Tag: climategate

California’s green policies destroy blue-collar jobs

Gavin Newsom complains of “faux outrage” over his comments to a largely black audience in Atlanta about his SAT scores, in which he implied a shared lack of ability.

No state makes more of its “enlightened” stance on racial justice than California. But few states do worse.

Governor Newsom and his Sacramento claque have embraced reparations for the descendants of slaves. They are also working overtime to preserve affirmative action policies, despite the electorate’s widespread rejection.

But Newsom’s racial rhetoric is, as the leftist site Jacobin suggests, nothing more than “pure rhetorical posturing.”

For example, the reparations promise new free tuition and housing subsidies to anyone who can prove they are descendants of slaves — but there’s little to no money behind this feint.

California’s adoption of such “reparations,” recently also embraced in San Francisco, also seems a bit absurd, given that it was never a slave state.

California, like every state, is burdened by a racist past, but much of this was aimed at what were larger populations — first Native Americans, then old Californios (descendants of Mexican/Spanish settlers) and, most of all, Asians, who were banned from landownership and were subject to brutal pogroms, the worst occurring in Los Angeles.

But the greatest irony is that both Latinos and African Americans do worse in California than in  “unenlightened places”  like Texas and Florida.

The key difference in California has been the imposition of draconian environmental regulations, which have devastated industries like construction, manufacturing, and logistics. 

It’s what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls “the green Jim Crow.”  

Latinos have been hardest hit because many are employed in the “carbon economy,” which relies on energy and has been decimated by regulatory pressures. 

For example, Latinos constitute well over 50% of all California construction workers and the majority working in logistics, according to the American Community Survey.  

But due to regulatory constraints, construction in California has been among the weakest in the nation, making it hard to build what the market wants — namely, affordable apartments and modestly-priced single family homes. 

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Dutch farmers protest across the country in response to proposed environmental laws

Farmers all across the Netherlands have banded together in recent weeks to protest newly proposed emission cuts that would devastate the livestock industry, with farmers shutting down major city centers, distribution centers, airports, and more across the small European country.

On Tuesday evening, police fired upon farmers in their tractors.

Police said that they were responding to a “threatening situation” in which farmers were attempting to drive their tractors into officers and service vehicles at just before 11 pm.

According to Friesland police, officers issued warning shots as well as more targeted shots.

One tractor was shot, with the tractor being stopped shortly after. Three people were arrested, and no injuries were reported.

Due to shots being fired, The Rijksrecherche, the Dutch government’s internal investigator, has been requested to conduct an investigation into the matter.

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Was Climate Change The Greatest Financial Scandal In History?

Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex.

And for what?

Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources.

The war on safe and abundant fossil fuels has cost countless lives in poor countries and made those countries poorer by blocking affordable energy.

Since the global warming crusade started some 30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree—as even the alarmists will admit.

In other words, $16 trillion has been spent—a lot of people got very, very rich off the government largesse—but there is not a penny of measurable payoff.

But it’s much worse than that.

In economics there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?

What if the $16 trillion had been spent on clean water for poor countries?

Preventing avoidable deaths from diseases like malaria?

Building schools in African villages to end illiteracy?

Bringing reliable and affordable electric power to the more than 1 billion people who still lack access? Curing cancer?

Many millions of lives could have been saved.

We could have lifted millions more out of poverty.

The benefits of speeding up the race for the cure for cancer could have added tens of millions of additional years of life at an economic value in the tens of trillions of dollars.

Instead, we effectively poured $16 trillion down the drain.

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Global Warming Claim: CO2 CAN’T Hold Heat — and Real Scientists Have Known This for Ages

President Donald Trump recently reversed the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” which had identified CO2 as a public-health threat. Global-warming alarmists consider this a step backwards. But, says a man with actual hands-on experience working with so-called greenhouse gases, it’s a step toward sanity.

In fact, writes James T. Moodey on Sunday, “Real scientists have known the truth about global warming for decades.”

What’s more, “There’s an easy test to disprove global warming,” he states at American Thinker. “I did it myself.”

Moodey then elaborates, providing some background on climate-change alarmism’s origins:

The groupthink started in 1994 as a political movement to ban fossil fuels at our country’s first climate change bureaucracy, Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). A local professor wrote a rule for them that became known as “cap and trade.” It required our factories to reduce combustion of natural gas by an average 75 percent over five years. I owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test-and-repair facility. The air quality district chose my company to test the factories’ gas-physics instruments for accuracy once per year. We witnessed the closing of over 1,200 factories because of that rule.

