An Explosion of Green Lies

By Alan Caruba, November 24, 2008 @ Warning Signs

Editor's Note:  As you can see, this was published in 2008, and it's timeless.  When I first started P&D Alan was among the first to allow me to publish his work, and was a constant encouragement to me. My friend Alan died ten years ago in June.  I've continued to occasionally publish his work since it has a sense of timeless about it, and this piece is evidence of that.   Even though Alan has passed, his Warning Signs blog is still there waiting for those who wish to see behind the curtain.  Take some time and review his legacy.   RK

If you think you’ve been hearing and reading more and more Green lies about global warming and a whole range of other Green scares, you’re right. The election of Barack Obama has opened the floodgates to a deluge of propaganda by the many Green groups seeking to advance their various agendas.

The mainstream news media folk who have not yet figured out that their credibility has long since gone into the toilet keep pushing this stuff and with exquisite irony—no doubt lost on these geniuses—NBC nearly killed one of its Today Show anchors in a stunt that dispatched all them to the far corners of the globe to prove that global warming was happening.

At the very same time, it announced that it was firing the staff of its Weather Channel’s environmental unit! That’s right, while the famed anchors were trudging up mountains, hanging out on glaciers or snorkeling reefs, the entire staff of “Forecast Earth” was laid off halfway through NBC’s “Green Week.” In all, some 80 people were cut, but it was the Forecast Earth staff that existed solely to spread global warming lies despite the fact that the real Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998.

Meanwhile, on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Ann Curry and more than a hundred local Masai porters were experiencing a dangerous condition called High Altitude Cerebral Edema in order to prove that global warming was causing the mountain’s ice cap to melt. Everything about this idiot stunt was wrong from the gitgo.

If anyone on the Today Show had bothered to do any research, they would have known that the mountain’s ice cap had been receding for years due to deforestation. In the October 2003 edition of Nature Magazine it was pointed out that, “Without the forest’s humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.” Sunshine! On the Equator!

A June 2007 study published in American Scientist revealed that the melting of Kilimanjaro’s icecap had been occurring for at least a century as forests were cleared for farmland. Indeed, most of the melting had occurred prior to 1953!

Curry, age 52, aborted the trek up the mountain that was intended to announce something that an NBC page spending a half-hour on Google could have told her was not just a waste of time, but a complete and total lie.

As the Obama administration makes ready to assume power, the Greens are going crazy with campaigns denouncing coal as “dirty” and demanding an end to the use of all plastic bottles, claiming that a life-threatening component exists. If this is so, don’t you think we would know about it by now? Plastic, of course, is made from oil and that too has been stigmatized for decades by the Greens. The plunge of global oil prices has been about the only good news that consumers have had in weeks.

The new big lie is that millions of jobs can be created from Green sustainable or “clean” energy in the form of solar and wind power, but even with vast government tax subsidies and other incentives, neither of these has gained a foothold because they both require back-up generation facilities when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

The notion that electric cars will replace those using the highly efficient gasoline powered automobiles and trucks has been around since the late 1800s and the problem now is the same problem as then; the batteries which must be so large and so frequently charged that they are impractical. A new electric auto from a company called Tesla will cost you $50,000 to purchase. Only demented Hollywood stars will be able to afford them.

There will be no explosion of jobs from so-called Green industries and the real industries, like auto industries, are just blowing smoke up your skirt when they trumpet how Green they are. It is a marketing scheme, not science, and frequently a costly waste of money that could have been spent more wisely to benefit their investors.

I keep telling people that businesses large and small exist to make a profit!

At some point, when the economy reaches a truly horrid low point, people will begin to shed all the nonsense they have been taught in America’s schools about the environment and start thinking about where the next rent or mortgage payment will come from. They will have noticed by then that, wherever they live, it is getting colder and the cold weather is lasting longer.

Over at the Weather Channel, the newly trimmed down staff will be tracking and talking about the latest blizzards burying cities and rural areas in snow.

Greenies Lie, Period!

By Rich Kozlovich

As it turns out, the greenies make things up, ludicrous things that only the brain dead can accept, you see, according to them "climate change is making plants less nutritious − that could already be hurting animals that are grazers".  Really?  And they know that how?  Let's try and get this right:

Never believe anything the green pushers, including the media, tell you. Their previous predictions have been pure garbage or propaganda to push an agenda, and they clearly care more about money and power than our length and quality of life. It is pathetic and dangerous when almost all people pretending to be journalists just regurgitate what they are told on “climate change” and “global warming” instead of doing research and asking questions. They are great contributors to the dumbing down of society, especially the children.

