Category Archives: Climate Scam

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Climate Cultists Smash Tablets At Top Of Mt. Sinai

For those who do not know, there is a sort of official Mount Sinai. At the base is Saint Catherine’s Monastery, and then a long, high trail that leads to the summit, where there is a chapel and a mosque. Pilgrims make the long, arduous trek in the pre-dawn hours, wanting to be there as the sun rises. If you like Expedition Unknown, watch the episodes on Moses. And here we have supposed religious folks joining a cult

Activists smash tablets atop ‘Mount Sinai’ to launch faith-based climate push

An initiative to mobilize faith leaders worldwide to push governments to do more about climate change kicked off Sunday morning with an Israeli environmental activist smashing mock tablets of stone atop an Egyptian peak believed by many to be Mount Sinai, to symbolize the world’s failure to protect the planet.

The idea was hatched in the run up to the United Nations COP27 climate conference taking place in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, by solar energy entrepreneur Yosef Abramowitz and David Miron Wapner, who chairs the Jerusalem-based Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development.

The Sinai Climate Partnership, symbolically launched at the ceremony, brings together the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, the Elijah Interfaith Institute, the Peace Department, the United Nations Faith for Earth Initiative, Abramowitz’s Gigawatt Global, and the Israeli environmental advocacy organization, Adam Teva V’Din.

After sunrise, Abramowitz and Wapner gathered at the summit together with Nigel Savage, the founder and former director of the US Jewish environmental organization Hazon, and his successor Jakir Manela, to read sections the Holy Land Declaration on Climate Change signed in 2011 by the multifaith Council of Religious Leaders of the Holy Land. Two teens from the US, there as part of Christian Climate Observers, joined the ceremony as well.

After the group read from a new draft list of “Ten Principles for Climate Repentance,” formulated by dozens of multifaith leaders meeting in London over the past few days, Abramowitz smashed two tablets on the ground.

You know, just like Moses gave us God’s 10 Commandments. This is beyond nuts, especially as we dip into the climate repentance stuff, which is very silly, if you go read it. Using this spot is insane.

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Brandon Flies In To COP27, Yammers About Forcing Other People To Make Progress

How’s this work again? A fossil fueled helicopter flight to the airport, then a FFd jumbo jet, followed by a backup jumbo jet, along with FFd fighter jets, then a large number of low MPG fossil fueled vehicles. Then back to the airport, and he headed of to Cambodia

Biden touts U.S. climate progress at COP27, unveils new methane plan

President Biden announced a set of small new actions by his administration to address climate change in a speech at the United Nations Climate Change Conference on Friday. The new measures include pledging more than $200 million in funding for climate change resilience and adaptation in developing countries, and a new plan to reduce emissions of methane — an especially potent greenhouse gas — from oil and gas infrastructure.

“The climate crisis is about human security, economic security, environmental security, national security and the very life of the planet,” Biden said in a speech at the conference, known as COP27 and held this year in the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. “So today, I’d like to share with you how the United States is meeting the climate crisis with urgency and with determination to ensure a cleaner, safer, healthier planet for all of us.”

Most of what Biden went on to share was a recapitulation of actions the administration has already taken, including significant investments in reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions through subsidies for clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power and electric vehicles, included in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act. These programs are projected to help cut U.S. emissions by 40% from 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

Of course, the elites like Biden aren’t doing their “fair share”. It’s just the peasants who are being forced.

As has often been the case at recent climate change conferences, the actions of Biden’s climate-science-denying predecessor, former President Donald Trump, cast a shadow on the proceedings. Biden was interrupted by applause when he noted that his administration had “immediately rejoined the Paris [climate] agreement” upon taking office. Referring in an apparent ad lib to his predecessor’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the climate pact, Biden said, “I apologize we ever pulled out of the agreement.”

Oh, look, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Remember, the media doesn’t take sides.

The hell?

Oh, look, Pelosi took a separate fossil fueled flight.

