Radical Green New Deal predictions

 

Jack Hellner at American Thinker debunks some “global warming” myths: 

Here are some of the destructive policies of the radical greenies that are based on predictions, not scientific data:

The destruction of energy-producing companies that produce reasonably priced energy.  (They clearly don't care about the harm to the poor and middle class by high inflation.)

The promotion of the highly flammable pollutant lithium while seeking to control CO2, a non-pollutant clear gas that makes plants grow and allows the world to be fed.

Spending trillions on carbon capture.

Selling worthless carbon credits so people like John Kerry can pretend they care as they fly in their private jets.

Outlawing gas stoves, furnaces, lawnmowers, leaf-blowers, and gas grills.

The destruction of fishing and killing of whales by wind farms.

Read the rest here.

RELATED:  Edward Ring at American Greatness just published “The Corruption of Climate Science”;  click here.

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Wind & solar renewables: pointless

 

Bryan Leyland at The Telegraph UK explains why renewable energy sources (wind and solar) are never going to achieve "net zero".  I missed this column when it appeared a few weeks ago, but it's still current.  And it's still a pipe dream:

Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It's widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.

These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.

In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.

The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down.

In fact it's already common to see efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines. Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!

Much more at the link here.  But try sharing any of these facts with a green zealot.  It may be that only after unimaginable damage and suffering resulting from reducing access to energy that the greenies will wake up.  Maybe not even then . . .

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Crushing the enemy

 

Kurt Schlichter published a column on the expanding GOP field of presidential candidates.  And in the course of his run-down of the GOPe “festival of losers,” he sums up what’s at stake when commenting on Tim Scott

Tim Scott is a nice guy with a nice story and a nice demeanor who does not take pleasure in crushing his enemies, which means that he will not aggressively seek to crush his enemies, and the crushing of our enemies is the key requirement of a Republican nominee in 2024

The enemy hates us, and it is dead serious about converting its hatred into policy. From legalizing crime to weaponizing the government against us, from disenfranchising us at the ballot box to disarming us in our homes, to gagging us on social media and leveraging the regime media to hide the truth and amplify the lies, this is a cold war where we become serfs if we don’t win. It’s not the time for Team Use Your Inside Voice. The enemy holds every major institution; if you are worried about collateral damage to the institutions that seek to enslave us – or worse – then you don’t have the stones to flatten them and their current occupants. And that’s what we need to do.:

Read the full column at Townhall here.  And as always, Schlichter is entertaining even when he’s dead serious.  And even when I don't agree with everything he has to say (especially with respect to Ron DeSantis).

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Call them what they are: communists

 

John Green at American Thinker considers the various terms used to describe the "fundamentally change America" insurgents, i.e., liberals, progressives, leftists, and Democrats:

None of those labels adequately describes those who are actively working to undermine America's founding principles.  Let's stop denying the threat and call them what they are: communists.

I was a child of the Cold War.  We learned the evils of communism in history and social studies at school.  I never thought we'd be talking about America as a communist country — yet we leave people in power who are moving us in that direction.

Let's examine what communism is.  Communism is the establishment of a communal society, in which the state controls the means of production and the populace works for the welfare of the commune — not the welfare of individuals.

Personal freedom must be sacrificed for the commune.  In the last three years, the government has attempted to take away our property rights, our rights of association, our freedom of speech, and our freedom to manage our own medical decisions — all for the good of the commune.

In communism the state controls production, dictating what will be produced and when it will be produced.  The government determines what crops can be grown and what they will be used for (e.g., food or renewable energy).  In recent years, the demands to nationalize the financial and energy industries have become increasingly loud.

Read the column here.  I am not sure if this country is being moved in that direction, or if we are already past the tipping point.

