Guterres Mangles Metaphors To Pitch Extreme Climate Alarmism
History will record that the United Nations has established itself as the greatest organizational perpetrator of junk science in modern times, if not of all time, with current Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (pictured) destined to be singled out for his contribution to the grossly-distorted UN climate alarmism
Since his appointment in 2019, Guterres and the UN have lived up to our standard formal definition of junk science.
It occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risk is exaggerated (or underplayed), and “the science” is adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.
That definition encompasses a wide range of activities among scientists, NGOs, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks, and quacks who manipulate science for political, environmental, economic, and social purposes.
It also nicely captures the entire United Nations climate crusade and the work of its institutional creation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But no single official can top Guterres as a purveyor of IPCC hype and doom, a living embodiment of Hans Christian Andersen’s fabled emperor who believes he is fully, stylishly dressed but in fact, has no clothes.
Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal (1995-2002) and president of the Socialist International (1999-2005) was in typically ridiculous form on June 5th when he delivered a speech at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, at an event billed as “A Moment of Truth” and a “special address on climate action.”
Guterres talked about a planet on a “highway to climate hell,” rehashing a line he used in 2022 in Egypt at the COP27 climate conference:
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
Guterres also has no qualms about mixing and mangling metaphors.
He simultaneously told the Manhattan audience that humans are:
“like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”
The longer Guterres rambles on, the more confusing, contradictory, and senseless the metaphors become:
“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet. We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.
And the truth is … we have control of the wheel.”
Other Guterres’ climate spins include:
“Humanity has opened the gates of hell” and “become a weapon of mass extinction.”
And:
“We must go into emergency mode and put out this five-alarm fire.”
Is Guterres describing reality — or the content of a new AI computer game in which some crazed, teenaged human monster drives a flaming meteor through the ozone layer, knocking off dinosaurs before crashing onto a highway and plowing into a Russian Museum of Political Roulette just outside the Gates of Hell?
As UN secretary-general, Guterres sits atop a hierarchy of agencies such as the IPCC climate science megaplex, which was created in 1988 by two other UN agencies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
UNEP was cobbled together in 1972 as the brainchild of Maurice Strong, the late Canadian global environmental schemer, who famously mused about a fictional environmental crisis that led a group of global insiders to decide the only hope for the planet is “that the industrialized civilizations collapse”.
The current “degrowth” movement is a version of deindustrialization that reflects Guterres’ off-ramp from the highway to hell. In fact, the word “degrowth” appears 28 times in the IPCC’s sixth and latest Assessment Report.
https://principia-scientific.com/guterres-mangles-metaphors-to-pitch-extreme-climate-alarmism/
*****************************************************California Advances Bills to Ban Thicker, Reusable Plastic Bags That It Previously Required
It seems that California’s plastic bag ban has been a failure, but that is not stopping lawmakers from trying to impose a second bag ban.
California first adopted a statewide ban on “single-use” plastic bags with the passage of Senate Bill 270 in 2014.
After being held up by a referendum in November 2016, voters narrowly approved Proposition 67, thereby implementing SB 270. As a recent Mercury News report revealed, however, Democratic lawmakers who had plastic bag factories in their districts successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a provision in the bill that would allow the use of thicker plastic bags marked as recyclable.
However, people treated the thicker, “reusable” plastic bags the same as the previous “single-use” bags, which was entirely predictable. Plastic bag use is now greater than it was before the ban. Moreover, as an August 2023 Los Angeles Times article noted, not a single recycling center in California accepts the thicker, high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bags anyway.
Now, a pair of identical bills, SB 1053 and Assembly Bill 2236, would ban those thicker plastic bags and force grocery stores and retailers to sell paper bags made from at least 50 percent recycled paper for a minimum of 10 cents apiece, or reusable bags made of cloth or other washable textiles. The bills have each passed their respective chambers and are now under consideration in the opposite chamber.
So we are apparently going back to using paper bags, which, if you are old enough to recall, we were once told were not environmentally friendly, and we were scolded for using them because their manufacture required killing too many trees. In fact, those “single-use” plastic bags did have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than paper bags—and they had the added benefit of not ripping and dropping heavy loads of groceries as easily as the paper ones. (It should also be noted that the “single-use” moniker was always a misnomer, as people tended to use them to line trash bins, pick up pet waste, and store and carry a number of items after their initial use.)
In a 2013 San Diego Union-Tribune column, I asserted:
The claims that plastic bags are worse for the environment than paper bags or cotton reusable bags are dubious at best. In fact, compared to paper bags, plastic grocery bags produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, require 70 percent less energy to make, generate 80 percent less waste, and utilize less than 4 percent of the amount of water needed to manufacture them. This makes sense because plastic bags are lighter and take up less space than paper bags.
Reusable bags come with their own set of problems. They, too, have a larger carbon footprint than plastic bags. Even more disconcerting are the findings of several studies that plastic bag bans lead to increased health problems due to food contamination from bacteria that remain in the reusable bags.
In fact, according to a 2018 Danish government study, one would have to reuse a paper bag 43 times to equal the environmental performance of a “single-use” plastic bag (like the ones California already banned), a thicker polyethylene plastic bag (like the ones legislators are now trying to ban) 35 to 84 times, and an organic cotton bag 20,000 times. So, banning plastic bags will likely have a worse net effect on the environment. The substantial increase in the water needed to produce the paper bags that would largely replace them under the proposed laws seems doubly foolish for a state prone to periodic (and often severe) droughts.
