Environmental activism in America is based on unrealistic idealism which - in the real world - does more harm than good.  Often these are people who have the best intentions, but some of them will go to any lengths, whether illegal, unethical, dishonest or otherwise, to accomplish their goals.

Many environmental activists rely on propaganda, half-truths and one-dimensional statistics to convince others that the environment is fragile and the earth needs to be "saved" from humans.  This inevitably results in friction between the environmentalists — some of whom believe that man is just another animal — and the people who believe the earth was created for man's use and stewardship.

The environmentalist is more of an enemy to capitalism than a defender of nature.  The poorest countries in the world (for example, Nigeria) are the worst polluters, yet the environmentalists concentrate their efforts in the United States, Canada and England.

The Bible clearly states that God has made the heavens, with all their host, and the earth, and all things that are in it, and the seas, and all that is in them, and He preserves them all. (Nehemiah 9:6)  God himself preserves the earth (and the oceans and the atmosphere), not governments, not environmentalists, not anybody else.

The Species that Saved the Planet.  PhD in ecology in 1971, Patrick Moore becomes a radical environmental activist.  Fifteen years in the lead group in Greenpeace opposing US underground nuclear weapons testing, French atmospheric nuclear testing, whaling, and clubbing baby seals.  His video shows from international media this picture of him running a small inflatable boat into the Soviet whaling fleet.  Greenpeace created a focal point for the media to report on public opposition to nuclear tests and to stopping killing whales.  They were successful.  Good for them!  But, he was the only director of Greenpeace with a formal education in science.  He left it because they drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the earth.  Set himself to develop an environmental policy that is based on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, anti-humanism and fear.  For example, he favors genetically modified (GMO) Golden Rice solving the vitamin A deficiency in Africa.  He reminds us that NASA and many scientists benefit from the fear of Climate Change.  He accepts that most of the rise of CO2 from 280 to 400 ppm is caused by human CO2 emissions.  The G7 plan to "end extreme poverty and hunger" by phasing out 85% of the world's energy supply including 98% of the energy used to transport people and goods, including food.  Ridiculous, he implies.

May the Force be With Us.  The movement from an administrative state to the sort of republic the Founders envisioned, should be easier as a result of recent Supreme Court cases reining in an out-of-control unelected federal work force.  This week even the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in on the issue in Marin Audubon Society v. FAA, in which it held that the Council on Environmental Quality lacked any authority to prescribe the content of environmental impact statements, something it had been doing since 1978.  Think!  For over four decades this agency has been deciding when such statements are necessary (each of which cost thousands and thousands of dollars to prepare) and what they must contain while acting with no legal authority to do so.  With regard to all federal agency action, every project's organizers and their counsels have been complying without the Court's challenging by examining the National Environmental Policy Act to determine if the Council even had jurisdiction.  Had they done so, they would have easily discovered the Council had appropriated to itself powers it did not have.

Study: Most 'climate' policies don't help reduce emissions.  Only a small percentage of climate policies instituted globally have actually resulted in any significant emissions reductions, according to a study published earlier in August in Science, a respected scientific publication.  The new study, titled "Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions:  Global evidence from two decades," used artificial intelligence to assess 1,500 different climate policies pursued across 41 nations between 1998 and 2022, aiming to determine which types of policies have prompted significant emissions cuts.  The study's analysis found that only 63 of these policies constituted "successful policy interventions," meaning that just 4% of the measures evaluated in the study's sample effectively reduced emissions.  [Tweet]

Hawaiian kids said climate change violated their rights.  They just landed a juicy settlement and praise from Dem gov.  A group of 13 Hawaiian youths won a $40 million settlement against the state after accusing the Hawaii Department of Transportation (DOT) of violating their rights by not doing enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Politico reported Friday.  In a legal settlement resolving the landmark case brought against the DOT for prioritizing highway development over public transit and vehicle electrification, the state agreed to develop a plan to fully decarbonize travel — including ground, sea and interisland air travel — by 2045, according to a copy of the Navahine v.  Hawai'i Department of Transportation agreement.  The DOT also agreed to complete a pedestrian, bicycle and transit network in the next five years, and to allocate a minimum of $40 million to "rapidly accelerate the expansion of the public EV charging network" between now and 2030, according to Politico.

Hawaiian kids said climate change violated their rights.  A group of 13 Hawaiian youths won a $40 million settlement against the state after accusing the Hawaii Department of Transportation (DOT) of violating their rights by not doing enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Politico reported Friday.  In a legal settlement resolving the landmark case brought against the DOT for prioritizing highway development over public transit and vehicle electrification, the state agreed to develop a plan to fully decarbonize travel — including ground, sea and interisland air travel — by 2045, according to a copy of the Navahine v.  Hawai'i Department of Transportation agreement.  The DOT also agreed to complete a pedestrian, bicycle and transit network in the next five years, and to allocate a minimum of $40 million to "rapidly accelerate the expansion of the public EV charging network" between now and 2030, according to Politico.

Sue-and-settle strikes again.
Hawaii reaches settlement with youth who sued over climate change.  Thirteen children and teens in Hawaii took the state government to court over the threat posed by climate change.  Now they're celebrating a settlement that emphasizes a plan to decarbonize Hawaii's transportation system in the next 20 years. [...] The youths in the suit had argued that Hawaii was violating the state constitution by operating a transportation system that harms the climate and infringes upon the right to a clean and healthy environment.  More specifically, they accused the Hawaii Department of Transportation of consistently prioritizing building highways over other types of transportation.  The burning of fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — is the main contributor to global warming caused by human activity.  Hawaii is the state most dependent in the U.S. on petroleum for its energy needs, according to Our Children's Trust.

The Editor says...
The Associated Press says, "The burning of fossil fuels [...] is the main contributor to global warming caused by human activity," as if that is an undisputed fact.  This statement ignores several other facts:  [#1] The combustion of hydrocarbons is the most practical and affordable energy source in Hawaii or anywhere else.  [#2] Global warming and cooling will always happen — too gradually to notice — whether there is any industrial activity or not.  [#3] China and India burn far more coal than the United States, so it doesn't matter what the U.S. uses as an energy source.  [#4] Carbon dioxide, a byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion, is highly beneficial and is not a pollutant.  [#5] The children participating in this lawsuit appear to be astroturf pawns being used by anti-capitalist fruitcakes to coerce Hawaii into adopting a half-baked mass transit system.  [#6] There is no "right to a clean and healthy environment."  That's a lofty goal, but it's not guaranteed.

The Cost of Being a Green "Leader".  New York seems determined to challenge California for the title of green energy "leader," regardless of what doing so costs residents.  The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is reportedly "considering" (read: almost certainly will adopt) rules that will be used to justify more forced electrification and higher energy costs for New Yorkers.  The DEC intends to accomplish this using new estimates of the "social cost of carbon" (SCC).  The SCC is a made-up number, calculated using simplistic models that assume a one-to-one relationship between carbon emissions and global temperature.  After estimating how much carbon dioxide will get released into the atmosphere and the resulting temperature increases, the models project the resulting environmental doom and its costs:  rising seas that will flood coastal cities and sink island nations, the expansion of virulent tropical diseases into colder climates, and megadroughts leading to crop losses.

Beware of Climate Activists Cosplaying as 'Conservatives'.  As a general rule of thumb, if the only reason you would identify somebody as a conservative is because they repeatedly insist they are a conservative, they likely are not a conservative.  Readers should keep this general rule in mind if they read self-proclaimed conservative climate activist Benji Backer's new book The Conservative Environmentalist:  Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future.  Backer has created a niche for himself claiming conservative politicians can and must embrace climate activism as a way to hold true to conservative principles and win over young voters.  His message runs along the line of, Hey, conservatives, I am one of you.  You can trust me that climate activism is truly a conservative issue.  Most conservatives, however, would not recognize Backer's words and actions as those of a conservative. [... For example,] Backer praises the Clean Water Act for its brevity, which allows the EPA to interpret the Act any way it wants and become a runaway authoritarian entity.  Backer bemoans the "overconsumption of coffee" because coffee cultivation sometimes occurs on previously undeveloped land.

Lawmakers to examine influence of 'extreme' environmental activist groups in the Interior Department.  House lawmakers will hold an oversight hearing Tuesday to scrutinize the influence of what Republicans call "radical" environmental activist groups in the Department of the Interior.  "Under Secretary Deb Haaland, the Department of the Interior has cultivated intimate and potentially improper relationships with radical NGOs [non-governmental organizations] driving the Biden administration's extreme environmental agenda," GOP lawmakers on the oversight and investigations panel of the Natural Resources Committee said.  Republicans on the panel, led by Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, say the influence of "extreme environmental activist" groups over policy and politics in the U.S. is on the rise.

Biden Suddenly Uninterested in Environment When Uranium is Involved.  I'm old enough to remember when Democrats lectured everyone about protecting the environment and how evil Republicans wanted to lynch Mother Nature and roast all of the California condors.  One other thing they were definitely against was drilling and mining.  Digging vast holes in the ground is dangerous and releases all sorts of toxins.  Do any of you remember those days?  Well, put away your scrapbooks because a new day has dawned.  Joe Biden and the Democrats are now in love with mining, but not for coal, of course.  (Perish the thought.)  But if you're willing to mine for uranium, you can tear up the landscape to your heart's content.

'The River Is Essentially Dead': How Enviros' Push To Save Salmon Ended Up Killing 'Hundreds Of Thousands' Of Them.  A well-funded environmentalist group played a key role in the push to remove dams in the Pacific Northwest's Klamath River ahead of premature deaths of thousands of salmon.  American Rivers — an organization that has received millions of dollars from left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking organizations in recent years — was "the orchestrator of the Klamath dams removal project," according to Siskiyou News, a local outlet in Northern California.  The drawdowns of several reservoirs pursuant to the scheduled removal of four dams in the river preceded the deaths of "hundreds of thousands" of young salmon in the waterway, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.  The push to remove the dams is often marketed as beneficial for salmon, as proponents of the plan — including American Rivers — have argued that the dams obstruct the natural movements of salmon as well as their access to habitat.  However, weeks after beginning the process to remove one of the systems scheduled for deconstruction on the river, a large number of the 830,000 young salmon released into the river on Feb. 26 had died as of March 2, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW).

Payable to whom?
Climate alarmists say U.S., U.K. militaries 'owe' $111 billion in 'climate reparations'.  China's state-run Global Times on Wednesday eagerly touted a report from two climate alarmist think tanks, Common Wealth in the United Kingdom and the Climate and Community Project in the United States, that claimed the British and American militaries "owe" $111 billion in "climate reparations" to communities supposedly threatened by their carbon emissions.  The Global Times is the house organ of the Chinese government, the worst polluter and carbon emitter on Earth by a very wide margin, but it naturally left China's emissions unmentioned as it focused on the "social cost of carbon" calculations run by the two think tanks to slam the "toxic legacy of war" spread by its Western rivals.

Can't We Phase Out Climate Change Instead?  It is time to phase out the climate crisis.  Tone it down.  Make it believable.  Listen to, don't cancel, scientists who want to present another side of the debate.  The constant barrage of climate alarmism causes fatigue in public opinion.  The dire predictions, "hockey stick" graphs, and "population bomb" datelines that fail to deliver an apocalypse rightly cause great skepticism.  Blaming every freak weather storm, natural disaster, or even sociopolitical crisis on climate change destroys the credibility of "the science" that should seek empirical evidence, not political agendas.  A phase-out or even a gradual phase-down of the eco-rhetoric and its accompanying climate summits would be a welcome relief for a public tired of being told inconvenient untruths.

Climate Change Is Taking Over Common Sense.  The late, great humorist P.J. O'Rourke used to quip that everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to wash the dishes.  Well, now that can be said for traditional environmental groups that seem to have lost their way.  Green groups are supposed to be about keeping our rivers, lakes and streams clean.  They are supposed to be about fighting litter and keeping toxic chemicals out of the air.  Their job is to maintain the beauty of our national parks and save elephants and tigers.  Not anymore.  The New York Times recently reported in a disturbing headline: "Environmental Groups Cut Programs as Funding Shifts to Climate Change."  In other words, the Left's climate change hysteria and its campaign to end fossil fuels is interfering with a commonsense green agenda.  Worse than that, the climate agenda is in some ways making the condition of the environment worse.

Trudeau's 'climate czar' is the losingest loser in cabinet.  Steven Guilbeault was required to pay $20,000 in costs to Rebel News after blocking journalists from reading his taxpayer-funded X (formerly Twitter) account.  [Tweet]  Then Guilbeault lost a legal challenge to Bill C-69, the no more pipelines law, which created an impossible bar for energy projects to achieve approvals.  The challenge to the law, led by the province of Alberta, struck down the new requirement to consider social, gender and climate agendas in the regulatory process for energy projects as unconstitutional.  [Tweet]  Good things come in threes.  Trudeau's Climate Czar just lost another court challenge.  This time, the court ruled against Trudeau's unscientific ban on single-use plastics, which found the safe, sterile petrochemical classified as a Schedule One toxin, along with asbestos and lead.  [Tweet]  However, Guilbeault hasn't paid the money he owes to Rebele News.  And he vows to keep the no pipeline law and his plastics ban despite the court ruling against him.  [Tweet]

Time to Tell America's Climate Cult 'Stop!'  Describing the mission of his National Review magazine in its inaugural edition on Nov. 19, 1955, the then-not-yet 30-year-old conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that his new magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."  Rishi Sunak, Britain's Tory prime minister, seems to have bravely adopted at least some of that mission by challenging Britain's radical climate agenda.  It's a lesson for the United States.  Addressing Britain's sanguine climate policy, Mr. Sunak said, "there's nothing ambitious about simply asserting a goal for a short-term headline without being honest with the public about the tough choices and sacrifices involved and without any meaningful democratic debate about how we get there."  Mind you, Mr. Sunak isn't what the climate cult types call a "climate change denier"; far from it.  But he understands that aspirations without means are merely pipe dreams.  And he also understands that imposing climate mandates without public discourse or debate is antithetical to the democratic principles that underlie his republic, as they do ours.

Incorporating Out-of-State Regulations is Unconstitutional.  Besides Washington D.C., as many as 14 states — the CARB states, so called after the California Air Resources Board — apply the bluebook, California's stringent air pollution control laws.  In most of them, lawmakers have neither legislated on the matter nor consulted citizens.  This anomaly is being challenged as unconstitutional by Peters Brothers Inc., a trucking firm based in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania.  The family business owns a fleet of refrigerated trucks.

The perils of net zero coercion.  Climate coercion is a very bad way to cut greenhouse gas emissions in Western democracies.  The reflex of sweeping bans is already provoking a bitter backlash in Europe. [...] Germany's heat pump industry is not physically capable of covering such a sudden switch from gas boilers.  Heat pumps will become cheaper over the course of the 2020s, and new technologies are arriving that could let you keep old radiators without having to rip up the house.  We are not there yet.

Canadian smoke signals: It ain't 'climate change'.  The climate change mob will never allow a crisis to go to waste.  They just can't help themselves; it must be in their DNA.  Once again, we masked up, cancelled, and submitted.  One emergency goes, another arrives born of the left's favorite religious denomination: environmentalism even though reported evidence points to the fire's origin as arson. [...] To question whether shoddy government forest mismanagement is to blame is unacceptable.  Rather, lay the blame on all those plastic bags, straws, gas stoves and, of course, systemic racism.  Smokey the Bear's contract has gone up in smoke and why not?  Smokey roams in flyover country.  Environmentalists own this and will not tolerate dissent.  What they fail to realize is timber, like any crop, needs to be cultivated and managed.

Biden's World Bank Head Promises To Spend 'As Much As We Possibly Can' On Climate Change.  Ajay Banga, the Biden-appointed president of the World Bank, promised to "push" the financial institution to its limits to combat climate change in an interview with Reuters late Tuesday.  While Banga said he would not take any actions that would threaten the global financier's "AAA" credit rating, he said that he would leverage the bank's balance sheet "as hard as you can" to address climate issues, Reuters reported.  Members of the Biden administration, notably including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and President Joe Biden himself, and climate activists have — at times over the objections of developing nations — called for Banga to shift the bank's focus from combating poverty to additionally combating climate change.

The Corruption of Climate Science.  It is no exaggeration that every major institution in America has now committed itself to the elimination of affordable and abundant energy.  If it isn't stopped, this commitment, motivated by misguided concern for the planet but also by a lust for power and money and enabled by moral cowardice and intellectual negligence, will destroy Western civilization.  For over 50 years, with increasing frequency, corrupted, careerist scientists have produced biased studies that, amplified by agenda-driven corporate and political special interests, constitute a "consensus" that is supposedly "beyond debate."  We are in a "climate crisis."  To cope with this climate emergency, all measures are justifiable.  This is overblown, one-sided, distorted, and manipulative propaganda.  It is the language of authoritarians and corporatists bent on achieving even more centralized political power and economic wealth.  It is a scam, perhaps the most audacious, all-encompassing fraud in human history.

Neil Oliver: There's nothing green about the green agenda; It's all a scam.  [Video clip.]

That's probably the only way to meet this ridiculous goal.
South Africa beats climate goal as load shedding slashes emissions.  South Africa is ahead of its target for cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.  Output of the climate-warming gases from the world's 14th-biggest emitter is already falling even though its Nationally Determined Contribution, a target adopted by the cabinet in 2021, only forecast a decline from 2025.  Regular breakdowns of the coal-fired power plants that supply more than 80% of South Africa's electricity mean that less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere and daily rotational cuts of more than 10 hours a day are further limiting emissions from factories.  "It's unintentional," Crispian Olver, the executive director of South Africa's Presidential Climate Commission, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Monday.

COVID shutdowns were just the beginning.  Climate lockdowns are next.  [Scroll down]  Now, for clarification "net zero" means total greenhouse gas emissions (including methane) must be less than their removals (such as from planting trees).  The FIRES report instead focused on an absolute zero target because they recognize the absence of novel revolutionary scalable technologies for 1) capture and removal of these gases; and 2) non-fossil fuel mass transportation and energy production.  In other words, if you realistically want to achieve the net zero target by 2050 you essentially have to go for absolute zero.  My twitter thread highlighted the eye-watering points that the strategy required:
  •   All airports in the U.K. except Heathrow, Belfast, and Glasgow to close by 2030.
  •   No flying at all by 2050.
  •   No new petrol/diesel cars by 2030.
  •   By 2050 road use restricted to 60 percent of today's level.
  •   Food, heating, and energy restricted to 60 percent of today's level by 2050.
  •   Beef and lamb to be phased out by 2050.
I said that, apart from the extreme limitations on personal freedom and travel, this means either a colder, hungrier population or massive depopulation.

What Will Net Zero Ever Do For Us?  We are being asked to cut overall energy use by 46-60% per person.  The evidence shows a clear relationship between high energy use and high GDP per capita.  Such dramatic cuts in energy use would put us on a par with Ecuador, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.  It is clear that reducing energy consumption puts us at severe risk of making us all poorer with big cuts in living standards.  We are also being asked to cut meat consumption by 35-50% and the zealots at UK FIRES want to ban beef and lamb entirely.  However, higher meat consumption is linked to longer life expectancy, so big cuts to meat consumption runs the risk of making us live shorter lives.  In addition, there are calls for up to a quarter of all our agricultural land to be re-forested, reducing our ability to grow our own food.  The UK FIRES extremists also want to ban all aviation and shipping, so non-rail food imports would be curtailed.  They also want to greatly reduce fertiliser use, further reducing crop yields and risking food security.  They don't stop there: we are to be forced into electric cars and to use them less.  We will be forced to heat our homes with heat pumps and install ruinously expensive insulation.

Assault and Battery: Beware Those EVs.  There can be little doubt in any serious person's mind that Green technology is an unmitigated disaster.  It is no longer an issue of Big Oil, which the Leftwaffe is strafing and bombing daily, but of the multi-billion-dollar industry of Big Green, or the Climate-Industrial Complex.  The game has changed.  As The Epoch Times reports, "a powerful lobby of politicians, scientists, and media pushes climate-related falsehoods into the popular perspective," to the advantage of Big Business and the attendant cohort of technopreneurs.  Whether we are considering the fantasy of costly, inefficient, and environmentally harmful wind farms, the array of solar panels under the cloudy skies and grey winters of the northern hemisphere, or even the pending legislation against gas stoves — "now you're cooking with gas" is an expression that may have seen its last days — we must prepare for a penurious and meager future.  Moreover, renewables are not keeping pace with the doing away of conventional and nuclear sources of energy, which means that the national energy supply may be increasingly depleted before the shortfall can be made up — if ever.

When Will This Climate Madness End?  What do gas ranges, Dutch farmers, and moose have in common?  In a normal everyday context, very little.  But in the world of apocalyptic climate change, everything. [...] The enlightened climate cult solution is to ban everything that adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and embrace everything that lowers the concentration of greenhouse gases.  For example, gas ranges and ovens are bad because they use fossil fuels like natural gas and propane to cook food.  If gas stoves are banned, electric ranges and ovens can fill the gap.  No worries, right?  The same argument can be made for fossil-fueled vehicles.  Ban them, and switch over to electric vehicles.  Ditto for fossil-fueled power generating stations.  Ban them, switch to renewable sources, and have a happy day.  This sort of logic extends to another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.  In the Netherlands, the Dutch Government is trying to force up to 3,000 farms to close to meet European Union pollution limits on nitrogen oxides and ammonia.  This means that almost no form of agriculture is safe from climate change diktats.

The public has never seen any scientific data that shows that our use of natural resources increases temperatures or controls the climate.  The United States and other supposedly advanced and intelligent countries are working as fast as they can to destroy companies that produce oil, coal, natural gas and all the products derived from them.  They are doing it because of the predictions that these products cause temperatures to rise and massive climate damage.  What the media and other pushers of radical green energy policies never show is scientific data that show a direct link between our consumption of these products and warming temperatures.  Because there is none. [...] Government policies should be based on factual data, not predictions especially since the dire predictions from the last 100 years have been completely wrong.

Climate Hysteria and Woke Gobbledegook Are Becoming Inseparable.  One of Britain's leading climate 'experts', Professor Kevin Anderson, has provided a valuable insight into the increasingly bizarre demands that surround the promotion of the collectivist Net Zero political project.  Writing in the Conversation, he argues for Net Zero within 12 years, complete with a refit of U.K. housing stock, a withdrawal of all combustion engine cars in favour of expanded public transport, electrification of industry, the roll out of 'zero-carbon' energy, and the banning of all fossil fuel production. [...] On a practical level, Anderson's latest calls for radical societal restructuring under the guise of a 'climate emergency' are plainly ridiculous.  Retrofitting Britain's well-ventilated housing and industrial stock along with installing heat pumps would cost around £3 trillion, according to a paper published last year by the technology professor Michael Kelly — equivalent, it should be noted, to Britain's annual GDP.

Biden admin buckles to environmental groups, makes sudden reversal on key land decision.  The Biden administration announced late Tuesday that it would reverse a Trump-era land swap deal facilitating the construction, in an Alaska wilderness area, of a potentially life-saving road opposed by environmental groups.  The Department of the Interior (DOI) withdrew the land exchange — which had been finalized by former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in 2019 and aggressively defended in court by the Biden administration — and explained that it contained procedural flaws and wasn't consistent with agency policy.  DOI Secretary Deb Haaland said the agency would initiate another environmental analysis of the proposal as part of President Biden's conservation agenda.

Bureaucracies [are] Utterly Incapable of Making Reasonable Tradeoffs.  You don't go into a career as an environmental bureaucrat if you think that your concern for the environment is something that can or should be compromised.  In the U.S., battle is currently joined on multiple fronts as to whether unaccountable bureaucracies get to declare the non-toxic beneficial gas CO2 a "danger" to human health and welfare and thereby claim the ability to shut down the entire fossil fuel energy economy and force a multi-trillion dollar (and probably impossible and impoverishing) energy transition on the people. [...] But consider for a moment how it works in the different governance model of the EU, where bureaucrats answer to no one and are virtually unconstrained.  This consideration is relevant to the U.S. situation, because the EU governance model of the unconstrained bureaucratic state, at least as to environmental issues, is the one favored by Democrats in our Congress and by the "liberal" justices on the Supreme Court.  Over in the EU, they have decided that nitrogen — or maybe it is "reactive nitrogen" — is a pollutant.  And pollutants are bad, and therefore they should be reduced or, better, eliminated.  And the bureaucracies have been empowered toward this goal.  Well, here's the problem.  Nitrogen is an essential building block of life, including human life, without which we all starve to death.  Every protein is made up of amino acids, and every amino acid has at least one atom of nitrogen in it.

House votes to kill Biden's 'woke' ESG investment rule that props up 'phony climate movement'.  The House voted Tuesday [2/28/2023] to kill the Biden administration's controversial rule that encourages private retirement plan fiduciaries to consider environment, social and governance (ESG) factors when making investment decisions for tens of millions of Americans.  The Department of Labor rule is widely seen by Republicans as part of the Biden administration's push to inject "woke" ideology into all aspects of government.  Under the rule, fiduciaries who make investment decisions for the retirement plans of more than 150 million people would be explicitly permitted under federal guidelines to consider companies' approach to climate change and other social issues, instead of focusing on only profitability and return on investment for retirees.  Republicans say that's a recipe for tanking millions of investment accounts, and on Tuesday, House GOP leaders called up a resolution aimed at killing the rule, which passed 216-204.  Only one Democrat voted for it.

Global Warming, The Moral Equivalent Of War.  It's not the first time climate alarmists have argued that rationing resources is an important weapon in the war to defeat global warming.  In some cases, it's rationing carbon dioxide, which would mean less of everything, since our economy runs on CO2-emitting fossil fuels.  But there have also been appeals to ration food, meat in particular, and consumer goods.  In a passage that is as revealing as it is revolting, the paper, published last week, argues that carbon rationing would "allow people to receive an equitable portion of resources based on their needs, therefore sharing out the effort to protect the planet." [...] The "fight" against global warming has the earmarks of Marxist thought, in which the individual members of society are expected to surrender themselves to the common good, as defined of course by the regime's rulers.  The core thinking in the paper is also perfectly aligned along the axis of malice with the World Economic Forum elites, who have said the future is a promised land in which we will own nothing and be happy about it.  Yes, those wretches who want us to eat bugs.

We Can 'Fix' The Climate Without Destroying Our World.  Briefly, a cleared forest releases a slow-motion plume of carbon dioxide as forestry waste decomposes.  This continues until the new canopy has grown enough to soak that up.  By contrast, thinning a forest leaves the canopy intact.  That avoids these releases to begin with.  This highlights three things that happen when you clear a field.  (1) You remove canopy above ground.  (2) You leave organic waste that decomposes behind.  (3) Plants soak up the resulting soil emissions.  Land stewards have been removing the plants that offset these soil emissions since the industrial era.  Loggers adopted clear-cutting at the turn of the 20th century.  A cleared forest is a wide-open field.  The soil fungi, which need plants for sugars, eventually die.  The wind takes the soil emissions up in the atmosphere before nearby plants soak them up.

California: Atmospheric river and misguided climate fear.  According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an atmospheric river is a long, narrow region in the atmosphere that can transport large amounts of water vapor, roughly equivalent to the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River.  When atmospheric rivers make landfall, they release this water vapor in the form of rain or snow.  An atmospheric river that forms in the tropics near Hawaii, sometimes called the Pineapple Express, can deliver large amounts of water to the U.S. West Coast.  This winter's atmospheric river has been catastrophic.  Ten different storms have stuck the California coast in the last three weeks.  More than 20 people have died, thousands have been forced to evacuate their homes, and 25 million people are under a flood watch.  The state averaged more than 11 inches of rain from late December to mid-January.  The series of flooding storms were unexpected, following several years of severe drought in California.  Government leaders and some scientists blame human carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.

Our Liberal Friends Have Learned Nothing [about] Climate Change.  Don't you lefties understand that climate change is just as much of a fake war as you believed the Cold War to be, back in the day?  Al Gore bellowing away at Klausi's WEF shindig ought to remind you about Sen. McCarthy bellowing about communists in the State Department.  But go ahead.  You climatistas will end up crashing the economy and get thrown out of power for a generation.

Climate change talking points.  [Scroll down]  "Global warming" entered the public policy debate in a serious way when the midterm election of 2006 made Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House of Representatives.  Knowing of the general public's pervasive ignorance of earth science, the demagogues of the Left seized the opportunity to wage war on fossil fuels as a convenient stand-in for capitalism.  After losing out to technology when it came to smog and acid rain, global warming had to be their next best line of attack.  Add to this the compelling appeal that doomsday cults have for those who are looking for any excuse to avoid facing the boring drudgery of ordinary life.  And lastly, we are seeing climate change being woven into just about every weather-related news report.  The current prolonged deluge that may be ending California's three-year drought is a prime example.  The term "atmospheric river" is used prolifically, as it was some years back in a Scientific American article that discussed the flood of 1862.  This flood is seldom mentioned in today's reportage concerning the current situation, even though it was of tremendous historic importance.  The (ahem) inconvenient truth being that sediment analysis shows such floods to have regularly occurred about every 165 years, give or take, going back thousands of years.  Doing the arithmetic, the last occurrence was 161 years ago.

The green agenda has never been about science or the environment: It is about green money and power.  The people pushing the green agenda always say they are basing the agenda on "science," yet their actions continually show that is not true.  The EU's scientific arm said that the chemical element lithium, used in green-vehicle batteries, should be labeled as a toxin, but the EU refused to call it that because it would interfere with their policy to promote electric cars powered by the highly flammable pollutant. [...] Why do scientists in and out of government promote the toxin lithium as a green alternative while seeking to control and bury CO2, a clear, innocuous non-pollutant that make plants grow and allows the world to be fed?

