Tag: climategate

Iowa Landowners Fight Seizure of Private Property for a Pipeline

A privately owned company is proposing a pipeline across five states. While some of the state governments appear to be on board, the project is facing backlash from a large and formidable population: property owners.

The pipeline, known as Summit Carbon Solutions, would span 2,500 miles and transport carbon dioxide (CO2) captured at 57 ethanol plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas to a permanent underground storage site in North Dakota. Construction of the $9 billion pipeline is expected to begin this year, with operations kicking off in 2026.

In June 2024, the project received regulatory approval from the Iowa Utilities Commission, despite landowner protests.

Julie Glade and her husband, Paul, are Iowans who oppose the project because of its use of eminent domain. Their property aligns with the proposed route, and in 2022 the couple was visited by a land agent. “The guy who came to our door wanted us to sit down and sign it without reading it,” Glade tells Reason. “They swooped in and tried to contact as many people as possible right away before the people knew what the consequences were. It’s very unethical.”

Several other landowners in the state share the Glades’ worries. During a hearing conducted by the Iowa Utility Commission, landowner Joan Gaul testified against the pipeline, which she said would cross a large portion of her farmland.

Gaul said Summit Carbon Solutions mailed two easements, which would give the pipeline a legal right to her land, to her without notice.

“This letter came telling us about taking our land using eminent domain. It was a difficult pill to swallow,” she said. Gaul said she didn’t accept the easements and has indicated that she will continue to fight the project.

The Glades visit the Iowa Capitol nearly every week to voice their opposition to the pipeline. They are joined by what the couple calls a diverse coalition united by their concern for the basic constitutional right to land ownership.

“We have MAGA Republicans and we have lefties. We put our differences aside and we work together,” she says.

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‘The Agenda: their Vision, Your Future’: The digital prison that awaits us all

“The prophecies made in 1931 [in ‘Brave New World’] are coming true much sooner than I thought they would … The nightmare of total organisation … has emerged … and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.”—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958

‘The Agenda: Their Vision, Your Future’ is a feature-length independent documentary produced by Mark Sharman; former UK broadcasting executive at ITV and Sky (formerly BSkyB).

In fiction and fact, there have always been people and organisations with ambitions to control the world. And now the oligarchs who pull the strings of finance and power finally have the tools to achieve their global objectives; omnipresent surveillance, artificial intelligence, digital currency and ultimately digital identities. The potential for social control of our lives and minds is alarmingly real.

The plan has been decades in the making and has seen infiltration of Governments, local councils, big business, civil society, the media and, crucially, education. A ceaseless push for a new reality, echoing Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, or George Orwell’s ‘1984’.

‘The Agenda: Their Vision, Your Future’ examines the digital prison which awaits us if we do not push back right now. How your food, energy, money, travel and even your access to the internet could be limited and controlled; how financial power is strangling democracy and how global institutions like the World Health Organisation are commandeered to champion ideological and fiscal objectives.

The centrepiece is man-made climate change and with it, the race to Net Zero. Both are encapsulated in the United Nations and its Agenda 2030. A force for good? Or “a blank cheque for totalitarian global control”?

The Agenda presents expert views from the UK, the USA and Europe.

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To Outrun the Complacent Class

“The emails showed the world’s leading climatologists busily working to organize a research cartel. Peer review was a legitimate source of authority when the process supported their positions. It was compromised, if not malicious, when it offered critics of the orthodoxy a platform. The wish to crush dissenting views, in their minds, had become indistinguishable from the pursuit of truth.”  

– Martin Gurri

Over the last two decades, exafloods of Internet content have educated and entertained beyond imagination. Exponentially-growing communications bandwidth and data transparency empowered regular people, elevated previously unknown geniuses, and helped expose deep dysfunction among many existing “experts.” A tsunami of social media also generated psychedelic confusion, not least among the experts themselves, leading to, in Martin Gurri’s words, a “crisis of authority.”

Now, artificial intelligence is about to amplify this infowarp a million-fold, for good and ill, producing both unprecedented knowledge and wealth and new epistemic challenges. 

If you thought the battles over social media “misinformation” were intense, just wait for the A.I. era. 

Lots of failed experts are engaged in a tactical retreat, regrouping for the coming battles. They passively admit “mistakes were made” but dodge specific accountability and refuse to acknowledge those who got the big questions right. 

