Tag Archives: #ClimateChange

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Where there’s ‘heat inequality,’ Joe Biden wants to fight ‘racial injustice’ by making wealthier people poorer, not poor people wealthier

The Seattle Times print edition had a headline which has sparked uncounted internet meme’s, though the article title, when I found it online, was different; it had been updated six days later:

New maps of King County, Seattle show how some communities are harder hit by heat waves

By Evan Bush | June 23, 2021 at 6:30 PM PDT | Updated: June 29, 2021 at 8:30 AM PDT

If this weekend’s heat wave sends temperatures soaring well above 90 degrees in King County as meteorologists expect, some communities are likely to suffer much worse than neighbors mere miles away.

That take-away comes from a new map of temperature data throughout King County collected during a scorching day last July. The map, which was publicized by the county Wednesday, shows how the impacts of heat waves and the effects of climate change depend — even at a small scale — on where you live. Continue reading →

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Don’t chill out so much!

I responded to William Teach’s article Rolling Stone: We’re In An Air Conditioned Nightmare Or Something by noting:

A couple of months ago, on the Weather Channel’s AMHQ, Stephanie Abrams went a bit off script and called Jen Carfagno over to the side of the screen. The camera caught her, in the middle of the show, as having pulled on her puffy coat when she was supposed to be off-camera. I found it amusing.

Of course, the on-camera women on the Weather Channel almost always wear dresses or skirts, and women’s ridiculous shoes, and it seems that bare arms are pretty much called for, not just in the summer, but other seasons as well.

Women working in offices have long complained that office air conditioning is set too low, and there are valid scientific reasons for them to think that, reasons which go beyond the differences in the way men and women dress.

Well, today I saw this amusing retweet by Mrs Carfagno:

Of course, while Mr Wooten is wearing long pants, a shirt, suit coat, socks and men’s dress shoes, Mrs Carfagno is wearing what her network seems to assign as appropriate dress for female anchors. I have noted that the women on the Weather Channel are always dressed up, while many of the men appear with rolled up sleeves, often eschewing a tie, but, of course there’s no sexism involved in any of that! 🙂

Office air conditioning is too cold, women think, and science says they’re right

A new study says that office air conditioning may be biased against women, with temperatures more suitable to the average male of the 1960s.

Aug. 4, 2015, 11:25 AM EDT / Updated July 5, 2017, 12:40 PM EDT / Source: TODAY
By Scott Stump

To all the women bundled in sweaters and blankets in your office air conditioning even though it’s 100 degrees outside: A recent study says that it’s not all in your head. It really IS cold.

As many women bundle up against the arctic air conditioning, their male counterparts one cubicle over have no idea what all the fuss is about. It turns out that science says the office A/C may be biased toward temperatures that more comfortable for men — thanks to a formula from more than 50 years ago.

A 2016 study in the journal Nature Climate Change notes that the temperatures in many office buildings are based on a formula developed in the 1960s that employs the resting metabolic rate of 154-pound, 40-year-old man.

Wait, what? A 40-year-old man weighing just 154 lb, and they thought that was average?

More than half a century later, the workforce is much different, but the thermostat isn’t. Half of the workforce is now female, and many of them are wrapping themselves up in blankets to be able to type without shivering. The new study finds that females prefer the average temperature at home and in the office to be 77 degrees, compared to 71.6 degrees for men.

“Women tend to have lower basal metabolic rates, so they tend to burn off energy a lot slower,” Dr. Devi Nampiaparampil of NYU School of Medicine told TODAY. “They actually give off less heat than men, so they tend to be colder.”

Much of the rest of the article is about different office wear for men and women.

Rolling Stone said:

But long before that, the most obvious impact of extreme heat is that it pushes people to turn on – and turn up – their air-conditioning. With cool air, you can feel the chaos within you subsiding. But it comes at a cost: AC sucks up huge amounts of electricity, which strains the grid and increases the risk of blackouts. More electricity also means burning fossil fuels, which means more CO2 pollution (President Biden has promised a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2035, but that’s still a long way off). In addition, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the human-made chemicals inside of air-conditioners used to cool the air, are super greenhouse gases, up to 3,000 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. What it comes down to is this: By cooling ourselves off, we risk cooking ourselves to death.

