Friday, November 11, 2022

Links - 11th November 2022 (2 - Climate Change)

Japan signals return to nuclear power to stabilise energy supply - "Japan will restart more idled nuclear plants and look at developing next-generation reactors, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Wednesday (Aug 24), setting the stage for a major policy shift on nuclear energy a decade after the Fukushima disaster.   The comments from Kishida - who also said the government would look at extending the lifespan of existing reactors - highlight how the Ukraine crisis and soaring energy costs have forced both a change in public opinion and a policy rethink toward nuclear power."

Why even environmentalists are supporting nuclear power today - "  In California, the state's last remaining power plant — Diablo Canyon, situated on the Pacific Coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles — long scheduled to be scrapped, may now remain open. Governor Gavin Newsom, a longtime opponent of the plant, is seeking to extend its lifespan through at least 2029.  It's a remarkable turnaround in a state where anti-nuclear activists and progressive Democratic lawmakers have fought with great success to rid the state of nuclear power... Germany pulled the plug on nuclear after Fukushima, too. But this summer there's been an intense debate in Germany over whether to restart three plants in response to the country's severe energy crisis prompted by the Russia-Ukraine war. Backers of nuclear power note that it is a source of emissions-free reliable power. And they believe their case has been strengthened due to the threat of climate change and the need to stabilize unreliable electrical grids.  In California the moment of truth came in 2020 when residents had to endure a series of rolling power outages, said Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist and author who supports nuclear.  "The state is constantly on the verge of blackouts"... The turnabout on Diablo Canyon is noteworthy because California is the birthplace of America's anti-nuclear movement. The case against nuclear power stems primarily from fears about nuclear waste and potential accidents as well as its association with nuclear weapons...   In terms of deaths from accidents or pollution, nuclear is far safer than coal or natural gas - the largest sources of electricity in the U.S.  Diablo Canyon got a boost last year when researchers from MIT and Stanford said keeping the plant open until 2035 would cut carbon emissions from California's power sector by more than 10% and save $2.6 billion in electricity costs."

Nuclear Power is Racist, Sexist and Ageist: So Why Do Some Progressives Support It? - "The fuel for nuclear power plants comes from uranium, which must be mined. The majority of those who have mined it in this country — and would again under new bills such as the ‘International Nuclear Energy Act of 2022’ forwarded by not-so-progressive “Democrat”, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) — are Native Americans...   Studies conducted among members of the Navajo Nation have shown increases in a number of diseases and lingering internal contamination from uranium mine waste among newborns and children... At the other end of the nuclear power chain comes the lethal, long-lived and highly radioactive waste as well as the so-called low-level radioactive waste stream of detritus, including from decommissioned nuclear power plants. Again, Indigenous peoples and poor communities of color are routinely the target... Nuclear power is sexist because exposure to the ionizing radiation released at every stage of the nuclear fuel chain harms women more easily than men. Women are more radiosensitive than men — the science is not fully in on this but it is likely connected to greater hormone production.  Instead, the standard guidelines on which allowable radiation exposure levels are based (and “allowable” does not mean “safe”), consider a healthy, White male, in his mid-twenties to thirties and typically weighing around 154 pounds. He is known as “Reference Man”...   Even around nuclear power plants, the very young are at greater risk. Numerous studies in Europe have demonstrated that children age five or younger living close to nuclear power plants show higher rates of leukemia than those living further away... the elderly are more vulnerable to the harmful effects of radiation exposure than adults in the prime of life... Ruling out fossil fuel use is a must. But turning to nuclear power — rather than the faster, cheaper and safer options of renewable energy and efficiency — is not a humane choice."
The usual progressive staples, complete with fact and citation-free accusations. Grievance mongering is more important than saving the planet. Not to mention the usual lies about renewable energy

Nuclear power plants cleared of leukaemia link - "Living close to a nuclear power station does not increase a child's risk of developing leukaemia, according to one of the most detailed studies of the issue to date."

