Worst Climate Stories of the Week (More Inconveniently Mild Weather)

Sep 06, 2024
Jeff Reynolds
Environmentalism

Once again, the climate has failed to get extreme enough to concern the voters, but the politicians will tax you more anyway.

Last week, we wrote about Christmas in August, as the snows began to fall in Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming. This week, Montana and Colorado decided to join in the summertime fun and have snowstorms of their own. Meanwhile, hurricane season has fizzled in the Atlantic tropics. Sure, there’s a heat wave out west, but eastern states are below normal temperatures for this time of year. What does it all mean? The weather has turned decidedly un-severe, even as the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres says we need a “surge of funding” to deal with surging seas.

The concerning lack of severity displayed by our weather has also played a factor in the continuing meltdown in the electrical vehicle “market.” Despite that, Kamala Harris presses on with her anti-fossil fuels policies (which, of course, she denies). The word salads keep getting tossed, and the facts on the ground keep contradicting the Vice President.

The media keeps doing its level best to promote climate alarmism, as corporate news outlets take on Big Plastic—at the behest of leftist foundations paying them for “special” coverage.

(Don't miss last week's column: (It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas … In August??)

In our good news segment, even the radical leftist green energy acolytes have begun to realize how crazy some of the plans have gotten. That’s why Bobby Kennedy has joined forces with Donald Trump.

The craziness of 2024 just keeps on chugging away.

Let’s get to it.

“The Atlantic Tropics Are Completely Broken”

That’s the quote from meteorologist Ryan Maue, who posted about the utter lack of tropical cyclones this hurricane season. Various government forecasting agencies had predicted a severely overactive summer, calling for 25+ named storms. Just past the peak of the season, we’ve seen a total of five.


The season could still produce dangerous storms, and as the saying goes, it only takes one. But so far, we’ve only had four hurricanes or tropical storms make landfall in North America, and two of those only lasted a matter of hours before dissipating. Many climate skeptics have observed the cultists and hysterics have completely ignored the effects of a major volcano eruption in Tonga in 2022, throwing the mathematical models into chaos.

Will we continue to set records for longest stretches between named storms?


Summer Snow in Montana and Colorado

In August, the snow showed up early in parts of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains. The trend continued around the Labor Day weekend.

A whopping eleven inches fell at Glacier National Park, Montana on August 28!

glacier-snow.jpg

Then, on September 5, Pike’s Peak in Colorado saw its first snowfall of the year.

pikes-peak-snow.jpg

On Drilling, Kamala Flips, Harris Flops

In her first major primetime interview, with Dana Bash on CNN (and with Tim Walz by her side), Kamala Harris offered insight into the messaging she will use in her campaign for president. Well, insight isn’t exactly right. She gave us talking points. The Free Beacon has taken apart the talking points on energy—in which she ludicrously claimed she didn’t oppose fracking, and voted to increase “fracking leases:”

"Dana, excuse me," Harris told CNN's Dana Bash during her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee. "I cast the tie-breaking vote that actually increased leases for fracking as vice president. So I'm very clear about where I stand."

The federal government is required under federal statute to offer oil and gas leases through regular auctions. It doesn't offer "fracking leases," though the leases it offers can use the method of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a common method of drilling used to reach tight-oil resources.

The Free Beacon notes the total number of acres offered in new drilling leases dropped 98 percent under Biden-Harris from the previous three years under Donald Trump. The total number of leases offered dropped by 84 percent.

Her campaign continues to insist Harris does not support a ban on fracking. Her record in office tells a completely different story.

Big Philanthropy Buys Time in Big Journalism to Attack Big Plastic

It’s becoming harder and harder to keep track of all the big money influences in the mainstream media. Journalism continues to suffer from a crisis of authenticity, which makes independent journalists ever more important.

