Week’s Worst Climate Stories ($600 Million for “Environmental Justice”?)

New year, new batch of moronic stories from the Left

It’s a new year, and we’ve got all sorts of new climate absurdities to talk about in 2024. We have an election coming up, which means candidates will surely make all sorts of weird and crazy declarations. Here at Restoration of America, we can hardly wait. In the mean time, Big Journalism and Big Philanthropy have teamed up to give you a full-court press on the ways in which everything relates back to climate boiling. This week, we have the EPA acting like Santa Claus, batteries burning holes in ships at sea, forest hippies making policy, Skynet potentially targeting non-believers, and all sorts of journalistic malfeasance. Sadly, we ran out of room for good climate news, but that’s fine, because there wasn’t much anyway. But there’s plenty of crazy to fill our time, so here we go.

EV Batteries Explode Prior to Installation

I was lost until you found me

You’re the reason for my today

Was tempest tossed, now I sleep soundly

Thanks to you I gladly say

That if your goldmine comes up empty

I’ll be there to work the claim

If you’re a captain of a shipwreck

I’ll be first mate to your shame

~Neil Diamond, Captain of a Shipwreck

Somehow I picture Joe Biden softly humming this song, as he watched helplessly from shore as a container ship full of lithium batteries caught fire out over the Pacific.

Last week, a ship bound from Vietnam to San Diego was rerouted to the Aleutian Islands after lithium batteries in cargo hold #1 caught fire while at sea. The crew (unironically) pumped the hold with carbon dioxide and sealed it shut to prevent the cargo from exploding. The Coast Guard ordered the ship to anchor two miles from shore to keep the fire’s toxic fumes away from the port.

Rest assured, however, as these batteries pose no danger to the EV-buying public.

EPA Gives Out Mad Stacks For Christmas

Last week, while you were still digesting your Christmas goose, Biden’s EPA announced $600 million in extra presents for “environmental justice” groups, courtesy of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The EPA calls it Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking, which announced grants to 11 different “grantmakers.” The justice part comes in, according to the EPA, because they’ve “reduce[d] barriers to federal funds.”  The EPA claims:

This new grant program, which will make it easier for small community-based organizations to access federal environmental justice funding, responds to community feedback about the need to reduce barriers to federal funds and improve the efficiency of the awards process to ensure communities that have long faced underinvestment can access the benefits of the largest climate investment in history.

Who are the grantmakers? The EPA says:

The 11 Grantmakers consist of regional selectees (i.e., Regional Grantmakers) who will issue subgrants to communities in specific EPA Regions, as well as national selectees (i.e., National Grantmakers) who will provide additional support, coordination, and oversight to the subgrantees, applicants, and the Regional Grantmakers themselves, as well as issue additional subgrants to fill potential gaps in the regions. Ten Grantmakers are receiving $50 million each with one selectee, Research Triangle Institute, receiving $100 million to serve as both a Regional Grantmaker serving communities in EPA Region 4 and as a National Grantmaker in which part of their responsibility is providing subgrants to communities in EPA Region 7. Collectively, the 11 Grantmakers will issue thousands of subgrants to disadvantaged communities over the next three years.

Only a huge new bureaucracy can remove barriers to money laundering funding!

Oregon Hippies Doing Oregon Hippie Things

Climate change is boiling our seas and burning our forests, but trees have yet to evolve legs. So when their habitats inevitably change, they’re going to need a helping hand. From Oregon Public Broadcasting:

As native trees in the Pacific Northwest die off due to climate changes, the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, Oregon, and citizen groups around Puget Sound, Washington, are turning to a deceptively simple climate adaptation strategy called “assisted migration.”

As the world’s climate warms, tree-growing ranges in the Northern Hemisphere are predicted to move farther north and higher in elevation.

Trees, of course, can’t get up and walk to their new climatic homes. This is where assisted migration is supposed to lend a hand.

The idea is that humans can help trees keep up with climate change by moving them to more favorable ecosystems faster than the trees could migrate on their own.

Talk about your invasive species—the trees and the humans.

When Does Skynet Become Self-Aware?

AI companies have started offering their services to various industries interested in tracking global warming. The “climate lead” for an AI company called Hugging Face, which creates predictive computer models, told National Public Radio their company can process data and predict “climate disasters” faster and more efficiently. A growing number of companies are using AI to detect methane in the atmosphere using satellite data, placing sensors in forests to detect fires, modeling climate data to direct controlled burns, and mapping out new operations for “green tech mining.”

How long until the mission becomes more important than human life for artificial intelligence?

Radical Nonprofits Intervening In Journalism, Justice System

Raise your hand if you voted to allow radical, anti-American nonprofit organizations to train journalists and judges on how to handle global warming stories, and global warming lawsuits.

Nobody?

Something called the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) created the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) in 2018. CJP has trained over 1,700 judges on how to handle lawsuits over global warming. “As the body of climate litigation grows, judges must consider complex scientific and legal questions, many of which are developing rapidly,” the CJP website states. “To address these issues, the Climate Judiciary Project of the Environmental Law Institute is collaborating with leading national judicial education institutions to meet judges’ need for basic familiarity with climate science methods and concepts.”

According to American Greatness, ELI is “closely connected” to a large law firm involved in such lawsuits, which seems totally non-biased and fair. In a statement announcing a $500,000 grant to ELI, the left-wing MacArthur Foundation said, “This will lead to better-informed decisions and ultimately build a body of law supporting climate action.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press (AP) accepted donations from radical overseas foundations to push leftist reporting on climate issues. The Washington Free Beacon reported the KR Foundation, a radical Danish nonprofit, gave $300,000 to the AP to fund climate reporting:

It’s the latest left-wing charity to fund the Associated Press, which says it is read by four billion people each day. Philanthropies that support packing the Supreme Court, defunding the police, and other left-wing initiatives have contributed millions of dollars to the AP in recent years, the Free Beacon reported.

The KR Foundation sees media outlets as prime targets to push its climate agenda. It funds media outlets to “significantly” influence “the media narrative around climate policy.” Its grant to the Associated Press, which extends through December 2024, is to be used for the wire service’s Global Scholars Network.

Not to be outdone by their competition, Reuters has also jumped all-in on climate reporting. They’ve actually partnered with the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), funded by the worst of the green billionaires. They offer training for journalists on how to inject climate into their reporting, no matter the subject of the story, and feature at least one speaker who has called for climate deniers to be jailed and fined.

The radical philanthropic assault on truth and basic sense continues apace.

We Have to Burn the Climate To See What’s In It

Speaking of radical reporting, the Financial Times ran an article justifying all the carbon being burned to discover what effects carbon has had on the climate. The headline is hilarious enough: “Carbon emissions from research are the price we must pay to understand the world.”

The article is even better:

It is unarguable that our laboratories, scientific instruments, rockets and satellites — the tools we scientists need to measure the planet’s pulse — demand significant amounts of energy both in their construction and operation. And it is equally true that science’s unrelenting appetite for information has caused a mushrooming of energy-intensive data centres around the world. According to the International Energy Agency, these buildings now consume about 1 per cent of the world’s electricity.

However, this is a price we must pay for understanding the world. How can we inform decision makers about the best ways to bring down carbon emissions if we can’t track the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, where it’s coming from and who’s producing it? The carbon emissions from technological research are well spent: ultimately this research will safeguard the future of our planet.

One presumes this applies to other elites trying to save the world, like Al Gore and John Kerry and their private jets, but not, say, Kenyan farmers trying to become economically self-sufficient.