Tag Archives: #ClimateChange

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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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Sometimes even The Los Angeles Times has to tell people the truth

There has been much mockery of the California’s announcement that, beginning in 2035, only zero-emissions personal new vehicles could be sold in the Pyrite State, followed just a couple of days later by pleas that owners of plug-in electric vehicles not be recharged at home during peak energy use hours, and that was followed by the threat of rolling blackouts, to avoid a major collapse of the state’s power grid. If the power couldn’t be kept on during a heat wave, and people couldn’t recharge their Chevy Dolt’s when there just aren’t that many of them on the roads, how could things be handled if only plug-in electric vehicles could be sold come 2035?

Somehow, in all of that, what Patterico used to call the Los Angeles Dog Trainer managed to use 2,351 words to actually document what all of this means.

With gas-fueled car ban, California hopes to lead the nation. Can it deliver?

By Hayley Smith and Tony Briscoe |

It was the sort of bold, climate-focused initiative that California has developed a reputation for — an effective ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

But last week’s historic vote by the California Air Resources Board follows a number of sweeping state environmental actions that have met with varying degrees of success.

Now, as officials seek to fundamentally change California’s automotive culture — thereby reducing its largest source of planet-warming carbon emissions and air pollution — experts say those past initiatives may shed light on whether California’s nation-leading auto plan can work.

In Los Angeles, the dense smog that once smothered the city is regarded today as folklore. At its worst, between the 1950s and 1980s, the caustic haze was so thick that people could see only as far as a city block. It irritated people’s throats and lungs, and gave them bloodshot eyes. Back then, there were more than 200 days with unhealthy air annually, according to the Air Resources Board.

Since that time, there has been tremendous progress toward reducing smog and air pollution, much of it due to cleaner cars. The amount of smog-forming nitrogen oxides has been slashed by more than 50% in the last two decades, substantially improving public health.

But California’s progress in fighting air pollution has stagnated in recent decades, and the state is still home to the worst air pollution in the nation. The South Coast air basin — Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and part of San Bernardino counties — has yet to meet any federal health standards for ozone levels, including the oldest measure enacted in 1979.

“If you’re looking back 70 years, we’ve done a wonderful job,” said Joe Lyou, president of the Coalition for Clean Air. “If you’re looking back over the last decade or two, not so good. And if you’re looking at the legal standards that demand that we provide healthy air for people to breathe, we’re not doing well at all.”

Naturally, I have to cut a lot of the text, to avoid plagiarism and copyright violations, but what follows next is a brief history of the state’s efforts to reduce smog produced by exhaust pipe emissions. It notes that California was the first state to require catalytic converters. Then, in 2006, the silly cap-and-trade system was introduced.

Also read: William teach: Bummer: California’s Solar Batteries Have Been Kicking In At The Wrong Time

It was in 2002 that I was part of a meeting in which a cap-and-trade proposal was made at the ready-mixed concrete company for which I worked. Because the company used flyash as a pozzolan, or partial cement replacement, it would have carbon ‘credits’ for the Portland cement that was not used. Those credits could be sold to a company which was supposed to reduce its CO2 emissions, but found itself unable or unwilling to spend the money to do so. I saw it for what it was: not the reduction in CO2 emissions, but simply the moving around of money.

One of California’s landmark climate programs, cap-and-trade was initially launched in 2006 with the aim of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. It exceeded expectations, and in fact reached the target four years ahead of time.

In 2017, the program was reauthorized with a much more ambitious goal: Slashing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% of 1990 levels by 2030. To get there, the program uses a system of pollution credits that essentially lets large carbon emitters buy and sell unused credits with the aim of keeping everyone at or below a certain total.

Experts say it only sort of worked. While the program has remained a key element of California’s climate strategy, emissions were down about 11% in 2020 — far from the 40% goal. What’s more, that number likely accounts for emissions reductions tied to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This was a point which covered only half the issue. Yes, the panicdemic — no, not a typo, but the word I intended to use, because the biggest effect of COVID-19 was panic — would up reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but only via the mechanism of throwing millions of people out of work.