At the same time, they are busy establishing new gatekeepers, taboos, and approved voices. The very people who got so many giant questions so very wrong over the last two decades are attempting to build a new information fortress for the next 20 years.

Journalist Douglas Murray, who once backed free speech but also celebrated America’s forever-war disasters, is threatening misbehavers with excommunication. After a dismal recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the prolific podcast guest warned against listening to the wrong podcasts. 

What the standards are in the new media — especially on podcasts — is still being worked out.

But there must be some.

Otherwise the new media will lead people into errors and evils far greater than the old media could ever dream of.

What a turn of events. In recent years, on varied topics from Covid to Ukraine, the highly imperfect and diverse new media demolished the lockstep old media. Years from now, we might conclude the new media helped save Western civilization. Murray himself owes much of his impressive influence to new media. But now, suddenly, if Joe Rogan and alternative outlets don’t bow to Murray and his friends, they might be more “evil” than the people who lied about Joe Biden’s health, the origin of the virus, Iraqi WMD, Russia collusion, climate apocalypse, and so much more.

But doesn’t Murray have a point? Don’t standards matter? 

Of course, standards matter. Credibility matters. Expertise, editorial judgment, and curation are all important – perhaps more so in an era of information overload. No single person can navigate the infowarp alone. We need trusted sources and guides. 

When Murray balks at defining any standards, however, his tsk-tsk-ing is exposed as an arbitrary threat. If you don’t toe the party line, he and his friends will smear you out of polite society. 

The question is not whether we value standards and expertise. Obviously we do. The question is: at what layers of the stack are these judgments made? 

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Global Greening From Higher CO2 Hits “Striking” New Heights – but the Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You About It

Significant new evidence has emerged of widespread and significant increases in plant vegetation across the Earth due to the recent rise of the trace gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Using what they describe as True Significant Trends – a workflow programme integrating sophisticated spatial and time-period data – a geographer and an agrobiologist in Spain found “robust quantitative evidence” of widespread global greening, describing it as “striking” – “with a significant portion of Earth’s terrestrial land surface showing measurable increases in vegetation cover over the last four decades”.

This is the CO2 story that dare not print its tale in the mainstream media. Recent dramatic world vegetation boosts are easily tracked by satellite, and estimates of growth range around 14-20% over just 40 years. Recent scientific work has found the rate of greening has actually been increasing since the turn of the century. Ask Grok for recent coverage of this important trend in the BBC and Guardian, and the answer comes back with none since 2016. Global greening heads a long list of taboo subjects for captured journalists promoting the political Net Zero fantasy. Also on the not-to-do list is the pause of the Arctic sea ice extent since 2007, the continued strength of the Gulf Stream, record growth for three years of coral on the Great Barrier Reef and North American wildfires in the last 100 years running at barely a quarter of those recorded back to 1600.

Global greening helps reduce world famine and reclaim desert areas but it is not of the slightest interest in the mainstream since it disrupts the fake claims of a climate in crisis due to humans burning hydrocarbons. It is easier to stick with the witch doctor attribution pronouncements of extreme weather and all the dodgy temperature data pumped out at unnaturally heat-ravaged measuring sites. To consider all the data that show extreme events are not getting worse, with or without human involvement, risks the punters concluding that a little extra warmth and CO2 in the atmosphere is probably a good thing. Perish the thought that the climate is currently in a rather pleasant and benign phase of Earth’s existence. If that is the uplifting take, cue, of course, the end of Net Zero and that would never do. Net Zero relies on fake science and much of the real stuff is fatal to the collectivist ambitions of its hard-Left promoters.

The Spanish researchers do not quantify the amount of new vegetation but conclude that 38% of the world’s land surface shows significant vegetation change. It was found that 76% of the change total showed more greening and, interestingly, those areas with more plant life showed higher rates of additional growth. The results help confirm global greening, with the researchers hoping their work incorporating addition relevant data will provide a clearer picture of what is going on. (Just don’t tell the mainstream press!)

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Energy group says Biden had no knowledge of climate change EOs, doubt validity of autopen use

Apro-energy group scrutinized eight of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders which pertained to climate and energy issues, but their research found no evidence that Biden ever spoke publicly about the contents of the climate change-oriented EOs. The group also asserts that the signatures on the EOs match Biden’s autopen signature instead of his genuine signature, thus calling into question whether the president ever knew about the executive orders. 

Power the Future, the organization who examined the orders, is now urging investigations from multiple bodies to determine if Biden knew of the executive orders and, if not, who did, and what course of action should be taken next. 