But this poses an interesting question for the global warming climate change emergency activists: since setting the thermostat higher during the summer will save electricity, and the fossil fuels burned to produce it, the activists should be all for it! Hey, ditch those coats and ties for shorts and flip flops!

Not sure how that’ll work out in the C Suite.

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The urban #ClimateChange activists cannot see outside their own little worlds.

I do not watch a lot of network television. My go to networks for TV are the various Discovery Channel networks, primarily HGTV, DIY Network, and Great American Country, and I watch a lot of the home building and home search shows.

Of course, all of the house hunters have their wish lists, but one thing is very consistent: people want gas ranges in their kitchens.[1]If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges. But what people want is not what the left want to allow them to have. From The Wall Street Journal:

Battle Brews Over Banning Natural Gas to Homes

Cities are considering measures to phase out gas hookups amid climate concerns, spurring some states to outlaw such prohibitions

passed the first such prohibition in the U.S. in 2019.

The bans in turn have led Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kansas and Louisiana to enact laws outlawing such municipal prohibitions in their states before they can spread, arguing that they are overly restrictive and costly. Ohio is considering a similar measure.

The outcome of the battle, largely among Democratic-led cities and Republican-run states, has the potential to reshape the future of the utility industry, and demand for natural gas, which the U.S. produces more of than any other country.

Proponents of phasing out natural gas say their aim is to reduce planet-warming emissions over time by fully electrifying new homes and buildings as wind and solar farms proliferate throughout the country, making the power grid cleaner.

There’s more at the original. What people in general want, the left say is bad, bad, bad! for us. One wonders what the municipal government leaders pondering these measures have in their own homes.

My wife and I live in the country; the nearest town is four miles away, and there are no natural gas lines out this far. When we moved in, in July of 2017, the house was total electric: electric heat pump for HVAC, electric water heater, and an electric range.

Come December of 2017, it got unusually cold in the Bluegrass State, with nighttime lows a few degrees below zero, and daytime highs in the teens. Our poor heat pump was running all the time, and the house was still cooler then we would have liked.

In January of 2018 came what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Hunter, an ice storm which knocked out the power. Where we live, practically at the end of Jackson Energy Cooperative’s service area, it was 4½ days before the sparktricity was restored.

Mrs Pico went to stay with our daughters, who had a nice, warm apartment in Lexington. Me? I had to stay at the farm, to take care of the critters and the water pipes. Fortunately, it was warmed than it had been the previous month, but, by the time we got power back, it was down to 38º F in the house. I spent a lot of time in bed, under the covers and comforter.

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.

Our house is a fixer-upper, and we knew that when we bought it. The kitchen was going to be the first remodel project, and my wife wanted, like everyone else, a gas range. Out in the boonies, that meant propane. With the problems of the previous winter, we decided to replace the very old electric water heater with a propane model, and we added a propane fireplace as well.[2]I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said. If the power goes out for 4½ days again — and a somewhat nearby neighbor has told me that her power has been out for over a week before — we’ll be warm, able to cook, and have hot water.

Fast forward to early March of this year, and the flooding in eastern Kentucky. The flooding was so bad that the river gauge at Ravenna, the closest one to me, jammed at 38.4 feet, but the level was estimated to have crested at 41.00 ft, topping the worst previous flood, on February 4, 1939, which saw a crest of 39.37 feet. We were more fortunate than some people, in that we did not lose our house,[3]A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate. but it was a very near thing: the HVAC system, which is in the crawl space under the house, was flooded and destroyed.

That meant, in early March, no heat.

But, after I stabilized the propane tank, which floated but I had tied in place so it didn’t float down the Kentucky River, as a lot of other people’s tanks had done, I was able to turn the propane back on, and once again, we had heat. The electricity never went out, but the electric HVAC system was totaled.

Were the left to have their way, we’d have suffered through early March without heat.

The left seem unable to think outside of their own comfort zones. When the electricity goes out, the power companies work to restore service in cities first, to get the largest number of people back into service fastest. The city dwellers in San Francisco and Seattle aren’t on the far ends of power lines, and don’t quite see that electric service in rural areas is dependent on long lines, stretched out over poles subject to the weather. They don’t understand how what they want imposes significant burdens on other people.