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We’re Saved: Actor Changes Name To Spread Awareness Of Climate Apocalypse Or Something

I’d be more impressed if he legally changed his name. Or, if he announced that he would give up his own use of fossil fuels, make his life carbon neutral, and tell all his Hollywood Comrades to do the same

Actor who played Dwight on ‘The Office’ changes name to protest climate change

Actor Rainn Wilson, who played “Dwight Schrute” in the popular TV show “The Office,” has changed his name in an effort to bring awareness to and protest climate change.

The 56-year-old actor’s new name, which Wilson announced on Twitter in a video, is “Rainnfall Heat Wave Extreme Winter Wilson.”

The name change comes as the United Nations plans to meet in Egypt for a climate change conference this week named the ” 27th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC” or “COP27.”

Wilson is a board member of “Arctic Basecamp,” which is a team of scientists and experts who share their knowledge with the world at various events, and the name change is apparently part of their collective efforts.

Let me ask: how do all those people get to the Arctic? And travel around? And get power? They wouldn’t survive without fossil fuels. Solar panels and wind turbines damned sure would not keep them warm.

Wilson used a website called the “Arctic Risk Name Generator” to generate his new name, and he invited his social media followers to do the same.

So, a very silly climate cult thing. What, exactly, does this accomplish? All these cultists rushing to create their cult name (William HeatSnow Bad Weather Teach) are doing the bare minimum to make their own lives carbon neutral.

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Brandon’s Pushing “Nature Based Solutions” For Hotcoldwetdry Or Something

It almost looks like Biden wants to turn military bases into hippy style nature preserves, making larges swathes unusable for training

Biden promises billions for ‘nature-based solutions’ to climate change

The Biden administration said it will direct billions of taxpayer dollars toward “nature-based” climate change solutions, which includes plans for “bringing the power of nature to maximize the value and resilience of military bases.”

The White House on Tuesday released its “Roadmap for Nature-Based Solutions to Fight Climate Change,” which the White House says will “put America on a path that will unlock the full potential of nature-based solutions to address climate change, nature loss, and inequity.” It said $25 billion worth of current and pending projects are already aligned toward this goal.

“Nature-based solutions” means actions to protect or restore ecosystems that are also “solutions to societal challenges,” such as the conservation of natural areas that help boost resilience to flooding or heat.

I actually don’t mind this that much: there’s nothing wrong with conserving nature and “re-naturing”, as it’s termed, areas. It’s environmentally sound, and nature is good. It’s just linking this to the idiocy of ‘climate change’ and inequality. Stop. Please. They really do not have to add the cult stuff to the environment.

One element of the roadmap calls on the Department of Defense to create a guide for “nature-based solutions for Military Installation natural resources management planning.” That guide will “provide military installation planners and managers with current and actionable information on the appropriate use of nature-based solutions; the current state of science and observed performance reliability; and other considerations regarding design, cost and benefits, implementation, and operations and maintenance.”

In other words, this is going to take a huge chunk of the military budget, turn soldiers into gardeners, interfere with training. Great plan

The plan calls for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to consider “nature-based solutions” as alternatives for all projects that have the potential to affect floodplains or wetlands. It said FEMA has already started to make things easier for “disadvantaged communities” to fund projects with “nature-based solutions.”

In addition to finding “nature-based solutions” for military installations, the administration said it would look for similar solutions for “energy, the economy and national security.” For example, the administration is rating Department of Energy sites for climate sustainability and wants the department to also rate sites on environmental justice and cultural resource protection.

Does anyone else see rising costs for anything the government does and the private sector does? And the need to seriously expand the federal workforce to do this? And giving lots more power to the Central Government? This could have been so easy, non-silly, non-culty, and bipartisan.

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This morning’s rant

At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: “Then let them eat brioches.“

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

My good friend and sometimes blog pinch-hitter William Teach pointed me to this article from Nicholas Goldberg in The Los Angeles Times, which can also be found on Yahoo! News to get around the Times paywall:

Americans don’t care about climate change. Here’s how to wake them up

by Nicholas Goldberg | Thursday, September 22, 2022 | 6:00 AM PDT

Why is the greatest threat to the planet of so little concern to most Americans?