We were skeptical of the rule’s assumptions, so we tested carbon dioxide. It cools twenty degrees in less than four minutes. It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day (global warming). It does not cause any warming.

Of course, this may or may not be definitive. After all, a given researcher could always be missing something. But the scientific establishment wasn’t interested in finding out.

That is, Moodey brought his findings to a 2014 Heartland Institute conference. He was rebuffed — even by those on “his side.” As he relates:

I offered to build the test bench for a respected professor, who said to me, “We believe that carbon dioxide causes warming; we just don’t know exactly how or how much.” I walked away thinking, “That is the most unscientific statement I have ever heard.”

Moodey says he then realized that tackling all of academia was fruitless. He was astounded at the “groupthink.”

What he encountered, too, was something late author Michael Crichton warned of: “consensus” (pseudo)science. As Crichton put it in a 2003 Caltech speech:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he … has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

Crichton later added that talk of consensus is a red flag. It “is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough,” he explained. “Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”

Not anyone, that is, except global-warming alarmists.

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Rich Elites Ignored Climate Change by Flying Hundreds of Private Jets to the Super Bowl

Wealthy elites, many of whom likely believe that climate change is a big problem, flew hundreds of private jets to attend the Super Bowl this weekend.

These are the same people who support things like banning plastic straws. Funny how all of that goes right out the window when it comes to their comfort and convenience.

They will virtue-signal in public then just do whatever they want to do.

Townhall reported:

Elites Did Their Part to Fight Global Warming by Flying Dozens of Private Jets to the Super Bowl

The Democrats keep telling us we have to address climate change immediately, or half the country will end up underwater. Bernie Sanders, who supports the Green New Deal and calls climate change an “existential threat” to humanity, spent more than half a million dollars on private jets during his “Fight Oligarchy” tour.

Yesterday, following the Super Bowl in San Francisco, hundreds of private jets were seen leaving the area. We’re willing to be that 90 percent or more of them were owned by people who agree with Bernie Sanders about climate change.

As always, it’s (D)ifferent when they do it. The Obamas bought a waterfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard a couple of years ago, and Kamala Harris just dropped $8 million on a Malibu property with “sweeping ocean views.”

What kind of carbon footprint did all of this produce?

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DOJ probing incident where climate group stormed Jewish synagogue event with Democrat congressman

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into an incident this week in which climate protesters stormed a Jewish synagogue where a Democrat congressman was speaking, signaling an aggressive effort to protect houses of worship from vile intrusions from leftist activists.

Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the probe in a statement Saturday to Just the News.

“We are investigating this case and will continue to actively investigate any house of worship that is disrupted,” Bondi said.

The decision to probe the intrusion by the group Climate Defiance at a Long Island synagogue in Roslyn, N.Y., comes days after DOJ charged three activists — including former CNN anchor Don Lemon — for invading a Christian church service in Minnesota.

Both incidents involved increasingly aggressive leftist activists who are protesting the Trump administration’s arrests of illegal aliens nationwide.

The most recent episode targeted Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi over his initial vote to back a GOP-led spending bill that directed more federal funding to ICE’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Video footage showed Suozzi was speaking Wednesday night when activists from Climate Defiance stormed the synagogue with diapers and kneepads while cursing and making vile comments.

Climate Defiance called Suozzi a “hideous, grotesque, fascist-loving coward” with “blood on his hands” in a social post.

The New York probe will be slightly different than the Minnesota case, where a worship service was underway.  Wednesday’s event involved a speech by a politician hosted by a house of worship.

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The Only Thing That Melted Was Al Gore’s Credibility

…And Maybe His Beach House Value, But Who’s Counting?

You know how every summer a meteorologist screams “Category 5 apocalypse!” and the biggest storm we end up with is a light drizzle that barely ruins a barbecue?

After the tenth or so false alarm, people stop nailing plywood over their windows, keep hamburgers on the grill, and tune out the sirens.

It’s not denial; it’s pattern recognition. Cry wolf too many times, and eventually the villagers go back to binging Stranger Things.

Twenty years ago, Al Gore famously dropped An Inconvenient Truth like it was the final word from on high. The former vice president and Nobel laureate, and the man who invented the internet (or at least the weather forecasts), promised us the complete end-times package: vanishing polar ice caps, cities submerged underwater faster than you can say “evacuate Florida,” and snow becoming a fairy tale for kids.