For many years I've written about the green movement and I learned from very early on, they lie, so when I write, I start with that foundational premise, and after I do the research on any subject they're ranting about..... guess what I find. They lied!

As for their doom and gloom, Chicken Little, the sky is falling predictions, they're pathetic. Here is my Failed Predictions file, along with my commentaries, If Green Prediction Was a Corporation, They'd Have a Monopoly on Being Wrong! And I particularly like this one, A Prince Who Was Potty, is Now a King Who is Potty, and Dangerously So!

Many years ago a customer who knew about my articles asked if I believed in global warning. I said, yes, and I believe in global cooling, but I don't believe mankind has anything to do with either one, and that's the issue. As for their climate models and predictions, that's garbage in and garbage out, as a result their timelines for disaster have come and gone, and the world is still here.

Environmentalism is part and parcel of a green globalist, one world government tyrannous socialist secular religion, with disaster mongering and lying as the central tenets of that religion.

A thousand years ago during the Medieval Warming Period the world was substantially warmer than it is today, and none of the disasters they're predicting for today occurred then, and there's no reason to believe they will occur now.

The world actually needs more CO2, not less. Climate change and CO2 have nothing to do with each other, except, climate change precedes CO2, not the reverse, and CO2 does not change the climate.   All that's absolutely known, and now we see Michigan is going to destroy 400 acres of woodland to build a solar farm with solar panels made in China.   

Remember 35 years ago the greenies were outraged at the controlled timber harvesting in the Northwest claiming logging was killing the spotted own.  After destroying that industry it was disclosed logging that was killing them at all, it was the barred owl, and the greenies knew that right from he start.  They lied, and now where are these green misfits over Michigan destroying 400 acres of forest to make way for solar panels?  The greenies have very selective outrage because their not about the environment, they're about destroying western civilization, and sadly so many of them at the base are nothing more than useful clueless idiots.

And now look at what that darned global warming has caused. Record-breaking wind, ice, and snow to impact 250 million Americans. Yes, and worse, global warming is now going to cause major winter storms and blizzard conditions in at least a dozen states, and even Washington DC. The answer?  Cut down more trees.   

Criminals have a code: "never give up on the con", and they haven't.

To Be Green is to Be Irrational, Misanthropic, and Morally Defective, Part II

By Rich Kozlovich

The world has been told for decades we must go green or we're doomed.  We don't need 'fossil' fuels, we can provide all humanities needs by moving to alternative energy sources.  There's only one problem.  It's a lie, and all in support of the greatest scientific fraud ever perpetuated on humanity. Anthropogenic Global Warming. 

These next articles demonstrate one lie after another, and one green boondoggle after another.  Boondoggles and insane polices the taxpayers are funding, and are expected to continue to fund.  There are two things the left, and especially the green left excel at.  Being wrong and failing to deliver, and they fail to deliver massively.  And the reason they're always wrong, and always fail is because everything they promote is predicated on lies.  Lies of commission and lie of omission.  

Normally I wouldn't care except they've pushed this on to humanity and there are serious consequences for them being wrong, and those consequences result in serious penalties to humanity and the environment.  

What we're seeing are deranged people, many are wealthy, many are in powerful positions promoting insane policies that even the average guy on the street can see are insane.  Why?  That's the 64 thousand question.  But it's clear all their schemes will ultimately lead to tyranny, leading to dystopia for humanity.  To be as delusional as they are, one has to think there's something seriously wrong with their minds.  In short, they're all certifiable. 

As Afghanistan collapsed, Pentagon had greenie better things to do report - August 31, 2023 By Monica Showalter - So when they should have been focusing on the Afghanistan withdrawal, they were locked up in committee meetings and reading bureaucratic paperwork about the importance of inserting the green agenda climate considerations into every decision the military made. This sounds like bad satire. The Pentagon has one job: To win wars. The only "war" they were paying attention to for vast stretches of time as the world looked on in horror at the shambles of the U.S. military pullout was the green agenda.  Anybody over there notice the junk priorities?..........

