What Happened To The Predicted Summer Of Hell?
In March this year, the German website Climate News carried a piece by former criminal biologist & politician Marc Benecke (and now apparently also a climate expert), who declared to all and sundry this year would see a ‘summer of hell with almost complete certainty’ because of ‘climate change’
We all know what happened next in Britain. April was so cold most people had their heating on for much of the month.
This must have been another case of mass delusion though, because the Met Office confidently stated in June we had only imagined the cold, and April was in fact warmer than usual.
May turned out to be about average in terms of temperature, and the first 18 days of June were up to five degrees cooler than usual (and only half the temperature we saw in the two-week heatwave last June), before we had five days of hot temperatures.
That qualified as a heatwave because about ten years ago the Met Office reduced the number of days from seven consecutive above the average temperature for the time of year, to just three, thus allowing them to claim heatwaves are becoming more common.
After the hot week, temperatures dropped again at the end of June and into July which, along with August, are traditionally the hottest months in the UK.
The Telegraph reported June saw more sunshine than usual, but acknowledged cold air from the Arctic made it significantly cooler than usual.
The Telegraph article said 30.3C was recorded at Heathrow Airport on June 26th which, as everyone should know by now, usually gives the highest readings, not least because of the urban heat island effect, and the fact that the Heathrow weather station is right in the middle of acres of highly reflective tarmac and concrete, and probably has aircraft exhaust washing over it.
The Met Office and the mainstream media decline to mention that inconvenient fact.
Today the temperature is predicted to reach just 16C, and the forecast for the next seven days is temps in the high teens, where the average July temperature for the UK is around 22C.
So much for the summer of hell then.
Those who remember the summer of 1976 with its eight-week heatwave will probably recall it was described by many as a glorious summer, and it was.
If that happened now you would undoubtedly hear shrill cries from the gullible and the indoctrinated that ‘the end is nigh’.
We shall see what temperatures the rest of summer brings, but whatever happens, you can guarrantee with almost complete certainty to paraphrase Marc Benecke, that the BBC and the Met Office will confidently state this year was ‘the hottest on record’.
This continues to ignore the fact that the 1930s was the hottest decade, a fact climate alarmists fervently wish didn’t exist.
https://principia-scientific.com/what-happened-to-the-predicted-summer-of-hell/
*************************************************Illegal ESG Collusion Behind Decarbonization Efforts
In mid-June, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released an interim report describing collusion between radical environmental groups, progressive activists, and corporate interests, especially in the financial sector, to impose Environment, Social, and Governance goals on the American people. The Judiciary committee is, in part, charged with the “[p]rotection of trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies.” This includes protecting against collusion which reduces competition, limits consumer choice, and increases prices, in the case at hand, through efforts to decarbonize the economy, in pursuit of environmental and environmental justice demands.
Doctrinaire, elitist adherents of ESG goals view capitalism is a sin against the environment that must be restrained through social engineering to ensure that the social, environmental, and ethical ends they believe are required by a social justice, are adopted and enforced across society. Evidence shows that there is no climate crisis, but ESG pushers use the alleged threat of catastrophic climate change to push progressive ends.
The Heartland Institute was well ahead of the curve in exposing the dangers ESG poses to freedom and economic progress, with our April 2023 study exploring the ways different special interests are colluding to universalize ESG standards – Congress is finally catching up.
Congress used the power of the subpoena to force recalcitrant ESG proponents (which it labels the “climate cartel”) to give up documents detailing their collaborations to promote ESG, and concluded based on the documentation that the various groups are illegally colluding against the interest of the American people by, for example, “forcing companies to slash output of products and services that are critical to Americans’ daily lives.”