Netherlands to SHUT DOWN 11 200 farms to meet climate goals - "According to calculations done by the Finance ministry, a whopping 11 200 livestock farmers will be forced to shut down by the government to reduce nitrogen emissions in order to meet European environmental rules. Another 17 600 farmers would need to reduce the amount of animals they keep to meet these climate goals.  And this is bad. Because there are about 54 000 farms in the Netherlands, meaning that around 1/5 of all farms will be forced to shut down and almost 1/3 of farms forced to scale down and reduce livestock.  Meaning that thousands and thousands of farmers will be loosing their livelihoods in order to meet government climate goals.  They are literally going to make people loose their livelihoods in order to meet climate goals. That is crazy. Not only that, think about all the food that will be lost as a result of this. We are already facing a food crisis due to sky high fertilizer prices and grain shortages due to the war in Ukraine. We need more food now, not less! The climate change fanatics are trying to bring us back to the middle ages. The state is planning on forcing farmers to sell their farms to the state (buying them out). State sanctioned appropriation of farms and land. Now where have I heard about that kind of thing before…? Oh yes, under Communism. I told you that this is Climate Communism and that The Great Reset is just another word for Global Communism. And it seems like people in the Netherlands are not happy with these government plans, as the political party of the Prime Minister in the Netherlands, VVD, has reached a new all-time low in the polls. If there was an election now, they would lose 13 of their 34 seats in parliament. A whopping 7 out of 10 voters say that they are dissatisfied with the Cabinet of the Prime Minister. Meanwhile the new party called Farmer-Citizen Movement is now polling in second place. Farmers held a meeting with the government on Friday, however some farmers are not satisfied with the results and are talking about more protests, with a farmers group that claims to represent 95% of agriculture pledging the ”toughest demonstrations ever”... we all know how that has gone when the state has seized farms before. Look no further than what happened under Stalin in Ukraine or under Mao in China.  It is not all bad news however. I guess we will be getting brand new factories producing bug snacks. Or we might get more of ”sustainable” supermarkets like the one named Picnic in the Netherlands which got €600 million in investments, the majority coming from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation! This supermarket focusing on things like vegan food and delivering food in electric vehicles. And guess what!  A millionaire investor at Picnic who has also been the director there, is family with a Dutch Minister who has been involved with these new nitrogen laws. You will eat the bugs and you will be happy. You will own nothing and you will be happy."

PeterSweden on Twitter - "In Italy, France and Spain they are now going to LIMIT people's indoor temperatures. We are getting pretty close to climate lockdowns now... Remember when I warned about this?"

Parliamentary question | The role of Russian-funded environmental organisations in shaping EU climate policy | P-001275/2022 | European Parliament - "It has recently come to light that environmental organisations operating within the European Union have, to a large extent, been a cover for Russian lobbying aimed at weakening the EU economically and making Member States dependent on Russian energy resources.  These so-called environmental organisations have focused their activities on three main objectives: fighting against the development of nuclear energy, fighting against energy production from fossil fuels extracted within the EU, including through fracking, and promoting so-called green energy (including solar and wind) at the expense of the previous two.  Today, in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is clear that Russia’s machinations have effectively made a large number of Member States dependent on raw materials from Russia...
1.Which environmental organisations and other NGOs were consulted during the creation of the so-called Green Deal and the Fit for 55 programme?
2.To the best of the Commission's knowledge, which environmental organisations or other NGOs have received or are receiving funding from the Russian Federation or related entities?
3.In light of the above, does the Commission intend to revise the provisions of the so-called Green Deal and Fit for 55 programme?"