Paul Ehrlich and the madness of climate alarmists.  All forecasters make mistakes.  But few forecasters have been as consistently wrong as biologist Paul Ehrlich.  So it was quite surprising to see, on 1 January, the once venerable CBS series, 60 Minutes, inviting Ehrlich on the show to give his take on the state of the planet. [...] Ehrlich, a Stanford University entomologist, is most infamous for his 1968 doom-mongering tome, The Population Bomb.  In reality, since The Population Bomb was published, rates of starvation have fallen off a cliff, while the world's population has doubled. [...] The reason Ehrlich always misses the mark is not just down to bad luck.  He relies on a kindergarten understanding of political economy, in which multiplying human beings always run up against the limits of Spaceship Earth.  What all his forecasts ignore is how human ingenuity, risk-taking ambition and technological innovation can overcome the apparent physical limits of the planet.  Even now, advances in genetic modification and irrigation continue to improve crop yields — defying the predictions of climate alarmists that a warming world will inevitably lead to shortages.  Despite Ehrlich's history of egregious errors, he is still treated as an authority on all things ecological.

30 by 30 is the biggest land grab in history marketed under the guise of "protecting biodiversity".  Last week we published an article about a statement issued by the Indigenous Environmental Network, an American initiative to protect sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, and the health of both indigenous people and all living things.  The statement exposed the private commercial interests at COP15 planning to profiteer from "Mother Earth."  At the recent COP15 — the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity ("UNCBD") conference — the Global Biodiversity Framework, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted. [...] Independently, the 'No Deal for Nature' campaign has investigated and detailed the monstrous and unprecedented assault on our living world under the guise of biodiversity.  "At the forefront is the accelerating loss of biodiversity, upon which all life depends," the campaign states, "this very real threat is now being marketed and exploited in order to reboot the global economy."

The Editor says...
"All life depends" on a lot of things, but "biodiversity" is not one of them.  When one specific type of plant or animal disappears, the rest adapt and move on.  In other words, they're smart enough to get over it!

A Fool's Game on Climate.  Use of fossil fuels had an immediate effect on our environment, as the use of kerosene soon took the place of whale oil for lamps and preserved the lives of thousands of whales.  Under the Trump administration this long tradition was continued and even added to.  The present administration has done much to reverse that trend.  It is almost as if they have determined that every act of President Trump had to go.  A couple dozen executive orders were issued the first day Biden was in office.  Many of these concerned the use of energy.  There was an immediate war on coal, oil, and natural gas, the very things that made America great.  First was cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline.  Then other pipelines bit the dust.  Oil exploration projects on federal lands and off shore were ended.  The goal of the present administration is to stop all production of carbon dioxide in just a few short years.  Carbon dioxide is a necessary gas from which every plant is built.  From that tiny percentage (0.042 percent) comes the substance of every plant and all plant life in the oceans.  We are just part of that carbon cycle.  Animals produce carbon dioxide while plants produce oxygen, essential for all life.  It is foolish to think that man can reduce carbon dioxide and control the earth's temperature.

Netherlands to close up to 3,000 farms to comply with EU rules.  The Dutch government is planning to buy out and close as many as 3,000 farms in the country, exacerbating an already-bitter dispute with growers as leaders attempt to halve the country's nitrogen emissions by 2030.  Leaders said last week they plan to allocate some $25 billion to the buyout plan, which they will use to purchase between 2,000 and 3,000 Dutch farms and other large nitrogen emitters "well over" their property values.  If farmers do not agree to the plan, the buyouts could become compulsory.  "There is no better offer coming," Dutch Nitrogen Minister Christianne van der Wal told members of parliament last week.  The plan comes as the Dutch government moves to halve its nitrogen emissions by 2030 in accordance with European Union conservation rules.  But to meet that target, the government estimates that 11,200 farms will have to close, and 17,600 others will have to reduce their livestock numbers significantly.

The Editor says...
Nitrogen emissions are not a plausible excuse for this action.  The atmosphere is already 78 percent nitrogen.  Nitrogen is not a pollutant, and the various nitrogen compounds resulting from (or essential to) farm work are not a real threat, either.  Certainly not a threat that justifies shutting off the food supply for millions of people.

From a Time When Communism Was Taught Right.  [Scroll down] We see now that China is showering entities like the World Health Organization and many organizations in the United States with Chinese cash so they toe the party line.  Many universities, think-tanks, and media have been corrupted.  Many corporations are beholden to cheap labor — think slave labor — to produce their goods and services.  Others provide service contracts that are configured to the restrictive nature of China.  These same companies hope to export their restrictive contracts from China to the United States.  Climate change hysteria is pushing for the elimination of fossil fuels in the United States and elsewhere.  The World Economic Forum is driving these changes on behalf of the Chinese government, Meanwhile, China is clamoring for the purchase and extraction of American minerals and building fossil fuel plants without pollution controls at an exponential rate to fuel its economic growth and rising influence in the world.

China has caused more pollution in 8-years than Britain has in the last 220, report claims.  China is responsible for 14 percent of all emissions throughout history, making it the second biggest polluter in the world, while the USA is in first place as it is responsible for 25 percent of all emissions.  In comparison, the UK has emitted just 4.6 percent of all emissions, which is the fifth highest in the world.  The Telegraph has reported that China has caused more pollution since 2013 than Britain has since the Industrial Revolution first began.  It comes at a time former Labour leader Ed Miliband recently suggested Britain should pay to help developing countries recover for "loss and damage" from climate change.

How You can Derail the Climate Agenda.  It's time, once again, for another climate conference.  This will be the 27th desperate effort to save the planet.  It doesn't have to be this way.  The fearmongers are hard at work.  They've put out no less than 8 reports in the run-up to the event.  We must act now, experts squeal.  The alternative is dire, as always.  The coverage is relentless, especially in rags that take money from conservancies.  A small twist this year is the number of leaders who won't show up.  UK prime minister Rishi Sunak was among the first to pass.  The event was set for failure by the time he changed his mind.  As of writing, the leaders of China, India, and a host of other countries will not attend.

The Green Energy Profiteering Scam.  When governments limit drilling and mining for hydrocarbons in the ground, they manufacture scarcity.  When governments set strict limits for how much oil, coal, and natural gas may be used commercially, such energies' broad industrial usefulness ensures increasingly high demand.  When companies are forced to limit their "carbon footprint" or purchase "carbon credits" (ordinary rocks) from licensed "green" vendors, then the government's preferred business partners reap windfalls (and the government's treasury mushrooms, too).  When only certain wealthy individuals and companies can afford artificially expensive hydrocarbon energies as regular business costs, then budding entrepreneurs and small firms can no longer compete.  Those at the peak of society's wealth pyramid have a much easier time staying on top when the same natural sources of hydrocarbon energy once used to amass fortunes are now denied to those who would do the same.  A war on "fossil fuels" is a superb tactic for protecting private market share.

The war isn't against 'fossil fuels' but rather the people.  Democrats in Congress just passed a slush fund — also known as the Inflation Reduction Act — which gives massive amounts of money to their political interests who claim they can control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity forever.  Politicians are waging a war against the people, which are made manifest in their attempts to force everyone to get rid of their cars, trucks, lawn mowers, and everything else powered by gas combustion engines, based on the unproven theory that they cause rising temperatures, storms, floods, and droughts.  They want the poor and middle class to be forced to buy inefficient, impractical, and unaffordable options, or go without.  What they don't put limits on are private jets, yachts, or the number and size of mansions that emit massive amounts of carbon compared to the rest of us. [...] What we never see in testimonies, articles, and news programs is any direct correlation between crude oil consumption, coal consumption, methane emissions, CO2 content and temperatures because there is none.  The temperature has fluctuated the last 160 years cyclically and naturally as it always has.

Green Fascists Are Destroying the World.  This is not the environmentalism of previous generations, and this new zealotry does not negate or diminish the common sense concern for the environment that most reasonable people share.  But this new breed of intolerant, fanatical environmentalism, manifested in the movement to avert a "climate crisis," is perhaps the most virulent and dangerous expression of fascism in America today.  If left unchecked, this fascistic climate change movement will destroy freedom and prosperity while it destroys the planet it purportedly wants to save.  This is not a frivolous accusation because, in this case, the shoe fits.  There are two types of fascism.  One is based on ideology and manipulates popular emotions, and the other is based on economics and appeals to elitist greed.  The climate crisis movement has found a way to combine both.

11,200 farms in The Netherlands to be shuttered in order to meet the government's climate goals.  By now, you have probably heard about the conflict in Europe over farm animals, which the globalist power lords claim are "warming" the planet and changing the climate with their flatulence — and thus have to be destroyed.  Well, The Netherlands is already doing this with the planned destruction of some 11,200 farms, we are told.  Calculations done by the country's finance ministry reveal that lots and lots of cattle will need to die in order to reduce nitrogen emissions — nitrogen being a natural gas in our atmosphere that, combined with oxygen, keeps us alive and thriving.  Without nitrogen, everyone and everything would die — and this includes all plant life, by the way.  This is the globalist agenda, and it is rapidly taking shape in Western Europe where farmers protests are boiling over across the land.

Why Greens Can't Keep Angry Farmers Down on the Farm, in the Netherlands or Globally.  Farmers in the Netherlands reduced nitrogen pollution by nearly 70% through a voluntary system.  But the government says that is not enough and is demanding that they cut pollution by another 50% by 2030.  By the Dutch government's own estimates, 11,200 farms out of the roughly 35,000 dedicated to dairy and livestock would have to close under its policies; 17,600 farmers would have to reduce livestock; and total livestock would need to be reduced by one-half to one-third.  The Dutch government has demanded that animal farming stop entirely in many places.  Of the over $25.7 billion the government has set aside to reduce pollution, just $1 billion is for technological innovation, with most of the rest for buying out farmers.  This effort has sparked a fierce backlash among Dutch farmers, who argue that the government seems more interested in reducing animal agriculture than in finding solutions that protect the food supply and their livelihoods.

There's No Despot So Tyrannical As A Green Politician.  Reports of unrest over environmental policies from the Netherlands and Sri Lanka are much more than novelty news.  What is happening in both spots is a lesson that has to be learned quickly.  If not, there's deep trouble ahead.  Dutch farmers, whose history of crop yields puts them among the most productive in the world, continue to protest rules that limit their use of nitrogen, a nutrient in commercial fertilizers that converts to nitrous oxide, which is feared as a greenhouse gas.  Officials expected them to cut use 50% nationally, which means in some regions, the reductions will be as high as 95%.  The crippled farmers, their survival under attack, are, as they should be, revolting.

Where Science Ends and Morality Begins.  Environmentalists' desire to halt development of the natural landscape is plainly visible in their restricting of the water supply in California.  Since 1970, the population of California has increased 100 percent, but the volume of water in her reservoirs has increased only 26 percent.  The last major dam in California was built 42 years ago.  Environmentalists fight the construction of every new water project, including even desalination plants, which could be a source of virtually unlimited water for Californians.  But more water would mean more people, more wealth, and more transformation of the landscape.  (It would be a mistake to attribute California's water shortage to radical environmentalists; in California, garden-variety environmentalists have simply enjoyed more power to enact the standard green agenda than their comrades elsewhere.)

Just Stop It!  Donald Trump left us with production elasticity and as net exporters of energy.  Biden deliberately blew it up because the administration fully supports the big lie that is the Climate Change/Green agenda.  The Climate Change movement has nothing to do with saving the environment and has everything to do with the collapse of our economy and the rise of globalist domination once America is neutered.  Greens, to that end, use misguided and disproven arguments that fossil fuel use must be immediately curtailed to save the planet.  Greens do not care if people starve or freeze, even though they have no workable replacement for our total energy needs.  Greens block all nuclear power options, which would be a clean solution, further demonstrating that their goal is economic collapse and not climate.  Biden cut, and now refuses to expand, US energy production, yet he is trying to convince the Saudis to pump more oil to alleviate the crisis he created.

Biden Wants to Regulate Everything — Even Your Air Conditioning.  President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to regulate any gadget or appliance with an electric switch that turns on in your house or your driveway.  New Department of Energy rules will dictate the amount of water that comes out of your showerhead, how much warm air comes out of your heater and how much cool air comes out of air conditioners.  There is even talk about gadgets monitoring your home's temperature in the winter and summer months.  How is any of this the government's business?

America [is] Moving From A Permission Society To A Repressive Regime.  Last month, the Energy Department announced it was taking public comments on efficiency standards for residential air conditioners and pool heaters that are intended to "to help consumers save on their utility bills."  The "savings" angle, though, feels more like cover for the department's deeper agenda, which is its "commitment to reaching net zero carbon emissions."  The Democrats who for now dominate policy making in Washington believe there is nothing so private that they cannot regulate, nothing so personal that it can't be intruded upon.  The only question is the pace of the arrogation of our freedoms.  They have to be taken down in increments, so that the country won't notice the slippery slope toward tyranny.  In many cases, often regarding energy and conservation policies, restrictions are even celebrated by the loudest factions to help numb the public to the constant attacks on liberty.

The Unspoken Evil of Climate Change Tyrants.  The current US Administration has driven the world into a more dangerous place, and it has been led there by the climate change dictators.  Consider where they have led us.  The forceful anti-fossil fuel dictates of the green energy policy makers have led America from being not just energy independent but also a major exporter to become dependent on dangerous and belligerent regimes.  They closed the spigots decades before the essential infrastructure had been installed to sustain any adequate dependence on wind-power, solar panels, or semiconductor chips.  They are so maniacal in their devotion to their golden calf that they truly believe that leaving America bereft of fuel and energy is the only way to combat their obsessive fear.  The outcome has been a domestic economic disaster and far more damaging to the global environment and security.

Vermont leads the way ... off the climate bureaucracy cliff.  A recent Vermont legislative initiative purports to save the planet, by "conserving" fifty percent of all Vermont territory for wildlife by 2050!  In addition to the economic and constitutional problems this poses, this effort holds up for public display the foolish power-mongering implicit in all these highbrow, counterproductive "climate salvation" fantasies. [...] This effort is totally disconnected from helping the ecosystem, though it dramatically expands elitist ideological tyranny — this is the common theme when bureaucrats fantasize they can solve problems they don't even understand, with more bureaucracy and power appropriated to themselves.  The common theme in all of these efforts is that they 1) eliminate private property rights; 2) while transferring wealth from poor people to wealthy elites and 3) are environmentally counterproductive.  Environmental writer Wendell Berry opines wryly that "People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food."  A parallel is that people in Vermont are subjugated by an elitist bureaucrat industry, which pays no attention to either human health, food, or the ecosystem — all of these are mere pretenses to advance counterproductive ideological delusions.

The US Must Face an Existential Threat, but It's Not Climate Change.  Democrats are committed "to eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035."  They want banks to stop financing fossil fuel development by 2030, and they want to end the use of fossil fuels completely by 2050. [...] Democrats are bent on the destruction of the oil industry.  They contend that climate change is an "existential threat" that political and environmental factions describe in millions of pages of mind-numbing documentation.  Climate change is a theory.  One may accept the theory and reject the prescribed remedies of the Democrat party.  Democrats offer an apocalyptic vision of climate change intended to scare the American people into voting for Democrat candidates.  They ignore the human capacity to innovate and adapt to changing conditions.  They assume that if oceans rise, people will throw their hands up and surrender coastal communities or drown.  The Dutch addressed life below sea level hundreds of years ago by building dikes and creating pumps powered by windmills to remove water.

Is this the end of the climate change scam?  Perfectly phrased by John Kerry's nonsensical plaint that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will increase the combustion rate of fossil fuels is the abject silliness of the whole concept of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).  Particularly recent U.S. policies against fracking, pipelines, coal, and internal combustion engines have placed us at a severe strategic disadvantage.  It has taken only a couple of days for it to become common knowledge that such policies have seriously enriched Vladimir Putin.  The grotesque human price of such a debacle will continue to mount, as will resentment for the foolish notion that weather can be subject to political influence.

The Great Climate Rip-Off.  Is the climate changing?  Yes.  Is mankind contributing to the change in climate?  Yes.  Should major national policy respond to this change?  No!  Climate changes continuously, both warming and cooling.  There is nothing new in this and probably nothing to get excited about.  Man inevitably modifies the climate.  The only questions are by how much and in which way.  Historically, man has modified the landscape sufficiently as to make a noticeable impact on the climate.  The essential question we must address is, how much are we, today, impacting the climate, and is that impact harmful?  The answer is we don't know!  My suspicion is that we have had only a modest, and probably benign, influence.  Given that we don't know, it is seriously bad policy to imperil our future in an attempt to control the climate.

People Don't Want to be Cold.  The climate summit was expensive, energy-burning theater.  One hundred eighteen private jets flew into the airport, President Joe Biden's motorcade had 24 vehicles, including SUVs and vans, and Greta Thunberg was angry.  Demonstrators denounced Israel, which recycles and reuses 90 percent of its wastewater while ignoring the Palestinian pastime of burning tires containing multiple carcinogens.  Sustainability, less, new technologies, clean technologies, and more less (yes, more less) were the watchwords.  Use less, do with less.  The President should have touted America's successes in reducing emissions:  From 2005 to 2018, total U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions fell 12% while global energy-related emissions increased nearly 24%.  Since 2005, national greenhouse gas emissions fell by 10%, and power sector emissions by 27% — as the US economy grew by 25%.  He should have compared that to China's announcement of 30 new, polluting coal-fired power plants and China being the world's biggest polluter.  Xi Jinping, naturally enough, was a no-show.  The president should have stood up for his people.  Our people.

The Latest Round of Global Climate Lie 'Pledges' From International Polluters.  The global "climate change" push is nothing more than the rest of the globe trying to crush our economy while doing nothing at all averse to theirs.  To that end, they'll rip us off and lie to us.  Because they hate us.  And they're not nearly as stupidly suicidal as are we.  America-sacrificing President Joe Biden and his "Climate Envoy" John Kerry just proudly announced they've secured yet another round of planetary climate promises.

Why RGGI is a "solution in search of a problem".  The Governor and other officials have relied heavily on the state's Climate Action Plans and specifically on the 2018 Pennsylvania Climate Action Plan in order to support their claims of current and future devastating impacts of continued CO2-driven warming.  Assertions in the Climate Action Plan are refuted by the analysis of Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition and an expert reviewer for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 6th Assessment Report (IPCC-AR6).  Because of DEP's flawed climatic analysis, the agency's predictions of drought, flooding and other extreme weather events have no scientific basis.

The Editor says...
DEP is the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which is the state equivalent of the EPA.  All fifty states have their own version of the EPA, which means there is no need for the federal EPA.

Biden Doesn't Want Us To Have Nice Things.  The current administration announced last week that it intends to force low-flow showerheads on the country that popularized showering, overriding an effort by the Trump administration to give consumers more options and reining in a government that believes it has no boundaries.  Donald Trump, like so many of the rest of us, had grown weary of the trickling drip from showerheads that caused us to stay in the shower longer so we could thoroughly rinse ourselves.  His Department of Energy proposed to change the 2013 federal rule that set a limit on water flowing through shower heads to 2.5 gallons per minute, a flow rate that was initially established by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1992 — signed into law by President "kinder and gentler" George H.W. Bush[.]  Had the revision gone through, the 2.5 GMP [sic] limit would have been applied to each individual nozzle in a shower head, rather than an entire head or unit, as was defined under the Obama administration, allowing for a greater flow of water.  This is what many consumers wanted.  They said so when they bought shower heads with multiple nozzles that were made to work around the 1992 rule.

Automobile tires, not climate change, are killing West Coast salmon.  From the "where the rubber meets the road" department, comes this bombshell finding that flies in the face of claims about the universal boogeyman of "climate change" killing salmon due to it supposedly raising water temperatures in streams where they spawn.  Just last year, PBS and Popular Science were screaming about "climate change" being the cause of salmon deaths with headlines like "Climate Change is Killing Salmon in the Pacific Northwest" and "Climate change is cooking salmon in the Pacific Northwest."  It seems they were wrong — dead wrong.  New research from the University of Washington published December 3 in the journal Science, exonerates "climate change" in the salmon-killing caper and finds a surprise villain:  an additive to automobile tires, not "climate change."  In fact, the researchers specifically ruled out climate change-driven water temperature increases as a cause.

Millions in Africa [are] Being Sacrificed to Extreme Poverty, Premature Death on Altar of 'Green Energy'.  Obama-era policies that favor so-called green energy over coal-fired electricity are dooming millions of Africans to lives of extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and increased risk of early death, according to a new analysis by the CO2 Coalition.  The study by the Arlington, Virginia-based coalition of 60 climate scientists and energy engineers contends that inadequate access to electricity is one of the key reasons for Africa's grinding poverty.  Economic growth in a competitive, global market requires reliable, universal electrification.  Without sufficient electricity for heating and cooking, Africans are exposed to high levels of indoor pollution from dirty fuels, the world's greatest environmental health risk, according to the World Health Organization.

The End Game.  The modern environmental movement was launched from the top of the economic food chain.  The Rockefeller Brothers, for example, funded some of the earliest environmental work, notably on population control.  Today, these depositories of old money built on fossil fuels, including not just the Rockefellers but also the Fords, have become leading advocates of radical climate policies.  In 1972, the influential book Limits to Growth was published with backing from major corporate interests, led by Aurelio Peccei of Fiat.  The book's authors suggested that the earth was running out of natural resources at a rapid pace and called for establishing "global equilibrium" through restrictions on growth and "a carefully controlled balance" of population and capital.  These conclusions, mostly accepted in top media, academic, and political circles, turned out to be almost comically off target, as production of food, energy, and raw materials accompanied not the predicted mass starvation but arguably the greatest rise of global living standards in history.

The Grifters of the Left.  [Joe] Biden at least got elected by the people of Delaware.  So many of the movers and shakers on the left aren't elected by anybody.  With a lot of them you aren't even allowed to know who they're working for.  Take the environmental movement, as a perfect example.  The enviros make nothing that anybody wants or needs.  In fact, they spend all their time attempting to stop other people from making things people want and need.  There's an entire fake industry that has sprung up out of a governmental impulse, fed by lobbyists and PR consultants and other spin doctors, to take money from taxpayers, rate payers, and other users of energy and feed it into zombie businesses that aren't otherwise competitive in the marketplace.  This industry depends on demonizing fossil fuels and the companies who extract them.  Because if the public were to fully appreciate the good the oil and gas industry has done for America's and the world's economy, it would be very rare that anyone would consent to paying extra for an electric car or wind or solar power.

50+ Questions No Reporter Dares Ask Joe Biden And His Campaign.  On The Environment:  You have previously said you want to ban fracking but then claimed that Trump was lying about your position.  Why is it a lie to say you want to ban fracking, when you said repeatedly you would ban or get rid of it?  You have publicly stated that climate change is a national and global emergency.  Does its urgency outpace the coronavirus?  If so, would shutting down the entire nation indefinitely be justified to also address climate change?  You and your campaign website have repeatedly warned of "increasingly intense hurricanes" and natural disasters due to climate change.  According to NYT bestselling author and climate activist Michael Shellenberger, "hurricanes aren't increasing in frequency," and data shows that "deaths from natural disasters are at their lowest point in 120 years."  Why is your campaign making inaccurate claims about climate, and do you plan to correct them?

'Social Action' as a Bogus Alternative to True Education.  "Environmentalism/Sustainability" means the globalist climate change initiative.  It means support for the United Nations Agenda 2030 and a one-world government.  This goes much farther than the onerous elimination of plastic bags at supermarkets.  Rather, it is the incredibly radical Green New Deal that the smug intellectual misfits of the Squad advocate.  It means eliminating autos and airplanes as viable means of transportation.

Environmentalism Today Is Infected with Urban Smugness.  As one of our guest bloggers and commenters noted recently, "the issues are really no longer Republican and Democrat in New York State, but rather downstate versus upstate."  I would only add the issue is much larger than New York and it's a battle of the working class and ordinary folks against urban elites who would govern them.  Environmentalism is the latter's religion.  It is the face of an urban smugness reflected in condescension towards those who provide the heat for their homes, put the food on their tables and maintain the green spaces in which they love to leisure.  Environmentalism today is the dead corpse of what we used to wisely admire as conservation, killed by this urban smugness.

More than 1,000 Minnesotans weigh in on proposed clean car standards.  The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is working on implementing clean car standards.  Gov. Tim Walz directed the agency to begin the process in September.  "If Washington won't lead on climate, Minnesota will," Walz said in a news release.  "That is why we are taking bold action to reduce carbon emissions in a way that increases car options, protects public health, creates jobs, and saves Minnesotans money at the pump."  The rule-making process is now underway, with a public comment period wrapping up in December.  The MPCA said it's received more than 1,000 comments.  "Transportation is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in our state, so tackling climate change means tackling emissions," said Amanda Jarrett Smith, the MPCA climate and energy policy coordinator. [...] According to the MPCA, there were 43 electric vehicle models available in January 2019, but only 19 of those were offered in Minnesota.  "We want to signal to the manufacturers this is a place they need to bring those vehicles and offer them for sale," said Jarrett Smith.

The Editor says...
[#1] The climate is not changing abnormally or intolerably.  [#2] Carbon dioxide is not carbon.  [#3] Electric car dealerships will be all over the map as soon as the demand is sufficient.  [#4] Minnesota's politicians are solving problems that don't exist.

Climate Stalinism.  The Left's fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty.  Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda.  They embrace a sort of "soft Stalinism," driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not — and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream.

Solar panels, vegan diets, no flights: meet America's climate revolutionaries.  The last time Californian climate scientist Peter Kalmus was on an airplane was in 2012:  He says it made him feel physically sick and like he was "stealing" from his children's future, and vowed never to fly again.  US President Donald Trump's administration has made no secret of its disdain for climate science, but that hasn't stopped some ordinary Americans from finding ways to drastically reduce their own carbon footprints, hoping to persuade others through their examples.

The Editor says...
Carbon dioxide is not carbon.  If you are leaving "carbon footprints," perhaps you stepped in some charcoal.

Greens: Save the planet, screw the people.  When an environmentalist says he or she wants to "save the planet" be sure to ask:  "For whom?"  Because often it seems like they're not doing it for people at all.  The anti-people nature of environmentalism is sometimes just a matter of minor inconvenience, as when environmentalist policies force upon us flickering light bulbs, weak showers and toilets, and front-loading washing machines.  Sometimes the imposition is greater, resulting in higher energy costs, the destruction of industries, and the degradation of human health.

Defining Nationalist Environmentalism.  Mother Jones just published a report titled, "Anti-Immigration White Supremacy Has Deep Roots in the Environmental Movement" that "highlights far-right extremists' budding revival of eco-fascism."  That report reprises a New Yorker article from 2015 headlined "Environmentalism's Racist History."  Expect more of this from the establishment media:  right-wing equals white supremacist equals genocidal eco-fascist.  But where are they going with this new narrative?  If their goal is simply to underscore the alleged danger presented by anyone right-of-center, is this truly the best approach?  Because it doesn't stand up to logic, and it risks exposing the illogic of most conventional environmentalist policies.

Climate Crazies Now Want You to Feel Guilty About Your Vacation.  The scolds who buy into the notion that we're all killing dear old Mother Earth have a seemingly endless list of joys they want to remove from our lives, and have now set their sights on one of the greatest:  your annual vacation.  The New York Times has an opinion piece this weekend titled "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?"  The article was written by a travel writer named Seth Kugel. [...] The "flight shaming movement" mentioned has been championed by that teenage brat who got a week's worth of publicity by refusing to meet with President Trump, even though no such meeting was ever discussed.  Those of us not members of the climate hysteria cult have long marveled at the disconnect exhibited by those who are as they wag their fingers at us from private jets and commercial airliners.

The Democratic Washing Machine.  The Democratic washing machine is so named because it was Democrats who decided to ruin a durable product in a mature industry.  In the name of saving electricity and saving water, they couldn't save just a little electricity and a little water.  No, they had to force manufacturers to create a product that used almost no water.  And to save electricity, they turned the control panel on the washing machine into something resembling the bridge of a starship, with so many options you have to study a detailed manual even to figure out how to turn on the device.

What I Learned on My Undercover Mission Among the Greenies at Glastonbury.  [Scroll down]  Scarier than that, though, is the assumption behind those paintings.  It's one that pervades the whole festival, namely:  every good and decent person in the world — including all 135,000 people at Glastonbury — knows that we have only 12 years left to save the planet and that if we don't put on our hair shirts, drink Oatly instead of milk [bit ironic that, given that the festival is held on a dairy farm and was founded by a dairy farmer...], abandon plastic, recycle everything, and bomb the economy back to the dark ages, we are all totally doomed.  I find the intolerance of this green totalitarianism utterly terrifying.

Climate science violates the basic precepts of science.  [Scroll down]  Climate science is more like "diet science", in which every second doctor has his own ideas about a good diet.  It is a very immature science at best, and most of its current conclusions will be totally rejected with time.  What is global temperature anyway?  How is it measured?  Why are we looking at the last fifty years and not the last fifty million years?  Even simple things like the measurements of temperature are subject to huge disagreements because of complexities like the urban heat island effect.  And the fact is that the world has seen much higher levels of CO2 in the past even during ice ages.  Until climate science can make accurate predictions of past ice ages and temperatures, will not be ready to be called a science.

Environmentalism: Evidence Suggests it Was Always and Only About Achieving World Government.  It is common sense to protect our environment, but what has occurred for 50 years is exploitation of that idea for a socialist agenda.  We wasted 50 years believing that humans are not natural, and everything they do is destructive.  We wasted and continue to waste trillions of dollars on unnecessary policies and useless technologies, all based on false assumptions, pseudoscience, and emotional bullying.  We now know 50 years later that every single prediction concerning the environmental demise of the Earth and the people made in the original Earth Day Report was wrong.  We also know that every additional claim, such as overpopulation, global warming, sea level rise, desertification, deforestation, and sea ice collapse, among many others, were wrong.  I challenge anyone to produce empirical evidence that proves anything happening today is outside any long-term record of natural activity.  Convince the people that the entire world is threatened, and you can convince them that no nation can save it.  It is then easy to convince them that a world government is the only way to save the planet.  The trouble is that none of it is true.  The World is in good shape, and people are living longer and healthier lives in every nation.