The groups colluding, include (not an exhaustive list), per the report:
Climate Action 100+, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ);
blue state pension funds like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS);
radical environmental non-profit organizations like Ceres;
stockholder engagement service providers like As You Sow;
activist investors like Arjuna Capital, LLC (Arjuna), Trillium Asset Management,
LLC, Engine No. 1 LP, and Aviva Investors Americas, LLC, which “acquire a minimal ownership stake . . . to stop climate change, not to make a financial profit;”
the “Big Three” asset managers BlackRock, Inc. (BlackRock), State Street Global Advisors (State Street), and The Vanguard Group, Inc. (Vanguard), who together own 21.9% and vote 24.9% of the shares of the Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 500;
and the foreign-owned proxy advisory duopoly of Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) and Glass, Lewis & Co. (Glass Lewis), which have a combined 90% market share and advise mutual funds controlling more than $27 trillion in assets.
The report says the climate cartel has, among other things:
[D]eclared war on the American way of life [by] … waging “a Global World War” for net zero against disfavored American companies, including those in the fossil fuel, aviation, and farming industries that allow Americans to drive, fly, and eat.
It has described Climate Action 100+ as “the global Navy,” and compared Ceres’s efforts to “the Army ground troops” and “an ‘air cover’ strategic and silent bombing campaign by a newly funded division of the Air Force.”
The climate cartel has agreed to force corporations to “decarbonize.” Members of groups like Climate Action 100+ expressly commit to engage “with the companies in which [they] invest” to make them reach “net zero [greenhouse gas (GHG)] emissions by 2050” by disclosing their carbon emissions, reducing their carbon emissions, and adopting enforcement mechanisms to strengthen these commitments.
The climate cartel “[r]amp[s] up” and “[e]scalate[s]” pressure against corporations on the “wrong side of climate history.” The climate cartel is “willing to go to the top rung” by filing shareholder resolutions, voting against management, and “replac[ing] board members” with those of its own choosing.
The climate cartel seeks to “keep fossil fuels in the ground,” raising prices and reducing output for American consumers.
In short, this exhaustively referenced report uses the climate cartel’s own documents and independent research to expose how these groups are colluding through pressure tactics and political influence (politicians and bureaucrats), to force companies to adopt ESG goals that further their social and political aims, to the detriment of many of the companies themselves, consumers, and the general public.
The report concludes:
The Committee’s ongoing investigation into collusion between left-wing activists and major financial institutions has revealed that a climate cartel is working to decarbonize the U.S. economy—with disastrous implications for American consumers. The climate cartel has declared war on our way of life, escalating its attacks on free markets and demanding that companies slash output of the critical products and services that allow Americans to drive, fly, and eat.
The Biden Administration has failed to act upon the climate cartel’s apparent violations of longstanding U.S. antitrust law.
For a government report, it is relatively short, and like The Heartland Institute’s report before it, well worth reading in full. As grim a picture as the Judiciary Committee paints of the collusion to decarbonize the world in pursuit of ESG, I think it actually understates the danger to humanity’s short-term and long-term well-being. ESG is a recipe for equality in squalor—with the exception of the elites in charge of the climate cartel—with poverty and premature death being the end result.
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Energy Innovation Is Key to Prosperity
In a recent report, “Powering Human Advancement,” The Heritage Foundation laid bare the truth that the driving force behind wealth creation and raising human development standards is the innovative harnessing of energy.
As historian Vaclav Smil sees it, “Energy is the only universal currency.”
Therefore, policymakers should endeavor to allow their citizens abundant access to energy and to the wealth and prosperity it affords.
Unfortunately, government bureaucrats have taken for granted the practical realities that energy abundance has on reducing poverty for its citizens. Subsequently, these policymakers are taking a dangerous path of forced energy scarcity that is deindustrializing countries like Germany.
America cannot turn its back on the energy abundance that made it the most advanced and greatest nation on Earth.
The universal currency of energy provides us with reliable rules-of-thumb for gauging human advancement. In nations with an energy use of only 500 kWh of energy per capita, there is often only subsistence-level agricultural production, and incomes hover around $1,000 per year.
When energy consumption per capita eclipses 10,000 kWh per capita, there is a drastic decline in poverty. At this point, societies tend to have one doctor per 1,000 residents and see a drastic reduction in child mortality. At 20,000 kWh per capita, the people have enough accumulated wealth to begin serious investments towards mitigating air and water pollution.
America exceeded 10,000 kWh per capita around the 1920s. This ushered in a period well remembered for material prosperity that saw the beginnings of mass-electrification and majority access to improved water sources.