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Relocate the DC swamp dwellers

 

 

Chip Bok cartoon via Townhall 

Roger Kimball published a fairly long column over the weekend, “Abandon the Swamp” at American Greatness.  Here are two paragraphs summarizing Mr Kimball’s solution to the ongoing progressives vs conservatives crisis:

The focus should be on eclipsing Washington, D.C. as the seat of government. It has long been obvious to candid observers that there is something deeply dysfunctional about that overwhelmingly Democratic, welfare-addicted city. It is a partisan sinkhole. Jefferson wanted the capital moved from New York to Washington in part to bring it closer to the South, but also to place it somewhere that was officially neutral. There is nothing neutral about Washington today. The city has some impressive architecture and urban vistas. They should be preserved and staffed as tourist attractions. But the reins of power should be relocated.

The more I think about our situation, the more I believe the only hope for the republic is to downgrade the place of Washington in our public life. The business of Washington is to make government bigger—forever. That is not what the people, who pay for it, want. Legitimacy is draining out of our governing institutions at an alarming rate. Stanching that debilitating flow requires that we redirect our attention away from the greedy puppet show in Washington to the true source of legitimacy, which is with the people.

“The greedy puppet show.”  Fits right in with Sundance’s scenario that all of the DC political construct is a “Potemkin Village”, maintained to provide us plebes with the “Illusion of Choice.”  Read Mr Kimball's column here.

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Heather Mac Donald and "the Pursuit of Equity"

 

Some readers describe Ann Coulter as a flame-thrower, and her columns are always provocative, whether you agree with her or not.  However, at TakiMag she’s just reviewed Heather Mac Donald’s book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. And the review is excellent – and informative:

“No Biggie, Just the End of Civilisation”

. . . It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

And her review concludes:

Luckily, learning to identify and treat disease isn’t such a big deal at today’s medical schools, anyway. Instead, the faculty are charged with teaching about “systems of power, privilege and oppression.” More than half of the top 50 medical schools now require students to take courses in systemic racism, Mac Donald notes. I’m sure that will be a huge relief when doctors miss your brain tumor.

In 2021, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that it would spend $2 billion … to find a cure for brain cancer? Parkinson’s disease? Heart disease? NO!!! The $2 billion would go to promoting “diversity and inclusion in science.”

In 2022, the National Cancer Institute, funded by you, taxpayer, decided to change its mission from conquering cancer — and really, who cares about that? FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS! — to guess what? Yes!!! Promoting diversity! Instead of Outstanding Investigator Awards being granted solely on the basis of merit, the gender and race of the researchers would have to be considered.

All this has done wonders for the morale of doctors. Mac Donald quotes one cancer researcher: “It’s the end of the road for me as a Jewish male doctor.” A UCLA doctor told her that the smartest undergraduates in science labs are saying, “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”

In response to this dystopic future, Mac Donald asked an oncologist, “When would white and Asian male scientists fight back? How much longer would they continue to allow their hard work and accomplishments to be disparaged and sidelined?”

He emailed back: “We value our jobs. We need our jobs. Our peers will turn on us. Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned.”

That’s why, Mac Donald says, it falls to the rest of us to never shut up about the tearing down of standards, to put forth “unapologetic defense(s) of color-blind standards,” and to “relentlessly provide the data that explain the lack of racial proportionality in meritocratic institutions.”

To paraphrase Orwell: If there is hope, it must lie in the uncancelable.

Read the whole column here.

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Armed Forces Day

 

Today is Armed Forces Day.  A couple of weeks ago, Patriot Post ran a tribute to Sgt Alvin York, the World War I hero celebrated in the film Sergeant York, with Gary Cooper in the title role.  Here’s the conclusion of Mark Alexander’s article:

In January 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, in a Memorial Day address at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, York said: “Liberty and freedom are so very precious that you do not fight and win them once and stop. They are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them!”

He added, “I think any man who talks against the interests of his own country ought to be arrested and put in jail, not excepting senators and colonels.”

It is well he is not witness to the disgraceful state of leftist “leadership” today, which disparages our nation and the American Liberty he and so many others have fought to defend.

Read the rest here.

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