Cult Failure: Green Energy Companies Want to Renegotiate Their Contracts With Blue State as Costs Eat Into Profits - A number of green energy companies and advocacy groups have petitioned the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) to renegotiate contracts with state utilities as rising costs could threaten the viability of numerous projects, according to UtilityDive. The requests to increase prices in established offshore wind and other green energy contracts in New York could bump up residential electricity rates by 2.5% and 1.5%, respectively, or a cumulative $4.67 per month, according to New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). “New York has outlined ambitious targets for clean energy generation and transmission, and the projects that have sought these modifications to their contracts are crucial parts of those targets. If these projects are not able to move forward, yes, it would endanger the goals New York has established,” Anne Reynolds, executive director of Alliance for Clean Energy New York (ACENY), told the Daily Caller News Foundation..........

Western economies wither at the altar of climate lies -  Under President Trump, the U.S. economy thrived. In 2023, that same economy—together with those of most European countries—is being destroyed by a campaign of climate lies. One of the biggest attempts at disinformation ever perpetrated is that man-made global warming is an existential threat. We can thank opportunists like Al Gore, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Greta Thunberg for spreading the hysteria that the ice will melt, the oceans will rise, and we will all die from heat exhaustion. Contrary to their frightening warnings, the glaciers have not melted, and the world has not ended. The global warming hoax is the result of faulty science, endorsed by inept bureaucrats at the UN, the WEF, the EU, and the Biden administration. Government policy in the U.S., and most of Europe, is based on the delusion that human beings can control the climate. This is pure nonsense that is contradicted by the facts..............

Green pusher Michael Mann ramps up the rhetoric against the people on MSNBC segment By Jack Hellner MSNBC continued its campaign against average Americans by bringing on Michael Mann, a well-known “green” pusher, who blamed Republicans for Hurricane Idalia, because we won’t sign our own death warrants and go along with the rapid destruction of industries that use oil, coal, and natural gas. To summarize what Mann said: warming water caused the storm to be more severe, and severe storms cost more, in terms of life and property. What you don’t see is any scientific data that shows a direct link between our consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas and temperatures, because temperatures have fluctuated while consumption of these natural resources has skyrocketed. Basically, this is a propaganda piece pushing a book and the radical green agenda................

The Key to Understanding the Global Warming Fraud - As vice president, Al Gore led the negotiations to establish the U.N. Kyoto Protocol in 1998.  The Kyoto Protocol was a "climate treaty" ostensibly designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the signatories during the period 2005–2012 to a level equivalent to 95% of each country's 1990 emissions.  While it did not introduce any new scientific means to reduce CO2 emissions (worldwide CO2 emissions grew by 32% during the period), the Kyoto Protocol introduced a novel economic concept: the trading of carbon credits and offsets. At first, the concept of trading carbon credits was straightforward; it was known as "cap and trade."  Each country was allocated a level of carbon emissions each year by the signatories to the agreement based on an annual targeted reduction in carbon emissions to reach the goal.  If a country or emitter expected to exceed its cap, it could "trade" or buy unused carbon credits from other countries that expected to emit less than their cap.  However, if a country failed to meet its emissions target and did not purchase carbon credits, the protocol required it to make up the difference in the second commitment period, with an additional 30% penalty...............

New Discoveries In Climate Science - Climate science is a wild and woolly multi-disciplinary field in which virtually every proposition is controversial. It is only the politics that is settled; the science is up for grabs. A recent study in Climate illustrates the point, not by introducing new concepts but by measuring the obvious:  A new study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Climate, by 37 researchers from 18 countries suggests that current estimates of global warming are contaminated by urban warming biases.  It is well-known that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside...........There is no question that the Urban Heat Island Effect exists. The question is, how much does it skew current temperature readings in an upward direction?...........The study also found that the IPCC’s chosen estimate of solar activity appeared to have prematurely ruled out a substantial role for the Sun in the observed warming........

Zero Carbon Is a Whale-Killer - John D. Rockefeller destroyed the whaling industry by replacing whale oil with Earth's natural compost: refined oil.  Whale oil had many uses, pharmaceutical and industrial, including lubricants for nearly all machines and trains.  And it was the age of machines.  The whaling ships of Nantucket were slow.  Their primary prey were gray whales who do not navigate by echolocation, like many other whales.  They follow the contour of coastlines, and they swim only about 3–6 mph.  Modern ships move much faster, and they will have technology to find and kill the faster and more acrobatic whales, including blue whales and humpbacks.  Using modern technology, they can find and kill them where they feed, in the Bering Sea...........