By the 1960s, America had eclipsed 20,000 kWh per capita, and the march of progress continued. This period saw near universal access to electricity and sanitized water systems causing infant mortality rates to decline and life expectancy to increase rapidly.
This increase in energy consumption is also directly correlated with improvements in GDP, agricultural productivity, health indicators, and overall human development. In fact, the U.S. saw GDP per capita rise from $4,000 in 1900 to over $60,000 in 2018, a clear demonstration of how increasing energy access drives economic growth and improves living standards.
The American Experiment has thrived as innovators created new businesses and jobs that increasingly harnessed energy with greater efficiency to build our modern wealth of material goods. This new wealth has one source – the intangible value created by the energized innovators and entrepreneurs that push our technological frontiers and expand the dream of tomorrow. It is not the individual innovator that benefits most from their creation, it is the rest of society.
As long as the government does not become captured by special interests, the voluntary exchange of wealth, the exchange of time and skills, allocates toward whoever can solve the scarcity of time the best. This free market, under properly ordered liberty, is the only system that allows individuals and their families to maximize their utility, their pursuit of happiness, and their indirect service to the rest of society through innovative pursuits.
With an energy abundance, the physical toil that defined much of human existence has been alleviated–for which we should be thankful.
As “gratitude is the heart of conservatism,” policymakers should be humble in this time of energy abundance and avoid punishing the creation of wealth, the fruits of easing scarcity for others.
Policymakers must prioritize facilitating the work of innovators and entrepreneurs to discover new methods of harnessing energy and increasing energy access. This is the only true path to accumulating the wealth necessary for human advancement worldwide.
When policymakers create radical energy policy, onerous regulations, and slush funds for favored groups, the resulting progressive corporatism strains our collective confidence in our time-tested marketplaces. The poverty these policies induce doesn’t largely fall on those government bureaucrats or wealthy business owners–it falls on families in the form of high prices, lower wages, and loss of access to products.
If we are to reverse our recent economic malaise and secure our nation for generations to come, policymakers must acknowledge that the innovative harnessing of energy is the driver of prosperity.
Thoughtful and grateful policymakers would be wise to respect the free innovative and entrepreneurial process by heeding the wisdom of the old Greek proverb that “Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
https://www.heritage.org/energy/commentary/energy-innovation-key-prosperity
***************************************************Greenwashing Kamala Harris: How the Veep Casts Herself as an Environmental Justice Crusader
Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice.
“When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country.”
In her telling, the San Francisco District Attorney formed the special environmental justice unit in the early 2000s especially to protect the long-neglected community of Bayview Hunters Point, a predominantly African American and impoverished part of the city, which had become “a dumping ground for people from other places.”
In dozens of speeches and interviews in recent years, Harris has bragged that she went “after polluters” and protected minority communities in San Francisco in novel ways as a local prosecutor.
The narrative has become a bedrock of Harris’ political identity. She featured her DA environmental justice crimes unit in her first statewide television advertisement and she rarely missed an opportunity to tout the history during her presidential bid, during which she promised similar initiatives if elected.
But records from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office and interviews with local environmental advocates point to a different, far less ambitious record.
“We’re unaware of any major or semi-major environmental justice work done by Harris in Bayview Hunters Point, including on the Hunters Point Shipyard Superfund site,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, a progressive watchdog group that seeks to “to promote environmental, social, economic and climate justice.”
Steve Castleman, an attorney with UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic, who has worked on urban pollution issues in the Bay Area, also noted that he did not know of any significant Harris environmental justice action as DA.
Far from targeting powerful corporate interests, Harris’ environmental justice unit appears to have filed only a few lawsuits, all against small-time defendants. The targets included a young man who conducted illegal smog checks at a small auto body shop in the city and a left-leaning community newspaper accused of illegally dumping leftover ink in an abandoned lot.
Another defendant charged by the unit was a small construction company accused of using adulterated concrete. The major industrial polluters of San Francisco were left untouched under Harris’ watch during her two terms that ended in 2010.
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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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