Americans, take note:  Aussies just rejected futile, hair-shirt environmentalism.  Yes, everyone wants a clean environment.  But that doesn't mean they will accept the crazed policies of today's green Left, which views the planet's supposedly imminent demise as a good excuse to impose socialism.  Australia's Labor Party campaigned heavily on higher taxes and cuts to greenhouse emissions.  Their program was typical of such a platform, involving higher energy prices, huge subsidies for unproven and politically favored forms of green power, and inevitable cutbacks in economically sustainable manufacturing and mining that currently sustain many jobs.  Of course, such policies hold forth no promise at all of reducing global temperatures, and they are certain to destroy the livelihoods of many while enriching a small number of politically connected cronies.

New Mexico Enacts 100 Percent Renewable Energy Mandate.  New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a law expanding the state's renewable energy mandate, officially known as the Renewables Portfolio Standard.  The Energy Transitions Act requires 50 percent of the electricity provided by the state's utilities to be generated by renewable sources by 2030, 80 percent by 2040, and 100 percent by 2050.

Finally, jail for a $54m fake green energy ponzi schemer.  From 2005 to 2009 a few US graduates straight out of college promised to turn biochar into energy and save the world as well.  They raised $54m, gave $17m to the early investors and then promised 484% returns to later investors.  The Clinton Foundation loved them, but they never made even a kilo of biochar.  Not long after that the US SEC figured the scam out and shut them down.  That was 2009.  Then it only took 10 years to get one sentenced to 30 months jail.

The Green New Deal : The Antithesis of Green.  Supporters are particularly vague about how they would find the hundreds of billions — or even trillions — of dollars needed to attempt such a plan.  Nevertheless, there is one unassailable fact about the Green New Deal:  It is not green.  Indeed, the entire notion of an all-renewable-energy system is the antithesis of environmental protection and scenic conservation.  The backers of the Green New Deal — along with their allies at big environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and others that tout all-renewable schemes — refuse to acknowledge the simple truth that deploying renewable energy at the scale required to fuel the U.S. economy would require covering state-sized territories with nothing but wind turbines and solar panels.  It would also require stringing tens of thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines.  Promoters of all-renewable schemes inhabit a make-believe world where there's endless amounts of vacant land — territory that's just waiting to be covered with energy infrastructure.  The truth is exactly the opposite.

The drive to make New York 'zero carbon' is insane.  New York's Democratic-run state Legislature might enact one of the most radical energy mandates on the planet.  The Climate and Community Protection Act would require that greenhouse-gas emissions from all sources be halved by 2030 and reach zero by 2050. [...] The state's existing Clean Energy Standard calls for reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050.  But the CCPA will require the entire economy to be run solely on electricity generated with renewable energy resources, primarily wind and solar power.  Transportation, which today accounts for 40 percent of the state's energy consumption, will have to be powered solely by electricity — even the Staten Island Ferry.  Manufacturing — or what's left of it — will have to be all-electric.  Farmers won't be able to use chemical fertilizers on their lands.  The state's dairy industry will be shuttered, because cows belch tons of methane.  How the CCPA envisions those emissions being captured is anyone's guess.  The same holds for methane emitted by landfills.  The few energy-intensive manufacturing industries that remain in the state will have to go.  Cement, for example, is manufactured from limestone using a chemical process that releases carbon dioxide.  Even the greenest electricity won't change that basic chemistry.

The Incredible Shrinking Credibility of the Climate Movement.  I'm old enough now to have lived through several predictions of environmental doom.  The purveyors of this eve of destruction theme come at us regularly, issue one forecast after another that is never realized and are seldom held to account.  I've learned enough at this point to know they'll always be with us.  No amount of facts, history or logic will change that; there's just too much emotional investment and too many special interests involved.  Human nature is human nature and it isn't pretty.  Nonetheless, the truth eventually outs as those who buy into the fear and the distortions invariably take things too far and illustrate the emperor has no clothes.  That's the tipping point and it looks like we're about there.

Washington could become the first state to legalize human composting.  When Americans die, most are buried or cremated.  Washington could soon become the first state to allow another option:  human composting.  The novel approach, known as "recomposition," involves placing bodies in a vessel and hastening their decomposition into a nutrient-dense soil that can then be returned to families.  The aim is a less expensive way of dealing with human remains that is better for the environment than burial, which can leach chemicals into the ground, or cremation, which releases earth-warming carbon dioxide.

The Editor says...
Ultimately, composting releases carbon dioxide, too, so there's nothing to be gained in that regard.  By the way, the Sun warms the Earth.  Carbon dioxide is just a small part of the atmospheric blanket which keeps us all from freezing at night.  One volcanic eruption could probably emit more CO2 than all the cremations in human history.

Five Dumb Arguments Against 'the Wall'.  [Scroll down]  A slightly less stupid, but equally ineffective argument to which the anti-wall crowd has inevitably reverted involves the claim that a physical barrier will damage the environment and doom certain flora and fauna to extinction.  A gaggle of environmentalist zealots sued the government based on the claim that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed into law in 1996 by Bill Clinton to strengthen the nation's immigration statutes, somehow violates the separation of powers established by the Constitution.  If this seems a little thin to you, you are not alone.

Why Won't Liberals Look at the Evidence on Climate?  To any unprejudiced person reading [Goklany's] account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.  I consider myself an unprejudiced person and to me these facts are obvious.  But the same facts are not obvious to the majority of scientists and politicians who consider carbon dioxide to be evil and dangerous.  The people who are supposed to be experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence.  Those of my scientific colleagues who believe the prevailing dogma about carbon dioxide will not find Goklany's evidence convincing.  I hope that a few of them will make the effort to examine the evidence in detail and see how it contradicts the prevailing dogma, but I know that the majority will remain blind.  That is to me the central mystery of climate science.  It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery.  How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?

Another report reluctantly admits that 'green' energy is a disastrous flop.  Amid hundreds of graphs, charts and tables in the latest World Energy Outlook (WEO) released last week by the International Energy Agency, there is one fundamental piece of information that you have to work out for yourself: the percentage of total global primary energy demand provided by wind and solar.  The answer is 1.1 percent. [...] The International Energy Agency (IEA) has in recent years become an increasingly schizophrenic organization.  As both a source of energy information and a shill for the UN's climate-focused sustainable development agenda, it has to talk up the "transition to a low-carbon future" while simultaneously reporting that it's not happening.  But it will!  This report should be profoundly embarrassing to the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, which has virtue-signalled itself to the front of a parade that is going nowhere, although it can certainly claim genuine leadership in the more forceful route to transition:  killing the fossil fuel industry by edict.

Climate change pain hits too hard, nearly 300,000 start revolt in France.  Changing the global climate is such a ridiculously ambitious task that there was never an scientific limit to the imposts that would be demanded.  So the zealots would take what they could get, and then ask for more in escalating cycles, until the people finally rose up in revolt.  Changing the climate is all apple pie until it really hits our quality of life.

How Misguided Environmentalism Is To Blame For California's Wildfires.  Part of the reason it is so difficult to manage California forests is the bureaucratic milieu.  The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of land, has 28,000 employees, and has an annual outlay of $7 billion a year, according to a 2017 Analytical Perspective from the budget of the U.S. government.  For decades, environmental protection schemes have usurped common sense.  For example, most fire ecologists say that the surest way of preventing massive forest fires is to use prescribed burns.  The California Environmental Protection Agency states that "prescribed burning is the intentional use of fire to reduce wildfire hazards, clear downed trees, control plant diseases, improve rangeland and wildlife habitats, and restore natural ecosystems."  Prescribed burns keep forests healthy by burning up the underbrush that accumulates on the forest floor and by thinning trees.  Yet for decades the Forest Service has suppressed most fires.  According to a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection executive summary:  "Land and fire management have in many cases increased fire hazard.

Soros Money Standing Behind Climate Activism in Texas.  A George Soros-funded government attorney in Texas has been leading the charge against a chemical manufacturing company that stands accused of jeopardizing the public safety.  The optics of the case have not been good for the company.  But the money trail that flows between Soros and elected officials comes with its own baggage and points to an agenda that is not necessarily in the public interest.  Lawsuits can make lawyers rich; they can advance political careers and impact public policy.  But how much they improve public safety and protect the environment is debatable.

Navajo Nation Spokesman Calls Tom Steyer's Green Energy Campaign A 'Slap In The Face'.  Navajo Nation leaders are not supportive of Tom Steyer's campaign to force Arizona into dramatically increasing its renewable energy mandate, a mandate they argue would financially ruin their community.  Arizona voters will head to the polls on Tuesday to decide the fate of Proposition 127, a ballot initiative that would mandate utility companies acquire half their electricity from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, by 2030.  The proposal would amend the state's constitution and be a sharp increase from its current renewable mandate — which stands at 15 percent by 2025.

Report: Climate Activists Are Secretly Collaborating With State Governments.  A new report details how a network of climate activists provides off-the-books staff members and consultants for governors and states' attorneys general to pursue an anti-fossil fuel agenda.  Using documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits when necessary to force their release, a new report details how a network of climate activists provides off-the-books staff members and consultants for governors and states' attorneys general to pursue an anti-fossil-fuel agenda.

Inside The $4 Billion Wealthy Liberal Foundations Handed To Environmentalists.  Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday [9/17/2018].  The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016.  It's a project of the free market Institute for Energy Research and is based on nonprofit tax filings.  IER president Tom Pyle said the vast web of funding detailed by Big Green, Inc. shatters the notion environmentalists are locked in a David versus Goliath-like struggle against energy companies.

Children of the Mob.  It was a beautiful day in Paris for a demonstration, brilliantly sunny and not too hot, and the crowds were out:  obviously bourgeois, prosperous, well-behaved, and not at all multiracial or even multicultural.  It was a march for the climate, as though the climate were an oppressed person wrongly imprisoned by a distant dictatorship.  Such nice, good, well-intentioned people!  I found it all terribly depressing.  The organizers estimated the crowd at 50,000, the police at 18,500.  I did not actually attend it, my taste for clichéd speeches interspersed with snatches of popular music being very limited.  But I watched the crowds on their way to the demonstration, mostly with beatific expressions on their faces, as if aware that they were doing something really good like feeding the hungry or healing the sick.  They were both saving the planet and amusing themselves on a Saturday afternoon. [...] What I object to is the indoctrination of children on contentious political matters.  I am all for indoctrinating children so that they are polite and respectful to their elders, eschew pop music, do not chew gum, drop litter, or send text messages to their friends in restaurants, and so forth.  But filling their minds with ill-digested slogans, from which they never recover their ability to think independently, seems to me altogether different.  I do not want them to be indoctrinated even with things that I happen to consider right or correct.  I want children to grow up so that they can think for themselves.

Report: Political Interests 'Commandeered' State AGs for Environmental Agenda.  Outside sources paid for new attorneys in the office of numerous attorney general offices around the country in order to gin up climate and environmental litigation for political purposes, according to a new report by a D.C.-based think tank.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a self-described free-market think tank, published the 56-page report, bolstering their claims with emails and documents from dozens of open records requests to AG offices and universities across the country over a two-and-a-half year period.  Many of those requests had to be litigated to win release of the documents.

Three Climate Change Questions Answered.  A claimed nearly unanimous scientific consensus on fear of climate change has caused a push to substantially reduce or even eliminate the use of fossil fuel in favor of solar and wind.  But three crucial questions are:  1) is the scientific community really united?,  2) can solar and wind take over any time soon to provide the required vital energy for the maintenance of modern civilization in today's world of 7 billion people?,  and 3) has CO2 caused any harm yet?  The answer to all three questions is no.

Is 100 Percent Renewable Energy Possible?  It probably is possible to run on 100% renewable power, if you don't mind crippling the economy by devoting vast sums to that pointless goal.  It won't make much difference in CO2 emissions unless you can convince the Asians, who make most of the CO2 emissions, to also switch to 100% renewable energy.

"Green" Energy, an Environmental Disaster.  One of the worst features of both wind and solar energy is that they are terrible for the environment.  Land-based wind turbines are bad enough, but offshore installations are a fiasco waiting to happen.

The Left's All-or-Nothing Mentality.  These days we've almost become immune to the stunts that members of the left in this country pull to get attention.  Nothing liberals do seems far-fetched anymore.  That's what made the suicide by immolation of LGBT attorney David Buckelso shocking.  Buckel set himself on fire and ended his life not over the issue of gay rights but as an environmental protest.

The Parade of Impending Catastrophes.  Here is a short list of impending catastrophes:  soil erosion, running out of minerals, running out of oil, the ozone hole, biological diversity, radon, death of coral, acid rain, global warming, global cooling, sea level rise, extreme weather, species extermination, air pollution, polar bear death, clear cutting forests, plutonium, dioxin, nuclear power, coal power, mountaintop mining, the many supposed causes of cancer, food additives, genetically modified organisms, water pollution, overpopulation, chickens in cages, cows fed grain, plastic bags, mid-ocean floating garbage, super-hurricanes, droughts, floods, environmental refugees, pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers.

The green empress has no clothes.  During December 2017, Germany's millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow.  Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it.  The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed.  Germany has long supported two incompatible ideas:  engineering excellence and green totalitarianism.  Angela Merkel's support of climate alarmism while preaching energy efficiency continues this discordant tradition.

Germany Becomes the New Poster Child for Climate Change Hypocrisy.  Climate hypocrisy is nothing new.  Celebrities cruise around the world in their private jets, eating filet mignon while telling you to pack a salad and bike to work to reduce your carbon footprint.  So, color me not at all surprised that Germany, a vocal critic of the U.S.'s decision to exit the Paris climate accord, is preparing to abandon its 2020 climate targets.  Strong economic growth is a critical reason why Germany is very likely to miss its target.

Conservation, Not Environmentalism.  Much of the disagreement over the use of America's natural resources stems from confusion over the difference between conservation and environmentalism.  Conservation, a rational, conservative approach to protecting and preserving the environment, is an ethic of resource utilization.  Conservationists view man as a natural, invested partner in the endeavor to preserve the environment to ensure its continued, sustainable use by humans.  Environmentalism began as a sincere conservationist movement but subscribes to a view of man as nature's enemy.  Nature itself is revered and intrinsically embodied with value.  Environmentalists seek to limit human access to, rather than allow use of, nature to advance human life, health, and happiness.  Environmentalists perceive man as an immoral, destructive interloper who can interact only negatively with his natural surroundings.

Utah 'Monument' Was a Reward to a Clinton Donor.  The shrinking in size of two national monuments in Utah by President Trump through executive order was a long overdue rebuke to federal land grabs that have enabled federal control of vast swaths of American land, particularly in the West. [...] President Trump, who has unlocked much of America's resources that were formerly held hostage by greenies and others, has decided to return to the people of Utah control of and decision-making power over the land of Utah, so you no longer need permission from a Beltway bureaucrat to pick up a rock and move it one foot to the left.

The Great Climate Hoax Challenged by 31,000 Scientists.  First, let's address the Climate Change silliness through the lens of the U.S. Constitution.  The way the Constitution works as the law of the land is that if the federal government is to have an authority, it must be expressly enumerated in the document, either in the first seven articles, or by amendment.  The authority for the federal government to be involved in any environmental issues, much less Climate Change, does not exist on any of the pages of the document.  That makes any laws regarding Climate Change unconstitutional, as well as agencies like the EPA.

Courts Spank Climate Alarmists Twice.  A federal judge in Boston dealt a major blow this week to environmental activist groups, led by the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), who are suing ExxonMobil for allegedly failing to sufficiently prepare a facility in Everett, Massachusetts, for the effects of climate change, including sea-level rise and more frequent and severe storms.  On September 12, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf partially granted ExxonMobil's motion to dismiss CLF's case, ruling CLF was unnecessarily injecting climate change into its complaint, to the detriment of its own argument.  Wolf says the case is about whether ExxonMobil violated the terms of a Clean Water Act permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ordering CLF to refile its complaint with all references to climate change removed.  Wolf's order made it clear for CLF's claims to move forward, the organization needed to show ExxonMobil had either caused harm to the plaintiffs or that harm was "imminent," and references to the projected effects of climate change by 2050 or 2100 wouldn't qualify as such.  If the plaintiffs were concerned about the effects of climate change on the facility in 2050, Wolf said, "they should refile their case in 2045."

'I Say:  We Let the Planet Die'.  With the current hurricane activity being hyped as if it is unprecedented (it is not) the climate change sycophants are in full hype mood and it's time to shed light on what's really behind the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the gullible.  Greed.  Did you notice that being green is a heck of a lot more expensive but manufacturers are finding it really easy to jack up the prices of products by simply adding the green packaging?  Admit it, do you buy everything organic even though you have no way to verify that it really is organic but will pay the higher price anyway?  The entire greening campaign waged around the world is so successfully endemic that one can only conclude that idiocracy is no longer an urban legend.  Sadly our school children are being indoctrinated into this campaign based on fake facts.

Beware the bin lorries with seven spy cameras which will snoop for evidence that you are breaking rubbish rules.  Binmen are filing reports on millions of families for rubbish and recycling 'offences'.  Town hall chiefs have ordered them to rifle through domestic garbage and record where recycling is 'contaminated' with food or other waste.  The dustmen are also told to report householders who put out their waste at the wrong time, overload their bins, leave the lids open or fail to use slop caddies.

Germany's Angela Merkel Quietly Retreating From Paris Climate Treaty.  Angela Merkel is essentially the de-facto global head of modern political liberalism.  The central tenet, almost religious-based in its importance, is the lunacy within "climate change".  However, as most reasonable people have concluded, the 'climate discussions' are more about controlled global economics than any actual concerns about planetary climatology.  Bottom line, it's the economics that really matter beyond all else.

Dirty Big Green Criminalizes Climate Science.  Environmentalism isn't a hippie with a cardboard sign.  It's multinational corporations and big banks.  It's environmental consultants padding the bill for every government project.  It's subsidies that get carved up ten different ways into highly profitable investments at taxpayer expense.  It's brand greenwashing and useless recycling programs.  It's a dime, a dollar or a hundred dollars added to every bill.  Big Green is booming business.  But it can't succeed on its own.  Without public policy based on the hoax that the planet is going to be destroyed unless Big Green gets more green cash, the scam collapses.

Costs of green electricity driving Aussies off the grid and into poverty.  When greenies get their way, poor people suffer.  Global warming hysteria tends to be an affliction of the affluent, who don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or how they will keep the lights on at night.  But for those lacking the leisure to hypothesize a crisis that keeps getting stuck on pause, the costs of green energy can wreck lives.  It is happening in Australia, in the State of Queensland, ironcally rich in coal deposits.

72.8% Of World's Renewable Energy Is Made By Burning Wood & Dung.  The hysteria over solar and wind power as the only feasible source of future 'renewable' energy flies in the face of the facts.  Wood and animal feces are both renewable, and account for almost 73% of the world's renewable energy, but you never hear about planting more trees.  Of course, the Technocrats cannot control wood or feces as energy, so it is completely ignored.

The Nazi Origins Of Renewable Energy And Global Warming.  This article provides a critical historical between the doctrines of Nazi Germany and modern Sustainable Development, Green Economy and Technocracy.  I have documented that the U.S. Technocracy movement, once based at Columbia University in 1932, established a sister organization in Nazi Germany by 1933.  Technocracy was very appealing to German scientists and engineers and while the ideology lived on, the organization itself was terminated by Hitler because of perceived competition to his budding dictatorship.

Why I Spend So Much Time and Effort on Climate Skepticism.  It is now clearer than ever that the alarmists have no intention of reaching a symbolic compromise that while unjustified might be livable by the rest of society.  Rather, their apparent intention is to keep pushing the US and other developed countries into a fossil fuel-less society in which all energy used will come from wind and solar or a few other "renewables" but not including either hydro or nuclear.  This is just what the Democratic Party included in its Party platform last year.  And if their candidate had won, this is exactly what the US would now be trying to do.  She even endorsed Al Gore's objectives just before the election, perhaps in hopes of added votes from "environmentalists."  If this had happened, this is a recipe for a financial disaster and probably the end of the US as a global innovator and economic leader.

The 'Business Case' for Paris Is Bunk.  The economic merits of the Paris Agreement take on a different air when more fully considered.  Climate-change advocates' bizarre premise is that economic gains will come from restricting access to the most abundant, reliable and affordable fuel sources.  Never mind that this defies the experience of many European nations that have invested heavily in renewable energy.  After "Germany's aggressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar," for example, the magazine Der Spiegel declared in 2013 that electricity had become "a luxury good."  Apparently this time will be different.  There are a few interesting hypocrisies to consider as well.  The commercial interests that strongly support the Paris Agreement typically have created programs to exploit, game or merely pass through the costs of the climate-change agenda.  Many also maintain a green pose for marketing purposes.

What Happens to an Economy When Forced to Use Renewable Energy?  Some of America's most prominent politicians want national mandates for renewable electricity.  In addition, over the past seven months, three states — California, New York, and Oregon — have instituted plans that will require utilities to produce 50 percent of the electricity that they sell to customers from renewables.  The politicians backing these measures claim that such mandates will help reduce customers' bills and create jobs.  Had these politicians considered the surge in electricity costs that have occurred in Europe in recent years, they might have been less eager to push such mandates.  Indeed, the three EU countries that have been the most aggressive in pursuit of renewable energy — Germany, Spain, and the U.K. — have all seen their electricity rates increase more than other EU countries.  Further, Germany and the U.K. are seeing job losses due to high energy prices.

You Gotta Lie.  The foundations for the unspoken, progressive faith in catastrophic man-caused global warming are self-evident.  Many Western elites believe that modern, free-market industrial growth and consumer capitalism endanger the planet. [...] The catch, however, is that most Americans believe that oil wells, mines, freeways, dams, cars, reservoirs, and factories — and the granite counters, stainless-steel fridges, and big-screen TVs that derive from them — are largely godsends, ensuring a good life undreamed of by their grandparents.  Or they believe that most accompanying deleterious effects on the environment, such as slight and periodic changes in temperatures, are outweighed by the benefits of industry and can be soon ameliorated by rapidly advancing scientific and technological remedies.  The result is an impasse.

Photos of the Trash the Climate Marchers Left Behind.  Remember the biohazard filth left behind by the Occupy movement?  Or, more recently, the Dakota Access Pipeline nutjobs, who deposited tons of trash at their protest site and abandoned dogs?  Well, the recent climate protests — There's Only One Earth! — were no different, with the hysterical hypocrites on the Left (many of whom probably drove gas-guzzling SUVs to get there), leaving behind their usual detritus.

The Top 10 Liberal Confusions.  [#6]  They see no problem in their contradictory environmental ideas.  It's okay in their world to scar an area with garbage while protesting an oil pipeline.  It's okay in their world to deplete the world's food supply to use corn in our gasoline.  It's okay to kill birds with solar arrays and wind farms, to deplete world's lithium supply for car batteries, to jet all over the world to wring their hands about climate change.  It somehow makes sense to them to outlaw cow flatulence.

Environmentalists Use Photoshop and Fraud to Deceive.  You may have seen the headline, I did:  Antarctica hits record high temperature at balmy 63.5°F.  Where?  Base Esperanza.  Where is Base Esperanza in relation to what we normally think of as Antarctica?  A long, long distance away: [...] Base Esperanza is close to Tiera Del Fuego and not far from Africa, so warm temperatures there are not exactly shocking.  Plus, the weather phenomenon that caused the recent high temperature is well understood and has nothing to do with global warming.

Paris vehicle pollution sticker scheme comes into force.  Drivers in Paris must display an anti-pollution sticker in their vehicles or face fines in the latest attempt by the French authorities to improve air quality.  The sticker scheme, which became mandatory on Monday, includes cars, lorries, motorcycles and scooters, and bans some vehicles from the city during weekdays.

Stand Back:  Green Police At Work In Paris.  [Scroll down]  Here's where it gets more interesting: ["]City hall plans include closing roads to traffic and pedestrianising areas of the capital as well as an eventual ban on all diesel vehicles.["]  Wait, weren't we told that diesel vehicles were super awesome?  Of course, we saw what happened with Volkswagen and their emissions cheating, and the EPA just slapped Fiat Chrysler for doing the same on two different models.  Well, in the article right next to the green police one, we learn  ["]Oslo will ban diesel cars from the road for at least two days this week to combat rising air pollution, angering some motorists after they were urged to buy diesel cars a few years ago.["]

California Lt. Gov:  We'll Stop Trump's Wall with Environmental Suits.  President-Elect Donald Trump's plan to build a border wall along with U.S.-Mexico Border will be challenged through environmental lawsuits, according to California's second-highest official.  California Lt.  Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an interview with 'The Golden State Podcast' that he would use specific environmental laws in the state to stop the border wall from being built, at least in southern California.

The Editor says...
In this case, environmental laws are being used as weapons.  The matter at hand has nothing to do with the protection of the environment.  One thing politicians and environmentalists do well:  they obstruct and impede their enemies' progress.

The Green War Against the Working Class.  There was a time in America — and it wasn't even so long ago — that liberals actually cared about working class people.  They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions (i.e., raising the minimum wage) but at least their heart was in the right place.  Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago.  The radical leftwing environmentalists took control.  These are people who care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class.  The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these radicals and now they — and all of us — are paying a heavy price.

Hubris: the Troubling Science, Economics and Politics of Climate Change.  This book should leave any dispassionate reader deeply disturbed.  It should be required reading for people in policy and politics who deal with these matters.  No thought leader should be ignorant of the contents.  How will humanity extricate itself?  One can hope that the accumulation of failed predictions over the next two decades will burst the bubble.  The world academies cannot be asked to sit in judgment on the misconduct, as they will be in the dock.  The UN is also hopelessly compromised.

How the World was Deceived about Global Warming and Climate Change.  Current weather is normal; that is, it is well within the range of all previous weather and climate variations.  There are no dramatic increases in temperature, precipitation, hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other severe weather.  The climate is changing just as it always has and always will and the rate of change is perfectly normal.  Of course, that is not what the government, environmentalists, or the media promote and as a result most of the public believe.  The misconception is deliberate and central to the exploitation of global warming and climate change as the vehicle for a political agenda.

The Polarization of Climate Debate — the Solution They All Miss.  The climate debate is more polarised than ever.  David Roberts at Vox is very honest about the challenges believers face to solve the deep partisan political divide.  But despite all the grants and funding to solve this problem, the experts miss the obvious.  I explain below why polarization will solve itself.  Indeed, all their best efforts to reduce polarization in the climate debate are creating the polarization.  It takes a sustained effort and millions of dollars to keep a false belief alive.

In New Book Scholar Peels Back Layers of Deception in Climate Change.  [Scroll down]  I was initially motivated by questions from my students — and my wife — about the policy implications of climate change.  The more I looked into it, however, the more I learned the extent to which it fit with one of my research interests:  the extent to which modern health, safety, and environmental regulatory activity relies on poor science advanced by activists to push an agenda.  I learned that both domestic and international actors had succeeded in using the poorly understood science of climate change to advance an ambitious environmental agenda focused on increasing centralized control over people's daily lives.

An update on the Energiewende.  Germany is still pursuing its goal of shutting down its nuclear plants but refuses to shut down its lignite plants.  It is slashing renewable energy subsidies and replacing them with an auction/quota system.  Public opposition is delaying the construction of the power lines that are needed to distribute Germany's renewables generation efficiently.  Renewables investment has fallen to levels insufficient to build enough new capacity to meet Germany's 2020 emissions reduction target.  There is no evidence that renewables are having a detectable impact on Germany's emissions, which have not decreased since 2009 despite a doubling of renewables penetration in the electricity sector.  It now seems certain that Germany will miss its 2020 emissions reduction target, quite possibly by a wide margin.  In short, the Energiewende is starting to unravel.

Pay Attention America — Environmentalism Is Crushing Europe.  [Scroll down]  First off, Germany is embarking on the next stage in its "green" agenda, and France has recommitted to being the world's dominant nuclear economy.  Meanwhile, Italy is once again worried about negotiating adequate imports of natural gas from Russia (via pipeline) and Qatar/North Africa (as liquefied natural gas, or LNG, shipments), while Poland returns to its earlier plans of resurrecting coal production as the country's shale gas remains elusive and prohibitively expensive.  All of which signals that there is positively no cohesive vision for what an energy policy for Europe should be.

Britain's New PM Drives a Stake Through the Heart of the Green Vampire.  Official:  Britain no longer has "the greenest government ever."  Incoming Prime Minister Theresa May has driven a stake through the heart of her predecessor David Cameron's fluffy, faux-Conservative project by scrapping the Department of Energy And Climate Change (DECC).  Established in 2008, DECC was a hangover from the Gordon Brown era of woeful misgovernance.  Its first Secretary of State was future failed Labour leader candidate Ed Miliband whose only significant political achievement also happened to be one of the most expensive and pointless in British parliamentary history:  the drafting of the truly disastrous Climate Change Act.

Brexit is also a repudiation of 'green' movement, other mandates beloved of the Left.  When British voters chose to leave the European Union Thursday night [6/23/2016], they weren't just voting against Brussels' immigration policies.  They were also voting against Europe's growing list of green mandates.  The EU's allowance of millions of refugees and open borders policy did play a large role in the "Brexit" vote, but it was also a repudiation of global warming policies Brussels has imposed on the U.K.  "The decision by the British people to leave the European Union will have significant and long-term implications for energy and climate policies," Dr.  Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Forum, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Greens' Daddy Warbucks Helps Himself.  Any comprehensive review of green energy and its politics and policies has to include the name of wealthy liberal Tom Steyer — who has been called the environmental movement's new "Daddy Warbucks."  Having made his billions from his tenure atop Farallon Capital Management — much of it from coal projects around the world — Steyer apparently had an environmental epiphany and now wants to atone for his past sins by trying to save the planet from manmade climate change.  He is using his wallet to try to elect candidates who will promote policies and energy plans that agree with him.  And that plan is "green."

Climate and Environmental Propaganda.  Have you ever wondered how the LA Times, Associated Press, Weather Channel and your local media always seem to present similar one-sided stories on climate change, fossil fuels, renewable energy and other environmental issues?  How their assertions become "common knowledge," like the following?  Global temperatures are the hottest ever recorded.  Melting ice caps are raising seas to dangerous levels.  Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts have never been more frequent or destructive.  Planet Earth is at a tipping point because of carbon dioxide emissions.  Fracking is poisoning our air, water and climate.  97 percent of scientists agree.  A clean renewable energy future is just around the corner.  It's as if a chain of command, carefully coordinated process or alliance of ideological compatriots was operating behind the scenes to propagate these fables.  This time, conspiracy theorists have gotten it right.

