit in various ways. Within the developed world, Australia would appear to be at the tail end of the queue to do something about neonics. To ignore the evidence, I think, is probably foolish.
“There is a perception that we banned the really nasty pesticides years ago, we got rid of DDT and modern pesticides are better, but in some senses modern pesticides are much more dangerous because we have invented compounds that are far, far more poisonous to insect life, it means less of them has to go astray, into rivers or whatever, to do harm.
Australian scientists have also found imidacloprid (a neonicotinoid) in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef and the reef lagoon. Professor Michael Warne at the School of the Environment, University of Queensland in a research study of 6500 samples from 14 Great Barrier Reef catchment areas found the average concentration of imidacloprid was 0.051 µg/L (micrograms/litre) between July 2009 and June 2017. That concentration is 2.5 times higher than that found in a study of Dutch rivers, which led to an annual decrease in insectivorous bird populations of 3.5 per cent.
In a paper published a year ago, Warne wrote that within the Great Barrier Reef catchment area that imidacloprid was used to control canegrubs in sugarcane and the banana weevil borer in banana crops. He said that in a not yet published work by UQ and Department of Environment and Science suggests the risks from imidacloprid since 2017 may have stabilised or decreased, in part through education programs conducted in collaboration with some industry groups.
But he said: “There are many water samples where the concentration exceeds the proposed Australian and New Zealand water quality guideline for ecosystem protection from imidacloprid.”
Imidacloprids were restricted by the EU in 2018. In June last year, New York State moved to pass the Birds and Bees Protection Act, a first-in-the-nation bill to rein in the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The Natural Resources Defence Council said in a statement: “Neonics are linked to massive bee and bird losses that impact food production, contaminate New York water and soil, and create human health concerns, especially with recent testing showing rising levels of neonics in 95+ per cent of pregnant women from New York and four other states.”
Pesticides use here is governed by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA). It updated its website page on neonicotinoids in May and lists six neonics approved for agricultural use in Australia. It published a report in 2014 and then announced a review in 2019. It states three of the six neonic pesticides used here were restricted in April 2018 in the European Union to greenhouse use only.
A spokesperson for the APVMA said in a statement: “The APVMA commenced its review of neonicotinoids in 2019 to allow for the consideration of new scientific information about risks to the environment, and to ensure safety instructions on products meet contemporary standards.
“Based on the statutory timeframes, the review is due to be completed in August 2023. The APVMA anticipates publication of proposed regulatory decisions during 2024 and has assigned additional resources to chemical review activities, including the use of external scientific reviewers to progress reviews as rapidly as possible.” However, there has been no update to the statement last May.
The authority was subject of a damning independent report in July which said it was “concerning that a number of chemical reviews have been ongoing for over 20 years”. It said the APVMA appeared reluctant to take compliance and enforcement action against industry.
Recent changes to the APVMA’s staff profile following the relocation of its offices from Canberra to Armidale in 2019, “has most likely impacted corporate knowledge, workload, and work capacity. Only a small proportion of previous APVMA staff relocated”.
Sanchez-Bayo said the APVMA was way behind schedule. “We are behind in many ways and how long it will take them to come up with a final decision we don’t know,” he said. “It is under-resourced and behind the times.
“My understanding is that the APVMA does not have enough staff, they are not properly trained in these issues, there has been a lot of turnover in the last few years. They are not producing the results they are expected to produce.”
Eddie Tsyrlin, a freshwater ecologist and waterbug taxonomist, estimates that as many as to 2000 species of freshwater invertebrates could have already been lost.
“The Ecological Safety section of Safety Data Sheet [for neonics] states that ‘these chemicals are very toxic to aquatic organisms, may cause long-term adverse effects to the aquatic environment’.
“For the adequate protection of Australian fish and invertebrates, testing needs to be done on pollution-sensitive and common species of freshwater invertebrates occurring in streams as well as in still waters. These could be mayfly and stonefly nymphs and sensitive species of midges.”
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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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