Investigate Russia’s covert funding of US anti-fossil fuel groups - "In 2014 – the same year Russia annexed Crimea – then-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned that Russia was covertly working to undermine European and U.S. fossil fuel production.   Three years later, in 2017, Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Randy Weber (R-Texas) sent a lengthy letter to then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin making a similar accusation. Importantly, their letter connected some of the dots highlighting Russia’s covert efforts to fund various environmental organizations that were trying to limit or end U.S. hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for shale gas and oil.  The media and Democrats mostly shrugged their collective shoulders at these allegations. They were far too busy trying to prove the now-discredited Russian-Trump election collusion to be bothered with a more plausible Russian-environmental activist collusion...   In hindsight, it is increasingly apparent that Putin has been preparing for his Ukrainian invasion for years. Dominating the global energy market by covertly working to limit U.S. production would have been a huge coup — in more ways than one... Had Russia dominated global energy production, Putin would be in a better position to thumb his nose at countries critical of his invasion — and deprive his critics of needed oil and gas. Putin can still squeeze his critics, but the U.S. energy industry may be able to temper the impact.  If Democrats and the media are still interested in finding some type of Russian collusion, maybe they should begin by investigating whether Russia actually has been covertly funneling money to environmental NGOs."

Vayod on Twitter -  "France's nuclear power buildout cost less than €85 billion in 2010 money. Germany's solar and wind buildout cost over €520 billion in 2016 money. Guess which one has cleaner electricity. Germany could have built 17 Hinkley Point Cs for the cost of its solar and wind buildout."

Stop Blaming Climate Change For California’s Fires. Many Forests, Including The Redwoods, Need Them. - "Fires have burned 1.3 million acres of California’s forests over the last month. That’s one million acres more than burned last year, and is an unusually high number for this early in the fire season.  California political leaders including Governor Gavin Newsom and Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, blame climate change... But every school child who has visited one of California’s redwood parks knows from reading the signs at the visitor’s center and in front of the trailheads that old-growth redwood forests need fire to survive and thrive. Heat from fire is required for the release and germination of redwood seeds, and to burn up the woody debris on the forest floor. The thick bark on old-growth redwood trees provides evidence of many past fires.   And, indeed, video footage taken by two San Jose Mercury News reporters, who hiked into Big Basin after the fire, shows the vast majority of trees still standing. What was burned up was the visitor’s center and other park infrastructure. Nor is it the case that California’s fires have “grown more apocalyptic every year,” as The New York Times reported. In fact, 2019 saw a remarkably small amount of acreage burn, just 280,000 acres compared to 1.3 million and 1.6 million in 2017 and 2018, respectively.  What about this year’s fires? “I see [the current California fires] as a normal event, just not one that happens every year,” Jon Keeley, a leading forest scientist, told me.    “On July 30, 2008, we had massive fires throughout northern California due to a series of lightning fires in the middle of the summer,” he said. “It’s not an annual event, but it’s not an unusual event.”  California’s fires should indeed serve as a warning to the public, but not that climate change is causing the apocalypse. Rather, it should serve as a warning that mainstream news reporters and California’s politicians cannot be trusted to tell the truth about climate change and fires...   “When I hear climate change discussed it’s suggested that it’s a major reason and it’s not,” Scott Stevens of the University of California, Berkeley, told me.   Redwood forests before Europeans arrived burned every 6 to 25 years. The evidence comes from fire scars on barks and the bases of massive ancient trees, hollowed out by fire...   In 1904, three large fires burned Big Basin for 20 days, scorching the crowns of many trees, just as the 2020 fire did.   Reporters for The New York Times were apparently as pyrophobic 116 years ago as they are today, reporting that year that Big Basin, “seems doomed for destruction.”   But redwood forests regularly burn. A 2003 fire in Humboldt Redwoods State Park burned 13,774. Forest in 2008 burned over 165,000 acres. And a 2016 fire burned 130,000 acres.   Climate activists who in the winter excoriate those, like Senator James Inhofe, for pointing to snow as proof that global warming isn’t happening, turn around and point to summer fires as proof that it is... Environmental scholars scoff at this ahistorical view. “The idea that fire is somehow new,” said geographer Paul Robbins of the University of Wisconsin, “a product solely of climate change, and part of a moral crusade for the soul of the nation, borders on the insane.”   The amount of California that burns year to year is not uniform, Keeley emphasizes. “It was a mistake for the politicians in 2017 and 2018 to say ‘This is the new normal’ because 2019 was totally abnormal compared to 2017 and 2018.”   Is that amount abnormal? Not historically speaking. Scientists calculate that, before Europeans arrived, 4.4 million acres of California burned annually, which is 16 times larger than the amount that burned in 2019...   Why do activist journalists and politicians get California’s fires so wrong?  Part of the reason is their determination to blame climate change for everything.  “If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail,” noted Keeley. “If all you study is climate change than everything looks like it is caused by climate change. Every climate change research center finds climate is a problem. They are trying to find climate as the explanation.”   Climate bias is compounded by partisan bias. For example, journalists ridiculed President Donald Trump for suggesting that California’s fires were due to the state’s failure to remove undergrowth from its forests, even though scientists agree that the build-up of wood fuel through fire suppression is a massive problem.  Part of the problem is that many environmental journalists are so disconnected from the natural environment...   The picture that Wallace-Wells and other activist journalists paint has more to do with religious depictions of a burning underworld than scientific descriptions of burning underbrush. “Looking from the vantage of today,” Wallace-Wells said last year, “we see that world and can think of it basically as a hell.”  Facts seem unlikely to get in the way of his desire to tell a good story. “Fires are among the best and more horrifying propagandists for climate change,” he notes, “terrifying and immediate, no matter how far from a fire zone you live.”"