The Inconvenient Truth about the Environment.  Al Gore became an alleged billionaire selling carbon credits to morons who wanted to continue their lives of excess without guilt.  I have always believed that we need to follow the money whenever anyone tries to sell us a bill of goods.  Just because a product says it's 'green' doesn't mean it is but I guarantee it will cost more. [...] An inconvenient truth about the environment is that it should primarily be about ensuring that our air and water is clean and safe.  To the militant and government environmentalists, it has become a means to control how we live our lives.

Dirty Big Green Criminalizes Climate Science.  [Scroll down]  California carbon auctions are climbing into the billions.  And the endgame is a national and a global carbon tax that will allow Big Green to take money out of the pockets of every single human being.  Environmentalism isn't a hippie with a cardboard sign.  It's multinational corporations and big banks.  It's environmental consultants padding the bill for every government project.  It's subsidies that get carved up ten different ways into highly profitable investments at taxpayer expense.  It's brand greenwashing and useless recycling programs.  It's a dime, a dollar or a hundred dollars added to every bill.  Big Green is booming business.  But it can't succeed on its own.  Without public policy based on the hoax that the planet is going to be destroyed unless Big Green gets more green cash, the scam collapses.

Obama: Let them freeze in the dark.  The energy industry should borrow a page from the National Rifle Association.  The NRA has won its many fights with the gun grabbers (a NRA coined phase) by extolling guns as harmless little items with many benefits.  They went after the motives of their opponents.  Just as those who want to disarm the public could really care less about crime and the sanctity of life the freeze in the dark crowd is really not concerned about the environment.  It is not about mythical global warming it is about controlling the population.  Even if were about mythical global warming it would not be an easy sell since a recent poll shows that less than ten percent of the public thinks it is an important issue.

Can we hit the 'restart' button?  Is the seemingly unending battle over tiny changes in metrics such as LOTI (Land-Ocean Temperature Index), ocean heat content, Annual Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Over Land & Sea (and its plethora of alphabet/version variations), fledgling measurements of global sea level rise, [and the list goes on] ... is this the purpose of Climate Science?  Can we justify the effort and resources being spent on this activity?  Does any of it produce new understanding of the Earth's climate or lead us to answers about potential solutions to changing climate?  Or is a major portion of the entire scientific endeavor we call Climate Science just an exercise in spinning our wheels, getting the subject mired further and further into the mud?

The Last Leftist Bastion: Environmentalism.  It is not a coincidence that today's Left has been reduced to justifying its policies with contorted references to the one remaining science whose findings can appear to suggest an expanded role for government:  environmentalism.  The long-standing progressive desire to impose racial and class quotas in affluent suburbs, for example, now issues forth under the guise of "ecologically friendly" higher-density housing.  Liberals similarly claim that public funding for community organization empowers the poor to fight for cleaner air, that avoiding military conflict prevents atmospheric pollution, and that greater access to abortion eases humanity's burden on scarce environmental resources.  The progressive distortion of environmentalism for unrelated political purposes has become so ludicrous, in fact, that many serious ecologists believe it has undermined bipartisan support for legitimate conservation programs.

When you rely on solar panels and windmills, there isn't enough electricity for toasters.
Sparks fly in Bradford as Tory councillors fight toaster ban.  A prized communal toaster has sparked a standoff between council staff and Conservatives at Bradford town hall, with councillors vowing to hide the appliance from health and safety staff who say it is a fire risk.  Staff working in the Grade I-listed, 19th-century building are banned from using toasters because they are a fire hazard and contravene the council's eco-friendly policies on energy use.

Money and Power Drive Obama's Climate Agenda.  Obama's green energy plan put the coal industry on life-support, targeted oil and gas as the enemy and sought to impose restrictions on power plants that generate electricity to homes and businesses.  What the president reportedly hides behind the curtain is his alliances with international green elites, a select group of political and Wall Street cronies, and energy regulatory czars who have orchestrated a CO2 carbon-taxing scheme that would put billions of dollars into their own pockets. [...] The media neglect the real reason Barack Obama wants your hard-earned dollars to flow into a global green machine.  Barack Obama continues to push, at the expense of America and beyond all logic and recent scientific data, for a long-term and massive financial commitment to global warming.<>/p>

Green Energy Investors Look to Cash in on Paris Talks.  A group of millionaires and billionaires that includes major investors in green energy are using the international climate talks kicking off this week to push for more government subsidies for the types of companies in which they are investing.  The Breakthrough Energy Coalition on Monday [11/30/2015] unveiled policy proposals demanding that governments step up their "investment" in green energy companies.  The coalition's founding members include a host of financiers with significant green energy portfolios.  At the same time, the group said it will be leveraging government support in its own investment work, which will target early-stage green energy companies.

California's Carbon Restrictions Hurt Poor, Minorities.  Jonathan A. Lesser, in his paper, "Less Carbon, Higher Prices: How California's Climate Policies Affect Lower-Income Residents," examines a number of California's environmental policies and how they impact electricity prices at the county and household level.  Lesser finds three significant economic results from the state's renewable-energy mandates and carbon cap-and-trade program:  Rising prices, a hidden regressive tax, and increasing energy poverty.  California's renewable-energy mandates and carbon cap-and-trade program have caused household electricity prices to rise, and Lesser estimates they will likely continue to rise at an even faster rate in coming years.

The Cynicism of the Clean Power Plan.  If you want to irritate promoters of the Clean Power Plan, just state the obvious:  It's going to increase electricity prices, and that will be bad for the poor and the middle class. [...] Eurostat data from Spain, which has also been on a renewable-energy binge, tells a similar story.  Between 2007 and 2014, residential electric rates in Spain jumped by 70 percent.  Over that same time period, wind capacity increased by about 50 percent and solar capacity grew about seven-fold.  Spanish households are now paying some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, about $0.27 per kilowatt-hour, a rate that is more than twice the U.S. average.

Four Dirty Secrets about Clean Energy.  For years, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has demanded that the U.S. and other industrialized countries cut carbon emissions to 20% of 1990 levels by 2050.  While most countries claim to support huge carbon caps, in practice they have resisted implementing them.  The reason is simple:  fossil fuels provide nearly 90% of the energy we use — the cheap, abundant fuel that powers modern farming, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and hospitals.  The use of fossil fuels is directly correlated to quality and quantity of life, particularly through the generation of electricity; in the past two decades, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of poverty because energy production has tripled in India and quadrupled in China, almost exclusively from carbon-based fuels.  To drastically restrict carbon-based fuels, countries have conceded in practice, would be an economic disaster.

Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not "Green".  A multi-billion-dollar government crusade to promote renewable energy for electricity generation, now in its third decade, has resulted in major economic costs and unintended environmental consequences.  Even improved new generation renewable capacity is, on average, twice as expensive as new capacity from the most economical fossil-fuel alternative and triple the cost of surplus electricity.  Solar power for bulk generation is substantially more uneconomic than the average; biomass, hydroelectric power, and geothermal projects are less uneconomic.  Wind power is the closest to the double-triple rule.  The uncompetitiveness of renewable generation explains the emphasis pro-renewable energy lobbyists on both the state and federal levels put on quota requirements, as well as continued or expanded subsidies.  Yet every major renewable energy source has drawn criticism from leading environmental groups:  hydro for river habitat destruction, wind for avian mortality, solar for desert overdevelopment, biomass for air emissions, and geothermal for depletion and toxic discharges.

German Professor: Europe's €5.7 Trillion Climate Policy Is "Very Expensive", "Counter-Productive" And "Does Nothing For Climate".  In the presentation [Joachim] Weimann makes it clear that he is an alarmist, and that he believes something needs to be done rapidly.  The thrust of his presentation, however, is about Germany's Energiewende and Europe's climate policies, and whether they are really effective.

How green megadonors built a bogus campus anti-carbon drive.  Finally, someone is saying what should already be obvious:  The fossil-fuel-divestment "movement" sweeping college campuses is really just Big Green astroturf.  Last week, the New York-based National Association of Scholars released a damning new report on the founding, funding and motivations of the divestment movement. [...] Divestment is the brainchild of radical environmentalist Bill McKibben and hedge-fund billionaire turned climate crusader Tom Steyer.  On its face, the goal is to get college students to pressure their universities to sell off any holdings in the natural gas, oil and coal industries.  In reality, the divestment movement serves the political and financial interests of its founders.

Green Tech and the climate crisis syndicate.  Renewable Portfolio Standard advocates recently held their 2015 National Summit.  The draft RPS agenda suggests it was quite an event — populated by bureaucrats, scientists and consultants who have jumped on the climate and "green energy" bandwagon, to follow the money.  Indeed, they are no longer content with 10% corn ethanol in gasoline, or some wind and solar power in the electricity mix.  Now they want to convert the entire electrical grid from fossil-fuels to renewable sources and, if Catholic bishops get their way, totally eliminate hydrocarbons by 2050, despite the horrendous impacts that would have on workers, families and the world's poorest people.  There's certainly a lot of money to be made.  The green revolution is estimated at $1.5 trillion per year, which means potentially huge profits for those with political connections.

Climate Bigwigs Coming For Your Fridge And AC.  Nothing says "climahypocrite" like taking fossil fueled flights to Dubai, then huddling in air conditioned hotel and meeting rooms while complaining about climate change caused by refrigerants[.] [...] HFCs were developed to replace ozone killing CFCs.  Now we're being told that they are bad for 'climate change'.  And, in all honesty, they tend to be more potent than CO2, the article isn't wrong on that.  But, the replacements are not ready for prime-time, and are considerably more expensive.

The IPCC's Legion of Hacks and Dunces.  As climateers turn their gaze toward Paris, what the warmist media won't be reporting is just how poorly qualified and error-prone many of them are.  That's no mere sceptic's complaint, by the way, but the honest verdict of their fellow scientists.

Saving the Environment from Environmentalism.  Most would agree on the major goals of environmentalism:  first, reduce carbon emissions, and second, minimize our environmental footprint as we pursue growing human needs.  Current thinking on how to achieve these goals is informed by two basic premises:  first, environmental solutions must "harmonize with nature", hence the emphasis on so-called "green" renewable resources; and second, nuclear power must be opposed at all costs.  Fossil fuels are to be displaced over the long term, but they take a back seat to nuclear power, like way back.  There is now good reason to believe those premises are fundamentally flawed.

Global Warming Goes To Court.  After years of testifying before administrative agencies and lobbying in legislatures with disappointing results, many climate activists see the courts as their last best hope.  Over the past few years, lawsuits have been filed in almost every American state and in many foreign countries asserting that the judiciary has the authority and the responsibility to order the executive and legislative branches of government to take more aggressive actions to combat climate change.

Warmists Want To Track Urban Emissions At Every Level.  Remember, most Warmists are members of the same party and belief set that says Government should stay out of all decisions when it comes to abortion, but wants the Green Police to monitor your carbon footprint.

Environmentalists Use 21 Children To Sue Obama Over Global Warming.  Environmentalists and a former NASA climate scientist are using 21 children to sue the federal government for allowing the burning of fossil fuels and "knowingly" harming future generations by causing global warming.  The intent of the lawsuit:  to force the U.S. with a court order to phase out fossil fuel use and reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million by the end of the century.

Apple And Google Pour Billions Down A Green Drain.  Business has been captured by climatism, the belief that humans are causing dangerous global warming.  Leading companies announce plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, purchase renewable energy, use vehicle biofuels, and buy carbon credits.  But there is no evidence that commercial policies to "fight" climate change have any measureable effect on global temperatures.  Apple and Google, the darling companies of the millennial generation, have spent billions trying to halt global warming.

German Experience With Green Power A Lesson Obama Should Learn.  Since the early 1990s, Germany has gone to great lengths to replace fossil-fuel-generated electricity with renewables.  Renewable electricity accounted for nearly 30% of the country's electricity by the end of 2014.  Germany is thus roughly where Obama hopes to take America over the next 15 years — he's even called on Americans to "look at Berlin" for inspiration.  But what are Germany's results?  Dramatically higher energy costs for businesses and consumers, an increasingly unstable electricity grid and a recent increase in carbon emissions.

De Blasio Flies to Vatican to Deliver Environmentalism Speech.  Pope Francis has been pushing hard on the issue of climate change, having issued a recent 184-page papal encyclical largely blaming climate change on fossil fuels and human activity.  He also said that developed, industrialized countries bore the most responsibility for the problem.  De Blasio referenced the encyclical, asserting that it "burns with urgency," while lauding the Pope, saying he had "awakened people across the globe to the dangers we face as a planet."  De Blasio loftily stated, "The encyclical is not a call to arms.  It is a call to sanity."

Let's Worry about a Real Threat.  These days, there is a lot of tampering with the electric grid.  People who wouldn't know a generator from a turbine are suddenly making no small plans to reform it.  We now have good electricity and bad electricity.  Good electricity is generated without emitting carbon dioxide (CO2).  But that rule is not rigid, because nuclear electricity, and hydro electricity, if it involves a dam, are both bad electricity, even though they don't emit CO2.  I'm not making this up.  I'm repeating the California legal definition of renewable electricity.

The Dept. Of Energy's War Against Common Sense Continues.  Toilets that don't flush; washing machines that don't wash; light bulbs that don't illuminate; electric cars that don't drive; exploding windmills; useless solar panels, and now...

Appliance industry warns federal dishwasher regs would lead to dirty dishes.  The recent proposal from the Department of Energy is meant to boost dishwasher efficiency by setting stricter limits on the amount of water each dishwasher can use, among other changes.  Under the plan, washers could use only 3.1 gallons of water for a single load.  But an appliance industry group says the new measures would be counterproductive — as they'd force users to run their dishwashers more, and hand-wash, just to get the same results, in turn using more water.  "[The regulations] would result in dishwasher performance that is unacceptable to consumers, essentially turning back the clock to the days of hand-washing dishes," the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) said in a statement.

Pope's Thinking is Outdated.  Pope Francis says, "The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth."  This is contradicted by extensive data on water and air quality, public health, lengthening life spans, and decreases in worldwide hunger and poverty.  The past decades have seen dramatic successes in improving the environment in the U.S. as well as billions of people lifted from poverty and hunger by free trade, cheap and reliable energy, and yes, by capitalism.  The pope says the only way to address the possible problem of climate change is for carbon dioxide emissions to be "drastically reduced."  But this is outdated thinking.  Scientists, economists and even the United Nations agree that adaptation to future climate change, rather than expensive and futile efforts to control climate by reducing emissions, is more likely to have a discernible positive effect on public health and safety.

The Climate Wars' Damage to Science.  The great thing about science is that it's self-correcting.  The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested — or so I used to think.  Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas.

The Subversion of Science by Green/Left Politics.  The development of modern science in the late 18th century went hand in hand with the rise of modern industrial capitalism.  Its potteries, mines, steam engines, mechanization, and science itself, were all done by private enterprise.  The role of government was to enforce patents and maintain a healthy legal and commercial environment.  Nowadays most scientists are paid by the government.  What passes for science has largely become taxpayer-funded Environmentalism.  Environmentalism has taken over much of science.

How Madness Rules Our Age.  Hyper-strict EPA requirements, Global Warming restrictions, and the Kyoto protocols all defy empirical science.  Who can forget those lab results from feeding mice twenty and thirty times their weight in tested substances to detect cancer, and how the government removed wonderful food additives from the shelves?  Does anyone remember the sweetener cyclamate?  Banned in the USA, but still allowed in fifty five other countries.

Lessons from Europe: Recipe for a high-cost energy system.  European energy policy today is dominated by the European Climate Change Program (ECCP), which was established by the European Community in 2000.  The program called for the nations of Europe to adopt measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  The goal was for Europe to collectively meet the targets of the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty signed in 1997.  The ECCP was based on two assumptions.  The first was that changes to national energy systems were needed to fight global warming.  Second, that coal, gas and oil fuels would become more expensive, allowing renewable energy to compete.  But policies to promote renewables resulted in substantially higher electricity prices for Europe.

There Are Big Divisions In Catholicism Over "Climate Change".  First, I'm wondering how any Democrat can be a Catholic, as the majority support abortion on demand.  They don't listen to the Pope on most issues, why should they listen to the Pope on this?  Second, we see that 68% believe that the Earth is warming.  Count me among those who have that belief, and the raw data and facts support that belief.  But, notice that only 45% of the general public believe that it is caused by human activity.  Unfortunately, it is rarely, if ever, asked as to the percent that Mankind is responsible for.  Some may say a little (put me in that box).  Cult of Climastrology members will say that Mankind is mostly/solely responsible, which seems to be the same feeling from Pope Francis.

Someone Tell the Pope: Environmentalism Crushes the Poor.  Yesterday [6/16/2015] the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity released a report that documents how the Obama administration's war on coal (and on cheap energy generally) has hurt poor and middle-class Americans.  While I can't vouch for the calculations, the report is an impressive piece of work, based on energy consumption and price data from the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, along with data from the Census Bureau and the Congressional Budget Office.  Energy costs consume a substantial portion of the budgets of lower-income Americans.  This simple chart tells the story:  while energy costs account for only 7% of expenditures by those who earn over $50,000 per year, those making less than $30,000 pay an astonishing 23% of their after-tax income for energy.

Merkel: G-7 leaders call for ending fossil fuel use by end of century.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the Group of Seven wealthy democracies have agreed that the world should phase out the use of fossil fuels by the end of this century.  Merkel said today that the G-7 leaders committed themselves to the need to "decarbonize the global economy in the course of this century."  That is a technical term for ending the use of oil, gas and coal — but not nuclear power — and replacing them with alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar power.

The Green Behind California's Greens.  [Scroll down]  Since the deaths of HP's cofounders, their heirs have pushed the two foundations' philanthropy ever-leftward, and activist environmentalism is a prime beneficiary.  Under the direction of Packard's three daughters, the conservative Republican's philanthropic wealth has gone to the National Abortion Rights Action League Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and the very green Earth Action Network.  This liberal giving has prompted Packard's son, David, whose political views are closer to his father's, to withdraw his money from the foundation and form his own nonprofit, which gives to more traditional and nonpolitical causes.  In a signature moment in green giving, the Packard and Hewlett Foundations decided in 2007 to boost their spending on climate-change issues, funneling the money into a new, San Francisco-based nonprofit, ClimateWorks, led initially by the former head of environmental programs at Hewlett.  The Hewlett Foundation, according to the Columbia Journalism School report, agreed to put $500 million into ClimateWorks, with the Packard Foundation adding approximately $390 million since 2008.

It's Done: Stick a Fork in the "Green Energy" Movement.  The green energy movement in America is dead.  May it rest in peace.  No, a majority of American energy over the next 20 years is not going to come from windmills and solar panels.  One important lesson to be learned from the green energy fad's rapid and expensive demise is that central planning doesn't work.  What crushed green energy was the boom in shale oil and gas along with the steep decline in the price of fossil fuel that few saw coming just a few years ago.  A new International Energy Agency report concedes that green energy is in fast retreat and is getting crushed by "the recent drop in fossil fuel prices."  It finds that the huge price advantage for oil and natural gas means "fossil plants still dominate recent (electric power) capacity additions."  This wasn't supposed to happen.

The Black Heart Of The Green Movement.  Initially, the anthropogenic global warming movement held people of all political stripes who expressed a concern as to whether Mankind was responsible for the warming.  This is how you get the Warmist talking point about Margaret Thatcher being a believer.  But, then we started seeing that the people who were pushing AGW the hardest were on the far left, especially Progressives (nice fascists).  The movement was rife with them, and what they wanted was the government, especially the central government and the United Nations, to be empowered with more and more power and control.

Environmentalism and Envy.  Environmentalists subscribe to continually changing prophecies of apocalyptic disaster.  Our topsoil is being washed into the ocean (The Road to Survival — 1948).  DDT is exterminating birds (The Silent Spring — 1962).  Overpopulation will result in starvation (The Population Bomb — 1968).  We will run out of resources and strangle on pollution (The Limits to Growth — 1972).  Acid rain from burning coal will destroy our forests and crops (circa 1985).  Hairspray will destroy the ozone layer and cause cancer (1980s).  Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere that will cause disastrous global warming (1988-2015).  These prophecies and many others were claimed to be scientifically justified.  The science is always secondary and almost always poor science.  What's important is the thrill of impending doom and the call to activists to engineer a rescue.

It's Time To Reclaim The Planet From Environmentalists.  The environment isn't getting worse — it's rapidly improving, even as our economy grows and our energy use increases.  The EPA recently released new data on air quality showing that total emissions of the six major air pollutants have dropped by 68 percent since 1970.  This is all the more impressive considering that during this same period, America's population has grown by 54 percent, we're using 44 percent more energy, we're driving 168 percent more miles in our cars, and our economy has grown by 238 percent.  It goes from impressive to astounding when you consider that natural gas, coal, and oil have driven this growth.  Technological innovations have made obtaining these energy sources smarter, safer, and more efficient than ever before.

By Hook and By Crook, You Are Going to Pay for Climate Change.  It's the first day of spring and we are having snow again.  Not much, a couple of inches, just enough to prove that March always goes out like a lion.  Undeterred, global progressives, intent on sending us into the stone age of technology, are forcing their agenda of redistributive taxation of man-made global warming/climate change on everyone.

The climate beclowning continues.  [Scroll down]  My main original contribution to the climate policy debate was to point out, based on raw data from the Department of Energy, that the climate change advocates' emissions targets for the U.S. for the year 2050 — an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from 1990 levels — would require rolling back hydrocarbon energy use to the level of 1910 (or 1905 by a separate analysis by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, a federal government lab I should point out).  On a per capita basis (since our population has grown so much), this would mean reducing U.S. hydrocarbon energy use to the per capita level of Somalia today.  This is sheer fantasy.

The High Cost of Energy Illiteracy.  "Energy romanticism" is perhaps the single greatest intellectual failing of environmentalists — the dreamy view that we can generate 95 quads of energy with puppy dog treadmills, unicorn flopsweat, and of course their beloved wind and solar.  (Of course, most enviros say "What's a 'quad'?" when I ask for even a cursory inventory of energy sources that would supply America's annual energy use.)  At the base of this is near total illiteracy about energy.  The latest example is the giddy celebration that Burlington, Vermont, has become carbon neutral!  And if a New England hippie town of 50,000 can do it, then surely Cleveland can do it too, no?

Keywords:  paranoia, fruitcake, nutty professor.
Climate Change Professor Now Worried CIA, Nefarious Countries Will Change Climate.  A Rutgers University professor is claiming that an employee at the Central Intelligence Agency contacted him with concerns that world governments may be causing floods and droughts by controlling the weather.  The professor is Alan Robock of the environmental sciences department at Rutgers, the Daily Mail reports.  He made the comments at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  The five-day conference in San Jose, Calif. wrapped up on Monday [2/16/2015].

Another Of Obama's "Green Energy" Projects Fizzles, Leaving Taxpayers $88 Million In The Hole.  Green energy is simply not viable without taxpayer subsidies.  The subsidy either comes on the front-end via tax credits, or on the back-end as we see here.  Either way the taxpayer is left holding the bag just so the ecotwits can smugly preen in their coal-powered Priuses.  There's a reason private enterprise won't build these boondoggles without government guarantees.  They're too risky, and the potential returns too meager.  Remember Solyndra?  Or the myriad failures of wind power?  Meanwhile environmental groups like the Sierra Club raise hundreds of millions of dollars from their deluded supporters, which they use to lobby government into wasting tax dollars on green energy.

Where's our refund for climate change costs?  A new report released by the White House shows Americans are overpaying for climate change reduction efforts, and considering scientific research shows average global temperatures have not risen significantly since 1998, maybe we should all get a refund.  A recent survey conducted by a Harvard political scientist found U.S. households are willing to pay approximately an extra 5 percent, or about five dollars, more on their electricity bill each month to combat climate change.

The Democrats' green energy dream is becoming their nightmare.  Like so many other scandalous episodes, the media long ago dismissed the controversy surrounding the green energy firm Solyndra.  A little corruption at taxpayer expense is the cost of doing green business, the left-leaning members of the press apparently tell themselves. [...] For years, Democratic politicians have been untouched by the scandalous antics of the green firms they supported.  But the Democrats' green energy chickens are finally coming home to roost.

China is lead contributor to plastic trash in oceans, study says.  Millions of tons of plastic trash flow into the world's oceans each year, and a new study finds that most of it comes from China and developing economies in Asia.  The study, published in Friday's [2/13/2015] edition of the journal Science, estimates that China's heavily coastal population contributes 1.3 million to 3.5 million metric tons of plastic to the world's oceans each year, largely due to mismanaged waste.

Failed climate predictions gets a website.  We are a small group who have followed the global warming / climate change issue for some years.  Initially we didn't know which version was correct but we noticed several things.  One was the frequent use of predictions, often scary, that seemed on the surface to be believable.  We wondered whether anyone ever went back to see if the predictions turned out to be true.

Arrogant statism of global warming fanatics.  I don't trust radical environmentalists.  Simply stated, too many of these people are nuts.  Environmentalists assert that you're racist if you oppose their agenda.  Some environmentalists don't believe in bathing.  How about the environmentalists who sterilize themselves to avoid carbon-producing children? [...] There are also environmentalist who claim that climate change causes AIDS.  And environmentalists put together a ranking implying that Cuba is better than the United States.  Then there's the super-nutty category.  The environmentalists who choose death to lower their carbon footprints.  But you know what's even worse than a nutty environmentalist?  What terrifies me far more are the very serious, very connected, and very powerful non-nutty environmentalists who hold positions of real power.

Now Hiring Rent-A-Mobs: Mobilizing Global Warming Activists for 2015 Action.  January blizzards have been blanketing the nation in snow from Maine to Texas — breaking many snowfall records in the process — but the "climate change" alarmists insist that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, AGW, is still the top "existential threat" to man and nature.  Climate Ground Zero is one of the many national enviro-activist groups gearing up to apply pressure on Congress to accept the new binding climate treaty to be offered later this year at the United Nations climate summit in Paris.  A key part of this effort is mobilizing street canvassers to sign up new members, get petitions signed and publicize marches, demonstrations, and protests.

Seattle government now going through citizens' trash for public shaming, revenue.  Sure, the incentive to compost is the putative reason for this regulation, but exactly how is it enforced?  In order for city officials and trash collectors to know you have committed the civic sin of disposing of leftover food in your trashcan, they have to examine the contents of your trashcan.  Let's hope the citizens of Seattle and trash collectors can come to some kind of silent truce over this.

No, there shouldn't be a law.  [Scroll down]  How on Earth are they going to enforce this on any kind of consistent basis?  Will garbage collectors be trained by some sort of trash removal Obi-Wan Kenobi, using the Force to sense if residents slipped some leftover tofu in the wrong trash container?  It's not enough that city employees have to collect our disgusting trash, we are going to make them collect tax revenue too?

Yes, the Greens Are a Joke — But Not a Funny or Harmless One.  [Scroll down]  Truth is, though, to laugh at the Greens is to underestimate the viciousness of their ideology — which is an unholy mix of economic illiteracy, pathological altruism, and misanthropy, built on a foundation of ignorance, self-delusion and mendacity.  These people aren't just misguided fools.  The policies for which they have agitated over the years — punching far above their weight — have caused the world and its inhabitants real harm.

Climate Researchers 'Prostitute' Science, Says Climate Expert.  The global warming dispute is more political argument than the settled science of impending disaster.  While those sound like something we'd say, in this case that's the message of Terry Hughes, a recently retired Earth science professor and glacier expert.  "You will never read or hear any of this from the scientific and political establishments," he told the College Fix.  "I'm now retired, so I have no scientific career to protect by spreading lies."

Green Power Would Make Life Nasty, Brutish And Short.  Three centuries ago, the world ran on green power.  Wood was used for heating and cooking, charcoal for smelting and smithing, wind or water power for pumps, mills and ships, and whale oil for lamps.  People and soldiers walked or rode horses, and millions of horses and oxen pulled ploughs, wagons, coaches and artillery.  But smoke from open fires choked cities, forests were stripped of trees, most of the crops went to feed draft animals, and streets were littered with horse manure.  For many people, life was "nasty, brutish and short."  Then the steam engine was developed, and later the internal combustion engine, electricity and refrigeration came along.  Green power was replaced by coal and oil.  Carbon energy powered factories, mills, pumps, ships, trains, and smelters; and cars, trucks and tractors replaced the work-horses.

America Is Being Transformed Into Brazil.  Our dishwasher broke just after Christmas.  The timer stopped working, and a new one costs about $100.  My wife suggested that since the dishwasher is nineteen years old, we should buy a new one.  Up until now it was working very quietly and efficiently, washing and drying a full load in about an hour.  We visited the appliance shop where we had recently purchased a new clothes washing machine a few months earlier.  I mentioned to the salesman that our new washer was very slow, taking nearly two hours to finish a large load compared to our old one, which took about 35 minutes.  With a bright smile, he explained that that was because of the new federal energy efficiency standards for clothes washers enacted by the Obama administration's Department of Energy in May 2012.

Climate change and the left.  With the collapse of Marxism, there was created a vacuum on the left.  Those seeking an ideological faith to cling on to for moral certainty, felt bereft.  They also wanted a faith which again gave them a feeling of still pursuing the common good of society, especially the new global society, and even more a feeling of moral superiority, which is a characteristic of many middle and professional types on the left.  Climate change and the moral common good of saving the planet, with its claimed scientific certainties, offered to fill the vacuum.  It may or may not be a coincidence that the climate change faith gained momentum in the 1990s immediately after Marxism collapsed with the Berlin Wall.

Abuse of Science in Texas.  This example of government scientists hiding information for years while simultaneously issuing press releases, giving interviews, testifying to county boards and state legislatures and briefing members of Congress is just one example of the "secret science" of government conducted by unelected bureaucrats that an industry comprised mostly of small family-owned businesses, such as the pavement maintenance industry, must grapple with.

