Tag: climategate

New York to Track Residents’ Food Purchases and Place “Caps on Meat” Served by Public Institutions

New York City will begin tracking the carbon footprint of household food consumption and putting caps on how much red meat can be served in public institutions as part of a sweeping initiative to achieve a 33% reduction in carbon emissions from food by 2030.

Mayor Eric Adams and representatives from the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy and Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice announced the new programs last month at a Brooklyn culinary center run by NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public healthcare system, just before Earth Day.

At the event, the Mayor’s Office -f Climate & Environmental Justice shared a new chart to be included in the city’s annual greenhouse gas inventory that publicly tracks the carbon footprint created by household food consumption, the Gothamist reported.

The city already produced emissions data from energy use, transportation and waste as part of the annual inventory. But the addition of household food consumption data is part of a partnership that London and New York launched with American Express, C40 Cities and EcoData lab, Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala from the NYC Department of Environmental Protection announced at the event.

Aggarwala — who founded Google smart city subsidiary Sidewalk Labs — celebrated the expanded data collection as forging “a new standard for what cities have to do” and a new way to shape policy.

He said the inventory also will measure greenhouse gas pollution from the production and consumption of other consumer goods like apparel, whether or not those items are made in New York City. It also tracks emissions tied to services like air travel and healthcare.

But Adams’ presentation at the event focused on food consumption, particularly meat and dairy.

“Food is the third-biggest source of cities’ emissions right after buildings and transportation,” Adams said. “But all food is not created equal. The vast majority of food that is contributing to our emission crises lies in meat and dairy products.”

Keep reading

Hollywood and left-wing foundations behind climate charity quietly bankrolling extremist protest groups

A little-known climate change advocacy organization heavily funded by celebrities and influential left-leaning foundations has been quietly dishing out grants to various activist groups deploying unorthodox and extremist methods across the world to protest fossil fuels, documents reveal.

Anti-fossil fuels groups have been ramping up protests in the United States and overseas as part of a coordinated campaign to bring awareness to climate change by vandalizing fine art, blocking major roads, and even gluing themselves to sports cars. Many of these activist hubs are being bankrolled by Climate Emergency Fund, a Beverly Hills-based charity linked to Hollywood celebrities and top liberal nonprofit organizations aiming to shape the Democratic Party’s agenda, according to tax forms and other documents reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

“Climate Emergency Fund has quickly become the ATM that radical environmental activists turn to fund their latest disruptions,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the conservative watchdog Americans for Public Trust, told the Washington Examiner. “And as their destruction increases, so should the scrutiny on who is bankrolling the Climate Emergency Fund and their ties to more mainstream environmental groups that might disagree with these over-the-top and dangerous tactics.”

Last week, an entity called Declare Emergency that calls fossil fuels reliance “genocidal” and “criminal” took credit for smearing paint on the display case of a sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Just Stop Oil, a group that made headlines in October 2022 for splattering tomato soup on a Vincent Van Gogh painting estimated to be worth $84 million at London’s National Gallery, has been blocking traffic for days in the United Kingdom.

These groups and those like it are either funded directly by Climate Emergency Fund or are part of coalitions backed by CEF, which touts on its website how it has “trained” tens of thousands of activists since being founded in 2019. Both Declare Emergency and Just Stop Oil are part of a coalition with almost a dozen climate protest groups called the A22 Network, which is primarily funded by CEF.

And, unlike the typical run-of-the-mill charity, CEF boasts a star-studded cohort of financial backers and board members, including Rory Kennedy, daughter of the late senator Robert F. Kennedy, Aileen Getty, the billionaire philanthropist and heiress of the Getty family fortune earned in the petroleum industry, and even Hollywood’s Adam McKay, who pledged it $4 million in September 2022 and directed the 2021 climate allegory film Don’t Look Up.

Keep reading

New York becomes first US state to ban gas in new buildings

New York has become the first US state to pass a law banning gas stoves and other fossil fuels in most new buildings, in a victory for environmental activists.

The legislation adopted by lawmakers in the Democratic-run state legislature late Tuesday will require newly built homes to be all-electric in three years’ time.

The move aims to tackle climate change by reducing New York’s dependence on natural gas.

“Changing the ways we make and use energy to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels will help ensure a healthier environment for us and our children,” said state assembly speaker Carl Heastie.

The law, which could face legal challenges from the gas industry, will require solely electric heating and cooking in new buildings under seven stories from 2026.

For taller skyscrapers, the deadline is 2029.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading