Worst Climate Stories of the Week—Kamala Harris, We’re Ready For Your Closeup
Vice President Kamala Harris now finds herself thrust into the biggest spotlight she’s ever experienced. What does that mean for climate?
Last week’s column happened in the midst of one of the momentous weeks of news in our nation’s history. This week, we haven’t seen quite as much noise, but several things have happened that will have direct consequences for our approach to the climate. The most consequential of which, of course: Joe Biden’s handlers announced he had dropped his reelection bid. Vice President Kamala Harris now finds herself thrust into the biggest spotlight she’s ever experienced.
How will Harris perform under pressure at the top of the ticket? More importantly, what does her candidacy mean for the Democratic Party’s embrace of climate hysteria?
Well, buckle up. Harris had a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders while in the Senate. When she ran in the Democratic primary for president in 2019, she staked out positions on the climate (and everything else) that put her firmly in the camp of radical extremists. She vowed to end the fossil fuel industry, repeatedly supported a full ban on fracking, and proposed $10 trillion in new spending on green energy. That puts Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, at a mere $1.2 trillion, to shame. She also signed on as a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal.
(Don’t miss last week’s crazy climate column: Time to Catch Our Breath)
So it’s safe to say the next 3 and a half months of presidential jockeying will be one for the ages. Kamala Harris will take every opportunity to convince the American people to vote for the most radical green policies ever conceived.
And we’ll be here to cover it all.
This Week’s Climate Insanity
On top of that, we had lots of other climate insanity this week as well. Kamala Harris may have difficulty advancing her EV agenda, since the industry had its worst week since . . . last week. The solar industry had almost as bad a time as EVs. We saw hysteria in the headlines as claims of “the hottest day ever recorded” roiled the news. And wildfires in the western United States got ironic for a moment, when they took out a forest set aside for carbon sequestration. We’ll give a special shout out to an energy expert and his take on a possible Harris administration’s policies toward oil and gas.
Meanwhile, the contrast could not be more stark, as Donald Trump made clear in a speech on energy issues. That will lead our good news segment—the good news coming for the energy sector (and climate sanity) should Trump 47 become a reality.
Here we go.
Electric Vehicles Lose Again . . . and Again . . . and, Well, You Know . . .
The hits just keep on coming for EVs. First up: Ford, which took such a loss on its electric vehicle portfolio it dragged down the entire company’s earnings. The good news? Ford remains the second-highest seller of EVs in America. The bad news? That only increased its losses, as Ford took a staggering loss of $47,600 on each EV sold. That caused them to miss their quarterly earnings estimate by $2.5 billion—just on EVs. Their total earnings missed by close to $5 billion. They blamed a “price war” in the EV market for the losses.
This caused Ford to start transitioning away from EVs at least at some of its manufacturing plants. A Canadian plant designed to produce EVs will instead churn out heavy-duty gas and diesel trucks, responding to market demand. Ford’s stock lost 20 percent of its value on Thursday.
The highest selling EV company, Tesla, fared little better. Despite significant price cuts of their own, overall sales fell for the fourth quarter in a row.
Home Solar Going Out of Business Too?
A large solar company in California, SunPower, has used state and federal subsidies to market solar panels to homeowners on the promise that they “pay for themselves over time” when all that excess sunlight allows the homeowner to sell power back to the grid. Everybody wins, right? Just so long as those taxpayers keep footing the bill. Even the nuts in California got tired of the skyrocketing costs of these subsidies, and cut them in 2023. In response, demand dropped by a mere 80 percent. On top of that, overburdened electrical grid operators cut the amount of power homeowners could sell back to the grid. Now, SunPower has started to exit the California market, announcing they will no longer accept new customers.
Like every other Ponzi scheme in human history, it comes crashing down when you run out of other people’s money to spend.
The Hottest Day Ever Recorded By Our Theoretical Model
Headlines blared this week, like this one from Newsweek:
Hottest Day on Earth Record Broken Two Days in a Row
This came after the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced its “highest average global daily temperature” of 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit.
How do we know? Computer models, of course! Steve Milloy of Junk Science broke down the scheme on X/Twitter:
Lots of unproven assumptions had to come together in just the right manner to get the computers to come to that conclusion.
Carbon Sequestration Goes Up In Smoke
In the dog days of summer, the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest used to be mild, pristine, and pleasant to visit. Decades of mismanagement, however, have left so much fuel on the forest floors that wildfire has become the dominant feature. It has created ecological disasters of our own making, but instead of implementing sound management, officials instead have chosen to blame the rampant fires on global warming.
One deeply ironic result occurred this week in Northern California. An 18,000-acre forest in the Siskyou Mountains, owned by Portland-based Ecotrust Forest Management, burned. Ecotrust created a forest reserve for trees that are protected in exchange for carbon credits. Companies can buy shares of the forest to offset carbon emissions their business produces. The stored carbon sequestered in these trees was intended to “offset” the “harmful climate effects” of other activities. Instead, 11,000 of the 18,000 acres went up in smoke, releasing all that sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.
Oops.
Kamala Harris Would Make Climate and Energy Policy Even More Incoherent
Energy industry expert David Blackmon writes at his Substack that a potential Kamala Harris administration would make the Biden administration’s green record look moderate by comparison:
While mounting her own disastrous campaign for her party’s presidential nomination in 2020, Harris endorsed a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, i.e., fracking. She later conformed that position to Biden’s own, slightly less insane view, but only after being picked as his running mate.
Consider also that, while serving in the Senate in early 2019, Harris chose to sign up as a co-sponsor of the ultra-radical Green New Deal proposed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It’s not enough that the Biden regulators appeared to be using that nutty proposal to use climate alarmism as the impetus to transform America’s entire economy and social structure as a reference document: Harris favors enacting the whole thing.
She is an energy disaster in waiting.
The whole thing is worth a read. We can stop that disaster, if voters overcome the margin of fraud in November and return Donald Trump to the White House.
Good news—IF . . .
Donald Trump Would Bring Sanity Back to Climate Policy
The contrast between the Republican nominee and the presumptive nominee for the Democrats could not be more clear. Again from David Blackmon, in analyzing Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC Convention:
There was much more energy-related content in his speech, but you get the gist: a second trump presidency would start by reversing as much of the Biden green new deal agenda as possible and go from there.
It’s safe to say no nominee has ever been as focused on energy as Donald Trump is today. We will see if it pays off for him in November.
Blackmon notes Trump’s speech included:
- Noting the Green New Deal was a scam that spend trillions, adding to inflationary pressures
- Vowing to end the Green New Deal
- Vowing to end EV mandates
- Pointing out Biden’s heavy reliance on Chinese EV technology
- Setting the goal of making the United States not just energy independent again, but energy dominant
- Vowing to get tough on Iran, including curtailing their ability to sell oil internationally
Getting tough on America’s global adversaries, while allowing our domestic energy production to take its rightful place of prominence in our economy, would put us in far better position than today.
Our choice in November could not be more stark.