References

References
↑1 If you watch the cooking shows on the Food Channel, as my wife and daughters do, you’ll see that all of them, with the exception of Molly Yeh’s Girl Meets Farm, use gas ranges.
↑2 I wanted a wood stove, but my wife vetoed that; too much of a mess, she said.
↑3 A lot of people around here did lose their homes, so we count ourselves as fortunate.
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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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Even in oh-so-liberal California, 20% of plug-in electric vehicle owners are trading them back in for gasoline-powered cars

We have previously noted the difficulties that people can encounter with plug-in electric vehicles, and that consumers really aren’t that thrilled with them.

Now, from good, green, but very, very blue California comes this story:

1 in 5 electric vehicle owners in California switched back to gas because charging their cars is a hassle, new research shows

Dominick Reuter | Friday, April 30, 2021 | 12:41 PM

In roughly three minutes, you can fill the gas tank of a Ford Mustang and have enough range to go about 300 miles with its V8 engine.

But for the electric Mustang Mach-E, an hour plugged into a household outlet gave Bloomberg automotive analyst Kevin Tynan just three miles of range.

“Overnight, we’re looking at 36 miles of range,” he told Insider. “Before I gave it back to Ford, because I wanted to give it back full, I drove it to the office and plugged in at the charger we have there.”

Let’s be clear here: “plugged into a household outlet” here means a standard, 110-volt wall receptacle. Those will never cut it.

Standard home outlets generally put out about 120 volts of power at what electric vehicle aficionados call “Level 1” charging, while the high-powered specialty connections offer 240 volts of power and are known as “Level 2.” By comparison, Tesla’s “Superchargers,” which can fully charge its cars in a little over an hour, offer 480 volts of direct current.

The only practical way to recharge your Chevy Dolt Bolt is if you have a dedicated 24 volt, 50 amp circuit available with which to power your Level 2 charger. As it happens, I have separate electric power in my garage/shop, and the knowledge, skills and tools necessary to add that kind of circuit. Though I do not intend to buy a plug in electric, as I am working on my shop, I’ll install such a circuit simply because it’s easier to do it with the walls still open, and, for me, it would be inexpensive.

I’ve looked at one of my sister’s garage; I could install such a circuit for her there as well, but it would be more complicated. She’s lucky that her favorite brother can do that kind of work.

But what about people who don’t have friends or family who could do that job? That means hiring a real electrician, and that could be well over $1,000, even for a relatively simple installation. If a sub-panel is required, due to the existing electric service in the dwelling, the dollars start to add up.

While I’m not poor myself, I do live in a poor, rural county in eastern Kentucky. While I have good, 200 amp service to my garage/shop, there are plenty, plenty! of homes in this area that have 100 amp service to their poorer homes, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to find some places which still have old 40 or 60 amp fused service rather than circuit breaker boxes.

That difference is night and day, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Energy by University of California Davis researchers Scott Hardman and Gil Tal that surveyed Californians who purchased an electric vehicle between 2012 and 2018.

Roughly one in five plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) owners switched back to owning gas-powered cars, in large part because charging the batteries was a pain in the… trunk, the researchers found.

Of those who switched, over 70% lacked access to Level 2 charging at home, and slightly fewer than that lacked Level 2 connections at their workplace.

They didn’t do their due diligence is what the article is saying. They got caught up with going green without asking the right questions. So much for the liberals being smart!

“If you don’t have a Level 2, it’s almost impossible,” said Tynan, who has tested a wide range of makes and models of PEVs over the years for his research.

Even with the faster charging, a Chevy Volt he tested still needed nearly six hours to top its range back up to 300 miles from nearly empty – something that takes him just minutes at the pump with his family SUV.

This is the part that the left don’t want to talk about. We have had fun with the story about Tesla TSLA: (%) drivers waiting for hours, in a half-mile-long line to top off at a Tesla ‘supercharger’ station. Even at a 480-volt supercharger, it can take more than an hour to fully recharge. And having worked with 480 volt three phase circuitry throughout my career in concrete plants, I’m not 100% certain that the general public ought to be handling them.

There’s more at the original, but it boils down to this: plug-in electric vehicles are a fine second car, useful for tooling around town, perhaps commuting to work, if you have a garage or dedicated, secure parking area in which you can have a Level 2 charging unit installed, and if you have a reliable gasoline-powered primary vehicle.

