Category Archives: Climate Scam

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Libertarian Republican Thomas Massie drives a Tesla!

This tweet caught my eye:

When Representative Massie (R-KY 4th District) was asked about the time it took, he replied:

Mr Massie is, of course, a free citizen, and I absolutely support his right to choose which vehicle he wishes to drive. But that map shows just what it’s like, because once you get away from the northeast corridor, your stops better be well-planned, or you’re going to run out of sparktricity along the way. If I’m reading that map correctly, and Mr Massie is taking Interstate 64, there are charging stations in Charleston, West Virginia, Huntington, WV, and then the next one is in Lexington. May the Lord help the Distinguished Gentleman from Kentucky if one of his well planned stops is at a Tesla TSLA: (%) station that is out-of-service for some reason.

Charleston and Huntington are not that far apart, roughly an hour along I-64. Mr Massie’s home in Lewis County isn’t that far from Huntington.

But what Mr Massie has told us, that so many don’t want to acknowledge, is that to make the roughly 475 mile trip, which would take 7 hours in a gasoline powered car, takes two hours longer in his Tesla due to the length of time it takes to recharge the infernal thing.  He is obviously willing to take that extra time — at least, is willing to avoid the idiotic mask mandate aboard commercial airliners  — but people considering electric vehicles need to be aware of this. And the people pushing these vehicles on other people should not only be aware of this, but willing to tell the truth about it.

The truth is in short supply among the left.

 

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The Wall Street Journal notes that professionals who can are leaving cities and moving to the ‘exurbs’ What will this mean for the climate emergency activists who want us all to live in cities with mass transit?

The COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ has hastened a social change that was already happening. People were getting frustrated with the incredible urban density of our major cities, and the ever-increasing crime rates there, along with the problems of trying to bring up children in apartments with no outdoor space. It doesn’t matter how much money you have; bringing up children in your apartment in Central Park West still means that your kids have a long way to go to see things like actual grass and trees. From The Wall Street Journal:

    The ‘Great Reshuffling’ Is Shifting Wealth to the Exurbs

    The flow of white-collar workers to fringe outlying communities could reshape everything from transportation to real estate

    By Laura Forman | Updated: June 25, 2021 | 2:51 PM ET

    White collar workers are trading their expensive lives in the nation’s most densely populated areas for cheaper, greener pastures. Online real estate company Zillow Group calls it the “Great Reshuffling.”

    These moves will reshape transportation, real estate and an emerging fixture of American life: the exurb.

    Fringe outlying communities of major metropolitan regions were prized for their extreme privacy or more affordable housing before the pandemic, but were typically much less wealthy than the denser cities and affluent suburbs they surrounded.

I look at places like Hockessin, Delaware, where it was only a short commute, fewer than ten miles, from downtown Wilmington. While there was some gentrification going on in the city, out in Hockessin, when I lived there, 2000 to 2002, builders were building like mad in developments like Hockessin Green and Hockessin Chase, in part because New Castle County development ordinances restricted the number of homes which could be built on a 100-acre lot. This led to pricier homes built on larger lots, which meant larger lawns on which kids could play. These were things that the execs at MBNA and DuPont wanted.

I’ve had years of cramped up city life, living like a duck in a pen.
All I know that it’s a pity life can’t be simple again.

With the restrictions brought on by COVID-19, telecommuting was put into practice where it could be, and as some urban professionals found that they could do their work from home, it became reasonable to continue that, at least for some days during the week, even as the restrictions were ending. Of course, with the recent surge, there’s more reason for corporations to allow more frequent telecommuting. Add to that reduced office costs, and there can be real reasons why companies which can have workers work from home to allow it to continue, at least for some days during the week.[1]My younger daughter, an IT professional, worked from home for a few months during the shutdowns, and while she continued to be paid and worked, even she would admit that she was less productive while … Continue reading

    The Great Reshuffling will likely make these far-flung exurbs richer and denser. The median household income across U.S. exurbs was $74,573 as of 2019, according to data from The American Communities Project. That likely ticked up over the last year as city dwellers in major job centers such as San Francisco and New York relocated to exurbs for the same or similar salaries. In 2019 the median household income in the San Francisco Bay Area was nearly $115,000 and in the New York metro area it was more than $83,000.

