Category Archives: Environment

Interior Department’s Misguided ‘Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful’ Program, by Joe Guzzardi

Posted on January 29, 2023 | Leave a comment

More people means more pollution and the U.S. is allowing millions of people to enter the country via the southern border. From Joe Guzzardi at progressivesforimmigrationreform.org:

A week after Joe Biden became president, he signed Executive 0rder 14008 (EO) that announced his commitment to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and water – 41.5 million acres per year – by 2030. Then, on May 6, 2021, the Department of the Interior published “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful,” a preliminary report about what’s become known as the “30 x 30” plan. Under the Department of Interior’s direction, in collaboration with the Agriculture and Commerce departments and consistent with Biden’s EO, the report reaffirmed the mission to conserve within the next seven years at least 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters. The order is tall, and time is short for the urgent undertaking.

As of 2023, the U.S. is going in the wrong direction if its intention is to preserve precious, irreplaceable natural resources. The growth and development mantra that the Chamber of Commerce, the media and most in Congress embrace have overwhelmed Americans who want to preserve what remains of the nation’s biodiversity.

The valiant battle against the powerful, wealthy, craven growth mongers is worth the fight. In the book, “Precious Heritage, the Status of Biodiversity in the U.S.,” the authors point out that the U.S. is, for species like salamanders and fresh water turtles, at the global center of ecological biodiversity. From Appalachia’s lush forests to Alaska’s frozen tundra, and from the Midwest’s tallgrass prairies to Hawaii’s subtropical rainforests, the U.S. harbors a stunning, unique ecosystem array. These ecosystems in turn sustain an incomparable variety of plant and animal life. Among the nation’s other extraordinary biological features are California’s coast redwoods, which are the world’s tallest trees, and Nevada’s Devils Hole pupfish, which survive in a single 10’ x 70’ desert pool, the smallest range of any vertebrate animal.

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Lost in Space, by Bill Bonner

Posted on January 25, 2023 | 1 comment

It’s hard to know which is more phony: John Kerry or The Science he touts. From Bill Bonner at bonnerprivateresearch.com:

John Kerry’s extraterrestrial delusions of grandeur, the middle-class gets whacked and more readings from the Church of “The Science”…

(US Climate Envoy John Kerry, touched by the Hand of God. Source: Midjourney AI)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Normandy, France…

Earth to John Kerry: yes, you are a lunatic.

Mr. Kerry is in Davos, Switzerland with the rich and the famous. We will return to him in a minute. First, an update.

The middle class is getting crushed. It has only two major assets – time and houses.  It earns its living by selling its time. It keeps its wealth at home, under its own roofs.

For the last 22 months, real wages have fallen. Over the last year, for example, the average working stiff got a 5% wage increase. But adjusted for inflation of 6.5%, the gain turned into a loss.

Meanwhile, his store of wealth – his house – is in the early stages of a sell-off. It goes like this: first, houses become too expensive, so the typical middle-class family can no longer afford the typical middle-class house. Then, naturally enough, sales fall. Builders stop building. And finally, prices drop. We are just in the beginning of the final stage. Here are the figures:

At the peak of the housing bubble in 2006, the median family spent 42% of its income on housing. Now the figure is 46%. And two years ago, you could get a 30-year mortgage at 2.77%. Today, the rate is more than twice as high.

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Extraordinary Claims . . . by Eric Peters

Posted on January 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

Where’s the evidence? From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

It’s always a sound idea to start at the beginning rather than in the middle – so let’s do that.

The whole push for “electrification” is based upon a manufactured “necessity” – that of preventing what is styled “climate change.” The assertion itself is so vague as to be without substantive meaning. That’s a good beginning. How are we supposed to have any kind of intelligent debate when the baseline of the debate is so shiftily amorphous? It is certainly not – as the saying has it – “scientific.” That latter being defined by specificity – in order that the specifics can be examined, challenged, proved – or not.

It is telling – or at least, it ought to be so – that the claimed necessity for the extreme measures subsumed under the rubric of  “electrification” is so . . . non-specific.

But we all know what those who use the term as a club mean by it.

They mean the “climate” will “change” in some catastrophic way at some indeterminate point in the ever-elaborating future on account of the added carbon dioxide “emitted” by the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels, as from gas and diesel-powered vehicles most of all.

