Category: Eco-Crap

Everybody Panic!!!!!

Eco-Crap, Marxists, Watermelons

If anybody has noticed that the hysteria surrounding Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© is ratcheting up, you’re not alone.  However, the reasons for this increased hysteria — fueled by the spate of summer heatwaves* consuming Yurp and Murka alike — are not surprising.  Why?  Because government and especially the Marxist wing thereof constantly affirm the wisdom of H.L. Mencken:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Now that the dreaded Covid has essentially subsided into a “seasonal flu” category, this eco-nonsense has perforce had to take its place:

There are a lot of religions on this planet, but none so demanding of one’s faith as the Church of Climate Change. It’s a cult whose message is so pervasive in our culture that many take it at its word that mankind is indeed changing the climate of the Earth, but once you start looking at the data you can see pretty quickly that a lot of its claims are based on half-truths or full-on lies.

The dirty secret about the Church of Climate Change is that all things considered, it’s a suicide cult. It wants humanity to die off and stop having so many children. All this to, ironically, save you from yourselves.

Moreover, its goal is to get you to give up on human advancements and regress back to a time when humanity worked with lesser technologies and fewer rights. It wants you to hand power to them, not only in the government but personal freedoms such as your ability to travel freely and eat what you want. It wants to regulate businesses into obeying rules that would cripple and restrict them.

As Jeffrey Tucker points out in the Epoch Times, the media is currently using the fear-inducing models they created for COVID-19 to push the climate change scam. There are orange and red “tracking maps” on major networks following big heat increases in the same way they would highlight COVID-19 outbreaks.

Executive summary:  don’t believe the hysteria, especially because the media is using that to attract eyeballs.  That it happens to coincide with the totalitarians’ aims is in itself no coincidence.

However, there are at least a few signs that this nonsense is finally being recognized for the foolishness that it is — not by us, the public, but by government officials.  Good grief, even squishy BritPM Rishi Sunak is snapping back:

He added: ‘If you or others think that the answer to climate change is getting people to ban everything… I think that’s the absolutely the wrong approach.’

Yeah duh, Rishi old man;  welcome to our party.

But if there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that climate change hysteria is not going to abate, but get more frantic.

*Note that there’s a perfectly good reason for said heatwaves, but blame can’t be laid at the door of airliners, SUVs or Republicans so it’s being ignored by the media:

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer.

Oh.

Maybe we should ban volcanoes.  What the hell, it makes as much sense (and as much chance of success) as any of the other initiatives proposed by the Greens.

There He Goes Again

Eco-Crap, Watermelons, Weather

…Steve Milloy, that is, using actual data (!) to prove — as he’s being doing pretty much ever since I can remember — that the Eco-Loons are a bunch of lying assholes:

Not a single extreme weather event can be:

1. Factually shown to be unprecedented; or

2. Scientifically shown to be linked to emissions.

This, in the middle of a heatwave both here and in Europe that is nowhere close to what’s happened in the recent past, let alone in the long-ago pre-SUV era when, as he points out, Greenland was once completely ice-free, and had been for centuries.  And even now, as people have been buying more and more large SUVs and trucks:

“No global warming in almost 9 years despite 500 billion tons of emissions.”

You fool, Milloy:  it’s not global warming, it’s Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©.

Maybe at some point some kind of collective — wait, “common”? — sense will kick in, and we’ll stop listening to the climate alarmists and implementing their insane policies.

Just not while we’re being governed by addled fools like Joe Biden and his cabal of watermelons.

Oh Dear

Bureaucracy, Eco-Crap, Lies and Untruths, Watermelons

We’re always being told how bad Eeeevil Oil is for us, for the environment and of course for the pore likkel beasties in the fields.

First off, we have to stop using oil-powered vehicles and start using Duracell-powered cars and trucks (lol) instead.  Except that it turns out that electric cars are worse for the environment than gasoline-powered ones (see here for the !SCIENCE!).

So if Teslas and Priuses are doubleplusungood after all, then we need to start using “sustainable” eco-fuels like corn-based ethanol because sustainable.  (Even Formula 1 is moving towards using ethanol-only fuel in the next couple of years, the idiots.)

Sounds good, right?  Errrr, nazzo fast, Guido.  Add this little snippet to the “Solution Is Worse Than The Problem” category:

The US biofuel program is probably killing endangered species and harming the environment in a way that negates its benefits, but the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is largely ignoring those problems, a new federal lawsuit charges.

The suit alleges the EPA failed to consider impacts on endangered species, as is required by law, when it set new rules that will expand biofuel use nationwide during the next three years, said Brett Hartl, government affairs director with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which brought the litigation.

Not that we need any further proof that the EPA is to the environment as cancer cells are to the human body, but I digress.

The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set minimum levels of biofuel usage for the transportation sector. The new rule approved by the agency calls for about 15bn gallons (57bn liters) of conventional corn ethanol for each of the next three years, plus an increase from 5.9bn gallons to 7.3bn gallons of advanced biofuels during the same time period. 