This week’s example comes from CBS News. Energy expert David Blackmon noted on his Substack that they chose to partner with an activist news site called Inside Climate News to attack “Big Plastic.” The plastics industry has recently run ads touting its new recycling technology, and the environmental and commercial benefits the industry could enjoy. Blackmon reports:

The decision by CBS News to partner with the activist “news” website Inside Climate News (ICN) for a story on plastic recycling should raise ­­journalistic alarm bells, especially when readers are left without any information or any acknowledgement about ICN’s funders and its mission to finance litigation and activism campaigns against American energy and industrial companies. Particularly troubling is the failure of this “partnership” to identify common funders between the authors of the story and cited sources. ­­

In a story posted online on August 23, CBS News and ICN reported on plastic recycling in Houston, including an accompanying short-form documentary, but readers have little information on why ICN and CBS News have partnered for this piece:

“This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News. Watch the CBS Reports documentary, ‘Advanced Recycling: Does Big Plastic’s Idea Work?’ in the video player above.”

Blackmon reminds us (where CBS failed to do so) that the nonprofit ICN receives its funding from huge foundations with an anti-petroleum agenda to push. He also notes that one of the sources quoted by ICN receives funding from the same sources as ICN—an obvious lack of independence in reporting. Those funding sources? The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. Incidentally, both have also showered funding on the groups organizing the pro-Hamas campus protests in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. According to Blackmon, ICN’s executive director also worked with the Rockefeller groups to support the climate lawsuit by Minnesota’s radical attorney general, Keith Ellison, against oil companies.

The story here is not ICN’s documentary—the real story is the incestuous relationships between the radical nonprofits and their increasing partnerships with corporate America.

This Week In Imploding EVs

The more governments force-feed EVs to consumers, the less they want them. One automaker has now reversed course on going all electric.

Breitbart reports Volvo, which pledged to sell 100% electric vehicles by 2030, announced this week it would “adjust” its electrification ambitions. Now, they’ll shoot for somewhere around 90 to 100 percent EV or hybrids, give or take. Breitbart quoted the Volvo CEO, who said, “It is clear that the transition to electrification will not be linear, and customers and markets are moving at different speeds of adoption.”

In a separate story, Breitbart reported car dealers in the United Kingdom self-imposing “rations” on sales of gas and hybrid vehicles. EV sales have slumped so badly, automakers risk selling too many conventional vehicles, which would trigger punitive fines. New orders for gas or hybrid vehicles face significant delivery delays as the dealers attempt to juggle a lack of consumer demand for the governmentally mandated EV sales. The UK has implemented a graduating mandate, requiring 22 percent of all vehicle sales made up of zero emission vehicles (ZEV) this year, increasing to 80 percent by 2030.

Let’s jump to the good news now, which is also the crazy news, which is so 2024.

RFK Teams Up With Trump to Protect the Environment

This headline would have seemed too insane to contemplate even a few weeks ago, but to quote Ferris Buehler, things move fast around here.

For a long time, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has staked out an extreme leftist stance on climate (among other things). His independent run for the presidency, which ended a few weeks ago with his endorsement of Donald Trump, seems to have opened his eyes to the state of the modern Democratic Party. Of course, he had to run as an independent after the Democratic establishment declared him an existential threat to his own party, and its incapable incumbent, Joe Biden. He had to go around them, because they wouldn’t let him challenge the status quo. In the process, at least from the outside, he seems to have come to realize the rot and corruption that fuel the Deep State also fuel the Democratic Party.

In that context, then, it’s hopeful to see his new statements on the environment. He made this post on X recently, decrying the singular focus on CO2 while ignoring the massive impacts climate policies have on the environment:


As Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify. Let’s hope this newfound sanity on climate holds with RFK Jr. If it does, it could serve as a guiding principle shared by conservatives and old school liberals, in a united effort to smash the climate bureaucracies in the Deep State.

(Learn more about climate science: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—And How to Stop It)


Jeff Reynolds is Co-Editor and Senior Investigative Researcher for Restoration News. A prolific researcher and writer, he authored the book Behind the Curtain in 2019, which details the billionaires and foundations responsible for the radical left's ascension in American politics. You can find his book at www.WhoOwnsTheDems.net.

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