What can you get in New York City on an $83,000 income? Where I live now, you could get a house and acreage and grass and trees; in Manhattan, you’d get a shoebox apartment in a six-story walkup on 96th Street!

2305 Beasley Avenue, Antioch, California.

Really? On February 20, 2020, 2305 Beasley Avenue in Antioch, California, sold for $360,000, and it’s just 1,174 ft², and wasn’t in good shape. It’s in Contra Costa County, the adjacent county to Oakland and Berkeley. I’m ‘familiar’ with the house because it was the one my parents bought when my father got back from Japan after the Korean war, and that’s where I lived up through the second grade.[2]I tend to look up my past residences on real estate sites. Yes, I still recognize the place, even though I haven’t seen it since I was eight years old. The chain link fence is a new addition, … Continue reading It looks pretty rough in the photos, but those were from the site when it was for sale; perhaps the new owners have made some improvements.

    The money stockpiled from leaving pricier areas, coupled with stimulus checks and enforced saving over the last year, are padding the bank accounts of these new movers. Rising credit scores are, in turn, enabling other major purchases such as cars. The new arrivals in the exurbs are finding they need their first or second automobile now that they are located in a more remote part of a metropolitan area. A January survey conducted by Engine Insights on behalf of Xperi DTS found 55% of millennials surveyed said car ownership was more important than ever.

But, but, but, the global warming climate change emergency activists want us to get away from personally owned vehicles, and commute by electric buses and trains. If the Journal story is correct, people are doing the opposite of that, moving into situations where cars are more important to them. Even if you commute by bus or train, odds are that you will need a car to get from your home to the commuter bus stop or train station. And now the ‘millennials,’ the group on which the global warming climate change emergency activists most heavily depend for political support are increasingly seeing personal vehicle ownership as important.

With a two car garage, I suppose the new owners of 2305 Beasley Avenue can install electric vehicle charging stations, and that’s what the urban professionals moving to the ‘exurbs’ are going to need.

But let’s face facts: what the global warming climate change emergency activists want is pretty much diametrically opposed to the American lifestyle and culture.

References

References
↑1 My younger daughter, an IT professional, worked from home for a few months during the shutdowns, and while she continued to be paid and worked, even she would admit that she was less productive while working from home. Too many distractions like puppies and cats and sunshine — her computer was set up on the screened in, northwest facing porch — led to perhaps not as much concentration.
↑2 I tend to look up my past residences on real estate sites. Yes, I still recognize the place, even though I haven’t seen it since I was eight years old. The chain link fence is a new addition, and the windows on the left of the house go to what used to be my bedroom. The old, roll out windows in metal frames have been replaced since I lived there.
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We can’t have a solar park there; it’ll shut down the drive-in theater!

You can’t have your solar park when it’s going to drive out a drive in theater!

When I spotted this on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, I was tempted to just forward it to William Teach, since this is more his kind of story than mine. But one photo in there prompted me to use it myself.

Joe Farruggio, the owner of the land that the Mahoning Drive-In sits on, says he believes Greenskies was unfairly bullied away from its plan to build a solar farm on the four-acre property. Photo by Steven M Falk, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer

Judging by that photo, maybe Greyskies would have been a better name than Greenskies! 🙂

Here’s the story:

A beloved Poconos drive-in theater was set to become a solar-panel farm. Then the fans stepped in.

Hundreds of die-hard fans of the Mahoning Drive-In banded together to convince a green-energy company to withdraw its plan.

By Vinny Vella | July 25, 2021

Virgil Cardamone couldn’t sleep July 13. He obsessed over how to relay the message that everything he and his friends had built over the last six years on a grassy lot in rural Carbon County was in jeopardy.

The next morning, it dawned on him: He would, as he put it “tear his heart open” in a smartphone video broadcast over social media, pleading with hundreds of the regulars at the Mahoning Drive-In to help save the institution.

In the six-minute video, Cardamone laid out the scenario: A green-energy company out of Connecticut had paid to option the land the theater sat on for a solar-panel farm. The local zoning board was going to vote in a few weeks, and the 38-year-old was rallying fans of ‘80s classics, forgotten B-movies, and films everywhere to plead with Greenskies Clean Energy LLC to change its mind.