It’s shocking, frankly, that global warming ranks 24th on a list of 29 issues that voters say they’ll think about when deciding whom to vote for in November, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Only 30% of voters say they are “very worried” about it and more than two-thirds say they “rarely” or “never” discuss the issue with family or friends.

Actually, some of us see the United States and democratic Europe so willing to engage in a proxy war with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal, with seemingly little thought as to what could happen, as “the greatest threat to the planet”.

How can people be so blithely unconcerned when the clear consensus of scientists is that climate disruption is reaching crisis levels and will result not only in more raging storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, but very possibly in famine, mass migration, collapsing economies and war?

Uhhh, with a year-over-year 8.3% inflation rate in August of 2022, on top of August 2021’s year-over-year inflation rate of 5.3%, perhaps Americans are more worried about “collapsing economies” today than they are about such “crisis levels” in fifty or eight years?

Sure, there are some obvious reasons for the apathy: High among them is that fossil fuel companies have spent decades pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans. And Republican politicians have been complicit.

Well, of course it’s all the fault of evil, reich-wing Republicans and greedy fossil fuel companies! But Mr Goldberg, an associate editor and OpEd columnist for the Los Angeles Times, as well as the formerly being the newspaper’s editorial page editor, then changes his theme, and goes strongly toward a more marketing approach to persuade people to get worried about global warming climate change emergency. After pointing out what he sees as the activists’ naïveté in ignoring marketing techniques, he tells us that the only way to sell the activists’ ideas is to consider those who are not already on their side that people are stupid:

Deliver simple messages, for one thing. In general, climate activists lean toward complexity and nuance because they don’t want to patronize or condescend or mislead by oversimplifying to their audiences.

Once you have a simple message, repeat it over and over. Did you know that consumers generally have to see an ad more than half a dozen times before they will be persuaded to buy a product?

Embed facts and data in what (David) Fenton calls “moral stories that tug at the emotions.” Anyone who has ever watched TV ads knows that strategy can make arguments far more powerful.

Talk about what people care about. There’s been too much talk about the effect of climate change on polar bears, and not enough on what it means for humans.

Use language people understand. Research shows, Fenton says, that many people don’t understand the phrases “existential threat” or “net zero” or “climate justice.” They understand what “pollution” is, but not what an “emission” is — which suggests that it might make more sense to use the former term.

That practically drips with condescension: Mr Goldberg is saying that those who aren’t already on the side of the global warming climate change emergency activists just can’t understand.

Still, at the end, he throws at least a little bit of concern that people will have to make “sacrifices”:

Is (Mr Fenton) right when he says the climate problem can be solved in a way that enhances economic prosperity? I hope so; that’d be great. But I worry — and this is just my opinion, not an expert’s analysis — that we’ve waited too long, and that to avoid the worst effects of climate change we are going to have to sacrifice, whether it sells or not. I take the gloomy approach.

Either way, we can all agree there’s an awful lot to be done. And Fenton is certainly right that you can’t mobilize people for war if they don’t know they’re under attack. Public education is obviously a missing piece of the puzzle.

Somehow we need to awaken a nation of sleeping, underinformed and insufficiently motivated citizens and persuade them to rise to the great challenge of modern times. To do that, the unmanipulation process needs to begin in earnest.

Apparently, for Mr Goldberg, those who do not support the global warming climate change emergency activists are victims of ‘manipulation’ by fossil-fuel companies and wicked conservatives, but it’s “unmanipulation” to market to people his ideas.