Weather Channel Comes Out for Junk Science, Scaremongering and 'Global Warming'.  "There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future," declared John Coleman, veteran meteorologist and founder of the Weather Channel, last week.  Every word of this statement is accurate, defensible and supported by all the current available science.  But that hasn't stopped Coleman's old home the Weather Channel issuing a bizarre "position statement" in response.

Energy trade group, green bosses rake in green.  It pays to be a top dog in the energy and environment business — even in the nonprofit arena.  Big bosses at some of the most influential environmental nonprofits and energy trade associations are making comfortable salaries — from hundreds of thousands of dollars to several million per year — and many have racked up sizable raises recently.

How camouflaged activists want to de-industrialize the West.  A federal judge recently rejected a lawsuit filed by environmental groups to prevent the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from issuing oil and gas leases for parts of central Nevada.  The case represents a small battle in protracted war to de-industrialize the West.  The activists employ a familiar battle plan:  Scope out an economic project, sue the government to block its approval, and sit back as legal costs mount.  Recently, these groups have grown more litigious — "sue and settle" cases, where activists sue the government to negotiate settlements with often-friendly bureaucrats behind closed doors, more than doubled over the last few years.

Climate Change Has Jumped the Shark.  Here's why: From the beginning 25 years ago the arguments over climate science have dominated the scene and distracted us away from the fundamental problem:  the prescribed method for preventing climate change is essentially replacing nearly all hydrocarbon energy, in the space of less than two generations.  Climate orthodoxy calls for an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide, by the year 2050, which would take the United States back to a level of hydrocarbon energy use last seen more than 100 years ago.  For the developing world, it means remaining poor for several more decades.  There has been very little recognition and less candor about the sheer fantasy of the emissions target.

It's the Poor Who Suffer Most from the Great Wind Power Fraud.  The wind industry and its parasites tout spurious and unproven benefits in terms of CO2 emissions reductions — reductions which cannot and will never be delivered by a generation source delivered at crazy, random intervals that adds nothing to the entire Eastern Australian Grid hundreds of times each year — and which, therefore, requires 100% of its capacity to be backed up 100% of the time by fossil fuel generation sources.  Despite (or, rather, because of) its mad wind-rush Germany has seen CO2 emissions increase as it has had to build and re-commission coal fired plants to provide reliable base-load power to keep the grid up and running. [...] Wherever there's been any significant investment in wind power retail power prices have gone through the roof — witness Denmark, Germany and South Australia — which all jostle for the top spot on the table for the highest power prices in the world.

Apple, Google and Greenwashing.  Apple is a great company.  But, Apple has a dark, pandering side.  Like many companies, Apple swears allegiance to green dogma.  The allegiance is mostly lip service, along with a few well-publicized green projects, such as their solar power installation in North Carolina that supplements coal power to run an Apple server farm.  According to the Guardian, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said that the climate change issue "resonates with Apple's workers and customers" and that is why the company has moved from environmental laggard to green leader.  In other words, Apple is pandering to its employees and customers.  Corporations do that, but they don't usually claim that the future of the Earth is at stake.

Jihadis and Warmunists: Brothers Under the Skin.  Watching the parade of the naïve, the far left, and their energy-hogging celebrity manipulators marching in New York City this week, I was struck by how much these true believers had in common with jihadis, a notion reinforced by Purdue Professor Louis Rene Beres' description of jihadis in Gatestone Institute and my friend "Ignatz's'" comment at Just One Minute.  Both movements seem to these authors to be a means of denying death and change and making the mortal, immortal and the insignificant individual life, a significant force when massed with others.  If this is true — and I think it is — we cannot defeat these irrational movements in the ordinary ways.  New strategies are called for.

March to nowhere: Futility of the climate protest.  Anti-global-warming activism consists of symbolic protests against a highly complex planetary phenomenon we understand poorly and don't control.  The unpredicted pause in the rise in global temperature since the late 1990s is so embarrassing to climate activists, who are filled with a fiery certitude about the "science," that it goes unmentioned.  In their fevered urgency, they give off the sense that they are desperate to save the planet before it might become evident that it doesn't need saving.

Climate Extremists and the Dirty Filthy Hypocrites.  The reported 400,000 who marched with the likes of Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio on behalf of the statists' climate change agenda left New York City a dirty mess.  They want to clean up the planet but not so much that they have to clean up their own trash.

The Air Comes Out of the Climate Change Talks.  There were quite a number of empty seats in the chamber as the president spoke.  Secretary of State John Kerry played with his BlackBerry.  Many looked bored.  At the end of the president's remarks, the most enthusiastic applause came from [Leonardo] DiCaprio.  Perhaps that's because he's good actor.  The climate change talks might be attracting dwindling audiences.  But there's one thing you can bet on:  the climate change show will run and run.

Climate change alarmists silent on economic damage done by climate change alarmists.  President Barack Obama and the climate-change crowd seem only interested in dire predictions when it comes to their environmental agenda.  They're not all that into the disastrous consequences extreme environmental regulations on business could have on the U.S. and global economy.  "It's one way to ramp up the messaging and frankly ramp up the sort of extreme positioning around this issue from that standpoint that they're not going to recognize the economic impacts," Betsy Monseu, chief executive officer of the American Coal Council said of the People's March.

Litterbug Climate Marchers Leave Behind Piles of Trash.  This week in New York City somewhere around 400,000 litterbugs descended on the Big Apple, and not to celebrate the wonderful news that the planet hasn't warmed in 18 years.  Instead they gathered to do, uhm, whatever this is, and to pretend Global Warming is real and dire, so that those pushing this phony crisis can tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives.  You would think that the one thing environmental fanatics and those of us who are not fascists could agree on is that only arrogant scumbags are litterbugs.

Reason Magazine actually asked climate protesters what they want to do, and it's hilarious.  Those in politics who spend much of their time railing about the dangers associated with anthropogenic climate change will often assert that the public largely shares their concerns about catastrophic climate shifts.  You rarely hear from those oft-cited members of the public who are supposedly alarmed by climate change alarmism.

Hands off our hair dryers! We've had enough of the EU's meddling.  First the EU came for our incandescent light bulbs but we said nothing because we thought saving energy was a good idea — and anyway, we didn't realise until it was too late how much brighter, warmer and nicer the old ones were compared with the flickery, mercury-filled eco ones. [...] Then they came for our televisions, our washing machines, our smart phones and our kettles...  It's easy to make light of all the tedious, pettifogging regulations that the EU has imposed on us over the years and that, unfortunately, is the problem.

Now EU targets our kettles, toasters and even lawnmowers.  Campaigners last night [9/3/2014] rallied round to vent their fury as Brussels bureaucrats unveiled their latest plan to erode the "lifestyles and choices of ordinary people".  It follows the banning this week of vacuum cleaners which have motors above the new EU limit of 1,600 watts in a bid to cut energy usage.  The permitted wattage will be almost halved again from September 2017 as the limit is reduced to 900 watts.  Dozens of other everyday appliances could have the power sucked out of them too and some scrapped altogether if new rules around climate change are brought in.

Britain Faces 'Winter of Blackouts' As Firms Are Asked to Ration Electricity.  "The chickens are coming home to roost".  So said the Ukip energy spokesman, commenting on the news that businesses are being asked to join a 1970s style energy rationing program this winter to stop Britain being plunged into darkness.  Offices and factories will be offered compensation to shut down for four hours a day so that energy can instead be diverted to households.  The scheme, reported in the Daily Mail, is part of a series of measures set to be taken by National Grid which also includes asking owners of decommissioned gas, coal and oil power stations to turn them back on.

The Editor says...
That's what you get for letting the tree-hugging hippies dictate your environmental laws and squeezing the life out of the electric utilities.  But if you're looking for places to cut back on electric power consumption, allow me to make a suggestion:  Lots of electricity could be conserved by limiting television stations to three or four hours a day.  But they would all have to be synchronized; that is, they could operate (for example) between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. and again from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.  That way, all the electricity currently being used by all the TV sets in England (as well as the TV stations) would be reduced by at least 50 percent.  If such a plan were implemented, what would you miss?  Hour after wasted hour of insipid game shows, soap operas and meaningless tripe.

Pressing the climate hoax.  A 127-page draft by the U.N. climate panel insists that humans must drastically reduce their production of carbon dioxide because it's heating the globe.  Urgent action is needed lest "abrupt and irreversible change" result.  The European Union just banned the most effective vacuum cleaners and has announced it is about to ban powerful hair dryers, lawn mowers, smartphones and kettles, all suspects in the continuing plot against the planet.  They're all in a hurry, but the planet isn't.

The Editor says...
Carbon dioxide is not "heating the globe."  The Sun heats the Earth, and the atmosphere keeps us from freezing at night and scorching in the afternoon.  Moreover, there has been no global warming for almost 18 years, so there is absolutely no reason to fast-track anything on the U.N.'s socialist agenda.

Having solved all other problems, Obama will now fix your dishwasher.  For some reason which I can't quite put my finger on, this sounds awfully familiar.  Changing regulations for everyone's benefit without taking into account the real world fallout and secondary costs which would inevitably be passed on to the consumer?  Give me a minute.  I'm sure it will come to me.

Obama pushes green standards for everything but the kitchen sink.  The Obama administration is working on new efficiency standards for seemingly every appliance but the kitchen sink.  Spurred by President Obama's climate action plan, the Department of Energy is pumping out new standards for refrigerators, dishwashers, air conditioners, ceiling fans, furnaces, boilers, water heaters, lamps and many more appliances.

Rise in powerful vacuum cleaner sales ahead of EU ban.  From 1 September, companies in the EU will be banned from making or importing vacuum cleaners above 1600 watts and it has led to a sharp rise in sales.  In one recent study, five of the top seven cleaners had motors of more than 1600 watts.  [Video clip]

EU to ban high-energy hair dryers, smartphones and kettles.  The European Union is considering pulling the plug on high-wattage hair dryers, lawn mowers and electric kettles in a follow up to its controversial ban on powerful vacuum cleaners.  The power of hairdryers could be reduced by as much as 30 percent in order to be more eco-friendly, a draft study commissioned by Brussels suggests, threatening many of the models favoured by hairdressers and consumers for speedy blow-dries. [...] Current EU legislation covers televisions, washing machines, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners but not most smaller electrical appliances.

The Editor says...
Dear European friends:  If you don't have enough electricity to go around, the solution is to generate more of it, which in your case means abandoning your attachment to solar panels and windmills.

Sustainability: The Universal Solvent of Private Property Rights.  [Scroll down]  On this side of the Atlantic, Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring laid the groundwork for a message that found a receptive audience in guilt prone readers.  She put a human face on the claimed crimes against the environment.  Misuse of insecticides was translated into a fear of all insecticides at any level.  DDT was made the poster child for environmental destruction.  Bird deaths and egg thinning were offered as evidence.  Years later, many of the claims in her book were termed "lies," once they were subject to scientific review.  In the interim, millions of innocent children have suffered malaria-related deaths in Africa from prohibition of DDT use, and the term "eco-imperialism" became a book title.

Environmentalism and the Fear of Disorder.  [Scroll down]  The researchers found that participants who read the article questioning scientific progress expressed greater intention to recycle, reduce washing temperatures, and buy organic foods than those who read the version affirming scientific progress.  Why the difference?  Because, the researchers report, "questioning scientific progress results in a relative increase in disorder perceptions, which in turn triggers the motivation to restore order via personal actions such as engaging in environmentally friendly behavior."  A reasonable reading of these results is that a lot of environmentalists experience many aspects of the modern world as chaotic and thus seek to compensate for their perceptions of disorder by engaging in ritual behaviors that make them feel like they are exerting more personal control.  It is not much of a leap to conclude that by imposing those rituals on others, some environmentalists seek to reduce their dread of disorder even more.

Senate Committee Report Details Environmentalists' Inner Workings.  Over the past fifty years, America's environmental movement has grown from college kids adorning flowers to a billion dollar industry.  With huge budgets to employ lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations professionals, many of America's leading environmental non-profits are unrecognizable from their modest beginnings.  What may seem like an organic, disparate movement is actually a well oiled machine that receives its funding from a handful of super rich liberal donors operating behind the anonymity of foundations and charities, according to a new report out today by the Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW).

How to cut emissions, and how not to.  The world's efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions began with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, were formalized in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and have since mutated into the hundreds of "XX percent of renewables by 20YY" targets adopted by groups of countries, individual countries and regional jurisdictions.  They have spawned, among other things, innumerable bureaucracies, countless climate conferences, forests of wind turbines, patchwork quilts of solar panels and a billion-dollar-a-day climate change industry.  And they haven't worked [at all].

Pursuing Energy Failure, Again and Again.  From the energy-independence moonshine of the corn-ethanol scam to the latest 645-page slate of regulations the EPA wants to inflict on the domestic electricity-generation sector, the supposed threats have varied.  Back in the 1970s, the claim was that we were too dependent on Arab oil (a claim that we continue to hear today).  These days, in addition to the never-ending blather about "energy independence," we have the spurious claim from the Obama administration that yet another layer of EPA rules on U.S. industry will make a dramatic difference when it comes to global climate change.

Report: US, Foreign Elites Pay Greens To Push EPA Policies.  Environmental organizations are often portrayed as homegrown groups fighting back against the tide of corporate boogeymen like Big Business or Big Oil.  But this is not the case, according to a new congressional report.  A report by Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee says environmentalists are being backed by "an elite group of left-wing millionaires and billionaires."  This "Billionaire's Club" funnels money to environmental groups who then lobby on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency to help promote its agenda, in return, getting access to generous tax write-offs and federal funding.

Get Ready for the New England Power Shortage.  In 1980, under the first administration of Governor Jerry Brown, California decided it wasn't going to build any more power plants but would follow Amory Lovins' "soft path," opting instead for conservation and renewable energy.  By 2000, with the new digital economy sucking up electricity, a drought in the Pacific Northwest cut hydropower output and the state found itself facing the Great California Electrical Shortage.  You know what happened next.  For weeks the Golden State struggled to find enough electricity to power its traffic lights.  Brownouts and blackouts cascaded across the state while businesses fired up smoke-belching diesel generators to keep the lights on.

The New Global Dictator.  New energy research is being directed by policy and diktat that has been decided in advance of the research being conducted.  In Europe, this has origins in the 20 20 20 policy that was decided in 2007 that itself has roots in the Kyoto Protocol and the desire to reduce global CO2 emissions. [...] These binding targets, created by unelected technocrats (who may not even know what the SI unit of energy is) have a profound effect on all of our lives.

Official Report: People Who Worry Most about Climate Change Use More Energy.  People who are most concerned about climate change use more electricity than those who believe it to be not so serious a threat, a government study has found.  The Household Electricity Survey, commissioned by the Department for Energy and Climate Change, said that this discrepancy may be due to the fact that older people, who are most likely to not see climate change as a threat, are generally more frugal with their energy consumption.

The Left Doesn't Really Believe in Climate Change.  The sky is always falling.  If the new ice age doesn't do us in, the ozone hole will.  The instant DDT is banned, aerosols must follow.  Global warming is replaced by climate change is replaced by "global weirding."  And what is the solution to these often-contradictory scenarios?  We anachronists who retain a bias toward the hard sciences would employ very different measures to prevent a freezing ocean and a boiling one.  To an engineer, soldier or plumber, this is obvious.  But how do leaders of the environmental left address these opposing doomsdays?  By raising taxes, increasing government, impeding capitalism and reducing national sovereignty.  Coincidentally, the same policies they would promote if their supposed environmental catastrophe was utter fiction.  It is little wonder that voters are suspicious.

German Govt Falsifies Climate Report Translation To Hide Green Policy Failure.  The German Ministry of Environment has falsified the conclusions of a UN climate change report in the German-language version released last week, in an attempt to hide the fact that the country's 'green policies' are useless.  The ministry's four-page summary of the report contains outright contradictions and falsifications of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommendations, apparently made to hide UN criticism of the way the German government has turned emissions-trading into a cash cow for futile renewable energy projects.

Keyword:  Slush fund.
Rep. Van Hollen Pushes For $50 Billion 'Federal Green Bank'.  Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is turning to the web to drum up support for the creation of a Federal Green Bank that would create $50 billion in debt in order to offer loans for clean energy projects.  In a video posted on YouTube this week for the Safe Climate Caucus, Van Hollen says even though several states have created their own "green banks", the federal government still needs to get involved.

Why Everything Is Dirtier.  [Scroll down]  My needs are for clean clothes, same as the laundry needs of the whole of humanity since the beginning of time.  The whole purpose of laundries is to meet that need.  Here's the problem, however.  The goal of the regulators who regulate the laundry is not to improve your life.  It is to wreck your life a bit at a time by pressing increasing numbers of restrictions and mandates upon private producers.  One of these mandates has removed TSP from detergent — and with catastrophic results.  No one wants to talk about this.  There is a major hush-hush culture here because business, understandably, doesn't want to face a consumer backlash, and government doesn't want to acquire the reputation for being the civilization wrecker that it truly is.

America's power grid at the limit: The road to electrical blackouts.  Americans take electricity for granted.  It powers our lights, our computers, our offices, and our industries.  But misguided environmental policies are eroding the reliability of our power system.  Last winter, bitterly cold weather placed massive stress on the US electrical system — and the system almost broke. [...] Eight of the top ten of PJM's all-time winter peaks occurred in January 2014.  Heroic efforts by grid operators saved large parts of the nation's heartland from blackouts during record-cold temperature days.

The Editor says...
What would alleviate this problem?  Increased production of electricity, of course, but that is exactly what environmentalists oppose when they campaign against coal, because coal is no longer used to power factories, propel ships and heat large buildings — it is used almost exclusively in the generation of electricity.  When the lights go out on the coldest (or hottest) day of the year, you can blame left-wing tree-hugging environmentalist hippies (and their socialist Democrat congressmen) who think they are "saving the earth" by eliminating the use of coal.

Roy Spencer invented satellite temperature analysis, gets called "a blogger".  Careful Cheryl Jones, your groupthink is showing.  She's a science writer who writes today in The Australian about "climate bets", but without seemingly using The Internet.  Here's how she describes Roy Spencer: [...]

Interview: James Delingpole on The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism.  "I'm not a scientist and actually given what I've seen of scientists in my experiences following the global warming scam, I'm glad I'm not a scientist because a lot of these guys are basically shysters and crooks.  They're not some kind of white-coated elite with a special hotline to the truth.  In fact, they're just ordinary guys and girls trying to earn a living like the rest of us but slightly more dodgily than the rest of us in the one or two egregious cases," James Delingpole [says.]

Science and Panic.  We are bombarded with dire warnings about our environment, but nearly all of the research purported to support those claims was funded by the political powers advocating them.  Political powers will pick-and-choose scientists who provide useful factoids, despite what caveats those scientists attach to preserve their credibility.  The topic of climate change brings this mixture to an extreme, such that some scientists have traded activism for credibility.  Politicians may further distort or lie about scientific findings, especially when results are scarce, inconclusive or contradictory.  For the layman or dangerously educated, point-by-point arguments are pointless, as it becomes difficult to discern between fact, deception, science or politics.

Chevron Takes Battle To Radical Environmentalist Lobby.  Chevron had been accused of polluting the rainforest floor in Ecuador through its 2001 acquisition of Texaco, supposedly harming thousands of villagers as it callously took its profits.  It was all-so-perfect a story to go with the leftist narrative about greedy oil companies exploiting innocent Third World victims.  Only it wasn't true.  Fact is, Texaco cleaned up its share of the Ecuadorean oil-extraction operation near Lago Agrio, where the accusations were hatched, and then got two clean bills of health from the Ecuadorean government in 1995 and 1998, having fulfilled its responsibilities free and clear.

Nothing but hot air: another alarmist report from global warming brigade.  I have long come to realise how environmental science works:  it starts from the premise that everything in the natural world is under threat, that mankind is to blame and that only drastic changes can save it.  It is bad news if temperatures rise, bad news if they fall, bad news if the climate gets wetter, bad news if it gets drier.  If a type of animal or plant is decreasing it is a man-made tragedy.  If it is increasing it is a threat to the "delicate ecological balance" caused by mankind's mismanagement.  The IPCC's latest summary for policymakers on the "impacts, adaptation and vulnerability" is a fine example of the genre.  It portrays a grim future of mass food shortages and asserts that the effects are already there to be seen."

Environmentalists to the Peasants: Drop Dead.  California is going through a terrible drought and 2013 was the driest on record in the state.  So who is suffering, financially and otherwise, from its effects?  Hint:  it is not the coastal elite.  The water still flows to the upscale neighborhoods of La Jolla, Malibu, and Marin County.  Their lawns are watered, their BMW's washed and polished, their swimming pools full.  No, it's the farmers in the Central Valley and the agricultural workers who are idled as 500,000 acres of the best farmland on the planet lies fallow.  Where is their water going?  To save the environment.

Uppity Deniers, Unite!  If we Americans could control the climate, all of our country would be like San Diego at all times and Russia would be like, well, Russia.  We can control our pollution output and we have.  When the Environmental Protection Agency started, it made enormous strides in cleaning up pollution in the U.S.  The easy pickings, however have all been picked.  Auto emissions and other sources of pollution were adjusted to great initial effect.  Big strides were made and the cost was appropriate to the outcome.  Now, however, any incremental benefit is at a huge and highly inappropriate cost for highly questionable efficacy.  This has not diminished the zeal of those that would use the planetary wellness issue to bludgeon Americans into submission.  It's not about the money to the EPA; it's about control of Americans, not control of pollution.

Hedge Funds, K Street, and the Ugly Underbelly of the Democratic Party.  In case you missed it, Senate Democrats staged an all-night talkfest on Monday to promote higher taxes and increased government regulation to address the scientific theory known as "climate change."  Hopefully you did miss it, because most well adjusted people have better things to do than stay up all night watching a bunch of senior citizens talk about solar panels and wind turbines.  At least one person was paying close attention:  liberal billionaire and reluctant democracy advocate Tom Steyer, who has pledged to spend $100 million backing Democrats who support aggressive government action to reduce carbon emissions.  Democratic senators want Steyer's money, they just don't want anyone to think their stance on "climate change" is based on anything other than a genuine concern for Gaia.

Skeptical Climatologist Calls Out 'Global Warming Nazis'.  Here are some of the things you are not allowed to mention if you are a climate skeptic.  [#1] Hitler's Germany was the most eco-friendly regime in modern political history.  As well as banning smoking on public transport and creating some of Europe's first nature reserves, the Nazis were heavily into wholefood and clean living.  Himmler wanted to feed the SS on organic food only.  Goering threatened to send people who were cruel to animals to concentration camps.  [#2] There is no such thing as a climate change "denier".  No one denies that climate changes.  All that skeptics dispute is the degree to which man contributes to this largely natural — and unscary — process.  [#3] The environmental lobby uses the same tactics used by totalitarian movements through the ages — fascists, Nazis, communists, there's really no difference.

GE Will No Longer Design Projects to Please Climate Change Advocates.  In a watershed moment and a huge victory over environmentalists, General Electric has agreed to stop projects that are designed solely for the purpose of carbon dioxide reductions to please those who lobby for climate change concessions.  The National Center for Public Policy Research, a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank which has been fighting GE for years because of GE's liberal bias under CEO Jeffrey Immelt, scored a huge victory after receiving the commitment from General Electric.

EPA proposes restrictions for new wood stoves.  The federal Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for wood stoves that would reduce the maximum amount of fine particulate emissions allowed for new stoves sold in 2015 and 2019.

The Editor says...
If you're burning wood to stay warm (and alive), do you care about the quality of the smoke?

The flooding of the Somerset Levels was deliberately engineered.  Devastating evidence has now come to light not just that the floods covering 65 square miles of the Somerset Levels could have been prevented, but that they were deliberately engineered by Labour ministers in 2009, regardless of the property and human rights of the thousands of people whose homes and livelihoods would be affected.  Furthermore, that wildly misleading Met Office forecast in November led the Environment Agency to take a step that has made the flooding infinitely more disastrous than it need have been.

10 Lefty Lies About The Floods Which Have Devastated Britain.  [#2] The Environment Agency has been doing a great job with inadequate resources.  No it hasn't.  With a staff of 11,200 and an annual budget of £1.2 billion, this bloated quango is grotesquely overmanned and overfunded, bigger almost than the size of the Canadian, Danish, French, Swedish and Austrian Environment Agencies combined.  It is also — like most government agencies — extremely wasteful, inefficient and poorly managed.

Why do environmentalists prefer Iran to Canada?  Is anyone more hypocritical than a professional environmentalist?  In case anyone needs a hint, see this month's exhibit:  As North American environmental activists throw all of their energy and resources into blocking Canada from selling its oil to the United States, they have haven't made a peep over Iran increasing its own oil exports.  And one would think they'd care, as the environmentalists' entire rationale for opposing Keystone is that if a pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is built, more carbon will be put into the atmosphere.  But their problem here — and often — is that the facts don't support their claims.

The Editor says...
Please note that carbon dioxide is not carbon, for the same reason that water is not hydrogen.

The Party Of Science Has Absolutely No Clue What It's Talking About.  For years, a concerted effort has been made to intertwine scientific truth with progressive politics in the public imagination.  In recent weeks alone, Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Crist both earned headlines by trashing the "anti-science" GOP.  The left-leaning media works hard to make campaign issues out of contrived litmus tests that bear little relationship to real national issues.  Their project seems to be working.

If You Think Communism Is Bad For People, Check Out What It Did To The Environment.  When the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain was finally lifted to expose the inner workings of communism to Western eyes, one of the more shocking discoveries was the nightmarish scale of environmental destruction.  The statistics for East Germany alone tell a horrific tale:  at the time of its reunification with West Germany an estimated 42 percent of moving water and 24 percent of still waters were so polluted that they could not be used to process drinking water, almost half of the country's lakes were considered dead or dying and unable to sustain fish or other forms of life, and only one-third of industrial sewage along with half of domestic sewage received treatment.

Global warming devastates America.  Everything's global warming, America. Didn't you get the message yet from your President and John Kerry and Al Gore and James Hansen and the gang?  Everything!  That's why, if ever any of you want to see a day of sunshine again in your miserable, too-selfish-to-change-your-lifestyle carbon-addicted lives, here are a few things you absolutely are going to have to do:  permanently reject the Keystone XL pipeline; beg your president for more green taxes and regulations; plead for more of your money to be diverted to successful clean energy businesses like Solyndra and Fisker electric cars; insist that more bald eagle nesting trees be chopped down in order to clear a space for wind farms; demand that the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute be defunded and that Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and Pat Michaels be executed.

Ohio EPA Proposes Phosphorus, Nitrogen Restrictions.  The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency is proposing restrictions on phosphorus and nitrogen amounts in state waterways.  Ohio would be only the third state to enact such restrictions, joining Florida and Wisconsin.  Excessive phosphorus and nitrogen can lead to algae outbreaks.  Environmental activists have recently pushed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental protection agencies to abandon qualitative assessments of bodies of water and instead impose strict numeric limits regardless of whether algae outbreaks are reported.

The Editor says...
The U.S. EPA overlaps the Ohio EPA, and anyone who tries to do business in Ohio must comply with the rules and regulations of both agencies.  There is no longer any justification for the federal EPA's existence, for two reasons:  (1) The severe pollution problems that led to the creation of the EPA in the early 1970's have been eliminated, and (2) each of the fifty states has its own EPA.

National Renewable Electricity Standard: Why raise electricity prices?  Earlier this month, Representatives Jared Polis (D Colorado), Ben Ray Luján (D New Mexico), and Ann Kuster (D New Hampshire) introduced the National Renewable Electricity Act of 2013 (RES Act) into the US House of Representatives.  The act mandates that all US retail electrical suppliers buy an increasing amount of electricity from renewable energy sources, or pay fines for the shortfall.  If the law is passed, it will raise electricity prices for Americans for questionable environmental gains.

The Environmental Movement: How Corrupt Is It?  We have written many times about the corruption of the global warming movement.  Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into the pockets of global warming alarmists, because they perform such a valuable service:  they help to persuade voters that governments should be given greater control over the world's economies.  What's a few billion dollars when trillions are at stake?

Environmentalism's Endless Lies.  [Scroll down]  There is no such thing as "environmental justice."  It is an invention of environmental groups that are intent on convincing people that whatever they do or fail to do somehow has an impact on the weather.  Indeed, the entire global warming hoax, now called climate change, was based on the lie that humans were responsible for producing huge amounts of carbon dioxide via industry, driving, or making some toast for breakfast.  The environmental enemy was and is the use of energy, but it is energy that has so vastly improved and protected everyone's life.

The Greens Are Coming!.  [James] Delingpole's home country of Britain in some respects has gone further than any.  It's not just the rampant fuel poverty.  England, reports Delingpole, is "the only nation anywhere on Earth legally bound to commit economic suicide in the name of environmentalism.  Thanks to the 2008 Climate Act, Britain is required to spend in excess of £18 billion per annum 'decarbonizing' the UK economy."  Unlike other countries, where drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are a goal, or target, England must, by law, reduce its CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050.  Incredibly, the 2008 Climate Act breezed through Parliament by an almost unanimous vote.  There were only five nays out of 650 members in the House of Commons.

Keywords:  necessarily skyrocket.
Price of Electricity Hit Record for October; Up 42% in Decade.  The price of electricity hit a record for the month of October, according to data released Wednesday [11/20/2013] by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  That made October the eleventh straight month when the average price of electricity hit or matched the record level for that month.  The average price of electricity in October was 13.2 cents per kilowatt hour (KWH), up from 12.8 cents per KWH in October 2012 — and up from 9.3 cents per KWH in October 2003.  Americans now pay 42 percent more for electricity than they did a decade ago.

Survey Shows Germans No Longer Willing To Pay Higher Prices For Green Electricity.  Some years ago, Germans as a whole were convinced that something had to be done to "rescue the climate" and were much more open to paying higher prices for electricity.  However the rapid increase in electricity prices over the last years, and hence correspondingly greater pain, has led the public to rethink.  Also 5 consecutive unexpectedly harsh winters and the fact that the globe isn't warming anymore also has had an impact.

Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia?.  [Scroll down]  What does hurt people is bad public policy.  Exhibit A is the U.S. ethanol mandate — justified in part as a response to global warming — which diverted the corn crop to fuel production and sent global food prices soaring in 2008.  Exhibit B is the cult of organic farming and knee-jerk opposition to [genetically modified crops], which risk depriving farmers in poor countries of high-yield, nutrient-rich crops.  Exhibit C was the effort to ban DDT without adequate substitutes to stop the spread of malaria, which kills nearly 900,000 people, mostly children, in sub-Saharan Africa alone with each passing year.  The list goes on and on.

Now Europe wants to make it harder to clean your carpets.  Home owners will find their armoury in the battle against dust and dirt weakened by a ban on powerful vacuum cleaners.  Under European Commission 'eco' rules that will come into force next September, the power of new vacuum cleaners must not exceed 1,600 watts.  That figure will be lowered further to 900 watts by 2017.  Current cleaners boast an average of 1,800 watts.

The Editor says...
If it takes twice as long to clean the house with a 900-watt vacuum cleaner than it took with your old 1800-watt vacuum cleaner, what have you saved?  What if you have a welding hobby or a ham radio station or some other use for electricity, in addition to your vacuum cleaner?  Once the electricity passes through the meter, it becomes your property, to use as you please.  If electricity is so scarce that vacuum cleaner rules like this are necessary, the correct response is to produce more electricity, using coal-fired power plants that already exist.

The Climate-Industrial Complex.  The National Academies of Science released in 2012 a 300-page report:  A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling.  The committee that authored the report was entirely composed of establishment climate scientists, mostly engaged in computer modeling of climate.  The report paints a glowing picture of climate models and suggests that near term climate forecasts are possible or will be possible in the future.  A more objective analysis is that climate models are severely troubled and not much progress is being made in spite of spending billions of dollars.

How Europe's Economy Is Being Devastated By Global Warming Orthodoxy.  Many Europeans complain about their high energy costs, largely due to their increasing dependence on renewables — the most costly energy sources.  But European political parties as well as a majority of people still want government to promote costly options, especially wind and solar power.  This is killing European economies.  Electricity costs in Europe are more than double the cost of electricity in the U.S.

Washers That Don't Wash and Dryers That Don't Dry.  From washing machines to microwaves to refrigerators, government regulations are making consumer goods far more expensive while reducing their effectiveness and longevity.  The Department of Energy claims that their new appliance standards save consumers money through reduced environmental costs and energy use.  But a recent study by the Mercatus Center confirms shows that you and I don't see that extra money in our wallets.

The Obama EPA's War on America.  Greenhouse gas emissions are primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas vital to all life on Earth, the "food" that vegetation depends upon.  It plays no role whatever in a "global warming" that is not occurring.  It is emitted by the Earth's many active volcanoes and hot springs.  It is exhaled by humans and land animals.  It is the product of the combustion of hydrocarbons.  As it increased in the atmosphere, the Earth has entered a cooling — not a warming — spell since the late 1990s.  Its atmospheric concentration is a very tiny 0.039 percent by volume.  It is, however, the justification on which much of the EPA's enforcement activities are based.

A science-based rebuttal to global warming alarmism.  The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program.  Over the last 25 years, the IPCC became the "gold standard" of climate science, quoted by all the governments of the world.  IPCC conclusions are the basis for climate policies imposed by national, provincial, state, and local authorities.  Cap-and-trade markets, carbon taxes, ethanol and biodiesel fuel mandates, renewable energy mandates, electric car subsidies, the banning of incandescent light bulbs, and many other questionable policies are the result.

California's Middle Class Faces Slow Death by Green Laws.  An environmental law in California, designed with the best of intentions of course, has helped wreck middle class prospects — and state lawmakers are finally taking note.  The California Environmental Quality Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1970 and beloved by environmental groups, mandates strenuous reviews of the environmental effects of all proposed construction projects.  While greens have claimed that the law has protected California's natural beauty from rapacious developers, lawmakers are coming around to the viewpoint that it has been abused to the detriment of citizens, as the New York Times reports: [...]

An Environmentalist Deception.  The federal government's ever-growing control over and continuous acquisition of land across America is the antithesis of the institution of private property and undermines conscientious private stewardship of land, waters, and other natural resources.  Every day, we see the results of a century of mismanagement of government-owned forests.  Failure to harvest timber allows the forests to become overgrown and filled with overstressed, diseased, beetle-ridden, dying, and dead trees — leading to millions of acres scorched by catastrophic wildfires every summer, year after year.

Global Warming Is Not The World's Top Problem, Energy Is.  Global warming gets all the attention in crisis thinking today but at its heart that is an energy issue too — when anti-science activists in America forced viable alternative energy out of America, it put us firmly on the path of rampant coal usage and higher greenhouse gas emissions.  Then they recognized the perils of coal emissions that were used in place of nuclear power and that solar was still not ready and promoted biofuels.

The Environmental Lobby's Great Forest Con.  Environmental activists constantly pressure government agencies to intervene in the lives of others, whether it is telling them how to run their businesses, where they can build their homes, or what types of food they can and cannot eat, among countless other examples.  Another area activists are increasingly focusing on is forest management, telling tree farmers how they should manage their land.

EPA Endangerment Finding:  At the time of the endangerment finding there were several dozen global climate models, now there are at least 73.  The US has 19.  One climate model is sufficient — if it has been validated.
  •   EPA offers no direct physical evidence that greenhouse gases are causing significant global warming or the dire future hazards.
  •   EPA relies heavily on global climate models for forecasts of future harm from increasing temperatures.
  •   From 1990 (first IPCC report) to the 2009 EF, the EPA and the scientific organizations upon which it relies have failed to produce a valid model.
  •   Two decades is twice the time it took the Apollo team to model how to land men on the moon and bring them back, and to successfully complete the mission.
  •   Without direct physical evidence or a valid model, the EPA cannot establish causation — that greenhouse gases are responsible for significant global warming or climate change.
  •   The failure to validate a model is recognized by the IPCC because after the 1990 report the IPCC shifted from using the scientifically proper term "model predictions" to "model projections."
  •   The term "model projections" is scientifically nebulous.
  •   All studies based on the models that have not been validated are scientifically nebulous, such as those that claim dire future weather events.
  •   Climate change has been occurring for hundreds of millions of years. The EPA has produced no evidence that it can successfully explain natural climate change.
  •   Without understanding the natural causes of climate change, the EPA cannot scientifically understand the human influence on climate.

The Age of Hyperbole: How Normal Weather Became 'Extreme'.  As American linguist Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa said:  "In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance."  It is effectively visual lying, dictated by Marshall McLuhan's observation:  "The medium is the message."  For example, TV news programs often illustrate air pollution with a smoke stack emitting water vapor, implying it is pollution when it is anything but.

Our rising bills for going green.  Yesterday [7/16/2013] energy giant npower said the Government's environmental policies would help to cause a 19 per cent rise in fuel costs by 2020.  They added that energy firms' subsidies of wind and solar power and the price of better energy efficiency will see annual bills rise £240 to £1,487 from £1,247.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg Pushes Mandatory Composting.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg — the man who brought about the failed supersize soda ban and restrictions on trans fats in city restaurants — is pushing for a law forcing New York City residents to compost their food refuse.  Bloomberg's proposal would encourage voluntary composting initially, and then make food composting mandatory by 2015-2016.  Opponents decried yet another expansion of the nanny state and also worried about food composting expanding the city's rat population.

Green taxes 'to increase energy bills by a third by 2020'.  The Taxpayers' Alliance predicts that green charges and tax will comprise £620 of a typical UK household's electrcity and gas bill by the end of the decade.  Green charges, which are used to fund wind and hydropower projects, and VAT currently make up 11 [percent] of gas bills, or £91 of an average £830 statement.  They account for 16 [percent] of electricity charges, equivalent to £100 of the £630 average bill.  However, Liberum Capital analysts expect green policies to push power costs up 29 [percent] by the end of the decade.

The Editor says...
Did you see that?  The average natural gas bill in England is £830, and the average electricity bill is £630.  At the time of this writing, that's the equivalent of $2,204.  Here in Dallas, I pay about one eighth to one tenth of that amount.

NHS hospitals asked to generate their own power amid blackouts fears.  According to one energy company, four hospitals have already signed up to a deal under which they will reduce demand at peak times by using diesel-fired generators.  KiWi Power, which is a commercial partner of National Grid, says it has started to approach every NHS trust in the country about undertaking similar plans after winning a government contract to encourage power saving.

The Editor says...
There is no longer enough centralized generating capacity in England to serve all customers during periods of peak demand.  This is because England's energy policy is dictated by environmentalists who are opposed to the use of coal.  So the hospitals — and presumably any other large consumers of electric power — are being asked to switch to diesel-powered backup systems during peak demand hours.  How big is the "carbon footprint" of a megawatt diesel-powered generator -- or a dozen of them?  What if the generator runs out of diesel fuel, and the (centralized) utility power fails, due to transformer overload, falling trees, lightning, or something else?  What will this increased demand do to the price of diesel fuel?  Any guesses?

German Energy Drain.  Germany's Christian Democrats unveil their campaign platform later this month ahead of September's federal election, and energy policy is expected to feature prominently.  The CDU-led coalition government has accelerated the country's push toward green energy during a period in which German industry has flourished relative to its European peers.  Unfortunately for Germany, this energy transformation has also spurred a flight of German industry outside the country — not least to the United States.

Risk of UK blackouts has increased, Government admits.  Ofgem warned there could be energy shortages in the middle of this decade as the UK has failed to build enough new wind farms and nuclear powers stations to replace old fossil fuel plants.  It also believes demand for energy may not fall as much as originally expected, as fewer households are insulating their lofts and switching to green appliances than predicted.

The Editor says...
Conservation and insulation are not energy sources.  The only solution to an energy shortage is increased energy production.  As a practical reality, the most reliable, cost-effective fuels for the generation of electric power are coal and natural gas.  This was all common knowledge 50 years ago, and then the tree-hugging earth-worshiping environmentalists acquired political power.  Now the general population is reaping what the greens have sown.

The Moment the Environmental Movement Changed.  In the summer between third and fourth grade, I attended a day camp at a "nature center" in our Chicago suburb — a large park with a lagoon, a hiking trail, and several fire pits.  The theme of the camp was learning about the wilderness — which meant, in essence, learning how to tame it.

Europe's anti-carbon agenda is adverse to human health and welfare.  The hostile regulatory environment toward carbon, especially coal, is leading to business closures, higher prices, stagnation, unemployment, fuel poverty and an increase in the death rate.  In their fascination with computer models based on untested hypotheses, European Union policymakers have put their countries so far behind the economic curve that it will take decades to catch up to more competitive nations.

Europe is becoming a green-energy basket case.  For years, European leaders have flaunted their unwavering commitment to fighting climate change — and chastised the United States for lagging behind.  But last week brought yet more confirmation that the continent has become a green-energy basket case.  Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.

European power plants are burning firewood from U.S. forests because of "global warming" restrictions.
Europe's Green-Fuel Search Turns to America's Forests.  Loggers [in Windsor, NC] are clear-cutting a wetland forest with decades-old trees.  Behind the move:  an environmental push.  The push isn't in North Carolina but in Europe, where governments are trying to reduce fossil-fuel use and carbon-dioxide emissions.  Under pressure, some of the Continent's coal-burning power plants are switching to wood.  But Europe doesn't have enough forests to chop for fuel, and in those it does have, many restrictions apply.  So Europe's power plants are devouring wood from the U.S., where forests are bigger and restrictions fewer.

Europe importing U.S. trees to keep the lights on.  Environmentalists in the United Kingdom are outraged by what has become a growing trend in Europe  — countries are importing more wood from the United States in order to meet the EU's strict renewable energy mandates.  The BBC reports that millions of tons of wood pellets will be shipped into Europe to help keep the lights on in a more environmentally friendly fashion.  Environmentalists argue that burning wood pellets wrecks U.S. forests and does nothing to address global warming in the short term.

The Editor says...
The environmentalists who are so alarmed by this latest development should have asked (years ago) where their energy was going to come from after coal was outlawed.  I'm pretty sure they didn't see this coming.  And what does Europe gain by burning down the forests, if global warming has already stopped?

Bees, pesticides, more green lies.  Have we been here before?  You bet we have, from at least Silent Spring (1962) onwards.  We've seen it involve everything from DDT to the snail darter, the spotted owl to the polar bear and fracking.  The odd detail changes but the basic story is always the same:  man is bad, capitalism is evil, let's ban another vital element in the Western industrial economy.

Who's turned off by 'save the environment' light bulbs? Almost everybody.  I have this experience regularly with products labelled as "environmentally friendly":  they don't work as well as the products they're replacing.  My environmentally-friendly shower head was really just a shower head that made my shower less showery.  I'm told cars with large-capacity engines are much less fuel efficient, but I've noticed how much better they respond.  Even when the product touted as "green" works as well as its counterpart, the tradeoff is often a higher price.

Activist 'Sustainability' Fails Environmental Goals.  How can politicians, regulators, and environmental activists decree that oil and gas are not sustainable — even as seismic, fracking, drilling, and other technologies unlock a century of new deposits?  And then insist that corn ethanol is sustainable even though this year's U.S. ethanol quota requires 40 percent of our corn crop, on an area the size of Iowa, billions of gallons of water, huge quantities of hydrocarbon-based pesticides, fertilizers, and tractor fuel, vast amounts of natural gas to run the distilleries, and perpetual subsidies ... to produce a fuel that drives up food prices and gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline?

Relentless Liars: The Great Green Edifice is Crumbling.  The Greens regard anything that would provide energy for any reason to anyone as the enemy.  That is why "a panel of experts will discuss fossil fuel projects in our state, their impacts, and ways to reduce that pollution."  Fuel is not pollution.  Fuel is what we use to heat or cool our homes, drive our vehicles, provide electricity, and conduct the business of the nation.  The air and water in New Jersey is so clean we actually invite people to live here, start businesses here, and to visit as tourists to enjoy it.

The Pressure is Building!  [Scroll down]  The 'green' agenda of Agenda 21 provides a cover for a whole host of abuses by those seeking to dominate the ignorant under the guise of Agenda 21.  Global cooling, global warning [sic], climate control, or whatever, is used to advance the agenda, and is leading us to a glacier-like death by 'greenocide'.  With this 'greenocide', we are losing personal property rights, and we are staring at mushrooming utility energy costs, as coal, natural gas and oil are under constant attack by ne'er do well elites.  Also, the cost of building just about everything is being driven up [...]

The Left's War on Science.  The environmentalists, like the Communists, believe that human beings have total control over the environment and that the environment determines all.  Warmunism, like Communism, originates not from science, but from ideology.  The Communists divided industry into two types by ideological classification; the good cooperative Socialist industry and the bad competitive Capitalist industry.  The Warmunists similarly ideologically classify two types of industry; environmentally conscious green technology and dirty non-socially conscious brown technology.

Too much green energy is bad for Britain.  With the worst snow conditions in the country since 1981, it's worrying, to say the least, that gas supplies are running low.  A month ago, The Sunday Telegraph warned in this column of the problems of an energy policy that puts expensive, inefficient green power before coal-fired and nuclear power. [...] Now we are reaping the consequences.

Don't Buy an Electric Car.  I live in California, home to all sorts of environmental nonsense.  We couldn't build our house where we wanted to because of a tiny plant you can hardly see and a grasshopper that might — just might — live there.  It cost a fortune to replace our perfectly good septic system with a more environmentally friendly one to meet new codes.

Green Tyranny.  The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will boost gas prices ("only" a penny, although industry says 6 to 9 cents) to make another minuscule improvement to air quality.  In New York City, my mayor wants to ban Styrofoam cups, saying, "I think it's something we can do without."  Congress already dictates the design of our cars, toilets and light bulbs.

The Darkness of Earth Hour.  Spreading awareness is the sole purpose of most environmental activism.  Awareness spreading doesn't make anything better, but makes people feel guilty, outraged, hopeful or some combination of the appropriate political sentiments in the face of an imminent armageddon that can only be fought by convincing everyone to be deeply concerned by it and disdainful of everyone who stands outside their Chicken Little consensus.

Have politicians had a mental blackout?  There's a real risk of energy shortages in Britain, yet still the political class is obsessed with cutting fossil fuel use.

Supreme Court sides with timber industry in runoff dispute, dealing blow to environmentalists.  In a defeat for environmentalists, the Supreme Court on Wednesday [3/20/2013] sided with the U.S. timber industry in a dispute over whether loggers should have to get special EPA permits because of gravel and dirt falling into nearby waterways.  In a 7-1 vote, the court reversed a lower-court ruling which said the run-off from logging sites is the same as any other industrial pollution, requiring a Clean Water Act permit from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The cleaner the enviroment, the more desperate enviros become to tackle the Next Big Scare.
Obsessive-Compulsive Environmentalism.  [T]he irony behind the modern-day environmental movement in America is that the more successful the movement is, the more petty subsequent goals necessarily become.  There is no other choice.  The big environmental organizations have mouths to feed and rents to pay just like any other business. [...] The pressing need to find new problems to solve is moving the big environmental organizations in new directions.  Their unending search for risks to micromanage and overinflate are leading towards a growing war on chemistry and common sense.

The Great Green Con no. 1.  The Mail on Sunday today [3/16/2013] presents irrefutable evidence that official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed.  The graph [in this article] blows apart the 'scientific basis' for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.  These moves have already added £100 a year to household energy bills.

The Greening Of Portland.  About a year and a half ago, then Portland mayor Sammy Adams and his cohorts on the Portland City Council decreed a radical, "green" approach to waste disposal: they sent little plastic slop buckets (made in China, naturally) out to virtually every house in the city, and cut garbage pickups to twice a month — with no reduction in rates, of course.

Prominent American Scientists Call For Eco-Dictatorship Under UN Rule.  [Scroll down]  By admitting they are willing to "move beyond existent levels of public permission" to push ahead with draconian environmental policies, these prominent scientists (among whom we find two Nobel laureates and one Paul Ehrlich) have proven their willingness to deceive the American population for their "environmental" control model.  As Aaron Dykes put it while interviewing Lord Christopher Monckton, the environmental "cause" is nothing more than "an absolute valued pretext for their absolute control model".

EPA's Secret and Costly 'Sue and Settle' Collusion With Environmental Organizations.  "Sue and Settle" practices, sometimes referred to as "friendly lawsuits", are cozy deals through which far-left radical environmental groups file lawsuits against federal agencies wherein courtordered "consent decrees" are issued based upon a prearranged settlement agreement they collaboratively craft together in advance behind closed doors.

Woodsy On The Rampage: The Ecology Of Radical Environmentalism.  [T]he radical environmental movement is more than a marketing ploy designed to win demands from government officials.  It is also a school of thought drawing inspiration from various philosophical sources.  One of the main philosophical schools that radical environmentalists draw upon is known as "Deep Ecology".  According to this set of ideas, the conservation policies pursued by more mainstream environmental groups are incorrect because man is still used as the primary measure of all things, at least when it comes to environmental protection.  To the Deep Ecologist, every natural thing is on equal footing.  Human beings are no better than moss or a pine cone.

Greenfellas: The Italian Mafia Muscles In On Green Energy Racket.  For an industry all puffed up about its supposed environmental virtue, green energy sure is attracting a dirty crowd.  Witness its latest entrant, Italy's Mafia.  The mob knows a good fraud when it sees one.

The Promise Of A Green Future Is More Than A White Lie.  Children and their mothers are victims of green propaganda, particularly through the schools.  Sadly, few people, including mothers, have any idea what is taught in the schools.  It is where the emotional blackmail of environmentalism is inculcated into society.  The message preached is that industry and development are the cause of most environmental and social problems.

Trampling on People, Environment, Science & Ethics.  The activist groups and government agencies certainly talk a good game.  They've certainly got the "mainstream" media and a lot of legislators and regulators on their side, while many who question their claims and agendas lack the greens' money, influence, connections and firepower — or the courage.  All that notwithstanding, these supposed "white hats" are often all hat and no cattle — or worse.  In truth, the very foundation for many of their policies is built on sand, worthless computer models or outright deception.

Government Scientist Gets Fired for Telling the Truth.  Over the past three decades, government has unleashed an unprecedented wave of environmental rules and regulations that affect nearly every aspect of American life, and for the most part the public has tolerated it.  Public embrace of environmental propaganda and fear mongering about the apocalyptic consequences of mankind's abuse of the planet have elevated environmentalism to a status above national security.  The public is now more likely to give up rights and freedoms for the cause of saving the planet than for security reasons.

Study: Environmental regulations turning outdoorsmen into eco-felons.  Five Gulf Coast states have over 1,000 laws that allow prosecutors to target people with criminal sanctions over rather minor infractions related to the environment and outdoor living, a new study shows, even in cases where the accused did not cause any harm or knowingly break the law.

Redressing global climate hysteria.  Throughout "Climate of Corruption," [Larry] Bell aptly demonstrates there are "big differences between environmental stewardship ideals, which most of us subscribe to, and the ideologically moralistic, antidevelopment, obstructionist activism that exemplifies much of today's environmental zealotry."  But, to a great extent, it is this zealotry that substantially misguides efforts to identify and successfully address real threats to the environment, energy sufficiency and ultimately, humanity itself.

Climate Science vs Politics: The Road Ahead.  There is good news and bad news about climate.  The good news is that science evidence has made it quite clear that the human contribution to a possible global warming is minor; in fact it cannot even be identified in the data record.  The bad news is that the media and politicians pay no attention whatsoever to the science and are marching ahead full-speed with efforts to control CO2 emissions — thereby hurting the economy, destroying jobs, and stunting economic growth.

How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity.  Nothing can be made, transported, or used without energy, and fossil fuels provide 80 percent of mankind's energy and 60 percent of its food and clothing.  Thus, absent fossil fuels, global cropland would have to increase by 150 percent to meet current food demand, but conversion of habitat to cropland is already the greatest threat to biodiversity.  By lowering humanity's reliance on living nature, fossil fuels not only saved humanity from nature's whims, but nature from humanity's demands.

The Dumbing Down Of Americans.  Even though Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' has been largely debunked, the global warming advocates continue to wield political power so that hapless Americans are being forced to save a planet that can pretty well take care of itself.  We recycle or get fined for not doing it; we buy expensive electric cars that require charging stations that don't exist or which tend to blow up; we can no longer buy incandescent bulbs and have to spend much more on mercury filled CFLs made in China; we pay for expensive useless wind turbines that kill birds but we must not develop on the sacred nesting place of obscure animals we never heard of before.  Basically our government mandates these nonsensical environmental regulations as if we're the only polluters in the world while China and India spew their contaminants unfettered by such rules.

Just Freeze! EPA Says Burning Wood Is Bad, but so Is Natural Gas, Coal, Oil.  So, you're living in Fairbanks, Alaska, and it's 45 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.  The high today will be -39 degrees below zero.  The weather services all project lots more double-digit minus numbers in the coming days and weeks, with dips into the minus 50s and 60s.  Heating oil prices are killing your family budget, so you crank up the wood stove and start burning some of the firewood you collected last summer.  Uh-oh!  Now you're in trouble!

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2024 by Andrew K. Dart

This subsection has moved to this page.

San Francisco bans wood burning on Christmas Eve.  No chestnuts on an open fire this Christmas Eve.  Bay Area officials have banned residents from burning wood, indoors and outdoors, on Tuesday — and might extend the ban into Christmas Day — as part of an air quality initiative.  The order came from a governmental body called the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Anti-capitalism motivates environmentalists

What Next for the Democrats?  Progressives want government entangled in every aspect of an individual's life.  Attacks are mounted against Western Civilization, patriotism, putting American interests first, and America winning.  Environmentalism is defined by alarmism, endorsement of uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly solar and wind energy generation, cessation of fossil fuel exploration and development, eradication of internal combustion engines, and endorsement of unaffordable and less capable EVs.

Author Elizabeth Nickson: 'If not stopped, Greens will become the most brutal oppressors & genocidal maniacs in human history'.  [Scroll down]  It'll take a couple of decades, but our world will be a slave state run by criminals, just like my gorgeous province that both sets of paternal great grandparents settled in the 1880's when there were 4,000 people in Vancouver.  They built the water systems, clear cut the neighborhoods, built churches, founded schools and the hospital and made a welcoming city replete with one hundred years of peace and prosperity.  Now, fathers are knifed in front of their children outside of Starbucks, and people lie on streets dying from fentanyl and native women are so desperate they prostitute themselves to serial killers, organ harvesters and slavers.  All that goodness extinguished under violence and greed and, above all, the wilful ignorance of the comfortable.  Many, many cities are experiencing the same and under COP28 it will get worse.  The cartels will pay for everything: science, health care, education, pensions and they will take a piece of each and determine what is allowed to happen.  They will own energy, they will own health, they will own education.  Because our entire culture will have fallen.  No one will make money beyond their pittance, allowance, that makes it possible to buy cheap consumer goods from their slave factories in Asia and Africa.  There will be no independent businesses, there will be no "local" economies.  We will be an enslaved earth.

Tesla Gigafactory Shut Down as Hundreds of Anti-Capitalism Protesters Violently Clash With Police and Storm Gates of Facility.  Activists demonstrating against the planned expansion of Tesla's gigafactory near Berlin have violently clashed with police as some tried to rush the site after hundreds turned out in protest. [...] What's not clear is how this mob relates to climate protesters.  The electric cars that Tesla makes are central to the Net Zero goals of most countries.  Yet here we have a gang of traditional anti-capitalist protesters trying to shut it down.  What would Greta say?  Maybe as long as Musk isn't performing in Eurovision she doesn't mind.  Note that, as at other Leftist demonstrations, the protesters are all wearing Covid face masks.  Why has that become the accepted symbol of woke protests?

Tesla gigafactory battlezone:  Hundreds of left-wing activists clash with police and storm the gates of the facility.  Activists demonstrating against the planned expansion of Tesla's gigafactory near Berlin are locked in violent clashes with police today as some tried to rush the site after hundreds turned out in protest yesterday.  Graphic images from the scene showed how officers equipped with riot gear were embroiled in a brutal fistfight with a sea of enraged demonstrators carrying flags and banners which read 'disrupt capitalism, create future'.  One shocking clip saw a stampede of protesters charge across a field toward the officers, who responded in kind by spraying CS gas and beating the oncoming demonstrators with batons and reinforced gloves.

UN Climate Advisers Say White Men Are To Blame For The Climate, Her Social Media Posts Shows Hatred For Capitalism And Whites.  A United Nations youth climate adviser has a history of social media posts that call for the destruction of capitalism, claim "terrorism" is used as a Western smear to justify its imperialism and attack White people for purportedly fueling humanity's extinction vis-à-vis the climate crisis.  The United Nations' Secretary-General António Guterres personally selected Pakistani-American Ayisha Siddiqa as one of his advisers to help "accelerat[e] the implementation of his climate action agenda," a 2023 UN announcement stated.  Siddiqa was a Time Woman of the Year in 2023 who has co-founded two youth climate activist organizations.  [Video clip]

Kill the 'Climate Corps' Before It Kills Us.  The word "corps" generally calls to mind a military force fighting whose job is to protect the nation.  But defending the nation is out of fashion at the moment, so the word, like so many others these days, has had to be repurposed.  President Joe Biden has just proposed an $8 billion budget item to create a "Climate Corps" program with the mandate of "tackling climate change" by "end[ing] fossil fuel."  Which is to say, rather than defending a nation, this corps' goal is to impoverish one.  The White House seems to think that curtailing the leasing of energy production on federal lands and inserting into the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act more than $369 billion in green giveaways isn't enough.

WEF Is Dictating Canada's 'Climate Change' Policies, Documents Show.  Newly revealed documents show that the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) has been dictating Canada's radical "climate change" policies.  Additionally, the docs show that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's far-left government has been paying the WEF with taxpayer money.  The documents were unsealed in response to an Order Paper Question sent by Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis.  The documents reveal Trudeau's "Environment and Climate Change" (ECCC) department paid the WEF to produce a report to draft the government's environmental agenda.  The report included the economic policies for Canada's ever-increasing carbon tax.

NY attorney general sues world's largest beef producer over methane emissions, climate commitments.  New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing JBS USA, the world's largest producer of beef, over the company's emissions and for "greenwashing" by allegedly misleading the public about its environmental impact.  In an announcement, James noted that beef production has the largest greenhouse gas footprint of any major food commodity and that animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.  According to James, JBS USA's various net-zero pledges for 2030 and 2040 are therefore misleading and "not feasible" given the scope of its worldwide beef production operations. [...] The global food system — which includes land-use change, actual agricultural production, packaging and waste management — generates about 18 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, the equivalent of 34% of total worldwide emissions, according to a 2021 study published in the Nature Food journal.

The Editor says...
So what?  Who cares if food production results in carbon dioxide emissions, if it also results in food?

Climate and Capitalism.  [Scroll down]  In Rhodes, Greece, this week, a resident published his video of fires being set at night, all at the same time across a ridge of trees.  This is an almost perfect climate psy-op.  Fires, and then film the misery of tourists sleeping in the airport waiting to leave.  And then there is this:  [Tweet]  I'm starting to think it is a world-wide scam of set fires meant to scare us into more regulation, more giveaways.  In Canada we have arrested dozens of fire-setters, and dozens are still being sought.  Fires and fear promote the idea that "nothing has been done," but in fact, behind the scenes, everywhere, the Iron Triangle of the movement has installed palettes of regulation on every town and county, every rangeland, parkland, wilderness, forest and mountain.  Wherever you go, metaphorically or not, there is a sign that says:  Do Not Enter.  It is killing all productive activity, it is killing the economy of every nation.  "Climate change" is now eating capitalism.  It is a profit center for both government and business.  In 2002 Goldman Sachs built a division that sold "climate solutions" by way of tax and carbon credits.  This zero-sum game is trading in the misery of hundreds of millions.