 

In order to save the whales, we must kill the whales - September 7, 2023 By Ben Bartee - That's how The Science™ works, boys and girls.  Respect it, or be made to answer to the Department of Homeland Security, bigot. If you live on the East Coast of the U.S., chances are you've seen and/or heard tell of the increasing-in-frequency local news reports on the dead-whale-washing-up-on-shore phenomenon. Via Michael Shellenberger: "A new documentary, 'ThrowThat's how The Science (TM) works, boys and girls.............Anyway, what's a few thousand dead whales when a totalitarian social control agenda is on the line?  You want to make a climate change omelet, you're gonna have to break some marine mammal eggs.......

 

The hidden energy crisis -  September 4, 2023 America is wrestling with the worst energy crisis in its history, a period of high prices and limited supply. According to the Brookings Institution, in 2022, the average U.S. residential retail electricity price was 15.12 cents/kWh, an 11% increase from 13.66 cents/kWh in 2021. In the first three months of 2023, the average U.S. residential monthly electricity bill was $133, or 5% higher than for the same time in 2022. There is confusion with savings or cost expectation of solar and wind conversion, also government decisions have impacted the natural gas and energy supply. While electric vehicles are a much-touted solution for replacing oil, gasoline or diesel fuel contains 40 times the energy as a state-of-the-art battery. Questionable efforts are being made by utilities and government leadership to address our energy future. Critical solutions have been avoided and hidden. Fossil-fuel plants are closing faster than green alternatives can replace them. Producers of oil and gas can't keep up with the confusion in supply. Fantasy thinking has taken hold of President Biden and Democrat leaders. Progressives and their media followers are guilty of denial concerning the reality of how to solve a potential climate/energy crisis.

 

Bill Gates and others behind massive deforestation scheme, for ‘global warming’ of course - We're being held hostage by "green" megalomaniacs with man boobs and CIA-linked eco-terrorists.As reported by Joshua Philipp, investigative reporter and host of the Epoch TV's Crossroads program, Bill Gates's company Breakthrough Energy Ventures is a main player behind a new deforestation scheme.  Per Philipp, Gates and "other investors" have contributed $6.6 million in a "stealth effort" to a California startup called Kodama Systems, which is offering a "novel" approach to the net zero agenda.Wondering who those "other investors" might be?  Well, for one, a woman named Jackie Kossman.  Wondering who those "other investors" might be?  Well, for one, a woman named Jackie Kossman.  Kossman is a partner at Congruent Ventures, a San Francisco–based investment firm, and according to her company bio, she previously worked for In-Q-Tel (the venture capital firm of U.S. government intelligence agencies, notably the CIA).So what does Kodama Systems have in mind?  Well, the company is launching efforts to deforest about seventy million acres, or around 110,000 square miles of trees, and then bury the biomass, all with the help of the U.S. Forest Service.............

 

Western economies wither at the altar of climate lies - Under President Trump, the U.S. economy thrived. In 2023, that same economy—together with those of most European countries—is being destroyed by a campaign of climate lies. One of the biggest attempts at disinformation ever perpetrated is that man-made global warming is an existential threat. We can thank opportunists like Al Gore, Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Greta Thunberg for spreading the hysteria that the ice will melt, the oceans will rise, and we will all die from heat exhaustion. Contrary to their frightening warnings, the glaciers have not melted, and the world has not ended. The global warming hoax is the result of faulty science, endorsed by inept bureaucrats at the UN, the WEF, the EU, and the Biden administration. Government policy in the U.S., and most of Europe, is based on the delusion that human beings can control the climate. This is pure nonsense that is contradicted by the facts..........

Bloomberg Falsely Says Climate Change Is Harming Crop Production, Reality Says Otherwise - A recent post at Bloomberg, titled “Climate Change Is Helping Pests and Diseases Destroy Our Food,” claims that recent crop shortages are due to increases in pest infestations and disease because of climate change. This is false for multiple reasons. First, the crops listed are not seeing substantial declines outside of particular production regions, which is to be expected from agriculture some years. Bloomberg contributor Mumbi Gitau writes that pests and disease “are exacerbating crop shortages that have sent prices for goods like cocoa, olive oil, and orange juice soaring.” Gitau also asserts that these shortages will “become even more prevalent as extreme weather events multiply.” To be clear data show that extreme weather events are not getting more frequent or extreme, even amid the last hundred-plus years of warming. Climate Realism has covered this fact many times, here, here, and here, for just a few examples..................