“The drive-in will never die,” Cardamone said in his sign-off, flicking tears out of his eyes with his thumb. “Mark my words.”

I moved away from what Vinny Vella, the article author, called “tourist darling Jim Thorpe” on July 1, 2017, roughly ten miles from the Mahoning Drive-In, and back to the Bluegrass State, but I’d certainly passed the place, on state route 443, many times. While my wife had taken our kids to see a few movies there, I hadn’t gone myself. Still, it was a local-to-me story; we lived in Jim Thorpe for fifteen years!

Two days and hundreds of emails, Facebook posts, and phone calls later, he posted a second video, announcing, almost in disbelief, that the grassroots campaign had been successful. Greenskies had agreed to pull their plan, and the theater’s landlord had expressed a willingness to sell the four-acre property to Cardamone and his business partners.

“To have the whole entire culture rise up and let them know how much it means to them, for me, I feel this business is invincible, even with all the madness going on,” Cardamone said in an interview last week. “This place is an escape for people, and it’s a celebration of a simpler time.”

So, the drive-in has been saved, at least for now.

I’m not sure just how much electricity a four-acre solar park would generate. The Nesquehoning Solar Park, off of state route 54 between Nesquehoning and Lake Hauto, for which I supplied some, but not all, of the concrete during its construction, covers, according to its website, 100 acres, and “will generate enough electricity to power 1,450 homes.” At the same efficiency, a four-acre solar park would power roughly 58 homes.

Regardless of that, some drive-in and old film buffs have managed to save the Mahoning Drive-In. What, I have to ask, will the global warming climate change emergency activists say about that? One thing is certain: in the push for ‘renewable’ energy sources, primarily solar and wind power, a lot of acreage is going to have to be taken up for solar panels and windmills, and there will always be pushback from those who don’t want the land used that way, and who object to having their scenic views taken up.

As it happens, we have more than four acres on the farm, and good, sunny, southwestern exposure; it would be perfect for a solar farm. But our best view is to the southwest as well, and there’s no way Mrs Pico would ever consent to spoil it with solar panels.

Photo taken on June 17th, while baling our second crop of hay for the season. The near tree line begins the downslope to the Kentucky River.

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If only the global warming climate change emergency activists understood what they ask

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted that some climate activists believe they may have to move away from strictly non-violent means to get the change they want. Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire,

absolutely rules out violence that harms people, but he wants the climate movement to include sabotage and property destruction in its plans.

If a natural gas pipeline is sabotaged, in a way in which no one is injured but the gas flow is cut off, I suppose that would meet Mr Malm’s criterion. But, if the flow of gas is cut off, that will mean that people wouldn’t have it available, to what, heat their homes in January, or have electricity for their workplaces and lose their jobs?

Natural gas is part of our infrastructure, something not a consumer item as much as it is a means of modern life.

48% of all homes in the US use natural gas for heat, while only 37% use electricity. Interestingly, the only region in which electricity is the primary source of heat is the Confederacy, in which winters are normally milder.

Today, natural gas piped directly into homes is the dominant source of heating fuel in every region but the South, where more than 60 percent of households used electricity in 2013. The South is also the region that has seen the greatest shift away from coal and toward natural gas for electric power generation.

The Midwest sees the greatest use of natural gas for heating, with more than 65 percent of homes there using gas.

But natural gas use for heating is declining. Every region in the U.S. except for the Northeast is seeing a slight drop in favor of electricity, according to an EIA report released Thursday.

More people may be using electricity for heating instead of natural gas because they may be moving into newer homes that use electricity, and use it more efficiently than older electrically heated homes, according to the EIA.

In the Northeast, the opposite is occurring, with the use of heating oil diminishing there in favor of natural gas. Heating oil is nearly unheard of outside the Northeast, which represents about 80 percent of all U.S. heating oil use.

More than 30 percent of all households in the Northeast used heating oil in 2005. That number dropped to less than 25 percent in 2013. Heating oil stocks have become tight in recent years with several Northeastern states, including New York, requiring heating oil to be marketed with lower sulfur levels.

The woodstove I installed in our house in Jim Thorpe. Not that I had installed, but installed personally. Click to enlarge.

