The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is about to start making one of the world’s largest and most polluting vehicle fleets a whole lot cleaner. That is, unless environmental zealots derail things.
On Monday, March 8, House Democrats introduced a measure that would provide USPS with $6 billion to purchase a variety of electric vehicles over the next decade. Simply put, the funds are not necessary and should not be provided.
Cases in point:
A federal climate bureau spent more than $600 million last year, says an internal audit. Spending did not include $800,000 in annual staff time to manage newly-detailed carbon offset regulations: “Doing nothing is not an option.”
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The $675 million Public Health Agency “lacked everything” despite assuring legislators it was prepared for the pandemic, a Liberal-appointed lawmaker told the Senate national finance committee. “I was told twice, not just once but twice, you had enough resources on hand to deal with the pandemic,” said Senator Éric Forest (Que.): ‘There was a huge gap between the perception and the reality.’
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The Liberal government will not release a budget in March as it takes more time to assess the impact of the pandemic, meaning that more than two years will have passed since the last federal budget was released.
The news was announced by Infrastructure and Communities Minister Catherine McKenna, and Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne. According to The Government of Canada, the money will also support municipalities, transit authorities, and school boards. Furthermore, it will assist in clean transitioning and increase the electrification of Canada’s transit systems. Lastly, the investment will deliver on the government’s commitment to help purchase 5,000 zero-emission buses over the next five years.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna said the money, which will be announced Thursday, is in addition to the $1.5-billion funding for electric buses that was announced earlier this year by the Canada Infrastructure Bank.
Throughout the midsection of the United States in February, record frigid temperatures were inconvenient for those politicians who call global warming an “existential threat.”
Global warming is already here, we are told. However, it didn’t feel like it if you lived in Bismarck, North Dakota, where temperatures fell to decades-low numbers, or in Chicago, Oklahoma City, Dallas or Houston. San Antonio had snow for the first time in recent memory.
The greenest thing about Big Green is its mountain of cash.
New research from the Capital Research Center reveals that groups on the environmental Left poured out the record $2.4 billion in 2019 (see the data in the Appendix). This stunning figure contrasts with the self-image of the environmentalist movement as David vs. Goliath: impoverished, idealistic eco-activists outgunned by powerful interests in the “fossil fuel” industry.
h/t Marvin
Sadly, as political considerations have increasingly trumped basic physics and engineering, electrical power failures have become more common in the past couple of decades in the United States. The decline in the reliability of the electric power system has coincided with the increasing incorporation of intermittent wind and solar power into electric power networks.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon pricing regime has become an expensive, confusing, multi-headed Hydra in which claims made by his government are not accurate and promises have been broken.
Among these inaccuracies and broken promises are the government’s claim the carbon tax is revenue neutral in the four provinces where it applies, that 80% of households are financially better off because of rebates and that the tax, currently at $30 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions, would be frozen at $50 per tonne in 2022.
Deflecting blame to a more exciting apocalypse.
Last month, President Biden signed a series of executive orders undermining fossil fuels, on the grounds the “climate crisis” forced his hand. “We can’t wait any longer. We see with our own eyes. We know it in our bones. It is time to act.”
Within days, most of the country was seeing “with our own eyes” and feeling “in our bones” a cold wave so severe that five million people lost electricity and, in a special irony, nearly half of the ballyhooed wind turbines in Texas, which had risen to supply 23% of her energy, were left frozen (and inoperable).
Taxpayers need to brace for impact as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gets ready to hammer Canadians with his second carbon tax.
Trudeau announced that he’s increasing the current carbon tax from $30 per tonne to $170 per tonne by 2030. That’s a 467% increase.
The state of Texas continues to dominate the headlines as millions of Lone Star State residents are without power. As U.S. President declares a state of emergency in Texas, the blame and fingerpointing have already begun. Initially, many blamed the rolling blackouts and outages on failed wind power turbines.
Then yesterday, we wrote that Texas grid failure was because Texas wind turbines did not use de-icing, carbon fiber technology, and lack of natural gas winterization, an approach practiced in other cold climate states.
The Biden administration should not allow the Chinese regime to use climate change as a bargaining chip to extract concessions in other areas, according to China experts.
The warning comes as the United States formally rejoined the Paris agreement on Feb. 19. President Joe Biden has described climate change as an “existential threat” and vowed to do more to reduce carbon emissions. But analysts are concerned that this may lead the United States to become cozier with the Chinese regime.
With the worst of the Texas power crisis now behind us, the blame and fingerpointing begins, and while the jury is still out whose actions (or lack thereof) may have led to the deadly and widespread blackouts that shocked Texas this week, Cascend Strategy writes that “in case there was any doubt why the Texas grid collapsed, the data is clear”
Texas crisis will reshape energy policy-making everywhere as wind-power collapse puts renewables under scrutiny
The North American energy policy community, a space already filled with plenty of hot air streaming in from the global warming conflict, now faces a new jet stream of cold winds blowing down via the polar vortex. There’s no point getting bogged down in the climatic origins of the polar vortex; suffice to say that its recent acceleration has had a devastating impact on North American weather patterns.