Electric vehicles plagued by logistical issues, but few mention the elephant(s) in the room - The push to exchange gas for electric in transportation is an idea that has ironically placed the proverbial cart in front of the horse. While the problems of an inadequate power grid, too few charging stations, short range, high costs, long recharging times, and battery fires are real, there are two gigantic issues looming that rival them all. Current state and federal gas-tax regulations siphon off more than $53 billion a year in tax revenue; for reference, about 67 cents from every gallon of gasoline purchased in New York, and around $1.18-per-gallon in California. Those taxes account for more than a quarter of the expense of road and highway costs around the nation.  No such system of taxation exists for electric vehicles. For every ten-percent reduction in gas vehicles being replaced by electric, a resulting decrease of more than $5 billion in tax revenue will occur. Add this to the long list of issues that the rush-to-electric crowd has failed to address........

Pelosi: China Terrible on a Lot of Issues, but We Need Them for Climate Utopia - During portions of an interview with Bloomberg released on Thursday, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) stated that “we have to find an accommodation” with how the U.S. and China treat each other, and while China is awful on security, the economy, and human rights, “we have a shared planet, and we have to work with the Chinese to save the planet, because they’re now, I think, the biggest emitter, if not us, they’re second, and they are part of the solution in all of this.” But we shouldn’t reward China, but have a “mutual discussion about how we can go forward.”...........

Woke companies must wake up on ESG

 Prevailing ‘ethics’ models ignore vital energy, environmental, labor and human rights issues 

Paul Driessen    

Growing numbers of companies, banks, universities and investment houses are adopting Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards and disclosure rules. They’re pressured to do so by activists, legislators and regulators. Many expect to get rich via taxpayer-subsidized “renewable” energy projects. 

Nearly all hope to “greenwash” their reputations, by claiming they’ll “make the world a better place,” by reducing fossil fuel emissions, and thus planetary temperatures and extreme weather events. 

They recently got a boost from the US House of Representatives. It voted 215-214 party-line to pass a bill supporting Securities and Exchange Commission plans to impose new ESG rules requiring publicly traded companies to disclose “climate risks” allegedly caused by oil, gas and coal production and use. Some think the SEC might now give greater scrutiny to ESG climate claims and misconduct, but that seems unlikely.

Regardless, woke organizations need to wake up to climate, renewable energy and ESG realities. 

The ever-more-hysterical climate and weather claims have been roundly debunked by Dr. Roy Spencer, Gregory Wrightstone, Marc Morano, Steven Koonin and others. But what’s truly outrageous about ESG is the way it studiously ignores the massive, widespread damage inflicted by pseudo-renewable energy. 

Wind and sunlight certainly are clean, renewable and sustainable. But harnessing their highly dispersed, unpredictable, weather-dependent energy to meet humanity’s huge and growing energy needs absolutely is not. That requires lands and raw materials that are anything but renewable – using fuels and processes that are absolutely not clean, green, ecological or sustainable. Because they fail to recognize this, ESG programs are dishonest, even fraudulent – and must be reformed, investigated or scrapped. 

Wind, solar and battery land and raw material requirements are astronomical. Onshore wind turbines require nine times more metals and minerals per megawatt than a modern combined-cycle gas power plant. One onshore 3-MW turbine foundation needs 600 cubic yards (1,500 tons) of concrete, plus rebar. 

Offshore wind requires 14 times more materials per MW. Just the 2,100 850-foot-tall offshore turbines (30,000 megawatts) that President Biden wants to install by 2030 would require 110,000 tons of copper, plus millions of tons of steel, aluminum, fiberglass, cobalt, rare earth metals and other materials. 

At an average of 0.44% copper in ore deposits worldwide, the copper alone would require mining and processing 25 million tons of ore, after removing 40 million tons of overburden to reach the ore bodies! 

Add in materials for solar panels, more onshore and offshore wind turbines, backup battery systems, electric vehicles, transmission lines, and all-electric home heating and cooking systems – to run the entire USA, Europe and world – and the “green energy transformation” would require hundreds of billions of tons of metals, minerals and plastics, trillions of tons of ores, trillions of tons of overburden, and thousands of mines, processing plants and factories. Nearly all these operations employ fossil fuels. 

America’s laws and attitudes make mining in the United States nearly impossible, even to support ESG-certified “green” energy facilities. That means most mining and processing will be done in Africa, Asia and Latin America, increasingly by Chinese companies. The manufacturing is done increasingly in China, which is why that country is building more coal-fired power plants every month. 