It seems that the liberals in New York and New England love them some heating oil! My previous home, in the southern end of the Poconos, used heating oil, and I later supplemented that with a wood stove. Why? It gets cold there, and the wood stove, not only helping in a house with an older, one-zone system, was a back-up in the event of a power outage. (Heating oil furnaces still depend on electricity to run.)

The northeast was also the area of our fastest early population growth, and the densely populated northeast has a lot of older, more poorly insulated homes. What the warmunists don’t understand — well, part of what they don’t understand, because, really, they don’t understand much at all — is that it costs money to retrofit an older home with better insulation, and it costs money to change out existing heating systems for newer ones, and that it costs money to do all of the things they want, and the clerk working at the Turkey Hill in downtown Jim Thorpe or the concrete mixer driver living in Brodheadsville can’t afford to just do those things.[1]Mr Teach uses the term ‘warmist’ as a mocking reference to the global warming climate change emergency activists. Given their seeming insistence on government controlling everything and … Continue reading

The warmunists all seem to be the people who are already well off, the people who don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, the people for whom day-to-day survival isn’t quite so guaranteed. Not only are they not poor, they don’t seem to have grown up poor, either, and have no flaming idea what things can be like for those who aren’t well off. It’s easy for them to say that these things can just be done, because they can afford them when they come.

Well, I grew up poor. I know what it’s like to have spent a couple of months without running water because the pipes froze and my mother didn’t have the money to hire a plumber right away. I know what it’s like to have frequent meals of chicken livers, rice and spinach because it’s inexpensive food.

Of course, the warmunists think our homes should be all-electric, because CO2, but when we bought our current home, in eastern Kentucky, it was all-electric. It is a fixer-upper as well, and we knew I’d have to work on it.

My wife wanted a gas stove as we planned the kitchen remodel, which meant, out in the country, propane; there are no natural gas lines out here. But, that first winter here, of 2017-18, before we got to the kitchen remodel, we had what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter, an ice storm which hit eastern Kentucky. The power went out . . . for 4½ days, in January. Our heat-pump electric heat, which wasn’t all that great anyway during a winter in which we saw temperatures below 10º F, wasn’t going to heat anything without power. Mrs Pico went to Lexington, to stay with our daughters, but I had to stay here, to take care of the house and the critters.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

It got down to 38º F in the house by the end, and was that warm only due to a couple of sunny days. But, due to this, our remodeling plans changed: not only would we have a propane range, but we changed out the (old) electric water heater for one which used propane, and added a propane fireplace as well. Neither the water heater nor fireplace requires electricity to operate, though there is an electric blower on the fireplace to better circulate the heat. We can use the range top without electricity, though not the oven.

OK, OK, it’s true: I wrote this in a way to show off my mad skillz in remodeling. 🙂 But it is meant to point out that the global warming climate change emergency activists don’t know squat about how people in this country actually live. To say that I have to stop using utilities which use fossil fuels is to say that I have to freeze in the winter if the power goes out. Sorry, not sorry, but I don’t intend to make that sacrifice! To say that everybody has to go all-electric ignores the fact that the 63% of the American people, many of whom could not reasonably afford it, would have to change their heating systems. To say that we have to go to all plug-in electric cars ignores the fact that many (most?) people would not have the ability to charge such vehicles at home, overnight, but would have to spend hours each week just sitting at commercial charging stations.

Showing off another corner of the kitchen.

When you have people like presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry, net worth $250 million, married to Teresa Heinz, net worth $750 million to $1.2 billion, leading the way in global warming climate change emergency activism, you have people who have no flaming idea what it’s like to be poor, what it’s like to live, to use the words of Robert E Howard, with their lives nailed to their spines, who think that everything can and should be just so easy to do, if only we’d make the commitment to do it, because being able to throw money at their problems has never been a problem for them.

That most people can’t just throw money at their problems? That an unexpected $400 emergency expense would be difficult for about 40% of Americans to afford — a figure from before the economic dislocations caused by the reaction to COVID-19 — is something so far outside their paradigm that the warmunists can’t comprehend it? These things simply don’t occur to the activists. We need to stop listening to them.