Stephen Stapczynski on Twitter - "Asia is embracing nuclear power, thanks to the global energy crisis ☢️ ❤️
🇯🇵 Japan is halting anti-nuclear policies
🇰🇷 Korea is reversing a nuclear phaseout
🇨🇳 China is accelerating its huge buildout in reactors
🇮🇳 India is moving to build more plants"
Meanwhile, in the West...

Meme" - "No gas no electric and zero emissions these are the vehicles of the future *Flintstones car*"

The UN's 'woke' climate change propaganda is an insult to science - "The climate change “emergency” is fake news. Many will roll their eyes in exasperation at the conspiratorial bombastry of yet another “denier”. But for years I have been a plastic recycling, polar bear cooing middle-grounder. In fact, Aristotle would probably turn in his grave at the logical fallaciousness of my long-held presumption that the truth must lie somewhere between those two mutually loathing opposites – Scepticism and Armageddon.  But as the doom-mongering acquires the rubber-stamped smell of instutionalised illness, it is impossible to ignore that the “woke” are the new “slept” – too deep in their sugar coma of confected hysteria to realise they are being duped by disinformation... the mainstream debate has become an insult to both the public’s intelligence and basic science... UN Secretary General António Guterres rumbled that, over the horizon, he could see “the point of no return”. Delegates waved the UN’s latest Emissions Gap Report as if it were both a millenarian death oracle and a methodologically indisputable text; in it, the recommendation to cut emissions by at least 7.6 per cent per year for the next decade.  One can’t help but feel that we have heard such curiously precise warnings before. Last year the UN warned that we had just 12 years to save the planet. Some scientists say we have approximately 18 months. Or perhaps it is already too late. The experts don’t seem quite sure... Claims such as these are projections, but they are routinely presented to the public as unquestionable facts. This effectively reduces them to fake news. Even more so, given that the accuracy of the climate modelling upon which these figures and scenarios rely is contested, and the climate does not change in a straight line.      To take one example, the UN’s international climate change body, the IPCC, said in 2007 that temperatures had risen by 0.2C per decade between 1990-2005 and used that figure for its 20-year projection. Inconveniently, warming turned out to have been just 0.05C per decade over the 15 years to 2012.  The IPCC acknowledges the uncertainty of the computations it champions; hence the disclaimer squirreled away on its website stating that it does not guarantee the accuracy of the information it contains. A caveat lost in translation at the resplendently funereal press conferences.  This post-truth scam is having a chilling effect on science. Experts are locked in a race to the bottom to make detailed and disastrous premonitions. And despite the fact that disciplined debate is the motor of scientific discovery, eco-extremists are shutting down discussions that dissent from the Apocalypse narrative" Cognitive dissonance is not just seen with doomsday cults. But then, climate change hysteria ia a doomsday cult too

NOAA Predicts Above-Normal 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season - May 2022
Hurricane Alley Hasn’t Been This Quiet in a Quarter Century - August 2022