Pseudo-clean-energy activities utilize hazardous chemicals and release toxic pollutants. They require vast volumes of water, often in the world’s most water-deprived regions. They cause acid mine drainage, create mountains of waste rock, and often result in vast “lakes” of toxic chemicals from refining the ores. Most are conducted under almost nonexistent pollution control, mined-land reclamation, endangered species, workplace safety, child and slave labor, and fair wage rules. 

Cobalt mining already involves 40,000 African children, as young as four! Many Chinese solar panels are made with Uighur forced labor. ESG “green” aspirations would multiply this slavery many times over. 

These travesties occur overseas – out of sight and out of mind – letting ESG activists and profiteers make incessant false claims that fossil fuel replacement energy is clean and virtuous. But when wind, solar and battery facilities are installed, adverse consequences will reverberate across the United States. 

Hundreds of millions of acres of scenic, wildlife habitat and coastal areas would be impacted; millions of birds, bats, tortoises and other wildlife displaced, maimed and killed. And when their short productive lives are finished, billions of turbine blades, solar panels and batteries will be sent to gigantic landfills, because they cannot be recycled; their toxic metals and chemicals could leach out into soils, streams and groundwater. The same will happen in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. 

Even on windy days, Mr. Biden’s 2,100 monstrous offshore turbines won’t meet New York State peak summertime electricity needs. Meeting just US coastal city needs would require tens of thousands of turbines. Dredge-and-fill operations associated with installing them would smother mollusks and other benthic species. Vibration noises would harm whale and porpoise navigation and communication. Their mere presence would create major safety issues for aircraft and fishing, naval and commercial vessels. 

A single industrial solar facility near Fredericksburg, Virginia required clearcutting thousands of acres of forest habitat. Dominion Energy is planning solar facilities on Virginia acreage totaling one-fourth of Delaware. Solar installations proposed for the American Southwest would blanket millions of acres of desert habitats. Wind and solar operations would threaten or eradicate dozens of bird and other species that environmentalists have utilized for decades to stop drilling, fracking and pipeline projects. 

Connecting far-flung wind, solar and battery installations to industrial centers and urban areas would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines – and still more steel, copper and concrete. Battery fires have already destroyed electric vehicles and homes. Imagine huge warehouses filled with thousands of battery modules erupting into enormous, uncontrollable conflagrations. 

Biodiesel projects have already destroyed important orangutan habitats, and thousands of acres of US hardwood forest habitats have been turned into wood pellets for Britain’s Drax Power Plant. 

Threatened, endangered, migratory and marine species must be protected – wherever mining, processing and manufacturing take place, and wherever “renewable” energy installations are contemplated. Human health impacts from infrasound and light flicker must guide decisions on how close to homes and businesses wind turbines may be installed. 

Reformed ESG rules – call them Environment and Human Rights (EHR) principles – must require that all these issues are addressed for every wind, solar, battery, transmission and biofuel proposal. 

People must know in advance how many turbines, panels, batteries and power lines are contemplated; how many tons of metals, minerals, concrete and plastics they will require; where those materials will come from; under what environmental, pollution, safety, wage and child labor standards. Companies and government agencies must certify that supply chains are free from child or slave labor. 

Project-specific, comprehensive and cumulative US and global environmental studies must be conducted before any projects are approved, and must include regular, independent reviews of bird, bat, reptile, whale, porpoise and other wildlife displacements, injuries and deaths. Project studies must fully assess all environmental, human health, human rights and other impacts worldwide, and must not be fast-tracked. 

These reality-based EHR principles will help ensure that any “green future” is founded on ethical standards that address all human and ecological consequences, and actually do make the world a better place. They can also help guide SEC investigations and prosecutions for ESG misconduct and fraud – and help spur much-needed mining in the United States, to reduce our reliance on China, Russia, Taliban Afghanistan and other adversarial countries for critical and strategic minerals. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, health and human rights issues.

 

Did you hear the story about the GMO that almost destroyed the world?

Andrew Porterfield | March 19, 2021

Once upon a time, way back in 1990, a German company modified the genetics of a bacterium so it could efficiently ferment plant waste, turning the material into ethanol. There was, the story goes, just one problem: the bacteria, Klebsiella planticola, “almost killed the world with booze,” according to an article on Cracked.

Earth Island Journal took a less sarcastic tack, quoting retired genetics professor and now environmental activist David Suzuki:

Geneticist David Suzuki understands that what took place was truly ominous. “The genetically engineered Klebsiella,” he says, “could have ended all plant life on this continent. The implications of this single case are nothing short of terrifying.”

