The Worst Climate Stories of the Week (Trust Scientism! Smash Capitalism!)
Athletes will be sweating their javelins off in Paris this summer, in the name of the climate.
Well, here we are, and winter has turned to spring. The temperature rises in the northern hemisphere as we hurtle headlong towards summer—and election season. Also rising to heat wave levels: climate hysteria. Governments have reached a boiling point as more citizens reject their climate fearmongering. That just means they’ll have to ratchet it up even more to make a dent on Election Day. The real world consequences of adopting net-zero policies have come into sharper focus, and the people don’t like them one bit. Instead of retreating or rethinking their proposed solutions, governments have regrouped, and deployed ever more hot air to advance climate as an existential threat. Government, of course, can provide the only logical solution to such a catastrophe.
Last week’s column was a bit light, providing false hope that might have lulled us to sleep. The crazy climate stories have come roaring back this week, however, ending the lull with a bang. China has decided to engage in lawfare against a small American town that rejected its electric vehicle (EV) battery factory. Paris will host the Olympics this summer, but the athlete accommodations will not have air conditioning, because “trust the science.” History shows that the “natural,” un-dammed state of one western river is a myth. The Biden Administration just stepped up its war on cars. And one United Nations (UN) official said the quiet part out loud about smashing capitalism for the climate.
(DON’T MISS: Dead Salmon and Glacier Curtains)
In our Good News segment, the Wall Street climate disclosure boondoggle appears to be dead. Plus, our friends at Just The Facts lay out why claims of 20th century sea level rise are a complete farce.
Let’s get to it.
Trust The Scientism
The Olympic Games get underway in Paris this July, which, as a reminder, marks the middle of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The host city announced their intention to make them the “greenest” games ever. So, of course, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo defended the decision not to provide air conditioning for athlete housing in Olympic Village. Several nations have protested and vowed to bring their own portable air conditioning for their rooms. That prompted Mayor Hidalgo to tell them to calm down: “Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo told those nations planning on installing air conditioning at the athletes’ village to ‘trust the science’ instead.”
If only we had a recent example of trusting the science and how it endangered human life.
CCP Invades Small Town Court
In 2022, Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer invited Chinese-owned Gotion, Inc. to build a multi-billion dollar EV battery manufacturing plant in the tiny town of Green Charter Township, with a population just over 3,000. The city council then negotiated secret contracts with Gotion to provide infrastructure improvements to the plant site. When the residents got wind of the sweetheart deal that brought the CCP to their town at taxpayer expense, they recalled the entire city council. The new council’s first order of business was to rescind the development agreement.
Now Gotion is suing Green Charter Township, setting up this tiny hamlet as the epicenter of green lawfare by CCP-owned and operated companies in America. The city supervisor vowed the city will continue to refuse to be bullied.
What If Dams ARE the Natural State of the River?
Last week we reported on the ecological catastrophe caused by the destruction of the first of a series of dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California. Klamath Lake has always been shallow and foul, unfit for drinking by humans or livestock. It makes for great irrigation for farmers, however. Veterans of the two world wars who had agricultural experience got the opportunity to bid for homestead plots supplied by irrigation canals from the Klamath River. They’ve farmed and ranched there for generations now. But the environmental extremists convinced Native American tribes to team up to save salmon and sucker fish they claimed had declined due to the hydroelectric and irrigation dams put in during the first part of the 20th century. They’ve breached one of four dams downriver, so far, in an effort to return it to its “natural state.” They think this will restore fish habitat.
Turns out, humans have recognized the need to dam the rivers in the Klamath Basin for thousands of years, long before the evil paleface settlers arrived. One could credibly argue the “natural condition of the river” is a fully invented myth.
According to an article at the Klamath Water Users Association (KUWA):
The outflow from Upper Klamath Lake has been influenced and manipulated by humans for thousands of years, long before any federal engineer envisioned a concrete dam there.
When William F. Clarke, a farmer from the Willamette Valley, traveled through “Klamath Lake County” in 1885, he noted the “ruins” of an ancient rock dam on Link River. “It is a semi-circle, pointing downstream, with a narrow channel extending some distance downstream. The water barely covers the wall, but its outline is plainly visible… The shallow outlet of Big Klamath Lake has been caused by the Indians, who wish to confine the waters of the lake for the sake of tule lands.”