References

References
↑1 Mr Teach uses the term ‘warmist’ as a mocking reference to the global warming climate change emergency activists. Given their seeming insistence on government controlling everything and forcing people to do as they wish, I’ve changed it to ‘warmunist,’ the etymology of which ought to be obvious.
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The Climate (scam) Crisis Has Become A Mental Health Crisis (part lots)

Now that it’s starting to get warm again, the stories about the climate scam messing with people’s mental health start to become more prevalent. Is it real? In a way. The grand high poobahs of the Cult of Climastrology constantly trot out prognostications of utter doom. They teach the Coming Doom in schools. Warmists read about doom online. They buy into it, and start spreading fables of doom coming Soon. And there they have created artificial mental health problems

Between anger and sadness: How the climate crisis has become a mental health crisis

What Phoenix Heberling remembers most about the tornado is the screaming. She was 2, living in a trailer park in rural Indiana, and her father and some friends were having a party when he got a phone call.

Get out now, a tornado is headed straight for you.

In a frantic scramble, the adults ran outside. The world was eerily silent. Some of them scattered and the rest piled into a car, including Phoenix and her father. To this day, the adults’ faces stick with her. A woman clawed at her cheeks in terror, tears streaming down her face. Others screamed and cried frantically: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die. (snip)

“You’re so young that you don’t have words to define what that feeling of ‘we’re about to die’ is,” Heberling said. “You only know if you felt it, that death looming over you. That pure terror. Knowing that whatever was happening, it was beyond anything I could define or ever know. It was just so powerful.” (snip)

At 27, the experience remains stamped in Heberling’s mind. In hindsight, she thinks it influenced her anxiety and depression in the face of the climate crisis, another force that to many feels profoundly intractable and terrifyingly destructive.

But this one is primarily human-caused.

Surveys have found that 47% of Americans aged 18 to 34 feel that stress related to climate change impacts their daily lives. That number is even higher for teens, at 57%. Climate anxiety is increasingly being seen as a public health issue, especially for young people and children.

So, wait, are they trying to say that experience with a tornado, something that has happened forever, is actually human caused climate crisis? Or not? It’s not particularly clear, which is exactly the point, because weak minded, indoctrinated climate cultists will immediately link the “climate crisis” with what happened to Heberling 25 years ago.

There’s good reason to be anxious, experts say. In 2018, scientists warned world leaders they needed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The world is not on track to reach that goal.

As a result, scientists say extreme heat, wildfires and other disasters will likely become more frequent and destructive. Rising sea levels, civil unrest and food shortages could displace billions by 2050 if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions aren’t severely cut.

Is it any wonder these Warmists are having mental issues when all they hear about is doom?

“I think younger people are generally more affected because they know they’re going to see these changes actualized in their lifetime,” said Collin Hagood, a therapist in Flagstaff who has seen the issue come up with his clients.

“It’s an anticipatory grief,” Hagood said. “I think it’s really important that we all are part of this conversation, being open about it, being expressive about it, trying to connect with one another and most importantly connect to nature so we can recognize why this is such a big deal.”

Or, bear with me here, it could be because they’ve been indoctrinated into this, hence losing their minds.

Anyhow, the continuation of Doom continues on in this very long screed. Have at it for a laugh. And, yes, people giving themselves what they think are mental health issues over a completely fake issue is funny.

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After Taking Long Fossil Fueled Flight, John Kerry Urges Top Polluters To Genuflect To Climate Cult

Unsurprisingly, no media members took photos of John Kerry landing his private jet nor disembarking. That would be bad optics, but, how did he get to England? He surely didn’t use a sailing ship, and hyper climate cult outlet the BBC won’t mention it

Climate change: Kerry urges top polluters to cut emissions now

US climate change envoy John Kerry has urged the world’s top 20 polluters which create 81% of emissions between them to reduce CO2 immediately.

He was speaking after meeting Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other senior UK figures in London to plan two upcoming international climate summits.

He praised the UK for phasing out coal, and for its “ambitious” climate goals.

But he told BBC Newsnight that the UK – along with other major nations – must deliver their proposed emissions cuts.

“China, the US, Russia, India, the EU, Korea, Japan and others all have to be part of this effort,” he said. “Twenty countries. Eighty one percent of the emissions.”