This story has become an occasionally arising myth, with articles that appear every few years bolstering anti-GMO activists’ views that anything transgenic or otherwise modified is at least bad for your health, bad for the environment, or perhaps fatal.............

So, what did happen? Scientists and engineers have been spending decades looking at new ways to handle plant waste, which can become rich material for soil amendments, or can be fermented into other chemicals, including ethanol, and turned into biofuels. In fact, the Klebsiella planticola bacterium (which is now called Raoultella planticola after scientists re-examined the members of Klebsiella), has been studied for its ability to create ethanol from decaying plant material.

As the story goes, a German company received U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permission to conduct field trials on the amended bacterium, called SDF20, which had a plasmid (a short loop of DNA) inserted into its genome. This plasmid contained a gene for an enzyme, pyruvate decarboxylase that allowed SDF20 to ferment plant waste to ethanol................

But problems with her and Holmes’ story began. In a rebuttal to Ingham’s testimony, Christian Walter, with Forest Research Institute in Rotorua, New Zealand, Michael Berridge, of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in Wellington, and David Tribe, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, wrote that:

• The paper she and Holmes wrote with their results actually doesn’t exist (the volume and page numbers were false, and no other citation can be found).
• Another paper, also by Holmes, Ingham and other colleagues, was cited later (after the rebuttal was published), but this paper reviewed the growth of spring wheat in poor, sandy soil that had been inoculated with the SDF20 strain of K. planticola. Not anything resembling grounds for worldwide plant Armageddon.
• There was no evidence from the EPA or the US Department of Agriculture that any field trials for SDF20 were ever approved.
• The SDF20 produced about 20 micrograms per milliliter of alcohol in the soil. “This concentration is several hundred times lower than that required to affect plant growth (10 milligrams per milliliter),” they wrote.

...........To Read More....

Destroying the environment to save it

Pseudo-green energy will wreak devastation, pretending to prevent exaggerated climate harm 

 

Paul Driessen 

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The infamous Vietnam era quotation may or may not have been uttered by an anonymous US Army major. It may have been misquoted, revised, apocryphal or invented. But it quickly morphed into an anti-war mantra that reflected attitudes of the time. 

For Virginians and others forced to travel the path of “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy, it will redound in modern politics as “We had to destroy the environment in order to save it.” 

Weeks after Governor Ralph Northam signed Virginia’s “Clean Economy Act,” which had been rushed through a partisan Democrat legislature, Dominion Energy Virginia announced it would reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To do so, the utility company will raise family, business, hospital and school electricity bills by 3% every year for the next ten years – as these customers and state and local governments struggle to climb out of the financial holes created by the ongoing Coronavirus lockdown. 

Just as bad, renewable energy mandates and commitments from the new law and Dominion’s “integrated resource plan” will have major adverse impacts on Virginia and world environmental values. In reality, Virginia’s new “clean” economy exists only in fantasy land – and only if we ignore “clean” energy CO2 emissions, air and water pollution, and other environmental degradation around the world. 

Dominion Energy plans to expand the state’s offshore wind, onshore solar and battery storage capacity by some 24,000 megawatts of new “renewable” energy by 2035, and far more after that. It will retain just 9,700 MW of existing natural gas generation, and only through 2045, build no new gas-fired units, and retire 6,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation. This will reduce in-state carbon dioxide emissions, but certainly won’t do so globally. The company intends to keep its four existing nuclear units operating. 

To “replace” some of its abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel electricity, Dominion intends to build at least 31,400 megawatts of expensive, unreliable solar capacity by 2045. The company estimates that will require a land area some 25% larger than 250,000-acre Fairfax County, west of Washington, DC. That means Dominion Energy’s new solar facilities will blanket 490 square miles (313,000 acres) of beautiful croplands, scenic areas and habitats that now teem with wildlife. 

That’s almost half the land area of Rhode Island, eight times the District of Columbia, 14 times more land than all Fairfax County parks combined – blanketed by imported solar panels. Still more land will be torn up for access roads and new transmission lines. All this is just for Dominion Energy’s solar panels. 

The panels will actually generate electricity maybe 20-25% of the year, once you factor in nighttime hours, cloudy days, and times when the sun is not bright enough to generate more than trifling electricity. 

Dominion and other Virginia utility companies also plan to import and install 430 monstrous 850-foot-tall bird-chopping offshore wind turbines – and tens of thousands of half-ton battery packs, to provide backup power for at least a few hours or days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The batteries will prevent the economy from shutting down even more completely during each outage than it has during the Corona lockdown. Similar policies across America will impact hundreds of millions of acres. 

Most of these solar panels, wind turbines and batteries – or their components, or the metals and minerals required to manufacture those components – will likely come from China or from Chinese-owned operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America ... under mining, air and water pollution, workplace safety, fair wage, child labor, mined land reclamation, manufacturing and other laws and standards that would get US and other Western companies unmasked, vilified, sued, fined and shut down in a heartbeat. 

It is those minimal to nonexistent laws and regulations that govern most of the companies and operations that will supply the “clean” technologies that will soon blight Virginia landscapes and serve the new “clean” Virginia economy. As Michael Moore observes in his new film, Planet of the Humans, other states that opt for “clean” energy will face the same realities. 

Thus far, no one has produced even a rough estimate of how much concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, lithium, cobalt, silica, rare earth metals and countless other materials will be needed. All will require gigantic heavy equipment and prodigious amounts of fossil fuels to blast and haul away billions of tons of rocky overburden; extract, crush and process tens of millions of tons of ores, using acids, toxic chemicals and other means to refine the ores; smelt concentrates into metals; manufacture all the millions of tons of components; and haul, assemble and install the panels, turbines, batteries and transmission lines, setting them on top of tens of thousands of tons of concrete and rebar. All of it beyond Virginia’s borders. 

No one has tallied the oil, natural gas and coal fuel requirements for doing all this “Virginia Clean Economy” work – nor the greenhouse gases and actual pollutants that will be emitted in the process. 

Nothing about this is clean, green, renewable or sustainable. But Virginia politicians and Dominion Energy officials have said nothing about any of this, nor about which countries will host the mining and other activities, under what environmental and human rights standards. 

Will Virginians ever get a full accounting? Just because all of this will happen far beyond Virginia’s borders does not mean we can ignore the global environmental impacts. Or the health, safety and well-being of children and parents in those distant mines, processing plants and factories. 

This is the perfect time to observe the environmentalist creed: think globally, act locally. Will that be done?

Will Dominion and Virginia require that all these raw materials and wind, solar and battery components be responsibly sourced? Will it require independently verified certifications that none of them involve child labor, and all are produced in compliance with US and Virginia laws, regulations and ethical codes for workplace safety, fair wages, air and water pollution, wildlife preservation, cancer prevention and mined lands reclamation? Will they tally up all the fossil fuels consumed, and pollutants emitted, in the process? 

Science journalist, businessman and parliamentarian Matt Ridley says wind turbines need some 200 times more raw materials per megawatt of power than modern combined-cycle gas turbines. It’s probably much the same for solar panels. Add in the millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of backup batteries that would be required under a nationwide Green New Deal, and the combined US and global environmental, human health and human rights impacts become absolutely mindboggling. 

If you ignore all the land and wildlife impacts from installing the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines – you could perhaps call this “clean energy” and a “clean economy” within Virginia’s borders. But not beyond those borders. This is a global issue, and the world would likely be far better off if we just built modern combined-cycle gas turbines (or nuclear power plants) to generate reliable electricity – and avoided all the monumental human and ecological impacts of pseudo-renewable energy. 

When it’s time to select sites for these 490 square miles of industrial solar facilities, will Virginia, its county and local governments, its citizens, environmentalist groups and courts apply the same rigorous standards, laws and regulations that they demand for drilling, fracking, coal and gas power plants, pipelines, highways, timber cutting and other projects? Will they apply the same standards for 850-foot-tall wind turbines and 100-foot-tall transmission lines as they demand for buried-out-of-sight pipelines? 

Virginia’s Clean Economy Act will also plunge almost every project and jurisdiction into questions of race, poverty and environmental justice. Dominion Energy and other utility companies will have to charge means-tested rates (even as rates climb 3% per year) and exempt low-income customers from some charges. They will have to submit construction plans to “environmental justice councils” – even as the companies, councils and politicians ignore the rampant injustices inflicted on children and parents slaving away in Chinese, African and Latin American “clean energy” mines, processing plants and factories. 

Government officials, utility industry executives, environmentalists and anyone else who promotes wind, solar, battery and biofuel energy need to explain exactly how they plan to address these issues. Future town hall meetings and project approval hearings promise to be raucous, entertaining and illuminating.  

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.