With a guesstimated annual salary of $88,663, and net worth of $845,000, and a wife, Amy Wilentz — who didn’t respect her husband enough to take his name — who earns a similar salary from The Nation as well as being an English Professor at the University of California at Irvine, perhaps the distinguished Mr Goldberg doesn’t truly understand that working-class Americans might be more concerned with paying the rent, keeping the electricity turned on, and food on the table now than they are in projections of doom fifty and eighty years in the future. With the high inflation rate, with which wage increases have not matched, Americans are poorer, in real terms, than they were two years ago.

Then they read what the global warming climate change emergency activists want to do, and all they can see are more expenses falling on them: a wholly rebuilt electricity grid for which they’ll have to pay, plug-in electric cars which cost more than gasoline-powered ones, power restrictions that don’t allow you to recharge your Chevy Dolt at home when it gets too hot, and government requests, along with some actual action to force you to set your thermostats higher in the summer and lower in the winter, heating costs projected to rise 17.2% this coming winter, and the last thing that they want are the programs of the global warming climate change emergency activists making them poorer.

Mr Goldberg wrote that he believes that “we are going to have to sacrifice,” but, with his wife’s and his resources, they are not going to have to sacrifice nearly as much as the average American. Whatever sacrifices they will have to make, perhaps fewer dinners at nice restaurants, or having to pay an electrician to install an at-home charging station for a Tesla, won’t be as stressful for them as the sacrifices made by the single mother with two kids left her by a deadbeat ex-boyfriend in Pittsburgh, or the family in eastern Kentucky trying to survive in a poor area in which the coal mines have all closed.

Mr Goldberg is not, like the “great princess” mention by Monsieur Rousseau, saying “Let them eat brioche,” but is suggesting that those who eat cake might occasionally have to eat bread instead. What he misses is that there are those who can only afford bread right now, and the policy proposals of the activists would take that away from them as well.

Those people are already sacrificing under the current economy, something today’s left just really don’t understand. Oh, they say that they are concerned, say that they know and understand, but they simply do not: you cannot understand people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and concomitantly propose mandatory programs which will make them even poorer.

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The Dummkopf from Delaware really doesn’t have a clue Enjoy paying your heating bills this winter!

We noted, on September 19th, that President Joe Biden said that we should put things in perspective, that the “inflation rate, month-to-month, was up just an inch, hardly at all”, that we’re in the position where for the last several months it hasn’t spiked, “we’re basically even.”

Well, our distinguished President doesn’t have to worry about paying his heating bills this winter, but most Americans do:

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.

Here’s how much more you’ll pay to heat your home this winter

By Kelly Hayes | Tuesday, September 20, 2022 \ 11:41 AM EDT

Americans are likely going to pay more to heat their home over the winter months.

The average cost of heating a household is set to increase by 17.2% this winter, compared to winter last year, according to a forecast by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), an educational and policy organization for federal programs that help low-income families pay their utility bills.

The article was illustrated with a nice, stock photo of a cheerily burning wood fire in a nice, upscale home fireplace, but I figured that, using my own photo from our previous home, was wiser for copyright purposes. Alas! Mrs Pico absolutely vetoed a wood-burning stove in our current house, because she says they make too much of a mess, so, to supplement the heat, and be a backup for when the sparktricity goes out — something not that infrequent here, and can be for several days out here in the country — we installed a propane fireplace.

The group expects the average winter heating bill to increase from $1,025 to $1,202, which would be the highest figure in over a decade.

U.S. residential electric bills are also forecast to increase 7.5% from 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest short-term outlook.

There’s more at the original.

Gas fireplace in my computer room/den.

Mr Biden is wealthy, and even if he did have to pay his own electricity and gas bills — which, for his private homes, he does — the increased costs would be an insignificant matter to him. But an extra $177 for the average working-class family? That’s a big bite. In the past, I’d have compared that $177 to a week’s trip to the grocery store, but now that’s barely half a week!

Let’s tell the truth here: for all of their protestations that they care about ordinary Americans, the Democrats really don’t understand us. The Washington elites have plenty of money, and the increases in energy costs simply don’t matter that much to them. Their proposals to fight global warming climate change will add thousands to people’s electricity bills, because so much new infrastructure will have to be built to support the greatly increased demand for electricity as people have to charge their Chevy Dolts at home. Phasing out reliable, fossil-fuel burning power plants and replacing them with solar and wind power generating facilities will cost big bucks.

By 2050, the US will demand nearly 90% more power than it did in 2018, in a scenario in which all new passenger vehicles sold by 2030 are electric and buildings and factories also aggressively electrify, according to an analysis by Nikit Abhyankar, a senior scientist at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Different scenarios will lead to a smaller increase in demand, but any changes which require more energy not from fossil fuels are going to lead to a huge increase in demand. Yet the projected increases in home heating costs are coming without any significant global warming climate change policies additions to current costs.

Perhaps President Biden doesn’t personally understand this, but his advisors certainly do, but that doesn’t matter: they just don’t care about what you have to pay, as long as they get their way.

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Economics writer Eduardo Porter wants gasoline to rise back to $5.00 per gallon It's for our own good, don't you know?

A bit hard to read, due to the glare from the sun, but this was the price at the station closest to my home, on Wednesday, July 20, 2022, $3.999 per gallon. It has been as high as $4.699 per gallon.

Just because you are having difficulty paying your bills doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have to pay more for gasoline!

Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of “American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise” and “The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost.” A prolific writer on economic matters, I have, sadly, been unable to find a link to his net worth, but it’s obvious that he’s reasonably well-to-do, with gigs with Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. It’s also obvious that he doesn’t really care about how people earning less than he does live.

The Earth Wants Biden to Keep Gas Prices High

There’s one bold move President Biden could make to curb climate change: Find a way to put a $5-a-gallon floor on gasoline prices.

by Eduardo Porter | Wednesday, July 20, 2022 | 10:10 AM EDT | Updated: July 20, 2022 | 11:34 AM EDT

When President Joe Biden visits the decommissioned coal-fired Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, on Wednesday afternoon to lay out his planned executive actions on climate, his allies will be looking for bold initiatives. As Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley put it to the Washington Post, the impasse in the Senate created by Senator Joe Manchin’s blocking of his environmental agenda “unchains the president from waiting for Congress to act.”

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Will Bunch really hates him some representative democracy . . . when the voters don’t vote the way he thinks that they should

Will Bunch, the long-time opinion columnist for what I sometimes call The Philadelphia Enquirer,[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. describes himself as “the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.”

Well, yes, he does have some “strong opinions,” but that doesn’t necessarily make them smart ones.

As world burns, a weak America’s climate fail makes us prey for monsters like Manchin, MBS

As Europe swelters, a weak-looking Joe Biden is played by Joe Manchin at home and MBS in Saudi Arabia. It didn’t have to be this way.

by Will Bunch | Sunday, July 17, 2022

In England, the place that invented the railroad and mastered the subway with London’s majestic Underground, the government is telling folks to stay off trains in the capital for the next couple of days. That’s because they can’t guarantee that the rails won’t buckle or melt in an extreme heat wave — the worst ever recorded in the nation’s long history.

Melt? Melt? Railroad tracks are made of steel, the melting point of which, depending upon how it is alloyed, is between 2,500º and 2,800º Fahrenheit. Buckle? Steel, like virtually every material, expands and contracts as the temperature changes, and at temperatures in very hot summer weather, the expansion may exceed the width of the expansion joints, possibly pushing the rails out of proper alignment.

Now, I can see how the distinguished Mr Bunch got the word “melt” in mind. From The New York Times article he cited:

In a country unaccustomed to such heat, workers were spreading grit on the roads, fearing they would melt without protection.

That, too, is wrong: asphalt, often called tarmac or tarmacadam in the UK, isn’t going to melt, as in become a liquid, but the surface can soften and become a bit sticky when it reaches 113º F. Nevertheless, Mr Bunch did use the word from his source, so it’s not entirely his fault, but a responsible journalist should have at least questioned it.

Mr Bunch continues for several paragraphs to tell us how beastly hot it has been in Europe for the past several days, paragraphs I’ll skip here to get to the meat — if Spam­® actually qualifies as ‘meat’ — of his column.

As Americans, the story we’ve always told ourselves in order to live is that the United States is the essential nation that always rises up to meet those global alarm bells, from World War II straight through to the current crisis in Ukraine. But our nation’s military and diplomatic might (for better or worse) looks nothing like America’s long-running addiction to oil, which is turning us into a pitiful helpless giant.

One might note here that all of Europe, far more politically liberal than we rebellious colonists, has proven to be just as dependent upon oil and natural gas, in particular Russian oil and natural gas. As we have previously noted, European energy companies have kowtowed to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s payment demands, in a face-saving mechanism to allow the Europeans to state that they are paying un euros, while Russia’s Газпромбанк converts euros to rubles, so Vladimir Vladimirovich can say that his demand to be paid in rubles has been met . . . and the ruble propped up on world currency markets at the same time. And this is being done for the obvious reason: Europe needs Russian gas and oil. It’s July right now, but to quote Eddard “Ned” Stark would say in Game of Thrones, “Winter is coming.”[2]Most Americans don’t realize it, but significant portions of western Europe, including almost all of Germany, are north of 49º, the western portion of our border with Canada. Northen Europe … Continue reading

It all came to a head on Friday as President Biden pulled a rare “double Neville Chamberlain,” as his country’s need for an immediate fix of cheap, planet-destroying crude oil made America’s commander-in-chief look hopelessly weak in two places at once. That America just can’t quit fossil fuels caused POTUS 46 to kowtow to a murderous dictator in the Middle East, even as events in Washington showed the Biden administration is held back by shortsighted greed on Capitol Hill from doing much of anything to end our oil oligarchy at home.

As a U.S journalist who holds the press freedoms of the First Amendment sacred, I have never been as disappointed and demoralized by Biden as the moment Friday that he fist-bumped Saudi Arabia de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the vile monarch who personally ordered the violent death of a critical Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, feared to have been dismembered with a bone saw after his body was never found.

One might more accurately call Mr Bunch a journolist. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. Somehow, in a country in which seemingly no secrets can be kept — other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s client list — the majority of JournoList’s roughly 400 members has been kept unpublished, and Mr Bunch’s name is not on the Chatham Journal’s list of the 64 known members.

One of a number of reasons that Biden rallied just enough voters to oust Donald Trump in 2020 was his proper moral outrage over the killing of a U.S.-based journalist, as he branded the Saudis “a pariah” state. Apparently American morality is only valid when gas prices are under $4 a gallon, though. Biden’s flipflop — to travel halfway around the globe to hand a stone-cold killer a photo op to restore his global credibility — shows that America is still held hostage by Middle East dictators’ ability to manipulate world oil prices.

Ever since the 1970s, Americans have been warned about the political dangers of failing to end our dependence on foreign oil from unstable, antidemocratic regions like the Middle East. Biden’s willingness in 2022 to chuck the Bill of Rights out the window for an ounce of black gold was exactly what they were talking about. But while I believe Biden’s actions in the present are shortsighted, self-serving and will be judged badly by history, I also have to acknowledge that he’s playing the horrible hand he was dealt by a generation of faux leaders that came before him.

President Biden “chuck(ed) the Bill of Rights out the window”? Well, yeah, he pretty much did when it came to trying to impose mandatory COVID vaccinations, but that’s not to what Mr Bunch referred. The columnist apparently believes that because President Biden met with the de facto ruler of a sovereign nation, he has thrown the First Amendment’s protection of Freedom of the Press into the dumpster. Sorry, but the United States doesn’t control other nations.

It was just over 34 years ago — June 24, 1988, to be exact, in the last year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — when the New York Times carried the front-page headline, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” That expert, the NASA climate scientist James Hansen, said at a Senate hearing that “[i]t is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’’

Instead, there has been so much waffling.