Moreover, banning the existing thicker plastic bags will only prompt consumers to buy more plastic bags to replace the ones they used to use for their trash can, pet waste, and other needs. This is precisely what happened not only here in California after the previous ban but also in places like New Jersey, Ireland, and the Australian Capital Territory (where the capital of Canberra is located) after they instituted similar plastic bag bans.
California state Senator Catherine Blakespear (D-Encinitas) and Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) recently wrote a Sacramento Bee column arguing for their bills, SB 1053 and AB 2236, respectively. In their piece, the politicians decried “our culture of plastic consumption.” They noted that a wide variety of plastics have been found “in our oceans and waterways.” The language they used suggests that not only is plastic pollution a substantial problem, but also that “we” in California and the United States more broadly are major contributors to that problem. But a little perspective is in order here.
Despite having the largest economy in the world and the third-largest population, the United States emits less than 1 percent of its plastic waste into the ocean. Moreover, the U.S. is responsible for just 0.25 percent of all plastic waste emitted to the ocean (and, of course, California accounts for only a small fraction of this total). That is less than half of the plastic waste emitted by tiny Panama (which accounts for 0.53 percent of ocean waste) and only about one-third of Guatemala’s total (0.73 percent). In fact, approximately half of all plastic waste emitted to the ocean comes from the Philippines (36.4 percent) and India (12.9 percent). Other top polluters include Malaysia (7.5 percent), China (7.2 percent), and Indonesia (5.8 percent).
So it is not the large, industrialized nations like the United States that are primarily responsible for plastic waste ending up in the oceans; rather, it is the poorer, industrializing nations—particularly in Asia—that do not have adequate waste management infrastructures. Thus, punishing Californians by (once again) dictating how they should carry their groceries to their cars and into their homes will have no significant effect on plastic pollution in the oceans and, as noted above, is likely to actually be counterproductive for the environment.
If California’s previous plastic bag ban, and others around the country and the globe, have taught us anything, it is that these prohibitions are less about the environment and more about control and virtue signaling: control over how we live our daily lives (in this case, through the decision of what kinds of bags in which we may carry our food and other goods) and control over our minds, through the propaganda that falsely claims that this sacrifice will save the lives of untold numbers of cute sea turtles and other marine life.
Until Californians stop electing preening busybodies intent on meddling with and micromanaging people’s lives with harmful and suffocating mandates, however, we can expect still more pointless nanny-state laws to come out of the formerly Golden State.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/06/26/california-reusable-plastic-bags-ban/
************************************************How the Climate Hysteria Is Lowering Your Standard of Living
Interview with Doug Casey.
Excerpts:
But perhaps the average person doesn’t think about these things or care. The standard of living has gone up for so long that we tend to think it’s automatic and divinely ordained. I’m not so sure about that. Everything tends to wind down unless there is enough outside force to counteract it.
The planet will be just fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years and will be here for billions more, long after humanity has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Anyway, the climate hysterics don’t really care about “saving the planet”; even they aren’t quite that stupid. What’s going on is that they actually hate humanity. And themselves. The world is suffering from an episode of mass psychosis.
One currently fashionable indication of this is the 15-minute city, which governments are trying to impose all over the world. These would penalize you if you exit your designated 15-minute zone more than X number of times per month. The idea is green. And, like most green notions, it is very retrogressive. They want to return people to the status of medieval serfs, when few ventured more than 15 minutes from their hovels.
https://progresswithgod.com/2024/01/19/how-the-climate-hysteria-is-lowering-your-standard-of-living/
*********************************************‘Screwed’: People trying to sell their used Teslas face massive challenges
A second hand Tesla that’s been listed for sale for the past four years without finding a buyer offers a stark insight into the challenges faced by Australians trying to offload older used electric vehicles.
The 2015 Model S in question is almost a decade old and has 115,000 kilometres on the clock, with some visible wear and tear across its interior.
Despite its age and the fact it’s sat unsold since July 2020, the current owner is seeking $86,800, although the price has been discounted by almost $16,000 over the years. Used car valuations site RedBook puts the guide for such a car in a considerably lower range of $51,400 to $57,300.
It’s one of almost 1000 used Teslas currently listed on carsales.com.au, ranging from a sleek 2011 Roadster for $349,000 to a stock standard 2019 Model 3 for just $32,000.
Analysis by news.com.au shows a large number of those vehicles for sale have been languishing for several months and up to two years.
“Second hand EVs do pose some challenges for retailers and private sellers at the moment,” Michael Costello from Cox Automotive Australia, which owns the Manheim wholesale auction house, told news.com.au.
Tesla resale values slide
A “perfect storm” of factors have combined recently to deliver generally lower residual values compared to traditional fuel cars, Mr Costello said.
“New EV prices continue to get cheaper, due largely to new Chinese players and Tesla’s ongoing price cuts. When new models get cheaper, you can’t sell an older model at inflated prices,” he explained.
Carsales.com.au motoring reviewer Toby Hagon said a surge in the supply of new Teslas globally, combined with weaker demand for the brand, has seen the US carmaker aggressively discount some of its models in recent times.
“Over the past 18 months or so, there have been multiple price reductions to Teslas, the most recent of which shaved $3000 off the Model 3,” Hagon said. “It’s all aimed at luring more buyers by lowering the price.”
In addition, rapid advancements in battery technology in the past few years mean older Teslas are beginning to look “a little obsolete”, Mr Costello added.
And then there’s customer anxiety over ageing batteries, which can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 to replace.
“A lack of clarity for consumers around battery longevity beyond the eight-year warranty, and a lack of battery health tests to reassure used buyers, [is another reason].”
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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