The Worst Climate Stories of the Week—Terrible Green Policies Have a Price
The more the radicals ruin everything they touch, the more they think they need to do.
When Monday rolled around this week, it seemed like any normal post-holiday return to work. Kinda sluggish, a bit overwhelmed by a full five days of work, still noshing on aging leftovers. The overwhelming emotion—not quite ready to engage. So it came as a bit of a blindside hit to see so many insane, cultish climate stories lined up like an army of orcs, ready to attack.
Seriously, there were a dozen crazy stories to review before the week even started.
Before we jump in, we must address the ecological and human disaster going on in Southern California. There will be a huge after-action report to discuss how this happened. But while the fires still rage, homes still incinerate, and lives still get lost, the democrats and radical activists have already assigned blame for the devastating wildfires on climate change. They deliberately and conspicuously ignore decades of denying the need to thin forests, dam removals that diverted water out of reservoirs for spurious environmental reasons, DEI hiring practices that prioritized quotas over competence, and sending firefighting equipment to Ukraine that might come in handy right about now. Instead of functioning fire hydrants, Los Angeles and the state of California have pride flags on their fire trucks. Leftism has led to an unimaginable human catastrophe. Feel free to roundly dismiss anyone who blames “climate change” for this.
Ok now to the regularly scheduled, if excessive, cult insanity.
This week, we have a potpourri of Biden-Harris lame duck moves designed to thwart the incoming Trump administration; another potpourri of collapsing green energy; Michigan clearcutting for solar; and another blue state shoots itself in the economy in the name of the climate cult.
We have one major bit of good news this week, as banking conglomerates seem to have come to their senses and removed themselves from “climate banking.”
Let’s jump in the deep end.
(Don't miss our year-end wrap-up: The Worst Climate Stories of 2024)
Lame Ducks Throwing Everything They Can In Trump’s Way
Less than two weeks remain in the Biden-Harris disaster, and they’ve dedicated the administration to wholesale institutional destruction on their way out. This week alone, they decided to ban natural gas tankless water heaters, and more importantly, Biden announced he would put a huge amount of U.S. territory off-limits to new offshore drilling projects.
Regarding those evil tankless water heaters, the Washington Free Beacon reports, “under the regulations, roughly 40 percent of the new tankless water heaters available in the United States today will be taken off the market by 2029. Experts and industry officials say that will force consumers to purchase either more expensive or less efficient water heater models. One industry analysis estimates that consumers will pay $450 more on average when purchasing new water heaters thanks to the regulations.” Because nothing screams Save The Planet like less efficient appliances!
Check out this analysis of the offshore drilling ban from X user @amuse, who succinctly puts it: “Together, these maneuvers exemplify a deliberate strategy to tie the hands of duly elected administrations and impose a radical environmental agenda without congressional input.”
— @amuse (@amuse) January 5, 2025
The Accelerating Collapse of “Green” Energy
Several stories this week demonstrating the monumental waste of resources in “green” energy scams.
It’s winter, so time to remind everyone that electric vehicles don’t perform in the cold weather. A study out of the U.K. tested several popular models of EVs in summer and winter, and found their range all declined in winter by anywhere from 30-40 percent, drastically underperforming the maximum range reported by the manufacturer.
Meanwhile, physicist John Droz, Jr., wrote at his Substack that green energy acolytes have grossly underestimated the costs of electricity generated by wind turbines:
The system is setup to grease the skids for wind energy developers — not ratepayers. When it comes to wind energy, we are dealing with 21st century snake oil salespeople. They have a sophisticated multi-part strategy to profit at the public’s expense.
Droz gives fifteen examples of hidden costs of wind energy, including several tax credits, subsidies, interest, transmission costs, auxiliary power costs, and several other direct and indirect costs. Put it all together, and you end up with power from wind farms costing three times that produced by nuclear.
Maybe this explains yet another state in the Northeastern U.S. getting out of the offshore wind boondoggle. Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Connecticut) partnered with Massachusetts and Rhode Island in to a three-state bid for offshore wind power through the Vineyard Wind 2 project. Now, citing consumer cost burdens, he has opted out of that plan and will instead try its hand with giant solar farms and battery storage facilities across the state.