Writing for the New Yorker on Saturday, the climate activist and writer Bill McKibben offered an excellent history of congressional cowardice and inaction on climate that long predates last week’s news that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — a multimillionaire from continued coal royalties — is so far using his veto power as the fulcrum of a 50-50 Senate to prevent any environmental legislation from passing in 2022.

The distinguished Mr Bunch apparently believes that, as a Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin must represent not the people of West Virginia who elected him, but the liberals of New York and San Francisco and Washington, DC.

In 2018, Senator Manchin had a ‘progressive’ opponent in the Democratic primary, Paula Jean Swearengin, and Mr Manchin defeated her, among a Democrat-only electorate, 112,658 (69.86%) to 48,594 (30.14%). It appears that the Mountain State’s Democrats heavily support Mr Manchin, whose politics were well known after eight years in the Senate. His general election victory, over Republican nominee Patrick Morrisey, was much closer, 290,510 (49.6%) to 271,113 (46.3%), as the people of West Virginia, while they like Senator Manchin, are moving heavily toward the Republican Party. In 2020, Mountain State voters gave 545,382 votes (68.62%) to President Trump, and only 235,984 (29.69%) to Joe Biden.

It would seem that Mr Manchin is doing something really radical like representing the views of his constituents!

McKibben reminds us that every single Republican and Democratic member of the Senate’s “millionaires’ club” voted 95-0 in 1997 to urge then-President Bill Clinton not to join the rest of the world in signing the Kyoto Protocols to reduce fossil-fuel pollution, and that Republicans cowed by the newly formed Tea Party (which got “Astroturf” funding from the oil billionaire Koch brothers) killed 2009′s “cap and trade” plan to curb pollution.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the 95 senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, didn’t think that the Kyoto Protocols were a good deal for the United States.

Whatever his reasons, while President Clinton sent Vice President Al Gore to Kyoto to sign the Protocols, he refused to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification. Could those reasons be that he knew it would be rejected by the Senate?

Mr Bunch continued to trash the younger President Bush, as expected, but also President Obama, who “embraced fracking”, which greatly increased American production of petroleum and natural gas, meaning that we were sending fewer of American workers hard-earned dollars to Saudi Arabia!

Meanwhile, Manchin’s pro-polluter insurrection on Capitol Hill will be long remembered as the last stand of a dying regime determined to take all of us down with them. The irony is that — as you watch hundreds of Europeans drop inside their sweltering flats or succumb from heat stroke this week — Manchin’s legacy will probably involve causing even more deaths than the Butcher of Riyadh. The West Virginian’s pride and greed — the first two of the seven deadly sins — has made him a Maserati-driving multimillionaire while allegedly working as a public servant. But if the Bible that they glorify every Sunday in the hollers around Farmington, W.Va., is accurate, the senator’s sins will ultimately bring him to a place much, much hotter than 104 in the shade.

With his concluding paragraph, Mr Bunch, albeit barely, recognizes that Senator Manchin represents people who glorify the Bible every Sunday in the hollers of West Virginia. Trouble is, Mr Bunch doesn’t really approve of representative democracy, or the free choices of the voters, when those choices aren’t ones of which he approves.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑2 Most Americans don’t realize it, but significant portions of western Europe, including almost all of Germany, are north of 49º, the western portion of our border with Canada. Northen Europe sees some serious, serious winters.
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Another problem for Joe Biden’s plan to eliminate all emissions from American electricity production in 13 years.

President Joe Biden and the Democrats, greatly concerned about global warming climate change, have urged an all-electric future for the United States, phasing out fossil fuel usage in transportation by requiring all new vehicles sold by the year 2035 to be zero-emissions, and that electric power generation be zero-emission by the same year. In The Long-Term Strategy of the United States: Pathways to Net-Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050, John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and Gina McCarthy, National Climate Advisor, said[1]The Long-Term Strategy of the United States: Pathways to Net-Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050, page 5 of .pdf file.:

    Electricity delivers diverse services to all sectors of the American economy. The transition to a clean electricity system has been accelerating in recent years — driven by plummeting costs for solar and wind technologies, federal and subnational policies, and consumer demand. Building on this success, the United States has set a goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035, a crucial foundation for net-zero emissions no later than 2050.