It is easy to illustrate the dubiousness of this assertion by simply pointing out the fact that the totality of C02 currently present in the Earth’s atmosphere amounts to just 0.04 percent of the total. The totality of the human-action produced C02 is a fraction of that fraction.

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Temperatures in Northern Hemisphere Due to Fall Over Next 25 Years, According to Six Top International Scientists, by Chris Morrison

Posted on January 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

The six top international scientists’ predictions will probably be more accurate than Al Gore’s and Greta Thunberg’s. From Chris Morrison at dailyskeptic.org:

Whisper it quietly – and don’t tell Al ‘Boiling Oceans’ Gore – but the Northern hemisphere may be entering a temperature cooling phase until the 2050s with a decline up to 0.3°C. By extension, the rest of the globe will also be cooled. These sensational findings, ignored by the mainstream media, were released last year and are the work of six top international scientists led by Nour-Eddine Omrani of the Norwegian Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. Published in the Nature journal Climate and Atmospheric Science, the scientists say that the North Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, an important sea current that has been pumping warmer water into the Arctic, is weakening and that’s leading to a cooler North Atlantic area and lower temperatures, as was observed in the period 1950-1970.

Certainly, current observations back up these suggestions. As we reported recently, Arctic summer sea ice stopped declining about a decade ago and has shown recent growth. The Greenland surface ice sheet grew by almost 500 billion tonnes in the year to August 2022, and this was nearly equivalent to its estimated annual loss. Of course, climate alarmists have not quite caught up with these recent trends, with Sir David Attenborough telling his BBC Frozen Planet II audience that the summer sea ice could all be gone within 12 years.

Interestingly, the six scientists, whose work has helped debunk the ‘settled’ science myth, still attribute some global warming to human causes. The Northern hemisphere is characterised by “several multidecadal climate trends that have been attributed to anthropogenic climate change”. But producing work that predicts 30 years of global cooling puts them outside the ‘settled’ narrative that claims human-produced carbon dioxide is the main – possibly the only – determinant of global and local temperatures. At the very least, it dials down the hysteria pushing for almost immediate punitive net-Zero measures. Lead author Omrani is reported to have said that the expected warming pause “gives us time to work out technical, political and economic solutions before the next warming phase, which will take over again from 2050”.

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“97% Consensus” — What Consensus? By Gregory Wrightstone

Posted on January 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The 97% consensus is a myth, but even if it wasn’t; science is not a matter of consensus, it’s a matter of seeking the truth. From Gregory Wrightstone at 2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com:

PSYOP-CLIMATE-CHANGE is the most dangerous power play of the criminal One World Government to usher in their global Great Reset dystopia.

You have likely heard that 97% of scientists agree on human-driven climate change. You may also have heard that those who don’t buy into the climate-apocalypse mantra are science-deniers. The truth is that a whole lot more than 3% of scientists are skeptical of the party line on climate. A whole lot more.

The many scientists, engineers and energy experts that comprise the CO2 Coalition are often asked something along the lines of: “So you believe in climate change, then?” Our answer? “Yes, of course we do: it has been happening for hundreds of millions of years.” It is important to ask the right questions. The question is not, “Is climate change happening?” The real question of serious importance is, “Is climate change now driven primarily by human actions? That question should be followed up by “is our changing climate beneficial or harmful to ecosystems and humanity?”

There are some scientific truths that are quantifiable and easily proven, and with which, I am confident, at least 97% of scientists agree. Here are two:

  1. Carbon dioxide concentration has been increasing in recent years.
  2. Temperatures, as measured by thermometers and satellites, have been generally increasing in fits and starts for more than 150 years.

What is impossible to quantify is the actual percentage of warming that is attributable to increased anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2. There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 that was directly caused by us.

We know that temperature has varied greatly over the millennia. We also know that for virtually all of that time, global warming and cooling were driven entirely by natural forces, which did not cease to operate at the beginning of the 20th century.

The claim that most modern warming is attributable to human activities is scientifically insupportable. The truth is that we do not know. We need to be able to separate what we do know from that which is only conjecture.