And that means: if you have plenty of money! You need to have the money to be able to afford an ‘extra’ car, and you need to have the money to afford the residence in which you can have that dedicated charging station. Somehow, some way, the oh-supportive-of-poor-people left just can’t understand that what they think everybody should do is not something that everybody can afford.

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#FirstWorldProblems: British writer worries about having a son who will grow up with running water and electricity

British Vogue isn’t exactly my go-to source for high-brow intellectual articles. Pieces like Oscars 2021 Red Carpet: The Best Dresses From the Night might not be the most inspirational articles on the scientific topic of Climate Change, but whatever! I’m sure that the lovely Amanda Marcotte would have approved of this article, and the author, until she revealed that she had, Heaven forfend! gotten pregnant!

Is Having A Baby In 2021 Pure Environmental Vandalism?

By Nell Frizzell | April 25, 2021

Is having a child an act of environmental vandalism or an investment in the future? Is it possible to live an ecologically responsible life while adding yet another person to our overstretched planet? Can I get away with it if I just never learn to drive, never get a dog and keep wearing the same three pairs of jeans for the rest of my life?

For the scientifically-engaged person, there are few questions more troubling when looking at the current climate emergency than that of having a baby. Whether your body throbs to reproduce, you passively believe that it is on the cards for you one day, or you actively seek to remain child-free, the declining health of the planet cannot help but factor in your thinking.

Well, not to worry, if enough people think the way Nell Frizzell does, we won’t have to worry too much about anthropogenic global warming climate change, as in a few more generations, there won’t be any more humans.

Oh, wait, I forgot. I need to stop using my sarcastic global warming climate change, because:

Scientific American magazine announced Monday that it would stop using the term “climate change” in articles about man-made global warming and substitute “climate emergency” instead.

So, what, now I have to switch to global warming climate change emergency? Sometimes it just gets so difficult to keep up!

But what got me was Miss Frizzell’s next sentence, which was a continuation of her second paragraph:[1] Miss Frizzell appears to be correct, in that her website “About” page states that she lives with “her partner, (and) her son,” which leads me to assume that she is not married.

Before I got pregnant, I worried feverishly about the strain on the earth’s resources that another Western child would add. The food he ate, the nappies he wore, the electricity he would use; before he’d even started sitting up, my child would have already contributed far more to climate change than his counterpart in, say, Kerala or South Sudan.

So, it wasn’t just a child, but a Western child which worried her. That child in South Sudan, who wouldn’t contribute as much to climate change? He’d be born into one of the world’s poorest countries:

South Sudan sits near the bottom of most human development indices, according to the United Nations, including the highest maternal mortality and female illiteracy rates.

Just how seriously am I supposed to take an article on saving the planet from a website that is also featuring “To All The White Boys I’ve Dated Before”?

So, no, he wouldn’t contribute as much to global warming climate change emergency, because he would very probably be born into a village with no electricity or running water, be more likely to be an orphan given the country’s high maternal death rate, and have a life expectancy of only 57.6 years. He would, in all probability, suffer more than Miss Frizzell’s British-born and reared son, but hey, he’d have less of an impact on global warming climate change emergency!

“(T)he nappies (her son) wore”? Well, if Miss Frizzell was all that worried about the contribution to global warming climate change emergency from those nappies, she could have bought cloth diapers, and washed them out in the toilet, as my mother, and every other American mother had to do in the 1950s. Was Miss Frizzell’s concern about the climate sufficient to encourage her to do that, or was she doing like most other First World mothers do in the 21st century, and buy disposable nappies?

But, at least in one regard, Miss Frizzell has told the truth, told a truth that so many of the climate activists either don’t realize or are reluctant to admit: to do as they say we should, they are going to have to leave London and Paris and New York, and start living that South Sudan lifestyle:

You don’t have to look into the future or to other continents to see that the world as it is organised now is dangerous for children. According to the World Health Organisation, 93 per cent of all children live in environments with air pollution levels above the WHO guidelines. Pollution now kills more people than tobacco – and three times as many as AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Across the world, more than one in every four deaths among children under five is already directly or indirectly related to environmental risks. Even here in the UK, where our wealth and geography has so far largely protected us from the effects of climate change, children are already dying from pollution-related respiratory problems.