Brits have been burning peat moss and wood to supplement the loss of power from doing away with coal (I’ll note again, I’m not a fan of coal) and having to rely on unreliable solar and wind, particularly when it is cold. UK power costs have skyrocketed over the past 15 years as the nation, or at least the nations leaders, joined the climate cult.

Asked during the interview whether the UK should be planning a controversial new coal mine in Cumbria, he replied: “The marketplace has made a decision that coal is not the future.

In this case the marketplace he refers to is The Government.

On Tuesday, climate diplomacy sees him in Paris and Brussels for talks with European leaders, who have been praised for their recent target to cut emissions 55% on 1990 levels.

Did he take a pure electric vehicle, a bus, or a train to Paris and Brussels? Or hop back in the fossil fueled private jet for quick trips to those two cities?

Leaders are wrestling with gloomy news from China, whose recent five-year plan takes tiny steps to decarbonisation.

But they will be heartened by President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package agreed by the Senate, which will support “green” economic growth.

Wait, I thought the $1.9 trillion was about COVID relief? No?

Yes, climate hypocrisy matters, especially when it’s a major league bigwig telling people they will be forced to comply.

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NY Times Blames Heat And Humidity On You And Your Burger Fixation

See, before fossil fueled vehicles there was no such thing as heat and humidity at the same time. Surely, there was no issue with this during the Global Climate Optimum, the Roman Warm Period, etc, right?

Global Warming’s Deadly Combination: Heat and Humidity

Here’s one more reason the world should aim to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement: It will help keep the tropics from becoming a deadly hothouse.

A study published Monday suggests that sharply cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to stay below that limit, which is equivalent to about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since 1900, will help the tropics avoid episodes of high heat and high humidity — known as extreme wet-bulb temperature, or TW — that go beyond the limits of human survival.

“An important problem of climate research is what a global warming target means for local extreme weather events,” said Yi Zhang, a graduate student in geosciences at Princeton University and the study’s lead author. “This work addresses such a problem for extreme TW.”

The study is in line with other recent research showing that high heat and humidity are potentially one of the deadliest consequences of global warming.

“We know that climate change is making extreme heat and humidity more common,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study. “And both of those things reduce our ability to live in a given climate.”

I thought it was making extreme cold and snow more common? Have these people actually been to the tropics? They’re already rather hot and humid. And humanity did just fine during previous warm periods which were actually much warmer than this one, and the didn’t have the luxury of air conditioning (which the climate cult wants to do away with for Other People, or at least force Other People to keep their AC at a much warmer level), or refrigerators (which the climate cult want to make way more expensive by changing the refrigerants), nor modern housing.

Work or exercise generates heat, and the body has to dissipate it. If the air temperature is higher than body temperature, the main source of cooling is through evaporation of sweat. But if the humidity reaches a point where sweat cannot evaporate, “essentially the body will gain heat,” said Dr. Kenny, who was not involved in the new study.

That stresses the cardiovascular system. “The strain that the heart is facing becomes progressively greater, especially if there’s successive days of heat exposure,” he said.

Kinda like always. Scientific studies mostly do not “suggest”, the offer proof. But, climate studies from the cult are about prognostication. Nothing more, nothing less, all about governmental power increases.

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NY Times Wonders If The Burger Is Nearing Extinction

See, I blame you quite often for your choice to cause the Earth to eat a tasty burger instead of having lettuce (raised organically without GMO’s, of course), beans, and water, or a plant based burger, which is pretty much the same thing, right? Along comes Frank Bruni, who wastes his opinion column with this

Is the Burger Nearing Extinction?
Meat has more competition — and less justification — than ever before.

I liked my patties thin and then I liked them thick. There was the Cheddar period, followed by the Roquefort interregnum. Sesame-seed buns gave way to English muffins as ketchup traded places with special sauce or even, God help me, guacamole, which really was overkill.

But no matter its cradle or condiment, the hamburger was with me for the long haul — I was sure of that.

Until now.