Despite California’s green reputation, it remains the seventh-highest oil producing state in the nation, extracting about 358,000 barrels per day, according to state data.

However, oil production has been declining for decades, and the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, reported that “more permits have been issued to plug and permanently seal existing wells than to drill new ones since 2019.” The agency issued 564 new well permits in 2021, down from 1,917 in 2020 and 2,665 in 2019.

Some experts said that’s not aggressive enough.

“This transition can’t happen too slowly, because there is a climate crisis, and there are significant public health impacts on frontline communities,” said Bahram Fazeli, director of research and policy at Communities for a Better Environment.

Although there are ambitions to phase out California’s oil and gas production completely — most recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom set his sights on 2045 — there has yet to be an official deadline such as the one for the gas car ban.

Just like the panicdemic, reducing and eventually elimination petroleum production in California doesn’t mean that gasoline and diesel will not be used; it simply means that more of the state’s residents will be thrown out of work. Perhaps Governor Newsom thinks that all of the displaced workers will simply learn to code.

For example, reducing demand without supply could mean California ends up exporting its excess oil, Meng said, while reducing supply too quickly could leave communities that rely on the industry in bad shape. In Kern County, one of the state’s top producing regions, oil and gas extraction provide as much as 20% of the area’s property tax revenue.

A few silly paragraphs then follow concerning “equity,” or the notion that trying to meet the state’s goals must not disproportionately impact disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups.

Then comes the big part.

Although phasing out gas-powered cars is one of the state’s greatest priorities, that alone won’t be enough. Driving habits must change, too, if the state expects to achieve carbon neutrality.

The state climate plan depends on motorists driving at least 12% fewer miles by 2030, and no fewer than 22% by 2045.

How, I have to ask, can the state require people to drive less, when California is the poster child for suburban sprawl?

“Highway building and sprawl go hand in hand,” said Susan Handy, a researcher at UC Davis who has studied strategies to reduce automobile dependence. “That’s true in California, and it’s also true everywhere else. When we built highways, it made it possible to develop farther from city centers than ever before. And now we’re in a situation where we’ve got these sprawling development patterns and it makes it very hard to get around by means other than the car.”

As the state’s population has risen and more cars are on the road, state officials funded highway construction and expansion to ease congestion, which ironically fostered more driving.

The only major significant decreases in miles driven occur during economic downturns and, recently, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as more people have worked remotely. However, driving has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

There you have it: even the very liberal Los Angeles Times has admitted that driving is necessary for the state’s economic health. You cannot reduce the transportation abilities of the people without making people poorer.

The article continues to talk about changing people’s behavior, but let’s face it: that means making them poorer. Public transportation is cited as a replacement, but public transportation is a burden and an inconvenience. You have to leave your home and walk to or drive to, depending upon the distance and weather, the bus or train or subway stop, ride in a smelly, dirty and sometimes unsafe public conveyance to the bus or train or subway stop, hoping that isn’t like the SEPTA station on Allegheny Avenue, and then walk or taxi from that station to where you work. Hope it isn’t raining!

Of course, the state will need multiple thousands and thousands of public car charging stations, and

plans to construct at least 250,000 public vehicle charging stations by the middle of the decade; 10,000 of which should be fast chargers, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Uhhh, the “middle of the decade” is almost here! 2025 is less than 2½ years away.

If 240,000 of those public charging stations are not 480-volt “fast chargers”, that means that people would need eight hours to recharge their vehicles. Even the fast charging stations require 45 to 75 minutes to recharge fully a vehicle that is down to 25% of battery capacity.

The state also plans to require landlords of multifamily housing units to provide residents with a means to charge electric cars, though those details are still being worked out.

Really? Great! Now, how can that be done?