The Fake Climate Consensus.  We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an "overwhelming scientific consensus."  "It's a manufactured consensus," says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video.  She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue "fame and fortune." [...] It made Curry realize that there is a "climate change industry" set up to reward alarmism.  "The origins go back to the ... U.N. environmental program," says Curry.  Some U.N. officials were motivated by "anti-capitalism.  They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along."

Do Leftists Believe What They Claim to Believe?  While many undoubtably believe in the dangers of man's contribution to global warming, consider Christine Stewart — former Canadian environment minister — who said, "No matter if the science is all phony, there are still collateral environmental benefits. ... Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."  So if you were to debate Christine Stewart on E.V.s or wind turbines, for example, you would not persuade her, because you would not be arguing against "social justice," which is the deeper issue.  Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, admitted that the true motivation behind her Green New Deal, which proposes transitioning the U.S. economy away from all fossil fuels in ten years, is to overhaul the "entire economy."  Note that AOC didn't call the Green New Deal the "Socialist New Deal," even though the Green Party site says it is a "major step towards ending unemployment for good and a tool to fight the corporate takeover of our democracy and exploitation of the poor."

Climate Alarmist War On Nitrous Oxide Threatens The Global Food Supply.  In November 2022, four eminent scientists issued a theoretical physics paper, "Nitrous Oxide and Climate."  It proves that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s "war on nitrous oxide" to achieve Net Zero Emissions (NZE) by 2050 threatens to cause a significant collapse in the world's food supply.  The article's four authors are eminent men in their field, so their analysis and opinion deserve to be taken very seriously: [...] All four are staunch critics of the IPCC war to expand the hysterical climate attack on carbon dioxide (CO2) to include demonizing nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4), which are classed as "minor greenhouse gases."  The report concludes with a compelling truth:  "It is not possible to maintain highly productive agriculture without nitrogen fertilizer."  It's a genuinely frightening thought that the neo-Marxists at the heart of today's climate hysteria have chosen to attack N2O because millions will die if governments ban nitrogen fertilizers.  The neo-Marxist ideologues are willing to manipulate existential climate fear in their insane willingness to kill millions if that's what is required to negate capitalism.

A Government at War with Its People.  [Scroll down]  Increasingly, the question is not whether the government is lying, but rather how malicious its intentions are. [...] Are the climate change cultists committed to taking over farms and ending hydrocarbon fuels because they are too dumb to understand weather patterns, solar and geothermal energies, and chemistry?  Because they are committed communists who believe in global government and command-and-control economies?  Because they wish to induce instability and famine that will depopulate the planet?

The Push for 'Net Zero Emissions' is Climate Hoax Fiction, Not Energy Reality.  Last August, Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, published a prescient report entitled "The 'Energy Transition' Delusion: A Reality Reset."  The report demonstrates convincingly that the transition to Net Zero Emissions (NZE), if politically imposed, will mean a dramatically reduced standard of living for the world's advanced industrial societies.  It's an excellent essay, but it misses the mark because Mills misses the real point of the leftist push for a "green energy" revolution: For leftists, NZE is not about the climate.  Instead, NZE is simply a vehicle to achieve a purely political goal.  While eminently reasonable and admirable, the Manhattan Institute's push for "energy and climate" reality to dominate governmental policy debates will fail because global warming and climate change hysteria derive from neo-Marxist anti-capitalist ideology.

There is a Simple Fix to Economic Chaos.  Some of us have been saying this for a very long time:  green will bring down the world.  Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101.  It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results.  That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy.  It has skewed every single market.  No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within.  This.  This is what threatens to bring down the world.  Green is built on subsidies.  And not just government subsidy.  Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth.

County's Lawsuit Suing Energy Companies For 'Climate Change' Teed Up For Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court may be getting ready to take up a county's lawsuit alleging oil companies are responsible for environmental damages caused by climate change, the latest development in a campaign by local left-wing officials to influence national climate policy.  The case, brought by Boulder County, Colorado against Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil, seeks monetary relief for the companies' decision to burn fossil fuels and allegedly "conceal" the associated dangers, which the county argues "caused, accelerated, an[d] exacerbated the impacts of climate change."  While the companies have appealed the case to the Supreme Court, it still has to decide on the question of jurisdiction, and whether or not the case should be heard in state or federal court.  Boulder isn't the only local government suing oil companies: local-level climate lawsuits have been occurring for years, and there are similar pending cases in cities across the country, from California to Rhode Island.

The Toxic Intersection of Climate Alarmism and Communism.  Environmentalism has far too much in common with communism.  In fact, the parts are so interchangeable that it can be hard to tell the difference.  We are reminded of this by the "degrowth" movement.  In the words of some of its adherents, degrowth prioritizes "social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption.  This requires radical redistribution, reduction in the material size of the global economy, and a shift in common values towards care, solidarity and autonomy."  In other words, economic growth has to be reversed to save the planet.  Poverty, then, is not only locked in, since the economic pie cannot grow larger, it also begins to spread, dragging those who had escaped it back into its grasp.

Saint Greta battles windmills.  Greta Thunberg is tilting at windmills.  Which, if you think about it, is pretty appropriate.  After all, Greta has delusions of grandeur, and those of us in the less exalted classes are expected to follow her docilely as she battles imaginary demons.  You are to be her Sancho Panza to her Don Quixote.  Saint Greta is no longer just fighting global warming and fossil fuels but has declared war on industrialized society itself.  Capitalism, not trapped atmospheric heat, is her real target.  In line with her values, she is now protesting a wind farm in Norway because it endangers the traditional hunting grounds of the native Sami people.

Environmentalism will be the ruin of Germany.  To add insult to injury, in 2022, even Germany's much-vaunted environmental goals have been missed.  If Germany's green zealots thought that sacrificing industry would be good for the planet, they were wrong.  Coal, one of the most polluting energy sources of all, provided a vital lifeline in 2022, with Germany's coal power output increasing by 20 percent on the previous year.  Nevertheless, it seems there are no limits to German madness.  Despite Germany's reliance on coal this year, economy minister Robert Habeck has recently announced that Germany will now give up coal entirely by 2030 — eight years earlier than originally planned.  This move comes just as Germany's elites are pushing for more heat pumps to replace gas boilers for home heating and for electric vehicles to replace petrol cars.  Both of these will require even more electricity to be produced, yet the German government seems determined to produce less.  All of this is a recipe for economic disaster — in Europe's most important economy.  Could a hostile power have designed a policy more devastating to the fundamentals of the German economy than that of the current government?  Probably not.  In the short term, the only way the government's proposals make any sense is if Germany is planning to go back to using Russian gas.  That might explain the German government's reluctance to more effectively support Ukraine.

Cold winter exposes climate frauds: Germany returns to coal.  This is weird.  After "leading the way" for the climate communists, Germany now faces a freezing winter and ballooning energy crises — they're at the precipice of an economic meltdown, so they're bringing back their coal. [...] [Carlos Fernandez] Alvarez acknowledges that a transition away from gas and coal as a source of energy is at this moment, not achievable without forcing people to return to the Dark Ages.  Ramrodding through policy to conform to "climate goals" results in "an unprecedented energy crisis" — it's just not feasible.  Secondly, Alvarez eviscerates the seriousness of the "climate crisis."  It's obvious the powers that be don't mind sacrificing the prosperity and comfort of the average citizen, so if it were actually a crisis, they'd make us use candles.  But it's not a crisis, rather it's communism in disguise, and therefore they can't do too much too soon, it's a boil the frog type strategy.

The 'save the world' racket is a scam: Stop falling for it.  Collectivism is now cloaked by environmentalism.  Bankman-Fried's fraud is dwarfed by "climate change," a financial scam and global power-grab of such monumental proportions that even collectivist megalomaniacs like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong wouldn't have dreamt of achieving it.  Using dubious "science" and massive propaganda campaigns, governments are imposing draconian policies that will never affect the planet's climate but will make proponents unimaginably wealthy, while stripping most of the world's population of their property and their freedoms, leaving them destitute and starving.

Teen Activist Goes Off the Rails at Book Launch.  Say whatever you will about Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, but at the very least, you couldn't really question her commitment to actually "saving" the planet (whatever that means in 2022).  But that annoying teenager, with her sneering "how dare you," seems to have melted away to reveal her true face, and it's a face that looks astonishingly similar to that of any modern-day dictator like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un.  To recount, right before Halloween this year, Thunberg had the entire London's Royal Festival Hall singing her praises as she unveiled her new book "The Climate Book."  As UnHerd notes, Thunberg was "gently quizzed" while on stage when it became apparent that it was no longer enough for her to save the planet — she needed to take down the very same capitalism that has allowed her home country to flourish.  Thunberg wasn't exactly subtle with this assertion, either.

Capitalism Must Be Smashed to Save "Climate," Activists Say at UN Summit.  The world is ending because of the profit motive and capitalism, and the "system" must be overturned to prevent planetary destruction, explained Lydinyda Nacpil with the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development in this brief interview with The New American magazine's Alex Newman at the United Nations COP27 climate summit.  Nacpil organized a protest with dozens of activists inside the UN venue demanding "system change, not climate change."  When asked what should replace capitalism and which nations she believes are closest to her vision, she declined to answer.  [Video clip]

Why Elites Like Greta Thunberg Hate Capitalism.  For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life's purpose was to save the world from climate change.  But last Sunday, she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow "the whole capitalist system," which she says is responsible for "imperialism, oppression, genocide... racist, oppressive extractionism."  Her talk echoed the World Economic Forum's calls for a "Great Reset" away from fossil fuels and toward renewables.  There is no "back to normal," she said.  But her claims are absurd.  The "whole capitalist system" has, over the last 200 years, allowed for the average life expectancy of humans to rise from 30 to 70 years of age.  The "whole capitalist system" produces larger food surpluses than any other system in human history.  And the "whole capitalist system" has resulted in declining greenhouse gas emissions in developed nations over the last 50 years.

Greta Thunberg throws in her lot with the anti-capitalist Left.  Last night, London's Royal Festival Hall hosted a children's crusade.  The purpose?  To "celebrate" the launch of The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg's coffee-table manifesto which collects essays from climate scholars, interspersed with photography and doom data (the cover itself is a colour chart of global temperature, moving from halcyon blue to DEFCON red).  London answered the call.  Greta was in conversation with a beaming Samira Ahmed ("You're the coolest 19-year-old I've ever met!"), who gently quizzed her about life as the world's most famous climate activist.  The crowd adored her.  They lapped up her awkward ingenuousness.  It was the perfect middle-class day out, like a trip to Glyndebourne or Blenheim.  Some had even brought their young children, clearly hoping to inspire them into the same breed of activism.  And, belying her reputation for aggressive sermonising, Greta was perfectly charming.  The fury of "How dare you!" Greta has given way to a likeable figure of exasperated passion.

Greta Thunberg Gets (Even More) Radical: 'There Is No Going Back to Normal'.  Nineteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg is at it again, scolding world leaders, predicting imminent doom for the planet and mankind, and shaming people who use too much energy.  This time, however, she's taking a more radical tone, calling for fundamental change in the way humans lead our lives. [...] She also says the quiet part out loud about the world's COVID response: it wasn't about safety at all, it was about creating a New World Order: [...] This is terrifying stuff.  She's saying the pandemic relief funds had nothing to do with the virus at all, they were thinly-disguised Green New Deal policies.  Note that if you had said that in 2021, you would have been roundly criticized as a conspiracy theorist and censored on every platform possible.  Although she did not snarl as she famously has in the past, the whole thing sounded more like a religious sermon than a scientific discussion.  The talk was heavily populated by evil corporatists, cynical world leaders, and angelic climate activists who know better.  Economic growth is a bad thing, she asserted.

Radicals Celebrate Earth Day: 'Maybe Humans Are the Disease'.  Leftists celebrated Earth Day on Friday by using it as a political wedge to cudgel those whom they oppose into compliance.  Earth Day, first designated as an annual event in 1970, has origins that go back to ancient forms of paganism.  For instance, nature worship or "earth religion" includes forms of paganism, such as "animism" (a worldview that all animals and plants have a spirit), "Wicca" (worship of earth mother goddess by magic), and "druidism" (the natural world is synonymous with divinity).  According to Refinery 29, Earth Day is a "sacred holiday" and "a chance for Pagans to show gratitude to nature."  In that sense, "every day is Earth Day," Pagan author Deborah Blake claimed.  Left-wing political pundits use the sacred holiday to push environmentalism, which is different than conservationism.  The radical left has adopted environmentalism as a wedge to promote "climate change," a political cudgel to orient the American economy away from capitalism.

Ten Steps to Totalitarianism.  Does anybody still think totalitarianism can't happen here?  Ask yourself how many of these steps we've already galloped past. [... #3] Control over Energy:  Whether you believe that anthropogenic climate change is an imminent threat or not, this much is indisputable: energy undergirds all economic activity.  Everything from agricultural production and industrial manufacturing to supply transport, shipping, and consumer shopping depends upon a constant supply of energy.  If everything bought and sold across the planet were viewed as a pyramid with the most luxurious items sitting at the top, hydrocarbon energy in all its forms provides the pyramid's foundation.  As governments seize greater control over hydrocarbon energy, they seize total control over the global economy.

I Survived Communism.  Now, it's Back, Veiled as 'Environmentalism'.  "It was scientifically proven that communism is the only social-economic system providing the masses with justice and equality — 100 percent of scientists agree on this.  The topic is not up for debate!"  So proclaimed my professor during one of his lectures on the subject of "scientific communism" while the former country of Czechoslovakia was still under communist control.  I was reminded of his blustery pronouncement the first time I encountered the spurious claim that "a consensus of 97 percent of scientists agree global warming is man-made."  Most people don't question scientific statements because they think they are facts.  They do not understand that scientific statements must always be challenged, because science is not about "consensus;" ideology is.

SEC takes first step toward requiring companies to disclose emissions and climate risks.  The Securities and Exchange Commission will seek public input on establishing a regime for requiring corporations to disclose the risks they face from climate change and policies to curb emissions.  The request for comment, which acting SEC Chairwoman Allison Herren Lee announced Monday [3/15/2021], is likely a first step toward the agency requiring such disclosures from companies.  Investors, including large asset managers such as BlackRock, and environmental groups have strongly called for mandatory disclosures, especially as they say it becomes increasingly clear that climate change poses a serious risk to the financial system.

Global lockdown every two years needed to meet Paris CO2 goals — study.  Carbon dioxide emissions must fall by the equivalent of a global lockdown roughly every two years for the next decade for the world to keep within safe limits of global heating, research has shown.  Lockdowns around the world led to an unprecedented fall in emissions of about 7% in 2020, or about 2.6 [billion] tonnes of CO2, but reductions of between 1 [billion] and 2 [billion] tonnes are needed every year of the next decade to have a good chance of holding temperature rises to within 1.5C or 2C of pre-industrial levels, as required by the Paris agreement.  Research published on Wednesday [3/3/2021] shows that countries were beginning to slow their rates of greenhouse gas emissions before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, but not to the levels needed to avert climate breakdown.

The Editor says...
At least this article answers one question:  The Paris agreement wants global temperatures to return to "pre-industrial levels."  Why?  Even if industrial activity is responsible for the very slight warming of the last 150 years, and it isn't, the world isn't going to forfeit all industrial activity for the sake of achieving the Goldilocks Temperature.  Moreover, the threat of a "climate breakdown" is ridiculous, because global average temperatures have been warmer in years past than they are now, and the climate didn't break down.  Nor will it ever do so.

Russian Spies are Behind Environmental Groups:  Democrats Shrug.  When are Russian foreign influence operations a major crisis?  When their existence can be exploited to achieve Democrat ends.  But when the operations themselves are achieving Democrat political ends, it's as quiet as a whisper.  It fell to the Financial Times and the former Danish PM who heads NATO to address the issue.  "I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas," the NATO Secretary General warned.  Finally an explanation for Greta Thunberg that makes sense.  But this isn't really new.  The Democrats and their media just chose to ignore it.

How Socialist Dogma Replaces Real Science with "Settled Science".  [Scroll down]  Climatology and ecology have turned from objective sciences into undersigners of party science.  Instead of scientific debate, doomsday advocates hysterically accuse political opponents of denying scientific facts and general ignorance.  These dogmatic beliefs were refuted not only from a theoretical point of view but also after the gloomy predictions did not come true:  the ocean did not flood the cities, and polar bears did not die out.  But the emerging facts of manipulation in temperature measurements, data processing, and data interpretation have only led to a change in the Left's terminology.  Instead of global warming, now we are dealing with climate change due to human activity.  Scholars who question harmful carbon dioxide's effect on the climate get ridiculed and silenced.  Luckily, the Left still falls short of prosecuting dissident scientists.  Nevertheless, leftists clearly understand that peddling climate change and recruiting more believers will bring them long-lasting political success.  The Green New Deal, which is presented as a means to save humanity from the consequences of climate change and is based on the false premises of socialist climatology, is as stupid as the fight against sparrows in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Green Groups Are China's 'Useful Idiots'.  Western environmentalists are being controlled and used by the communist regime in China, states a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  According to author Patricia Adams, a long-time observer of the country, Beijing has coopted western environmental groups through a combination of sticks and carrots.  "Like all western NGOs, green groups are only allowed to operate in China so long as they bite their tongues and toe the party line.  But Beijing is also able to influence their behavior through funding bodies like Energy Foundation China, a US-based body that distributes money from American billionaire foundations."  This two-pronged approach means that western greens have effectively become mouthpieces for President Xi.

Climate Reparations.  In case there was any doubt that 'Climate Change" was not communism, here is an article in Foreign Policy that will remove it. [...]

Forgetting History and Misrepresenting History is America's Real Pandemic.  [Scroll down]  As a result, none of what's happening now should surprise us, except for one thing:  We finally have a President that sees the problem as it is, and not as the media and ruling classes attempt to present it.  Having had to deal with the EPA, environmentalists and other misfits for many years representing my industry, I knew the bureaucracy was corrupt, and that corruption was created by elected representatives from both parties, especially starting with -- again -- Nixon, who created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), passed the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and a host of other "green" laws.  All of which have been out of control for years.  All of which are anti-capitalist.  All of which are anti-American.  All of which impose fundamentally unconstitutional regulations.  All of which the nation is struggling with today.

Climate Change:  Most Brazen Scientific Hoax In Human History.  [Scroll down]  Dr. Ottmar Edenhofer, one of the UN's top climate officials, effectively admitted that the organization's public position on climate change is a hoax.  The same admission was made in July 2019 by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who told governor Jay Inslee (D-WA) that the Green New Deal is not about saving the planet:  It wasn't originally a climate thing at all ... we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.  In other words, the intent of the Green New Deal is to use climate alarmism as a false flag excuse for dismantling America's capitalist economy. [...] Powerful globalists in this country feel it's not fair that billions of people in the world sleep on the ground in mud huts, while Americans sleep on soft mattresses in air-conditioned comfort.  The progressive elites who feel that way also believe that America's wealth must therefore be "shared" to an unprecedented extent with poor nations of the world.  Global wealth redistribution is the foremost tenet of communism, and those who advocate it are by definition communists, whether they are open about it or not.

The Climate Campaign Is Less And Less About The Climate.  Here in the United States, the environmental movement has been completely taken over by the campaign to ban use of fossil fuels, with the stated goal of slowing or preventing "climate change."  But at this point, is the "climate" campaign really about the climate in any meaningful way?  The alternative hypothesis is that the principal goal of the anti-fossil-fuel movement in the United States is destruction of the American freedom-based economic system, commonly going by the name of "capitalism."  So let's consider whether the anti-fossil-fuel campaign in the U.S. could really be about its avowed goal of saving the planet from climate change caused by greenhouse gases.  If that were the case, then the campaigners would be principally focused on the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, mostly CO2, not only in the U.S. but in the world.

Al Gore, UN Secretary-General, others now demanding 'Great Reset' of global capitalism.  The economic, social and political chaos caused by the COVID-19 outbreak and Black Lives Matter protests have for months captured the attention of virtually every American — and for good reason.  These are incredibly important issues worthy of significant and thoughtful debate.  But while most Americans have been preoccupied with protests and pandemics, a potentially bigger story has managed to slip beneath the radar:  a growing movement among the world's most powerful leaders to call for a "reset" of the entire global economy.

Radical Environmentalists' Giddiness During Pandemic Exposes Their True Aims.  While the country and really the whole world is enmeshed in stopping the COVID-19 pandemic, [Barack H.] Obama and many others on the left are desperately trying to get Americans to embrace their agenda. [...] Some environmental activists are clearly excited at the possibilities of "degrowth," as one environmental economist called the widespread economic contractions that have become possible in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.  Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky News, had a particularly disturbing take.  "Don't take this the wrong way but if you were a young, hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than [the] coronavirus," Conway wrote.  "Unlike most other such diseases, it kills mostly the old who, let's face it, are more likely to be climate sceptics.  It spares the young.  Most of all, it stymies the forces that have been generating greenhouse gases for decades."

Global Warming Alarmists:  Not Only Wrong But Vicious.  Christiana Figueres, at one time the United Nations' climate director, says the coronavirus might be good for the climate "because there is less trade, there's less travel, there's less commerce." She didn't say it, but given her past statements, it's not hard to imagine she'd be OK with any global or Western crisis that hurt the economy. [...] Speaking on Britain's Channel 4 Television last week, Figueres showed that her crusade against capitalism, which is simply basic human enterprise liberated from government controls, remains unchanged.

Mask off:  Greta Thunberg comes out full Marxist.  Surely, you didn't think climate change was the only thing Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg had in mind, did you?  Nope, she's now got bigger ideas: [...] It's natural to want to dismiss Thunberg as a spoiled brat, but the fanatical drumbeat emanating from her that "nothing has been done" and "we must act now" is the clarion call of a vintage Marxist looking to take over society.  Someone like this isn't going to be satisfied, no matter what is done.

Clearing the Air on Climate Change.  Another thing to ponder based on these facts is why capitalism is so often made out as the villain of the "climate crisis."  Capitalism has certainly been responsible for much greater industrial activity and production, which has resulted in an explosion of wealth and advancement of living conditions all over the world over the past 300 years.  But it has also been responsible for the development of technologies to produce more efficiently and to harness cleaner sources of energy, as well as creating the wealth to allow for their application.  Free economies excel at innovation; command economies do not.  The biggest environmental abusers over the past century have not been capitalist countries but socialist ones.  Witness the environmental messes exposed in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.  And, again, the biggest producer of greenhouse gases today, by far, is communist China.  Capitalism is the only system that provides the benefits of industrialization along with the ability to evolve systems of production in a more environmentally friendly direction.  The only other real alternative is to go back to a pre-industrial world, and I don't think even woke millennials are willing to do that.

Leaving the Democrats.  In 1978, I got a job in the wood products industry at a particleboard factory and began work a schedule that just became normal to me.  [S]even days on, two days off, working nights, weekends, and most holidays.  I wore "save the whales" t-shirts at work.  The industry came under attack because of environmental concerns for the spotted owl.  The lumber and wood products industry in the West was decimated over the next 15-20 years.  We tried to muster support from our government, but our efforts fell on deaf ears.  Eventually after 22 years, the facility I worked at closed.  The ability to do what we did, which was to recycle sawdust and discarded wood into a usable product, became too expensive as we had to go further and further away for our raw materials.  The logging industry was gone because of environmentalism and government policies to put animal concerns ahead of humans.

Tackling the climate crisis means the end of capitalism as we know it.  When John McDonnell announced plans to de-list the companies wilfully destroying the planet through unchecked carbon emissions, the response from the City was predictably hyperbolic.  "Financial totalitarianism," said one banker.  "Kamikaze communism," said the right-wing propaganda website Guido Fawkes.  Labour's thinking on industrial, fiscal and central bank policy has taken a sharp green turn under the impact of the Extinction Rebellion protests, and last October's IPCC report, which dramatically shortened the deadline for halving global carbon emissions.  But it is not yet radical enough.  Climate change is a problem where — given the scale and the deadlines — nothing short of dramatic structural change in the way capitalism works can deliver the 2030 target of a 45 percent cut in carbon emissions.  To deliver the net-zero carbon emissions demanded by 2050 will require an economy so different from ours that we are unlikely to recognise it as capitalism.

The Editor says...
There is no climate crisis.  "Tackling the climate crisis" will have no effect on the climate.  It's all about the destruction of capitalism.

Economists Have Been "Useful Idiots" for the Green Socialists.  In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used[i] the term "useful idiot" to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn't realize that they were being exploited in such fashion.  It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies.  The radical environmentalists were quite happy to embrace the economic concepts of "Pigovian negative externalities" and a carbon tax in the past, but now that it is impossible for economic science to endorse their desired agenda, the activists have discarded the entire field as hopelessly out of touch.  Economists who still support a carbon tax and other climate "mitigation policies" should be aware of the bigger picture.

False flag environmentalism is dangerous for America and the world.  Claiming the US, Europe or other westernized countries are environmental hellholes all in the name of smearing capitalism or trying to sway continents such as Africa to use unreliable, intermittent renewable energy is the worse form of environmental practice.  These lies halt "mining, logging, fossil fuels extraction and environmentalists condemn communities to poverty."  But environmentalists rail against America, Trump, Republicans, oil companies, capitalism — when the pathetic irony is — "it's not really about pollution or reducing CO2 emissions or solving the energy needs of the most needy and making the world cleaner and healthier."  American companies many times are the only way developing countries have access to better lives or have the resources to clean up environmental deprivations.

Environmental Hypocrites of the Left.  George Monbiot recently expressed a carefully calibrated environmental message that allows people on the environmental left to feel self-righteous without making any real sacrifice.  In a video that was shared widely, including by celebrities such as James Corden, the British writer argues that the only way to help the environment is to change the "big, structural, political economic stuff."  Monbiot concludes that we need to "go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it."

The Slow Walk to Silent Surrender.  More and more businesses and industries are buying into the climate orthodoxy that human activities are the primary cause of climate change.  And, democratic candidates for President are making it a wedge issue that will put further pressure on business and industry to get on board.  While a large number of scientists support this hypothesis, for a variety of reasons, it still is only a hypothesis that relies on complex computer models that have been built using a large number of assumptions that attempt to fill gaps in knowledge.  While short term business objectives may justify going along to get along, there is an unexplored alternative that would not compromise the business community and damage our economic system.

Environmental Activists Pushed Chinese-Friendly Policies with Obama Administration.  The World Resources Institute, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit devoted to curtailing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting sustainable development, was one of several environmental advocacy groups that received letters from the House Natural Resources Committee in 2018 inquiring about their relationship with China's government and the impact this relationship has had on their political activism.  The letters, signed by then-Chairman Rob Bishop (R., Utah) and Rep. Bruce Westerman (R., Ark.), who chaired the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, also asked the environmental groups if they followed foreign agent registration requirements.

Green New Deal Is A Revamped Communist Manifesto.  A few years ago at the height of the global warming scare I wrote a book which set out to answer one of the key questions of our time: if climate change isn't really a problem why do so many people act as though it is?  The answer, I discovered, is that environmentalism is just a fashionable mask for the usual leftist obsessions with state control and wealth redistribution.  Not everyone who believes in man-made climate change is a full on Commie.  Some are merely useful idiots.  But whatever reason people may have for supporting the scam — greed, stupidity, virtue-signalling, idiot leftist teachers — the net result is the same:  bigger government, higher taxes, more regulation, lower standards of living.  Exactly like you'd get under communism, in fact.

Climate Change:  The Poetry of Dreams and the Prose of Reality.  As the argument goes, if the United States would replace internal combustion engines with batteries and shut down oil refineries and coal-fired power plants, we would save the planet.  There is a reason they keep emphasizing the United States.  Other countries, especially the major polluters such as Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, have no intention of following this destructive path.  Every single week of the year, China brings into service a new, large coal-fired plant that has practically no environmental controls and subsequently contributes to 30 percent of the air pollution in Los Angeles.  By taking this position, the supporters of global warming have demonstrated that they selectively collect, analyze, and utilize scientific data to support their ideological position.  Otherwise, they might have found that the theory of global warming is full of holes.

Twilight of the Green Follies.  [Scroll down]  Its most consequential current incarnation — 'global warming' — is a barely disguised assault on capitalism.  It is for many, the last and best chance of the Left to do away with the hated free enterprise system.  Why this is so is not difficult to understand.  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American socialist, Robert Heilbronner, admitted that the capitalist system had proven economically superior to the socialist model, but urged his co-religionists — for this is what they really are — not to despair.  It was still possible to achieve socialist goals, he argued, by using the ecological movement.  And so they have.  With its bogus claims of ever greater triumphs of renewable energy, government mandates and exorbitant subsidies, the global warming scam closely resembles Stalinist Lysenkoism and the erstwhile Soviet propaganda of the glorious achievements of socialism.

The Mask Slips.  Meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote on Twitter this morning [10/9/2018] that "The world's top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet."  He said that as en endorsement of the latest UN climate report, which Grist claims "shows civilization is at stake" if we don't... bring Western Civilization to an end.  Funny how the Left's goals always seem to come to that, isn't it?

Turning Luddite eco-imperialism into a virtue.  Banks and other carbon colonialists glorify limited wind and solar energy for poor villages, while denying financial support for fossil fuel electricity generation.  Anti-chemical fanatics promote bed nets and narrowly defined "integrated pest management," but bitterly oppose chemical pesticides and the spatial repellant DDT to kill mosquitoes, keep them out of homes and prevent deadly malaria.  Radical organic food groups battle any use of genetically engineered crops that multiply crop yields, survive droughts and slash pesticide spraying by 75% or more.  They even vilify Golden Rice, which enables malnourished children to avoid Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death.  Now their struggles are getting worse, as a coalition of well-financed malcontents, agitators and pressure groups once again prove the adage that power politics makes strange bedfellows.  Coalition members share a deep distaste for fossil fuels, petrochemicals (including chemical pesticides and fertilizers), modern agriculture, biotechnology, corporations and capitalism.

