Green-Scam

It’s time, once again, for another climate conference. This will be the 27th desperate effort to save the planet. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The fearmongers are hard at work. They’ve put out no less than 8 reports in the run-up to the event. We must act now, experts squeal. The alternative is dire, as always. The coverage is relentless, especially in rags that take money from conservancies.

After decades of failure to curb emissions, let’s accept that capitalist investment is not the problem: it’s the solution

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This famous quote – often misattributed to Albert Einstein – might very well become the unofficial motto of the UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt, the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27).

Global CO₂ emissions have kept increasing since the world’s nations first committed to rein in climate change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – despite dozens of climate summits and the global climate agreements struck in Kyoto and Paris. This is the case, once again, in 2022, when we will collectively set a new emissions record. While rich countries increasingly promise draconian cuts (and then generally backtrack, as they import huge amounts of oil, gas and coal to save their citizens from energy poverty, as they have done most recently to address the current energy crisis), most of the future emissions will come from the currently poorer countries in Asia and Africa, as they power their climb out of abject poverty.

Another day, another success in the courts for Dutch environmentalists. This week, the country’s highest court, the Council of State, decided that building is no longer exempt from EU environment protection rules. In one of the world’s most densely-populated countries, where new homes are badly needed – and a 900,000 home building spree had just been announced – this spells trouble: within hours, building association Bouwend Nederland called it a ‘tragedy’ and experts warned it will exacerbate the Netherlands’ housing crisis.

Plugging in and charging on Petro-Canada’s Electric Highway just got a lot more expensive for EV owners. Instead of billing owners at differing rates in each province, the oil giant has now instituted a flat rate across the country.

According to the Petro-Canada website, the standard EV charging fee for all of Canada is now $0.50 per minute.

What makes this price increase even more difficult to understand is that just last week Petro-Canada published an open letter acknowledging how unreliable their EV charging network is.

h/t Mauser

China Is Burning More Coal, a Growing Climate Challenge

China is poised to take advantage of the global urgency to tackle climate change. It is the world’s dominant manufacturer and user of solar panels and wind turbines. It leads the world in producing energy from hydroelectric dams and is building more nuclear power plants than any other country.

But China also burns more coal than the rest of the world combined and has accelerated mining and the construction of coal-fired power plants, driving up the country’s emissions of energy-related greenhouse gases nearly 6 percent last year, the fastest pace in a decade. And China’s addiction to coal is likely to endure for years, even decades.

… “There is no solution to climate change without reducing China’s coal combustion,” said David Sandalow, a senior energy official in the Obama and Clinton administrations.

Screw China and Screw Trudeau for forcing a reduced standard of living on Canadians with a green-scam program that will have zero positive effect.

The importance of a strong power grid cannot be emphasized enough. Often, when a grid fails, the results are terrifying. Of all the major power grids in the world, the United States’ is one of the more vulnerable to attack.

State-sponsored hackers from the likes of Iran, Russia, and, unsurprisingly, China pose a real threat to the United States’ electrical transmission lines. However, there’s another (far less obvious) threat to the grid: electric vehicles (EVs).

Yes, you read that right.

THERE is an organisation called the Climate Psychology Alliance. Again, they wish to use their expertise in the field of psychology to nudge people into believing in their world view of climate-induced, impending doom.

Their website states: ‘It is now widely accepted that facts and information about the risk of climate change, taken, alone, do not promote change. There is a growing acceptance that the climate change movement could be enriched by incorporating deeper psychological perspectives. But mainstream positivist psychology is often part of the problem, especially when it reduces the human being to an object to be measured, controlled and then harnessed to the profit-making machine that now threatens our collective future.’

… But every rich country today became wealthy thanks to the exploitation of fossil fuels. What’s more, the elite prescription for the world’s poor – green energy – is incapable of transforming lives.

That’s because sun and wind power are useless when it is nighttime, or there is no wind. Off-grid solar power can provide light, but typically can’t even power a family’s fridge or oven, let alone provide the power that communities need to run everything from farms to factories, the ultimate engines of growth.

The activist has been showing a more overtly political stance in London

Last night, London’s Royal Festival Hall hosted a children’s crusade. The purpose? To “celebrate” the launch of The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg’s coffee-table manifesto which collects essays from climate scholars, interspersed with photography and doom data (the cover itself is a colour chart of global temperature, moving from halcyon blue to DEFCON red). London answered the call.