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "If you wonder why I’m skeptical when (seemingly) every significant weather event is linked to global warming, this is the global average temperature since it peaked in 2016. It’s been flat, not the gradual climb we saw pre-2016 (and will likely see again with the next El Niño weather pattern)."
That's why they rebranded it to climate change

Ralph Schoellhammer on Twitter - "It will remain one of the most intriguing stories for historians of the future: Two World Wars could not prevent the Germany from her re-emergence as an industrial power, but a few decades of Green ideology accomplished what no war could: the hollowing out of Germany's industry."

Prince Charles and the green counter-revolution - "Environmentalism wants to turn back the clock. No wonder royals and aristocrats love it... Charles is nothing if not out of touch. Walking around his Balmoral estate, he explains the sacrifices he has made to help the environment, including eating less meat. He has also had his 50-year-old Aston Martin refitted so it can be fuelled by surplus white wine and whey, taken from the production of cheese. There are few better metaphors for the absurdity and elitism of environmentalism than a prince funnelling Pinot and Camembert into his vintage auto.  The Prince of Wales is just one of many royals and aristocrats who are paid-up members of the environmentalist movement. In 2019, Princess Marie-Esméralda of Belgium, daughter of Leopold III, was arrested while taking part in Extinction Rebellion protests in London. Last year, Lady Dido Berkeley was cleared of charges after lying in the road during climate-change protests. There’s also Tamsin Omond, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, who is the grandchild of a baronet.   The princes and the toffs are moving in the same political circles as the greens. This should come as no surprise to us. The sweeping changes that climate-change activists demand would be disastrous for the masses, but wouldn’t cause the elites any real problems. The wealthy don’t need to worry about the impact of green policies on their jobs, their incomes or their cost of living.  What’s more, these aristo-greens seem to long for some kind of pre-industrial idyll. For a feudal utopia without mass production and consumption. For a green and pleasant land untarnished by dark, Satanic mills. For the good old days of noblesse oblige, when lords, serfs and nature lived ‘harmoniously’ and all had a jolly nice time.   Greta Thunberg made the feudal bent of environmentalism clear last month, when she attacked the Industrial Revolution. ‘The UK has an enormous historical responsibility’ for carbon emissions, she said, because ‘the climate crisis… more or less started in the UK, since that’s where the Industrial Revolution started’.  The Industrial Revolution was not some kind of catastrophe for which Brits should be ashamed. It was a transformation of society that gave birth to a better world. It produced wealth on a scale previously unimaginable. It was the death knell for a stifling feudal order, in which vast swathes of the population had little to live for. And it was the bell chime for a new age of growing prosperity, better health, better education and greater democracy."

Climate Catastrophiser Prince Charles Calls for a “War” on Apocalyptic Climate Change

Meme - "New McKinsey report shows current net-zero policies far too expensive: EU: €8,400 per family, per year
* Cost will keep increasing in real terms every year to 2050
* Annual cost of €940 billion is more than the entire EU spends on education (€654bn)
* More than collectively spent on environment (€110bn), recreation, culture and religion (€162bn), housing (€81bn), defense (164bn), police, courts and prisons (€234bn)
* About what EU spends on health (€983bn)"

Europe to America: Your love of air-conditioning is stupid - The Washington Post - 2015
Air conditioning in Europe: heatwave forces many to reconsider their need for air conditioning - The Washington Post - 2019

Heating and Cooling: Does It Take More Energy to Heat or Cool? - "on average, heating bills will empty your wallet faster than air-conditioning costs. Based on the need to overcome colder temperatures in populated areas, and the physical differences of warming air vs. moving it, heating systems simply demand more energy!"
This suggests that climate change is good for the environment