A few days ago I tripped across news that McDonald’s was testing a vegetable-based patty, coming soon to a griddle near you. The McPlant burger, they’re calling it — a McOxymoron if ever I’ve heard one. And McDonald’s is late to the game. Burger King has been selling a meatless Impossible Whopper since 2019. Dunkin’ has been serving a Beyond Sausage Breakfast Sandwich for nearly as long. (snip through other nasty meatless options)

This is the future: not a meatless one — not anytime soon — but one with less meat. I’m now sure of that. It’s the inevitable consequence of alarm over climate change, to which livestock farming contributes significantly. (Gates’s meatless musings were in the context of his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”)

When does the NY Times ban burgers at their giant building which has a massive carbon footprint?

Nature’s Fynd, which has attracted almost $160 million in funding, belongs to the third track: fermentation-derived proteins made from microorganisms, like fungi, that can be coaxed in a meaty, cheesy, creamy or milky direction. This track is arguably the most exciting — in terms of affordability, versatility, environmental gentleness and untapped possibility. There are microbes out there just waiting to feed us.

This opinion piece is actually looking more like an advertisement for Nature’s Fynd, because it spends a lot of time on the company.

Last month, Nature’s Fynd unveiled a direct-order breakfast combo of faux-sausage patties and a mock cream cheese for $14.99 and quickly sold out. It’s restocking and expects to have those products plus others — maybe the yogurt, maybe meatballs — on store shelves later this year. If all goes well, it will expand from there. A burger can’t be too far off.

Wait, what? $14.99? I can get a Big Breakfast (no pancakes) with a chocolate milk at McDonald’s or head to Bonjangle’s for a steak biscuit with egg, fries, and sweet tea, both under $5 before tax. This “eco-friendly” stuff looks expensive.

But given the long love affair that many humans, including this one, have had with animal meat, is there really a chance that these substitutes can make all that much headway in the near future? Thomas Jonas, the chief executive of Nature’s Fynd, said that a conspicuous change in America’s beverage-scape suggests so.

“Ten or 15 years ago, if you were looking at soy milk or almond milk, you were looking at something that was considered to be for health stores and tree-huggers and hippies, right?” he said. Now, both take up considerable space in every supermarket I visit, and there’s nary a coffee shop without one or the other. Nobody, Jonas argued, would have predicted that.

Both soy and almond, especially the latter, use immense amounts of water to produce their product. They’re fads. And, per the tenets of the Cult of Climastrology, bad for climate change. These people are all nuts. They’re aren’t eating or drinking this stuff because they like it but because their cult tells them to.

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Surprise: Michael “Robust Debate” Mann Claims Hurricane Activity Is Your Fault

His big tree ring study leading to the “hockey stick” was a bunch of mule fritters, so, sure, let’s listen to him again as he fear mongers

Humans, not nature, are the cause of changes in Atlantic hurricane cycles, new study finds

It’s well known in science that for more than a century hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean has oscillated between active and inactive periods, each lasting a few decades. For the past couple of decades, meteorologists and climate scientists have believed that this ebb and flow was due to a natural warming and cooling cycle built into the climate system called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO.

The term was coined in the year 2000 by world-renowned climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University and author of the new book “The New Climate War.” The concept of the AMO has become ubiquitous in explanations and forecasts of active or inactive hurricane seasons.

The image below, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), shows how hurricane activity seems to flow in roughly 60-year waves — active for around 30 years when the Atlantic in its warm phase and inactive for around 30 years when in the cool phase.

But today, in a newly released paper in the journal Science, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation may have been dealt a deadly blow — by the very man who named it. Mann now concludes the AMO is very likely an artifact of climate change, driven by “human forcing” from rising carbon emissions in the modern era and “natural forcing” due to massive volcanic eruptions in pre-industrial times.

It’s just very convenient that Mann, along with the rest of the Cult of Climastrology, can say “see, back then it was all nature but now it’s Your Fault,” eh?

The finding — which is bound to generate significant controversy and pushback from the weather and climate communities due to how broadly accepted the concept of the AMO has become — may very well shake the foundations of understanding of what has been driving historical hurricane cycles.

Simply put, if true, this discovery means that during the 20th century and beyond, humans — not natural variability — have been the main driving force in the up-and-down cycles of hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

I wonder how many faulty premises and data points will be in this study? Meh, it matters little to the Cult, because this now gives them an excuse to call for more taxes and government Authority.