And yet, like millions of others, I did it anyway. I had a baby. I’d have another if my partner agreed. Is that because I am selfish, myopic or greedy? Did I simply learn to compartmentalise my thinking, choose to listen to the arguments that supported what I wanted to do anyway, or ignore what was right in front of my face? Perhaps. But I also believe that when it comes to the future health of the planet, the question is not one of whether or not we continue to have babies. People will always have babies. Here, there and everywhere. Instead, it is a question of how we raise those babies, of learning to live within our environmental means, of turning away from the fever of consumerism and overturning a political system that rewards a tiny rich minority at the expense of everyone else.

Perhaps Miss Frizzell could bring up her son, not in Oxford, with its consumerism and ridiculous real estate prices and pollution and conspicuous consumption, but in South Sudan. Living there, he would certainly grow up “learning to live within (his) environmental means”!

Miss Frizzell is a writer, her About page telling us that she has written for many august publications. Well, couldn’t she do that anywhere, and simply send her stories to Vogue over the (non-present) internet in her Sudanese village (without electricity).

Miss Frizzell appears to feel some guilt at having had the privilege of growing up in a modern, Western society. So, I have to ask: does she feel enough guilt at that to move somewhere else?

References

References
↑1 Miss Frizzell appears to be correct, in that her website “About” page states that she lives with “her partner, (and) her son,” which leads me to assume that she is not married.
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Earth Day 2021

I was somewhat pleased when April 22nd was declared to be Earth Day, being as that is my birthday.

Yes, I know: that makes me full of Taurus!

It was, of course, many years later that I learned about Ira Einhorn, one of the ‘founders’ of Earth Day, was a stone-cold killer:

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the “composted” body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and ’70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself “Unicorn” because his German-Jewish last name translates to “one horn” —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.

But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen “Holly” Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn’t come back to pick them up.

And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.

It wasn’t until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn’s apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn’s bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux’s beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.

Mr Einhorn managed to flee justice, and wasn’t extradited from France until 2002. Nevertheless, he eventually was returned to the United States, tried and convicted in Pennsylvania, and sentenced to life without parole. Mr Einhorn took the stand in his own defense, and claimed that Miss Maddux was murdered by CIA agents who were attempting to frame him due to his investigations into the Cold War and “psychotronics”. He was sentenced to prison in October of 2002, and went to his eternal reward on April 3, 2020, dying of natural causes at the age of 79.

John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. Click to enlarge.

But, I digress. I have to wonder, on this Earth Day, just what the hard-core global warming climate change activists have been doing to reduce their own ‘carbon footprints’? We have President Biden’s ‘climate envoy,’ former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, using his family’s private jet, a Gulfstream G-IV private jet, with registration N57HJ, to travel all over the globe, to tell the rest of us to cut our CO2 emissions.

Of course, it’s up to us little people to bear the burdens of reducing our carbon footprints.

And so I do! Oh, it isn’t because I am worried about global warming climate change, but because I like saving a few pennies on my electric bill, and Mrs Pico has stated that she prefers it when the bedding has been dried outside, on the clothesline, for the fresh smell, rather than in the electric dryer. And so it is that when I buy light bulbs, I but the LED bulbs, not because I’m worried about the environment, but because they use less sparktricity and illuminate with little radiated heat.

There are many little things that people can do, and they needn’t be tied up in activism or worry about what other people have done, or in insisting that Other People follow mandatory rules and buy plug-in electric vehicles. But it sure would be nice if some of the activists told us just what they have done, what sacrifices they have made.

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President Biden wants to tax working-class people to subsidize new electric cars for their bosses Sadly, this headline isn't an April Fool's Day joke.

2020 Chevy Dolt Bolt.

President Biden, along with all of the other 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, promised to require that all new cars after a certain model year — 2035 for Mr Biden, 2030 for some of the others — would be ‘zero emission,’ which primarily means plug-in electric vehicles, all to fight global warming climate change.

Well, Mr Biden was elected, and he wants to try to put his promise into action, but even the liberal New York Times notes the problems:

Biden’s Push for Electric Cars: $174 Billion, 10 Years and a Bit of Luck

The president is hoping to make electric vehicles more affordable to turn a niche product into one with mass appeal.

By Niraj Chokshi | March 31, 2021

President Biden is a muscle-car guy — one of his most prized possessions is a 1967 Corvette that he got from his father. But he’s trying to make this an electric vehicle world.