Norway’s Green Delusions – Foreign Policy - "Norway is almost entirely run on hydropower, which meets about 95 percent of the country’s energy needs. New buildings larger than 500 square meters (about 5,000 square feet) are required to get 60 percent of their energy from a renewable source. Cities have vast green spaces, bike lanes, and little traffic. Oslo’s city center is slated to be car-free by 2019. And if one must own a car, it should be an electric vehicle. Norwegians who own them get breaks on parking fees, tolls, and more. All this means that, by some measures, Norway is among the world’s greenest countries. (Environmental Performance Index rankings place it at No. 14.) By others, however, it is not. Norway dredges up more oil per capita than most other countries in the world. Only Equatorial Guinea, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates beat it...   Most of the oil and gas produced by Norway is not used at home but is exported. In fact, the country is the one of the world’s top fossil fuel exporters. Beyond that, Norway is also a noteworthy global investor in fossil fuels elsewhere in the world. Its Government Pension Fund Global, commonly referred to as the “Norwegian oil fund” because it was developed to reinvest profits from Norway’s state-owned oil giants, is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. It is involved in plays ranging from property to renewable energy, but a hefty 6.2 percent of the fund is invested in the international oil and gas sector. Through it all, however, Norway can still claim to be green. After all, according to Peter Erickson, a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, institutions like the Paris climate agreement typically judge countries based on how much they are able to reduce emissions within their own borders. And only about 5 percent of emissions from oil and gas come from production. The rest come from consumption, which happens outside Norway. When taking into account Norway’s dependence on exporting fossil fuels, the Environmental Performance Index ranks the country fairly low, 128th, for carbon dioxide emissions intensity... Although the Norwegian public values many green policies, there is less pressure to end drilling. Trine Villumsen Berling, a political scientist at University of Copenhagen, argues that a positive portrayal of Norwegian oil and gas in the country’s culture and politics has been essential as a way to square economic realities with the country’s appreciation for nature. It is not enough to produce oil on the basis of its profitability. Norway’s gas must be the “cleanest in the world,” the “key to welfare,” and so on. When the Norwegian Green Party or Greenpeace suggests phasing oil out on environmental grounds, they are easily countered by the government, because so many positive notions about Norwegian oil are already embedded in the public conscience. In some ways, this story speaks to a global tension between environmentalism and development, something that is typically thought to be an issue more for developing countries...   After all, Norway, too, needs to fund its welfare state. And it would be nearly impossible to do so once the oil and gas reserves are empty or if the industry is stymied. Still, portraying the country’s petroleum industry as green does Norwegians a disservice. At some point, Oslo must face the fact that it is part of the world’s environmental problem, not the solution"
Time to condemn the world to penury to combat climate change

