Tag: climategate

Biden proposes 30% climate change tax on cryptocurrency mining

The White House is trying to persuade Congress to pass a 30% tax on the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining in the next federal budget in order to minimize the nascent industry’s impact on climate change.

“Cryptominers’ high-energy consumption has negative spillovers on the environment, quality of life, and electricity grids where these firms locate across the country,” the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) argues in a blog post that will appear on the White House website on Tuesday, to which Yahoo News gained advance access. The post will lay out the case for the Digital Asset Mining Energy (DAME) excise tax, which the CEA writes is an “example of the Administration’s efforts to fight climate change and reduce energy prices.”

“Currently, cryptomining firms do not have to pay for the full cost they impose on others, in the form of local environmental pollution, higher energy prices, and the impacts of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the climate,” the CEA writes in its post. “The DAME tax encourages firms to start taking better account of the harms they impose on society.”

Burning fossil fuels to create electricity accounts for 25% of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and releases harmful air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.

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A BBC Instruction Manual For Kids To Propagandize Their Parents

The day before yesterday, the BBC carried a piece titled “Earth Day: How to talk to your parents about climate change.”

The article begins addressing their target underaged readers:

You want to go vegan to help the planet, but you’re not paying for the shopping. You think trains are better than planes, but your dad books the summer holiday.

Young people are some of the world’s most powerful climate leaders and want rapid action to tackle the problem.

Big changes are difficult, especially when they involve other people. Where do you begin? For this year’s Earth Day, we spoke to people who have successfully had tricky climate chats at home. Here are their top tips:

The piece is broken into three sections targeting what they imply are evils of our times.

The first section focuses on “How to talk about going meat-free.”

The section begins by claiming that “eating less meat is one of the best ways to reduce our impact on the planet, say scientists.”

The piece introduces us to 17-year-old Ilse who has dyed her hair bright red, and her parents, Antonia and Sally.

The BBC claims that the family ate meat twice or even thrice a day, but when Ilse was 13, she “decided to do more about climate change and read that cutting out meat was a good start.”

Sally and Antonia were understandably skeptical about the plan initially. They were concerned about not getting enough protein and the fact that Ilse was too young to make that decision.

But they still complied with Ilse’s wishes and began with a one-day-a-week trial, they proceeded to scale up, and after a year, went totally meat-free.

Sally says that seeing the emotional impact of the topic on her daughter helped to persuade her it was the right thing for her family.

The BBC reveals that Ilse is part of ‘Teach the Parent’, a U.K.-based campaign that “encourages these conversations between generations.”

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Despite SCOTUS Ruling Limiting Its Authority, EPA Tries To Unilaterally Regulate Carbon Emissions Again

After a bruising defeat at the Supreme Court, the Biden administration is back to crafting regulatory limits on power plant emissions. A forthcoming rule from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would require that carbon-producing coal and gas power plants slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, reports The New York Times.

These emissions limits would be so strict that coal plants likely have to adopt carbon capture technology to meet them while gas plants would have to switch to burning carbon-free hydrogen gas, say administration officials to the Times.

The yet-to-be-made-public rule is currently being finalized by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

Since coming into office, President Joe Biden has been working on a rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. This has been a liberal priority going back to the Obama administration, which tried and failed to get Congress to enact an emissions cap-and-trade scheme in 2009.

Undeterred, in 2015, Obama’s EPA implemented very similar regulations to those that were found in the 2009 legislation, claiming that the Clean Air Act had given it the power to regulate carbon emissions all along.

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18 Spectacularly Wrong Prophecies from the First Earth Day

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article.

Well, it’s now the 46th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 16 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey.

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Just 0.3% of Scientists agree Humanity is causing Climate Change; NOT 97% as falsely spread by the UN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Extinction Rebellion leader drives gas-guzzling diesel car and buys imported food from other side of world

Extinction rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbook has been exposed by a fellow shopper as having a diesel car and importing food from the other side of the world.

The 50-year-old, who helped set up XR in 2018, was spotted out and about at a Waitrose store in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Bradbook pulled up to supermarket driving a polluting 1.5 litre diesel car.

The mother-of-two loaded her trolley with goods from across the world, stretching from Chile to Cyprus and India to Italy.

The items were also swathed in plastic and polythene.

An onlooker told The Sun: “Buying fruit flown halfway round the world in non-recyclable packaging then driving home in a ­diesel motor — what a towering hypocrite.

“But at least she wasn’t held up on her way home by idiots who glued themselves to the road.”

Images taken of the eco-activist showed where her items were originally from and suggested she is less concerned about items travelling thousands of air miles.

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NYC will target food choices in its battle against climate change

The Adams administration has announced a plan to begin tracking the carbon footprint created by household food consumption as well as a new target for New York City agencies to reduce their food-based emissions by 33% by the year 2023.

Mayor Eric Adams announced the plan on Monday along with the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice as part of the city’s ongoing pledge to reduce the impact of climate change. At the same event, the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice published a new chart in the city’s annual greenhouse gas inventory that publicly tracks the carbon footprint created by household food consumption — primarily generated by meat and dairy products.

The new analysis is a spin on the emissions data that comes standard with the annual inventory. It was made through a partnership with American Express, C40 Cities and EcoData lab.

Adams, an ardent evangelist of plant-based diets, announced the new tracker and policy at a Brooklyn culinary center run by Health + Hospitals, the city’s public health care system.

“It is easy to talk about emissions that are coming from vehicles and how it impacts our carbon footprint,“ Adams said. “But we now have to talk about beef.”

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Seize property to build wind and solar farms, says JP Morgan chief

The chief executive of JP Morgan has suggested that governments should seize private land to build wind and solar farms in order to meet net zero targets. 

Jamie Dimon, the longstanding boss of the Wall Street titan who donates to the Democratic Party, said green energy projects must be fast-tracked as the window for averting the most costly impacts of global climate change is closing. 

In his annual shareholder letter, Mr Dimon said: “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way. 

“We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”

Eminent domain is when a government or state agency carries out a compulsory purchase of private property for public use and compensates the asset holder. 

The proposal is unusual, especially coming from the longest-serving chief executive of a Wall Street bank, and could stir controversy as states in the US seek to crackdown on seizure orders. 

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Biden admin moving forward with light bulb bans in coming weeks

The Biden administration is preparing to implement a sweeping nationwide ban on commonly used light bulbs as part of its energy efficiency and climate agenda.

The regulations, which prohibit retailers from selling incandescent light bulbs, were finalized by the Department of Energy (DOE) in April 2022 and are slated to go into effect on Aug. 1, 2023. The DOE will begin full enforcement of the ban on that date, but it has already urged retailers to begin transitioning away from the light bulb type and, in recent months, begun issuing warning notices to companies.

“The lighting industry is already embracing more energy efficient products, and this measure will accelerate progress to deliver the best products to American consumers and build a better and brighter future,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said last year.

According to the DOE announcement, the regulations will save consumers an estimated $3 billion per year on utility bills and cut carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over the next three decades.

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