About 40% of all corn grown in the US is used for ethanol production, and nearly half is used as animal feed.

While the fuels are designed to decarbonize the transportation sector, their production eliminates wetlands and prairie land that act as carbon sinks, Hartl noted. The EPA in 2018 estimated that up to 7m acres (2.8m hectares) of land had been converted to grow corn for ethanol fuel. 

Ethanol production also pollutes water. Regulations around pesticides and fertilizers used in corn grown for ethanol fuel are much looser, which means much higher levels of dangerous chemicals run into surface and groundwaters. The pollution probably plays a significant role in dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico after pesticides flow down the Mississippi River, Hartl said. 

Read the rest to see how the EPA is ducking and diving to avoid doing anything that might actually, you know, alleviate the problem.

One by one, every single alternative proposed by the Greens (and their lickspittles in academia and the media) is proving to be a complete fiasco:  wind- and solar power generation instead of nuclear, electric vehicles (EV) instead of internal combustion engines, and now biofuels instead of gasoline.

But Oh No! we have to preserve the Gaia Cult — even if it kills us (and Gaia).

Fucking bastards.

Oops

Drive Time, Eco-Crap

So much for electric cars, then:

Is the electric car really as green as it appears?

Executive summary:  no.  Not even close.  Here’s the true cost of manufacture (even granting ad arguendo that CO2 is all that bad for us):

And here’s the pesky particulate pollution comparison (see article for explanation):

So, as we all knew, the risible NetZero goal is a waste of fucking time (the true executive summary).

But, as  Sage Commenter Butch  put it yesterday:

“The objective is not to get us all into ‘cleaner’ EVs. The objective is to deprive us of personal transportation and freedom of movement.”

What he said.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to drooling over Kim’s Lotto Dream Car, the 2002 BMW Z8 with manual transmission — which on a good day gets 15mpg from its 5-liter V8 gasoline-powered internal combustion engine:

…and that only if you don’t floor the gas pedal.  [exit, drooling]

Easier Option

Eco-Crap, Education, Watermelons

Well, you could choose to go through all this hassle:

The world’s richest known lithium deposit lies deep in the woods of western Maine, in a yawning, sparkling mouth of white and brown rocks that looks like a landslide carved into the side of Plumbago Mountain

But like just about everywhere in the U.S. where new mines have been proposed, there is strong opposition here. Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres. There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017. As more companies begin prospecting in Maine and searching for sizable nickel, copper, and silver deposits, towns are beginning to pass their own bans on industrial mining.

“Our gold rush mentality regarding oil has fueled the climate crisis,” says State Rep. Margaret O’Neil, who presented a bill last session that would have halted lithium mining for five years while the state worked out rules (the legislation ultimately failed). “As we facilitate our transition away from fossil fuels, we must examine the risks of lithium mining and consider whether the benefits of mining here in Maine justify the harms.”

Advocates for mining in the U.S. argue that, since the country outsources most of its mining to places with less strict environmental and labor regulations, those harms are currently being born by foreign residents, while putting U.S. manufacturers in the precarious position of depending on faraway sources for the minerals they need.

Geologists say there’s also likely a lot more lithium in spodumene deposits across New England. Communities that haven’t had working mines in years may soon find themselves a key source for lithium and other minerals needed for car batteries, solar panels, and many of the objects people will need more of to transition themselves off polluting fossil fuels.

There are good reasons for U.S. communities to have healthy skepticism about mining projects; there is no shortage of examples of a company coming into a community, mining until doing so becomes too expensive, then leaving a polluted site for someone else to clean up. There are more than 50,000 abandoned mines in the western United States alone, 80% of which still need to be remediated.

But of course, there’s no story without there being rayyyycism, and the Injuns:

Environmental concerns aren’t the only problem with mining, Morrill says. The history of mining in the U.S. is linked to colonialism; Christopher Columbus was looking for gold when he stumbled across North America, and as Europeans expanded into the continent, they took land from Indigenous people to mine for gold, silver, and other metals.

Today, mining in the U.S. often encroaches on Indigenous land. Under mining laws in the U.S. that date to 1872, anyone can stake a claim on federal public lands and apply for permits to start mining if they find “valuable” mineral deposits there. Most lithium, cobalt, and nickel mines are within 35 miles of a Native American reservation, Morrill says, largely because in the aftermath of the 1849 gold rush, the U.S. military removed tribes to reservations not far from mineral deposits in the West. In one particularly controversial project, the mining company Rio Tinto wants to build a copper mine on Oak Flat, Ariz., a desert area adjacent to an Apache reservation that Indigenous groups have used for centuries to conduct cultural ceremonies.

…and on and on it goes.  (Read it all until you begin to glaze over;  we’ve had these arguments so often that everyone knows what’s going on.)

OR:

We could just continue to use oil to power our cars and trucks, figuring that the gross pollution difference between batteries and electric cars (production and consumption) and using internal combustion engines is pretty much a wash.

But then that wouldn’t be an insane choice made by gibbering eco-lunatics now, would it?