So, his fossil-fueled Corvette is OK for he, but not for thee! Got it!

The $2 trillion infrastructure plan that he unveiled on Wednesday is aimed at tackling climate change in part by spending up to $174 billion to encourage Americans to switch to cars and trucks that run on electricity, not gasoline or diesel. That is a large investment but it might not be enough to push most Americans toward E.V.s.

Despite rapid growth in recent years, electric vehicles remain a niche product, making up just 2 percent of the new car market and 1 percent of all cars, sport-utility vehicles, vans and pickup trucks on the road. They have been slow to take off in large part because they can cost up to $10,000 more than similar conventional cars and trucks. Charging E.V.s is also more difficult and slower than simply refilling the tank at far more prevalent gas stations.

This is what prompted me to write on this article. Not only does the Times note that plug-in electrics are ‘niche products,’ but this is the first one I’ve seen from the liberal side of the credentialed media which has noted the problems with recharging the vehicles. The article noted that charging them was “slower” than filling your fuel tank with gasoline, though it was a journalistic failure to note how much slower. As we noted here, they can take the better part of an hour to charge at a high-capacity public station:

Charging an electric car at a charging station can take as little as 30 minutes or up to a day depending on a number of factors. The car’s battery size, your battery’s current state of charge, the max charging rate of your vehicle and the charger you’re using, and even the weather — all play a role in how quickly you’ll be able to fill up. A typical electric car like a Nissan Leaf (62-kWh battery) would take about 11.5 hours to charge from empty to full at home on a 240-volt Level 2 charger or could get to about an 80% charge in just 45 minutes if using a public Level 3 DC fast charger.

Then there was this:

Tesla Owners Wait in Long Lines to Recharge over Holidays

Institute for Energy Research | January 6, 2020

With over 400,000 Tesla vehicles on U.S. roads, Tesla’s Supercharger stations were overcrowded over the holidays and many Tesla owners faced an hours-long wait to recharge their electric vehicles. At one location in Kettleman City, California, a line of 50 or so Tesla vehicles awaiting a Supercharger stall stretched to about a quarter mile over Thanksgiving weekend. The station is located about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Its 40 stalls were insufficient to accommodate the demand, and the simultaneous recharging of the vehicles lowered the rate of recharging, frustrating customers even more. It takes about 52 minutes to charge a Model 3 to 80 percent at a 120 kilowatt Tesla Supercharger.

How many times have you gone to the gas station, and had to wait behind a vehicle or two to get your turn to fuel up. When it takes around five to ten minutes to pump gasoline into a vehicle, it’s annoying enough, but what if there was just one vehicle ahead of you . . . and it took the driver 52 minutes to recharge his car?

Mr. Biden hopes to address many of those challenges through federal largess. He aims to lower the cost of electric vehicles by offering individuals, businesses and governments tax credits, rebates and other incentives. To address the chicken-and-egg problem of getting people to try a new technology before it is widely accepted, he hopes to build half a million chargers by 2030 so people will feel confident that they won’t be stranded when they run out of juice. And he is offering help to automakers to get them to build electric vehicles and batteries in the United States.

It will take “federal largess,” because, as The Wall Street Journal noted, consumers aren’t buying them because most consumers don’t want them. The plug in electrics are simply not as convenient as gasoline powered automobiles.

And American consumers want larger vehicles; that’s why trucks and SUVs dominate the American market. Plug in electric vehicles like the Chevy Dolt Bolt are smaller, because manufacturers need to reduce size and weight to increase range.

The federal government and some states already offer tax credits and other incentives for the purchase of electric cars. But the main such federal incentive — a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of new electric cars — begins to phase out for cars once an automaker has sold 200,000 E.V.s. Buyers of Tesla and G.M. electric cars, for example, no longer qualify for that tax credit but buyers of Ford and Volkswagen electric cars do.

Mr. Biden described his incentives for electric car purchases as rebates available at the “point of sale,” presumably meaning at dealerships or while ordering cars online. But the administration has not released details about how big those rebates will be and which vehicles they would apply to.