No evidence Biden knew about the EO’s signed with his name

Daniel Turner, the founder and executive director of Power the Future, spoke to the Furthermore with Amanda Head podcast and said, “The curious thing about these executive orders is that we found no evidence at all that the President spoke of them on the record. He wasn’t asked a question by the media. He wasn’t stopped on Air Force One. He didn’t give a speech about it.”

“There’s no evidence that the president was cognizant that this was done, that he directed it, that he was part of the decision. There was never any follow-up,” Turner continued. “The only evidence we have that the President signed it is the autopen signature and then some little statement on social media.”

Turner said that his organization highlighted these specific orders because of their scope, how much damage they did to the energy industry and, by extension, to the overall economy and national security.

Power the Future sent their findings to multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, along with the House and Senate Oversight Committees. 

Among the most critical of Biden’s executive actions on climate and energy include an Inauguration Day executive order in 2021 committing the federal government to net-zero emissions by 2050, a 2023 order banning arctic drilling, and an order requiring “clean energy” artificial intelligence centers, and a last-minute offshore drilling ban shortly before leaving office in 2025. 

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Hawaii Becomes First State To Charge Tourists For Carbon Footprint

Hawaii became the first U.S. state to establish a climate impact fee on tourism this week, placing an additional tax on visitors to fund “climate change resiliency projects”.  As the country’s inaugural “Green Fee,” Act 96 will raise the state’s current transient accommodations tax (TAT) by 0.75% for a total of 11% placed upon the nightly lodging rate, effective Jan. 1, 2026, according to a press release by Governor Josh Green’s office.

“Today Hawaiʻi ushers in the first Green Fee in the nation. Once again, Hawaiʻi is at the forefront of protecting our natural resources, recognizing their fundamental role in sustaining the ecological, cultural and economic health of Hawaiʻi. As an island chain, Hawaiʻi cannot wait for the next disaster to hit before taking action. We must build resiliency now, and the Green Fee will provide the necessary financing to ensure resources are available for our future,” said Governor Green.

Green is ostensibly referring to the disastrous Maui fires in 2023 which did $5.5 billion in property damage and became an international embarrassment for the Hawaiian state government.  Of course, as we reported at the time, the fires had nothing to do with “climate change” and everything to do with the state’s gross mismanagement of water resources and fire response.

The new Green Fee will apply to travelers staying in hotels, short-term vacation rentals and for the first time ever, cruise ships. For a nightly hotel rate of $300, the tax would add an extra $2.25 each day.  This might not seem like much, but Hawaiian officials expect the tax to generate up to $100 million per year, and like all progressive governments, they are licking their chops over the possibilities.

In essence, carbon footprint schemes are a tax on an invisible byproduct with an imaginary climate impact.  These are taxes to solve a problem which does not exist.  So, the sky is truly the limit on how far carbon taxes can be taken to bleed the American public and fuel further government expansion.  It begins with a tax on hotel rooms, but there’s nothing stopping the state from adding the same fees to everything from boat rentals to tiki torches. 

Furthermore, if Hawaiian residents think they will be spared from such taxes, they are in for a rude awakening.  The new Green Fee also applies to people living in Hawaii who stay at hotels and resorts, and there’s little doubt that more taxes are incoming as the Green Fee sets the precedent.  Some legislators have pushed for carbon tax “kickback” to residents of the state, but this would represent a minimal offset if carbon taxes spread to all areas of the economy.

Keep in mind, Hawaii already has one of the highest tax burdens for citizens in the entire US.

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Climate extremists make our kids despair — and groom them to join the left’s crusades

Extreme privilege and fame have never been a recipe for emotional stability, but today’s Hollywood offspring seem especially unequipped to face reality.

Case in point: Ramona Sarsgaard, the 18-year-old daughter of actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, who was arrested this month for criminal trespass during a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University’s Butler Library.

This wasn’t her first foray into activism. Sarsgaard has been a committed climate crusader since childhood.

At just 13, she gave a speech at Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience award ceremony in honor of Greta Thunberg.

Like Thunberg, Ramona has built her identity around the belief that climate catastrophe is not only inevitable but imminent.

Sarsgaard marched in the Youth Climate Strike in New York and, according to her mother, is among the many children who “aren’t able to push out of their minds the dire situation that we’re in.”

She’s not alone: An entire generation has been raised to believe they are living through the end of the world — and their mental health reflects it.