    We can affordably and efficiently electrify most of the economy, from cars to buildings and industrial processes. In areas where electrification presents technology challenges — for instance aviation, shipping, and some industrial processes — we can prioritize clean fuels like carbon-free hydrogen and sustainable biofuels.

About those “plummeting costs for solar and wind technologies”? From The Wall Street Journal:

    Ukraine War Drives Up Cost of Wind, Solar Power

    ‘Greenflation’ problems are particularly acute in U.S., where tariffs targeting China helped increase project costs, led to delays before Russian attack

    By Jennifer Hiller and Katherine Blunt | Sunday, March 27, 2022 | 5:30 AM EDT

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is further driving up the price of renewable-energy projects, which were already facing supply-chain strains and raw-materials increases before the war.

    The new pressures, which are hitting two years after the pandemic created bottlenecks for wind and solar developers, are adding to delays for completing many projects.

    The Biden administration and other governments around the world have called for speeding the transition to renewable-energy sources to avoid reliance on Russia for oil and gas. But project developers say it might be nearly impossible to move faster in the near term.

    Wind and solar development has boomed world-wide in the past decade as a result of rapidly falling costs that made the projects more competitive with traditional sources of power generation such as natural gas and nuclear, as well as growing government pressure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to combat climate change.

    Globally, wind and solar accounted for about 6.4% and 4% of power generation last year, respectively, up from 3.8% and 1.4% five years prior, with further sharp growth projected, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. The cost of solar generation fell to $45 for a megawatt-hour last year, down from $381 in 2010, S&P estimated. The cost of onshore wind generation, meanwhile, fell to $48 for a megawatt-hour, down from $89 in 2010.

Sounds good so far, but trouble comes with the next paragraph:

    But like many other businesses, renewable-energy projects are now being hit by soaring post-invasion prices for key materials such as aluminum and steel, as well as higher transportation costs stemming from higher oil prices, which have surged by more than 50% this year.

    The rising costs are particularly acute in the U.S., where many projects were already facing increases in part because of trade tariffs targeting China, a dominant producer of solar cells and other renewable-energy components. A third of U.S. utility-scale solar capacity scheduled for completion in the fourth quarter of 2021 was delayed by at least a quarter and 13% of the projects planned to complete this year have been delayed for a year or canceled, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Infographic: China Dominates All Steps of Solar Panel Production | Statista Currently, the People’s Republic of China completely dominates all phases of solar panel production, producing 66% of polysilicon, 78% of all solar cells, and 72% of solar modules. More, 4% of solar cells and 1% of solar modules are produced in the Republic of China, Taiwan, which could be taken over by the People’s Republic any day.

Foreign Policy magazine noted that forced labor is used in much of China’s polysilicon production.

Back to the Journal:

    U.S. projects have also faced long wait times to receive necessary approvals to connect new projects to the electric grid, as developers rush to bring wind and solar farms online to capitalize on aggressive state mandates to reduce emissions, overwhelming grid operators. Those delays are adding to uncertainty for project investors.

Since Mr Biden took office, inflation has soared; the February year-over-year inflation rate was 7.9%, while real average hourly earnings decreased by 1.9%. Americans have been getting relatively poorer, and the data for the statistics were gathered before the invasion of Ukraine.

How, exactly, are we going to pay for this huge power generation transformation, all within 13 years? We’re going to be borrowing money, from Americans, from foreigners, and from China, to send to China, and having to pay back to investors, including Chinese investors.

We could, of course, do something really radical like build solar panel and module plants in the United States, but that will take years and, let’s tell the truth here, it will mean paying American wages, probably American union wages, to American workers, rather than the much lower Chinese wages, to build the solar collection systems, making them more expensive.

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