Let’s be honest here: new car buyers are wealthier than most Americans. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic hit, there were 40.8 million used cars sold, versus 17 million new vehicles, because used vehicles are much less expensive. President Biden’s plan calls for, in effect, taxing lower-income earners more to give a financial benefit to higher-income people, taxing working-class people to help pay for their bosses’ cars. What an absolutely great idea!

There’s considerably more at the Times original, but it’s pretty much what I have been saying all along: a whole lot of people do not have garages or secure, dedicated overnight parking spots in which they can have their own vehicle charging stations. Naturally, the Times looks at it from the perspective of a wealthier urban area, but when I look around the poorer area in eastern Kentucky where I live, I see older, not-as-well-kept-up homes, many of which have inadequate, 100 amp electric service — and not a few probably still have old fuse boxes instead — and I see people who have little prospect of buying a new car, having to depend on used vehicles.

Siemens US2 Versicharge electric car charger

President Biden’s ideas suffer from the same thing as the rest of the climate change activists: they are the wealthier elites who have no flaming idea how poorer people have to live their lives, how poorer people have to struggle. When around 40% of Americans would struggle with an unexpected $400 expense, how can we expect them to spend $599 for a Siemens 30 amp, 240 volt car charger? If they don’t have the tools, knowledge and skill to install a NEMA L 14-30P receptacle on a 40 or 50 amp circuit themselves, how are they going to come up with the money to pay a real electrician to install that for them?

I’ve said it before: the Democrats, who have for generations purported themselves to be the party of working people, have no idea what a working-class life is like. The Patricians driving the climate change agenda aren’t the people who have to worry about having enough money to buy the kids new blue jeans because what they have are worn out, don’t have to buy cheap Kroger brand products at the grocery store because the name brands cost more, and don’t have to worry if the electric bill gets too high due to colder weather in the winter. It’s just so easy for the elites to say that something won’t cost the plebeians all that much when they don’t themselves have to worry if the price of milk has risen.

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The silliness of ‘Earth Hour’

A group of environmentalists wants you to take ‘action’ on what they have named ‘Earth Hour,’ which is 8:30 PM in your local time zone. The image to the right is from their website, and shows a nice family with all of the electric lights out, burning candles, lots of candles, for illumination.

Oops!

Most candles are made of paraffin, a heavy hydrocarbon derived from crude oil. Burning a paraffin candle for one hour will release about 10 grams of carbon dioxide.

As Australian blogger Enoch the Red pointed out after last year’s Earth Hour that an average Australian who tries to replace all the light produced by an incandescent bulb with light cast by parrifin candles will result in about 10 times the greenhouse emissions.

The site claims that you can use candles made from something other than paraffin:

But of course you don’t have to burn paraffin candles. Beeswax and soy candles are mostly carbon-neutral because any carbon they release by burning was only recently absorbed by plants from the atmosphere. The carbon in paraffin, by contrast, has been sitting in the ground for hundreds of millions of years.

Uhhh, if they are concerned with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, doesn’t stating that soy or beeswax candles are mostly carbon neutral ignore the fact that not burning them at all is carbon negative?

It gets even funnier:

Take part in our first-ever Earth Hour “Virtual Spotlight”

👉 How? It’s simple. On the night of Earth Hour, we’ll be posting a must-watch video on all our social media pages – and all you have to do is share it. 

Share it to your Stories or to your wall, re-Tweet it, send it via DM, tag friends in the comments – the choice is yours!

Whether you share it with one person or one hundred, you’ll be helping us place the spotlight on our planet, the issues we face, and our place within it all.

Be sure to follow us on Instagram / Facebook / Twitter to stay updated!

Uhhh, doesn’t watching their must-watch video on all of their social media pages use electricity? Doesn’t sharing those vidiots on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter use electricity?

I copied the image to the left from their website, showing someone using the light from an iPhone to illuminate the earth. But, last time I checked, iPhones need to be recharged, and recharging them uses, you guessed it, electricity, electricity from the power plant! Perhaps they delayed its usage during ‘Earth hour,’ but it will still get used.

The real problem with the climate activists is that they do not understand their own hypocrisy. They want to Save the Planet from CO2 emissions, but the last thing they want to give up is modern life, their computers, their iPhones, their internet, their heating and air conditioning, really anything which differentiates the 21st century from the 14th.

The climate activists think that they are serious people, but it seems as though every action they take, everything they say, demonstrates how unserious they really are.