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The 1970s: From Rotting Carcasses Floating in the River to Kayak Races, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on January 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

It doesn’t matter how much money you have if you’re living in a garbage dump. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

If we don’t bother measuring national well-being, the health of the nation’s commons and resources and advances in the public’s interests, then we foolishly call a decade of tremendous advancement “stagflation.”

Correspondent J.D. read The Forgotten History of the 1970s and kindly added a graphic example of the remarkable transformation wrought by the federal Clean Water Act and other environmental regulations mandating the clean-up of the nation’s air and other public “commons”–the nation’s biosphere and resources that we all share as an essential part of the common good and the public trust.

The point of my previous post was to explain that measuring the economy by narrow measures of “growth” and “profits” grossly distorts what’s actually happening and what’s actually valuable–and despite economists’ delusional obsession with “growth” and “profits,” it isn’t “growth” or “profits.”

What’s actually valuable are advances in national well-being and security and the common good. These may be advanced by “growth” and “profits,” but they can also be diminished by “growth” and “profits.”

As Adam Smith took great pains to explain, open-market Capitalism can only function within a moral and ethical social structure. Stripped of moral constraints, “growth” and “profits” become fatal cancers in the economy and society. In and of themselves, “growth” and “profits” have no moral or ethical center; if those benefiting from “growth” and “profits” destroy the public commons and diminish the common good, those costs are ignored.

That’s the problem with proclaiming “markets solve all problems.” They don’t; in fact, left to their no-moral-compass ways, they create horrendous problems for the many subjected to the profiteering of the few, problems that destroy public “commons,” the common good and the public trust.

What better way to foster “growth” and boost “profits” than dump offal and carcasses in the public’s rivers, rather than bear the costs of proper disposal? This is one manifestation of The Tragedy of the Commons, a concept clarified by Garrett Hardin in his seminal 1968 essay of the same name: if a for-profit private enterprise can offload costs of its own production onto the public, that cost savings enables faster growth and higher profits.

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The Dangerous Fantasy of Scotland’s Net Zero Energy Transition, by Richard Lyon

Posted on January 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

There are a lot of loony green energy plans out there. Scotland’s ranks right up there as one of the looniest. From Richard Lyon at dailyskeptic.org:

Motivated by the moral necessity and urgency of this goal, the Scottish Government is proposing a novel energy policy – its “Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan”.

This article reviews its major themes and their implications, and considers briefly the probability of success of the Scottish Government implementing it.

In 2022, due to an insufficient quantity of wind and sun, Scotland’s current collection of wind and solar energy-scavenging devices failed to generate about 70% of their nameplate capacity. Recent exhaustive statistical and econometric analysis of wind generation in Scotland by Edinburgh University shows that it is uneconomic and destined for taxpayer bailout. Under the Scottish Government’s novel energy strategy, wind and solar energy-scavenging devices are to be greatly expanded.

Hydrogen, an energy carrier that squanders in waste-heat a gigawatt of power generation for every gigawatt it carries, is elevated in the Scottish Government’s understanding of energy to the category of a fuel, and also greatly expanded.

Hydrocarbon and nuclear – actual fuels – provide the energy to manufacture and endlessly replace wind turbines and solar panels. They also, in Scotland, provide the power sources that run under all conditions to ensure continuity of energy supply during Scotland’s frequent sunless and windless conditions. These are to be discontinued.

Like all advanced economies, Scotland cannot tolerate even a small measure of power supply fluctuation. Without firm dispatchable thermal standby generation capacity to smooth supply fluctuation, the eventual daily around 40GW amplitude power fluctuation resulting from the proposed expansion of weather-dependent electrical generation must be adapted for use in some other way. This will be provided by some form of 180-plus day, grid-scale electricity storage – a technical challenge for which no precedent exists, and therefore no cost estimate is available.