The Population Bomb Doomsday Scam - The American Spectator - "the dreaded “population bomb” of the 1960s and ’70s has turned into a global “population bust.” Let us put it even more concisely: the greatest environmental/demographic scare of the second half of the 20th century — overpopulation — is now officially conceded to have been a monumental fraud.  To appreciate what an embarrassing reversal this is for the green movement, consider that 40 to 50 years ago nearly all the scientists, policymakers, U.S. government agencies, and experts at the United Nations told us that rampaging population growth would lead to a Malthusian doomsday with the world in our lifetimes running out of food, energy, and nearly everything else. If ever there were an ironclad “scientific consensus,” this was it.   In their 1967 book Famine 1975!, U.S. government agronomist William Paddock and Foreign Service officer Paul Paddock predicted that population growth would soon lead to such mass starvation in so many nations that triage would be required and that nations like India and Egypt should be written off as “can’t-be-saved.”  Stanford scientist Paul Ehrlich became the most famous academic in the world with his mega-bestseller The Population Bomb...   It wasn’t just some academic kooks who were peddling these apocalyptic predictions. In 1975, a statement signed by such luminaries as soon-to-be National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, business titans J. Paul Getty and Henry Luce III, United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock, and others appeared on a full page of the Wall Street Journal with a similar forecast: “The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000,” because “food production cannot keep pace with the galloping growth of population.”  The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific predicted “500 million starvation deaths in Asia between 1980 and 2025.”... The University of Oxford’s Our World in Data reports that worldwide famine deaths have sharply decreased from an annual average of over 16.6 million in the 1960s to 255,000 since 2010 — and that total famine deaths worldwide (not just in Asia) were less than 60 million from 1980 through 2016... from 1970 through 2015, world extreme poverty fell from almost 48 percent to less than 10 percent. How could the “scientific consensus” have been so wrong? A simple answer is the doomsayers erroneously extrapolated short-term trends in fertility far into the future without understanding that human beings are not like Norwegian field mice (which some Malthusians compared us to). We adapt our behavior and we devise solutions, such as the “green revolution” in agriculture and the shale oil and gas revolution that overnight ended the preposterous fears of ever running out of food or energy.  The doomsayers also ignored decades of data showing population growth can be beneficial rather than harmful to humanity. Instead of impoverishing people and depleting resources, additional people on the planet, when paired with freedom and free markets, drives economic growth, productivity, and a cleaner, safer environment. The green movement that propagated this scientific fraud would like to sweep the whole episode under the rug — and keep the focus on their latest end-of-the-world scenario. When confronted with the new facts, instead of conceding that their dire predictions were dead wrong, they self-servingly congratulate themselves for saving us from a demographic nightmare.   In reality, the lesson of the population bomb lie is that false doomsday alarms come at a high cost, and in this case unleashed horrific outcomes. How many millions of women and couples in the U.S. and worldwide tragically followed the advice of the Malthusians that they had an ethical or moral obligation to have fewer children or even to go childless?  Much worse were the activities of repressive foreign governments in Africa, China, Egypt, India, and Central America, which bought into the primal screams of Western academics and imposed gruesome population control programs — including strapping women to metal tables and performing forced abortions and sterilizations to reduce births. China’s ghastly one-child policy led to millions of sex selection abortions and infanticides. Tens of millions of girls in China went missing.  Yet, in the name of “saving the planet,” the U.S. government and the UN applauded these inhumane tactics — and even helped finance them. So much for women having control of their own bodies.   A second lesson here is the dangers of shutting off open and fact-based debate on environmental issues. The hero in exposing the Malthusian hoax was the late doomslayer economist Julian Simon... When Simon and others challenged the myth of an overpopulated planet, they were berated in the media, the halls of Congress, and the university faculty lounges as “crazy” and “dangerous” for daring to challenge the “settled science” of overpopulation.   Shouldn’t this give us all pause when we hear this generation’s sages at the UN and the U.S. State Department (and now even the Biden Treasury Department) tell us that climate change is an “existential threat”? Shouldn’t this generation’s Julian Simons who dare question the oracles predicting catastrophic warming of the planet 50 and 100 years from now be heard from rather than being denounced as “science deniers” and erased from Twitter and Facebook?... a study published in 2015 by the British medical journal the Lancet found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat... the lesson of the population bomb that fizzled is that we need far more humility and open debate about predictions of the planet’s future"
"Trust the science"
The world is ending. The world has always been ending. The world will always be ending.
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises

Electric cars sales slow as charging costs weigh on drivers - "Electric car sales are slowing as electricity prices push up the cost of charging and the broader cost-of-living squeeze leaves drivers with less to spend. The UK passed the milestone of one million electrified cars sold to date in September, but battery-powered car sales for the month were below the high reached in March this year... “Affordability is clearly an issue and with just seven models available for under £30,000, this is a sign that Britain’s electric car buyers are struggling to get behind the wheel. “This, together with the withdrawal of the government grant, cost-of-living crisis and hike in energy prices is clearly leading to a slow-down in demand for electric cars.”... The cost of charging a car has also risen in line with energy prices, with customers paying 42pc more since May to charge at a quick public power point. While petrol prices have also risen, electric car owners without their own domestic charge points in a garage or on a front drive have been particularly stung. Recent research by the RAC suggested that the cost of charging a car using a rapid public charging point now rivalled petrol per mile. The expense is seen as a roadblock in mass adoption of electric cars, since many potential buyers who live in flats or in terraced houses will not be able to install a personal charger."
The same people who want internal combustion engine cars banned also want everyone to live in flats, so. Then again they don't want people to own cars too

blog comments powered by Disqus