Just this week Violet Affleck, 19, daughter of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, published an essay in Yale University’s “Global Health Review” describing a heated conflict with her mother earlier this year.

“I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room,” she wrote — in fights triggered by Garner’s shock at the devastation.

“As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of Generation Z,” Violet explained, “my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when.”

She went on to call climate change an “existential and accelerating” crisis.

It’s clear she wasn’t just debating a hot topic with her mother — she was evangelizing a worldview that sees environmental collapse as a given.

If that mindset sounds extreme, that’s because it’s being carefully cultivated.

Affleck’s worldview was deliberately drilled into her by climate activists, who have groomed an entire generation to join their crusade. 

At institutions like Yale, climate anxiety is treated as a developmental inevitability.

An advice column in a Yale newsletter a few years ago instructed parents and caregivers to lead even the youngest children through therapeutic climate exercises, like imagining their favorite animal being impacted by climate change and speaking from its perspective.

Just imagine launching that conversation with your 4-year-old: “Think of Peter Rabbit. Now imagine Peter has run out of food and dies because he’s too thirsty, has no grass to eat, and no shade to take refuge in as temperatures soar.”

You couldn’t come up with a more traumatic lesson for a young child to engage in if you tried —yet the “experts” at Yale recommend it as a therapeutic template to explain to children that the world is ending.

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The Net Zero Agenda’s Continued Collapse Into Chaos

Last week, Ofgem announced that the Energy Price Cap would be lowered. From July, average bill payers will see “a decrease of 7% compared to the cap set between April 1st to June 30th, 2025”. The likes of Ed Miliband were quick to capture the good news by reaffirming the Government’s commitment to the 2050 Net Zero and 2030 Clean Power agendas. But a closer look at the detail of the price cut and other news shows just how fragile those agendas really are.

The news that there would be a price cut was not unexpected. Energy price caps are announced quarterly. As reported here, the Spring (April-June) price cap rise was announced in February – the third since the Labour Government was elected in July last year on the promise of “lower bills”. “Energy bills are set to rise again due to a spike in global gas markets,” claimed Ed Miliband ahead of Ofgem’s February rise. But there is no such thing as “global gas markets”. And that “spike” had already passed.

A post-pandemic low price of gas on UK markets had occurred in February 2024 at around 56p per therm (29.3 kWh). But over the next year, this price increased to 142p, peaking on February 11th. On February 25th, Ofgem announced a 6.4% price cap increase for the second quarter of this year. But by the time of Ofgem’s announcement, a mere fortnight later, the price had fallen to 106p – a fall of 25%. Into the second quarter, the price fell further, reaching a low of 69p – or less than half of February’s spike price – on April 7th. The price then stabilised at around 83p (around 42% of the peak price).

“It’s great news the energy price cap is going down, but we have more to do”, tweeted Ed Milband in response to last week’s announcement from Ofgem – as if he and his policies had caused the price drop. “Our clean power mission is the route to long-term energy security and lower bills,” he added. Odd, isn’t it, that a 6.4% increase in the cap was blamed on (non-existent) “global gas markets”, but that a 7% drop in the cap, following a 42% reduction in UK gas prices, is not blamed on the same outside forces, but is instead given as cause to double down on the green agenda.

The clues are there for those whose capacity for simple maths is not hindered by green ideology… a 42% reduction in UK gas prices yielded only a 7% drop in the energy price cap. But doesn’t Miliband tell us that “global gas prices” are the cause of all our problems? 

And not just Milband. In the Times, the Green Blob’s favourite du jour talking point is reproduced uncritically by the newspaper’s Energy Editor, Emily Gosden. “Unlinking electricity prices from gas ‘would cut energy bills’,” claims the headline. According to this meme, remastered by energy market consultant Adam Bell, formerly Head of Energy Strategy at BEIS and Senior Policy Advisor at DECC, the “link” between gas prices and electricity prices could be “cut”. According to the article, “Britain’s wholesale market operates on a system of ‘marginal pricing’ whereby the most expensive plant needed to keep the lights on determines the price all generators are paid”.

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Green Agenda Has Cost British Households £220 Billion Since 2006: Study

British consumers have paid nearly £220 billion more on their energy prices over the past two decades as a result of Westminster’s radical green agenda schemes, a report from a leading energy consultancy firm has found.