Seattle bans plastic straws, utensils, becoming first major US city to do so.  Seattle has officially become the first major U.S. city to ban restaurants from giving plastic straws and utensils to customers in an effort to help the environment.  Since July 1, restaurants in the Emerald City are barred from providing customers plastic straws, cocktail picks or utensils unless someone specifically requests one.  In that case, the customer should be given a compostable option, according to Seattle Public Utilities.  With 5,000 food service providers in the area, Seattle is the first major city in the U.S. to enact such a ban, KIRO-TV reported.

The only thing you need to know about Earth Day.  Every country and populace that has got rich has done so through some variant of capitalist free-marketry.  No socialist system has managed it, no feudal, no planned, no fascist, certainly no communist.  Every place and time which has engaged in what we today call neoliberal globalization has become rich.

Subverting US Energy Policies:  A Summary.  Although there has been a lot of press coverage about Russian interference in our political process, they are actually attacking us in a much more effective way, with very little attention being paid to it. [...] There is significant evidence that our country's enemies (esp.  Russia and China) are purposefully subverting our energy sector in a variety of ways.  Of course they are being clandestine about this, in hopes that few citizens will notice.  One of their most effective tactics is for them to support US organizations whose energy agenda is synonymous with theirs.  For example, carefully consider these key energy questions.  Who is it that wants:
  •   US nuclear energy facilities to close down?
  •   US fossil fuel reserves to stay in the ground (onshore and offshore)?
  •   the costs of fossil fuels to go up (e.g. with a carbon tax)?
  •   a high percentage of the US electric grid to be based on unreliable sources?
  •   the US to waste trillions of dollars on unreliable electricity?
  •   our national security weakened by wind energy interference with our military?
If you answered:  "the Sierra Club and their allies," you'd be right.  However the correct answer is also our communist opponents:  Russia and China.

Mass. AG Wants 'Climate Change' Warning Labels At Gas Stations.  Do you know what would be great?  If fossil fuels companies threatened to pull out of areas run by climate change (scam) fanatics.  Perhaps they could develop a plan where they'd shut the gas off for a week (while making sure that gas station owners didn't lose money), and see how many climate change fanatics freak out.  Or, hey, they could refuse to sell their product to those governments.  Or, hey, how about this:  they could have a list of people they do not sell to, much like they use to for those who pass bad checks.

Is Capitalism Killing The Planet?  Every once in a while, environmentalists will let slip that the goal of fighting climate change can't be won unless capitalism is first defeated.  The fact that there's no evidence to support the claim doesn't seem to matter.

Warmist Monbiot:  We Need To Stop Living Modern Lives To Solve 'Climate Change'.  Crazy George Monbiot attempts to couch this in "environmental" terms as a placeholder for his real Belief in anthropogenic climate change, and, he does have a few points regarding over-consumption, let's be honest, but, at the end, it's all about changing the whole system[.]

The Watermelons Are Coming.  President Obama's short-lived Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, who self-identifies as a "communist," explained why he was not on the streets burning down the system but instead working within it.  "I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends," said he.  He had discovered in environmentalism a means to satisfy his need for both the radical pose and Marxist ends because environmentalism serves policies he already believes in.  The ecosocialist current within the Green movement has become a red tide engulfing the planet.  That is presumably why there is often a profusion of hammer and sickle communist party flags proudly flown by Green activists outside climate conferences, while inside leaders like the late Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, insist that socialism is the path to saving the planet.

All This for .01 Degrees Celsius?  As the president reveals his plan to reduce greenhouse gases to save us from an apocalyptic atmosphere, I wish to remind people of three things:  [#1] The true hockey stick of the fossil fuel era:  Global progress in total population, personal wealth and life expectancy.  This is truly amazing.  To show how fossil fuels played a roll in expanding the global pie, there are many more people alive today living longer and enjoying a higher GDP.  One has to wonder if someone against fossil fuels is simply anti-progress.

UN climate chief candidly admits goal is not environment but to end capitalism.  Anybody reading this website for any significant period of time could have told you this long ago, but it's refreshing that they're finally admitting it out in the open.

The Green War Against the Working Class.  There was a time in America — and it wasn't even so long ago — that liberals actually cared about working class people.  They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions (i.e., raising the minimum wage) but at least their heart was in the right place.  Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago.  The radical leftwing environmentalists took control.  These are people who care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class.  The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these radicals and now they — and all of us — are paying a heavy price.

What's the Real Agenda Behind Climate-change Alarmism?  The world leaders and activists who attended the UN Climate Summit in Paris last December are all about saving the world, saving the environment, right?  That's the standard narrative, isn't it?  Well, critics, ourselves included, have insisted that the UN climate agenda is really about power and wealth.  More precisely, it is about getting the power to redistribute global wealth — through carbon taxes, carbon pricing, carbon trading, and carbon regulation, etc.  But don't take our word for it; the top climateers have said so themselves.  Take, for instance, Dr.  Ottmar Edenhoefer — not exactly a household name in America, however, Dr.  Edenhofer is a big name in climate policy circles.  He says, "We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy."

Another Climate Alarmist Admits Real Motive Behind Warming Scare.  We have been told now for almost three decades that man has to change his ways or his fossil-fuel emissions will scorch Earth with catastrophic warming.  Scientists, politicians and activists have maintained the narrative that their concern is only about caring for our planet and its inhabitants.  But this is simply not true.  The narrative is a ruse.  They are after something entirely different.  If they were honest, the climate alarmists would admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures — they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.

It's Not About Warming: Here's Why The U.N. Holds Climate Summits.  The U.N.'s many climate meetings and its interest in climate through the years have nothing to do with warming, climate, weather or the environment.  The goal has always been to wreck capitalism, punish prosperous economies that became rich through free markets, reward poorer nations that are impoverished by policies that starve markets, and reshape the world in the image of left-wing thought.

How the Post-Soviet Left Latched Onto the Climate For Crusade on Capitalism.  The opening of the Paris conference on climate change will be the occasion for the customary lamentations about the imminent demise of life on Earth if we do not pull up our socks as a species and reduce carbon emission levels, and thus avoid the toasting of the world.  The adduced scientific evidence does not justify any such state of alarm.  Every sane and informed person in the world is concerned about pollution and demands vigilance about any clear trends of climate change and any convincing evidence that human behavior influences the climate.  Because the Copenhagen climate Conference of 2009 had promised agreement on imposition of dramatic measures to reduce fossil fuel use and resulting carbon emissions, thus avoiding apprehended rises in world temperature, and broke up in acrimonious farce and recrimination, the Paris conference has been more carefully and less ambitiously prepared.

Bill Gates says that capitalism cannot save us from climate change.  The world's richest man, Bill Gates, has said that the private sector is too selfish and inefficient to produce effective energy alternatives to fossil fuels.

Bill Gates: Only Socialism Can Save Us From Climate Change.  "Representative democracy" has failed; the private sector is "inept"; and only bigger government — led by China and the US — has the power to save the world from climate change.  So says Bill Gates in a dogmatic but somewhat confused interview with The Atlantic in which he simultaneously pours scorn on green tech solutions but insists that more of them are needed — on a scale bigger than the Manhattan Project — if we are to deal successfully with a problem whose nature he admits may well have been exaggerated by environmentalists.

Bill Gates Says Capitalism Can't Save Us from Climate Change.  [Scroll down]  Logical leaps — that greenhouse gases are the primary force behind "global warming," and that man, beast or government can make inroads against such environmental changes — aside, Gates actually goes on to make the case against his own theory, stating that it[']s the regulatory structure that surrounds energy methods development, not necessarily the free market's unwillingness, that keeps alternative fuel sources in the experimental stages.

Climate Change — A Cover for Repealing Capitalism.  The "crisis" it represents gets bigger and scarier with each passing week, and the people who want to save us from it cry out over and over again with more and more claims of how serious this tragic situation is.  The cause has been most recently trumpeted by Naomi Klein in her book and documentary of the same name, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. [...] While Klein wants everyone to think that climate change is her goal, it is clear from her book and documentary that bringing down capitalism and all the evil is stands for is her goal.

Fossil fuel companies risk plague of 'asbestos' lawsuits as tide turns on climate change.  Investors in the City are increasingly concerned that fossil fuel groups and their insurers are on the wrong side of a powerful historical shift and could be swamped with exhorbitant class-action lawsuits along the lines of tobacco and asbestos litigation in the US.

Who Is Greener?  We are seeing an interesting phenomenon in Europe and in the U.S. "Green" candidates and officeholders are vying to outdo one another in boasting of their environmental credentials.  In debates here and abroad, it's not uncommon to hear those office seekers asking voters to give them ever more power because, they claim, the "planet" is in dire need of their help.  Some of our European friends, especially those from the formerly Captive Nations held down for half a century by the power of the USSR, jokingly call the new Greens "watermelons."  Why so?  They may be green on the outside, our newly freed friends say, but they are red (Communist) on the inside.

The Devastating Corporate Response to Carbon Madness.  [Scroll down]  European politicians are too committed to green subsidies and carbon pricing to openly reverse their carbon pricing and green subsidy policies.  But they also can't afford to let energy intensive businesses which are important to their national economies collapse.  European politicians are now being forced to pay subsidies, not only for renewables, but also for unfashionable, energy intensive businesses, to keep them from closing.

Fun with the Green Climate Fund.  The globalists have a problem:  They want money, lots of it.  And they want the prosperous nations to give it to them so they can redistribute it to poor nations.  That would make the world "fair."  But how can the prosperous be separated from their wealth? [...] Armed with a philosophy that favors the environment, or environmentalism, the globalists have done a pretty good job of persuading people that some countries have prospered by driving their gasoline-powered machines all over creation, releasing greenhouse gases that put rich and poor alike in danger from global warming.  The prosperous must be stripped of their earned income.

Sustainability is the Left's New Code Word for Social Justice.  Sustainability is the latest buzzword when it comes to advocating for responsible environmental stewardship.  And why not?  Its proper implementation can have positive results.  But sustainability has become a new religion for the Left and its church is the college campus, where converts — the future leaders of America — have twisted the concept into a catch-all for social justice activism bent on transforming socioeconomic and political foundations.  "Sustainability, it turns out, is the new battle cry in an old war," states Katherine Kersten in a commentary for Minneapolis's Star Tribune.  She means that although what is familiar in the cause is age-old environmentalism, it has been rebranded and redefined to include a broader spectrum of social justice issues like gender neutrality, transgenderism, and addressing white privilege and police brutality.

Anti-capitalist eco-crusader Naomi Klein hosted at Vatican.  The Vatican added yet another strange bedfellow to its expanding ecological alliance Wednesday, hosting anti-capitalist eco-crusader Naomi Klein at a conference on saving the planet.

Pope Francis and Naomi Klein Both Hate Free Markets, Technological Progress, and Economic Growth.  Last week, Pope Francis issued his new encyclical Laudato Si' in which he addresses the problem of man-made climate change.  Unfortunately, the encyclical makes it clear that the Pope completely fails to understand how the spread free markets yielded the technological and economic progress that has lifted billions out of humanity's natural state of abject poverty.  Global life expectancy has more than doubled over the past century; the amount of food per capita has never been higher; literacy has never been more widespread; and the level of violence never lower.  Nearly all of these improving trends can be traced to the spread of sweet commerce.  In Laudato Si' the Pope strongly urges that markets and technology be reined in.  Instead of creating more wealth, the Pope would prefer to redistribute it.  Now, in a not-so-strange-bedfellow alliance, Pope Francis has invited prominent hater of free markets Naomi Klein to advise him and the Vatican on economic and climate policy.

Pope Partners with Anti-Capitalist Activist to Promote Climate Change Encyclical.  Pope Francis' call to action on climate change with his encyclical, Laudato Si', has resulted in some strange and "radical" alliances.  The Guardian (UK) reported on June 27 that the Vatican added pro Occupy Wall Street activist Naomi Klein to a growing list of activists for its upcoming environmental conference.  Klein is an "ferocious critic of capitalism" and a "secular radical," according to the left-wing Guardian newspaper.

Scottish Warmist: Nationalize All Energy.  Of course, this is just one guy writing a letter to the Herald Scotland.  But, if one Warmist is writing it, how many others are bobbing their head in agreement?

U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare.  The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment.  But we know that's not true.  A United Nations official has now confirmed this.  At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.

Pope Francis, Put a Lid On It. Please.  Pope Francis has already caused consternation among knowledgeable Catholics with his criticisms of economic freedom.  Some have tried to defend him or reinterpret his words, but it is hard to sugarcoat the fact that he is instinctively hostile to free enterprise.  Perhaps this is because, as a native of Argentina, he has never seen free enterprise at work and doesn't understand what it can do for the average citizen.  Now Francis has taken on the global warming cause.  Again, it is hard to interpret his words as representing anything but ignorance of the relevant science.

Climate Rhetoric vs. Reality.  Sure, some 300,000 people showed up in Manhattan to express their desire for action on carbon dioxide emissions.  But if the marchers and the organizers behind the march are serious about addressing climate change, then they should be holding a march against coal use.  Instead, according to a key observation on the march made by Ed Crooks, a reporter for the Financial Times, the marchers were overwhelmingly demonstrating against [...] natural gas.

The Empire of Progressive Poverty.  Global Warming rhetoric is still couched in the usual social justice rhetoric, aimed at the poorer kleptocracies who are eager to join the line for a handout, but its logic is poverty driven.  It is not out to create wealth, but to eliminate it, on the grounds that cheaply available food or electricity is an immoral activity that damages the planet.  The Empire of Poverty is chiefly concerned with the impoverishing of the West, to maintain the manufactured scarcities of its water empire it has gone beyond taxation to entirely shutting down or crippling entire branches of human activity.  This could not be justified by appeals to class or race alone.  Social justice could not shut down power plants or decrease food production.  Its impact was not sufficient to maintain a state of permanent poverty.  For the water empire to succeed, it is necessary to destroy any form of social mobility not dependent on the centralized system.

White House using global warming as a tool against capitalism?  [Scroll down]  However, the real core of 350.org's mobilization is more bluntly stated in a cover article [Naomi] Klein wrote for the November 2011 issue of The Nation (the self-described "flagship of the left)." [...] [S]he admitted that the left really is using global warming as a tool in its campaign against capitalism, and urged leftists to stop denying and trying to hide the fact. [...] Her shredding machine is adapted from standard Leftist Utopia dogma:  government will pay for everything with seized corporate profits, it will dismantle the fossil fuel infrastructure, mandate public transit instead of cars, allow only no-carbon energy sources, pretend to feed 318 million Americans from community organic farms, create make-work jobs for the disemployed, regulate personal incomes with caps and subsidies, and so on.

Idiocracy on Parade.  After reviewing all the photos and articles written about last week's Climate March in Manhattan, I have come to the conclusion that there were only two main elements on parade — communism and Idiocracy. [...] It was not hard to figure out who the communists were as they waving the anti-capitalism signs and wearing Karl Marx t-shirts while passing out the communist newsletters.  The very fact that it was called the 'People's" Climate March should have been a giveaway; according to these marchers, capitalism is the main cause of climate change or as it was formerly known in an earlier life-Global Warming.

Global Citizen Festival Fights Poverty By Leaving A Mess.  If you caught any of the Global Citizen Festival on MSNBC Saturday night, you saw millionaires and billionaires decry "extreme poverty" around the world.  The concert was held in New York City's Central Park and involved an elaborate stage and light show by the likes of No Doubt, Jay-Z and Beyoncé.  They could easily end a lot of poverty if they wanted, but...  Since the hypocrisy of people who made their fortunes through capitalism complaining about it is obvious, I'll just say this on that:  Capitalism is so awesome that you can even get rich by telling people it's awful.

The It Girl Of Climate Change Doesn't Get It.  Ms. Klein and her new book are being written up everywhere.  Its publication brilliantly coincides with today's big UN climate-change gabfest in New York, which has been billed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a last chance (yet another one!) to save the planet.  Just one problem.  The leaders of three of four of the world's top carbon polluters — China, India and Russia — didn't bother to show up.  Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel stayed home.  Stephen Harper has been widely excoriated for his failure to attend, but it turns out he's got lots of company.  The thesis of This Changes Everything is that global warming is a war of capitalism against the planet, and that we need a people's uprising to reclaim true democracy from the venal and corrupt politicians who have been co-opted by Big Oil.  If this sounds like the Occupy movement all over again, you're right.

Climate Movement Drops Mask, Admits Communist Agenda.  Communists along with a few environmental groups staged a "People's Climate Rally" in Oakland, California on Sunday, September 21, in conjunction with the larger "People's Climate March" in New York City on the same day.  Wait — did I say communists?  Isn't that a bit of an exaggeration?  Well... no.

'Save the Environment'... from Obama, Strong & Gore.  We all now know about [Al Gore's] predictions about the sea rising to swallow the sea coast didn't come true and about how the gas and electric bills for his 20-room home and pool house in Tennessee devoured 20 times the power of an average home.  But for Sunday's People's Climate March, Gore arrived in a GM SUV gas guzzler in time to pose for a picture linking arms with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, environmentalist Jane Goodall and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who led the garbage strewing protest along with tens of thousands of marchers, including recycled rent-a-mob Occupy Wall Streeters (OWS), this time posing as "concerned environmentalists who came together to SAVE THE PLANET.

Activists plan to shut down NY stock exchange.  Hundreds of environmentalists marched in New York's financial district on Monday to protest the relationship between global warming and Big Business.  The protesters blocked traffic as they staged a sit-in and shouted slogans on climate change.  But they couldn't march on the actual Wall Street after running into barricades and had to abandon plans to "shut down" the New York Stock Exchange.

'Flood Wall Street' protesters will try to shut down Stock Exchange.  The group will be dressed in blue and meet at 9 a.m. [9/22/2014] in Battery Park to listen to speakers such as writer Naomi Klein before gathering for a mass sit-in on the steps of the [New York Stock] exchange.  The protesters will carry a 300-foot banner that says "Capitalism = Climate Chaos.  Flood Wall Street."

Thousands March in New York to End Industrialized Civilization.  Tens of thousands of marchers from all over the world came to New York City to protest inaction on climate change.  A "wake up call" they are calling it.  In fact, at 12:58 Eastern time, there was to be a moment of silence followed by "a blare of noise — a symbolic sounding of the alarm on climate change — from horns, whistles and cellphone alarms.  More than 20 marching bands and tolling church bells were expected contribute to the cacophony."  A perfect way to sum up the march:  a lot of noise signifying nothing.

Full-Frontal Environmentalism: We Knew It All Along.  [E]nvironmentalists resist being called socialists.  But next week Naomi Klein is coming out with a book called This Changes Everything. [...] Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine, a book ragingly popular with the far left that is so far gone into absurd conspiracizing and looney renderings of "neoliberalism" that it makes Lyndon LaRouche look positively staid by comparison.  What is the "this" that "changes everything" in her title?  Why climate change, don't you know?  And what does it "change"?  Why capitalism, of course.  The argument of the book in one sentence is that only overthrowing capitalism can solve climate change.

Luvvies unite against shale gas, jobs, cheap energy and economic growth.  A bunch of self-important luvvies has signed a letter calling for a moratorium on Britain's barely nascent fracking industry.  The list of contributors is like a Who's Who from Hell.

Environmentalists Cheer California's Latest Plan to Sink Its Economy.  Environmentalists are gleeful at the news reported last week by the U.S. Energy Information Administration that the amount of recoverable oil from California's Monterey Shale formation — predicted to be the nation's largest reserve of oil — is a whopping 96-percent below original production estimates.  In response, more than 100 environmental groups signed a letter to the California Legislature calling for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing and other "stimulation" techniques that ultimately would be needed to develop this oil field.  They say the new estimates are "undercutting the misguided rationale" for allowing fracking before more studies are done.

Prince Charles: Save the World From Global Warming by Ending Capitalism.  It must be hard to be Prince Charles, and know that you're the royal that nobody likes.  The fact that he constantly spews drivel like this, saying that the world should abolish capitalism to prevent global warming, probably doesn't help much. [...] Apparently, Charles hasn't gotten the memo that global warming is a complete myth yet.

The New Totalitarianism and the Logic of Civil War.  [Christopher] Hayes' article is notably noxious, attempting as it does to draw a parallel between the fossil fuel industry and slavery and arguing that efforts to destroy the fossil fuel industry amount to a "New Abolitionism" in that as the Abolitionists of old argued for the destruction of the wealth represented by the slaves held in the Antebellum South, today's "New Abolitionists" now must argue for destruction of the accumulated wealth represented by fossil fuels.  This radical course of action in setting out to deliberately destroy $10 Trillion in wealth is justified, he argues, by the requirement to stop climate change and thereby "save the planet."

Stuart Varney Rips The Fig Leaf Away From Socialists Masquerading As Environmentalists.  It's an open secret that all of the policy prescriptions from the warming alarmists just happens to coincidentally and by accident transfer wealth.  They punish the producers of goods, and reward the parasitic organizations of the left.  They take prosperity from prosperous nations and redistribute it to third world economies.  Stuart Varney isn't fooled.  Neither should we be.

Greens Are Reds.  I would like to modestly propose that it is time for conservatives to combat the most economically dangerous and statist movement in the world today, and it is not socialism.  It is the modern-day green movement, which is not run by people who primarily want to keep the air we breathe and the water we drink clean, or safeguard endangered species like tigers and bald eagles, or prevent urban blight — every sane person is for those things.  Its guiding principle is instead to impede economic growth, material progress, and capitalism.

MSNBC host pens radical 'climate justice' manifesto.  "What the climate justice movement is demanding is the ultimate abolition of fossil fuels," writes MSNBC's Chris Hayes in a lengthy new call for action against global warming.  To drive home the point, Hayes' piece, published in The Nation, is titled "The New Abolitionism," and its message is that a way must be found to "convince or coerce" the world's energy companies and energy-producing nations to give up the multi-trillion dollar business of powering the planet.

Chevron Gets Justice From Environmentalist Frauds.  A federal judge has ruled that a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in Ecuador was won through fraud.  It's a victory for Chevron, but at a cost of millions.  So why isn't someone in this environmental predator racket in jail?

Smoking Gun: Disgraced Obama EPA Official Testifies to Anti-Capitalist Plan.  The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has released a transcript of former senior EPA official John Beale's testimony.  The Committee deposed Beale in connection with his recent fraud conviction.  He was sentenced to prison for posing as a CIA agent, and defrauding the government of about $900,000.  Beale told the Committee that under President Barack Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency is being used for a purpose far beyond protecting the environment.

Emails Show Extensive Collaboration Between EPA, Environmentalist Orgs.  Internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emails show extensive collaboration between top agency officials and leading environmentalist groups, including overt efforts to coordinate messaging and pressure the fossil fuel industry.  The emails, obtained by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (EELI) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, could fuel an ongoing controversy over EPA policies that critics say are biased against traditional sources of energy.  Emails show EPA used official events to help environmentalist groups gather signatures for petitions on agency rulemaking, incorporated advance copies of letters drafted by those groups into official statements, and worked with environmentalists to publicly pressure executives of at least one energy company.

Global Warming [is] A Back Door To Socialism — And Now Even The UN Admits It.  As evidence discredits global warming, resistance to such facts by green elites reveals their real aim is bringing socialism in through the back door.  But don't take our word for it.  Listen to the climate change boss at the U.N.  Christiana Figueres, with the lumpy title of executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), came right out and said it:  Democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming.  The really good model is communist China.

UN climate chief: Communism is best to fight global warming.  United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming.  Communist China, she says, is the best model.  China may be the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution problems of their own, but the country is "doing it right" when it comes to fighting global warming says Figueres.  "They actually want to breathe air that they don't have to look at," she said.  "They're not doing this because they want to save the planet.  They're doing it because it's in their national interest."

Our Fragile Planet: Man is the Fragile Animal That Must Be Must Be Protected.  Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda.  Barry Commoner said, "Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy."  Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, "On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument."  With the decline of the USSR, communism has lost considerable respectability and is now repackaged as environmentalism and progressivism.

Obama Is Laying the Groundwork to Move Without, Around, and Outside Congress.  "Climate change" suggests that Obama intends to ramp up his war on coal in the remaining years of his presidency, via the EPA and perhaps executive actions similar to those he has used with regard to Obamacare and immigration.  Obama came into office threatening to bankrupt the coal industry, wanting to impose a cap and trade regime, but could not get one passed by Congress even when Democrats controlled both houses.  Obama is aware that his actions will force energy prices skyward.  His actions come at a time when evidence for global warming has disappeared.  That has not changed his intention to impose cap and trade.

Australian ministers: We've had just about enough of this "socialism masquerading as environmentalism".  The oh-so-august bureaucrats gathering in Warsaw, Poland for yet another United Nations climate conference this week usually turn up their noses at such tacky, backwards notions as fiscal sustainability, but Australia is already putting the word out that they have no intention of participating in whatever globalist, redistributive, and ostensibly "green" cockamamie scheme the UN comes up with next.

Chevron Vindicated As Evidence Points To 'Green Fraud' By Environmentalists.  So what happened to the $19 billion judgment against Chevron over rainforest pollution in Ecuador?  Seems the leftist lawyer behind it all now finds himself in the dock on a RICO rap for a massive fraud.

Lindbergh, Nazism, and Environmental Fascism.  Although Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) is known as the first pilot to cross the Atlantic solo in 1927 piloting the Spirit of St. Louis, his Nazi sympathies are often downplayed, and few know that he was an extreme environmentalist.  Strangely enough, the very man who helped kick-start the space age became less interested in aviation late in life.  In fact, he came to believe that technology and machines were the enemies and destroyers of the natural world.

New Rules On Power Plants Will Kill Coal Industry.  The administration finally has released its rules for curbing CO2 emissions from U.S. power plants.  Far from being a plan to clean up the environment, it is in fact a road map to de-industrialization and poverty.

Environmentalism: The Road To A Primitive Existence.  The environmental movement is remarkably backward.  It prefers to push back man's achievements in return for some vague environmental gain.  Today's environmentalists are arguably anti-energy.  As others have said, they see energy as a problem, not a solution.  Sure, they like taxpayer-funded energy.  But it is too expensive for the market, too undeveloped, too unreliable for practical use, and is harder to produce than the energy we easily get from fossil fuels.  We can't run a modern and growing economy on costly experimental energy.

My constituents are complaining about eco-protesters, not drilling.  This isn't a protest about pollution; it's a protest about capitalism.  If your sole concern were for the environment, you'd be delighted about shale.  Here is an energy source that doesn't emit soot (as coal does), nor jam estuaries (as tidal turbines do), nor starve Africans (as biofuels do), nor slaughter rare birds (as wind farms do).  It doesn't soak up public subsidies (as both nuclear and renewables do); on the contrary, it will generate a healthy stream of tax revenue for the Exchequer.  Oh, and it will reduce our carbon emissions, by displacing coal in electricity generators.  Why, then, are the greenies so glum?

Climate Change 'Experts': You should be dead by now.  Why is it that global warming "experts" claim to be concerned about humanity, but seem to find glee in contemplating its destruction?  Actually, my belief is that they hate capitalism with such passion that its elimination is their singular focus.  Their weapons of war are pseudo-scientific scare tactics and outright lies.  Humanity is just collateral damage.

Greens don't like fracking because they don't like prosperity.  You'd think Greens would be delighted by the shale gas bounty under our feet.  Here is a plentiful energy supply which does not emit soot (as coal does), nor jam estuaries (as tidal turbines do), nor starve Africans (as biofuels do), nor slaughter rare birds (as wind farms do).  It does not require public subsidies (as both nuclear and renewables do).  On the contrary, it will generate a healthy stream of tax revenue for the Exchequer.  It will diminish our reliance on nasty regimes, from Tehran to Moscow — precisely the sorts of regimes that Greens march against.  Oh, and it will reduce our carbon emissions, by displacing coal in electricity generators.  What, then, is the problem?  Some campaigners talk of water pollution; others, a touch histrionically, of earthquakes.  If either was a remotely serious prospect, we'd know by now.

President Obama's recently proposed policies will do little to combat climate change — but they will do much for his political and economic objectives.
"Carbon Pollution" and Wealth Redistribution.  No crisis should go to waste, an eternal truth highlighted in bold by a purported climate change apocalypse that is now the target of actions newly proposed by President Obama.  This so-called "crisis" will flood not various coastlines, but instead the front pages, replacing other, less flattering political headlines for the administration.  And if the proposed actions offer the potential of sizeable wealth transfers to political allies?  That is far more than mere icing on the cake.  Whatever the weakness of the evidence on greenhouse gases and climate effects, the real goal of carbon policy is a regional redistribution of wealth [...]

Misguided Energy Policy: Alone, Enough to Cause American Failure.  Nowhere is the threat to America's future more clear, and more easily avoided, than in the energy sector.  Therein, fairytale fears about climate change have grown to the point that the U.S. is now on the verge of committing suicide by turning off many of its most important energy sources to appease loud, misinformed climate activists.

Web of environmental rules threatens Gulf Coast businesses with jail, steep fines.  According to a new report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, thousands of people are being prosecuted for environmental crimes every day they didn't know were even on the books.  They've been threatened, fined and thrown in jail.  The trend is especially prominent along the Gulf Coast, but is becoming a national issue.

Ramping Up Government Control of the Energy Sector.  To understand the president's thinking, or what passes for thought, all that's necessary is to grasp one simple fact:  that for the left, profits are evil, and therefore businesses that make a profit and succeed are evil.  Only businesses that fail are virtuous.  A corollary of this is, of course, that all businesses must be made to fail.  The function of government, as the left sees it, is to transfer control of the economy from the private sector to government.

"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs."

— John Davis,    
editor of Earth First! Journal    

•    Average vehicle emissions are dropping about 10 percent per year as the fleet turns over to inherently cleaner vehicles, including modern SUVs.

•    Ninety-four percent of the population is served by water systems that have reported no violations of any health-based standards.

•    There has been a 55-percent decline in toxic releases since 1988, even while total output of the industries covered by this measurement has increased 40 percent.

•    Despite most popular assumptions, U.S. air quality trends are found to be at least equal, if not slightly better, than in Europe.

"Unfortunately, the environmental leaders are what could be described as hard-core socialist psychotics.  They are the lunatic fringes of socialism, and they are killing the American dream."

– Jan Michael Jacobson, environmentalist.