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As a miner for 40 years I have worked in various mines around the world. By John Lee Pettimore

Posted on January 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

That all electric future they’ve got planned for us is never going to happen. Not even close. Read the following from a guy who is obviously plugged in (pun intended) to reality. From John Lee Pettimore at en.rattibha.com:

As a miner for 40 years I have worked in various mines around the world. Gold, platinum, copper, coal, lead, zinc, oil and salt. I’m going to tell you something, and here it is. We will destroy the earth in the name of “Green Energy” Follow along and I will explain. 🧵
MiningWatch Canada is estimating that “[Three] billion tons of mined metals and minerals will be needed to power the energy transition” – a “massive” increase especially for six critical minerals: lithium, graphite, copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earth minerals
Over the next 30 years 7.5 billion of us, we will consume more minerals than the last 70,000 years or the past 500 generations, which is more than all of the 108 billion humans who have ever walked the Earth.
Mining requires the extraction of solid ores, often after removing vast amounts of overlying rock. Then the ore must be processed, creating an enormous quantity of waste – about 100 billion tonnes a year, more than any other human-made waste stream.
Purifying a single tonne of rare earths requires using at least 200 cubic meters of water, which then becomes polluted with acids and heavy metals. On top of that, imagine the destruction and energy required to obtain these essential metals:
18,740 pounds of purified rock to produce 2.2 pounds of vanadium 35,275 pounds of ore for 2.2 pounds of cerium 110,230 pounds of rock for 2.2 pounds of gallium 2,645,550 pounds of ore to get 2.2 pounds of lutecium Also staggering amounts of ore are needed for other metals.

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The Gas Stove Scare Is A Fraud Created By Climate Change Authoritarians, by Brandon Smith

Posted on January 16, 2023 | 2 comments

Now we have the gas stove scare, which won’t have nearly the staying power of climate change or Covid. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

In the past I have often tried to take a big picture approach to the issues facing the American public and how there is almost always a deeper connection between a variety of political and economic events. And, what has become increasingly clear to me is that in order to understand government actions and geopolitics, you must always ask yourself “Who benefits?”

The bottom line is this – At the heart of nearly every conflict and every crisis the same group of power mongers usually benefits, and they have taken a keen interest in the climate change narrative in particular. But like I said, this is the big picture. Right now I’d like to take a look at a relatively small issue and how the little dominoes lead up to a bigger con game and a bigger disaster. Let’s talk about gas stoves…

Frankly, I don’t care about what my stove uses to cook with as long as it works. That said, around 38% of US households use natural gas for cooking and heating. That’s a significant percentage of people that rely on gas based energy for their daily needs. Here’s the problem, though – Natural gas is not politically correct these days. Nearly all carbon emitting energy sources have been marked by climate activists and western governments as a threat that needs to be erased between 2030 to 2050.

Globalist institutions and climate change grifters have put natural gas on the naughty list, but there are a couple of realities that must be addressed. First, as noted, a vast portion of the western world including the US and Europe rely on natural gas for numerous energy applications. Ban natural gas and civilization faces an immediate plunge in economic activity, as well as much higher prices on all remaining energy sources due to increasing demand. There is NO green energy solution that can fill the same roll as gas.

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Wind Farms Eyed In Surge Of Dead Whales On NJ, NY Beaches, by Tyler Durden

Posted on January 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Where’s the save the whales crowd when you need them? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

In a case of odd bedfellows, environmental groups and Republican politicians are calling for a pause in offshore wind farm development following a string of whales washing up dead on New Jersey and New York beaches.

Seven whales have turned up dead in little over a month. The latest victim, a 20- to 25-foot juvenile Humpback whale, turned up in Brigantine, New Jersey on Thursday afternoon, close to a Coast Guard station.

“The wave of dead whales is the ocean sounding the alarm, and we must heed the warning,” said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Jersey-based Clean Ocean Action, after the sixth whale washed up in Atlantic City on Jan. 7 with signs of head trauma. “[The wind farm development] is too much, too fast. It’s outrageous and our ocean deserves better.”

A dead humpback whale washed up at Atlantic City on Jan 7, and was observed to have head trauma (via @AtlanticCity911 on Twitter) 

On Friday, Congressman Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) announced he would seek a federal investigation. “Ocean life is being put at risk as our governor and president force through their Green New Deal policies, without giving full consideration to their real-world impacts.

Drew sits on the House Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee. New Jersey Republican state Senator Vince Polistina called for a pause in the offshore construction:

“The work related to offshore wind projects is the primary difference in our waters, and it’s hard to believe that the death of (seven) whales on our beaches is just a coincidence.”

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