The UK public has been “seduced by narratives that renewables are cheap,” however, according to a study conducted by Watt-Logic’s Kathryn Porter presented by Lord Offord, the Shadow Energy Minister in the House of Lords, has found that the opposite is true, with the green agenda not only siphoning off taxpayer cash subsidies but also driving up energy costs for consumers.

“That renewables are not cheap should be clear, based both on the evidence that after 35 years of subsidies, we are yet to see any benefits through lower bills,” the report found.

According to Porter’s calculations, if the British government had not embarked upon its so-called green energy transition programme, British households would have saved £218 billion since 2006.

The report found that the direct cost of net zero policies in 2023-24 accounted for £17 billion in additional costs on consumer energy bills, and it predicted that this would continue to rise to more than £20 billion in 2029-30.

Porter acknowledged that gas prices were impacted by the Ukraine War and broader Western conflict with Russia, however, she noted that this would not explain why energy prices have steadily risen for the two decades prior to the 2021-23 gas crisis in Europe.

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“Reduce the Need for Personal Vehicles”: Top Massachusetts Democrat Wants to Limit How Many Miles Residents Can Drive or Drive at All, Because ‘Climate Change’

Massachusetts Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Stone Creem (D) introduced a bill this year to create a commission with the goal of reducing the number of miles driven by residents in their cars because of ‘climate change’, with an ultimate goal to “reduce the need for personal vehicles.”

The 82-year-old Creem wants the state government to promulgate regulations that could fine residents for driving too much and force them into riding public transportation, using bikes paths and walking.

Excerpts from Bill S. 2246:

(b) No metropolitan planning organization shall approve a Regional Transportation Plan or Transportation Improvement Program developed pursuant to 23 CFR Part 450, and the department shall not approve a Statewide Transportation Improvement Program, unless the plan or program, including any mitigation measures interlinked to individual projects within the plan or program, provides a reasonable pathway to compliance with the greenhouse gas emissions sublimits for the transportation set pursuant to section 3A of chapter 21N and to the statewide vehicles miles traveled reduction goals established by the secretary pursuant to section 81 of this chapter.

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(f) The department may promulgate rules or regulations for the implementation of this section.

Section 81. (a) To relieve traffic congestion, improve air quality, and promote compliance with the greenhouse gas emissions limits established pursuant to chapter 21N, the secretary shall, in consultation with the secretary of economic development, the secretary of energy and environmental affairs, and the secretary of housing and livable communities, set a statewide vehicle miles traveled reduction goal for the year 2030 and for every fifth year thereafter. The vehicle miles traveled reduction goals shall be incorporated into: (i) the greenhouse gas emissions sublimits for the transportation sector set pursuant to subsection (b) of section 3A of chapter 21N; and (ii) the roadmap plans published pursuant to subsection (b) of section 3 of said chapter 21N.

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The council shall assess and report on strategies and plans necessary to reduce statewide vehicles miles traveled through the establishment of an equitable, interconnected, accessible and reliable network of non-personal vehicle transportation options and through land use policies that reduce the need for personal vehicles. The plan shall facilitate: (i) compliance with the greenhouse gas emissions limits and sublimits set pursuant to chapter 21N of the General Laws, with emphasis on compliance with the emissions limits and sublimits set for 2030; (ii) attainment of the numerical benchmarks for vehicle miles traveled set pursuant to section 81 of chapter 6C; (iii) the development of compact, walkable neighborhoods; and (iv) advancement of access to, and affordability of, non-personal vehicle transportation options.

The assessment shall include, but not be limited to: (i) the present condition of, and future needs for, non-personal vehicle transportation infrastructure and services, including, but not limited to, bicycle paths and lanes; bicycle sharing stations; pedestrian paths; bus, ferry, subway, and train services; transportation demand management programs; and microtransit programs ; (ii) the present status of, and future needs for, land use policies that reduce the need for personal vehicles; (iii) suggestions for optimal locations for new, expanded or improved non-personal vehicle transportation options in urban, suburban and rural areas including, but not limited to, low-income and moderate-income communities; (iv) discussion of programs and policies that may incentivize residents to adopt non-personal vehicle transportation options; (v) discussion of present and projected future costs and methods of financing those costs; (viii) recommendations to assist local governmental and private sector officials in expanding access to non-personal vehicle transportation options and in planning and developing compact, walkable neighborhoods; and (ix) identification and discussion of current policies and recommendations for policies, laws and regulatory actions that may facilitate reductions in vehicle miles traveled.

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