An important point few seem to realize: if green energy truly were viable, costs would lower as we scale up wind and solar production. Instead, those costs have—at best—plateaued, and at worst have gotten even more burdensome. Green energy has proven itself a complete failure, and no amount of government subsidies can prop it up and make it viable.
Michigan Rids Itself of Pesky Trees to Make Way for Environmentally Friendly Solar
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has selected 420-acre tract of state forestland near Gaylord, MI as a location for a solar energy farm. Since the sun doesn’t penetrate the forest canopy terribly well, that will require clear-cutting to get all those trees out of the way. The Daily Caller spoke with a researcher at the Institute for Energy Research, who called it the theater of the absurd. Reports indicate this move was heavily influenced not just by the state’s clean energy goals, but also the need for DNR to develop new sources of revenue—which theoretically will be provided by revenues from the solar farm.
Oregon Takes Another Step Towards the Economic Abyss
Believe it or not, the largest tractor trailer manufacturer in the United States has its headquarters in Portland, Oregon, along with a plant that employs about 3,000 workers. Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) rolls Freightliners and Western Stars off the assembly line all year long—accounting for 40 percent of the new trucks sold in America. Trucking defines a swath of the economy in the state of Oregon, both in transportation and in manufacturing of the trucks themselves.
So it comes as a pretty significant surprise that Daimler has announced it can’t sell trucks into the state of Oregon anymore. The reason? The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, which issued the Advanced Clean Trucks rule that took effect Jan 1. DTNA issued the following message to its Oregon dealers on Dec. 20:
“Effective immediately, DTNA is pausing all orders for new internal combustion vehicles intended for registration in Oregon,” wrote Daimler’s general manager of product strategy and market development, Mary C. Aufdemberg, in a message to Oregon truck dealers.
The Advanced Clean Trucks rule requires 7 of every 100 heavy trucks sold by a manufacturer in Oregon to be electric. That will ratchet up over several years, reaching a 40 percent requirement by 2032.
For perspective, Willamette Week reported that, of the 1,708 new heavy trucks sold in Oregon in 2023, merely nine were electric.
This represents another example of California-style policies creeping to other states, as Oregon has followed the lead set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in attempting to limit “carbon pollution.” Oregon implemented this new rule without taking into account its unique trucking requirements. Whereas California has built a series of state-funded charging stations for tractor trailers, Oregon only has one.
Yet another example of the deep blue Pacific Northwest making radical environmental policy that kills off yet another sector of its economy.
Now for the good news:
Banks Make Their Withdrawal from the Climate Cult
In 2021, the United Nations created the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) as part of its UN Environmental Programme Financial Initiative. Banks from all over the globe were encouraged to set environmental finance goals:
- Banks shall set and publicly disclose long-term and intermediate targets to support meeting the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
- Banks shall establish an emissions baseline and annually measure and report the emissions profile of their lending portfolios and investment activities.
- Banks shall use widely accepted science-based decarbonisation scenarios to set both long-term and intermediate targets that are aligned with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.
- Banks shall regularly review targets to ensure consistency with current climate science.
The UN website boasts 141 members of the NZBA, bringing $61 trillion in assets to bear for the cause.
A funny thing happened shortly after Election Day in the United States, however: corporations started getting cold feet on advancing wokism and radical globalist policies. Banks—big ones—started pulling out of the NZBA, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Now, the New York Post reports that the biggest woke money management fund in the world, BlackRock, has also announced its exit:
BlackRock said its “involvement in organizations where various companies pledge efforts to reduce carbon emissions subjected us to legal inquiries from various public officials. Following our routine review of our continued participation in these groups, we are writing to notify of our formal withdrawal from the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative.”
It’s almost as if money managers have realized that if they get woke, they go broke.
Learn more about the green hoaxes perpetrated by the cultists in the comprehensive special report by Restoration News: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—And How to Stop It