There are hundreds of thousands of apartment buildings which have no designated parking for residents; how can landlords get charging stations for such buildings? More, in those “multifamily housing units” which do have designated parking places, requiring landlords to provide electric car charging facilities costs money. The Pyrite State is already one of the most expensive places to live in the country, and half of the state’s 40 million people are renters. If landlords have to plow multiple thousands of dollars into car charging stations for their tenants, rents will have to be raised to cover that cost, and rents are already increasing significantly thanks to Joe’s Bidenflation.

So much of not just California’s, but the global warming activists’ plans nationwide show two very fundamental flaws: they don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand poor people and how they have to live. California has a huge homelessness problem, and major cities which can’t keep people from living and pooping in the streets are going to be impossibly pressed to provide the infrastructure to increase electricity supply and delivery by the amount needed to meet its goals. We have already noted how the Inflation Enhancement Reduction Act’s renewal of tax credit for electric car purchases has been met with electric vehicle prices rising, because economic forces trump the good intentions of liberal legislators. California’s legislators have already voted to keep Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, open several years longer, because as much as the left hate nuclear power, the state needs the sparktricity.

It doesn’t matter how good or noble or necessary the state’s liberal leaders believe their intentions to be; reality cannot be denied, and what they want California to become is simply not something which can be legislated into existence. Construction takes time, often lots of time, and it takes money, usually lots of money.

But more, they believe that they can change the culture of the state in ways people do not wish to change. Who wants to take the bus to the grocery store, and have to lug grocery bags back several blocks by hand?

California’s car culture emerged because that was what the people of the Pyrite State wanted. But, then again, the left have never really cared what other people want.

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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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I love a green lawn!

This might be a post more suited for The Pirate’s Cove, and I did notify William Teach about the article, but with my nice, brilliantly green lawn, and the whole farm, I just had to write something!

The Suburban Lawn Will Never Be the Same

Homeowners from Las Vegas to Sydney are swapping real grass for artificial turf as climate change forever alters what a normal yard looks and smells like.

By Brian Eckhouse and Siobhan Wagner | Friday, July 8, 2022

The lawn part of the farm. I planted all of the trees myself, and did the brick sidewalk as well.

Judy Dunn moved to her home in the Las Vegas suburbs from Washington state in late 1998, when there was little concern about water levels at nearby lakes. Dunn could nurture the verdant lawn of her dreams in a valley of cacti and sand that developers had recast as an oasis. But then a drought arrived and never left, and now local agencies are fining more residents for wasting water.

For Dunn, the final straw arrived last summer. Lake Mead, historically America’s largest reservoir, plunged to its lowest level since 1937 and the first-ever water cuts were ordered on a Colorado River system that benefits about 40 million people including Dunn. “If we don’t start saving water, we’re not going to have any,” says the 76-year-old.

So, Dunn opted to install an artificial lawn, a choice being made by more and more residents of Southern Nevada—one of the many places that’s getting drier as the planet warms. For some, it’s the cash-for-grass rebates being offered by local water agencies. For others, it’s the realization that the classic lawn is increasingly unsustainable in a time of megadrought. And then there are the residents coaxed into the shift by the water notices or fines.

Well, Las Vegas is in, you know, the desert, with average daily high temperatures reaching 95º F from June 3rd through September 16th, and 105º on July 13th. You move to Vegas, and you get the desert, and desert weather, and desert rainfall.

Beyond the drainage ditch and its too-high weeds is the corn field, another brilliant green part of the farm

For water suppliers worldwide, climate change is raising the stakes. Italy in July declared a state of emergency as water levels in its largest river dropped to the lowest in 70 years. The US Southwest is suffering through the worst drought in over a century. Within the next 30 years, droughts may impact three quarters of the world’s population. While plastic turf poses its own climate challenges, it’s increasingly seen as a viable alternative to real green yards that devour precious water. . . . .

A couple of decades ago, artificial turf was often a thin carpet atop a hard surface—rough on the knees as well as the eyes. Athletes playing on it complained that it wore their legs out. But as the product improved, so did homeowners’ interest. From the US to the UK, artificial grass retailers have seen sales tick up during pandemic lockdowns, when housebound property owners put their money toward home improvements. Indeed, Google Trends shows a worldwide surge in searches for “artificial grass” during the middle of 2020.