Dissent? That was simply “denial,” or the moral equivalent of kicking puppies.

Settled science, folks: pay up or shut up.

Fast-forward two decades and ask yourself, how’d that work out?

The Predictions That Missed Harder Than a Drunk Darts Player

Gore shared dramatic graphs. 

Polar ice? Gone, any day now. 

Sea levels? Twenty feet in the “near future,” which, in political time, means “before the checks clear.” 

Arctic summers ice-free by, oh, pick a year, any year; 2013, 2014, five to seven years from whenever he was speaking. 

Snows of Kilimanjaro? Vanished within a decade. 

Coastal cities? Should be holding snorkel conventions by now.

Reality, being the stubborn jerk that it is, refused to cooperate with Tipper’s husband. 

Arctic ice dips and bobs like it’s on a budget seesaw—it never quite disappears.

Sea levels creep up a modest few millimeters each year, and at this rate, your great-great-grandkids might need taller beach chairs.

Snow still falls on Kilimanjaro, while cities keep building condos on the water like it’s prime real estate.

No mass evacuations, no sirens, just… life.

Deadlines came and went quieter than a mime convention. There wasn’t a press conference with Gore saying, “Oops! My bad; turns out the models were a little more enthusiastic than I thought.” Just new deadlines, fresh urgency, yet using the same PowerPoint.

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Kamala Harris Buys $8.2 Million Seaside Mansion After Warning ‘Sea Levels Are Rising’ Due to ‘Climate Crisis’

Kamala Harris warned in 2023 that to “live in a coastal community is to live on the front lines of the climate crisis.” The failed presidential candidate is reporting for duty: She and her husband, Doug Emhoff, purchased an $8 million oceanside mansion in Malibu.

The purchase, our Thomas Catenacci writes, “calls into question Harris’s earnestness when discussing the threats posed by what she calls the ‘climate crisis.’” During her short-lived presidential campaign, Harris warned that “sea levels are rising” because humans are “poisoning the planet.” In the Senate, she cosponsored the Living Shorelines Act, which called to earmark $50 million annually for combating rising sea levels because they threaten “thousands of coastal communities and economies.” And the Biden-Harris administration released a climate model that says the beach that’s a short walk from Harris’s new pad will be significantly damaged by sea level rise.

Harris doesn’t appear to be bothered by those risks. Her new home is “perched in a prime coastal location” with “breathtaking ocean views,” according to a real estate listing we reviewed. It also features some of the luxuries—like a gas-powered stove and fireplace—that the Biden-Harris administration targeted with burdensome regulations.

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Climate extremists claim responsibility for blackout affecting 50,000 households

A group of self-described climate activists has claimed responsibility for a massive power outage that hit five districts in southwestern Berlin, saying the action targeted the fossil fuel industry and “the rich.”

Up to 50,000 households and 2,200 commercial entities were affected by the blackout in the early hours of Saturday, a spokesman for the local electricity provider, Stromnetz Berlin, told the Berliner Zeitung. “Full restoration of power supply” is expected no sooner than January 8, according to the company. The residents of the affected areas would have to remain without power in “freezing temperatures” ranging from -7C to -1C, the paper reported.

Police are treating the incident as a targeted arson attack, according to local media. The blackout was caused by a blaze that hit a power bridge over the Teltow Canal, which goes through the southern part of the city. Several nursing homes and elderly care centers had to be evacuated because of the incident, according to a local fire department. No casualties have been reported in connection to the incident.

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Appeals Court Blocks Hawaii’s Climate Change Tourist Tax on Cruise Ships

A federal appeals court on New Year’s Eve blocked Hawaii from enforcing a new tax on cruise ship passengers, one day before it was set to go into effect.

Two judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit imposed an injunction on the law, reversing a lower court ruling.

The injunction against Hawaii’s tax is in place pending resolution of appeals, Circuit Judges Andrew Hurwitz and Daniel Bress stated in an order.

Cruise Lines International Association, which challenged the tax, did not respond to a request for comment.

“We remain confident that Act 96 is lawful and will be vindicated when the expedited appeal is heard on the merits,” a spokesperson for Hawaii’s attorney general told The Epoch Times via email.

Hawaii had taxed short-term accommodations such as hotels. With Act 96, scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, the state increased the tax to 14 percent and extended it to cruise ships.

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