The Week’s Most Absurd Climate Cultist Stories

We’re starting a new feature here at Restoration of America—a column bringing you the most absurd stories and headlines from climate cultists we’ve seen over the past week or so. Climate cultism, or scientism, if you prefer, leads radical activist journalists, politicians, and scientists in the field to jump so hard to unsupportable conclusions. They can’t help but to beclown themselves, so we thought it would be fun to show our readers the unintentional comedy gold they come up with. These stories range from the silly, to the frightening, to the moments that make you go, “What the…”

Our first column covers stories that caught our eye since the beginning of September, or so.

1. EV Batteries, Brought to You by Coal

Panasonic is building a huge lithium-ion electric vehicle (EV) battery assembly plant in De Soto, Kansas. The plant will cost $4 billion to build and will receive $6.8 billion from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, along with other incentives from state and local governments. Total government incentives could reach as much as $8 billion. The plant will require so much energy that a coal plant slated to be mothballed over environmental concerns will be expanded instead of shut down, and the local electric company will be allowed to extend its productive life and build out transmission infrastructure. Consumers will foot the expansion costs to make the coal plant sufficient to the needs of the new EV battery in the form of a series of rate hikes. All in the name of “saving” the climate.

2. Rivers Are People, Too

In our intersectional collision of the week, a tribe of indigenous people living near a river in Brazil has successfully petitioned a local government to grant legal personhood to that river. The AP reported on the pressures on the river by expanding soybean agriculture, “land-robbers” who promote “illegal deforestation,” and the indigenous people in that part of Brazil fighting back by using “the white man’s law,” despite Brazil’s largest racial demographic group being Pardo, or mixed-race, followed closely by Portuguese. The municipal government of Guajara-Mirim passed a law designating the Komi Memem river and its tributaries as living entities with rights. One wonders if an accidental toxic discharge into the river might constitute manslaughter?

3. The Great Armadillo Migration Shift?

One sure sign of “global boiling” is the migration patterns of armadillos. Ok, ok, it could, IN THEORY, indicate a profound change in the climate. Or it could simply result from populations seeking resources in other territories. Animal populations don’t naturally stay in those territories you see on maps, because armadillos can’t read maps.

A Southern Illinois University professor told AccuWeather News they can’t be sure why armadillos have moved north, but it probably has something to do with the “much warmer” winters in Illinois. If you look at the official NOAA average temperature in Illinois in winter, however, between 1895 and 2023, you see the upward trend increases by 1.6° Fahrenheit per century. Is that enough to entice armadillos to come party, when the mean winter temperature is still 31.9°F?

4. Biden EPA Arms for War, Literally

Yet another alphabet soup swamp agency not involved in law enforcement has ramped up its purchases of military and surveillance equipment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has spent close to $3 million under President Biden on mobile command posts, camouflage, body armor, breaching equipment, tactical rifles, shotguns, and pistols (857 guns in all), night vision equipment, and unmanned aerial and ground vehicles. This is an annual spike since the Trump administration, but EPA has spent almost $10 million on such equipment since 2006. That’s a lot of military equipment for the agency with the mission of, “protecting human health and the environment.”

5. Let Them Eat Cake (While They Still Can)

An article republished by Yahoo! Life claims bakeries all around the world have begun to show signs of weakness as we battle out-of-control climate change. We can already see degradation in baked goods from fluctuating temperatures in kitchens, changes in water and gluten content, changes to how yeasts grow to make baked goods rise, and a decline in quality in raw ingredients. Wheat supposedly can’t grow properly anymore. Also, as temperatures rise, good luck finding anyone who wants to work in a hot kitchen. The proof offered consists of a bakery in Chicago in 2021 which threw out 2,000 croissants that they screwed up.

To the credit of the handful of readers, the first of two comments on the article said, “No one with a brain believes this nonsense.”

6. Your Car Caused California’s Wildfires… 13,000 Years Ago

According to a new environmental reporter for the New York Times, humans caused massive wildfires due to climate change when they first migrated north to California 13,000 years ago, burning down huge forests near what is now La Brea Tar Pits, revealing our original sin as environmental destructors who can’t help ourselves. As the story goes, humans overhunted all the large mammalian herbivores, which caused the underbrush to overproduce fuel on the forest floor, which led to out-of-control wildfires, which led to massive local extinctions.

Never mind that this happened approximately 12,800 years before the Industrial Revolution, commonly claimed as the cause of current man-made global warming. Nope—we went in, destroyed the ecosystem, killed all the plant-eaters, and then finished off the job when our camp fires got out of control. The scientists who got their paper published in a peer-reviewed journal used a computer model to come up with their results, “similar to the ones that forecast trends in the stock market,” the cub reporter helpfully adds. The holes in the theory are too numerous to list here, which calls into question how they got this cockamamie idea into a peer-reviewed journal.

7. “Green” Energy Out-Subsidizes Petroleum Industry

When Joe Biden adopted the Green New Deal as a major component of his 2020 presidential campaign, the bargain included the classic leftist refrain about ending “subsidies for Big Oil.” This concept has reverberated so loudly and so long on the Left that many Americans accept it gospel that these subsidies are the only reason “green” energy can’t succeed. Never mind that the radicals can’t define subsidies, or distinguish between progressive taxes, direct payments, tax breaks, or corporate welfare. It all counts, to them, even if they can’t quantify it.

In any event it may come as a surprise, then, that the Biden administration released a report on a Friday after 5pm when most newsrooms closed for the weekend—the classic Friday evening document dump—proving that green energy gets WAAAYYYY more “subsidies” than the hydrocarbon industry could ever dream about.

As Fox News reported:

The Biden administration quietly issued a 59-page report outlining the current scope of federal energy-related subsidies revealed that the renewable energy sector enjoys significantly larger taxpayer backing than the fossil fuel industry.

The report — authored by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) and published in August — represents the first of its kind since 2018. The EIA analyzed data from 2016 through 2022, and determined that, during that time period, the federal government doled out $183.3 billion in direct and mainly indirect taxpayer subsidies, more than half of which came over the last three years.

In 2022 alone, renewable energy received $83.8 billion in subsidies, while the “fossil fuel” industry got only $24.5 billion. That should make for some intriguing conversation with liberal family members around the Thanksgiving table this year.