I don’t know if it’s still there, because the last time I saw it was the late 1980s, but Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company had, outside their public office, which was not inside the shipyard’s gates, some integrally-colored green concrete where grass would have been expected, by their normal sidewalks! Of course, Newport News got plenty of rain, but this way, the shipyard didn’t have to maintain the grass!

Me? I live in the Bluegrass State, and I’ve got to love all of the rain we get!

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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.

References

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The Patricians just don’t understand how the plebeians live! The elites push policies that will affect the working class in ways the policymakers just can't comprehend

As the patricians try to force the plebeians into plug-in electric vehicles, another thought came to me as I got our electric bills: it isn’t just gasoline prices which have increased, but electricity costs as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an evil reich-wing propaganda site:

    Pa. electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% this week. Here’s how you can save.

    Energy charges are set to increase on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. There are ways to save. But beware the risks.

    by Andrew Maykuth | November 28, 2021

    Energy costs for electric customers are going up by as much as 50% across Pennsylvania next week, the latest manifestation of across-the-board energy price increases impacting gasoline, heating oil, propane, and natural gas.

    Eight Pennsylvania electric utilities are set to increase their energy prices on Dec. 1, reflecting the higher cost to produce electricity. Peco Energy, which serves Philadelphia and its suburbs, will boost its energy charge by 6.4% on Dec. 1, from 6.6 cents per kilowatt hour to about 7 cents per kWh. Energy charges account for about half of a residential bill.

    PPL Electric Utilities, the Allentown company that serves a large swath of Pennsylvania including parts of Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties, will impose a 26% increase on residential energy costs on Dec. 1, from about 7.5 cents per kWh to 9.5 cents per kWh. That’s an increase of $40 a month for an electric heating customer who uses 2,000 kWh a month.

    Pike County Light & Power, which serves about 4,800 customers in Northeast Pennsylvania, will increase energy charges by 50%, according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

    “All electric distribution companies face the same market forces as PPL Electric Utilities,” PPL said in a statement. Each Pennsylvania utility follows a different PUC-regulated plan for procuring energy from power generators, which explains why some customers are absorbing the hit sooner rather than later, it said.

There’s more at the original.

2022 F-150 charging in a lot nicer garage than I have. It shows you just how much money you have to have to buy one of the fool things. Photo from a Ford sales site. Click to enlarge.

I just got my sparktricity bill, and with most, though not all, of our heating on it, it’s $325.73 for the house and $30.11 for the shop[1]The garage/shop is not heated.. Now, imagine if we were driving plug-in Chevy Dolts, or, for me, a plug-in Ford F-150 Lightning[2]My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.: all of the electric charging for the month would be coming in one monthly bill! It will be argued that that might still be a bit less than gasoline, but when a month’s worth of your driving costs comes all at once, that can be quite the shock. Yes, we have the money, and the discipline, to handle that, but when I see these ‘payday loan’ places — and they certainly seem to have metastasized in poor eastern Kentucky — you know that there are a whole lot of people who are not living just paycheck to paycheck, but from paycheck to not quite the next paycheck. Do these people have the money and discipline to save up for that next big electric bill?

We bought a house for my sister-in-law, and got her electric bill — from a different provider — which was $462.80. The house we bought for her is total electric, so that includes the range and water heater, which our bill does not.

Those bills were for February, a cold winter month, so they’ll decrease as spring springs, but I can imagine what it would be like if there were a couple hundred more bucks tacked on to charge electric vehicles. This is something the left, which tell us how wonderful it would be to go all-electric, never consider: Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have plenty of money, and a big electric bill would, to them, be certainly manageable, but the Patricians just don’t understand the lives, the economics, and the struggles of the working class.

More, it is well known that cold weather decreases both range and charging speed in plug-in electric vehicles. You’ll have to leave your Tesla plugged in longer, and you won’t get as many miles out of it, meaning that it will cost you more in your electric bill to charge your EV in winter, the same time as your heating costs are high.

In 2019, before the panicdemic, the Federal Reserve reported that “Nearly 40 percent of Americans would struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense, according to a new report by the Federal Reserve — a stark reminder of many people’s financial insecurity even amid solid economic growth.” Yet the people who could handle such an expense are trying to proscribe a ‘solution’ to global warming climate change that would drastically change how the working class would have to handle things . . . if they could at all.

How many Kentuckians, how many working class people, are going to get their electricity shut off because they don’t have the money, or money-management skills, to pay for the plug-in electric vehiclesinto which President Biden and the activists want to force people?

References

References
↑1 The garage/shop is not heated.
↑2 My current vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150, and it’s an actual work truck; I need a work truck around the farm.
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What have the #ClimateAction activists done to reduce their own carbon emissions?

“I’ll believe ‘carbon pollution’ is dangerous when people like Biden stop putting out so darned much themselves,” William Teach said. Why, I have to ask, don’t the people telling us we must reduce our CO2 output ever do anything to reduce their own? Why wouldn’t someone from the Show Me State, such as Mr Teach’s frequent commenter Elwood P Dowd, want to show us just what and how much he has done, personally, to reduce his own carbon footprint?

What I have done isn’t much: we replaced our light bulbs with LEDs, not to reduce our energy consumption, but because when we bought the place, it had incandescent bulbs that were burning out anyway. In addition, as we remodeled the kitchen, we installed canister lights, and the much lower temperature LEDs are far safer in canister lights.

I installed a clothesline outside, which means that, in decent weather, our bedding and my clothes gets dried using solar and wind power. Admittedly, I did this because my darling bride (of 42 years, 9 months, and 7 days) likes the way the bedding smells after line drying, rather than any concern over global warming climate change, but it still saves on over an hour in the 220-volt, 30-amp electric dryer.

Of course, many of the urbanites who like to lecture us on reducing our CO2 output don’t have yards in which they could install a clothesline, or, if they did, are stuck with homeowners’ associations which won’t permit it. But it is amusing to me that none of them ever seem to even think about it or mention it.

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.

When I added windows, I added double-paned insulated ones; you can see the large windows I installed in our kitchen remodel to the left.

It replaced one much narrower double hung window. I added another window in our living room, along a wall which had only one, and the room needed more light. As I had walls open, I added insulation to exterior walls. When we put in new kitchen appliances, we were buying energy efficient ones.

Perhaps my motives weren’t pure enough for the warmunists — Mr Teach calls them ‘warmists’ in his long-term, daily ‘If All You See‘ posts — but, in the end, my wife and I still did these things, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of money doing so; that kitchen window was over $700 just by itself.

Oil lamp and candles on the kitchen counter. Photo by Dana R Pico, on January 16, 2022, when power was lost due to a snowstorm.

Of course, we also added propane, to a house which was previously all-electric, because when the sparktricity goes out in our end-of-the-line farmhouse, it can be out for several days. I’m sure that has us near the gates of Hell as far as the global warming climate activists are concerned, but, then again, we didn’t freeze when we lost power for 46 hours in the middle of January.

So, what has the man from Missouri done, what has the Hirsute One done, to reduce their carbon footprints (feetprint?) that they tell the rest of us we must do? We already know that Mr Teach’s frequent commenter ‘Hairy’ is keeping his current, fossil-fueled automobile, and has no plans to trade it in for a plug-in electric, but, then again, he has told us he’s in his 70s and doesn’t ever plan on buying another vehicle. Being less than two months from my 69th birthday, I can understand that!

I don’t expect our high-flying government officials like the ‘Climate Tsar’ John F Kerry — a very wealthy man who made his money the old-fashioned way; he married it! — to stop flying around the world in his private jet, a Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. But maybe, just maybe, some of the otherwise regular people advocating all sorts of restrictions on other people could spend a little time telling us what sacrifices they have made, what things they have done, to put their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

But at some point, those global warming climate change activists need to do more than just lecture others; they need to lead by example. That so few of them do says a lot about how seriously they take global warming climate.

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Left coasters just don’t understand American politics Mother Jones editors think that Joe Manchin should represent the Democratic party, not his constituents in West Virginia

Mother Jones, named after Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, an Irish-American trade union activist, and socialist advocate, is a far left opinion journal founded in 1976, so the following article they printed is hardly a surprise.

    The Whole World Is Hating on Joe Manchin

    “He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe.”

    by Oliver Milman | Wednesday, January 26, 2022 | 2:00 AM EST

    Within the brutal machinations of US politics, Joe Manchin has been elevated to a status of supreme decision-maker, the man who could make or break Joe Biden’s presidency.

    Internationally, however, the Democratic senator’s new fame has been received with puzzlement and growing bitterness, as countries already ravaged by the climate crisis brace themselves for the US—history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases—again failing to pass major climate legislation.

    For six months, Manchin has refused to support a sweeping bill to lower emissions, stymieing its progress in an evenly split US Senate where Republicans uniformly oppose climate action. Failure to pass the Build Back Better Act risks wounding Biden politically but the ramifications reverberate far beyond Washington, particularly in developing countries increasingly at the mercy of disastrous climate change.

As it happens, the article is not a Mother Jones original, but was reprinted from the United Kingdom’s left-wing newspaper, The Guardian, and the Guardian original had a slightly less dramatic headline: “‘He’s a villain’: Joe Manchin attracts global anger over climate crisis: The West Virginia senator’s name is reviled on the streets of Bangladesh and other countries facing climate disaster as he blocks Biden’s effort to curb planet-heating gases”.

One might have thought that an American-based opinion journal like Mother Jones would have had a greater understanding of American politics, but apparently not. You see, the “whole world” is not hating on Joe Manchin, because the people of West Virginia, the ones he represents in the United States Senate, aren’t hating on him. As William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted, Senator Manchin is pretty popular in his home state, with 72% of his constituents approving his opposition to President Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ plans. Mother Jones, headquartered in San Francisco, appears unaware of that fact.

In Senator Manchin’s last campaign, in 2018, the incumbent drew a Democratic primary opponent, Paula Jean Swearengin, a very ‘progressive’ candidate, so ‘progressive’ that, in July 2021, she left the Democratic Party for the far-left People’s Party. West Virginia’s Democrats didn’t think much of Miss Swearengin’s candidacy, giving Mr Manchin 111,589 votes, 69.8% of the total, to Miss Swearengin’s 48,302 votes, 30.2%. West Virginia’s voters knew what they had in Mr Manchin, as he was one of very few Democrats to vote to confirm most of President Trump’s cabinet nominees, yet they still gave him the vast majority of their votes.

Miss Swearengin tried again in 2020, against incumbent Republican Shelley Moore Capito, and was stomped 547,454 (70.28%) to 210,309 (27.00%).

Still, Senator Manchin, who had won statewide elections in 2000 (for Secretary of State), 2004 and 2008 (for Governor), and 2010 and 2012 (for the United States Senate) didn’t have an easy time of it, defeating Republican Patrick Morrisey by the relatively narrow margin of 290,510 (49.6%) to 271,113 (46.3%).

The truth is simple: the voters of the Mountain State are very conservative, and Mr Manchin, who has described himself as a “centrist, moderate, conservative Democrat”, is not only representing the voters of his state the way they would like, but has been true to the way he has described himself to the voters.

It appears that the editors of The Guardian, who, being Brits, believe that candidates represent their party rather than their geographical constituency. The way British elections work, the way a lot of European elections work, such a belief is understandable. But the editors of Mother Jones ought to know better; in the United States, elected officials represent the voters of their geographical districts, and politically educated Americans, a subset which ought to include the magazine’s writers and editors, know this to be true. Mr Manchin does not represent the Democratic Party; he represents West Virginians.

So, no, Mother Jones, the whole world isn’t hating on Joe Manchin. A lot of Republicans aren’t hating on him, and, most importantly, his constituents aren’t hating on him. But that might be too difficult a concept for people in the City by the Bay.