In the 1800s, before the dams and during extreme low water conditions, contemporary writers noted numerous dam-like structures with stone platforms, used by Native Americans to fish with spears—a common practice among Pacific Northwest tribes. They even built “runways” in the structures to allow the salmon to pass upstream.
The idea of “reclaiming” the river and restoring its “natural flows” has its foundations in pure environmentalist myth.
Biden’s War on Cars Escalates, Media Covers It Up For the Climate
The Biden administration announced this week it wants to phase out internal combustion cars altogether. In a journalistic sleight of hand, the New York Times ran with that headline blaring. Then they realized they needed to soften their language to minimize the political damage to Biden’s reelection campaign. This was pretty blatant, and not too many folks noticed the presto change-o.
First, the regulation. The Times’ climate reporter reported excitedly:
The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.
Nearly three years in the making, the new tailpipe pollution limits from the Environmental Protection Agency would transform the American automobile market. A record 1.2 million electric vehicles rolled off dealers’ lots last year, but they made up just 7.6 percent of total U.S. car sales, far from the 56 percent target under the new regulation. An additional 16 percent of new cars sold would be hybrids.
Someone seems to have noticed, because the headline went from this: Biden Administration Announces Rule Aimed At Phasing Out Gas Cars
To this: Biden Administration Announces Rule Aimed at Expanding Electric Vehicles
A momentary bit of honesty, covered up by a later decision by the editorial board. Greenwashing, indeed.
The UN Lets Its Guy Fawkes Mask Slip
The UN’s Secretary General, Antonio Guterres—the guy who coined the term “global boiling”—chose a radical American woman of Pakistani descent as his Youth Climate Adviser in 2023. Guterres selected Ayisha Siddiqa to help accelerate the implementation of his climate agenda. Siddiqa holds radical views, even for the UN. She wants to abolish the police and capitalism, and she blames white people specifically for climate change. Her X/Twitter stream is composed of frequent harangues against white people, calling for them to be stripped of all governmental power in favor of “black and brown” people. An article at Fox News gave some of Siddiqa’s gory highlights:
“[T]he white man has brought life as we know it, to the verge of extinction.”
“The white man sits at the highest level of power in the world, the same way he has killed, looted and abused black and brown people for profit so has he the earth”
“You want to know why I got into climate activism, it wasn’t because I wanted to protect the environment (although that is a very valid reason). I became involved [because] the West slaughtered, bombed and starved my people to death in the name of oil. And no one talks about it,” she wrote.
“When I think of fossil fuel, I don’t think of pollution… I think of… organized terrorism and I think of demolished democracies at the hands of the West,” she wrote in a separate post in November 2020.
“We’re allowing White people to have too much space. [W]hite people have absolutely no prerogative or authority to lead the movement.”
Naturally, Time Magazine named her one of the Women of the Year in 2023.
Remember, Antonio Guterres chose her personally.
Good Climate News
This week, Just The Facts asked a question about sea level rise. You really ought to check these guys out, they do a great job.
By how much did the average global sea level rise between the 1990s and the recent decade from 2011 to 2020?
Correct Answer
2 inchesCorrect Answer Rate 22%
Tell Me More
Since late 1992, instruments on satellites have been collecting data that scientists use to calculate the average global sea level. Averaging the 8 available datasets, it increased by 2.0 inches (50 mm) between the 1990s and the recent decade from 2011 to 2020. Local tide gauges indicate that sea levels have been generally rising since 1860 or earlier. This is about 45 years before surface temperatures began to rise and 75 years before man-made emissions of CO2 reached 1% of natural emissions. Some have claimed that sea level is rising at an accelerating rate, but the fact is that global sea-level accelerations are so close to zero that they can be positive, zero, or negative depending upon the timeframe that scientists analyze. Thus, a 2011 paper in the Journal of Coastal Research reviewed the results of numerous sea-level acceleration studies and concluded that there is “disagreement” over whether acceleration can “be detected.”
Documentation
Finally, ding dong the witch is dead. SEC Climate Disclosures, that is. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced new proposals earlier this month to make publicly traded companies disclose climate risks in the business they conduct. It would have required companies traded on the stock market to make disclosures about greenhouse gas emissions. This caused several companies to sue to block the new rules. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the suit that called the rules arbitrary, capricious, and expensive, and granted an emergency stay on the new rules.
(READ MORE: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—and How to Stop It)
